Axios

Waymo, the self-driving car unit recently spun out of Alphabet, has filed a lawsuit against Uber for stealing trade secrets when it acquired a startup founded by former employees, according to a lawsuit filed in San Francisco federal court on Thursday. Alphabet's investment arm, GV, is a long-time investor in Uber.

The details: According to the complaint, Waymo says that Anthony Levandowski and other employees secretly downloaded and copied confidential information about the company's LiDAR system and other technology before leaving to start their own startup focused on autonomous driving. The new startup, Otto, was subsequently acquired by Uber just a few months later in August for $680 million.

As the week following the emergence of explosive allegations of sexism at Uber continues, early investors and well-known diversity advocates Mitch and Freada Kapor have penned an open letter to the company outlining their concerns, including the independence of the investigation team and Uber's patterns when dealing with such crises.

"Independent" investigation: As the Kapors point out, the team assembled to investigate the former employee's claims and Uber's overall culture is already closely tied with the company.

"This group is not set up to come up with an accurate analysis of the culture and a tough set of recommendations."

• Former U.S. attorney general Eric Holder has advocated against fingerprinting requirements on behalf of Uber in the past.
• Arianna Huffington has been on Uber's board of directors for a year now, "and is deeply invested in the company weathering the PR crisis," write the Kapors.
• HR chief Liane Hornsey reports to CEO Travis Kalanick's team, as does associate general counsel Angela Padilla.

Uber is in the midst of dealing with its latest controversy, this time allegations of sexual harassment and sexism by a former employee. But it's far from the first Silicon Valley tech company to face criticism for its treatment of female employees.

As Uber continues to reel from the explosive allegations of sexual harassment and discrimination a former employee published on Sunday, more details about the company's culture are emerging.

According to a report from the New York Times, citing anonymous sources, incidents at the company include:

• An Uber manager groped female co-workers' breasts at a company retreat in Las Vegas where other employees did cocaine in bathrooms at private parties (the manager was immediately let go).
• A director shouted a homophobic slur at a subordinate.
• A manager threatened to beat an employee's head in with a baseball bat.
• Uber faces at least three lawsuits in at least two countries from former employees alleging being sexually harassed or verbally abused by managers, according to documents obtained by the Times.
• As a response to complaints against high-performing managers, Uber would shuffle them around different regions, rarely firing them.

Uber declined to comment on any specific incidents to the Times.

What's next: Kalanick has already put together a team to investigate the former employee's allegations and the company's overall work culture. He's also vowed to rectify the company's practices and culture.

Instagram will now allow users to combine up to 10 photos and videos in one post and swipe through to see them all. Industry experts have anticipated the move for some time, especially after a blogger discovered a beta version of the feature on Android, but until now, only advertisers were allowed to use this format.

Why it matters: A study by data analytics firm Parse.ly shows that swipe-initiated slideshows can be very effective in increasing user engagement, an important metric for Instagram's advertisers. Parse.ly tells Axios that this Vogue Magazine slideshow of celebrities' outfits at the Met Gala last year was one of the most trafficked pieces of content on the internet in 2016.

Snapchat slow-down:

This is just the latest of steps Instagram has taken to slow Snapchat's growth ahead of its IPO. Today's announcement — the additional of a carousel feature to view photos and videos chronologically — mimics Snapchat's swipe format. Last year, Instagram launched a stories feature that mimics Snapchat's. They've also

copied

many of Snapchat's advertising features to win over ad dollars.

Get ready for 5G, or at least the 5G hype.

The next generation of mobile service won't be really ready until 2020, but to get their feet wet, AT&T, Verizon and others plan to use it to deliver an alternative to home broadband in select cities.

Verizon plans to offer service to some customers in 11 cities by the middle of this year. AT&T, meanwhile, has said it will use early 5G to deliver its DirecTV Now video-over-Internet service in Austin sometime in the first half of the year.

The 5G standards haven't even been fully set, so Verizon and AT&T will use pre-standard gear as network equipment makers such as Nokia and Ericsson also look to ramp up for the next generation of cell service.

What's next: Expect the 5G hype to continue to build, with the noise level set to rise next month as the cell phone industry gathers for the annual Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Waze, a navigation app owned by Alphabet, plans to expand its carpooling service to several cities in the U.S. and Latin America in the coming months, the company told the Wall Street Journal. Waze began testing the service, which matches commuters with others near them going to a similar destination, in Tel Aviv and the Bay Area in 2015 and 2016 respectively.

How it works: Unlike ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft, Waze offers true carpooling for commuters. Even its pricing structure—54 cents per mile—is designed to provide a simple compensation to the driver for gas, not a wage. Waze has also built a special app for the service, called Waze Rider. Waze eventually plans to start charging an additional fee to the rider.

Uber competition: In 2013, the same Alphabet acquired Waze for about $1 billion, the search giant also invested in Uber. Since then, the two companies have begun to compete increasingly, in areas such as self-driving cars, and now ride-sharing. Last year, Google executive David Drummond stepped down from Uber's board because of these growing conflicts of interests.