Select a friend or contact from your Facebook or LinkedIn address book rather than a destination (by pressing a 'waving man' icon at the top right of the screen) and Skyscanner will show you the price of the cheapest flights to their location.  This is clearly Skyscanner socialising nextgen style. 

The new version app is  sleeker, slicker and runs faster, so you can find the cheapest flights even quicker than before.

Profiling founder Gareth Williams recently and his plans for a flotation with £100m turnover The Herald noted  Skyscanner has since grown into one of Europe’s leading travel search sites, providing instant online comparisons on flight prices for almost 700,000 routes and on more than 600 airlines.

With an office in Edinburgh and Poland, latest accounts, reveal a turnover of £15m and pre-tax profits of £3.5m in its financial year to the end of May, compared with an £8.8m turnover and profits of £1.3m previously.

The company is also using technology in the form of a battery of large flat screens around the office to display live information feeds - a world map where all Skyscanner flight searches have originated at various points around the globe – moving with the sun as the day progresses.

The number of installations of Skyscanner Android and iPhone apps monitoring shows that 20% of traffic comes from mobile devices and tracks to four decimal places the proportion of people selecting flights and linking through to the airlines, updating daily usage by the nano-second.