Daily Crunch: Coronavirus prompts more conference cancellations
Google cancels its big developer conference, Justin Kan's legal startup shuts down and Robinhood offers more details about a recent outage. Here's your Daily Crunch for March 4, 2020.
1. Google cancels its 2020 I/O developer conference
After Facebook canceled its F8 developer conference and Google itself moved its Cloud Next event in April to a digital-only conference, this wasn't a huge surprise, but it provides another sign of how the COVID-19 coronavirus is clearing the 2020 industry calendar.
Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg has outlined some of the steps that Facebook and his family's nonprofit, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, are taking to respond to the pandemic. Facebook's response focuses on three areas: providing accurate information, stopping misinformation and providing data for research.
2. $75M legal startup Atrium shuts down, lays off 100
Justin Kan's hybrid legal software and law firm startup Atrium is shutting down today after failing to figure out how to deliver better efficiency than a traditional law firm. The startup has now laid off all its employees; it will return some of its $75.5 million in funding to investors, including Series B lead Andreessen Horowitz . The separate Atrium law firm will continue to operate.
3. Robinhood offers $15 discount, blames outage on record trades
It wasn't the leap year, a coding blip or a hack that caused Robinhood's massive outages earlier this week that left customers unable to trade stocks. Instead, the co-CEOs write that "the cause of the outage was stress on our infrastructure - which struggled with unprecedented load. That in turn led to a 'thundering herd' effect - triggering a failure of our DNS system."
4. India lifts ban on cryptocurrency trading
India's Supreme Court has overturned the central bank's two-year-old ban on cryptocurrency trading in the country in what many said was a "historic" verdict. The Reserve Bank of India had imposed a ban on cryptocurrency trading in April 2018 that barred banks and other financial institutions from facilitating "any service in relation to virtual currencies."
5. The future of gig work could involve unions and co-ops
Behind the scenes, an alternative approach to California's AB 5 worker protection law has been picking up steam. Called the Cooperative Economy Act, the draft legislation is designed to accomplish much of what AB 5 aims to achieve, such as worker protections and benefits. But it also brings unions and co-ops into the mix. (Extra Crunch membership required.)
6. VSCO's new editing tool Montage lets you edit and layer both photos and video
VSCO already allowed users to apply photo-like edits to their videos by doing things like applying filters or adjusting the exposure. But Montage is an entirely different sort of video editing experience.
7. Uber sold its food delivery business in India to Zomato for $206M
In January, Uber announced that it had sold the India business of Uber Eats to Zomato for a 9.99% stake in the loss-making Indian food delivery startup. In a regulatory filing, the company has now disclosed that the deal was worth $206 million.
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