HAI
CAN HAZ UBERDEPLOY?
VISIBLE "O HAI! WILL U HAZ UBERKITTY?"
LOL VAR R USERSEZ
IM IN YR LOOP
GIMMEH USERSEZ
IZ USERSEZ LIEK "KITTENS!"?
YARLY
VISIBLE "KITTYZ IN YR LAP!"
UBERDEPLOY
KTHX
NOWAI
VISIBLE "CAN U HAZ KITTYZ?"
KTHX
KTHX
One of the big things they stressed, at least for the dogs, was how important it was to play with the them. Expose them to people, scratch their ears through the grate on their kennel, pay attention to them, etc. etc.
The reasoning being that dogs who are used to humans, and are affectionate towards them, are more likely to get adopted.
If this was for dogs, it would be a HUGE benefit to them. Getting them out around people is almost always a good thing for them.
Just to give some perspective, my own cat loves people, strange or familiar, it doesn't matter at all. Take her to the vet in a car though, and she will go mental, crap and pee in the cat carrier, meow and hiss when she gets let outside of it (never does that otherwise) and be extremely edgy for sometimes 2 days afterwards. I wouldn't go as far as saying this is 'cruel' to the kittens, and it's great that the proceedings are donated to an animal shelter, but I'm pretty sure the kittens will not enjoy it nearly as much as the people who get to cuddle with them.
Though, normally it's free, and the animals aren't delivered by a taxi service.
From the article "You will have a chance to adopt the Kittens! YES, IT’S TRUE! For more information, please chat with the shelter representative that will be assisting with kitten wrangling!"
All kittens come with a shelter representative who will presumably keep an eye on you and the kitten.
Sounds harmless to me as long as the animals have long-term support too.
I will adopt any cat that forms an attachment to me in 15 minutes of petting (I don't own any cats).
It never ceased to amaze me how quickly they would get adopted after an off-site day; seemed to just hit a reset button on their stress levels.
You have to select cats that are well-socialized, but it can be very healthy for both participants if done properly.
The place still seemed popular. I don't know why. The one stray cat I found during my stay in Tokyo was much more friendly than any of the cats in the cafe.
One of them really liked me (Artemis). :)
Uber = On-Demand... anything?
Yes, Uber has said in their interviews (or maybe it was pg talking about them?) that once they have the infrastructure set up to deliver a car anywhere they can branch out into on demand delivery of anything.
I'm not sure how much synergy there actually is between "get a taxi on demand" and "deliver goods on demand." I mean, taxis have existed forever. Presumably, if someone thought it was cost effective, they could have used taxis as a logistics network long ago. But taxis are really, really, really expensive (and Uber black cars are yet more expensive) in terms of what people expect to pay for shipping. UPS or the postal service will ship a small package across the country for me for $10 or less. A taxi in SF won't go a mile for $10.
Is there some reason to believe that Uber changes the game with regard to all that? They aren't drastically lowering the price of taxis. Their success has been in raising the service level of taxi-like-services, and in reducing the inconvenience of getting a taxi dispatched to you. I don't say this to take anything away from Uber -- I think they have a fantastic service -- but I don't see their successes as being things that really have a lot to do with what you want from a goods distribution network. If what you want to do is have a very expensive courier service for some kind of physical good, do you really mind calling dispatch and talking to a person?
I believe that Google's driverless cars have a bigger financial gain by delivering goods rather than people. We all think they're doing the automated taxi thing, but I think that's just to make the general public comfortable with driverless cars being on the roads.
This kind of business, when not tied to an ethically operated shelter, has a lot of abusive potential, of course.
Over the summer Uber had some cool stuff here. You could hire a boat with friends, and the ice cream truck of course.
Of course, every day is a good dog day. Perhaps Uber will consider doing something like this quarterly.
If I see ONE MORE CAT on the Internet, I'm leaving.
I mean it. Don't push me.
Edit: Oh, they're adoptable? Well, all right then; I'm for that.
Seriously, this is a great way to get some kittens adopted from shelters. I am in the UK, and very jealous.
-It's a great PR gimmick for Uber/CheezBurger and it's something others can learn from.
-Uber articles typically end up on HN because of their presence in SF and that a lot of HN users use Uber (all of the 50~ people that I personally know on HN have used Uber) or are otherwise connected to people who work at Uber.
-Ben Huh is awesome. He's a great advisor and him being involved means I'm going to upvote it.
-Kittens on demand = cool.
-Kittens, cupcakes, and raising money for a good cause = Awesome.
>> No cash required! Donations will be charged directly to your Uber account.
This is big as most everyone who signs up now has an account with Uber. Once Uber has my credit card information, I am less hesitant to use their service in the future. It sounds like a great way to reduce friction to me.
Off-topic: I remember when the only reason I signed up for Living Social was because Amazon.com was giving me $10 in gift certificate. I thought they were idiots for giving me free money. Of course, I don't think twice about having a $90 gift card balance "because it never expires".
This is a reputable company offering the service, not some sketchy back-of-the-alley vendor. It could be a wonderful service for people that cannot keep pets in their rental apartments for instance, or people that live with someone allergic to cat fur preventing them from owning a cat, or plain and simple people with really busy lives that wished they could own a pet but know they'd be unable to care for it properly.
Personally I've wanted countless times to keep a cat for the long-term, it simply wasn't possible because I knew I'd end up neglecting it, especially considering that kittens require so much attention.
What's the harm in this? Instead of sitting in a shelter all day long, the animals are socialized well, they get to experience varied new environments and maybe even end up being adopted by the customer.
Have you considered that this could also be great for old, retired and lonely persons, like someone's grandma that lives all by herself and barely gets any visitors?
Isn't it because Japanese people love animals, but with the sizes of apartments in Tokyo it's pretty much impossible to have one of your own?
Either a car is safe to drive on regular streets without human supervision or it isn't. It doesn't matter what's inside.
You could probably imagine a scenario in which the cost of the self-driving kit (not the software, but things like "a LIDAR array") was something like $100,000. In which case maybe most private individuals are priced out of the market, but some corporations are like, "This is still cheaper than paying for drivers." But I don't really see why that wouldn't apply to taxis as well as kitten-delivery. And in any case, it's hard to imagine why the cost of an automation kit would not drop in time.
So I don't think there are too many plausible scenarios in which it is persistently the case that automated cars only carry non-human cargo.
I still don't know if the financials make sense in my particular example but it does tell you the optimizations Uber can make based on the historical data.
And if they were to offer some kind of "by the way" service where you say, "I want to get this package across town, you send somebody who will eventually deliver it to my destination because my destination is near a major taxi destination," do people actually want that service? I was under the impression that in-town point-to-point couriering was typically done because you have a tight deadline for when the package needs to arrive -- after all, if it's just a few miles away, and you aren't on a tight schedule, you could just mail it and it would probably arrive the next business day. This doesn't sound like a big business opportunity to me.
Delivery of large quantities of goods on a same-day timeframe, like Amazon wants to do, that's a big business opportunity. But I don't see how Uber's business or Uber's dataset solves that problem.