Author: azeeadmin

Facebook has already come under fire for hosting groups organizing anti-quarantine protests in response to government lockdowns amid the coronavirus outbreak, and those promoting fake coronavirus cures and misinformation. Now it’s trying to figure out what to do with the growing number of COVID-19 community groups on its platform worldwide. In hopes of better educating group admins, the company today began its first-ever digital event for those running COVID-19 groups. The event, “Community Connect: Navigating COVID-19,” takes place April 21-23 depending on timezone, and focuses on best practices for COVID-19 groups.

In the English portion of the event that ran today, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, as is typical, positioned Facebook as a force for good.

“It’s times like this when strong communities are needed most. With everything going on, I think the power of online communities in particular has really shined through and been clear, and you all are at the heart of this,” he said. “You are running groups that have helped to organize grocery delivery to older neighbors, groups where parents can share homeschooling tips, groups to source equipment and lifesaving information for healthcare workers, groups to support people who are now out of work or who have seen their businesses take a really big hit,” he continued.

“Even if not organizing directly around coronavirus yourself, your groups have provided an escape for people or a sounding board for people who need support and comfort during this time,” Zuckerberg added.

However, Facebook Groups have also contributed to the spread of misinformation, despite Facebook’s efforts to keep this content off its platform.

Just yesterday, for example, The WSJ reported on data from watchdog group NewsGuard which found that coronavirus misinformation and conspiracy theories remained highly available across Facebook, with some posts seeing thousands of likes and comments. The report also found that sites with millions of Facebook followers have been touting fake cures. Others spread conspiracies so bizarre they’d be laughable except for the fact they’ve led to real-world crime — as in the case of arson attacks on cell towers by those convinced a virus is spread by cell signals.

An earlier study by a different group examined over 100 pieces of debunked COVID-19 related misinformation, and found these posts were shared 1.7 million times and viewed 117 million times between Jan. 21 and April 7, VICE recently reported. When the report was published, 41% of the content was still live — indicating a failure in Facebook’s promises to remove this sort of COVID-19 misinformation.

The rapid growth Facebook Groups as a result of the coronavirus health crisis now makes it even more difficult to get a handle on this sort of content, as many groups operate privately.

In the U.S., more than 4.5 million people joined COVID-19 support groups on Facebook, the company announced today. Over 3 million have done the same in Italy and more than 2 million have in the U.K, Facebook said.

It’s true that many groups may be focused on community information and support — like those designed to help neighbors, support local businesses, or give to charitable organizations, for example. But Facebook groups can also be a private forum where misinformation is easily shared, without fact-checking.

And in a pandemic situation, misinformation and fake medical advice becomes even dangerous as people risk their own health and put others at risk, as well. These fake cures are not dubious supplements being hawked by your high school friend in an MLM — they’re useless and sometimes even dangerous fake cures — like drinking bleach or snorting cocaine.

Facebook has at least been trying to wedge in credible health information into groups.

Recently, it added a prompt for group admins to share live broadcasts about COVID-19 from credible health organizations like the WHO and official state and country health departments. And in partnership with the CDC, Facebook developed learning units based on CDC guidelines that admins are able to add to their group.

Coronavirus group members will also see an educational pop-up in the group itself, directing them to credible information from health organizations. Plus, coronavirus-related search will point to this same information.

“I can promise you that I can speak for everyone at Facebook when I say that it is our top priority to build products that can help everyone right now,” said Fidji Simo, Head of Facebook App, at today’s event. “Whether it is helping make sure you see the latest accurate information from credible health organizations, to helping to provide economic opportunity and stability to businesses who are struggling, to helping facilitate the growth of online communities at the local and global level,” Simo added.

Facebook’s real top priority, however, has been its money-making ad business, which captures a significant portion of its engineering resources, while moderation and fact-checking get outsourced. Without regulatory penalties for allowing dangerous information to spread, that will likely remain unchanged.

Facebook says it plans to host a number of digital events for group admins in the months ahead.

There are few more messages more timely than the opening line, “Dance your cares away, worry’s for another day” (or is it “worries?”). Today the familiar Fraggle Rock bass line returns, along with the titular felt underground dwellers, as the first of a new series of mini-episodes hits Apple TV+.

Apple’s streaming service will post free short episodes of Fraggle Rock: Rock On! each Tuesday, starring a familiar parade of Muppets, including Gobo, Red, Boober, Mokey, Wembley, Uncle Traveling Matt and those poor, hardworking Doozers.

Arguably even more interesting than the show itself is the circumstances of its production. As the global COVID-19 pandemic has brought television production to a screeching halt, the show’s producers have taken to creating the show remotely. “ In accordance with the Covid-19 ‘Safer at Home’ guidelines,” Apple writes in a release, “Fraggle Rock: Rock On! is all shot on iPhone 11 phones from the homes of the production team and individual artists from all over the U.S.”

If nothing else, the current pandemic has proven how creative people can be with an internet account and a lot of free time. It’s already has already reshaped how we view musical and comedy performances as a long parade of creatives have opened their homes to the internet. A new Fraggle Rock series demonstrates what can be done when you add a bit of production values into the mix.

The series joins a number of familiar childhood properties being revamped for the platform, including Peanuts (Snoopy in Space) and Ghostwriter.

AWS and Facebook today announced two new open-source projects around PyTorch, the popular open-source machine learning framework. The first of these is TorchServe, a model serving framework for PyTorch that will make it easier for developers to put their models into production. The other is TorchElastic, a library that makes it easier for developers to build fault-tolerant training jobs on Kubernetes clusters, including AWS’s EC2 spot instances and Elastic Kubernetes Service.

In many ways, the two companies are taking what they have learned from running their own machine learning systems at scale and are putting this into the project. For AWS, that’s mostly SageMaker, the company’s machine learning platform, but as Bratin Saha, AWS VP and GM for Machine Learning Services, told me, the work on PyTorch was mostly motivated by requests from the community. And while there are obviously other model servers like TensorFlow Serving and the Multi Model Server available today, Saha argues that it would be hard to optimize those for PyTorch.

“If we tried to take some other model server, we would not be able to quote optimize it as much, as well as create it within the nuances of how PyTorch developers like to see this,” he said. AWS has lots of experience in running its own model servers for SageMaker that can handle multiple frameworks, but the community was asking for a model server that was tailored toward how they work. That also meant adapting the server’s API to what PyTorch developers expect from their framework of choice, for example.

As Saha told me, the server that AWS and Facebook are now launching as open source is similar to what AWS is using internally. “It’s quite close,” he said. “We actually started with what we had internally for one of our model servers and then put it out to the community, worked closely with Facebook, to iterate and get feedback — and then modified it so it’s quite close.”

Bill Jia, Facebook’s VP of AI Infrastructure, also told me, he’s very happy about how his team and the community has pushed PyTorch forward in recent years. “If you look at the entire industry community — a large number of researchers and enterprise users are using AWS,” he said. “And then we figured out if we can collaborate with AWS and push PyTorch together, then Facebook and AWS can get a lot of benefits, but more so, all the users can get a lot of benefits from PyTorch. That’s our reason for why we wanted to collaborate with AWS.”

As for TorchElastic, the focus here is on allowing developers to create training systems that can work on large distributed Kubernetes clusters where you might want to use cheaper spot instances. Those are preemptible, though, so your system has to be able to handle that, while traditionally, machine learning training frameworks often expect a system where the number of instances stays the same throughout the process. That, too, is something AWS originally built for SageMaker. There, it’s fully managed by AWS, though, so developers never have to think about it. For developers who want more control over their dynamic training systems or stay very close to the metal, TorchElastic now allows them to recreate this experience on their own Kubernetes clusters.

AWS has a bit of a reputation when it comes to open source and its engagement with the open-source community. In this case, though, it’s nice to see AWS lead the way to bring some of its own work on building model servers, for example, to the PyTorch community. In the machine learning ecosystem, that’s very much expected, and Saha stressed that AWS has long engaged with the community as one of the main contributors to MXNet and through its contributions to projects like Jupyter, TensorFlow and libraries like NumPy.

In a surprising move, SAP ended its co-CEO experiment yesterday when the company announced Jennifer Morgan will be exiting stage left on April 30th, leaving Christian Klein as the lone CEO.

The pair took over at the end of last year when Bill McDermott left the company to become CEO at ServiceNow, and it looked like SAP was following Oracle’s model of co-CEOs, which had Safra Catz and Mark Hurd sharing the job for several years before Hurd passed away last year.

SAP indicated that Morgan and the board came to a mutual decision, and that it felt that it would be better moving forward with a single person at the helm. The company made it sound like going with a single CEO was always in the plans, and they were just speeding up the time table, but feels like it might have been a bit more of a board decision and a bit less Morgan, as these things tend to go.

“More than ever, the current environment requires companies to take swift, determined action which is best supported by a very clear leadership structure. Therefore, the decision to transfer from Co-CEO to sole CEO model was taken earlier than planned to ensure strong, unambiguous steering in times of an unprecedented crisis,” the company wrote in a statement announcing the change.

The move also means that the company is moving away from having a woman at the helm, something that’s unfortunately still rare in tech. Why the company decided to move on from the shared role isn’t clear, beyond using the current economic situation as cover. Neither is it clear why they chose to go with Klein over Morgan, but it seems awfully soon to be making a move like this when the two took over so recently.

Google is making a change to its product search offering meaning that unpaid listings picked by algorithm will dominate results displayed on the Google Shopping tab, instead of mostly paid product listings.

In a blog post announcing the move, Bill Ready, president of Google’s commerce division, cited the coronavirus pandemic as a catalyst for Google to speed up a pre-existing plan to switch from Shopping results being determined by paid ad auction to mostly free listings.

Making Shopping listings free for merchants is one way the tech giant is looking to support struggling retailers through the COVID-19 crisis, he suggested.

“Beginning next week, search results on the Google Shopping tab will consist primarily of free product listings, helping merchants better connect with consumers, regardless of whether they advertise on Google,” wrote Ready. “With hundreds of millions of shopping searches on Google each day, we know that many retailers have the items people need in stock and ready to ship, but are less discoverable online.”

The expansion of free listings is slated to be completed by the end of April. Initially it will only take place in the US — but Google says it intends to roll out the change globally before the end of the year.

While Google is packaging the change as a gesture to help cash-strapped retailers during a time of economic crisis there’s no doubt the tech giant is also spying strategic opportunity to expand its role in ecommerce in the midst of a coronavirus-shaped boom.

With millions of people stuck at home, and scores of physical stores closed or with heavily restricted access, online shopping has seen huge uplift.

So far, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has been the most notable winner, adding a reported $24BN to his personal wealth since the shutdown began — while ad giants like Google are facing heavy exposure to the crisis, as advertisers hunker down and rip up their 2020 marketing budgets.

If Google Shopping can start returning better results for products, and indeed results for more products, there’s an opportunity for the search giant to grow its share of shopping traffic and grab listings clicks from shoppers who might otherwise have run product queries directly on Amazon.

Google is also using the new free product listings feature as a value add ‘carrot’ — to encourage advertisers to (keep) paying it for ads.

“For retailers, this change means free exposure to millions of people who come to Google every day for their shopping needs. For shoppers, it means more products from more stores, discoverable through the Google Shopping tab. For advertisers, this means paid campaigns can now be augmented with free listings,” is how Ready pitches the switch.

As SearchEngineLand points out, this is actually Google returning to its roots — given the first version of its Shopping service (which was then called Froogle) was also free to list.

The switch to purely paid came in 2012. Though the changes now will still see paid product listings slotted into the top of Google search results if users search for product keywords, as well as into the top of the Shopping tab. So Google isn’t giving up all product ad revenue.

In terms of how it works, existing users of Google’s Merchant Center and Shopping Ads who have already opted into the “surfaces across Google program” won’t have to do anything else — and may already be eligible to show products in what Google’s help center describes as “the unpaid experiences”.

Those needing to opt in can do so by selecting “Growth” and then “Manage programs” in the left nav menu and then choosing the “surfaces across Google” program card.

“You can also add products to your product feed, to make even more products discoverable in these free listings,” Google adds.

For new users of its Merchant Center it says it’s aiming to ramp up the onboarding process “over the coming weeks and months”. But presumably there may be some delay in getting access.

Accompanying the switch is a “new partnership” with PayPal — which Google says will allow merchants to link their accounts in order to “speed up our onboarding process and ensure we’re surfacing the highest quality results for our users”.

Existing partnerships to help merchants manage products and inventory, including those with Shopify, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce, are ongoing, it adds.

What’s not mentioned in Google’s blog post is that its Shopping service has faced antitrust intervention in the European Union which slapped Google with a $2.7BN fine back in 2017 — finding it had systematically given prominence to its own shopping comparison service in results while also demoting rival comparison shopping services.

The company later rolled out tweaks to the Shopping service in Europe that it said are intended to comply with the antitrust ruling, letting comparison services bid to be displayed in the ads displayed at the top of product related search results. Though rivals have continued to complain about the ‘remedy’, and the EU’s competition chief suggested last year that additional changes may be needed.

A new acquisition should help Fandango expand its streaming efforts, Apple brings its digital services to new countries and new research suggests a higher-than-expected infection rate for COVID-19.

1. Walmart is selling its on-demand video service Vudu to Fandango

Details as to how Fandango will specifically leverage Vudu weren’t immediately disclosed, but the company currently operates a four-year old movie streaming platform, FandangoNOW, which is an obvious integration point.

As a part of the agreement, Vudu will continue to power Walmart’s digital movie and TV store on Walmart.com. The video service supposedly reaches more than 100 million living room devices across the U.S.

2. Apple expands App Store, Music, iCloud and other services to dozens of additional markets

The App Store, Apple Arcade, Apple Podcasts and iCloud are now available in 20 additional nations in Africa, Europe, Asia-Pacific and Middle East. Meanwhile, the music streaming service Apple Music has launched in an additional 52 countries.

3. LA COVID-19 antibody study adds further support for a higher-than-suspected infection rate

A new study conducted by the University of Southern California along with the LA County Department of Public Health indicates the presence of antibodies for COVID-19 in between 2.8% and 5.6% of the population of LA County, suggesting that between 221,000 and 442,000 individuals had the infection — up to 55 times more people than have been confirmed via testing.

4. Alphabet’s Loon deploys internet connectivity balloons to Kenya for first commercial service launch

Loon, Alphabet’s high-altitude broadband connectivity company for hard-to-reach places, has launched the first balloons that will provide its first ever commercial connectivity services to Kenyans. The balloons are now in testing, but pending the results of those tests, Loon says it will turn on service “in the coming weeks.”

5. Eight top fintech VCs discuss COVID-19 trends, signals and opportunities

It’s clear that we’re going to see some fintech startups struggle in the near future, but venture capitalists claim not to think in a short-term manner. And since we ran our last fintech VC survey in November 2019, we wanted to get their take on where fintech is today. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

6. The Nintendo Switch had a very good March

Switch sales more than doubled their numbers from March 2019, according to NPD. It was a March record for the console, which launched in March 2017. It was also the best first quarter unit sales for any gaming console since the company’s DS system, way back in 2010.

7. ForgeRock nabs $93.5M for its ID management platform, gears up next for an IPO

ForgeRock has built a platform that is used to help make sure that users accessing online services really are who they say are, and to help organizations account for how their services are getting used.

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.

There is massive momentum in fintech right now: regulations are finally opening up, APIs are more widely available than ever before, and there is a sense that existing products — both financial and technical — are just not doing the job that consumers and financial professionals demand.

With excitement like that, fintech has unsurprisingly seen a veritable explosion of exit activity over the past year, with massive numbers being posted on the leaderboard like Credit Karma’s $7.1 billion acquisition by Intuit, Plaid heading to Visa for $5.3 billion, and Galileo being snatched by SoFi for $1.2 billion.

So VC firms are bulking up on their fintech talent — even those who specialize in the field itself.

Nyca Partners publicly announced today that Jeremy Solomon will be joining as a principal. Among the best-known and longest-term investors in the fintech space, Nyca has invested in dozens of fintechs such as Affirm, OpenFin, Blend, and Digit over the past six years, and the firm also just raised a fresh, $210 million third fund last year.

While “fintech” didn’t really exist a decade ago, Solomon has a uniquely deep background in the rapidly expanding space. He started as a banker, but then veered off the traditional Wall Street path to move to Uganda to work on microfinance. We “had to figure out how to do small-dollar lending in a rural environment,” he said of the time, which was right before the 2008 financial crisis. He came back to the U.S. for business school, but “what puzzled me was why the U.S. market was so far behind” in financial services.

While at Stanford GSB, he linked up with the co-founders of SoFi, which started out as an online lending marketplace for business students to find more affordable student loans. He became employee number one, leading up the financing that the company would lend out to borrowers. From there, he went to another lending marketplace, LendingClub, and worked through the company’s IPO.

LendingClub though was later in its development than what Solomon experienced at SoFi, and he wanted to head back to those early-stage roots. He eventually linked up with Max Levchin and joined Affirm, heading up its finance as interim CFO before becoming its Chief Capital Officer.

It was the connection with Levchin which brought Solomon to Nyca. Nyca and Levchin have a deep alliance with each other, with Nyca being an early investor in Affirm, and Levchin previously serving as an “investment partner” with the venture firm. Solomon built up a relationship with Nyca and its partner Hans Morris over several years, and eventually decided to make the leap to venture after a decade in the startup world.

Solomon will move from the Bay Area, where has been located for more than a decade, to New York City — a reasonably rare transition for someone with his pedigree. “It’s going to be detrimental to my cycling hobby,” Solomon jokes, but “while there is more innovation going on in the fintech space in the Bay Area, I think it really is shifting in a lot of ways to the New York scene.”

The huge focus on consumer fintech products is expanding to include more and more of the infrastructure that runs these finance institutions. “There are a lot of problems that are emerging in banking, asset management and insurance that are New York centric,” Solomon said. “Some of the problems that financial institutions face today are much more nuanced and really require prior expertise in financial services.”

Solomon says he will focus a majority of his time on the credit sector. “What’s interesting about the credit sector right now is that nothing is working in it,” he said. Given the COVID-19 situation, nearly every step of the pipeline for underwriting loans today is challenging, from assessing creditworthiness to properly securitizing loans for the right prices.

For fintech founders, the additional hire is welcome news. Solomon officially started a few weeks ago at Nyca, but is in the process of conducting a (rather daunting) move cross-country to officially begin investing in NYC proper.

AT&T’s WarnerMedia announced last fall its plan was to launch the new streaming service HBO Max in May 2020 for $14.99 per month. Today, we have a solid launch date: May 27th. AT&T also revealed its initial programming slate for the new direct-to-consumer service, which includes over 10,000 hours of premium content from both the HBO service and past and present titles form Warner Bros., in addition to a selection of original programming.

However, some of the more high-profile original projects won’t arrive on launch day.

Instead, HBO Max is promising a more modest slate of original programming at its premiere, including a scripted comedy called “Love Life,” starring Anna Kendrick; the Sundance 2020 Official Selection feature documentary “On the Record;” an underground ballroom dance competition series “Legendary;” a kids competition series “Craftopia,” hosted by YouTuber LaurDIY; the all-new “Looney Tunes Cartoons,” from Warner Bros. Animation; and Sesame Workshop’s “The Not Too Late Show with Elmo.”

WarnerMedia also today released the trailers for the new shows for the first time.

The service’s added focus on family-friendly entertainment is meant to offer HBO a better way to compete with rival streamers, like Netflix and Disney+, in a crowded market. That said, the launch comes at a time when many families are stuck at home amid the coronavirus pandemic, in search of things to watch as a group. That could prove beneficial for HBO Max, at least in its early days, before the government lockdowns are lifted.

“Our number one goal is having extraordinary content for everyone in the family, and the HBO Max programming mix we are so excited to unveil on May 27th will bear that out,” said Robert Greenblatt, Chairman of Warner Media Entertainment and Direct-To-Consumer, in a statement about the launch. “Even in the midst of this unprecedented pandemic, the all-star teams behind every aspect of HBO Max will deliver a platform and a robust slate of content that is varied, of the highest quality, and second to none. I’m knocked out by the breadth and depth of our new offering, from the Max originals, our Warner Bros library and acquisition titles from around the world, and of course the entirety of HBO,” he added.

WarnerMedia had been steadily announcing the shows it had greenlit for HBO Max to whet consumers’ appetite for the service, pre-launch. These included a “Game of Thrones” spin-off called “House of the Dragon,” plus new shows from Elizabeth Banks, Issa Rae and Mindy Kaling; new DC Comics titles “Green Lantern” and “Strange Adventures” from “Arrow’s” producer; and reboots of classics ranging from “Grease” to “Gossip Girl” to “Dune,” and more.

Last week, WarnerMedia also revealed the first three J.J. Abrams series for HBO Max, including “Duster,” “The Shining” offshoot “Overlook,” and an untitled DC Comics project focused on characters in the  Justice League Dark universe.

However, many of its more anticipated projects weren’t mentioned today as being in HBO MAX’s near-term future.

Instead, the next set of Max Originals to arrive this summer and fall include “The Flight Attendant,” starring and executive produced by Kaley Cuoco; all-new original episodes of DC fan favorite “Doom Patrol;” the return of the mystery comedy “Search Party;” a three-part documentary series “Expecting Amy,” starring comedian Amy Schumer; sci-fi series “Raised by Wolves” from director and executive producer Ridley Scott; the adult animated comedy “Close Enough,” from J.G. Quintel (creator of Cartoon Network’s Emmy-winning “Regular Show”); and “Adventure Time: Distant Lands- BMO,” the first of four breakout specials resurrecting Cartoon Network’s Emmy-winning franchise “Adventure Time.”

In fact, the biggest draw in terms of can’t-get-it-elsewhere content may end up being the unscripted cast reunion special for “Friends,” which will arrive later this year.

The service will also soon include the full run of “Friends,” along with the libraries of “The Big Bang Theory;” (new) “Doctor Who;” “Rick and Morty;””The Boondocks;” “The Bachelor;” “Sesame Street;” “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air;” CW shows such as “Batwoman,” “Nancy Drew,” and “Katy Keene;” the first season of DC’s “Doom Patrol;” “The O.C.;” “Pretty Little Liars;” the CNN catalogue of “Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown;” and more.

“South Park,” “Gossip Girl,” and “The West Wing,” will be added in the first year.

Features films to arrive will include “Crazy Rich Asians,” “A Star is Born,” “Aquaman,” and “Joker,” along with others it acquired, the Criterion Collection, and the acclaimed Studio Ghibli. Classics will include “Casablanca,” “The Wizard of Oz,” “The Matrix,” “The Goonies,” “When Harry Met Sally,” “The Lord of the Rings,” “Citizen Kane,” “Gremlins,” and the “Lego” movies, along with every DC film from the last decade, including “Wonder Woman,” “Justice League,” and every “Batman” and “Superman” movie from the last 40 years.

In total, HBO Max promises a library of over 2,000 feature films in the first year.

And finally, the service will also pull from WarnerMedia’s library of movies and TV, New Line, and library titles from DC, CNN, TNT, TBS, truTV, Cartoon Network, Adult Swim, Crunchyroll, Rooster Teeth, and Looney Tunes. And it will offer a selection of classic films curated in partnership with TCM, plus third-party acquired series and movies.

Here’s another edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.

“Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says Sophie Alcorn, a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to answer your questions in my next column.”

“Dear Sophie” columns are accessible for Extra Crunch subscribers; use promo code ALCORN to purchase a one or two-year subscription for 50% off.

Borders can’t stop germs. But borders will also never be able to stop ideas, or love, either.

Last night Trump tweeted that he will temporarily suspend immigration. I’m still waiting to review the text of the executive order, which at the time of this late writing, hasn’t been published yet. I expect significant litigation, as only Congress has the authority to cease immigration pursuant to the Immigration and Nationality Act. I’m hopeful that a court will issue a temporary restraining order in the near future.

We’re monitoring the situation closely and will continue to provide updates. Stay tuned, and be well. We all share this one Earth. We’ve got this. We’ll figure things out, one step at a time. Together.

Big hugs,
S

Dear Sophie:

We’ve decided to wind down our existing startup to move on to a new biotech opportunity. A co-founder is on H-1B and we sponsored an employee for a TN. How can we support both of them to stay in the U.S.?

— Winding Down in Woodside

Dear Winding Down,

It sounds like you’re handling the transition with grace. Every new experience teaches us what we want and what we don’t want, so I’m excited for all of you that you’ll be freeing yourselves to pursue new ideas. The fact that you care so much about your team makes you a strong leader. Your international colleagues will greatly appreciate your support as everybody transitions to new roles and new adventures.

Uber Eats customers have given $3 million in direct contributions to restaurants using a new feature on the app designed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The milestone caps off a related campaign by Uber Eats to match up to $3 million in contributions made by customers. Uber Eats is sending its $3 million in matched funds to the National Restaurant Association’s Restaurant Employee Relief Fund. The company had previously donated $2 million to RERF.

The matching campaign has ended. However, the restaurant contribution feature, which was first rolled out in New York and is now in 20 countries, will continue.

The restaurant contribution feature was developed by a team of engineers in a flurry of activity over about seven days, according to Theresa Lim, who leads the restaurant product management team for Uber Eats.

“There was no executive who said ‘oh we need to build this feature, you all go build this now,” Lim said, adding that this was a grassroots effort prompted by the wave of restaurants that were forced to close regular dine-in eating due to the spread of COVID-19. Lim said Uber Eats users started reaching out to employees via LinkedIn, email and other means to ask how they could help restaurants.

“We started to see restaurants get impacted severely by this,” Lim said. “This was particularly true as the various states started implementing shelter-in-place or stay-at-home orders.”

The team had two primary concerns — beyond the basic backend operations — about the feature. They didn’t want it to cannibalize the amount of tips that users gave delivery workers, nor did they want it to cause customers to buy less from restaurants.

The team started to roll out the feature in a small area within New York City on April 1 to make sure tipping of delivery workers wasn’t impacted. The feature launched April 3 across the entire city and then expanded over the next week to the rest of the United States. The contribution feature is now live on the Uber Eats in 20 countries.

“We didn’t want to introduce anything that actually hurts restaurants,” Lim said. “It was important to make sure we weren’t introducing  friction into the experience that would cause a user to become impatient or displeased with the outcomes and maybe not actually finish their order.”

Those concerns didn’t bear out, according to data compiled since the app feature launched. Customers not only tipped more, they were also frequent users of Uber Eats.

Users who made restaurant contributions tipped their couriers 30% to 50% more than orders without a contribution, according to Uber. About 15% of Uber Eats customers in the U.S. who made a restaurant contribution were repeat contributors.

Data also shows that early dinner time, around 6 p.m., was the most generous time period, according to Lim. Dinner time, between 5 p.m. to 11 p.m., was the most popular for contributions, making up 60% of contribution dollars.

And certain foods, namely international cuisine, encouraged more contributions from users. French, Ethiopian, Argentinian and Thai restaurants had the highest contribution rates, according to Uber.

Some states were more generous than others. The top five most generous states, by percentage of active Uber Eats users who made at least one contribution, were Washington, Vermont, Montana, Connecticut, and South Carolina.