Two months ago, Owen Byrne talked at eBC about his experiences at Digg.com, while hinting at a top secret project he was working on at Ottawa's Travelpod Labs in cooperation with Tripadvisor.com. That product, "Tripadvisor Flights" which launched in the last week of February, has received significant positive press coverage from the Boston Globe, USA Today, LA Free Press, and the New York Times.

Tripadvisor Flights is a airfare meta-search product designed to compete head-on with the industry leader Kayak.com, aggregating prices from Expedia, Hotwire, Travelocity, and several major airlines, allowing site visitors to filter itineraries according to many different criteria and providing the most breadth of results in the market.

In the wake of what one industry analyst called "about as pivotal moment in the history of meta search as you are going to find," Owen will demo Tripadvisor Flights, provide a project retrospective, and look at the dynamics of the meta-search niche as well as the online travel industry as a whole.
Archived Presentation

Owen Byrne, BIO
Owen Byrne is currently Senior Manager of Travelpod Labs, where he is leading a crack team of developers building a large travel-related application for launch in February 2009. He is probably best known as the co-founder and original developer of digg.com, which at one point was the 55th largest website in the world according to alexa.com.  He was the primary technical decision maker there for most of its period of explosive growth, from inception to the Series A financing.

Owen holds three degrees from Saint Mary's University and Dalhousie University, as well as an ABD from the University of Manitoba, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign's Reflections/Projection, and most recently, PHP-Quebec. He has over 20 years experience in software development and managerial roles including a brief stint as a university professor. He has presented at several conferences, including O'Reilly's Web 2.0 Expo, Digital Hollywood: Building Blocks, Webmasterworld PubCon, Administrative Sciences Association of Canada and most recently University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign's Reflections/Projection.