Jeff’s Live Nudes

While I’m setting up the foundation for this blog, I might as well mention Kakeya, another project I’ve been engrossed in.

The idea was suggested by Phil a couple months ago in what would become his trademark, an obscenely long email, and it took off from there.  He suggested “a website dealing with transportation costs”, lining out the goals, obstacles and motivation.  We worked through kinks and plausibilities, and surprisingly, came up with no reason not to tackle the project.  The only thing left was to get our hands dirty.

One thing you realize as a college student in an urban environment is that public transportation is one of the toughest problems to tackle in the United States.  Our country’s density is wildly inconsistent — in the cities like Boston and New York, public transportation is a necessity, in the Virginian suburbs where I lived, an afterthought.  Yet it’s often a necessity to travel to and from areas with wildly varying population densities.  Typically speaking, transportation competition is fierce and numerous within populated areas, dropping prices extensively, but not so for long range transportation services (think greyhound, amtrak).

One consequence of this inconsistent price distribution is that there are often multiple routes from point A to point B, each with a cost often disproportionate to the “goodness” of the route (distance, comfort, # of transfers, etc).  This is something we can take advantage of.  Theoretically, transportation route data can be scraped from all the bus, train, subway and plane lines in the country, and one can query the cheapest or shortest route from any location to any other location in a fraction of the time it takes to discover by hand.  This has never been done on such a large scale in our country before (though London has a similar system), and this is the purpose of Kakeya, named after the Kakeya Conjecture, a problem Phil tackled at RSI that nearly destroyed his soul.

Here’s some food for thought: Ashu and I booked tickets a few months ago for a Killswitch/Disturbed concert, one we were both ecstatic about.  That is, until he found out there was a 006 test on the day of the concert.  Essentially our only hope was to find a quick route to the concert so we could make it after the openers.  It took us 2 hours of fishing through piece of shit websites (I’m looking at you, lrta.com) to find a single decent route, and it would have required us to take a 6am bus home.

Here’s another real life example.  Ashu and I (I think he has an aura that causes everyone around him to get owned) went down to Yale to present our Kakeya business plan to potential investors.  About an hour into looking for a cheap route, I turned to Ashu and said, “you know what would help?”  We had the same thought.  KAKEYA.

We have a site up and running in a sort of pre-alpha stage, but I’m not ready to present it yet.  There’s a lot of work to do over the summer, and I’m stoked about our progress.  We have a lot of obstacles in the way, mostly in the form of Google.  But I have reason to believe that we can beat them, or at least offer our own brand of innovation and perspective, and create a free product that can save millions of people heaps of time, money and productivity.  Here’s to making a difference.