Bike-sharing company ofo adds geofencing capabilities in Singapore

Ofo, the bike-sharing company, has announced updates to its geofencing technology. Developed in-house, the Noah geofencing platform will help encourage users to park at preferred parking zones. The feature creates a virtual boundary that will be able to detect whether users have ended their rides within the geofenced area, also known as the preferred parking zone. Users who park within the preferred parking zones will be rewarded with one extra credit in their app.

The move is in line with guidelines set out in an agreement announced earlier this month among the Land Transport Authority (LTA) in Singapore, all five bike-sharing operators, the National Parks Board and all 16 town councils, ofo said.

Geofencing technology was successfully implemented during ofo’s Oxford, UK launch in August, and will be systematically introduced to all the cities that ofo has a presence in, to mitigate issues around indiscriminate parking. To date, ofo has geotagged 1,400 locations across Singapore primarily around bus stops, MRT stations, and under HDB blocks. It is set to geotag up to 2,000 of these preferred parking zones so that they show up with a ‘P’ sign on the mobile application that is required to operate an ofo bike. Noah is able to detect if ofo bikes with Global Positioning System (GPS)-enabled smart locks are parked within one of the 1,400 preferred parking zones.

"The true differentiator lies in our rewards system, which helps inculcate long-term, positive riding habits in our users,” said Alan Jiang, ofo’s latest hire as Regional GM, Southeast Asia. The company will be introducing an incentive programme that allows users to exchange their credits for a reward at selected merchants at the later stages of implementation.

The company is gradually replacing the old bikes with mechanical locks in order to make way for greater effectiveness when dealing with errant parking. In September, ofo announced that its latest fleet of bikes have GPS-enabled locks that are certified safe by the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) Singapore. At the time, ofo said that it is the first and only bike sharing company that has filed for and received this machine-to-machine (M2M) certification in compliance with the Telecommunications Act.

Each GPS-enabled lock contains a SIM card which allows users to easily locate and unlock the bike. While a GPS-enabled lock increases location accuracy, allowing users to find and use the bikes easily, an uncertified lock brings with it a host of cybersecurity threats, ofo explained.

Founded in 2014, ofo has connected over 10 million bikes with 200 million global users in more
than 180 cities across 17 countries. The platform generates 32 million transactions per day and
has provided more than 4 billion rides in total.

A girl scans the QR code at a street corner in Shenzhen, China to unlock an ofo bike ride.

Users accumulated a riding distance of over 1.2 billion km, reducing 84 million litres of
fuel consumption and 265,000 tons of carbon dioxide from just April to June of 2017 alone.
The company raised US$700 million in its Series E funding led by Alibaba, Hony Capital and CITIC Private Equity in July, 2017.