Is it that time of the year when Aussie startups begin to feel restless and eye international markets? Last month, it was the taxi booking company ingogo that hinted at international expansion after raising $1 million from San Francisco-based Pacific Venture Advisors. Now it’s goCatch, also operator of a taxi-booking app, that is casting a…
goCatch hasn’t had a smooth ride since its launch a year ago. The app threatened taxi alliances, because its freed cabbies and allowed passengers the online equivalent of flagging a cab anytime. With cabbie councils hitting back, citing a lack of passenger safety, goCatch was pushed on the defensive, and never quite hit the high gears.
It’s not for nothing that goCatch last month won the $50,000 top prize at Tech23, a program sponsored in part by the New South Wales government and run by Slattery IT Consulting. Its iPhone app – which allows passengers to directly find and hire cabs in their vicinity – has been disruptive of the market. The app, launched in June, enables a cabbie to become a free agent, posing an evident threat to cabbie networks. The Taxi Council of Queensland has hit back, saying goCatch passengers could be compromising on their safety, and perhaps service as well, by hiring cabbies directly.
The Holy Grail of internet search could soon be in the sites of an Adelaide upstart. For years, technologists seeking to go one up on search giant Google – and Google itself through its Goggles search program – have been developing so-called visual search based on three-dimensional images. It is the form of search that…
The Early Warning Network, an emergency service first started in 1995, has won the Ninefold Cloud Computing Prize at the Tech23 awards. The network uses satellite mapping and forecasts from the Bureau of Meteorology, weather stations and experts to issue location-based emergency alerts during severe weather, including storms, hail, flash flooding, damaging winds, fires, earthquakes…
End of content
End of content
GET THIS AMAZEBALLS THING!
Click the button to get it now
