Taxi app promises to revolutionise private hire business

A FORMER Phoenix Nights cameraman has launched a free app which lets users hail private taxis anywhere in the UK from their smartphones.

Manchester-based Chris Burton is behind TaxiTastic, which also calculates journey distances and provides estimates of the fare based on data from over 10,000 taxi firms.

The first phase of the app uses GPS technology to show users their location and destination. The second phase, due in December, will enable users to pay for their journey from their phone via credit card or PayPal.

Mr Burton said: “I first got the idea when I was constantly getting overcharged on my travels abroad by taxi drivers who took advantage of my lack of local knowledge and took me the long way to my hotel or airport.

“I had the Eureka moment whilst ordering a pizza over the internet and thought why not apply similar technology with taxis? Mobile phones have GPS built in these days, so there’s no confusion about where you are being picked up from and using online mapping I could quickly calculate routes and therefore quotes for cab rides and automatically pass the booking to the partner company covering that area.”

Mr Burton, who also worked on The League of Gentlemen, started an e-commerce site in 1999 and now runs a Chinese lantern supplier called Sky Orbs.

Earlier in the year he launched the ‘Race It Home’ app which allows holidaymakers to send personalised postcards using uploaded holiday photos.