Month: July 2019

Enlarge / DoorDash CEO Tony Xu. (credit: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

In recent months, food delivery company DoorDash has faced a growing backlash over a compensation formula that critics said amounted to DoorDash pocketing drivers' tips. On Tuesday evening, DoorDash CEO Tony Xu announced on Twitter that the company would change its compensation formula so that drivers' "earnings will increase by the exact amount a customer tips on every order."

"It’s clear from recent feedback that we didn’t strike the right balance," Xu tweeted.

Xu insists that DoorDash never intended to take drivers' tips. Rather, he said, the goal was to protect drivers from low earnings in cases where a customer failed to tip. If a driver's total pay for a job—DoorDash's base rate plus any customer tip—fell below a DoorDash-determined minimum, DoorDash would make up the difference.

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  The Red phone. It's scary-looking.

The high-end camera maker Red jumped into the smartphone market in late 2018 with the launch of the Red Hydrogen One. The $1,300 phone was certainly unique, featuring Red's trademark industrial design, moulded finger grips on the side, a carbon fiber back plate, and either a titanium or aluminum body. The wild design was not enough to create a compelling smartphone package, though, and now Red's outspoken founder, Jim Jannard, has taken to the company's forums to talk about what went wrong. Jannard blamed Red's design and manufacturing partner for the failure of the Hydrogen One, and he made big promises for a forthcoming "Hydrogen Two" phone.

"We chose an ODM in China to prepare the Hydrogen One for manufacture at Foxconn," Jannard wrote. "While Foxconn has been fantastic, our ODM [Original Design Manufacturer], which was responsible for the mechanical packaging of our design including new technologies along with all software integration with the Qualcomm processor, has significantly under-performed. Getting our ODM in China to finish the committed features and fix known issues on the Hydrogen One has proven to be beyond challenging. Impossible actually."

Blaming the ODM for the woes of the Hydrogen One is an interesting strategy. The biggest complaints about the first Red phone weren't that it was shoddily built or designed but that the basic outline of the phone didn't offer any compelling features over a normal smartphone. Red is an ultra-high-end camera company, but none of its camera technology made it into the Hydrogen One, which used an off-the-shelf camera sensor. The phone was supposed to have a modular camera system, but that never shipped. The Red phone had 3D screen technology, but it didn't offer a compelling illusion of a third dimension. What, then, was the point of this bulky, ugly phone with dated hardware?

Enlarge / New changes to Windows' deployment policies will hopefully mean more time for testing, and fewer chances for major public breakage. (credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft outlined new directions for Windows 10's update model in a pair of blog posts. It looks like the company is shifting its twice-annual major release cycle to a twice-annual major/minor release cycle, with major upgrades in spring and minor upgrades in the fall.

To understand the shift, you need to know a little about how Microsoft has released Windows 10 builds to date—and particularly, how they've released them to Windows Insiders. In short, Fast Ring subscribers are the first to get new features and updates. Slow Ring subscribers get those features before they're public, but not until after the Fast Ring folks have had a while to flush out the worst of the bugs.

In the past, this meant Fast Ring customers get a new major Windows 10 build first, then Slow Ring customers get that same build after the first few servicing updates have been applied. What happened this year was different: Fast Ring insiders skipped 19H2 (fall 2019) entirely and went directly to 20H1 (spring 2020), and the Slow Ring never joined them at all.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto )

The Justice Department plans to approve the T-Mobile/Sprint merger as part of a settlement involving the sale of spectrum licenses, wholesale access, and a prepaid wireless business to Dish Network, The Wall Street Journal reported today.

"The companies have spent weeks negotiating with antitrust enforcers and each other over the sale of assets to Dish to satisfy concerns that the more than $26 billion merger of the No. 3 and No. 4 wireless carriers by subscribers would hurt competition," the Journal wrote, citing people familiar with the matter.

As a result of those negotiations, the DOJ is "poised to approve" the merger and could announce a settlement with T-Mobile and Sprint "as soon as this week, but the timing remains uncertain," the Journal wrote.

Enlarge / In January 2018, Cruise said that it would begin producing cars like this before the end of 2019 for use in a commercial taxi service. (credit: Cruise)

In late 2017, Cruise, the self-driving startup that is majority owned by General Motors, announced that it planned to launch a driverless commercial taxi service by the end of 2019. The company stuck to this 2019 launch date even after Google's Waymo missed its own self-imposed goal to launch a fully driverless service by the end of 2018.

But in a post this morning, Cruise CEO Dan Ammann now admits that Cruise won't launch a commercial driverless service in 2019 after all. Instead, he says, Cruise will further expand its testing infrastructure in San Francisco, preparing the company for a large-scale launch at some unspecified date in the future.

"Our first deployment needs to be done right and we will only deploy when we can demonstrate that we will have a net positive impact on safety on our roads," Ammann writes.