Coronavirus-related disruptions continued to impact the local tech and startup community Thursday, despite no confirmed cases in the Austin area.
Startup Crawl at SXSW, which was slated for Friday, March 13, has been postponed to June 22. Meanwhile, Capital Factory House at SXSW has also been canceled, founder Joshua Baer wrote today. Additionally, defense related programming planned for Capital Factory House will be moved to Defense Week, June 22–26.
"There is no hesitation about this decision after reviewing all of the available information and speaking at length with all of our team, our members, our partners, and our advisors," Baer wrote.
Outside of that, Capital Factory, one of the biggest hubs for startups in Austin, will open as usual for the time being, and large events or those with international attendees will be evaluated on case-by-case basis. The "Hack Coronavirus Town Hall" they've planned for Friday is also still on as scheduled.
Meanwhile, Zoho, a business software company that moved its HQ from California to Austin last year, announced it has canceled its Zoholics 2020 event because of concerns about the coronavirus outbreak.
The event had been slated for April 28-30 at the Palmer Event Center. The company cited COVID-19 as the reason. "With no foreseeable end in sight, we've had to make this difficult decision — Zoholics Austin is now cancelled," the company posted.
The company had planned keynote speeches by its co-founder and CEO Sridhar Vembu, as well as 40-plus other Zoho leaders. The company has about 100 employees in Austin and 7,000 globally.
The moves comes as companies across Austin and throughout the U.S. have been enacting new measures, including limiting or banning travel for conferences, canceling events and, in some cases, asking employees to work from home.
Meanwhile, we've updated our list of SXSW additions and cancellations, including recent withdrawals from some events and screenings by Apple, IBM, Netflix and WarnerMedia. As Beat readers know, the event is still going on mostly as planned and festival organizers are working with a group of physicians and the city to monitor the situation leading up the festival.
We've also added a bunch of new voices to our main SXSW/coronavirus story by adding in new tweets from founders, investors, physicians, conference speakers and more.
