Uber - Digital Swarms tackle Distressed Inventory

In case you haven't had the pleasure of using Uber (https://www.uber.com/), it's the mobile app that has democratized the limo service world (everyone's private driver!) and it is based on using digital swarms (collective intelligence) to deliver value (for more on Digital Swarms, see my book The New World of Wireless: How to Compete in the 4G Revolution).  Uber is a brilliant yet simple approach to matching supply (roaming executive cars/drivers) and demand (users with smartphones), using location/navigation to optimize the assignments/routing.  The user can summon an executive car with just two touches on their smartphone screen and then executes a prepaid/cashless transaction, offering a very easy experience.  It is currently deployed in 9 cities around the world.  Much like other services that attack the excess capacity problem like Ebay, Airbnb and TaskRabbit, Uber creates a revenue opportunity for drivers during time that would normally be spent trolling for new customers.  So despite Uber taking a 20% lead gen fee, the driver is still ahead on overall revenue.  

So once again, mobile and digital swarms of taken another ancient industry and flipped it on its head.  And in the end, the user wins.  Thanks Uber. 
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This page contains a single entry by Scott A. Snyder published on July 3, 2012 5:40 PM.

Using Digital Swarms to Predict the Weather was the previous entry in this blog.

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