Brisbane's Yellow Cabs add mobile booking

This is pretty neat.

I’ve used taxi booking text services before and invariably the are rather smart. I don’t like speaking to people on the phone. I don’t have a nervous tick or anything when it comes to dialing folk I don’t know, it’s just I don’t like uncertainty in the form of a stupid telephone agent. You know when you try to book a cinema and you say ‘Lakeside’ and the human on the other end of the phone says ‘London? Ok,’ and you have to spell everything out phonetically to get anywhere. Then trying to read out your card details to the numbskull becomes eminently painful. The author of this piece, Stuart Corner, feels my pain too — as (Australian) speech recognition systems don’t like his North of England accent too much.

So texting is good.

If you want a taxi in Brisbane, it won’t cost you more than a standard text message to book your ride.

Link: iTWire – Book your cab via SMS

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.

It’s not just text — they’ve also, smartly, implemented a mobile application for booking rides. Genius. They licensed the technology from UK developer Amplefuture. So, if you’ve ever booked Addison Lee online, I imagine the mobile version works very similar. Smart.

Speaking of which, it’s just ridiculous that this sort of mobile application system doesn’t exist for 1) Addison Lee and 2) black taxis in London.

You know who’d be good at implementing something like that on the front-end for the consumer? ShopQwik. Mark from ShopQwik is, incidentally, coming to the SMS Text News Unlimited Drinks on Thursday.