Kargo, a Jakarta-based logistics startup co-founded by veteran Uber Asia executive Tiger Fang, has raised $31 million to scale its business and help firms in the Southeast Asian nation fight the coronavirus.

Silicon Valley-based Tenaya Capital, Sequoia India, and Intudo Ventures among others financed Kargo’s Series A round. The startup, which has raised $38.6 million to date, counts Uber founder and former chief executive Travis Kalanick as an investor.

Kargo takes some of the concepts behind Uber and applies them to trucking and logistics. That’s to say that business customers order trucks using a mobile app or website, but the scope is wider, said Fang. Unlike Uber, Kargo works with truck operators and 3PLs rather than truck drivers themselves.

For its Series A announcement, Kargo has an unusual pitch: It wants to help companies in Indonesia fight the coronavirus. The startup plans to do so with its newly formed $1 million relief fund for truckers, and through partnerships with several charitable organizations including Kita Bisa, PT Akar Indah Pratama, with whom it is working to deliver meals and essential medical supplies to healthcare workers and patients at multiple hospitals.

The startup said it is taking several precautions to keep drivers safe. This includes ensuring that all pit stops on its routes are well-stocked and properly disinfected. Kargo has also implemented an electronic proof of delivery mechanism on its platform to limit physical contact between users.

“Kargo pledges to be the most reliable logistics partner to ensure no disruptions to the supply chain of essential items in Indonesia. Our entire company is donating a portion of our salaries to this cause and we invite local businesses and organizations to get in touch so we can work this problem together,” said Fang.

“We’re grateful for our wonderful investors who continue to support us, even in a time of financial uncertainty,” he added.

Logistics remains a major opportunity in several South Asian markets as local shippers and transporters begin to slowly adopt technology to address infrastructure inefficiencies.

Kargo has already amassed more than 6,000 active shippers and a network of more than 50,000 trucks across the nation.

Here come the blood tests, and it’s about time. Serosurveys, to determine what percentage of populations have already contracted COVID-19. And, individually, tests to indicate whether you, too, already caught it, but suffered only mild symptoms, or none at all.

In America alone, millions will soon be recovered from COVID-19 infection. Half the people I know, including myself, seem to have had Schrödinger’s Respiratory Infection in the last couple of months, and are beyond eager to know if they test positive for COVID-19 antibodies.

Even if they do, though — to be clear, most won’t — what then? Suppose antibodies indicate immunity, for a while at least. That seems somewhat likely, he said cautiously. Suppose the tests are accurate enough to rely on. What do we as a society then do with that information?

The immune — the positives — could return to relative normality with no immediate fear of further infection, while everyone else — the negatives — could not. Do we want to create a two-tier society like that? Do we want to make a point of replacing negatives with positives in high-risk contexts like nursing homes? Do we want people’s test status to be publicly known, or available upon demand by the government? How about their employer? How about their healthcare provider?

Most of these are hard questions with no easy answers, and while I, like you, have opinions, some strong, about which are the least bad options, I also think this is mostly a subject about which reasonable people can disagree. Still, no matter what our collective answers are, we can all agree we want them to be implemented in the most privacy-preserving way. That’s where technology comes in.

It’s worth noting that proving immunity is far from a new problem. I’ve traveled to many countries which require proof of yellow-fever vaccination before they allow visitors to enter. Some even enforce it. The solution is venerable, simple, and decentralized; a slip of paper stamped, dated, and signed by a doctor.

This solution is relatively privacy-preserving — authorities can’t demand to see anyone’s yellow-fever papers at any given moment, because they’re only needed at border posts. It is very hard to verify, and relatively easy to forge … but it’s good enough to have worked. Its purpose is not to eliminate the risk of transmission with absolute 100% efficacy, but to reduce it to a manageable amount.

The same applies to COVID-19. As Harvard epidemiologists Bill Hanage and Marc Lipsitch wrote back in February, it’s important to “distinguish between whether something ever happens and whether it is happening at a frequency that matters.” We don’t have to worry about freakish edge cases. A 99% effective solution should be just fine.

So what would that solution be? Something simple, decentralized, reasonably effective, and privacy-preserving. Suppose that you go to your doctor’s office to get a test, and while you’re there, your picture is taken, and you choose a passcode. Then, along with your test result, you may receive some kind of wristband with a QR code. When your status needs to be verified, the QR code is scanned, you enter your passcode (or choose not to, or conveniently forget it), and then your headshot pops up, confirming your identity and status.

I’m not pretending this is any kind of perfect solution; real cryptographers will likely come up with something different and better. (In particular, to pseudonymize your individual test sample to the extent possible, and ensure that whoever hosts the central database, if any, cannot decipher the data therein.) This is to illustrate the key points that 1) only those you approve of can see your status, and 2) that status can be verified to ensure it’s actually yours, via some personal identifier like a headshot.

What do we then do with such a system? Well, after the curve flattens and recedes, perhaps we will consider reopening restaurants so long as every other table remains empty, and stores as long as only 1 (masked) customer is within for every 100 square feet of floor space. Alternatively, perhaps, restaurants and stores will also have the option of opening only to the positives — meaning with no internal restrictions, but COVID-19 positive status must be verified before allowing entry, in the same way that bars check your age before letting you enter.

Would those requirements be desirable? Again, that is eminently debatable. Would some people hack such a system in the same way that kids use fake IDs? Sure. Will this happen “at a frequency that matters?” That seems quite unlikely. In cases where it seems more likely, presumably more stringent rules can be applied.

The important thing to which technology can contribute is to make this all simple, straightforward, effective, and privacy-preserving, while consonant with our collective goals as a society. Regardless on what we agree on as those goals, if it turns out previous infection confers immunity, the positives will have a key part to play as we try to resume our lives — to the extent possible — in the ever-present shadow of the pandemic.

Some of us have learned how to be uniquely scrappy during this pandemic. I’m talking socks as masks and chickpea water as a vegetarian egg-white replacement type of scrappy.

And you will learn in this week’s installment of Tech For Good startups are no exception. Companies around the world are pivoting and partnering their way into helping us navigate the  COVID-19 pandemic. Below is a list of some recent partnerships that caught our eyes, as well as other goodness from private companies.

From greeting cards to virtual therapy

Ali O’Grady founded greeting-card startup Thoughtful Human in 2017. The greeting cards tackle difficult topics, such as cancer, grief and, more recently, quarantine and the pandemic. Thoughtful Human has partnered with BetterHelp Therapy to offer a month of free virtual therapy through phone or text.

Zira wants to help you bounce back if you were laid off

Zira is an automated workforce solution to help with shift schedules and team communication. Now, it launched a free tool called Bounce Back to help those laid off due to COVID-19. The application chiefly teaches users how to navigate unemployment, curated by location. It also creates a community for users to stay in touch with former employers, and has a job marketplace.

Yext goes up State

Yext, a site search tool, has partnered with the US Department of State to create a COVID-19 informational hub to disseminate information about travel alerts. In the last month, Yext has developed sites for the State of New Jersey and the State of Alabama.

An alternative to a good ol’ restaurant menu

My Menu, which traditionally offered a digital tablet menu platform to restaurants, is now giving away its underlying technology to help restaurants become online-friendly overnight. Using My Menu technology, restaurants can create a menu that pops up when customers scan a QR code on their phones. It will help restaurants make their menus more accessible.

Creativity using the cloud

DigitalOcean, a cloud provider, created a hub for developers to share projects aimed at helping people deal with the pandemic. Projects that have sprouted up as a result include an app that lets people anonymously report their health conditions to pulsecheck the spread across the world, and a remote learning group of Kenyan primary school teachers.

Founder therapy for free

Betaworks is launching a free, 6-week, peer-to-peer mentorship program to connect founders and company leaders in mentor-led support groups. The application deadline is April 13, and participants will be chosen on a first-come, first-served basis.

#MaskUp

Janelle M. Jimenez, the founder and CEO of sustainable clothing startup Stellari, is using her startup capital to work with Los Angeles manufacturers to create masks. She has invested $15,000 of seed money into partnerships with factories, and needs $10,000 to produce cloth masks at scale. She plans to donate the masks at cost and support the local garment industry at the same time. The effort has raised nearly $24,000 on Indiegogo.

Coders unite to make websites COVID-19 friendly

Coding Dojo has launched an initiative to connect its alumni group of coders to small businesses that need website development. Coders will take on projects, for no charge, like creating a website for that corner bodega or adding a delivery feature to existing websites.

As the marathon gets canceled, Boston’s new stride

Tom O’Keefe is the founder of StrideForStride, which buys race bibs for low-income runners from around the world, ranging from Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Jamaica, and the US. Due to COVID-19, they lost a fundraiser at hotels and donations from restaurants and Sam Adams. Stride plans to host running clubs around various businesses and bars in Boston once everything re-opens, and in the meantime has launched a website DownloadBoston.com to highlight local businesses.

Bonus round

A group of New Yorkers has launched a challenge called #InMyScrubs to raise money to send meals from local restaurants to feed health care workers at critical-need hospitals. While this isn’t a tech initiative, it is heartwarming. The idea is to post pictures of yourself on Instagram in home “scrubs” like sweatpants and athleisure as an act of solidarity with those in their hospital scrubs. The challenge has raised nearly $68,000.

[Editor’s note: Want to get this free weekly recap of TechCrunch news that startups can use by email? Subscribe here.] 

While consumer tech has matured as a startup category in recent years, many investors continue to be bullish on specific trends like online gaming, voice, and the unbundling of platforms in favor of focused social networks. That’s the key takeaway from a survey that Josh Constine and Arman Tabatabai did this week with 16 of the most active investors in key social product categories over on Extra Crunch. Here’s an excerpt of the responses, from Olivia Moore and Justine Moore of CRV:

• “Unbundling of YouTube.” You can build a big company by targeting a vertical within YouTube with a product that has better features and more opportunities for creator monetization. Twitch is a great example of this! We’re also watching early-stage companies like Supergreat (in beauty) and Tingles (ASMR).

• Voice as a social medium. Voice continues to pick up steam as a broadcast medium via podcasting, but we haven’t seen a lot in social or P2P voice yet. We think a successful platform will leverage the fact that voice content can be created and consumed while doing other things. We’re big fans of companies like TTYL and Drivetime that are making strides here!

• Flexible digital identities. Gen Zers are online constantly but have different preferences across platforms/friend groups about how they want to “show up” digitally. The rise of “Finsta” accounts is one good example of this. Companies like Facemoji already help users create social content using a curated digital avatar — we’re excited to see what else founders build here!

• Synchronous, shared mobile experiences. We’re bullish on apps that connect users in real time to have a shared social experience. Most apps now are “single-player,” which creates scroll fatigue. HQ Trivia was an early example more on the entertainment side, while companies like Squad help users browse the internet and watch TikTok together.

Other respondees include: Connie Chan (Andreessen Horowitz). Alexis Ohanian (Initialized Capital), Niko Bonatsos (General Catalyst), Josh Coyne (Kleiner Perkins), Wayne Hu (Signal Fire), Alexia Bonatsos (Dream Machine), Josh Elman (angel investor), Aydin Senkut (Felicis Ventures), James Currier (NFX), Pippa Lamb (Sweet Capital), Christian Dorffer (Sweet Capital), Jim Scheinman (Maven Ventures), Eva Casanova (Day One Ventures) and Dan Ciporin (Canaan).

EC subscribers please note: a second part of this survey will be running this coming week, focused specifically on social investing in the COVID-19 era.

Are VCs investing — or maintaining?

Speaking of financing, who is actually writing checks right at this moment in time?

“I’ve seen a lot of VCs talking about being open for business,” Eniac Ventures founding partner Hadley Harris proclaimed on a fundraising-trend panel this week, “and I’ve been pretty outspoken on Twitter that I think that’s largely bullshit and sends the wrong message to entrepreneurs.” Instead, as Connie Loizos covered for us on TechCrunch, he said he didn’t have time to talk to more founders because he was so busy helping existing portfolio companies.

Not every investor agrees with that viewpoint —  VC Twitter features many an anecdote about fresh companies getting funding. 

Let’s just hope that both things are true, because it is already rough out there. 

Does your startup qualify for a PPP loan? (And should you apply?)

Two debates have been raging around government support for startups. First, the big, messy new Paycheck Protection Program — designed to cover expenses for small businesses — does seem to be somewhat available to startups, based on revisions published by the Small Business Administration late last week. But things get complicated quick depending on your fundraising and cap table, as Jon Shieber covered last weekend for TechCrunch. Venture firms typically have controlling interests in a portfolio of companies that total more than 500 people, so if such a firm also has a controlling interest in your startup, you may not be eligible. Even if the VC stake is under 50%, preferred terms that came with the fundraising may your application afoul of the rules.

To help founders work through their own situations faster, startup lawyer William Carleton wrote a quick guide for Extra Crunch. Here’s where he says you need to start:

Do you have a minority investor which controls protective covenants in your charter, or which controls a board seat afforded certain veto rights on board decisions? If the answer to either fork of that question is “yes,” you almost certainly have confirmed that you will need to amend your charter and/or other governing documents before proceeding with a PPP application.

The other aspect, of course, is whether startups should be applying for this in the first place. Congress broadly intended the money to go towards small to medium sized businesses, most of whom would never be considered for venture. Shieber’s article is full of comments on that topic, if you feel like weighing in….

The commercial real estate comeuppance

If you’re like me, and you’ve started companies in the Bay Area and struggled to find office space you could afford, enjoy this bit of schadenfraude as you plot your remote-first future. Because the commercial real estate industry is facing an existential crisis after many, many years of rent-seeking upon the Silicon Valley tech economy (and everyone else).

Connie explored this exploding topic with a range of startups, investors and CRE agents in a big feature for TechCrunch this week. One analyst “expects the market to come down by ‘at least 10% and probably 20% to 30%’ from where commercial space in San Francisco has priced in several years, which is $88 per square foot, according to CBRE. Driving the expected drop is the 2 million square feet that will come onto the market in the city as soon as it’s possible — space that companies want to get off their books.”

It’s quite possible to imagine even bigger declines, given the broader hits that most any possible tenant is also taking to their budgets. Who knows, maybe this whole process will even help make the Bay Area and other wealthy metros a little more affordable again.

Edtech gets hot again, according to investors

After lots of money and lots of struggle over the past decade, edtech is suddenly hot again thanks to the pandemic. Natasha Mascaranhas has been covering the trend recently, and dug in this week with a big investor survey on the category for Extra Crunch.

“One investor pivoted from spending a third of their time looking at edtech companies to devoting almost all their time to the sector,” she tells me. “Another, who has been bullish for years on edtech, says its business as usual for them, but that competition may arise. An ed-tech focused fund thinks the sector has been underfunded for a while, so the moment of reckoning has begun.”

Respondents include:

• Jenny Lee, GGV
• Tetyana Astashkina, LearnLaunch
• Jean Hammond, LearnLaunch
• Marlon Nichols, MaC Venture Capital
• Mercedes Bent, Lightspeed Venture Partners
• Jennifer Carolan, Reach Capital
• Shauntel Garvey, Reach Capital
• Jan Lynn-Matern, Emerge Education
• Lesa Mitchell, Techstars
• Tory Patterson, Owl Ventures
• Ian Chiu, Owl Ventures 
• Tony Wang, 500 Startups

Across the week:

TechCrunch

Economists haven’t thrown out the models yet (but they will)

Five CEOs on their evolution in the femtech space

Equity Monday: Hunting for green shoots amid the startup data

Extra Crunch

How SaaS startups should plan for a turbulent Q2

Fintech’s uneven new reality has helped some startups, harmed others

Fast-changing regulations give virtual care startups a chance to seize the moment

Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson on shifting a 3,000-person company to fully remote

Amid unicorn layoffs, Boston startups reflect on the future

#EquityPod

From Alex:

We started with a look at Clearbanc  and its runway extension not-a-loan program, which may help startups survive that are running low on cash. Natasha covered it for TechCrunch. Most of us know about Clearbanc’s revenue-based financing model; this is a twist. But it’s good to see companies work to adapt their products to help other startups survive.

Next we chatted about a few rounds that Danny covered, namely Sila’s $7.7 million investment to help build technology that could take on the venerable and vulnerable ACH, and Cadence’s $4 million raise to help with securitization. Even better, per Danny, they are both blockchain-using companies. And they are useful! Blockchain, while you were looking elsewhere, has done some cool stuff at last.

Sticking to our fintech theme — the show wound up being super fintech-heavy, which was an accident — we turned to SoFi’s huge $1.2 billion deal to buy Galileo, a Utah-based payments company that helps power a big piece of UK-based fintech. SoFi is going into the B2B fintech world after first attacking the B2C realm; we reckon that if it can pull the move off, other financial technology companies might follow suit.

Tidying up all the fintech stories is this round up from Natasha and Alex, working to figure out who in fintech is doing poorly, who’s hiding for now, and who is crushing it in the new economic reality.

Next we touched on layoffs generally, layoffs at Toast, AngelList, and not LinkedIn — for now. Per their plans to not have plans to have layoffs. You figure that out.

And then at the end, we capped with good news from Thrive and Index. We didn’t get to Shippo, sadly. Next time!

Listen to the full thing here!

As workers moved from office to home and students moved to being educated online, demand for new PCs surged in Q1, but Canalys found that shipments actually dropped 8% in spite of this, due to COVID-19 related supply chain problems.

The 8% drop was the worst since 2016 when shipments dropped 12%, according to the firm. Companies were looking to get new machines into the hands of employees who normally worked on desktop machines in the office, while parents were buying machines for children suddenly going to school online.

Rushabh Doshi, research director at Canalys says that products were flying off the shelves in Q1, but the PC makers couldn’t keep up with demand as supplies were limited due to a number of factors.

“…PC makers started 2020 with a constrained supply of Intel processors, caused by a botched transition to 10nm nodes. This was exacerbated when factories in China were unable to reopen after the Lunar New Year holidays.

“The slowdown in supply met with accelerated demand, as businesses were suddenly forced to equip a newly remote workforce, placing urgent orders for tens of thousands of PCs. Children, too, needed their own PCs, as schools closed and lessons went online,” Doshi explained in a statement.

Lenovo and HP owned the lion’s share of the PC market in Q1 with 23.9% and 21.8% share respectively. Dell was in third with 19.6%. Apple was well behind in fourth place with just 6% of worldwide market share.

Only Dell projected positive growth with a modest 1.1% annual rate. All others were projected to be negative with Apple projecting the sharpest drop at -21%.

The good news is that from a revenue perspective, at least for the short term, these companies could command higher prices due to high demand and low supply, but overall the year looks bleak for PC makers, as Canalys predicts the rest of the year will see a further drop in sales as companies cut back on purchases, and consumers also likely limit purchases with so much economic uncertainty and demand satisfied for the short term.

Another week in quarantine.

As the world adjusts to working from home under mandatory stay-at-home orders, hackers are keeping busy. Microsoft said this week that coronavirus-related attacks are on the rise but still make up just a fraction of the overall malicious activity. Cybersecurity companies seem to be faring mostly well — in part thanks to the uptick of attacks, but also the challenges of securing the workforce as hundreds of millions work from home.

But as coronavirus dominates the headlines, the wheels of government keep turning. Lawmakers are trying to push through a controversial bill that critics say would undermine encryption, which keeps everything from your phone to your online banking accounts safe. One startup is bracing for a showdown. Signal, the end-to-end encrypted messaging app, sounded the alarm when it warned this week that it may exit the U.S. market if Congress passes the controversial EARN IT Act.

In a blog post this week, Signal engineer Joshua Lund wrote it would “not be possible for a small nonprofit like Signal to continue to operate within the United States.”

Will encryption become the latest causality of this tumultuous year?

THE BIG PICTURE

Zoom slapped with more security woes, but calls in the cavalry

A growing number of companies and governments, from SpaceX and Google to Taiwan and Germany, have banned Zoom. Not even the U.S. Senate is taking any chances with the video-calling software, which has faced a steady stream of headlines critiquing its security practices and privacy policies. But Zoom’s popularity, undoubtedly sparked by the mass working from home to stem the spread of the coronavirus pandemic, seems to be weathering the storm.

SpaceX has banned use of Zoom for remote operations. So have Google, Apple, NASA, and New York City schools. Earlier this week, the FBI warned about Zoom teleconferences and live classrooms being hacked by trolls; security experts warn that holes in the technology make user data vulnerable to exploitation.  Zoom’s CEO, Eric Yuan, has this week publicly admitted that he “messed up” on privacy and security.

But we are missing a larger question as we grapple with Zoom’s security flaws. Who controls the platform? Who benefits from it? Zoom received its seed funding from TSVC, which presents as a Los Altos-based venture capital firm but invests with the funds of a Chinese State-owned Enterprise, Tsinghua Holdings. Founded and run by a Chinese entrepreneur, Zoom’s mainline app is developed by China-based subsidiaries. Zoom servers in China appear also to be manufacturing its AES-128 encryption keys, including, as a Citizen Labs report documents, some used for meetings among North American participants. Beijing’s privacy laws likely obligate China-manufactured keys to be shared with Chinese authorities.

Zoom is precisely the kind of tool that Beijing values. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) pursues a decades-long grand strategy to develop and capture global networks and platforms – with them to define global standards. Hold over standards promises enduring control of international resources, exchange, and information; a global geopolitical operating system with coercive might. Beijing has officially endorsed this ambition since its 2001 accession to the World Trade Organization, when it launched the National Standardization Strategy. 

Now, the CCP is putting that intent into action. Beijing is about to launch China Standards 2035, an industrial plan to write international rules. China Standards 2035 is the successor to Made in China 2025; an even bolder plan for the subsequent decade premised not on governing where global goods are made, but on setting the standards that define production, exchange, and consumption. 

Beijing completed two years of planning for China Standards 2035 at the beginning of March. The final strategy document is projected to be issued this year. While the specifics of China Standards 2035 have yet to be published, the intent – and focus areas – are already evident. The National Standardization Committee has released its preliminary report for the year ahead, the “Main Points of National Standardization Work in 2020.”

Our firm, Horizon Advisory, has translated and analyzed that report – and the past two years of planning that informed it. We find in it instructions to “seize the opportunity” that COVID-19 creates by proliferating China’s authoritarian information regime; to co-opt global industry by capturing the industrial Internet of Things; to define the next generation of information technology and biotechnology infrastructures; to export the social credit system – and Beijing’s larger litany of incentive-shaping platforms. We find an explicit global ambition that weaponizes commerce, capital, and cooperation.  

As Beijing sees it, the world is on the verge of transformation. “Industry, technology, and innovation are developing rapidly,” explained Dai Hong, Director of the Second Department of Industrial Standards of China’s National Standardization Management Committee in 2018. “Global technical standards are still being formed. This grants China’s industry and standards the opportunity to surpass the world’s.” 

Dai was speaking at the inauguration of China Standards 2035’s planning phase. He said that the plan would focus on “integrated circuits, virtual reality, smart health and retirement, 5G key components, the Internet of Things, information technology equipment interconnection, and solar photovoltaics.” Throughout, the emphasis would be on “internationalization” of Chinese standards.

Two years later, China Standards 2035’s initial research results reveal the concrete implications of those buzzwords. China Standards 2035 is to focus on setting standards in emerging industries: high-end equipment manufacturing, unmanned vehicles, additive manufacturing, new materials, the industrial internet, cyber security, new energy, the ecological industry. These align with the focus areas of the Strategic Emerging Industries initiative — also of Made in China 2025. Having secured its foothold in targeted physical spheres, Beijing is ready to define their rules. 

DJI has a near monopoly over commercial drone systems. The National Standardization Administration is now intent on “formulating the international standards for ‘Classification of Civil Unmanned Aircraft Systems’ to help the domestic drone industry occupy the technical commanding heights.’” 

Second, China Standards 2035 will accelerate Beijing’s proliferation of the virtual systems underlying, and connecting, those industries: the social credit system, the State-controlled National Transportation Logistics Platform (known as LOGINK), and medical and consumer good standards.

The plan’s third prong is internationalization. The Main Points outline the intent to “give full play to the organizational and coordinating roles of the Chinese National Committees of the International Standards Organization (ISO) and International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC).” Reports from the National Standardization Committee explain that giving “full play” means shaping “strategies, policies, and rules.” Beijing is to bolster internationalization through bilateral and regional standards-based partnerships – partnerships like China and Nepal’s standardization cooperation agreement, ASEAN’s standards docking, and nascent efforts with Germany, the United Kingdom, and Canada, among others.  

China’s standards plan stems from a clear, deliberate strategic progression. Beijing has spent the past two decades establishing influential footholds in multilateral bodies and targeted industrial areas. Now, it is using those footholds to set their rules – with them, to define the infrastructure of the future world. According to China’s strategic planning, this is what power means in a globalized era: “The strategic game among big powers is no longer limited to market scale competition or that for technological superiority. It is more about competition over system design and rule-making.”

But no one appears to be noticing China’s strategic positioning. Not much pops up when you Google China Standards 2035. That was a serious deficit before COVID-19’s global disaster. The stakes are higher now. Global shutdown has created what the CCP calls an opportunity to accelerate its strategic offensive.  Our lock-down induced reliance on virtual connections has offered Beijing an unprecedented angle in. 

As we grapple with the COVID-19 disaster, we need also to resist Beijing’s exploitation of it. We need to recognize the role of standards and the manner in which the CCP weaponizes them. We need to compete for alternative, safe, norm-based ones – and protect them from Beijing’s influence. Or we need to get used to security, privacy, ownership, freedom concerns far more serious than trolls at Zoom happy hour.

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the Extra Crunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all.

The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 204 billion downloads in 2019 and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019, according to App Annie’s “State of Mobile” annual report. People are now spending 3 hours and 40 minutes per day using apps, rivaling TV. Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours — they’re a big business. In 2019, mobile-first companies had a combined $544 billion valuation, 6.5x higher than those without a mobile focus.

In this Extra Crunch series, we help you keep up with the latest news from the world of apps, delivered on a weekly basis.

This week we’re continuing to look at how the coronavirus outbreak is impacting the world of mobile applications, including Apple and Google’s plans to team up on a contact tracing platform and other COVID-19 apps worldwide. We’re also looking at how WhatsApp is fighting fake news, and how home quarantines are impacting online grocery and dating applications. In non-COVID-19 news, we look at Quibi’s debut, Facebook’s new app for couples and a possible iOS version of Android’s “Slices,” among other things.

Coronavirus Special Coverage

Apple and Google partner on COVID-19 tracing tools

Apple and Google announced on Friday a plan to join forces to create a decentralized tracing tool to help people determine if they’ve been exposed to someone with COVID-19. The first phase of the project is an API that public health agencies can integrate into their own apps. This will be followed by a system-level contact tracing system that works across iOS and Android and is opt-in. The system will involve transmitting an anonymous ID over Bluetooth. The servers will relay your last 14 days of rotating IDs to other devices that look for a match based on time spent and distance between two devices. If a match is found, you’re notified so you can get tested and self-quarantine.

The APIs will be available in May, while the Bluetooth-based system will be released in the months ahead.

Other COVID-19 apps in the news

• EU suggests standardization: This week, the EU began pushing for its 27 nations to develop common standards for coronavirus tracking technologies that would make apps interoperable or even perhaps develop a single app to be used across the bloc, Bloomberg reported. Today, multiple developers in the U.K., Germany and elsewhere are working on mobile phone apps to track people who’ve been exposed to the coronavirus, but the data will be harder to aggregate and understand in its fractured state.
• France to develop a contact-tracing app: France is officially working on a smartphone app to slow the spread of COVID-19, by tracking people living in France. The app will leverage the PEPP-PT protocol, which will involve an open standard using BLE to identify other phones running the app.
• How Chinese apps handled COVID-19: A post from Dan Grover analyzes how Chinese apps from major tech companies like Baidu, WeChat, Alipay and others worked to help people get through the coronavirus crisis by offering statistics, e-medicine, tools for quarantine, e-commerce and tools to check your exposure. By comparison, the U.S. has largely just added PSAs from the CDC and WHO to their platforms, instead of having offered more robust solutions. The pros and cons of both are debated from an app-centric point of view, which makes for interesting reading from a more technical perspective.
• COVID-19 symptom checker from startup Zoe arrives in U.S.:  A free iOS and Android application called COVID Symptom Tracker was originally developed in partnership with food science startup Zoe and released first in the U.K. After a million downloads, the app is now launching in the U.S.
• Stanford Medicine app helps first responders get tested: Stanford, in partnership with Apple, launched an app that helps first responders get access to drive-thru coronavirus tests. This includes front-line workers like police officers, firefighters and paramedics. The service is limited to Santa Clara and San Mateo counties in California for now, but will later expand to other states.

Tesla started Friday to furlough its sales and delivery workforce — with the least experienced employees bearing the brunt of the action — days after a companywide email announced salary cuts and reductions due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Several employees, who work in sales and delivery and spoke to TechCrunch on condition of anonymity, reported they were on corporate calls in which more details of the furloughs were explained. Performance is less of a factor. Instead, experience and position is being used to determine who stays and who is furloughed. Delivery and sales advisors who have been with the company less than two years will be furloughed, according to sources.

CNBC reported earlier Friday that furloughs would impact half of Tesla’s U.S.  delivery and sales workforce. TechCrunch was unable to verify the total number of sales and delivery employees who would be impacted.

The furloughs also come a little more than a week after the end of the quarter, a typically busy time for delivery staff who try to meet lofty internal goals. COVID-19 hampered delivery efforts, although customers were still reporting deliveries in California, New York and other states.

The furlough calls have been expected since an internal email sent April 7 by Tesla’s head of human resources Valerie Workman informed employees that the company would be cutting pay for salaried employees and furloughing others.

It wasn’t clear, until Friday, exactly who might be affected.

The internal email, which was viewed by TechCrunch, told employees that production at its U.S. factories would be suspended until at least May 4 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, requiring the company to cut costs.

Salaried employees will have pay reduced between 30% and 10%, depending on their position. The salary reductions are expected to be in place until the end of the second quarter, according to the email. The salary cuts and furloughs will begin April 13. Employees who cannot work from home and have not been assigned critical onsite positions will be furloughed until May 4, according to the email.

The mass die-off of coral reefs due is a catastrophe of global proportions, but the sheer scale of their success as organisms has lessons for science. Case in point: these 3D-printed “bionic corals” from Cambridge researchers that are more than scaffolds for fragile microorganisms — they’re built out of them.

If 3D-printed corals sound familiar, that’s because a couple years ago some other researchers suggested using structures printed to resemble the complex shapes of reefs as solid bases on which new corals and other animals could grow. It’s a good idea, but there’s more to a reef than a solid base.

Corals are in fact a highly evolved symbiosis between the coral organisms themselves and algae that live inside them. The algae use photosynthesis to power the creation of sugar for their host, and the coral provide a safe living environment — and, interestingly, are also highly efficient at collecting and redirecting light. This partnership has been fruitful for millions of years, though rising ocean temperatures and acidity have upset the delicate balance necessary for success.

The team at Cambridge realized that to successfully imitate the coral micro-ecosystem, they’d need to replicate that special quality of capturing sunlight and diffusing it within for use by resident algae. To do so, they studied the structure of corals closely and worked to remake it at a microscopic level. But instead of using an ordinary durable substrate, they created a sort of living gel.

“We developed an artificial coral tissue and skeleton with a combination of polymer gels and hydrogels doped with cellulose nanomaterials to mimic the optical properties of living corals,” explained Cambridge chemist Daniel Wangpraseurt, lead author of the paper in which the technique is described. Algae were infused into the mixture as well, so the researchers were essentially printing living matter.

That kind of technique is already being tested and used for medical purposes — printing part of an organ or tissue for implantation, for instance. In this case it has to be printed not with a specific large-scale shape, but with an extremely complex internal geometry that maximizes the reach of light hitting the surface. This has to be done very quickly or the algae will die from exposure.

The resulting bioprinted structure is an ideal home for the algae, producing growth rates many times the speed of an ordinary medium. That doesn’t mean the next step is growing corals super-fast — in fact, there’s no reason to think this will actually lead to coral restoration. On the other hand, this type of simulation could lead to a better understanding of the ecosystem in which the coral-algae partnership thrives, and how it can be nurtured.

In the meantime the promise of multiplying algae growth speeds has commercial appeal today, and a startup called Mantaz has been founded to pursue more near-term uses of the technology.