John McManus on how Mytaxi killed Irish taxis and now owns the future
Hailo arrived on our shores in 2012. It was billed as a simple app that allowed you to book a taxi using your smart phone and pay using your bank card. It was convenient for passengers and attractive to taxi drivers because it brought them more fares.
By 2017 one fifth of the Irish population had its app installed on their phones and Mytaxi could be safely said to own the taxi market in Ireland. It’s worth noting that taxi fares – which are regulated and, in theory at least, reflect the vicissitudes of the business – have not come down. Drivers also continue to pay Mytaxi a commission on every fare.Not only have Mytaxi managed to push their costs on to their customers and dictate terms, they have in the process made us surrender a wealth of valuable information about ourselves and our habits via the app which we all willingly installed on our smartphones.
The out-and-out winner is Mytaxi, soon to be rebranded as Free Now – reflecting a not-entirely unsurprising lack of any corporate sense of irony on behalf of its owners, Daimler and BMW The same goes for Amazon, Facebook, eBay and the other household names of the internet. They are utterly dominant in their markets and have immense power and this is what makes them attractive to investors. The internet stopped being about technology quite some time ago and is now all about size and the ability to control and above all monetise what comes next. It’s about owning the future.
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