Casual Friday: Flying Chipmunks

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If you are spending some time this Friday dreaming of a warm get-away, plan that fantasy trip on Hipmunk . Hipmunk has a great way to view your flight options with a clean, easy to use interface to make searching easy. You can look by airport or by city, calendars are right on the main page and you can limit to a certain airline quickly if you are racking up the frequent flyer miles. You can even filter out the early morning flights, these folks know how I roll. The sort feature is the best though. You can sort by the usual price, stops, and duration, but the great feature is sort by Agony. The Agony sort combines all 3; price, stops, and duration, because sometimes it pays to get there in a timely fashion without 3 layovers. Hipmunk doesn't sell flights, but once you select your flight and it connects you to Orbitz where you can purchase.

Hipmunk, the rising star of startups, just announced last week that they have some new investors -  former Expedia execs Rich Barton, Erik Blachford and Simon Breakwell, along with Ignition Partners, Jim Hornthal of Triporati and Rob Glaser, founder of Real Networks joined in this round of funding and invested $4.2 million in the business. Some of these investors also have interests in Room 77 and Travelpost, so there is some speculation in the blogosphere that these guys might be creating a whole new integrated travel site.

And since I’m on a chipmunk theme, download the Crazy Chipmunks app for iPhone or Android. It is 99¢ and $1.99 respectively. There are 3 games: Crazy Maze (like Bejeweled), Crazy Party (a memory game) and Whack-A-Mole. Who doesn’t love a good game of Whack-A-Mole to while away a Friday afternoon?