Find a carpool buddy with Carticipate

Written on August 03, 2008 by Josh Pigford and 10 people have commented

With gas prices costing an arm and a leg these days, people have found that carpooling is a great way to cut down on costs. Trouble is, it’s not always that easy to find a group of people that are traveling to your general destination.

Thankfully, with the iPhone’s location aware capabilities and the release of Carticipate, you can now make that task easier!

Carticipate helps you find other’s in the area (who also are Carticipate users) so you can find a buddy to carpool with. Simply drop in where you are going and when you want to go there and you will find others in your area that are on that same route so you can work out some traveling options.

Obviously this app only really works if there are other people in your area using Carticipate, but the potential here is really great.

One big thing going here to help with adoption rates of this app is that it doesn’t cost a dime. Yep, completely free! So if you’ve got an iPhone, be sure to download the app and see how it goes. Who knows, you might be able to reduce your gas bill a bit this month.

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#1 Goobi says:
Nice. Although it does need a big user base to be of any use. Here’s to iPhone selling 100 mil in 1 year!
#2 brian says:
you can also check out the iPhone carpool calculators at iphone.ridesearch.com.
their website already has over 6500 users and is a free nationwide carpool matching system.
#3 Blain Hamon says:
Thanks! I’m the iPhone dev for Carticipate, and we’re (the company’s 3 people, currently) working on the whole needing a big user base thing, among a lot of other features.

One thing that was figured out is that if you have a group of friends/club/local mailing list, you don’t need as large a user base. For things like common events (going to the movies or big game) the usefulness goes up as both time and place are concentrated.

If there’s anything you’d like in the app, definitely email features@(the company/app name).com. I, uh, probably should get back to coding.
#4 David says:
You should contact VPSI Inc. http://www.vpsiinc.com. They are the world’s largest carpooling company with over 25 years of experience.
#5 dave Sag says:
Is this app USA only or will it work anywhere?
#6 Blain Hamon says:
Currently, it’s USA only, but that’s changing soon. I finished putting in an Contacts-like address editor, to list the countries and handle the wide variety of address formats, that’ll be in the next version. Unfortunately, it’s a bit of a catch-22 with testing, especially for countries that have more detailed addresses than the US. For example. the Ukraine has an additional Postal District that doesn’t have anything similar in the US.

I’m not sure which stores are next, but it’ll probably be limited at first just to make sure there’s no show-stoppers (Or, rather, limit the show stopping). Given that translation/localization hasn’t been finished yet, it’ll probably be english-speaking countries and western europe first.
#7 Eric Dewhirst says:
If you want the largest carpooling site in the world you need to go to PickupPal.com. With over 100,000 registered and active users worldwide, (45,000 in the US), it is the leader in online ridesharing. Stay tuned for PickupPal’s iPhone app coming out soon.
#8 Steffen Frost says:
Thanks for the great write up on Carticipate.

We gave a talk on carticipation last week in Palo Alto at the Silicon Valley iPhone Developers’ Meetup.

Here is the video for those interested:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaphdB6Wafs