Book your cab via SMS

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 21 August 2007 07:05

Your IT - Home IT

Maybe it's my North of England accent but I consistently confound speech recognition based taxi booking services. Now one taxi company has come up with a different way to cut out the human operator, using SMS from a cellphone.

Brisbane's Yellow Cabs has implemented a system from MTX (a subsidiary of ASX listed - and one time VoIP hopeful - Broad Investments (ASX: BRO) that it claims "provides the cheapest and most convenient booking service in the market today."

Unlike telephone bookings, there is no surcharge applied to the taxi fare: the caller pays only for the SMS at whatever rate their mobile plan charges. They also do not have to wait, at busy times, for the phone to be answered.

MTX's Pocket Portal mobile application provides travellers with the option of downloading a series of booking forms to their mobile phone. Once downloaded, the forms sit locally on the handset, allowing customers to enter their booking details for as many regular pickups they want, or for one-off pickups, and then to book a cab simply by sending an SMS.

The technology is licensed from UK-based Amplefuture  and is a mobile Java and Symbian based application that provides "a branded 'web-like' experience. "From the application, consumers can transact and interact with brands in a carrier and handset agnostic environment," BRO claims.

Yellow Cabs serves an area with a population of 1.8 million and takes approximately 600,000 bookings in an average month. It is hoping to convert 20 percent of these to the Pocket Portal service over the next 24 months.

"As customers realise this is the cheapest, quickest and easiest way of booking a cab by phone, it is expected that Pocket Portal will change the long term behaviour of the cab booking public...The Yellow Cabs program is the first in a series of deals that will see BRO's Pocket Portal become a ubiquitous and essential part of taxi booking services Australia wide," Broad Investments claims.