Last spring, after my first encounter with the Uber taxi app in Chicago, I was wowed and I told you about it here.
As I wrote back then, Uber, basically, is a quick and easy way to order a cab, a black car or a private SUV ride.
Create an account, download the app and you’re good to go. Open the app and it immediately finds you and shows you the cars in your area (you can even watch your car as it makes its way to you). A driver accepts your request immediately and you see the driver’s name, photo and car number. At the tap of a button you can send a text or call the driver.
A text tells you how long you’ll wait and another pops up to let you know the car is arriving, in case you’re waiting inside, for example.
On another trip to Chicago, I used Uber again and had the same great, hassle-free experience.
A couple days ago New York Magazine said Uber might be "more valuable than Facebook."
In the piece Kevin Roose wrote, "Uber's plan is to outgrow its car-service roots, and become, as investor Shervin Pishevar put it, 'a digital mesh' capable of providing all kinds of transportation and logistical services to people in the cities it serves. Once it has you summoning cars from your phone, the logic goes, it can use that same back-end technology to hook you in for all other kinds of deliveries — food, clothes, Christmas trees. And eventually, like Amazon, it can become something akin to an all-purpose utility — it'll just be a way you get things and go places."
Uber is in more than 30 cities in North America and in others in Europe, Asia Pacific, and South and Central America. It's in 22 countries.
Though you can't find Milwaukee on the list of city blogs on the Uber web site, such a page does, in fact, exist already, though there's not much on it ... yet.
Now, thanks to Barb Haig, Haig/Jackson Communications, I see that Uber is hiring for a position with the title "Community Manager – Milwaukee," though the job will be based in Chicago.
According to the posting, "You’ll be tasked with scaling support in an innovative way at a company that’s growing like crazy and changing constantly."
Another page on the Uber site says the company is looking to run Uber in three Midwestern cities remotely, presumably from Chicago.
"We’re looking for a fearless, brilliant managers to run the Detroit, Milwaukee and Indianapolis Markets as we experiment running a city remotely."
I'm still waiting on a reply from the Uber folks and when it comes, I'll post an update. Uber Milwaukee could be a game-changer in Brew City transportation.
Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he lived until he was 17, Bobby received his BA-Mass Communications from UWM in 1989 and has lived in Walker's Point, Bay View, Enderis Park, South Milwaukee and on the East Side.
He has published three non-fiction books in Italy – including one about an event in Milwaukee history, which was published in the U.S. in autumn 2010. Four more books, all about Milwaukee, have been published by The History Press.
With his most recent band, The Yell Leaders, Bobby released four LPs and had a songs featured in episodes of TV's "Party of Five" and "Dawson's Creek," and films in Japan, South America and the U.S. The Yell Leaders were named the best unsigned band in their region by VH-1 as part of its Rock Across America 1998 Tour. Most recently, the band contributed tracks to a UK vinyl/CD tribute to the Redskins and collaborated on a track with Italian novelist Enrico Remmert.
He's produced three installments of the "OMCD" series of local music compilations for OnMilwaukee.com and in 2007 produced a CD of Italian music and poetry.
In 2005, he was awarded the City of Asti's (Italy) Journalism Prize for his work focusing on that area. He has also won awards from the Milwaukee Press Club.
He has be heard on 88Nine Radio Milwaukee talking about his "Urban Spelunking" series of stories, in that station's most popular podcast.
