Exclusive Sneak Peek: Ma2too3a! Pivots Towards Crowdsourced Traffic Updates
Last June, during Lebanon’s latest electricity
crisis, AUB-trained computer engineer and software developer
Mohammed Taha received a frantic call from his wife. She had been
driving with their small child through a neighborhood in Beirut,
when protestors, furious at recent electricity cuts, fired shots
across the windshield of their car. Sobered by his family’s brush
with tragedy, and wishing there was some way they could have
received immediate updates about the danger, Taha created one.
Ma2too3a! is a mobile app for Android and iPhone that crowdsources
information about roadblocks, demonstrations, traffic accidents,
and anything that might pose danger or inconvenience on the streets
and highways of Lebanon and, soon, the Arab world.
Users can directly report disturbances within the app, which are
then verified by the Ma2too3a! staff and posted on its mobile and
website map. This skeptic’s questions about the accuracy of
crowd-sourced information were answered when several (albeit rather
outlandish) fake disturbances I reported failed to appear on my
phone’s Ma2too3a! display.
Given Lebanon’s notoriety for colorful street-level political
demonstrations including roadblocks, checkpoints, and tire burning,
the app has predictably enjoyed instant and widespread popularity.
Although Ma2too3a!’s parent company LaRoche hasn’t marketed the
app, Taha notes that his media appearances on outlets like
Lebanon’s LBC and Al-Jazeera pushed the downloads from around 200
per day after its launch on August 1st last year to up
to 1,600 on peak days.
The October 19th assassination of Lebanese Intelligence
Chief Wissam al-Hassan in the Achrafiyeh district of Beirut was
also a critical moment for the app. In the immediate aftermath of
the car bomb, the Ma2too3a! team saw daily downloads double and
then triple as people became obsessed with checking local updates
before making any trips in the city.
As of today, at least 67,000 users have downloaded the app – that’s
one out of every nine smartphone users in the country, according to
data communicated to Taha by Lebanon’s Ministry of
Telecommunications.
This December, the app also won international recognition, claiming
First Runner Up in the US State Department’s 2012
Global Innovation in Science and Technology (GIST Tech-I)
contest, which won the team US $15,000 a three-month
internship in Silicon Valley.
Pivoting
Now, to expand beyond the Lebanese market, Ma2too3a! is adjusting
their vision to focus exclusively on news and traffic updates. The
model for a crowdsourced traffic app has already been proven in the
U.S. by a company named Waze, which Apple
may be looking to buy. While Waze has established itself in the
U.S. by offering turn-by-turn navigation and real-time social
updates, Ma2too3a! is looking to pioneer this model in Egypt, Saudi
Arabia, and UAE.
In Egypt, the app will come into competition with Bey2ollak, a community-based
traffic information service that helps iPhone, Android, Nokia,
Blackberry, and Windows phone users navigate roads in Cairo and
Alexandria, and Wasalny, a very similar
crowdsourced traffic app also built for iPhone, Android, Blackberry
and Nokia, which just relaunched a new version. Both faced off as
semifinalists in Google’s Ebda2 competition last year, which
awarded Bey2ollak a victory some called
controversial.
In the Gulf, where traffic is often not quite as chaotic as it is
in Cairo, Google itself has enabled live road traffic updates
within Google Maps, throughout the
UAE, and in
Saudi Arabia (in Jeddah) and Kuwait City.
Google’s expansion is something the Ma2too3a team hopes to
capitalize on, potentially selling its crowd-sourced traffic and
map information about Beirut and Lebanon to the tech giant. While
the Ma2too3a! app is currently free, the team plans to offer
location-based mobile advertising in its second version, which will
be released in 4-6 weeks.
The new version (featured above and below), which is still in
testing and development, also adds interactive features that will
get people more personally involved in confirming or denying
developments on the road as they happen.
Based on its growth rate to date, Ma2too3a! seems poised to take
the region by storm. Yet with its next launch, the startup will
have to prove that they can translate success during conflict into
excellent traffic reporting. The coming year will tell if
Ma2too3a!’s star will continue to burn as brightly as it has in the
six months.
More screen shots below: