Week in Review - Facebook's hardware is built for a quarantine

Saturday, April 18, 2020 • By Lucas Matney

Hey everybody, welcome back to Week in Review.

The world of COVID-19 is our new reality, so I’ll continue to include links to some positive updates on research, but I’ll be shifting back the focus to covering tech’s movers and shakers of the week.

If you're reading this on the TechCrunch site, you can get this in your inbox here, and follow my tweets here.

The big story

One thing that’s been interesting to see over the past few weeks is how our relationship with screen time has changed. For many, screen time is now all the time and while we haven’t stopped using too many gadgets, there are some we’ve taken out of drawers and closets.

For some, it’s been cooking gadgets. While I’ve yet to open up the sous vide gadget I recieved over the holidays, I was very tempted by my editor’s review of the Ooni gas-fired outdoor pizza oven this week.

For me, I’ve strangely seemed to spend a lot more time with the two gadgets I own that are made by Facebook. The Oculus Quest and Facebook Portal are the twin pillars of Facebook’s hardware strategy, but it’s been a bit interesting to see how much more that strategy seems to thrive when we’re all stuck at home.

In a lot of ways, Facebook’s hardware feels built for a quarantine.

The Quest spent a lot of time in my closet when I was out in the world pre-quarantine, but now that I’m in my house most of the day, it spends a good amount of time strapped to my face. When VR was a more hyped technology, there was a broader conversation of whether it encouraged isolation which promoters of the tech pushed aside, noting that it enable rich shared experiences over the web. As we all host Zoom birthday parties and visit each other’s Animal Crossing islands, it’s becoming clear that with the absence of available physical connections, we can turn a lot of things into rich shared experiences.

My Portal usage has spiked in the past weeks as well. Before stay-at-home orders, coordinating a call with multiple family members was a logistical nightmare and individual calls or mobile FaceTime calls made it more likely we’d get in touch with each other, but none of my siblings are wandering far from their Portals these days.

Facebook has designed gadgets explicitly built for home use, and more than that, they’re designed devices built around session-based use cases. While Amazon Echos and Google Homes have fit into a persistent IoT platform, Facebook’s gadgets are meant to be actively engaged with, and it’s not surprising they can be quicker to fall out of mind when our lives are busy and we’re moving about.

Invest in the future of Orthopaedics

Trends of the Week

Bezos wants to test all Amazon employees for COVID-19
As Amazon bares the brunt of America’s online shopping needs, CEO Jeff Bezos wrote in a shareholder letter this week about some of the strategies the company has to ensure its workforce stays on the job. One possibility seems to be “regular testing of all Amazonians, including those showing no symptoms,” Bezos says. Read more here.

Google is building a smart debit card
Just as every startup is getting into lending or banking, every tech giant wants to have a piece of plastic (or metal) in your wallet. This week, TechCrunch broke news that Google is building a smart debit card that could rival the Apple Card. Read more about it here.

Apple launches a new iPhone SE
The iPhone SE has grown to become one of the more fascinating devices Apple sells, cramming speedy components into a form factor that’s fallen out of vogue for their customer obsessed with the latest designs. The latest SE adopt the body of the iPhone 8 with souped-up internals that rival more recent flagships on performance. Read more about the new hardware here.

COVID-19 research updates

Image Credits: Bloomberg / Getty Images

Extra Crunch

Investors and entrepreneurs are shifting their chats to Zoom, so we’re taking note and hosting live Q&A discussions for our Extra Crunch subscribers with some of tech’s most visible figures. We’ll be hosting these Extra Crunch live chats over the next several weeks.

Announcing the Extra Crunch Live event series

This upcoming week, we’ll be talking to Aileen Lee & Ted Wang of Cowboy Ventures.
Monday, April 20 at 10:30am PT / 1:30pm ET

We'll be chatting with Aileen Lee (former KPCB partner, founder and managing director at Cowboy.vc and coiner of the term "Unicorn") and Ted Wang (Cowboy.vc partner, former partner at Fenwick & West, and former outside counsel to Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, Square and more) about how they're advising their portfolio companies, if there are new and innovative ways for early-stage startups to secure capital beyond the traditional VC route and whether startups should hunker down or lean in during these uncertain times.