geekosystem

Don't drink and drive. To prevent drinking and driving, companies like Uber offer smartphone apps that can summon classy limos and town cars, complete with driver, to your location. That's very noble of them, but Uber is also a business. That's why Uber has emailed its users to warn them of increased New Year's Eve pricing. It's part of what they call "surge pricing," but it sounds an awful lot like price gouging. They warn users that they can expect to pay a minimum of $100 for a ride during peak hours on New Year's Eve. For that much, the driver better be a jeet kune do master ready to take you on a crime-fighting adventure around town.

Uber, the folks behind the glorious on-demand car service app that operates out of San Francisco and other cities, has officially shuttered their taxi services in New York City after just over a month of operation. Their more expensive black car service will continue to operate unimpeded, but their attempt to recruit the more traditional yellow taxis to the fold has failed for now. New York's Taxi and Limousine Commission's legal hurdles proved to be too much.

Group messaging and picture apps were the obvious contenders to break through at this year's South by Southwest, and based on the hundreds of thousands of GroupMe threads muted and Instagram filters applied, it seems that both varieties of apps are well poised for the mainstream. For countless other companies, however, making SXSW more than a four-day bender of a work write-off can be a challenge. Free beer and vaguely familiar musical acts work when you have marketing budgets the size of StumbleUpon's or Foursquare's, but it's hard to recite your elevator pitch when the crowd is moshing. We found several apps, sites and giant media conglomerates whose untraditional approaches to engage the tech set at SXSW involved more than “open the bar and they will come.”