fortune--2020-03-24--With 5G, wearable devices are expected to become even more sci-fi

In a few years, you’ll be a walking connected app. When trying to find a friend’s house, you’ll feel a vibration in your right shirt sleeve to indicate that you should turn. A personal digital assistant embedded in your contact lens will show you your appointments on a miniature screen in your eye. Your shoes will measure how far you walk—while they recharge your wearable devices.
This future, straight out of a sci-fi movie, will be possible partly because of 5G, the superfast successor to today’s wireless networks. After the upgrade by major telecom companies, which is just getting underway, wearables will be able to send and receive far greater amounts of data wirelessly, providing the people wearing them with vastly more digital information.
In a few years, 5G optimists say, wearables will be sleeker and smaller than today’s versions because they’ll need less data crunching power internally. Instead, huge volumes of information will be sent through 5G networks to be processed. “What 5G does is make it easy to transport data to the cloud, to make decisions faster,” says Sanyogita Shamsunder, Verizon’s vice president of 5G Labs and Innovation.
In essence, 5G turns people and the sensors they wear into an embodiment of the Internet of things, the tech industry’s term for Internet-connected appliances and machinery. “It’s 5G that’s the big enabler,” says Angela McIntyre, executive director of Stanford University’s eWear Initiative.
But not everyone believes 5G will bring a huge change to wearables—at least not immediately. For one thing, making them 5G-ready will take a lot of time. Manufacturers will have to come up with technical standards, better product designs, and batteries that last longer, says Frank Gillett, technology analyst who follows 5G developments for Forrester Research. Moreover, the question remains: Do consumers even want 5G-connected wearables? “There’s a lot of hyped hand-waving about 5G,” he says. “Plus, why on earth do I need 16 other connected things?”
Perhaps, but even without 5G, the market for wearables is flourishing. At least a quarter of consumers now own a wearable device like an Apple Watch or Fitbit, according to a recent Gallup poll. As prices drop and technology improves, sales will likely grow, to $69.8 billion in 2024 from an expected $49.4 billion this year, according to IDC.
The rise of 5G and the huge volume of data collected from the wearables using it already have privacy advocates worried. Marketers will be eager to mine data from the devices, including precise location information, to deliver targeted ads, for example.
“When we’re dealing with location data and sensitive biometric and health information, that’s a risk that consumers should take seriously,” says Gennie Gebhart, associate director of research at privacy watchdog Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Already, a new wave of wearables is gaining traction, albeit without relying on 5G. Smart earbuds, or “hearables,” provide information via audio including directions that can be heard only by the people wearing them. Meanwhile, nearly a dozen companies sell smart glasses, most of which are aimed at health care, exercise enthusiasts, music aficionados, and owners of smartphones with no headphone jacks.
Wearables go beyond ears, faces, and wrists, however. Clothes are now “wearables” too, and while they’re not 5G powered yet, they highlight what may be possible down the road. For example, this month, Adidas introduced a $40 pair of insoles that measure, for instance, the number of kicks and amount of running that real-life soccer players do and award them “virtual points” for that physical activity in EA’s FIFA soccer video game. Additionally, clothing startup Wearable X makes yoga pants that alert customers when they’re using poor technique for their downward dogs.
“By 2024, we’ll hit an inflection point,” says Shamsunder of Verizon. People may have devices on or beneath their skin that monitor heart rate, glucose, or oxygen saturation and help control chronic conditions like diabetes or respiratory disease. The monitoring could enable people to live at home instead of having to move into an assisted living facility.
Paramedics and firefighters may eventually be required to use wearables that track their heart rates and stress levels. Doctors, too, may regularly use smart glasses to review a patient’s anatomy in 3D before surgery.
Further out, the future gets still weirder. Researchers are working on ultrathin electric mesh for human skin, “tattooable”—or temporary skin that can store data and deliver drugs—and electronic second skins made of microscopic semiconductors. Billionaire Elon Musk is even pushing the concept of a brain-computer interface with his startup, Neuralink. This year, it hopes to implant flexible computer “threads” inside the brains of paralyzed people.
5G would play an important role in all of these far-out technologies. Or maybe not.
“Call me a skeptic,” says Gillett of Forrester. “But I just don’t see it.”
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fortune--2020-03-24--How will Tesla weather the coronavirus storm? Quite nicely, analysts predict

Delta is downgraded to the ‘ junk ’ pile—and may soon have lots of company

Tesla took the seemingly dire step of closing a car factory in Fremont, Calif., and a solar panel plant in Buffalo this week because of the coronavirus epidemic.
But despite its immediate struggles, many analysts consider the company’s long-term outlook to be surprisingly good. On March 19, just after announcing the closures, Morgan Stanley even went so far as to upgrade its rating on Tesla’s stock to the equivalent of a “hold,” from its equivalent of a “sell.” That’s largely because the stock has fallen to a more attractive price, but also because Morgan’s analysts, like some other observers, think the electric carmaker is well-positioned to navigate choppy waters.
Here’s why:
Wheels on the Ground
Obviously, Tesla’s Fremont plant closure will have a significant impact on business: The factory is the company’s biggest car producer. Morgan Stanley assumes the shutdown will last a month and reduce Tesla’s annual car deliveries by 30,000 in 2020 to 420,000 cars. That would still be a substantial increase from Tesla’s 2019 delivery of 367,000 vehicles, but still well short of its own prediction that this year’s production would “comfortably exceed 500,000 units.”
Then there’s the demand question. Morgan Stanley’s analysis accepts Tesla’s claims that it has so many eager buyers, it can sell every car it produces. But there’s reason to question that assumption. Even before COVID-19 crashed the auto market, Tesla was facing headwinds like expiring tax credits for electric vehicles and rising competition.
And no one can predict with certainty the depth or length of the recession that is unfolding. It’s possible that the downturn in new car purchases, which has already begun, lasts two weeks, but it’s also possible it lasts four months. For the first time, Tesla could even wind up producing more cars than it can sell.
“If the industry takes a dive as a whole, people aren’t going to be running to spend money on a Tesla,” says Alyssa Altman, lead transportation analyst for Publicis Sapient, which does not have a financial position in Tesla.
Money in the Bank
But that worst-case scenario actually points to why Tesla is ultimately so well-positioned: It’s sitting on a massive cash reserve.
Above all, Tesla’s decision to raise an extra $2.3 billion from new stock sales in February is looking clairvoyant. That stock sold on Feb. 12 for $767.29 per share, then peaked just a week later at $917.42. Anxiety about the coronavirus in China, then the rest of the world, has driven the stock back down to $505 on Wednesday.
But Tesla still gets to keep the $2.3 billion, pushing its total cash reserves to a whopping $8.6 billion. In a recent SEC filing, Tesla also said it has approximately $3 billion in available lines of credit.
Tesla has some large outstanding obligations, which Pierre Ferragu of New Street Research estimates includes $2 billion in committed investment for factories in Shanghai and Berlin, and $1.5 billion in payments to suppliers. But even accounting for that money, at $600 million per quarter in net spending, Ferragu thinks Tesla can operate for 15 months without further investment.
While there are some restrictions on that $3 billion in credit, Tesla could extend the runway even further. On the other hand, declining demand could increase Tesla’s estimated cash burn. But there’s still a good chance Tesla’s runway is long enough to outlast the worst stretch of even a serious recession, then return to growth.
The Long After
Under CEO Elon Musk, Tesla has methodically, if somewhat theatrically, built a retail market for electric vehicles and taken a dominant position therein. An average recession wouldn’t likely derail that success. But if COVID-19 creates greater economic damage, the narrative could be drastically altered—for worse or for better.
As Morgan Stanley highlighted in a separate March 11 report, the oil market is one clear threat. With help from a price war between oil-producing giants Saudi Arabia and Russia, the coronavirus has triggered the sharpest drop in oil prices in memory. Altman believes that lasting global transformations from the coronavirus, such as shortened supply chains for manufactured goods, will keep those prices low. Cheaper gasoline could make drivers less likely to buy an EV, because it lowers the cost of owning an internal-combustion vehicle.
However, Morgan Stanley’s analysts say this is not a serious threat, because the next “burst” in EV adoption will be from large fleets going electric, with consumer adoption taking a back seat. And Altman says consumer thinking about EVs is less driven by gas costs than it was a decade ago, and more about charging infrastructure—an area where Tesla’s sophisticated and exclusive Supercharger system has an advantage over competitors.
Another risk is the impact a serious downturn could have on government initiatives that have been crucial to Tesla’s growth. If a serious recession pressures government budgets, cuts could threaten generous incentives given to EV buyers in countries from Germany to South Korea. The cuts would dampen sales and slow their return in a recovery, putting Tesla further away from the goal of producing Model 3s and Model Ys at the large scale necessary for sustained profits.
Altman, however, predicts quite the opposite. “The push to rebuild infrastructure is going to be renewed after this,” she says. “There’s a huge opportunity to think differently about how people move around.”
That could mean large new government initiatives to support EV-charging networks, battery research, or even increasing direct subsidies. Coronavirus recovery stimulus could be tied to such decarbonizing efforts, as proposed by liberal think tank Data for Progress. While politically unlikely in the present-day U.S., leadership changes or similar initiatives globally could set the stage for a truly electric recovery—for Tesla and the rest of the economy.
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—The Supreme Court has shunned technology. Could the coronavirus change that?
—What medical experts say about Everlywell’s at-home coronavirus testing kits
—TikTok’s newest viral influencers? Personal finance stars
—Privacy could be the next victim of the coronavirus
—Listen to Leadership Next, a Fortune podcast examining the evolving role of CEOs
—WATCH: Best earbuds in 2020: Apple AirPods Pro vs. the Sony WF-1000XM3
Catch up with Data Sheet, Fortune’s daily digest on the business of tech.


fortune--2020-03-24--SXSW announces its film awards, even after festival’s cancellation

South by Southwest, the sprawling Austin, Texas, conference and festival, was one of the first major gatherings canceled by the coronavirus pandemic. But its organizers, eager to lend a hand to the movies that had been set to premiere at SXSW, on Tuesday went ahead with its film awards.
The announcement Tuesday made for a strange anomaly: prizes handed out, virtually, for a film festival that never happened.
But SXSW and its film director, Janet Pierson, wanted to salvage some of the lost exposure and buzz that are so vital for independent films in securing distribution or stoking word of mouth. SXSW, which had been scheduled to run March 13-22, plays a significant role in boosting the profiles of smaller, scrappy films, along with being a springtime launchpad for Hollywood genre fare.
Most of the high-profile films that had been set to debut at SXSW have reshuffled their release plans. (Judd Apatow’s “The King of Staten Island,” with Pete Davidson, had been set to open SXSW.) But the festival was able to proceed with awards for its juried competitions, with self-isolating jurors watching films on screening links and making selections by teleconference.
The grand jury prize for narrative feature went to Cooper Raiff’s “S—-house,” a micro-budget coming-of-age comedy about a college freshman struggling with the transition. The 22-year-old Raiff wrote, directed, co-edited and stars in the movie. The jurors called it “refreshing and winningly sincere.”
Best documentary feature went to Danish director Katrine Philp’s “An Elephant in the Room,” which tracks a group of kids who have lost family members and who are attending a grief counseling center in New Jersey. The category’s jury called the film heartbreaking, but also “inspiring, uplifting and — especially in these troubled times — essential.”
The festival also announced its Adam Yauch Hörnblowér Award, a prize begun in 2017 named after the late Beastie Boy to honor a filmmaker with an original voice. The award was given to Frank Oz’s “In and of Itself,” a documentary of magician Derek DelGaudio’s show.
The pandemic has forced other festivals, including France’s Cannes Film Festival and New York’s Tribeca Film Festival, to postpone. Cannes organizers hope to put the festival on in June or July. Tribeca, which hasn’t announced new plans, is releasing a short film a day on its website over the next month.
SXSW, which also features interactive and music festivals, was canceled entirely just a week before it was to begin when the Austin government — to prepare for a spike in infections — declared a local disaster and urged against large gatherings.
The cancellation of an annual event that attracts more than 100,000 people to Austin had enormous repercussions on the Texas capital’s businesses, along with the hundreds of films, bands and start-ups that hoped SXSW would be their big break. Immediately after the cancellation, SXSW laid off about one-third of its staff, or around 50 people.
A full list of the film prizes is posted on SXSW.com. SXSW couldn’t go ahead with every award it usually gives out. One that it couldn’t announce Tuesday: the festival’s audience award.
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—Japan finally admits coronavirus might disrupt Tokyo 2020 Olympics
—Which stores are open—and closed—during the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S.?
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—How Emmy season is proceeding, with caution, amid the coronavirus crisis
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Subscribe to Outbreak, a daily newsletter roundup of stories on the coronavirus pandemic and its impact on global business. It’s free to get it in your inbox.


fortune--2020-03-24--As the U.K. goes into lockdown, London faces isolation—and clear skies

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London has been trying to tackle its air-pollution problem for years. Now, with the U.K. on its first day of a nationwide lockdown, the city’s skies are expected to get a silver-lining benefit from the spread of the coronavirus: a break.
On Monday, the National Centre for Atmospheric Science at the University of York showed a sharp drop in air pollution for London beginning in mid-February, noting that the decline was “much more significant” than the trend for the previous three years.
Levels of #AirPollution have dropped over some regions around the world, as #Coronavirus impacts travel and work.
We looked at data from London to see if the UK will follow suit.
Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2) and Particulate Matter (PM2.5) levels have both fallen since mid-Feb. pic.twitter.com/OUWgINbD8h — National Centre for Atmospheric Science (@AtmosScience) March 23, 2020
The center noted that there are other factors that can affect air pollution—including weather. But it said the decline was expected to continue, given that traffic across the capital has increasingly disappeared and business has slowed.
“Air quality has started to improve in many U.K. cities, mirroring what has been seen in other countries that have restricted travel and levels of outdoor activity,” said Alastair Lewis, professor of atmospheric chemistry at the center, in a written comment. “This is primarily a consequence of lower traffic volumes, and some of the most clear reductions have been in nitrogen dioxide (NO2), which comes primarily from vehicle exhaust.”
London’s decline is expected to replicate the noticeable drop-off in air pollution occurring in other areas around the world that have been put under lockdown. Wuhan, China, and northern Italy—home to the industrial Po Valley, one of the most polluted areas in western Europe—have both seen dramatic drops in pollution, as measured by satellite monitoring systems.
The U.K.’s decline in pollution was expected to gain momentum as the country entered lockdown beginning Monday evening, following other European countries from Italy to Germany that have announced increasingly restrictive measures to keep people in their homes and stem the spread of the coronavirus.
In a televised address Monday evening, Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced that people were barred from leaving the house other than to get essential food and medicine and for daily exercise, essential work, and emergencies.
The government also moved to ban groups of more than two people who don’t live together from assembling, and said police would break up gatherings and fine those who do not comply.
“No Prime Minister wants to enact measures like this,” said Johnson. “I know the damage that this disruption is doing and will do to people’s lives, to their businesses, and to their jobs.”
Last week, the government pledged hundreds of billions of pounds to support the economy as businesses have been forced to close and companies have announced widespread layoffs. Those include a pledge to pay 80% of salaries for workers who would otherwise be laid off owing to the crisis, among other measures.
That dramatic economic hit is transforming Europe’s largest capitals, where pollution is often a consequence of the vast networks of road transport and their resulting traffic, particularly in regard to the most dangerous sources of air pollution: nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and particulate matter.
For London, road traffic accounts for roughly half of the city’s NO2, and about 26% of particulate matter, according to Breathe London, an air-quality monitoring project. Concentrations of those pollutants frequently exceed legal levels in high-traffic areas of the British capital.
Bringing down emissions has been a long-term focus of London Mayor Sadiq Khan. Under Khan, the city has instituted an Ultra Low Emission Zone in its center; dramatically expanded its fleet of low-emissions buses, including the red double-deckers the city is known for; and stopped licensing new diesel taxis.
One of the ironies of the dramatic recent reductions in emissions is that—under normal circumstances—any increase in air quality would have a measurable impact in terms of saving lives.
Outdoor air pollution is estimated to cost 400,000 lives per year in the U.K., according to figures from the Royal College of Physicians, noted Anna Hansell, professor in environmental epidemiology at the University of Leicester, in a written comment.
“Sadly we may not see reductions in air pollution translated into direct drops in mortality,” said Hansell. She noted that at least into 2021, the causes of many deaths—which can be exacerbated by stress, isolation, and an overburdened National Health Service system—will likely be difficult to parse.
In the meantime, Lewis said, the newfound quiet in London, and in other major cities, may offer something going forward: “The temporary reductions in emissions being seen at the moment provide us with some unique insight into what might be possible for future air quality in cities.”
It’s a view of how a city with dramatically lower emissions could look—under better circumstances—and feel.
More coronavirus coverage from Fortune:
—Why the extraordinary dollar surge spells more trouble for the global economy
—Japan finally admits the coronavirus might disrupt the Tokyo 2020 Olympics
—Which stores are open—and closed—during the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S.?
—What medical experts say about Everlywell’s at-home coronavirus testing kits
—How to defer your mortgage payments during the pandemic
—How Emmy season is proceeding, with caution, amid the coronavirus crisis
—Listen to Leadership Next, a Fortune podcast examining the evolving role of CEOs
—WATCH: World leaders and health experts on how to stop the spread of COVID-19
Subscribe to Outbreak, a daily roundup of stories on the coronavirus pandemic and its impact on global business, delivered free to your inbox.


fortune--2020-03-24--The Coronavirus Economy: President of the New York City Tenement Museum on what we can learn from pr

The Coronavirus Economy: President of the New York City Tenement Museum on what we can learn from previous pandemics

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As the coronavirus pandemic continues to upend normal life, the fate of cultural centers and museums remains unknown. Like other institutions, the Tenement Museum in New York City’s Lower East Side neighborhood was forced to shut its doors on the evening of March 13 with no reopening date in sight.
Morris Vogel served as museum president from 2008 through 2017, before coming out of retirement in November 2019 to resume his post. In an earlier career, Vogel was a historian who taught the history of medicine and public health at Temple University for 30 years. Additionally, he served as a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and the University of Pennsylvania.
Telling the immigrant story—and putting it into context for modern times—is the driving mission of the museum. “People understand the importance of our message,” says Vogel of the museum’s success. “We’re a core part of the American story. We helped change the American story from being a story of settlers and founding fathers and conquistadors and cowboys and generals and great white men, to being the story of ordinary people in their everyday lives. They found homes, they built families, they raised children, they earned livelihoods. They built communities, and in the process, they built this country. They didn’t assimilate into what America was. They made America what it is, what it has become, and indeed people are continuing to come in, are continuing to do precisely that.”
Morris Vogel, public health historian and president of Manhattan’s Tenement Museum. Courtesy of Morris Vogel
Fortune spoke with Vogel for a new series, The Coronavirus Economy, to ask about how COVID-19 has affected his employment status and plans for the future, and to get a sense of how he was handling this news, both emotionally and financially. The following Q&A has been condensed and lightly edited.
Fortune: Explain what is meant by “public health.”
Vogel: Public health has a real race and class and gender overlay. It’s not as straightforward as “You’re sick, here’s treatment.” It’s about communities; how communities are perceived and how the communities act.
So being on the Lower East Side, some of the most revealing public health episodes—at least in American history—take place in lower Manhattan. There are things like the great cholera epidemics of the early and mid-19th century that are very much focused in Five Points and what we think of today as Chinatown and lower Manhattan. And then in 1892, the Jewish population of the Lower East Side was the great subject of quarantine when an epidemic threatened the United States.
There have always been deeper questions at play and how society responds to events like that. You tend to see it most in communities of people who are disadvantaged, seen as outsiders, subject to social controls. And in this epidemic, it hasn’t fully played into that trope yet, but what we’ve seen in Chinatown so far suggests that it’s just a matter of time.
Can you provide some historical context to what we’re seeing today with COVID-19?
Let’s look at 1793. Yellow fever, mosquito-borne. Philadelphia (the center of that epidemic) was the capital of the United States. This is not an original analysis on my part. What you get is some people who believe that everything about this country is hunky-dory. It’s great. Any disease must be coming from somewhere else. The answer is to quarantine, to keep foreigners out of the country. And these people who have these views? It’s the party in power, the Federalists. On the other side is that day’s Republicans, who actually have a fairly direct line to today’s Democratic party. What they see is wrong is inadequate investment in our own institutions and in our own people. The way they see it—because the idea of investing in people, human capital, isn’t yet a subject—is the streets are filthy. Housing is poor. We’ve got to clean up the miasma, the foul rot that permeates our atmosphere, which is the result of inadequate care for our communities. So that’s pretty clear-cut.
Of course, it turns out that both of these were to some degree right: Mosquitoes spread yellow fever by biting people who were already infected. And in 1793, Philadelphia held a growing population of infected persons fleeing Haiti, which was in the throes of radical revolution. The city’s mosquitoes were an ever-present fact of summer life; they bred (as they do now) in environments where there were swamps, where water stood in stagnant pools, and where properties weren’t cared for, often situations marked by poverty.
The key takeaway from the 1793 yellow fever epidemic for our moment is the degree to which political parties used it to build support. And there is a terrific risk today of blame replacing effective action, of political leaders heightening xenophobia by reassuring at least some Americans that some other group (even a group that lives among us as fellow citizens) is the cause of our problems.
A re-created apartment at New York City’s Tenement Museum. Courtesy of Morris Vogel
What’s happening with the museum since it had to close its doors on March 13?
We’re a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit. We generate most of our operating costs through earned revenue, probably around 75%. The only other museums in New York in that category are the 9/11 Museum and the Intrepid. So in ordinary times, people say, “Wow, that’s a sign of such incredible strength.” But as soon as we zeroed out earned income, which we did on Friday afternoon [March 13], all of a sudden that 75% or so, it becomes—I don’t want to say insurmountable—it becomes an extremely difficult challenge.
We’ve got a great board. They help us generate the 20% to 25% of our operating expenses that come through philanthropy. They’re engaged, they’re supportive, but there’s a limit to what they can do. And now we’re trying to figure out how we go forward, given our dependence on earned revenue and given the challenges to philanthropy.
I mean, it’s no secret that philanthropy has gotten harder as the stock market is vulnerable. We also have no endowment. Over the years we’ve taken what money we’ve raised and put it into expanding programs.
In ordinary circumstances, we write a budget where we could absorb Hurricane Sandy or being closed for 9/11. We’ve absorbed closures, and we could take off a month and get through it. We’re rewriting the budget to get us through June 30 and with absolute uncertainty about what comes after that.
How has your working life changed since the museum’s closure?
I will be working full-time from home. I had retired about two and a half years ago, and so I was doing a lot of consulting from home and going into people’s offices on a need-to-travel basis. I’m used to sitting at a laptop, in a semi-quiet space, usually with classical music in the background. And before that, don’t forget, I spent more than 30 years as a college professor. And a college professor may go in and have classes two days a week, and the rest of the time you’re doing research and writing.
So, I’m used to being in a place with my own thoughts. These days are a lot more online; even if you’re sitting around and working, you have got these pings on the screen coming at you. You’re not as isolated.
Is there anything actionable that people can do based on what we’ve seen in the past?
Don’t overlook the best medical advice: Wash your hands. Avoid crowds. Have yourself tested. There’s the personal, and then there’s the public health. You do your best as a public citizen to not be in public. That’s what we can learn in a medical way.
We have to—it’s kind of like third grade—learn that we are in all of this together. That an individual that’s setting one group off against another is a formula for disaster, both in terms of the response to the epidemic and in terms of maintaining the social and political institutions on which we depend as individuals and collectively.
So that’s almost a metaphoric response. But when you’re trying to maintain a society, that becomes as important as washing your hands. You have to be able to anticipate the good intentions of the people around you. And if you’re not doing your best to make that possible, you can’t assume that they are.
In a bigger way, [the museum] tells the story of people who were brave in a place that had been unknown to them and circumstances that were unknown to them. They didn’t know what the future held, but they believed that it was worth taking the risk. We have no choice about taking the risk at this moment; it’s been dropped onto us, but we should try to be as brave in figuring out how we get through this as were the people whose stories we tell.
More coronavirus coverage from Fortune:
—How to get a refund on your Broadway tickets after the coronavirus shutdown
—The oil sector takes its next hit: The coronavirus on offshore rigs
—Some of the most extreme ways companies are combating the coronavirus
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Subscribe to Fortune’s Outbreak newsletter for a daily roundup of stories on the coronavirus and its impact on global business.


fortune--2020-03-24--There’s a global sprint to design thousands of ventilators

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Fortune’s recent list of the greatest modern designs didn’t mention Forrest M. Bird, but perhaps it should have.
The aviator and inventor’s early research into high-altitude breathing problems of World War II pilots led to the world’s first reliable mechanical ventilators. He built prototypes out of strawberry-shortcake tins and doorknobs, but rounds of improvements ultimately resulted in a portable cardiopulmonary marvel widely used in homes and hospitals. Bird’s innovations helped millions who suffered from acute and chronic heart and lung conditions, and made cumbersome, expensive contraptions like the iron lung obsolete.
The COVID-19 pandemic has already led to a ventilator shortage. Last week, New York governor Andrew Cuomo said his state has fewer than 6,000 ventilators but likely needs 30,000 of them. A report by the Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins University said U.S. hospitals have about 160,000 ventilators, with another estimated 12,700 coming from the federal government’s emergency stockpile. But James Lawler, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Nebraska, warned American hospitals that up to 96 million people could contract the virus. About one million of those people will need ventilator support. That said, a study in Wuhan found that 2.3 percent of those infected required ventilators—more than double the rate Lawler posits. And that’s just in the United States.
Over the next three months, access to ventilators could mean the difference between recovery and death for thousands, if not millions, of patients. This makes the question of how to build them quickly and cheaply one of the world’s most urgent design challenges.
British officials have rushed ventilator blueprints to Rolls-Royce and Jaguar Land Rover. Fiat Chrysler are in talks with Siare Engineering, Italy’s largest ventilator manufacturer. On Sunday, President Trump challenged Ford, General Motors, and Tesla to begin producing ventilators, tweeting “Go for it auto execs, let’s see how good you are?”
GM says it is exploring the feasibility of building ventilators for Ventec Life Systems at one of its plants in Indiana. Musk says Tesla is working on producing ventilators at its factories, and is in discussions with Medtronics. Over the weekend, Musk air-freighted 1,225 ventilators to Los Angeles, saying the machines were sourced from China, which now has an “oversupply.” Bloomberg Intelligence reports Chinese manufacturers could produce about 14,000 non-invasive ventilators by April, for patients in Milan and New York.
Meanwhile, two leading hospitals in Montreal have offered a $200,000 prize for anyone who can come up with a simple and efficient design for building ventilators. Britain’s Daily Mail says engineers the world over are using Google Docs and Github to exchange designs for homemade ventilators.
But ventilators have come a long way since Bird’s prototypes. Robert Chatburn, an associate professor of medicine at Case Western Reserve University, scoffs at the notion car makers, gifted designers, or brilliant hackers will be able to magically ramp up ventilator production in a matter of months. “It’s laudable that car manufacturers would want to help,” he told New York magazine. “But there’s only a handful of people in the world who know how to design a ventilator, much less manufacture one safely at scale.”
These are complicated machines, made from hundreds of small parts produced by companies all over the world. Even if manufacturers succeed in producing thousands of safe ventilators quickly, hospitals will need to distribute them efficiently to severe outbreak areas and train people to use them properly. It’s not just a design quandary, but a supply-chain problem. Nevertheless, it’s often said that designers love wicked problems. This is about as wicked as they come.
More design news below.
Clay Chandler
@ClayChandler
Clay.Chandler@Fortune.com
NEWS BY DESIGN
This edition of Business By Design was curated by Margaret Rhodes.
Courtesy of Hedley & Bennett
Masks on. As retail slows down, the fashion industry is dedicating resources to fight the spread of COVID-19. Fashion designer (and Project Runway co-host) Christian Siriano and Los Angeles Apparel CEO (and disgraced former American Apparel CEO) Dov Charney will use their factories to make protective masks. They’re inspiring other brands to do the same.
Testing, testing. Health startup Everlywell plans to start selling at-home coronavirus test kits to healthcare companies, but the FDA recently said the tests weren’t authorized. Designed to complement telemedicine, the tests mimic the nose swabs used by doctors, and ship to and from patients who receive diagnoses online.
The Internet of diapers. MIT’s Auto-ID Lab developed a sensor that responds to moisture and can trigger an alert when a diaper needs changing—an innovation that could help parents as well as busy nurses in neonatal units.
The new normal. Some businesses are booming during the pandemic: Twelve million new users joined the chat and collaboration app Microsoft Teams. (For a survey of the big teleworking players, check out last week’s newsletter; it’s also worth reading up on certain stealthy features built into remote working platforms.)
Patient zero. A fashion designer is believed to have sparked a coronavirus outbreak in Uruguay. Carmela Hontou, who attended a 500-person wedding after flying back from Spain and contracting the virus, may face legal charges.
Work, life, balance. Bill Burnett and Dave Evans—professors at the Stanford d.school and authors of Designing Your Work Life—stopped by the Hello Monday podcast to talk about how anyone can leverage design thinking to optimize their work life.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Here’s a timely book: Health Design Thinking: Creating Products and Services for Better Health came out this week. By Bon Ku, an emergency physician and director of the Health Design Lab at Thomas Jefferson University, and Ellen Lupton, senior curator at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, the book considers how principles of design thinking might transfer to improving services and products in healthcare. Ku and Lupton chart methods (such as design workshops and spatial data mapping) and case studies (such as iBreastExams and sensory art gardens) around the idea that exploratory problem-solving could lead to more thoughtful healthcare experiences. From the book (bolded for emphasis):
“Design for health care extends beyond improving the layout of lobbies and treatment rooms and creating more ergonomic medical equipment. Many opportunities for design intervention arise from the area of service design. Such projects can include anything from improving the process of obtaining informed consent to building awareness of treatments that are available but underutilized in a community.”
BRAINSTORM SESSION
Who is AI, really?
As technologists build and improve upon AI-powered assistants, they might be designing their own biases into the chatbots. A study by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that speech recognition technology from Amazon, Apple, Google, IBM, and Microsoft transcribed audio more accurately from a white person than it did from a black person. The study offers “another cautionary sign for A.I. technologies rapidly moving into everyday life,” writes New York Times writer Cade Metz.
Meanwhile, most popular voice assistants sound female while fulfilling stereotypically gendered housekeeping or secretarial roles, and deliver coy scripted responses to rude remarks. Could designers move away from that anachronistic approach while still developing intuitive technology? Concerns over gendered AI have led some to experiment with more nuanced, politically-aware voice technology.
In AIGA Eye on Design, journalist Madeleine Morley looks at some alternatives: There’s Q, a genderless voice assistant, as well as F’xa, a chatbot built from feminist principles. But the most interesting approach might just be doing away with personification altogether. A developer who works in computational technology told Morley that personification of voice assistants is akin to skeuomorphism: “Both wrap products in representations that mimic different mechanisms, and thus hide their underlying logics.” Companies might find themselves better off training voice technology to recognize users of all identities, and then not tricking consumers into thinking a sympathetic female ear is listening—a shift that sounds like responsible AI.
QUOTED BY DESIGN
On building tomorrow
“ What’s the most pressing issue facing the species? I ask this question every week. Sometimes every day, [when] I meet someone. Oh, what is the most pressing issue do you think facing our species? How do we figure out how to work together across economic, political, geographic, religious divides? If we can get rid of those divides somehow and just work together, then figuring out how to make every air conditioner in a developing country have a lesser carbon footprint will be easy. How to get away from fossil fuels faster will be tenable … It’s not about the technology, really, anymore. It’s not about anything else [other] than figuring out how to get eight or ten billion people with a shared worldview. That’s where culture—and again, science—plays the role of steward.”
— Artist and Pioneer Works founder Dustin Yellin, on the latest episode of the Time Sensitive podcast.


fortune--2020-03-24--17 companies that are hiring during the coronavirus crisis

Subscribe to Outbreak, a daily newsletter roundup of stories on the coronavirus pandemic and its impact on global business. It’s free to get it in your inbox.
As the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic continues to spread, there are stories almost daily about businesses furloughing employees (or laying them off completely) as demand dries up. It’s a scary, seemingly endless flow of bad news. But there are plenty of companies looking to hire those displaced workers.
Well over a dozen national companies have announced substantial hiring plans. And while it might be a career shift for some, it will ensure a regular stream of income that can be a lifesaver for others.
Here’s a look at who’s hiring and what jobs they’re offering.
The largest convenience store chain is looking to add 20,000 jobs to meet increased demand, with jobs ranging from in-store positions to delivery jobs. Apply at careers.7‑Eleven.com
The grocery chain has nearly 5,000 open positions. Most are based in retail stores, but there are a handful of openings in specialized fields such as human resources, public relations, and IT. Apply here
Roughly 30,000 temporary jobs are being created at the grocery chain, which includes Albertsons, Safeway, Vons, Jewel-Osco, Shaw’s, Acme, Tom Thumb, Randalls, United Supermarkets, Pavilions, Star Market, Haggen, and Carrs. To help fill the roles, the company is working with hospitality and food service companies that have had to furlough workers.
The online retailer is looking to add 100,000 workers amid an “unprecedented” surge in demand due to the coronavirus. The bulk of those jobs are in warehouses and as delivery workers. (The company has also raised salaries by $2 per hour through April.) You can apply for the jobs on Amazon’s website.
Drugstores are seeing a surge in business during the coronavirus pandemic. CVS will hire 50,000 additional staffers to keep up with demand and is awarding bonuses of $150 to $500 to employees who work directly with patients. Roles include store associates, home delivery drivers, distribution center employees, and member/customer service professionals. Hiring will take place via virtual job fairs, virtual interviews, and virtual job tryouts.
As many as 50,000 (mostly temporary) jobs are being opened up to support the discount chain’s operations as COVID-19 continues to spread. The company has doubled its hiring rate and hopes to fill those jobs by the end of April. Apply on the company’s website.
The value variety chains plan to bring another 25,000 full- and part-time associates on board to support in-store and distribution roles at over 15,000 locations. For a full list of available positions or to apply online, visit www.DollarTree.com/careers or www.FamilyDollar.com/careers.
The world’s largest pizza chain is looking to hire up to 10,000 employees in roles ranging from pizza makers to delivery drivers to customer service reps. It’s also looking for Class A CDL drivers to ensure its supply chains flow smoothly. Apply at jobs.dominos.com
With unprecedented demand for ventilators and other critical medical supplies, the health care company is expanding its manufacturing capacity and needs workers to staff it.
The company that fills grocery store orders plans to hire 300,000 full-service shoppers over the next three months, more than doubling its current workforce. Learn more at the company’s website.
Kroger
The grocery chain says it has already hired 2,000 people since the pandemic began and it currently has more than 10,000 openings at its stores (which include Harris Teeter and Fred Meyer). Apply on the company’s website.
Even in a pandemic, people want pizza. The nation’s third-largest chain is hiring 20,000 people to help with deliveries and carry-out orders. To learn more or apply, visit jobs.papajohns.com or text JOBS to 47272.
The food and beverage giant plans to bring another 6,000 people on board in full-benefit positions in the coming months. It did not detail what those jobs would be. Apply at pepsicojobs.com/main.
There are over 30,000 open positions at the restaurant chain. The company has sped up the hiring process to the point where it says new drivers can be on the road within five hours. In addition to drivers, it’s looking for cooks, shift leaders, restaurant managers, and virtual call center agents. Apply at jobs.pizzahut.com.
The grocery chain is hiring “thousands” of workers to fill positions at its stores and distribution centers. Apply at www.publix.jobs.
The drug chain is looking to fill roughly 9,500 full- and part-time positions, ranging from customer service associates to pharmacy technicians to shift leads. Visit jobs.walgreens.com to apply.
Not to be outdone by Amazon, Walmart is adding 150,000 temporary positions, which will run (as of now) through the end of May. Many of the jobs, however, will convert to full-time positions, the company says. The company is looking for people to staff its stores, clubs, distribution centers, and fulfillment centers. And it has reached out to restaurant and hospitality industry groups to let people displaced from those fields use this as a bridge. To expedite things, the company has streamlined its hiring process from two weeks to 24 hours. Apply here.
More coronavirus coverage from Fortune:
—Why the extraordinary dollar surge spells more trouble for the global economy
—Japan finally admits coronavirus might disrupt Tokyo 2020 Olympics
—Which stores are open—and closed—during the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S.?
—What medical experts say about Everlywell’s home coronavirus testing kits
—How to defer your mortgage payment due to coronavirus
—How Emmy season is proceeding, with caution, amid the coronavirus crisis
—Listen to Leadership Next, a Fortune podcast examining the evolving role of CEO
—WATCH: World leaders and health experts on how to stop the spread of COVID-19
Subscribe to Outbreak, a daily newsletter roundup of stories on the coronavirus pandemic and its impact on global business. It’s free to get it in your inbox.


fortune--2020-03-24--MusiCares’ COVID-19 Relief Fund gets all-star help for donations, concerts

When artists started canceling shows in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak in February, Harvey Mason Jr., the chairman and interim CEO of the Recording Academy, saw that the music industry was headed into devastating, unprecedented territory.
“We knew right away when one or two tours got canceled,” he tells Fortune. “If people aren’t able to do concerts, it’s going to be really hard for our community to continue to make money. That’s musicians, cartage people, engineers, lighting—everybody who works to put these things on, not just the people you see on the stage singing.”
That’s why the academy and its affiliated charitable organization MusiCares quickly established the COVID-19 Relief Fund, which provides financial assistance to music industry professionals whose jobs and lives have been disrupted by the pandemic. To kick things off, both organizations donated $1 million each, and more contributions are coming in from all over the industry. Payments are already going out to help people with rent, medical bills, groceries, mental health treatment, and other needs.
Considering that many people in the music world operate independently, without benefits or protections afforded to typical full-time workers, the situation is particularly dire. “It’ll be the worst thing to happen to a lot of industries, but definitely for ours,” Mason says. “During Katrina, MusiCares served around 3,500 people and gave away almost $4 million. If you take that huge disaster and extend it across the country and think about how many musicians in the U.S. alone are going to be needing help, that gives you an idea of the scale.”
To be eligible for the MusiCares fund, applicants initially had to have at least five years of employment in the music industry (or six commercially released recordings or music videos), but the board voted to relax the criteria to help more people. Now, the minimum is three years, though those with less will be considered. The amounts given out are determined on a case-by-case basis, as opposed to a set amount like the government’s proposed stimulus checks, while the fund awaits more donations. “If we could give $10,000 to everybody who asks, we would rather do that,” Mason says. “But it’s just going to be a matter of how much money can we raise and how many people need help.”
So far, the donations are pouring in, thanks to Mason and his colleagues hitting up all their contacts in the industry for help. On Tuesday, they announced that the fund has grown by millions, thanks in part to donations from Amazon Music, Facebook, SiriusXM and Pandora, Spotify, Tidal, and YouTube Music. “It’s been just person-to-person, one-on-one outreach. Steve Boom, who’s the chairman of MusiCares, has been very active and has done an amazing job. I’ve been calling, emailing, using relationships that we both have,” Mason says. “It’s been targeted to the streaming companies, the labels, the publishers, managers, artists. There have been estates who call and say, ‘Hey, we want to donate.’ We’ve been really surprised and excited about that.”
Musicians themselves have also been using their time off the road to pitch in with songs, performances, and partnerships. Father John Misty released a live album via Bandcamp to benefit the fund; Dirty Projectors released a cover of John Lennon’s “Isolation”; Amanda Shires and Jason Isbell are soliciting donations during their daily at-home live-streaming concerts; concert site Bandsintown is raising money through a weeklong marathon of online shows; and Alicia Keys teamed with Amazon to spread the word via Instagram and donate up to $100,000 each, with fans encouraged to like, comment on, and share the post.
Going forward, the Recording Academy and MusiCares plan to hold concerts and “festivals” with long-running productions “rather than just one person in a room, playing,” as Mason says. Aside from helping boost the fund, he believes it has a secondary purpose—helping the fans at home who are also struggling financially and/or emotionally. “Music and art are things that people need when they don’t feel as good as they normally do. That’s why we’re really pushing to get more performances going for people in their homes. Not being able to come together and rally around music like people normally do is a hardship for everyone, so we want to be able to provide something in this crazy time.”
Even as he oversees round-the-clock claims for assistance and encounters so many people in pain, Mason views this effort and the spirit of community imbued in it as reasons to be optimistic.
“I would say signs of hope are how generous people are being around the initiative that we’ve started. I would say the signs of hope are that people in need are starting to get to take advantage of the fund that we’ve raised. And I think the ultimate sign of hope is going to be when we start gathering around music performances that are generated specifically not only to give back to the community but also to try and give back to our culture in a time when we need it. You’re seeing more people create more music, more people sharing—people reaching out to bring people together. Hopefully, that can be a positive that comes out of this. I just know music is going to be an important part of the healing.”
More must-read stories from Fortune:
—How Emmy season is proceeding, with caution, amid the coronavirus crisis
—Filmmakers must make a choice as the coronavirus forces festivals online
—Contagion writer, scientific adviser reflect on film’s newfound relevance amid the coronavirus crisis
—How Harvey Weinstein’s sentencing could change the entertainment industry
—Don Cheadle on Black Monday, Wall Street in the Trump era, and hope about the climate change fight
Subscribe to Outbreak, a daily roundup of stories on the coronavirus pandemic and its impact on global business, delivered free to your inbox.


fortune--2020-03-24--This is not a drill: The coronavirus pandemic is testing A.I.’s ability to handle extreme events

This is the web version of Eye on A.I., Fortune’s weekly newsletter covering artificial intelligence and business. To get it delivered weekly to your in-box, sign up here.
In finance, they are called black swans. Those rare, extreme events that come along only once every decade or even once a century and can send markets reeling. The global coronavirus pandemic is certainly one.
In data science and artificial intelligence circles, those same kind of events are known by different names: edge cases, corner cases, or “out-of-distribution” datapoints. And most A.I. systems do not cope well when confronted with them.
The coronavirus pandemic is providing a real-world test of how robust many companies’ new-fangled A.I. systems really are.
Most of today’s machine learning systems need to be trained on lots of historical data. But what happens when the present suddenly stops looking like the recent past?
Most A.I.-driven trading algorithms, for instance, have only been implemented in the last five years. Their training data might not even have included the 2008 financial crisis. They almost certainly don’t include anything like the massive demand-driven shock we’re seeing across all industries right now.
So, some A.I.-driven investment strategies that were supposed to do well in all kinds of different market conditions have actually performed much worse than expected in the past few weeks.
Another example: Ocado, a popular online grocery business in the U.K., has seen traffic to its website spike four times higher than any previous peak the company has experienced in its 20-year history. In a conference call with reporters Thursday, Ocado spokesman David Shriver said so many visitors went to its website that the company’s cybersecurity software, which uses machine learning to detect aberrant behavior, assumed the site was experiencing a denial of service cyberattack and moved to block those connections. Luckily, human operations managers intervened to prevent that from happening.
What can a company do to make sure its machine learning models are able to cope with these extremes? Jay Schuren, a data scientist at DataRobot, a Boston startup that helps large corporations create and run machine learning models, has tips.
It’s vital that companies monitor their data models in real-time. For a grocery that normally sells 22 cartons of milk a minute, you want to know if you suddenly start selling 10 times that amount. Not enough businesses do this today, Schuren says.
Businesses need to be proactive about which machine learning models and which input variables within the models are most sensitive to extreme events. Anything that depends on human behavior—from electricity demand to shopping—will probably change because of Covid-19, he says.
Businesses need to think about the risks associated with different algorithms. If a system for placing ads goes haywire, that’s not good, but the consequences are a lot less severe than a system dispatching $1 million worth of products to a store that’s now shuttered due to social distancing measures.
A company’s data scientists should sit down with the business’s subject-matter experts and stress-test a system in simulation: What items might customers want in a crisis? And what will happen to your supply management algorithm if you do get thousands of people wanting to purchase six months’ worth of toilet paper in a week?
Data scientists can rejigger which inputs an A.I. system uses so the software might be less thrown-off by extreme variations: For instance, rather than using prices as an input variable, a model that uses the percentage change in prices instead will return to normal functioning faster.
Companies should look for proxies that might exist in their data: Does this look like what happened during Hurricane Sandy or what happened during the 1973 oil crisis?
Finally, data scientists need to think carefully about whether they want the current coronavirus extremes included in future training data. For some systems, doing so might inoculate the software from being caught off guard by a similar crisis. But in a lot of other cases, it might have the opposite effect, leading the system to falsely expect that the crisis reflects a “new normal.” All those people stockpiling toilet paper today may have so much on hand they won’t need to buy any more for months, resulting in a sudden crash in demand in the near-future that the A.I. system won’t be able to foresee, even though a human analyst would certainly expect it.
Schuren says that companies could benefit from building families of different types of machine learning models for different conditions: one type that is more economically efficient, but more fragile, that they use in normal circumstances, and another that is maybe less efficient, but also less prone to break when confronted with abnormal data, that they can fall back on during extreme events.
On that note, here’s the rest of the news in A.I. this week.
Jeremy Kahn
jeremy.kahn@fortune.com
@jeremyakahn
A.I. IN THE NEWS
A.I. startups helped spot the COVID-19 pandemic and may enable faster response to future outbreaks. My Fortune colleague Aaron Pressman looks at the A.I. startups whose technology was able to provide an early warning of the emerging COVID-19 outbreak in China back in autumn, predicting how the virus would spread. The companies, which include Toronto-based BlueDot, Boston-based HealthMap and San Francisco startups Kinsa and Metabiota, as well as the giants Google, Facebook and Tencent, use a variety of A.I.-based techniques, including natural language processing and predictive analytics based on flight booking data, to spot the emergence of mysterious diseases.
Intel to release experimental "neuromorphic" chip. Neuromorphic chips try to mimic in silicon the sparse connections found in the human brain and which scientists believe partly account for the brain's electrical power efficiency when compared with traditional silicon computer chips. Semiconductor giant Intel is going to release its version of the potentially revolutionary hardware, which it is calling Pohoiki Springs, later this month to a select group that includes academic researchers, government labs and about a dozen companies including Accenture and Airbus, which will be able to access the devices through Intel's cloud-computing network, reports The Wall Street Journal.
Add autonomous vehicles to the list of COVID-19 casualties. The social distancing measures put in place to fight the pandemic has forced autonomous vehicle companies to suspend testing of their self-driving cars on public roads. Tech publication VentureBeat reports that Alphabet's Waymo, GM's Cruise, Uber, Aurora, Argo AI, and Pony.ai have all halted their testing programs, largely in order to limit contact between passengers and safety drivers. In the case of Waymo, which has been running a fully autonomous ride-hailing service in Phoenix, Arizona, no staff members could disinfect cars between customer uses.
Of course, some self-driving companies were in trouble even before coronavirus. The self-driving truck startup Starksy Robotics has shut down, according to a Medium post from its founder, Stefan Seltz-Axmacher. He didn't blame coronavirus for his company's demise. Instead, Seltz-Axmacher said the company struggled with the spiraling costs of perfecting its technology, especially to handle rare edge cases. "Rather than seeing exponential improvements in the quality of AI performance (a la Moore’s Law), we’re instead seeing exponential increases in the cost to improve AI systems," he wrote.
SenseTime pulls IPO plans for now and will seek up to $1 billion in private funding. The Chinese facial recognition startup, which is backed by funders including Alibaba and SoftBank and considered one of the most promising A.I. companies anywhere, was expected to pull off a blockbuster IPO, seeking to raise at least $750 million on Hong Kong's stock exchange later this year. But the COVID-19 pandemic, plus the fact that the U.S. blacklisted SenseTime and eight other Chinese tech companies for their alleged complicity in human rights abuses in China, has forced SenseTime to shelve those plans for now. Instead, the company will try to raise between $500 million and $1 billion in additional funding from its current investors, sources told the Nikkei Asian Review.
EYE ON A.I. TALENT
Axon, a Seattle security technology company, has hired Yasser Ibrahim as its senior vice president of artificial intelligence. Ibrahim is joining Axon from Amazon, where he most recently headed distributed machine learning for Alexa AI. He also worked on the computer vision technology underpinning Amazon's "Amazon Go" cashier-less stores.
EYE ON A.I. RESEARCH
Can A.I. help diagnose COVID-19 from CT scans? Researchers from six different medical centers across China have created a deep-learning algorithm they say can differentiate CT scan images of pneumonia caused by COVID-19 from those of other kinds of pneumonia, with an accuracy of above 96%. The study was published in the medical journal Radiology.
But some researchers have criticized this and other computer vision studies recently published on COVID-19. Luke Oakden-Rayner, director of medical imaging research at the Royal Adelaide Hospital in Australia, wrote a whole blog post debunking many of the studies, saying that almost all of them suffer from flawed methodology, including severe selection bias, inadequate control groups and a poor selection of metrics. "That 97% sensitivity report is unfounded and unbelievable," he wrote.
FORTUNE ON A.I.
Privacy could be the next victim of the coronavirus—by David Meyer
Should the government increase surveillance to help fight the coronavirus?—by Robert Hackett
How Samasource’s CEO helped turn a non-profit into a fully sustaining for-profit—by Adam Lashinsky and Aaron Pressman
How A.I. is aiding the coronavirus fight—by Aaron Pressman
Some of these stories require a subscription to access. Thank you for supporting our journalism.
BRAIN FOOD
In a break from all the coronavirus-related news, I want to highlight something completely different: the growing use of A.I. to unlock archaeological secrets. Back in October, DeepMind showed that it could train a deep-learning system to decipher and reconstruct passages in ancient Greek inscriptions, many of which are damaged and have letters, words or whole passages, missing. Now, researchers at Southwest University in China have used a similar method to decipher 3,000-year old ancient texts carved onto ox bones and tortoise shells, or oracle bones. The system was able to come close to the abilities of scholars who have spent their whole careers studying them. In other uses of A.I. in archaeology, researchers have used computer vision systems to try to detect likely excavation sites from aerial imagery and to help classify pottery shards found on digs. A.I. can even help archaeologists figure out how to reassemble those shards into complete vases and sculptures.
What can't A.I. do yet? Well, it can't help with arguably the most difficult part of an archaeologist's job: figuring out exactly how artifacts were used and what role they played in ancient civilizations. What exactly were the customs of those ancient cultures? That, for the moment, still requires human imagination.


fortune--2020-03-24--Why isolating older Americans would be a huge mistake in fighting the coronavirus

As the global economy turns for the worse amid the coronavirus outbreak, you can just imagine the entertainer George Burns saying, “Everyone who says they could fix the economy seems to be too busy driving cabs and cutting hair.” The catastrophic public health and economic consequences of the current pandemic have made everyone a policy expert.
In the New York Times last Friday, health expert David Katz weighed in on what many management, critical care, virology, epidemiology, and medical experts believe is a dangerously misguided recommendation. His argument is to triage infection testing for more vulnerable and older people, isolating them from their younger families and sending healthy, younger people back to work, school, parties, rallies, and concerts.
Katz thinks that diagnosing only older and more vulnerable people is more efficient and better for the nation’s economic well-being and that the risk of halting all economic activity is far more harmful. Nothing could be further from the truth. Older Americans are vital contributors to our economy and our communities. We should be encouraging intergenerational living, which facilitates the sharing of wisdom, energy, and optimism within the home.
Katz feels that given a lack of kits to test the general U.S. population, we should focus our efforts on the elderly, who appear to be more susceptible to serious illness from COVID-19, which is the disease caused by the coronavirus. We think this narrow approach is wrong and brings unacceptable risk to the rest of the population. This is based on a risky bet: that we can develop herd immunity in the general population by allowing enough people to get and recover from COVID-19 that it becomes less susceptible to spreading.
Testing the herd immunity hypothesis on our general population would be far too dangerous, exposing most Americans to a disease we still know far too little about. Instead, our best approach is to focus on flattening the curve of infections, so that too many people do not get it at one time to overwhelm our health care system.
As such, we believe the acute shortage of medical supplies, from masks to surgical gloves to hand sanitizer, is a far larger concern. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated in 2005 that if a pandemic similar to the 1918 Spanish flu hit the U.S., we would need 740,000 ventilators; we currently have only 160,000 nationally. How would testing only older people fix such an expensive and urgent problem?
Besides, we need test results from young people too. The COVID-19 strain is novel, and evaluating its effect on people of all ages will help develop vaccines and other therapies for use among the general population.
And while COVID-19 has proven certainly more lethal for older people, there is increasing evidence that it’s harmful—and potentially fatal—to younger, healthy people too. Twenty percent of those admitted to a hospital in the U.S. with COVID-19 symptoms are between the ages of 20 and 44. Are we truly comfortable asking younger people not to step out of harm’s way?
What’s more, Katz argues that “if we were to focus on the especially vulnerable, there would be resources to keep them at home, provide them with needed services and coronavirus testing, and direct our medical system to their early care.” But our current medical system isn’t particularly equipped to manage patients in this way. It’s hard to believe we’re really prepared to overhaul our health infrastructure in the midst of a pandemic.
Katz fears that COVID-19 will trigger economic impacts like those of the flu pandemic of 1957–58, which caused unemployment to nearly double and GDP to drop 10% annualized. During that event, we sought to protect our entire population, not a portion of it. Though we suffered short-term economic pain, we survived and flourished after it was over.
Sure, it would be wonderful to magically cordon off a piece of the population to spare us the worst effects of the coronavirus. But this is the real world. We are well into a massive pandemic that is long past containment.
The silver lining: We are not past mitigation. We need not lose our humanity or good sense. And we need an evidence-based approach and leadership more than ever.
Michael Apkon is president and CEO of Tufts Medical Center, a pediatric critical care specialist, and a research scientist.
Howard P. Forman is an emergency/trauma radiologist and professor of radiology and biomedical imaging, economics, public health, and management at Yale University.
Jeffrey Sonnenfeld is senior associate dean and Lester Crown professor of management practice at the Yale School of Management and a director of the National Council on Aging.
More coronavirus coverage from Fortune:
—Why the extraordinary dollar surge spells more trouble for the global economy
—Japan finally admits coronavirus might disrupt Tokyo 2020 Olympics
—Which stores are open—and closed—during the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S.?
—What medical experts say about Everlywell’s home coronavirus testing kits
—How to defer your mortgage payment due to coronavirus
—How Emmy season is proceeding, with caution, amid the coronavirus crisis
—Listen to Leadership Next, a Fortune podcast examining the evolving role of CEO
—WATCH: World leaders and health experts on how to stop the spread of COVID-19
Subscribe to Outbreak, a daily newsletter roundup of stories on the coronavirus pandemic and its impact on global business. It’s free to get it in your inbox.


fortune--2020-03-24--Is this online grocery delivery’s moment?

Americans are willing to buy a lot of things online, from clothes to mattresses to electronics to vitamins.
But groceries have been a challenging space. Just 3% of Americans ordered groceries online for weekly pickup or delivery in 2019, according to a Gallup poll. Consumers, it seemed, still preferred to choose their own perishables, and overly precocious startup attempts during the dot-com bubble may have stunted development in the space. (Per Reid Hoffman’s book, Blitzscaling: “Webvan’s notorious failure kept most players out of the grocery delivery space for over a decade.”)
Now, though, in a turn of events no one could have predicted, Americans are stuck at home and wary of human contact and turning to online grocery delivery in droves.
On Monday, Instacart, which delivers groceries from the likes of Costco or Kroger, said it would hire 300,000 full-time shoppers over the next three months to meet rising demand. Amazon, which owns Whole Foods, said it would onboard some 100,000 more employees in warehouse and delivery positions over the entire business. Target-backed Shipt is seeking thousands too.
The best ideas are born out of recession, venture capitalists say. Now the question is, which grocery delivery companies will, well, deliver the services needed to convert customers and keep their employees when all this is over? Unable to handle demand, Amazon Prime Pantry temporarily closed last week. Grocery delivery business Peapod also crashed for some parts of the country on Friday. Walmart meanwhile limited its delivery window to two days rather than the typical seven.
So is this a turning point for the grocery delivery market, or is it a symptom of coronavirus?
It’ll depend on whether companies can handle the strain.
On a not-coronavirus-related note: SoftBank. The Japanese telecom giant will sell as much as $41 billion in assets in a bid to buyback shares and reduce debts, after its venture capital strategy met heavy scrutiny last year. As part of the deal, SoftBank is planning to offload roughly $14 billion of its crown jewel stake in Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, Bloomberg reports.
But don’t worry—its 300-year vision isn’t dead yet. SoftBank is said to be finalizing a $300 million investment in the autonomous driving unit of Chinese ride-sharing company and existing investment, Didi Chuxing, per The Information.
Read more.
Lucinda Shen
Twitter: @shenlucinda
Email: lucinda.shen@fortune.com
VENTURE DEALS
- Nature’s Fynd, a Chicago-based food tech company producing a protein from microbes previously known as Sustainable Bioproducts, raised $80 million in new funding. Generation Investment Management and Breakthrough Energy Ventures led the round. Existing investors 1955 Capital, ADM Ventures, Danone Manifesto Ventures, and new investor Mousse Partners also invested.
- Arkose Labs, a San Francisco-based provider of online fraud and abuse prevention technology, raised $22 million in Series B funding. Microsoft’s venture fund, M12, led the round, and was joined by existing investors PayPal and USVP.
- Manetu, an information privacy platform focused on consumer consent and data-access requests, raised $3.5 million in seed funding. Castle Island Ventures led the round.
- IASO Biotherapeutics, a Nanjing, China-based biotech, raised $60 million in Series B funding. GL Ventures, the venture capital fund of Hillhouse Capital, was the investor.
- SouSmile, a Brazilian direct-to-consumer dental company, raised $10 million in Series A funding. Global Founders Capital, Kaszek Ventures, and Canary were the investors. Read more.
- Coterie, an Ohio-based insurtech connecting small businesses to insurance, raised $8.5 million in Series A funding. Investors include RPM Ventures and Allos Ventures.
- Cat Person, a startup focused on cat owners, launched. Razor startup Harry's Lab backs the firm.
PRIVATE EQUITY
- Transportation Impact, an Emerald Isle, N.C.-based provider of technology and service solutions for small parcel and freight, was acquired by The Jordan Company. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Tangent Technologies, a portfolio company of the Sterling Group, acquired Bedford Technology, a Worthington, Minn.-based plastic lumber extruder.
- Global Resale, a portfolio company of Brightstar Capital Partners, acquired CFA Trading, a U.K.-based IT hardware refurbisher. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
OTHERS
- Quantum completed its acquisition of Western Digital’s ActiveScale object storage and erasure coding technology business. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Cognizant (Nasdaq: CTSH) agreed to acquire Lev, an Indianapolis, Ind.-based digital marketing consultancy in the U.S. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Brex acquired three businesses, Neji, Compose Labs, and Landria. Neji is a startup building blockchain and networking technologies for businesses. Compose Labs focuses on online learning experiences. Landria builds internal knowledge databases for companies. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- BigBasket, a Bengaluru-based company backed by Supermarket Grocery Supplies, acquired milk delivery app DailyNinja. Read more.
IPOS
- Finance Ireland, an Irish non-bank lender, has paused its 100 million ($108 million) IPO amid market volatility. Read more.
F+FS
- Coefficient Capital raised $170 million for its first fund out of a target of $150 million.


fortune--2020-03-24--Help wanted: Amazon and online delivery services staff up during coronavirus outbreak

The coronavirus outbreak has set off an online shopping frenzy for cleaning supplies, groceries, and toilet paper. In an effort to satisfy the huge demand, another kind of frenzy is underway: Companies are scrambling to hire enough workers to pick up and deliver those orders.
On Monday, Instacart, which fills grocery store orders, said it plans to hire 300,000 full-service shoppers over the next three months. The hiring binge would more than double the number of shoppers already on the job, which the company says is itself a record.
Target’s delivery service, Shipt, which also delivers from stores including Petco, CVS, and OfficeMax, said it wants to add “thousands” of shoppers. Meanwhile, Amazon recently said it would hire 100,000 drivers and warehouse workers to staff its sprawling operations and that it would increase worker pay by $2 an hour to $17.
In a note on Monday to its contract shoppers, who pick up groceries and deliver them, Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta called the last few weeks “the busiest in Instacart’s history.” He did not elaborate on any increase in order volume or the value of those orders.
The rise in open delivery jobs comes as cities and states tell people to stay home to prevent further spread of the coronavirus. People who are under orders to “shelter in place” are still allowed to grocery shop as long as they remain six feet from others. But many of them are reluctant to do so because they’re worried about catching the virus, or they don’t want to wait in long lines.
Amazon Flex delivery drivers, Shipt shoppers, and Instacart’s full-service shoppers are all contractors. Amazon pays drivers according to the block of time they work, which varies depending on location. Shipt’s shopper pay is based on how long each order takes to deliver. Instacart pays per order, basing it on a variety of factors, such as the number and type of items, the estimated distance and time, and additional incentives.
Because they’re contractors, these workers generally don’t receive benefits such as health care, vacation, and overtime. They also don’t get paid sick leave unless they test positive for the coronavirus, a policy that critics argue encourages employees to come to work while sick.
In contrast, Amazon’s warehouse workers are employees and therefore receive some benefits. Because of the recent shortage of workers, Amazon employees received an increase in overtime pay. The company also offered paid time off to seasonal and part-time employees, following months of pressure from these workers.
One potential source of new hires are the legions of Uber and Lyft drivers who have suffered a big drop-off in fares because of the coronavirus. Nearly three in 10 of those drivers are considering taking delivery jobs, according to a recent survey of 200 on-demand drivers by Harry Campbell, author of The Rideshare Guy blog, which provides ride-hailing workers with information and advice about things like benefits and safety.
Meanwhile, of all the drivers surveyed who already work for on-demand delivery services, nearly 35% are seeing an increase in demand for orders.
“One of our best recommendations for drivers who are worried about the coronavirus is to consider signing up for a food delivery service,” Campbell writes on his blog. “There’s much less exposure potential, and the income is comparable.”
In addition to doing more online shopping, consumers are increasingly searching for services that deliver food from restaurants. According to recent data from Google, U.S. searches for four leading meal delivery services—Uber Eats, DoorDash, Postmates, and Grubhub—jumped 53% within the past month. Individually, Uber Eats led with a 70% increase in searches, followed by DoorDash at 55%, Grubhub at 46%, and Postmates at 42%.
During a global pandemic rife with bad news, consumers’ changing behaviors appear to have created at least one small bright spot: There are still thousands of jobs for the taking—albeit with limited to no benefits.
More coronavirus coverage from Fortune:
—Why the extraordinary dollar surge spells more trouble for the global economy
—Japan finally admits the coronavirus might disrupt the Tokyo 2020 Olympics
—Which stores are open—and closed—during the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S.?
—What medical experts say about Everlywell’s at-home coronavirus testing kits
—How to defer your mortgage payments during the pandemic
—How Emmy season is proceeding, with caution, amid the coronavirus crisis
—Listen to Leadership Next, a Fortune podcast examining the evolving role of CEOs
—WATCH: World leaders and health experts on how to stop the spread of COVID-19
Subscribe to Outbreak, a daily roundup of stories on the coronavirus pandemic and its impact on global business, delivered free to your inbox.


fortune--2020-03-24--2020 Tokyo Olympics will be delayed by about one year due to coronavirus

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and the leader of the International Olympic Committee agreed to the unprecedented move to delay the Tokyo Olympics by about one year due to worries of holding the event during the coronavirus pandemic.
Abe told reporters Tuesday he won the backing for the proposal to delay the games planned to start in July in telephone call with IOC President Thomas Bach. “The Tokyo Olympics will not be canceled,” Abe told reporters in Tokyo after the call.
The postponement would be the first since the modern games began in the 19th century and make the Tokyo 2020 Olympics the biggest sporting event called off due to the pandemic that has caused more than 387,000 confirmed cases, led to a plunge in global markets and slammed the brakes on international travel.
Due to the IOC’s numerous stakeholders, it may take some time for the postponement to be made officially.
The Tokyo Olympics were headed toward postponement this week as national teams arranged to pull out if the games went on as planned and Abe acknowledged a delay may be unavoidable due to the coronavirus.
More coronavirus coverage from Fortune:
—Why the extraordinary dollar surge spells more trouble for the global economy
—Japan finally admits coronavirus might disrupt Tokyo 2020 Olympics
—Which stores are open—and closed—during the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S.?
—What medical experts say about Everlywell’s home coronavirus testing kits
—How to defer your mortgage payment due to coronavirus
—How Emmy season is proceeding, with caution, amid the coronavirus crisis
—Listen to Leadership Next, a Fortune podcast examining the evolving role of CEO
—WATCH: World leaders and health experts on how to stop the spread of COVID-19
Subscribe to Outbreak, a daily newsletter roundup of stories on the coronavirus pandemic and its impact on global business. It’s free to get it in your inbox.


fortune--2020-03-24--How Docusign has held up so well in the coronavirus pandemic

This is the web version of Data Sheet, Fortune’s daily newsletter on the top tech news. To get it delivered daily to your in-box, sign up here.
No company is unaffected by this crisis, but some are better off than others. I spoke Monday to Dan Springer, CEO of e-signature company DocuSign, to find out how business is and how he’s dealing with the emergency.
DocuSign charges businesses for electronic transactions, like purchase orders or contracts. Customers buy “capacity” in bulk. Springer says that because his company already was serving the “digital transformation” trend now being accelerated by the temporary end of face-to-face business, it has held its own so far. Of course, he’s concerned there will be customers who put all spending on hold. “We’ve seen a little, little bit of that,” he says. At the same time, customers like banks and government agencies, not traditional work-from-home environments, have stepped up purchases.
Even an all-digital business must cope. Weeks ago, the company converted its internal sales kickoff meeting and then its external customer conference to virtual events. Shortly after that it suspended all travel that didn’t involve customers. (Emily Heath, the company’s chief security and trust officer, had only recently arrived from United Airlines and impressed upon her colleagues the potential dangers from a pandemic.) Before long, the entire company was working from home.
Springer, a repeat CEO, portrays DocuSign as fortunate to be helpful to customers and employees. It has created a 90-day free program for small businesses and is helping real estate agents, a core and imperiled customer set, to downgrade to no- or low-cost packages. It has given $1,000 grants to all employees to spend on short-term needs, like arranging for day care. And it is retaining all hourly workers. He’s also asking employees to be flexible. Sunday night a group worked late into the night to help a big bank implement DocuSign’s product. He says if no one needs you at 10:00 a.m., then “go play with your kids.”
The CEO cops to having “no clue” how long this will last. But for business-planning purposes, he told a virtual all-hands meeting 10 days ago to expect to work from home for eight weeks. He’s also doing his best not to look at the company’s stock price, which has held up remarkably well.
Springer also is doing his best to keep things light, including by encouraging virtual happy hours. An East Coast sales manager asked him to join one last Friday, and though it was only 2:00 p.m. in California, he raised a glass to the webcam. He calls this the equivalent of the “walking around stuff” managers need to do all the time—and especially when times get tough. Even if the walking around is by Zoom.
Adam Lashinsky
@adamlashinsky
adam.lashinsky@fortune.com
This edition of Data Sheet was curated by Aaron Pressman.
NEWSWORTHY
Cross-over trial. In virus-fighting news, Tesla CEO Elon Musk donated 1,225 ventilators that he acquired in China to hospitals in Los Angeles. Facebook said over the weekend that it would donate 720,000 masks that it had stockpiled during the California wild fires. The Federal Communications Commission gave AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon permission to use additional airwave spectrum temporarily during the pandemic. And T-Mobile debuted a phone plan costing just $15 per month for people needing to cut back on expenses.
Background therapy. In other virus-related news, numerous startups have been cutting back, as former Fortune writer Erin Griffith, now at the New York Times, cataloged on her Twitter feed. Companies reducing staff included Convene, Yonder, Leafly, Compass, and Inspirato.
Serious adverse event. As we stick in the department of not-so-great news, Microsoft says hackers found a security flaw in the current version of Windows that exploits a weakness in the font manager to run malicious code. No patch is yet available.
Dosing discontinuation. Meanwhile, in the department of almost-too-good-to-be-true news, flying car startup Lilium raised $240 million of venture capital from investors including Tencent, Atomico, and Freigeist.
Placebo. People stuck inside are signing up for streaming services at a rapid clip. Signups to Disney+ tripled last week from the week before, HBO Now signups increased 90%, and Netflix subscriptions rose 47%, market research firm Antenna said. Also booming in the time of coronavirus? Digital payments handled by PayPal and others.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
As noted above, major tech companies are making efforts to cope with the coronavirus pandemic. But SparkToro CEO Rand Fishkin thinks big tech should do more. In an essay on GeekWire, Fishkin has some very specific requests. Google Maps, for example, could help small businesses more, he says.
Google Maps’ long-term revenue relies on small businesses, local businesses, and the advertising they do. Now is the time to pull out all the stops to help these folks, and directing traffic to the Maps listings, IMO, isn’t the best move. Instead, I’d propose highlighting the local business websites, enabling gift card purchases via Google Pay on Google Maps, creating more visibility for the email lists of restaurants and local businesses, directing Maps visitors to e-commerce opportunities or takeout menus or whatever the business owner tells Google brings them the most revenue and relief right now.
In some cases, that might actually be sending their visitors to a competitor! I talked to Charlie (the co-owner of Moshi Moshi today), and they’ll be shuttered for the next few weeks, possibly longer. Charlie would love to redirect their Google Maps listings to someplace productive, where folks can find takeout or delivery, but without Google’s help, can’t do it.
ON THE MOVE
Will they be coming out with a line of toy cars? Uber appointed former Mattel CEO Robert Eckert to its board...Salesforce hired Arundhati Bhattacharya as CEO of its India operations. Bhattacharya headed the State Bank of India until retiring in 2017...Amanda Langowski will lead Microsoft's Windows Insider testing program. She had been the head of the company's Flight Platform team.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
‘Essential’ stores like CVS and Dollar General go on hiring sprees while the rest of retail reels By Phil Wahba
Some Amazon Prime shipments won’t arrive for a month due to coronavirus By Chris Morris
Updated: Here’s what medical experts say about Everlywell’s home coronavirus testing kits By Terry Collins
Women are on the front lines of the coronavirus crisis By Emma Hinchliffe
Book tours are key to promoting new releases, but authors have been left stranded amid coronavirus pandemic By Lindsey Tramuta
(Some of these stories require a subscription to access. There is a 50% discount for our loyal readers if you use this link to sign up. Thank you for supporting our journalism.)
BEFORE YOU GO
Astronomers recently found a new comet, dubbed C/2019 Y4, but known more commonly as Comet ATLAS after the alert system that discovered it. Atlas is getting brighter as it approaches Earth and will likely become shiny enough to be seen at night with the naked eye soon. Some theorize, based on the rate of increase, it may even become visible in daylight. I'll keep you posted.
Aaron Pressman
@ampressman
aaron.pressman@fortune.com