BusBus – City Bus Routes (for Chennai, Mumbai and Bangalore)
While there are few in-car navigation systems, majority of Indians still travel by bus and the irony is that there are very few places online to get 
the bus routes.
BusBus is addressing this challenge for Chennai, Mumbai and Bangalore. Once you enter your search query (auto-suggest implemented), BusBus flushes out bus routes available – one can filter results by alighting points ).
Busbus is integrated with Google maps (click on bus name and get the detailed route on maps).
The product surely looks interesting (it takes sometime to understand the UI though), however there are couple of features missing in the current avatar – significant ones being bus timings and frequency of arrival/departure.
If you are from Bangalore, Mumbai or Chennai, do give BusBus a ride and share your feedback.
Related product: NearHop – Travel Planner (across Cities as well as Local routes)
About the author - Ashish Sinha is a Startup Mentor/Product Strategy Coach, and the founder/chief editor of pluGGd.in.
He has launched/managed couple of products (consumer as well as enterprise) in US and India, and now consults with startups/small businesses on their product/media strategy. He can be reached at: ashish (at) pluGGd.in [+91 98452 06443]
Nice. I tried out a few searches and it provides really useful info. I just bookmarked this site.
[...] BusBus.in offers details of bus routes in Chennai, Mumbai and Bangalore (I read about this site on PluGGd.in). As I imagine some people will view these bus route details while they’re on the go, I think a [...]
One idea for this startup – Why not tie up with local bus authorities, or even pvt. operators, for installing GPS systems on all buses and then providing real time data about bus movement and timings. This can then be tied up to an SMS based query system, where you send in the bus number or bus stop, and get the next bus arriving there. This would actually create a really valuable system, and I see a huge potential for this in a populated country like India!
while it is a website of decent utility – not sure of the revenue model of this website?
Great website. Simple and just works. Thanks for covering it.
>>however there are couple of features missing
>>in the current avatar – significant ones being
>>bus timings and frequency of arrival/departure.
You are kidding right? Do you think anyone in Mumbai/Chennai/Bangalore would know these things? Do you think the bus driver knows? This calls for prediction markets.
Excellent initiative. When I lived in California, I used the local information website regularly to plan my bus travel. Great to see it happening in India, it will increase the bus commute.
Suggestion: Also add the local train routes for Delhi / Mumbai.
IBM has developed a new protocol — Hyperspeech Transfer Protocol (HSTP) — which is similar to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).
“India now has over 360 million cell phone subscribers. Last month we added 15 million,” he said pointing out that the research technology targets ordinary mobile phone users, all of whom may not be literate.
Good work guys. Couple of things I came across while on your site:
1. the “City Select” could be placed next to your start/end boxes instead of at the top-right.
2. the searches can be better – my start/end selections got mixed up (see: http://shrinkd.com/images/busbus.jpg)
3. Good use of “static images” of google maps for showing bus routes.
4. I agree with @shivaas about tying up with local authorities. You dont want to be responsible for making updates to route changes, etc.
Good Luck.
Hi,
I wonder who the target audience for this site is. How many people who use the internet travel by bus, or vice versa? However, understand the utilitarian value of it, but cant sustain without a supporting revenue model.
Best