The massive surge of COVID-19-related layoffs has put tech in a unique position. While the startup world is facing layoffs itself, it is also trying to help get people back to work.

Back at the end of 2019, the SoftBank-backed belt-tightening period led to a flurry of crowdsourced spreadsheets with employee names from companies like Oyo, WeWork, Zume and more. The spreadsheets popped up as a bet on the network effect, with the ultimate goal of hoping the sheets land in the hands of a recruiter looking to hire one of hundreds laid off. Now, as COVID-19 cripples the economy, layoffs have surged dramatically past that one period.

On one end, we&ve reported on numbers of tech companies cutting staff, from Oyo, toZipRecruiter, to TripActions. But on the other, brighter end, we&ve also seen the rise of platforms to connect those laid off and pledges from employers to not fire any employees during this trying time.

In a world where people are laid off on Zoom, techefforts to give community, and a course of action, to those laid off is undeniably important.

The current climate of the pandemic, and the massive unemployment that has resulted, means that a spreadsheet with a long list of employee names and unverified contact information doesn&t cut it.

Shannon Anderson, the director of talent at Madrona Venture Group in Seattle, saw her firmportfolio companies struggling with layoffs and the changing economy. Two of the portfolio companies, Textio and Rover, laid off staff, along with a number of other companies.

&We wanted to anticipate a reduction in force across the ecosystem,& said Anderson. &Ita global problem.&

So, to help boost the network of those laid off, Anderson reached out to a number of HR leaders, including Chris Brownridge, the founder of Silver Lining, a job platform for those who have been laid off. He started Silver Lining after he shut down his startup last summer and had to lay off his staff of 20.

&I felt the pain [of layoffs] from the employer side, and it is painful for the employer, especially when you care about [your workers],& he said back in January. &I don&t want to keep seeing spreadsheets thrown around; I think that is not the right answer. We need a standardized way to deal with it, with a community behind it.&

Silver Lining is a platform that lets candidates submit profiles for recruiters from top companies to review. Job seekers on the site range from architects, UX designers, engineers, community managers and more.

Then COVID-19 spread across the world, forcing people to stay home and spend less. The economydownturn unevenly impacted companies around the world: where layoffs exist for the travel sector, usage surges exist for the remote work companies. But as a whole, the labor force is struggling, with 6.6 million Americans filing for unemployment just last week alone.

Madrona said it is donating a portion of its budget to help Silver Lining offer more services to those laid off. The firm declined to share the total amount of the donation.

Silver Lining will also now offer coaching, resume writing and emotional support to folks on the platform, Brownridge says. Thanks to donations from Madrona, Skytap, Bandwidth, Voodle, Female Founders Alliance and more, the site is free to use.

The uptick in layoffs has led Boston-based Drafted, a referral startup, to launch a product called the Layoff Network to help those who have been laid off. The startup previously was sending out a newsletter, Layoff List, of weekly list of layoffs with spreadsheets hyperlinked. During the SoftBank layoffs, Olivia Clark, the creator of the newsletter, noticed a surge in traffic — more than 1,000 recruiters subscribed.

Now she says traffic is &up 2,000%& and, in just two weeks, Draftedengineering team has productized that newsletter into a job search network.

The Layoff Network connects with recruiters people who have been recommended by their colleagues and &endorsed& for their skills. If you&re laid off, you can sign up and create a profile and ask a previous employer or colleague to recommend you. Clark says this is similar to LinkedIn&endorse& feature to make sure the people are credible.

Once the person has been endorsed, they will be added to a talent feed. That is where recruiters can search for nominees, job titles, companies or locations. Unlike a spreadsheet, this is clearly easier to navigate and adds another layer of human touch.

Clark says that the platform will be free for individuals who have been laid off, and who are recruiting or hiring. Drafted has a paid enterprise level that is for organizations that are conducting mass layoffs and want to provide support for former employees.

The grassroots efforts are vast and diverse. Herea list that posts companies that are actively hiring. Herea list for Canadian tech workers, and one for Coloradotech scene. And herea live tracker of startups that have issued layoffs, started by the team over at Human Interest, a startup that has nothing to do with layoffs.

Megan Murphy, who created Chicago Superstars for those laid off from the Chicago tech scene, has not received donations or support yet. As the number of unemployed people increases, Murphy says shenoticing a lack of clarity on which companies are hiring, and which job postings are still active. If a company was hiring for a position in January, it might not be anymore (to help keep costs down).

&I can&t waste time crafting cover letters and custom resumes for jobs that won&t actually move forward,& she said. &There are tons of crowdsourced tools trying to flag whoactually hiring still, while others are trying to flag whoinstituted a hiring freeze or laid people off, and in the meantime, company career pages aren&t up to date. We need one source of truth — and right now nobodyreally set up to do that.&

For now, Murphy says shegetting creative in her own search, and asking for others to do the same. &Virtual communities and experiences are about to be more important than ever.& She notes guerrilla Slack channels and Reddit as an example of organic communication.

As for how sheable to keep up with the demand of people needing help for their next job? Murphy, who is looking for a job herself after getting laid off, says she has fewer interviews from potential employers, so shebeen able to help those reaching out.

The work done by these entrepreneurs scratches at the same hope that lies within the hundreds of lines of contact information within a crowdsourced layoff spreadsheet: a need for a community in a trying time. And these days, more than most, remind us of the power of having a group of people together in the first place.

As capable as robots are, the original animals after which they tend to be designed are always much, much better. Thatpartly because itdifficult to learn how to walk like a dog directly from a dog — but this research from GoogleAI labs make it considerably easier.

The goal of this research, a collaboration with UC Berkeley, was to find a way to efficiently and automatically transfer &agile behaviors& like a light-footed trot or spin from their source (a good dog) to a quadrupedal robot. This sort of thing has been done before, but as the researchers& blog post points out, the established training process can often &require a great deal of expert insight, and often involves a lengthy reward tuning process for each desired skill.&

That doesn&t scale well, naturally, but that manual tuning is necessary to make sure the animalmovements are approximated well by the robot. Even a very doglike robot isn&t actually a dog, and the way a dog moves may not be exactly the way the robot should, leading the latter to fall down, lock up or otherwise fail.

The Google AI project addresses this by adding a bit of controlled chaos to the normal order of things. Ordinarily, the dogmotions would be captured and key points like feet and joints would be carefully tracked. These points would be approximated to the robotin a digital simulation, where a virtual version of the robot attempts to imitate the motions of the dog with its own, learning as it goes.

So far, so good, but the real problem comes when you try to use the results of that simulation to control an actual robot. The real world isn&t a 2D plane with idealized friction rules and all that. Unfortunately, that means that uncorrected simulation-based gaits tend to walk a robot right into the ground.

To prevent this, the researchers introduced an element of randomness to the physical parameters used in the simulation, making the virtual robot weigh more, or have weaker motors, or experience greater friction with the ground. This made the machine learning model describing how to walk have to account for all kinds of small variances and the complications they create down the line — and how to counteract them.

Learning to accommodate for that randomness made the learned walking method far more robust in the real world, leading to a passable imitation of the target dog walk, and even more complicated moves like turns and spins, without any manual intervention and only a little extra virtual training.

Naturally manual tweaking could still be added to the mix if desired, but as it stands this is a large improvement over what could previously be done totally automatically.

In another research project described in the same post, another set of researchers describe a robot teaching itself to walk on its own, but imbued with the intelligence to avoid walking outside its designated area and to pick itself up when it falls. With those basic skills baked in, the robot was able to amble around its training area continuously with no human intervention, learning quite respectable locomotion skills.

The paper on learning agile behaviors from animals can be read here, while the one on robots learning to walk on their own (a collaboration with Berkeley and the Georgia Institute of Technology) is here.

People seem to love the concept of the battle pass.

Largely popularized by Fortnite, battle passes reward players for playing well, and playing often. The better you do, the more XP you earn; the more XP you earn, the more stuff (new looks for your character, or victory dances to fire off at the end of a gunfight) you unlock. Willing to cough up a few bucks for an optional &premium& battle pass? That&ll open up a whole new set of rewards. The model has made its way into countless games over the last couple of years, from PUBG to Rocket League.

Zelos, an LA-based company out of Y CombinatorWinter 2020 batch, is aiming to make that same concept work across multiple games. Tackle challenges in one game, earn rewards for another — or use your points to buy new games altogether.

Each day, Zelos offers up a handful of challenges across each of the games it supports, like dealing 10,000 damage in League of Legends or getting five kills with Wraith in Apex. Completing a challenge earns you &zips&; most challenges I&ve seen will earn the player somewhere between 15 and 150 zips, depending on how tough it is to pull off.

Once you&ve pooled up a pile of zips, they can be redeemed for all sorts of virtual goodies. The more something would cost otherwise, the more zips it&ll require. For example, 60,000 zips gets you a $5 Steam gift card — or 90,000 zips for $10 worth of Apex Coins. Once you get into the 50,000-200,000 zip range, you can redeem them for digital download codes for games like Rainbow Six Siege, Monster Hunter: World and Tabletop Simulator. Getting the good stuff can mean completing a lot of challenges, but remember: these are games people are playing anyway.

In addition to zips, each challenge earns the player a bit of EXP. EXP levels up your Zelos profile; with each level, you unlock a bundle of zips, additional challenges and items for your Zelos avatar.

Zelos is currently issuing challenges and tracking stats across seven games: Fortnite, Apex, League of Legends, Teamfight Tactics, DOTA 2, Counter Strike: GO and Clash Royale. Stat tracking works a bit better in some games than it does in others, depending on how open a gamedevelopers are with the data. With League of Legends, for example, they&re able to ping Riot Games& dedicated API for a rich backlog of match data; with Apex, on the other hand, they&re limited to pulling stats based on a handful of unlockable trackers players can flip on between matches.

Zelos co-founder Jeffrey Tong tells me they&re focused on ensuring they stay above board with the data they pull, making sure they comply with each providerToS. That makes sense, of course: Getting on a developerbad side could mean losing access to the data firehouse, in turn squashing Zelos& ability to support a game. The more popular games Zelos can support, the better the whole idea works.

So if they&re giving stuff away based on challenges in games they themselves aren&t selling… how will they make money? The same way the aforementioned games do: a premium battle pass. Tong tells me that they&re currently testing a subscription-based battle pass that&ll unlock new challenges, award more prizes and increase the rate at which points are earned.

This isn&t Tongfirst foray into the gaming space; he previously built and sold OverStats, an analytics system for tracking a playeresports stats over time. Co-founder Derek Chiang, meanwhile, was previously a senior software engineer at the decentralized computing company Dfinity.

Tong tells me they raised $2.8 million in the days after YC demo day, eyeing expansion of the platform, supported games and their team. The Zelos team is currently three people, with plans to hire another &six or seven& in the coming weeks. They&re currently seeing more than 50,000 weekly active users, with 55% of their users playing two or more games on the platform.

Sick of sharing those generic Zoom video call invites that all look the same? Wish your Zoom link previewheadline and image actually described your meeting? Want to protect your Zoom calls from trolls by making attendees RSVP to get your link? ZmURL.com has you covered.

Launching today, ZmURL is a free tool that lets you customize your Zoom video call invite URL with a title, explanation and image that will show up when you share the link on Twitter, Facebook or elsewhere. ZmURL also lets you require that attendees RSVP by entering their email address so you can decide who to approve and provide with the actual entry link. That could stop Zoombombers from harassing your call with offensive screenshared imagery, profanity or worse.

&We built zmurl.com to make it easier for people to stay physically distant but socially close,& co-founder Victor Pontis tells me. &We&re hoping to give event organizers the tools to preserve in-person communities while we are all under quarantine.&

Zoom wasn&t built for open public discussions. But with people trapped inside by coronavirus, its daily user count has spiked from 10 million to 200 million. Thatled to new use cases, from cocktail parties to roundtable discussions to AA meetings to school classes.

Thatunfortunately spawned new problems, like &Zoombombing,& a term I coined two weeks ago to describe malicious actors tracking down public Zoom calls and bombarding them with abuse. Since then, the FBI has issued a warning about Zoombombing, The New York Times has written multiple articles about the issue and ZoomCEO Eric Yuan has apologized.

Yet Zoom has been slow to adapt it features as it struggles not to buckle under its sudden scale. While it has turned on waiting rooms and host-only screensharing by default for usage in schools, most people are still vulnerable due to Zoompermissive settings and reused URLs that were designed for only trusted enterprise meetings. Only today did Zoom concede to shifting the balance further from convenience to safety, turning on waiting rooms by default and requiring passwords for entry by Meeting ID.

Meanwhile, social networks have become a sea of indistinguishable Zoom links that all show the same blue and white logo in the preview, with no information on what the call is about. That makes it a lot tougher to promote calls, which many musicians, fitness instructors and event producers are relying on to drive donations or payments while their work is disrupted by quarantines.

ZmURLfounders during their only in-person meeting ever

Luckily, Pontis and his co-founder Danqing Liu are here to help with ZmURL. The two software engineers fittingly met over Zoom a year ago and have only met once in person. Pontis, now in San Francisco, had started bike and scooter rental software companies Spring and Scooter Map. Liu, from Beijing but now holed up in New York, had spent five years at Google, Uber and PlanGrid before selling his machine learning tool TinyMind.

The idea for ZmURL stemmed from Liu missing multiple Zoom events he&d wanted to attend. Then a friend of Pontis& was laid off from their yoga instructor job, and they and their colleagues were scrambling to market and earn money from hosting their own classes over Zoom. The duo quickly built a beta, with zero money raised, and tested it with some yoga gurus who found it simplified promoting events and gathering RSVPs. &We&re all going through a tough time right now. We see ZmURL as our opportunity to help,& Pontis tells me.

To use the tool, you generate a generic meeting link from Zoom like zoom.us/ji/1231231232 and then punch it into ZmURL. You can upload an image or choose from stock photos and color gradients. Then you name your event, give it a description and set the time and date. You&ll get a shorter URL like https://zmurl.com/smy5m or you can give it a custom one like zmurl.com/quidditch.

When you share that URL, it&ll show your image, headline and description in the link preview on chat apps, social networks and more. Attendees who click will be shown a nicely rendered event page with the link to enter the Zoom call and the option to add it to their calendar. You can try it out here, zmurl.com/aloha, as the startup is hosting a happy hour today at 6pm Pacific.

Optionally, you can set your ZmURL calls to require an RSVP. In that case, people who click your link have to submit their email address. The host can then sift through the RSVPs and choose who to email back the link to join the call. If you see an RSVP from someone you don&t recognize, just ignore it to keep Zoombombers from slipping inside.

Surprisingly, there doesn&t seem to be any other tools for customizing Zoom call links. Zoom paid enterprise customers can only set up a image and logo-equipped landing page for their whole companyZoom account, not for specific calls. For now, ZmURL is completely free. But the co-founders are building out an option for hosting paid events that collect entry fees on the RSVP site while ZmURL takes a 5% cut.

Next, ZmURL wants to add the ability to link your Zoom account to its site so you can spawn call links without leaving. Italso building out always-on call rooms, recurring events, organizer home pages for promoting all their calls, an option to add events to a public directory, email marketing tools and integrations with other video call platforms like Hangouts, Skype and FaceTime.

Pontis says the biggest challenge will be learning to translate more of the magic and business potential off offline events into the world of video calling. Therealso the risk that Zoom will try to intercede and force ZmURL to desist. But it shouldn&t, at least until Zoom builds all these features itself. Or it should just acquire ZmURL.

We&re dealing with an unprecedented behavior shift due to shelter-in-place orders that threaten to cripple the world economy and drive many of us crazy.Whether for fostering human connection or keeping event businesses afloat, Zoom has become a critical utility. It should accept all the help it can get.

As of this writing, nearly a million people globally have been infected with the novel coronavirus and 50,322 have died. Healthcare systems are overwhelmed, consumers and profiteers are hoarding supplies and some service workers have launched strikes while many others have been let go. In the world of micromobility, we&ve seen Bird lay off hundreds of employees and Lime is reportedly gearing up for layoffs of its own.

Ride Report creates software that enables cities to better work with micromobility operators and has a bird&s-eye view on the industry. In a conversation with TechCrunch, CEO William Henderson outlined some of the trends that have emerged and what we can expect for micromobility operators amid the pandemic — and once itover.

&All of this came at a really hard time for micromobility,& he tells TechCrunch. &It couldn&t really have occurred at a worse time in some ways.&

Thatbecause there was already a lot of pressure on startups in the space to reach profitability on an accelerated timeline, Henderson says. While winter is notoriously known as a rough time, the environment in this pandemic is &micromobility winter on steroids.&

Over the last month, companies have paused operations in cities and started laying off people. Operators Bird and Lime, for example, paused operations across the board last month.