GoMyWay lets you save money by finding people to share a taxi with

Traveling on a taxi is expensive in Singapore: A trip from a housing estate to the Central Business District could easily set you back S$20 or more.

A new mobile app called GoMyWay can make it cheaper, and you could even make some new friends in the process. Available on the iPhone now before its official launch this week, the app lets you search for riders in the vicinity and contact them to arrange for a shared taxi ride together.

You can either key in your destination, and the app will generate a list of people near you that are going to roughly the same place, or you can post a trip and hope that others will join you.

In order to chat with a potential travel companion, you’ll need to purchase credits through the app. Each chat session costs between 11 and 20 cents. The chat interface actually protects the user by removing the need to share contact information, preserving the user’s privacy.

There are other safety features that are baked into the app too: Females have the option of filtering riders by gender, and riders can receive a thumbs up or thumbs down from fellow travelers.

GoMyWay is only available in Singapore for now, although the team has plans to expand internationally soon. The app will also in the near future add the ability to plan future shared trips.

Interestingly, it claims to be the first taxi-sharing app in Singapore. That is not true. Another app called ShareTransport.sg has been in existence for quite some time, and in addition to sharing taxi rides, it allows users to carpool too.

Making claims about being ‘first’ is something that no company should do flippantly.

Like many Asian startups, GoMyWay is essentially a clone of Western companies. In New York, there’s Fare/Share (which appears to have died) and CabCorner.com,  which acquired another similar company called Hitchsters. It is actually available in Singapore, Tokyo, Seoul, and Beijing too, providing GoMyWay some competition.

There’s nothing wrong with cloning other startups really; Western startups have great ideas but they often don’t expand to Asia or don’t have much traction in the region. Apps like GoMyWay are certainly good news to us consumers, provided they execute well and give us a pleasant user experience.

See: 10 taxi apps you can use across Asia