Portrait of Phil Chrun, CEO of mycarpoolstation.com (1)
Philippe K. Chrun is a young technology entrepreneur I met at the latest Montreal Tech entrepreneur breakfast. I found his idea promising and we got to meet today for a lenghty exchange.
Phil Chrun was born in Québec but studied at the University of Western Ontario, in London. Like many students, Phil wanted to travel and move around Canada. If you attended college, you know how it works: billboards, maybe local small ads, or word of mouth. In best cases, the local student association starts a carsharing initiative. But most of time, everything is improvised. You finish by taking buses or team up with friends. The question was then, why isn’t there any mainstream carpooling website?
He started thinking about it in 2004 and started the project in december 2005. He wanted to setup a website for long travel carpooling, and setup local stations where riders and drivers will meetup. The website will compute the itinerary, find avalaible drivers and also offer alternative routes. Web2.0 was hot at the time and social networking was added to the mix. But, this is not a gratuitous move, as you might think, because unlike other web2.0 websites, the core of the website translates to offline services. Social networking features lets you manage trust, reputation, reliability and other criterias that prevails in carpooling.
mycarpoolstation.com has 4 founders, and development is handed to an Indian web development company. We talked a lot about outsourcing, and while communication problems got into the way in the beginning, things have been smooth since then. Phil Chrun likes the model, in the sense that works gets done 24 hours a day. He gets cost-effective development costs, and still heads product design and development, to make sure that it fits North American Culture. We certainly live in transitionning times and mycarpoolstation is a good example of the upcoming generalized globalization.
1 year and 2 months later, the website is in alpha stage and has most of the features implemented. The product evolved since then; the service is no longer for long travel and is also aimed at schools and workplaces, typically people who will need daily carpooling. The service offers a free carpoolstation for every school, participants are then free to register, create their user profile and then look for drivers. mycarpoolstation uses the mapquest Advantage API and has a custom home algorithm to compute the best possible itinerary.
The service is great, in a time where many people worry about global warming and want to make a change. Instead of every worker having to commute with 1 car, it could gather collegues and save on gas. It might be also a great service for parents who don’t have time to bring their kids to school daily. And of course, this is a great service for students and travelers. I know for example many european and US exchange students in Montreal who are just dying to use this kind of service.
Another innovative idea of mycarpoolstation is the exchange and barter system. Phil Chrun wants to create a token-based economy. Users of the service can purchase a set of tokens, which they can use to get a carpool ride. Drivers will receive tokens and can cash out after a while. The system is simple and is a winner for me. (think about it, you don’t have to carry change every day)
mycarpoolstation.com targets a real need with innovative ideas. Yet, there are still open questions. The service is ambitious and targets all North America; and Phil Chrun says one challenge right now is to get additionnal investors, to roll out the final product.
Stay tuned in for news about mycarpoolstation.com, the beta is planned in less than one month!
[...] Chrun made next his first public demo to the tech crowd. I have already talked about his project: Mycarpoolstation.com is a car sharing website where coworkers and students can share rides. He [...]
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