Information Madness

Just the other day I was talking to my friend who lives in USA about the transportation system and let me tell you that Indian transportation system is far better than what other coutries have currently. It's just that it is not organized properly and the information is not available to public. Say for e.g. bmtc route information system might not have bangalore bus route list. You have to digg deeper to find out which bus you need to take to go from one place to another place.

Today I got an email from Venkata Rao Chimata, the founder of an Indian travel search engine company. He is an MTech from IIT Kanpur. I would not call his company an Indian search engine but call it a route finder for India. The site is called NearHop.com. Sometimes we should not go by the looks but by the value.

NearHop.com is not that great looking site (may be they will work on it later). Its not an eye candy site but provides loads of features that can make our life easier by providing city bus routes information on the fingertips. I am from Ahmedabad and I know how hard it is to find out which bus I should take if I want to go from location A to location B. I have to ask friends/relatives or go to AMTS information desk.

NearHop.com provides local city bus route search for Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Bilaspur, Chennai, Coimbatore, Delhi, Hyderabad, Indore, Jabalpur, Kolkata, Lucknow, Mumbai, Udaipur & Visakhapatnam. When you select a city, it gives you a "Google Suggest" like box where you can type your origin and destination and it will tell you train routes and bus routes information with timings and frequency. It also gives you a google map where you can see the origin and destination.

Indian City routes search application is also made available for download for mobile users. You can download the application for free. Once you have the mobile application, you can search for your city bus routes from within your mobile and you DON'T need GPRS connection for it.

I would like to suggest few things to NearHop though. I like the idea of displaying route information on the Google Map but why not provide Map Controls to the users? Also I noticed that Ahmedabad bus route map doesn't plot the polyline properly. The Google Suggest like input box is great but the data is not formatted properly and its hard to read place names such as "bapunagarstation" instead of "Bapu Nagar Station" or "andheristation" vs. "Andheri Station".

NearHop can focus on the city transportation niche and if they design their database flexible enough, there are chances that Google Transit can buy this company. I would suggest Venkat to do some research on Google Transit and try to accomodate those features NearHop's database. Who knows what future holds.

Keep up the good work Venkat. Wish you all the best. Check out Mumbai Metro Google Map and let me know if I can be of any help with the lat long information.