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Uber arch-rival Careem, which operates in Pakistan and across the Middle East and North Africa, has inked a deal to use self-driving electric pods, reports Gulf Business.

The pods, made by Italy-based Next Future Transportation, are modular, allowing them to drive individually or by clamping to other units to form a bus. One pod, 8.8 feet (2.7 m) in length, can hold up to 10 people.

The deal, described as a strategic partnership between the two firms, is a long way from bringing the actual autonomous pods into service since the Italian company has not yet started testing on a working prototype.

The firm last month rolled out its first full-scale prototype – pictured here:

“We are ready to power it and start the testings [sic], however we are still looking for a lead investor,” said Next in a post on LinkedIn.

Melding cars with mass transit

The Italian company first debuted its idea towards the end of last year. The pods are the brainchild of Tommaso Gecchelin, an engineer and industrial designer who envisions a network of the electric vehicles owned by businesses which people can summon via an app. Tommaso has said that the buzzy little cubes will be up and running by 2020.

“Next offers a unique and compelling vision for mass transit. We look forward to working closely with Next to pioneer their solutions in the region,” said Careem co-founder and managing director Mudassir Sheikha to Gulf Business.

Careem, based in the United Arab Emirates, last year raised $60 million in series C financing to help it grow. The startup recently vowed to spend $100 million on R&D in the next five years.

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In an emotional 1,100-word Facebook post published Friday, Sheryl Sandberg reflected on her first year as a widow and single mother. 

The Facebook COO, who lost her husband Dave Goldberg in May 2015, describes a "new and unfamiliar world" of trying to succeed at work without a partner at home, struggling to comfort her grieving children and regularly encountering reminders, like father-daughter dances, that her family will never be the same.

"Before, I did not quite get it. I did not really get how hard it is to succeed at work when you are overwhelmed at home," Sandberg writes in her post. "I did not understand how often I would look at my son’s or daughter’s crying face and not know how to stop the tears. How often situations would come up that Dave and I had never talked about and that I did not know how to handle on my own."

While the post was deeply personal, Sandberg devoted much of it to honoring single mothers and describing the challenges they face. 

"For many single mothers, this is the only world they know," Sandberg writes. "Each and every day they make sacrifices, push through barriers, and nurture beautiful families despite the demands on their time and energy."

Sandberg, who authored the 2013 bestselling book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, even gave credit to critics who said she didn't fully understand or account for the choices single mothers must make when trying to tend to their children and excel at work. She writes: 

In Lean In, I emphasized how critical a loving and supportive partner can be for women both professionally and personally—and how important Dave was to my career and to our children’s development. I still believe this. Some people felt that I did not spend enough time writing about the difficulties women face when they have an unsupportive partner or no partner at all. They were right.

Sandberg, however, didn't stop there. She marshaled statistics to illustrate the tough odds single mothers labor against, including the fact that 35% of them experience food insecurity and 46% of families headed by black and Hispanic single mothers live in poverty. 

"Single moms have been leaning in for a long time." 

Sandberg highlights the story of one San Jose, California, mother who works two jobs and must choose between groceries and paying her cell phone bill. Both are essential, she writes, because without the phone, her son won't be able to call his mother at her second job to say he's arrived home after traveling through their unsafe neighborhood. 

"Single moms have been leaning in for a long time—out of necessity and a desire to provide the best possible opportunities for their children," Sandberg writes. 

She criticizes the American stance on issues like paid parental and sick leave as leaving families to "fend for themselves" and concludes the post with a call to "rethink our public and corporate workforce policies and broaden our understanding of what a family is and looks like." 

Sandberg's strong convictions and empathetic approach will likely quiet some of her critics, particularly if she continues to advocate for all single mothers and their families — and she seems poised to do just that.

"We need to understand that it takes a community to raise children and that so many of our single mothers need and deserve a much more supportive community than we give them," she writes. "We owe it to them and to their children to do better." 

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Joe Atkins, chief executive officer of Bowers & Wilkins, has owned a majority stake in the half-century-old British speaker business for the last 30 years. On Tuesday, he told his 1,100 employees that he’s selling it to a tiny company that almost no one has heard of, run by a man he met just 30 days ago.

Over the weekend, Atkins reached a sale agreement with Eva Automation, a 40-person Silicon Valley startup that hasn’t yet sold a single product or service. The company was started in 2014 by Gideon Yu, a former Facebook Inc. chief financial officer, ex-venture capitalist, and current co-owner of the San Francisco 49ers. Yu has said little about his startup. According to the company’s website, it is “making products that will change how people interact and think about the home.” About a quarter of its employees have worked at Apple, according to their LinkedIn profiles.

Older, bigger companies usually acquire younger, scrappier upstarts in hopes of injecting some innovation into their ranks, not the other way around.

The companies declined to disclose financial terms of the deal. Eva is looking to raise as much as $252 million in a round that could value it at more than $600 million, according to an analysis of its public filings by VC Experts, a firm that studies private market data. Eva is backed by at least $20 million in funding, and the additional round of financing will help fund the acquisition. Yu said the Formation Group would lead the investment but declined to comment on how much money the company is raising. Both Eva and Bowers & Wilkins noted that the structure of the deal was unusual. Older, bigger companies usually acquire younger, scrappier upstarts in hopes of injecting some innovation into their ranks, not the other way around.

Bowers & Wilkins became a household name before speaker companies had to distinguish themselves through Spotify integrations and voice recognition capability. While Bowers & Wilkins does sell speakers designed to accommodate people used to listening to music through their smartphones, Atkins acknowledges that his company lacks the expertise needed to build software that communicates with cloud services. Any company that wants to sell speakers at a significant premium would need to integrate high-end hardware with sophisticated software. Yu plans to begin selling new products that incorporate Eva’s work by early to mid-2017.

While the details of the sale are odd, Atkins’s decision to sell isn’t a total surprise. He hinted at a potential acquisition in an interview with the Guardian last year, but that was long before talks started with Eva. Bang & Olufsen A/S, another high-end audio-equipment maker, walked away from takeover talks with a Chinese billionaire last month and replaced its CEO.

Bowers & Wilkins’s most devoted customers will probably be skeptical about a Valley startup being the best steward for a fancy speaker brand. Audiophiles often turn their noses up at digital music companies, which have a reputation for sacrificing fidelity for convenience. “It will take some explaining,” said Atkins. “I think when the verdict comes back, it will be clear that this is exactly what Bowers & Wilkins should be doing.”

Atkins will become CEO of the combined company, and Yu will be executive chairman. They will drop the name Eva in favor of the much more familiar Bowers & Wilkins brand. Yu and Atkins said there will be no staff cuts, and the company will continue to sell the current lineup of Bowers & Wilkins products. Atkins, who owns 60 percent of Bowers & Wilkins, will take a significant ownership stake in the new company. Bowers & Wilkins’s outside investors, Caledonia Investments and Sofina, will cash out.

Yu has been a Silicon Valley dealmaker for years. He was chief financial officer at YouTube when Google bought the company for $1.65 billion. At Facebook, he helped the social network raise money from Microsoft Corp. As a partner at Khosla Ventures, he was an early investor in Square Inc. He also owns part of the 49ers and championed the football team’s new stadium in the Valley.

Yu said his latest deal is a potential model for other well-funded startups. “I think there will be others to follow,” he said. “This is the way that Silicon Valley and other industrial companies raise the game for consumer-brand electronics.”