iCarsclub :: Review

~ michael_msft ~ 16 Comments

I have been quite vocal about my experience with http://www.icarsclub.com because I was looking forward to taking advantage of it in Singapore. People outside of Singapore may not know that owning a car in Singapore is for rich folks or people who don’t mind 1/3 of everything they make going to towards their car. I see in my own condo building, not high end, very expensive cars that look to be rarely driven. I am sure these folks are car poor cause if I had that kind of money I would probably be living in a bigger pad. In Singapore some locals choose to live cheap but own a car – I guess some sort of status symbol of sorts. All that being said though, it is nice to be able to get in a car once in a while, especially when one has a family. Sometimes the public transit thing is just a lot of work if one wants to roam around town on errands or go somewhere slightly further than normal – like the Kranji countryside for example. Taxis are okay in Singapore but if you were to use one all day it would be cheaper to rent a car – even UberX is awesome (prices in Singapore are the same as a taxi right now) but yet using Uber all day would still be more than renting a car.

So the idea that I can share someone else’s car for a day at reasonable rates without the hassle of dealing with a rental car company is appealing. Enter iCarsclub. Find a car near you, rent it online, go drive it and return it. Sounds great but what I discovered is the promise is so much better than the execution. I will add I successfully rented a car yesterday and all in all was a great experience but the issue is dealing with the service and the company – not the driving experience.

The way it works with iCarsclub is to go online to their site and submit the docs you need to get verified to rent cars. No biggie – it says it takes 3 days. Right. It actually took 3 weeks to get approved which I assume is just cause there is either a backlog or no one working on it. The frustrating part is when I used their support to check in on things – there was never any reply. To this day actually not one support email has been answered. Then I took to twitter – no replies. Left a message on their Facebook page – no replies. Again – to this day there has never been any replies to any of my social media messages. None.

Approved and ready to rock I started to find a car. The selection is actually pretty good and I was surprised to find some pretty cool cars but I was looking for cheap and no too far away from me. This is where I found the service to be badly implemented in that it looks like pretty much all cars are always available but what happens is that the owners of the cars are not blocking their own usage. It only shows when someone else has rented the car. For the first car I rented, which means you have to pay all the fees associated with it – will discuss the payment stuff more later, everything appeared to work fine. Yet moments after reserving the car and paying for it the system would sms tell me the owner rejected my request. Of course being the ass that I am I would sms the owner back to ask why – first owner said his car was in use every Sunday and I asked him why he didn’t block it as so. He said he wasn’t aware of needing to do that. So the owners are just accepting or rejecting based on their schedule versus updating the system to say the car is blocked. Lame. What’s lamer is I as the user can’t leave a review on that car since one can only leave reviews when you have rented the car already. This is silly.

So minutes later I found another car, I got the refund from the last attempt which is not a refund but a credit to the rental account. This is not a huge deal but when you get rejected a lot this could be frustrating but it seems there is a way to force a refund but I didn’t try it. The next rental went the same way – the user rejected it mins later. I again sms’d them and the owner said they were using the car for personal use. Again I asked why they didn’t block it and they didn’t reply. It seems the owners are not at all aware of how to use the system properly.

Finally I rented a car and everything was confirmed for Sunday at 2pm. Around Sunday at 12 I sms’d the owner to confirm pickup spot. Owner replied that he had canceled the rental due to car trouble. Did I get a cancellation message – no. Owner said to call iCarsclub but I didn’t have a number. No where in all the emails and sms’s did I see a number. While this was happening someone called me from iCarsclub. A no caller ID call that I almost didn’t pick up – I don’t get why they can’t use caller ID so that one can at least see a number and call back. I answered and they said they were canceling the car and the money would be back in my account and that I would need to find another car.

Since I finally had someone on the line I decide to go all in and ask what the fuck was wrong with them.

Let me summarize some of this:

Q/A –

Why is no one responding to FB or twitter :: They don’t think they need to reply to social media. Plus they are busy opening China.

Why does no one respond to the online help system (powered by Zopim) :: They never got any emails from me. (I sent 4).

Why do the owners constantly cancel versus blocking their cars :: They probably don’t know how or are lazy.

Why can’t we complain in same way about these owners :: They don’t want any bad feedback about owners since they may leave the system.

Isn’t the users renting just as important as the owners when it comes to service :: No comment.

I tried to dig in more but the guy obviously didn’t know much and said he would try to find another car and sms where it was. I still needed to go online and book it.

Which I did and the request was confirmed by the owner. He sms’d me to say where is was, same as what the system was saying, and that it would be unlocked with the keys in the glove box. Now this is where it is weird in that with a country like Singapore this might work but in most countries I would want that car locked until it unlocked for me. How else would you know you are safe or that someone did not tamper with the car resulting in some damage that I might have to pay for. For this transaction it was on a nice street and in broad daylight but who would want to rent a car at night that was unlocked for example? Not me. This is where I am not sure if they don’t have the tech to remote unlock and lock stuff or if this is just how the owner does it. It worked in this situation but I don’t think this is scalable or would work outside of ultra safe countries like Singapore.

I grabbed the car and settled in. One thing I forgot was to get my own cash card for ERP and parking – I don’t remember this being in the tutorial but is pretty important in Singapore since pretty hard to get around without it. Fortunately I could stop into any gas station and buy one. Small Singapore formality that cannot be forgotten. I used the car almost all day and even extended it by 30 mins cause we were late getting home.

The return consisted of parking it back on the street in that same place and putting the keys back where I found them. Of course the car was unlocked since that is how I found it. I did use the system to end the time and stop the insurance but this did not involve remote locking it. Once again I see where this could be problematic – what if someone stole it right after me or took something from it. My time would be marked as over but would it come back on me in any way? The system should do remote lock and unlock or something more secure.

It cost me bout 85 SGD for everything. I don’t know how that compares to a car rental – I need to check but my experience with any car rental is this was less hassle. All of our trips on public transit would obviously be much less but I don’t think we could have covered the same ground by bus and train in the same time period. Taxi’s or uber covering all the same ground would be much more. A combo of transit and uber would be much less and doable but still the hassle factor is much higher.

So this worked for me. I got to use a car for a part of the day. We will most likely do it again and I don’t think there is another option besides iCarsclub but this product could use a lot of help. On the payments since this service suffers from what a lot of services in Singapore suffer from – they only accept PayPal for credit cards via PayPal. No drama since credit cards are the norm here but the process is so cumbersome and web only. Payments in Singapore for online services need some competition from the likes of Strip and others ASAP.

ICarsclub needs to hire some real product folks to make this work.

Consumer services update – iCarsClub, veggies, and broken iPhone 5

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

So after about 2 weeks http://www.icarsclub.com finally approved my application for their service. I think it normally takes 3 days or at least that is what they say. Still no replies to my support emails or tweets. A fail then on all levels for customer service – what if I start using the service? How do I reach them?

On the vegetable front I tried this place :: http://www.greencircle.com.sg. In general it worked well but I think they could communicate a little better. I did the online order form which sends you a confirmation email. After that nothing happened but then my wife rang me to say someone left a box of veggies at our door. We didn’t know when they were coming and yes, get this – I never paid them. Still need to work that out. Veggies are good though and I will use them again. I might even pay them too. 😉

Last but not least my little girl dropped my iPhone 5 face down on the train yesterday and shattered the glass. I hunted around for someone to repair it near where I live and found this guy :: http://mworks.weebly.com. He quoted (130 sgd) over the phone and I went right over. Fixed it in like 20 mins and put a nice screen cover on it. Very friendly guy that Vincent and does awesome work. Even corrected one of the dents on the side of the phone so the new glass could lay down all the way into the phone. I may take him my bashed iPad mini and my other iPad with cracked glass. Highly recommend his work.

back to work…

Consumer services in Singapore…

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

I tweeted this yesterday mostly out of frustration with trying out a consumer service here in Singapore with horrible customer service. Looking at you http://www.icarsclub.com/. I signed up over a week ago – about 2 weeks now – for their iCarDriver service where you get access to automated short term car sharing. My app is still processing:

iCarDriver
To rent and keyless enter nearby cars affordably
PROCESSING

Okay – no drama. I user their online customer support email thingy twice. No replies.

I tweet at them in a friendly, like is anywhere there kind of way, and no response. Nothing. How does a consumer company not answer any emails or tweets? Appalling.

Seems they have not tweeted in 30 days. How is that possible?

Check out the tweet search about them – just all stuff about funding and nothing about customers, traction or customer service.

Yet this is a company recently funded – https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/car-sharing-startup-icarsclub-raises-035538613.html

Maybe they are just annoyed by me, wannabe paying customer, asking for help. I just don’t get it.

But this brings me back to my other feeling about the local ecosystem coverage. There is not much depth to it. It is announcements about starting/funding, then the buzz about someone doing well and then the general industry coverage. There is not a lot about actual reviews of the service, report cards on how companies are doing and a little, but not much about the failing companies – how they failed and what the peeps at the failed places are now doing. I am not bashing the coverage or the people that cover the scene – just highlighting what I think is missing.

Will anyone with a bigger voice than me look into the iCarsClub weirdness? Probably not.

Next I will look into one of these organic vegetable services.

Fear BizDev

~ michael_msft ~ 1 Comment

So JDFI 2014a is over. Check the videos here :: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QO7W6ePtwM8&list=UU77igO-PM8Ww1pWCjfYdfUw

What a great event and investors are frothing to get at the startups. awesome.

I had great fun mentoring a few of them.

I have had some follow up talks post demo day and I thought I would share one tidbit.

There is always a few big companies swarming around startups looking to grow their own business via partnering with a startup. Startups are small and looking to grow so initially the thought of working with a big company looks really appealing – a growth strategy of sorts. Well – let me warn you – many times partnering or doing some sort of business development deal #BizDev can usually be worse than not partnering at all.

Some of the pros:

– Getting users
– Getting traffic without paying for it
– Getting some PR
– Being able to tell investors you are working with or have signed a deal with so and so
– Learning from a big company

But in reality what can happen is the cons:

– It might take months to bring the project online
– You will have all the red tape to sort
– You will be at the mercy of the big company development and QA schedules
– Investors will think that the deal is more important than it really is and hound you about it. Not realizing the schedule is now out of your hands
– You might find that the cost of the users was more expensive than just buying the users via marketing
– You probably won’t learn a lot from the big company cause in reality they are learning from you
– The PR is not that big of a deal – sure it helps but it won’t make your startup

I am not saying don’t do #BizDev but have a healthy skepticism for how hard it is, how it may slow you down and how it may throw you off your core business plan.

Sometimes #BizDev is better in the middle stages of a startup than the early stages.

Just saying…

AWS does need to get a mobile story together

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

I am a big fan of AWS but I will call a spade a spade – their mobile services suck but really they just don’t have any.

Good article on the current situation is here :: http://gigaom.com/2014/07/08/cloud-favorite-aws-is-finally-ready-to-join-the-mobile-development-services-party/

We love AWS at Spuul and wouldn’t be here without it. Yes – you can find cheaper services to run virtual machines on – we know that but when it comes to running a global service with servers we can spin up around the globe – I still think AWS has no equals. None.

However doing some simple things on AWS for mobile is well – not simple. We tried to build our push messaging stack around it and we hit too many walls and had our messages capped per day. AWS had no concept of our user base and the ability for us to buy messages in volume. We went to PushWoosh cause it was simple and cheap. Everything else we do we hand roll behind an API that we run on AWS using AWS services. We always try to use a service versus install code on a server so we have less things to support and update. This keeps our admin headcount low. I won’t tell you how low but let’s say it can’t go any lower.

MSFT is doing a good job with mobile services but I have no first hand experience with it but I know they make some things dead simple – like push messaging, among others. AWS is never really dead simple but it works and you know what you are dealing with.

Mobile is the thing and my guess even the next thing is all about – mobile.

AWS needs to up their mobile game.

I am watching.

Any yes – Brazil really did get spanked.

The 3rd one

~ michael_msft ~ 3 Comments

It’s more a question than a statement. All one has to do is watch WWDC and Google I/O to see that Apple and Google are in a league of their own.

I keep thinking that Windows Phone is the one holding on to 3rd place but it seems like they are barely holding on according to this – http://gigaom.com/2014/06/30/windows-phone-sales-are-falling-in-the-u-s-and-china-according-to-new-survey/. Meaning they are only going to get 3rd place cause no one else is doing better than MSFT. Kind of a sad state.

I still think a healthy ecosystem in mobile phones would be the best thing for all of us product folks but of course I say that knowing the truth of the paradox – I am rooting for a 3rd place but I am not using anything or building anything for the runner up. There in lies the issue – if no one builds for #3 then there won’t be a #3. We want there to be one but we are not really supporting anyone right now apart from the two lead dogs.

This is kind of scary.

I played around with Firefox OS some and well – it’s interesting but has a long ways to go before I would use it or build on it.

We can see BlackBerry is still trying, http://crackberry.com/exclusive-pre-release-review-blackberry-passport, but seriously would you buy one of these phones? I wouldn’t. Someone might but I think BB will be a niche hardware maker with an OS not many developers are going to build for. I guess they may eventually make a great takeover target for some Chinese handset maker wanting to hedge their android bets.

So where does that leave the playing field?

Apple and Google getting it all or will MSFT do something cool – other than add folders?

Messing with your brain

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

I am sure you have all heard about the Facebook experiment – I really don’t know what to say other than I am not surprised.

What it brings me to is realizing that a lot of us in the product world need to think about when designing our products that the human mind is complex – we tend to build things sometimes without remembering this. Meaning there is lot more to your product than the bits – you have to think about how people will react to it and how you might be able to invoke the reactions you want.

I found this video on pricing to help ton when thinking about pricing, market fit and feature matrixes.

http://www.heavybit.com/library/video/2013-07-16-michael-dearing

Love this section:

20 bucks.

Most common answer I’ve ever heard is 20 bucks. Some people say 30, some people say 40, but 20 is a very good guess. Now, what if I told you that that toaster had a mechanical timer that allowed you to get exactly the right level of golden deliciousness that you wanted on that piece of toast?

Do you see what I’m doing? I’m reaching into your brain, and I’m playing with your idea of what is value. I’m moving around the assumptions and beliefs that you have about what makes for good toast, and what makes for a good toaster. And I’m going to do it again. This toaster that I want to sell you has faster warm up, and that ensures that there’s perfect browning from the first slice to the last slice. You know, that terrible situation where you toast the first one and it doesn’t quite toast. And you toast the second and the third and they turn out to be charcoal? This solves that problem completely.

You feel what I’m doing, right? I’m going into the command line of your human OS and I’m playing with it.

enjoy!

It’s tough to bank on Google

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

It’s Google I/O time and it’s another conference, like WWDC, that I wish I was attending. Despite that I am not going, I still need to pay attention since Google will inevitably announce something that I will have to consider building on or for. Android is still the biggest thing to come from Google, and startups, like Spuul, have to build on android. There is still some schools of thought that say stick with iOS or start with iOS and deal with android later. However, if you are doing anything at all in Asia or the emerging markets you have to be on android. Period. But I insist that the money for paid services is still in iOS. Android users just don’t pay the way iOS users do – not even close.

Like with WWDC, Google will spend the week announcing a ton of things – I won’t even bother trying to play soothsayer since I don’t think it makes sense to. But I am more sensitive than I have been in the past at taking Google products seriously.

I think the biggest problem with whatever Google will announce is deciding which products or platforms to bank on. I see android TV is already getting some pre announcement love and folks are blessing it as the new thing for Google and it’s love affair with TV. Let me be first the first to say I hope it works cause god knows the current TV ecosystem is fucked. My money is still on Apple TV cause it works, it’s dead simple to build on and we know Apple values ecosystem lock in which means Apple TV is here to stay.

Android TV? Who the hells knows. Google TV was also heralded as the savior for the TV ecosystem and the next best thing to sliced bread for developers working around the TV. What happened to it? It was promising but in typical Google fashion it was essentially a beta that never made it out of beta. I understand why Google does this but it makes it hard to know which beta projects to depend on or bet your company’s development dollars on. Once bitten, twice shy.

I am sure some big companies can jump on every new Google dream in hopes of being the front runner and to ensure that big companies stay big but as a startup I don’t have that luxury. We actually semi invested in Google TV cause it was easy to stick to HTML 5 and HLS for a host of Smart (which we all know means hella dumb) TV platforms. Google TV was almost a reference platform of sorts and mostly just worked – wish I could say the same for the supposed Dumb TV platforms which are some of the worst shipping ecosystems of the modern day web.

But Google TV was a dud and once it looks like a dud the normal Google response is to not really kill it, that’s far too easy for them, but to let it just limp along pretending to be alive but we all know it’s actually the walking dead. Then Google got Apple envy and decided to make chromecast which on paper, plus based on sales, seems to be rocking. But some studies are showing that it’s not being used much. This doesn’t surprise me cause unlike an Apple TV, chromecast is not super user friendly. Yes it works, but it is a pain to setup and is buggy as hell. I am actually hoping that Google will re affirm their commitment to it during I/O, fix all the bugs and double down on it since I think it has legs.

As a techie though it is shocking how much Google forgot to ship with chromecast. Security for streams was not something they focused on but has improved some with updates. At Spuul we still find that HD content with encryption creates brain freezes faster than swallowing a Magnum in one go. The real shocker with chromecast though is there is no easy way to serve video ads with it. Yes – a video product from Google that doesn’t even have a premium content focus has no hooks to any of the standard video ad platforms – not even Google’s own video ad platform. I find this quite comical since if they aren’t going to focus on premium content, something folks pay for, one would think they would make it easy to stream free content with ads.

I hear Google is going to announce something new on the TV front, which I guess means Google TV is dead, but this action will call in to question what the plan is with chromecast. My guess is Android TV has different goals than chromecast so one would hope both platforms are a go and will see proper investment by Google. However, it wouldn’t surprise me to see Android TV getting all the attention while chromecast starts to whither on the vine.

I will be watching the announcements and doing my best to read the tea leaves as to what Google makes that actually will still be going strong in a few years.

Time to update my Google minus account via my Vizio Google TV chrome browser.