UberPOP suspended from today as innovators praise its disruptive power

Taxi services disintermediated by the cloud, they say

Cloud Week in Paris heaped praise on car-share provider Uber, despite the company backing down in its standoff with local taxi drivers.

UPDATED Car-share app provider and serial disrupter Uber was praised for its innovation by speakers at Cloud Week 2015 in Paris.

Constellation Research president Ray Wang and Chiseki Sagawa, director of Fujitsu's Platform Strategies unit, were among several luminaries to single out Uber for its disruptive power from the conference stage.

Their timing was controversial. Uber Technologies will suspend its UberPOP service in France from today, after backing down a few days ago in an angry standoff with Parisian taxi drivers. In September, two senior Uber executives are due to stand trial in the capital for conspiring to organise "illegal work".

UberPOP allows passengers to hail rides from unlicensed drivers, which Parisian taxi drivers claim is illegal under French law. In the UK and elsewhere, the company has been heavily criticsed, not least for removing regulatory protections for passengers.

The company believes that, in the long run, its services and business model will be vindicated.

Uber apps are popular in many large cities throughout the world, including London and, especially, New York, where 'hailing' an Uber car is part of daily life for younger New Yorkers. In London, however, Uber users have complained of prices surging by as much as 300 per cent during the Tube strike.

Wang implied that the traditional notion of the taxi has been swept aside by the cloud. Not only that, but Uber's cloud-based data-gathering can be used for urban planning applications, he said, claiming that central London traffic movements have already been transformed by Uber drivers.

• Computing's attempts to hail a cab in Paris to ask the driver's perspective resulted in a long walk and some gesticulating.