Being Street Smart the public way

September 2, 2016

The SmartShehar, (Hindi word for city) mobile app has been around for about four years. Meet Chetan Temkar, its creator, who envisaged smart mobility long before ‘smart’ became a buzzword. After two decades spent in the US, Temkar knows a thing or two about smart commuting and smart mobility in large cities.

Extracts from an interview :-

Tell us how SmartShehar happened.

We started in 2006 when we created a car pooling mobile app which was short message service (SMS) based. I got into mobile apps in 2011 and thought about what could be done in Mumbai that is useful. In a city where over 30 lakh people use the public transport systems daily, I realized that with regard to buses, there was no information, unlike the trains. Even today, if you ask anybody about buses, no one knows too much about them. Hence, we decided to create a location-based application for buses.

What does the application do?

In short, it figures everything out. It finds out, in connection with your location in real-time, which buses are available and the nearest stops. If you then click on a bus, it shows all its stops on a map. If you then get into the bus, it shows you the next stop so you don’t have to keep asking the conductor. We have also done interesting things like showing the landmarks around every bus stop as people are mostly not aware of the colloquial names for these stops. It’s a very intelligent application. Moreover, based on the back-end intelligence we have about traffic, we try to figure out how long a bus will take to reach a particular point. This does not mean it is foolproof, because BEST does not have a tracking mechanism. However, we have suggested to them we’ll provide this functionality free of charge. All they need to do is buy a phone and put it in the bus. The bus driver enters the bus number, picks out the start and end stops and starts his journey. After that, the app does everything else.

In developed countries, all this information is relayed on display panels in the bus shelter itself. The problem with this in India, as BEST pointed out to us, is that people will either break the panels or take them away. Therefore, it is better to have the information on your smart-phone, and maybe this is even better as you don’t even have to be at the bus shelter. You could be at a pub nearby with a friend but you are informed always about the bus through your phone! Therefore, this is a good example of taking a global solution and localising it for the Indian context.

How many downloads do you have so far?

We have more than 250,000 downloads.

Have they peaked out at that level?

We generally get about 400-500 downloads daily if you count the other app as well. We have an app called Jumpin Jumpout which is a very ambitious project. We have parts of it ready. It allows you to share your care with your friends, or a group of people, friends of friends, or with strangers. The operation is very optimized. It is also being used in the US. With this app, as soon as you create a trip, it sends a notification to all the people on the route or to selected people. These people get notifications that you have created a trip. Now, when you leave, actually start moving, people again get a notification about that.

The app is intelligent enough to figure out the speed at which you are moving so it knows that you are now in the car since you must be moving at a pace faster than if you were walking. It has a lot of logic built in.

What are the challenges you are facing here?

It is very difficult to get public data. We have been talking to the government to make this data available to website owners and app makers. We have also offered to put all the data in a certain format. If the government does this, then it will open up these kinds of services. I’m hoping that now with the focus on start-ups by the current government, they’ll push these kinds of things. Once they make data open, then us app-makers can get to work. When we had gone to Western Railways, we faced a very high-handed and arrogant attitude from the official in charge there. In the US, where I worked for about two decades, it is exactly the opposite. They welcome you with open arms. However, the attitude of BEST has been great. Of course, we still have to ask many times, etc., but generally, they have been much better compared to the Railways.

What is your vision? What do you want to finally do with this app?

We envision a transparent, cashless, and effortless system to use. For instance, if I am at Andheri and want to go to Churchgate, the app should show me different options. I should be able to see trains, buses as well as people offering rides in their own cars. The app should not only show me all these options but also list the quickest way for me to reach my destination along with other details such as who has air-conditioning, for instance. We already have about 70 per cent of these functionalities in our apps. We’ll also have a seamless and transparent system which will enable one to pay through the mobile, whatever form of transport he or she decides to use. I believe the unique thing about us is we are taking an integrated approach.

The big data analytics platform we are building in the back-end will allow the government to make intelligent public policies. It will allow them to prioritize issues and also allow them to predict problems. This is a very ambitious goal but we feel such platforms are critical for the smart cities of the future.

How are you funded and are you making money yet through the app?

We are not yet making money. We are hoping for enough users. For SmartShehar, we have 2.5 lakh downloads already and we can leverage that. We are currently funded through friends and family. I have a partner and we have an office in Mumbai. There are about 10 of us, seven of whom are core staff and three or four associates work on a part-time basis. At this stage, we can’t reveal much as this relates also to our competitive edge. However, once we have a fixed set of users over a longer period who have an engagement with the app, we can look at ways to monetize what we are doing. We are not worried about that right now. Our goal is just to get as many downloads as possible at this point.