 |
|
|
|||||
Consider this: You want to book a multicity, international trip with flights from New York City to London, then Paris, and then back to New York City. There are numerous variables in the mixdifferent airlines, various ticketing levels, and morethat make the booking more complicated than anticipated. Accordingly, you may end up booking several separate flights, with multiple tickets and confirmation codes to keep track of. If you travel a lot, that can be a lot to manage. But Navan, a corporate travel and expense platform, says it has smoothed the whole process out for booking flights. Navanwhich went public less than a month and a half ago, and mainly competes in the same space as companies such as Ramp and Concurannounced on Wednesday that it has unveiled a huge upgrade to its multicity booking process, making it easier than ever to book complex travel itineraries. Thats something that amounts to a rather large engineering breakthrough, its team says. While users previously could use Navan for exactly these types of complicated, multicity bookings, doing so, following the upgrades, is now much simpler. These types of itineraries amount to around 10% of bookings on the platform, says Ian Fette, vice president of Engineering at Navan, but it wasnt the feature that got all the attention and love. However, the process has been massively upgraded, he says, although it took some time. Navan started working on the improved process during the second half of 2024. And, as noted, its the myriad variables that come into play when booking multicity trips that made it such a daunting task for engineers. Whats hard about multicity [itineraries]is not all airlines can handle all the itineraries you can throw at them, Fette says. Some airlines have partnerships and can sell one ticket that covers the whole journey, or you can construct itineraries where one airline can fulfill all the routes, he continues, but it may not be price competitivewe try to break it up and see if we can fill it as one ticket, and get a good price. Previously, balancing simplicity and pricing for multicity bookings has been the goal for travelers, and it generally involved a one-ticket approach (comprising all flights) or a series of one-way flights. Navans upgraded system spares travelers from trying to do all that mental work of trying to put it together. Fette says users are already lauding the changes, and that the upgrades lay the foundation for future enhancements to the Navan platform. This unlocks our ability to continue to iterate our ticketing intelligencehow we use the knowledge and data we have to drive you to the best pricing, he says. This is an ongoing area of investment for us, and its a huge step up.
Category:
E-Commerce
A SpaceX initial public offering might be on the horizon. The aerospace company, run by founder and CEO Elon Musk, is reportedly planning an IPO aimed at raising over $30 billion, according to Bloomberg, which cited people familiar with the matter. The IPO could be as soon as mid- to late-2026 or 2027. In its recent 2026 US Venture Capital Outlook, PitchBook pointed to the rise in space-focused stock listings, citing favorable policies. Fast Company has reached out to SpaceX for comment and will update this post if we hear back. Reaching the $30 billion threshold would make SpaceX the largest IPO in historyand give it a reported $1.5 trillion valuation. Oil company Saudi Aramco currently holds the record, raising $29 billion in 2019. It hit a $1.9 trillion valuation, selling 1.5% of its ownership. Sources cited by Bloomberg claim that SpaceX will hit about $15 billion in revenue this year and estimate $22 billion to $24 billion in 2026. Most of that income is courtesy of Starlink, which has been used by governments and companies alike to provide satellite internet services. Executives at SpaceX have floated the idea of Starlink spinning off and doing its own IPO. However, last year, CFO Bret Johnsen said it would likely be in the years to come. Musk and the companys board have reportedly already started making plans for an IPO, including hiring. The funds would, in part, go toward developing space-based data centers, presumably to help power the enormous computing needs of the AI boom. Stocks rise in space-adjacent companies News of a potential SpaceX listing has led to a spike in share prices of related companies. Take EchoStar Corporation, which sold spectrum licenses to SpaceX this fall. Between two separate deals, EchoStar received $11.1 billion in SpaceX private stock. The companys shares (Nasdaq: SATS) closed up about 6% on Tuesday and jumped nearly 7% in premarket trading on Wednesday. Space transportation company Rocket Lab Corporation saw its shares (Nasdaq: RKLB) close up 3.6% and rise another 1.5% overnight.
Category:
E-Commerce
Its a common experience: you search for white bean soup recipes one time on Instagram, and you are bombarded with white bean soup content on the app for seemingly all eternity. Instagram wants to fix that. Starting today, the companys three billion users can have more control over their algorithm via a Your Algorithm feature. Its not quite Bluesky, or the Instagram of yore that only displayed content from accounts users followed, but it does let users select or unsubscribe from different topics. The new feature, which leverages AI, lets users pick topics they want to see more or less of on their explore page. Users will first be able to see a list of suggested topics that their algorithm thinks they are interested in which they can modify. Users can also share their interests to their stories, allowing their followers to see and even replicate some of their feed. [Image: Instagram] We’re always trying to show people the best possible reels for them. After 2020 [we] slowly started figuring out how to do a good job of predicting people’s interests and showing them reels they’d be interested in, Tessa Lyons, Instagrams vice president of product, says. I think we do a pretty good job today, but we don’t always get it right, and we know that people’s interests change. What we really want to do is give people control over the experience that they have on Instagram. In designing the feature, Instagram had to balance Reels’ utility as a discovery tool with the features that give users control over what they will see. The ideal Reels experience is one that helps you go deeper on the interests you already have and then discover new interests that you might not even know about. And getting that balance right is really important, Lyons says, adding, [your algorithm] is one input we have into your Reels experience. So even if you add a handful of different interests, thats not going to be the only content you see. You’re still going to see other content as well. Lyons also says that the feature can help Instagrams algorithm learn about users and serve them relevant content more quickly; after she adopted a cat and tuned her algorithm to feature more kitten content, her feed immediately updated to include relevant reels. In the past, the algorithm may have needed a few days to understand she wanted to see more. By this same measure, the feature will likely improve the ad experience, as Instagram will be able to surface more targeted content for each user based on the interests they signal. According to Lyons, the inspiration for the feature started as a meme on Threads a couple of years ago, when users started writing posts to their respective algorithms, asking it to connect them with different interests, like writers or books. It was just people expressing what they wanted from their Threads experience. Some of them would say, Dear Algorithm, I just dont want to see politics anymore. Im over it, Lyons says.
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||