On Wed, Jul 28, 2010 at 11:18 AM, saidimu apale <saidimu@gmail.com> wrote:
Project Goal: ========= - A system for receiving, sending and tracking petrol/gas prices within Nairobi petrol stations. You can then schedule to fill-up at specific stations, knowing they are the cheapest within a particular range. - The primary use-case will be via SMS, but a web-interface may be added as well.
Most fantastic idea! Seems like most skunks here think in the same wavelength. This idea too has been in my back burner for a while, at one point, I got so inspired I hired someone to travel around town collecting fuel prices; he did so for about 100 petrol stations, before I realized that for the data to be accurate, it needed regular collection of that data plus GPS locations of each petrol station so that using any of the free mapping APIs, one can give directions to motorists as to where a petrol station is....
From there, I thought integrating with the international crude fuel prices, so that using common formulae, one can more or less accurately predict how the change of prices in UAE and US will affect the price right here...
Then I realized, waita minute, the ministry of energy at some point released a formula to guide on the pricing of fuel based on the distance from KPA in msa plus a few other, which led me to http://www.petroleum.co.ke/ To cut short this long story, I have a ton of research material good for background information on stuff related to petroleum, anyone who wants can have them, i'll upload them somewhere. In addition to participating in this venture, if the language that will finally be settled on is PHP and MySQL, then i am doubly in!