Business & Tech Bay Area-Based Zoom Pledges to Beef Up Security Amidst Potential State Investigations While the popularity and stock price of Zoom are both booming, the San Jose video conferencing software company is struggling with ever-unfolding privacy flaws and fresh regulatory scrutiny.
Business & Tech SF Doctor Featured In Netflix Doc Says Possible COVID-19 Treatment Could Be Ready By September A local doctor known for his research into a universal flu vaccine says that his lab has a potential treatment in the works for COVID-19 using SARS antibodies. If all goes well, he says it could be ready for a public rollout by September — and it could also serve as a temporary vaccine as well.
Business & Tech Zoom Video Conferencing Hit With Lawsuit Over Facebook Data Sharing; Other Security Issues Racking Up A class action lawsuit gets Zoom to admit they give your data to Facebook, just as the FBI warns that hackers are having a field day on the video conferencing platform.
SF Restaurants, Food & Drink Bay Area Bar and Restaurant Owners Furious to Find Out Yelp Has Launched Fundraisers on Their Behalf Yelp has never exactly been seen as a friend to the Bay Area restaurant community so much as a necessary evil they've begrudgingly had to live with for a decade and a half, so a forced fundraiser effort isn't being taken too kindly by some.
Business & Tech Airbnb Hosts Furious That People Can Cancel Stays for Free During COVID-19 Outbreak The home-sharing service Airbnb is allowing guests to cancel for free over the “extenuating circumstances” of coronavirus travel restrictions, but house-hoarding hosts are huffy about it.
Business & Tech Inundated With Requests For Experimental Coronavirus Drug, Gilead Halts Individual-Case Program As predicted several weeks ago, Bay Area-based Gilead is at the center of the international conversation — and domestic desperation — about potential treatments for the novel coronavirus.
Business & Tech PG&E Pleads Guilty In Camp Fire Manslaughter Case Brought By Butte County The latest development in the painfully slow bankruptcy clownshow of Pacific Gas & Electric is a proposed settlement in a case brought by the Butte County district attorney and county officials.
Business & Tech Ex-Uber Exec Pleads Guilty to Stealing Google’s Self-Driving Car Trade Secrets Wunderkind engineer Anthony Levandowski pled guilty to stealing Google’s trade secrets on his way out the door, but it’s hard to think justice has been done when he got let off on 32 of 33 counts.
Business & Tech San Francisco To Press Hotels Into Service For Healthcare Workers and Homeless The city of San Francisco is preparing for a surge in coronavirus cases, and is trying to protect both the homeless population and the families of healthcare workers through the use of currently empty hotel rooms.
Business & Tech EU Wants Netflix To Stop Streaming In HD to Keep Internet From Breaking Los Gatos-based Netflix and other streaming platforms are being urged by a European Union commissioner to temporarily stop streaming content in HD due to the unprecedented levels of internet usage occurring as multiple countries go on lockdown.
Business & Tech Uber and Lyft Suspend Pool Options for Social Distancing; Uber Expands Paid Sick Leave for Drivers We're going to be hearing a lot of stories in the coming weeks about how industries are facing the COVID-19 pandemic and feeling its vast, unknowable economic impacts.
Business & Tech Coronavirus Vaccine Begins Testing On Volunteers In Seattle An experimental coronavirus vaccine developed by a Massachusetts-based biotech company along with the National Institutes for Health has officially begun being tested in humans.
Business & Tech Complaints About Illegal Airbnbs in SF Quadrupled Last Year You may have thought that talk of illegal Airbnb units was a thing of the past, but new data from SF's Office of Short-Term Rentals (OSTR) suggests that scofflaws are back at in our fair city.
Business & Tech Gig Workers Uniquely Vulnerable to Coronavirus, No Employee Protections in Place Many on-demand delivery companies are cleaning up as the shut-in economy surges, but the rideshare industry is taking a hit, and gig workers are forced to put in extra work under high-risk conditions.
Business & Tech Uber’s Self-Driving Volvos Resumed Testing in San Francisco Today They’re only in the Richmond District, with a human safety driver onboard, but the Uber self-driving cars are back in town starting today.
Business & Tech United Is Now Disinfecting All Tray Tables, Not Letting Passengers Reach For Their Own Water Cup United Airlines announced in a note to frequent travelers Monday that it is ramping up and changing its cleaning and inflight service procedures to address the coronavirus outbreak — and encourage more people to get on planes, which, good luck.
Business & Tech Facebook Pulls Down Trump Campaign Ads That Refer Confusingly to Census Facebook has made good on its policy barring ads that mislead users about the upcoming U.S. Census and removed a set of Trump campaign ads that created some confusion and referred to a "Congressional District Census."
Arts & Entertainment As Mashable, Facebook, and Intel Back Out, Talk Turns to SXSW Maybe Getting Canceled South By Southwest 2020 may become the next high-profile casualty of the coronavirus pandemic on people's event calendars as more companies say they're backing out of the event which is supposed to kick off next week.
Business & Tech Facebook Cancels Its Biggest Event of the Year, the F8 Developers' Conference, Over Coronavirus Concerns After canceling a couple of smaller events in San Francisco in recent weeks over coronavirus travel caution, Facebook announced Thursday that it is canceling its biggest industry conference of the year, the F8 developers conference set to take place in San Jose in May.
Business & Tech Lyft E-Bike Users Balk At Price Hike Users of Lyft's previously flammable Bay Wheels e-bikes are in revolt this week after the company announced price hikes effective March 2 that make the formerly cheap monthly membership option significantly less cheap.
Business & Tech Startup Boom Starting to Bust, as Layoffs Sweep Silicon Valley The robot reckoning may be afoot, as the New York Times finds that startups have laid off more than 8,000 people in the last four months.
Business & Tech Gilead Sciences Stock Jumps After World Health Comments On Its Coronavirus Drug A World Health Organization official has said that Gilead's remdesivir is "the only drug right now that we think may have real efficacy" against the novel coronavirus that first appeared in China.
Business & Tech In New Book, Uber Whistleblower Susan Fowler Describes Early Red Flags, and a Warning Not To Date Travis Kalanick "Whistleblower: My Journey to Silicon Valley and Fight for Justice at Uber," is a memoir of Fowler's upbringing, education, and ultimately her brief stint in the engineering department at Uber ca. 2015-2016.
Business & Tech Oracle Employees Circulate Petition Over Larry Ellison's Planned Golf Fundraiser for Trump Billionaire Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is hosting a golf fundraiser for President Trump's reelection campaign on Wednesday, and some Oracle employees have started a petition denouncing the event.
Business & Tech Protesters Swarm Zuckerberg’s SF Home to Condemn Facebook Political Ad Policy Mark Zuckerberg was not home to see this morning’s demonstration, but maybe he’ll see the phrases ‘Facebook is a Russian asset’ chalked on his sidewalk when he's back in town.
