FlyScan

Bon Grimes, Skyscanner Co-founder and Development Director, speaks about how Skyscanner’s FlyScan project – to design, build and deliver a Twitter flight finding service in just 24 hous – all went. Watch the video below.

So it’s the day after the 24 hour Twitter project storm. There’s a certain calm in the office, but the work continues.

With the brand new FlyScan Twitter service now up and running in English (and flight Tweet queries flying in to @FlyScan!) the next phase is to ensure the service is working for our other key languages.

Max Janson, our German Market Manager for Skyscanner.de, who also holds the title of “most multi-lingual member of Skyscanner” (being fluent in German, English, French and Swedish), explains how the new service will go down in Deutschland.

“Twitter is pretty important in Germany and the new FlyScan_DE flight finder service is going to help German travellers save time and money. We’re in the final stages of ironing out any bugs right now, and we hope to go fully live with the finished product today.

“The German travel market is already highly developed and advanced, and anything innovative and useful will be of great appeal. Skyscanner will be the first company to bring a flight finding Twitter service to Germany so I expect there will be a big buzz about this.”

For 24 hours only, the Skyscanner homepage has been taken over with details of our FlyScan project. (Don’t worry though – you can still find your flights as normal!)

A massive thanks again to our partners – ebookers, lastminute.com, bmi, BA, monarch and Netflights.com – who have donated over 5000 prizes which we will be giving away over the next few days and weeks to those using the FlyScan flight finder.

So, the 24 hours are over, but the FlyScan project continues.

The basic FlyScan service is up and running, but we are now working hard to make sure everything works in other languages.

Russian, which uses the Cyrillic alphabet, poses a particular challenge. A sleep deprived Dima, our Russian Market Exec for Skyscanner.ru, who has kept himself going on Red Bull and Chinese food explains:

“There are extra complexities with Cyrillic and our developers have had to tackle these on top of everything else. Twitter is big in Russia and once we get FlyScan_RU finalised for the Russian market – it will be very popular.

“These days, people are getting lazy on the internet; they want to be able to find the information they want without jumping around from site to site.

“The more places we can make Skyscanner flight search available, the better. For people already using Twitter, we’re taking out that step of having to navigate to the Skyscanner site to find their flights.”

A little walk and talk around the Skyscanner office – shortly before the deadline.

Well, our 24 hours are up and at 12:00 today, after a massive team effort, @Flyscan is now live!

“This has been an extraordinary effort,” said Skyscanner’s Development Director Bonamy Grimes. “The idea was dreamed up by some of the Skyscanner team over dinner the night before last, and the @FlyScan project was given the go ahead just yesterday morning. The team worked flat out for the rest of the day and through the night to make it happen.

“We hit a number of challenges, as you’d expect, and we’ve had to find some imaginative ways round them. Development is going to continue today while we iron out a couple of glitches. For instance we’d hoped we could get a million Tweets out in the first 24 hours but we didn’t anticipate some of the volume constraints on the Twitter platform.  We’re working out now how to boost capacity so we can keep up with demand, so please bear with us while we do that.”

Skyscanner is donating £5,000 to Comic Relief to celebrate hitting the 24 hour deadline and pledged a further £20,000 when the first 1 million @FlyScan tweets have been sent.

Over 5000 prizes are also being given away to our Tweeters, including an iPad2, flights to New York with British Airways, £250 lastminute vouchers, exclusive deals from Netflights.com, flights to Europe with Monarch and ebookers hotel discount vouchers.

“We’ve known for a while we wanted to create something special for Twitter,” said Bonamy Grimes.

“We set ourselves the challenge to do it this way partly for the hell of it and partly to raise money for a very worthwhile cause and we’re very grateful to the companies who have lent their support and donated such fantastic prizes.”

“As one of the team put it, we’ve been running on caffeine and ‘techtosterone’ during the last 24 hours! Anyone who wants a flavour of the atmosphere at Skyscanner HQ should check out the blog at flyscan.org and send us any feedback and suggestions to us Twitter @skyscanner.  It’s triggered a lot of new ideas too. We already have a ground-breaking new social media based project in the pipeline. Watch this space!”

See the final 10 seconds of the FlyScan project:



We’re just 53 minutes and 24 seconds away from the deadline now. Cans of Red Bull and cups of coffee sit on desks. Tiredness is kicking in, and the office is a little quieter than it was 12 hours ago.

However, everyone is still going for it at full pace.

Our coders are scrutinising lines and lines of code, ironing out the last few bugs. The PR team are racing to add the final details to press releases. French, Russian, Italian, German and Spanish is flying around the office as our Country Marketing Managers speak to bloggers and journalists in their home countries about the FlyScan project.

Mickael, our French Marketing Manager for Skyscanner.fr says interest has been high in France.

“It’s a really exciting project to be involved in and the French media have shown a surprising amount of interest in the project. Nothing like this exists in France (or anywhere else!) and it could really change the way people search for flights. It’s brought the whole company together and it’s great for the brand.”

Bon, Skyscanner Development Director and co-founder gives us an update after working through the night.

Ed, who played a big part in the idea of the FlyScan project, catches a quick forty winks after working late into the night.

Sam P monitors TweetDeck – keeping a close eye on the testing and the incoming tweets.

Yara – our Italian Market Manager (who also took on DJ duties during the night) – flashes us a smile as she works hard to push FlyScan_IT in her motherland.

Dima – our Russian Market Manager – is still going strong after a total of zero hours sleep.

Alasdair Dewar not happy at the lack of Internet in the Edinburgh Development Office

As I type this from my Android phone over a 3G signal, my apologies for the shortness of this update from the Development Office in Edinburgh. Currently we have lost Internet connectivity with only 2 hours and 22 minutes to go. The Infrastructure team is hard at work to restore connectivity but in the meantime, work goes on despite no Internet.

A slight change of guard as the overnighters head off for a shower and a nap as the dayshift take over for the final few hours. Alistair Hann has just left having been here all night and sang the praises of fellow night owl Joe Sarre, “his energy and enthusiasm has been an inspiration, Joe is a machine”.