Latest on easing transport issues is a website that offers online coordination of carpools. Zimride, the latest fad in cost-effective commuting, beautifully blends the best of facebook and google maps to help coordinate carpools. Tactfully eliminating the anxiety of not knowing the driver, the single greatest concern while carpooling, Zimride has received mammoth funding. The success of Zimride is doubted by many industry veterans. Though massively funded, they need colossal user base to emerge triumphant.
India too, is serving as a fertile base for many such tech start-ups. I have traveled to places like Gurgoan, Bangalore, and Hyderabad to meet the budding entrepreneurs. But to my disdain, most of them started looking for emergency exits when I started pointing at their loopholes. Most of these brilliant entrepreneurs copy existing models that are a success in the States. That’s perfectly fine as I belong to the pirates club myself. But their brilliance becomes a little gloomy when they fail to make a clone of the original. I wish they COPIED with passion. Instead, they use their undeniable intelligence which results in churning up of insipid products which are bound to fail. No one can save them and no angel investor will touch them and I will never write a word about them.
One such nifty product is Zinghopper.com – the Indian version of Zimride.com. They have done a fantastic job of copying zimride.com’s functionality; I wish they had done the same with design too. The design is quite similar but with a little too many things glued all over the place. ‘Hideous’ would be the apt description. If they are to take a wise man’s advice, they should consider cleaning up the design before heading for the big release.
The most sensible thing to do would be to just exactly stick to zimride’s design. Now let’s move to their biggest flaw - charging customers for using the website. They may still stand a slim chance of success with the appalling design, but with charging customers for using their website they are bound to doom.
Zinghopper is a great idea, and I sincerely wish the product does well. They have done a great job adapting the product to Indian transport pooling requirements. If successful it would be a very useful tool for college goers and the working middle-class, not to mention the good it would do by reducing the CO2 levels. Victorious, they are bound to change the way India commutes.
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