Show HN: Embark SF – A new Bay Area transit app

It's terrific how they got funded in spite of the difficulty of the difficulty of monetizing this (at least, in the short term).

First, to be completely unbiased, the app looks awesome and pretty slick - so great job on it.

Now the challenges: 1) This app will be incredibly difficult to monetize unless you reach significant scale and then use advertising

2) Most of the daily commuters in the bay area are either bart riders or caltrain riders or muni riders -- as in, the mode of public transport they take is fixed. As a Caltrain rider, i have never taken the bart in the last 2 years i've commuted to the city. And I believe vice versa is equally true. Bart riders are unlikely to ride Caltrain regularly (discounting every once in a while ride). Why am I saying this and how is it relevant ? Most of the existing daily commuters have already downloaded free apps which provide the schedules, maps etc. -- most will have very little incentive to download your app, unless it provides some additional value above and beyond the existing apps

3) This app could be more valuable for those who are visiting bay area -- although most of my friends who have visited bay area rent a car -- since they plan day trips to napa, carmel etc -- while in the city, most just tend to use cabs.

This kind of app makes a lot of sense for a place like nyc or london where the subway and public transport system is much more complex and extremely well connected. And where majority of the people use public transport. But even then -- those whose daily commute route is fixed, the app adds little value, IMHO. But I havent used it in nyc, so I could be wrong.

This SF one is awesome—new design and it includes BART and Muni and the rest of the crazy set of transit systems in SF. Nice work, guys.

There's some more info about the app on our company blog too.

He's actually in the US at the moment at Google I/O and hoping to meet up with fellow hackers, but his Ask HN fizzled a bit (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5678888). He's @hendx on Twitter if anyone can spare time to meet up with him - he'll be over there for a number of weeks.

I badger him all the time to do a Show HN and talk about the work that's gone into his app, but he's too shy about it. Embark guys, can I convince him to buy you a coffee and compare transit notes?

Please consider doing Tokyo someday. The only offline routing app for Tokyo today is MetrO, which doesn't include a map nor timetables.

I've been trying to ask developers about their platform choice whenever I see a new app announcement.(Eventually I think it'd be neat to have a list compiled) Is there a particular reason you chose iOS for your first releases over Android? Do you plan on an Android version, BlackBerry, etc in the next year?

Thanks in advance!

Also, any chance of an iOS 5 version? Thanks.

(a) Universal (b) only require iOS 5?

My humble iPad 1 would love to give it a home.