CabCorner WorldWide

I write from South America, where I’m leisurely pursuing projects while Jon, Sankho, Lou and Ajay work frantically to birth our baby. A very promising discussion with the Taxi and Limousine Commission has given us new direction, and we’ve begun achieving a bit of notoriety as word of our offering spreads.

Surveying the streets of Santiago has convinced me that our web-based service has application in cities worldwide. And frankly, I think we need to erect CabCorner installations in as many countries as possible as soon as possible, to establish our platform as the worldwide pioneer in this area… even if each platform is not entirely ready for launch. The point is that the conversation must extend beyond NYC, in anticipation of cultures that may soon be ready for the new evolution in urban transport.

And yet Santiago is not yet ready to be best served by CabCorner. For one, it does not immediately appear to be a browser-enabled cellphone environment… and it is through this form of access that our platform affords the most value. And second, it’s hard to know whether sites like MySpace or Facebook have so penetrated the culture as to habituate Chileans to the nature of social networking… on which CabCorner’s success as a service is based.

Too often our team has explored the nature of the “new” model we’ve created without articulating its underpinnings. As a service designed to facilitate communication among like-minded users (cost-conscious or environmentally conscious urban commuters), CabCorner is really in the “relationships” business; we help users leverage connections to share the costs of travel from A to B, with a stop at C along the way, and in the process Spaceship Earth benefits.

But how did we get here, and are we relying too heavily on the romance of social networking? Does a globalized, densely populated world community translate into more efficient interaction automatically… or are we responsible for orchestrating the paradigm shift? Have virtual, customizable online societies (i.e. facebook) provided the framework through which strangers are more inclined to reach out and forge a friendship in the real world… or are these new connections confined solely to the screen? Most pressingly, is there validity to our business thesis: that users will bring the social habits they display on the networking sites to real-life scenarios, that they will be comfortable carrying online relationships from computer to street?

That a business model is prescient or inevitable says nothing about whether 2009 is the year. But it might as well be… I’m not sure what user habits are lacking in order to achieve win-win scenarios for all CabCorner stakeholders.