Nearly two years after one of Uber's self-driving cars was involved in a fatal crash in Arizona, the ride-hailing firm has been allowed to test its autonomous vehicles on public roads in California. "Receiving a permit in California -- which has granted permits to 65 other transport firms -- is the latest step in Uber's revival of the program," reports the BBC. From the report: California allows companies to test self-driving technology with a backup driver in the car. Before the fatal crash, Uber's self-driving cars were being tested in four locations in the United States -- Phoenix, Toronto, Pittsburgh and San Francisco. Uber said it is considering using San Francisco, where the company is based, again. It did not give a timeline for when it will resume testing. California has granted permits to 66 companies in total to test autonomous vehicles, but Uber is the only one that has been involved in a fatal crash.

A reader shares a report from The Atlantic, written by Sidney Fussell: Uber has banned guns in cars, for both drivers and passengers, since 2015. But over email and Facebook Messenger, four current and four former drivers told me they carry firearms on the job. In explaining why, they each cited the same self-determinalist rhetoric Uber has slapped on subway ads to entice drivers and used in hearings to justify the business model: Drivers maintain good ratings, own their own cars, set their own hours, act as their own bosses, and follow local laws. But ultimately, they work for themselves, and Uber is, to use a Silicon Valley term of art, just a platform.

In 2017, Jose Mejia, a Miami driver, filed a federal class-action suit against Uber to reverse its firearm ban. Florida's 2008 "bring your gun to work" law empowers employees to store legal firearms in personal lockers or their own cars. With Uber, of course, the car is the workplace. Mejia claimed that Uber policy violated Florida law and, citing an incident in which an Uber driver with a concealed-carry license shot and disarmed a Chicago gunman, argued that arming Uber drivers could save lives. But Mejia couldn't prove that Uber violated his rights: He hadn't been fired or threatened with suspension. The company had announced a ban, yes, but never materially stopped him from carrying a firearm. The Florida court dismissed the suit (PDF) without prejudice in 2018. Here we have a uniquely American absurdity: Drivers can carry guns to work, to a bar, to a supermarket, but not in their own cars while using the app to transport passengers. Like Mejia, they exist in this space between name and effect, adherent to a ban with little practical enforcement.

The plan to ban private cars from Market Street -- one of the city's busiest and most dangerous downtown thoroughfares -- enjoys a remarkable level of local support. From a report: In a city known for stunning vistas, San Francisco's Market Street offers a notoriously ugly tangle of traffic. Cars and delivery trucks vie with bikes and pedestrians along this downtown corridor, as buses and a historic streetcar clatter through the mix. Dedicated lanes for transit and bikes end abruptly several blocks from the street's terminus at the edge of the San Francisco Bay. But the vehicular frenzy is ending, in part: Starting Wednesday, private vehicles -- meaning both passenger automobiles and for-hire ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft -- may no longer drive down Market, east of 10th Street. Only buses, streetcars, traditional taxis, ambulances, and freight drop-offs are still allowed. The closure to private vehicle traffic heralds the start of a new era for the city's central spine, and perhaps for San Francisco at large, as it joins cities around the world that are restricting cars from downtown centers.

"We need to do better than use Market as a queuing place for the Bay Bridge," said Jeffrey Tumlin, the newly arrived executive director of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. "Today represents the way the world is finally changing how it thinks about the role of transportation in cities." After decades of debate, the vision for a car-free Market Street has arrived at a remarkable level of support among activists, politicians, planners, and businesses. (Especially compared to the rancor and legal challenges that greeted New York City's long-delayed effort to create a car-free busway along 14th Street in Manhattan.) In October, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency's board of directors voted unanimously in support of a $600 million "Better Market Street" capital construction plan. Ground is set to break on construction for a protected bikeway, repaved sidewalk, fresh streetscaping, and updated streetcar infrastructure by the start of 2021.

Clayton Christensen, the business scholar who coined the term "disruptive innovation," died of cancer treatment complications on Thursday at age 67. The Verge reports: You may not immediately recognize his name, but the tech industry -- and every resulting industry -- is built on the framework of technology disruption and innovation that Christensen devised. The crux of Christensen's theory is that big, successful companies that neglect potential customers at the lower end of their markets (mainframe computers, in his famous example) are ripe for disruption from smaller, more efficient, more nimble competitors that can do almost as good a job more cheaply (like personal computers). One need look no further than the biggest names in Silicon Valley to find evidence of successful disrupters, from Napster to Amazon to Uber to Airbnb and so on.

And scores of notable tech leaders have for years cited Christensen's 1997 book The Innovator's Dilemma as a major influence. It's the only business book on the late Steve Jobs' must-read list; Netflix CEO Reed Hastings read it with his executive team when he was developing the idea for his company; and the late Andy Grove, CEO of Intel, said the book and Christensen's theory were responsible for that company's turnaround. [...] He later refined his thinking on disruption, introducing the concept of "jobs to be done," which stressed the need to focus on customers' needs, and acknowledged that disruption was a great way to start a company, but not a good way to grow a company. "It's not a manual for how to grow or how to predict what customers want. [Jobs to be done] is the second side of the same coin: How can I be sure that competitors won't kill me and how can I be sure customers will want to buy the product? So it's actually a very important compliment to disruption."

Uber is testing a new feature that gives some drivers in California the ability to set their fares, the latest in a series of moves to give them more autonomy in response to the state's new gig-economy law. From a report: Starting Tuesday morning, drivers who ferry passengers from airports in Santa Barbara, Palm Springs and Sacramento can charge up to five times the fare Uber sets on a ride, according to a person involved in developing the feature. Uber confirmed in an emailed statement that it is doing an "initial test" that "would give drivers more control over the rates they charge riders." The ride-hailing giant has made many changes to the way it works in response to California's passage of Assembly Bill 5. The law requires companies to treat workers as employees -- eligible for sick days and other benefits -- rather than independent contractors if they are controlled by their employer and contribute to its usual course of business.

An anonymous reader quotes a report: Uber said on late Tuesday that it has sold its food delivery business, Uber Eats, in India to local rival Zomato as the American ride-hailing giant races to shed lossmaking operations to become profitable by next year. As part of the deal, Uber would own 9.99% of Zomato and its Eats users would become part of the Indian company, the two loss-making firms said. The deal valued Uber Eats' India business between $160 million and $200 million, two people familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. TechCrunch reported last month that the two were in advanced stages of talks for a deal. Indian newspaper Times of India first signaled about the two companies' talks in November. Satish Meena, an analyst at Forrester, told TechCrunch that despite the Uber deal, Zomato still lags local rival Swiggy, which services more number of orders each day. Backed by Prosus Ventures, Swiggy raised $1 billion in late 2018.

Will Larson has been an engineering leader at Digg, Uber, and Stripe, and last May published the book An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management.

Recently he wrote a thoughtful essay asking, "Do engineering managers need to be technical?" exploring the industry's current thinking and arriving at a surprisingly thoughtful conclusion:
Around 2010, with Google ascendant, product managers were finding more and more doors closed to them if they didn't have a computer science degree. If this policy worked for Google, it would work at least as well for your virality-driven, mobile-first social network for cats... [N]ow the vast majority of engineering managers come from software-engineering backgrounds. This is true both at the market-elected collection of technology companies known as FANG (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google) and at the latest crop of technology IPOs, like Fastly, Lyft, and Slack.

While engineering management has not prioritized its own measurement, there is evidence that expert leadership works in some fields... If this is the case, modern technology companies are already well along the right path. This is where the story gets a bit odd. If we know that managers with technical skills outperform others, and we're already hiring managers with backgrounds as software engineers, why are we still worrying whether they're technical? If these folks have proven themselves as practitioners within their fields, what is there left to debate? This is an awkward inconsistency. The most likely explanation is that "being technical" has lost whatever definition it once had...

It's uncomfortable to recognize that a distinction I relied upon so heavily for so long no longer means anything to me, but comfort has never been a good reason to get into management.

With the term "not technical" unusable, I instead focus on the details. Is there a kind of technology that a given person is not familiar with? Were they uncomfortable, or did they lack confidence when describing a solution? Would I care about them knowing this detail if I didn't personally know it? Given their role in and relation to the project, was the project's success dependent on them knowing these details...?

Looking forward to the next 30 years of management trends, only a few things seem certain: Managers should be technical, and the definition of technical will continue to change.

An anonymous reader quotes Slate:
Separating out the meaningful threats from the noise is hard. Is Facebook really the danger to democracy it looks like? Is Uber really worse than the system it replaced? Isn't Amazon's same-day delivery worth it? Which harms are real and which are hypothetical? Has the techlash gotten it right? And which of these companies is really the worst? Which ones might be, well, evil?

We don't mean evil in the mustache-twirling, burn-the-world-from-a-secret-lair sense -- well, we mostly don't mean that -- but rather in the way Googlers once swore to avoid mission drift, respect their users, and spurn short-term profiteering, even though the company now regularly faces scandals in which it has violated its users' or workers' trust. We mean ills that outweigh conveniences. We mean temptations and poison pills and unanticipated outcomes.
Slate sent ballots to "a wide range of journalists, scholars, advocates, and others who have been thinking critically about technology for years," and reported that while America's big tech companies topped the list, "our respondents are deeply concerned about foreign companies dabbling in surveillance and A.I., as well as the domestic gunners that power the data-broker business."

But while there were some disagreements, Palantir still rose to #4 on the list because "almost everyone distrusts Peter Thiel."

Interestingly, their list ranks SpaceX at #17 (for potentially disrupting astronomy by clogging the sky with satellites) and ranks Tesla at #14 for "its troubled record of worker safety and its dubious claims that it will soon offer 'full self-driving' to customers who have already paid $7,000 for the promised add-on... Our respondents say the very real social good that Tesla has done by creating safe, zero-emission vehicles does not justify misdeeds, like apparent 'stealth recalls' of defects that appear to violate safety laws or the 19 unresolved Clean Air Act violations at its paint shop."

Slate's article includes its comprehensive list of the 30 most dangerous tech companies. But here's the top 10:

1. Amazon
2. Facebook
3. Alphabet
4. Palantir Technologies
5. Uber
6. Apple
7. Microsoft
8. Twitter
9. ByteDance
10. Exxon Mobil

There's also lots of familiar names higher up on the list, including both 8chan (#20) and Cloudflare (#21). 23andMe came in at #18, while Huawei was #11. Netflix does not appear anywhere on the list, but Disney ranks #15.

And Oracle was #19. "It takes a lot to make me feel like Google is being victimized by a bully," wrote Cory Doctorow, "but Oracle managed it."

The social media team for a Minnesota football team playing against San Francisco's 49ers just incorporated "big tech" into its online trash talk, reports the San Francisco Chronicle's SFGate site. They call the resulting video "incredibly weird." The video in question depicts a time-lapse of [San Francisco's] Levi's stadium with two cartoon characters in the foreground that are basically team helmets with arms and legs. The 49ers character says "Welcome... to Silicon Valley" and we're then suddenly in the Matrix (?). The 49ers character pulls out a space gun that says "Big Tech" on it and starts shooting tech company logos at the Vikings character.

After slow-motion dodging Twitter, Facebook, Apple, Google Chrome, Instagram, What's App, and Uber logos a la Neo, the Viking character jump kicks the 49ers character.

The whole thing is as odd as it sounds, and even users on Reddit struggled to understand it.
The Reddit post attracted over 2,100 upvotes and 253 comments (including "Unsportsmanlike conduct, kicking opponent in the head. 15 yards penalty.")

The video has now been viewed 117,162 times over the last 18 hours -- and attracted 27,827 likes.

Uber informed its California customers this week that it would switch to providing estimates as opposed to fixed prices for its rides in response to a new law that makes it harder to qualify its drivers as contractors. From a report: In an email sent out to riders and seen by Reuters the company said the final price would now be calculated at the end of a trip, "based on the actual time and distance traveled." "Due to a new state law, we are making some changes to help ensure that Uber remains a dependable source of flexible work for California drivers," the company said in the email. The change applies to all private rides, while upfront prices will continue to be provided for shared, or pooled rides. The email included a picture displaying an example of a ride request on the Uber app. It showed a $27 to $36 range for an UberX ride, the company's most popular private ride option.

An anonymous reader shares a blog post from Kevin Rooke, investment specialist and co-founder of blockchain marketing agency agency0x: Imagine a startup with $12 billion of revenue, 125%+ YoY revenue growth (two years in a row), and Apple-esque gross margins (30-50%). Without knowing anything else about the business, what would you value it at? $50 billion? $100 billion? More? That's Apple's AirPods business, the fastest-growing segment of the world's most valuable company. Though Apple doesn't share sales numbers for AirPods, industry analysts have converged on estimated sales numbers for each of the last 3 years. In 2017, Apple sold an estimated 15 million devices, each priced at $150. That gave Apple a $2.25 billion revenue boost, only a 1% boost to Apple's $215 billion iPhone revenue.

But in 2018, AirPods sales began to quiet Apple bears. 35 million pairs were sold, still priced at $150. That gave Apple an additional $5.25 billion in revenue, then representing 2.4% of iPhone revenue. And in 2019, Apple has pulled off yet another incredible year of AirPods sales. Apple sold an estimated 60 million units, but in 2019 the prices increased too. Apple's second generation AirPods launched at $200, and their newest variation, the AirPods Pro sell for $250. Assuming an even split of sales between Gen 1, Gen 2, and AirPods Pro, Airpods revenue was $12 billion in 2019. That's 4.5% of Apple's iPhone revenue. Investors are paying attention now. AirPods make as much money as Spotify, Twitter, Snap, and Shopify combined. And considering their triple-digit growth two years in a row, I would be shocked if AirPods didn't earn more money than Uber in 2020.

"2020 may be the year where tech unionizing efforts gain some actual traction for the first time," argues GeekWire: The chances of this happening in 2020 reflect several factors in the industry and political landscape coming together in the right way for the first time ever. The "Streisand Effect" is basically where the actions you take to prevent what you most want not to happen actually makes it happen. Google has been in the news recently around unionizing activity and its response to that.... [T]he perceived heavy-handed response by Google and the response to it seem more likely to foster more pro-union activity at Google in the near future than to quell it. As Google is a huge presence in Silicon Valley and other cities such as Seattle, these actions can have ripple effects throughout the industry. Certainly, it seems more rather than less likely that there will be continued actions like this at Google in 2020. Since Google is such a leader in the industry, that could spread to other companies in Seattle, Silicon Valley, and beyond.

Here we turn from Google to two other tech powerhouses: Amazon and Uber. Both of these companies now have a huge presence in areas that have historically strong bastions of union activity: trucking and transportation... [T]he war around unionization and ride-sharing is happening on multiple fronts and at the state level it will be harder for Uber and Lyft to combat this.

Two other factors come into play here in the broader business and political landscape and they both mean that right now, tech companies have few friends outside of the tech industry that would be willing to come to their aid in these fights against unionization... Take all these factors and put them together and you have the makings of a true perfect storm for union activity in tech in 2020.

Helsinki, Los Angeles, Shanghai, Singapore, and other metros have been experimenting with on-demand buses -- and not seeing a lot of success. From a report: Since September, commuters using Shanghai's Number 9 bus route have had a new way of catching a ride. Rather than stand at a designated stop, they open a smartphone app and book a ride to wherever they're going. The service, provided by Alibaba, takes those reservations into account and calculates where the bus should go, using the company's artificial intelligence to customize the route. The idea is to boost ridership -- and curb traffic --by making public transit more convenient. Shanghai is just the latest city to give this sort of scheme a try. From Helsinki, Finland, to Sydney, cities around the world have spent the past few years trying to implement AI-fueled, on-demand bus services. Few have succeeded. Earlier this year, Singapore decided against renewing a pilot for on-demand buses. In Germany, microtransit company CleverShuttle -- which bills itself as more of a ride-pooling service than a bus -- pulled out of three of the eight cities it was operating in, citing economic and bureaucratic hurdles.

In a pilot project with shared rides company Via, bringing underserved residents to public transit nodes, Los Angeles Metro is spending $14.50 per trip -- twice what it spends on a regular bus trip. On-demand buses have been a thing for decades. Public transit agencies often call them demand-responsive buses, and deploy them to serve users who lack easy access to standard routes because they live especially far away, or may have special needs. Because they reach relatively few people, they're expensive to operate. They're inefficient too, often making riders wait undetermined amounts of time for a ride. So cities must strike a balance between making public transit accessible to the largest number of residents, and meeting their budget goals.

schwit1 shares a report from CBS News: A federal judge has temporarily blocked a new California labor law from impacting more than 70,000 independent truckers. The law, passed late last year, makes it harder for companies to classify workers as independent contractors instead of employees, who are entitled to minimum wage and benefits such as workers compensation.

U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez of San Diego on Tuesday granted a temporary restraining order sought by the California Trucking Association while he considers imposing a permanent injunction. He said the association is likely to eventually prevail on its argument that the state law violates federal law. He also ruled the truckers would otherwise be likely to suffer irreparable harm, and that temporarily blocking the law from applying to truckers is in the public interest. While the law's main target was ride-sharing companies such as Uber and Lyft, there are about 400,000 workers in California doing such "gig" work. Also, the report says an additional 1.5 million workers in California, doing jobs such as cleaning, construction, building maintenance and trucking, are likely to feel its effects.

Chinese startup Mobike has announced that it lost more than 200,000 bikes in 2019. From a report: The company said in a blog that 205,600 "dockless" bikes were lost to theft and vandalism. In 2018, it pulled out of Manchester after a series of incidents. Shared dockless bikes, which are hired via an app, have become commonplace in cities worldwide over the last few years. Companies like Uber, Lime and Ofo have all put shared bikes on city streets, as have some local councils. In China, thousands of shared bikes have ended up in huge scrapheaps, leading to questions about whether there is demand for them.

Since 2010, a slew of on-demand companies and technologies have managed to use consumer data to transform the commercial significance of urban living. From a report: Historically, one of the great economic benefits of urban life is having access to jobs, schooling, goods, and services without needing to travel very far. But digital platforms that aggregate consumer demand are making physical density less important. Uber and Airbnb, the killer apps of the 2010s, exemplify this change. Once upon a time, visitors needed to flock to quarters where a city's supply of hotel accommodations and other tourist amenities were physically consolidated, usually downtown. If you needed a ride, you used to call the taxi company directly, or flag down one of the cabs that served that area.

Now we transmit our demands for trips and beds as data from wherever we are, rather than direct interactions that depend on physical nearness. Uber and Airbnb consolidate our requests with those of a sea of other users, set prices, offer us suppliers, and dispatch them to us. The apps are creating their own agglomerations of demand, networks that are held together via digital ligaments instead of actual proximity. Kevin Webb, a transportation data expert, points out that Amazon works the same way, building off the big-box store model that came before it: Instead of physically traveling to an area where you can buy tennis balls, shampoo, and a can of tomato paste at three different but close-together shops, its shopping algorithms mean that it can stash those items on a single warehouse shelf thousands of miles away.

What does this shift mean? On-demand platforms have made certain kinds of goods and services more convenient, affordable, and accessible for customers across the income, age, and race spectrums. New places and things opened up for new markets. But the less-desirable consequences of replacing physical marketplaces with digital bundles of demand have been major. As ride-hailing emerged, the taxi industry in most cities has been gutted; in many others, traffic congestion has spiked and transit ridership has declined. Thanks to online short-term rentals, traditional hotels have seen a declining share of travelers opting for their wares and neighborhood housing shortages have been exacerbated by hosts who rent to Airbnb guests rather than full-time tenants. In some cases, once-residential neighborhoods have been emptied of locals and turned into streets of rentable ghost hotels.

Uber and Postmates sued the state of California, alleging that a labor rights law set to go into effect this week is unconstitutional. From a report: The lawsuit filed Monday in Los Angeles federal court is a preemptive strike against the state's landmark measure designed to ensure gig workers receive employment protections. Uber and Postmates argue the legislative process around California's Assembly Bill 5 unfairly targeted gig economy companies while favoring other industries and that the law will threaten workers' flexibility. The passage of A.B. 5, which takes effect Wednesday, has set in motion a bitter dispute about the rights of Uber drivers, food couriers and other people who derive their income from apps made in Silicon Valley working as independent contractors. Uber and Postmates say it's arbitrary that direct salespeople, travel agents, grant writers, construction truck drivers, commercial fishermen and others are exempted from the law. "There is no rhyme or reason to these nonsensical exemptions, and some are so ill-defined or entirely undefined that it is impossible to discern what they include or exclude," according to the complaint.

The discounts and freebies many tech startups have used to lure customers-- free lunch delivery, $3 beauty products and bargain taxi rides -- have fallen out of favor with investors who are losing patience with the failure of these companies to turn a profit. From a report: The proliferation of subsidized products and services from venture-capital-backed startups over the past decade reflected a rush by investors to fund the next behemoth consumer-tech company. The thesis: Create a market leader with loyal customers hooked by attractive deals delivered at the touch of a smartphone app. Once the company got big enough, profits would flow and the subsidies could end.

Startup investors are re-evaluating that approach. Following a year of dismal performances from companies that were heavily subsidized by venture capital, investors and board members are pressuring companies to figure out a more profitable business model, tech deal makers and startup founders say. Investors want startups to become less dependent on raised capital to cover the cost of customer discounts, such as e-commerce startup Brandless selling home and beauty products for a fraction of the cost of shipping, ride-hailing companies Uber UBER and Lyft discounting the cost of their rides, and meal-delivery service Postmates offering coupons for $100 off delivery fees.

"The Financial Times is reporting that Los Angeles may now force Uber and Lyft to use electric cars," reports Electrek: Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said, "We have the power to regulate car share. We can mandate and are looking closely at mandating that any of those vehicles in the future be electric...."

Mayor Garcetti's concept to require rideshare services to use EVs has not yet moved beyond the idea phase. But the Los Angeles city council is considering how to exert more control over rideshare services, including by creating a driver-registration program. The state's Public Utilities Commission currently regulates ride-hailing services in California.

Implementing the EV policy for Uber and Lyft drivers could be tricky. Most drivers own their vehicles. Regardless, Mayor Garcetti is seeking any means to use city powers to mitigate climate change. He said:

"Local actors, no matter who is in power, are the most critical elements of whether or not we win the fight against climate change. It is local governments and regional governments that regulate or directly control building codes, transportation networks, and electricity generation, which together are 80% of our emissions."

The Federal Aviation Administration put forward a rule Thursday that would empower the government to track most drones in the U.S. From a report: The rule will require drones to implement a remote ID system, which will make it possible for third parties to track them. The measure will help law enforcement identify unauthorized drones that may pose a security threat, paving the way for wider adoption of commercial drone technology. The rule said that the FAA expects all eligible drones in the U.S. to comply with the rule within three years. The approval is a milestone in commercial drone delivery, as companies including Amazon, Uber and Google parent Alphabet are racing to add unmanned aircraft to their fleets to save costs and deliver goods faster.

In June, Amazon debuted its newest delivery drone as part of a push inside Amazon to speed up its delivery times for Prime members. In October, Alphabet's drone unit Wing officially launched the country's first commercial drone delivery flight. UPS's Flight Forward subsidiary said in October that it received federal approval to operate a fleet of drones, giving it broad privileges to expand unmanned package delivery. It was the first time the FAA had granted such broad approval to a company to operate a fleet of drones as an airline.