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 Gaps in Amazon's Response as Virus Spreads To More Than 50 Warehouses
Shifting sick-leave policy and communication issues are causing employees to assert themselves after they stayed on the job. From a report: As millions of Americans heed government orders to hunker down, ordering food and medicines and books and puzzle boards for home delivery, many of Amazon's 400,000 warehouse workers have stayed on the job, fulfilling the crushing demands of a country suddenly working and learning from home. Orders for Amazon groceries, for example, have been as much as 50 ti
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New Renewable Energy Capacity Hit Record Levels In 2019
According to data from the International Renewable Energy Agency (Irena), solar, wind and other green technologies now provide more than one-third of the world's power, marking another record. The Guardian reports: Fossil fuel power plants are in decline in Europe and the U.S., with more decommissioned than built in 2019. But the number of coal and gas plants grew in Asia, the Middle East and Africa. In the Middle East, which owns half the world's oil reserves, just 26% of new electricity genera
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Foursquare Merges With Factual, Another Location-Data Provider
Foursquare, the 10-year-old location platform based in New York City, has today announced its plan to merge with Factual. From a report: The terms of the deal were not disclosed. The merged company will keep the Foursquare moniker, and Foursquare CEO David Shim will remain at the helm, with Factual's founder and now-former CEO Gil Elbaz joining Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley as a member of the board and executive team. Shim confirmed to TechCrunch that this merger was in the works before t
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Tesla Shows How It's Building Ventilators With Car Parts
Tesla has provided a behind-the-scenes look at its ventilator design process, which involves using parts from its vehicles. TechCrunch reports: Like Ford and General Motors, Tesla engineers are building its vent with parts for its vehicles. The reason is simple: car parts are available. Automotive companies obsessively stage parts for final assemble. Without doing so, having a shortage on, say, door handles can shut down a production line. In this thought, Tesla engineers say in this video they
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NVIDIA Is Contributing Its AI Smarts To Help Fight COVID-19
NVIDIA is using its background in AI and optimizing supercomputer throughput to the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium group, which plans to support researchers by giving them time with 30 supercomputers offering a combined 400 petaflops of performance. Engadget reports: NVIDIA will add to this by providing expertise in AI, biology and large-scale computing optimizations. The company likened the Consortium's efforts to the Moon race. Ideally, this will speed up work for scientists wh
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 Bidet startup Tushy scales up to meet demand amid toilet paper shortage
Business at Tushy is booming. While the circumstances that led to the boom are sobering, the bidet company needed to adapt its strategy after seeing an uptick in business amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Other companies in this cohort include video conferencing service Zoom, meal kit service Blue Apron and Facebook, thanks to its social network, […]
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US Schools Are Banning Zoom and Switching To Microsoft Teams
After many schools adopted Zoom to conduct online lessons during the coronavirus lockdown, concerns about security and privacy have led to a ban on the video conferencing software across the U.S. BetaNews reports: The chancellor of New York City's Department of Education Richard A Carranza sent an email to school principals telling them to "cease using Zoom as soon as possible." And he is not alone; schools in other parts of the country have taken similar action, and educators are now being trai
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Experiment Finds That Gravity Still Works Down To 50 Micrometers
An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a report via Ars Technica: To make small-scale gravity measurements, researchers rely on conceptually simple experiments: measure the changes in rotational speed of an oscillating disc that is subject to a periodically changing gravitational force. The periodic force is supplied by a spinning disc. Both discs have wedges cut out so that the force due to gravity varies as the gaps spin past each other. The two discs are arranged right on top of each othe
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UK Government Encourages Social Distancing With In-Game Health Messages
To help slow the spread of the coronavirus, the UK Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) is using advertisements in mobile games to encourage social distancing. CNET reports: The message "Stay Home. Save Lives" has begun to appear in popular games like Candy Crush Saga, Sniper Elite 4, Dirt Rally 2.0 and Farm Heroes. The DCMS teamed up with leading gaming companies in the UK like King Games, Rebellion and Codemasters to include the messages, with the help of geotargeting techno
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UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson Taken To Intensive Care For Coronavirus Treatment
Boris Johnson has been taken into the hospital intensive care unit for treatment for coronavirus after his condition worsened, his office said. The Guardian reports: The British prime minister was admitted to St Thomas's Hospital in London on Sunday night because his virus symptoms had not cleared up and he became more seriously ill on Monday afternoon, a government spokesperson said in an email. "Over the course of this afternoon, the condition of the prime minister has worsened and, on the adv
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PayPal and Venmo Are Letting SIM Swappers Hijack Accounts
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Several major apps and websites, such as Paypal and Venmo have a flaw that lets hackers easily take over users' accounts once they have taken control of the victim's phone number. Earlier this year, researchers at Princeton University found 17 major companies, among them Amazon, Paypal, Venmo, Blizzard, Adobe, eBay, Snapchat, and Yahoo, allowed users to reset their passwords via text message sent to a phone number associated with their accoun
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Some Users Experiencing System Crashes on macOS 10.15.4, Especially During Large File Transfers
A sizeable number of Mac users are experiencing occasional system crashes after updating to macOS Catalina version 10.15.4, released a few weeks ago. From a report: The crashing issue appears to be most prominent when users attempt to make large file transfers. In a forum post, SoftRAID described the issue as a bug and said that it is working with Apple engineers on a fix for macOS 10.15.5, or a workaround. "SoftRAID said the issue extends to Apple-formatted disks: There is a serious issue with
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Quibi had a launch day outage
Looks like things haven’t gone completely smoothly with Quibi‘s launch. The issue appears to have been resolved, but the Quibi customer support account tweeted this afternoon that “some users may be experiencing problems with the Quibi app,” only to add an hour later that “Users should once again be able to use the Quibi app […]
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Uber Connects Out-of-Work U.S. Ride-Hail Drivers To Delivery, Production Jobs
Uber said on Monday its app will list job openings in the delivery, food production and grocery industry that its U.S. drivers can access during a slump in ride-hailing demand due to the coronavirus. From a report: Beginning on Monday, drivers can find job listings of other companies in a new section of their app, Uber said in a blog post. Uber also said it would reach out to the more than 240,000 of its registered drivers holding commercial licenses to connect them to logistics companies for em
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A Google Plan To Wipe Out Mosquitoes Appears to Be Working
An experimental program led by Google parent Alphabet to wipe out disease-causing mosquitoes succeeded in nearly eliminating them from three test sites in California's Central Valley. From a report: Stamping out illness caused by mosquitoes is one of Alphabet unit Verily's most ambitious public-health projects. The effort appears to be paying off, according to a paper published in the journal Nature Biotechnology on Monday. Verily is also running coronavirus triage and testing in parts of Califo
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Bill Gates To Spend Billions on Coronavirus Vaccine Development
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said his foundation will spend billions of dollars to fund the construction of factories for the most promising efforts to develop a vaccine to combat the novel coronavirus. From a report: Mr. Gates, a billionaire philanthropist who is one the richest people in the world, said the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will work with seven makers of a possible vaccine to build these factories. Mr. Gates, who announced the efforts in an appearance on "The Daily Show Wit
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National Geographic launches a homeschool hub for parents and teachers, NatGeo@Home
The COVID-19 outbreak has closed schools across most of the U.S., impacting more than 55 million students who are now learning at home. That’s created an increased demand for homeschool resources. Today, National Geographic is responding to that need with the launch of a new online hub, NatGeo@Home, which pulls together all of National Geographic’s […]
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New Jersey Desperately Needs COBOL Programmers
In New Jersey, the coronavirus outbreak has resulted in something that few people outside that state's tech department would have foreseen: a dire need for COBOL coders. From a report, shared by reader AmiMoJo: Standing for Common Business-Oriented Language, COBOL's day came and went long ago. It initially made a splash by giving coders a programming language that could work across the proprietary computers of multiple manufacturers. That was in the early 1960s. After becoming a staple of mainfr
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EU privacy experts push a decentralized approach to COVID-19 contacts tracing
A group of European privacy experts has proposed a decentralized system for Bluetooth-based COVID-19 contacts tracing which they argue offers greater protection against abuse and misuse of people’s data than apps which pull data into centralized pots. The protocol — which they’re calling Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (DP-PPT) — has been designed by around 25 […]
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'Quit Trying To Make Quibi Happen'
Devindra Hardawar of Engadget, writing about Quibi, a new streaming service that launched today: Nobody asked for Quibi. Nobody, that is, except for Jeffrey Katzenberg, the founder of Dreamworks Pictures and famed Hollywood producer. Where other mobile video startups failed, like Samsung's long-forgotten Milk Video and Verizon's own Go90 (RIP), Katzenberg figured he could succeed by pouring money (somehow he's raised $1.75 billion so far!) into top talent and well produced shows. At CES in Janua
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AngelList lays off a number of staff and cuts executive salaries
AngelList, a platform that connects angel investors to startups and has roughly $1.8 billion assets under management, has laid off a sizable number of staff and cut executive salaries across all departments, according to a source familiar with the company. AngelList declined to share the number of people who were laid off. The layoffs, which […]
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Daily Crunch: Quibi finally launches its mobile streaming app
Quibi launches its mobile streaming service, Apple sources 20 million protective masks and Red Hat announces a new CEO. Here’s your Daily Crunch for April 6, 2020. 1. Quibi launches its mobile streaming service in the middle of the quarantine era The much-hyped mobile app promising to deliver "quick bites" of video entertainment is finally […]
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Koch Industries closes nearly $13B Infor acquisition
Koch Industries announced today that it has closed on the acquisition of Infor, announced in February. The company never officially announced the purchase price, but sources indicated that it was close to $13 billion, putting it in line to be one of the top 10 enterprise acquisitions this year. The company will remain an independent subsidiary […]
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Open banking fintech Yapily raises $13M Series A
Yapily, one of a number of fintech startups that offer an opening banking API to let enterprises, such as financial service providers and merchants, connect to banks, has raised $13 million in Series A funding. Leading the round is Lakestar, which is also a backer of fintech unicorn Revolut. Existing investors HV Holtzbrinck Ventures, and […]
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Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson on shifting a 3,000-person company to fully remote
What’s it like to take a company with 3,000 employees distributed across 25 offices and make it fully remote with just a few weeks’ notice? I hopped on a call with Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson to hear about how their transition has gone so far, and what he’s learned from the process. Remote work isn’t […]
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Apple Begins Making Millions of Face Shields and Sources 20 Million Face Masks
"Apple announced Sunday it's launched a companywide effort to design, produce and ship face shields to medical workers battling the coronavirus outbreak," reports CNET:
The first shipment was delivered this week to a Kaiser facility in the Santa Clara Valley, Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a video posted to Twitter.
"Teams across Apple have been working hard on ways we can support our heroic front-line medical professionals," Cook said, explaining that the fully adjustable shields pack flat and
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India's Swiggy raises $43M to expand to new businesses
Indian food delivery startup Swiggy has bagged an additional $43 million as it looks to expand to new businesses. Existing investor Tencent and new players Ark Impact, Korea Investment Partners, Samsung Ventures and Mirae Asset Capital Markets financed the new tranche, which is part of Swiggy’s ongoing Series I round. In February, the Bangalore-based startup […]
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Boeing suspends 787 airplane production
Boeing said Monday it will suspend all 787 operations at its South Carolina factory following a stay-at-home order issued by the governor, effectively putting the company’s entire commercial airplane production on hiatus. The closure will start at the end of the second shift April 8. Boeing announced the production suspension on the same day it […]
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Equity Monday: Hunting for green shoots amid the startup data
Good morning friends, and welcome back to TechCrunch's Equity Monday, a short-form audio hit to kickstart your week. Before we jump into today’s show, don’t forget that the long-form Equity that we’ve done for more than three years still drops on Friday. Last week’s was a particular delight, so make sure you’re caught up. Ready? Let’s […]
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American stocks rally sharply on COVID-19 optimism as earnings loom
Stocks rallied Monday, with all major indices snapping back into positive territories as investors seized on any positive developments in the fight to mitigate the spread of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. The stock market is, of course, not the economy. And this is likely a dead-cat bounce — a temporary recovery after […]
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Paul Cormier takes over as Red Hat CEO, as Jim Whitehurst moves to IBM
When Ginni Rometty indicated that she was stepping down as IBM CEO at the end of January, the company announced that Arvind Krishna would be taking over, while Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst would become president. To fill his role, Red Hat announced today that long-time executive Paul Cormier has been named president and CEO. […]
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COVID-hit UK startups cry out for help, as UK gov trails Europe in its response
The UK government is reportedly looking at a range of options to support the startup industry, possibly involving a co-investment model involving state-owned funds (via the British Business Bank) and private VC funds. Investors have been warning that typically loss-making, early-stage startups are at risk of collapse amid the coronavirus crisis. But the moves come […]
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Uber partners with Flipkart and BigBasket in India to deliver essential items
Uber is resuming some services in India as it looks to help other firms deliver grocery and other essential items in select parts of the country, nearly two weeks after New Delhi ordered a three-week lockdown for its 1.3 billion people. The American firm said on Monday that it has partnered with Flipkart to deliver […]
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Quibi launches its mobile streaming service in the middle of the quarantine era
Quibi, the much-hyped mobile app promising to deliver “quick bites” of video entertainment, is finally here. The company has been in the headlines for more than two years, thanks to the involvement of founder Jeffrey Katzenberg (who previously co-founded DreamWorks Animation) and CEO Meg Whitman (previously the CEO of eBay and Hewlett Packard Enterprise). Plus, […]
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Airbnb turns to private equity to raise $1 billion
Airbnb said Monday that it has raised $1 billion in debt and equity from private equity firms Silver Lake and Sixth Street Partners, even as the online rental marketplace has seen its business plummet due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. It’s unclear how this funding might alter Airbnb’s previously […]
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Agritech startup DeHaat raises $12M to reach more farmers in India
DeHaat, an online platform that offers full-stack agricultural services to farmers, has raised $12 million as it looks to scale its network across India. The Series A financial round for the eight-year-old Patna and Gurgaon-based startup was led by Sequoia Capital India. Dutch entrepreneurial development bank FMO, and existing investors Omnivore and AgFunder, also participated […]
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Elon Musk Shares a Video: Making Ventilators From Tesla Parts
Elon Musk shared a new video today from Tesla Engineering. "We're trying to make some ventilators from some car parts, so we can help the medical industry without taking away from their supply," it begins. (All three people who appear in the video are wearing a face mask.)
It ends with a demonstration of a prototype using a touchscreen display from the Model 3 infotainment system. "There's still a lot of work to do," the video concludes, "but we're giving it our best effort to make sure we c
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BounceX cuts staff, reduces salaries in wake of COVID-19 economic disruptions
TechCrunch confirmed today that BounceX (the firm is rebranding this year) has executed layoffs and salary cuts in the wake of recent COVID-19-led economic disruptions. Many startups are undergoing staff cuts as the domestic and global economies slow, making individual reductions less newsworthy as the layoff tally rises. However, as BounceX is a company we’ve […]
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Researchers develop emergency ventilator based on resuscitation bags used in ambulances
The need for innovative solutions to address shortages in crucial medical equipment is greater than ever, and a new initiative from a global team of biomedical engineering experts is a perfect example. The team developed a way for resuscitation bags - common pieces of equipment carried by ambulances and paramedics around the world, and typically […]
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Myriota raises $19.3 million to expand its IoT satellite constellation
Internet of things satellite connectivity startup Myriota has raises a $19.3 million Series B funding round, led by Hostplus and Main Sequence Ventures, with additional funding from Boeing, former Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull, Singtel Innov8 and others. The company has now raised $37 million in Funding, and has four satellites on orbit already, with a […]
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Creative ways to host a virtual birthday party for kids
Social distancing requirements amid the COVID-19 pandemic may have canceled kids’ birthday parties, but parents are finding new ways to take the celebrations online. While video chat apps like Zoom, Google Hangouts or FaceTime are an option for gathering kids together in the virtual space, there’s still the challenge of what to do once there. […]
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WHO Africa hosts hackathons, offers seed funds to fight COVID-19
The World Health Organization in Africa is holding virtual hackathons and offering up to $20,000 in seed-funds to finalists with digital solutions to stem COVID-19. The regional office of the UN agency completed its first challenge earlier this month and will host a second, for French speaking Africa, in coming weeks, WHO’s Technical Officer Moredeck […]
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A second potential COVID-19 vaccine, backed by Bill and Melinda Gates, is entering human testing
A new COVID-19 vaccine candidate is entering Phase 1 clinical human testing today, after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) accepted an application from Inovio Pharmaceuticals under the regulator’s Investigational New Drug program. Inovio plans to inject its first volunteer test subject with the INO-4800 DNA vaccine candidate it has developed, following promising results […]
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Creative Destruction Lab launches a new startup program dedicated to COVID-19 response
Global academic science and tech startup accelerator program Creative Destruction Lab (CDL) is adding a dedicated stream to its existing areas of focus, which include AI, health sciences, space, quantum computing, blockchain, energy, and oceans. The new addition is a timely one: CDL Recovery, which is designed to help turn science and research work into […]
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