Check out the press release.  It demonstrates that interest for the city’s cab-sharing solutions are growing.  A positive sign for CabCorner and other shared transportation logistics platforms.

Setting aside the issue of how to measure the success of cab sharing in NYC thus far, one thing can be surmised from the programs that have been proposed by both the current and former commissioners of the TLC, cab sharing will play an important role in New York City’s transportation future.

In light of cogestion problems and obvious unmet capacity, Matthew Daus, the former TLC commisioner, understood the need for the taxi cab industry to try something new and bold. His proposal was met with both enthusiasm and trepidation, as most novel concepts often are. His ride sharing stands, all of which which are located in or near mid town Manhattan, are designed to reduce the strain on both the streets and the commuters, particularly during rush hours. And although the program is off to a slow start having launched this past March, the concept has seen the light of day and is being tested in real time situations. It can only benefit from this process and will undounbtedly be reviewed for “what about it worked” and what about it did not work — and will be revamped accordingly.

But Daus is not alone in attempting to innovate the cab industry by way of introducing ride sharing policies. David Yassky, the new commissioner, has continued these efforts by announcing a ride sharing program from La Guardia airport, which is notorious for providing sub par transportation options to and from its location. Yassky hopes to make it more affordable, environmentally friendly and reasonable for travelers to get to their city wide destinations.

And even more recently, as of this week, Mayor Bloomberg’s office in conjunction with Yassky’s office has proposed van ride sharing to help those in areas where the MTA has been forced, due to budget constraints, to eliminate bus routes. These routes are critical for many outer borough residents and the city is scrambling to create viable solutions, one of which is to erect ride sharing programs that involve the coordination of riders, drivers and routes to meet the complicated demand of transporting large numbers of people on a daily basis around NYC.

These solutions as i see them, all speak to one larger issue and that is tackling the issues surrounding how a city as large and complicated as NYC, will meet the challenges of tomorrow’s urban transportation needs. Finding ways to share resources by more efficiently leveraging the current infrastructure will certainly be at the center of any major transportation proposal that is to be presented in both the near and distant future.

Tonight, in discussing a blog post he had come across a few months ago, Jon said the following:

“People want to share cabs, they just don’t have an idea as to where the act of meeting would take place, or they can’t get to one that is convenient for them.”

He was speaking, of course, about NYC’s widely derided implementation of its own cab sharing program.  And while Shareable.net offered some great ideas for how the city could better promote its efforts to introduce this concept, the reality is that sharing a cab needs to be as simple as hailing a cab.  Otherwise, commuters will just take the bus… or they’ll spend the extra duckets.

To wit: the introduction of a whole bevy of new players in this space–all of them mobile applications–attests to the fact that our on-demand culture requires on-demand gadgets to make cab-sharing the on-demand experience it needs to be.

BONUS:
Read Shareable’s take on cab-sharing etiquette.  This topic is always kinda fun.

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After a year of prototype operation and six months of development, CabCorner’s powerful new platform has launched!!!

We commend the entire team for their hard work and dedication, and look forward to serving our users.  Check out the site, and let us know what you think.

After reading Oren Frank’s thought provoking article, Goodbye, Smart Phone; Hello Predictive Context Device, regarding how smart phones could possibly come to play a more judgmental role in our modern lives,  I had a back and forth with a friend and this is what she had to say:

Her: I mean, do we want our phones to be that involved in helping us out? Personal assistants are nice and all, but don’t we want to feel like we still have free will? That we will check out the apps WE choose to help organize our lives? Not the other way around. In his hypothetical example, his phone knew that he had been eating too much Italian food, so it suggested a falafel joint. Well, maybe the phone should have figured that he really liked Italian, so it should have provided him another Italian restaurant. I don’t need my phone judging my taste in carryout.

But that being said, there’s always that weird line between the convenience of a new technology and the Orwellian surveillance it could create. Like, it’s so easy to use EZPass, but now we’re willfully giving information over to the state about where our cars have been. In every battle we’ve had like this, technology has always won because it makes our lives easier. Maybe apps for the phone will be just one of those privacy issues we won’t care about because it improves our lives so much. I just wonder where the line will be drawn…whenever it does get drawn.

Don’t get me wrong — I’d love to see developers look at ways to synthesize the data we willfully give our phones in a smart way. But isn’t there something here that makes you say “Hey, what if I don’t want my phone telling me what to do?”

And my response, albeit to play the contrarian, was to continue the debate: Click here to read more

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This evening, Varun alerted us to a story he uncovered in amNewYork…

Rather unfortunately, the title falsely asserted that newcomer Fare/Share was the “first mobile app to help riders split taxi trips.”   Yet CabCorner’s iPhone companion application was in fact the first out of the gates.  However, when I issued that complaint to Jonathan, he calmly responded that we in fact needed the pressure of an aggressive new market entrant, and terming it “first” would give us a bit of cover.  After all, he said, our platform has been well-received precisely because of the work we’ve done in ironing out the flaws that plague our competitors’ platforms.

I suppose he’s right.  The challengers of today make the partners of tomorrow, and these fellow cab-share logisticians will help further disseminate the cab-sharing concept to the public.  Moreover, it’s truly refreshing that they built an app for the BlackBerry, as opposed to the iPhone.  (As a BB user myself, I’m getting tired of Apple’s ubiquity.)

Curiously, the Fare/Share team appears interested in tackling the NYC market exclusively.  I suppose this is because their idea comprises a particular subset of CabCorner’s overall strategy: to make a platform powerful enough to cater to the various taxi environments throughout the country, by relying on yellow-cab density in NYC and livery-cab partners in Los Angeles, for example.

BONUS:
You have GOT to check out this video featuring some entrepreneurial tykes showing off their own concept for sharing taxi fares.  I’m not sure how these little peeps are related to the Fare/Share enterprise, but suffice it to say that if school’s today are cranking out this degree of innovation and media savvy, I might as well just wait around to be hired by one of these pre-adolescents!

• Fare/Share on the WSJ “App Watch” blog
• Fare/Share in Amvona

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RELEASE: CabCorner acquires CabEasy; Partners with SenseNetworks

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Friends!

I am so pleased to report that the acquisition of CabCorner’s former competitor CabEasy.com has been completed.  This is a truly exciting time for our company as we prepare for our Memorial Day launch on May 31st.  Our operation now stands as the leader in cab-sharing technology, and we are poised to lead this industry into the future.

To learn more about the merger, check out our Press Release above, where we also discuss the exciting new deal we’ve struck with Sense Networks, makers of the popular CabSense mobile application.

Our partnership with CabEasy has been truly exciting, and brings to our team the expertise of CabEasy’s founder and “serial entrepreneur” Laurent Kretz.  If that name sounds familiar, it’s likely because you read about him in the New York Post, which recently reported on SubMate, a new venture Laurent is pursuing to pair up straphangers on the subway.  We look forward to working with Laurent to expand our operation overseas, especially to his native France.

Congratulations to all who made this deal possible!

• Check out the deal’s coverage in CenterNetworks
  

Without filter, from the horse’s mouth…our dev team, Galaxy Weblinks has spoken.
Check it out!

The “scale” upon which mass social migration for the purposes of seeking desirable dwellings is wieghed, with migrations out of cities on one side and migration into the cities on the other, has begun to tilt back in favor of the urban experience.

If we are to look at the United States over the last century,  a significant shift out of cities and into rural dwellings began in earnest after the Great Depression. And that should come as no surprise to many. Economic turmoil and upheaval forced a great number of people to seek shelter and a livelihood outside of  the cities, where jobs had become scarce and opportunity was virtually non existent. The advent of WWII marked the true beginning of what was to become a lasting and defining image of American life over the second half of the last century– this image, this idea  became known as suburbia. With the economic winds shifting in favor of America, Americans became interested in moving out of the cities, which on the whole had become some what neglected and were seen, with each passing day,  more as places of commerce than places of dwelling. The natural progression was to move out in to open space where the air was cleaner, the skies were broader and each American was free to pursue their perfect piece of happiness. The implementation of the US Highway Act in 1956,  played no small role in this evolution, but it was strongly aided by a sense that America was ready to use its wealth and resources to spread itself out and begin to live a much more standardized and compartmentalized way of life.

And this model has imposed itself, very effectively on the fabric of American society for the past 60 years. Yet it has seemingly met its first real challenge, ironically, on account of another economic upheaval (maybe not as audacious as the great depression) but the ” great recession” has affected and challenged us to view many things we had come to know as iconically American. Click here to read more