Framingham, MA-based Punchbowl Software, the company behind party planning site MyPunchbowl.com, said today that it has acquired the assets of I’m In, a group vacation website formerly owned by Waltham, MA-based GroupGo. Punchbowl’s founder and CEO Matt Douglas says the local search tools created by I’m In have enabled MyPunchbowl to launch a new local vendor portal where party planners can connect with small businesses.

“I had known the guys at I’m In from the local startup scene,” says Douglas. “They were building a group travel and local search product for the trip and travel world, and what impressed me most was their local vendor portal. They were doing a great job, and we kept an eye on them. Over time, the opportunity came to us to acquire the property, and long story short, I decided to pull the trigger. It’s not every day that a startup acquires another startup, but my investors and our board got together and said, ‘You know what, this is something that could really accelerate the company.’”

Punchbowl has acquired I’m In’s software code, designs, trademarks, and domain names, but hasn’t brought in any of its former employees. Douglas isn’t saying how much Punchbowl paid in the deal, but he says Punchbowl didn’t have to raise any new venture funding to make the purchase. The company’s most recent venture round of $2.1 million, supplied by Contour Ventures, Intel Capital, and eCoast Angels, came in September 2008.

Punchbowl earns revenue largely by generating sales leads for party vendors, so the new directory could be a big asset. “I can’t overemphasize how big of a project it is to launch a local vendor portal for 50 states and 30,000 cities—there are over 1 million vendors” in the new portal, says Douglas. “The technology we acquired will give us a huge head start, and we’re excited that we can finally talk about the acquisition and our new portal.”

Don Dodge—the former Microsoft emerging business team director who announced this week that he has accepted a position at Google—is on the board at Punchbowl. We profiled the startup shortly after its launch in October 2007.

GroupGo, meanwhile, was founded in 2005 by entrepreneurs and hotel-industry veterans Brian Harrington and Josh Lesnick and had backing from Annex Ventures. The company was known for helping groups of young adults plan so-called “girlcations” and “mancursions” to locations such as Napa Valley or Las Vegas. Boston.com profiled the company in 2007.

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It’s Friday, the weekend is beckoning, and you’ve got your Web browser open. As much as we’d love it if you spent the weekend reading Xconomy, there’s now a less sedentary option, from a Boston startup called Goby. It’s a search engine designed specifically to help you find fun things to do out in the real world—assuming, that is, that you already have some inkling of what kinds of activities you enjoy, where you’d like to do them, and when you have time free.

In fact, the Goby.com website—which goes public today after more than a year in stealth mode—features a row of three search boxes that ask you for exactly that information: What, Where, and When. Once you’ve given Goby those clues, the MIT-bred software behind the site goes to work, using what the company calls “deep Web” technology to scour some 500 data sources, from Yelp to to BedandBreakfast.com. Using the context it’s gleaned, it then organizes the results in a way that’s designed to be easy to explore.

Say you’re thinking about going hiking this weekend north of Boston. Goby will show you nearly 200 options culled from sites like The Trustees of Reservations, mntnLife.com, LocalHikes.com, and Wildernet.com, and arrange them in order of distance from a central point. Buttons within each result let you instantly view additional details like driving directions and photos. Every location is also displayed on an interactive map.

There are plenty of links to the original sources—this is a search engine, after all—but the information is compiled so cleverly that you can finish a lot of your research and activity planning without ever leaving Goby. And that’s part of the point.

“Our belief is that today, information and choices on the Web are very fragmented, and people don’t have a good sense for how to browse it,” says Mark Watkins, Goby’s CEO and co-founder. “We thought there was an opportunity to pull that information together in a consistent framework and interface, where people will have a much more robust sense of their choices. We’re kind of halfway between a search engine and a destination site, in that respect. It’s not just about getting people through as quickly as we can. Product design and user experience are very important to us.”

By “us,” Watkins is referring to the small group of experienced, New England-based database researchers and search industry executives who started Goby in the summer of 2008. Watkins himself is the former director of R&D and professional services at Endeca, the Cambridge, MA-based enterprise search provider. Chief technology officer and co-founder Vince Russo, a PhD computer scientist who designed Goby’s core search functionality, is a former chief architect from …Next Page »

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Raveable is a year-old Seattle-area startup that launched its hotel review summarization website in May. If there were a Raveable entry for Raveable itself, here’s what it might say:

Ranked 116 out of 340 tech startup websites in Seattle.

The good: Team is ambitious and knowledgeable; large market; useful technology; fun interface; customer focused; strong word of mouth.

The bad: Relatively new; pre-revenue company.

Best kept secret: Gaining attention from angel investors and VCs.

The idea of Raveable is to help leisure travelers quickly make sense of all the user reviews out there on the Web, and choose a hotel that’s right for them. So the company aggregates reviews from sites like TravelPost (Kayak), MyTravelGuide (Priceline), CitySearch, Yahoo Travel, and VirtualTourist, and provides a bullet-point analysis of the pros and cons of each hotel—for 55,000 establishments and counting in the U.S.

The company was founded by Philip Vaughn and Rafik Robeal, former Microsoft veterans with expertise in database applications, data synchronization, and mobile social networking. Raveable grew out of difficulties they’d each had in booking hotels quickly; they found they were sorting through dozens of reviews on multiple sites, without having a top-down view of how various hotels stack up against each other.

“We want to make it really easy to make a decision,” Vaughn says. “We were really frustrated by ‘Everything is 3.5 stars, everything is above average, everything is good.’”

The technology behind their approach is semantic analysis of text—an area that’s been in research for decades, but is increasingly being applied to Web search and corporate software. The goal is for the software to understand the meaning of sentences in user reviews—including the topic, the context, and the sentiment. So if reviews say the rooms are great, beds are comfortable, or parking is expensive, that’s pretty straightforward. But if they say the service could be faster, rooms get cold, the view is sick, or the place is in good need of repairs, say, the software relies on statistical models (trained and updated by the founders) to ascertain whether the sentiment is positive or negative.

Vaughn gives a sense of historical perspective, pointing out that Raveable fits into the trend …Next Page »

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Xconomy is saddened to note that Brett Allsop, the chairman and co-founder of Seattle-based Yapta, died last night in a car accident in Bellingham, WA. Allsop was 38. The news was reported by the Bellingham Herald.

Allsop co-founded Yapta, an online travel site that tracks airfares and hotel prices, in 2006. The startup raised $2 million in venture capital in June from Voyager Capital and other investors, and a total of $7.7 million since it got started.

The Seattle Times quotes Yapta spokesman Jeff Pecor as saying, “We’re obviously deeply saddened about it. All our prayers and thoughts go out to the Allsop family.” TechFlash quotes Yapta co-founder and CEO Tom Romary as saying, “It is a tremendous loss. He was an exceptional person—ethical, bright, innovative—and I will miss him dearly.” A blog post on the Yapta website today reads, “Without Brett, there would have been no Yapta. He was a visionary and a great entrepreneur—and most importantly, a terrific guy.”

“I love helping to create that break through idea,” Allsop wrote on his LinkedIn page.

Allsop began his career by founding Fogdog, a leading online sporting goods retailer that was acquired by GSI Commerce (NASDAQ: GSIC) in 2000. He then joined Amadeus Capital in London where he evaluated investment opportunities in software. In 2003, he became president of his family’s business, Bellingham-based Allsop Inc., a computer and consumer electronic accessories company. Allsop was a Stanford University engineering alum, and was married with two children.

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It was a slow week for deals in the Northwest, with just a trickle of activity in software, Internet, and medical devices. We’ll see if things pick up after the holiday weekend.

—Bellevue, WA-based PhysioSonics raised $2 million in equity funding from undisclosed investors, as Luke reported. The maker of ultrasound technology for monitoring blood flow in the brain, led by chief executive Brad Harlow, previously raised $4 million last June from Johnson & Johnson Development Corp. Its device is designed to help doctors track the effects of drugs in stroke patients and people with head injuries, as Luke wrote in a company profile.

—Seattle-based Yapta, a travel website that tracks airfare and hotel prices, closed a $2 million Series B investment round led by Voyager Capital in Seattle. The round also included Swiftsure Capital, W Media Ventures, Bay Partners, and First Round Capital. Founded in 2006, Yapta is led by CEO Tom Romary and has raised $7.7 million in total funding.

— Seattle-based Escapia raised $1.6 million, led by existing investors including Steven D. Murch, Buerk Dale Victor, and Atlas Accelerator, as Eric reported. Escapia, founded in 2000, hosts online vacation rental software. The new funds will be used to expand the software’s capabilities and customer base.

—Rachel took a closer look at what Seattle-based energy efficiency firm Powerit Solutions is doing with its recent funding—$6 million last month from Siemens Venture Capital, ArcelorMittal, @Ventures, and Expansion Capital Partners. The short answer: it is expanding globally, but carefully. Powerit (pronounced Power-eye-tee) makes hardware and software to help industrial facilities monitor their energy use and adjust it according to changes in electricity rates.

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Seattle-based Yapta, an online travel site that tracks airfare and hotel prices, announced it has closed a $2 million Series B funding round led by Voyager Capital. The round also included Northwest investors Swiftsure Capital and W Media Ventures, and San Francisco-area firms Bay Partners and First Round Capital. Yapta was founded in 2006 and has raised a total of $7.7 million. The news was first reported by TechFlash.

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Escapia, a Seattle-based provider of online vacation rental software raised $1.6 million from investors, according to an announcement by the company today.  Escapia, which was founded in 2000 and hosts software used by vacation rental managers to market and administer their property, is using the money to expand the capabilities of its software and accommodate new clients, with a 25 percent increase in the past year of rental agencies using the site.

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Dan Weld spends a lot of time thinking about the Web and how to get the best information out of it. Weld is a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington and a serial entrepreneur, having co-founded Netbot, AdRelevance, and Nimble Technology. He is also a venture partner with Seattle-based Madrona Venture Group. Some of his research projects include customizable software interfaces and ways to improve information finding on Wikipedia. He is an expert in Web search, information extraction, and adaptive user interfaces, so he seemed like the perfect person to ask: what is the big deal with Microsoft’s Bing, anyway?

In a recent interview, Weld talked about the improvements Bing has made over Google and other current search engines (only slight), the future of Web search, and a hint at a project he is working on that he thinks could change the way we find information online.

The following is an edited version of our conversation.

Xconomy: Let’s start with your general impressions of Bing.

Dan Weld: I think it’s a nice, if small, advance. Some of the things they’ve done in this relaunch are primarily architectural and will support their plans for the future. In terms of what is actually available right now, the biggest change is integrating vertical search in a uniform way.

X: What does that mean?

DW: When you think of search, everyone thinks about Google, and maybe Yahoo, but there are many other kinds of search, like people searches (you can think about Facebook as a people search), travel search (Kayak and Expedia), health information sites. You can think about Wikipedia as providing a search for encyclopedic information. Shopping searches—Amazon is great in part because it makes it easy to find so much information about the products, and reviews of products. All of these are examples of vertical search experiences. Instead of having wide coverage, you have a better experience within a narrow range.

Bing has tried to marry those things into an integrated wide search experience. All of the engines have been doing this. If you do a search on Google for a movie, you might see information about show times and trailers at the top, for example. Bing has gone further in some directions than people have gone before, in this aspect. If you look at their tabbed pane, it lets you look at different kinds of information right there.

X: But doesn’t Google do that too?

DW: All the engines are trying to do it, but the way Microsoft has done it with Bing is somewhat better than what Google has done. With the shopping tab, you get a faceted interface, meaning you can narrow your search using categorical information, restricting yourself to a particular brand or price range. Those facets are specific to the object you’re searching.

X: So if this is just a small change, what kinds of big changes can we expect to see in the future?

DW: Lots of people are happy with search today, but that’s because they set their sights too low. I think search is going to change enormously in the future, and I think it’s going to do so by …Next Page »

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Although Microsoft made the official announcement about its new search engine Bing last week, the site won’t be fully functional until this Wednesday.  Here are some tidbits about Bing collected from the Web to tide you over until then.

—In his early test drive of Bing, The Seattle Times’ Brier Dudley concluded that the upstart search engine won’t replace Google.  However, he did say that the video searching and travel price prediction capabilities will give the big G a run for its money.

—On a more historical note, CNET’s Ina Fried wrote the story of the development of Bing, why search matters, and why one of the major developers built a boat in China.  Nautical pursuits aside, the most important nugget of information may be that Bing is meant to continue to develop and grow—by adding more information to the search results, for instance—after Wednesday.

—Qi Lu, Microsoft’s head of online services (who came over from Yahoo in January), gave a rare interview to Peter Burrows of BusinessWeek that conveyed a similar idea.  He described Bing as just a small part of a long journey.  Lu also said he expects other competitors to arise, which will ultimately benefit end-users of search technologies.

My favorite bit of Bing-ology?  Typing “Bing” into Google brings up “Bing Surfboards” directly below the listing for the new search engine.

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A few weeks ago, after sending out a notice reminding folks of our then-upcoming Xconomy Battle of the Tech Bands on January 22, I got an e-mail back from Bob Metcalfe of Polaris Venture Partners. It read: “Thanks for inviting me…but darn, on January 22, I will be returning from Africa, having just climbed (I hope) Kilimanjaro.”

Did anyone else detect sarcasm in that “darn”?

But guess what—he did it! Turns out the 62-year-old Ethernet co-inventor was part of a team from the Explorers Club that did indeed reach the 19,340-foot (5,898.7 meters) summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro, the highest point in Africa, in northeastern Tanzania.

Here’s his communique:

Our Explorers Club “Flag Expedition” had 24 climbers and 44 guides and porters. Seven days up, and two days down.

We had a team of doctors working to keep us well, and a team trying to study AMS — acute mountain sickness, which I lucked out and did not get.

Researchers from US Army and MGH.

After summit at Uhuru peak of Kibo crater, we camped just below, in the crater, at 18,800 feet, COLD, next to remnants of Kilimanjaro’s famously melting glaciers. I am wondering if Kilimanjaro’s glaciers melt after every ice age (since the crater formed 100K+ years ago) or just this past one.

This ascent/descent followed our family descent/ascent into the Grand Canyon a couple of weeks ago. Mt. Washington a couple of weeks before that. Beacon Hill daily.

Click on the photo below for a larger view. The photo was taken on January 19, so recall his note about “two days down.” I think he could have made the Battle on January 22. Bob?

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Seattle and Boston, two of Xconomy’s network cities, have something extra to be proud of today—at least when it comes to Internet startups. Each city contributed two companies to a popular list of the year’s best Web applications for improving customers’ real lives.

That’s according to the tech-news blog ReadWriteWeb, which has published its list of the “top 10 real world Web apps of 2008.” These are Web services that help keep people’s offline lives more organized and efficient. The categories were finance, health, education, politics, nonprofits, and travel. Without further ado:

—In Seattle, the teacher/student community site TeachStreet won in the education category, while the airfare-tracking site Yapta won in travel. TeachStreet expanded to the San Francisco Bay Area last month, from Seattle and Portland. Yapta is in the process of closing a funding round of at least $2.7 million.

—In the Boston area, the social-networking sites PatientsLikeMe and Sermo, both based in Cambridge, MA, won in the health category. PatientsLikeMe is an online community for people with life-changing medical conditions like Lou Gehrig’s disease, HIV, and Parkinson’s disease. Sermo is a site where 90,000 doctors exchange information about medical practice. Sermo recently signed a deal to open up access to this network to financial industry experts who subscribe to the Bloomberg Professional information service.

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Maybe it’s because everyone is trying to get their deals announced before the holidays, but it was a busy week in the Northwest, with plenty of activity in mobile software, online media, and medical devices.

—Bellevue, WA-based BlueKai, an Internet marketing firm, raised $10.5 million in Series B funding, led by Waltham, MA-based Battery Ventures. Existing investor Redpoint Ventures also contributed to the round. BlueKai is creating a marketplace for online consumer data.

—Luke reported that Seattle-based Uptake Medical, a maker of medical devices, raised $3 million to carry out a pair of clinical trials for a technique to treat emphysema and other deadly lung-obstructing diseases. The capital was raised from all of Uptake’s previous investors, including Prism VentureWorks, Onset Ventures, and WRF Capital.

—Seattle-based mobile startup Zumobi teamed up with outdoor retailer REI to release a free software application, called the REI Snow Report, for getting instant …Next Page »

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BlueKai, an online-marketing startup in Bellevue, WA, has nailed down one of the bigger tech venture deals of the past few months. The company is announcing today it has closed a $10.5 million Series B investment led by Battery Ventures, based in Waltham, MA, and Menlo Park, CA. The round also includes returning investor Redpoint Ventures.

The company’s name with the Hawaiian suffix (”kai” means ocean) is inspired in part by the bestselling business book Blue Ocean Strategy, which urges businesspeople to create a new market or “blue ocean” rather than fight it out with competitors in established markets. BlueKai seems to be applying this idea to online advertising, creating a completely new way for businesses to reach customers.

I spoke with BlueKai CEO Omar Tawakol to get the story behind today’s deal. Tawakol, an MIT and Stanford University alum, is a veteran of Seattle-based Medio Systems and Bellevue-based Revenue Science. He started BlueKai in December 2007 with the idea of creating a huge database of online users’ preferences and intentions. The company provides data on users’ Web-browsing behavior to marketers, advertising networks, and publishers, and it collects a percentage of each ensuing transaction.

What makes BlueKai different from other related companies is its notion of “data exchange,” and the fact that it separates user data from everything else. A travel site, for instance, may sign up with BlueKai to provide anonymous user data. Publishers, airline marketers, and ad networks can then bid for the right to its “cookies”—snippets of code that tell where a user has been and what their preferences are—so as to more effectively target ads. “We’ve aggregated very high-value data at massive scale,” says Tawakol. “People pay for the data, instead of revenue sharing. That encourages big sellers, it gives them a revenue option that’s safe.”

Back in March, BlueKai closed a $3.2 million Series A round led by Redpoint. As Tawakol explains, the original plan was to focus on one “vertical” space—but the company got up and running in the travel, retail, and automotive sectors, ahead of schedule. “Our goal was to validate the concept in one vertical,” he says. “As it approached October, we had three verticals up with huge sellers, and a growing buyer base. So we thought, this is the right time to go for Series B…Our strategy was to keep our relationships with VCs, and we kept our contacts open.”

It seems to have paid off. Besides the infusion of capital, BlueKai gains the online-media expertise of Battery Ventures. Satya Patel, a Battery principal based in Silicon Valley, is joining the BlueKai board. Patel has previous experience as a product manager at Google and DoubleClick.

Tawakol isn’t naming names, but so far, BlueKai has signed up more than 20 large retailers, half of the top 20 ad networks, and several top travel search engines. He says the new funds will be used for “more investment in the product” and sales teams—to do things like add new categories and get more visibility. There will be modest growth in the staff, he says, which currently numbers 13.

I asked Tawakol whether consumers have to buy into the whole concept in order for BlueKai to take off. He emphasized that BlueKai is a business-to-business operation, and that its revenues are growing independent of any consumer push. But he acknowledged the privacy issue, pointing out that the company lets consumers opt out of having their data traded online, as well as letting you “see exactly what data is known about you by marketers” through its BlueKai Registry program.

As Tawakol points out, “If we don’t raise the bar and be more open with consumers, there could be FTC [Federal Trade Commission] backlash.” He adds that it’s important to be completely transparent about what is being done with user information.

All that said, Tawakol envisions a day, perhaps five to seven years from now, when Internet users will receive the equivalent of mileage points for their own data, and be able to trade them for goods and services. People could then manage their product preferences and other information, he says. “We’re creating an economy for data.”

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Seattle-based Yapta, an online travel service that tracks airfares for consumers, has raised $2.7 million in funding from undisclosed investors, according to a company spokesman. The funding round is still open, so that figure could change in the next month. Yapta launched in May 2007 and is backed by First Round Capital, Voyager Capital, Swiftsure Capital, and Bay Partners.

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Newton, MA-based travel media network TripAdvisor said yesterday that it has acquired a majority stake in FlipKey, a Boston-based consumer review site for rental vacation homes. FlipKey was launched in March by TJ Mahony, Carl Query and Jeremiah Gall; Mahony and Query previously founded Boston-based web analytics and marketing firm Compete.com, which was purchased by London market research company TNS in March for $150 million. The terms of the FlipKey acquisition were not disclosed.

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Right now, if you want to zip through security lines at major airports you have three basic options: travel at weird hours when few people are in the airport; shell out big bucks for a first-class ticket (provided the airport has a separate line for first class); or sign up for a Clear pass (or a similar pass from a competing company) that verifies your identity and makes it easy to get through lines at a growing number of airports around the country.

Although option 2 sounds nice, option 3 is probably the most practical and affordable. Right now, Clear is offered at some 18 airports—none of them named Logan or Sea-Tac (in Xconomy’s home cities). But it might be coming to those airports soon. And to help Clear expand to more locations, faster—as well as non-airport venues like sporting events—Boston’s Spark Capital has taken the lead in a $44.4 million investment in the New York-based security firm, the companies announced today. Syncom Venture Partners also joined the round, as did repeat investors Lockheed Martin, Baker Capital, GE Security, and Lehman Brothers. With the new funding, Clear has raised a total of $116.4 million.

Clear works on an annual membership basis. Enrollment starts online, where you provide some basic biographical information. Then, if you receive government approval for the program, you are invited to a Clear center (they currently operate in 11 states), where you must provide two forms of government-issued identification (a passport and driver’s license, say) and then have your fingerprints and iris images captured—and your picture taken. Only then do you pay your $128 annual membership fee, and in return you get a Clear card that allows access to special security lanes, where your identify is verified biometrically.

Clear, with some 200,000 members, claims its lanes are 30 percent faster than regular security lanes, and according to the release, the company “plans to improve that even more through enhanced technology which, once approved by the US Government, could allow cardholders not to have to remove shoes, outer garments or laptops as they pass through the security checkpoint.”

Right now, Clear has two main competitors, FLO Corp. and Vigilant Solutions, according to a spokesman. The cards from the three programs all work at the same special security lanes. Clear plans to use its new cash influx to recruit more members in its current markets and also expand to new markets around the U.S..

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Spire.com, the Boston-based social networking site for the affluent—not be confused with Bedford, MA-based photovoltaic equipment maker Spire Corporation—said this week that it has raised $9 million in Series A venture financing, in a round led by Hearst Interactive Media, Trident Capital, TL Ventures and private investors.

The company, whose network is aimed at high-net-worth individuals but is open to all, said it has already used some of the funds to acquire London-based travel and lifestyle site Suzanne’s Files. The creator of Suzanne’s File’s, Suzanne Aaronson, co-founded Spire.com with CEO Janet Kraus, formerly of Circles, a Boston-based concierge service that helps companies arrange luxury experiences for their clients. Aaronson’s reviews of travel destinations and luxury products now appear as a separate section of Spire.com called the “S-Files.”

Spire.com says that its members have an average annual income of more than $250,000 and average assets above $1 million. Members use the free, advertising-supported site to share information about travel, restaurants, shopping, health, recreation, arts and culture, and the like. In that sense, the site is similar to another affinity-based social network based in Boston, Eons, which mainly targets people over 50.

It’s easy to imagine how the site might become a conduit for exclusive travel offers, sponsored content, and various other kinds of marketing aimed at affluent consumers—but so far, it’s unclear from Spire.com’s public materials whether the company’s business model extends beyond Web-based advertising.  For now, the company seems to be concentrating on adding more content to the site and growing its network of members. “With our financial resources now in place, we are poised to grow a dynamic social resource where these savvy people can connect, share and source anything and everything that’s important to their worlds,” Kraus said in the company’s announcement about the funding round.

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At the 2008 Webby Awards in New York City last night, three Seattle-based companies accepted their prizes. I Can Has Cheezburger? won awards in both the “weird” and “humor” categories (I still have no idea what this website is about). Zillow won in the “real estate” category. And Farecast (recently acquired by Microsoft) won in “travel.”

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Reveal Imaging, a Bedford, MA-based maker of explosives detection devices, said Tuesday that it has collected $20.3 million from a group of investors led by BBH Capital Partners III. The fund, managed by Brown Brothers Harriman of New York, put up $18.75 million, while the rest of the new money came from Reveal’s existing investors, including Waltham, MA-based Greylock Partners, Cambridge, MA-based General Catalyst Partners and Boston-based Flybridge Capital Partners.

Reveal’s luggage-screen systems employ tomography technology similar to a medical CT scan and are used at airports and other high-security facilities. Its machinery can be purchased in the form of stand-alone units or integrated into luggage handling conveyor systems.

Last year Xconomy wrote about a company in a similar niche, Passport Systems. The Acton, MA producer of cargo screening systems raised $7.4 million last November.

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Needham, MA’s TripAdvisor, which publishes a suite of sites where travelers share reviews and advice, has acquired another one, the U.K.’s Holiday Watchdog, for an undisclosed sum. Holiday Watchdog will remain an independent site, TripAdvisor said. The Needham firm is an operating company of Expedia (NASDAQ: EXPE).

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