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I did not see that coming - does anyone know whether money changed hands here? It'll be interesting to see how Lyft and others respond.

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Google Ventures is an investor.

Yes, but as mentioned in the article: "Google always maintains its venture arm operates independently from the rest of the organization"

Are there other examples of something like this happening to a GV backed company?

I'm sure that the venture arm operates independently of main Google -- but it's not like the folks at Google Maps are somehow unaware of the fact that GV sunk a quarter-billion into Uber.

And Uber is one of the, if not THE, biggest investments GV has made. They have $1.5 billion in assets, according to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Ventures). So 1/6th of all their assets is Uber. Which means that asking whether other GV-invested companies have experienced easier Google integrations is not all that meaningful -- Uber is an outlier.

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