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Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi is enthusiastic about the companys pilot with Waymo. In Q1 prepared remarks, he said the launch in Austin has exceeded our expectations, noting that the 100 self-driving vehicles there were busier than 99% of the citys human drivers. The strong performance has Uber looking ahead to its next Waymo rollout in Atlanta. But Waymo isnt Ubers only autonomous partner. Just hours before Khosrowshahis comments were released, Uber announced an expanded deal with WeRide, a global rival to Waymo. WeRides robotaxis will soon launch in 15 new cities outside the U.S. and China. While Waymo may be Ubers marquee U.S. partner, the rideshare giant is making it clear it wont rely on just one self-driving tech provider. Ubers expanding self-driving deals In the United States, Waymo remains the dominant force in robotaxis, especially since Cruise has shuttered. Waymo’s autonomous vehicles are already operating in Austin and are set to launch in Atlanta. Waymos safety record and rider experience coupled with Ubers scale and reliability in the market have ensured that these vehicles are extremely busy, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi noted in his Q1 remarks. But the Uber-Waymo relationship hasnt been without friction. When Waymo announced a Miami expansion without Uber in December, Ubers stock took a hit. In response, the company unveiled new American partnerships, first with Volkswagen in April and then with May Mobility in June. (Uber declined to comment for this story.) Meanwhile, Ubers international self-driving investments are accelerating. Just ahead of Khosrowshahis remarks, the company announced an expanded partnership with WeRide, the Chinese robotaxi firm already operating with Uber in Abu Dhabi. The new agreement covers 15 additional citiesintentionally outside both the U.S. and Chinaand includes a $100 million investment. The same week, Uber announced an expanded deal with Pony.ai, another Chinese autonomous vehicle company. While the agreement excludes operations in China and the U.S., it significantly broadens their collaboration across the Middle East. Just days earlier, Uber also announced a new partnership with Momenta for deployment across Europe. To date, Uber has inked deals with 18 self-driving companies. Waymo may still be Ubers biggest U.S. bet, but globally, the ride-hailing giant is hedging those bets fast. Who should lead the robotaxi revolution? Not long ago, Uber was hoping to produce robotaxis, and not just commission them. The company invested over $1 billion into their own self-driving technology. But in 2020, it pulled the plug, selling its autonomous vehicle unit to Aurora, where CEO Dara Khosrowshahi now sits on the board. Uber isnt alone among American companies that failed to crack autonomous driving. Lyft also abandoned its self-driving ambitions. Cruise, General Motors robotaxi division, effectively shut down after one of its vehicles dragged a pedestrian about 20 feet. Tesla continues to hype its Full Self-Driving (FSD) software, but Elon Musks promised robotaxi still hasnt arrived. That leaves Waymo as the leadingif not the onlyAmerican contender in the robotaxi race. Meanwhile, Chinese firms like WeRide, Pony.ai, and Momenta are rapidly expanding. Uber is poised to play a major role in this growing global market, serving autonomous rides to its loyal user base. For now, Uber isnt picking just one horseits betting on the entire field.
Category:
E-Commerce
When India banned TikTok in 2020, YouTube responded by launching a short-form video feature with a similar user experience in the country. Less than a year later, that feature rolled out globally as YouTube Shorts, which allows creators to post 180-second-long swipeable vertical content. Today, YouTube Shorts has roughly 1.5 billion users and receives an average of 70 billion daily views. With TikToks future in limbo in the U.S.a much-delayed ban is set to take effect on June 19Shorts is hoping that TikToks audience of almost 2 billion people will see it as a compelling alternative. YouTube is already the second-most visited site in the world, and the platform has spent years building a strong creator ecosystem. YouTube Shorts product lead Todd Sherman came on the Most Innovative Companies Podcast to talk working with creators, tweaking the Shorts algorithm, and competing with TikTok. It’s been five years since you launched YouTube Shorts in India. Why did you create the product, and why launch it in India first? I worked at Twitter when we had Vine and I recognized it as the beginning of something. Even though Vine didn’t continue forward, and other apps took its place, none quite had the same vibe. At YouTube, we wanted to get into short-form video. We felt like it was going to give a whole new generation of creators a voice and would also be really fun to watch short videos between moments throughout the day. India was an important proving ground. Theres a long tail of Android devices there and a lot of them are lower-end. Theres a massive group of creative people [there], and it has a really big population, so we wanted to plant a stake in that market. Around five years ago, as YouTube Shorts launched, TikTok took off in the Unites States. How did you think about that product as you were developing Shorts? A lot of people started paying attention to short form video when TikTok started to get scale. [But] I had been paying attention to it since Vine, and pushing for us to make progress there even before TikTok was a mainstream name. It’s interesting to take inventory of how short-form video evolved. At first it was just squarish videos with no algorithm and a really basic camera where you just held your finger on the screen to record segments. Then Dubsmash and Musical.ly really embraced the remix of the sound. They added the audio pivot page where you could see all of the other videos that were using that sound, but there still really weren’t great algorithms. What [TikTok developer and eventual Musical.ly acquirer] ByteDance did is they were applying machine learning algorithms to short-form video in a way that none of the other ones had been. I think the most impressive thing about the rise of TikTok is really their algorithm and how effective they are at finding videos that you want to watch, [while] also supporting creator growth. There’s always two sides to the algorithm. It’s how easy is it to get started and [get viewers] inspired, but then also how good is it at serving viewer needs? That continues to be a really bright spot for them. Something that is a huge commitment for us is improving the algorithm over time. Does the Shorts algorithm operate the same way as the longer YouTube one? There’s many things that are different in short form because you watch so many more of them. So you approach the amount of diversity across hundreds of videos across different topics or creators differently than if youre serving people 10 or 15 videos a day that are longer form. In short form, you can proactively introduce people to new things more easily, because the cost of being wrong is a lot lower. Do Shorts viewers often click through to watch longer videos from creators they like? That’s one way that happens. We also try to understand these videos through technology. We try to know how videos are related, even if one is short or one is long. We feed these [videos] into what we call an embedding space that [has] a higher dimensional video understanding capability. And so that means a short video can sit in this spot [where] it shares space with longer videos. Because of that, we say to ourselves, here’s all the videos that you enjoy about training dogs, and maybe [some of them are] short videos. Because we have that understanding, we can start to recommend longer videos related to that. Does that work across categories? I like dance videos that are short. I might not actually longer dance videos. Longer ones tend to be more about choreography and I have zero hopes of ever dancing in any respectable way. So from a personalized point of view, I only like one and not the other, whereas for dog training or science videos, I may like both. So the algorithm is personalized. Last year, Shorts went from being one-minute long to three-minutes long. Why did you make that decision? We’re always listening to creators. Sometimes when people are telling a story, it just feels like they’re hitting against this wall. I would go to creator events and ask them what is on their wishlist. Especially amongst people that have this narrative-style storytelling where they’re scripting and there’s a dialogue, they were asking if they could get a little breathing room. It led us to say, we think that we can expand this while still preserving the shorter side of videos. Around a minute and 45 seconds-long, videos tends to be more narrative style, where you have beginning, middle, and end. We want all those stories to be told on YouTube. You recently changed the way views are counted on the platform. Why is that? On long-form YouTube, most engagement comes from people explicitly selecting a video. They’re tapping or they’re clicking and then they’re watching. The vast majority of engagement is explicit. When we started auto-playing things, we asked ourselves, when should we count it as a view? Should it just be immediately? No, we think we should basically approximate it to be equivalent to when somebody clicked or tapped. So we started adding watch time thresholds. Then we inherited that for Shorts. But when we looked at Shorts and what people were telling us, they were telling us they expect it to start counting views [as soon as] they see the video. [We would] talk to new creators, and they’re like, I got zero viewsno one saw my video. Actually, that wasnt true. A lot of people liked their video, but no one watched the video up to the threshold that we define as a view. Within short-form content, most engagement is not coming from explicitly selecting a specific video. It’s coming from people swiping in the feed. So it’s a bit of a redefinition of view. We made the decision [to count all views as views no matter the threshold] because the fundamentals of the product are that when people view your video, they’re just sort of swiping into it. What are your conversations like with Shorts creators?Thescale of Shorts is now that we sort of have to segment creators to kind of talk about them. [Some] long-form creators are effectively production studios with teams. When you think about how they like to use Shorts, they love it as either kind of a creative outlet to try something new. They use it as a testing ground for new ideas. And if something pops off there, then maybe they’ll go and invest 80 hours making a longer video. Who are your favorite creators to follow? I really like Nile Red. He’s this chemist. We watch a lot of his shorts in the living room because he does these little science experiments, and I have little kids. We recently watched one where he tried to make coffee end to end. I’ve also been getting into cooking videos. I don’t know how to cook well, but there’s something I love about watching people quickly prepare a meal. Ian Fujimoto has great storytelling and a great personality. Theres also Nick Suarez who has a channel The Nick of Time where they involve their family in internet trends.
Category:
E-Commerce
Booking travel has become a bit of a gameespecially if you want to get the best possible prices and avoid getting ripped off. Thats because hotels and airlines have developed the lovely habit of futzing around endlessly with their rates. Depending on when, exactly, you go to book the room or flight you want, you might end up being charged way more than if you waited a few days or even hours for prices to drop. The problem is that its damn-near impossible to figure out the logic behind it and know the right time to buy. And who among us has the time or energy to stay on top of that and keep checking back at all hours with the hope of magically stumbling onto a magnificent deal? Well, my fellow savings-seeker, weve officially got a better way. Its a completely free-to-use service, with no downloads or installations involved. In fact, its right in front of your facejust waiting to be found. Be the first to find all sorts of little-known tech treasures with my free Cool Tools newsletter from The Intelligence. One useful new discovery in your inbox every Wednesday! Your travel-planning deal-seeker Our tool in question is actually just a websiteone you mightve even visited before. But its got a simple-seeming new switch that massively boosts its usefulness and transforms what its able to accomplish. The tool is none other than Googles hotel search site. The site has long been a handy way to compare hotel prices and reviews for any given date and locationand now, as of this month, it sports a single subtle switch that can save you serious money. The switch automatically tracks prices on any specific dates and destinations youre considering. Once you flip it into the active position, Google will send you updates via email anytime prices drop with any hotels that match your parametersso that way, youll instantly know the second savings become available and you can zip over to complete your purchase right at that most optimal moment. Youll need about 20 seconds to get things going. Just head to google.com/hotels in any browser, on any device, and look for the newly added Track hotel prices options within the search area at the top of the screenafter youve put in a location and dates. That new “Track hotel prices” toggle is the key to finding good deals. If you arent seeing the switch right away, try clicking or tapping on a specific hotel in the resultsor try performing a different search and then coming back to your original search after. It can be a little finicky at first, but once the switch shows up once, it seems to stick around even as you change the specific parameters youre searching for. Its placement may change, but the purpose remains the same. Google offers a similar switch on its flight search site, too, by the way. There, you have to start a new searchthen the switch will show up once youve selected specific flights. One quick click, and you can find the best prices on flights, too. Either way, once you flip the switch, Google will email you alerts to let you know anytime prices change. (You will need to be signed into Google during the initial search, for obvious reasonsor it wont know your email address and be able to send you those updates!) Alerts about price drops land right in your regular inbox. Notably, you still end up making your purchase through the actual hotel or airlineor, if you so choose, a third-party reseller. Google itself doesnt handle any transactions or payments; it just scans all sorts of sources for the best possible prices, then links you out to the appropriate place whenever youre ready to buy. Bonus tip: If you own an Android device, combine this site with the app-creating advice I shared in a recent issue of my Android Intelligence newsletter for a powerful one-two punch of on-demand efficiency! Googles hotel search site and flight search site are both available on the webno apps or downloads required. The services, including their price-tracking systems, are completely free to use. And they follow Googles standard privacy practices, in which no personal data is ever sold or shared with any third parties. Ready for more life-enhancing excellence? Check out my free Cool Tools newsletter for an instant introduction to an exceptional audio app that’ll tune up your daysand another off-the-beaten-path gem every Wednesday!
Category:
E-Commerce
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