San Francisco Chronicle Business & Technology News - Spoken Edition

Emmett Carson, CEO of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation has been placed on paid administrative leave as the nonprofit delves into an investigation into a culture that former employees say allowed bullying and sexual harassment. The foundation said Thursday that Greg Avis, a founding board member and prior chair will become the interim CEO. Avis is a managing partner at private investment firm Bangtail Partners and serves on more than 40 company boards.

Body Time, a Berkeley business that sells bath soaps and lotions, says it is closing its stores due to rising rent. “Our rents have almost doubled and we weren’t able to negotiate our lease,” the retailer said on its Facebook page. “This was a big surprise to us as well as our many loyal customers.

What the world needs now are trucks that can cook food en route to customers’ homes so it arrives piping hot. That’s the view of Mountain View’s Zume Pizza. Armed with dozens of patents, the startup has been honing its baked-on-the-way method since 2016 with a pizza delivery operation in Silicon Valley. It also has robots make the pies, but it says the trucks are a bigger breakthrough. “The truck is a fully deployed kitchen,” said Zume CEO and co-founder Alex Garden.

Automakers, it seems, have figured out a new way to reach potential electric vehicle buyers — go through their utility company. Pacific Gas and Electric Co. announced this week that its customers can receive $3,000 off a new 2018 Nissan Leaf, a special offer that will end July 2. The discount — which comes out of the automaker’s profit and does not involve a rebate from PG&E — will be applied at the time of sale.

The median Bay Area home price surged to an all-time high of $820,00 in March, up 9.3 percent from February and up 14.7 percent from March of last year, research firm CoreLogic reported Tuesday. The previous peak was $784,000 in November. The report includes newly built and existing homes and condos sold in all nine counties. For the past six months, the median price has risen 12.8 percent year-over-year on average.

Thanks to a booming economy and soaring stock market, California’s income tax revenue has continued to far exceed both projections and last year’s totals. For the crucial month of April through Monday, personal and corporate income tax revenues have come in about $700 million above projections and nearly $1 billion more than last year, according to Justin Garosi, an economist with the Legislative Analyst’s Office.

It’s always surprising to see the new ways people dig up to make money online. Some entrepreneurs are starting with their closets — closets they don’t even own. Ugly Christmas sweaters, wheelchairs, strollers, car seats, bikes, hair dryers, tents, vacuum cleaners, guitars, surfboards, skis, poker chips, a Chewbacca costume, clothes galore.

San Francisco’s Twitch has landed the exclusive rights to stream the inaugural season of the NBA’s first foray into video game e-sports. The NBA 2K League said Wednesday that Twitch will livestream up to 199 games between e-sports teams run by 17 NBA franchises, including the Golden State Warriors and Sacramento Kings. The league tips off May 1, with weekly matchups or tournaments running through Aug. 11. Twitch will also stream playoffs that start Aug.

When Starbucks announced Tuesday that it will close more than 8,000 stores for a day of racial-bias education for its employees, W. Kamau Bell wondered if the effort would be more than “a splashy headline.

A bill to create California’s version of expiring national net neutrality regulation passed its first major test Tuesday by getting through the state Senate Energy, Utilities and Communications Committee. The committee voted 8-3 to send the bill authored by state Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, to the Senate Judiciary Committee. The bill, however, still has a long road ahead before gaining approval by both houses of the Legislature.

San Francisco’s Turo is going global and adding car-rental companies’ fleets to its on-demand inventory. Besides its current model of letting regular people rent their personal cars to others, Turo is now adding independent car-rental companies, small firms that often have specialized inventories. That’s allowing it to offer rentals in 56 countries starting Monday.

Berkeley, long known as a hub of independent bookstores, may soon be home to an Amazon bookstore. The online giant plans to open its third Bay Area bookstore — it already has locations in Walnut Creek and San Jose — on Fourth Street in West Berkeley. The website for the City of Berkeley shows that Amazon Books’ building permit for 1785 Fourth St. is under review. The space was until recently a Crate and Barrel outlet.

The number of H-1B applications for the next fiscal year dipped for the second year in a row — a trend experts say could be influenced by the current administration’s “America First” rhetoric and a rise in scrutiny on companies’ petitions. The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services agency said Thursday that it received 190,098 H-1B applications for the next fiscal year, a four percent drop from 2017, when 199,000 applications were filed.

Uber soon will add “peer-to-peer” car rentals from Getaround, which arranges rentals of regular people’s cars, to its app in San Francisco, the companies said on Wednesday. Within a couple of weeks, local Uber riders will be able to tap on the app’s upper-left menu to see an option called Rent, and then a map of what cars are available. Users will be able to find, book and unlock rental cars from within the Uber app.

Author Michael Lewis has no idea where the next “big short” is coming from but says it won’t come from the banking system. Lewis’ best-selling book “The Big Short” chronicled traders who anticipated the housing market collapse and made a fortune shorting, or betting against, complex mortgage securities. It was later made into a movie with an all-star cast including Brad Pitt.