Hipmunk Surfacing New $6 Million Round

   if you were Kayak, and you already had a backend in place, wouldn't you assign at least one designer/developer to play around with novel UIs?

What's to say the current players haven't already tried those UI changes and found them less usable by the general population?

I don't know for sure, but I do know that calling the current competitors lazy is the completely wrong view (and factually incorrect). First, they deal with an older, less "techie" audience, which means different UIs are immediately viewed as confusing rather than cool. Second, they have the traffic to run A/B tests on everything, which allows them to know what such changes will do to their bottom line without having to publicly deploy or announce them.

Full disclosure: I worked on TripAdvisor Flights and was in the same YC batch as Hipmunk, though there was no overlap between the two and I actively avoided mixing the two circles, so I don't actually know anything about how Hipmunk views TA and vice-versa.

"A new hot startup launches, and they don't even lift a finger as a counter measure."

Probably because they don't think it's an improvement and they think it will go out of business on its own if they ignore it. This is what happens to most 'hot' startups anyway, and if Hipmunk is able to beat the odds then I doubt it will be because of their current UI.That's not to knock Hipmunk at all, I just think you need to lengthen your arc a little on this.

Large corporations are physically incapable of doing that (most of them, anyway). Who does the lone designer report to? Who gets him integration support from dev and ops? Who has to jump out a window when he clocks the upgrade that VP Marketing spent $400 million on last year because he liked the color scheme? (Hint: highly unlikely to be VP Marketing.)

Oftentimes it's because the innovations that the startup pioneers have hidden costs that become prohibitive with the big company's scale and consumer base. It's easy to prototype a feature, which is basically what a startup is. It's much harder to predict that feature's impact on all the other features in the system. Oftentimes those same new innovations have already been tried and rejected by the big companies because they result in unacceptable quality losses elsewhere.

Occasionally, the startup is right, and consumers care more about the innovations that they introduce than the features that conflict with them. In that case, the startup displaces the big company and doesn't remain a startup for long. But more often, as the startup grows, they run into the same issues that led the big company to reject the innovation in the first place. At that point, they hit a brick wall in their growth, and they either have to become lame like the big company or forego the users that need those conflicting features.

http://matrix.itasoftware.com/ offers a similar view if you choose "Time Bars" in the upper right corner in the flight list.

I read about this page one of the first times Hipmunk was discussed here, but I don't know who had it first.

Didn't hipmunk file some silly patents regarding their UI "just in case"?

Well, we have zero interest in selling for $10 million.

I think I've booked at least 10 flights thru Hipmunk. Much easier system for the business traveler to understand and plan.

$7mil in this market for seasoned entrepenuers with a product making over 100k a month (their numbers via recent interviews)... not a bad business to invest in.

Let's see how they scale.

I think so, for financial reasons. AA cut themselves out to cut costs. Orbitz and other similar services were (from what I heard) overcharging AA for referral costs. Naturally, I think Hipmunk and AA simply have a deal that won't really hurt AA.

That may have been a fluke. Delta wasn't listed on Hipmunk for a day or so.

they don't have enough partner airlines.

frankly i still find sidestep.com to be a better interface with more granular controls over what you're looking for.

I also don't get their business model. Last time i checked plane ticket affiliate payouts are abysmally low; south of $10 per ticket.

Alexis got someone to make it for us.

Can someone explain the image? So it's the hipmunk chipmunk stalking somebody in a kayak... Surface great airfare... EDIT: Wait, I get it. Setting sights on kayak.com. :)

The cost of just existing in this space is very high, let alone competing in it. We're a small operation now, but we've got a long way to go, and it won't be this way for long.