Davemichels

• Facebook is adding 50-person video chatrooms called Messenger Rooms.
• The new feature reflects how people have turned to video-calling to stay in contact amid the pandemic.
• And it's an attempt to counter the rise of Zoom, the once-business-focused video-conferencing app that has exploded during lockdown.
• Dozens of people can join the Rooms, even if they don't have a Facebook account, and use virtual backgrounds and augmented reality filters.

Facebook is adding 50-person video chatrooms to its social network in a significant update that seeks to counter the surprise rise of video-chat service Zoom and offer people more ways to communicate with their friends while separated by the pandemic.

On Friday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company is introducing "Messenger Rooms" — a new feature that allows members to create public or private video chatrooms to interact with friends and strangers. 

As coronavirus has erupted around the world in recent months, it has radically transformed how billions of people interact with one another. Separated by fear and lockdowns around the globe, people have turned to social networks and online communication services to stay in touch and work.

There has been an explosion in video conference-calling, and the big winner thus far has been Zoom — once a firmly corporate-focused video-chat service, it has skyrocketed from 10 million daily users to 300 million in a matter of months. 

Facebook's announcement of Rooms, and the prominence the new feature is being given, is a clear indicator that the company views group video communication as a strategic priority right now. 

The chatrooms are being displayed at the top of users' Facebook news feeds — some of the most prime real-estate in the Facebook universe — as well as group pages, screenshots shared by the company show. They even sit above Stories, the auto-deleting photos and videos that have been a focus for the company recently.

Similarly, if a room's privacy settings allow it, people will be able to join them via a link even if they don't have a Facebook account. It's an unusual move for Facebook, but one that may help broaden the feature's appeal to people unwilling to sign up for services with the company.

Rooms comes alongside a bunch of other video-related announcements from Facebook. The company is adding eight-person video calls to messaging app WhatsApp, as well as video-call functionality to Facebook Dating, the company's dating service that faces the challenge of most prospective daters being unable to meet face-to-face right now. 

It's also beefing up its livestreaming functionalities — letting users watch Instagram Live broadcasts from desktop for the first time, letting users livestream from their Portal video-chat devices, and reintroducing the "Live With" feature that allows users to co-livestream with others and which it previously discontinued.

Facebook is determined not to be left behind

Messenger Rooms is launching in some unspecified countries this week, Facebook wrote in a blog post announcing the news, and will roll out to the rest of the world "in the coming weeks."

Initially, users will be able to create them through the core Facebook app — but in time they'll spread throughout all of Facebook's services, to Instagram direct messages, WhatsApp, and its Portal device.

Like Zoom, users will be able to set virtual backgrounds, and they can also use Facebook's augmented reality tech to add face filters. They can be made public, or restricted to a users' friends, or select group of people only.

With most of the world unable to venture outside, Zoom and other large-scale video chat services have suddenly become host to everything from trivia nights to fitness classes to funerals. 

Friday's announcements illustrate Facebook's historic determination not to be left behind as people's behaviour shifts online — even if it sometimes means shamelessly copying competitors. When Snapchat first appeared as a potential threat to Facebook, it cloned its features numerous times, to varying degrees of success — most significantly by co-opting the Stories features that became a smash hit for Instagram.  

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SEE ALSO: Facebook just beefed up its work app Workplace as COVID-19 lockdowns continue, and its chief says it can help companies retain their culture

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NOW WATCH: Pathologists debunk 13 coronavirus myths

AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson has announced that he’ll be stepping down from his position, with current AT&T president and COO John Stankey set to replace him as the new CEO on July 1st, via CNBC. Stephenson will continue to serve as the executive chairman of AT&T’s board until January 2021.

Stephenson has served as AT&T’s CEO since May 2007, a time period that saw the company massive expand in both existing and new markets, with an attempted (but failed purchase of T-Mobile) in 2011, an acquisition of Leap Wireless in 2013, a purchase of DirecTV in 2014, and the landmark $85 billion Time Warner deal that closed back in 2018 after years of regulatory fighting and objections from the Justice Department.

Stankey became the heir apparent in...

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Though businesses prepare to shrink their IT spend, an economic contraction can provide an opportunity to assess where software can boost productivity.

• Slack will not reopen its offices until at least September 1 of this year, and is committed to continue paying its employees who can't do their work from home, including contractors and hourly workers. 
• While other tech companies have also committed to paying their hourly and contract workers during this time, Slack's potential reopening date of September 1 would likely make it the longest period any tech company has committed to yet. 
• Slack made the decision to make the delay because it means "less exposure for our employees, fewer invasive distancing measures in offices, less disruption for customers, and greater flexibility in weathering a potential second wave of the virus," SVP of people Robby Kwok said in a blog post.
• Slack's announcement also comes as the company has seen record usage due to the spike in remote work — adding 9,000 new customers in the first half of the quarter.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Slack says it will not reopen its offices until at least September 1 of this year — a significant delay to the date of June 1 that it had originally targeted. 

In blog post announcing the decision, Slack Senior VP of People Robby Kwok wrote that embracing remote work for a longer period means "less exposure for our employees, fewer invasive distancing measures in offices, less disruption for customers, and greater flexibility in weathering a potential second wave of the virus."

Kwok also wrote that Slack was committed to continuing to pay any employees who can't do their work from home, including contractors and hourly workers.

Slack first closed its offices on March 18, in a decision that came right before its home city of San Francisco enacted a shelter-in-place order. That order has since been extended until May 3 for most counties in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Slack is one of the very few companies to provide its employees with a target date for a return to the office. Of note is that while many other tech companies have also committed to paying their hourly and contract workers during this period of mandatory remote work, this news means that Slack is promising to keep that commitment alive through at least September 1st — likely the longest period publicly announced by any major tech company. 

Kwok added that the new date also can pave the way for "other workers to return to work first—those who cannot work remotely to sustain their livelihood," and gives employees more flexibility throughout the summer months when schools and childcare facilities will like be disrupted. California schools are closed for the remainder of the school year.

In China, where the pandemic started, social distancing mandates are being lifted. Microsoft is gradually reopening its China offices and manufacturers like Foxconn, Apple's largest manufacturing partner, have reopened factories.

In order to fully reopen all offices, experts say testing and contact tracing will likely have to become widely available.

Slack's announcement comes as the company has fully adapted to "remote operations, while helping millions of new and existing users meet the challenge of a new way of working," Kwok wrote. Slack has seen record usage of its workplace chat app due to the spike in remote work — adding 9,000 new customers in the first half of the quarter, almost as much as in the previous two quarters combined. 

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NOW WATCH: Why electric planes haven't taken off yet

Zoom has hit the headlines recently for a growing number of security and privacy concerns, but that doesn’t seem to have stopped people from flocking to the video conferencing app. Zoom has now revealed that it has surpassed 300 million daily Zoom meeting participants. That’s up 50 percent from the 200 million the company reported earlier this month, and a huge jump from the 10 million back in December.

Zoom does say the figures are daily meeting participants, which could mean if you have five Zoom meetings in a day then you’re counted five times. However, Zoom also states in the same blog post that it has “more than 300 million daily users” and that “more than 300 million people around the world are using Zoom during this challenging...

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Miro is a company in the right place at the right time. The makers of a digital whiteboard are seeing usage surge right now as businesses move from the workplace and physical whiteboards. Today, the company announced a hefty $50 million Series B.

Iconiq Capital led the round with help from Accel and a slew of individual investors. Today’s investment brings the total raised to around $75 million, according to the company. Among the company’s angel investors was basketball star Steph Curry, and Dutch investor Bas Godska, one of the most prolific Western investors in Eastern Europe.

What’s attracting this level of investment is that this is a product made for a moment when workers are forced to stay home. One of the primary complaints about working at home is the inability to sit in the same room with colleagues and brainstorm around a whiteboard. This reproduces that to an extent.

What’s more, Miro isn’t simply light-weight add-in like you might find built into a collaboration tool like Zoom or Microsoft Teams; it’s more of a platform play designed to integrate with many different enterprise tools, much like Slack does for communications.

Miro co-founder and CEO Andrey Khusid said the company planned the platform idea from its earliest days. “The concept from day one was building something for real-time collaboration and the platform thing is very important because we expect that people will build on top of our product,” Khusid told TechCrunch.

Image Credit: Miro

That means that people can build integrations to other common tools and customize the base tool to meet the needs of an individual team or organization. It’s an approach that seems to be working as the company reports it’s profitable with more than 21,000 customers including 80% of the Fortune 100. Customers include Netflix, Salesforce, PwC, Spotify, Expedia and Deloitte.

Khusid says usage has been skyrocketing among both business and educational customers as the pandemic has forced millions of people to work at home. He says that has been a challenge for his engineering team to keep up with the demand, but one that the company has been able to meet to this point.

The startup just passed the 300 employee mark this week, and it will continue to hire with this new influx of money. Khusid expects to have another 150 employees before the end of the year to keep up with increasing demand for the product.

“We understand that we need to come out strong from this situation. The company is growing much faster than we expected, so we need to have a very strong team to maintain the growth at the same pace after the crisis ends.”

At a time when more transactions than ever are happening online, payments behemoth Stripe is announcing three new features to continue expanding its reach.

The company today announced that it will now offer card issuing services directly to businesses to let them in turn make credit cards for customers tailored to specific purposes. Alongside that, it’s going to expand the number of accepted local, large card networks to cut down some of the steps it takes to make transactions in international markets. And finally, it’s launching a “revenue optimization” feature that essentially will use Stripe’s AI algorithms to reassess and approve more flagged transactions that might have otherwise been rejected in the past.

Together the three features underscore how Stripe is continuing to scale up with more services around its core payment processing APIs, a significant step in the wake of last week announcing its biggest fundraise to date: $600 million at a $36 billion valuation.

The rollouts of the new products are specifically coming at a time when Stripe has seen a big boost in usage among some (but not all) of its customers, said John Collison, Stripe’s co-founder and president, in an interview. Instacart, which is providing grocery delivery at a time when many are living under stay-at-home orders, has seen transactions up by 300% in recent weeks. Another newer customer, Zoom, is also seeing business boom. Amazon, Stripe’s behemoth customer that Collison would not discuss in any specific terms except to confirm it’s a close partner, is also seeing extremely heavy usage.

But other Stripe users — for example, many of its sea of small business users — are seeing huge pressures, while still others, faced with no physical business, are just starting to approach e-commerce in earnest for the first time. Stripe’s idea is that the launches today can help it address all of these scenarios.

“What we’re seeing in the COVID-19 world is that the impact is not minor,” said Collison. “Online has always been steadily taking a share from offline, but now many [projected] years of that migration are happening in the space of a few weeks.”

Stripe is among those companies that have been very mum about when they might go public — a state of affairs that only become more set in recent times, given how the IPO market has all but dried up in the midst of a health pandemic and economic slump. That has meant very little transparency about how Stripe is run, whether it’s profitable and how much revenues it makes.

But Stripe did note last week that it had some $2 billion in cash and cash reserves, which at least speaks to a level of financial stability. And another hint of efficiency might be gleaned from today’s product news.

While these three new services don’t necessarily sound like they are connected to each other, what they have underpinning them is that they are all building on top of tech and services that Stripe has previously rolled out. This speaks to how, even as the company now handles some 250 million API requests daily, it’s keeping some lean practices in place in terms of how it invests and maximises engineering and business development resources.

The card issuing service, for example, is built on a card service that Stripe launched last year. Originally aimed at businesses to provide their employees with credit cards — for example to better manage their own work-related expenses, or to make transactions on behalf of the business — now businesses can use the card issuing platform to build out aspects of its customer-facing services.

For example, Stripe noted that the first customer, Zipcar, will now be placing credit cards in each of its vehicles, which drivers can use to fuel up the vehicles (that is, the cards can only be used to buy gas). Another example Collison gave for how these could be implemented would be in a food delivery service, for example for a Postmates delivery person to use the card to pay for the meal that a customer has already paid Postmates to pick up and deliver to them.

Collison noted that while other startups like Marqeta have built big businesses around innovative card issuing services, “this is the first time it’s being issued on a self-serving basis,” meaning companies that want to use these cards can now set this up more quickly as a “programmatic card” experience, akin to self-serve, programmatic ads online.

It seems also to be good news for investors. “Stripe Issuing is a big step forward,” said Alex Rampell, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, in a statement. “Not just for the millions of businesses running on Stripe, but for credit cards as a fundamental technology. Businesses can now use an API to create and issue cards exactly when and where they need them, and they can do it in a few clicks, not a few months. As investors, we’re excited by all the potential new companies and business models that will emerge as a result.”

Meanwhile, the revenue “optimization” engine that Stripe is rolling out is built on the same machine learning algorithms that it originally built for Radar, its fraud prevention tool that originally launched in 2016 and was extended to larger enterprises in 2018. This makes a lot of sense, since oftentimes the reason transactions get rejected is because of the suspicion of fraud. Why it’s taken four years to extend that to improve how transactions are approved or rejected is not entirely clear, but Stripe estimates that it could enable a further $2.5 billion in transactions annually.

One reason why the revenue optimization may have taken some time to roll out was because while Stripe offers a very seamless, simple API for users, it’s doing a lot of complex work behind the scenes knitting together a lot of very fragmented payment flows between card issuers, banks, businesses, customers and more in order to make transactions possible.

The third product announcement speaks to how Stripe is simplifying a bit more of that. Now, it’s able to provide direct links into six big card networks — Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover, JCB and China Union Pay, which effectively covers the major card networks in North and Latin America, Southeast Asia and Europe. Previously, Stripe would have had to work with third parties to integrate acceptance of all of these networks in different regions, which would have cut into Stripe’s own margins and also given it less flexibility in terms of how it could handle the transaction data.

Launching the revenue optimization by being able to apply machine learning to the transaction data is one example of where and how it might be able to apply more innovative processes from now on.

While Stripe is mainly focused today on how to serve its wider customer base and to just help business continue to keep running, Collison noted that the COVID-19 pandemic has had a measurable impact on Stripe beyond just boosts in business for some of its customers.

The whole company has been working remotely for weeks, including its development team, making for challenging times in building and rolling out services.

And Stripe, along with others, is also in the early stages of piloting how it will play a role in issuing small business loans as part of the CARES Act, he said.

In addition to that, he noted that there has been an emergence of more medical and telehealth services using Stripe for payments.

Before now, many of those use cases had been blocked by the banks, he said, for reasons of the industries themselves being strictly regulated in terms of what kind of data could get passed across networks and the sensitive nature of the businesses themselves. He said that a lot of that has started to get unblocked in the current climate, and “the growth of telemedicine has been off the charts.”

I started becoming obsessed with EarthCam’s Times Square live stream a few weeks ago. Instead of habitually opening Instagram or Facebook when I was bored, I’d check in on some low-res strangers from the safety of my apartment. It was oddly comforting to see that the blazing walls of billboards and larger-than-life store names were still there, even if the streets around them were unusually empty. The barrage of LED advertisements felt a little less searing on a small laptop screen than they do in real life.

Someone had arranged the chairs to spell “I <3 NY,” which actually made me love New York a little bit more.

I even saw the Naked Cowboy! And a tourist taking a photo while simultaneously running away from him. I feel so safe just by...

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• More than 300 million people joined Zoom meetings on April 21, up 50% from the beginning of the month, CEO Eric Yuan said in a webinar Wednesday.
• Zoom's surging popularity comes despite numerous privacy scandals that have plagued the company in recent weeks, from "Zoom bombing" to surreptitiously sharing data with Facebook.
• Zoom is rolling out several new features this week aimed at fixing those issues, like allowing users to report trolls and offering them more control over their security settings, it announced Wednesday in a blog post.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

More than 300 million people used Zoom's video conferencing software on April 21, a 50% jump from 200 million daily users at the beginning of the month, CEO Eric Yuan said during a webinar Wednesday.

"Clearly, the Zoom platform is providing an incredibly valuable service to our beloved users during this challenging time," Yuan said. "We are thrilled and honored to continue to earn the trust of so many enterprises, hospitals, teachers and customers throughout the world."

As coronavirus lockdowns have encouraged more people to turn to video conferencing tools to keep working as well as stay in touch with friends and family, Zoom has emerged as the dominant platform, topping charts in both Apple and Google's app stores at the end of March.

But Zoom's popularity has skyrocketed in recent weeks even as the company scrambles to address various privacy scandals, like a practice called "Zoom bombing" where trolls have been hijacking users' meetings and harrassing them. The company was also for a time sending analytics data to Facebook without alerting users, and while it has since reversed course, it was recently hit with a class-action lawsuit related to the data sharing.

In a blog post earlier Wednesday, Zoom announced that the new version of its software, set to roll out to users within the week, would have a number of features aimed at fixing some of those issues. Users will soon be able to report trolls who intrude on meetings uninvited, and they'll also be able to take advantage of stronger AES 256-bit GCM encryption. Other changes to default settings around meeting passwords and "waiting rooms" — which help keep uninvited guests out of meetings — are already available to users, the post said.

SEE ALSO: Afraid of the person in the middle of your Zoom call? You're not alone. Researchers say large faces in video meetings can trigger a 'fight or flight' response.

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NOW WATCH: We tested a machine that brews beer at the push of a button

Courts are moving online due to COVID-19. No one is sure if that’s a good thing.

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But their default touch controls are a chore

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Polar has announced its latest fitness watch, called the Grit X, and it’s made for the outdoors. The company claims that this is the ultimate outdoor watch, taking every feature (along with a few design cues) from its 2018 Vantage lineup of watches and adding even more utility to help athletes get more out of their workouts.

One of those new features, called Hill Splitter, will appeal to those who like to hike. It tracks stats on how many ascents and descents you’ve taken during your run, walk, or hike — anything with an incline. This could be a fun way to track your performance if basing your workout on distance metrics alone doesn’t motivate you.

Most people know...

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Zoom promised a 90-day feature freeze to fix privacy and security issues, and the company is delivering on some of those promises. A new Zoom 5.0 update is rolling out today that’s designed to address some of the many complaints that Zoom has faced in recent weeks. With this new update, there’s now a security icon that groups together a number of Zoom’s security features. You can use it to quickly lock meetings, remove participants, and restrict screen sharing and chatting in meetings.

Zoom is also now enabling passwords by default for most customers, and IT admins can define the password complexity for Zoom business users. Zoom’s waiting room feature is also now on by default for basic, single-license Pro, and education accounts. This...

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If you’re finding that background noise is disrupting voice or video calls made from your computer, then a new piece of software from Nvidia might help (provided you have the necessary hardware to run it). Released in April 2020, RTX Voice uses the hardware found in Nvidia’s RTX (and more recently, GTX) GPUs to process your incoming and outgoing audio and eliminate almost all background noise.

Below, you’ll find a quick demonstration I recorded to show how it works. This was recorded from a Blue Snowball microphone using the built-in call recording functionality in Zoom. When I don’t have the software enabled, you can hear the loud clacking of my mechanical keyboard in the background of the call. But when I turn on RTX Voice, the sound...

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Ice T loves the app Marco Polo. So does P!nk, who shouted out the app on Instagram, and Amy Poehler, who mentioned it during a Late Night appearance. All three celebrities have highlighted the four-year-old video messaging app in recent weeks, saying they’re using it to stay in touch with friends and family while social distancing. It’s seen a 12 times increase in new signups over the last month, with a 745 percent increase in signups during just the week of March 30th. Marco Polo wouldn’t provide concrete user numbers, but it said that “millions” of people are now using the app.

Still, for a four-year-old app with explosive growth and celebrity fanfare, no one seems to know exactly why people are flocking to Marco Polo.

“I think the...

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A few weeks ago, a new talking point popped up among telecom policy pundits opposed to net neutrality. They began claiming that the only reason the internet hasn't buckled during the pandemic was thanks to the FCC's controversial and unpopular net neutrality repeal. That repeal, you'll recall, not only killed net neutrality, but much of the FCC's ability to hold ISPs accountable for pretty much anything, including outright billing fraud.

But to hear various net neutrality opponents tell it, the repeal is the primary reason the US internet hasn't fallen apart during COVID-19 quarantine:

"We should thank our lucky stars that Title II net neutrality regulations were repealed by the FCC in 2017. In doing so, the US avoided the fate of much of Europe today, where broadband networks are strained and suffering from a lack of investment and innovation."

Except none of this is true. This entire narrative is fantasy -- built almost entirely off of the EU simply asking various streaming companies to throttle certain services in an abundance of caution. There remains no evidence that this was due to any serious problems, and, at the same time, there's been no evidence that US networks have measurably outperformed their EU counterparts (indeed, many of the companies that throttled services in the EU did so in the US as well). Investment at many US ISPs actually dropped post net neutrality repeal. And there's literally no indication that US networks are somehow "more robust" than the EU because the FCC decided to ignore the public and obliterate its own authority at the behest of the telecom lobby. It's just not a supportable claim.

In fact, networks in China and Italy, like here in the States, have (with a few exceptions) held up reasonably well under the massive load of telecommuting and home learning. Not because of net neutrality policy, but because network engineers are generally good at their jobs. While there have been some network problems, they're usually of the "last mile" variety in both the EU and US. As in, because of limited competition, your ISP never upgraded that "last mile" to your house, leaving you stuck on a DSL line from around 2007 that struggles to handle Zoom teleconferencing particularly well.

The claim that the EU was suffering some kind of exceptional congestion problems appears to have originated among some EU regulators who simply urged Netflix to reduce bandwidth consumption by 25% to pre-emptively help lighten the load. There was no supporting public evidence provided of actual harm. The move was precautionary, and may not have even been necessary. Somehow this flimsy base was used as the foundation of the claim that because the EU passed some fairly basic and inconsistent net neutrality rules, it suffered more network headaches than the US.

But if you look at Ookla's data of how networks have held up around the globe, you see that the US appears to have performed at about the same level as other places. Here's the US:

There's a small dip in mid-March as a lot of the country began to shut down, but no massive problems. On that, everyone seems to agree. But to hear the various anti-net neutrality folks tell it, the EU was struggling to keep its network up and running. But... uh, the data doesn't show that at all:

In Germany, France, and Spain you see that download speeds actually jumped up before eventually doing a small dip as those countries locked down. There isn't enough evidence to make a definitive claim, but if we were to argue using the same points raised by critics of net neutrality, Looking at all that, you might even be able to make the argument that EU broadband providers handled this situation better and more quickly than the US.

None of this has stopped the telecom sector and its allies from embracing this whole flimsy argument anyway. In a speech at the Inter American Development Bank last week, FCC boss Ajit Pai made, albeit more subtly, similar claims:

"In the end, I believe trusting the markets rather than solely relying on mandates resulted in more consumer-friendly policies than we would have achieved with a more heavy-handed government intervention, and I know that we were able to make these changes more quickly. I’d also argue that the general regulatory approach that we have in the United States have applied to the broadband marketplace gave us much stronger infrastructure in the first place, as it gave companies the incentives to invest in resilient, robust networks that could withstand unprecedented consumer demands."

Again though, Pai's not telling the truth. US broadband investment didn't magically improve due to the net neutrality repeal, no matter how many times he makes the claim. In fact, AT&T and Comcast dropped overall CAPEX despite massive deregulation and billions in tax cuts. There's zero evidence any of this industry ass-kissing made US networks more resilient to a pandemic. In fact, respected former FCC advisors like Gigi Sohn have argued that gutting FCC authority over ISPs has made it harder than ever to hold them accountable for bad behavior, pandemic or otherwise.

Using a pandemic to justify regulatory capture is grotesque, especially given there's just no evidence to support the claims being made here. That didn't stop FCC General Counsel Tom Johnson, who also tweeted out his support for a new Wall Street Journal opinion column (not coincidentally) making most of the same claims:

Notice how the telecom industry doesn't even have to publicly make these false claims, because they've got think tankers and government employees now doing it for them. These arguments are rife with cherry picking and selective reasoning (for example you'll see none of these folks highlighting how EU consumers pay far less for broadband than those in the US, in part because regulators are generally more active when it comes to protecting competition and consumer welfare). The Wall Street Journal story also suggests that US networks are more resilient to COVID-19 thanks to killing net neutrality, broadband privacy rules, and other "heavy handed" US telecom consumer protections:

"In Europe, networks have struggled to meet bandwidth demand, leading officials to ask popular services such as Netflix and YouTube to degrade the quality of their streaming video from high definition to standard definition. U.S. networks have faced fewer problems adjusting to the increase in demand. Public policy explains the different outcomes. The European Union has embraced a heavy-handed regulatory scheme designed to allocate access to the existing network, while the U.S. has emphasized private investment to expand network capacity."

But again, there's no evidence that European networks have fallen apart during the COVID-19 crisis. Or that any differences in performance have anything to do with deregulation or net neutrality. Netflix's decision to throttle back its bandwidth usage by 25% was done entirely pro-actively. There was no underlying network data provided by regulators to justify the move. It was just EU regulators being cautious (perhaps overly so).

Indeed, similar steps have been taken here in the States. YouTube for example has downgraded video quality to conserve bandwidth. So has game platform Steam, which is slowing some game downloads. You can't selectively highlight the EU's efforts on this front then ignore the US ones because it supports your flimsy narrative. Well I guess you can, but you should be laughed at.

It takes a particular type of person to look at a brutal pandemic and think that it provides a wonderful opportunity to justify one of the most controversial, scandal prone, and fact-averse regulatory policy decisions in modern history. Using COVID-19 to justify mindless telecom sector coddling sets a new, even lower bar for a sector whose argumentative integrity was already at ankle height.

So why do it? It's a distraction from several things the sector would prefer you not pay attention to. One being that an estimated 42 million Americans still can't access broadband during a pandemic, and millions more can't afford service because of a lack of competition among regionally power monopolies. They'd also really like it if you forgot how the FCC ignored the public, made up a bunch of data, and ignored a whole bunch of fraud to gut oversight of one of the most problematic business sectors in America--leaving consumers and regulators alike on precarious footing in the wake of an historic global crisis.

• Mary Meeker, best known for her insights on tech trends, just published a new report on how coronavirus will reshape the technology industry.
• The research, published in full by Axios, talks about how coronavirus will add fuel to remote work and benefit companies that can adapt to an environment with more digital interactions.
• It also dives into healthcare. Meeker, who founded Bond Capital, says the pandemic will accelerate five health-tech trends, like telemedicine and interoperability, that are already underway. 
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Mary Meeker, best known for her reports on tech trends, just published a new report on how coronavirus will reshape the technology industry.

The report, published in full by Axios, discusses how coronavirus will add fuel to remote work and benefit companies that can adapt to an environment where there are a lot fewer in-person interactions. The report was authored by Meeker and colleagues at the investment firm Bond Capital.

The report also includes a section focused on healthcare. The coronavirus pandemic has put a massive strain on the US healthcare system, sickening about 2.5 million people and killing more than 170,000.

Meeker says the outbreak has revealed two big problems with US healthcare: healthcare delivery still mainly happens in person, and healthcare data sources aren't connected or able to talk to each other.

"The front line of the battle with COVID-19 has been the institutions and individuals that make up America's healthcare delivery system," Meeker and colleagues wrote in the report. "Unfortunately, the pandemic also exposed a number of structural flaws in our healthcare system."

The pandemic will accelerate five health-tech trends that are already underway, Meeker writes. She said that medicine will keep moving away from hospitals, and that patients will act more and more as consumers.

Read on to see those trends.

More healthcare will be delivered online.

From the report: "Telemedicine is faster, often delivers better quality, and is almost always cheaper than traditional delivery systems."

Why now? Delivering care at home reduces the burden on hospitals and clinics and can prevent patients with the coronavirus form infecting others.

Read more: Meet the 12 telemedicine startups being put to the test as they gear up to confront the coronavirus pandemic

Home health monitoring devices will gain ground.

From the report: "Internet connected monitoring devices, when deployed alongside telemedicine can enhance its efficacy and can help to produce better outcomes."

Why now? These devices can help doctors who are delivering care virtually.

Read more: Best Buy just gave a 109-slide presentation on the future of the company. Here are the 7 crucial slides that spell out why the company is going all-in on healthcare.

Rapid lab testing will become more widely available.

From the report: "It's time to expect the iPhone equivalent of diagnostics, and there are a number of technology companies making great progress on that vision."

Why now? Coronavirus has revealed big shortcomings in the US's ability to test patients for the disease, and getting testing devices into more homes and clinics could help improve the situation.

Read more: A buzzy startup's struggle to make the first at-home test that can tell if you've had the coronavirus reveals a crucial roadblock to reopening the US

Healthcare data will become more connected.

From the report: "In the COVID-19 environment, the pressure to connect systems is greater than ever and we expect innovative companies, together with government support, to accelerate connectivity without the intensive integration requirements of past attempts."

Why now? The coronavirus outbreak has underscored that hospitals and clinics in the US don't have good ways of sharing data with each other.

Read more: A buzzy healthcare startup that raised $50 million from Andreessen Horowitz 3 months ago just cut staff amid the coronavirus pandemic

Automation and artificial intelligence will keep catching on in healthcare.

From the report: "Automation will continue to make inroads in healthcare to reduce workload and improve the quality of data capture. Applied/vertical artificial intelligence is just beginning to be paired with abundant EHR data to drive the right insights to the right providers at the right time."

Why now? Coronavirus showed that the healthcare labor force is "stretched thin," Meeker writes in the report.

Read more: Investors just poured more than $1 billion into startups using AI to tackle every part of healthcare. Here are the 5 healthcare AI startups raking in the most cash.

Theo Gove-Humphries and Bee Roper had their next two years planned out. They would fly — with their van, naturally — from the UK to Canada. They’d make their way across North America, dipping down into the Midwest US before cutting over to Alaska, and eventually ending up… well, somewhere that would let them ship off to Australia.

But shortly after getting their visas approved in early March, Canada banned most incoming international travel due to the COVID-19 pandemic. A day later, the UK began recommending that all nonessential international travel be canceled, too. Suddenly, they were stuck in the UK.

Continue reading…

Peloton today announced that it will resume live workout classes after finally closing its studios on April 3rd when an employee tested positive for COVID-19. Classes will now be streaming from the instructors’ homes — a format that many Peloton members had requested shortly after cities across the United States began shutting down non-essential businesses.

Classes will pick up again on the Peloton app, bike, and treadmill beginning April 22nd and will span cycling, running, strength training, and yoga. Users can expect between two to three new live classes daily; the schedule currently focuses on morning classes but the company promises to resume live evening “prime time” classes in the coming weeks.

In the days after US...

Continue reading…

• Jim Benton leads Chorus.ai, a San Francisco-based startup that analyzes sales meetings with artificial intelligence to find what approaches are working best to close deals. 
• Hired March 16, a week after his company sent staff home to work remotely, Benton has started a daily briefing webcast to interview customers about how they are adjusting to the COVID-19 crisis.
• Benton's firm and customers have unearthed trends during the past two months such as delayed payments, a decrease in cold calls, leadership involvement in sales meetings, and low open rates in COVID-themed emails.
• A major takeaway: Salespeople who demonstrated empathy for their customers amid the pandemic were generally more successful.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

If you're a newly-remote office worker who feels like you haven't seen your coworkers in forever, consider the situation of Jim Benton, the CEO of an AI startup who has never met his staff. Hired March 16, Benton has only met a handful of the employees of Chorus.ai, the 100-person San Francisco company he now leads. 

"I have not worked in the office yet," says Benton, a veteran of AT&T and Ticketmaster. "We started working from home the week before I started, and I had interviewed with a few folks. But I showed up Day 1 to face 100 tiles on a Zoom screen." 

Talk about the new normal of work life during COVID-19 staring you in the face. Looking into those 200 strange eyes, Benton knew he needed to do some informed communicating in order to lead his new staff. 

"I thought, 'What can we do with this situation to be our best? This is our moment, whether we would have chosen it or drawn it up this way or not. This is what we have. How can we make the most of it and help others to do the same?'"

Luckily, what his company does is study how firms communicate. Chorus.ai has raised $55 million in venture funding to date, from Canadian investment firm Georgian Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Emergence Capital, and its customers include Zoom, Mavenlink, Qualtrics, Adobe, and GitLab. 

Benton, the new CEO, has created a daily briefing video conference that breaks down how businesses are approaching sales calls during the COVID-19 crisis. Benton's daily briefing is broadcast live at 8:35 AM Pacific Time here, with past episodes available to stream. 

With a guest from a different company every day, Benton discusses the trends identified by Chorus.ai's natural language processing — the combination of computer science and linguistics that helps computers understand human language. Those AI programs swim through a vast data lake. Last year Chorus processed 5 million sales calls for its State of Conversation Intelligence report, and Benton says the data he cites in his daily briefings is culled from millions of calls from this year already. 

What the data show is a very different approach to sales over the past two months.  

"You might think the workforce just collapsed. It didn't. Teams are as productive or more productive working remotely, but it looks different. That's why we started the daily briefing, to show what we're seeing," Benton said.

One of the main things Chous.ai is seeing is that successful meetings over the past two months often "start with the heart." Participants connect, ask about each other's families and home life. If salespeople swoop in for a quick sale, it feels tone deaf, Chorus.ai customer Sean Andrews of MongoDB said in Benton's daily briefing last week.

"I think we're having more sincere discussions. Everyone is going through this so I think people are slowing down and building more rapport," said Andrews, whose firm provides a database for application developers. 

Lessons learned

What Chorus.ai calls its Conversation Intelligence Platform identifies and helps teams replicate the performance of top-performing reps by analyzing recordings of their sales meetings – who's at the meeting, when does it happen and on what platform, what's the outcome of the meeting, and what materials are presented? If the meeting led to a sale, what conversations led up to that? What patterns of speech show up regularly? These insights inform coaching strategies for sales and customer success teams. 

Other lessons learned so far include:

• Payment terms of longer than 30 days have doubled since the beginning of March, as companies rethink their budgets for the oncoming recession. 
• Mentions of COVID-19 more than doubled over the past month, but half of them occur in the first 10 minutes of a business conversation as participants inquire about each other's health and well-being, then move on to focus on business. 
• Cold calls have dropped 38% since January as salespeople have adjusted to remote work and a more personal approach with budgets tight.
• There's been a big jump – by 70% – in companies' leaders joining sales calls as budgets tighten. 
• Some of the markets hit hardest by the virus are rebounding in their productivity, with meetings increasing in New York and Chicago. 

'People are shying away from COVID messaging'

The effort to connect personally is also paying off within companies, Benton's guest on his daily briefing webcast said Friday. Grayson Cooper, head of sales at the transcription and captions company Rev.com, urged managers not to "miss out on what you're used to seeing in the office. It's a chance to have that coffee conversation that's crucial to having healthy relationships with your team."

All of this personal conversation doesn't just mean sympathizing about the virus' impact, said  Matt Amundson, the chief marketing officer of business data firm EverString on Benton's web conference show last week. "People are shying away from COVID messaging so much that if you use coronavirus in a subject line, the open rate decreases by 60%," Amundson said.

"We're focusing on humanity more than empathy. Something like 'I'm writing this email sitting in a bean bag chair in my living room rather than the office.'" That kind of messaging really clicks, he said.

What this all signals to Benton is that "We're all in my position. We're all trying to connect in this situation and make sense of this new environment."

Join the conversation about this story »

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A complete adoption of the Apple/Google coronavirus contact tracing API within the EU looks to be moving forward. Reporting for 9to5mac, tech writer Ben Lovejoy writes that the European Commission has endorsed the collective adoption of one app or common standard (e.g. the Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (PEPP-PT) platform).

Meet Leverice: A team messenger and collaboration platform that’s aiming to compete with b2b giants like Slack by tackling an issue that continues to plague real-time messaging — namely, ‘always-on’ information overload. This means these tools can feel like they’re eating into productivity as much as aiding it. Or else leave users stressed and overwhelmed about how to stay on top of the work comms firehose. 

Leverice’s pitch is that it’s been built from the ground up to offer a better triage structure so vital bits of info aren’t lost in rushing rivers of chatter than flow across less structured chat platforms.

It does this by giving users the ability to organize chat content into nested subchannels. So its theory is that hyper structured topic channels will let users better direct and navigate info flow, freeing them from the need to check everything or perform lots of searches in order to find key intel. Instead they can just directly drill down to specific subchannels, tuning out the noise.

The overarching aim is to bring a little asynchronicity to the world of real-time collaboration platforms, per co-founder and COO Daniel Velton.

“Most messaging and collaboration tools are designed for and built around synchronous communications, instant back-and-forth. But most members of remote teams communicate at their own pace — and there was no go-to messaging tool built around asynchronous communications,” he tells TechCrunch.

“We set out to solve that problem, to build a messenger and collaboration platform that breaks rivers down into rivulets. To do that, we needed a tech stack and unique architecture that would allow teams to efficiently work with hundreds of channels and subchannels distributed between scores of channel branches of varying depths. Having that granularity ensures that each little shelf maintains topical integrity.

“We’re not discussing Feature 2.1.1 and 2.1.2 and 2.1.3 and 2.1.4 inside a single ‘Features’ channel, where the discussions would blend together. Each has its own little home.”

Of course Slack isn’t blind to the info-overload issues its platform can generate. Last month it announced “a simpler, more organized Slack”, which includes the ability for users to organize channels, messages and apps into “custom, collapsible sections”. Aka folders.

So how is Leverice’s subchannel architecture a great leap forward on the latest version of Slack — which does let users organize themselves (and is now in the process of being rolled out across its user-base)?

“All structuring (including folders) on other popular messengers is essentially an individual preference setting,” says Velton. “It does not reflect on a teamwide channel tree. It’s definitely a step in the right direction but it’s about each user adding a tiny bit of structure to their own private interface, not having a structure that affects and improves the way an entire team communicates.

“Leverice architecture is based on structuring of channels and subchannels into branches of unlimited depth. This kind of deep structuring is not something you can simply ‘overlay’ on top of an existing messenger that was designed around a single layer of channels. A tremendous number of issues arise when you work with a directory-like structure of infinite depth, and these aren’t easily solved or addressed unless the architecture is built around it.”

“Sure, in Leverice you can build the ‘6-lane autobahns’,” he adds, using an analogy of vehicle traffic on roads to illustrate the concept of a hierarchy of topic channels. “But we are the only messenger where you can also construct a structured network of ‘country roads’. It’s more ‘places’ but each ‘place’ is so narrow and topical that working through it all becomes more manageable, quick and pleasant, and it’s something you can do at your own pace without fear of missing important kernels of information as they fly by on the autobahn.”

To be clear, while Slack has now started letting users self-organize — by creating a visual channel hierarchy that suits them — Leverice’s structure means the same structured tree of channels/subchannels applies for the whole team.

“At the end of the day, for communications to work, somebody on a team needs to be organized,” argues Velton. “What we allow is structuring that affects the channel tree for an entire team, not just an individual preference that reflects only on a user’s local device.”

Leverice has other features in the pipeline which it reckons will further help users cut through the noise — with a plan to apply AI-powered prioritization to surface the most pressing inbound comms.

There will also be automated alerts for conversation forks when new subchannels are created. (Though generating lots of subchannel alerts doesn’t sound exactly noise-free…)

“We have features coming that alert users to forks in a conversation and nudge the user toward those new subchannels. At this stage those forks are created manually, although our upcoming AI module will have nudges based on those forks,” says Velton.

“The architecture (deep structuring) also opens the door to scripting of automated workflows and open source plug-ins,” he adds.

Leverice officially launched towards the end of February after a month-long beta which coincided with the coronavirus-induced spike in remote work.

At this stage they have “members of almost 400 teams” registered on the platform, per Velton, with initial traction coming from mid-size tech companies — who he says are either unhappy with the costs of their current messaging platform or with distraction/burnout caused by “channel fatigue”; or who are facing info fragmentation as internal teams are using different p2p/messaging tools and lack a universal choice.

“We have nothing but love and respect for our competitors,” he adds. “Slack, Teams, WhatsApp, Telegram, Skype, Viber, etc.: each have their own benefits and many teams are perfectly content to use them. Our product is for teams looking for more focus and structure than existing solutions offer. Leverice’s architecture is unique on the market, and it opens the door to powerful features that are neither technically nor practically feasible in a messenger with a single layer containing a dozen or two dozen channels.”

Other differentiating features he highlights as bringing something fresh to the team messaging platform conversation are a whiteboard feature that lets users collaborate in the app for brainstorming or listing ideas, prorities; and a Jira integration for managing and discussing tasks in the project- and issue-tracking tool. The team is planning further integrations including with Zoom, Google Docs and “other services you use most”.

The startup — which was founded by CEO Rodion Zhitomirsky in Minsk but is now headquartered in San Jose, California, also with offices in Munich, Germany — has been bootstrapping development for around two years, taking in angel investment of around $600,000.

“We are three friends who managed complex project-based teams and personally felt the pains of all the popular messengers out there,” says Velton, discussing how they came to set up the business. “We used all the usual suspects, and even tried using p2p messengers as substitutes. They all led us and our teams to the same place: we couldn’t track large amounts of communications unless we were in “always-on” mode. We knew there had to be a better way, so we set out to build Leverice.”

The third co-founder is Dennis Dokutchitz.

Leverice’s business model is freemium, with a free tier, a premium tier, and a custom enterprise tier. As well as offering the platform as SaaS via the cloud, they do on-premise installations — for what Velton describes as “the highest level of security and privacy”.

On the security front the product is not end-to-end encrypted but he says the team is developing e2e encrypted channels to supplement the client-server encryption it applies as standard.

Velton notes these forthcoming channels would not support the usual search features, while AI analysis would be limited to “meta-information analysis”, i.e. excluding posts’ content.

“We don’t process customer or message data for commercial purposes, only for internal analytics and features to improve the product for users,” he adds when asked about any additional uses made of customer data. (Leverice’s Privacy Policy can be found here.)

With remote work the order of the day across most of the globe because of the COVID-19 pandemic, it seems likely there will be a new influx of collaboration tools being unboxed to help home workers navigate a new ‘professionally distant’ normal.

“We’ve only been on the market for 6 weeks and have no meaningful revenue to speak of as of yet,” adds Velton.

• The UK government will launch a £500 million co-investment fund for startups struggling to survive COVID-19.
• Half that cash will be the government money issued via convertible notes, with the private sector expected to match funding on a deal-by-deal basis.
• Business Insider reported in March that startup backers were seeking up to £300 million in rescue funds for early-stage startups.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

British venture-backed startups strapped for cash during the pandemic will get a helping hand from the government.

The Treasury has announced a £1 billion ($1.2 billion) bailout package targeted at startups and innovative small- and medium- sized business, to keep the UK's tech and life sciences industries afloat as COVID-19 bites.

There are two parts to the bailout package.

The first is a co-investment fund called the Future Fund, which will make up to £500 million ($625 million) available to venture-backed early-stage startups.

The government has now rubber-stamped an initial £250 million ($300 million) of taxpayer cash for the Future Fund, with the private sector expected to make up the remaining half.

Business Insider first reported on this fund in March, when investors warned that thousands of startups could collapse thanks to the economic slowdown.

As expected, the Future Fund will be managed by the state-backed British Business Bank and will launch in May. The fund will offer eligible startups between £125,000 and £5 million via convertible notes, which will convert to shares on the startup's next funding round. However, this funding must be matched by private backers.

In other words, this won't just be government cash going into startups. It will however see the UK government taking stakes in a number of the UK's fast-growing early-stage startups.

Sources indicated last week that it was unlikely that the government would continue to hold equity through later funding rounds. Instead, they said, it was probable that late-stage investors will be given the option to buy the government out.

According to a Treasury statement on Sunday, startups applying to the Future Fund will need to have raised £250,000 from private backers within the last five years in order to qualify. The Treasury has yet to publish all the criteria that startups will need to meet in order to apply.

The package doesn't apply to the UK's bigger "unicorn" startups, which are in separate discussions with the government on accessing the Treasury's financial schemes for businesses. 12 larger-stage tech firms wrote to the government earlier in April asking for financial help and warning that the tech sector was "at risk" during the COVID-19 pandemic. Those discussions are still ongoing.

The remaining £750 million funding tranche of the £1 billion package is targeted at small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) focused on research and development, and thus likely to be burning cash. That funding will be available through the UK's innovation agency, Innovate UK.

Join the conversation about this story »

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• Office workers have been working at home en masse across the world for about a month and have been successfully maintaining their productivity, tech CEOs tell Business Insider.
• This is causing CEOs to rethink whether they really need to provide office space for everyone.
• Some CEOs are starting to think about using offices more like "flex-space" meeting rooms, rather than as permanent desks.
• One New York VC who has invested in real estate startups thinks that a whole new business model may emerge, one that's even more flexible than the coworking model pioneered by WeWork.
• In fact, the shift doesn't bode well for WeWork, the CEOs say.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

If you are lucky enough to not be among the 22 million Americans who lost their jobs this month, chances are, you are working from home.

And if you work for a tech company or live in a major metropolitan area, chances are you've been working from home for a month.

Tech CEOs have noticed that their companies are still running well and employees are still productive even with everyone working from home. For instance, just this week, Oracle founder and chairman Larry Ellison felt so moved by how well his 136,000-employee strong company had been performing, that he took to YouTube to praise the videoconference tech they are using, Zoom, and to say that the company will never fully go back to just in-person meetings again.

All of this is causing at least some CEOs to wonder: why are they paying so much for real estate and office headquarters when their companies operate so well with a fully remote workforce.

"If everyone can really work at home, why do we have all these big offices around the world?" says Rimini Street CEO Seth Ravin, a software technical support company based in Las Vegas that operates 30 offices worldwide.

"Maybe you don't need everyone having an office, right? Maybe you don't need all that real estate. Maybe you only need half. And it's just full of conference rooms and hotel-like spaces for those who come in and use it occasionally versus permanently based in the office," he says.

He predicts. "You're going to see so many companies rethinking real estate."

Flex is in, desks are out 

He says that Japan is providing the ultimate proving point.  The notoriously hard-working Japanese culture centers around office life and doesn't have much a remote work ethic. But at the urging of government officials major Japanese companies such as Honda, Toyota and Nissan have asked staff to work from home. And Japan's Ministry of Labor has offered grants to help small and medium-sized companies retool themselves to support teleworking, reports CNN.

Rimini Street has offices in both Tokyo and Osaka. "This is changing Japanese culture dramatically because they were not a work at home culture. So I think the world will change," he said.

Okta CEO Todd McKinnon agrees. His company grew from 1,561 employees at the start of 2019 to 2,248 employees at the start of 2020, most of them at its 207,000 square-foot San Francisco headquarters but also scattered among offices in 12 other countries.

His real estate team has not only secured the lease for that building, but had been working on grabbing more square footage in expensive and competitive San Francisco in preparation for more growth.

But now that his company has been successfully working from home for a month "this is going to lead to us having less square footage of real estate for sure," McKinnon says.

"Our growth plans were to add a bunch more square footage, but I think we're seeing with the productivity we're having, we probably don't need as much square footage," he said. Now his real estate team is talking about turning the office "into more flexible work environments, not dedicated desks, and moving to a more dynamic, flexible work space."

The idea is to allow employees and teams who are thriving working from home to continue, with no pressure to commute to an office every day, except for a specific need for an in-person gathering.

Not great for WeWork

To the extent that WeWork doubles down on its original, so-called "space-as-a-service" offering, where it offers companies very flexible short-term lease terms on smaller spaces, WeWork could fair well in the post-COVID-19 business world, McKinnon believes.

But, WeWork is currently struggling, not helped by the economic implosion, and has reportedly fallen behind on some of its own rent payments.

Prior to the COVID-19 WeWork was gravitating towards longer-term, more lucrative, and less-risky enterprise contracts, where it custom-designed offices spaces for large companies. Its current website is splashed with endorsements from companies like GE, BBC Royal Bank, Standard Chartered Bank, for instance.

But in the post-coronavirus world, larger companies won't need such a real estate middleman, especially when they're shrinking their real estate footprint.

"That's not going to be great for the real estate business, even the WeWorks, if this kind of culture holds. You would rent less space from them than you would before," says Ravin.

Interestingly, this could become a new business opportunity for both landlords and coworking companies, says New York venture capitalist Charlie O'Donnell, the founder of the seed-stage fund Brooklyn Bridge Ventures. Among O'Donnell's investments is some real estate startups including like The Wing, a coworking space designed for women. The Wing has been hurting during lockdown and laid-off nearly all of its staff last week.

O'Donnell has been vocally opposed to the way WeWork has been treating some of its struggling startup tenants.

He sees real the potential for a new business model, one that involves even more flexible space than coworking, or even The Wing-like clubs.

"Maybe flexible work space is an answer, but much more flexible than that's been offered by a coworking company," O'Donnell says.

Instead of a permanent desk in a room, multiple companies might use a room more like a timeshare, keeping their things in lockers when other tenants used the space. He points to an office furniture company like Heartwork, which designs easily moved furniture and office cabinets on casters, as being an example of how this might be set up.

"Spaces could be built with the assumption that the same people are not in every day. Maybe they're going to use this office only on Thursdays," he suggests.

The one thing that most business leaders can agree on is that now that workers have gotten a taste of home offices with no commute, and CEOs have seen the money that can be saved on real estate, the status quo will shift.

"It changes real estate," says Ravin. "It changes the way people think about what are the critical things we spend our money on."

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Here's what it's like to travel during the coronavirus outbreak

• Samsung created new packaging for its Lifestyle TVs that lets customers re-use the cardboard in useful ways.
• Cardboard packaging for The Serif, The Frame, and The Sero TVs can be made into shelves, cat houses, or containers.
• Samsung teamed up with Dezeen, a British magazine, to award up to $20,000 to the customer that repurposes the packaging most creatively.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Samsung designed new eco-friendly packaging for some of its TVs so customers can transform what might have been a heap of garbage into useful household items like cat houses, magazine and book holders, or entertainment centers, the company recently announced.

Samsung introduced the new packaging, which we first saw thanks to Gizmodo, as a way to limit waste and encourage recycling. The packing comes with some of Samsung's luxury TVs including The Serif, The Frame, and The Sero. 

Check out what you can do with Samsung's cardboard packaging:

SEE ALSO: Check out these images that reimagine what Tesla's Cybertruck camper add-on could look like

The boxes from the various products include a dotted matrix design that customers can cut along in order to dismantle them for easier recycling or to reconfigure them for a new purpose.

Each box comes with an instruction manual on how to make your own DIY shelves or end table. Just scan the QR code on the box to access your building guide.

Samsung is partnering with Dezeen, a British lifestyle magazine, to award the customer who makes "the most unique and practical designs" out of the eco-packaging.

The winner of the packaging competition will get their designs incorporated into the instruction manual and can win a total of $20,000. The competition ends on May 29, 2020.

Enter the contest here.

Climate change has exposed an ancient Viking mountain route in Norway that is littered with hundreds of archeological artifacts left by travelers over a period of more than 2,000 years.

The high-elevation path is located at Lendbreen on Lomseggen ridge in the Jotunheimen mountains, and was a “focal point” for regional travel with a history that dates back to the Bronze Age, according to a study published on Thursday in the journal Antiquity.

“Artifacts exposed by the melting ice indicate usage from c. AD 300–1500, with a peak in activity c. AD 1000 during the Viking Age—a time of increased mobility, political centralization and growing trade and urbanization in Northern Europe,” according to the study, led by Lars Pilø co-director of the Glacier Archaeology Program in Norway.

The route seems to have been more or less abandoned by 1500 AD, possibly due in part to the crippling fallout of the Black Death across Europe.

Lendbreen became a magnet for archaeologists in 2011 when a wool tunic from the 3rd or 4th century was discovered along the pass. Since then, expeditions to the route have recovered approximately 800 artifacts, about 150 bones and antlers, dozens of cairns, and the ruins of a stone shelter.

These abundant remains distinguish Lendbreen from other nearby passes. “Among five mountain passes on Lomseggen known from historical oral accounts and/or archaeology, only Lendbreen has such a shelter and a large number of cairns,” the team said. “It was clearly a route of special significance.”

In addition, Lendbreen is “unique in that it is the first known route up to a pass that crosses an ice patch, and hence provides exceptional preservation conditions for artifacts lost by past travellers,” the researchers noted.

Before the advent of modern transportation over the last two centuries, these mountain passes along the Lomseggen ridge were the quickest way for local populations to travel to nearby communities.

Though the route reaches fairly high altitudes of nearly 2,000 meters, it provides a clear path over the ridge above the treeline. Pilø and his colleagues also think that the ice and snow cover may have provided a firmer footing for pack animals, compared to the exposed summer scree slopes.

For this reason, the route may have experienced its heaviest traffic in spring and early summer when the temperatures were warm enough for travel, but the ice patches were intact enough to help horses and other animals remain steady as they crossed the pass. The discovery of horse-shoes, sleds, skis—preserved for centuries inside the ice—lends weight to this theory.

A horseshoe from Lendbreen. Image: Espen Finstad/SecretsOfTheIce.com

But just because Lendbreen was relatively busy and easily traversable doesn’t mean it didn’t claim victims from time to time, as many alpine environments do. “The presence of dead horses at Lendbreen parallels the skeletons of dead pack animals found at Alpine and Himalayan mountain passes,” the researchers said.

The team speculated that rags and garments found over the pass may even suggest that some “items of clothing were discarded in dire circumstances, such as the irrational behavior associated with hypothermia.”

Expeditions to the pass will continue in the coming years, as it is important to rescue artifacts in a pristine state soon after they spill out of the receding ice patches. This rush to recover these once ice-bound treasures is happening all around the world, from the Rocky Mountains to Mongolia.

“This archaeological record provides new insights into the nature of high-elevation travel in the past, including the changing material and socio-economic factors that influenced it,” the team concluded. “Far from being barriers or marginal zones, high mountains could also be arteries of intra- and inter-regional communication and exchange.”