Uber pledges to be more humble as woes mount

WASHINGTON: It has built a reputation of being in your face and on the ball. Dubbed one of the great disrupters of our times, on par with Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook and the like, Uber, the smartphone-based rideshare service, has been the apple of the investing eye from the time it revved up in San Francisco in 2010 as an app for ride-seekers, promising rich pickings for early trend-spotters among venture capitalists.

Bankrolled to the tune of $50 million within months of its first download, and a further $1.2 billion in 2014, the company reached a staggering $ 40 billion valuation this week even as its public image became something of a wreck, with the alleged rape of a New Delhi female executive by an Uber driver the latest disaster to tail-end the feisty company.

In the US and across the world, Uber has become the subject of heated debates, mostly on account of how it has up-ended the traditional taxicab business. Going by its popularity and rapid spread across the world (now available in 200 cities across 50 countries including India), workaday commuters and riders love it. It's easy and convenient (for smartphone users) and most of all, it can also be cheap, at least initially, because with its deep pockets can subsidize drivers. However, on account of its unique, disruptive model, it has also run into regulatory hurdles and liability issues in several countries, including in India.

In the US itself, the company has come under fire over privacy issues after it was discovered that its staff could track the movements of its customers through what it called a 'God mode' by using data from riders who had used its cabs. As its use of customer information because public, one of its executives targeted a journalist who had written articles against Uber, suggesting the company could use its deep pockets to dig into the personal lives and backgrounds of reporters. The executive later apologized for his remarks, but it added to the damage the company was already suffering from run-ins with various governments across the world trying to protect the traditional business model.

At the heart of the dispute is Uber getting around licensing requirements that are mandatory for traditional cabs and its ability to cut costs. Just about anyone with a smartphone who can use an app and owns a car can become an Uber driver, and because the customer is always close and at hand when the driver has his app on and has a choice of picking up the nearest rider, time and utility is optimized. ("How many Uber drivers does it take to change a light bulb? Only one, but the light bulb better not be more than five minutes away," goes one Uber joke).