Belgium based MotoSmarty will help you avoid road accidents

Motorcycles are a convenient, economical and easy way to commute. But they are dangerous too! The number of motorcycle accidents we hear about every day is scary. And it cannot be blamed only on careless riding, the conditions of roads and the hazards it pose have lead to many serious

accidents too. A Belgian startup is trying to reduce the rate of motorcycle accidents across the world by providing bikers with a simple app to warn them about the coming road hazards while riding without pulling out their phones out of their pockets.Motosmarty, can record many road hazards – potholes, manholes, fissures, slippery surfaces, dangerous curves, bumps etc (20 types to be precise) and warn the biker about them. The app takes into account the current location of the biker and the direction he/she is going in and alerts them about any upcoming road hazard.

How it works:

Before starting to ride, you will have to launch MotoSamrty on your smartphone and turn on the

‘Ride’ mode and turn off the screen. Either a wired earphone/ Bluetooth headset plugged into the phone for transmitting a voice message about the hazard is needed or a vibration will alert you about an upcoming one. The phone should be in any easily accessible (actually touchable) pocket. The data for the app is crowdsourced – generated and updated by bikers.So while riding, when biker sees a danger point he/she can tap the phone twice to record the location and if he/she is connected to earphone or Bluetooth headset, a voice memo can be recoded to remember the problem area later on. If the biker is not connected to any headset then when arrived at the destination or taking a pause, details about the problem area can be added.

For each hazard point, other riders can confirm or deny the existence for the data to be updated. The danger spots can also be checked in advance, not only on smartphones but also on the web. On the web based map the site shows all the danger, hazard and caution points on Google's Streetview.

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Further extension plans and usefulness of the captured data by governments:

Co-founded by Maciej Myslinski and Mateusz Maj, Motosmarty currently has a core team of 3 with Rudradeb Mitra heading the marketing and they plan on extending the feature set of apps after launching it on Android. Looking at the need of timely medical assistance in case of accidents, they plan on adding an accident detection system and hence send a distress call to the emergency services in the event of an accident.

Motosmarty has raised $50,000 equity free funding from Belgium government. The interest of the government in the app is because of the data it collates. The idea behind the solution it will provide for city councils is to have a dashboard for them where they can see all the reported dangerous spots and can fix it. After the problem is fixed, the spot can be removed from the map.

Looking at the conditions of roads in India, the team feels that the same solution can potentially be of high interest for Indian government too.

Target market and traction:

The target market globally is niche (people who ride bikes and use smartphones) for the alerts but for using the app to report the road hazards, the app can be of use to everyone. The kind of hazards the app alerts about are irrelevant or at least a lot less important for car drivers and hence they are not targeting that segment.

The app has been launched worldwide for iOS 2 weeks back and has around 4000 downloads from across 40 countries. Before this it was available in Belgium and France for last 7 months where they have got around 3000 dangerous spots marked. They have 150 Android users testing the beta version of the app and will be launching next week on Google play.

How will it fare? Lets wait and watch

Besides the response the app receives in terms of number of downloads or active users, the interesting point which will decide how Motosmarty fares in its purpose will be the number of people contributing to the crowdsourcing of data. If adopted well by users and government it has the potential of improving on and solving the big problem hazards pose in everyday road safety.