Technology

Musicians have been quickly turning to Twitch to support themselves during the COVID-19 pandemic, as they&re no longer able to make money from live gigs and touring. Now Twitch is staffing up to turn this ad hoc use of Twitch into more of a formal product. The company today announced it hired SpotifyTracy Chan as its new head of Product and Engineering for Music.

Chan worked at Spotify for four years as director of Product Management. In this role, he was primarily focused on leading product strategy and development for Creator platforms and developing analytics tools for artists and labels, including Spotify for Artists and Spotify Analytics.

He joined Spotify in April 2016 after the streaming music company bought his photo aggregation startup, CrowdAlbum, in order to add to its growing set of marketing tools aimed at artists. Before CrowdAlbum, Chan worked at YouTube as a product manager, where he launched YouTubesCreator Platform and whatnow called YouTube Creator Studio.

Now at Twitch, Chan joins a growing music team headed by Twitchhead of music, Mike Olson. Going forward, Chan will focus on evolving the Twitch experience specifically for live music and helping artists and fans better connect in real time, Twitch said in an announcement.

This is not Twitchfirst ex-Spotifyto join Twitch with a focus on music. Earlier this year, Athena Koumis, formerly of XITE and Spotify, joined as the Music Partnerships Manager, the company notes.

Though many artists now performing on Twitch may already have followings on mainstream social platforms — like Facebook, Instagram and YouTube — some have found iteasier to make money on Twitch, reports have said. In addition, Twitch has made several efforts amid the pandemic to help onboard more musicians to its platform. For example, Twitch and SoundCloud recently announced a partnership that allows SoundCloud creators to start earning money from Twitch streams by fast-tracking their Affiliate status.

Twitch also partnered with Bandsintown on a similar effort focused on quickly giving artists access to the Twitch Affiliate program.

Once live on Twitch, the artists can generate revenue through subscriptions, direct donations, by cheering with Bits (an online tipping feature), by running ads on their channel and by linking to music and merchandise stores. They also can directly connect with fans via Twitch chat. Some have even taken advantage of Twitch features like raids, which redirect viewers to another live channel, and another that lets a channel broadcast anotherstream when they&re not live. Though designed with the gamer audience in mind, these have also proved useful for musicians looking to collaborate with others in order to grow their Twitch followings.

Though Twitch today is still best known for game streaming, it has been steadily expanding its live music footprint. Since the coronavirus breakout, Twitch has featured live musical performances from artists including John Legend, Diplo, Willie Nelson, Paul Simon, Lady Antebellum and dozens of others. Some of these were a part of Twitch12-hour charity stream, Twitch Stream Aid, which benefited the COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund for WHO powered by the United Nations Foundation.

In a statement, Chan spoke of the opportunity ahead at Twitch.

&I have spent my career building Creator tools and I believe there is a massive opportunity to help artists connect with their fans through virtual performances and live streaming, which is what led me to Twitch,& said Chan. &Across the board, and especially at this moment in time, we are seeing disruption in the music industry as artists are having to find new ways to both make money and interact with fans. As Twitch looks to expand its offerings for music creators and within the music industry as a whole, I am confident that together with the team, we will be able to build the necessary tools to support artists now and as they continue to explore their new virtual stage,& he said.

Olson, meanwhile, added that Chanhire comes at time when Twitch is heavily investing in building more product and monetization tools for music creators.

&Tracy is joining our team at a critical moment as we continue to see growing interest from both new and established musical talent joining Twitch,& said Olson. &His experience in developing video and music Creator tools will be invaluable to our team as we pursue new ways to support artists and connect them to their fans around the world.&

Many, many symptom trackers have launched during the coronavirus pandemic, but few have the potential to reach even a bucketful of Facebook vast ocean of users.

Facebook launched a symptom tracking partnership with Carnegie Mellon UniversityDelphi epidemiological research center early this month, and now the company plans to expand the project outside of the U.S. In early April, Facebook began prompting some users in the U.S. with a CMU survey asking them to self-report COVID-19 symptoms. The effort is designed to help governments and health officials predict where the virus could hit next.

Facebook will work with researchers from the University of Maryland on the expansion as the team at CMUDelphi develops an API that would allow any researcher to tap into the data set.

Facebook is also collecting survey data onto its own symptom map, which visualizes the percentage of the population with COVID-19 symptoms by county and hospital referral region. The map also displays flu activity distinct from reported COVID-19 symptoms. With testing capacity still limited in many places, this kind of survey effort seeks to provide a more anticipatory picture of the virus and where it might be spreading next.

&The real-time estimates we&ve derived correlate with the best available data on COVID-19 activity, which gives us confidence that we may soon be able to give health care officials forecasts of disease activity that is likely to occur in their localities several weeks into the future,& Ryan Tibshirani, co-lead on Carnegie Mellon UniversityDelphi COVID-19 Response Team, said in a statement.

The opt-in CMU survey asks Facebook users if they were experiencing coughing, fever, shortness of breath or loss of smell — symptoms that can show up in COVID-19 patients in more mild forms and that likely would be present prior to an individual seeking treatment and thus being tracked by healthcare systems.

CMU published its initial findings on Monday, which show the data collected on Facebook correlates with existing COVID-19 public health data. The research team is introducing a tool called COVIDcast, which collects aggregated data about COVID-19 activity, sorted by geographic area. Google has also joined CMUresearch effort and later this week the COVIDcast will integrate data from both Facebook and Google survey responses. So far, the project has collected nearly one million responses each week on Facebook and 600,000 through GoogleOpinion Rewards and AdMob apps.

In an op-ed in The Washington Post, Mark Zuckerberg touted his companyefforts.

&Getting accurate county-by-county data from across the United States is challenging, and obtaining such focused data from across the whole world is even harder,& Zuckerberg wrote, adding that Facebook is &uniquely& suited to aid research efforts that require surveying large subsets of the population.

After a long season of criticism, social media companies are striving for relevance in the fight against the virus. Facebook, particularly dogged by negative press and privacy scandals in recent years, was early to add UI elements promoting COVID-19 information from health experts on its platform. Still, Facebook and other social networks remain plagued by coronavirus misinformation, scammers and conspiracies, which spread quickly and have proven difficult for companies to stamp out.

Last week, a handful of U.S. anti-government protests organized on Facebook and promoted by President Trump defied the advice of state governments and public health officials, calling users to gather in public — an act of defiance that could potentially spread the virus to new communities in spite of the best efforts by state governments to protect their residents.

The Chinese decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol dForce has fallen victim to a well-known exploit of an Ethereum token which led to $25m worth of its customers' cryptocurrency being stolen.

As reported by Decrypt, DForce recently announced that it had secured $1.5m in a seed funding round led by the crypto venture capital fund Multicoin Capital.

Plasma taken from the blood of recovered COVID-19 patients stands a real chance of being one of the more effective short-term measures feasible in the ongoing effort to control the global coronavirus pandemic. The FDA has issued a broad call for donations from eligible individuals, and now Microsoft has built an online screening tool on behalf of the CoVIg-19 Plasma Alliance (which is funded in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation).

The &CoVIg-19 Plasma Bot& that Microsoft created for the foundation is just the latest COVID-19-related bot built by Microsoft using its technology, and its symptom self-checker for the CDC was one of the earliest large-scale efforts of its kind in the U.S. The Plasma Bot takes you through a series of simple questions to determine your eligibility, from the perspective of both your ability to meet the actual biological and health requirements, to your willingness and a ability to participate in the plasma collection process itself at a donation center.

Use of convalescent plasma, or the liquid part of blood taken from people who have had, and subsequently fully recovered from, COVID-19, is a key treatment avenue being explored by a number of different scientists and researchers. The investigations into its use take two main paths: First, direct use of the plasma injected into coronavirus patients and high-risk individuals in order to boost their own immune system for either prevention or faster recovery; and development of what are known as hyperimmune therapies, which concentrate the antibodies from donated plasma to develop treatments that are potentially easier and more effective to administer at scale.

The biggest bottleneck to overcome for the trials and therapeutics in development related to convalescent plasma is definitely the plasma itself, which can only come from patients who&ve had COVID-19 and are now fully recovered and healthy, and who also meet other standard, existing requirements for donating blood and plasma.

Unlike a lot of other treatments under investigation and development to address COVID-19, convalescent plasma has been shown to have been effective in treating other respiratory infections, and it has a long history of use for such applications.

Apple and Google's upcoming smartphone-based contact-tracing system will be unavailable on as many as 2bn mobile phones according to new estimates from industry researchers.

As reported by The Financial Times, the system will allow mobile phone users to track whether or not they have come into contact with anyone infected with the coronavirus which