Lastminute.com: Forget Google - we're the innovators

Chip Steinmetz is on a mission. While US dot-coms such as Google, Amazon and eBay have been praised for their technical innovation, UK Web survivor Lastminute.com has shuffled around in the shadows -- seen as functional but not exactly cutting-edge.

But since his appointment as Lastminute's CTO almost a year ago, the ex-head of Walt Disney Internet Group, has trying to redress the balance. He's been slowly re-architecting the site and bulking out his tech-team with computer science PhDs -- made financially possibly in part by the decision to outsource core database administration to Argentina.

Steinmetz, whose CV includes developing real-time trading systems for the likes of Credit Suisse First Boston, claims the search technology required to collate fluctuating and temporary flight times and prices with hotel reservation systems is much harder than anything that Amazon has to cope with. Book prices don't tend change from one hour to the next, he says. 

ZDNet UK spoke to Steinmetz about the Argentine connection, location-based services and the computer-science challenges of travel.

Google has done a lot to foster its reputation as a technical innovator. Do you think Lastminute would benefit from following suit?
I think Google is a good example. I know a lot about search -- I ran the Infoseek search engine at Disney. Let's say you do a Google search, what have they got? They have got a bunch of spiders that go out there and bring everything back. They have got a great big bank of 20,000 PCs all chained together that do searches in parallel, bring your index back in the right order and you pick one.

Now consider us doing a hotel search. The first thing that comes up is that you might do a geo-spatial search; you might want to stay 30km from the Eiffel Tower. So we actually have a map that comes up. It has coordinates with little pictures of the hotel on it, you can click on it. That goes to a latitude/longitude database, which gives a correlation to a city and a country. Then you find your hotel; there are around 50,000 properties that explode out in 60GB of data. That hotel chain then explodes out into all sorts of room types. Then the search degenerates into a temporal search through time because that room price is only available for a certain period. It's almost like a tick-by-tick database almost like they have in stock and bond trading applications. Now we are doing that in real-time and we are giving you instantaneous results.

Now technologically, I think that is ten times more difficult than search - not one of scale but pure computer science. On our search team we have three guys who have PhD's in neural nets who are really attracted here because of the computer-science problems.

Have you hired a lot of new staff since you arrived?
Yep. Most of the recruiting has been permanent staff out of the UK [and] a few guys from the US that maybe had special skills. But I would say you could find everything you need in the UK pretty much. We are also going to do some university recruiting this year out of Imperial and the five or six best schools.