Parasound won’t ship orders, receive returns or issue return authorizations until the end of the COVID-19 crisis, the company emailed Wednesday, citing the San Francisco Bay Area “shelter at home” directive for nonessential businesses. The company informed dealers and manufacturer reps that the office and warehouse are closed, but company personnel are “still on the job” helping customers by phone and email, it said. Protocols are in place to handle sales orders and customer support by phone and email to prepare for a resumption in operations. The company is accepting dealer orders for future shipments and will process the backlog of orders “as quickly as possible” when shipments are possible.
The FCC can take several steps to help with the coronavirus, including acting on an E-rate petition “clarifying that schools can wirelessly extend E-Rate subsidized connections to students at home,” Microsoft officials told an aide to Commissioner Geoffrey Starks, said a filing posted Wednesday in docket 02-6. The FCC should also act on changes to the technical rules for TV white space devices provide an expected waiver of citizens broadband radio service transition requirements (see 2003160049).
Nokia postponed its April 8 annual general meeting to a “later stage” in keeping with the Finnish government’s ban on public gatherings of more than 10 people, said the company Wednesday. The event will be rescheduled “as soon as it is practically possible,” it said. “Nokia strongly advocates for measures to allow fully virtual general meetings to enable efficient shareholder participation.”
Many conference and trade show promoters are trying to decide “how to go virtual with your event either canceled or on the verge of being canceled,” CadmiumCD Chief Technology Officer Peter Wyatt told event organizers on a webinar Tuesday. His company supplies event software for bringing live in-person conferences online, and he said the webinar had seven times more attendance than normal due to COVID-19 cancellations. One consideration in the decision to go virtual is how to “retain the revenue you otherwise would have gotten with live events,” he said. Organizers also “want to leverage the work that you’ve done in the past year getting ready for your event this spring,” he said. “I’m sure many of you are heartbroken by the countless hours you’ve put in only to find out that attendees won’t be able to experience what you’ve planned.” Cadmium's eventScribeLive has the capability to “capture” a keynote or breakout session at a physical conference and stream the slides, the audio and the video “directly live to a mobile app,” Wyatt said. “We had thought two or three weeks ago this was our go-to for helping us through the crisis” for attendees unable or unwilling to attend conferences in person, he said. “It turned out that live meetings were going away.” It’s rejiggering eventScribeLive to optimize it for conferences with no in-person component, he said.
Display Week 2020 “will take place as scheduled” June 7-12 at San Francisco’s Moscone Center, emailed the Society for Information Display Tuesday. Show organizers will “comply with local, state and federal guidelines to limit the spread of the virus and provide a safe environment for our exhibitors, attendees and all those involved in Display Week 2020,” it said. SID is “aware” of the Trump administration’s European travel ban and the “shelter in place” policy imposed in the Bay Area, it said. “However, we remain optimistic that both of these measures will be lifted within the next couple of months and will not affect the show.”
Disney will incur “unprecedented pain” from COVID-19 “impacts” and the "ensuing" recession, MoffettNathanson's Michael Nathanson emailed investors Tuesday. He’s forecasting a 40% decline in Disney’s earnings per share for fiscal 2020 ending late September and an additional 29% decrease a year later. “The floor dropped” when the coronavirus forced Disney’s U.S. theme parks to close and the NBA and NHL to suspend their seasons, said Nathanson. The analyst thinks Disney’s direct-to-consumer and international businesses will take a hit from recession-induced advertising losses. The stock closed 1.6% lower Tuesday at $93.53.
Though major studios are scooting up digital release dates of feature films during the COVID-19 crisis, that's unlikely to be a permanent change, nScreen Media analyst Colin Dixon blogged Monday. If studios see some subscription VOD success with earlier releases, they likely will chalk it up to parents "trying to placate stir-crazy kids" and return to the traditional movie-theater-first releases once theaters reopen, he said. NBCUniversal said it will make a variety of films in theatrical release or being released also available for on-demand rental starting Friday. "Rather than delaying these films or releasing them into a challenged distribution landscape, we wanted to provide an option for people to view these titles in the home that is both accessible and affordable,” NBCU CEO Jeff Shell said.
CTA is canvassing members and other companies for information it's compiling for a “public-facing” website on telehealth practices in the tech industry. It asked respondents to complete a questionnaire by Tuesday summarizing their digital health offerings. The questionnaire also asks companies to identify what “federal and state legal and regulatory barriers” are preventing them from “fully deploying services/solutions to address COVID-19.”
The White House Office of Science and Technology facilitated the Monday release of more than 29,000 machine-readable articles and other literature on COVID-19 and other coronaviruses in a bid for artificial intelligence experts to develop text and data-mining techniques to help the scientific community answer “high-priority” questions about the COVID-19 pandemic. The White House, meanwhile, postponed a planned April 1 5G summit because of the outbreak (see 2003160064). The National institutes of Health, National Library of Medicine, Microsoft, Allen Institute for AI, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology contributed to the literature released Monday, OSTP said. “Decisive action from America’s science and technology enterprise is critical to prevent, detect, treat, and develop solutions to COVID-19,” said U.S. Chief Technology Officer Michael Kratsios on a conference call with reporters. “The White House will continue to be a strong partner in this all hands-on-deck approach. We thank each institution for voluntarily lending its expertise and innovation to this collaborative effort, and call on the United States research community to put artificial intelligence technologies to work in answering key scientific questions about” COVID-19. “We need to come together as companies, governments, and scientists and work to bring our best technologies to bear across biomedicine, epidemiology, AI, and other sciences,” said Microsoft Chief Scientific Officer Eric Horvitz. “The COVID-19 literature resource and challenge will stimulate efforts that can accelerate the path to solutions.”
Apple's June Worldwide Developer Conference will be held online, with content available for consumers, media and developers, said Phil Schiller, senior vice president-worldwide marketing, Friday, citing global health concerns. Developers will get "early access" to the future of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS, and be able to engage with Apple engineers, said the company. Apple is committing $1 million to local San Jose organizations to offset associated revenue loss due to the online format, it said. The company didn't respond to questions.