While Uber and Lyft are the most prominent example of smartphones disrupting the taxi industry, a new app feature from Hailo is hoping to shake up both companies by letting Hailo users pay for journeys using their iPhone — even when they’re in a non-Hailo booked taxi.
The feature is called “Pay with Hailo” and uses Apple’s iBeacon technology to automatically recognize taxis, with users given the option to connect and pay for a journey automatically as soon as they set foot inside a vehicle. Even if the driver doesn’t have an iBeacon set up in their cab, it’s still possible to pay the fare by choosing their name from a list inside the app.
Launched in November 2011, Hailo’s taxi-hailing app is available in more than 20 cities, including London,Manchester, New York, all of Ireland, Toronto, Montreal, Chicago, Boston, Madrid, Barcelona, Washington DC, Montreal, Atlanta and Osaka, Japan.
At present, however, the company’s new payment option is only available in a fraction of these areas — Ireland and the city of Boston — although Hailo says it plans to expand this coverage over the coming weeks.
Downloading the Hailo iOS app will give you a discount on your first journey, as well as a bonus to the driver. What could be fairer than that?
Source: The Next Web
Luke Dormehl is a U.K.-based journalist and author, with a background working in documentary film for Channel 4 and the BBC. He is the author of The Apple Revolution and The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems … and Create More, both published by Penguin/Random House. His tech writing has also appeared in Wired, Fast Company, Techmeme and other publications.
