a new competitor enters the race…

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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