Twitter is making it mandatory for all employees around the world to work from home in response to the COVID-19 pandemic — After “strongly encouraging” it earlier this month, Twitter said today that working from home is now mandatory for all employees around the world due to COVID-19 concerns.
NorthOne, a New York-based digital bank that provides a banking app for small businesses, announces a $21M Series A raise led by Battery Ventures — NorthOne, a digital challenger bank focused on small businesses, announced this morning a $21 million Series A raise.
Source: at least one of this year's iPhones will have a 3D depth camera on its back, enabling new photo and video effects, as well as better AR experiences — Our source confirms Apple's plans to put a 3D depth camera on the back of the iPhone. Here's what it'll do.
After “strongly encouraging” it earlier this month, Twitter said today that working from home is now mandatory for all employees around the world due to COVID-19 concerns. In announcement, the company said “we understand this is an unprecedented step, but these are unprecedented times.”
The World Health Organization officially declared COVID-19 a pandemic yesterday. There are now about 118,000 reported cases in 114 countries, with the global death roll passing 4,000.
The company said it will help all employees, including hourly workers and contractors, cover expenses for setting up home offices. Contractors, vendors and hourly workers who cannot work from home, will continue to be paid for their standard working hours while the work-from-home policy is in effect. Twitter also said it will cover additional daycare expenses parents may have if their usual daycares close due to COVID-19.
Twitter’s Inclusion and Diversity team will also hold a virtual “#FlockTalk,” an employee support program to discuss how “news around COVID-19 is impacting people in number of different ways—from schools and offices being closed, to serious health concerns, to racism towards communities.”
On March 2, Twitter announced that it was strongly encouraging working from home, and making it mandatory for employees in Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea, due partly to government restrictions. In today’s announcement, the company said it is expanding its policy worldwide because “our top priority remains the health and safety of our Tweeps, and we also have a responsibility to support our communities, those who are vulnerable, and the healthcare providers who are on the front lines of this pandemic.”
Other large tech companies, including Amazon, Box and Lyft, have implemented work from home recommendations or policies in response to COVID-19, while major events like MWC and E3 have been cancelled or moved partially online.
In a Wednesday evening address from the Oval Office President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. would issue a thirty day travel ban for travel from the European Union. He is also looking to Congress, the Small Business Administration and the Treasury Department to take steps to stimulate the U.S. economy.
The steps are the latest effort by the government to tamp down on the spread of COVID-19.
“We will be suspending all travel from Europe to the United States for the next 30 days,” President Trump said, adding “the new rules will go into effect Friday at midnight. These restrictions will be adjusted subject to conditions on the ground. There will be exemptions for Americans who have undergone appropriate screenings. And these prohibitions will not only apply to the tremendous amount of trade and cargo.”
In addition to the travel ban, which does not include the United Kingdom, the President said that he would be authorizing the Small Business Administration to issue some $50 billion in loans to compensate businesses whose income is impacted by efforts to respond to the coronavirus outbreak. Congress would need to approve the funding boost.
That move should allow for more companies to compensate workers for time spent in quarantine if they, or their family members are ill.
Additionally, the President said that he would instruct the Treasury Department to defer tax payments without interest or penalties for individuals and businesses that are negatively impacted by the disease.
“Using emergency authority, I will be instructing the Treasury Department to defer tax payments, without interest or penalties, for certain individuals and businesses are negatively impacted. “ President Trump said. “This action will provide more than $200 billion of additional liquidity to the economy.”
Furthermore, the President issued a call to Congress to eliminate payroll taxes as another step to cushion the economic blow of a more aggressive response to the COVID-19 outbreak in the U.S.
These unprecedented steps follow a tumultuous day on Wall Street and the wider world as the World Health Organization officially declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic and stocks again suffered massive losses in trading on Wall Street.
As notable as the European travel ban is (and as inexplicable as the exclusion of the U.K. may be), the President’s speech drew criticism for the things it did not include. Nicholas Burns, the former U.S. Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs under President George W. Bush, wrote, “COVID-19 is not a ‘foreign virus’. It is a global threat that can only be resolved by working with, and not against, all the other nations of the world.”
And while the President issued assurances that the government was well-prepared to meet the challenge that the spread of COVID-19 poses, recent reporting indicates that critical components for the COVID-19 test are facing shortages and there’s still not enough testing being done.
Johns Hopkins University is currently tracking 1,281 people who have been infected with the disease in the U.S. and that number is likely to increase as more tests are conducted. So far, 36 people in the U.S. have died of the illness.
“The virus will not have a chance against us. No nation is more prepared, more resilient than the United States,” the President said.
Augmented reality headset maker Magic Leap has struggled with the laws of physics and failed to get to market. Now it’s seeking an acquirer, but talks with Facebook and medical goods giant Johnson & Johnson led nowhere according to a new report from Bloomberg’s Ed Hammond.
After raising over $2 billion and being valued between $6 billion and $8 billion back when it still had momentum, Hammond writes that “Magic Leap could fetch more than $10 billion if it pursues a sale” according to his sources. That price seems ridiculous. It’s the kind of number a prideful company might strategically leak in hopes of drumming up acquisition interest, even at a lower price.
Startups have been getting their valuations chopped when they go public. The whole economy is hurting due to coronavirus. Augmented Reality seems less interesting than virtual reality with people avoiding public places. Getting people to strap used AR hardware to their face for demos seems like a tough sell for the forseeable future.
No one has proven a killer consumer use case for augmented reality eyewear that warrants an expensive and awkward-to-wear gadget. Our phones can already deliver plenty of AR’s value while letting you take selfies and do video chat that headsets can’t. My experiences with Magic Leap at Sundance Film Festival last year were laughably disappointing, with its clunky hardware, ghostly projections, and narrow field of view.
Apple and Facebook are throwing the enduring profits of iPhones and the News Feed into building a better consumer headset. Snapchat has built intermediary glasses since CEO Evan Spiegel thinks it will be a decade before AR headsets see mainstream adoption. AR rivals like Microsoft have better enterprise experience, connections, and distribution. Enterprise AR startup Daqri crashed and burned.
Magic Leap’s CEO said he wanted to sell 1 million of its $2300 headset in its first year, then projected it would sell 100,000 headsets, but only moved 6,000 in the first six months, according to a daming report from The Information’s Alex Heath. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai left Magic Leap’s board despite Google leading a $514 million funding round for the startup in 2014. Business Insider’s Steven Tweedie and Kevin Webb revealed CFO Scott Henry and SVP of creative strategy John Gaeta bailed in November. The company suffered dozens of layoffs. It lost a $500 million contract to Microsoft last year. The CEOs of Apple, Google, and Facebook visited Magic Leap headquarters in 2016 to explore an acquisition deal, but no offers emerged.
Is AR eyewear part of the future? Almost surely. And is this startup valuable? Certainly somewhat. But Magic Leap may prove to be too little too early for a company burning cash by the hundreds of millions in a market newly fixated on efficiency. A $10 billion price tag would require one of the world’s biggest corporations to believe Magic Leap has irreplicable talent and technology that will earn them a fortune in the somewhat distant future.
The fact that Facebook, which does not shy from tall acquisition prices, didn’t want to buy Magic Leap is telling. This isn’t a product with hundreds of millions of users or fast-ramping revenue. It’s a gamble on vision and timing that looks to be coming up snake eyes. It’s unclear when the startup would ever be able to deliver on its renderings of flying whales and living room dinosaurs in a form factor people actually want to wear.
One of Magic Leap’s early renderings of what it could supposedly do
With all their money and plenty of time before widespread demand for AR headsets materializes, potential acquirers could likely hire away the talent and make up the development time in cheaper ways than buying Magic Leap. If someone acquires them for too much, it feels like a write-off waiting to happen.
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