Uber Invests $1 Billion In Indian Market 54
New submitter keithlynpitts writes: Uber is looking to expand its services in India, and will invest $1 billion there in the next nine months. India is the second biggest market for Uber after the U.S. The company hopes their investment will help speed growth in the country, which is already at a staggering 40% every month. "We expect to hit over 1 million trips per day," said Amit Jain, president at Uber India.
Hype (Score:2, Interesting)
Unlimited funding to attract an expected unlimited number of post-IPO suckers.
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The problem with all these hypes is that when the bubble burst all stock markets suffer, even the 'honest' businesses. Even when you don't follow the hype and only invest in the trustworthy stocks, you will still be a loser when the bubble burst. You can only hope that you are not in a bear market caused by deflating bubbles when you desperately need your money.
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And create an Uber cartel that simply outbids the taxi drivers for government... ah.. services... yeah... that's it
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All depends where the money goes...
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All depends where the money goes...
Good News... per the headline, and TFS, and the related article, it's going to India.
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And create an Uber cartel that simply outbids the taxi drivers for government
Except that ride-sharing is not a cartel. There are no big barriers to entry. Even the "network effect" that allows, say, eBay to dominate auctions, doesn't apply as much to ride-sharing, since both drivers and riders can easily switch between multiple services on a ride-by-ride basis.
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I plan to invest 1 million litoshi in Uber.
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500 Quatloos on the Übercomers!
Unfortunately, no one here is old enough to get that joke . . .
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Of course not. They all died in combat. I did make 2500 quatloos though.
fuber (Score:3)
Re:fuber (Score:5, Interesting)
The driver involved in the recent uber rape incident in India had earlier been booked for rape and uber had no clue about this .
The problem is doing something about it. If you search for information on this stuff you could easily get the impression that Uber is the root of all rape in India, but that's a lot of complete horseshit. The truth is that some states still have incomplete and/or half-assed records on taxi drivers [indiatimes.com], and no Indian state really gave a shit about criminal background checks until the international community began to shine a light on rape in India after a young woman was raped to death on a moving bus, and the locals finally reacted.
The truth is that most of the world is inordinately kind to rapists, this is only really changing now, and Uber is no more or less complicit than the rest of India. There's literally no framework in place which would make it possible for them to do background checks on drivers in India. The ones used for the licensed taxis are bullshit, when they even exist.
TL;DR: India is rapey, it's not just Uber.
Re:fuber (Score:4, Insightful)
There's literally no framework in place which would make it possible for them to do background checks on drivers in India.
Apparently there are private investigators who do background checks in India for the IT outsourcing industry but they are a little more expensive than directly accepting forged supporting documents from a driver.
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These people are delusional along with their investors.
economy = i
Uber will succeed in India (Score:4, Interesting)
The 'call taxi' market, as it is called here in India, is fractured and ripe for disruption. Unions in taxis are very weak. People here do not value privacy over saving a few rupees. RedBus and TicketGoose have made it big in bus reservations. Uber will tie up with Microsoft and Google to plunder the call taxi market.
I helped write taxi dispatch s/w for 3 firms, and I feel Uber will drive out Ola, TaxiForSure and other fringe players...
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Used both Ola and Uber a lot while in Chennai. While the taxis arrived with either, there were significant differences between the two:
1) About 50% of the time, the Ola drivers don't get your GPS coordinate. So they call for directions. This is a pain, I don't want to spend 15 minutes directing the driver when the app can be written well to do so. Never had this problem with Uber, not once.
2) The Ola app sends incessant SMS messages for everything. It's a pain to keep switching between Ola and the SMS app a
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And Ola forces you to either pre-pay or pay in cash before you get out of the car. It's a big hassle. Uber is miles better. You can pay whenever you want with a credit card, or you can pre-pay. No cash, no hassle at the end of your ride. Also, the app accepts destination coordinates. I literally don't need to interact with the driver at all.
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Your first sentence there is awkward and could badly use a conjunction word after the quotes. Why do you grammar trolls never get your grammar right?
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The GP AC hasn't written the summary though, only a modest, 0 scored post. I think the its vs it's is beaten to death to the extent that mixing it up shows such deliberate ignorance on the part of the editors that it almost borders with trolling. Guess what happens if you grammar troll the readership. Some of them will bite and some others like you will call _them_ trolls.
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This site is community moderated. Most of the article descriptions are given a quick read-though and then left verbatim the way the submitter wrote it. Anyone who tries to teach the internet at large about the finer points of grammar is swimming up stream.
I also reject your assertion that critics should be held to a lower standard than content creators.
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Most of the article descriptions are given a quick read-though and then left verbatim the way the submitter wrote it.
[citation needed]
Most submissions I know anything about, which is to say both mine and those which submitters have commented on, have been edited.
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Interesting.
Ok, so it's a small sample size, but every article I've submitted has appeared exactly as I typed it.
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Ok, so it's a small sample size, but every article I've submitted has appeared exactly as I typed it.
Well, it's possible that you made higher-quality submissions than I did, or that you just tripped over lazy editors. It would be interesting to have some actual statistics on this, but hahaha. I mean, the editors are already lazy.
$1 Billlion in exactly what? (Score:2)
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H1B Uber drivers...
Good for India (Score:2)
Step 1: wait for Uber to come to town
Step 2: let them build some momentum and drop some cash investing in scaling up
Step 3: act outraged when cab companies complain and promise to shut them down
Step 4: drop a lot of fines on them to absorb even more of that phat US VC cash
Step 5: repeat step 4 until the taxi companies, Uber or citizens force your hand into either legitimising them or actually banning them.
This seems to be the tactic of my home town (Brisbane, Australia). Last I saw we'd fined Uber $1.7m, al
Cue the foreign taxi driver jokes (Score:2)
$1 BIllion (Score:2)
And they still can't pay their drivers decently.
Microsoft (Score:2)