Tag: friends

Boston’s Fare Collection

The tickets. On the bus and on the subway (known in Boston as the “T”), they are accepted in only 1 of 4 possible senses. If you enter a ticket in the wrong direction, it is rejected. Already, a bus driver passed me through without paying because I dipped the card the wrong way the first time (nice trick, I know). When the amount purchased has run out, the temptation is to leave the ticket on the top of the gate as you pass through. I’m not alone. New York and DC have the same problem. I hear they plan to encourage re-use by introducing a plastic card instead of the paper ticket. That hasn’t happened in New York, however. People ditch the plastic cards, too.

rekha on the MBTA fare machines

one-upping trulia and housingmaps

my friend bernhard‘s former company again pushes the envelope of web applications (their mapping site predated google maps by almost 6 months). this time, they are tackling real estate search, a field ripe for a better experience. while there are some nice efforts online by housingmaps.com and trulia.com (trulia seems to have inked a deal with google, their google maps integration does not even load scripts from google..), immo.beta.search.ch does them one better.

  • tighter integration between list view and map (just mousing over a list item show’s it’s location)
  • histograms for the search terms to give you a quick idea what the spread in prices is, for instance
  • shows matches in context (public transport, shopping etc)
  • leverages the superior map quality from endoxon
  • allows you to take notes for each object
  • shows you new matches for your search since your last visit

all in all, an excellent new site that can easily hold it’s own against us-centric players, and is at the same time without equal in (sadly, a web backcountry) switzerland.

KAYWA still around


My former startup KAYWA got a nice puff piece in the june 16th issue of CASH, a swiss business magazine. Now if only they would not be so incompetent with keeping their customer data around. My 2003 burning man photo collection which I uploaded to their servers for promotional purposes is still missing after repeated emails to their CEO.