Now you can hail a cab right from Facebook with the new Cabulous Facebook app:
http://apps.facebook.com/cabulous
Cabulous on Facebook - Hail a Taxi Cab in San Francisco
Archive for the ‘Notes from the CEO’ Category
Cabulous reunites Girl and her Gift
August 25th, 2010
As many Cabulous drivers and passengers know, we keep phone numbers private and mask them, so drivers and passengers can call each other without worrying about giving out personal information. But tonight, an honest driver for San Francisco’s Metro Cab rang us to report that a Cabulous user had left a gift bag that looked expensive. He could no longer call her, because the private session between them had ended.
We contacted the passenger for the driver, and after getting permission from the driver, passed on contact information so she could arrange to get her belongings back.
And yeah, turned out to be an expensive gift.
Cabulous to the rescue!
Invisible Cabs!
July 12th, 2010
We debated long and hard about whether to show occupied taxis in the Cabulous Map. It would sure fill the map with cars, and that would make us happy on days (and nights) when most of the cabs are filled up with passengers, but what would it accomplish for the passenger? It would add inevitable confusion, that’s certain. ”Why is that cab red? Why can’t I select it?” All things we could answer with a more complicated user interface, but that would go against what we are all about – keeping things simple…just cabs on a map. Or rather, just cabs that you can actually hail on a map.
Tonight I thought I’d show you what we see behind the scenes. Here are two pictures, separated in time by just a minute or two. The one on the left shows you the cabs one of our dispatch centers can see – just their cars, but all of them (whether they are available or not). The available cars are in green, the occupied ones in red. Note that there are far more occupied cars than available ones.
And on the right…what you see on the iPhone or web map at cabulous.com. Just the ones you can hail. It doesn’t look like a lot, but wait for it….by the time I finished writing this post a few minutes after taking the first shots:
Taxi App Candidate for Best App Ever
January 3rd, 2010
Ridecharge’s Taxi Magic is nominated for a Best App Ever award.
Might seem strange for us to promote this, but for what Taxi Magic does – booking a cab through traditional dispatch – it really is a whole lot better what we had before…dial-up. We even recommend Taxi Magic when you want to book a car in advance of your trip…say to the airport tomorrow.
Cabulous, on the other hand, focuses squarely on the pick-up market: You are on the street and need to find that nearest cab, which is probably just a couple blocks away and out of sight. What you don’t want is to let one company’s dispatcher decide who that closest cab is. You want to see for yourself. That’s where to use Cabulous. Every nearby driver on your map – no matter what company they work for, no matter how small or large the cab company.
We hope you will agree that as Cabulous matures, it will be to Taxi Magic what Taxi Magic was for dispatch…a huge step up (at least for the “find a cab” part). If their focus on becoming a new way to pay for a cab works, we might be in line to add their payment system to allow Cabulous users to pay through Ridecharge. Who knows? (For now though, Cabulous will continue to focus on simply making an insanely great experience for drivers and passengers trying to find each other.)
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