Year: 2020

We look at an in-depth screener app for COVID-19, U.S. stocks take another tumble and Apple extends its free trial for Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro. Here’s your Daily Crunch for March 27, 2020.

Stay safe and socially distanced this weekend!

1. Clearstep’s COVID-19 chat-based screener goes in-depth to preserve healthcare resources

There are a growing number of symptom checker and screening tools that you can use at home if you suspect you might have contracted the new coronavirus that is causing the global COVID-19 pandemic. Most of these are relatively simple, including three or four questions that cover the top reported symptoms experienced by anyone who has confirmed to have had the disease.

In contrast, chatbot-based symptom checking software startup Clearstep has created its own COVID-19 screener, which goes more in-depth to combine symptom checking with screening for potential exposure to the virus.

2. Stocks fall sharply Friday morning as the mid-week recovery falls short

The major American stock market indices are down sharply this morning at the open, with stocks falling after a multi-day rally helped shave some losses off their calendar-year results.

3. Apple extends free trials for its pro creative apps

Apple announced today that they are temporarily extending the free trials on Final Cut Pro X and Logic Pro X from 30 days to 90 days, giving potential customers stuck at home a longer window of time to try out the software. With this announcement, Apple joins a number of other software companies extending the free trials of their products in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis.

4. Yelp pauses GoFundMe Covid-19 fundraising after opt-out outcry

A fundraising program that Yelp and GoFundMe put in place this week to help local businesses impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic has been paused after public outcry over how it was rolled out — specifically, controversy over how the two provided no easy and quick way to opt out of the fundraising.

5. Smart telescope startups vie to fix astronomy’s satellite challenge

The stakes involved are high, with projects like Starlink (the satellite branch of SpaceX) potentially being central to the future of global internet coverage, especially as new infrastructure implements 5G and edge computing. At the same time, satellite clusters — whether from Starlink or national militaries — could threaten the foundations of astronomical research. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

6. Notarize to add 1,000 online notaries to address demand for remote transactions

The startup is partnering with the National Notary Association to verify notaries have been screened and have the necessary insurance or bonding. The service is available to Americans in all 50 states or abroad, but notaries must be physically located in Florida, Nevada, Texas or Virginia to join the platform.

7. Social Bluebook was hacked, exposing 217,000 influencers’ accounts

Social Bluebook, a Los Angeles-based company, allows advertisers to pay social media “influencers” for posts that promote their products and services. The company claims it has some 300,000 influencers on its books, but in October 2019, its entire backend database was stolen in a data breach.

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Bird is the latest startup hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. Today, Bird laid off about 30% of its employees amid the uncertainty caused by the coronavirus, TechCrunch has learned.

“The unprecedented COVID-19 crisis has forced our leadership team and the board of directors to make many extremely difficult and painful decisions relating to some of your teammates,” Bird CEO Travis VanderZanden wrote to staffers in a memo, obtained by TechCrunch, today. “As you know, we’ve had to pause many markets around the world and drastically cut spending. Due to the financial and operational impact of the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, we are saying goodbye to about 30% of our team.”

Bird has confirmed the layoffs and says it is providing four weeks of pay, three weeks of health coverage and an extended timeframe of 12 months to exercise their stock options. According to a source, Bird’s balance sheet is strong but it needed to reduce burn in order to extend its runway into 2021.

Bird’s layoffs come shortly after news broke that Lime is looking for a funding round that would cut its valuation from $2.4 billion to $400 million.

Last week, Bird along with Lime suspended their respective services in response to the pandemic.

Bird is not the only startup forced to have layoffs amid the crisis. As The Information reported earlier this week, layoffs are accelerating across Silicon Valley. Meanwhile, Lime is reportedly considering laying off up to 70 people in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Here’s the full memo VanderZanden sent this morning:

We’ve watched the COVID-19 pandemic radically and quickly transform our lives, the world, and our business in less than a month. This once in a decade black swan event presents one of the greatest challenges in history because of the viral impact it has not just on our health, but also on our lives—our families, friends, communities, finances, work, emotions—the list goes on.

The unprecedented COVID-19 crisis has forced our leadership team and the board of directors to make many extremely difficult and painful decisions relating to some of your teammates. As you know, we’ve had to pause many markets around the world and drastically cut spending. Due to the financial and operational impact of the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, we are saying goodbye to about 30% of our team.

In business, I feel like every challenge is surmountable with the right team. And I believe Bird has been building the right team these past few years. Until today, there wasn’t a problem we couldn’t solve together. That’s what makes this such a painful situation. To say goodbye to some of the most incredible, intelligent, scrappy, funny, loving, dedicated members of our Bird Family for reasons totally outside our control, hurts deeply.

I recognize and sympathize that this situation adds to an already difficult time. As you know, we strive to be community-focused at Bird—we always try to care deeply about the people we serve. The impacted individuals are an important part of this community and I hope that our commitment to caring and supporting them during this transition by providing severance pay, extended health insurance, and an extended window to exercise options makes a positive impact during this crisis.

We looked at many different options and scenarios and took as many preventive measures as possible to reduce the impact of the virus. Given the unknown timeline and current economic situation, we were forced to cut back in this way to elongate the trajectory of Bird and our mission.  As you know, we just raised hundreds of millions from investors, but given all the uncertainty, we needed to ensure a cash runway to last through the end of 2021.

Moving forward, together

As we all know: yes, the world has changed and continues to change. This will be a difficult season, but we continue to work around the clock to move us forward as a team. As mentioned last week, we’re aggressively shoring up resources and protecting our existing assets. We’ve curbed all spending company-wide that is not directly related to helping us weather this storm together. We appreciate all your help identifying unnecessary spend during this down time.

History also tells us something important: micromobility, especially scooters, will very likely have an important role to play as communities begin to get moving again in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This is not the first time that a public health crisis has had a direct impact on the micromobility industry. When the SARS outbreak was sweeping through China, e-bike sales surged as riders looked for more personalized alternatives to public transit.

History suggests that people will demand a large scale mobility option that still allows for personal distancing. And Bird will be there, working hand in hand with cities to help communities heal, and help riders regain mobility, in the wake of the most serious global pandemic in recent memory.

I just want to give a heartfelt thank you to everyone who has rallied to keep up with such a rapidly changing situation. We’ll try to keep everyone informed as it relates to changing priorities and business impact. We’ve had successes that allow businesses to persevere in times of uncertainty and, with your trust, patience and determination, we will overcome the challenges we face today as well.

Lean on each other. Over communicate. Support each other. Reach out to your teammates and managers to understand what you can do to keep us moving forward.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced Friday that his company would be donating more than $800 million in ad credits and cash to help government orgs and small businesses respond to the COVID-19 crisis.

The announcement gives a full breakdown of the deployment, the bulk of which is in credits for Google services.

• Google will be giving $250 million worth of ad grants to more than 100 government orgs across the globe, including the World Health Organization.
• They will also be seeding $340 million in ad credits to small businesses with accounts that have been active in the past year. The credits are good through the end of the year.
• They’ll be giving away $20 million worth of Google Cloud credits to academic institutions and researchers that are tackling COVID-19.
• $200 million will go to an investment fund for non-profits and financial institutions to provide small businesses with access to capital.
• Google further reiterated that they are continue to invest in helping suppliers scale up production of face masks and other personal protective equipment.

COVID-19 is a global crisis and big tech companies like Google have strong global networks that are important to leverage. The global economy is undoubtedly being stressed by the pandemic with small businesses especially being affected and Google signal-boosting the World Health Organization and other government orgs with information to disseminate is a good move that more companies should follow.

As with any donation from a big tech company, it’s healthy to look at what recipients are getting and what the institution itself is earning.

Google’s ad business has taken a major pandemic hit as businesses that have temporarily closed up shop or reduced operations have also stopped advertising their services. Giving away hundreds of millions of dollars worth of ads gets some of these businesses back to their advertising dashboards, lets Google boost the throughput of the competitive ad ecosystem and lands the company some solid goodwill in the process. Giving ads away to government orgs boosts goodwill that could be useful for future lobbying efforts and bringing academics into the fold with Google Cloud credits could entice those institutions away from AWS or Azure.

New York University is among the many academic, private and public institutions doing what it can to address the need for personal protective equipment (PPE) among healthcare workers across the world. The school worked quickly to develop an open source face shield design, and is now offering that design freely to any and all in order to help scale manufacturing to meet needs.

Face shields are a key piece of equipment for frontline healthcare workers operating in close contact with COVID-19 patients. They’re essentially plastic, transparent masks that extend fully to cover a wearer’s face. These are to be used in tandem with N95 and surgical masks, and can protect a healthcare professional from exposure to droplets containing the virus expelled by patients when they cough or sneeze.

The NYU project is one of many attempts to scale production of face masks, but many others rely on 3D-printing. This has the advantage of allowing even very small commercial 3D print operations and individuals to contribute, but 3D printing takes a lot of time – roughly 30 minutes to an hour per print. NYU’s design requires only basic materials, including two pieces of clear, flexible plastic and an elastic band, and it can be manufactured in less than a minute by essentially any production facility that includes equipment for producing flat products (whole punches, laser cutters, etc.).

This was designed in collaboration with clinicians, and over 100 of them have already been distributed to emergency rooms. NYU’s team plans to ramp to scale production of up to 300,000 of these once they have materials in hand at the factories of production partners they’re working with, which include Daedalus Design and Production, PRG Scenic Technologies and Showman Fabricators.

Now, the team is putting the design out there for pubic use, including a downloadable tool kit so that other organizations can hopefully replicate what they’ve done and get more into circulation. They’re also welcoming inbound contact from manufacturers who can help scale additional production capacity.

Other initiatives are working on different aspects of the PPE shortage, including efforts to build ventilators and extend their use to as many patients as possible. It’s a great example of what’s possible when smart people and organizations collaborate and make their efforts available to the community, and there are bound to be plenty more examples like this as the COVID-19 crisis deepens.

Instacart shoppers, led by the folks over at Gig Workers Collective, are planning a nationwide strike in protest of the company’s practices amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Vice first reported. Shoppers, who are responsible for grocery shopping and deliveries, say they have urged Instacart to take proper safety precautions, such as providing hand sanitizer and disinfectant products, but “have been ignored,” Gig Workers Collective wrote in a post today.

On March 30, shoppers will strike and not return to work until their demands are met. Shoppers are demanding Instacart provide personal protective equipment at no cost to workers and hazard pay of $5 extra per order, change the default tip to 10%, extend the sick pay policy to those who have a doctor’s note for a pre-existing condition that may make them more susceptible to contracting the virus, and extend the deadline to qualify for those benefits beyond April 8th.

“The health and safety of our entire community — shoppers, customers, and employees — is our first priority,” an Instacart spokesperson said in a statement to TechCrunch. “Our goal is to offer a safe and flexible earnings opportunity to shoppers, while also proactively taking the appropriate precautionary measures to operate safely. We want to underscore that we absolutely respect the rights of shoppers to provide us feedback and voice their concerns. It’s a valuable way for us to continuously make improvements to the shopper experience and we’re committed to supporting this important community during this critical time.”

Shortly after their demands went public, Instacart outlined its plans to extend its financial assistance through May 8, 2020. The company says it is also extending contactless deliveries to alcohol so that shoppers will no longer need to collect signatures from customers unless it’s explicitly required by the state or retailer. While Instacart has addressed some of the demands, the company has not met all of them.

This all comes after Instacart announced it would bring on another 300,000 independent contractors to keep up with the demand that has resulted from many Americans staying at home during the pandemic.

“Instacart has a well established history of exploiting its Shoppers, one that extends years back before our current crisis,” the shoppers wrote. “Now, its mistreatment of Shoppers has stooped to an all-time low. They are profiting astronomically off of us literally risking our lives, all while refusing to provide us with effective protection, meaningful pay, and meaningful benefits.”

Amid the coronavirus outbreak, Instacart has offered sick pay for in-store shoppers and extended pay for independent contractors. The company has also implemented contactless deliveries, but shoppers say these efforts fall short. In fact, shoppers say Instacart has failed to honor its promise of paying shoppers up to 14 days of pays if diagnosed or placed in quarantine.

It’s now widely understood that gig workers are providing essential services during these times, as many cities have enacted shelter-in-place ordinances and as vulnerable people are remaining at home in order to reduce their risk of exposure to the virus. In San Francisco, legislators are pushing for more gig worker protections while the House of Representatives is currently reviewing the $2 trillion stimulus package that would provide gig workers with unemployment insurance.

A massive bipartisan effort to provide relief to a U.S. economy on ice just leapt over its last major hurdle. On Friday, the House of Representatives passed a historic stimulus package known as the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security or “CARES” act, which contains an unprecedented $2.2 trillion in total financial relief for businesses, public institutions and individuals hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The bill passed the House today after Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) took the unpopular step of blocking a voice vote that could House members could conduct remotely. House lawmakers quickly returned to Washington to appear in person Friday, where they spread out in the galleries above the House floor for safety. The bill passed with a quorum of more than 216 members of the House present.

“The aid must be robust, rapid and resilient, just like its recipients,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) said during proceedings Friday. “We are going to help Americans through this. We are doing to do it together.”

“Whatever concerns we may have and whatever we want to do next, right now we’re going to pass this legislation,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said in her speech on the floor.

To get to a place of fast bipartisan consensus, the bill, shepherded by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, came together through addition rather than subtraction. The result is a sprawling 880 page piece of legislation stuffed with concessions for members of both parties—but one that can provide for Americans quickly. Here are some of the key relief measures targeted toward small businesses, big industry players and a gutted American workforce reeling from job losses.

Expanded unemployment benefits

After Democrats negotiated their own priorities into the bill, it now includes greatly boosted unemployment benefits that will reach workers usually left out in the cold. Under the new legislation, gig workers, contract workers and freelancers will be now eligible for unemployment benefits—a huge boon for anyone not employed full-time.

The bill also adds a substantial additional $600 per week on top of existing state benefits to help the jobless navigate the crisis. Nearly one in five Americans had lost work as of mid-March—a number that’s likely going up.

Those benefits will last four months, in spite of objections from Republican Senator Lindsey Graham who claimed the enhanced unemployment provisions could actually give some workers more money than they were making previously, a fact he said “incentivized people not to go back to work.” Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders slammed those objections in a passionate speech on the Senate floor Wednesday night.

“Somebody who’s making 12 bucks an hour now like the rest of us faces an unprecedented economic crisis with 600 bucks on top of their regular unemployment check might be making a few bucks more for four months,” Sanders said. “Oh my word, will the universe survive? How absurd and wrong is that?”

Business loans

Small businesses can expect some relief. The bill sets aside $350 billion for small business loans up to $10 million, with priority given to women-owned businesses, new businesses and those run by anyone “socially and economically disadvantaged.” A separate $10 billion in emergency small business grants of up to $10,000 is also set aside—an unprecedented measure from the Small Business Administration.

A separate $500 billion pool of money is set aside for bailing out larger businesses hurt by the crisis with emergency loans—a provision of the bill key to its Republican support. In recent days, Democrats were able to work in some oversight measures for how that money gets allocated, provisioning for an inspector general to oversee the process.

The hard-hit airline industry will receive $58 billion from that pool of money, half in loans and half in grants for worker pay. The loans come with some strings attached—to accept them, airlines will have to agree not to lay workers off through the end of September. The package forbids stock buybacks and issuing dividends to shareholders for a year after paying off one of the loans.

The bill also sets aside $100 billion for hospitals and health providers as they struggle to meet the challenge of COVID-19 amid widespread shortages of personal protective equipment and depleted staffs.

In an effort to get companies to spend the money on workers rather than self-enrichment, the bill includes a ban on companies buying back their own stock while receiving help from the federal government and for one year afterward.

Cash payments

One of the most surprising parts of the package is the bipartisan decision to include direct cash payments to Americans, a generally strongly Democratic idea with its roots in universal basic income proposals. The stimulus will include direct cash payments of $1,200 for adults and $500 for children in a move likely to include up to 94% of all tax filers. Above an adjusted gross income of $75,000 for single filers and $150,000 for couples filing jointly the payment phases out by $5 for every $100 in extra income. Single filers without children making $99,000 and couples without children making $198,000 would receive no benefit.

In spite of some Democrats pushing for recurring payments, the benefit is a one-time payout, though some in Congress expect additional payments to be discussed in the near-future bills. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she didn’t think Congress has “seen the end of direct payments.”

The payment will go directly to anyone who received a tax refund through direct deposit in recent years. For everyone else, the government will be sending a check—a process that’s expected to take longer. Some critics of the final bill wanted the direct payments to circumvent the notoriously difficult-to-navigate U.S. tax system, but this is how they ended up.

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We’ll be sorting through the finer print in the coming days and looking for ways the stimulus will affect workers, startups and tech giants. To comb through yourself, the full text of the bill is embedded below.

Broadband constellation satellite operator OneWeb has officially filed for bankruptcy protection in the U.S., after attempts to secure new funding, including from existing investor SoftBank, fell through, TechCrunch has learned. The Financial Times also reported on the failure of its funding attempt on Friday, based on its own separate sources. The company will be laying off most of its staff, with a team remaining in place to continue to operate its existing satellites in space, according to our sources.

OneWeb, founded in 2012 as WorldVu Satellites, had been seeking to build out a constellation of broadband internet satellites that would operate in low Earth orbit, providing low-cost connections to customers on the ground with coverage that extends into more remote and hard-to reach areas that are not addressed by current ground-based networks.

Earlier this month, Bloomberg reported that OneWeb had been considering a bankruptcy protection filing, while also weighing other options. One of those other options was a new funding round targeting a raise of around $2 billion. The company had previously raised $3 billion over multiple rounds, including a $1.3 billion and $1.2 billion round in 2019 and 2016 respectively, both of which had SoftBank as lead investor.

OneWeb also just completed a launch earlier in March, bringing the total number of its satellites in orbit to 74. The company then reduced its headcount by as much as 10% through layoffs we reported last week.

This latest step essentially means that OneWeb had exercised all other options for continued cash to stay afloat, and it required considerable reserves in order to continue its planned rapid pace of launches, with the ultimate aim of putting over 650 satellites in orbit in order to provide its service globally. SoftBank backing away as an investor leaves a big hole that’s difficult to fill in terms of scale and depth of pockets among the rest of the VC field, and the company has been stepping away from a number of its more high-profile investments since encountering difficulties of its own in terms of returning value on the biggest checks its cut, including for WeWork .

OneWeb’s funding situation can’t have been helped by the current global comic climate, also, rocked as it has been by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Reports suggest that at least some investors are taking a more conservative approach, suggesting that traditional routes to securing more investment may have proven more difficult to unlock than usual.

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French startup Zyl has released a major update of its mobile app for iOS and Android. The app is all about finding long-forgotten memories of important life events in your photo library.

Zyl scans your photo library and magically finds photos that matter. Every day, the app sends you a notification to tell you that you can unlock a new memory — a new Storyl. It instantly brings you back to that special day with an automatically generated story. All your photos are already stitched together, the app is just waiting for you.

With today’s update, Zyl lets you share your memory with your friends and family members who were part of this past event. They can contribute and add their own photos from their photo library.

Sure, each user could have created their own version of this story. But collaborative stories lead to something more powerful. Years after celebrating something, Zyl brings you closer to your friends right now.

Behind the scene, the company has been working on machine learning-powered algorithms to understand the emotions behind your photo. The company has a privacy-focused approach. It scans your photo library on your devices — your photos aren’t uploaded to Zyl’s servers. You don’t need to create a user account either.

Zyl doesn’t want to overwhelm you with a ton of content at once. You have to wait 24 hours to unlock a new Storyl. That slow-paced approach sets it apart from Instagram, where you have to frenetically tap on the screen to gobble as much content as possible.

Just like with your memories, you have to make room for new memories and cherish the most important ones. In the future, Zyl could remove some of your old Storyls to let you focus on the ones that matter. If you haven’t shared it with a friend, chances are that it wasn’t that important.

Instead of traditional comments, the startup is also working on a way to add some meaningful content on top of your photos. Again, Zyl is focused on emotions and generating a good vibe. For me, it has been a great way to forget about the news cycle for a few minutes.

Big tech companies are looking to ensure that people have easy access to key information on COVID-19.

Today, Apple launched its own coronavirus screening site (apple.com/covid19) developed alongside the White House, CDC and FEMA. The site is pretty simple with basic information about best practices and safety tips alongside a basic screening tool which should give you a pretty solid idea on whether or not you need to be tested for COVID-19.

Depending on your symptoms, teh site will push you to get in contact with your health provider, contact emergency services or it’ll inform you that you likely do not need to be tested. It will not route you to a testing center directly.