Amazon opens grocery pickup kiosks
Amazon.com opened two grocery pickup kiosks in Seattle, part of its latest effort to enter the $800 billion grocery market and compete with "click and collect" shopping options from big-box competitors like Wal-Mart Stores.
The "AmazonFresh Pickup" spots let shoppers buy groceries online and pick them up in as little as 15 minutes rather than having them delivered to their homes. The service is open to Amazon Prime members who pay $99 a year for delivery discounts and video and music streaming. Each location has parking spaces beneath canopies similar to those seen at gas stations.
Grocery sales have been slow to shift online, unlike books and electronics, leaving Amazon at a disadvantage to competitors like Wal-Mart, Target Corp. and supermarket chain Kroger Co. Amazon is experimenting with brick-and-mortar concepts to get a toehold in grocery sales while its competitors add online options to their existing stores.
Amazon also opened a convenience store format called "Amazon Go" that lets shoppers check in with a smartphone app, grab sandwiches, salads and other items they want from shelves and leave without having to check out. Instead, customers get billed automatically.
-- Bloomberg News
Video-game engine OKs $400M boost
SAN FRANCISCO -- Unity Technologies, which makes software at the heart of Pokemon Go and other video games, has agreed to receive $400 million in a new funding round led by the investment firm Silver Lake, the company said.
If the round closes, it will be a big show of support for the company as it focuses more on offerings to help develop virtual-reality and augmented-reality apps, two areas that Silicon Valley has been keen to dive into.
Founded in 2004, Unity sells an engine, or software that underpins games' infrastructure. The company says its engine is used on 2.4 billion smartphones and other devices.
The company has made a big bet on virtual reality and augmented reality, saying its engine now powers 70 percent of such experiences.
The new funding round would value Unity at $2.6 billion, not including the latest investment, a person with knowledge of the deal said, requesting anonymity to discuss private talks.
-- The New York Times
Chinese drone can fly from user's palm
China's SZ DJI Technology Co. unveiled a small camera drone starting at $499 that can take off and land from the palm of a hand, seeking to appeal to the broader consumer market.
The new Spark drone weighs 10.6 ounces, is equipped with a 1080-pixel video camera and can be controlled with a remote, a mobile device or using hand gestures alone, DJI said at an event in New York last week. The Shenzhen-based company will start shipping orders in mid-June.
DJI is the world's leading maker of drones, but most of the gadgets in its existing lineup cost $1,000 or more and are used for surveying crops or industrial sites and in high-end filmmaking. The 11-year-old company is looking to expand its market to stay ahead as global revenue in the industry is projected to increase from more than $6 billion this year to $11.2 billion by 2020, according to researcher Gartner Inc.
As the drone market becomes more mainstream, DJI is facing competition from cheaper rivals, especially in China, that have flooded the market with models from $10 mini-toys to sub-$100 camera carriers.
-- Bloomberg News
Brazilian Uber rival gets $100M infusion
A Latin American competitor to Uber -- 99 -- has raised $100 million from SoftBank of Japan to fuel growth, the Brazilian startup's chief executive says.
SoftBank will become a minority shareholder in the privately held 99, as the ride-hailing service Didi Chuxing of China did when it backed the startup in January. SoftBank is also a major investor in Didi Chuxing.
The transaction, which was completed earlier this month when Peter Fernandez, 99's chief executive, traveled to Tokyo and met with the SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son, puts another obstacle in Uber's path to succeed in emerging markets.
Fernandez said that 99 planned to use the new capital to expand its peer-to-peer ride offering, called 99POP, which it started in the fourth quarter of last year.
-- The New York Times
Tesla rebounds with automatic braking
Tesla Inc. has earned back half the points it lost in Consumer Reports' vehicle rankings after deploying automatic emergency braking to its recently built electric vehicles.
The carmaker, whose newer models were originally released without functioning automatic emergency-braking systems, has clawed back one point on both the Model S and Model X after losing two each in April. The scores, based on a 100-point scale, could rise further if the updated braking system becomes operational at highway speeds like in earlier models, Consumer Reports said.
The cheapest car in Elon Musk's suite now retails for about $70,000, so consumers looking for all the bells and whistles don't want to wait for a feature that was supposed to be available by the end of 2016.
Tesla disabled automatic braking when it transitioned to new hardware in October that it said would render every one of its vehicles capable of self-driving at a later date. The carmaker began deploying updates last month in stages but not in time to keep its models from dropping on the magazine's scale.
-- Bloomberg News
Maker of yoga clothes dealt Web blow
Lululemon Athletica Inc.'s website suffered a lengthy failure late last week, dealing a blow to the yoga brand's efforts to draw more online shoppers.
The company's North American site crashed after a power failure and other problems at a server farm, according to a person familiar with the situation. The site is now back online after being down for less than 24 hours, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the details aren't being shared publicly.
Laurent Vasilescu, a Macquarie analyst in New York, said he first observed that the e-commerce site wasn't working on the afternoon of May 22. The Vancouver-based company counts on direct-to-consumer sales for about 17 percent of its revenue, Vasilescu estimates.
For hours, the website presented an error message that said, "We are usually awesome at this. Please don't refresh your browser. You'll be back in the flow shortly."
The website failure represents a setback for a brand that's been working on its online performance. Lululemon has expanded its e-commerce product selection, and Chief Operating Officer Stuart Haselden said in March that the company was taking "aggressive actions" to improve the site.
-- Bloomberg News
Back pay to cost Uber millions in NYC
Uber Technologies Inc. said it underpaid its New York City drivers by improperly calculating the company's share of passenger fares and will pay out an average of $900 per driver in restitution, costing tens of millions of dollars.
The back pay could run at least $45 million, based on the approximately 50,000 drivers the Independent Drivers Guild says work in New York City.
The ride-hailing company has previously misled drivers about how much they could make and miscalculated fares. In this case, Uber was taking its cut of fares based on the pretax sum, instead of after taxes and fees as stated in its terms of service. The issue was also raised in a lawsuit against San Francisco-based Uber filed by the New York Taxi Workers Alliance. In March, Uber acknowledged that it had underestimated drivers' pay in Philadelphia by millions of dollars.
"We are committed to paying every driver every penny they are owed -- plus interest -- as quickly as possible," Rachel Holt, Uber's head of U.S. operations, said in a statement. "We are working hard to regain driver trust, and that means being transparent, sticking to our word, and making the Uber experience better from end to end."
The Wall Street Journal reported earlier on Uber refunding money to drivers.
"Uber's theft of drivers' hard-earned wages is the latest in a long history of underhanded tactics in this industry," said Jim Conigliaro Jr., founder of the Independent Drivers Guild. The guild called on regulators to investigate ride-hailing companies' payment practices.
Uber recently updated its terms of service for drivers. While drivers' pay is determined according to the time and distance they travel, Uber has begun to experiment with how it calculates the price for riders.
-- Bloomberg News
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