A slow climb

“ALL of the entrepreneurial spirits left here 200, 300 years ago,” jokes Maxim Nohroudi in his Berlin office. That is obviously not quite true. He met his business partner at Düsseldorf airport in 2010, their flight grounded by the eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano. If only there were an app to compare their options to get back to Berlin by schedule, price and time required, they thought. Now there is: Waymate, which quickly compares both inter-city and intra-city means of travel. To make money, Waymate plans to sell adverts aimed at people based on their location. Eventually the app will allow data to travel two ways, so that users can tell each other when a bus is stuck in traffic.