| California takes another step towards our self-driving future, Rakuten embraces crypto and we round up the big announcements from Mobile World Congress. All that and more in The Daily Crunch for February 27, 2018. 1. California to allow testing of self-driving cars without a driver present Until now, California's DMV only allowed companies to test autonomous vehicles if there was a trained safety driver behind the wheel. Now they've also added rules for fully driverless tests — another step towards commercial deployment. The new rules go into effect on April 2. [caption id="attachment_1553784" align="aligncenter" width="680"] Image: Just_Super/Getty Images[/caption] 2. Rakuten will roll its $9B loyalty program into a new blockchain-based cryptocurrency, Rakuten Coin The Japanese e-commerce company is planning a new cryptocurrency called Rakuten Coin — built on blockchain technology and the company's existing loyalty program, Rakuten Super Points. The goal is to encourage loyalty services globally and to help customers to buy goods across different Rakuten services and markets. 3. Rating the big smartphone makers at MWC 2018 Mobile World Congress is still underway in Barcelona, but all of the big names have already wrapped up their press conferences. Brian Heater breaks down the winners and losers. 4. Google's Flutter app SDK for iOS and Android is now in beta Flutter is Google's open source toolkit for helping developers build iOS and Android apps. It's not necessarily a household name yet, but it's also less than a year old. (Also, do open source toolkits generally become household names? I'm just asking.) 5. Industrious picks up $80M to outclass WeWork for the enterprise Industrious pitches itself as a more premium version of WeWork, offering coworking space and workplace services to some 35 locations across 25 cities nationwide. 6. Cellebrite may have found a way to unlock iPhones running iOS 11 This is a cat-and-mouse game, and Apple engineers are presumably working hard to fix all the vulnerabilities they can find. As always, if you don't want to let authorities read your personal data, you should keep your devices up-to-date. 7. 'Wolverine: The Long Night' director talks podcasts and superheroes "What does an audio fight scene look like?" | 
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