A Palo Alto company that’s speeding credit card swipes and dips for restaurants and other retailers is now planning to expand to more countries with its recent funding. Poynt recently raised $100 million in a round of funding led by Elavon and National Australia Bank, bringing its total backing to $133 million. The new round will help Poynt expand to several countries in Europe and Asia. It will also help the company bring Poynt’s software to other makers of card-reading devices.

California’s economy is likely to slow next year, along with the rest of the nation’s, in part because it’s running out of workers, economists at UCLA said in their annual forecast for the state and nation, released Wednesday.

Next week, grain bowls and salads will be sold to the public in a new San Francisco tower leased by Facebook — but you’ll need to take an elevator to get there. Organic food and juice company Urban Remedy is opening on Wednesday on the seventh floor of 181 Fremont, currently the city’s third-tallest tower. The store is unusually high up.

Health and fitness are year-round concerns, but as each New Year approaches, lots of us resolve to start exercising or to rev up our workouts. Some people think that putting skin in the game — paying for a membership at a health club — will provide motivation. But beware: It’s a little like Las Vegas, in that the house wins more often than it loses.

Number of the day $1.2 million That’s how much Uber has been fined by British and Dutch authorities for failing to protect customers’ data during a cyberattack in 2016. Britain’s Information Commissioner’s Office fined the company $491,000, and Dutch officials imposed a $679,000 fine. British officials cited “avoidable data security flaws” that allowed personal data for roughly 2.

Emanuel “Manny” Luhn, who owned a chain of Bay Area stores known to generations of children for the assortment of hard-to-find toys before the business was whittled down to one location, Jeffrey’s Toys, has died. He was 93. Luhn died of heart failure Oct. 23 at his Danville home, said son Jeffrey Luhn, for whom the store was named.

Google has purchased the former site of LinkedIn’s Mountain View headquarters for $1 billion in the largest Bay Area real estate sale in 2018. The search giant on Monday confirmed it bought the 12-building Britannia Shoreline Technology Park, totaling 795,663 square feet. Google declined to comment further. The deal caps a year of seemingly boundless growth and investment for Google and the rest of the tech industry, with vast digital profits fueling concrete acquisitions.

Trade wars may be heating up, but the Port of Oakland is seeing a cool opportunity to ship more meat. The port, a major shipping hub for agricultural products, is expecting to boost beef, pork and poultry exports with a massive refrigerated storage facility called Cool Port Oakland. The $91 million depot is expected to lower costs and thereby draw more shippers. The Port of Oakland saw a 43 percent increase in meat exports to Asia from October 2015 to October 2018.

Most brokerage firms have found a subtle way to squeeze money out of their customers. The trick: switching their sweep accounts from higher-yielding money market mutual funds to lower-yielding bank accounts. Sweep accounts are the places within a brokerage account where cash from dividends, interest, stock sales and other transactions accumulates. When investors buy stock or other securities, it comes out of the sweep account automatically.

Welcome back to Tech Chronicle. If you lean in a little, you’ll find subscribing is the right option. I warned you about Sheryl Sandberg Facebook is drawing scads of negative press. Executives are bailing. And questions are arising about the company’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg. My only question: Is this 2018, or 2008? When Mark Zuckerberg hired Sandberg away from Google to be his No.