iPerson.mobi: Instant Phone-Enabled Ride Sharing On Demand

Your idea's name

Instant Phone-Enabled Ride Sharing On Demand

Please select a category that best describes your idea

Environment: How can we help promote a cleaner and more sustainable global ecosystem?

What one sentence best describes your idea?

Imagine Couchsurfing meets Ridesharing, but instant:location-aware mobile phones connect riders & drivers going the same way to share rides real-time.

11. Describe your idea in more depth.

There are always people driving where other people would like to go. If those drivers could happily be matched up with those riders real-time and instantly, the world would save billions of car-miles a year, billions of gallons of fuel, billions of dollars, untold tons of CO2. The world would be a cleaner, happier, more social, less-trafficky place.

Why don't we do it? In the end, lack of information, really.

If you were driving to the market and your friend who lives along the way needed to go there, you'd happily give him a ride. However, if that friend were a stranger instead, and more so, you didn't know he wanted to go to the market, you wouldn't be giving him a ride.

The problem is lack of information. Couchsurfing.com proves clearly that strangers are happy to help each other out - even let them sleep in their houses - we just want some way to first check each other out a bit.

Your mobile phone knows where you are. Imagine you told it where you want to go and a back-end ride sharing system checked all drivers driving in your area to find which ones were statistically most likely to be passing you and going your way. You and those drivers would get pinged with each others' profiles, you could call each other, the driver could pick you up, and you'd share the ride.

The system would note the distance you traveled together and transfer some gas money to the driver to help him cover his costs - and it would be quite safe as the system would always know exactly who traveled with whom, when.

You got a ride, the driver got some gas money, a connection was made, gas was saved, traffic was reduced, our environment got a bit cleaner.

What problem or issue does your idea address?

The world's car "population" is growing quickly, and traffic and pollution is getting worse, particularly in rapidly-developing countries. Our environment is under huge stress and we are decades from having a world of clean cars.

Our world's human population is growing and we all need to get around - going to work, going to market, getting through life. For lots of people - people with and without cars - getting around is expensive and difficult, but absolutely essential to survival.

Currently, we have lots of cars driving around almost empty, wasting fuel and drivers' money, while lots of other people without cars going the very same way are spending lots of time, money, and effort themselves.

This is a huge inefficiency caused by nothing more than a lack of information shared, and a lack of trust. With the world's 4 billion location-aware mobile phones, we can end this inefficiency and solve these problems.

If your idea were to become a reality, who would benefit the most and how?

If Instant Phone-Enabled Ride Sharing On Demand (iPerson.mobi) became a reality, almost every single person on earth would benefit!

Anyone with a car who wanted to save gas money by sharing rides would benefit.

Anyone who needed to get somewhere quickly and easily without their own car would benefit.

And since iPerson.mobi would reduce car-miles, and the number of cars on the road, and thus traffic, fuel consumption and pollution, everyone who breathes the air, or doesn't want our polar ice caps to melt, or would like less traffic, or wants a cleaner planet for future generations would benefit.

Plus all the other living creatures on our planet would benefit from us humans living a bit cleaner...

What are the initial steps required to get this idea off the ground?

To launch the Instant Phone Enabled Ride Sharing On Demand system (iPerson.mobi), we would have to:

- develop the on-phone apps
- develop the back-end ride-sharing system that would:
-- register the location and destination of the riders
-- register the location and movements of the drivers (probably identifiable as drivers by their location and speed at which they are moving)
-- statistically predict which drivers were most likely to be passing the relevant rider and then pass his destination
-- match riders and drivers and their profiles
-- note them meeting up, track their travel together and transfer the gas money
- develop the appropriate financial transactions partnership to power the gas money transfer process
- secure relationships with the various carriers to get necessary data access
- establish a privacy regime to ensure an acceptable level of privacy for users
- develop a marketing and public relations/education campaign to rapidly build to critical mass in selected first-market countries

Describe the optimal outcome should your idea be selected and successfully implemented. How would you measure it?

The optimal outcome would be a wide adoption of the iPerson.mobi system with millions of rides being shared on a daily basis.

The system should be self-sustaining, and even profit-generating via a revenue stream coming from a small percentage of each gas money exchange transaction being charged by iPerson.mobi.

Measurement would be a simple matter of noting the number of rides shared and the number of miles traveled by multiple parties in one vehicle. Based on this information and the location of these trips, the environmental, societal, and economic impact of the venture could be clearly assessed.

Additionally, the activity in social network of profiles, feedback, recommendations, etc. would provide an additional treasure trove of information to assess and analyze the human impact of the project.

If you'd like to recommend a specific organization, or the ideal type of organization, to execute your plan, please do so here.

I would recommend Google for the technology infrastructure and international telco partnerships, PayPal for the electronic financial infrastructure, EFF for the privacy regime, and of course, Abraham Harrison, LLC for the management and the public relations efforts :-)