YC-Funded Flightcaster Tells You When Your Flight Is Delayed

I can't help but imagine pilots checking the statuses of their own flights, thousands of feet up in the air, punching the gas to beat their odds.<p>Congrats on launching!

I have a neat viral marketing / mailing list building idea for you if you like - a local radio news station here has a "weather guarantee".<p>They have a pool of prize money which increases daily. Every day on the radio they say what their guaranteed weather high is - if they don't hit it, they pick a name from their member database and give them the pool and start over again. Therefore you must join their database in order to win the prize - and the contest itself reaffirms the accuracy of the radio broadcast (if they are willing to be against their weather estimates they must be good!)<p>What you can do is have the same model with a daily flight time guarantee, and give away a free copy of the app as a prize. People who are going to buy your app will likely do it anyways, so this is a way to collect all the info of the "tire kickers" so you can slowly remind them over 3-12 months why they should buy your app. The viral part can come from getting additional entries in the pool by recommended your friends.<p>Just a random thought that popped in my head - something to consider while you have all this early launch hype surrounding you..

I am flying this Friday so I will make sure to test it out. That's a pretty steep price for the iPhone app though... if you guys can recommend me alternative routes then that would be worth paying for, but at the current stage I don't see myself paying for an app just to check if my flight will be delayed or not.<p>When I was a consultant, I used to travel every week. What irritated the heck out of me is these in-route weather conditions. So for instance, if I am flying from Dallas to NY, and there's bad weather somewhere in the middle, they will cancel the flight. If you can recommend me to get on a flight that will go around the problem (such as Dallas -&#62; Miami, Miami -&#62; NY), then it would be really useful. But this is probably only useful for business travelers since casual travelers probably won't be willing to shell out the extra airfare.

I'm trying to understand how this differs from <a href="http://www.tripit.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.tripit.com/</a>

This sounds really cool and I will check it out next time I fly. One thing - is the patent on your patent-pending algorithm really appropriate? Necessary? I imagine there's some prior art, too, since I bet the airlines have statistical models to predict whether their own flights are going to be late based on weather, congestion, etc.

Neat idea. I think it will be really useful if you provide a track record of what percentage of your predictions are right. Otherwise, this service is mostly going to be useful to business customers who buy flexible tickets. Someone like me, is not going to take a chance even if you say 80% probability of a delay on an economy class ticket.

Just in time for Demo Day! Nice writeup.

Question is do you have a sustainable model, once everyone buys your app you don't a new stream only from new customers. I just bought your app ;) just wondering if I have to worry about the future of it.

Cool .... do you have an API?