Hundreds of academics across the world have welcomed efforts to introduce privacy-friendly contact tracing systems to help understand the spread of coronavirus.
A letter, signed by nearly 300 academics and published Monday, praised recent announcements from Apple and Google to build an opt-in and decentralized way of allowing individuals to know if they have come into contact with someone confirmed to be infected with COVID-19.
The academics said that contact tracing apps that use automated Bluetooth tracing are far more privacy preserving than apps that collect location data in a central store.
“Contact tracing is a well-understood tool to tackle epidemics, and has traditionally been done manually. In some situations, so-called ‘contact tracing apps’ on peoples’ smartphones may improve the effectiveness of the manual contact tracing technique,” the letter reads. “Though the effectiveness of contact tracing apps is controversial, we need to ensure that those implemented preserve the privacy of their users, thus safeguarding against many other issues, noting that such apps can otherwise be repurposed to enable unwarranted discrimination and surveillance.”
The academic endorsement couldn’t come at a more critical time. There are competing methods to trace individuals’ contact with coronavirus. Decentralized systems are far more privacy conscious because no single entity stores the tracing data. But the academics say that centralized stores of data can “allow reconstructing invasive information about the population should be rejected without further discussion,” and instead urged all countries to “rely on systems that are subject to public scrutiny and that are privacy preserving by design.”
“It is vital that, in coming out of the current crisis, we do not create a tool that enables large scale data collection on the population, either now or at a later time,” the letter reads.
The letter lands just days after some of the same academics pulled their support for a similar contact tracing project, known as PEPP-PT, which is said to have seven unnamed governments signed up so far. Two of those, Spain and Switzerland, have called for a decentralized contact tracing solution. But after PEPP-PT published details of its centralized proprietary protocol, several academics associated with the project disavowed the project, saying it was neither open or transparent enough, and lent their support instead to the decentralized systems, such as the privacy-friendly DP-3T protocol, or systems like Apple and Google’s cross-platform solution.
Alan Woodward, a professor at the University of Surrey who also signed onto the letter, told TechCrunch that the letter serves as what the academic community thinks is the “correct approach” to contact tracing.
“I’ve never seen anything like it in this field,” Woodward said. “It shows that it’s not just the few but many who share the concern. I really hope governments listen before they do something that will be very difficult to undo.”
Extra Crunch Live: Episode 1 featuring Aileen Lee and Ted Wang airs today at 1:30pm ET/10:30am PT and we could not be more excited to have such esteemed guests for the launch of this new speaker series for Extra Crunch members.
The coronavirus has gripped the nation for the past five weeks (which has felt like 7,042 years), and at this point it’s fair to say that this is a totally transformed world. It’s incredible, really, how quickly our behavior changed and how lasting that change is likely to be.
What will that mean for the tech sector moving forward? For consumer companies and enterprise companies? For early stage startups and behemoths? For entrepreneurs and VCs alike?
The best people we can ask are early stage investors like Aileen Lee and Ted Wang . In many ways, the growth of the tech sector and perhaps the economy at large starts with seed investors and the founders in which they invest.
Today, we’ll ask Lee and Wang how they’re advising their portfolio companies, which includes DocSend, Brit+Co., ProductHunt, and DollarShaveClub to name a few, during this time. Has their own investment thesis changed? What categories are particularly interesting to Cowboy Ventures right now?
Aileen Lee founded Cowboy Ventures, a well-known early-stage firm, after serving as a partner at KPCB from 1999 to 2012. She coined the term “unicorn” (in a TechCrunch article, no less) and has been named one of Forbes’ 100 Most Powerful Women, The Top Women Investors on Midas and The Times’ 100 Most Influential People.
She has worked hands-on with companies such as Bloom Energy, Blue Nile, One Kings Lane, Rent the Runway, Shopkick and Tellme (acquired by Microsoft) during her time at KPCB, and has investments in StyleSeat, Textio, August Home, Brit+Co, Crunchbase, Dollar Shave Club and Drop via Cowboy Ventures. Lee is also a co-founder of AllRaise, a nonprofit to accelerate the success of women in the tech ecosystem.
Ted Wang was one of the country’s leading tech startup lawyers, at Fenwick & West, before joining Cowboy Ventures. At the law firm, he served as outside counsel to some of the biggest tech companies in the world, including Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, Square, Sonos, Spotify, Jet, Stripe and Wealthfront.
Wang’s specialty is helping early-stage startups understand the metrics they need to hit to go from seed to Series A and beyond, and he likes to say one of his investment focuses is “Unsexy Tech,” with an interest in both consumer and enterprise tech.
We have a solid list of questions to ask Lee and Wang, but we’re not the only ones getting in on the action. Extra Crunch members will also be able to ask their own questions on this Zoom video call, so be sure you come prepared!
Lee and Wang are just the first in a packed upcoming agenda for Extra Crunch Live, which includes Charles Hudson, Mitch and Freada Kapor, Mark Cuban, Roelof Botha, and Kirsten Green, with more to be announced soon.
Sign up to Extra Crunch to get access to the full slate of Extra Crunch Live episodes where you can view live, participate in the Q&A, and view later on demand. We’d love to have you. And you can try out your first month of Extra Crunch for just $1.
Facebook has expanded Fundraisers to India and is working with several additional state governments to provide authoritative information about the coronavirus to more people in the country, it said today.
Fundraisers, which was available in the U.S. and Europe prior to Monday’s announcement, allows people to collectively contribute towards the community.
The social juggernaut, which counts India as one of its biggest markets by user base, said people in the nation can find more than 70 charities on its platform to financially support and create their own causes.
Facebook Fundraisers’ expansion to India is the latest of several efforts from the U.S. headquartered company to actively participate in doing its part in the world’s second largest internet market, where several of its businesses have been scrutinized in recent years.
“At a time when the country is in the middle of an unprecedented effort to fight the outbreak of the virus, we are deeply aware of the economic impact of the disruption in normal life. Communities around the country need help. Facebook Fundraisers allows people to leverage the full scale and power of the platform, and their passion, to direct resources to initiatives that can protect and save lives,” said Ajit Mohan, the head of Facebook in India.
Facebook said today it now maintains partnership with 11 state governments in India for its WhatsApp helpline and 9 state governments for Messenger . The helplines are available in several regional languages including Hindi, Telugu, Marathi, and Odia.
“Each of these health alert lines provide the government and health authorities a powerful mechanism to dispel rumors and misinformation that may be circulating about the Coronavirus,” said Mohan, who previously led Disney’s Hotstar business in India.
The company said it is also conducting training sessions with local governments and health organizations to help them deliver information to the community. It has so far engaged in training sessions with Union Health Ministry, state units of the National Health Mission, State Governments of Kerala, Delhi, Karnataka, Telangana, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan, Punjab and Odisha.
In recent weeks, the Indian government has asked social media services to stop the spread of misinformation on their platforms. For Facebook, it’s not a new warning. The ruling government, a big user of Facebook’s services itself, has warned the company to contain the spread of misinformation that has resulted in severe consequences in the real world.
Facebook additionally said today that more tens of thousands of educators in India were using Workplace Advanced, a tier of its team collaboration service that it is providing to organizations and individuals for free of charge to ease burden on them during the crises.
Meet Leverice: A team messenger and collaboration platform that’s aiming to compete with b2b giants like Slack by tackling an issue that continues to plague real-time messaging — namely, ‘always-on’ information overload. This means these tools can feel like they’re eating into productivity as much as aiding it. Or else leave users stressed and overwhelmed about how to stay on top of the work comms firehose.
Leverice’s pitch is that it’s been built from the ground up to offer a better triage structure so vital bits of info aren’t lost in rushing rivers of chatter than flow across less structured chat platforms.
It does this by giving users the ability to organize chat content into nested subchannels. So its theory is that hyper structured topic channels will let users better direct and navigate info flow, freeing them from the need to check everything or perform lots of searches in order to find key intel. Instead they can just directly drill down to specific subchannels, tuning out the noise.
The overarching aim is to bring a little asynchronicity to the world of real-time collaboration platforms, per co-founder and COO Daniel Velton.
“Most messaging and collaboration tools are designed for and built around synchronous communications, instant back-and-forth. But most members of remote teams communicate at their own pace — and there was no go-to messaging tool built around asynchronous communications,” he tells TechCrunch.
“We set out to solve that problem, to build a messenger and collaboration platform that breaks rivers down into rivulets. To do that, we needed a tech stack and unique architecture that would allow teams to efficiently work with hundreds of channels and subchannels distributed between scores of channel branches of varying depths. Having that granularity ensures that each little shelf maintains topical integrity.
“We’re not discussing Feature 2.1.1 and 2.1.2 and 2.1.3 and 2.1.4 inside a single ‘Features’ channel, where the discussions would blend together. Each has its own little home.”
Of course Slack isn’t blind to the info-overload issues its platform can generate. Last month it announced “a simpler, more organized Slack”, which includes the ability for users to organize channels, messages and apps into “custom, collapsible sections”. Aka folders.
So how is Leverice’s subchannel architecture a great leap forward on the latest version of Slack — which does let users organize themselves (and is now in the process of being rolled out across its user-base)?
“All structuring (including folders) on other popular messengers is essentially an individual preference setting,” says Velton. “It does not reflect on a teamwide channel tree. It’s definitely a step in the right direction but it’s about each user adding a tiny bit of structure to their own private interface, not having a structure that affects and improves the way an entire team communicates.
“Leverice architecture is based on structuring of channels and subchannels into branches of unlimited depth. This kind of deep structuring is not something you can simply ‘overlay’ on top of an existing messenger that was designed around a single layer of channels. A tremendous number of issues arise when you work with a directory-like structure of infinite depth, and these aren’t easily solved or addressed unless the architecture is built around it.”
“Sure, in Leverice you can build the ‘6-lane autobahns’,” he adds, using an analogy of vehicle traffic on roads to illustrate the concept of a hierarchy of topic channels. “But we are the only messenger where you can also construct a structured network of ‘country roads’. It’s more ‘places’ but each ‘place’ is so narrow and topical that working through it all becomes more manageable, quick and pleasant, and it’s something you can do at your own pace without fear of missing important kernels of information as they fly by on the autobahn.”
To be clear, while Slack has now started letting users self-organize — by creating a visual channel hierarchy that suits them — Leverice’s structure means the same structured tree of channels/subchannels applies for the whole team.
“At the end of the day, for communications to work, somebody on a team needs to be organized,” argues Velton. “What we allow is structuring that affects the channel tree for an entire team, not just an individual preference that reflects only on a user’s local device.”
Leverice has other features in the pipeline which it reckons will further help users cut through the noise — with a plan to apply AI-powered prioritization to surface the most pressing inbound comms.
There will also be automated alerts for conversation forks when new subchannels are created. (Though generating lots of subchannel alerts doesn’t sound exactly noise-free…)
“We have features coming that alert users to forks in a conversation and nudge the user toward those new subchannels. At this stage those forks are created manually, although our upcoming AI module will have nudges based on those forks,” says Velton.
“The architecture (deep structuring) also opens the door to scripting of automated workflows and open source plug-ins,” he adds.
Leverice officially launched towards the end of February after a month-long beta which coincided with the coronavirus-induced spike in remote work.
At this stage they have “members of almost 400 teams” registered on the platform, per Velton, with initial traction coming from mid-size tech companies — who he says are either unhappy with the costs of their current messaging platform or with distraction/burnout caused by “channel fatigue”; or who are facing info fragmentation as internal teams are using different p2p/messaging tools and lack a universal choice.
“We have nothing but love and respect for our competitors,” he adds. “Slack, Teams, WhatsApp, Telegram, Skype, Viber, etc.: each have their own benefits and many teams are perfectly content to use them. Our product is for teams looking for more focus and structure than existing solutions offer. Leverice’s architecture is unique on the market, and it opens the door to powerful features that are neither technically nor practically feasible in a messenger with a single layer containing a dozen or two dozen channels.”
Other differentiating features he highlights as bringing something fresh to the team messaging platform conversation are a whiteboard feature that lets users collaborate in the app for brainstorming or listing ideas, prorities; and a Jira integration for managing and discussing tasks in the project- and issue-tracking tool. The team is planning further integrations including with Zoom, Google Docs and “other services you use most”.
The startup — which was founded by CEO Rodion Zhitomirsky in Minsk but is now headquartered in San Jose, California, also with offices in Munich, Germany — has been bootstrapping development for around two years, taking in angel investment of around $600,000.
“We are three friends who managed complex project-based teams and personally felt the pains of all the popular messengers out there,” says Velton, discussing how they came to set up the business. “We used all the usual suspects, and even tried using p2p messengers as substitutes. They all led us and our teams to the same place: we couldn’t track large amounts of communications unless we were in “always-on” mode. We knew there had to be a better way, so we set out to build Leverice.”
The third co-founder is Dennis Dokutchitz.
Leverice’s business model is freemium, with a free tier, a premium tier, and a custom enterprise tier. As well as offering the platform as SaaS via the cloud, they do on-premise installations — for what Velton describes as “the highest level of security and privacy”.
On the security front the product is not end-to-end encrypted but he says the team is developing e2e encrypted channels to supplement the client-server encryption it applies as standard.
Velton notes these forthcoming channels would not support the usual search features, while AI analysis would be limited to “meta-information analysis”, i.e. excluding posts’ content.
“We don’t process customer or message data for commercial purposes, only for internal analytics and features to improve the product for users,” he adds when asked about any additional uses made of customer data. (Leverice’s Privacy Policy can be found here.)
With remote work the new order of the day across most of the globe because of the COVID-19 pandemic, it seems likely there will be a new influx of collaboration tools being unboxed to help home workers navigate a new ‘professionally distant’ normal.
“We’ve only been on the market for 6 weeks and have no meaningful revenue to speak of as of yet,” adds Velton.
Alibaba Cloud announced today that it will invest another RMB 200 billion (or about $28 billion) into its infrastructure over the next three years, prompted in part by increased demand for services like video conferencing and live streaming as businesses adapt to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The investment will focus on expanding Alibaba Cloud’s technology, including its operating system, servers and chips, in its data centers. The provider currently has 63 availability zones, located in Asia, Australia, the Middle East, Europe and the United States.
In press statement, Jeff Zhang, president of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence and chief technology officer of Alibaba Group, said, “By increasing our investment on cloud infrastructure and fundamental technologies, we hope to continue providing world-class, trusted computing resources to help businesses speed up the recovery process, and offer cloud-based intelligent solutions to support their digital transformation in the post-pandemic world.”
In its last quarterly earnings report, issued in February, Alibaba reported cloud revenue grew 62% to $1.5 billion. Alibaba Cloud is the top cloud provider in the Asia Pacific market, according to Gartner.
French startup Alan has raised a $54.4 million (€50 million) Series C funding round. Temasek is leading the round with existing investors (such as Index Ventures) also participating. Overall, Alan has raised $136 million (€125 million) over the past four years.
Alan has built a health insurance product for the French market. The company first started with a well-designed insurance product and wants to tackle all things related to your personal health in the future.
The startup isn’t partnering with an existing insurance company. It has obtained an official health insurance license. Compared to legacy products, Alan wants to be as transparent as possible with clear pricing and policies.
Alan has a huge market opportunity in France as every employee is covered by both the national health care system and private insurance companies.
In addition to its health insurance product, the company has been working on multiple products to help you stay on top of your health. For instance, Alan has partnered with Livi so that can easily schedule telemedicine appointments.
Alan has launched a directory of doctors around you. With Alan Map, you can easily find a health practitioner without any surprise — the company tries to predict how much you’re going to pay so that you can check if you’re 100% covered.
You can also use Alan to keep track of your past appointments, get the phone number of a doctor you’ve already interacted with and more.
Just like fintech companies are building apps that act as financial hubs, Alan wants to become a health hub. Whenever you have a question, you need a piece of information or you want to get reimbursed on your health appointments, Alan wants to become the entry point for those use cases.
More recently, Alan has worked on some content about the coronavirus outbreak and COVID-19 symptoms. You can create an account and talk to a doctor through Livi for free. You can also get two months free on a Headspace subscription in case you’re looking for a meditation app.
With today’s funding round, Alan plans to expand to other countries. It has already opened offices in Spain and Belgium and the company wants to be available all around Europe within five years.
Alan currently covers 76,000 people. It represents $63 million (€58 million) in revenue. At the end of 2018, Alan’s insurance covered 27,000 people. As you can see, the company is growing nicely.
After mounting pressure from the U.K. tech startup ecosystem, and much debate, the British government today unveiled plans for a new “Future Fund” designed to ensure high-growth companies — namely, startups — across the U.K. receive enough investment to remain viable during the coronavirus crisis.
Initially, the U.K. government is pledging a total of £250 million of taxpayer’s money to the new fund (delivered via the British Business Bank). To unlock the investment — which looks to be in the form of a convertible loan note — businesses must secure an equal or greater amount of match funding from private investors, and be a U.K. registered private company that has previously raised at least £250,000 in private investment in the last five years.
The Future Fund is pegged to launch in May, and will see the U.K. government invest between £125,000 and £5 million in qualifying startups. It also says the scale of the fund will be kept “under review,” suggesting more taxpayer money could be committed in future. Applications will initially be open until the end of September.
Meanwhile, there’s some confusion with regards to how the Future Fund’s convertible loans will work in practice. Early reports of the U.K. treasury’s plans stated that “the loans will convert to equity if not repaid,” leading some to believe that there would be an option to repay the loan instead of having it convert to equity during a company’s next funding round.
However, critics point out that if a repayment option did exist, the U.K. taxpayer would be exposed to all of the downside with very little or none of the upside. In practice, the best performing companies would likely choose to repay the loan and the worst performing companies (or at least those that don’t go bust entirely) would opt to convert to equity.
Or, put simply, a convertible loan note system that automatically converts is favourable because the U.K. government needs to hold discounted equity in the startups that don’t go bust to offset against the ones that do.
Thankfully, despite shoddy initial communication and a number of people with the ear of the government arguing for a repayment option, I understand from sources with knowledge of the treasury’s plans that conversion to equity will be mandatory, except possibly in a few specific cases and at a significant premium. I’ve asked the HMT Press Office for formal clarification and will update this post if and when I hear back.
£750 million of R&D support
Separate from the new Future Fund, the U.K. government is also pledging £750 million of targeted support for what it describes as “the most R&D intensive small and medium size firms,” although it looks like a portion is previously committed money. The cash will be made available through Innovate UK’s existing grants and loan scheme.
“Innovate UK (the national innovation agency) will accelerate up to £200m of grant and loan payments for its 2,500 existing Innovate UK customers on an opt-in basis,” says the U.K. treasury.
“An extra £550m will also be made available to increase support for existing customers and £175,000 of support will be offered to around 1,200 firms not currently in receipt of Innovate UK funding”.
The first of these Innovate UK payments will be made by “mid-May”.
Hey everybody, welcome back to Week in Review. The world of COVID-19 is our new reality, so I’ll continue to include links to some positive updates on research, but I’ll be shifting back the focus to covering tech’s movers and shakers of the week.
If you’re reading this on the TechCrunch site, you can get this in your inbox here, and follow my tweets here.
The big story
One thing that’s been interesting to see over the past few weeks is how our relationship with screen time has changed. For many, screen time is now all the time and while we haven’t stopped using too many gadgets, there are some we’ve taken out of drawers and closets and added to our repertoire.
For some, it’s been cooking gadgets. While I’ve yet to open up the sous vide gadget I received over the holidays, I was very tempted by my editor’s review of the Ooni gas-fired outdoor pizza oven this week. For me, I’ve strangely seemed to spend a lot more time with the two gadgets I own that are made by Facebook. The currently sold-out Oculus Quest and Facebook Portal are the twin pillars of Facebook’s hardware strategy, but it’s been a bit interesting to see how much more that strategy seems to thrive when we’re all stuck at home.
In a lot of ways, Facebook’s hardware feels built for a quarantine.
The Quest spent a lot of time in my closet when I was out in the world pre-quarantine, but now that I’m in my house most of the day, it spends a good amount of time strapped to my face. When VR was a more hyped technology, there was a broader conversation of whether it encouraged isolation, something promoters of the tech pushed aside, noting that it enables rich shared experiences over the web. As we all host Zoom birthday parties and visit each other’s Animal Crossing islands, it’s becoming clear that with the absence of available physical connections, we can turn a lot of things into rich shared experiences.
In a lot of ways, the Quest is a reminder of what I’m missing out on. The walls of my SF apartment feel less containing when I can hop into a VR workout or jump between games. For the first time, the technology has felt transportive in the way that the ads sold it, but it’s not that the experiences have gotten better, the world has just gotten much worse.
In the same way that VR allows us to re-skin isolation, the Portal allows us to commiserate in it.
My Portal usage has spiked in the past weeks as well. Before stay-at-home orders, coordinating a call with multiple family members was a logistical nightmare and FaceTime calls made it more likely we’d get in touch with each other, but none of my siblings are wandering far from their Portals these days.
We are all still on our phones, but for those of us working from home, mobile we are not. It’s always been fascinating that a tech company which has wildly succeeded at capturing the nuances of mobile computing has been so devoted to selling hardware meant to move us around the internet while staying in place at home. Now, that we are all at home, we are all always there and the Portal really lives up to its name.
Facebook has designed gadgets explicitly built for home use, and more than that, they’re designed devices built around session-based use cases. While Amazon Echos and Google Homes have fit into a persistent IoT platform that are always there for us, Facebook’s gadgets are more high-maintenance, designed for people to fully commit to. For a company that’s focused on the universal nature of its software, its hardware has been built for almost no one’s needs, instead designed to pull people into a future Facebook imagines.
For now, I put the Quest on my face and sometime I tell the Portal to call my sisters, but will these quarantine oddities form tech habits I hold onto after this is all behind us? In these historic times, we are at home and we are craving connections, and, for the time being, the Facebook future feels good.
Trends of the week
Here are a few big news items from big companies, with green links to all the sweet, sweet added context:
Bezos wants to test all Amazon employees for COVID-19 As Amazon bares the brunt of America’s online shopping needs, CEO Jeff Bezos wrote in a shareholder letter this week about some of the strategies the company has to ensure its workforce stays on the job. One possibility seems to be “regular testing of all Amazonians, including those showing no symptoms,” Bezos says. Read more here.
Google is building a smart debit card
Just as every startup is getting into lending or banking, every tech giant wants to have a piece of plastic (or metal) in your wallet. This week, TechCrunch broke news that Google is building a smart debit card that could rival the Apple Card. Read more about it here.
Apple launches a new iPhone SE
The iPhone SE has grown to become one of the more fascinating devices Apple sells, cramming speedy components into a form factor that’s fallen out of vogue for their customer obsessed with the latest designs. The latest SE adopt the body of the iPhone 8 with souped-up internals that rival more recent flagships on performance. Read more about the new hardware here.
Photo by Andrew Theodorakis/Getty Images
COVID-19 Research
Here are some of the stories this week chronicling the fight against the coronavirus pandemic.
Investors and entrepreneurs are shifting their chats to Zoom, so we’re taking note and hosting live Q&A discussions for our Extra Crunch subscribers with some of tech’s most visible figures. We’ll be hosting these Extra Crunch live chats over the next several weeks.
This upcoming week, we’ll be talking to Aileen Lee & Ted Wang of Cowboy Ventures. Monday, April 20 at 10:30am PT / 1:30pm ET
We’ll be chatting with Aileen Lee (former KPCB partner, founder and managing director at Cowboy.vc and coiner of the term “Unicorn”) and Ted Wang (Cowboy.vc partner, former partner at Fenwick & West, and former outside counsel to Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, Square and more) about how they’re advising their portfolio companies, if there are new and innovative ways for early-stage startups to secure capital beyond the traditional VC route and whether startups should hunker down or lean in during these uncertain times.
Hey everybody, welcome back to Week in Review. The world of COVID-19 is our new reality, so I’ll continue to include links to some positive updates on research, but I’ll be shifting back the focus to covering tech’s movers and shakers of the week.
If you’re reading this on the TechCrunch site, you can get this in your inbox here, and follow my tweets here.
The big story
One thing that’s been interesting to see over the past few weeks is how our relationship with screen time has changed. For many, screen time is now all the time and while we haven’t stopped using too many gadgets, there are some we’ve taken out of drawers and closets and added to our repertoire.
For some, it’s been cooking gadgets. While I’ve yet to open up the sous vide gadget I received over the holidays, I was very tempted by my editor’s review of the Ooni gas-fired outdoor pizza oven this week. For me, I’ve strangely seemed to spend a lot more time with the two gadgets I own that are made by Facebook. The currently sold-out Oculus Quest and Facebook Portal are the twin pillars of Facebook’s hardware strategy, but it’s been a bit interesting to see how much more that strategy seems to thrive when we’re all stuck at home.
In a lot of ways, Facebook’s hardware feels built for a quarantine.
The Quest spent a lot of time in my closet when I was out in the world pre-quarantine, but now that I’m in my house most of the day, it spends a good amount of time strapped to my face. When VR was a more hyped technology, there was a broader conversation of whether it encouraged isolation, something promoters of the tech pushed aside, noting that it enables rich shared experiences over the web. As we all host Zoom birthday parties and visit each other’s Animal Crossing islands, it’s becoming clear that with the absence of available physical connections, we can turn a lot of things into rich shared experiences.
In a lot of ways, the Quest is a reminder of what I’m missing out on. The walls of my SF apartment feel less containing when I can hop into a VR workout or jump between games. For the first time, the technology has felt transportive in the way that the ads sold it, but it’s not that the experiences have gotten better, the world has just gotten much worse.
In the same way that VR allows us to re-skin isolation, the Portal allows us to commiserate in it.
My Portal usage has spiked in the past weeks as well. Before stay-at-home orders, coordinating a call with multiple family members was a logistical nightmare and FaceTime calls made it more likely we’d get in touch with each other, but none of my siblings are wandering far from their Portals these days.
We are all still on our phones, but for those of us working from home, mobile we are not. It’s always been fascinating that a tech company which has wildly succeeded at capturing the nuances of mobile computing has been so devoted to selling hardware meant to move us around the internet while staying in place at home. Now, that we are all at home, we are all always there and the Portal really lives up to its name.
Facebook has designed gadgets explicitly built for home use, and more than that, they’re designed devices built around session-based use cases. While Amazon Echos and Google Homes have fit into a persistent IoT platform that are always there for us, Facebook’s gadgets are more high-maintenance, designed for people to fully commit to. For a company that’s focused on the universal nature of its software, its hardware has been built for almost no one’s needs, instead designed to pull people into a future Facebook imagines.
For now, I put the Quest on my face and sometime I tell the Portal to call my sisters, but will these quarantine oddities form tech habits I hold onto after this is all behind us? In these historic times, we are at home and we are craving connections, and, for the time being, the Facebook future feels good.
Trends of the week
Here are a few big news items from big companies, with green links to all the sweet, sweet added context:
Bezos wants to test all Amazon employees for COVID-19 As Amazon bares the brunt of America’s online shopping needs, CEO Jeff Bezos wrote in a shareholder letter this week about some of the strategies the company has to ensure its workforce stays on the job. One possibility seems to be “regular testing of all Amazonians, including those showing no symptoms,” Bezos says. Read more here.
Google is building a smart debit card
Just as every startup is getting into lending or banking, every tech giant wants to have a piece of plastic (or metal) in your wallet. This week, TechCrunch broke news that Google is building a smart debit card that could rival the Apple Card. Read more about it here.
Apple launches a new iPhone SE
The iPhone SE has grown to become one of the more fascinating devices Apple sells, cramming speedy components into a form factor that’s fallen out of vogue for their customer obsessed with the latest designs. The latest SE adopt the body of the iPhone 8 with souped-up internals that rival more recent flagships on performance. Read more about the new hardware here.
Photo by Andrew Theodorakis/Getty Images
COVID-19 Research
Here are some of the stories this week chronicling the fight against the coronavirus pandemic.
Investors and entrepreneurs are shifting their chats to Zoom, so we’re taking note and hosting live Q&A discussions for our Extra Crunch subscribers with some of tech’s most visible figures. We’ll be hosting these Extra Crunch live chats over the next several weeks.
This upcoming week, we’ll be talking to Aileen Lee & Ted Wang of Cowboy Ventures. Monday, April 20 at 10:30am PT / 1:30pm ET
We’ll be chatting with Aileen Lee (former KPCB partner, founder and managing director at Cowboy.vc and coiner of the term “Unicorn”) and Ted Wang (Cowboy.vc partner, former partner at Fenwick & West, and former outside counsel to Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, Square and more) about how they’re advising their portfolio companies, if there are new and innovative ways for early-stage startups to secure capital beyond the traditional VC route and whether startups should hunker down or lean in during these uncertain times.
It’s scary, living with a killer virus that we can’t yet destroy and that has completely upended our lives for who knows how long. It’s very easy to feel helpless in the face of it all, to throw up one’s hands.
Don’t do this, says Marc Andreessen in thoughtful new essay published today to the site of his venture firm, Andreessen Horowitz. In it he says, build something — anything — that moves society forward from here.
In order to “reboot the American dream.” he writes, we need to “demand more of our political leaders, of our CEOs, our entrepreneurs, our investors. We need to demand more of our culture, of our society. And we need to demand more from one another. We’re all necessary, and we can all contribute, to building.”
Andreessen notes that much of the technology has already been built. He highlights housing, education, manufacturing and transportation, observing that many of the tools needed to massively accelerate each into a bright new future already exist, but that it’s easier to keep on keeping on with the systems that once served us well than muster the collective will to uproot and replace them.
The problem, he says is “desire. We need to want these things. The problem is inertia. We need to want these things more than we want to prevent these things. The problem is regulatory capture. We need to want new companies to build these things, even if incumbents don’t like it, even if only to force the incumbents to build these things. And the problem is will. We need to build these things.”
He’s right, of course, but we’d love something more prescriptive from Andreessen, who has largely retreated from public view in the last couple of years and whose 20,000-foot view is inspiring yet also, we hope, only a starting point.
What society would seem to need right now is not top-down advice but a bottoms-up approach. The way to solve problems is by breaking down big challenges into little bits. Someone like Andreessen could really lead here, by talking more explicitly about how current technologies can and should be used to achieve goals we need to meet right now, including to: get money into the hands of people who need it faster, use business intelligence to gather information from ER doctors in how they are managing Covid-19 patients, and help the country’s governors with supply chain management.
Andreessen argues that America, expressly, needs a strenuous push. That reality can’t be clearer than right now, as he writes, noting that, “We don’t have enough coronavirus tests, or test materials — including, amazingly, cotton swabs and common reagents. We don’t have enough ventilators, negative pressure rooms, and ICU beds. And we don’t have enough surgical masks, eye shields, and medical gowns — as I write this, New York City has put out a desperate call for rain ponchos to be used as medical gowns. Rain ponchos! In 2020! In America!”
It’s an appalling state of affairs, one driven largely by our political system, as he notes but also, not said by Andreessen, by the fact that the United States has the highest income inequality of all the G7 nations, with more wealth accruing to a relative minuscule number of people every year, an ever-shrinking middle class, and ballooning poverty.
But one thing at at time. What we really need right now is the Covid-19 equivalent of the Manhattan Project, and we need Silicon Valley to lead it.
If Andreessen wants to help on this front, we’re all for it. We’re listening.
