Hey everybody, welcome back to Week in Review. The world of COVID-19 is our new reality, so I&ll continue to include links to some positive updates on research, but I&ll be shifting back the focus to covering techmovers and shakers of the week.

If you&re reading this on the TechCrunch site, you can get this in your inboxhere, and follow my tweetshere.

The big story

One thing thatbeen interesting to see over the past few weeks is how our relationship with screen time has changed. For many, screen time is now all the time and while we haven&t stopped using too many gadgets, there are some we&ve taken out of drawers and closets and added to our repertoire.

For some, itbeen cooking gadgets. While I&ve yet to open up the sous vide gadget I received over the holidays, I was very tempted by my editorreview of the Ooni gas-fired outdoor pizza oven this week. For me, I&ve strangely seemed to spend a lot more time with the two gadgets I own that are made by Facebook. The currently sold-out Oculus Quest and Facebook Portal are the twin pillars of Facebookhardware strategy, but itbeen a bit interesting to see how much more that strategy seems to thrive when we&re all stuck at home.

In a lot of ways, Facebookhardware feels built for a quarantine.

The Quest spent a lot of time in my closet when I was out in the world pre-quarantine, but now that I&m in my house most of the day, it spends a good amount of time strapped to my face. When VR was a more hyped technology, there was a broader conversation of whether it encouraged isolation, something promoters of the tech pushed aside, noting that it enables rich shared experiences over the web. As we all host Zoom birthday parties and visit each otherAnimal Crossing islands, itbecoming clear that with the absence of available physical connections, we can turn a lot of things into rich shared experiences.

In a lot of ways, the Quest is a reminder of what I&m missing out on. The walls of my SF apartment feel less containing when I can hop into a VR workout or jump between games. For the first time, the technology has felt transportive in the way that the ads sold it, but itnot that the experiences have gotten better, the world has just gotten much worse.

In the same way that VR allows us to re-skin isolation, the Portal allows us to commiserate in it.

My Portal usage has spiked in the past weeks as well. Before stay-at-home orders, coordinating a call with multiple family members was a logistical nightmare and FaceTime calls made it more likely we&d get in touch with each other, but none of my siblings are wandering far from their Portals these days.

We are all still on our phones, but for those of us working from home, mobile we are not. Italways been fascinating that a tech company which has wildly succeeded at capturing the nuances of mobile computing has been so devoted to selling hardware meant to move us around the internet while staying in place at home. Now, that we are all at home, we are all always there and the Portal really lives up to its name.

Facebook has designed gadgets explicitly built for home use, and more than that, they&re designed devices built around session-based use cases. While Amazon Echos and Google Homes have fit into a persistent IoT platform that are always there for us, Facebookgadgets are more high-maintenance, designed for people to fully commit to. For a company thatfocused on the universal nature of its software, its hardware has been built for almost no oneneeds, instead designed to pull people into a future Facebook imagines.

For now, I put the Quest on my face and sometime I tell the Portal to call my sisters, but will these quarantine oddities form tech habits I hold onto after this is all behind us? In these historic times, we are at home and we are craving connections, and, for the time being, the Facebook future feels good.

Trends of the week

Here are a few big news items from big companies, with green links to all the sweet, sweet added context:

• Bezos wants to test all Amazon employees for COVID-19As Amazon bares the brunt of Americaonline shopping needs, CEO Jeff Bezos wrote in a shareholder letter this week about some of the strategies the company has to ensure its workforce stays on the job. One possibility seems to be &regular testing of all Amazonians, including those showing no symptoms,& Bezos says. Read more here.
• Google is building a smart debit card Just as every startup is getting into lending or banking, every tech giant wants to have a piece of plastic (or metal) in your wallet. This week, TechCrunch broke news that Google is building a smart debit card that could rival the Apple Card. Read more about it here.
• Apple launches a new iPhone SE The iPhone SE has grown to become one of the more fascinating devices Apple sells, cramming speedy components into a form factor thatfallen out of vogue for their customer obsessed with the latest designs. The latest SE adopt the body of the iPhone 8 with souped-up internals that rival more recent flagships on performance. Read more about the new hardware here.

Photo by Andrew Theodorakis/Getty Images

COVID-19 Research

Here are some of the stories this week chronicling the fight against the coronavirus pandemic.

• FDA debuts new online portal to encourage donation of plasma from recovered COVID-19 patients
• Mammoth Biosciences receives first peer-reviewed validation of CRISPR-based COVID-19 test
• FDA authorizes production of a new ventilator that costs up to 25x less than existing devices
• FDA clears N95 decontamination process that could clean up to 4 million masks per day
• MIT developed a wireless box that can detect COVID-19 patients& movement and breathing at home

Extra Crunch

Investors and entrepreneurs are shifting their chats to Zoom, so we&re taking note and hosting live Q-A discussions for our Extra Crunch subscribers with some of techmost visible figures. We&ll be hosting these Extra Crunch live chats over the next several weeks.

Announcing the Extra Crunch Live event series

• This upcoming week, we&ll be talking to Aileen Lee - Ted Wang of Cowboy Ventures.Monday, April 20 at 10:30am PT / 1:30pm ET

We&ll be chatting with Aileen Lee (former KPCB partner, founder and managing director at Cowboy.vc and coiner of the term &Unicorn&) and Ted Wang (Cowboy.vc partner, former partner at Fenwick - West, and former outside counsel to Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, Square and more) about how they&re advising their portfolio companies, if there are new and innovative ways for early-stage startups to secure capital beyond the traditional VC route and whether startups should hunker down or lean in during these uncertain times.

Helena Price Hambrecht and Woody Hambrecht always had plans for Haus, their direct-to-consumer low-alcoholic drink, to land white-label partnerships with local restaurants. But when coronavirus spread across the country and hurt thousands of local restaurants, the Haus founders saw an opportunity to fast forward on that product plan and at the same time give back.

Haus recently announced its plans to work with restaurants across the country and co-create local digs-inspired apéritifs. For Mister Jiu&s, an upscale Chinese restaurant in San Francisco, the beverage will mix &warm black cardamom, smoky lapsang tea, spicy ginger, and floral osmanthus.& For JuneBaby, a southern fare restaurant in Seattle, the drink will have hints of elderflower and oranges. The entire profit will go to the restaurants themselves, Helena tells me. And Haus has already begun cutting five-figure checks to restaurants just from pre-orders of these Haus-powered beverages alone.

On this refreshing note, letget into other ways venture-backed startups are using their presence to help others struggling during this time.

1. A phone booth for COVID-19 tests. Room, which manufactures privacy-focused office phone booths, hasn&t had much of a customer base lately as COVID-19 limits people from going into the office. The company has pivoted its resources to deploy a new product: coronavirus test booths for use in hospitals. The booths allow healthcare professionals to conduct tests with a protective barrier. It has already donated the first group of test booths to hospitals around the world, and it has made the design files for the booths available for free download to encourage others to manufacture locally.

2.Mission critical deliveries for free. Onfleet is offering its delivery software free of charge for companies and organizations that have mobilized to do community building deliveries. The startup is notably focused on critical deliveries and institutions that have had to change to delivery operations overnight. Itworking with partners like SF-Marin Foodbank, The NYC Dept for the Aging, various farmers markets around the country and other PPE delivery organizations that have recently organized.

3. Code from home. Fullstack Academy, an online coding and career development bootcamp, is offering a bootcamp prep course for free for two upcoming cohorts. The course, which will be run remotely, will cover specific coding and JavaScript concepts.

4. A daily assessment as a civic duty. A small team at Stanford Medicine created a National Daily Health Survey to help identify the prevalence of symptoms associated with COVID-19 in different ZIP codes across the United States. This survey is aimed at individuals who want to do a small part every day to help predict surges and inform response efforts. The survey takes 2-3 minutes to complete the first day, and 1 minute to complete in the days after that. It is currently being translated into five languages for broader usage. The team says that itlooking for people who will make a long-term commitment for the survey.

5. World Without COVID. Clara Health, along with tech folks like Raj Kapoor of Lyft and Vijay Chattha of VSC, are launching a free website to track the public health status of the sick and healthy alike. The site wants to draw COVID-19 treatment data for public health professionals, as well as connect people to clinical trials. The team says that it will also track immunity status to help surface individuals that can volunteer in healthcare efforts in the future.

6. Twilio -powered hotline. WhileAtHome.org is a website spun up by volunteers to provide resources on education, healthcare tips and concerts. Recently, the team launched a Twilio-powered hotline so people can be connected to local state hotlines. If you dial 478-29COVID, Twilio will automatically route you to the hotline that is in your state.

Hiring efforts for laid-off make-up artists. Il Makiage is hiring makeup artists who were recently laid off due to COVID-19 related reasons for virtual one-on-one makeup tutorials. The direct-to-consumer beauty brand is paying make-up artists $25 an hour.

7. A charitable Chrome extension. 4thwall wants to take all the TV binge-watching and put it toward a social good. First, users can sign up for a 4th wall Chrome extension. Then, once they activate the extension, they can stream Netflix or Hulu. After 250 minutes of streaming, a relief cause is unlocked and users can pick which COVID-19 specific charity they want to support. 4thwall will make a donation at no cost to the user. Per the website, the cost-free donations are possible because the company will send the viewer demographic metrics, anonymized, to other companies to see viewing trends and create content accordingly. One of the creators, Andrew Schneider, says that the community has already raised $1,500 in the first two weeks, and the goal is to raise $40K in the next 10 weeks.

8. Bridal brand gives back. Online bridal brand Anomalie is delivering CDC-certified face masks to hospitals to help front-line healthcare workers. The company is using its supply chain and manufacturing relationships in China to make masks, instead of wedding dresses. The first two shipments of over 10,000 masks have been delivered and received.

9. Bedtime storytelling just got a glow up. Yumi, a science-based childhood meal delivery startup, has created a free childrenbook to explain COVID-19 to your little ones. It is available for download, and Snoop Dogg tweeted about it.

Itscary, living with a killer virus that has completely upended our lives for who knows how long. Itvery easy to feel helpless in the face of it all, to throw up onehands.

Don&t do this, says Marc Andreessen in thoughtful new essay published today to the site of his venture firm, Andreessen Horowitz. In it, he advocates for building something — anything — that moves society forward from here. To &reboot the American dream.& he writes, we need to &demand more of our political leaders, of our CEOs, our entrepreneurs, our investors. We need to demand more of our culture, of our society. And we need to demand more from one another. We&re all necessary, and we can all contribute, to building.&

Andreessen notes that much of the technology has already been built. He highlights housing, education, manufacturing and transportation, observing that many of the tools needed to massively accelerate each into a bright new future already exist, but that iteasier to stick with the systems that once served us well than muster the collective will to uproot and replace them. He attributes the problem to a lack of &desire. We need to want these things. The problem is inertia. We need to want these things more than we want to prevent these things. The problem is regulatory capture. We need to want new companies to build these things, even if incumbents don&t like it, even if only to force the incumbents to build these things. And the problem is will. We need to build these things.&

Heright, of course, but we&d love something more prescriptive from Andreessen, who has largely retreated from public view in the last couple of years and whose 20,000-foot view is inspiring yet also, we hope, only a starting point.

What society would seem to need right now is not top-down advice but a bottoms-up approach. The way to solve problems is by breaking down big challenges into little bits. Someone like Andreessen could really lead here, by talking more explicitly about how current technologies can and should be used to achieve goals we need to meet right now, including to: get money into the hands of people who need it faster, use business intelligence to gather information from ER doctors in how they are managing Covid-19 patients, and help the countrygovernors with supply chain management.

Andreessen argues that America, expressly, needs a strenuous push. That reality can&t be clearer than right now, he writes, noting that, &We don&t have enough coronavirus tests, or test materials — including, amazingly, cotton swabs and common reagents. We don&t have enough ventilators, negative pressure rooms, and ICU beds. And we don&t have enough surgical masks, eye shields, and medical gowns — as I write this, New York City has put out a desperate call for rain ponchos to be used as medical gowns. Rain ponchos! In 2020! In America!&

Itan appalling state of affairs, one driven largely by our political system, Andreessen observes and — unsaid by Andreessen — the fact that the U.S. has the highest income inequality of all the G7 nations, with more wealth accruing to a relative minuscule number of people every year, an ever-shrinking middle class, and ballooning poverty.

But one thing at at time.

What we really need right now is the Covid-19 equivalent of the Manhattan Project, and we need Silicon Valley to lead it.

If Andreessen wants to help on this front, we&re all for it. We&re listening.

Welcome to a look back at the past week in security and what it means for you. Each week we&ll look at the big news of the week and why it matters.

What will the world look like after the coronavirus pandemic subsides?

Some of us are now in our fifth week of sheltering in place, but thereno fixed end-date in sight. We&ve gone from a period of confusion and concern to testing and mitigation. Now we&re starting to look ahead at the world post-coronavirus. Things still have to get done. But how do we regain a semblance of normality in the middle of a pandemic?

Tech can be the answer but itnot a panacea; Apple and Google have explained more about their contact tracing efforts to help better understand the spread of the virus seems promising. But privacy concerns and worries that the system could be abused have raised justified concerns. On the other hand, with a U.S. presidential election slated for later this year, many experts want tech out of the picture in favor of a secure solution that uses paper ballots.

Will tech save the day, or will it kick us while we&re down? Letdive in.

THE BIG PICTURE

Voting by mail should be having its moment. Will it?

This yearU.S. presidential election will still go ahead — itin the constitution as an immutable fact — but a pandemic throws a wrench in the works.

But security experts say electronic voting isn&t secure or resilient enough to protect from foreign interference. Even the more established mobile voting offerings have been shown to be deeply flawed.