Travel Time; helping people to search, navigate and enjoy Smart Cities

We are applying for challenge 3 - 'developing a scalable on-demand mobility solution to help employees or visitors reach businesses within a city'.

Our project uses travel time to enable employees and visitors to find businesses; so travel time rather than distance. City businesses include for example shops, restaurants, offices, garages, gyms, and cinemas - these are all locations that residents and visitors will travel to, and when traveling, time is more important than distance. The only way to filter location-specific content currently is distance - the 'within X miles' search box used by most web sites - but distance simply isn't very helpful. A location 5 miles away might take 10 minutes if on a fast connection, but 2 hours if it's not; it might take 1 hour on a weekday morning but 5 minutes on a Sunday morning. Travel Time typically doubles the number of relevant results compared to distance, but its usefulness extends far beyond searching for those places we want to visit; it can also (for example)
a) compare all different transport modes for the journey (so contrasting cars to public transport);
b) provide optimum routing - both direct to the destination, but also routing via other specific points if required.
c) define catchment areas for councils when considering business planning applications;
d) help businesses to plan office relocations by analysing the impact on their staff's commuting time;
e) simplify and optimise car-pooling and car sharing schemes;
f) improve mail order delivery services, and the increasingly popular 'click collect' schemes run by many retailers.

Our project is to enable cities (the residents, employees, visitors, and the city administrators) to plan their travel by time rather than distance, and this will save time, congestion, cost and CO2 emissions.

What makes this project possible is that iGeolise have already built the Travel Time Platform which makes location-specific content searchable by travel time. The platform is unique, is patent pending in the UK and USA, and has been built to scale (currently live across the UK, USA, and Thailand; goes live on 2 of the UK's largest websites in Q4 2013). This project will enable us to add three new features to the Platform which will deliver great value to a 'smart city'. 1) calculate CO2 emissions for a journey; 2) calculate the cost of a journey; and 3) update and refresh results based on real-time information (i.e. X bus route is closed, don't show results that rely on using that bus route).

The Travel Time Platform is accessed via an API - which means that developers can include Travel Time into existing applications / websites / mobile applications as well as into new ones, which greatly reduces the time to market.