Bey2ollak

BEY2OLLAK

[pic 1]

Table of content.

Abstract-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3

Introduction--------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 4-5

What is bey2ollak-------------------------------------------------------------------------- 5-7

What they do and how they do it----------------------------------------------------- 7

Success factors---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 8

1. They fulfilled a need------------------------------------------------------------------ 8-9
2. Creativity and using existing resources-------------------------------------- 9-10
3. They had what it takes-----------------------------------------------------------  10-11

Why bey2ollak is such a success-------------------------------------------------- 11-12

Bibliography---------------------------------------------------------------------------------13

Abstract

The frustration caused by everyday traffic in Egypt’s  biggest  cities such as Cairo and Alexandria  made people wish if they only knew that the road they are planning to drive thru is blocked they would have probably took another route to  where ever they hoping to go.Bey2ollak nowadays is helping to achieve such wish throughout all Egypt. With almost one million trusted users and more than two thousand active monthly users. This five years old application is now an award-winning mobile application with its every day updated ideas and creativity of its user interface

What is bey2ollak and how it all started are two of the topics that will be covered and explained in this paper. Also to know how bey2ollak is such a huge success some of their success factors will be presented and explained.

Introduction

Cairo is counted as one of the worlds most populated cities with its twenty million citizens and fourteen million vehicles. If you live in Cairo you would probably arrange your life schedule, meeting, birthday parties and even wedding according to the traffic and no matter how hard the people tried they still get stuck in it.

 Getting stuck in traffic is inevitable. People schedule workdays, weddings, even walks outside around traffic patterns. A recent World Bank study found that Cairo congestion costs the economy eight billion a year. A presidential debate in 2012, hailed as sign of burgeoning democracy, was delayed when one of the candidates got stuck in traffic. A CNN reporter tweeted:”No matter who is running for president, #traffic always wins” (Rottenberg, 2014). Imagine waking up at five in the morning so you can reach the university at eight thirtie and the university is only eighty kilometers away.  In average it would talk an hour to reach the university at 8:30 am but due to the morning rush and [pic 2]

Cairo’s traffic it takes two and half hours to reach the university.

Five cousins decided to create a solution in a form of an application. In 2010 they created an app that allows its user to share real time traffic reports. They named it bey2ollak, it is Arabic for “it is being said” The name is inspired from an expression used by frustrated drivers when they roll down their window and shout traffic warnings to others. Hopping to inject fun into an annoying situation, bey2ollak invites users to report road conditions using cheeky options like “sweet” indicating no traffic, and “no hope” which means avoid this road at all costs (Rottenberg, 2014).

What is bey2ollak?

Bey2ollak is an mobile application that allow its users to share real time information about traffic in Cairo and Alexandria, bey2ollak was launched in October of 2010. It was five founders who created bey2ollak, and now it has a user base of more than one million users with more than two thousand active monthly users. Although Egypt’s political situation was not the best at that time to start a business. A group of youth took the slogan of “Be local, social, adaptable and simple” as their motto when they launched their successful application (Farid, 2013).so where did the idea come from? The whole idea came when the two of the founder noticed that people were communicating through social media not just with family members or co-workers but with everybody else, sharing their experience about the traffic and how disparate, frustrated and boring the road is, and warning  people about specific roads at specific times and suggesting alternative routes for them. At that time Cairo’s radio stations also were reporting the traffic updates, and also the “#Cairotraffic” hash tag on twitter was enormously active at that time. So basically the idea was build out of people frustration. The founders decided to create a platform in a form of an application which will help in combining all these types of information about what is happening in Cairo’s traffic. This platform was built on people’s sharing information. Ali refae and Gamal El-Din Sadek who had a computer science background, had this idea but they didn’t know where to start. After searching and gathering information, they realized that what they needed was a team this team should contain people with a different set of techniques and expertise. So they started to create their team, and that was an easy task for them as they had a huge family which combines different educational backgrounds. In no time a team of five co-founders of Bey2ollak was created and ready to roll. Ali Rafea, Mohamed Rafea and Gamal El-Din Sadek have a computer science background so they set to be responsible for development, Mostafa El-Beltagy with his business and marketing background had the responsibility of marketing the service, last but not least Yehia Ismail is specialized in fine arts and design was responsible for the colures and designs. So they covered all the main aspects necessary to build and launch the service. Before they started working they didn’t know how the application will look like and whether it should be a web based application in a form of a website or a mobile application, but what really made this decision more harder is that at the year they started In 2010, the idea of mobile applications wasn’t that popular like now, and Android systems were not available in Egypt yet and there wasn’t an app store for Blackberry yet. So they did an online survey which showed a great appeal to the mobile application over the website. So they decided to start with a blackberry application which was the most popular at that time to guarantee a good startup and a successful lunch (Farid, 2013).[pic 3]