Travel Search Company Skyscanner Acquires Budapest-Based Mobile App Developer Distinction

Skyscanner, the travel search company headquartered in Edinburgh, Scotland (and a veteran of the space), is consolidating its mobile strategy today with the acquisition of Budapest-based app developer Distinction.

The deal — terms of which remain undisclosed — sees the Scottish company pick up Distinction’s 30-strong team of mobile designers and developers who will form the basis of Skyscanner new Budapest, Hungary-based mobile ‘hub’, effectively bringing its mobile app development in-house.

The two companies had already been working together, most recently to develop Skyscanner’s hotel app which launched in August this year on iOS and Android. However, I understand the relationship harks back to 2011, including Distinction helping to build the travel search company’s Windows Mobile 8 flight search app a couple of years ago.

Along with its new Budapest mobile development hub via today’s acquisition, Skyscanner says it plans to create additional roles to drive mobile growth, which has already seen a multitude of travel apps hit the various app stores. “We have expanded our range of apps over the past 12 months, adding car hire and, most recently, hotels and have had over 30m downloads across our product range,” a company spokesperson tell me.

To that end, Gareth Williams, Skyscanner co-founder and CEO, says in a statement: “The future of online travel booking is undoubtedly mobile. More and more of travellers’ plans are made on the move and that is accelerating fast.

“The team at Distinction, led by Bálint Orosz and Akos Kapui, are some of the best app developers that I’ve ever come across. In working closely with them on the design of our hotel app, we saw how focused they were on the user experience. They have built a fantastic company with a great culture and, as part of our combined team, will focus on creating the mobile travel assistant that future travellers will need.”

How To Hide Text In Microsoft Word 2007, Reveal It & Protect It

Sometimes what we hide is more important than what we reveal. Especially, documents with sensitive information, some things are supposed to be ‘for some eyes only’. Such scenarios are quite common, even for the more un-secretive among us. You want to show someone a letter composed in MS Word, but want to keep some of the content private; or it’s an official letter with some part of it having critical data. As important as these two are, the most common use could involve a normal printing job. Many a time we have to print different versions of a document, one copy for one set of eyes and others for other sets. Rather than creating multiple copies and therefore multiple printing jobs, what if we could just do it from the same document? That too, without the hassle of repeated cut and paste. We can, with a simple feature in MS Word – it’s just called Hidden and let me show you how to use it to hide text in Microsoft Word 2007. It’s a simple single click process. Open the document

Clip & Convert Your Video Faster With Quicktime X & The New Handbrake 64-bit [Mac]

Recently a friend of mine asked for my help to find a video of a good presentation to be shown to one of his classes. He also requested for it to be iPod friendly as he would also distribute the video to his students. Three things came to my mind: Steve Jobs, Quicktime and Handbrake . Mr. Jobs is well known for his great presentations which are often used as references. I have several Apple Keynotes videos. For my friend, I decided to choose the one that introduced MacBook Air – the one that never fails to deliver the wow effect to the non-techie audience. It’s a part of January 2008 Macworld Keynote. First step: The Cutting To get only a specific part of the Keynote, I clipped the 1+ hour video into about 20 minutes using Quicktime X (which comes with Snow Leopard). I opened the movie using Quicktime X and chose Trim from the Edit menu ( Command + T ). Then I chose the start and end of my clip by moving both edges of the trimming bar to the desired position. To increase th

Ex-Skypers Launch Virtual Whiteboard Deekit

Although seriously long in the tooth and being disrupted by a plethora of startups, for many years Skype has existed as an almost ubiquitous app in any remote team’s toolkit. So it seems apt that a new startup founded by a team of ex-Skype employees is set to tackle another aspect of online collaboration. Deekit, which exits private beta today, is a virtual and collaborative whiteboard to help remote teams work smarter. The Tallinn, Estonia-based startup is headed up by founder and CEO, Kaili Kleemeier, who was previously a Head of Operations at Skype. She and three colleagues quit the Internet calling giant in 2012 and spent a year researching ideas in the remote team space. They ended up focusing on creating a new virtual whiteboard, born out of Kleemeier’s experience collaborating with technical teams remotely, specifically helping Skype deal with incident management. “Working with remote teams has been a challenge in many ways – cultural differences, language differences, a

Kiran Upadhyay

Search This Blog