[darkzeroman]

Can anyone explain to me what is so attractive about Uber?

To me, Uber is just taxi with smart phones. My opinion is that is that Uber is avoiding a lot of the bureaucracy and fees that real taxi companies are paying for their rights and things such as insurance. I always figured that once the taxi companies figure out the convenience of smart phones they will start to integrate that technology more aggressively and be able to fight Uber back.

But there must be something I'm not seeing.

> "The $258 million is an 86 percent chunk of Google Ventures’ $300 million dollar a year fund..."

That's a lot of money, and that's a large part of Google Ventures fund. What are they seeing that I'm not seeing? Is there a future vision of Uber that's going over my head?

[exogen]

Convenience and reliability. Lots of people have stories of cabs never showing up, or taking forever, or barking and grumbling when offered a credit card as payment. Particularly if you're in a hurry, paying with a credit card also seems to take a lifetime – at least with cabs that use the paper carbon copy method (which they do here in Seattle).

Uber experience: you open the app and see on a map where all the cars are. It tells you exactly how many minutes the closest cab will take to arrive. When you arrive at your destination, you just hop out. The app knows what credit cards your account has on file and will just charge the one marked as the default or the one you've selected. There's no tipping. If you're in a hurry, not having to wait around to sort out the payment is a big deal.

I've never had an Uber not arrive or arrive exceptionally late; when I've had a less than stellar experience, customer service has been extremely responsive and offers refunds. On a recent trip, the driver made a poor route choice just because there ended up being a bunch of construction downtown, so it ended up taking longer than it could have. Customer service adjusted my fare to what it would have been had we taken the optimal route.

[joshfraser]

My guess is they're pitching themselves to investors as a logistics company with far larger aspiration than just replacing taxi's. They want to replace Fedex too. It's the only way to justify their valuation. A lot is possible once you have a network of locked-in, under-employed workers available at the push of a button. Point-to-point deliveries are a lot harder to pull off than the old hub and spoke model, but Uber have put a lot of the foundation in place to move into other types of point-to-point deliveries.