Uber in China:

http://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/20...o/ideas/nexus/

Few questions:

1) Why do you think route density is immaterial to logistics? Taxis serve as the de facto last mile logistic companies in many areas. DHL failed in the US due to a lack of this infrastructure. Examples abound.
2) Uber has two pure logistic products. So the comment about it being a taxi company alone is both idiotic and false indicative of someone talking about something without any clue what the underlying business actually is.
3) Why did they rebrand to a tagline that explicitly references logistics instead of sticking with "Everyone's private driver"?

You probably just agree with him out of specific ignorance rather than being ill suited to understand the technical and infrastructure advantages they're gearing up for.

Ah you see that is a more fair way for al concerned.

But i wonder if uber screens people that they let use their app/service?

Because it would be easier for lets say criminals as for instance rapists, muggers, drug dealers too get them self a cover.

Do they have any security towards that kind of abuse of the uber app/services.

JUst wondering.

Yes, Uber do criminal checks. They go as far as sending drivers older model iPhones for dash mounting, and paired bluetooth earpieces that speak directions. In places where laws or regulators are unfavorable, they organize grass roots lobbying.

They are on top of everything they can do in a way that most companies could learn from. They are also very, very, very good at dealing with the risk and problems and potential PR disasters of their business. Exceptional, in fact. They are Scientology level of dedication, it's almost scary (and excellent if you're going to bet on them to win this space, which they probably won't for other reasons).

Long haul freight gets interesting again with self-driving trucks. At the end of the day, no matter how contemptible the vast majority of them are as people, even long haul truckers want to go "home" at some point, which complicates routing.

Once that's in place you end up fighting over who will solve the "traveling salesman" problem the best.

I don't see a situation anytime in the near future where warehouses are building significant LTL and FTL loads without a shipping option already in place. The SLA's and penalties for late shipments are crushing. Not to mention that a lot of the time the company scheduling the shipment (who owns the inventory) isn't the company building/loading the shipment (who runs the warehouse).

Ok thank you.
But seeing what a uber driver can make they are not so dedicated in what they pay their drivers[or percentage they pay their driver] and dedication from personnel i think includes a good paycheck, and saying they need the money too grow/invest does not go that far.
And i bet the owners are not forgetting about themselves if it comes to finances, seeing they are busy with a high risk business that could fail if too many country's [trying too] ban/forbid their app/business model as it is now.

So even you could be right, but they have too deal with a lot of country's with their own rules, so yea they must/better be dedicated too fight on so many fronts.

Because when you are going to get too many ex-drivers so too say , are going too say uber is not paying enough, that is not going to be good for a so called starting company, you know what they say too much negative publicity is going to drive the investors away, and that is almost the same in any country.
And with all the estimates of what uber is worth, nobody is going to believe the owners are putting all their money back in the company and don't take care of themselves, most people are going to see them as another couple of greedy bastards making a quick fortune, whatever the truth is.

I very well may be ignorant to the specifics but I have the exact background you described. The only 'logistics' program I was familiar with was the Christmas tree thing and I don't really think that qualifies in my mind because the niche application of that doesn't really seem relevant to the larger logistics market (and isn't worth much money).

The logistics markets and agents I'm familiar with universally operate around good freight, meaning customers that have reasons to need care, quality, expediency and/or problem solving with their loads. Getting a load of mulch from A to B is basically irrelevant because the customer will use the cheapest solution he can come up with regardless of the market, logistics operators as a whole will never make money from this type of freight, it simply takes the slack capacity or one notch above that at best from the worst/broke/desperate operators.

The money comes from freight like cleverly and efficiently packaging up LTL loads, sensitive produce, oversized loads, legally complex freight, high value, just in time manufacturing, fickle third parties, time sensitivity, etc..

Bottom line is, the skills required to overcome these varying issues (which all the billion dollar+ operators live in) don't really relate to Uber at all. I could very well be missing something but I need someone to explain to me what type of freight Uber is going to get in volume or quality that ties into any advantages they have.

I'm not exactly sure what you meant by route density but if you're referring to Uber somehow understanding logistics volume areas better than say UPS (who stopped making left turns in 2006) I would like to see some elaboration as to why you think they have an advantage.

I really don't understand your harping on about logistics/delivery/transport. It's utterly irrelevant to Uber. They live or die on taxi/human transport services. Some numbers for you:

Number of trips taken per day in the US: 1.1 billion, or 1100 million. 87% are in private cars.

Number of packages delivered each day in the US by UPS and Fedex: 20 million. And most of these have the unbeatable economy of a driver doing a route with large numbers of packages; point to point is a tiny fraction. Any other kind of package services like shopping or goods delivery are a) already serviced and b) require someone versed in the business and c) best serviced and most cheaply serviced and already serviced by emanating with staff from point of goods.

Packages are irrelevant for Uber, and Uber isn't going after larger freight, and even if they did there's zero money in it. Your focus on logistics is just a waste of everyone's time. The only thing worth talking about with Uber is transporting humans.

Good to see you respond. My point about math and tech is that it is simply table stakes for understanding this topic. If you aren't capable of understanding the underlying technologies (many people in math and tech simply aren't, as well), then you have no hope to understand their business proposition.

Your experience sounds cool. Logistics is around 9 trillion at last glance. You seem to think that there are many stratified layers of logistics. And that is true! But how much of logistics is simply: "Get something place to place pretty soon"? Uber is not going to attack overnight seafood to Tulsa.

I find it somewhat baffling you'd comment on a topic about Uber and their value proposition with understanding the literal core element of their business. The virtuous cycle/route density/whiz-bang algos are all about reducing marginal cost for delivery of the next person/item/etc. If you can reduce the marginal cost for delivery, you can effectively seize the commodity market. There are large barriers to entry for some instances (the last mile business that USPS/Fedex/UPS occupy currently). Their whole business model is based on this. If people can attack route density (lyft et al), then they're ****ed. If there are economies of scale to route density, then they can easily scale to hundreds of billions.

Does that make it more clear?

You are just so out of your depth here it's laughable. You're stuck in abstractions with no clue of how the real world works.

Here's a challenge: why don't you list five things in non-human-transport logistics that Uber could do better, how large the market is, and how they would make money from it. Be specific.

I say this not to antagonize you. The fact is that you're never going to understand the issues without getting away from your laughably simple abstract model and looking at the real world.

Many of your abstract ideas and generalizations do however apply to human transport, where logistics are currently terrible for a number of reasons and no one has attacked the problem.

It seems like it all depends on how far reaching their patents are.

http://www.faqs.org/patents/app/20130246207

Dynamic pricing as it's explained in that patent could be applied to anything.

When there's a finite supply of trucks to move cargo you could inflate prices based on demand to allow the vendors with the highest time sensitivity to take priority.

I just have a hard time believing it doesn't already exist in practically every industry, and the idea of courts coming down on companies for adjusting their prices based on demand... it's hard to imagine.

Price gouging is illegal in plenty of jurisdictions.

I don't think the patent will hold for 2 reasons off top of my head:

1a. That patent reads a whole lot like a class on "yield management" that every airline has been practicing since long before Uber existed.
1b. Amazon (and other retailers) has already been practicing "dynamic pricing" for years. Amazon actually took it even farther and had individualized prices (that didn't go over well with customers)
2a. Even Uber itself is declining to sue to protect this patent.
2b. Google (and I suspect Amazon too) has its own dynamic pricing patent that predates Uber.

Ultimately I think Uber got this patent to protect itself from patent trolls with essentially the same patent.

On a practical level, business customers have no interest in dynamic pricing.

Price gouging laws have to do with emergencies.

You forgot to respond to the post that claimed that dynamic pricing is the norm.

Do you think this is defensible?

Your original comment was neckbearding on the legality of dynamic pricing. I'm sure you'll also equivocate to some silly view like everyone else. Or just fall back into outright falsehoods. That is what most of this thread consists of.

Do I think what is defensible? That prices are frequently influenced by demand in all industries, or that courts wouldn't recognize the validity of that patent?

http://www.wsj.com/articles/federal-...ing-1411343300

I'm not sure what your point is. Or what that nonsense is that is disguised behind a paywall.

You're trying to ramble about Alice Corp v CLS. Whatever. If you are an internet blowhard, you learn something. If you are in the field, you don't. (Much like the people who just learned that 18m ago Uber made public moves into logistics)

If their patent on the tech isn't recognized their value in that space is whatever it would cost someone else to do it. I get that it's an economy of scale but there're some pretty key distinctions between what they're doing and something like adwords and I guess time will exactly how difficult/costly it is for competitors to produce an alternative.

Dude logistics is ALL seafood to Tulsa. Or Watermelons to Chicago. Or auto parts to Michigan. Or beer to everywhere. It's not a monolithic 9T dollars in one segment... It's 1000's of segments combined in an arbitrary and abstract way to add up to 9T with the slapped on label 'logistics'.

It's already a fairly competitive business, and it has been a competitive business for years. Uber has shown that it can do a good job of attacking one fairly large segment of the transportation industry. That doesn't mean that they're going to successfully challenge 3PL's on their home turf.

The company that builds 'uber for the freight spot market' is going to be a tech startup with a hardcore trucking background. They have a decent chance of disrupting the major 3PLs.

The major carriers won't be affected by this as 90+% of their business is LTL/parcel/contract FTL. This means that XPO-Conway, CHR, UPS, Fedex, etc are going to be 100% fine. TQL is probably the most likely victim of this along with countless smaller shops.

It seems pretty likely imo that, in a not too distant future, Uber, as it is today, will be replace by a DAO.

Uber in India:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/sarithar...in-two-months/


London:

http://techcrunch.com/2015/09/30/ube...-rule-changes/


Middle East/North Africa:

http://www.arabianbusiness.com/focus...l#.VhFXzmujIso

Taxi going full bu

http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article...-show-a-profit

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