knuthsprotege

By most accounts, Uber has built a great customer experience. However their technology is not really an exclusive secret sauce. The key in disrupting taxis will likely be scaling a private operation like Uber to where it costs as much or less than taxis currently do, at least on average (hard to do), or to co-opt the current taxi/limo infrastructure to improve the customer's experience and automate things (also not easy). The technology is not a piece of cake, but not rocket science either, and is certainly not the key to the kingdom.

Disclaimer: My startup (RideCell) builds automatic request/dispatch/tracking technology for fleets.

"It's also important to remember that street taxi service is not a particularly efficient market system. In the norms of the taxi market, you cannot in fact be choosy about what cab picks you up (even if you could, there's virtually no information available to you when a cab pulls up)."

The technology to do this already exists. If taxi drivers could see where the demand is, and riders could see feedback on drivers, it would solve this problem. Of course technology alone is not enough. To achieve this, you'd need to disrupt the status quo, a part of which is laws that disallow "street hails" of taxis that don't have medallions.

I do frequently return to old conversations when looking for advice about everything from tools to strategy. I think having the points visible would make it easier.