Last year I wrote an entry on how Wasalny is technically superior to Bey2ollak but due to how social apps work Bey2ollak is much more reliable. Which explained why Bey2ollak won the Google’s much coveted Ebda2 award. Seems like there is an interesting twist unfolding right now, in which Wasalny may end up having the upper hand.
Seems like the Kuwaity government is interested in using Wasalny as their official app, this twist means that Wasalny will have a new fresh start to grab the critical mass needed to maintain market superiority. This adoption grants wasalny access to this huge untapped gulf market, with most of the population being in their 20s-30s and most having access to a smart phone its a treasure trove that no one was able to break into prior to this point.
Kuwaiti leaders showed great support for the venture, installing the app on the electronic devices of every police officer and providing access to every billboards in Kuwait City to allow for real time traffic information.
Bey2ollak’s massive user base is irrelevant when it comes to global expansion, since the data set greatly relies on the location of the users contributing it. Furthermore one of the main reasons Bey2ollak was such a hit in egypt, the usage of funky franco arabi interface and street names actually works against it when we talk about regional expansion, I recon it’d be completely unreadable for none Egyptians. Bey2ollak team have been working on revamping their interface but they retained the quirky but cool franco arab routes designations, since it is one of their main selling points.
Bey2ollak full of terms only Egyptians would understand
Wasalny is a bit more standard
I believe Wasalny has a really interesting future ahead of it, with the partnership they have with Etisalat -which happens to have branches in most of gulf countries- and the official adoption by the Kuwaiti government its only a matter of time until it breaks into the gulf’s user base. Once the initial critical user base is achieved it’d be quite hard for any competitor to depose them.
**I’ll write a follow up post on the potential revenue streams traffic apps can generate.
sources http://www.wamda.com/1970/01/wasalny-co-founders-on-their-traffic-app-s-next-turn?ref=fb
