As Uber works on trying to find a more profitable path ahead for its transportation-on-demand service, it has sold off one of its units that sat peripherally to that business. Fair, the car leasing startup that announced debt and equity funding of up to $1 billion in October, has acquired the active leasing portfolio of Xchange Leasing, a service Uber first established in 2015 to lease new… Read More
30
Jan
2018
Uber sells its Xchange Leasing portfolio to car leasing startup Fair
As Uber works on trying to find a more profitable path ahead for its transportation-on-demand service, it has sold off one of its units that sat peripherally to that business. Fair, the car leasing startup that announced debt and equity funding of up to $1 billion in October, has acquired the active leasing portfolio of Xchange Leasing, a service Uber first established in 2015 to lease new… Read More
Mahjoubi joined Emmanuel Macron’s team as the person in charge of all things digital while Macron was campaigning to become France’s President. He joined the French government immediately after the 2017 election and has been in charge of Digital Affairs. In addition to being the go-to policymaker for the tech industry in general, he’s also working on digital initiatives… 
French startup Spendesk just raised $9.9 million (€8 million) from Index Ventures with Michael Benabou, Laurent Asscher and Showpad cofounders Louis Jonckheere and Pieterjan Bouten also participating. Spendesk is a service that combines prepaid cards with an expense report solution. After signing up, each employee receives a personal card. Companies can top up their global Spendesk account… 
Waymo has ordered thousands of new Chrysler Pacifica minivans from FCA to help populate its autonomous ride-hailing fleet, which it will open to the public in 2018, the company says. The public launch of its Pacifica-based self-driving ride hailing service is set to occur sometime later this year, after Waymo starts testing its minivans without anyone behind the wheel, achieving true Level… 
Google has announced the completion of its $1.1 billion deal to buy a large slice of HTC’s hardware business.
The acquisition was announced back in September 2017 but now it has passed the requisite approvals and is finalized. Beyond the transfer of over 2,000 engineers from HTC — that’s around one-fifth of HTC’s engineering team — Google will also receive… 
Fitness app Strava has said it will review its privacy settings and features after it was found to have exposed the location of military bases across the world by releasing user activity data. The Strava activity heatmap was supposed to be a fun and informative look at how the world works out. It ended up, however, putting Washington on alert after a student noticed flashes of activity in… 
2018 is the year for ride-hailing expansions. Fresh from China’s Didi moving into Brazil and Taiwan, Ola in India is taking the first steps to move into the Australian market and expand its rivalry with Uber. Ola — which counts Didi as an investor — announced today that it has started recruiting drivers in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth in what will be its first expansion… 
Instagram copied the ‘Snap’ and now it might be going after the ‘chat’. A video calling feature was spotted in a non-public version of Instagram by WhatsApp industry blog WABetaInfo. It would let users who’ve begun an Instagram Direct message thread to video chat with each other. That could let people spend even more time in the app, but by actively…