What do you mean by "it's spices"?

And can you outline what you have in mind for the payment system?

this plattform how would be implemented? i mean only us?" or worldwide?

So would this basically be a web forum for people to match up with someone willing to gve them a ride. How would this site make money?

So if I read this right, the business makes a % profit from the fees a passenger would pay to the site. Also, a % would go to the driver accepting rides.

but...

I can already carpool for free, including the mapping .. so why would I pay for it?
http://www.carpoolto...en/my/howitworks.php
http://www.carpoolzo...artcommute.ca/en/my/

Maureen: Sorry, english is not my native language... I meant it's differential.

Rizal: Worldwide. The website will determine where the user is connecting from and would show in it's homepage information about the users region (communities of interest, user profiles, map information, etc).

Esshakip: No. It is a site that offers the users the ability to create communities and profiles (like in Orkut.com), receive $ for their rides, transfer $ easily for ride sharers (if you are a hitchhiker), and it automatically matches rides for the user (warning via SMS/E-mail)

Norman: You carpool for free because it is hard to pay the ride giver. If you travel between cities you probably share the gas and other expenses, right? Why don't you do that for city rides? Because it's hard/annoying to pay the driver (US$1.13 for example). The site does it for you. When a user registers as a "ride seeker" he makes a deposit in his account (say $15.00). When he takes a ride the site automatically transfers the money to the "ride giver" and takes a share of it (say 15%). This is fairer to the "ride giver" and easier to the "ride seeker". Another benefit of using the site is the User Rating. If you have good ratings you'll be able to get rides with strangers (because they will probably trust you and you will trust them if they are well rated), your pool of possible carpoolers extrapolates your communities (college communities, company communities, etc) and acquaintances.

You guys can see an example of a wireframe here (http://www.crowdvent...lcaronero/home.html) but it's in portuguese.
I'm not a programmer/webdesigner so it really sucks... and the logo is from (ZipCar.com), just a place holder.

Oh, one more thing I believe is very important. The site is VISUAL. Most carpooling sites are LISTS, All text, forum type things... In this site you point-and-click where you want to go.
In mobile form it would work the same way, with a J2ME app using Google Maps Mobile as a base.

Ah... some more infos... :]

*COMMUNITIES are EXTREMELLY important for this site. If they didn't exist, matching would be hard. People naturally don't trust strangers, but they trust people from their social circles (I know that because I interviewed many people). So, you probably wouldn't take a ride with a total stranger but you would consider taking a ride with someone from your school, for example... although you might not know that person yet.

*USER RATING solves the problem of taking rides with people OUTSIDE YOUR COMMUNITIES (social circles). As in eBay, user ratings are very important and really make a difference when it comes to trust in strangers. If a user has many good ratings, he probably can be trusted. So, if you use the site a lot, you'll get many good ratings and your chances of getting a ride increase.

*ENVIROMENTAL ISSUES. I want the site to display carbon displacement achieved by the users. This is maybe the #1 reason to build a site like this. We can make an enormous difference in big cities pollution.

---
Thank you for your ratings and interest in my business idea. Please give me more feedback! I'll answer everything I can.

What would prevent Facebook or Google from eating your lunch?

Andy, the same thing that prevents any business of doing anything else other then their core business: focus.
Right now they are not focusing on that, maybe after "El Caronero" launches they will open their eyes to the opportunity. Until then it's up to the company to make the community grow. If it catches some speed it would be easier for Google to buy "El Caronero" then to compete with it... that's why there are so many mergers and acquisitions (e.g.: Dodgeball and YouTube by Google).

i think symbian tech via SMS or WAP browsing will do better for community based...

Saigon, it sure is an alternative. The thing about SMS is that it gets limited, u have to build a database with easy-to-type geocodes. Maybe an integration of Symbian and J2ME Google-Maps? If that is possible, anyway...

The key might be making the site a fun community place to hang out - otherwise it takes much more time than the things it replaces. I wonder if this would work even better integrated into an already existing community website.

how different is your idea from this?

http://goloco.org/greetings;guest

it can be enhanced if other hidden/transactions costs can be agreed upon by members (i.e. gas saved, toll saved, parking fees, insurance saved, etc.)

also, greater patronage should also result in deeper discounts or service upgrades.

I think the key here is that this is not a carpooling site for repeated journeys to work and such like but for one off kind of hitch-hiking. Douglas Adams had the idea in the Hitchhikers Guide of an Electronic thumb where you activated the thing and the nearest spaceship that was passing picked you up. The technology for this now exists and this could be implemented. Or is this another idea?...

Davidwei: I totally agree with you on the point that it has to be a fun community. I can't stress that enouth, this site has communities in it's core (different from other sites). They allow people to find rides easier (you don't need a huge community to be built up, 40 people from your college or neighborhood is enouth) and more safely. BUT, integrating it with other existing social networks has an imense drawback: People from different countries use different social networks (i.e.: MySpace/Facebook in USA, Orkut in Brazil, Beebo in Denmark, etc).

Acamedia: I'm aware of GoLoco and kinda happy that they exist (it shows that the idea has market potential). But I think GoLoco is still far from what a service like this can achieve. It really has many (almost all) of the utilities I wish to build, but they are poorly executed. The site is not user friendly, not visually based, there is no clear incentive to communities, etc. What I?'m saying is: We can do it better. On your second point, we will let people input other costs like parking and tools, but gas will be calculated by the website.

Anathema: You're right on the spot! I dream of this site shifting the way carpooling works. Today people usually carpool on regular trips (to your school, to your job, etc) but cannot carpool on one-time trips, like to a mall, concert, pub, etc. When the community is large enouth I believe people will be able to find rides "just-in-time". That, together with mobile service, will be a killer service, changing the way ridesharing works.

That is an interesting thing about El Caronero... people have an incentive to make it viral. If you spread the world, everybody wins.

Keep the feedback comming! :]

sucks..

it seems you have it all pretty well thougth... why dont u start writing businessplan and how you are planning to create this technology.. making it a real web 2.0 site would be smart. with ajax that functions with the mashups of google maps etc.. and if you want to make it fun ... have a cliche name. and make it easy to use so anyone needed to use this service will like it. one more thing you say it will be for worldwide. what do you know about your market?

as i know it will be hard in some countries as they dont caarpool at all. here in sweden you either have your own car or you take bus train or subway....

like it is in most european countries. even in asia its like that. ppl have hard to thrust strangers....

so better have numbers on statistics on how many people in different regions of the world actually share travel

Rizal, I'm working on a BP already! What I desperately need is the help of programmers to get a Beta version running ASAP, since I don't know much about that area... :) There are some BP competitions coming up soon here in my College and I want to participate with this idea. It would be awesome to have something concrete to show them.

You're absolutelly right about country diferences.
Here in Brazil, for example... people nowadays do not carpool. They prefer to get their own cars and face traffic (and it's HUGE in some cities like Sao Paulo) or take public transport (which sux...)
Why do they do that?
#1: They don't trust strangers. #2: They don't know they have friends going the same way. #3: They want flexibility.
BUT, that's exactly what this service is all about, changing the way people carpool OR their vision about carpooling!

The #1 problem we solve with communities and user ratings. I talked to many people (about 50) and they all loved the idea and agreed that they would take a ride with a stranger as long at he/she belonged to a close community (same college, same neighborhood, same company, etc). But, even if the person is not in their community, they said they'd probably trust a person if he/she had great user feedback (user rating).

#2 is solved by the service itself. Getting people together to share their day-to-day rides.

The last problem we solve with a mobile interface (cell phones, PDAs, etc) and also with communities. The Mobile aspect is quite obvious, you wont need a PC near you to arrange a ride. But why do communities help? Because you don't need a huge social network to find rides if you have enough people from your own "real life" communities because people, most of the time, go to the same places (work & school). If you have 50 people from your work using the service, you probably will find a suitable ride everyday, without the need of a huge social network. But when this site gets HUGE it will be awesome... I bet people will be able to get rides to most places on-demand. It's like wi-fi networks (http://www.fon.com).
I also plan on allowing people to share cab rides, but that's for the future, I haven't thought much about it...

I agree with you about most European countries that have great public transportation or no traffic at all, but I know that in the USA and Canada, carpooling is very common. In India as well. If the site gets a small portion of that public, it can make piles of cash and make a huge difference in the enviroment!

Feel free to contact me via MSN Messenger or GTalk (email is on the description of the idea)!

You guys gave your 2 cents... but would you use it??? What do you think???

I'm not sure there is enough market for this.

Well, if you do some quick math you can see this is a money machine.
I'll use my city, São Paulo (Brazil) as an example.

We have about 12 million people in the main city area (huge, I know). We have about 6 million cars being used, those cars do around 10 million round trips a day (official stats).

Ok, 10 million trips a day, around 6 million people driving.
If we achieve 5% of those drivers that's 300.000 registered users (as drivers). And 5% of the trips is 500.000 trips per day.
Supose that the average trip distance is 5km (really short for a city like SP).

So, we have (500k)x(5km)=(2,5 million km) travelled per day
An average car does 9km/liter of gas, Gas here costs around US$1.10 per liter.
2,500,000km = 278,000 liters of gas = US$278,000 spent on fuel per day in São Paulo

Since the site will share the trip costs between the people involved (let's assume, in average, 2 people per car), that's US$139,000 per day being transfered via the service.

If we charge 15%, that's:
* US$20,883 revenue per day.
* US$625,000 per month
* US$7,500,000 per year

It's not huge, but the operational costs are very low. These numbers are conservative, imagine them replicated to Mexico City, Los Angeles, Mumbai, and others.

For curiosity, those people in São Paulo would be reducing emissions of almost 400 tons of CO2 in the atmosphere (per day)! ;)

I love this idea, but it should be implemented in a social networking site I think. However It was great!

Thanks Sajjadi!
I don't know if you read my explanation about the social networks so I'll give my 2 cents on it.
I agree that doing this with a social network would be great because there would be a large number of people already linked to it. In fact there's a website that does this (ZimRide), it is integrated with Facebook.
But, in my opinion this decision comes with a problem... there are different social networks being used around the world (MySpace/Facebook in the US, Orkut in Brazil, etc), and since I want this to be a global site it would get in the way.
BTW, although there are many sites working with the carpooling issue, I have to stress that I believe it can be done in a much better way! ;)

End of feedback? :/

What I meant about the market size is not so easy to determine. It's not just the number of trips and the number of people without cars.

Figuring the market size is closer to determining how much is the overlap between trips taken by cars and trips that people without cars want to take. This means not just the routes, but whether drivers and riders want those routes at approximately the same time.

And also how much this service would be of an improvement over public transportation in a given area.

I haven't lived in very urban areas, so it's hard for me to judge.

Maureen: Oh, definitely... determining market sizes is always tough for internet businesses. If you think about it, our market potential is 100% of the people who use cars inside the city.. but how much of that we can bring into the business is really hard (impossible?) to tell. Only doing it to know the results...
The biggest objective here isn't so much helping people without cars to get rides but to convince people who HAVE cars to, instead of using theirs everyday, carpool a few times a week.

Well, at least comparing to São Paulo, I would much rather take a carpool than public transport. Much more comfortable! And the improvement a service like this brings could be huge. Here in São Paulo we have rotation of cars - some days of the week some cars can't go around the city in determined hours. The effect was huge on pollution and traffic jams. If we get 15% of those riders to carpool in a given day, the results will be amazing, trust me!

Hi Advocatus,

Im an NGO worker, so Im always interested with projects that can help our environment. Here's some questions, assumptions and probably new insights on your idea.

-Lets say I plan to travel from my City to another city 300 km distance
-I will go to the site and input my itenerary and request for pooling.
- The site will show me the list of cars and owner profile that will travel on that route on the day and on the time that I specified in my request. (is that possible?)
- Then having the match, i will submit my request. (how can i get confirmation?)
- Instead of paying P500 the normal bus fare, Ill pay say half. (how will I pay? Pre-paid? Post paid? Cash or credit card? Paypal? How about if the trip was cancelled? (my call or the car owner's call) If the car broke down? Is there a payment return or a charge back?
- The carbon credits is good. I heard about the Kyoto Protocol that Japan and other first world countries will monetize as a reward the carbon credits. (will this be possibly integrated?)
- Do you expect people to join a social network for car pooling sake? Or you just make the application for this and offer it as a "plug in" for existing social networks?

By social networking, I didn't mean one of the ones available now, but I meant you should develop social networking in your site too, so that trust can be made between users of the site.

Kyera: Hello (nice name, btw)! This project definitly can have a huge impact in the enviroment, that?'s why I?'m so motivated by it! Now I?'ll try to answer your questions:
* For travels between cities>>> we have an interesting situation. Your starting point isnt so relevant (because generally you're willing to rendesvouz somewhere else besides close to home) so the first difference is that you don't set an area from where you begin or end your trip. Your starting and ending point is the city of origin and destiny. The time is definitly important, and you'll have the option to determine it. You can also make "open" searches and post "open" trips, so that you can arrange with a user if your schedule is flexible.

* The confirmation>>> this is a critical point. If I think about the future it will be by Mobile confirmation. I envision a Java (or similar) applet installed in your phone. If you're searching for trips you'll keep it connected (minimal transfer necessities so it doesn't get too expensive) and when a trip is confirmed you receive a message that you answer (accepting the trip or not). Maybe we will not be able to launch with mobile capabilities, so the confirmation may have to be via Internet. I'm studying also the possibility of using a Twitterbot to do that.

* Payment>>> You'll have an Account in the website with credits. When you arrive at your destination you confirm the end of the trip (and so does the driver) and the credits are autom. transfered from your web account to his. He may withdraw that money via Paypal.

* Carbon credits>>> I was talking to some friends about the possibility of selling these credits. Unfortunetly the market is extremely regulated and slow... so, today, this isn't an alternative. Maybe in the future, it's in our radar! :)

* Social network>>> I expect them to join a social network for transport sake! I believe transport is a very social thing, if you give it a chance! Like sajjadi said, and I've tried to explain, the social aspect of this site is EXTREMELY important! It's what make people trust each other and makes the site fun to use!

Please warn me if you still have any doubts! Feel free to email me also! And sorry about the bad english...!

I'd like to use a site like this myself in the winter. Let me describe what I see as how I could see it working to meet my needs.

I usually take the bus, walk or bike between 4 different points in the city. I typically go from any point to any point. But the 4 arrival/departure points are fixed.

It would be nice to advertise my need for a lift with nothing more than a cell phone. But cell phones make crappy data entry devices. So I suggest we allow users to set up a profile on the web. Users can designate their primary pickup/destination locations, enter their cell phone number, and print out a handy guide of what numbers to SMS when we need a lift or have gotten a lift at our pickup points.

Similarly, drivers would also have to pre-populate their profiles. I'd include details like make of car, license. So passenger can spot the car.

But (and I'm thinking as I go here)...

- What is to keep 2 drivers from converging on the same passenger at once?

- Rider needs to SMS that he's been picked up.

- Picking up a passenger at an address is easy, but finding him at an intersection could be tough.

There's all sorts of levels of service that could be explored with this idea. From the basic forums where people hook up online for rides, and hope to repeat similar patterns with small group of people (else it is too hard to find a lift when you need one), to the crazy GPS-SMS random lifts.

I'd find the cellphone-GPS-SMS (and J2ME?) combo the most interesting because it hasn't been done. And we're just getting to the point where it is possible. But boy would it be hard. We'd be basically competing with taxis. Its like taxis for a sub-set of the population who have signed up to the site.

But...

- Telco will charge you for making GPS API call on cellphone (tower triangulation). Can be free if you have a GPS device on your phone, but apparently those drain a lot of power. With no GSP, we'll never know where drivers are except for the moment after one has entered their location onto their cellphone.

- SMS costs money.

- Cellphone data rates are high.

The good thing is most of these costs are carried by our passengers/drivers, and El Caronero can focus on mostly creating website/database/j2me app.

Could IM be the bearer of the relevant Data here?

Presence data is built in - so no risk of delayed SMS.

Federation is uniting massive existing commuities of users.

IM is on more platforms. and more communications carriers.

Most majotr mobile companies are building IM strategies. (See the major announcements from 3GSM 2006)

Sites like Twittervision.com are integrating IM messages www/SMS/IM clients we just need to build it backwards :-) so we could have the map interface when on the www and IM when mobile.

log in and IM (or SMS) your buddy El Caronero with where you want to start and where you need to go. An IM converstaion would then take place with El Caronero acting as automated broker to make the arrangements.

Using mobile phone based IM could even be used to provide authenication and perhaps later payment.

Hey! First I wanna say thank you for the great feedback! You are all pointing out very important issues of this idea! Thank you vary much and keep 'em coming!
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Gordon: Very, very cool to hear that you would use a site like this!
The cell phone is a real problem here.. as you might know, mobile's have a huge problem with platform so we face that same issue... I'm thinking about J2Mee and Symbian as possible solutions. I have many of your visions such as the user has a WWW profile, but the Mobile interface is much simpler. But let me try to answer you:
* What keeps 2 drives from going to the same passanger>>> you only send confirmation to 1 driver. Probably, if the driver keeps the "hitch-hiker" waiting he may be punished (negative points or credit's taken from his account)
* Confirmation>>> As I told Kyera, it's a critical point. Totally dependent on the platform we chose for the mobile. SMS would be great but there are local issues (you need gateways, etc).. Twitter might be a solution for UK and US, but not for the rest of the world. Platforms based on Data Transfer earn points here, cause they cost the same to people around the world. And we could use a more visual interface. It's a point to discuss on development.
* Social network>>> Personal Profiles and Communities will be the basic communication means between users.. I think they're enough. Communities would have Forums and Profiles would have scrapbooks.
* Taxis>>> I believe they can earn from this. I thought about a solution where people share not only their own car-rides but also taxi-rides! That's why I call "El Caronero" Transport 2.0 and not Carpool 2.0! We could build a platform where people arrange Taxi-sharing rides. How taxi's earn? They get rides that maybe people wouldn't take... but since they get (at least 50%) discounts they are more willing to ride.
* Costs>>> totally agree.... from the business side, "El Caronero" basically has development costs

Allan: TKz for the feedback!
* IM>>> I have to research more about the topic... thanks for the heads up! But I have thought about using Twitter Bots as an intermediate of SMS between users (read one of my posts above)!

It's nice to see this one starting to take off, whatever it's called. I think building on top of twitter is an excellent idea as much for access to its existing user base as for any technical reason. Maybe it will even be possible to implement it entirely without any server side stuff of our own.

The only thing to be said for SMS as a bearer is the ease of obtaining revenue whereas data transfer over cellular networks is gradually becoming cheaper andf flat-rate as it did in the web as a whole.

The difficulty of location remains but GPS is becoming much more coomonplace on phones and surely will shortly become standard. Otherwise, obtaining location is very difficult to do. Believe me, I've tried and eventually forked outfor a bluetooth GPS.

Gordon, Allan and Anathema, I'm liking more and more the idea of using Twitter (or similar) as a platform for SMS. Creating a set of fixed (and individual) waypoints via web that latter can be used by SMSsing a "El Caronero" Twitterbot. It could be a really fast and inexpensive solution.
Obviously the problem is leaving a whole world without service (anywhere outside UK, like Brazil, where we pay International SMS costs to message Twitter).
I really think Twitter will actually become an International SMS service... sorta like SKYPE but for Mobile services. They'll obviously start to charge for it some time...

I agree with Anathema that data costs are going down. I believe they are going to drop significantly in the next year. Mobile internet will become the cheapest and most open way to disseminate internet around the world (here in Brazil we have 9 million Internet home users, but 147 million cell phones!). WE ARE AIMING for the Future! SMS based could be a starting point, but definitely THE FUTURE is full J2MEE(or similar) platform with Google Maps, profiles and community views.

Anyway.. I'm really excited with this!!!

Just to keep you guys up to date... I found someone interested in my idea that lives in my city. The guy works at the same start-up that I do and he's currently working on a Alfa version of the website! We should have something better then my horrible wireframe online very soon (by the end of the month, we hope!)!

I guess RFID and SMS will fit to your idea.
But I think that it will work better before with the public transport system.
You can check where you wanna go and you receive a message when the right bus is getting close to your bus stop.

Obs.: Me manda o link desse alfa pra eu conhecer!

http://www.carpoolwo...&country=IND,IN
dude I am from India,Bangalore. this service is there check out the link above

I am all for reducing Carbon emissions.

I guess my main question though is security and safety; how do I or anyone else know who I am carpooling with, unless we rely on pre-existing relationships? I mean eventually you will find meet and get to know some of the people on the network a little better, but that takes time, until then and even after that you will still have to worry about jumping in a car with the next Jeffrey Dahmer...and how much liability do you have as a site owner for acting as the enabler?

Sorry....I love the idea and I am just trying to flush this all out next to my whiteboard now....

hows it going with this?

Ashwin -> I met that site some months ago! I hope they are doing well... but as I said earlier, it can be done in a better way! More user friendly, with a better built website. "El Caronero" has some other major differences such as: Communities, profiles, mobile interface and payment system.

Definitive -> Tkz for the feedback! I totally agree with the trust issues. The solution, I think, comes from the communities. From my research I found that people Trust strangers IF they are part of a real-life community that they are also part. For example... you don't know everyone from the company you work for, but you trust them for a carpool. The same for colleges, schools and maybe even neighborhoods. "El Caronero" will let people build those communities so they can find "strangers" that they might feel confortable with for a carpool.

Rizal -> We're building a Beta website for a small proof-of-concept fase here in São Paulo. We're going to invite some colleges and entrerprises to try out the service. If it is has a positive feedback we'll keep on working with it!

The main problem that I see with this is that of you do it for money, someone will do it for free in about 30 seconds. The technology is trivial - you can probably just modify an existing PHP system. Looks at myspace, google, youtube, craigslist etc. All those free! Why should anyone pay you a penny?

why not include motor/manual bike pooling too?

i got my helmet anyway....

also my Mobile network in use have Gprs locator too!

Theguru -> because by paying they get better services. I doubt a company that works for free can build a better platform then we are going to build. MySpace is not free, you're bombarded with ADs when you use it. We could put adds on the site, or send SMS ads to users, but I believe it's intrusive. And also, users are paying a very small ammount (10-15% of their transactions) for a service that will make things a whole lot easier for them (payment wise). It's like Basecamp (http://www.basecamphq.com)... someone can build a free platform.. but why not pay for it? It's so friggin' inexpensive!

Thunderbear -> nice idea. that could be done. :)

interesting, any updates on the project?