Year: 2020

Ford announced the details of its current manufacturing efforts around building much-needed medical supplies for front-line healthcare workers and COVID-19 patients on Tuesday. Its efforts include building Powered Air-Purifying Respirators (PAPRs) with partner 3M, including a new design that employs existing parts from both partners to deliver effectiveness and highly-scalable production capacity.

Ford says that it’s also going to be building face shields, leaning on its 3D printing capabilities, with an anticipated production rate of over 100,000 units per week. These are key pieces of personal protective equipment (PPE) used by frontline healthcare staff to protect them against virus-containing droplets that are spread by patients through coughing and sneezing in clinical settings. The company has designed a new face shield, which will be tested with the first 1,000 units this week at Detroit Mercy, Henry Ford Health Systems and Detroit Medical Center Sinai-Grace Hospitals in Michigan to evaluate their efficacy. Provided they perform as planned, Ford anticipates scaling to building 75,000 by end of week, with 100,000 able to be made in one of the company’s Plymouth, MI production facilities each week thereafter.

The automaker is also going to be working with GE on expanding production capacity for GE Healthcare’s ventilator, with a simplified design that should allow for higher volume production. That’s part of a response to a U.S. government request for more units to support healthcare needs, the company said. On top of its U.S.-focused ventilator project with GE, Ford is also working on a separate effort to spin up ventilator production targeting the UK based on a request for aid from that country’s government, and it’s also shipping back 165,000 N95 respirator masks that were sent by the company from the U.S. to China earlier this year, since the need for that equipment is now greater back in the U.S., the company said, and China’s situation continues to improve.

Over the weekend, President Trump tweeted that U.S. automakers, including Ford, GM and Tesla had received the “go ahead” to make “ventilators and other metal products, fast.”

“We have had preliminary discussions with the U.S. and U.K. governments and looking into the feasibility,” Ford spokesperson Rachel McCleery said at the time in a statement to TechCrunch . “It’s vital that we all pull together to help the country weather this crisis and come out the other side stronger than ever.”

Based on this update, it seems like Ford did indeed move quickly to take stock of where it could contribute, and in what capacity. The company will be looking at using both its own and partner facilities to produce this much-needed medical equipment, it said on Tuesday during a press conference call about the announcement, and it’ll also be leveraging existing parts and equipment to speed production capabilities and capacity.

The PAPRs that Ford is building, for instance, will use off-the-shelf components from the automaker’s F-150 truck’s cooled seating, as well as 3M’s existing HEPA filters. These respirators could potentially offer significant advantages in use compared to N95s, since they are battery-powered and can filter airborne virus particles for up to eight hours on a single, swappable standard power tool battery pack worn at the waist. Asked about production timelines and capacity, 3M Global Technical Director Mike Kesti said that they’re still working that out, with a focus on how Ford can supplement existing PAPR production before moving into producing their new version.

“[Ford is] helping us expand the capacity of our existing units,” Kesti said. “So impact will be over the next days and weeks to just increase capacity of our existing [PAPR]. But we’re also working closely together with them the leverage components both from Ford, that they have available, and 3M, particularly our filters that meet the NIOSH [National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health] regulatory requirements, and trying to integrate that into a modified design that will meet the NIOSH regulation performance requirements, and scale it up as as quickly as possible.”

Ford is also assisting 3M with ramping production of its existing N95 respiratory masks, Kesti said.

Ford and GE don’t yet have a timeline, or estimates of production capacity for the new types of ventilators they’re working on either, but the team is “working feverishly to get to the release point,” according to GE Healthcare VP and Chief Quality Officer Tom Westrick.

“We don’t have specific timelines and numbers related to the to the design and the release of the new ventilators,” he said. “Although, obviously this is of utmost importance to both us and Ford.”

Amazon said on Tuesday that it is temporarily discontinuing accepting orders for “lower-priority” products in India and prioritizing urgent items such as household staples, health care, and personal safety products as the e-commerce players grapple with coronavirus outbreak in one of the key overseas markets.

“To serve our customers’ most urgent needs while also ensuring safety of our employees, we are temporarily prioritizing our available fulfilment and logistics capacity to serve products that are currently critical for our customers such as household staples, packaged food, health care, hygiene, personal safety and other high priority products. This also means that we have to temporarily stop taking orders and disable shipments for lower-priority products,” the American e-commerce giant said in a statement.

The move, which goes into effect today, comes as nearly every Indian state has imposed a lockdown to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

More to follow…

Brex wants to help startups get the money that traditional big banks won’t lend them, and it just acquired three companies to help it do so: Neji, Compose Labs and Landria. Per Brex, 12 new people will be joining Brex in total from the three companies. 

While the San Francisco fintech startup declined to share how much each deal cost, we all know Brex doesn’t have a shortage of capital: It has raised more than $300 million in known venture capital from investors like Kleiner Perkins, DST Global, Ribbit Capital and Y Combinator, per Crunchbase. 

While on first thought the COVID-19 pandemic may have slowed the acquisitions, Henrique Dubugras, the co-founder of Brex, said that it simply enhanced the importance of the investments, which span across security, e-commerce and customer support. Let’s get into them respectively. 

Neji is a San Francisco-based startup that specializes in protecting customer data across multiple cloud deployments. Security is important, especially when it comes to bank transactions. Dubugras said this acquisition will focus on making sure Brex Cash, the business cash management account that connects to the Brex Credit card, is secure. 

It also scooped up Compose Labs, which powers information videos on coding and technology, and it will help grab data and analytics from Brex’s e-commerce credit card. Brex’s e-commerce credit card is similar to Brex’s flagship credit card product and includes partnerships with e-commerce tools and solutions. Dubugras says e-commerce has been a “fast growing vertical” for Brex, and that they are “adding engineering talent to specifically increase the number of data sources” used in underwriting and products around it. 

Finally, Landria helps companies organize and manage all their SaaS tools. Brex says Landria staff will help ensure transaction accuracy for customers.  

Back to the pandemic in the room. Brex, which was last valued at $2.6 billion, did not acquire all three companies as the rest of the world faced an economic downturn. Co-founder Henrique Dubugras told me that Brex began conversations with the three companies starting last fall and closed the deals this quarter. As startups across the world are met with layoffs and uncertainty, it’s clear that the lucky startups with cash in the bank from those nine-figure rounds in 2019 will be turning to different routes than customer acquisition and fundraising when it comes to growth. I bet that we’ll start to see solid growth coming from M&A, as prices for deals lower and companies have less exit opportunities. 

But regardless of our economic state, Brex’s buys are another move from the company to show that it is more than a corporate credit card company, and inherit some expertise from other companies at the same time. Let’s remember that Brex wants to be a bank for startups, and has largely swung at payment processing behemoth Stripe since launch. Stripe has launched its own credit card for startups and, unlike Brex, has years of operation to prove why it should be trusted as a major fintech company.

ePlane, described as a B2B sourcing and business intelligence platform for the aerospace parts and repair market, has raised $9 million in funding. The round is led by Japanese trading and investing company Marubeni Corporation, along with a number of previous investors.

Founded in 2016 and launched fully in 2018, ePlane has built to let users trade aircraft parts, locate repair services, and improve supply chain bottlenecks and reduce costs. The idea is that by throwing tech at the problem, including an online marketplace — covering buying, selling, repairing, loaning, and exchanging aircraft parts — many inefficiencies within the aerospace parts and repair market can be eradicated.

For example, the platform’s “Autopilot” feature claims to use an AI algorithm to match buyers and sellers based on needs, available inventory, past transactions, and required timeframe. It then automatically sends requests for quotes (RFQs) to appropriate sellers, therefore eliminating the need to send each request manually.

More broadly, ePlane’s platform digitizes the procurement process, “syncing enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and custom inventories, to ensure that inventories are most up to date in real time”.

The aviation maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) market is said to be large, too, totalling $80 billion globally. ePlane says the market is expected to grow to $116 billion by 2029, and therefore is prime for its B2B sourcing platform.

To that end, I’m told the aviation industry is already embracing Cyprus-headquartered ePlane. The startup is now receiving over $50 million in monthly demand from over 4,000 major companies in the aerospace industry.

Cat Person is a new startup trying to change the way you think of cat people — and hoping to sell that new type of cat owner a whole range of cat products.

“We know what the stereotypes are, we just don’t think they’re true,” said CEO Jimmy Wu. “They’re incredibly outdated. We want to build a brand for who the modern cat persons are.”

When asked for more detail about these “modern cat persons” (not the kind dramatized by Kristen Roupenian’s famous short story), Wu said the company isn’t focusing on a specific demographic or geographic group — the words “hip,” “urban” and “millennial” were never uttered during our conversation.

Instead, he suggested that Cat Person recognizes that there are a wide variety of people who “genuinely care about cats.” He also suggested that their ranks could grow, given all the stress and anxiety around the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Obviously we’re in unprecedented times,” he said. “[But] this is a great time for this business. If anything, more than ever, people need cats. Cats provide relief.”

Wu co-founded the company with Lambert Wang, who previously worked in business development at razor startup Harry’s. In fact, Wang said he first took the idea to Harry’s co-founder Jeff Raider, and Cat Person is now spinning out as an independent startup from the company’s innovation group Harry’s Labs.

In Wu’s view, walking into a pet store today is like walking into “a dog store” with a single aisle reserved for cat products. Similarly, the pair suggested that when it comes to startups bringing the direct-to-consumer model to the pet world, most of the focus has been on dogs.

At the same time, Wu and Wang pointed to a survey of 1,000 U.S. cat owners that they commissioned from market research firm AYTM, which found that 71 percent of cat owners aren’t completely satisfied with the selection of cat furniture on the market, while 74 percent wish they had healthier food options.

Cat Person is supposed to deliver all of that, with an initial product lineup that includes high-protein cat food (wet food, dry food and treats), a modular cat bed ($80), a cat bowl ($40, designed to prevent whisker fatigue) and catnip toys ($7). Customers can also subscribe to a customizable recurring meal plan — Cat Person says that an average four-week shipment would cost $68.85.

The startup is launching at time of greater scrutiny and skepticism of the direct-to-consumer model, thanks to news like Outdoor Voices announcing layoffs and ousting its CEO and Casper revealing disappointing financials as part of its IPO.

It’s worth noting, however, that Harry’s exited successfully in a $1.37 billion acquisition by Edgewell Personal Care. Wu also suggested that even though Cat Person is starting out by selling directly to consumers via the Cat Person website, he isn’t wedded to a pure DTC model.

“We’re not building a direct-to-consumer company, we’re building a brand for cats and cat persons first and foremost,” he said. “I think DTC happens to be a channel through which we’re launching initially that allow us to build that direct relationship. But we want to be able to really quickly evolve.”

Mozilla just announced a new initiative called Firefox Better Web with Scroll, which combines the tracking protection built into its Firefox browser with the ad-free browsing experience offered by Scroll .

Last year, Firefox turned on something called Enhanced Tracking Protection for all its users by default, blocking third-party cookies and crypto-mining. Scroll, meanwhile, is startup that recently launched a subscription service allowing you to read sites like BuzzFeed News, Business Insider, Salon, Slate and Vox without ads, with the revenue split among the publishers that you’re actually visiting.

Mozilla has already been working with Scroll to collect feedback on this approach from small groups of Firefox users. Here’s how the company summarized its findings:

• Users see ads as distracting and say their online experience is broken (in the tech world, we call it breakage).
• Users care a great deal about supporting journalism. Many users intentionally choose not to install ad-blockers because of the impact that it would have on publishers.
• Users want to support Mozilla because we’re a non-profit and put our users first with Firefox.

Now, anyone in the United States who’s interested in trying this out can sign up for a Firefox account and install the Scroll extension. They’ll need to pay for a Scroll subscription as well — the company’s currently charging an introductory price of $2.49 per month, with plans to eventually increase to $4.99.

In a blog post, Scroll said the results since launch are delivering on its promise to bring publishers more money than advertising — in fact, publishers are seeing an average $30 to $40 RPM (revenue per thousand pageviews) from Scroll visitors.

“The model works, and combined with Firefox’s best ever private browsing experience, we can bring a better web to many more,” the company said.

Scheduled for early-June in Taipei, Computex has been one of the world’s largest technology trade shows for decades now. It was also among the last big hold outs as events all over the world have been canceled on postponed over the growing COVID-19 pandemic.

Earlier this week, a number of manufactures sent out public flares, asking organizers to delay the event. Organizers have finally given in, announcing today via press release that 40th anniversary event will be pushed back to September 28-30.

Per the press release,

Computex organizers, TAITRA President & CEO, Mr. Walter Yeh, and TCA Secretary General, Mr. Enoch Du jointly announce, for the health and safety of exhibitors and visitors, the effectiveness of the exhibition, and maintaining the Computex brand image, Computexscheduled for June 2-6 will be rescheduled to September.

We’ve reached out to the show’s organizers for further comment. The news comes as Taiwan has begun to experience another flare up in COVID-19 cases. This week, government officials announced 20 additional cases, totaling 215, since the beginning to the novel coronavirus’s spread.

According to officials, all new cases were brought to the country from travel abroad — no doubt the some 120,000 people that attend the show each year would only exacerbate the virus’s spread.

For the past eighteen months the iPad Pro has been my only machine away from home, and until recently I was away from home a lot. Traveling domestically and internationally to event locations around the world or our offices in San Francisco, New York and London. Every moment of every day that I wasn’t at my home desk, the iPad Pro was my main portable machine.

I made the switch on a trip to Brazil for our conference and Startup Battlefield competition (which was rad, by the way, a computer vision cattle scale won the top prize) on somewhat of a whim. I thought I’d take this 1 week trip to make sure I got a good handle on how the iPad Pro would perform as a work device and then move back to my trusty 13” MacBook Pro.

The trip changed my mind completely about whether I could run TechCrunch wholly from a tablet. It turns out that it was lighter, smoother and more willing than my MacBook at nearly every turn. I never went back.

The early days were absolutely full of growing pains for both the iPad and myself. Rebuilding workflows by patching together the share sheet and automation tools and the newly introduced Shortcuts was a big part of making it a viable working machine at that point. And the changes that came with iPadOS that boosted slipover, split and the home screen were welcome in that they made the whole thing feel more flexible.

The past year and a half has taught me a lot about what the absolute killer features of the iPad Pro are, while also forcing me to learn about the harsher tradeoffs I would have to make for carrying a lighter, faster machine than a laptop.

All of which is to set the context for my past week with the new version of that machine.

For the greater part, this new 2019 iPad Pro still looks much the same as the one released in 2018. Aside from the square camera array, it’s a near twin. The good news on that front is that you can tell Apple nailed the ID the first time because it still feels super crisp and futuristic almost two years later. The idealized expression of a computer. Light, handheld, powerful and functional.

The 12.9” iPad Pro that I tested contains the new A12Z chip which performs at a near identical level to the same model I’ve been using. At over 5015 single-core and over 18,000 multi-core scores in Geekbench, it remains one of the more powerful portable computers you can own, regardless of class. The 1TB model appears to still have 6GB of RAM, though I don’t know if that’s still stepped down for the lower models to 4GB.

This version adds an additional GPU core and ‘enhanced thermal architecture’ — presumably better heat distribution under load but that was not especially evident given that the iPad Pro has rarely run hot for me. I’m interested to see what teardowns turn up here. New venting, piping or component distribution perhaps. Or something on-die.

It’s interesting, of course, that this processor is so close in performance (at least at a CPU level) to the A12X Bionic chip. Even at a GPU level Apple says nothing more than that it is faster than the A12X with none of the normal multipliers it typically touts.

The clearest answer for this appears to be that this is a true ‘refresh’ of the iPad Pro. There are new features, which I’ll talk about next, but on the whole this is ‘the new one’ in a way that is rarely but sometimes true of Apple devices. Whatever they’ve learned and are able to execute currently on hardware without a massive overhaul of the design or implementation of hardware is what we see here.

I suppose my one note on this is that the A12X still feels fast as hell and I’ve never wanted for power so, fine? I’ve been arguing against speed bumps at the cost of usability forever so now is the time I make good on those arguments and don’t really find a reason to complain about something that works so well.

CamARa

The most evident physical difference on the new iPad Pro is, of course, the large camera array which contains a 10MP ultra wide and 12MP wide camera. These work to spec but it’s the addition of the new LiDAR scanner that is the most intriguing addition.

It is inevitable that we will eventually experience the world on several layers at once. The physical layer we know will be augmented by additional rings of data like the growth rings of a redwood.

In fact, that future has already come for most of us, whether we realize it or not. Right now, we experience these layers mostly in an asynchronous fashion by requesting their presence. Need a data overlay to tell you where to go?  Call up a map with turn-by-turn. Want to know the definition of a word or the weather? Ask a voice assistant.

The next era beyond this one, though, is passive, contextually driven info layers that are presented to us proactively visually and audibly.

We’ve been calling this either augmented reality or mixed reality, though I think that neither one of those is ultimately very descriptive of what will eventually come. The augmented human experience has started with the smartphone, but will slowly work its way closer to our cerebellum as we progress down the chain from screens to transparent displays to lenses to ocular implants to brain-stem integration.

If you’re rolling your un-enhanced eyes right now, I don’t blame you. But that doesn’t mean I’m not right. Bookmark this and let’s discuss in 2030.

In the near term, though, the advancement of AR technology is being driven primarily by smartphone experiences. And those are being advanced most quickly by Google and Apple with the frameworks they are offering to developers to integrate AR into their apps and the hardware that they’re willing to fit onboard their devices.

One of the biggest hurdles to AR experiences being incredibly realistic has been occlusion. This is effect that allows one object to intersect with another realistically — to obscure or hide it in a way that tells our brain that ‘this is behind that’. Occlusion leads to a bunch of interesting things like shared experiences, interaction of physical and digital worlds and just general believability.

This is where the iPad Pro’s LiDAR scanner comes in. With LiDAR, two major steps forward are possible for AR applications.

• Initialization time is nearly instantaneous. Because LiDAR works at the speed of light, reading pulses of light it sends out and measuring their ‘flight’ times to determine the shape of objects or environments — it is very fast. That typical ‘fire it up, wave it around and pray’ AR awkwardness should theoretically be eliminated with LiDAR.
• Occlusion becomes an automatic. It no longer requires calculations be done using the camera, small hand movements and computer vision to “guess” at the shape of objects and their relationship to one another. Developers essentially get all of this for “free” computationally and at blazing speed.

There’s a reason LiDAR is used in many autonomous free roaming vehicle systems and semi-autonomous driving systems. It’s fast, relatively reliable and a powerful mapping tool.

ARKit 3.5 now supplies the ability to create a full topological 3D mesh of an environment, with plane and surface detection. All with greater precision than was possible with a simple camera-first approach.

Unfortunately, I was unable to test this system, as applications that take advantage of it are not yet available, though Apple says many are on their way from games like Hot Lava to home furnishing apps like Ikea. I’m interested to see how effective this addition is to iPad as it is highly likely that it will also come to the iPhone this year or next at the latest.

One thing I am surprised but not totally shocked at is that the iPad Pro rear-facing camera does not do Portrait photos. Only the front-facing True Depth camera does Portrait mode here.

My guess is that there is a far more accurate Portrait mode coming to iPad Pro that utilizes the LiDAR array as well as the camera and it is just not ready yet. There is no reason that Apple should not be able to execute a Portrait style image with an even better understanding of the relationships of subjects to backgrounds.

LiDAR is a technology with a ton of promise and a slew of potential applications. Having this much more accurate way to bring the outside world into your device is going to open a lot of doors for Apple and developers over time, but my guess is that we’ll see those doors open over the next couple of years rather than all at once.

One disappointment for me is that the True Depth camera placement remains unchanged. In a sea of fantastic choices that Apple made about the iPad Pro’s design, the placement of the camera in a location most likely to be covered by your hand when it is in landscape mode is a standout poor one.

Over the time I’ve been using iPad Pro as my portable machine I have turned it to portrait mode a small handful of times, and most of those were likely because an app just purely did not support landscape.

This is a device that was born to be landscape, and the camera should reflect that. My one consideration here is that the new ‘floating’ design of the Magic Keyboard that ships in May will raise the camera up and away from your hands and may in fact work a hell of a lot better because of it.

Keyboard and trackpad support

At this point enough people have seen the mouse and trackpad support to have formed some opinions on it. In general, the response has been extremely positive and I agree with that assessment. There are minor quibbles about how much snap Apple is applying to the cursor as it attaches itself to buttons or actions, but overall the effect is incredibly pleasant and useful.

Re-imagining the cursor as a malleable object rather than a hard-edged arrow or hand icon makes a ton of sense in a touch environment. We’re used to our finger becoming whatever tool we need it to be — a pencil or a scrubber or a button pusher. It only makes sense that the cursor on iPad would also be contextually aware as well.

I was only able to use the Magic Trackpad so far, of course, but I have high hopes that it should fall right into the normal flow of work when the Magic Keyboard drops.

And, given the design of the keyboard I think that it will be nice to be able to keep your hands on the keyboard and away from poking at a screen that is now much higher than it was before.

Surface Comparisons

I think that with the addition of the trackpad to the iPad Pro there has been an instinct to say ‘hey the Surface was the right thing after all’. I’ve been thinking about this at one point or another for a couple of years now as I’ve been daily driving the iPad.

I made an assessment back in 2018 about this whole philosophical argument and I think it’s easiest to just quote it here:

One basic summary of the arena is that Microsoft has been working at making laptops into tablets, Apple has been working on making tablets into laptops and everyone else has been doing who knows what.

Microsoft still hasn’t been able (come at me) to ever get it through their heads that they needed to start by cutting the head off of their OS and building a tablet first, then walking backwards. I think now Microsoft is probably much more capable than then Microsoft, but that’s probably another whole discussion.

Apple went and cut the head off of OS X at the very beginning, and has been very slowly walking in the other direction ever since. But the fact remains that no Surface Pro has ever offered a tablet experience anywhere near as satisfying as an iPad’s.

Yes, it may offer more flexibility, but it comes at the cost of unity and reliably functionality. Just refrigerator toasters all the way down.

Still holds, in my opinion, even now.

Essentially, I find the thinking that the iPad has arrived at the doorstep of the Surface because the iPad’s approach was not correct to be so narrow because it focuses on hardware, when the reality is Windows has never been properly adjusted for touch. Apple is coming at this touch first, even as it adds cursor support.

To reiterate what I said above, I am not saying that “the Surface approach is bad” here so go ahead and take a leap on that one. I think the Surface team deserves a ton of credit for putting maximum effort into a convertible computer at the time that nearly the entire industry was headed in another direction. But I absolutely disagree that the iPad is ‘becoming the Surface’ because the touch experience on the Surface is one of the worst of any tablet and the iPads is (for all of the interface’s foibles) indisputably the best.

It is one of the clearer examples of attempting to solve a similar problem from different ends in recent computing design.

That doesn’t mean, however, that several years in the iPad Pro is without flaw.

iPad Promise

Back in January, Apple writer and critic John Gruber laid out his case for why the iPad has yet to meet its full potential. The conclusions, basically, were that Apple had missed the mark on the multi-tasking portion of its software.

At the time I believed a lot of really good points had been made by John and others who followed on and though I had thoughts I wasn’t really ready to crystalize them. I think I’m ready now, though. Here’s the nut of it:

The focus of the iPad Pro, its North Star, must be speed and capability, not ease of use.

Think about the last time that you, say, left your MacBook or laptop sitting for a day or two or ten. What happened when you opened it? Were you greeted with a flurry of alerts and notifications and updates and messages? Were you able to, no matter how long or short a time you had been away from it, open it and start working immediately?

With iPad Pro, no matter where I have been or what I have been doing I was able to flip it open, swipe up and be issuing my first directive within seconds. As fast as my industry moves and as wild as our business gets, that kind of surety is literally priceless.

Never once, however, did I wish that it was easier to use.

Do you wish that a hammer is easier? No, you learn to hold it correctly and swing it accurately. The iPad could use a bit more of that.

Currently, iPadOS is still too closely tethered to the sacred cow of simplicity. In a strange bout of irony, the efforts on behalf of the iPad software team to keep things simple (same icons, same grid, same app switching paradigms) and true to their original intent have instead caused a sort of complexity to creep into the arrangement.

I feel that much of the issues surrounding the iPad Pro’s multitasking system could be corrected by giving professional users a way to immutably pin apps or workspaces in place — offering themselves the ability to ‘break’ the multitasking methodology that has served the iPad for years in service of making their workspaces feel like their own. Ditch the dock entirely and make that a list of pinned spaces that can be picked from at a tap. Lose the protected status of app icons and have them reflect what is happening in those spaces live.

The above may all be terrible ideas, but the core of my argument is sound. Touch interfaces first appeared in the 70’s and have been massively popular for at least a dozen years by now.

The iPad Pro user of today is not new to a touch-based interface and is increasingly likely to have never known a computing life without touch interfaces.

If you doubt me, watch a kid bounce between six different apps putting together a simple meme or message to send to a friend. It’s a virtuoso performance that they give dozens of times a day. These users are touch native. They deserve to eat meat, not milk.

This device is still massively compelling, regardless, for all of the reasons I outlined in 2018 and still feel strongly about today. But I must note that there is little reason so far to upgrade to this from the 2018 iPad Pro. And given that the Magic Keyboard is backward compatible, it won’t change that.

If you don’t currently own an iPad Pro, however, and you’re wondering whether you can work on it or not, well, I can and I did and I do. Talking to 30 employees on multiple continents and time zones while managing the editorial side of a complex multi-faceted editorial, events and subscription business.

I put 100,000 (airline) miles on the iPad Pro and never once did it fail me. Battery always ample; speed always constant; keyboard not exactly incredible but also spill sealed and bulletproof. I can’t say that of any laptop I’ve ever owned, Apple included.

I do think that the promise of the integrated trackpad and a leveling up of the iPad’s reason to be makes the Magic Keyboard and new iPad Pro one of the more compelling packages currently on the market.

I loved the MacBook Air, and have used several models of it to death over the years. There is no way, today, that I would choose to go back to a laptop given my style of work. It’s just too fast, too reliable and too powerful.

It’s insane to have a multi-modal machine that can take typing, swiping and sketching as inputs and has robust support for every major piece of business software on the planet — and that always works, is always fast and is built like an Italian racing car.

Who can argue with that?

It all started with a tweet from 11:FS co-founder Simon Taylor. If the U.K. government could be persuaded to provide financial support to the self-employed during the Coronavirus crisis, as it has already pledged for full-time employees, then Open Banking technology could be used to self-certify lost income, and therefore overcome one of the main hurdles of administering potential compensation.

The founders of two other London-based fintechs, Fronted and Credit Kudos, were first to accept the challenge, and soon they were joined by dozens of other volunteers from the wider U.K. fintech community, with the aim of turning around a working prototype of “Covid Credit” in just 48 hours.

“Like many, we saw a challenge for non-salaried workers who are currently ineligible for government relief,” says Fronted’s Jamie Campbell. “By using Open Banking, we have been able to quickly develop a simple process that allows non-salaried workers to generate a proof statement which details their past income and the impact of COVID-19”.

The Covid Credit team’s hypothesis is that evidencing and validating the income of a sole trader is significantly harder than a salaried worker, and that there was an opportunity to use Open Banking (via Credit Kudos’s existing API) to quickly access and analyse data from the bank accounts of a sole trader and generate a validated income statement, something Campbell frames as a “Covid Credit ‘minted’ self-certification”.

“Using the application, applicants answer a few simple questions relating to their legal status and the impact of COVID-19 on their income,” he explains. “The application processes this information and creates a unique link that (in time) can be shared with the appropriate government body in order to prove loss of income”.

Under the hood, Covid Credit exists as a standalone Python web application which is running on Google Cloud. The app uses the Credit Kudos API, and aggregates data from an individual’s bank accounts and applies a number of pattern recognition algorithms in order to calculate key income figures.

“We believe Covid Credit can provide a crucial piece of the puzzle in identifying and validating the needs of freelancers and non-salaried workers affected by COVID-19,” adds Campbell. “In practice, this might help extend the reach of furloughed worker relief (part of the government’s package for full-time workers) to include self-employed workers, though, this is just a hypothesis. We plan to present the finished solution to key stakeholders this week and support the potential roll out in the coming days”.

To that end, the Covid Credit team say they have already engaged with a number of key stakeholders across HMT, HMRC and the FCA, and are hopeful that sole traders will be supported, with or without the app being part of the solution.

“This afternoon the Covid Credit team have spoken to @TheFCA, @HMRCgovuk, submitted a response to @hmtreasury and been given direction to help Number 10,” tweeted Campbell yesterday.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is making use of its Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) powers to expand the pool of available COVID-19 testing resources in the U.S., and now you can add another rapid test that delivers results in just 30 minutes to the list. Mesa’s test is also small enough to be able to be used right at the frontline of care, including in clinics and hospitals, with multiple tests able to be run in parallel.

Mesa’s rapid test follows one from Cepheid that was approved on Monday. Both are PCR-based molecular tests, which identify the presence of virus DNA in a sample of a patient’s mucus. Both these tests prevent an important expansion of the technologies available to those looking to combat the spread of the new coronavirus, since they can provide lab-quality results, but can do so much faster, and without requiring transportation of the samples from the point of collection to off-site testing facilities.

On-site testing not only has advantages in terms of convenience and speedy return of results, but also in limiting the potential exposure of medical personnel to the virus itself. Testing on-site means you don’t need to worry about possible exposure to the virus for more people in the chain, including logistics and delivery people, as well as lab technicians and dedicated diagnostics people.

These tests will require that facilities are equipped with Mesa’s Accula testing system, but its equipment is already in use for testing flu, as well as other less serious equipment, and it was originally designed specifically to address use on the frontlines of efforts to combat global pandemics, including SARS before this.