Yet another startup idea

This time it’s an i-phone/android app. The motivation for this is the heavy advertising in the last few days for Mapmyindia GPS, on hoardings all over Bangalore. Again, I don’t know if this has been implemented before.

So this will be built on top of Mapmyindia or any other similar GPS. When you hunt for the shortest route between point A and point B, you can give two possible choices – shortest by distance and shortest by time. The former is the default choice that all GPSs currently use. This one is an app to provide the latter.

Now, each city will be mapped out as a network of intersections. And then, for each “edge” on this graph, we use data that we’ve gathered from other users of the app in order to predict the amount of time taken to travel. Of course, the prediction model is not going to be simple, and I’m willing to partner you (via my forthcoming quant consultancy firm) in developing it. It’s going to be a fairly complex model based on time-of-day, recency of data, outlier detection (what if someone stops off for lunch in the middle of an “edge”?) and all such.

So, now you have the city mapped out (for a particular instant) both in terms of distance and in terms of time, and in cases of any traffic jams or such, my system will help you find the quickest route to your destination. Should be useful, right?

Of course, the success of this app (like a lot of other apps, I guess) depends heavily on “network effect”. The more the users of this app, the better the model I’ll have in predicting time between intersections, and save you the headache of mentally trying to optimize the route to your destination each time you set out (like I do).

I’m pretty serious about this. If you think this hasn’t been done before, we can work together to get this up!