Business & Tech Lyft Rolling Out Feature Allowing Women to Request Women Drivers The rideshare company that once put pink mustaches on cars is launching a new change intended to lure women and nonbinary riders and drivers, as those riders can now specifically request a woman driver in San Francisco and San Jose.
Business & Tech Dreamforce Arrives Tuesday, Bringing Celebrities, Street Closures, Traffic, and Breathless AI Hype Some 43,000 corporate types will converge on South of Market for SF’s biggest conference Dreamforce, which starts Tuesday, making a mess of traffic, but hopefully also a mess of money for the local hospitality biz.
Business & Tech Elon Musk Is Now Suing California Over Its New Content Moderation Law In what seems like another ill-advised move from a PR and advertiser-comfort perspective, Elon Musk's X Corp. is now suing the state of California over a new law that requires social media platforms to make their content moderation policies and methods public.
Business & Tech Elon Musk Admits to Preventing Ukrainian Drone Strike on Crimea These are extraordinary times when a billionaire capitalist is able to singlehandedly intervene in an international conflict on his own whims. But that appears to be at least partly what happened in an incident last year that's described in a new book about Elon Musk.
SF Restaurants, Food & Drink Square Outage Cost Bay Area Businesses Thousands; Company Says It Will Publish Full Report on the Cause Square and its parent company Block have apologized for a nationwide outage on Thursday that impacted businesses' ability to collect customer payments, but one can easily see how an outage like this is not the same as when Instagram goes down.
SF News Friday Morning Constitutional: Square Says Services Slowly Returning After Outage Square and CashApp are recovering from a Thursday outage; police in Hayward fatally shot a man holding a BB gun outside a Safeway; and a suspect in a San Jose murder trial violently attacked his own attorney in court.
Business & Tech SF-Based Square and Cash App Experience Widespread Outages, Leading to Widespread Headaches If you were trying to pay for something with Square or Cash App today and had a problem, you're not alone. Square, and its Cash App, both apps were experiencing major issues Thursday.
Business & Tech SF Loses Google Conference to Las Vegas, But Scores Big AI Conference From ChatGPT Company Google has reneged on its deal to hold the 2024 Google Cloud Next conference at Moscone Center, instead moving the event to Las Vegas, but SF did just score a big AI conference from ChatGPT producer OpenAI.
Business & Tech Marc Benioff Threatens to Move Dreamforce Conference Out of SF Over Homelessness, Drug Use The annual Dreamforce convention is still set to begin less than two weeks from now, but Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is threatening to move the whole shebang elsewhere if he thinks drug use and homelessness disrupt this year’s event.
Business & Tech OpenAI Rumored to Be Close to Signing Deal For One of Uber's Mission Bay Buildings In what would be one of the first big office-lease deals in San Francisco since the mad sublease sell-off wave began during the pandemic, AI pioneer OpenAI is said to be in "serious" talks to take one of Uber's four buildings next to the Chase Center in Mission Bay.
Business & Tech X Rolls Out Its First Non-Tweet-Related Feature, and It's a LinkedIn Competitor Saying over the weekend that he can't bring himself to look at resumes on LinkedIn because "the cringe level is so high," Elon Musk rolled out a beta version of X Hiring, which will charge verified organizations a fee to post jobs.
SF News Uber and Lyft Drivers Detail Five Most Common Screw-Ups Made by Self-Driving Cars There’s no love lost between human rideshare drivers and the self-driving car companies that hope to replace them, but the rideshare drivers are quick to point out that the robotaxis are nowhere near up to the task yet.
SF News Meet the First 17 Pop-Ups That the City Will Pay to Live Rent-Free Downtown In Revitalization Effort We learned in April that the city was offering to pay pop-ups as much as $8,000 to occupy vacant retail spaces downtown. We now know the first batch will include Devil’s Teeth Bakery, KALW, and a flea market called Sucka Flea.
SF News Mayor Breed Still Pushing This Curious Idea of Turning Westfield Mall Into a Soccer Stadium An off-the-cuff remark by Mayor Breed in June apparently has fresh legs, as she said Tuesday that the city has now retained an architecture firm for a preliminary design work on a possible soccer stadium to replace the beleaguered Westfield San Francisco Centre.
Business & Tech Facebook Taking Heat for Blocking News About Wildfires From Canadian Users A new Canadian law requiring Facebook to compensate news outlets for using their content has led the social media company to just block news article posts outright, which has unintended consequences as wildfires continue to rage in Canada.
Business & Tech Musk Says X 'May Fail' Amid Weekend of Glitches and Drama Elon Musk threatened to jettison the "block" feature on Twitter/X, which led to plenty of drama on the platform over the weekend, and meanwhile, something went awry with all photos and links from pre-December 2014.
SF News Cruise Vehicle Involved In Collision With SF Fire Truck; Separate Collision With Cruise Vehicle Occurs In Mission It was a rough night for the robotaxis Thursday, with two self-driving Cruise vehicles getting into car crashes — one striking, or getting struck by, a fire truck that was responding to a call, and one passenger was hospitalized with a head injury.
SF Politics Trump May Do Interview With Tucker Carlson on X Next Week, Upstaging Republican Debate Donald Trump has reportedly made plans to do an online interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, on a platform still to be determined, in a middle-finger move to upstage the first Republican candidate debate.
Business & Tech Judge Asked Whether Elon Musk Wanted to 'Cozy Up' to Trump By Refusing Order In January 6th Case We just learned this week that Special Counsel Jack Smith definitely got Donald Trump's DMs from his defunct Twitter account, but now we're getting court transcripts showing how it went down.
SF News Day Around the Bay: Brands Suspend Ads on X Over Pro-Nazi Content At least two big brands, Adobe and Gilead, have suspended their ads on Twitter/X over Nazi content; Twitter apparently did give up some of Donald Trump's DMs; and another Cruise car drove into a construction site in SF.
SF Politics Friday’s North Beach Self-Driving Car Clusterf*** Has SF Officials Begging the State to Walk Back Approval Barely 24 hours after getting state approval to run their self-driving cars at all hours in SF, Cruise robotaxis froze up en masse in North Beach Friday night. Now SF City Hall is urging a state commission to go into reverse on that approval.
Business & Tech State Commission Votes to Approve Autonomous Taxi Expansion In San Francisco In Historic Vote The California Public Utilities Commission voted 3-1 on Thursday night, after over seven hours of public comment, to approve the expansion of robotaxi service in San Francisco to 24 hours — and approved both Cruise and Waymo to take paid fares at all hours.
Business & Tech Over 200 Members of the Public Set to Give Comment at PUC Hearing on Robotaxis The hearing on expanding autonomous-vehicle taxi service in San Francisco has gotten underway at the California Public Utilities Commission — and a long line of attendees and possible speakers during the public-comment portion was visible at Van Ness and McAllister on Thursday morning.
Business & Tech One Autonomous Vehicle Appeared to Chase a Fire Truck; Another Blocked a Fire Truck From Getting Out of Its Station On the eve of a key vote by a state commission on whether to allow Cruise and Waymo to further expand their autonomous vehicle testing and begin taking paid passengers all over SF, we're getting to see some of the 55 incident reports filed by the SF Fire Department involving AVs.
SF News City Buys Former Zendesk HQ On Market Street, Will Make It ‘Mental Health Service Center’ A full reversal from an Ed Lee-era “Twitter tax break” deal, as after Zendesk bailed from 2019 Market Street during the pandemic, the City of San Francisco is buying the property with plans to transform it into a “mental health service center.”
