Nearly one-third of US households live in multi-family housing—but only about 5% of electric-vehicle home charging is done there.

This underscores the reality that charging an EV is a little more complicated for apartment dwellers in the US. It’s also cumbersome in large cities like New York City and San Francisco, where the majority of residents live in multi-family housing, as they work to decarbonize.

But there’s an emerging solution, popular in Europe, that’s starting to gain steam in the US: curbside charging. Among the companies trying to make this a reality is Brooklyn-based startup Itselectric.

Tech Brew recently visited one of Itselectric’s charging posts in Detroit, one of several cities with which the company has a contract. Donté Harris, Itselectric’s Detroit project manager, demonstrated how drivers can use Itselectric’s app to initiate a charging session, then grab a detachable cable they can get from the company to connect their vehicle.

“We say, it’s not weird, it’s European,” Harris said of the detachable cable. In Europe, he said, it’s common for automakers to provide customers with a cable when they purchase an EV. Having users bring their own cable, according to Itselectric, helps prevent vandalism and other damage that can occur when cables are left hanging.

Keep reading here.—JG

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• Grayscale Bitcoin Mini Trust (ticker: BTC), offering exposure to Bitcoin
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^{The Trusts are not funds registered under the Investment Company Act of 1940 as amended (“1940 Act”) and are not subject to regulation under the 1940 act, unlike most exchange-traded products or ETFs. An investment in the Trusts is subject to a high degree of risk and heightened volatility. Digital assets are not suitable for an investor that cannot afford the loss of the entire investment.}

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• Mini commitment: You don’t need an entire Bitcoin or thousands of dollars’ worth of Ethereum to get crypto exposure—as exchange-traded products, BTC and ETH allow you to allocate as much or as little as you want to crypto.

Turns out, a Mini gets you a lot. Crypto investing begins with Grayscale. Learn more.

The romance genre has enemies to lovers, but the automotive industry has its own familiar trope: rivals to friendly rivals.

In one of the latest examples of competing automakers making nice, General Motors and Hyundai earlier this month announced plans to collaborate on several “key strategic areas,” per a joint news release.

The specific areas of collaboration were not immediately clear, though “codevelopment and production of passenger and commercial vehicles, internal combustion engines and clean energy, electric and hydrogen technologies,” were noted, and GM and Hyundai plan to look into combined sourcing of components and raw materials.

“It begs the question: What is the larger plan between these two companies?” Sam Fiorani, VP of global vehicle forecasting at AutoForecast Solutions, told Tech Brew. “There are a lot of items that could be there for the picking between these two companies, and it could result in big changes for both companies.”

Keep reading here.—JG

Social media is all about followers, but the real followers may be the platforms themselves.

In a report released last week, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said top tech and social media companies—Amazon (which owns Twitch), Facebook, YouTube, Twitter/X, Snap, ByteDance (which owns TikTok), Discord, Reddit, and WhatsApp—“engaged in vast surveillance of consumers in order to monetize their personal information while failing to adequately protect users online, especially children and teens.” Targeted advertising was cited as a main motivator for the platforms’ data collection practices.

The report, which is the result of an FTC study focused on the nine companies that began in December 2020 found that they collected personal data from users—and non-users in some cases—at a “staggering” level, and that many of them “failed to implement adequate safeguards against privacy risks.” In addition to data-sharing, the FTC found that companies were able to “indefinitely retain troves of data,” and that some “did not delete all user data in response to user data deletion requests.”

Additionally, many users “lacked any meaningful control” over how their personal information was being used for AI purposes, the report found.

Keep reading on Marketing Brew.—KH

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