Earlier today, we noticed a large amount of activity on Twitter linking to a blog post entitled The Cleartrip Hurry Algorithm. The writer of the post was confused by one of our recently launched features and felt we were engaging in “fake scarcity tactics” by employing some sort of ‘algorithm’ to trick users into feeling a sense of urgency.
We’d like to take the opportunity to explain and to improve.
How often have you shortlisted a particular flight (at a particular price point), and then seen the price change when you came back to book, even if it’s just a few minutes or a few hours later?
Airline pricing is based on ‘fare classes’ or ‘buckets’. Buckets typically work like this:
- Each bucket is allocated a fixed number of seats.
- Each bucket is associated with exactly one price point.
- When there are no more seats available in a bucket, prices from the next highest bucket are displayed and so on.
To help our users make faster and better decisions, we launched a feature last week to show our users when there are very few seats left in a bucket (i.e. a specific price point). The feature is not an algorithm — it only shows users a simple count of the number of ‘seats remaining’ at a specific price point for a specific flight departure.
For instance, let’s take a single person search for a flight from Bangalore to Srinagar on 26th January. The available price for a specific Kingfisher flight is Rs. 14,839. As there is only a single seat available at that price point, we display a “1 SEAT LEFT” indicator under the price.
There is only a single seat left at a price point of Rs. 14,839. This does not mean that there is only one seat left on the flight, it means there is only one seat left at that specific price.
When we repeat the same exact search for two travellers instead of one, the total price for the same exact Kingfisher flight is Rs. 33,240 or Rs.16,620 per person. The price per person increases by Rs. 1,781 (almost 12%) because there aren’t two seats available at the Rs. 14,839 price.
For three travellers, it gets even more interesting — the total price goes to Rs. 58,259, or Rs.19,419 per person. The per person price is now higher by Rs. 4,580 for the same seat.
| Price | Number of seats available |
| Rs. 14,839 | 1 |
| Rs. 16,620 | 2 |
| Rs. 19,419 | 3 |
We hope this post explains our current implementation of the feature. We will also be taking a hard look at how we can improve and make the feature clearer since it seems to be confusing some users and causing a storm in a social media teacup.
Time is precious, use yours well.
Startups are a funny thing and so are the entrepreneurs who start them.
Successful companies are started by people who want to make something — something new, something better — which the world will want. These are people who see things in the world and ask themselves, “Why does it have to be that way? Heck, it should be a hell of a lot better than that.” And then they push themselves and everyone around them to make it happen.
We recently ran a post here entitled Why are you starting something? where we stated:
If you’re starting something without a clear idea of what problem your startup will solve, your startup will fail.
We wanted to revisit that today, because there’s too many people starting things for the wrong reasons. The wrong reason we hear most often is some variation of “I want to be my own boss”.
There are gobs of so-called ‘entrepreneurs’ who start companies with nothing more than this as their rationale. They think big and dream even bigger about how one day they will be rich and famous with no one to thank but themselves. They write manifestoes, think up company names, write blogs and focus on how ‘cool’ it is to be ‘doing a startup’. They delude themselves and, in general, waste a lot of their own time and energy doing it.
Think about this for a moment, because it’s important–your company’s raison d’etre is that “you want to be your own boss”? If a company’s entire reason for existing is that the founder “wants to be their own boss”, why should the rest of the world give a damn? Does the company have a purpose other than celebrating your self-employment? Why will anyone want to be employed by a company which exists primarily to serve its founder’s megalomania?
What’s more, the romantic notion of being ‘your own boss’ is very different from the reality of it. When you start a company, the buck stops with you. All the bucks stop with you. Did marketing screw something up? No, you screwed it up, you fix it. Sales team isn’t hitting their targets? No, you’re not hitting the targets. Engineering team can’t figure out a good approach for code management? Your problem. In-fighting between departments? Your problem. Everything is your problem and everyone else is your boss–your investors, your employees, your partners and your customers; you are answerable to them all.
The very worst part is that most startups fail. And the so-called ‘startups’, created by ‘entrepreneurs’ who are enamoured of being their own bosses, they’re more likely to fail than startups focused on ideas for the things they want to create. If you’re not extremely passionate about what you’re doing, one day you will want to stop doing it. Are you really that passionate about being your own boss? Is anyone?
Steve Jobs said this part best:
“I get asked this a lot and I have a pretty standard answer which is, a lot of people come to me and say ‘I want to be an entrepreneur’. And I go ‘Oh that’s great, what’s your idea?’ And they say ‘I don’t have one yet’. And I say ‘I think you should go get a job as a busboy or something until you find something you’re really passionate about because it’s a lot of work. I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance. It is so hard. You put so much of your life into this thing. There are such rough moments in time that I think most people give up. I don’t blame them. Its really tough and it consumes your life… Unless you have a lot of passion about this, you’re not going to survive. You’re going to give it up. So you’ve got to have an idea, or a problem or a wrong that you want to right that you’re passionate about otherwise you’re not going to have the perseverance to stick it through. I think that’s half the battle right there.” ~ Steve Jobs
“I want to be my own boss” is not a good reason to start a company. In fact, it might well be the worst reason, so spare yourself and everyone else the agony. Start a company because you’re going to make something great, not because you’re going to make a great boss for yourself.
We had someone special book a very important trip with us recently. It was such an important trip Kedar felt we had to do a special, one-off redesign of our flight ticket.
Merry Christmas and a happy new year…
Katy Tur, for “NBC New York”http://bit.ly/rxeZiC:
A pair of would-be robbers targeting Columbia students in upper Manhattan seem to be rather picky as they prowl.
Twice… the suspects demanded the victims hand over their iPhones, police said.
The first victim complied, but the second only had a Droid, according to police. The thieves apparently didn’t want a Droid — so they took cash instead.
[via: Daring Fireball]
Jenna Wortham for The New York Times
Tyson Balcomb quit Facebook after a chance encounter on an elevator. He found himself standing next to a woman he had never met — yet through Facebook he knew what her older brother looked like, that she was from a tiny island off the coast of Washington and that she had recently visited the Space Needle in Seattle.
“I knew all these things about her, but I’d never even talked to her,” said Mr. Balcomb, a pre-med student in Oregon who had some real-life friends in common with the woman. “At that point I thought, maybe this is a little unhealthy.”
You’re not the only one who isn’t on Facebook. There are others.
The Ultimate Productivity blog has the best productivity tip we’ve ever come across:
Hard to argue with that — whether it’s work, fitness, personal goals or something else, the best way to hit your goals is to keep working at them.
[via Coding Horror]
Somewhere in the history of the Internet, publishers made a huge left turn. They gave their product — content — away for free. They blindly assumed that the economics of old media would apply to new media and that they would be able to recoup their ‘manufacturing’ costs by charging advertisers. Unfortunately, that’s not how it panned out.
“Radio ushered in the idea that content could be free 80 years ago. TV confirmed it. The internet circulated the idea that it should be free. This is neither logical nor fair to writers and editors (and art directors)–it’s just the market. If people are accustomed to free content, if their mental price-point is zero, then publishers can’t charge much for a publication.”
~ Roger Black, The Holy Grail, Part 1
The supply of ad-space and ‘eyeballs’ on the Internet was so vast, that the value of the ad-space being sold by publishers plummeted to pennies on the dollar compared to the price of ad-space in old media. Publishers never figured out how to turn this around.
What they did, instead, is pollute their content to the point where ugly, intrusive banner ads lie in wait at every turn on the information superhighway. Caught between an audience which expects that content should be free and plummeting ad revenue, publishers see no solution other than to slap even more ads on their content and to make those ads even more ‘in-your-face’ than ever before.
Publishers have pushed this to the breaking point — to the point where their audience now want their content money-free and ad-free.
“The ability to read uncluttered web pages is going mainstream.”
~ Brent Simmons, The Readable Future
In July 2010, we posted This Reader is indispensable, calling Safari’s new feature the best thing since tabbed browsing. With iOS 5, the Safari browser now lets people just read on their phones and tablets. If the feature was a joy for desktop users, it is nothing short of a blessing for tablet and phone users who have smaller screens.
This doesn’t bode well for publishers and that’s unfortunate, but if they’re bold enough to focus on their users instead of their short-term revenues, they might just find the answer.
Software developers and engineers are often accused of ‘designing for other engineers’, or, in other words, creating products that feel like they were designed by six year olds riding the bus on the way to school.
It is patently false, however, to assume that it is impossible for developers to deliver good design and this presentation is great grounding for any developer who is committed to getting better at design.
Steve Denning, Forbes — Cisco vs. Juniper: Delight or Die!
In the 1980s American business discovered quality and started getting into the quality business. They had learned from Toyota that the best ideas came from the bottom up. They recognized that everyone could make a difference and contribute to delighting a customer. It was all about teamwork. It was exciting. Some companies were succeeding but others were finding it difficult to implement.
Then the investment bankers-Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, J.P.Morgan and so on-showed up and started whispering in the CEOs’ ears.
“How do you know that what you are investing in is worth it? Why go through all that hassle? Why not just buy your competitor and let half their people go. There’s little risk. Your stock price will go up. Your company will be much bigger and more powerful. And you personally will get a huge bonus.”
And that’s basically what happened. Many companies took the easy way out. And in the short run, it worked. The acquisitions were made. The companies got bigger while many jobs were lost. The CEOs got their bonuses. In the short run, buying other firms made money, but essentially these firms were heading down a long-term death spiral.
