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Uber To Add Blade Air Taxi Bookings Through Its App
Joby Aviation will integrate Blade’s air mobility service into the Uber app from 2026, linking airports and cities with quiet, zero-emission electric aircraft.
Electric air taxi firm Joby Aviation and Uber will begin integrating Blade’s urban air mobility services into the Uber app as early as 2026, following Joby’s acquisition of Blade’s passenger business this summer.
Blade carried more than 50,000 passengers in 2024 across New York and Southern Europe, linking high-demand routes such as Newark, JFK, Manhattan and the Hamptons. Once folded into Uber, Blade flights will be bookable alongside ground rides, giving users faster, seamless connections in congested cities.
Joby and Uber have been partners in advanced air mobility since 2019, with Joby acquiring Uber’s Elevate division in 2021. That deal gave Joby tools for market modelling and multimodal integration. The Blade acquisition extends that partnership by adding a ready-made network of landing sites and passenger lounges.
Joby’s electric aircraft, designed to carry four passengers and a pilot at speeds up to 200 mph, promises an acoustic footprint far quieter than helicopters and aims to launch in cities including Dubai, New York, Los Angeles, the UK and Japan.
JoeBen Bevirt, founder and CEO of Joby pitched the integration as both a practical step and a long-term signal: “We’re excited to introduce Uber customers to the magic of seamless urban air travel. Integrating Blade into the Uber app is the natural next step in our global partnership with Uber and will lay the foundation for the introduction of our quiet, zero-emissions aircraft in the years ahead. Together with Uber’s global platform and Blade’s proven network, we’re setting the stage for a new era of air travel worldwide”.
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Andrew Macdonald, president and COO of Uber, added: “By harnessing the scale of the Uber platform and partnering with Joby, the industry leader in advanced air mobility, we’re excited to bring our customers the next generation of travel”.
For Uber, adding air mobility is less about novelty than keeping users inside its platform for every leg of a journey.
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At I/O 2026, Sundar Pichai Concedes AI Must Deliver Real Value
Gemini 3.5, a personal agent called Spark, agentic shopping, and Android XR eyewear are all aimed at making AI feel useful, not just impressive.
Google’s annual I/O developer conference (I/O 2026) has recently become a status update on the same question: can the company turn its AI spending into products people use every day? This year, chief executive Sundar Pichai described Google as being in a phase of hyper progress, while conceding this is the part of the cycle where people want to see real value in the products they use on a day-to-day basis.
The strategy on display was to push agents — AI systems that act on a user’s behalf — into nearly every Google product at once. Search now has an “intelligent search box” that returns generated explainer videos alongside links. Gmail, Docs, YouTube and Maps are gaining their own agent layers, including a Docs Live feature that turns spoken instructions into drafted text with citations.
Two new models, Gemini 3.5 and a cheaper Gemini 3.5 Flash, arrived the same day. Google says 900 million people now use Gemini, and that more than 50 billion images have been generated with it. The pricing tier names are likely to confuse buyers: a new AI Ultra plan launches at $100 a month, while the older Gemini AI Ultra drops from $250 to $200.
The flashier announcements were Gemini Omni, a video generator pitched as a more realistic answer to OpenAI’s discontinued Sora 2, and Gemini Spark, a personal agent that handles recurring tasks across a user’s Google account. A new universal shopping cart lets agents complete purchases across multiple retailers from inside Google itself, placing the company between the merchant and the buyer, and also owning the checkout.
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Google also confirmed its Android XR eyewear, built with Samsung and frames from Warby Parker and Gentle Monster. Audio-only glasses ship this autumn; a display-equipped version, which would superimpose live translations into the wearer’s field of view, is still in development. Both sets translate, however only the display version shows you the result.
What Pichai did not resolve is the bargain underneath all this. An agent is only useful to the degree it knows your calendar, your inbox, your shopping history and your physical surroundings. Google has now confirmed that, in time, the same context may carry advertising.
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