World Taximeter gives you an estimate of the cost of a taxi ride in cities worldwide. Currently they support Barcelona, London, Madrid, New York, Prague, Rome and San Francisco with more cities including Paris to follow. There is even a mobile application for your phone when your on the go. This great little web application was started by three friends from Spain out of a general need.

According to Gerardo Robledillo, one of the co-founders and developers, “World Taximeter came to be when Jose (Lorenzo) was making a trip to NYC and the days before the trip he was trying to find out how much a taxi from the airport to his hotel would cost him. He wanted to know how much money he should have ready for the taxi”. Jose was also trying to avoid being ripped off by the cabbies. He couldn’t find anything that would help him with this problem so he decided to solve it by building such a solution.

When Jose met with Gerardo, one of his developer friends, he told him of his idea on a Friday and that Saturday, Gerardo built the first prototype of the site. He showed it to Jose on Sunday. Monday they told Dani Jimenez, an R&D Manager, and he got so excited he decided he would like to help.

World Taximeter is built using Ruby on Rails because of how great it is to use for a developer such as Gerardo and how much faster it would be to build. Dani and Jose were curious as they were not that familiar with the frameworks capabilities. Needless to say they fell in love with the programming language when they found out it took less than six hours to build the first prototype. The group didn’t have a hard time deciding on going the Rails way from then on out.

I unfortunately couldn’t put the application to the test as I don’t live in New York. However, I can say the application has a simple interface where you choose a city, then enter your starting destination, your ending destination and put in the time you plan on doing the trip. It’s still a little buggy at least for me on my Mac with the results, but it has a great integration of Google Maps which shows you the route, estimates the time and distance and gives you a price. It even can break down some routes into waiting time, riding time and flat fare fees.

In the future there are the obvious next steps translating it to Spanish (the groups native language), adding new cities, and improving the printing version. But beyond that they are looking to see what the community would like to see them add to the application. World Taximeter is very new and they are still waiting to see if it will catch on. They are looking for feedback and suggestions and believe that the customers and community should drive the applications future features.

Currently World Taximeter doesn’t have a revenue model. They do have plans to create a business model once the concept takes off and they gain a following. The obvious ideas are to have focused advertising by the taxi companies themselves. “First we have to focus on being known, get traffic and users and add more features. Then it will be time to think about creating revenues. ” Says Gerardo Robledillo.

If you happen to travel to or live in one of the cities they cover try it out, see how accurate the fare is and let us know how you like the app.