ikude

Ikude is a location information service which I have spent one year developing.

https://ikude.jp

The inspiration for the reason why I started development on Ikude goes back to the days when I first discovered UberEats, when it just arrived in Japan. - This was during the latter half of 2017.

I first made the discovery when I was extremely busy with two large projects. This led to the usage of UberEats as I did not have the time to go back and forth between the closest convenience store and the office I was working at.

The application provided me with the estimated time of arrival and location of the driver. This allowed me to use that time gap to work on the project further which helped me with maximising productivity at the time. I found this to be quite excellent.

I was inspired to consider creating a similar product to UberEats whenever I had free time to do so for instructional purposes related to location tracking. This was due to the fact that in the previous year prior to my discovery, I had made a blog post about location tracking.

Despite my desires, I in fact did not have the time to work on the project like I had hoped to do so. As 2018 came around, the initial plan for making instructional material which would have come in the form of a “driverless UberEats-like” project for my blog had turned into a desire to create a full length project, an “UberEats-like location service” with the intention of drivers using this project. This led to the ideas which came to be “Ikude”.

My idea was to provide a helpful location service, tracking drivers for restaurants with delivery take-out options through the use of their own drivers or using services like UberEats.

The simple user experience I conceptualised at the time for Ikude was:

• provide a share link to the users from the app prior to the delivery
• when the link is clicked, open the browser to see the driver’s location

One of the details that I viewed to be one of the key features of the service was to provide a link which is accessible by the recipient for the delivery without the installation of the app from the recipient side. This was upon assumption that the recipients will not need to/will not want to download an additional app just for location tracking of the driver.
From then on, spending approx. half a year, I developed the Ikude service for iphone, android and the web.
Here are the languages used for various platforms

• iPhone app - Swift
• Android app - Kotlin
• Web app - Vue.js
• Backend - Node.js

The development process with various languages was handled by Miss Ishikawa and I with Miss Kashima who worked on the design. We were proud to be able to develop a service that covers multiple platforms through the skills and experience we acquired at Goldrush over the last couple years. After this, we started our first walk-in sales, and thus the sales for Ikude had begun. To learn more about the sales experience, please visit the blog I have published here.