Year: 2020

After five days of negotiations, Senate leaders and the Trump administration the White House said early Wednesday morning that Senate leaders and the Trump administration have reached a deal on a $2 trillion stimulus package to help relieve the economic impact of COVID-19.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we are done. We have a deal,” White House legislative affairs director Eric Ueland told reporters around 1AM, according to the Washington Post.

Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who negotiated with Ueland, Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin and other officials, are expected to discuss the deal in Senate soon.

The deal still needs to be approved by the Senate and House of Representatives, but the stock market rose on Tuesday as reports came out that an agreement was imminent, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average gaining more than 2,100 points, or 11.4%.

The size of the stimulus package has grown over the past week, from the $850 billion that the Trump administration reportedly first asked for, to the current $2 trillion.

The deal includes an increase in unemployment insurance, $130 billion earmarked for hospitals, $1,200 checks to many Americans and a $367 billion loan program for small businesses, among other provisions.

According to New York Times reporter Alan Rappeport, the deal also includes a provision, secured by Schumer, that bars businesses controlled by the president, vice president, members of Congress and heads of executive departments from receiving loans or investments from Treasury programs.

Schumer secured a provision in the agreement that will prohibit businesses controlled by the President, Vice President, Members of Congress, and heads of Executive Departments from receiving loans or investments from Treasury programs, per senior Dem aide.

— Alan Rappeport (@arappeport) March 25, 2020

President Donald Trump suggested this week that he wants to lift emergency orders much more quickly than public health experts have suggested. Yesterday Trump told reporters he wants the nation to be “opened up and just raring to go by Easter,” despite warnings by public health experts that more time is needed to contain the spread of novel coronavirus.

According to data from John Hopkins University, there are currently more than 55,200 cases of COVID-19 in the U.S., with a total of 801 deaths.

Esports racing, helped by record-setting viewership, is hitting the big time.

Fox Sports said Tuesday it will broadcast the rest of the eNASCAR Pro Invitational iRacing Series, following Sunday’s virtual race that was watched by 903,000 viewers, according to Nielsen Media Research.

While those numbers are far below the millions of viewers who watch NASCAR’s official races — the last one at Phoenix Raceway reached 4.6 million — it still hit a number of firsts that Fox Sports found notable enough to commit to broadcasting the virtual racing series for the remainder of the season, beginning March 29.

The races will be simulcast on the FOX broadcast network, Fox Sports iRacing and the FOX Sports app. Races will be available in Canada through FOX Sports Racing.

Virtual racing, which lets competitors race using a system that includes a computer, steering wheel and pedals, has been around for years. But it’s garnered more attention as the spread of COVID-19, the disease caused by coronavirus, has prompted sports organizers to cancel or postpone live events, including the NCAA March Madness basketball tournament, NBA, NHL and MLB seasons as well as Formula 1 and NASCAR racing series.

NASCAR ran its first virtual race in the series on Sunday in lieu of its planned race at the Homestead-Miami Speedway, which was canceled due to COVID-19. Not only was it the most watched esports event in U.S. television history, it was Sunday’s most-watched sports telecast on cable television that day.

“This rapid-fire collaboration between FOX Sports, NASCAR and iRacing obviously has resonated with race fans, gamers and television viewers across the country in a very positive way,” Brad Zager, FOX Sports executive producer said in a statement. “We have learned so much in a relatively short period of time, and we are excited to expand coverage of this brand-new NASCAR esports series to an even wider audience.”

Granted, there aren’t any live sports to watch in this COVID-19 era. Still, it bodes well for the future of esports, perhaps even after the COVID-19 pandemic ends.

“The response on social media to last Sunday’s race has been incredible,” said four-time NASCAR Cup Series champion Jeff Gordon, who is announcer for Fox NASCAR. “We were able to broadcast a virtual race that was exciting and entertaining. It brought a little bit of ‘normalcy’ back to the weekend, and I can’t wait to call the action Sunday at Texas.”

You can see what the virtual racing looks like here in this clip from Fox Sports.

NASCAR isn’t the only racing series to turn to esports. Formula 1 announced last week that it would host an esports series, the F1 Esports Virtual Grand Prix series, with a number of current F1 drivers alongside a number of other stars.

The virtual Formula 1 races will use Codemaster’s official Formula 1 2019 PC game and fans can follow along on YouTube, Twitch and Facebook, as well as on F1.com. The races will be about half as long as regular races, with 28 laps. The first race took place March 22. The first-ever virtual round of the Nürburgring Endurance Series kicked off on March 21.

Rocket Lab is the latest new space company to feel the impact of the global coronavirus pandemic: The small satellite launcher announced on Tuesday that it would be suspending its next launch, a mission called ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ that was set to take-off from Rocket Lab’s Launch Complex 1 on New Zealand’s Mahia peninsula on March 30.

The launch is a rideshare mission that includes satellites from a range of customers, including NASA, as well as the US. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), and a communications and tech demonstration satellite built by the University of New South Wales, Canberra Space and the Australian government. Rocket Lab says that it has “the full support of [its] customers in pausing operations,” and that it will be working with the New Zealand government and health officials, as well as its customers, in figuring out a new timeframe for the mission, with the launch vehicle and systems on the ground set to “remain in a state of readiness for launch” for the time being.

Rocket Lab said in its statement about the delay that it made this decision in light of the New Zealand government’s March 23 announcement that it would be escalating its COVID-19 response to Level 4 as of Wednesday March 25, which means everyone is expected to effectively stay at home, while all non-essential businesses are closed and events are cancelled.

The company, which was founded in New Zealand but now maintains a headquarters in Los Angeles, also said that it “commend[s]” the decision to take this level of action in an effort to stop the spread, and that its team is now working from home for the most part, with a few personnel deemed to be essential remaining on site to ensure site and mission safety.

Rocket Lab also notes that despite pausing its production of new launch vehicles, it has taken an approach of readying rockets and launch pads ahead of time in order to meet rapid-response requirements from its customers, so it has a stock of vehicles ready even with a production stoppage.

So far, the COVID-19 crisis has impacted some launches but not others – SpaceX flew a Starlink mission last week, for instance, but will postpone a planned launch at end of March, while ULA appears to be on track to launch a sixth high-frequency defense communications satellite on behalf of the U.S. Space Force on Thursday.

The game developer behind Second Life has abandoned its grand efforts for a virtual reality follow-up to its early 2000s hit.

SF-based Linden Labs announced today that they’ve sold off assets related of Sansar to a small little-known company called Wookey Search Technologies, which will take over development of the title. Linden Lab will continue developing and maintaining Second Life and it sounds like some of its employees will be joining Wookey. The deal was reported by Protocol.

The game studio had already announced layoffs last month.

Though Second Life has remained in the limelight of popular culture, the studio claimed to still be hauling in substantial revenues from the game in recent years. That said, the failure of Sansar is a disaster for Linden Labs which has focused considerable resources on the effort since it first teased the platform back in 2014.

When the title was announced, VR was at the peak of its hype following Facebook’s Oculus VR acquisition. Though Sansar launched in beta with support for both VR and desktop usage, the slow adoption of VR certainly didn’t help the title’s popularity. The studio’s leadership has detailed in interviews that the majority of Sansar’s users are desktop-based.

Given the evident turmoil at the studio, Sansar’s user base will likely be relieved to hear that the studio did their best to give the title a soft landing, though it’s unclear what resources its new acquirer has access to.

With the COVID-19 crisis, startups across Silicon Valley are looking for opportunities where they can both increase the visibility of their services and be helpful to people and businesses deeply affected by the pandemic.

Wefunder, an investment crowdfunding platform, announced an initiative Tuesday to help small businesses impacted by the coronavirus secure loans through its platform on friendlier terms.

The goal of the Coronavirus Crisis Loan program is to “provide critical cash flow during this economic crisis at a reduced interest rate,” a release from the company detailed. Loans can be structured in amounts ranging from $20,000 to $1 million with payments deferred until 2021 and flexible depending on revenue.

For Wefunder’s part, it’s not charity, they’re still taking a slice of the total volume raised, though they are halving their usual percentage from 7.5% to a 3.75% take. Wefunder also charges individuals a 2% cut from their contribution.

Wefunder was founded in 2011 and has raised just over $9 million in funding from investors including Visary Capital and Y Combinator. In recent years, legislation passed that has made it possible for companies to raise smaller amount of money — about $1 million or less in total — from non-accredited investors. The company says that businesses have raised $130 million to date through the platform.

Back in 2016 when the legislation was first introduced, equity crowdfunding was a pretty hot topic of discussion, but for the most part, equity crowdfunding hasn’t become commonplace. Part of this is the result of prevalent seed capital, something that has likely increased the riskiness of the startups that seek funding through platforms like these. This is obviously less of an issue when a good deal of the motivation to invest in a small business is because of the social good component, as might be the case with investors backing businesses taking advantage of this new program.

Alongside its loan program, Wefunder has also announced a three-month startup accelerator program focused on startups that can help tackle problems that will result from the crisis. They’ve notably cast a pretty wide net for the startups they are looking for, everything from remote collaboration to telemedicine to homeschooling, but they will invest $50K in each company and then help them raise more money through their platform on demo day.

Zoom, a video chat service then popular with corporations, filed to go public on March 22, 2019.

Best known in venture and corporate circles, Zoom was far from a household name at the time. However, the groundwork for its 2020-era consumer breakthrough during the novel coronavirus epidemic was detailed during its IPO march in the years leading up to its public debut.

The company didn’t begin trading until mid-April last year, but it was through its March 2019 IPO filing that its name took on new prominence; here was a quickly growing software as a service (SaaS) business that was posting profits at the same time. As the rate at which unprofitable companies went public set records, Zoom’s growth and positive net income helped it gain brand recognition even before its shares began to trade.

Investors certainly recognized this was a rarity among SaaS companies, sending its IPO share price up 72% in its first day. The company’s equity has risen more than 100% since that first close, more than doubling in less than a year. Not bad in a market that has turned ice-cold in recent weeks.

To understand how Zoom became so valuable as a business — and later as a consumer product — let’s go back in time to consider its product and business strategies. As we’ll see, to become the video chat tool that everyone is using today, Zoom had to beat a host of entrenched competition. And it did so while making money, helping set the financial stage for its prominence today.

Product history

Polestar has started production of its all-electric Polestar 2 vehicle at a plant in China amid the COVID-19 pandemic that has upended the automotive industry and triggered a wave of factory closures throughout the world.

The start of Polestar 2 production is a milestone for Volvo Car Group’s standalone electric performance brand  — and not just because it began in the midst of global upheaval caused by COVID-19, a disease that stems from the coronavirus. It’s also the first all-electric car under a brand that was relaunched just three years ago with a new mission.

Polestar was once a high-performance brand under Volvo Cars. In 2017, the company was recast as an electric performance brand aimed at producing exciting and fun-to-drive electric vehicles — a niche that Tesla was the first to fill and has dominated ever since. Polestar is jointly owned by Volvo Car Group and Zhejiang Geely Holding of China. Volvo was acquired by Geely in 2010.

COVID-19 has affected how Polestar and its parent company operate. Factory closures began in China, where the disease first swept through the population. Now Chinese factories are reopening as the epicenter of COVID-19 moves to Europe and North America. Most automakers have suspended production in Europe and North America.

Polestar CEO Thomas Ingenlath said the company started production under these challenging circumstances with a strong focus on the health and safety. He added that the Luqiao, China factory is an example of how Polestar has leveraged the expertise of its parent companies.

Extra precautions have been taken because of the outbreak, including frequent disinfecting of work spaces and requiring workers to wear masks and undergo regular temperature screenings, according to the company. Polestar has said that none of its workers in China tested positive of COVID-19 as a result of its efforts.

COVID-19 has also affected Polestar’s timeline. Polestar will only sell its vehicles online and will offer customers subscriptions to the vehicle. It previously revealed plans to open “Polestar Spaces,” a showroom where customers can interact with the product and schedule test drives. These spaces will be standalone facilities and not within existing Volvo retailer showrooms. Polestar had planned to have 60 of these spaces open by 2020, including Oslo, Los Angeles and Shanghai.

COVID-19 has delayed the opening of the showrooms. The company will have some pop up stores opening as soon as that situation improves, so people can go see the cars and learn more while the permanent showrooms are still under construction, TechCrunch has learned.

It’s not clear just how many Polestar 2 vehicles will be produced, Polestar has told TechCrunch that it is in the “tens of thousands” of cars per calendar year. Those numbers will also depend on demand for the Polestar 2 and other models that are built in the same factory.

Image Credits: Screenshot/Polestar

Polestar also isn’t providing the exact number of reservations until it begins deliveries, which are supposed to start this summer in Europe followed by China and North America. It was confirmed to TechCrunch that reservations are in the “five digits.”

The Polestar 2, which was first revealed in February 2019, has been positioned by the company to go up against Tesla Model 3. (The company’s first vehicle, the Polestar 1, is a plug-in hybrid with two electrical motors powered by three 34 kilowatt-hour battery packs and a turbo and supercharged gas inline 4 up front.)

But it will likely face off against other competitors launching new EVs in 2020 and 2021, including Volkswagen, GM, Ford and startups Lucid Motors and even adventure-focused Rivian.

Polestar is hoping customers are attracted to the tech and the performance of the fastback, which is produces 408 horsepower, 487 pound feet of torque and a 78 kWh battery pack that delivers an estimated range of 292 miles under Europe’s WLTP.

The Polestar 2’s infotainment system will be powered by Android OS and, as a result, bring into the car embedded Google services such as Google Assistant, Google Maps and the Google Play Store. This shouldn’t be confused with Android Auto, which is a secondary interface that lies on top of an operating system. Android OS is modeled after its open-source mobile operating system that runs on Linux. But instead of running smartphones and tablets, Google modified it so it could be used in cars.

YouTube has announced that videos on the site will default to standard definition (SD) quality for the next month in order to cope with demand from the bored, housebound masses. Similar measures were undertaken by the company in Europe last week, and other big consumers of bandwidth are likewise taking steps to minimize their impact.

Bloomberg first reported the new, or rather expanded policy of limiting stream quality by default. In a statement, Google wrote that “we continue to work closely with governments and network operators around the globe to do our part to minimize stress on the system during this unprecedented situation.”

Users will still be able to select higher quality streams, but having the default be the considerably lower bandwidth may save quite a few bits and bytes if people don’t notice or mind the difference. The changes should roll out gradually starting today.

There are already plenty of safeguards in place to make sure that YouTube isn’t stressing the pipes. “We have measures in place to automatically adjust our system to use less network capacity,” a YouTube representative told TechCrunch last week.

Netflix, Disney+, and other streaming providers have likewise opted to limit the bandwidth they use to prevent users from experiencing skipping and buffering should demand outstrip supply. Microsoft and Sony are slowing down and delaying game downloads and updates so as not to saturate connections during peak hours.

I’ve reached out to YouTube for more details on the new policy and will update this post when I hear back.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has updated its rules around use of experimental treatments for the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic to include use of ‘convalescent plasma,’ in cases where the patient’s life is seriously or immediately threatened. This isn’t an approval of the procedure as a certified treatment, but rather an emergency clearance that applies only on a case-by-case basis, and only in extreme cases, as a means of helping further research being done into the possible efficacy of plasma collected from patients who have already contracted, and subsequently recovered from, a case of COVID-19.

Plasma is a component of human blood – specifically the liquid part – which contains, among other things, antibodies that contribute to a body’s immune response. Use of plasma, through direct transfusion into a patient, like every other proposed treatment for COVID-19 (and the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes it), has not undergone the clinical studies needed to show that it’s actually safe and effective in combatting the disease.

Despite a lack of completed clinical trials, the FDA has granted this temporary authorization under its Investigational New Drug Applicants (eINDS) exemption, in light of the extent and nature of the current public health threat that COVID-19 represents. A number of pre-clinical and clinical trials around use of plasma from patients who have recovered are underway, however, and there are some promising signs that convalescent plasma could indeed be effective against SARS-CoV-2.

This is hardly the first time that convalescent plasma has been proposed or attempted to fight off a disease. People who have had a virus and subsequently recovered from it typically build up an immunity to it – either long-term, as with chicken pox, or short-term, as with the seasonal flu. Logically, it stands to reason that it should be possible, at least in theory, to take the antibodies from one individual who has already developed them, and transfuse them into a patient whose immune system is not doing a good enough job producing its own.

Convalescent plasma transfusions have been used in previous outbreaks, including against the H1N1 flu, as well as the original SARS and MERS epidemics, with varying results.

A number of research projects are underway regarding use of plasma against COVID-19, including a study by a team of Chinese medical professionals published in pre-print format (prior to any peer review) that studied ten severe patients who received donations from recently recovered patients. That study found that in five of the ten cases, the level of antibodies “increased rapidly” immediately post-transfusion (four other patients already had a high level of antibodies, and that persisted), and that within a week, the presence of the virus was undetectable in seven patients.

That still isn’t a formal clinical study, but other small-scale investigations from clinical practice have shown similar results. A group of doctors and researchers have also put together a set of protocols for use by doctors working with both donors and recipients to help align efforts across investigations and ensure that everyone working on this problem in the medical science community is working from the same playbook.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that state health agencies would be beginning a convalescent plasma trial this week, and it was cited by FDA Director Dr. Stephen Hahn as an area of early promise last week during a White House coronavirus task force briefing.

All donor patients would have to be tested to confirm that they are not at risk of transmitting the virus, and they must also qualify as a blood donor under the existing rules in place by state and federal agencies. While some early studies have shown that plasma transfusions could be effective in prophylactic use (meaning treating health people before they encounter the virus), this FDA specifically prohibits any prophylactic use.

As with all the treatments currently under development, this will take a lot of testing and research both to validate, and then to certify for general use – though there are a lot of researchers working on those challenges, because work to date shows this is likely to be more effective as a strategy in cases that haven’t yet progressed to the severe symptom stage. Convalescent plasma treatment isn’t new, or even all that sophisticated, but it does have the advantage of being relatively safe (in line with standard blood transfusions, once a person is confirmed to no longer be carrying any active virus), so this could be something to watch for more active updates vs. some of the longer-lead treatment technologies in development.

After years of hype, the AR/VR space has certainly grown quieter as of late, but some investors are still coalescing behind a vision that the technologies could one day replace mobile if the technical kinks can be worked out.

Creal is a Swiss startup that’s working on some fundamental display technologies that could make VR and AR headsets more comfortable with more life-like optics.

The startup raised a $7.4 million Series A last year from Investiere and DAA Capital Partners. The company announced this week that they received grant funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program to continue working on their light field display tech.

Light field displays are a category of displays that are quite a bit different that anything you’ve seen. While existing AR and VR headsets can show you stereoscopic 3D by displaying slightly different images to each of your eyes, future headsets will allow you to change what’s in and out of focus based on where your eyes are looking. The big optics issue this solves for is called the vergence-accommodation conflict and it allows for interacting with objects closer to your face and functionally makes reading in VR quite a bit more effective as well.

Here’s a “through-the-lens” demo of the startup’s technology from a video posted last year:

There are varying degrees of how the technology is implemented. Magic Leap rolled out a lightweight version of its technology in its headset that leverages a pair of focal planes that are switched between with eye-tracking. This “varifocal” approach is also something that Facebook is investing in, they’ve showcased prototype headsets that allow users to shift their focus between multiple planes.

Creal is having to deal with some of the same struggles as its big company counterparts have when it comes to making sacrifices in order to miniaturize the technology. Integrating their tech into a virtual reality headset is the nearest-term target for the company, though they have ambitions to integrate into lightweight AR headsets within the next several years.

Startups building tech like Creal may be particularly at risk to a global recession, when investment in frontier technologies typically takes a big hit. A prolonged period of economic instability will almost certainly tilt the scales in the favor of big tech companies like Facebook as startups approaching the same advances will likely be forced to push out roadmaps and cut costs in order to survive.

While Oculus has seen some recent success in expanding the VR market niche, augmented reality hardware has been an incredibly tough sell for startups. A number of companies in the space shut down last year, including Meta, ODG and Daqri. Earlier this month, Bloomberg reported that Magic Leap was positioning itself for a sale after raising billions of dollars in funding.