Uber and Lyft are the two major companies of ride sharing services, which are currently competing for customer’s attention. Let’s have some discussion about the introduction of these two companies.
Uber is involved in a ridesharing service based business and its’ headquarter is located in San Francisco. It was established at March in 2009. The key founders are Garrett Camp and Travis Kalanick. This private transportation network company is operating their business worldwide now. They use smart-phone application to communicate with passengers who requires a ride and the drivers who own a car. According to a survey of September, 2014- almost 45 countries have the facility to use this service. Now-a-days, Uber offers different types of car for the passengers including smaller cars (example: Toyota Prius) and full-size luxury cars.
Now I invite you to be introduced with Lyft Company. Among the competitors of Uber, Lyft is remarkable. This rapidly growing company has been established only two years before. Lyft is also a private transportation and Network company. It is mainly an American company which is based in San Francisco. Peer to peer ridesharing is facilitated by the mobile phone application of this company. This application is mainly used to communicate with the passengers and the drivers. In this case, the passengers have a need of a ride and the driver has a car to meet the need of the passengers. Three ride choices are offered by Lyft. First of them is Lyft and another one is Lyft Line and the rest one is Lyft plus. Tagline of this company is “Your Friend with a Car”. Including, New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco the company has a reach up to more than 65 U.S. cities. Lyft was established in 2012 and the key founders are Logan Green and John Zimmer.
According to Wall street journal it appears that the latter one (Lyft Company) is suing a former company’s executive for stealing company’s secrets. The executive was found out to be formerly an employee at Lyft and was alleged to have brought secret documents from the company after he left the company.
Travis vander zanden who is now working for Uber, once held the position of chief operating officer at Lyft .He is blamed for downloading private financial and product information to his dropbox account before leaving Lyft. The Ride sharing company has also stated that the man tried to woo employers to join him .Vander zanden now holds the position of vice president of international growth at Uber.
Both Uber and Lyft have now been on a long standing rivalry as they came on the ride sharing scene. They have stolen features from each other and have cancelled the ordered rides in the last minute, wasting their time and payment. This rivalry behind the companies has provided ground for users to hail rides through a mobile app in the place of running for a taxi in the streets through day and night. It has caused disturbance amongst the local taxi drivers.
Neither of the two companies has responded to outreach of lawsuit. Thanks, to their rivalry as it will be a long process before things are settled officially.