Uber – Newswire Report

Gig Work Relief, Auto Care, and More Car News This Week

April 13, 2020April 13, 2020 NewsEditorair travel, COVID-19, Lyft, tsa, Uber

WIRED is usually about solutions, which has been hard in the past few weeks as Covid-19 continued its deadly trek across the world. For a while there, it felt like the biggest questions were: What is going on? And when will it end? This week, the tech and science folk we usually lean on for ideas started to roll some big ones out. Researchers looked at whether it’s possible to prevent more coronavirus outbreaks by using mobile location data to track the whole country’s movements—without putting every bit of our…

Odds and Ends

Self-driving car engineer Anthony Levandowski files motion to force Uber into arbitration

April 2, 2020April 2, 2020 NewsEditorAlphabet, Anthony Levandowski, California, Claire Delaunay, district attorney, Don Burnette, Emerging-Technologies, engineer, Google, Judge, lior ron, otto, san francisco bay area, self-driving cars, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Uber, unmanned ground vehicles, waymo

Anthony Levandowski, the star self-driving car engineer who was at the center of a trade secrets lawsuit, has filed a motion to compel Uber into arbitration in the hopes that his former employee will have to shoulder the cost of at least part of the $179 million judgment against him. The motion to compel arbitration filed this week is part of Levandowski’s bankruptcy proceedings. It’s the latest chapter in a long and winding legal saga that has entangled Uber and Waymo, the former Google self-driving project that is now a…

Headlines

The Covid-19 Pandemic Aggravates Disputes Around Gig Work

March 31, 2020March 31, 2020 NewsEditorcoronavirus, COVID-19, Lyft, on-demand economy, Uber

The rapidly spreading novel coronavirus is supercharging a debate about the treatment of gig workers. The relief bill signed Friday by President Trump will provide a short-term lifeline. But some workers for companies such as Uber, Lyft, Postmates, Instacart, and Amazon worry the help won’t come soon enough. Today, many gig workers are considered independent contractors, not entitled to workers’ compensation, health care benefits, or sick pay. Because their employers don't pay into unemployment insurance, the workers haven’t been able to obtain those benefits either. Many app-based companies have established…

Headlines

Susan Fowler: When the time came to blow the whistle on Uber, I was ready

March 2, 2020March 2, 2020 NewsEditor#MeToo movement, Feminism, sexual harassment, Silicon Valley, Technology, Travis Kalanick, Uber, women, Women's rights and gender equality, World news

The former Uber engineer has written a memoir about exposing the companys systemic sexism she hopes it will help other women in the industry Before Susan Fowler was a whistleblower she was a violinist, and before she was a violinist she fed fruit flies to spiders that were milked for their venom at a small Arizona business known as Spider Pharm. In February 2017, Fowler was thrown into the public eye after she published a damning blogpost exposing the toxic sexism she experienced working as a software engineer at Uber.…

Headlines

A Cruise Ship Quarantine, a Hunt for Cheaters, and More Car News This Week

February 24, 2020February 24, 2020 NewsEditorcoronavirus, future of cars, helicopters, Uber

Turns out transportation angles lurk in every story. This week, the global reach of the coronavirus was top of mind, so we investigated how cruise ships—and one cruise in particular—helped spread the virus worldwide. Then, for a change of pace (pun intended), we looked into how digital footprints helped one data obsessive track down (we did it again) marathon cheats. Meanwhile, in California, a labor law is changing the way Uber and its drivers do business, which may end up affecting the price of a ride. Plus, check out this…

Odds and Ends

SoftBank-backed Fair puts the brakes on weekly car rentals for Uber drivers

February 17, 2020February 17, 2020 NewsEditorcar leasing, fair, Softbank, Uber

When Fair laid off 40% of its staff in October, CEO Scott Painter promised it wasn’t shuttering leasing services to on-demand fleets. But just one week later, he stepped away from the role of CEO and was replaced by Adam Hieber, a CFA from Fair investor SoftBank. Today, according to two sources, Fair announced at an all-hands meeting that it would end its Fair Go program that helped Uber drivers lease cars on short-term (by the week) deals, as the company pushes for profitability. The program will cease in April.…

Odds and Ends

Indian bike rental startup Bounce raises $105M

February 13, 2020February 13, 2020 NewsEditorAccel Partners, Amazon, b capital, Eduardo Saverin, India, Uber

Bounce, a Bangalore-based startup that operates more than 20,000 electric and gasoline dockless bikes and scooters in nearly three dozen cities in India, said today it has raised $105 million in a new funding round as it explores sustainable ways to expand within the nation and build its own electric vehicles. The new financing round, a Series D, was co-led by existing investors Eduardo Saverin’s B Capital and Accel Partners, the startup said. The new round valued Bounce at a little over $500 million, up from about $200 million in…

Odds and Ends

What we know (and dont) about Goldman Sachs Africa VC investing

February 1, 2020February 1, 2020 NewsEditorafrica, Andreessen Horowitz, asia, e-commerce, entrepreneurship, Europe, finance, Ghana, Goldman Sachs, head, Investment Banking, Jules Frebault, jumia, jumo, Kenya, kobo360, London, Middle East, Money, Nigeria, player, Private Equity, Rocket Internet, San Francisco, sequoia capital, South Africa, Twiga Foods, Uber, United States, Venture Capital, zipline

Goldman Sachs is investing in African tech companies. The venerable American investment bank and financial services firm has backed startups from Kenya to Nigeria and taken a significant stake in e-commerce venture Jumia, which listed on the NYSE in 2019. Though Goldman declined to comment on its Africa VC activities for this article, the company has spoken to TechCrunch in the past about specific investments. Goldman Sachs is one of the most enviable investment banking shops on Wall Street, generating $36 billion in net revenues in 2019, or roughly $1…

Odds and Ends

The year of the gig worker uprising

January 16, 2020January 16, 2020 NewsEditorDoorDash, gig workers, Instacart, Labor, Lyft, Uber

2019 was a momentous year for gig workers. While the likes of Uber, Lyft, Instacart and DoorDash rely on these workers for their respective core services, the pay does not match how much they’re worth — which is a lot. It’s this issue that lies at the root of gig workers’ demands. “This past year has been a pivotal year not only for gig workers but for workers across the tech economy,” Gig Workers Rising co-organizer Lauren Casey told TechCrunch. “That unto itself is a win — to see mass…

Odds and Ends

R.I.P. Goofy Times

January 14, 2020January 14, 2020 NewsEditorDatadog, DocuSign, Lyft, one medical, Pinterest, Softbank, Uber, WeWork

A strange new sensation has settled across the tech industry, one so foreign, so alien, it’s almost hard to recognize. A sense that some great expectations are being radically revised downwards; that someone has turned down a previously unquenchable money spigot; that unit economics can matter even when you’re in growth mode. Could it be … thrift? Well, OK, let’s not go that crazy. But we are witnessing a remarkable confluence of (relatively) parsimonious events. Last year’s high-profile tech IPOs are far from high-fliers: Uber, Lyft, Slack, Pinterest, and Peloton…

Odds and Ends

Design may be the next entrepreneurial gold rush

December 23, 2019December 23, 2019 NewsEditorAirbnb, amish jani, andrew reed, Atlassian, canva, clark valberg, confluence, Dropbox, Dylan Field, eloqua, Figma, GitHub, HubSpot, LinkedIn, marketo, MySpace, Salesforce, Shopify, sketch, trello, Uber

Ten years ago, the vast majority of designers were working in Adobe Photoshop, a powerful tool with fine-tuned controls for almost every kind of image manipulation one could imagine. But it was a tool built for an analog world focused on photos, flyers and print magazines; there were no collaborative features, and much more importantly for designers, there were no other options. Since then, a handful of major players have stepped up to dominate the market alongside the behemoth, including InVision, Sketch, Figma and Canva. And with the shift in…

Odds and Ends

Daily Crunch: Uber faces legal battle in London

December 22, 2019December 22, 2019 NewsEditorDaily Crunch, Uber

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here. 1. Uber has again been denied licence renewal in London over safety risks With Uber’s two-month license extension in London coming to an end, the company has once again been denied a full renewal by the city’s transport regulator — which said that it had found a “pattern of failures” that put “passenger safety and security at…