Have you heard… Courtesy of Bey2ollak Facebook page Bey2ollak is Cairo and Alexandria's only traffic service that functions the way it should be. With a thriving community, a clean and interactive app on every platform possible, Bey2ollak has quite literally saved the lives and jobs of many of its users. Though Bey2ollak has been around for a while, the application's popularity has reached an all-time high. Unbearable traffic has made Bey2ollak indispensable for thousands of users who simply cannot stomach the idea of battling through the streets during rush hour without it. Bey2ollak is based on a very simple idea; most major roads are listed on the app and users give live feedback on how the traffic is. The app updates each road visually according to feedback, in the form of traffic lights with different colors, thus giving you a clear idea which road to take, and more importantly which to avoid. “Bey2ollak is basically a platform for exchanging traffic information. We looked at the way people would informally communicate with each other and warn each other about the state of traffic. This was back in the summer of 2010 when it was just me and Ali Rafea," said Gamal Sadek, co-founder of Bey2ollak. The project then expanded to include Yehia Ismael, Mostafa Beltagy and Mohamed Rafea, in addition to cousins Sadek and Rafea. “The team we had ensured that we had the necessary expertise to build Bey2ollak without spending too much on hiring people. What we invested was mainly our time and money," said Sadek. After a small online survey, the team decided it was time to grab the idea before it became someone else's reality. The team designed a BlackBerry app due to its popularity and the prevalence of BlackBerry Messenger and launched on in October 2010. “The next day we had Vodafone approach us for a meeting and we now have an agreement with them. We also won the Google ‘Ebda2' competition which allowed us to use the prize money to expand and hire more aggressively," said Sadek. In addition to a main list of roads for both cities, the app allows you to create a list of “my roads" where only the roads you choose, the one you frequently take, are shown when you open it. This saves you time and the trouble of having to navigate through the long list of roads Bey2ollak has been adding over the past two years. The more users the app has, the better and more frequent the feedback is. The entire application is designed in romanised colloquial Arabic, clearly intended to be user-friendly. The idea works because Bey2ollak is unpretentious and even humorous at times with its choice of words. The choice of colloquial Arabic is explained by Sadek, “I already registered the domain name Bey2ollak and it had a ‘2' in it. I was very happy with the name because it is a popular and informal, quintessentially Egyptian expression people use every day. Then we looked at who we were targeting and we saw that it was those who were already online and complaining about traffic or warning each other but needed a platform. Did they speak in classical Arabic or pure English? No, they used a mix of Arabic and English and typed using the Latin alphabet, so this is what we used." The app is currently available for free on most platforms as well as on a website. It features Cairo, Alexandria and recently ‘Sa7el'; Egypt's very popular North Coast destination in the summer. Sadek says future plans for Bey2ollak include growing as a company and also possibly expanding to other cities, though not at the expense of quality. “We would like to expand of course but we have to ask ourselves whether there is a need for Bey2ollak in other Egyptian cities before we do. The problem is never the availability of users but whether we can help and whether the city is fit for such a service the same way Cairo or Alex is."
