Uber Technologies Inc is paying US$245 million to Google’s self-driving car spinoff to end a legal brawl that aired out allegations of a sinister scheme, which tore apart the once-friendly companies.
The surprise settlement announced on Friday came as lawyers for Uber and Waymo, a company hatched from Google, prepared to wrap up the first week of a trial that had attracted global attention.
Waymo filed its lawsuit nearly a year ago, adding to Uber’s woes with allegations of a bold high-tech heist orchestrated by its former chief executive, Travis Kalanick, and a former Google engineer.
That engineer, Anthony Levandowski, subsequently went to work for Uber and was later fired when he declined to answer questions about the theft charges, citing his constitutional right against self-incrimination.
Uber had on Monday offered to settle the case for US$490 million just before the start of the trial, but that agreement did not provide Waymo with enough assurances that its technology would not be improperly used, two people familiar with the thinking of both parties in the lawsuit said.
Not long after Thursday’s trial proceedings ended, the top lawyers from both companies, Uber’s Tony West and Waymo’s Kevin Vosen, met to hammer out an agreement.
The resulting compromise cut Uber’s payment in half, but provided Waymo with the guarantees that it wanted to prevent its technology from being used in Uber’s autonomous cars.
The payment, to be made in Uber’s stock, is a fraction of the nearly US$2 billion in damages that a Waymo expert had estimated Uber’s alleged theft had caused, but US District Judge William Alsup refused to allow Waymo to use that figure in the trial.
“This has the look of two companies trying to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat,” said Dan Handman, a Los Angeles lawyer who specializes in trade secrets for the firm Hirschfeld Kraemer. “You try to structure a settlement so both sides can spin it as a win-win situation.”
However, Uber’s settlement will not necessarily help Levandowski. The US Department of Justice opened a criminal probe at the prodding of Alsup, although it has not publicly identified the targets of that investigation.
For Waymo, the settlement protects the technology that has vaulted it into the early lead in the self-driving car market and provides a measure of personal vindication for Google cofounder Larry Page.
Alphabet had another reason to settle. It was an early investor in Uber and, although it sold some of its stock late last year, it still holds a significant stake in Uber.
The settlement gives Alphabet an additional 0.34 percent of Uber’s outstanding stock, based on an investment round that placed the company’s market value at US$72 billion.
The final value of the settlement could swing up or down, depending on how much Uber is worth when it goes public.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
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