Skip to main content

Google Parent Leads a $1 Billion Investment in Lyft.

Google's parent company is throwing its financial support behind ride-hailing service Lyft, deepening its rift with market leader Uber.

Alphabet Inc., which gets most of its money from Google's digital ad network, is leading a $1 billion investment in Lyft that values the privately held company at $11 billion. The investment announced Thursday is being made through Alphabet's CapitalG venture capital arm.

Lyft is still far smaller and worth far less than Uber, another privately held company based in San Francisco whose investors have valued it at nearly $70 billion.

But Uber has been enmeshed in internal strife amid management upheaval and allegations of rampant sexual harassment that culminated in the departure of co-founder Travis Kalanick. Uber lured away Expedia's CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, to replace Kalanick and clean up the mess.

Lyft has seized on Uber's turmoil as an opportunity to gain ground on its rival in the rapidly growing ride-hailing market while expanding into more cities across the U.S. Its drivers' cars can now be summoned by 95 percent of the U.S. population, up from 54 percent at the beginning of this year.

"While we've made great progress towards our vision, we're most excited about what lies ahead," Lyft President John Zimmer said in a statement.

Alphabet, which is based in Mountain View, California, has also emerged as a thorn in Uber's side, even though Google was among Uber's early investors and still holds a stake in the company.

Google's self-driving car spin-off Waymo is suing Uber in federal court, alleging that its former ally recruited some of its top engineers as part of an elaborate scheme to steal its trade secrets. The high-profile legal battle is scheduled to go to trial in early December and, if Waymo prevails, could cost Uber billions of dollars in damages and derail its efforts to build its own fleet of self-driving cars.

The falling out dates back to last year when Kalanick became convinced that Waymo intended to deploy its robotic cars in a rival ride-hailing service. Those tensions prompted one of Google's top executives, David Drummond, to resign from Uber's board last year. Shortly after Drummond stepped down, Google's mapping service, Waze, began to expand a carpooling program that could eventually draw riders away from Uber.

Earlier this year, Waymo and Lyft formed a partnership to begin testing self-driving cars on the roads in a move that was widely seen as another attack on Uber.

Now that Lyft is growing even closer to the Alphabet family with the $1 billion investment, it is giving one of the seats on its board of directors to a CapitalG partner -- David Lawee.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Online wealth.

I've got little to say about myself. I'm interested in wealth in a legal ways. I've spent time searching for how to make money online without failing in the hands of scammers, without selling Ebooks that will involve one taking illegal steps online too, and at it, I came across some. I'm not going to collect a dime and they're things one can do by oneself. You can get in touch with me and I'll show you. I'm from Nigeria, mentioning Nigeria, I know most of you'll have a kind of funny thoughts. We've got some honest as well as dis honest people everywhere. I'm also going to be posting motivational and inspirational stories to encourage people too. Before I go, I'll like to leave you with something. The least they paid is $1. You can get in touch vis the following numbers; cell phone number: +2348032739705, Blackberry pin: 216F1C6E my email is jsiahtoycom@gmail.com

AWS Battles Rivals: Advertising Campaign

Amazon Web Services has defeated IBM in a competition for lucrative federal contracts, threatened Microsoft's core businesses, and reshaped corporate technology. In the last few months, the pioneering cloud-computing unit of the online retail giant has taken a page from the playbook of some of its more traditional competitors: It started advertising. Ads have been splashed across billboards and in airport terminals, television spots and web videos, featuring a whiteboard full of sketches of software architecture and appeals to invent something using Amazon's collection of rented computing services. The advertising campaign, which bears the "Build On" tagline, represents a milestone in AWS' march from technology upstart to one of the major players in business software, technologists and marketers say. For many years, AWS didn't advertise, partly because it didn't have to. The service held a wide lead over the competition, and word-of-mouth was enough to...

It's real and cool, no scam involve.

Beat Bad Breath naturally!   Breathing nauseating odor from mouth makes isolate you from the goodies of societies. It is a state when you are not wanted to utter even a single word or breathe publicly. Bad breath is a result of many a factor such as dentures, cavities, throat infection, alcohol, smoking, lung infection, anything from food to poor oral hygiene. Thanks to some the natural home remedies that prove immensely helpful in getting rid of bad breathe. Following are some helpful tips to overcome bad breath. 1. The first and foremost thing to be bear in mind is dont forget to brush your teeth after every meal. 2. Sweeten your breath by chewing up a few cardamom seeds. The aromatic flavor in cardamom freshens up your breath. 3. Often drink one glass of lemon juice with little salt and sugar. 4. Chew up some leaves of Parsley for fresh breath. 5. Tea made from Fenugreek (methi) seeds also helps relieve of bad odor and bad breath. 6. Before going to bed, rinse your mouth ...