Technology

Uber is aiming to perfect the art of the pickup with three features it says minimize cancellations. Guaranteed pickup windows boost confidence that you&ll make your flight, and give you a credit of $10 if your scheduled ride is late. Pre-written messages let drivers and riders let each other know they&ll &Be right there& or &I&ve arrived& with a single tap.

And most flashily, three years after I suggested Uber let you hold up a colored screen so your driver could find you amidst a crowd of hailers, itintroducing Spotlight. Each driver gets assigned a semi-unique color gradient to look for. Hit the Spotlight button, that color takes over your screen, and you can wave it to help your driver locate you.

Wave Ubernew Spotlight or send canned chats to find your driver

These optimizations show the depths Uber is willing to go to shave seconds off of pickups. That can reduce unpaid waiting time for drivers while boosting the number of rides they complete per hour for the startup. And the peace of mind that they&ll be able to hop in right when they&re ready could lure riders away from competitors as Uber dukes it out across the globe. The updates are rolling out on iOS and Android in the U.S. and Canada today.

&Human-to-human interaction is hard. Driver-initiated cancellations after the driver has arrived at the pickup point are particularly stressful,& Uber senior product manager for rider experience Ryan Yu tells me. But in tests of the new quick messages features, he said &We found cancellations on both sides reduced significantly, especially for drivers after they&ve arrived.&

We can only hope this level of attention to detail will be applied to optimizing its internal company culture — a hope shaken by this monthresignation of Uberhead of HR Liane Hornsey after a probe into how she handled racial discrimination at the company, and the NYTreport of insensitivity complaints about COO Barney Harford.

Wave Ubernew Spotlight or send canned chats to find your driver Uber has been steadily adding little improvements to the pickup process over the years. Herea quick, abridged list:

  • Incentivizing drivers to wait instead of cancelling by starting the meter after waiting at the pickup spot for more than 2 minutes
  • Live location sharing so riders can optionally let drivers see where they are as they seek the vehicle
  • Suggested pickup spots nearby where drivers can safely pull over, and avoid themlooping around one way streets
  • Sequential pickups so you&re assigned the nearest driver, even if they&re still finishing their previous ride
  • Pickup location changing so you can choose a different spot nearby if you got the address wrong or are on the other side of the building

There are three upgrades in particular that serve as the foundation for todayupdates.

Wave Ubernew Spotlight or send canned chats to find your driver

In-app chat between riders and drivers makes it so you don&t have to use SMS. Uber could only anonymize your number in some markets, creating privacy concerns, and SMS could be cost-prohibitive in some parts of the world. Uber messaging launched in mid-2017, and could be read aloud to the driver and replied to with a thumbs-up emoji to reduce the chance of distracted driving. Lyft still uses SMS for comparison.

Now both users and drivers will see the most common messages pre-written and sendable with the touch of a button so they don&t have to type. &Drivers noted that they were more reassured when their rider actually sent them a message,& said Yu, which can keep them from cancelling if the rider needs a little more time to get to the pickup spot. I asked if automatic translation would be available here, so if a driver in Brazil sent an American user &eu cheguei,& it&d show up as &I have arrived.& Yu told me &Translations are on the road map. We&re figuring out how to best pair them alongside voice.&

Uber added scheduled rides in mid-2016 shortly after Lyft did the same. You can plan a ride up to 30 days in advance, but you&re still subject to surge pricing in the moment. At least now you&ll get $10 credit if the driver is late. Unfortunately, the pickup window Uber showed me in the demo was 15 minutes, though Yu said it may very by region. I sometimes only make my flights by 10 minutes, and since my pickup ETA in San Francisco is typically only 3 to 5 minutes, I&m probably better off just booking the ride when I&m ready.

Wave Ubernew Spotlight or send canned chats to find your driver

Uber Beacon and LyftAmp are color-coded dashboard lights that help riders find their driver

Back in 2015, I suggested that &Uber could offer some signal on the driver or passengerphone to help them find each other.& A week later it announced it would start testing Spot, which let users pick a color that would light up on an LED bar installed on driverwindshields. In November 2016, Lyft launched its Amp dashboard light that assigned a random color riders could look out for. A month later, UberSpot had evolved into the dashboard Beacon light that lets users pick the color and is now available in 14 cities.

Todayupdate gives riders a light too, which is great if you&re one of dozens of people waiting outside a concert or sports game trying to find their Uber. Hit the Spotlight button, and you&ll get instructions to wave your colored screen in the air. Drivers are permanently assigned a color that stays constant across trips so they can train themselves to look out for it.

Wave Ubernew Spotlight or send canned chats to find your driver

&Spotlight is meant to supplement Beacon. Not all drivers will have a Beacon, and we want to pass that to two-way communication,& says Yu. But since the Beacon dashboard lights are always visible, Uber says that if a driver has one, users won&t see the Spotlight option and will instead just be able to choose the Beaconcolor.

Together, these features should eliminate most pickup problems. We&ll see if Ubercompetitors and international partners like Didi adopt them too. After retreating from markets like China in exchange for a percentage of ownership of the local leader, theremore pressure on Uber to squash its homeland competitor Lyft, which has been gaining market share. Yet neither has offered an oft-requested feature some users would even be willing to pay an extra dollar for: a &quiet ride& where the driver doesn&t make small talk.

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Roku is getting into the speaker business with todayannouncement of Roku TV Wireless Speakers.

Mark Ely, the companyvice president of product management, said Roku is trying to address a growing consumer problem — the fact that as TVs get thinner, you end up buying &this beautiful TV, but it sounds bad.& To address this, you may end up purchasing a soundbar or creating a more elaborate home theater setup, but Ely argued that many consumers find this process confusing and intimidating.

So as the name suggests, Roku has created wireless speakers specifically for Roku TVs, the companylineup of partner-built smart TVs. Ely described them as speakers that deliver &really premium sound in a really compact package,& and at an affordable price. (They&re about seven inches tall and weigh four pounds each, he said.)

Roku says it should be easy to pair these speakers wirelessly with a Roku TV using Roku Connect, and since the company controls both the video and audio experience, it can ensure that they&re sync&d up perfectly, without lag. To minimize those moments when you&re frantically reaching for the remote to adjust the volume, the speakers also come with Automatic Volume Leveling to lower the sound in particularly loud scenes and boost the sounds when it gets too quiet.

Couple on Couch

Ely said the product takes advantage of Rokuacquisition last year of Danish audio startup Dynastrom: &The goal has been to have audio be a real center of excellence for the company.&

&Our fundamental belief here is that by delivering a better sound experience, you get a better entertainment streaming experience,& he added.

The speakers will also come with a new remote called the Roku Touch, which is designed to emphasize voice controls without fully giving up the benefits of a regular remote — you can press-and-hold to deliver voice commands, but it still has buttons for playback control and others that you can preset.

Smart speakers from big tech companies like Apple and Amazon are seen as one main ways to get into the voice-powered home assistant market. Roku has its own voice assistant (which it&smaking available to manufacturing partners), but Ely and Director of Consumer PR Seana Norvell said itreally focused on understanding your entertainment needs — rather than, say, telling you the weather or helping you order products online.

End of Entertainment Center

While Roku says the speakers will ship in late October at a price of $199.99, they&re available for pre-order now, with pricing at $149.99 until July 23, and then $179.99 until October 15.

Ely said the company is only selling the speakers from the Roku website, at least initially, because that allows it to &market directly to Roku TV customers& while ensuring that other Roku customers (namely, those who have a Roku streaming device but not a Roku TV) don&t end up buying these speakers, which won&t work for them.

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WeWork may have combined forces with its fiercest rival in China, Naked Hub, in a recent merger, but its new enemy numero uno in the country is also building up a roster of friends through aggressive M-A.

Ucommune may not be spending the kind of cash WeWork China did — it reportedlyspent $400 million to get Naked Hub — but it is quietly picking up smaller rivals via acquisitions. Last week, it completed its fourth piece of M-A of the past yearwith a deal to buyWorkingdom for 300 million RMB, or roughly $45 million.

Two-year-oldWorkingdomoffers working spaces in Shanghai, and online services that help SMEs and multinationals growth their businesses.

An acquisition spree from Ucommune — which was forced to rebrand from UrWork following a lawsuit from WeWork — has seen itsnap up lesser but strategic playersWedo, Woo Spaceand New Spaceto boost its presence and rival WeWork. All told, and thanks to these deals, Ucommune claims to operate 60 offices in Beijing, 20 more in Shanghai and a significant presence inGuangdong, Macau and Hong Kong.

In comparison, Naked Hub says it has 10,000 members across its 24 office locations while WeWork says it has 10,000 members in 13 locations in Greater China. The U.S. firm plans to grow its reach to 40 offices by the end of this year, a move that it says will quadruple its membership numbers in China to 40,000.

Those numbers explainwhy the acquisition deals aren&t likely to stop any time soon for Ucommune.

The Chinese he company said in its latest announcement that it will &continue to acquire more co-working companies to grow its global footprint.& Currently, its presence outside of China includes New York and Singapore, but it is clearly exploiting the bursting of the co-working bubble which initially attracted a huge number of companies to the space, particularly in China.

WeWorkbiggest rival in China is on an acquisition spree

Inside a Ucommune space

Ucommune last raised money when it closed a $17 million round at a valuation of 9 billion RMB ($1.4 billion) in February 2018. Post-acquisitions, the company said that it plans to return to private investors with the goal of raising further capital at an enhanced valuation of 11 billion RMB, or $1.65 billion.

Thatsome way short of WeWorkgargantuan figures. The company has raised capital at a valuation of $20 billion, whilenewer reports suggest the figure has ballooned to $35 billion in its latest quest for additional financing, but the continued efforts of Ucommune will give WeWork food for thought in China.

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As payments companies continue to look to the long tail of global markets to expand their businesses, a startup that helps them do business in disparate economies is getting a strategic investment from one of payment world leaders.

PayPal is leading a $50 million investment into PPRO, a London-based business that is focused on cross-border payments for merchants, specifically by offering the merchants a seamless way of accepting payments from customers using whatever the most popular payment form happens to be in a particular country. To date, the PPRO platform covers some 140 payment methods, and the plan will be to add more countries, and more payments, into the mix.

The deal comes at the tail end of a wave of acquisitions from PayPal as it looks for new ways of expanding its business as growth tails off in its more established markets and established business lines. Between mid-May and now, it has acquired iZettlefor $2.2 billion to expand its mobile point-of-sale opportunities; AI-based CRM specialist Jetlore; AI-based fraud and risk management firm Similityfor $120 million; and gig economy payment facilitatorHyperwallet for $400 million.

This PPRO investment also includes participation from new investor Citi Ventures and previous backer HPE Growth Capital. PPRO is not disclosing its valuation but Simon Black, its CEO, said in an interview that itdefinitely up on its previous funding and described it as a &minority investment& in the company.

Interestingly, PPRO has raised only around $10.6 million since its founding in 2006; it is already profitable; it has around 200 employees; and it competes with the likes of Adyen, which recently went public at a valuation of over $8 billion — to give you an idea of the opportunity and value of the company.

The challenge PPRO — pronounced &pea-pro& — is addressing is an interesting and complicated one. While the growth in e-commerce has been a global phenomenon, like a plant, it has grown differently and adapted to each market depending on local conditions.In the case of payments, that has meant a disparate range of payment methods that are standard in some countries, but not others.

While credit cards or debit cards, for example, are very standard in the US and UK, in Japan, a lot of people pay for items purchased online by cash on delivery, or at convenience stores. In the Netherlands, there is a system called iDEAL that routes payments directly through your bank account. And so on.

For a merchant that is based in one country but interested in selling to people in another, this can pose a problem, if it doesn&t accept whatever the local payment method happens to be.

Thatwhere a company like PPRO comes in. It essentially creates an interface for the merchant to be able to select acceptance using a variety of methods, with the idea being that PPRO will provide access to whatever happens to be the most common methods in a particular geography. Ita kind of service that would be too timely, and not the core competency, for a merchant to resolve by itself, and if anything continues to become more complex as e-commerce continues to become more ubiquitous.

&There has been a real change in the last three to five years,& Black said of the rise in transactions, which have been fuelled by smartphones and a much bigger population of people doing more of their buying and transacting through them. &Alternative payments are here to say, and the growth seems to be going a lot faster.& In fact, PPRO estimates that these days, credit cards account for less than 20 percent of all online transactions globally.

PayPal has an obvious agenda in hoping that its platform becomes to default for any transaction, and that is a big part of its strategic interest in PPRO, to provide PayPal as an option in the mix of payment acceptance methods wherever its nearly 20 million merchants happen to be doing business.

The other is to make sure that within PayPal itself, that users can integrate whatever their preferred payment method is into their PayPal wallets. (So in the UK I can link up my debit card, but in the Netherlands a resident there can link up its iDEAL account to top up their PayPal wallet.)

&A merchantchoice of payments partner is increasingly being driven by the ever-expanding range of locally relevant payment methods available,& said Arnold Goldberg, vice president of merchant product and technology,PayPal, in a statement. &PayPalis pleased to support PPRO as the company continues to grow.&

The two have already kicked off a commercial deal to integrate a &wide range of payment options for our merchants,& he added, as part of the newPayPalCheckout with Smart Payment Button, which also integrates Braintree. &This is yet another way we are positioning ourselves to be the one-stop solution for global digital commerce.&

The other side of PPRObusiness is in issuing physical or virtual Visa and MasterCard prepaid cards to consumers under the VIABUY brand as well as a white-label offering.Itthis part that might have particularly interested Citi, which has a giant credit card business — although itone that PayPal can also potentially tap down the line as it expands in more markets outside of its home base in the US and stronghold in Europe.

&Technology is revolutionizing how consumers and businesses make and accept payments, and PPRO is on the leading edge of meeting those needs,& said Luis Valdich, Managing Director, Citi Ventures. &Citi Ventures is delighted to invest in PPRO, which enables businesses to collect funds from alternative payments schemes globally and more and more consumers to join the digital economy.&

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Reverse, a long time player in thedebugging tools area, providing its program execution capture and replay innovation to help others detect software failures, has closed a $14 million Series B round led by Cambridge Innovation Capital, the Cambridge, UK-based contractor of tech and health care companies. The 2005 founded start-up —-- at first bootstrapped (out of founder Greg Lawgarden shed) —-- has come a long method, and now has more than 30 paying clients for what it describes as its & record, rewind and replay & debugging innovation, consisting of the similarity SAP HANA, Mentor Graphics, Cadence and Micro Focus. A quick potted history: In 2012, Law quit his job to go full time on Undo, raising a small amount of angel financing and then a $1.25 M from seed investment in 2014, followed by $3.3 M in a series A financing in 2016. Brand-new investors in the Series B round include Global Brain Corporation, a Japanese equity capital fund; and UK-focused Parkwalk Advisors, while all Undoexisting investor groups also participated —-- including Rockspring; Martlet; Sir Peter Michael (creator of Quantel, Classic FM and CaliforniaPeter Michael Winery); the Cambridge Angels group and Jaan Tallinn (co-founder of Skype and Kazaa). The Series B will be utilized to broaden Undosoftware development team, accelerate item advancement and grow its United States operations. Undo states its finest markets so far are electronic design automation (EDA); database manufacturers/data management; and networking. & This funding will be used to significantly enhance performance as part of Undo & salways-on recordingvision, and also to accelerate our product roadmap and widen the innovation beyond put together code so that it can be utilized with Java and other VM-based languages, & it informs us. & Our main rival is the status quo —-- engineering organisations that do not progress with the times. Old-school debugging techniques (e.g. printf, logging, core dump analysis) have actually been around for decades. 2000 was everything about fixed analysis. 2010 was about vibrant analysis, 2020 will have to do with recording software application failures ‘& lsquo; in the act & through capture -replay technology. &. Undo argues that its Live Recorder innovation provides & a totally new method of identifying software application failures during development and in production & —-- arguing that its technique is superior to standard debugging methods such as printf, logging, core dump analysis which are & general purpose and provide minimal info &, while it says static and vibrant analysis & are deep however can just take a look at particular instances of bugs & —-- whereas it claims its tech & can record failure instances throughout the whole spectrum and for that reason plugs in the gaps which no-one else has filled yet &. The UK business also sees a growing chance for its approach provided increasingly intricate and significantly autonomous software threats ending up being unaccountable, if itmaking decisions without people knowing how and why. So thewider vision for Undo is not just getting much faster at fixing bugs however dealing with the growing need for software makers to be able to articulate —-- and account for —-- what their programs are doing at any given moment. & Longer term itabout that journey towards software application accountability, & says Law. & Software responsibility is quite a broad thing —-- it truly implies the ability to be able to know for sure what some software application did as it ran. And today thatall about the programmerunderstanding of what their program has done. But really itfar more than simply programmers that require to understand software —-- and particularly as we move into this 2nd chapter of the info transformation where computer systems are starting to make decisions that affect our lives and our livelihoods. I suggest in the case of social networks and Facebook and things, Western democracy! The capability to have that responsibility behind software actions is going to become a truly essential thing. Thata progressive journey that we & re on. & So the question is what did the software application in fact do And as we grow, and as time goes on, we & ll answer that question in progressively larger and bigger contexts. &.
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WeWork, the co-working startup thatvalued at~$20 billion and has some 200,000 members across 200 locations globally plus nearly 6,000 staff of its own, will no long allow employees to expense meat. It will also no longer serve meat at company events. The policy shift is intended to reduce the business& environmental impact.

The new internal policy was reported on Friday by Bloombergwhich obtained a company memo in whichco-founder Miguel McKelvey revealed the policy, writing: &New research indicates that avoiding meat is one of the biggest things an individual can do to reduce their personal environmental impact — even more than switching to ahybrid car.&

So Elon Musk take note.

A WeWork spokeswoman confirmed the new policy to us — which specifically removes red meat, poultry and pork from company menus and expenses policy. Though she emphasized that the company is not prohibiting WeWork staff or members from bringing in meat-based meals they&ve paid for themselves.

Members are also still free to host their own events at WeWork locations and serve meat they&ve paid for themselves. The policy only applies to food purchased (or paid for) by WeWork itself.

The spokeswoman also confirmed that fish is not covered in the meat-free initiative.

The internal memo announcing the meat-free policy is embedded below:

Global Team,

One thing that inspires me most about WeWork is our ability to effect positive change. Our team, united together, has no limit when solving any problem. Thatthe Power of We.

In the past few weeks, many teams around the world have already taken action to help us become more environmentally conscious. From plastic-free events in Montreal to recycling initiatives in Hong Kong, we&re excited and humbled by how quickly our teams can make an impact.

But we know we can do more.

We have made a commitment to be a meat-free organization.Moving forward, we will not serve or pay for meat at WeWork events and want to clarify that this includes poultry and pork, as well as red meat.

Newresearchindicates that avoiding meat is one of the biggest things an individual can do to reduce their personal environmental impact — even more than switching to a hybrid car. As a company, WeWork can save an estimated 16.7 billion gallons (63.1 billion liters) of water, 445.1 million pounds (201.9 million kg) of CO2 emissions, andover 15 million animalsby 2023 by eliminating meat at our events.

One of our most powerful annual events is Summer Camp. Many of you have asked if we will be serving meat this year. In keeping with our commitment, we will not be serving meat at camp. This is a significant first step — and one that will have a meaningful impact. In just the three days we are together, we estimate that we can save more than 10,000 animals. The team has worked hard to create a sustainable, plentiful, and delicious menu. If you require a medical or religious accommodation, please contact ourGlobal Policy Team.

We are energized by this opportunity to leave a better world for future generations and appreciate your partnership as we continue the journey.

For information on changes (from T-E to the Honesty Market), additional reading onthe effects a meat-free diet can have on the world, or to get involved, visit ourConnect page. You can also reach out to us This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

The changes you are making every day will truly change the world.

Miguel

Scientists have been warning for years that the meat industry is a massive generator of greenhouses gases — although the topic often gets bypassed in mainstream environmental discussions and overlooked by corporate social responsibility policies, so itinteresting to see WeWork stepping up to the plate (ha!) and putting its policies where its environmentally conscious soundbites are.

According to Bloomberg, the company will also exclude meat products from theself-serve food and drink kiosk systems that are present in around 400 of WeWorkco-working buildings.

So its affirmative environmental action to reduce meat consumption will have some impact — albeit likely a smaller one — on its paying members too.

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