The 9th DIMACS Implementation Challenge from 8 years ago (see http://www.dis.uniroma1.it/challenge9/ ) served as a way to gather the best algorithms for the shortest path problem. I don't see how this project can be significantly better, or even close to, a traditional effort like that.

It doesn't have to be better at producing good algorithms. It just has to be better at making those algorithms implementations easy to use.

But I still don't think the business model is viable.

The Boost Graph Library includes three different shortest path implementations, and I have that already downloaded. That library likely fits my needs.

In the DIMACS challenge papers at http://www.dis.uniroma1.it/challenge9/papers.shtml you'll see "Single-Source Shortest Paths with the Parallel Boost Graph Library".

Indeed, the Parallel Boost Graph Library library is easily available, and contains two parallel shortest-path implementations.

The flip question is, what if it doesn't fit my needs? Well, then the question is "what do I need"?

The other DIMACS challenges include 1) pre-computation, which is useful for road-based graphs, 2) supercomputer parallelism to search billions of nodes, 3) out-of-core graph searches, for when you don't have enough RAM, and 4) k-shortest path search.

It's very unlikely that this proposed algorithm service provider will implement these alternate algorithms.