[kapnobatairza]

Agreed 100%. Uber isn't adding anything disruptive to NYC, they are just adding another channel for booking town cars. In my personal experience, the town car services I've been using for over a decade that I call to book with have been faster and more reliable than my experiments with Uber.

As I mentioned in my own comment, however, this makes me wonder if there is a space for a PAAS for Town Car services to easily roll out their own web and mobile booking apps... That way they don't even need to cut Uber in at all.

[FelixP]

But at that point, why not just aggregate the services, in which case you've effectively become Uber?

[kapnobatairza]

Because if you operate your own booking app you can set your own prices and you don't have to pay Uber a cut.

You'd also be able to use it to operate a private network of drivers. For example, large corporations can roll out a private web/mobile booking app for the private network of drivers they have for their employees. Not many companies still have drivers on payroll in the US, but in other countries like the UAE or South Korea this is still more common.

Why do some businesses use Google Apps in the cloud and others maintain their own CMS systems on their own equipment? Some businesses prefer in-house solutions.