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Hey there listeners. It’s Brett Molina. Welcome back to Talking Tech.
Big news for Uber, the ride hailing app. Uber announced that it is going to start listing New York City taxi cabs on its platform, which is pretty astonishing considering for the longest time apps like Uber and Lyft have been at odds with cab companies over the same business, helping customers get to where they need to go. You can read more about this on a story that’s on money.usatoday.com.
According to the Associated Press, Uber is partnering with a couple tech companies, Creative Mobile Technologies and Curb, and the plan is to eventually have all the taxi cabs in New York City available on its app, so if you’re in New York City and you pull up the Uber app, you’ll be able to not only see the drivers for Uber, but you’ll also get to see the various taxi cabs that are available.
As the AP reports, it benefits both sides. First off, Uber is going to boost the number of rides that are available during certain times of the day, which is big for them, especially for customers who… Maybe there are time periods that are just heavier and it’s much harder to find an Uber.
This also helps New York City cab drivers a ton because now they have a ton more customers to work with, so this is significant, and we’ve seen Uber expand in this way in other places as well. They’ve done this in Spain and Columbia, in several other countries where they have partnered with cab companies there, and so there are cab drivers that are available on the app along with the standard Uber drivers.
I am very curious to see if this expands beyond just New York City, because obviously this would be a big step and this hopefully makes life finding a ride hailing service like Uber, Lyft, cab, whatever, it just becomes more seamless and much easier to pull off, especially during a stressful time, say you’re coming home from the airport or whatever it might be, but you need a ride right away. The fact that you can potentially have so many more options for that, it’s a pretty big deal. You can read more about this by going to money.usatoday.com.
Listeners, let’s hear from you. Do you have any comments, questions, show ideas? Any tech problems you want us to try to address? You can find me on Twitter, @BrettMolina23. Please don’t forget to subscribe and rate us or leave a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, anywhere you get your podcasts.
You’ve been listening to Talking Tech. We’ll be back tomorrow with another quick hit from the world of tech.