Project Launching Soon- Taxi App

RideFHV

Hello all, I'm the COO of a new project about to go live in NYC in a few months called RideFHV. NYC is one of the largest taxi market in the world and since the start of big ride-share companies there has been a major shift in the business.

The idea of our company is that it will be completely driver-owned in the sense that the taxi business will operate at a 0% profit margin to its member-drivers (minus operational cost.) We're still in our underground phase only pitching and recruiting to qualified licensed drivers (NYC has a taxi agency that licenses each driver.) We've had major success signing up and onboarding drivers before even launching the service.

Where the company plans on making profit outside of the actual taxi business (which also will be shared with the drivers/community) is in the data. I've been attracted to this community because we also believe in a decentralized future where and when it relates to private for-hire vehcile (FHV) transportation. Why should a big company monopolize on the data and taxi business when it's the drivers who front the cost of actual hardware (cars), licensing and insurance? It's our belief that they only offer the booking software but take anywhere between 30-50% of the fare. No other industry would allow the booking platform to come in at such a high commission rate (think Kayak.com taking that much when booking an airline ticket.)

We've jumped through all the legal regulations to be an actual FHV business in NYC (we have secured the same license to operate as the other big guys) and are fine tuning our software while recruiting drivers. We're small so we can pivot whichever way we deem best for the community without needing to worry about corporate policies. All FHV drivers are independent contractors and can work with whoever they want (exclusively or altogether.) No one company can limit who a driver can drive with at any given moment. Big ride-share actually lobbied to create this environment and we believe it will be the same cause of their inevitable fall.

I want to know if there's any interest from this community of the idea of attacking "big ride-share" and funneling the data they collect from the drivers away from them? Just a thought on the type of data big ride-share collects include logistics/movement of traffic patterns in a city. 3rd party dash cam companies are starting to give out dash cams to commercial FHV drivers only to collect actual driving footage. Can this be used and sold to autonomous car companies? We have a list of potential ideas where this can go but would love to hear from this community.

Thanks

smo_key

Capturing the data that's being thrown off by Uber/Lyft drivers and selling it seems interesting. Competitors or others would be potential buyers of it. It'd be a matter of correctly incentivizing drivers to agree to sell it. So for starters, I think it would have to be pretty friction-free which means no dash cams or other devices. Just an app on their phone that can collect as many different data as possible. And if you can onboard enough drivers and get that data in volume, then it would make sense to move to collect more data that may have more friction like dash cams, etc.

RideFHV

smo_key We collect the typical data needed for conducting taxi business; GPS location. The ₇₅₀ drivers who signed up during our soft recruitment based on the philosophy of the company are all-in with making money on all different directions (data and other projects.) Dash cams seem like the natural next step. Why it works in our market is because our niche insurance carriers offer a discount in policy which comes out to more than a data-connected dash cam cost. Seems like a no-brainer.

I guess I'm just trying to gather different ideas on how we can develop towards our own platform beyond the taxi business. It's a known thing that the big guys use and sell all types of data drivers and riders collect. None of them get anything out of it and that seems par for the course. Part of our mission (and what attracted me here) is that we plan on splitting the benefits of freeing up our data and working together with it. So far they all seem receptive and have very negative feelings towards the big guys. Perfect storm.

smo_key

Ok, I see now. Congrats on signing up 750 drivers. Two logical ideas that first come to mind are expanding into other towns in the same vertical--taxi drivers--and of course, cross-selling your current drivers on more real-time data products. The latter doesn't necessarily have to be strictly related to their taxi business. For example, there is a team working on creating an app called MyDiem (you can find it in one of the threads) which will gather and sell various real-time mobile phone data. Maybe those insurance companies would buy this too. It seems likely that type of information would help those companies price their insurance policies better. Right now, it's unclear that insurance companies are using their customers' web/app surfing data to price their policies. So that's one way you could add value.

To your original thought of using dash cams to collect video footage, I'd think there would be buyers of that data. Not entirely sure which those would be, but insurance companies, (autonomous) car companies would be just two.

Also, it may be worth speaking with insurance companies to find out what data they do not currently have but would like to have and then you can figure out a way to collect it.

Hopefully others in the Streamr community will have some ideas too.

martin

I like your initiative a lot! You can definitely get interesting data our of your service. The best data to start monetising should be trip data related of your customers (start, destination, time, price, payment method..) and also data related to the cars and driver (car position, speed, acceleration). You can/should anonymize the data too.

Collecting data from dashcams for developing autonomous driving is very tricky use case. It is hard to get data that would actually be useful for an automotive company and that can be used to develop something.

However this data be used to create alternative service to google street view - I am not aware of any potential buyer for data like this atm.

When the data is sold, you can also share the revenue with your drivers or maybe even customers - this can give another great UVP to your service.

RideFHV

martin This is EXACTLY what the mantra of our platform is. If we're able to monetize data beyond the service is should go to the members who generate the data. The FHV (black car service) car & driver population in NYC is around 130,000. An average driver drives 100-200 [city] miles a day.

We also have been brainstorming other data topics delving into the insurance arena but that is way far down the line. 🙂

wei

RideFHV I think that if you can get enough coverage of NYC, for example, you could potentially share data related to traffic simulation or even real-time traffic data to route optimization companies. I think in the age of on-demand everything and explosion of delivery services, all companies would like to have rich traffic data and real-time insights to maximize their resources 🙂

RideFHV

wei We launch in a few months. We're very excited as we believe the future is away from top-heavy and centralized companies. We plan on mapping the whole city and have a record and data of when each traffic light changes (throughout the day.) This is wishful thinking but everything you mentioned is 100% correct and in our development list of ideas. We're still small though so we have to be smart on how we initially move.

wei

RideFHV Nice to hear that, yes I do agree a progressive approach is right, especially focusing on the right core priorities at early stage, when resources are limited.

I have shared your ideas with broader Streamr team, we would be interested to learn more and have a quick chat for potential collaboration, or exchanging some technical ideas. If you have Telegram account, feel free to DM me here https://t.me/weileiy 🙂