There is a lot to say about the current situation and it’s mostly not a good thing but it was interesting to watch so many initiatives and advancements in tech that aim to help fight COVID-19. Ironically, it speeded up the innovation process and we rushed to put everything on the side to figure out how to support people, keep jobs, transfer them to WFH mode, make everyone safe and shorten the lockdown period as much as possible. People want to live their regular life, meet friends and family. Businesses want to provide a safe environment at work and continue to grow their operations. It literally made a lot of people work harder on the best solutions and creatively use technology to make it all happen. Here are some examples of innovations that were born as a result of the lockdown, tackled the pandemic problem as well as make the way we live way different but somehow possible nowadays. A lot of technologies significantly progressed and found new use cases as we no longer could take the time to adapt, we had to do it immediately and immerse ourselves into the ‘new’.
Ecommerce
Amazon, Standard Cognition opened cashierless grocery stores in different cities around the states. Camera-only checkout works with great accuracy and it looks like a big breakthrough in the shopping industry.
Drones Technology
Drones technology became more helpful than ever. The development and use cases I described in the separate post a few weeks ago.
Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR & AR)
When each pair of medical hands is more needed than ever before, young students as well as older professionals are more than welcome and can literally save lives. Free VR medical training was helping to bring retired healthcare workers back to work. Medical workers could use VR to fight against coronavirus. Oxford Medical Simulation offered the medical training platform for free to U.S., Canada, and U.K. facilities. VYVID XR is another new initiative, a young startup offering a surgical training and assessment platform that enables fellows, surgeons, and medical device teams to train and assess using Mixed Reality.
VR was also used to inspect vehicles from home during the lockdown.
Ford, on the other hand, used VR tech to connect designers in the virtual studios to allow them to collaborate on automobile designs remotely.
VR was also used by elderly people and made them get familiar with this technology (e.g.Rendever). MyndVR donated VR to US seniors to make the social isolation less impactful. I love this one! It’s never too late to learn and keep yourself busy with new things 🙂
If you are still more ‘paper and pen’ enthusiast, you can connect with your loved ones through Craftopolis Craft Club. I love Carlton Senior Living initiative with letters and handmade cards!
Telemedicine
Healthcare was on the first line, directly and constantly struggling with a lack of resources, proper technology to serve people without physical contact. It sparked the booming development of online consultation, telemedicine, online patients platforms and other forms of distance communication with doctors. Recently, some telemedicine service has grown more than 1000 % and a lot of new others have been founded (e.g. Tembo Health, Precavida).
3-D Printing
3_D Printing technology has been steadily growing for years but recently it’s accelerated helping with a shortage of ventilators and masks.
Video Conferencing and F2F communication platforms
Staying at home, working from home, living the lockdown life made social contact almost impossible and people were starving for seeing their relatives and staying in contact with coworkers. Video conferencing became the only way to imitate get together and feeling of connection with others. The global video conferencing market reached $3.02 billion USD in 2018 and it is projected to double by 2026. To make the workspace future ready, or now already current reality ready, the technology needs to focus on video quality, visuals and acoustics during the meeting. We can see that Zoom undoubtedly benefits from the WFH policy but a lot of other new startups got together and started working on new platforms. GoogleMeet, Microsoft Teams, Skype, ezTalks Meetings, StarLeaf, Cisco WebEx, GoToMeeting, BlueJeans, Slack, Google Hangouts, CrowdCast are just a few that developed their services and adapted functionalities (many times giving the system for free use) in the recent time of the pandemic.
Cybersecurity
Since remote work has been globally enforced, organizations and personal exposure to a variety of cyberthreats drastically increased. Specialists work hard to ensure the security of data and people in the companies while they stay at home. A lot of publications and safety recommendations have been released and encouraged to put in place in the work from home environment (e.g. eBook from Crowdstrike, “Securing Today’s Distributed Workforce”.)
Chatbots
Microsoft informed that the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were using their Azure-run healthcare chatbot service to quickly assess symptoms as well as suggest the next steps for the potential patients like seeing a doctor or staying at home. Microsoft made its Healthcare Bot generally available in February 2019 but only this year the use of them became critical and freed up a lot of human power for more serious cases and further diagnostics in the hospitals.
Around 1 million customer service calls were registered within 2 weeks and companies found it extremely difficult to handle doubled number of queries (travel cancellations, gym membership disputes, delayed orders, etc.). Chatbots (e.g. Orbita.ai) and other technologies with speech recognition functionalities helped a lot in this situation.
Artificial Intelligence
AI experts focused on the processes of discovering which drugs can help fight the virus. With big data and thousands of potential cures where any single one could possibly work, time to test it and disqualify for further processing was crucial.
HBR talks about leveraging AI to fight the pandemic suggesting the technology of personalized prediction. Using different data, ML models could be trained to measure an individual’s clinical risk of suffering severe outcomes (if infected with Covid).
Robots
Delivery robots flourished in the last months and took over the food delivery (touchless delivery model) in many cities around the world.
Education
Education platforms became first place to go when you cannot go to school and attend the regular classes. I wrote about the Education Platforms in another post so you can see the details here.
National and International Support
The last but not least, people went extra miles and made impossible possible in many cases. It’s important to highlight the development of people mindset, leadership, compassion, and empathy.
Spotify added fundraising features to support the creative music community to survive the crisis.
VOI offers its Nordic fleet of 25.000 scooters to help support local communities like helping doctors with their on-demand house calls.Â
KRY is making its platform available for free to doctors around the world to conduct video consultations during the coronavirus pandemic.
Edutech company Kahoot! adjusted their services and offers all premium features for free, and developed new features to keep not only the kids in a row but also to keep remote teams connected and enable e-learning.
FirstVet offers its video vet service for free to UK pet owners from 12 to 5 pm, 7 days a week.
MIT develops wearable sensors that monitor vital health signs.
Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma said he will donate 500k coronavirus testing kits and 1M face masks to the United State.
Elon Musk produces ventilators to support hospitals.
Factorial announced an unlimited free trial and free consultations on the digital HR suite as long as the crisis lasts.
Young engineers in India were rushing to develop a low-cost ventilator that could save thousands of lives.
VC Investors and Other Business Leaders Prepared and Shared Manuals, Recommendations, Webinars, Office Hours to Support Startups, and SME.
Village Capital co-founder Ross Baird wrote a guide for small businesses and entrepreneurs to help navigate loans and relief during the COVID-19 crisis.
SOCAP prepared a comprehensive resources page that covers government, philanthropy and the non-profit sector.
Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs put together an emerging-markets-focused list.
Cathy Clark (Duke’s CASE center) launched #COVID19CapitalRelief, a searchable database of the $145 billion in newly-available capital.
Gusto created a bunch of helpful materials: a COVID-19 Small Business Resource Hub, a COVID-19 Relief Resources for SMBs tracker of federal, state, a guide to tax relief.
Mandela Schumacher-Hodge Dixon, CEO of Founder Gym, created a list of articles and resources: “’How can my business survive the coronavirus?’ Industry Experts Weigh In”.
National Venture Capital Association shared Coronavirus Information and Resources for VCs and Startups.
Indie.vc created Navigating COVID-19 Relief & SBA loans resources.
Ashley Lowes and Sarah Mattina curate COVID-19: Startup Resources & Insights.
Here is a list of 190 investors still actively investing despite COVID-19.
Other Resources and Guides
- SBA loan guidance
- Layoff and talent resources
- Insights from the venture capital industry
- Insights from the startup community
- Tips and tools for working remotely
- Relief resources and programs
- Your Guide to Navigating COVID-19:
- How to Survive in Extraordinary Times
- How To Keep Your Company Alive
- How to run a startup in the time of coronavirus (Covid-19)
- Wulf Glatz, CEO of greenTeg, Gives Advice to Entrepreneurs During COVID-19
- Investor wisdom for startups’ coronavirus pain
- Startup Management Through The COVID-19 Crisis -GS Capital + Slides
- “Raising Capital in the Time of Coronavirus”
- SBA Loans & Financial Relief Guidance
- Layoff and Talent Resources
- Venture Capital Industry Insights
- Startup Community Insights
- Tips and Tools for Working Remotely
- Relief Resources and Programs
- A reading list for leaders in uncertain times by a16z
- A master list of carefully curated coronavirus resources by a16z
- Future of Work after COVID
- How the crisis may change the startup for good by NFX
Work From Home Resources
The working from home guide created by Sifted.
Favro put together a very helpful guide to keep the efficiency and productivity of your team high, see the guide here.
Work From Home advice from Slack.
A Guide to Managing Your (Newly) Remote Workers by HBR.
Interactive platform from WEF
