Man sues Uber for a BEEELLION dollars over alleged theft of concept Uber is being sued by the founder of a small wireless business who claims Uber stole his idea for a ride-sharing app. Kevin Halpern, founder of a company called Celluride Wireless, is suing Uber and its CEO Trevor Kalanick, along with several other early investors in the company, accusing them of having misappropriated trade …
Last night I was at a local pub with a friend, who pushed the Uber button and the map appears.
"I love the way the cars move around", says my buddy.
I would be interested if any *taxi* firms, had a competing product...
Otherwise I file this under noise, which every reasonably obvious innovation gets hit with.
P.
This Halpern character is just one of the many trolls that turns up when a good idea goes global. As the holder of a few patents myself, I've seen this sort of nonsense many times - never for this kind of insane amount, but often for a million or two. Since the most I've ever made from a patent is a few tens of thousands, my legal eagle tells me just to laugh at them and file them as spam!
These are just the modern equivalent of the "begging letters" that every football pool and lottery winner receives.
Too lazy to search out and read the complaint, and don't want to wast the time to watch the Youtube flic. Is there a patent here (the article didn't say so) or is Halpern simply an idiot who found a lawyer to take on a contingent fee lawsuit figuring that 40% of a $1B with a probability of approximately zero might be worth a few hours and a filing fee to get a mention or two in the press?
1. Halpern created the Uber business model and founded Celluride in 2003, some four years before the iPhone was released.
2. In 2006, after three years doing nothing (?) with the idea, he let it slip to Trevor Kalanick.
3. In 2009 Kalanick and Garrett Camp started Uber, Halpern having spent another three years doing nothing significant with "his" idea.
Halpern's suit probably is due for a quick and unfortunate end unless he has signed documents from Kalnick acknowledging his precedence. If he is lucky, his lawyer hired on for a contingent fee and the risk of court censure for wasting a judge's time.
"Halpern's claim indicates that, at the time, he was developing his own mobile-based, private-car-hailing service, and that one of the few parties that Halpern trusted with the details of his company was Trevor Kalanick, who later went on to found Uber."
Yep - looks like he was ripped off.
I came up with the idea of rating tradesmen based on user experience (like TripAdvisor but for people instead of places). The fact that someone else got it off the ground and built the product that people wanted to use means they win and I lose. I'm not going to cry a river - that's how business works.
"I'm not going to cry a river - that's how business works"
You hire a lawyer and make enough mud stick to gain traction in court. You drag it out in court until it is costing the company massive amounts and you offer to settle for an amount cheaper than running the court battle. The company pays up and the lawyer buys a new BMW
That's how lawyers work.......
I remember 'inventing these' donkey years ago (in my head)...
- Method of tracking mileage when driving a private car for business use, with a method of seperating business from private mileage for tax purposes.
- Combining a CCD with a flash memory stick to enable recording of events whilst driving
- Putting Windows on a memory stick so when you plug it into a base PC, 'your' Windows then boots and runs with all your data available.
People can have ideas, but may not always follow it up.
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