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Concept
Uber
Summary
Uber Technologies, Inc. (commonly referred to as Uber) is an American transportation conglomerate that mainly provides taxi services where individuals can hail a taxi (Uber) in an app on their phone. The company, based in San Francisco, provides additional services of ride-hailing, food delivery, package delivery and freight transport in the United States and around the world.
Uber sets fares using dynamic pricing, which is a model based on the local supply and demand in a specific region at the time of the booking. The company operates in approximately 70 countries and 10,500 cities. The company has over 131 million monthly active users and 5.4 million active drivers worldwide. The company has an average of 23 million trips each day through all of their services combined.
In 2009, Garrett Camp, a co-founder of StumbleUpon, came up with the idea to create Uber to make it easier and cheaper to procure direct transportation. Camp and Travis Kalanick had spent $800 hiring a private driver on New Year's Eve, which they deemed excessive, and Camp was also inspired by his difficulty in finding a taxi on a snowy night in Paris. The prototype of the mobile app was built by Camp and his friends, Oscar Salazar and Conrad Whelan, with Kalanick as the "mega advisor" to the company.
In February 2010, Ryan Graves became the first Uber employee; he was named chief executive officer (CEO) in May 2010. In December 2010, Kalanick succeeded Graves as CEO and Graves became the chief operating officer.
Following a beta launch in May 2010, Uber's services and mobile app launched publicly in San Francisco in 2011. Originally, the application only allowed users to hail a black luxury car and the price was approximately 1.5 times that of a taxi. In 2011, the company changed its name from UberCab to Uber after complaints from San Francisco taxicab operators.
The company's early hires included a nuclear physicist, a computational neuroscientist, and a machinery expert who worked on predicting arrival times for Uber's cars more accurately than Google APIs.
Official source
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