CabEasy Archive

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.

I’m currently working on a cool startup called SubMate. SubMate allows you to discover the familiar strangers you see every day in the subway. This super cool idea has some history. Here is how I learnt some basic entrepreneurship lessons, the hard way.

About 4 years ago (early 2006), while I was living in New York, we sat down with a good friend to tackle an idea we had. It turned out to be a cool idea, something that would solve a problem (or fill a gap) we all knew. The service we imagined would allow subway commuters to discover and meet each other. SubMate was born.

In brief, we failed. We failed for various reasons, and it took us two years to pull the plug. 
Continue reading “A Happy Failure Story: Lessons Learned From My First Startup” »

CabEasy is a new NYC-based startup that aims to help people share cab and taxi rides inside NYC. For example, a taxi ride to JFK airport from Manhattan can run over $60 — if you could split the ride in half, now it becomes a bit more reasonable.

When you browse the current ride requests on CabEasy, you are presented with a map and information about the ride request along with information on the emissions that would be reduced by sharing with another person. Here’s an example using a ride from the upper west side to JFK airport, "By sharing this cab, you could reduce by 15.71lbs / 7.13kg (est.) the emissions of CO2 of this cab ride !"

The concept behind CabEasy is great and it would be awesome to see a full list of available rides and riders on the service. While I am not sure it will work for short city trips, longer trips to the three city airports and beyond could see more usage. Adding other transportation options would help as well – for example, there are a variety of shuttle bus companies that pickup and dropoff — could be an excellent addition to the site overall. So if there is no cab to share, there are alternative options to get from point A to point B.