If you travel to somewhere which you are not familiar with, usually you can just buy a travel guide which helps you find the suitable restaurant, hotel, tourist points etc. But, usually the travel guide misses one type of information which I mean, when you need it you Really need it, the locations for public toilet.
Ohbaba (app store dowload), is a simple location-based service which can help you locate the public toilets around you. The idea is simple, like other LBS apps, it detects your location and finds the closest public toilets for you. Ohbaba also does UGC (or you can call it Toilet 2.0) as it allows users to submit new entries for toilets. And when you submit a new entry, there is a tick box of Toilet Tissue Available, which you can tick. How sweet it is!!
Ohbaba, is probably the most interesting and simplest Chinese app I’ve ever wrote about so far. I love it for a few reasons:
Technology is all about Life. Ohbaba is a public toilet locator, simple as that. But it is really targeted at people’s needs in their real life. The idea might sounds a bit doggy, but it is useful;
There are loads of LBS applications helping users to discover this and that. If you talk to the developers of all these apps, probably 95% of them will tell you the big ideas behind the apps. I mean, it’s good to hear. But don’t forget, tiny idea can be big too. Everyone needs toilets, but why only Ohbaba picks it up?
And what’s the next for Ohbaba, I don’t know, but it gonna be joking me if it goes for a toilet-centric social networks.