There haven’t been too many epic brand fails during Coronavirus so far, but we do some some competition.

With social distancing on everyone’s mind these days, someone had to ask: How can my brand weigh in on the topic? If you are a healthcare company, like Cigna, or you’re in high demand, like Lysol, maybe you do have a reason to weigh in.

But if you sell cars or sandwiches, maybe sit this one out. But no…brands gotta brand!

Gotta stay top of mind even if no one wants to buy your products!

Why it’s hot: Not only are many companies donating money to governments and non-profits, but they are using their existing manufacturing infrastructure to manufacture essential supplies that healthcare workers and hospitals need and are in short supply.

Non-healthcare manufacturers (auto companies) are manufacturing ventilators and apparel and fashion companies (clothing/footwear) are manufacturing masks and hospital gowns.

These are great examples of large companies re-orienting their business to support people at large in times of a global crisis.

Social distancing got you down? Get your dopamine fix with Botnet.The social media network made up of millions of bots programmed to shower you with flattery and positive, supportive messages.

Botnet

Not only does Botnet serve as an ego booster, it also doubles as a journal of sorts. The app gives users access to a searchable library of their posts.

It has only been online since late last year, and with only 30 reviews in the app store it’s not really a blip on anyone’s radar. But, with Covid-19 social distancing seeming like it’s not going away any time soon, it may just be the type of emotional support people are searching for.

Ignoring the need for connection at this time is not an option. Research suggests that the majority of individuals today lack sufficient social connection. This connection deficit may exacerbate the negative effects of stress and diminish physical and emotional resilience that people will need to fight the COVID-19 virus.
Source: https://www.govexec.com/management/2020/03/covid-19-coinciding-loneliness-epidemic/164153/

Disclaimer: As with all things online, not to be used as a substitute for IRL relationships.

Why it’s hot: As social distancing measures become the new normal and the long term effects of loneliness start to take their toll, people will be looking for new tools and systems to help them emotionally cope.

That’s if you add up the wireless connection, data usage, and battery charging.

Which is the interesting fact I learned while looking into Back Market’s new tool CO2NSCIOUS. Backmarket is an online marketplace selling refurbished and electronic devices like smartphones and created something that would allow you to harness a few energy hacking tools.

First, there are a few types of energy that goes into anything you plug in.

Coal, Gas, Wind and Hydraulic.

A combination of them goes into charging at any given time. With CO2NSCIOUS, they are able to show you real time which ones you would be using to juice up, by analyzing global energy sets. Then they’re able to recommend times that would be most CO2 friendly.

Source

Why It’s Hot:

An interesting way to bring 2 ideas together. People who are buying refurbished are maybe more environmentally friendly.

I also think it might have an added benefit of being more conscious of how much you are using your phone. And inserting BackMarket into your awareness.

What does this remind you of?

As a wave of stay-at-home orders rolled out across the United States, the average time it took to download videos, emails and documents increased as broadband speeds declined 4.9 percent from the previous week, according to Ookla, a broadband speed testing service. Median download speeds dropped 38 percent in San Jose, Calif., and 24 percent in New York, according to Broadband Now, a consumer broadband research site.

Quarantines around the world have made people more reliant on the internet to communicate, work, learn and stay entertained. But as the use of YouTube, Netflix, Zoom videoconferencing, Facebook calls and videogaming has surged to new highs, the stress on internet infrastructure is starting to show in Europe and the United States — and the traffic is probably far from its peak.

• In the United States, regulators have given wireless carriers access to more spectrum to bolster the capacity of their networks.
• YouTube said this week that it would reduce the quality of its videos from high to standard definition across the globe.
• Disney delayed the start of its Disney Plus streaming service in France by two weeks.
• Microsoft’s Xbox asked gaming companies to introduce online updates and new releases only at certain times to prevent network congestion.

“We really don’t know how long we’re going to be in this mode for”
Dave Temkin, Netflix’s vice president of network and systems infrastructure

 

“In just two days we grew all the traffic we had planned for 2020”

Enrique Blanco, the chief technology officer at Telefónica

 

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Why it’s hot:

Necessity is the mother of invention. As the situation evolves, I wonder what kind of “light” services could be born out of the need of reduced internet latency? How will this change our approach to cloud infrastructure—a Home Edge Infrastructure of sorts?

Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York was blunt about the rationale behind this time of quarantine.

“There is a density level in NYC that is destructive,” he tweeted Sunday, after similar comments at one of his daily press briefings. He’d seen New Yorkers out in parks together, behaving as if this were a normal sunny spring weekend, and he was dismayed. Togetherness itself could now be deadly.

“It has to stop and it has to stop now,” he tweeted. “NYC must develop an immediate plan to reduce density.”

This has been an especially painful realization in major cities: The very thing that makes cities remarkable — the proximity of so many people to one another — is now making them susceptible in a pandemic. Density, suddenly, is bad for our health. And we are trying everything we can think of to dismantle it.

Special grocery store hours for older people — those are about reducing density. Closed schools and dispersed children — the same.

Telework is the least dense version of office life; takeout the least dense way to eat someone else’s cooking. Governor Cuomo has even suggested opening roads normally reserved for cars to pedestrian traffic. An empty street is the least dense way to walk somewhere, even in a seemingly empty city.

What feels so disconcerting about this is not just that density normally brings urban perks — diverse restaurants, rich cultural institutions, new business ideas — that we can’t enjoy right now. Even more than that, density, in the right conditions, is good for us. It even protects against other kinds of calamities.

Density makes mass transit possible. It allows for more affordable housing. It creates environments where people can walk and where children can find playgrounds. It enables us to pool risks. It supports big public hospitals and stronger safety nets. It allows us to curb climate emissions, which present a public health problem of an entirely different kind.

Crucially, it enables the kind of redundancies that make communities more resilient during disasters.

How, then, do we reconcile the benefits of density for a healthy society with the threat of density in a pandemic? And what happens if we lose sight of those benefits — including the ways they are operating even now — while we are preoccupied by the harm?

Since the 1990s, researchers and planners have increasingly come to argue that dense urban environments, derided historically as diseased, can actually foster health. They don’t mean overcrowded tenements, but places where people live close enough to one another to walk where they need to go and to support one another. Such environments offer an alternative to sedentary, car-dependent sprawl, an antidote to growing health problems like obesity.

“This does feel like something that’s going to set all of that back a little bit,” said Sara Jensen Carr, a professor of architecture, urbanism and landscape at Northeastern University. She is working on a book, due out this fall, looking at how urban landscapes have been designed in response to epidemics, from cholera to obesity.

Cholera outbreaks helped lead to the design of modern sanitation systems. Respiratory diseases in the early 20th century encouraged city dwellers to prize light and air, and something that looked more like country living. Now Ms. Carr worries that the coronavirus may teach people to further fear density, even in the form of new housing proposed nearby.

But if the earlier history of American cities is full of public-health horror stories about substandard housing, factory pollution and poor sanitation, more recent history tells of the health and resiliency density can provide.

In practical ways, density makes possible many of the things we need when something goes wrong. That is certainly true of hospital infrastructure — emergency response times are faster, and hospitals are better staffed in denser places. When one store is closed or out of toilet paper, there are more places to look. When people can’t leave home for essentials, there are alternative ways to get them, like grocery delivery services or bike couriers. When people can’t visit public spaces, there are still ways to create public life, from balconies, porches and windows.

When New York’s subways were inundated during Hurricane Sandy, the city could lean on its bus system (made possible by density). And now that the buses seem off-limits, the city’s bike-share system offers backup (that also exists thanks to density). When all else fails or floods or shuts down, walking is still possible in New York and Washington, San Francisco and Seattle. And many of the things people need are close enough to walk to.

Atlanta illustrated the opposite lesson in 2014, when two inches of snow brought the entire region to a standstill, trapping tens of thousands of people in highway gridlock, some for 12 hours or more. The region, critics pointed out, had for decades failed to invest in a transit system that could have offered an alternative to those highways — and in the density that could make transit viable and highways less essential.

Hurricane Katrina survivors displaced to more walkable communities around the country later showed signs of health benefits. Older Chicago residents in the 1995 heat wave were more likely to survive in neighborhoods dense with neighbors, stores, public spaces and street life.

“Dense social networks in communities save people,” said Jacob Remes, a historian at N.Y.U. who has studied urban disasters. “That’s what makes communities resilient, and it’s what then helps communities recover.”

But it’s unclear how we’re supposed to leverage all those dense connections this time.

“What does that look like when the thing we have to do is stay apart from each other, when what we need to do is further isolate ourselves?” Mr. Remes said. “I don’t know. I don’t know what the answer is.”

One hopeful note is that Singapore, Hong Kong and parts of Taiwan, places as dense or denser than New York, were able to pursue early testing and extensive tracing of coronavirus cases rather than widespread isolation.

Mr. Remes, Ms. Carr and others are also sure of this: It will be a shame if we come away from this moment skeptical of density itself, or if some of the benefits of density, like mass transit and bustling commercial corridors, suffer lasting damage. Whether or not we fully appreciate them right now, we may need them in the next disaster.

Why it’s hot: Will there be a move away from walk-able neighborhoods and dense cities for businesses and young people in the post Covid-19 world? Will there be greater migration into suburbs for both businesses and people? Will this affect housing, building, and transportation patterns in the years to come?

Source: New York Times

A new video from UK movie magazine Little White Lies reveals how Anderson’s characters have been practicing social distancing from the beginning. The two-and-a-half minute clip draws from the director’s entire filmography to show how his characters are often kept apart, even when they’re together. Sometimes, it’s a depth-of-field trick, with one character close to the camera and another one further back and thus relatively tiny. Other times, it’s a tracking shot of characters moving along on the same path, each at his or her own pace. While it would be a reach to suggest Anderson actually anticipated that it would one day become standard hygienic praxis to maintain six-feet of distance at all times, the director’s visual depiction of isolation sure looks prescient at the moment.

Why it’s hot: Making light of the grim situation at the moment, we are given a new perspective at beloved favorites such as Wes Anderson movies.

Source: FastCo

Last week, it was announced that staff who have been temporarily laid off from Scandinavian airline SAS will be offered fast-track training as healthcare workers. SAS has laid off more than 10,000 staff due to the coronavirus pandemic. Now, the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation will fund fast-track healthcare training for those staff, so that they can support the Swedish healthcare system.

The course will be free for attendees, who will be trained in providing information to patients and their families, sterilising equipment, and basic administrative duties.

Why it’s Hot: In the current situation, we are seeing vast sectors of the economy lose their jobs or their income- while other areas are seeing a severe shortage of workers (healthcare, grocery, etc). In the healthcare industry, workers are now understaffed and overworked. So much so, many healthcare workers who have retired are being requested to join the fight against this pandemic. This is a great example of retraining a workforce to serve the current need while making sure they are not affected economically because of the loss of their jobs.

On Friday, Allbirds posted a message ton its Instagram saying the brand would gift its signature Wool Runners to medical professionals working on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic and inviting them to get in touch.

View this post on Instagram

To our US healthcare community – we want to thank you for being on the front lines and helping to keep our communities healthy. We appreciate and admire everything you are doing. We hope a pair of Tuke Matcha Wool Runners on us might be a small token of our appreciation. Thank you. – (Offer valid while supplies last)

A post shared by Allbirds (@allbirds) on Mar 20, 2020 at 11:40am PDT

On Monday, founders Tim Brown and Joey Zwillinger shared a second update, in the form of a letter to its audience. “We’ve been completely blown away by the response to our U.S. healthcare donation last week,” they wrote. “Our team has been working overtime to get back to all of the requests, and we’ve distributed $500,000 in shoes since Friday.”

Allbirds has since introduced a “buy-one-give-one” option to U.S.-based shoppers: Purchase its shoes online, and the brand will split the cost of donating a pair of Wool Runners to a healthcare professional who could use them; you can also choose to donate a pair at checkout.

Why it’s hot: 

From their sustainable products to open sourcing their sustainable formulas, Allbirds has built a name for themselves as a philanthropic company looking to better the world. This effort is a natural extension of that mission and is something that will increase brand affinity for the future.

Source

NVIDIA, inventor of the GPU, which creates interactive graphics is calling for gamers to lend pare computing power from their graphic processing units (GPUs) to support scientific research on Corona Virus.

PC Gamers, let’s put those GPUs to work.

Join us and our friends at @OfficialPCMR in supporting folding@home and donating unused GPU computing power to fight against COVID-19!

Learn more → https://t.co/EQE4u7xTZT pic.twitter.com/uO0ZCq8PEv

— NVIDIA GeForce (@NVIDIAGeForce) March 13, 2020

By downloading the folding@home app,participating users can decide when to share or turn off sharing of their GPU’s. Able to carry out massive computing tasks, such as those required during research as complicated as drug and virus simulations, idle GPUs could come in handy in the battle against Covid-19.

The more data that is generated around the virus (think genome analysis) the more analysis becomes the bottleneck in both time and cost perspectives. Having the extra processing power will come in handy.

Source: Forbes, NVIDIA

Why it’s hot: Businesses of all sorts and sizes are being forced to pivot, this is a good example of how businesses can leverage unused resources to fight the corona virus.  

According to Facebook, over the last few weeks, it’s seen:

• Total messaging increases of more than 50%, across both WhatsApp and Messenger
• An increase of 70% in Messenger group video calls, and more than double the regular demand for video calls in WhatsApp
• Overall U.S. traffic from Facebook to other websites has increased by more than 50% week-on-week

But while engagement is up, ad spending is down as brands cancel campaigns, put temporary holds on media spending, or pivot to other channels, according to Social Media Today.

Why it’s hot: Coronavirus news has dominated the headlines and many social feeds, but conversation and engagement on social platforms goes well beyond sharing news. Entertainers, parents and others have found ways to use social media features to their advantage, hosting live comedy events, performing music, and reading books to kids stuck at home during the lockdown. Brands should take note of all the creativity happening out there, and use this opportunity to try out new forms of authentic communication that may adapt to support a paid social strategy made for the post-pandemic landscape.

“Twitter broadened their definition of ‘harm’. ” when it comes to users Tweeting about the Corona virus.  Expanding to, “content that goes directly against guidance from authoritative sources of global and local public health information.”

They are cutting off these Tweets, as well as ones that may suggest a cure, origin, spread and protection.

• “Coronavirus is not heat-resistant—walking outside is enough to disinfect you.”
• “Use aromatherapy and essential oils to prevent COVID-19.”
• “Drinking bleach and ingesting colloidal silver will cure COVID-19.”
• “COVID-19 does not infect children because we haven’t seen any cases of children being sick.”
• “Coronavirus is a fraud and not real—go out and patronize your local bar!!”
• “The news about washing your hands is propaganda for soap companies, stop washing your hands.”
• “Ignore news about COVID-19, it’s just an attempt to destroy capitalism by crashing the stock market.”
• “The National Guard just announced that no more shipments of food will be arriving for 2 months—run to the grocery store ASAP and buy everything!”
• “If you can hold your breath for 10 seconds, you do not have coronavirus.”
• “If you have a wet cough, it’s not coronavirus—but a dry cough is.”
• “You’ll feel like you’re drowning in snot if you have coronavirus—it’s not a normal runny nose.”
• “People with dark skin are immune to COVID-19 due to melanin production.”
• “Reading the Quran will make an individual immune to COVID-19.”
• “Avoid businesses owned by Chinese people as they are more likely to have COVID-19.”

These Tweets when not substantiated are the equivalent of shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theater. They can also be seen as completely outlandish on their own but what if one

Why it’s hot:

Censorship that might have ripple effects, currently unseen.