Car-sharing startup Uber on Friday bragged it rang in the new year with 2 million rides, many of them apparently to revelers heading home in early morning hours.
While demand for rides spiked from 1am to 2am in most cities where Uber operates, partygoers in Paris did not put pressure on the service until after 4am.
The Uber smartphone application was downloaded more than 20,000 times after midnight on New Year’s Eve, the company added.
Use of Uber through the night hit a peak of 58 rides reaching their destinations a second, according to the San Francisco-based startup.
Last month, Uber scrambled to allay fears that executives at the hot car-sharing startup were gunning for journalists and spying on riders.
The controversy widened when a BuzzFeed report indicated that executives at Uber had taken liberties with access to a “God View” that showed where riders and their drivers were located at any given time.
The firm, which lets customers order and pay for taxis or private vehicles via smartphones, has been unofficially valued in the range of between US$25 billion and US$30 billion based on funding rounds.
Its smartphone app connects users with local drivers and the company charges a commission for each ride.
Founded in 2009, Uber is now present in more than 200 cities and in 45 countries.
The company’s rapid expansion has caused tensions with traditional taxi drivers, especially in Europe.
On Tuesday, Uber suspended its amateur driver service in Spain after it received confirmation of a court ruling to ban it in the country. France outlawed the UberPOP service starting from Thursday, and it has also been banned in the Netherlands.
“We’ve temporarily suspended UberPOP in Spain while we appeal the ruling and study new options to allow Spanish people access to safe and comfortable journeys,” Carlos Lloret, the head of Uber in Spain, wrote in a blog post.
Uber was working with Spanish politicians to develop new regulations, he added, underlining that the company “respects the law.”
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained