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Google To Compete With Uber, Uber To Explore Autonomous Transportation
An anonymous reader writes: Bloomberg breaks news that Uber has a major new competitor in ridesharing: Google. According to the report, Google has informed Uber's board of directors of this development, and shown them screenshots of a ride-sharing app currently being tested by employees. Why did Google share this information with Uber? Because they've heavily invested in Uber, and Google's David Drummond, chief legal officer and senior VP of corporate development, is on Uber's board. Of course, a Google ride-sharing service would fit perfectly with their project to build and develop autonomous vehicles. This could be very bad news for Uber (not to mention other ride-sharing services) because they rely heavily on Google's mapping data. That is, unless Uber beats them to it. Uber today announced a partnership with Carnegie Mellon University to develop, among other things, "autonomy technology." A source told TechCrunch that Uber went on a hiring spree and "cleaned out" the National Robotics Engineering Center, a research organization affiliated with CMU.
If Google is the majority shareholder, are they required to not maintain a conflict of interest?
Years ago, even though eBay owned a percentage of Craigslist, they sued Craigslist, then bought Kijiji and have attempted to bring it to the United States as eBay Classifieds, with only limited success...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I've been following with interest the debate about government-regulated taxis versus free-market Uber.
So far as I can tell, the argument for Uber is that it's cheaper, and the rides are nicer and more convenient, but otherwise it's the same service. In particular, the service has not been a statistically significant source of crime.
The arguments against are that 1) it's illegal, and 2) Uber drivers don't have enough (or the right kind of) insurance.
The first argument seems contrived. Up here in NH the Portsmouth taxi commission decided that Uber is a better solution, then voted to disband. (As the Free State project points out, "where else would this happen?")
And as to the insurance argument, the Boston Globe reports that "Passengers hurt in accidents often run into denial and evasion by poorly insured firms".
Uber is a good service, people seem to like and want it.
Are there any objections I've missed? Besides "predictions", of course(*). Anyone can predict anything and sound just like an economist.
(*) Predictions are invalid because both solutions are in play right now. There's no need to predict what will happen because we can just look to see if it's happening.