Cabulous » ubercab

Cabulous Global: The Most Scalable Dispatch System in the World

admin — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 17:40:54 +0000

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.

Hail a Cab on Facebook with Cabulous!

admin — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 01:55:22 +0000

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

Invisible Cabs!

admin — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 03:18:29 +0000

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:

Cabulous wins! First iPad app to show you where the taxis really are.

admin — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 02:42:59 +0000

We honestly figured someone else might get there before we did, but no – the fabulous Cabulous team got a full iPad/iPhone iOS4 app up first.
Now Cabulous runs in the background, letting drivers stay on the map even when they are on the phone or checking email. Yay!! Hurray!

And Wow! Cabulous looks GORGEOUS on the iPad. Check it out. Click here to download for iPhone or iPad.

Cabulous on iPad