Uber connects major tourists spots along Croatian coast via speedboat service

Uber Technologies Inc launched its speedboat service in Croatia on 30 June, 2017, connecting major tourist spots along the country’s Adriatic coast.

UberBOAT, which offers speedboats for up to 12 people, has already been tested in Istanbul and Miami among other locations, and will operate in Croatia during the summer tourist season.

It will compete with other boat services along the Adriatic coast.

The service will be available, via the Uber app, from the cities of Split and Dubrovnik in the southern Adriatic as well as from the island of Hvar. The price of hiring a speed boat for up to eight people to travel from Split to Hvar, for example, will cost 2,600 kuna ($400).

“UberBOAT offers two different services – transfer between the mainland and the island or speed boat rent for half-day or whole-day trips … There is no possibility to stay overnight on the boat nor to hire the boat without captain and sailors,” Uber said in a statement.

The users will be able to define their own itinerary during daily trips or opt for an organised schedule involving some of the most popular destinations.

Croatia is a popular tourist destin

Dropbox seeks to hire underwriters for an initial public offering later this year: Reuters

Data-sharing business Dropbox Inc is seeking to hire underwriters for an initial public offering that could come later this year, which would make it the biggest U.S. technology company to go public since Snap Inc, people familiar with the matter said on 30 June. The IPO will be a key test of Dropbox’s worth after it was valued at almost $10 billion in a private fundraising round in 2014.

Dropbox will begin interviewing investment banks in the coming weeks, the sources said, asking not to be named because the deliberations are private. Dropbox declined to comment.

Several big U.S. technology companies such as Uber Technologies Inc and Airbnb Inc have resisted going public in recent months, concerned that stock market investors, who focus more on profitability than do private investors, would assign lower valuations to them. Snap, owner of the popular messaging app Snapchat, was forced to lower its IPO valuation expectations earlier this year amid investor concern over its unproven business model. Its shares have since lingered just above the IPO price, with investors troubled by widening losses and missed analyst estimates. It has a market capitalization of $21 billion. Still, for many private companies, there is increasing pressure to go public as investors look to cash out.
Proceeds from technology IPOs slumped to $6.7 billion in2015 from $34 billion in 2014, and shrunk further to $2.9 billion in 2016, according to Thomson Reuters data. Dropbox’s main competitor, Box Inc, was valued at roughly $1.67 billion in its IPO in 2015, less than the $2.4 billion it had been valued at in previous private fundraising rounds. San Francisco-based Dropbox, which was founded in 2007 by Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduates Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi, counts Sequoia Capital, T. Rowe Price and Greylock Partners as investors.

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Dropbox started as a free service for consumers to share and store photos, music and other large files. That business became commoditized though, as Alphabet Inc’s Google, Microsoft Corp and Amazon.com Inc started offering storage for free. Dropbox has since pivoted to focus on winning business clients, and Houston, the company’s CEO, has said that Dropbox is on track to generate more than $1 billion in revenue this year. The company has expanded its Dropbox Business that requires companies to pay a fee based on the number of employees who use it. The service in January began offering Smart Sync, which allows users to see and access all of their files, whether stored in the cloud or on a local hard drive, from their desktop.