The most online concert ever
Image: Global Citizen
Taylor Swift performs during the "One World: Together at Home" concert

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Taylor Swift performs during the "One World: Together at Home" concert
Good morning! This Monday, the coronavirus benefit concert that was literally everywhere, how an online therapy company is trying to help more people, and how two guys and a bunch of glitter broke YouTube.
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Marc Andreessen offered a call to action for entrepreneurs, officials and people everywhere:
Startups won't feel the worst of this crisis until early next year, Upfront Ventures' Mark Suster told Protocol's Biz Carson in the first edition of her new must-read Protocol Pipeline column:
Terrorism now "moves at the speed of social media," former FBI director Christopher Wray said:
On Saturday, the "One World: Together at Home" concert raised $127.9 million for virus-related charities. It was very cool! There are worse ways to spend a quarantine day than with eight hours of musicians playing from their bedrooms, living rooms, and wherever it was that J.Lo was sat.
The concert was a unique thing: a massive, worldwide event, viewable from virtually every platform and device you could think of. And the numbers are gaudy. Global Citizen, one of the event's organizers, said only that it reached "billions of people in 175 countries," across almost as many different platforms:
The numbers here aren't exactly repeatable — good luck getting Oprah, The Rolling Stones and Michelle Obama to do your event. But the night was a perfect example for anyone who wants to understand how content is changing:
If you missed it, here's the best roundup I've seen of the night's best moments.
As we get further into these isolated, uncertain times, there's a mental health crisis happening — one that Oren Frank, the CEO of online therapy service Talkspace, is seeing first hand. But for Talkspace, helping more people isn't as simple as turning on more servers.
"It's significantly more affordable than face-to-face therapy," Frank told me. "But it's still a big investment." So Talkspace has been working on ways to help people find each other and get support beyond a one-on-one session:
Talkspace has seen a big uptick in business in recent weeks, which is hardly surprising. Frank said he's mostly seeing people who have some experience with face-to-face therapy, who are looking for a way to keep going from quarantine.
Frank said he's struggling with the tension of this being a particularly horrible moment for so many people, and it also being a huge business opportunity for Talkspace, a venture-backed and for-profit company.
If you can't see how AI makes its decisions, how can you trust the results?
The answer lies in Explainable AI or XAI.
Explainable models provide transparency — so you can stay accountable to customers, build trust, and make decisions with confidence.
Speaking of people doing stuff together online: Facebook excels at getting people onto its platforms, but it's never had much luck building stuff for them to do beyond basic socializing. Notes isn't a huge blogging platform; Watch is a feature you only ever find by accident. Facebook's only true on-platform success? Gaming. And so Facebook, smartly, continues to double down.
Facebook's newest app is called Facebook Gaming, and it's … well it's Twitch. You can stream yourself playing games, or watch others do so.
There are a couple of intersecting trends here: Live-streaming has become a powerful way for people to congregate in these otherwise lonely times, and Facebook surely feels left out of the Twitch / Houseparty / Netflix Party chill times. (It may also not like the idea that Instagram's a better go-live platform than the Big Blue App itself.)
Protocol's next Virtual Meetup is Thursday. I'll be talking with YouTube Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan about all sorts of things: the ad business, entertainment, streaming, misinformation, and what it's like to run a global product team from home. Sign up now and join us live!
Netflix, IBM, Snap, and Intel all report earnings this week. It's the beginning of an uncommonly interesting earnings season, as the tech industry details the good, bad and ugly of business in coronavirus.
Two guys known as "The Slow Mo Guys" on YouTube recently tried to make what they called "the most watchable unwatchable video." The goal: use super slow-motion glitter to break YouTube's video compression. What they came up with is, indeed, somewhere between can't-look-away beautiful and ahh-my-eyes horrible. It's also a lesson in how cameras work, what you don't see when you stream, and why it really sucks to drop a giant glitter bomb all over yourself.
If you can't see how AI makes its decisions, how can you trust the results?
The answer lies in Explainable AI or XAI.
Explainable models provide transparency — so you can stay accountable to customers, build trust, and make decisions with confidence.
Thoughts, questions, tips? Send them to me, david@protocol.com, or our tips line, tips@protocol.com. Enjoy your day, see you tomorrow.
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