The Wiki Man: The best thing since wheeled suitcases

I had a Land Rover Discovery once. It was expensive to run, largely on account of the rear visibility. The blind spot was so large that, when reversing, you had to worry not only about lurking cats, shrubs and bollards but also bungalows. I felt proud whenever I went for six months without needing to replace one of the rear lights.

My present car, when reversing, beeps if it detects any obstruction, the frequency of beeps increasing as the object gets closer. This is a godsend when parking. (The only problem is that I sometimes expect these beeps when driving cars not similarly equipped: when I borrow my wife’s car I park like a Neapolitan.)

The parking sensor is a simple idea which should have been invented earlier than it was. Why so late? Car manufacturers’ profits from replacement lights? Male parking machismo? Or because, for their own self-aggrandisement, clever people are too busy aspiring to find heroic solutions to intractable problems, instead of fixing the humbler problems of daily life?

The philosopher Nassim Taleb has asked why the wheeled suitcase seems to have been invented after we had landed a man on the moon. A good question. After all, as Silicon Valley has found, progress often comes more from the accretion of many little ideas than from betting on one big one.

So while armies of engineers and lawyers are busy wrestling with Crossrail and High Speed 2, it has fallen to a trio of entrepreneurial London cabbies to develop an immediate and simple solution to the pain of travelling around London.

Hailo is a free taxi app which you can download to an iPhone or Android smartphone — and soon the Blackberry. (There is an equally good alternative, Get Taxi, also for black cabs, and also one called Kabbee for minicabs.