Uber, Careem Suspend Services in UAE Capital

Ride-hailing companies Uber and Careem have suspended services in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, since Saturday and do not know when they can resume operations, they said on Sunday.

The National, a UAE newspaper, quoted unnamed sources as saying that as many as 50 drivers for Uber and Careem had been arrested.

An Abu Dhabi source familiar with the situation told Reuters some drivers had been detained over violations of regulations, but did not specify how many drivers or describe the violations.

“This is a temporary suspension and we will let you know of any further updates,” an Uber spokesman in Dubai said via email. He did not respond to questions about the arrests or the reason for the suspension of services.

Christian Eid, vice-president of marketing and communications for Careem, a Dubai-based company, said many of its drivers were being stopped by authorities in Abu Dhabi, apparently over licensing issues, and as a result had become nervous and were staying off the roads. This had forced Careem to halt services there, he said.

The Abu Dhabi government’s Center for Regulation of Transport by Hire Cars, which manages the taxi and transport sector, did not respond to queries. The center oversees about seven taxi operators and 18 limousine operators, some of which are partly government-owned. Abu Dhabi police did not respond to requests for comment.

Uber and Careem said they had not suspended operations in neighboring Dubai, the commercial and tourist hub of the UAE. The emirate of Abu Dhabi has a population of about 2.8 million and Dubai has roughly 2.5 million.

Uber, which launched services in Abu Dhabi in 2013, said last year that the Middle East and North Africa contained some of its fastest-growing markets and that it planned to invest $250 million to expand in the region.

(Reporting by Stanley Carvalho and Celine Aswad; Editing by Andrew Torchia and Susan Thomas)

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Grab Raises $750 Million to Take on Uber in Southeast Asia

Grab, the biggest rival to ride-sharing service Uber Technologies Inc. in Southeast Asia, has raised $750 million in a funding round, turning up the heat on the U.S. firm now seeking to expand in the region after exiting China.

The successful cash-injection just a month after Indonesian peer Go-Jek raised $550 million highlights the intensifying competition in the region, as Uber shifts its focus following a deal to sell its China operations into Didi Chuxing.

Four-year-old Grab said it planned to expand its services in Southeast Asia through the funding round, which was led by Japan’s SoftBank Group with new and existing investors.

The region has become a key battleground for ride-hailing firms thanks to a burgeoning middle class as well as a youthful, internet-savvy demographic.

Since leaving China in August, Uber is even more focused on Southeast Asia, doubling down on resources, staffing and technology deployed there, a source familiar with Uber’s plans has said.

Specifically, the company is refocusing more than 150 engineers to work on its Southeast Asian operations and hiring more engineers in India, the source said. It was also working on making sure its maps fit the region.

The latest funding values Grab at over $3 billion, a source familiar with the matter said.

It increases its total capital position to over $1 billion, the company said without naming other investors in the round. A Grab representative told Reuters institutional investors from the United States and China took part.

Uber had no comment on Grab’s fund-raising.

Buffering

Grab says it has 95 percent market share in third-party taxi-hailing services, while its private-car business has more than half of the Southeast Asian market.

In addition to expanded ride-hailing services, Grab said it planned to invest in mobile payments capabilities in a region with low banking and credit card penetration and limited cashless payment options.

“Grab is using this funding to try to diversify because the ride-hailing industry, in terms of profitability, is still a big question. Grab need to hedge risks and diversify,” said Rushabh Doshi, an analyst with researcher Canalys.

“The additional funding and diversification will give Grab buffer to fend off Uber’s attack,” he said.

Since its launch in 2012, the company has expanded into motorbike hailing, carpooling and delivery. It also recently teamed up with Indonesian conglomerate Lippo Group to roll out a mobile payment platform in its biggest market, Indonesia.

“We are particularly excited about the growth opportunity in Indonesia, where we see an almost $15 billion market for ride-hailing services alone, as well as the potential to extend GrabPay’s platform regionally,” CEO and co-founder Anthony Tan said in the statement.

Grab said it will also invest in data science and machine learning capabilities to enable services like predictive demand and driver and user targeting.

The company operates in Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam.

(Reporting by Aradhana Aravindan; Editing by Edwina Gibbs and Stephen Coates)

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Google’s Ride-Sharing Platform Is Now Live in San Francisco

Waze Rider, the ride-sharing version of the popular Google-owned navigation app, is now open to the general public in the Bay Area. After several months in , the  that Google is ready to open up its casual carpool competitor to Uber and Lyft.

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Google Expands Nascent Ride-Sharing Service

Alphabet Inc.’s Google unit plans to open its ride-sharing program to Waze app users in San Francisco this fall, pitting itself against Uber Technologies Inc., The Wall Street Journal reported.

Google in May launched a pilot program around its California headquarters which allowed several thousand area workers at specific firms to carpool together with users of its Wave navigation app, according to the WSJ report. 

Alphabet executive David Drummond on Monday resigned from Uber’s board due to increasing competition between the companies. Google in 2013 had invested $258 million in Uber, but now increasingly see each other as rivals, the WSJ reported.

Google did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

(Reporting by Aishwarya Venugopal in Bengaluru; Editing by Shounak Dasgupta)

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Business Model of Uber Essay

Uber has come a long way from cabs. It now offers boats, helicopters as well as some other transportation means on demand. Uber recently launched a motor-cycle-pickup service in Paris, a delivery service in San Francisco, and an ice-cream-truck-delivery service in 7 other cities. However, these means are available in selected geographical locations but it has led Uber to add new streams of revenue into its business model

In less than 6 years, Uber has managed to become the best example of a city-by-city mobile service company roll-out. Many generic pointers that I talked about in this Blog Post regarding scaling User Acquisition efforts for On Demand platforms borrows elements right from Uber’s playbook. The underlying principle here is that for every city it launches, it faces the same chicken and egg problem. The advantages that Uber has as compared to new startups in this space are:

Lot of money to incentivize both drivers and customers. Rock solid processes or playbooks that have evolved through experience launching Uber in 311 cities till date. Already known brand that gets early curious adopters. Everything starts with a small city launch team. Every city has a general manager who heads the customer acquisition as well as driver acquisition. The first cabs to come on board are generally professional drivers who are already associated with local taxi companies and have their own cars.

First customers come from various local advertising channels like FM radio, newspapers, online advertising etc. Uber is such a large name that people are already waiting for the cab company to start services in their city. Main Growth opportunities tapped by Uber Party people who go to clubs, parties or events. Business Travellers and Tourists. Cab at doorstep in bad weather conditions. City’s Nightlife.

CORPORATE AND BUSINESS LEVEL STRATEGIES VALUE-CREATING STRATEGY

As a value proposition for customers, Uber offers no need to wait for a taxi for long times. Additionally, free rides on certain occasions and discounts from time to time. Since the prices lesser than the normal taxi fares it is more attractive on customers mind. Uber’s tagline says – Your personal driver. It lets customers travel in style. And they determine fixed prices for common places like Airport etc. As a value proposition for drivers, Uber has additional source of income and flexible working schedules. Drivers also can work part time or simply whenever they like. Easy payment procedure helps everyone to use Uber easy. Those who love to drive can earn money while pursuing their hobby. And Uber pays drivers to be online, even if they don’t get any request.

INTERNATIONAL LEVEL STRATEGIES UBER IN EUROPE AND TURKEY

Uber starts to operate in 2015 in Ä°stanbul. UberBlack is the product that they establish for Turkey. As a marketing, National basketball player Sinan Güler is chosen as a testimony. Uber take Sinan Güler with a Mercedes S Class car via its application. UberBlack starting price is 11,20tl and for each kilometer 3tl will charged. (Webrazzi.com, 2015) It’s operating just only in Ä°stanbul and they are try to work with taxis as well. Even for the market penetration Uber uses 20% off, legal issues may affect their performance badly for the near future.

Bibliography

Bacon, J. (2012, February 3). Innovation Uber Alles; Personal-Driver Service Can Revolutionize Transportation Services. The Washington Times.

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How Uber Drivers Might Be Ripping You Off

No, you’re not being paranoid if you suspect that an Uber or Lyft canceled your ride request because of your race or gender, took you for an unnecessary detour or failed to report your ride had ended once you arrived at your destination. The results of a recent study suggest that your distrust was warranted.

Researchers at MIT, Stanford and the University of Washington recently found that black passengers hailing UberX or Lyft rides in Seattle waited up to 35 percent longer for rides than white customers. Across nearly 1,500 trips in the Seattle and Boston metropolitan areas, passengers with African-American-sounding names experienced cancellations more than twice as frequently as those with white-sounding names.

Related:

These are some of the disturbing findings published last week in a for the National Bureau of Economic Research (NEBR), titled, “Racial and Gender Discrimination in Transportation Network Companies.” The authors explore potential strategies that ridesharing companies and their users could adopt in order to eliminate this type of , such as obscured passenger identities.

Drivers, who are , rather than employees, have the freedom to choose the areas in which they seek riders. In the NEBR study, males with African-American-sounding names requesting rides in low-density areas were more than three times as likely to find their trip canceled than if they used a white-sounding name. A report published in August examined the negative impacts of ridesharing companies on the underserved communities they purport to help.

In Boston, the NEBR authors also found evidence of drivers taking female passengers for 5 percent longer — and more expensive — rides than men. Their analysis also showed that rides tended to last longer during times of high demand and .

Related:

Here are the ways in which drivers have been found to rip off female passengers:

  • Women were charged higher fares as a result of a driver starting their trips prior to pick-up — or failing to end it once she had exited the vehicle.
  • In some cases, drivers had lengthy conversations with female riders, meanwhile taking them on excessively long routes — even through the same intersection multiple times.

To alleviate this problem, the authors propose that ridesharing companies establish more fixed fares.

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I Drove Around Pittsburgh in a Self-Driving Uber

“Did you do that, or did the car do that?” I first asked that of my self-driving Uber’s “safety driver” when the car pulled out of the lane it was in to go around a pedestrian on the side of the road. I then asked it another half-dozen times throughout the 30 minutes I spent as a passenger in one of Uber’s autonomous cars that are . Nearly every time, the answer came back: “the car did that.”

Indeed, my time as a passenger in the self-driving Uber as it drove around downtown Pittsburgh was blessedly uneventful — and in that relative safety and peace, I got an up-close look at what the challenges will be in making autonomous vehicles a widespread reality. I even got behind the wheel to “not drive” the car for myself.

For starters, it’s important to note that I never once felt like the car made any unsafe maneuvers. It obeyed the speed limit, left plenty of space between it and the car in front of it, took turns slowly and smoothly and generally behaved like an excellent citizen in vehicular society. It decides on speed first by determining a safe driving distance from the vehicle in front of it, and then by going as fast as the speed limit when it was able to. Uber’s engineers are also able to call out roads in which the car can exceed the speed limit to drive safely with the flow of traffic.

All told, it was a pretty boring ride — aside from the fact that a freaking computer was driving me around downtown Pittsburgh. That’s all the more impressive when you consider how much harder making a self-driving car operate around a city is compared to on the highway (like Tesla’s autopilot feature does).

The times when my safety driver had to take control were less about the car doing something unsafe and more about it being confused about what its many sensors and cameras were recording. For example, the car didn’t know how to deal with a truck that was double-parked very well. It read the truck as a vehicle stopped in the road, but it didn’t have the context to know that it wasn’t going to move any time soon, so we just sat behind it until the driver pulled around it.

The car also had a tough time dealing with a four-way intersection — while an autonomous car will obey the letter of the law, humans don’t. So, with safety as a top priority, the car sat at the stop sign, waiting for crossing cars to come to a complete stop before it would enter the intersection. But most people out there don’t come to a complete stop at a stop sign, so we just sat and waited while multiple cars crossed in front of us, glancing curiously at the strange bed of sensors on top of the vehicle.

Uber’s cars will likely learn these intricacies sooner than later, and I got to see examples of that learning on display in my drive. Apparently, when you’re stopped at a red light in Pittsburgh, it’s customary to let the first car across from you take a left turn if they need to before continuing straight through the intersection ( appropriately). The autonomous cars thus are programmed to take a little pause before continuing through an intersection when a car across from it has its left blinker on. That’s not about driving “right” or “wrong” — it’s about knowing local rules of the road and respecting them. Every area these cars go into will have their own quirky rules like this they’ll need to learn.

The few hiccups we encountered didn’t really detract from the experience; the overall ride was as smooth as I’ve ever had with a human driver behind the wheel. The autonomous system is finely tuned to provide a smooth and safe ride, and it never accelerated or decelerated in a way that made me feel uncomfortable. If you’ve taken a cab around any major city, you’ve probably experienced some car sickness from a driver with a heavy foot on both the brake and gas, but there was none of that here.

I’m someone with a rather sensitive stomach, but I felt fine for the rather lengthy ride I went on. In fact, the ride almost felt too smooth, too in control. Like a computer was driving — which, of course, it was. That’s not a bad thing, but you can definitely tell the difference between a human behind the wheel and the autonomous system.

While sitting in the back of the Uber, I could look at an iPad mounted to show the riders some details on the car. You can see how far you’ve driven autonomously, the current speed and a graphic showing the movements of the steering wheel and when the brakes are applied. But most interesting was a view of what the car’s radar system is seeing at any given moment. You can see cars, buildings, pedestrians and anything else in range of the car. It’ll satisfy the curiosity of people interested in how the car works as well as provide some transparency and possible security to people skeptical about the system.

After cruising around Pittsburgh for a bit, I was offered my own chance to get behind the wheel. At first, I thought I was just getting a look at what the driver sees while they’re behind the wheel, but nope — I was getting a chance to sit up front while the car drove me around. The most interesting thing about that experience was the strange awareness I needed to keep while letting the car do its thing. I was tempted to look around and take in the sights of the city, because I felt totally comfortable letting the car do its thing.

Of course, the system is not even close to ready to have a driver totally check out, so I kept my hands touching the wheel and a foot ready to tap the gas or brake so I could take over. Fortunately, it’s dead simple to take control of the car: moving the steering wheel or applying any pressure to the brake or gas will deactivate the autonomous driving system. I took over the car a few times, mostly just to see how it worked, and it was dead-simple to both drive as normal and then hit a button near the shifter to put the car back into autonomous mode.

It’s not surprising that full manual control is so easy to activate, but it makes sense that Uber would want the press to see firsthand how easy it is to snap the car into your control. That said, I could definitely see a situation in which a “safety driver” couldn’t help but tune out a bit during a long shift behind the wheel. It’s also not the easiest thing to keep your foot hovering over a pedal and hands lightly gripping the wheel without accidentally engaging with them.

The fundamentals appear to be in place for Uber, here in Pittsburgh at least. But there’s a long way to go before its cars can navigate all of the city, let alone other cities. A number of Uber engineers and spokespeople I talked to made it clear the focus was to build out Pittsburgh first, both in terms of increasing the area that autonomous cars could travel as well as fixing little oddities like its performance at four-way stop signs. Other cities will likely come in the future, depending on how the pilot goes, but right now all thoughts are focused on Pittsburgh.

One of the big challenges for Uber will be learning more about how the cars deal with inclement weather. That’s one of the reasons they’re testing in Pittsburgh — between the complexity of the old city’s layout (small streets, lots of one-way roads, lots of congestion) and the fact that it sees all kinds of weather, there will be a lot to learn from testing here. Uber engineers feel that if they can master Pittsburgh, they can make the system work pretty much anywhere. (I’m thinking both Boston and Manhattan will make for a serious challenge.)

But it’s not clear exactly how Uber will deal with bad weather. The team said they’ve tested in rain and had good success thus far, but I wasn’t able to get a straight answer when I asked about how it’ll recognize and account for snow. It seems that it’ll be up to the safety driver to decide when to engage the autonomous features, and I have a feeling that in the winter these cars will be operated in traditional fashion to be on the safe side.

As much as the pilot is to gauge Uber’s technical prowess, it’ll also be a judge to how the public reacts to self-driving cars. In some ways, it’s like Google’s very public beta of Glass — except that no one was going to die if Glass went horribly wrong. Consumers will understandably be a bit nervous the first time they get into one of these vehicles. But with a human being behind the wheel and the cars operating at relatively low speeds around the city, the potential for true disaster seems pretty low.

The 1.3 million who Uber said die every year in car accidents is a big part of why they’re doing this in the first place. The company says that 94 percent of those accidents are caused by some variety of human error, and it believes that self-driving cars can see and process more than humans, making them safer. There’s a lot to be done before that’s a reality, and Uber’s definitely starting small. But right now, they have a lead on just about every other company working on self-driving cars.

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