This Much I Know: Hamish Petrie

I founded Moshtix in 2003. News Limited bought it from me in 2007, so I took time off and spent it with my family and did a bit of travelling and did a bit of sculpting and got something into Sculpture by the Sea. But the business bug got the better of me.

Living down in Bondi, it’s a pretty tricky exercise trying to get a cab. You ring and you think it’s coming and then you ring them again and it still doesn’t turn up. That led me to thinking: what if you use mobile phone technology to locate where the cabs are?

Ingogo is an application for your iPhone or your Android phone. You download the application and you can see all the taxis that are nearby on the GPS map. You can request one of those cabs, and the system sends the request to the local drivers that have an ingogo mobile phone. Once one accepts your job, you see on the live GPS map their taxi number and exactly where they are so you can actually watch them come towards you on a map. And when you get to the end of the trip, you can pay using a four-digit ingogo pin code.

Fifty thousand people have downloaded the app in Sydney. And we’ve got close to 1,000 taxi drivers using the ingogo driver application. The drivers are really excited about it. At the moment they don’t know if a passenger’s just gone and jumped into another cab. On our app the passenger can say, 'cancel the cab,’ and the driver automatically gets a message.

If you’re in a hurry or doing a short trip, you can offer an amount over the meter. You can say, "If you show up in the next ten minutes I’ll give you ten dollars over the meter." So we have a driver incentive scheme that increases your likelihood of getting a cab.

With ingogo, every cab driver’s licence is recorded for every journey. If you’re a woman you know you’re getting into a cab that’s monitored from start to finish. If you have left your camera or wallet in the taxi you can ring us and we can ring the driver because we know who they are.

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