Archive for November, 2008

I’m on TechCrunch ;)

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Via TechCrunch: CabEasy Looks To Pair Off Strangers For Half-Priced Taxi FaresThat’s cool ! I guess pretty much everyone could be covered on TechCrunch, but it’s a first and it’s great. It follows from a few days a great review on CenterNetworks too.Cool first week for CabEasy.com ! 

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I want to be the CEO of such a service

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I wrote yesterday about premium and pricing options for CabEasy.com. This afternoon, I was reading Allen Stern’s note on CenterNetworks about Twitter stopping to deliver outbound SMS to twitter users in Canada.

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The unstated contradictory postulate

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While emptying my feed reader, I came across a 3 parts post on Venture Hacks by Eric Ries, co-founder of IMVU on how to analyze and solve problems for your startup. He calls it the 5 Whys (part one / two / three).

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Come-on, let’s be serious.

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A black president, OK.

A woman chancellor, fine.

But a black James Bond ??? Come-on, please, let’s be serious for a second !!

;)

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How much is a dollar worth?

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CabEasy.com allows taxi users to save money and protect the environment while meeting new people.

One of the business models that I am considering for CabEasy.com is going the freemium route. The service is and will remain free, but maybe limited in time? or limited in features? in database leverage? limited for the length of the trips (= amount you can save)? in number of uses per month?

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Action, Preparation and Perfectionism

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Yesterday evening, I sent the invites to all my friends for the soft beta launch of CabEasy.com. And I was a bit scared to do it. The site is not perfect, and of course will never be. It will require continuous improvements and innovations. That’s normal.

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CabEasy.com beta launches today !

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CabEasy.com Logo

Save Money And Protect The Environment: Share A Cab Ride With CabEasy.com !

CabEasy launches today to allow millions of taxi passenger to save money while being environmentally friendly.

CabEasy helps taxi users create future cab rides with a simple 3 step process (where from, where to, when), and publishes them to the web and to social networks. The service is free and available literally in every city in the world. CabEasy helps future passengers find rides to and from airports, offices, malls, train stations – any place they might need transport to: they simply browse the map to find taxi rides matching their needs.

Not only does CabEasy.com save passengers money by sharing cab rides, it helps reduce greenhouse gas emissions by reducing taxi journeys. And of course, it’s also a great way to meet people that live or work in your neighborhood.

Some facts and figures …

In New York City, there are over 13,000 Yellow Cabs and about 40,000 for-hire cars. Yellow Cabs carry 240 million passengers over 800 million miles every year. The famous Manhattan cab Ford Crown Victoria rides 13 m.p.g. on average, which represents a consumption of 55 million gallons of fuel every year for the entire yellow cab fleet. Each Crown Victoria releases on average 150,000 pounds of CO2 each year, and the entire yellow cab fleet about 1.7 billion pounds of CO2. Yellow cabs are a 1.8 billion USD a year industry.

There are over 15,000 taxis in Paris representing 3 billion euros in yearly revenues (about 4.5 billions USD). An average taxi has 13 clients a day, which represents 200,000 cab rides in Paris in total every single day, 73 million rides a year.

To name a few other cities, in Singapore, there are over 24,000 taxis, and there are 20,000 Black Cabs in London.

Related news and sources

PBS Taxidreams
State of the NYC Taxi, 2006
The New York City Taxicab Factbook, 2006
Inventory of New York City Greenhouse Gas Emissions
Judge Blocks Hybrid Taxi Requirement

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Creating my first press release - Tips for home made PRs

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I have to write a press release for the beta launch of CabEasy.com and I never did that in the past. A great way to learn from scratch, but also to collect feedback from the crowd !

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Crash testing done on CabEasy.com, getting ready to launch !

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Ok, it seems that I more or less passed the crash tests !

Last week, I wrote a post saying that CabEasy.com  was up and running for crash tests, and I got some of my friends to do them. Got some good feedbacks out of it, and that’s great !

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CabEasy.com - Up and running ?

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CabEasy.comIt’s the last day of a 3 weeks run. I’ve been working on evenings and week ends on finalizing the development of CabEasy.com and integrating some very early feedback. I had a small to do list that I detail below, and have been able to work my way through it (besides some friends visiting and my girlfriends being in New York for a while !).

And tonight, I am done !

Here was my to-do-list:

  • Change name (see my posts here):
  • Design a logo (see my post here):
  • Change hosting provider (analysis on connection times, check here):
  • Update DNS info on Dreamhost:
  • Redesign web site with new format (this has been the most difficult I guess, but I am now pretty good with CSS formatting, see my post here):
  • Clean the site header file:
  • Verify contact form:
  • Send email alerts in html format:
  • Redo the form validation in Ajax with the jQuery library:
  • Add Delete a trip function:
  • Add “twitter your trip” function (see my post here):
  • Improve search on home page:
  • Add contact / bug / new feature form:
  • Add UserVoice or GetSatisfaction feedback widget (finally opted for UserVoice):
  • Add a test on TripDetails to see if trip exists and is still active:
  • Test twitter + delete functions online:
  • Set an automatic backup of the database:
  • On the “Save new trip” page, add fading tool-tips (based on QuirksMode):
  • Create a Screencast of the service:
  • Rewrite the “FAQ” page:

I’m now ready for some heavy crash testing, and you’re all welcome to help !

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