Year: 2020

Last Friday, President Trump, together with Vice President Pence and White House coronavirus task force coordinator Deborah Brix, announced that we would soon see a new website go up that would be at the core of the government’s testing strategy.

This website, which was supposedly being built by 1,700 Google engineers, was meant to help direct people to testing locations and “be very quickly done.” Now, a week later, that site, whether built by Google or not, is still nowhere to be found.

While a number of companies and other organizations have set up basic screening websites that let you check your symptoms, the nationwide website is still missing in action.

What we do have is Verily’s relatively small pilot project in the Bay Area, which is the closest to the project the government promised last week, but it’s not nationwide. We asked Verily for data about how many people its service has sent to testing sites so far. The company has not yet responded to our request, but The Guardian staked out the testing sites earlier this week and saw very little activity there.

“I want to thank Google. Google is helping to develop a website,” Trump said last Friday. “It’s gonna be very quickly done — unlike websites of the past — to determine whether a test is warranted and to facilitate testing at a nearby convenient location. […] Google has 1,700 engineers working on this right now. They have made tremendous progress.”

Earlier this week, Trump also said that “the head of Google,” Sundar Pichai, called him to apologize. We have not been able to confirm this call actually happened and neither Google nor the White House wanted to share any details, so it remains unclear what Pichai apologized for.

There is an immediate need for startups to handle the crisis around the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, from diagnostics to identify potential carriers of the virus to assisting the treatment of patients with respiratory symptoms. As we get a grip on this crisis though, what’s going to help the world stop the next pandemic and improve health security for all?

MIT Solve is hoping to galvanize more entrepreneurs to investigate and improve the world of health security, launching a new “global challenge” through its program that will help fund companies, non-profits, academic research projects, and even individual ideas through its marketplace of funding partners. The program’s current application deadline is June 18th.

It’s a special program that we have profiled before on Extra Crunch. Designed to take a much broader approach to innovation, MIT Solve brings together a diverse coalition of funders and networks them with a heterogeneous collection of projects and organizations focused around its pillars of health, education, economic prosperity, and sustainability.

The program’s new challenge around health security joins four other challenges around inclusive entrepreneurship, learning for girls and women, sustainable food systems, and maternal and newborn health. It’s an attempt, Executive Director Alex Amouyel explained, to respond more rapidly to big issues facing humanity.

“Usually, how we design a challenge is we crowdsource the challenge itself,” Amouyel said. The program uses an open innovation method to take a bottoms-up approach to discover persistent challenges that might be overlooked by traditional business model innovation. The program holds design workshops, conducts online voting, and spends potentially up to six months to determine what challenges it will publish each year. The health security challenge is shortcutting that lengthy process given the immediate need for improvements in that area.

Amouyel said that the team expects to select a final list of about 35 winners, or roughly seven for each of the five challenges being hosted. She emphasized that they are taking a “venture portfolio” approach to each challenge, selecting individuals and teams that have “diversity in technology, in the business model, in the geography and in the people who are proposing it.” Multifaceted challenges require many different solutions to tackle.

For winners, they get joint access to a pool of more than a million dollars in funding from the program’s partners, and also mentorship to accelerate their projects, locking in critical proof points and user validations in the process. “We are bringing together the resources to help them achieve that next stage,” Amouyel said.

The program has been around since late 2015, and so far, has disbursed about $14 million in funding.

Finally, the program’s application is also synchronized with a free course at edX called “Business and Impact Planning for Social Enterprises” which teaches students how to build a business plan and an impact blueprint. The hope is that the course can help onramp individuals and teams and teach them how to funding opportunities like Solve.

Streaming services will reduce video quality in Europe, we get our hands on the new MacBook Air and Anthony Levandowski pleads guilty. Here’s your Daily Crunch for March 20, 2020.

1. Netflix will reduce streaming quality in Europe for 30 days

EU Commissioner Thierry Breton has called for Netflix to reduce streaming quality in Europe — a move to limit its overall bandwidth usage as more users turn to streaming services for in-home entertainment during the outbreak — and the company has confirmed that it will comply with this request.

Other services have followed suit, with Amazon and YouTube both announcing that they will be reducing streaming quality as well.

2. Apple MacBook Air review

Brian Heater says it feels good to type again.

3. Anthony Levandowski pleads guilty to one count of trade secrets theft under plea deal

Levandowski — the former Google engineer and serial entrepreneur who was at the center of a lawsuit between Uber and Waymo — has pled guilty to one count of stealing trade secrets while working at Google under a plea agreement reached with the U.S. District Attorney.

4. Here’s how TechCrunch is keeping our brains busy while we’re stuck at home

Now more than ever, diving into new skills, old interests and even totally fluffy mindless entertainment can keep our minds refreshed and our days full. From at-home workouts and soothing virtual farming simulators to Catherine’s honestly uncannily good drawings of our staff pets, here’s what’s working for us.

5. Despite canceled trade shows, gaming startups can still win an extra life

As organizers cancel events with massive attendance, like SXSW (400,000 attendees), E3 (66,000), GDC (65,000) and Mobile World Congress (100,000), mobile game developers have felt the crunch. So here are five ways to salvage a launch lost to a trade show cancellation. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

6. Slack adds 7K customers in 7 weeks amid remote-work boom, besting its preceding 2 results

Don’t worry about uptime, though: In a memo about business continuity, Slack said that “the demands on our infrastructure do not change when employees shift away from working together in the same office; there is no difference in load on our systems whether people are connecting from their office, a cellular network, or their homes.”

7. Announcing the Disrupt SF Digital Pass

The new Digital Pass and Digital Pass Pro (to be announced soon!) are a complement — not a replacement — for the existing Disrupt SF conference. But with so much uncertainty around the coronavirus pandemic, we’ve sped up our plans to offer access to Disrupt SF content and networking opportunities virtually.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

Coronavirus quarantines are hurting local businesses, but Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger wants to help them keep revenue rolling in. Krieger and his wife Kaitlyn this week launched SaveOurFaves, a directory of Bay Area restaurants selling gift certificates to offset lost income amidst ‘shelter in place’ orders across the region. Users can search for restaurants or browse by neighborhood, and then click through to buy gift certificates straight from the eateries with no added fee from SaveOurFaves.

“We’re no longer going out because of COVID-19 (San Francisco is under a “shelter in place” ordinance), so we started buying gift cards to help support our favorite cafes and restaurants during this unpredictable time” write the Kriegers. “SaveOurFaves is our simple way to make it easier for people to help local businesses.”

For now the plan is for SaveOurFaves to focus on the San Francisco Bay Area that the Kriegers call home. It’s currently listing 700 restaurants and coffee shops, and getting 50 submissions per day. Similar sites for other locations are quickly popping up, including Help Main Street in New York, and Give Local and Rally For Restaurants that provide directories for multiple cities.

“It’s been heart-wrenching”

The Kriegers got the idea for SaveOurFaves after a call with Zack Schwab, Mike’s sister’s partner and co-owner of SF restaurant The Snug. “How long could he keep the restaurant afloat with sales plunging?” Kaitlyn tells me. The couple says there are 12,000 small businesses that employ more than 350,000 people in SF alone. The problem was too big to fix with one-off donations.

But then they saw an Instagram post about how NYC restaurant Atomix was asking their community to support them through gift cards, and set out to build SaveOurFaves with Kaitlyn doing design while Mike coded. They crawled the web for a list of local restaurants, and hired people through Fiverr to hunt down their gift card links. Next they want to open source the code and expand the site to include other types of businesses.

“I’ve lived in the Bay Area for over 15 years, and one of the reasons I fell in love with it was the vibrant community of shops, restaurants, cafés, and other businesses” Mike tells me. “It’s been heart-wrenching to see the immediate effect that the shutdown has had on the people working at these places. While there’s no one single thing that will solve the problem, I’m hopeful SaveOurFaves is one of many initiatives to help.”

AUSTIN, TX – MARCH 11: Josh Constine, Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom speak onstage at Interactive Keynote: Instagram Founders Kevin Systrom & Mike Krieger with Josh Constine during the 2019 SXSW Conference and Festivals at Austin Convention Center on March 11, 2019 in Austin, Texas. (Photo by Chris Saucedo/Getty Images for SXSW)

Krieger and his co-founder Kevin Systrom resigned from Instagram and Facebook in November 2018 following tensions regarding Insta’s dwindling autonomy. The pair told me they plan to start something new together during a talk at SXSW a year ago, but are still exploring opportunities. That’s given Krieger the time to build out SaveOurFaves with his wife.

Restaurants need all the help they can get. “This is like armageddon” SF restaurant China Live’s chef and owner Geroge Chen told Eater’s Luke Tsai, referring to the three-week shelter-in-place order issued in across California.

While restaurants can still offer delivery and take-out, higher-end spots with large dining rooms or that usually only offer dine-in are being hit hard. China Live cut its workforce from 200 to 20. Oakland’s Brown Sugar Kitchen laid of its whole staff of 50 except for three full-timers. The SF Mission’s Prubechu went from 20 to employees to just 5 managers who also took pay cuts, according to Eater.

Brown Sugar Kitch and Prubechu are now two of the many restaurants listed on SaveOurFaves. If users discover one of their favorite haunts is missing, they can submit them via a form to have them added or to have SaveOurFaves reach out to recommend selling gift certificates. The site even recommends how restaurants can contact their point-of-sale provider like Square or Toast to start selling gift certificates, or make their own gift cards on GiftUp or GiftFly.

More ways to help

SaveOurFaves is just one of many efforts spearheaded by local techies to address the health crisis and the subsequent financial fallout of social distancing. Crypto startup MobileCoin‘s Joshua Goldbard helped create The Safety Net Fund, which has raised $145,000 to provide living expense grants to Bay Area artists who’ve lost income due to event cancellations. Investor Ryan Sarver of Redpoint Ventures and friends are running an #SFHospitalMeals program where people can donate $1000 to buy meals from local restaurants for hospital staff of SF’s emergency rooms and intensive care units. You can click through those links to donate.

The Kriegers hope the government will do more too. That includes “Big, immediate, and lasting cash transfers to Americans” as well as zero-interest loans for small businesses that need representation in the conversations about stimulus efforts. “We are also advocating for a reduction in prison & jail density, because those populations are exceptionally vulnerable to a pandemic like this” Kaitlyn tells me.

The Safety Net Fund

In the private sector, they support the idea from Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Peter Eckersley for Apple, Google, and other mobile operating system vendors to create an opt-in, privacy-preserving feature for contact tracing. That could notify people if they’ve been near someone who tested positive for the virus. And when the crisis subsides, the couple note that we’ll need ways to smoothly reconnect people with stable jobs.

“There’s been a lot of talk about ‘flattening the curve’ of the coronavirus outbreak — slowing the spread to reduce the burden on our healthcare system” Mike concludes. “We hope SaveOurFaves will help ‘flatten the curve’ of lost income for restaurants — giving them the resources to make ends meet and preserve the livelihood of wage earners during this difficult time.”

French startup October wants to reduce the pressure on small and medium companies going through the Coronavirus crisis. In order to give them some headroom, companies that have borrowed money on October won’t have to pay back their loans for the next three months.

October works with small companies in France, Spain, Italy, Netherlands and Germany who need a credit line. One of the company’s key advantages compared to borrowing money from a bank is that it’s much faster. You can apply to a credit line and get an answer just a few days later. Usually, companies pay back their loans over time with monthly repayments over three months to seven years.

October evaluates risk before handing out loans. It works with many institutional partners to raise funds and deploy capital in those loans. Some retail customers also invest on October directly on a company-by-company basis.

But many small European companies that have borrowed money on October won’t generate revenue for a little while. They could face cash flow issues and they could have issues repaying those loans.

That’s why October has decided with its institutional partners that it is postponing all outstanding loans for the next three months. Companies won’t have to pay a huge sum of money after that, October is also postponing the end date of the loans by three months.

October then asked retail investors to vote whether they are in favor or against postponing loans. 99.42% of retail investors who voted followed October’s move.

October is also waving its own fees for the next three months, but companies will still have to pay interests on outstanding capital.

This way, fewer companies should go bankrupt over the next three months. It should minimize the impact of the current economic crisis on the overall default rate of October loans.

Dating may be proving next to impossible for many during this era of mass social distancing, but Tinder’s hoping to leverage an existing feature to help bring people closer together. Virtually, at least.

The dating app is waving fees for Passport, a feature designed to let premium users connect with people outside of their dating radius. The offer kicks in next week far all users and runs through April 30. Tinder is hoping that it will be adopted for virtual socializing beyond dating.

Our hope is that you use the Passport feature to virtually transport yourself out of self-quarantine to anywhere in the world. You can check in on folks in their hometown, college town, or sister city, and find those across the world who are going through the same things. If nothing else, you can learn how to say “hey” in another language.

Users can ‘visit’ one location at a time. The move comes as competing services like Hinge, The League and Tinder’s parent company Match.com have turned to video chats to help maintain some sense of normalcy for people looking to socialize through dating.

“Within dating apps, users can still be active by matching and messaging without actually meeting up in-person,” App Annie writes in a recent trend report. “The gamification of ‘swiping’ in dating apps slots into this behavior to find avenues to pass time and entertain, so we could expect to see a level of resiliency there.”

Formula 1 had to postpone and cancel several races on its calendar due to the current COVID-19 pandemic. With races in Australia, Bahrain, Monaco and Vietnam and China already called off, and the Dutch and Spanish Grands Prix now postponed, the organization today announced that it would now 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 will take place this Sunday.

“We are very pleased to be able to bring some light relief in the form of the F1 Esports Virtual GP, in these unpredictable times, as we hope to entertain fans missing the regular sporting action,” said Julian Tan, Formula 1’s head of digital business initiatives and sports. “With every major sports league in the world unable to compete, it is a great time to highlight the benefits of esports and the incredible skill that’s on show.”

While some F1 drivers are already avid gamers, many are not. To make up for this difference in skill levels, “game settings will be configured in such a way to encourage competitive and entertaining racing,” the organization says. That means all cars will be set to the same performance characteristics, vehicle damage will be reduced and anti-lock brakes and traction control will be optional.

As the organization notes, “The series is strictly for entertainment purposes, to bring racing action to fans in this unprecedented scenario the world has been affected by, with no official World Championship points up for grabs for the drivers.”

Formula 1 is not the only motorsports organization to take these steps to keep their events top of mind for fans even as the real races have been postponed. NASCAR is launching its eNASCAR iRacing Pro Invitational Series this weekend, for example, which will also feature current drivers.

“Until we have cars back on track, the entire NASCAR community has aligned to provide our passionate fans with a unique, fun and competitive experience on race day,” said Ben Kennedy, VP of racing development at NASCAR. “Our long-time partners at iRacing offer an incredible product and we are excited to see how many of our best drivers will stack up in the virtual domain of competitive racing.”

Across the Atlantic, the first-ever virtual round of the Nürburgring Endurance Series will kick off on Saturday.

Ride-hailing giant Ola said on Friday evening that it is temporarily suspending pool rides on its platform, called Ola Share, in India in a bid to slow the coronavirus pandemic by encouraging social distancing.

The Indian firm, which operates in several countries including Australia, New Zealand, and the UK, offers Ola Share only in India. “In our efforts to curb the spread of COVID- 19, we are temporarily suspending the ‘Ola Share’ category until further notice,” a spokesperson said in a statement.

“The health and safety of our driver-partners and customers are of utmost importance and we have taken several steps in this regard to ensure the highest levels of hygiene are maintained in the vehicles on the platform. The temporary suspension of Ola Share services is an attempt to encourage social distancing for all cases of essential travel for citizens.”

Other ride options including Micro, Mini, Prime, Rental, and Outstation would remain operational. “Our Partner Care teams and Safety Response teams are available 24×7 for any concerns that may arise for driver-partners and customers respectively. We encourage everyone to proactively report any instance that may be symptomatic for us to help action and guide appropriately,” the firm said.

A source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch that the suspension would remain in place until New Delhi deems social gathering safe again.

The move comes days after Uber and Lyft moved to enforce similar restrictions in the U.S. But Uber, which rivals Ola in India, has yet to suspend Uber Pool in the country.

On Thursday, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi urged the nation’s 1.3 billion citizens to stay at home as much as possible for the next few days to prevent any “explosion” of coronavirus cases.

“For the last few days we have seen that people think we are safe from coronavirus. This is not right. It’s not okay to get complacent,” he said in a nation-wide televised appearance.

About 223 individuals have tested positive for COVID-19 so far.

In the latest effort to tighten travel restrictions to limit the spread of the novel coronavirus, President Trump has ordered the closure of the border between the U.S. and Mexico to all but essential travel. This move follows an announcement earlier this week that both America and Canada agreed mutually to close their shared border to non-essential travel for at least 30 days, while it remains open for urgent, necessary business and commercial traffic.

Trump had also already taken steps to minimize border crossing at the Mexican border, taking additional steps to block migrants and asylum seekers on top of what measures are are already in place, as reported by CNN earlier this week. The U.S. also issued a “do not travel” warning to its own citizens on Thursday, which broadly advises against traveling to any international destination. Trump has also said that internal travel restrictions are not out of the question pending the pandemic’s progress.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced the closure of the U.S.-Mexican border on Friday, noting that it was decided in collaboration with the Mexican government. Earlier on Friday, Trump said that the U.S. with Mexico, are suspending “non-essential travel,” not related to trade and commerce, at all ports of entry, which mirrors the moves made with Canada. He added that Mexico is also suspending air travel from Europe, which will help “protect the southern border” of the U.S. as well.

Trump added that both the Canadian and Mexican borders are being treated equally in this instance, in terms of the actions taken to limit cross-border travel.

Developing…

Ohio-based Coterie, a startup working on in the commercial insurance space, has announced today it has raised $8.5 million Series A. The company had previously raised a little over $3 million in early investments, bringing its equity capital raised to nearly $12 million to date; the firm also told TechCrunch that it has raised $2.5 million in available venture debt as part of its current round.

In an uncertain market, Coterie is better capitalized than it ever has been, thanks to Intercept, and The Hartford, and Hippo, which led its latest round.

Coterie operates in insurtech, a space we’ve covered extensively in recent months. But it’s not MetroMile or Lemonade, both of which selling consumer insurance. Nor is it akin to The Zebra, Policy Genius, Gabi, or Insurify, helping consumers link to third-party insurance products. It’s closest private market comp, looking at our recent coverage, is Briza, which produces APIs linking small businesses to small business insurance products.

But what Coterie does is slightly different if we’re grokking its model correctly: It offers what it calls “commercial insurance as a service,” according to an interview with TechCrunch. Let’s explore.

Model

In a call with TechCrunch about its latest funding event, Coterie explained that, using APIs, it connects “places that have some commercial insurance requirement, or service customers who need commercial insurance, and we simply pass that information into our system and we quote and bind automatically.”

While Coterie does partner with external insurance entities (more on that in a second), it handles a lot of the work in-house: “We actually have the underwriting control, so we don’t we don’t ship it off to 10 different carriers. We actually say yes, we will bind this policy, or no, we won’t,” said Coterie CEO David McFarland, adding that “most of the time we have a pretty broad appetite so we can write a good bit of business.”

Helping it in this process are some partners in the insurance market that help with “the licenses and the capital requirements,” the company said.

What makes Coterie interesting isn’t that is a digital take on a previously paper business, but that it’s product allows it to insure freelancers (Coterie partners with freelance marketplaces, allowing it access to a potential customer base and helping the marketplace itself provide insured providers) for even small increments of time; that’s something that wasn’t economically attractive under old models, if even possible.

According to the firm, it offers general and professional liability insurance, along with business owners policies. Coterie has eyes on various types of data to power its model (and make good policy pricing choices), highlighting information like business payment flows to vet company health, to pick an example.

Coterie only started selling its products in September of 2019, but noted to TechCrunch that it saw “pretty good growth” from from the jump, and “pretty steady growth” since then. But as Coterie noted in our call, insurance is a somewhat low-margin business, meaning that policy growth, while good, needs to be pretty steep for the gross margin generated to stack up too high.

But with $8.5 million in new equity capital and total access to over $10 million in funds, the startup now has more money than ever to pursue its model. And if it’s like the rest of the insurtech space, it has a good shot at quick growth.