Technology

The Citroën Ami is a new take on urban mobility. Itelectric, cheap and doesn&t require a license. In short, itless of a car and more of an electric scooter with two seats, doors and a heater. Jokes aside, the Citroën Ami could be a glimpse at the future of mobility.

The innovation isn&t in the technical aspects of the Ami. Citroën is positioning the Ami as an urban mobility solution. The size is perfect for narrow streets and the price is right to be competitive against public transport. The Ami is not classified as a motor vehicle. As such, operators do not need a license and can be as young as 14 in France and 16 in other European countries.

Passengers sit side-by-side in the heated compartment and under the panoramic roof. The 5.5kWh lithium-ion battery is housed under the floor and is good for up to 70 kilometers after a three-hour charge from a standard 220v outlet. The top speed is 45 km/h (28 mph).

And because ita Citroën, therea nod to the companyquirky past: The side windows open manually by tilting upwards like the classic 2 CV.

The Ami is available to consumers in several different ways. It can be rented long term at a cost of €19.99 (including VAT) per month with an initial payment of €2,644 (including VAT). The Ami can be rented through a car-sharing service for up to a day at a rate of €0.26 per min. Or, the Ami is available for purchase from €6,000 (including VAT).

Citroën is taking orders for the Ami starting on March 30 in France and several months later in Spain, Italy, Belgium, Portugal and then Germany. The first Ami vehicles are expected by June.

Following a successful debut for Tinderfirst foray into original content, the company is giving its interactive video series &Swipe Night& another run. The company confirmed today itrenewing &Swipe Night& for a second season, which will launch this summer (again) as an in-app experience within Tinderdating app.

Variety first reported the news of &Swipe Night&s& return. Tinder further confirmed the details to TechCrunch.

&Swipe Night,& as you may recall, first launched in October 2019 within Tinder. The experience introduced a first-person adventure played in-app, where users would make choices at key turning points to progress the narrative — like a choose-your-own-adventure story.

The series was designed to increase user engagement and help the appyoung users better connect.

Today, half of Tinder is Gen Z (ages 18-25) — a demographic thatembracing their single lifestyle and more casual relationships compared with those on other dating apps, like Tinder parent company Match, for example, or its newer acquisition Hinge. These younger users connected with the idea of starting conversations based on a shared experience, says Tinder.

However, the reality is that &Swipe Night& had also arrived at a time when users were opening Tinderapp less on a daily basis, even as monthly usage climbed. Though &Swipe Night& only ran on specific dates in October 2019, users& choices within the interactive experience were added to their profiles. This allowed users to see who else agreed with their decisions and who took the opposite path. That made launching Tinder and swiping through profiles more compelling — even for those who may have been tiring of Tinder before the series& arrival.

The experiment worked. Tinder said millions of users tuned in to &Swipe Night,& and matches and conversations increased by 26% and 12%, respectively. With &Swipe Night,& it seemed, Tinder finally gave users something to talk about.

The returning second season of &Swipe Night& will again be directed by Karena Evans, who directed Coldplaymusic video &Everyday Life& and Drake&In My Feelings& and &GodPlan.& This time, it will be written by Jessica Stickles (&Portlandia,& &Another Period&) and Julie Sharbutt (&3 Days&).

&Working on Swipe Night was such a fulfilling experience for me. I got to do something that had never been done before and innovate with storytelling to bring a generation of people together. I&m in search of projects that impact, shift or curate a culture and couldn&t be more excited to return for more,& said Evans, in a statement.

&Swipe Night&s& second season may see Tinder tweaking the formula a bit, and may even introduce new mechanics to keep it feeling fresh.

In addition to the Season 2 launching in the U.S., Match previously confirmed that 10 international markets across Europe and Asia will get &Swipe Night& this year. Tinder said today that Season 1 would be launching internationally on March 14th, but declined to say when those users would receive Season 2.

Earlier today, during an eye-popping market selloff, DoorDash announced that it has privately filed to go public. The decision to file privately will allow the high-valued startup to get its S-1 documents in good order with the SEC before showing the rest of us what it has up its sleeve.

The move to announceits private filing is more interesting and could be related to prepping demand for its shares, providing some PR-cover for backer SoftBank, which could use the assist, or, perhaps, to dampen investor excitement for rival companies, in the face of DoorDashimplied success and maturity.

Whatever the reasons behind the timing — some of which must deal with the capital requirements of long-running cash burn — the filing is a new milestone for the on-demand and gig economies. And how well DoorDashfiling is received, predicated in no small part on its recent financial performance, will help set sentiment for a number of other, richly backed startups.

So letremind ourselves of what we know about DoorDashfinancial history. This will give us a workable foundation heading into its eventual S-1, and, we presume, old-fashioned IPO. (Ithard to imagine the cash-fired engine that is DoorDash looking toward a direct listing.) We&ll dig through its fundraising, unearth what we know about its revenue over time and turn over some data concerning its hiring efforts in recent months to better understand its IPO prep.

History

DoorDashfundraising history is well-known but worth recalling sequentially.

Google Cloud announced today that its new data center in Salt Lake City has opened, making it the 22nd such center the company has opened to date.

This Salt Lake City data center marks the third in the western region, joining LA and The Dalles, Oregon with the goal of providing lower latency compute power across the region.

&We&re committed to building the most secure, high-performance and scalable public cloud, and we continue to make critical infrastructure investments that deliver our cloud services closer to customers that need them the most,& said Jennifer Chason, director of Google Cloud Enterprise for the Western States and Southern California said in a statement.

Cloud vendors in general are trying to open more locations closer to potential customers. This is a similar approach taken by AWS when it announced its LA local zone at AWS re:Invent last year. The idea is to reduce latency by moving compute resources closer to the companies that need them, or to spread workloads across a set of regional resources.

Google also announced that PayPal, a company that was already a customer, has signed a multi-year contract, and will be moving parts of its payment systems into the western region. Itworth noting that Salt Lake City is also home to a thriving startup scene that could benefit from having a data center located close by.

Google Cloudparent company Alphabet recently shared the cloud divisionquarterly earnings for the first time, indicating that it was on a run rate of more than $10 billion. While it still has a long way to go to catch rivals Microsoft and Amazon, as it expands its reach in this fashion, it could help grow that market share.

Xbox-maker Microsoft announced today that it will not have a presence at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this year, highlighting concerns surrounding the coronavirus outbreak.

The company made the announcement on its Game Stack Blog:

After a close review of guidance by global health authorities and out of an abundance of caution, we&ve made the difficult decision to withdraw from participating at Game Developers Conference 2020 in San Francisco.

Instead of holding a physical event at the conference, Microsoft says it will be holding an online-only event that week.

Microsoft is just the latest company to pull out from the conference, which is being held March 16-20. Other companies backing out include Facebook, Unity and Sony. Epic Games announced it would also be pulling out of the event Thursday.

Earlier this week, city officials in San Francisco declared a state of emergency.

The COVID-19 outbreak has already affected several large industry conference. Facebook also announced Thursday morning that it would be canceling its F8 conference. With such major players exiting GDC, one wonder whether the conference could face a similar fate to GSMAMobile World Congress which eventually had to cancel the mobile event outright after its major exhibitors all bowed out.

We&ve reached out to the folks behind GDC for comment.