Everything But the Girl

Showing a little leg along with the shuttle schedule seems to have gone out of style. ShuttleGirl, the curvaceous lady who loved “taking you home,” has been retired since the Sept. 24 debut of Shuttletime (www.shuttletime.harvard.edu), Harvard’s new version of the site.

After watching ShuttleGirl co-creators Anthony Delvecchio ‘01 and Jason R.P. Karamchandani ‘02 create a splash on campus last year with their techno-savvy key to the unreadable shuttle schedule, University Operation Services decided they needed to get in on the innovating. So they bought her. David E. Harris Jr., general manager of fleet management and passenger transport services, says they realized how fantastic a product it was and wanted to make sure it didn’t leave Harvard when Delvecchio and Karamchandani did.

“It was the largest single investment Shuttle Services has made in a software product,” Harris explains. “It’s unprecedented.” No one will disclose the exact fee for the contract, but according to Karamchandani, it was in excess of $10,000. That price tag may still be small for stealing the ShuttleGirl icon from the student body, but Harvard thought the image wouldn’t appeal to the entire University community. “Certainly the majority of riders are students, but we offer the service to faculty and staff too. Shuttletime matched better to our mission,” Harris says. “We didn’t do any market studies to see what people would prefer. We thought it would be better to give it our identity.”

ShuttleGirl fans need not fear however. While a notice on the original site, www.shuttlegirl.com, informs users that it hasn’t been updated with current information, it worked as well as Shuttletime in a series of scientific tests. And with Delvecchio working full time on Second Kiss Wireless, Inc., the company that formed from the duo’s development of ShuttleGirl technologies, something equally exciting is bound to materialize. “We’re working on something to replace the fun of ShuttleGirl,” Karamchandani notes cryptically. “If it all goes well, it will be entertaining.”

And, given their track record, it’ll be popular too. Their merger with MultiModal Applied Systems puts them on par with a company with full-time employees. The MBTA’s commuter rail schedule is within weeks of its debut. Seattle transportation will probably soon succomb to the ShuttleGirl charm too. And in a characteristic show of humanitarian aid, they are donating their services to Amtrak, which has experienced huge increases in ridership since Sept. 11. “There are so many times when you feel you can’t do anything,” Karamchandani says, referring to the attacks. ShuttleGirl, though, rarely feels that way.