Uber is worldwide transportation company. It allows its users to press a button on their app and a taxi cab will turn up for them.

Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp were waiting in the snow on a Paris evening in 2008. After having trouble hailing a cab down, the two entrepreneurs came up with the idea of an app that can be used to request a car.

Originally called UberCab, the company was founded in 2009 and the app was launched to the public in May the following year. By September they were getting positive press coverage and in October they raised $1.25 million in funding. Later that month, the name was simplified to just “Uber”. Up until this point, Uber had only been available in San Francisco but in May 2011, they officially expanded into New York City. Within six months they had expanded into four more American cities and began its international expansion by moving into Paris.

Since then it has gone on from strength to strength and is now a worldwide service operating in well over 500 cities in 70 countries and counting. Uber’s success is at least in part due to their ability to solve a real-world problem that people face every day – not being able to get a cab. As the cliché goes, “sometimes the greatest ideas are the simplest”.