OREANDA-NEWS. June 28, 2012. Yandex (NASDAQ: YNDX) has launched a web-based desktop version of its mobile taxi booking app Yandex.Taxi. Yandex partners with taxi service providers in Moscow to instantly find the nearest vacant cars for someone looking for a taxi. The service covers the entire city so that users won’t have a problem getting a car in its remotest parts to travel to the centre or the other way around. Anyone with an internet-connected device at hand can now access the service at taxi.yandex.ru to book a taxi and quickly set off to their destination.

“With Yandex.Taxi, people don't need to make dozens of calls before they can find a taxi company that will offer them a vacant car,” says Tigran Khudaverdyan, head of mobile products at Yandex. “All you need to do is make an order and the service will do the rest. It takes literally a minute for the service to contact its partner providers and find an available car. The client can just sit back and watch their car approaching on a map. We have done some research and found that starting from the moment of booking, anywhere in Moscow, be it the centre or the suburbs, it takes on average 12 minutes for a car to arrive at a client's address.”

The car fleet of the Yandex.Taxi partner providers totals to over 6,000 vehicles, of which about 2,000 stay in touch with the service at any given second. The service is based on a partnership model that benefits both taxi companies and their clients. Large to medium-size to small taxi service providers joining the Yandex.Taxi partnership minimize idle time for their cars and save on advertising. Taxi service consumers, on the other hand, can be sure they will get a safe and comfortable car in a timely fashion. Besides the price category, booking options include smoking or non-smoking car, or air conditioning. Clients can also watch the car's progress on a map to make sure that the driver is on the way or to check where the car has parked to pick them up.

The web-based taxi-aggregator service follows the release of the Yandex.Taxi app for iPhone and Android in October 2011. Since then, the application has seen more than 300,000 downloads, while the service has added many more partner providers, doubled the number of available cars and considerably reduced waiting time.