Krampus.com launches

I’m one of three co-founders for the Krampus.com webpage. I’m in charge of all things product management, marketing, and business development. The site went alpha yesterday. I’m heartened. We have some extremely talented people involved on the project. The site will only keep improving…

Car Share Mashup

I live in San Francisco. There are lots of great companies in South Bay, but I’ve never wanted to consider them because I hate driving, and I hate the prospect of commuting.

Commuting is possibly the biggest waste of time I can think of. Sure you can talk on the phone, sure you can listen to the radio, sure you can listen to audiobooks, sure you can try to learn a new language, sure the commute gives you separation of work and home, sure the commute allows you to decompress. But honestly, think how many hours you flush down the toilet due to commuting. Let’s take a reasonable 30 minutes each way commute? 5 hours a week. 15 hours a month. 260 hours a year. That’s 11 days. Spent in a car. 4% of your life. Think about it. And what if your commute is an hour each way? *Shudder*

Who doesn’t want to work from home? Raise your hands, don’t be shy.

Which brings us to an intelligent car share mashup. Specifically for the San Francisco -> Palo Alto commute. If you know of an existing service who’s UI isn’t a pile of garbage, please point me in that direction.

Enter your:
home address
work address
range of times to get in to work
range of times to go home from work

Function:
Drivers declare “I’m leaving at x time from y place”
Passengers can check in “I want to get a ride with you, I’ll meet you at your car at x time”
Driver can approve / disapprove passengers who request rides
People meetup, and a ride is shared

How:
Drupal or simple Ruby on Rails CMS to store user info
Meeting- done via a google map mashup -> easily shows driver / passenger proximity -> home and work location both
Drivers can control privacy level of their ride offerings (degrees of friendship, or user defined friend groups)
Mobile integration could push it over the top- Location based service / on the fly check-in / check-out…

Why?
Exchange rides with people so you don’t have to drive all the time
Meet interesting people (presumably you only ride with friends, friends of friends, or friends of friends of friends)- have interesting conversations

Issues:
Ensuring trust (easily done with a recommendation / positive feedback engine)
Getting workers from drop-off point to work address (route planning- if you’re driving past someone’s office?)
Can be as public or private as you want- if you want to just offer rides / set up a carpool with a small group of people, more power to you (single degree friends)
If you want to broadcast more, that’s cool too (4th degree friends)

Scalability:
Would start as just me and a group of my friends who don’t want to drive all the time.
Extends to their friends as more people want in.
Distributed privacy is key as it grows.

Business viability:
Slim to none, but would be a useful service on a personal level
Potential acquirers- department of transportation, government, random tech company, large enterprise company looking for software to improve employee connectedness, environmentally friendly organizations
Good for the environment, promotes car shares, etc so on so forth

Do people trust eachother enough? Would it fly?