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The gig worker revolt over COVID-19
Your five-minute guide to what's happening in tech this Monday, from Quibi's insistence that its plan still holds, to Breitling's embrace of the blockchain.
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Your five-minute guide to what's happening in tech this Monday, from Quibi's insistence that its plan still holds, to Breitling's embrace of the blockchain.
Good morning! This Monday, Instacart shoppers are striking, HQ Trivia is back, and Hans Zimmer is writing the sounds of your next car.
Ro Khanna spoke to Protocol about the stimulus package, and said it overlooks how startups really work:
Quibi's launching into a different world than it expected, but Jeffrey Katzenberg said the plan hasn't changed:
Instacart workers across the country plan to strike today, as they demand better protection and better pay to continue their jobs in increasingly dangerous times. A quick history:
That was where we left it Friday. But ahead of the strike, this weekend turned into a battle of Medium posts. On Sunday, Instacart tried again: It said it would begin providing hand sanitizer to shoppers, and start nudging customers to tip more.
The Gig Workers Collective's immediate response? Not. Good. Enough.
This is a battle of leverage. Instacart and others have jobs to offer when people desperately need them. But as those jobs become increasingly essential, the workers doing them have more power than ever.
Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders both expressed support for the strike. As did many others. And you can bet that delivery companies and workers everywhere are watching to see what happens.
In related news: Amazon employees at a Staten Island warehouse are also planning to strike today, after the company refused to close the facility when a coronavirus case was detected there.
Drone deliveries seem like an obvious solution to some of our current issues. In the U.S., high FAA safety standards have mostly kept the vehicles out of the sky — UPS and Alphabet only recently got approval to fly drones out of the line of sight, and even then they're rolling out in limited areas.
In other countries, though, drones are already on the front lines in the response to the pandemic:
Hamilton said Zipline is actively exploring ways to get involved with response to the outbreak in the U.S., too:
If ever there were an app made for life in lockdown, it was HQ Trivia. And after going dark in mid-February, the game came back online last night.
If Sunday's game is any indication, HQ might be able to recapture its magic. Its 113,000-player peak last night was nowhere near the app's all-time high of 2.38 million, but it's not bad for an app everybody thought was dead until about two hours before game time.
Did you play HQ last night? Or … are you the undisclosed acquirer? Tell me what you make of the HQ return: david@protocol.com.
There are lots of free conferences and content to check out this week:
On the earnings calendar: Xiaomi reports its financials tomorrow — which will be another interesting tell for how things are going in China.
We know what a regular car sounds like. Vroom vroom and whatnot. But with electric cars, we get to choose! Should the car play Mozart as it accelerates? Chime "La Cucaracha" every time you hit the horn? Presumably, Hans Zimmer can do a bit better. BMW hired the composer to create "sound worlds" — the sounds that a car should make when doors open, as it starts, and as it moves — for its Concept i4. Wired got inside Zimmer's process a bit, which sounds ... far from finished. But at least one answer seems obvious to me: The car should make the "Inception" BRAAAAAGH (which Zimmer wrote!) every time you hit the horn. Nobody'll get in your way after that.
This Thursday at noon PT/3 p.m. ET senior reporter Issie Lapowsky interviews California Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) about what Washington and Silicon Valley are doing to address the COVID-19 outbreak.
Thoughts, questions, tips? Send them to me, david@protocol.com, or our tips line, tips@protocol.com. Enjoy your day, see you tomorrow.
David Pierce ( @pierce) is Protocol's editor at large. Prior to joining Protocol, he was a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, a senior writer with Wired, and deputy editor at The Verge. He owns all the phones.
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Every business leader knows you can learn the most about your customers and partners by meeting them face-to-face. But in the wake of Covid-19, the kinds of conversations that were taking place over coffee, meals and in company halls are now relegated to video conferences—which can be less effective for nurturing relationships—and email.
Email inboxes, with hard-to-search threads and siloed messages, not only slow down communication but are also an easy target for scammers. Earlier this year, Google reported more than 18 million daily malware and phishing emails related to Covid-19 scams in just one week and more than 240 million daily spam messages.
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One day, you might not need to carry that physical passport around, either.
Mike Murphy ( @mcwm) is the director of special projects at Protocol, focusing on the industries being rapidly upended by technology and the companies disrupting incumbents. Previously, Mike was the technology editor at Quartz, where he frequently wrote on robotics, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics.
There will come a time, hopefully in the near future, when you'll feel comfortable getting on a plane again. You might even stop at the lounge at the airport, head to the regional office when you land and maybe even see a concert that evening. This seemingly distant reality will depend upon vaccine rollouts continuing on schedule, an open-sourced digital verification system and, amazingly, the blockchain.
Several countries around the world have begun to prepare for what comes after vaccinations. Swaths of the population will be vaccinated before others, but that hasn't stopped industries decimated by the pandemic from pioneering ways to get some people back to work and play. One of the most promising efforts is the idea of a "vaccine passport," which would allow individuals to show proof that they've been vaccinated against COVID-19 in a way that could be verified by businesses to allow them to travel, work or relax in public without a great fear of spreading the virus.
Mike Murphy ( @mcwm) is the director of special projects at Protocol, focusing on the industries being rapidly upended by technology and the companies disrupting incumbents. Previously, Mike was the technology editor at Quartz, where he frequently wrote on robotics, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics.