Year: 2020

It’s admittedly difficult to have a comparative conversation about the iPhone SE. This device isn’t really in the same neighborhood as the iPhone 11, even though it’s furnished with the same plush carpeting and fluffy armchairs.

The iPhone SE is a value offering. Even though I will use comparatives throughout this piece to help put it in the context of Apple’s lineup, that probably doesn’t matter to the vast majority of potential customers for this device.

Simply, it’s a super value for the price, just smashing really. And a damn good phone. Alas, I am too used to no home button for it to be really appealing to me, but this is going to be a great phone for millions of people. And talk about timing on the value side of things — $399 for an iPhone with Apple’s latest power plant on board is huge.

The quick response to the iPhone SE was that it was ‘an iPhone 8 with iPhone 11 internals’. That’s…well, that’s true. There was some general sentiment of shruggery about Apple producing a phone out of their ‘spare’ parts. But, dear reader, your level of excitement about that is very likely going to be tied closely to how much you can afford to spend on a phone, how much you care about camera quality and how much of a priority the size of your phone is to you.

Let’s begin at the end.

Size and feel

It’s smaller, but not too small. If you’re keening for a 4” phone you won’t find the solace you desire here, but it’s refreshingly thin and light and very easy in the reach department. If those things are vital for you, it’s the only game in town with fresh internals.

I actually bought an old iPhone SE a while back as a pocket device, but I found that I could no longer reliably type on a 4” phone.

The new iPhone SE is just fine in that regard, and 4.7” is what I consider to be my lower limit for typing reliably. That, of course, does not apply if your hands are smaller or your fingers are shorter than mine. If that’s the case, you may still find the iPhone SE to be too large for your tastes. But alongside current iPhones it is practically petite.

Touch ID makes an appearance on the iPhone SE — fortuitously as we enter a world where many of us will be mask wearers for some time and Face ID is naturally limited in its effectiveness.

Pushing the home button is so awkward. The insane durability and utility of the swipe-able interface presented in the iPhone X jumps out hard here. Those swipe gestures are so natural and organic now that breaking them is no easy feat. If you are coming from a current Touch ID device you’ll be ok, but it will be a big adjustment from, say, an iPhone X.

There’s not much more to say because we’ve seen this design in the iPhone 8. It still feels good and modern.

I didn’t have enough time to do a serious battery life test but it seemed…fine? It’s so hard to tell the first couple of days anyway with indexing and other background stuff happening. Apple also says that the new iPhone SE is IP67 rated for up to 1 meter for 30 minutes so it’s still dunk proof, one of the biggest reducers of accidental damage to come to iPhone in the years since the first SE.

Camera

The iPhone SE’s camera system is a rare monocular addition to the lineup. It’s a single, wide-angle camera with an effective 28mm focal length. This is slightly narrower than we’re used to seeing in iPhones these days, most of which hit around 26mm. This means a slightly closer crop on photos. There is no telephoto lens, just like the iPhone XR.

The iPhone SE gets a boost from the totally new image pipeline of the iPhone 11 and 11 Pro. The ISP and the Neural Engine of the A13 processor give it more help in a variety of ways, especially given that so much of what makes up photography is in now really computer math.

Even with the painful lack of a telephoto lens, this is still one of the better smartphone cameras on the market because it has the full imaging pipeline of the iPhone 11 behind it. If it didn’t, I think that it would feel much ‘older’ in terms of imaging quality, but it speaks to how much of photography is driven by the CPU or GPU rather than the lens and sensor these days.

This proves out, as in my tests, the iPhone SE camera was much improved over the iPhone 8, and offered more portrait modes than the iPhone XR. The additional modes focus on cutting subjects out of the background. Their inclusion is tied directly to the ability of the Neural Engine (a portion of the A13’s chip dedicated to high frequency low-lift machine learning tasks) to execute segmentation masking and semantic rendering.

It also records expanded dynamic range 4k 30fps video and 4k 60fps video with cinematic stabilization.

The biggest practical benefit of the pipeline, though, is the improved Smart HDR feature which I covered in my iPhone 11 review. This really improves detail across massive tonal ranges from bright highlights to shadow detail. While it does not magically make the iPhone SE the same class of image making device that the iPhone 11 is, it goes a long way to making your average snapshot look the best it can.

It does, and should, blow away the ‘old’ iPhone SE when it comes to sharpness, color rendition and dynamic range. It’s clearly better than its predecessor and clearly better than the iPhone 8, which it will most directly replace in Apple’s lineup.

For those considering stepping downward in their choice of device, it’s worth noting here explicitly that nearly across the board the image quality was just pounded by the iPhone 11 Pro. Which is, on one level, expected. The iPhone 11 Pro is a much more expensive device.

The iPhone SE does not have Night Mode. It performs notably worse than the iPhone 11 in dark areas because of this. It does have optical stabilization on the rear camera, which helps, but don’t expect the same performance in those tough conditions as the more expensive phones.

Given that the camera performs well across most other vectors, this is probably one of the biggest things in this category to recommend the iPhone 11 over the iPhone SE. That is assuming that we’re even having that conversation. Given that so many people use the iPhone as their primary camera, however, I think it’s one worth having. If you are pretty comfortable with ‘whatever’ pictures the iPhone takes, the SE is going to deliver with flying colors. You get a bunch of technical improvements and performance leaps behind the scenes and a solid, if not amazing, optical front end. Basically, It is what it is.

Screen

I prefer the iPhone SE’s color rendition to the iPhone XR. Though, on paper, the Liquid Retina Display and the Retina HD Display should be pretty much the same performance wise, there’s always been something a bit off-putting to me about the XR’s color tone — with True Tone off and at the same brightness, the iPhone SE tends to be more neutral warm with the iPhone XR ending up on the cooler end of the spectrum.

These observations are, by definition, anecdotal. And the panels that Apple is using in the iPhone SE are not really anything special — they are run of the mill ‘fantastic’, as is usual for the iPhone. The iPhone 11 Pro’s OLED screen, of course, trumps easily on black levels, color and tone.

The main differences between the iPhone XR and the iPhone SE screen come down to the ‘edge-to-edge’ design of the XR’s wraparound display and the SE’s more standard rectangle. Well, that and tap-to-wake.

The 32% difference in total pixels between the two devices is a complete non-factor in my testing, by the way. Once again, not a huge surprise given the same 326ppi.

As with the gesture situation, I really, really miss tap-to-wake, which seems. Not being able to wake your phone to peek at the screen with a touch is a step backward in usability for anyone who has previously owned an iPhone with that feature and I highly encourage people considering a move “down” to the SE to factor in losing that utility.

If you’re coming from another iPhone without it you’ll be fine, but if you had it, you’re gonna miss it.

Greasing the chute

The iPhone SE adds lubrication to what has historically been the most frictional section of Apple’s entry chute to its ecosystem. Where Apple previously relied on the the churn of used devices being put into the market or handed down to family members as a ’spackle’ for the low-end onramp, it now has a first party offering. One that is actually an amazing value for the price.

That lower price point can be looked at through a purely pragmatic prism: it’s cheaper and it fills in gaps in Apple’s device pricing umbrella. The last time people thought Apple was making a play for affordability was back in 2013 during the subsidization era, with the iPhone 5C. That didn’t actually help with the onramp issue because Apple did not commit to a ‘cheap phone’ strategy on any real level. Instead of the low end phone everyone expected, it released a relatively high-end phone as a branching upgrade path for iPhone 5 users.

This time around, we get to see exactly how a ‘cheap’ iPhone will perform.

I know Apple executives hate that word, but there’s a great UK idiom that I’ve always loved: cheap and cheerful. That’s exactly what the iPhone SE is. Attractive, inexpensive and pleasant to use. Not a bad tagline for a device.

But what does the company get out of it, really? Is undercutting the price of the iPhone XR or other devices worth it in the long run?

To fully understand the iPhone SE’s appeal for Apple, here’s a few bullet points to consider:

• People in Apple’s universe spend money with Apple.
• Once people enter Apple’s world, they are often very satisfied and do not leave.
• People are rewarded for entry with an extremely affordable device that will be supported for 5 years or more — an easy industry peak.
• Revenue generated per U.S. iPhone hit $80 in 2018.
• Subscription revenue for U.S. mobile apps jumped 21% in 2019.
• Worldwide app stores saw record consumer spend of $120B in 2019.

Back in 2018, analyst Horace Dediu noted that Apple appeared to be emphasizing a ‘lasts longer’ strategy for iPhones. The strategy, he noted, prioritized usage and users over units sold, which became reinforced when Apple stopped reporting unit shipments data and boosted the metrics it doled out about its Services category.

Basically, the longer that Apple keeps iPhones in circulation, the less they will sell on an individual basis — but the longer they would keep people in the ecosystem.

All of this adds up to the fact that Apple stands to gain far more from making the front door wider than it does from making the threshold higher. The iPhone SE opens up new audiences for Apple. It’s an ideal phone for first time iPhone users, young buyers getting their first device and people currently on a budget.

Besides being the first attempt by Apple at this market in the modern smartphone era, it’s also the first iPhone since the company pivoted heavily into the services business. Apple saw that every iPhone needed to give the breath of life to more business for its other divisions as the market for devices entered its oxygen-saturation phase.

The iPhone SE will bring, or graduate, people into the Apple ecosystem and push money into the services category of its business for years to come. Even if they keep the device for years and never upgrade.

In a time of severe market disruption, where big consumer purchases may take a back seat, Apple has timed the iPhone SE perfectly to serve a real need. The barrier to entry is lower and customers know that they will be served by this purchase for 2-5 years with full backing of Apple’s software support and far better security and privacy track record than the rest of the field. Right now, as we’re all isolated, these pocket machines make us more connected to one another and provide us a lifeline of information about the best way to stay healthy and safe.

As smartphones became ubiquitous and then commonplace, they have taken on the role of pariah and scapegoat for a number of societal ills. The focus on superficiality, obsession with small things or even plain old sloth. Now, all of those equations have been scribbled out. Just as parents have re-thought the idea of screen time while we’re all locked up and social media has become a vital tool for maintaining our sanity rather than bragging — we’ve also come to realize that maybe the smartphone stands between us and real isolation.

The iPhone SE has come along right as Apple has an opportunity to make those benefits available to the widest audience.

This iteration of the iPhone is one of those rare moments where the business gets served, the users get served and everyone comes out of it with a good deal.

When the Air Force asked hackers to break into a F-15 fighter jet at last year’s Def Con security conference, the results were both eye-opening and eye-watering.

It was the first time hackers were allowed to work on the system to look for bugs. In just two hours, a team of seven hackers found a devastating flaw, which if exploited in the real world could have crippled a critical aircraft data system, causing untold and potentially catastrophic damage.

It was also proof that the Air Force desperately needed help.

“I left that event thinking there is a huge national asset in this level of cyber expertise that we are lacking in full in our Air Force,” said Will Roper, assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology, and logistics, in a call. As the acquisitions chief, all of the satellites that the Air Force builds fall under his purview. But the Air Force historically held the security of its systems and technology in absolute secrecy, fearing espionage or sabotage by the enemy. Roper said this was like being “stuck in Cold War business practices.”

“But in today’s world that’s not the best security posture. Just because you’re not telling the world about your vulnerabilities doesn’t mean you’re secure to go to war,” he said.

Riding the waves of last year’s success, Roper planned to bring in security researchers again at this year’s Def Con in Las Vegas — this time hack into a real orbiting satellite, hovering miles above the earth’s surface.

Space was once only for the brave and the well-funded. For decades, only a handful of governments had the resources to blast a satellite into space. But as private businesses fire tons of their own technology into orbit, space is more crowded than ever. Now, space isn’t just a level playing field for private enterprise, it’s also a potential future battleground for adversaries.

Miles above the earth, satellites may seem far from harm’s way, but Roper said the risks they face are real. “I could launch a direct ascent anti-satellite weapon that will go hit a satellite and disable it,” he said. “I could use directed energy weapons to try to blind a satellite or destroy components that allow it to collect critical information from the earth. I could jam satellite links so that you can’t communicate whatever information needs to be relayed to other important decision makers,” he said. And it’s not just the satellites in orbit. The ground stations and the communication links between the earth and the skies could be as vulnerable as the satellites themselves, Roper said.

“We don’t know the ghosts that are in our systems that come from the supply chain and the companies that assemble those and the fighters and satellites don’t either, because they don’t know to ask for them,” he said. The goal isn’t to just fix the existing bugs but also to shore up its supply chain to prevent introducing new bugs.

“We absolutely need help,” said Roper.

Working with the Defense Digital Service, which its director Brett Goldstein refers to as a “SWAT team of nerds that operates in the Pentagon,” they came up with Hack-a-Sat, a space security program that invites hackers and security researchers in to find the same bugs and flaws that the enemy wants to exploit.

It’s a massive shift from building closed and locked down systems that the Air Force is accustomed to. By switching to semi-open systems, it can open up its satellite technology to the wider community, while reserving the most classified technology to its in-house highly vetted experts and engineers.

Surprisingly, Goldstein, who reports directly to the Secretary of Defense, said convincing the folks upstairs to allow a bunch of hackers to take on a working military satellite wasn’t as difficult as it might sound. “There was enormous support for doing it and enormous support to partner with the Air Force on it,” he said. Roper agreed: “Isn’t it better to know about it prior to conflict than to naively keep our head in the sand and take that vulnerability into war at the risk of the operators who will have to use it?”

Roper and Goldstein say they want the cream of the crop to take on the satellite. In order to find the best hackers, the Air Force today launched its qualification round for the next month. The Air Force will let researchers hack a “flat-sat,” essentially a test satellite kit, which will help to weed out the right technical chops and skills needed to hack the orbiting satellite at Def Con.

Those who qualify for the next and final round get to take on the satellite as it orbits the earth.

“Our plan was to use a satellite that had a camera and to see if the team would be able to turn the camera to face the moon,” said Roper. “It would be a literal moonshot.”

What comes out at the other end is anybody’s guess. Both Roper and Goldstein said they want to be able to reveal the hackers’ eventual findings. But given that any findings may contain real-world security bugs of a working satellite, the Air Force may need to hold onto the key details to avoid a mid-orbit catastrophe.

At the time of writing, Black Hat and Def Con, the two largest security conferences that run back-to-back in Las Vegas every August, say it’s business as usual. But as the coronavirus pandemic continues with no end date in sight, the Air Force team is planning for a range of contingencies. Roper and Goldstein said they are determined to plow ahead, with an eye on virtualizing the event.

Whether or not the event is held on stage or remotely from people’s homes, the duo say the show will go on. The beauty of hacking is that often it can be done from anywhere with an internet connection.

As much as they hope that the hackers succeed in hacking the satellite, Roper said the event was as much about finding and fixing vulnerabilities as it was about “shocking our system” so that the Air Force thinks differently about security.

“I suspect there will be a generation of airmen and space professionals that will think about working with the hacker community different, so when they’re designing a satellite they’re not thinking,” said Roper. “If that generation comes to be, we will be in a much better cyber posture in the future to the better readiness of our forces.”

Firefly Aerospace has signed an agreement with Spaceflight Inc. that provides Spaceflight with the majority of the payload capacity aboard a Firefly launch vehicle scheduled to take off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California sometime in 2021. Spaceflight is a rideshare service provider for space-bound payloads, working with other companies to pool resources and combine spacecraft aboard one vehicle to defray the per-customer cost of a launch while maximizing use of the rocket’s payload capacity.

Firefly’s Alpha rocket, its first launch vehicle, will have a full payload capacity of 630 kilograms (around 1,400 lbs) to sun synchronous orbit, and Spaceflight will manage singing and integrating payloads from a number of customers to fill that capacity. This agreement also includes a provision that extends longer-term to future missions, with Spaceflight on board to help secure customers to join future Firefly Alpha launches as well.

Already, Spaceflight has emerged as a leading company in the rocket rideshare market, providing launch payload management services for 271 satellites across 29 different launches. Firefly is currently still in the testing phase for Alpha, but has made significant progress and continues its work despite the coronavirus pandemic, despite some setbacks including a fire on the test pad in January.

Firefly Aerospace still plans to fly Alpha for the first time later this year, with final acceptance testing of the vehicle’s first and second stages currently underway at the company’s Briggs, Texas facility. Should that initial test flight prove successful, the company should be in a good position to begin flying commercially in 2021.

As the pandemic pushes more investors towards examining opportunities in telemedicine, a VR startup building out a platform for remote treatment has closed on new funding.

XRHealth tells TechCrunch that they’ve raised $7 million in funding with backing from Bridges Israel, Flint Capital and 20/20 HealthCare Partners. The startup has raised $15 million to date, including a $4 million seed round complete in late 2018.

Telemedicine has long been seen as a particularly strong fit for VR tech, but adoption has been slow and uneven. Off-the-shelf consumer VR headsets have typically been difficult to use, and dedicated hardware has proven prohibitively expensive to develop.

As doctor’s offices across the country struggle to extensively adopt video conferencing software to meet with and treat patients during the COVID-19 crisis, it may seem like we are a very long way from a VR solution reaching any sort of mainstream appeal.

XRHealth founder Eran Orr has been aiming to position his company as the leading VR health software platform, courting developers to create content that can help people suffering from a variety of ailments. FDA_registered software offered by the company focuses on rehabilitation for back, shoulder and neck injuries; cognitive training; and stress relief. The team has also been exploring leveraging the social features of its platform to allow patients a way to join VR support groups moderated by physicians.

There is a separate web portal for medical professionals which offers quick insights into how patients are progressing through the software and where they are having challenges.

The software is pretty simple, but Orr is hopeful that his startup’s focus on simple exercises can help early patients alter their perception of VR tech.

“VR has been stigmatized as only being for gaming, one of our challenges is convincing the world that it can be helpful,” Orr tells TechCrunch. “By the end of the month we’ll have more than 500 trained clinicians operating our software.”

Consumer can rent the hardware directly from XRHealth. During the COVID-19 crisis, XRHealth is waiving rental fees and is working with insurance providers to waive co-pays so that people can gain access to the headset-based treatment for free. The startup currently ships Vive Focus and Pico Neo 2 headsets to patients, though the software is also compatible with Oculus hardware if patients already own VR hardware.

Philadelphia-based Fishtown Analytics, the company behind the popular open-source data engineering tool dbt, today announced that it has raised a $12.9 million Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with the firm’s general partner Martin Casada joining the company’s board.

“I wrote this blog post in early 2016, essentially saying that analysts needed to work in a fundamentally different way,” Fishtown founder and CEO Tristan Handy told me, when I asked him about how the product came to be. “They needed to work in a way that much more closely mirrored the way the software engineers work and software engineers have been figuring this shit out for years and data analysts are still like sending each other Microsoft Excel docs over email.”

The dbt open-source project forms the basis of this. It allows anyone who can write SQL queries to transform data and then load it into their preferred analytics tools. As such, it sits in-between data warehouses and the tools that load data into them on one end, and specialized analytics tools on the other.

As Casada noted when I talked to him about the investment, data warehouses have now made it affordable for businesses to store all of their data before it is transformed. So what was traditionally “extract, transform, load” (ETL) has now become “extract, load, transform” (ELT). Andreessen Horowitz is already invested in Fivetran, which helps businesses move their data into their warehouses, so it makes sense for the firm to also tackle the other side of this business.

“Dbt is, as far as we can tell, the leading community for transformation and it’s a company we’ve been tracking for at least a year,” Casada said. He also argued that data analysts — unlike data scientists — are not really catered to as a group.

Before this round, Fishtown hadn’t raised a lot of money, even though it has been around for a few years now, except for a small SAFE round from Amplify.

But Handy argued that the company needed this time to prove that it was on to something and build a community. That community now consists of more than 1,700 companies that use the dbt project in some form and over 5,000 people in the dbt Slack community. Fishtown also now has over 250 dbt Cloud customers and the company signed up a number of big enterprise clients earlier this year. With that, the company needed to raise money to expand and also better service its current list of customers.

“We live in Philadelpha. The cost of living is low here and none of us really care to make a quadro-billion dollars, but we do want to answer the question of how do we best serve the community,” Handy said. “And for the first time, in the early part of the year, we were like, holy shit, we can’t keep up with all of the stuff that people need from us.”

The company plans to expand the team from 25 to 50 employees in 2020 and with those, the team plans to improve and expand the product, especially its IDE for data analysts, which Handy admitted could use a bit more polish.

Online coding bootcamp Lambda School is the latest startup to announce layoffs, writing in a blog post that it’s made the “difficult decision” to cut 19 staff from roles across the company.

The eight members of its executive team, including CEO and founder Austen Allred, are also taking a 15% pay cut, it said.

It’s not clear what proportion of the company has been hit by the layoffs — we’ve asked Lambda for more details and will update this report with any response.

Allred said the job cuts are partly linked to coronavirus-related uncertainty affecting the hiring and financial markets for the foreseeable future — given how Lambda’s model is linked to graduated students finding employment which pays well enough for income share agreement to kick in. (The school gives students the option to pay no tuition up front and instead pay 17% of their salary for two years, once they have a job that pays a minimum of $50,000 per annum.)

However Allred also writes that the headcount reduction is related to an executive decision to dial back growth goals for 2020 — in order to put increased focus on “quality and student experience”, as he puts it.

The Y Combinator-backed startup, which launched its first courses back in 2017, has fielded plenty of controversy over its model, including criticism from students over the quality of the teaching it provides.

It has also been the target of anonymous social media accounts which have characterized its model as exploitative and even a scam. And Allred himself has frequently taken to social media to defend against repeat accusations and attacks.

In one clear misstep, the school failed to properly register with California authorities — and was last year ordered to cease teaching until it had done so. It was later fined $75,000 by California’s Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education.

Lambda has also been selling some of its income-sharing agreements (ISAs) to investors. The Verge reported in February the startup had quietly partnered with Edly — a digital marketplace that helps schools sell ISA to accredited investors. Wired reported in 2019 on an earlier sale.

Critics contend such sales undermine Lambda’s claim that its incentives align with students’ goals because it doesn’t make money on ISAs until students have been hired and are paying it back.

Although Allred was talking about the potential to sell ISAs “at the point of graduation” back in 2017 — when we asked about how it would raise enough capital to sustain the program. “We have a lot of interest in purchasing the income share agreements at the point of graduation, from investment funds and that kind of thing,” he said then, suggesting the startup was looking at a variety of ways of funding the business.

In the blog post yesterday announcing the round of job cuts, Allred does not refer directly to any of the criticism about the quality of the teaching it provides — but does appear to give tacit acknowledgement that it has at times been lacking.

“Lambda has always had a culture of ‘yes.’ Yes, try that new idea. Yes, run that experiment. Late last year, we realized that trying to do too much was actually holding Lambda School back – that we weren’t good enough at saying ‘no.’ As much as students want shiny new things, they need excellence. And excellence requires focus,” he writes.

“We’ve been moving in that direction since Q4 of last year. We talked in All Hands and at the retreat about making 2020 a time to optimize – to focus on quality and student experience.”

He goes on to list a number of internal decisions related to this claimed shift of focus — to quality and away from quantity — including pausing new EU program enrollments; pausing new Android enrollments; and putting a hold on a cybersecurity program.

Other changes he said the startup has made “over the last several months” include reducing its admissions targets; ending new enrollments in the UX program; ending new enrollments for dedicated international cohorts; and restructuring the Hiring Solutions and Outcomes teams to “more effectively support students in their job search”.

The layoffs are part of an internal reorganization to “support these new, more focused priorities”, per Allred.

“Today is a sad day, and people will react in different ways. However you react, those emotions are real, and they matter. This was one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever made in my life,” he also writes.

“I want to publicly say thank you to everyone who has worked at Lambda for what you’ve contributed. I know you’ve given parts of who you are to Lambda, and to our students. You are part of our journey. You are the reason we are here. Thank you.”

Facebook announced the launch of Messenger Kids in more than 70 new countries and new features that will gradually roll out in different markets. As schools around the world remain closed because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the new features are designed to let kids increase their contacts on the app under parental supervision.

The first new feature, called Supervised Friending, will launch today in the United States before other countries. Prior to Supervised Friending, kids needed to have their parents approve each of their Messenger Kids contacts. Supervised Friending lets parents turn on an option that allows their children to accept, reject, add and remove contacts. Parents are notified through Messenger and allowed to override any approvals through the Parent Dashboard.

The second new feature allows parents to approve other adults, like teachers, to add their kids to group chats. The third feature, now available in the U.S., Canada and Latin America, allows parents to make their child’s profile name and photo visible to a circle of users that includes friends of their kids’ contacts and their parents, children of parents’ Facebook friends who also have Messenger Kids, and the children of people parents invite to download the app.

In its announcement, Facebook said the new features were developed with its Youth Advisors, an advisory group made up of child development, media and online safety experts. In February, the company introduced new tools and features that give parents more control over their children’s activity on Messenger Kids, including an activity log that makes it easier to see who they are chatting with and what they are sharing. But, as TechCrunch’s Sarah Perez noted, Facebook’s privacy policy still gives the company plenty of room to collect personal data.

Africa focused payment startup PalmPay will waive transfer fees in Nigeria and offer direct payouts to customers who have contracted COVID-19 in the West African country.

The venture — that launched in 2019 backed by China’s Transsion —  has created the PalmPay Support Fund. The initiative will start with 100 million Naira (≈ $300K) and offer individual payments of 100,000 Naira (≈ $250) to PalmPay customers who have contracted the coronavirus.

The startup will expand the fund’s value by providing a matching gift per customer transaction for at least on month. PalmPay will also extend the fund to offer grants to organizations working on coronavirus mitigation and assistance efforts in Nigeria.

On the structure of the initiative — and adding a matching function — PalmPay aims to create interactivity with its clients on coronavirus relief efforts. “We want to provide relief…and get our customers feeling that they’re adding something to it as well,” PalmPay CEO Greg Reeve told TechCrunch on a call.

The company has created a page on its app for applications and funds dispersal. PalmPay is working with Nigeria’s Center for Disease Control on a verification process to confirm those who apply have tested positive for COVID-19, according to Reeve.

PalmPay’s initiative comes as COVID-19 has hit Africa’s largest economies and the continent’s fintech platforms have been mobilized as tools to stem the spread.

Early in March, Africa’s coronavirus numbers by country were in the single digits, but by mid-month those numbers had spiked, leading the World Health Organization’s Regional Director Dr Matshidiso Moeti to sound an alarm.

By WHO stats Tuesday there were 14,922 COVID-19 cases in Africa and 702 confirmed virus related deaths, up from 345 cases and 7 deaths on March 18.

Countries such as South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria — which happen to be Africa’s top tech hubs — have imposed social distancing and lockdown practices.

Governments and startups on the continent have also turned to measures to shift a greater volume of financial transactions to digital payments and away from cash — which the World Health Organization flagged as a conduit for the coronavirus.

It’s an option facilitated by the boom in fintech that’s occurred in Africa over the last decade. By several estimates, the continent is home to the largest share of the world’s unbanked population and has a sizable number of underbanked consumers and SMEs.

But because of that opportunity, fintech startups now receive the majority of VC funding annually in Africa, according to recent data.

Increasingly, Nigeria has become the focal point for digital finance development on the continent, boasting Africa’s largest economy and population (200 million).

The country has multiple new digital-payments entrants — see Chippercash — and several firmly rooted later-stage fintech players, such as Paga and recently confirmed unicorn Interswitch.

PalmPay launched in Nigeria last year on the back of one of Africa’s largest 2019 seed-rounds — $40 million led by Transsion. In addition to a lot of capital, the investment came with an additional competitive advantage for the startup. Through its Tecno brand, Transsion is the largest seller of smartphones in Africa and PalmPay now comes preinstalled on all Tecno devices.

While PalmPay reamins in the race to capture fintech market share in Nigeria, for now the startup looks to weather the COVID-19 crisis in the country. Like most of Nigeria — and much of the world — PalmPay’s staff are on lockdown and working from home, according to the company’s CEO.

Commercial times in the country could be tough into the next year. Nigeria has already seen a reduction in economic activity as a result of COVID-19, and as a major oil producer, the country will face an additional economic blow due to the drop in demand the pandemic has dealt to petroleum markets.

A trend that could come out of the crisis that benefits fintech players, according to PalmPay CEO Greg Reeve, is greater digital finance adoption in Nigeria. In the past, the country has shown a cash-is-king reluctance by parts of the population to use mobile payments and lagged Africa’s digital finance leaders Kenya and South Africa.

The current health crisis could shift consumer habits in Nigeria, according to Reeve. “We’ve seen an increased use in our service, whilst people aren’t able to move around,” he said.

“There is a natural uptake right now for services like mobile money and I think when people start to use it, they’ll continue to use it when the COVID-19 ceases.”

Vivaldi, the browser launched by former Opera CEO Jon von Tetzchner, has long positioned itself as a highly customizable alternative to Chrome and Firefox for power users. Today, the team is launching version 3.0 of its desktop browser, with built-in tracker and ad blockers, and it’s bringing its Android browser out of beta.

I’ve long been a fan of Vivaldi, but the company was relatively late to the tracking protection game. Now, it’s doubling down on this, by integrating a blocklist powered by DuckDuckGo’s Tracker Radar.

Like competing browsers, Vivaldi offers three blocking levels that users can easily toggle on and off for individual websites. Those blocking levels are relatively blunt, though, with the options to either block trackers, block trackers and ads or disable blocking. Competitors like Edge offer slightly more nuanced options for blocking trackers, though I would expect Vivaldi to adopt a similar scheme over time.

For the most part, the Vivaldi team always said that it would delegate ad blocking to extensions, though it added the option to block highly intrusive ads in the middle of last year. And while the company still notes that blocking trackers provides enough privacy protection, with today’s update, it now also gives users the option to block virtually all ads without the need to download any extensions (as a Chromium-based browser, Vivaldi supports all Chrome extensions).

Also new in the desktop version is a clock. Yes. A clock. That may sound like a weird feature, given that your desktop of choice surely features a clock, but like all things Vivaldi, you can a) remove it and b) there is actually some usefulness here as you can, for example, set up timers if you’re into Pomodoro or similar productivity techniques. And because it is Vivaldi, you can set all kinds of custom alarms and countdown timers, too.

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As for the mobile version, which is now generally available for Android 5 and higher, the most important fact is probably that it exists, given how most users expect to be able to easily sync their bookmarks, passwords and browsing history between mobile and desktop. As with other browsers, you can choose what you want to sync.

Like the desktop version, Vivaldi for Android now also features a tracking and ad blocker. There’s also a built-in screenshot tool and support for Vivaldi notes, which also sync between devices.

The mobile browser isn’t quite as flexible as the desktop version, with its plethora of options, but that’s probably not what you’re looking for in a mobile browser anyway. But having a stable mobile browser that can accompany the desktop version is a big deal for Vivaldi and may give users who were on the sidelines a reason to take another look at it.

Out of the box, there’s no other browser that will give you the kind of flexibility Vivaldi does.

Worldwide, there are numerous efforts underway to create a vaccine for COVID-19. Without one, we are likely to see some form of social distancing in place for the foreseeable future. And experts like Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, think it’ll take at least a year before we’ll have a vaccine that can be approved for public use. MigVax, an Israeli startup that’s affiliated with the Migal Galilee Research Institute, thinks it can speed up this process by quite a bit, in part, because it had already worked on building a framework for the Infectious Bronchitis Virus, a coronavirus that infects chickens, and that has proven to be safe in animals.

I think everybody is currently skeptical when it comes to COVID-19 vaccines, and in Israel alone there are multiple efforts underway, but crowdfunding platform OurCrowd is putting $12 million into MigVax to help the team accelerate its efforts to develop an oral vaccine.

“The experiments we have carried out so far show that because the vaccine does not include the virus itself, it will be safe to use in immune-suppressed recipients, and has fewer chances of side effects,” said David Zigdon, CEO of the Migal Galilee Research Institute. “It uses a protein vector that can form and secrete a chimeric soluble protein which carries the viral antigen into tissue and causes the production of antibodies against the virus by the immune system. We are now working to adjust our generic vaccine system to COVID-19. Using a fermentation process, MigVax aims to have the material ready for clinical trials within a few months.”

MigVax argues that its approach would offer significant advantages in manufacturing and cost because it uses bacterial fermentation to produce the vaccine, a process that’s generally well understood and commonly used today. “We are already in talks with major strategic partners able to manufacture at high volume and distribute globally,” the company tells us.

“We are humbled by the opportunity to invest in this company, which means so much to so many people,” said OurCrowd CEO Jon Medved today. “The race for a COVID-19 vaccine is about saving countless lives, and we are grateful to be able to support this important effort.”

When I last talked to Medved earlier this year, shortly before COVID-19 was officially deemed a pandemic, he was already thinking about how his existing portfolio companies could play a role in fighting the disease. No doubt, though, whoever manages to first develop a safe vaccine also stands to gain financially, and that’s not something most VC firms would turn down, so it’s no surprise that we now see funding for startups in this space, too.