Global tech firms and investors are reshaping Latin America’s startup environment

 Latin America is emerging as the new battleground for the global tech giants, and some of Silicon Valley and Asia’s biggest investors—from Sequoia Capital to SoftBank—are taking notice. International investment in Latin American startups has more than doubled since 2013, with 25 new investors entering the region in 2017 alone, including SoftBank, Didi Chuxing and… Read More

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Uber’s hosting its flying taxi-focused Elevate Summit for a second year

 Uber will talk about flying taxis, autonomous aerial transport and everything in between, in an industry event designed to bring together stakeholder on the subject in one place. This is the second year in a row that Uber has hosted its ‘Elevate Summit,’ and this year it’s in LA. The event fill feature a ton of speakers working on making aerial personal urban transit a… Read More

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Uber officially launches Uber Express POOL, a new twist on shared rides

 Uber has launched Uber Express POOL officially after a lengthy trial period that kicked off in San Francisco last November, and has until now remained available only in that market. Starting today, it’s coming to DC, LA, Miami, Philadelphia, San Diego and Denver, and more cities will be added over the next few weeks and months across the U.S. The Express POOL launch brings a change to… Read More

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London sets out safety-first plan for regulating ride-sharing

 After London sent ripple’s of shock through Silicon Valley last year, by denying Uber a renewal of its private hire vehicle license, the city’s transport regulator is doubling down on its scrutiny of the impact of app-based ride operators like Uber. Read More

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GM expands Maven car sharing to Toronto

 GM has launched its first major international city for its Maven car sharing product. The service is going live in Toronto, Canada’s largest city by population, with rates beginning at $9 per hour which include gas and insurance coverage. The launch follows a prior pilot in the Waterloo region nearby, but Toronto is the first launch at scale Maven has undertaken outside of the U.S.… Read More

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Uber to require a 6-hour break for every 12 hours of driving in the U.S.

 Uber has added a feature that will force a six-hour offline break whenever a driver on its platform reaches 12 hours of driving time. The feature is similar to one that Uber has in place in a few markets already around the U.S., which differs dep…

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Uber CEO hopes to have self-driving cars in service in 18 months

 Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi was speaking to Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait today at the new outlet’s event #TheYearAhead event, and he shared some more information about Uber’s plans around autonomy, and autonomous ride-hailing service rollout. “True autonomy for every single use case, is some ways away,” Khosrowshahi began, acknowledging that the problem is… Read More

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Turo car sharing marketplace launches in Germany

 Peer-to-peer car sharing platform Turo is expanding to Germany officially starting today, after acquiring Daimler’s Croove in-house product forpvoding essentially the same service last September. Turo also received a significant strategic investment from Daimler at the same time as it acquired the automaker’s cars sharing experiment, and it now operates peer-to-peer rental services… Read More

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Uber’s big SoftBank deal has officially closed

 SoftBank’s $1.2 billion primary direct investment deal has officially closed, according to Uber itself, which confirmed the deal closure and provided the following statement to TechCrunch via a spokesperson:
We’re proud to have SoftBank, Dragoneer and the entire consortium in the Uber family. This is a great outcome for our shareholders, employees and customers, strengthening… Read More

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Toyota teams with Uber, Amazon, Pizza Hut, more on mobility services

 Toyota has partnered with a number of companies to form the “e-Palette Alliance,” which is a group intended to help guide its transformation as a mobility services company, and determine how it makes use of its new e-Palette vehicle platform, which is a modular, driverless vehicle intended to suit a number of purposes at once. The alliance at launch includes Uber, Didi, Mazda,… Read More

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Uber taps Nvidia for its self-driving vehicle fleet

 Uber has picked Nvidia as one of its key technology partners in its fleet of self-driving, specifically to provide the AI computing aspects of its autonomous software. The partnership is one that has been in development for a while now, including in its very first test Volvo XC90 SUVs, which followed the introduction of its program using modified Ford sedans. Uber has used Nvidia’s GPUs… Read More

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