Facebook product director joins Uber as head of driver product

Under Uber’s current CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, the ride-hailing service has placed heavy emphasis on its drivers. But the company has been without a head for its driver product division since December, when Aaron Schildkrout left after the company wrapped its 180 days of change driver campaign. That just changed as former Facebook product director for video and Facebook Live, Daniel Danker, joins Uber. He will serve as a senior director and head of driver product. Danker will be in charge of planning, strategy, and execution for the said division. He has been working in Silicon Valley for a while already. Between 2000 and 2010, he worked in a couple of roles at Microsoft and left when he was a director of development and operations. He found his way to BBC in 2010 and then went to Shazam where he served as chief product officer for almost three years.

“Drivers are the heart of the Uber experience, and Daniel’s passion for our mission and deep product knowledge will ensure we continue to improve and innovate on their behalf,” Uber Head of Product Manik Gupta told TechCrunch in a statement.

Self-driving Uber vehicle kills pedestrian in Arizona

A self-driving Uber vehicle has reportedly hit and killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona. The vhicle, which was allegedly in autonomous mode had a driver, who was not driving, behind the wheel. Local news reports

 

say a woman was walking outside of a crosswalk when she was hit. She was taken to a hospital where she died.

Arizona has been a destination for autonomous driving pilot projects and has a rather relaxed mandate to allow testing. Uber has reportedly ceased all autonomous driving tests in the area while investigations are going on. Uber has also halted similar initiatives in Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Toronto and Phoenix. This is the first pedestrian casualty resulting from autonomous vehicles failing to sense a person and killing them.

An incident involving a Tesla and its autopilot feature (not autonomous driving) resulted in a crash that killed the driver last year.

Source: Mashable

Uber launches Express Pool in the US with cheapest fares yet

Uber seems to be addressing three different problems with the latest option it’s offering in a number of major US cities. It’s a slightly different version of Uber Pool, which lets you hop into an Uber ride that might have at least one other passenger (basically their version of carpooling). Called Uber Express Pool, this option still pairs you with other riders but lightens the load on drivers and assigns a designated pickup spot for both of you. So, instead of having to pick you both up individually, you just head to the pickup point and get picked up there.

As mentioned earlier, it addresses three different concerns. One is drivers who complain that Pool is a lot more work for more or less the same pay. Another is the riders who need the cheapest option possible. And last is the shareholders who want to see the company’s profits go up. At the moment, it’s currently available in big cities like New York City, San Francisco, and Chicago, to name a few.

Source: Android Authority

Uber and Waymo abruptly settles lawsuit

In a surprising turn of events, Uber and Waymo have agreed to settle a self-driving trade secrets lawsuit on the fifth day of the case going to trial. Uber agreed to pay out 0.3 percent of its equity, which with the company’s US$72 billion valuation, puts that at over $245 million in stock. The company has also promised to work with Waymo’s parent company Alphabet to make sure none of Google’s confidential data will be used for Uber’s self-driving program (both in the hardware and software side).

The case began over a year ago when Waymo filed a suit against Uber accusing one of its former engineers, Anthony Levandowski, of downloading around 9.7GB of data or around 14,000 files before abruptly resigning from the company and later creating his own company called Ottomotto, which was acquired by Uber a few months later.

Source: Ars Technica