Travelling by car in India in an unfamiliar city is often an interactive process very much along the lines of cluedo or a treasure hunt. Considering that most city streets run like a maze and the concept of a grid system is virtually non-existent the analogy is apt.

First, make sure you are in the city or at least close to it, (highway signs are pretty good about this).  Once you have determined that you are in fact in the city, pull over and flag down a passerby to help you with directions.  Extra points if the passerby is a local taxi or rickshaw driver.  Show them your address and they will point you not the address itself, but to a landmark in the general direction of the locality where the address is located, the methodology is always the same, once you get to a certain landmark, ask someone for the next set of directions...hence the hunt continues with the set of landmarks dwindling in importance as you get closer to your intended destination. As an old expert in this form of travel, I now remark with some surprise how the number of stops always seemed to be in the 4 - 7 range regardless of the complexity of the city I was visiting.  I say with some shame that my recent use of technology on a road trip was a direct assault on this generation’s old venerated form of transport.  How does this fit into entrepreneurship you ask? Read on…

My wife and I decided to visit the city of Pune a bustling university town and I.T hub only 90 odd miles away from Mumbai.  Rather than drive, we hired a driver that I knew, who had come to Mumbai in the late nineties and had capitalized on the growth of the city by starting his own taxi business. On the highway, I decided to run a little experiment.  I whipped out the blackberry and fired up Google maps.  The goal- to get to our destination without having to stop to ask for directions.  My wife was not thrilled, our driver a little mystified, he knew what a GPS was but had not used it since it was a nascent industry in India. Mystification gave way to outright chagrin as a pointed out to landmarks and navigated the city like an expert auto rickshaw driver. Granted, with the haphazard and rampant construction, we did run into a couple of dead ends but we made it to our destination without too much drama, even managing to stop on the way at a gas station to tank-up. Our hosts in Pune were even more shocked at our arrival – the reason, they were expecting at least a few harried phone calls explaining that we were hopelessly lost which in turn would give them a fair estimate of when to expect us. (An example of how technology can sometimes complicate things – I guess).

On the drive home, the driver had been musing our use of the GPS and had a hundred questions regarding how I used mine. How much did it cost, were they reliable, how rugged they were, how often they updated maps, could they chart the shortest distance in terms of distance and well as time. Could they look up where the shortest gas station or mechanic was? I could see the wheels turning in his head. A GPS in every one of his taxis was the goal. 

Later that evening I ran some numbers…there are about 60,000 cabs in Mumbai alone (and that is not counting the private taxis – of which I estimate there are 10,000 to 20,000). Mumbai is going through a rash of infrastructure projects, which often seem to spring up unaware and can sometimes catch even the most grizzled veteran taxi driver off guard. A GPS with live traffic tracking would not only be a boon to drivers and passengers, but could easily aid the often-overwhelmed traffic cops and municipal officials. With applications like google-maps smart phones become more popular (though far from ubiquitous) the price of a practical GPS device has been diving. Is it possible, just possible that a technology device like the GPS would and could help cities like Mumbai, Bangalore, and Pune with what has become one of their regular features…the dreaded traffic snarl?

Long story short – you have this technology, which for the most part has become routine in our lives in America. All of a sudden, when you introduce it in another country, you not only open a brand new market for the product (and what a market India can be!) but you see a huge potential for it to impact cultural norms and uses. It is also entirely possible that the way people use GPSs in India will be different from the way we would use it in the US, which in turn might have an impact on the physical product itself….all, grey areas and niches where entrepreneurs can build solutions, grow, and flourish.