Technology

The Trump administration is heading to Congress to ask for a $850 billion stimulus package to stabilize an economy shaken by the dramatic response to the novel coronavirus, according to multiple reports. Citing multiple sources, stories in the Washington Post, New York Times, and CNBC report that Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is presenting details to Senate Republicans later on Tuesday.

While the specifics of the planned stimulus package are limited, the White House is pushing for a payroll tax cut and another $50 billion in direct stimulus to help the airline industry, which has cratered as global quarantine rules have stymied air travel. Reportedly, the White House is also hoping to add more economic benefits for small businesses and employees in a new stimulus package, according to administration officials cited by The Washington Post.

The aid package is on top of another $100 billion in funding for programs aimed at providing paid sick leave, food assistance, and other aid to American workers. That bill was passed by the House of Representatives last week.

Details surrounding these legislative maneuvers remain sketchy as the countrypolitical leadership continues to jockey for political points around aid as the countryeconomy crashes and is frozen by the need for social distancing and health precautions necessary to save off the worst effects of the global pandemic.

As the price tag for aid approaches $1 trillion, the differences in approach from Democrats and Republicans are becoming apparent and could threaten to slow down efforts to get the economy moving. The White House and its supporters are pushing for a payroll tax cut that would essentially help wage earners who keep their jobs during the downturn along with direct assistance to the businesses that are affected. Meanwhile, Democrats are focused on assistance to workers, public health care providers, schools and senior citizens.

In a sign of how fractured the political class remains, Senate Democrats are conferencing to discuss a $750 billion aid proposal which would include expansions to unemployment insurance, school financing, public transportation, Medicaid, additional healthcare funding, loan assistance and a freeze on evictions and foreclosures. Republicans are discussing the White House proposal with Secretary Mnuchin.

Some of the opposition to payroll tax cuts stems from their position at the heart of the current benefits system as the primary source of funding for Medicare and Social Security. The concern among Democrats is that a payroll tax cut won&t benefit people who have lost their jobs as small businesses shutter because of lost income.

They&re not alone. On Sunday, UtahRepublican Senator, Mitt Romney, embraced a modified version of a policy popularized by Democratic Presidential candidate Andrew Yang — universal basic income. Romneyproposal, made with Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton, called for the federal government to send checks directly to Americans.

Romney called for a $1,000 one-month payment to Americans to help cover costs of rent, food, and other necessities for citizens impacted by the COVID-19 outbreak.

The last time Congress threw around these kinds of numbers was in 2008, when a $700 billion relief package moved through government to respond to the global financial crisis which had wrecked the worldeconomy. That last economic crisis was caused by financial speculation and over-leveraging in Americahousing markets. This new crisis is impacting American businesses more directly as business in restaurants, bars, hotels, travel and tourism broadly, airlines and manufacturing grinds to a halt under the weight of social distancing requirements to stop the diseasespread.

The era of social distancing is going to put a lot of existing systems to the test. Nintendoonline services for the Switch have been experiencing outages in the U.S. and parts of Europe. The company noted the issues on social media, adding that it&looking to rectify the situation as soon as possible.&

The official Network Maintenance Information page noted that it is currently &Unable to connect to the network service.&

Surely not the most dire of situations, though many are no doubt relying on such services to help pass the time, as more and more cities enact bans on gatherings and closures of schools and restaurants to encourage social distance in order to curb COVID-19spread. MicrosoftXbox Live also experienced a multiple-hour outage over the weekend.

Nintendo is currently readying the system for the release of Animal Crossing: New Horizons. The latest entry in the series looks perfectly positioned to help eat away some hours when itreleased March 20.

Amazon &Fulfillment by Amazon& (FBA) program, through which it provides warehousing and shipment services for products from third-party sellers, was well as its larger vendor shipment services are being partially suspended through April 5 due to the global coronavirus outbreak. This suspension will allow Amazon to prioritize shipment of &household staples, medical supplies and other high-demand products& the company said in a support document on its website, and confirmed to TechCrunch in an email.

The commerce giant notes in the email that it is &seeing increased online shopping& in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, and will focus on prioritizing the reception, restocking and delivery of the essential products that are most in demand from this new uptick in activity from Amazon shoppers. For all other products, Amazon says it has disabled the creation of new inbound shipments for FBA members, as well as for retail vendors (their business-to-business selling platform).

Any existing shipments created prior to today are still going to be processed at Amazonfulfillment centers as usual, the company says, but otherwise new orders won&t be processed until such time as Amazon alerts sellers that things are back to normal. The tentative date for the program to resume in full is April 5, as mentioned, but it sounds like Amazon could extend these limitations depending on how the pandemic progresses.

Amazon is prioritizing goods in baby, health and household, beauty and personal care, grocery, industrial and scientific and pet supplies categories, the company says in a support document explaining the new limitations. Products outside of these categories that are already in Amazonfulfillment centers, or that are on their way to those facilities ahead of March 17, can still be sold through the platform.

This also doesn&t block sellers from selling their products on the platform and fulfilling the shipments themselves, the help document notes. That might be the only option available to sellers and retailers who want to continue offering their non-prioritized goods to Amazon buyers through at least the next few weeks.

An Amazon spokesperson provided TechCrunch the following statement regarding the suspension:

We are seeing increased online shopping and as a result some products such as household staples and medical supplies are out of stock. With this in mind, we are temporarily prioritizing household staples, medical supplies, and other high-demand products coming into our fulfillment centers so we can more quickly receive, restock, and deliver these products to customers. We understand this is a change for our selling partners and appreciate their understanding as we temporarily prioritize these products for customers.

Amazon has taken other steps to address the increased demand itseeing on the platform as more and more countries and cities implement isolation and quarantine measures, including shelter-in-place orders. The company announced on Monday that it would be looking to hire as many as 100,000 additional warehouse and delivery employees to address the increase.

Investors seem to be taking a wait-and-see approach to the markets right now, after a bumpy evening where a presidential tweet and commitment of economic support seemingly sent traders to smash buy buttons before realizing that there was no new substance behind Mondaynight moves.

Economies around the world are in for a rough ride as businesses shut down and social distancing measures take effect to limit the spread of the novel coronavirus, which is already a global pandemic and an epidemic in the U.S.

After their worst day of trading since 1987, stocks rose sharply in overnight trading. The pattern of shares falling sharply, followed by a rebound of sorts, continues, then, as traders continue to look for signals amidst the global noise; how to value one promise of further government stimulus, for example, against more border shutdowns and bad corporate news is now daily labor.

But as stocks opened domestically, they did manage slight gains, a welcome sight after yesterdaysharply negative trading. Herethe morning report at the open:

• Dow Jones Industrial Average: rose 314.81 to 20,503.33 for a gain of 1.56%
• S-P 500: rose 52.91 to 2,439.04 for a gain of 2.22%
• Nasdaq Composite: rose 147.45 to 7,052.05+147.45 for a gain of 2.14%

Even cryptocurrencies are seeing a bit of a comeback, though they, like stocks, remain depressed when compared to recent highs. Bitcoin, the most famous of all cryptos (as the distributed tokens are sometimes called), is off by about half.

The latest economic forecasts are bleak. Goldman Sachs expects a Q1 contraction of perhaps 5%, a shocking figure. Even more, per reporting, the bank sees it likely that the U.S. will enter a recession. If you were waiting for the correction, this is it. We have now seen the end of the long-running bull cycle that brought companies like Dropbox and Airbnb and Slack and Zoom from little-to-nothing to giant-status. This is the downturn. A new generation of startups will soon be born that will lead the markets higher in the future. But, given the economic data we&re seeing, not yet.

The TechCrunch crew will keep tracking the public markets so long as they are fascinating. More on how select companies performed when the day closes.

Addapptation, a startup that wants to build a practical design layer on top of Salesforce and other enterprise tools, announced a $1.3 million seed investment today.

2048 Ventures led the round with participation from East Coast Angels, The Millworks II Fund and additional angel investors from New Hampshire, where the firm is located

Co-founder Sumner Vanderhoof says the startupgoal is to build a user experience platform for enterprise tools like Salesforce . &Our goal is to help make simple, easy to use Salesforce.com solutions built on the addapptation UX platform.

&At the end of the day, we&re really helping transform the way companies work, making their employees more efficient, making the job they do easier and more consistent, so they have a bigger impact on the companies that they work for,& Vanderhoof told TechCrunch.

He says they do this by looking at the company workflow and what issue the customer is trying to solve — such as a problem converting deals through the sales cycle. They will then help build tools and an interface to make it easier to pinpoint this information with the goal of being able to reuse whatever solutions they create for other customers.

He says the platform is template-driven and designed to quickly go from idea to solution. A typical solution takes no longer than two weeks to build and implement. Once a customer is using addapptation, employees can log into the addapptation platform or it can be a layer built into Salesforce providing a more guided experience.

The company has built around 40 plug-ins for the platform, including a heat map that identifies where sales is likely to find the best opportunities to close a deal. The solutions they build are designed to work online or on mobile devices as needed.

Photo: addapptation

Vanderhoof says that the company has a good relationship with Salesforce, and it doesn&t compete directly with the company. &Their main focus is providing tools for a wide audience. Ours is extending the platform beyond what it can do,& he said.

The two founders, Vanderhoof and his wife Carla, took three years building the platform, essentially bootstrapping before taking todayfunding. The company has 15 employees in its Exeter, NH, headquarters and has 20 customers including Comcast and Ingram Micro.

Intelsat has tapped SpaceX for the launch of its Intelsat 40e spacecraft, a high-throughput communications satellite that will join the companyexisting geostationary network. The satellite is being built by Maxar, Intelsat announced last month, and will be carried to its target orbit by a Falcon 9 rocket using a flight-proven first-stage booster.

Intelsat is a connectivity infrastructure company that operates a communications network providing video and broadband services globally. The Intelsat 40e satellite will specifically help serve customers in North and Central America.

SpaceX has provided launch services for Intelsat previously, flying its 35e satellite to orbit in 2017. That satellite is currently in operation, offering connectivity to customers across North and South America, as well as in Europe and Africa.

This next launch is set to take place in 2022, so not immediately, but itan important get and a valuable return client for SpaceX.