My favorite use of screen time for my daughter is to make some snacks, gather in the living room, and have family movie night. My husband and I like to introduce her to some of our old favorites, and we also love experiencing new movies as a family. Amazon Prime Video has plenty of movie options for us to do just that. Prime Video also has a wide selection of hour-long "movie" episodes of kids TV shows — the perfect length to hold a preschooler's attention. 

Prime Video is currently available as part of an Amazon Prime membership for $12.99 per month or $119 per year. Other perks offered with a Prime membership include free two-day shipping on a large selection of eligible items, Prime Music streaming, and more. You can also subscribe to Prime Video as a standalone service for $8.99 per month.

Scrolling through the seemingly endless options on streaming services can often make the act of choosing a movie take more time than actually watching it. When you have a young kid with a short attention span, you don't have that kind of time. To speed along the process, we put together a list of options for you. 

Our picks feature a mix of animated and live-action titles selected from the Prime Video app's Kids and Family content sections. All of our recommended kids' movies are rated G or PG, and the ratings are listed for each title under their descriptions.

Updated on 03/20/2020 by Steven Cohen: Removed films no longer available on Prime Video and added new picks available to stream right now. Updated formatting and details about the selection process.

Check out our list of the top 15 kids' movies on Amazon Prime Video: 

*Series descriptions are provided by Amazon and lightly edited for length.

Twenty-eight percent of a nurse’s time is wasted on low-skilled tasks like fetching medical tools. We need them focused on the complex and compassionate work of treating patients, especially amid the coronavirus outbreak. Diligent Robotics wants to give them a helper droid that can run errands for them around the hospital. The startup’s bot Moxi is equipped with a flexible arm, gripper hand and full mobility so it can hunt down lightweight medical resources, navigate a clinic’s hallways and drop them off for the nurse.

With the world facing a critical shortage of medical care professionals, Moxi could help healthcare centers use their staffs as efficiently as possible. And because robots can’t be infected by COVID-19, they’re one less potential carrier interacting with vulnerable populations.

Today, Diligent Robotics announces its $10 million Series A that will help it scale up to deliver “more robots to more hospitals,” CEO Andrea Thomaz tells me. “We’ve been designing our product, Moxi, side by side with hospital customers because we don’t just want to give them an automation solution for their materials management problems. We want to give them a robot that frontline staff are delighted to work with and feels like a part of the team.”

The round, led by DNX Ventures, brings Diligent Robotics to $15.75 million in total funding that’s propelled it to the fifth generation of its Moxi robot. It currently has two deployed in Dallas, Texas, but is already working with two of the three top hospital networks in the U.S. “As the current pandemic and circumstance has shown, the real heroes are our healthcare providers,” says Q Motiwala, partner at DNX Ventures. The new cash from DNX, True Ventures, Ubiquity Ventures, Next Coast Ventures, Grit Ventures, E14 Fund and Promus Ventures will help Diligent Robotics expand Moxi’s use cases and seamlessly complement nurses’ workflows to help alleviate the talent crunch.

Thomaz came up with the idea for a hospital droid after doing her PhD in social robotics at the MIT Media lab. Her co-founder and CTO Vivian Chu had done a master’s at UPenn on how to give robots a sense of touch, and then came to work with Thomaz at Georgia Tech. They were inspired by a study revealing how nurses spent so much time acting as hospital gofers, so in 2016 they applied for and won a National Science Foundation grant of $750,000 that funded a six-month sprint to build a prototype of Moxi.

Since then, 18-person Diligent Robotics has worked with hundreds of nurses to learn about exactly what they need from an autonomous assistant. “Today you will go about your day, and you probably won’t interact with any robots….we want to change that,” Thomaz tells me. “The only way you can really bring robots out of the warehouses, off of the factory floors, is to build a robot that can work in our dynamic and messy everyday human environments.” The startup’s intention isn’t to fully replace humans, which it doesn’t think is possible, but to let them focus on the most human elements of their jobs.

Moxi is about the size of a human, but designed to look like an ’80s movie robot so as not to engender an uncanny valley cyborg weirdness. Its head and eyes can move to signal intent, like which direction it’s about to move, while sounds let it communicate with nurses and acknowledge their commands. A moving pillar lets it adjust its height, while its gripper hand and arm can pick and put down smaller pieces of hospital equipment. Its round shape and courteous navigation makes sure it can politely share crowded hallways and travel via elevator.

Diligent Robotics’ solution engineers work with hospitals to teach Moxi how to get around and what they need. The company hopes to eventually build the ability to learn and adapt right into the bot so nurses can teach it new tasks on the fly. “The team continues to demonstrate unmatched robotics-specific innovation by combining social intelligence and human-guided learning capabilities,” says True Ventures partner and Diligent board member Rohit Sharma.

Hospitals pay an upfront fee to buy Moxi robots, and then there’s a monthly fee for the software, services and maintenance. Thomaz admits that “Hospitals are naturally risk-averse, and can be wary to take up new technology,” so the startup is taking a slow and steady approach to deployment so it can convince buyers that Moxi is worth the learning curve.

Diligent Robotics will be competing with companies like Aethon’s TUG bot for pulling laundry and pharmacy carts. Other players in the hospital tech space include Xenex’s machine that disinfects rooms with light, and surgical bots like those from Johnson & Johnson’s Auris and Intuitive Surgical.

Diligent Robotics hopes to differentiate itself by building social intelligence into Moxi so it feels more like an intern than a gadget. “Time and again, we hear from our hospital partners that Moxi not only returns time back to their day but also brings a smile to their face,” says Thomaz. The company wants to evolve Moxi for other dull, dirty or dangerous service jobs.

Eventually, Diligent Robotics hopes to bring Moxi into people’s homes. “While we don’t see robots replacing the companionship and the human connection, we do dream of a time that robots could make nursing homes more pleasant by offsetting the often staggering numbers of caretakers to bed ratios (as bad as 30:1),” Thomaz concludes. That way, Moxi could “help people age with dignity and hold onto their independence for as long as possible.”

French startup October wants to reduce the pressure on small and medium companies going through the coronavirus crisis. In order to give them some headroom, companies that have borrowed money on October won’t have to pay back their loans for the next three months.

October works with small companies in France, Spain, Italy, Netherlands and Germany that need a credit line. One of the company’s key advantages compared to borrowing money from a bank is that it’s much faster. You can apply to a credit line and get an answer just a few days later. Usually, companies pay back their loans over time, with monthly repayments over three months to seven years.

October evaluates risk before handing out loans. It works with many institutional partners to raise funds and deploy capital in those loans. Some retail customers also invest on October directly on a company-by-company basis.

But many small European companies that have borrowed money on October won’t generate revenue for a little while. They could face cash flow issues and they could have issues repaying those loans.

That’s why October has decided with its institutional partners that it is postponing all outstanding loans for the next three months. Companies won’t have to pay a huge sum of money after that; October is also postponing the end date of the loans by three months.

October then asked retail investors to vote whether they are in favor or against postponing loans; 99.42% of retail investors who voted followed October’s move.

October is also waving its own fees for the next three months, but companies will still have to pay interest on outstanding capital.

This way, fewer companies should go bankrupt over the next three months. It should minimize the impact of the current economic crisis on the overall default rate of October loans.

Ohio-based Coterie, a startup working on in the commercial insurance space, has announced today it has raised $8.5 million Series A. The company had previously raised a little over $3 million in early investments, bringing its equity capital raised to nearly $12 million to date; the firm also told TechCrunch that it has raised $2.5 million in available venture debt as part of its current round.

In an uncertain market, Coterie is better capitalized than it ever has been, thanks to Intercept, and The Hartford, and RPM Ventures , which led its latest round.

Coterie operates in insurtech, a space we’ve covered extensively in recent months. But it’s not MetroMile or Lemonade, both of which selling consumer insurance. Nor is it akin to The Zebra, Policygenius, Gabi, or Insurify, helping consumers link to third-party insurance products. It’s closest private market comp, looking at our recent coverage, is Briza, which produces APIs linking small businesses to small business insurance products.

But what Coterie does is slightly different if we’re grokking its model correctly: It offers what it calls “commercial insurance as a service,” according to an interview with TechCrunch. Let’s explore.

Model

In a call with TechCrunch about its latest funding event, Coterie explained that, using APIs, it connects “places that have some commercial insurance requirement, or service customers who need commercial insurance, and we simply pass that information into our system and we quote and bind automatically.”

While Coterie does partner with external insurance entities (more on that in a second), it handles a lot of the work in-house: “We actually have the underwriting control, so we don’t we don’t ship it off to 10 different carriers. We actually say yes, we will bind this policy, or no, we won’t,” said Coterie CEO David McFarland, adding that “most of the time we have a pretty broad appetite so we can write a good bit of business.”

Helping it in this process are some partners in the insurance market that help with “the licenses and the capital requirements,” the company said.

What makes Coterie interesting isn’t that is a digital take on a previously paper business, but that it’s product allows it to insure freelancers (Coterie partners with freelance marketplaces, allowing it access to a potential customer base and helping the marketplace itself provide insured providers) for even small increments of time; that’s something that wasn’t economically attractive under old models, if even possible.

According to the firm, it offers general and professional liability insurance, along with business owners policies. Coterie has eyes on various types of data to power its model (and make good policy pricing choices), highlighting information like business payment flows to vet company health, to pick an example.

Coterie only started selling its products in September of 2019, but noted to TechCrunch that it saw “pretty good growth” from from the jump, and “pretty steady growth” since then. But as Coterie noted in our call, insurance is a somewhat low-margin business, meaning that policy growth, while good, needs to be pretty steep for the gross margin generated to stack up too high.

But with $8.5 million in new equity capital and total access to over $10 million in funds, the startup now has more money than ever to pursue its model. And if it’s like the rest of the insurtech space, it has a good shot at quick growth.

Update: The first version of this post included an incorrect investor; it has since been corrected.

Sramana Mitra: Do you want to do another example? Ashish Jain: Let’s take one from India. I would not even call it emerging anymore. India is going through Innovation 3.0. 1.0 was around business...

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We’re big believers in Bootstrapping Using Services, as you know. Here’s the story of CEO James Kane who scaled RWS to over $10 million in revenue using the method. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the...

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Entrepreneurs are invited to the 477th FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Thursday, March 19, 2020, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/4 p.m. CET/8:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious...

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In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here: 477th 1Mby1M Roundtable March 19, 2020: With Elly Truesdell, Almanac Insights

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At-home diagnostics startup Scanwell, which produces smartphone-based testing for UTIs, is working on getting at-home testing for the novel coronavirus into the hands of U.S. residents. The technology, which was developed by Chinese diagnostic technology company INNOVITA and has already been approved by China’s equivalent of the FDA and used by “millions” in China, can be taken at home in 15 minutes with the guidance of a medical professional via telehealth, and produces results in just hours.

Scanwell’s test will require FDA clearance, but the company tells me that it’s in the process of securing approval through the FDA’s accelerated emergency certification program. The FDA guidance says that this approval process should take 6-8 weeks (though that “could be faster,” Scanwell says), and Scanwell is aiming to be ready to go with shipping these as soon as it receives that approval. While the U.S. drug regulatory agency previously had only included PCR tests in its protocols, it updated that guidance to include serological tests earlier this week. Scanwell further says they “don’t anticipate any issues with FDA approval.”

The test that Scanwell is aiming to launch uses what’s called a ‘serological’ technique, which looks for antibodies in a patient’s blood. These are only present if someone has been exposed to the SARS-CoV-2 virus, since as of right now researchers haven’t found any evidence that natural antibodies to this particular virus exist without exposure. By contrast, the types of tests that are currently in use in the U.S. are “PCR” tests, which use a molecular-based approach to determine if the virus is present genetically in a mucus sample.

The PCR type of test is technically more accurate than the serological variety, but the serological version is much easier to administer, and produces results more quickly. It’s also still very accurate on the whole, and is much cheaper to produce than the PCR version. Plus, it could help expand efforts beyond testing only the most severe cases with symptoms present, and do a much better job of illuminating the full extent of the presence of the virus, including among people with mild cases who have already recovered at home, and those who are asymptomatic but carrying the virus with the possibility of infecting others.

Other, PCR-based at-home testing options already exist, like one from Everlywell that will start going out on Monday, require round-tripping test samples, adding time, complexity and cost and relying on testing materials like swabs that are in short supply globally. Scanwell’s can be performed completely at home, reducing time for a diagnosis and lessening strain on the supply chain.

Once the test is available, people deemed eligible via Scanwell’s screening process in their Scanwell Health app will be sent the test via next-day delivery. They’ll be guided by telehealth partner Lemonaid‘s licensed doctors and nurse practitioners, and they’ll then receive results and further guidance about those results via the app within a few hours. The whole testing process will cost $70, which Scanwell says just covers its costs (it’s also looking at ways to provide free service to those who need it), and will be deployed first in Washington, California and New York, as well as other areas depending on the severity of their coronavirus situation.

That the tests will take potentially 6-8 weeks to come to market seems like a long time, given the current state of the rapidly evolving COVID-19 situation and testing. But we’ll likely still be very much in need of testing options at that time, especially ones that can serve people who aren’t necessarily meeting the criteria for other available testing resources.

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