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"I was traveling in South America before coming to Harvard Business School, backpacking for four months. There, I have a couple of friend from different cities, Lima, Buenos Aires, Santiago Do Chili and every time we went out together, they all told me : "you can never ever take a taxi from the street, it's too dangerous, they may do something to you. So what you have to do is, you call up a taxi company you trust, tell them where you want a taxi and they will come and pick you up 15 up 30 minutes later." But I hate waiting and if it's rush hour or it's raining, there is no way for you to get a taxi within an hour." These thoughts and experiences were the basis of Clemens Raemy's idea to create SaferTaxi, a new application for IPhone recently released in Latin America, London and recently launched in Boston, with the goal of fighting taxi safety issues.

In the interview, Clemens explains us how the service functions, why he thinks it is of great value for users and cab companies and further, how citizens now experiment sort of a shift of powers when it comes to different urban services.

Find here more information about innovation regarding taxis.

Clemens Raemy is a Swiss citizen and a young entrepreneur who graduated from Yale with a BA in economics. He is currently doing a MBA in Harvard Business School while working on the SaferTaxi project.

SaferTaxi : how does it work?

The first market solution focused purely on fighting taxi crimes by implementing a license plate registration and rating system. How does it work? Crowed sourcing and peer reviews are the answer. Passengers text us or submit via smart phone applications the taxi's license number before entering the taxi. Passengers then inform their drives that they have registered them. This creates a record thereby making the driver accountable for his/her actions. Following registration, passengers will receive within one second an instant response message providing a rating for their taxi and past incident information (InstantFeedback). This will enable them to make an informed decision whether or not they should enter/stay in the car. At the end of the ride, passengers can rate the taxi by text message or online, thereby helping to build the safety taxi database. Optionally, clients can choose an emergency contact who will receive a notification should they fail to confirm their safe arrival (DoubleSafety).

On top of the safety features, SaferTaxi also allows users to book taxis through its smart phone applications. Furthermore, users can collect taxi miles, resulting in free taxi ride coupons, opt for an express booking and see on a map any taxi stand close to the user's current position.

Why can it be valuable to users?

You can clearly see the value of that system in countries like Argentina, where the crime rate is very high or in Columbia where every 22 minutes (http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=59060010204), taxi passengers get ripped. But it's not just about Latin America. In the UK, more than 5.000 women are attacked in London taxis each year. Most of those attacks don't happen in black cabs, who tend to be much safer and have a greater reputation, but there are only 40.000 of them which is not enough to meet the high demand. That is why you have lots of private chauffeur's services, and that is the case in many cities. It is also very common in the US. But then, even with taxis, people we spoke with often hold a deep grunch with many taxi drivers because, so conveniently their credit card machine is broken, it's smelly, or in bad condition... The app we propose can operate a powerful shift in power.

And for cab companies?

SaferTaxi offers several products to increase the revenues for taxi companies and to help them to build a quality control system.

• AutomatedPayment is a system for MiniCabs in the UK, remises in Argentina, or limousine services in the US to charge completed rides directly through paypal or online credit card payment. The moment the user pre-books and confirms a ride, the member account is charged. The AutomatedPayment also allows taxi companies, who operate on a government set taximeter, to at least charge a minimum fee for taxi passenger no-shows. This is important to allow taxi companies to accept bookings from remote locations and increases the trust between the drivers and the dispatch service.
• CarStickers will be given out to all drivers / companies that want to partner with the SaferTaxi. Passengers seeing such a sticker know that drivers are willing to be rated, have nothing to hide and are therefore preferable to non-branded taxis.
• Driver Ratings submitted by the members are also visible in the corporate account of taxi companies, allowing the headquarters to ensure that their drivers deliver the best possible customer experience.

The outcome in Boston

SaferTaxi is currently running a pilot project in Boston. 300 Harvard Business School Students have downloaded the SaferTaxi iPhone and Android applications. During the three weeks test phase before Christmas, 972 taxi ratings where sent in. Taxis are rated on a scale of 1 to 5. The ratings 1 and 2 are considered as bad service, 3 barely acceptable, and 4 and 5 as good service. Out of the received ratings only 13 taxis received either a 1 or a 2 and 41 a 3. Most complaints in Boston were because the taxi was in a bad condition, i.e. ripped open seats, broken credit card machines, or missing seatbelts. SaferTaxi takes these concerns very serious and passes the information on to local governments.

Data from taxis, data for cities?

The technologies of the app would need to be scaled up to track and map taxi rides, but you can easily envision the use of the data both for cities and companies. Cities and planning agencies could use the data to decide on where to put a taxi stand, where to send a bus at night because many people want a taxi in that area, etc. So, we work closely with cities to consider those possibilities. We also work, for instance, with a group of people in Boston, who want to have more streetlighting, to use safer taxi as a platform to issue safety concerns people generally have.

But the impact of the data can go quite far when you consider that in New York City, a company has implemented GPS tracking on some taxi to collect and then sell off data to hedge funds indicating where people who use taxis are getting off. So, the story still need to written and it's up to us all to see what we want it to be.