Month: June 2019

FedEx will not renew a contract with Amazon to provide express delivery for the e-commerce giant’s packages in the United States.

FedEx, which made the announcement Friday, said in a statement the change would not affect other existing contracts with Amazon or international services.

Amazon has not responded to a request for comment. TechCrunch will update the article if the company provides new information.

FedEx tempered the news by stating that Amazon is not its largest customer. The percentage of total FedEx revenue attributable to Amazon.com represented less than 1.3 percent of total FedEx revenue for the 12-month period ended December 31, 2018, according to FedEx.

The decision follows an explosion in e-commerce, a trend that is expected to continue. FedEx estimates that e-commerce  is expected to grow from 50 million to 100 million packages a day in the U.S. by 2026.

That growth, along with the logistical gymnastics required to make, not lose, money pursuing the opportunity, has led FedEx and Amazon and others to look for efficiencies in their businesses as well as develop and deploy new technology.

For instance, FedEx unveiled in February an autonomous delivery device called SameDay Bot. The bot, which will be tested this summer in select markets, including FedEx’s hometown Memphis, is being developed in collaboration with DEKA Development & Research Corp. and its founder Dean Kamen, who invented the Segway  and iBot wheelchair.

The initial test will involve deliveries between selected FedEx Office locations, the company said. Ultimately, the FedEx bot will complement the FedEx SameDay City service, which operates in 32 markets and 1,900 cities.

Amazon has made its own moves from investing in electric vehicle company Rivian and developing a fully electric delivery drone to acquiring urban delivery robot startup Dispatch and warehouse robotics startup Canvas Technology.

More than three years ago, self-driving trucks startup Starsky Robotics was founded to solve a fundamental issue with freight — a solution that CEO Stefan Seltz-Axmacher believes hinges on getting the human driver out from behind the wheel.

But a funny thing happened along the way. Starsky Robotics started a regular ol’ trucking company. Now, nearly half of the employees at this self-driving truck startup help run a business that uses the traditional model of employing human drivers to haul loads for customers, TechCrunch has learned.

Starsky’s trucking business, which has been operating in secret for nearly two years alongside the company’s more public pursuit of developing autonomous vehicle technology, has hauled 2,200 loads for customers. The company has 36 regular trucks that only use human drivers to haul freight. It has three autonomous trucks that are driven and supported by a handful of test drivers. Starsky also employs a number of office people who, as Seltz-Axmacher notes, “know how to run trucks.”

The CEO and co-founder contends that without the human-driven trucking piece, Starsky won’t ever have an operational, or profitable, self-driving truck business. The trucking business has generated revenue, led to key partnerships such as Schneider Logistics, Penske and Transport Enterprise Leasing, and importantly, helped build a company that works in the real world. It has also been a critical tool for recruiting and vetting safety drivers and teleoperators (or remote drivers), according to Seltz-Axmacher.

“The decision to have a trucking business interact with the real trucking world in parallel with developing the robotics piece is a necessary part of building a longstanding business in the space,” said Reilly Brennan, general partner at Trucks VC and the first institutional investor in Starsky.

Starksy, which was co-founded by Seltz-Axmacher and Kartik Tiwari, has raised $21.7 million in equity from investors including Shasta Ventures and Trucks VC.

The evolution over at Starsky illustrates the challenge that awaits the autonomous vehicle industry and the giant companies and startups operating within it. Even after engineers solve the complexity of building an AI-powered driver that’s better than a human, these companies must figure out the equally intricate task of operations. Robotaxis, autonomous delivery robots and self-driving trucks won’t matter if humans don’t use, like or trust the tech.

Figuring out the basics of operations — including the rather pedestrian and obvious ones — will mean the difference between making or losing money. Or, having a business at all.

And the stakes are high. Trucks are the backbone of the U.S. economy and moved more than 70% of all U.S. freight and generated more than $700 billion in 2017, according to the most up-to-date statistics available from the American Trucking Associations (ATA).

Companies pursuing robotaxis and other autonomous vehicle programs are going to eventually wake up — if they haven’t already — to the same realities that Starsky has accepted, Brennan contends.

“The interaction with the market, particularly in logistics, is vital,” Brennan said, adding that companies pursuing robotaxis that haven’t built out and tested a consumer-facing app risk the same problems. “They need to have a business on day one, not on day 720.”

For Starsky, it started with something as basic as having a working vehicle and access to mechanics that could fix it.

Trucks, the hard way

Seltz-Axmacher admits now he underestimated how difficult trucks could be.

“Hey, it’s a truck, how hard can buying one be?,” said Seltz-Axmacher, as he described the company’s first major purchase of a truck for about $50,000. “We quickly realized that having a truck and driving a truck are not easy things to do.”

Starsky engineers retrofitted the truck, named Rosebud, with its autonomous driving system and made plans to test it at the Thunderhill Raceway about 150 miles north of San Francisco. It didn’t make it. The truck’s engine was smoking by the time it crossed the Bay Bridge. And then the truck, along with all those engineers, sat for two weeks while Seltz-Axmacher hunted for a diesel mechanic.

Self-driving truck startup Starsky Robotics began with this first, and problematic truck

The truck, pictured above, continued to break down. The company ran into more snafus, including a problem with insurance and the title of the vehicle. Starsky was going to miss a key milestone and Seltz-Axmacher was going to have to tell investors that it wasn’t because of bottlenecks in engineering, but because they didn’t know how to manage the truck part of this self-driving truck company.

The founders learned that even “average” trucks needed to go to the shop every 60 days, which is operationally complex when vehicles are traveling throughout the United States.

Starsky ended up making a key hire, Paul Schlegel, who is a veteran of trucking operations, to organize the enterprise. Schlegel, who has 32 years in the transportation industry with companies such as Schneider National and Stevens Transport, developed the trucking business that enabled autonomous trucks, but still worked in their absence. The trucking operations team is in Dallas. 

The driver pinchpoint

Seltz-Axmacher has said repeatedly that “unless you’re getting the driver out of the truck, you’re not solving anything.”

The problem in trucking is the supply of drivers. The chronic shortage has, in turn, driven up costs. For instance, the median salary for a truckload driver working a national, irregular route was more than $53,000 — a $7,000 increase from ATA’s last survey, which covered annual pay for 2013, or an increase of 15%. It’s even higher for private fleet drivers, who saw their pay rise to more than $86,000 from $73,000, or a gain of nearly 18%.

Starksy soon found that finding the right drivers was just as hard as finding the right trucks. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration shows the company has reported three crashes of its manually driven trucks.

Seltz-Axmacher said they’ve had a driver make a wrong turn and have a low-hanging branch rip a hole in the side of a trailer. The most serious incident involved a new driver who took an offramp in Florida too fast and rolled the truck onto its side. No one was injured and the driver was terminated.

These drivers are critical to the autonomous program and the best of them end up becoming teleop controllers, a job that involves sitting in an office, not logging days and weeks in a truck.

Starsky is taking a dual approach to its autonomous trucks. It outfits regular trucks with a combination of sensors like radar and cameras along with software that allows long-haul trucks to drive autonomously on the highway. When the truck is about to exit, a trained remote operator, who is sitting in an office, takes over and navigates the truck to its final destination.

The promise of being able to be promoted to teleoperator is a big part of how Starsky is able to hire drivers effectively. The company contends it wouldn’t be possible to find 25 highly skilled safety and remote drivers without having a broader fleet of regular truck drivers to choose from.

Robotrucks or bust

The ultimate goal of Starsky Robotics hasn’t changed, Seltz-Axmacher said. To get there, the company recently hired Ain McKendrick as vice president of engineering, and former Tesla executive Keith Flynn to head up its hardware manufacturing to support Starsky’s fleet build. McKendrick, who co-founded Podtek and Lyve, also has experience at autonomous vehicle company Cyngn, Highfive, Netflix and Dell .

By early 2020, the company aims to have 25 autonomous trucks — a goal that is only possible if it has 100 regular trucks, he added.

The only way Starsky can scale its operations on the autonomous side is to continue to scale its regular trucking operations six months in advance. In other words, the regular trucking business is inextricably linked to the success of deploying autonomous trucks.

The company has already found that the 15-plus brokers that are regularly giving it freight to haul are ready for driverless trucks.

“Many times the brokers who have given us loads have been fairly ambivalent to whether or not we’re hauling that freight with a self-driving truck, Seltz-Axmacher said. “A lot of the concern that people might have is that this is a technology-averse industry and might not be willing to accept self-driving trucks has proven not to be true.”

Jessica Powell, Google’s former head of PR from 2012-2018 (years in which Google required a not-insignificant amount of PR leadership), is now a rock star writer whose 2018 debut book, The Big Disruption: A Totally Fictional But Essentially True Silicon Valley Story, was the first novel published by Medium.

I recently spoke with Powell for this series on the ethics of technology, because The Big Disruption, for all its manic energy and a playfulness at times bordering on sci-fi sitcom level-absurdity, should be viewed as a key work in the emerging field of tech ethics. In scenes like the one that begins below, her comic timing and characters help us see how “disruptive” technologies may not so much change humanity, as reveal it.

As a product manager, you are tasked with leading a team and bringing an idea to life. You are the visionary who must direct not just engineers but also marketers, sales teams, lawyers, and others. You are a mini-CEO, the ruler of your product!

“Just like king!” Arsyen shouted to the empty stalls.

It’s part Dave Eggers’ The Circle; part “Coming to America” (the classic 1988 Eddie Murphy comedy about an African prince’s incognito sojourn in New York City); and part dystopian Tarzan. In this rather amazing sequence from an early chapter in The Big Disruption, Arsyen Aimo, an exiled prince from the fictional backwater country of Phyrria who has been working in Silicon Valley as a janitor, has accidentally convinced executives at the tech behemoth Anahata to hire him as Project Manager for the company’s disruptive new project – a car slash social network. Now, Arsyen has locked himself in the bathroom to scroll his phone for info on what Project Managers at tech companies actually do.

Of course, there is one important difference: You have no direct authority over anyone, and you must lead through influence.

“Hmmph, more like queen,” Arsyen grumbled. But then he reconsidered: Other than the receptionists, he had yet to meet any women at Anahata. He probably didn’t need to worry about being treated like one of them.

Jessica Powell, of course, was a woman you might well have met at Google, if you’d been working at the highest levels in or around the real-life tech giant over the past decade. While she joins others who’ve left Big Tech to write important philosophical books shedding light on the political and social implications of their industry (James Williams, Chamath Palihapitiya, Tristan Harris, and others come to mind), no one has yet succeeded like Powell in illuminating our current culture of technology. And if we can’t see our own culture, how can we change it?

After the short scene below, you’ll find part one of my two-part conversation with Powell, where we discuss the importance of satire in ethics, and how her background may have led her to become one of Silicon Valley’s most interesting and important class traitors.

Arsyen skimmed a few more blogs, trying to memorize the P.M.’s language — words like “action items,” “B2B solutions,” and “use cases,” and then something mystic called a “roadmap,” which as far as Arsyen could tell had little to do with either roads or maps. There was an even greater obsession with “alignment,” a concept Arsyen struggled with as his translation app told him that the equivalent word in Pyrrhian was pokaya, meaning to place the chicken coop parallel to one’s home.

Suddenly there was a banging on the stall door.

“Arsyen? You in there?”

It was Sven.

“Listen, you’ve been in there long enough. Only senior engineers get to work in the bathroom. Roni has some sort of roadmap question for you, so come on back.”

Arsyen washed his hands and returned to the cubicle, armed with his new vocabulary.

When Roni asked Arsyen about prioritization, Arsyen asked, “Is this on the roadmap?”

When Sven suggested adding images of attractive women to the car dashboard, Arsyen rubbed his chin.

“Does this align with our strategy?”

When all three looked to him for an opinion in how best to implement Symmetry Enhancement, Arsyen stood and put his hands on his hips.

“Does this align with the strategy on our roadmap?”

No one seemed to notice anything was amiss. If anything, it seemed like product managers just asked questions that other people had to answer.

Jessica P.: When you first reached out to me, I knew your name. Then I looked you up, and ended up reading your Wikipedia page and being intimidated.

There’s this amazing line in there, and because it’s Wikipedia, it’s written so straight…something to the effect of, he went to Asia, discovered that actually no one has enlightenment, so he came back to the US and became a rock star. And it was like, “Oh, wait. I can talk to this guy.” It was just so funny.

Greg E.: That made me more relatable?

The FCC voted at its open meeting this week to adopt an anti-robocall measure, but it may or may not lead to any abatement of this maddening practice — and it might not be free, either. That said, it’s a start towards addressing a problem that’s far from simple and enormously irritating to consumers.

The last two years have seen the robocall problem grow and grow, and although there are steps you can take right now to improve things, they may not totally eliminate the issue or perhaps won’t be available on your plan or carrier.

Under fire for not acting quick enough in the face of a nationwide epidemic of scam calls, the FCC has taken action about as fast as a federal regulator can be expected to, and there are two main parts to its plan to fight robocalls, one of which was approved today at the Commission’s open meeting.

The first item was proposed formally last month by Chairman Ajit Pai, and although it amounts to little more than nudging carriers, it could be helpful.

Carriers have the ability to apply whatever tools they have to detect and block robocalls before they even reach users’ phones. But it’s possible, if unlikely, that a user may prefer not to have that service active. And carriers have complained that they are afraid blocking calls by default may in fact be prohibited by existing FCC regulations.

The FCC has said before that this is not the case and that carriers should go ahead and opt everyone into these blocking services (one can always opt out), but carriers have balked. The rulemaking approved today basically just makes it crystal clear that carriers are permitted, and indeed encouraged, to opt consumers into call-blocking schemes.

That’s good, but to be clear, Wednesday’s resolution does not require carriers to do anything, nor does it prohibit carriers from charging for such a service — as indeed Sprint, AT&T, and Verizon already do in some form or another. (TechCrunch is owned by Verizon Media, but this does not affect our coverage.)

Commissioner Starks noted in his approving statement that the FCC will be watching the implementation of this policy carefully for the possibility of abuse by carriers.

At my request, the item [i.e. his addition to the proposal] will give us critical feedback on how our tools are performing. It will now study the availability of call blocking solutions; the fees charged, if any, for these services; the effectiveness of various categories of call blocking tools; and an assessment of the number of subscribers availing themselves of available call blocking tools.

A second rule is still gestating, existing right now more or less only as a threat from the FCC should carriers fail to step up their game. The industry has put together a sort of universal caller ID system called STIR/SHAKEN (Secure Telephony Identity Revisited / Secure Handling of Asserted information using toKENs), but has been slow to roll it out. Pai said late last year that if carriers didn’t put it in place by the end of 2019, the FCC would be forced to take regulatory action.

Why the Commission didn’t simply take regulatory action in the first place is a valid question, and one some Commissioners and others have asked. Be that as it may, the threat is there and seems to have spurred carriers to action. There have been tests, but as yet no carrier has rolled out a working anti-robocall system based on STIR/SHAKEN.

Pai has said regarding these systems that “we [i.e. the FCC] do not anticipate that there would be costs passed on to the consumer,” and it does seem unlikely that your carrier will opt you into a call-blocking scheme that costs you money. But never underestimate the underhandedness and avarice of a telecommunications company. I would not be surprised if new subscribers get this added as a line item or something; Watch your bills carefully.

Alongside today’s news that Walmart will soon introduce in-home grocery delivery in select markets, the company today announced another new effort similarly aimed at saving customers’ time. But this time, the focus was on Sam’s Club members, and specifically addressed the long process involved with buying car tires. To address that challenge, the company is rolling out a new “Sam’s Garage” app across the U.S. in July that will turn what used to take half an hour into a 5-minute process, the company claims.

Walmart CEO Doug McMillon recounted a fun anecdote about his tire-buying experience at a Sam’s Club, which prompted the creation of the new app.

“A few months ago, I ran over a nail and ruined a tire, so I went to Sam’s Club for help. It was a Saturday, and we were busy. At one point, I’m third in line with two members behind me. Our associates are working hard, but the process is time-consuming,” McMillon said. “As we’re all waiting there in the Bentonville club, I can tell that one of the members has recognized me. He doesn’t say anything – but he doesn’t have to. His facial expression says it all: ‘How does it feel to wait in line, dude? Surely you can do something about this,'” he recalled.

He later suggested to Sam’s Club CEO John Furner to re-evaluate the tire buying experience, and the new Sam’s Garage app is the result.

Typically, tire buying can be a longer process, and one that can even involve archaic systems like paper catalogs. The same was true at Sam’s Club, which McMillon said relied on “multiple systems, paper catalogs and a large desk” to service its tire buying customers.

Nine months after the CEO waited in line, there’s a new app for tire shopping aimed at helping Sam’s Club members. The app, Sam’s Garage, will run on mobile tablets and can do things like scan the customer’s membership card to pull up their associated vehicles. It then helps the Sam’s Club associate filter possible tire options based on their conversation with the customer about their tire needs.

For example, there are buttons to tap for things like “responsiveness,” “winter traction,” “wet road handling,” “offroad,” “ride comfort,” and more.

As they continue, more filters appear allowing the associate to narrow down the tire options based on other factors like in-store availability, special offers, brand, load index, speed rating, mileage warranty, and many more options. They can even do side-by-side comparisons of different factors.

They can then tap a button to get an estimate, email estimates or place an order.

“This is what it looks like to be a digital company. Sam’s Garage will be rolled out nationwide in July. From concept to design to rollout in fewer than nine months from that Saturday when I was buying tires,” McMillon said.

I’m spending some time in the new Audi Q8, and the car company equipped the crossover with its latest infotainment system. I love it, fingerprints, dust and all.

The fingerprints are part of the story. I could have cleaned up the screens for the photos, but I thought it was essential to show the screens after a couple of weeks of use.

There are two screens placed in the center stack of the Q8. The top one features controls for the radio, mapping system, and vehicle settings. The bottom screen is for climate controls and additional controls like garage door opener and the vehicle’s cameras. Both have haptic feedback, so the buttons feel nearly real.

Both screens are tilted at the right angle, and the shifter is built in a way that provides a handy spot to wrist your wrist, steadying it as you hit the screens.

Car companies are, turning to touchscreens over physical buttons. It makes sense on some level, as screens are less expensive and scalable across vehicles. With screens, car companies do not need to design and manufacture knobs, buttons, and sliders but instead create a software user interface.

Tesla took it to the next level with the debut of the Model S in 2012. The car company stuck a massive touchscreen in the center stack. It’s huge. I’m not a fan. I find the large screen uncomfortable and impractical to use while driving. Other car companies must agree as few have included similar touchscreens in their vehicles. Instead of a single touchscreen, most car makers are using a combination of a touchscreen with physical knobs and buttons. For the most part, this is an excellent compromise as the knobs and buttons are used for functions that will always be needed like climate control.

Audi is using a similar thought in its latest infotainment system. The bottom screen is always on and always displays the climate control. There’s a button that reveals shortcuts, too, so if the top screen is turned off, the driver can still change the radio to a preset. The top screen houses buttons for the radio, mapping, and lesser-used settings.

The user interface uses a dark theme. The black levels are fantastic even in direct sunlight, and this color scheme makes it easy to use during the day or night.

The touchscreens have downsides but none that are not present on other touchscreens. Glare is often an issue, and these screens are fingerprint magnets. I also found the screen to run hot to the touch after a few minutes in the sun.

Apple CarPlay remains a source of frustration. The Q8 has the latest CarPlay option, which allows an iPhone to run CarPlay wirelessly. It only works sometimes. And sometimes, when it does work, various apps like Spotify do not work in their typical fashion. Thankfully, Apple just announced a big update for CarPlay that will hopefully improve the connectivity and stability.

The infotainment system is now a critical component. Automakers must build a system that’s competent and feels natural to the driver and yet able to evolve as features are added to vehicles through over-the-air updates. It’s a challenging task made harder by the YEARS BETWEEN HARDWARE REVISIONS. Automakers must build a system that works today and continues to work years from now.

Audi latest infotainment system is impressive. It does everything right: it’s not a distraction, it’s easy to use, and features fantastic haptic feedback.

In developing VC markets such as the Midwest, some may think that funding from the government or economic development organizations are a godsend for local entrepreneurs. Startups are often looking for all the help they can get, and a boost in funds or an attractive set of economic incentives can be perceived as the fuel they need to take the next step in their growth journey.

While this type of funding can be helpful, a startup should ensure that funding from these sources is not a double-edged sword. The biggest positive, of course, is the money, which can help startups with product development, hiring, marketing, sales and more. But there can also be certain restrictions or limitations that are not fully understood initially—these restrictions could hinder growth at an inopportune time later on.

The inevitable question, then, is should startups consider partnering with the government or various economic development groups as they look to get off the ground? Let’s take a closer look.

What Local Economic Development Organizations Have to Offer

Today, particularly in the Midwest, it’s common for state and local governments to offer startups incentives such as tax exemptions or grants in an effort to keep local businesses around and also attract companies from other regions.

So how do these incentives work? When it comes to tax credits or exemptions, local governments are sometimes willing to provide these incentives if a startup can demonstrate how paying lower taxes will benefit the wider community.

When Google announced it was buying Looker yesterday morning for $2.6 billion, you couldn’t blame some of the company’s 1600 customers if they worried a bit if Looker would continue its multi-cloud approach, but Google Cloud chief Thomas Kurian made clear the company will continue to support an open approach to its latest purchase when it joins the fold later this year.

It’s consistent with the messaging from Google Next, the company’s cloud conference in April. It was looking to portray itself as the more open cloud. It was going to be friendlier to open source projects, running them directly on Google Cloud. It was going to provide a way to manage your workloads wherever they live with Anthos.

Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst at Constellation Research says that in a multi-cloud world, Looker represented one of the best choices, and that could be why Google went after it. “Looker’s strengths include its centralized data-modeling and governance, which promotes consistency and reuse. It runs on top of modern cloud databases including Google BigQuery, AWS Redshift and Snowflake,” Wang told TechCrunch. He added, “They wanted to acquire a tool that is as easy to use as Microsoft Power BI and as deep as Tableau.”

Patrick Moorhead, founder and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, also see this deal as part of consistent multi-cloud message from Google. “I do think it is in alignment with its latest strategy outlined at Google Next. It has talked about rich analytics tools that could pull data from disparate sources,” he said.

Kurian pushing the multi-cloud message

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian, who took over from Diane Greene at the end of last year, was careful to emphasize the company’s commitment to multi-cloud and multi-database support in comments to media and analysts yesterday. “We first want to reiterate, we’re very committed to maintaining local support for other clouds, as well as to serve data from multiple databases because customers want a single analytics foundation for their organization, and they want to be able to in the analytics foundation, look at data from multiple data sources. So we’re very committed to that,” Kurian said yesterday.

From a broader customer perspective, Kurian sees Looker providing customers with a single way to access and visualize data. “One of the things that is challenging for organizations in operationalizing business intelligence, that we feel that Looker has done really well, is it gives you a single place to model your data, define your data definitions — like what’s revenue, who’s a gold customer or how many servers tickets are open — and allows you then to blend data across individual data silos, so that as an organization, you’re working off a consistent set of metrics,” Kurian explained.

In a blog post announcing the deal, Looker CEO Frank Bien sought to ease concerns that the company might move away from the multi-cloud, multi-database support. “For customers and partners, it’s important to know that today’s announcement solidifies ours as well as Google Cloud’s commitment to multi-cloud. Looker customers can expect continuing support of all cloud databases like Amazon Redshift, Azure SQL, Snowflake, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Teradata and more,” Bien wrote in the post.

No anti-trust concerns

Kurian also emphasized that this deal shouldn’t attract the attention of anti-trust regulators, who have been sniffing around the big tech companies like Google/Alphabet, Apple and Amazon as of late. “We’re not buying any data along with this transaction. So it does not introduce any concentration risk in terms of concentrating data. Secondly, there are a large number of analytic tools in the market. So by just acquiring Looker, we’re not further concentrating the market in any sense. And lastly, all the other cloud players also have their own analytic tools. So it represents a further strengthening of our competitive position relative to the other players in the market,” he explained. Not to mention its pledge to uphold the multi-cloud and multi-database support, which should show it is not doing this strictly to benefit Google or to draw customers specifically to GCP.

Just this week, the company announced a partnership with Snowflake, the cloud data warehouse startup that has raised almost a billion dollars, to run on Google Cloud Platform. It already runs AWS and Microsoft Azure. In fact, Wang suggested that Snowflake could be next on Google’s radar as it tries to build a multi-cloud soup-to-nuts analytics offering.

Regardless, with Looker the company has a data analytics tool to complement its data processing tools, and together the two companies should provide a fairly comprehensive data solution. If they truly keep it multi, cloud, that should keep current customers happy, especially those who work with tools outside of the Google Cloud ecosystem or simply want to maintain their flexibility.

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 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

1. Facebook plans June 18 cryptocurrency debut. Here’s what we know

Facebook is finally ready to reveal details about its cryptocurrency, codenamed Libra. It has currently scheduled a June 18 release of a white paper explaining its cryptocurrency’s basics, according to a source.

It sounds like Facebook’s cryptocurrency will be a stablecoin, transferable with zero fees via Facebook products including Messenger and WhatsApp.

2. NASA declares International Space Station ‘open for business,’ including private astronaut visits

NASA’s plan also includes allowing private business activities to take place on the ISS, including “in-space manufacturing,” marketing activities, healthcare research “and more,” NASA says.

3. How Amazon’s delivery robots will navigate your sidewalk

In Amazon’s current trial, the robots are always accompanied by human assistants — who probably look like robot dog walkers as they trot through the neighborhood.

4. HTC launches Vive Pro Eye stateside, costs four times as much as Rift S

HTC’s Vive Pro Eye headset is its latest enterprise play, integrating an eye-tracking camera to give users an additional input mode and a way for users to signal attention. It’s available in a bundle with SteamVR 2.0 base stations and Vive controllers for $1,599.

5. Depop, a social app targeting millennial and Gen Z shoppers, bags $62M, passes 13M users

Depop is a London startup that’s built an app for individuals to post and sell (mostly resell) items to groups of followers.

6. Walmart to launch in-home grocery delivery in three cities, starting this fall

The service will allow the retailer to deliver items directly to a customer’s fridge or freezer, even when that customer isn’t home.

7. Why identity startup Auth0’s founder still codes: It makes him a better boss

An interview with Eugenio Pace, who founded Auth0 in 2013. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

Xiamoi recently discovered a safety issue with the M365 electric scooter where a screw could become loose in the folding apparatus. That would then cause the vertical component of the scooter to break off while in use.

Xiaomi said it only affected a “limited number of production units” — 10,257 to be exact. The recall program will start in the United Kingdom on June 26 and in other markets July 1. The United States is not one of the markets affected.

Electric scooter startup Bird got its start with this exact model but has since unveiled custom scooters. However, Bird has previously said it would continue using the Xiaomi M365 models for its monthly rentals. I’ve reached out to Bird to see if this affects any of its units.

“As such, we are encouraging all those who purchased this product to immediately stop using the Xiaomi Mi Electric Scooter (M365) until they have determined whether their scooter is part of the recall,” Xiaomi stated in its safety warning.

To figure out if you have one of those affected scooters, you can head over to this site and enter your serial number.