CabEasy Acquired By CabCorner

We first wrote about NYC-based taxi sharing app CabEasy nearly two years ago. The concept of taxi sharing is pretty simple: you post a request noting the departure time and your travel plan (e.g. from 125th and Broadway to Canal St.). Other members of the service can view all available travel plans and select one that is close to the trip and time they plan to take. You meet the other party at the designated location and share a taxi to both destinations.

Last month NY-based CabCorner announced the acquisition of CabEasy. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. CabCorner also provides a taxi-sharing service.

Back in March we wrote about CabSense which took historical taxi data to create an application that shows you the best place to hail a taxi based on your current GPS location. Last month CabCorner signed a deal with the parent of CabSense, Sense Networks to integrate their location finder into CabCorner.

Last month we wrote about a new taxi sharing app, FareShare. They will be providing a demo of their mobile app next week at the NY Tech Meetup.

As a public transit fan, I’d love to see taxi sharing take off but I fear that the combinations just make it too hard to complete enough rides to make it a sustainable project. These services will need massive marketing efforts to get enough riders into the system to find potential matches. I actually think that “time” will be more difficult to match than location.