Category: Uncategorized

Have you ever wondered what formula Excel uses to make its “curved line” scatter plots? I have!

Admittedly, this sounds like an odd thing to wonder about. But it’s actually a super-practical question: what if you want to approximate an intermediate point along the curve you have just plotted? For some reason, Excel hides this formula from you, and according to my source post, Microsoft has left this formula a black-box and given users no access to it. WTF, mate. Continue reading Mystery solved! The secret of Excel curved line interpolation

While the Splitwise furniture calculator can help you deal with buying shared furniture (and who gets to keep it when you move out), the hassle of shopping for and hauling furniture is definitely one of the worst parts of moving. An article in SF Gate last week mentions an interesting new service called CORT which will help you rent all the furniture in your apartment all at once. Continue reading Rent your furniture instead of buying?

Never in my life have I read a more twisted and weird roommate story. If you have 10 minutes to kill and want to feel better about your roommates, read this lengthy, hilarious, well-written NYC horror story.

Today is a celebration of America’s greatest champion for fairness, who would have turned 83 this year. Even if you are working today (as we are here at Splitwise) and not taking the day off, there’s always time to read and reflect on what the day stands for:

• MLK’s Wikipedia article. While Martin Luther King is best remembered for his achievements in Civil Rights, he was also an advocate for economic justice and fairness for the poor.
• Google Doodle for MLK day. This link also has a flashback to Google’s earlier tributes.
• CNN’s coverage including some Obama quotes and added context.

Over the past few months, we’ve done a lot of research into how to share vacation expenses, thanks to the help of users like you. We posted a detailed survey to recruit respondents from the Splitwise interface. That data enabled us to create a travel calculator that tells you how much each person should pay for an expense based on how many days each person was on the trip. Go check it out! This is all part of our grand strategy to make Splitwise the best travel sharing app on the web.

I also have a new blog post on Forbes describing our data analysis. Read my post there for lots of juicy graphics, conclusions, and economic logic.

Splitwise is all about making sharing with your friends, housemates, and family easier. Since we’re fairly nerdy, we like to do that by making calculators that address common fairness situations. But sometimes, the situation is just too specific for a calculator. Since we started with the rent calculator in February, we’ve received several emails asking about the specifics of a given roommate situation.

If you have a fairness or roommmate situation that just does not fit into a calculator, email us at ask@splitwise.com. Not only do we answer really, really fast (usually within a few hours at most), we will study the question, consult with experts, or do a survey to solve your conundrum. Then we’ll turn it into a blog post for the amusement of others. Think of it like a relationship advice column for your sharing questions, answered by nerds with charts.

I just posted the second article in the guest series over at Forbes, “How Much To Charge A Couch-Crasher” over at Forbes. Please feel free to indulge your inner survey-nerd and give it a look.

In the article, I introduce a method for charging your guests who crash on the couch for a week or longer. It’s called the Guest calculator and you can view it right now on Splitwise.com and from within the Splitwise interface.

I’m also posting the full-text of the first article about guests, “How Much To Charge Your Roommate’s Girlfriend”, on this blog, so that you can read it all here. That article has also been featured on AskMen.com and MSNBC, so if you found it first elsewhere – um, welcome! If I post content first somewhere else, I will try to post it here within a week or so.