Is it possible for the holiday season to get even more jolly?
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.
We are very excited to announce that we’ve had 50,000 hails through the Cabulous mobile and web apps as of today!
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!
Tokyo is a city notorious for both its tech consumption and its lack of free internet access, so needless to say, it’s very exciting to hear that over 800 taxis are now equipped with free WiFi courtesy of mobile company NTT DoCoMo. On top of that, 100 of the connected cabs will even offer Sony PSP Go devices so customers can play games while they speed – or crawl, if it’s rush hour — toward their destinations.
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/)
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:
New Web Service Transforms the Way San Francisco Hails a Cab
Cabulous.com allows consumers to see, hail, and track nearby taxis on the web for free
SAN FRANCISCO, CA – April 12th, 2010 — UpStart Mobile, makers of the popular Cabulous iPhone app, today announced the launch of Cabulous.com, a free service that helps consumers instantly hail and track cabs from the web.
With over 300 licensed taxi drivers across more than 25 cab companies participating mainly in San Francisco, passengers have already begun to take advantage of the service to painlessly hail taxis from their homes, offices, and on the go.
“It is so much fun being able to watch all the cabs driving around on the map, then just clicking on one and seeing him come to you,” says John Wolpert, CEO of UpStart Mobile. “It’s like having a fleet of personal drivers.”
Cabulous, which has been available as a free iPhone app since December 2009, is the first GPS-based service that allows consumers to see available cabs nearby on a map and hail the driver of their choice with just a touch. Once the driver confirms that s/he is on the way, the passenger can track their cab’s progress on the map.
The hailed drivers, in turn, can use their own smartphone’s Cabulous application to see the passenger’s location on a map. To prevent no-shows and increase efficiency, passengers and drivers can call each other directly through Cabulous when they are having difficulty finding one another.
In one popular feature currently available only on the iPhone app, passengers bookmark cabbies they like as “Favorite Drivers” in order to easily spot them the next time they need a cab – a plus for drivers who want to build customer loyalty and get more regulars.
Cabulous drivers are mostly local to San Francisco at this time, but any driver in the world can sign up and tell passengers to hail him or her through Cabulous.com or the iPhone app. Participating drivers can already be found in Austin, Miami, Chicago, San Jose, Zurich, Sydney and Barcelona.
About UpStart Mobile, Inc.
UpStart Mobile develops location-based mobile solutions. Cabulous, UpStart’s flagship product, was conceived and developed in a Best Buy incubator program in 2008 and spun out in 2009 to be incorporated under UpStart Mobile. The company’s leadership team has direct experience in the commercial transportation industry, a history of working with governments in the US, Asia and Europe, and 20 years experience leading startups and creative development teams.
For further information, please visit http://www.cabulous.com
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
Subscribe
Embed