• Google Maps Community Mobility Reports (Thanks to Önder)
• Spotify and Warner Music Group have renewed their global licensing partnership
• Mobile app spending to double by 2024, despite economic impacts of COVID-19
• Our Post-Covid World
• WSJ: Instagram Encroaches on Amazon With New Shopping Feature (paywall)
• How Many Jobs Can be Done at Home?
• Apple’s iOS 14 may turn iCloud Keychain into a true 1Password and LastPass competitor
• Ford, GE plan to produce 50,000 ventilators in 100 days
• 775 per cent increase in usage of Microsoft Azure cloud services
• Modern meteorology was born 60 years ago today
• SoftBank is letting internet satellite company OneWeb file for bankruptcy
• Scott Kelly on isolation
• The US Army’s Virus Research Lab Gears Up to Fight Covid-19
• Coronavirus Ended the Screen-Time Debate. Screens Won
• Apple buys weather app Dark Sky
• Ikea acquires AI imaging startup Geomagical Labs to supercharge room visualisations
• Apple accidentally confirms the existence of an unreleased product, AirTags
• Peloton launches an Android TV app
• In a depressing turn of events, one group of hosts still receiving bookings through Airbnb are those offering properties close to hospitals. FT (paywall)
• “...An epidemic poses special challenges to face-to-face retail…In normal times, “60 cents of every food dollar spent in New York City is spent in restaurants,” he says. “Let me say that again: 60% of the food eaten in New York is made by restaurants…There will be the next generation of packaging…” WSJ (paywall)

• Citymapper Mobility Index
• WhatsApp has seen a 40% increase in usage due to COVID-19 pandemic
• Jupe is a new startup aiming to address hospital room shortfalls with modular, mobile space
• Airbnb to provide free or subsidized housing for 100,000 COVID-19 healthcare workers
• Coronavirus home test delivery gives Amazon key move towards UK healthcare dominance
• Sony Spins Off Camera Business Into Separate Company
• Apple releases final iOS 13.4, iPadOS 13.4, macOS 10.15.4, tvOS 13.4, and watchOS 6.2
• Amazon’s Prime Video Cinema hub to corral new theatre releases
• Coronavirus Will Change the World Permanently. Here’s How.
• London Business School: The economics of a pandemic: the case of Covid-19 [PDF]
• WSJ: Online Grocers Are Getting a Preview of Their Future (paywall)
• FT/LEX: Apple: 5G-shock (paywall)
• How 3M Plans to Make More Than a Billion Masks By End of Year…The company has in two months doubled global production of N95 masks to about 100 million a month, and it’s planning to invest in new equipment to push annual mask production to 2 billion within 12 months.
• Duke University uses vaporized hydrogen peroxide to clean N95 face masks for reuse
• How the Pandemic Will End…“…We realized that her child might be one of the first of a new cohort who are born into a society profoundly altered by COVID-19. We decided to call them Generation C…”
• WSJ: A Real Digital Infrastructure at Last (Eric Schmidt) (paywall)
• WSJ: Europe Tracks Residents’ Phones for Coronavirus Research (paywall)

Parenting in 2019: stop staring at that screen. Parenting in 2020: have you done your online math, science, art, reading, writing, and music classes? Ok, now go FaceTime with your friends.

— Luke Wroblewski (@lukew) March 26, 2020

• McKinsey: COVID-19: Implications for business
• How execs at Twitter, Slack and Box decided to send everyone home
• Amazon to Hire 100,000 Warehouse and Delivery Workers Amid Coronavirus Shutdowns
• Nokia adds 5G to worldwide IoT network, lets carriers test new sensors
• “Microsoft Corp’s Teams chat and conferencing app gained more than 12 million daily users in one week, a 37.5% jump as more people worked from home during the coronavirus outbreak, the company said on Thursday…Teams had 44 million users as of March 18, Microsoft said, more than double the 20 million daily active users that the software maker reported in November. Teams users grew from 32 million to 44 million in the period between March 11 and March 18 alone, as many more U.S. companies asked employees to work from home, Microsoft said.”
• Netflix urged to slow streaming to prevent breaking the internet
• Ford releases a data set to accelerate autonomous car development
• iPadOS 13.4 lets iPads use trackpads
• Here’s everything new in Android 11 Developer Preview 2
• Can Astronauts Use GPS to Navigate on the Moon? NASA Scientists Say Yes
• PlayStation 5 will feature a 10.2-teraflop GPU and a speedy custom SSD
• E-commerce sales surpassed 10% of total (US) retail sales in 2019 for the first time
• WSJ: Square Gets Green Light to Open a Bank (paywall)
• Closer than ever: It is 100 seconds to midnight
• Italian hospital saves Covid-19 patients lives by 3D printing valves for reanimation devices

• Pandemic Erodes Gig Economy Work
• Coronavirus will change the grocery industry forever…”A third of consumers said Sunday that they had purchased groceries for online pick up or delivery in the past seven days, according to a survey by analysts at Gordon Haskett Research Advisors. Around 41% said they were buying groceries online for the first time.”

China's #WechatPay generates 1 billion+ payment transactions per day. That's more than Visa and Mastercard combined 🤔

— Matthew Brennan (@mbrennanchina) March 19, 2020

Verizon says that video gaming traffic was up 75% week over week across its network. General traffic was up 20% WoW. Video streaming up 12% WoW. Social media usage was flat. The increase is primarily due to lockdowns and self isolation keeping people at home due to COVID-19 pic.twitter.com/Bbb1ehmPhY

— Daniel Ahmad (@ZhugeEX) March 18, 2020

fascinated by Pre-Covidian Era & Covidian Era views of the World. pic.twitter.com/u7HoG368we

— Luke Wroblewski (@lukew) March 18, 2020

• OECD AI Policy Observatory
• Why you sometimes need to break the rules in data viz
• Harvard to Make All Classes Online March 23, President Says
• 2014: Sequoia’s Investment Memo on YouTube
• Huawei expects 20% drop in Android smartphone sales this year
• Amazon is now selling its cashierless store technology to other retailers
• Amazon is secretly working on a cure for the common cold
• What Office Life Might Look Like in the Year 2030 (paywall)
• Coronavirus Conference Gets Canceled Because of Coronavirus
• Augmented-reality startup Magic Leap reportedly considering selling itself
• Hackers are jumping on the COVID-19 pandemic to spread malware
• AT&T Suspends Broadband Data Caps During Coronavirus Crisis
• Gsuite 2 billion monthly active users
• Europe’s Deliveroo and Glovo switch on contactless delivery during COVID-19 pandemic
• Coronavirus Forces World’s Largest Work-From-Home Experiment

• Amazon makes its same-day delivery service faster in select U.S. cities
• “…British online grocer Ocado warns of “exceptionally high demand” as coronavirus spreads…Ocado suggests placing grocery orders two to three days in advance and booking a weekday delivery slot…Ocado’s stock rose more than 6% in late afternoon trading on Monday…”
• Facebook Messenger on iOS is now twice as fast and a quarter the size
• Alibaba says AI can identify coronavirus infections with 96% accuracy within 20 seconds
• Apple now lets apps send ads in push notifications…Apple single sign-on coming next month
• Google’s self-driving biz Waymo eyes expansion with $2.25B cash injection…this is the first time the company has welcomed external investment. Investors included VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, auto part maker Magna, and American auto retailer AutoNation
• Alipay owner Ant Financial takes minority stake in Klarna…”…Klarna said its technology is being used by more than 200,000 retailers and e-commerce platforms globally at this point, including AliExpress, H&M, ASOS,  Expedia Group, IKEA, Farfetch, Adidas, Spotify, Samsung and Nike…Last year it said it added over 75,000 new merchants …It claims a base of 85 million shoppers...”
• Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference will now be online only due to coronavirus concerns
• Earth may have been a ‘water world’ 3bn years ago, scientists find
• FT:Operators will spend about $1tn on kit to enable them to offer the latest generation networks (paywall)
• GM reveals ‘Ultium,’ the heart of its EV strategy…Using a single architecture for such a wide variety of vehicles provides much-needed scale and capital-efficiency to what has been a small-volume and profitability-challenged EV market
• NASA accepts applications for astronauts for the first time in four years
• Clearview AI is operating a sister entity called Insight Camera that’s been experimenting with live facial recognition
• Electric vehicles are changing the future of auto maintenance…Tires and glass emerge as dominant consumables of the EV era
• Nvidia acquires data storage and management platform SwiftStack…a software-centric data storage and management platform that supports public cloud, on-premises and edge deployments.
• Sequoia Capital sent a memo to its portfolio companies on Thursday.
• Twitter is testing ephemeral tweets in Brazil and calling them ‘fleets’

• “…Google is placing new restrictions on which Android apps can track your location in the background, with a new review process that will check whether an app definitely needs access to the data…”
• Intuit confirms that it is buying Credit Karma for $7.1B in cash and stock
• Revolut raises $500 million at a $5.5 billion valuation
• “…Amazon will open the doors to a 10,000 square-foot Amazon Go Grocery store in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighbourhood, less than a mile from the tech giant’s downtown Seattle headquarters. It’ll be stocked with 5,000 different products…”
• Global telcos join Alphabet, SoftBank’s flying cellphone antenna lobbying effort
• WSJ: Teens Are Deleting Instagrams Almost as Fast as They Post Them (paywall)
• FT/LEX: Tier/e-scooters: ride at your own risk…Competition in the sector is as crowded as the cities catered for — expect consolidation (paywall)
• FT: Mastercard announces new chief executive (paywall)
• PDF: The Future of the Last-Mile Ecosystem (World Economic Forum)

• The a16z Marketplace 100: Index and analysis
• YouTube has more than two billion monthly users around the world, and 500 hours of video uploaded every minute.
• Softech 2020 Tech Report (in Turkish) 
• Walmart is quietly working on an Amazon Prime competitor called Walmart+
• The first protein to be discovered in a meteorite.
• Gmail: Improving Malicious Document Detection in Gmail with Deep Learning

• AWS acquired Datarow
• Morgan Stanley Is Buying E*Trade, Betting on Smaller Customers…Investment bank will pay $13 billion for the e-broker (paywall)
• In 2020, Amazon will deliver more packages in the United States than FedEx…Amazon to deliver 3.5 billion packages through own network in 2019
• Apple is considering letting users change default email, browser, music apps in iOS
• Battery charging meets machine learning
• DoorDash, Grubhub and others are weighing tie-ups or looking for funding…“…DoorDash Inc., Postmates Inc. and Uber Technologies Inc.’s Eats have each discussed merging in various combinations last year, according to people familiar with those talks. None resulted in a deal…” (paywall)
• Elon Musk’s Boring Company Finishes First Tunnel for 155mph Vegas Loop
• China Turns to Health-Rating Apps to Control Movements During Coronavirus Outbreak…Tech giants such as Alibaba and Tencent tapped to develop color-coded systems to classify people based on their health conditions and travel history (paywall)
• Twitch to top 40 million US viewers next year, forecast says
• Why DNA tests are suddenly unpopular
• Google launches the first developer preview of Android 11…Currently, the release schedule calls for monthly developer preview releases until April, followed by three betas and a final release in Q3 2020.
• Etsy Accelerates AI Experimentation Thanks to Cloud (Paywall)
• How ‘The Mandalorian’ and ILM invisibly reinvented film and TV production
• Powerful antibiotic discovered using machine learning for first time
• A group of ex-NSA and Amazon engineers are building a ‘GitHub for data’
• Almost half of connected medical devices are vulnerable to hackers exploiting BlueKeep

• GSMA cancels Mobile World Congress due to coronavirus concerns
• Our phones can now detect health problems from Parkinson’s to depression. Is that a good thing?
• Microsoft’s game streaming service Project xCloud launches in preview on iOS
• Blue Origin’s new rocket engine production facility opens on Monday
• Rocket Lab will launch a satellite to the Moon for NASA to prepare for the Lunar Gateway
• Shopify Annual Report PDF [2019]
• The making of Mojo, AR contact lenses that give your eyes superpowers
• Tesla owner says remotely disabled Autopilot features have been restored
• Apple might use its own 5G antenna in its 2020 iPhones
• Britain sets new daily record for wind generation, topping 44% of country’s electricity consumption
• Online-only platforms are going offline with permanent spaces
• YouTube says it paid the music industry more than $3 billion last year
• WhatsApp hits 2 billion users, up from 1.5 billion 2 years ago
• Is a $1000 Aftermarket Add-On as Capable as Tesla’s Auto­pilot and Cadillac’s Super Cruise?