Cabulous now works for fleets of cars, enabling them to run traditional dispatch as well as our patented public presence technology that puts their cars on public web and smartphone maps for everyone to see and hail.

Some companies build in Ruby. Some use Python. Some use .net or Java. We didn’t go that way. We took a risk and went a different way, building Cabulous on an advanced platform with special properties for robustness, reliability, and scalability. Functional languages ftw!

The result is that today Cabulous has one of the very few dispatch platforms in the world that can scale to many hundreds of thousands of vehicles, millions of passengers, and thousands of dispatchers, with position update rates so high that the cars seem to move on the map in real-time, giving passengers confidence that the car they see on Cabulous is actually moving to pick them up.

Cabulous can hot-update systems without any downtime, so taxi fleets in countries all over the world don’t have to go off the map when we need to patch or make a change.

Most existing systems are built to provide only one company’s vehicles with GPS dispatch – a small number of cars, no passenger interface, and a few dispatchers and order takers. The customer fleet must buy and maintain its own servers – complicated, costly, isolated. By contrast, a fleet that chooses Cabulous is up and running in about ten minutes and as quickly as they can put the units in their cars (which takes about 4 minutes each by our last count). A system like this, deployed in the Cloud, needs to achieve a whole new level of reliability and scalability.

So in making the choices we made, Cabulous now has arguably the most advanced infrastructure platform for dispatch in the world.

And we are only making it better.

Excerpt:

HER ORDER COMES TO ME via cabulous.com, and less than three minutes later she’s in my backseat, singing the praises of cabulous.com:

“Just now I decided I needed a cab, I looked on the cabulous map and saw you three blocks away… I touched my finger to the little icon for your cab… Fifteen seconds later my phone rings and I’m talking to you… On my screen I followed you coming down Mission Street… Three blocks away…two blocks away…and here you are — it’s brilliant!”

Me: “Do you use cabulous a lot?”

For the rest of the story, read Brad’s blog, Free Ride Journal. It’s a cool story.

Brad drives for SF Green Cab, home to some of the coolest drivers in San Francisco.

Here’s the Toyota Prius commercial Brad was in:

http://apps.facebook.com/cabulous

Cabulous on Facebook - Hail a Taxi Cab in San Francisco

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!

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:

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.)