Death of a Hacker (From Hacker to Developer)

On 16 April, I got an e-mail from Kirsty Nathoo of YC that my application is rejected. I still remember it was 5:35 Pm and I was in the bus. I came to know about YC last Spring and ever since then getting into YC had become my dream. I did so many side projects/freelancing that I had never done in my four years of Undergrad cause I was preparing myself. After my last summer internship, I realized that instead of being a developer my traits were more aligned to be a hacker. I applied to YC last year. My application was very amateur. I was bound to get rejected. I never left hacking. I was still at school getting my M.S but after Spring of last year I took my credits in such a way that in my last semester I could do just what I wanted to, hacking, without any coursework.

Few weeks ago, precisely three weeks from the YC application deadline, I got this idea. It is something that has never happened before and it was B2B. I had nothing to show off at that time but a hope that the idea may get me in for an YC interview at least. I met my best friend since years and now co-founder and we discussed over the idea. He is a hacker but the kind of guy I guess today’s companies would die for. He has no Facebook or LinkedIn profile and both of us sleep only 5-6 hours every day.  He is a *nginx and AWS ninja. We have had countless 17 hour days and brainstorming sessions all over Skype, Google Hangouts and ScreenHero because he is in the Bay area and I am in LA. In two weeks we came to know why the idea was difficult and why no one was into it. We also realized that the customer touch points of our idea were dynamic and we would have to strategically order them to get faster users. We developed our model on AWS, decided on the backend, and bootstrapped a part of it too. YC was our hope but we failed.

I had mixed feelings about my application. I was not sure about the end result but I there was hope.  It was very important for us to get through because we are international students. We want to hack and if we would not get in this time then we would be working at some Software development firm (E-verified) waiting for our Visas. It took me a while after the rejection. Start-up is what I want to do because I think that is in our blood. I will work on this idea but I am really unsure on what our next steps would be. I guess we would have to at some point of time become developers again. 

The Current Navigation System is Broken

                                                     

Recently, I have been reading a lot of articles about quick App development and how we can design apps and put it in the App Store or on Google Play very fast. Well today, I am going to write about an App which is years in the making. 

We all know that Navigation problems and Navigation Apps are hard. The reason being the sheer volume of data that is required to come up with a good Navigation App. We all know that Google took years to develop its Google Maps App and when Apple tried to do something similar in months they failed miserably. Even though there are so many Navigation Apps which try to solve this problem, I feel the Navigation system in place is still broken.

Now let’s dwell into the real problem with the current navigation Apps. Let’s say you want to go from A to B. The current navigation apps would take a path snapshot “at that time instant” from A to B giving you the best paths based on distance and in some Apps traffic as well. So you get a path say from A -> X -> Y ->B. This is what Google Maps or any other navigation App will give you. Now, the path from X -> Y or from Y -> B is not based on what time you reach X or Y but on the time you leave A. This is why the current Navigation system is still broken.

At Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC) at USC, Prof.Cyrus Shahabi and Associate Director Dr. Ugur Demiryurek and the entire team at IMSC are really aimed to solve this Navigation and traffic problem. Their solution is ClearPath. ClearPath is based on years of traffic data and research. The data for Clearpath not only comes from the road networks but also from live real traffic data which are pulled from the LA Metro. So there is previous data about traffic and there is current data as well. Now when you say you want to go from A to B in ClearPath, first it takes into account the time taken to reach A -> X and X -> Y and runs spatio-temporal algorithms (based on years of research) to do pattern recognition and analysis at each X and Y to give a more accurate path which saves time. Traffic changes as you drive. It works on an algorithm that accounts for all these changes before you even start your commute. Results show that ClearPath beats all the current Navigation Apps hands down on time and accuracy of paths. Hence, ClearPath tagline reads, "The right path, all the time!".   It is featured on Android Apps, Viterbi Blog and Stevens Blog and Voanews.

ClearPath is an App which has the potential to change the future. It is a very excellent example of something which is going to be commercially successful coming out from research.