Mobio has come out with a useful, cost-saving feature for your mobile phone called Cheap Gas.
This weekend, I choked when I pumped gas for $4.01 a gallon here in the SF Bay Area.
Mobio’s Cheap Gas application lets me locate the cheapest gas stations near any address and lets me filter search results by station brand. Cheap Gas provides a map to the destination station.
There are a number of other cheap-gas Web site offerings, such as Mapquest’s GasPrices, MSN’s Gas Prices, Gasbuddy.com and Fuelfinder, but they’re more basic, giving you gas prices by zip code, not exact address, and not letting you filter by brand. Mobgas sends you information by SMS.
Mobio’s rich media client requires a Java phone. The product announcement will be Tuesday, but we’re told the service should be available tomorrow (Monday).
See our previous coverage of Cupertino, Calif.’s Mobio here. It is backed with $9 million from Storm Ventures. More images below.
5 Comments
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A. Smith said:
Who would want this on their cell phone????
The info may (note may) be useful, but gasoline is commoditized. As such, prices won’t vary enough to even care who has lower prices.
I also live in the bay area, and appreciate the frustration. Unfortunately, a painful problem is high gas prices, but this solution is useless.
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Jim Chang said:
Actually, the difference in pricing between my home and work is about $0.20/gallon…on my 15 gallon tank, filling up once a week, that’s about $150/year…which I would rather have in MY pocket than Exxon’s.
Beyond that, it’s the principle of the thing…why would I pay more when I don’t have to? And since this looks like it’s free, where’s the downside? I like it!
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A. Smith said:
@Jim,
I think you are right on point here. However, I must add that the difference you reference likely won’t maintain over a 12 month period due to competition. If it did happen for some period, you’d learn about that service station (or stations) and use them regularly. Either way, I don’t believe you need an app on your cell phone for this need.
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Bad Gas said:
Even if i fill up on my usual route, this helps me get the warm fuzzy that I am not being ripped off. Or, i would drive the 3 extra miles and fill up there. I really like the radius feature on the widget.
Matt - I am told that they will be supporting BlackBerry soon too (and are taking on beta users).
