Uber rival Lyft valued over £1.5bn after £353m funding round March 12, 2015 Taxi app Lyft has raised $530m (£353.6m) from a new funding round, softening the blow dealt by a US judges’ ruling against the ride-sharing service. Lyft is now valued at more than $2.5bn (£1.67bn) after a funding round led by Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten closed this week. Rakuten now owns an 11.9 [...]
Uber teams up with UN in a bid to recruit one million women drivers March 10, 2015 Uber has announced plans to create one million jobs for women as drivers by 2020, as it looks to bounce back from negative publicity received in recent months. The taxi app company has partnered with the United Nations to accelerate economic opportunities for women and help them to become more independent. UN Women executive director [...]
2015 Forbes’ billionaires list: Bill Gates joined by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Uber’s Travis Kalanick and Snapchat’s Evan Spiegel March 2, 2015 While Forbes’ list of billionaires is topped by the usual suspects – Microsoft founder Bill Gates, business magnate Carlos Slim and investment guru Warren Buffett – young tech entrepreneurs are hot on their heels. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg joined the top 20 for the first time with an estimated fortune of $33.4bn (£21.7bn), placing him [...]
Uber has launched its own quarterly magazine: Momentum March 2, 2015 Not content with branching out into grocery and fast food delivery Uber has decided to try its hand in the media business. The ride-sharing giant is launching its own quarterly magazine – Momentum. The publication will be targeted at the company's 150,000 drivers. Momentum will be on sale in Boston, Oklahoma, San Francisco, New York [...]
Food deliveries roll out at Uber and Burger King February 19, 2015 CONTROVERSIAL ride hire firm Uber yesterday launched its latest experiment in delivering more than just people with UberEATS in Barcelona. UberEATS works with local restaurants in the Spanish city to put together a daily selection of meals that can be ordered to arrive in under 10 minutes. Meanwhile, US fast food chain Burger King has [...]
Tech #Crunchies 2014: Uber named best overall startup of the year February 6, 2015 Uber's success drove it into first place at the tech Crunchie awards in San Francisco this morning. The taxi-app company picked up the prize for “Best Overall Startup in 2014” at the event, beating runners up GoPro and SnapChat to the title. Uber was founded six years ago and has grown over [...]
Delivering people isn’t Uber’s $40bn dream – Bottom Line February 3, 2015 If Uber floated on the London Stock Exchange tomorrow – don’t hold your breath – it would be the thirteenth largest FTSE 100 constituent. Its $40bn (£26.3bn) valuation is larger than that of Twitter ($24.7bn) or Adobe ($35bn). News that Uber is exploring self-driving cars, mapping and vehicle safety shouldn’t surprise those who watch the [...]
Uber and Google rivalry heating up as both target driverless cars February 3, 2015 Controversial ride-hire app Uber is planning to research self-driving cars by partnering with a leading US university, a move that could put it in competition with its shareholder Google. Google has been exploring driverless cars since 2010 and now has a fully functioning prototype that it plans to begin testing on San Francisco roads this [...]
Uber partners with CMU to open self-driving taxi lab in Pittsburgh, US February 3, 2015 Uber has partnered with Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in the US to open a robotics lab for the development of driverless cars. Called the Uber Advanced Technologies Center, the purpose of the research centre is to develop long-term technologies that allow Uber to bring “safe, reliable transportation to everyone, everywhere,” according to the driver-on-demand service. [...]
Uber raises $1.6bn from Goldman Sachs clients January 21, 2015 Uber has raised $1.6 billion in financing from the clients of Goldman Sachs’s private wealth arm, adding even more cash to its ever-expanding pile. This comes months after the popular taxi-app raised $1.2 billion from big institutions, and one investment valued the company at a weighty $41.2 billion, the Financial Times reported. The cash will be used [...]