Looking behind the car seats to find half a trillion of value

Here’s a hypothesis: One of the most interesting places to look for new business value for the mobile industry is in the other industries that can be disrupted by the selective application of mobile intelligence.

The taxi industry is one such – an industry that is crying out for a dose of efficiency (or rather, has customers that are). How many people take cabs from any airport to the city centre, while the person behind them in the cab queue is about to do the same thing? Funnily enough, it again comes down to a communication problem – make it easier for the right information to pass between the right people at the right time, and you’ve got yourselves some savings, some of which could be turned into value (the way that Skype turns saving telco bills into willingness to pay).

My colleague Stephan Hartwig published a paper earlier this year about this that’s worth a read if you’re into this stuff. The intro says it all:

There are 500+ million privately owned passenger cars worldwide, thereof 236 Million in the US. These cars travel in the magnitude of 5 Trillion km per year. Let’s assume 2 empty seats per car and a small hypothetical value of only 5 cent per km and seat, the potential value of empty travelling seats amounts to 500billion€.

Of course, there are some pretty formidable social, technical and business model challenges to plugging into these opportunities, but that's what entrepreneurs are for. I wonder where else the selective application of mobile intelligence could also have the potential for change? Government tranparency and charitable donations could be candidates, and journalism and media in general surely have lessons to offer.