Technology

Ithard enough in the first place having to drive an astronomically expensive rover around a planet millions of miles away. Doing it from home seems like a pretty big ask — but it turns out NASA Curiosity team is up to it.

The space agency posted today about how the team has adapted to the unprecedented situation of having to manage an important, ongoing mission involving hundreds of people, without any of those people meeting in person.

&We&re usually all in one room, sharing screens, images and data,& said team lead Alicia Allbaugh. Now they&re not only in separate rooms, but on different schedules and computing setups. &I probably monitor about 15 chat channels at all times. You&re juggling more than you normally would.&

Naturally there are video calls, too — sometimes several at once. Processes previously accomplished on high-performance workstations are now being done on laptops and web services. But while the added complexity makes the planning process less efficient, the results are still rolling in.

In mid-March, the Jet Propulsion Lab offices in Pasadena, Calif., had already been totally emptied of staff and work was suspended elsewhere. But Curiosity was still trucking. It drove up to a rock, drilled a sample and sent confirmation back to the team — just as it would if they were all working as normal. And the work continues.

&Mars isn&t standing still for us; we&re still exploring,& said Allbaugh.

The well-funded Japanese space startup Synspective has tapped launch provider Rocket Lab to take its first Earth observation satellite to orbit. Launch is planned for late 2020, and the companyStriX&α craft will be the sole payload.

Synspective was founded in 2018 and by mid-2019 had raised about $100 million, making it one of the most successful recent funding stories in the country. Itgoing to need all that and more, though, to realize its ambition of a 25-satellite constellation regularly imaging the whole planet.

The number may seem small when compared to Planet and SpaceX, which will require hundreds or thousands of satellites to cover the Earth. Thatbecause Synspectivecraft are not making visual observations or providing internet access, but imaging the planetsurface using whatcalled synthetic aperture radar.

This difficult technique uses the motion of the satellite to essentially imitate a much larger antenna, letting it produce highly detailed imagery through cloud cover and other interference. It also can cover a much wider area than an optical camera or a radio antenna beaming data to dishes on the surface.

The satellites themselves are about 100 kilograms each and are smaller than existing SAR systems — an advantage that lets Synspective use a smaller launch vehicle like Rocket Lab Electron to put its birds in the air.

The launch isn&t scheduled yet, but as the sole customer, Synspective will have lots of latitude in choosing the time of launch and target orbit. &We are very pleased to work with Rocket Lab, a pioneer in rocket ventures,& said Synspective founder and CEO Motoyuki Arai in a press release. &We are also grateful for their flexibility in accepting our requests on the satelliteorbit and launch period.&

At present the plan is only for &late 2020& and to launch from Rocket LabLaunch Complex 1 in New Zealand, not its brand new one in the States. We&ll know more closer to launch time.

Adriel is a South Korean startup bringing automated ad tools to small businesses — and in recent months, itbeen expanding into the United States and the United Kingdom.

This might seem like exactly the wrong time to be growing an ad-buying platform, since we&re at the beginning of whatlikely to be a tremendous pullback in ad spend due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, co-founder and CEO Sophie Eom told me via email that ad spend on Adriel increased by 7% in February, then by 6% in March, and she estimated that spend will be up by 8% in April.

&We all know that businesses are struggling from the uncertainty of the economic situations with COVID-19,& Eom said. &And most are hesitant about hiring agencies for their marketing and advertising efforts due to the high costs — in addition to the fact that many corporates don&t have enough knowledge about the right marketing processes.&

So why is Adriel still seeing growth? She argued, &We see that even in the midst of tough times, many startups and entrepreneurs are not giving up their businesses. In fact, they are shifting their focus and investments into more digital to reach their customers.&

As part of its response to COVID-19, the company is also donating ads to support small business customers in the San Francisco area.

Adrieltechnology automatically generates creative materials and suggests keywords for ads, as well as managing the targeting. But therealso a human team that reviews campaigns and suggests ways to improve. The company does not require retainers or contracts, but charges a 19% fee on ad spend.

I first spoke to Eom at the end of 2019, when she was first expanding Adriel into the U.S. In some ways, it felt like a familiar pitch — I&ve written about companies like AdEspresso (acquired by HootSuite) and Smartly.io (which sold a majority stake to Providence Equity Partners last year), which also said they were optimizing or automating small business advertising. Plus, Facebook itself has launched an automated ad builder.

Eom suggested that while there are tools that sound superficially similar, therenothing quite like Adriel (which was part of FacebookNamsam Lab Korea incubator), with its multi-platform support for managing Facebook, Google and Instagram ad campaigns in one place, and with its focus on the true &long tail& of advertisers — she said the average Adriel client spends a relatively modest $1,000 per month on digital advertising.

&We&re not merely a self-service tool either,& she said. &We support and assist our clients in getting their ad placed, making their campaign more successful. We use technology to make all these processes more affordable for more business owners.&

She added that Adriel has launched 7,200 campaigns for nearly 20,000 business accounts.

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented an unprecedented challenge for healthcare workers. Among the major challenges are social distancing issues, which have required novel approaches to diagnosing and treating illness.

For many who have already tested positive, home stays are the best option to avoid an already massively overtaxed hospital system in many areas and to avoid further infecting others. The question, then, is how doctors and nurses can continue to provide treatment remotely with the pronounced limitations of telemedicine.

MITCSAIL this week shed some light on ongoing trials it has been conducting on a new device designed to keep tabs on patients in their home. The opt-in system superficially resembles a Wi-Fi router, mounted to the patientwall.

It utilizes wireless signals to detect a wide range of different activities, including patient movements, sleep patterns and even — most crucially — breathing. Emerald is able to distinguish between different people, using artificial intelligence to track movement.

The system is currently being tested at the Heritage Assisted Living facility outside of Boston. &Itclear that, with these high-risk elderly patients, they would greatly benefit from us being able to passively gather medical data over time when it is not possible to interface with each person directly,& the facilitymental health chief William McGrory said in a release.

Asked why a wireless system is preferential to a simple wearable, a CSAIL rep told TechCrunch that the nature of the technology is &set it and forget it,& requiring no interaction on the patientpart after initial set up.

If you&re looking at footage from your Nest Cam and the quality seems a bit lower than normal: itnot your eyes.

In an email to users, Google says it is temporarily lowering the video quality of Nest Cams in an effort to limit how much bandwidth each camera uses and, in turn, &conserve internet resources.& The adjustment is rolling out over the next few days, and Google says anyone who has their quality settings adjusted will get a notification in the Nest app.

Itthe latest in a series of moves made by tech companies in an effort to keep the internet stable through the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. More people are at home during the day than ever before, video calling for work and school, or streaming content to pass the time — and that all requires bandwidth. Amazon, Netflix, and YouTube have each taken steps to limit the strain they might be adding to the network, while Sony has been capping PlayStation game download speeds.

While Nest cameras aren&t inherently using more bandwidth right now than they otherwise might, each camera alreadyused a good amount of bandwidth day to day. A Nest Cam IQ, for example, uses roughly 400GB of data per month at its highest settings; cutting this down to medium high shaves that down to 300GB.

Google confirmed their plans with TechCrunch, with a Google spokesperson adding:

To answer the global call to prioritize internet bandwidth for learning and working, in the next few days we&re going to be making a few changes. We believe these changes have the potential to help make it easier for communities to keep up with school, work, and everything in between.

While they&re automatically making the change on behalf of the user (a move some owners are complaining is an overstep), Google notes that you&re able to bump your cameras back up to their highest settings should you see fit. They&re not capping the quality, instead just lowering settings by default — so if you&ve got a camera in a setting where every pixel counts, know that you&re going to need to adjust accordingly.

Labster, a virtual science lab edtech company, today announced that it is partnering with Californiacommunity college network to bring its software to 2.1 million students.

California Community Colleges claims to be the largest system of higher education in the country. The Labster partnership will provide 115 schools with 130 virtual laboratory simulations in biology, chemistry, physics and general sciences.

As COVID-19 has forced schools to shutter, edtech companies have largely responded by offering their software for free or through extended free trials. Whatnew and notable about Labster partnership today is that it shows the first few signs of how that momentum can lead to a business deal.

Based in Copenhagen, Labster sells virtual STEM labs to institutions. The startup has raised $34.7 million in known venture capital to date, according to Crunchbase data. Labster customers include California State University, Harvard, Gwinnett Technical College, MIT, Trinity College and Stanford.

Lab equipment is expensive, and budget constraints mean that schools struggle to afford the latest technology. So Labstervalue proposition is that it is a cheaper alternative (plus, if students spill a testing vial in a virtual lab, thereless clean up).

That pitch has slightly changed since COVID-19 forced schools across the world to shut down to limit the spread of the pandemic. Now, itpitching itself as the only currently viable alternative to science labs.

For many edtech companies, the surge of remote learning has been a large experiment. Often, edtech companies are giving away their product and technology for free to help as schools scramble to move operations completely digital.

For example, last week self-serve learning platforms Codecademy, Duolingo, Quizlet, Skillshare and Brainly launched a Learn From Home Club for students and teachers. Before that, Wize made its exam content and homework services available for free. And Zoom offered its video-conferencing software for free to K through 12 schools, which had mixed results.

Labster itself gave $5 million in free Labster credits to schools across the country. The list continues.

Labsternew deal shows edtech companies can secure new customers right now — without breaking the bank.

Labster CEO and co-founder Michael Bodekaer declined to give specifics on what the deal is worth. He did share that Labster works with schools one by one to understand how much they can, or want to, invest in teacher training and webinar support. He also confirmed that Labster does profit from the deal.

&We want to make sure that we set ourselves up for supporting our partners but still also make sure that Labster as a financial institution can pay our salaries,& Bodekaer said. &But again, heavy discounts that help us cover our costs.&

The long game for Labster, like many edtech companies, is that schools like the platform so much that these short-term stints have a better chance to lead to long-term relationships.

&We&ll be keeping these discounts as long as we possibly can sustain as a company,& he said. &It looks like initially the discount was until August and now we&re extending it until the end of the year. If that continues, we may extend it even further.&

Pricing aside, the real struggle toward implementation for Labster, and honestly any other edtech company focused on remote learning, is the digital divide. Some students do not have access to a computer for video conferencing or even internet connection for assignments.

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted how many households across America lack access to the technology needed for remote learning. In California, Google donated free Chromebooks and 100,000 mobile hotspots to students in need.

Bodekaer said that Labster is currently working on providing its software on mobile, and has worked with Google to make sure its product works on low-end computers like Chromebooks.

&We really want to be hardware agnostic and support any system or any platform that the students already have,& he said. &So that hardware does not become a barrier.&

While todaypartnership brings 2.1 million students access to Labstertechnology, it does not directly account for the percentage of that same group that might not have access to a computer in the first place. The true test, and perhaps success, of edtech will rely on a true hybrid of hardware and software, not one or the other.