Zoomatelo's Blog

Customized Traffic Reports

zoomatelo — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 07:12:38 +0000

One of Carpooling’s advantages is less stress for the passengers who dont have to deal with the traffic madness. We wanted to help the drivers out too.

Today we launch Customised Traffic Reports. Basically traffic reports customised for your drive, delivering you an email at 16:00 if there are any traffic incidents on your route form work home. No incidents, no email.

The service is still in testing, but we are hard at work making it better, already. On our to do list:

Morning Updates
Ability to change the times of the email
Improved route matching

Coming soon

500 Users

zoomatelo — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 18:00:53 +0000

We’ve hit our first milestone, 500 users. Thats enough that we should have at least one really good carpooling partner for each of our users. It took just about a week and we have seen a rapid increase in interest, with over 1,000 visits today!

So any guesses on how long before we get the next 500?

Lift Off!

zoomatelo — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 19:41:15 +0000

We’ve launched!

So after around nine months of gestation Zoomatelo is finally released and ready for users. Thanks to everyone involved in testing, you guys have been invaluable in making Zoomatelo a working product.

Tomorrow, the marketing blitz will begin with a set of pull up banners and bunch of posters, that Standard Bank has kindly arranged. They look great, and I am sure they are are going to inspire a whole bunch of Standard Bankers to save money, make friends and go green by starting their own carpools.

Testing, Testing 123

zoomatelo — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 11:05:51 +0000

So we’ve hit user testing, finally. Its been a hard slog ironing out all the IE6 bugs. But now we are on the way and we have a few weeks of user interactions and little work groups to understand how potential users will use the website. Its going to be interesting to see real people on the website, to see what they do, what they like and what they dont. We pray to the gods of web-design that all the tutorial and reading has paid off, and its more like than dislike

The search for a development platform…

zoomatelo — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 14:22:42 +0000

Now that we have an idea, finding a good development platform is key!

Neither Mike nor I have had any real experience with web development (besides our own simple sites), so we were up for anything. As I studied computer science, and Mike had only done a little bit of programming in Information Systems, the decision was largely up to me.

After reading some wikipedia entries on Web Development and A Comparison of Web Application Frameworks, I had narrowed it down to a few.

Bearing in mind we wanted this to scale well, we had:

Google App Engine
PHP
Django
Drupal
Ruby on Rails

as our option. Seeing the cloud as the next best step, and coupled with the free hosting, I decided to start working on Google App Engine!

Will post v0.01 alpha when it’s up and running

Fleshing out the Concept, Implementation and Advertising

zoomatelo — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 02:14:14 +0000

A simple and clean website designed to get people carpooling…

It would use google maps as the basis, with a database of people, who are willing to carpool and their addresses. Some Inference engine which can quickly calculate the distances between possible carpoolers/total distance/total distance to miles saved, and match possible people up with eachother.

Some implementation ideas:

We would have a general area for people. This way their actual address is not listed (stalkers!!!) but they are able to get a rough estimate of how much it will put them out of their way (using google’s estimated time for exact addresses, but not showing the addresses).

- People have to invite, and accept for their addresses to be added/known…

- Get a company to buy a subdomain specifically for their employees to use

- Have profiles so that one can be selective about their carpooling. Base on results of:

Age, sex, marital status?
Select an area you feel comfortable picking people up from, and taking people to, and approximate times
Select near by businesses you are happy to carpool with
Weekly Schedules
SMS reminders/

-Rate calculators for suggested pricing structure (based on AA rates or something) so that ppl can contribute towards their trip. This would make it cheaper to travel

- Automatic direction generation / most efficient route to pick ppl up

- Feel Green – By carpooling::

How many miles have you saved
How much money you have saved (based on AA rates)
Tons of CO2 reduced
Miles out of your way
Total miles saved per trip

- Use as a launch pad for selling Carbon

- Facebook App

The app would try and match not only you, but your friends up with eachother…
This would promote carpooling, as you would gladly carpool with your friends, and more likely with a friend of a friend…
The app would automatically generate suggestions which the user can approve, by starting a convo/thread/message about it…
This would make it easier to find to and from destinations, and to generate suggestions

Advertisement Ideas..

I think the green thing sells itself, but it would be cool to advertise making life more exciting/interesting… It will appeal to the non green ppl etc…

[Picture of Gangsters in a pimped up ride]
Carpooling gets you street cred…

[Picture of the hottest bikini model in a car]
I met my wife Carpooling… / Meet people

Some stats on hijacking happening to ppl who travel alone vs in a group
Carpooling is safer.

[Pics of a businessman, a bikini model and a Rock Star]
Make driving to work interesting

There are a host of “Be Green” alternatives.. but the cheeky comic ones are funnier in my mind

Project Inception…

zoomatelo — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 16:31:11 +0000

Today We had an Idea… Mike and Jono were chatting about how ridiculous it was that it took three months to learn that a friend (Mike saw every day in the office) actually lives with in a city block them.

After a few beers, and a few google searches, we found that there were no useful and intuitive websites to facilitate carpooling!

The idea was born