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!
This Fall, UpStart Mobile completed its enterprise dispatch technology for ground transportation fleets.
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.
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
Here is a video with UpStart Mobile Team Member, Tal Flanchraych, talking about the future of the Taxi industry.
Here’s a great video clip covering Cabulous at MacWorld 2010.
Here’s a late-night talk radio interview with John Wolpert and Kieran Farr about Cabulous on San Francisco station KPOO: Cabulous Interview on 89.5 FM KPOO San Francisco
It’s pretty funny, and a pretty good overview of what Cabulous is all about – why it is important for taxi drivers.
San Francisco’s Haydar, known for his famous Disco Cab (part of the Town Taxi fleet), can now be found wherever he is in the city with Cabulous!
Welcome Disco Cab!
You can now see Cabulous on DataSF‘s App Showcase. DataSF is a resource provided by the city that helps residents access quality public data, and they’ve created the App Showcase to highlight mobile applications taking advantage of this data.
Some other neat apps being featured on DataSF are Crimespotting, an interactive map of crimes across the Bay Area, and Routesy, a Muni/BART trip planner that uses algorithms to make predictions about real-time arrivals.
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