Hailo

» see hailocab.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

hailo was a london problem solved for london. the black cab and the driver who did the knowledge to earn the wheel, the hand raised on a wet street corner, that is a very specific piece of a very specific city, and hailo was the app built to fit it exactly. i was in ankara, where the taxi economy runs on different rules and a different app landscape, so hailo reached me only as a case study in how a local incumbent gets an app before the disruptor shows up. it is the rare grave where the honest distance is the whole geography.

it started on 1 november 2011, founded by a mix of three actual london cab drivers and three tech people, which was the pitch in one line. instead of fighting the licensed trade the way uber would, hailo hooked into it. a passenger opened the app and hailed one of the nearby cabs on the map, while the driver kept the fare structure the city already set. by may 2013 it had run more than three million rides through over 30,000 registered drivers.

the money followed. hailo raised somewhere around 120 million dollars and pushed into sixteen cities, carried by the idea that working with the existing taxi trade was the safe, defensible position. then the ground moved.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

for a couple of years hailo looked like the sensible bet. it did not need to convince cities to bend their rules, because it sat neatly inside them, and drivers liked that it fed them fares without asking them to become something new. that alliance with the licensed trade was the moat, right up until the moat stopped mattering.

~ how it actually ended ~

uber did not respect the licensed-trade boundary, and it had far more money to burn. hailo pulled out of north america in 2014 and retreated to europe, then in july 2016 it announced a merger with mytaxi, the taxi app owned by daimler. the deal put daimler in majority control and combined the two apps, and the hailo brand was phased out into mytaxi by early 2017. mytaxi later became free now. the arm-out-of-a-black-cab app was absorbed into a german car company's roadmap, which is a quiet way to disappear.

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