Nevertheless, what amazed me was that there was such amazing conversation about the topic on the web. In a way, this is what blogging was and is always about — discussion. I am aggregating a few responses just to highlight what people were thinking.

Ariel Seidman, founder of Gigwalk, pointed out that not all data is created equal.

 As an Uber driver optimizing to maintain a 5-star rating, which job would you rather do? Drive four drunk and angry customers to a club at 1 a.m., or drive a kind and generous venture capitalist from downtown Palo Alto to Sand Hill Road at 2 p.m.? Uber has no idea that your customers were drunk and nasty. All they know is that you got a 1-star rating.

Nick Brisbourne drew the parallels between the dilemmas faced by the workforce and the privacy debates:

The same point can be made about the current battle raging between privacy advocates and big online advertising companies like Google and Facebook. As a society we need to figure out what constitutes acceptable practice for the harvesting and use of personal data for advertising purposes. In both these debates there is much to be gained from getting it right and much to lost by getting it wrong.

My favorite response came from Fred Wilson, who is co-founder of big-time venture capital firm Union Square Ventures. He writes on his blog:

This redrawing of societal expectations is likely to be the political battle of our time. Om goes on to talk about this in the context of the labor issues that Uber is having in San Francisco. That is a good example of what happens when networks and the data they produce reshape a market that has been operating in a traditional framework. We are at the start of this battle between incumbents, be they black car drivers or cable companies or government itself, and the network-driven upstarts. And we have many of those upstarts in our portfolio.

P.S.: If you don’t have time to read the article, here is a tl:dr version of it. Damn, this is one useful service.

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The news was first reported by Kara Swisher. We heard about Pishevar’s exit a few days ago and since then have independently confirmed with two sources that he is leaving the firm he joined as a managing director in 2011. When we got in touch with Shervin, he said that he is switching roles from being managing director to venture adviser at Menlo and is going to join Uber as a strategic adviser.

The reason, he said was to start a new company — Sherpa, which is startup foundry. He explained that Sherpa is a company helping to build other companies, and it will be working with large corporations and other founders to come up with ideas. He declined to offer any details. It is rumored that he is partnering with Scott Stanford, a Goldman Sachs investment banker, for this new project.

“In his continued role as a venture advisor he’ll still be working with portfolio companies, sourcing deals and networking,” Shawn Carolan, managing director at Menlo wrote in an email. “This was a unique opportunity to let him pursue a passion at the formative stage while still have him active in the firm for companies further along.”

During his tenure at Menlo, Pishevar had invested in companies such as Uber, Fab, Getaround and Cinemagram. Pishevar is one of the most liked people in the entrepreneur community. He was an angel investor in about three dozen companies before joining Menlo Ventures in 2011.

Updated with comments from Menlo VC and Shervin Pishevar.

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The company wrote in a blog post Thursday that it’s rolling out Uber perks to allow companies to distribute Uber credits to all their employees, designed for the size and scale of a particular group:

“Starting today, your company can offer these same transportation benefits through Uber Perks, our program for giving monthly Uber credits to people in your organization,” Uber wrote in the blog post.

Getting employees hooked on Uber through work would likely translate to more people using the service on weekends and off-work hours (when Uber pricing goes up.) The company has a history of trying out a variety of buzz-worthy marketing tactics, and has recently seen regulatory wins in states including California, prompting the company to note that it plans to roll out ride-sharing in the near future.

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While Uber is not currently offering peer-to-peer ride-sharing, the CPUC agreement allows for “drivers not specifically licensed to drive a limousine or taxi” to provide rides, which could include Uber’s drivers, the company notes. And Uber wrote that it could pave the way for ride-sharing in the future.

Update: As TechCrunch first reported and Uber later confirmed with us, the company plans to expand into ridesharing, although it has no immediate specifics to announce. “It would be natural to expect us to go into competition,” an Uber spokesman said.

Lyft’s parent company Zimride announced Wednesday that it had entered into an agreement with the state where the CPUC would drop its earlier cease-and-desist order and fine against the company. Lyft wrote in a blog post that the company has worked to improve safety measures, increasing liability insurance and performing background checks on drivers, and is pleased the state will let them continue operating for the time being:

“This agreement supports the continued legal operation of Lyft and sets a precedent for the upcoming rulemaking process. This agreement would not have been possible without the outpouring of support from the community,” wrote the company co-founders.

Uber announced Thursday that they also have reached an agreement with the CPUC over the company’s technology used to hail rides and has confirmed that its legal in California:

“This settlement agreement is part of a steady drumbeat of progress in which pro-consumer, pro-innovation jurisdictions like Washington D.C., New York City, and Massachusetts are recognizing that everyone wins when new technology that fosters efficiency, affordability, and choice in transportation is allowed to flourish. California has always been on the cutting edge. The CPUC agreement further demonstrates how the Golden State welcomes and supports not only technological advancement, but a better future for drivers, riders, and our cities.”

Rideshare and next-generation taxi companies like Uber and Lyft have struggled to gain acceptance in cities across the country even as users embrace their services, with Uber facing regulatory challenges in D.C., push-back from cab drivers in San Francisco and Chicago, and earlier problems in the more stringent New York City market. With Lyft and Sidecar, questions revolved around how the companies would properly insure drivers and riders.

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Mobile is not an iterative step for the web, but a complete revolution. So instead of asking ourselves how we can adapt web-based stores to our smartphones, we should be asking how we can use unlimited access to information to help us when we are in actual stores. The full potential of the mobile revolution won’t be realized until we build the tools that make every moment of our lives better.

The internet squeezed onto mobile devices

It’s understandable that we use the web as the baseline for measuring mobile, especially since many of our most widely used apps and services originated online – email, text, maps, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon and so on. The comparison has worked until now because we’ve spent our first years with smartphones reformatting the desktop experience of the web to fit into our pockets.

Today the web itself  is the product of decades of adapting the real world onto the connected desktop. First we ported over letters (email) and posters (websites). Then we moved what we could of traditional businesses online to the large screen perched on our desks: Bookstores and record stores became (literally) Amazon.com and iTunes; travel agents became Kayak.com and Yelp.com.

Since smartphones have brought computing power and an internet connection to our pockets, naturally we want those tools everywhere we go. But porting these advancements to our phones is only a pre-game to the real mobile revolution: when connectivity reshapes our minute-by-minute lives.

The offline opportunity

Opportunity is everywhere: The offline world is filled with friction, inefficiency, incomplete information, tedium and excess capacity. We feel it all the time. Waiting for elevators. Waiting for delivery drivers. Going across town only to find an empty bar. Forgetting the name of the person you just met.

These problems are so frequent and inherently human we are often blind to them. But for almost every problem we encounter, relief will be found in the same place: The device we carry with us. We don’t need to log in. Sensors minimize the information input. Smart assistants and voice recognition allow hand’s-free use and allow the least technically capable among us to use their deepest, richest features.

Last year saw the first mass implementations of phones making what used to be our offline lives better with companies like Uber and HotelTonight, but 2013 will be the year in which we start looking to our devices to scratch our every itch – for companionship, entertainment and much more.

Why now?

A number of these ideas have been around for a long time, but 2013 will be our first chance to build many of these new companies.

When Amazon.com started in 1994, less than 10 percent of U.S. adults were online. But even though that small segment of the population was spread around the country, everyone used the product in the same way whether the user was in Dubuque, Detroit or Dallas. Everyone hit the same website, bought the same things and was plugged into the same distribution network. In its infancy, Amazon only needed a tiny fraction of the country to use its services.

The comparison today with Uber, the real-time limo service, almost makes itself. Uber instantly pairs available drivers and cars with demand for rides. Crucially, Uber needs a critical mass of both supply and demand on its platform in the same geographical area, down to the same neighborhoods and streets, and needs to be able to update and match them in real time based on their current locations – a task nearly impossible to accomplish at scale on desktops or laptops. There are several forces beyond raw adoption numbers though that enable Uber’s success:

• Smartphones free us from our desks. When we have problems, questions or desires, we don’t need to return to our homes or offices to satiate them; we can address them on the spot.
• Touchscreens, Android and iOS are amazingly simple to use. Not only do people have the technology readily available to them, but even the least technically savvy can (and do) use it.
• Apps are simple, elegant problem solvers. Small, beautiful, and easy-to-use, the best apps are easily understood in seconds.

This is the year these trends will reach critical mass in almost every major market in the US. The result will be that more great companies will be started, gain meaningful traction and drive investment. More startups will get more tries at solving problems, and a virtuous cycle will accelerate the trends.

Bringing the offline world online poses unique hurdles and rewards

While some problems are easy to identify they may be difficult to solve. Unlike many of the first internet companies, the real world has legacy industries with entrenched lobbies, distribution providers or regulations. Many require real infrastructure that needs to be acquired, integrated with or leased. In the offline world, scale is often much harder than simply spinning up additional servers.

On the other hand, many of these new companies will become natural monopolies – difficult to overthrow once they achieve scale, lock up resources within their systems and start generating significant cash. Many are adaptations or improvements of current businesses, but given the inability of incumbents to design, develop and deploy revolutionary software, we can expect many to be upset by startups.

Looking to the future

Unlike any technology we have ever seen, mobile has the opportunity to improve our minute-by-minute lives, wherever we are. While there are unique perils to the offline world, the significant rewards to those that build these new companies more than offset the risk.

Companies like Uber and HotelTonight are just the tip of the iceberg. Square isn’t just revolutionizing payments, but the experience of paying for things in real life. A company like Highlight will eventually be a real-time, in-person LinkedIn that gives us context, history and information for all of our encounters.

Mobile isn’t a portal to the internet we know today, but a gateway to build world-changing companies that will upend entrenched incumbents and exponentially recast even the most bullish of mobile expectations.

Edward Aten is a designer and entrepreneur. He is the founder and CEO of CopThis and previously founded Swift.fm. Follow him on Twitter at @aten.

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The list of honorees follows below, and it’s a list packed with newcomers as well as Silicon Valley veterans. Thanks to all for voting in the nomination process, and now that we’ve narrowed it down to five candidates for each award, don’t forget to vote for which person or company you think is most deserving. Voting begins today (the voting page can be found here, and the rules are here) and closes on January 24th.

As a reminder, the Crunchies, a joint production with our friends at Techcrunch and Venturebeat, will take place on Thursday, January 31, 2013, from 7:30pm to 11:30pm at Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall, 201 Van Ness Ave, San Francisco. You can purchase tickets here.

So, without any further delay, the nominees for the 2012 Crunchies are as follows:

Best Technology Achievement
Baumgartner Jump
Google Glass
Mars Curiosity
SpaceX docks with International Space Station
Tesla Supercharger Network

Best Collaborative Consumption Service
Airbnb
Get It Now/Postmates
Lyft
TaskRabbit
Uber

Best E-Commerce Application
Fab
Hotel Tonight
Karma/Facebook Gifts
Warby Parker
Zulily

Best Mobile Application
Evernote
Google Maps
Grindr
Instagram
Square

Fastest Rising Startup
Exec
Lyft
Pinterest
Snapchat
Stripe

Best Content Discovery Application
Flipboard
Instapaper
Pinterest
Prismatic
Tumblr

Best Design
Facebook Timeline
Medium
Paper by FiftyThree
Square
Svbtle

Best Bootstrapped Startup
FreshBooks
Instapaper
Nimbus
Techmeme
Upverter

Sexiest Enterprise Startup
Asana
Box
Cloudera
Plexxi
Zendesk

Best International Startup
Hailo
Rovio
Soundcloud
Spotify
Xiaomi

Best Education Startup
Codecademy
Coursera
Edmodo
Khan Academy
Udacity

Best Hardware Startup
Lit Motors
Lockitron
Makerbot
Nest
Raspberry Pi

Best Time Sink
Angry Birds Star Wars
Buzzfeed
Letterpress
Pinterest
WhatsApp

Biggest Social Impact
Donors Choose
Indiegogo
Kickstarter
Kiva
Reddit

Angel of the Year
Michael Arrington
Chris Dixon
Paul Graham
David Lee
Chris Sacca

VC of the Year
Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz
Matt Cohler
Jim Goetz
Michael Moritz
Peter Thiel

Founder of the Year
Nathan Blecharczyk, Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia (Airbnb)
Kevin and Julia Hartz (Eventbrite)
Elon Musk (SpaceX, Tesla)
Kevin Systrom (Instagram)
Nir Zuk (Palo Alto Networks)

CEO of the Year
Dick Costolo (Twitter)
Phil Libin (Evernote)
Marissa Mayer (Yahoo!)
Larry Page (Google)
Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)

Best New Startup of 2012
Coursera
Crowdtilt
Lyft
Snapchat
Waze

Best Overall Startup of 2012
Fab
Github
Instagram
Palantir
Square

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But it means that taxi users will now get to legally hail a cab from their smartphone, though the rules will be different depending on where a user is located. User will be able to hail a taxi that’s within a half-mile radius in Manhattan below 59th street. The radius grows to 1.5 miles for the rest of New York. Users will pay using the existing credit-card payment systems from VeriFone and CMT. And companies wanting to offer e-hailing will need to get a license from the city.

Uber tried unsuccessfully to start an e-hailing service back in September but quit within six weeks after encountering difficulties in building up its fleet of available taxis because of obstacles put up by the city. Now, it’s poised to get back on the road, the second big win in two weeks for Uber after the Washington D.C. City Council approved digital dispatch services last week. The company wrote excitedly in a blog post what this means:

“We already know how this pilot will turn out. As you may remember, New York City’s first experiment in e-hailing yellow cabs was only a couple months ago. Along with quite a bit of controversy there was enormous, unprecedented demand from New Yorkers who used it to get a yellow cab dispatched to them for the first time in decades. Drivers who found themselves in neighborhoods far from midtown Manhattan were finding riders they never had before – and were earning hundreds of dollars a week more than before – helping them make a far better living. But obstacles and roadblocks, and politics got in the way and six weeks ago we ended our ambitious e-hail experiment.

Now, UberTAXI’s return is imminent.”

But it’s not just Uber that wins. Services like Hailo, GetTaxi and Taxi Magic will also get a shot at offering services under the pilot program. The new approvals in New York and D.C. suggest that cities are acknowledging consumer interest in these services and the need to look at more technology options for moving people around. A TLC survey found that 70 percent of passengers said they had a smartphone and 55 percent wanted the ability to hail a cab and pay with their smartphone.

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CEO Steve Humphreys said the company is changing the name because Cabulous is very “very taxi-centric” and very English-specific. Given that the company wants to address the transportation concerns of different types of people with a variety of options, including black cars and eventually international taxis, the company is looking for a more all-encompassing name.

“We want to be your practical get-around-town solution,” he said in an interview. “We didn’t want it to be a super serious name. We wanted the brand to be kind of fun.”

The company just raised an $8 million funding round in June led by RockPort Capital and Shasta Ventures, making the re-name timing slightly odd, but it’s also easy to understand how they’d want a new direction as the ride-sharing and collaborative consumption model has changed so quickly even in just the past few months. Since June, Lyft launched its public product for on-demand rides, Uber added taxis and hybrid cards to its lineup, and even the car-sharing market got more crowded.

It seems that for Cabulous, providing taxis alone isn’t enough, and it will take a foray into new territory — as well a new name — to keep up with the competition.

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The company has seriously struggled with regulatory issues and opposition from cab companies in a variety of cities, from San Francisco — where it’s being sued by cab drivers for unfair competition — to Chicago — where the cab drivers sued the company for pocketing driver tips — to New York — where the company’s taxi service failed to overcome local cab regulations. A win that could lead to a sizable D.C. presence will likely boost Uber’s outlook for the new year, as it attempts to win over local governments as well as loyal customers.

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick wrote a blog post praising the D.C. city government on Tuesday, and explaining what it will mean for Uber:

Today the DC Council unanimously passed a legislative framework for “digital dispatch” that is pro-innovation, pro-consumer, and pro-driver. It will not only improve transportation in the District, but also serve as an innovative model for city transportation legislation across the country.

Kalanick wrote that the legislation, which still needs approval from Mayor Vince Gray, accomplishes a few priorities that Uber pushed for:

It explicitly defines a separate class of for-hire vehicles, sedans, that operate through digital dispatch and charge by time and distance.

It creates a single operator license for taxis, sedans and limousines and requires the DC Taxi Commission to actually issue licenses after a long four-year hiatus.

It sets new standards for price transparency that will benefit consumers.

And, above all, it brings regulatory certainty to the vehicle-for-hire marketplace – making it very clear that Uber and its partners, the licensed/regulated sedan companies and drivers, can’t be regulated out of existence.

Many cities have drastically different approaches to taxi and transportation regulation, as well as supply and demand for those services, but if D.C. manages to work with Uber and keep the startup and traditional taxis happy, it’s an interesting model to watch.

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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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