On the Road

Brandweek, Oct 23, 2000 by Janis Mara

With its duo of wireless apps, Qsent hopes to deliver customized radio and taxicabs to users on the go.

Forget standing on a street corner to hail a cab. Harried travelers in need of transportation can now acquire rides through their PDAs, thanks to Qsent.

Qsent, a Lake Oswego, Ore.-based e-commerce technology provider, last month introduced its iQtaxi and iQradio applications, which run on wireless Palm VIIs, browser-enabled cell phones and PCs.

The iQradio helps users locate stations that broadcast your favorite music, sports teams and talk shows.

The idea is that the minute the traveler's derriere hits the rental-car seat, he or she can check iQradio and get a list of stations and call numbers, rather than having to scan radio channels or wait for station identification to find appealing stations.

Patrick Cox, CEO of Qsent, says, "You can search more than 13,000 radio stations by artists, talk show hosts, sports teams and frequency. Also, once you identify your favorite stations, the system can recommend stations as you go from city to city." The app is downloadable at www.iqradio.com.

According to Cox, the company will partner with radio stations to add content such as news headlines and sports scores. Cox plans to add a transactional mode by the first quarter of 2001. "We'll be selling CDs and tickets to sporting events and the like. We'll probably do this through a partner," Cox says.

While iQradio seems like a moderately useful service, albeit one with a somewhat uncertain revenue model, iQtaxi sounds like an idea with legs--er, wheels. The service makes it possible for users to order up a taxi, black car or limo via a Palm VII (and, eventually, on a Web-enabled cell phone or PC), even, for example, in a meeting, without having to speak.

This offers an advantage over services such as 1-800-TAXICAB, a telephone service, because the order can be placed silently. (It is possible to order a cab from 1-800-TAXICAB online, but only with 24-hour notice.) Also, according to Greg Keene, Qsent's chief technology officer, "we have screened the companies and only chose those that meet our standards."

Amanda McCarthy, an analyst for Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research, says of iQradio and iQtaxi, "In general, they are seemingly useful. Who doesn't need a taxi? Who doesn't want to listen to radio stations? The question, as with every interesting consumer-related mobile app, is who is going to pay for them?" While iQradio's plans to sell tickets and CDs are still in the future, iQtaxi's revenue model is firmly in place.

Qsent gets a referral fee for every ride ordered through its site, ranging from $1 to $7.50, with taxis on the low end and limos on the high end.

The service has relationships with more than 1,000 cab, limo and black car companies nationwide. For urban residents used to hailing cabs, the business model may seem dubious, but Keene says about 85 percent of all taxicab orders are not hailed, according to the Kensington, Md.-based International Taxicab and Livery Association.

To place an order, customers go to www.iqtaxi.com and access a series of six screens, specifying city, date, time of day, type of vehicle and so forth. There are many shortcuts in the system--a calendar appears when choosing the date, for example, and it is not necessary to specify the address when writing in the name of any U.S. hotel, Keene says.

"You can fill out all these screens in advance and leave everything blank except the time of pickup. Then when you're in your meeting and it's drawing to a close, you can place your order in two to five- minutes," says Keene. Once the order is placed, a confirmation flashes up on the screen, giving a price quote, which is guaranteed.

What happens next? According to Jim Gillespie, general manager of DeSoto Cab Company in San Francisco, when a customer orders a cab, "the call goes to the Qsent center and then Qsent calls us. They have a special number to call."

Do Qsent calls get priority treatment? "Well, we pick it up right away. But then it gets normal treatment."

Which leads to a key question: Taxi service is notoriously unreliable. What if an exec orders a cab from Qsent--and it doesn't show? Keene is confident this won't happen. "We have not chosen everybody because we want the best," he says.

Forrester's McCarthy notes that not that many people have Palm VIIs. "You have a fairly limited user group that is going to take advantage of this. There aren't that many Palm users, even though [they] are a very attractive demographic."

Cox says, "Initially this is a high-end group of people. But it will spread. Five years ago if you asked most people if they needed a cell phone, they would laugh. Now they have one in their purse and one in their car. The adoption is going to happen."