The delays come on a day when the price of bitcoin surpassed its all-time high.
Read more A combination of volume, derivatives action and infrastructure improvements led bitcoin’s price to go where it hasn’t gone before. Ether is looking supremely bullish, too.
Read more The pandemic has made it all but impossible for a retail company without an online presence to survive. Yet while companies heavily dependent on foot traffic like J.Crew and Sur la Table have filed for bankruptcy this year, companies that are expert in e-commerce have thrived, including Target and Walmart.
Amazon has gained perhaps the most steam in 2020, attracting roughly one quarter of all dollars spent online by U.S. shoppers throughout the year.
Unfortunately, as more shopping moves online, fraud is exploding, too. The problem is such that startups working with enterprises on the problem — flagging transactions for banks, for example — are raising buckets of funding. Meanwhile, one New York-based startup, Fakespot, is taking a different approach. It’s using AI to notify online shoppers when the products they’re looking to buy are fake listings or when reviews they’re reading on marketplaces like Amazon or eBay are a fiction.
We talked earlier today with founder and Kuwaiti immigrant Saoud Khalifah about the four-year-old business, which got started in his dorm room after his own frustrating experience in trying to buy nutritional supplements from Amazon. After he’d nabbed his master’s degree in software engineering, he launched the company in earnest. Like many other companies,
Like many other companies, Fakespot was originally focused on helping enterprise customers identify counterfeit outfits and fake reviews. When the pandemic struck, company spied an “opening crack on the internet,” as Khalifah describes it, and began instead catering directly to consumers who are increasingly using platforms that are struggling to keep up — and whose solutions are often more focused on protecting sellers from buyers and not the other way around.
The pivot seems to be working. Fakespot just closed on $4 million in Series A funding led by Bullpen Capital, which was joined by SRI Capital, Faith Capital and 500 Startups among others in a round that brings the company’s total funding to $7 million.
The company is gaining more attention from shoppers, too. Khalifah says that a Chrome browser extension introduced earlier this year has now been downloaded 300,000 times — and this on the heels of “millions of users” who have separately visited Fakespot’s site, typed in a URL of a product review, and through its “Fakespot analyzer,” been provided with free data to help inform their buying decisions.
Indeed, according to Khalifah, since Fakespot’s official founding it has amassed a database of more than 8 billion reviews — around 10 times as many as the popular travel site Tripadvisor — from which its AI has learned. He says the tech is sophisticated enough at this point to identify AI-generated text; as for the “lowest-hanging fruit,” he says it can easily spot when reviews or positive sentiments about a company are posted in an inorganic way, presumably published by click farms. (It also tracks fake upvotes.)
As for where shoppers can use the chrome extension, Fakespot currently scours all the largest marketplaces, including Amazon, eBay, Best Buy, Walmart, and Sephora. Soon, says Khalifah, users will also be able to use the technology to assess the quality of products being sold through Shopify, the software platform that is home to hundreds of thousands of online stores. (Last year, it surpassed eBay to become the No. 2 e-commerce destination in the U.S., according to Shopify.)
Right now, Fakespot is free to use, including because every review a consumer enters into its database helps train its AI further. Down the road, the company expects to make money by adding a suite of tools atop its free offering. It may also strike lead-generation deals with companies whose products and reviews it has already verified as real and truthful.
The question, of course, is how reliably the technology works in the meantime. While Khalifah understandably sings Fakespot’s praises, a visit to the Google Play store, for example, paints a mixed picture, with many enthusiastic reviews and some that are, well, less enthusiastic.
Khalifah readily concedes that Fakespot’s mobile apps need more attention, which he says they will receive. Though Fakespot has been focused predominately on the desktop experience, Khalifah notes that more than half of online shopping is expected to be conducted over mobile phones by some time next year, a shift that isn’t lost on him, even while it hinges a bit on the pandemic being brought effectively to an end (and consumers finding themselves on the run again).
Still, he says that “ironically, a lot of [bad] reviews are from sellers who are angry that we’ve given them F grades. They’re often mad that we revealed that their product is filled with fake reviews.”
As for how Fakespot moves past these to improve its own rating, Khalifah suggests that the best strategy is actually pretty simple.
“We hope we’ll have many more satisfied users,” he says, adding: “No one else really has consumers’ backs.”
Canadian electric truck and bus manufacturer The Lion Electric Company said Monday it plans to become a publicly traded company via a merger with special purpose acquisition company Northern Genesis Acquisition Corp.
The combined company, which will be listed on the New York Stock Exchange, will have a valuation of $1.9 billion. The companies raised $200 million in private investment in public equity, or PIPE, and hold about $320 million in cash proceeds.
The deal is the latest example of an electric automaker opting to go public via a SPAC merger in an aim to access the level of capital needed to become a high-volume vehicle manufacturer. Arrival, Canoo, Fisker, Lordstown Motors and Nikola Corp. have all announced SPAC mergers in 2020.
In Lion’s case, the combined net cash will be used to fund the company’s growth, notably the planned construction of a U.S.-based factory and to further develop its advanced battery systems. Lion is evaluating more than 10 potential brownfield plant sites in nine states, including California, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin. The company told TechCrunch it plans to pick a site and complete its industrialization plan by the end of the year. Production at this yet-to-be named factory is expected to start in the beginning of 2023.
Lion is already producing all-electric medium and heavy-duty urban trucks and buses at a 2,500-vehicle-per-year manufacturing facility. Some 300 vehicles are on the road today and the company has plans to deliver 650 trucks and buses in 2021. It even landed a contract with Amazon to supply the e-commerce giant with 10 electric trucks for its “middle mile” operations.
Completion of the proposed transaction is expected to occur in the first quarter of 2021. Lion is expected to be listed on the NYSE under the new ticker symbol “LEV.” Lion’s CEO and founder Marc Bedard will continue in his role. The combined company will have a board of directors consisting of nine directors, including Bedard, Pierre Larochelle from Power Sustainable as chairman, and five other existing Lion board members, as well as Ian Robertson and Chris Jarratt, who are co-founders of Algonquin Power & Utilities Corp.
Facebook makes a billion-dollar acquisition, we learn more about Twitter’s Clubhouse-style feature and Moderna applies for emergency authorization for its COVID-19 vaccine. This is your Daily Crunch for November 30, 2020.
The big story: Facebook acquires Kustomer for $1B
Kustomer says it can give customer service teams better data and a more unified view of the people they’re interacting with. So with this acquisition, Facebook can improve its offerings for businesses that have a presence (in some cases, their primary digital presence) on the social network.
The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but TechCrunch has confirmed that the deal price was around $1 billion.
Facebook isn’t the only social media company making acquisitions to improve its customer service features. Earlier this month, Snap bought Voca.ai, a startup creating AI-based voice agents for call centers.
The tech giants
Alphabet’s DeepMind achieves historic new milestone in AI-based protein structure prediction — The advance in DeepMind’s AlphaFold capabilities could lead to a significant leap forward in areas like our understanding of disease, as well as future drug discovery and development.
Twitter’s Audio Spaces test includes transcriptions, speaker controls and reporting features — Earlier this month, Twitter announced it would soon begin testing its own Clubhouse rival, called Audio Spaces.
With an eye for what’s next, longtime operator and VC Josh Elman gets pulled into Apple — Elman said he will be focused on the company’s App Store and helping “customers discover the best apps for them.”
Startups, funding and venture capital
HungryPanda raises $70M for a food delivery app aimed at overseas Chinese consumers — HungryPanda makes a Mandarin-language app specifically targeting Chinese consumers outside of China.
Materialize scores $40M investment for SQL streaming database — CEO Arjun Narayan told us that every company needs to be a real-time company, and it will take a streaming database to make that happen.
Curio Wellness launches $30M fund to help women and minorities own a cannabis dispensary — The new fund, started by the Maryland-based medical cannabis company Curio Wellness, aims to help underserved entrepreneurs entering the cannabis market.
Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch
DoorDash aims to add $11B to its valuation during public offering — The delivery platform gave a range of $75 to $85 per share.
Strike first, strike hard, no mercy: How emerging managers can win — Investors at Fika Ventures argue that “Cobra Kai” offers valuable lessons for VC.
The road to smart city infrastructure starts with research — The right technology can upgrade any city, but we need to understand its impacts.
(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which aims to democratize information about startups. And until November 30 — that’s today! — you can get 25% off an annual membership.)
Everything else
Moderna claims 94% efficacy for COVID-19 vaccine, will ask FDA for emergency use authorization today — If granted the authorization, Moderna will be able to provide it to high-risk individuals such as front-line healthcare workers.
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai will step down to make way for the Biden administration — Pai’s tenure has been a controversial one.
Original Content podcast: Just don’t watch Netflix’s ‘Holidate’ with your parents — But if you avoid parental awkwardness, it’s a perfectly adequate holiday-themed romantic comedy.
The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.
With the release of watchOS 7, Apple at last turned the Apple Watch into the GPS-based kid tracker parents have wanted, albeit at a price point that requires careful consideration. As someone in the target demographic for such a device — a parent of a “tween” who’s allowed to freely roam the neighborhood (but not without some sort of communication device) — I put the new Family Setup system for the Apple Watch through its paces over the past couple of months.
The result? To be frank, I’m conflicted as to whether I’d recommend the Apple Watch to a fellow parent, as opposed to just suggesting that it’s time to get the child a phone.
This has to do, in part, with the advantages offered by a dedicated family-tracking solution — like Life360, for example — as well as how a child may respond to the Apple Watch itself, and the quirks of using a solution that wasn’t initially designed with the needs of family tracking in mind.
As a parent of a busy and active tween (nearly 11), I can see the initial appeal of an Apple Watch as a family tracker. It has everything you need for that purpose: GPS tracking, the ability to call and text, alerts and access to emergency assistance. It’s easy to keep up with, theoretically, and it’s not as pricey as a new iPhone. (The new Apple Watch SE cellular models start at $329. The feature also works on older Apple Watch Series 4 or later models with cellular. Adding the Apple Watch to your phone plan is usually around $10 per month more.)
I think the Apple Watch as a kid tracker mainly appeals to a specific type of parent: one who’s worried about the dangers of giving a younger child a phone and thereby giving them access to the world of addictive apps and the wider internet. I understand that concern, but I personally disagree with the idea that you should wait until a child is “older,” then hand them a phone and say “ok, good luck with that!” They need a transition period and the “tween” age range is an ideal time frame to get started.
The reality is that smartphones and technology are unavoidable. As a parent, I believe it’s my job to introduce these things in small measures — with parental controls and screen time limits, for example. And then I need to monitor their usage. I may make mistakes, and so will my daughter, but we both need these extra years to figure out how to balance parenting and the use of digital tools. With a phone, I know I will have to have the hard conversations about the problems we run into. I understand, too, why parents want to put that off, and just buy a watch instead.
Image Credits: TechCrunch
After my experience, I feel the only cases where I’d fully endorse the Apple Watch would be for those tech-free or tech-light families where kids will not be given phones at any point, households where kids’ phone usage is highly restricted (like those with Wi-Fi-only phones) or those where kids don’t get phones until their later teenage years. I am not here to convince them of my alternative, perhaps more progressive view on when to give a kid a phone. The Apple Watch may make sense for these families, and that’s their prerogative.
However, a number of people may be wondering if the Apple Watch can be a temporary solution for perhaps a year or two before they buy the child a smartphone. To them, I have to say this feels like an expensive way to delay the inevitable, unavoidable task of having to parent your child through the digital age.
Given my position on the matter, my one big caveat to this review is that my daughter does, in fact, have a smartphone. Also, let’s be clear: this is not meant to be a thorough review of the Apple Watch itself, or a detailed report of its various “tech specs.” It’s a subjective report as to how things went for us, from which, hopefully, you can learn.
Image Credits: Apple
To begin, the process of configuring the new Apple Watch with Family Setup was easy. “Set Up for a Family Member” is one of two setup options to tap on as you get started. Apple offers a simple user interface that walks you through pairing the Watch with your phone and all the choices that have to be made, like enabling cellular, turning on “Ask to Buy” for app purchases, enabling Schooltime and Activity features and more.
What was harder was actually using the Apple Watch as intended after it was configured. I found it far easier to launch an iPhone app (like Life360, which we use) where everything you need is in one place. That turned out not to be true for the Apple Watch Family Setup system.
For the purpose of testing the Apple Watch with Family Setup, my daughter would leave her iPhone behind when she went out biking or when meeting up with friends for outdoor activities.
As a child who worked her way up to an iPhone over a couple of years, I have to admit I was surprised at how irresponsible she was with the watch in the early weeks.
She didn’t at all respect the multi-hundred-dollar device it was, at first, but rather treated it like her junk jewelry or her wrist-worn scrunchies. The Apple Watch was tossed on a dresser, a bathroom counter, a kitchen table, on a beanbag chair and so on.
Thankfully, the “Find My” app can locate the Apple Watch, if it has battery and a signal. But I’m not going to lie — there were some scary moments where a dead watch was later found on the back of a toilet (!!), on the top of the piano and, once, abandoned at a friend’s house.
And this, from a child who always knows where her iPhone is!
The problem is that her iPhone is something she learned to be responsible for after years of practice. This fooled me into thinking she actually was responsible for expensive devices. For two years, we painfully went through a few low-end Android phones while she got the hang of keeping up with and caring for such a device. Despite wrapping those starter phones in protective cases, we still lost one to a screen-destroying crash on a tile floor and another to being run over by a car. (How it flew out of a pocket and into the middle of the road, I’ll never understand!)
But, eventually, she did earn access to a hand-me-down iPhone. And after initially only being allowed to use it in the house on Wi-Fi, that phone now goes outdoors and has its own phone number. And she has been careful with it in the months since. (Ahem, knocks on wood.)
The Apple Watch, however, held no such elevated status for her. It was not an earned privilege. It was not fun. It was not filled with favorite apps and games. It was, instead, thrust upon her.
While the iPhone is used often for enjoyable and addictive activities like Roblox, TikTok, Disney+ and Netflix, the Apple Watch was boring by comparison. Sure, there are a few things you can do on the device — it has an App Store! You can make a Memoji! You can customize different watch faces! But unless this is your child’s first-ever access to technology, these features may have limited appeal.
“Do you want to download this game? This looks fun,” I suggested, pointing to a coloring game, as we looked at her Watch together one night.
“No thanks,” she replied.
“Why not?”
“I just don’t think it would be good on the little screen.”
“Maybe a different game?”
“Nah.”
And that was that. I could not convince her to give a single Apple Watch app a try in the days that followed.
She didn’t even want to stream music on the Apple Watch — she has Alexa for that, she pointed out. She didn’t want to play a game on the watch — she has Roblox on the bigger screen of her hand-me-down laptop. She also has a handheld Nintendo Switch.
Image Credits: TechCrunch
Initially, she picked an Apple Watch face that matched her current “aesthetic” — simple and neutral — and that was the extent of her interest in personalizing the device in the first several weeks.
Having already burned herself out on Memoji by borrowing my phone to play with the feature when it launched, there wasn’t as much interest in doing more with the customized avatar creation process, despite my suggestions to try it. (She had already made a Memoji her Profile photo for her contact card on iPhone.)
However, I later showed her the Memoji Watch Face option after I set it up, and asked her if she liked it. She responded “YESSSS. I love it,” and snatched the watch from my hand to play some more.
Demo’ing features is important, it seems.
But largely, the Apple Watch was strapped on only at my request as she walked out the door.
Soon, this became a routine.
“Can I go outside and play?”
“Yes. Wear the watch!” I’d reply.
“I knowwww.”
It took over a month to get to the point that she would remember the watch on her own.
I have to admit that I didn’t fully demo the Apple Watch to her or explain how to use it in detail, beyond a few basics in those beginning weeks. While I could have made her an expert, I suppose, I think it’s important to realize that many parents are less tech-savvy than their kids. The children are often left to fend for themselves when it comes to devices, and this particular kid has had several devices. For that reason, I was curious how a fairly tech-literate child who has moved from iPad to Android to now iPhone, and who hops from Windows to Mac to Chromebook, would now adapt to an Apple Watch.
As it turned out, she found it a little confusing.
“What do you think about the Watch?” I asked one evening, feeling her out for an opinion.
“It’s fun…but sometimes I don’t really understand it,” she replied.
“What don’t you understand?”
“I don’t know. Just…almost everything,” she said, dramatically, as tweens tend to do. “Like, sometimes I don’t know how to turn up and down the volume.”
Upon prodding, I realize she meant this: she was confused about how to adjust the alert volume for messages and notifications, as well as how to change the Watch from phone calls to a vibration or to silence calls altogether with Do Not Disturb. (It was her only real complaint, but annoying enough to be “almost everything,” I guess!)
I’ll translate now from kid language what I learned here.
First, given that the “Do Not Disturb” option is accessible from a swipe gesture, it’s clear my daughter hadn’t fully explored the watch’s user interface. It didn’t occur to her that the swipe gestures of the iPhone would have their own Apple Watch counterparts. (And also, why would you swipe up from the bottom of the screen for the Control Center when that doesn’t work on the iPhone anymore? On iPhone, you now swipe down from the top-right to get to Control Center functions.)
And she definitely hadn’t discovered the tiny “Settings” app (the gear icon) on the Apple Watch’s Home Screen to make further changes.
Instead, her expectation was that you should be able to use either a button on the side for managing volume — you know, like on a phone — or maybe the digital crown, since that’s available here. But these physical features of the device — confusingly — took her to that “unimportant stuff” like the Home Screen and an app switcher, when in actuality, it was calls, notifications and alerts that were the app’s main function, in her opinion.
And why do you need to zoom into the Home Screen with a turn of the digital crown? She wasn’t even using the apps at this point. There weren’t that many on the screen.
Curious, since she didn’t care for the current lineup of apps, I asked for feedback.
“What kind of apps do you want?,” I asked.
“Roblox and TikTok.”
“Roblox?!,” I said, laughing. “How would that even work?”
As it turned out, she didn’t want to play Roblox on her watch. She wanted to respond to her incoming messages and participate in her group chats from her watch.
Oh. That’s actually a reasonable idea. The Apple Watch is, after all, a messaging device.
And since many kids her age don’t have a phone or the ability to use a messaging app like Snapchat or Instagram, they trade Roblox usernames and friend each other in the game as a way to work around this restriction. They then message each other to arrange virtual playdates or even real-life ones if they live nearby.
But the iOS version of the Roblox mobile app doesn’t have an Apple Watch counterpart.
“And TikTok?” I also found this hilarious.
But the fact that Apple Watch is not exactly an ideal video player is lost on her. It’s a device with a screen, connected to the internet. So why isn’t that enough, she wondered?
“You could look through popular TikToks,” she suggested. “You wouldn’t need to make an account or anything,” she clarified, as if these details would fix the only problems she saw with her suggestion.
Even if the technology was there, a TikTok experience on the small screen would never be a great one. But this goes to show how much interest in technology is directly tied to what apps and games are available, compared with the technology platform itself.
Other built-in features had even less appeal than the app lineup.
Image Credits: Apple
Though I had set up some basic Activity features during the setup process, like a “Move Goal,” she had no idea what any of that was. So I showed her the “rings” and how they worked, and she thought it was kind of neat that the Apple Watch could track her standing. However, there was no genuine interest or excitement in being able to quantify her daily movement — at least, not until one day many weeks later when were hiking and she heard my watch ding as my rings closed and wanted to do the same on hers. She became interested in recording her steps for that hike, but the interest wasn’t sustained afterwards.
Apple said it built in the Activity features so kids could track their move goal and exercise progress. But I would guess many kids won’t care about this, even if they’re active. After all, kids play — they don’t think “how much did I play? Did I move enough today?” And nor should they, really.
As a parent, I can see her data in the Health app on my iPhone, which is the device I use to manage her Apple Watch. It’s interesting, perhaps, to see things like her steps walked or flights climbed. But it’s not entirely useful, as her Apple Watch is not continually worn throughout the day. (She finds the bands uncomfortable — we tried Sport Band and Sport Loop and she still fiddles with them constantly, trying to readjust them for comfort.)
In addition, if I did want to change her Activity goals later on for some reason, I’d have to do so from her Watch directly.
Of course, a parent doesn’t buy a child an Apple Watch to track their exercise. It’s for the location-tracking features. That is the only real reason a parent would consider this device for a younger child.
On that front, I did like that the watch was a GPS tracker that was looped into our household Apple ecosystem as its own device with its own phone number. I liked that I could ping the Watch with “Find My” when it’s lost — and it was lost a lot, as I noted. I liked that I could manage the Watch from my iPhone, since it’s very difficult to reacquire a device to make changes once it’s handed over to someone else.
I also liked that the Apple Watch was always available for use. This may have been one of its biggest perks, in fact. Unlike my daughter’s iPhone, which is almost constantly at 10-20% battery (or much less), the watch was consistently charged and ready when it was time for outdoor play.
I liked that it was easier for her to answer a call on the Apple Watch compared with digging her phone out of her bike basket or bag. I liked that she didn’t have to worry about constantly holding onto her phone while out and about.
I also appreciated that I could create geofenced alerts — like when she reached the park or a friend’s house, for example, or when she left. But I didn’t like that the ability to do so is buried in the “Find My” app. (You tap on the child’s name in the “People” tab. Tap “Add” under “Notifications.” Tap “Notify Me.” Tap “New Location.” Do a search for an address or venue. Tap “Done.”)
Image Credits: TechCrunch
I also didn’t like that when I created a recurring geofence, my daughter would be notified. Yes, privacy. I know! But who’s in charge here? My daughter is a child, not a teen. She knows the Apple Watch is a GPS tracker — we had that conversation. She knows it allows me to see where she is. She’s young, and, for now, doesn’t feel like this a privacy violation. We’ll have that discussion later, I’m sure. But at the present, she likes the feel of this electronic tether to home as she experiments with expanding the boundaries of her world.
When I tweak and update recurring alerts for geofenced locations, such alerts can be confusing or even concerning. I appreciate that Apple is being transparent and trying to give kids the ability to understand they’re being tracked — but I’d also argue that most parents who suddenly gift an expensive watch to their child will explain why they’re doing so. This is a tool, not a toy.
Also, the interface for configuring geofences is cumbersome. By comparison, the family-tracking app Life360 which we normally use has a screen where you simply tap add, search to find the location and you’re done. One tap on a bell icon next to the location turns on or off its alerts. (You can get all granular about it: recurring, one time, arrives, leaves, etc. — but you don’t have to. Just tap and be alerted. It’s more straightforward.)
Image Credits: Apple
One feature I did like on the Apple Watch, but sadly couldn’t really use, was its Schooltime mode — a sort of remotely-enabled, scheduled version of Do Not Disturb. This feature blocks apps and complications and turns on the Do Not Disturb setting for the kids, while letting emergency calls and notifications break through. (Make sure to set up Shared Contacts, so you can manage that aspect.)
Currently, we have no use for Schooltime, thanks to this pandemic. My daughter is attending school remotely this year. I could imagine how this may be helpful one day when she returns to class.
But I also worry that if I sent her to class with the Apple Watch, other kids will judge her for her expensive device. I worry that teachers (who don’t know about Schooltime) will judge me for having her wear it. I worry kids will covet it and ask to try it on. I worry a kid running off with it, causing additional disciplinary headaches for teachers. I worry it will get smashed on the playground or during PE, or somehow fall off because she meddled with the band for the umpteenth time. I worry she’ll take it off because “the strap is so annoying” (as I was told), then leave it in her desk.
I don’t worry as much about the iPhone at school, because it stays in her backpack the whole time due to school policy. It doesn’t sit on her arm as a constant temptation, “Schooltime” mode or otherwise.
The Apple Watch Family Setup is also not a solution that adapts as the child ages to the expanding needs of teen monitoring, compared with other family-tracking solutions.
To continue the Life360 comparison, the app today offers features for teen drivers, and its new privacy-sensitive location “bubbles” for teens now give them more autonomy. Apple’s family-tracking solution, meanwhile, becomes more limited as the child ages up.
For instance, Schooltime doesn’t work on an iPhone. Once the child upgrades to an iPhone, you are meant to use parental controls and Screen Time features to manage which apps are allowed and when she can use her device. It seems a good transitional step to the phone would be a way to maintain Schooltime mode on the child’s next device, too.
Instead, by buying into Apple Watch for its Family Setup features, what you’ll soon end up with is a child who now owns both an Apple Watch and a smartphone. (Sure, you could regift it or take it back, I suppose…I certainly do wish you luck if you try that!)
Beyond the overboard embrace of consumerism that is buying an Apple Watch for a child, the biggest complaint I had was that there were three different apps for me to use to manage and view data associated with my daughter’s Apple Watch. I could view her tracked activity was tracked in my Health app. Location-tracking and geofence configuration was in the Find My app. And remotely configuring the Apple Watch itself, including Schooltime, was found in my Watch mobile app.
I understand that Apple built the Watch to be a personal device designed for use with one person and it had to stretch to turn it into a family-tracking system. But what Apple is doing here is really just pairing the child’s watch with the parent’s iPhone and then tacking on extra features, like Schooltime. It hasn’t approached this as a whole new system designed from the ground-up for families or for their expanding needs as the child grows.
As a result, the whole system feels underdeveloped compared with existing family-tracking solutions. And given the numerous features to configure, adjust and monitor, Family Setup deserves its own app, or at the very least, its own tab in a parent’s Watch app to simplify its use.
At the end of the day, if you are letting your child out in the world — beyond school and supervised playdates — the Apple Watch is a solution, but it may not be the best solution for your needs. If you have specific reasons why your child will not get their own phone now or anytime soon, the Apple Watch may certainly work. But if you don’t have those reasons, it may be time to try a smartphone.
Both Apple and Google now offer robust parental control solutions for their smartphone platforms that can mitigate many parents’ concerns over content and app addiction. And considering the cost of a new Apple Watch, the savings just aren’t there — especially when considering entry-level Android phones or other hand-me-down phones as the alternative.
[Apple provided a loaner device for the purposes of this review. My daughter was cited and quoted with permission but asked for her name to not be used.]
Josh Elman is moving over to Apple, he announced on Twitter today, saying he will be focused on the company’s App Store and helping “customers discover the best apps for them.”
Asked for more details about his new role, Elman referred us to Apple, which confirmed his employment but declined to offer more, including about his new title. (This is typical operating procedure for the tech giant.)
Certainly, Elman has plenty of experience with fast-growing technologies and popular apps in particular. One of his first jobs out of Stanford was with RealNetworks, a bubble-era internet streaming company that went public in 1997, three years after it was founded. (It remains publicly traded, though its market cap is just $60 million these days.)
After RealNetworks, it was on to LinkedIn, which Elman joined in 2004 as a senior product manager when the company was just two years old. From there, Elman worked in product management at the custom apparel and accessories company Zazzle, then at Facebook, then Twitter.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the venture firm Greylock brought Elman into the fold in 2011 as a principal, and by 2013, he was a general partner, investing in social networking deals throughout, like Musical.ly (ByteDance acquired the company and turned it into TikTok); Nextdoor (which is reportedly eyeing ways to go public); Houseparty (acquired last year by Epic Games, which is now suing Apple); and Discord (which is sewing up a private funding deal at a valuation of roughly $7 billion).
Somewhat unexpectedly, in 2018, Elman left his full-time role with Greylock to join a company notably not in the firm’s portfolio — the stock-trading platform Robinhood. As interesting, though he took on the role of VP of product at the popular and fast-growing startup, he didn’t cut ties with Greylock entirely, taking on the title of venture partner and remaining on as a board member to his companies.
Asked about the move, Elman told TC at the time that he had “started talking with a few of my partners about how I want to spend the next decade of my professional life. What gets me the most energized is when I can dig in on product with a hyper-growth company.”
Ultimately, the Robinhood role didn’t last long, with Elman leaving last November after less than two years on the job. Now Elman — who said he’s stepping away from some of his Greylock-related board seats — has a new chance to do what he loves most, from one of the most powerful perches in the world, the App Store.
Now, to see what he does there. “I’m really excited to get to build ways to help over a billion customers and millions of developers connect,” he tweeted earlier, apparently sharing as much as he can publicly for now. Added Elman in the same thread: “I recently found my college resume. My career objective was ‘To create great technology that changes people’s lives’. Still at it :)”
As covid-19 cases spiral out of control in the US, states are scrambling to fight the virus with an increasingly stretched arsenal. Many of them have the same weapons at their disposal: restrictions on public gatherings and enforcement of mask wearing, plus testing, tracing, and exposure notifications.
But while many states struggle to get their systems to work together, Guam—a tiny US territory closer to the Korean Peninsula than the North American mainland—may offer clues on how to rally communities around at least one part of the puzzle: smartphone contact tracing.
With no budget, and relying almost entirely on a grassroots volunteer effort, Guam has gotten 29% of the island’s adult residents to download its exposure notification app, a rate of adoption that outstrips states with far more resources.
A collaborative effort
Guam diagnosed its first covid cases in March, but a few weeks later, it gained international attention—and a much bigger case load—when a covid-stricken US Navy ship was ordered to dock at the Naval base on the island. Sailors who tested negative were quarantined in local hotels and forbidden from interacting with civilians.
Having so many positive cases on the island drove home how vulnerable the island really was—but it also created a lot of new volunteers looking for ways to help out.
Around the same time, Vince Munoz, a developer at the Guam-based software company NextGenSys, got a call. The island was being offered a partnership with the PathCheck Foundation, a nonprofit that was building government contact tracing apps. Munoz immediately saw an opportunity to help his community fight this new threat.
“It is something you do to help other people,” Munoz says. “It empowers you to help reduce the spread of the virus.”
Digital contact tracing is a potentially low-touch way for health departments to reduce the spread of covid-19 by using smartphones to track who’s been exposed. And even if exposure notifications aren’t the panacea many technologists hoped for, new research suggests that breaking even a few links in the chain of transmission can save lives.
So Munoz’s team of volunteers connected with PathCheck—which was founded at MIT—and they started building an app called Covid Alert. Like the majority of America’s exposure notification apps, it uses a system built by Google and Apple and uses Bluetooth signals to alert people that they’ve crossed paths with someone who later tests positive. From there, they are urged to contact the island’s local health authorities and take appropriate action. Everything is done anonymously to protect privacy.
After several months of testing and tweaking, the app was ready. But it was still missing an important piece: users. After all, any contact tracing app needs as many downloads as possible to make a difference. Munoz knew just the people to build buzz: the Guam Visitors Bureau. Tourism is massively important to the island, which gets more than 1.5 million visitors each year—almost 10 times the local population. In pre-pandemic times, the bureau helped tourists plan trips to Guam’s “star-sand beaches.” Staff jumped at the chance to help.
With assistance from Thane Hancock, a CDC epidemiologist based on the island, and Janela Carrera, public information officer for the Guam Department of Public Health and Social Services, the team started building a marketing campaign.
“Because we didn’t have any funding, we decided to do a grassroots campaign,” says Monica Guzman, CEO of Guam-based marketing company Galaide Group, who works with the bureau. “Guam is a very small community. We’re all either related or neighbors or friends.”
While PathCheck and Munoz’s development team worked on building the app, the Visitors Bureau began reaching out to community groups and nonprofits to build awareness. It hosted Zoom calls with organizations, schools, and cultural groups across the island with the message that the app could help suppress the virus, if enough people were willing to “be a covid warrior.”
“The schools, the government agencies, the media, they all jumped on board,” Carrera says.
Together, these efforts are part of what ethics researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology recently called the “piecemeal creation of public trust.” To get people to use a novel technology like exposure notification, you have to reach people where they live and get buy-in from community leaders.
It takes a village (on WhatsApp)
Once the app was ready to launch in September, it was time to get the word out.
The day before the official launch, Visitors Bureau marketing manager Russell Ocampo sent a message about the app to Guam’s notoriously large and unruly WhatsApp groups. That message ricocheted around the island, resulting in almost 3,000 downloads immediately. “I received it back like 10 times from other people,” he says.
A further 6,000 people signed up the next day during a press conference, including the governor, who downloaded it while live on the air.
The effort received a show of support that many US states and territories could only dream of. All three major telecom companies on the island sent free texts encouraging people to download the app. A local TV station, meanwhile, ran a two-hour “download-a-thon,” to try driving uptake. The show featured performances by local musicians, interspersed with information about the app, including debunking myths about privacy and other ongoing concerns. Viewers were offered the chance to win $10,000 in prize money, much of it donated personally by Guam Visitors Bureau members and others who worked on the app, if they could prove they downloaded the app during the program.
The Guam Visitors Bureau has offered other cash prizes for government agencies whose employees rack up the most downloads. And small businesses, eager to get the economy back on its feet, have offered give-aways to customers — one shopping center is offering a box of chocolates to visitors who download the app.
Challenges
But, crucially, has the app worked? Despite a successful launch, Guam’s covid-19 response has faced major challenges overall. Many people, especially those from minority ethnic groups who came to Guam from other Pacific islands, live in multi-generational, overcrowded housing, often with limited access to healthcare and even basic hygiene tools like municipal sewage. The health department recently launched door-to-door testing in these neighborhoods, and found positivity rates as high as 29%.
At the beginning of April, the governor’s office projected that the virus could kill 3,000 people—almost 2% of the island’s population—over the next five months. That dire prediction has yet to come true. As of Monday, Nov. 30, 112 people have reportedly died of covid on the island. Overall, the territory’s trajectory has been typical of America itself: Cases remained low through most of the summer, before ticking steadily up through the fall and spiking in early November.
While a large proportion of residents have downloaded the app, one major challenge has been getting people to upload positive test results. This is in part because people are often in shock when they first receive the news about their diagnosis, according to Janela Carrera, the health department officer.
Contact tracers call everyone who tests positive, and part of their script involves recommending that people upload their positive result: That’s how the app knows to send (anonymous) exposure notifications to people who’ve been near each other. But that first call can feel extremely stressful, and it’s not a great time to suggest they try out a new app or go through the process of entering a special numerical code that kicks off the chain of notifications.
“Especially if they’re symptomatic, they may feel like, ‘oh my gosh, I may not make it through this,’ or ‘I might be infecting others in my home.’ So [contact tracers] follow up with them a few days later, once they’ve had a chance to recuperate, and offer the code then,” Carrera says.
Clearly, though, some people are uploading the codes. “I’ve had co-workers tell me, ‘Janela, oh my God, I got a notification!’” Carrera says. Ocampo himself received one in October, and quarantined for 14 days.
This is boosted by the fact that when public health workers do their door-to-door testing, they offer information about how to download the app. At the same time, other strategies, often shared through multilingual PSAs on local radio, may be more effective for people in these communities, who often don’t use smartphones for anything more than texting, according to Munoz.
Guam faces one other challenge that’s very common worldwide. It’s difficult to know exactly what effect the app is having, says Sam Zimmermann, CTO of PathCheck Foundation.
Zimmermann says: “Because Guam cares a lot about privacy and making sure their systems are safe, their app doesn’t have any kind of analytics or logging,” like whether users actually learn how the app works after downloading it or whether they pay attention if they receive an exposure notification.
Still, while the team launched the app hoping to achieve a 60% download rate based on an early mathematical model, there’s now evidence that even a much smaller portion of the population using it may have a positive impact.
Munoz, for one, hopes the app will help take pressure off health officials doing labor-intensive outreach like door-to-door testing.
“Manual contact tracers have a very difficult job. They can’t keep up with everyone who tests positive,” Munoz says. “Any little percentage helps.”
This story is part of the Pandemic Technology Project, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation.
For all of its upheaval, the deadly 2020 coronavirus pandemic—and efforts to stop it—has taught a valuable lesson: organizations that invest in technology survive. IT infrastructure initiatives put in place before the crisis have allowed countless businesses to shift to online commerce and remote working. In other words, operate during it.
The pandemic has taught a similar lesson about artificial intelligence (AI): Organizations are either on the right track with their AI strategies or, if anything, need to dramatically step up the pace of investment. Children’s Hospital chief information officer Dan Nigrin points out that AI applications that promote telehealth, for example, “are not necessarily covid-related, but certainly the pandemic has accelerated the consideration and use of these kinds of tools.”
In a recent MIT Technology Review Insights survey of 301 business and technology leaders, 38% report their AI investment plans are unchanged as a result of the pandemic, and 32% indicate the crisis has accelerated their plans. The percentages of unchanged and revved-up AI plans are greater at organizations that had an AI strategy already in place.
Consumers and business decision-makers are realizing there are many ways that AI augments human effort and experience. Technology leaders in most organizations regard AI as a critical capability that has accelerated efforts to increase operational efficiency, gain deeper insight about customers, and shape new areas of business innovation.
AI is not a new addition to the corporate technology arsenal: 62% of survey respondents are using AI technologies. Respondents from larger organizations (those with more than $500 million in annual revenue) have, at nearly 80%, higher deployment rates. Small organizations (with less than $5 million in revenue) are at 58%, slightly below the average.
But most organizations haven’t developed plans to guide them: a little more than a third (35%) of respondents indicate that they’re developing their AI capabilities under the auspices of a formal strategy. AI plans are more common at big organizations (42%), and even small businesses are, at 38%, slightly above the mean.
Of those without current AI deployments, a quarter say they will deploy the technology in the next two years, and less than 15% indicate no plans at all. Here, the divide between large and small widens: less than 5% of big organizations have no AI plans, compared with 18% of smaller ones.
More applications are moving closer to the source
Increasingly, organizations are moving their IT infrastructure to cloud-based resources—for myriad reasons, including cost-efficiency and computing performance. At energy management company Schneider Electric, the cloud has been imperative “not only to transform our company digitally but also to transform our customers’ businesses digitally,” says Ibrahim Gokcen, who was until recently chief technology officer at Schneider. “It was a clear, strategic area of investment for us before the crisis.”
As such, it is unsurprising that most organizations are putting AI in the cloud: 77% are deploying cloud-based AI applications. That makes cloud resources far more popular than hosting on servers or directly on endpoint devices, such as laptops or smartphones.
Cloud-based AI also allows organizations to operate in an ecosystem of collaborators that includes application developers, analytics companies, and customers themselves. Nigrin describes how the cloud allows one of Boston Children’s Hospital’s partners, Israeli medical technology developer DreaMed Diabetes, to “inject AI smarts” into remote insulin management. First, patients upload insulin-pump or glucometer data to the cloud. “The patient provides access to that data to the hospital, which in turn uses software—also in the cloud—to crunch the data and use their algorithmic approach to propose tweaks to the insulin regimen that that patient is on,” offering tremendous time savings and added insight for physicians.
But while the cloud provides significant AI-fueled advantages for organizations, an increasing number of applications have to make use of the infrastructural capabilities of the “edge,” the intermediary computing layer between the cloud and the devices that need computational power. The advantage is these computing and storage resources, housed in edge servers, are closer to a device than cloud computing’s data centers, which can be thousands of miles away. That means latency is lower—so if someone uses a device to access an application, the time delay will be minimal. And while edge computing doesn’t have the infinite scalability of the cloud, it’s mighty enough to handle data-hungry applications like AI.
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This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff.
When Mastercard wanted to improve the speed and security of credit card transactions, when Baylor College of Medicine was scaling up its human genomic sequencing program, and when toymaker Spin Master was expanding into online video games and television shows, they all turned to object storage technology to facilitate the processing of massive amounts of data.
Object storage, with its virtually infinite capacity and low cost, has a long history of being deployed for backup, archiving, disaster recovery, and regulatory compliance. But the demands of today’s data-centric organizations have brought the technology from the dusty storage closet to the center stage of digital transformation.
For any tech decision-maker thinking about an overall data strategy, having a large central repository, also known as a data lake, is the preferred approach—it helps break down silos and aggregate data from multiple sources for the type of data analysis that delivers value to the business. Object storage is the most effective underlying technology for applying data analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to those vast data stores, says Scott Sinclair, storage analyst at market researcher Enterprise Strategy Group.
“The biggest advantage of object storage is to add more value to primary data. It doesn’t just store files; it adds context,” says Paul Schindeler, a former IDC analyst and currently CEO of the Dutch consultancy Data Matters. An object store includes metadata, or labels, which enables companies to easily search vast volumes of data, determine the origin of the data, whether it has been altered and, more important, to set policies and keep auditable records on who can see the file, who can open it, and who can download data.
Most organizations today use a mix of storage types: file storage, block storage, and object storage. But the use of object storage is surging for a number of reasons: speed, scalability, searchability, security, data integrity, reliability, and protection against ransomware. And it’s the wave of the future when it comes to big data analytics.
Object storage, then and now
Object storage was developed in the 1990s to handle data stores that were simply too large to be backed up with file and block storage, says Sinclair. When introduced, the almost infinite scalability, low cost, and immutability of object storage made it ideal for backup and recovery and long-term archiving and compliance with regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, in health care, and Sarbanes-Oxley, in banking.
The next watershed event in the evolution of object storage was the ascendance of cloud storage. Cloud services vendor Amazon Web Services chose object storage architecture as the foundation for its popular Simple Storage Service (S3), and object storage has become the standard platform for all cloud storage, whether from Google, Microsoft, or others. In addition, S3 protocols have become the industry standard for modern data-centric applications, whether they run in the cloud or in a corporate data center.
More recently, organizations have come to the realization that they need to do more than just park and protect their data; they need to extract value from vast troves of historical data, as well as from new data sources and data types, such as internet-of-things sensor data, video, and images. That’s where object storage really shines. It has become the platform organizations are building their data analytics capabilities on to modernize their computing environments, create innovation, and drive digital transformation.
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This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff.