Startup Stories: Connecting Cabs and Customers

(exerpt)

To celebrate the first six months of the White House-led Startup America initiative, this week we are highlighting the stories of real entrepreneurs who are creating jobs across the country.

The Startup America initiative aims to create the right policy environment for entrepreneurs to flourish.  For example, the President signed into law a 100% capital gains tax cut for investment in small businesses made throughout 2011. The President’s budget would make this tax incentive permanent.

Taxi drivers in America can spend as much as 57% of their day driving around an empty cab. In most cities and towns, there is almost always an available taxi within an acceptable distance to someone who needs a ride, but the cabs are “out of sight and out of mind,” and, rather than finding one that might be around the corner, people get in their cars and drive, adding to congestion, pollution and the number of intoxicated drivers on the road.

It makes sense that if drivers were more visible, if potential passengers had the equivalent of x-ray vision to spot and hail cabs from blocks away, drivers would make more money and communities would benefit from improved transit efficiency.  My partners and I spotted an opportunity, and outlined a plan for a company we called Cabulous. Our goal? Putting an end to “invisible taxi drivers” — and to wasteful inefficiency.

Read the rest of the story here.

Cabulous Founder, Tal Flanchraych

The answer is YES, because San Diego’s USA Cab will be on the Cabulous map between now and the end of the year.  If we manage to deploy in time, smart partygoers on New Years Eve will have an easier time catching a safe ride home thanks to USA Cab and Cabulous.

We’ll be sure to let you know as soon as we’re officially deployed in SD! In the meantime, grab a ride with our friends at USA Cab by calling (619) 231-1144.

On top of that, we just passed 15,000 active users in San Francisco alone.

Also, come to think of it, the one-year launch anniversary of our launch should be coming up soon. All the more reason to celebrate. Who wants to throw us a party? I do!

Within a few years, the current iconic New York City taxi will have a totally different look — Ford Motors is ceasing production on the Crown Victoria, which makes up about 70% of NYC’s fleet and a big chunk of taxi fleets nationwide.

Although the yellow isn’t going away anytime soon, the City of New York has selected three finalists, one of which will have an exclusive 10-year contract over all of the city’s taxicabs. They’re even letting New Yorkers weigh in on their favorite design and the features they want. We sure hope New Yorkers like vans though, because here are the three models they have to work with:

The Ford Transit Connect has already been approved for taxi use by Boston, and needless to say Ford has more experience supplying the taxi industry than any other company.

Nissan’s model can be quickly made available as a fully electric vehicle as well, unlike the other contenders.

The third finalist, by Karsan (who!?), a Turkish company, is the smallest of the three and has many taxi-specific special features, although it is at a disadvantage due to the fact that it doesn’t exist yet.

(photos from http://autos.aol.com/article/taxi-of-tomorrow/)

]]> http://cabulous.com/2010/12/04/the-end-of-an-era-what-will-replace-the-crown-vic/feed/ 0 http://cabulous.com/2010/12/02/radio-cab-is-taking-cabulous-to-portland-or/ http://cabulous.com/2010/12/02/radio-cab-is-taking-cabulous-to-portland-or/#comments Thu, 02 Dec 2010 22:41:48 +0000 admin http://cabulous.com/?p=1042 Starting in January, you’ll be able to hail the best fleet in Portland from your Cabulous map!

Radio Cab has great drivers, an awesome team, and one of the largest taxi fleets in the Pacific Northwest. They also stay involved in their community through green initiatives and the Radio Cab Foundation — needless to say, we’re proud to be working with them.

Check out their site at radiocab.net!

Santa Barbara Yellow is one terrific family of drivers.  We love these guys.  In addition to putting their drivers on the map, they will be using Cabulous to power their very warm, personal-touch radio dispatch and order taking operation.  So if you don’t have an iPhone or web browser handy and you want to talk with a real human being when ordering a cab in Santa Barbara, just call 800-549-TAXI.

Welcome Yellow Santa Barbara!

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.