Mark Russell spent 13 years commuting the 50-odd miles from Graham, WA, to Kirkland and back. Driving alone, he couldn’t use the carpool lane, so he spent countless hours sitting in traffic. Now he is channeling years of pent-up frustration to help solve the broader ride-sharing problem, using a confluence of social networks, mobile applications, and smart optimization algorithms.

Russell’s company, Zebigo, is introducing its new service in Seattle later this week, when it will begin signing up customers. The Web-based service will start in earnest on June 17 in Seattle, Bellevue, and Tacoma. It works sort of like a cross between Zipcar and eBay, without the bidding. Customers set up accounts with Zebigo, and the software and Web interface matches up riders trying to go from A to B at a certain time with drivers already heading there or planning to go—all within a minute or two. If both parties agree to the rideshare, then the rider will pay the driver after they carpool together (much less than a taxi fare), with Zebigo taking a flat fee of 49 cents from each transaction. The whole thing can be done with smartphones; Zebigo sends information to the rider and driver by e-mail and text message.

“Our goal is to turn your mobile phone into a set of keys,” Russell says.

Although the service is meant for strangers to be able to share rides—more on this social barrier below—repeat carpoolers might drive a lot of business, and build their own network of people they get to know. “I feel like I am the customer for this system. I wasted three and a half hours a day in traffic,” Russell says. “I want to amalgamate all these technologies into something that really has an impact on society and the environment.”

Russell is no stranger to high-impact work. He’s a veteran of Boeing, Intel, and Blue Origin, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s aerospace firm. Perhaps what’s most intriguing about Zebigo is that its team of seven full-timers (and about a dozen people in all) comes largely from the aerospace industry, where they solved technical problems ranging from flight routing to intelligent database programming to spacecraft separation for launching satellites.

But it isn’t too surprising that they’ve turned their efforts to a big transportation problem. There seems to be renewed interest in sharing cars, exemplified by Cambridge, MA-based Zipcar’s plans for an initial public offering, as we reported just yesterday. And online ride-sharing services, such as Zimride, PickupPal, and GoLoco, have been sprouting up around the U.S. and Canada in the … Next Page »

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Do you ever sit down with a friend who wants to show you all their latest vacation pictures? (Maybe not as much since photo-sharing sites took off.) Well, yesterday’s kickoff of the Distinguished Lecturer Series at the University of Washington’s department of computer science and engineering was just like that—if your friend were Charles Simonyi, a software billionaire, showing you videos from a $35 million vacation in space.

Simonyi, the father of Microsoft Word and Excel, and now head of Bellevue, WA-based Intentional Software, regaled the crowd of a couple hundred students, faculty, and guests with stories and videos from his second trip to space last March. Simonyi rode a Russian Soyuz rocket to the International Space Station (ISS), docked and spent some time there, and returned safely to Earth, looking none the worse for wear. He is an outspoken proponent of space tourism, and he pointed out that Guy Laliberté, the founder of Cirque du Soleil, is currently making his way aboard the space station as “the first clown in space” (and the seventh space tourist ever).

Just a few interesting tidbits that stood out to me:

—Seattle and Mercer Island look very pretty from space. “You can’t see the Great Wall or the Pyramids, but you can see Sea-Tac,” Simonyi said. You can also see clouds, lightning storms, and jet contrails, the latter especially over North America. Watching the sunrise from orbit is spectacular.

—The instruments on the spacecraft look refreshingly antique. You think they’d be slick and modern-looking, but the inside of the Soyuz and space station look like they’re out of a 1970s sci-fi movie. In fact, some instruments date back to 19th century designs (“tried and true”), and software on the rocket runs on an Intel 386 processor from the ’80s. “Older chips are more resistant to radiation,” Simonyi explained.

—Bodily functions are funny in space. You wear a lightly applied tourniquet to keep blood flowing in your legs; you get a puffy face from lack of circulation; the toilet is an engineering marvel … Next Page »

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When NASA announced last week it was postponing the launch of its next mission to Mars by 26 months, Michael Ravine says his heart sank—and then he breathed a sigh of relief.As the advanced projects manager at San Diego’s Malin Space Science Systems, Ravine says his team has been working frantically to deliver two cameras for the mission by the end of January. They are the last two of four cameras that NASA hired the company to build for the Mars Science Laboratory, an SUV-size rover designed for backcountry four-wheeling across the Martian landscape.

NASA’s decision to delay the launch that was set for next October until 2011 was disappointing, Ravine says. But the extra time could give one of San Diego’s most unusual business ventures a chance to restore advanced optical capabilities that NASA was forced to delete from the two cameras to meet its test schedule.

Malin’s 2004 proposal called for building identical stereoscopic cameras that would be mounted on masts aboard the big Mars rover. Ravine says that for several reasons their plans included a wide-field zoom lens in each mast camera. One was the fact that Ravine had recruited “Titanic” filmmaker James … Next Page »

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