For two years, Apple's AirPods were a bizarre curiosity. They were clever, but they looked odd and didn't sell very well. Then, they exploded, and according to one source, they have sold more units than even the iPhone at the same age.
The state of play: This will come as no surprise to anybody who has walked down the street or taken the subway in New York of late. AirPods had limited availability when they were first released, but as they became more common, they also started to look less weird. With broad adoption, Apple has managed to re-architect what is socially acceptable and even desirable.
This week, California's Department of Motor Vehicles released the latest data from companies testing AVs in the state, including the total number of self-driving miles logged and how often human backup drivers had to take control of the wheel.
Reproduced from the California DMV via The Drive; Chart: Axios Visuals
In a New York Times op-ed published Saturday evening, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio condemned Amazon for its decision to pull the plug on its HQ2 expansion in Queens, calling it a byproduct of massive economic power concentrated in the hands of few wealthy corporations.
"As the mayor of the nation's largest city, a place that's both a progressive beacon and the very symbol of capitalism, I share the frustration about corporate America. So do many of my fellow mayors across the country. We know the game is rigged. But we still find ourselves fighting one another in the race to secure opportunity for our residents as corporations force us into all-against-all competitions.
Amazon's HQ2 bidding war exemplified that injustice."
Despite calls from power users for an “edit” button, Twitter instead is considering how it could enable “clarifications” of tweets, CEO Jack Dorsey said Thursday at Goldman Sachs’ tech conference in San Francisco.
The bottom line: Twitter really, really doesn’t want to add an “edit” button. Dorsey emphasized that even the "clarification" option might never see the light of day.
Despite doubling its profits in 2018, Amazon did not pay a cent of federal income tax for the second consecutive year, according to an analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
The big picture: Amazon actually received a rebate of $129 million — or an effective tax rate of -1% — thanks to tax credits and other breaks stemming from the GOP's 2017 tax cuts. The Washington Post's Chris Ingraham notes that while Amazon earned $11.2 billion in profit last year, it was able to pay a lower federal tax rate (1.5% in 2015) than the bottom 20% of American households.
Former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick is quietly developing his first venture since being ousted from the ride-hailing company in 2017, working on a multimillion-dollar plan to build CloudKitchens, a global network of commercial kitchens that offer extra capacity and expanded reach for delivery-only restaurants, the Financial Times reports.
Details: Following the momentum of Uber Eats and similar services, CloudKitchens buys and leases real estate and develops software to help restaurants manage their back-office systems and integrate with food-delivery platforms. Last March, Kalanick acquired a $150 million controlling stake in City Storage Solutions, the Los Angeles-based parent of CloudKitchens, and began opening kitchens and recruiting early hires in California.
Researchers have broadened the controversial technology called "deepfakes" — AI-generated media that experts fear could roil coming elections by convincingly depicting people saying or doing things they never did.
Driving the news: A new computer program, created at OpenAI, the San Francisco AI lab, is the latest front in deepfakes, producing remarkably human-sounding prose that opens the prospect of fake news circulated at industrial scale.
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