Technology

With arecent software update, AppleiPad OS gets support for an excellent feature borrowed from Apple School Manager called Shared iPad for Business. Thislets enterprises share iPads between employees much more effectively.

What is Shared iPad for Business?

Apple first introduced the capacity to share iPads within Apple School Manager.The idea behind this option is that by combining Managed Apple IDs and the cloud it became possible to share fleets of iPads among multiple students.

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Formlabs, the privately held, Massachusetts-based 3D-printing company, will soon receive an exemption from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for its swab designed for use in COVID-19 test kits, TechCrunch has learned.

Global supply chains for test kit components including swabs and chemical reagents have hampered the ability of governments to increase testing to a point where they can adequately ascertain the scope of the outbreak of the novel coronavirus within their borders.

&Yesterday we got a notification from the FDA that this is going to be a class one exempt product,& said Formlabs chief product officer David Lakatos. &As long as itmanufactured in an ISO 135 controlled facility.&

As cases are identified across the U.S., tests are flowing to the geographies where the disease has spread the fastest, leaving other parts of the country under-resourced to address what could be an increasing outbreak in other communities that have yet to receive a complete picture of the diseasespread.

With swabs, the problem has been compounded that of the few manufacturers of the sorely needed test kit component, only one is in the U.S. while another is in Italy.

&About a week and a half ago we joined this effort,& says Lakatos.

Formlabs is uniquely positioned to scale up production he said, thanks in part to the 60,000 printers the company has on hand and the recent acquisition of a facility in Ohio that enables the company to make surgical-grade products.

The company is currently finishing up human trials and gearing up to expand capacity at its Ohio manufacturing facility. According to Lakatos, the company will be able to supply 100,000 swabs per day. &We are starting to print these,& Lakatos said. &But we won&t send anything out until we get the green light.&

Currently most of the swabs are earmarked for partner hospitals that worked with the company to develop the swabs, but the company is also working with large distributors to access their distribution channels and get the swabs into roughly 3,000 hospitals around the U.S.

&At the end of the day we&re just looking to get them out,& Lakatos said.

A new bowling alley opens up near the office where this IT pilot fish works, so he and his co-workers decide to try it out — and their manager tags along.

&Unfortunately, we managed to break out of the screen while entering our names,& says fish. &We decided the best course of action was to leave it alone and get the people at the alley to fix it.

&This wasn't good enough for our manager, who decided since he worked in IT that he could fix it. At this point we tried to hide and pretend he was not with us.

Result after much typing and hitting of the screen: All games in the 24 lanes stopped for 20 minutes. Every game is cleared and has to be restarted from the first frame.

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When Eliot Buchanan tried to use his credit card to pay his Harvard tuition bill, the payment was rejected because the university said it doesn&t accept credit. Realizing the same problem exists for thousands of different transactions like board, rent and vendor payments, he launched Plastiq. Plastiq helps people use credit cards to pay, or get paid, for anything.

Plastiq today announced that it has raised $75 million in venture capital in a Series D round led by B Capital Group. Kleiner Perkins, Khosla Ventures, Accomplice and Top Tier Capital Partners also participated in the round. The round brings the companytotal known venture capital raised to more than $140 million.

To use Plastiq, users enter their credit card information on Plastiqplatform. In return, Plastiq will charge you a 2.5% fee and get your bills paid. While Plastiq was started with consumers in mind, SMBs have now accounted for 90% of the revenue, according to Buchanan. The new financing round will invest in building out features to give SMBs faster services around payments and processing.

Plastiq provides a way for SMBs and consumers to pay their bills and make sure they have reliable cash flow. For example, restaurants sometimes have a drop in revenue due to seasonality or, as we&re experiencing now with COVID-19, pandemic lockdowns. Or tourism companies for cities that are struggling to attract visitors. Those companies still need cash flow, and using Plastiqservice, they can use credit cards to pay suppliers even in an off season.

There is no shortage of competition from other companies also trying to solve pain points in small-business cash flow. According to Buchanan, Plastiqbiggest competitors are traditional lenders, as well as companies like Kabbage and Fundbox. Similar claims could be made about Brex, which offers a credit card for startups to access capital faster.

Kabbage provides funding to SMBs through automated business loans. The SoftBank-backed company landed $200 million in a revolving credit line back in July, fresh off of landing strong partnerships with banks and giants like Alibaba to access more customers. Kabbage loans out roughly $2-3 billion to SMBs every year.

Plastiq, according to its release, is also on track to make more than $2 billion in transactions. But unlike Kabagge, Plastiq doesn&t issue loans or credit, it just unlocks a payment opportunity.

&SMBs don&t need to be burdened with additional debt or additional loans,& Buchanan said. &So rather than trying to reinvent the wheel, letuse a behavior they have already earned.&

Buchanan would not disclose Plastiqcurrent valuation or revenue, but he did say that itnot too far away from $100 million in revenue run rate. The companyrevenue has grown 150% from 2018 to 2019.

The company also noted that it has surpassed &well over 1 million users,& up 150% in unique new users from 2018 to 2019.

In terms of profitability, Buchanan said that &we could be profitable if we wanted to be,& noting that Plastiqrevenue and margins could lead them toward profitability if they wanted to focus less on growth. But he added they don&t plan to &slow down& the growth engine any time soon — especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Because the Series D round closed at the end of 2019, Buchanan said the pandemic did not impact the deal. However, the company had planned to time the announcement with tax season. Now, as small businesses struggle to secure capital and stay afloat due to lockdowns across the country, Plastiqnew raise feels more fitting.

&Our customers are more thankful for solutions like ours as traditional sources of lending are drying up and not as easy to access& Buchanan said. &Hopefully, we can measure how many businesses make it through this because of us.&

The 140-person company is currently hiring across product and engineering roles.

Netflix is currently experiencing outages around the world, but affecting mostly users in the United States and Europe. According to Down Detector, users began reporting issues around 12PM Eastern Standard Time on Wednesday, and many people are still unable to connect to the streaming service on different platforms, including mobile, PCs and smart TVs.

Many people around the world are relying on Netflix for entertainment while under lockdown or quarantine measures to stop the spread of COVID-19. Both Netflixstatus and help pages have notes saying &We are currently experiencing a higher than normal wait time for support via phone and chat. Please try again later or check our online help center for answers to frequently asked questions. Thank you for your patience.& It is also fielding issues through its customer support Twitter account.

On March 21, Netflix said that in response to the European Unionrequest for streaming services to use telecommunications networks more efficiently, it had developed a way to reduce Netflixtraffic on them by 25% and deployed it in Italy, Spain, the rest of the Europe and the United Kingdom before rolling it out to other places including India.

The estimated size of the global collectibles market is $370 billion.

People have an innate propensity to collect, which drives purchases of collectible goods like art, games, sports memorabilia, toys and more. But given that the world is rapidly adopting digital each day, how likely is it that this market can continue to grow as is?

Won&t this primarily physical market have little choice but to evolve with the times?

With an increase in digital adoption, a step-function innovation is emerging; digital collectibles. The new medium is gaining in popularity and its influence is spreading relatively quickly.

The potential impact on the cryptocurrency landscape, while seemingly unrelated, is quite profound. Businesses already present in the collectibles market have new offerings, demographics and economic impacts to take into account. Even household brands are acknowledging their significance and building strategies around them.

Image byChristian BraunviahobbyDB

Digital collectibles have taken a foothold and are well on their way to increase their presence in our daily lives.

What is a digital collectible?