With the help of a company called Masabi, Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority is now offering commuters the option to pay for train tickets via smartphone.
The London-based company will make MBTA into America's first ticketless transit Utopia by Fall, 2012, after a test-drive that will take place over this coming summer.
Masabi is a small company backed by big money. The company employs a mere 35 people, but M8Capital backs the smaller business. If your first response to Masabi’s innovation is “Who cares?”, the answer is simple: M8 cares, and they have a lot of money involved. To give an idea of how big of a fish M8 is, the last investment of theirs that got press attention was the $10 million they put down on Aylus Networks (News - Alert) in June of 2011.
In November of 2011, Masabi and a partner company called Atos won the “Most Effective Mobile Ticketing Solution” award for proving the possibility of a 90-minute commute between London and Birmingham.
Ben Whitaker, chief executive at Masabi, is confident that the Massachusetts-based project will progress swimmingly. As he points out, if a program such as this one can get up and running in England, home of what is debatably the most complicated transit systems anywhere on earth, it can certainly work in Massachusetts.
Similar projects have been completed in Greece, China and Spain. Countries such as India are working alongside the US to install ticketless transit systems at this very moment.
So, how does “the ticket machine in your pocket” work? QR Codes. QR Codes are like bar codes, but they hold an exponentially larger amount of information, and you don't need a specialized scanning tool in order to use them. Any smartphone with a camera feature can use QR codes. Masabi's site provides more on some of the finer points on the issue.
Edited by Jennifer Russell
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