Group members: Kenisha Spencer, Calvin Gill JR, Neredia Aranda, Harrison Marshall, and Ibssa Abdo
I.O.U Transports is an app that can be accessed from your mobile phone to help college students build a community among one another and help new students or students without cars get around the city. (Way BETTER than UBER)
2 comments:
I could definitely see this app/concept being useful to college students, but maybe for universities with larger campuses than CBU's. For instance, I recently visited my friend who attends Cornell up in Ithaca, NY. There, a majority of the students do not have cars, because the campus doesn't allow freshmen to have them and also they make you pay to store your car once you bring it to school. As a result, no one brings their cars and instead uses public transportation that's free for the students. However, after listening to my friend talk about it, the students are basically have to work around the very short bus schedule in order to get to anywhere. Grocery stores like Walmart or Target aren't close enough to walk to and there isn't anything else around except the overpriced campus store. There are "college taxis" that you can call or even Uber, but obviously those are overpriced and would cost a lot just to go buy groceries.
Basically, I.O.U. would be a great help to campuses like Cornell across the U.S. I'm sure there are students with cars that would make weekly or biweekly trips to the store and would gladly carpool a couple of other students along with them. These students could even make these trips a scheduled, permanent thing! For example, they could meet every other Wednesday at 4 pm and head to Target for some food and stuff, which allows the driver to meet some new people they wouldn't ordinarily see as well as make some money while going to a store they were going to anyway. Eventually, as you mentioned in your presentation, you'd pay your drivers more for their time so that they could actually make a profit. For now, though, I could see a prototype of this doing fairly well. However, for a campus like CBU, I think it would be hard for this app to stick since we're so small. Bigger campuses would benefit from this, in my opinion. In the end, though, I really liked this idea.
I.O.U. transport was a pretty neat idea because it was kind of a twist on Uber. The benefits of I.O.U. over Uber would be that you would meet student from your school or in your area. I personally related to this idea because when I moved here from Florida I only knew a handful of people which were all on my sports team. The group presented very well they all seemed to agree on where the app was going and why it would be a better alternative to Uber giving real examples of where Uber went wrong in addition they added in personal experience with Uber. My main concern is how they would keep drivers who were barely breaking even when they drove someone somewhere personally if I was going to drive someone I did not know around in my car I would want to make a little bit more money that a few cents. In addition, I think that the school should monitor the students who are drivers for the app’s grades because you would not want a student’s grades to start dropping because they are spending too much driving around. I liked the idea of campus security being a way to solve issues you have with a driver but what is the likelihood that campus security would want to adapt more responsibility or would even follow through properly? Also, if they did make the app so that students from other school could drive each other how would the campus work together to ensure that everyone stays safe? Over all I did like this idea and could see myself using this app if it did get off the ground.
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