Uber's doing a new kind of dance with regulators, Trump treats the Valley to a tete-a-tete and Mario is coming to hopefully salvage just a little bit of 2016. All that and more in The Daily Crunch. And Tom Wheeler if you're reading this – I'll miss you. 1. Uber ordered to stop its SF self-driving service on day 1 Uber has been told that it must cease offering service via self-driving cars in San Francisco, on the same day it began those operations. The California DMV has insisted Uber go through its self-driving licensing process, or else face legal action. This is something Uber must've known was coming when it launched in the city. For the ride-hailing company, stepping over or around local regulations is par for the course, and generally speaking it gains more than it loses in terms rallying locals to its side doing this kind of thing. Autonomous tech could be a different story, however, as the day also saw a report of a self-driving car running a red (though Uber later said this was a human-caused incident). 2. Donald Trump hosts tech titans A who's who of tech leadership assembled at Trump tower yesterday, in a move that was seen by many as an about-face for Silicon Valley, which had previously seemed pretty opposed to Trump and what he represents. It was kind of gross to watch, tbh. Benioff was doing something quite different at the time. 3. Yahoo reveals another hack – and yes, that's "b" as in "billion" Yahoo is basically the most insecure company in internet history at this point. Another hack, separate from the huge hack it revealed earlier, may have comprised the data of more than 1 billion accounts. Verizon (disclosure: owns TechCrunch) understandably is considering leaving the table. 4. Twitter made a messaging app but then killed it A lot of companies make a lot of things that we never hear about and are subsequently killed, but Twitter's might've-been messaging client is an interesting one. You coulda been a contendah, little birdie. 5. Facebook Messenger gets text filters Facebook Messenger has new filters that turns your typed text into auto-generated visual filters. Sounds okay but I can't remember the last time I took a photo in Messenger and sent it to someone. Other apps are for that. 6. FCC's Tom Wheeler will resign when Trump takes office This is why we can't have nice things. Net Neutrality-friendly FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler will be stepping down in January rather than serving under Trump. Makes sense, since Trump seems to want to undo everything Wheeler did to get net neutrality protections in place. Still: sad. 7. Mario's iPhone debut day Today's the day Mario starts jumping over stuff on the iPhone. It'll happen later – some in the know suggest around 4 PM ET, in case you're looking for a heads up on when the App Store will crash. |