Ubers, Olas & Merus: Ride the app wave

Price wars,  Acquisitions,  PR crises, New Segments, Geographical expansion, Mobile wallet,  Cutting edge technology, Alliances,  Ecosystem of driver-preneurs, Dynamic pricing, Investor Funding, Promotions & Offers, Data Analytics, Services, it is all happening in the world of technology enabled radio taxi hailing apps of Uber, Ola, Meru and more. While opportunities abound to grow market share, am going to pen down some potential cross app integrations. App integration, in my opinion is a key B2B lever for acquiring customers. A distribution network which can catapult the touch-points for bookings.  The northward statistics on mobile usage is stodgy. The application of this trend, however, is exciting. Customers demand and deserve a seamless integrated user journey, on-demand, at the touch of a finger-tip and most importantly in their native environment. Which are these native environments?

1. Healthcare: This could be integration with apps that a hospital builds or for service aggregators like Practo. Either way a single click to a doctor’s appointment and cab booking can be quiet convenient.
2. Travel: From holiday packages, to flight bookings with airlines, train reservations to out-of-station bus rides, everything is online. Yet I have to book cabs separately each time. How I would like my cabbie to receive flight details and pick me up to and fro airport. Partners you ask? The world of Aggregators; MakeMyTrip, Cleartrip, Yatra, Airlines: Indigo, Jet; Corporate Bookings, Amex; Trains: IRCTC; Bus: Red Bus. This category is so vast it would deserve a post by itself.
3. Accommodation: Hotels are moving servicing, house-keeping, in-room dining and wake-up calls on their apps. It’s only natural that they will need a trusted concierge to book cabs, online. Aggregators are intuitive; Hotel.com, Booking.com, AirBnB, Oyorooms and the list is long.
4. Events: When booking myself for a play, a movie, a concert only if I could book myself a ride. Bookmyshow, Timescity, Buzzintown, Eventshigh are the obvious choices. Then there are large scale events on Travel & Tourism, Music Festivals, Advertising Awards, Marathons, Technology Conferences which are large enough to have custom application development. How about white label event app publishers like Procialize? People registering for the event would find it very useful to take the pain of booking out of their trip. Oh by the way wedding planning apps are quite the rage these days. Picture getting all those baraatis packed-in for a nice family ride. One logistical nightmare off your back.
5. Real Estate: I have often observed that people scouting to rent or buy properties find it difficult to get to the place on their own. Many times because they are new to the city, don’t know directions to the location, have not got their car yet, are not sure of parking facilities and sometime sheer lazy to drive. A service by 99acres, Magicbricks, Housing, Commonfloor can be quite handy.
6. Marketplace: We speak of buying and selling. Chat and Calls. Collectibles and Connections. How about helping me get there. Navigation Maps or then maybe a cab. Olx and Quikr.
7. Social: Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp all get my location. Can I simply book using a chat window? A tweet? A ping? What more, a group discount?. Now don’t just use social to market but to monetize the market on social.
8. Carpool: Whenever you do decide to cater to this category please do be a part of the carpooling app destinations. I would have loved this facility back in college. More than many would love it today. Carpooling, Tripda, Poolmycar.
9. Classifieds: Justdial is quite a wiki. They now facilitate booking appointments with service professionals like doctors. Am I going to repeat the opportunity? No
10. Beauty: This is not quite an organized sector yet. Let me qualify that. Neither is there an aggregator nor is the individual player technologically savvy. A potential for an entrepreneur to aggregate the bookings and utilize the lean hours. But for those parlors and spas that do facilitate online booking via apps, a ride would complete the experience.
11. Fitness: This is a bit of a repeat customer base category. Only if the customer is not like me. Paying annual memberships when paying them an annual visit. Given the increased emphasis on fitness and multitude of activities spawning, a trip to the Gym in a mall with little or no parking to bicycling trips. A pick up and drop could be a treat.
12. Food and Beverages: The Zomato and Uber integration is rather cool. Love it. Am greedy about more players joining the bandwagon.

Rounding-off number of ideas got boring: Hence 12 🙂

Zomato: Bite on this.

Am adventurous with food, especially when the adventure sits in another’s plate. Am committed to spending hours browsing over where to eat. On many occasions missing the open hours and compromising on my meal. Defeating the purpose all together, I know. Those are exceptions. Zomato is pinned to my start screen, it serves me well. Payback time.

Here are 10 ideas;  some a gravy train, others will bring home more bacon, some are a piece of cake and perhaps very few that you may chew and spit out.

1. Travel recommendations: A partnership with the travel segment should serve your customers well. Think MakeMyTrip, Expedia, Ibibo, Yatra and more. As a tourist am keen to discover new places to eat, am looking for recommendations. It would be fantastic to get that information right up. Book a package and with it get recommended places. Perhaps even throw some deals into the package itself. Help me discover.
2. Location based promotions: Don’t we all love discounts? How we discover them needs to be easier. Currently one zeroes down on the restaurant and then one knows of the promotions running. Why not have promotions and discounts listed separately? Everyone cares for a better ROI. Your users included.
3. Events: Yes, think category. Shouldn’t everything food be there at Zomato. Now I don’t mean be everything to everyone, but listing food events & walks is not too off. Book My Show and or other event platforms could be great partners. Cross app traffic integration. Win-Win.
4. Mobile wallet: Home delivery or dining-in, mobile is my wallet. Click to pay. Seamless and convenient for users. Rich user history for Zomato. Need I say more?
5. Split the bill: Now assuming you are going the mobile wallet route why not solve for a common problem that of splitting a bill. Pay for what you order. Place the order on the app and get your bill. No bad debts.
6. In App Orders: Give me a check box menu, let me place my order, generate an estimated bill, save my address and credit card details, track my order. Serve it hot. No dialing in for orders, reduces manpower dependency and turnaround time for the restaurants, Simply efficient.
7. Home cooked food: You recommend restaurants but then there is a market for home cooked food, not quite organized agreed but could do with the right user base. There are plenty start-ups but do they have scale? Food for thought?
8. Rude food: There are power users and reviewers but I miss a Vir Sanhgvi like content on Zomato. More academic interest, yes. But that’s how one explores, learns and engages. Please excuse the paid bloggers. They don’t yield the kind of credibility anymore.
9. Personalized recommendations: Inundated with social; more feeds, more check-ins, more point of views on reviews, to what end? You know what I bookmark, what I browse, categories I read, where I go and probably if you included some my suggestions what I eat and how much I spend. I deserve some personalized recommendations don’t you think?
10. Loyalty: Now you are not into a loyalty program but in this day and age of decreasing attention span some form of reward is good. Don’t read this as screaming a discount, How about Gourmet Club invite for power users? Occasions I am likely to dine out, Birthdays & Anniversary are a no brainer? Make my date special, make group check-in count. Take a leaf out of American Express.

Holler your business, marketing and product managers and tell me what you think.

15 Ideas to Reduce Traffic Jam

We 20Mn+ Delhites, please allow me the luxury to extend the definition to lesser mortals of NCR too, are proud owners of 8.9Mn vehicles. Vehicles, that ply on roads clogged by traffic. Traffic, that belongs to it and some that doesn’t: Pedestrians, Strays, Hawkers, Pavement houses, Construction, Dumpsters, Unammned check posts, Broken down trucks, Trees for shrines. Traffic powered by machine, humans and animals.

Oh, am otherwise in awe of the wide, and the very rare experience of, uninterrupted roads of Delhi. To chance upon the later, is a fairy tale. We are often blamed for Indian Stretchable Time. Truth be told, it’s not of volition. Waddling through traffic and the harrowing task to find a parking is no small feat. I recollect leaving my car to be towed for lack of both a parking spot & time to reach the interview with Microsoft at Cyber City, Gurgaon. An ocean of offices swamped with an ever increasing school of employees and of course, negligible parking. The other time I did find parking in the bylanes, my patrician stilettoes gave up on the cobbled dusty track. Then there is, carpeting, to save you from the embarrassment of grating heels.

Life goes on, at the rate of 4 hours of daily commute to and fro work, since. Am no exception. Those who live in spitting distance are not better off either. Well, I say that because they spend inordinate time covering a short distance. This regular life of mine is often interrupted, by the likes of wedding season. 20,000 weddings on a single day! While it might tell you the obvious, about the exploding traffic and potential mating population, I am perplexed to know that there are so many eligible men out there! Who are these people? Where are their watering holes? How come ‘I’ have not spotted these unicorns! Then we have festivals, VIPs, maintenance, construction stalemate and religion. Be warned Kanvarias and Chhat puja can dent you! Speaking of dents, virgin cars in Delhi are a myth.

In my ranting thus far I have not spoken about anything you did not know. Although, I may have been able to evoke empathy, by stating the obvious. Doing so was not the intention but admittedly is quite charming of me.

This write-up could have well been about air pollution due to traffic but then healthy lungs, chirping birds and green earth move few to action. Selfishness, can and does. Let us pivot this around us; our comfort, time, money & life. Now we should be better prepared to lend an ear and a thought.

It is also easier & natural to expect, after all we pay taxes; we elect. We have paid for infrastructure development, salaries of cops and waivers for violations. We should have better roads, faster construction, improved connectivity, flawless enforcement of traffic rules, pavements for cyclists, overhead bridges, shelters for the homeless, sheds for the stray and Santa Claus.

There are things “they” , the other partridges, can do. Lane driving, abide by signal, respect distance & your vehicle, be less ear-splitting, get that black hose of hell fixed, give way to the emergency siren, to start with. I am sure you have your asks.

Then there are some things we can do. Of course we do them already; not give into road rage & profanity, acknowledge our mistake, time our travel- but then again there are no off-peak hours I know of anymore.

Also, there are real solutions that do not require investments or infrastructure. Some solutions dangle the carrot, some whip the stick, others, do neither.

Here are the 15 Ideas that I can think of to reduce traffic and save you some money, time & life: 

A Case for Car Pooling

Car Pool

This can be done informally at an individual level, formally by large organizations and monetized by 3rd part technology solution providers via apps. Carpooling, Letsride & Pool Circle

Shared Taxi Service

Why can’t the radio taxis not add a feature of multiple pick-ups and drops on the same route. Some will take it, few every day, others will cringe. Here is how UberPool works.

Single Passenger Hours

Disallow single passenger vehicles to ply during certain hours. If not disallow, make it prohibitively expensive.

Cap cars/person

Increase tax liability, charge higher registration, higher loan rates for second car. And the whip cracks!

Dangle the Public Transport carrot

Income Tax relief. Student concession. Loyalty cards. Reward points for Metro kms.

Meter the Autos!

Create an economical option for people to use. If autos charge this steeply & arbitrarily, I might as well buy my Nano.

Technology at help: Automated real time heat map

Spot the congestion, avoid it like plague. No need for twitter and radio updates, most of which are awfully incorrect.

Shared transfers

Hotspots like offices, marketplaces, theatres, parks can have shared transfers at standardized rates that ply frequently. Metro being the hub, hotspots the spokes.

Promote Work from Anywhere

Why incent individuals alone when you can influence the culture they work in. Reward companies where employees enjoy a work from home.

Do telemarketers need to be in office?

Use collaborative workspaces to plug and well, play.

Flexible work hours

Let the cogs decide the hours that work for them. The company and the manager should care for the output.

Company transport

Facilitate busses and cabs. Charge them if required, but nominally.

Car Pooling Alliance

If there can be coopetition why can’t offices in the same zone or building come together. This serves as company transport with centralized security and logistics. Small businesses benefit! Win-Win.

Preferred housing

Allocate preferred societies for employees to stay at. Give them a reason to live there; benefits. Membership to gym, compensation component, schooling for children, doctor on call, Life balance. High density of employees in an area = economical and efficient shuttle service.

Be Draconian:

Allocate days when odd and even registration number plates cannot ply.

Don’t turn right on the green light.

A lot amongst these ideas may need organizational or policy level support. A few are fledgling, others growing wings. Then, there are those you can excuse as a thing of my late evening, hyperactive imagination. What I hope though is that it leaves you with food for thought and me with a comment on how you think we can solve for traffic congestion.