Priceline.com acquires Kayak for $1.8B

By Vasudev Ram

Seen via this Hacker News thread:

Priceline.com acquiring travel company KAYAK for $1.8B.

Sramana Mitra has blogged about Kayak in the past.

The NextWeb article above says that one of the founders of Kayak was earlier at Orbitz: "Kayak was launched in 2004 by Steve Hafner of Orbitz, Terrell Jones of Travelocity and Greg Slyngstad of Expedia."

The Wikipedia article about Orbitz (linked above), says that Orbitz licenses ITA Software's Lisp-powered QPX software to power their site. ITA Software was acquired by Google a while ago, and I've heard that they have / had a large number of Lisp developers working for them.

The Wikipedia Orbitz article also says that "Orbitz runs on a Red Hat Linux, Sun Solaris based platform and was an early adopter of Sun's Jini platform in a clustered Java environment.".

I did know about Jini from the earlier Sun days :), but hadn't checked it out. Interesting to see that Jini is now called Apache River, and that Ken Arnold was one of its architects. Ken was a big contributor to UNIX. See linked Wikipedia article.

I like this Ken Arnold quote:

"Every program has at least one bug and can be shortened by at least one instruction — from which, by induction, it is evident that every program can be reduced to one instruction that does not work."


- Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises

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A Lisp success story - ITA Software/Orbitz

Carl de Marcken: Inside Orbitz

from Paul Graham's site. The essay is old but of interest. Also, ITA Software was acquired a while ago by Google.

- Vasudev Ram
www.dancingbison.com