San Francisco’s largest taxi company is edging toward filing for bankruptcy. Yellow Cab Co-Op said challenges from tech rivals Uber and Lyft, as well as mounting lawsuits from traffic collisions contributed to the fiscal Hail Mary. Those “rideshare” companies are headquartered in San Francisco – their home turf. Regular cab operations will not be affected in the near future and Yellow Cab has no plans to close if it can successfully restructure, representatives said.

What began as a small lawsuit brought by four former Uber drivers against the tech-titan just expanded into a potentially industry-crippling class action suit that could force the company to rethink its entire business model. Attorney Shannon Liss-Riordan first filed suit against Uber back in 2013, on behalf of four Uber drivers in San Francisco who wanted the company to reimburse them for their business expenses. Uber claims it's not required to pay for things...

Edmonton city council has approved a bylaw that will allow ride-sharing companies like Uber to operate legally. Councillors voted in favour of the bylaw on Wednesday. The bylaw, which takes effect March 1, includes two licences: one for ride-sharing companies, called private transportation providers, and the other for taxis. Mayor Don Iveson said the bylaw is a result of demand for more choice in the vehicle for hire industry.

"If I'm doing something useful for the company, I should be paid for that time,” Mark says to me as he drives me over the Brooklyn Bridge. “That's what work is, right?” It seems like a simple enough principle. And yet when it comes to the nature of work in the digital platform economy, getting paid for that time is anything but a simple proposition. Mark has a special appreciation for what constitutes value to a corporation.

Andrew Crow, Uber’s head of design, has announced that he’s leaving the company. Since joining in 2014, he helped grow Uber’s design team from 30 to nearly 200 while leading "all aspects of design," according to his LinkedIn, "including Product, Brand, Marketing, Content Strategy & Copywriting, and Design Research. " Before Uber, he was a global brand and design director at GE. Crow announced the news on Medium last week...

Quebec Transport Minister Jacques Daoust and Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre are calling for the suspension of UberX while a government committee examines how taxis and the popular app-based ride service can co-exist in the province. The calls to suspend UberX come in the wake of a demonstration Wednesday that saw hundreds of taxis disrupt traffic at Montreal's Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport.

The rise of Uber has convinced many pundits, economists, and policymakers that freelancing via digital platforms is becoming increasingly important to Americans’ livelihood. It has also promoted the idea that new technology—particularly the explosion of platforms enabling the gig economy—will fundamentally alter the future of work. While Uber and other new companies in the gig economy receive a lot of attention, a look at Uber’s own data about its drivers’...

Travis Kalanick, founder and CEO of Uber, took the stage at TED 2016 to talk about the “future of human-driven transportation.” How can we use technology to cut traffic, congestion, and parking woes? Kalanick suggested that we have the technology; the problems lie in the current regulatory landscape. And Kalanick believes that history is on his side. There was “an Uber before there was Uber,” Kalanick said during his presentation today.

According to data provided by Uber to BuzzFeed News, the company received five claims of rape, and “fewer than” 170 claims of sexual assault directly related to an Uber ride as inbound tickets to its customer service database between December 2012 and August 2015. Uber provided these numbers as a rebuttal to screenshots obtained by BuzzFeed News. The images which were provided by a former Uber customer...

Uber has revealed it received five rape allegations between December 2012 and August 2015. The firm said the figure accounted for 0.0000009% of more than 500 million Uber journeys made during that time. The information was released after Buzzfeed obtained screenshots suggesting more than 5,000 messages concerning rape had been logged by Uber customer support. But Uber said the numbers were "highly misleading".

"I asked Dalton what made him get his gun tonight and he said the Uber app made him."

Quick recap: ride-sharing behemoth Uber is famous for connecting passengers with people who have their own cars. (Well, among other things.) Uber doesn't own a fleet of cars for would-be drivers to use, which makes the fact that the company seems to have purchased least 100,000 Mercedes Benz S-Classes from Daimler all the more fascinating. What gives? Germany's Manager Magazin, which broke the story earlier today...

It’s disgusting, it’s duplicitous, and apparently, it’s being done in Uber cars across the United States. A number of reports have surfaced claiming that Uber drivers are planting fake vomit in their cars to collect cleaning fees from unsuspecting customers. The latest alleged victim of such a scandal is Manhattan-based art director Meredith Mandel, who says that her Uber driver placed yellow vomit around his car’s dashboard...

Uber is suing Indian rival Ola, alleging it created more than 90,000 fake accounts to interfere with its business and frustrate its drivers. The US company claims the fake accounts were used to make over 400,000 false bookings that ended up cancelled. It filed a lawsuit in the High Court of Delhi this month requesting an injunction against Ola and $7.4m (£5.2m) in damages. OlaCabs has denied the accusations, calling them "frivolous and false".

The idea that an "Uber for X" model could fit any service proved arrogant, especially for customer-service focused startups.

Travis Kalanick, founder and Chief Executive Officer of Uber, really didn't want to deal with a lawsuit brought against him by one angry former customer: for the past three months, his lawyers have been trying to get the judge to drop the case, which claims that Uber's pricing algorithm violates antitrust laws. But yesterday, Manhattan judge Jed Rakoff ruled that he won't dismiss the suit, which is seeking class-action status on behalf...

Uber Technologies Inc [UBER.UL] on Tuesday released its first ever transparency report detailing the information requested by not only U.S. law enforcement agencies, but also by regulators. The ride-sharing company said that between July and December 2015, it had provided information on more than 12 million riders and drivers to various U.S. regulators and on 469 users to state and federal law agencies.

For the first time, San Francisco is going to require the 37,000 Lyft and Uber drivers who work in the city seven or more days a year to obtain a business license. City Treasurer Jose Cisneros wouldn’t fully explain why he is now requiring the license, which will cost drivers $91 annually, when the companies started operations years ago. But one reason, he said, is that the city launched its online business registration system in March...

There’s an uncomfortable amount of fraud in the ride-hailing app industry. Drivers have been caught doing everything from spoofing their locations to faking rides to cash in on subsidies. Apps like Uber, China’s Didi Kuaidi, and India’s Ola have rolled out a suite of security features to crack down on fraud and get a handle on who the hell is driving those cars. The latest comes from Uber, which today unveiled a sophisticated new facial recognition feature to make...

Uber drivers made news last week when the company settled class-action suits that could pay drivers as much as $100 million, but court documents show that most eligible drivers will probably get less than $25. The suits covered Uber drivers in California and Massachusetts who said they were not independent contractors, as Uber claimed, but employees.