Uber

The Amazonification of Uber • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 14, 2022Posted in Apps, ride hail, Transportation, UberNo Comments

It’s been six months since Uber hosted Go, Get, a global smorgasbord of product reveals and features that covered everything from booking party buses and voice ordering for Uber Eats to linking travel plans to Gmail and skipping the food lines at sports stadiums. The product reveals aren’t just about creating new revenue streams or attracting users — although these are certainly goals. Uber has a bigger end game: create a closed business loop with each product feeding customers back into other Uber channels. And that loop is growing. On Monday, heartened by a strong momentum in user engagement and girded for the upcoming holiday season, Uber released another slew of product updates and new features. This time the products were released under the marketing banner of Go, get, give. Now, Uber customers can do things like book with OpenTable and Viator through Uber’s app, search across merchants for the right bottle of booze to be delivered and even schedule Uber gift cards to send on Christmas day. Amazonification Uber was founded on a strategy of scaling at all costs. As Uber struggled to crack the elusive profitability nut through ride-hailing, it added its food delivery pillar Uber Eats. Now, Uber appears to have taken a page out of the Amazon book of customer stickiness to attract new users and get existing customers to spend more money on the platform. Just as Alexa, Amazon’s voice assistant, drives secondary revenue to Amazon every time a customer says, ‘Alexa, buy more shampoo and conditioner,” so, too, does Uber increase its ride revenue when a customer books an event via Uber’s partnership with Viator and then books an Uber to get them there. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi touched on this during the company’s third-quarter earnings call held November 1. “We are actively cross-selling food delivery consumers into grocery, grocery consumers into alcohol, and actually back now to mobility,” said Khosrowshahi. “All of the cross-sell that we have across the platform continues to increase, drive new customers and drive retention, as well.” There’s evidence to suggest that, at least in the short term, there are fruits to these labors. In the third quarter, Uber’s gross bookings reached $29 billion, a 26% increase from the year prior. The company’s monthly active platform consumers (MAPC) grew 14% year-over-year from 109 million quarterly users to 124 million. If gross bookings grew at a rate faster than MAPC, we can infer that each customer is spending more on the platform than they would have. “As far as the consumers go – high frequency, low frequency consumers – it’s absolutely true that if we can move our consumer use from lower frequency to higher frequency, we will see very significant growth,” said Khosrowshahi during Uber’s Q3 earnings call. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that Uber will extend beyond the mobility space and into other revenue channels. The company recently launched a new advertising division that oversees in-app ads during rides. To grow that business out, we might one day see Uber hiring creatives and using its vast amounts of data on riders to provide external marketing services for brands. Who knows? While short-term reports show that Uber’s depth of products might have customer stickiness, the company should be wary of biting off more than it can chew. Uber made revenue gains in the third quarter, yet it still lost $1.2 billion, almost half of which can be attributed to operating losses. Tech giants and hotshot upstarts alike are in the midst of cutting costs — measures that include slashing jobs — as growth becomes more difficult amid the current economy. Even Amazon is not immune. There are rumblings that Amazon is planning to lay off 10,000 people this week and there is speculation that the company’s devices group, which includes Echo, Fire tablets and Kindles, could be on the list to get cuts. At an operating loss of $5 billion a year, it’s not hard to see why.

Uber withdraws petition to annul new ride-hailing regulations in Kenya • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 4, 2022Posted in kenya, Transportation, UberNo Comments

Uber has applied to withdraw a petition in Kenya challenging the new ride-hailing regulations that capped commissions at 18%, and required taxi apps operating to acquire licenses. Coulson Harney, the law firm representing Uber, filed the notice of withdrawal bringing to an end its push to have the new digital ride-hailing regulations annulled. “Take notice that Uber B.V, the petitioner, gives notice and wholly withdraws its petition and the notice of motion application,” read the application, seen by ZebethMedia, and which came days after Uber lowered its commission from 25% and got a license to operate in Kenya. Estonia’s Bolt, Kenya’s Little and Rwanda-based Yego have also received approval to operate in the East Africa’s biggest economy. Uber confirmed to ZebethMedia that it had applied to withdraw the case, saying it remains committed to working closely with Kenya’s policymakers to help improve driver earnings, and ensure a great user experience. “On 03 November 2022, Uber filed an application to withdraw the constitutional petition on the new transport network regulations published by the Ministry of Transport in June. Having received a transport network license from the National Transport and Safety Authority (NTSA) has and considered several factors, we felt that the best course of action was to comply with the regulations, which includes the lowering of our service fee from 25% to 18%. We will continue to liaise with NTSA on the implementation of the regulations,” said an Uber spokesperson. The new law by Kenya’s Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure gives NTSA the mandate to enforce it. “We remain committed to Kenya and to creating economic opportunities for drivers and providing enhanced mobility for riders, as we have done since our launch in the market in 2015,” Uber said. Uber filed the petition in September this year urging Kenya’s high court to expunge the newly-implemented regulations, adding that some sections were unconstitutional, discriminatory, discouraging to foreign investments, and infringing on its rights and those of its riders and partners. Uber protested Kenya’s decision to cap commissions charged per ride, and plans to reevaluate pricing structures, saying the move would dent its earnings. It insisted that Kenya is a free market, where ride-hailing companies have the right to negotiate commercial agreements without external influence. It also claimed that the regulations were made and gazetted without following due process and public participation. The new law requires all platforms to have a physical presence in Kenya, and to obtain a license to operate. Uber had also faulted the condition that all ride-hailing companies must obtain a transport network license from NTSA to operate, saying that it was not a transport service but an app offering intermediation service. It said the regulations are discriminatory because only persons with Kenyan Personal Identification Numbers (PINs) were allowed to obtain the mandatory license. Ride-hailing companies in Kenya, including Bolt and Little, are also required to share drivers’ and riders’ data upon request by the authority. Uber said that this would be a contravention of the new Data Protection Act.

Loop lassos ex-Uber talent and money to finally fix freight invoicing • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 3, 2022Posted in Fintech, Founders Fund, logistics, Loop, payments, Startups, UberNo Comments

Matt McKinney was a data science manager at Uber, helping launch Uber Freight, along with software engineer Shaosu Liu. One of the main problems the pair saw there was that while they were able to grow the top line, they found it difficult to grow the bottom line because they were “losing a bunch of money” to bad debt and late payments. When digging in to understand why, the duo realized that “there’s so much complexity in a single freight bill.” For example, they found out that 20% of all freight invoices have an error. They also discovered it takes 50 days on average to process and pay a single invoice. “A lot of people in this business aren’t like Uber — they don’t have 250 engineers working on problems to figure this out,” McKinney explains. “So Joe’s Trucking in Cincinnati, Ohio, for example, probably has very similar billing and payment problems as Uber Freight.” In speaking to about three dozen shippers, carriers and brokers in the industry, McKinney and Liu kept hearing the same thing: “It’s hard for us to get paid and it’s hard for us to pay.” “So as an entrepreneur, when you hear that pain described so vividly verbatim 35 different times, you kind of, you know that the pain is your opportunity to build a product that doesn’t exist in the market,” he told ZebethMedia in an interview. So the pair spent nights and weekends building a prototype for Loop, a startup that sits at the intersection of logistics and payments, before leaving Uber in May of 2021 to focus full time on the business. Soon after, they raised a $6 million seed round co-led by Susa Ventures and 8VC. And then earlier this year, they raised a $24 million Series A round led by Founders Fund. Both financings were not previously publicly announced. During their exploratory phase, three of the 35 companies — unnamed large enterprises — they talked to told them if they built a tool to help solve the problem that they would help test out the prototype and be its first customers. Since then, the company has developed open APIs that it says “ingest data and streamline shipment document capture.” More specifically, the company said it uses natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision to digitize workflows and reconcile payments and that its technology “accommodates the lack of standardization and is able to extract data from a variety of document types and data sources to validate invoice accuracy, so that invoices and payments can be cleared in close to real-time,” or even to real time, depending on when the user wants to release their funds. Loop goes as far as to claim that its tech can reduce the lag time between the time an invoice is received and paid from 50 days to 3 days, as well as reduce invoice errors to “near 0%.” The startup’s target customers are shippers that manufacture or distribute goods (think Walmart, Pepsi, Coca-Cola and Nike). They also can work with brokers, or 3PLs, who broker a transaction between a truck driver and shipper. Loop launched its product offering in March and in its first month, did $25 million in booked total payment volume. Today, it’s doing over $1 billion in total payment volume. Image Credits: Loop One of the tailwinds that helped Loop, believes McKinney, is the COVID pandemic-driven secular shift of paper to electronic methods of payments. Also, geopolitical issues and the pandemic exposing vulnerabilities in the global supply chain have led to a surge in freight costs, which means that shippers “are looking for every way to cut costs,” he said. Loop’s aim is to help these companies minimize cost and be more efficient. And, McKinney claims, it can bring payments down Loop makes money by taking a percentage of total payments volume. It’s a fixed percentage based on tier, and as a company advances tiers, the percentage they pay goes down. A consumption-based revenue model was important to the pair, McKinney told ZebethMedia. “We want to align incentives so that if you’re getting value out of the product, you’re going to be using it more,” he said. “And that’s how we should get paid.” The company today has 35 employees, with engineers hailing from Uber, Google, Meta and Flexport. In fact, one senior software engineer from Flexport cold emailed Loop about a job. When he told Flexport founder and then-CEO Ryan Peterson that he was leaving for Loop, Peterson reached out. “He said, ‘You just stole one of our No. 1 engineers,’” McKinney said. “I want to know what you’re doing and I want to invest.” And so he did. Also showing no hard feelings in backing the company are Uber co-founders Garrett Camp, through his venture firm, Expa, and Ryan Graves, through his family office, Saltwater Capital. And more than 10 of Loop’s 35 employees came from Uber. Other investors include FourMore Capital, Lineage Ventures, Nichole Wischoff, 9Yards Capital, McVest Co, Mark Pincus and OEL Ventures. “We’re simplifying logistics payments but we’re also generating data and that data, and the quality of the data, is what differentiates us from a lot of the competition as well,” McKinney said. Founders Fund principal John Luttig, who led the Loop investment, told ZebethMedia via email that his firm was drawn to the startup because it is using a tech-first approach to eliminate friction for all parties in the supply chain “while competitors are simply throwing more people at the problem.” “As the domestic logistics renaissance continues and more companies look to reshore U.S. manufacturing, Loop’s technology will only become more valuable,” he added.

Uber tests push notifications, a feature literally no one wants • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 1, 2022Posted in Apps, Privacy, Transportation, UberNo Comments

Uber recently launched its new advertising division and in-app ads. Apparently, those ads aren’t staying within the app. Instead, ads from other companies are being sent out as push notifications, much to the chagrin of some Uber users. Over the weekend, people turned to Twitter to complain about the notifications, sharing screenshots of ads, including one particularly popular one from Peloton that Uber had sent out. One of the primary complaints: notifications are being sent out when users aren’t engaging with the app. When Uber first announced its in-app ad “experience,” the company didn’t mention the potentially intrusive implications. Uber told ZebethMedia this “was a limited test and users can always manage their mobile notification settings under Privacy and then Notifications in the app.” The company did not respond in time to follow up questions from ZebethMedia, including how many users are included in the test, whether it is tracking data on how many users turn off ad push notifications, how long the test is scheduled to last and whether Uber would fully implement push notification ads in the future. Uber’s in-app ads feature a single brand for the entire trip. The so-called “journey ads” lets brands show a user different ads at three points of a trip: while waiting for a car, while riding and upon reaching the destination. Brands are able to “personalize” ads to each user based on their travel history and geographic destinations. It’s also not clear if Uber used the same type of data for its push notification ads.

Uber to freeze fake rider account names, pilot front-facing video recording • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 27, 2022Posted in Apps, Transportation, UberNo Comments

Uber is releasing a suite of new safety features geared towards the driver, including freezing fake rider account names and piloting a front-facing video recording tool to replace a driver’s dashcam. The safety features follow a feedback period from drivers that Uber began this summer. It looks like drivers have been having a hard time with fake user names. Uber, in its attempt to prevent discrimination based on name, has allowed riders to update their names in the app. The result is some users changed their names to cartoon characters or “even offensive language” which Uber said “can lead to challenging pickups or uncomfortable situations for drivers.” Uber will conduct a large audit of rider account names and freeze any accounts with clearly fake names. Riders will have to update or validate their account names with Uber’s support agents to have their accounts unblocked, the company said. Drivers will also be able to flag any fake or inappropriate names in their app’s Help section. Uber is also expanding its audio recording feature and piloting front-facing video recording. The ride-hail giant says in-app audio recording during rides has helped it determine the best course of action after a safety incident, and it’s helped riders and drivers feel safer when using the app. Uber has been piloting audio recording in three U.S. cities over the past year, and will now expand to six new U.S. cities next month, including Cincinnati, Nashville, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, San Antonio and Tucson. The video recording trial, which will take place in Cincinnati, Louisville and New York City in the U.S. and Santos and João Pessoa in Brazil, will allow drivers to record video using the front-facing camera on their smartphone. The idea is to replace an interior-facing dashcam with a much cheaper and easier to set up alternative, and it will allow drivers to record both video and audio on every trip, the company said. As with the audio recording feature, no one, including the driver, can access the recording unless the driver wants to share it with Uber to find information in a safety-related incident, Uber said. Uber also revealed some new road safety features on Thursday. The company said its in-app navigation system will now suggest fewer left turns, which according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, result in 22% of crashes. The navigation will also alert drivers to “watch for cross traffic” when approaching an intersection without a four-way stop.

New Zealand Uber drivers win case declaring them employees • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 25, 2022Posted in Apps, gig economy, labor, New Zealand, Transportation, UberNo Comments

A group of Uber drivers in New Zealand won a landmark case Tuesday against the ride-hail company which will force Uber to treat them as employees, rather than independent contractors. New Zealand’s employment court decision only applies to four drivers who were part of a class action lawsuit filed last July, but the ruling may have wider implications for drivers across the country keen on qualifying for worker rights and protections. The move in New Zealand comes just a couple of weeks after the U.S. Department of Labor proposed widespread changes to how gig workers should be classified. Specifically, the proposed ruling seeks to classify gig workers as employees if they are economically dependent on the company for which they work. The formal decision in New Zealand was made in respect to the individual drivers in the case. The court doesn’t have jurisdiction to make broader declarations of employment status for all Uber drivers, according to chief employment court judge Christina Inglis. That means all other Uber drivers don’t immediately become employees; however, Inglis did say the decision “may well have broader impact” because of the “apparent uniformity in the way in which the companies operate, and the framework under which drivers are engaged.” In the ruling, the Employment Court said that even though a worker’s contract might define them as an independent contractor, that definition depends more on the “substance of the relationship and how it operated in practice.” “The Court accepted that some of the usual indicators of a traditional employment relationship were missing,” reads the ruling. “However, it was found that significant control was exerted on drivers in other ways, including via incentive schemes that reward consistency and quality and withdrawal of rewards for breaches of Uber’s Guidelines or for slips in quality levels, measured by user ratings.” The court found that Uber had sole discretion to control prices, service requirements, guidelines, terms and conditions, marketing, relationships with riders and more. “Uber was able to exercise significant control because of the subordinate position each of the plaintiff drivers was in and which its operating model was designed to facilitate and did facilitate,” according to the ruling. Two unions, First Union and E tū, took up the case last year on behalf of more than 20 drivers. Their goal was to override a legal precedent set in the Employment Court in 2020 that ruled a driver was not an employee. Labor rights activists argued there, as in the U.S. and everywhere else, that because an Uber driver’s rate is set by Uber, the company controls wages, which puts it in employer territory. At the time, the judge ruled that the driver actually had control over their wages because they could be paid less or improve the profitability of their business through adopting cheaper business costs. Tuesday’s ruling will grant the drivers in the case sick leave, holiday pay, minimum wage, guaranteed hours, KiwiSaver contributions, the right to challenge an unfair dismissal and the right to unionize, according to New Zealand’s labor laws. First Union is now accepting Uber drivers to join as members for a discounted fee of $3.05 per week and would move to initiate collective bargaining. The union says Uber drivers may be owed backpay for lost wages, holiday pay and other entitlements. “This is a landmark legal decision not just for Aotearoa but also internationally,” said Anita Rosentreter, First Union strategic project coordinator, in a statement. Uber did not respond in time to ZebethMedia for a comment, but a spokesperson for the company told The Guardian that the company would be appealing the decision, and that it was “too soon to speculate” how the court ruling would affect the company’s operations in New Zealand more broadly. The decision in New Zealand is the latest in a string of international cases where workers have fought for employment rights from gig economy companies. Last December, the U.K. High Court dealt a massive blow to Uber by declaring the business was unlawful and by classifying gig workers as “workers,” a new classification that allows for the flexibility of independent contract work and the rights of employee status. Last year, an analysis from the International Lawyers Assisting Workers Network, a membership organization of trade union and workers’ rights lawyers, showed gig companies like Uber and Deliveroo had faced at least 40 major legal challenges in 20 countries, including Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, South Korea and across Europe.

Uber pilots electric cab offering in India • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 21, 2022Posted in EV, india, Transportation, UberNo Comments

Uber has started offering electric vehicles to customers in certain parts of the Delhi-NCR region and says it will be expanding its efforts over the coming months. The electric cabs are currently only available for pre-scheduled trips. “As the leading mobility app in India, we are committed to supporting the Indian government’s emission goals. Expect to see more electric vehicles — be they two, three or four-wheeled — across Indian cities in the coming months,” the spokeswoman said in a statement emailed to ZebethMedia in response to a query. The company did not share how many EV cabs were operational on its platform in India, but insisted that it is working with multiple fleet partners, OEMs and charging infra providers “to gradually build the EV business in a sustainable manner.” Uber’s move comes as India pushes ride-hailing firms to electrify a significant portions of their fleets over the next few years. Reuters reported in 2019 that the Indian government had ordered Uber and its arch-rival Ola to convert 5% of their fleet by 2022 and make it 40% by April 2026. The push came amid New Delhi’s pledge to reduce dependency on oil imports and cut air pollution to meet its commitment to 2015 Paris climate change treaty. The electric cabs are available through the Reserve feature on the app, allowing customers to choose a pick-up time for the ride up to 30 days in advance. Users can cancel their scheduled trips 60 minutes before their trip for no charge, according to description on the app. Image Credits: ZebethMedia Both the federal government and various state governments in India have started to offer incentives to customers and vendors in recent years to increase the adoption of EVs. The state government in Delhi, for instance, says it has installed 1,000 EV charging points across the city. It also introduced the Delhi EV policy in August 2020, as part of which it gives subsidies for installing charging stations. The city is aiming to get 18,000 EV charging points in the next three years. Ola — which counts SoftBank, Temasek Holdings, Hyundai Motor and Kia among its investors — also has a separate electric mobility unit to build EVs. The company initially introduced its EV scooters in the market and says it has plans to expand that business to include an electric car in 2024. Ola has also tried to enter the market of EV cabs in India. In 2018, it launched a program called “Mission: Electric” to bring electric cabs, electric auto rickshaws, electric buses, rooftop solar installations, charging stations and battery swapping experiments in the country. Other than Uber and Ola, Gujarat-based BluSmart Electric Mobility is also in the race for EV cabs in the South Asian market. The company, which raised $25 million from BP Ventures earlier this year and is eyeing to raise $250 million, has an all-electric fleet as a significant difference over the existing two giants. It also claims to have completed over 2.5 million all-electric trips and has over 900,000 app downloads since its launch in 2019. BluSmart’s reach is, however, currently limited to Delhi-NCR and Bengaluru. Uber has been offering EVs in the U.S. and Europe for some time. The San Francisco, California-headquartered company runs an Uber Green program to offer EVs on its fleet and aims to become a zero-emission platform by 2040. It has also set aside $800 million to encourage drivers on its platform to start using EVs by 2025.

Uber scales back in Pakistan • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 12, 2022Posted in Asia, pakistan, Transportation, UberNo Comments

Uber is scaling back its operations in Pakistan, the latest in a series of efforts from the ride-hailing firm as it looks to improve its financial performance. The company says its marquee app is ceasing operations in five of the six cities where Uber had launched and expanded to over the years. The eponymous service will now only be available in Lahore in Pakistan, Uber said. Uber insists that it remains committed to Pakistan and its subsidiary brand, Careem, will offer services in Karachi, Multan, Faisalabad, Peshawar and Islamabad. The move will nonetheless impact several jobs. Uber says it will help some driver partners switch over to Careem. It did not specify the number of jobs that will get eliminated as part of the decision. “We know this is a difficult time for the teams who have worked incredibly hard to build this business over the past few years,” the company said in blog post. “We greatly appreciate everyone’s contributions and our priority is to minimize the impact to our employees, drivers, riders, and Hero partners who use the Uber app during this change in Karachi, Islamabad, Faisalabad, Multan and Peshawar.” Uber’s abrupt decision came as a surprise to local residents. Uber entered Pakistan in early 2016 as part of a $250 million push to expand into the Middle East and North Africa. The company has faced tough competition from InDrive and Prosus Ventures-backed Bykea in the nation in recent quarters. The company, which aggressively expanded to dozens of nations half a decade ago, has slowed its investments in many markets. In India, a key overseas market for the firm, Uber offloaded its Uber Eats delivery business to Zomato, a local rival, and sold its shares in the company recently at an assumed unrealized loss of $707 million. Media reports in recent months have speculated that Uber might sell its India ride-hailing business to rival Ola, a claim both the firms have denied.

Federal gig worker proposal tanks Uber, Lyft and DoorDash stocks • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 11, 2022Posted in Apps, DoorDash, Lyft, Transportation, UberNo Comments

The stock prices of Uber, Lyft and DoorDash slid on Tuesday after the Department of Labor announced proposed changes to how workers should be classified. The prospective guidance is intended to “combat employee misclassification,” the federal agency said. Investors swiftly drove Uber’s share price down by more than 10% to $24.61, while Lyft’s tanked more than 12% to $11.22 and DoorDash’s slid more than 5% to $44.98 at the time of writing. The change could make it easier for contractors to gain full employment status if they are “economically dependent” on the company, although the scope of the rule would be limited to areas such as minimum wage enforcement. The proposal is subject to a public comment period, which runs from from October 13 to November 28. Uber, Lyft and DoorDash depend extensively upon so-called gig workers, who haul people and meals around on their behalf but do not receive many hard-won benefits of employment — such as employer contributions towards their Social Security and Medicare taxes. Despite pressure from labor organizers and some lawmakers, tech firms have fought to continue classifying their workers as independent contractors, arguing the status benefits their businesses, other local businesses and workers themselves. Efforts to alter gig worker classification in the U.S. include a recently rejected ballot measure in Massachusetts, which could have explicitly defined such workers as independent contractors. In California, an effort to secure benefits for gig workers — AB-5 — passed in 2019. A year later, app-based gig workers in California were excluded from the law via Proposition 22, which itself was deemed unconstitutional in the state in 2021. However, app-based gig companies have appealed that ruling and continue to operate in California under the guidance of Prop 22. (Every day is a winding road.) In a statement, Lyft claimed the proposal had “no immediate or direct impact on the Lyft business at this time.” The firm then reiterated its argument that classifying gig workers as employees would deny them independence and flexibility. DoorDash published a similar statement on its blog earlier today. Uber also cited flexibility in an email to ZebethMedia, saying the “proposed rule takes a measured approach, essentially returning us to the Obama era, during which our industry grew exponentially.” In stark contrast, groups such as Gig Workers Rising have long argued that independent classification denies gig workers “basic worker protections and rights,” such as unionization, living wages and benefits such as paid time off. While ride-hail and meal-delivery companies argue that changes to how workers are classified would threaten their business models, these firms aren’t profitable. Uber, Lyft and DoorDash have posted hefty net losses under the status quo.