european entrepreneurs

Estonian travel tech company Turnit is starting a public beta test for its hands-free mobile ticketing solution Turnit BiBo, which enables seamless public transportation usage for the passengers. The test is conducted in the city of Tartu, Estonia under the brand Jiffi and is planned to launch at the beginning of 2018.

The road to hands-free mobile ticketing started in 2015, when the founder of Turnit, Andres Osula, had an idea to make the public transport paperless and as convenient as possible. Enter Turnit BiBo, a mobile ticketing solution for urban and suburban mass transport systems. It started as a startup called Jiffi, which won Ajujaht 2015, the biggest startup contest in Estonia. On the 1st of October 2017, Jiffi moved under one company and brand Turnit. Thus Turnit Bibo was born. The name Jiffi will remain in Tartu as the name of the application the passengers will use.

Turnit BiBo as a platform uses custom-made, secure Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons and micro-locating technology to detect accurately when smartphone-equipped passengers enter and exit the transport vehicle. It detects when the passenger enters and exits the vehicle meanwhile taking care of the payment automatically. The passenger doesn’t even have to take their phone out of the pocket. „The validation works seamlessly without any user action needed. This results in superior user experience for the passenger,“ explains Osula.

But the seamless experience for the passenger is only the first half of the solution. The CEO of Turnit, Andres Birnbaum, says that in addition to ticketing, Turnit BiBo functions as a source of information. „It provides highly valuable check-in and check-out data that is crucial for efficient route planning, multimodal transfer management and flexible pricing based on customers’ actual needs,“ adds Birnbaum.

Currently, Turnit BiBo is being piloted in the city of Tartu, Estonia, where the initial phase of closed group testing was successful. By the end of the first test, there were 2840 trips done with Jiffi in Tartu.  The next step towards commercial launch is the public beta testing that began November 13. It involves around 2000 testers, who are actively testing the system until the end of 2017. „The goal of this next stage is to collect more data from a bigger user group, because there are many different types of phone models that we need to test. A bigger test group brings out the specific needs and problems of different phone models that we can solve before the official launch. Making the system as reliable as possible for every user,“ said Birnbaum.

Turnit BiBo is planned to launch in Tartu at the beginning of 2018.

Turnit is a travel tech company with more than 20 years of industry experience. They provide mission-critical software technology and consultation to passenger transport industry. Company’s Turnit Ride platform is targeted for operators who require complex logistics management, dynamic pricing, and flexible responsiveness to the market situation, maximizing their revenue while streamlining their business processes. The platform, delivered as full service, processes around 8 million seat reservations annually and its services are used by over 40 operators across the world, including industry leaders like Transdev and Nettbuss. Their second product, Turnit BiBo, enables hands-free ticketing and crucial data collection in urban public transportation. Company headquarters with 50 employees is located in the digitally driven country of Estonia.