LIVE FROM GSMA MOBILE 360 NORTH AMERICA: Bringing mobile technology to public transport is the way to “get in the front door to city life”, Josh Robin, VP for North America at Masabi, said in a keynote session about smart cities.

Noting the existing model for selling tickets, Robin said that “the traditional answer in public transport was more infrastructure, it was always about more stuff”.

“The problem is that putting that stuff out there costs a lot of money,” he continued.

In addition to the cost, deploying new infrastructure is complex, time consuming, and requires ongoing field maintenance. “I always used to say that the last thing we needed in the world was more guys with their buttcracks hanging out, across eastern Massachusetts,” Robin said.

Citing a rollout of Masabi’s m-ticketing technology in Boston, he said that “within two months we were serving about 10 per cent of riders, within about six months we had the same number of tickets being sold on the phone as being sold by these vending machines which cost thousands of dollars a pop, and within basically a year we were serving about 25 per cent of riders”.

And with users interacting with the company’s app on a daily basis to buy tickets, “there are tremendous possibilities to leverage that interactivity”.