UK tech industry forms Code4COVID.org to fight the Coronavirus crisis

A coalition of grassroots UK tech initiatives has come together to co-ordinate the key groups of tech industry people supporting the UK’s response to the Coronavirus.

COVID19 Tech Response (CTR) aims to co-ordinate the supply of available tech talent; work on the problems that need solving and the matching of the two. So far, they have brought over 400 tech volunteers together, mostly from the UK, some of whom have been providing volunteer support to local Covid Mutual Aid groups which have sprung up across the country.

CTR will also aim to co-ordinate tech industry volunteers to coach and support UK citizens who are experiencing problems during the crisis, with any tech solutions available. 

The coalition is working closely with the CoronavirusTechHandbook, an initiative by political technology college Newspeak House which has quickly become a global resource. 

The four main “call to arms” of the group are:
1) Join the Code4COVID Slack as a volunteer or to source volunteers, or work on projects

2) Add your tech skills to the Covid-19 Tech Response Airtable form

3) Submit mainstream UK tech problems to Covid Tech Support

4) Contribute to and access the resources on the CoronavirusTechHandbook

CTR has been formed by many of those coming together to support anyone building solutions to the ongoing pandemic. These include:

• Covidmutualaid.org – Find your local mutual aid group and volunteer or seek help
• CoronavirusTechhandbook – A crowdsourced library of resources and organizations
• Code4Covid Slack community  and TechForUK – Slack groups for collecting tech volunteers
• Covid Tech Support – Collecting requests for technical support, for volunteers to work on
• Covid19-Response – A US-based moderated scientific ‘request for ideas’ 
• Helpwithcovid.com – International volunteer sign-ups and ideas board
• Catalyst – a UK charitable collective providing digital support for civil society organizations.
• TechForce19 – technology to combat self-isolation, particularly among the elderly and vulnerable

COVID19 Tech Response says its aim is not to build the individual solutions needed by those on the front line but instead be a steering group that provides the broad oversight that connects these individual efforts together. It also aims to put in place the system that enables new problems to be solved efficiently and effectively using technology. 

CTR hopes to create a “matching agency” where community volunteers are matched with technical problems. It will also be encouraging the tech community to talk to healthcare workers/public service workers they know and share tools and build tech teams who can be staged to solve problems.

The formation of the group was inspired by similar initiatives globally, including, Helpwithcovid.com and Covid19-response.

Commenting, Ed Saperia, co-founder of CoronavirusTechHandbook said: “Millions of knowledge workers are showing up to help. This is fantastic, and will change society, but it needs coordination. Often the hard part is not the tech, but understanding what you can do, and it’s here that you should apply your intelligence and creativity.”

Cinzia Ricciardone, co-founder of code4covid, said: “Formed on March 16th by a few technologist friends, code4covid now counts over 400 tech volunteers. Our mission is to find technology solutions and resources to help people during the COVID-19 crisis, and ensure energy gets directed to the right place in order to save lives.”

CTR Co-organiser Freddie Fforde said: “Like so many other groups across the country, people in tech are trying to play their part. We don’t know where this will lead but we have to start somewhere by helping people come together and seeing what they can build.

Josh Russell, co-founder of Tech For UK, said: “Our goal is for teams that emerge to have a good understanding of the problem space, so we’ll be forming a User Research (explainer) function that will feed insights to the community on a regular basis. User Research is the secret sauce, if you’re a User Researcher tick the right box when you register on code4covid.org.”

Marc Sloan, co-founder of Covid Tech Support, said: “Our aim is that no one should needlessly be put at risk because they didn’t have access to technology that a volunteer technologist could have helped with.”

Nathan Young, co-founder of CoronavirusTechHandbook said: “CoronavirusTechHandbook is a library of every project and resource, and working together with initiatives like CTR to illuminate problems and coordinate responses, we can achieve incredible things very quickly.”

Mike Butcher, co-founder of Tech For UK, said: “There are several UK tech communities responding to this crisis, but many are not co-ordinating or even aware each one exists. It’s our responsibility to get as many people into a broad group, where the UK can call on the greatest amount of tech talent at this time of need.”

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Activist investor Starboard Value taking three Box board seats as involvement deepens

When activist investors Starboard Value took a 7.5% stake in Box last September, there was reasonable speculation that it would begin to try and push an agenda, as activist investors tend to do. While the firm has been quiet to this point, today Box announced that Starboard was adding three members to the 9 member Box board.

At the same time, two long-time Box investors and allies, Rory O’Driscoll from Scale Venture Partners and Josh Stein from DFJ, will be retiring from the board and not seeking re-election at the annual stockholder’s meeting in June.

O’Driscoll involvement with the company dates back a decade, and Stein has been with the company for 14 years and has been a big supporter from almost the beginning of the company.

Starboard Value takes 7.5% stake in Box

For starters, Jack Lazar, whose credentials including being chief financial officer at GoPro and Atheros Communications, is joining the board immediately. A second new board member from a list to be agreed upon by Box and Starboard will also be joining immediately.

Finally, a third member will be selected by the newly constituted board in June, giving Starboard three friendly votes and the ability to push the Box agenda in a significant way.

At the time it announced it was taking a stake in Box, Starboard telegraphed that it could be doing something like this. Here’s what it had to say in its filing at the time:

“Depending on various factors including, without limitation, the Issuer’s financial position and investment strategy, the price levels of the Shares, conditions in the securities markets and general economic and industry conditions, the Reporting Persons may in the future take such actions with respect to their investment in the Issuer as they deem appropriate including, without limitation, engaging in communications with management and the Board of Directors of the Issuer, engaging in discussions with stockholders of the Issuer or other third parties about the Issuer and the [Starboard’s] investment, including potential business combinations or dispositions involving the Issuer or certain of its businesses, making recommendations or proposals to the Issuer concerning changes to the capitalization, ownership structure, board structure (including board composition), potential business combinations or dispositions involving the Issuer or certain of its businesses, or suggestions for improving the Issuer’s financial and/or operational performance, purchasing additional Shares, selling some or all of their Shares, engaging in short selling of or any hedging or similar transaction with respect to the Shares…”

Box looks to balance growth and profitability as it matures

Box CEO Aaron Levie appeared at TechCrunch Sessions: Enterprise, the week this news about Starboard broke, and he was careful in how he discussed a possible relationship with the firm. “Well, I think in their statement actually they really just identified that they think there’s upside in the stock. It’s still very early in the conversations and process, but again we’re super collaborative in these types of situations. We want to work with all of our investors, and I think that’ll be the same here,” Levie told us at the time.

Now the company has no choice but to work more collaboratively with Starboard as it takes a much more meaningful role on the company board. What impact this will have in the long run is hard to say, but surely significant changes are likely on the way.

Box’s Aaron Levie says it will take creativity and focus to get through this crisis

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Box’s Aaron Levie says it will take creativity and focus to get through this crisis

The COVID-19 virus is touching every aspect of our lives and having a profound impact on individuals, businesses and society at large. Box’s Aaron Levie has built a successful business from dorm room to IPO and beyond. He spoke to TechCrunch today about the level of creativity and focus that it’s going to take to succeed in the current environment.

Levie pointed out that his company was a fledgling startup when the economic downturn hit in 2008, but he thinks this one could have a much greater impact on business than that one did.

“I think Silicon Valley is going to definitely experience this in a very, very significant way. We were building a company in 2008, and that was extremely hard, but I don’t think it is going to compare to how hard the coming year is going to be,” Levie said.

This morning on Twitter, Levie wrote that we are in uncharted territory, and everyone will have to work together to help navigate this crisis.

We have *no* playbook for this type of economic event. That means we can’t wait around for others to execute their playbook. It doesn’t exist. We all have to collectively find a way, however creative, to support others as we find a way through this.

— Aaron Levie (@levie) March 22, 2020

He believes the government will need to step in to help individuals and businesses alike. “Businesses, who have lots of employees, need to be supported, but fundamentally we need to make sure that we’re focused on all the workers that are out of work, hopefully just temporarily displaced, but we’re going to need a lot of government financial support to get through this,” he said.

For startups, he advised startups to firmly focus on their mission. “It’s about extreme focus right now. It’s about extreme discipline. It’s about making sure that you’re maintaining your culture during this time,” Levie said.

As for his own company, he’s looking a three areas: his employees, his customers and the community. He said his first priority is making sure his employees are safe and healthy and that the hourly workers who support the business normally are being taken care of as we move through this unprecedented situation.

Secondly, he’s making sure that he supports his customers. To that end the company has removed any license limits as customers deal with increased usage with employees working from home.

He has also joined forces with Cloudflare in an effort to provide small businesses with 90 days of free services to help ride out the situation, and he said they would revisit extending these programs if the situation continues.

Thirdly, he says every business who can has to look at ways to support the communities where they live to assist non-profit organizations who are helping in the response. “This is an event where business communities globally are going to have to put more of a concerted effort on this than any issue in modern history,” Levie said.

Levie is not alone in this thinking by any means. He points to other leaders such as Chuck Robbins, Marc Benioff and Tim Cook, all who have stepped up in recent days to offer help and support.

He has built his company from the ground up to one that’s on nearly an $800 million run rate, but like so many business leaders, he is dealing with a situation which, as he said, has no playbook. Like every other CEO, he’s trying to help keep his business thriving, while not losing sight of the needs of the people in his organization, his customers or his community. It’s not an easy balancing act for anyone right now.

Box looks to balance growth and profitability as it matures

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Under quarantine, media is actually social

The flood of status symbol content into Instagram Stories has run dry. No one is going out and doing anything cool right now, and if they are, they should be shamed for it. Beyond sharing video chat happy hour screenshots and quarantine dinner concoctions, our piece-by-piece biographies have ground to a halt. Oddly, what remains feels more social than social networks have in a long time.

With no source material, we’re doing it live. Coronavirus has absolved our desire to share the recent past. The drab days stuck inside blur into each other. The near future is so uncertain that there’s little impetus to make plans. Why schedule an event or get excited for a trip just to get your heartbroken if shelter-in-place orders are extended? We’re left firmly fixed in the present.

A house-arrest Houseparty, via StoicLeys

What is social media when there’s nothing to brag about? Many of us are discovering it’s a lot more fun. We had turned social media into a sport but spent the whole time staring at the scoreboard rather than embracing the joy of play.

But thankfully, there are no Like counts on Zoom.

Nothing permanent remains. That’s freed us from the external validation that too often rules our decision making. It’s stopped being about how this looks and started being about how this feels. Does it put me at peace, make me laugh, or abate the loneliness? Then do it. There’s no more FOMO because there’s nothing to miss by staying home to read, take a bath, or play board games. You do you.

Being social animals, what feels most natural is to connect. Not asynchronously through feeds of what we just did. But by coexisting concurrently. Professional enterprise technology for agenda-driven video calls has been subverted for meandering, motive-less togetherness. We’re doing what many of us spent our childhoods doing in basements and parking lots: just hanging out.

For evidence, just look at group video chat app Houseparty, where teens aimlessly chill with everyone’s face on screen at once. In Italy, which has tragically been on lock down since COVID-19’s rapid spread in the country, Houseparty wasn’t even in the top 1500 apps a month ago. Today it’s the #1 social app, and the #2 app overall second only to Zoom.

Houseparty topped all the charts on Monday, when Sensor Tower tells TechCrunch that Houseparty’s download rate was 323X higher than its average in February. It’s currently #1 in Portugal (up 371X) and Spain (up 592X) despite being absent from the chart a week earlier.

After binging through Netflix and beating the video games, all that’s left to entertain us is each other.

Undivided By Geography

If we’re all stuck at home, it doesn’t matter where that home is. We’ve been released from the confines of which friends are within a 20 minute drive or hour-long train. Just like students are saying they all go to Zoom University since every school’s classes moved online, we all now live in Zoom Town. All commutes have been reduced to how long it takes to generate an invite URL.

Nestled in San Francisco, even pals across the Bay in Berkeley felt far away before. But this week I had hour-long video calls with my favorite people who typically feel out of reach in Chicago and New York. I spent time with babies I hadn’t met in person. And I kept in closer touch with my parents on the other coast, which is more vital and urgent than ever before.

Playing board game Codenames over Zoom with friends in New York and North Carolina

Typically, our time is occupied by acquaintances of circumstance. The co-workers who share our office. The friends who happen to live in the neighborhood. But now we’re each building a virtual family completely of our choosing. The calculus has shifted from who is convenient or who invites us to the most exciting place, to who makes us feel most human.

Even celebrities are getting into it. Rather than pristine portraits and flashy music videos, they’re appearing raw, with crappy lighting, on Facebook and Instagram Live. John Legend played piano for 100,000 people while his wife Chrissy Teigen sat on screen in a towel looking salty like she’s heard “All Of Me” far too many times. That’s more authentic than anything you’ll get on TV.

And without the traditional norms of who we are and aren’t supposed to call, there’s an opportunity to contact those we cared about in a different moment of our lives. The old college roommate, the high school buddy, the mentor who gave you you’re shot. If we have the emotional capacity in these trying times, there’s good to be done. Who do you know who’s single, lives alone, or resides in a city without a dense support network?

Reforging those connections not only surfaces prized memories we may have forgotten, but could help keep someone sane. For those who relied on work and play for social interaction, shelter-in-place is essentially solitary confinement. There’s a looming mental health crisis if we don’t check in on the isolated.

The crisis language of memes

It can be hard to muster the energy to seize these connections, though. We’re all drenched in angst about the health impacts of the virus and financial impacts of the response. I certainly spent a few mornings sleeping in just to make the days feel shorter. When all small talk leads to rehashing our fears, sometimes you don’t have anything to say.

Luckily we don’t have to say anything to communicate. We can share memes instead.

The internet’s response to COVID-19 has been an international outpour of gallow’s humor. From group chats to Instagram joke accounts to Reddit threads to Facebook groups like quarter-million member “Zoom Memes For Quaranteens”, we’re joining up to weather the crisis.

A nervous laugh is better than no laugh at all. Memes allow us to convert our creeping dread and stir craziness into something borderline productive. We can assume an anonymous voice, resharing what some unspecified other made without the vulnerability of self-attribution. We can dive into the creation of memes ourselves, killing time under house arrest in hopes of generating smiles for our generation. And with the feeds and Stories emptied, consuming memes offers a new medium of solidarity. We’re all in this hellscape together so we may as well make fun of it.

The web’s mental immune system has kicked into gear amidst the outbreak. Rather than wallowing in captivity, we’ve developed digital antibodies that are evolving to fight the solitude. We’re spicing up video chats with board games like Codenames. One-off livestreams have turned into wholly online music festivals to bring the sounds of New Orleans or Berlin to the world. Trolls and pranksters are finding ways to get their lulz too, Zoombombing webinars. And after a half-decade of techlash, our industry’s leaders are launching peer-to-peer social safety nets and ways to help small businesses survive until we can be patrons in person again.

Rather than scrounging for experiences to share, we’re inventing them from scratch with the only thing we’re left with us in quarantine: ourselves. When the infection waves pass, I hope this swell of creativity and in-the-moment togetherness stays strong. The best part of the internet isn’t showing off, it’s showing up.

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Pixar CG pioneers Pat Hanrahan and Edwin Catmull share $1M Turing Award

The 2019 Turing Award, one of the highest honors in computing, was today awarded to Pat Hanrahan and Ed Catmull, founding members of Pixar who helped shape the future of computer graphics. The two will share a $1M prize and of course the satisfaction of receiving this prestigious award for doing something they clearly love.

The award has recently been given to such luminaries as Tim Berners-Lee, cryptographer Martin Hellman, and last year, AI pioneers Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, and Yann LeCun.

Catmull was at Pixar for more than 30 years, appointed its president from the very beginning as a LucasFilm animation studio bought and repurposed by Steve Jobs. Hanrahan was an early hire, and between them the two would have had enormous effects on the world of CG, even if they hadn’t built the poster child for the technology.

I spoke with Catmull and Hanrahan about the origins of the field and their early work in it that the Association for Computing Machinery chose to recognize this year.

“When I started out, graphics didn’t really exist,” Hanrahan recalled. “I sort of discovered graphics in grad school, but there were no professors, no classes, it wasn’t even in the computer sciences, really.”

“CG wasn’t thought of as being at the same level as new architectures and languages,” said Catmull. “But we believed that it was going to fundamental tool going forward. it just took a long time to get here.”

That belief was shared by George Lucas, who hired Catmull to work on CG imagery way back in 1979. It wasn’t until 1986 that Pixar was formed and Hanrahan joined the team.

Hanrahan was only at Pixar for a few years, but during that time created several of the tools and techniques that essentially made modern CG imagery possible. The system for which he was the architect, RenderMan, was what enabled the complex lighting and shaders to be used, making a final image with a far more realistic feel than any that had come before. For anyone curious about the name, Hanrahan has a funny story:

“When I came out to California I ran into Jaron Lanier, he actually came up to Pixar, and got me all excited about VR,” he said. “Around that era you had the Walkman, the Discman, and Jaron said, what we need is a ‘RenderMan,’ you hang it on your belt and just put on the glasses and it renders these unbelievable scenes. But nobody else really liked the word RenderMan, so I got a lot of flak about that. I’m certainly not in marketing.”

Catmull’s contributions were equally important; as a researcher, he had established early techniques for Z-buffering in 3D environments (it’s really important) and texture mapping, one of the most fundamental processes to realistic CG graphics. Early on, as a graduate student, he built a new way of representing polygonal surfaces as smooth shapes that seemed lost to time… until years later it was iterated on by another researcher, who was hired by Catmull and brought the technique with him.

“It was so successful they switched out what they were doing with Bug’s Life,” Catmull said. “I was so busy building the company and making movies and so on, I wasn’t even aware until last year when the MPAA gave an award to me for developing these techniques, which are now the dominant technique in all animation.”

Clearly the mark these two left on the world of CG and moviemaking is considerable, but what they are most proud of, they told me, is nurturing the overlap between creativity and technology in their respective fields.

“What I’m most proud of is keeping an environment in Pixar where we kept the technology and the art in balance for so many years,” said Catmull. “We established a relationship between a group of artists who want to do something new and technical people that work on things people normally don’t see. It leads to this really phenomenal dynamic between the two.”

Hanrahan, for his part, looks back on a fruitful academic career and later, founding Tableau.

“I’m most excited about my teaching,” he said. “I just graduated my 40th grad student. They’ve gone off and done amazing stuff, I mean out of my group we’ve started 16 companies, and many are professors of computer graphics and so on. And Tableau was a huge thing for me — I think just building a company that’s part of the community and a good place to work, that stands out to me more than my technical achievements.”

I’ll be posting more of our wide-ranging interview soon. For now, congratulations to to the pair for their wide-ranging and influential work in computing and beyond.

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How Uber, Lyft, Seamless and more are addressing taxed gig economy workers

The ongoing COVID-19 crisis is going to prove a major test of the gig economy. Already an ever-increasingly important part of our daily lives, grocery and food delivery services along with ride-hailing apps are going to play a fundamental role in helping individuals enact government-recommended social distancing.

More often than not, however, these workers get short shrift. Many times those who drive our cars and deliver our food do so with little pay and long hours. As for healthcare, well, that’s a distant dream for many.

This situation is only going to worsen many of these issues, and there’s a very real fear that the United States’ inability to provide the working class with a legitimate social safety net will only incentivize workers to continue to do their job while sick, further exacerbating the spread of the novel coronavirus, in spite of restrictions on gatherings and other attempts to increase social distancing.

Things are changing quickly and will continue to do so. This situation is, in many respects, unprecedented in recent memory. Curbing the impact of COVID-19 and supporting the workers whose job it is to help support those of us who have the job flexibility and financial capabilities to stay at home will require flexibility and creativity on behalf of policy makers. We’ve reached out to a number of those companies whose job it is to ensure the safety and well-being of a team of freelancers.

Delivery.com

The service is among those that have introduced a contactless delivery option, letting users choose from one of three methods:

• Please deliver to my door
• Please leave order outside my door
• Call when here and leave order at building entrance

“We have also taken steps to educate our restaurants, stores and delivery personnel on the importance of these instructions to ensure that your food is brought to you in the safest way possible,” the site writes.

Lyft

In a comment offered to TechCrunch, Lyft says it’s “monitoring the…situation closely.” Here’s the full statementL:

We are monitoring the coronavirus situation closely, and taking action based on guidance from the Centers for Disease Control. Our focus is on keeping our riders, drivers and team members safe. We have an internal task force dedicated solely to this issue, and are prepared to take action as needed.

Postmates

Postmates recently added “non-contact” deliveries to its list of app options. The service launched a Relief Fund aimed at helping shoulder medical expenses for impacted delivery people. It also is offering up to two weeks of paid sick leave for those who test positive for COVID-19.

Seamless

Seamless notes that dine-in has grown upwards of 75% (a number that will no doubt only increase). As such, it will be deferring commission fees to independent restaurants impacted by the crisis. It also is offering of a “contact-free” delivery option.

“For the safety of you and our drivers, drivers will call/text when they arrive and drop off your order on the doorstep, in the lobby or other area designated by you.” This option is now available on the website and latest version of the app.

Uber

In a blog post titled “Supporting you during the Coronavirus,” Uber laid out next steps over the weekend. The top-level item is financial assistance to drivers who are infected and placed in quarantine by a public health authority. Assistance will be provided for up to 14 days.

“Every eligible driver in the U.S. will receive a minimum payment of $50, even if they have only done one trip,” Uber writes. “The minimum payment will differ by country.”

Uber Eats

Like others, Uber Eats is offering a contactless option. The service is also providing some financial assistance to delivery people and providing more than 300,000 free meals to first responders in the U.S. and Canada.

In Europe, Deliveroo and Glovo introduced contactless options last week.

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