Non-taxi on-call cars have existed for many, many decades before Uber. Especially in NYC where this article is relevant, car services are a dime a dozen and have been a regular part of city life for decades.

The difference is between picking up your phone to get one vs. using your smartphone. Uber was first to market, but it's silly to pretend that without them it wouldn't have happened. That's like calling the Pizza Hut app a clone of the Domino's app, because they both order pizzas and Domino's came out first. Ultimately Uber is a newfangled (and more convenient) front-end to a service that has pre-dates itself by a wide, wide margin.

The extension from "call the car company to get a car" to "use an app to get a car" is a pretty obvious innovation, particularly in NYC.