Travellers will soon be able to order taxis via SMS, if a South Australian wireless communications company has its way.

ABM Industries has developed SmartMove, which uses the GPRS network and GPS system to accept bookings and direct them to the nearest taxi. Alex Mezhvinsky, managing director of ABM Industries, told ZDNet Australia   the new technology would decrease waiting times and be less expensive to run than the current two-way radio assignation system.

For consumers, Mezhvinsky sees the benefits including shorter waiting times, more information over the location of the taxi, and a wider variety of booking options, including over the Internet and SMS.

Businesses will be able to pre-register a location, and will be assigned an acronym. Customers simply SMS "[acronym],taxi" to a specified number, and the system will dispatch a taxi to the registered location. Customers will receive a confirmation number so there are no arguments over which taxi goes with which customer.

In a year or so, Mezhvinsky hopes to be using a system being trialled by Telstra and Optus that will allow them to use the mobile network to pinpoint the location of a caller.

"When the customer initiates an SMS call for a taxi the system will locate him automatically," said Mezhvinsky. "It will give him a choice of three intersections (because it can't locate him precisely) and when he chooses which one the taxi will be sent there."

Other features include the ability to specify a service and get a report on the availability of that service, and find out the estimated time of arrival of a taxi.

According to Mezhvinsky, taxi companies will be the big winners. The system currently in use operates over a private radio network, which is expensive to set up and maintain. The SmartMove system will be Internet based, so the companies will have minimal start-up costs.

Taxi drivers, who currently have a screen and two-way radio costing around AU$3,500, will use a Compaq iPad 3870 with a Motorola GSM modem. As well as displaying the job details, the PDA will present a map with turn-by-turn directions to the pick-up. The next generation will include Bluetooth, so drivers can get out of their cars without worrying about missing jobs.

Mezhvinsky said they had two ways of charging for the service, per job or a fixed amount per car per month, but were still in negotiations with several companies and couldn't reveal any figures. However, he said it currently costs taxi companies an estimated AU$1.30 to book a job. "We've already proven we can reduce that cost," he said.

According to Mezhvinsky there are 15,000 taxi drivers in Australia who undertake two million jobs per month.

To create SmartMove ABM Industries received AU$50,000 in funding from Playford Capital, which distributes money from the Federal program, Building on IT Strengths.

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