The Next Billion Dollar Idea

In 2008, Arun Ganesh, a Chennai-based information design student, was frustrated by the lack of accurate bus route maps or timetables and decided to take the matter into his own hands.^1,2 Mapping Chennai's bus routes can be daunting. It is India's fourth largest city, spread over 426 square kilometres, and on average five million passengers use more than 800 different bus routes.³ Arun and his fellow students came up with a simple but innovative solution to solve the problem: they crowdsourced the data pertaining to bus routes from daily commuters. Less than a week after setting up the platform, they were able to map most of Chennai's bus network.⁴ The crowdsourced maps were not only more accurate, they also unearthed a host of information on the city's infrastructure that has proved of huge value to city planners.