San Francisco Chronicle Business & Technology News - Spoken Edition

S.F. clone phone There’s a weird new tiny phone with the word “Palm” on it that comes from a startup in San Francisco, which purchased the rights for the name from Chinese phone maker TCL. It’s designed as a clone of your phone to help you reduce your obsession with it. The mini-phone costs $350 and will be available in November, but you can’t go out and buy it on its own.

Two Bay Area Sears stores will be closing as part of the company’s financial restructuring plan after it filed for bankruptcy. Sears filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Monday, buckling under its massive debt load and staggering losses. The company will close 142 Sears and Kmart stores nationwide near the end of the year, including Sears stores in Pleasanton and Santa Rosa.

There’s not much about the physical details of Google’s new Pixel 3 phone that you can’t find elsewhere. That bigger display and curved design? Apple and Samsung phones already have that. But the Pixel doesn’t intend to wow people with its hardware anyway. It’s really a showcase for Google’s latest advances in software, particularly in artificial intelligence.

Details on recent Facebook hack Facebook says hackers accessed names, email addresses or phone numbers from about 29 million accounts as part of a security breach that the company disclosed two weeks ago. For 14 million of them, hackers got even more data, such as hometown, birth date, the last 10 places they checked into or the 15 most recent searches. Originally Facebook said 50 million accounts were affected, but that it didn’t know if they had been misused.

Uber’s Jump Bikes unit has gotten a green light from San Francisco to add 250 electric bikes to its free-floating rental service, doubling its quota in the city. “The No. 1 thing people have been asking for since we launched is more bikes, more bikes, I can’t find a bike,” said Ryan Rzepecki, CEO of Jump, which Uber acquired in April. “It will amazing to have more.

Carpooling — the cheapest, easiest way to solve traffic congestion — remains stubbornly stuck in neutral. Americans love riding solo. Fewer than 10 percent share rides en route to work. Google wants to change that. The search engine company’s Waze GPS traffic navigation division has been helping people arrange carpools in 13 states, including California, since 2016.

Sugar (slow) rush “I don’t understand it. It’s as if we’ve never seen a doughnut before.” A woman waiting in the drive-through line at Ireland’s first Krispy Kreme franchise last week, speaking to the Guardian.

Results under review Despite a strong earnings report, Costco shares dropped 5.5 percent after the warehouse club said it will review past financial reports because of possible deficiencies. Costco reported quarterly earnings of $2.36 per share on revenue of $44.41 billion. Online sales jumped more than 26 percent. The company said it will look at earlier reports because of a “material weakness” detected in its IT systems. What’s in a name? It’s Tronc no more.

Asus AC2900 dual-band Wi-Fi router (RT-AC86U) Cnet rating: 4.5 stars out of 5 The good: You can customize just about every setting and the 5-GHz speeds are amazing. It also has gaming-centric features, security for your entire home and USB 3.1 Gen 1 for fast network storage and printing. The bad: You can only use the app while you’re connected to your home network, and the physical router has to stand upright with no wall mount option.

Nearly 2,500 workers walked off their jobs Thursday morning from seven Marriott hotels in downtown San Francisco to demand higher wages, workplace safety and job security. Picket lines formed outside the Courtyard by Marriott Downtown, the Marriott Marquis, the Marriott Union Square, the Palace Hotel, the St. Regis, the W and the Westin St. Francis, according to Unite Here Local 2, a union that represents 89 percent of the workers.

Twist Bioscience, the San Francisco startup that makes synthetic DNA used in genetically modified foods and pharmaceutical drugs, is the latest Bay Area biotech firm gearing up to go public. The company, founded in 2013 and based in the city’s Mission Bay neighborhood, on Tuesday filed a form S-1 saying it plans to raise up to $86.3 million in an initial public offering.

J.C. Penney is counting on a former CEO of the nation’s largest fabric and crafts chain to inject some energy into the struggling department store chain. On Tuesday, the retailer named Jill Soltau, who had been the president and CEO of Jo-Ann Stores since March 2015, as its first female CEO, effective mid-October.

Executives Struggling GE boots CEOGeneral Electric ousted its CEO, took a $23 billion charge and said it would fall short of profit forecasts this year, further signs that the century-old industrial conglomerate is struggling to turn around its vastly shrunken business. H. Lawrence Culp Jr. will take over immediately as chairman and CEO from John Flannery, who had been on the job for just over a year.

Silicon Valley has been arguing for days over the matter of founders — or rather, whether founders matter. It started Monday when news broke that Instagram’s co-founders, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, were leaving Facebook, the company that bought the photo-sharing app six years ago.

Salesforce co-CEO Marc Benioff hopes the discovery of a cracked beam at San Francisco’s new $2.2 billion transit center was a good thing, because it may have prevented future injuries. “I am very sorry to hear of the closing of @TransitCenterSF due to the cracked beam. I pray this is a blessing that the crack was discovered before anyone was hurt or injured.