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Google told employees this week that the company will hold off on reopening its offices until Sept. 7, according to a memo obtained by Bloomberg News.
<p>The company employs more than 1,000 people in Austin and took steps last year to expand its office space both downtown and on the East Side. <a href="https://www.statesman.com/news/20190614/google-says-it-plans-significant-expansion-in-austin" target="_blank">As of last June</a>, Austin was Google's seventh-largest office outside of the San Francisco Bay Area.</p><p>The decision came as both Texas and California, the state where most of the tech giant's employees work, have seen spikes in coronavirus cases. Texas saw nearly 7,000 new cases Tuesday.</p><p>"While conditions do vary from state to state, we need to see that the U.S. outlook as a whole is stable before we move forward," Chris Rackow, vice president of global security, wrote in the memo. "As the recent resurgence of cases demonstrates, Covid-19 is still very much alive in our communities."</p><p>Previously, the company's CEO Sundar Pichai <a href="https://www.blog.google/inside-google/working-google/working-from-home-and-office/" target="_blank">told employees in May</a> that the company would begin slowly returning some workers to the office on July 6. Those plans now appear to be scrapped based on the company memo.</p><p>Google's parent company, Alphabet, sent employees home during the second week of March, weeks ahead of some of the other big tech companies. Indeed, another tech giant with offices in Austin, sent its employees home barely a week earlier, one of the first companies in Austin to do so.</p><p>Even without the recent spikes in coronavirus cases in the U.S., the company planned for most Google employees to work from home through the end of the year. The work from home extension this week also comes on the heels of a host of other tech companies announcing that they would allow some employees to <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/22/tech/work-from-home-companies/index.html" target="_blank">work from home "forever" if their job allows.</a></p>
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(Gerald Youngblood)
Tankee founder and CEO Gerald Youngblood posing with his son at Graffiti Park.
This summer doesn't look much like last summer for a lot of kids.
<p>Camps are allowed to operate, but <a href="https://austonia.com/summer-camps-austin" target="_blank">not all</a> of them will; pools are up and running, but <a href="https://austonia.com/barton-springs-reopens-with-restrictions" target="_blank">reservations and masks</a> are required; and of course they're coming off <a href="https://austonia.com/Coronavirus/teen-pandemic" target="_blank">months of at-home learning</a> in a pandemic that is, for some, providing an excellent excuse to spend more time on their primary obsession: playing video games or watching other people play them via streaming services. </p><p>All that time at home for kids has been an opportunity for Tankee, an Austin-based streaming video platform that offers a large library of content geared toward children of all ages. That library includes lots of walkthroughs/tutorials from top gamers about Minecraft, Roblox, and Fortnite as well as videos from influencers with their own massive following, such as Eh Bee Family and Thinknoodles.</p><p>Before the pandemic, users typically watched about an hour per day on average, with a noticeable spike on the weekends during the school year.</p><p>"What we've seen [since the pandemic hit] is the weekend has become every day," said founder and CEO Gerald Youngblood, who cited a 500% uptick in consumption as of May.</p><p><strong>A parent's perspective</strong></p><p>Part of that success can be attributed to Tankee launching on Roku and Comcast's Xfinity set-top boxes. But Youngblood, who is also a parent, said it's also because the platform provides a safe place, which isn't always true of other streaming services.</p><p>"Parents tend to do one of two things. Either they tell their kids to turn up the volume in case a swear word comes up, or they're hovering behind them watching over their shoulders," he said. "But the whole time parents are doing this, they're not actually doing other things, right? They're not reading their book, washing the dishes, or [working]."</p><p>Monitoring what's being watched online can be quite a challenge for parents who are weary of inappropriate content on platforms like YouTube and Twitch. He launched the company in 2018 after recognizing many popular streaming platforms were exhausting to police for young eyes. </p><p>"With YouTube you don't know what that next video is going to be. Even if you feel comfortable about what they're watching, you don't know what the next video will be," he explained. "And it's far too easy for kids to get into things that are not just inappropriate, but damaging."</p><p>All the videos on Tankee's platform are screened by a team of curators, and about a third of its library is produced in-house. </p><p><strong>The big questions</strong></p><div class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="7ccfaad54c2c0a8fb3fe1fe280ebb418" id="58343"><blockquote class="twitter-tweet twitter-custom-tweet" data-partner="rebelmouse" data-twitter-tweet-id="1243205327069347841"><div style="margin:1em 0">NEW Germ-Busting Video now on Tankee from our friends at @KUncomplicated to remind kids how to stay safe during the… https://t.co/K7NulAUUIF</div> — Tankee - Kids Gaming Network (@Tankee - Kids Gaming Network)<a href="https://twitter.com/TankeeGaming/statuses/1243205327069347841">1585238222.0</a></blockquote></div><p><br/></p><p>Youngblood said he feels strongly about including content about important issues like the pandemic, and serious topics like systemic racism and the police protests happening in Austin and all around the country. </p><p>The pandemic led Tankee to produce videos that went over best practices for social distancing, hand washing, and more. It was done in an animated video so that the topic wasn't so ominous or scary for children. </p><p>Youngblood said producing content that's a good fit for the platform's young audience is the key, which meant that tackling racism required a different strategy. "Injustice and brutality is a much tougher thing for us to address on the platform," he said.</p><p>"As a Black founder, it's really important to me that we don't overwhelm kids with things that they are going to struggle to understand or make them fearful of the world. So we're taking a different approach, looking at ways to infuse more positivity with a message that they have value and to be kind to one another," he said.</p>
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GoDaddy to close both Austin offices and lay off hundreds of workers as pandemic impacts business
24 June
(GoDaddy)
The tech company GoDaddy announced Wednesday it would be laying off more than 300 workers, including many in Austin, and closing both of its offices there as well.
<p>The change comes as the company, which offers website-hosting services as well as social media management for businesses, has experienced revenue losses in the latter of the two offerings, formally known as GoDaddy Social. The office closings and layoffs were announced in an email to employees from the company's CEO Aman Bhutani.</p><p>Overall, GoDaddy's financial expectations for the second quarter have actually gone up despite the pandemic. This follows a trend seen across many tech companies in recent months, which have been able to maintain a firm economic standing even as other sectors have fallen drastically. Nevertheless, the decline in revenue from GoDaddy Social, which is heavily based in Austin, created the need for steep cuts to that part of the company.</p><p>"Even as our overall business continues to perform well and we are updating our revenue guidance for Q2 as evidence of that, we are still facing challenges in U.S. outbound sales, including GoDaddy Social sales," Bhutani said in the email, which was posted to the company's website. "The outbound sales teams have made many creative efforts over the last three months to reverse the impacts of COVID-19, but the results of these improvements are still far below what we need for the operations to be sustainable."</p><p>Shortly after announcing the layoffs, the company <a href="https://aboutus.godaddy.net/newsroom/news-releases/press-release-details/2020/GoDaddy-Sees-Continued-Strength-in-Overall-Business/default.aspx" target="_blank">issued a statement</a> saying its second-quarter revenue would exceed previous expectations by 1%. Purchases of website domains and marketing services led the rise, the company says.</p><p>The layoffs also come just a year and a half after GoDaddy purchased Main Street Hub, a social media management company based in Austin, for $125 million.</p>
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(SeanPavonePhoto/Adobe)
In 2010, shortly after the Great Recession ended, entrepreneur Paul O'Brien and his family—wife and three kids—packed up their home in the Silicon Valley town of Los Gatos and headed to the Silicon Hills hub of Austin. The O'Briens were eager for a better quality of life.
<p>The mortgage crisis and other issues "made us realize we were not where we wanted to be," said O'Brien, founder and CEO of Austin-based MediaTech Ventures.</p><p>Ten years after arriving here, O'Brien believes many current residents of the San Francisco Bay Area—encompassing the San Francisco and San Jose metro areas—will pull up stakes and settle in Austin (and other cities in Texas) to flee sky-high housing prices and other quality-of-life drawbacks. Why now? The coronavirus pandemic has propelled the remote-work movement, freeing up folks who've been tethered to offices to work from, and live, practically anywhere.</p><p>On Twitter, Silicon Valley investor and entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan wrote in May that the remote-work wave has erased some of the key reasons for staying in the Bay Area.</p><p>"The office isn't used, the industry is going remote," <a href="https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1260276923743129600" target="_blank">he tweeted</a>. "So SF is just pure repulsion. And people will fly away."</p><p>A <a href="https://www.redfin.com/blog/wfh-leaving-new-york-san-francisco/" target="_blank">May 3-5 survey by Redfin</a>, a residential real estate brokerage company, found that 51% of people living in San Francisco would "fly away" if current work-from-home policies became permanent. The No. 1 driver of this would-be exodus? The desire to live somewhere less expensive. The <a href="https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Bay-Area-migration-Coronavirus-prompts-residents-15225445.php" target="_blank">San Francisco Chronicle reported in April</a> that, based on anecdotal evidence, the coronavirus pandemic apparently "has prompted a minor but disorienting Bay Area exodus."</p><p>Before the pandemic, 35% of local residents indicated in a <a href="https://sfgov.org/citysurvey/likely-leave-san-francisco" target="_blank">2019 survey</a> by the San Francisco Controller's Office that they were likely to move away from San Francisco in the next three years.</p><p>Perhaps buoying the potential San Francisco-to-Austin shift is the fact that a number of Northern California-based employers maintain sizeable outposts in Central Texas. The list includes AMD, Apple, Applied Materials, Dropbox, Facebook, Google, Oracle, PayPal and Visa.</p><p>Data suggests a pandemic-inspired migration from the Bay Area to Austin might already be underway.</p><p>Figures from Apartments.com show an upward trend in searches by people in San Francisco for places to live in Austin. The data covers the period from Feb. 1 to June 5.</p><p>Another apartment website, Zumper, has recorded a 29% spike in Austin searches by people located in the San Francisco Bay area. The site compared the two-month period of February and March to the two-month period of April and May. Zumper noted that May is the kickoff of the summer moving season, which might account for part of the 29% increase.</p><p>Of course, Austin has seen this scene play out for a while, with a steady stream of folks transplanting themselves from the Bay Area to Austin in the years since the Great Recession. One high-profile example: Silicon Valley entrepreneur, investor, author and podcaster Tim Ferriss relocated to Austin in 2017 to escape an environment that <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/why-tim-ferriss-left-silicon-valley-for-austin-texas-2017-12" target="_blank">he branded as close-minded</a>.</p><p>"While many poke fun at all the immigrants to Austin, and even disdain all those Californians," O'Brien said, "the fact is that many left in 2009 and 2010 precisely to be Texan and not Californian. Austin, from that point forward, became a prototype—an MVP—of how cities throughout the world could also thrive through the internet and how we could all look to the internet in our traditional industries."</p>
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Developers look beyond pandemic, protests and see a bright future for the Austin office market
10 June
Two weeks ago, as Texas continued its pandemic reopening plan but before mass protests against police violence erupted in downtown Austin, a $275 million deal fell through.
<p>Ryman Hospitality Properties announced May 22 that it would not purchase Block 21, a mixed-use real estate development that includes ACL Live at the Moody Theater and the W Austin, from Stratus Properties, forfeiting a $15 million nonrefundable deposit.<br/></p><p>"In the current capital markets and economic environment caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, we have determined that it is not in the best interest of our shareholders to focus our resources and capital on this project at this time," Ryman CEO Colin Reed said in a press release.</p><p>In the wake of COVID's arrival in Austin—and after more than a decade of strong sustained growth—the local office real estate market contracted. But experts say that the city is poised to recover, even if office space <a href="https://austonia.com/lifestyle/the-workplace-of-tomorrow-reopening-austin-offices-plan-for-one-way-foot-traffic-sanitizing-stations-distanced-desks" target="_self">looks different</a> post-pandemic.</p><p>"I think what you'll see in Austin is short-term paralysis as a result of the freeze in the venture market," said Ryan Bohls, a director focused on office tenant representation for NAI Partners' Austin office. </p><p>But in the longer term, Bohls believe Austin's strong relationships with what he calls "the four horsemen"—Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google—will sustain the city's office market, especially as they and other tech companies seek to expand their reach into cities outside of the coastal areas hit harder by the pandemic.</p><p>The city's diverse economy—which includes big tech as well as the University of Texas at Austin, Ascension Seton and most recently the U.S. Army—is what helped it rebound after the 2008 recession.</p><p>Ben Tolson, a principal for Aquila Commercial, believes that diverse economy will carry the city through this crisis as well. "I just feel very, very positively about how our city's positioned relative, again, to much of the nation," he said. </p><p>While data is limited, initial reports indicate that market activity picked up toward the end of May. As more workers return to their offices, companies will likely reevaluate their needs.<br/></p><p>Richard Paddock, who oversees HPI's Austin office portfolio, said he is hearing from tenants and companies that most are incorporating a work-from-home strategy into their business plans. But this does not mean office space is obsolete.<br/></p><p>Paddock anticipates some companies will downsize, which may reduce the overall occupied square footage across Austin's office market. "But it still yields velocity," he said.<br/></p><p>Other companies may realize they want more space, either to accommodate social distancing or because of trends that predate the pandemic.<br/></p><p>Research <a href="https://hbr.org/2019/11/the-truth-about-open-offices" target="_blank">published in the Harvard Business Journal</a> found that denser offices resulted in less meaningful interaction among employees—and therefore less productive collaboration.<br/></p><p>Open-floor plans were <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/04/health/coronavirus-office-makeover.html" target="_blank">on their way out</a> before COVID-19, Tolson said, as companies moved to "de-densify" their spaces and improve productivity. "That's going to be accelerated as a result of this," he said.<br/></p><p>There was also a trend in Austin toward neighborhoods such as East Austin, Mueller and Parmer Lane, where office space is cheaper, parking easier and commutes shorter. "Austin has a tremendous amount of really well positioned mid-rise [and] low-rise opportunities," Tolson said.<br/></p><p>While working from home may outlast the pandemic, Bohls said major employers will continue to use top-tier offices—with prime locations, walkable amenities and perks—as a recruiting tool, "especially for technology companies that use real estate to lure top talent."<br/></p><p>And what about the protests downtown?<br/></p><p>"The effects of the civic unrest are largely going to be confined to first-floor retail occupiers," Bohls said. <br/></p>
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Should Tesla move its HQ to Austin? Take our poll.
Elon Musk threatened to pull Tesla all operations out of California and move them them to Texas and Nevada in a tweet today. Musk is currently in conflict with officials in California over whether his Alameda factory should be allowed to reopen.
@GerberKawasaki @thirdrowtesla Frankly, this is the final straw. Tesla will now move its HQ and future programs to… https://t.co/IDLjEvXyDW— Elon Musk (@Elon Musk)1589042677.0
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The Austin-based education platform Aceable has brought in the former CEO of Austin-based RetailMeNot, Marissa Tarleton, as its new president.
According to the news release:
<p style="margin-left: 20px;">Tarleton has over 20 years of e-commerce and marketing leadership experience for companies including RetailMeNot, RxSaver by RetailMeNot, Dell and Ogilvy & Mather. She was named a top 50 CMO on the inaugural Forbes CMO Next list in 2018, is a member of YPO Austin, and is a 2020 Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute.</p><p>The release also says that Aceable founder Blake Garrett will remain at the company as CEO.</p>
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Bobboz/Adobe Stock
"We really went from concept to implementation in less than three weeks," said Chris Merdon, NTT Data's senior vice president of public sector. (Bobboz/Adobe Stock)
Returning Austin from pandemic lockdown to some measure of normalcy will require improved contact tracing, the practice of identifying and isolating anyone infected with COVID-19.
But with an insufficient supply of testing kits and a limited amount of manpower, this is easier said than done. Tech giants like Apple and Google have announced their own solutions—all of which seem weeks or months away from availability—that come with concerns about security and the use of personal data.
<p>Austin won't have to wait long. City officials recently rolled out a new set of <a href="https://covid19.austintexas.gov/s/?language=en_US" target="_blank"><u>digital tools</u></a> focused on making this process more efficient.</p><p>Austin residents who suspect they might be infected with COVID-19 can now download a mobile app or visit a dedicated website to determine if testing is necessary after answering a series of questions, the <a data-linked-post="2645821215" href="https://austonia.com/austins-public-covid-19-online-testing-enrollment-system-is-live" target="_blank">city of Austin announced last week</a>. The system is part of a comprehensive platform built by Plano-based technology firm NTT Data, a Fortune 50 company.</p><p>"The reality is, this happened very quickly. We really went from concept to implementation in less than three weeks," said Chris Merdon, NTT Data's senior vice president of public sector. The software was built using Salesforce's PaaS [platform as a service], marking the first time the company has used it for COVID-19 contact tracing. </p><p>"The advantage of Salesforce is that it's able to scale quickly," Merdon said, making it easier to expand the city's contact tracing initiatives as necessary.</p><p>Prior to the platform being implemented, a physician would screen patients to decide if testing was needed. Then, further coordination was required to determine when and where to send people to testing sites—not to mention contacting those infected or potentially exposed. But now most of those steps have been automated, allowing city officials to focus their efforts elsewhere.</p><p>"If a recommendation to get tested is made, you are provided with a QR code and directed to the nearest of five testing centers located throughout Austin," he explained, adding that the platform is able to schedule appointments every 15 minutes. After being tested, people are automatically sent an email notifying them when results are available through the contact tracing website. Those who test positive will also receive instructions on what to do next, and will be prompted to fill out a survey to help identify who they may have come into contact with in the past few days or weeks.</p><p>In addition to speeding up the screening process, <a data-linked-post="2645744786" href="https://austonia.com/Coronavirus/officials-will-debut-new-covid-19-testing-enrollment-system-to-expand-access-tracking" target="_blank">the new platform will allow</a> officials to more easily find infection hotspots and better distribute limited resources like test kits or personal protective equipment where needed. Austin Public Health officials anticipate initially testing up to 2,000 people per week. That figure is expected to grow as the supply of test kits, and the number of labs processing results, increase. But the city wouldn't be able to ramp up without the new contact tracing platform. </p><p><strong>Security and privacy concerns</strong></p><p>Much of the discussion about contact tracing technology has centered around the partnership announced April 10 between <a href="https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/04/apple-and-google-partner-on-covid-19-contact-tracing-technology/" target="_blank"><u>Google and Apple</u></a> to produce a comprehensive solution that regional health organizations can connect to their own efforts. This has caused <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/04/14/999472/how-apple-and-google-are-tackling-their-covid-privacy-problem/" target="_blank"><u>concerns about security and privacy</u></a> of personal data, despite <a href="https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-and-google-say-they-will-shut-down-covid-19-tracking-tools-once-pandemic-ends/" target="_blank"><u>claims</u></a> by both companies that such data would not be harvested or used outside of the COVID-19 contact tracing efforts. </p><p>Merdon said that protecting personal information was at the top of the list of priorities for the city and for NTT Data. The city's platform is fully encrypted and HIPAA compliant, with data stored on a FedRAMP-certified data center at Salesforce. He said the overall approach to the city's platform is also completely different from what Google and Apple are building.</p><p>"We are partnering with government to jointly develop the [platform], while the data itself will actually be owned by the government," he said. "The Google/Apple model is a little bit different because they are developing the application themselves without a government partner. They're retaining ownership of the data and then making it available to government partners."</p><p>The Google-Apple approach to contact tracing involves using Bluetooth technology from smartphones to track when people may have encountered one another. But participation requires downloading an app and opting in, to some degree. </p><p>Justin Harvey, CEO and founder of Austin-based Spatial Cinematic, said that the data being collected by Google-Apple's platform doesn't include locations, only contacts. Since each smartphone has a unique identifier, what's happening is that the platform will log when your smartphone comes within a specific distance of another smartphone. People typically carry their mobile devices everywhere, so this could provide a more accurate and comprehensive way to track and identify those exposed to the virus. Collected data is stored on a smartphone rather than a central database.</p><p>"The only data that's leaving the device is data from someone who has self-reported as positive," Harvey said. </p>
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