Mobile App – Tell your Train Ticket Status
An app to tell your train ticket status
PANAJI: Come Diwali or Christmas holidays and thousands of Goans in Bangalore and Mumbai begin to fret as they plan their trip home. With thousands of tourists traveling to Goa for the holiday, 60% of them by rail, it is nigh impossible to get tickets.
Booking a railway ticket during this time through IRCTC is nothing short of excruciating which only worsens when the end result is a waitlisted ticket. Till date, all one could do was pray for a confirmed ticket or opt for the more expensive tatkal service, which is equally dicey. Until, three upstarts in their 20s thought differently.
In 2012, while working at IBM, Dinesh Kumar Kotha and Sripad Vaidya decided to employ their data analytic skills to design an algorithm that could predict whether a waitlisted ticket could get confirmed. After testing over two lakh tickets and getting a 75% success rate, Confirmtkt was born. Realizing that they were on to something significant, the two quit their jobs and decided to better Confirmtkt.
In July 2014, they launched the Confirmtkt (app bit.ly/1O7UIxq) which not only notified users when a ticket gets confirmed but also lets users check their PNR status. Till date, the app which is available for Android and Windows smartphones has been downloaded by 3 lakh users across the country. It has processed 5.64 crore ticket queries and predicted 1.41 crore tickets with an impressive 98% success rate, said Kotha who hails from Telangana.
Keen to continue growing, the duo took in Ponda-lad Pranav Chimulkar as part of the core team.
“We were not happy with the 98% so we went ahead and enabled machine learning. The software now learns from those mistakes where the prediction was wrong,” Chimulkar said.
The guys at Confirmtkt went one step further. “When a direct ticket is unavailable and the chances of getting a ticket confirmed are slim, we suggest breaking up the journey,” Vaidya said.
Despite tickets being unavailable, railway statistics indicate that nearly 57% of tickets available go unutilized. “There are several ticket quotas. By breaking the journey, the user only has to change the seat or coach and not the train,” Vaidya added.
ConfirmTkt has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Pravin Agarwala among other angels.
Source : Times of India
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