Round Three of Washington versus Big Tech
A plea for dumb cities, Uber eats London, Daydream VR headset
Following Mark Zuckerberg's grilling on Capitol Hill earlier in the year and the probing of social media companies over election interference, some of Silicon Valley's most powerful companies will be under the microscope again next week.
This time, executives from companies including Apple, Google and Twitter will appear before the Senate commerce committee for a hearing on online privacy. It follows a change of stance by the tech industry, which earlier this month decided national privacy regulation in the US was a good thing after all (no doubt prompted by the dawning realisation that some sort of action is starting to look inevitable).
There will be plenty to discuss. Among the latest revelations senators might want to dive into: how third party developers can sometimes peer into users' Gmail (though this only happens when users have granted permission, not because Google gives the data away), and Friday's disclosure by Twitter of a bug that may have let developers read users' private messages for more than a year.
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Let's hear it for dumb cities. The FT's Janan Ganesh worries that smart cities – those planned urban environments where chaos gives way to order and all the self-driving cars behave nicely – will be boring, uncreative places to live.
Taking a bite out of food delivery. Does this sound like a negotiation through the media? Deliveroo investors insist their company isn't for sale, and anyway they would want more than $4bn for it. Someone close to Uber, which has been circling the London-based company, insists $4bn is the ceiling. It's unclear whether a full sale or a significant investment is the most likely outcome – or no deal at all.
Forwarded
VC exit. Former Facebook executive and outspoken investor Chamath Palihapitiya has a jaundiced view of how the venture capital business works: "Raise a fund, collect fees, manage limited partners, deploy the capital in obvious things, rinse, repeat." He says he's had enough of it. After seven years the fund he led, Social Capital, has reached the end of the road, though he says he will continue to invest from a new tech holding company.
Augmented warfare. Augmented reality company Magic Leap hopes to sell its headsets to the US military, reports Bloomberg.
Tech tools you can use – Daydream VR headset
Next week's Oculus Connect event could see Facebook's VR company unveil a new, high-end headset that isn't tied to a computer. In the meantime, Google's Daydream is also racing to improve the experience of untethered VR.
Google has just announced some experimental new capabilities for developers to tap into. These include support for handheld controllers that give "six degrees of freedom", matching the experience of a more expensive, PC-based tracking system.