Hailing a cab in Dublin will soon be as easy as pressing Send on your mobile. A new fleet of 1,000 Mercedes-Benz E-Taxis - summoned by sending an SMS (short messaging service) text message via mobile phone - is due to hit Irish streets later this month.
Called E-Taxi, the new service is a joint venture between City Cabs, a Dublin cab company, and Bellstream, a start-up that creates wireless applications.
Noel Ebbs, the chief executive of City Cabs, and Colin Hayes, the chief executive of Bellstream and E-Taxi, say they will be operating a virtual company with a fully computerised dispatch system.
"He's the e-man and I'm the t-man (taxi-man)," says Ebbs. "He'll operate the venture in the air, so to speak, and I'll run the venture on the ground."
To hail a cab, a customer texts E-Taxi for a car. The SMS message is automatically routed to cab drivers who are closest to the pick-up point, and the driver who takes the fare phones the customer to confirm by mobile.
The GSM-based system uses triangulation to locate the closest cabs by pinpointing which mobile phone mast a mobile is receiving its connection signal from. This locates a mobile user with up to several metres' accuracy.
The cabs will also carry a wireless modem swipe-card terminal in the back that will allow customers to make electronic payments by credit or debit card, initially to top up prepaid mobile phone accounts.
The service, operated for E-Taxi by the electronic arm of the Irish national postal service, will enable E-Taxi to earn a cut of each purchase as the vendor of mobile minutes. In Ireland, some 65% of Irish mobiles are prepaid, creating a market for phone credit worth Irish £600m annually, said Hayes. But Hayes and Ebbs are looking beyond prepaid mobiles, and eventually intend to offer theatre and cinema tickets, a smartcard loyalty scheme, and taxi charge cards.
E-Taxi is also planning a combined web and SMS portal to link customers to online and real world events, and is working with the sports wear company Adidas as a sponsor.
E-Taxi is betting that the SMS-crazy Irish will jump at the chance to text for a taxi. The Irish are said to have one of the highest rates of SMS messaging in the world.
Stephen Brewer, the chief executive of the Irish mobile phone company Eircell (recently purchased by Vodafone), notes that 14% of Eircell's revenue comes from texting, as opposed to 8% of Vodafone's. With nearly seven in 10 people in Ireland carrying mobiles, E-Taxi and City Cabs figure the market is big enough to support their service.
The E-Taxi service will be the first of its kind in the world, says Hayes, although the two are looking at other markets as well for the service. Hayes has been in initial talks with a cab company in Singapore, which has 11,000 taxis. "We want to show the industry what we can do," says Ebbs.
