Zingo Stake Sold for just £1

According to the FT via Yahoo, Manganese Bronze, the parent company of location based taxi service, Zingo, has sold a stake in the company for just £1. That's right, no missing "million".

Zingo cost £13 million to develop and is currently losing about £4 million a year. Funnily enough, its losses aren't caused by lack of user demand, but failure to sign up enough taxi drivers. This means that during peak times, only 1 in 3 calls successfully order a taxi. I wrote a fuller analysis here, including a prediction that they'd do something like this.

The deal has been made with another taxi company based in Singapore, ComfortDelGro, but who also operate Computer Cab in London. For £1, they get the rights to use the Zingo system in UK, Ireland and Asia and share future profits with Manganese Bronze.

The great thing about Zingo is that it proves that there's user demand for a location based service. This is encouraging as there a lot of scepticism in the market following the early failure of frankly silly applications like "Find my nearest X". I mean, who needs to find X's anyway?