Usually, when someone spams your comments, you delete it. But I got an interesting spam comment the other day which is a potentially good idea. There is a company called Texxi which is arguing there is a market in which people post where they are going to enable dynamic ride-matching/taxi services, which they call a Transit Exchange.

The message in full

The answer, David, is a Demand Responsive Transit Exchange which borrows heavily from the I.T. network transit exchange (that, incidentally, also allows for largescale peer-peer bandwidth sharing and trading, killing centralised monopolies and NSA snoopers in one go – http://www.educause.edu/members/michael-hrybyk), finance, aeronautics and biology.

RoadSpaceTime is virtualised into a tradable commodity and made available to people via mobile devices (XML, SMPP, SMS, Smartphone App, Web Page or Email) to connect to a futures exchange and “database of transit intentions” which store itineraries and price searches.

A credit contagion solver working through the social network graph applies genetic algorithms to suggest “solutions” to customers in realtime. In 2013, this is now laughably trivial, but even 5 years ago, the cost of the computing power would have required millions in VC money.

Take a look at:

“The Market Opportunity for Dynamic Ridesharing” | http://bit.ly/vtpi-EqTransit-1
Or download (26Mb pdf) The Market Opportunity – http://www.texxi.org/pres/marketopp.pdf

“Transport – A New Beginning” | http://bit.ly/vtpi-EqTransit-3
Or download (21.70Mb pdf) – http://www.texxi.org/pres/newbeginning.pdf

“The underpinnings of the Transit Exchange” | http://bit.ly/tranexch00
Or download (19.53Mb pdf) – http://www.texxi.org/pres/underpinnings.pdf

Certainly they are not the only ones in this space, and the idea has been around for a quite long time (Mel Webber noted the idea of Dynamic Ridesharing decades ago) but they filed for a patent as early as 2006. They propose to be the market maker here, rather than relying on peer-to-peer matching. They thus would guarantee the seller and the buyer that they will be fulfilled at a given price (and get a vig).

They say:

By combining Futures Exchanges + Mobile + Social + Big Data + Genetic Algorithms any vehicle with spare capacity becomes your private vehicle for just when you need it.

Whatever your needs, Texxi can make any participating local vehicle fleet able to offer an easy and tailored transport solution for you
Patent Pending (July 2006)

They also have a really weird video

The website is worth visiting if you are interested in possible future scenarios for The New Mobility.