The onset of 1st April every year presents an opportunity for brands to ‘trick’ their consumers with generous doses of mischief and pranks through humorous and almost-believable campaigns. Brands capitalize on the event with many things – ranging from fake products and offers, to contests and basically anything that would help them with engagement.

This year was no different, as many brands jumped into the fray with some unique and clever deceptions. We bring to you a list of all the major April Fools Day campaigns from travel brands on social media this year.

Ixigo’s special ‘kavach’

Ixigo is one company that has never shied away from making a fool out of consumers on this special occasion. Over the years, they have mastered the art of deception and this year, they went a step ahead by announcing the launch of a new smart lock for travellers called Ixigo Kavach. Apparently, this smart lock automatically gave thieves electric shocks when pilfered bags were taken more than 5 meters away from their owners.

The brand didn’t wait for April 1 to announce the campaign, and instead tweeted the launch on March 29, making it all the more believable. While most people were smart to catch on to the fact that this might be a joke, the brand was lauded for its hilarious efforts.

Ola’s fake news

Ola has had some of the most elaborate pranks. In 2015, it claimed to launch a helicopter service called Ola Air, while in 2016 it had said it had launched Ola Rooms, a concept through which people could sleep in cabs. This year, Ola announced the launch of Ola News Network, or ONN, which it called India’s fastest news-on-the-go. It said ONN would utilize Ola’s driver partner network to report news, and that its drivers would double up as news reporters.

Ola was consistent with its posts on social media regarding the launch and people were quite happy to finally see some real on-ground reportage. Alas, it wasn’t to be.

Oyo’s cryptic moves

Hospitality giant Oyo went all out with the blockchain theme by announcing the launch of its very own cryptocurrency called Oyo Smart Coin, which would be used by its vendors, hotels and customers to seamlessly conduct transactions among themselves. Oyo even had a dedicated site and whitepaper for Oyo Smart Coin. They even had a registration forum with people lining up to get their hands on the latest currency. Kudos to the efforts at making the prank so elaborate and detailed.

Zoomcar’s home-like caravans

Zoomcar was yet another company that tricked people into believing that they had started rentals of caravan-like vehicles. With a promotional video and a hashtag #Zoomcaravan, the brand urged people to try out its latest offering and take the caravan around places, sleep in forests or the foothills of mountains, banks of lakes or unending tea gardens. One glance at the replies and it is evident that people fell for the ruse, with most consumers asking Zoomcar for details and showing excitement about the launch.

Emirates’ sky views

This prank from Emirates was as big and elaborate as anyone would rightly expect from the Middle-Eastern airline. They announced a new ‘SkyLounge’ – part of a plane where the entire cabin is windows. The airline posted renderings of the lounge to show how it would look like from inside and outside.

The announcement was no more than just a prank and even came with a punchline: the SkyLounge will be introduced on the “Boeing 777X fleet.” Emirates is known to share pranks on April 1st. Even last year, the airline pranked internet users with its life-changing plan to launch the world’s first triple-decker that will feature a swimming pool, game room, gym and a park.

Also read: These travel brands are raising the bar for April Fool’s Day pranks.

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While Uber gained traction in early days with the idea of letting people use their vehicles to give rides and make money, things were always much different in India. Uber and its local rival Ola work with vehicles that have commercial licences. Now however, the government is opening up to the idea of allowing private vehicles to be used with ride sharing platforms and is reportedly assessing the impact of the same.

While this appears to be a positive step, the impact might not entirely be positive. The objective here is to reduce congestion and the impact on environment with ever increasing number of vehicles. Allowing private cars on the platform would make more cars available for catering to ride requests making it more accessible and could, in turn, motivate more people to ditch their vehicles and rely on sharing services for transportation.

However, this would cause trouble for Uber and Ola with their current fleet of drivers. The driver partners have already been pressurising the companies to stop shrinking incentives and have been expressing their inability to pay for even car ownership in some cases. There are stricter regulations and considerably higher costs associated with commercial vehicles which means in its current form, the system would favour private vehicles. And while the objective is also to cut down on emissions, it is also worth mentioning that in some parts, Uber/Ola vehicles run only on CNG and no diesel powered cabs are allowed to operate. The same should also apply strictly to private vehicles because of the environmental concerns. However, the infrastructure to cater to CNG vehicles is still very limited in terms of capacity and presence.

To add to that, the attractive earnings resulted in a surge in the number of commercially registered small hatchbacks and sedans. It is not uncommon to find dozens of yellow plate cars waiting for the next ride during off peak hours. A fraction of them are novice, unskilled drivers lured by the higher potential payout compared to whatever else they were doing. This situation could have been avoided by opening up to the idea while the government was resisting the expansion of Uber and Ola despite a broken urban transportation system.

There are other challenges as well. Security is the biggest concern of them all as entry barriers for drivers are lowered. Another question is if this would really get car owners to share their vehicles or if this would just be another channel for cab operators to expand their fleet at lower costs. But this could also be the start of a change in transportation. If the trials work out fine, it could also inspire relaxation in car sharing regulations making it easier for rental businesses and thus for the masses to share vehicles.

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Saying that Uber is going through a rough patch so far this year might be an understatement. One of the most aggressive players in the ground transportation game has been on the defensive owing to an array of issues that cropped up. From high profile exists to the Waymo lawsuit and everything in between, Uber has been facing hurdles and the competition has been keeping the momentum to gain.

India, being a major market for Uber, will also bear the consequences of all the disruptions. Particularly the recent exit of Emil Michael will affect decisions related to investments in India. Amidst this, Ola has reportedly raised about USD 50 million from New York-based hedge fund Tekne Capital Management LLC, as part of its ongoing funding round. Economic Times quoted people closer to the development saying that the investment would push the valuation of Ola up to around USD 3.65 billion from USD 3.5 billion earlier this year. The valuation was down from USD 4.8 billion after the previous round in August last year. It is also reported that Ola might be in conversation with more investors to add more funds to this round, possibly to quickly cover ground while Uber is distracted.

In other part of the world, Careem, its rival operating across 80 cities across the Middle East, has raised another USD 150 million to close the USD 500 million Series E round announced in December. The latest tranche of funding is led by Dubai’s Kingdom Holding. Along with some VCs, German automaker Daimler also participated. Car companies have been actively joining the sharing ecosystem in ways and Daimler particularly has even made acquisitions in this space. Careem raised $350 million from investors including Japan’s Rakuten Inc. and Saudi Telecom Co. when it announced the investment back in December 2016. Careem plays on an even bigger opportunity as currently, Uber and Careem account for just one percent of the potential transportation market.

With these developments rolling in, Uber will have to face heightened challenge on multiple fronts once it has dealt with its internal issues.

Source: ET, Bloomberg

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Security threats plague almost every tech company out there. With limited resources at hand, not many start building with security as the first thought and this often creates problems on the way. Large companies run bug bounty programs so that they can identify security loopholes but that is often not possible for young startups. Ola is trying to help a bit here by offering a tool called ‘Jackhammer’ to make it easier for teams to identify vulnerabilities and fix them.

In a press statement, Ola shares that built in-house, Jackhammer finds security vulnerabilities in the target application (website, mobile app, network, source code and blogs) and it helps security teams to manage complex continuous integration and multiple deployments required for secure product development. Moreover, the application also has a customized dashboard that presents a consolidated set of vulnerable applications and helps the organization identify top vulnerabilities conveniently and work towards aligning efforts to address those vulnerabilities.

Speaking on the development, Shadab Siddiqui, Head – Security Engineering at Ola said, “As a homegrown technology company, we realize the importance of building security infrastructure that will help efficiently address vulnerabilities that may exist in product application, and there was a serious need for such a tool in the developer/security community. As part of the growing technology ecosystem in India, our aim is to share our knowledge and expertise to help other companies address similar challenges by using our application that is built to provide a comprehensive picture of all vulnerabilities, eliminating the need to shuffle between platforms. We have already reached out to a few of the leading product companies with Jackhammer and they are excited with the prospect of benefitting from our application.”

Jackhammer offers a collaborative tool between those focused on security, developers, quality assurance, Technical Program Managers (TPMs) and senior leadership. It can integrate with multiple third party open source and paid tools and can run all kinds of scans (on source code, web apps, WordPress, mobile apps, and networks, etc.) from one place and track them to closure.

Ola says that this step signifies its commitment towards supporting the tech community and entrepreneurism in India. Jackhammer shows the spread of vulnerabilities across all these levels and provides a complete overview of the level of security the tool maintains with respect to vulnerabilities in its code, allowing security teams to understand the complete picture and streamline efforts to mitigate vulnerabilities.

Jackhammer can be accessed at https://github.com/olacabs/jackhammer

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Bengaluru based cab aggregator Ola is reportedly looking to raise USD 100 million, not long after it was in news previously after raising funds in a down round. Livemint reports that Ola’s board of directors approved a capital infusion of USD 100 million last month.

The development comes after the aggregator raised USD 250 million from SIMI Pacific Pte Ltd, a SoftBank subsidiary. Ola plans to sell 495,526 Series-I shares at 13,531 a piece which is higher than the price at which Ola sold its shares to Softbank in November. This indicates a rise in valuation with the investment.

Ola has been looking to raise fresh capital for a while to continue holding its aggressive position against Uber. It was reported that the company is looking for new investors for fresh investment of USD 300-400 million. If Ola gets new investors, SoftBank will invest more funds in the company.

However, the company has been facing challenges and Ola co-founder Bhavish Aggarwal called for enforcing protectionist measures against the global rival last year. After selling its China business to Didi, Uber turned focus from the China market to India. Apart from introducing new products, Uber has been strengthening its team in India further adding to Ola’s worries.

Source: LiveMint

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Uber must have been quite optimistic about India after trading its China business. With one major market off the list, it was clear that it was time to go guns blazing in India. Ola was in a good spot too. Funding woes aside, it had a stronger presence in India with more cities covered and a larger network of drivers. However, past few weeks proved that it isn’t all smooth sailing for either in India.

Both the aggregators have been trying to strike the right balance between the customers and driver partners while fighting each other on both the fronts. Along with this, they were also trying to cut down their mounting losses and as a result, thousands of cars working with both the aggregators went off the road for weeks as drivers felt they were being squeezed in the hustle. The strike for better incentives turned into a contest of who gives up first. With the scale of commuters affected by the strike, Ola and Uber clearly knew that they are now an integral part of how cities move. The strikes were called off earlier this month but the underlying problems were far from solved. Neither the cab aggregators, nor the drivers were able to draw anything from the table in this entire episode.

The drivers still hold grudges against the two and are eager to jump on opportunities that would allow them to have more control over their work and earnings. The customers on the other hand, are cautious that similar disruptions could happen again and thus are wary of committing to the services and this seems to have slowed down the two aggregators.

Until a while back, there were smaller players finding room for themselves while Uber and Ola were growing. Many of them faded with their progress of Ola and Uber while some settled for their own corners in the room. However, with the recent protests by drivers, almost all the player having a role in the urban transportation space were quick to jump on the situation. Radio taxi service Meru started pushing its mobile app and lowered fares to attract users. Auto aggregator Jugnoo announced entry into the cab space while highlighting the problems with the current model of Uber and Ola. Along with this, other regional upstarts, including some by taxi unions, started to pop up again trying to lure drivers with similar messaging, hoping that users will follow if they are able to get driver partners. Experts don’t think that these regional players will be able to create a major dent but that isn’t stopping any of them from trying and signing up some drivers.

Looking at the situation, Bike taxi startup Baxi also started moving in the same direction. In a bid to lure the drivers, they partnered with taxi unions across different geographies and started promoting their flat payment structure with print ads communicating with the drivers. In Bengaluru, another attempt by driver unions, HDK cabs, received investment from former Karnataka Chief Minister.

A visible solution for Uber and Ola is to raise fares for the users and in turn, offer higher incentives to drivers. However, it would push away some customers, something both of them won’t like when expanding aggressively is the key plan, and also give a sign to the drivers that they can yield under pressure, yet another message they won’t like to send. They know they have a massive user base and strong technology platforms that the smaller newcomers can’t replicate easily. The two are likely to continue operating as they are doing now and let the new aggregators face the challenges of building demand.

However, this doesn’t mean that the two will be absolutely unaffected. Judging by the numbers the new aggregators are boasting already, they are setting foot into the ground paved by Uber and Ola and the two will have to regain the lost ground. And while the threat from smaller players can be ignored, Meru could turn into a serious competitor as its tries to move up from the distant third spot it has been holding for a while. It has its own network of drivers and is already a trusted brand among users. The problems for Uber and Ola may have faded for now but they are far from over. We are keeping a close watch on the cab space to see how it pans out. Sign up for our newsletter below to stay updated on the developments.

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Uber’s driver partners haven’t been quite happy with the cab hailing company. While they have been quite happy until recently to get the incentives to top up the unrealistically low fares, the company has since started to squeeze whatever they could without having to raise fares for the passengers. This led to various protests across India with drivers looking for alternatives.

It appears that now they have decided to take matters in their own hands as Uber and Ola drivers in Delhi gear up to launch their own app. Similar attempts have been made in other parts of the world like Paris and Austin. The cab union behind this new app comments that this is a reaction to the dropped earnings from Ola and Uber.

The app is expected to launch on April 7 with over 5,000 drivers signed up already. They have contracted multiple providers for technology, customer care, operations, marketing and other business needs. The service won’t charge commissions on rides and instead, will charge a flat fee of INR 700 (10.7 USD) per month from the drivers. There is no word on the pricing yet but there will be flat pricing irrespective of the demand.

Named SEWA, the service will initially rely on cash payments but introduction of other payment options is planned. It will follow a hybrid model for accepting rides as users will be able to flag down a cab on the street and driver will use the passenger’s phone number to feed into the fare meter in his or her app.

However, this group of drivers isn’t the only one trying to give Uber an elbow. Some other driver associations across the country are also exploring the option and have promised the drivers a better service. Looks like new cab hailing fights are going to start soon.

Source: DNA India

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During an Uber ride in April last year, the driver mentioned that Reliance is considering an entry into the app based cab hailing market. According to him, some of his friends who have been driving with Uber and Ola were approached by people from Reliance to discuss with them the challenges they are facing and other details about their work. His tone indicated that he was quite excited about a more familiar name joining the race. Over the next few Uber rides, I brought up the topic with other drivers but none of them had similar story to share so it was dismissed as a rumour.

However, almost a year later, similar news has been popping up again. Trak.in reports quoting someone from Reliance that the company has a plan to launch the service in April but it might take longer depending on how the commercial rollout pans out. It also reports that the service will be called Reliance Jio Cabs named after the recently introduced 4G only telecom operator by Reliance Industry.

Reportedly, a business model is being worked out currently with E&Y taking care of the details. It is expected that the rollout will start with South India and they will eventually move towards North.

A simultaneous rollout in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities is also on the cards. If things fall in line and the details in various reports are to be believed, Uber and Ola will have a strong competitor in the form of Reliance. As it has been seen in some of the previous ventures of the group and more recently with telecom operator Reliance Jio, expect a new price war to start. Flush with cash, the upcoming player can give Ola serious run for its money, quite literally.

The fact that Uber and Ola have been recently facing lot of backlash from its driver partners would further help them. Reliance might also be able to cash the brand recognition it already enjoys in India. To further help matters, the recently introduced telecom operator Reliance Jio has attracted many first time mobile internet users with its slew of freebies and it used the opportunity to push along its own suite of media, security and payment apps. It is likely the company will leverage its already 100 million strong reach of mobile users to drive growth for its cab service. Maybe the problems for Uber and Ola aren’t ending soon.

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Uber and Ola in India were recently ordered to stop their sharing services, Pool and Share respectively, in the state of Karnataka. Both the companies have been aggressively pushing to gather support for their sharing services. However, their problems aren’t just limited to the suspension of car pooling service.

In other parts of the country, the two companies are facing backlash from their network of drivers allegedly over ‘false promises’. The drivers across multiple cities are protesting because according to them, the two companies made huge promises when they started working but now they are struggling to make ends meet. Drivers in the city of Hyderabad went out begging at traffic lights to show their plight.

It was the same story in capital city Delhi as well. Protesting drivers are demanding that the cab aggregators increase the fares to a more realistic number. This has also caused disruption for daily commuters and travellers looking to move across the city. According to the drivers, they expect the cab hailing companies to offer better fares, lesser working hours and insurance. Along with this, the drivers are also expecting the cab aggregators to slow down with the addition of drivers on their networks and end the car pooling service as it affects their earnings. It is yet to be seen how the two major cab hailing platforms respond to the drivers.

Popular radio cab service Meru recently launched its own app based cab hailing service at comparatively higher prices to go against Uber and Ola. On the other side, auto aggregator Jugnoo jumped on the opportunity and quickly announced the launch of its own cab hailing service in addition to the autos offered on its platform. Both the companies claim to offer prices that are sustainable in the long run unlike what Uber and Ola are offering.

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India is a big market for the American cab hailing company but not without the unique challenges. Apart from the local rival Ola, low internet penetration and slow adoption mean that the large number of rides they complete are still a very small fraction of the entire cab market.

Accounting for the challenge of slow connectivity and low end devices, Uber earlier introduced a simplified mobile web version at dial.uber.com to allow people to book cabs without the need of downloading the app. Taking another step in the same direction, Uber is looking to associate with Indian Railways to allow for train travellers to book an Uber easily.

While there is no confirmation from either parties yet, some news reports quote railway officials confirming the development. According to the reports, the proposal is being considered and a revenue model is being worked out.

Uber is looking to lease out space at railway stations to make cabs readily available and set up kiosks to allow for passengers arriving on a train to book cabs easily. Some sources suggest that Ola is also looking at a similar partnership. Ola also recently started offering cab service to Mumbai Metro passengers by setting up Ola Zones.

With the massive scale of train travel in India, if Uber is able to attract even a small fraction of travellers, there will be a huge bump in the number of rides. With 12,000 trains daily, Indian Railways carries over 23million passengers everyday across 8000 stations. For railways, it would open up a new revenue source from the lease, commissions and service charges. Along with that, the railway stations will be able to provide better cab service to the travellers.

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