For some reason I have always liked talking to taxi drivers about their business.  Maybe it’s because my dad was a NYC taxi driver back in the 70s, or maybe it’s because driving a taxi is such a classic immigrant path to building a life here.  And it’s certainly because of the amount of tech and business model innovation in the transportation space.  

Last night I took an Uber home from the airport, and was talking to the driver about his experience with it.  He loves Uber — in the past 2 years, he switched from being a Boston city cab driver to being an Uber driver — and in the process traded $4000 / month in cab lease fees (what you pay a garage as a base rate to drive the cab — regardless of how much you earn) for a $700 / month car payment and $400 / month in insurance.  And he gets to have a vastly improved quality of work (managing his own business & time, driving in a nicer car, etc).

Of course there are tradeoffs — if the Uber business slows down, he’s still on the hook for that car payment.  And it’s possible that the number of Uber drivers will continue to increase (unconstrained by medallion restrictions, which in NYC cap taxis at 13,000), increasing competition and bringing down his margins.

But overall, he said that Uber changed his life (for the better).  Not everyone feels this way, but it’s one story.

Anyway, the most interesting thing he said was not about the business, but the impact on neighborhoods.  He said that Uber has radically increased the taxi / car service business in the city’s tough neighborhoods.  This comes across as sounding counter-intuitive since most tech-driven transportation platforms (like Uber, Lyft and Sidecar — but especially Uber) are derided as “For Yuppies By Yuppies”.  But the reason makes perfect sense: with Uber, you know your passenger.

So whereas a traditional taxi would hesitate to pick up fares in tough parts of town, because you never know who’s going to get in, Uber drivers can do this with much more confidence, since there is personal identity (and therefore accountability) built into the system.

This makes perfect sense in theory, and I’d be really interested to explore data that could test this out.  Especially as NYC gears up to offer mobile payments in traditional taxis.

This is a perfect example of Regulation 2.0 — using real-time / mobile accessible data to build trust and safety into a networked system.  And it points out the limitations of “1.0” regulation schemes (in this case taxi licensing), that don’t have access to such data and can hence only solve for part of the problem (in this case, protecting passengers from bad drivers).  And it’s a really great example of some of the unexpected benefits of allowing new, networked models to emerge.

When we got home from vacation last night, my new Chromecast was sitting waiting for me.  I’ve been really psyched to try it out.

The out-of-the-box experience was clear and simple.  My favorite thing about Chromecast is how small it is — it’s barely there; just a tiny little add-on to web-enable your TV.

The installation and setup were smooth, with one major exception: the first time through, my setup failed, citing a mysterious UPnP error, and a vaguely worded message to “check my router settings”.  Being a geeky person, I (a) knew that that meant going to 192.168.1.1 to get to the router config, (b) was able to remember / figure out the username and password for my router and (c) hunted around for the Universal Plug and Play settings until I found what looked like the right one.  My guess is that all of the above would be a deal breaker for 99.5% of consumers.

Once I got through that, I played around a bit with mirroring my computer screen to the TV (just like you can do with Airplay), and playing some web videos on the TV (including this video from the awesome Smarter Every Day series, showing an AK-47 firing underwater at 27,000 frames per second, to illustrate the physics of it — the explanation of the pressure forces about 2 minutes in is stellar).

I’m excited about this — I’m pretty sure this is not **the** answer to bringing the internet to TVs, but it’s a nice step on the road.  A few things come to mind as tough problems:

 * getting past having to switch “inputs” on the TV. This is another super clunky step that I’m sure loses a ton of people (and certainly just makes this content feel “farther away” and just out of reach of my regular routine.  It would be awesome if TVs provided an API to let apps / devices control the input.  I have no idea how that works but I’m almost certain it’s not possible now.

 * being able to queue content I see on the web to my TV for viewing later.  That was my favorite feature of the old Boxee.

 * the config steps (as mentioned above).  Also: in my case, relying on my broadband / TV provider, Verizon, actually allowing me to access and change those settings.  This kind of thing is disruptive to traditional TV and I could easily imagine combo broadband / tv providers clamping down to protect the legacy TV business.

Relatedly: I hung out with a friend last week who is a writer / producer at The Onion, and asked him how many of their video views came from people watching on TVs (vs computers or mobile devices).  He had no idea and it sounds like it’s not something they track, or even think about very much.  I guess it makes sense, given how early this all is, and given the relative clunkiness of the web / tv integrations thus far.  But man, it seems clear to me that this is where we’re headed, and I think & hope it’ll be good for independent content outlets like the Onion and others.

Despite the extent to which I talk and think about car sharing and other newly possible. web-enabled modes of transportation, the truth is I still don’t use too many of them on a regular basis.  Need to work on that.

It seems as though I need to travel to SF to get the urge to get around town in new ways.  A few months ago, I tried out Scoot’s new battery-powered short-term scooter rental service, which was really fun (and will get much better as battery life improves).

This week, I tried a new one: FlightCar.  FlightCar is a peer-to-peer car sharing service, not unlike RelayRides, Getaround, or Buzzcar.  The twist is that it’s all based around airport trips.  Here’s the idea:

Every day, thousands of people drive to their local airport and park their car in long term parking before they head out of town.  At the exact same time, thousands of people are arriving at that same airport — and guess what, lots of them need cars. Add a little web-based matchmaking, booking, and logistics, and there you go. 

What I like about this approach is that it builds on behavior that people are doing anyway — dropping off and picking up cars at airports.  It’s not a huge stretch to go from there to peer-to-peer renting, especially if the whole experience is really seamless.  There is something about that arrangement that helps overcome the awkwardness that is a factor in lots of peer-to-peer businesses.  Maybe airports is the perfect beachhead for entering the peer-to-peer car sharing business (or maybe not; we’ll see…).

My experience with FlightCar was pretty good.  The online booking was really easy, just like renting a normal car, but with the added bonus of getting to pick out the exact car you’ll be driving (I chose a 1999 Audi A4 with a stick-shift — not a car you’re often likely to rent; my second choice was a mazda miata).

A FlightCar valet met me at the baggage claim (after a bit of wrangling since I was 2 hours early and we were waiting in the wrong place) - I dropped the valet and signed the paperwork, and then Brad, Albert and I set out on our way.

I gotta say, I actually liked it a lot — just like you feel more like a local when you stay in an Airbnb apartment, there is something different about driving a “real” car when you’re traveling.  In this case, it’s a car I’ve always liked, and I don’t get a chance to drive stick that often, so it was definitely more fun than my typical rental.

FlightCar is still working out the kinks in the service, there are a few rough edges in the pick up / drop off experience that they’ re still working out, in this case the car wasn’t washed and was out of gas when I picked it up.  The former will continue to improve I’m sure, and the latter was likely a function of my showing up early.

I feel like with all of these peer-to-peer services, there’s an initial hump you need to get over before you can participate at all.  Something to get you past the “whoa that’s kind of weird” moment that many people have as their first reaction.  Like Airbnb did with their “crash the inauguration” website around the 2009 inauguration.

In this case, I thought FlightCar did a good job of doing that for me.