Gas Station Locator: A student from Osijek just launched an app which shows where to find the cheapest nearby fuel in Croatia! The application, which is available in English, German and Croatian, currently tracks prices at gas stations from the five major oil companies in Croatia. There are also plans to expand the service to the rest of Southeast Europe.

As reported by Mladen Smrekar/tportal on November 20, 2019; the new application was created by Matej Arlović, a 23-year-old student of Software Engineering at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Computing and Information Technology in Osijek.

Gas Station Locator

"After almost four months of development and administrative tasks, I’ve reached the moment where the Gas Station Locator application is ready for public release," said Matej Arlović, a 23-year-old student of Software Engineering at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Computer and Information Technology in Osijek, on Facebook. “A big thank you to everyone who helped me with this project: from developing and testing concepts, to writing articles and translations. This is my first experience with Android apps, so if you find any bugs let me know and I will fix them.”

The application monitors the prices at gas stations from five major oil companies in Croatia: INA, Petrol, Tifon, AdriaOil and APIOS. Information on the companies, gas stations and the prices of petroleum products are checked and updated regularly.

Cheapest Fuel in Croatia

"The goal is for the user to come up with the cheapest nearby fuel options, which result in significant savings," Arlović says. “Our algorithm does not predict fuel prices but uses current prices at gas stations. Fuel prices are updated on a weekly basis.”

The Gas Station Locator uses the user’s location to find the nearest gas station with cheapest fuel. Your location is detected when you enter the application, and if you are on the move you can refresh your location by clicking the button. Refreshing the location also moves the marker showing the user’s location, and the algorithm automatically searches for gas stations in the new location. If the new location is more than 100 kilometers away, the data will reload.

The user’s location is not saved, however, and the application will delete it after shutdown. As the team at Gas Station Locator points out: their goal is to preserve users' privacy.

Additional Services

In addition to fuel prices, the app shows additional services offered by gas stations: from restaurants and cafés to car washes. You can also find the gas station’s business hours and opening/closing times. Holidays and seasonal hours are also calculated within the algorithm.

You can download the app from the Google Play Store here and on the Gas Station Locator website, where you can find additional information about the service.

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As Lucija Spiljak/Poslovni Dnevnik writes on the 21st of May, 2019, the Zagreb software company Ingemark and the RoomOrders startup, launched by Croats despite having been registered in America, created the first application (app) for ordering food from hotels to hotel rooms and started to conquer the many challenges of the huge global market. They began with the development of this application at the end of 2017, and back then, as a pilot project, they first tested it out at the Hilton Hotel in Boston.

According to them, they will launch RoomOrders at the Hilton Sydney hotel, and then in Belgrade's Hilton in Serbia by the end of the month. The application's software, in which 2 million euro has so far been invested was started by the Zagreb-based company Ingemark, which has been in existence since as far back as 1990, and as of 2006, it has specialised in software development by order.

Funds for the application's development have also been withdrawn from EU funds. In the list of references are big clients such as Agrokor, Adris, HT... One of the most significant cooperations was, as they say, one in the Middle East where clients developed a platform that distributed multimedia content, and soon their latest project, ZorroTines, a regional music platform, will see the light of day right here on the Croatian market. Right now, it seems that this Zagreb company's RoomOrders app is going to go very far indeed.

As Eugene Brčić Jones, the marketing and sales manager at RoomOrders revealed, last week at the International Hotel Technology Forum in Zagreb, the company negotiated with numerous hotel industry leaders about integrating their products.

"We've intrigued the leading world chains and deepened the existing relationships, about which we're certain will bring us to the position of ''disrupter'' of the in-room dining segment within the hotel industry," Brčić Jones said, adding that he believes that in several years, it will be present in a number of world hotels which boast 4 and 5 stars.

"With the help of the RoomOrders application, guests in hotels can order food to their rooms in a few clicks and not in the ''old fashioned'' way. In addition to it having a faster mode, hotels can embark on this project without any large investments," explained Ingemark's director Jurica Mikulić, adding that the application has managed to receive some excellent initial customer reviews and financial results for the hotel. Hilton in Boston has increased its average order value by as much as thirty percent.

''We offer a simple solution that not only increases revenue, but promotes hotels through user-generated content and facilitates analytics. The greatest benefit is that this solution can be implemented without disturbances to the processes involved, and it provides almost instantaneous results,'' Brčić Jones added.

The author of the application, Haris Dizdarević, explained that the creation of RoomOrders was triggered by the current rather obsolete ways of ordering and the obvious need for faster selection and the changing of the menu that guests want in the room.

"We realised we should digitise the offer and thus expand it. The simple idea has become a complex but a successful project," said Dizdarević, explaining that the positive signal was the fact that hotel guests continue to use the application after the first time of using it, and for several days in a row. Although they acknowledge that the Croatian market is not really a priority, they're still negotiating with several Croatian hotels in Dubrovnik and with Maistra, Blue Lagoon (Plava Laguna) and Liburna, and that soon, the application will be launched in Sheraton, part of the huge global Marriott hotel chain.

Otherwise, RoomOrders was introduced DoubleTree by Hilton in Zagreb a few months ago, but then it was a modified version of the app.

"With the new application or system, the guest can, as soon as he is given the room after booking, in advance, even when travelling, immediately choose a range of dishes and orders so that it's ready and waiting in the room upon their arrival. The guest doesn't need to order it from the hotel room, they can do it in advance and choose from a simple and flexible application where all the photos, descriptions and the prices of the food and drinks in the hotel's offer are,'' they explain from hotel Sheraton where this new type of offer and service will be on offer by the end of May, which will, as they say, bring about improvements.

"The application also enables sharing of guest experience on the platform, real-time appraisal of food and services so that the hotel can almost react at the same time to all guests' comments and adapt to the current wishes and preferences of the guest," they added from Sheraton.

"We're sure that at some point there will be some competitors in this segment on the market, but we believe that we're strong and already ahead of them all. We're focusing on the development of this product which we want to make perfect. Along with marketing, the analytic component is the most important, to be more concrete, the analysis of the reactions, comments and the number of orders, so, the entire internal process. We hope to conclude this year with good results and continue to expand successfully,'' Brčić Jones concluded.

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Click here for the original article by Lucija Spiljak for Poslovni Dnevnik