The future of Uber
If you think Uber is a ridesharing app, then you’re dead wrong.
It is true that Uber now operates with drivers to revolutionize the taxi market, which is in many countries held by corporations afraid of losing their privileges and rather blocking highways than innovating to keep their market share.
But more than that, the company makes moving from A to B less of a pain in the app. Uber is a logistical facilitator, knowing real-time where both its vehicles and the demand are.
It could thus be a major stakeholder in the global transporation market, helping thousands of people complete a task that involves going from one place to another.
Uber will be deliver.ee
Deliver.ee is the first service that enables the French market to make efficient deliveries for an optimal costs. Recently funded, they even call themselves the Uber for delivery boys.
Uber could benefit from its drivers’ trunks to make delivery more efficient and less costly.
Uber will be Street Bump
Street Bump is an app that helps detect potholes in Boston, so that the City Council can take action faster and keep the roads safe for local drivers, avoiding accidents and complaints. Using the collective “intelligence” of its vehicles, Uber will be able to detect potholes easily, making transportation and highways safer, for a cheaper price.
Uber will be Alfred or Cleanio
Alfred is the “25$-a-week personal butler” that helps you save one of your most precious assets : your time. Alfred comes to your home, picks up your dirty clothes and brings it to dry cleaning, does grocery shopping for you and can ensure fresh items are in your fridge when you come back home. Cleanio is also a great company does the same but only for your laundry. “No more constraints, no more effort” as long as your app is well-thought and permits you to make what used to be a logistical pain a fantastical time-saver. That’s where Uber can help.
Uber will be McDonald’s and the many other restaurants in your town.
McDonald’s McDelivery is only available in 25-ish countries, while restaurants are present in 119 countries, because labor cost don’t assure them an optimal profit in some of them. Uber will be able to pick-up your McD’s, your dish from any other restaurant, your alcohol, your cigarettes and whatever you need them to get from one place to your home.
Uber will be BigBagNGo
BigBagNGo is a great French company enabling you to put your trash inside a “big bag” : a big jumbo bag that could fit one to two “Smart Fortwo”, or a lot of your trash if you just did work home or for your company, bringing your dump to the closest waste collection sites and ensuring they are treated in a sustainable way. But where BigBagNGo’s advantage is, is the fact they use the pick-up trucks coming back from a delivery, and ensures they can pick up the trash and deliver it to collection sites without a big deviation from their original way. Some day you might see UberTruck, that’ll either pickup your trash or deliver your latest IKEA furniture home.
Uber might be Waze
When Uber will open its API to all companies that need to transport someone or something from A to B, and everyone will use the Uber app, or the Uber API in a way or another, this would just mean millions of people whose data could be collected to create a more efficient global traffic, to make everyone happy, from families to public transportation to truck drivers to the firemen...to Uber itself, as more efficient roads mean more tasks, and thus more profit for the company.
Uber might be the United Nations World Food Programme
As you may know, developed countries are producing more food than needed for the whole market, but this overproduction did not yet help eliminate hunger. No, 850 million people are still suffering from malnutrition while 1.3 billion tonnes of food (ie. 1/3 of the world production) gets lost and wasted. This figure could only be solved by a logistical wizard (as well as more committed politicians…but that’s another point) so that most soon-to-be-wasted food is shipped to homeless people and developing countries. Uber, please use your intelligence for good too.
Conclusion
I cannot predict the future and while Uber may not be all of those things, I believe great companies or NGOs could build such services, maybe benefitting from the powerful algorithm of Uber, through an efficient API.
Travis, what are you thoughts ? ;-)
