The Station: Pony.ai turns to delivery, Kodiak cuts, Lime snaps up Boosted’s IP

Hi and welcome back to The Station, a weekly newsletter dedicated to the future (and present) of transportation. I’m your host Kirsten Korosec, senior transportation reporter at TechCrunch.

What you’re reading here is an abbreviated version of The Station. To get the complete newsletter, which comes out every weekend, go here and click The Station.

Here’s a friendly reminder to reach out and email me at kirsten.korosec@techcrunch.com to share thoughts, opinions or tips or send a direct message to @kirstenkorosec.

Let’s go.

Micromobbin’

There wasn’t a ton of news in micromobility this week, but I came across an interesting read over at City Lab about whether or not cities should financially support micromobility services. Shared bikes and scooters provide transportation options to city-dwellers during a time when some cities are deciding to scale back public transportation operations in order to keep its employees and residents safe.

In Portland, City Lab pointed to how the city agreed to temporarily waive e-scooter fees as long as Spin passed those savings onto riders. Now, Spin rides cost about 50% less in Portland.

But, as the authors write, “While we believe that waiving e-scooter fees and offering public funding may be necessary, we harbor no illusions that it would be easy to do so in the current fiscal environment.”

— Megan Rose Dickey

A little bird

We hear things. But we’re not selfish. Let’s share.

Layoffs are nothing new in this COVID-19 world. More than 260 startups have laid off 25,010 workers, according Layoffs.fyi, a website that is attempting to track cuts in the startup ecosystem amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Not all of these layoffs are directly related to the COVID-19 pandemic. In many cases, the pandemic has merely augmented pre-existing problems. One such example is Kodiak Robotics, an autonomous trucking startup, that laid off 20% of its staff on Wednesday (about 15 of its 85-person staff). The Information was the first to report the layoffs and TechCrunch has since confirmed those numbers. The official line is that Kodiak reduced its headcount due to the dramatic impact COVID-19 has had on the economy. The move was couched as the best way to position Kodiak for the future.

We’ve learned from several people that the company was already facing considerable headwinds on the fundraising front.

Kodiak Robotics came out of stealth in August 2018 with $40 million in a Series A funding round led by Battery Ventures. CRV, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Tusk Ventures also participated in the round. The company likely attracted interest and investment because of its founders. CEO Don Burnette was part of the Google self-driving project before leaving and co-founding Otto in early 2016, along with Anthony Levandowski, Lior Ron and Claire Delaunay. Uber then acquired Otto (and its co-founders). Burnette left Uber to launch Kodiak in April 2018 with Paz Eshel, a former venture capitalist and now the startup’s COO.

The pair scaled up quickly. The company, headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., went on a hiring spree in 2019 and opened a new facility in North Texas to support commercial deliveries using its fleet of eight trucks. Autonomous vehicle technology startups are already capitally intensive. But Kodiak was also trying to launch a carrier service — not just developing the self-driving truck stack.

Fundraising efforts started late last year and Kodiak was hoping to raise a $100 million round on a $300 million pre-money valuation, according to two sources. It was suggested that Kodiak already had a lead. However, the company has had trouble closing a Series B round with attractive terms, according to several sources who spoke to TechCrunch on condition of anonymity. When COVID-19 erupted it put more pressure on the startup.

Kodiak is hardly alone. Autonomous vehicle technology startups have had a more tepid reception from investors since spring 2019. It’s still possible to raise funds. But it’s harder now — particularly those seeking larger raises — and the terms are less desirable.

Another autonomous delivery pivot

Pony.ai is the latest autonomous vehicle startup to turn its efforts to delivery — at least temporarily. The company announced this week it will partner with e-commerce platform Yamibuy to provide autonomous last-mile delivery service to customers in Irvine, Calif.

The new delivery service was launched to provide additional capacity to address the surge of online orders triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, Pony.ai said.

Pony.ai, which recently raised $400 million from Toyota Motor Corporation, has focused on shuttling people, not packages. The company has launched ride-sharing and commuter pilots in Fremont and Irvine, California and Guangzhou, China.

Pony.ai now said it will use its Irvine robotaxi fleet of 10 electric Hyundai Kona vehicles for delivery through at least mid-summer. It’s not clear how, or if, Pony.ai can generate revenue with this new delivery service. The company is in talks with the California Department of Motor Vehicles, the agency that issues AV testing permits, about this issue. The DMV doesn’t allow AV testing fleets to charge money by delivering goods or rides. However, a deployment permit, which Pony.ai has for its Irvine service, does allow for commercial use, just not a delivery fee.

Pronto.ai makes a move

Pronto.ai, a startup co-founded by controversial star engineer Anthony Levandowski, is not pursuing Level 4 autonomous vehicle technology, Instead, the company is developing an advanced driver assistance system product for trucks called Copilot. Pronto AI was originally called Kache.ai, according to paperwork discovered at the time by TechCrunch, and was registered as a corporation with the California Secretary of State.

The startup has maintained a low profile since August 2019 when Levandowski was indicted by a federal grand jury on theft of trade secrets, forcing him to step down as CEO. Levandowski has since reached a plea deal. Now, it seems that the company is making some moves.

Pronto.ai recently applied for a five-year exemption from the federal government that would let drivers in trucks with Pronto’s CoPilot technology to stay on the road longer than current rules allow. The request to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, which was first reported by Freight Waves, would let drivers to drive up to 13 hours within a 15-consecutive hour driving window after coming on duty, following 10 consecutive hours off duty.

Drivers are typically allowed to drive up to 11 hours in a 14-hour window, after being off duty for 10 or more consecutive hours.

Lime swoops up Boosted IP

Boosted, startup behind the Boosted Boards and, more recently, the Boosted Rev electric scooter, would typically fall into micromobbin’. But it deserves it’s own segment this week.

Five weeks ago, Boosted laid off “a significant portion” of its team and began actively seeking a buyer. It seems that a sale never materialized and Lime swooped in and bought up Boosted’s core patents, according to a report from The Verge.  Lime was apparently working on acquiring Boosted’s intellectual property since the end of 2019. The shared scooter company snapped up the IP after a proposed acquisition from Yamaha fell through for Boosted.

Boosted cofounder and former CEO Sanjay Dastoor, who left the board 18 months ago, posted a message to the Boosted subreddit shortly after The Verge story published that suggests Lime’s acquisition was broader than originally thought.

Dastoor wrote that the company is closed and will likely enter into some form of bankruptcy protection. He also wrote that Lime had purchased all the assets and IP of the company and appears to be in possession of everything at Boosted’s headquarters in Mountain View, including access to the building. Here’s one important nugget:

“As far as I can tell, this includes design files, software and code, diagnostics, parts, and test equipment I’m not sure if this includes the responsibility for warranty coverage for boards and scooters sold before. I do know that a handful of former engineers at Boosted, most senior is Michael Hillman who joined as VP Engineering last year, are now at Lime and may be able to help. Regardless of how this is structured, if we want our products to continue being supported, including parts for boards or any software diagnostic tests and debugging, their cooperation and help will be needed.”

He added that some Boosted employees have been trying unsuccessfully to service and send boards back to customers for weeks.

“I’m not a lawyer, but I suspect that those boards should rightfully get back to their owners and should be safe to ride, and I’m trying to find a way to help with this,” Dastoor wrote. “In the meantime, I’d recommend folks who are looking to get in touch more urgently should reach out to Lime directly.”

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Facebook launches COVID-19 data maps for the US, will take its symptom tracking efforts global

Many, many symptom trackers have launched during the coronavirus pandemic, but few have the potential to reach even a bucketful of Facebook’s vast ocean of users.

Facebook launched a symptom tracking partnership with Carnegie Mellon University’s Delphi epidemiological research center early this month, and now the company plans to expand the project outside of the U.S. In early April, Facebook began prompting some users in the U.S. with a CMU survey asking them to self-report COVID-19 symptoms. The effort is designed to help governments and health officials predict where the virus could hit next.

Facebook will work with researchers from the University of Maryland on the expansion as the team at CMU’s Delphi develops an API that would allow any researcher to tap into the data set.

Facebook is also collecting survey data onto its own symptom map, which visualizes the percentage of the population with COVID-19 symptoms by county and hospital referral region. The map also displays flu activity distinct from reported COVID-19 symptoms. With testing capacity still limited in many places, this kind of survey effort seeks to provide a more anticipatory picture of the virus and where it might be spreading next.

“The real-time estimates we’ve derived correlate with the best available data on COVID-19 activity, which gives us confidence that we may soon be able to give health care officials forecasts of disease activity that is likely to occur in their localities several weeks into the future,” Ryan Tibshirani, co-lead on Carnegie Mellon University’s Delphi COVID-19 Response Team, said in a statement.

The opt-in CMU survey asks Facebook users if they were experiencing coughing, fever, shortness of breath or loss of smell — symptoms that can show up in COVID-19 patients in more mild forms and that likely would be present prior to an individual seeking treatment and thus being tracked by healthcare systems.

Facebook starts prompting US users to fill out a COVID-19 survey to help track the virus

CMU published its initial findings on Monday, which show the data collected on Facebook correlates with existing COVID-19 public health data. The research team is introducing a tool called COVIDcast, which collects aggregated data about COVID-19 activity, sorted by geographic area. Google has also joined CMU’s research effort and later this week the COVIDcast will integrate data from both Facebook and Google survey responses. So far, the project has collected nearly one million responses each week on Facebook and 600,000 through Google’s Opinion Rewards and AdMob apps.

In an op-ed in The Washington Post, Mark Zuckerberg touted his company’s efforts.

“Getting accurate county-by-county data from across the United States is challenging, and obtaining such focused data from across the whole world is even harder,” Zuckerberg wrote, adding that Facebook is “uniquely” suited to aid research efforts that require surveying large subsets of the population.

The pandemic is already reshaping tech’s misinformation crisis

After a long season of criticism, social media companies are striving for relevance in the fight against the virus. Facebook, particularly dogged by negative press and privacy scandals in recent years, was early to add UI elements promoting COVID-19 information from health experts on its platform. Still, Facebook and other social networks remain plagued by coronavirus misinformation, scammers and conspiracies, which spread quickly and have proven difficult for companies to stamp out.

Last week, a handful of U.S. anti-government protests organized on Facebook and promoted by President Trump defied the advice of state governments and public health officials, calling users to gather in public — an act of defiance that could potentially spread the virus to new communities in spite of the best efforts by state governments to protect their residents.

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An evolutionary perspective on human health and disease | Lara Durgavich

An evolutionary perspective on human health and disease | Lara Durgavich

How does your genetic inheritance, culture and history influence your health? Biological anthropologist Lara Durgavich discusses the field of evolutionary medicine as a gateway to understanding the quirks of human biology -- including why a genetic mutation can sometimes have beneficial effects -- and emphasizes how unraveling your own evolutionary past could glean insights into your current and future health.

Click the above link to download the TED talk.

Facebook’s new Gaming app launches on Android, with iOS version coming soon

Facebook’s dedicated Gaming app is now live on Android, months before its planned June release. The social media giant pushed the app out two months prior to its scheduled unveiling amid a global pandemic that’s left people all over the world isolated at home, rapidly burning through entertainment options.

The New York Times announced the upcoming release in an exclusive over the weekend, noting that Facebook’s massive gaming investment has culminated in more 700 million of the sites’s 2.5 billion users actively playing games through the platform monthly. The launch of a devoted app is a clear next step for content that has, until now, been the domain of the site’s Gaming tab.

Social engagement is the focus for the app (naturally), which will be getting an iOS version at some point in the near future (pending Apple approval). “It’s entertainment that’s not just a form of passive consumption but entertainment that is interactive and brings people together,” the app’s head Fidji Simo told the paper, later adding, “We’re seeing a big rise in gaming during quarantine.”

Twitch and YouTube are among the biggest competitors for the app’s gaming Go Live streaming feature. Facebook has already has a massive platform in its own Live offering, which is currently seeing high levels of use as isolated users seek some manner of human connection during the COVID-19 shutdown. With Go Live, users can share gaming streams directly to their Facebook page.

Live streaming is the highlighted feature upon launching the app, while a second tab offers game discovery both through your friends’ activities and a by category breakdown. A final tab sports a chat platform.

The app’s arrival comes after a year and a half of testing in various markets, including Latin America and Southeast Asia. Gaming is launching without ad support, though Facebook tells the Times that it plans to monetize by taking commission off of “stars” — donations viewers send to streamers.

It remains to be seen how the Twitch/YouTube method will translate for a platform traditionally more focused on casual gaming titles like Words With Friends. Not all of the service’s attempts to spin off features as devoted apps have been successful, but the rushed timing could give the service an extra boost, as users seek out new forms of content and socializing during a global shutdown. 

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Office 365 Is Now Microsoft 365: What It Means for You and Your Family

Microsoft’s Office 365 service has represented great value for Office users for several years. However, in March 2020, the company announced some changes to the service, including a new name. As of April 21, 2020, Office 365 will be known as Microsoft 365.

Let’s take a look at what Microsoft 365 offers, including new tools for families.

Microsoft 365 Is Still Office 365

In case you’re not familiar, Office 365 was available in two plans for home users: Office 365 Personal and Office 365 Home. After the change, Office 365 Personal has become Microsoft 365 Personal and Office 365 Home was rebranded as Microsoft 365 Family.

Microsoft 365 Personal is for one person across all their devices. Meanwhile, Microsoft 365 Family provides the same benefits for up to six people in a family, on all their devices.

The Personal plan is $6.99/month (or $69.99 for a year), while Family is $9.99 per month (or $99.99 for a year).

Both include Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook, plus Access and Publisher on Windows only. In addition to always having the latest versions of these Office apps, you also get 1TB of OneDrive storage and 60 minutes of Skype credit every month.

If you’re an existing Office 365 subscriber, your plan changes to Microsoft 365 as of April 21. You won’t need to do anything, and won’t experience any disruptions in service since Microsoft 365 has everything Office 365 had and more.

Speaking of which, let’s take a look at some of the new features Microsoft 365 brings.

Microsoft Editor

The Microsoft Editor service, which was once exclusive to Word, will now be available in Word, Outlook.com, and across the web with a browser extension.

If you’ve used tools like Grammarly, this will be familiar to you. Microsoft Editor lets you check your writing for issues with grammar, clarity, formality, long sentences, and other common issues.

The basic features of Editor are free, but you need a Microsoft 365 subscription to access everything.

One of the standout stools includes Rewrite Suggestions, which lets you highlight a sentence and ask Word to help you rephrase it. Doing so lets you improve the sentence quality without changing the meaning of what you want to say.

The tool also includes enhanced plagiarism checking. This helps students know if they need to insert citations and thus do so easily. Given that Grammarly Premium costs $139.95 per year, this is a great value on its own.

Download: Microsoft Editor for Chrome | Edge (Free, subscription available)

Presenter Coach in PowerPoint

If you’re one of the many people who fear public speaking, the updated Presenter Coach tool in PowerPoint can help you better prepare. As you rehearse your presentation, the coach will give you real-time feedback on your voice.

Until now, the Coach would let you know if you talked too fast, said filler words like “um” too much, or read from your slides. However, the tool is getting some new tricks with Microsoft 365.

One of these is monotone pitch detection. Now, the Presenter Coach will give you real-time feedback on your voice. If your presentation sounds too one-note, you’ll see suggestions on how to improve. Another neat function will give you grammar suggestions so you can phrase parts of your speech more smoothly.

Manage Your Money in Excel

There are lots of great budgeting apps to help you keep track of your money. If you don’t use any of them yet or want to cut out a subscription, a new feature in Excel might be a fit for you.

Money in Excel allows you to connect your bank and credit card accounts to the software. After doing this, you can easily import transactions to see where your money has gone.

And thanks to Excel’s data-crunching tools, you’ll get personalized recommendations to take control of your money. These include when subscriptions change in price, you’re charged a bank fee, or other easy-to-miss entries.

Microsoft Teams for Families

Microsoft Teams, like Slack, is intended as a business communication and collaboration tool. However, in 2020, Microsoft is bringing new features to Teams that make it suitable for personal use.

These allow you to, for example, create a group for your neighborhood friends or small club. All the power of Teams is here, meaning you can use it to chat one-on-one, make video calls, share media, and much more. Families can use the tool to manage all their calendars, store shared account info, and check in on the location of their children.

If you struggle to keep track of everything related to your family or other small group, Teams could be a great way to get it under control.

Microsoft Family Safety

Microsoft also unveiled a new app called Microsoft Family Safety, which will roll out in 2020. This is designed as a complete screen time-tracking and location tracking solution for parents.

Notably, the service will allow you to see your children’s screen time across Windows, Android, and Xbox. You can see where they spend the most time and what apps they use. This combines with location services so you can know when someone gets home or arrives at work.

We’ve looked at other parental management solutions in the past, but this could be a great solution if your family primarily uses the platforms that Microsoft Family Safety supports.

Much More With Microsoft 365

While we’ve looked at the highlights above, Microsoft 365 brings even more little touches to Office. For instance, PowerPoint Designer provides tons of new backgrounds, images, and fonts to dress up boring slides with little work.

Excel will also receive new data types that let you import information about food, places, animals, and more. These automatically update to let you make comparisons and create powerful tables without manually copying tons of data.

As an added bonus, Microsoft 365 subscribers receive a slew of benefits from Microsoft partners. Check the Partner Benefits page to redeem these, where you’ll find offers like a free month of Headspace and three free months of Adobe CC.

With little extras like this, Microsoft 365 will continue to provide a great value. Between Office apps, OneDrive storage, and access to advanced grammar tools, you get a lot for the money here.

The Best of Microsoft With Microsoft 365

It’s clear that Microsoft 365 will offer even more value than Office 365 did, all at the same price. Even if you only use Office apps occasionally, the extra benefits are enticing.

Unfortunately, the standalone Office 2019 does not include any of these benefits. The enhanced features in Office we looked at are exclusive to Microsoft 365 subscribers. That’s why we think it’s not worth buying Office 2019.

Read the full article: Office 365 Is Now Microsoft 365: What It Means for You and Your Family

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Facebook launches Fundraisers in India, expands partnerships with state governments for WhatsApp and Messenger helplines

Facebook has expanded Fundraisers to India and is working with several additional state governments to provide authoritative information about the coronavirus to more people in the country, it said today.

Fundraisers, which was available in the U.S. and Europe prior to Monday’s announcement, allows people to collectively contribute towards the community.

The social juggernaut, which counts India as one of its biggest markets by user base, said people in the nation can find more than 70 charities on its platform to financially support and create their own causes.

Facebook Fundraisers’ expansion to India is the latest of several efforts from the U.S. headquartered company to actively participate in doing its part in the world’s second largest internet market, where several of its businesses have been scrutinized in recent years.

“At a time when the country is in the middle of an unprecedented effort to fight the outbreak of the virus, we are deeply aware of the economic impact of the disruption in normal life. Communities around the country need help. Facebook Fundraisers allows people to leverage the full scale and power of the platform, and their passion, to direct resources to initiatives that can protect and save lives,” said Ajit Mohan, the head of Facebook in India.

In recent weeks, Facebook has also launched an information centre in India (and other markets) that provides up-to-date information from local government agencies and global health organizations, and an information hub on WhatsApp in partnership with the WHO, UNICEF, and UNDP. WhatsApp and Messenger have also launched helplines in India in partnership with the government of India.

Facebook said today it now maintains partnership with 11 state governments in India for its WhatsApp helpline and 9 state governments for Messenger. The helplines are available in several regional languages including Hindi, Telugu, Marathi, and Odia.

“Each of these health alert lines provide the government and health authorities a powerful mechanism to dispel rumors and misinformation that may be circulating about the Coronavirus,” said Mohan, who previously led Disney’s Hotstar business in India.

The company said it is also conducting training sessions with local governments and health organizations to help them deliver information to the community. It has so far engaged in training sessions with Union Health Ministry, state units of the National Health Mission, State Governments of Kerala, Delhi, Karnataka, Telangana, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan, Punjab and Odisha.

In recent weeks, the Indian government has asked social media services to stop the spread of misinformation on their platforms. For Facebook, it’s not a new warning. The ruling government, a big user of Facebook’s services itself, has warned the company to contain the spread of misinformation that has resulted in severe consequences in the real world.

Facebook additionally said today that more tens of thousands of educators in India were using Workplace Advanced, a tier of its team collaboration service that it is providing to organizations and individuals for free of charge to ease burden on them during the crises.

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