Latest and Hotest Technology Updates

Apple and Google ask for developer feedback on their contact tracing efforts, Facebook sees a “significant reduction” in ads and Microsoft makes life easier for IT managers.

Here’s your Daily Crunch for April 30, 2020.

Apple and Google release first seed of COVID-19 exposure notification API for contact tracing app developers

This is a developer-focused release, and it’s a seed of the API in development, with the primary intent of collecting feedback from developers who will be using the API to create new contact tracing and notification apps on behalf of public health agencies.

Apple and Google first announced the combined API and eventual system-level contact tracing feature on April 10, and intend to release the first version of the API publicly in mid-May, with system-level integration to follow in the coming months. The tech is designed to be privacy-preserving, ensuring that contact IDs are rotating and randomized, and never tied to an individual's specific identifying information.

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How should VCs approach preparing for a shaky Q2?

Sponsored by Certent

With the impact of COVID-19 reverberating across every industry, there's more than ever for investors to manage. We sat down with professionals at Certent to discuss what investors need to know in Q2.

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Facebook stock spikes despite 'significant reduction' in demand for ads

While Facebook's ad revenues in Q1 increased by 17% year-over-year growth, Facebook used its earnings announcement to hedge expectations for Q2. In its release, the company said it saw "a significant reduction in the demand for advertising, as well as a related decline in the pricing of our ads, over the last three weeks of the first quarter of 2020."

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Microsoft makes it easier to get started with Windows Virtual Desktops

Microsoft announced a slew of updates to various parts of its Microsoft 365 ecosystem. The thrust is to make life easier for the IT admins that help provision and manage corporate Windows — and Mac — machines, something that's even more important as many companies try to adapt to a new work-from-home environment.

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Twitter Q1: sales up 3% to $808M as it swings to a loss on COVID-19, mDAUS hit record 166M

None of this should come as a surprise. Twitter announced more than a month ago that it was removing its own financial guidance because of the instability of its business due to COVID-19, noting only that it would be lower than expected.

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Freada Kapor Klein warns of 'vulture capitalists' during pandemic

"We have seen a lot of VCs acting incredibly badly in the last couple of weeks — taking advantage of startups that are in a precarious position," Kapor Capital’s Fraeda Kapor Klein told us. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

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Here's what NASA's Mars helicopter will look like when it makes history with the first extraterrestrial powered flight

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory created a trailer of sorts to show you approximately what the flight will look like, sometime after the Mars 2020 mission’s targeted February 18, 2021 arrival date.

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With fresh support from its billionaire backers, Pivot Bio is ushering in a farming revolution

Pivot uses genetically edited microbes to replicate the work that naturally occurring bacteria had done for millions of years to fix nitrogen in the soil.

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Google is making a big push for its Zoom competitor, Samsung outlines how COVID-19 is reshaping consumer demand and Ford delays its autonomous vehicle plans.

Here’s your Daily Crunch for April 29, 2020.

Google is making Meet free for everyone

Meet is Google’s video meeting tool for businesses. (Hangouts is the company’s free consumer equivalent.) Until now, you could participate in a Meet call without being a paying user, but you needed a paid G Suite account to start calls.

Meanwhile, Google’s parent company Alphabet reported that its business grew more than expected in the first quarter of the year — but with a “significant slowdown” in March.

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Who's most responsible for your data privacy protection?

Sponsored by NortonLifeLock

Government? Companies? You? To better understand the interplay between these entities and how they'll affect the future of privacy, we looked into key findings from the 2019 NortonLifeLock Cyber Safety Insights Report.

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Samsung expects COVID-19 to hurt smartphone and TV sales, but increase demand for memory

More earnings news: In its first-quarter report, Samsung said it expects the COVID-19 pandemic to continue impacting its business for the rest of the year, cutting into sales for smartphones and TVs, but increasing demand for PCs, servers and memory chips as people continue to work or study from home.

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Ford postpones autonomous vehicle service until 2022

“Understanding customer behavior is a critically important part of building a new mobility service built around trust and making people's lives easier,” the company said. In fact, Ford said COVID-19 has already affected consumer behavior in China, prompting the automaker to turn to online sales.

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As COVID-19 misinformation grows, YouTube brings video fact-checking to the US

Fact-check articles will begin appearing in relevant search results, using information pulled from a dozen or so third-party publishers, including The Dispatch, FactCheck.org, PolitiFact and The Washington Post Fact Checker.

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A conversation with Sasha Astafyeva, Atomico's new consumer-focused investment partner

We caught up with Astafyeva for a conversation that spanned the coronavirus crisis' impact on her area of interest, new trends during and potentially after lockdown and how it feels to be a consumer-focused investor in turbulent times. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

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Spotify Q1 beats on sales of $2B with monthly active users up 31% to 286M

The coronavirus may be decimating some corners of the economy, but the impact on the digital music — as evidenced by the world's biggest music streaming company — appears to be minimal.

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Smart contact lens startup Mojo Vision raises $51M

Mojo Vision's technology still felt early-stage when we met with the company back at CES — but the demos we did see were enough to convince us that there really could be something to the California startup's smart content lens technology.

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• Senior Unity Engineer at AmazeVR (West Hollywood, CA, USA)
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• Chief Operations Officer at Capital (New York, New York, USA)

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Graduation goes virtual, more details emerge about the U.K.’s contact tracing app and Shopify launches a mobile commerce app.

Here’s your Daily Crunch for April 28, 2020.

Facebook will stream a virtual graduation ceremony featuring Oprah and Miley Cyrus

Here’s some consolation for the Class of 2020: a virtual graduation ceremony, which kicks off at 11AM PT/2PM ET on May 15 via the Facebook Watch App. Oprah Winfrey will be giving the commencement address, while Awkwafina, Jennifer Garner, Lil Nas X and Simone Biles will all be giving speeches. And Miley Cyrus is set to perform.

Other sites are holding similar events — and many schools are also planning their own, less star-studded events to celebrate graduations remotely.

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UK's coronavirus contact tracing app could ask users to share location data

More details have emerged about a coronavirus contact tracing app being developed by U.K. authorities. NHSX CEO Matthew Gould said today that future versions of the app could ask users to share location data to help authorities learn more about how the virus propagates.

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Shopify launches Shop, a new mobile app

The app is actually an update and rebrand of Arrive, an app for tracking packages from Shopify merchants and other retailers — in addition to package tracking, Shop allows consumers to browse a feed of recommended products, learn more about each brand and make purchases using the one-click Shop Pay checkout process.

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Okta hires ex-Symantec executive as new chief security officer

David Bradbury, a security veteran with more than two-decades of security experience and recently served as chief security officer at Symantec, takes over from Yassir Abousselham, who departed for Splunk in February.

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Five top gaming investors explain how the pandemic is reshaping MMOs and social games

This month, when we asked 17 VCs how this era would impact consumer startups, gaming was one of the top verticals they named. We wanted to learn more about how the venture community thinks about the future of this sector, so we asked five experienced gaming investors about where they do — and don't — see new opportunities within this trend. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

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DJI's mini Mavic Air gets an upgrade with improved camera and battery life

The original Mavic Air’s 21 minutes of life was among Brian Heater’s key frustrations with the product. The company says the new drone should be able to get up to 34 minutes on a charge.

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Partech raises $100 million seed fund

The firm is looking for companies at the very early stage, from pre-seed to pre-Series A. Partech can invest as little as a few hundred thousands dollars and as much as several million dollars, depending on the stage of the startup.

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• Project Engineer at Seeger Weiss LLP (New Jersey, USA)
• Senior Unity Engineer at AmazeVR (West Hollywood, CA, USA)
• Technical Artist (Unity) at AmazeVR (West Hollywood, CA, USA)
• IT Support Engineer at Rose Associates (New York, NY, USA)
• Chief Operations Officer at Capital (New York, New York, USA)

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