We presented our current thinking at the Australian and New Zealand Communication Association (ANZCA) 2014 conference last week, at Swinburne University Melbourne, Australia.
For this version, we focussed on the mobile media policy gap, i.e. how policy is slow to adapt, is ignorant towards the cultures of use and is slow to adapt, and focussed on the autonomous automobility area. The work was well received with two significant pieces of feedback.
Firstly, Ben Goldsmith pushed our thinking around the privacy concerns of cars that are driven by mobile phones. Beyond the concerns of your data being captured and used in ways not previously thought of, ala FourSquare, what are the consequences of users relying on their mobile phones to arrive at a destination to be ‘hijacked’ and re-routed. A very plausible consideration for manufacturers and policy people to address.
Given the tight time constraints, we only had time for one other comment, provided by Jason Farman asked a great question around the cyclic nature of mobile communication and and cars. Given the past development of cars ‘accommodating’ mobile phones and then becoming an ideal space for mobile communication, are we seeing a similar turn in the current thinking? I.e. mobile phones being incorporated through app development and integration to only advance to the next space of phones driving communication and entertainment in vehicles.
Certainly two great ideas from two amazing scholars that we will incorporate as we move forward with this research.
We are beginning to understand the connected car ecology as a precursor to autonomous automobility. Interestingly, and form discussions with industry experts of late, autonomous automobility isn’t the issue here – driverless cars are here in various incarnations. What many specialists are saying is difficult to imagine at this stage is how cars will communicate with other cars.
A great example is an oil spill on the road. ‘In the future’ cars will identify the oil spill, proceed with caution, alert other cars to avoid the spill or proceed with caution, and alert authorities to come and fix it.
Another interesting area I have been thinking about lately was established with my recent conversation with the Zoox crew. In talking about the transition of the horse and cart technology to the combustible engine technology, low value driving was re-introduced as a task for the driver . The driver would have taken care of the low level driving, potholes, tree branches, gradients, while the driver would have taken care of the high level driving – location A to location B. Driverless cars once again take the low level thinking out of mobility.
These are some of the threads we are developing in the latest Moving Media discussions. In the meantime, enjoy our latest visualisation of the Connected Car ecology that highlights the organisational, political and commercial actors identified in the discussion to date. More to come…
I don’t know what I did, but I got a message from them saying that I could no longer use Uber to pick up passengers. They reckon I didn’t turn up to a job, but I was just late because I picked up another fair along the way (Sydney Taxi Driver, March 17, 2014).
The way we are catching taxis is changing, and mobile apps such as ingogo, Uber and goCatch are driving the changes. The new taxi apps work to combat the inconsistencies of the taxi industry and bypass the centralised process of booking and paying.
The two Australian entrepreneurs who established goCatch, Ned Moorfield and Andrew Campbell, did so when they twigged to problems with centralised booking and payment for cabs. In 2011 they received a A$250,000 innovation grant from the NSW Government for innovative mobile phone projects to help develop goCatch.
They partnered with Microsoft, Nokia, Blackberry, NSW Taxi Drivers Association, PayPal and Google and in October 2012 they launched goCatch. Some 16,000 of Australia’s 70,000 taxi drivers are now signed up to the service, a number that is still increasing.
The application enables passengers to broadcast their request to nearby taxis via their geo-located position. The passenger monitors how many drivers have seen the job. If the request is not accepted because of high demand or location, the passenger can offer the driver a tip as an incentive.
When the job has been accepted, both passenger and driver can see each other’s location on a real-time map, and can directly communicate via their shared phone numbers. The passenger has the option to finalise payment via PayPal, and when the journey is complete, both driver and passenger rate the transaction. goCatch takes a fee to facilitate the service.
Recently, James Packer, SEEK co-founder Paul Bassat, along with members of the Limberman and Kahlbetzer families, invested A$3 million into the goCatch service. This investment not only strengthens goCatch’s market share, it also indicates a market shift.
Users benefit from a self-regulating service that operates across the existing transportation infrastructure. Apps work much more efficiently than the heavily regulated, inefficient centralised offering, that is, calling for a cab.
This, of course, contradicts the role of the existing taxi councils and peak body, which have lobbied to restrict and regulate ridesharing apps.
The Australian Taxi Industry Association
The taxi industry is a highly centralised sector of the public transport industry. In Australia alone there are 20,658 taxis performing more than 172 million jobs each year, and moving more than 283 million passengers. This adds up to approximately A$3.94 billion revenue.
Of those jobs, Moorfield and Campbell claim that as many as 20,000 transactions are missed by either taxis failing to arrive or passengers disappearing.
In the recent Taxi Industry Inquiry presided over by former ACCC chair Allan Fels, it was revealed that the taxi industry should be concentrating its efforts on improving services for people with disabilities, as well as driver quality, taxi availability, safety, fare structure, booking services, and taxi availability.
The inquiry also concluded that “the existing regulatory regime governing taxis … is overly complex and prescriptive, and imposes unnecessary costs on the industry”.
The Australian Taxi Industry consists of one federal peak body, the Australian Taxi Industry Association (ATIA), with a collection of state members including NSW Taxi Council, Victorian Taxi Association, Taxi Councils of Western Australia, South Australia, and Queensland, Canberra Taxi Industry Association, and The Taxi Council of the Northern Territory. The ATIA describes its agenda in the following terms:
The ATIA will continue to play a leading role in promoting the public benefits delivered by regulated taxi markets. Well regulated taxi markets have been shown by empirical research to consistently outperform their deregulated counterparts on the important metrics of safety, pricing and service. While the threat remains from interests pushing hypothetical merits of open entry markets, the ATIA will strongly pursue its industry advocacy role using facts based lobbying.
Taxi apps are improving the way passengers source taxis and ensure fares are correct. Most of all, they reassure us that our taxi will arrive on time to connect us with our imminent flight. The overall experience of those who use ridesharing apps to travel in taxis is generally positive. This is the creative economy at its best: the market sorts out the supply and demand to suit the stakeholders.
All this raises the question: why do we need to regulate a system that is working?
The NSW Government was wise to the possibilities of goCatch when it gave the company an innovation grant. It’s a shame it is now moving to inhibit goCatch and other similar taxi apps through regulation.
With both passengers and drivers happy, surely a regulatory light touch, or even deregulation or self-regulation, is a better solution.
2013: Emphasis on smartphone integration; iOS and Android are producing apps that connect to the car; apps are using GPS and drawing information from communities of users to provide real time information; aCar to interface with the car’s operating systems (fuel consumption, mileage etc); CarLocator; GasBudy; iOnRoad – camera to detect accidents; iWrecked for when you have an accident; 3rd party componentry is quite distinct in this era to connect older cars with smartphones; average cost is around $5.99 per app (needs further investigation); Audi is working with Inrix Inc for parking data; BMW working with Parkopedia Ltd. for info on parking spaces (user communities); GM using OnStar RemoteLinkMobile app to start car and lock/unlock car; manufacturers still unclear about whether to connect to other cars or internet; Telematics is the burgeoning field from these types of discussions; Hyundai has Blue Link mobile services; BMW release “Last Mile” app.
What this leads me to believe is that there are four distinct eras in mobile internet within cars which has directed car manufacturers to abandon their desire to turn cars into mobile hot spots. The first sees the push come from academia (and no doubt the policy sector) to establish a suitable mobile automobile internet technology and protocol. The second sees car manufacturers implement communication systems that, awkwardly, brings the internet to the automobile. The third has manufacturers abandoning their push to make the car the internet source, and concentrate on app installation. While the final era demonstrates an integration moment where the manufactures concentration appears to be BYOD (bring your own device) to the automobile, where the apps are preinstalled to integrate with the car.
More research is required to fill a few of the obvious gaps here, but what is clear is there are four moments that are ‘driven’ by the political economy approach that are fascinating to investigate. Why did certain manufacturers partner with particular technological groups and not others? At what point did the manufacturers decide to abandon one form of tech for another? Will apps on smartphones be the future or will we see a reversion to include connectivity in the automobile?
The final observation is there seems to be three types of automobile apps emerging: safety apps (crash prevention, diagnostics, etc), general apps (radio, media, radars, navigation, objects etc), and insurance apps relevant to incidents (speed, camera, cause).
Moving Media is a comprehensive study of mobile Internet, how the infrastructures are evolving, how people use these convergent technologies, and how traditional and new modes of media policy respond.