Tokyo Launches Cab-Calling Mobile App

January 24, 2014 Leave a comment

Tokyo Launches Cab-Calling Mobile App

January 23, 2014, 9:54 AM
KANA INAGAKI
The next time you’re in a long lineup waiting for a taxi in Tokyo, you might want to download a new application onto your mobile phone that will connect you with a nearby cab that can pick you up in a few minutes.
Is this the Japanese version of Uber — the hugely popular car-service app in the U.S. that has also spread rapidly to nearly 70 cities around the globe, including New York, London and Singapore? Perhaps not, but it seems like a step in the right direction.
On Tuesday, the Tokyo Hire-Taxi Association introduced a mobile app service that allows users to connect with around 6,500 cabs in central areas of the city. The app works on iPhones and devices using Android and Windows operating systems through Microsoft’sMSFT -0.66%
cloud computing system.
By April, the service is expected to work for about 9,200 taxis. There won’t be any extra charges to use the app, and payments will need to be made to the driver. (With Uber, the fare is automatically charged to your credit card.)
Japan has an incredible number of taxis — over 50,000 in Tokyo alone, nearly four times the number in New York. So getting a cab in the big city is usually fairly easy.
But not always. In the upscale shopping district of Ginza, for instance, there are long lines of waiting taxis everywhere, but you can end up walking in circles looking for the start of the line, the proper place to get a cab.
And despite being one of the most wired cities on the planet, mobile phone apps for calling cabs aren’t widely used.
Some Japanese taxi companies have individually created similar apps, but until now there had been no industry-wide system.
While the Uber app is already available in Tokyo, its service area is limited and its name not widely known. When Uber Technologies co-founder and chief executive Travis Kalanick visited Japan last April, he complained about the “very byzantine and complicated regulations” — from price rules to special operating licenses — that made it difficult for his company to enter the market.
For now, the new Tokyo taxi association app is only available in Japanese. And like most things in Japan, it features a cute mascot, called “Takkun,” a blue car with blinking eyes, arms and yellow wheels. The association says it hopes to expand the app’s coverage area and offer the service in English ahead of the 2020 Summer Olympics.
It might not be Uber, but it might be the closest Tokyo comes to making taxis fast and easy to call before the Olympics come to town.

Filed under TMT Trends

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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