Gert H. Staal
“crowdsourcing” is used by Dutch
internet company 9292 to create a
new travel application
Gert H. Staal, NpDp, Managing Director and ceO, 9292 ( gstaal@9292.nl)
Ground travel anywhere can be daunting, especially when trying to coordinate all those timetables for trains, buses, subways (metros), and
ferries. But such transportation has gotten easier in the Netherlands with the advent of a new amartphone app (application) developed
by a Dutch Internet company—known as 9292. This app was created through “crowdsourcing” in the form of a public contest. Here is
the story from Gert Staal in the Netherlands of how 9292 did it.
The Internet company 9292 may not be a household name in North America. But in the Netherlands the name is well known. Well over 60 percent of the general public know
9292: That number was derived from the company’s original
phone number 0900-9292 when it was officially launched in 1992.
It was the first numerical website to go live in the Netherlands.
This is the story of a new travel “app”—application—which
illustrates how “crowdsourcing” can be used successfully to
help companies create new products for today’s generation of
consumers.
The story starts in late 2008, when Mark de Bruin, 9292’s
product manager for mobile Internet, told the management team
that a smartphone ground travel planner application for platforms
like the iPhone® would make sense. The number of smartphone
users was growing, application platforms were becoming more
stable, and the installed base of smartphones was beginning to
“Young developers were increasingly building applications
using public transport data on
the iPhone platform.”
9292 REISinformatiegroep B.V.
9292 ReiSinformatiegroep B.V. is a prominent Dutch internet
company and call center service that specializes in providing travel
information to travellers on the public transport network in the
Netherlands. it was established in 1991 by the public transport
companies and the Ministry of Transport as a cooperative project
organization. The company provides nationwide travel itineraries
across the entire network of trains, buses, trams, metros, and
ferries in the Netherlands.
climb to notable levels. At the same time, young developers were
increasingly building applications using public transport data on
the iPhone platform. Sometimes they were using data for apps
that was, at best, semi-legal.
We found this development strangely fascinating: Here was a
mobile device, with a fully functional platform, with a set of apps
that was reaching critical mass, with a distribution mechanism
through the Apple Store and i Tunes® and with a dedicated and
highly critical audience who were particularly tech-savvy. We
thought this phenomenon was interesting enough for us to explore.
I wondered, though, if we, as an organization, were equipped to
build applications ourselves or whether we should have others do
that for us. One business model—revenue-sharing—would allow
us to do the latter. Our first effort at building a GPS-aware travel
planner was a GPS launcher that basically took an individual’s
GPS position and used it to launch our mobile website on some-
one’s smartphone. Not a real application, but a step in the right
direction. It was cheap and fast, but it garnered us a lot of criti-
cism from the smartphone communities: This was not a real app,
people said. But what were we to do? Building and maintaining
apps on all platforms wasn’t inexpensive.
Breaking the paradigm
In early 2009 some 9292 managers had an impromptu brain-
storming session on mobile Internet product development after a
meeting with external partners. The question was how to lever-age the development
community outside of
9292. How should we
engage young talent on
the new scene? Should
we fight illegal use of
data, or cooperate and
explore new avenues
for 9292? After an
animated discussion,
we decided to start
deploying the talent that was out there in a totally new fashion
and write out a public contest for college students, which would
be the first of its kind in the Netherlands and would take place
in the spring of 2009. Looking back, this was a landmark shift,
“I wondered, though, if we, as an organization, were equipped
to build applications ourselves
or whether we should have
others do that for us.”
