Year: 2020

A group of nine Senators led by Massachusetts Democrat Elizabeth Warren penned an open letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos this week, seeking more information about recent employee firings. The statement cites the terminations of four employees who were vocally critical of the company’s policies pertaining to both COVID-19 and climate change.

Cosigned by Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Sherrod Brown, Kirsten Gillibrand, Ed Markey, Richard Blumenthal and Tammy Baldwin, the letter notes:

Given the clear public history of these four workers’ advocacy on behalf of health and safety conditions for workers in Amazon warehouses preceding their terminations, and Amazon’s vague public statements regarding violations of “internal policies,” we are seeking additional information to understand exactly what those internal policies are.

It poses nine questions, asking Bezos and Amazon to respond by May 20. The senators single out the firings of Christian Smalls, Bashir Mohamed, Maren Costa and Emily Cunningham, all of whom have been publicly critical of the company’s handling of COVID-19. A number of the above have stated publicly that they believe their terminations were directly linked to the whistleblowing — something Amazon has strongly denied.

“We support every employee’s right to criticize their employer’s working conditions,” the company said in a statement offered to TechCrunch at the time, “but that does not come with blanket immunity against any and all internal policies. We terminated these employees for repeatedly violating internal policies.”

Amazon lost another employee when VP Tim Bray publicly left the company on May 1, and workers across the country were striking over working conditions.

“[R]emaining an Amazon VP would have meant, in effect, signing off on actions I despised,” Bray wrote. “So I resigned. The victims weren’t abstract entities but real people; here are some of their names: Courtney Bowden, Gerald Bryson, Maren Costa, Emily Cunningham, Bashir Mohammed, and Chris Smalls. I’m sure it’s a coincidence that every one of them is a person of color, a woman, or both. Right?”

The letter echoes Bray’s concerns about inequality at the company, asking, “Do Amazon tech workers, Amazon warehouse workers, and Amazon executives have the same discipline and termination policies?”

This isn’t the first time the senators have pushed back against Amazon. Sanders helped lead the push for a $15 minimum wage at the company, while Warren noted her desire to break up the company (along with Google and Facebook) during her 2020 presidential bid.

For its part, Amazon has been very conscious of the messaging around its coronavirus response in recent weeks. It played a prominent role in both Bezos’s annual shareholder letter and the company’s earnings report. Earlier this week, another warehouse employee died after testing positive for the virus. As of mid-April, workers in at least 74 Amazon warehouses had tested positive.

We’ve reached out to the company for comment on the letter.

Zoom acquires some encryption expertise, Uber makes a big investment in scooters and we review the new 13-inch Macbook Pro.

Here’s your Daily Crunch for May 7, 2020.

1. Zoom acquires Keybase to get end-to-end encryption expertise

Keybase, whose encryption products include secure file sharing and collaboration tools, should give Zoom some security credibility as it goes through pandemic demand growing pains. A number of Zoom security issues have come to light the last couple of months as demand as soared and exposed security weaknesses in the platform.

Under the terms of the deal, Keybase will become a subsidiary of Zoom and co-founder and Max Krohn will lead the Zoom security engineering team, reporting directly to Yuan to help build the security product.

2. Uber leads $170 million Lime investment, offloads Jump to Lime

As part of the deal (which was reported earlier this week but is now official), Lime is also acquiring Uber’s micro-mobility subsidiary Jump. There will be more integrations between Uber and Jump in the future, but both apps will remain active for now.

3. Apple MacBook Pro 13-inch review

With this week’s news, the 13-inch becomes the third and final member of the MacBook family to get the new keyboard. It’s not “Magic” as the name implies (Apple really does love the M-word), but Brian Heater says improvements are immediate and vast.

4. Nintendo sells a lot more Switches, as people stay and home playing Animal Crossing

The company says it has sold 21 million Switch units in the past year, handily beating a 19.5 million forecast. 6.2 million of those systems were the newer, cheaper Switch Lite, which hit the market in September. All of this comes as Nintendo has run up against shortage through a combination of increased popularity and a a global supply chain knocked off balance from COVID-19.

5. How will digital media survive the ad crash?

Bustle Digital Group’s Jason Wagenheim told us that he’s anticipating a 35% decline in ad revenue for this quarter. And where he’d once hoped BDG would reach $120 or $125 million in ad revenue this year, he’s now trying to figure out “what does our company look like at $75 or $90 million?” (Extra Crunch membership required.)

6. Apple awards $10 million to rapidly scale COVID-19 sample collection kit production

Apple has awarded $10 million from its Advanced Manufacturing Fund to COPAN Diagnostics, a company focused on producing sample collection kits for testing COVID-19 to hospitals in the U.S. The money comes from the fund that Apple established to support the development and growth of U.S.-based manufacturing — to date, the fund has been used to support companies tied more directly to Apple’s own supply chain.

7. Sonos debuts new Arc soundbar, next-generation Sonos Sub, and Sonos Five speaker

Sonos has introduced a trio of new hardware today, adding three new smart speakers to its lineup, including the Sonos Arc soundbar that includes Dolby Atmos support, as well as Sonos Five, the next version of its Sonos Play:5 speaker, and a third-generation Sonos Sub.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

With conferences canceled indefinitely, companies are increasingly reliant on online events to hype product launches. As they prepare to release next-gen console before the end of the year, expect plenty of livestreams and blogs from both Microsoft and Sony, in an attempt to flesh out all that their respective systems have to offer.

Today, Microsoft took to YouTube, Mixer and Twitch to give the world a better idea of what to expect from the upcoming Xbox Series X release. Recent updates have, understandably, been largely focused on console hardware, as the company attempts to distinguish the from the upcoming PlayStation — after all, the systems will likely be launched within weeks of one another.

This time out, however, games were very much the thing. The Xbox team showcased a baker’s dozen of titles this morning, including,

• Assassin’s Creed Valhalla (Ubisoft)
• Bright Memory Infinite (Playism)
• Call of the Sea (Raw Fury)
• DiRT 5 (Codemasters)
• Madden NFL 21 (Electronic Arts)
• Scarlet Nexus (Bandai Namco Entertainment)
• Scorn (Ebb)
• Second Extinction (Systemic Reaction)
• The Ascent (Neon Giant / Curve Digital)
• The Medium (Bloober Team)
• Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 (Paradox Interactive)
• Yakuza: Like a Dragon (SEGA)

The company hasn’t issued specific dates for titles (those will largely be dependent on publisher), but a recent blog post notes, “Our goal remains to launch Xbox Series X and Halo Infinite this Holiday.” Clearly the MS’s language is more uncertain than earlier — after all, these are uncertain times we’re living in.

All of the above titles are “Xbox Series X Optimized,” which means they’ll be able to be played in 4K at 120FPS, load faster and utilize DirectX raytracing among others. Nine of the 13 also use Microsoft’s Smart Delivery System, which saves users from having to rebuy titles, regardless of the console it’s played on.

More info on the above can be found on Microsoft’s blog.

Stilt, a Y Combinator alum that provides financial services for immigrants without Social Security numbers or credit reports, announced today that it has closed a $7.5 million seed round. It also launched FDIC-insured pre-approved global bank accounts today.

The startup has raised equity from investors including Liron Petrushka; Hillsven Capital; Streamlined Ventures; Gokul Rajaram; Bragiel Brothers; Fundbox CEO Eyal Shinar; Next Insurance CEO Guy Goldstein; Charles Choi of SK Networks; and Y Combinator partners Dalton Caldwell and Kevin Hale.

It also raised about $100 million in debt capital, or money to be used for lending, from Smart Lenders Asset Management, FourthGreen Capital and others.

The startup, which launched out of Y Combinator’s winter 2016 batch, was founded by CEO Rohit Mittal, who previously worked as a data scientist at PopSugar, and Priyank Singh, a software developer who worked at Amazon subsidiary A9 and Microsoft.

Both experienced firsthand the challenges of renting apartments, securing student loans and other financial services as immigrants to the United States, and wanted to create a service that would help others in the same position.

Stilt’s first product was loans and over the past four years, Mittal said it has lent tens of millions of dollars.

“There are very few services in the U.S. that allow non-U.S. citizens to open accounts without a Social Security number, so our focus is not only giving them the best cross-border digital banking service, but one that is also very tightly integrated into a credit platform. Anyone opening a bank account with us is eligible for a whole bunch of credit products,” Mittal told TechCrunch.

The company uses proprietary technology that scores applicants without credit reports by analyzing a wide range of financial and non-financial data to create risk models. This includes data sets from universities, half a million employers and millions of job positions, plus data from credit bureaus and banks, in addition to the type of visa an applicant has (for example, an applicant on a student visa would be scored differently than someone on a H-1B visa), and their financial history. Further loans are underwritten based on the performance of the user’s first loan from Stilt.

The interest rate for Stilt’s loans is generally about 13.5% to 14%, offering applicants a better alternative to traditional lenders or payday loans.

“We’re a mission-driven company, so we won’t do business where we are charging anyone a 100% interest rate. Consumers should be able to get the best option and we try to improve our credit risk model to give the best rate possible, even if they don’t have the traditional credit criteria that other banks look for,” said Mittal.

Stilt currently focuses on personal financial services, but plans to add products for small businesses in the future. Over the past few months, Mittal says the company has seen an increase in applications because of the COVID-19 pandemic, but he adds that loan performance has remained steady.

A rebranded and expanded version of the CBS All Access streaming service will arrive this summer, ViacomCBS announced this morning. The service, now run by ViacomCBS following the merger, today offers a mix of live TV, on-demand video, original programming, streaming news, local broadcast stations, and sports. Now the company is accelerating its plan to make it a broader offering by incorporating TV and movies from across the ViacomCBS portfolio of brands, including Nickelodeon, MTV, BET, Comedy Central, Smithsonian and Paramount. It also plans to expand its original content lineup and news and sports offerings, the company said.

These efforts are already underway ahead of the big relaunch.

Alongside ViacomCBS’ quarterly earnings this morning, CBS All Access announced the addition over 100 Paramount films to its service.

These include Oscar winners like “The Godfather,” “Terms of Endearment,” and an “Inconvenient Truth,” along with popular titles like “Star Trek: First Contact,” “Patriot Games,” “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape,” “Airplane!,” “The Hours,” “The First Wives Club,” “Pretty in Pink,” “To Catch a Thief,” and others.

“Expanding CBS All Access’ library of films with these iconic titles from Paramount Pictures is just one of the many ways we’re integrating the phenomenal catalog of IP available to us within the ViacomCBS family,”  said Julie McNamara, EVP & CBS All Access Head of Programming, in a statement. “The service is on a growth trajectory with two record-breaking months in March and April, and we look forward to bringing even more premium content and value to our subscribers in the coming months.”

During the earnings call with investors, ViacomCBS CEO Bob Bakish offered more detail as to what the rebranded CBS All Access service will entail when it relaunches this summer.

While the service will showcase the company’s biggest franchises and deep library content, it won’t solely rely on back catalog content to attract viewers. It will also leverage the company’s IP, as its original programs like “Star Trek: Discovery,” “Star Trek: Picard,” and “The Good Wife” spin-off “The Good Fight,” have already done. And it will continue to promote its sports offerings, which will include its continued airing of NFL games, as well as those from other leagues like the NCAA and PGA.

In addition, Bakish noted the new service is not being built from scratch, but will instead be based on CBS All Access’ existing tech platform.

The company had alluded to its plans for CBS All Access in February, describing its future as a “House of Brands” product that will also be further expanded outside the U.S. through a variety of distribution deals.

ViacomCBS has yet to reveal key details like its pricing plans or new name, but the time frame of the “summer 2020” launch is new.

The news of the relaunch comes at a time when streaming services are seeing significant gains as consumers stuck at home during the coronavirus quarantine are in search of more entertainment. In this environment, NBCU has launched its service Peacock and WarnerMedia’s HBO MAX is just around the quarter. Recently launched Disney+ has also benefitted from the rise in consumer demand to reach 54.5 million subscribers in the five months since its U.S. debut.

The rebranded CBS All Access may have a good chance at gaining an audience too, given it’s already seeing increased usage and interest in amid the coronavirus pandemic. The company said its domestic streaming services, CBS All Access and Showtime combined, were up 50% year-over-year to reach 13.5 million total subscribers by the end of the first quarter. Both CBS All Access and Showtime also broke their own records for sign-ups, streams, and time watched in the quarter.

The company’s stock was up 16% on the news of the jump in streaming subscriptions and expanded deal with YouTube TV, despite the 19% decline in ad revenue it saw in the quarter.

Image credit: ViacomCBS via Facebook

Cuckoo Internet is a new UK start-up that aims to disrupt the UK broadband market. It has now raised £425,000 in seed funding, which includes funding from work.fund, a new Silicon Valley fund operator fund led by Bart Macdonald (Sapling Founder). Other investors include Lorin van Nuland (early investor in Betterment) and GrowthInvest among others. The key to its strategy is that it has no servers of its own, meaning it can scale faster than traditional providers.

The anecdotal evidence is that the pandemic-led lockdown in many countries has revealed that your home broadband is almost certainly not fast enough for modern use. This has become especially obvious in the UK, where TV interviews with key figures are often interrupted by terrible buffering. Indeed, regulator Ofcom says 40% of people in the UK are paying more for terrible broadband merely because they are loyal customers. Complaints about broadband and mobile are almost 40% higher than every other sector in the UK economy, according to research from the Institute of Customer Service. At the same time younger workers, who usually rent so move home regularly, do not have broadband because of the long contracts and high exit fees.

Traditional ISPs are not set up for this new world. BT, Sky, Virgin Media and TalkTalk between them own more than 90% of the broadband market. The biggest independent challengers to them today are Shell Energy, the Post Office and Vodafone. No companies are incentivized to break the pattern of long contracts, high exit fees, and hidden loyalty taxes. But when you switch between most suppliers the only thing that normally changes is your router and the software you interact with. So there is now an opportunity to disrupt this space.

Cuckoo has one deal and a one-month rolling contract; simple pricing, no loyalty tax, no hidden charges. It says it also offers the fastest speed available on the network.

The startup was inspired when Cofounder Alexander Fitzgerald had to take on BT to get his father’s internet to work properly and for the right price. “The broadband market is broken. Customers struggle with complex deals, high prices, and bad service. There has to be a better way. Unlike the current providers, we will be transparent, with clear pricing, simple contracts, and good customer service,” he said.

Fitzgerald previously helped Bulb grow to 1.5 million customers as a consultant and while working with Bulb he saw there was something missing in broadband. The Bulb founders gave him advice on his first-ever pitch deck. He then quit his job in October 2019 and founded Cuckoo.

Google today is launching a new app, Read Along, that aims to help elementary school students practice their reading skills and stay educationally engaged amid school closures due to coronavirus. The new Android app is based on Google’s existing application, Bolo, which launched in India last year with a catalog of read-along stories in both English and Hindi. The updated and rebranded version is now globally available with support for 9 languages. 

Like Bolo, Read Along also leverages Google’s speech recognition and text-to-speech to help kids learn to read.

The app includes a built-in reading assistant named Diya. As kids read aloud, Diya detects if the child is struggling with a passage and can jump in with positive reinforcement or help. At any time, the child can ask Diya to help them read a sentence or pronounce a word they don’t know.

As children progress in the app, they’re presented with mini word games and earn in-app prizes as they improve their skills.

Google says the app was built with children’t privacy in mind and is able to work without either Wi-Fi or data. The voice data is analyzed in real-time on the device, and is not synced, stored or analyzed on Google’s servers. The company also stresses that it’s not using a voice sample from the kids to make the product better.

The app doesn’t include advertising or in-app purchases, either. Parents can opt to connect to the internet if they want to download additional stories, but there isn’t a charge.

At launch, Read Along offers around 500 stories and the catalog is continually expanded with new books.

Since its debut as Bolo in March 2019, Google says feedback from parents was encouraging, prompting it to bring the app to new markets. While in India, “Bolo” is broadly understood to mean “speak,” Google rebranded the app to Read Along to resonate with parents and children around the world. The app has also been updated with an enhanced library, new games and other user interface improvements since launch.

The new Read Along app is now globally available, except in the Philippines, Colombia and Denmark and offers stories in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu.

The app is a free download on Google Play for children ages 5 and up.

Sidewalk Labs is closing its project in Toronto, the company said in a brief statement on Thursday.

“For the last two-and-a-half years, we have been passionate about making Quayside happen — indeed, we have invested time, people, and. resources in Toronto, including opening a 30-person office on the waterfront,” wrote Sidewalk Labs chief executive, Dan Doctoroff in a blog post. “But as unprecedented economic uncertainty has set in around the world and in the Toronto real estate market, it has become too difficult to make the 12-acre project financially viable without sacrificing core parts of the plan we had developed. together with Waterfront Toronto to build a truly inclusive, sustainable community.”

Sidewalk Toronto was meant to be a testing ground for a host of new technologies designed to reshape urban infrastructure in a way that put data collection at the heart of how to build (or rebuild) the cities of the future. From the outset the project suffered from a panopticon problem which was exacerbated by the fact that Sidewalk Labs shared a corporate parent with Google — and the search giant’s record on privacy protections is… checkered.

The decision to mothball the project in Toronto is a huge blow for Sidewalk, but one that should have been expected given the collapse of the global economy due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“While we won’t be pursuing this particular project, the current health emergency makes us feel even more strongly about the importance of reimagining cities for the future,” Doctoroff wrote in his statement. “I believe that the ideas we have developed over the last two-and-a-half years will represent a meaningful contribution to the work of tackling big urban problems, particularly in the areas of affordability and sustainability. This is a vital societal endeavor, and Sidewalk Labs will continue our work to contribute to it.”

Doctoroff said Sidewalk Labs would continue to support the internal initiatives it has backed or spun out including its next generation urban planning tool, Replica; Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners, its infrastructure investment fund; and Cityblock, the company’s attempt to reimagine healthcare services in urban communities.

Sidewalk will also continue to support the startups it’s backed including Ori Systems, the robotic furniture company; the recycling company, AMP Robotics; and VoltServer, a provider of tools to monitor and manage electricity.

The company has also done groundbreaking work around the use of novel construction materials for high-rises and design tools for urban development.

“The Quayside project was important to us, and this decision was a difficult one. We are grateful to the countless Torontonians who contributed to the project, and for the support we received from community groups, civic leaders, and local residents,” wrote Doctoroff. “Sidewalk Labs was attracted to Toronto by the diversity, growth, and opportunity the city has to offer, and that view has been affirmed and strengthened at every step along the way. Toronto is one of the world’s great centers of technological innovation, and nothing about this decision will in any way diminish that.”

In the space of several weeks, COVID-19 has transformed countless industries and will continue to do so in ways we can only imagine.

The pandemic has also spurred many to find new ways to work and keep society moving amid physical distancing, stay-at-home orders and mass hospitalizations. For years, robotics and automation have been a looming presence in a number of fields ranging from shipping and fulfillment to construction sites and operating rooms. But the novel coronavirus could well be the disruption that accelerates the adoption of these technologies.

These changes take time, but because COVID-19 won’t be disappearing any time soon, it seems likely that this era will transform many of the robotics- and automation-curious into full-fledged converts. How different would this moment be if we were bolstered by a workforce that couldn’t transmit viruses or call in sick?

Following recent surveys exploring COVID-19’s impact on media, fintech startups and esports, along with an earlier exploration of robotics investments, we’ve asked the category’s top VCs to discuss how the pandemic will impact their portfolio companies:

• Shahin Farshchi, Lux Capital
• Aaron Jacobson, NEA
• Kelly Chen, DCVC
• Cyril Ebersweiler and Duncan Turner, SOSV & HAX
• Eric Migicovsky, Y Combinator
• Helen Liang, FoundersX Ventures

Shahin Farshchi, Lux Capital

How has COVID-19 impacted automation and the robotics investing landscape?

We just closed on a fresh $1 billion and are actively making new investments in automation. COVID-19 revealed that our just-in-time manufacturing and logistics infrastructure cannot react to unexpected change. We expect the best practices of tech companies: rapidly adopting new tools and quickly iterating on their products and processes to become common in the realm of manufacturing and logistics. Engineers will be handed credit cards to try the latest tools, building on open source will be widely embraced, and making bets on products from startups will become the norm in this industry which has its roots in the industrial revolution.

COVID-19 will also encourage employers to rethink workspace layouts; keeping workers at a distance makes for a safer work environment. Automation enables that distance, and we continue to seek amazing teams aiming to empower human workers through automation. COVID-19 has created a period of uncertainty relating to demand, which will impact manufacturers’ ability to purchase automation to meet that demand. We encourage automation startups to revisit their assumptions on customer purchasing patterns, knowing that automation will become a priority in our new normal.

YouTube is giving advertisers a few more tools to reach consumers and measure ad effectiveness on TVs.

These tools already exist for YouTube on other platforms, but now the Google -owned video service is bringing them to connected televisions. In a blog post, it says this is in response to how YouTube viewership has grown dramatically on TVs in the past year.

And this is growth is happening across a range of content. YouTube says that watch time for live content on TVs in has grown 250% globally, while watch time for feature-length movies via the YouTube Movies hub has grown 800%. Meanwhile, its live and on-demand TV service YouTube TV has seen watch time for shows grow 300% in the United States. And watch time for news on YouTube TV has grown 450%.

These numbers cover the period from March 11 to April 10, but since they’re year-over-year, it’s not clear how much this growth was driven by COVID-19 and resulting stay-at-home measures. Either way, YouTube is pitching its latest ad products as a way to help advertisers “navigate the streaming boom.”

First, it’s “accelerating the launch” of its Brand Lift measurement tool on TVs.

Image Credits: YouTube

Regular YouTube viewerships will likely recognize these surveys asking about you which brands or products you recognize — the idea is to measure whether YouTube ads are leading to increased recognition. YouTube will start running these surveys on the YouTube app on TVs in the coming weeks, and then launch it on YouTube TV early in Q3 of this year.

“For viewers, this means surveys are now optimized for the big screen and interactivity with a TV remote, so people can easily respond or skip the survey,” the company says.

YouTube also says that this year, it’s bringing skippable ad formats to videos that are being casted onto a TV screen.

“As casting watch time soared by over 75 percent year over year, this provides advertisers a new way to reach their audience as they embrace the evolving ways consumers are watching their favorite content,” it says.