Farecast

Farecast LogoI just got my beta account for Farecast yesterday and was able to take it for a spin. Farecast is a different type of travel site than your typical dime-a-dozen Expedias and Travelocities. Those sites search the airlines for the lowest price right now. What Fareast does is try to predict how the airline fares are going to change. Since airline pricing is such a screwy thing, based on a million different variables, it’s hard to find good prices for airfare. Your seat could cost you $100 less than the exact same seat of guy sitting right beside you only because he bought it a day later than you. Farecast tracks prices over history to determine whether a price is going to go up or down (and whether you should buy now or wait).

The patent pending Fare History shows what the lowest fare was for your trip each day up to 90 days ago. We monitor price changes multiple times a day and store more than 50 billion observations and counting. We make a significant investment in data, hardware and storage costs to provide you with real prices based on availability.

Farecast Arrows
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The site is still in beta, so there were some features that weren’t quite ready for prime time. One of the biggest missing pieces for me was that it will only show you outgoing flights from Boston and Seattle (which doesn’t really do me much good). As for the functionality of the site, it’s pretty nice, and I have no reason to doubt the buying recommendations Farecast gives since the whole airline pricing scheme is such a mystery. I think once they get the site filled out a bit more (more markets and more buying options), it’ll be a nice weapon in my arsenal of travel sites. I’m not ready to switch to it all at once quite yet.

As a beta tester, I’ve got a few invites if anyone would like to give it a spin. Leave me a comment (with a valid e-mail address) and I’ll send an invite your way.

Wikimapia

WikimapiaTaking the customization of Wikipedia and the mapping ability of Google Maps, the new Wikimapia lets anyone anywhere put location specific information on a map of the world. Similar to just about any wiki, information can be tagged and edited by anyone visiting the site. To add something to the wikimap, just zoom to the area you want, and draw a box around the section you’d like to write about.

Flickr Gamma?

flickr gamaFlickr is finally out of beta (which they’ve been in since their launch in Feb ’04) and now in gamma! With their gamma release, they’ve added some nice new features to the site.

There are now nice drop-down on many of the menu items and site elements. A nice new search has been added to the site and will dig through all titles, tags & descriptions in the system. Organizr has some nice (needed) improvements allowing you to do a lot more with your photos (batch edits, tagging etc.). Organizr seems a bit snappier too, but that could just be me.

If you’ve never tried Flickr… now would be a good time to check it out!

Apple MacBook

MacBookToday Apple quietly released the MacBook, their new version of the iBook with an Intel chip inside. This is the fourth in their computer line to switch to the Intel chips, leaving only one machine left still using their older PowerPC processors.

The new Macbooks include the Intel Core Duo chips running 1.83 – 2.0 GHz with prices from $1099-1499. They’ve added the built-in iSight camera similar to the new MacBook Pro’s and the iMacs. One other nice touch is a black version at the high end of the line-up that looks pretty slick. All the machines (in their default configurations) are still a bit short on RAM with only 512 included, but shorting you on RAM seems to be pretty standard for Apple.

By and large, this looks like a pretty nice laptop, especially with the availability of BootCamp letting your run both OS X and Windows on it.

Google Trends

Google Trends was released today along with a few other new tools. Trends is a bit like Google Fight that I blogged about last year except the data is probably a little more detailed and accurate since it’s coming straight from the source. You can type in several terms and Google will show you a nice graph comparing the ratings of the search terms in Google.

Just so you know, Mentos rates way above Certs, Altoids and Breathsavers. I’d like to think that I’m somewhat responsible for that.

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ASCII Maps

ASCII MapsEver wondered what a map of your neighborhood looked like in ASCII text? Well, wonder no more – ASCII Maps is now available to provide an ASCII text version of Google Maps. It isn’t very useful at all since you can’t really tell what you’re looking at. But for you die-hard text-lovin’ ASCII art fans, you can now view maps in clean pure black and white text!

Yahoo! TV Launched

Yahoo TVIt didn’t take long for Yahoo to get their branded version of Meedio out there. They’ve called it Yahoo Go TV which adds to their Go Mobile and Go PC. I downloaded and installed Go TV and everything seemed to work pretty well. Out of the box, it doesn’t really have the Meedio feel to it though. Meedio had a lot more customization options. I haven’t had a whole lot of time to really dig into it, but from what I can tell by looking through the program files someone might be able to customize it like Meedio. In fact, some of the icons in the application directory are still the old red and yellow Meedio icons. I quickly tried dropping in a new theme and couldn’t get it to pick it up. I’m sure someone with a little more knowledge of the inner workings of Meedio shouldn’t have any problems hacking that (or any other plugins for that matter) to work.

As it stands now, it looks like Yahoo is keeping a pretty closed system. The great thing about Meedio is its incredible customization options. I’m hoping (since this is still beta) that they’ll open it up a little more and you won’t need to hack your way around to get plugins and themes to work. If not, the value of this app drops significantly.

UPDATE: It looks like folks on the old Meedio forums already have.

Street Wars

Check out this live action assassin game in LA. At the beginning of this three-week game, people that have signed up to play get an envelope that includes:

  • A picture of their intended target(s)
  • The home address of their intended target(s)
  • The work address of their intended target(s)
  • The name of their intended target(s)
  • Contact information of their intended target(s)

Then they have to go around and kill (with water guns) the targets provided. Once a target has been killed they hand their target info over to the killer. It lasts till someone is the only one left. How cool is that?