Year: 2020

Apple today is rolling out a dedicated section within its Apple News app that will help readers stay updated on the coronavirus outbreak. The special coverage will include informative, fact-based stories from reputable publishers, says Apple, which are curated by Apple News’ team of editors.

The launch of the section comes at a time when social media platforms are struggling to reign in misinformation around the coronavirus outbreak, ranging from conspiracy theories about the virus’s origins to bogus medicines, preventatives and treatments — including those are bizarre as drinking bleach, and more. Facebook, Twitter, and Google have been working with the World Health Organization to remove misinformation and to direct users to trusted resources, but the inaccurate and often dangerous information continues to spread.

With Apple News, Apple has the ability to reach millions of people through the built-in app on iPhone, iPad, and Mac devices. On desktop and on mobile, users will now see a banner at the top of the Apple News homepage (the “Today” section) directing them to the special coverage on COVID-19.

When clicked, users are taken to an organized roundup of recent news stories and other information, starting with a list of the latest headlines.

Currently, stories from The New York Times, NBC News, and CNN are featured here, but other sources are also utilized, as they are elsewhere in Apple News. There’s also a map showing the spread of the coronavirus, a guide to understanding the epidemic (via Ars Technica), and a section on “Your Health,” with information about washing hands, which disinfectants to use, how self-quarantine works, and more.

Further down the page are other featured articles offering various perspectives, those that track the numbers of cases, and a guide planning ahead. A list of resources, including links to the CDC and State.gov, are at the bottom of the section.

In addition, users can follow the “coronavirus” topic on Apple News to be alerted to the latest news at any time, the app reminds users.

This is not the first time Apple has launched a dedicated special coverage section in its Apple News app. It regularly does this for tracking election coverage in the U.S., for example. It is, however, a little late to introduce such a feature, given that all other major tech platforms had already launched their own initiatives focused on guiding users to factual, trusted resources within their own apps.

That said, Apple News is doing more than just pointing users to sites like CDC.gov or WHO.int when they perform a search for coronavirus information. It’s curating content from across a variety of news publications to find the most important stories.

The special section is available today to Apple News readers on desktop and mobile.

 

Orchard, formerly Perch, is sprinting towards its goal of having a fully integrated home buying and selling platform, from title and mortgage services to its tech-focused real estate brokerage to a consumer search portal. They company has many plates spinning at once, one could say.

Today, Orchard is announcing new features for its home search portal in the form of Home Match and Photo Switch.

Home Match gives users the chance to specify the degree of their preferences to filter search results down to the stuff they really want. For example, users can choose between “Not Important”, “Nice to Have” and “Very Important” for features like a Kitchen Island, a pool in the backyard, high ceilings and many other features of a home.

Most home search portals ask about what you want in a binary way — either you want a pool or you don’t. They don’t take into account that yes, you want a pool, but it’s not nearly as important as having stainless steel appliances in the kitchen.

“Our view is that search is nowhere near a solved problem in the real estate space,” said Court Cunningham, CEO and founder of Orchard. “The insight is that when you watch people search, they look at every home coming on the market and when you ask why they aren’t using filters, they say they don’t want to miss anything. So we put some gradation on that search filter to give users much more relevant results and save them time.”

Alongside Home Match, Orchard is also introducing Photo Switch, a smaller feature but a vastly more technical tool to build.

Photo Switch allows users to choose the lead image on any home listing to see the part of the house they’re most interested in. For example, folks whose priority is a back yard can see pics of the back yard as they browse through listings. Same for the kitchen, the master bedroom, the front yard and the living room.

Again, this allows users to make their own choices about their priorities and save time by focusing on those priorities as they search.

Cunningham says that the new features, which have been in beta for several weeks, are deepening engagement on listings, with more people clicking through listing pages and details instead of shuffling around the top-level search results.

Orchard focuses on dual-trackers, or people who are both selling a home and buying a new one at the same time. This situation, which is very common among home buyers, usually forces those buyers to either take on a huge financial risk by buying a new home before they’ve sold their last home, or to place an offer on their new home contingent on the sale of their old home, which is unattractive to most sellers.

Orchard solves this by making an offer on buyers’ old houses that is guaranteed for 90 days. In January, Cunningham said that more than 85% of those homes sell at a market price before the 90-day period.

Orchard also offers a title business, letting buyers close the transaction via their phone from the comfort of their home, with plans to go live with mortgage services in the near future.

The company has raised a total of $86 million in equity financing, from investors like FirstMark Capital, Navitas, and Juxtapose, with another $200 million in debt financing.

Felicis Ventures, the early-stage, Menlo Park-based venture firmed founded nearly 15 years ago by Aydin Senkut, has closed its seventh and newest fund with $510 million in capital commitments.

That’s almost twice what Felicis raised for its last fund, which had initially closed in 2018 with $270 million in capital commitments but wound up garnering $310 million when all was said and done. As notably, both funds are a far leap from where Felicis started in 2006, when Senkut, a former international sales exec with Google, decided to try his hand at investing using $4 million of his own capital.

Of course, every venture fund has grown bigger in recent years as more institutions have looked to find more ways into what’s been a fast-ballooning private company market. Indeed, until fears over the coronavirus abruptly began upending lives around the globe, the market and the money had largely moved in one direction since 2008. It’s natural to wonder whether there’s anything particularly different happening at Felicis or if its boat has risen along with the tide.

Naturally, the firm will tell you that it’s different. Senkut — helped by partners Wesley Chan, Sundeep Peechu; Wesley Chan; Victoria Treyger; and the firm’s youngest and newest addition, Niki Pezeshki — is mindful of creating an “antifragile” portfolio, for example. As Felicis defines it, that means the firm very intentionally makes uncorrelated bets across stages and geographies to bolster its overall resiliency.

Part of that strategy has led to bets around the world, even while Felicis only has offices in the Bay Area, including its Silicon Valley headquarters and an outpost in San Francisco. Those far-flung bets — including the graphic design firm Canva in Australia, the Ottawa-based e-commerce platform Shopify, and the Finnish payments platform Adyen — have arisen largely because Felicis settles on particular themes it wants to pursue, then chases after the team tit determines to have the biggest advantage over competitors. “We didn’t want to have [global] offices where you’re going to see 99 percent crap deal flow in that place,” Senkut told us by phone last week. “We pick the market first, then we pick the founders,” says Senkut.

It’s pretty clearly working, too. According to Cambridge Associates benchmarks, the firm’s lifetime cash-on-cash multiple across all funds was 5.4x as of January 2020, and its first three funds are in the top decile for their respective vintages.

The returns are thanks in part to Adyen and Shopify, both now publicly traded companies. But Felicis has seen a long string of other exits, too, including the IPOs of the blood testing company Guardant Health, the wearables company Fitbit, and the online training service Pluralsight.

That’s saying nothing of those of its portfolio companies to get acquired, including, most recently, Credit Karma, which was just gobbled up by Intuit; Plaid, sold in January to Visa; Ring, sold in 2018 to Amazon, Cruise, sold to General Motors in 2016, and, going farther back, Meraki’s 2012 sale to Cisco.

As for how its bigger fund changes the equation, Senkut says that Felicis — which had been writing checks as small as $1 million and as large as $20 million (one of these went to Guild Education in 2018) — will now be writing checks of up to $40 million on occasion.

It did this in late January, in fact, when a business security video company called Verkada closed on $80 million in Series C funding at a $1.6 billion valuation. It was Felicis that led the round.

Otherwise, Senkut suggests, Felicis’s plan it to stay the course — and that largely means staying out of founders’ way, apparently.

“VCs tend to overrate themselves,” says Senkut, who, it’s worth mentioning, tried getting a job with a variety of traditional venture firms upon leaving Google and was consistently turned away.

“You’re helpful when a big decision is getting made or founders need help with a big hire. But founders build the companies,” he continues, recalling his old bosses to underscore his point.”The VCs didn’t tell Larry [Page] or Sergey [Brin] anything. VCs are just lucky to be on the journey.”

The European Parliament is instructing managers to prepare for all but a minority of staff to work remotely for 70% of the week as of next Monday — dialling up its response to Covid-19, the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Full-time remote working may follow, it has also said.

In an email sent today European Parliament staff have been instructed that teleworking will be introduced on March 16 — for “all colleagues whose physical presences in Parliament is not absolutely indispensable”.

“At this stage it will be 70% teleworking. That means presence in the office will be limited to 1½ days a week,” the email continues, adding: “Later on teleworking could be increased to 100% of working time dependent on the further developments.”

Earlier this week the parliament instructed “vulnerable” staff with pre-existing health conditions to telework to shrink their risk of exposure to the virus. The move followed the European Commission confirming its first cases of the disease.

The European Parliament is based in three locations in the EU, with the administrative offices in Luxembourg and plenary sessions of the parliament taking place in Brussels, Belgium, and Strasbourg in France.

We understand the teleworking shift applies across all locations.

The World Health Organization’s most recent Covid-19 situation report, for 10am CET March 10, lists a total of 1,402 confirmed cases in France; 239 in Belgium; and four in Luxembourg.

In recent days members of parliaments in several EU countries have also been reported to have contracted the virus — including politicians in Italy, Spain and the UK.

Another EU institution, the European Commission — which is primarily based in Brussels — is also allowing some staff to work remotely in response to the threat posed by the coronavirus, including staff with a pre-existing health condition and those who have recently traveled to regions it defines as high risk. It has also urged staff to take precautions, such as regular hand washing and social distancing.

It seems likely the Commission will follow the parliament’s lead and expand remote working further as confirmed cases of Covid-19 continue to increase. Local press in Belgium has reported 47 new cases today, including seven in Brussels.

The Belgian Federal Public Health service is also recommending businesses offer employees the option to work from home, postpone meetings and/or make use of video conferencing and avoid gathering large numbers of people in one place.

Some Libra Association members like Andreessen Horowitz and Coinbase are double-dipping, backing a competing cryptocurrency developer platform. Launching today with over 50 partners, non-profit The Celo Foundation’s ‘Alliance For Prosperity’ offers a way for developers to build decentralized mobile apps that are based on Celo’s blockchain platform and USD stablecoin.

The open-source Celo platform is still in testing with plans to officially launch its mainnet in April. The non-profit founded in 2017 has raised $36.4 million, including its Series A where Andreessen Horowitz’s a16z Crypto bought $15 million worth of Celo Gold tokens.

The biggest differentiator of Celo’s network versus other blockchains is that payments in the Celo Dollar stablecoin can be sent to people’s phone numbers rather than complicated addresses. The goal is to make delivering utility via blockchain easier by building a flexible network of applications that doesn’t scare regulators like Libra has.
The Alliance For Prosperity includes Andreessen Horowitz (which funded Celo), Coinbase (Ventures), Bison Trails, Anchorage, and Mercy Corps — all of which are also Libra Association members. That could potentially create a conflict of interest regarding which cryptocurrency and developer platform they promote to their portfolio companies, integrate into their products, or focus on for delivering financial services to the needy.

Other high-profile Alliance partners include Carbon, GiveDirectly, Grameen Foundation, Maple, and Polychain. Partners have made a somewhat vague commitment to “backing development efforts of the project, building infrastructure, implementing desired use cases on the platform, integrating Celo assets in their projects, or collaborating on education campaigns in their communities to further advance the use of blockchain technology” according to Chuck Kimble, Celo’s cLabs head of business development and head of the Alliance. Anyone can apply to join the open network, and there’s no minimum financial investment like Libra’s $10 million prerequisite.

Celo isn’t trying to replace the dollar with its own synthetic currency, and its reserve is backed with other cryptocurrencies rather than fiat cash. That might make it more acceptable to regulators who were worried that Libra’s token and fiat currency bundle-backed reserve could impact the global financial system. The first of the decentralized apps on the platform, the Celo Wallet, is already available for iOS and Android.

Like many blockchain projects, there are some lofty intentions for social impact with Celo. Use cases include “powering mobile and online work, enabling faster and affordable remittances, reducing the operational complexities of delivering humanitarian aid, facilitating payments, and enabling microlending” says Kimble. The real driver of this potential is Celo’s promise of much lower transaction fees than traditional middlemen charge.

When asked what the biggest threats to Celo’s success are, he told me “Banking infrastructure improving faster than we expect” and “Mobile adoption or LTE data not expanding on their current trajectory.” He did not mention the developer fatigue, regulatory scrutiny, technical complexity, or slow adoption of blockchain utilities that have plagued other crypto for good projects.

Here’s the full list of members working towards these goals:

Abra, Alice, AlphaWallet, Anchorage, Appen, Ayannah, Andreessen Horowitz, B12, BC4NB (Blockchain for the Next Billion), BeamAndGo, Bidali, Bison Trails, Blockchain Academy Mexico, Blockchain.com, Blockchain for Humanity (b4h), Blockchain for Social Impact (BSIC), Blockdaemon, Carbon, cLabs, CloudWalk Inc, Cobru, Coinbase, Coinplug, Cryptio, Cryptobuyer, CryptoSavannah, eSolidar, Fintech4Good, Flexa, Gitcoin, GiveDirectly, Grameen Foundation, GSMA, KeshoLabs, Laboratoria, Ledn, Maple, Mercy Corps, Metadium, Moon, MoonPay, Pipol, Pngme, Polychain, Project Wren, SaldoMX, Semicolon Africa, The Giving Block, Utrust, Upright, Yellow Card, and 88i.

“Many of these organizations have on-the-ground operations that will begin to get Celo into the hands of those who have been underserved by the current global financial system” Andreessen Horowitz general partner Katie Haun told me. “Our hope is that this partnership will start unlocking the potential of internet money”. To spur adoption, the Alliance will distribute ‘Prosperity Gifts’ in the form of financial grants to developers proposing Celo products that would benefit society. 

There are also some peculiar characteristics of Celo’s system. People exchange other cryptocurrencies for Celo Gold, then exchange that for Celo Dollars they can spend. The reserve is backed with other cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ethereum rather that fiat, and isn’t fully collateralized. That could make it vulnerable to a Celo bank run or crash in price of those currencies. Celo also lets arbitrageurs pocket the difference if Celo Gold and Celo Dollars get out of sync.

While it might not be a danger to the world financial system like Libra, it could be a danger to itself. At least on the anti-money laundering front, cLabs — the team that’s kicking off development of the Celo platform — has hired former Capital One head of enterprise risk management Jai Ramaswamy. Plus, the Celo founders come well pedigreed, including Marek Olszewski and Rene Reinsberg who spun out machine learning startup Locu from MIT and sold it to GoDaddy, as well as EigenTrust inventor and former MIT Media Lab professor Sep Kamvar.

So far, 130 teams have expressed interest in building on the Celo platform. For reference, Libra said 1,500 organizations had said they wanted to work on that project four months after its reveal. Celo Camp and Blockchain for Social Impact Incubator will also be fostering projects for the blockchain.

Celo could make banking cheaper and more accessible while power new fintech innovation. But for any of that to happen, it will need to get enough developers building truly useful products, make the blockchain and currency exchange simple enough for mainstream audiences in developing nations, and grow adoption to meaningful levels few cryptocurrency projects have yet achieved. The Alliance For Prosperity will have to throw their weight into this project, not just their names, if it’s going to succeed.

Small and medium enterprises make up the vast majority of businesses globally, and today a startup building merchant services to help them operate is announcing a growth round to address that opportunity.

SpotOn — which provides point of sale payment solutions, alongside a number of related tools such as marketing, appointment booking and loyalty services — has raised $50 million in funding, a Series B that it plans to use to keep expanding its business after a strong year: in the last 12 months the startup says that it has grown revenues by 150% and in these first couple of months of 2020 has added 5,000 customers to its books. The aim is to grow the company both in the US as well as internationally.

The funding is coming from a high-profile group of investors, among them 01 Advisors (the VC firm run by former Twitter execs Dick Costolo, Adam Bain and David Rivinus), Dragoneer Investment Group, Franklin Templeton and EPIQ Capital Group. Dragoneer and Franklin led the company’s previous round, a $40 million Series A raised less than a year ago.

This latest investment from former Twitter execs is an… interesting… one, given that the current CEO of Twitter (co-founder Jack Dorsey, who succeeded Costolo in the role) is also the CEO of Square, which is one of SpotOn’s biggest competitors.

“There are companies that build great products, and there are companies that build great sales teams, but it’s rare to find an organization that can do both,” said Dick Costolo, Managing Partner and Co-Founder of 01 Advisors, in a statement. “SpotOn has proven an unwavering commitment to building products that matter and getting them into the hands of businesses nationwide.”

Small and medium businesses have traditionally been a neglected stepchild in the world of tech: their needs are more particular and demanding than those of consumers, but they individually represent very small returns compared to much larger businesses, and they are often operating on much smaller and tighter budgets, making them less likely to experiment or upgrade services that basically work fine, or well enough.

That has evolved a lot in the last several years, as a host of new tech companies — capitalising on the growth of better devices, better connectivity and more advanced cloud technology — have built a number of services catering specifically to the SMB segment, with the belief that if you can do it efficiently enough, you can realise some clever economies of scale in providing smaller-margin services to a wide swathe of customers, and then if you can attract customers with one very useful tool — such as a good POS system — you can upsell them to a number of others.

This is the basic premise behind the growth of San Francisco-based SpotOn, but its numerous competitors. Alongside Square, they include PayPal, Clover, Lightspeed and many others.

SpotOn’s traction has partly come from the fact that it positions itself as an affordable, modular option — pricing varies depending on the package a company takes, but a package that is priced at $25/month for the first year (it goes up after that depending on volume) includes a range of tools plus add-ons for payments, hardware and other options. It’s also making an effort to continue expanding the services that it provides. Last year, it partnered with Poynt, another startup in the payments space, to integrate loyalty and marketing with payments; and it has made a number of acquisitions, including of website builder Lifeyo and EmaginePos, to enhance its own-brand services. It has also worked to develop solutions targeting specific verticals such as restaurants and salons.

Its traction with investors, meanwhile, stems from the fact that the founders have a successful track record in payments already. Specifically, two of the co-founders, brothers Zachary and Matt Hyman, previously co-founded and subsequently sold another company, Central Payment, to TSYS at a valuation of $850 million. Before that, they sold a previous startup called CardPayment to iPayment. The third SpotOn co-founder, Doron Friedman, also has a background in business services.

“Businesses need help navigating the digital shift in commerce, whether that’s utilizing new payment methods, leveraging actionable data or taking advantage of new mediums to communicate with their customers,” stated Zach Hyman, Co-Founder of SpotOn, in a statement. “Business owners are rapidly selecting SpotOn as their go-to technology partner, and we’re excited to continue building SpotOn into a household name within the business community and beyond.”

The company is not disclosing its valuation but we are trying to find out.

TNL Media Group, the Taipei-based media and journalism company, announced it has acquired mobile ad technology startup Ad2iction. In addition to digital advertising and data analytics, Ad2iction also operates verticals like Agent Movie, a film site, and its brands will remain independently run after joining TNL Media Group.

Ad2iction currently serves about 500 brands with a cloud-based platform, called Ad2 CMP (creative management platform) that helps them analyze behavior and create digital content for displays and mobile devices.

Launched in 2013 with The News Lens, a news site, TNL Media Group expanded through a series of partnerships and acquisitions and now includes a portfolio of content brands dedicated to lifestyle, sports, technology and video content. For example, in 2018 it acquired Taiwanese tech news site INSIDE and sports site Sportsvision. The company focuses on creating Chinese-language content for users in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Southeast Asia, and English-language articles for international readers, too.

TNL Media Group also recently founded a market research unit called TNLR (with the “R” standing for research) to provide reports that use data analytics from its user base for clients like Dell, Uber and Ford.

Inn a press statement, TNL Media Group founder Joey Chung said “Both companies believe this is the perfect moment for a strategic partnership as we set up to build one of the top content platforms and diversify our product offerings with each bringing in more scale. We look forward to helping Ad2iction’s superior mobile adtech products expand to new clients and international markets while building one of the international Chinese market’s top content and technology service platforms.”

Disney+, with its original catalog, has arrived in India weeks ahead of its scheduled launch date. Disney revamped its video streaming service Hotstar in India early Wednesday and populated Disney+ titles on the platform.

The service is currently available at no additional charge to existing Hotstar subscribers, though the premium tier carries a new sticker price of Rs 3,588 ($48) for a year.

The “Disney+ Hotstar” currently offers more than a dozen original titles from Disney, including “Diary of a Future President,” “Disney Family Sundays,”
“Disney’s Fairy Tale Weddings,” “Encore,” “High School Musical,” “The Mandalorian,” and “The World According to Jeff Goldblum.”

Some users have pointed out that the in-app player is not able to stream some titles seamlessly. And that the titles are available in full-HD (1080P), instead of their native 4K (UHD) resolution. Hotstar in India has yet to add support for 4K.

The early rollout of Disney+Hotstar comes at a rough time for Disney and Hotstar that have received criticism for censoring John Oliver’s “Last Week Tonight” show.

The streaming service, which is the exclusive streaming syndicating partner for HBO, Showtime, and ABC in India, blocked a recent episode of “Last Week Tonight” that was critical of India’s ruling party and its leader, Narendra Modi.

Oliver documented these instances and revealed that Hotstar had also edited a few jokes about Disney from some of his recent episodes.

More to follow…

Just days ago, Y Combinator announced that its upcoming Demo Day event would be moving online due to “growing concern over COVID-19“. The event, previously planned to span across two days at San Francisco’s Pier 48 building, would instead be hosted entirely online on March 23rd.

More changes this evening: YC is shifting Demo Day forward one full week, from March 23rd to March 16th.

In a blog post on the change, Y Combinator CEO and partner Michael Seibel cites an “accelerated” pace from investors in recent days as having encouraged the move:

Over the last few days, a large number of investors have accelerated their outreach to our current batch of founders. They are moving quickly to make investment decisions, and we’re going to match their pace and accelerate our schedule by one week. YC W20 online Demo Day will now be on March 16.

On March 16, the YC Demo Day website will go live, a modified version of the website that investors and founders have used over the past five years. Through the website, investors will have access to a single-slide summary, a short description of the company, and a team bio. They can sort companies by industry and geography, and will be able to export the list of companies to a spreadsheet.

While YC initially said that the pitches each company traditionally does live onstage for Demo Day would be “pre-recorded and released to all investors at the same time,” the announcement of the sooner-than-expected Demo Day only mentions slide summaries, company descriptions, and team bios — suggesting plans might have changed a bit to accommodate the new schedule. Y Combinator confirmed to me that the Demo Day site will not have video presentations.

 

 

The number of COVID-19 cases in the U.S. crossed 1,000 on Tuesday as President Donald Trump met with the nation’s largest insurers and members of his cabinet to discuss how to pay for treatment and lessen the financial blow of the disease’s spread.

With the nation’s healthcare apparatus beginning to get a better understanding of the proliferation of the virus within its borders, efforts have shifted fully from containing the disease’s spread to stopping the contagion from getting worse.

“What we would like the country to realize is that as a nation we can’t be doing the kinds of things we would be doing a few months ago,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, during the daily briefing from the President’s Coronavirus Task Force. “It doesn’t matter if you’re in a state that has no cases or one case, you have to start taking seriously what you can do now, if and when the infections will come, and they will come.”

The government and private testing facilities Quest and LabCorp are quickly distributing new test kits, with the expectation that 5 million will be made available by the end of the week. The availability of testing means that more cases will be diagnosed and efforts will be made to limit the spread in the new clusters as they’re identified.

However, that rollout might be hampered by a potential shortage of a critical component of the tests — the “RNA extraction” kits, first reported by Politico earlier on Tuesday.

“RNA extraction is the first step in being able to perform” a COVID-19 test, Michael Mina, associate medical director of molecular diagnostics at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston told Politico. “If we cannot perform this step, the [coronavirus] test cannot be performed.”

More roadblocks to testing could limit the identification of clusters of the virus and stop governments from taking the kinds of dramatic action that medical professionals think could be necessary to mitigate the spread of the virus.

“When you have community spread you’re going to ratchet up the kinds of mitigations that you have,” said Fauci. “Everyone should be saying all hands on deck. This is what we need to be doing.”

In New York state that’s meant establishing a containment zone around New Rochelle, a city that has been the focal point for the disease’s spread in the region.

That mitigation strategy looks like an extreme version of the steps that Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the former Food and Drug Administration chief recommended over the weekend.

Meanwhile, more companies made calls for remote work for their employees and took steps to shield their workers from financial hardship caused by the disease — either through illness or because of the mitigation strategies imposed by the companies themselves. Their commitments come as President Trump and his economic advisors move forward with a stimulus package to boost the economy and provide a safety net for companies that are paying for workers’ time off.

Earlier in the day in a briefing at the White House, Vice President Mike Pence outlined the steps that insurance companies would be taking to ensure that patients receive the treatment they need.

“All the insurance companies here — either today or before today — have agreed to waive all copays on coronavirus testing and extend coverage for coronavirus treatment in all of their benefit plans,” Vice President Pence said. Last week the government said that Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries would have their testing and treatment covered.

“They’ve also agreed to cover telemedicine so that anyone, particularly among the vulnerable senior population, would not feel it necessary to go to a hospital or go to their doctor,” said Pence. “They’ll know that telemedicine is covered.”

And for tech companies like Instacart, Postmates, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Salesforce, and Facebook, which have all committed to paying for hourly workers sickened by the virus or who have lost work due to office closures, the Federal government may provide some financial assistance (not that the tech companies need it).

Following up on the commitment made yesterday,  Director of the United States National Economic Council Larry Kudlow said at Tuesday’s briefing that the administration is putting together a proposal for a payroll tax cut and tax deferrals for small and medium-sized businesses who are impacted by the spread of COVID-19. 

Technology companies and the billionaires that own them are also chipping in to help local communities and finance initiatives looking for new diagnostics to identify the disease and treatments for the sick.

Earlier today, Amazon announced a $5 million initiative to help local businesses affected by the outbreak of COVID-19 in Seattle, while the Gates Foundation committed $50 million to a $125 million effort to develop treatments.

Still, executives at startups operating clinics in geographies affected by the virus are saying that the infrastructure is not yet in place to adequately and effectively diagnose and treat COVID-19.

“Testing isn’t being done widely,” said one executive at a startup that runs a network of clinics and urgent care centers. “The supplies in the country are just very limited right now.”