Gadgets
Uber, Lyft Offer Free Rides to Vaccine Sites for Customers in US
]Uber Technologies and Lyft are spending millions of dollars to provide drivers with access to COVID-19 vaccines and offering tens of millions of free or discounted rides to vaccination sites for people in communities that lack access to transportation and healthcare services.
The effort is both public-spirited, and self-interested.
Ride-hailing demand is ramping up throughout the United States from pandemic-induced lows, but drivers are still slow to return to the road, slowing the companies’ efforts to rebuild revenues.
Lack of transportation is a major hurdle to healthcare equity and vaccine access, and studies show fewer options for medical care in low-income and Black communities, which are frequently poorly served by public transit and have lower car ownership rates.
At Uber, a large team of employees has started calling thousands of drivers who left the platform over the past year, asking them what they need to return, Uber US and Canada Head of Driver Operations Carrol Chang told Reuters.
The company is trying to address drivers’ main concerns – safety and earnings – through mask mandates, a vaccination partnership with Walgreen’s and $250 million (roughly Rs. 1,868 crores) in pay guarantees and incentives.
The Walgreen’s partnership has allowed Uber to distribute unique codes to more than 240,000 drivers in several states, including California, Illinois, Virginia and New Jersey, allowing them to book a vaccination appointment at the pharmacy chain.
Lyft said it is emailing drivers when they become eligible for vaccination in their states. The company requires masks and offers pay incentives and promotions in select markets.
Julia Paige, Uber’s director of social impact, who is in charge of the vaccine rides programme, said that in her conversations with company management “I really tried to show people that there are times when doing good is good for business.”
While Uber has not disclosed the costs of the largely self-funded vaccination programmes, analysts estimate the roughly 10 million free and discounted rides the company has promised will cost $50 million to $100 million (roughly Rs. 373–747 crores).
Lyft said its vaccine rides are paid for in partnership with corporate sponsors, including JPMorgan Chase, Anthem, and Target, and private donations.
Officials in Chicago, New Orleans and Jersey City, New Jersey, and nonprofit groups working with the companies said the rides have allowed thousands of people to get vaccinated who otherwise likely would not have gotten a shot.
“”There’s a huge swath of people sitting on the fence about this vaccine, and only if they have access to it they’ll get it done,” said Tamara Mahal, leader of the Chicago health department’s vaccine operation, which has partnered with Uber to offer free rides to 5,000 people.
The Uber and Lyft vaccine rides can be booked by cities or nonprofits on behalf of residents, or by passengers through access codes. Drivers receive the regular fare for the trips, an important element for nonprofit United Way, which partnered with Lyft.
“People who are driving for Lyft and Uber are financially challenged in our society and this creates more work for them,” said Suzanne McCormick, the organization’s president.
Uber and Lyft say they are not collecting passenger data for vaccine rides, and the data is protected by health privacy laws.
Some city and nonprofit partners said the vaccine service has introduced older people and those in transit deserts to the potential benefits of ride-hail services.
Uber and Lyft have both set up fledgling health businesses, aimed at providing non-emergency medical rides to cities and healthcare facilities. Many of the vaccination rides are provided through those health units, and closer ties with government agencies and healthcare providers could spell more business opportunities down the road.
Lyft said rides to vaccine centres organised through its healthcare unit were paid for by the clinics and facilities booking them, but counted toward its vaccine access campaign goal.
In New Orleans, Uber is providing a total of 20,000 free or reduced-price rides to the city’s mass vaccination sites. Laura Mellem, public engagement officer of New Orleans’ office of homeland security and emergency preparedness, said the city was so happy with the partnership that it was discussing how Uber could help with evacuations during the yearly hurricane season.
City officials said their vaccine collaboration with the companies does not change their outlook on other issues, such as driver pay, taxation and congestion, which have frequently caused rifts between local regulators and Uber and Lyft.
In Jersey City, across the Hudson River from New York City, Mayor Steven Fulop said the city is working with Uber to provide 12,000 free round trip rides, mainly to seniors. Jersey City has in the past enacted regulations Uber opposed, such as caps on food delivery fees delivery companies can charge restaurants.
“We’ve differed with Uber plenty in the past, but it doesn’t mean that we’re going to just differ on everything for the sake of disagreeing. Here, we have an overlapping interest and I’m happy to work with them,” Fulop said.
“At Xbox, we believe that with better tools, creators can make even more extraordinary games,” Haiyan Zhang, GM, Xbox Gaming AI, said in a blog post. “This partnership will bring together: Inworld’s expertise in working with generative AI models for character development, Microsoft’s cutting-edge cloud-based AI solutions including Azure OpenAI Service, Microsoft Research’s technical insights into the future of play, and Team Xbox’s strengths in revolutionizing accessible and responsible creator tools for all developers.”
The aforementioned AI design copilot is a toolset that will help game designers turn prompts into scripts and dialogue trees. In contrast, the character runtime will enable dynamically generated plot beats and quests. We’ve already seen heavy AI integration in games by way of procedural generation — a more recent example being the 1000+ planets in Starfield. Not to mention, enemy AI has been around for way longer.
Inworld made headlines in August when it launched a modded story mode for Grand Theft Auto V, Sentient Streets, in which players had to investigate the rise of a bizarre AI-worshipping cult — a segment loaded with characters that spoke in AI-generated dialogue, on the fly. The mod was later taken down by publisher Take-Two, leaving a permanent strike on the creator Bloc’s YouTube channel. As per The Verge, Inworld’s AI technology can also be used for narration in top-down RPGs to warn players about any events awaiting off-screen and respond to questions like we’ve seen in the past year with AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Bing Chat. Microsoft has also been heavily banking on artificial intelligence, having made a $10 billion (about Rs. 83,254 crore) investment in OpenAI. The company has also integrated AI tools into its popular suite of services and also added an AI copilot to Windows.
Despite being a Microsoft-affiliated AI toolset, it would be interesting to see whether titles using them will be allowed to thrive on other platforms. In July, Valve claimed that it would be cracking down on games that included AI-generated assets if the developer didn’t own the copyright to the piece of art. For the uninitiated, when you insert a prompt to create something in AI, the software simply repurposes existing assets found online and mushes them together — basically stealing from other artists and writers without appropriate commercial licenses. Infringing them would lead to the game not being distributed on Steam, forcing the developers to seek proper licenses for the asset by reaching out to the AI companies involved. It’s unclear how Microsoft’s partnership will play out — as long as AI content is being used as a catalyst to innovate and create something new, it should be fine.
In a post on X shared by BSNL’s Andhra Pradesh (@bsnl_ap_circle) unit, the company confirmed that BSNL users can upgrade their older 2G or 3G SIMs to a 4G SIM for free. Not only will the upgrade be free, but a promotional image shared with the post suggests that users who opt for the upgrade will also receive 4GB of free data that will be valid for three months. It is speculated that BSNL is aiming to boost its upcoming 4G services with this offer. The announcement was first spotted by Telecom Talk.
To access the free data offer and the free upgrade, BSNL users are requested to get in touch with executives at BSNL’s Customer Service Centre, franchisee or retailer stores, or contact one of their Direct Selling Agents (DSA). The promo image also adds in a finer print that the offer is available with certain terms and conditions, but hasn’t detailed any, so far.
Reliance’s Jio recently launched the 4G-supported Bharat B1 feature phone in India. The handset is priced at Rs. 1,299 in India. Alongside 4G connectivity, the phone comes with JioCinema and JioSaavn applications pre-installed.
The Jio Bharat B1 is equipped with the JioPay application, which is said to allow users to make UPI payments. Aiming to increase accessibility, the phone supports 23 languages overall, including multiple regional languages.
Realme, via Weibo, announced the arrival of the Realme GT 5 Pro in China. The display of the handset is confirmed to offer 3000 nits peak brightness. It has also been teased to offer heat dissipation with a surface area of around 10,000mm2. It is confirmed to ship with Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC. The post doesn’t specify the exact launch date of the smartphone, however, given the release of the teasers, the launch could be just around the corner.
The Realme GT 5 Pro has been in the news a lot lately. It is expected to feature a 6.78-inch (1,264×2,780 pixels) AMOLED display and is tipped to come in 8GB, 12GB, and 16GB RAM options along with 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB inbuilt storage options.
For optics, the Realme GT 5 Pro is said to have a triple rear camera unit comprising two 50-megapixel sensors and an 8-megapixel shooter at the rear. The camera setup might include a Sony LYTIA LYT808 sensor, an OmniVision OV08D10 secondary sensor, and a Sony IMX890 telephoto sensor. For selfies, there could be a 32-megapixel sensor at the front. It is said to carry a 5,400mAh battery with support for 100W wired charging and 50W wireless charging.
The Realme GT 5 Pro is expected to come with upgrades over Realme GT 5. The latter was launched in China in August with a price tag of CNY 2,999 for the base model with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage.
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