Room77 - World’s First Hotel Room Search Engine.

The mobile app will let you know if the room you've been assigned is a match with your preferences.

(Credit: Room 77)

Yesterday, at the  LAUNCH Conference an exciting new application - Room 77-  was officially launched.  There were many other notable folks like Kara Swisher, Aaron Patzer, Bill Lee and Robert Scoble — not to mention several other startups doing some very cool and innovative things at the conference.

The start-up Room 77,  is building a system that gives hotel guests a look at their potential room before they check in. 

In short, the company is building a database of individual hotel rooms, including information like distance from elevators, what floor they're on, subjective ratings from people who have stayed in them.

If you get the upcoming Room 77 app, when you're checking in to a hotel you'll be able see if the room you're offered matches what you like, and also check out the view. Bad-for-you rooms will come back red-tagged.

Better yet, when you're booking a hotel room online, you can tell Room 77 what's important to you and it will rank the rooms in the hotel based on your preferences. You can jump between entries and see their views, and possibly interior pictures. 

Assuming that Room 77 can build a good database of hotel room information, using its own services as well as customer-provided images and reviews, the company's future hinges on how successful it can be in inserting this database into the travel economy.

The first way the company will make a buck is straightforward: From booking fees, just like any other travel site. If you book through the site, the company will get its cut. You have to call the hotel to make sure you get the room you want, though. Room 77 provides a cheat sheet for doing so. 

Eventually, though, Room 77's real value will be in bulk transactions around its database--in selling the room-specific data back to hotels or allowing other travel sites or hotel sites to use the Room 77 database through a paid API. If Room 77 ends up with a lock on this data, this is the killer business.

Projecting the economics of Room 77 out a bit, this service could have an impact on how hotel rooms are priced. With granular data available to travelers about each room, it stands to reason that pricing could get granular as well. Instead of just booking a deluxe room at a hotel, you'd book a room by view quality and proximity to elevator, if that's what matters to you. An algorithm could end up pricing hotel rooms by demand, similar to how airfares change frequently based on booking flow, availability, and other projections.

Room 77 seems to be a useful, fun, and economically interesting start-up. A few turns of the development wheel as the product grows up and this travel company could become very important.