I got into a GrabCar Economy for the first time this week. The driver, a 60-something, is a senior executive working in manufacturing full-time but bought a car for his son and now wants some income to pay off his road tax and insurance.
This is the more affordable version of GrabCar, the private car service launched by the Malaysia-based start-up that, at the last funding round of $500 million, got a valuation of $1.5 billion.
I feel like I’m driving with a headmaster rather than a taxi driver. As soon as I get in, he tells me the fare is $11. “It’s a fixed rate, you know that right?”
He explains to me how GrabCar Economy works. The fare is based on kilometres and is fixed. “So it’s good for the customer if there is bad traffic,” he said.
He started with the service just a week ago and does about two to three rides a day. He is also signed up with UberX, the equivalent competitor service.
We discuss the changes happening in the world, how his industry, manufacturing, has changed and now, taxi services and we discuss how in London, Paris and Melbourne, taxi drivers are protesting against services like Uber.
“They have strong unions in those countries. There’s nothing taxi drivers in Singapore can do. The (taxi drivers) union is owned by the government which also invests in companies like GrabTaxi,” he said in the pragmatic way often associated with Singapore.
Spottly Insider Guide
In his car, I notice a booklet called “Spottly”. It’s probably because I write about travel start-ups that I recognise the name. It’s one of the start-ups we’ve featured at WIT and it’s a social travel app that allows travellers to exchange recommendations and reviews about places they are visiting.
It’s pretty hard and expensive to build a brand just online these days – there are billions and billions of websites and apps vying for the consumer attention – and Spottly has clearly decided to take the printed route to build awareness.
See how everything swings back …
The Spottly Insider Magazine, tagged “a curated travel guide for locals by locals”, is a handy guide, giving visitors tips about the city they’re visiting. It’s well-designed, very clean, lots of visuals, and lots of lists from “style icons” in different cities. My Top 5 Spots, Our Favourite Picks …
It seems that the travel world, indeed the whole world, is being boiled (euphemism for dumbed) down to lists. 10 foods you must not eat, 10 things you can do with a hanger, 5 things you must not feed your dog, 10 secrets of happy people …
From Buzzfeed to Huffington Post to Mashable, and every travel website or app out there, everything is about lists – because “the man up there” has figured that’s what gets us to click on those links. We humans apparently like lists.
Now I don’t know about you but frankly, I am suffering from LFS – List Fatigue Sydnrome. And I think I now hate it more than I do reading manuals. (I have yet to read the manuals for my two newest acquisitions, GoPro and the Apple Watch so to me, right now they are, respectively, a glorified camera and a glorified watch).
Anyway, I digress. But it’s a sign of the times we live in – where private cars are now taxis, where senior executives are your drivers, where smartphone apps are now publishers and where lists are how we live by …
Now let me get back to my list of things to do for the rest of the week.
