Could avatars that show what co-workers are up to save work-from-home teams from constant distraction and loneliness? Thatthe idea behind Pragli, the Bitmoji for the enterprise. Ita virtual office app that makes you actually feel like you&re in the same building.

Pragli uses avatars to signal whether co-workers are at their desk, away, in a meeting, in the zone while listening to Spotify, taking a break at a digital virtual water coooler or done for the day. From there, you&ll know whether to do a quick ad hoc audio call, cooperate via screenshare, schedule a deeper video meeting or a send a chat message they can respond to later. Essentially, it translates the real-word presence cues we use to coordinate collaboration into an online workplace for distributed teams.

&What Slack did for email, we want to do for video conferencing,& Pragli co-founder Doug Safreno tells me. &Traditional video conferencing is exclusive by design, whereas Pragli is inclusive. Just like in an office, you can see who is talking to who.& That means less time wasted planning meetings, interrupting colleagues who are in flow or waiting for critical responses. Pragli offers the focus that makes remote work productive with the togetherness that keeps everyone sane and in sync.

The idea is to solve the top three problems that Pragliextensive interviews and a Buffer/AngelList study discovered workers hate:

1. Communication friction
2. Loneliness
3. Lack of boundaries

You never have to worry about whether you&re intruding on someonemeeting, or if it&d be quicker to hash something out on a call instead of vague text. Avatars give remote workers a sense of identity, while the Pragli water cooler provides a temporary place to socialize rather than an endless Slack flood of GIFs. And because you clock in and out of the Pragli office just like a real one, co-workers understand when you&ll reply quickly versus when you&ll respond tomorrow unless therean emergency.

&In Pragli, you log into the office in the morning and therea clear sense of when I&m working and when I&m not working. Slack doesn&t give you astrong sense if they&re online or offline,& Safreno explains. &Everyone stays online and feels pressured to respond at any time of day.&

Pragli co-founder Doug Safreno

Safreno and his co-founder Vivek Nair know the feeling first-hand. After both graduating in computer science from Stanford, they built StacksWare to help enterprise software customers avoid overpaying by accurately measuring their usage. But when they sold StacksWare to Avi Networks, they spent two years working remotely for the acquirer. The friction and loneliness quickly crept in.

They&d message someone, not hear back for a while, then go back and forth trying to discuss the problem before eventually scheduling a call. Jumping into synchronous communicating would have been much more efficient. &The loneliness was more subtle, but it built up after the first few weeks,& Safreno recalls. &We simply didn&t socially bond while working remotely as well as in the office. Being lonely was de-motivating, and it negatively affected our productivity.&

The founders interviewed 100 remote engineers, and discovered that outside of scheduled meetings, they only had one audio or video call with co-workers per week. That convinced them to start Pragli a year ago to give work-from-home teams a visual, virtual facsimile of a real office. With no other full-time employees, the founders built and released a beta of Pragli last year. Usage grew 6X in March and is up 20X since January 1.

Today Pragli officially launches, and itfree until June 1. Then it plans to become freemium, with the full experience reserved for companies that pay per user per month. Pragli is also announcing a small pre-seed round today led by K9 Ventures, inspired by the firmdelight using the product itself.

To get started with Pragi, teammates download the Pragli desktop app and sign in with Google, Microsoft or GitHub. Users then customize their avatar with a wide range of face, hair, skin and clothing options. It can use your mouse and keyboard interaction to show if you&re at your desk or not, or use your webcam to translate occasional snapshots of your facial expressions to your avatar. You can also connect your Spotify and calendar to show you&re listening to music (and might be concentrating), reveal or hide details of your meeting and decide whether people can ask to interrupt you or that you&re totally unavailable.

From there, you can by audio, video or text communicate with any of your available co-workers. Guests can join conversations via the web and mobile too, though the team is working on a full-fledged app for phones and tablets. Tap on someone and you can instantly talk to them, though their mic stays muted until they respond. Alternatively, you can jump into Slack-esque channels for discussing specific topics or holding recurring meetings. And if you need some down time, you can hang out in the water cooler or trivia game channel, or set a manual &away& message.

Pragli has put a remarkable amount of consideration into how the little office social cues about when to interrupt someone translate online, like if someonewearing headphones, in a deep convo already or if they&re chilling in the microkitchen. Itleagues better than having no idea what someonedoing on the other side of Slack or whatgoing on in a Zoom call. Ita true virtual office without the clunky VR headset.

&Nothing we&ve tried has delivered the natural, water-cooler-style conversations that we get from Pragli,& says Storj Labs VP of engineering JT Olio. &The ability to switch between ‘rooms& with screen sharing, video and voice in one app is great. It has really helped us improve transparency across teams. Plus, the avatars are quite charming as well.&

With Microsoftlack of social experience, Zoom consumed with its scaling challenges and Slack doubling down on text as it prioritizes Zoom integration over its own visual communication features, thereplenty of room for Pragli to flourish. Meanwhile, COVID-19 quarantines are turning the whole world toward remote work, and itlikely to stick afterwards as companies de-emphasize office space and hire more abroad.

The biggest challenge will be making comprehensible enough to onboard whole teams such a broad product encompassing every communication medium and tons of new behaviors. &How do you build a product that doesn&t feel distracting like Slack but where people can still have the spontaneous conversations that are so important to companies innovating?,& Safreno asks. The Pragli founders are also debating how to encompass mobile without making people feel like the office stalks them after hours.

&Long-term, [Pragli] should be better than being in the office because you don&t actually have to walk around looking for [co-workers], and you get to decide how you&re presented,& Safreno concludes. &We won&t quit, because we want to work remotely for the rest of our lives.&

Newly launched mobile streaming service Quibi is killing one of its more highly anticipated series — a show depicting Snapchatorigin story, focused on founder Evan Spiegel. The news was exclusively reported by Variety on Tuesday, which did not detail the source of its news.

Plans for the Snapchat show were first announced at SXSW in 2019, when Quibi founder Jeffrey Katzenberg and CEO Meg Whitman took the stage to talk about their plans for the new streaming service and its unique technology for mobile viewing.

The Snapchat series was to be based on the screenplay &Frat Boy Genius& by Elissa Karasik, which had depicted Spiegel as a hard-partying Stanford student, according to a review of the much-hyped script by Vulture.

&It is the story of how [Spiegel] built and created Snapchat, which is one of the great social platforms of our time,& touted Katzenberg, at the event. &And we want to tell a story that is as compelling and interesting about the creation of Snapchat and Evanstory as ‘[The] Social Network& was for Facebook,& he added.

The show was meant to appeal to Quibitarget audience of young, on-the-go millennials and Gen Z users who were looking to watch short-form videos while out and about — for example, while riding the subway, waiting for an appointment, standing in line and more.

However, Quibi launched its service at a time when its users are no longer running around town. These days, everyone is sheltering in place amid the COVID-19 pandemic. And real-world activities are canceled, so therenothing much to do but go for walks or stream Netflix.

Quibilaunch-day downloads had indicated a lack of pent-up demand for the mobile service, topping only around 300,000 after the first day.

However, in an interview with CNBC, Quibi CEO Meg Whitman has since confirmed the appfirst-week downloads have now reached 1.7 million. But these installs were boosted by a high-profile partnership between Quibi and T-Mobile, which is offering the service for free for a year to its unlimited wireless customers on family plans.

Whitman also said Quibi was accelerating its plans to add support for casting features that would allow Quibi content to play on televisions.

The company had earlier confirmed at CES in January that AirPlay and Chromecast were on its roadmap, but the COVID-19 pandemic has changed Quibiplans. People today are watching movies and TV at home on their big TV screens, and may not be looking for &quick bites& of video they can binge in a few minutes& time.

Quibi and Snapchat have been asked for comment. We&ll update if any are provided.

Amazon fires two employees who criticized the companyCOVID-19 response, Google may be creating its own chips to use in Pixel phones and more details emerge about Apple and Googlecontact tracing plan. Hereyour Daily Crunch for April 14, 2020.

1. Amazon fires two more employees who were openly critical of working conditions during pandemic

Two additional employees who were publicly critical of Amazonwarehouse conditions amid the COVID-19 pandemic have been fired by the company. Those employees — UX designers Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa — were also members of Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, an organization of employees &who believe itour responsibility to ensure our business models don&t contribute to the climate crisis.&

Amazon has pushed back against the notion that the employees were fired expressly due to their criticisms of its treatment of workers during the pandemic. But, at the very least, the optics are less than ideal.

2. Google said to be preparing its own chips for use in Pixel phones and Chromebooks

Axios reports that Google is readying its own in-house processors for use in future Pixel devices, including both phones and eventually Chromebooks, too. The in-house chip is apparently code-named Whitechapel, and itbeing made in collaboration with Samsung.

3. Q-A: Apple and Google discuss their coronavirus tracing efforts

On a media call, Apple said it will roll out the feature update to the broadest number of iOS devices as possible — more than three-quarters of iPhones and iPads are on the latest version of iOS 13 and will receive the update. Google said it will update Google Play Services with the feature so that the contact tracing system can run on the entire fleet of Android devices running Android 6.0 or newer.

4. Reddit announces updates, including a new subreddit, to increase political ad transparency

Reddit announced an update to its policy for political advertising that will require campaigns to leave comments open on ads for the first 24 hours. The platform also launched a new subreddit, r/RedditPoliticalAds, that will include information about advertisers, targeting, impressions and spending by each campaign.

5. Venture capitalists chat edtechnew normal after COVID-19

TechCrunch asked top investors in the space for their predictions on whatahead once life resumes to its new normal. One investor mentioned how in March, they spent a third of their time in edtech — now, they&re spending almost all their time vetting startups there. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

6. Nintendo Switch update adds ability to transfer game downloads to SD card

Previously, Switch owners had few options if their console ran out of storage space. With the update, if storage is running low, a person can transfer a game directly to an SD card.

7. UK tech job vacancies fall 31% in less than 4 weeks, according to job site data & so who is still hiring?

According to numbers shared exclusively with TechCrunch from job sites Adzuna (which also powers the U.K. government&Find a job& service and provides data to No. 10) and WorkinStartups, tech hiring activity amongst 100 of the U.K.top tech companies has fallen 31% in the last month.

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.

With a lot of towns instituting shelter-in-place orders to restrict how people physically interact in order to slow down the spread of the novel coronavirus, fitness has come into its own.

In places where people are still allowed outdoors to exercise, we&ve seen an explosion of independent exercising like walking, running and cycling — often in conflict with each other, if my Facebook community board is anything to go by — to get the most out of being allowed outdoors. And in cases where people are remaining indoors, figuring out exercise regimes within our four walls has become a way to stave off boredom, to offset the cessation of our normal gym or sports routines or just to stay in shape in our newly extra-sedentary lives.

In that context, a startup called Aaptiv— a Netflix-style app-based business that connects people to a range of trainer-led indoor and outdoor fitness and wellness sessions that they can do on their own, usually without any special equipment — is today announcing that it has raised some funding from one of its big investors, Insight Partners, on the back of a recent surge in business.

Founder and CEO Ethan Agarwal says the the number ofpeople using the service during the novel coronavirus outbreak has spiked, with organic traffic in the last month up 100% and engagement with content up 200%. Aaptiv has now passed 30 million classes consumed on its platform (up from 22 million in May last year). The company, like many startups, is not yet profitable but is coming close to breaking even.

The new infusion of funding will be used to continue expanding a new Enterprise channel that Aaptiv recently launched to provide classes via API on other platforms. Aaptivpartners include FitReserve, Weight Watchers and Audible (Amazon, owner of Audible, is one of Aaptivinvestors), and the list is growing.

We asked, but Agarwal said that Aaptiv is not disclosing the amount of the investment, nor its valuation.

&I don&t want my companyperformance or success measured by those numbers,& he noted earlier today in an interview. &Itnot how we are thinking about the company.&

That could mean the round or valuation are not huge; or it could mean that they are so large that they would distract from the companyproduct news, so not much to read into that. Insight Partners& Thilo Semmelbauer, who sits on the board of the company, was equally quiet on the numbers.

&Crossing 30 million classes is a big milestone, and we&ve been excited to see the interest from corporates increase substantially in recent months,& he told TechCrunch. &The round is specifically for launchingAaptivcorporate offering to capitalize on such strong global interest. As the company is nearing break-even we aren&t disclosing the figure at this time.&

Insight earlier this month disclosed that it had raised a whopping $9.5 billion for a new fund, with a mission to support existing portfolio companies through these complicated COVID-19 times.

For some more context, Aaptiv has raised more than $60 million to date, and in its last round — the $22 million Series C in 2018 that included Amazon — Aaptiv was valued at $200 million. Last year, we noted that the startup was talking to potential acquirers to be sold for what we understand from a close source to be a &nine-figure& (hundreds of millions of dollars) price.

It was, in fact, those M-A conversations that led the company to deciding to build the enterprise tier and walking away from a possible exit for now.

&What was the point of selling if we could build a bigger business by making Aaptiv available to multiple companies,& said Agarwal.

Agarwal said that now Aaptiv is getting inbound interest from &multiple verticals& for its B2B2C offering, including businesses that want to integrate Aaptiv into their employee wellness programs, companies whose core business model — for example, FitReserve providing carnets of passes for in-person fitness or related classes — has been completely stalled by the coronavirus, and others that might benefit from providing more fitness and wellness services to their users.

The company started out life by connecting a network of trainers to users through a series of on-demand classes. Last year, however, it made a small pivot of sorts when it launched an AI-based service called Coach that aimed to provide workouts and other suggestions more tailored to your specific abilities and interests and goals: not replacing the human trainers, but augmenting them.

Along with that shift, Aaptiv laid off an unspecified number of trainers. Today, it has 20 on staff, Agarwal said, and has no plans to change that model with a move into, for example, an all-AI platform, or building a fitness marketplace where any trainer could sign up to offer classes.

&Part of the reason we are so successful is because itnot that easy to create these classes,& he said. &We, and the trainers, put a lot of time, effort and energy into building them.&

Apple is providing a data set derived from aggregated, anonymized information taken from users of its Maps navigational app, the company announced today. The data is collected as a set of &Mobility Trends Reports,& which are updated daily and provide a look at the change in the number of routing requests made within the Maps app, which is the default routing app on iPhones, for three modes of transportation, including driving, walking and transit.

Apple is quick to note that this information isn&t tied to any individuals, as Maps does not associate any mobility data with a userApple ID, nor does it maintain any history of where people have been. In fact, Apple notes that all data collected by maps, including search terms and specific routing, is only ever tied to random rotating identifying numbers that are reset on a rolling basis. This anonymized, aggregated data is collected only to provide a city, country or region-level view, representing the change over time in the number of pedestrians, drivers and transit-takers in an area based on the number of times they open the app and ask for directions.

As far as signals go for measuring the decrease in outdoor activity in a given city, this is a pretty good one, considering Appleinstall base and the fact that most users probably don&t bother installing or using a third-party app like Google Maps for their daily commuting or transportation needs.

The data is available to all directly from Applewebsite, and can be downloaded in a broadly compatible CSV format. You also can use the web-based version to search a particular location and see the overall trend for that area.

For an individual, this is more or less a curiosity, but the release of this info could be very useful for municipal, state and federal policy makers looking to study the impact of COVID-19, as well as the effect of strategies put in place to mitigate its spread, including social distancing, shelter-in-place and quarantining measures.

Apple has also announced that itworking with Google on a new system-level, anonymized contact tracing system that both companies will first release as APIs for use by developers before making them native built-in features that are supplemented by public health agency applications and guidance. Apple seems particularly eager to do what it can to assist with the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, while still striving to ensure that these measures respect the privacy of their individual users. Thata hard balance to strike in terms of taking effective action at a population level, but Applereach is a powerful potential advantage to any tools it provides.

A court in Nanterre, France, has ruled that Amazon should greatly restrict orders in France in the coming weeks. According to the decision that AFP and a union have obtained, Amazon can only accept orders of groceries, hygiene and health-related products.

The company has 24 hours to comply or it&ll have to pay a fine of €1 million per day.

Since the coronavirus pandemic-induced lockdown started in France, Amazon has already been &prioritizing& essential items over non-essential ones. It means that if you order a video game on Amazon, it might take a week or more to show up at your home.

But all six fulfillment centers in France are still operating as usual as of today. Last month, Mediapart shared audio recordings of Amazon executives saying that they haven&t been doing enough to protect warehouse workers — it has been particularly hard to respect social distancing for instance.

Since then, at least one Amazon employee has been diagnosed with coronavirus in France. A union (Sud Solidaires) referred to a court, asking Amazon to shut down its warehouses altogether in order to protect employees.

The court has ruled that Amazon can&t keep operating as usual under these circumstances. But the company can still accept orders of essential items. It has to overhaul its operations if it wants to accept more orders going forward.

According to Le Parisien, the decision will remain valid for up to one month, pending a review of COVID-19-related risks. The court could decide to extend the restrictions.