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Uber's Rivals Forming an International Alliance
jfruh writes: Didi Kuaidi is China's biggest native ride-sharing app, and it's using its cash hoard to build an alliance to take on global giant Uber. On the heels of a $100 million investment in Lyft, the company is also investing in Ola, India's biggest entry in the market. The deals have been described as involving sharing technology and market knowledge. "We look forward to exchanging learnings from two of the worlds largest markets and the tremendous synergies this partnership can bring, towards our commitment of building mobility for a billion Indians," Ola said about the new deal in a statement Monday.
But they're running late to the meeting
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
...to stop using the word synergy in press releases?
No, they do that in Pakistan, too.
As long as it doesn't involve rent seeking.
So they bathe in the ganges? That's hardly a mark in their favor.
Uber is going down on so many governmental levels. Competing with Uber? Competing to be knocked down and told to go away.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
correctly referring to Uber & al with the correct term: bandit taxi dispatchers. These are not ride sharing services (the car wasn't going that way already), they are dispatchers for quasi-contractor taxi drivers.
Is a Uber monopoly.
After they kill the taxi industry, they would then raise prices back as high or even higher then before.
So any competition is good.
There's soooo many unlicensed cabs in China. You need to be really careful because while some are honest people, there's a slew of opportunists who will just drive you out to nowhere and demand a fortune to bring you back, especially if you are a foreigner.
My wife (a Chinese native) is adamant about make sure the cab is legit when we go there. There's no way in hell she would ever let me get into a ride-share. If she found out I did that, she'd be furious--I'd probably be better off if had committed an affair than did a shady cab ride.
But when it comes down to it, their business is getting started less than a decade before robots are going to destroy their market.
Lets face it, we already have viable driverless cars, the only reason we don't already have them available for sale to the wealthy old folk that drive into farmer markets and wealthy parents of drunkard teenagers are the legal and insurance issues.
They have a sellby date, just like Newspapers.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I've thought for a while an international collaboration between taxi companies via open source would be a great way for them to combat Uber. Rather than spin off a million of their own crappy little apps with terrible user experience, they could all be working together to make a nice piece of software they can all use.
One of the reasons Uber is great (for me anyway) is it works really really well when traveling. You turn up at a new place, load the app, and you know it will work. I can get a price estimate in an entirely new city while I'm on the plane waiting to disembark. A collaborative approach between taxi services would allow for the same kind of thing internationally.
There's all the usual benefits of an an open source app as well; I'd feel much more comfortable - I don't like all the permissions required (Android) and the mystery behind the Uber app.
They will be bloody. And some may fall by the wayside faster than the competitive price drops that brought them there. But I fear that, through it all, no matter which company wins and loses...
I fear that the real losers will be: The Drivers.
~theCzar