Lyft has stepped up to try to making driving for the rideshare service more attractive, offering a series of changes aimed at upping driver’s earnings and goodwill. One change will, by default, give a driver a 5-star rating if a passenger doesn’t rate their driver at all. The other will allow passengers set up their app to tip drivers by default — no extra taps needed after the ride. Finally, it’s also making some changes to the driver home screen, adding in predictive...

Uber may be delivering burgers by drones as soon as 2021. According to a job listing spotted by The Wall Street Journal, Uber is looking to hire an operations executive to make drone delivery functional by next year and available for commercial use by 2021. The job post referenced UberExpress — which is the internal name for UberEats' drone delivery initiative — and said the executive would help "enable safe, legal, efficient and scalable flight operations" for the program.

Toyota has invested $500m (£388m) in Uber and announced plans for the firms to collaborate on developing driverless cars for ride sharing. The carmaker said technology from each company will be used to produce purpose-built Toyota vehicles to be deployed on Uber’s ride sharing network. The first fleet of cars will be based on Toyota’s Sienna minivan, and a pilot scheme is set to begin on Uber’s network in 2021.

After a string of branding and user interface updates to Uber’s mobile application, the companies CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, has excitedly announced a new service option titled “Drive yourself” which is available to all users, today. This new option will be the lowest priced method of traveling with Uber, beating out the “Express Pool” feature released earlier this year

More people are working for ride-sharing and delivery companies but on average they’re making less.

Ride-hailing firm Uber is paying $148m (£113m) to settle legal action over a cyber-attack that exposed data from 57 million customers and drivers. The massive breach happened in 2016 but Uber sought to hide it from regulators. The company paid the hackers behind the intrusion $100,000 to delete the data they grabbed from Uber's cloud servers.

Uber and Lyft cars contribute heavily to San Francisco’s traffic slowdowns, especially in the downtown and at night, according to a report being released on Tuesday, which both companies said used a flawed and incomplete approach.

Uber briefly charged its users in downtown Sydney a minimum $100 to escape an armed hostage crisis, a result of automatic surge pricing meant to get more drivers online. An executive in the city's Central Business District (CBD) sent Mashable screenshots of the Uber app that showed the company was charging up to four-times the normal rate because "demand is off the charts."...

Last month, as Uber weathered a fresh storm of criticism about its attitude to critics and user privacy — following revelations that a senior Uber exec had floated the idea of spending money to dig up dirt on critical journalists’ private lives — Senator Al Franken posted a public letter to Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, raising concerns about the company’s apparently systematic disregard for privacy and asking that it clarify its privacy policies.

Of the many attractions offered by my hometown, a west coast peninsula famed for its deep natural harbor, perhaps the most striking is that you never have to leave the house. With nothing more technologically advanced than a phone, you can arrange to have delivered to your doorstep, often in less than an hour, takeaway food, your weekly groceries, alcohol, cigarettes, drugs (over-the-counter, prescription, proscribed), books, newspapers...

Everyone's favorite rideshare app has decided that Christmas Eve is the perfect time to slip through a small change to its Uber Taxi service. Nothing big. Just a $2 fee every single time you want to hail a cab through Uber. Motherboard has a copy of the email that Uber (very quietly) sent to UberT users, on this, a day when everyone will totally be paying attention to their emails. UberT currently works as a hailing system for yellow or boro cabs — use the app to get a ride...

Uber has called it quits in Spain, at least for now. Uber, the ride-booking company that has been plagued by vocal opposition from taxi associations and policy makers around the world, suspended its operations in Spain late Tuesday. The decision came in response to a judge’s ruling this month that the company’s low-cost service, called UberPop, did not comply with Spanish laws and potentially amounted to unfair competition for taxi drivers.

I always thought it would be fun to drive a cab. I always talk up the person driving when I take a cab or Uber. How long have they been doing it? Do they own the car or does the company? What do they think they will make tonight? About a month ago I decided I wanted to drive for Uber on New Years Eve. It seemed like an opportunity to earn a good chunk of money and experience what it was like.

I am Uber. I can see my thousands of cars. I don’t know if I am an extension of them or they are an extension of me.

Tonight we might get a glimpse of the kinder, gentler Uber, but we won’t be able to talk about it. The startup has endured months of disastrous press coverage, including Uber exec Emil Michael saying the company should smear journalists that criticize it. Now the company has emailed reporters saying “The Uber Communications Team invites you to join us for drinks” at a San Francisco bar tonight.

Ever wonder how and why Uber drivers get banned? If it’s not for criminal behavior, the waters get murky. What do Uber and Harvard have in common? Both only use the top 10 percent or so of their rating scales. For a Harvard student, the median grade is an A- and for an Uber driver, anything below a 4.7 out of 5 average rating from passengers spells trouble. Or, as one driver memorably puts it on Uber People, a popular...

Uber has been the subject of controversy all around the globe. An Indian woman who says she was raped by an Uber driver while she was traveling in his cab in December is suing the San Francisco–based online firm in a U.S. federal court in California, claiming it failed to put in place basic safety procedures while running its car service in India.

“It’s a genius way to start a business nowadays, especially because nobody’s doing it.” The man sitting beside me is sharing the most insightful business advice I’ve heard lately. His ideas are as unconventional as the location of our conversation. We’re not in a coffee shop or a corner office. We’re in an Uber and he’s my driver.

Uber waited more than five months to notify 50,000 drivers whose names and drivers-license numbers were taken in a computer-security breach last year, much longer than allowed by many state laws.

Uber's "low-cost" UberPop service has been banned in Germany after a court decided it contravened transport laws. Judges imposed fines of €250,000 (£181,000) for each violation of the order. It followed the news that the company's Paris offices were raided by police investigating the same service. And, in South Korea, nearly 30 people linked to the company, including chief executive Travis Kalanick, were charged with running an illegal taxi firm.

Uber denies that its servers were hacked after reports that thousands of usernames and passwords for the taxi-like service are available to buy for as little as $1 online. Two sellers with outlets on the AlphaBay Market dark web marketplace, hidden from the open internet within the Tor anonymity network, claim to sell stolen, working Uber credentials allowing purchasers to login and book rides. According to the market place listing, one vendor has sold over 180 Uber logins since 18 March.

An Uber driver’s secret recording of his conversation with a passenger prompted Cook County prosecutors Monday to drop rape and kidnapping charges against him, his attorney said. Maxime Fohounhedo, 30, was charged in December in the Nov. 16 sexual assault of a female passenger. Fohounhedo was expected to be released from the Cook County Jail later on Monday. He has spent the last four months behind bars.

The on-demand industry says it’s turned our concept of work upside down. But one attorney thinks we’ve been here before — again, and again, and again.

Starting in New York and Chicago, Uber says its drivers will deliver you grub wherever you are in 10 minutes or less.

Uber appears to be on the wrong side of the law — again. Authorities in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou raided the ride-sharing firm's offices on Thursday. As part of the raid, cellphones and other gear was confiscated from the offices. In a statement to The Guangzhou Daily, officials said that the company is "suspected of organizing private cars which are not qualified to provide passenger services, and of not having registered with the commercial authorities."

So Silent

Uber could be about to become one of the most valuable venture-backed startups in history after a fresh fundraising round may bump its worth up to around $50 billion.

This January, as much of the world was getting over its post-holiday hangovers, people began disappearing from Carnegie Mellon University's robotics center. At first it was only a few individuals, mostly software developers. Then it became an entire team, and eventually the group included the center's director. They weren't going far.

Uber, beware: Mexican taxi drivers will hunt you down. A leader of Mexico State's taxi drivers said as much. "We are not going to leave (Uber cars) alone. We are tracking these colleagues and hunting them down," Esteban Meza, who represents about 13,000 cabbies, told the country's top-selling newspaper, El Universal.

In cities from New York to New Delhi, the car service Uber has faced threats and bans from regulators but usually comes out on top. Has it met its match in Paris?

Uber is laying down the law in China. The ride-hailing service has ordered its drivers in China not to participate in taxi protests in the city of Hangzhou, located in Eastern China.

According to a spokeswoman for the Paris prosecutor’s office, two French executives of taxi-hailing app Uber have been arrested and are being questioned about “illicit activity” linked to the ride sharing company’s service.

Two managers of the taxi-ordering app Uber have been arrested in France. A spokeswoman for the Paris prosecutor said they were in custody for questioning over "illicit activity". Uber, which puts vetted drivers in touch with passengers, is unpopular with registered drivers in many cities because they tend to undercut prices. A recent French taxi-drivers' strike turned violent. The US company is banned in some places, but it says it will keep operating in France.

The company does not want a cap on its fleet.

An Ontario Superior Court judge has dismissed the city’s application for an injunction against Uber’s ride-hailing operations in Toronto.