Daily Crunch: Quibi finally launches its mobile streaming app

Quibi launches its mobile streaming service, Apple sources 20 million protective masks and Red Hat announces a new CEO. Here’s your Daily Crunch for April 6, 2020.

1. Quibi launches its mobile streaming service in the middle of the quarantine era

The much-hyped mobile app promising to deliver “quick bites” of video entertainment is finally here. The company has been in the headlines for more than two years, thanks to the involvement of founder Jeffrey Katzenberg (who previously co-founded DreamWorks Animation) and CEO Meg Whitman (previously the CEO of eBay and Hewlett Packard Enterprise), not to mention $1.75 billion in funding.

Judging from a few hours of exploration, the app is as slick as promised, with impressive Turnstyle technology for switching between portrait and landscape viewing. What’s missing so far, however, is any real sense of creative breakthrough.

2. Apple has sourced over 20 million protective masks, now building and shipping face shields

The company is working with governments around the world to distribute its supply of face masks to where it’s needed most. Meanwhile, the first delivery of Apple face shields went out to Kaiser hospital facilities in the Santa Clara valley earlier this week, according to CEO Tim Cook.

3. Paul Cormier takes over as Red Hat CEO, as Jim Whitehurst moves to IBM

Cormier would seem to be a logical choice to run Red Hat, having been with the company since 2001. He joined as its VP of engineering and has seen the company grow from a small startup to a multi-billion dollar company.

4. GrubHub, Seamless’s pandemic initiatives are predatory and exploitative, and it’s time to stop using them

Jon Evans argues that GrubHub (which also owns Seamless) is hurting, not helping, the restaurants that it pretends it’s trying to support.

5. Pandemic puts the brakes on micromobility

Ride Report creates software that enables cities to better work with micro-mobility operators and has a bird’s-eye view on the industry. In a conversation with TechCrunch, CEO William Henderson outlined what we can expect for micro-mobility operators during the pandemic and once it’s over. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

6. Open banking fintech Yapily raises $13M Series A

Founded in mid-2017 by ex-Goldman Sachs employee Stefano Vaccino, Yapily’s open banking platform makes it easier for various service providers to connect to banks. Specifically, it provides a way to retrieve financial data and initiate payments via a “single secure API” that in turn connects to each supported bank’s open API.

7. This week’s TechCrunch podcasts

The latest full-length episode of Equity discusses the tremendous growth of Zoom and how that’s cast a spotlight on the videoconferencing app’s security flaws, while the Monday news roundup looks for positive signs in startup funding. And on Original Content, we review the first season of “Star Trek: Picard” and the extremely unsettling Netflix film “The Platform.”

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 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

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In uncertain times, think like a mother | Yifat Susskind

In uncertain times, think like a mother | Yifat Susskind

There's a simple and powerful way to confront the world's most pressing crises, says women's rights activist Yifat Susskind: think like a mother. As she puts it: "When you think like a mother, you prioritize the needs of the many, not the whims of the few." Follow along as she shares moving stories of people around the world who embody this mindset -- and shows how it can also help you see beyond suffering and act to build a better world.

Click the above link to download the TED talk.

Lydia lets you donate to hospitals and charities

Fintech startup Lydia is the dominating mobile payment app in France with most of its 3.3 million users in its home country. That’s why the startup has been working hard over the past ten days to ship a feature that was originally planned for this summer — donations to charities and hospitals.

Starting today, Lydia users can choose between 17 charities and send money to those charities using the familiar Lydia payment flow. It works like sending money to your friends and family.

Donations start at €0.50 and those are one-off payments — you can’t set up recurring payments or round up transactions for instance.

Lydia recently introduced “the market”, a marketplace of financial products, such as small credit lines, phone insurance and free credit on home insurance and utility bills. The market menu was buried under the profile tab. The company is now surfacing that screen in its own tab right next to your accounts and transaction history. You can find donations as a new button in the market.

There’s another way to donate. On the payment screen, when you tap a sum and hit next, in addition to the usual list of recipients, you can choose to send money to a charity from there as well. This feature is live on Android and will be available soon on iOS — iOS users have to go through the market for now.

The startup has selected 17 charities for now, but that list could grow over time. You’ll find public hospitals (Paris, Nantes, Strasbourg, Grenoble, Lille and Nice), charities focused on health as well as general public interest charities (Fondation de France, Fondation 101, Médecins du Monde, Epic, Action contre la Faim, La Croix Rouge française, La Fondation Abbé Pierre, La Ligue Nationale contre le Cancer, Réseau Entourage and La Maison des Femmes de Saint-Denis).

If you’re not a Lydia user, you can still use Lydia’s payment flow in your web browser with a credit or debit card. (But nothing is stopping you from donating directly on the charity websites of course.)

If you want to give a large sum of money and deduct part of your donation from your income taxes, you’ll have to ask charities directly. Lydia can’t give you a tax form directly as it only acts as an intermediary.

Eventually, Lydia will deduct processing fees from your donations before handing them over to charities. But the company is waving fees until June 30 due to the coronavirus crisis.

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Quibi launches its mobile streaming service in the middle of the quarantine era

Quibi, the much-hyped mobile app promising to deliver “quick bites” of video entertainment, is finally here.

The company has been in the headlines for more than two years, thanks to the involvement of founder Jeffrey Katzenberg (who previously co-founded DreamWorks Animation) and CEO Meg Whitman (previously the CEO of eBay and Hewlett Packard Enterprise).

Plus, it’s raised a whopping $1.75 billion to fund a star-studded content slate from filmmakers like Steven Spielberg, Guillermo del Toro, Lena Waithe and Catherine Hardwick.

Quibi is launching with nearly 50 shows today. The initial lineup includes “Chrissy’s Court” (in which Chrissy Teigen presides over small claims court), “Shape of Pasta” (a food and travel show starring chef Evan Funke), “Most Dangerous Game” (a dystopian thriller starring Liam Hemsworth) and “Survive” (a scripted plane crash drama starring Sophie Turner). All the episodes are less than 10 minutes in length, and can be viewed in either portrait or landscape mode.

Quibi says it will be delivering more than 25 new episodes every day, including segments of what the company is calling Daily Essentials — news and entertainment shows like “Last Night’s Late Night” from Entertainment Weekly and “The Replay” from ESPN.

The service will cost $4.99 with ads or $7.99 per month without ads. Quibi is also offering a 90-day free trial if you sign up before the end of April.

Image Credits: Quibi

In a briefing with reporters last week, CTO Rob Post acknowledged that it’s been a long, expensive road to launch. But he said that given the heavy investment in content, “There was no room for [Chief Product Officer Tom Conrad] and I to deliver a minimum viable product.” Instead, they had to build something that was fully polished.

While Quibi has been building up to this for months, with a big presentation at the Consumer Electronics Show, Super Bowl ads and more, the world has changed, with a global pandemic making this a strange time to launch any product.

People are certainly looking for distraction and escape right now. But the app is designed for viewing while you’re on-the-go, whether that’s walking around, waiting in line or sitting in the backseat of a car — all moments that are happening considerably less often as huge swaths of the population are advised to shelter in place and maintain social distance.

Still, Post argued that there’s a need for the kind of entertainment that Quibi is offering.

“I’m looking to take small breaks more than ever before to stand up, walk around, go outside,” he said. “Our use cases are these in-between moments. Now more than ever, that use case is still present.”

And of course, these restrictions have also created challenges for Quibi’s launch and content production.

“That’s meant all kinds of things,” Conrad said. “Our Daily Essentials, which were all set to be produced in studios in New York and L.A. each day, in most instances are being shot in people’s homes … Everybody from the production team to postproduction houses to the engineering and marketing organizations are trying to adapt to this moment.”

Quibi has already been showing off is Turnstyle technology, which allows for a seamless transition back-and-forth between portrait and landscape modes. (Apparently Quibi’s filmmakers have to deliver two edits of each episode, one optimized for each orientation.) Last week, the company gave reporters access to the full app.

Judging from a few hours of exploration, Quibi is indeed as polished as Post and Conrad promised, making it easy to swipe through and browse the day’s offerings. Turnstyle also works smoothly, with a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it transition every time I rotate my phone.

I quickly noticed, however, that I was torn between the two viewing modes. Portrait mode was more comfortable, particularly when I was watching a full seven- or eight-minute episode, but landscape mode looked much more cinematic, and often included imagery that had been cropped out of the more narrow, vertical footage.

Image Credits: Quibi

In addition, the focus on a smartphone app — rather than an experience for the browser, tablet or connected-TV — made for a clumsy experience anytime I tried to watch with someone else. (The whole point is to focus on the mobile viewing experience, but Conrad said, “If there’s appetite for Quibi in the living room or on tablets, we certainly will follow that interest as the data reveals.”)

As for the content itself, my favorite show was probably “Most Dangerous Game,” which kicks off with a tantalizingly bleak introduction (the premise will be familiar to viewers of the classic film of the same name). I also enjoyed “Shape of Pasta,” which includes plenty of mouth-watering pasta footage, and”Chrissy’s Court” — Teigen is always delightful, and I liked seeing a courtroom reality show that leans more into humor than drama.

At CES, Whitman positioned Quibi as the first platform to truly take advantage of the new creative opportunities that mobile phones offer to filmmakers. She also emphasized that in contrast to free video platforms like YouTube, Quibi will offer “Hollywood-quality content.”

“[YouTube] is the most ubiquitous, democratized, incredibly creative platform,” Whitman told us. “But they make content for hundreds of dollars a minute. We make it for $100,000 a minute.”

The production value is certainly evident — most of the shows I watched look significantly more expensive that what you’ll find on YouTube. What’s missing so far, however, is any real sense of the creative breakthrough that Whitman was hinting at. Instead, Quibi delivers well-produced, moderately entertaining shows that can be watched when you’ve got a few minutes to spare. They’re fine, but rarely more than that.

Maybe that will be enough for most viewers, particularly during the trial period. The challenge will be convincing those viewers to stick around and pay a subscription fee. To do that, I suspect Quibi will need a breakout show, or something that really takes advantage of the phone in a new way. We’ll see if that arrives in the months to come.

Quibi execs Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman explain their big vision

 

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