Swedish telehealth startup Kry has launched a tool for healthcare professionals to conduct remote consultations during the coronavirus pandemic. Calls for EU citizens to self isolate to reduce the spread of COVID-19 is driving major demand for video appointments, it said. The platform — Care Connect by Kry — is launching in Europe, with ten
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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is making use of its Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) powers to expand the pool of available COVID-19 testing resources in the U.S., and now you can add another rapid test that delivers results in just 30 minutes to the list. Mesa’s test is also small enough to be
Snapchat’s location sharing app acquisition Zenly has gamified shelter-in-place during the COVID-19 outbreak. Today the app launched its Stay At Home challenge that shows a leaderboard of which friends have spent the most percentage of the last three days in their homes. Users can see who’s social distancing the best and share stickers of the
After years of hype, the AR/VR space has certainly grown quieter as of late, but some investors are still coalescing behind a vision that the technologies could one day replace mobile if the technical kinks can be worked out. Creal is a Swiss startup that’s working on some fundamental display technologies that could make VR
Zoom, a video chat service then popular with corporations, filed to go public on March 22, 2019. Best known in venture and corporate circles, Zoom was far from a household name at the time. However, the groundwork for its 2020-era consumer breakthrough during the novel coronavirus epidemic was detailed during its IPO march in the
The COVID-19 outbreak has led to record Pinterest usage as people stuck at home increased their searches for things like lesson plans, kids’ crafts, new recipes, and gardening ideas. Last weekend, for example, Pinterest saw more searches and saves globally than any other weekend in its history. And in the U.S., it saw record numbers
It all started with a tweet from 11:FS co-founder Simon Taylor. If the U.K. government could be persuaded to provide financial support to the self-employed during the Coronavirus crisis, as it has already pledged for full-time employees, then Open Banking technology could be used to self-certify lost income, and therefore overcome one of the main
A new annual survey taken before the current COVID-19 crisis led to restrictions of movement in much of the U.S. suggests good news for Amazon, Facebook’s dominance unthreatened and continued growth in podcasting. Edison Research and Triton Digital released their annual Infinite Dial survey last week, compiling data on consumers’ use of smart speakers, podcasts,
It’s like Google Docs for everything. Screen is a free interactive multiplayer screensharing app that gives everyone a cursor so they can navigate, draw on, and even code within the apps of their co-workers while voice or video chatting. Screen makes it easy and fun to co-design content, pair program, code review or debug together,
Rocket launch startup Astra, which had been attempting to claim DARPA’s prize for successful demonstration of flexible space launch capabilities until earlier this month, will not be moving forward with an attempted flight of its launch vehicle this week as planned. The company’s “One of Three” rocket ran into an “anomaly” during pre-launch testing in
Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. The public markets are in turmoil as the economic impact of COVID-19 comes into focus; however, it is less clear what the impact of the changing value of public companies today will have on the
Social media companies have been hard at work to make sure they play a helpful rather than harmful role in disseminating news and information about the coronavirus pandemic. Today, Twitter took an extra step beyond its own platform to put its efforts into the wider, already under-pressure world of journalism. Twitter announced that it would
As companies that used to having workers in the same building struggle to find ways to work from home, one company that has been remote from Day One is GitLab . It recently published a handbook to help other companies who are facing the work-from-home challenge for the first time. Lest you think GitLab is
ePlane, described as a B2B sourcing and business intelligence platform for the aerospace parts and repair market, has raised $9 million in funding. The round is led by Japanese trading and investing company Marubeni Corporation, along with a number of previous investors. Founded in 2016 and launched fully in 2018, ePlane has built to let
There’s a global shortage of available protective equipment (PPE) and medical supplies for use by frontline responders working to fight the spread of the novel coronavirus, and the Frontline Responders Fund wants to channel donations to help address that shortage. The fund, which is seeking public donations via GoFundMe, will use all proceeds to cover
Apple has released software updates for the iPhone, the iPad, the Apple Watch, the Apple TV and the Mac. The biggest changes are on the iPad. Starting today, you can pair a mouse or trackpad with your iPad and use it to move a cursor on the display. Apple unveiled trackpad support for iPadOS when
Meet Imatag, a French startup that has been working on a watermarking product. Watermarking is nothing new, but the company has found a way to mark images even if they are resized, cropped, edited or compressed. Many photographers and brands watermark their photos so that you can see who’s the original source when the photo
When activist investors Starboard Value took a 7.5% stake in Box last September, there was reasonable speculation that it would begin to try and push an agenda, as activist investors tend to do. While the firm has been quiet to this point, today Box announced that Starboard was adding three members to the 9 member
Disney+, the streaming service from the Walt Disney Company, has been rapidly ramping up in the last several weeks. But while some of that expansion has seen some hiccups, other regions are basically on track. Today, as expected, Disney announced that it is officially launching across 7 markets in Euopre — but doing so using
Smart thermometer maker Kinsa has been working on building accurate, predictive models of how seasonal illnesses like the flu travel in and among communities — and its fever map is finding new utility as the novel coronavirus pandemic grows globally. While Kinsa’s US Health Weather Map has no way of tracking the spread of COVID-19
Over-the-top live TV streaming service fuboTV announced today it plans to merge with the virtual entertainment technology company, FaceBank Group. The proposed merger would retain the name fuboTV for the combined company, consisting of fuboTV’s direct-to-consumer live TV streaming platform and FaceBank’s technology IP in sports, movies and live performances. FaceBank is not a household
The vicissitudes of social distancing have taken many people by surprise, making video calls a new necessity for distant socializing. But which of the two dozen apps out there should you and your (perhaps not as tech-savvy) friends and family use? Here are our recommendations, whether it’s for a coffee meeting, a family get-together, or
For much of the history of enterprise technology, companies tended to buy from a single vendor because it made managing the entire affair much easier while giving them a “single throat to choke” when something went wrong. On the flip side, it also put customers at the mercy of said vendor — and it wasn’t
Facebook is temporarily downgrading the quality of video streaming in Europe on its social platforms Facebook and Instagram in response to a call for action from the European Commission, per Reuters. Disney has also said it will work to shrink bandwidth used by its streaming service, Disney+, which is due to begin launching in Europe
Startups continue to find new ways to contribute to ongoing efforts to fight the global spread of COVID-19 during the current global coronavirus pandemic, and personal health hardware-maker Oura is no exception. The smart ring startup is working with the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) on a new study to see if its device
Earlier this month, the FCC issued a new measure aimed at easing some of the burdens on consumers as COVID-19 continues to have an increasingly profound impact on nearly every aspect of life. Most or all major internet and wireless providers in the U.S. signed up for the pledge, agreeing to take actions like waiving
Planet 13 is located blocks off the Las Vegas Strip and holds the title as the world’s largest cannabis dispensary. But it’s much more than just a storefront. There’s a lot to the 115,000-square-foot facility, including entertainment, restaurants and cannabis processing equipment where the company makes edibles and drinks. This is a destination, Vegas-style. In
For now, the late-stage venture world simply isn’t as bad as we expected Alex Wilhelm 8 hours Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. This morning we’re taking a look at mega-rounds: funding events of $100 million or more. What’s fun about these
Big tech has been making a huge effort to mobilize its power to help people work better together to battle the ongoing coronavirus pandemic — whether it’s creating search and information portals or making sure the most authoritative voices are surfacing above the noise, or gathering compute power to supercharge research efforts to find vaccines.
When designers need to collaborate with other teams, they can currently turn to products like InVision and Zeplin. But Ceros creative director Jack Dixon said there’s a “pretty interesting gap in the market” — once you move beyond prototypes and start working with websites that are either live or in staging, the process starts to