Year: 2020

The FCC has denied a request that it investigate and take action on a broadcast the petitioners allege has made material and deadly contributions to the spread of COVID-19: President Trump’s frequent press conferences.

In a petition filed with the FCC in late March, media watchdog Free Press wrote that the briefings were so full of incorrect and misleading information that the communications regulator had a duty to at the very least investigate and report on the broadcasts.

Of particular and urgent concern is the deadly disinformation broadcast on television stations across the country in the form of context-less coverage of President Donald Trump’s press conferences and other statements…

We urge the FCC to conduct an urgent examination into the extent to which broadcasters have aired hoaxes and false or misleading information about COVID-19, and immediately issue an emergency policy statement or enforcement guidance recommending that broadcasters prominently disclose when information they air is false or scientifically suspect.

It’s a big ask that a federal agency should step in and say the President is perpetrating a hoax on the country. And while the accuracy of the information in the briefings is certainly questionable — for instance the President’s repeated assurances that the pandemic “will disappear,” that there are plenty of “beautiful” tests, and that the unproven chloroquine is effective against the virus — the FCC determined that it was not advisable or possible to restrict their broadcast.

A simple “no” with the requisite technical details probably would have sufficed, but the FCC opted to post a more lengthy takedown of the Free Press petition on its front page. If that seems a bit excessive, recall that Free Press has been a frequent and effective critic of the FCC, calling out a nonsensical economic analysis at the heart of the agency’s justification for rolling back net neutrality, and more recently exposing an embarrassing error that inflated broadband deployment numbers in the country by millions.

So perhaps there is something more to the decision to perform a more meticulous dismantling of Free Press’s petition. All the same, the FCC’s response provides valuable information on why the agency both can’t and shouldn’t take the actions suggested:

The Commission does not—and cannot and will not—act as a self-appointed, free-roving arbiter of truth in journalism. Even assuming for the sake of argument that Free Press’s assertions regarding any lack of veracity were true, false speech enjoys some First Amendment protection, and section 326 of the Communications Act, reflecting First Amendment values, prohibits the Commission from interfering with freedom of the press or censoring broadcast communications.

…The Commission has historically regulated the broadcast of dangerous hoaxes. But the Commission has applied this rule narrowly in light of the substantial First Amendment concerns involved with the federal government policing the content of broadcast news.

At this moment, broadcasters face the challenge of covering a rapidly-evolving, national, and international health crisis, in which new information—much of it medical or technical in nature and therefore difficult to corroborate or refute in real time—is continually revealed, vetted, and verified or dismissed.

Under such circumstances, it is implausible, if not absurd, to suggest that broadcasters knowingly deceived the public by airing these press conferences or other statements by the President about COVID-19.

Instead, the FCC suggests that the broadcast of incorrect information merely presents a new opportunity for journalists to add context and correction to the record. As it concludes, with a parting shot at Free Press:

We leave to the press its time-honored and constitutionally protected role in testing the claims made by our political leaders—as well as those made by national advocacy organizations.

The full text of the FCC denial (PDF) is an educational read if, like many these days, you wonder about the potential of a government entity like the FCC stepping in to control the airwaves in a time of crisis.

Social distancing requirements amid the COVID-19 pandemic may have canceled kids’ birthday parties, but parents are finding new ways to take the celebrations online. While video chat apps like Zoom, Google Hangouts or FaceTime are an option for gathering kids together in the virtual space, there’s still the challenge of what to do once there. A few companies are working to solve this challenge for parents who are looking for ideas to make their child’s birthday special in the time of COVID-19.

Sky Zone

One business that’s been heavily impacted by government-mandated retail closures is Sky Zone, the indoor trampoline park that’s home to dozens of kids’ birthday parties per day. The company operates Sky Zone parks in more than 160 locations across the U.S. and Canada, mainly to franchisees, which have now temporarily closed due to the coronavirus outbreak.

To help give back to families who still want a party while staying at home, Sky Zone has shifted its current focus to virtual birthday parties. The move not only offers parents the benefit of the hassle-free party planning that a typical events space provides, it also gives Sky Zone a way to keep employees working during the business closures.

The party, however, is not a new source to replace the business’s lost revenue or a way to make payroll. Instead, Sky Zone is offering to host the party for free to parents for up to 10 guests. Parents will have the option to tip the party host at the end of the event to support Sky Zone team members.

To request a party, parents fill out an online form with their information, then wait to hear from the Sky Zone representative who will schedule the party and create a digital invitation with a link to join the party room. Parents forward the digital invite to their friends and family however they choose. Then, on the day of the event, everyone joins the virtual party, which is hosted via Zoom.

The party itself is a 20 to 25-minute experience with the party host leading the kids through games and activities to get kids moving, like Simon Says, Dance Battles, Trivia and even teaching the kids a TikTok dance. They’ll also lead the group in singing Happy Birthday to the Guest of Honor while parents bring in the cake.

The offering was first launched on March 26, 2020 and already Sky Zone has hosted 30 parties and has more than 100 others scheduled.

The benefit of this party over a DIY group chat is that the staff hosting the party are already used to working with kids. Plus, it’s an easy way for overworked parents to get the party handled when they don’t have time to organize more time-consuming events, like a drive-by birthday parade, in-home scavenger hunt or the other alternative birthday party options some parents have turned to in this time of crisis.

Roblox

Another company venturing into the virtual party space is gaming platform Roblox .

Already a huge online hangout for kids in the pre-COVID-19 era, Roblox usage has been booming in recent weeks as kids stuck at home look for ways to socialize with both online and real-life friends in the virtual world. Today, Roblox claims more than 120 million monthly active users and is now No. 35 on App Annie’s 2020 ranking of the top 52 mobile game publishers by revenue.

The company says it was inspired by the stories of friends, family and classmates connecting on its platform during the pandemic, including those who were hosting in-game birthday parties.

Together, with its developer community, Roblox on Friday launched the new “Play Together” game sort, which makes it easier for players to find those games where you socialize with others — like visiting a virtual shopping mall, going camping or riding virtual water slides, for example. The games in the Play Together game sort also offer VIP servers for 10 Robux (10 cents). That allow users to play with family, friends, classmates and others they choose in a private virtual space — like a virtual birthday party.

To create a VIP server, you first visit the individual game’s page on Roblox, then click on the “Servers” tab and then the button “Create VIP Server.” Give your server a name, then invite others using the link provided. (Note that this is opting you into a subscription, so you’ll need to cancel it after the party ends — unless you want to retain the option to have private playspaces like this going forward.)

If you can’t figure out this process, trust me that your child can show you the ropes here.

While Roblox is popular with both boys and girls alike, a private match on Fornite is an alternative for some parents. The majority of Fornite players (roughly 73%) are male, so this could be an option for non-coed parties, for instance.

Caribu

For younger children and toddlers whose virtual party may only involve gathering together extended family — like grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins, for example — there’s Caribu.

The family-friendly video calling app helps little ones get over their awkwardness about chatting online by offering a variety of in-app activities. For birthday parties, Caribu’s paint and drawing feature could be a fun, mess-free activity. The app also includes other simple games like Tic-Tac-Toe, interactive word puzzles and word searches.

To help keep families connected during the COVID-19 pandemic, AT&T is sponsoring 60 days of free access and unlimited use of the Caribu app, which offers in-app subscriptions for its full content library, which includes kids’ e-books.

Houseparty

For tweens and teens, the group video chat app Houseparty is another option that works across mobile and desktop.

Houseparty has also seen significant growth due to coronavirus-related lockdowns and home quarantines, particularly in Europe. During the week of March 21, Houseparty downloads surged at 423 times the average weekly number of downloads in Q4 2019.

What makes Houseparty an option for a virtual party experience is that it’s not just another way to group chat — friends can play online games in the chat, including Heads Up!, Trivia, Chips and Guac and Quick Draw. These are free to play, though there is an option to purchase more decks through in-app purchases for some games.

Evites with built-in video chat

Even if you do choose to go the DIY route to host a simple FaceTime, Google Hangouts, Zoom or Skype video chat, there are ways to make the invite more special than just a text. For example, the digital invitations service Evite has updated its app and website to now allow party hosts to add a video chat link to their personalized invite.

The company is also beta testing its own Evite video chat, which is a more integrated option that allows up to eght guests to be able to join from a tab within the invite.

Hobnob’s digital invites app has also updated to make it easier for friends to send invitations for online-only events through Zoom, Facebook Live and YouTube Live.

Personalized Zoom invites

Another option for Zoom users is the newly launched service ZmURL.

This free online tool lets you customize your Zoom video call invite URL with a title, explanation, image and RSVP requirement. This latter RSVP feature means that only those you’ve specifically invited via email will be able to access the provided link and join.

Live streams

Some parents have turned to live-streaming as an option for virtual parties, like those offered by YouTube or Facebook.

While a Facebook Live stream may not have a party host like Sky Zone, or built-in options to play games like Caribu or Houseparty, it does offer an easy way to share a celebration happening at home with others. Though children won’t have their own Facebook account (hopefully!), parents can send out invites to the parents of the child’s friends or family members through a Facebook Group invite, for instance, or by posting a message about the virtual party on their own profile. Participants can then watch the stream together as the child opens gifts left on the porch (and wiped down) and celebrates at home with family.

While technology can help to facilitate these virtual events, parents can take extra steps to make a virtual party special. Some local businesses that used to send characters — like superheroes or Disney princesses — to kids’ birthday parties are now offering to record video messages or even join a virtual party the parent is hosting. Neighbors and friends can decorate the yard or leave chalk messages. Surprise balloon drops, car parades, scavenger hunts and other activities can make the party memorable for other reasons besides being the child’s first quarantine birthday.

Starting today, some U.S. Facebook users will see a new pop-up on the app asking them to fill-out a survey about COVID-19. The survey, from Carnegie Mellon University’s Delphi epidemiological research center, is one of many new symptom mapping projects that seek to anticipate where the next wave of the virus will hit as COVID-19 sweeps through populations the world over.

As if often the case in research, the challenge for these symptom mapping efforts is attracting a large enough sample of respondents to paint a statistically meaningful picture. Carnegie Mellon’s research effort will get a big leg up from Facebook, which may promote similar surveys in different parts of the world if this one goes well.

While some other projects require users to download an app or find their way to an obscure web portal, Facebook’s promotion of the Carnegie Mellon survey means it can instantly reach a portion of users from the largest pool of online users any social network has ever collected. Facebook declined to provide details on how many users will be seeing the new prompt, but even a sub-section of Facebook’s U.S. users over the age of 18 would likely be massive from a data collection standpoint.

Many U.S. symptom tracking projects launched as the virus exploded over the last month, including a new app from Pinterest’s co-founder and others from research institutes like Harvard and New York’s Weill Cornell Medicine. The idea is that tracking self-reported symptoms could provide geographical insights that bolster the limited testing data available now.

While users might be understandably wary of a research effort promoted by Facebook given its recently fairly notorious record on user privacy, the company’s knowledge of who you are won’t be linked to the university’s data, which will be examined in aggregate. According to Facebook’s announcement, the survey data collected will aid public health planning around resource allocation and eventually “when, where and how to reopen parts of society.”

The company announced the effort along with an expanded set of disease prevention maps which the company will make available to researchers as part of its “Data for Good” initiative.

“Our real focus is on democratizing mental healthcare,” says SonderMind co-founder chief executive, Mark Frank.

His company, founded back in 2017, is having a moment. With the restrictions and economic stresses caused by the government’s efforts to mitigate the spread of the COVID-19 epidemic in the US, demand for mental health services is soaring. And it’s compounding what was already a mental health crisis in the US. 

A 2019 article from Bloomberg Businessweek laid out the scope of the problem in stark terms. In 2017, 47,000 people died by suicide in the US and there were 1.4 million suicide attempts — a suicide rate that’s the country’s highest since World War II, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Drug overdoses, another measure of the nation’s anguish, killed 70,000 people in 2017. Another 7% of U.S. adults reported suffering at least one major depressive episode in 2018.

Taken together, the data points to a tremendous health problem. One that the current healthcare system is only now grappling with.

SonderMind’s chief executive sees his company as part of the solution.

Most mental health practitioners don’t operate within a healthcare network or take insurance, which means that the only folks with access to care are the ones that can afford the high price of therapy. SonderMind changes that equation by offering practitioners a toolkit and back office services so they can bill insurance providers and take care of the operational side of running a healthcare practice. It also acts as a funnel, gauging the needs of potential patients and connecting them to the therapists that are best suited to provide them the care they need. That lets practitioners focus on seeing patients, the company said.

The company currently counts 500 providers on its marketplace, which operates in Colorado, Arizona, and Texas, and has raised $27 million in its latest round of financing to extend its services to other parts of the US.

The San Francisco-based investment firm General Catalyst led the financing which also included additional new investors F-Prime Capital and participation from previous investors like the Kickstart Seed Fund, Diōko Ventures (managed by FCA Venture Partners) and Jonathan Bush. 

“This financing provides the fuel to support our growth objectives and advance our mission to make behavioral health more accessible, approachable and utilized by building a modern marketplace that holds great appeal to both clinician and patient,” said Mark Frank, co-founder and chief executive officer of SonderMind, in a statement.

The investment extends General Catalyst’s funding into healthcare services in recent years and represents a continued emphasis on healthcare services for the firm. “Healthcare is obviously a really important thesis for GC as a whole,” says Holly Maloney Burbeck, a managing director at General Catalyst. “This is going to be one of the largest value drivers for VC this decade.”

General Catalyst already had a robust portfolio of healthcare focused companies — including Livongo, OM1, and Oscar Health

For Maloney Burbeck, the investment in SonderMind grew out of the firm’s exposure to mental health investment through another portfolio company, Mindstrong Health. “Mindstrong forced us to explore… access to care and finding care,” says Maloney Burbeck. 

The General Catalyst investor sees the investment in SonderMind as also helping to open doors for more people to join the profession.

“It helps people to start their business for sure. It helps more people pursue it as a career path,” she said. And that’s good for a country where more mental health professionals and better access to care are desperately needed. 

Airbnb said Monday that it has raised $1 billion in debt and equity from private equity firms Silver Lake and Sixth Street Partners, even as the online rental marketplace has seen its business plummet due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

COVID-19, the disease caused by coronavirus, has prompted governments to issue stay at home orders that triggered a wave of cancellations in the travel and hospitality industries.

“While the current environment is clearly a difficult one for the hospitality industry, the desire to travel and have authentic experiences is fundamental and enduring,” Silver Lake Co-CEO and Managing Partner Egon Durban said in a statement. “Airbnb’s diverse, global, and resilient business model is particularly well suited to prosper as the world inevitably recovers and we all get back out to experience it.”

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky acknowledged Monday that while the desire to connect and travel has been reinforced during this time, the “way it manifests will evolve as the world changes.”

The expectation of this evolution has spurred Airbnb to direct its attention and new funds towards three core products: hosts, long-term stays and Airbnb experiences.

Last month, Airbnb said it would direct $250 million to help hosts who have been impacted by COVID-19. The funds will be used to pay a host 25% of what they would normally receive through their cancellation policy if a guest cancels a reservation due to COVID-19 between March 14 and May 31. Airbnb said this policy applies retroactively to all cancellations during that period.

The move was an attempt by Airbnb to make amends to its hosts who complained that the company’s policy would allow guests to cancel reservations and receive a full refund. That policy, which is still active, lets guests who booked reservations on or before March 14 that begin anytime on or before May 31 to cancel and receive a standard refund or travel credit.

Looks like things haven’t gone completely smoothly with Quibi‘s launch.

The issue appears to have been resolved, but the Quibi customer support account tweeted this afternoon that “some users may be experiencing problems with the Quibi app,” only to add an hour later that “Users should once again be able to use the Quibi app normally. Thank you for your patience.”

It’s not clear how widespread the outage was, but according to The Verge, one staffer saw an error screen and was unable to browse the app, while another was another to create an account. The app seems to be working normally as I write this shortly after 4pm Eastern.

If nothing else, it’s a reminder that reliably delivering streaming video is hard, even for a startup that’s raised $1.75 billion. Heck, even Disney experienced widespread streaming issues when it launched Disney+ in November. (It all worked out fine.)

A quick catch-up for those of you still wondering what Quibi even is: It’s a short-form video service founded by Hollywood executive Jeffrey Katzenberg and led by CEO Meg Whitman (previously CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise and eBay).

The app is launching with nearly 50 shows today, all of them created specifically for mobile, with episodes that are less than 10 minutes long. After a 90-day free trial, it’ll cost you $4.99 with ads or $7.99 per month without ads.

Stocks rallied Monday, with all major indices snapping back into positive territories as investors seized on any positive developments in the fight to mitigate the spread of COVID-19, the disease caused by coronavirus.

The stock market is, of course, not the economy. And this is likely a dead cat bounce — a temporary recovery after a big fall. The question is how many dead cat bounces will we see in the coming weeks?

And while the economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic is continuing that didn’t stop investors from grasping at data from John Hopkins University that suggests the number of new COVID-19 cases is slowing. The institution’s coronavirus map, which has become a go-to source, showed 25,200 new cases rising on March 31, then rising to 33,300 new cases by April 3. Those numbers dropped to 28,200 new cases April 4, per its data; other trackers have posted slightly different results.

Today’s rally will be tested in the days and weeks to come as COVID-19 cases continue and eventually hit a peak before plateauing. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a member of the White House coronavirus task force, has warned that cases, and deaths, will likely surge in the next week.

Here are the day’s results:

• Dow Jones Industrial Average: up 7.59%, or 1,597.21 points, to close at 22.649.74
• S&P 500: rose 6.95%, or 172.86 points, to close at 2,661.51
• Nasdaq composite: popped 7.33%, or 540.15 points, to close at 7,913.24

There were other indirect COVID-19 fundamentals such as new sales guidance or analyst notes that also moved certain stocks.

E-commerce stocks, including eBay and Amazon saw positive movement. Online retailer Wayfair was perhaps the biggest mover in this category. The company’s shares opened 36% higher after reporting its gross revenue growth rate more than doubled at the end of March. Wayfair shares closed up 41.7% to $71.50.

Music streaming company Spotify saw shares decline more than 4% after Raymond James downgraded the stock from “strong buy” to “market perform,” citing that COVID-19 was causing less engagement and fewer downloads as users spend more time indoors. Spotify shares did manage to bounce back during the day and ended up closing up nearly 0.33% to $122.52.

Shares of SaaS companies rallied on the day as well, with the Bessemer cloud index rising 6.79% on the day; shares of SaaS companies, modern software firms, have enjoyed strong revenue multiples in recent years. They have tracked the broader indices down, however, and remain in bear-market territory.

Looking ahead, we’re entering earnings season during a period of intense economic uncertainty; how the stock market performs in the future will at least partially depend on how companies performed in Q1 2020, and what they project for the future. Get ready.

While a number of startups have been hard hit by efforts to curb the spread of the COVID-19 virus, refurbishing firm Back Market is showing increased growth globally.

The Paris -based startup encourages customers to send in their old devices so they can be refurbished and resold into the e-commerce secondhand market. The growth achieved in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis is partly due to increased laptop sales as people seek better devices to work remotely.

For people who are unsure whether refurbished products are reliable, Back Market permits customers to send in old devices, exchange them for newer versions and pay the difference. CEO Thibaud Hug de Larauze said this payback service is currently possible only in France, but starting in Q2, it will be available in other markets.

Founded in 2014, Back Market has raised a total of €48 million in funding over two rounds, most recently a Series B in June 2018. The company is profitable and reportedly still has money to spend from its last funding round.

“We don’t release the gross merchandise volume, but it’s a three-digit growth rate,” Hug de Larauze told TechCrunch. “We saw an increase in demand for laptops, printers and other devices needed for working at home. Demand for refurbished phones is going down as people seek to get the first necessity items, like food for their situation.”

Over the past two weeks, Back Market saw skyrocketing demand from Italy, a nation with a high coronavirus death toll where citizens were warned they would be confined to their homes for four weeks.

Another factor that helped the platform’s growth: Smartphone brands like Apple and Samsung closed their retail stores, a move that turned Back Market into a major supply channel. While offline retailers and carriers are shut down in Europe, Hug de Larauze says Chinese offline retailers and refurbishing factories are starting to get back to work.

TechCrunch confirmed today that BounceX (the firm is rebranding this year) has executed layoffs and salary cuts in the wake of recent COVID-19-led economic disruptions.

Many startups are undergoing staff cuts as the domestic and global economies slow, making individual reductions less newsworthy as the layoff tally rises. However, as BounceX is a company we’ve recently highlighted for its growth and capital efficiency, its own cuts are worth noting.

Reductions

TechCrunch was tipped concerning the BounceX staff cuts and salary reductions earlier today, events that the company confirmed this afternoon. Our original tipster pegged the cuts at around 20% of staff, with pay cuts for the rest of its denizens.

The company confirmed the existence of salary cuts and layoffs, but did not affirm our figures. Here’s BounceX on its hard day; the firm confirmed pay cuts via a spokesperson separately from this comment:

COVID-19 has hit our client base really hard, especially if they had significant retail presence. In order to accommodate clients and help stabilize our business & their businesses, we made the immensely difficult decision to move forward with a reduction in force. While we expected over 30% growth this year and adding 150 new roles by year end, we were forced to consolidate roles in order to do everything we could to take care of as many of our people as possible and continue to help our clients get through this.

It is not a surprise that BounceX was planning revenue growth and 150 new roles; the company recently crossed the $100 million ARR threshold, an event that TechCrunch covered as part of our long-running series focused on companies that reach the revenue threshold.

Indeed, in February, when BounceX shared the milestone, the firm also announced a rebrand, stating that it would change its name to Wunderkind. As you can read from the name, BounceX was feeling good at the time, looking to the future, proud of its growth and track record of efficient capital use.

As TechCrunch wrote at the time:

Wunderkind has been super efficient to date, with [CEO Ryan] Urban telling TechCrunch that “the amount of equity [his company has] actually put to work is probably sub-$35 million,” with less than $50 million in equity capital raised. The company also has debt lines that it can use, the CEO noted.

Given its history of conservative capital management, it doesn’t seem likely that BounceX is in existential danger after its layoffs. The company’s debt line — though we don’t know anything about its covenants — could provide more cushion. But its quick turnaround in fortunes shows how fast things can change.

The impact of COVID-19 on BounceX shows that no company, no matter how successful they were in February, is safe in April. Heck, TripActions was crowing about a huge new debt facility it secured right before COVID-19; the firm has since pared staff as well.

A new COVID-19 vaccine candidate is entering Phase 1 clinical human testing today, after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) accepted an application from Inovio Pharmaceuticals under the regulator’s Investigational New Drug program. Inovio plans to inject its first volunteer test subject with the INO-4800 DNA vaccine candidate it has developed, following promising results from preclinical studies performed on animals that did indicate increased immune response.

The Inovio DNA vaccine candidate works by injecting a specifically engineered plasmid (a small, independent genetic structure) into a patient so that their cells can produce a desired, targeted antibody to fight off a specific infection. DNA vaccines, while available and approved for a variety of animal infections in veterinary medicine, have not yet been approved for human use.

That said, Inovio’s work isn’t starting from scratch: The company previously completed a Phase 1 study for a DNA vaccine candidate for Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), where it showed promising results and a high level of antibodies produced in subjects that persisted for an extended period of time.

Inovio has been able to scale up quickly, developing and producing “thousands of doses” of INO-4800 in just a few short weeks in order to support its Phase 1 and Phase 2 trials. The company has done so in part thanks to backing from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, as well as funding from other non-profits and organizations. If clinical trials are succeeding, Inovio says that it will be able to have up to one million doses of the vaccine ready by end of year, for use both in additional trials and for potential emergency use pending authorization.

This is the second vaccine to undertake Phase 1 clinical testing on human subjects: Moderna began its trial in mid-March. Inovio’s trial will be made up of 40 volunteers, all health adults selected via screening conducted at either Philadelphia’s Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Center for Pharmaceutical Research in Kansas City. It’ll span the next several weeks, and the company expects data around the immune responses from test subjects as well as info pertaining to the safety of the treatment for humans, to be available by late this summer.

Any broad clearance or approval for use is still likely at least a year to 18 months away, but the pace with which human trials are beginning is already still exceptional, so hopefully we won’t have to wait too much longer than that.