Today, FlightCaster launched. It's a site that can predict whether or not your flight will be delayed. Before it happens. Built by Jason Freedman, Bradford Cross and eight others in about four months, FlightCaster represents, I believe, the future of application development in numerous ways. Allow me to enumerate them.
- FlightCaster was built fast to address a need. Faster than fast. Four months fast.
- FlightCaster is built on Hadoop.
- FlightCaster uses a JVM to run other languages, specifically Clojure.
- Its Hadoop cluster is hosted in Amazon's cloud.
- The total costs to start this business came to less than seven digits.
- They use Cascading.
- The primary use case includes a mobile app. But it would work in a mobile browser, anyway.
- FlightCaster is built on top of data feeds and existing data. Data is the primary resource used to build the business. Publicly available data, no less.
- Their secret sauce is using predictive AI for forecasting. FlightCaster actually uses AI to solve a real problem.