Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Taxis in every city are regulated. How then did Uber enter and disrupt the market, in city after city, country after country? The Uber Files leak has the answer – but you knew the gist of it anyway. Evasive practices, favours from politicians, a global expansion that was “rife with violations of local transportation laws”. Uber Files just confirms what everyone always suspected: “The investigation is based on a leak of sensitive texts, emails, invoices, briefing notes, presentations and other documents exchanged by top Uber executives, government bureaucrats and world leaders in nearly 30 countries.”   On the one hand, of course, this is nothing new. Doesn’t every big company have lobbyists? Don’t all such companies have access – and thus influence – on politicians and thus policies? Yes, indeed. The Uber Files just provides a detailed glimpse of how one such company operated, how easy it is to get access to top politicians – in short, the system is built and operated for su...

Uber and Airbnb mark the advent of software companies into the physical world, writes Brad Stone in his book on the two companies, The Upstarts . In the physical world, these companies ran into the treacherous waters of regulations, and political lobbying by established industries. Everyone knows of Uber. Airbnb is short for Airbed ‘n Breakfast, a site that started by offering people a way to rent a room (with an airbed, hence the name) to a stranger for a couple of days (with breakfast). It was started with the aim of allowing people to find accommodation in cities they visited if they couldn’t find a hotel or just wanted a cheaper option, and allowed others to make some money when they had a room to spare or if they were out of town for a few days! Uber, as I explained in an earlier blog , ran into conflicts with existing cab companies over questions on license to operate and certified billing meters. Airbnb ran into conflicts for different reasons: 1)    ...

Uber is the posterchild for all kinds of criticism, some valid and others not. But the existing cab systems have themselves to blame for the rise of Uber too: -          Artificial constraints on the number of cabs put by regulations; -          Cab fleet owners didn’t care about their drivers; -          Cab drivers didn’t care about their passengers, because where was the repeat business with any particular driver? -          No guarantees of even a booked cab even showing up; -          Next to impossible to find a cab on the fly when you wanted it. Software companies had tried to work with the cab companies to fix these problems. They never got far, as Brad Stone explains in his book, Upstarts : “No technology could solve for the fact that there was resistance among ...

Like it or not, as everything goes digital, algorithms (software rules) will make more and more decisions for us. Every now and then, those rules will misfire. Note that this is totally different than good old bugs in the software; the issue is with the algorithm not being appropriate in a specific context or time period. Let’s take 2 very recent examples of this problem. Remember that famous 1972 pic from the Vietnam War of a naked, 9-year-old girl fleeing napalm bombs? When a Norwegian newspaper, Aftenposten , posted that pic on Facebook (in the context of the horrors of war), Facebook’s algorithms removed the pic because it was (mis)identified as child porn. An honest mistake, obviously. But Aftenpost ’s editor, Espen Egil Hansen, wrote an open letter to Mark Zuckerburg : “Please try to envision a new war where children will be the victims of barrel bombs or nerve gas. Would you once again intercept the documentation of cruelties, just because a tiny minority might possibly ...

Some time back, I had described Uber’s working (It’s a cab ride sharing company). In Silicon Valley, change is the only constant. And so, recently, Uber announced that if you were willing to walk a bit to the nearest Smart Routes location (shown on your Uber app, of course), they’d give a $1 discount on the fare. A bit before that, they’d announced that they would suggest nearby points from where your pickup would happen earlier than wherever you were currently located. A few months before that, Uber mentioned something they called “Perpetual Trip”  that would “allow drivers to pick up and drop off passengers continuously along the way”. Join all these dots together, says Matt Buchanan, and a pattern begins to emerge : “If you put all of these Uber innovations together—pre-determined routes with fixed pickup points and continuous passenger pickups—it sounds remarkably like a gently optimized version of currently existing mass transit.” Ha ha! The wheel has com...

In November, 2013, Aileen Lee  coined the term “Unicorn” to describe a certain type of company: “U.S.-based software companies started since 2003 and valued at over $1 billion by public or private market investors.” By that definition, Lee called Facebook the super-Unicorn! Today, just a year and a half after the term was coined, Fortune says we live in the “Age of the Unicorns” ! And the top companies on that list aren’t even all American anymore: Xiaomi, the Chinese smartphone manufacturer, tops the list and India’s Flipkart is number 7 with a valuation of $11 billion. At number 2 on the list is Uber ($41 billion), the ride sharing company that was in the news when one of its drivers raped a passenger in Delhi. What does “ride sharing” even mean? Here’s what it means: 1)       When someone wants to go somewhere, they ask for a ride via the Uber app on their phone; 2)      Uber finds a driver (someone who installed t...

Online, people rate everything, from restaurants to movies to books. Given how freely we rate our purchases and experiences, would it feel odd to be the one getting rated? To be the ratee, not the rater? Uber, the ride sharing app (company), allows for just that! The person getting the ride rates the driver via Uber’s app. But also, as Adam Greenfield says : “What riders are not told by Uber — though, in this age of ubiquitous peer-to- peer media, it is becoming evident to many that this has in fact been the case for some time — is that they too are rated by drivers, on a similar five-point scale. This rating, too, is not without consequence. Drivers have a certain degree of discretion in choosing to accept or deny ride requests, and to judge from publicly-accessible online conversations, many simply refuse to pick up riders with scores below a certain threshold, typically in the high 3’s. ” How did that make you feel? Most of us curse our politicians for not being willin...