Category: StartUps

One of the defining characteristics of the European Union has been its strong policy of taking an open approach when it comes to borders in the region: the EU may be a collection of individual countries, but it works as one, and so when you travel from one to the other as an EU citizen, you can move as freely as you do within your own country. Now, in the wake of the novel coronavirus pandemic, all that is changing. Today the EU announced new measures to limit movement between borders within the EU, with the restrictions initially covering 30 days.

After that, Russia, which shares a border with various countries in the EU, also announced its own border closure.

We have already had a number of border closures within the EU and the wider region — in keeping with the global response to movement, and specifically in response to outbreaks that starter earlier (for example, Italy has had travel restrictions in place for weeks at this point). The aim with today’s announcement — laid out in a press briefing — however, is to bring about a more coordinated approach across the region.

“Our measures to contain the Coronavirus outbreak will be effective only if we coordinate on the European level,” said EU president Ursula von der Leyen in a statement. She added that the travel ban does not extend to everyone: emergency medical professionals and other essential goods and services will continue to move across borders, as will citizens of the respective countries coming home, and those making their way home through a country. “We have to take exceptional measures to protect the health of our citizens. But let’s make sure goods and essential services continue to flow in our internal market. This is the only way to prevent shortages of medical equipment or food. It’s not only an economic issue: our single market is a key instrument of European solidarity. I am in discussion with all Member States so that we confront this challenge together, as a Union.”

Russia, meanwhile, had closed off borders with specific countries such as Iran (which has been one of the worst-hit countries globally) and Poland, and now it is closing off its border to all international travel until the beginning of May (for now), with the exception of Russian nationals, airline professionals, diplomats and a few other specific categories.

Border closures are coming into effect the world over in an effort to stem the infection rate of the novel coronavirus, with the UK yesterday announcing more restrictions on travel, and Canada raising its walls earlier today. (The UK is not included in the EU measures, given its exit from the European Union; but it has followed suit regardless on its own steam and via its own policies.)

Many of these measures are coming in the wake of a serious curtailment of travel anyway — a trend that has had a severe impact already on airlines and other companies in the travel and tourism industries.

The impact on tech in Europe (and indeed, globally) has been a palpable chilling effect. Apart from the direct hit that travel, tourism and related startups are feeling, overall it has meant a drastic wave of event cancellations, meetings and overall activity. There has, of course, remained a commitment to continue business as usual, or at least try to, and that will hopefully be a reality in the medium term, even if for now, it’s wheels down, wheels down.

Source: Tech Crunch

Uber Eats said Monday it will waive delivery fees for all orders from independently owned restaurants on the app as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to spread and causes cities to shutter all non-essential businesses.

Restaurants throughout the U.S. are facing economic headwinds as city and state officials take steps to stop the spread of COVID-19, a disease caused by novel coronavirus. Denver Mayor Michael Hancock ordered Monday the closure of all restaurants and bars except for delivery and carryout service for the next two months. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti ordered all restaurants in the city to close, except for delivery and takeout until at least March 31. New York City has directed all bars and restaurants to close. Restaurants in NYC can still deliver food.

There are more than 100,000 local restaurants on the Uber Eats app, according to the company.

“As more people stay home, local restaurants need your business more than ever. That’s why we’re waiving the Delivery Fee for all orders from every independent restaurant on Uber Eats—more than 100,000 local restaurants on the app,” the company said in an email Monday morning.

Customers can find the independent restaurants by looking for the EAT LOCAL banner in the app. Delivery Fees will be automatically waived on all applicable orders.

Uber Eats is also taking precautions to limit the spread of COVID-19, including the option of contactless deliveries and working to provide drivers with sanitization materials. The company added that “as always, your food items aren’t touched once they’ve been packed by the restaurant.”

Uber Eats said it will support its delivery people and drivers with financial assistance in the event of a COVID-19 diagnosis or exposure that prevents them from working and is committing more than 300,000 free meals on Uber Eats to healthcare workers and first responders in the U.S. and Canada.

Source: Tech Crunch

Service, a tool that helped you get compensation when there are flight delays and find lower hotel rates after you’ve already booked, today said it would shut down its service.

The company, which launched in 2015, says it faced a fundraising round that collapsed two weeks ago and was in the middle of an acquisition that collapsed on Friday. It cites the current economic downturn and COVID-19 as the reason for both of these events.

Service will shut down later this week, on Friday, March 20. It’ll try to refund subscribers (pending its cash position), route all pending claims directly to existing users and delete all personal information from its customers within the next 30 days.

It’s worth noting that Service founder and CEO Michael Schneider also notes that since it was founded, the company never turned a profit, even though it recovered over $4,000,000 for its customers.

“Despite partnerships with major brands such as KAYAK and Microsoft, we have never turned a profit, despite a focus on revenue growth and cost cutting through software automation,” Schneider writes. “We were in the middle of a fundraise when it collapsed two weeks ago, and then we were in the middle of an acquisition that collapsed last Friday due to everything going on with COVID-19 and the economy.”

With the current downturn in travel, we’ll likely see more travel startups collapse. Margins are notoriously low in this business and a lot of companies depend on what is essentially affiliate marketing revenue. Since the travel industry is currently in a tailspin, that source of revenue is quickly dwindling for this class of startups.

Service had raised a total of $5.1 million since it was founded. Investors include Founders Fund, which led its seed round, as well as Menlo Ventures, Maveron, Xfund, Flight Ventures and others. The company last raised a convertible note last September.

“I remain proud of what we accomplished over the last nearly five years, and I’m grateful to our investors, employees, and customers for all their support. While I regret not succeeding in building a sustainable long term business, I am proud that we tried, and that we made people’s lives a bit easier around customer service,” writes Schneider.

Source: Tech Crunch

The first step to combating climate change for businesses is for them to understand their contributions to it. That’s where the new Y Combinator graduate, SINAI Technologies, comes in.

Founded by Maria Fujihara, a 16-year veteran of the sustainability industry whose previous work had been around the technical adaptation of LEED certification tools, SINAI is the culmination of her years of working to adapt certification tools to international markets and five years spent researching carbon emissions profiles — most recently at Singularity University .

“When I started the company, I started to do carbon offsets,” Fujihara said. “For the past three years companies and governments have been calculating their carbon emissions and they know their carbon footprint and they know their carbon inventory and they’ve been using their carbon inventory to buy carbon credits.”

The market is mature enough for more companies to get involved, she said. “Emissions have only increased in the past six years and not decreased at all,” said Fujihara. “We’re not thinking of mitigation solutions.”

Companies have been focusing on understanding their measurements, but not identifying how to mitigate those emissions through different policies — or even what areas of the business to target, Fujihara said.

“Once we understand their business as user scenarios we can reduce emissions in their value chain,” she said.

The SINAI service automates different reporting and data around emissions for companies to monitor in an easy format. “It’s kind of like doing financial analysis, but doing the environmental analysis in addition,” said Fujihara. “We allow them to do this year-by-year, if not quarter-by-quarter.”

Right now the company is focused on five industries: manufacturing, transportation, apparel and retail, food and beverage and real estate. 

“The building blocks of a carbon journey are: create carbon emissions inventories (footprint), build a low-carbon scenario by selecting options that will reduce emissions, set up a carbon reduction target (science-based or not), calculate their carbon budget, analyze potential carbon taxes, define an optimal carbon price and finally, do external scenario analysis (based on national or international policies compliance),” the company said in a statement. 

Joining Fujihara is Alain Rodriguez, one of the first 20 engineers at Uber who is now focused on the climate issue.

“Basically, we combine climate finance methodologies, to manage emissions reductions and costs related to the implementation of low-carbon technologies (ultimately, this is what a carbon price means for a company). Our inter-dependent modules allow us to onboard companies at any moment of their carbon journey and provide value on every single step,” SINAI said in a statement. 

Source: Tech Crunch

The U.K. government is advising citizens and residents against all travel to the U.S. in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

In a brief statement, the U.K. Foreign Office said it is “advising against all but essential travel to the USA,” a day after the U.S. government expanded its list of countries whose nationals are effectively banned from entering the U.S. to include the United Kingdom and Ireland.

The announcement by the U.K. authorities follows a move by the Trump administration to impose restrictions on foreign travelers entering the U.S. in an effort to help stem the number of infections of the coronavirus strain, COVID-19, which last week was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization.

The Trump administration initially initially spared the U.K. and Ireland from its 30-day European travel ban, which included France, Spain, and Italy — all of which this week saw massive increases in the number of citizens infected with the virus. But a day later, the U.K. and Ireland was also added to the list, with an effective ban on all U.K. and Irish travelers entering the U.S. beginning Monday night.

The Foreign Office said the restrictions go into effect immediately as of Sunday.

U.S. citizens — including dual citizens — and lawful permanent residents are exempt from the ban, but may be asked to self-isolate upon arrival for 14 days out of caution.

A Foreign Office spokesperson told TechCrunch by phone that despite one report, U.S. travelers will not be banned from entering the U.K. in response to the coronavirus outbreak.

Source: Tech Crunch

SpaceX was attempting to launch its sixth batch of Starlink internet broadband satellites, but the launch was aborted when the countdown timer reached zero. On the live feed of the launch, SpaceX engineers were heard to cite a “launch abort on high engine power,” and the announcer presenting the webcast said that it was indeed an abort related to Merlin engine power, and SpaceX later provided added detail, including that the sequence was auto-aborted by its system.

The announcer noted that the “vehicle appears to be in good health,” which SpaceX later confirmed, which should bode well for resetting for another attempt. SpaceX has a backup opportunity on Monday, but the actual next launch attempt is still to be determined, likely as SpaceX investigates and learns more about what exactly was behind the engine power issue and when it makes sense to try again, given conditions on the launch range.

This would’ve been a record fifth flight for the Falcon 9 booster used in this launch, as well as a first re-use of the fairing that protects the cargo. SpaceX has advised that it’ll reveal when it’ll make its net launch attempt once it can confirm those details, and we’ll provide that info once available.

Source: Tech Crunch

We are handling the first real global crisis since the Cold War with staggering incompetence. People are already dying en masse. We all need to stay home and stay away from one another. If we wait until those who can’t do math see the awful consequences all too visible to those who can, things will get colossally worse. It is already later than you think.

A few nations–Taiwan, South Korea–are responding with admirable competence and alacrity. People everywhere else have a lot to be extremely angry at. Especially in America, the theoretically wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world, which, it turns out, is completely incapable of handling a crisis that is neither military nor financial.

A pandemic is to a society as a month of heavy rain is to a roof. It will find all of your architectural flaws, papered-over cracks, and loose tiles; it will use them to spread and spread; and you only have so many buckets. The USA is like a palace whose owners chose to spend the last twenty years squandering their money on gaudy decorations and a home theater, rather than fixing its decrepit roof. Now a storm is hammering down.

None of this is news. We’ve all been witnessing America’s ongoing diminishment in real time for some years now. It’s easy to imagine this crisis marking its official decline into former-hyperpower status, while China assumes the global title of “most important nation.”

In in the meantime, pay no attention to the reported, so-called confirmed, numbers of Covid-19 cases in America. The real numbers are clearly much larger. We’re in a dark room, surrounded by an unknown number of monsters, unable – and apparently unwilling – to turn on the lights.

But let’s be optimistic. Suppose people come to their senses, and stop interacting with — and infecting — one another. Suppose the period during which hospitals are overwhelmed, and grandparents die in parking lots because there are no ICU beds left for them, is mercifully brief. Suppose we actually do manage to Flatten The Curve.

What then?

Previous, lesser crises have gone away by themselves. The 2008 financial crisis was, as Bruce Sterling observed at the time, something “we made up”: nothing about the world changed except our perception of it. The World Trade Center attacks were only a real crisis for those in Lower Manhattan that morning and their families. This, though, is likely to affect our collective way of life, and our economy, for a long time.

For most people, “the economy” is a giant treadmill of rent, bills, and paychecks, on which they must keep perpetaully running lest they be flung into an abyss. Social distancing right now is — and will remain, for an unknown period — critically important. But its implication is to say to everyone in travel, hospitality, retail, restaurants, nightlive, events, etc.: “You absolutely must stop running, right now, but of course we’re not turning that treadmill off for you. Don’t be ridiculous! We can’t even imagine what turning it off would look like.”

Things are better if you’re in tech … but not much better. Does your company count any travel, hospitality, retail, events, etc., companies or people as clients or customers? No? Well, do your clients and customers count any as their clients or customers? You won’t have to go very far before you realize: we’re all interconnected. Meaning: we’re all screwed. The whole treadmill starts breaking down if enough of us stop running.

So what would turning that treadmill off, or slowing it down, look like?

In the US, it obviously starts with universal healthcare. But there’s no reason to stop there. Think bigger. Imagine a six-month rent jubilee, on the grounds that property owners are more able than suddenly self-isolating renters to deal with the financial repercussions, and also better positioned to negotiate with governments for a subsequent bailout. Imagine giving people cash, whether you want to call it “special unemployment insurance” or “universal basic income.”

Imagine maybe even rebuilding the whole treadmill from scratch, into an entirely different machine.

We built it ourselves, after all; it was not handed down from Mount Sinai. Maybe we can fix it so that it encourages scientists and artists and engineers to start up truly new and better things, rather than more adtech and parasitical financial instruments. Maybe it can reward subway workers and teachers and farmers, rather than the throngs wasting their days in dreary, pointless, but better-paid “bullshit jobs” in offices everywhere.

But that’s all in the future. Right now we’re in a crisis. Stay home, cancel on your friends, wash your hands; flatten the curve. We can’t fix the treadmill after the fire is out, and the grim nature of fire is that if we wait to act until we feel ourselves burning, it will already be too late.

Source: Tech Crunch

UPDATE: SpaceX aborted today’s attempt, and will reset for a future attempt at a time and date to be determined.

SpaceX is launching its latest Starlink mission today, with a takeoff time of 9:22 AM EDT (6:22 AM PDT) currently scheduled to take place at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The launch will carry 60 more Starlink broadband internet satellites to their low Earth orbit destination, using a Falcon 9 rocket with a booster that flew four times previously, including twice in 2018 and twice last year, most recently in November for another Starlink mission.

This launch will include a landing attempt for the Falcon 9 booster, meaning if all goes well SpaceX could recover it for a fifth time for an attempt at refurbishment and re-use. Five flights of a Falcon 9 booster would be a record for SpaceX – and the booster that it’s attempting this mission with is already a record-holder, since it achieved SpaceX’s existing high-water mark for re-use with its last November launch.

The primary mission is to deliver the sixth batch of 60 of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites to space, which will grow the total constellation size to 360. SpaceX plans to begin commercial operation of the constellation later this year if all goes well, providing high-speed, reliable broadband internet to customers in North America, with lower latency and better speeds than are available using existing satellite internet service, which depend on larger, geosynchronous satellites placed much farther out from Earth.

SpaceX will also be aiming to recover the two fairing halves used to protect the satellite cargo on this launch, using two ships stationed at sea that have large nets strung across struts extending from their surface. SpaceX has been attempting these recoveries in order to further increase the reusability (and reduce the cost) of launch but so far it hasn’t had much consistency in its success, catching three fairings in total. The fairing being used today flew before, too – during the May 2019 Starlink satellite launch.

The broadcast of the launch will begin above around 15 minutes prior to the target takeoff time, so at around 8:57 AM EDT (5:57 AM PDT).

Source: Tech Crunch