I'm getting attacked here, but I'll be rational.

> Dial a ride? That’s something to research 40 years ago. The new world is app driven, no one need answer a phone call.

Look, you've got it in spite of some of what you write: The "dispatching" part is 40 years old. So, that's nothing new. When I looked at dispatching as an optimization problem, it looked so ill-defined that any optimization looked not worth the bother. Or, just assign the next call to the closest taxi or some such.

I have a quite good background in optimization and a year or so communicated with a guy who claimed to be high in Uber and working on optimization. I sent him some outlines of some approaches, some questions to clarify the real problem, etc. and never got back anything at all meaningful. My guess was that he knew next to nothing about optimization and had made no real progress on optimization at all. I doubt that Uber's dispatching optimization amounts to much.

For answering the phone, for a solo business, let the driver answer his own phone. Or let his wife or kids at home do it. Or have 10 taxi guys form a little informal group and rotate the phone answering one day at a time among themselves or their wives.

For a simple server to answer the phone, that can't be very hard to do. Then for the app, the smartphone just uses a standard Web browser, no mobile app required.

> The new world is app driven, no one need answer a phone call.

Don't need an app; on the client side, a Web browser, including on a smartphone, is enough.

Besides, having a human answer the phone stands to be a big, huge advantage. Nearly any taxi customer would much rather talk to the nice voice of the wife or daughter of the taxi driver than some computer. Out where I am, when I called for a taxi, that's what I got, a wife or daughter.

Where I live, 70 miles north of Wall Street, the taxi business is just mom and pop operators. There's no way for Uber to make any money here; nothing like Uber is an advantage to anyone or needed or wanted.

You have talked about medallions, monopolies, sweet-heart deals with governments, etc., but out where I am my impression is that the situation is fairly simple, that anyone who wants to be a taxi service need only say so or nearly so. On my computer I have lists of phone numbers of local taxi services. That's all I need. I don't have or need a smartphone (a friend gave me a cell phone, but I've never bothered to learn to use it; I just don't need it), but if I did and was out someplace and needed to call a taxi, then I'd have the phone numbers of the local taxi services on my smartphone. When my startup is farther along, I'll do more driving, get a smartphone, carry it in my car just in case, and to use it will just make a phone call to a local taxi service.

Here's one: Just set up a Web site with names, addresses, phone numbers, and user rankings of taxi services, for the world. In the US, include GPS coordinates, Zip code, and area code. Link to maps at Google. Start in a medium sized US city where there are lots of small, local taxi services and expand from there. Client side? Sure, just a Web browser. A smartphone user could just paste in his GPS coordinates, and the Web server would give back the 10 closest taxi services. Giving back the 10 closest is common at Web sites now.

At least in all but two dozen or so of the largest US cities, anyone who uses a local taxi service has a good shot at being a well-known, favorite customer of a local taxi service, that is, with "the human touch", and get good service -- a good situation for both the taxi and the customer. It would be harder but not impossible for a big company to do some such.

Sure, if I suddenly had to travel to some medium sized city in Europe for the first time, maybe I'd be glad to use the brand name of Uber. But so far I've never been in Europe even once! Maybe when my startup is doing well!