Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 750

This week the FT reported that Amazon is in "advanced talks" to acquire the self-driving startup Zoox. This would be Amazon's first acquisition in the space, though it did lead a $530M funding round in Aurora in early 2019.

Zoox last raised two years ago and was valued at $3.2 billion. Rumor has it that its valuation will be less than that today. Some of its investors, according to FT, include Breyer Capital and the Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board.

The move seems reasonable. Amazon wants to build out its (driverless) logistics capabilities. It's also in keeping with what we have been seeing from big tech. Companies that can are using this environment to be acquisitive, invest in the future and, hopefully, gain market share. It's probably also inevitable that the self-driving space will see some consolidation going forward.

If you go back to this post from earlier this year , Zoox and Aurora weren't near the top in terms of R&D spending on autonomy. And it has become increasingly clear that this a giant problem/opportunity requiring giant funding capabilities. It's going to take time.

I recently heard Chamath Palihapitiya refer to Jeff Bezos as the greatest investor of our time -- even more so than Warren Buffet. Why? Because he is consistently, and sometimes exclusively, investing in the future. Is this one of those moments?

People are starting to eat at restaurants again. Here is a recent chart from the WSJ showing seated diners at restaurants on the OpenTable network:

OpenTable has been publishing this data since the beginning of the pandemic in something they call "the state of the restaurant industry." All of their datasets from around the world can be downloaded here .

Back in March, it was interesting to see this data, but most people basically just stopped eating out around the middle of the month. After that, in-person dining mostly flatlined. (This data wouldn't capture takeout, delivery, and other activities not flowing through the OpenTable network.)

At this point, we are now seeing geographies reopen in different ways. Germany, for example, is ahead of many other countries (at least on the OpenTable network). Note the spike (i.e. lower year-over-year decline) on May 21st. It was a national holiday.

You can also drill down into individual cities:

I think this is a pretty good indicator for how people are feeling, and so it could be useful to follow this data. Governments can reopen things, but people need to feel confident to go out and spend money. It looks like a number of people already feel that way.

The last thing you probably need at this point is another webinar. But this one could actually be interesting. On May 29th, 2020 at 9:00 AM eastern, the Senseable City Lab at MIT is hosting one called, Tracking epidemics in cities: urban environments and the insights they provide into disease . The Senseable City Lab has previously looked at how sewage could be mined for real-time information about an urban population, revealing things like eating habits, genetic tendencies, drug consumption, and -- yes -- contagious diseases. In this webinar, SCL plans to pickup on this last point, as well as discuss how mobile phone patterns can help to inform epidemiological studies. If you'd like to register, click here .

Image: SCL