Anyone looking for clues about potentially world-changing innovations in 2015 and beyond would do well to consider three announcements from Silicon Valley companies made in the final weeks of 2014. These announcements had nothing to do with the usual high-tech obsessions: no social media or wearable gadgets. Instead, they all revolved around a technology that has been with us for more than a century: the automobile.
First, the embattled but massively successful transportation network Uber announced on its blog that it was rolling out a new service called UberPool in New York City. (Early versions had been deployed in San Francisco and Paris.)
UberPool relies on a phenomenon that the company had observed tracking ride patterns in dense metro areas such as Manhattan: most Uber journeys have what the company calls a “lookalike” trip, where two or more separate passengers travel in separate cars along the same route. The old-fashioned technique of hailing a cab makes it almost impossible to identify these “lookalike” passengers; there’s no way to know that two blocks north of you, some other stranger is looking for a cab to take him to Grand Central as well. But Uber’s algorithm can easily identify these lookalikes and bundle them into the same vehicle.
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