INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Hey everybody, welcome back to Week in Review
The world of COVID-19 is our new reality, so I&ll continue to include links to some positive updates on research, but I&ll be shifting back
the focus to covering tech movers and shakers of the week.
If you&re reading this on the TechCrunch site, you can get this in your
inboxhere, and follow my tweetshere.
The big story
One thing that been interesting to see over the past few weeks is how our relationship
with screen time has changed
For many, screen time is now all the time and while we haven&t stopped using too many gadgets, there are some we&ve taken out of drawers and
closets and added to our repertoire.
For some, it been cooking gadgets
While I&ve yet to open up the sous vide gadget I received over the holidays, I was very tempted by my editor review of the Ooni gas-fired
outdoor pizza oven this week
For me, I&ve strangely seemed to spend a lot more time with the two gadgets I own that are made by Facebook
The currently sold-out Oculus Quest and Facebook Portal are the twin pillars of Facebook hardware strategy, but it been a bit interesting to
see how much more that strategy seems to thrive when we&re all stuck at home.
In a lot of ways, Facebook hardware feels built for a
quarantine.
The Quest spent a lot of time in my closet when I was out in the world pre-quarantine, but now that I&m in my house most of the
day, it spends a good amount of time strapped to my face
When VR was a more hyped technology, there was a broader conversation of whether it encouraged isolation, something promoters of the tech
pushed aside, noting that it enables rich shared experiences over the web
As we all host Zoom birthday parties and visit each other Animal Crossing islands, it becoming clear that with the absence of available
physical connections, we can turn a lot of things into rich shared experiences.
In a lot of ways, the Quest is a reminder of what I&m
The walls of my SF apartment feel less containing when I can hop into a VR workout or jump between games
For the first time, the technology has felt transportive in the way that the ads sold it, but it not that the experiences have gotten
better, the world has just gotten much worse.
In the same way that VR allows us to re-skin isolation, the Portal allows us to commiserate in
it.
My Portal usage has spiked in the past weeks as well
Before stay-at-home orders, coordinating a call with multiple family members was a logistical nightmare and FaceTime calls made it more
likely we&d get in touch with each other, but none of my siblings are wandering far from their Portals these days.
We are all still on our
phones, but for those of us working from home, mobile we are not
It always been fascinating that a tech company which has wildly succeeded at capturing the nuances of mobile computing has been so devoted
to selling hardware meant to move us around the internet while staying in place at home
Now, that we are all at home, we are all always there and the Portal really lives up to its name.
Facebook has designed gadgets explicitly
built for home use, and more than that, they&re designed devices built around session-based use cases
While Amazon Echos and Google Homes have fit into a persistent IoT platform that are always there for us, Facebook gadgets are more
high-maintenance, designed for people to fully commit to
For a company that focused on the universal nature of its software, its hardware has been built for almost no one needs, instead designed to
pull people into a future Facebook imagines.
For now, I put the Quest on my face and sometime I tell the Portal to call my sisters, but will
these quarantine oddities form tech habits I hold onto after this is all behind us? In these historic times, we are at home and we are
craving connections, and, for the time being, the Facebook future feels good.
Trends of the week
Here are a few big news items from big
companies, with green links to all the sweet, sweet added context:
Bezos wants to test all Amazon employees for COVID-19As Amazon bares the
brunt of America online shopping needs, CEO Jeff Bezos wrote in a shareholder letter this week about some of the strategies the company has
to ensure its workforce stays on the job
One possibility seems to be ®ular testing of all Amazonians, including those showing no symptoms,& Bezos says
Read more here.
Google is building a smart debit card
Just as every startup is getting into lending or banking, every tech giant wants to
have a piece of plastic (or metal) in your wallet
This week, TechCrunch broke news that Google is building a smart debit card that could rival the Apple Card
Read more about it here.
Apple launches a new iPhone SE
The iPhone SE has grown to become one of the more fascinating devices Apple sells,
cramming speedy components into a form factor that fallen out of vogue for their customer obsessed with the latest designs
The latest SE adopt the body of the iPhone 8 with souped-up internals that rival more recent flagships on performance
Read more about the new hardware here.
Photo by Andrew Theodorakis/Getty Images
COVID-19 Research
Here are some of the stories this week
chronicling the fight against the coronavirus pandemic.
FDA debuts new online portal to encourage donation of plasma from recovered COVID-19
patients
Mammoth Biosciences receives first peer-reviewed validation of CRISPR-based COVID-19 test
FDA authorizes production of a new
ventilator that costs up to 25x less than existing devices
FDA clears N95 decontamination process that could clean up to 4 million masks per
day
MIT developed a wireless box that can detect COVID-19 patients& movement and breathing at home
Extra Crunch
Investors and
entrepreneurs are shifting their chats to Zoom, so we&re taking note and hosting live Q-A discussions for our Extra Crunch subscribers with
some of tech most visible figures
We&ll be hosting these Extra Crunch live chats over the next several weeks.
Announcing the Extra Crunch Live event series
This upcoming
week, we&ll be talking to Aileen Lee - Ted Wang of Cowboy Ventures.Monday, April 20 at 10:30am PT / 1:30pm ET
We&ll be chatting with Aileen
Lee (former KPCB partner, founder and managing director at Cowboy.vc and coiner of the term &Unicorn&) and Ted Wang (Cowboy.vc partner,
former partner at Fenwick - West, and former outside counsel to Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, Square and more) about how they&re advising
their portfolio companies, if there are new and innovative ways for early-stage startups to secure capital beyond the traditional VC route
and whether startups should hunker down or lean in during these uncertain times.
