Greek Ride , an app focused on facilitating and organizing the sober ride system, is set to launch next week.
Sophomores Martin Aguinis and Ben Gavette created the idea to make a safer sober ride system last year, Aguinis said.
“We’re talking about flaws in the greek system and how there’s this huge inconvenience of rides,” Aguinis said. “So we started thinking, why don’t we do something about it? And immediately the name Greek Ride came to me.”
The entrepreneurial pair purchased the domain name greekride.com and reached out to investors in Silicon Valley , Aguinis said. As investment offers started coming in, the next step was to develop the product itself.
Meanwhile, sophomore Liam Bolling had the same idea and began developing a prototype just a few months earlier.
“When I was going through associateship with Lambda Chi Alpha, I pretty much ran into the same issue of, ‘I’m tired of picking up five different phone calls while I’m driving for the night,”’ Bolling said. “It’s a risk, it’s horrible. And I was thinking ‘How can I fix this?’”
As Aguinis and Gavette searched for a developer, a mutual friend suggested Bolling. The trio combined forces to become co-founders of their company Bloom LLC and proceeded developing the app.
Bloom LLC has an advisory board and legal team behind it and recently expanded with specialized programmers for web, Android and iOS, Bolling said.
This summer, the boys dedicated an average of five hours a day working on the logistics of the app from separate parts of the country via Google Chat, Aguinis said.
“Over the summer we had so much time to think about every single avenue,” Bolling said. “So many little design choices. The amount of time and work we’ve put into this just makes it so flawless.”
Greek Ride was submitted to the Apple App store for confirmation Wednesday and is set to officially launch next week, Bolling said. Greek Ride is built cross-platform, so it will be available for iPhones, Androids and Windows phones.
“We thought that if we just launch on one platform, we’re not going to get everyone to use it,” Bolling said. “We want everyone to be using it as soon as possible.”
The app will be free and accessible to all IU students — greek and non-greek, Aguinis said. After downloading the app, users sign up using their phone numbers and Facebook login, Bolling said.
Users will have a profile on Greek Ride displaying their name, Facebook profile picture, organization and number of ride requests, Bolling said.
After requesting a ride, users will be able to call, message and live track their driver from the app, Bolling said. Both the rider and the driver see each other’s profile for safety.
“The difference between us and Uber is that we’re not creating a system like Uber did,” Aguinis said. “We’re grabbing a system that already exists and is inefficient and making it efficient.”
Being liaisons between drivers and users instead of coordinating rides reduces liability for Greek Ride in the event there’s an accident, Aguinis said.
Greek Ride uses the same level of industry-standard encryptions as sites like Facebook to reassure the information being sent will remain private, Bolling said.
The location data of users is wiped every 10 minutes to ensure the information is kept private, Bolling said.
“It’s extremely secure,” Bolling said. “We have very sensitive information of people’s location. We don’t want that getting out. We don’t think we should keep the history of where someone goes. That’s just inappropriate. It’s not needed.”
Risk management chairs of each chapter will control who has access as a sober driver. To register to be a driver, the user will enter the four-digit validation code given to them. The codes are changed every 24 hours for security, Aguinis said.
Each organization can tailor its accessibility to users as well.
This means fraternities have the option of making their sober drivers available to all Greek Ride users, certain greek chapters or only after a certain time, Aguinis said.
“It’s really gratifying knowing we’re creating something we think is going to make these rides so much safer,” Aguinis said. “Not to be extreme, but I honestly think we will be saving lives with this because it makes it a lot safer.”
