Kabbee

This Android and iPhone app is a minicab price comparison and booking service for greater London. You have quick access to a choice of good value and safe minicabs. You can pay by cash and card, or you can set up a prepaid account.

Uber

This San Franciscan startup provides cars to anyone with a mobile: cars should arrive in five minutes and cost about 1.5 times the price of a normal cab ride. When the ride is over, Uber will automatically charge your credit card on file.

Hailo Cab

Jay Bregman, CEO of Hailo Cab, estimates that taxis lose £25 million every day by people not being able to find a car. With Hailo, you can hail one of London’s 23,000 trusted and reliable black cab drivers. You can pay automatically with your credit or debit card or in cash.

Addison Lee

Addison Lee runs the biggest car fleet in Europe, but just eight controllers plot 25,000 journeys a day. Auto Allocator, their proprietary piece of software, manages all bookings ensuring the fastest pick-up times for passengers: it looks 20 minutes into the future and cuts CO2 emissions. They have mobile apps foriPhone, Android, BlackBerry and Nokia.

Related Post: Taxishare – Fab App or Pushing the Legal Boundary?

The board of Yahoo is considering selling both its 40% holding in the Alibaba Group of China and its 35% ownership position in Yahoo Japan to their majority owners. The tax-free transactions are valued at about $17 billion.

By reducing its investments in Asia, Yahoo would get a large cash infusion and would also be able to focus on turning around its core Internet advertising business under its new leader. *Yahoo*’s board in September ousted its chief executive, Carol Bartz, and started a strategic review that led to the discussions with the Asian companies as well as with private-equity firms.

In fact, just a few weeks ago, the company appeared to be leaning toward the sale of a minority stake to private equity investors: separate groups led by Silver Lake and TPG made bids to acquire stakes of roughly 20%, but despite initial support by the board those proposals have been harshly criticised by shareholders, who are concerned that such a deal would dilute their holdings and concentrate too much power with a new investor group.

Yahoo then restarted talks with Alibaba and Softbank, which had submitted an initial proposal in October. The plan is rather complicated: Alibaba would have to create a subsidiary and put several billion dollars of cash into it, as well as to create an operating asset that Yahoo would buy using additional cash from Alibaba. It’s more or less like giving Yahoo a prepaid card for an asset of its choice.

Alibaba would then swap the stock of this subsidiary for just under two-thirds of *Yahoo*’s stake in Alibaba. The transaction would leave Yahoo with a 15% stake in Alibaba plus the cash and the subsidiary’s assets. Yahoo would carry out an identical transaction for its entire 35% stake in Yahoo Japan, which has a market value of around $6 billion.