Year: 2020

Plasma taken from the blood of recovered COVID-19 patients stands a real change of being one of the more effective short-term measures feasible in the ongoing effort to control the global coronavirus pandemic. The FDA has issued a broad call for donation from eligible individuals, and now Microsoft has built an online screening tool on behalf of the CoVIg-19 Plasma Alliance (which is funded in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation).

The ‘CoVIg-19 Plasma Bot’ that Microsoft created for the foundation is just the latest COVID-19-related bot built by Microsoft using its technology, and its symptom self-checker for the CDC was one of the earliest large-scale efforts of its kind in the U.S. The Plasma Bot takes you through a series of simple questions to determine your eligibility, from the perspective of both your ability to meet the actual biological and health requirements, to your willingness and a ability to participate in the plasma collection process itself at a donation center.

Use of convalescent plasma, or the liquid part of blood taken from people who have had, and subsequently fully recovered from, COVID-19, is a key treatment avenue being explored by a number of different scientists and researchers. The investigations into its use take two main paths: First, direct use of the plasma injected into coronavirus patients and high-risk individuals in order to boost their own immune system for either prevention or faster recovery; and development of what are known as hyperimmune therapies, which concentrate the antibodies from donated plasma to develop treatments that are potentially easier and more effective to administer at scale.

The biggest bottleneck to overcome for the trials and therapeutics in development related to convalescent plasma is definitely the plasma itself, which can only come from patients who’ve had COVID-19 and are now fully recovered and healthy, and who also meet other standard, existing requirements for donating blood and plasma.

Unlike a lot of other treatments under investigation and development to address COVID-19, convalescent plasma has been shown to have been effective in treating other respiratory infections, and it has a long history of use for such applications.

This week in space was pretty active, with some startup news – including timing for a historic first – as well as scientific discoveries and innovation in the time of lockdown.

Who better than NASA to demonstrate how science can get done remotely, since the agency is used to conducting experiments from millions of miles away.

SpaceX will launch its historic first astronaut mission on May 27

SpaceX and NASA are now targeting a specific date and time for their first ever astronaut launch, the final demonstration mission in the Commercial Crew program before SpaceX’s Crew Dragon is fully certified for regular transport of human passengers to the International Space Station. The launch will happen on May 27, at 4:32 PM EDT if all stays on target.

First in-space satellite life extension was a success

The first-ever mission to use a dedicated vehicle to extend the life of a satellite on orbit worked as planned. Northrop Grumman’s first Mission Extension Vehicle (MEV-1) has successfully changed the orbit of an Intelsat spacecraft, extending its useful life another five years.

NASA’s daring Mars sample return plan explained

NASA plans to bring back a piece of Mars with its next robotic rover mission to the red planet, and now it’s explained how it proposes to do that. It’s a mission that will involve many firsts, including the first-ever spacecraft launch from the surface of Mars.

And Perseverance… perseveres

The Mars rover for that sample collection mission is called ‘Perseverance,’ and NASA is persevering wits plans to launch that mission, with preparations continuing despite the COVID-19 pandemic. NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine went into a bit more detail in a new interview about what work continues, along with why and how.

Meanwhile another rover adapts to WFH life

NASA’s current Mars rover, Curiosity, is operating actively despite work-from-home restrictions – with NASA engineers actually running the rover on the red planet from their home office setups. Rover was already remotely operated, so moving from the control room to the living room isn’t that much of an additional stretch.

New Earth-sized temperate exoplanet found

It hits the sweet spot for both size and temperature, but we still have a lot to learn about new exoplanet Kepler-1649c before we can say for certain whether it has all the conditions that would enable life. Chief among those is the composition of its atmosphere, but the discovery of the planet on its own is still cause for scientific celebration.

The first private space cargo mission has a landing site and launch date

Intuitive Machines is set to be the first private company to send a lunar lander to the Moon, as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. The launch will aim for a spot in the Moon’s largest valley, and carry instruments that will provide valuable info and testing for our own human return to the lunar surface in 2024.

The Australia government has said it will adopt a mandatory code to require tech giants such as Google and Facebook to pay local media for reusing their content. The requirement for them to share ad revenue with domestic publishers was reported earlier by Reuters.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg published an opinion article in The Australian Friday — writing that an earlier plan to create a voluntary code by November this year to govern the relationship between digital platforms and media businesses — in order to “protect consumers, improve transparency and address the power imbalance between the parties” — had failed owing to “insufficient progress”.

“On the fundamental issue of payment for content, which the code was seeking to resolve, there was no meaningful progress and, in the words of the ACCC [Australia’s competition commission], “no expectation of any even being made”,” he wrote.

The ACCC has been tasked with devising the code which Frydenberg said will include provisions related to value exchange and revenue sharing; transparency of ranking algorithms; access to user data; presentation of news content; and penalties and sanctions for non-compliance.

“The intention is to have a draft code of conduct released for comment by the end of July and legislated shortly thereafter,” he added. “It is only fair that the search engines and social media giants pay for the original news content that they use to drive traffic to their sites.”

The debate around compensation for tech giants’ reuse of (and indirect monetization of) others’ editorial content — by displaying snippets of news stories on their platforms and aggregation services — is not a new one, though the coronavirus crisis has likely dialled up publisher pressure on policymakers as advertiser marketing budgets nose-dive globally and media companies stare down the barrel of a revenue crunch.

Earlier this month France’s competition watchdog ordered Google to negotiate in good faith with local media firms to pay for reusing their content.

The move followed a national law last year to transpose a pan-EU copyright reform that’s intended to extend rights to news snippets. However instead of paying French publishers for reusing their content Google stopped displaying content that’s covered by the law in local search and Google News.

France’s competition watchdog said it believes the unilateral move constitutes an abuse of a dominant market position — taking the step of applying an interim order to force Google to the negotiating table while it continues to investigate.

Frydenberg’s article references the French move, as well as pointing back to a 2014 attempt by Spain which also created legislation seeking to make Google to pay for snippets of news reused in its News aggregator product. In the latter case Google simply pulled the plug on its News service in the market — which it remains closed in Spain to this day…

“We are under no illusions as to the difficulty and complexity of implementing a mandatory code to govern the relationship between the digital platforms and the news media businesses. However, there is a need to take this issue head-on,” Frydenberg goes on. “We are not seeking to protect traditional media companies from the rigour of competition or technological disruption.

“Rather, to create a level playing field where market power is not misused, companies get a fair go and there is appropriate compensation for the production of original news content.”

Reached for comment on the Australian government’s plan, a Google spokesperson sent us this statement:

We’ve worked for many years to be a collaborative partner to the news industry, helping them grow their businesses through ads and subscription services and increase audiences by driving valuable traffic. Since February, we have engaged with more than 25 Australian publishers to get their input on a voluntary code and worked to the timetable and process set out by the ACCC. We have sought to work constructively with industry, the ACCC and Government to develop a Code of Conduct, and we will continue to do so in the revised process set out by the Government today.

Google continues to argue that it provides ample value to news publishers by directing traffic to their websites, where they can monetize it via ads and/or subscription conversions, saying that in 2018 alone it sent in excess of 2BN clicks to Australian news publishers from Australian users.

It also points out publishers can choose whether or not they wish their content to appear in Google search results. Though, in France, it’s worth noting the competition watchdog took the view that Google declaring that it won’t not pay to display any news could put some publishers at a disadvantage vs others.

The dominance of Google’s search engine certainly looks to be a key component for such interventions, along with Facebook’s grip on digital attention spans.

On this, Frydenberg’s articles cites a report by the country’s competition commission which found more than 98 per cent of online searches on mobile devices in Australia are with Google. While Facebook was found to have some 17M local users who connected to its platform for at least half an hour a day. (Australia’s total population is around 25M.)

“For every $100 spent by advertisers in Australia on online advertising, excluding classifieds, $47 goes to Google, $24 to Facebook and $29 to other participants,” Frydenberg also wrote, noting that the local online ad market is worth around $9BN per year — growing more than 8x since 2005.

Reached for comment on the government plan for a mandatory code for reuse of news content, Facebook sent us the following statement — attributed to Will Easton, MD, Facebook Australia and New Zealand:

We’re disappointed by the Government’s announcement, especially as we’ve worked hard to meet their agreed deadline. COVID-19 has impacted every business and industry across the country, including publishers, which is why we announced a new, global investment to support news organisations at a time when advertising revenue is declining. We believe that strong innovation and more transparency around the distribution of news content is critical to building a sustainable news ecosystem. We’ve invested millions of dollars locally to support Australian publishers through content arrangements, partnerships and training for the industry and hope the code will protect the interests of millions of Australians and small businesses that use our services every day.

If enough countries pursue a competition-flavored legislative fix against Google and Facebook to try to extract rents for media publishers it may be more difficult for them to dodge some form of payment for reusing news content. Though the adtech giants still hold other levers they could pull to increase their charges on publishers.

Indeed, their duel role — involved in both the distribution, discovery and monetization of online content and ads, controlling massive ad networks as well as applying algorithms to create content hierarchies to service ads alongside — has attracted additional antitrust scrutiny in certain markets.

After launching a market study of Google and Facebook’s ad platforms last July, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) raised concerns in an interim report in December — kicking off a consultation on a range of potential inventions from breaking up the platform giants to limiting their ability to set self-serving defaults and enforcing data sharing and/or feature interoperability to help rivals compete.

Per its initial findings, the CMA said there were “reasonable grounds” for suspecting serious impediments to competition in the online platforms and digital advertising market. However the regulator has so far favored making recommendations to government, to feed a planned “comprehensive regulatory framework” to govern the behaviour of online platforms, rather than taking it upon itself to intervene directly.

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.

Late last week a Chinese company called Kingsoft Cloud filed to go public in the United States. The cloud infrastructure business intends to list on the Nasdaq under the symbol “KC,” with J.P. Morgan, UBS and Credit Suisse helping out with running the deal.

Kingsoft Cloud has a $100 million placeholder figure in its F-1 filing, giving us an idea of its expectations for the size of the public offering. According to Crunchbase data, Kingsoft Cloud raised nearly $1 billion while private.

There are a few questions to answer:

1. Does Kingsoft compete with Alibaba’s cloud projects that the Chinese tech giant just promised to spend $28 billion building out?
2.  Is it an economically viable business?
3. What are we supposed to think about an IPO in this economy?

What does Kingsoft Cloud do?

The best founders seek out great mentors and guidance from folks who know best, but during the coronavirus pandemic, asking for help when it’s needed is critical for all entrepreneurs.

Ureeka, a startup founded by Melissa Bradley, David Jakubowski and Rob Gatto, is looking to provide that mentorship and guidance through their platform, which just closed on an $8.6 million funding round from Bullpen Capital, Chicago Ventures and Salesforce Ventures.

“There is an intentionality in our business to go after what we see as the fastest growing, largest and most interesting market opportunity, which is not the Harvard and MIT pedigree, but underrepresented entrepreneurs,” said Bradley. “Small and medium businesses account for 99 percent of all business in this country and there has been a real missed opportunity around serving them.”

The company says that female led venture-backed business performance is 63 percent higher than investments in all male teams, while the same businesses have 12 percent higher revenue and use 33 percent less capital, with a 15-25 percent lower failure rate. Since the recent recessions, businesses owned by people of color are the fastest growing segment, with 38 percent growth between 2008 and 2012, according to Ureeka. Meanwhile, Hispanic-owned businesses have seen 46 percent growth from 2007 to 2012, with $700 billion in sales globally, creating 8 million jobs with a total payroll of $254 billion, the startup says.

Ureeka pairs these entrepreneurs with mentors and coaches to get answers to their most pressing questions. The idea for the startup came when the cofounders were judging a pitch competition in Michigan and got to talking about the challenges associated with starting a company, particularly for underrepresented founders.

The Ureeka founders noted that black, hispanic and women founders begin businesses with approximately half of the capital that white men do, on average, and that loan rejection is three times higher for minority entrepreneurs than their white counterparts.

“In talking with Melissa, I realized that there are some basic things I was taking for granted,” said Jakubowski, formerly Head of Data & Analytics, Emerging Business & Partnerships at Facebook . “For example, I could pick up the phone and have an answer to my question in 30 minutes.”

After testing for months, Jakubowski and Bradley (Managing Director of Project 500, adjunct professor at Georgetown’s Business school and presidential appointee under both President Clinton and President Obama) launched Ureeka to give access to mentorship to underrepresented small and medium business owners, agnostic of sector or region.

These entrepreneurs can hop on the platform with a question and get an answer from a mentor or coach in under two hours. Mentors, experts from just about any sector of business, give their time to the platform for free. Coaches, on the other hand, are paid contractors (many of whom have their own business or operational position at a large company). Ureeka members can also start up conversations with other members, and access on-demand webinar-style content on topics that are common to the whole community, such as adapting to the coronavirus pandemic.

Ureeka has more than 200 mentors on the platform, many of whom hail from companies like Facebook, Snap, Salesforce, Google, and Adobe, among others. Ureeka members can also pay a premium ($3,000/year) to have access to a dedicated coach, who can then follow along with the various questions and issues that arise and ultimately skip over the exposition and context-gathering part of the conversation. Those that opt for a dedicated coach get two hours each month of one-to-one video chat with their coach.

Alongside the funding announcement, Ureeka is also announcing that it will be facilitating the SMB grant programs from Facebook and Salesforce. Facebook’s grant program will provide $100 million to SMBs in the United States, and Salesforce’s Small Business Grants will provide $10,000 individually to SMBs.

According to the company, Ureeka members see 2x revenue growth once they’re connected to mentors and coaches, and the founders noted that many Ureeka members graduate to mentors or coaches and pay it forward to new members.

The for-profit business charges $200/year for members to join, and the company takes less than 15 percent margin. Ureeka is also waiving its fee for all businesses impacted by coronavirus through 2020.

The company also has a vendor partnership program, helping members find the right vendor for their need without being overwhelmed by thousands of Google search results. In fact, many vendors are Ureeka members themselves, creating a virtuous circle within the Ureeka community. Big corporations that would like to be included in the Ureeka vendor program must provide a dedicated line of communication for the Ureeka community.

Twins have long played a role in the world of medical research, specifically in the area of clinical trials, where they can help measure the effectiveness of a therapy by applying a control to one of a genetically-similar pair. Today, a startup founded by a former principal scientist at Pfizer, which has developed a way of digitising this concept through the use of AI, is announcing some funding to further its efforts. Unlearn.AI, which has built a machine learning platform that builds “digital twin” profiles of patients that become the controls in clinical trials — is announcing that it has raised $12 million in a Series A round.

The round is being led by 8VC with previous investors DCVC, DCVC Bio and Mubadala Capital Ventures also participating.

The startup’s DiGenesis platform is first being applied to neurological diseases, specifically Alzheimer’s Disease and Multiple Sclerosis, where effective treatment options remain an elusive goal and it has been hard to build clinical trials around patients with already-impacted health.

Although Unlearn.AI is not working on anything close to medicines related to the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s a timely reminder of why improving clinical trials is important. We’re now in an urgent race to find vaccines and treatments for this new virus, and that highlights the need for more efficient approaches to trials, and that is an area where AI could prove to be a boost.

Unlearn does not disclose who its commercial partners are today, nor how far they’ve come with rolling out active, live trials. The funding will be used to inch closer to that point, it seems.

“This new financing marks an important milestone in our growth and will contribute to the significant progress we are making with regulators and with our commercial partners, who are already running studies with Digital Twins and demonstrating their value in generating robust evidence and increasing the potential for trial success,” said Charles K. Fisher, Ph.D., founder and CEO of Unlearn.AI, in a statement.

“Clinical trials are facing a number of persistent challenges that have only been exacerbated in recent weeks. With support from our forward-thinking investors and industry partners, we are excited to continue growing our exceptional team and advancing the science behind our first-of-its-kind Digital Twin approach.”

Fisher’s background is one that falls squarely at the nexus of technology and medical research. In addition to time spent as a principal scientist at pharma giant Pfizer, he has also worked at Leap Motion, and those roles followed years of studying and researching biophysics in academia.

Unlearn approaches the idea of building these so-called digital twins as a classic machine learning problem, using “clinical trial datasets from thousands of patients to build the disease-specific machine learning models used to create Digital Twins and their corresponding virtual medical records.”

These are more than simple medical profiles: they match people according to demographics, lab tests and biomarkers. The idea is that by building AI-based twins, there is less of a need to find similar actual pairs of people — actual twins, even — to run tests and controls.

Unlearn has been working on its platform since 2017, but the use of twins (and the pair’s very close genetic makeups in medical research) to track pathology and treatments goes back decades, and interestingly one of the novel coronavirus tracking apps that has seen some strong traction was borne out of a long-term twins study run out of Kings College Hospital in London working with Stanford and Massachusetts General Hospital in the US.

The growth of using AI to build “people” to run the effects of drugs also follows a much bigger theme of using computers and algorithms to test and create chemical combinations and therapies that would have in the past taken much longer, and cost much more, to run out manually. (Another example of where this is being applied is in the world of product development, where consumer goods companies are using AI platforms to formulate new soaps and other goods.)

“Unlearn’s pioneering use of Digital Twins will limit the number of patients that need to go on placebo while also reducing overall trial enrollment time,” said 8VC Principal, Dr Francisco Gimenez, in a statement. “As investors at the intersection of healthcare and technology, we’re passionate about companies that pair cutting-edge computational techniques and innovative business models to meaningfully improve patient care. 8VC is excited to partner with Unlearn to bring about the biggest change in the drug approval process since the RCT.” Gimenez is joining the board of the startup with this round.

Uber is introducing two new types of services, the company announced this week, including Uber Direct and Uber Connect. Direct is a delivery platform for retail items, while Connect is a peer-to-peer package delivery service, for sending goods to family and friends. This marks the most aggressive foray yet for Uber into courier services, after it already introduced grocery items to its Uber Eats platform as the coronavirus pandemic continues to suppress its ride-hailing business.

Uber has already also introduced new extensions of its platform for transporting personal protective equipment to front-line workers, and Eats is also delivering convenience items in some markets in addition to grocery goods. The Direct and Connect services will likewise open in select cities initially, and the service looks very different depending on where it’s in use. IN NYC, for instance, it’s delivering over-the-counter medications in partnership with Cabinet, whereas in Portugal it’s essentially supplementing the public postal service with general mail parcel delivery.

Uber Connect provides same-day, on-contact delivery from one person to another, which Uber positions as a way for people to send care packages, supplies, games and other quarantine daily staples with their friends and family. It’s launching in over 25 cities across Australia, Mexico and the U.S. to start. At heart, Connect isn’t much different from Uber’s basic rider service, but instead of transporting people door-to-door, it’s moving stuff.

Both of these are being introduced today but will evolve over time as Uber sees how usage proceeds, and what people want out of the service. Stepping up on the goods delivery front should also mean bolstering utilization rates for drivers, and continued income in the face of massive decreases in demand for general rider transportation services, even as Uber Eats sees a big usage spike as more people seek direct-to-door food delivery.

Uber is introducing two new types of services, the company announced this week, including Uber Direct and Uber Connect. Direct is a delivery platform for retail items, while Connect is a peer-to-peer package delivery service, for sending goods to family and friends. This marks the most aggressive foray yet for Uber into courier services, after it already introduced grocery items to its Uber Eats platform as the coronavirus pandemic continues to suppress its ride-hailing business.

Uber has already also introduced new extensions of its platform for transporting personal protective equipment to front-line workers, and Eats is also delivering convenience items in some markets in addition to grocery goods. The Direct and Connect services will likewise open in select cities initially, and the service looks very different depending on where it’s in use. IN NYC, for instance, it’s delivering over-the-counter medications in partnership with Cabinet, whereas in Portugal it’s essentially supplementing the public postal service with general mail parcel delivery.

Uber Connect provides same-day, on-contact delivery from one person to another, which Uber positions as a way for people to send care packages, supplies, games and other quarantine daily staples with their friends and family. It’s launching in over 25 cities across Australia, Mexico and the U.S. to start. At heart, Connect isn’t much different from Uber’s basic rider service, but instead of transporting people door-to-door, it’s moving stuff.

Both of these are being introduced today but will evolve over time as Uber sees how usage proceeds, and what people want out of the service. Stepping up on the goods delivery front should also mean bolstering utilization rates for drivers, and continued income in the face of massive decreases in demand for general rider transportation services, even as Uber Eats sees a big usage spike as more people seek direct-to-door food delivery.

Facebook’s dedicated Gaming app is now live on Android, months before its planned June release. The social media giant pushed the app out two months prior to its scheduled unveiling amid a global pandemic that’s left people all over the world isolated at home, rapidly burning through entertainment options.

The New York Times announced the upcoming release in an exclusive over the weekend, noting that Facebook’s massive gaming investment has culminated in more 700 million of the sites’s 2.5 billion users actively playing games through the platform monthly. The launch of a devoted app is a clear next step for content that has, until now, been the domain of the site’s Gaming tab.

Social engagement is the focus for the app (naturally), which will be getting an iOS version at some point in the near future (pending Apple approval). “It’s entertainment that’s not just a form of passive consumption but entertainment that is interactive and brings people together,” the app’s head Fidji Simo told the paper, later adding, “We’re seeing a big rise in gaming during quarantine.”

Twitch and YouTube are among the biggest competitors for the app’s gaming Go Live streaming feature. Facebook has already has a massive platform in its own Live offering, which is currently seeing high levels of use as isolated users seek some manner of human connection during the COVID-19 shutdown. With Go Live, users can share gaming streams directly to their Facebook page.

Live streaming is the highlighted feature upon launching the app, while a second tab offers game discovery both through your friends’ activities and a by category breakdown. A final tab sports a chat platform.

The app’s arrival comes after a year and a half of testing in various markets, including Latin America and Southeast Asia. Gaming is launching without ad support, though Facebook tells the Times that it plans to monetize by taking commission off of “stars” — donations viewers send to streamers.

It remains to be seen how the Twitch/YouTube method will translate for a platform traditionally more focused on casual gaming titles like Words With Friends. Not all of the service’s attempts to spin off features as devoted apps have been successful, but the rushed timing could give the service an extra boost, as users seek out new forms of content and socializing during a global shutdown. 

Good morning and welcome back to TechCrunch’s Equity Monday, a brief jumpstart for your week. Regular Equity episodes still drop each and every Friday morning, so if you’ve listened to the show over the years, don’t worry — we’re only adding. In fact, last week’s show (with Danny Crichton and Natasha Mascarenhas) was a blast, and you should check it out.

This morning, however, we had a lot to get through, so let’s go over the show’s rundown:

• Changes are afoot in Israel regarding employee comp and startup valuations.
• The UK is coming to the aid of its startups at a notable cost.
• Alibaba is dropping serious coin on new cloud infra, reminding us that there’s more to the world than Washington state.
• Alan, a French insurtech startup, has raised $54.4 million.
• It’s earnings week, with a number of major tech companies joining other large American companies in reporting results. Q1 2020 is whatever. What everyone wants to know is how bad the rest of the year is going to be.

And, finally, Marc’s latest essay. I should probably write about it more broadly, but as we said this morning: “Aspirational construction of the future is a concept that many people associate with America,” and demanding that we harken back to our halcyon days is no sin. That said, we’ll need to do work as a country to set the groundwork needed to make an explosion in entrepreneurship and building possible — like providing healthcare to all citizens so that folks can quit their jobs without losing care, making room for new businesses to rise.

Still, it’s good for Marc to get hyped up and mad at our current state, and he has the money to do something about it. So, let’s see what he does about it.