Anyone can say they were too early to market as the main reason for their failure.

The idea of hailing cabs electronically is not new. A confluence of factors helped Uber figure out how the idea could work, in hindsight.

> "The idea of using black cars never occurred to us, so Travis gets props for that."

lisper is right: using blacks cars was a much better strategy than trying to negotiate with local cabs in trying to gain traction

iCab started almost a year after Uber (it was called Ubercab back then). And there were half a dozen other also-rans that started about the same time.

You seem to be contradicting yourself then if you say "iCab started almost a year after Uber" when you wrote above that: " But I have a conflict of interest here because in 2008 I made my own attempt at starting an Uber-like thing (I called it iCab).

Uber was not yet a thing until 2009.

Yeah, sorry, my mistake. iCab started in late 2009.