Things I geek out about
Hacking airline miles
CHALLENGE: Maximizing the airline points from credit card welcome bonuses can be very lucrative, but reading the fine print takes too long for most people. Blogs like The Points Guy only add to the glut of information, and tools like CardMatch only recommend one card at a time, not a long-term strategy. Not to mention, recommendations from both of these sites are biased, because they work on commission. The bottom line is, most people are leaving money on the table.
MY SOLUTION: For years, I have been advising my friends (and their friends) on how to maximize their point strategy. My advice always came down to a few simple recommendations, based on 5 or 6 quick questions. So my friend Andrew and I coded a lightweight prototype to automate my recommendations. You can play with the tool here and see the code behind it here.
Solving transit delays
CHALLENGE: New York’s Lexington Avenue subway line (
service) is one of the busiest in the world, carrying more than 1.3 million people per day. For context, this one line has more riders than the entire Boston, Chicago and San Francisco subway systems combined. Unfortunately this popularity leads to overcrowding, causing chronic delays.
MY SOLUTION: By releasing an app that uses the same Destination Dispatch concepts popularized in elevators, the city could get this subway line to carry 30% more trains traveling 25% faster. It’s certainly a longshot, but it’s far cheaper than building new infrastructure and it comes with an interesting byproduct- the option to introduce on-the-fly surge pricing to subways. Read more in my design brief Destination Dispatch for mass transit.