Thursday last week at the Royal Ballroom of Eros Hilton, Delhi was an evening to remember! From over 291 nominations across categories, Olacabs emerged the winner in the travel and tourism category of the mBillionth Award, South Asia- 2013.

The Olacabs mobile application for Android and iOS is the first of its kind in the whole of Asia which allows users to view, plan, book and even track a cab in real-time through the app. The application has added benefits like user safety, transparency and hassle-free trip experience that makes it a full blown personal transport solution that a user can blindly trust. The jury also appreciated the social impact created by the business model – using available cab inventory efficiently to maximize supply rather than adding more cars to the road and creating a strong entrepreneurial ecosystem at the driver’s end directly impacting livelihoods and socio-economic status of over 4000 families.

The mBillionth Award recognizes outstanding application of mobile innovations across 9 categories from countries all over South Asia. This is hosted jointly by the Digital Empowerment Foundation and the Vodafone Foundation in association with IAMAI, Mint and PwC. The jury comprises of experts from disciplines as wide as mobile, internet, social entrepreneurship, media, academia, corporate as well as the Government. We congratulate Redbus and SmartShehar who were co-winners in the category. Other notable nominees included MakeMyTrip.com and Cleartrip.com.

You sure want to know more about the award and what we feel about it- read here.

How often have you spent endless minutes on the phone, waiting for someone to help you with a cab booking? Haven’t you always wished that your cab booking was as simple as wish, touch go! Enter the Olacabs mobile app with a whole host of features to make your life on the road effortless.

The Olacabs app does much more than just getting you a cab. The intent is to simplify your booking experience and make it a one touch process, everytime you book a cab and this is made possible by those tiny features that you might have probably not discovered for yourself.

The #KnowThyApp series is a set of flashard tutorials that help you uncover every one of these features that could make your life simpler. You could pinpoint your exact location, choose your car type, locate the nearest taxi, mark your favorite pickups or even get yourself an invoice!

For instance, you really don’t have to search for your current location everytime you stray away. Simply hit the ‘locate me’ button and the location point automatically comes back to your current location on the map! Small thing, but saves you the pain of hunting for your exact location on a 4 inch screen!

In the first part of this series, we bring you nine different features that will enhance your cab booking experience. The second part will acquaint you with your account related details like sending an invoice, applying an offer code etc. Watch out for this.

When we started Delhi as our 3rd city in November 2012, we were positive this would be one market where we would want to permanently redesign the way ground transportation happens. The Delhi metro, has remained a mass solution. Autos continue to be a meter-less option, effectively meaning you pay by mood. Buses are surely not safe anymore. Gurgaon needs no introduction on the pathetic ground transport options available.

With frequent no-shows and terrible experiences if their cab did arrive, we took a bold decision to go live for Delhiites with few cars on the road. The response was overwhelming, not just from customers but also operators and drivers. All this trust stems from the Ola standard of training, ownership, stress on cab quality through frequent audits and technology integration that enables the driver / operator to function more as  a stakeholder in a larger scheme of things than your regular cabbie!

While the service quality, on-time performance and the overall booking experience is second to none with an Ola, our awesome offers for Delhi, be it Gurgaon10 or Airport399 (and many more to come) have been runaway hits.

By end of June, we doubled the number of cabs on road in the Delhi NCR region- a strong sign of the number of drivers/operators across size and scale who are keen on working with us and also the number of customers who love to say Ola to us, everyday! Read more about our fleet addition here.