Daily insights for city builders, delivered every morning at 6 AM ET. I’m Brandon Donnelly — a Toronto-based real estate developer and founder of Globizen. I’ve been writing here since 2013.
The last thing you probably need at this point is another webinar. But this one could actually be interesting. On May 29th, 2020 at 9:00 AM eastern, the Senseable City Lab at MIT is hosting one called, Tracking epidemics in cities: urban environments and the insights they provide into disease. The Senseable City Lab has previously looked at how sewage could be mined for real-time information about an urban population, revealing things like eating habits, genetic tendencies, drug consumption, and — yes — contagious diseases. In this webinar, SCL plans to pickup on this last point, as well as discuss how mobile phone patterns can help to inform epidemiological studies. If you’d like to register, click here.
On Monday it was reported — by the Wall Street Journal, Tech Crunch, and others — that Uber will be laying off another 3,000 employees and closing 45 of its offices around the world. Here is a quote from TechCrunch:
“I knew that I had to make a hard decision, not because we are a public company, or to protect or stock price, or to please our Board or investors,” Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi wrote to employees today in a memo, viewed by TechCrunch. “I had to make this decision because our very future as an essential service for the cities of the world — our being there for millions of people and businesses who rely on us — demands it. We must establish ourselves as a self-sustaining enterprise that no longer relies on new capital or investors to keep growing, expanding, and innovating.”
According to this SEC filing, the company expects to pay approximately $110 million to $140 million in severance and other termination benefits, and somewhere between $65 million to $80 million in costs related to closing its offices.
All of this is, of course, being driven by a steep decline in ride bookings, which is about 70% of the company’s revenue. Ride bookings were down 80% in April from a year earlier. For Q1 2020, they were down about 5% compared to 2019.
Uber Eats has seen a spike in demand with people staying at home. Bookings were up 52% in Q1 2020 from a year earlier. The problem is that, unlike its rides business, their food delivery business is far from profitable. That’s the point of the possible merger with Grubhub.
The company has said that they are seeing some signs of a recovery in markets that have begun to reopen. But it’s too early to predict what that will really look like. The hole is pretty deep.
Either way, the company is making some really tough decisions right now. But it seems to be doing what it needs to do in order to get to the other side of this and become a self-sustaining and profitable business. Full disclosure: I own some $UBER.
Today I am going to talk about 3 things that recently happened and/or that are on my mind.
Sidewalk Labs pulled out of Toronto. I think this is sad. A lot of people have said that they’re surprised, but not surprised. The official reason is that this unprecedented environment has made it financially infeasible for them to develop the 12-acre site, while still adhering to their core principles. I don’t have any inside knowledge of the situation, but I can’t help but think that this is probably just an opportune excuse. They were getting beat up pretty badly by Toronto on all fronts, even though they had put forward an incredibly ambitious development proposal. As I said before, I can’t imagine many (or any) “conventional” developers coming forward with something like this. The last plan I saw was 1/3 non-residential, and 40% of the residential component was to be priced below market. And never mind all of the other innovations that were being contemplated.
In other tech news, Uber just led a $170 million investment in Lime (the micromobility scooter company). I think this is smart — both from an overall mobility standpoint and, selfishly, as a shareowner of $UBER. It is being reported that this round of investment values Lime at about $510 million. This is a 79% decline from April 2019 when it raised its last round. So presumably, Uber is getting a pretty good deal here. The bet is that the urban landscape demands multi-modal transportation solutions, everything from bikes and scooters to cars and public transit. There is also an argument to be made that in the short-term, our post-pandemic world is going to gravitate toward individual mobility and away from things like public transit. I’ve heard a few people say that, as we re-open the global economy and try to maintain social distancing, we’re going to face two major mobility bottlenecks: transit and elevators. Sounds like more testing would be a prudent idea.
Above, I was very careful to say “in the short-term” because I think the narrative that is emerging around the demise of urban density is entirely overblown. Few of us are clamoring to jump back into a mosh pit right now (perhaps a metaphorical mosh pit), but I also don’t believe that we will suddenly look to sprawling Brasilia as a source of urban inspiration. While it is true that “disease did shape architecture in the 20th century” (Alex Bozikovic wrote a good piece on this over the weekend) and that there have been oscillations in terms of how we view urbanity, I also know that this isn’t the first pandemic that our cities have lived through. The Hong Kong flu of 1968 is thought to have killed one million people around the world after, allegedly, emerging in one of the densest cities ever created. Hong Kong’s relationship with Beijing is a tenuous one right now, but it still remains one of the world’s most important global cities.
Perhaps cities are more resilient than we give them credit for.
This is an interesting business story. Deliveroo is a London-based online food delivery company that was founded back in 2013 and today accounts for a big chunk of the online restaurant platform market in the UK. (They are also developing a network of “ghost kitchens” through a subsidiary called Deliveroo Editions.)
Amazon has been and still is interested in buying a minority stake in the company (Roofoods Ltd). But the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has been blocking it out of fear that it would stifle competition. The thinking was that if they blocked this deal, maybe, just maybe, Amazon would enter the market on its own. And more participants means more competition.
Well, Deliveroo’s business is now struggling amid this pandemic. To deliver food from restaurants and then charge those restaurants a commission, it turns out that you typically need those restaurants to be open for business. So the CMA is now revisiting the case. Is it better to have Amazon invest in Deliveroo or have Deliveroo possibly fail?
One of Alphabet’s moonshot projects is an autonomous delivery drone service called Wing. As far as I can tell, they’re only company offering this kind of service to the general public in North America — though they are only operating in a few test locations in Virginia, Finland, and Australia.
Specifically:
Canberra, Australia
Logan, Australia
Helsinki, Finland
Christiansburg, United States
Not surprisingly, demand for Wing deliveries has surged during this pandemic. According to the Verge, the company made over 1,000 deliveries in the past two weeks, which represents a doubling of deliveries in the US and Australia. The most popular items seem to be essentials like toilet paper and coffee.
This is perhaps a good example of the argument that COVID-19 isn’t going to change things per se, it will simply accelerate the adoption of things that were already in the process of happening. I was and am of the opinion that drones will become an integral part of delivery logistics. (Full disclosure: I own a bit of Alphabet and Drone Delivery Canada stock.)
There is still a lot that will need to happen. Alphabet/Wing is also working on an autonomous traffic management platform, because you obviously need something robust if you’re going to scale this up. How you make this work in dense urban environments is also a whole other kettle of fish, though already people are starting to reconsider how rooftops are used.
Venture capitalist Albert Wenger wrote on his blog today that the road back from COVID-19 could start — as early as May — provided we’re able to get our act together around three essential things: masks, tests, and tracing for everyone. We have all been talking about the importance of these things over the last few weeks, but I think it’s worth mentioning just how quickly some of this is starting to happen.
Both Apple and Google have announced that they are building a voluntary contact-tracing network. By May, they hope to release a set of APIs that other software developers will be able to build on top of. Bluetooth will be what is used to detect when humans are in close proximity to each other. Eventually, both companies plan to integrate contact tracing right into their operating systems.
Here’s how it might work:
Of course, we are also seeing new startups emerge, like this one here called Coronatrace.
Similar to what Apple and Google have in mind, the app will be a voluntary contact-tracing network. By using it, your phone will begin to log how you move about, something that is already happening today with many of the apps we already use. Should someone test positive for COVID-19 (they would need to update their health status within the app), it would then immediately notify the network and anyone who might have crossed paths with them.
Obviously it would be far better to simply have a vaccine. But the experts are saying that will take some time — 12 to 18 months? And in the interim, we’re going to need to get the global economy back up and running. Seeing solutions like these being developed makes me hopeful we’ll be able to do that sooner rather than later.
This week it was announced that Foursquare and Factual are planning to merge. Both use location data to improve advertising and overall business intelligence. But unlike Foursquare, Factual doesn’t have a consumer-facing app. So most of us probably haven’t heard of them before. But they are some of the data and tech behind many of the companies that we do all know, including Starbucks.
I have long been fascinated by location-based startups — like Foursquare — because they are inherently spatial. And how we move about our cities and spaces is rich with information. Companies want this data because, among other things, it is a register of intent. Me going somewhere signals certain things, including where else my kind might want to go.
But location data can also be used for many other things beyond advertising and retail analytics. Foursquare has started sharing aggregated and anonymized foot traffic data with local governments and public health officials in the fight against COVID-19. That data is currently powering http://www.visitdata.org. Foursquare is also publishing a regular insights report.
Here is a chart from them showing casino visits in Clark County since March 1:
In many ways this chart is fairly obvious. In fact, it actually mirrors my own journey into isolation. After the NBA shutdown on Wednesday, March 11, things started to feel pretty real and on Friday I was working from home. But there’s a lot more that can be done with location data and there’s a lot more that will be done going forward. I am confident that will help not only business, but also society more broadly.
The following video was published last week showing the “secondary locations of anonymized mobile devices that were active at a single Ft. Lauderdale beach during spring break.” Said differently, the company used anonymized mobile phone data to see where spring breakers went after they left the beach. This was in order to better understand how they may have contributed to the spread of COVID-19. If you can’t see the video below, click here.
Want to see the true potential impact of ignoring social distancing? Through a partnership with @xmodesocial, we analyzed secondary locations of anonymized mobile devices that were active at a single Ft. Lauderdale beach during spring break. This is where they went across the US: pic.twitter.com/3A3ePn9Vin
The video is astonishing for two reasons. One, it shows you the extreme reach of just one beach in South Florida. Imagine if they had analyzed all of the beaches up and down the coast. And two, a lot of you are probably freaked out that this sort of mobile phone data is available to private companies. If you’d like to learn more about how this all works, check out this opinion piece from the New York Times.
Most of us are using the internet and our phones a lot more these days. According to Cloudflare — who recently published these stats on how the pandemic has impacted internet usage — traffic is up about 36% in Toronto between early January and late March 2020. Here is a heatmap of the city:
Similar maps are available for other major cities across the world. The red areas are places where internet traffic has declined and the green areas are where internet traffic has increased. Looking at Toronto, you can see that usage in the financial core of the city has, not surprisingly, declined. This makes sense. Most people are now at home using the internet there.
It would be interesting to see some sort of split between residential and commercial usage, because my mind is associating these red areas with businesses. And when you do that, some cities, like Toronto and New York, appear very monocentric; whereas others, like Berlin, appear far more polycentric.
The other thing Cloudfare looked at was internet activity by category (as of March 2020). What is also not surprising is that kids content is way up, and leads by a wide margin. For you real estate folks, you should also note that apartment searches seem to be down and are not far off from air travel. Now would be a suboptimal time to move.
Much of this probably won’t surprise you, but it is revealing nonetheless.
Smartphone user data is hugely valuable at a time like this. Which is why governments all over the world from Israel to South Korea are using aggregated telecom data to try and track how their citizens are moving during this pandemic.
Some are calling this a violation of digital rights. I don’t know enough to comment on that specifically, but I do know that the value to society as a whole is clear. It strikes me that if we knew (1) who was infected (you know this by doing widespread testing), (2) where people have been, and (3) where people are today, we would be in a much better position to contain the spread.
To that end, Singapore’s Ministry of Health has been publicizing a surprising amount of information regarding its cases. And that data has been in turn made into interactive maps. You can see who is infected, where they live and work, which hospital they were admitted to, and so on. Is this an overshare? Or is this price of collective health and security?
The New York Times has similarly gone and visualized the movement of people and the virus using data from major telecoms, Baidu, and other sources; though in this case it is more of a retrospective view of what went wrong as opposed to a proactive management tool. The argument they make is that Wuhan’s lockdown was too little, too late.
According to the NY Times, 175,000 people left Wuhan on January 1st alone. Throughout the month of January, outbound travel from Wuhan accelerated as many started to fear a lockdown. About 7 million people left in January. Where they travelled to can be found here. Would it be too draconian to use this kind of mobile phone data to see who is obeying a lockdown and who is not?
