| On Friday 5th June 1998 I witnessed two Internet
technologies that totally impressed and amazed me - Dial-a-Cab's real-time taxi booking
system and a space invaders game! DAC: REAL-TIME TAXI BOOKING
I'll concentrate on DAC's system first. DAC's new system is an exciting new
technology, although not the first. Yellow Cabs, Brisbane, Australia, http://www.yellowcab.com.au
have created the world's first real-time taxi booking system using the Internet, but to be
honest, Dial-a-Cab's will steal the show and leave it standing.
Allen Togwell, along with his trusty laptop, visited my house in sunny south
London to give a demonstration of the new system using my telephone line (what a cheek!).
After booting the laptop ie turning it on, Allen started Internet Explorer version 3 and
connected to the Dial-a-Cab web site located at, http://www.dialacab.co.uk.
From the home page, Allen entered the restricted part of the web site by typing his name
and password. This section of the site is where the real-time booking system resides.
The system, as it stands now, is still in development and Allen stressed that
there is still a lot of work to be done. I was shown a screen that resembled the control
room's screen at Dial-a-Cab when I last visited. This screen was grid shaped like a
spreadsheet and colour coded displaying all the London postal areas with the number of
fares available. It also displayed the current status of the taxis in that postal area.
The screen was being updated as I watched. Just as jobs were taken by drivers, the
available jobs were reduced along with the available cabs. Absolutely fascinating stuff!
HOW THE EDITOR IMPRESSED MY WIFE!
Allen Togwell continued by showing me another screen where you could send a
message to a driver over the Internet by identifying his call sign. So I sent a message to
Alan Fisher, I kept it polite just in case it was transmitted to all the drivers. Within a
minute, Alan phoned me at home and told me exactly what I'd sent him, not only was I
impressed, so was the wife!
Allen Togwell proceeded to show me many other facilities that this new system
has and will have, such as giving the client the ability to view all his previous fares
including statistics. In fact, there are just too |
many to list here. The
technology employed in developing this ground breaking system is cutting-edge, but it
differs immensely to the Australian real-time system in that Dial-a-Cab's provides real
feedback, dynamically!
Brisbane's Yellow Cab company has developed the world's first real-time taxi
booking system over the Internet and from what I can see it's a good system so long as the
public enter the correct details. Yellow Cabs state that once you've entered your details
on their Internet pages, which is about four of them, they go straight to the cab's
computer. The major limitation to this system is that the public can and will type
erroneous details. It tests for blank entries and characters instead of numbers, but the
system doesn't test for correct addresses whereas Dial-a-Cab’s system does.
BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA TO CATFORD? FIVE MINUTES, GUV…
As a test, I entered total rubbish into the Brisbane Yellow Cab form, it
accepted all of it and replied saying a cab would arrive within five minutes, now that's
fast, Brisbane to London in five minutes! What they need is a postal code identifier where
the public types in the post code and the rest of the form is immediately completed with
the public only having to enter the street number. This system would help eliminate
erroneous entries and could reject addresses outside of a certain region. I wonder if they
need a web developer? However, I don’t come cheap and travelling could pose a
problem!
SPACE INVADERS
Now to the fun stuff! The other exciting technology I witnessed was Space
Invaders over the Internet. You're probably asking just what is so fascinating about space
invaders, it's old hat? Well this site was developed totally using Javascript, Cascading Style Sheets (CCS) and Dynamic HTML - something I have been waffling
on about for the past year. It is cutting-edge development, requires no plug-ins, extra
software or time consuming downloads and is well worth a visit, but bear in mind it will
only work with Microsoft Internet Explorer version 4, so upgrade and visit: http://www.otn.co.uk/
See you next month…Vince Chin |
