Uber competitor Ola launches in UK as ridesharing competition heats up →

Despite some of the same financial backers, Ola and Uber will now be competing for the same prize: ride-hailing app supremacy in London.

Indian ride-hailing app Ola recently announced plans to launch its services in the UK, taking its battle with Uber to British shores.

Ola is now looking for drivers in Cardiff, Vale of Glamorgan, Newport and many more towns throughout South Wales and Greater Manchester. In a statement, its said they plan to expand nationwide by the end of the year.

To lure drivers to its side, the company claimed it will serve both private cabs and black taxis, taking 10 percent of each private fare and five percent of every black taxi fare. Both of these figures are less than what Uber currently takes from drivers.

The company, founded in 2011 by Bhavish Aggarwal and Ankit Bhati, is dominating the Indian ride-hailing market, serving an estimated 125 million customers across 110 cities in India. It expanded to Australia in February and now have 40,000 drivers on the road in seven Australian cities. Despite its success, Ola is one of many ride-sharing and ride-hailing apps seeking to dominate a variety of markets across the world.

Ola is hoping to enter the UK market on good terms with every side, cajoling strict British regulators with offers to meet their every need and assuaging established taxi drivers with a plan to allow both private cars and traditional black cabs to use its app. The company said it wants to provide 24-7 voice support, an Ola app emergency feature, and stringent screening for drivers.

"Ola is excited to announce its plans for the UK, one of the world's most evolved transportation markets," said Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal.

"The UK is a fantastic place to do business and we look forward to providing a responsible, compelling, new service that can help the country meet its ever demanding mobility needs."

While not explicit, Ola's focus on compliance with regulators is seen as a subtle jab at Uber, which is currently in the middle of a vicious court battle with London over how its business operates and treats drivers. It recently won a court appeal, allowing it to operate in London for about 15 months. Uber has been in the country for years and now has 48,000 drivers serving millions of people each month. But Uber is also particularly despised by drivers of black cabs, who have to spend years securing a license before they can legally operate.

Ola's announcement comes on the heels of meetings held between Aggarwal and London's Director of Transport Innovation Michael Hurwitz last year. The London market is already crowded with apps despite pressure from politicians and courts to treat them as employers instead of just service-based apps. A number of apps rivaling Uber have had discussions with the city about gaining licenses to operate in the city.

Despite pledges for reform, drivers in India have protested against both companies, saying their practices are abusive and often arbitrary. In March, drivers in New Delhi, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune and other towns protested against Uber and Ola, saying the wages they made were impossible to live on and that both companies were often assigning random "fees" that cut into driver profit.

The move to the UK opens up another front in the battle between Uber and Ola despite sharing a major investor. According to Business Insider, Japanese tech company Softbank has invested heavily in both companies, promising Ola $2 billion last October and securing a 20 percent stake in Uber earlier this year.

There were even rumors that Uber and Ola would eventually join forces in India, as both apps were suffering losses in the fight against each other. Uber recently pulled out of Southeast Asia entirely, handing its business, along with Uber Eats, over to Singaporean ride-hailing app Grab before taking a 27.5 percent stake in the company and having its CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, join the company's board.

Analysts expected Uber to continue pulling out of markets and securing partnerships with locally dominant ride-hailing apps, but Ola's decision to enter the UK market kicks off a new round of the fighting between the two.

Aggarwal told a conference last month that Ola, which is now valued at around $7 billion, would go public in the next three to four years, and today it secured a $225 million stake purchase by Singaporean bank Temasek.

"The ambition for both me and [fellow co-founder] Ankiti [Bhati] has always been to build a sustainable, long-term independent institution," Aggarwal said.

"In that direction, we are definitely going to IPO. Our goal is to aim for an IPO in about three to four years. We are on that path, our focus on building a sustainable business model [and] a profitable business builds into that ambition."

*this article was featured on Download.com on August 8, 2018: https://download.cnet.com/blog/download-blog/uber-competitor-ola-launches-in-uk-as-ridesharing-competition-heats-up/

You can catch a self-driving taxi in 2018, if you're traveling to Phoenix, AZ

The Alphabet subsidiary will begin operating a self-driving car service akin to Uber or Lyft by the end of the year, with no driver present.

The CEO of self-driving car company Waymo told attendees of the 2018 Google I/O conference Tuesday that their self-driving car service will begin operations by the end of the year in Phoenix, Arizona.

At the I/O developers conference, Google invited Waymo head John Krafcik onstage to make the big announcement. Waymo is a subsidiary of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, and Krafcik said engineers at both companies were hard at work on the AI backing their self-driving cars.

People will be able to download a Waymo app and secure rides on autonomous vehicles through it, with no driver present, Krafcik said.

Waymo has been operating autonomous vehicles on the roads of Phoenix since October, and is one of the first companies to do so in the US. Originally, Waymo was a part of Google before it was spun off into its own company under the Alphabet umbrella. Despite the separation, members of Google's Brain team have helped Waymo engineers by beefing up the neural networks underpinning the AI operating the vehicles.

Waymo engineers have been testing the cars' autonomous driving skills but they have left an engineer in most vehicles as a safety precaution in the past. But in a speech last year, Krafcik said Waymo vehicles are designed and built for "full autonomy."

"Our combination of powerful sensors gives our vehicles a 360 degree view of the world. The lasers can see objects in three dimensions, up to 300 meters away. We also have short range lasers that stay focused close-up to the side of the vehicle. Our radars can see underneath and around vehicles, tracking moving objects usually hidden from the human eye," he told a conference in Madrid.

Waymo said their cars have driven more than 6 million miles on the road and 5 billion miles through simulations. Part of what helps the cars improve their driving is practice. The more time the vehicles spend outside learning and accumulating data on specific situations, the better equipped they'll be to handle tough problems in real time. Waymo believes their cars are ready for public use after hours of testing in Arizona as well as Michigan, Washington, Arizona, California and Georgia.

"People will get to use our fleet of on-demand vehicles, to do anything from commute to work, get home from a night out, or run errands," Krafcik said at the conference last year. For business travelers, the autonomous vehicles offer a unique way to get to a conference or meeting as well.

Waymo has also secured deals with Jaguar, Fiat-Chrysler, Lyft, and Avis to provide fleets of autonomous vehicles.

But the plan to fill the roads with driverless cars has had its fair share of speed bumps. Legislation, both locally and federally, has been slow to keep up with the rapid pace of advancement, and there have been a number of accidents involving autonomous vehicles.

One of Uber's autonomous vehicles struck and killed a Tempe, Arizona woman in March as she crossed the street and only a few weeks after that incident, a Tesla driver died while using their self-driving system "Autopilot."

*This article was featured on the Tech Republic website on May 9, 2018: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/business-travelers-self-driving-waymo-service-will-be-available-in-phoenix-in-2018/