“
the uber map is a psychological moonshot, because it does not reduce the waiting time for a taxi but simply makes waiting 90% less frustrating
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Rory Sutherland (Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense)
“
Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. Something interesting is happening.” Indeed,
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Kevin Kelly (The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future)
“
to make old things work better, to make new things possible, and to do old things in fundamentally new ways. For instance, the invention of the Uber taxi service did all three: it didn’t just create a new competitive taxi fleet; it created a fundamentally new and better way to summon a taxi, to gather data on riders’ needs and desires, to pay for a taxi, and to rate the behavior of the driver and the passenger. These sorts of transformations are now happening in every business, thanks to the energy release of the supernova.
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Thomas L. Friedman (Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations)
“
Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, owns no inventory. Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate.
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Allan Dib (The 1-Page Marketing Plan: Get New Customers, Make More Money, And Stand out From The Crowd)
“
Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. Something interesting is happening.
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Tom Goodwin (Digital Darwinism: Survival of the Fittest in the Age of Business Disruption (Kogan Page Inspire))
“
My mother refused to use Uber. She said they weren’t New York. Taxis were New York.
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Stephen King (Later)
“
she hated the concept of Uber. In her eyes, it was barely a step above hitchhiking. At least taxi drivers had to go through rigorous background checks.
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Darcy Coates (Hunted)
“
Uber operates as UberTaxi in Athens. (You book your ride through the app, but a taxi picks you up.) Uber is generally cheaper than hailing a cab (often even half the cost, except for rides to and from the airport where there’s no savings). Note there is a €3 minimum charge.
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Rick Steves (Rick Steves Greece: Athens & the Peloponnese)
“
Let me give a simple example. The Uber map is a psychological moonshot, because it does not reduce the waiting time for a taxi but simply makes waiting 90 per cent less frustrating. This innovation came from the founder’s flash of insight (while watching a James Bond film, no less*) that, regardless of what we say, we are much bothered by the uncertainty of waiting than by the duration of a wait. The invention of the map was perhaps equivalent to multiplying the number of cabs on the road by a factor of ten – not because waiting times got any shorter, but because they felt ten times less irritating.
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Rory Sutherland (Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life)
“
Yet each favor and handout and protection of vested interests shifts the direction of capital and labor artificially, resulting in over-investment in, say, mortgaged houses, or over-investment in corruption to get and maintain restrictions on entry to, say, ownership of taxi medallions, or over-investment in a war to protect slavery. Of course, any proposal to drop the mortgage-interest deduction or to let Uber and Lyft compete freely with medallioned taxis raises political storms. Or a Civil War.
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Deirdre Nansen McCloskey (Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All)
“
The same thing, notes Brynjolfsson, happened 120 years ago, in the Second Industrial Revolution, when electrification—the supernova of its day—was introduced. Old factories did not just have to be electrified to achieve the productivity boosts; they had to be redesigned, along with all business processes. It took thirty years for one generation of managers and workers to retire and for a new generation to emerge to get the full productivity benefits of that new power source. A December 2015 study by the McKinsey Global Institute on American industry found a “considerable gap between the most digitized sectors and the rest of the economy over time and [found] that despite a massive rush of adoption, most sectors have barely closed that gap over the past decade … Because the less digitized sectors are some of the largest in terms of GDP contribution and employment, we [found] that the US economy as a whole is only reaching 18 percent of its digital potential … The United States will need to adapt its institutions and training pathways to help workers acquire relevant skills and navigate this period of transition and churn.” The supernova is a new power source, and it will take some time for society to reconfigure itself to absorb its full potential. As that happens, I believe that Brynjolfsson will be proved right and we will start to see the benefits—a broad range of new discoveries around health, learning, urban planning, transportation, innovation, and commerce—that will drive growth. That debate is for economists, though, and beyond the scope of this book, but I will be eager to see how it plays out. What is absolutely clear right now is that while the supernova may not have made our economies measurably more productive yet, it is clearly making all forms of technology, and therefore individuals, companies, ideas, machines, and groups, more powerful—more able to shape the world around them in unprecedented ways with less effort than ever before. If you want to be a maker, a starter-upper, an inventor, or an innovator, this is your time. By leveraging the supernova you can do so much more now with so little. As Tom Goodwin, senior vice president of strategy and innovation at Havas Media, observed in a March 3, 2015, essay on TechCrunch.com: “Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. Something interesting is happening.
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Thomas L. Friedman (Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations)
“
By contrast, one company that clearly understands the stakes is Uber. In the last several years, few companies have captured the media’s attention like Uber. In my opinion, Uber has been successful because it’s perfectly nailed a Job to Be Done. Yes, Uber can often offer a nice car to take you from point A to point B, but that’s not where it’s built its competitive advantage. The experiences that come with hiring Uber to solve customers’ Jobs to Be Done are better than the existing alternatives. That’s the secret to its success. Everything about the experience of being a customer—including the emotional and social dimensions—has been thought through. Who wants to have to outmaneuver other poor schlubs on the same street corner who are trying to hail a cab? You don’t want to either pay for a car service to wait outside your meeting or be at its mercy when you’re finally ready to call it to come back and get you. With Uber, you simply push a few buttons on your mobile phone and you know that in three minutes or seven minutes a specific driver will arrive to pick you up. Now you can relax and just wait. You don’t have to worry if you have enough cash in your wallet or fear that if you swipe your credit card in that taxi machine, you’ll get a call from your bank wondering if you’ve recently made purchases in some state you’ve never even been to. Calling an Uber has even more potential to ease your anxieties about getting into a cab alone. With Uber there’s a record of your request, you know specifically who is picking you up, and you know from the driver’s ratings that he or she is reliable.
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Clayton M. Christensen (Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice)
“
In 2014, Aswath Damodaran, a professor of finance at NYU’s Stern School of Business, estimated that Uber was probably worth roughly $ 6 billion, based on its ability to ultimately win 10 percent of the global taxi market of $ 100 billion, or $ 10 billion. According to Uber’s own projections, in 2016 the company processed over $ 26 billion in payments. It’s safe to say that the $ 10 billion market was a serious underestimate, as the ease of use and lower cost of Uber and its competitors expanded the market for transportation-as-a-service.
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Reid Hoffman (Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies)
“
Al desaparecer los conductores de taxis privados, el costo de viajar en Uber o alguna otra empresa de taxis privados se desplomará.
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Andrés Oppenheimer (¡Sálvese quien pueda!: El futuro del trabajo en la era de la automatización)
“
Disintermediated brands appear in other contexts, too. For instance, Facebook creates no content, yet it brokers content for billions of individuals and thousands of media markets; Uber owns almost no vehicles, yet it is the world’s largest taxi service. In a hyper-networked world where mobile phones, speakers, thermostats, and even exercise clothes are connected to the internet and potentially each other, brands have to learn to play well with each other or give up a certain amount of control to those that own the most popular interfaces. For better or for worse, the power is in the portal.
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Paul R. Daugherty (Human + Machine: Reimagining Work in the Age of AI)
“
The implicit assumption in traditional business strategy that competition is a zero-sum game is far less applicable in the world of platforms. Rather than re-dividing a pie of more-or-less static size, platform businesses often grow the pie (as, for example, Amazon has done by innovating new models, such as self-publishing and publishing on demand, within the traditional book industry) or create an alternative pie that taps new markets and sources of supply (as Airbnb and Uber have done alongside the traditional hotel and taxi industries). Actively managing network effects changes the shape of markets rather than taking them as fixed.
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Geoffrey G. Parker (Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy and How to Make Them Work for You: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy―and How to Make Them Work for You)
“
One assumption that is already being shattered is the idea that only routine, semi-skilled jobs like taxi driving, food delivery, or household chores are susceptible. Even traditional professions like medicine and law are proving to be susceptible to platform models. We’ve already mentioned Medicast, which applies an Uber-like model to finding a doctor. Several platform companies are providing online venues where legal services are available with comparable ease, speed, and convenience. Axiom Law has built a $200 million platform business by using a combination of data-mining software and freelance law talent to provide legal guidance and services to business clients; InCloudCounsel claims it can process basic legal documents such as licensing forms and nondisclosure agreements at a savings of up to 80 percent compared with a traditional law firm.11 In the decades to come, it seems likely that the platform model will be applied—or at least tested—in virtually every market for labor and professional services. How will this trend impact the service industries—not to mention the working lives of hundreds of millions of people? One likely result will be an even greater stratification of wealth, power, and prestige among service providers. Routine and standardized tasks will move to online platforms, where an army of relatively low-paid, self-employed professionals will be available to handle them. Meanwhile, the world’s great law firms, medical centers, consulting partnerships, and accounting practices will not vanish, but their relative size and importance will shrink as much of the work they used to do migrates to platforms that can provide comparable services at a fraction of the cost and with far greater convenience. A surviving handful of world-class experts will increasingly focus on a tiny subset of the most highly specialized and challenging assignments, which they can tackle from anywhere in the world using online tools. Thus, at the very highest level of professional expertise, winner-take-all markets are likely to emerge, with (say) two dozen internationally renowned attorneys competing for the splashiest and most lucrative cases anywhere on the globe.
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Geoffrey G. Parker (Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy and How to Make Them Work for You: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy―and How to Make Them Work for You)
“
Havas Media, observed in a March 3, 2015, essay on TechCrunch.com: “Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. Something interesting is happening.” Something
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Thomas L. Friedman (Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations)
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Why did eBay not become Amazon? Why did IBM not become Microsoft? Why didn't taxi companies invent Uber? Why didn't Hilton or Marriott invent Airbnb? Why didn't Oracle invent Snowflake? Why didn't BMC invent ServiceNow? Why didn't tape automation companies invent Data Domain? Why didn't Ford invent Tesla? The answer in all those examples, and many more, is incrementalism.
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Frank Slootman (Amp It Up: Leading for Hypergrowth by Raising Expectations, Increasing Urgency, and Elevating Intensity)
“
Webmonde provides a complete Taxi Booking Solution script that helps you start your own Online Cab Booking Business like Uber/Ola/Lyft.
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Webmonde Softtech Solutions
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Shop, Cooks Cycles, and Easy Riders Bicycle Rentals, who will deliver bikes to your lodging!). The island also has Uber, Lyft, and a host of taxis. My favorite taxi company is Roger’s Taxi, 508-228-5779. Cranberry Transportation provides a proper “car service” and they also give private tours of the island. Where Should I Stay? You just finished a novel called The Hotel Nantucket, so I’m going to start by recommending the inspiration for the main character in the book, which is The Nantucket Hotel and Resort, located at 77 Easton Street.
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Elin Hilderbrand (The Hotel Nantucket)
“
As media strategist Tom Goodwin wrote in a TechCrunch article in March 2015: “Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate.”9
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Klaus Schwab (The Fourth Industrial Revolution)
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As a result, the motto in Silicon Valley today is: everything that is analog is now being digitized, everything that is being digitized is now being stored, everything that is being stored is now being analyzed by software on these more powerful computing systems, and all the learning is being immediately applied to make old things work better, to make new things possible, and to do old things in fundamentally new ways. For instance, the invention of the Uber taxi service did all three: it didn’t just create a new competitive taxi fleet; it created a fundamentally new and better way to summon a taxi, to gather data on riders’ needs and desires, to pay for a taxi, and to rate the behavior of the driver and the passenger. These
”
”
Thomas L. Friedman (Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations)
“
Tom Goodwin, senior vice president of strategy and innovation at Havas Media, observed in a March 3, 2015, essay on TechCrunch.com: “Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. Something interesting is happening.” Something
”
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Thomas L. Friedman (Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations)
“
Rather than taking supply and demand as a given, the new breed of microeconomist helps nudge the two into line. In the early days of Airbnb, an online market for home rentals, its economists pored over customer data to spot market weaknesses. Costly enhancements, including professional photographs of every listing, are rigorously tested to make sure they work before being rolled out. The company also guides users uncertain about the right rate to charge for a listing. At Uber, a taxi service, prices surge during peak hours, pulling more drivers onto the road. At Poynt, a Silicon Valley startup offering a new type of cashless
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Anonymous
“
innovation—perhaps from the translation world’s equivalent of Uber, a taxi app. Software is unlikely to replace the translators, but it could co-ordinate their work with clients more efficiently. Smartling, an American company which seeks to cut out middlemen in this way, has clients including Tesla, an electric carmaker, and Spotify, a music-streaming service. Jochen Hummel, a pioneer in translation memory, says that a real breakthrough would come from combining software, memory and content management in a single database. But making money may still be tricky. The American tech titan has not tried to commercialise Google Translate. A former executive says the firm experimented with content-management software but “decided to focus on easier stuff, like self-driving cars.
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Anonymous
“
Uber insisted its app-based taxi service would continue in Germany, despite a court in Frankfurt imposing the first countrywide ban on the firm for contravening transport laws. Although it operates in 170 cities around the world, Uber has been targeted by regulators in Europe and America over passenger safety and insurance issues in cases that are often lodged by more conventional taxi operators.
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Anonymous
“
Anja Floetenmeyer, a spokeswoman for Taxi Deutschland, told the FT the trade group intends to pursue fines against the company for continuing to operate. “We didn’t expect anything else,” she said. “Uber has never observed German law. This is Wild West capitalism without consumer rights.” Local authorities in cities across Europe have tried to restrict the company’s services. Uber also faces opposition in the UK, Italy, France and Spain.
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Anonymous
“
Ofer Sharone, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, says some of these new services create wonderful opportunities for the underemployed and long-term unemployed. “If you’re looking for a way to survive, they can be helpful.’’ But, he acknowledges, they are “threatening to people who are doing OK with the status quo, like a taxi driver or bed-and-breakfast owner who has invested a lot and suddenly is competing with Uber or Airbnb.
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Anonymous
“
And a recent study revealed that American politicos spend more on Uber than on regular taxis when campaigning, a strong indication that the road ahead is likely to remain clear.
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Anonymous
“
Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate.
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”
Geoffrey G. Parker (Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy and How to Make Them Work for You: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy―and How to Make Them Work for You)
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la mayor firma de taxis del mundo, Uber, posee ningún coche. medios más populares del mundoempresa, Facebook, crea ningún contenido. minorista más valiosa del mundo, Alibaba, lleva ninguna acción. Y el mayor proveedor de alojamiento del mundo, Airbnb, posee ninguna propiedad”(Hamish McRae 2015).[
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Scott Marks (Blockchain Para Principiantes: Todo un principiante, como usted, necesita saber sobre la tecnología Blockchain (Blockchain for Beginners. Libros en español/Spanish version) (Spanish Edition))
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But the world is changing at warp speed, and cities have to evolve to stay ahead of the curve. Which brings us to the third generation of cities, Cities 3.0, where the city is a hub of innovation, entrepreneurship and technology. Cities 3.0 is paperless, wireless and cashless. In Cities 3.0, we have more cell phones than telephone landlines, more tablets than desktop computers, more smart devices than toothbrushes. We know that in order to keep up in the modern era, we have to be innovative. If cities are going to drive the nation's economic revitalization, then we need to become laboratories and incubators of change. Yet the pending state legislation, which seeks to require the same insurance for ride-sharing companies as for old-style taxi companies, would discourage innovation and force out-of-date thinking on Next Economy companies such as Uber and Lyft.
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Anonymous
“
Uber’s chief innovation is not that its app summons a car to your location with a smartphone and a GPS signal. It is that it used this moderately novel configuration of technology to argue that the old rules did not apply whenever it brought its taxi business to a market that already had a regulated taxi code.
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Brian Merchant (Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech)
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...would he drive back out and get me? No way. I'd have to wait around for a taxi. Or get murdered in an Uber.
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Freida McFadden (The Devil You Know (Dr. Jane McGill, #2))
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Uber Driving In Los Angeles Is Random And Very Unpredictable. Expect The Unexpected.
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Mark Alan Nisall (Rideshare Revelations From An LA Uber Driver: The Highlights, The Lowlights and The Darkness)
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Webmonde provides Uber/Lyft Taxi clone application and website development. Our Clone is outstanding amongst scripts that suit well for the ride-hailing business. Our taxi clone app comes with important features like a user-friendly interface, customized admin panel, and interactive solution for both customer and driver. Please speak with our expert at +91 9990 492 467
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webmonde
“
The African business dynamics is still complicated as compared to the rest of the world, in America Tesla started making better cars, electric, to be used GLOBALLY competing with car makers like Toyota, Amazon was started to provide services GLOBALLY, Uber started to serve and compete with taxi's GLOBALLY.
In Africa James started a chicken business to compete with his neighbor supplying eggs to the community near them, Jane started a clothing business to compete with another clothing business in her area of residence."
Africa; Starting small, does not mean think small, and stay small.
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Dwayne Mulenga Isaac Jr
“
In today’s era of digital transformation, every organization and every industry are potential partners. Consider the taxi and entertainment industries. Ninety percent of Uber riders wait less than ten minutes for a driver, compared with 37 percent of taxi riders. Netflix costs its viewers $0.21 per hour of entertainment compared with $1.61 per hour with the old Blockbuster video-rental model.
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Satya Nadella (Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone)
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In the eyes of Travis Kalanick, Uber’s co-founder and chief executive, the entire system was rigged against startups like his. Like many in Silicon Valley, he believed in the transformative power of technology. His service harnessed the incredible powers of code—smartphones, data analysis, real-time GPS readings—to improve people’s lives, to make services more efficient, to connect people who wanted to buy things with people who wanted to sell them, to make society a better place. He grew frustrated by people with cautious minds, who wanted to uphold old systems, old structures, old ways of thinking. The corrupt institutions that controlled and upheld the taxi industry had been built in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, he thought. Uber was here to disrupt their outmoded ideas and usher in the twenty-first.
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Mike Isaac (Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber)
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These examples can be multiplied. As mentioned before, Uber and Lyft are better regulators than the State’s paper-based taxi medallions, email is superior to the USPS, and SpaceX is out-executing NASA.
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Balaji S. Srinivasan (The Network State: How To Start a New Country)
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La firma más grande de taxis en el mundo, Uber Technologies Inc. (ticker: UBER), no posee ningún carro. La compañía de medios más popular en el mundo, Facebook, Inc. (ticker: FB), no crea ningún contenido. El más valuado minorista del mundo, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. - ADR (ticker: BABA), basado en China, no cuenta con inventarios. Y el más grande proveedor de hospedaje en el mundo, Airbnb, Inc., no posee ninguna propiedad. Bastante disruptivo, de hecho.
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Andrew Aziz (Como Vivir del Day Trading (Spanish Edition))
“
Tencent had partnered with leading mobile carriers like China Mobile to receive 40 percent of the SMS charges that QQ users racked up when they sent messages to mobile phones. A new service could hurt Tencent’s financial bottom line and at the same time risk its relationships with some of China’s most powerful companies. It was the sort of decision that publicly traded, ten-thousand-person companies typically refer to a committee for further study. But Ma wasn’t a typical corporate executive. That very night, he gave Zhang the go-ahead to pursue the idea. Zhang put together a ten-person team, including seven engineers, to build and launch the new product. In just two months, Zhang’s small team had built a mobile-first social messaging network with a clean, minimalistic design that was the polar opposite of QQ. Ma named the service Weixin, which means “micromessage” in Mandarin. Outside of China, the service became known as WeChat. What came next was staggering. Just sixteen months after Zhang’s fateful late-night message to Ma, WeChat celebrated its one hundred millionth user. Six months after that, it had grown to two hundred million users. Four months after that, it had grown to three hundred million users. Pony Ma’s late-night bet paid off handsomely. Tencent reported 2016 revenues of $ 22 billion, up 48 percent from the previous year, and up nearly 700 percent since 2010, the year before WeChat’s launch. By early 2018, Tencent reached a market capitalization of over $ 500 billion, making it one of the world’s most valuable companies, and WeChat was one of the most widely and intensively used services in the world. Fast Company called WeChat “China’s app for everything,” and the Financial Times reported that more than half of its users spend over ninety minutes a day using the app. To put WeChat in an American context, it’s as if one single service combined the functions of Facebook, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Venmo, Grubhub, Amazon, Uber, Apple Pay, Gmail, and even Slack into a single megaservice. You can use WeChat to do run-of-the-mill things like texting and calling people, participating in social media, and reading articles, but you can also book a taxi, buy movie tickets, make doctors’ appointments, send money to friends, play games, pay your rent, order dinner for the night, plus so much more. All from a single app on your smartphone.
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Reid Hoffman (Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies)
“
LegalZoom.com, por ejemplo, cobra un mínimo de 29 dólares por preparar un contrato de arrendamiento de una propiedad, 69 dólares por un testamento básico y 299 dólares por un divorcio incausado, según su sitio de internet. Todas estas tareas llevarían varias horas de trabajo para un abogado de carne y hueso, que a un mínimo de 300 dólares la hora cobraría muchísimo más por la misma tarea. Millones de personas están haciendo uso de estos bufetes de servicios legales virtuales no sólo para producir contratos básicos, sino también para enviar una carta amenazante a un deudor moroso o a un vecino que pone la música demasiado alta. En muchos casos, estas plataformas de internet que ofrecen servicios legales ni siquiera están manejadas por abogados. De la misma manera en que cada vez más gente está utilizando taxis privados de Uber o Lyft que no tienen licencias de taxis tradicionales, cada vez más personas están usando plataformas de servicios legales básicos sin cédulas profesionales de abogados.
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Andrés Oppenheimer (¡Sálvese quien pueda!: El futuro del trabajo en la era de la automatización)
“
Shervin Pishevar’s other star investment, Uber, was embroiled in its own case about whether it was as humble and powerless as it claimed. A group of drivers had sued Uber, as well as its rival Lyft, in federal court, seeking to be treated as employees under California’s labor laws. Their case was weakened by the fact that they had signed agreements to be contractors not subject to those laws. They had accepted the terms and conditions that cast each driver as an entrepreneur—a free agent choosing her hours, needing none of the regulatory infrastructure that others depended on. They had bought into one of the reigning fantasies of MarketWorld: that people were their own miniature corporations. Then some of the drivers realized that in fact they were simply working people who wanted the same protections that so many others did from power, exploitation, and the vicissitudes of circumstance. Because the drivers had signed that agreement, they had blocked the easy path to being employees. But under the law, if they could prove that a company had pervasive, ongoing power over them as they did their work, they could still qualify as employees. To be a contractor is to give up certain protections and benefits in exchange for independence, and thus that independence must be genuine. The case inspired the judges in the two cases, Edward Chen and Vince Chhabria, to grapple thoughtfully with the question of where power lurks in a new networked age. It was no surprise that Uber and Lyft took the rebel position. Like Airbnb, Uber and Lyft claimed not to be powerful. Uber argued that it was just a technology firm facilitating links between passengers and drivers, not a car service. The drivers who had signed contracts were robust agents of their own destiny. Judge Chen derided this argument. “Uber is no more a ‘technology company,’ ” he wrote, “than Yellow Cab is a ‘technology company’ because it uses CB radios to dispatch taxi cabs, John Deere is a ‘technology company’ because it uses computers and robots to manufacture lawn mowers, or Domino Sugar is a ‘technology company’ because it uses modern irrigation techniques to grow its sugar cane.” Judge Chhabria similarly cited and tore down Lyft’s claim to be “an uninterested bystander of sorts, merely furnishing a platform that allows drivers and riders to connect.” He wrote: Lyft concerns itself with far more than simply connecting random users of its platform. It markets itself to customers as an on-demand ride service, and it actively seeks out those customers. It gives drivers detailed instructions about how to conduct themselves. Notably, Lyft’s own drivers’ guide and FAQs state that drivers are “driving for Lyft.” Therefore, the argument that Lyft is merely a platform, and that drivers perform no service for Lyft, is not a serious one.
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Anand Giridharadas (Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World)
“
As media strategist Tom Goodwin wrote in a TechCrunch article in March 2015: "Uber, the world's largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world's most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world's largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate.
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Klaus Schwab (The Fourth Industrial Revolution)
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Uber’s got nothing Lyft is weak. And taxis? Nah My ride is da mom
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Rick Riordan (The Hidden Oracle (The Trials of Apollo, #1))
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FREE EXCHANGE Pricing the surge The microeconomics of Uber’s attempt to revolutionise taxi markets 1014 words
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Anonymous
“
Flywheel, which provides an app for users to summon taxicabs with their smartphones, will offer a flat $10 rate for all Flywheel-summoned cab rides within San Francisco from 8 p.m. Wednesday to 3 a.m. Thursday. The same price will apply in Seattle and Flywheel’s new markets of San Diego and Sacramento. “Uber can charge 30 times (normal) or whatever they hell they want to do, but we want to make sure anyone who takes a taxi pays a flat fee,” said Flywheel CEO Rakesh Mathur. (He clarified that the 30-times number was “just made up.”) That promotion will cost Flywheel a pretty penny. The startup will pay cabbies double what the metered rates would have been — so in effect, they receive surge pricing, without passengers having to pay it. While Flywheel doesn’t have the massive war chest of Uber, which has raised about $3 billion, it has a respectable $30 million in venture backing, including a recent $12 million round.
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Anonymous
“
When investors debated the merits of Uber, the question was whether the company would be a niche taxi service worth perhaps a billion dollars or a transportation revolution that would create and capture trillions in value. Because these visions of the future are so radically different, there is no middle ground.
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Byrne Hobart (Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation)