Location Based Taxi Service Not Catching On As Quickly As Hoped
It looks like a plan to create a location-based taxi calling service hasn’t worked out quite as well as planned. Zingo lets people needing a cab call up the service via their phone, which uses location tracking info to connect them to the nearest free Zingo-enabled cabdriver, with whom they can describe their precise location. Passengers apparently love the service, but it’s still having trouble signing up drivers who also have to pay to use the service. That may be part of the problem. They’re trying to get money at both ends, out of both the passengers and the drivers — which makes sure to screw up the incentives. If Zingo really wanted to get as many passengers using the service as possible, they’d make sure that every driver they could find would have one. Instead of worrying about the incremental fees of the equipment for cab drivers, the trick is to blanket the market, and make it so that every taxi passenger knows to use Zingo, rather than any other method of hailing a cab — even such “high tech methods” as the geek beacon of waving your glowing mobile phone rapidly in the air to catch the eye of a passing cabbie.
