Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan said today on Wolf BlitzerCNN show that the city of Detroit is on track to be the first city to deploy Abbott Labs& five-minute COVID-19 test. The mayor said the test would be available for first responders. The goal, he said, was to test those first responders who are self-isolating but have yet to test positive for the virus.

The city of Detroit received the Abbott Labs tests today, April 1. They will be available for use within the next 24 hours, the mayor said.

This system from Abbott received emergency clearance for use by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Ita lab-in-a-box that is roughly the size of a small kitchen appliance. The small size and rapid test results mean it can be deployed and utilized more quickly than other methods.

The City of Detroit is getting hit especially hard by the novel coronavirus. According to recent numbers, the counties around Detroit contain 81% of Michigan7,615 coronavirus cases. More than 20% of the 2,500-strong police force is quarantined with suspected instances of COVID-19.

The significant number of cases in Detroit led the mayor to go outside of traditional channels to obtain the tests first.

As The Washington Post tells it, Mayor Mike Duggan secured the cellphone number of Miles White, the chairman and outgoing CEO of Abbot Labs, and woke him up Sunday morning to beg for the test. This early morning phone call netted the city five machines and 5,000 tests.

Today the company said in a tweet that itmaking the system available this week in an urgent care setting in the U.S. where the company already has instrumentation. Abbott Labs says it already holds the most significant molecular point-of-care footprint in the U.S., and is &widely available& across doctoroffices, urgent care clinics, emergency rooms and other medical facilities.

Abbott expects it will be able to produce 5 million tests in April, split between the new rapid tests and traditional lab tests that received emergency authorization from the FDA on March 18.

Many TikTok videos don&t start from scratch, so neither can its competitors. TikTok is all about remixes where users shoot a new video to recontextualize audio pulled from someone elseclip, or riff on an existing meme or concept. That only works because TikTokhad time to build up an immense armory of content to draw inspiration from.

Creators will find themselves unequipped trying to get started on TikTok copycats including Facebook Lasso, and Instagram Reels which is testing in Brazil. Direct competitors like Triller and Dubsmash are racing to build up their archives. YouTube Shorts, which The Information today reported is in development, only has a shot if Google lets users harness the 5 billion videos people already watch on YouTube each day.

This is the power of what I call &content network effect&: Each piece of content adds value to the rest. ThatTikTok.

You&re likely familiar with traditional network effect — ‘a phenomenon whereby a product or service gains additional value as more people use it.& Itnot just the network itself that gains value, as the value delivered to each user increases too. Todaytop social networks are shining examples. The more people there are on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, the more people you can connect to, and the more material their relevance algorithms can draw on to fill your feeds.

If you had to choose between using two identical social networks, you&re probably going to pick the one with more friends or creators already onboard. Network effects raise the switching cost of moving to a different network. Even if it has better features, fewer ads, or less misinformation and bullying, you&re unlikely to leave a robust network behind and decamp to a sparser one. That makes scaled social networks difficult to Disrupt. All the top ones have been around for almost a decade or more.

Except for TikTok. The Chinese music/video app has managed to demonstrate a new concept of &content network effect&. In its case, each video uploaded to the app makes every future potential video more valuable. Thatbecause all the content on TikTok serves as remix fodder for the rest. Every song, dance, joke, prank, and monologue generates resources for other creators to exploit. Ita bottomless well of inspiration.

Remixability, the ultimate creative tool

TikTok productizes remix culture by making it easy to &use this sound&. Tap the audio button on any video and it becomes yours. Click through and you&ll see all the other videos that use it. TikTok even offers a whole search engine for sorting through sounds by categories like Trending, Greatest Hits, Love, Gaming, and travel. Sometimes remixes are based on an idea rather than an audio. #FlipTheSwitch sees couples instantly swapping clothes when the light flicks off, and has collected over 3.6 billion videos across over 500,000 remixed versions of the video.

You can even duet with the original creator, sharing your video and theirs side-by-side simultaneously. A solo performance becomes a chorus as more duets are hitched together. Meanwhile, remixes of remixes of remixes provide an esoteric reward for hardcore users who recognize how a gag has evolved or spiraled into absurdity.

Other apps in the past have spawned video responses, hashtags, quote-tweets, surveys, and chain letters and other ways for pieces of content to interact or iterate. And therealways been parodies. But TikTok proves the power of forging a social app with content network effect at its core.

Facilitating remixes offers a way to lower the bar for producing user generated content. You&d don&t have to be astoundingly creative or original to make something entertaining. Each individuallife experiences inform their perspective that could let them interpret an idea in a new way.

What began with someone ripping audio of two people chanting &don&t be Suspicious, don&t be suspicious& while sneaking through a graveyard in TV show Parks - Recs led to people lipsyncing it while trying to escape their infantroom without waking them up, leaving the house wearing clothes they stole from their sistercloset, trying to keep a llama as a pet, and photoshopping themselves to look taller. Unless someonealready done the work to record an audio clip, therenothing to inspire and enable others to put their spin on it.

TikTokarchive vs the world

Thatwhy I wrote that Mark Zuckerberg misunderstands the huge threat of TikTok after the CEO told Facebookstaff that &I kind of think about TikTok as if it were Explore for Stories&. Facebook and Instagram found massive success cloning Snapchat Stories because all they had to do was copy its features. Stories are autobiographical life vlogging. All you need are the creative tools, which Instagram and Facebook rebuilt, and people to share to, which the apps had billions of.

But TikTok isn&t about sharing what you&re up to like Stories that typically start from scratch since each userlife is different. Itmicro-entertainment powered by content network effect. If TikTok competitors give people the same video recording features and distribution potential, they&ll still be missing the archive of source material.

FacebookLasso looks just like TikTok but itfailed to gain steam since launching in November 2018. Instagram Reels smartly copies TikTokremixing tools, but if the Brazilian tests go well and it eventually launches in English, it will start out flat footed.

When YouTube launches Shorts, as The InformationAlex Heath and Jessica Toonkel report itplanning to do before the end of the year, it will be buried inside its main app. That could make it impossible to compete with a dedicated app like TikTok that opens straight to its For You page. Its one saving grace would be if YouTube unlocks its entire database of videos for remixing.

Thanks to its position as the default place to host videos and its experience with searchability that Facebook and Instagram lack, YouTube Shorts could at least have all the ingredients necessary. But given YouTubenon-stop failures in social with everything from Google+ to YouTube Stories to its dozen deadpooled messaging apps, it may not have the chef skills necessary to combine them.

[Postscript: Or maybe YouTube will be worse at cloning TikTok than anyone. Record labels and YouTube should understand that short videos promote rather than pirate music, as TikTok propelling Lil Nas X and many other musicians up the charts prove. But if YouTube ruthlessly applies Content ID and takes down Shorts with unauthorized audio, the feature is dead in the water.]

Other social networks should consider how the concept applies to them. Could Facebook turn your friends& photos into collage materials? Could Instagram let you share themed collections of your favorite posts? Remix culture isn&t going away, so neither will the value of fostering content network effects. With video consumption outpacing professional production, remixes are how the world will stay entertained and how amateurs can contribute creations worthy of going viral.

Vijay Shekhar Sharma, founder and chief executive of Indiamost valuable startup, Paytm, posed an existential question in a recent press conference.

&What do you think of the commercial model for digital mobile payments. How do we make money?& Sharma asked Nandan Nilekani, one of the key architects of the Universal Payments Infrastructure that created a digital payments revolution in the country.

Itthe multi-billion-dollar question that scores of local startups and international giants have been scrambling to answer as many of them aggressively shift their focus to serving merchants and building lending products and other financial services .

New Delhiabrupt move to invalidate much of the paper bills in the cash-dominated nation in late 2016 sent hundreds of millions of people to cash machines for months to follow.

For a handful of startups such as Paytm and MobiKwik, this cash crunch meant netting tens of millions of new users in a span of a few months.

India then moved to work with a coalition of banks to develop the payments infrastructure that, unlike Paytm and MobiKwik earlier system, did not act as an intermediary &mobile wallet& to serve as an intermediary between users and their banks, but facilitated direct transaction between two users& bank accounts.

Silicon Valley companies quickly took notice. For years, Google and the likes have attempted to change the purchasing behavior of people in many Asian and African markets, where they have amassed hundreds of millions of users.

In Pakistan, for instance, most people still run errands to neighborhood stores when they want to top up credit to make phone calls and access the internet.

With China keeping its doors largely closed for foreign firms, India, where many American giants have already poured billions of dollars to find their next billion users, it was a no-brainer call.

&Unlike China, we have given equal opportunities to both small and large domestic and foreign companies,& said Dilip Asbe, chief executive of NPCI, the payments body behind UPI.

And thus began the race to participate in the grand Indian experiment. Investors have followed suit as well. Indian fintech startups raised $2.74 billion last year, compared to 3.66 billion that their counterparts in China secured, according to research firm CBInsights.

And that bet in a market with more than half a billion internet users has already started to pay off.

&If you look at UPI as a platform, we have never seen growth of this kind before,& Nikhil Kumar, who volunteered at a nonprofit organization to help develop the payments infrastructure, said in an interview.

In October, just three years after its inception, UPI had amassed 100 million users and processed over a billion transactions. It has sustained its growth since, clocking 1.25 billion transactions in March — despite one of the nationlargest banks going through a meltdown last month.

&It all comes down to the problem it is solving. If you look at the western markets, digital payments have largely been focused on a person sending money to a merchant. UPI does that, but it also enables peer-to-peer payments and across a wide-range of apps. Itinteroperable,& said Kumar, who is now working at a startup called Setuto develop APIs to help small businesses easily accept digital payments.

The Google Pay app has amassed over 67 million monthly active users. And the company has found the UPI pipeline so fascinating that it has recommended similar infrastructure to be built in the U.S.

In August, the Federal Reserve proposed to develop a new inter-bank 24×7 real-time gross settlement servicethat would support faster payments in the country. In November, Google recommended (PDF) that the U.S. Federal Reserve implement a real-time payments platform such as UPI.

&After just three years, the annual run rate of transactions flowing through UPI is about 19% of IndiaGross Domestic Product, including 800 million monthly transactions valued at approximately $19 billion,& wrote Mark Isakowitz, Googlevice president of Government Affairs and Public Policy.

Paytm itself has amassed more than 150 million users who use it every year to make transactions. Overall, the platform has 300 million mobile wallet accounts and 55 million bank accounts, said Sharma.

Search for a business model

But despite on-boarding more than a hundred million users on their platform, payment firms are struggling to cut their losses — let alone turn a profit.

At an event in Bangalore late last year, Sajith Sivanandan, managing director and business head of Google Pay and Next Billion User Initiatives, said current local rules have forced Google Pay to operate in India without a clear business model.

Mobile payment firms never levied any fee to users as a strategy to expand their reach in the country. A recent directive from the government has now put an end to the cut they were receiving to facilitate UPI transactions between users and merchants.

GoogleSivanandan urged the local payment bodies to &find ways for payment players to make money& to ensure every stakeholder had incentives to operate.

Paytm, which has raised more than $3 billion to date, reported a loss of $549 million in the financial year ending in March 2019.

The firm, backed by SoftBank and Alibaba, has expanded to several new businesses in recent years, including Paytm Mall, an e-commerce venture, social commerce, financial services arm Paytm Money and a movies and ticketing category.

This year, Paytm has expanded to serve merchants, launching new gadgets such as a stand that displays QR check-out codes that comes with a calculator and a battery pack, a portable speaker that provides voice confirmations of transactions and a point-of-sale machine with built-in scanner and printer.

In an interview with TechCrunch, Sharma said these devices are already garnering impressive demand from merchants. The company is offering these gadgets to them as part of a subscription service that helps it establish a steady flow of revenue.

The firmMoney arm, which offers lending, insurance and investing services, has amassed over 3 million users. The head of Paytm Money, Pravin Jadhav, resigned from the company this week, a person familiar with the matter said. A Paytm spokeswoman declined to comment. (Indian news outlet Entrackr first reported the development.)

Flipkart PhonePe, another major player in Indiapayments market, today serves more than 175 million users, and over 8 million merchants. Its app serves as a platform for other businesses to reach users, explained Rahul Chari, co-founder and CTO of the firm, in an interview with TechCrunch. The company is currently not taking a cut for the real estate on its app, he added.

But these startups& expansion into new categories means that they now have to face off even more rivals, and spend more money to gain a foothold. In the social commerce category, for instance, Paytm is competing with Naspers-backed Meeshoand a handful of new entrants; and heavily-backed OkCredit and KhataBook today lead the bookkeeping market.

BharatPe, which raised $75 million two months ago, is digitizing mom and pop stores and granting them working capital. And PineLabs, which has already become a unicorn, and MSwipe have flooded the market with their point-of-sale machines.

&They have no choice. Payment is the gateway to businesses such as e-commerce and lending that you can monetize. In Paytmcase, their earlier bet was Paytm Mall,& said Jayanth Kolla, founder and chief analyst at research firm Convergence Catalyst.

But Paytm Mall has struggled to compete with giants Amazon India and Walmart Flipkart. Last year, Mall pivoted to offline-to-online and online-to-offline models, wherein orders placed by customers are serviced from local stores. The company also secured about $160 million from eBay last year.

An executive who previously worked at Paytm Mall said the venture has struggled to grow because its goal-post has constantly shifted over the years. It has recently started to focus on selling fastags, a system that allows vehicle owners to swiftly pay toll fees. At least two more executives at the firm are on their way out, a person familiar with the matter said.

Kolla said the current dynamics of Indiamobile payments market, where more than 100 firms are chasing the same set of audience, is reminiscent of the telecom market in the country from more than a decade ago.

&When there were just four to five players in the telecom market, the prospect of them becoming profitable was much higher. They were scaling like crazy. They grew with the lowest ARPU in the world (at about $2) and were still profitable.

&But the moment that number grew to more than a dozen overnight, and the new players started offering more affordable plans to subscribers, thatwhen profitability started to become elusive,& he said.

To top that off, the arrival of Reliance Jio, a telecom operator run by Indiarichest man, in 2016 in the country with the cheapest tariff plans in the world, upended the market once again, forcing several players to leave the market, or declare bankruptcies, or consolidate.

Indiamobile payments market is now heading to a similar path, said Kolla.

If there were not enough players fighting for a slice of Indiamobile payments market that Credit Suisse estimate could reach $1 trillion by 2023, WhatsApp, the most popular app in the country with more that 400 million users, is set to roll out its mobile payments service in the country in a couple of months.

At the aforementioned press conference, Nilekani advised Sharma and other players to focus on financial services such as lending.

Unfortunately, the coronavirus outbreak that promoted New Delhi to order a three-week lockdown last month is likely going to impact the ability of millions of people to use such services.

&India has more than 100 million microfinance accounts, serviced in cash every week by gig-economy workers, who hawk vegetables on street corners or embroider saris sold in malls, among other things. Three out of four workers make a living by working casually for others or at their family firms and farms. Prolonged shutdowns will impair their ability to repay loans of 2.1 trillion rupees ($28.5 billion), putting the worldlargest microfinance industry at risk,& wrote Bloomberg columnist Andy Mukherjee.

A recent update from Amazon has made it easier for Apple customers to buy or rent movies from its Prime Video app. Before, customers using the Prime Video app from an iOS device or Apple TV would have to first purchase or rent the movie elsewhere — like through the Amazon website or a Prime Video app on another device, such as the Fire TV, Roku or an Android device. Now, Prime Video users can make the purchase directly through the app instead.

The changes weren&t formally announced, but quickly spotted once live.

Amazon declined to comment, but confirmed to TechCrunch the feature is live now for customers in the U.S., U.K. and Germany.

The change makes it possible for Prime Video users to rent or buy hundreds of thousands of titles from Amazonvideo catalog. This includes new release movies, TV shows, classic movies, award-winning series, Oscar-nominated films and more.

This is supported on a majority of Apple devices, including the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch running iOS/iPadOS 12.2 or higher, as well as Apple TV HD and Apple TV 4K.

Amazon for years has prevented users from directly purchasing movies and TV shows from the Prime Video app on Apple devices. Thatbecause Apple requires a 30% cut of all in-app purchases taking place on its platform. To avoid fees, many apps — including not only Amazon, but also Netflix, Tinder, Spotify and others — have bypassed the major app platforms& fees at times by redirecting users to a website.

Since the news broke, many have questioned if Amazon had some sort of deal with Apple that was making the change possible — especially because it didn&t raise the cost of rentals or subscriptions to cover a 30% cut.

As it turns out, it sort of does.

Apple tells TechCrunch it offers a program aimed at supporting subscription video entertainment providers.

&Apple has an established program for premium subscription video entertainment providers to offer a variety of customer benefits — including integration with the Apple TV app, AirPlay 2 support, tvOS apps, universal search, Siri support and, where applicable, single or zero sign-on,& an Apple spokesperson said. &On qualifying premium video entertainment apps such as Prime Video, Altice One and Canal+, customers have the option to buy or rent movies and TV shows using the payment method tied to their existing video subscription,& the spokesperson noted.

It remains to be seen if Amazon will extend Apple the same courtesy on its Fire TV platform, by allowing Apple customers to rent or buy movies directly in the Apple TV app there.

Amazonadoption of this program is notable, as it comes at a time when Apple is under increased scrutiny for alleged anti-competitive behaviors — particularly those against companies with a rival product or service — like Prime Video is to Apple TV+, or Fire TV is to Apple TV, for example.

Amazon called attention to the new feature in its Prime Video app, which now alerts you upon first launch that &Movie night just got better& in a full-screen pop-up. It also advertises the easier option for direct purchases through a home screen banner.

Star Trek TV shows generally take a while to get good — but if any of them was going to have a strong start, you&d think it&d be &Star Trek: Picard.&

After all, it returns Patrick Stewart to the role that made him famous, that of one-time Starfleet captain Jean-Luc Picard. Plus, the writing team was led by Michael Chabon, author of beloved novels like &The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier - Clay& and &The Yiddish PolicemenUnion.& (He also wrote a lovely New Yorker piece about writing for Star Trek while his father was dying.)

As we discuss on the latest episode of the Original Content podcast, the resulting show doesn&t quite avoid the standard first season growing pains, with a fast-paced pilot followed by several slow, setup and exposition-heavy episodes. Throughout the season, the writers still seem to be figuring out what kind of show they want to be making, and it all ends with some preposterous, clunky twists in the two-part finale.

But even if &Picard& didn&t quite live up to our expectations, itstill a pretty good first season. It was genuinely moving to see Stewart on the bridge of a spaceship again, and to greet returning friends like Brent Spiner as Data (who died in the movie &Nemesis& but appears here in an opening dream sequence), as well as Jonathan Frakes as William Riker.

And despite its occasional clunkiness, the story finds new emotional notes for Picard as he struggles to overcome decades of disillusionment and become the Picard we know. Therealso fresh science fictional territory, as &Picard& treats artificial intelligence and synthetic life more seriously than any previous Star Trek show.

You can listen to our review in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcasts or find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You also can send us feedback directly. (Or suggest shows and movies for us to review!)

And if you&d like to skip ahead, herehow the episode breaks down: 0:00 Intro 0:19 &Star Trek: Picard& season 1 review 24:28 &Star Trek: Picard& spoiler discussion

Vinyl has been coming back for the last few years, but unlike MP3s, CDs or even cassette tapes (also coming back), records aren&t easy to record on your own. This tiny toy record maker makes it easy, though you probably shouldn&t expect that famous vinyl sound quality.

The Easy Record Maker was created by designer Yuri Suzuki, who has been itching to do something like this for years.

&This idea has been my dream machine since I was teenager,& Suzuki told Dezeen. Digital media are easy to copy, but making your own vinyl has proven difficult. &Of course professional-use record cutting machines exist, but they are very expensive. As ita complicated process with records, there is no way to create them at home.&

Thatnot quite true — last year the Phonocut record maker hit Kickstarter and more than doubled its goal, but the large (think turntable plus hi-fi), $1,000+ machine is a bit more than many are ready to commit to. The tiny Easy Record Maker is meant to be a simpler, smaller option for people who want, for instance, to let their kids create their own records for fun. (This was done in the past when records were more common, but this is surely a more serious effort.)

The device cuts and plays five-inch records, of which it comes with 10, at both 33 and 45 RPM. Operating it is as simple as plugging a sound source — your phone, a mic, whatever — into the 1/8″ headphone jack and playing the content while the cutting head is in the groove. Put down the other head to play it back, or put the record in any other turntable.

The resulting records have a &nice low-fi sound,& Suzuki said, which is as much as admitting they don&t sound particularly good — but thatnot the point.

Hehoping that the device will make the idea and process of creating vinyl records familiar to a new generation, helping them appreciate the physical side of the medium and the value of a permanent object associated with music rather than a fleeting stream.

Thereno price yet, and no definite retailers, but expect the Easy Record Maker to be available later this year (certainly before the holidays) online and in a few stores in the U.S. and EU.