Kayak.com is a travel search engine website based in the United States. Founded in 2004, it aggregates information from hundreds of other travel sites and helps users book flights, hotels, cruises, and rental cars. Kayak combines results from online travel agencies, consolidators such as Orbitz, and other sources such as large hotel chains.Kayak doesn't sell directly to the consumer; rather, it aggregates results from other sites then redirects the visitor to one of these sites for reservation. Thus, Kayak.com makes money from pay per click advertising, when the consumer clicks-through to one of the compared websites (for example, when the consumer is redirected to the Orbitz website).
The company was formed in January 2004 by co-founders of leading online travel agencies, Orbitz, Travelocity and Expedia. The company co-founders include Steve Hafner (CEO) a co-founder of Orbitz, Paul M. English (CTO) a former VP of technology at Intuit, Terry Jones (Chairman), founder of Travelocity, and Greg Slyngstad (Director), founder of Expedia. KAYAK is headquartered in Norwalk, CT and has R&D centers in Concord, MA and Sunnyvale, CA. The company launched a beta site in May 2004, and launched publicly in January 2005.
In late 2007 Kayak bought SideStep, another travel search site.
In March 2011 Kayak accepted a partnership with Bing to provide results in the U.S. from multiple cities, airports and airlines in the travel search section. By partnering with Kayak, Bing can differentiate itself from the competition and improve its position in the industry.
KAYAK has raised $230 million to date; its investors include General Catalyst Partners, Sequoia Capital (led by Michael Moritz), Oak Investment Partners, America Online, Accel Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, Trident Capital, and Tenaya Capital. It was named one of TIME Magazine's "50 coolest websites" of 2006. In November 2010, Kayak filed with the SEC to raise up to $50 million in an initial public offering.
Kayak is built on a Java, Apache, Perl and Linux platform. It uses XML-HTTP and JavaScript to create a rich User interface.
KAYAK employees respond to consumer inquiries on a regular basis and thereby stay in touch with how design decisions affect users, including even having engineers answer a "hotline".

The primary purpose of the foreign exchange is to assist international trade and investment, by allowing businesses to convert one currency to another currency. For example, it permits a US business to import British goods and pay Pound Sterling, even though the business's income is in US dollars. It also supports speculation, and facilitates the carry trade, in which investors borrow low-yielding currencies and lend (invest in) high-yielding currencies, and which (it has been claimed) may lead to loss of competitiveness in some countries.
In a typical foreign exchange transaction, a party purchases a quantity of one currency by paying a quantity of another currency. The modern foreign exchange market began forming during the 1970s when countries gradually switched to floating exchange rates from the previous exchange rate regime, which remained fixed as per the Bretton Woods system.
The foreign exchange market is unique because of
As such, it has been referred to as the market closest to the ideal of perfect competition, notwithstanding currency intervention by central banks. According to the Bank for International Settlements, as of April 2010, average daily turnover in global foreign exchange markets is estimated at $3.98 trillion, a growth of approximately 20% over the $3.21 trillion daily volume as of April 2007. Some firms specializing on foreign exchange market had put the average daily turnover in excess of US$4 trillion.
The $3.98 trillion break-down is as follows: