First-place Peter Farrell Cup Competition winner TaxiApps has won again, this time at the John Heine Entrepreneurial Challenge at the University of Adelaide (in partnership with Queensland University of Technology) on 9 & 10 December 2010. Taxi Apps is a mobile phone-based taxi booking and fare payment platform.
Team TaxiApps not only won First Runner-Up, which comes with over $7,000 in cash and prizes, but also the Outstanding Showcase Display Award, and the i.lab technology incubator Award.
Team member Andrew Campbell says, "[We] embarked on this journey because we perceived it would be a great process to go through to refine the business plan. And you know what? It has been remarkable as a way of doing this. The prize money was perceived as a bonus...If we had just tried to write a plan and a model ourselves, I can imagine how crap it would be.
"By going through the PF Cup and the JH Challenge we have received so much in-put, energy, critique and motivation. The TaxiApp plan is now really well refined and we believe that it now has a much greater chance of success as a business. In addition, we now also have some great contacts, we learned lots, we pitched and pitched and pitched this thing & we know it backwards."
TaxiApps has developed a mobile phone-based taxi booking and payments platform. One of the application's main features is to connect passengers and taxi drivers directly by broadcasting their location using mobile phone technology: passengers save time and effort finding cabs, while drivers get more fares and revenues.
In Australia, large taxi network operators and the highly monopolistic payments firm, Cabcharge, wield enormous influence and control over other players in the industry. The Taxi Apps business is founded on the principal of applying emerging technology to disrupt a highly monopolised market, redefining in the process how this market operates.
For more information on the John Heine Entrepreneurial Challenge, click through on the following link: http://www.johnheinechallenge.org/competitor/prizes.jsp
Blog for the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE) at the Australian School of Business (ASB) at the University of New South Wales (UNSW). The CIE inspires innovation and entrepreneurship through its educational programs, competitions, events, and research initiatives.
