Year: 2018

Every few months, Google’s Project Fuchsia makes the rounds in the tech press. And for good reason, given that this is Google’s first attempt at developing a new open-source kernel and operating system. Of course, there are few secrets about it, given that it’s very much being developed in the open and that, with the right know-how, you could run it on a Pixelbook today. There’s also plenty of documentation about the project.

According to the latest report by Bloomberg, about 100 engineers at Google work on Fuchsia. While the project has the blessing of Google CEO Sundar Pichai, it’s unclear what Google really wants Fuchsia to be. I don’t think it’ll replace Android, as some people seem to believe. I don’t think it’s the mythical Chrome OS/Android mashup that’ll bring Google’s two operating systems together.

My guess is that we’re talking about an experimental system here that’s mostly meant to play with some ideas for now. In the future, it may become a real product, but to do so, Google will still have to bring a far larger team to bear on the project and invest significant resources into it. It may, however, end up in some of Google’s own hardware — maybe a Google Home variant — at some point, as that’s technology that’s 100 percent in the company’s control.

It’s not unusual for companies like Google to work on next-generation operating systems, and what’s maybe most important here is that Fuchsia isn’t built on the Linux kernel that sits at the heart of Android and ChromeOS. Fuchsia’s kernel, dubbed Zircon, takes a microkernel approach that’s very different than the larger monolithic Linux kernels that power Google’s other operating systems. And building a new kernel is a big deal (even though Google’s efforts seem to be based on the work of the “littlekernel” project).

For years, Microsoft worked on a project called Singularity, another experimental microkernel-based operating system that eventually went nowhere.

The point of these projects, though, isn’t always about building a product that goes to market. It’s often simply about seeing how far you can push a given technology. That work may pay off in other areas or make it into existing projects. You also may get a few patents out of it. It’s something senior engineers love to work on — which today’s Bloomberg story hints at. One unnamed person Bloomberg spoke to said that this is a “senior-engineer retention project.” Chances are, there is quite a bit of truth to this. It would take more than 100 engineers to build a new operating system, after all. But those engineers are at Google and not working on Apple’s and Microsoft’s operating systems. And that’s a win for Google.

Got an odd screw, nut, bolt, washer or fastener you need to buy more of, but have no idea to how to find the right one? Amazon’s AR “Part Finder” can help. The company has rolled out a new feature on mobile that lets you point your camera at the item in question, so Amazon can scan it, measure it, then direct you to matching items from its product catalog.

The company didn’t announce the feature’s launch, but confirmed to us it was rolled out to all users a couple of weeks ago.

The feature takes advantage of the iPhone’s camera and its augmented reality capabilities to measure the object in question – a process it walks you through when you first launch “Part Finder” by tapping the Camera button next to the search box in the Amazon app.

This is the area where Amazon has added a number of product-finding functions that let consumers search for products without entering text. For example, here is where you’ll find the barcode scanner, the image recognition-based product search, package X-Ray, Smilecode scanner, AR View, and more.

To use Part Finder, you first tap the icon to launch the feature, then place the object on a white surface next to a penny, as instructed. (A piece of white paper worked well.)

The instructions explain how to correctly tilt the phone in order to measure the part. This involves an augmented reality display of a crosshairs and circle that appear on the white surface in the camera’s viewfinder. You tilt the phone until the circle is lined up in the center of the crosshairs.

Amazon’s app then scans the item and delivers results, assuming the product is in focus and you’ve followed the instructions properly.

On the following screen, you add more information to help narrow down the results. For example, we scanned a screw and it asked for other details like whether it was a flat head and the drive type. (Some of this information could have been derived from the scan, one would think, so it’s not clear how much Amazon is relying on the scan itself versus user input here.)

Of course, a screw is an easier thing to find on Amazon. The feature will be a lot more handy when you’re stuck with an odd part that you don’t know how to identify. Unfortunately, we don’t currently have a bunch of unintended parts lying around to test.

Amazon’s Part Finder is one of the more practical examples of AR technology, which can be used to determine the size of real-world objects using a smartphone’s camera. Apple, for example, is introducing a new app in iOS 12 called “Measure” which will let you point your iPhone at things like picture frames, posters and signs, tables, and other objects, to get automatic measurements.

Amazon is not the only retailer using AR to improve the shopping experience. Many other retailers are also taking advantage of the technology – like Wayfair, Houzz and Target are for visualizing furniture in your own room. Topology is using AR to let you virtually try on custom-fit glasses. Target is letting shoppers try on makeup at home in its mobile AR Studio. Ebay’s AR tool helps sellers find the right box for their items. And so on.

The Part Finder feature is currently showing up in Amazon’s app on iOS. No word yet on its Android release.

Malta AKA “Blockchain Island” has been making waves lately in the world of cryptocurrency and governance. Their latest move involves the crypto exchange Binance and the ICO builders at Neufund.

The plan is simple: Neufund will help MSX, the Malta Stock Exchange’s skunkworks, create tokenized securities. Binance has agreed to carry these securities on its own exchange, essentially creating a straight path to regulated tokens via the already regulated Malta Stock Exchange. In short, this enables Malta to become the first country to be able to offer tokens alongside traditional equities as well as an easy way to go public in multiple ways including via ICO.

The plan is still in the pilot stage. This year they will begin “the public offering of tokenized equity on Neufund’s primary market which may later be tradable on Binance and other crypto exchanges pending regulatory and listing approvals” said Neufund CEO Zoe Adamovicz.

“We are thrilled to announce the partnerships with Malta Stock Exchange and Binance, that will ensure high liquidity to equity tokens issued on Neufund. It is the first time in history, that security tokens can be offered and traded in a legally binding way. The upcoming pilot project will allow us to test the market’s reaction and realize the overall project idea in an environment with minimized risk.” said Adamovicz.

“We are delighted to welcome Neufund as our key partner in building a Blockchain-based exchange that is fully integrated with established financial markets. With the upcoming pilot project we become a worldwide pioneer in digital finance,” said Joseph Portelli, chairman of the Malta Stock Exchange.

This move is interesting in that it offers a parallel track to companies wishing to go public via token sales. While even the terminology isn’t completely hashed out in regards to the future of these systems, having a spot like Malta lead in the matter of token sales selling alongside equities is a solid decision. Malta is increasingly becoming the testbed for these sorts of experiments and, even if this is not yet a real project, it could create a turnkey solution for ICO launches on the island.

The new MacBook Pro has a thermal issue. YouTuber Dave Lee found out that the top-performing MacBook Pro can’t operate at full speed for a long time because it gets too hot.

According to him, a video export in Adobe Premiere Pro is taking longer on a brand new MacBook Pro with an Intel Core i9 CPU than on a 2017 MacBook Pro with an Intel Core i7 CPU (previous Intel generation).

Sure, if you look at benchmarks, the new MacBook Pro destroys previous models, and even many iMacs. But Apple is throttling the speed of the CPU so that it doesn’t get too hot under heavy load.

Apple Insider tested the performance of the new MacBook Pro with a Core i7 and Core i9 model. In both instances, the clock speed of the CPU started to drop drastically after a while.

For the i9, the CPU dropped from 4.17 GHz to 2.33-2.9 GHz after some tests. The i7 dropped from 3.8 GHz to 2.3-2.6 GHz under load.

Some users on Reddit also got a new laptop and noticed the same issue:

We’ve reached out to Apple for comment and didn’t hear back.

If all those benchmarks are true, the MacBook Pro might have a ventilation problem. You will never get perfect CPU performances on a laptop compared to a desktop computer due to size contraints. But it becomes an issue when you buy a laptop expecting great performances and it doesn’t deliver.

Insight Venture Partners that it has raised $6.3 billion for its latest (and largest ever) fund as technology investors continue to amass increasingly large war chests.

In the wake of SoftBank’s massive $100 billion Vision Fund, investors in technology companies have said that capital has become weaponized as a way to create a competitive moat around a startup’s business — ostensibly giving it so much money that investors become de facto kingmakers for the companies they back. rather than simply enablers for success.

That redefinition of the investors’ role — in a way trying to circumvent competition in a market by fiat — has led funds to follow Softbank’s lead and try to raise increasingly large funds. That’s why there’s Sequoia juiced its fund to a whopping $8 billion (and has already closed on $6 billion for it).

However, Deven Parekh says Insight Venture Partners isn’t simply following the herd with its latest raise. The firm is staying true to its mission of investing in companies, and continuing to commit the same amount of capital it always has, Parekh says.

“Our fund size has gone up and our portfolio size has gone up,” says Parekh. “The competitive dynamics is not the driver here as much as the types of companies we invest in.”

Still, the pace of investment has been pretty blistering. It was only three years ago that the company closed its ninth fund with $5 billion in capital commitments.

As technology commands an increasingly large share of the economy, it makes sense for the firm to raise more cash because there are simply more opportunities to deploy it, according to Parekh.

But competition is also something the firm is wary of — especially as technology becomes more popular for generalist investors.

“It’s hard to argue that the market is not more competitive today,” he says. “There’s significant growth in firms focusing on tech investing.” 

However, many of the growth capital and private equity investors that are beginning to invest more heavily in technology don’t have experience in the industry which is creating upward pricing pressure on deals, says Parekh.

“You have a lot of generalists going after software who don’t have a point of view on these assets,” he says. “The multiples are being paid without having a point of view.”

Since it was founded in 1995, Insight has always had a point of view on the software industry. The firm was one of the early pioneers in growth capital investing into technology companies and has always been more of a later stage investor — writing larger checks for companies that it backs once they’ve found traction in the markets that they’re serving.

That strategy has served the firm well through deals in companies like Pluralsight, Smartsheet, Delivery Hero, HelloFresh, Yext, and Alteryx (to name a few of the firm’s recent wins).

“The closing of Fund X is a historic moment in Insight Venture Partners’ 20 plus year history, demonstrating continued confidence by our global investors in our ability to invest in industry-leading software companies,” said Jeff Horing, Co-Founder and Managing Director, Insight Venture Partners, in a statement.

Facebook and Instagram will more proactively lock the accounts of users its moderators suspect are below the age of 13. Its former policy was to only investigate accounts if they were reported specifically for being potentially underage. But Facebook confirmed to TechCrunch that an ‘operational’ change to its policy for reviewers made this week will see them lock the accounts of any underage user they come across, even if they were reported for something else, such as objectionable content, or are otherwise discovered by reviewers. Facebook will require the users to provide proof that they’re over 13 such a government issued photo ID to regain access. The problem stems from Facebook not requiring any proof of age upon signup.

A tougher stance here could reduce Facebook and Instagram’s user counts and advertising revenue. The apps’ formerly more hands-off approach allowed them to hook young users so by the time they turned 13, they had already invested in building a social graph and history of content that tethers them to the Facebook corporation. While Facebook has lost cache with the youth over time and as their parents joined, Instagram is still wildly popular with them and likely counts many tweens or even younger children as users.

The change comes in response to an undercover documentary report by the UK’s Channel 4 and Firecrest Films that saw a journalist become a Facebook content reviewer through a third-party firm called CPL Resources in Dublin, Ireland. A reviewer there claims they were instructed to ignore users who appeared under 13, saying “We have to have an admission that the person is underage. If not, we just like pretend that we are blind and that we don’t know what underage looks like.” The report also outlined how far-right political groups are subject to different threshholds for deletion than other Pages or accounts if they post hateful content in violation of Facebook’s policies.

In response, Facebook published a blog post on July 16th claiming that that high-profile Pages and registered political groups may receive a second layer of review from Facebook employees. But in an update on July 17th, Facebook noted that “Since the program, we have been working to update the guidance for reviewers to put a hold on any account they encounter if they have a strong indication it is underage, even if the report was for something else.”

Now a Facebook spokesperson confirms to TechCrunch that this is a change to how reviewers are trained to enforce its age policy for both Facebook and Instagram. This does not mean Facebook will begin a broad sweep of its site hunting for underage users, but will stop ignoring those it comes across.

Facebook prohibits users under 13 to comply with the US Child Online Privacy Protection Act that demands that requires parental consent to collect data about children. The change could see more underage users have their accounts terminated. That might in turn reduce the site’s utility for their friends over or under age 13, making them less engaged with the social network.

The news comes in contrast to Facebook purposefully trying to attract underage users through its Messenger Kids app that lets children ages 6 to 12 chat with those approved by their parents, which today expanded to Mexico, beyond the US, Canada, and Peru. With one hand, Facebook is trying to make under-13 users dependent on the social network while pushing them away with the other.

Child Signups Lead to Problems As Users Age

A high-ranking source who worked at Facebook in its early days previously told me that one repercussion of a hands-off approach to policing underage users was that as some got older, Facebook would wrongly believe they were over 18 or over 21.

That’s problematic because it could make minors improperly eligible to see ads for alcohol, real money gambling, loans, or subscription services. They’d also be able to see potentially offensive content such as graphic violence that only appears to users over 18 and is hidden behind a warning interstitial. Facebook might also expose their contact info, school, and birthday in public search results, which it hides for users under 18.

Users who request to change their birthdate may have their accounts suspended, deterring users from coming clean about their real age. A Facebook spokesperson confirmed that in the US, Canada, and EU, if a user listed as over 18 tries to change their age to be under 18 or vice versa, they would be prompted to provide proof of age.

Facebook might be wise to offer an amnesty period to users who want to correct their age without having their accounts suspended. Getting friends to confirm friend requests and building up a profile takes time and social capital that formerly underage users who are now actually over 13 might not want to risk just to able to display their accurate birthdate and protect Facebook. If the company wants to correct the problem, it may need to offer a temporary consequence-free method for users to correct their age. It could then promote this options to its youngest users or those who algorithms suggest might be under 13 based on their connections.

Facebook doesn’t put any real roadblock to signup in front of underage users beyond a self-certification that they are of age, likely to keep it easy to join the social network and grow its business. It’s understandable that some 9- or 11-year-olds would lie to gain access. Blindly believing self-certifications led to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, as the data research firm promised Facebook it had deleted surreptitiously collected user data, but Facebook failed to verify that.

There are plenty of other apps that flout COPPA laws by making it easy for underage children to sign up. Lip-syncing app Musically is particularly notorious for featuring girls under 13 dancing provocatively to modern pop songs in front of audiences of millions — which worryingly include adults. The company’s CEO Alex Zhu angrily denied that it violates COPPA when I confronted him with evidence at TechCrunch Disrupt London in 2016.

Facebook’s Reckoning

The increased scrutiny brought on by the Cambridge Analytica debacle, Russian election interference, screentime addiction, lack of protections against fake news, and lax policy towards conspiracy theorists and dangerous content has triggered a reckoning for Facebook.

Yesterday Facebook announced a content moderation policy update, telling TechCrunch “There are certain forms of misinformation that have contributed to physical harm, and we are making a policy change which will enable us to take that type of content down. We will be begin implementing the policy during the coming months.” That comes in response to false rumors spreading through WhatsApp leading to lynch mobs murdering people in countries like India. The policy could impact conspiracy theorists and publications spreading false news on Facebook, some of which claim to be practicing free speech.

Across safety, privacy, and truth, Facebook will have to draw the line on how proactively to police its social network. It’s left trying to balance its mission to connect the world, its business that thrives on maximizing user counts and engagement, its brand as a family-friendly utility, its responsibility to protect society and democracy from misinformation, and its values that endorse free speech and a voice for everyone. Something’s got to give.

Chinese bike-sharing company Ofo is entering a new phase. After a period of aggressive growth, the company is looking back at its international markets and focusing on the most promising ones.

A couple of weeks ago, the company issued a press release highlighting some of the priorities outside of China. As part of this move, Ofo co-founder and CEO Dai Wei is going to be directly in charge of international markets.

“It’s a new strategical phase on the international front,” Ofo France General Manager and Head of EMEA Laurent Kennel told me. “The company wants to focus on the most mature and promising markets.”

So it means that Ofo will stop altogether in some countries, such as Australia, Austria, Czech Republic, Germany, India and Israel.

At the same time, there are some markets that work quite well. In particular, the press release highlights Singapore, the U.S., the U.K., France and Italy. But even if you look at a more granular level, Ofo is going to focus on some specific cities in particular going forward.

As Quartz and Forbes highlighted, Ofo hasn’t been a massive success in smaller American cities. “In the U.S., some markets work better than others, and they’re going to focus on that,” Kennel said. Instead of operating in dozens of American cities, the company is going to scale back and focus on the most important ones.

In France, Ofo has only been available in Paris for instance. Numbers are encouraging as the company handles 5,000 to 10,000 rides a day with 2,500 bikes.

“[In Paris,] We crossed an important milestone to prove that our business model is sustainable,” Kennel said. “Our revenue covers all our operational and maintenance costs.” That doesn’t include occasional investments to purchase new bikes.

Overall, Kennel was quite optimistic about those remaining markets. By focusing on a limited number of cities, the company can invest properly on each of those markets. In Europe, Ofo is going to focus on the U.K., France and Italy.

Just like in the U.S., Ofo is also reducing the number of cities in the U.K. and Italy. The company recently shut down its service in Norwich and Sheffield. In Italy, there was an internal reorganization and the company stopped operating in the mid-sized city of Varese.

Following Mobike’s acquisition by Meituan, Mobike recently announced that it would stop requiring deposits in China. Ofo still asks for a refundable deposit when you sign up in China, but not in Europe.

Mobike’s deep pockets increase the pressure on Ofo. Ofo needs to find a sustainable business model to become a viable independent company in the long term. “It has an impact on international markets, but also on the internal organization in China,” Kennel said.

Ofo doesn’t want to comment on the situation market-by-market. So it’s hard to know for sure where Ofo still operates and where it plans to scale back. On Ofo’s website, you can find a map with all the markets where it claims to operate. I looked at this map, listed the 21 countries and tried to find out what’s happening at a local level.

This isn’t a perfect list, but it gives a good overview of what’s happening at the company.

Still operating normally as far as I know:

• China
• France (Paris)
• Japan
• Malaysia
• Portugal (small operation)
• Singapore
• Thailand

Scaling back operations:

• Italy: internal reorganization, shut down in Varese to focus on Milan
• Spain: available in a handful of cities (Madrid, Valencia, Marbella, Granada) but recently scaled back in Madrid with fewer bikes and a smaller area of service
• United Kingdom: focusing on London (and potentially Cambridge and Oxford) while shutting down operations in Norwich and Sheffield
• United States: scaling back to some key cities, such as New York, Seattle and San Diego

Shutting down:

• Australia
• Austria
• Czech Republic
• Germany
• India
• Israel
• Netherlands: dockless bikes are temporarily banned

Unclear:

Hungary: service is unavailable in the app

Kazakhstan: service is unavailable in the app

Russia: service is unavailable in the app

Making sense of DNA data is a two-step process, namely the biochemical-sequencing of the DNA and the analyzing and extracting insights from the sequenced DNA data. As of today in 2018, the first part of this process is now almost fully automated requiring minimal human intervention. Even sequencing costs have dropped below $1,000 and soon they will reach $100, according to the industry. The second part of the process, however, is a long way from being automated because it’s very complex, time-consuming and requires highly specialized experts to analyze the data.

Now a startup plans to address this problem.

London-based Lifebit is building a cloud-based cognitive system that can reason about DNA data in the same way humans do. This offers researchers and R&D professionals, with limited-to-no computational and data analysis training, and their corresponding organisations (ie. pharmaceutical companies), a highly scalable, modular and reproducible system that automates the analysis processes, learns from the data and provides actionable insights.

It’s now closed a $3m (£2.25m) Seed funding round led by Pentech and Connect Ventures, with participation from Beacon Capital and Tiny VC (AngelList). The company is simultaneously announcing the launch of its first product, Deploit, what it claims is the world’s first AI-powered genomic data analysis platform, and, says the company, is already being trialled by major pharmaceutical and biotech companies.

The main “competitor” for Lifebit is the DIY process of analysing and getting actionable insights out of genomics and biodata. Organisations, both in industry and research, build custom software and hardware solutions to be able to analyse the huge volumes of genomic and biodata at scale. This leads to a large waste of resources since custom software and hardware is expensive and hard to scale and maintain.

A few platforms have been created like DNAnexus and SevenBridges. However, these platforms tend to lack flexibility, don’t integrate with the way the vast majority of bioinformaticians work, operate like black boxes which fail to provide the user with full control and transparency, can be very costly to use, and enforce lock-downs. All in all, if the user stops using these platform, all their past work is no longer accessible. And they are not designed for AI and advanced learning from previous analysis performed.

Lifebit’s Deploit platform is designed to address all these problems with a particular highlight on the machine learning functionalities that automate the process and on creating the next tool that will be used by everyone in the community who is trying to analyse and understand genomic and bio data, very much like GitHub changed software engineers’ lives.

In fact, Deploit will be priced with a pricing model similar to GitHub. It is free for individual, non-commercial, usage, and then you pay for team functionalities and for enterprise deployment and usage.

Lifebit was incorporated in April 2017 but founders Dr. Maria Chatzou (CEO) and Dr. Pablo Prieto only started working on it full-time in July when we moved to London to join Techstars.

“The problem these organizations face is no longer sequencing vast quantities of genomic data, but rather making sense of this data quickly and affordably,” says Chatzou. “This requires new data analysis technologies, which is where Lifebit comes in. Our mission as a company is to enable cloud-based real-time genomic analysis at scale, anywhere, by anyone.”

In other news bears shit in the woods. In today’s second day Trump news: President ‘The Donald’ has seized, belatedly, on the European Commission’s announcement yesterday that it had found Google guilty of three types of illegal antitrust behavior with its Android OS since 2011 and was fining the company $5 billion; a record breaking penalty the Commission’s antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager said reflects the length and gravity of the company’s competition infringements.

Trump is not! at all! convinced! though!

“I told you so!” he has tweeted triumphantly just now. “The European Union just slapped a Five Billion Dollar fine on one of our great companies, Google . They truly have taken advantage of the U.S., but not for long!”

Also not so very long ago, Trump was the one grumbling about tech giants. Though Amazon is his most frequent target in tech, while Google has been spared the usual tweet lashings. Albeit, on the average day he may not necessarily be able to tell one tech giant from another.

Vestager can though, and she cited Amazon as one of the companies that had suffered as a direct result of contractual conditions Google imposed on device makers using its Android OS — squeezing the ecommerce giant’s potential to build a competing Android ecosystem, with its Fire OS.

Presumably, for Trump, Amazon is not ‘one of our great companies’ though.

At least it’s only Google that gets his full Twitter attention — and a special Trumpian MAGA badge of honor call-out as “one of our great companies” — in the tweet.

Presumably, he hasn’t had this pointed out to him yet though. So, uh, awkward.

Safe to say, Trump is seizing on Google’s antitrust penalty as a stick to beat the EU, set against a backdrop of Trump already having slapped a series of tariffs on EU goods and Trump recently threatening the EU with tariffs on cars — in what is fast looking like a full blown trade war.

Even so, the tweet probably wasn’t the kind of support Google was hoping to solicit via its own Twitter missive yesterday…

#AndroidWorksButTradeWarsDon’t doesn’t make for the most elegant hashtag.

But here’s the thing: Vestager has already responded to Trump’s attack on the Android decision — even though it’s taking place a day late. Because the EU’s “tax lady”, as Trump has been known to vaguely refer to her, is both lit and onit.

During yesterday’s press conference she was specifically asked to anticipate Trump’s tantrum response on hearing the antitrust decision against Google, and whether she wasn’t afraid it might affect next week’s meeting between the US president and the European Commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker.

“As I know my US colleagues want fair competition just as well as we do,” she responded. “There is a respect that we do our job. We have this very simple mission to make sure that companies play by the rulebook for the market to serve consumers. And this is also my impression that this is what they want in the US.”

Pressed again on political context, given the worsening trade relationship between the US and the EU, Vestager was asked how she would explain that her finding against Google is not part of an overarching anti-US narrative — and directly asked how would she answer Trump’s contention that the EU’s “tax lady… really hates the US”.

“Well I’ve done my own fact checking on the first part of that sentence. I do work with tax and I am a woman. So this is 100% correct,” she replied. “It is not correct for the latter part of the sentence though. Because I very much like the US. And I think that would also be what you think because I from Denmark and that tends to be what we do. We like the US. The culture, the people, our friends, traveling. But the fact is that this [finding against Google] has nothing to do with how I feel. Nothing whatsoever. Just as well as enforcing competition law — well, we do it in the world but we don’t do it in a political context. Because then there would never, ever be a right timing.

“The mission is very simple. We have to protect consumers and competition to make sure that consumers get the best of fair competition — choice, innovation, best possible prices. This is what we do. It has been done before, we will continue to do it — no matter the political context.”

Maybe Trump will be able to learn the name of the EU’s “tax lady” if Vestager ends up EU president next year.

Or, well, maybe not. We can only hope so.

Uber has teamed up with Cargo, a startup that makes it easy for rideshare drivers to sell goods to their passengers. Cargo works by giving drivers free boxes, filled with goods like gum, phone chargers and snacks, to sell to passengers from the center of the car console.

Cargo, which has partnered with brands like Kellogg’s, Starbucks and Mars Wrigley Confectionery, provides these boxes to drivers for free. The only requirement is that drivers must have at least a 4.7 rating and be relatively active on the platform, Cargo founder and CEO Jeff Cripe told TechCrunch.

Each Cargo box comes with both free samples and items for purchase. Drivers earn at least $1 per order, even if what the rider gets is free.

Starting today, Uber drivers in San Francisco and Los Angeles can pick up Cargo boxes at one of Uber’s driver support locations, called Greenlight Hubs. While this is an exclusive business partnership, Cargo will continue to let drivers sell its goods even if they don’t drive for Uber. 

Since launching in 2017, about 7,000 drivers have made more than $1 million. On an annual basis, drivers can earn between $1,500 – $3,000 in additional income. This seems like a great deal for drivers and also a way for Uber to attract and retain drivers.

As it stands today, customers request and pay for goods via Cargo’s mobile site, but down the road, Uber envisions integrating Cargo’s functionality into its app. To date, Cargo has raised $7.3 million in funding.