One of India’s most popular taxi aggregator, recently launched an Offline feature for its user. This new feature would allow the users to surf through the Ola App to book a cab without internet. The launch of this feature from Ola would be available in 4 metro cities as of now. The launch will be, if not, a test to check the compatibility of the whole offline spectrum of this feature. If successful, the featured would be then escalated to all the 102 cities where the company operates as of now. Ankit Bhati, CTO & co-founder of the company, said that the feature was piloted in several smaller markets like Indore and Nagpur, and saw significant acceptance among the consumers in these cities over the past few weeks. The key feature of this new add-on would be the availability to book a cab while being offline on your smartphone.
Why this feature?
The most important question here is that why the company has launched such a feature? Well, to answer that, we have to look at the problem which people have while booking a cab for themselves. A large part of smartphone internet users run their phones on wi-fi, however, to book an Ola, one must have a data package on their phone. So, the solution was to provide the offline feature. This is also a solution to the people who are out of their internet data package while booking out for a cab via Ola.
About Ola :
ANI Technologies Pvt. Ltd., operating under the trade name Ola, is an Indian online transportation network company. Ola was founded as an online cab aggregator in Mumbai, but is now based out of Bangalore.
It was founded on 3 December 2010 by Bhavish Aggarwal (currently CEO) and Ankit Bhati. As of 2014, the company had expanded to a network of more than 200,000 cars across 100 cities. In November 2014, Ola expanded to incorporate autos on-trial basis in Bangalore. Post the trial phase, Ola Auto expanded to other cities like Delhi, Pune, Chennai and Hyderabad and Kolkata starting December 2014. In December 2015, Ola expanded its auto services in Chandigarh, Indore, Jaipur and Guwahati, Visakhapatnam. Ola is valued at $5 billion as of September 2015.
Good Move Ola..!
There could be more types of memes and jokes about Baba Ramdev and Patanjali than the number of products the company have in the market. But the fact that none of these memes and jokes makers match the success of a dhoti wearing baba is near the fame which Baba Ramdev developed in recent years. The company is a multi-million dollar company and if everything goes well, it could be a billion dollar company (in profits) in coming months. The fact that it have a lot more than what an ecommerce company needs, it could be the most successful company in India in the etailing space.
They are not funded and therefore do not worry about the funding rounds which keeps a lot of startups breathing. They can venture on their own, suffer the losses (if any) and can compensate on the offline side of the sales. There is no pressure from the investors and the company would be working on its own will and experiments.
People use the products, love them, but do not discuss about them because it is not cool because a ‘dadhi-wala baba’ is endorsing some cheap but quality products. Furthermore, penetration in the Indian market is good already, therefore the company needs not to introduce the brands and the products with some gloomy ads as the Yoga-camps already did it earlier 
. There are numerous other reasons but these one seems more prominent as of now. Anyways, what awaits with any startup is an opportunity in multiple dimensions.
