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In three years Zachariah Reitano’s startup, Ro, has managed to hit a reported $1.5 billion valuation for its transformation from a company focused on treating erectile disfunction to a telemedicine service for a range of elective and urgent care-focused treatments.

Through Rory for women’s health, Roman for men’s health, and Zero for smoking cessation, Reitano’s company now treats 20 conditions including sexual health, weight loss, dermatology, allergies and more, according to a statement from the company.

Ro also has a new pharmacy business, Ro Pharmacy, which is an online cash pay pharmacy offering over 500 generic medications for just $5 per month per drug. And the company is getting into the weight loss business through a partnership with the private equity-backed health care company, Gelesis.

Ro’s also becoming a gateway into patient acquisition for primary care providers through Ribbon Health, and a test-case for the use of Pfizer’s Greenstone service, which provides certification that a generic drug is validated by one of the major pharmaceuticals.

The company’s $1.5 billion valuation is courtesy of a new $200 million investment from existing investors led by General Catalyst and including FirstMark Capital, Torch, SignalFire, TQ Ventures, Initialized Capital, 3L, and BoxGroup. New first time investor The Chernin Group also participated. In all, Ro has raised $376 million since it launched in 2017.

“This new investment will further our mission to become every patient’s first call. We’ll continue to invest in our vertically-integrated healthcare ecosystem, from our Collaborative Care Center to our national pharmacy operating system. This is just the beginning of Ro’s patient-centered healthcare platform.” 

It’s all part of the company’s mission to provide a point of entry into the healthcare system independent of insurance qualifications.

“Telehealth companies like Ro are using technology to address long-standing healthcare disparities that have been exacerbated by Covid-19,” said Dr. Joycelyn Elders, MD, Ro Medical Advisor and Former US Surgeon General. “By empowering providers to leverage their skills as efficiently and effectively as possible, Ro delivers affordable, high-quality care regardless of a patient’s location, insurance status, or physical access to physicians and pharmacies.”

Ro’s new financing is one of several forays by tech investors into reshaping the healthcare system at a time when patient care has been severely disrupted by attempts to mitigate the spread of COVID-19.

Digital medicine is assuming a central position in the healthcare world with most consultations now occurring online. Reimbursement schemes for telemedicine have changed dramatically and investors see an opportunity to capitalize on these changes by aggressively backing the expansion plans of companies looking to bring digital healthcare directly to consumers.

That’s one of the reasons why Ro’s major competitor, Hims, is reported to be seeking access to public markets through its sale to a Special Purpose Acquisition Company for roughly $1 billion, according to Reuters.

The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 paved the way for decades of incremental changes to the way buildings, businesses, and laws accommodate people with a wide variety of disabilities. At 30 years old this week, the law’s effect on tech has been profound, but there’s still a lot of work to do.

The ADA originally applied mainly to things like buildings and government resources, but over the years (and with improvements and amendments) came to be much broader than that. As home computers, the web, and eventually apps became popular, they too became subject to ADA requirements — though to what extent is still a matter under debate.

I asked a few of the most prominent companies and advocacy organizations what they think about how tech has improved the everyday lives of people with disabilities, and where it has so far fallen short.

Those who responded had the most to say about how tech has helped, of course, but also offered suggestions (and recriminations) for an industry that has in some ways only recently begun to truly include people with disabilities in its processes — and in many ways has yet to do so.

Claire Stanley, Advocacy and Outreach Specialist at the American Council for the Blind

“Tech has opened the door to so many things,” said Stanley. “Books, for instance — 10 years ago to get a book you might have to wait for the Library of Congress to convert it to audio. Now, because of Kindles and e-readers, the day a book comes out I can buy it. Access is a lot faster than it once was.”

“The ability to do certain things in the workplace, too. The caveat is, people don’t always design software to work with accessibility technology. Designing with screen readers in mind can be very helpful, but if they don’t, that opens up whole new problems,” she said.

“Companies just don’t think about accessibility, so they design a product that’s totally inaccessible to screen readers. To my understanding, if you design it right from the get go it should be easy to make it compatible. There are the WCAG standards — if programmers took even a cursory glance at these, they’d be like, oh I get it!,” said Stanley. “And I’ve heard from a lot of people that when you make something accessible to the blind it makes it better for everybody.”

That’s exactly the problem that Fable intends to alleviate by providing software testers with various disabilities as a service to companies that may not have thought that far ahead in their QA process.

New devices and services are also changing the landscape for blind folks:

“Braille literacy is going down because people are turning to audio synthesizers — but new designs of braille readers are coming out, and they’re getting cheaper. I have mine right next to me,” said Stanley.

Of course for the deaf-blind community braille is still indispensable. One dad hoping to teach his daughter braille recently built his own inexpensive braille education device — not something you were likely to do 20 years ago.

“And Aira is an app that has been around for about four years – basically, though video from your phone, a person on the other end can answer questions and identify things. I use it all the time. They’re starting to integrate AI to do some simple things like read signs,” Stanley said.

“We’ve also been working a lot in the autonomous vehicle space. That will open up a lot of doors, and not just for blind people, but people with other disabilities, the elderly, children,” she added. “I know we have a long way to go, but we’ve been fortunate enough to be at the table with companies and Congress when we’re talking about what making an autonomous vehicle accessible looks like.”

Eve Andersson, Director of Accessibility at Google

“To me, one of the most notable tech advances has been changes in captioning technology. About two years after I started at Google, in 2009, we introduced automatic captioning on YouTube using AI. Then 8 years later, we introduced the ability to caption sound effects (laughter, music, applause, etc) to make video content even more accessible,” said Andersson.

She pointed out that although captions were originally made with accessibility for deaf and hard of hearing users, they quickly became helpful for many other users who wanted to be able to watch videos on mute, in other languages, and so on.

“Programming computers to be able to understand and display or translate language is allowing for so many more advances that benefit everyone. For example, speech recognition and voice assistants have made it possible to have the speech to text features that we have today, like voice typing in Google Docs or dictation in Chrome OS,” she said.

Live transcribe is another feature that tech has enabled, letting hearing impaired people follow in-person communications live.

“Before the ADA, some parts of the physical world remained inaccessible to people who are blind or low-vision,” Andersson said. “Today, you can find braille under almost all signs in the United States, which paved the way for us to create products like Google BrailleBack and the TalkBack braille keyboard, which both allow braille users to gain the information they need and communicate effectively with the world around them. In addition, the spirit of ADA in making the physical world accessible to people with disabilities is what inspired innovations like Lookout, an app that helps people who are blind or low-vision identify the world around them.”

“One area that we’re thinking about more and more is how to leverage technology to be more helpful for people with cognitive disabilities. This is an incredibly diverse space spanning many different needs, but it remains largely unexplored,” she said. “Action blocks” in Android are an early effort to address it, simplifying multi-step processes into single buttons. But the team is looking into larger scale improvements to help out those who have trouble using a smart device out of the box.

“As an industry, we need to work to ensure that people with disabilities – from employees to consultants to users – are always included in the process of developing a product, research area, or initiative from the very beginning,” she said. “People with disabilities or who have family members with disabilities on my team bring their experiences to the table and we make better products as a result.”

Sarah Herrlinger, Director of Global Accessibility Policy at Apple

“It’s fundamentally about culture,” said Herrlinger. “From the beginning Apple has always believed accessibility is a human right and this core value is still evident in everything we design today.”

Though somewhat general of a statement, Apple has the history to back it up. The company has famously been ahead of others on the accessibility curve for decades. TechCrunch columnist Steve Aquino has documented these efforts over the years, summing many up in this feature.

The iPhone, being Apple’s flagship product since its introduction, has also been its main platform for accessibility.

“The historical impact of iPhone as a mainstream consumer product is well documented. What is less understood though is how life changing iPhone and our other products have been for disability communities,” said Herrlinger. “Over time iPhone has become the most powerful and popular assistive device ever. It broke the mold of previous thinking because it showed accessibility could in fact be seamlessly built into a device that all people can use universally.”

The feature that has been helpful to the most people is likely VoiceOver, which intelligently reads off the contents of the screen in a way that allows blind users to navigate the OS easily. One such user posted her experience recently, racking up millions of views:

As for where the tech industry has room to grow, Herrlinger said: “Representation and inclusion are critical. We believe in the mantra of many within disability communities: ‘Nothing about us without us.’ We started a dedicated accessibility team in 1985, but like all things on inclusion — accessibility should be everyone’s job at Apple.”

Melissa Malzkuhn, Founder & Creative Director, Motion Light Lab at Gallaudet University

“If not for the laws in place to safeguard our access, no one would implement them,” Malzkuhn said frankly. “The ADA really helped push greater access, but we also saw a lot of change in how people think, and what is considered socially responsible. More and more people now see that their use of social media comes with a sense of social responsibility to make their posts accessible. We would like to see that social accountability with all individuals, and with all companies, big and small.”

Gallaudet is a university that aims to be “barrier-free for deaf and hard of hearing students,” providing a huge amount of resources and instruction for that community. Many of the technologies its staff has used for years have seen major improvements as mainstream users have flocked to virtual meetings and the like and found them wanting.

“We have more video meeting options than ever, and they continue to improve. We also have seen a constant improvement in our experience with video relay services,” Malzkuhn said. She also cited voice-to-text as having improved a lot and provided serious utility; Gallaudet’s Technology Access Program has worked with Google’s Live Transcribe.

“Language-mapping processing, and the early pioneering work on gesture and sign recognition is exciting,” she added, though the latter is still a ways from practical use. She was unsparing in her criticism of the many attempts at smart gloves, however: “Enough with the sign language gloves. It reinforces a bigger ideology: Give deaf people something to wear and our communication issues will go away. It is not about putting the burden of communication on one group of people.”

“I would say that the Apple iPad has revolutionized how we look at the experience of reading for deaf children. In the Motion Light Lab here at Gallaudet University, we have created bilingual storybook apps, intersecting both ASL videos and written text on the same interface,” she said. “But technology will never replace the humanity in all of us. All it takes are attitudes and the willingness to communicate, regardless of technology. Learning a bit of sign language goes a long way.”

Malzkuhn emphasized the value of inclusion and chastised companies that fail to take even elementary steps in hiring and process.

“Companies that hire Deaf people have it right. Companies that focus on inclusive design and accessibility as an important and ‘non-negotiable’ aspect in product design also have it right. Their products are invariably superior to inaccessible products,” she said, while those who do not are guilty of “a serious omission. Many companies strive to create products to ‘help’ our lives, but if we are not in the room in the first place, and if we do not have a seat at the table, that is not helpful. Inclusive design starts with an inclusive team.”

Investors need to look at startups focused on accessibility and deafness as well. Like any growing community, they need funding and mentorship.

Malzkuhn also wanted to make sure that companies are thinking about the deaf and hard of hearing not just as consumers of an end product, but full-fledged users.

“That is a driving force in my work — we need to always give tools so anyone can design technology. We need to ensure that we have the responsibility of training, teaching, and making those accessible so we develop and cultivate the next generation of young deaf people who design and construct, who are architects of systems, who can program systems, as well as being end users of technology.”

Jenny Lay-Flurrie, Chief Accessibility Officer at Microsoft

“On a personal level, the ADA drove a new bar of awareness and provision of captioning, interpreting which are both invaluable to me in the workplace, home, and navigating crucial life needs like medical care,” said Lay-Flurrie. “Technology can unlock solutions that can help empower people with disabilities in the spirit of the ADA and lead to greater innovations for everyone. To enable transformative change accessibility needs to be a priority.”

Like Google’s Eve Andersson, Lay-Flurrie highlighted captioning as a major recent advance.

“Captioning, like many other aspects of accessibility is increasingly woven into the fabric of what we do,” she said. “Captioning has evolved so much in the last 30 years, and accelerated as a result of AI and ML in the last 5. Teams now has AI captioning integrated and we have seen the impact of that during COVID with Teams Captioning usage up 30x from a few months prior.”

“Accessibility has also diversified – with technologies like Seeing AI, Learning Tools, and the Xbox Adaptive Controller as Microsoft focuses on inclusive design, building with and for people with disabilities in these instances, creating breakthrough technologies for blind/low vision, dyslexia and mobility,” she said.

The Adaptive Controller was one of the best hardware surprises of recent years — a device for playing games and interacting with computers and consoles that’s hyper-compatible and clearly the result of immense effort and expenditure.

It’s an example of one of the “doors that remain closed and need to be opened, vehemently and with speed,” as Lay-Flurrie put it. “Seeing AI is a great lens on what is possible here, and I get excited to think about what AI/ML, as well as AR can do across the spectrum of disability. Additionally, we believe that AI can help unlock solutions to some of the biggest challenges people with disabilities face, which is why the AI for Accessibility program plays a crucial role in how Microsoft is working to drive inclusive innovation.”

Lay-Flurrie had a good deal to say on how to integrate inclusivity into a company’s processes — and with good reason, seeing as Microsoft has been a leader on these issues for years.

“Accessibility isn’t optional. It must be part of your business, ecosystem and managed/measured,” she said. “It starts with people and we have really focused on how we build an inclusive culture, pipeline of talent. Though we are still continuing to grow and learn, have also taken steps to share our learnings with other organizations through resources like the Autism Hiring Playbook, Accessibility at a Glance training resources, the Supported Employment Program Toolkit, and the Inclusive Design Toolkit.”

“We realize that each organization has its own pace and starting point. The first step is to recognize the need to design for accessibility,” she continued. “It’s particularly important to evaluate the maturity of a product development lifecycle through the lens of accessibility and look to build in assistive features from the start, not bolted on later in the process. But there is more to do here. Until then, my mantra stands – if you don’t know its accessible, its not.”

Mike Shebanek, Head of Accessibility at Facebook

“The portability, ease of use, affordability, and built-in accessibility of smartphones has allowed people with disabilities to be more connected, more mobile and more independent than anyone thought possible thirty years ago,” said Shebanek. “The rise of voice technologies like speech synthesis, speech recognition, and voice control of devices has also radically improved the lives of people with disabilities.”

“Facebook created React Native, and made it open source, so that developers can create accessible mobile apps. We’ve also helped set global digital standards for web accessibility that enable everyone to enjoy a more accessible Internet,” he continued.

Like the others, he suggests that tech companies need to consider accessibility needs and methods early on, and increase the numbers of people with disabilities in the development and testing process.

Machine learning is helping address some major obstacles in a more automated way: “we’re using it at Facebook to power automatic video captioning and create automatic Alt-Text to provide spoken descriptions of photographs to people who are blind,” said Shebanek. “But these are only recent innovations and the industry has barely begun to scratch the service of what’s possible in the next 30 years as we begin to thoughtfully address the needs of people with disabilities.”

According to a new court filing, multiple California state offices are actively investigating Amazon over worker safety concerns as the coronavirus continues to rage throughout the U.S.

In the filing, reported by Reuters, a San Francisco Superior Court Judge Ethan Schulman writes that California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health and San Francisco’s Department of Public Health have all opened investigations into the online retail giant’s workplace practices in light of the pandemic. The Attorney General’s office declined to comment when reached by TechCrunch.

While Amazon faced frequent criticism for worker well being before the pandemic, the ongoing crisis has made those concerns even more stark. With white-collar workers sent home, the virus has spread quickly through clusters of employees at factory floors and warehouses nationwide where social distancing isn’t enforced. Amazon’s own shipping centers have reported outbreaks, including one in the Pocono Mountains and another in Oregon and by May eight Amazon warehouse workers had died from the virus.

The disclosure of the three California state investigations came out of court case accusing Amazon of failing to adequately protect workers in a San Francisco Amazon Fresh Fulfillment Center. In the lawsuit, filed in March, Amazon Fresh worker Chiyomi Brent accuses the company of taking risks, including sharing the suits they wear into freezers without cleaning them after each use. Brent also filed a complaint with California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health, which is now looking into Amazon’s distribution center practices.

Tenet has long been expected to be a bellwether for filmgoers’ readiness to return to theaters. Director Christopher Nolan is a blockbuster machine, and if anyone can get butts in seats amid the worst pandemic in modern memory, it’s probably him. And to be fair, the film really has served as a kind of litmus test — just not kind Warner Bros. was hoping for.

After numerous delays, Tenet has a new release date. Not a final release date, mind. If there’s one thing that COVID-19 has taught us, it’s that things can always get worse. For now, however, the mysterious sci-fi thriller is slated to hit theaters in select North American cities on September 3, for the Labor Day Weekend.

Notably, however, the film will receive an international release in 70 territories next month. The list includes Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, Russia and the U.K. While U.S. theater owners have eagerly been waiting the film’s arrival, shutdowns in too many key markets have continued to make a wide release untenable. Among other things, the move can be viewed as a kind of indictment of the United States’ on-going inability to curb the virus’s spread.

And while, as Variety notes, global day-and-date releases aren’t unheard of for these kinds of blockbusters, much of Tenet’s appeal has hinged on the film’s mysterious nature. The trailers thus far released for the film have remained purposefully obtuse. An international release ahead of the the U.S. will almost certainly go a long ways toward removing some of that mystery through piracy and online spoilers.

Other upcoming releases Mulan and A Quiet Place 2 have also seen further delays in recent days.

BMW said it will offer the all-electric versions of X1 compact SUV and the 5 Series as part of the German automaker’s plans to have 25 electrified models in its portfolio by 2023.

BMW didn’t say exactly when an all-electric X1 or 5 Series might be available (TechCrunch reached out and will update if we get an answer). The all-electric drive train will be one of four options to buyers of the BMW X1 and BMW 5 Series vehicles. The sedan and SUV are also available as a plug-in hybrid as well as diesel or gas with 48-volt mild hybrid technology.

The two vehicles are the latest to join BMW’s expanding electrified portfolio. Earlier this year, the automaker said its flagship 7 series sedan would also be offered with an all-electric drive train.

BMW has said that half of the 25 “electrified” models slated to be on roads by 2023 will be fully electric. The term electrified can also mean a hybrid and plug-in hybrid. The company’s longer term goal is to have more than 7 million electrified BMW Group vehicles on the road by 2030. BMW has said it wants two thirds of those to have a fully-electric drive train.

The automaker is bringing five all-electric vehicles to market by the end of 2021, including the BMW i3, the Mini Cooper SE, the BMW iX3, the BMW iNEXT and the BMW i4. The i3 is a well-known member of the wider EV industry. But the others likely less so. The Mini Cooper SE has the i3 motor and with 110 miles of EPA-rated range from its 32.6-kWh battery, the vehicle is marketed as a fun-to-drive urban commuter.

The iX3, which is based off of the X3, is an electric crossover that will be assembled in China. The iX3 is not coming to the United States. Instead, the vehicle will go on sale in the first half of 2021 in China.

The BMW i4, an all-electric four-door Gran Coupe with an estimated EPA range of 270 miles and the ability to produce 530 horsepower, is slated to enter production in 2021. The iNEXT, which is meant to be the flagship of its EV lineup, is expected to be in production next year.

Following earlier reporting, Google has confirmed that it will continue to allow employees to work from home through the end of June of next year. The company told TechCrunch that Sundar Pichai announced the plan in an email sent to staff earlier today.

“To give employees the ability to plan ahead, we are extending our global voluntary work from home option through June 30, 2021 for roles that don’t need to be in the office,” the CEO wrote.

The move marks the company’s most aggressive extension of its remote work policy to date. Like many other tech companies, it appeared cautiously optimistic that things might return to normal after a couple of months. Lately, however, it’s clear that the threat of the COVID-19 pandemic won’t be going away any time soon.

Back in May, Pichai outlined plans to allow a small number of employees to return to various offices this month, all while maintaining social distancing and keeping buildings at around 10% occupancy. That same month, Twitter sent a memo noting that staff would be able to continue working from home on a permanent basis.

Depending on how long the pandemic continues to rage on, it seems reasonable to expect that even the largest tech corporations are rethinking their approach to remote work.

Mobile consumers are downloading and using more apps than ever before. According to recent data from App Annie, mobile users now have 93 apps on their phone as of the end of 2019, up from 85 apps at the end of 2015. They also now use around 41 apps per month, up from 35 in 2015. Related to this increase, users are now also spending more hours per day using apps. Worldwide, daily time spent in apps has grown to 3.1 hours per day in 2019, up from 2.1 hours per day in 2015, for instance.

But with that growth has also come increased diversity among the top apps, the report found. That means top apps now make up a smaller proportion of consumers’ total time spent in apps, compared with five years ago.

It’s worth noting that this report was commissioned by Facebook, App Annie says, with a goal of offering a more detailed look at the evolving app ecosystem over the past five years. The report aims to determine how growth is playing out in terms of popular app categories, among the top publishers, and how quickly newly successful apps are achieving sizable growth.

Facebook, in the past, had generated this sort of market research data first-hand by way of its Onavo VPN application — now shuttered over privacy concerns — and other similar efforts.

Turning to App Annie’s data team is just a new way for the company to get at the same sort of data.

App Annie’s market analysis, in part, is similarly derived by way of third-party apps. The company acquired Distimo in 2014, and as of 2016 has run the VPN app Phone Guardian under the Distimo brand. It also acquired Mobidia in 2015 and has operated My Data Manager (now on the App Store under Distimo). Both apps disclose their relationship with App Annie and explain that the apps are used for market research purposes, with specific examples of the type of data collected.

The new report’s findings may not be all good news for Facebook and other top app publishers. As the app economy evolved, users now have more places to spend time on mobile.

Over the past five years, worldwide downloads continued to grow to reach a record of 120 billion in 2019, with several key countries now driving growth including India (10% year-over-year growth in 2019), Brazil (9%), Indonesia (8%) and Russia (7%).

Downloads in mature economies also hit record levels in 2019, including the U.S. (12.3B), Japan (2.5B), U.K. (2.1B), South Korea (2B), Germany (1.9B), and France (1.9B).

As users grew their time in app to 3.1 hours per day, they also began to use more of a variety of apps. According to the report, 35 of the top 100 apps were new entrants in 2019, up from 27 in 2016 across categories that included social, photography, video, communications, entertainment, and more.

This is likely worrisome data for top app publishers, like Facebook, which has for years maintained a suite of top apps including not only its flagship app, but also Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp. As the competitive pressure increases, these top apps make up a smaller proportion of the time spent on mobile devices as users have grown more comfortable trying out newcomers — particularly across gaming, entertainment, and video categories.

The top 30 non-game apps accounted for 69.4% of U.S. users’ total time spent in 2016 among non-games. That dropped to 65.5% in 2019, a nearly 4% decline. Among games, the share fell from 49% to 39%, a 10% drop. (This data was sourced from Google Play in the U.S.)

Not only are consumers more open to trying new apps, the report found that new apps can also quickly achieve app store success. In the U.S., for example, over 60% of apps are able to reach their category’s Top 30 in their first 6 months.

This is aided by larger initial marketing pushes as well as improvements in terms of consumer’s devices themselves — like more storage and processing power, which encourages more downloads.

There are also more apps than ever before capable of achieving the once milestone metric of 1 million monthly active users (MAUs). In 2019, over 4,600 apps saw 1 million MAUs, including those outside of social and communications like Netflix, Roku, Disney, CBS, Amazon, Alibaba, Walmart, Target, PayPal, Venmo, Chase, Capital One, Uber, DoorDash, McDonald’s, and Starbucks.

Apps are also achieving the 1 million downloads milestones more quickly, in data analyzed from 2015 to 2018. In the video, finance, communications, social, photo, and entertainment categories, 67% of apps achieved the 1 million downloads milestone within their first 12 months, App Annie says.

Because of the increases, there’s now a lot of overlap in between top apps. Today, mobile consumers will often choose and use multiple apps within and across categories to address similar needs, including on social, the report found.

For example, 89% of Snapchat’s users also used YouTube in April 2020 in the U.S., and 75% also used Instagram.

TikTok saw the greatest year-over-year increase in cross-app usage of Snapchat, rising from 17% in April 2019 to April 2020 — an indication of how much it has captured the youth demographic.

Meanwhile, video apps and gaming are taking up more of users’ time spent in apps. This broad category of “play”-focused apps accounted for 22% of the growth in time spent in apps in 2019.

Plus, top gaming apps are also implementing social features, including Top 50 games like Fortnite, Clash of Clans, Call of Duty: Mobile, Township, Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes, New Yahtzee With Buddies, Golf Clash, and Slotomania, for example.

More than two-thirds of the Top 50 games have added at least one social feature, whether that’s inviting friend to play, social assists for progressing, guilds or clans, or in-app chat. This, in turn, has led to players spending more time in games as they can connect with friends there.

Fortnite, as one key example of this trend, rolled out Party Hub based on its acquired Houseparty technology, in September 2019. In the three months after the rollout, time spent in Fortnite grew 130%.

Outside of games, TikTok has risen by blending elements of top categories like social, video and entertainment. After merging with Musical.ly, it has rapidly rolled out more video editing features and increased ad spend aggressively to grow its user base and drive engagement. By December 2019, U.S. users were spending 16 hours, 20 minutes in the app per month, on average, up from 5 hours, 4 minutes in August 2018.

The full report also delves into country-by-country breakdowns but, overall, found that most countries saw record downloads in 2019 and similar trends in terms of app usage frequency increases and time spent.

One notable point of comparison is that U.S. users have more apps installed than in other markets (97 vs. 93), but tend to use fewer apps compared with worldwide trends (36 vs. 41). They also spend slightly fewer hours per day in apps, on average, than the worldwide average at 2.7 hours versus 3.1 hours.

“This report shows that the app industry is more competitive today than ever. New companies are succeeding with innovative apps that meet needs people might not even know they have,” said Ime Archibong, Head of Facebook’s New Product Experimentation team, an internal team at Facebook looking to find new models for social apps. “All of this choice and competition fuels innovation, and that’s the heart of our work at Facebook,” he added.

App Annie’s report is available upon request here.

After launching a number of new developer tools for Alexa last week, Amazon today introducing an updated version of its Alexa mobile app for consumers. The new app aims to offer a more personalized experience, particularly on users’ home screens, and offers more instructions on how and when consumers can use the digital assistant, among other changes. Notably, the app has moved its third-party skill suggestions off the main screen, to increase focus on how consumers are actually using Alexa.

The redesign offers an updated home screen, with a big Alexa button now at the top informing users they can either tap or say “Alexa” to get started.

This is followed by a list of personalized suggestions based on what consumers’ usage of the app indicates is important to them —  whether that’s reminders, a recently played item like their music or an Audible book, access to their shopping list, and so on.

Users may also see controls for features that are frequently accessed or currently active, like the volume level for their Echo devices, so they can pick up where they left off, Amazon says. It’s worth noting that these Echo devices could include Echo Buds, Amazon’s Alexa-powered wireless earbuds, which could be key to its plans of enabling Alexa’s newly announced capabilities for controlling mobile apps.

For first-time users, the Alexa app will offer more tips on what to do on mobile. For instance, new users may see suggestions about playing songs with Amazon Music or prompts to manage their Alexa Shopping List.

Meanwhile, the app’s advanced features — like Reminders, Routines, Skills and Settings — have been relocated under the “More” button as part of the redesign.

The changes don’t necessarily mean Amazon has decluttered the Alexa home screen, however.

Because the update moved the Alexa button to the top of the screen, it has left room in the navigation bar for a new button: “Play,” which encourages media playback.

The revamp also suggests that Alexa’s dedicated app hasn’t exactly found its sweet spot to become part of users’ daily lives.

Before, the app had featured the date and weather at the top of the screen — an indication that Amazon had hoped the app would be something of a daily dashboard. (See below). Now, the company seems to understand that users will launch the app when they want to do something Alexa-specific. That’s why it’s making it easier to get to recent actions, so they can effectively pick up where they left off on whatever they were doing on their Echo smart speaker, for example.

In addition, the new app notably deprioritizes Alexa’s third-party voice apps (aka “skills”), which have not yet evolved into an app ecosystem to rival its mobile counterparts, like the Apple App Store for iOS apps or Google Play. Studies have indicated a large number of Alexa skills weren’t being used, and as a result, the pace of new skills releases has slowed.

Instead of showcasing popular skills on the home screen, as before, the app’s “Skills & Games” section has been shuffled off to the “More” tab. Amazon’s first-party experiences, like shopping, media playback and communications, now take up this crucial home screen real estate.

Amazon says the new app is rolling out worldwide over the month ahead on iOS, Android, and Fire OS devices. By late August, all users should be migrated to the new experience.

When it comes to building a company, lots of things can and do go wrong. Margit Wennmachers — an operating partner at Andreessen Horowitz and long one of the most powerful public relations pros in the startup world — knows this firsthand.

Thankfully for all of you, Wennmachers was able to join us for our recent Early Stage event, where she shared some of her tips and tricks for dealing with everything from fast-ballooning crises that reporters catch wind of, to laying off people during a pandemic, to why lawsuits can actually fuel some companies’ growth.

It’s advice you might save for future reference. As she noted, how a crisis is handled can make or break a startup, and the list of things that can go wrong at even the smallest outfit is “long,” including a product needing to be recalled, a site going down, a cyber breach, a founding team that doesn’t get along, inappropriate behavior, lawsuits and cultural issues.

Some of her most actionable advice included:

How founders can prepare for the inevitable crisis

First, said Wennmachers, spend time modeling out the scenarios, and “let your imagination run wild” as you do. Spend a month on this if necessary. As you’re thinking of worst-case scenarios, also figure out the team that would be involved in a crisis response. Legal will always have to be involved but also, often, HR, outside counsel, and, if a startup can afford it, the help of an outside crisis communications team. If it’s a product failure, you’ll also need the product lead, too, she noted.

The coronavirus caused some disagreement amongst Boston’s venture capital community. Looking back at our mid-2020 survey of its VCs, some saw the city’s strength in biotech and healthcare as a competitive advantage, while others saw Boston’s diverse startup ecosystem as key to its survival.

And some were worried that activity was about to clamp down. Jeff Bussgang, Flybridge Ventures, put it most frankly: “Q2 financing for Boston is going to fall off a cliff. The biotech industry may see some bright spots […] but the financing market has frozen up as solid as the Charles River in February.”

With fresh data in hand, it appears that the more bullish were more right than the bears and that, in a good turn of affairs for Boston startups, Bussgang was wrong.

The city, much like the country, did not see the sharply negative quarter that many anticipated. Boston posted record venture capital investment in the period, its highest total since at least Q3 2018 according to CB Insights data.

The same dataset also says that Boston-area companies raised $3.7 billion across 126 deals. Indeed, the good news from Boston’s Q1 bested better-than-anticipated-results from both the global venture capital community, and the domestic VC world in Q2.

Bussgang sent an updated metaphor to the TechCrunch team in response to this data: “It was a tundra in March and April but, as happens in Boston, April showers and May flowers kicked in and the financing markets started to gush again in the late spring/early summer, just in time to save Q2 .”

While the data isn’t historically definitive due to reporting lags, it can be used as a directional sign that Boston’s rebound isn’t ahead of us, it’s upon us.

The solid numbers are a sign that COVID-19 and economic turmoil have put many startups in greater demand than before, which means that they need to amass money to meet growth needs.