PingoSpace App Looks to Uber Everything Else for Beijingers

Fans of Uber and Didi Dache may be getting spoiled, finally having the option to do little more than snap their fingers – more like tap their fingers on an iPhone screen – and a car appears and whisks them to their destination like a magic carpet. But what if you could do that for everything?

Similarly, finding services beyond learning Chinese, cooking Chinese, or studying wushu are often hard to find or involve taking a class at a larger enterprise or school. Can’t I just find someone to teach me this in their spare time?

PingoSpace, a new app launching today (Nov 20), seeks to do just that. Just as Uber connects spare car capacity with passengers wanting rides, along with payment facilitation, the app seeks to connect Beijingers, especially foreigners in Beijing, to the services that they need and want. Looking for a French teacher before that holiday on the Cote D’Azur? Need a tennis coach to improve your game? Getting married and want to learn salsa dancing for the reception? PingoSpace looks to fill exactly those kinds of requests.

On the provider side, someone wishing to offer a service registers on the app, and then creates a profile for herself or himself. The company producing the app, Ping Xing Shi Kong, is fond of using the phrase “branding” to describe this process. It includes photos, rates, and other information about the instructor or service provider. Unlike Uber, the service provider is not required to accept every request, although PingoSpace interactions are less likely to occur drunk after 2am.

For the user, it should be an Uber-like experience. Payment is made through WeChat Wallet, so it’s no fuss, no muss on that side. Clients rate the provider, and that ranking pushes them up or down, encouraging better performance and potentially leading to more business.

PingoSpace was just launching as we were going to press, so we didn’t have too much opportunity to play around with it, but we already have a couple of areas lined up to hire instructors and teachers, along with registering to be providers. There has been a fresh, new crop of apps aimed at English-language users in Beijing or China lately, and PingoSpace looks to be joining it. We’ll know if it works as soon as “pingo” becomes a verb.

Available for iOS and Android beginning November 20. Visit pingospace.com for more information.

More stories by this author here.

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Image: PingoSpace