Author: azeeadmin

Neighborhood social network Nextdoor and Walmart are teaming up today to launch a new “Neighbors Helping Neighbors” program that will make it easier for vulnerable community members to get assistance from neighbors who are already planning a trip to Walmart. The new in-app feature will allow Nextdoor users to post to groups associated with their local Walmart store to request shopping assistance.

To find the new option, Nextdoor users can either use the Nextdoor website or mobile app.

From there, users will click on the “Groups” tab where they’ll see local Walmart stores pinned to the top of the page. Members can then post a message to the group feed where they can ask for help or offer to help others.

Members who connect in the feed can then work out the details on the message board or through direct message, where they can share more private details like their address and what they need from the store.

The feature is designed to help elderly, high-risk or other vulnerable members find someone who will pick up groceries, medications, or other essentials when they’re planning a trip to the store.

This could also offer a low-cost alternative to using online grocery delivery services, which require tipping. In the case of a neighbor helping a neighbor, the assistance is offered on a volunteer basis, not as someone’s job. That could be potentially life-saving for low-income community members who can’t risk shopping in a store during the coronavirus pandemic, but who also struggle to afford alternatives like online grocery.

Walmart isn’t moderating or managing these Nextdoor groups, to be clear, but worked with Nextdoor to make the feature available.

For the retailer, the addition isn’t just beneficial in terms of directing customers to Walmart to shop, it’s also seen as a way to reduce the number of people who come to the store in-person.

“I’ve seen first-hand the countless ways our Walmart team is working together during this challenging time, leading with humanity, compassion and understanding to serve our customers,” said Janey Whiteside, Walmart’s Chief Customer Officer, in a statement about the feature’s launch. “We’re continuing to do that through our new program with Nextdoor. We’re connecting neighbors to each other so that more members of our communities have access to essential items, while limiting contact and the number of people shopping in our stores,” she added.

Nextdoor has launched several new features in response to the coronavirus pandemic in recent weeks.

Its new “Help Maps” allowed members to post and offer help in their neighborhood, for example. But this feature had been buried on the “More” menu in the app and was being underutilized as a result. A dedicated place within Nextdoor Groups for these sorts of requests is more visible, making it easier to offer assistance or to ask for help.

Over the past few weeks, Nextdoor says it’s seen a 7x increase in people joining groups to help one another, a not surprising figure given its recent exit from beta.

Nextdoor will also make the Walmart groups easy to find by pinning them to the top of the Groups tab, it says.

Meanwhile, Walmart store locations and hours where “Neighbors Helping Neighbors” is available can be found on Nextdoor’s “Help Map.”

“We’re inspired everyday by the kindness of people around the world who are stepping up and helping out. In recent weeks, we’ve been blown away by the number of members who have raised their hand to run an errand, go to the grocery store, or pick up a prescription for a neighbor,” said Sarah Friar, Nextdoor CEO, about the feature. “We’re grateful for Walmart’s partnership to make this important connection between neighbors around vital services, and we’re proud to come together to ensure everyone has a neighborhood to rely on,” she said.

The new initiative is launching nationwide starting today, but may not be immediately available in the app as the rollout could take time to complete.

Apple plans to fix an iPhone email security bug, Magic Leap cuts 1,000 staffers and Google is requiring all advertisers to identify themselves.

Here’s your Daily Crunch for April 23, 2020.

1. A new iPhone email security bug may let hackers steal private data

According to security firm ZecOps, the bug is in the iPhone’s default Mail app. By sending a specially crafted email to the victim’s device, an attacker can overrun the device’s memory, allowing the attacker to remotely run malicious code to steal data from the device.

The bug dates back to iOS 6, but on the latest version of iOS 13, it doesn’t require any user interaction. Motherboard, which first reported the story, said the bug has been fixed in a beta version of the software, and a fix will be rolled out in an upcoming update.

2. Magic Leap reportedly slashes 1,000 jobs and steps away from consumer plans

Magic Leap announced today that it has laid off a “number of employees” and is backing away from its consumer ambitions to focus more heavily on selling to enterprise customers. Bloomberg reports that half of the company’s employees were laid off, roughly 1,000 in total.

3. Google is extending identity verification requirements to all advertisers

The identity verification feature was first introduced in 2018, requiring political advertisers to provide documents to verify their identity, which is then displayed as part of the ad itself. Moving forward, Google says it will make identity verification a required part of the ad buying process, regardless of topic.

4. JustEat Takeaway $7.6B merger approved, pair pick up $756M in new funding

The UK’s competition watchdog officially gave a nod to the merger between UK’s JustEat and the Netherlands’ Takeaway.com. And the merged company announced that it had raised an additional €700 million ($756 million) in funding.

5. Cowboy VC’s Aileen Lee: Your coronavirus scenario planning should be more conservative

Lee and her fellow Cowboy Ventures partner Ted Wang joined us for our first episode of Extra Crunch Live, a virtual speaker series for Extra Crunch members. They covered a wide range of topics, including PPP loans, advice for business leaders around layoffs, the right time to seek funding and the right firms from which to seek that funding, how to pitch during a downturn and which sectors in particular Cowboy is interested in financing right now. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

6. Boston Dynamics’ Spot finds a new career in telemedicine amid COVID-19 pandemic

For two weeks, Boston Dynamics’ Spot robot has been walking the halls of local hospital Brigham and Women’s. Telemedicine wasn’t generally listed as one of the primary applications for the company’s first commercial product, but Boston Dynamics is only one in a long list of tech companies that’s found itself shifting on the fly as the COVID-19 pandemic has become an all-consuming part of life.

7. Bill Gurley is stepping away from an active role at Benchmark, 21 years after joining the firm

Gurley’s transition out of the firm won’t surprise many. Benchmark — which has always run a fairly small operation — has routinely groomed new investors as veterans of the firm have moved on.

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.

Polestar, the electric performance brand spun out of Volvo, said the base price of its first all-electric vehicle will be $59,900 in the United States, lower than originally targeted.

The 2021 Polestar 2, an electric performance fastback, is the first EV to come out of a brand that was relaunched three years ago. Polestar, once a high-performance brand under Volvo Cars, was recast as an electric performance brand in 2017. The aim was to produce exciting and fun-to-drive electric vehicles — a niche that Tesla was the first to fill and has dominated ever since.

The company believes the vehicle is well positioned for a successful entry into the the U.S. market thanks to its lower pricing, tax incentives and the ability for customers to buy it online, said Gregor Hembrough, who heads up Polestar USA. The U.S. prices are also below incentive thresholds in a few critical markets such as California and New York.

Polestar has been trickling out announcements around the upcoming Polestar 2 for months now, including pricing for Europe, which starts at 58,800€. On Thursday, the company revealed a few more pricing details for the various options customers can buy, including a $5,000 performance pack, a $4,000 upgrade of Nappa leather interior and $1,200 for 20-inch alloy wheels.

The Polestar 2 will likely be held up as a possible competitor to the Tesla Model 3. The pricing on the two vehicles don’t quite match up unless the $7,500 federal tax incentive, which Polestar still qualifies for, are considered. Tesla no longer qualifies for the federal tax credit because it’s sold more than 200,000 electric vehicles.

Stripping out the incentives, the base price of the Polestar 2 is slightly more expensive than the performance version of the Model 3, which starts at $56,990.

Until the automaker begins delivery to the U.S., which is expected this summer, it won’t be clear how it stacks up against the Model 3.

Polestar is aiming to attract customers with tech and the performance specs of the fastback, which produces 408 horsepower, 487 pound feet of torque and has a 78 kWh battery pack that delivers an estimated range of 292 miles under Europe’s WLTP. Polestar hasn’t released the EPA estimates for the Polestar 2.

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

Polestar, which is jointly owned by Volvo Car Group and Zhejiang Geely Holding of China, plans to open physical retail showrooms called Polestar Spaces once stay-at-home orders prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic are lifted. The first of these locations will open on the West Coast of the United States and New
York in late summer 2020, the company said. The Polestar 2 will be available in all 50 states to buy or lease.

The first version of Apple and Google’s jointly developed, cross-platform contact tracing API should be available to developers as of next week, according to a conversation between Apple CEO Tim Cook and European Commission for internal market Thierry Breton. Bretton shared a photo from his office which shows him having a video conversation with Cook, and told Les Echos that the Apple chief executive told him April 28 would be the day the contact tracing API will be available to software developers building apps that employ it on behalf of public health agencies.

Apple and Google announced that they were working on the contract tracing system, which works across iOS and Android mobile device, on April 10, and detailed how the opt-in network would use randomized IDs not tied to a user’s actual identify information to communicate potential contacts with individuals with a confirmed positive COVID-19 diagnosis. It’s a decentralized system that never collects any geographic data in order to preserve individual privacy, and Apple and Google chose to collaborate on the project so that any apps built to use it will have the furthest potential reach possible in terms of user base.

The rollout of the contact tracing system is happening in two parts: First, the API is being made available to developers – that’s the part that’s happening next week. This phase was originally set for a mid-May release, but it sounds like the companies have stepped up their timeline (at least on the Apple side) based on this conversation between Thierry and Cook. That makes sense, given the urgency of the need for contact tracing in order to better understand how and when to alter or relax social distancing measures.

The second part of the plan is issuing a system update to build in contact tracing at the OS level. Opt-in would be managed on the device, and both Android and iOS smartphones with this toggle enabled would automatically be able to participate in local contact tracing efforts –whether or not they had any specific health agency apps installed. Apple and Google clarified in a follow-up Q&A session about the system that users would still be prompted to download and install a public health app from their local authority should their phone notify them of a possible contact, so that they could get additional info about next steps from a trusted source.

Note that the second phase isn’t expected until sometime later this year, but the early arrival of the first version of the API for developers is a promising sign that suggests both companies are focusing considerable effort and resources on getting this to market.

There are myriad contact tracing systems either in development or already being implemented, but a common technological backbone that makes it possible for them to cross-communicate, and that opens up broad participation across the most popular mobile devices currently in use has the greatest chance of actually being effective.

Today Opera Event, an influencer software service, announced that it closed a $5 million Series A. The Oakland-based startup raised the capital from new lead investor Antera, with prior investors Atlas Ventures, Everblue, and Konvoy Ventures coming along.

According to Crunchbase data, Opera Event had raised at least $1.2 million before this new round.

Opera Event is starting with a focus on influencers in the esports market, a business that founder Brandon Byrne knows well. Byrne previously worked for former esports organization Curse and served as the CFO of Team Liquid; Team Liquid is an active esports organization with players in a number of games, including League of Legends and Starcraft 2.

The startup wants to help esports teams monetize, a likely welcome effort given the industry’s historical issues with revenue generation, and reward micro-influencer fans. How it intends to do that is its core software service, one that Byrne expects will in time work for other verticals and influencer sets. Let’s explore.

Opera Event in practice

It’s perhaps best to explain what Opera Event does with a hypothetical example, built off notes from an interview with Opera Event’s Byrne. Let’s say that Alex Wilhelm Super Awesome Esports (AWSAE) is a small Starcraft 2 team — it’s just big enough to attract some sponsorship, but not as much as the team would like. However, AWSAE’s Starcraft 2 players have dedicated fans, many of whom also stream on Twitch and maintain a presence on Twitter.

By using Opera Event, AWSAE’s fans that stream can join the team’s commercial world, adding its sponsors to their Twitch pages, tweeting out the same campaigns and more. Opera Event sits between the team, its community and capital sources (brands), helping make everything click. It’s a situation that works well for Alex Wilhelm Super Awesome Esports. With its community streaming under its commercial banner, its demonstrable in-market impact (tweet impressions, minutes engaged on Twitch, etc) grows sharply. Its associate small streamers and fans get to take part in in the team’s world, and can be rewarded with things like social follows and other bits of love — all while brands can better deploy capital. (Opera Event calls this “the ability to engage and manage content creators efficiently and at scale.”)

Now AWSAE can get bigger sponsors as it can offer a bigger audience, it can share revenues or provide other succor to its fanbase, and brands can get their whatnot in front of more viewers at once.

One team that Byrne detailed had about 39 members doing around 50 million engaged minutes each month on Twitch. Using his startups software to create two affiliate programs, the same team grew to over 3,000 influencers that generated north of 450 million minutes per month of viewership. The latter set of figures are far more commercially viable.

The aggregation of small streamers is more than adding up views, it turns out. Byrne told TechCrunch that smaller esports streamers have better click through rates than the entertainment categories giants, which could help team fans and other community members that sign up as part of their Opera Event network have outsized impact on sponsor results.

Opera Event takes a material cut of deals it lands through its sales team (25% to 30% per the company) and a small cut for deals that flow through its platform but originated elsewhere (2% to 3%). The model generated around $1.8 million for the startup in 2019, and Opera Event hopes to reach $9 million in revenue this year.

Particularly important in today’s changed market, Byrne told TechCrunch that Opera Event is a quarter away from breaking even. That should keep the company safe during a downturn.

In time, Opera Event wants to add more niches to its stable. Its founder mentioned yoga as an example. Where there are influencers big and small, the startup wants to show up and help facilitate influencer commerce and collaboration.

At a time when more transactions than ever are happening online, payments behemoth Stripe is announcing three new features to continue expanding its reach.

The company today announced that it will now offer card issuing services directly to businesses to let them in turn make credit cards for customers tailored to specific purposes. Alongside that, it’s going to expand the number of accepted local, large card networks to cut down some of the steps it takes to make transactions in international markets. And finally, it’s launching a “revenue optimization” feature that essentially will use Stripe’s AI algorithms to reassess and approve more flagged transactions that might have otherwise been rejected in the past.

Together the three features underscore how Stripe is continuing to scale up with more services around its core payment processing APIs, a significant step in the wake of last week announcing its biggest fundraise to date: $600 million at a $36 billion valuation.

The rollouts of the new products are specifically coming at a time when Stripe has seen a big boost in usage among some (but not all) of its customers, said John Collison, Stripe’s co-founder and president, in an interview. Instacart, which is providing grocery delivery at a time when many are living under stay-at-home orders, has seen transactions up by 300% in recent weeks. Another newer customer, Zoom, is also seeing business boom. Amazon, Stripe’s behemoth customer that Collison would not discuss in any specific terms except to confirm it’s a close partner, is also seeing extremely heavy usage.

But other Stripe users — for example, many of its sea of small business users — are seeing huge pressures, while still others, faced with no physical business, are just starting to approach e-commerce in earnest for the first time. Stripe’s idea is that the launches today can help it address all of these scenarios.

“What we’re seeing in the COVID-19 world is that the impact is not minor,” said Collison. “Online has always been steadily taking a share from offline, but now many [projected] years of that migration are happening in the space of a few weeks.”

Stripe is among those companies that have been very mum about when they might go public — a state of affairs that only become more set in recent times, given how the IPO market has all but dried up in the midst of a health pandemic and economic slump. That has meant very little transparency about how Stripe is run, whether it’s profitable, and how much revenues it makes.

But Stripe did note last week that it had some $2 billion in cash and cash reserves, which at least speaks to a level of financial stability. And another hint of efficiency might be gleaned from today’s product news.

While these three new services don’t necessarily sound like they are connected to each other, what they have underpinning them is that they are all building on top of tech and services that Stripe has previously rolled out. This speaks to how, even as the company now handles some 250 million API requests daily, it’s keeping some lean practices in place in terms of how it invests and maximises engineering and business development resources.

The card issuing service, for example, is built on a card service that Stripe launched last year. Originally aimed at businesses to provide their employees with credit cards — for example to better manage their own work-related expenses, or to make transactions on behalf of the business — now businesses can use the card issuing platform to build out aspects of its customer-facing services.

For example, Stripe noted that the first customer, Zipcar, will now be placing credit cards in each of its vehicles, which drivers can use to fuel up the vehicles (that is, the cards can only be used to buy gas). Another example Collison gave for how these could be implemented would be in a food delivery service, for example for a Postmates delivery person to use the card to pay for the meal that a customer has already paid Postmates to pick up and deliver to them.

Collison noted that while other startups like Marqeta have built big businesses around innovative card issuing services, “this is the first time it’s being issued on a self-serving basis,” meaning companies that want to use these cards can now set this up more quickly as a “programmatic card” experiences, akin to self-serve, programmatic ads online.

It seems also to be good news for investors. “Stripe Issuing is a big step forward,” said Alex Rampell, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, in a statement. “Not just for the millions of businesses running on Stripe, but for credit cards as a fundamental technology. Businesses can now use an API to create and issue cards exactly when and where they need them, and they can do it in a few clicks, not a few months. As investors, we’re excited by all the potential new companies and business models that will emerge as a result.”

Meanwhile, the revenue “optimization” engine that Stripe is rolling out is built on the same machine learning algorithms that it originally built for Radar, its fraud prevention tool that originally launched in 2016 and was extended to larger enterprises in 2018. This makes a lot of sense, since oftentimes the reason why transactions get rejected is because of the suspicion of fraud. Why it’s taken four years to extend that to improve how transactions are approved or rejected is not entirely clear, but Stripe estimates that it could enable a further $2.5 billion in transactions annually.

One reason why the revenue optimization may have taken some time to roll out was because while Stripe offers a very seamless, simple API for users, it’s doing a lot of complex work behind the scenes knitting together a lot of very fragmented payment flows between card issuers, banks, businesses, customers, and more in order to make transactions possible.

The third product announcement speaks to how Stripe is simplifying a bit more of that. Now, it’s able to provide direct links into six big card networks — Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover, JCB, and China Union Pay, which effectively covers the major card networks in North and Latin America, Southeast Asia and Europe. Previously, Stripe would have had to work with third parties to integrate acceptance of all of these networks in different regions, which would have cut into Stripe’s own margins and also given it less flexibility in terms of how it could handle the transaction data.

Launching the revenue optimization by being able to apply machine learning to the transaction data is one example of where and how it might be able to apply more innovative processes from now on.

While Stripe is mainly focused today on how to serve its wider customer base and to just help business continue to keep running, Collison noted that the COVID-19 pandemic has had a measurable impact on Stripe beyond just boosts in business for some of its customers.

The whole company has been working remotely for weeks, including its development team, making for challenging times in building and rolling out services.

And Stripe, along with others, is also in the early stages of piloting how it will play a role in issuing small business loans as part of the CARES Act, he said.

In addition to that, he noted that there has been an emergence of more medical and tele-health services using Stripe for payments.

Before now, many of those use cases had been blocked by the banks, he said, for reasons of the industries themselves being strictly regulated in terms of what kind of data could get passed across networks and the sensitive nature of the businesses themselves. He said that a lot of that has started to get unblocked in the current climate, and “the growth of telemedicine has been off the charts.”

Earlier this week, we kicked off our Extra Crunch Live series with an interesting chat with Cowboy’s Aileen Lee and Ted Wang. Today, we will be back at 3 p.m. PST/6 p.m. EST/10 p.m. GMT with a new guest: Charles Hudson, the general partner of Precursor Ventures.

Extra Crunch members will find an AddEvent link below to drop the details directly into their calendar and folks who want to participate directly can hit up the Zoom link (also below). We’ll ask as many audience questions as we can, so please make them sharp — no pitches, please.

Charles Hudson founded Precursor Ventures to invest in pre-seed and seed-stage companies. Earlier this year, the firm filed paperwork to put together a $40 million third fund after previously raising two main funds and one $10 million “opportunity” fund.

As we await hard and accurate numbers on how COVID-19 is impacting fundraising, we’ll ask Hudson to walk us through the changes he has seen and will cover some basics: The best way to pitch him, what his to-do list looks like these days and if the pandemic has made Precursor newly bullish or bearish on certain sectors.

Then, we’ll get much nerdier: Will we see the number of party rounds fall further now that it’s harder to gather investors in real life? Do you think we’ll see pre-seed raises ask for more ownership terms? And what is the latest with the wacky world of early-stage valuations?

There’s a lot to talk about. And we haven’t even mentioned YC’s pro rata change yet.

After Hudson, we have a stacked lineup of Extra Crunch live guests, including Mitch and Freada Kapor, Mark Cuban, Roelof Botha and Kirsten Green, with more to be announced soon.

You can find information below with details for joining today’s discussion, as well as an AddEvent link to put the details directly onto your calendar.

Sign up for Extra Crunch to get access to all these episodes where you can view the talks live, participate in the Q&A with industry leaders and watch later on-demand if you can’t make the live timing. Talk soon!

Details

It’s not exactly a secret that the travel industry is in free fall right now as the pandemic has brought the industry to a screeching halt. With nobody moving, travel site Expedia announced that it has raised $3.2 billion to help ride this out.

The deal consists of two separate tranches of cash with $1.2 billion coming from private placement of perpetual preferred stock and approximately $2 billion coming from new debt financing, according to the company.

Apollo Global Management and Silver Lake will be providing the funds to give the company some capital to help make it to the other side of the coronavirus pandemic. Apollo partner Reed Rayman sees a solid company going through a rough time.

“This investment helps ensure the company has the resources to sustain market leadership and emerge from the current economic environment stronger than ever,” Rayman said in a statement. While it may not emerge stronger than ever, certainly having a significant chunk of operating capital will help ensure that it simply emerges whenever this industry slump ends.

In addition, the company is making big changes in the executive team, naming vice chairman Peter Kern as CEO and company veteran Eric Hart as CFO. The company also announced these executives and members of the board will forgo salary for the remainder of the year, and senior executives will take a 25% pay cut.

In a press release, company chairman Barry Diller outlined all of the steps the company was taking, but he indicated that the management changes had been in the works even prior to the crisis that has overtaken the company and the entire industry.

As a result of the ongoing industry issues, the company will be forced to go lean and that means furloughs and reduced work weeks for certain volume of employees, at least through August 31st. The company will also be suspending 401(k) matching for the remainder of the year and asking employees to voluntarily reduce work weeks, as well.

Diller wrote that they were forced to make these moves to survive the precipitous drop in travel due to the pandemic and subsequent worldwide lockdowns.

“Since the crisis began, the company has encountered an extraordinary number of challenges, and just as governments around the world were unprepared, so too were we. We had limited online tools to support widespread cancellations and our call volume spiked 500%. Under extraordinary pressure, our tech teams built new tools and managed to bring our call center capacity to acceptable levels,” he said in the letter.

He closed his letter on a positive note, stating these moves will help them hunker down with enough cash to survive until it’s over. “We have the financing to carry us through, a superb newly named senior management team, and a very clear focus for whatever the future brings. So, we’ll seize the (next) day…,” he wrote. These moves should help them get there.

MIT has developed a new type of lightweight sensor that can be integrated into flexible fabrics, including the kinds of polyesters often used in athletic wear, to provide constant monitoring of vital signs including body temperature, heart rate and respiratory rate. These sensors are machine-washable and can be integrated into clothing that appears totally normal on the outside, and they can also be removed and re-used in different garments.

The research, which led to the design of a prototype that communicates with a smartphone and that could lead to eventual mass production with partners in China, has potential applications across the health industry, in athletics and even in space for astronaut vital sign monitoring. MIT’s research was funded in part by NASA and the MIT Media Lab Space Exploration Initiative, but its potential here on Earth has much more widespread benefit potential, particularly in the era of COVID-19 and the healthcare landscape that will result even once it’s more under control.

In particular, this could be a cost-effective and easy way for patients with chronic conditions that require regular monitoring and check-ins with their physicians to keep on top of reporting that is often manual and difficult to maintain consistently. Rather than relying on updates either in-person, or even via telemedicine, these individuals could provide a steady stream of biometric data to the healthcare professionals monitoring their treatment. It could automate the process to an extent that makes it easier for both individual and their caregivers to keep on top of the situation in real-time.

Remote healthcare solutions are already seeing massive spikes in demand due to COVID-19, as patients and healthcare professionals seek ways to continue to manage healthcare needs while lessening COVID-19 exposure risk, especially among the most vulnerable, which includes individuals with chronic or pre-existing conditions.

Some companies are already experimenting with variations of this approach, including U.S. primary care startup Forward, which is distributing biometric sensors to its patients for at-home monitoring. Connected sensor company Kinsa is also showing the value of aggregated anonymized biometric data with a map that employs its sensor data to track a potential leading indicator of COVID-19 spread: the prevalence of fever in a community.

Wearable sensors embedded in clothing have been tried before, and even productized, but MIT’s version looks like the most wearable and least disruptive to the wearer in terms of convenience and comfort yet. In future, always-on health data monitoring could inform the development of more and better pandemic modeling, too, so this is definitely an innovation space to watch.