Taxi Driver Online

Are we talking the software or the car kits as well (CT4000).

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A member of the Hire or Reward Industry

Typically, looking right across the board, all the systems we looked at cost around £1,000 a car for the total set-up. GPRS costs were substantially higher than PMR-based systems, but, the GPRS systems offer a lot more for the money.

On sales-people, the only company we ever spoke to who were totally honest with us were DataMaster. I salute Bill for his wholesome and seeming rare integrity in this day and age.

Our spec was considered bizarre by most companies, more than one telling us that we didn't want what we wanted and instead wanted what they were offering.

I viewed the whole episode as being based upon "The installation of which system, is going to get me the least sacked?".

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There is Significant Unmet Demand for my Opinion.

Surely it must be at least 5 years since you started looking.

Still you must have had a few free lunches from the data reps.

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IDFIMH

Thanks for that Andy.

There’s a very good reason though for not giving out any bull and that’s nobody can come back on you with the “You said” thing and that way you keep your customers happy. I reckon that about 50% of the people that call us are advised either to look to other companies or to spend their cash developing their own company until they reach the point where computerisation and or data can benefit them. We generally get a big thank you for the advice at the end even if it does cost us a sale.

Just as a matter of interest, we’ve just developed a new data terminal as a direct replacement for our existing customers. It’s a single box affair looking much the same as its predecessor but with integral GPS and a lot more processing power. Cost per car, including new radio and fitting works out at £450 per car irrespective of quantity so including all the office costs the average company ends up effectively paying somewhere between £550 /£600 per car.

Bill

Yes, has been a while. And Nope. Never had a free lunch from any of them. Feedback I have had from some of them is that we are "too demanding a customer" which is probably right.

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There is Significant Unmet Demand for my Opinion.

No free lunches here either Andy. I think myself lucky if I get bought a Big Mack and fries!

The way I see things is that many of the smaller companies work in rather strange ways and while we like to provide a flexible system, some requests are so obscure that you just have to admit that it wouldn’t be economically viable to write such code. I often tell people that if our software doesn’t meet your needs then it’s worth considering just how you’re running the business. The larger companies tend to be pretty straightforward and it’s just a case of how much does it cost and what’s the support like. The irony is that the smaller the company the more demands they make on us so if anything we should charge these more for support but that just isn’t doable.

Just been reading back about core systems. Not quite sure what constitutes a “core system” but assuming this is all the office software and hardware, for us, that would be between £5K (2 user) and £12K (10 user) typically with an annual support cost of £1,500 per company. We would normally recommend one workstation for every 35 working cars but that does depend on the nature of the work.

Bill

Just to refresh your memory Bill, we wanted multiple pick-up multiple-drop TaxiBus street level routing algorythms in real time (among other factors). You said it was "too far away from you at the moment" but understood what we wanted.

The problem was with people who said they could do it, but then couldn't. The people who said they could do it as an extra for a price, but wanted us to fund all the R&D on it (fair comment, but it made it too expensive for us), and the people who said their system already did it, but didn't.

Then, there were the people who could actually do it (principally the bus industry suppliers) but who wanted to down-grade from Bus programmes which didn't work with the cab side.

To be fair, there were three suppliers who came up with most of the goods, to name them: Mobi, Trapeze and Logical Transport. Only the first of these could actually handle the mixture of scheduled bus, taxibus and taxi (at that time), but the whole affair became so complicated and dragged on so long, that the Council had a change of leadership/direction, and my Boss lost interest and invested his money elsewhere.

End of story.

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There is Significant Unmet Demand for my Opinion.

did anyone view the alantaxi system it looks very good the way the datahead is built in to the radio and the priceing structure seems so simple

are Cordic system using dell pc and pda?

Dell PC and Orbit XDA

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A member of the Hire or Reward Industry

how much for the Orbit XDA

I don't know. Ring them up and ask them.

You can supply your own if you want. They will still want to charge you for the licence to upload their software on it.

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A member of the Hire or Reward Industry

how much is the license then?

I reckon that depends how many you want to buy.

PM Don and ask him.

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A member of the Hire or Reward Industry

i can get them for £100 each or if you buy off a junkie for £20 that just robbed a city cab lol