Category: TECHNOLOGY
Deutsche Telekom Sells Stake in Tower Business for $6.6 Billion
The German telecoms company said it had agreed to sell a 51% stake in its tower unit in Germany and Austria to Brookfield Infrastructure Partners and DigitalBridge. …read more
DoorDash to hike subtotal minimums for US subscribers
Food and grocery delivery company DoorDash is raising the bar for orders through its subscription service DashPass.
According to an email update, starting August 12, “DashPass subtotal minimums may increase and vary by store, city and time of day…” DashPass subscribers pay $9.99 per month for free delivery and decreased service fees. Currently, subscribers need to order at least $12 of food or $35 worth of groceries to get the discounts.
DoorDash wouldn’t share which markets would be affected, nor what the new minimums would be, but the changes will only affect U.S. markets and only on convenience, drugstore and liquor store orders, as well as DashMart orders, which is DoorDash’s branded local convenience stores, according to a DoorDash spokesperson.
The spokesperson said that things like alcohol and groceries are already hitting a larger minimum subtotal anyways, so DoorDash is matching what it’s seeing to “make sure we’re thinking about all sides of the business.”
In its email announcement, DoorDash hinted that labor, and potentially increased wages, are the reason it raised the subtotal minimums.
“Delivering the essentials you need requires a few more steps than you might think: a real human hand picks items to make sure you get exactly what you asked for,” DoorDash wrote.
Multiple states in the country hiked up their minimum wages at the start of 2022. At the same time, the U.S. is experiencing a labor shortage that predated, but was exacerbated by, the pandemic. A recent U.S. Chamber of Commerce survey indicated workers are still concerned about COVID-19 at work, think pay is too low and are more focused on acquiring new skills and education before re-entering the job market.
A company spokesperson explained that DoorDash wants to ensure Dashers are being fairly compensated for the extra labor of going into the stores and doing the shopping, picking and packing of orders, rather than just rocking up to a restaurant and picking up a ready meal.
It’s not clear how DoorDash will make decisions on increased subtotal minimums in the markets where it’s testing. It may rely on dynamic pricing algorithms, but the company refused to confirm with TechCrunch.
DashPass has become an increasingly popular service over the past couple of years as customers have grown accustomed to relying on delivery during the pandemic. DoorDash’s total orders grew 23% year over year to 404 million, with order growth driven by an increase in monthly active users and increased average order frequency, due in part to increased penetration of DashPass, according to the company’s first-quarter earnings.
Earlier this week, DoorDash also shut down Chowbotics, the salad-making robotics startup it acquired only last year.
https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/13/doordash-to-hike-subtotal-minimums-for-us-subscribers/
Walmart doesn’t want Canoo selling EVs to Amazon
Walmart kicked off a deal with electric vehicle company Canoo on Tuesday to purchase 4,500 of its last-mile delivery vehicles. While the deal is not exclusive, it does prevent Canoo from making sales to Walmart’s rival Amazon.
Walmart’s agreement to purchase up to 10,000 electric vans from startup-turned-SPAC Canoo includes a caveat blocking sales to Amazon, according to a regulatory filing first reported on by Bloomberg. Canoo had warned last quarter that it may not have enough money to stay in business, so it’s no surprise that the company took this deal with Walmart, despite the restrictions.
Canoo shares surged more than 50% when the news of the deal broke, but have since fallen 1.65% in after-hours trading on Wednesday. The company’s shares are down nearly 56% year-to-date.
Amazon may not be interested in Canoo anyway. The online retail giant has ordered 100,000 vehicles from Rivian, of which it also owns a 20% stake. While it’s not clear how many EVs Rivian has yet delivered to Amazon, the company says it is on track to hit its goal of producing 25,000 EVs this year. However, that is about 15,000 shy of Rivian’s initial production target — the company lowered its production guidance in March after disappointing 2021 Q4 earnings.
Amazon also signed on to be the first commercial customer for the Ram ProMaster electric van, which Stellantis plans to launch in 2023.
In terms of pure revenue, Walmart is still a good bet for Canoo. Total sales topped $141 billion in the company’s first-quarter results, compared to $81 billion in retail-related sales for Amazon. And per the terms of the deal, Walmart could end up owning more than 20% of Canoo through a warrant issued to the retailer to buy up to 61.2 million shares at an exercise price of $2.15 per share. The warrant has a term of 10 years and is vested immediately with respect to 15.3 million common shares, according to the filing.
The rest of the shares will be vested quarterly and proportionate to any revenue realized by Canoo from transactions with Walmart or its affiliates or any products or services offered by Walmart to Canoo until the net revenue equals $300 million, at which point the warrant will have been fully vested.
Canoo’s filing also indicates that Walmart’s purchase order is non-binding, but that seems to be the standard for risky deals with EV SPACs — Amazon’s deal with Rivian is also non-binding and subject to change.
Walmart has also reserved 5,000 e-delivery vans from BrightDrop, General Motors’ commercial EV unit, as part of its larger goal to reach a zero-emissions logistics fleet by 2040.
https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/13/walmart-doesnt-want-canoo-selling-evs-to-amazon/
Tesla loses top AI executive who led Autopilot vision team
Andrej Karpathy, the deep learning and computer vision expert who was hired five years ago as Tesla’s director of AI and led Autopilot vision team, is officially leaving the company.
Karpathy was on a four-month leave of absence, fueling widespread speculation as to whether he would return.
In a tweet posted Wednesday afternoon, Karparthy wrote, “It’s been a great pleasure to help Tesla towards its goals over the last 5 years and a difficult decision to part ways. In that time, Autopilot graduated from lane keeping to city streets and I look forward to seeing the exceptionally strong Autopilot team continue that momentum.”
Karpathy said he had no concrete plans for what he might do next, adding that he looks to spend more time “revisiting my long-term passions around technical work in AI, open source and education.”
Sources have previously told TechCrunch that Karpathy is considering some venture investing.
Karpathy’s announcement comes as Tesla said in a California regulatory filing it was laying off 229 data annotation employees who are part of the company’s larger Autopilot team and shuttering the San Mateo, California office where they worked.
Prior to joining Tesla in 2017, Karpathy was a researcher at OpenAI, the artificial intelligence nonprofit backed by Elon Musk. He has an extensive background in AI-related fields and was the creator of one of the most respected, deep learning courses taught at Stanford University.
His role at Tesla, where he focused on the computer vision system built to support the Autopilot advanced driver assistance system, tied back to his previous dissertation work. In his dissertation, Karpathy had focused on creating a system in which a neural network could identify multiple discrete and specific items within an image, label them using natural language and report to a user. Notably, it included developing a system that works in reverse. This allowed for a model to use descriptions in natural language (e.g., “black dress”) and find that object in a given image.
https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/13/tesla-loses-top-ai-executive-who-led-autopilot-vision-team/
Uber sued by 550 women and counting over sexual assaults by drivers
Uber is being sued by 550 women passengers across the U.S. who have alleged they were assaulted by drivers on the platform.
The complaint, which was filed in San Francisco County Superior Court on Wednesday by attorneys at Slater Slater Schulman LLP, alleges that passengers were kidnapped, sexually assaulted, sexually battered, raped, falsely imprisoned, stalked, harassed or otherwise attacked by Uber drivers, per a court filing. They are seeking damages and demanding a jury trial for a laundry list of claims, including negligence around hiring and supervising drivers and liability for everything from the attacks to product design flaws.
The lawsuit comes only a few days after the Uber Files, a trove of 124,000 documents — including internal emails and text messages between executives and politicians — was leaked by former Uber lobbyist Mark McCann. The files, which reveal the inner workings of Uber from 2013 to 2017, detail a history of lawbreaking, lobbying and exploiting driver safety.
Last month, Uber released its second U.S. Safety Report, which showed there were 998 sexual assault incidents, including 141 rape reports, in 2020 alone. Between 2019 and 2020, Uber received 3,824 reports of the five most severe categories of sexual assault. Uber’s first safety report, which details incidents from 2017 to 2018, found nearly 6,000 reports pertaining to sexual assault.
The lawsuit against the company claims that Uber has been intentionally concealing the fact that Uber drivers had been regularly sexually assaulting women since at least 2014 and “instead represented that Uber was a safe mode of transportation.” It also accuses Uber of actively giving sexual predators a platform to find and assault women, without conducting proper background checks on the drivers or providing adequate safety measures for riders. In addition, the complaint accuses Uber of benefitting monetarily from rides where women were sexually assaulted.
“Uber’s whole business model is predicated on giving people a safe ride home, but rider safety was never their concern – growth was, at the expense of their passengers’ safety,” said Adam Slater, founding partner of Slater Slater Schulman, in a statement. “While the company has acknowledged this crisis of sexual assault in recent years, its actual response has been slow and inadequate, with horrific consequences.”
While 550 women in the U.S. have come forward to join Slater Slater Schulman’s class action suit, the law firm is actively investigating 150 more. And this is just in the U.S.
One of the frightening tidbits revealed in the Uber Files details the company’s strategy for dealing with assault in at least one case abroad. When an Uber driver raped a 25-year-old passenger in Delhi in 2014, the company decided to “shift blame to flawed Indian background checks.”
Wednesday’s lawsuit details claims from at least five women who were victims of sexual predators driving for Uber between 2021 and 2022. The complaint accuses Uber of being fixated on getting new drivers onboarded as quickly as possible to fuel growth, which led to shoddy background checks.
“For example, former CEO Travis Kalanick intentionally …read more
Panasonic to build $4B EV battery plant in Kansas
Panasonic said Wednesday it plans to build the world’s largest EV battery plant, a $4 billion factory in Kansas that will manufacture and supply lithium-ion batteries to EV makers.
The factory is slated to be larger than the Gigafactory it operates with Tesla in Sparks, Nevada, which is already one of the largest lithium-ion battery factories in the world.
The electronics supplier also aims to begin producing a high-capacity battery for Tesla in early 2024. Those batteries are expected to increase energy capacity fivefold, which could boost range by more than 15% and cut production costs.
Panasonic said its advanced battery technology will improve EV range and that scaling its operations will lower the cost to produce EVs.
“With the increased electrification of the automotive market, expanding battery production in the U.S. is critical to help meet demand,” Kazuo Tadanobu, president and CEO of Panasonic Energy, said in a statement.
The deal represents the largest economic development project in Kansas’s history. Located in the Kansas City region, the facility will create up to 4,000 new jobs and about $4 billion in capital investment.
This story is developing.
https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/13/panasonic-to-build-4-billion-ev-battery-plant-in-kansas/
Arrival to slash costs, cut up to 30% of workforce to meet on EV van production target
Arrival, the U.K.-based commercial EV company, plans to slash costs and cut as much as 30% of its workforce as it attempts to protect the business from a challenging economic environment while meeting its production targets.
The company, which went public last year via a merger with a special purpose acquisition company, said the restructuring plan includes a targeted 30% reduction in spending across the entire business. It anticipates the reorganization could “potentially impact up to 30% of employees globally.” The plan would allow the company to meet its targets through late 2023 using the $500 million of cash it has on hard.
The cuts are designed to keep Arrival on track to start production of its commercial EV van in the third quarter of this year, the company said. Arrival added that it must address challenges such as supply chain issues, an ongoing pandemic, geopolitical tensions and rising inflation now as it starts production this year.
The company will provide more details on the plan during its second-quarter earnings call scheduled for August 11.
Arrival is one in a growing list of EV companies issuing layoffs and slashing spending as economic conditions tighten. Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe told employees this week in an email viewed by TechCrunch that job cuts may occur. Tesla has also laid off hundreds of employees.
While Arrival is staring down a considerable reduction in spending and layoffs, it has fared better than many of its EV SPAC brethren — a group of companies that have faced SEC investigations, insolvency and executive shuffling.
The company, which has centered its business plan around using microfactories to build its products, announced in May that its electric bus model achieved certification in the European Union with customer models expected to be produced by the second half of this year.
Arrival said in its first-quarter earnings report it expects to produce 400 to 600 vans plus low-volume production of buses in the second half of 2022. The report also notes that Arrival has collected a total of 143,000 nonbinding letters of intent and orders for its vehicles as of May, including the commitment from UPS to buy up to 10,000 vehicles from the startup in the U.S. and Europe.
Daily Crunch: Interactive gaming developer Unity merges with app monetization platform ironSource
Take note, startup workers: the same people who welcomed you aboard when you signed your offer letter are now looking for places to save money so they can keep your company afloat.
Reducing headcount is another way for founders to claw back equity, as many workers who’ve been laid off lack enough cash to exercise all of their vested options. Once those options expire, they’ll go back to your employer.
If you work for a startup that extends the traditional 90-day post-termination exercise window, count your blessings. If you don’t, this TC+ guest post contains useful advice for budgeting, negotiating and strategizing to save your hard-won equity.
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Goodness! Have a scroll through the TechChrunch homepage today — it’s like drinking from a fire hose here the past couple of days! There’s so much news that it’s legitimately hard to pick our selection for the newsletter today. We’ve done our best, but it’s def worth giving the homepage a look to see if we left something out that you might be particularly interested in. — Christine and Haje
The TechCrunch Top 3
- Get your game on: Unity and ironSource confirmed that they are merging of “two powerhouses” in interactive development and app monetization, Ingrid writes. She says of the union, “Pursuing M&A as a route to product and user growth has long been a strategy for larger tech companies, but the last several months have seen a number of M&A deals surface among smaller players, too, as funding sources become less free flowing, performance targets are tightened and valuations drop.”
- Ding dong indeed: While we are always worried about data some large entity collects about us, we can’t say it makes us feel good that Amazon’s Ring was apparently one of them. In fact, Zack reports that the Ring “gave a record amount of doorbell footage to the government” last year. Time to slam the door on that.
- Don’t pass ‘go,’ don’t collect crypto: We introduced you to Jagmeet yesterday, and already he has a hit on his hands covering Sri Lanka’s central bank warnings to users not to use cryptocurrency. The country doesn’t consider it legal tender anyway, but with it being unregulated and a “sovereign-debt crisis” going on there, the government is saying it’s better to be safe than sorry.
Startups and VC
What started as a pet project to electrify food trucks in the San Francisco Bay Area — an enterprise inspired by the cacophony of generators that greeted Ben Parker every day during his lunch break at Tesla — has evolved into a much larger, complex and potentially more lucrative undertaking of creating electric recreational vehicles, reports Kirsten.
Also in the hardware world, Magic Leap detailed the availability and pricing of its next release: the Magic Leap 2, Lucas reports. Unlike its first release, this headset will be geared entirely toward professional users with less intentional vagueness. That professional focus is apparent with the device’s pricing.
We also loved the most recent episode of our Equity podcast, where the team discusses how Roe v. Wade’s reversal will change how startups need to be built.
Moar:
- A little bit of Itica, all night long: Yes, that’s a size 5 mambo reference, and Ivan reports that Here lets you make fractional vacation rental …read more
A Twitter test will remind you to add alt text to images
In the midst of absolutely no internal chaos whatsoever, Twitter’s accessibility team launched a much-requested feature test. Ten percent of users, who make up the test group, will be served reminders to add image descriptions to their photo uploads.
Image descriptions, or alt text, are exactly what they sound like: descriptions of what appears in an image. Sometimes these descriptions appear when the image doesn’t load, but more importantly, they offer context for people using screen readers, who might be blind or low-vision. Alt text helps make sure that everyone can be included in the conversation.
This test is designed to encourage more people to use alt text. If you have access to the feature, you can navigate to your account’s settings, click “Accessibility,” and then scroll to the “Images” header. There, you can turn on a reminder to prompt you to add alt text before sending a tweet with an image.
“If you forget to add image descriptions, turning on the reminder will be a big favor to your future self. And to everyone on Twitter,” the platform wrote. “Actually, if everyone turns it on, everyone would be helping everyone.”
In April, Twitter started rolling out features that make it more apparent when an image has alt text. Now, “ALT” badges appear in the bottom corner of photos, showing whether an image has alt text or not. When you click that button, you can view the image description.
But even the best-intentioned among us might forget to add image descriptions sometimes, so these reminders should come in handy. For users who don’t know what alt text is or why it matters, these pop-ups might also serve an educational purpose.
“Image descriptions are a simple way to expand info access to people with disabilities, and everyone who wants more context,” Twitter explained.
In its announcement thread, Twitter references an ongoing discussion about the pitfalls of misused alt text — sometimes, Twitter users will use alt text to hide easter eggs or jokes for anyone who might click the ALT badge. But using image descriptions in this way is confusing for users who actually need the alt text for context. When more tweeters use accessibility features as intended, though, it makes it more clear how to actually write good alt text.
There’s much debate around what constitutes well-written image descriptions. For example, if you see a photo of a woman eating salad, you probably don’t need to know what color the bowl is, or whether the salad has croutons in it. Maybe it’s relevant to the context that she’s mid-bite, or that she’s staring …read more
https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/13/twitter-alt-text-reminder-image-description-test/
Elon Musk and Twitter Each Face Challenge to Define What Makes an Account Fake
The Tesla boss questions Twitter’s stated number of fake accounts, but data scientists say such a figure isn’t easy to determine. …read more