Here are the new markets receiving LTE services: Albemarle, N.C.; Bloomington, Ind.; Charlotte, N.C.; Contra Costa County, Calif.; Denison, Texas; Greeneville, Tenn.; Joplin, Mo.; Kerrville, Texas; Lafayette, Ind.; Lincolnton, N.C.; Los Angeles; Mankato/North Mankato, Minn.; Memphis, Tenn.; Norfolk/Virginia Beach/Newport News, Va.; Palm Bay, Fla.; Port St. Lucie, Fla.; Rochelle, Ill.; Salisbury, N.C.; Shelby, N.C.; Tullahoma, Tenn.; West Palm Beach, Fla.

Sprint now has LTE service in 88 markets (you can see the complete list here), and while many of them are on the small side, the operator is readying some major cities for launch. The operator called out New York City, San Francisco and Washington in Thursday’s announcement, saying customers are already starting to get LTE signals in those cities. In the coming months, Sprint said, it will officially unveil networks in additional 120 cities and towns in coming months.

Sprint is trying to catch up to Verizon Wireless and AT&T, both of which got more than a year’s head start on the No. 3 U.S. operator. Verizon is pretty much finished with its primary LTE network — in its earnings call today that it revealed it has built 4G in 95 percent of its 3G footprint — and it is set to break ground on its second network this year.

Recently AT&T has been turning on new LTE markets in small increments. For instance, on Thursday it said the 4G service has expanded to Cheyenne, Wyo.; Cushing, Okla.; and Florence, S.C. But it plans to make a big push this summer as well, launching in 77 new markets. By the end of the year it plans to have 250 million people under its LTE umbrella, which would put it about 50 million shy of Verizon’s footprint.

Meanwhile T-Mobile’s LTE build is just starting. Its first seven 4G cities went live in March.

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In a complaint filed in California Superior Court, cab drivers Leonid Goncharov and Mohammed Edine say Uber drivers are breaching San Francisco taxi laws by, for instance, not accepting cash and failing to use meters.

The two drivers say they have brought the case on behalf of all other San Francisco cabbies, and are seeking an injunction to shut Uber down and an order for the company to hand over its profits since 2010.

The case turns on the distinction between taxis and “limousines” or black cars which are not permitted to take street hails. Uber claims it is part of the former class while the lawsuit points to Uber’s “e-hails” and dispatch service to say it is the latter. In other words, if it acts like a taxi, it should be regulated like a taxi. (you can read the full filing below).

Update: Uber has retained prominent lawyer John Quinn who said in an email that the company complies with all laws and that, “Uber would rather compete for business on the streets of San Francisco than in the courtroom, but Uber will defend these claims in court and is confident of the outcome.”

Disruption in the taxi industry

This is just the latest legal headache for Uber, which is facing regulatory pressure in Boston and New York and a class action lawsuit brought by Chicago cab companies that accuses it of pocketing tips and catering to rich hipsters.

In the bigger picture, Uber has come under fire because its business model — which allows people to summon cabs based on the GPS in their smartphones and pay with a pre-stored credit card — is proving disruptive to the traditional taxi business.

Outspoken Uber owner Travis Kalanik has been clashing with cabbies head-on. He recently railed against “industry corruption” and said Uber “would continue to fight the good fight,” according to The Next Web, which was first to report the story.

While Kalanik has succeeded in rallying users and tech types to his defense, the story may not be as simple as a hidebound industry resisting an innovator. That’s because taxis provide a vital transportation function like buses or semi-trucks, and cities have long used rules in an attempt to make them safe and available to everyone (that’s not to say the existing system works). While Uber and other upstarts like Hailo appear to have discovered a more efficient distribution model, it appears likely they will have to jump through a hoop or two before becoming a permanent part of the urban transportation eco-system.

IMAGE 11-14-12 114428

(Image by Pius Lee via Shutterstock)

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• Like many of the 1980s kids, I love Tom Wolfe and Martin Amis. In this freewheeling interview with Esquire, Amis shares what he has learned about life and writing. “The only real measure of merit — prizes certainly aren’t that — is longevity, how long your stuff lasts,” he muses.
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PLUS: I am hosting the second annual GigaOM Roadmap conference in San Franciscoon November 5, 2012 with my colleague Katie Fehrenbacher. We have invited folks like Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, Instagram’s Kevin Systrom, Tumblr’s David Karp, Nest’s Tony Fadell, designers Yves Behar and Scott Wilson and many others to talk about how we design our connected future. Join us.

Like its cable compatriot Time Warner, Comcast isn’t just latching onto the established managed Wi-Fi networks in coffee shops, restaurants and shops. It’s building an extensive outdoor hot zone network as well, exposing its access points to the elements to capture high-traffic pedestrian zones and public gathering spots.

Until now Comcast has been mainly concentrating on the eastern seaboard where it has built extensive networks using Ericsson BelAir Networks equipment in and around Boston; Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and Richmond, Va. But now it has cast its eye on the left coast. Comcast has also struck up roaming pacts with Time Warner and Cablevision that will eventually allow them to create a unified national hotspot network, though so far its only been implemented in New York City.

Comcast’s California rollout doesn’t appear to be quite as dense as its mid-Atlantic deployment, but it covers a lot of markets. A complete list of cities and towns is at the end of this post, but you can also see detailed coverage maps at the Xfinity website.

Comcast’s Wi-Fi hotspots are detailed in red

As with its east coast network, Comcast is offering Wi-Fi access to its residential broadband customers for free. For non-Comcast subscribers, the cable operator is selling access by the hour, day and week. The SSID for the network “XfinityWiFi” and can be accessed from any laptop, tablet or smartphone.

Apart from the Bay Area the new Comcast network is in the following markets: Aptos, Atwater, Buellton, Cameron Park, Carmel, Chico, Chowchilla, Colusa, Corcoran, Davis, Diamond Springs, Dinuba, El Dorado Hills, ElkGrove, Fairfield, Folsom, Fresno, Galt, Grass Valley, Hanford, Kerman, Lathrop, Lemoore, Lodi,Lompoc, Los Banos, Madera, Manteca, Marysville, Mendota, Merced, Modesto, Monterey, Murphys, Nevada City, Newman, Oakdale, Oroville, Parlier, Patterson, Placerville, Rancho Cordova, Reedley, Roseville, Sacramento, Salinas, San Andreas, Sanger, Santa Maria, Selma, Solvang, Sonora, Soquel, Stockton, Tracy, Tulare, Twain Harte, Vacaville, Vallejo, Visalia, Willows and Yuba City.

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Vevo’s previous video watch page offered a list of related clips in a sidebar, a playlist at the bottom and a lot of other information sprinkled across the page. The new page does away with most of that, and instead offloads artist information to a new page that opens as an overlay (or modal box, as web designers like to call it). It’s much cleaner, with a bigger focus on what really matters to Vevo: the play button. Pandora, said Cerda, has been a great inspiration for this kind of simplicity.

Vevo’s new video watch pages do away with a lot of clutter.

Cerda isn’t afraid to point to these kinds of inspirations. As a matter of fact, they’re the reason that he left Vevo’s New York office to build out a product team in San Francisco. He wanted to be closer to the startup scene, and that simply wasn’t possible with a glitzy music industry office in Times Square. “The ecosystem was restricted to just that floor,” he said.

In San Francisco, inspiration is everywhere, and things are decidedly more low-key. Cerda’s team of seven initially worked out of his garage, and moved into a small downtown office just a few weeks ago. Tables were still being assembled when I stopped by earlier this month, and everything looked more like a small startup than a major label-backed music platform.

A lot of contextual information is now presented through a new artist modal.

One computer in the space was dedicated to a permanent Google+ Hangout with the New York office, where Vevo’s iOS developers are working on the next steps in mobile. In San Francisco, the team is working on improving the Android experience, and getting ready to take on the living room next.

Vevo rolled out its Xbox app this spring, and Cerda told me that it “turned out to be wildly successful.” That’s why he wants to take Vevo to other connected TV platforms as soon as possible. “There is a huge opportunity for us there,” he told me.

Cerda’s previous stints include being the CEO and cofounder of VOIP startup Ooma and a VP of messaging technologies gig at Myspace. The biggest lesson he learned in those years was “not to overbuild product,” he said, but instead to take small steps and continuously improve things. Vevo used to roll out new product builds every two months or so. Cerda switched to a weekly schedule. “I like to develop and release early and often,” he told me, explaining that he started to involve the whole company in testing these product iterations before they roll out to Vevo’s user base. Said Cerda: “I’ve made the company my extended QA team.”

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In San Francisco (and across the bay in neighboring Oakland), Parking Panda will have 5,000 to 10,000 parking spaces available for reservation. Users can search for spots available in a certain area and see what the garage or driveway owner is charging before committing to a reservation. It can be for a a few hours, a day, week, month, whatever. Though it’s one of its most useful features, you don’t have to plan in advance to use Parking Panda.

“Parking is always the unknown,” Parking Panda CEO Nick Miller said in a phone call last week. “You have the tickets, you have a dinner reservations … we sort of take that [parking] problem away.”

The service works in two ways, Miller said. “Like AirBnb, private owners can list spaces for rent, and we’re working with commercial operators to yelp them optimize their yield.” In other words, it’s helping privately owned parking garages that aren’t full manage their space inventory better. By doing peer-to-peer driveway renting, and helping large garages rent out space, Parking Panda is combining the services of a few of its competitors; ParkAtMyHouse lets individuals rent out their driveways only, while ParkWhiz, for example, just does event parking.

Miller and company started off just doing the AirBnb model, but soon realized that wasn’t going to cut it in large cities. “That’s great, but one of the things we find is that [model] only works in certain neighborhoods.” For instance, a notoriously difficult SF neighborhood to park in, the South of Market area, doesn’t have many private driveways. “In SoMa, you need garages to supplement that.”

Parking Panda has been live in Washington, D.C. and Baltimore for several months with 20,000 spots between the two cities. But its debut in San Francisco on Monday comes with another important milestone for the company: its first iPhone app. (Android is “coming soon.”) Also, users can still use the app outside of D.C., Baltimore and SF — there are 25 other cities where you can search for open spots, you just can’t reserve or pay in advance just yet.

Also coming soon: more cities. Boston, Los Angeles, and Austin are in Parking Panda’s near future. But before those, Miller promises me he has a bigger priority: my own city, Philadelphia, a place where the parking situation is so nightmarish, there’s a reality TV show about it.

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Two good reports out overnight run through the state of play as Uber, the Californian town car service beloved by San Francisco’s technocracy, prepares to hit New York with an app for yellow cab booking. It’s Uber’s latest move from the high end of the market down the stream (the company has already introduced UberX lower-grade private car hire in SF and NYC) but it’s not coming easy: just as the app was supposed to be released, it’s hit a few snags.

A report in The New York Times runs through Uber’s situation, and outlines the concerns that the city, particularly the Taxi and Limousine Commission, has with its product.

…the program may have a significant problem: Taxi officials say that Uber’s service may not be legal since city rules do not allow for prearranged rides in yellow taxis. They also forbid cabbies from using electronic devices while driving and prohibit any unjustified refusal of fares. (Under Uber’s policy, once a driver accepts a ride through the app, no other passenger can be picked up.)

As a riposte, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick appears to be promising to launch the app for free to give riders “a taste of the future” (either a blessing or a Trojan horse, depending on where you sit).

But what’s really interesting is why Uber’s pushing to get to market so quickly. After all, it already has two services in New York. Can’t a third wait, just a little while?

No, says Betabeat in a great blow-by-blow breakdown of the situation, which points out that there may be something else prompting Uber’s speedy approach: the competition.

In particular, the company is heading for a straight-up clash with Hailo, the London-based taxi hailing service that is also preparing for its debut in New York. Hailo’s already going strong in London and has already built a service there that’s more in line with what yellow cabs would require, rather than a new product like Uber’s. As Betabeat says, Hailo “is planning on launching here in a couple of weeks. However, Hailo does not have explicit approval from the TLC either,” but it “has 2,500 pre-registered to use its app.”

Hailo has since stood by those numbers, and if they are in any way accurate, it’s got good reason to scare the living daylights out of Uber: that base of 2,500 drivers is way higher than Uber’s 105 — perhaps signaling why the San Francisco company wants to be first.

So who will win?

Trying to understand who’s going to emerge victorious is hard right now, not least because there’s only one city where Hailo and Uber are in competition, albeit indirectly, and that’s London.

There are no clear winners there, but it’s a brutal arena for anyone to fight in, so there may. I wrote about the complexities of that market earlier this summer in a post detailing precisely why Uber would find the British capital complex, confusing and highly competitive.

There are more rival startups in this space than I can count, and they aren’t simply clones of the San Francisco company. Some, like the well-backed Hailo, focus on black cabs. Others, like UbiCabs, are pointed toward the lower end of the private hire (minicab) market.

But Uber’s biggest rival in London comes from neither the world of black cabs or the world of tech startups. Private hire firm Addison Lee is the most significant player in the British capital’s upscale private driver market that Uber wants to dominate. It’s been around for a while, and it’s doing well: the company’s last financial filings say it ended up with £5.5 million of profit last year ($8.5 million) on revenues of £127 million ($198 million). Addison Lee may not be liked by all, but it is ubiquitous, connected, competitive and extremely aggressive.

I don’t think anything has changed since then.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that right now Hailo has the upper hand over its rival. Uber is spending heavily to try and build up a fleet of drivers, but finding it hard going, while Hailo is getting more traction and building up a strong community of black cab drivers and users. The economics of both are tough, and the markets they’re appealing to are slightly different, but Hailo is showing more signs of success in hostile conditions. Still, I’m going to dig in and see what more I can find out about this, because it’s a really interesting area.

One thing to remember, though: this isn’t a two-horse race.

Sure, there are other startups who could win — but I also think you shouldn’t forget the system. In Washington, the local legislature is looking at blocking Uber from offering lower-tier services, and while New York may not be run by the same sort of quislings, it has its own problems and inefficiencies. The march of progress might be inevitable, but that doesn’t mean Hailo, Uber or anyone else from this generation of startups will be able to overturn the TLC’s legal objections easily.

Taxi photo courtesy of Flickr userPankseelen

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The City of San Francisco is (unsurprisingly) first up, according to the Wall Street Journal:

Officials with the San Francisco Department of Environment told CIO Journal on Monday they would send out letters over the next two weeks, informing all 50 of the city’s agencies that Apple laptops and desktops “will no longer qualify” for purchase with city funds.

It doesn’t mean future purchases will be totally impossible: the city does have a waiver application if someone really wants a Mac in the future, though the process is described as “long and onerous.” However, Apple will barely notice those missing sales: Less than 2 percent of San Francisco city computers are Macs, according to the report.

Apple already had 39 of its computers and monitors certified by the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool, a standards group funded by the EPA, when it asked the group to drop its products from its rankings last month. The reason? Apple’s design priorities. Thinner and lighter devices will presumably no longer meet the standards requiring easy disassembly and recycling of its parts.

It was pretty much a foregone conclusion that many public agencies — which are often required to take a detailed look at product labels and buy EPEAT-certified electronics — would be out of luck when it comes to purchasing new Macs. Some large corporations and possibly even schools follow the same policies. But, as I wrote yesterday, it’s less certain if individual consumers will have the same concerns.

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But now Uber is getting ready to step up to its biggest challenge yet: London.

The company is preparing to hit the British capital just in time for the Olympics, and the reality is that it’s a venture that has the potential to make — or break — the business.

Europe is already proving tricky

The London launch has been a long time coming. Over the last few months, Uber has been quietly gearing up to open in London, staffing up and making regular visits ahead of a planned debut that could happen as soon as this week. A few test drivers are now in place, and last week hand-picked attendees at the LeWeb conference were given the chance to use the service too — presumably in order to build buzz among early adopters.

It’s definitely making progress. But the same approach was taken in Paris last December, and yet that seems to have not been a roaring success. I’m hearing that the number of registered Uber drivers is just 100 six months later; a figure Kalanick didn’t refute when I asked him about it.

And while Paris might be confusing, London is a monster. It’s a vastly complex, confusing city in which Uber will face competitive threats the like of which it hasn’t seen anywhere else. Can it stand up to the test?

An uber is not a black cab

London’s black cabs are as important to the city’s identity as yellow cabs are to New York’s, but they’re also a much stronger rival to any incomers. London’s highly regulated cabbies are legendary for their intimate knowledge of the city’s streets and while they aren’t cheap, well, neither is Uber.

Think that doesn’t matter? Customers demand a lot in London.

First time with @Uber_LON. Pimping car but clueless driver – makes you appreciate those who have passed the Knowledge. I guess SF is easier?

— Jon Gold (@jongold) June 23, 2012

Plus black cabs are pretty available in central London (despite complaints) and you can flag down a black cab on the street, or order one to come and pick you up by calling up a company like Dial a Cab, which is effectively a black cab aggregator, and has developed its own app to make things easier.

And black cabs are just one of many competitors that Uber will have to best. There are more rival startups in this space than I can count, and they aren’t simply clones of the San Francisco company. Some, like the well-backed Hailo, focus on black cabs. Others, like UbiCabs, are pointed toward the lower end of the private hire (minicab) market.

There are more, too: services like Taxizapp, Get Taxi, Tweet a London Cab, London Taxi App, Taxi Square and many more.

These not only provide some competition to Uber; they add to the noise that it has to cut through. And some of them are very well connected to the driver population that is vital to making these services work. Those bonds can be hard to break.

Oh, and then there are the big dogs

But Uber’s biggest rival in London comes from neither the world of black cabs or the world of tech startups. Private hire firm Addison Lee is the most significant player in the British capital’s upscale private driver market that Uber wants to dominate. It’s been around for a while, and it’s doing well: the company’s last financial filings say it ended up with £5.5 million of profit last year ($8.5 million) on revenues of £127 million ($198 million).

Addison Lee may not be liked by all, but it is ubiquitous, connected, competitive and extremely aggressive.

Drivers I’ve spoken to suggest that their contracts with Addison Lee will preclude them from working for Uber as well — and those who care about the money they make (which is all of them, of course) are much more likely to stick with a sure thing than take a risk on a venture-funded company from California.

So what does Uber do?

The company is stuck in a difficult situation. If it’s really aiming for global domination, it can’t ignore London. With a complicated mesh of public and private services, London is an incredibly competitive and valuable market… and that combination makes it so attractive and so dangerous to new entrants.

Uber’s challenge — and it’s something that Kalanick seems to recognize, at least — is to provide black cab-style service at prices that are competitive with other private hire rivals. That’s tough. Sure, it’s got venture money to help it get there — but it’s hard to see how it can sustain massive losses in one market over a long period of time.

With the Olympics just around the corner, winning London would be a huge prize. But scooping the gold medal is going to be tough, and Uber might just have to settle for something less. But will it be happy to come home with silver, bronze — or even worse?

Kalanick seems aware of the challenge: “London is the gold standard,” he told me.

But in another conversation I had with the company recently, an Uber spokesman brushed aside the size of the obstacles facing it. He told me that he’d heard this sort of argument before — for example, when the company hit New York.

“Just get people using Uber and they’ll know what’s different about it,” was the thrust of the argument.

That’s not a strategy, that’s a prayer. It seems highly unlikely that things will come so easy.

Profile of cab used under Creative Commons license courtesy of Steve Bott; Addison Lee image courtesy of panmike1

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Seesmic CEO Loic Le Meur

Started more than seven years ago, the event now claims to be the industry’s most international shindig, and now it’s about to see its first spin-off, to be held in London next month.

But when I spoke to Le Meur a couple of days ago, he admitted to me that just a few months back it wasn’t the English Channel he wanted to cross with LeWeb — it was the Atlantic. He’d just started exploring the idea of starting a LeWeb for the Bay Area, where he has lived for the past five years.

“We had started to think about doing one in San Francisco,” Le Meur told me. “But then Cameron stepped in.”

By “Cameron” he means David Cameron, the British Prime Minister.

Reports have long suggested that the British government — keen to score a victory over their rivals in France — wanted to lure LeWeb to London. Le Meur says those rumors are accurate, but he never intended to move the entire conference away from Paris. However, he says, in the end, British politicos offered such a range of assistance that eventually meant the decision to set up a second, London-based event, was easy to make.

“It was a special request from Mr Cameron,” says Le Meur. “Last year I was was a Founders’ Forum event and I was very impressed because he shook me by the hand and said ‘Loic, you need to move Le Web to London.’ We’re not moving Le Web, and we had no plans for London just two months ago. But they’ve been so helpful that we couldn’t refuse.”

That helpfulness extended to a financial commitment, too, with Tech City Investment Organization (the body charged with drumming up publicity and investment for London’s startup scene ahead of the 2012 Olympic Games) acting as the first major sponsor for the event.

But anyone concerned that the U.K. government may end up underwriting the whole affair as it tries to woo European startups to London are misplaced, says Le Meur.

“They took a top-level sponsorship, but I would say it’s about 10 to 20 percent of the whole budget,” he says. “It’s very nice and one reason we decided to go to London, but we’re still taking a risk.”

That chimes with what TCIO chief Eric van der Kleij told me last month.

Le Meur said that the early takeup for the event, which takes place on June 19th and 20th, shows there actually is “room and demand in London for us”, and that there is enough going on in the startup world to warrant a spinoff.

“Everything moves so fast in six months,” he says. “At LeWeb, nobody was talking about Pinterest. Instagram was on stage in Paris, but nobody cared very much.”

Photo of Loic Le Meur courtesy of Joi Ito on Flickr. Photo of David Cameron user under Creative Commons license courtesy of World Economic Forum.

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