Waymo and Uber have signed a long-term, strategic partnership to collaborate on long-haul autonomous trucking. The idea is to help customers deploy autonomous trucks more efficiently. Those who buy trucks equipped with the Waymo Driver system will be able to tap into Uber Freight's marketplace technology, meaning they'll be able to deploy vehicles on the latter's network for deliveries. Uber Freight is essentially a version of the regular Uber app designed for shippers, which helps them find truck drivers for on-demand haulage. Waymo Via -- the company's trucking division -- plans to earmark billions of miles of goods-only driverless delivery capacity for the Uber Freight network.

Over the past year, technology companies Uber and Waymo (the self-driving business spun out of Google) have been engaged in a battle of wills, culminating in a high-profile court case that commenced last week. Waymo has accused Uber of stealing trade secrets related to its self-driving technology. But on Friday, just four days after the trial began, Uber and Waymo announced they had reached a settlement. After a year of accusations and very public dirt-throwing, the case was ready to go to trial. But according to a report in the New York Times, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi had been working behind the scenes for weeks, looking to took advantage of a golden opportunity.

It's been a busy week, with a successful SpaceX launch, Uber and Waymo's legal tussle, and guides to both smartwatch buying decisions and cameras. Snap is now doing better business, and Twitter finally made a profit. Watch this video with your sound turned on. After a brief delay, the most powerful rocket in the world launched yesterday afternoon. While the Falcon Heavy's top portion (complete with Space Oddity-playing Tesla roadster and Starman aboard) is proceeding on a path that will take it beyond Mars' orbit into the asteroid belt, two of its booster rockets safely returned to Earth.

Uber executives are travelling the globe to reassure regulators that the company is changing the way it does business. As Laura Frykberg reports, it follows a string of controversies that have hurt the ride-hailing firm's reputation. A group led by Japanese technology conglomerate Softbank has acquired a major stake in Uber. In a tender offer that expired Thursday, Dec. 28, SoftBank acquired a 15 percent stake in Uber while the remaining members got about 3 percent, according to a person familiar with the situation who was not authorized to publicly discuss details. (Photo: Eric Risberg, AP) SAN FRANCISCO -- There's a big trial starting Monday between two companies you've heard of -- Uber and Waymo, the autonomous car company owned by Google-parent Alphabet. But their brawl is over a topic you might not be familiar with: the technology inside a little spinning eyeball on the top of a self-driving car's roof.

A magistrate judge has ruled that Uber Technologies Inc must hand over a key document that could shed light on what its executives knew about alleged theft of trade secrets from Alphabet Inc's Waymo self-driving car unit. Alphabet's Waymo claimed in a lawsuit earlier this year that former engineer Anthony Levandowski downloaded more than 14,000 confidential files before leaving to set up a self-driving truck company, which Uber acquired soon after. The document in question is a due diligence report on Levandowski's startup prepared by Uber during its acquisition talks with the firm in 2016. High-profile: Levandowski, a'swaggering' six-foot-seven tech leader, is one of Silicon Valley's most significant figures in the development of self-driving cars Alphabet's Waymo claimed in a lawsuit earlier this year that former engineer Anthony Levandowski downloaded more than 14,000 confidential files before leaving to set up a self-driving truck company, which Uber acquired soon after. Many of these documents relate to lidar -- or light detection and ranging -- scanning, one or more lasers sends out short pulses, which bounce back when they hit an obstacle, whether clouds, leaves or rocks.