However, I am a perfectionist. Over the last 2 years, I spent a big amount of time (and worries, and money, and sweat, …) working on another project always thinking that it was not good enough for shipping. And, eventually, it never shipped. We faced other blocking problems that we could not overcome, and our perfectionism was not a showstopper, but the feeling that “it’s not ready enough” was always present.

I am a perfectionist, and I learned from my mistake.

When I started working on CabEasy.com, I promissed myself a few things:

• Fix problems often, release often,
• Improve according to feedbacks,
• Don’t try to have the perfect documents to launch an action - once you think you’re good to go, launch the action and then prepare,
• When you feel you’re ready, give yourself an additional day as security and, if there is no the-world-is-falling-appart type of problem, launch every new release.

Preparing to ship your product is like showing your paintings at an exhibit, your short film at a festival, getting on the stage and performing your music: you will be judged. It hasn’t begun yet, and hopefully I’ll get some coverage in December already, but it will happen and it’s exciting and scary.

There are a bunch of other things that I tried to set as guideline for this new venture, and I will sum them up this week end.

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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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Why?

Why would I write a press release? It sounds very “offline” to me, and maybe not adapted or well suited to web services at launch phase: blogs, twitter, social networks, meetups, … Well, that’s true, but at the end of the day, whether it is for paper press or online media (and they actually now merge 99% of the time), a press release is to communication what an executive summary or elevator pitch is to fundraising: a brief and sexy way to make people talk about you.

And besides, it’s also a great way to prepare yourself to communicate efficiently. A way to get a few facts, phrases, selling points and a sexy story down. Brief, concise, and appealing.

For whom?

Bloggers and journalists (if there is still a difference …). I will never send a blank press release, but it’s a good support for your introduction, explanation, …

How?

The key is to always remember that: you are not unique, bloggers/journalists receive hundreds of releases every day, they have a lot of writing to do, and they want readership and pageviews.

All this means that you have to be brief to save their time, sexy so that they will pick your story, and appealing so that your story will interest their readership. Finally your release has to be written in a way that allows the blogger/journalist to “copy paste” part of it: the less writing he/she has to do, the better chance you’ll have to be covered. Include sensational facts and figures, it also helps give a reason to write about you.

And, if like me you have a journalist roommate, ask for some help ;)

Here are some good sources:
http://www.publicityinsider.com/release.asp
www.centernetworks.com/title-not-important
http://www.wikihow.com/Write-a-Press-Release
http://www.ehow.com/how_8793_write-proper-press-release.html
http://www.alouwebdesign.ca/smallbusiness/how_to_write_a_press_release.htm

Your opinion?

So here is a first draft of my first press release of my  first web service.
Let me know what your think !

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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 !

Here are some of the many visible or invisible improvements:

• New screencast with sound and comments
• Add a thing about spam email after activate of a new trip
• Send a message form on trip details: remove the form if/when message is sent
• Save the email and create a new account (if not existing) of a user sending a message
• Add an more clear indicator for the date field to show that the date entered is correct
• Add a note on the dynamic airport list to say that it’s only airports ….
• Add a clear link to homepage on every page

Next step, soft beta public launch !

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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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The first western city is New York and appears at the 13/14th position. Out of the 20 most populated cities of the world, 2 only are from western countries, the other being London. 3 are from China.

Out of the 20 most busiest metropolitan areas in the world, only 3 are from western countries. 3 are from China, 3 from India, 2 from Japan, 2 from the United States.

However, out of 20 richest countries on earth and depending on the different sources, 12 (CIA) / 10 (World Bank) / 9 (International Monetary Fund) are from western countries. If you order them by GDP growth (by the CIA world fact-book), the first western country is Poland (# 57th) and the second is Ireland at the 99th position. 165 countries had GDP growth rates higher than the United Kingdom’s, and 178 countries higher the United States’.

And finally, out of the 20 “most developed” countries (debatable, but based on the HDI), 19 are western countries (the 20th is Japan, #8 on the list).

To finish, according to the UN, western countries (as defined as Europe + North America) count for just over 1 billion population. 1 sixth of the world population, less than a third of Asia’s.

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Dreamhost is in Los Angeles, 5,650 miles (9,100 km) from Paris (5,840 miles from my hometown, where I’ll sure get some support from my mother !!). So item #1 on the spec list is to try to find a web host that would be well located between Europe and the US.

CabEasy.com will be a very low page views generator. Ideally, that’s my objective, it will have only 1 main page, where you would do everything. A real web app. However, there is (and will be even more) a lot of exchanges with various APIs, and mainly google maps. And that means Mountain View, CA USA. So if the stream from CabEasy.com’s server down to the user is limited (a few dozens kilobytes for the page), the stream between my server and other API’s servers will be heavy. Or those services are located in the US, and mainly on the West Coast. So hosting the site in London or Paris might not be a good idea either. Item #2.

Now of course, it is very early to speak about traffic. I don’t think (but I don’t know …) that you can speak about important “traffic” before …. 10,000 daily uniques ? 50,000 daily uniques ? If I get a steady flow of 5,000 uniques, i’ll be happy ;)  Item #3 on the spec list is: a cheap shared web hosting solution.

So I started comparing the main web hosts in the US, and more specifically the ones on the East Coast. I then launched some traceroutes from various traceroute servers from France and the US to see what would be the most acceptable solution.

As this takes some time and could be useful to others, I decided to share it. All numbers are milliseconds. In red is any connection that exceeds 150ms. In blue is any connection below 60ms. It seems that that MaiaHost, GetInSpace or NY Internet would be the best choices: their averages traceroutes are below 75ms.

Notes:

The traceroutes are from the following traceroute / tracert servers:
T1 Shopper (Denver, Colorado, USA)
Watchour.com (Jersey City, NJ, USA)
Network-Tools.com (Dallas, Texas, USA)
FrontierOnline (Paris - Evry, France)
SDV (Strasbourg, France)
Stella Net (Valbonne, near Nice, France)

How I located an IP or host ?
Info Sniper, http://www.infosniper.net/

Web hosts in New York
http://www.hostsearch.com/hostdirectory/new_york_web_hosting.asp

Some interesting/serious web hosts on the East Coast:
NYI, New York Internet, New York City
Host A Site (hosted by NYI, but with cheaper plans)
Get In Space, Long Island
MaiaHost, near Washington, DC

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