I'm not sure I approve of this

Anyone in the ICT startup industry can agree on that a Me-too startup sucks. Either your a really early into a segment/vertical/functionality or you are the best, even better if you are both. The "Me-too's" are just trying  to become valid for a) investments b) acquisitions c)exits d)mediapromotions and that is just... bad.

I've met so many startups the last couple of years that is into ride sharing. Haven't they done their homework? Can there be +3 in every country? How to stick out in a jungle of choices?

Then I got this new info that Ants is out there. Well that wouldn't be the first time my name is on the agenda but this time it's bad, really bad. Because it's a ride sharing service app provider. I don't like.
Because they are using my name on something anyone can do.
I don't like.

So let us get down on this one; what is ride sharing about?

It's about hooking up with people that needs to fill the seats in their car to cut costs of driving and that is neat.
But it's very difficult to do in a competent way. You need to mix both social with smartphone reach (ie folks need to have the app and on) and intelligent algorithms to calculate who can benefit the most from getting into a ride that might just be a fraction of a ride for the driver and then calculate the cost and bill it instantly to the passenger while riding plus that you need to have ratings on the driver (don't want to dwell on that subject as I suck as a driver..) and mix that into a seamless service. I don't think that 9 out of 10 in this niche is good at that package.

That is fouling everything and it means that the whole idea of ride share gets into problem. It's not simple to repair damage done after using a service that has stood you up, raped you or even worse...

So let's pretend that it is a perfect world.

Then this would be assured by authorities so that we have legal protection and quality assurance, insurances and lot's of examples on how good it is. Lord and behold, I'm advocating a public service!
Shit.
I've been against public services since... well a long time. We even founded a political party on the matter (the June List if anyone remembers) and it's against my whole body that I admit that a public service can bring safety to this shitty industry of hooking drivers and passengers up.

The big reason to all of this is the price of fuel that is based on political incompetence and market domination by the oil industry which have created an enormous pressure on the consumers that still needs to drive to work or elsewhere because the imbalance between taxation for environment (not really) and the big shift that needs to come someday (far away).

But it feels like the only way to do it because now it's a jungle and jungles tend to kill people. Which I find unnecessary for traveling from A to B.

So kill the Ants;) and the other sucky ones by making the best of the breed the EU approved service for ride sharing and make it fast otherwise it will be proven by death statistics that this wasn't a good industry segment.

Btw, my favorite team is Flinc:-

I might be wrong but...

I've recently started to map up what I've seen in the last two years as a limbo of technology. Not in general stupid, mobile and software based technology.

You know, five years ago the world entered into mobility for real by Jobs launching the iPhone, that was remarkable and as yet to be seen; impossible to repeat. So we now live with mobile devices that all look the same, carry eithe one or two or the bad third kind of OS but all got apps, more or less (sorry Lina, you won't get a smartphone until you are 12) so the world fragmented and then kind of joined up in one kind of playground again.
Which is kind of what ecosystems do.
I could go on and on about the similarities between the ecosystems and how they work and how we as so-called humans work. Anyway.
The thing is that stuff that we just need to work in our life, the pyramid you know, Ma Ma Maslow's; works on the stuff that is constantly getting huge amounts of useless venture capital thrown at it. Software back in the days, my teens; the golden 80-ies, then we rapidly woke up mid 90-ies with the Web, that is as dead as a Dodo today; it's now all in the protocols.
Shazaam enter the 00-ies with add-ons for the Web similar to aids for the elderly; like e-commerce platforms, CMS and ERPs that sooner or later will die like a fly. Some still hang on but they are hung out to dry. Btw don't let me guide you on stock promises, I suck at stock exchange analytics as there are still millions of idiots out there and they can't be analyzed. I think.

Ok The decade of 2010 came with promises of mobility for everything but we are still struggling, hell even Facebook are hanging like a dry duck because of the lack of mobile smartness (pssst, I know how to fix it but I don't know if I want to...)  and we see even pretty smart people struggling with how they can transform their rigid backbones to something that could be embracing mobiles at least to a point of 10% and that would be counted in as a success; hey they don't know what they are doing and that's fine, it keeps the economy going even if it could be something much better.

I'm talking about all the companies that just got supergazillions of financing to extend, sell and stupify the audience with their databases, analytics tools, big data stuff, semantic search, image/face/social/graph recognition platforms/systems/tech; well they are all in for the bleedin' kill. That was yesterday when stupid managers were looking for stuff to fix their stupid systems for stupid ecommerce/communications, now anyone can do it with free tools. So all proprietary sales is going ape; let me say this once again:

Single, walled garden, freemium licenced still standard server based shit is dead.

Go find yourselves a new tech, life, economy and future; the current one is killed. This is a list that I will update as soon as I can of dead stuff:

Oracle, Sun, WMware, HP, Apple, Blackberry, MySql, Neo Technology, everything CMS, semantic web and search, face and finger recognition, search optimization and meta currency.

Hola.