431–440 of 542 posts
No relationship between Uber's Ottomotto and the self-driving vehicles of OTTO Motors: https://www.ottomotors.com/company/newsroom/press-releases/o... Disclosure: employee of Clearpath, the company behind OTTO Motors.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Uber will pay as much as $25 million to settle a civil lawsuit with the district attorneys in Los Angeles and San Francisco" https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/08/technology/uber-settles-s... "Uber settles driver lawsuit over background checks, to pay $7.5 million" http://www.reuters.com/article/us-uber-lawsuit-idUSKCN0Z12GS "Uber has agreed to pay $28.5 million to settle litigation brought by customers who alleged the…
Settlements are not admissions of guilt.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Feasible but not likely. From this 25% to 35% Uber will still do this 1. Run their operating business - Maintain data centers - Maintain a global web infrastructure - Maintain the app 2. Run campaigns to compete in markets with strong local competition - Europe (Hailo, Car2Go, etc) - Asia (Didi, Ola, Grab, etc) 3. Finance their ongoing operations - Equity financing expensive - Debt financing hard to get at this stage…
Everything in that list, aside from 2 (advertising and expansion), 7 (fleet operations), and 8 (self-driving R&D, which is honestly well outside of their current business) is dirt cheap in comparison to their operating costs - paying drivers, vehicle purchasing, insurance, and maintenance, and buying fuel. Service and hardware businesses have completely different cost structures as compared to tech companies. Think a…
According to the CEO, self-driving cars are "existential" to Uber's success. They may need something that disruptive to meet the company's sky high valuation.
Among the circumstantial evidence, the self-funding aspect is what jumped out at me the most. This is the equivalent of a hedge fund manage buying something based on inside information, but only for his personal account. Why cut other people in on the wink-and-nod-guaranteed payday? Besides, Lewandowski couldn't realistically raise money through proper channels if his pitch amounted to, "I stole stuff from Waymo."
"Besides, Lewandowski couldn't realistically raise money through proper channels if his pitch amounted to, "I stole stuff from Waymo." yes he could, the team and him had a killer track record and he wouldn't admit to stealing anything from Waymo "He joined Google in 2007 as part of its Maps team and helped to build the company’s Street View product. When Google gave the green light to begin working on a self-driving…
Why would he need to steal if he had that kind of money already?
It's not a bigger bombshell than what was already in the news. We know what stealing means. The guy is an engineer at Waymo and plugs a USB stick in a laptop to download 9GB of code. And he hoped to get away with this? I'm pretty sure everyone at Google knew, they were just waiting to time it right. "Hey, what about now? When Uber is taking fire from all directions?"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
What happens when Google, Apple, Amazon or other company with a solid cloud app team steps in? Austin's homegrown competitors may not be fearful, but one of the existing majors could single-handedly shatter Uber's image with a half-decent app, esp if it's integrated with something like Google Maps or Apple Wallet or equivalent feed.
This is sort of a fundamental problem with our entire conception of a digital economy. Google, Microsoft and Amazon are fundamentally the only games in town that can compete. Our regulations, laws, and economics are not well set up to deal with the fact that there is a wholly new type of meta-entity that is so overwhelmingly important for modern business.
We can barely regulate (and often fail to regulate) the energy industry appropriately and that's a way more competitive market.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That's actually why they passed the measure in the first place, the taxi lobby was incredibly strong. No the measure passed because Uber and Lyft failed to understand Austin culture and shot themselves in the foot by annoying Austinites with intrusive tactics that made them look bad in the eyes of a local culture that tends to be fiercely anti big business. It's the same type of mistake Airbnb made in SF with their…
That's not what I've heard from insiders.
Good riddance.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have only played slots for a few hours, but my lifetime average is up ~3x and a few hundred dollars vs. what I put into the machines. So, I think they are set fairly close to break even as that's from a few dozen minor wins vs a single jackpot. Honestly, if every single time someone played for 3+ hours they where always down then fewer people would come back. That said, they probably set machines in very high traff…
It's likely that the RNG's in slots don't produce uniformly distributed wins and losses except over long timeframes. A machine that's truly random will result in everyone losing money slowly and reliably after a large number of pulls. So not fun. A machine built to have the odds wander around over a period of time will be more unpredictable with a greater earnings spread