What’s your idea?

Our idea uses innovative online mapping tools to allow people who wish to make a certain journey but can’t to meet people who make the same journey and have extra space. The exchange can be free or there may be a reward for the person driving their vehicle.

Our aim is to provide an easy and effective service that allows these people to find each other based on departure and destination points, distance range, availability and other factors. Furthermore, when possible, our idea is to use geolocalisation technology to assist these people during their sharing time.

What is the social need or challenge your idea could address?

The idea offers a solution to the social challenge of meeting people making the same journey, empowers people to solve this problem and travel cheaply using online technology in a user friendly way. It addresses the need for a cheap method of transport for journeys not well served (time and journey ineffective) by public transport and earn rewards for sharing their own mean of transport. It also helps with environmental issues by reducing carbon footprint (less cars travelling empty and less traffic).

What’s really new about your idea?

Car sharing is a fairly new idea “per se” plus we intend to use specific technology that would automate the service so that we can offer much more than other providers do. Also we have in mind to heavily integrate our service with social networking websites such as Twitter and Facebook.

What inspired you to come up with the idea in the first place?

The idea of car sharing has always been in our mind. The idea was inspired by the simple problem that on a daily basis people need to get from one place to another cheaply and easily. There are people who use a car to make a certain journey everyday with several empty seats and other people who wish to make the journey but have no way of doing it.

We also realised that there was a social issue in that these two groups had no easy way of meeting each other. It was when we started to understand that technologies like API’s for mapping and web based social tools can now allow such a service to work in an efficient way that we decided to pursue the project. We also recognised how it could help with the recent problems with Global warming, the Global financial crisis and the rise of fuel prices.

From 1-5, what stage of development would you say your idea was in?

The idea is fairly well developed, probably a 4. My collegue and I attended Yahoo! Hack Day in London which encourages people to experiment with Yahoo’s open API’s including Yahoo! Maps and FireEagle. We made good progress in developing the concept with two other web developers but we were unable to bring it to a stage near to completion.

What can we do for you?

From your list funder would be ranked first, mentor second and geek third. The idea is fairly well thought out and we have the skills between us to make progress on the project. We would be very pleased to take the project forward and plan to work on it prior to the event, though input from others would be welcomed.

This idea was submitted by Paul Elliot and Martin Sarsini.

Paul and Martin both work for NSDesign Ltd, a web design and hosting company based in Glasgow. Martin is a developer and Paul is a designer.