DoorDash Pays SF Fine; Life 360 Buys Tile; Zoom Beats Street; Rolls EV Plane Breaks Records

DoorDash, which calls San Francisco home, agreed to pay the city of San Francisco  Dashers $5.3 million, for alleged violations of past benefits required by the city. According to the Chronicle, the delivery service did not admit to wrongdoing. Most of the DoorDash settlement money will go directly to workers. The majority will receive $500 to $1,500, although awards range up to $17,000, depending on how often the Dashers worked from 2016 to 2020.

Tile, which has taken a beating since Apple rolled out Air Tags, has been picked up by another tracking company called Life360. 9to5mac.com reports that its a $205 million deal, and will close first quarter of 2022. Life360 is a ‘focused family’ tracking platform, that sports features like location history, favorite routes, personalized alerts, and SOS messages. Tile, which says its business is still doing fine, has an advantage over Air Tags in that they have different sizes and shapes, like a ‘sticker’ for remotes and a card-shaped tracker for wallets. (One hacker almost immediately created a similar wallet one with an Air Tag, so expect Apple to pick up on that!)

The late pandemic Zoom doom hasn’t exactly materialized. CNBC says the video conferencing company did better than expected in earnings announced yesterday. They are warning of a slowdown as the pandemic continues to unwind, though. Zoom had a 35% increase in revenue for the last quarter, year over year, and net income was up 71%. Even with things softening, they are still predicting 19% growth.Of course that is down from the peak of the pandemic…for the quarter that ended in January 2021, their year over year revenue was up 300%! Zoom Rooms continues to grow, but the company has canceled plans to acquire cloud contact center software provider Five9.

The big problem for electric aircraft is battery weight, which seems at this point to keep them out of the large, commercial airliner market. There are a number of companies working on electric planes for general aviation and smaller regional commuter planes, though. Now, Rolls-Royce…famous for building jet engines for decades….has set records with their all-electric plane. According to engadget.com, the Roller plane has broken the speed record for EPs, hitting 387.4 MPH. They also set a climb record to 9843 ft (yes, a strange number…but it’s 3,000 meters!). The Rolls did that in 202 seconds. The records are not yet certified, but the old speed record was 213 MPH, so they comfortably beat the hell out of that number. Rolls says the plane uses the most power-dense propulsion battery pack ever assembled in aerospace.