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Uber announced<\/a> on their blog today that they have rolled out their secret Uber drivers in Lyon today – the first passenger was\u00a0Mickael Miro<\/a>, a Lyon-based singer. This is Uber’s 2nd French city, and its\u00a07th European city (London, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, Milan, & Stockholm). In fact, you” notice this is the first European country in which Uber has rolled out in a second city.<\/p>\n Uber has a\u00a0tendency\u00a0to do private beta testing with its early adopters – it is currently doing “Secret Ubers” in Milan & Detroit as well, and usually is their way of testing the market as well as tasting the waters before scaling up operations and bringing more drivers on board.<\/p>\n This comes at a pretty interesting point, as the French taxi commissions<\/a> just announced they would be cracking down on smartphone-enabled ‘tourist chauffeurs,”<\/a> as they call them. Perhaps it was the taxi commissions statement which pushed Uber to roll out more quickly, before the belt starts to tighten.<\/p>\n The story was originally picked up on TheNextWeb<\/a> by Jon Russell<\/a>, who pointed out that “CEO Travis Kalanick revealed this weekend that\u00a0Uber is looking to quadruple its staff<\/a>\u00a0over the next twelve months.”<\/p>\n Will we be seeing Ubers in Bordeaux, Toulouse, Marseilles, Nantes, Grenoble and Nice soon? It’s not too likely – Lyon is the largest city outside of Paris (when including the suburbs), and it also has a large\u00a0technology-oriented culture. With Marseille, Lille, and Toulouse as the 3rd, 4th, and 5th largest cities in France<\/a>, it’s unlikely that Uber will roll out here anytime soon, at least before they role out in larger cities in Europe – Madrid, Rome, and Hamburg all sit on the top European cities by population list<\/a> on Wikipedia, and lack an Uber presence thus far.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Just for your pleasure, here’s the latest single by Mickael Miro – it’s pretty awful.<\/em><\/p>\n