It's April 01, 2020 at 12:15PM
Tuesday, March 31, 2020
Investors tell Indian startups to ‘prepare for the worst’ as Covid-19 uncertainty continues
Just three months after capping what was the best year for Indian startups, having raised a record $14.5 billion in 2019, they are beginning to struggle to raise new capital as prominent investors urge them to “prepare for the worst”, cut spending and warn that it could be challenging to secure additional money for the next few months.
In an open letter to startup founders in India, ten global and local private equity and venture capitalist firms including Accel, Lightspeed, Sequoia Capital, and Matrix Partners cautioned that the current changes to the macro environment could make it difficult for a startup to close their next fundraising deal.
The firms, which included Kalaari Capital, SAIF Partners, and Nexus Venture Partners — some of the prominent names in India to back early-stage startups — asked founders to be prepared to not see their startups’ jump in the coming rounds and have a 12-18 month runway with what they raise.
“Assumptions from bull market financings or even from a few weeks ago do not apply. Many investors will move away from thinking about ‘growth at all costs’ to ‘reasonable growth with a path to profitability.’ Adjust your business plan and messaging accordingly,” they added.
Signs are beginning to emerge that investors are losing appetite to invest in the current scenario.
Indian startups participated in 79 deals to raise $496 million in March, down from $2.86 billion that they raised across 104 deals in February and $1.24 billion they raised from 93 deals in January this year, research firm Tracxn told TechCrunch. In March last year, Indian startups had raised $2.1 billion across 153 deals, the firm said.
New Delhi ordered a complete nation-wide lockdown for its 1.3 billion people for three weeks earlier this month in a bid to curtail the spread of COVID-19.
The lockdown, as you can imagine, has severely disrupted businesses of many startups, several founders told TechCrunch.
Vivekananda Hallekere, co-founder and chief executive of mobility firm Bounce, said he is prepared for a 90-day slowdown in the business.
Founder of a Bangalore-based startup, which was in advanced stages to raise more than $100 million, said investors have called off the deal for now. He requested anonymity.
Food delivery firm Zomato, which raised $150 million in January, said it would secure an additional $450 million by the end of the month. Two months later, that money is yet to arrive.
Many startups are already beginning to cut salaries of their employees and let go of some people to survive an environment that aforementioned VC firms have described as “uncharted territory.”
Travel and hotel booking service Ixigo said it had cut the pay of its top management team by 60% and rest of the employees by up to 30%. MakeMyTrip, the giant in this category, also cut salaries of its top management team.
Beauty products and cosmetics retailer Nykaa on Tuesday suspended operations and informed its partners that it would not be able to pay their dues on time.
Investors cautioned startup founders to not take a “wait and watch” approach and assume that there will be a delay in their “receivables,” customers would likely ask for price cuts for services, and contracts would not close at the last minute.
“Through the lockdown most businesses could see revenues going down to almost zero and even post that the recovery curve may be a ‘U’ shaped one vs a ‘V’ shaped one,” they said.
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Creating Triggers Based on Language Conditions in Teneo
In Teneo, you can use two different kinds of triggers in your flows, class triggers and syntax triggers. We have already shown some examples of the former one, and will here show you how to create a syntax trigger.
Both class triggers and syntax triggers can be built automatically from learning examples. The difference is that with syntax triggers, a language condition will be created that can later be manually adjusted. This language condition consists of language objects that are concatenated using Teneo’s condition syntax.
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Hiring My Cat as a Software Developer
Meet Samson. Samson is a cat, more specifically a Faelis Feline. You can see a picture of Samson below. Since it seems to be popular to work from home these days, I figured I'd hire my cat as a software developer. That way, I can lay around in my hammock, enjoying the sun, while my cat does all the heavy lifting. Whenever it's time to pay salary, all I need to do is to open a box a Whiskas, and voila! Salary paid!
The idea came from the following logical chain of arguments.
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Vericool raises $19.1 million for its plant-based packaging replacement for plastic coolers
Vericool, a Livermore, Calif.-based startup that’s replacing plastic coolers and packaging with plant-based products, has raised $19.1 million in a new round of financing.
The company’s stated goal is to replace traditional packaging materials like polystyrene with plant-based insulating packaging materials.
Its technology uses 100% recycled paper fibers and other plant-based materials, according to the company, and are curbside recyclable and compostable.
Investors in the round include Radicle Impact Partners, The Ecosystem Integrity Fund, ID8 Investments and AiiM Partners, according to a statement.
“We’re pleased to support Vericool because of the company’s track record of innovation, high-performance products, well-established patent portfolio and focus on environmental resilience. We are inspired by the company’s social justice commitment to address recidivism and provide workplace opportunity to formerly incarcerated individuals,” said Dan Skaff, managing partner of Radicle Impact Partners and Vericool’s new lead director.
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Monday, March 30, 2020
Artificial Intelligence (AI): Transforming The IT Industry In 2020
It's not a matter of whether or not artificial intelligence will change the future of the IT industry, but how and to what extent it will change it. What a great year we had! 2019 brought us great transformation and excitements in the artificial intelligence (AI) space. 2020 promises to be greater!
The 21st century age is one of the exciting periods of human history where technological advancement is taking place in our daily life. We now have smartwatches monitoring patient’s health, cars driving themselves, robots working in industries, and artificial intelligence unleashing unstoppable innovation every day.
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Los Angeles-based challenger bank HMBradley officially opens its virtual doors
The Los Angeles-based digital challenger bank, HMBradley, opened its virtual doors to the public today, allowing the thousands of waitlisted would-be users to set up direct deposits and collect their sign-up bonuses.
The company is offering banking customers an up to 3% return on their savings based on the percentage they save of their quarterly deposits.
HMBradley also set up a new feature which allows users to save towards specific goals.
Backed by PayPal founder Max Levchin’s HVF Labs, along with Walkabout Ventures, Mucker Capital, Index Ventures, and Accomplice, to the tune of $3.5 million, HMBradley was designed to benefit savers, the company said.
Account holders with balances up to $100,000 can receive up to 3% annual percentage yields on their accounts. These account holders qualify by receiving one direct deposit and saving at least 5% of the total amount deposited in an account monthly.
HMBradley accounts are held through Hatch Bank, which is FDIC insured.
To qualify for the 3 percent rate, customers need to save over 20 percent of their income, account holders who save between 15 percent and 20 percent receive 2 percent of their cash per year, and those saving less than 15 percent but more than ten percent receive a 1 percent APY.
“We want to empower and protect every consumer financially to show them that a bank can be on their side, regardless of how much money they make,” said Zach Bruhnke, co-founder and CEO of HMBradley, in a statement.
Account holders have access to 55,000 fee-free ATMs around the country, mobile check deposit and around-the-clock support, the company said.
The company’s MasterCard comes with all of the standard features including zero liability protection and an ability to set up travel, fraud alerts, and cancel cards all through an online portal, the company said.
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Facebook deletes Brazil President’s coronavirus misinfo post
Facebook has diverted from its policy of not fact-checking politicians in order to prevent the spread of potentially harmful coronavirus misinformation from Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. Facebook made the decisive choice to remove a video shared by Bolsonaro on Sunday where he claimed that “hydroxychloroquine is working in all places.” That’s despite the drug still undergoing testing to determine its effectiveness for treating COVID-19, which researchers and health authorities have not confirmed.
“We remove content on Facebook and Instagram that violates our Community Standards, which do not allow misinformation that could lead to physical harm” a Facebook spokesperson told TechCrunch. Facebook specifically prohibits false claims regarding cure, treatments, the availability of essential services, and the location or intensity of contagion outbreaks.
BBC News Brazil first reported the takedown today in Portuguese. In the removed video, Bolsonaro had been speaking to a street vendor, and the President claimed “They want to work”, in contrast to the World Health Organization’s recommendation that people practice social distancing. He followed up that “That medicine there, hydroxychloroquine, is working in all places.”
If people wrongly believe there’s an widely-effective treatment for COVID-19, they may be more reckless about going out in public, attending work, or refusing to stay in isolation. That could cause the virus to spread more quickly, defeat efforts to flatten the curve, and overrun health care systems.
This why Twitter removed two of Bolsonaro’s tweets on Sunday, as well as one from Rudy Giuliani, in order to stop the distribution of misinformation. But to date, Facebook has generally avoided acting as an arbiter of truth regarding the veracity of claims by politicians. It notoriously refuses to send blatant misinformation in political ads, including those from Donald Trump, to fact-checkers.
Last week, though, Facebook laid out that COVID-19 misinformation “that could contribute to imminent physical harm” would be directly and immediately removed as it’s done about other outbreaks since 2018, while less urgent conspiracy theories that don’t lead straight to physical harm are sent to fact-checkers that can then have the Facebook reach of those posts demoted.
Now the question is whether Facebook would be willing to apply this enforcement to Trump, who’s been criticized for spreading misinformation about the severity of the outbreak, potential treatments, and the risk of sending people back to work. Facebook is known to fear backlash from conservative politicians and citizens who’ve developed a false narrative that it discriminates against or censors their posts.
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Johnson & Johnson partners with BARDA to fund $1 billion in COVID-19 vaccine research
Pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson is partnering with the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to fund over $1 billion in COVID-19 vaccine and antiviral treatment research and development, the company said on Monday.
The partnership is an expansion of an existing agreement between BARDA and J&J’s Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies division.
With the agreement, the company is setting a goal of providing a global supply of more than one billion doses of the vaccine, which J&J expects to have in clinical trials by September 2020 at the latest. The first batches of the vaccine may be available for emergency use by early 2021, the company said.
BARDA’s partnership with J&J encompasses research and development of potential antiviral treatments in addition to the work that’s being done to develop a vaccine for the disease. Those efforts include development work J&J and BARDA are conducting with the Rega Institute for Medical Research in Belgium.
J&J said it had also committed to expanding its global manufacturing capacity, both in the U.S. and overseas. That additional production ability will help the company bring an affordable vaccine to the public on a not-for-profit basis for emergency pandemic use, the company said.
Working with teams at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a part of the Harvard Medical School, Janssen Pharmaceuticals began its research into potential vaccine candidates back in January. Those candidates were tested at several academic institutions, the company said, which led to the identification of a lead COVID-19 vaccine candidate — and two potential back-ups.
Last week, Moderna Health, another pharmaceutical company working on a vaccine, said that it could have an experimental treatment available to healthcare workers as soon as the fall.
The Moderna vaccine uses messenger RNA, rather than doses of the COVID-19 virus itself, to inoculate against the disease. The use of mRNA means that the inoculation doesn’t expose recipients to the disease itself, so they’re not at risk of contracting the disease.
Last Monday, Moderna made the vaccine available to volunteer participants as part of the company’s Phase 1 clinical trials conducted in Washington state.
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Sunday, March 29, 2020
MiBand 3 and React-Native (Part 3): Docker, Spring Cloud, and Spring Boot
After significant work on my mistakes described in the second chapter of this series, I decided to move on to the final chapter. In this article, we will focus on my latest findings in the development of the server-side. I am going to show how a React-Native application can collect MiBand data and transfer it to a real server.
My server will be based on a microservice solution that can be deployed easily because of docker-compose. For the last 5-8 years, microservices have become a trending solution for solving many issues in server-side development. Its significant capabilities in scaling of infrastructure and efficient and minimal time consuming for request's processing, motivated me to implement a small server-side API, based on Spring Cloud.
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Saturday, March 28, 2020
Detroit Auto Show canceled in preparation for FEMA to turn venue into field hospital
The North American International Auto Show, which was scheduled for June in Detroit, has been canceled as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to spread and the city prepares to repurpose the TCF Center into a temporary field hospital.
NAIAS is held each year in the TCF Center, formerly known as the Cobo Center. Organizers said they expected the Federal Emergency Management Agency to designate the TCF Center as a field hospital.
“Although we are disappointed, there is nothing more important to us than the health, safety and well-being of the citizens of Detroit and Michigan, and we will do what we can to support our community’s fight against the coronavirus outbreak,” NAIAS Executive Director Rod Alberts said in an emailed statement.
The NAIAS is the latest in a long line of events and conventions that have been canceled as COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, has spread from China to Europe, and now the U.S. and the rest of the world.
More than 100 convention centers and facilities around the country are being considered to potentially serve as temporary hospitals. Alberts said it became clear that TCF Center would be an inevitable option to serve as a care facility.
The NAIAS, also known as the Detroit Auto Show, will be held in June 2021. Organizers are discussing plans for a fundraising activity later this year to benefit the children’s charities that were designated as beneficiaries of the 2020 Charity Preview event.
This year’s show was highly anticipated because it had moved from January to summer, following years of encouragement to schedule it during the warmer months.
All tickets purchased for the 2020 NAIAS show, including tickets for the Public Show, Industry Preview and Charity Preview will be fully refunded, organizers said. Charity Preview ticket holders will be given the option of a refund, or the opportunity to donate the proceeds of their refund to one of the nine designated Charity Preview beneficiaries. The NAIAS ticket office will be in contact with all ticket holders, according to the organizers.
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Friday, March 27, 2020
A new FDA-authorized COVID-19 test doesn’t need a lab and can produce results in just 5 minutes
There’s a new COVID-19 test from healthcare technology maker Abbott that looks to be the fastest yet in terms of producing results, and that can do so on the spot right at point-of-care, without requiring a round trip to a lab. This test for the novel coronavirus causing the current global pandemic has received emergency clearance for use by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and will begin production next week, with output of 50,000 per day possible starting next week.
The new Abbott ID NOW COVID-19 test uses the Abbott ID NOW diagnostics platform, which is essentially a lab-in-a-box that is roughly the size of a small kitchen appliance. It’s size, and the fact that it can produce either a positive result in just five minutes, or a negative one in under 15, mean that it could be a very useful means to extend coronavirus testing beyond its current availability to more places including clinics and doctor’s offices, and cut down on wait times both in terms of getting tested and receiving a diagnosis.
Unlike the rapid tests that have been used in other countries, and that received a new type of authorization under an FDA guideline that doesn’t confirm the accuracy fo the results, this rapid testing solution uses the molecular testing method, which works with saliva and mucus samples swabbed from a patient. This means that it works by identifying a portion of the virus’ DNA in a patient, which means it’s much better at detecting the actual presence of the virus during infection, whereas other tests that search the blood for antibodies that are used in point-of-care settings can only detect antibodies, which might be present in recovered patients who don’t actively have the virus.
The good news for availability of this test is that ID NOW, the hardware from Abbott that it runs on, already “holds the largest molecular point-of-care footprint in the U.S.,” and is “widely available” across doctor’s offices, urgent care clinics, emergency rooms and other medical facilities.
In total, Abbott now says that it believes it will produce 5 million tests in April, split between these new rapid tests and the lab tests that it received emergency use authorization for by the FDA on March 18.
Testing has been one of the early problems faced by the U.S. in terms of getting a handle on the coronavirus pandemic: The country has lagged behind other nations globally in terms of per capita tests conducted, which experts say has hampered its ability to properly track and trace the spread of the virus and its resulting respiratory disease. Patients have reported having to go to extreme lengths to receive a test, and endure long waits for results, even in cases where exposure was likely and their symptoms match the COVID-19 profile.
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