Travel as a category has been a leader when it comes to adopting new technology. As a budding traveler and a curator of www.ghumakkar.com, I would hazard a guess that it might have to do with them being more liberal and risk-taking about new things. May be you have to be ready to face the uncertain, that makes them a traveler and in-turn an ‘early adopter’ of new technology. Over last 6 years, if we look at the interest level in ’Travel Apps’, it has constantly grown. Here’s is some data from ‘Google Trends’
Uber came out with a statement
Below is the statement issued by the taxi service:
Our thoughts are with the victim of this terrible crime and we are working with the police as they investigate. We will assist them in any way we can. It is also our policy to immediately suspend a driver’s account following allegations of a serious incident, which we have done.
Safety is Uber’s highest priority and in India, we work with licensed driver-partners to provide a safe transportation option, with layers of safeguards such as driver and vehicle information, and ETA-sharing to ensure there is accountability and traceability of all trips that occur on the Uber platform. – Evelyn Tay, Uber Spokeswoman
Yesterday, I recd the following email from Uber
Two snapshots for posterity (and to document the date and time of Uber’s email) Mail from Uber sent on Dec 11 evening
And more of the message Well crafted message
I felt better and hoped for better. As I finished reading the message it said very clearly in the end that if I have any questions then I can just reply back to this email or send a tweet.
And I did that
And I did reply to the email on Friday morning. The only reason I wrote it to see if they really respond. My whole premise was on the fact that this particular driver was already ‘FLAGGED’ by one of the commuters, Nidhi Shah,in the past. Here is the source of the story – http://www.huffingtonpost.in/2014/12/10/uber-rape-case_n_6298094.html
And here are the tweets by Nidhi Uber customer tweets and alerts about the potential danger
So Über knows that they were alerted and they should have paid attention. So now they are writing to their customers and assuring them of a response, So I wrote a small email,
Message to Uber
I sent this at 1000 hrs on Dec 12, 2014. As I write this post, it is 1800 hrs on Dec 13. More than 32 hours and no response.
Makes me think that Uber (or at least Uber India) is still non-responsive. Sad.
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Update on Dec 19
So I finally heard back, after 6 days. My guess is that they were trying to hire community managers (And my guess is that this person could be on a contract to kind of respond and keep SoMe community pacified than any real hands-on support)
Here is the response
It took them 6 days to compose this
And as you could see, there is no mention of being apologetic for responding after 6 days. I am gonna get my money off PayTM now.
Recently I got an invite to try and review state.com and so I did. Here is a short review and my recommendations. If you are looking for a much deeper, longer, detailed review of something then I am up for it. Just putting a plug for more work.
Before we begin the walk-through, lets pause for a moment and take a look around the new modes of communication which are gaining ground. Mostly termed as ’Social Media’, these are the places where small communities, set of friends or even as individuals hang-out and share opinions, thoughts. They read and reflect, get influenced and then influence others, build opinions and in extreme cases, define and drive large movements. Whether it is the all encompassing Facebook and Twitter or lesser known Quora, these are all around us. As a social animal, these websites or cloud hosted software programs provide us an platform to exchange ideas, to test ideas, to converse and meet our inherent need to socialise. Before I moved my blog to nandanjha.com, I had a blog at blogspot which I started in 2005 and though its been about 10 years, the yearning for a comment (or a Like in FB parlance) is same as what was there many years back. This latent, inner need is so ingrained in us that we keep looking for newer, better means to fulfil this. State.com seems like another step in that direction.
Why AAP is contesting for 2014 Lok Sabha elections ? Why did they not run Delhi, did a good job and then reach elsewhere? Did AAP get too ambitious down the way? Does this mean that they really do not want to govern since there is no possibility of them winning seats in double digits, forget getting close to 50 or more. Are they fighting to spoil the game of a particular party ?
Too often these question have been asked. As an Aam Aadmi movement enthusiast, I share my perspective. AAP’s spokespersons Arvind Kejriwal and Yogendra Yadav have often clarified on why fighting nationally is important. In keeping with the healthy culture of questioning and debate, it is not something which AAP can ignore.
So here is my attempt at taking a stab at it. This is no official version and is rumbling of someone who has developed interest in politics, post AAP.
Recently, I got an invite to speak at United Health Group, Noida, as part of their TNS (Test Symposium) event at Noida. I was lucky to be offered the topics and I quickly picked the one which was not in the arena of ‘Software Testing’. How much so I love talking on ‘Software Testing’, and how much hard I try to not sound boring (or too academic), it gets very difficult to piece together a software testing talk which is interesting to listen to as well as valuable to apply. I have not done any non-software talk for a probably very long time so for this one, my topic was
“Talent to Skill – Good to Great’.
I made a short and light deck, and not too preachy. The talk went well with some very good questions, comments and observations by the ever enthusiastic software engineers of UHG. If I get to do this again, I must incorporate some bits of post-lecture learning back into the deck, to close the loop as they say. Since I spent some time on making these slides, I thought it would be a good use of a Sunday afternoon to share this with wider group.
Here are the slides and a brief descripto of my thoughts.
