After weeks of speculation, Uber has concluded a deal that will see it sell its business in Southeast Asia to local rival Grab . The company plans to announce the agreement this coming week and potentially as soon as Monday, two sources have confirmed to TechCrunch.
Full details of the arrangement aren’t fully clear at this point, but TechCrunch understands that Singapore-based Grab will take over Uber’s ride-sharing in the eight markets in Southeast Asia where it is operational. It will also take ownership of Uber Eats, which is available in Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore. Bloomberg reported today that Uber will take 25-30 percent equity in Grab in exchange.
Both Uber and Grab declined to comment when contacted separately for comment.
The successful conclusion of negotiations comes less than two months after SoftBank, an early investor in Grab, secured a long-drawn-out deal to become an Uber shareholder.
SoftBank is thought to have favored consolidating Uber’s businesses in emerging markets, with Southeast Asia — a loss-making geography for all — one of its apparent targets. That’s despite significant growth potential as more of the regions 600 million consumers come online for the first time.
Revenue from taxi apps is said to have more than doubled over the past two years to cross $5 billion in 2017, according to a recent report co-authored by Google. The industry is expected to reach $20 billion by 2025, the same report found.
Uber previously exited China in 2016 after striking an equity exchange deal with Chinese market leader Didi. The U.S. firm also quit Russia last year after it sold its business in the country to local rival Yandex.
Unlike those two deals, however, Uber had held a decent position in Southeast Asia in recent times although it appeared to lose considerable market share last year. Issues inside Uber, including the resignation of founding CEO Travis Kalanick and investor squabbles, seemed to divert its attention away from Southeast Asia. All the while, Grab marched on and it notably refueled its tanks with over $2.5 billion in additional funding from investors.
Grab isn’t the only rival in Southeast Asia, however. Go-Jek leads the Indonesian market and it recently gained the backing of Google, JD.com and Tencent at a valuation of some $5 billion. Despite winning in Indonesia, Southeast Asia’s largest economy and the world’s fourth most populous country, Go-Jek is yet to venture overseas. This Uber-Grab consolidate certains gives it a good reason to expedite those plans.
Source: TechCrunch
Facebook chief calls scandal a “breach of trust” and outlined preventative steps the company is taking.
Source: CNET
Adrian Lovett, the Web Foundation’s new CEO and president, says we shouldn’t take the good things about the web for granted — we should fight for them.
Source: CNET
Money, speed, and prestige are the hallmarks of auto racing. Take all that away, and you get Norwegian bilcross.
Source: Wired
Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg has taken out a full page ad in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and six UK papers today to apologize Cambridge Analytica scandal, according to CNN’s Brian Stelter.
The ad starts in bold letters, saying:
“We have a responsibility to protect your information. If we can’t, we don’t deserve it.”
The ad was published on Sunday, following Zuck’s first public acknowledgement of the issue on Facebook and a subsequent media tour earlier this week.
Congress has also put Mark Zuckerberg on notice to potentially come speak with them, with Senator Kennedy of Louisiana encouraging Zuck to “do the common sense thing and roll up his sleeves and take a meaningful amount of time talking to [them].”
For those of you still unsure what’s going on with Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, you can see a full play-by-play here.
Here’s the full transcript from the print ad:
We have a responsibility to protect your information. If we can’t, we don’t deserve it.
You may have heard about a quiz app built by a university researcher that leaked Facebook data of millions of people in 2014. This was a breach of trust, and I’m sorry we didn’t do more at the time. We’re now taking steps to make sure this doesn’t happen again.
We’ve already stopped apps like this from getting so much information. Now we’re limiting the data apps get when you sign in using Facebook.
We’re also investigating every single app that had access to large amounts of data before we fixed this. We expect there are others. And when we find them, we will ban them and tell everyone affected.
Finally, we’ll remind you of which apps you’ve given access to your information — so you can shut off the ones you don’t want anymore.
Thank you for believing in this community. I promise to do better for you.
Mark Zuckerberg
Source: TechCrunch
Increase your total baggage awareness with some technologically enhanced luggage.
Source: Wired
Earlier this year, the business community received a wake-up call issued with all of the might that $6 trillion can muster.
The call came from Laurence Fink, the founder and chief executive of the global investment firm, BlackRock, and was delivered as a letter to the CEOs of the world’s largest companies.
Aptly titled, “A Sense of Purpose,” the letter informed business leaders that driving record profits is no longer enough to garner BlackRock’s support. Companies must also positively contribute to society, or in Mr. Fink’s words, “Companies must benefit all of their stakeholders, including shareholders, employees, customers, and the communities in which they operate.”
I was elated when I read the letter. I’ve spent my entire career as a social entrepreneur advocating for businesses—specifically technology businesses in Silicon Valley—to use their technology, wealth, and influence for social good. After reading the letter in the New York Times and seeing the extensive coverage in major business publications, I turned to the leading Silicon Valley tech blogs to get their take on this blockbuster announcement. After all, the Bay Area is home to many of BlackRock’s largest clients.
Crickets. Fink’s letter wasn’t covered by the technology press. Well, to be accurate, I checked the first ten pages of Google results as well as all of the tech pubs in Techmeme’s top ten list. Nothing.
Guys (I hate to say it, but it’s mostly guys here in the Valley), Fink’s point is that ignoring society’s voice will lead to the loss of our “license to operate.” Putting the Valley’s collective hands over our ears and saying “we can’t hear you” only works for so long.
Instead, what if Silicon Valley embraced the letter to commit good for the better of society as a whole, not just the interests of the software and data industrial complex? What if Fink’s letter served as a constant reminder to build products that make the world a 10x more equitable place to live and prosper and not just to build products that deliver 10x profit?
With those questions in mind, here are two interrelated and crucial ways to commit good on purpose while making sure Silicon Valley technology companies embrace “A Sense of Purpose.”
Put People Before Algorithms. The goal of algorithms must not be to replace, manipulate, or deceive in the name of profit. This is all too often the case as black-box algorithms use massive amounts of data to attract eyeballs, encourage clicks, and, in more dire circumstances, even determine if someone goes to prison.
We must always ask up front how unaccountable algorithms impact individuals and society as a whole. Instead of eyeballs, clicks, and even prison time served, algorithms should be optimized to make people better—more efficient in their jobs, more informed in their daily lives, and more connected to their communities. We must make a cognizant effort to analyze and identify the risks of algorithms-gone-rogue before they result in disasters. Let’s not only ask, “How can we make more money?” but also, “What could go wrong?”
Risk-benefit analysis already takes place around boardroom tables by those with monetary interests, but those conversations fail to include the diverse voices of the communities that will feel the decision’s impact. There will never be perfect clarity around what will unfold after a decision is made. That’s exactly why decisions that impact thousands, millions, and even billions of people must include all company stakeholders—shareholders, employees, customers, and the communities in which they operate—if we are ever to prevent a world where algorithms reign supreme in the name of profit.
Treat Diversity as Our Greatest Asset. It’s very easy to discount points of view, values, and even someone’s humanity when the voice of diversity is not present. Establishing diversity as a core company principle is a good start, but it’s not enough. Diversity must be omnipresent and it must be truly embraced across an organization as an asset, not a statistic.
Many in Silicon Valley will tell you that diversity has been a top priority for years, only to follow with reports that cite a 2% increase in women employees, 0% increase in black employees, and no data at all on the number of employees with disabilities. Let’s not conflate transparency with priority. We must increase diversity now while investing in STEM education and training to create a more diverse pipeline of workers for tomorrow’s technology jobs. By making the workforce of today and tomorrow more diverse, we make our communities more diverse. We are then one step closer to never discounting a point of view, value, or someone’s entire humanity due to a lack of voice.
It’s not too late to use Mr. Fink’s letter as a wake-up call for Silicon Valley to commit good on purpose. While the two proposals detailed in this article are aspirational, they have at their core something much more valuable than $6 trillion. These ideas are about regaining Silicon Valley’s conscience. They are about investing in a collective future that prizes diversity and equality, not a future that allows technology, data, and algorithms to further entrench the inequality that we face today in Silicon Valley and everywhere that feels our impact.
Source: TechCrunch
You’ve probably seen the acronym before, but do you really know about virtual reality is? Our guide will explain the ins and outs of VR, where the technology is right now, and where it’s headed. If you’re curious about this VR trend and want a clearer definition, then read on!
The post What is VR? appeared first on Digital Trends.
Source: Digital trends
Dear blockchain people: this is your hour. Abandon your transparently greedy get-rich-quick schemes, turn away from your casinos of de-facto modern-day penny stocks, and focus your decentralized attention on what the world needs. Save us, O blockchainers, from the scourge that is Facebook! Decentralize all the things!
I’m kidding, of course. For now.
Every year, it seems, a new “new Facebook” arises, swells, deflates, and vanishes, generally in a matter of weeks. Remember Diaspora? Ello? Mastodon? Vero? I imagine them as gangs of bandits charging The Wall in Game of Thrones, prompting the Night’s Watch of Menlo Park to … ignore them completely until they go away. The critical mass of everyone you know, plus the cost and complexity of an infrastructure that provides a broad panoply of valuable features to two billion people — those are Facebook’s 700-foot-high barrier of enchanted ice.
And yet. It is whispered in dark corners, at conventions with names like Consensus and TokenFest, that there is a secret tunnel in that wall, a fundamental flaw. That Facebook’s advantage of massive scale could melt away if faced by the dark magic of decentralization, wherein users own their own data, encrypted by them, stored in the location of their choice, shared only as and when they explicitly approve, while they connect peer-to-peer with interactions mediated and paid for via a tokenized protocol, across an armada of nodes running — yep, you guessed it — some sort of blockchain.
This is essentially nonsense. For now. Its fundamental flaw is the fundamental flaw of most grandiose decentralized blockchain notions; they are too much, too large, too megalomaniacal, too soon. They want to supplant the entire existing order, whether it be money, the entire financial sector, democratic governance, social media … or, really, pick a field of human endeavour, there’s probably some white paper outlining a token-based decentralized wholesale replacement for the way things are done now.
Dear blockchain people: stop it. I like big thinking as much as anyone, but in practice you don’t change things by overthrowing them. You won’t blow out a torch that’s been burning for many years with your new Big Bang. Instead, in practice, you start small, with a tiny cohort of enthusiasts, and you iterate — sometimes for a very long time — before you get any traction that the wider world notices at all. You do not, repeat not, gather a band of adventurers together in an inn to immediately form up and charge The Wall.
Especially stop it with consumer applications. I stand by my statement that “blockchains are the new Linux, not the new Internet” more strongly with each passing month. Blockchain enthusiasts may enjoy perusing their wallets and counting how many different kinds of ERC20 tokens — which generally still have no actual utility, beyond that of a penny stock — are contained within. Ordinary users, however, do not.
Better token UX won’t fix their fundamental problem. Online micropayments didn’t fail again and again because decentralized tokens weren’t a thing yet; they failed because their cognitive load was far too great to sustain their use. Tokens don’t change that one iota. If your consumer decentralized app involves ordinary users knowingly accumulating, spending, or transferring custom tokens, your consumer decentralized app will fail.
But, you know what? Having said all that? I wasn’t kidding with the first line of this post. Dear blockchain people, this is your hour, if you would only recognize it. But your objective is not to compete with, or replace, centralized services. That may never be the objective, and that’s OK. Rather, your goal right now is to create a viable alternative for those who reject existing centralized services, whether they be many or few.
That’s what Bitcoin itself is, after all; a weird little alternative to centralized finance. Over the course of a decade it has, beyond astonishingly, actually become viable, useful, self-sufficient, and globally successful, but it remains a weird little alternative, and will for the foreseeable future.
In its wake we now have the tools to create decentralized apps that aren’t just about value transfer. Consider Blockstack, which includes “a decentralized micro-blogging app” among its basic tutorials. Consider Cosmos, designed to allow blockchains to interoperate with one another, forming a decentralized web of chains they call “the Internet of blockchains.” And of course consider Ethereum, which, believe it or not, isn’t just for ICOs, but lets you run arbitrary decentralized code, and, importantly, has serious plans to massively scale its throughput.
We’re approaching — or maybe already at — the point at which these tools could be put together to construct, say, a small-scale decentralized social network. It would still face the critical-mass problem: but that could be addressed by focusing on specific cohorts and communities; art collectives, churches, fandoms, etcetera. It would still face the ordinary-people-don’t-want-tokens problem: but that could be addressed by having a designated token-handling admin for each node, in the same way that online communities used to have designated email admins or local Usenet sysadmins, so ordinary users would just need a URL, a userid/password, and perhaps a decision whether to pay for access or be advertised to.
Is this vague and handwavey? You betcha. But I’ve done a fair amount of decentralized systems coding myself, of late, and I can tell you that the tools and networks are — well. They’re getting there. They’re close. And once you’ve built a local social network wherein users control their data, one which is part of a higher-order decentralized network of nodes, all communicating via a common tokenized protocol … well, then you have a whole world of new, interesting, and daunting scaling problems.
But my point is that you don’t have to scale to the size of Facebook for an alternative to be viable. Think small. The Wall isn’t going anywhere, but maybe you don’t need to traverse it after all. The world will have Facebook for a long time to come, but Facebook doesn’t have to be part of your world … especially if a weird, clunky, charmingly ramshackle little alternative exists, one from which you ultimately find you get far more net emotional and practical value. If things keep going as they are, maybe you won’t ever have to go through the Wall to get to the people on the other side. Maybe, eventually, they’ll come to you.
Source: TechCrunch
Frustration with Mark Zuckerberg’s company has dominated the chatter on social media.
Source: Wired
