I was just traveling back to Paris from Amsterdam yesterday. Thanks to the Rotterdam station, the Thalys was 2 hours late and arrived at 1AM…
In the Parisian cab, I was astonished at the number of electronic devices in the car.
That included the car radio, the company’s taxi system, a TomTom One XL, a Sony Ericsson Bluetooth headset and… a mobile phone (HTC Touch) supporting a service I had never seen before.
It is called Taxilibre.fr (free taxi) and it just allows taxi drivers to report their live location on the web and… to indicate when they are available.
By going to www.taxilibre.fr, you can see the location of registered taxis and call the taxi you want to hire.
It is also free of charge for the user and the taxi driver, entirely financed by advertising. Amazing! As for all fantastic inventions, you ask yourself why nobody had thought about it before. In that case, the phone application was developed on Windows Mobile.
I will add this splendid taxi availability service to my 61-long list of location-based applications.
Conclusion: there will be dozens of ground-level innovations that will revolutionize entire professions. Look around…
