Salesforce is cancelling all its events for the rest of 2020 and making them virtual, including its annual Dreamforce conference.
Dreamforce is the cloud giant's largest event of the year, with over 170,000 attendees at the 2019 event.
This also applies to other Salesforce events, including Tableau Conference 2020, Tableau Conference Europe, TrailheaDX India and its World Tour customer events.
Salesforce said it made the decision as the "COVID-19 situation continues to evolve" and its "first priority is to help ensure the health and safety of our customers, partners, employees and communities."
Salesforce is cancelling all its events for the rest of 2020 and bringing them online, including its annual Dreamforce conference that typically takes place in the fall.
Dreamforce is Salesforce's largest annual conference, held in San Francisco, where the cloud giant's headquarters is located. The event usually draws up to 170,000 attendees, and has generated more than $150 million in annual spending for the local economy, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
This comes as the coronavirus pandemic has already canceled or moved online many tech conferences and tech company events in this past spring. Salesforce plans to move all upcoming 2020 events online, inlcuding Dreamforce, Tableau Conference 2020, Tableau Conference Europe, TrailheaDX India and its World Tour customer conferences.
"As the COVID-19 situation continues to evolve, our first priority is to help ensure the health and safety of our customers, partners, employees and communities. With this in mind, we have decided to reimagine our events through the end of the year in new and virtual ways," Salesforce wrote in a blog post.
It already took a similar approach with its World Tour Sydney event in March, and said the event, normally attended by 11,000 people, turned into one "viewed by 80,000 people."
Salesforce says it will refund all passes purchased for upcoming events and will refund all sponsorship fees.
Facebook stands to be a major beneficiary of the pandemic.
Its efforts to combat coronavirus may help revive the company's damaged reputation.
Advertisers are likely to choose Facebook's precise ad tools over other mediums during the crisis.
Unable to attract physical customers, businesses are going online — another trend that may help Facebook.
And the company has also quietly been investing in ecommerce, an area that is growing rapidly due to the pandemic.
Businesses across the United States are being devastated by the coronavirus — losing customers, laying off staff, or being forced to shut down entirely.
But not Facebook.
The California-based social networking giant currently looks set to come out of the pandemic in an increasingly strong position, as the economic crisis reinforces its dominance, helps rehabilitate its image, and accelerates market trends that are working in its favor.
On Wednesday, Facebook announced its financial results for the first quarter of 2020, the period when the crisis began to bite. As expected, Facebook's advertising-business took a hit — but even then, it did better than Wall Street was anticipating and Facebook's stock jumped 10% in after-hours trading.
And in the first few weeks of April — when some of the pandemic and lockdown's impacts have been most acute — Facebook said that its revenue is at roughly the same level as it was during the year-ago period. To be sure, flat revenue is a significant slowdown from Facebook's typical double-digit revenue growth, but it's a sign that the fundamentals of the business remain healthy.
The future is foggier than ever, and a lot could change in the coming months. But for now, in both the near, and long-term, both financially and reputationally, Facebook is positioned to do well.
Advertisers are turning to ad formats that can deliver tangible results
In the midst of the crisis, advertisers are focusing on advertising campaigns and formats that can deliver direct, tangible results, and away from broader awareness-raising efforts, Facebook executives said on a call with analysts on Wednesday.
For Facebook's business thus far, that has meant better performance in verticals like gaming (where the success of the ad can be easy to measure: did the viewer install the game?) over ones like autos (where an advertiser might be trying to less boost their company's reputation in less tangible ways).
It's a trend that will benefit Facebook, which can promise scared and hurting advertisers incredibly precise tools to target narrow segments of the population and track the success of their ads. Advertisers still looking to spend will likely turn to Facebook and similar platforms like Google in the coming weeks and months over other outlets that don't offer the same functionality — like news organizations, who are already reporting a cratering in ad revenues that have sparked industry-wide layoffs.
Coronavirus may do wonders for Facebook's reputation
Facebook has not had a great few years.
Since 2016, the company has been beset by scandals, from Cambridge Analytica's misappropriation of tens of millions of users' data to the social network's role in spreading hate speech that fueled genocide in Myanmar. But now, coronavirus has the potential to help rehabilitate the company's reputation.
Similarly, Facebook is handing out $100 million in grants to 30,000 small businesses in their time of need. For some companies, this cash injection may mean the difference between life and death. They likely won't forget who helped them stay afloat.
Businesses are being forced to develop online presences
Due to lockdowns in place around the globe, the internet is many businesses' only hope of survival.
"With so many businesses forced to close their physical storefronts, more are looking to build their digital presences and those who already invested in their digital presences are increasingly viewing them as their primary storefronts," CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Wednesday.
In the short-term, Facebook may be a major beneficiary of this, as companies use the platform as a free way to build out a long-term presence, and perhaps even take out ads to try to attract customers.
But over the longer-term, it also points to a shift that will also work in the social network's favor.
Over the last decade, the rise of ecommerce and online shopping has been the defining trend of the retail landscape. With physical stores closed, the pandemic is drastically accelerating this, not only bringing more businesses online but forcing ever-more people to adopt online shopping to fulfill their needs.
For years, Facebook has quietly been investing in shopping tools, particularly on Instagram. While this functionality is likely too early to give a material short-term boost to Facebook's revenues, it means the company is well-positioned to take advantage of consumers' shifting shopping habits over the coming years.
It also sounds like Facebook is doubling down on this area: On Wednesday, Mark Zuckerberg said the company would have more to share on this front in the coming weeks.
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Microsoft Teams now has 75 million daily active users, CEO Satya Nadella said on the company's earnings call with analysts on Wednesday.
This comes as the coronavirus pandemic has forced businesses to operate remotely, and has boosted the demand for Microsoft's products that enable communication and collaboration.
The new milestone comes a little more than a month after Microsoft said Teams had 44 million daily active users.
Microsoft has been adding new features to Teams in recent weeks amid all of this growth, as it steps up its push to beat out competitors in the space like Slack and Zoom.
Microsoft's workplace chat app Teams now has 75 million daily active users, CEO Satya Nadella said on the company's earnings call with analysts on Wednesday.
The announcement comes as the coronavirus pandemic has forced businesses to operate remotely, and has boosted the demand for Microsoft's products that enable comminication and collaboration. It also highlights the rapid growth of the tool: On March 18, Microsoft said Teams had hit 44 million daily active users. That was itself up from the 32 million daily active users Teams had just the week before that.
"As COVID-19 impacts every aspect of our work and life, we've seen two years' worth of digital transformation in two months," Nadella said on the call. He touted Microsoft Teams as the only tool that combines meetings, calls, chat and collaboration in one place, given that it integrates with the rest of the Office 365 cloud suite.
Indeed, Teams is part of the broader Microsoft 365 bundle of productivity tools offered by the company, meaning that customers of one are customers of the other, and have merely to turn it on to start using it.
Microsoft also said it plans to release a consumer version of Teams later this year as part of a revamped bundle of its Office 365 tools for consumers, to try and capture that market as well.
This comes as the landscape for video conferencing and communication have become increasingly competitive, as people's personal and professional lives rely on tools like Microsoft Teams to stay connected.
Zoom, in particular, has seen its prominence rise amid the pandemic, with 200 million daily active users at last count. The company confused the issue when, in a recent blog post, it said that it had 300 million daily active users — but then later amended it to say that the number referred only to the number of Zoom meeting participants. Zoom has yet to comment on the matter, first spotted by The Verge.
Microsoft, for its part, says that it had 200 million meeting participants in a day this month. The distinction between the two metrics is that "daily meeting participants" count across multiple meetings: If you take five Zoom or Teams meetings in a day, then you're counted five times.
Slack, which offers a competing chat app, has seen a boost recently as well, but has not released a new daily active user number since October when it said it had 12 million. On March 25, Slack did say it added 9,000 new paid customers about halfway through its current quarter.
On the call, Nadella highlighted that healthcare and educational institutions using Teams, saying in healthcare there were more than 34 million Teams meetings in the past month and that over 183,000 educational institutions are using the tool.
He highlighted a few large customers who are using Teams including the NFL, which used it for its draft and Accenture which is the first organization to surpass 500,000 users on Teams.
"More broadly, we continue to see momentum with organizations across Microsoft 365," Nadella said.
A group of patent lawyers had argued that a "creativity machine," called DABUS, should be listed as an inventor on patents for a shape-changing drink container and a flashing light that mimics brain activity.
But the patent office disagreed, determining that under current law, "only natural persons may be named as an inventor in a patent application."
Artificial intelligence systems cannot legally be credited as inventors on patent applications, the US Trademark and Patent Office (USTPO) said in a ruling Monday that was first reported by The Verge.
"USPTO regulations and rules limit inventorship to natural persons," the agency wrote in its decision to reject a petition arguing that two patents should list an AI system called DABUS as an inventor.
DABUS, a creation of Missouri-based AI expert Dr. Stephen Thaler, was fed a wealth of information including abstract concepts related to design, practicality, color, and emotion. Afterward, the AI program designed two original inventions.
The first is a fractal drink container that can change shapes, making it easier for prosthetic or robotic hands to grip. The second is a flickering light that mimics brain activity — or "neural flame," as Thaler dubbed it — that could potentially be more effective at catching a person's attention in an emergency situation.
The Artificial Inventor Project, an international group of legal experts that filed the patents, has previously filed similar applications across the world in an attempt to convince patent authorities to recognize AI systems as inventors, arguing that current laws are outdated and fail to account for machines' creative output.
So far, the group has been unsuccessful. Earlier this year, the UK's Intellectual Property Office and the European Patent Office both rejected patent applications submitted by Artificial Inventor Project for the drink container and flickering light designed by DABUS. The group has also filed applications in Israel, Taiwan, and Germany, and is recruiting patent lawyers around the world to join its efforts.
Martin Coulter contributed reporting to this story.
Jim Clark and Tom Jermoluk, veterans of the pioneering web browser Netscape, launched the startup Beyond Identity this month with $30 million in Series A funding.
Clark and Jermoluk have a personal history with passwords, which they helped to entrench with systems they put in place 25 years ago. They see Beyond Identity as a form of apology for what they see as "password hell."
Beyond Identity's approach would require you to just access your laptop or phone the way you already do, and after that their software would identify you everywhere online.
"If we do our job right this will be deployed to hundreds of different medium and large companies in the next year," Jermoluk says. The company says that it already has plenty of deals on the books and in the works, but declined to name any customers.
Many other companies and startups are trying to eliminate passwords, which are inconvenient and a security risk.
Twenty-five years ago at the pioneering browser company Netscape, Jim Clark and Tom Jermoluk helped the world get online and connect to websites that could be trusted – by now you know the reassuring little lock icon you see on the left end of your browser address bar that lets you know your connection is secure.
Clark and Jermoluk could have tried for the same kind of security for users – a system to verify your identity wherever you go online – but they couldn't get that done. Instead they helped to give the world passwords – which research shows have led to user frustration and costly security issues – and for that they have sincere regrets.
"We decided to punt on the user authentication because it was just too hard," Clark recalls. "If we had thought of this approach then, we could have eliminated the descent into password hell. For that I'm deeply sorry. Better late than never."
Now they want a shot at redemption.
This month Clark and Jermoluk launched the startup Beyond Identity and announced $30 million in Series A funding from Koch Disruptive Technologies and New Enterprise Associates.
A system based on trust
Clark and Jermoluk were portrayed in the book "The New New Thing" by Michael Lewis as having a magic touch at starting tech companies, but not everything since Netscape has been easy for the pair. Miami real estate ventures more than a decade ago hit major problems, according to the New York Times.
This, they say, could be different.
Beyond Identity's approach would require you to just access your laptop or phone the way you already do – with facial recognition or a fingerprint, for instance – and from then on, everything you access on your device knows who you are – without passwords.
Here's how its system works: Their software is downloaded to a device that is registered by a consumer or employer. Based on that user registration, the software verifies the user with the same system of digital certificates that verifies websites. The user can then interact with websites as if they were also a trusted website, and benefit by the secured connection without needing to sign in.
Trusted websites are verified by certificate authorities, like Komodo, Symantec, and GoDaddy, which act as trusted third parties that tell two connecting websites that they are both legitimate. This is how your bank and cable company can connect when you pay a bill online. The data in the bill payment is encrypted and unreadable to anyone but the bank and cable company, but their certifications allow them to see the data and process the payment with your approval.
In the Beyond Identity process, you would connect with your bank and cable company like another verified website. You wouldn't have to sign in to either to make the payment. The chip in your laptop would tell the websites who you are, acting the same way certificates do for websites. All you have to do is access your laptop with a fingerprint, facial recognition, or passwordless key.
Karmic symmetry
Part of the karmic symmetry of this venture is that Netscape helped to launch the certificates system. The company saw the possibility of extending the certificate system to users, but it wasn't feasible at the time.
Certificates issued by trusted certificate authority companies were not scalable to hundreds of millions or billions of individual users. At that time an identifying chip required too much computing power, but barriers have disappeared that stood in the way before, like limited memory in computers and the lack of strong biometric authentication techniques like facial recognition.
"We didn't really have the computing horsepower to do that back then," says Jermoluk. "It was a complicated database problem. We didn't quite know how you would do it."
Jermoluk says the 40-employee startup based in New York is "mostly talking with very large companies who want to deploy it: "We're been in stealth mode and been able to get with CISOs and into some of the largest companies in America," but declined to list any customers by name.
The company says it has also developed integrations with enterprise password managers like Okta, ForgeRock, and Ping, to make it that much easier for IT departments to roll out its tools.
"If we do our job right this will be deployed to hundreds of different medium and large companies in the next year," Jermoluk says.
But they are hardly the only ones trying to get rid of passwords. Microsoft, Google, Intel, Apple and and other big companies are members of the FIDO Alliance, an association that advocates new authentication standards to help reduce reliance on passwords. Microsoft has also said it's working to kill off passwords, at least for internal use. A growing handful of startups, including Trusona, Nuance, and YubiCo, all offer their own password alternatives
A December report from the analyst firm Gartner said the many options for doing away with passwords may, in fact, be a key part of the challenge. "There are many ways to eliminate passwords, improving the user/customer experience and/or enhancing security; however, technological constraints make a universal approach elusive."
But none of these approaches may have the personal story the new startup's veteran founders have with the password.
"Sorry about those. I feel a bit responsible," says Clark. "But I am righting the wrong. After all, what is an apology without a resolution?"
By Dave Michels With a new slate of announcements, Google continues to give its conferencing app some much-needed attention… as interest in meetings explodes during COVID-19 crisis.
Lyft said in a filing with US regulators on Wednesday that it planned to lay off "approximately 982 employees," or 17% of its workforce, and had furloughed 288 others as the coronavirus pandemic wreaks havoc on the ride-hailing industry.
Collectively, the job cuts and furloughs represent more than 20% of Lyft's latest reported headcount of 5,683 employees at the end of 2019. The company said the layoffs would cost $28 million to $36 million in severance payments and other expenses.
Lyft also said its executive leadership would take a 30% pay cut, with vice presidents seeing a 20% reduction and "all other exempt employees" taking a 10% cut. Members of Lyft's board of directors "have voluntarily agreed to forego 30% of their cash compensation for the second quarter of 2020," Lyft said.
In a statement, Lyft CEO Logan Green said it was a "difficult decision" to cut jobs.
"It is now clear that the COVID-19 crisis is going to have broad-reaching implications for the economy, which impacts our business," he said. "We have therefore made the difficult decision to reduce the size of our team. Our guiding principle for decision-making right now is to ensure we emerge from the crisis in the strongest possible position to achieve the company's mission."
Shares of Lyft were up more than 5% on Wednesday, outpacing broader market gains.
A New York Times reporter said that word of the layoffs circulated earlier this week thanks to a slip-up by an employment lawyer.
Lyft is laying off 17 percent of its workforce and furloughing 5 percent. This is after an employment lawyer at the company accidentally invited much of the workforce to a weekend meeting called "Jetty" in what workers took to be a reference to jettisoning jobs.
The coronavirus pandemic has had an outsize effect on Lyft — and, to some extent, its larger competitor Uber — as stay-at-home orders around the world drastically reduce demand for on-demand car rides. By some measures, ride-hailing volumes have decreased by more than 90% in hard-hit areas.
Lyft, which doesn't have a food-delivery arm the size of Uber's, announced earlier in April that it had launched a pilot delivery initiative to move essential goods like groceries and medicine. It's not clear what effect that's had so far on mitigating revenue loss from the pandemic.
Uber is also mulling staffing cuts of even greater magnitude, the technology news site The Information reported on Tuesday. The company did not confirm the report, but a representative told Business Insider that it was "looking at every possible scenario to ensure we get to the other side of this crisis in a stronger position than ever."
Lyft is set to report its first-quarter financial performance on May 6, with investors eagerly awaiting an update on how the company is weathering the crisis.
"This update will include detailed actions the company is taking to strengthen its financial position, improve its cost structure, and support drivers and riders on the Lyft platform," Lyft said in announcing the earnings call. "In light of the evolving and unpredictable effects of COVID-19, Lyft is currently not in a position to forecast the expected impact of COVID-19 on its financial and operating results for the remainder of 2020."
Do you work for Lyft? Affected by the layoffs? We want to hear from you. Get in touch with this reporter at grapier@businessinsider.com or via the secure contact methods available here.
Interested in improving the video quality of your own Zoom frame tenfold? If you’ve got a recent Canon mirrorless, DSLR, or PowerShot camera, you can now use it as a webcam and put everyone else on your video call to shame. As noted by DPReview, the company has released a beta of “EOS Webcam Utility” for Windows 10 that lets you plug in any of the below supported cameras over USB and have it serve as your PC’s webcam.
Image: Canon
“Built by Canon software developers, this beta version software helps consumers to improve their video appearance while using popular video conferencing applications in the market, delivering clarity and high-image quality,” Canon wrote in its press release.
I’ve spent a good chunk of my workday so far creating memes thanks to this amazing website from Imgflip that automatically generates captions for memes using a neural network. I’m addicted because the site A) takes the pressure off trying to be clever by auto-filling the captions; B) actually, somehow, regularly generates clever captions; and C) sometimes creates captions that make no sense, which are hilarious anyway.
You can pick from 48 classic meme templates, including distracted boyfriend, Drake in “Hotline Bling,” mocking Spongebob, surprised Pikachu, and Oprah giving things away. To generate meme captions, you just have to click on the meme template on the top of the page. If you don’t like what the site serves up, or you just...
Marco Polo, an app that became popular for staying in touch with friends while social distancing, is looking to make some cash. The free app is launching an expanded premium product today called Marco Polo Plus that costs $5 per month with an annual commitment or $10 if paid monthly. The subscription gives people access to HD video, voice notes, custom emoji, creation tools like speed control, and passes to share with friends to gift them free memberships. The company is giving people a seven-day trial to show them what the Plus experience is like and to convince them to sign up.
Until now, Marco Polo has been sustained by venture capital. The pandemic increased its user base, however, and its server costs in tandem.
The tough times don't look likely to go away anytime soon, according to Google executives like CFO Ruth Porat, who said Tuesday that she antic pates the second quarter will be "a difficult one."
To prepare for the difficult conditions, Google and parent company Alphabet are looking for ways to cut costs, from less business travel for employees to increased automation of certain tasks.
"After a decade of growth there have to be opportunities for added efficiency," Porat said during a conference call on Tuesday.
On Tuesday, Porat and Pichai provided more details about where the company would find savings.
Among the biggest changes:
Headcount —With 123,048 employees on its payroll, Alphabet is a massive organization. And the company started the year intending to get even more massive, with plans to slightly exceed the 20% growth in headcount that it logged in the last three months of 2019.
Now, Porat said , Alphabet instead anticipates a "deceleration" in headcount from that 20% growth rate.
A deceleration from 20% growth still leaves a lot of room for Alphabet's ranks to increase though. The company will keep hiring — there's no total hiring freeze on the horizon — but plans to do so in a "small number of strategic areas" of its business, such as Cloud, which is getting a nice boost right now.
Office space — With reduced hiring plans, and most employees currently working at home, Google won't need as much office space right away. That's one of the main reasons that Google now expects "a modest decrease" in the total amount of capital expenditures in 2020 compared to its $23.5 billion in cap ex in 2019.
"The biggest change in our outlook is a reduction in global office facility investments, due to both the need to pause most of our ground-up constructions and fitouts in response to COVID-19, and our decision to slow down the pace at which we acquire office buildings," Porat said on Tuesday.
Data centers: Google spends billions of dollars creating space not just for its staff, but for its computers. The company's "technical infrastructure" will remain "roughly" at the same level as 2019, Porat said. The company will spend more money on servers however and less on data center construction, much of which is being delayed due to COVID-19.
Marketing spending: Executives confirmed that Google has lowered its "non-business essential marketing" spending for the year, but said there was a "healthy" budget still in place.
Google’s Meet teleconferencing service is now adding about 3 million users per day, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced on the company’s first quarter earnings call. That’s up quite a bit from earlier this month — Google had said that more than 2 million new users were were connecting on the service every day as of April 9th. Meet’s significant growth is likely driven by increased usage of the service as schools and workplaces have had to host classes and meetings online while at home due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Last week, we surpassed a significant milestone,” said Pichai on today’s earnings call. “We are now adding roughly 3 million new users each day and have seen a thirty-fold increase in usage since January. There are now over...
When people were ordered to stay home during the pandemic, online shopping became a vital resource for basic goods like toilet paper, groceries, and cleaning supplies. People need those products fast, and Amazon provides that service.
Before the pandemic, the Institute for Local Self-Reliancereported in 2016 that Amazon captures nearly one in every two dollars that Americans spend online. Over the past month, Amazon’s stock value has increased significantly during a recession while its demand grows further, advancing its dominance in the online shopping market.
Stacy Mitchell, co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, says that kind of dependence should make us deeply concerned.
With the company growing in leaps and bounds, Zoom went shopping for a new cloud infrastructure vendor to help it with its growing scale problem. In a surprising choice, the company went with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure as its latest partner.
The company indicated it also uses AWS and Azure.
Zoom has become the go-to video conferencing service as much of the world has shut down due to the pandemic, and life needs to go on somehow. It now claims to have 300 million meeting participants per day. That kind of usage puts a wee bit of pressure on your infrastructure, and Zoom clearly needed to beef up its game.
What’s surprising is that it chose Oracle, a company whose infrastructure market share registers as a strong niche player in Synergy Research’s latest survey in February. It is well behind market leaders including Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and even IBM (and that’s saying something).
Brent Leary, who is founder at CRM Essentials, says he sees this as a move to show that Zoom can move beyond the SMB market to power enterprise customers, no matter what they demand.
“I think Zoom went with Oracle because they are proven in the enterprise in terms of mission critical apps built on Oracle databases running on Oracle hardware in the cloud. Zoom needs to prove to enterprises that they are able to handle scale and data security needed to beyond what SMBs typically require,” Leary told TechCrunch.
In addition, Leary speculated that Oracle might have given Zoom a good deal to get a hot company into the fold and beat rivals like Amazon and Microsoft.
It’s worth noting that CNBC reported a couple of weeks ago that Oracle chairman Larry Ellison called Zoom an “essential service” for his business, as well as others. It certainly seems in hindsight that was hardly a coincidence, as he was praising up his new prize customer.
Others have speculated that it might have to do with keeping business away from a potential rival given that Amazon with Chime, Google with Hangouts and Microsoft with Teams all have competing products. However, none of them have become synonymous with online meetings as Zoom has during this crisis.
Zoom went public last year and has become the darling of the video conference market since in spite of a set of security issues that have developed as the company scaled, which they have been working to address.
The stock market is apparently not impressed with the choice. As we went to publish, the stock was down 3.38% or $5.56.
Note: (4/29/2020) This story has been updated to indicate that Zoom has multiple cloud infrastructure partners.
Note (4/30/2020): The story has also been updated to reflect that that Zoom had made a claim of 300M daily active users. It later changed that to 300M meeting participants per day. The company has yet to release correct daily active users numbers.
Anchor, a podcast-making app owned by Spotify, will now let you take recordings of your video calls and chats and turn them into podcasts (via TechCrunch). If you’ve been doing a regular Zoom meetup with your friends to talk about Animal Crossing: New Horizons town designs, for example, this new tool could help you turn those conversations into a podcast you can publish and share.
However, it’s important to note that all Anchor is doing here is letting you upload a file of a video recording and pulling the audio out of that file. Anchor says the new tool works on the web and supports .mp4 and .mov uploads.
Anchor supports .mp4 and .mov uploads
To actually get the recordings, though, you’ll have to record your video call yourself, and...
According to IT company Flexera's annial "State of the Cloud" report, 59% of enterprises expect usage of clouds like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud to be higher than originally planned before the coronavirus pandemic.
This demand is driven by a surge in remote work, hardware supply chain disruptions, and difficulty in accessing data center facilities.
Optimizing their spending on the cloud even as usage spikes is the top cloud initiative for businesses, the survey says.
The ongoing coronavirus pandemic is poised to push even more companies to the cloud, as a surge in remote work causes a huge uptick in cloud usage, a new survey shows.
According to IT company Flexera's annual "State of the Cloud" report, 59% of enterprises expect their usage of clouds like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and Google Cloud to exceed their prior plans from before the outbreak of coronavirus in the United States. That's according to a subset of 187 respondents surveyed by Flexera.
That's largely because more businesses may need extra cloud capacity for their applications. Around the world, countries are issuing stay-at-home orders and businesses are requiring employees to work from home, leading to a higher demand in shifting to the cloud as employees spend more time online.
In addition, during the pandemic, it can be more difficult to access data center facilities, while hardware supply chains are delayed. As a result, many companies may find using the cloud to be especially valuable to continue to scale their businesses and keep them running.
Optimizing cloud costs and usage is the top priority
Already, many companies are making cloud a big part of their strategy. About 1 in 5 enterprises spend more than $12 million a year on public cloud, while over half of enterprise companies' data and applications will move onto the cloud within one year, the report says.
A previous Flexera report also shows that companies plan to allocate more spending to cloud or cloud software providers like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, ServiceNow, Salesforce, and Google. Meanwhile, cloud providers like AWS, Microsoft, and Google Cloud have also been making major pushes to win customers in more traditional industries like retail and finance.
While most companies surveyed plan to increase their spending on the cloud, they're also paying attention to making sure they're doing so efficiently and affordably. Survey respondents said that optimizing the cost and use of cloud is their top cloud initiative for the fourth year in a row.
Cloud providers themselves are working to keep up with this increased demand, and analysts have said they're ready to handle this crisis because they continually test for peak traffic. They even say that AWS, Microsoft, and Google Cloud could come out on the other side in even better shape and use this time to look into making big acquisitions. Another major cloud player, the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, announced last week that it's investing $28 billion into its cloud business amid the downturn.
In general, analysts say the cloud business is recession-proof, although they may face some risks during this time such as cybersecurity concerns and strain on their infrastructure.
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Italian design studio Design Libero created a prototype for a new kind of protective equipment people might wear to protect themselves against COVID-19, the coronavirus disease: a bubble shield.
More than 2.5 million people around the world have been infected with the coronavirus, and at least 179,000 have died, and the US has the largest reported outbreak. A third of the world's population is under some kind of lockdown as experts try to contain and treat the disease.
No one really knows what the world will be like as countries come out of lockdowns while the risk of infection remains, at least until there is a vaccine. In the meantime, designers have come up with some creative ideas for how people will have to adapt, like Design Libero's bubble shield, or Sun Dayong's "Be a Batman" shield.
Designers Libero Rutilo and Ekaterina Shchetina told Business Insider that the Bubble Shield is "an inflatable personal environment designed for protecting people in public spaces." Take a look here.
The inflatable Bubble Shield is designed as a physical barrier to protect people out in public spaces as they slowly begin to reopen from coronavirus lockdowns. It's made from thermic-welded Etfe, a kind of fluorine-based plastic.
The top and bottom are connected by a zipper, for an easy way to put the shield on and remove it.
The prototype is solar-powered, with a battery pack in the backpack that powers the air pump compressor and fan.
The fan purifies and filters the air. Design Libero also proposes it as a solution to pollution, which could make the design useful even after there is a coronavirus vaccine.
Many designers and labs are working on protection solutions for doctors, but this specific prototype focuses on average people being able to go outside while staying protected from the virus.
The design has a similar idea to the anti-coronavirus shield by Sun Dayong, which is also designed to prevent transmission through droplets, and worn like a backpack.
The $900 OnePlus 8 Pro is our top choice for a high-end Android smartphone so far in 2020.
The phone has a gorgeous design, an amazing screen, it's fast, powerful, it comes with an unbelievably fast charger. It's equal or better than its competition, like the $1,200 Samsung Galaxy S20 Plus, in almost every respect, including price.
It's also a 5G phone, which adds to the OnePlus 8 Pro's cost. The issue here is that 5G networks are not ready for the mainstream, so you'd be spending money on a feature that you'd barely use, if at all.
The OnePlus 8 Pro comes highly recommended, but it could be worth waiting at least another year if you want a 5G phone. And, if you want to save money, strongly consider the $500 OnePlus 7 Pro or OnePlus 7T.
OnePlus has built a reputation around its high-end smartphones that easily compete against the iPhones and Galaxy S phones from the big companies, all while costing hundreds less.
As expected, OnePlus has done it again. The OnePlus 8 Pro is a superb, beautiful, and powerful smartphone that costs hundreds less than most of the competition. And, like almost every OnePlus phone before it, the 8 Pro comes highly recommended. But this time, my recommendation comes with significantly more "ifs and buts" than usual.
On one hand, the OnePlus 8 Pro is a fantastic smartphone that's $300 cheaper than the equivalent 5G phone from Samsung, the $1,200 Galaxy S20 Plus.
On the other hand, the OnePlus 8 Pro is $900 — which is expensive and $230 more than the OnePlus 7 Pro from last year. That $900 price tag alone both adds to OnePlus' reputation while simultaneously taking away from it. It's both value-oriented and expensive.
So, what do you get for $900 — the new norm for "value" in high-end Android smartphones in 2020?
OnePlus 8 Pro specs
Display: 6.7-inch 1440p (2,560 x 1,440) 120Hz AMOLED
The OnePlus 8 Pro is a gorgeous smartphone whether it's in or out of a case.
There's nothing that suggests OnePlus compromised on materials, aesthetics, and overall feel of the OnePlus 8 Pro. Clad in metal and frosted glass on the back, the "ultramarine blue" OnePlus 8 Pro review unit I've been using decidedly feels ultra-premium, and that's likely to be case with other color options. Just note that the black version has a glossy glass back, not the frosted texture.
Even if you hide away the OnePlus 8 Pro's design in a case, the curved screen edges, ultra-narrow bezels, and a hole-punch style selfie camera easily makes for one of the best looking smartphones you can buy, alongside phones like the Samsung Galaxy S20 lineup.
The OnePlus 8 Pro's QHD (1440p) AMOLED screen is sharp, bright, colors are rich and vibrant, and the color black is inky, making for a dynamic screen that makes everything look pleasant. That's to be expected in such a high-end smartphone, but the OnePlus 8 Pro differentiates itself with the incredibly smooth 120Hz refresh rate.
The 120Hz refresh rate at QHD resolution means the screen stays sharp while you glide through the Android operating system and apps. It'll look like a massive leap compared to smartphones with standard 60Hz screens, like the iPhone 11 series and most phones from before 2019 and before.
To be sure, such a smooth screen as the OnePlus 8 Pro's purely serves an aesthetic function — there are very few, if any, functional benefits for high refresh rate screens on smartphones. But, it sure makes an impact.
Performance and battery life
The OnePlus 8 Pro is a powerful, fast phone for the enthusiast who doesn't want to wait for things to happen after tapping and swiping on the screen — plain and simple.
But again, all the big Android smartphones of 2020 so far are sporting similar specs, like the Snapdragon 865 mobile chip and a ton of RAM, so stellar performance is a given at this level of the smartphone game. OnePlus' main differentiator here is that it delivers the same performance as its competitors for a lower price tag.
For those who want a number, a standard GeekBench test showed 894 for a single-core score, and 3,322 for a multi-core score. Those are technically slightly better scores than the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra, which sports nearly identical specs as the OnePlus 8 Pro. But in real life, there really isn't any perceivable difference between the two. Indeed, that's to say there isn't a perceivably difference in performance between a $900 phone and a $1,200 phone. That's a win for the OnePlus 8 Pro.
Battery life is stellar. I had almost five hours of screen-on time running apps like YouTube, Reddit, and Google News the majority of the time. By the time the OnePlus 8 Pro got to 15%, the phone had gone almost 48 hours without seeing a charger. To be fair, the apps I use aren't super intensive, like a game would be — expect to see shorter battery life for those kinds of power hungry apps.
Cameras
You get three cameras on the OnePlus 8 Pro, including a 48-megapixel standard wide lens, an ultra-wide angle lens, and a 3x optically zoomed lens, which is pretty much standard on high-end smartphone (unless you're Google's Pixel 4 with a dual-lens camera and an $800 price tag).
Overall, pretty much anyone should be quite pleased with the OnePlus 8 Pro's cameras.
Here's a photo from the standard wide lens:
Here's a photo with the ultra-wide lens:
And here's a photo from the 3x zoomed lens:
The OnePlus 8 Pro takes great photos, but it can trip up under certain lighting conditions. Below, it looks like the phone added some kind of Instagram filter, where colors appear faded and washed out:
And, digitally zooming into a subject beyond the 3x optical zoom introduces a hazy look to photos:
Additional features
OnePlus also gets one of the most undervalued parts of a smartphone almost completely right: fingerprint unlocking and facial recognition. Both are incredibly fast and accurate, making for a seamless and frustration-free unlocking experience. It might seem trivial, but it's a massive part of using a smartphone, and it's amazing how often companies get it wrong. The fancy ultrasonic in-display fingerprint scanner on the Galaxy S20 series, for example, is an unfortunate and frustrating mess to use.
You might notice that the fingerprint sensor doesn't work very well when your finger is wet (or even damp) or dirty, and even in direct sunlight, but that's when the incredibly fast facial recognition comes in hand. Conversely, you'll find that the facial recognition can be slow when it's darker, and that's when the fingerprint recognition comes in.
OnePlus also has better battery charging than any other smartphone company. The OnePlus 8 Pro comes with OnePlus' Warp Charge 30T charger, which is still among the fastest chargers that comes included with a smartphone.
The OnePlus 8 Pro also ushers in a brand new, long-awaited feature for OnePlus phones: wireless charging. And boy, what a wireless charger. The Warp Charge 30 Wireless Charger makes quick work to fill up the phone's battery at 30W. From 15% to 75%, it only took 37 minutes on the OnePlus wireless charger. From 15% to 100%, it took about an hour. That's incredibly fast for wireless — and even for wired — charging. To note, however, the wireless charger is a $70 optional extra, not an included accessory.
Drawbacks
The OnePlus 8 Pro is on the larger side, so those who like smaller phones won't be happy here. The OnePlus 8 is smaller (but still quite large with a 6.55-inch screen), but it's barely the same phone — it doesn't have wireless charging, it has a 90Hz screen, and it has lesser cameras.
The cameras can misfire from time to time — colors can look washed out or overly saturated.
The curved screen edges aren't for everyone. They look good, but they actually feel like wasted screen space. This isn't specific against OnePlus phones, as a lot of Android phones employ the curved screen edges.
The OnePlus 8 Pro is the most expensive OnePlus phone to date, and 5G is largely to blame, as OnePlus CEO Pete Lau previously said. You're basically paying extra for 5G, but 5G is barely available — unless you live in a 5G coverage area, 5G will be a rare network that few people can realistically connect to until carriers flesh out their 5G networks. At the moment, 5G is more of a novelty rather than a functional network.
To go even further, one of the only two 5G networks worth connecting to — the super fast high-band mmWave networks — will only be available to Verizon units of the OnePlus 8 Pro. That means you need to buy your OnePlus 8 Pro from Verizon, and you need to be a Verizon customer. AT&T also has a high-band 5G network, but no OnePlus 8 Pro users will be able to connect to it.
Should you buy the OnePlus 8 Pro?
If you're looking for a high-end smartphone in 2020, the OnePlus 8 Pro should be at the very top of your short list. It's the best high-end Android smartphone to date — end of discussion.
The OnePlus 8 Pro is what happens when OnePlus unleashes itself without the limitations of "value." It has all the flagship features that were previously missing in OnePlus phones, like an official water resistance rating and wireless charging, and it just went all out and created an indisputable force of smartphone nature.
With that said, I'd consider waiting another year before buying any 5G smartphone if you care about saving money. 5G technology adds to the cost of smartphones, and 5G just isn't ready for you yet. Indeed, it's entirely possible to buy the OnePlus 8 Pro and never connect to a single 5G network during the year 2020. With that in mind, you'd be paying for 5G technology that you might not get to use, or use extremely rarely. And, if you do connect to a 5G network, you're likely a T-Mobile customer connecting to T-Mobile's low-band network, which frankly doesn't impress and feels just like regular 4G LTE. Other carriers have shorter range 5G networks that are faster, but coverage is unbelievably sparse at the moment.
Whichever way you look at it, you'll be connected to your carrier's 4G LTE network more often than a 5G network, and you'll rarely be using the 5G technology you paid for in the OnePlus 8 Pro. If you'd rather wait for 5G networks to become more mainstream, I'd suggest either waiting before buying a high-end smartphone like the OnePlus 8 Pro. Or, if you need a new phone now, I'd strongly consider the $500 OnePlus 7 Pro or OnePlus 7T.
Venture capital investors say they expect a slowdown in merger and acquisition activity because of the looming coronavirus recession.
Potential acquirers may focus on their own survival because they're not sure how long the recession will last. Many could cut costs and scrap their acquisition plans.
But it's a buyer's market as startup valuations drop, and some cash-rich companies are still shopping around.
However, venture capital investors say startups should brace for a decline in merger and acquisition activity, robbing them of the main alternative to an IPO.
We asked a panel of venture capitalists if they think mergers and acquisitions will be affected by the drastically changing market conditions. Of the 17 people who responded, 11 people said they think activity will slow in the second quarter.
Selling to a competitor, while often painful, affords a startup the funding to keep going, new customers, and an increase in market share — a potential lifeline in an economic crisis. A sale also provides liquidity to investors, which may be why Sequoia's Doug Leone told startup leaders during the dot-com bust to "aggressively examine and pursue M&A opportunities" if cash is running out.
Now, the likelihood of a recession — and the uncertainty around how long it will last — has large potential acquirers cutting costs to ensure their survival.
Eight investors told Business Insider that merger and acquisition activity will "greatly slow" in the second quarter, and three people said it will "somewhat slow." One person said activity will "stay about the same" in the second quarter as in the first quarter, which saw financial services startup Credit Karma sell to Intuit for $7.1 billion in cash and stock, amidst other big-ticket acquisitions.
Deals are already collapsing
The volley of unknowns has already spurred potential buyers to delay or cancel their plans to snap up other businesses.
Many erstwhile buyers are being forced to focus on the immediate health of their own operations. They may sacrifice some possible growth by scaling back their hiring and acquisition strategies in favor of burning less capital in the near term.
So far this year, Xerox has pulled the plug on its hostile bid to buy larger rival HP, saying that it was no longer sensible to pursue the takeover. A private equity firm is now trying to undo its purchase of Victoria's Secret, after the lingerie brand closed its stores and temporarily laid off most of its retail workers.
SoftBank also rowed backwards on an offer to buy $3 billion worth of WeWork shares earlier this month, though the tech giant justified the move by citing "significant" civil and criminal investigations into WeWork, and not the economic crisis. WeWork's board has sued its lost investor for reneging on the bailout, and the startup's disgraced former chief executive officer, Adam Neumann, also intends to sue the megafund, according to Bloomberg.
The merger and acquisition market could dry up further.
On Thursday, the chairman of the US House antitrust committe proposed a temporary freeze on most merger and acquisition activity until the crisis ends, saying that a "period of rampant consolidation" could wipe out competition from smaller players, as reported by Axios. The proposal would, however, permit deals involving a company that's already bankrupt or on the brink of failure.
The government has never passed such a sweeping moratorium on mergers and acquisitions, and the proposal is "highly unlikely" to have the support of Republicans on the panel, Politico reported.
'It's a buyer's market'
The doomy M&A forecast wasn't shared by everyone on our VC panel.
Five respondents said deal activity will "somewhat increase" in the second quarter, compared to the first quarter. No one thought it would "greatly increase."
Other notable deals in the first quarter include Google's acquisition of data-analytics startup Looker for $2.6 billion and Salesforce's $1.33 billion pick-up of cloud-software startup Vlocity. The much younger acquirer Brex also went on a shopping spree, buying three companies at discount prices since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.
Henrique Dubugras, Brex's 24-year-old cofounder and co-chief executive, told Business Insider in March that his business plans to keep buying startups.
"Because of the markets, there will be opportunities that weren't possible before," Dubugras said. "Valuations are correcting and many startups can't raise [funds] right now, so they find it better to work together on things. We are in a position with a lot of cash and a strong business model, so we are in a position to help a lot of these companies."
The cloud business, in particular, could see an explosion of deal activity, as Business Insider previously reported.
The shelter-in-place orders underline the advantages of running a network on a web-based application that's accessible from anywhere, instead of a private, on-premise data center at company offices. These conditions could lead to a period of consolidation when the three most dominant players — Amazon, Microsoft, and Google — as well as other tech giants gunning for a greater piece of the market, could seize opportunities to expand by acquiring smaller players at very low prices.
David Blumberg, a venture capitalist who focuses on startups that sell to other businesses, said one of his portfolio companies recently bought a company without meeting the team in person. The terms of the deal allow the acquirer to pay nothing in the initial sale, while agreeing to give the purchased company all of its earnings on future sales if the business achieves certain financial goals, according to Blumberg.
"It's a buyer's market in that regard," he told Business Insider.
AV1 is coming to WebRTC sooner rather than later. Apparently so is HEVC. It is an AV1 vs HEVC game now, but sadly, these codecs are unavailable to the “rest of us”.
WebRTC codec wars were something we’ve seen in the past. During the early days of WebRTC there have been ongoing discussions if the mandatory video codec in WebRTC should be VP8 or H.264. The outcome was to have both of them mandatory to implement in browsers.
Fast forward to today, and life is simply. We have ubiquity and support across all browsers that have WebRTC in them, which is great.
We are now gearing up for the next fight. This one isn’t going to be between VP9 and HEVC, but rather between AV1 and HEVC.
Why now?
COVID-19 is causing all communication vendors to fast forward and accelerate their roadmaps by 6-18 months. Those that don’t are going to be left behind on the other side of this pandemic.
COVID-19 is fast forwarding all roadmaps and plans related to WebRTC, including codec improvements
This isn’t an attempt to scare anyone or to FUD people into doing things. It is just the way things are.
If you want to see how serious things are, just check what’s going on around you:
Zoom is rolling out new features on almost a daily basis. They are plugging in their security gaps faster than most vendors can plan their roadmap, let alone develop anything
Google is releasing features on Duo and Meet to drastically improve them. A lot of it hinges on machine learning but also on the latest coding technologies (more on that later, when we get to AV1 again)
Most UCaaS vendors have launched their own video meeting service in the past 6 months. A lot of them in the last month. Many now offering it for free
Many vendors in the video space from all verticals are seeing a 10x or more increase in use
There’s a race towards filling different gaps when comparing these meeting services versus Zoom
The AV1 vs HEVC angles here are VERY interesting.
HEVC requires royalties and is a licensing mess.
AV1 is so new it hasn’t even had an opportunity to cool down a bit after being taken out of the oven. Frankly? It is still half baked and requires a bit more cookin’ – and yet… it is now being rolled out in Google Duo.
The thing is, that 6 months back, video was nice to have. A feature that needs to be ticked in a long requirements list.
Today? Video first. All the rest comes later.
Zoom’s stock price and market cap is the best indicator of that change.
A brief history of WebRTC video codecs
In less than 10 years, we’ve witnessed 3 codec generations in WebRTC:
VP8 / H.264
VP9 / HEVC
AV1
Each video codec generation improves over the last one, addressing different market requirements
With each generation of codec introduced, CPU and memory requirements grow along with the complexity of the codec and the resulting quality for a given bitrate increases.
VP8/H.264
I’ve been working with H.264 since 200x. Probably somewhere in 2005. It was brand new at the time and was about to replace H.263 and all of its extensions.
Fast forward to around 2010, when you started it being deployed in almost all video conferencing room systems.
VP8 came to our lives along with WebRTC, in around 2012. It is comparable to H.264.
Both are probably at their peak right now when it comes to video calling:
They are ubiquitous
Readily available
Understood and known, with vibrant ecosystems
They can run on most CPUs
This is the tipping point, where a new video codec is being sought after.
If you are using it today, you should be just fine. If you seriously want to be at the forefront of technology, right on the bleeding edge (and you will bleed – time, money and blood), then read on to your next alternatives.
And if you need to decide between VP8 and H.264, check out this free video course: H.264 or VP8?
VP9
It should have been a VP9 vs HEVC thing and not an AV1 vs HEVC thing.
The next best thing in video codec was supposed to be VP9. VP9 is the replacement to HEVC. HEVC is what comes next after H.264, and the intent was always for VP9 to be the alternative to HEVC.
VP9 gives you either less bitrate for the same quality or more quality for the same bitrate than VP8
As things go, VP9 advantages are just what you’d expect in a new codec generation:
What VP9 was supposed to bring to the world is SVC – scalability. While VP8 supports temporal scalability, VP9 was touted as a codec that would bring also temporal, spatial and SNR scalability. With VP9 SVC we were supposed to improve resiliency of video as well as the ability to scale large group video calls better than ever before. This never really came to be, as some of these improvements were left out of the official WebRTC APIs until today.
Need a boost and have a very good grasp at who is in a call before everyone joins? VP9 might be a good alternative for you.
AV1
AV1 is the new kid on the block. An impossible dream coming true: vendors working together in a new Alliance of Open Media, working on a royalty free video codec. Something that was never heard of a few years ago and now feels like the new norm
Starting with 7 founding members, this changed the dynamics of the WebRTC codec wars. Instead of having Google with VP9 on one side of the ring and the rest of the world on the other side with HEVC, it brought a team of large players to the royalty free side, standing behind the AV1 video codec
Today, the alliance includes 48 members, including all browser vendors and most chipset vendors
The Alliance of Open Media is the who’s who of the video industry
The focus in terms of comparisons are now AV1 vs HEVC
I’ve written at length about AV1 when the specification got released. You can learn about AV1 there.
There are those who believe AV1 is ready and have been ready for quite some time. Reality says otherwise. It isn’t for the faint of heart at this point. More on that – below.
Adventurous? Go AV1!
Where in the world is WebRTC VP9 video call?
VP9 shipped in Chrome 48 for WebRTC. That was January 2016. 4 years later and it is safe to say that not many are using VP9 in WebRTC.
Adoption of VP9 is slow
The two main places where VP9 is making sense?
Google. Google Meet for example has been using VP9 for quite some time in its own calls
Peer-to-peer calls. Just because it is easy to achieve
Once AV1 was announced, the debate began if one should even try and adopt VP9 or wait for AV1 instead. The majority are waiting for AV1. Laziness at its best (and what I would have selected as well if you’re wondering).
The other reason for delaying and skipping a generation is investment in VP9. Since everyone’s looking at AV1, VP9 is left with less eyeballs and developers improving it. Add to that the slow release of SVC support to it in Chrome and the fact that Safari still doesn’t support VP9 and you can understand the reluctance of going this route.
Apple’s appetite for HEVC in WebRTC
The big Apple is insatiable. Apple has been banking on HEVC for many years now, and where HEVC & WebRTC fits in Apple has been a topic here in the past as well.
Apple is banking on both royalty bearing (HEVC) and royalty free (AV1) video codecs
Apple is a founding member of the Alliance of Open Media, so it is banking on AV1 as the future video codec
In iOS 11 (2017), Apple introduced HEVC to its devices. That was done with the addition of hardware acceleration
Android devices usually don’t have HEVC hardware support, and licensing being as tough and expensive as it is, this is a continued differentiator for Apple
Google will be reluctant to add HEVC to Chrome. So would Mozilla. Not sure what Microsoft’s stance would be on this one
Apple isn’t playing an AV1 vs HEVC game, but rather an AV1 and HEVC game, and they are alone in that at the moment
Apple isn’t especially strong or dominant in the WebRTC space. Safari is the worst browser these days in terms of WebRTC support, with users already used to switching to Chrome on Mac. What would adding HEVC to WebRTC Safari add? Especially when there are so many other, more basic things to fix and improve in Safari WebRTC support…
To me, this is the biggest conundrum at the moment. A piece of this puzzle is missing. What would make developers use HEVC if it is only available in Safari and nowhere else? This isn’t the app store. It is the web.
Time will tell.
WebRTC AV1 support in Google Duo
I said it before and I’ll iterate it again. AV1 is too new. Too early to be adopted in WebRTC or real time communications. And yet… Google just announced supporting AV1 in Google Duo:
[…] in the coming week, we’re rolling out a new video codec technology to improve video call quality and reliability, even on very low bandwidth connections.
They made sure to add a nice moving GIF so you can see the difference between “a video codec” and AV1 in the same bitrate.
Is that other codec VP8? VP9? H.264? HEVC? Maybe H.261…
Are they using it for all Duo calls? In all devices? In all network conditions?
The only thing I could find is that this rolls out to Android with iOS 2 weeks behind in the roll out. There are more things left unsaid.
Some thoughts here
AV1 doesn’t have hardware acceleration on smartphones. Maybe on 1 or 2 very new ones (I doubt it), and even then, the hardware would still be buggy as hell – especially for real time video, which is different than just camera recording or playing YouTube videos
This means that going to HD resolutions with AV1 on smartphones is going to be brutal to CPU, battery life and device temperature. This isn’t where AV1 support in DUO is going
This leaves us with the low bitrate scenario – probably anything from VGA or lower. Maybe even a quarter of that (QVGA)
It is where AV1 is going to shine in 2020 and into 2021
Why AV1?
We’re all stuck at home burning the networks. The large streaming vendors are lowering resolutions (and bitrates) for their default players in certain countries. This reduces the CPU load, making room for improving quality on lower bitrates. And that leads to the ability (and need) of better video codecs.
Why not VP9?
Google Duo most probably already makes use of VP9. Maybe even HEVC on iOS devices due to hardware acceleration benefits. When it comes to 1:1 sessions, there’s no real reason to stick to a single video codec for all sessions.
With Apple working publicly now on HEVC in WebRTC, it put pressure on Google, and getting AV1 into Duo in order to bolster their side in the AV1 vs HEVC debate became a pressing matter. Google Duo’s 1:1 call scenarios were the most suitable candidate for Google to make that stand.
Enter AV1
When a new video codec generation was introduced, the thinking was simple: “we are expecting it to support a higher resolution, at a higher bitrate, with a higher CPU consumption”
Higher resolution, because let’s face it – QVGA sucked in 1995 and we were still using it in 2000 in video conferencing. So each generation had to get 4 times the pixels the previous one was capable of dealing with
Higher bitrate, because at 4 times the pixels we couldn’t really get 25% the size, so there was an expectation of needing more bandwidth for the content we wanted to use
Higher CPU consumption, because we were adding more work to the encoder and decoder
In 2020, things are changing.
Sometimes, all you need is a better fit into smaller spaces (like low bitrate)
Bigger is no longer better with video codecs
I have 4K resolution on my desktop and laptop. 1080p on my phone and TV. I am happy with 720p content most of the time. I hate fonts on a 4K screen that aren’t enlarged (the damn characters are just too small to read).
What is the value of higher resolution? HDR content? 8K? 360? VR? If all I need is just plain video, no higher resolution is required. We’re all content most of the time with 720p resolutions for business meetings anyway.
Resolution requirements for most content types and use cases are not going to get higher any time soon.
We are probably at peak resolution already.
So we are free to think of next gen video codecs as ones that help consume lower bitrates.
There’s a distinction here. While any new video codec generation consumes lower bitrates for the same resolution/quality, the main purpose of these new video codecs was almost always in increasing the resolution as well.
AV1 on mobile makes perfect sense here. Especially for low resolutions – since we can have some CPU to spare for that scenario.
A quick FAQ on the latest WebRTC video codecs
Is HEVC (H.265) supported in WebRTC?
No. Not officially. Apple is adding support for it in Safari, but no other browser has added support for it or indicated plans to add support for it
Can I use HEVC in WebRTC?
Yes, but not in browsers. Apple will introduce HEVC in Safari, but no other vendor will. If you build your own native application for either PC or mobile you can add HEVC as another supported codec and use it in your application.
Should I start investing in adding AV1 to my WebRTC application?
That depends. If you want to add AV1, you need to make sure your use case fits well, as well as the devices you expect your users to have. You will also need to put a considerable investment of time and money to make it happen. My suggestion for most vendors would be to wait with AV1 support.
Why isn’t VP9 used in WebRTC much?
That is a good question with no good answer. I believe it is a matter of timing. When the time came to adopt VP9, AV1 was already announced and on its way, so vendors preferred to wait and jump directly to AV1 instead of going for VP9. VP9 doesn’t enjoy much hardware acceleration, which also makes it CPU intensive, requiring companies to tweak, fine tune and optimize their systems to use it. That kind of work is something many prefer not to do.
WebRTC and the future of video codecs
We’re at war again. The video codec war of WebRTC. And this time, each vendor needs to pick a strategy to play.
Is there a single video codec today that will answer all of your WebRTC needs?
We’ve got multiple codecs in our warchest: VP8, H.264, VP9, AV1 and sometimes even HEVC now.
Which one will we be using?
Which ones will we be using?
Here, scenarios matter. Different scenarios will call for totally different video codec selection to optimize for quality, CPU use, performance, bitrate, cost, etc.
In 1:1 sessions, you may want to keep your options open – use the best one dynamically just by making a decision as the session is set up.
For group calls, will you be using a single, static video codec? Or allow for multiple ones? Will you have multiple codecs in a single group session? Are you going to have an SFU tweaked and tuned for that? Will you pick the best video codec for a session and then dynamically switch over as the nature of the session changes (=someone joins and leaves who has certain limitations)?
What about consumers? What kind of video codec selection strategies are going to be prevalent there? How are they going to be different than the ones we see in enterprise solutions? What will be the difference for mobile first or application based versus web based solutions?
WebRTC differentiation: the next battlefield lines are being drawn
WebRTC differentiation is back in focus
We live in interesting times.
Codec selection has never been more interesting or important.
While WebRTC offers 2 codecs (H.264 & VP8), most browsers support VP9 and now we’re seeing browser vendors either adding HEVC or using AV1 in their own apps.
If media quality is at the core of your service (think carefully about your answer to this question), then rethinking your video codec selection strategy might be in order.
It is going to require research and investment. But this is where the future lies for video codecs in WebRTC.
John Legere has formally cut ties with T-Mobile US, the company he led as CEO for over seven years. After steering T-Mobile through a dramatic turnaround that culminated in its successful merger with former rival Sprint, Legere stepped down and Mike Sievert was appointed T-Mobile’s new chief executive earlier this month. At that time, Legere had said he would remain on T-Mobile’s board of directors until June 4th.
But that’s not the case anymore. In an 8K filing with the SEC today, T-Mobile revealed that Legere is leaving the board “effective immediately to pursue other options.”
“Mr. Legere noted that he was not resigning because of any disagreement with management or the board on any matter,” T-Mobile said in its note, which also...
Soon after saying he would not permit a $10 billion loan to the US Postal Service unless it hikes its rates on Amazon, President Donald Trump tweeted on Friday that he will "never let our Post Office fail."
The USPS is estimated to shutter in the summer unless there is significant monetary intervention, according to a March report from Democratic lawmakers.
The March report suggested $25 billion in emergency funding for the USPS. The CARES Act, which came later, provided for the $10 billion loan.
President Donald Trump said in an April 24 press briefing that he would not sign additional bailout funds to the US Postal Service unless it increased rates on Amazon, a major customer of the USPS.
Hours after those statements, Trump tweeted that he would "never" let the USPS fail.
"I will never let our Post Office fail," Trump wrote on Twitter. "It has been mismanaged for years, especially since the advent of the internet and modern-day technology. The people that work there are great, and we're going to keep them happy, healthy, and well!"
I will never let our Post Office fail. It has been mismanaged for years, especially since the advent of the internet and modern-day technology. The people that work there are great, and we’re going to keep them happy, healthy, and well!
Per the CARES Act, the USPS is eligible for a $10 billion loan from the Treasury Department. Secretary of Treasury Steven Mnuchin told reporters on Friday that he is outlining criteria that the USPS must meet to receive the loan, including a postal reform program and recruiting a new postmaster general.
Trump added one more requirement to the USPS during the briefing: Hike its Amazon rates, or receive no cash.
He said on Friday, emphasis ours:
If they don't raise the price of the service they give, which is a tremendous service, and they do a great job and the postal workers are fantastic — but this thing's losing billions of dollars.
It has been for years, because they don't want to insult for whatever reason, you can imagine, they don't want to insult Amazon and these other groups.
If they don't raise the price I'm not signing anything, so they'll raise the price so that they become maybe even profitable, but so they lose much less money, OK? And if they don't do it, I'm not signing anything and I'm not authorizing you to do anything, Steve.
Before Trump made that statement, he advised the USPS to quadruple its rates.
"If they raise the price of the package by approximately four times, it'd be a whole new ballgame," Trump told reporters. "But they don't want to raise because they don't want to insult Amazon, and they don't want to insult other companies perhaps that they like."
USPS is estimated to shutter in the summer unless there is significant monetary intervention, according to a March report from Democratic lawmakers. Reps. Carolyn Maloney and Gerry Connolly said that the coronavirus outbreak was leading to plummeting mail volumes and that the USPS "is in need of urgent help" from Congress and the White House.
A closed-down USPS would endanger deliveries to rural Americans, voting by mail, and prescription delivery. To protect that, lawmakers proposed $25 billion in emergency funding. Ultimately, Trump signed into law a $10 billion loan through the CARES Act.
But Trump's comments about the USPS' finances leave out an important fact: that much of it financial woes don't stem from delivery losses, but instead from a 2006 law. The law required the USPS to determine how much it would spend on pensions over the next 75 years and build up a fund to cover that cost, and it's had a huge toll: According to the USPS' inspector general, the pre-funding requirement accounted for $54.8 billion of the agency's $62.4 billion in losses from 2007 to 2016.
An ongoing feud
Trump has long targeted Amazon and its founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, whom he's referred to as "Jeff Bozo."
For much of 2018, Trump took to Twitter and the press to wage a war on Amazon — as well as its relationship with the USPS. He said the rates USPS charges Amazon are far below market value, cutting key transportation costs for the $1 trillion online retailer.
"Why is the United States Post Office, which is losing many billions of dollars a year, while charging Amazon and others so little to deliver their packages, making Amazon richer and the Post Office dumber and poorer?" Trump tweeted on December 29, 2017. "Should be charging MUCH MORE!"
More recently, the feud has leaked outside of the delivery realm and into Amazon Web Services, the Seattle-based company's cloud computing arm. Amazon said Trump's vendetta against the company cost it a $10 billion contract with the Pentagon, and is pushing for Trump to testify on his dislike of Bezos.
Trump may not be completely off base with Amazon, even if his comments on the USPS' finances leave out important context. Logistics analysts have concluded that Amazon is able to build a transportation network, in which Amazon can save money delivering its own packages, with significant help from the USPS.
Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson cofounded his company in early 2008, amid the Great Recession. It's now valued about $15 billion on the public markets.
Fundraising was difficult for Twilio at first, which meant that the company had to buckle down, be frugal, and focus solely on delivering something that worked for its customers. Lawson even sold his wedding gifts to finance the company's operations in its early days.
"That notion of frugality and investing wisely has been a core part of Twilio's DNA because of our founding in the recession," Lawson said.
As the global economy faces another recession, Lawson says that this should be a lesson to entrepreneurs: Focus less on raising wads of cash, and more on your customers.
When Twilio first launched in the beginning of 2008, it was right in the middle of the Great Recession, and the company struggled to raise any money from venture capitalists. It took about a year after its founding to raise so much as a seed round — belts were tightening at VC firms, and investors were skeptical about a company focused on developers.
"Founding a company during a recession and not having a lot of investor money available to you definitely changes how you think about the core values," Twilio CEO and cofounder Jeff Lawson told Business Insider. "One of ours has always been, be frugal."
Because Twilio didn't have much by way of venture capital, Lawson says, it had to instead focus on solving problems for its customers while also watching how it spent every single dollar it had in the bank.
Twilio describes itself as a cloud communications company, helping customers like Lyft, Hulu, and Airbnb build software that can send text messages and make and receive phone and video calls.
Lawson says that its business is booming, amid the coronavirus crisis: Lawson says that healthcare and telemedicine providers have been using Twilio to power their outreach to patients, while call centers are using the company's tech to move operations into remote workers' homes. The company is now valued at some $15 billion on the public markets.
Even as it rose to success, though, Lawson says that the company never lost sight of what it was like not to have any money coming in, and how it only got through it by building products that its customers wanted. It's a lesson, he says, that will stick with him and his team through the recession that many experts fear the economy has now entered.
"That notion of frugality and investing wisely has been a core part of Twilio's DNA because of our founding in the recession," Lawson said.
That's in stark contrast to some of the other companies he's seen come and go over the years. He says he's seen too many tech startups that were "founded for the wrong reasons" and raised massive rounds when they didn't even have a product on the market yet.
'You get a lack of focus'
"Those companies, I struggle to think of a single company that raised a lot of money before they had a product before they succeeded," Lawson said. "There's no discipline and frugality. They're spending a lot on offices and product development. You get a lack of focus. It's more for optics."
He says that this is an important lesson for other startups, as they face a similarly tough fundraising environment through the rest of 2020. Don't focus on venture capital, especially as it gets harder to find, he says. Instead, focus on customers.
"Your job as an entrepreneur was to find customers," Lawson said. "When you're tapped into a customer to understand what they need at this time, find out how to serve customers...If you follow customers, more than ever you'll find opportunities."
'Your job as an entrepreneur was to find customers'
Twilio wasn't Lawson's first time as a founder. Besides a career at Amazon helping build what would later become the Amazon Web Services cloud computing unit, Lawson also cofounded three companies, including StubHub.
Right before Lawson launched Twilio, he was the CTO of Nine Star, and he thought that developers and companies needed a way to easily send messages to and call their customers. He and cofounders Evan Cooke and John Wolthuis decided they wanted to bring communications from hardware, like phones and routers, to software.
With that experience, the team decided to get together and have Twilio start fundraising in summer 2008. At the time, Lawson says, he thought that "we'll raise money and it will be fantastic."
It wasn't that easy. The Great Recession had made investors more cautious about making investments in the first place, and venture capitalists were wary of investing in the then-unproven market for developer tools.
"We finished the summer and hadn't raised a dime," Lawson said. "We thought, maybe this is a bad idea. Maybe this developer thing is a horrible idea. Maybe this is a bad time."
Still, Twilio didn't give up: Lawson said that the team decided to trust that its product was something customers wanted and needed. With that faith in its own abilities to anchor it, Lawson took steps like selling all the gits from his recent wedding to help finance the company. Eventually, it worked, with the company getting traction, leading to revenue, and finally allowing the company to raise a venture capital round.
"Sometimes you have to get creative," Lawson said. "Fundamentally, a lot of entrepreneurs have a vision of how it's supposed to be done. That's the makings of a great company."
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With people forced to work, learn, and socialize from home, apps like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Houseparty have seen spikes in downloads as they become essential to daily life.
According to SensorTower's analytics, some of these apps have had downloads increase by more than 1,000% between February and March when most US shelter in place orders were first issued.
Based on SensorTower's findings, people seem to be downloading tools for remote work and school, social apps for keeping in touch with friends, and simple mobile games. Instacart's inclusion also makes sense as fears of COVID-19 stop people from venturing out to the grocery store.
Here are the 12 apps with the biggest increases in downloads in the US.
This simple single-player game was released in February and became the overall top mobile game in the world in March.
News app News Break has increased 275%.
Coronavirus coverage has given a bump to news ratings across the country.
Grocery delivery app Instacart downloads grew by 296.5%.
In February, Instacart was downloaded 455,000 times, compared to 1.8 million downloads in March. Since the coronavirus put many under stay at home orders, Instacart has been hiring thousands of shoppers, and workers striked for hazard pay and safety gear.
Another news aggregation app, Smart News, grew downloads by 571%.
Words with Friends 2 saw downloads increase by 614%.
A 2017 sequel to the original Words with Friends, shelter in place orders have led to people redownloading the app to connect with friends in other ways.
Microsoft's workplace chat app, Teams, grew by 639%.
Like other remote work apps, COVID-19 has been a boon to Microsoft Teams. In just one week in March, it added 12 million daily active users.
Online learning platform Google Classroom also saw a jump of 661%.
Downloads increased as schools closed and turned to remote learning, despite some students' attempts to get it removed from the app store with one-star reviews.
Video chat app Houseparty saw renewed interest, with a 1072% increase in downloads.
The app originally launched in 2016. It's now regaining popularity as experts warn about the importance of social distancing in order to slow the spread of the coronavirus.
Video chat app Zoom saw downloads grow 1330%.
In February, Zoom was downloaded 783,000, compared to 11.2 million downloads in March, despite security concerns.
Zoom also had the most overall downloads of any app on this list in March, with 11.2 million, nearly twice as many as any other app.
Google Meet, Google's video chat app, grew by 2,746%.
Some extensions and tools make Google Meet more like the video chat app of choice, Zoom.
Spiral Roll downloads increased 3,629%.
The mobile game, which went from just 118,000 downloads in February to 4.4 million in March, was the top downloaded game in the App Store in March.
Finally, Perfect Cream, a mobile game where users decorate cakes, had a whopping 11,844% increase in downloads.
The game, which had the second most downloads in the App Store in March, went from only 36,000 downloads in February to 4.3 million in March.
The coronavirus pandemic and the subsequent rise of remote work has led to dramatically increased demand for apps that enable collaboration and communication.
Zoom, Slack and Microsoft Teams are three apps that have seen a big boost.
Here are four graphs that help illustrate just how much of a boom each company has seen.
The rise in remote work due to the coronavirus pandemic has led to huge gains for cloud software apps that help people collaborate and stay connected.
Zoom, Slack and Microsoft Teams have all seen massive spikes in users in a very short span of time.
Video conference tool Zoom has received the most unprecedented publicity. It's evolved from being a platform aimed at businesses to a household name, as consumers use it for happy hours, online classes, Passover celebrations, yoga instruction, and so much more.
Microsoft Teams and Slack have also seen increased usage, as businesses seek out moe ways for their employees to continue working without being in the office.
"With the rise of COVID-19, the at-home economy, and social distancing, people are trying to find ways to continue to engage on multiple platforms," Futurum Research analyst Dan Newman told Business Insider.
Here are four graphs that help illustrate just how big of a boost each company has seen:
Zoom saw its usage skyrocket, reaching 300 million daily meeting participants in April.
Zoom said it had 300 million free and paid meeting participants on its app every day as of April 21.
That is tremendous growth from when it first released coronavirus-related users metrics in March, and to put that into context: Zoom only had 10 million daily meeting participants at the end of December.
However, there has been some confusion over Zoom's metrics.
"In a blog post on April 22, we unintentionally referred to these participants as 'users' and 'people.' When we realized this error, we adjusted the wording to 'participants.' This was a genuine oversight on our part," a Zoom spokesperson said.
The confusion goes back further, though. When Zoom released metrics in March, it used the "daily meeting participant" language as well. The figure was widely reported in outlets including Business Insider as Zoom claiming to have 200 million daily active users, rather than meeting participants. It remains unclear why Zoom never corrected the record.
Regardless, what is clear is that the numbers do show that usage of Zoom has grown tremendously during the pandemic. For comparison, rival Microsoft Teams said it reached 200 million meeting participants in a single day in April — closing in behind Zoom.
As Zoom's popularity has swelled, so too has its stock price.
Zoom's stock price has soared almost 150% since the beginning of the year.
While the stock briefly fell at the beginning of April due to questions about Zoom's privacy and security, it rebounded and reached an all-time high of $169 on April 23, one day after the company announced 300 million daily meeting participants.
Microsoft Teams now has 75 million daily active users, adding 31 million in a little over a month.
Microsoft Teams, which combines chat, video, and document collaboration into one tool, has also seen a big spike in usage amid the increase in remote work. Teams now has 75 million daily active users, CEO Satya Nadella said on its last earnings call at the end of April.
Microsoft Office 365 already dominates the workplace, and Teams comes bundled in with that suite. Its recent surge in popularity shows that businesses are turning to Teams, which may have already laid dormant in their Office 365 accounts, when faced with the necessity.
"I think that the moment that companies were put in a position where they had to make a decision, they decided, 'This is going to be our collaboration platform, this going to be how we meet when we no longer go to meetings,'" Newman said. "IT leaders and business leaders trust Microsoft."
Microsoft plans to release a consumer version of its productivity suite, including Teams, so it will be seen whether the product catches on with non-business users like Zoom has.
In the meantime, 183,000 school districts in 175 countries were using Teams for Education, as of a Microsoft blog post on April 9, and the company said it tracked 2.7 billion meeting minutes in Teams in a single day on March 31. That was up from 900 million minutes a day earlier in March.
Slack added 9,000 paid customers halfway through its first quarter, almost as many as it added in its two previous quarters combined.
Slack has also seen a massive usage growth around the world.
When Slack reported earnings in mid-March it said it had seen a "significant spike" in usage, as the pandemic forced people to work remotely. A few weeks later, Slack gave some metrics to show what it meant: Between the beginning of February and the end of March, it added 9,000 new paid customers, almost as many as it added in its previous two quarters combined.
"Some of our customers will inevitably go bankrupt, there will be layoffs, and some customers will shrink," he said during an analyst call in March. "I don't think we've got the super computers that can tell us how the world will look three months from now and that's where the uncertainty comes from."
Retailers across the US are feeling the strain of the coronavirus pandemic, which is creating a surge in demand at some stores that remain open but has wholly dried up business for those that haven't.
Experts, landlords, and retailers are now turning their thoughts to life after lockdown and how different the retail landscape could look in the future.
"We are working on how we come out of this, what are we going to look like, and how are we going to make it so our customers feel comfortable coming to our properties. That's what our main concerns are right now," Greg Maloney, who heads commercial real estate services company JLL Retail in the US, said in a recent conversation with Business Insider. JLL Retail offers property management and leasing services to landlords.
"9/11 changed our way of doing things...and I think this is going to change our way of doing things in a lot of ways," he said.
Here's how our shopping experience could change, according to retail experts:
Stores that are deemed essential and can stay open during the lockdown have already enforced new measures to make shoppers and employees feel safer. These include anything from social distancing markers and limits on the number of customers in-store at any one time to sneeze guards at the cash registers. And experts say that some of these measures will become a permanent fixture.
Greg Maloney of JLL Retail said he is already working with clients who have busy stores – such as Apple – to see how they can prepare for the future. It includes changing the store layout and limiting the number of customers.
Movie theaters are doing the same, he said, by looking at how they can space out seats or leave some empty to limit the number of people.
Hand sanitizing stations and free masks
While some retailers have started to supply workers with masks, Maloney said JLL is looking at how to take this a step further. It is considering whether malls and stores might also begin to provide free masks for customers and install hand sanitizing stations in public areas to prevent the spread of infection.
Appointment-only shopping services typify expensive boutiques or wedding dress stores but Kelly Stickel – founder and CEO of consultancy firm Remodista – said in the future we could see more stores adopting this model to limit the number of people in a store.
A less drastic measure would be to open the store every other day to make time for a deep clean, she said.
More contactless payments
Retailers are already advising customers to avoid germ-ridden cash and pay by card. Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData Retail, thinks we are only going to see more contactless payment options in stores along with "scan and shop" services to help customers avoid the registers altogether, he said.
Pick-up becomes the norm
Before the pandemic, some of the country's biggest retailers were building out their buy online pick-up in-store services to make shopping more convenient. But in the past few weeks, grocery and big-box chains have been ramping up these services as customers avoid shopping in-store.
Saunders is expecting more stores to jump on the bandwagon and for collection points in-store to be given more prominence and space, he said.
Chengyi Lin, an affiliate professor of strategy at INSEAD business school, said we would see the same process applied to restaurants as well. Ordering online and dining in the restaurant could decrease the wait times outside and inside restaurants and provide a "smoother and safer dining experience for patrons," he said. And ordering online and picking up at the restaurant or store could save time and reduce human interaction.
These services could also play an important role in contact tracing.
"Back-tracking digital transactions could help identify potential contacts should an individual be diagnosed positive,' he said.
Leaning more on ecommerce
Social distancing is already encouraging consumers to shop online more, and experts say this will only continue.
Lin used China as an example of this.
"After China comes out of national confinement, many brick-and-mortar supermarkets continue to lose foot traffic, while their online channels continue to thrive.
"In the US, we may see a similar recovery pattern. We could expect to see a continued increase of ecommerce penetration for retailers. This increase could benefit both pure ecommerce players such as Amazon and traditional retailers who manage omnichannels. In-store foot traffic may have a slow recovery," he said.
It hasn't applied to all businesses, however. According to Lin, restaurants in China have seen a faster rebound.
"With continued physical distancing rules, such as one table one person, diners come back to enjoy the flavors they've missed," he said. Still, he's expecting takeout and food delivery demand to continue to rise.
More stores will close
As more consumers switch to ecommerce shopping, we are likely to see a contraction in the number of stores in the US.
This trend was already well underway before the pandemic started but is likely to accelerate over the next few years, experts say.
"I think some retailers will also use the crisis as an opportunity to assess what they want from their store portfolio and I expect some to shrink because demand has dropped off," Saunders said.
In a recent UBS report, a group of analysts estimated that as many as 100,000 stores could close in the US in the next five years. In the report, UBS cited the immediate impact of the pandemic and the subsequent changing shopping habits it is likely to cause as crucial reasons for this.
Robots replace humans in stores
COVID-19 has become a testing ground for several new technologies such as delivery robots and drones in China, Lin said.
"In the case of prolonged confinement, or the "long-tail" scenario, these technologies could become very helpful," he added, highlighting that drones could deliver medicines in cities and remote areas.
Robots could also become more critical in stores and used for tasks such as cleaning and stock checking. The benefits of this are twofold, Saunders said: It "both minimizes staff exposure and also helps reduce costs – which retailers will be desperate to do after this crisis."
Virtual reality brings the store to our home
If store visits do drop, longterm retailers are going to have to come up with more creative ways to recreate the experience of shopping in-store online.
Artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR) could play an important role here by offering services such as personalized recommendation, image-based search, and virtual personal stylists, Lin said.
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