Murugesh Annadurai works in the Bay Area.
By Raif Karerat
With the plethora of ride hailing apps that have inundated smartphones of late, Indian American Murugesh Annadurai, a senior software engineer at a Bay Area-based tech company, saw room for improvement in the way people went about choosing which service to use.
Annadurai subsequently set out on a six-month quest to develop Zailoo, a free cost-comparison app that can sort ride-hailing options based on price and wait times.
“When I was trying to figure out which service to use, it was always a painful process,” Annadurai told Las Vegas Review-Journal. “In San Francisco, I would have to look at one app’s service, then look at another and then another before making a decision about which was best for me at the time.”
When users punch an originating address and destination into Zailoo, it calculates the distance and estimated travel time of the ride. Based on those estimates, the app produces a list of available services and fare approximations. It also gives an estimated time of arrival of the closest vehicle, and indicates when peak- fare pricing is in effect for the two most popular ride-hailing apps, Uber and Lyft.
Furthermore, in the future, the app will aggregate coupons and promo codes, according to its Google Play page.
Regarding the name of his app, Annadurai stated he wanted to find something that demonstrated the frustration of hating to search multiple applications for a simple solution.
“Some tech companies have been coming out recently that started with the letter Z,” he told The Review-Journal. “I don’t know. Zailoo. That sounds kind of techie, doesn’t it?”