Those guys have built a business around an NP-hard problem. Is anyone here working on solving hard computational problems and thinking of building a business around it?

I think the bigger story is less about computationally hard problems, but about

1) finding a problem being solved the wrong way by the world and setting out to solve it the right way

2) the pains of dealing with all of the proprietary (and often annoying) deals and details in a well-established industry.

PS: It's easy to miss, but the interesting link here is http://www.demarcken.org/carl/papers/ITA-software-travel-com...

Is there a way to access the airfares data as an individual?

According to http://www.demarcken.org/carl/papers/ITA-software-travel-com... :

"The search engines run on databases of flights, prices, and seat availability, provided electronically over private networks by the 800 or so airlines of the world. The data is not directly available to the general public and access often must be negotiated with individual airlines [...] A large portion of the flight, price and seat availability data, called published data, is used by all the major search engines, but a significant amount of private data is restricted."

Anyone else see the toilet advert? Very disturbing...