Mobility Innovators

Complete transcript:

Jaspal Singh [00:10]:

Hello, everyone. I’m so happy to welcome all listeners from around the world to the mobility innovators podcast. I’m your host, Jaspal Singh. Mobility Innovator Podcasts invite key innovators in the mobility and logistics space to share their thought about the key changes in the sector about their work and what is their forecast for the future.

Today, I’ll be talking about two of my favorite topics, technology, and informal Transport. Our today guest is a real hustler. He’s the CEO and co-founder of Where Is My Transport. The technology company is building a large source of mobility and location data for emerging markets producing and maintaining public task network information from every mode of passport, whether it’s formal or informal, as well as the adjacent data like the point of interest.

Jaspal Singh [01:05]:

He has built three ventures and all ventures have been tech-related in high school, in the university and now with Where Is My Transport. He faced a lot of challenges but has continued his entrepreneurial journey and got big success. He co-founded his venture as a boot-strapped business in South Africa, between 2008 and 2014. At which point, he realized that his vision is global. Where Is My Transport was reincorporated as a venture capital back business in the UK in 2015. And since then, has raised more than $28 million from some notable investors.

I’m so happy to welcome Devin de Vries, CEO and co-founder of Where Is My Transport. Before starting this episode, I would like to share a couple of general definitions with the audience.

Informal Transport – informal transport is the transportation services offered by an individual in a low transport governance environment, using various types of vehicles. Many developing cities around the world, depend on informal public transport systems to meet transportation demand. Some examples are Boda Boda in Africa, Jeepneys in the Philippines, etc.

Big Data – big data refers to an extremely large dataset, which one able to be acquired, stored, and interpreted through modern technology. The big data process involves data acquisition, processing, and aggregation.

 

And I had a long conversation with Devon given his experience and knowledge in the sector. So we decided to break this episode into two parts. The first episode will be published this week. So keep track of the next episode. It’s now time to listen and learn.

Jaspal Singh [02:43]:

Hello Devin, thank you so much for joining us on this show. I’m really looking forward to our conversation today.

Devin de Vries [02:50]:

Thanks for having me just felt it’s good to be here.

Jaspal Singh [02:52]:

Great. Today. I’ll be spending time getting to know more about you, about Where Is My Transport, your journey as an entrepreneur and your thoughts on the application of technology in mobility.

And to begin with, I would like to ask you to share a little bit more about yourself and also, are there any interesting fact about your career that you haven’t put on LinkedIn?

Devin de Vries [03:13]:

I should hope there’s a number of more interesting aspects to myself that are not on the internet. But yeah, I guess, growing up, you know, I was an avid sportsman, but that was never something that went in the direction of going pro, but it did deeply entrench sort of discipline within the way that I work, the way that I approach life. And so, being an avid sportsman growing up is definitely a part of what has shaped me as a person. I also have a deep love of the act of building with purpose and the rate of learning that that building requires. And so really for, for me, Where Is My Transport is a manifestation of that love of building with purpose.

Devin de Vries [04:06]:

I’ve mentioned to you before, this is my third endeavor in life, but it’s my first venture back journey. And, yeah, the first one that’s truly also gone to scale. So, completely different set of lessons and experiences. I’m also an engineer at heart. I don’t get to work on the tech directly nowadays, but growing up technology, coding, computers for me were like Lego blocks are for many kids. And so that was something that was in the household and in my space of play, you could say and so at the end of the day, no matter what it is that I’m engaging in building technology is absolutely going to be at the core of it. And, I guess in terms of spending your time as a precious thing for all of us and, I really just want to be doing things that matter. And for me, things that matter, sit at the intersection of working as a team, integrating technology and rooted in emerging markets, and aiding humans within emerging markets. So I think that’s sort of the three-way intersection of also things that invoke and ignite that passion for me.

Jaspal Singh [05:29]:

Great. It’s amazing to see you found your purpose so early in your life because a lot of people struggle with finding the real purpose. So it’s, it’s great to see that you found it and you’re putting your heart. And so, my next question is about you and your entrepreneurial journey. You already mentioned about you build three ventures. So it show that you are like a persistent guy who want to push thing hard till you complete it.

So you earned your degree in bachelor in business science and with major in information system. And you were the team leader of a team, which was in final round of Microsoft, Imagine world cup, rural innovation accelerator award, and software development award, which showed that you were always in technology, and you launch one of your earliest consumer-facing product called FindMyWay in 2012 and launch, WhereIsMyTransport, which is today, is in 2015. So I’m curious to know more about your journey from FindMyWay to WhereIsMyTransport and which user and problem do, WhereIsMyTransport solves?

Devin de Vries [06:39]:

I mean, the journey for WhereIsMyTransport has been a long one, as you mentioned. It started under the apices of a university thesis project, then went on to be a bootstrapped business. Yeah. Uh, for the first several years. And at some point, uh, we made the transition into this is something we wish to scale up. And for that we took on venture capital and that’s the journey most people read about sort of 2015 onwards, but, you know, all, if I track all the way back to the beginning, perhaps not as articulately put out there into the world, but the purpose has been the same all along, which is to empower people everywhere, to get where they need to go. I think the purpose statement, the early stages used to say empower people everywhere to get where they want to go.

Devin de Vries [07:28]:

And we’ve just changed that want to need as a way of sort of underscoring that this is core to people’s everyday life. And it’s not a matter of a choice of mobility for them. It’s, this is the mobility that they rely on public transportation and that desire to enable a better quality of life for human beings that are reliant on public transport, across emerging markets. Yeah. Has always been the thing that has sort of underpinned, the purpose behind, uh, WhereIsMyTransport and the group of people that it’s brought together. And, you know, for people outside, I guess, they’ll look at this journey and, they’ll observe sort of the different paths that we’ve taken, the different products that we’ve put out over the years. But ultimately I think it’s, it’s helpful to remember that all of this has been underpinned by a single purpose that has been unwavering, both for myself and for the business.

Devin de Vries [08:33]:

And yeah, that journey has taken us. You mentioned FindMyWay as an app to actually proceeding find my way. There was, I was going to say SSD, but it was actually SMS. It was, there was an SMS based version of app, a journey planner. but ultimately, we began with an app with the intention of helping people that are public transport users, commuters. We then moved on to building out a platform or an API, that provided information and services in the public transport space. And that did everything from providing passenger information systems through to running the signage of the stations and stops through to operating the call centers where transit information was served up and managed to these central data stores that governments and cities and operators and agencies would utilize to house all that transport data and manage it.

Devin de Vries [09:31]:

And, then we got to a point where in order to that platform, we actually needed to obviously put data into it. And what we were quickly finding was that was actually the inhibitor of being able to scale market. you can build all this fantastic technology, but if there’s no good data to put into it, then there’s really nothing for you to put out that is of greater in increased value. And so data actually became the key challenge that we needed to solve. And that started off, you know, top of Africa you’d know our story there, we spread throughout Africa and ultimately moved into Southeastern Europe, Latin America, Southeast Asia and South Asia, and ultimately achieving global scale. And actually very soon we’ll be crossing the 50 city milestone for the business, which is quite remarkable mapping 50 cities around the world.

Devin de Vries [10:29]:

So, yeah. And then as you may have read about, we finally circle all the way back to directly engaging the users again, through a consumer facing app that we put out in the middle of the pandemic in late 2020. And that has been our effort to bring together all of the various data offerings, the platform technology in order to drive an improved human experience on public transportation and in emerging market cities, and one where we’re not accountable to building what we have done at a scale of many multiples millions of users for different markets. Where we put out these white labeled apps for cities and governments and agencies, but you could say they were held the pen in terms of adapting the designs and how the products would ultimately manifest. And that often led to less than the best decisions being made in that product space. So it’s wonderful to now be in a space where we are putting out a product, but nobody but us are the people holding the pen for yeah the features and how the product is crafted and how it drives the user experience. So I do feel like we’ve come somewhat full circle from trying to aid the user directly to working with operators, governments, and cities, to focusing on the data and the platform scale. And then coming back to the users again.

Jaspal Singh [12:03]:

Oh, that’s, that’s like life, it’s always full circle. You come back to where you start. I really like your mission, what you mentioned about offering people so that they can go where they need to go. Because a lot of time in city, we forget a lot of these people don’t have choice, except the public transit. So they have no other choice, but to use public transport and, and you are actually helping those people to make the journey more comfortable and, uh, providing the real information. I love, what you’re doing, in fact, that’s my next question is about, how you move from Africa to global world, because it’s a great  feat, not many company has able to achieve. The Google map launch in 2005. And WhereIsMyTransport begin in South Africa in 2008.

Jaspal Singh [12:53]:

I would say you are one of the world’s earliest player in mobility technology. Like you mentioned SMS based journey planner. I never even heard about that. So, that’s great. and also you build a mobility company in a space, which is not very investor friendly because it’s hard to sell this idea to investors. You still managed to do it. So I would love to know more about that. Currently you provide data for Africa, Latin America, Southeastern Europe, South and Southeast Asia.

What were the learning you take away from building a bootstrapped business that begin its journey in Africa, because it’s not easy?

And what did you discover about people’s mobility behavior in these countries? Now you’re working in so many different countries, anything which surprise you about people’s behavior in these countries?

Devin de Vries [13:44]:

Yeah, there’s a, there’s a few questions there. I mean, I’ll start just briefly reflecting on the bootstrapping. At the end of the day, bootstrapping is a tremendous discipline and something every founder, every founding team should experience. It truly forces you to narrow your focus to truly question and battle test. What you believe is the place to put your sort of minimum viable effort to realize something that allows you to know you’re taking the right path. At the end of the day, too much capital too soon can be detrimental. There was an investor that used to liken it that venture capital is a little bit like jet fuel, but the thing is you only want to put jet fuel into a jet. You don’t want to put jet fuel into a motor car, otherwise it’s more likely to combust rather than to drive.

Devin de Vries [14:46]:

So, yeah, at the, at the end of the day, bootstrapping definitely taught me a different set of disciplines about what it means to run a business. What it means to be scrappy and What it means to do a lot with very little. And I’m very grateful for that, for that very close knit period of boot strapping, where ultimately we were all together in what you could call, it was a garage. It started off as a tool shed and then expanded into a single garage and the double garage. And so that little area was our team. And we boots strapped until 18 people. And it was that at that moment where we had in a second or third city contract, and we are like, okay, this is something that we wish to scale now globally.

Devin de Vries [15:40]:

And, the point at which we, we went out to raise capital truly for the first time. But capital also has its place, right? It lets you move faster. It lets you invest in things you would otherwise not be able to invest in. and as I mentioned, just a moment ago, you know, we are closing in on 50 cities and we’ve learned an incredible amount being able to understand mobility, the different modality, the different styles, the different human expectations. And, and this is something that actually links back to the culture of the team. You know, with diversity also comes differing expectations and as the, the same exists for people that are users of public transportation and different parts of the world. Maybe just, you know, thinking of a, the second part of your question.

Devin de Vries [16:36]:

Some of the observations that I’ve had that have struck me or stayed with me, in particular reflecting on the differences between developed markets and emerging markets. I, and, you know, as we like to refer to the majority world, which is a helpful way of reminding people, it’s actually the majority of us still live within these circumstances and this reality that we’re refer to as emerging market reality. Within these places, transportation options abound, there’s actually more transportation options from a public transport standpoint, than in a traditional developed market city. It’s a lot more, you could say the networks are much denser. They are formed quite well to match human disbursement and shaped themselves to human demand. But the thing that’s actually solely lacking are information services.

Devin de Vries [17:47]:

I’ve often used the term, these markets are asset rich, but information poor. And yeah, I would adapt, that’s likely say they’re option rich, but information poor. And so what information really has the power to do is to bridge that gap for people to understand what the options are. Because the mistake that we make is that when I’m traveling across the city, when something goes wrong, that I know what all my options are around me. You and I both know from spending extensive time traveling in and working in emerging markets, that’s just not true. So this is where information really stands to empower the individual. The other point, I think critical observation is that plan B is a question that lives in people’s minds within emerging markets that is perhaps fundamentally different from the reason a person uses to mobility up in a developed market.

Devin de Vries [18:52]:

So in a developed market environment, I expect that when I go down to the station, if the bus says it’s going to arrive in two or three minutes. It’s going to arrive in two or three minutes, and you could say my flexibility, or my level of patience is counted in seconds and minutes not in multiples of minutes to quarter hours to half hours. But within the emerging market context, the individual just would love to have just a bit of information about – Is the vehicle coming? Is it coming within a half an hour timeframe or 15 minute timeframe? and if the vehicle’s not coming, what might my options be? Because the reality is more than 50% of the time, your Plan A doesn’t go to as per plan and you have to revert to a Plan B and that’s a fundamental difference within these markets.

Devin de Vries [19:50]:

And so once again, you know, it doesn’t mean putting more buses or more trains or more minibuses onto the streets. It just means like, how do you make the information of this very transport, rich environment available? So people actually understand how they can alter their journey to have a reliable, alternative plan available to them. And yeah, I think the last thing that’s worth reflecting on is just the time, the average time that the individual spends in transit on a daily basis is significantly longer than what you experienced within a developed work environment. We often within the business, we refer to people in developed markets as their and back again. Commute anything from half an hour to an hour in half an hour to an hour back. And for many of us that are more privileged, we just get to sit by in our cameras like this and work remotely.

Devin de Vries [20:51]:

Yeah. But the reality is a large portion of population that are reliant in public transportation are also reliant on commuting to and from work. And often for them work is a multi-location, it’s a change trip. And so, once again, access to information disproportionately affects that individual because of the sheer number of trips they’re taking. And the total number of hours that they’re spending in transit. but I guess one of the other ways to look at this is that it does mean that this information stands to affect a disproportionately large part of a person’s day. And it is relevant to a disproportionately large part of the commute of the individual’s day within these markets. And so that’s also a tremendous opportunity for private companies, technology companies, and the likes to be able to service that, that human need by leveraging that information.

Jaspal Singh [21:53]:

That’s a great point. You mentioned because in developing country, people need to spend at least two to three hours in the travel and, and sometimes it can even stretch to four. And you can imagine like working for 8 to 10 hours and spending four hours in commute. it’s a big part of their daily life and they don’t have energy. So providing that right information. In fact, you remind me in Delhi at any point of time, you can see at least 15 modes of transports on the street. So there are so many options available from the high-tech buses and the Metro. There are so many modes already exists is just that information, which is lacking. You don’t know when the next bus is coming. And I really love your point about bootstrapping, because I meet a lot of entrepreneurs and they don’t even have a jet or not even a car, and they’re still looking for a jet fuel.

Jaspal Singh [22:40]:

So I love your analogy about like, first, you need to build a jet to get the jet fuel, and I can see that’s why you are able to expand and you’re able build a team across the globe. And actually, this is my follow up question that you’ve built a fully remote business from the beginning, because you were bootstrap. You didn’t spend money on creating a lavish office or putting multiple offices everywhere. You have team members in Europe, Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. How do you manage such a geographically and culturally diverse team? And can you share more about the concept of hyper-localism? I know you, you love this concept about hyper-localism. What is it all about?

Devin de Vries [23:24]:

Yeah, at the end of the day, you know, I believe that diversity is absolutely an advantage. It’s an advantage in society. It’s an advantage for businesses at the end of the day, even, you know, around us, it’s, biodiversity. I think as a species, we are starting to cotton onto the fact that this is really important for how we live and how we evolve and how we also tend to our health. But, taking it back to WhereIsMyTransport, if we are trying to represent the local ground truth, it on market, which we also acknowledge has its idiosyncrasies, and has the things that makes the style and modalities of transportation unique to that place then hyper-localism means that we need to have a deep understanding of every region where we provide data.

Devin de Vries [24:24]:

And, that means that one has to be part of all side business operations and how we run our teams. So we went down to the individuals that are collecting the transport information that we work with in the market – the gig maps collectors. We deliberately look for people that are active public transport users, regular public transport producers. People that are typically grown up in that city and who will even look for people that are geographically dispersed across the city. Because as you know, especially in some of these really large sprawling cities. You could live there your entire life and still have only explored a small subset of the overall city network. And so we really try to capture that hyper local knowledge in the way that we even choose the people that make up our both our gig mapper team, as well as the, the full-time team that then stays on following the mapping task.

Devin de Vries [25:35]:

Similarly that comes into play when you’re managing a global team. We have an incredibly diverse team of people all over the world and with diverse cultures also means that people come with different expectations. While it’s important for us to define sort of what the core values are for us as a business, which sort of creates an anchor point for everyone to agree on in terms of so certain values and ways of working and how to respect one another and be accepting of one another. It also means that we need to have a certain degree of flexibility and patience in how we work together and how we work with one another. And so, I think of the day, you know, we have also been fortunate to have some investors that have been very supportive and even beat that drum of reminding us of the importance of building diversity throughout the business.

Devin de Vries [26:39]:

There are still areas where I would love for us to continue to strengthen that, but in some ways, the pandemic actually accelerated our transition into an even more diverse team. I guess sometimes I just try to remind people in the business when, you can imagine as with all good things, when everyone’s passionate, they’re working together. Yeah. People knock heads. And I just try to remind people that, you know, try and approach with a mindset of best intentions and aiming to understand the other. When you create that space and you approach in that manner, allow room for ideas and, and difference to germinate and come together. This often land you with something stronger than what you would’ve had if you had just kept to your personal views. So, I realize we’ve taken a bit of a right turn there, but I really believe that hyper-localism plays strong role both in how our business is able to produce such exceptional, data quality and data offerings that is just way ahead of everyone else. And you know, that that actually is in a number of ways, bettered in that love of diversity.

Jaspal Singh [28:03]:

That’s great. That’s a DNA of your company, the love of diversity, not just for customer, but also for employee. And I agree with you lot of time, we see people or things from our own lens. We need to sometimes change our lens and look at from other perspectives. And the culture is very diverse across the globe. I see in some country raising questions is a good thing. And in some countries in questioning is a bad thing because they feel like, how can you question me on different things? And in some country, if you don’t question, they feel like you are not able to understand, or you’re not working hard. So it’s very important to have that anchor point. I love your notion about that anchor point.

Jaspal Singh [28:52]:

Recently, WhereIsMyTransport published that paper – Navigating Growth. And I must say it’s tons of knowledge. I’m happy to put it in the show note because people should read it. You talk about a lot of new things, but the thing which catch my attention is the first line of the paper, I’ll read that line.

 

“There are several major lessons from the evolution of both technology and mobility over the past 10 year, and that are likely to have an impact on their collective future, in both develop and emerging market.”

Which is great. It means that what we’ve seen in the last 10 year will have a bigger impact in next 10 year. How do you see the next 10 year will be different from the past and how technology will change the future of mobility in emerging market? Because a lot of time we think, it’s only the developed countries, but I think the technology will have greater impact on the emerging market, which is your main area? And what role will, WhereIsMyTransport will play in this transformation?

Devin de Vries [29:48]:

Well, I’m going to obviously take the more emerging market view on this, given that that is where a lot of our focus has been or say, all of our focus really has been centered over entire life of the business. We have always been motivated by making the invisible – visible, and I genuinely believe as a starting point to your question in the next 10 years, the invisible will be visible in emerging markets. And I mean, isn’t it overdue, right? I long for the day when the top five mapping products that are out there, all of the apps, which I have on my phone, that I can just, as when I fly to the US or I fly to Europe and I fly to Japan, or other places. I can take out the phone and like, I’ve got not just driving directions there, but I’ve actually got all of my transit mobility options available for me.

Devin de Vries [30:48]:

But this is just not true today for any of the mapping products that we use because ultimately, they have been designed largely for people that are trying to find restaurants and bar around us and drive their car. Those have been the primary users of many of those products. And so, I really believe that within the emerging markets, this presents incredible opportunity. We have put out the numbers before, but on the conservative side, we’ve spoken about 2 billion users of public transport. And, recently we tallied up some newer figures that were put out by UN and other organizations, the figure is actually just shy of 3 billion users of public transportation across emerging markets. That’s an incredible opportunity. For any business seeking to grow their user base and to approach these new internet users and high growth markets.

Devin de Vries [31:51]:

So, I really believe the information availability and reliability that is a fundamental step change that is going to happen across these markets over the course of the next decade. I also think that there are a number of technological changes that are set to mirror on the ground situation in emerging markets. So I’m thinking of decentralized tech that is matching the decentralized nature of mobility and the economies in which this mobility operates. And I think that can lead to some powerful incentive models that we have not yet seen, and that we have not yet been able to tap into. I really think that that is an area where we don’t know, we don’t know what it will look like, but I believe that that is an area that’s set to transform.

Devin de Vries [32:49]:

So how business models and incentive models operate within these markets at the end of the day, public transport is here to stay. Hopefully, also something that will grow and I think where technology can really stand to help us to bridge the gap between the supply and the need. As I mentioned, you know, these markets are not transit poor but they are transit rich, they have more optionality because they are also a mixture of state operators transportation and let me call it community operators transportation, and incredibly this is actually profitable. Community operated transportation is a really important point. People forget that all the, the government operated transportation is subsidized. And incredibly in these markets, you have these decentralized demand responsive transportation networks that are privately operated and are profitable.

Devin de Vries [33:54]:

I mean, that is an incredible collection of facts that people conveniently overlook. So technology already stands to bridge that gap and create some incredible efficiencies that doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out that. There are a remarkable number of efficiencies that can be extracted from how that network already operates. Just given those points that I just listed a moment ago. I think, to maybe close our thought on this at the end of the day, what motivates us at WhereIsMyTransport is not going to change. You know, we believe that information has the power to truly transform the experience for users of public transportation and is core to our work. And, that is something that we also need to remember is proven in many of the markets and is no less true within the majority world markets. I already believe that this making the invisible – visible and creating greater accountability and ownership around this information so that the experience of public transport can be less in uncertainty and more dignified for the individual who spends this disproportionate part of their day using it. I really believe is something that will greatly benefit society.

Jaspal Singh [35:29]:

That’s great. I love your point about, making invisible, visible in next 10 year, and you are absolutely right. The decentralized technologies, a lot of other technology, like if I look back 10 years, nobody thought about the use of smartphone, the way we are doing right now. Nobody ever imagined that it will become part of our life so much that you can’t think of anything else beyond your mobile phone or smartphone. You’re doing your banking. You’re ordering your food. You are ordering your clothes, are ordering everything through your smartphone. You are connecting with people with their smartphone. So you never know how the next 10 year will look like. Now I want to talk about the point, you mentioned about, 360-degree view of WhereIsMyTransport. You started as a consumer product, and you now again come back and launch a new consumer product, which is called Rambo app.

Jaspal Singh [36:19]:

I love the name. I would like to know why you coined this app as Rambo app. You launch your Android app, focusing on public transfer information for commuter in 2021, and already have more than half a million users, which is a great feat launching in pandemic and getting so many users at the same time. You’re not doing so much of advertising. So it’s really show that people really love the app. And you’re getting a lot of promotion through word of mouth and already the app is available in Mexico City, Lima and Bangkok, and you’re planning to expand to other cities. Can you share more about the app and how it’ll help user? May I say this is the first step toward launching the mobility as a service application in the future?

Devin de Vries [37:04]:

I will park that last point. but potentially we’ll see where the future takes us. Rumbo, as we see it is a one-of-a-kind consumer app for commuters in emerging markets. And it is powered by WhereIsMyTransport mobility location data and technology. So it really is a sum of all of the various things, we have built and the problems we have solved. It’s a culmination of all of experience and the knowledge that we have garnered from data collection in 50 cities across four continents. At the end of the day, when I look at Rumbo and I try and sort of distill down, I guess what’s sort of core. It is about providing people, a companion that is, uh, with them on their every day and, gives them that sense of security that they’ll never travel alone.

Devin de Vries [38:13]:

Again, that’s sort of at the very human level of what is the purpose behind the product. But if we’re going to look at it from a more feature set basis, Rumba offers, journey planning that is all inclusive of all forms of transportation. We will often refer to formal and informal, but the truth is for the human that lives in an emerging market, there is no such thing as informal transport. We just need to remember that is something we use in a business space, in an academic space, in a speaking with governments and agency space, but for the human being it’s public transport. They don’t really make this distinction between I am using formal and informal. We’ve built Rumbo that provides journey planning across all modes of transportation.

Devin de Vries [39:04]:

It also provides disruption alerts, which are brought together both by contributions from agencies, operators, from WhereIsMyTransport teams on the ground that are in, that are in touch with the various fleet operators and something where we also pull information out of many different sources that range from chat through social media and otherwise. We actually use a combination of human and machine learning to distill all of this data into disruption, information alerts that we can provide to users. What we’ve been able to see is that over a year and a bit of operating, this is a core value proposition within Rumbo. We have seen that, it just has this incredibly high relevance to the individuals, because we can tell that there is exceptionally high engagement actually with our real time information products.

Devin de Vries [40:05]:

And then, the third thing, which I sort of alluded to earlier, which was the person needs their plan B more than they need their Plan A. Rumbo is really great at providing people with alternatives when things go wrong. And, you know, recognizing that the average person’s commute in is typically around about two hours. It can be longer, it can be a bit shorter, but you you’re looking at about a two hour timeframe. You’re traveling very long distances. And so when something goes wrong, you don’t know where you are, you don’t know what you’re options are. At the end of the day that ability to know you’ve always got all the options with you in your pocket, that companion is very comforting to people. And we’ve actually been able to see that in a lot of the app reviews that have come through, we have also baked into the product, a number of other more unique aspects that make it a bit different from your typical journey plan that you might see.

Devin de Vries [41:03]:

So using street imagery, using vehicle imagery, showing the head signs that you get at the front of the vehicles allowing users to contribute, where route are missing, where we can observe that they’re traveling. And perhaps the full route that they’re traveling is not within the data set. So, at the end of the day, there is a far greater desire to participate in community and to share with one another. And so we have also tried to capture that within the application experience in order to give people that freedom to engage. And in some ways, therefore also democratize the ownership of the data, and allow citizens to participate and aid in keeping the information up to date and accurate to the ground truth.

Jaspal Singh [42:01]:

That’s great point, which you mentioned about, be a companion in the journey. Because a lot of time there are journey planner, which give you option – How to go point a to point B, but there are not many app which tell you if something goes wrong, what to do. And especially when you don’t know what is going wrong in the other end of the service or middle of the service, how will you find out? So, it’s a great point, which you mentioned that helping people, not only to have their Plan A, but also make them ready for their Plan B, uh, because when you have to commute for two R you do don’t know, and in a new city, and sometime if you are traveling every day, these people have no other options. They can’t just hire a Uber to go from Point A to Point B.

Jaspal Singh [42:43]:

They need some cheaper mode. they don’t want to spend their whole day earning just to transport themselves from Point A to Point B. So for providing those disruptions and these notices, and that’s why I can see you have one of the highest rating for a newly launched app, because generally people get a negative review, but you thought through and you work very hard. So people really love the app. And I read some of the review. So I do these kind of investigations. I saw how people are asking you to add more features and giving more information, and then provide more information, which is good. Getting feedback from the user. And, when people ask you to do something so great congratulations on that.

Jaspal Singh [43:32]:

You mentioned one important point earlier, which is that more than 2 billion people are using public Transport in emerging market. In fact, you mentioned now it’s 3 billion. So, you added 50% more users, which is true because a lot of these people are dependent on public transport in emerging market and sometimes ignore them. But the other key thing, which we always ignore is that most of these users are female travelers. In fact, in develop market, it’s around 60% of the users are women. And, and I would be curious to know if you have any gender-related data on emerging market. But my main point, I want to ask you is that WhereIsMyTransport is working with TUMI to decode women mobility experience across three African city, which is amazing. I’m looking forward, what will the outcome of that? I would love to know more about this project, what you’re doing with TUMI, and are you planning to expand it to other cities? What is your long-term vision for Women in Mobility?

Devin de Vries [44:28]:

Sure. Actually, this is an incredible initiative that has been driven by a very strong research team that we have within the business. That team is also looking for what, how else might they stretch the business’s frontier to have impact? And this is a, this is a perfect example of, of a way in which the business through its data, through its capability can have impact. At the end of the day, WhereIsMyTransport’s primary focus has been on infrastructure. So public transport networks, the informal economy and data related to that space. So, we haven’t actually produced gender related from those that are using and operating these services before. However, as I mentioned, because we have this incredibly talented function internally, that is also very motivated to do work in this women’s advocacy space, specifically transportation.

Devin de Vries [45:32]:

We were fortunate to be able to get this project with TUMI and work with them on collecting data on the women’s experience within public transport and the cities. The cities that we’re doing this work on Nairobi in the region, which is more selection of three major cities and three pretty large cities in that region. So sort of six cities and then Lagos in Nigeria. The study has adopted a user centric and ethnographic research approach in data production. The sort of way that we have gone about extracting these deep insights on the motivations of women using public transport is a combination of surveys and workshops and ride along. And the team has also been very careful to not just type one type of women but try to really get a diverse sort of set of experiences.

Devin de Vries [46:40]:

We’ve got about 200 participants in each city that we are interviewing. So, I think in total, there’ll be about 600 participants that’ll be interviewed as part of the research study and they’ll range from students, merchants or informal trainers, to working professionals and mothers. That is obviously not the full band, but just to give you a sense of sort of the diversity within the set of participants. And yeah, I know that the team is also looking to scale this to other cities, both in Africa and globally. Hopefully we can be part of helping them create the first database of its kind on women’s usage and behavioral patterns in public transport. So, yeah, it’s an exciting piece of work, and it’s really great that our team is getting ready to get this out of the blocks and onto the track as something meaningful.

Jaspal Singh [47:41]:

That’s great. You likely mentioned, it’s important to have that diverse audience because the travel pattern for woman is very different and they need to do many more trips than us. They need to complete their mother duty. They need to complete their homemaker duty. They have to sometime work in the offices. So, they have to complete their professional duties. So they have to take three or four journey in a day to complete all those trips

Devin de Vries [48:11]:

Add into this, to the male counterparts, right? The sheer number of change trips that women have to do versus men is just night and day. Yeah. So the exposure period is also much greater.

Jaspal Singh [48:23]:

No, I am looking forward, what will be the outcome of that study and see what the key learning are which other cities can adopt and how it’ll be expanded.

Now, let’s talk about the latest tech buzz words, which you mentioned about decentralized technology. So Web3, Blockchain and NFT. How do you envision these technologies can use in mobility services? I mean, there are a lot of use cases we talk about in developed market and in the formal public transport network, but how do you see these technologies can be used for these informal setting of transport in emerging market? In your paper, you mentioned about some potential cases, and I read about that.

One was, secure offline ticket payment, which I’m curious to know how to do that. And then you mentioned about NFT transit passes in MaaS deployments, royalties for user-generated content etc., which you mentioned democratizing the data like users should own the data. And in fact, we did a podcast on this topic, blockchain in mobility. And, but I would be very curious to learn your perspective on this and What are WhereIsMyTransport’s future projects around these technologies, if you want to give a brief glimpse about, about that.

Devin de Vries [49:36]:

So yeah, the blockchain space is, as I think I mentioned in my part of the papers, unfortunately everyone sorts of notices the, can I call it the red flag? Over here distracting us all, which is the crypto hype and the tokens and all the rest. But if you’re able to just step back from all of that and look at what the underlying technology can enable, it’s a little bit like, when we had the advent of the internet and people didn’t really understand all its applications. I mean, there’s some remarkable interviews. So if you go back to the 90s and look up sort of CNBC interviews and people trying to discuss what the a sign does. And it’s remarkable you fast forward to today, and you’ve got, a two-year-old understands what that is. I feel the same way about the space of blockchain and Web3. There’s a lot of hype, there will be a lot of stuff that will just be flavor of the month, flavor of the year and it will drain away with time. But out of this noise, out of all these activities are also going to be many new changes that will underpin big macro shifts that we will see in, in many different sectors and transportation is no different. I think I mentioned, ticketing as one of those areas. I’ve seen work that’s been done in the space where startups are looking at, how do you provide ticketing regardless of the phone type that an individual is using.

Devin de Vries [51:22]:

And, you know, we’ve all gotten very used to the use of QR codes, thanks to pandemic. Because we don’t want to hold slips of paper. And so everyone is using QR codes. So actually in a crazy scenario, QR codes are not new, but their adoption has suddenly seen sort of this parabolic uptake and people are a lot more accustomed to it. And in the same manner, QR codes can also be used to represent a wallet. And so people can have a wallet distributed to them and that wallet can hold a pass. That can be both in the form of money that can be spent on the transportation ticket, or it could be, as you’ve mentioned, some kind of an NFT that is more representative of a week pass or a month pass. It can also have much deeper data connected to that connects to identity, which says that you’re a pensioner or you’re a student, or you’re a healthcare worker.

Devin de Vries [52:21]:

And so that can provide you certain kinds of access. That today is very hard for governments to distribute. I mean we just look at the sort of these, if I can call it social grants that the government put out, and the UK in its own way did as well. And the incredible amount of wastage that occurred. Yes, a lot of people were helped. There was also a massive amount that just sort of drained away all that was abused. And, you can actually avoid a lot of that through the application of this technology while still not taking away the good parts, which is that you do want to provide social support to certain people within society and leveraging this technology will make that a lot more possible. So, you know, I’ve touched on the fact that a wallet can be as simple as a sticker on the back of a feature phone.

Devin de Vries [53:13]:

Yeah. And you can use that to interact with the reader and the terminal. And so you don’t need to be online for that to happen. Just the reader needs to be, and even there, the reader could actually batch the transactions for when it goes back to the hub. Similarly, we’ve touched on how NFTs can be used to have different things. That can govern what a ticket, what a pass allows you access to. And we speak about, I’m not going to go into the differences between Web1, Web2 and Web3now, but, we’ve come from a world where in the Web2 world, these centralized platforms own all of the data that we contribute to them where you’re talking about Facebook or Google or Twitter, whatever it is, all of that content that we are putting out is no longer our content.

Devin de Vries [54:05]:

Once we put it out, it is the property of platform X. And as we move into this Web3 world and I mean, we shouldn’t get ourselves. The existing Web2 incumbents are not going to give up that hold easily. And if anything, they will likely ultimately adopt these, Web3 frameworks. But, you know, as in the book, The Innovators Dilemma, they’re not going to be the first movers in the space. They will, once they see a working model, they will leverage their existing distribution to be able to make that model, available at scale and, and likely pass any of the new paid entrance. At the end of the day, if there were a way for users to be not just incentivized, but given something meaningful back for their contributions, whether it is contributions of Point of Interests and landmarks or, contributions of updating the transit information that is not owned by any one central authority that is sort of in many ways, operated by the community and people can be remunerated in some meaningful manner, not necessarily in monetarily, but some something that is fungible and meaningful. That is at, within the essence of this Web3 world where you have some degree of ownership, but you are also able to reap the rewards of your contributions.

Devin de Vries [55:39]:

And I believe that when we look at the solutions that are going to hopefully solve the future, that we are move into within emerging markets, to the point that we spoke about earlier with there will be a lot of room for efficiencies and optimizations within the business models. I fundamentally believe that this technology will allow the flow of value to occur in ways where we couldn’t create sort of multi-part key alignment and trust between all these stakeholders. But leveraging this underlying blockchain technology, we will be able to align these actors within future business models. At the end of the day, it takes time for complexity to be abstracted away from users. We just have to think back to the, the early experience of using the internet compared to today’s like ready, click go.

Devin de Vries [56:38]:

And similarly, within the blockchain space, I’ve been fortunate to be an acquired participant for a good 7-8 years now. And being able to see the incredible rate of change that’s occurred and how difficult it used to be to interact with certain aspects of the technology versus just how simplified it is today. I mean, it’s not entirely simplified this to a lot more work that will go into creating regulatory frameworks and protections and just layers of abstraction so that the user again is ready, click go. It’s much easier for them to interact with without necessarily even realizing they’re interacting with a blockchain based technology. So, yeah, I think and to your last point is what is WhereIsMyTransport doing in this space? I think at the moment it’s more a matter of observing, we’re a business focused on the data and when it comes to future technological innovations, we’re a technology company are obviously constantly testing and looking for opportunity. So all, I guess I can say to this is watch, watch the space.

Jaspal Singh [57:56]:

Yeah. or I would say there’ll be a lot of invisible, which will be visible in next five years. So we will see a lot of these things which are not obvious right now. A lot of people have skepticism about the whole thing we’ll go away and we’ll see the underlying technology, how decentralized can help, and probably we’ll have a Rumbo app with the blockchain technology, helping user to crowdsource the data and get some benefit out of it.

Devin de Vries [58:23]:

That would be a fantastic application. Yeah. Look forward to that.

Jaspal Singh [58:26]:

Thank you for listening to this episode, we will be inviting some other inspiring guest in the coming week. You can subscribe to this podcast online to get the notification for the next episode. If you like this podcast, please don’t forget to give us a five star rating as it’ll help us to spread our message. If you have any feedback or suggestion for this podcast, please do right to us at info mobility. Hi, fun, innovative.com. I look forward to see you next time.