Category: UNCATEGORIZED

On Thursday, the United States crossed an unfortunate milestone in the global fight against the novel coronavirus: leading the world in confirmed cases.

By Thursday afternoon around 3 p.m. PT, the U.S. reports 82,404 confirmed cases of the coronavirus to China’s 81,782 according to a popular COVID-19 tracking tool from Johns Hopkins. Italy, regarded as the world’s emerging hotspot in recent weeks, dropped to third with 80,589 cases.

Image Credits: Johns Hopkins

As the scientific community warned in the U.S. for some time, a lower case count doesn’t necessarily mean there’s no cause for concern. Widespread testing is one of the most effective ways of containing an early epidemic, but it can also lead to boosted numbers when compared to countries doing less testing. Without complete population-wide testing, case counts only represent the sample of a given population that’s undergone testing and do not offer a complete picture of the situation on the ground. 

In some parts of the U.S., testing remains far from easy to come by. At one hospital in Queens this week, potential COVID-19 sufferers waited hours to be tested and many were still turned away after the wait. With cases continuing to tick up dangerously in New York, the U.S. also reported 1,000 deaths from the coronavirus on Thursday.

While the hardest-hit areas of the country are still struggling to accommodate an alarming influx of COVID-19 patients, testing is becoming more broadly available. Test availability ramped up dramatically over the last week after a fumbled response from the federal government led to a delay in deploying tests to health care providers—a critical factor in the explosion of coronavirus cases the U.S. is grappling with today.

During a recent visit, Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella reiterated his company’s commitment to India and revealed a new fund to help SaaS startups in the country.

And then Nadella and Anant Maheshwari, president of Microsoft India, discussed the success story of B2B platform Udaan in three separate onstage public appearances.

Headquartered in Bangalore, Udaan is a business-to-business e-commerce marketplace founded by former Flipkart executives Amod Malviya, Vaibhav Gupta and Sujeet Kumar. The startup used Microsoft’s free Azure credits to scale in its early days; as in some other markets, Microsoft, Amazon and Google offer free cloud credits in bulk to early, promising Indian startups in a bid to onboard them and see if their solutions could be relevant to other clients down the road.

More often than not, these bets don’t work, but sometimes they pay off. Udaan, valued at about $2.7 billion after raising nearly $900 million from investors like Lightspeed Venture Partners, Tencent Holdings, GGV Capital and Hillhouse Capital, has become one of Microsoft India’s biggest clients in the last three years.

Udaan was founded in 2016 at the tail end of India’s e-commerce frenzy, when scores of startups that had attempted to build business-to-consumer online shopping platforms were conceding defeat.

At the time, very few players — like Power2SME and Moglix (industrial products) and Bizongo (packaging for businesses) — were looking at the business-to-business market in India.

But despite venturing into a road less traveled, Udaan had ambitious dreams. The startup was building its own logistics network, a herculean task that even Flipkart and Amazon avoided to a certain measure for years, yet it was reaching an audience that had never sold online.

A school in Norway has stopped using Zoom, the popular video conferencing service, after a naked man apparently “guessed” the link to a video lesson.

According to Norwegian state broadcaster NRK, the man exposed himself in front of several young children over the video call. The theory, according to the report, is that the man guessed the meeting ID and joined the video call.

One expert quoted in the story said some are “looking” for links.

Last year security researchers told TechCrunch that malicious users could access and listen in to Zoom video meetings by cycling through different permutations of meeting IDs in bulk. The researchers said the flaw, tested on both Zoom and Webex calls, worked because many meetings were not protected by a passcode.

Zoom later changed the settings so that private rooms are password protected by default.

School and workplaces across the world are embracing remote teaching as the number of those infected by the coronavirus strain, known as COVID-19, continues to climb. There are some 523,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 across the world as of Thursday, according to data provided by Johns Hopkins University. Norway currently has over 3,300 confirmed cases.

More than 80 percent of the world’s population is said to be on some kind of lockdown to help limit the spread of coronavirus in an effort to prevent the overrunning of health systems.

The ongoing global lockdown has forced companies to embrace their staff working from home, pushing Zoom to become the go-to video conferencing platform for not only remote workers but also for recreation, like book clubs and happy hours.

Some found out the hard way that not setting up Zoom the correct way can lead to “Zoombombing,” where trolls jump into public calls, hijack screens, and displaying obscene imagery to unsuspecting guests.

Stocks soared on Thursday even as the US reported its worst unemployment numbers in fifty years of tracking data.

The pain felt on Main Street is offset for investors by the Federal government opening its wallet to Wall Street, businesses and (at some point) workers in the form of the $2 trillion stimulus package designed as a response to business closures as a result of the COVID-19 epidemic.

Details of the plan and its implications for startup companies are still being assessed, but the spigot is now on for businesses large and small to avail themselves of low interest stimulus loans and financing that should keep them afloat even as prolonged shutdowns look to continue in the nation’s most populous cities.

Here’s the tale of the tape:

• Dow Jones Industrial Average: jumped 6.38%, or 1,351.62 to close at 22,552.17
• S&P 500: popped 6.24%, or 154.51, to close at 2,630.07
• Nasdaq Composite: bounced 5.60%, or 413.24, to close at 7,797.54

Tech stocks followed the broader markets and posted gains on the day. Facebook was up nearly 4.5% and Alphabet (Google’s parent company) was up 5.5%. Shares of Apple were up over 5% as well and Amazon rose 3% on the day.

Social media usage has grown as a result of the COVID-19 crisis as more users go online to stay connected with family, friends, and colleagues. Now, new data from insights and consulting firm Kantar reveals exactly how much some apps are benefitting. According to a survey of over 25,000 consumers in 30 markets conducted from March 14 to 24, WhatsApp is the social media app that has experienced the greatest gains due to COVID-19.

Overall, Facebook-owned WhatsApp has seen a 40% increase in usage that grew from an initial 27% bump in the earlier days of the pandemic to 41% in the mid-phase. For countries already in the later phase of the pandemic, WhatsApp usage has jumped by 51%.

In individual markets, that usage may be even higher, Kantar noted. For example, WhatsApp usage in Spain was up 76%.

Across all messaging platforms, the growth in usage has been the largest in the 18 to 34-year-old age group, the study also found. In addition, WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram saw a 40%+ increase in usage from this same demographic.

Other social media apps seeing gains during the pandemic include, not surprisingly, Facebook and China’s Wechat and Weibo.

Overall, Facebook usage has increased by 37% while China’s local social media apps saw usage climb by 58%, Kantar says.

Despite the gains, consumers reported they didn’t trust their social media platforms for critical news related to COVID-19. National news channels and government agency websites were considered better options, with 58% and 48% of survey respondents, respectively, identifying them as a “trustworthy” source of news and information. Social media platforms, meanwhile, were only considered “trustworthy” by 11% of consumers.

Kantar’s is not the first study to report on the growth in social media activity attributed to the COVID-19 outbreak.

Facebook recently shared its own data, noting that total messaging on its platform was up by more than 50% over last month. This would include Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp combined. It also claimed that time across all apps since the crisis had grown 70%, as well, and time in group calls (3 or more participants) was up by over 1,000% during the last month.

In addition, Instagram and Facebook Live views doubled in a week’s time, Facebook said.

While not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison, Facebook’s metrics confirm Kantar’s report of significant growth during March related to the pandemic. The company spoke, too, of preparing its infrastructure for this unprecedented amount of usage. Previously, Facebook was able to remain stable during major events, like New Year’s Eve or the Olympics, but now says it’s seeing sustained, record levels of use which required it to reduce bit rates on Facebook and Instagram videos and add capacity as needed.

Related to this, another report from influencer marketing platform Klear compared the week of March 7-14 to the week of March 15-21, in order to drill down into more specific Instagram user behavior. It found that users posted 6.1 Instagram Stories per day, on average, an increase of 15% week-over-week. Stories’ impressions, meaning views, also increased by 21% during that time.

The impending shortage of ventilators for U.S. hospitals is likely already a crisis, but will become even more dire as the number of patients with COVID-19 that are suffering from severe symptoms and require hospitalization grows. That’s why a simple piece of hardware newly approved by the FDA for emergency use – and available free via source code and 3D-printing for hospitals – might be a key ingredient in helping minimize the strain on frontline response efforts.

The Prisma Health VESper is a deceptively simple-looking three-way connector that expands use of one ventilator to treat up to four patients simultaneously. The device is made for use with ventilators that comply to existing ISO standard ventilator hardware and tubing, and allows use of filtering equipment to block any possible transmission of viruses and bacteria.

VESper works in device pairs, with one attached to the intake of the ventilator, and another attached to the return. They can also be stacked to allow for treatment of up to four patients at once – provided that the patients require the same clinical treatment in terms of oxygenation, including the oxygen mix as well as the air pressure and other factors.

This was devised by Dr. Sarah Farris, an emergency room doctor, who shared the concept with her husband Ryan Farris, a software engineer who developed the initial prototype design for 3D printing. Prisma Health is making the VESper available upon request via its printing specifications, but it should be noted that the emergency use authorization under which the FDA approved its use means that this is only intended effectively as a last resort measure – for institutions where ventilators approved under established FDA rules have already been exhausted, and no other supply or alternative is available in order to preserveve the life of patients.

Devices cleared under FDA Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) like this one are fully understood to be prototypes, and the conditions of their use includes a duty to report the results of how they perform in practice. This data contributes to the ongoing investigation of their effectiveness, and to further development and refinement of their design in order to maximize their safety and efficacy.

In addition to offering the plans for in-house 3D printing, Prisma Health has sourced donations to help print units for healthcare facilities that don’t have access to their own 3D printers. The first batch of these will be funded by a donation from the Sargent Foundation of South Carolina, but Prisma Health is seeking additional donations to fund continued research as well as additional production.

Facebook today unveiled Messenger Coronavirus Community Hub that offers tips, authoritative information and other resources to help people stay connected and informed about the coronavirus outbreak, weeks after launching a similar information hub on its other messaging service WhatsApp.

The launch of the coronavirus hub on Messenger, used by more than a billion people, comes at a time when users are engaging with the instant messaging and voice calling more often than they have ever before, the company said.

“Around the world, we’ve seen significant increases in people using Messenger for group calls to stay in touch with their loved ones. Globally, 70% more people are participating in group video calls and time spent on group video calls has doubled,” wrote Stan Chudnovsky, VP of Messenger.

The community hub for Messenger users is the latest effort from the social conglomerate, used by more than 2.5 billion users, to help fight the global pandemic.

In recent weeks, Facebook has stepped up to help governments, agencies with free developer tools for Messenger to combat COVID-19, and introduced an info centre atop of the news feed to prominently offer reliable information.

Additionally, the company is also working with non-profit organizations such as the WHO to build helplines and has committed to donate millions of dollars. The World Health Organization’s helpline on WhatsApp has already reached more than 10 million users, days after its launch.

But the vast reach of Facebook has also attracted scammers. “Unfortunately, scammers may try to take advantage of people’s vulnerability and generosity during this time. We take your safety seriously and continue to take aggressive steps to remove fake accounts and catch scammers before they reach you,” wrote Chudnovsky.

More to follow…

The United Launch Alliance (ULA) has completed its 134th successful launch, continuing its perfect track record with a mission today for the U.S. Space Force. This is the first ever dedicated mission for the Space Force, a new branch of the U.S. armed forces dedicated to the defense and protection of America’s strategic assets in space.

The payload today was the sixth Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF) satellite that has been deployed for U.S. defense customers, though the original five that are already in orbit which launched over the course of the past decade were obviously sent up before Space Force was officially formed. The purpose of all the satellites is the same, however – providing strategic, reliable and secure communications for U.S. armed forces on Earth across land, sea and air.

While the launch did end up going smoothly on Thursday, it ran into an issue during the countdown to its original planned liftoff time that caused the countdown to be reset. That was due to a fault with a part of the launch system called the ‘ground hydraulics accumulator,’ according to ULA CEO Tory Bruno on Twitter. Since ULA’s launch window today extended to 4:57 PM EDT, the company was able to resolve the issue and reset for take-off, which took place without any problems at TK TK.

The actual satellite deployment will occur roughly five hours after liftoff, and ULA won’t be airing that since they typically don’t with any national defense-related missions. That’s still a critical component for overall mission success, beyond the successful launch itself, so we’ll update you when that is confirmed to have gone as planned.

ULA also addressed how and why it was able to get this launch off as planned despite the global COVID-19 crisis. The company clarified that its missions are considered “critical to security and national defense,” and that it is following all applicable guidance from the CDC, as well as from state and local health agencies, about keeping its facilities and personnel safe, secure and healthy in light of the coronavirus pandemic. ULA’s work is officially designated “part of the nation’s essential, critical infrastructure,” which means that it’s not subject to the same restrictions as other private businesses.

Described by Sequoia Capital as the black swan event of 2020, the long-term economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic on startups is still to be seen. However, one effect which is sure to disrupt the MO of many early-stage startups is the cancellation of events and conferences.

According to Forbes, more than 35.3 million people who were planning to attend an event have been forced to change their plans in recent months. And while some might lament being forced to leave their Metallica T-shirts and 2020 Summer Olympics flags in the cupboard, many startup founders are biting their nails at the prospect of lost leads and connections from events and conferences.

The silver lining: Forcing founders to wean themselves off conferences and events as a “go-to” business development tactic might not be a bad thing in the long run.

Based on my experience, many early-stage startups waste lots of time and resources doing the rounds at events without clear aims, using up lots of the founder’s time, without driving much business value. At an early stage in a startup’s journey, every tactic used needs to drive real ROI and ultimately be driving new business opportunities.

So let’s look at why missing out on events might not be the end of the world, and how startups can focus their time, energy and resources on more scalable and consistent lead-gen activities.

What’s my beef with startup events and conferences?

It is worth clarifying early on that conferences and events can provide valuable ROI in terms of lead generation and business development to startups that approach them in the right way.

Getting involved in events as speakers, taking part in panels or showcasing projects via pitch competitions offers the “Golden Ticket” that grants access to the speaker’s lounge, side events and dinners. This facilitates conversations with the most important investors, journalists and potential partners and clients in attendance on a level setting, rather than having to bustle for attention with the rest of the masses on the conference floor.

Aside from increasing the probability of real business development opportunities, taking part in a conference normally includes a free ticket, if not accommodation and travel costs being covered too.

On the flip side, in my experience, going to startup events and conferences as a lowly attendee offers very little tangible ROI, and can accumulate into a considerable expense too. However, as Forbes contributor Sophia Matveeva puts it, even a $10 event is expensive if it doesn’t offer ROI, “because the opportunity cost of events is not just money, it is also time.”

The value of attending events has to be assessed in relation to the time commitment required. If a meetup lasts three hours and includes an hour’s travel, and a large conference is a full-day commitment or even two days in a different location, the opportunity cost of the conference should be carefully weighed against time that could be invested in other lead-generation activities.

Can we approach events/conferences in a data-driven manner?

Unless founders track and assess the ROI from events in the same way as they would any other lead-generation tactic, the chances are that a pocketful of useless business cards and some branded swag (and possibly a hangover) will be the only returns from the time and resources invested.

So how can we assess the value of events in the same way as we would, for example, paid ads? First, founders should be placing metrics on each individual event, such as:

1) Source of lead: Was this via speed-networking, or by reaching out via an event app?
2) Customer acquisition cost (CAC): What were the total costs of this event? Yes, beers count.
3) The number of leads: Only count warm leads. Business-card confetti at speed-networking doesn’t count.
3) The number of those leads closed: How many paying customers did this event lead to?
4) Lifetime value (LTV): How big were these tickets?
5) Sales cycle: How long did the lead take to close?

Assessing the value of particular events via metrics is possible, but it would take a long time. Founders would need to record data over the course of a year, allowing them to highlight which events on the calendar offer the highest chances of returns for the next year. However, the reality is that this requires time and resources, which many early-stage companies simply don’t have. Testing the effectiveness of events also requires trying different tactics, including:

• Paying for a booth
• Becoming a sponsor
• Increasing the number of representatives in attendance
• Paying for a ticket with increased access to side events, etc.

Testing these tactics makes sense for larger-ticket businesses that can expect $50,000+ returns from successful events. But for startups, the chances are that after blasting through lots of time and resources, they will most likely only highlight one of the 10 conferences they attended that offered real ROI. For any other lead-generation activity, this would be considered a massive failure.

Why aren’t events scalable lead-gen activities?

Making lead generation scalable requires monitoring the success rate of different tactics, doubling down (scaling) the activities that are working and putting fewer resources behind those that are not.

This requires founders to be in control of the levers in the sense that they have the ability to add more, reduce or adjust the scale at which different activities are utilized.

This is not really the case for events, for a number of reasons:

1. Conference organizers control the content tracks/side-events/activities that take place during the events themselves. Unless they are organizers/sponsors, founders have few ways to exert influence at the events they attend.
2. Even if a founder does highlight a certain event that brings in lots of leads, there are still a limited number of events that offer access to the right target audiences and cover themes related to particular verticals/niches within their geographic region.

Focus on more scalable lead-gen activities

In my opinion, it makes more sense to focus on lead-generation activities that offer startups more control. There are many different ways for startups to experiment with different tactics within more established inbound and outbound techniques:

Inbound lead generation:

• Content marketing: Monitoring traction of webinar versus e-book, long-form versus short-form
• Blogging: Trying different content formats, keywords and themes
• SEO: Changing keywords, titles, themes and user intent
• Paid ads: Testing different platforms, target users, content styles and themes

Outbound lead generation:

• Direct emails: Sending emails at different times, including different content formats
• Targeted social media messaging: Targeting different positions in a company, on different platforms
• Cold calling: Using different amounts of representatives, targeting different target users

With the aforementioned techniques, there are fewer limits on how many different variations of these techniques startups can experiment with. They are also a lot more flexible in terms of scalability, meaning startups can invest as much or as little in each technique as they please. You can spend $10 on paid ads, or $1,000. You can have two sales representatives, or 200.

When deciding how to best spend lead-generation budgets, founders should ask themselves:

1. Can I control the levers? i.e. the tactics I am using within these tactics.
2. Can I scale to the capacity I need to; is there room for exponential growth?
3. Can I control the rate of scale over time?

The final point is arguably the most important, but often overlooked. Startups need to be able to control the pace at which they scale, meaning they can increase activity when things are going well, but also reduce activity if things aren’t working out, or — in the case of COVID-19 — if the company needs to tighten its belt due to unforeseen, or uncontrollable circumstances.

The best way to drive sustainable growth is by establishing sustainable internal systems and processes. If you think of a business as an engine, we don’t know what the machine can handle until we test its capabilities. We have to be able to scale processes, as this is where we will find the weaknesses in the system. However, we also need to be able to back off when we do find the weaknesses without causing further damage.

Startups need to “stress-test” lead-generation techniques gradually. If a startup is investing $100 in paid media and achieving five sales-qualified leads (SQLs) per month. The next step is not to go “hey, it’s working,” and chuck $1,000 at it. The sensible next step would be to scale up the tactic by investing $200 and aiming for 10 SQLs per month.

Summing up

So, with events and conferences canceled for the foreseeable future, and a high probability that many event organizers will not be able to recover from their losses this year, startups should use this forced pause to re-assess their processes and strategies.

As they say, slow but steady wins the race. The end goal should always be to achieve consistency in processes that are scalable. When startups approach processes in a data-driven, consistent manner, it offers the chance to scale exponentially over time.

Facebook has filled the lead independent board director role with former Deputy Secretary of the Treasury and U.S. Ambassador to Germany Robert M. Kimmitt. Meanwhile, the CEO of The Cranemere Group Limited Jeffrey D. Zients will not seek re-election to Facebook’s board at the 2020 annual meeting, but will serve until then. Kimmitt replaces Dr. Susan Desmond-Hellmann, who was the former lead independent director but left the board in October.

“The lead independent director is an important role for us and we’ve been looking for a leader who can bring significant oversight and governance experience” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said. “I’m confident Bob is going to make our board and our company better and I’m looking forward to working with him as we continue to build important social infrastructure to bring the world closer together.”

The board now consists of Zuckerberg, Kimmitt, Zients until the annual meeting, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, PayPal’s Peggy Alford, investor Marc Andreessen, Dropbox’s Drew Houston, McKinse’s Nancy Killefer, Estee Lauder’s Tracey T. Travis, and investor Peter Thiel.