| Zuckerberg's grammarian gotcha, Uber's regulator retreat and biotech with big potential. All that and more in The Daily Crunch for December 22, 2016. And if you're in the market for a smartwatch, this option looks pretty good. But also I have to ask why you're in the market to begin with. 1. Zuckerberg finally (sort of) admits Facebook is a media company Zuck, you're a media baron – at least you're finally getting closer to admitting it. The Facebook CEO used his platform's own Live video broadcast feature for a year-end talk with COO Sheryl Sandberg on Wednesday and said that FB is "not a traditional media company." Linguistically, that means it is SOME KIND OF media company. Grammar checkmate, Mr. Zuckerberg. Seriously though, this means that the company is at least coming around to the idea that it has some kind of responsibility where media is concerned, and that's better than the opposite situation. 
2. Uber's San Francisco self-driving pilot ends SF has a few less robo-cars circling its streets today. After a meeting with the California DMV and reps from the state Attorney General's office on Wednesday, Uber announced that it's stopping its self-driving pilot there immediately. The ride-hailing company had made SF its second city for field trials of the cars on public roads, but they did not get California's permission to do so. Uber says it'll look elsewhere to redeploy its vehicles, for now. 3. CRISPR's other enzyme You may have heard of CRISPR, the gene-editing technique that uses enzyme Cas9 to sniff out specific sequences of DNA, snip them, and potentially even replace them with alternate DNA with extreme precision. But did you know that CRISPR can work with Cas3, another enzyme that could help target bacterial DNA for total destruction. A targeted anti-bacterial could be a terrific medial advancement, but there's a lot of studying left to be done. 4. NBA was to own some of its own fantasy Fantasy sports are blowing up, but the NBA wants to tie them back to the game itself, with a second-screen fantasy experienced synced to TV broadcasts. It just wants some more of that sweet fantasy cheddar basically, but neat idea. 5. New China regs could be trouble for Didi New regulation that limit the available driver pool in both Shanghai and Beijing could be bad news for Didi. The rules are designed to prevent a huge influx of rural denizens crowding into the city to get work as drivers, but they could mean Didi has a much smaller pool of potential supply on the driver side going forward. 6. Waymo and Honda talk tech Alphabet's Waymo self-driving tech company is in formal talks with Honda to partner on turning some of Honda's vehicles into self-driving cars, which the ex-Google company would use in its pool of autonomous test vehicles. Waymo means business. 7. Misfit wants your smartwatch to be simpler Smartwatches might be all but DOA, but Misfit (now owned by Fossil) is still trying to offer something that might be more broadly appealing, with a simplified design that's more watch than smart. It looks good, but this is not a category it's easy to be very optimistic about. | 
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