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Traveler router history / Matkustajareitittimen historia
In 1997 when I was doing my military service as a boat captain (not the rank, the duty, just a sub-sargeant, at ease.) I had lot of time to think about what I would like to achieve with the CS studies I had begun at the University of Helsinki in autumn 1996. The Wired magazines and various books on chaos theory and my in-born desire to innovate combined with difficult commute from home to uni using public transport lead me to dream up the public transport route finder, basically I described it to my confidants as “Choose A-to-B and press button”-interface to mass transit.
After finishing my military service and resuming the CS studies at the uni I proceeded to pursue the idea. First in the context of doing the information systems lab work in the Spring 1998 for which I received top grade mainly due to intense interest in the subject. I also did the course on user interfaces in the Spring 1998 on drafting a user friendly interface to various information about the route that the route finder could provide. I decided to set-up shop and go for proof-of-concept-by-code. This was not wise as I should have known to try to sign a letter of intent based on an action plan presented to the authority in charge of procuring the metropolitan Helsinki area public transport (YTV at the time). With a letter of intent it would have been more plausible to find financing and to gather a team of various skilled people.
So there I was: One guy, one dream, 2 computers, neither of which worked very well, some ICT skills, strong ideal of the copyleft side of the world and no funding. I set up a sole proprietorship that didn’t do anything else then try to develop the system and had gone 18,000 FIM into the red by the time I got beat to the market in the Spring of 2001 by a quartet of engineering students and graduates who had formed Dipec-Com Oy. First came out the cell phone SMS service and it was naturally complemented by a web interface to the system.
They had superior staffing, a technical mathematician, a venture capital savvy CEO, an UI specialist and I forget what the 4th guy did. They had venture capital from 3i Investments and all participants exited the venture with sale of 100% of shares to Novo Group OyJ in the early 00’s. Currently CGI.com owns the rights to the http://reittiopas.fi and is apparently still charging the procurer, Helsinki Region Traffic ( HSL ) heavily on the per-hit basis
I did not give up the dream of doing things that are innovative, ecological and ethical.
In the Spring 2015 I approached the HSL with a clear improvement to the current service and got clued into the current ongoings in the field. I heard that HSL is tired of paying big money to CGI for the extremely popular service and have initiated a project to build a similar system with special emphasis on using copyleft solutions and open data interchange standards.
To get the latest on this very exiting development go to http://matka.hsl.fi/digitransit-ui/ . I intend to pitch some of my feature ideas onto this development team but honestly would like to find a way to see some income from my innovating but have not yet found it.
Other interesting players in this scene are
- The benemoth Google Transit which has been exerting heavy market pressure on the local players, many of which have given up and Google Transit has taken their turf.
- https://www.rome2rio.com is a new kid on the scene, a global multi-modal route finder with advantage over Google Transit is that it finds prices, quite accurately in fact. Rome2Rio is apparently also backed up by big money, which they must be if they are going to beat Google at the game.
Consumium / Consumerium consumer empowerment effort
From the commercial view point the goal of Consumerium effort is to enable consumers to take up new buying criteria beyond fundamental factors of price, availability and suitability and superficial factors like advertisement and product packaging for making their buying decisions… [more from the commercial point of view]
I would say that Consumium is a plan for a social media game where each player can set her/his own goals and tactics. Everyone can choose their prerogative freely. The system (as it is planned) takes care not to force roles on anyone.
Personally I plan to play idealist so my game-plan is therefore to make all parties, the consumers, the workers and the owners better off.
Free road safety innovation
Brake lights that start to strobe if the driver really steps on the breaks
Future innovation: Internet service
I have a future innovation to provide as a service a better UI for a certain segment of all Internet users.
For this innovation I am seeking developer(s) with strong front-end skills and a party with adequate financing.
Labor intensity of the innovation is extremely low, fully automated system, and capital requirements are low, yet, the service once introduced to market will leave it’s users wondering how they managed without the service.
Build up customer awareness of service by marketing independently and likely co-branding with convergent more established businesses.
Co-founder revenue model: Base revenue model likely freemium and value development cooperation deals and possible mergers with sights on a synergetic exit to player with much larger scale market presence who desires our product into their portfolio making the exit a win-win.
Interested? Contact info here or just fill in the form below and hit submit