Uber Gratification

Two of Uber’s top Europe execs, including their France CEO, were taken into custody in Paris yesterday and charged with running illegal taxi operations and concealing documents, TechCrunch’s Romain Dillet reports. While the main Uber service is legal in France, its uberPOP service, which enables nonprofessional drivers to offer rides to passengers, is not.

Uber NYC is offering free uberPOOL rides to City Hall today between 10:30am and 2:30pm to steer people to a rally opposing legislation that it says would ban new drivers from joining the company. As Joe Tacopino reports for the New York Post, the City Council’s Transportation Committee is considering legislation calling for a study on how ride services are affecting congestion, and it would lead call for a cap on adding new cars while that study is performed.

Reviewing the rise of Uber (and its detractors) in the New Yorker, longtime tech journalist Om Malik makes an important point about “what is often called the sharing economy….it often isn’t really about sharing. It is an economy driven by our desire for instant gratification.” And in an age where we now carry tools for such gratification in our pockets, he suggests that the protests of traditional taxi drivers won’t be able to hold back the changed expectations of their customers.

Uber’s senior VP of policy and strategy, David Plouffe, tells Caroline Fairchild, the new economy editor of LinkedIn, that “every month our driver population becomes more and more part time. I think in the future you might see people driving for Uber just on their commute….Uber and ride-sharing and add to the existing ecosystem. We serve a lot of underserved areas that were sort of transportation deserts. What flows from that is you can help reduce emissions and congestion and you can help get carpooling at scale to work which is something that has eluded the world for decades.”

In Bloomberg View, Justin Fox argues that Uber’s army of lobbyists are serving the public’s interest in “having more convenient ways of getting around.”

Taking the opposite view, Adam Greenfield argues that Uber represents the rise of a particularly noxious version of “smart city” ideology that should be resisted.

Don’t miss Darren Samuelsohn’s detailed survey in Politico of how Congress and the executive branch are barely facing up to the challenges presented by the emerging “internet of things.”

Since last Friday, more than 26 million people have changed their Facebook profile photo to put a rainbow filter over their image, Caitlin Dewey reports for the Washington Post.

BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow is moving with his family to Los Angeles, in part because the rent is too damn high (in London) and in part because of the shifting political winds. As he writes: “The USA is putting curbs on surveillance, expanding its national healthcare, and there are mass parental boycotts of standardised testing in its public schools. The U.K. just elected a Tory majority government that’s going to continue to slash and burn the welfare state, attack schools, health, legal aid and teachers, and impose mandatory cryptographic backdoors in the technology we use to talk to each other.”

This is civic tech: Patrick Meier reports on “one of the most promising humanitarian technology initiatives I’ve seen in years,” called Peta Jakarta, which is taking real-time crowdsourcing of flooding conditions in that city to a whole new level.

Inside Philanthropy’s David Callahan says Sean Parker’s Wall Street Journal essay on “Philanthropy for Hackers” deserves close attention for delivering “a strong statement for why and how philanthropy should be done better.”

In the New York Times Magazine, David Segal captures the crazy pace of life at the Huffington Post, and how its founder, Arianna Huffington stresses work-life balance while her staff develops ulcers at what one calls “a jury-rigged, discombobulated chaos machine.”