UBERLÂNDIA (December 4, 2015)

This morning I checked the traffic on my Residua website. Among other things, I checked the countries and cities from which the visitors came. Thus I came to Uberlândia, which was in the twentieth place in the list dominated by Zagreb, London, Pula, Copenhagen, and Udine. Having bumped into Uber in many a newspaper as of late, I thought it was a joke of some kind. A pure invention, that is. And so I searched for it on the World Wide Web. As it turns out, Uberlândia is a municipality in the state of Minas Gerais in southeastern Brazil. The pictures I found showed a sizable city with many a tall building. The joke was on me, in short. Which only shows how much I know about Brazil, a country of more than two-hundred-million people. As well as about Uber Technologies, an international transportation network company with headquarters in San Francisco. The company has become so famous lately that many other companies are copying its business model, a trend referred to as Uberification. Come to think of it, the company could well move its headquarters to Uberlândia. A perfect match, I reckon. Uberification incarnate, as it were.