Technology

Amazon has instituted a new policy which will see all Amazon employees diagnosed with COVID-19 or placed into quarantine receiving up to two-weeks of pay.

The additional pay is to &ensure employees have the time they need to return to good health without the worry of lost pay,& the company said in a statement.

That pay is in addition to unlimited paid time off for all hourly employees through the end of March, which the company announced as a policy to its workers last week.

The company also said it was setting up a relief fund with a $25 million contribution to support delivery service partners and drivers along with Amazon Flex participants and seasonal employees.

&We will be offering all of these groups the ability to apply for grants approximately equal to up to two weeks of pay if diagnosed with COVID-19 or placed into quarantine by the government or Amazon,& the company said.

The fund will also support employees and contractors who face financial hardships due to natural disasters, federal emergencies or personal hardship, the company said.

Amazon affiliated workers can apply to receive grant funding ranging from $400 to $5,000 per person.

NASA ambitious plan to put boots on the Moon in 2024 is looking increasingly costly — and increasingly unlikely — if the current cost overruns and delays are any indication, according to a report by the agencyOffice of the Inspector General.

&NASAcontinued struggle with managing SLS Program costs and schedule has the potential to impact the Agencyambitious goals for the Artemis program,& reads the report issued yesterday. &Each of the major element contracts for developing and building the SLS for Artemis I—Stages, ICPS, Boosters, RS-25 Adaptation, and RS-25 Restart—have experienced numerous technical challenges, performance issues, and requirement changes that have resulted in $2 billion of cost overruns and increases and at least 2 years of schedule delays.&

That doesn&t mean that the 2024 date has slipped to 2026, of course — the delays are in the creation of the first, test version of the Space Launch System, the next-generation heavy-lift launch vehicle NASA intends to use for the crewed Artemis missions. That first launch is currently estimated to take place sometime in spring of 2021 — more than two years after the original estimate.

To put those delays in perspective, the SLS program really started back in 2010, with the design stage concluding in 2014 and contracts for testing and manufacturing being awarded after that. Dates as early as 2016 were floated for SLS readiness, but NASA eventually officially committed to late 2018. But that has slipped several times, most recently in January, when NASA said that launch in November of this year was no longer tenable.

Whatmore, these extensions and difficulties (some at NASA, some at contractors and subcontractors) have complicated finances and caused the program to blow past its original budget. Part of this is simply in how itreported, but it also means that what has been accomplished has cost more than expected.

As the report states: &Overall, by the end of fiscal year 2020, NASA will have spent more than $17 billion on the SLS Program—including almost $6 billion not tracked or reported as part of the ABC.& Thatthe Agency Baseline Commitment, essentially what NASA told Congress it would do in order to get this funding secured.

It should surprise no one that a major endeavor like accelerating a Moon landing program is more difficult and expensive than first suspected. And ultimately what matters for Artemis is that the U.S. return to the Moon — &to stay,& as Administrator Jim Bridenstine is fond of saying — safely and in good time. The 2024 goal is an arbitrary one and no engineer or astronaut is going to rush the project in order to satisfy a political agenda — not when lives are at stake.

The Office of the Inspector General makes a few suggestions as to how to better track spending and keep NASA and its contractors accountable for time and spending. But the repeated warnings of delays seem to indicate, if never to actually state, that the goal of getting to the Moon in 2024 is only a few months of delays away from being no longer possible.

Superpeer is giving YouTube creators and other experts a new way to make money.

The startup announced today that it has raised $2 million in pre-seed funding led by Eniac Ventures, with participation from angel investors including Steven Schlafman, Ankur Nagpal, Julia Lipton, Patrick Finnegan, Justin De Guzman, Chris Lu, Paul Yacoubian and Cheryl Sew Hoy. It also launched on ProductHunt.

The idea is that if you&re watching a video to learn how to paint, or how to code, or about whatever the topic might be, therea good chance you have follow-up questions — maybe a lot of them. Ditto if you follow someone on Twitter, or read their blog posts, to learn more about a specific subject.

Now you could try to submit a question or two via tweet or comment section, but you&re probably not going to get any in-depth interaction — and thatif they respond. You could also try to schedule a &Can I pick your brain?&-type coffee meeting, but again, the odds aren&t in your favor, particularly when it comes to picking the brain of someone famous or highly in-demand.

With Superpeer, experts who are interested in sharing their knowledge can do so via remote, one-on-one video calls. They upload an intro video, the times that they want to be available for calls and how much they want to charge for their time. Then Superpeer handles the appointments (integrating directly with the expertcalendar), the calls and the payments, adding a 15% fee on top.

So a YouTube creator could start adding a message at the end of their videos directing fans who want to learn more to their Superpeer page. And if you&re a founder who wants to talk to an experienced designer, executive coach, product manager, marketing/sales expert, VC or other founder, you could start with this list.

Of course, there might be some wariness on both sides, whether you&re an expert who doesn&t want to get stuck on the phone with someone creepy or annoying, or someone who doesn&t want to pay for a call that turns out to be a complete waste of time.

To address this, co-founder and CEO Devrim Yasar (who previously founded collaborative programming startup Koding) said the company has created a user rating system, as well as a way to ask for a refund if you feel that a call violated the terms of service — the calls will be recorded and stored for 48 hours for this purpose.

Superpeer launched in private beta two weeks ago, and Yasar said the startup already has more than 100 Superpeers signed up.

These days, most of the games developed need to be social, multi-platform and extensible, but there are only a few developers with the expertise to bring those toolsets to the profusion of new games that crop up every year.

Well, now those development studios can turn to Pragma, which is building the back-end toolkit for gaming companies so their developers can focus on what they do best — making games.

Itbasically taking a page from the application development playbook where off-the-shelf toolkits can reduce by months the time it takes to get an app into the market, according to Pragma chief executive Eden Chen. In the game industry, a game can stay in beta for years as developers work out the kinks.

&In the game world, because of the necessity to build multiplayer, the length to launch a game has gotten way, way, way, way longer. Games are taking five to 10 years to launch out of beta,& Chen said.

Founded by Chen and former Riot Games engineering lead Chris Cobb, Pragma is offering a &backend as a service,& according to the company, selling a toolkit that includes accounts, player data, lobbies, matchmaking, social systems, telemetry and store fulfillment.

In a way ita complement to the front-end game engines from companies like Epic, the creator of Fortnite.

Indeed, Epic had announced plans to create a back-end system for game developers of its own, but Chen sees the benefits of having an independent operator doing the work — not a potential competitor.

Pragmainvestors agreed. The company raised $4.2 million in funding from a clutch of high-quality firms and individual investors, led by the Los Angeles-based Upfront Ventures with participation from Advancit Capital and angel investors Jarl Mohn, president emeritus at NPR and former Riot Games board member; Dan Dinh, founder of TSM; and William Hockey, founder of Plaid.

&In a world where gaming studios have long used third-party engines to power their front-end development, it makes no sense for the same studios to spend millions of dollars to build their own custom back-end,& said Kevin Zhang, partner at Upfront Ventures and board member at Pragma, in a statement. &This broken system has lasted for so long because creating a reusable, platform-agnostic backend is not just extremely complex but rarely prioritized compared to the game.&

The gaming industry is a $139 billion behemoth that in some ways lags behind its technologically-savvy peers in creating off-the-shelf tools to speed production. They&re combinations of social media platforms like Facebook and Snap, and big, high-budget movie productions, but lack any tools to simplify the process of development or ensure that persistence, scale and feature complexity don&t lead to downtimes. And downtimes could mean millions in expenses and lost revenues, Pragma said.

&Creating online multiplayer games is increasingly complex and expensive. Studios are hindered by the need to not just create compelling games, but also to build custom server technology to operate their game,& Chris Cobb, the companychief technology officer, said in a statement.

The company currently has one customer on its platform and will launch to an exclusive set of beta users in late 2020.

Stocks listed on American exchanges today fell sharply, erasing their Tuesday rebound and adding to their Monday declines.

On a day that saw the World Health Organization declare that the spread of COVID-19 has officially become a pandemic, with 4,000 deaths reported from the illness so far, stock markets seemed more affected by the prolonged human and economic toll the virus could take than any stimulus package that could potentially offset its costs.

For the first time in over a decade, bears overran Wall Street with the Dow down more than 20%.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA), S-P 500 and Nasdaq composite fell 5.6%, 4.9% and 4.7% during the day, respectively. After the daydeclines, the DJIA was off 20.4% from recent highs, while the S-P is off a more modest 19.2%. The Nasdaq is off a similar 19.2%, just missing bear territory. (Previously SaaS stocks entered a bear market after setting records earlier in the year.)

While the Nasdaq is not down as far as the DJIA or S-P 500, some technology stocks suffered sharper declines than the broader market or their larger corporate category. Companies like Uber and Lyft, both recent IPOs that leveraged technology solutions and venture capital to grow, fell 9.4% and 11.8%, respectively. Those declines pushed their equity even further under their IPO prices, undercutting their Q4 narrative of rising chances of profitability ahead of expectations; those wins now feel distant.

Travel hit hard

The ride-hailing companies saw shares fall as the market reacted to their vulnerability to the coronavirus. In an effort to get ahead of the spreading virus, Uber announced Wednesday that it may suspend accounts of drivers and passengers who have been exposed to or contract COVID-19. The company also has said it will work to provide drivers with disinfectants to help keep their vehicles clean.

Those efforts weren&t enough to keep shares out of the red. Uber and Lyft are dependent on drivers and passengers to use the ride-hailing app, as well as their other shared products, like scooters and e-bikes.

Travel-related stocks also got pummeled today, notably Boeing, which announced in a monthly update that companies were canceling the 737 MAX aircraft. Boeing shares fell more than 18% to around $189 after the company reported it had more cancellations than orders in February.

Volatility as the new normal

In recent weeks, the global stock market has shaken, boosting volatility both at home and abroad. Quickly itbecome normal for the DJIA to shift by 1,000 points in a day, and to see huge losses met with next-day gains. This could be read as the market repricing as new information is digested. A less charitable read is that investors are simply unsure of what companies are worth in the face of an uncertain economic future.

The volatility, however, has likely slowed the IPO market, a key liquidity source for private investors and technology companies. A number of private companies that were hoping to make their market debut are likely rethinking their plans, given the state of markets and thereno indication of when things may stabilize.

For now, the new normal has much of the global economy seeing red.

Google Cloud today announced the beta launch of Cloud AI Platform Pipelines, a new enterprise-grade service that is meant to give developers a single tool to deploy their machine learning pipelines, together with tools for monitoring and auditing them.

&When you&re just prototyping a machine learning (ML) model in a notebook, it can seem fairly straightforward,& Google notes in todayannouncement. &But when you need to start paying attention to the other pieces required to make an ML workflow sustainable and scalable, things become more complex.& And as complexity grows, building a repeatable and auditable process becomes harder.

That, of course, is where Pipelines comes in. It gives developers the ability to build these repeatable processes. As Google notes, there are two parts to the service: the infrastructure for deploying and running those workflows, and the tools for building and debugging the pipelines. The service automates processes like setting up Kubernetes Engine clusters and storage, as well as manually configuring Kubeflow Pipelines. It also uses TensorFlow Extended for building TensorFlow-based workflows and the Argo workflow engine for running the pipelines.

In addition to the infrastructure services, you also get visual tools for building the pipelines, versioning, artifact tracking and more.

With all of this, getting started only takes a few clicks, Google promises, though actually configuring the pipelines isn&t exactly trivial, of course. Google Cloud is adding a bit of complexity (or flexibility, depending on your perspective) here, given that you can use both the Kubeflow Pipelines SDK and the TensorFlow Extended SDK for authoring pipelines.