Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber

by Mike Isaac

The seeds of it first came to him during a Bond flick. Camp was relaxing at his new luxury apartment in South Park—just yards away from where the idea for Twitter was first conceived, and where Instagram’s early offices were located—when he decided to watch a movie. Casino Royale, the 2006 reboot starring Daniel Craig, was a favorite, something he watched when he didn’t have anything else in mind. There was something about the understated cool of Craig’s Bond; perhaps, on some level, Camp liked the idea of the world’s greatest spy being a short-tempered, crew-cut blond not dissimilar to himself. Then he saw it. There was a moment when Bond was driving a Ford through the sunny streets of Nassau, approaching a beachfront resort on the sparkling blue Bahamian seaside. What caught his eye was a small flourish on Bond’s cell phone as he drove through the beachscape. The phone, a boxy, silver Ericsson antiquated by later standards (it still had a numerical push-button keypad!) displayed a GPS-based map on its tiny screen. Bond was watching himself—a small arrow icon gliding across a dark green bitmapped grid—as his car moved across the Nassau landscape, inching toward The Ocean Club. It was a throwaway scene, something most people would have absorbed passively in the theater. It primarily served to highlight some of Bond’s cool gadgetry while plugging an Ericsson product, something the producers got paid to do. But the image stuck in Garrett’s head. The iPhone, in all its glory,...