Technology

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

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

Details as to how Fandango will specifically leverage Vudu weren&t immediately disclosed, but the company currently operates a four-year old movie streaming platform, FandangoNOW, which is an obvious integration point.

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

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

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

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

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

4. AlphabetLoon deploys internet connectivity balloons to Kenya for first commercial service launch

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

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

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

6. The Nintendo Switch had a very good March

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

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

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

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunchroundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you&d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

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

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

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

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

The move also means that the company is moving away from having a woman at the helm, something thatunfortunately still rare in tech. Why the company decided to move on from the shared role isn&t clear, beyond using the current economic situation as cover. Neither is it clear why they chose to go with Klein over Morgan, but it seems awfully soon to be making a move like this when the two took over so recently.

Starting today, watching TV can be good for your health: Samsung is rolling out six new apps to its Tizen-based smart TVs aimed at improving your health and wellness.

Included in the launch are Jillian Michaels Fitness, obé Fitness and Echelon, as well as Fitplan and the popular meditation app, Calm, all of which are free to download.

As part of the

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

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

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

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

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

While Google is packaging the change as a gesture to help cash-strapped retailers during a time of economic crisis, thereno doubt the tech giant is also spying strategic opportunity to expand its role in e-commerce in the midst of a coronavirus-shaped boom.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The switch to purely paid came in 2012. Though the changes now will still see paid product listings slotted into the top of Google search results if users search for product keywords, as well as into the top of the Shopping tab. So Google isn&t giving up all product ad revenue.

In terms of how it works, existing users of GoogleMerchant Center and Shopping Ads who have alreadyopted into the &surfaces across Google program& won&t have to do anything else — and may already be eligible to show products in what Googlehelp center describes as &the unpaid experiences.&

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

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

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

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

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

Google has been paying more attention to Shopping recently — with a major revamp of the service last year.

In 2019, it also mergedits Google Express shopping service with Google Shopping, thensunset the Google Express brand. And it took on Pinterestvisual search experience by integratingGoogle Lens into Google Shopping to guide customers to similar products as those in photos.

Like Amazon, Google leveraged personalization technology to create a homepage thatunique to each shopperhabits and purchases. And like Honey and other price-trackers, itcan alert customers to potential savings.But to truly rival Amazon, Google Shopping has to be open to more retailers — and the pay-to-play route doesn&t allow for that, especially now as retailers face financial difficulties due to coronavirus lockdowns.

Whatnot mentioned in Googleblog post is that its Shopping service has faced antitrust intervention in the European Union, which slapped Google with a $2.7 billion fine back in 2017 — finding it had systematically given prominence to its own shopping comparison service in results while also demoting rival comparison shopping services.

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

TechCrunchSarah Perez contributed to this report

As the number of remote workers has surged as a result of the global pandemic, Google Cloud has launched a new security tool designed to allow users to access their company networks remotely without using a VPN.

The company's new cloud-based security solution is called BeyondCorp Remote Access and it is actually based on the zero-trust approach