Introduction
If you have ever heard about the “New York minute”, you would know about the ultra fast paced but equally exciting life of a New Yorker. Going to college in New York, I believe that Uber’s service truly allows one to make most of his time New York. It almost seems as if Uber’s efficiency and reliability have just made the New York minute a little longer. I have realized is that the real value of Uber is in its ability to allow people to do more. I use Uber to seek places that will fulfill our hunger for excitement; to capture a fleeting experience that could be missed if it wasn't for Uber's fast and effective service.
The Experience
By using Hermes, you will be able to share your experiences, with the people that you are linked to by posting pictures at your location. These posts are designed to last for only 24 hours and will only appear on your friend’s map they are in a 15 mile radius around the location where the picture was taken. Users can also search for keyword events within this radius by entering a word or using a recommended word provided by the trending table. This table works by parsing through descriptions of posts to find nouns, verbs, and other words and rank them in order of frequency. By doing this, I want people to receive relevant and real time information on where their friends are, what they are doing, and information on nearby locations that match the user’s interests. Your friends are most likely to share the same interests as you, and by sharing pictures of your location with them, you are likely to inspire some of your friends to travel to these locations.
The Value
In this way, Hermes is able to add value to Uber, it evolves Uber to an all rounded social platform. One that not only allows people to travel to destinations but also inspires people to take on new adventures. Hermes will will provide a platform for people to share their moments at businesses with friends, inspiring others to go to these places. Furthermore, I have created an incentive for people to share their moments through the concepts of “likes”. To add more value to these "likes", I created a news feed of all users who have liked your moments as well as a point system for users to gauge how informative your posts are. This newsfeed also allows the user to view who is traveling to their location using Uber.
Using Uber
By clicking on the Uber icon on a location, users will be able to inform the person that captured the moment that they are traveling their location (if they are still there) or simply inform them that they are traveling to their posts. Through this user flow, Uber will benefit from Hermes because it will seamlessly integrate Uber into the social activity of going out to meet friends. Not only does Hermes help businesses and Uber generate more demand, it also has potential to sustain itself as a business. If the purpose of Hermes is to allow users to make more informed decisions on where to go, it could evolve to become a social recommendation app with the Uber service as its backbone. However, since this can only be implemented once I have developed a large user base, for the purposes of this hackathon, the primary focus was on developing the social experience of the app to enhance the Uber service. Hermes was designed for people like you and me: people who are passionate about going places and want to share their experience with others.