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/)
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!
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.
Brad Newsham – travel writer, taxi driver, and the guy on that Toyota Prius Taxi commercial, gives a free ride to one person every shift he drives, and then he writes about the experience on his blog.
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:
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
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!
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:
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