Notes:
I started Freiker, because I had a real problem to solve: my kids
wanted to be driven the half-mile to school. This is a pet peeve
of mine after living in Switzerland where walking is a national
past-time.
Started very simply. I made up some punch cards, and kids would turn
them in for small prizes after ten punches. This generated a lot
of excitement at the bike racks, but clearly was not scalable.
My partner, Tim Carlin, suggested we put barcodes on the bikes.
This had some technical issues, but it allowed us to gather
data centrally.
Success came when we gave out 12 iPods to kids who rode
more than 150 times that year. You can see the crossover at June/Sep
2006.
This success caused Tim to suggest RFID. He went off to Italy for
a year, and I toiled in my basement all summer trying to make the
Freikometer work. It was the winter of 2006-2007, which was very
cold, but we increased ridership signficantly.
Freiker has turned into KidCommute and Boltage. It's grown beyond my
skills.
