Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai and Mark Zuckerberg will defend their companies before the House Antitrust Subcommittee Wednesday in a hearing that will make tech industry history, no matter what happens.
Given that the tech giants are accustomed to answering to no one in particular, collecting four of them on a substantive topic is notable in its own right. Remarkably, Wednesday will mark the first time Amazon’s CEO has faced lawmakers in a public hearing — and they’re bound to have plenty of questions for the take-no-prisoners online retail behemoth.
For Apple and Cook, who prefer to stay above the public-facing political fray, it’s the first time before Congress in years. Facebook and Google have both been called to Congressmore recently, but lawmakers have still barely scratched the surface of two companies that have completely reshaped modern life.
If you’re just catching up, read our explainer about why this whole thing is happening at all and what to expect. You can also read the opening statements from Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google and skip them tomorrow so you can spend more time with your Nespresso or whatever it is we’re all doing to get by these days. The statements provide a good idea of how the companies will play defense against regulators keen to install some safety features before we barrel into a fresh decade of unchecked growth.
There are a lot of unknowns heading into the hearing. Will lawmakers extract any useful revelations or will it be five hours of “let us get back to you on that?” Could tech executives manage to be even more evasive now that they’re appearing remotely via video chat? Will some subcommittee members lead the hearing so far into off-topic territory that we learn nothing about the business practices that scaled an industry of market-owning giants? And most importantly: On a scale of one to supervillain, what kind of vibes will Bezos give off?
We hope to know the answers to all of these questions and more — possibly even a question from a lawmaker or two — as we cover Wednesday’s events closely. If you’re interested in watching it go down yourself, you can tune into the livestream right here (well, up there) on Wednesday July 29 at 12PM ET.
Preston Estep was alone in a borrowed laboratory, somewhere in Boston. No big company, no board meetings, no billion-dollar payout from Operation Warp Speed, the US government’s covid-19 vaccine funding program. No animal data. No ethics approval.
What he did have: ingredients for a vaccine. And one willing volunteer.
Estep swirled together the mixture and spritzed it up his nose.
Nearly 200 covid-19 vaccines are in development and some three dozen are at various stages of human testing. But in what appears to be the first “citizen science” vaccine initiative, Estep and at least 20 other researchers, technologists, or science enthusiasts, many connected to Harvard University and MIT, have volunteered as lab rats for a do-it-yourself inoculation against the coronavirus. They say it’s their only chance to become immune without waiting a year or more for a vaccine to be formally approved.
Among those who’ve taken the DIY vaccine is George Church, the celebrity geneticist at Harvard University, who took two doses a week apart earlier this month. The doses were dropped in his mailbox and he mixed the ingredients himself.
Church believes the vaccine designed by Estep, his former graduate student at Harvard and one of his proteges, is extremely safe. “I think we are at much bigger risk from covid considering how many ways you can get it, and how highly variable the consequences are,” says Church, who says he has not stepped outside of his house in five months. The US Centers for Disease Control recently reported that as many as one-third of patients who test positive for covid-19 but are never hospitalized battle symptoms for weeks or even months after contracting the virus. “I think that people are highly underestimating this disease,” Church says.
Harmless as the experimental vaccine may be, though, whether it will protect anyone who takes it is another question. And the independent researchers who are making and sharing it might be stepping onto thin legal ice, if they aren’t there already.
A simple formula
The group, calling itself the Rapid Deployment Vaccine Collaborative, or Radvac, formed in March. That’s when Estep sent an email to a circle of acquaintances, noting that US government experts were predicting a vaccine in 12 to 18 months and wondering if a do-it-yourself project could move faster. He believed there was “already sufficient information” published about the virus to guide an independent project.
Estep says he quickly gathered volunteers, many of whom had worked previously with the Personal Genome Project (PGP), an open-science initiative founded in 2005 at Church’s lab to sequence people’s DNA and post the results online. “We established a core group, most of them [from] my go-to posse for citizen science, though we have never done anything quite like this,” says Estep, also the founder of Veritas Genetics, a DNA sequencing company.
To come up with a vaccine design, the group dug through reports of vaccines against SARS and MERS, two other diseases caused by coronaviruses. Because the group was working in borrowed labs with mail-order ingredients, they wouldn’t make anything too complicated. The goal, says Estep, was to find “a simple formula that you could make with readily available materials. That narrowed things down to a small number of possibilities.” He says the only equipment he needed was a pipette (a tool to move small amounts of liquid) and a magnetic stirring device.
In early July, Radvac posted a white paper detailing its vaccine for anyone to copy. There are four authors named on the document, as well as a dozen initials of participants who remain anonymous, some in order to avoid media attention and others because they are foreigners in the US on visas.
The Radvac vaccine is what’s called a “subunit” vaccine because it consists of fragments of the pathogen—in this case peptides, which are essentially short bits of protein that match part of the coronavirus but can’t cause disease on their own. Subunit vaccines already exist for other diseases such as hepatitis B and human papillomavirus, and some companies are also developing subunits for covid-19, including Novavax, a biotechnology company which this month secured a $1.6 billion contract from Operation Warp Speed.
To administer its vaccine, the Radvac group settled on mixing the peptides with chitosan, a substance from shrimp shells, which coats the peptides in a nanoparticle able to pass the mucous membrane. Alex Hoekstra, a data analyst with an undergraduate degree in biology who previously volunteered with the PGP, and who also squirted the vaccine up his nose, describes the sensation as, “like getting saline up your nose. It’s not the world’s most comfortable feeling.”
Does it work?
A nasal vaccine is easier to administer than one which must be injected and, in Church’s opinion, is an overlooked option in the covid-19 vaccine race. He says only five out of about 199 covid vaccines listed as in development use nasal delivery, even though some researchers think it’s the best approach.
A vaccine delivered into the nose could create what’s called mucosal immunity, or immune cells present in the tissues of the airway. Such local immunity may be an important defense against SARS-CoV-2. But unlike antibodies that appear in the blood, where they are easily detected, signs of mucosal immunity might require a biopsy to identify.
Don Wang administers a do-it-yourself nasal vaccine against the coronavirus on April 26 at an undisclosed Boston location.
ALEX HOEKSTRA
George Siber, the former head of vaccines at Wyeth, says he told Estep that short, simple peptides often don’t lead to much of an immune response. Moreover, Siber says, he doesn’t know of any subunit vaccine delivered nasally, and he questions whether it would be potent enough to have any effect.
When Estep reached out to him earlier this year, Siber also wanted to know if the team had considered a dangerous side-effect, called enhancement, in which a vaccine can actually worsen the disease. “It’s not the best idea—especially in this case, you could make things worse,” Siber says of the effort. “You really need to know what you are doing here.”
He isn’t the only skeptic. Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at New York University Langone Medical Center, who saw the white paper, pans Radvac as “off-the-charts looney.” In an email, Caplan says he sees “no leeway” for self-experimentation given the importance of quality control with vaccines. Instead, he thinks there is a high “potential for harm” and “ill-founded enthusiasm.”
Church disagrees, saying the vaccine’s simple formulation means it’s probably safe. “I think the bigger risk is that it is ineffective,” he says.
So far, the group can’t say if their vaccine works or not. They haven’t published results showing that the vaccine leads to antibodies against the virus, which is a basic requirement for being taken seriously in the vaccine race. Church says some of those studies are now underway in his Harvard laboratory, and Estep is hoping mainstream immunologists will assist the group. “It’s a little bit complicated, and we are not ready to report it,” Estep says of the immune responses seen so far.
A question of risk
Despite the lack of evidence, the Radvac group has offered the vaccine to a widening circle of friends and colleagues, inviting them to mix the ingredients and self-administer the nasal vaccine. Estep has now lost count of exactly how many people have taken the vaccine. “We have delivered material to 70 people,” he says. “They have to mix it themselves, but we haven’t had a full reporting on how many have taken it.”
One of the Radvac white paper’s co-authors is Ranjan Ahuja, who volunteers as an events manager for a nonprofit foundation that Estep started to study depression. Ahuja has a chronic condition that puts him at heightened risk from covid-19. Although he can’t say whether the two doses he took have given him immunity, he feels it’s his best chance of protection until a vaccine is approved.
Estep believes taking the peptide vaccine, even if it’s unproven, is a legitimate way to reduce risk. “We are offering one more tool to reduce the chance of infection,” he says. “We don’t suggest people change their behavior if they are wearing masks, but it does provide potentially multiple layers of protection.”
“If you are just making it and taking it yourself, the FDA can’t stop you.”
By distributing directions and even supplies for a vaccine, though, the Radvac group is operating in a legal gray area. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requires authorization to test novel drugs in the form of an investigational new drug approval. But the Radvac group did not ask the agency’s permission, nor did it get any ethics board to sign off on the plan.
Estep believes Radvac is not subject to oversight because the group’s members mix up and administer the vaccine themselves, and no money changes hands. “If you are just making it and taking it yourself, the FDA can’t stop you,” says Estep. The FDA did not immediately respond to questions about the legality of the vaccine.
Estep says the group did seek legal advice and its white paper begins with extensive disclaimers, including a statement that anyone who uses the group’s materials takes “full responsibility” and must be at least 18 years old. Among those who Estep says advised the group is Michelle Meyer, a lawyer and ethics researcher at Geisinger Health System, in New York. In an email, Meyer declined to comment.
Given the international attention on covid-19 vaccines, and the high political stakes surrounding the crisis, the Radvac group could nevertheless find itself under scrutiny by regulators. “What the FDA really wants to crack down on is anything big, which makes claims, or makes money. And this is none of those,” says Church. “As soon as we do any of those things, they would justifiably crack down. Also, things that get attention. But we haven’t had any so far.”
Self-experimentation
According to Siber, experimenting on oneself with covid-19 vaccines wouldn’t have any chance of winning ethics approval at any university in the US. But he acknowledges there is a tradition among vaccinologists of injecting themselves as a quick and cheap way to get data. Siber has done so himself on more than one occasion, though not recently.
The chance to speed up research makes self-experimentation tempting even today. There have been reports of Chinese scientists taking their own covid-19 vaccines. Hans-Georg Rammensee, of the University of Tubingen, in Germany, says he injected a covid-19 peptide vaccine into his abdomen earlier this year. It caused a bump the size of a ping-pong ball and a profusion of immune cells through his blood.
Rammensee, who cofounded the company CureVac, says he did it to avoid red tape and quickly get some preliminary results about a vaccine being developed at his university. He says it was acceptable to do so because he is a “renowned expert in immunology” and understood the risks and implications of his action. “If someone like me who knows what he is doing [does it], it’s fine, but it would be a crime for a professor to tell a postdoc to take it,” Rammensee said in a phone interview. He claims Germany has no clear rules on the subject, leaving self-experiments in a gray zone of actions which, as he puts it, “are not forbidden and which are not allowed.”
Because more people are involved in the Radvac project, it may be viewed differently by authorities, who could decide the group is in fact operating an unsanctioned clinical trial. In recent weeks, Estep and other Radvac members have started to publicize their work and contact acquaintances to encourage them to participate.
“He called me and said ‘Do you want it?’ and I said ‘no.’”
“It’s real, he’s a solid scientist, but I wouldn’t do what he is doing,” said one executive to whom Estep offered the vaccine. The executive asked to remain anonymous because he doesn’t want to be associated with the effort. According to the executive, “He called me and said ‘Do you want it?’ and I said ‘no.’ ‘Do you want me to send you some?’ I said ‘No, I am not going to do anything with it, so don’t waste it on me.’ I told him, ‘The less I know, the better.’”
Whether or not regulators step in, and even if the vaccine proves to be a dud, the DIY covid-19 vaccine is already changing the attitudes of those who’ve taken it. Hoekstra says that since twice spraying the formulation into his nose, he moves through an “unsafe” world differently.
“I am not licking doorknobs,” says Hoekstra, who joined the group after departing his day job due to the shutdown. “But it’s an amazingly surreal experience knowing that I may have an immunity to this constant danger [and] that my continued existence through this pandemic will be a useful dataset. It lends a level of meaning and purpose.”
I asked Hoekstra if I could join the group and get the vaccine, too. “Consider the invitation open,” he said.
A group of Japanese lawmakers is seeking to restrict the use of TikTok and other apps developed by Chinese firms, following the footstep of India, which has already blocked dozens of Chinese apps, and the U.S., which is floating the idea of a ban.
The decision was first reported by the Japanese national broadcaster NHK. The lawyers shared the same concern as officials in the U.S. and India that their domestic user data could end up in the hand of Beijing, and planned to submit the proposal to the Japanese government as early as September.
Japan was one of TikTok’s first overseas success cases despite being considered a tough nut for foreign internet firms to crack. The nascent localization team went all out to attract celebrity users and made its breakthrough with Kinoshita Yukina, a TV personality, after holding “six or seven rounds of discussions” with her studio. Kinoshita’s participation ushered in other stars, who brought with them flocks of fans to the platform.
In the Japanese iOS store, TikTok has consistently ranked at the top among entertainment apps and is the fifth-most downloaded app across all categories in the country as of this writing, according to research firm App Annie.
In response to scrutiny coming from Japan, a TikTok spokesperson reiterated the app’s distance from Chinese control in a statement to TechCrunch:
“There’s a lot of misinformation about TikTok out there. TikTok has an American CEO, a Chief Information Security Officer with decades of industry, U.S. military and law enforcement experience, and a U.S. team that works diligently to develop a best-in-class security infrastructure. Four of our parent company’s five board seats are controlled by some of the world’s best-respected global investors. TikTok U.S/ user data is stored in the U.S. and Singapore, with strict controls on employee access.”
Other Chinese tech giants have their eyes locked on Japan for years. Baidu, for instance, operates Simeji, one of the most popular input methods among Japanese. Line is the main chat app in the country, but WeChat is essential to Japanese businesses with Chinese ties. While the Indian ban is certainly a debacle for Chinese developers coveting the fastest-growing internet market, the country’s ARPU, or average revenue per user, also remains low compared to numbers in the West. Japan, on the other hand, is a much more lucrative market.
With their big day before lawmakers just around the corner, previews of Google (well, Alphabet), Facebook, Amazon and Apple’s opening statements are now available on the House Judiciary Committee’s site. On Wednesday, the CEOs of each company will appear in an unusually executive-packed Congressional hearing focused on antitrust concerns over the business practices.
While the opening statements are just a glimpse of the hearing’s potential topics, they do provide a useful outline for the strategy each company will use to fend off accusations that their businesses have grown on such an enormous scale due to anticompetitive behavior. In recent hearings, tech executives have mostly managed to stick to safe, well-rehearsed lines, so if any moments deviate from these scripts those will likely be the most interesting or useful bits of testimony.
In their opening statements, the chief executives of each company make some similar arguments–for example, all four claim that their companies, despite their size and power, still face intense competition, especially in global markets. Amazon and Apple also say that their ecosystems have created millions of job for third-party businesses that use their platforms.
But the CEOs also take slightly different approaches to how they present their opening statements. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive officer, and Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Alphabet and Google, go into their personal backgrounds. Meanwhile, part of Apple CEO Tim Cook and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg strategy for their testimony in front of Congress is focusing on how American their companies are, despite their international footprints: Cook calls Apple an “uniquely American company,” and Zuckerberg says that Facebook is a “proudly American company.”
Here are some of the key points from each opening statement:
Though Amazon is the largest online retailer in America, Bezos will argue that it is a small player in the global retail market, with Amazon accounting for “less than 1% of the $25 trillion global retail market and less than 4% of retail in the U.S.” Among domestic competitors, Bezos focuses on Walmart, stating that it is “a company more than twice Amazon’s size,” and also names newer competitors like Shopify and Instacart.
Bezos also dwells on the small- and medium-sized retailers that sell products on Amazon’s platform, estimating that third-party businesses on Amazon have created over 2.2 million new jobs around the world.
Cook says that the “smartphone market is fiercely competitive,” with rivals like Samsung, LG, Huawei and Google, and that all of Apple’s product categories, including the iPhone, do not have a dominant market share in any of the markets where it does business.
Like Bezos, Cook’s statement also argues that Apple’s ecosystem has helped create jobs. He says that the App Store now hosting more than 1.7 million apps, only 60 of which were developed by Apple, and “more than 1.9 million American jobs in all 50 states are attributable to Apple.”
Even though Google Search is the dominant search engine in the U.S., Pichai will claim that is facing down a large roster of rivals, including services that aren’t specifically search engines. For example, he cites Amazon’s Alexa, Twitter, WhatsApp, SnapChat, and Pinterest as alternative sources of information and says consumers turn to e-commerce sites like Amazon, eBay and Walmart for information about products.
Google’s ad business is also expected to be in the spotlight during the hearings. Pichai argues that advertisers have “an enormous amount of choice” for platforms, including Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Comcast and others, that means advertising costs have lowered by 40% over the last decade.
Zuckerberg also argues that Facebook still faces intense competition, especially in other countries. Though Zuckerberg doesn’t reference any specific company or app, he calls out competition from the Chinese tech industry, telling lawmakers that “China is building its own version of the internet focused on on very different ideas, and they are exporting their vision to other countries.”
While Facebook has been criticized for acquiring companies like Instagram and WhatsApp, Zuckerberg says that those services improved under his company’s ownership.
The big tech hearing with the House Judiciary’s Antitrust Subcommittee will begin Wednesday at 12PM ET and we’ll be following along over the course of the day so check back for coverage of the most noteworthy moments. For reference, the full opening statements can be found below.
At company's 43rd AGM, Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani said that Jio has developed its own 5G technology. The company plans to take its indigenous 5G solution global. However, some experts feel Jio will face challenges as it enters 5G club and offers its product to operators globally. https://ift.tt/2DbNxXs
Apple tightly controls the App Store, which forms the centerpiece of its $46.3 billion-per-year services business. https://ift.tt/3fdbnz3 https://ift.tt/eA8V8J
The four tech CEOs will testify to a panel of lawmakers investigating how their business practices and data gathering have hurt smaller rivals as they seek to retain their dominance https://ift.tt/3f71enF https://ift.tt/eA8V8J
Toppr, one of the largest online learning startups in India, has secured $46 million in a new financing round as it looks to scale its platform including a new product.
Dubai-headquartered investment firm Foundation Holdings led the Mumbai-based seven-year-old startup’s Series D round. Kaizen Private Equity, an existing investor, also participated in the new round, which brings Toppr’s to-date raise to over $92 million.
Toppr operates four products and services that are aimed at K-12 students. Learning app, Toppr’s marquee service, offers students live classes and sessions to clear doubts, pre-recorded lessons and tests. Toppr’s catalog covers 17 subjects and prepares students for five dozen competitive exams, explained Toppr founder and chief executive Zishaan Hayath in an interview with TechCrunch.
A portion of Toppr’s library is available to students at no charge on Learning app, but full access requires a membership. The subscription starts at 1,000 Indian rupee ($13.35) and goes as high as 3,000 Indian rupee ($40).
The startup launched Codr, a product aimed at helping all school-age children learn computer programming, last month. A Codr session costs about $9.35. Toppr also maintains a free problem solving app that enables a student to take a picture of a question, use machine learning to sift through the large bank of problems Toppr has amassed over the years, and get its solution instantly, explained Hayath.
Toppr’s Learning app has amassed over 13 million users, more than 150,000 of whom are paying subscribers, he said. In recent months, the startup has also worked on a new product called School OS, which enables a school to digitize their learning experience. Through School OS, a teacher can assign and collect homework digitally, and students can attend live classes.
Zishaan Hayath, the founder and chief executive of Toppr, a Mumbai-headquartered edtech startup (Photo: Toppr)
“They can also attend classes from previous years, or of grades ahead of them. Our schooling system is built in a way that keeps you locked in the current year’s curriculum. On digital, one of the benefits is that you don’t have to follow such rules. So for instance, if a student in tenth grade needs to brush up some concept from grade nine, they can do so at any moment,” said Hayath.
More than 40 schools have deployed School OS for their 60,000 students, he said. The startup plans to have 300,000 students enrolled to School OS in the next few months.
“Toppr has emerged as the highest traffic destination for K-12 learning and hosts over 1 million sessions every day. Toppr’s community of 50,000+ educators from across the country has contributed to over 35 lakh learning pieces, including questions, solutions, concepts, games and videos for the students. Our investment in Toppr also reflects our commitment to empowering great teachers via the new School OS. The new School OS already has 55,000+ learners on it,” said Aakash Sachdev, Managing Director of Foundation Holdings, in a statement.
Sachdev has joined Toppr’s board as part of the new financing round.
Hayath said the startup will continue to focus on scaling its various products and services, and also invest a little on marketing — an aspect he said Toppr has never spent any penny on.
Another relatively new area for Toppr is exploring merger and acquisition deals. Hayath said the startup has so far resisted the idea of acquiring a team or firm to grow inorganically, but is open to scouting deals for a right fit.
Toppr’s fundraising announcement today comes as edtech startups in India witness a significant surge in their userbases at a time when firms in other industries are finding it difficult to steer through the coronavirus pandemic.
Realme C11 will go on its second sale today, July 29, at 12pm (noon) via Flipkart and Realme India website. The phone was originally unveiled in Malaysia in June and launched in India earlier this... https://ift.tt/39zM2hC
