Uber's efforts to develop self-driving cars also have been bogged down during the past year amid allegations that it stole technology from a Google spinoff and a fatal collision involving one of its robotic cars that ran over a pedestrian in Arizona. And on Tuesday, New York City's mayor signed a bill that would impose a yearlong cap on new licenses for ride-hailing apps and also allow the city to set a minimum wage for drivers. New York is the largest American market for Uber.

The basic argument is increasingly deployed by frustrated executives and self-promoting private-equity groups: Companies are doing dumb things to meet the market's quarterly expectations, and hurting their long-term prospects as a result. Take the company private and executives no longer have to care about the short term, allowing them to invest for the long run and help the company, their loyal shareholders and wider society. The trouble is that none of this applies to Tesla. It is hard to think of a company that cares less about sucking up to Wall Street than Tesla. Mr. Musk earlier this year rejected "boring bonehead questions" from analysts on his quarterly earnings call; the company offers no guidance on quarterly earnings; and it has frequently and unapologetically reported losses far worse than expected (only twice has it made a quarterly profit, both times a surprise).

When it comes to relationships, even the business kind, sometimes you just have to make nice. That's what Tesla's Elon Musk did this week, when he expressed regret about sounding a bit overtaxed during an ultimately upbeat quarterly earnings call for the tumultuous electric carmaker. He's still in the depths of production hell, you see. Meanwhile, the autonomous developers at Waymo decided to make friends with public transit officials in Phoenix, agreeing to work with them to ensure their driverless vehicles work for seniors and writers with disabilities. And in Sacramento, officials are opening their doors, er, streets to all the Bay Area self-driving developers who are sick of the fog and high housing costs.

As a result, electric car company reported a net loss of £548 million ($717.5 million) for its latest financial quarter, despite cranking out more vehicles than ever before. However, investors were buoyed by the news that Tesla still holds £1.6 billion ($2.2 billion) in cash reserves -- enough to keep building cars without borrowing more. CEO Elon Musk also pledged to post a profit later this year, as he set the firm the ambitious new goal of producing 10,000 Model 3s each week by next year. Tesla has cut back on capital spending by changing its strategy to produce the sedan on existing assembly lines – one of which is protected from the elements using a giant tent outside the factory – rather than adding all-new lines. Shares jumped 9.3 per cent to £328.85 ($328.85) in after-hours trading.

REVENUE FORECAST: Baidu's quarterly revenue is likely to have reached $3.9 billion, up from $3.1 billion a year ago, the survey showed. AD GROWTH: Baidu has seen its search-related advertising bounce back, boosting both its revenue and profit in recent quarters. Baidu should continue to benefit as companies--especially in areas such as health and online education--allocate more of their ad budgets to search advertising, which has a higher conversion rate than newsfeeds, Shawn Yang, executive director at Blue Lotus Capital Advisors, wrote in a research report. "We see an increasing demand of search ads from both users and advertisers," he wrote. "Chinese internet users become more mature in gaining information and tend to use search engines more frequently."

ARM Holdings is preparing a $600mn takeover bid for data analytics specialist Treasure Data, reports Bloomberg. SoftBank-owned ARM, which is based in the United Kingdom and is an industry-leader in semiconductor and software design, is eyeing the acquisition to expand its footprint in the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT is at the forefront of ARM's long-term strategy - in June, it completed the acquisition of leading technology connectivity management provider Stream Technologies and by 2035 it hopes to operate a trillion connected devices around the world. ARM was sold to SoftBank in 2016 for a reported $32bn, a purchase funded by SoftBank's Vision Fund which delivers investment for startups in advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, driverless cars, robotics and ride sharing, as well as IoT. Treasure Data operates cloud services tailored to Big Data collection, storage and analysis and already works with a number of major IoT companies.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai may acknowledge that the future is multi-cloud, but that doesn't mean he thinks all clouds are equal. In a revealing comment during the company's Q2 earnings call, Pichai dropped this bombshell: "[T]here is a tremendous cost to your business of being on the wrong [cloud] architecture." In other words, Pichai believes going with anything but Google is something of a dead end. Now, if only he could convince the majority of enterprises that have elected to go with cloud market leader Amazon Web Services (AWS), or leading contender Microsoft Azure. Which is of course what he spent the earnings call, as well as the company's Google Next conference, trying to do.

Wall Street is buzzing over Alphabet's blowout June quarter financial results. Analysts are growing more confident over the prospects for many of Alphabet's emerging businesses including YouTube, autonomous cars and cloud computing. The internet giant reported better-than-expected second-quarter earnings Monday. It posted adjusted earnings per share of $11.75 versus the Wall Street consensus of $9.59 for the June quarter. Alphabet shares are up 4.3 percent in Tuesday's premarket session to $1,263.50.

Facebook Tests AR Adverts in Its News Feed Facebook is working with a select group of advertisers to create augmented reality ads for its News Feed. When users activate an ad's tap-to-try AR capability it can display for example how a pair of glasses would look on their face via the user's webcam and screen. Facebook says it also intends to expand shopping support in Instagram Stories. July 10th -- NVIDIA Collaborates with Daimler and Bosch to Develop Robotaxi Fleets. NVIDIA, Daimler and Bosch announce a partnership to develop on-call, fully automated and driverless taxis.

Microsoft reported its Q4 2018 earnings yesterday, with highlights like surpassing $100 billion in revenue for the fiscal year, all three operating groups seeing double-digit year-over-year growth, and as a result the stock soaring past $800 billion in value. All of that meant a smaller tidbit slipped through: three additions and three minor changes made to the earnings release. Statements in this release that are "forward-looking statements" are based on current expectations and assumptions that are subject to risks and uncertainties. This is then followed by 24 factors. In this past quarter's release, there were 27 factors. The third one seems ordinary and something that any company would want to include.