Your iPhone will soon be able to tell 911 about your medical conditions and allergies
Remote work is a huge opportunity for high-impact climate policy
Intel Is Acting Like Only the Paranoid Survive. The CEO Wants It to Stay That Way…Bob Swan sees a future company of more empowered managers: ‘If you know the right thing to do, just go do it… For instance, as the pandemic spread, many customers ordered more chips for PCs that were in high demand as employees shifted to working from home. Cloud-computing giants, including Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp., also wanted more chips to cater to growing demand in the work-from-home economy…”(Paywall)
Zoom acquires Keybase to get end-to-end encryption expertise
Walmart is piloting a pricier 2-hour Express grocery delivery service
Ocado said that retail sales were up by 40 per cent in the second quarter (paywall)
GitHub Codespaces lets you code in your browser without any setup
COVID-19
“…The changes in our traffic light system to assist pedestrians and avoid build-ups of pedestrians at crossings actually preclude a return to previous high levels of private car use…”
Property Investors See Fiber-Optic Cables as ‘Railroads of the Future’ (paywall)
NHS reveals source code behind the contact-tracing app
Roaming ‘robodog’ politely tells Singapore park-goers to keep apart
Facebook to allow employees to work remotely until year-end
Google will let most employees work remotely until the end of 2020
Microsoft updates WFH policy, lets employees work remotely through October
Zoom Bachelorette, Minimum Viable Shows, and the nature of celebrity in quarantine
Wow! Noise is a secret killer of performance. A 10db noise increase (from a dishwasher to a vacuum) drops productivity by 5% – but most people don't notice since it impacts cognition, not effort. Also, note that noise is greater in poorer neighborhoods… https://t.co/RaIAsSudyYpic.twitter.com/ROejxzbJcP
“…SARS-CoV-2 has a mutation rate of less than 25 mutations per year, compared with influenza’s mutation rate of almost 50 mutations per year, according to an analysis by computational biologists of the Nextstrain consortium…” (WSJ)
EU data portal launches to support COVID-19 research
“…In general, emerging use-cases for 5G can be classed into two groups: those requiring a low latency round-trip time between device and application service (e.g. cloud gaming, server-side video rendering and deep learning) and those characterized by localized/site-bound application deployment (e.g. Industry 4.0, controller software for machines, sensors and actuators infactories)…”
Bill Gates: The first modern pandemic & the scientific advances we need to stop COVID-19.
Germany’s COVID-19 contacts tracing app to link to labs for test result notification
First version of Apple and Google’s contact tracing API should be available to developers next week
AWS launches Amazon AppFlow, its new SaaS integration service
“...Airbnb’s home page is suddenly very focused on three things — online experiences, monthly stays and what you’re calling “frontline,” which is an area for hosts to offer housing to healthcare staff and firstresponders…“
“…Amazon’s private-label business encompasses more than 45 brands with some 243,000 products, from AmazonBasics batteries to Stone & Beamfurniture……39% of U.S. online shopping occurs on Amazon, according to research firm eMarketer……The majority of Amazon’s sales—58%—come through third-party sellers, primarily small and medium-size firms that list their items for sale on Amazon’s Marketplace platform.”WSJ (Paywall)
The World Bank predicts global remittances will fall by 20% this year
Airbnb rolls out new features aimed at its next big bet: longer-term stays
Google expands AI calling service Duplex to Australia, Canada, and the UK
Apple, Google team up on coronavirus contact tracing
Microsoft says video calls in Teams grew 1,000% in March
People Are Open-Sourcing Their Patents and Research to Fight Coronavirus
White House advisor Dr Fauci says handshaking needs to stop even when pandemic ends—other experts agree
iOS 14: Apple developing ‘Clips’ feature for using apps without requiring full downloads
The Humble Phone Call Has Made a Comeback…”…Verizon said it was now handling an average of 800 million wireless calls a day during the week, more than double the number made on Mother’s Day…”
All Microsoft events will be digital-only until July 2021
“…And in the long run, the firms that survive will have to master a new environment as the crisis and the response to it accelerate three trends:
an energising adoption of new technologies
an inevitable retreat from freewheeling global supply chains
a worrying rise in well-connected oligopolies…” (paywall)
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)
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.
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, Microsoftsaid.”
Netflix urged to slow streaming to prevent breaking the internet
Ford releases a data set to accelerate autonomous car development
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 🤔
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
Amazon makes its same-day delivery service faster in select U.S. cities
“…British online grocer Ocado warns of “exceptionally high demand” as coronavirusspreads…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’