Technology

Self-driving startupWaymo,aGooglespin-off owned by parent company Alphabet, has been granted the first permit in California to begin driverless testing on public roads. Yes, that means self-driving cars without a human behind the wheel will be cruising around California, beginning with a limited geographic area in Silicon Valley.

The companyautonomous vehicles are a common sight on public roads in and around Googleheadquarters in Mountain View, California. The startup, which began as a moonshot project under X, has been testing on public roads for years now. But this permit, issued by theCalifornia Department of Motor Vehicles, allows Waymo to test these self-driving cars without a human test driver behind the wheel.

New California DMV regulations that took effect in April allow companies to apply forfully driverless testing within carefully defined limits. Waymo is the first to get approval. At least one other company is waiting in the wings.

Where you&ll find them

Waymo said its driverless test cars will initially hit the streets near its Silicon Valley headquarters, including parts of Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills and Palo Alto. See the map below for the initial driverless launch.

Perhaps anticipating wariness from the public, Waymo emphasized that it knows this area &well.&

&Mountain View is home to more than a dozen autonomous vehicle companies, and has supported safe testing for years,& the company said in its announcement.

Waymo will eventually expand its driverless testing territory. Before it moves into a new area, Waymo said it will notify the new communities where this expansion will occur, and submit a request to the DMV.

Members of the public won&t be invited into these driverless cars just yet. However, Waymo is working toward that goal. The first driverless rides will be for Waymo employees. Waymo said it will eventually &create opportunities for members of the public to experience this technology,& similar to its early ride program in Arizona.

What Waymo is allowed to do

The driverless permit allows Waymo to test its driverless vehicles during the day and night oncity streets, rural roads and highways with posted speed limits of up to 65 miles per hour. Waymo is also allowed to test in fog and light rain, conditions that the company said its vehicles can handle.

If one of its driverless vehicles encounters a situation it doesn&t understand it will come to &safe stop,& Waymo said, adding that it has well-established protocols that include contacting fleet and rider support.

The company announced earlier this month that its autonomous vehicles havedriven 10 million mileson public roads in the United States since it began working onself-driving technology in 2009.

California is not the first state to test true driverless vehicles on public roads. Arizona gets that distinction. Waymobegan testing self-driving Chrysler Pacifica Minivans in Phoenix suburbs, notably Chandler, in 2016. The companylaunched an early rider program in April 2017. Later that year,Waymo removed employees and passengers from its test fleet, sending empty self-driving minivansonto the streets of greater Phoenix.

With its shiny new $8 billion valuation, Coinbase is now worth more than all but the top three cryptocurrencies that trade on the platform.

Thatright, the only cryptocurrency assets that are worth more than the platform that trades them are Bitcoin, Ethereum and Ripple. Bitcoin Cash, the currency forked from Bitcoin, is a distant fourth in valuation at $7.3 billion.

Coinbase Series E is nearly three times as much as the company raised inits Series D, and the fresh cash brings Coinbasetotal-capital-raised-to-date toover $520 million.

Thata lot of money. Indeed, if Coinbasecapital raised figured is compared to the market cap of the worldvarious cryptocurrencies and other similar assets, it would rank around 20th.

But the bet for investors is, and should be, that if cryptocurrencies are indeed the next big idea in the ways that humans determine value, then Coinbase should be worth far more than any of the assets that trade on its exchange.

The fact that itneither indicates how much farther the company has to grow, or the limits of the thesis that cryptocurrencies will take over the world.

It shows that the wager on a particular crypto company is looking like a better investment than putting money to work in nearly any of the other crypto assets that are for sale. During the last few crypto booms, some investors said that it was probably simpler to just invest in various tokens instead of companies working on blockchains — faster returns and your money would be more liquid, to boot.

However, at least in the case of Coinbase, that wager likely wouldn&t have worked. Coinbase is also the company that every investor has wanted to invest in; itbeen a known winner for a while now, so its performance isn&t a huge surprise.

And now with $300 million, Coinbase is well-capitalized to survive either a market downturn (one will come eventually), and the current Crypto Interregnum.

Coinbasechief executive certainly thinks the market will grow. As we noted,Coinbase currently allows trading to just a handful of cryptocurrencies, but it has long harbored ambitions to expand beyond that.

Speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt SF in September,CEO Brian Armstrong revealedthat he sees a future in which every cap table will have its own token. Based on that, he said he believes that Coinbase couldhost hundreds of tokens within &years& and even potentially &millions& in the future.

After last quarterbloodbath earnings report that cut 20 percent from Facebook share price, the social network stumbled in Q3 2018, reaching 2.27 billion monthly users, up 37 million users or 1.79 percent — only slightly better than Q1slowest-ever growth rate of just 1.54 percent, and compared to an 2.29 billion Wall Street estimate. It added 24 million daily active users hit 1.49 billion, up 1.36 percent compared to Q11.44 percent, missing the 1.51 billion estimate.

But the real growth story depends on its core US/Canada and Europe markets where Facebook saw zero growth and lost 1 million monthly users respectively last quarter. In Q3, Facebook added 1 million monthly users to reach 242 million in the US/Canada region, but held flat at 185 million dailies there. It lost 1 million users in Europe in both dailies and monthlies. Those markets make up over 70 percent of its revenue, which is why the slow growth and shrinkage is scaring Wall Street.

Revenue Slows Alongside Western User Growth

As for Facebookbusiness, the company earned $13.73 in revenue, compared to Refinitivconsensus estimate of $13.78 billion, and saw $1.76 EPS compared to an estimate of $1.47, making for a mixed report. Revenue was up 33 percent year-over-year, but thatmuch slower than the 49 percent YOY gain it had a year ago, and the 59 percent it had in Q3 2016.

Facebook blamed foreign exchange headwings for$159 million in Q3, which was the difference between its miss and a beat on revenue. Mobile accounted for 92 percent of Facebookad revenue, up from 91 percent last quarter, so when you think of the social network, be sure you&re not thinking of a desktop website.

Long-term, Facebook can&t exchange growth in its core markets for expansion in Asia-Pacific and the developing world. Facebook average revenue per user worldwide is $6.09, but the regional differences are stark. It rakes in $27.61 per users in the US and Canada, and $8.82 in Europe, but just $2.67 in Asia-Pacific and $1.82 in the Rest Of World region. In fact, ARPU dropped 4 percent in the Rest Of World, indicating users there may be spending fewer minutes per day browsing the News Feed and seeing ads.

A Wild Earnings Call

Facebookshare price closed at $146.22 before earnings were released, still massively down from its $217 peak for before it announced user growth troubles and slowing revenue growth in Q2earnings report. Facebook shares climbed 2 percent upon the announcement of earnings, in part thanks to Facebook pulling in $5.14 billion in profit and it adding 1 million users in the North American region after going flat last quarter, but oscillated wildly throughout the earnings call.

There, Zuckerberg stressed that sharing is shifting towards private chat where users send 100 billion messages on Facebookapps per day, and Stories where people share 1 billion slideshows per day. He cited AppleiMessage and YouTube, but not Snapchat, as Facebookbig competitors going forward. Those comments drove shares down 5 percent, reversing early gains. But later, he noted that Facebook believes itfound the right formula for showing people more meaningful passive video, so Facebook will lift some restrictions on how many lucrative video ads it showed. That pushed Facebookshare back to 3 percent up in after-hours trading.

Facebook hoped to show that its business can keep growing even as amidst a wide range of troubles. It did note that &more than2.6 billionpeople now use Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, or Messenger each month& compared to 2.5 billion last quarter. It also revealed another new stat: &more than2 billion people use at least one of our Family of services every day on average.& The goal of both of these stats is to distract from Facebookown slow growth by reminding people that some of those users who leave are going to its other properties.

But still, the companyrevenues and profits have been overshadowed by the non-stop parade of scandals ranging from election interference to its biggest security breach ever. Next quarter we&ll see if the breach scared users away or if Facebook logging them out for safety led some to never log back in.

Letremember that the company should be lauded for investing so much to beat back fake news and election interference, and cutting back on viral videos and clickbait that juice engagement but are terrible for user well-being and society. It doubled its security and content moderation staff from 10,000 to 20,000 this year. They now make up over half the company, as headcount grew 45 percent year-over-year to 33,606. Twittershares soared on last weekprofitable Q3 earnings report, but itmade no such measureable commitment to fight harassment and misinformation. Facebook is still constantly screwing up when it comes to privacy and security, but at least itputting its ample money where its mouth is.