Technology

Google's Chrome OS platform sure has come a long way.

From the early days, when Chrome OS was little more than an experimental "browser in a box," to today — with the platform powering first-class hardware and supporting a diverse range of productivity applications — Google's once-crazy-seeming project has turned into one of the world's most intriguing and rapidly expanding technological forces.

I've been covering Chrome OS closely since the start. I lived with the first Chromebook prototype, the Cr-48, and have used Chromebooks as part of my own personal computing setup in varying capacities ever since. I write about the field not only as someone who's studied it professionally from day 1 but also as someone who has used it personally that entire time, up through today.

Pilot fish who's a computer science professor gets a call from a former student stumped by a database problem -- one that should be pretty easy to solve.

"This was not one of my most stellar students," fish admits. "It seems they had set up a database for a new state agency and the system was running very slowly.

"I did a small amount of consulting on the side, so I agreed to take a look."

Turns out the database is rather strangely organized. The explanation Former student tells fish it's set up for ease of data entry.

And for retrieval "No problem," former student says. "We created an index for every field so you can look up anything quickly. We even created Soundex codes for every last name, and created an index for the Soundex codes too."

Restaurant food delivery startup Deliveroo is taking the next logical step to expand its business by opening up to restaurants that have their own delivery fleets — thereby also expanding the food choices it can offer its couch-loving users.

Next month the company will launch the new service, called Marketplace+, in seven of its markets — onboarding restaurants that do their own food deliveries to its platform, and offering them the ability to tap into Deliveroo network of riders to extend their delivery services and support faster delivery times if they choose (it says restaurants will be able to &choose for themselves how best to offer delivery& but the impact on, for example, existing delivery fleet staff employed by larger food chains remains to be seen).

Commenting on the launch in a statement, Deliveroo CEO and co-founder Will Shu said: &Today we are unveiling the next big step in our plan to offer customers an even greater choice of restaurants, at a greater range of prices while continually improving service. Thatwhy we introduced delivery-only kitchens, bringing new, exciting restaurants to new areas. Itwhy we invested in new restaurant brands to boost innovation, and itwhy today we are giving restaurants with their own fleets of riders the chance to be on our platform and to use our rider network whenever they need it.

&This is a major development for the company that will mean thousands of new restaurants delivering new orders to new customers and itpart of our mission to become the definitive food company.&

The Marketplace+ service is being rolled outglobally across all Devliveroomarkets this year, but will launch first in July in Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, Australia, Hong Kong and the UK and Ireland.

The company says itexpecting Marketplace+ to bring more than 5,000 additional restaurants into its UK app by the end of the year — which would be a 50% increased on the 10,000 current available.

The move will also expand where itable to offer a service in the market, saying it will add 50 new towns and cities in the UK by the end of the year.

It also expects that, within a year, it will be able to reach an additional 6 million UK customers. (It says italready profitable in the whole of the UK market, and notes that its core service achieved growth of 650% globally in 2017.)

Explaining why itable to onboard thousands more restaurants via the expansion to its marketplace, Deliveroo says this is as a consequence of building up what it dubs &its own extensive delivery network of 35,000 riders worldwide and 15,000 riders in the UK&.

Albeit, none of those riders are considered employees by the company.

Rather, like many gig economy platforms, Deliveroo classes the riders who deliver its product as self-employed contractors. And this type of classification is under increasing legal pressure in European markets such as the UK — where the government is currently reviewing employment law to take account of tech-fueled shifts in work.

Just today the UKsupreme court backed a rights challenge by a ‘self-employed& plumber who had solely worked for six years for Pimlico Plumbers — supporting an earlier employment tribunal decision that he is entitled to workers rights.

Uber has also faced a similar tribunal decisionrelated to its classification of drivers as self-employed, and is continuing to appeal.

So while Deliveroo is loudly touting business growth and expansion, as it prepares to plug thousands more restaurants into its platform, another aspect of gig economy businesses which is also set to fatten substantially — yet which none of these companies are shouting loudly about — are the associated costs of doing this kind of business once all the ‘self-employed& people who actually deliver the product are judged to be workers.

Then these platform businesses will be picking up the bill for all those service delivering workers& rights.

And in the UK at least the courts have been setting clear direction on that front — and feeding the governmentreview of employment law.