| Hi all, it's Eric. Silicon Valley has long been known for its lofty, change-the-world rhetoric. Now, the pandemic is forcing many tech companies to abandon their most revolutionary dreams. Just this week, Alphabet Inc.'s Sidewalk Labs announced it isn't going to reinvent the city of Toronto. Airbnb Inc. said it's cutting back on luxury rentals and travel investments (including, presumably, its air travel plans). And Uber Technologies Inc. seems to have given up hope that it will transform urban transportation with electric bikes. On Thursday, Uber Chief Executive Officer Dara Khosrowshahi finalized a deal to sell its electric bike program to scooter company Lime. As part of the deal, Uber led a $170 million investment in the startup that valued Lime at $510 million. That's a far cry from Lime's $2.4 billion valuation last year. Uber has the right to try to buy Lime down the road. But for now, the bike unit sale means that the ride-hailing giant can jettison a money-losing line of business. On Uber's earning call Thursday, Khosrowshahi said that the company was going to focus on its core businesses: rides and food delivery. That mission has a very different ring to it than the drive for expansion that characterized the startup's earlier days. Khosrowshahi clearly believes that investors want to see Uber play it safe. In March, he promised shareholders that in the worst-case scenario, Uber would have $4 billion cash on hand at the end of the year. Uber Eats shut down operations in the Czech Republic, Egypt, Honduras, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Ukraine and Uruguay earlier this month. Shortly thereafter the company slashed thousands of jobs. And on Thursday, the CEO told analysts that ditching Jump could save more than $160 million a year. The cost reductions could pay off. Uber said that it expects to turn a profit on an adjusted basis sometime in 2021. That's later than the fourth quarter of this year, which Uber had initially promised, but probably better than many investors expected. Still, as recently as a year ago, Khosrowshahi was telling prospective investors how Uber could be an all-encompassing transportation platform. The company would stitch together all sorts of transit options and create a powerful one-stop shop—including trains, buses, cars, bikes and scooters. Uber customers will be able to get some of those services through Lime, but the company's ambitions seem tempered. The Jump acquisition was one of Khosrowshahi's early deals—and one of the few moments when he seemed eager to expand Uber's domain. Tellingly, Uber didn't even put out its own press release Thursday morning when it off-loaded Jump. We've also heard less about Uber's self-driving car unit and trucking efforts. Time will tell whether those endeavors ever turn into core parts of Uber's business. Food delivery, even though it loses money, is a saving grace keeping Uber busy during a global shutdown. It's all a far cry from the previous era at the company, when its wildly ambitious co-founder Travis Kalanick was incinerating billions of dollars in China, trying to win an unwinnable market. (Kalanick eventually relented, taking a stake in the local ride-hailing leader there instead.) It doesn't feel like that long ago that tech companies thought they could remake the world, and get rich doing it. It might be a long time before it feels that way again. —Eric Newcomer | 
⇉〖OpenLoad〗 2020 Superintelligence Película Completa En Línea released 2020. story: La vida de Carol Peters se trastorna cuando es selecci...
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