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The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

danielcompton.net

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Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#201

Post by jacquesm »

thrill wrote: post #83
ontoillogical wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>As someone who several years ago "managed" to take over a publicly traded company ... That sounds like an interesting story! Have you told it elsewhere?

Heh - usually after a few beers, and it gets even better. The first SEC attorney involved was a real stickler, but up for retirement in the middle of the process. His replacement was a real hard charger, and worked with me to get the former CEO incarcerated ... and he then went into private practice ... and a few years later got indicted for pulling the same scheme himself working with another small cap company as th…

> usually after a few beers

I'm not near to you and I'm not sure what the options are to ship crates of beer but count me in.

I'll swap you a story of attempting to help the father of a friend who was CEO of some company that ended up with me fronting the bill for a lawyer to keep him out of jail.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#202

Post by elsewhen »

patmcguire wrote: post #39

How credible are all these logs? Email records (came up in Oracle Android case) are one thing, emails are a known thing. But how trustworthy are Google Drive logs, a record that only exists within Google, when what they've recorded helps their case? I'm not casting aspersions, just curious how a new kind of evidence plays out.

remember that in civil cases, the burden of proof is 'preponderance of the evidence', not 'beyond a reasonable doubt' as it is for criminal cases.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#203

Post by MaxfordAndSons »

payne92 wrote: post #109

I'll be curious to see if the Uber-Otto acquisition gets strained. It's common for the acquired company to make specific "representations and warranties", particularly around IP. "We own our IP and didn't steal it" is typical, and some percentage of the deal is held back for ~1-2 years in case there is a problem. But if there's fraud, all bets are off. Does Uber throw Otto under the bus? It would be "The Uber Way", b…

I was under the impression the acquisition was a done deal as of August 2016? Hence why Waymo is suing Uber, not Otto.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#204

Post by stale2002 »

acchow wrote: post #150
stale2002 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that is called a two-sided market/network effect. Each driver increases value for riders, and each rider increases value for drivers. This two sides. A 1 sided network is facebook. A two sided market is like the video game industry (more video games are good for gamers and more gamers are good for video game devs) For taxi apps, imagine if there was only 1 driver in SF. That wouldn't be a good experience for con…

> A 1 sided network is facebook. Almost every user in Facebook is both a provider and consumer of content. It's like an exponentially-sided network. In Uber, drivers provide supply to riders. Riders provide demand for drivers.

Yes, they are both a provider and a consumer.

That is the definition of a 1 sided market.

Sorry, I am using economics jargon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-sided_market

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#205

Post by erikpukinskis »

sfeng wrote: post #21
temp246810 wrote: post #18

Not related - but I do find it ironic that google is up in arms about stolen tech given Steve Jobs' vendetta against google over stolen smart phone ideas. And yes I realize that the gravity of the situation here is different but it's still an amusing thought - not sure why everyone is so offended by this comment. Regarding the lawsuit - I've learned that we have no clue what is going on behind the scenes, so why stre…

Given the context provided in this post, it seems pretty blatant and obvious. Stealing a design is one thing, stealing the circuit board design from an unreleased product is espionage.

Out of curiosity, what is it about a user interface and a circuit board that makes you consider the design of one to be protected but not the other?

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#206

Post by WatchDog »

mmanfrin wrote: post #59

Outside of the case, the most striking thing to me about this is the level of detail that Google has over the logs and actions of their laptop. They were able to tell that a memory card was plugged in for 8 hours a year ago? I have trouble finding exactly how a customer encountered a 500 10 minutes ago.

Does anyone know if this information was collected as part of a monitoring service or if it was collected by forensically recovering the data from the laptops hard disk?

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#207

Post by rtkwe »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #91
jacknoble wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The drivers are going to be removed from the equation no matter what though.

The drivers will get removed from the "bring me from X to Y and leave me alone" equation, but drivers who can do slightly more complex things while driving around (pick up flowers here, then get my son from Judo practice, and practice his French with him in the car) will be a huge market, bigger than the current rideshare market, and a better moneymaker for drivers. Uber just needs to think of themselves as a mobile…

> pick up flowers here, then get my son from Judo practice, and practice his French with him in the car

This would basically turn them into a private driver service and finding qualified staff would be a pain for anyone wanting a french tutor for the drive. Ignoring that as an off the wall example though they'll still hit a pretty hard wall with trust. Even if the fear is unfounded trying to get a huge number of people to sign up for random (to them) people to pick up and drive around their kids is running into a lot of child abduction/abuse fears that run kind of deep in the US.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#208

Post by vikiomega9 »

pm90 wrote: post #139
r00fus wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

#3 if anything should be proof to Uber's potential future investors that they need to be wary that Uber has anything but name recognition and first mover advantage. They have no moat, no barrier to entry, and a whole lot of hubris just waiting to mature in the form of fierce competitors and negative PR.

To be fair, the new apps do suffer with reliability issues in periods of high loads. e.g. I would not, from experience, trust fasten to get me back home at 2.30am on a weekend night (even if I'm willing to pay their "boosted" fares). Its not an unsolvable problem though. I bet if they could hire more/better engineers and invest in infra for reliability they could be a lot better. And it might actually happen if Uber…

> To be fair, the new apps do suffer with reliability issues in periods of high loads

Doesn't this count as first-mover advantage?

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#209

Post by csours »

Eridrus wrote: post #136
aresant wrote: post #100

- Google's recently revised goal for their program is to license to existing manufacturers vs. building a car. (1) - It's unlikely that whichever automotive company achieves autonomy first is going to immediately get into the ride sharing game, except perhaps Tesla but they don't have enough manufacturing capability (yet, or anytime soon) to be a global threat to Uber. - Uber is never going to be a manufacturer but t…

> - It's unlikely that whichever automotive company achieves autonomy first is going to immediately get into the ride sharing game I think GM shows clear signs of interest of being in the ride sharing game if they have an advantage there. Would you rather be the first self-driving ride sharing company, and use that to displace Uber in high margin areas, or would you rather try to make a little bit of money off the pr…

The buzzword is "mobility", and yes GM is already in the game, through pilot programs (Maven), Lyft and Cruise Automation.

Disclaimer - I work for GM, but not on any of these things.

Re: The Uber Bombshell About to Drop

#210

Post by powera »

patmcguire wrote: post #39

How credible are all these logs? Email records (came up in Oracle Android case) are one thing, emails are a known thing. But how trustworthy are Google Drive logs, a record that only exists within Google, when what they've recorded helps their case? I'm not casting aspersions, just curious how a new kind of evidence plays out.

Google has SOX controls for this type of thing, that should allow them to prove that the requests came from a specific user at a specific time.

Also, if he actually did the queries, the defense team is incredibly unlikely to claim that Google may be forging evidence.

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