OFO bike in Chiang Mai - a failure of a share bike company
If you follow my stuff you are probably tired of hearing me talk about Mobike, a share-bike company that has thousands of bikes available all over the city that you can just use for basically as long as you want to for a very reasonable monthly fee of around $8. I was unaware that there was actually another company in the same city until I saw a yellow bike being ridden by someone that was not me last night.
The company is called OFO (i have no idea if that is an acronym or not) and their bikes look similarly clunky to the Mobikes that I have spent the last month or so racking up 300+ km of rides on.
Just to see what was going on I decided to download their app and see what sort of differences there are as far as the companies are concerned. I would say that one major difference right out of the gate is that the Mobike app is streamlined, functions wonderfully, and shows really quickly all the options that you have available to you in the surrounding area.
OFO's app on the other hand is a glitchy piece of crap. It kept rebooting on me as it would try to center in on my location. It seemed to have a hard time deciding if i was actually in Thailand or not.
source
it's supposed to look like this... it did not
When the app finally did launch, there were no bikes anywhere near my location. Actually there were very few that I could see anywhere.
I went online to have a look about this company and then came to the realization that the company may have folded in this country and the one OFO bike that I did see, may actually be a stolen bike where they have removed the GPS tracker and locking mechanism. Go back and look at the first photo and this kind of explains why the person riding this bike has another padlock on the bike. It would be completely unnecessary on at regular share bike to have your own chain / padlock.
So for the time being in Chiang Mai, the only company that really has any sort of presence in the share-bike world is Mobike and I have been really happy with them and highly recommend that you use them if you find yourself in the north of Thailand anytime soon.
Haha sounds like someone robbed that OFO bike from somewhere! Seeing as they’re using their own lock etc... but, they’re fairly heavy/clunky... well I guess if it’s free some don’t mind!
Do you have a Thai bank account that you link to your mobike app? I’m wondering in China if I can link my British account to certain things...
i don't know if mobike works that way but i didn't investigate. They have lots of ways to pay because Thai ppl generally speaking don't have credit cards. I used a credit card though.
oh good informations friend
thank you for sharing
Me I have a bitwin 340 bleu
resteemid
Lol!
thank you
Good investigating and would make perfect sense why they have a padlock and chain. I remembering reading about the bike share schemes some time ago and how many companies jumped in. I know the factory where we used to get our bikes from had virtually 6 months of orders to fulfill and we couldn't get all the stock we required because of this.
It looks like an interesting project for my brother but it will work out very well
Especially that they have GPS tracking
Thanks for the artical
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Sounds like it might be a good market for some healthy competition! If you were looking to start up a new business that is. I really do think these types of services are awesome and it is cool to see all of the features that they have integrated into the app. I didn't realize that they had GPS tracking on them too. That is pretty ingenious. If you were to improve on the service what would you do?
Okay I will use Mobile, good to know. Once Bitcoin is back at 20k. ;)