China's game-changing taxi-hailing app

Beijing stands as one of the world's most populated cities, with over 21 million people residing in the Chinese capital. Inevitably, this has put huge pressure on transport structures in the city.

It took less than 10 years for the number of inhabitants in Beijing to quadruple, and with a population continuously on the rise, taxi services have found it difficult to keep up.

Cheng Wei, co-founder and CEO of taxi-hailing app Didi Dache, is on a mission to make travel simple and efficient.

"Our innovation is to redistribute taxi resources using mobile internet." Says Wei. "We found that 30% of the time, taxis in China were actually driving around empty."

Launched in September 2012, Didi Dache uses GPS technology to allow users to locate cabs that are nearby on their handheld device. You can send a text to book your taxi, but the app's voice message feature has proven more popular with Chinese users.

"In Chinese cities, unlike in New York or elsewhere, you'll find that addresses are hard to describe in a few words." mentions Cheng Wei.

"That's why Didi Dache lets you send out your location by voice messages to taxi drivers. People love this function in China. Over 60% of our users adopt it." he adds.

Unsurprisingly, Didi Dache has proven extremely popular in the city and it is currently China's biggest taxi app. The app counts more than three million daily transactions in three Chinese cities. This large uptake is a testament to China's urbanization.

"There are more and more people living in cities now, and the limited number of roads have become a bottleneck of urban development, in addition to the increased number of cars on the road.

Despite its success, Wei believes that there is plenty of room to grow, in fact, it seems that Didi Dache has a lot more up its sleeve.

"There are still a lot of transport challenges waiting for solutions in China." Wei exclaims.

"Our start-up is still young, and the road is long."