Uber rival in Pak uses rickshaws, low-tech phones

LAHORE: As taxi hailing giant Uber enters Pakistan, a little-known local competitor is counting on a mix of new ideas and old technology to tap what could be a big

LAHORE: As taxi hailing giant Uber enters Pakistan, a little-known local competitor is counting on a mix of new ideas and old technology to tap what could be a big chunk of the market: low-income residents who travel in rickshaws, not cabs.

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Known as Rixi, the Lahore-based service hails rickshaws instead of cars. Its platform is SMS phone messaging that allows nearby drivers to bid for any user’s business. Pakistan has more than 130 million cellphone subscriptions, but only 21% subscribe to data packages.

Rixi founder Adnan Khawaja says his company works with more than 1,000 rickshaw drivers in Lahore. It works by bypassing poor smartphone penetration in the low-income rickshaw market by polling drivers’ locations using cellphone towers and matching passengers’ messaged locations to points on Google Maps.