In a battle to dominate the ride-sharing market in India, Uber is taking on Ola and other homegrown taxi-aggregators with innovation. The ride-hailing company on Friday rolled out ‘m.uber.com,’ a light, web-based version of its service to tap users with basic smartphones. The San Francisco, California-based firm is also piloting three new app features — ‘call to ride’, ‘request for a guest’ and offline search. The aim is to woo customers who prefer booking a taxi through a phone call or have Internet connectivity issues. Uber’s India team played a key role to develop these pieces of innovation.
“The solutions they [India team] are building, are global solutions. This is not like ‘let’s do an extra feature for India,’” said Daniel Graf, vice president and product head at Uber. The firm, which globally facilitates 10 million trips a day, has a team of more than 150 engineers at its Bengaluru and Hyderabad centres.
The firm said the light web-version of Uber is focused on riders with basic smartphones that feature web browsing but cannot support mobile apps due to limited storage space. It would also enable the users to book a ride from a tablet or a desktop computer.
‘Phone calls preferred’
The firm said in India many people prefer booking a ride through a phone call. In Pune, Uber is piloting a phone number so that riders can call to book the cab across popular zones in a city. The service ‘call to ride’ would be useful for customers who use feature phone or are in an area with Internet connectivity issues. They can call a single, nationwide phone number and enter a numeric code displayed on signage to help Uber identify their location.
“We would be able to avoid a call between the driver and the rider, [such as] ‘where are you.’ We exactly know (the location),” said Mr. Graf. Uber said it would also start its ‘request for a guest’ feature for its app in the next few weeks. It would allow riders to book cabs for their guests, friends and relatives from their Uber app wherever they are located. They also don’t require use of a smartphone. “You can be in Bengaluru and request (the cab) for your family member in Delhi,” said Peter Deng, head of rider experience at Uber.
Without the Net
Another new feature would be ‘offline search’, useful for riders in limited network areas. It enables this by caching the top points of interests in the city. Uber said riders could enter their destinations in the app without having to wait for the connection. “Through (past) trips, we have enough data to understand where users typically go,” said Manik Gupta, head of product, marketplace and maps at Uber.
Uber’s India engineering team is also playing a key role to help the company for its self-driving technologies, mapping and vehicle safety efforts. These self-driving cars depend on mapping data and a lot of that work happens in India, said the company.