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Volkswagen Group is launching a car-sharing service called WE that only uses electric vehicles, following the lead of rivals such as Daimler and BMW that have operated their own on-demand car rental services for years.

VW’s car-sharing service will launch in Germany next year and then expand to major cities in Europe, North America and Asia beginning in 2020. The entire fleet will be electric vehicles, VW Group said Wednesday.

“We are convinced that the car sharing market still has potential,” Jürgen Stackmann, Volkswagen’s board member for sales said in a statement. “That is why we are entering this market with a holistic single-source concept covering all mobility needs from the short journey that takes just a few minutes to the long vacation trip.”

The German automaker’s WE business is designed to do more than car-sharing. The WE vehicle-on-demand platform will initially focus on car sharing. But eventually it will include other modes of transportation such as scooters.

Volkswagen showed off two electric concepts in March, an e-scooter it calls the Streetmate and Cityskater, which the company describes as a “last-mile electric street surfer.” Volkswagen sees the WE platform helping connect customers to car-sharing service, rent one of these micro-mobility vehicles, or even pay for parking.

Volkswagen introduced these mobility concepts in March 2018. The Streetmate, on the left, and Cityskater.

The automaker also sees the WE platform connecting to MOIA, the automaker’s mobility company that has launched a ride-sharing service with an all-electric shuttle vehicle. The all-electric car, which made its debut at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin in December, is designed to provide space for up to six passengers.

The vehicle-on-demand services available on the Volkswagen WE platform will be managed by UMI Urban Mobility International, a subsidiary of Volkswagen AG that began operating in 2018.

Source: Tech Crunch

Food delivery startup Deliveroo opened its first shared kitchen in Paris earlier today. Deliveroo first launched this concept of shared kitchens called Deliveroo Editions in London last year.

As the AFP reports, the company is starting with 12 kitchens in a warehouse in Saint-Ouen, right next to the north-western part of Paris. So far, 8 restaurants have agreed to make a deal with Deliveroo.

You’ll find top restaurants on Deliveroo, such as Blend, Petit Cambodge, Tripletta and Santosha. Restaurants can choose to pay a rent or get started for free and pay higher fees.

Deliveroo customers currently pay €2.50 per order for the delivery in Paris. But the company also gets a cut of the total order amount — customers don’t realize that Deliveroo gets a cut from both sides. It can be as much as 25 or 30 percent of what you order. It’s unclear how much Deliveroo is asking for those new kitchens.

But it makes sense for restaurants that can’t expand indefinitely. Deliveroo lets you accept orders without any additional table.

Gérard Julien / AFP / Getty Images

While there are multiple Blend or Petit Cambodge restaurants in Paris, they can’t deliver everywhere around the city. But opening a new restaurant also represents a huge investment.

That’s why those Deliveroo kitchens can be a good compromise. You can hire a handful of people and see if there’s enough demand in the area. It’s also a good way to differentiate Deliveroo from UberEats and other compatitors.

This is the first site in France. Let’s see if it gets out of control like in the U.K. The Guardian reported that Deliveroo Editions are now tiny containers with no window on car parks. It gets hot in the summer, cold in the winter, and you can hear a ton of mopeds getting orders from those metal boxes.

Deliveroo first started with the idea of helping regular restaurants accept online orders — not just pizza places with existing delivery persons. But containers on a car park don’t sound as attractive.

Gérard Julien / AFP / Getty Images

Source: Tech Crunch

Tech CEOs and founders are disrupting everything from travel to food, to space, to sleep. Now it’s time to disrupt a process that so many of us have relied on to get where we are today: immigration. According to a study by the National Foundation for American Policy, immigrants have founded more than half of U.S. startup companies that are valued at more than one billion dollars.

With all that is happening around us, now is the time for entrepreneurs to use their playbook for disrupting markets and apply it to immigration as a space — not for a financial upside, but for a more social, human upside.

• Turning a Problem Into an Opportunity

One of the most important lessons you learn as an entrepreneur is outlining the problem you are trying to solve and turning it into an opportunity.

Economists generally agree that immigration has net positive effects on both the sending and receiving countries. Contrary to popular belief, immigration doesn’t increase crime rates or take jobs awayfrom native workers. In fact, according to The Silicon Valley Competitiveness and Innovation Project Report, almost every major tech hub has more foreign-born workers than domestic ones.

Before solving a problem, we have to agree on the facts. Research shows that people in many western countries greatly overestimate the number of immigrants — in this case, Muslim immigrants — coming into their country. Misinformation makes it difficult to pursue effective solutions.

Source: The Guardian

There’s an opportunity to educate ourselves and instead highlight the economic and innovation opportunity that immigration offers. Immigrants provide access to more talent, more diverse thinking, and more creativity.

Dr. Adrian Furnham, a professor of psychology at University College London who studies immigrants and entrepreneurship said, “What I’ve found is that immigrants not only have the qualities that help any entrepreneurs succeed—including aggressiveness and creative thinking—but they get a big boost because many of the skills they picked up coping with a new world are transferable to the entrepreneurial world.”

• Rebranding the Word “Immigrant”

Another important step in an entrepreneur’s playbook relates to changing perceptions. Airbnb, for example, had to challenge people’s assumption that opening their home to strangers was a dangerous and risky endeavor. Now, facilitating these types of interactions is an act of hospitality and the beginning of a friendship.

More and more recently, the word “immigrant” has become a bad word. We have the responsibility to rebrand it to mean maker not taker. Look at Hamdi Ulukaya, the Turkish immigrant who created the Chobani yogurt empire. He employs 3,000+ people and has given them ten percent of the shares in the company.

When people research the word “immigrant” online, they need to find Ulukaya’s story. They need to find images of successful, eloquent, and positive entrepreneurs and leaders. That’s why it’s so important to speak as immigrants. To tell the story of how we came here and the challenges we’ve had to overcome. It’s tempting to try to blend in, but we have to infuse the word “immigration” with more positive visuals.

The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG) established the Center for New North Carolinians (CNNC), with the aim of supporting refugees and immigrants living in the local community. CNNC piloted a STEM club program for female refugees and immigrants using littleBits’ electronic building blocks. Photos from the CNNC STEM Club, courtesy of littleBits

• Taking [Commercial] Risks

In January 2017 when the Trump Administration’s travel ban was first implemented, littleBits posted a billboard in Times Square that said in English and Arabic: “We Invent the World We Want to Live In.” We wanted people to associate Arabic script with a positive, inclusive message. It was the first time I decided to speak to my background as an Arab and Muslim immigrant. The public response, the impact on our team culture, and the feeling of having stood up for what’s right made me bolder about using my platform to speak out.

That’s why, when the debate around immigration rose up again in response to family separation at the border, I knew I had to say something.

At littleBits, being from “another” place is a reality; we are a company built on diversity. We have close to 20 languages in the office, a multitude of religions, and about 20 percent of us have visas or green cards or were born in other countries. I myself know firsthand the struggle that immigrants face, I’ve had to flee my country of Lebanon three times for my own safety

So, last week I joined leaders from Facebook, Twitter, AirBnB, and Microsoft and I made my voice heard. I announced a donation program and wrote a blog post which opened with: “We at littleBits strive to separate politics from our work. But when something touches human rights, it is no longer about politics. It becomes about justice.”

And you know what? Like most things in America today, the reaction we received was polarizing. Some people said that speaking out was an “admirable move” and that it was clear we were focused on “making a big difference.” On the other hand, 27% of respondents explicitly told us they would be less likely to purchase littleBits products as a result of us speaking out. One loyal customer told us they would now “actively discourage” their children from buying or using our products. Another said they would “throw [their] Bits in the trash.”

And yet, I stand by our statement.

The business risks involved with speaking out are real. But to me, putting a flag in the ground is always worth it. One email, one blog post, one donation at a time, I protect the diversity of my team, my company, and the country in which I reside. History will judge us if we quietly allow our government to strip us of the diversity and innovation that make America so amazing.

As entrepreneurs, we have a platform. Despite the potential costs, we must use this platform to put ourselves out there, to speak out the issues that matter to our country, our businesses, and ourselves. There may be financial downside and yes, it will be more difficult to quantify the human upside, but I for one am willing to take a gamble that net net, it will be a positive.

Source: Tech Crunch

This is a comeback story. Or at least the first chapter to one.

Anthony Levandowski, the former Google engineer and serial entrepreneur who was at the center of a trade secrets lawsuit between Uber and Waymo, is back. And he is connected to an autonomous trucking company that is still in stealth mode, TechCrunch has learned.

The company, called Kache.ai (pronounced like cache), has kept a low profile since paperwork registering it as a corporation was first filed with the California Secretary of State nearly seven months ago. And at first glance, there’s no indication that Levandowski is even tied to the company.

Corporation documents, filed with the state, list a “Thomas S. Lee Jr” as its president. A search on LinkedIn showed Lee, a software developer whose previous experience includes co-founding two San Diego-based companies, as president of Kache.ai. Since reaching out to Kache.ai, all references of the company have been removed from LinkedIn.

However, the address listed on the corporation’s state filing tells a different story. Kache.ai’s documents filed with the state lists an address in St. Helena, California. The property is owned by Levandowski’s father and stepmother, according to property tax and title records reviewed by TechCrunch. Levandowski’s stepmother Suzanna Musick was CEO of another one of Levandowski’s startups called 510 Systems.

The company didn’t return calls for comment. However, other unnamed sources within the global autonomous vehicle ecosystem confirmed to TechCrunch that Levandowski is connected to the company.

Little is known about Kache.ai. The word “Kǎchē” in Chinese means truck, which could signal a connection to China. Although TechCrunch was not able to independently verify if Kache.ai has any outside partners or backers yet.

The company’s website, which at one point listed an email contact for Lee and described its mission, is now blank except for a single image of a jagged mountain ridge. TechCrunch was able to review and capture screenshots of the website prior to the changes, one of which is shown above. At that time, the Kache.ai website said the company was working on “the next generation of autonomous vehicle technology for the commercial trucking industry.” The employment opportunities section of the now erased website once said:

“We’re developing the solution for the next level of on-the-road self-driving trucks. Our development philosophy is based on a fast moving, very aggressive agile team approach and we’re seeking both software and hardware engineers that thrive in such an environment.”

It appears the company is hiring at every level, from mapping and database experts to people with robotics and simulation skills. The website also noted that the company is looking for software engineers with experience in convolutional neural networks as well as computer vision and machine learning algorithms.

The website said Kache.ai is located in the San Francisco area.

A not so unlikely return

To outsiders, Levandowski’s return to the autonomous vehicle stage might have seemed improbable just a year ago. To former colleagues and others who know him, it was inevitable. However, outside a few vague remarks that Levandowski was “working on something,” his return (until now) was mostly based on rumor and speculation.

Levandowski is part of the braintrust of autonomous vehicle technology that for years was largely confined to academic research.

That began to change on March 13, 2004 when 15 teams brought their autonomous vehicles to the desert outside of Barstow, California. They were there to compete in the Grand Challenge, a 142-mile race sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to encourage development of autonomous vehicle technology. Levandowski’s “blue team” had the distinction of being the only one to bring a two-wheeled vehicle, an autonomous motorcycle they called Ghostrider. The vehicle is now at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

And while not a single team completed the course, it prompted DARPA to hold two more autonomous vehicle challenges. The endeavor fueled the interest and passion of a few dozen people who would later go onto to lead Google’s self-driving project, head AV R&D efforts at large companies, or looks for ways to move the autonomous vehicle needle forward. Levandowski was one of them.

In 2007, Levandowski joined Google, where he was one of the principal architects of Google Street View. The engineer had other projects too, notably a startup called 510 Systems that made and sold sensor systems to his employer, Google. 510 Systems was a pioneer of using light ranging and detection systems known as LiDAR to make maps. Google quietly bought 510 Systems and another one of his startups Anthony’s Robots in 2011.

(Photo: ANGELO MERENDINO/AFP/Getty Images)

A meteoric rise and fall

After nearly nine years at Google, Levandowski left the company with fellow Google employee Lior Ron. The pair founded Ottomotto, which later became Otto, along with Don Burnette and Claire Delaunay.

The timing couldn’t have been better. The race to deploy autonomous vehicles had heated up, creating a frenzied winner-takes-all environment. Competition between companies to attract talent pushed up salaries and incentives. For those, who had been on the ground floor at Google’s self-driving project and other high-profile startups and academic positions, the world was theirs for the taking. The venture capital community didn’t just take note; they poured money into the effort. Large automakers and Tier 1 suppliers looking for an edge started snapping up startups brimming with self-driving technology talent.

Uber’s purchase of Otto for an eye-popping $680 million in August 2016 — just months after its founding — was just one example of the feeding frenzy. As part of the acquisition, Levandowski became head of Uber’s self-driving car research. (Documents filed as part of the lawsuit between Waymo and Uber suggest the pay out might have been as low as $220 million.)

But the buzz around the size of the Otto deal would soon be replaced with a different, more unwelcoming kind of attention.

Nine months after the acquisition, Uber was embroiled in a trade secrets lawsuit with Waymo, the former Google self-driving project that spun out to become a business under Alphabet. And Levandowski was out of a job.

The lawsuit, filed against self-driving truck startup Otto and its parent company Uber in February 2017, alleged patent infringement and stealing trade secrets. The lawsuit made a number of allegations specifically against Levandowski, including that he downloaded more than 14,000 confidential and proprietary files shortly before his resignation. Waymo contended that Otto and Uber were using key parts of its self-driving technology, specifically related to its light detection and ranging radar. This technology, known in the industry as LiDAR, measures distance using laser light to generate highly accurate 3D map of the world around the car.

The case went to trial in February 2018. After days of titillating testimony, including from former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, the two parties reached a settlement agreement. Uber agreed to not incorporate Waymo’s confidential information into their hardware and software. Uber also agreed to pay a financial settlement that includes 0.34% of Uber equity, per its Series G-1 round $72 billion valuation. In other words, Waymo got about $244.8 million in Uber equity.

Six weeks later, Uber would be grappling with the tragic fatal accident involving one of its self-driving test vehicles in Tempe, Arizona.

The other three Otto founders have all left Uber as well. Burnette, the last one to depart, founded an autonomous vehicle company in April called Kodiak Robotics with Paz Eshel, who formerly worked at Battery Ventures.

Kache.ai next chapter

Levandowski’s return will likely raise questions, and possibly even anger, people within Uber and Waymo. However, it’s unclear if Kache.ai will even use LiDAR, the sensing technology at the heart of the trade secrets lawsuit and one of Levandowski’s talents.

Some autonomous trucking startups have avoided LiDAR except for use in mapping because they argue that the sensors aren’t practical on a heavy duty autonomous truck traveling on highways at speeds in excess of 60 miles per hour. Instead, autonomous trucking companies like TuSimple use multiple cameras, which have better resolution. If Kache.ai bypasses LiDAR —which at this point is unclear — it could help alleviate IP concerns and attract investors.

For now, the beginning of Kache.ai’s story is tied to Levandowski’s past, which is marked by engineering prowess and ingenuity as well as legal and ethical missteps. The remaining chapters will reveal whether the unique value prop of what Kache.ai is developing is strong enough to render all of that moot.

Source: Tech Crunch