City Slickers

After a night out on the town it’s easy to catch the next bus, tram or metro with jakdojade.pl (English: how to get there). Just wait for your smartphone to geolocalize you and presto – the nearest connections pop up. A trio of young techies from Poznań has steadfastly led millions of Poles in their commutes around town and their application has become a household name. Now they’ve started talking with Scandinavian municipalities about their services By Matthew Czaja There couldn’t have been a more textbook example of academics-to-business evolution than the Poznań-based company City-Nav. This company grew from a master’s thesis to a recognized brand. Choosing an office location outside the city center, they are based just a city block away from a Poznań transportation authority tram depot. Cities are flocking in droves to sign new deals with the company for the provision of mapped journey planning services via web and smart phone applications. It may not be rocket science, but the tool sure works like a charm. The rookies get guidance The idea was born around 2006 when two Poznań University of Technology students worked on their thesis projects. Artur Szychta and Mikołaj Grajek wanted to develop an application for mobile phones that would help users find public transportation connections on-demand. “They were ahead of their time in 2006, since smartphones were not popular yet,” said City-Nav CEO Bartosz Burek. The university professors did not lose heart though and convinced the young scientists to implement their application as a web platform. Burek insists that the intervention of the professors helped keep the project alive. Students gathered data by hand at first. Schedules and geographic coordinates of stops had to be collected in the field and entered into a database. Finally, the city of Poznań came around to appreciate the new tool and decided to cooperate with the team. The initial web application was ready in 2008. Poznań University of Technology professors helped their students come into contact with willing investors. This gave Szychta and Grajek some breathing room upon graduating from school. They could devote themselves to the project full-time. Hence, five business angels, as well as Szychta, Grajek, and Burek are the current shareholders in the company. At the beginning, Burek also applied for funding from the European Union and this money further secured development of the start-up. What works Szychta summed up Jakdojade’s utility, “Creating Jakdojade, we tried to program the system to select routes that would have been selected by a commuter that knows the system well. This is the only way we could earn the trust of the users.” It’s simple. You log onto jakdojade.pl, choose your city and enter the journey beginning point and the destination. A number of options are available, such as the hilarious “grandma mode” which allows more time between connections. The user can also click on the map screen to choose beginning and end journey points, a very neat tool for geographers and tourists. “I had to create demand for Jakdojade in the beginning. It was necessary to criss-cross the country in order to convince authorities and users alike that the application was useful,” said Burek. “It is not a simple website, I told them. It promotes the use of public transportation in a given city and this is what I tried to relay to the people in city hall.” Once users gave it a whirl, there was no going back. The website’s popularity skyrocketed. Today, Jakdojade’s Polish empire spans 20 different cities or multi-city transportation systems, including one of Europe’s largest tram networks in the Silesian Agglomeration. Further cities will be added and an inter-city journey planner is in the works. Their business model is rather simple. Most of the revenue comes from advertisements, which seem to be tastefully placed, yet visible enough for partners to find them attractive. A premium membership (PLN 6.99 per year) gives users commercial-free access, unlimited journey planning and additional goodies, such as a widget app that can display vital information night and day. With monthly figures reaching 2 million unique users of the web application and 1 million users of the smart app, Jadojade can boast a huge audience base. City-Nav’s financial results may not necessarily be a tidal wave, but they sure look promising with an annual growth  rate of 20 percent. In 2013, revenue was PLN 890,000 and net profit reached PLN 270,000. Cooperation with public entities The benefits of Jakdojade’s platform wouldn’t be achievable without the company’s ongoing cooperation with city transportation authorities. Once it sees the benefits of cooperation with City-Nav, it chooses to share route planning data and geographic coordinates of stops. Not only that, but ongoing communication is needed between Jakdojade and the authorities in order to identify emergencies and detours. A recent fire of the Łazienkowski Bridge in Warsaw resulted in massive detours of bus lines and an implementation of an emergency tram line. Jakdojade was on top of its game and its application reflected the change just hours after the dramatic fire surprised Warsaw’s citizens. In some cases, such as the one above, the team has an RSS feed from the city of Warsaw, which still necessitates manual entry of changes into the databank. In other cases, this data entry is automated. The disciplined and functional communication between the cities and a team of 14 employees spread out across the country ensures seamless information flow to the website. Real-time information Increasingly more city bus and tram units are installed with Global Positioning Systems (GPS), hence the position of these vehicles can be monitored in real time. The city of Wrocław already has GPS units installed in its vehicles due to the Intelligent Transportation System project, which yielded mixed results for the city. Nonetheless, for Jakdojade, GPS signals offer an added bonus: real-time travel information. Białystok also has GPS tracking available already, and Bydgoszcz and Poznań should make their real-time data available soon. What is the benefit of real-time data? “In essence, the user does not need to know the schedule. If real-time data is at an arm’s reach, a commuter can automatically see when a vehicle will arrive,” said Burek. The Białystok map on the application even shows the real-time location of a vehicle with a moving arrow icon. On deck City-Nav is working with a Finnish city and will soon unveil their first foreign project. A joint partnership has already been inked with a Scandinavian company, therefore it looks like Northern Europe will be the direction in which City-Nav wants to expand. With IT and GIS solutions looking like the clear winner in the European (and Polish) mission for innovative technology, as well as EU funds for promotion of eco-friendly transport, Jakdojade should catch on in other areas of the continent. Similar projects do exist, for example the city of Munich has a very similar geoportal for public transportation searches, but Jakdojade seems to be the first of its kind in this part of Europe. The application’s success also points to effective partnership with local governments. Whereas every city with a transportation department could technically develop its own application (e.g. Munich), none can deliver the ease of use and speed that the people at City-Nav have given the Polish commuter. It is a simple advantage of economies of scale – City-Nav can develop systems much more efficiently because its programmers and team can service multiple cities at the same time, all while developing a recognizable service across Poland. “When we created the project, our goal was simple: to create a nationwide Polish standard used by millions of users,” said Szychta. Their mission was accomplished. On the basis of this successful project and business venture, investors and planners alike can draw conclusions. Perhaps the role of private enterprises in public services is not to take over services from city hall, but rather improve them, thus saving taxpayer money and helping increase the standard of living within Polish cities. Jakdojade does just that, and does it very well.