Taxi!

I got introduced to Hailo, a taxi app, by a Cabbie the other day. There are many taxi apps on the market all with standard functionality and on the surface Hailo’s no different. 

It allows users to “hail” cabs within 3 min and two taps of the app. So far so good. But Hailo only uses accredited London black cabs, is Transport for London approved and allows you to track the movement of your cab in real time. Perhaps the best part is that your credit card gets charged automatically according to whatever’s on the meter with Hailo taking a 10% cut from the driver. 

With over 20,000 cabbies in the London area alone that amounts to serious revenue potential. This robust business model explains how the development story has progressed; 3 Cabbies got together, partnered with Google and brought it to market after a round of VC funding. They’re now about to introduce it to the US and have secured $17M more in funding. 

Drivers get access to more customers and customers get transport exactly when and where they want it. The app tracks cabs using drivers' locative enabled smart-phones and overlays the tracking data on Google Maps. It gives drivers a network to communicate and update one another on traffic conditions as well as providing geo-fencing tools to notify each other of trouble spots. All of which serve to underline the app’s USP and provide a service which off-sets Hailo’s lack of existing customer network. It’s an infrastructure and development intensive operation (which accounts for the 50 strong team, sizeable for an app startup) that has nevertheless secured solid VC backing and buy-in from over 10%, and growing, of London’s black cab drivers. 

Perhaps the most promising aspect of Hailo lies in the networked, locative nature of the service. The app already uses Google Maps to provide a visual on taxi and trouble-spot movements. Depending on the Hailo API other mobile or static services can be integrated or piggy-backed on further extending the  app’s functionality and reach. Similarly to Badoo and Foursquare there’s also strong potential for advertising and possible affiliate partnerships. However, the real key to accessing the ad potential of mobile networks and services is in mapping behavioral and locative information accurately enough to serve up genuinely targeted adverts based on user movement, preferences and spending. 

Currently a lot of this potential lies in successfully monetising data to provide triggered messages, offers and effective customer loyalty and life-cycle management. Whilst mobile lags behind more conventional channels like email it nevertheless offers potential for overlaying transactional, demographic, behavioral and preference data in similar ways to other direct marketing channels. But mobile can further enrich a brand’s customer view with locative information to create a precise data-driven framework for serving highly personalised messages at exactly the right time, in the right place to the right user ensuring engagement and revenue generation. Marketing’s holy grail of creating perfectly targeted comms might not be achievable in the near future but given the pace of innovation within the data management space it will only be a matter of time.