Waymo received approval Friday afternoon from the California Public Utilities Commission to operate a commercial robotaxi service in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Peninsula and on San Francisco freeways.
Importantly, it opens up new territory for Waymo in one of the country’s largest cities and unlocks a route to the San Francisco Airport.
Waymo has operated a commercial service 24 hours a day, seven days a week throughout the city of San Francisco since receiving approval from the commission in August.
Waymo is also allowed to give people free driverless rides in parts of Los Angeles.
Until today’s approval, it was not able to charge for rides in Los Angeles.
For co-founder and CEO Dayo Esho, the idea for TravelJoy emerged from his experiences growing up in the travel industry, supporting his mom’s travel agency business.
The co-founders began working TravelJoy in 2018, while participating in NFX’s accelerator.
The company also recently added integrations with travel insurance provider Faye and Viator, a marketplace for travel experiences.
The idea is to centralize the travel entrepreneur’s workflow, with CRM, messaging, invoicing, payments, proposals, itineraries, and group trip management in one digital solution.
Despite the pandemic’s massive and immediate impact on global travel, TravelJoy surprisingly didn’t shut down.
Frequent travelers who want to track their trips and reminisce about their favorite spots and travel memories now have a new app to do so.
Globetrotter is today introducing a location-based travel photos app that lets you look back on your past travels and share your memories and stats out to other social apps, like Instagram and others.
In addition to sharing your travel highlights and looking back on past trips, Globetrotter also has a feature called “2023 Wrapped,” which leverages the popularity of Spotify Wrapped to showcase your travels for the year, in a similar “year in review” format.
He said the idea of building a travel app appealed to him because he also enjoys taking photos on his trips and wanted a way to look back at his past travels in a new way.
The app includes a social element, too, where you can add friends and then compete on a travel leaderboard which shows your statistics.
