About 1, 000 Sabre employees will eventually have access to at least some of the data, as will the airlines that now buy tapes of Sabre's raw booking data, says warehouse manager Kathleen Wayton.

FORBES: Database evangelist

This could open up more possibilities, from concert ticket-buying apps based on a musician in an image, to a TripAdvisor-like travel review or Orbitz-like travel-booking app that pops up data related to the travel destination in the image.

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Before long he realized the most frought and time-consuming thing was booking travel for the MIT debate team using Kayak and Expedia and plugging all the data into spreadsheets.

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