Business
About 100 current and former employees of the popular Bay Area restaurant chain Burma Superstar have filed a lawsuit claiming pay and benefit violations. The workers claim that Burma Superstar—in its three restaurants in San Francisco, Oakland and Alameda—routinely failed to pay minimum wages or overtime, while denying mandatory breaks and sick leave. The lawsuit also alleges the restaurants failed to keep accurate payroll records. The restaurant had not yet responded publicly to the lawsuit as of Sunday. Efforts to…
For years, Oakland has been the subject of startup-centric speculation: Is it about to blow up into the Bay Area’s next tech hub? Will San Francisco’s astronomical rents drive companies out of SoMa and across the bridge? There’s plenty of reason to bet “yes” on both. While the tech sector accounts for only about three percent of the city’s jobs, it’s growing at a gallop. Oakland is now home to more than 400 tech firms, according to the Chamber of Commerce,…
kindVR is developing customized 360 degree virtual reality therapies aimed at pain mitigation and stress.
Impact Hub Oakland strives to become an intersection for technology and social change.
The new kids on the block look to change the face of video game journalism.
Electric vehicle charging gets easier in apartment garages.
Education software company Turnitin is arguably one of Oakland’s biggest technology companies that few people know about. Turnitin, which makes anti-plagiarism software, was founded in 1998 by John Barrie and Christian Storm. Both were doctoral candidates in neuroscience at UC Berkeley when they came up with the idea after seeing a high level of plagiarism in the undergraduate papers they were grading. Using their expertise in brain wiring, Barrie and Storm wrote pattern matching recognition algorithms that can scan text…
The Kapor Center for Social Impact moved into its new Oakland headquarters this summer.
An aging bald man waist-high in trash rummages through a dumpster outside Stay Gold Delicatessen. Residents walk by and yell, tell him to stop messing with junk, but he keeps sorting through it as if he can’t hear them. Just over a fence covered with black fabric and grapevines, another Oakland exists.