Please welcome “Baby Uber “.

So we have the first baby Uber in town. Yes you heard it right , a woman gave birth to a child in an Uber cab last week. The lady who was going towards Safdarjing Enclave in Delhi went into labour . The cab driver initially panicked but then took the matter in his hands and delivered the baby in the can itself. It was a difficult situation for the cab driver, Shahnawaz, and the onlookers but it all ended well when a healthy baby was born.

“I asked them to get an ambulance”, says Shahnawaz. But even after repeated calls no ambulance was seen in sight and the driver had to take the important decision.

This is a positive news for the cab provider after the unfortunate rape incident in an uber cab last year. The woman wanted the cab the driver to name the baby and the cab driver decided to name him Uber.

After this news we wish to hear about the ‘OLA’ baby soon :).

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Brain behind google map to join Uber.

Google maps Product director Manik Gupta today announced on Linkedin that he has joined Uber as the Director of Map products. Gupta joined google in 2008 as a product manager for Google Map maker and has lead the company’s map initiative for Japan and Asia Pacific region. Gupta was promoted as a product director in 2011 and has spearheaded many feature releases in recent times.  Before joining Google , Gupta worked for HP for four years. He also had a entrepreneurial stint and co founded Buyittoghether.com which was later acquired by CoShopper in 2000.

Gupta is the second big tech move to Uber in recent times. Last month Akash Garg joined the taxi hailing app as the head of their mobile and engineering department. Garg was previously working as the engineering director with twitter.

Uber has so far raised $8.2 billion and has invested aggressively in its mapping and mobile technology.It acquired a mapping startup De Carta in March this year . The company has also hired top robotics experts from Carnegie Mellon and is also funding the university for its robotics innovations.

Ola, now worth $5billion,raises 500 million

Indian Taxi app unicorn Ola, has raised 500 million from a series of new and existing investors.The series F funding was lead by investor Baillie Gifford and existing investors like Tiger Global,Falcon edge, Softbank group and DST global.With this amount Ola has raised a total of $1.4billion from investors.The company plans to use the money to further accelerate in the existing markets and penetrate in more cities and town.The company’s app has already crossed more than 1 million in downloads and has recieved more than 1 billion bookings so far.The company is present in more than 100 cities across India.

The funding comes at an intersting time when the global market leader Uber, has planned to invest $1billion to tap the growing Indian internet population.Uber targets only high end customers in the country and is present only in 22 cities.
“As we pursue our mission to build mobility for a billion people, we are excited about bringing onboard partners who can help us get there faster,” Bhavish Aggarwal, co-founder and CEO of Ola said in a statement. “We will continue to build for the local market through innovative solutions like Ola Share, Ola Prime and Ola Money, as we grow the mobile ecosystem in India.”

According to Uber it plans to surpass its total ridership in US.The basic difference between the two services was that OLA allowed cash payement to its customers while uber only focused on the in app payments.Both the companies have come to common terms if we talk about payments.OLA recently launched its in app wallet named OLA money which allows customers to makepayments in app.

Uber launches a new feature so that the drivers can earn more efficiently

Uber is exploring ways by which their drivers can make extra cash while returing or reaching a customer.In a move that could revolutionalize the way drivers make money , uber is working on a pilot in Bay area which would match the destination of the drivers and the passengers travelling in that area.Dirvers are allowed to input their destinations and the system then identifies the people travelling in the same direction.
The move is to help driver pick and drop passenger through the system and reduce the idle time .The driver just need to select the saved searches and the app would automatically show the passengers travelling in same direction and then the driver can then ping the passenger to use their service.

The feature was initially released by their competitor lyft where the drivers were allowed to ping the users only thrice a day.It also allows the potential customers to block the feature in order to avoid unnecessary disturbances.