this story originally appeared in on may 9 2015mumbai procrastination it turns out is enough of a national trait that its the basis of business for a bunch of startups while indians clearly arent a nation of meticulous planners theyre also loath to pay the high prices that lastminute purchases entail some companies are trying to exploit this peculiarity roomstonite a bengalurubased startup provides a mobile application for lastminute hotel room bookings using the app customers can book rooms 48 hours before checkin and not before even so rates offered through the app are said to be 4570 cheaper than other sourcestravel portals or the hotel itself officially launched in january the company has already aggregated rooms for more than 1500 hotels across 250 cities it plans to have an inventory of 3000 hotels by june end hotels on an average have only 60 of their rooms occupied at any time we partner with hotels to offer their unsold rooms at deeply discounted rates said founder and ceo suresh john adding that the best rates are arrived at through a complex set of algorithms these are presented to the hotel roomstonite evolved from ids next a provider of hotel inventory software since its launch the app has been downloaded 50000 times the company has targeted 5 lakh downloads by the end of this calendar year the idea itself isnt newit was the business model for lastminute com set up by lady lanefox and brent hoberman 17 years ago but after rising to heady levels at one time the company was valued at a much lower 120 million when it changed hands last year however the ondemand concept has gained immense traction in india especially after the launch of services by taxi aggregator uber similar homegrown services such as ola followed the company recently said it booked 2 lakh rides in january and is growing at 3040 a month ondemand transportation has gone beyond taxi services zoomcar and wicked ride both bengalurubased startups offer selfdrive rentals on cars and luxury bikes respectively indians are much tech savvy about what they want than they were a few years ago where we differ from other selfdrive rentals is we offer you the vehicle anywhere you want have the simplest paperless booking procedure which makes things fast said greg moran ceo and cofounder of zoomcar the company started with a fleet of seven cars and has since scaled it up to 1000 including small cars luxury sedans and midlevel suvs it provides services in bengaluru chennai pune mumbai and delhi and plans to launch in hyderabad in a few weeks wicked ride founded last year by chartered accountant vivekananda hr and two of his friends rents out motorcycles including harleydavidsons and royal enfields in bengaluru it plans to launch in pune this year with a fleet of 100 bikes in october a group of graduates from the birla institute of technology and science pilani decided to exploit the concept through a more localised model