This article was taken from the January 2012 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Kabbee
"The black-taxi model hasn't really changed since hailing a horse and cart on Piccadilly," says Phil Makinson. He's the business development manager for Kabbee, an Android and iPhone app for booking taxis. It locates you, then aggregates minicab fleets around you to give a quote.
Uber
This San Franciscan startup provides cars to anyone with a mobile: cars should arrive in five minutes and cost about 1.5 times the price of a normal cab ride. Behind the app is a lot of tech: Uber employs 33 people, including a computational neuroscientist and nuclear physicist.
Hailo Cab
Jay Bregman, CEO of Hailo Cab, estimates that taxis lose £25 million every day by people not being able to find a car. Hailo aims to fix that, with an app "developed for cabbies by cabbies" (three of Hailo's six founders are ex-black cab drivers). Works like Kabbee.
Tweeting Taxis
Twitter lets cabbies self-organise: @gamesdead provides traffic updates such as "S cabup Chelsea bri mashed back to lwr sloane" for his 70 mainly cabbie followers; @belgiancabby tells his 348 followers about speed guns on Constitution Hill westbound and the iPhone 5's mooted release date.
Addison Lee
Addison Lee runs the biggest car fleet in Europe, but just eight controllers plot 25,000 journeys a day. How? Using "The Allocator" -- a proprietary piece of software that assigns jobs by looking 20 minutes into the future. Its app version made £20 million in revenue last year.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
