Alison Griswold

This post has been updated.

The Federal Communications Commission on Wednesday (Dec. 30) released its 2015 report on broadband internet in America. And things are good! In fact, better than you might expect.

A big debate in the ride-sharing industry is what the still young market will look like when it matures. There are two sides: those who believe that on-demand rides is a “winner takes all” industry, and those who think there will be room for multiple successful companies.

By now, the US craft beer boom is old news. But how exactly craft beer production has spread across the country is a different story—and the subject of a newly released paper in the Journal of Wine Economics.

Altogether, 2015 was a good year for the US hotel industry. For the month of November, US hotels improved on three key metrics: room occupancy, average daily rates, and revenue per available room, according to STR Global, a hotel industry research firm. Year to date, hotel performance is also up across the board. But in big US cities, Airbnb is making a more noticeable dent in the hotel business.

Over the last week, Shannon Liss-Riordan, the lawyer representing drivers in the big California class-action lawsuit against Uber, filed a flurry of motions requesting that the trial be decided by a judge and not face a jury. Her reasoning: The issue of whether drivers are independent contractors or employees in this suit is a legal matter, and not a factual one.

For the last year, Uber and its competitor Lyft have been running political campaigns in cities and states across the US. The politics may differ from place to place but for the companies the goal is always the same: to get local regulators to legalize (and therefore legitimize) ride-hailing technology, while also excluding any measures that could hinder its rapid growth.

Yesterday (Dec. 21) US health officials said they were investigating a new wave of E. coli cases linked to Chipotle’s restaurants. The company’s stock fell 3.5%.

Chipotle would presumably like nothing better than to put its recent spate of health scares behind it, and over the last week or so the company has looked ready to start doing that. An outbreak of norovirus in Boston that sickened around 140 people appeared to finally stop spreading. The Centers for Disease Prevention and Control hadn’t reported any new E. coli cases. Chipotle founder and co-CEO Steve Ells went on NBC’s Today to publicly apologize for the scares and promote Chipotle’s reinvigorated commitment to food safety.

Uber is a master of the $1 billion funding round. Since June 2014, the car-hailing service has raised six rounds of that much or more. Most recently, Uber was said to be seeking another $2.1 billion in financing that would value it at $62.5 billion—more than the market cap of General Motors.

Martin Shkreli, CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals and infamous jacker-upper of drug prices, has been released on a $5 million bond. He was arrested this morning (Dec. 17) by the FBI at his Manhattan home in connection with multiple charges of securities fraud. Per CNBC, Shkreli’s travel has been restricted to the eastern and southern districts of New York.

Welcome to the first full day since the US Federal Reserve’s long-awaited interest rate hike. You made it!

It’s a big day for the US economy. The Federal Reserve, as expected, just announced it’s raising its benchmark interest rate by a quarter point, the first hike since 2006.

Along Fifth Avenue in New York’s Flatiron District, buttressed by a Nike store and an Ann Taylor Loft, is the entrance to Civic Hall, the self-described “home for civic tech” in the city. Through the heavy front door, up a marble staircase, past a receptionist on the second floor and down a long hallway, is a small, white-walled room, lit by 11 overhead bulbs, entirely unremarkable but for one thing—its recent repurposing as Airbnb’s exclusive “New York data room.”

Uber and Lyft are facing a new and significant challenge to their business models in Seattle after a first-of-its-kind ordinance allowing drivers to unionize passed the City Council unanimously on Monday (Dec. 14).

Chipotle’s latest week is not one that any company would envy. Here’s a quick rundown of the last several days:

Uber has spent much of this year lobbying for legislation that accommodates their peer-to-peer ride operations. Those efforts have largely paid off: To date, more than 25 states and dozens of cities have passed laws that let Uber and competitors such as Lyft operate with relatively few regulatory hurdles.

Health officials confirmed Wednesday (Dec. 9) that a Chipotle restaurant in Boston has been linked to an outbreak of norovirus, a highly-contagious food-borne illness. The outbreak was reported earlier this week when Boston College said that 30 students had fallen ill after eating at the chain’s Cleveland Circle location. The number of students reporting symptoms of norovirus has since risen to more than 120.

A class-action lawsuit in California that has the potential to wreak havoc on Uber’s operations just got a whole lot bigger.

As a “sharing economy” company, Uber is constantly, proverbially iterating. And on Tuesday (Dec. 8) Uber announced the latest iteration of its service in Seattle. The test program, scheduled to begin on Thursday, is called UberHop; its stated goal is to use ”today’s existing infrastructure more efficiently at no extra cost by getting more butts into the backseats of fewer cars.”

Americans’ obsession with the internet is very, very real. One-fifth of US adults say they go online “almost constantly,” and three-quarters at least once a day, according to a new survey from Pew Research Center. That’s equivalent to about 49.3 million US adults who almost never leave the internet during their waking hours, based on the latest US population estimates, and 171 million who sign onto it daily.

Chipotle’s troubles are continuing, with 30 Boston College students falling ill over the weekend after eating at a Chipotle restaurant in Boston’s Cleveland Circle, a Boston College spokesman said. The sick group of students includes members of the men’s basketball team, according to Reuters which reported on the story Monday (Dec. 7).

Chipotle’s week is off to a rough start. Its stock slipped as much as 8% on Monday (Dec. 7) as the fast-casual restaurant chain continued to grapple with an E. coli outbreak that has sickened 52 people in nine states and late on Friday led the company to project its first same-store sales decline since going public.

Keurig Green Mountain, the company best known for its K-Cup coffee, is being bought and taken private for about $13.9 billion. The main acquirer is JAB Holding Company, the investment arm of the billionaire family that in 2014 combined its coffee business with that of Mondelez to create a company with annual revenue topping $7 billion. JAB’s portfolio also includes Peet’s Coffee & Tea, a chain that has recently acquired two smaller coffee brands, Stumptown Coffee Roasters and Intelligentsia.