Tag: uber

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It’s not just for taxis – it’s also needed for good grammar

Originally published over at Taxi Leaks, this provided a chuckle this morning and happens to sit at the intersection of two topics dear to my heart. Uber and Accurate Language. (Slightly edited for better flow and consistency with this blog’s style.)

“licence” is a noun

“license” is a verb

(in British English, the Americans use “license” for both )

Hard to remember UNLESS you think of ” advice ” and ” advise ” , which work exactly the same way but their respective pronunciations give them away.

FYI ” practice ” and ” practise ” also work the same way

SO to choose a random example :

Uber have lost their licence

Uber are no longer licensed

Uber were not deemed fit and proper to hold a licence

TfL’s licensing decision re Uber was the right one

Uber are appealing against the loss of their licence

We all hope that Uber are not relicensed

Hope that helps !

Vaughan Williams.

Who is Vaughan Williams? Producer of the stage play from the movie ‘The Knowledge’

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Couldn’t Happen To A Nicer Chap

Via Mike Allen and Axios : Travis Kalanick faces a lawsuit

Axios business editor Dan Primack landed a monster scoop this afternoon: former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick faces a lawsuit from an early Uber investor:

Benchmark Capital is suing the former Uber CEO for fraud, breach of contract and breach of fiduciary duty.

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Is It Seriously A Question?


Crunchbase reporting this morning …

SoftBank’s Son to invest in Uber…or Lyft

SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son told investors that he wants to invest in either Uber or Lyft as part of the firm’s strategy for the U.S. ride-hailing market. Son’s statement comes amid a period of high-level flux for Uber, which is still without a CEO as founder Travis Kalanick reportedly explores ways to reassert control at the company.

Well – you know who I am routing (sic) for.
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Both topics dear to my heart


My thanks to my friend Louis for sharing this link … which is called ‘Why Tesla Is Worth More Than GM’. It mentions Tesla 12 times and the word platform 3. The whole article centers on how platforms will / are going to rule the world .. no argument there … yet … though I do have my preferred approaches to how platforms should work – that I have started to write about here – and also this was an interesting read from Doc Searls just yesterday.

Here’s what’s going to happen when the whole cryptocurrency / ICO / token / blockchain / distributed ledger / distributed-everything finishes going down: We will each have far more command of what and how we pay for everything, how we remember what we paid, how we run our personal and social lives online, and how we control our relationships in an open marketplace no longer dominated by giant corporate silos and fiat currencies.
That’s my bet, anyway. Because I see the pendulum swinging away from platforms, and up the stack to new protocols. Union Square Ventures illustrates it this way:

Alas – I can’t provide a link to this post because it now seems to have gone away
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… or at least that excuse for a CEO Travis Kalanick.
Uber CEO Travis Kalanick attends the summer World Economic Forum in Tianjin, China, June 26, 2016. REUTERS/Shu Zhang – RTX2I8Y7

I have just completed this weekends catch up on my news feeds. I have written for a long time about what I consider to be the stark corruption that is in the DNA of Uber and how I believe that it emanates from the top – in the form of Travis Kalanick. (I am not alone)

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‘Uber’ is just one of the five topics that caught my eyes and ears this past week that I wanted to share with you. Enjoy.

BB-Highlight-04Excuses

Steinbeck uses the old ‘Dog ate my homework’ line …

I don’t know whether I told you. My setter pup, left alone one night, made confetti of about half of my [manuscript] book. Two months work to do over again. It sets me back. There was no other draft. I was pretty mad but the poor little fellow may have been acting critically. I didn’t want to ruin a good dog for a ms. I’m not sure is good at all. He only got an ordinary spanking with his punishment flyswatter. But there’s the work to do over from the start.

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‘Science’ is just one of the 5 things that caught my eyes and ears this past week that I wanted to share with you.

BB04Life

Sometimes things just come together in my feed. First I saw this cartoon from Gaping Void …

gapingvoid

and then I read this article from Vice.

For 18- to 29-year-olds, real wages are down and living expenses are up, but fresh batches of transplants keep coming here anyway.

Art replicating society – or the other way round?

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First published on Beyond Bridges on February 5th, 2016.

Updated February 23rd, 2016
More on 'Uber's Atomic Meltdown'

In general, it is not a great idea to put the brand of a company valued in the tens of billions of dollars in the hands of people who readily admit they don’t know what their own intentions are.

(To remind you they are talking about Travis ….

Kalanick is not a designer. He’s an engineer by training and an entrepreneur by nature. Yet he refused to entrust the rebranding process to someone else…he studied up on concepts ranging from kerning to color palettes. “I didn’t know any of this stuff,” says Kalanick. “I just knew it was important, and so I wanted it to be good.”

I knooooow – you just read a couple of books and you are good to go – who needs training, experience, capability … or the bill for that matter !

The Original Piece Follows

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