Read more: Coronavirus: UK broadband data caps removed during pandemic
Write comment (93 Comments)Read more: Coronavirus: Mercedes F1 to make breathing help
Write comment (95 Comments)Only a few days after saying that he would like to see the country &opened up and raring to go by Easter& and maybe relax rules for at least some parts of the U.S. sooner than later, President Trump today announced that he is extending the governmentsocial distancing guidelines through April 30.
&Nothing would be worse than declaring victory before the victory is won. That would be the greatest loss of all,& he said. &Therefore, the next two weeks and during this period itvery important that everyone strongly follows the guidelines — have to follow the guidelines that our great vice president holds up a lot. Heholding that up a lot. He believes in it so strongly. The better you do, the faster this whole nightmare will end. Therefore, we will be extending our guidelines to April 30 to slow the spread.&
He also noted that we can expect more data and information about the federal governmentstrategy on Tuesday. &We&ll be having a very important statement made on Tuesday.&
Earlier today, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said that we should expect between 100,000 and 200,000 deaths from COVID-19. &The reason the president made the announcement today about going to the end of April, is because we want to make sure that we don&t prematurely think we&re doing so great. We may be, but we want to push it to the extreme,& Fauci, who called the decision &wise and prudent,& said in todaypress conference.
And while Trump has said that he wants to open up the country as fast as possible and get the economy back on track, it now looks that — at least for the time being — that timeline has been pushed back as he listened to Fauci and task force head Deborah Birxadvice.
The new date he mentioned today is June 1st.
&We can expect that by June 1st we will be well on our way to recovery,& he said today. &We think by June 1st a lot of great things will be happening. I want every citizen in our country to take heart and confidence in the fact that we have the best medical minds in the world tackling this disease.&
Currently, Trump said, death rates are expected to peak in two weeks. The original &15 days to slow the spread& campaign launched just under two weeks ago, on March 15.
Read more: White House extends social distancing guidelines to April 30
Write comment (96 Comments)Hello folks, welcome back (or hi for the first time) to The Station, a weekly newsletter dedicated to the all the ways people and packages move around this world. I&m your host, Kirsten Korosec, senior transportation reporter at TechCrunch.
I also have started to publish a shorter version of the newsletter on TechCrunch . Thatwhat you&re reading now. For the whole enchilada — which comes out every Saturday — you can subscribe to the newsletter by heading over here, and clicking &The Station.& Itfree!
Before I get into the thick of things, how is everyone doing? This isn&t a rhetorical question; I&m being earnest. I want to hear from you (note my email below). Maybe you&re a startup founder, a safety driver at an autonomous vehicle developer, a venture capitalist, engineer or gig economy worker. I&m interested in how you are doing, what you&re doing to cope and how you&re getting around in your respective cities.
Please reach out and email me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. to share thoughts, opinions or tips or send a direct message to @kirstenkorosec.
It was a rough week for micromobility amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Bird laid off about 30% of its employees due to the uncertainty caused by the coronavirus.
In a memo obtained by TechCrunch, Bird CEO Travis VanderZanden said:
The unprecedented COVID-19 crisis has forced our leadership team and the board of directors to make many extremely difficult and painful decisions relating to some of your teammates. As you know, we&ve had to pause many markets around the world and drastically cut spending. Due to the financial and operational impact of the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, we are saying goodbye to about 30% of our team.
The fallout from COVID-19 isn&t limited to Bird. Lime is also reportedly considering laying off up to 70 people in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Meanwhile, Wheels deployed e-bikes with self-cleaning handlebars and brake levers to help reduce the risk of spreading the virus. NanoSeptictechnology, which is powered by light, uses mineral nano-crystals to create an oxidation reaction that is stronger than bleach, according to the companywebsite. NanoSeptic then implements that technology into skins and mats to turn anything from a mousepad to door handles to handlebars into self-cleaning surfaces.
The upshot to all of this: COVID-19 is turning shared mobility on its head. That means lay offs will continue. It also means companies like Wheels will try to innovate or pivot in hopes of staying alive.
While some companies pulled scooters off city streets, others changed how they marketed services. Some turned efforts to gig economy workers delivering food. Others, like shared electric moped service Revel, arefocusing on healthcare workers.
Revel is now letting healthcare workers in New York rent its mopeds for free. To qualify, they just need to upload their employee ID. For now, the free rides for healthcare workers is limited to Brooklyn, Queens and a new service area from upper Manhattan down to 65th street. Revel expanded the area to include hospitals in one of the epicenters of the disease.
Revel is still renting its mopeds to the rest of us out there, although they encourage people to only use them for essential trips. As you might guess, ridership is down significantly. The company says it has stepped up efforts of disinfecting and cleaning the mopeds and helmets. Revel also operates in Austin, New York City, Oakland, and Washington. It has suspended service in Miami per local regulations.
— Megan Rose Dickey (with a cameo from Kirsten Korosec)
Typically, I would highlight a large funding round for a startup in the &deal of the week& section. This week, I have broadened my definition.
On Friday, the House of Representatives passed a historic stimulus package known as the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security or &CARES& act. President Donald Trump signed it hours later. The CARES act contains an unprecedented $2.2 trillion in total financial relief for businesses, public institutions and individuals hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic.
TechCrunch has just started what will be a multi-day dive into the 880-page document. And in the coming weeks, I will highlight anything related or relevant to the transportation industry or startups here.
I&ll focus today on three items: airlines, public transit and small business loans.
U.S. airlines are receiving $58 billion. It breaks down to about $25 billion in loans for commercial carriers, $25 billion in payroll grants to cover the 750,000 employees who work in the industry. Cargo carriers will receive $4 billion in loans and $4 billion in grants. These loans come with some strings attached. Airlines will have to agree not to lay off workers through the end of September. The package forbids stock buybacks and issuing dividends to shareholders for a year after paying off one of the loans.
Public transit has been allocated $24.9 billion. The CARES Act provides almost three times the FY 2020 appropriations for this category, according to the American Public Transportation Association. The funds are distributed through a formula that puts $13.79 billion to urban, $2 billion to rural, $7.51 billion towards state of good repair and $1.71 billion for high-density state transit. APTA notes that these funds are for operating expenses to prevent, prepare for, and respond to COVID-19 beginning on January 20, 2020.
Amtrak received an additional $1 billion in grants, that directs $492 million of those funds towards the northeast corridor. The remaining goes to the national network.
Small business loans are a critical piece of the bill, and an area where many startups may be focused. There is a lot to unpack here, but in basic terms the act provides $350 billion in loans that will be administered by the Small Business Administration to businesses with 500 or fewer employees. These loans are meant to cover an eligible borrowerpayroll, rent, utilities expenses and mortgage interest for up to eight weeks. If the borrower maintains its workforce, some of the loan may be forgiven.
Venture-backed startups seeking relief may run into problems qualifying. It all comes down to how employees are counted. Normally, SBA looks at a companyaffiliates to determine if they qualify. So, a startup owned by a private equity firm is considered affiliated with the other companies in that firmportfolio, which could push employment numbers far beyond 500. That rule also seems to apply to venture-backed startups, in which more than 50% of voting stock is held by the VC.
The guidance on this is still spotty. ButFenwick - West, a Silicon Valley law firm, said in recent explainer that the rule has the &potential to be problematic for startups because the SBA affiliation rules are highly complex and could cause lenders to group together several otherwise unaffiliated portfolio companies of a single venture capital firm in determining whether a borrower has no more than 500 employees.&
One final note: The SBA has waived these affiliation rules for borrowers in the food services and food supply chain industry. Itunclear what that might mean for those food automation startups or companies building autonomous vehicles for food delivery.
COVID-19 has taken over, but deals are still happening. Herea rundown of some of partnerships, acquisitions and fundraising round that got our attention.
Remember, the weekly newsletter features even more mobility news and insights. I&ll leave ya&ll with this one chart from Inrix. The company has launched a U.S. traffic synopsis that it plans to publish every Monday. The chart shows traffic from the week of March 14 to March 20. The upshot: COVID-19 reduced traffic by 30% nationwide.
Microsoft is pulling out of an investment in an Israeli facial recognition technology developer as part of a broader policy shift to halt any minority investments in facial recognition startups, the company announced late last week.
The decision to withdraw its investment from AnyVision, an Israeli company developing facial recognition software, came as a result of an investigation into reports that AnyVisiontechnology was being used by the Israeli government to surveil residents in the West Bank.
The investigation, conducted by former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and his team at Covington - Burling, confirmed that AnyVisiontechnology was used to monitor border crossings between the West Bank and Israel, but did not &power a mass surveillance program in the West Bank.&
Microsoftventure capital arm, M12 Ventures, backed AnyVision as part of the company$74 million financing round which closed in June 2019. Investors who continue to back the company include DFJ Growth and OG Technology Partners, LightSpeed Venture Partners, Robert Bosch GmbH, Qualcomm Ventures, and Eldridge Industries.
Microsoft first staked out its position on how the company would approach facial recognition technologies in 2018, when President Brad Smith issued a statement calling on government to come up with clear regulations around facial recognition in the U.S.
Smithcalls for more regulation and oversight became more strident by the end of the year, when Microsoft issued a statement on its approach to facial recognition.
Smith wrote:
We and other tech companies need to start creating safeguards to address facial recognition technology. We believe this technology can serve our customers in important and broad ways, and increasingly we&re not just encouraged, but inspired by many of the facial recognition applications our customers are deploying. But more than with many other technologies, this technology needs to be developed and used carefully. After substantial discussion and review, we have decided to adopt six principles to manage these issues at Microsoft. We are sharing these principles now, with a commitment and plans to implement them by the end of the first quarter in 2019.
The principles that Microsoft laid out included privileging: fairness, transparency, accountability, non-discrimination, notice and consent, and lawful surveillance.
Critics took the company to task for its investment in AnyVision, saying that the decision to back a company working with the Israeli government on wide-scale surveillance ran counter to the principles it had set out for itself.
Now, after determining that controlling how facial recognition technologies are deployed by its minority investments is too difficult, the company is suspending its outside investments in the technology.
&For Microsoft, the audit process reinforced the challenges of being a minority investor in a company that sells sensitive technology, since such investments do not generally allow for the level of oversight or control that Microsoft exercises over the use of its own technology,& the company wrote in a statement on its M12 Ventures website. &Microsoftfocus has shifted to commercial relationships that afford Microsoft greater oversight and control over the use of sensitive technologies.&