Overall this is great, and hopefully will lead to something evolving that has the convenience and function of Uber but is less abusive... this bit brought me up though:
this sort of crowdsourced information provides drivers with the opportunity to game the system, for example by agreeing to log off from the app simultaneously, thereby tricking Uber's algorithms into thinking there is a shortage of drivers and implementing surge pricing to tempt them back.
Isn't this market manipulation? Like Enron deliberately shutting down lots of power stations in California to push up prices?
1. Or like competitors getting together and setting prices. Uber drivers are "independent contractors" and not employees. Presumably antitrust laws would rule out this kind of action.
The haptic feedback angle reminded me of this. https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/attentivu/overview/
No way that could result in something horrible (micropayments based on amount of attention apparently paid to work in hand say)
3: Maybe. Uber is currently suing Seattle over its ride-share driver collective bargaining ordinance on that theory (as well as a horizontal boycott theory). Seattle has already pared back the ordinance some in what looks like an implicit recognition that it was vulnerable to the price-fixing claim. I don't know nearly enough about antitrust to know how the case should come out.
Isn't this market manipulation?
No, because its not an actual market. Its an algorithm controlled by a single entity that pretends to be a market.
Amazon has been granted patents for ultrasonic wristbands
Not that I put this kind of thing past them, but patents are often speculative. "Company X has a patent for Y!" really tells you nothing about whether or not Y really exists or is being used. Stick to the really existing atrocities.
(At more than one of my jobs in tech, I have been in meetings whose entire purpose is "Let's dream up shit we can patent, no matter how tenuously related to our products" This led to at least one patent application for "Z Device that includes both X and Y", where Z was our specialty, already quite well-patented, and X and Y were basically unrelated commodity technologies that happened to be useful.)
When my employer was briefly owned by a big evil company, there was a push to develop a defensive patent portfolio. They provided financial incentives for patenting anything that had even the remotest chance of being accepted--their strategy was defense in quantity, not quality. (If they had ever actually come to blows with an incumbent power, they would've found their portfolio more useless than the Maginot line.) Then leadership changed and the project, with everything else (including my unit) was abandoned. Long story short, my name is on a bunch of unapproved (and will never be approved) patent applications for silly, over-specific things. Only one of them came close, but it turned out the TurboTax people had beat me by a year.
You can search the patent databases from a number of countries in the world on google's patentsearch if you are curious.
10 is a common strategy, such that a given field is often a mutually-assured-destruction zone of patents. You're always violating a few dozen of your competitor's patents, but no matter, they're violating a few dozen of yours, and nobody wants to make things messy.
Jammies' former employer also ran that game plan, the patent-the-whole-world method of profit.
But it isn't actually profitable, right? Except in some very indirect sense that it allows larger companies to threaten smaller.
but no matter, they're violating a few dozen of yours
Only if you are big. All the little people are fucked.
Startups are also encouraged to go for as many patents as resources allow on the theory that it makes them a more attractive acquisition target. When I was with my dinky 2-3 person outfit we put a fair amount of effort into getting one, which maybe would have meant something if we'd ever gotten big enough to annoy a competitor, but as it was just set us up for an astounding amount of junk mail after it was issued. ("Get your patent in a dumb frame! Get your patent on a coffee mug!")
Anyway, I stopped ordering food delivery except small businesses that deliver their own food. If I want fast food, I'll drive to get it because of ethics and assuming people will steal my fries otherwise.
10. Ouch. If TurboTax beats you by a year, you know what you are doing is useless anyway.