Grabbing more or the future evolution of ride sharing services

Coming back to this page after a long absence mainly due to other priorities and procrastination, to be honest.

I am jumping right into it by following up on my last post about GrabTaxi. As of a few weeks ago it is now Grab. This comes with a new graphic identity, a new logo, a new transit campaign, international agreements and many new services.

Based on the picture you can see they went big and were (and still are) all over the place in Singapore. 

New services (GrabCar - in 4 flavours -, GrabHitch, Limo Taxi) on top the legacy taxis and certainly more to come outside of the world of transportation. Why? The change in name calls for the ability to call on the service to literally "grab" anything one would want: food, general order delivery, and why not payment like successful Chinese social services? Future will tell but I am not the only thinking about it.

China & the rest of the world are actually very much top of mind following the announcement of a cross partnership with Lyft (itself $500M richer following investment by GM), Didi Kuaidi of China and Ola from India. Using one's favorite app is really a good thing for users as they don't need to learn a new UX or language. But looking at the backers of these companies, there may be more at work: Softbank backs all of them, even Lyft via its investment in Alibaba. The cut throat competition will call for consolidation amongst all the players and money will be made in the backend as well as with additional services. Otherwise there is going to be blood, like in the US this past January.

This will be a short post and before my last comment I want to point to a link towards a re/code decode podcast featuring the president of Lyft, John Zimmer, who talks about the company, the recent investment from GM and the future. One interesting thought was about the real turning point for ride sharing apps: a 3-minute ETA anywhere in a market would make them a good alternative to other modes of transportation. How would that change our habits? Would that still provide ride sharing app drivers with living wage? Those are questions up for debate but very real.

And I will leave with a geeky picture of my early morning ride to the airport this week when, to my surprise, a Tesla S picked me up. What a great car, and that screen!