EBay Billionaire-Backed Startup Tries to Unravel Rickshaw Routes
Summary
A London-based startup backed by the billionaire co-founder of EBay Inc. and an executive at Uber Technologies Inc. is trying to make sense of seemingly anarchic transportation networks in some of the world’s largest cities. While commuters in the developed world can easily check the internet to track rail schedules and hail cabs from their mobile phones, life isn’t as simple for people in emerging markets. South African city authorities such as the Municipality of Tshwane, which includes the capital Pretoria, as well as the Gautrain transit system in Johannesburg and the University of Cape Town, are paying for the information, according to co-founder Devin de Vries. WhereIsMyTransport’s staff jump onto passenger vans to track routes or mine global positioning data gathered from mobile phones to build on the platform, said de Vries, who started the venture after winning a Microsoft competition at the University of Cape Town that sent him to Silicon Valley for a spell. “It requires scale and coverage, which are hard to create in the early days.” WhereIsMyTransport has more than 200 projects signed up to the platform including apps and websites, and the company has data for 20 cities across 10 countries, CEO de Vries said.
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