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FareScout
The frustrations of air travel are fodder for countless standup comics, and online booking services have not fully eased the agony. Andrew Cole, CCO of Flyinaway Travel Technologies, hopes the company's new, free app, FareScout, will change that, or at least take out some of the guesstimating.
[ibimage==30111==Medium==none==self==ibimage_align-right]“FareScout searches 13 months of historical airline data to help travelers determine if now is the right time to buy or if you may be able to save some money by waiting for the fare to drop in the near future," said Cole. "It presents you with a simple range and a 'buy' or 'wait' suggestion, or a 'too close to call' if it falls right in the middle.”
If you love gamification, think of FareScout as a much more calm and personalized version of Mad Money for plane tickets.
FareScout already has some heavy tech on its side. “The app is built on a new API from Sabre, one of the Global Distribution Systems," said Cole. As the app gains traction, Flyinaway hopes to please even more demanding users by beefing up its capabilities and adding international destinations as FareScout emerges from beta.
“Right now,” said Cole, “you can search dates up to two months in advance, the period when pricing is most likely to change, due to a limitation in the API, but we're working to lengthen that period for a better user experience. And we currently only have domestic travel, but we're working to add international soon as well.”
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SlamData
In the best tradition of Colorado tech startups, SlamData is pioneering a new analytics tool for enterprise databases. Founder Jeff Carr said he realized that as more people use NoSQL databases, like MongoDB, data creation and management is changing.
“There was a need for more complex data structures. Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare — they needed more sophisticated ways of storing data,” said Carr.
For many tech companies that meant shifting to MongoDB. Unfortunately, as companies have moved in that direction “what hasn’t kept up is the analytics side of that,” said Carr. That is there are not many good ways to query these new and complex databases. This is where SlamData comes in.
Currently if you want to query something in your MongoDB database you have to write your own unique code to do it. Building your own query code can be labor intensive, error prone and frustrating.
“It’s sort of the moral equivalent of every time you’re going somewhere you have to build your own car,” said Carr. “It might take days. With our tool it’s a matter of minutes.”
SlamData, which is currently in beta, lets users run queries and build reports directly on the data stored in MongoDB. SlamData is also open source and doesn’t require any data relocation, ETL or developer resources. The company has plans to expand beyond MongoDB too. In the future they hope to support queries for Apache Spark, Elasticsearch and Cassandra. SlamData is currently a team of six, raised $250,000 of angel funding this summer and is expecting to make their product generally available this month.
Ramen
“More than once,” said Ryan Angilly, founder of Ramen, “I’ve spent a year on a company only to kill it. In retrospect, probably should have killed them sooner. In a way, I knew there was a need for something like Ramen before we came up with the idea for Ramen.”
What is Ramen? It's a tool that helps startups avoid the pitfalls Angilly experienced, a pre-order funding platform designed to help software startups find their first customers, with tools to turn those relationships into funding and sustainability.
“The seed for Ramen was one line on a 450-line spreadsheet,” said Angilly. “'Build a crowdfunding platform for B2B SaaS.' Over the summer of 2013, the concept of a customer collaboration platform was introduced, and eventually became the core product. This idea of building a platform around customer collaboration to help entrepreneurs be more efficient in how they build products really resonated with me.”
After a seed funding round earlier this year, including investments from Jason Calicanas and other tech giants, Ramen has just recently begun to ramp up its customer base. Now that the company is growing from its roots as a four-man hackathon team with four contractors, Angilly is eager to expand.
“I’m starting to have a real hard time keeping up with sales and support conversations,” said Angilly. “Therefore, it’s getting close to that time where I should get some more resources to help out there.”
Angilly said his observations on the Colorado tech circuit are incredibly positive. “Boulder is an incredible 'beachhead' into the technology startup world,” he said. “You can come into Boulder without knowing anyone, cold-email 80 people asking to hang out, and end up with 70 coffee dates and another 30 introductions. Once you’re here for a while, you realize that you might not know many of the 'famous' people in the startup world, but you’re only one degree of separation away from them."
“Meanwhile, Denver is much bigger when it comes to harboring successful tech companies than a lot of people, even people in Denver, realize. This creates a phenomenally valuable - and I believe, unique - juxtaposition of two types of cultures: one that can act as a catalyst for creating lots of diverse and crazy ideas, and one that can act as a filter and maturation chamber for those ideas before sending them out into the world.”
He leaves us with a bit of advice. “Capitalistic karma is real,” said Angilly, “so keep being a beachhead, mentor people, and give first.”
This post includes contributions from Garrett Reim.
