Year: 2020

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Hi readers. Welcome back to The Station, a weekly newsletter dedicated to the future (and present) of transportation. I’m your host Kirsten Korosec, senior transportation reporter at TechCrunch .

While COVID-related stay-at-home orders have been extended in places like the San Francisco Bay area, officials in other counties and states in the U.S. have decided to open up for business. The rest of us are watching and waiting to see how these two experiments play out.

These opposing approaches have managed to create even more tension in the United States. If politics didn’t divide us before, how and when to open amid a health pandemic is proving to be an effective wedge.

The “how” is as important, or even more so, than the “when.” What will life and business look like? Wuhan, China, a transportation and manufacturing metropolis of 11 million people and where COVID-19 started, offers a view into one approach. (The photo below shows a worker disinfecting a bus in Wuhan on April 30.)

When those stay-at-home orders are finally lifted, returning to work won’t be quick or easy. Wuhan was placed on lockdown January 23. Wuhan officials eased outgoing travel restrictions April 8. While the strictest component of that lockdown has been lifted, many businesses remain closed. Didi didn’t reopened its ride-hailing services in the city until April 30.

In short, it’s going to be complex. Ford’s back-to-work playbook is a case in point. The plan includes a number of daily measures such as online health self-certifications completed before work every day, face masks and no-touch temperature scans upon arrival. But that’s just a sliver of what it will take. Check it out their complete playbook.

Here’s a friendly reminder to reach out and email me at kirsten.korosec@techcrunch.com to share thoughts, opinions or tips or send a direct message to @kirstenkorosec.

I’ll alrighty folks, shall we dig in? Vamos. 

Micromobbin’

It was a rough week for micromobility. Over at Lyft, the company laid off 982 employees and furloughed 288 amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Lyft also permanently ceased scooter operations in Oakland, San Jose and Austin.

“We’re focusing our resources where we can have the biggest impact and best serve cities and riders,” a Lyft spokesperson said in a statement to TechCrunch. “We’re continuing to invest in our bike and scooter business, but have made the tough decision to shift resources away from three scooter markets and toward opportunities where we are set up for longer-term success.”

At Lime, the startup let go 13% of its staff while the very next day relaunching its electric scooters in Baltimore and Ogden, Utah.

“Almost overnight, our company went from being on the eve of accomplishing an unprecedented milestone — the first next-generation micromobility company to reach profitability — to one where we had to pause operations in 99% of our markets worldwide to support cities’ efforts at social distancing,” Lime CEO Brad Bao wrote in a note to employees.

Just one day after those layoffs, the company relaunched scooters in Baltimore to help support essential medical workers as well as in Ogden.

Uber is weighing its own layoffs. The Information reported that the company could cut up to 20% of its staff. That translates to more than 5,000 jobs. Those cuts could be announced in stages over the next several weeks. Meanwhile, Thuan Pham, who was hired as Uber’s chief technology officer by former CEO Travis Kalanick back in 2013, is leaving the company in three weeks, the ride-share giant revealed in an SEC filing.

— Megan Rose Dickey

Deal of the week

Chinese electric vehicle startup Nio secured a $1 billion investment from several state-owned companies in Hefei in return for agreeing to establish headquarters in the city’s economic development hotspot and giving up a stake in one of its business units.

The injection of capital comes from several investors, including Hefei City Construction and Investment Holding Group, CMG-SDIC Capital and Anhui Provincial Emerging Industry Investment Co.

Why deal of the week? The deal alleviates some concerns about Nio’s liquidity. It also marks the latest Chinese EV startup to turn to the state as private capital has shrunk.

There is no free lunch, however. The deal itself is complex and involves some asset shuffling. Nio is transferring its core businesses in China into a new company called Nio China. The investors will get a 24.1% stake in Nio China. The shareholding structure of the parent company is unchanged.

Other deals announced this week are below. Keep in mind that just because a deal is announced that doesn’t mean it closed amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Fundraising rounds often close weeks and even months before they’re announced.

Otonomo, an automotive data services startup based in Israel, raised $46 million in a Series C funding round that included investments from SK Holdings, Avis Budget Group and Alliance Ventures. Existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners also participated. Otonomo has raised $82 million, to date.

The company has a software platform that captures and anonymizes vehicle data so it can then be used to create apps to provide services such as electric vehicle management, subscription-based fueling, parking, mapping, usage-based insurance and emergency service.

KlearNow, a startup that has built a software platform to automate the customs clearance process, raised $16 million in a Series A funding round led by GreatPoint Ventures, with additional participation from Autotech Ventures, Argean Capital and Monta Vista Capital. Ashok Krishnamurthi, managing partner at GreatPoint Ventures, will join KlearNow’s board. Daniel Hoffer from Autotech Ventures is joining as a board observer.

Skycell, a Switzerland-based startup that builds hardware and operates a logistics network designed to transport pharmaceuticals has raised $62 million.

A merger between UK’s JustEat and the Netherlands’ Takeaway.com has been approved by regulators. The merged company announced that it had raised €700 million ($756 million) in new outside funding in the form of new shares and convertible bonds.

Cheetah, a San Francisco-based startup that provided a wholesale delivery service and has pivoted to selling to consumers during COVID-19, raised $36 million in Series B funding.

Innovation of the week

Computer vision company Eyesight Technologies has tweaked its driver monitoring system so it can detect driver distraction and drowsiness even while wearing a medical face mask.

This “innovation of the week” gets back to my opening remarks about “how” we get back to work. Face masks will likely be a part of our world for some time.

Driver monitoring systems, which are increasingly being used by commercial fleets, are trained to detect and monitor facial features of the driver. The system will take in data points like head pose, mouth, eyes and eyelids and use the gathered visual data to detect signs of drowsiness and distraction. If the sensor can’t read one or more of these features the system could fail to detect a drowsy truck driver or inattentive transit worker.

Eyesight Technologies says that its computer vision and AI algorithms have been trained to detect distraction and drowsiness even if a driver is wearing a mask and glasses.

“We are living in unprecedented times,” Eyesight Technologies CEO David Tolub said. “Without a concrete end date to the current situation, wearing medical masks may be a reality for the foreseeable future. Eyesight Technologies is forging ahead and adapting to provide a reliable solution to help guarantee safety even under less than ideal circumstances.”

Audi punts on Level 3

Audi has scrapped plans to roll out a Level 3 automated driving system in its A8 flagship sedan. Automotive News Europe broke the story.

The feature, which is branded Traffic Jam Pilot, theoretically allows the vehicle to operate on its own without the human driver keeping their eyes on the road. But it’s never been commercially deployed.

Traffic Jam Pilot was supposed to be in the latest-generation A8 that debuted in 2017. It’s now 2020. What happened? Regulations, or lack of them, have been the primary scapegoat. But it’s not quite the whole story.

TechCrunch reached out to Audi to dig into why? In short, the company told us, that it’s complicated. The lack of a legal framework has raised concerns about liability. To further complicate the problem, the A8 is now progressing through its generational life cycle. And Audi was faced with continuing to pour money into the feature to adapt it without promise of framework progressing.

Here’s a few tidbits from the folks at Audi.

On the legal framework:

As of now, there is no legal framework for Level 3 automated driving. Consistently it is not possible to homologate such function anywhere in the world in a series production car. It is still very challenging to plan the exact introduction scenarios for level 3 systems, as we continuously moving in an intensive interplay between the findings from ongoing testing and the requirements that legislators and approval authorities are now defining for conditional automated driving.

On development costs:

As these clarifications and safeguards continue to take time, we also monitor economic aspects in addition. This includes development costs, which are summing up continuously. Secondly, the remaining life of the determined target model A8 combined with the forecasted installation rate and the expected market greediness in the individual countries are playing an important role.

This has brought us to the following decision: We will not see the traffic jam pilot on the road with its originally planned level 3 series function in the current model generation of the Audi A8 because our luxury sedan has already gone through a substantial part of its model life cycle.

Audi’s belief in automated driving:

We still believe in the technology of automated driving and today we know better than almost anyone when it comes to the decisive technological key factors. During the development phase we continuously learned more and more technical “unknown unknowns” and developed approaches how to handle the fact, that there will appear more.

Together with the above mentioned dependencies concerning legislation and type approval, we believe that actually it is not the right moment to deliver the function to the customer. This is our attitude of responsibility.

How Audi is moving forward:

An important part of the truth, which the industry is now facing: development of automated driving is extremely complex and cost-intensive. Our aim more than ever before is to generate the greatest possible synergies.

Within the VW group we therefore have the best preconditions. We have consolidated our efforts to further develop level 3 automated driving in the Car.Software organization. This is a new organization within the Volkswagen Group .

Former Audi managers will be head of two out of the five domains within this new organization: Thomas Müller will manage the automated driving area, and Dr. Klaus Büttner will manage the Intelligent Body&Cockpit area. Together with the specialists coming from Audi, Volkswagen and Porsche, this ensures that the current expertise in this cross-brand organization is available for the greatest possible benefit to everyone in the Volkswagen Group.

Uber is planning to require drivers and riders to wear face masks as it prepares to ramp its ride-hailing business back up after being hobbled by the COVID-19 pandemic.

CNN was first to report that executives approved a new policy that would require drivers and riders to wear face masks or coverings in some markets, including the U.S.. TechCrunch confirmed Monday that Uber has developed a policy for certain markets.

Uber still faces one considerable challenge: securing enough face masks and other supplies to protect drivers. The company said multiple orders have either been delayed or canceled as from major manufacturers prioritize healthcare workers and other first responders.

It’s also not clear how Uber will enforce its policy.

“As countries reopen, Uber is focused on safety and proceeding with caution,” an Uber spokesperson said in a emailed statement. “Today, we continue to ask riders to stay home if they can, while shipping safety supplies to drivers who are providing essential trips. At the same time, our teams are preparing for the next phase of recovery, where we will all have a role to play. We’ll communicate updates directly to users when ready, but in the meantime, we continue to urge all riders and drivers to wear masks or face coverings when using Uber.”

Uber has been encouraging riders to stay home through an in-app message and through marketing such as TV spots. The app is still available and people have used it to take trips to grocery stores, to essential jobs and pharmacies. Uber has urged, but not yet required, riders and drivers to wear masks or face coverings.

Protecting drivers

As the COVID-19 pandemic swept through Europe and North America, Uber drivers have found themselves on the front lines, often times transporting healthcare and other essential workers who were potentially exposed to the disease.

Uber announced last month that it would buy and ship face masks to active drivers and delivery workers globally. However, COVID-19 has squeezed global supplies for face masks and disinfectant. Uber and other ride-share drivers have reported problems accessing the supplies.

In the first week of April, Uber said it began receiving and then shipping about 500,000 ear-loop face masks to drivers. The company initially targeted the most active drivers in COVID-19 hotspots such as New York City and Los Angeles. (In LA, Mayor Eric Garcetti signed a Worker Protection Order that requires companies to provide essential workers with personal protective equipment.) Uber said it also is prioritizing cities and states such as San Francisco, Washington D.C. and New Jersey that have asked drivers to wear face covers.

Uber said it will make these supplies available to all active drivers as more become available. Uber’s goal is to be able to offer masks nationwide regardless of local regulations.

As of this week, Uber has either shipped or preparing to ship 1.4 million ear-loop face masks in the United States. The company also started in early April to ship disinfectant to drivers in Chicago, Los Angeles, NYC, Seattle and Washington D.C.

Lyft has slimmed down its internship program from 12 weeks to eight weeks, cut some intern salaries by half and rescinded its housing stipend, TechCrunch has learned. The company confirmed that it has shortened the internship and that it only cut some intern salaries. It did not define which roles and departments were specifically effected.

The internship change comes after Lyft cut nearly 1,000 employees due to the COVID-19 pandemic last week. Uber, which reportedly is doing layoffs as well, declined to comment when asked if new graduate offers have been rescinded.

Tech’s coveted, and oftentimes glamorous, internships have been largely impacted by the coronavirus pandemic, with companies across the country canceling their programs altogether. Big companies have a unique privilege in this situation, as they can often afford to virtualize the program to some degree. In March, Lyft, like other big tech companies such as Twitter and Google, told TechCrunch that they would move their internship programs to be completely remote. Now we’re seeing an even more conservative approach as Lyft faces greater struggles. Now it’s not a question of if there will be snacks, but more along the lines of if there will be job offers.

Internships are important because they pipeline in new, diverse talent. Cancellations challenge the makeup of the future workforces of our companies, and are yet another blow to a graduating class entering a harsh job market.

Google Meet — the video call service formerly known as Hangouts Meet, which itself was an offshoot from Hangouts, not to be confused with Google Chat, Duo, Allo, or any of the company’s other communications products — is finally making its debut on Gmail accounts, where it probably should have been since 2010.

Everyone with a Gmail account has access to Meet as of a few days ago, when Google removed most of the restrictions that made the product a go-to for many business customers but a non-starter for everyone else.

As they announced then, anyone with a Google account can make calls with up to 100 people, for up to an hour. The option to do so will appear on the sidebar, where one will can start a meeting and invite participants in a pop-up browser window — it’s quite fast and a dial-in and PIN are provided immediately — or join an existing meeting using a code.

It’s a welcome improvement, to be sure. But it’s also something that on reflection one wonders why Google hasn’t had there for years.

Despite running one of the world’s largest communications platforms and owning its most popular operating system, person to person communication has always been something of a puzzler for Google. Every couple years the company debuts a new and ill-advised app or service that’s confusingly branded, competes with its existing offerings, and isn’t even available for most people to use. Sometimes they even do two at once!

This experimental approach (unsuccessfully aping the old, weird Google) wasn’t a problem when there was the only pressure was the usual trickle of enterprise and startup innovations that Google could easily bat down from its high seat. But the coronavirus pandemic produced a tsunami of demand for video calling that suddenly threw the competition into gear.

As we have seen, Zoom emerged as the dark horse winner, despite serious security issues and other general murkiness.

The secret was, of course, simplicity: one or two clicks and it “just works.” While Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and other major tech companies have seen huge gains, and startup efforts like Houseparty and Discord have also spiked, Zoom’s ubiquity is such that people speak of “doing a Zoom call on Google” or “we can do a Zoom meeting on Skype.” It’s the ultimate insult.

As a strategy by Google to acquire users, this expansion of Meet is months too late, and as an attempt to salvage its dignity, years too late. After the execution of Reader and the utter boondoggle that was Google+, the company will forever be considered as having a gun in each hand, one pointed at users and one at its own foot. Sorry, do I seem bitter?

At the same time, it’s quite clear that Google has the capability to create a simple, cross-platform, universal video calling service. After all, it offered one for years: GChat.

It’s not really clear what happened to this popular, practical service, which unsurprisingly lived exactly where Meets now lives, and provided a similar (if simpler) service. Now is not the time to reopen the case of GChat or the dozens of other beloved products Google has sent to the big datacenter in the sky, but it’s worth considering what might have been the case had the company simply, as it said it wanted to, “put more wood behind fewer arrows” and made that service the one, developing and adding to it as it has with Maps and Search.

GChat would be open in every browser (in the omnipresent Gmail tab), able to launch personal or business meetings instantly (as Meet can now), and it would be on every phone as well, the way Google’s most popular apps, like Maps, are. As a (mostly) trusted, presumably encrypted chat and occasional multimedia app, it could have taken the wind out of WhatsApp and Messenger’s sails, rivaled iMessage, and perhaps even given rise to the more decentralized social network the company seemed to want to build some years back.

Ah well. “Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: ‘It might have been.’ ”

Enjoy Meet, if you can, and while it lasts.

Google Meet — the video call service formerly known as Hangouts Meet, which itself was an offshoot from Hangouts, not to be confused with Google Chat, Duo, Allo, or any of the company’s other communications products — is finally making its debut on Gmail accounts, where it probably should have been since 2010.

Everyone with a Gmail account has access to Meet as of a few days ago, when Google removed most of the restrictions that made the product a go-to for many business customers but a non-starter for everyone else.

As they announced then, anyone with a Google account can make calls with up to 100 people, for up to an hour. The option to do so will appear on the sidebar, where one will can start a meeting and invite participants in a pop-up browser window — it’s quite fast and a dial-in and PIN are provided immediately — or join an existing meeting using a code.

It’s a welcome improvement, to be sure. But it’s also something that on reflection one wonders why Google hasn’t had there for years.

Despite running one of the world’s largest communications platforms and owning its most popular operating system, person to person communication has always been something of a puzzler for Google. Every couple years the company debuts a new and ill-advised app or service that’s confusingly branded, competes with its existing offerings, and isn’t even available for most people to use. Sometimes they even do two at once!

This experimental approach (unsuccessfully aping the old, weird Google) wasn’t a problem when there was the only pressure was the usual trickle of enterprise and startup innovations that Google could easily bat down from its high seat. But the coronavirus pandemic produced a tsunami of demand for video calling that suddenly threw the competition into gear.

As we have seen, Zoom emerged as the dark horse winner, despite serious security issues and other general murkiness.

The secret was, of course, simplicity: one or two clicks and it “just works.” While Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and other major tech companies have seen huge gains, and startup efforts like Houseparty and Discord have also spiked, Zoom’s ubiquity is such that people speak of “doing a Zoom call on Google” or “we can do a Zoom meeting on Skype.” It’s the ultimate insult.

As a strategy by Google to acquire users, this expansion of Meet is months too late, and as an attempt to salvage its dignity, years too late. After the execution of Reader and the utter boondoggle that was Google+, the company will forever be considered as having a gun in each hand, one pointed at users and one at its own foot. Sorry, do I seem bitter?

At the same time, it’s quite clear that Google has the capability to create a simple, cross-platform, universal video calling service. After all, it offered one for years: GChat.

It’s not really clear what happened to this popular, practical service, which unsurprisingly lived exactly where Meets now lives, and provided a similar (if simpler) service. Now is not the time to reopen the case of GChat or the dozens of other beloved products Google has sent to the big datacenter in the sky, but it’s worth considering what might have been the case had the company simply, as it said it wanted to, “put more wood behind fewer arrows” and made that service the one, developing and adding to it as it has with Maps and Search.

GChat would be open in every browser (in the omnipresent Gmail tab), able to launch personal or business meetings instantly (as Meet can now), and it would be on every phone as well, the way Google’s most popular apps, like Maps, are. As a (mostly) trusted, presumably encrypted chat and occasional multimedia app, it could have taken the wind out of WhatsApp and Messenger’s sails, rivaled iMessage, and perhaps even given rise to the more decentralized social network the company seemed to want to build some years back.

Ah well. “Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: ‘It might have been.’ ”

Enjoy Meet, if you can, and while it lasts.

Last week was a fairly busy week in space news, but the dominating story was preparation for the first ever commercial crew launch that will actually carry human astronauts to space. This is, in many ways, the culmination of years of work and billions of dollars spent by partners NASA and SpaceX on their part of the commercial crew program.

On May 27, SpaceX will launch two NASA astronauts on a demonstration mission to the International Space Station, and this week saw a flurry of activity to get ready for that milestone, including a fully day of press briefings by both the agency and SpaceX.

Here’s how SpaceX’s first astronaut launch will go

This is what will happen during that historic first SpaceX astronaut launch, which has been expanded to include not just a quick trip up and back to the ISS, but also a small tour of duty for Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley as temporary space station staff. It could last anywhere from one to more than three months, depending on NASA’s needs.

NASA awarded human lander contracts

NASA announced who it would be contracting to develop and build human landers for its Artemis program, which will return humans to the surface of the Moon. They actually picked three different companies, including SpaceX, Blue Origin and Dynetics, each of which will be taking very different approaches to building human-rated landers that can transport astronauts from lunar orbit to the Moon’s surface.

Blue Origin’s winning lander bid in action

Here’s a concept animation of what Blue Origin’s winning lander will look like in practice, complete with transfer and ascent vehicles built by top-tier aerospace industry partners Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin. Bezos’ space company went with an all-star lineup, which has to have reassured the agency about its chances of success.

SpaceX’s Starship passes a key development test

SpaceX’s winning bid was actually for Starship, the fully reusable multi-purpose spacecraft that it’s in the process of developing and testing. So far, the full-scale starship prototypes have not held up well to high-pressure fuel tank testing, but the latest version did ace that test, and is now getting ready for engine fire and low-altitude flight tests. There’s still a lot of work before it gets to the Moon, but now NASA is counting on SpaceX making that happen.

NASA taps small satellite maker for solar sail test

NASA wants to develop and certify solar sail technology for use in deep space missions that don’t necessarily involve transporting humans, since it’s a very cost-effective way to propel small satellites over long distances (mainly because you don’t need to take any fuel with you). The agency has now signed up NanoAvionics to build the spacecraft that will test its solar sail prototype in space.

SpaceX is using flip-up sunshades to help out Earth astronomers

SpaceX has a new, hardware-based potential solution to the phenomenon where its Starlink satellites appear very visibly in the night sky, potentially blocking out Earth-based observation of stars and other stellar bodies. The company has designed a system of hardware shades that flip out and block the sun, preventing it from reflecting off the antennas on the satellite that broadcast internet signals back to Earth. It’ll test these soon and then they could become a permanent part of Starlink’s design.

LIDAR from space could make for much better maps

Devin check in on a project at MIT that is looking to supplement road maps with lidar in order to improve even the best, machine-learning based inferred maps of roadways and transit paths. Extra Crunch subscription required.

The UK’s data protection watchdog confirmed today the government still hasn’t given it sight of a key legal document attached to the coronavirus contacts tracing app which is being developed by the NHSX, the digital transformation branch of the country’s National Health Service .

Under UK and EU law, a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) can be a legal requirement in instances where there are high rights risks related to the processing of people’s information.

Last month the European Data Protection Board strongly recommended publication of DPIAs in the context of coronavirus contacts tracing apps. “The EDPB considers that a data protection impact assessment (DPIA) must be carried out before implementing such tool as the processing is considered likely high risk (health data anticipated large-scale adoption, systematic monitoring, use of new technological solution). The EDPB strongly recommends the publication of DPIAs,” the pan-EU data protection steerage body wrote in the guidance.

Giving evidence to the human rights committee today, UK information commissioner Elizabeth Denham confirmed that her department, the ICO, is involved in advising the government on the data protection elements of the app’s design. She said the agency has been provided with some technical documents for review thus far. But, under committee questioning, she reserved any firmer assessment of the rights impacts’ of the government’s choice of app design and architecture — saying the ICO still hasn’t seen the DPIA.

“I think that is on the verge of happening,” she said when asked if she had any idea when the document would be published or provided to the ICO for review.

“Having that key document — and the requirement for the NHXS to do that, and provide that to me and to the public — is a really important protection,” Denham added. “Especially when everything’s happening at pace and we want the public to take up such an app, to help with proximity and notification.

“The privacy notice and the DPIA will both need to be shared with us and I do know that NHSX plans to also publish that so that they can show the public — be transparent and accountable for what they’re doing.”

The NHSX has given a green light for the ICO to audit the app in future, she also told the committee.

Coronavirus contacts tracing applications are a new technology which, in the UK case, entail repurposing the Bluetooth signals emitted by smartphones to measure device proximity as a proxy for calculating infection risk. The digital tracing process opens a veritable pandora’s box of rights risks, with health data, social graph and potentially location information all in the mix — alongside overarching questions about how effective such a tech will prove in battling the coronavirus.

Yesterday the BBC reported that the NHSX will trial the tracing app in the Isle of Wight this week.

“As we see the trial in the Isle of Wight we’ll all be very interested to see the results of that trial and see if it’s working the way that the developers have intended,” added Denham.

At a separate parliamentary committee hearing last week NHSX CEO, Matthew Gould, told MPs that the app could be “technically” ready to deploy nationally within two to three weeks, following the limited geographical trial.

He also said the app will iterate — with future versions potentially asking users to share location data. So while the NHSX has maintained that only pseudonymized data will be collected and held centrally — where it could be used for public health “research” purposes — there remains a possibility that data could be linked to individual identities, such as if different pieces of data are combined by state agencies and/or if the centralized store of data is hacked and/or improperly accessed.

Privacy experts have also warned of the risk of ‘mission creep’ down the tracing line.

Today the Guardian reported that the government is in talks with digital identity startups about building technology to power so called ‘immunity passports’, as another plank of its digital response to the coronavirus. Per the report, such a system could combine facial recognition technology with individual coronavirus test results so a worker could verify their COVID-19 status prior to entrance to a workplace, for example. (A spokeswomen for Onfido confirmed to TechCrunch that it’s in discussions with the government but added: “As you’d expect these are confidential until publicly shared.”)

Returning to the coronavirus tracing app, the key point is that the government has opted for a system design that centralizes proximity events on an NHSX-controlled server — when or if a user elects to self-report themselves suffering from COVID-19 symptoms (or does so after getting a confirmed diagnosis).

This choice to centralize proximity event processing elevates not just privacy and security questions but also wider human rights risks, as the committee highlighted in a series of questions to Denham and Gould today — pointing out, for example, that Denham and the ICO have previously suggested that decentralized architectures would be preferable for such high rights risk technology.

On that Denham said: “Because I’m the information commissioner, if I were to start with a blank sheet of paper [it] would start with a decentralized system — and you can understand, from a privacy and security perspective, why that would be so. But that does not, in any way, mean that a centralized system can’t have the same kind of privacy and security protections. And it’s up to the government — it’s up to NHSX — to determine what kind of design specifications the system needs.

“It’s up to government to identify what those functions and needs are and if those lead to a centralized system then the question that the DPIA has to answer is why centralized? And my next question would be how are the privacy and security concerns addressed?  That’s what a DPIA is. It’s about the mitigation of concerns.”

Apple and Google are also collaborating on a cross-platform API that will support the technical functioning of decentralized national tracing apps, as well as baking a decentralized and opt-in system-wide contacts tracing into their own platforms.

The tech giants’ backing for decentralized tracing apps raises interoperability questions and technical concerns for governments that choose to go the other way and pool data.

In additional details for the forthcoming Exposure Notification API, released today, the tech giants stipulate that apps must gain user consent to get access to the API; should only gather the minimum info necessary for the purposes of exposure notification, and only use it for a COVID-19 response; and can’t access or even seek permission to access a device’s Location Services — meaning no uploading location data (something the NHSX app may ask users to do in future, per Gould’s testimony to a different parliamentary committee last week. He also confirmed today that users will be asked to input the first three letters of their postcode).

A number of European governments have now said they will use decentralized systems for digital contacts tracing — including Germany, Switzerland and the Republic of Ireland.

The European Commission has also urged the use of privacy preserving technologies — such as decentralization — in a COVID-19 contacts tracing context.

Currently, France and the UK remain the highest profile backers of centralized systems in Europe.

But, interestingly, Gould gave the first sign today of a UK government ‘wobble’ — saying it’s not “locked” to a centralization app architecture and could change its mind if evidence emerged that a different choice would make more sense.

Though he also made a point of laying out a number of reasons that he said explained the design choice, and — in response to a question from the committee — denied the decision had been influenced by the involvement of a cyber security arm of the UK’s domestic intelligence agency, GCHQ .

“We are working phenomenally closely with both [Apple and Google],” he said. “We are trying very hard in the context of a situation where we’re all dealing with a new technology and a new situation to try and work out what the right approach is — so we’re not in competition, we’re all trying to get this right. We are constantly reassessing which approach is the right one — and if it becomes clear that the balance of advantage lies in a different approach then we will take that different approach. We’re not irredeemably wedded to one approach; if we need to shift then we will… It’s a very pragmatic decision about what approach is likely to get the results that we need to get.”

Gould claimed the (current) choice of a centralized architecture was taken because the NHSX is balancing privacy needs against the need for public health authorities to “get insight” — such as about which symptoms subsequently lead to people subsequently testing positive; or what contacts are more risky (“what the changes are between a contact, for example, three days before symptoms develop and one day before symptoms develop”).

“It was our view that a centralized approach gave us… even on the basis of the system I explained where you’re not giving personal data over — to collect some very important data that gives serious insight into the virus that will help us,” he said. “So we thought that in that context, having a system that both provided that potential for insight but which also, we believe provided serious protections on the privacy front… was an appropriate balance. And as the information commissioner has said that’s really a question for us to work out where that balance is but be able to demonstrate that we have mitigations in place and we’ve really thought about the privacy side as well, which I genuinely believe we have.”

“We won’t lock ourselves in. It may be that if we want to take a different approach we have to do some heavy duty engineering work to take the different approach but what I wanted to do was provide some reassurance that just because we’ve started down one route doesn’t mean we’re locked into it,” Gould added, in response to concern from committee chair, Harriet Harman, that there might only be a small window of time for any change of architecture to be executed.

In recent days the UK has faced criticism from academic experts related to the choice of app architecture, and the government risks looking increasingly isolated in choosing such a bespoke system — which includes allowing users to self report having COVID-19 symptoms; something the French system will not allow, per a blog post by the digital minister.

Concerns have also been raised about how well the UK app will function technically, as it will be unable to plug directly into the Apple-Google API.

While international interoperability is emerging as a priority issue for the UK — in light of the Republic of Ireland’s choice to go for a decentralized system. 

Committee MP Joanna Cherry pressed Gould on that latter point today. “It is going to be a particular problem on the island of Ireland, isn’t it?” she said.

“It raises a further question of interoperability that we’ll have to work through,” admitted Gould.

Cherry also pressed Denham on whether there should be specific legislation and a dedicated oversight body and commissioner, to focus on digital coronavirus contacts tracing — to put in place clear legal bounds and safeguards and ensure wider human rights impacts are considered alongside privacy and security issues.

Denham said: “That’s one for parliamentarians and one for government to look at. My focus right now is making sure that I do a fulsome job when it comes to data protection and security of the data.”

Returning to the DPIA point, the government may not have a legal requirement to provide the document in advance of launching the app to the ICO, according to one UK-based data protection expert we spoke to. Although he agreed there’s a risk of ministers looking hypocritical if, on the one hand, they’re claiming to be very ‘open and transparent’ in the development of the app — a claim Gould repeated in his evidence to the committee today — yet, at the same time, aren’t fully involving the ICO (given it hasn’t had access to the DPIA), and also given what he called the government’s wider “dismal” record on transparency.

Asked whether he’d expect a DPIA to have been shared with the ICO in this context and at this point, Tim Turner, a UK based data protection trainer and consultant, told us: “It’s a tricky one. NHSX have no obligation to share the DPIA with the ICO unless it’s under prior consultation where they have identified a high risk and cannot properly manage or prevent it. If NHSX are confident that they’ve assessed and managed the risks effectively, even though that’s a subjective judgement, ICO has no right to demand it. There’s also no obligation to publish DPIAs in any circumstances. So it comes down to issues of right and wrong rather than legality.

“Honestly, I wouldn’t expect NHSX to publish it because they don’t have to,” he added. “If they think they’ve done it properly, they’ve done what’s required. That’s not to say they haven’t done it properly, I have no idea. I think it’s an example of where the concept of data ethics bumps into reality — it would be a breach of the GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation] not to do a DPIA, but as long as that’s happened and we don’t have an obvious personal data breach, ICO has nothing to complain about. Denham might expect organisations to behave in a certain way or give her information that she wants to see, but if an organisation’s leadership wants to stick rigidly to what the law says, her expectations don’t have any powers to back them up.”

On the government’s claim to openness and transparency, Turner added: “This isn’t a transparent government. Their record on FOI [Freedom of Information] is dismal (and ICO’s record on enforcing to do something about that is also dismal). It’s definitely hypocritical of them to claim to be transparent on this or indeed other important issues. I’m just saying that NHSX can fall back on not having an obligation to do it. They should be more honest about the fact that ICO isn’t involved and not use them as a shield.”

AWS today announced the launch of the Elemental Link, a small hardware device that makes it easy to connect a live video source to the AWS Elemental Media Live service for broadcast-grade live video processing in the cloud. The $995 Link, which weighs in at less than a pound, is meant to allow Media Live users to connect a camera or video production setup to the AWS cloud.

The fanless Link has an Ethernet port and inputs for either an HD-SDI or HDMI cable. In the AWS Management Console, it’ll show up as a media source for MediaLive and it’ll automatically adapt the streaming video based on available bandwidth.

“In sophisticated environments, dedicated hardware and an associated A/V team can capture, encode, and stream or store video that meets these expectations,” explains AWS’s Jeff Barr in today’s announcement. “However, cost and operational complexity have prevented others from delivering a similar experience. Classrooms, local sporting events, enterprise events, and small performance spaces do not have the budget or the specialized expertise needed to install, configure, and run the hardware and software needed to reliably deliver video to the cloud for processing, storage, and on-demand delivery or live streaming.”

Amazon obviously has quite a bit of experience with streaming video, not only because of the broadcast networks it partners with but also thanks to Twitch.

The Link devices aren’t meant for Twitch streamers, though. AWS is clearly targeting these devices at more sophisticated organizations that are already using the AWS cloud for their broadcast infrastructure. And while the Link takes away some of the complexities of managing the streaming hardware, the MediaLive cloud piece isn’t exactly as trivial to manage as the more consumer-grade live streaming platforms available today. For those platforms, OBS Studio and a maybe a prosumer switcher like the Blackmagic ATEM Mini is all you need to get started with a multi-camera setup anyway.

Barr says AWS is working on a CloudFormation-powered solution that can take care of setting up the output from MediaLive and make actually doing something with the video that’s coming from the Link devices a bit easier.

Careem, the Dubai-based ride-hailing and delivery company that was acquired by Uber last year, is cutting its workforce by 31% and suspending its mass transportation business due to affects from the COVID-19 pandemic.

The layoffs will affect more than 530 employees. Employees who are laid off will receive at least three months severance pay, one month of equity vesting, and where relevant, extended visa and medical insurance through the end of the year, according to the company’s blog post announcing the reductions.

“We delayed this decision as long as possible so that we could exhaust all other means to secure Careem,” Mudassir Sheikha, the company’s co-founder and CEO, wrote in a blog post Monday.

Careem started in 2012 as a ride-hailing company aiming to compete with Uber rival in the Middle East. In recently years, Careem has diversified its business, expanding into credit transfers, food and package delivery and bus services. Uber bought Careem in March 2019 for $3.1 billion.

Since the COVId-19 pandemic hit, Careem has seen business fall by more than 80%, Sheikha said.

The company made the cuts to preserve the business and its vision to create a consumer-facing “super app” that offers a suite of lifestyle services, including a digital payment platform and last-mile delivery. Those reductions will also affect some previously announced products, namely its mass transportation feature called Careem BUS.

“The economics of the mass transportation business have improved but remain challenging, and at this time, we need to accelerate our investments in deliveries and the Super App,”  We believe Careem BUS is a much-needed offering in some of our core markets, and I predict that the service will reappear on the Careem Super App in the future.” 

The announcement comes just hours after Uber Eats said it will shutter its on-demand food business in several markets, including in the Czech Republic, Egypt, Honduras, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Uruguay and Ukraine. Uber Eats said it will transfer its business operations in the in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to Careem.

“Consumers and restaurants using the Uber Eats app in the UAE will be transitioned to the Careem  platform in the coming weeks, after which the Uber Eats app will no longer be available,” according to a regulatory filing detailing the operational shifts.

The economic effects of COVID-19 could delay Africa’s next big IPO — that of Nigerian fintech unicorn Interswitch.

If so, it wouldn’t be the first time the Lagos-based payments company’s plans for going public were postponed; the tech world has been anticipating Interswitch’s stock market debut since 2016.

For the continent’s innovation ecosystem, there’s a lot riding on the digital finance company’s IPO. After e-commerce venture Jumia, it would become only the second listing of a VC-backed African tech company on a major exchange. And Interswitch’s stock market debut — when it occurs — could bring more investor attention and less controversy to the region’s startup scene.

What is Interswitch?

TechCrunch reached out to Interswitch on the window for listing, but the company declined to comment. The tech firm’s path from startup to IPO aspirant traces back to the vision of founder Mitchell Elegbe, a Nigerian electrical engineering graduate whose entire career has pretty much been Interswitch.

Africa’s tech scene is still fairly young, but it does have a timeline with several definitive points. An early one would be the success of mobile money in East Africa, with the launch of Safaricom’s M-Pesa in 2007. Another is the notable wave of VC-backed startups and founders that launched around 2010.

With Interswtich, Elegbe pre-dated both by a number of years, founding his fintech company back in 2002 to connect Nigeria’s largely disconnected banking system. The firm became a pioneer of the infrastructure to digitize Nigeria’s economy.

Interswitch created the first electronic switch whereby Nigerian financial institutions could communicate and thereby operate ATMs and point of sales operations. The company now provides much of the rails for Nigeria’s online banking system.