Year: 2020

One month after President Trump declared a national emergency and announced commitments from some of the nation’s largest companies to help expand testing capabilities in the U.S., most regions still lack access to the necessary tests and equipment they require.

When the president stepped to the podium in the Rose Garden in March surrounded by executives from the country’s largest pharmacies and retailers, including Target, Walmart, CVS and Walgreens, the expectation was that the nation would soon see an explosion in testing facilities that could provide the kind of population-scale testing necessary to manage a nationwide outbreak.

President Trump also said at the time that a team of 1,700 Google engineers was developing a triage tool to assess whether someone should be tested for COVID-19 and direct them to sites where those tests could be administered.

The reality has fallen far short of those expectations. Google was not responsible for the development of the triage tool that the president described. The development effort was undertaken by another subsidiary of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, and had completed 3,700 tests by the end of March. The company was able to set up four testing sites across California in two weeks.

The efforts to make screening available at pharmacies around the country is also lagging. Last week, Walgreens said that it would be expanding its drive-through testing capabilities to 15 sites in seven states. That’s up from a single site at the end of March. Each site can test 3,000 people per day the company said. And CVS is expanding from a single site in Massachusetts to four sites with two in Massachusetts, and one each in Rhode Island and Georgia. Its sites have capacity to test 1,000 people per day.

Meanwhile, Target has not opened a single facility.

“At this time, federal, state and local officials continue to lead the planning for additional testing sites,” a Target spokesperson told National Public Radio in a statement. “We stand committed to offering our parking lot locations and supporting their efforts when they are ready to activate.”

Both CVS and Walgreens are using Abbott’s new ID NOW COVID-19 test, but neither company is testing at the scale that medical professionals have said is appropriate to proceed with a broad re-opening of the U.S. economy (which is something that some pundits were advocating for as soon as early May).

In fact, the speed of testing lags across the country in both state and private facilities, in part because only the people who are presenting with severe COVID-19 symptoms are getting tested for the disease.

As Vox reported over the weekend, the U.S. has tested at 74% the rate of South Korea — where testing and tracing has largely kept the outbreak from becoming too severe — and is not even approaching the level of testing of other hard-hit countries like Canada, Germany, and Italy.

Part of the problem is a lack of the necessary equipment to perform tests at the scale required. States are racing to find vital personal protective equipment for the healthcare workers most at risk of exposure to COVID-19, but they’re also running out of the equipment they need to test patients.

Just today the Los Angeles Times reported that New York may run out of the testing swabs it needs. “It’s still an atmosphere of tremendous scarcity,” the Times quoted Mayor Bill de Blasio saying. “I spoke with the president and other key members of the administration … this is the crucial need.”

Earlier today Ford announced a partnership with Thermo Fisher aimed at reducing shortages of test kits, and personal protective equipment, but it’s far from the only company to begin working on that particular shortage. Last month, privately held 3D printing technology developers like Carbon, Markforged, and FormLabs all announced efforts to begin manufacturing both personal protective equipment and the needed test swabs to conduct COVID-19 testing.

But even with more swabs, there may not be enough testing capacity to meet increased demand.

Already, Quest Diagnostics, one of the private testing firms that process COVID-19 tests, has a two-day backlog of cases, according to its latest statement on testing.

Quest, LabCorp and the lobbying group that represents them in Washington have approached the White House about providing more support to increase their ability to test people who are potentially infected, according to an NPR report.

In early March, the companies approached the government with three requests: funding to build new facilities for testing; standards to ensure that testing is conducted appropriately and administered to the right people; and support to receive the necessary supplies to conduct tests. To date, the companies haven’t received that guidance or support, according to NPR.

Testing remains the lynchpin for any successful attempts to successfully contain the spread of COVID-19, according to a Duke University report co-authored by Scott Gottlieb, a former FDA commissioner and partner at the multi-billion dollar venture capital New Enterprise Associates.

“The capacity to conduct rapid diagnostic testing for everyone with COVID-19 symptoms and those with exposures or at higher risk of contracting or transmitting the virus (health care workers, those in congregate settings), with a robust sentinel surveillance system that routinely monitors for infection among samples of the population to enable early identification of small outbreaks, particularly in vulnerable populations,” is the first step of any successful containment plan, according to the study.

Even the efforts by Google and Apple to develop a contact tracing technology need to be supported by more robust testing capacity.

So far, the U.S. hasn’t even been able to meet the testing goals that the president had set in the Rose Garden. “It’ll going very quickly,” he said of the approval process for new tests. “It’s going very quickly — which will bring, additionally, 1.4 million tests on board next week and 5 million within a month. I doubt we’ll need anywhere near that.”

On that Friday in March when the president made his Rose Garden address, 2,006 people had tested positive for the disease and 42 people had died.

To date, the U.S. has performed 2.935 million tests, with 576,774 positive cases, 2,358,232 negative cases, and 17,159 cases waiting approval. And 23,369 people in the U.S. have died from the disease.

Layoffs have struck the startup world swiftly, hurting hospitality and travel startups, as well as recruitment and scooter companies. New data shows that some of those layoffs, brought on by COVID-19, might be disproportionately impacting satellite campuses.

By nature, satellite offices are secondary to a startup’s headquarters. Opening smaller offices is a strategic move when a company gets a fresh round of funding or wants to expand to a new market. We’ve seen satellite offices pop up in cities like Portland, Phoenix or Austin, which has satellite offices for Apple, Facebook and Oracle, for example.

While most layoffs are coming from companies whose headquarters are located in the main entrepreneurial hubs of the Bay area and New York, the actual staff members are located in the satellite cities, according to data from Layoffs.fyi, a tracker created by former Y Combinator grad Roger Lee.

EasyPost in San Francisco laid off 75 employees, nearly all in Salt Lake City and Louisville. U.K.-based Challenger bank Monzo laid off 165 customer support employees recently in Las Vegas.

Toast, based in Boston, laid off 1,300 employees, or 50% of its entire staff. Per Layoffs.fyi data, 12% of those layoffs were in Omaha, and another 10% were in Chicago.

KeepTruckin, based in San Francisco and last valued at $1.25 billion, laid off around 350 employees, and 33% of those employees were located in Nashville or Chicago.

These numbers are only a fraction of the total layoffs across the country, as Layoff.fyi’s data set only includes publicly disclosed actions and tips. But even if the data is just serving as an anecdotal snapshot, it’s an important one to note.

What the data means

Once the economy does recover to a new normal, it’s unclear whether HQ cities or satellite cities will be in a better position to bounce back. We caught up with some investors in Boston, a top startup hub that has recently faced its own flurry of layoffs, to hear their thoughts.

According to Lily Lyman, a partner at Boston-based venture capital firm Underscore, satellite offices are often where a company might locate the sales, customer success and business development staff. Logistically, those roles are the most vulnerable as consumer activity slows. For a lot of businesses, there are no sales and deals to be done right now.

“[These roles are getting] disproportionately affected in [reduction of forces] as companies expect a slowdown on the commercial side,” Lyman said. “While a logical decision to extend the cash runway, it does come with the risk that this withdrawal can damage relationships with customers that may be hard to recover.”

Not everyone sees cuts hitting satellite offices the hardest. Michael Skok, another partner at Underscore, said that “in some cases, we’ve seen that satellite offices are established in emerging markets which come with cost savings, so these offices may actually be more protected in these times.” In other words, if you’re cutting costs, San Francisco employee expenses might be higher than Denver employee expenses by sheer nature of the former having exorbitantly high living costs. Revolution Ventures, which invests in startups in emerging tech scenes, said it has not heard about satellite office layoffs from its portfolio as of recently.

And finally, to put it crassly, layoffs in a non-HQ city might quell some of the negative signaling that founders and venture capitalists are trying so hard to avoid (well, most of them at least). Slimming down operations is becoming a proactive response, not a reactive strategy as the pandemic continues to evolve.

Today’s data reminds us that layoffs are rarely an isolated occurrence, and staff cuts appear to be landing harder on less robust tech ecosystems.

Marty Pichinson gets called a lot of things: Silicon Valley’s undertaker, its terminator, a grave digger. These aren’t meant as slights; Pichinson is the founder of Sherwood Partners, a restructuring firm that Bay Area venture firms frequently turn to when they need someone to help sell off the assets of startups they have funded. The idea is to return at least some money to the company’s creditors and, if anything is left, to the VCs, too.

We last checked in with Pichinson almost exactly three years ago when the startup world was humming along. Even then, because of the sheer number of companies that get funded — and thus the number of startups that invariably don’t make it — Sherwood Partners was helping to wind down two to four companies a week.

Now, as he told us in conversation last week, it’s winding down two to three companies every day.

So who is shutting down, how does it all work and what can VCs expect to get in terms of a return in the age of the coronavirus?

Right now, Pichinson says the shutdowns are across verticals and across stages. “We’re in companies that raised $10 million to $25 million, to companies that raised up to $1.5 billion. It doesn’t matter what size they are; when they come to us, they’re all broke. If we’re closing it down to clean up and monetize what we can, they are basically in the same position, whether they raised $20 million or they were once a billion-dollar business.”

Emerging from the smoldering wreckage of Echo Fox and Vision Venture Partners, the investor Stratton Sclavos is rising again to launch a new esports related venture — a gaming-focused digital network also backed by the WME talent agency and Daylight Holdings.

Tapping Daylight and WME’s roster of talent, Sclavos has created PLAYERS NTWRK, a new gaming-focused production company that will look to compete with other upstarts angling to tap into esports and competitive gaming’s newly dominant place in the entertainment firmament.

Players Ntwrk will feature original programming, unscripted series, celebrity gameplay and live events tapping talent from music, traditional pro-sports, and the esports gaming world.

Sclavos and the multifaceted talent manager and president of Daylight Holdings, Ben Curtis, dreamed up Players Ntwrk as a way to tie together disparate groups of athletes and entertainers around their shared love of gaming and entertainment. the network will initially leverage relationships with WME and Klutch Sports Group, the agency founded by LeBron James’ longtime manager, Rich Paul, to find talent for programming.

The network will launch on Tuesday at 5:00pm Pacific for two hours of gameplay featuring the New Orleans Pelicans Guard/Forward Josh Hart and Sacramento Kings point guard De’Aaron Fox on the Players Ntwrk Twitch channel. Additional live streams will be broadcast Friday and Saturday, the company said.

Over the next twelve weeks the network will add live programming featuring all of its “First Squad” talent and experimenting with different gaming and unscripted formats. Ultimately, the network will produce between twelve and fifteen hours of original programming per week by the end of the second quarter and will ramp up to twenty to twenty-four hours of programming per-week by the end of the year.

Initial programming is going to be devoted to charity fundraising, with proceeds going to designated charities based on direct audience donations, the company said.

PLAYERS NTWRK’s First Squad talent roster includes:

• Professional athletes: De’Aaron Fox (Sacramento Kings), Josh Hart (New Orleans Pelicans), Jarvis Landry (Cleveland Browns), and Alvin Kamara (New Orleans Saints)
• Music and Entertainment: PARTYNEXTDOOR, Murda Beatz, producer Boi-1da, actor/former athlete Donovan Carter (Ballers)
• Creators/Streamers: KatGunn, Sodapoppin, Cash, Jesser, Jericho, Octane, Sigils, Sonii and DenkOps

Players Ntwrk joins companies like Venn, which are angling to gain a slice of the roughly 37.5 million monthly viewers that are expected to watch live streams on Twitch by the end of 2020, according to research done by eMarketer.

“The number of viewers and subscribers consuming gaming entertainment across YouTube and Twitch tops other entertainment services such as Netflix, HBO, Spotify and ESPN combined,” said Sclavos, in a statement. “Entertainment spectacle is trumping hardcore gaming competition. That kind of engagement makes it clear; gaming entertainment is the next pop culture phenomena. PLAYERS NTWRK is the only platform embracing and executing this new reality by creating original content with the most influential people who also happen to be fans themselves.”

Hi and 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 .

What you’re reading now is a shorter version of the newsletter, which is emailed every weekend. If you want to subscribe, go here and click The Station.

The transportation industry has seen an influx of “disruptors” in the past 15 years, including car sharing and ride-hailing apps and later shared ebikes and scooters. Now autonomous vehicle technology developers and flying car startups are working for that title.

COVID-19 could turn out out to be the transportation disruptor of this new decade. Yes, yes I know — it’s still early days. However, COVID-19 is already changing how we get around. Public transit has taken a hit and shared scooters have been pulled off streets. Meanwhile, ebike sales are booming and some cities are experimenting with how to provide transportation (and even space) that we need to move around without spreading the disease.

Shall we explore further? Read on. Before we dig in, here’s one more 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.

Micromobbin’

Electric bikes are having a moment. While shared micromobility companies have pulled scooters and bikes off streets, there is evidence that private sales are growing. Meanwhile, cities are taking action to make this means of transportation more available.

Here are three examples:

• New York’s tentative budget agreement reached April 1 includes a provision that would legalize throttle-based bikes and scooters.
• Lectric eBikes, an Arizona-based startup that launched in May 2019, told TechCrunch it has seen a spike in sales since mid-March. The company was selling an average of 25 bikes a day before COVID-19. By mid-March sales jumped to about 48 bikes a day. The following week, the company averaged daily sales of 55 ebikes. Lectric sold 175 bikes the week of March 7th. A month later, weekly sales hit 440.
• Portland is trying to make its shared bike system known as Biketown more accessible and a helluva a lot cheaper. The city has reduced pay-as-you-go plans to a $0.10 one-time sign up fee and then $0.01 a minute. Yes, 1 cent a minute.

Autonomous delivery

COVID-19 has put a new focus on autonomous vehicle delivery. There aren’t fleets of delivery bots at the ready, but progress is being made.

Starship Technologies launched this month a robot food delivery service in Tempe, Ariz., as part of its expansion plans following a $40 million funding round announced last August.

Starship Technologies, which was launched in 2014 by Skype co-founders Ahti Heinla and Janus Friis, has been ramping up commercial services in the past year, including a plan to expand to 100 universities by late summer 2021. Now, with the COVID-19 pandemic forcing traditional restaurants to close and placing more pressure on gig economy workers, Starship Technologies has an opportunity to accelerate that growth. The company recently launched in Washington D.C, Irvine, Calif., and says it plans to roll out to more cities in the coming weeks.

Nuro’s next milestone

Meanwhile, Nuro has been granted permission to begin driverless testing on California’s public roads. Nuro’s low-speed R2 vehicle isn’t designed for people, only packages.

And it’s well positioned to actually scale commercially in California. Under state law, AV companies can get a separate permit that allows them to operate a ride-hailing service. But they can’t charge a fee.

Nuro can’t charge a delivery fee either. However, it can generate revenue by working with local retailers to launch a commercial delivery business using the autonomous vehicles.

Other autonomous vehicle news

AutoX has opened an 80,000 square-foot Shanghai Robotaxi Operations Center, following a 2019 agreement with municipal authorities to deploy 100 autonomous vehicles in the Jiading District. The vehicles in the fleet were assembled at a factory about 93 miles outside of Shanghai.

AutoX, which is developing a full self-driving stack, has operations in California and China. It has been particularly active in China. The company has been operating a fleet of robotaxis in Shenzhen through a pilot program launched in 2019 with BYD. Earlier this year, it partnered with Fiat Chrysler to roll out a fleet of robotaxis for China and other countries in Asia.

The Shanghai operations center marks an escalation of AutoX’s ambitions. The company plans to unveil a ride-hailing app that will let users in Shanghai request ride from one of vehicles at the new operations center.

Trend Watch

Trend watch is meant to be a bookmark that we can look back on in a few weeks, months or even years and see if it actually caught on.

I’ll mention two this week.

Nauto is an automotive tech startup that combines cameras, motion sensors, GPS and AI algorithms to understand and improve driver behavior. The company’s platform is used in commercial fleets and some fresh data shows an uptick in last-mile driving and more distracted driving.

Nauto’s distribution and last-mile fleets averaged 41 miles driven every active driving hour in March, a 46% increase from the same month last year.

Meanwhile, distracted driving incidents increased. Nauto said that its distribution and last-mile fleets averaged 1.54 distraction events every active driving hour in March compared to 0.98 events per hour in the same month last year.

Now onto cities. Oakland mayor Libby Schaaf launched Saturday the Oakland Slow Streets initiative to help folks maintain physical distancing. The city has shut down down 74 miles of streets to through traffic to give people space to recreate.

Streets are open to local traffic only and residents are able to drive home. Fire, police, deliveries and other essential services won’t impacted by street closures either.

Other cities are experimenting with similar efforts. While streets will likely open back up after the pandemic passes, this could change how people, including planners, business owners and city officials view how we should use streets.

From you

Over the past few weeks, I’ve shared comments from readers about how COVID-19 has affected their business or how they use transportation. This week, I thought I’d share some advice from Laurie Yoler, a new partner at Playground Global, board member of Zoox and adviser to multiple companies. She was an early adviser and former board member at Tesla .

Here’s what she shared.

This is a time of deep reflection. Instead of viewing ‘social distancing’ as a prison, we can focus on the people we care about and reflect on our work and what gives us joy. Look at this time as an opportunity to be compassionate with yourself and the people around you, and pursue your curiosity. That doesn’t mean forcing yourself to complete a list of tasks with urgency and focus, but rather using this time for gentle creative exploration.

If your business needs to rethink its plans or is facing a substantial slowdown, as so many are, remember you can only be effective by focusing on one thing at a time. I have five “F’s” I run through with entrepreneurs I advise. Friends and family first, then physical facilities, in order to ensure business continuity. After that, you can move to finances, cutting costs and creatively thinking about your business model in order to give your company the best chance of survival. Next, it’s about planning for the future. Scenario planning is essential for all critical areas of your business. Ask yourself, “can I use this crisis to make the company stronger?” Lastly, we turn to faith in the world’s scientists and innovators to see us through this difficult time.

Remember, even amid the devastation around us, there is still space for optimism. This could be a catalyst for the sweeping innovation in healthcare and education that we so desperately need. Use this time of stillness to restore yourself. Watch inspirational TED talks, exercise, meditate, and check in with friends and colleagues often.”

— Laurie Yoler

The fact that so many people are stuck at home makes for strange opportunities. Italy’s confined populace has taken to singing from the balconies — and now researchers are asking them to use those same balconies to help accomplish a bit of citizen science.

The project, created by the Italian National Research Council, aims to take widespread samples of light pollution in the country. The question of “light trespass,” or how much light from outside our homes reaches inside them, isn’t a particularly easy one to test without access to those homes. So they’re asking people to collect that information themselves.

Using their phone and a special app, some 7,000 Italians participated in an initial run of the experiment two weeks ago. All they needed to do was turn off all the lights in their place, go to their window or balcony, and point their phone at the brightest light source they could see.

The resulting data showed that the average light trespass in Italian cities is nearly twice that of homes in the country — not exactly surprising, but it’s important for even supposedly obvious conclusions to be quantified and supported with evidence. Sure, it’s brighter in the city — but how much brighter? What type of light is it? More data means better understanding of even the most basic questions.

“With this experiment, we wanted to bring citizens closer to measurement techniques, to let them see the often complex process and allow them to participate in the scientific method,” Alessandro Farini, one of the organizers of the experiment, told Nature. (I contacted the researchers for more information but have not heard back.)

The experiment was so successful that #scienzasulbalcone, or “science on the balcony,” is having an encore — new measurements taken last week and a final one tomorrow night. The team issued revised instructions to its participants in order to better characterize the data they bring in.

Anyone interested in helping is asked to find a light bulb they can easily check the wattage on, then calibrate their phone by leaving only that light on and using their phone’s ambient light sensor to measure its output. This will help calibrate the system, since some phones are more sensitive to light than others. Once they’re done, they can make another measurement out their window or off the balcony, and submit that.

If you’re interested in taking part, you can find the instructions in Italian here; English instructions are here, but I don’t think it is intended to be a global effort just yet.

It’s a mark of 2020 that the image of throngs of Americans flocking to polling places to exercise their right to vote, once a heartening symbol of democracy in action, is now a nightmare scenario that could visit widespread death on unsuspecting communities nationwide.

In the midst of a viral outbreak that’s infected more than half a million people and swiftly claimed more than 20,000 lives in the U.S. alone, the country is grappling with the question of how Americans will safely cast their votes in November’s election—and time is running out.

A number of state officials have pushed back their primaries to protect residents, but last week’s Wisconsin primary, with its long lines, uneven protective measures and shuttered polling places demonstrated a worst case scenario for what November’s general presidential election could look like if states don’t quickly implement a Plan B.

But a handful of lawmakers pushing for a more equitable voting system don’t believe we need a full-on Plan B to rescue the election, just a scaled-up version of systems in place that millions already use to cast their ballots each election cycle. Early voting, absentee voting and mail-in voting have all ticked upward in the last 20 years. Five states now use vote-by-mail as their primary way of voting: Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Utah and Hawaii. The military also relies on mail-in absentee voting for those deployed overseas. By 2018, one in four Americans who voted did so through the mail.

With the economy still frozen in place, Congress is working on another big coronavirus relief package, though efforts are at a political standstill for the moment. Proposing their own bill, Democratic Senators Amy Klobuchar and Ron Wyden are striving to get vote-by-mail provisions into the next relief package. “… It is wrong to shortchange our election officials as we provide relief to address the effects of this global pandemic,” Klobuchar said in a statement.

The bill, called the Natural Disaster and Emergency Ballot Act (NDEBA), seeks to provide 20 days of early voting for all states, a guarantee that all voters can request to vote with a no-excuse absentee ballot, accommodations for voters who don’t receive an absentee ballot in time and additional funding for the Election Assistance Commission to make the changes.

“We are gonna fight like hell to get our bill in the next COVID-19 package,” Wyden told TechCrunch in an interview.

States take the lead

Republicans in Congress have yet to show any support for expanded mail-in voting, but a swath of Republican state officials close to the election process have turned to mail voting systems to keep residents safe, including the secretaries of state in Kentucky, West Virginia, and Georgia.

On a bipartisan call led by Sen. Klobuchar with secretaries of state last week, West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner was skittish about the idea of a permanent, expanded vote-by-mail system but agreed voters should be allowed to cast their votes safely through the mail during the COVID-19 crisis. He previously announced that all West Virginia voters would be sent application postcards for voting through the mail.

“The Governor, Attorney General, county clerks and I have zealously worked together within state law to balance health concerns with the ease of voting,” Warner said. “We have determined that the absentee voting process is the safest method… Your ballot box is as close as your mailbox.”

Washington Secretary of State Kim Wyman, also a Republican, touted her state’s own system in the bipartisan call.

“Washington state’s vote-by-mail system is accessible, secure, fair, and instills confidence in our voters,” Wyman said, encouraging officials “across the political spectrum” to unify around keeping voters safe and stressing that expanded absentee voting and vote-by-mail “must be options on the table” for 2020.

On the call, secretaries of state around the U.S. emphasized the need to act quickly to scale up absentee voting systems, stressing that funding, organizing and putting new systems into practice will be a scramble over the next seven months.

President Trump has attacked vote-by-mail systems in recent White House coronavirus briefings and tweets, but there is no evidence that voting through the mail is “fraudulent in many cases” as he has claimed. Trump himself uses mail-in voting to cast his absentee ballot in Florida.

The president’s attacks on expanded vote-by-mail also contradict the CDC’s own guidance for safe elections during the pandemic, which encourage expanded mail-in voting to “minimize direct contact with other people and reduce crowd size at polling stations.”

Out of the billions of absentee votes cast through the mail in the U.S. over a 12 year period, an examination of all known instances of voter fraud found only 491 cases involving absentee voting. With those numbers, Americans are less likely to commit voter fraud than they are to be struck by lightning. In states with vote-by-mail, safeguards built into the system can catch or deter anyone who might tamper with a ballot. In Oregon, which uses forensic signature matching to secure its vote, a poll was sentenced to 90 days in jail and ordered to pay a $13,000 fine for tampering with two ballots.

Politics aside

Republicans today mostly believe that Democrats would benefit from any effort that might broadly boost voter turnout, a perspective that the president echoed in a recent Fox News interview discussing the early coronavirus relief bill. “The things they had in there were crazy,” Trump said. “They had things — levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

That package included $400 million to safeguard November’s election—an amount Democrats argue is insufficient—and no requirements that states implement vote-by-mail. But the conversation around vote-by-mail hasn’t always broken down along today’s political lines and the political reality of a broad mail-in voting system is likely nuanced, though untested on a national scale.

An early and vocal proponent of vote-by-mail, Wyden explains that those lines have been redrawn over the years as attitudes toward implementing vote-by-mail have shifted.

“You have to put this in context of where we are,” Wyden said, noting that the debate around vote-by-mail was an “academic thing” two decades ago, with political scientists hashing out which party stood to benefit. In Oregon, other Democrats initially opposed vote-by-mail efforts, believing that because their voters skewed older, Republicans would benefit.

“After all this bickering back and forth on who would benefit, Oregonians put it on the ballot.” In 1998, 69% of voters supported the ballot measure, which passed easily.

In the U.S., implementing any voting changes across the country is politically challenging due to the fact that states oversee and administer their own elections. Even the oversight process varies widely from state to state. Differences aside, many states have expanded absentee voting in recent years.

“Back then when I was introducing those first bills, you didn’t have the number of people voting absentee that you have today,” Wyden said. While voting absentee once required a justification, a “big chunk” of those excuse requirements have given way since then, allowing more people to vote by mail.

“Absentee voting is enormously popular,” Wyden said. “Basically what I tell people… is what we’re really doing with our legislature is kind of upscaling what is already going on—not reinventing the wheel.”

Wyden warns that we’ve already seen the worst case scenario play out in Wisconsin. “You have older voters waiting in line to talk to older poll workers… some had masks, some didn’t.

“[In] Wisconsin, literally in the middle of a pandemic, the legislature said ‘we’re going to put the lives of our people at risk.’ I thought that was very troubling,” Wyden said.

“All I can think of was at this point in the middle of a pandemic, I don’t think this is a partisan issue.”

Adobe was scheduled to hold its annual conference in Las Vegas two weeks ago, but the coronavirus pandemic forced the company to make alternate plans. In less than a month, its events team shifted venues for the massive conference, not once, but twice as the severity of the situation became clear.

This year didn’t just involve Adobe Summit itself. To make things more interesting, it was also hosting Magento Imagine as a separate conference within a conference at the same time. (Adobe bought Magento in 2018 for $1.6 billion.)

Originally, Adobe had more than 500 sessions planned across four venues on the Las Vegas Strip, with more than 23,000 attendees expected. Combining all of the sponsors, partners and Adobe personnel, it involved more than 40,000 hotel rooms.

Once it became clear that such a large event couldn’t happen, the company reimagined the conference as a fully digital experience.

Plan A

VP of Experience Marketing Alex Amado is in charge of planning Adobe Summit, a tall task under normal circumstances.

“Planning Summit is a year-round endeavor,” he said. “Literally within weeks of finishing one of those Las Vegas events we are starting on the next one, and some of the work actually is on an 18 or 24-month cycle because we have those long-term hotel contracts and all of that stuff.

“For the last 12 months, basically, we had people who were working on what we now call Plan A — and we didn’t know that we needed a Plan B and Plan C — and the original event was going to be our biggest yet.”

After the team began to wonder in January if the virus would force them to change how they deliver the conference, they started building contingency plans in earnest, Amado said. “As we got into February, things started looking a little scarier, and it very quickly escalated to the point where we were talking really seriously about Plan B.”

Last week, Apple and Google announced a partnership that will soon let users opt-in to a decentralized tracing tool, designed to help determine if a person has come into contact with someone who tested positive for COVID-19.

The opt-in system uses Bluetooth to transmit a randomized and anonymous identifier to nearby devices. A user can then choose to upload their anonymized data, which is then broadcast to other devices. If a match is found based on time spent and distance between nearby devices, a user will be told that they may have been exposed to a person — whose identity is not shared — with the virus.

It’s a similar system to one conceived by MIT researchers, which also uses Bluetooth to anonymously inform others of potential infection. The system, like Apple and Google’s new effort, also sidesteps the use of location data.

Contact tracing has proven somewhat effective in some parts of the world, helping authorities understand hotspots of infections. But privacy groups and security experts are concerned that privacy would take a backseat over people’s individual rights in an effort to contain the spread of the virus. Apple and Google said the service is privacy-focused. The system doesn’t use location data, the user’s randomized identifiers change every 15 minutes to prevent tracking, and any data collected is processed on the device and doesn’t leave a user’s phone unless they choose to share it.

But security and privacy experts were quick to point out the possible flaws in the system. Former FTC chief technologist Ashkan Soltani warned of false positives but also false negatives. Moxie Marlinspike, founder of the Signal encrypted messaging app, also expressed concerns that the system could be abused.

TechCrunch joined a media call with Apple and Google representatives, allowing reporters to ask questions about their coronavirus tracing efforts.

Here’s what was discussed on the call.

Which versions of iOS and Android will get the feature update?

Apple said it’ll roll out the update to the broadest number of iOS devices as possible. More than three-quarters of iPhones and iPads are on the latest version of iOS 13 and will receive the update. Google said it will update Google Play Services, a core part of Android, with the feature so that the contact tracing system can run on the entire fleet of Android devices (running Android 4.1 or newer) and not just the most recently updated devices.

When will this tracing system be available?

Apple and Google said they will roll out software updates in mid-May to begin support for contact tracing. Public health authorities will incorporate the contact tracing API into their apps, which can then be downloaded from the Apple and Google app stores. The companies said they will bake the contact tracing feature into iOS and Android in the coming months, so that users won’t even have to install an app. The companies said this would help get more people using the system.

Event when the contact tracking feature is baked into the OS at the system level, any detection of a positive match would still prompt the user to download the relevant public health app for their region to receive more information about what the COVID-19 contact tracing process is, and next steps.

Can anyone else use the API?

The companies said only public health authorities will be allowed access to the contact tracing API.

This limited API use will be restricted in the same spirit that you restrict individual health care to licensed medical professionals like physicians. In the same way, use of the API will be restricted only to authorized public health organizations as identified by whatever government is responsible for designated such entities for a given country or region. There could be conflict about what constitutes a legitimate public health agency in some cases, and even disagreements between national and state authorities, conceivably, so this sounds like it could be a place where friction might occur and Apple and Google on tricky footing as platform operators.

Will any of the data be stored in a central database?

Apple says the data is processed on a user’s device and that data is “relayed” through servers run by the health organizations across the world, and will not be centralized. The tech giants said that because the data is decentralized, it’s far more difficult for governments to conduct surveillance.

Does that mean Apple, Google, or the public health authorities can access the data?

Apple and Google admitted that no system is completely secure — it’s a widely known concept in cybersecurity that nothing is “unhackable.” Servers can get breached and data can get lost. But in decentralizing the data, it makes it far more difficult for anyone with malicious intentions to access the data, they said.

How are you preventing people from producing false reports?

The companies said they’re working with different public health organizations to confirm diagnoses, like public health authorities, to do the validation. Apple and Google said they want users to trust the system, and that includes users knowing that the system is reliable.

How is a confirmed COVID-19 case identified?

Apple and Google point out that while a positive test result is likely the best means of identifying a case, it isn’t necessarily the only way. It’s true that a diagnosis by a medical professional doesn’t actually require a confirmed positive test result specifically identifying the presence of the virus — theoretically, a public health agency could set a lower bar, requiring just a diagnosis based on symptom presentation, for instance.

Both tech giants concede that for contact tracing to be effective, there needs to be a high degree of case identification within a population, but left the door open to the possibility that a high degree of case identification doesn’t necessarily translate one-to-one to widespread testing, should other means of identifying cases be deemed reliable enough by local health authorities in any given area.

Should you trust this system?

There’s no easy answer. It seems like Apple and Google have made a system that’s better than nothing, but it’s a system that requires considerable user trust. You have to trust that Apple and Google have built a system that can withstand abuses — either from themselves or governments. But no system is foolproof or immune to abuse. If you don’t trust the system, you do not have to use it.

Price Technologies, the operator of the comparison shopping website Price.com and its related browser extension, is adding a feature to show product availability for a few essential items that have had supply issues caused by the COVID-19 outbreak in the US.

Products like aspirin, acetaminophen, facial tissues, hand sanitizer, ibuprofen, rice soap, soup, toilet paper, and other items are going to be shown on the company’s website with their availability at online vendors.

“We’ve been tracking how essential COVID-19 supplies are becoming difficult to find online,” the company wrote in a blogpost. “Therefore, we are now updating the product availability in real-time for these essential items. We are launching an early version of this feature and plan to continue to expand/refine this feature’s functionality in the following weeks.”

Launched in 2016, Price.com is somewhat of a competitor to services like Honey, the online discount shopping service acquired by PayPal last year.

According to CrunchBase the company’s backed by a slew of early stage investors including Dave McClure, the founder of 500 Startups; Plug and Play Ventures, Social Capital, and VentureSouq.