The robotaxi company will offer rides directly through its own smartphone app, like it does in other cities. Uber confirmed to TechCrunch Wednesday that it still plans to host Waymo robotaxis on its app for as long as the two companies agree. Waymo did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Mawakana's comments come after reporting earlier this year by the Financial Times that Waymo was looking to get out of its deal with Uber, which was set to expire in May 2028. Mawakana told Bloomberg that Waymo initially partnered with Uber because the ride-hail giant offered scale. But the experience for riders has been 'a little bit of a crapshoot,' she said, especially because riders never know for sure if they're going to hail a robotaxi or a human-driven car....

DuckDuckGo is pitching itself to schools after Google created an opening for the alternative search engine. On Tuesday, Google told schools they could turn off Gemini, but it said shutting off its other AI features would cost schools Google Search, as well. DuckDuckGo, a company that focuses on user privacy by limiting data collection, clearly sees this as a moment to make inroads in education, where Google has historically dominated. According to figures Google has published in previous years, there are around 50 million Chromebooks in schools, used by students and educators, and its Google Classroom platform serves over 150 million users globally. On X, DuckDuckGo's founder and CEO, Gabriel Weinberg, pointed to the company's online documentation, explaining how schools can switch their default search engine to DuckDuckGo's service instead, adding, 'get in touch for help.' Meanwhile, DuckDuckGo's chief public affairs officer, Kamyl Bazbaz, issued a stronger statement, writing, 'Forcing AI on school children: how a monopolist behaves when they think people are powerless. Prove Google wrong.'...

'Over the past thirteen years, we've turned a dream in a pitch deck into a platform used by hundreds of millions of people. None of it would have been possible without the talent, imagination, and care of every single person who has been part of this journey. Yet success in our first chapter doesn't guarantee success in the next. This has been our hardest year yet, and as we shared earlier this year, our growth has slowed for the first time in a decade,' Perkins wrote. Canva is reshuffling its organizational chart and merging its product, growth, and platform teams to reduce communication friction. The company is also reducing 'subspecialisation,' which means its employees might be asked to take up more responsibilities. The company is also moving toward hybrid work and asking people to work from an office a few days a week. The company has been shipping its own AI models to reduce costs and reliance on third-party models, but it still had to cut its revenue growth forecast to 20% from 30% to address ballooning AI costs. This also resulted in Canva's early investors cutting its valuation to about $35 billion earlier this year....

'I have big news: Conductor is joining Meta,' wrote the startup's founder and CEO, Charlie Holtz, on Wednesday. 'We have some big, crazy plans for the next interface,' he added, teasing that the company would have 'something new' for customers to use by 'early next year.' On X, Holtz also noted that he was looking forward to working with Alexandr Wang, Meta's chief AI officer, and Nat Friedman, head of product at the company's Superintelligence Labs. 'They've been on an absolute tear, and I'm convinced MSL has the highest talent density of all the labs,' he added. Conductor, founded in 2024, only launched its core product just last summer. The company's agentic teams, which can be deployed in the cloud, locally, or via a user's phone, are designed to help software engineers work on separate, compartmentalized parts of a project in concert. The agents that the platform deploys aren't developed in-house but come from major labs like Anthropic and OpenAI. Holtz said that, until early next year, Conductor's core features would continue to work as they previously have. The exception is Conductor's cloud service, which will shut down on November 20, after which the company will begin deleting user cloud data....