Uber announced today that they'd be taking a step up in the world by buying up a bunch of Russia's Google - Yandex. If you'll take a look at Yandex on the web, it'll become clear rather quickly what they're in a position to do. They've got all the bases covered - or nearly all the bases covered - for a Russia-based do-everything company of which Uber now owns a significant portion.
Waymo has dropped all but one of the patent infringement claims it's challenging Uber over in court, as the two companies fight over self-driving car tech. The Alphabet-owned company had accused Uber of infringing on four different patents related to autonomous driving, filing a lawsuit back in February. According to Waymo, its former employee Anthony Levandowski had stolen a cache of technical documents about the company's developments and taken them to set up Otto, a self-driving vehicle startup later acquired by Uber.
Uber has a new fleet of autonomous trucks, deploying a new version of self-driving hardware and sensors that won't be impacted by the ongoing legal battle with Alphabet's Waymo. Though the company may be best-known for its passenger ridesharing service - or, more recently, most infamously for its controversial former CEO - Uber has also been working on modernizing haulage, too. That has centered on the Otto autonomous trucks project, another aspect of the company which Uber took over after it acquired Otto last year.
There are two primary reasons you may need to order someone else an Uber ride: they don't have a smartphone or they're too incapacitated (read: drunk) to do it themselves. In that case, you can use your own phone to order them a ride, but it's a hassle and not one that many people enjoy. Here to fix that is Uber itself, which has rolled out a feature greatly enhancing the ordering-a-friend-a-car experience.
The writing has been on the wall for months now, so it should really surprise no one that Uber's controversial CEO is stepping down. Of course, that doesn't mean he's completely out of picture, as he still serves on the company's board. It, however, also doesn't translate to an immediate recovery for the embattled ride hailing service, whose woes, not to mention lawsuits, will proceed even without Kalanick at the helm.
Uber has fired Anthony Levandowski, the controversial vice president of technology who had until recently been leading the ride-sharing firm's autonomous car business. Levandowski was one of Uber's highest-profile talent grabs, joining the company after it acquired his startup, Otto, in July 2016. That prompted a lawsuit from Alphabet's self-driving car company Waymo, accusing the engineer of stealing tech secrets.
As the ongoing trade secrets lawsuit between Google's Waymo and Uber continues to heat up, the ride-sharing company has threatened to fire one of its top engineers if he doesn't cooperate with court orders. Anthony Levandowski is currently an employee on Uber's self-driving car efforts, but before that he was a technology lead at Waymo, similarly developing autonomous vehicle tech. Now he's at the center of the lawsuit and is being accused of stealing confidential information and taking it with him to Uber.
Uber has announced a new app integration with Transit, enabling it to offer transportation options for public transport systems like local trains and buses. The idea here is that if you're in the city and taking an Uber car somewhere, you're probably only going to use it for part of your overall trip, which may include something like using an Uber to get from your home to the train station, then taking the train for the longest portion of the trip.
Things don't seem to be going Uber's way of late. And we're not just talking about gender-related controversies. San Francisco District Judge William Alsup as issued a ruling that rejected Uber's attempt to take the matter behind closed doors. He has sent the lawsuit to the Department of Justice to investigate whether there was indeed a case of trade secret theft. Unless it catches a break, it will see its self-driving ambitions dashed even before they could take root.
In a legal battle between Alphabet's Waymo (previously under Google) and Uber is raging in California. Revelations today suggest that Uber may have given a former Waymo engineer Anthony Levandowski $250-million in stock options in exchange for a massive amount of data (9.7GB, according to Waymo outside attorney Charles Verhoeven) essentially stolen from Waymo computers. Of course it's not all that simple - there's another company in between Waymo and Uber, but Google suggests that the company in question was created only to act as a shell to cover Levandowki's tracks.
It's going to get easier to delete your Uber account and all the data associated with it, as the ride-sharing firm finally updates one of its more controversial aspects. The service repeatedly made headlines over the past few months, in no small part down to the behavior - and political side-projects - of Uber founder Travis Kalanick. It even spawned a campaign of account deletions, at which point users realized that, while it was easy to get started with Uber, extricating yourself from their databases was a whole lot trickier.
Uber's self-driving car lead has been put on the back-burner for LIDAR development, amid accusations from Alphabet's Waymo that he stole secrets about the technology. Anthony Levandowski has been head of the Advanced Technologies group at the ride-sharing firm since his startup Otto was acquired by Uber in July 2016. However, his time there hasn't been straightforward.
