DirectHotels.com vs ThingieQuery

Innovative meta-search travel engine focused on hotel coupons and direct bookings.

DirectHotels.com is placing direct bookings as the priority for the new meta-search engine. There is a possibility to get promo codes to use on hotels’ official website. What is more, whenever a hotel is offering any benefits for booking directly (e.g. free breakfast or better cancellation policy) it will be visible in the search results. Additionally, the lowest price from all the booking sites is shown - in this case, a tourist can choose the best option based on facts given by hotel and travel sites. Both hotelier and a customer are profitable in this model.

A SQL IDE for Excel

ThingieQuery is a plugin for Excel that enhances the user's productivity by enabling the use of SQL inside Excel, and additionally combining it with VBA, regular expressions and other popular technologies.

Its goal is to make SQL operations accessible in Excel so they can be used easily and often. It has a minimalist user interface and a short learning curve while still adding a huge amount of expressiveness and power to the user.

It is not a plugin that does one specific thing, like merging tables, or removing duplicates. Rather, it's a tool that serves to enable the user's existing knowledge and skills in a setting that has limited native support for them.

Joining tables, filtering, grouping etc. are just a start. With its ability to automate writing results, its VBA automation API, its ability to call into VBA functions and subroutines and its ability to use external database engines to process Excel data, possibilities for making your Excel chores easier and faster are abundant.