Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan have donated $25 million through their foundation to a philanthropic effort organized by Bill Gates to explore new coronavirus treatments.
The Gates Foundation donated $50 million last week to what it’s calling the “COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator.” The initiative brings together life sciences companies to collaborate on the development of new vaccines, diagnostics, and treatments for COVID-19.
“The Therapeutics Accelerator will enable researchers to quickly determine whether or not existing drugs have a potential benefit against COVID-19,” Chan and Zuckerberg said in a press release. “We hope these coordinated efforts will help stop the spread of COVID-19 as well as provide shared, reusable strategies to respond to future pandemics.”
The two donations are the largest from tech billionaires since the coronavirus outbreak. Wellcome and Mastercard are supporting the effort as well.
The goal of the initiative is to either develop a new drug or adapt an existing treatment that it could help distribute alongside partnering pharmaceutical companies.
The 15 companies participating in the project kicked off the effort by sharing their proprietary libraries of molecular compounds that have some history of being tested with COVID-19.
The lineup includes big names in biotech such as Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Pfizer, Sanofi, and Bristol-Myers Squibb.
Microsoft announced on Thursday it would provide a free version of its group chatting app, betting that the platform's integration with Microsoft's other programs will give it a leg up on Slack. “We have power of the full collaboration suite in there,” says Lori Wright, GM of Microsoft 365.
Papa John's founder John Schnatter resigned as chairman of the pizza chain after it came to light that he used a racial slur on a conference call in May. Schnatter apologized for his comments, saying they were "inappropriate and hurtful."
Uber is planning to lay off more than 100 people from its autonomous car units in San Francisco and Pittsburgh. This comes as Uber is trying to recover from the fatal crash in Arizona involving one if it's self-driving cars.
And Cheddar's Alex Heath sits down with Joey Levin, CEO of IAC, to discuss Match Group's recent acquisition of dating app Hinge.
The iconic Apple founder and innovator was reportedly high "on a massive dose of LSD at the time of death," says Adam Fisher. Fisher's book also digs into Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak's secret feud with Jobs.
Charlie Lee, creator of Litecoin, says the partnership with the digital finance app will help expand its reach. “I think the idea is to have more adoption, to have easier ways for people to get Litecoin, and to have easier ways for people to spend it,” he tells Cheddar.
In recent years, Vimeo has been pushing to transform itself into an end-to-end platform for video creators, adding post-production tools, storage capabilities, and live streaming features. Creators can publish their content on any other platform through Vimeo, including on competitors like YouTube. "That provides a real advantage for us in that we can be Switzerland in that publishing landscape," CEO Joey Levin tells Cheddar's Alex Heath at the Sun Valley conference.
IAC, which owns Match, Tinder, and OkCupid, recently added Hinge to its portfolio because "we like competing with ourselves," says CEO Joey Levin. "Tinder was created inside of Match to disrupt Match." Levin spoke with Cheddar's Alex Heath at the Allen & Co. Conference in Sun Valley, Idaho.
The wireless company will hold a stake in Magic Leap, which released a demo of its mixed-reality headset Wednesday afternoon. “For AT&T, it makes a lot of sense to invest in this area,” says Ed Baig, personal tech columnist at USA TODAY. “It’ll be curious to see if AT&T subsidizes the price of this headset” like it does with smartphones.
Even when Netflix was a DVD rental company, it tried to customize choices for its customers, says Gibson Biddle, former VP product at the streaming giant. That strategy still drives many of the company's decisions today, including the kind of content it spends money on.
According to a New York Times report, Zelle -- institutional banks' answer to Venmo -- has been extremely vulnerable to hacks and fraud. The company that created the app, Early Warning Services, is now working on making Zelle harder to exploit, says Ravi Loganathan, the company's head of business intelligence.
Cheddar’s Alex Heath caught up with industry heavyweights at the 2018 Allen & Co. conference in Sun Valley, Idaho — an event commonly referred to "summer camp for billionaires." The hot merger landscape in the media industry was front-and-center, with Comcast and Disney fighting over the future of Rupert Murdoch's 21st Century Fox empire.
