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Sarah Roach
Sarah Roach is a news writer at Protocol (@sarahroach_) and contributes to Source Code. She is a recent graduate of George Washington University, where she studied journalism and mass communication and criminal justice. She previously worked for two years as editor in chief of her school's independent newspaper, The GW Hatchet.
Firefighters and pizza joints join the rush for last-mile data
Fueled by quick-commerce services and heightened delivery expectations, tech companies are building unique data sets and AI-based software to make the final steps toward a destination speedier and more efficient.
To secure the best parking, Salinas firefighters would have to flip through a binder full of printouts en route to an emergency.
Photo: Salinas Fire Department
Kate Kaye
Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Her reporting on AI and tech ethics issues has been published in OneZero, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, CityLab, Ad Age and Digiday and heard on NPR. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia.org and is the author of "Campaign '08: A Turning Point for Digital Media," a book about how the 2008 presidential campaigns used digital media and data.
March 22, 2022
When Thomas Melia, an engineer for the City of Salinas Fire Department in California, was dispatched earlier this year on a medical call to an assisted-living facility, his routing app told him where to park the truck. But when he pulled into the sprawling multi-unit complex, the ambulance service that had already arrived was parked near the front door, far from the apartment in need.
“It’s just a super long walk,” Melia said. His team had time to reposition the ambulance near the back door. “We looked and knew this unit is going to be right by the elevator by the back door.”
In the past, in order to make sure they parked in a spot where they could easily access a particular apartment and nearby standpipes, hydrants and sprinklers, the firefighters would have to flip through a “target hazard” binder full of printouts while frantically adjusting masks and toolbelts en route to an emergency.
Now, their fireproof mobile devices tell them not only the best route to take there, but the best spot to park the truck. That means Melia’s captain doesn’t have to flip through a binder as often. “It increases safety by having more eyes on the road,” said Melia. “You can start to come up with a plan before you even get there.”
They’re not using Google Maps, though.
Instead, the firefighters rely on routing technology from Beans.ai, one of many companies building unique data sets and AI-based software that make the final steps to a destination speedier and more efficient. After the pandemic fueled use of quick-commerce services and heightened delivery expectations in general, the routing data and applications devised by companies including Beans.ai, Here and even pizza purveyor Domino’s aren’t just about the last mile. They’re about the last few feet.
FOIA requests and building photogs
Founded over three years ago, Beans.ai was not originally intended strictly as a service for emergency responders. However, it turned out fire departments and government agencies were useful places to look when foraging for data that would help food and package delivery workers find the closest parking spot to a destination.
Not only did the company temporarily borrow the Salinas Fire Department’s binders of maps to input data into its system, but Beans.ai even used freedom-of-information requests — it petitioned 180 municipal agencies such as building inspection and occupational safety departments in all 50 states and 118 cities — in the hopes of retrieving information such as physical maps that show building layouts. In the end, only 31 of those agencies had something to share that the company could use to feed what it calls “ground-ops” data, said Nitin Gupta, its co-founder and CEO.
In fact, most of its data does not come from old-school analog sources. Instead, more than 90% of it has been supplied by people the company pays to submit photos of maps posted inside large apartment complexes, mobile home parks and assisted-living facilities through its 100ft Surveyor app and driver-routing app. To date, Beans said it has mapped about 70% of U.S. apartments that have 40 or more units.
Binders used by the Salinas Fire Department.
Photo: Salinas Fire Department
Today, the company uses that information to refine machine-learning models for features in its apps that optimize delivery dispatch, routing and other logistics-related activities. For instance, its technology is integrated with FedEx Ground, allowing delivery contractors that pay $25 per month per driver to upload daily delivery locations in order to generate routing information for their drivers. But Beans.ai also aims to sell to government and public safety agencies through integrations with software used by emergency responders, including Tablet Command and BCS Marvlis.
Stairway to 15-minute deliveries
Hunting for last-foot data could pay off as the rise of quick-commerce delivery services from companies such as Buyk, Gopuff and Gorillas spur competition and development in the delivery-routing tech arena. More-established companies including DoorDash have been gathering delivery logistics data to train models used in their delivery fulfillment apps for years.
Last November, Coresight Research estimated that retail sales in the overall quick-commerce market would total $20 billion to $25 billion in the U.S. in 2021, around 10% of the research company’s share of estimated U.S. online consumer packaged goods sales for the year. New players like Fridge No More, JOKR and 1520 that promises 15-minute deliveries “have intensified instant needs in terms of speed promises ,” according to Coresight.
Companies in the quick-commerce sector will need accurate data and tools to get items to people at a rapid speed or they’ll risk losing out on customers who can easily switch to another service, said Christoph Herzig, head of Fleet Applications for Here Technologies, which sells its routing application for delivery drivers to businesses.
“The value of location technology becomes even more important because it’s all about early user conversion,” Herzig said.
But other sorts of companies also are interested in data showing building minutiae. Herzig said Here is working with a package-delivery carrier to gather building data including details about elevators, staircases and mailboxes.
The company uses a combination of automation, machine learning and human analysis to test and refine delivery routing maps created using a variety of data sets such as information about road surfaces and speed limits: Data that is especially relevant to heavy commercial vehicle drivers who can only travel on certain roadways. Here also sells its proprietary data, and lets customers sell their own data sets or build applications using data available in its exchange.
Keeping tabs with workers’ personal devices
Pizza giant Domino’s has also attempted to mine data to help streamline deliveries. The company’s more than 10,000 delivery drivers use a delivery app that its manager of Data Science Zack Fragoso told Protocol is “a key piece” of its last-mile routing efforts.
The app tracks driver locations while they are en route in order to alert customers when they are nearby. But he said that when the app was first introduced, it needed better data to improve problems such as false notifications telling customers an order was delivered when it was not. In the hopes of achieving higher accuracy, the company added features to help gather more specific location information during deliveries, Fragoso said.
Over the last couple years, Domino’s delivery drivers have given the Domino's Delivery Experience app — which many drivers say their managers demand they install and use on their personal phones — mixed reviews on Reddit. Some have said they found it useful, while others complained that they didn’t like having to enable tracking functions on their phones for work, and worried about battery life and phone data usage.
“The only reason it's there is to make sure we're not off fuckin’ around during deliveries,” wrote a Reddit poster last year.
Domino’s delivery drivers have given the Domino's Delivery Experience app mixed reviews.
Photo: Domino's
While helping to make emergency calls and deliveries more efficient, emerging technologies used for delivery routing and fleet management also create ethical questions related to worker privacy and civil rights.
Apps used by workers that merge personal and professional device use are “undermining workers’ basic human right to disconnect” especially “when workers are required to use personal devices that deliver data to employers, which can be used against them,” wrote Wilneida Negrón in a 2021 report for Coworker.org. The report pointed to threats to worker rights that can be exacerbated by data collection and algorithmic technologies such as increased worker monitoring, wage theft and labor-organizing surveillance.
When FedEx drivers or other delivery drivers use Beans.ai apps to assist in routing, they can turn off location tracking while still accessing static routing information, said Gupta, who added that Beans.ai does not sell its data as a separate product.
Still, as Beans.ai pushes for ways to turn its data technologies into valuable services for business customers in the delivery game, the company has added features and capabilities that some drivers might find invasive. For example, the company uses phone accelerator data to determine whether someone is driving, walking or idle, as well as camera footage data from a dashcam provider to help determine whether deliveries happened, if drivers parked where they say they did or if they were driving while using their phones.
That data gets fed into the Beans.ai system to improve its machine-learning models for routing, but is also used for driver safety reports provided to customers to keep track of driver activity. “With the camera footage we’re getting, we’re able to constantly reevaluate the data,” Gupta said, noting that the Beans.ai app only tracks drivers while they’re working. “When the driver clocks out, it automatically clocks out of any type of tracking.”
The additional driver-tracking capabilities were integrated to ensure the company’s services stay relevant to potential customers, such as delivery contractors that are required to monitor driver incidents or behavior, he said. “Our integration with our partners helps streamline the user experience,” Gupta said. “Every other data company we looked at in the space does not have a strong feedback loop on their data.”
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Why spiking nickel prices are brutal but not fatal for EVs
The metal is a core part of electric vehicle batteries.
People are seeking out EVs right as supply chain issues tracing back to the price of battery metals will make that demand increasingly hard to meet.
Photo: Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg via Getty Images
March 21, 2022
Veronica Irwin
Veronica Irwin (@vronirwin) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol, covering breaking news. Previously she was at the San Francisco Examiner, covering tech from a hyper-local angle. Before that, her byline was featured in SF Weekly, The Nation, Techworker, Ms. Magazine and The Frisc.
March 21, 2022
Nickel prices have been on a hell of a ride recently. The price of nickel saw an unprecedented surge earlier this month, doubling in price to $100,000 per ton on March 8. It has since swung wildly downward to $31,380 per ton as of Monday. The big initial spike was most immediately due to the impact of sanctions placed on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, but there’s more to it; resources like nickel and lithium have been squeezed for almost a decade, and analysts have been waiting for the impending shortage to catch up with the rush to build out renewables and other clean energy technologies like electric vehicles.
Sure enough, supply chain watchers quickly looked toward green tech like electric vehicles as news of the short squeeze circulated across Twitter. “The price of nickel is going hyperbolic in a short squeeze for the ages today,” tweeted Ryan Petersen, CEO of global logistics platform Flexport. “Reminder that nickel is a key input for electric vehicle batteries.”
Oil and gas prices have also surged in tandem, as anyone who’s been to the gas pump recently knows. (Big Oil has also been raking in record profits due to commodity price swings .) This is creating a complex problem: People are seeking out EVs right as supply chain issues tracing back to the price of battery metals will make that demand increasingly hard to meet.
“We’ve woken up, for the first time in a couple of decades, to the geopolitical reality that things are impacted by commodities production,” said Jonathan Crowder, founding partner of renewables-focused investment firm Intelis Capital. “But the impact is slightly different because rising gas prices have the immediate impact that’s being felt at the pump today.”
Robert Mullin, general partner at the natural resources investment advisory firm Marathon Resource Advisors, sees something similar. He’s been bracing for the cost and supply shortage of battery metal mining to catch up with EVs since long before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In fact, he predicted in a January 2021 report that, after nearly half a century of natural resources declining in value, prices are set for a rebound, due in part to supply chain constraints.
“We were naturally set up to have crises in all of these metals, materials and oil over the next two to four years anyway. Ukraine just brought it all forward,” he said.
But consumers are more likely to pay attention to the price of EVs, not intricate issues in the battery metals supply chain, said Crowder. A Morgan Stanley report released earlier this month pointed out that the surge in battery metals could increase the price of EV production by about $1,000 a car — something Crowder said is fairly marginal for now, but could make it harder for some would-be EV buyers to take the plunge.
The wild price swings can be seen in the ups and downs of Rivian’s fortunes recently. The company initially said it would raise preorder prices on two of its vehicles because of supply chain constraints and inflation. Then it walked that decision back after social media uproar, and a shareholder is suing . Tesla, too, announced 5% to 10% price hikes across all of its vehicles last week.
To adapt, Mullin said that EV companies should vertically integrate their natural resource mining supply chain. Tesla, for example, has created some buffer to price fluctuations and supply constraints by signing a deal with Minnesota-based Talon Metals Corp., which mines nickel.
But batteries aren’t only made of nickel — they include other metals, like cobalt and lithium, too. Vertically integrating all those types of mining could prove challenging for companies trying to produce the EVs we need to both get off oil and stave off the climate crisis.
Though batteries made with nickel can’t just be swapped out for other types of batteries into the same cars, several companies are working on creating battery packs that use different types of metals that could be used in new EVs. Zinc-air and sodium-ion varieties are widely considered the most promising.
Vertical integration could come with another challenge as well, particularly as companies set stringent climate and ESG goals. Mining can be environmentally destructive and the industry is rife with human rights abuses . By vertically integrating mining operations, Mullin said EV companies might find it harder to meet their ESG goals .
Yet solving these issues and making the mining industry a more just one is essential going forward. The Russian war on Ukraine and the volatility in the oil market show the need to kick fossil fuels to the curb, a move that would also weaken petrostates. But the climate crisis also demands we wind down carbon pollution or suffer a vastly degraded future. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found in a 2018 report that the world needs to increase renewable energy production up to a staggering 470% by 2030, all while oil, gas and coal use fall. The current wild swings in the nickel market show the need for policies and government support to keep EV and renewable tech prices low enough to spur even more widespread adoption.
Crowder, for his part, isn’t too worried. These supply chain issues, too, shall pass. “We have to look at the overall arc of battery pack prices over the last 10 years, which have fallen massively,” Crowder said. “I’m hesitant to call this the apocalypse for electric vehicles.”
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​Streaming video is big business. Now, Sonos wants a piece of it.
The company is hiring people with smart-TV experience for a new “Home Theater OS.”
To date, Sonos has built apps to control its speakers for mobile devices and desktop PCs but not TVs.
Photo: Andrej Sokolow/picture alliance via Getty Images
March 21, 2022
Janko Roettgers
Janko Roettgers ( @jank0 ) is a senior reporter at Protocol, reporting on the shifting power dynamics between tech, media, and entertainment, including the impact of new technologies. Previously, Janko was Variety's first-ever technology writer in San Francisco, where he covered big tech and emerging technologies. He has reported for Gigaom, Frankfurter Rundschau, Berliner Zeitung, and ORF, among others. He has written three books on consumer cord-cutting and online music and co-edited an anthology on internet subcultures. He lives with his family in Oakland.
March 21, 2022
Sonos appears to be getting ready to play a bigger role on the TV: The company is hiring multiple staffers for a new “Home Theater OS” project, with job descriptions hinting at plans to run apps or experiences directly on the TV. This comes after the company considered various ways to play a bigger role in TV streaming in recent years, according to multiple sources who spoke to Protocol on the condition of anonymity.
A Sonos spokesperson declined to comment.
The company recently started searching for a “UX Lead — Next Generation Home Theater Experience,” who will work “across device surfaces (mobile, television, tablet, and HW remote) to deliver a next generation content delivery experience.” Applicants need to have multiple years of experience designing for mobile “and/or TV.”
To date, Sonos has built apps to control its speakers for mobile devices and desktop PCs but not TVs. The company’s existing home theater products also don’t ship with a hardware remote and can instead be controlled with third-party TV remotes.
Another job listing is for a future “Principal Platform Product Manager” to develop an “OS & Media Platform roadmap”; the listing asks for applicants to have experience with modern operating systems, including Android/Android TV. And a “Head of Partnerships, Home Theatre” will “play a pivotal role in connecting users to the content and services they love with Sonos quality experiences they’ve come to expect,” according to another recent listing .
That listing was promoted on LinkedIn by Sonos Chief Innovation Officer Nick Millington, who said he was working on “a new home theater project.” Millington noted that the gig would be a great match for people with experience with streaming media, including “audio, video, games, sports, music, news, movies, TV, news, podcasts.”
Sonos released its first soundbar nearly a decade ago and has seen revenue from home theater projects grow significantly as people embraced streaming video services. In its fiscal Q4 of 2019, the company’s soundbar revenue nearly matched its smart speaker revenue (Sonos stopped breaking out home theater products in its earnings reports in subsequent quarters).
Sonos has been exploring a variety of ways to further capitalize on the growth of streaming, according to multiple sources with knowledge of these discussions. One approach, which was floated internally several years ago, was to partner with smart-TV manufacturers to equip their TV sets with Sonos speakers, similar to the way the company has been partnering with car-makers like Audi.
Another idea under consideration involved turning the company’s soundbars into full-fledged media players capable of running smart-TV apps. Roku, JBL and other companies have developed similar products in the past, with mixed success.
It’s unclear whether the current “Home Theater OS” plans are related to either of those ideas. Technically, it would be possible for the company to take other avenues, including running its own apps on third-party smart TVs, to achieve similar goals.
Whatever the ultimate product may look like, the new job listings make it clear that Sonos wants to play an even bigger role in the living room and shift its business model to benefit from the recurring revenue streams of the streaming media market. The “Head of Partnerships” is supposed to help the company develop a “a platform monetization strategy,” among other things. Applicants are supposed to have a “background in digital media and/or media/application distribution platforms & technologies” as well as “working knowledge of platform monetization technologies (AdTech, billing, audience measurement, etc.).”
Sonos has in recent years taken some first steps to generate recurring revenues with services. The company launched
an ad-supported radio service two years ago, and has since also rolled out an ad-free radio subscription . Thus far, services have been a relatively minor contributor to the company’s overall revenue, but executives have hinted at plans to grow this in the future. Sonos CFO Brittany Bagley called services “the long-term game for us” during an appearance at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference this month.
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In a world where employees can double their salaries by jumping ship, does it make sense to ding candidates for frequent job-hopping?
As the talent market has grown more competitive, recruiters have had to become open-minded about shorter stints.
Illustration: zuperia/iStock/Getty Images Plus; Protocol
March 21, 2022
Allison Levitsky is a reporter at Protocol covering workplace issues in tech. She previously covered big tech companies and the tech workforce for the Silicon Valley Business Journal. Allison grew up in the Bay Area and graduated from UC Berkeley.
March 21, 2022
In the last two months, Scott Moss has watched his mentee change between three jobs. Each time, the engineer — who only has two years’ experience — has nearly doubled her salary, said Moss, a principal at Initialized Capital.
“She was so nervous that they were going to call her out for leaving a job within a month,” said Moss. “But no, they were really excited to have her, and they offered her the moon.” (For the record, Moss said, he wasn’t encouraging his mentee to job-hop.)
A decade ago, job-hopping every two or three years — even in tech — could land a resume in the recycling bin. But as the talent market has grown more competitive , recruiters have had to become open-minded about shorter stints.
“There are many candidates who have nine months or six months [in a job] — it’s really tough,” said Whitnie Narcisse, a senior vice president at First Round Capital. “If they have a story behind it, it’s hard to just say ‘OK, if you have X number of skips, then we just skip over your resume.’”
Narcisse, who herself has stayed at First Round for seven years, still sees two years as a good minimum, particularly for executives. With so many competitive offers on the market, it’s rare to find individual contributors who stay very long, she said.
This dynamic can put recruiters in a bind: Especially when it comes to leaders, companies want candidates who will stay long enough to make an impact.
“Multiple short stints — meaning less than two years, in particular — time after time, to me, indicates poor judgment,” said Katie Hughes, the head of Executive Talent at General Catalyst.
Why everyone’s job-hopping
Job-hopping isn’t new to tech: Average tenure has been dwindling for years, and that trend has only accelerated since the late 2010s, said Matt Birnbaum, talent partner at Pear VC.
“I’m not sure that it’s that much more significant of a phenomenon than it was five years ago,” said Birnbaum. “I think it’s more that there’s been a lot of movement of people post-pandemic.”
Tech companies and venture firms are feeling that movement. General Catalyst has seen “an uptick” in turnover among its portfolio companies and is trying to keep attrition rates below 15%, Hughes said.
This isn’t a surprise, given all the incentive that job-hoppers have to leave. Average pay is climbing so quickly that compensation data becomes outdated every few months, Narcisse said. Employees are getting offers for 30% more , or double what they would have made three years ago — sometimes even double what they’re making now.
Kat Steinmetz, a principal at Initialized who advises portfolio companies on talent and culture, warned against jumping too quickly in pursuit of more pay. Candidates should vet opportunities for whether they’re truly a good fit before hopping.
“I don’t think that really pans out very well for people in the long run,” Steinmetz said. “Usually, someone will do that once and then realize that it’s not a very good reason to hop, because you need to be looking for other things too.”
When Steinmetz led the Talent Success team at Box, Facebook wooed one of her employees with a “ridiculous” salary, but the woman ended up leaving Facebook after four months upon realizing it wasn’t a good fit, Steinmetz said.
“It was totally not the right job, because she got hired in, like, four days,” Steinmetz said. “They didn’t do their due diligence. She didn’t do her due diligence.”
Career stage plays into some of this job-hopping. Executives will do more harm to an organization by leaving quickly, and Hughes believes it takes two years for leaders to even start making an impact. Leaning in and working on interesting problems at a second-rate company is better than spending two years each at three of the best companies, she said.
“Like, what are you learning?” Hughes asked. “I’m happy to support people in finding the type of work and the type of company that supports their personal and professional goals, but I think that’s different than someone who is chronically optimizing for a sexier brand or 30% more on their paycheck, versus leaning in and really doing the work.”
Young engineers — such as Moss’ mentee — might be particularly incentivized to job-hop. They have less to lose by jumping ship, and even inexperienced engineers are a hot commodity now. “Two years is the new five years,” Moss said.
“Anyone with five years’ experience is either rich off crypto, working at a Netflix-like company or they’re starting a company,” Moss said. “You have to look at the two-years now, the three-years, the people who are just hungry.”
When to read between the lines
In such a competitive market, heads of Talent are willing to ask candidates for context about their frequent job-hopping. The pandemic in particular shook up the workforce, and some professionals changed jobs or took a sabbatical for all kinds of reasons .
“COVID is weird, right? People had to do a lot of weird things,” Steinmetz said. “You have to ask more questions right now to get a better sense of what has really happened for somebody.”
Whether pre-pandemic or post-pandemic, a candidate may have been caught up in a big layoff or a company having issues. Longer stints before and after can help cushion these exceptions, Narcisse said.
Birnbaum experienced this firsthand eight years ago. In 2013, he spent four months as the head of Talent Acquisition at the ill-fated mobile payment startup Clinkle before leaving because, he said, “At the end of the day, it just wasn’t a company.”
“There are a lot of times where people stay for a shorter period of time because what they understood or what they walked into wasn’t necessarily what they expected,” Birnbaum said. “I’m always on the side of giving people the benefit of the doubt in these scenarios and asking for a bit more context.”
As with Clinkle, tech startups can rise and fall quickly. Companies can change at warp speed, and jobs can also turn out to be a bad cultural fit. For candidates, it can be hard to know what you’re signing up for when judging from an interview process where “everyone’s on their best behavior,” Hughes said.
But short of those rare, untenable situations, Hughes looks for candidates who are “really digging in” once they’re at an organization.
“There’s an element of stick-with-it-ness that’s required in order to really maximize your learnings and your own development,” Hughes said. “If you’re not getting into that deeper level of work and that deeper level of contribution to the organization, I feel like you’re just not developing at the same rate as someone who is.”
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