Share a cab ride using GPS on Android

In response to the recent post in Tech Crunch saying that MIT students develop projects in 13 days, we students at SJSU have a lot of potential to create some exciting next generation Mobile Apps. I along with my project partners Naing and Htay took one mobile course(Cmpe 277) under Dr Shan to develop one promising concept. Unfortunately we couldn’t convert it into commercial project but developers can take fresh ideas from it and make a revenue out of it.

The app is called Share a Taxi Ride. Generally in metro cities like San Francisco, New York where many business executives travel a lot can find this application useful especially everybody is using iPhone for their prime business communication. This Mobile application allows users to share a cab ride based on their current locations. It is about finding people to share a taxi based on source and destination points. Along with that, it can also be applied to many other cases such as going to and from special events, conventions, ball games etc. The typical functions of this portal are listed as follows:

•  Registration: It allows a first time user to register so that they can log in with their username and password during their next visit.
• Login: This allows registered users to access the mobile application along with the validation of their credentials
• User Profile Management: This allows registered users to create and manage their profiles access the mobile application. It also allows users to manage their preferences like Sex, Smoke or Contact (By Chat or Call)
• Sign Out: Allows user to log off the application session

These are some “Nice to have” features:

• User Account Management
• Manage Preferences (who you are and what type of people you want to share with)
• Save Destinations on phone
• Search people based on current location your destination and other criteria such as destination proximity, time, number of persons, etc.
• Prearrange the ride beforehand
• Display search result and communicate or exchange information with selected person(s) by email or phone
• Show people on the map (sometimes they could be a couple blocks away from you)
• Rating system (Rate, Comment, Filter search based on rating)

Application Snapshots

 1] Title Page: It is being displayed when the application is loaded for the first time

 

2] Registration: It is being displayed when user comes to the site for the first time

3] Login: It asks for the user credentials

 4] Based on the correct username and password, the system will navigate user to the Main User panel.

5] The cab request form is displayed when user requests to find the riders within defined proximity. Generally, the system will calculate user’s source address from GPS but for the simplicity we allow user to enter the address

6] Search Result

7] Give user ratings

 Here are the configuration details:

GUI: Android Development Tools Plugin for the Eclipse IDE, Android Debug Bridge (adb)  

Web Server: Tomcat Apache Server

Database: MySQL, SQlite

 

We were not able to create complete application within provided time limit but we explored power of Android as a Dev Platform…We found development of similar app on net called GCab

This could be a potential project but I am not sure whether this idea is already been practiced commercially…

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