Juan Matute 6 is quoted in the New York Times

For a time, the story Juan was quoted in had prominent placement on the New York Times's website. Then the Zimmerman verdict came out.

Juan Michael was quoted in a New York Times story on real-time ridesharing applications this weekend!

In his conversation with the reporter, Juan discussed the emergence of real-time ridesharing applications. 

Last week, on his first full day in office as the new mayor of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti proudly proclaimed that Los Angeles was beginning to leave behind its culture of car ownership. And Juan Matute, director of the Local Climate Change Initiative at the University of California, Los Angeles, said that if more people used ride-sharing services — even just 3 percent of the population, he said — substantial reductions in driving in Los Angeles could result. 

“It would be easier to share rides that are incidental to daily life,” he said.

As of late, Juan has become a subject matter expert on real time ridesharing and the regulatory issues it is facing in California by proxy; it was one of the fifteen topics he authored papers on funded by Next10. Real-time ridesharing applications, like Lyft, Uber, and Sidecar, are examples of so-called "disruptive technology". 

Innovation in technology is moving faster than ever - exponentially so. Consider the story of online carpool matching.

You've got to be kidding, GM

My family owns a 1999 Chevy Malibu that looks like this car. I am soured on GM and Chevys, in particular, after our experience owning this car. Source: Wikipedia

The transportation geek in me was piqued by the recent publication of a New York Times story on GM's efforts to market cars to Millennials. (The Atlantic's Jordan Weissman added his own analysis here.) Allow me to explain why.