The coronavirus outbreak has forced millions of U.S. employees to work from home — many for the first time. But remote work can be lonely and isolating, as people feel disconnected from their team and co-workers due to the lack of face-to-face conversations. That’s where the new startup, Hallway, aims to help. The service re-creates the break-room experience and the serendipity of random hallway conversations with its new app aimed at Slack users.

The app allows companies to schedule 10-minute video chats within Slack channels, where colleagues can catch up with one another outside of more formal web meetings.

The startup was co-founded by Parthi Loganathan, a former product manager at Google who launched Google Chat and Google Go; and Kunal Jasty, a former associate at private equity firm Insight Partners.

The two were originally working on a product called Across that would help teams provide customer support in shared Slack channels. But when the shelter-in-place was brought into effect in San Francisco, things quickly changed.

“It forced a lot of companies that were unprepared for remote work to go remote overnight,” Loganathan explains. Meanwhile, his roommate complained he was going stir-crazy working from home and missed talking to his team.

“Hallway seemed like a simple and fun way to tackle that problem, so we built it in a couple of days,” Loganathan says.

The founders already had first-hand experience with the challenges involved in dealing with remote teams, as half their team was based in India. And they had experience building Slack apps, not only with Across but with others similar to Hallway, as well.

As a result, Hallway was built quickly, with only four days in between the idea and the first user, Loganathan says.

To use Hallway, you can either add it to Slack from the Hallway website or from the Slack app directory. (To install it, you may need admin approval if you don’t have permission to add apps to your Slack workspace.)

There’s no front-end for the app — everything is user-facing in Slack, including the login process, onboarding experience and the settings user interface. Once installed, you’re given the onboarding instructions over direct message within Slack. You can then invite the Hallway bot to any Slack channel by typing /invite @hallway. This kicks off the bot to start creating break rooms on a recurring basis automatically, which are announced by way of an @here message.

By default, Hallway’s break rooms are scheduled every two hours between 9 AM and 6 PM Monday through Friday, but users can adjust the timezone and adjust the frequency of the breaks by typing in /hallway in a Slack channel to customize the settings.

You can opt to use your own Zoom or Google Meet links with Hallway. But the experience works better with Hallway’s timed video chat rooms, which are powered by daily.co’s video infrastructure.

The service itself is free for up to two slack channels, but only offers 10 of its timed video chats before you have to either switch to using your own web meeting links or have to upgrade.

Hallway’s “team” pricing plan for larger companies supports up to five channels and offers an unlimited number of video chat rooms, as well as the customization options, for $30 per month. For more than five channels, enterprise pricing is available upon request.

Since launching just a few weeks ago, Hallway has quickly grown its customer base.

The service is now being used by more than 170 teams at companies like Nextdoor, Productboard, Bank Novo, Pivotal, Coursera and others. The majority of users are on the free plan for now. However, companies in need of an upgrade can access more flexible pricing if users are willing to share the service with friends.

For the time being, the co-founders want to focus on improving the Hallway experience in Slack, but they’re already thinking about what comes next.

“We’re solving the problem of keeping teams connected and reducing workplace loneliness while working remotely. Right now, we’re improving the core experience of spontaneous timed video chats and giving users more options to customize them,” says Loganathan. “We’re looking into specific use cases we can help companies with, like team building and employee onboarding for remote teams,” he notes.

The company may also consider a solution for Microsoft Teams in the future, he says.

Hallway has raised an undisclosed amount of pre-seed funding.

Source: Tech Crunch

As workers moved from office to home and students moved to being educated online, demand for new PCs surged in Q1, but Canalys found that shipments actually dropped 8% in spite of this, due to COVID-19 related supply chain problems.

The 8% drop was the worst since 2016 when shipments dropped 12%, according to the firm. Companies were looking to get new machines into the hands of employees who normally worked on desktop machines in the office, while parents were buying machines for children suddenly going to school online.

Rushabh Doshi, research director at Canalys says that products were flying off the shelves in Q1, but the PC makers couldn’t keep up with demand as supplies were limited due to a number of factors.

“…PC makers started 2020 with a constrained supply of Intel processors, caused by a botched transition to 10nm nodes. This was exacerbated when factories in China were unable to reopen after the Lunar New Year holidays.

“The slowdown in supply met with accelerated demand, as businesses were suddenly forced to equip a newly remote workforce, placing urgent orders for tens of thousands of PCs. Children, too, needed their own PCs, as schools closed and lessons went online,” Doshi explained in a statement.

Lenovo and HP owned the lion’s share of the PC market in Q1 with 23.9% and 21.8% share respectively. Dell was in third with 19.6%. Apple was well behind in fourth place with just 6% of worldwide market share.

Only Dell projected positive growth with a modest 1.1% annual rate. All others were projected to be negative with Apple projecting the sharpest drop at -21%.

The good news is that from a revenue perspective, at least for the short term, these companies could command higher prices due to high demand and low supply, but overall the year looks bleak for PC makers, as Canalys predicts the rest of the year will see a further drop in sales as companies cut back on purchases, and consumers also likely limit purchases with so much economic uncertainty and demand satisfied for the short term.

Source: Tech Crunch

Another week in quarantine.

As the world adjusts to working from home under mandatory stay-at-home orders, hackers are keeping busy. Microsoft said this week that coronavirus-related attacks are on the rise but still make up just a fraction of the overall malicious activity. Cybersecurity companies seem to be faring mostly well — in part thanks to the uptick of attacks, but also the challenges of securing the workforce as hundreds of millions work from home.

But as coronavirus dominates the headlines, the wheels of government keep turning. Lawmakers are trying to push through a controversial bill that critics say would undermine encryption, which keeps everything from your phone to your online banking accounts safe. One startup is bracing for a showdown. Signal, the end-to-end encrypted messaging app, sounded the alarm when it warned this week that it may exit the U.S. market if Congress passes the controversial EARN IT Act.

In a blog post this week, Signal engineer Joshua Lund wrote it would “not be possible for a small nonprofit like Signal to continue to operate within the United States.”

Will encryption become the latest causality of this tumultuous year?

THE BIG PICTURE

Zoom slapped with more security woes, but calls in the cavalry

A growing number of companies and governments, from SpaceX and Google to Taiwan and Germany, have banned Zoom. Not even the U.S. Senate is taking any chances with the video-calling software, which has faced a steady stream of headlines critiquing its security practices and privacy policies. But Zoom’s popularity, undoubtedly sparked by the mass working from home to stem the spread of the coronavirus pandemic, seems to be weathering the storm.

Source: Tech Crunch

SpaceX has banned use of Zoom for remote operations. So have Google, Apple, NASA, and New York City schools. Earlier this week, the FBI warned about Zoom teleconferences and live classrooms being hacked by trolls; security experts warn that holes in the technology make user data vulnerable to exploitation.  Zoom’s CEO, Eric Yuan, has this week publicly admitted that he “messed up” on privacy and security.

But we are missing a larger question as we grapple with Zoom’s security flaws. Who controls the platform? Who benefits from it? Zoom received its seed funding from TSVC, which presents as a Los Altos-based venture capital firm but invests with the funds of a Chinese State-owned Enterprise, Tsinghua Holdings. Founded and run by a Chinese entrepreneur, Zoom’s mainline app is developed by China-based subsidiaries. Zoom servers in China appear also to be manufacturing its AES-128 encryption keys, including, as a Citizen Labs report documents, some used for meetings among North American participants. Beijing’s privacy laws likely obligate China-manufactured keys to be shared with Chinese authorities.

Zoom is precisely the kind of tool that Beijing values. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) pursues a decades-long grand strategy to develop and capture global networks and platforms – with them to define global standards. Hold over standards promises enduring control of international resources, exchange, and information; a global geopolitical operating system with coercive might. Beijing has officially endorsed this ambition since its 2001 accession to the World Trade Organization, when it launched the National Standardization Strategy. 

Now, the CCP is putting that intent into action. Beijing is about to launch China Standards 2035, an industrial plan to write international rules. China Standards 2035 is the successor to Made in China 2025; an even bolder plan for the subsequent decade premised not on governing where global goods are made, but on setting the standards that define production, exchange, and consumption. 

Beijing completed two years of planning for China Standards 2035 at the beginning of March. The final strategy document is projected to be issued this year. While the specifics of China Standards 2035 have yet to be published, the intent – and focus areas – are already evident. The National Standardization Committee has released its preliminary report for the year ahead, the “Main Points of National Standardization Work in 2020.”

Our firm, Horizon Advisory, has translated and analyzed that report – and the past two years of planning that informed it. We find in it instructions to “seize the opportunity” that COVID-19 creates by proliferating China’s authoritarian information regime; to co-opt global industry by capturing the industrial Internet of Things; to define the next generation of information technology and biotechnology infrastructures; to export the social credit system – and Beijing’s larger litany of incentive-shaping platforms. We find an explicit global ambition that weaponizes commerce, capital, and cooperation.  

As Beijing sees it, the world is on the verge of transformation. “Industry, technology, and innovation are developing rapidly,” explained Dai Hong, Director of the Second Department of Industrial Standards of China’s National Standardization Management Committee in 2018. “Global technical standards are still being formed. This grants China’s industry and standards the opportunity to surpass the world’s.” 

Dai was speaking at the inauguration of China Standards 2035’s planning phase. He said that the plan would focus on “integrated circuits, virtual reality, smart health and retirement, 5G key components, the Internet of Things, information technology equipment interconnection, and solar photovoltaics.” Throughout, the emphasis would be on “internationalization” of Chinese standards.

Two years later, China Standards 2035’s initial research results reveal the concrete implications of those buzzwords. China Standards 2035 is to focus on setting standards in emerging industries: high-end equipment manufacturing, unmanned vehicles, additive manufacturing, new materials, the industrial internet, cyber security, new energy, the ecological industry. These align with the focus areas of the Strategic Emerging Industries initiative — also of Made in China 2025. Having secured its foothold in targeted physical spheres, Beijing is ready to define their rules. 

DJI has a near monopoly over commercial drone systems. The National Standardization Administration is now intent on “formulating the international standards for ‘Classification of Civil Unmanned Aircraft Systems’ to help the domestic drone industry occupy the technical commanding heights.’” 

Second, China Standards 2035 will accelerate Beijing’s proliferation of the virtual systems underlying, and connecting, those industries: the social credit system, the State-controlled National Transportation Logistics Platform (known as LOGINK), and medical and consumer good standards.

The plan’s third prong is internationalization. The Main Points outline the intent to “give full play to the organizational and coordinating roles of the Chinese National Committees of the International Standards Organization (ISO) and International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC).” Reports from the National Standardization Committee explain that giving “full play” means shaping “strategies, policies, and rules.” Beijing is to bolster internationalization through bilateral and regional standards-based partnerships – partnerships like China and Nepal’s standardization cooperation agreement, ASEAN’s standards docking, and nascent efforts with Germany, the United Kingdom, and Canada, among others.  

China’s standards plan stems from a clear, deliberate strategic progression. Beijing has spent the past two decades establishing influential footholds in multilateral bodies and targeted industrial areas. Now, it is using those footholds to set their rules – with them, to define the infrastructure of the future world. According to China’s strategic planning, this is what power means in a globalized era: “The strategic game among big powers is no longer limited to market scale competition or that for technological superiority. It is more about competition over system design and rule-making.”

But no one appears to be noticing China’s strategic positioning. Not much pops up when you Google China Standards 2035. That was a serious deficit before COVID-19’s global disaster. The stakes are higher now. Global shutdown has created what the CCP calls an opportunity to accelerate its strategic offensive.  Our lock-down induced reliance on virtual connections has offered Beijing an unprecedented angle in. 

As we grapple with the COVID-19 disaster, we need also to resist Beijing’s exploitation of it. We need to recognize the role of standards and the manner in which the CCP weaponizes them. We need to compete for alternative, safe, norm-based ones – and protect them from Beijing’s influence. Or we need to get used to security, privacy, ownership, freedom concerns far more serious than trolls at Zoom happy hour.

Source: Tech Crunch

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the Extra Crunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all.
The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 204 billion downloads in 2019 and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019, according to App Annie’s “State of Mobile” annual report. People are now spending 3 hours and 40 minutes per day using apps, rivaling TV. Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours — they’re a big business. In 2019, mobile-first companies had a combined $544 billion valuation, 6.5x higher than those without a mobile focus.

In this Extra Crunch series, we help you keep up with the latest news from the world of apps, delivered on a weekly basis.

This week we’re continuing to look at how the coronavirus outbreak is impacting the world of mobile applications, including Apple and Google’s plans to team up on a contact tracing platform and other COVID-19 apps worldwide. We’re also looking at how WhatsApp is fighting fake news, and how home quarantines are impacting online grocery and dating applications. In non-COVID-19 news, we look at Quibi’s debut, Facebook’s new app for couples and a possible iOS version of Android’s “Slices,” among other things.

Coronavirus Special Coverage

Apple and Google partner on COVID-19 tracing tools

Apple and Google announced on Friday a plan to join forces to create a decentralized tracing tool to help people determine if they’ve been exposed to someone with COVID-19. The first phase of the project is an API that public health agencies can integrate into their own apps. This will be followed by a system-level contact tracing system that works across iOS and Android and is opt-in. The system will involve transmitting an anonymous ID over Bluetooth. The servers will relay your last 14 days of rotating IDs to other devices that look for a match based on time spent and distance between two devices. If a match is found, you’re notified so you can get tested and self-quarantine.

The APIs will be available in May, while the Bluetooth-based system will be released in the months ahead.

Other COVID-19 apps in the news

• EU suggests standardization: This week, the EU began pushing for its 27 nations to develop common standards for coronavirus tracking technologies that would make apps interoperable or even perhaps develop a single app to be used across the bloc, Bloomberg reported. Today, multiple developers in the U.K., Germany and elsewhere are working on mobile phone apps to track people who’ve been exposed to the coronavirus, but the data will be harder to aggregate and understand in its fractured state.
• France to develop a contact-tracing app: France is officially working on a smartphone app to slow the spread of COVID-19, by tracking people living in France. The app will leverage the PEPP-PT protocol, which will involve an open standard using BLE to identify other phones running the app.
• How Chinese apps handled COVID-19: A post from Dan Grover analyzes how Chinese apps from major tech companies like Baidu, WeChat, Alipay and others worked to help people get through the coronavirus crisis by offering statistics, e-medicine, tools for quarantine, e-commerce and tools to check your exposure. By comparison, the U.S. has largely just added PSAs from the CDC and WHO to their platforms, instead of having offered more robust solutions. The pros and cons of both are debated from an app-centric point of view, which makes for interesting reading from a more technical perspective.
• COVID-19 symptom checker from startup Zoe arrives in U.S.:  A free iOS and Android application called COVID Symptom Tracker was originally developed in partnership with food science startup Zoe and released first in the U.K. After a million downloads, the app is now launching in the U.S.
• Stanford Medicine app helps first responders get tested: Stanford, in partnership with Apple, launched an app that helps first responders get access to drive-thru coronavirus tests. This includes front-line workers like police officers, firefighters and paramedics. The service is limited to Santa Clara and San Mateo counties in California for now, but will later expand to other states.

Source: Tech Crunch

Tesla started Friday to furlough its sales and delivery workforce — with the least experienced employees bearing the brunt of the action — days after a companywide email announced salary cuts and reductions due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Several employees, who work in sales and delivery and spoke to TechCrunch on condition of anonymity, reported they were on corporate calls in which more details of the furloughs were explained. Performance is less of a factor. Instead, experience and position is being used to determine who stays and who is furloughed. Delivery and sales advisors who have been with the company less than two years will be furloughed, according to sources.

CNBC reported earlier Friday that furloughs would impact half of Tesla’s U.S.  delivery and sales workforce. TechCrunch was unable to verify the total number of sales and delivery employees who would be impacted.

The furloughs also come a little more than a week after the end of the quarter, a typically busy time for delivery staff who try to meet lofty internal goals. COVID-19 hampered delivery efforts, although customers were still reporting deliveries in California, New York and other states.

The furlough calls have been expected since an internal email sent April 7 by Tesla’s head of human resources Valerie Workman informed employees that the company would be cutting pay for salaried employees and furloughing others.

It wasn’t clear, until Friday, exactly who might be affected.

The internal email, which was viewed by TechCrunch, told employees that production at its U.S. factories would be suspended until at least May 4 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, requiring the company to cut costs.

Salaried employees will have pay reduced between 30% and 10%, depending on their position. The salary reductions are expected to be in place until the end of the second quarter, according to the email. The salary cuts and furloughs will begin April 13. Employees who cannot work from home and have not been assigned critical onsite positions will be furloughed until May 4, according to the email.

Source: Tech Crunch

Earlier this week TechCrunch caught up with Union Square Ventures‘ (USV) Albert Wenger. Wenger, a managing partner at the venture firm, is well-known in the New York startup scene. USV has invested in former startups like Twitter, Twilio, Etsy and Cloudflare.

TechCrunch is touching base with a number of investors during the COVID-19-driven economic slowdown. Everyone is already at home, in front of a computer, so why not get them on the phone? (Follow @TechCrunch for updates, we’re keeping the series alive over the next few weeks with more neat guests.)

We wanted to know what Wenger thought about the level of fear in his local market, and how much cash startups should hold during the COVID-19 era. On the latter point, Wenger noted that each company’s present situation is suitably diverse as to avoid any single rule, but implied that companies with healthy backers don’t have to hold as much cash, as they have access to more; the weaker a startup’s investing syndicate is, the more cash it should hold, as that might be all the money it has access to.

We also took time to talk about PPP loans, and what types of startups should apply for them, a subject that Wenger has written about. There’s a moral point in the discussion that’s worth understanding.

We also took a number of questions from folks tuned in on Zoom during the call and generally had a good time. We’ve preserved the audio, so take a listen. If you wanted to see the video of TechCrunch’s Jordan Crook and Alex Wilhelm talking to Wenger, every one of the three in a different state, you missed out. Come to our next public Zoom!

The recording

Source: Tech Crunch