Daily Crunch: Waymo opens up driverless ride-hailing


Alphabet’s self-driving technology company hits a major milestone, TV+ extends its free subscription period and Affirm files to go public. This is your Daily Crunch for October 8, 2020.


The big story: opens up driverless ride-hailing


: It’s offering fully driverless rides to (some) members of the public.



While the Alphabet-owned company has offered plenty of self-driving rides before, they usually came with a human in the driver’s seat for safety. Members of the early rider program who’d signed nondisclosure agreements were able to try out fully driverless rides — but again, they had to sign NDAs first.


Today, the company said members of its more open Waymo One program in Phoenix will be able to go fully driverless, and to take friends and family with them. And over the next few weeks, the program will open up to even more passengers.


The tech giants


— Apple gave away a free year of Apple TV+ to new device purchasers last year; now it’s bumping those subs out to February.


— The van’s unique features include sensor-based highway driving and traffic assist features.


— The company said this will allow it to focus on newer opportunities in hybrid cloud applications and artificial intelligence.


Startups, funding and venture capital


— It’s not hard to trace a connection between COVID-19 and business results.


— The news comes after the impending debut was reported in July.


— GoPuff delivers products like over-the-counter medicine, baby food and alcohol (basically, the stuff you’d buy at a convenience store) in 30 minutes or less.


Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch


— Startups that deliver their service via an API are having a moment.


— Speakers at Disrupt explained how technology companies have taken a backseat to frontline workers, rather than attempting to “solve” the issues on their own.


— Fundamental fixes could unleash the channel’s revenue potential.


(Reminder: Extra Crunch is our subscription membership program, which aims to democratize information about startups. .)


Everything else


— Matt Burns writes that GM’s current crop of in-car user interfaces is among the worst on the market.


— According to a new report from App Annie, consumers in the third quarter downloaded 33 billion new apps globally.


 — The U.S. Space Force obviously won’t be able to train most of their service people in actual space, so the new arm of America’s defense forces has tasked Slingshot Aerospace to create a VR space sim.


The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can .







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