The Uber Delivery Hero deal carries a headline figure of $14.8 billion and the ambition to double Uber’s delivery footprint overnight. But the more revealing story of the past week was playing out in a Washington, D.C. hearing room, where Uber and Waymo were squaring off over the rules that will govern the next era of autonomous vehicles. The two threads are connected. Uber is simultaneously trying to cement its position in food delivery and trying to limit how freely its robotaxi rivals can operate. Both are competitive moves, just fought on different terrain. Inside the Uber Delivery Hero Deal…
Author: Funke Adeyemi
Funke Adeyemi
Funke Adeyemi spent a decade in corporate banking and fintech before moving to business journalism. She started in trade finance at a major UK bank, moved to a payments company scaling into African markets, and spent her last role leading partnerships at a cross-border remittance platform. She writes about business strategy, fintech, digital banking, and the corporate news that moves markets. She is interested in how companies actually make money rather than how they describe making money in investor presentations. Funke lives in South London. She reads earnings calls the way other people listen to podcasts, and finds them about as reliable.
The Nolan AI Trojan horse analogy arrived with a laugh. Asked by French YouTuber Hugo Travers whether artificial intelligence might be a gift that conceals something darker, Christopher Nolan, director of the newly released The Odyssey, agreed, and then sharpened the metaphor. ‘I think AI is a Trojan horse that everybody knows the Greeks are inside,’ he said. ‘It’s a transparent horse, it’s made of glass.’ The remark landed as more than a clever soundbite. Nolan is president of the Directors Guild of America, which secured explicit AI protections in its 2023 three-year collective bargaining agreement with the Alliance of…
The Waymo San Francisco pause lasted roughly one hour on Saturday morning, a precautionary shutdown triggered by a SFGate-reported power outage that cut electricity to northwest neighbourhoods including the Presidio, Golden Gate Park, and the Richmond District at about 9:52 a.m. The Alphabet-owned robotaxi company told riders that service was ‘temporarily paused’ and that ‘freeway routes are unavailable.’ A spokesperson later confirmed the full picture: the company ‘decided to pause service for approx. one hour to assess the scale of the power outage affecting a large portion of San Francisco and coordinate with local officials.’ A Larger Outage Than First…
The US EV market retreat is broader, and moving faster, than any single discontinued model can capture. Honda’s confirmation that the Prologue is going out of production is the most recent entry on a list that now spans Japanese, Korean, Swedish, and German automakers, all pulling back from American showrooms for overlapping but distinct reasons: federal tax credit expiry, Chinese-linked technology bans, import tariffs, and a platform strategy that has simply moved on. Honda Prologue: From Promising Numbers to Free Fall The Prologue had genuine commercial momentum before the bottom fell out. Honda sold roughly 33,000 units in 2024 and…
EV fast charging reliability has quietly undergone one of the more credible turnarounds in consumer technology, and a 600-mile round trip to Montreal this summer put that improvement to the test. The result was near-flawless: three charging stops, roughly 20 minutes each, zero queues, and a single app hiccup at a station just outside the city. Three years ago, the same driver made a shorter trip, about 350 miles to Maine and back, in the same Audi e-tron. That experience required three calls to customer service, two broken stalls, and a charging session that refused to end properly before a…
Neil Rimer’s AI redistribution warning landed in Athens, not Sand Hill Road. Sitting at a tech festival in the Greek capital in late May, the co-founder of Index Ventures told a reporter he has ‘a strong sense that there will be some sort of a redistribution’ of the wealth piling up around artificial intelligence. ‘It’ll either be voluntary or it’ll be involuntary, but it’ll happen, and I hope it’s voluntary,’ he said, adding that tech leaders ‘can play a leading role in seeing that through.’From most mouths in venture capital, that would be unremarkable. From Rimer, whose firm has raised…
The Dyson HF1 fan heater markets itself as a year-round solution: a single $499 appliance that replaces both the space heater you drag out in October and the ceiling fan you reinstall every May. After three months of living with one, the pitch holds up.Dyson brands the HF1 under the ‘Rapid React’ sub-branding, describing it as its quietest and most powerful heater and cooling fan. The unit stands 23 inches tall, weighs just under six pounds, and carries the company’s signature bladeless design. Its slim profile moves between rooms without disrupting either the furniture arrangement or the electricity bill: Dyson’s…
The AWS billing bug that surfaced on the night of 16 July sent shockwaves through the cloud computing community: customers opened their dashboards to find estimated charges running into the millions, billions, and in at least one case, the trillions. None of the figures were real. But the hours of confusion that followed were. Amazon confirmed that a defect inside its billing computation subsystem corrupted unit pricing estimates, hitting the Cost Explorer tool and spreading across the AWS Billing and Cost Management platform. According to Yahoo Tech, the defect first appeared at 7:38 PM PDT on 16 July. By Friday…
San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie wants binding Waymo robotaxi regulations after a July 4 fireworks crowd turned a sizeable stretch of the city into a hours-long car park. Nearly two weeks after dozens of Waymo vehicles ran out of power, stalled in heavy traffic, and blocked key streets near the Presidio, Lurie has written to California’s State Transportation Agency demanding that the state establish enforceable, statewide standards for autonomous vehicles operating during major events. The letter, first reported by the San Francisco Chronicle, singles out two incidents: a widespread power outage in December and the Golden Gate Bridge fireworks show…
Google Vids’ personal avatar feature, announced on Thursday, now lets users upload a selfie and a voice recording to generate a digital clone of themselves for use in workplace videos, a move that pushes the tool well beyond its origins as a presentation builder. The update is powered by Gemini Omni Flash, Google’s latest media generation model, which the company says delivers improved text rendering, physics, and realism compared to its predecessors. The model handles everything from generating video from a written prompt and reference images, to swapping out backgrounds, correcting lighting, and adding effects to footage recorded on a…
