Amazon’s Fire TV platform now has its own rival to Roku’s popular free movies and TV hub, The Roku Channel. Today, Amazon introduced a new “free” section on Fire TV that makes it easier for customers to find free movies, TV shows, news and other content, across its apps — including IMDb TV and Twitch — as well as third-party sources like TUBI, Pluto TV, Crackle, The CW, and others.

The tab will also point users to other apps offering free content like Red Bull, PBS, and PBS Kids.

The browsing experience within the free section on Fire TV is slightly different than on The Roku Channel, however. While the latter focuses solely the content that can be streamed for free, Amazon Fire TV’s section starts of with a row of “featured apps.” And Amazon’s own app, IMDb TV, sits prominently in the first position.

Below this, Amazon then offers thematic, horizontal rows of curated content. This includes a set of personalized recommendations of free movies and TV shows across categories like new, trending, and popular, plus a row dedicated to Amazon’s News app on Fire TV. Amazon says most of the content on the Free tab will be sourced from other providers, not from Amazon itself.

In addition, the Free tab will feature other types of free content to watch, including unlocked content from streaming services and a row dedicated to Kids & Family programming that’s free through Prime Video.

Amazon says that across Fire TV, users have access to over 20,000 free movies and TV episodes via apps like IMDb TV, Pluto TV, TUBI, and others. But the free tab isn’t necessarily trying to pull in all this content — only a curated selection.

The launch of the Free tab does indicate Amazon is aware of the challenge Roku presents with its free movies and TV hub, which has grown to become one of its top channels and attracts customers to its platform. Roku, in its Q1 2020 earnings, said it now has 39.8 million active users as of the end of March. Amazon, meanwhile, had announced 40+ million actives in January — meaning the two are still very much neck-and-neck in terms of user growth.

Amazon Fire TV’s new Free tab is live today in the U.S.

 

Over the last few weeks all eyes in the crypto world have been glued to the halvening, a nigh-religious moment in the blockchain realm. Every once in a while, the amount of new bitcoin mined — distributed to miners, the folks with fleets of computers powering bitcoin’s database, or blockchain — is cut in half. Why does that matter? It slows the rate at which new bitcoin is introduced to the world as the cryptocurrency marches toward its 21 million coin cap.

That’s to say that, while you weren’t looking, the world of digital tokens and currencies has marched along, maturing to some degree as cryptocurrencies and other blockchain-based services settle into slightly more predictable trading ranges.

The companies working in the crypto space are growing up as well, building out better, more sophisticated tooling for retail and institutional investors alike. FalconX is one such company, and today it announced that it has raised $17 million to date.

The crypto trading service — more on what it does in a moment — is backed by a legion of investors including Fidelity-affiliated Avon Ventures, corporate shop Coinbase Ventures, and a host of more traditional players including Lightspeed, Flybridge, Accel, Fenbushi, and Accomplice. Normally we’d curtail the list of investors to merely the most interesting, but in this case it felt reasonable to include them all, as the sheer number of capital shops that put up money for FalconX details that there is still niche and mainstream venture interest in at least some crypto-focused companies.

FalconX is also a company that anyone can understand, which probably helped. The company’s tech helps provide pricing information for cryptocurrencies, offering what it calls the “best” price for a period of time (seconds). That might sound somewhat simple, but it’s not; the crypto world is made of up a host of exchanges, is awash with fake trading volume and has a history of being pushed around by large accounts. To be able to offer a price, and hold onto it, is material.

The company is currently focused on institutional customers, which the company’s founders Raghu Yarlagadda and Prabhakar Reddy loosely described to TechCrunch as those with $10 million AUM (assets under management) and up. This likely makes KYC (know your customers) rules easier for the startup to follow.

FalconX makes money from trading fees, albeit in two ways. It offers either crypto prices with its fees included or on a fixed-fee model. Notably the firm says that cyrpto-native customers prefer the baked-in approach, while more traditional customers prefer the visible-fee method.

Either way, FalconX’s tech has found an audience. It has executed $7 billion in trading volume in the last 10 months (I asked about the seemingly odd time interval, which the firm explained as its most recent, fully-audited time period; it has seen more total volume during its life.)

That $7 billion volume result is likely why FalconX was able to attract external capital. And the fact that the startup appears to care about treating crypto seriously and not as a way to get around traditional banking regulations.

For example, after FalconX brought up anti-money laundering work during a discussing about regulation, TechCrunch asked the company how far it can look into its transactions to make sure that it isn’t accidentally helping bad folks get money. Yarlagadda responded, saying that “the future of regulation” in his space is “solving some of these problems and showing [them] to the [regulatory] agencies so that they get comfortable about the space.”

How is FalconX going about that? It uses “internal on-chain analytics” as well as third-parties to help get “context [into] which bitcoin addresses, or ethereum addresses, are associated with dark web or terrorist activities” to make sure that its trades are not winding up helping the wrong folks. This isn’t easy; the startup has to look through “six, seven hops” so that it can see if any money that goes through its service is suspect.

That seems pretty good, right? I found it impressive. Even more, after Yarlagadda joked that it’s not cheap to pay for the computing power needed to pull off that work, FalconX told TechCrunch that the expense counts as COGS. Neat!

There’s a fine line when covering anything blockchain-related between producing something that regular folks can understand, and writing something that the crypto-believing world won’t dismiss out of hand as insufficiently nuanced. Summing then, in case I swung too far towards the latter, FalconX built a pricing engine that allows big investors to make trades with more confidence. It gets paid when they trade and is processing lots of volume. That means its revenues are going up. And that’s why it raised more money.

The next question for FalconX is how fast it can scale volume. The faster it can, the more enticing it will prove to investors. And in time, if it does open up to more retail-sized traders, who knows, it could even become a household name.

At least in crypto.

As Harley Davidson rounds year one on its electric debut, we’re still riding in the fog on how to evaluate the company’s EV pivot.

The American symbol of gas, chrome, and steel released its first production electric motorcycle, the LiveWire last fall. The $29,799 machine is the first in a future line-up of EVs planned by Harley-Davidson — spanning motorcycles, bicycles and scooters.

The LiveWire started shipping to dealers September 27. It’s meant to complement, not replace, Harley-Davidson’s premium internal-combustion cruiser motorcycles.

The LiveWire has received mostly positive reviews from motorcycle stalwarts on design, features and performance. Two things are missing, however, to offer an initial grade on Harley Davidson’s first  production e-moto and overall commitment to electric.

The company needs to release EV specific sales data and tell us what’s next in its voltage powered lineup.

Stats

Seven months out from the LiveWire debut, there’s been plenty of speculation on how the motorcycle’s fared in the marketplace, particularly with pricing just short of Tesla Model 3.

As a publicly traded company, I was hoping Harley would offer EV data in its end of year and first quarter 2020 financials.

We didn’t see that. HD’s reporting on motorcycle sales doesn’t include a separate line for electric. Instead, LiveWire units sold are folded into Harley’s “Cruiser” stats that include some 16 different motorcycle models across HD’s Softtail and CVO lines. From the numbers, it’s evident sales in that category fell for Harley Davidson over 2019, but it’s not possible to know how Harley’s EV debut performed on sales floors.

I checked with a Harley Davidson spokesperson, who confirmed the company hasn’t released any LiveWire specific sales data in any form.

Without this info, we’re left to speculate from incomplete dealer feedback that’s made its way to press, including an October Reuters piece pinning LiveWire as a “flop” with buyers. To be fair, its difficult to find reliable e-motorcycle sales statistics anywhere, as the main source of data in the U.S. — the Motorcycle Industry Council — doesn’t compile or release them.

But Harley Davidson could and should give the public a better benchmark on the progress of its electric products by releasing EV specific sales stats.

The market

The move to create an electric mobility line has been a bold one for the Milwaukee based company —which is steeped in tradition of creating distinctly loud, powerful, internal combustion two-wheelers since 1903.

With the LiveWire debut, Harley Davidson became the first of the big gas manufacturers to offer a street-legal e-motorcycle for sale in the U.S.

The move is something of a necessity for the company, which like most of the motorcycle industry in the U.S., has been bleeding revenue and younger buyers for years.

The U.S. motorcycle industry has been in pretty bad shape since the last recession. New sales dropped by roughly 50% since 2008 — with sharp declines in ownership by everyone under 40 — and have never recovered.

Execs at Harley Davidson have spoken about the LiveWire, and the company’s entire planned EV product line, as something to reboot HD with a younger generation in the on-demand mobility age.

While Harley got the jump on traditional motorcycle manufacturers, such as Honda and Kawasaki, it’s definitely not alone in the two wheeled electric space.

HD entered the EV arena with competition from several e-moto startups that are attempting to convert gas riders to electric and attract a younger generation of buyers to motorcycling.

One of the leaders is California startup Zero Motorcycles, with 200 dealers worldwide. Zero introduced a LiveWire competitor last year, the $19K SR/F, with a 161-mile city range, one-hour charge capability and a top speed of 124 mph. Italy’s Energica is expanding distribution of its high-performance e-motos in the U.S.

And Canadian startup, Damon Motors, debuted its 200 mph, $24K Hypersport this year, which offers proprietary safety and ergonomics tech for adjustable riding positions and blind-spot detection.

Harley Davidson, e-moto startups, and all the big manufacturers now face growing uncertainty on the buying appetite for motorcycles that could persist into 2020 — and beyond — given the economic environment created by the COVID-19 pandemic.

This month Harley Davidson appointed a new CEO, Jochen Zeitz, to lead the company into the future.  On last month’s first quarter earnings call, Zeitz didn’t offer much insight on HD’s EV sales or future, except to say, “We also remain committed to…advancing our efforts in electric.”

Scorecard so far

Without knowing how the LiveWire did in the ultimate product test — getting folks to give up money to buy it — there is some scorecard feedback to register on Harley’s electric debut.

To start with the negative, the company really missed the mark on the $29K price. The messaging on the price and product placement has shifted a bit since I first started talking to HD on LiveWire. In July 2019, Harley execs gave the “premium product” jingle on how the $30K price was justifiable over comparable e-moto offerings, such as Zero’s SR/F, priced $10,000 less.

More recently a Harley Davidson spokesperson commenting on background, described the LiveWire as a halo product  — more of an attention getting model, and not priced for mass-market. Whatever actually went into the EV’s pricing, the consensus of just about everyone I’ve spoken to on the LiveWire is that it was priced too damn high.

On the thumbs up side, Harley Davidson did nail a lot of important factors on its electric debut. The company had a difficult task of creating something that bridged two worlds, at least in attributes and public response. Price aside, the bike had to check out in features and performance as a legitimate e-motorcycle entrant. The LiveWire also had to pass the sniff test with Harley’s existing clientele, who are loyal to chrome and steel cruisers and aren’t exactly Tesla, EV types.

Price and unknown sales numbers aside, I’d say Harley Davidson achieved both. I spent a day testing the 105 horsepower LiveWire on a track and pestering HD’s engineers on all the bike’s features, including its  range and charge time. Overall, I found it to be a solid package across performance, design and key specs. Most of the motorcycle press has agreed.

HD also succeeded in engineering an e-motorcycle in a Harley Davidson way, including styling and creating a distinct, yet subtle, sound for its EV. I showed some LiveWire photos it to my grandpa — a loyal loud-pipes Harley rider since the 50s — and he responded favorably, saying he’d love to try one out. So HD’s electric debut did arouse the right kind of response and enthusiasm with the right crowds. That’s something to build on.

What’s next?

What HD has to do now with its electric program is show us what’s next.  And whatever the company releases, it must appeal to and sell to a wider audience, including millennials.

I could envision the company’s next EV product release including a scooter offering — registering Harley in the urban mobility space — and an affordable e-motorcycle with wider market appeal.

And what could Harley’s next e-motorcycle be? I see it as something priced around $10K, lighter and more accessible to beginner riders than the 549 pound LiveWire, cloud and app connected with at least 100 miles of range and a charge time of 30 to 40 minutes. A tracker styled EV channeling Harley’s flat track racers — with some off-road capability — could also help HD hit the mark. Harley released a mockup to this effect, in its EV concepts last year.

Of course, getting it all right on specs, style, and price point will be even more critical for Harley Davidson in COVID-19 economic environment, where spending appetites for things like motorcycles will be more conservative for the foreseeable future.

Harley-Davidson’s LiveWire gave the company’s commitment to electric credibility, but the company’s next round of two-wheeled EVs — and the market response — will tell us more about HD’s relevance in the 21st century mobility world.

Around two-thirds of the way through “Beautiful the World,” a voice declaratively whispers, “The music of the Earth has arrived.” Created by the fittingly-named Uncanny Valley, the three-and-a-half minute track bombards the listener with fragments of relentless optimism, coupled with nearly comprehensible inspirational phrases like, “Dreams Still Live in the Wings of Happiness.”

If that all sounds like it was penned by a robot, you’re not wrong. The song is the winner of the first “Eurovision AI,” an event held by Dutch broadcaster VPRO to fill the void after COVID-19 left a Eurovision-shaped hole in the world’s hearts.

While not an official Eurovision event, the AI song contest drew plenty of notice as the world shelters in place. Thirteen international teams competed, and the Australia-based winner racked up a decisive victory among the 12,000 or so votes cast.

Uncanny Valley’s victory song when created by setting machine learning on a slew of past Eurovision winners, coupled with the sounds of native Australian species, including koalas, Tasmanian devils and the kookaburra bird (the latter of which also indirectly inspired this immortal classic). It’s a nod to what’s been a rough stretch of time for the country’s wildlife. 

Per the BBC, a panel of AI judges also gave high marks to Uncanny Valley, but ultimate sided with Dadabots’ entry, which  features such lyrics as “It couldn’t be done, I’m committed to band Sherman / that one.” The German place ultimately finished second. 

VMware announced today that it intends to buy early-stage Kubernetes security startup, Octarine and fold it into Carbon Black, a security company it bought last year for $2.1 billion. The company did not reveal the price of today’s acquisition.

According to a blog post announcing the deal from Patrick Morley, general manager and senior vice president at VMware’s Security Business Unit, Octarine should fit in with what Carbon Black calls its “intrinsic security strategy” — that is, protecting content and applications wherever they live. In the case of Octarine, it’s cloud native containers in Kubernetes environments.

“Acquiring Octarine enables us to advance intrinsic security for containers (and Kubernetes environments), by embedding the Octarine technology into the VMware Carbon Black Cloud, and via deep hooks and integrations with the VMware Tanzu platform,” Morley wrote in a blog post.

This also fits in with VMware’s Kubernetes strategy, having purchased Heptio, an early Kuberentes company started by Craig McLuckie and Joe Beda, two folks who helped develop Kubernets while at Google before starting their own company,

We covered Octarine last year when it released a couple of open source tools to help companies define the Kubernetes security parameters. As we quoted head of product Julien Sobrier at the time:

“Kubernetes gives a lot of flexibility and a lot of power to developers. There are over 30 security settings, and understanding how they interact with each other, which settings make security worse, which make it better, and the impact of each selection is not something that’s easy to measure or explain.”

As for the startup, it now gets folded into VMware’s security business. While the CEO tried to put a happy face on the acquisition in a blog post, it seems its days as an independent entity are over. “VMware’s commitment to cloud native computing and intrinsic security, which have been demonstrated by its product announcements and by recent acquisitions, makes it an ideal home for Octarine,” the company CEO Shemer Schwarz wrote in the post.

Octarine was founded in 2017 and has raised $9 million, according to Pitchbook data.

Facebook’s Avatars feature, which lets you customize a virtual lookalike of yourself for use as stickers in comments and Messenger chats, is today launching in the U.S. Essentially Facebook’s version of Snap’s Bitmoji, Avatars were first introduced last year and have been since made available in Australia, New Zealand, Europe, and Canada.

Based on early feedback, Facebook is also today expanding its range of Avatar customizations to include a variety of new hairstyles, complexions, and outfits.

Avatars may seem a little silly, but they allow for a form of self-expression that extends beyond the capabilities text and emoji alone. On digital platforms, using an avatar can be a helpful way to indicate the tone of your comment, so you’re not misinterpreted. Plus, many people like having the option of crafting a digital character that actually looks like them — meaning their candy-colored hair, piercings, glasses, goatees, sense of style, or anything else doesn’t come across when using just an emoji alone.

Initially, Facebook users will be able set up their Avatar from either the Facebook or Messenger comment composer. From here, you’ll click on the smiley face icon which takes you to stickers. You’ll then see a new option: “Make Your Avatar.”

After completing your Avatar, you can return to edit it at any time from Facebook’s Bookmark section (the three horizontal lines in the bottom-right of the Facebook mobile app.) You’ll need to click on “See More,” then “Avatars,” in the list that appears.

Today, the Avatars can be used Facebook comments and Messenger conversations, and they can be used on your Facebook Gaming profile. But soon, Facebook says Avatars will be able to be used in text posts with backgrounds.

The company isn’t yet sharing any metrics on the feature’s adoption, but did say Avatars have become particularly popular with the gaming community.

However, the source of inspiration for the feature, Bitmoji, has seen widespread adoption.

In January, Snap said 70% of its daily active users, or 147 million of its then 210 million, had made themselves a Bitmoji. The company first bought its way into the “digital persona” business back in 2016 when it picked up Bitmoji’s parent company Bitstrips for $62.5 million. It more recently launched Bitmoji TV, a Snapchat show that puts users’ Bitmoji avatars into animated situations.

Facebook hasn’t yet detailed any grand ambitions to make its Avatars more of a platform or a monetizable feature. Instead, it seems to be playing a game of catch-up with its rivals.

Though Snapchat popularized the concept, many companies have since cloned the Bitmoji phenomenon. Apple in 2018 introduced a customizable persona called Memoji to complement its existing Animoji characters, for use in iMessage and FaceTime. Samsung and Google also rolled out their own take on Bitmoji in 2018.

But despite its delayed arrival, Facebook hasn’t broken any new ground — for example, by introducing Avatars created automatically from your Facebook profile photo or those that move and react as in the popular Gen Z app, Facemoji.

Facebook says its Avatars feature will roll out to the U.S. starting today. You may not see it yet — as rollouts can take time — but should soon.

 

 

 

U.S. federal agencies have publicly accused top hackers working for the Chinese government of trying to steal U.S. research into the coronavirus strain, known as COVID-19.

In a rare joint unclassified statement published today by the FBI and Homeland Security’s cybersecurity advisory unit CISA, the government said Chinese hackers “have been observed attempting to identify and illicitly obtain valuable intellectual property and public health data related to vaccines, treatments and testing from networks an personnel associated with COVID-19-related research,” it reads.

“China’s efforts to target these sectors pose a significant threat to our nation’s response to COVID-19,” it reads.

Both the FBI and CISA said organizations should bolster their cybersecurity defenses.

The joint statement follows a similar announcement between U.S. and U.K. authorities last week, which warned that hackers are using password spraying — a common attack that uses recycled or default passwords to break into systems — against healthcare bodies and medical research organizations “that provide medical support services and supplies in a concerted effort to prevent incidents and enable them to focus on their response to COVID-19.”

Research firms and pharmaceutical giants have scrambled to find a vaccine for the COVID-19 strain, which experts have said is likely the only way that strict lockdown restrictions can be lifted across the world.

To date, there have been more than 4.2 million confirmed cases since it was first discovered in December.

U.S. authorities have long accused China of hacking into U.S. systems. Since 2018, Justice Department prosecutors have brought charges against several hackers, said to be working for the Chinese government, for the 2015 Anthem breach, dozens of technology giants and governmental organizations, and more recently Chinese military hackers who stole close to 150 million records from credit giant Equifax.

Beijing has repeatedly denied accusations of hacking.

But China isn’t the only government accused of using its offensive cyber prowess to steal coronavirus research. Earlier this week, Reuters reported that Iran-backed hackers targeted U.S. drugmaker Gilead, whose antiviral drug remdesivir is the only treatment that has so far shown to help patients suffering from COVID-19.

A new small study out of Harvard and Boston University is targeting the use of soft robotic exosuits among stroke survivors. The aim is to demonstrate how such technologies could impact the rehabilitation of patients suffering hemiparesis, a kind of paralysis that impacts muscles and limbs on one side of the body.

The results so far seem promising. Among the six patients involved in the study, walking speed has been improved by an average of 0.14 meters a second. The patients are also able to walk 32 meters further on average during a six minute interval, with one walking more than 100 meters further.

The suit itself is small and soft, weighing around 11 pounds, including battery. Electronics aside, it’s largely fabric-based, with actuators mounted on the wearer’s hip. Those are used to assist movement in the ankles by way of attached cables. The system can be worn on either side of the body.

“The vast majority of people who have had a stroke walk slowly and cannot walk very far. Faster and farther walking after physical therapy are among the most important outcomes desired by both, patients and clinicians. If neither speed nor distance are changed by a therapy, it would be difficult to consider that therapy to be effective,” study co-author and Harvard Wyss faculty member Lou Awad says in a release.“The levels of improvement in speed and distance that we found in our exploratory study exceeded our expectations for an immediate effect without any training and highlight the promise of the exosuit technology.”

Awad says the team is “eager” to explore the results in settings outside of the lab. The team’s findings were published in IEEE Open Journal of Engineering in Medicine and Biology (OJEMB). 

FeaturePeek’s founders graduated from Y Combinator in Summer 2019, which for an early stage startup must seem like a million years ago right now. Despite the current conditions though, the company announced a $1.8 million seed investment today.

The round was led by Matrix Partners with some unnamed Angel investors also participating.

The startup has built a solution to allow teams to review front-end designs throughout the development process instead of waiting until the end when the project has been moved to staging, co-founder Eric Silverman explained.

“FeaturePeek is designed to give front end capabilities that enable developers to get feedback from all their different stakeholders at every stage in the development process and really fill in the missing gaps of the review cycle,” he said.

He added, “Right now, there’s no dedicated place to give feedback on that new work until it hits their staging environment, and so we’ll spin up ad hoc deployment previews, either on commit or on pull requests and those fully running environments can be shared with the team. On top of that, we have our overlay where you can file bugs you can annotate screenshots, record video or leave comments.”

Since last summer, the company has remained lean with three full time employees, but it has continued to build out the product. In addition to the funding, the company also announced a free command line version of the product for single developers in addition to the teams product it has been building since the Y Combinator days.

Ilya Sukhar, partner at Matrix Partners says as a former engineer, he had experienced this kind of problem first hand, and he knew that there was a lack of tooling to help. That’s what attracted him to FeaturePeek.

“I think FeaturePeek is kind of a company that’s trying to change that and try to bring all of these folks together in an environment where they can review running code in a way that really wasn’t possible before, and I certainly have been frustrated on both ends of this where as an engineer, you’re kind of like okay I wrote it, are you ever going to look at it,” he said.

Sukhar recognizes these are trying times to launch a startup, and nobody really knows how things are going to play out, but he encourages these companies not to get too caught up in the macro view at this stage.

Silverman knows that he needs to adapt his go to market strategy for the times, and he says the founders are making a concerted effort to listen to users and find ways to improve the product while finding ways to communicate with the target audience.

UK food delivery giant Deliveroo has been called on to do more to protect riders’ incomes and safety during the coronavirus crisis. The ‘meals-on-wheels’ service couriers provide makes them key workers in a pandemic characterized by social distancing and ‘shelter in place’ lockdowns, is the key argument.

More than forty MPs from across the political spectrum — including the former leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn and veteran Conservative MP, Sir Peter Bottomley — have co-signed a letter urging the company to provide all riders with adequate personal protective equipment (PPE), given the risks faced to those who keep working doing deliveries during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The letter also calls for riders who contract the disease or need to self isolate because of exposure risk to be given “full pay” — rather than the £100 per week Deliveroo has sets aside for riders via a coronavirus emergency fund.

The MPs argue the fund “is simply not enough to compensate a courier for having to self-isolate and forces many to work through potentially early symptoms in the hope of it not being COVID-19″.

“The fund has also proven to be inaccessible for many riders as they are not able to meet the eligibility criteria, as they have not completed the numbers of orders required. The fund should be there to assist everyone during this testing time; self isolation should not be a privilege,” they add.

The letter also calls for a “minimum standards guarantee” — given couriers’ key worker role delivery food during the crisis — arguing they should be provided with “a real living wage plus costs, holiday pay and sick pay”.

Another demand is for Deliveroo to allow “high risk” couriers — such as those who have pre-existing health conditions that may make them more vulnerable to the virus — to self isolate for 12 weeks with “full pay”.

Regular testing for riders is another demand.

The MPs also call for a halt to terminations until the end of the crisis, arguing: “It is clear that Deliveroo headquarters staff is stretched and does not have adequate time and resources to investigate customer and restaurant complaints which could lead to riders being unfairly terminated.”

Contacted for a response to the MPs’ demands, Deliveroo aggressively rejected accusations it has been lax in providing riders with adequate PPE.

The MPs argue the company’s current opt-in system for PPE provisions is “inadequate and ineffective” — urging it to take a proactive approach instead by providing “necessary safety equipment to all”.

The letter also claims some riders that have opted in the system have not been provided with the promised PPE. “The riders ordered this PPE from Deliveroo on the 26th of March and have not yet received any provisions (14th of April),” they write. “Your negligence is putting your riders and your customers at risk, especially now that you are encouraging hospital staff to order from your platform.”

The Independent Workers Union of Great Britain’s (IWGB), which has been campaigning for Deliveroo couriers to gain workers rights — and has today launched a petition in support of the MPs’ demands to Deliveroo — told us that many riders still haven’t received any PPE after requesting it on March 26, querying how much PPE has been despatched by the company to its ‘30,000’-strong workforce to date.

The union also said it’s heard from riders who have received PPE who told it the amount provided — four masks and four small bottles of hand sanitizer — would only last them for around a week.

Asked about this, Deliveroo told us it has ordered 135,000 masks and 145,00 hand sanitizers for UK riders to date — though it did not provide a figure on how many items have actually been delivered to riders, saying only that it has delivered “tens of thousands” of masks and hand sanitizers.

Additionally, it said it has reimbursed all riders “up to £20” to cover any PPE and hand sanitiser they procure and pay for themselves — as an interim policy.

On pay, Deliveroo claimed the £100 per week emergency provision it offers for COVID-19 sick (or isolating) riders, via its emergency fund, is higher than the rate of Statutory Sick Pay available to employees.

On the call for a minimum standards guarantee, Deliveroo reiterated its long-standing argument that riders value the flexibility afforded by its business model which involves them working as independent contractors, not contracted workers.

It also disputes that the IWGB’s campaign for riders to gain workers’ rights has widespread support among Deliveroo riders. But it noted that it has continued to call for updates to UK employment law which would enable it to provide more support for riders without jeopardizing flexibility.

It also told us it was involved in providing input to the government when it was working on support measures for self employed people during COVID-19. This support can cover riders, per Deliveroo, which notes that anyone who has been self employed for more than a year will receive three months of their average earnings based on previous years under this national government scheme.

Even if riders continue to ride and earn during the crisis the support still applies, it added. On vulnerable people, its line is therefore that it would never suggest such people ride during this time.

Rather it suggests they seek support under the government’s Self Employment Income Support Scheme, as well as the wider UK social security system.

On rider terminations, Deliveroo disputed that it is unable to properly focus on this area during the pandemic, arguing that contract terminations are an important safety tool at this time — such as in instances where riders have ignored public health requirements to be socially distant when making deliveries.

The company added an option for customers to request so-called ‘contactless’ deliveries early on in the crisis in Europe, removing the requirement that couriers hand food packages direct to customers. Though it was only optional at that point.

On testing, Deliveroo said it has worked closely with the government to ensure riders are entitled to claim free COVID-19 tests — noting that riders were in the first group of people outside of the National Health Service and care home staff able to be able to access these tests.

However the company is not itself sourcing and making tests available to riders. Rather it’s indicating they do the leg work of ordering them via the government’s online self-service portal.

The UK government, meanwhile, has faced weeks of sustained criticism for failing to provide enough tests for people who need them, with accusations of inadequate provision and inaccessible test centre locations which require people to have a car to access a test continuing to trouble Boris Johnson’s government.

So Deliveroo’s message that riders essentially ‘fall back’ on government testing provision may offer little comfort for workers at a front line of exposure to the virus.

In a statement responding to the MP’s letter Deliveroo added:

At Deliveroo, riders are at the heart of everything we do and we are working hard to support them during this unprecedented time. This includes distributing PPE kit to riders across the UK, supporting riders financially if they are unwell and keeping riders safe through contact-free delivery.

We are incredibly grateful and proud of the vital role riders are playing in their communities, helping the public, including the vulnerable and isolated, receive the food they need and want. We have dedicated teams on hand to support riders every step of the way through this crisis.

The London-based food delivery giant has raised some $1.5BN in venture capital to date, according to Crunchbase, including a whopping $575M round led by Amazon last year.