Uber’s CEO Travis Kalanick today hinted that his company would soon be offering more than just luxury vehicles on-demand. At the LeWeb conference in Paris, he described Uber as an “urban logistics fabric” that was about physically delivering products and services.
“It’s the cross between lifestyle and logistics,” he said. “Lifestyle is ‘give me what I want, and give it to me right now’. What we’re used to on the internet for the last fifteen years is just clicking and getting stuff. But now it’s logistics, where we’re delivering it. Physically delivering it.”
He added: “So give me what I want and give it to me right now, that’s Uber.”
French entrepreneur and LeWeb founder Loic Le Meur then pushed Kalanick on “Uber clones” that were beginning to exploring other on-demand services.
“We’re in the business, today, of delivering cars in five minutes. But once you’re delivering cars in five minutes, there’s a lot of things you can deliver in five minutes,” Kalanick replied. “If someone is doing ‘Uber for X’, whatever it is, and it matches that lifestyle and logistics thing, you can count on Uber doing it.”
Le Meur again probed Kalanick on possible offshoots for Uber, such as same-day delivery for groceries. “I know what you’re trying to do Loic,” he replied. “I’m not going to comment on any specific thing, but I’ll just say we think of that as being Uber. They (competitors) should count on us at some point being there.”
Uber has previously experimented with other products for its on-demand taxi-hailing service. In the past, customers have been given the chance to request Christmas trees, ice cream trucks, roses and even kittens for a limited period.
Kalanick has suggested before that Uber will become an on-demand service for everything. These latest comments reiterate those intentions, however, and suggest that an expansion of its services could be in the not too distant future.
“There’s going to be interesting ideas coming for us in 2014,” he said at LeWeb. “It’s just getting in all of those places, going deep in those places and then extending the number of services that we offer. That’s how we think about it.”
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