I have pondered the sensibility of using AI to support the initial birth of new communities. Given the needed social validation of seeing both 1. A populated community and 2. The tone of the community being grounded, non-toxic and useful.
The alternative is having a community born that will be small, have early adopters who can be overly passionate or critical and gatekeep folks from discussion. That means high effort to curate initially.
It’s a pity that the leading eBike brands like Van Moof and Cowboy are not available in Australia.
I believe part of the reason for the delay & resulting country exclusivity is due to needing a repair presence to support the bikes.
Speaking to an independent senior bike repairer, they told me that they’re unlikely to fix eBikes as they can be more complicated & once they touch a bike to repair the onus is on them to bring it to restore to a repaired state (ie if you pay for a repair and it’s not repaired then the fault will lay with them until corrected).
So unlike traditional bikes that largely are free & operate mechanically similarly, you’re more likely going to see a more electronic car-style repair model (eg where only Tesla are repairing Tesla cars) and a push to consolidation where the 3rd party bike manufacturers or parts (eg Bafang motors or no-name) will lose out to those who have a physical store & large network (Trek, Giant, etc).
I’d love someone’s opinion on this to validate or challenge the thinking here — as for now, it seems I’ll wait forever and never to get a Van Moof or Cowboy & importing seems a dead end since it wouldn’t be repairable by any local repairer.
Reading the comments, I thought I’d jump in to try Apollo again. I recalled it being stifling and yep sure enough, it hasn’t changed:
Basic navigational functionality such as swiping through content from one post to another is not available by default, instead it is behind a paywall.
Look, I totally get if there’s premium functionality such as notifications, better posting functions that you need to charge for it.
But as it exists it has less functionality than the default reddit app in which you can navigate. If you’ve already broken user trust by degrading a basic service I will not trust to pay you for the rest.
No worries. There's five rows to interact with in the app. Pickup time, Pickup location, Destination, Car type and Request. Car type is what you're after.
Selecting 'Economy' car type puts you in a ride share, Taxi and Maxi are taxi-related rides, Premium is hire cars or Uber.
Ride types and the monikers given have been a natural evolution in the industry. Even for most folks, when they say 'Uber' they're likely referring to 'UberX' not a hire car premium experience.
Grab's massive! Unless you're deep in the country, you might not have known but it's actually pretty big. Quote from CNBC from June 2017: "Grab facilitates as many as 2.5 million rides each day, making it the largest ride-hailing platform in Southeast Asia with over 930,000 drivers in 55 cities and seven countries. In the past six months alone, daily rides have more than doubled."
Steve Yegge famously just joined them after leaving Google/Amazon, a great blog read if you're curious about their culture, mission.
*Disclaimer: I managed GoCatch operations from Nov 2013 to Mar 2014.
GoCatch has ride-sharing options since February 2016 (that's two years). While I can't state accurately to today's figures, there was akin to 350,000+ unique passengers last time I poked around.
In ASEAN/AP region, Grab is huge. It's founder is from the region (Malaysia) and arguably bigger than Uber in most countries including Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and yes, Vietnam: https://www.grab.com/vn/en/
The alternative is having a community born that will be small, have early adopters who can be overly passionate or critical and gatekeep folks from discussion. That means high effort to curate initially.