In contrast to cab companies and vehicle leasing companies, the new model of online booking taxi service has given rise to a number of Internet service platforms, which represent the direction of the new economy and new business models. In the era of the sharing economy, Internet service platforms will drive the progress of the times by creating new business and management models that are compatible with the Internet economy.
In fact, it is necessary for us to jump out from the topic of cabs because, as an innovative representative of the sharing economy model in the era of “Internet+”, the innovation of online taxi service is much more significant than replacing cabs. In the “Internet+” era, one of the fundamental impacts of the Internet is the “de-channelization” of consumers: through the Internet, consumers can directly connect with the final suppliers of their needs and conduct transactions, which are nothing more than physical goods, information and services. This means that in the case of the offline channel, it is not only online but also offline. This means that, as far as offline channels are concerned, network booking taxi services open the door to unlimited possibilities: in addition to participating in public transportation services, network booking taxi services can be used as an offline carrier for all services involving the delivery of people or goods, such as logistics, express delivery, and distribution.
In this sense, opening up the thinking of sharing economy, opening up the network reservation taxi service, combining it with the construction of smart cities, and letting the idle and wasteful transportation resources in cities start up, will undoubtedly greatly improve the efficiency of the flow of people and materials in cities, significantly reduce the operating costs and social and environmental costs, and add a colorful touch to the modern urban civilization.
Internet-booked rental car service: the technical function of “Internet+”.
Information technology is the enabler of management change and the catalyst of service innovation. In the era of “Internet+”, new technologies such as Internet of Things, cloud computing, big data, and mobile Internet have changed the ecological environment of traditional industries, while also giving rise to new business models. Leaving the support of information technology, these new thinking and new models will stay at the level of concept, and it is difficult to truly implement. The online taxi service has created a new way of travel in the sharing economy, and the platform and socialization brought by information technology are undoubtedly the strong driving force to realize this travel change.
Information technology: the driving force of the innovation of network-booked rental car service.
The public service platform based on information technology is undoubtedly the engine that drives the service innovation. In fact, the greatest value of the service platform comes from the centralized management and decision-making based on big data analysis, and the resulting service innovation. With the large-scale commercialization of 4G network, the public service platform can collect and control all legal traffic and travel data through GPS, RFID, sensors, image acquisition and other devices. These data are real-time and polymorphic, with structured data and unstructured data, such as initiation time, traveler identity, driver information, origin and destination, vehicle travel routes, traveler interaction information, etc. Faced with such a huge amount of data, what innovative service value can information technology bring to mobile travel? It is worth envisioning several potential scenarios.
First, real-time navigation. Collection of vehicle origin and destination information, real-time driving information, and real-time traffic information, based on real-time forecasting, city-wide and global optimization, to provide personalized, real-time navigation services for vehicles, to provide local traffic guidance and driving solutions for congestion, to achieve the purpose of reducing traffic congestion;
Second, real-time scheduling of service supply. With the cloud platform’s super computing and storage capabilities, it identifies the unbalanced distribution of supply capacity in different regions and time periods, predicts unnecessary supply shortages and surpluses, integrates the idle fragmented transportation service supply, and implements dynamic scheduling to lay the foundation for transforming the transportation network into a value-added service network;
Third, travelers interact with each other. The service platform helps to integrate the transportation network and social network, and provides passengers with humanized services before, during and after the trip. Take carpooling as an example, in the dynamic process of taxi hailing, the service platform centralizes the dispatching and optimizes the driver-rider adaptation scheme to achieve the most optimal state. In addition, the rise of social media provides a place for passengers to share their experiences and express their opinions. Through text analysis, targeted identification of user preferences, based on which recommendation algorithms are designed to facilitate reasonable selection of travel solutions;
Fourth, service regulation. The service platform can realize the supervision of the whole route for travel services, and provide a quantitative basis for assessing the driver’s credit and service quality. Multi-source heterogeneous data collection and fusion technology can display the status of drivers and passengers in a multi-dimensional and full life cycle, which is the basis for achieving qualification certification. In addition, based on big data analysis, anti-cheating monitoring can be realized. For example, for a series of malicious behaviors such as driver and passenger swiping, through data mining, screening the authenticity of transaction information, and designing intelligent anti-cheating algorithms with low misuse rate, so as to improve the travel experience of passengers;
Fifth, mobile payment. Based on relatively mature digital encryption and secure transaction technologies, establish a mobile payment ecological environment by improving industry standards. Interface with the billing system of the service platform to enable online payments based on remote ID, including WeChat Pay, Alipay and Baidu Wallet;
Sixth, service accessibility. Given the high digital divide index in China, there is an urgent need to consider the gaps in information technology usage by vulnerable groups for network appointments. To this end, the functionality and performance of the software can be improved with the help of technologies such as wearable devices, voice recognition or visualization, to enhance the usability and ease of use of the system in various contexts and environments.
