London’s High Court rules Uber is legal, but its troubles aren’t over

Uber and other ride-hailing services like it have completely changed the way we interact with on-demand transport. But being a new, popular force in a traditional industry has its downsides. When Uber isn’t taking flak from local taxi firms, it’s sitting in a courtroom trying to justify the legality of its business model. This is true the world over, and it’s no different in London, where the capital’s High Court has just ruled that the way Uber calculates fares is legal. It’s a huge win for the company, because if the decision had gone the other way, it would’ve effectively outlawed Uber’s entire London fleet, and possibly set a precedent for other UK cities to follow suit.

It was Transport for London (TfL) that originally asked the High Court to get involved in May last year. The Licensed Taxi Drivers Association (LTDA), a union representing London’s black cab drivers, has long argued that Uber’s use of GPS tracking in its smartphone app to calculate fares is illegal. It’s basically the same as a Hackney carriage taximeter, the LTDA and the Licensed Private Hire Car Association (LPHCA) claim, which private hire vehicles aren’t permitted to use. TfL disagreed and was happy that Uber abided by all necessary regulations, but under relentless pressure from the traditional taxi trades, asked London’s High Court to make a definitive ruling and put the argument to bed.

The High Court decision was delayed after the LTDA brought cases against a few individual Uber drivers, but today it’s reached the same conclusion TfL did. You can read the judgement in its entirety here, but what it really comes down to is the definition of a taximeter, which is a standalone device installed in a vehicle to calculate fares. The High Court says the smartphones used by Uber drivers log GPS data and travel time, and communicate this with an outside server that calculates the fares. The two are not the same, as the final declaration lays out:

“A taximeter, for the purposes of Section 11 of the Private Hire Vehicles (London) Act 1998, does not include a device that receives GPS signals in the course of a journey, and forwards GPS data to a server located outside of the vehicle, which server calculates a fare that is partially or wholly determined by reference to distance travelled and time taken, and sends the fare information back to the device.”

Needless to say, the LTDA isn’t happy with the outcome, taking to Twitter to vent and announce that it’s already lodged an appeal with the Supreme Court:

The law really is an Ass! It uses time & distance to calculate fare and it’s not a meter????

— The LTDA (@TheLTDA) October 16, 2015

Unbelievable! High Court says it’s NOT a meter! LTDA have lodged appeal to Supreme Court

— The LTDA (@TheLTDA) October 16, 2015

Thus, it appears this isn’t the final act of the drawn-out legal battle. Uber still has cause to celebrate, of course, but it’s also taking the opportunity to draw attention to other threats to the way it operates. Though TfL was on Uber’s side of the taximeter dispute, the rapid growth of the ride-hailing service is making London’s transport authority rethink private hire regulations. The Mayor of London Boris Johnson had already proposed capping the number of vehicles for hire allowed in the capital, and introducing a Knowledge-like test for Uber drivers that would include English-language skills. Following an industry consultation, TfL is now considering additional regulations, too.

One of the proposals could mean drivers must wait five minutes between accepting a hail request and picking the passenger up, while another would force private hire outfits to offer bookings up to seven days in advance of the journey. Other rules may stop Uber from being able to show vacant cars within its app, and force passengers to enter a final destination before making a booking. Commenting on today’s High Court decision and what the future may hold, Jo Bertram, Uber’s Regional General Manager for the UK, Ireland and the Nordics, said:

“This is great news for Londoners and a victory for common sense. Now the High Court has ruled in favour of new technology, we hope Transport for London will think again on their bureaucratic proposals for apps like Uber. Compulsory five-minute waits and banning ride-sharing would be bad for riders and drivers. These plans make no sense. That’s why 130,000 people have already signed our petition against these proposals. We hope TfL will listen to Londoners and let Uber keep London moving.”

For today, Uber’s dodged a high-calibre bullet that could’ve shut down its entire London arm. Should these new regulations brought forward by TfL come into force, however, the aftermath could be just as devastating. It all depends on how fast Uber can adapt to a different way of doing things, and given how outspoken the company has been about the proposals, chances are it’ll struggle to fit in.

Source: Uber, London’s High Court

MediaTek alludes to a future full with smarter mobiles

Think that your smartphone is pretty smart? Well, MediaTek seems to disagree. Speaking at a press event in London recently, MediaTek shared a little about its vision for the future of our connected mobile devices and how it plans to help to make them all a lot more intelligent. There are some pretty interesting ideas here.

Battery life, visual processing and 5G

Looking at the more immediate future for the minute, MediaTek is looking to improve the energy efficiency of its products and move into new imaging and visual technologies. This can already be seen through innovative processor development ideas using ARM’s big.LITTLE technology and image processing enhancements through its Imagiq suite. A focus on power efficiency is no doubt keen to please end users too, especially when we look at the increasing power consumption from technologies like faster processors and higher resolution displays.

Not only that, but MediaTek is looking to boost development in lower power Internet of Things (IoT) devices and Deep Learning heterogeneous compute ideas. Deep Learning is looking to bring new learning capabilities to mobile, including object and speech recognition. For a closer look at what ideas like Deep Learning could mean for the future of mobile products, check out the article below.

See also: 5 MediaTek technologies you may have missed10

In terms of mobile devices, MediaTek is still primarily after the “super-mid” tier of the market and is expecting growth in disposable income to drive further demand in this segment of the market and bring additional consumers online. As this is where MediaTek’s see most consumers coming online, it seems logical to focus on bringing advanced connection technologies to these markets, rather than just the very high-end.

Although still a little way off, MediaTek is also preparing for the arrival of faster 5G mobile networks. This year MediaTek has its Category 6 LTE modem with carrier aggregation ready and will be moving up to Cat10/11 speeds next year. The first 5G network trials aren’t expected to start up until 2018 at the earliest, but the company is determined not to be caught behind next time around.

Unified devices

All of these ideas tie together with MediaTek’s vision for a more connected future and the company has some pretty ambitious sounding plans for what future products may be like.

Independently, MediaTek talks about ideas like ambient computing, cloud computing and deep learning, which may be terms that you’re familiar with. When combined though, this could create a situation where multiple bits of hardware can act together as one more capable device, by sharing software and hardware resources to perform new tasks. Data could be collected on one platform, uploaded and processed by another and then sent to your phone for you to make use of.

We’ve already seen the start of this with company’s like Nest, but there are many more consumer electronics categories that could be integrated into smart systems. Wearables and even automobiles could learn to talk to one another. This could have a wide range of useful applications for business too, from food and farming to health and energy markets.

Idea’s like MediaTek CrossMount, which allow supported consumer gadgets to interact with each other’s hardware, such as microphones, is already on the way to realising this type of unification across devices. Broad access to blazing fast 5G networks and lower power hardware could allow for this type of technology not only to be smarter and faster, but also to escape the living room and reach out into the wider world.

The big focus seems to be on better connectivity, allowing for seemingly simple low powered devices to have access to complex data that was previously unavailable. If this sounds a lot like the promised made by the Internet of Things idea, well then you’d be right. MediaTek is also making advancements in this area too.

MediaTek Labs is the company’s free to use development portal which offers developers access to the company’s SDKs and reference designs. MediaTek also recently launched its IoT starter kit designed for developers and hobbyists, which is powered by Amazon Web Services for pull and send data to the web. The kit includes the MediaTek LinkIt ONE development board, which works with the popular Arduino IDE, and a range of Grove sensors from Seeed Studio.

While little Internet of Things devices may not be that exciting on their own, extra connectivity and faster networking that will accompany IoT expansions could lead to much smarter products sitting in our pockets. Come 2020, we could be looking at some really smart smartphones.

Although MediaTek may not be as prolific in Western devices as it is in the East, the company has a growing list of devices and customers, along with an ecosystem looking to expand into new product ideas. It’s certainly a company we’ll be hearing more about in the coming years.

Intel throws its tiny Curie module in an Arduino board

The low-power Curie from Intel helps developers quickly prototype a device with turn-key access to Bluetooth, a six-axis sensor with gyroscope and accelerometer and the 32-bit SOC Quark micro-controller. It’s main focus has been the wearable market and since its introduction at CES 2015, it’s has been used in sports bras, creepy robot spiders and to measure wicked-cool bike tricks. Now it’s being included in a new Arduino board. The Arduino 101 (internationally it’ll be called, Genuino 101) is the first widely available development board for the tiny chip. Priced at a reasonable $30 and using the same open-source platform as the rest of the Arduino line, the 101 is targeted at students and makers looking to add some connectivity to a project.

Source: Intel