Amazon finally announces its HQ2, Flipkart's CEO resigns and a comics legend dies. Here's your Daily Crunch for November 13, 2018. 1. Amazon confirms NYC and Arlington, VA as the site of its dual new HQ After months of deliberations, data dumps, short lists and wish-lists, Amazon has finally announced the location of its second headquarters, HQ2 — and as widely reported, "2" is the important detail here: Amazon has named not one, but two different cities, New York (specifically, Long Island City in Queens) and Arlington, Virginia. Amazon says it will invest $5 billion and create more than 50,000 jobs across the two new locations. But it will be getting some money, too, specifically more than $2 billion in performance-based incentives around job creation. 2. Flipkart CEO Binny Bansal resigns over allegations of 'serious personal misconduct' Flipkart, the India-based e-commerce firm owned by Walmart, has lost its Group CEO Binny Bansal after he resigned from the company following an investigation into "serious personal misconduct." Bansal denied the allegation, but Walmart said it's accepting his resignation due to "other lapses in judgement, particularly a lack of transparency, related to how Binny responded to the situation." 3. Pandora brings its Genome technology to podcast recommendations Earlier this year, Pandora challenged Spotify's personalization capabilities by using its Music Genome technology to create dozens of customized playlists for its users. Today, it will begin leveraging similar technology to do the same for podcasts. 4. Poynt raises $100M for its smart payment terminal Palo Alto-based Poynt was launched in 2014 by Osama Bedier, the former vice president of Wallet and Payments at Google. 5. GM is going to allow Ford vehicles and other competitors on its Maven car-sharing platform Maven plans to open up its new peer-to-peer car rental service to allow owners to rent out non-GM vehicles. 6. Airbnb ends forced arbitration days after Google, Facebook did the same Airbnb and eBay both confirmed to TechCrunch they too would no longer require sexual harassment claims to be settled through private arbitration. Their announcements follow a BuzzFeed News article exploring which tech companies were updating their policies in light of the recent Google protest. 7. Comics legend Stan Lee has died Along with artists Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, Lee was one of the primary creative forces at Marvel Comics during an extraordinary run in the 1960s, which saw the launch of a mind-boggling list of popular characters. |