The Housing and Transportation group met up throughout the week to talk about the solutions we had developed based on the research conducted last week. Each person had come up with technology solutions for the sectors they had researched; yet the challenge was to find a way to connect the best of them in one application. Gautham made a really strong point this week: we should aim to make an application that leverages the people of Vizag and the infrastructure that is already present. With this in mind, we began developing different ideas that didn’t require major infrastructural changes, yet that would still cause significant impacts on Vizag. When we were doing our original business models, Avani had suggested a multimodal, single-payment card system—much like the Clipper card. With the rest of the group, we started trying to include different aspects of transportation and housing into this card. Aridam suggested that a way to have the application affect traffic would be to create a point system that rewards people for changing their routes to reduce peak traffic. This is something that is seen in Hong Kong and in Austin. On the same train of though, Isabel suggested we reward people for parking in socially optimal ways. The application could also include a law violation and infrastructure suggestion portion that would also reward points. Furthermore, this point system can also be used with retail partners. These major ideas are what came together to start forming VizagOne. Overall, it would be a both a holistic payment system and an incentive system to improve infrastructure and land use.

When thinking about implementation, we realized that we need to be conscious of the cultural characteristics of Vizag. Helen brought up that the majority of people in the area would still rather receive their information via SMS than through an application. This means that we need to figure out a way to make this application adaptable to SMS and the population of Vizag. To get more information on what the people of Vizag want, Avani, Aridam, and Gautham have all started to mobilize their networks in India to find residents of Vizag who would be willing to share their opinions with us. We will be talking more about specifics of VizagOne next week. Furtehrmore, we will also start working on our share of the dashboard that will encompass all of the groups.

The Housing/Transportation Group

Gautham Kesineni, Isabel Viegas De Lima, Helen Fan, Avanishree Kanoria, Aridam Kumar