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IBM has picked Slack to power its chat communications companywide for its more than 350,000 employees, according to Business Insider. In what can only be seen as a big win for Slack over rival Microsoft Teams, the report reveals that IBM has been experimenting with Slack and is now rolling it out to all employees.

It’s a big test for Slack, but it has been one the pair has been working toward in recent years. Internal teams at IBM reportedly started using the chat app as far back as 2014, and this has grown over time. “Going wall to wall in IBM — it’s basically the maximum scale that there is, so we now know that Slack will work for literally the largest organizations in the world,” says Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield in an interview with...

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The popular Edison email app, which is in the top 100 productivity apps on the Apple app store, scrapes users' email inboxes and sells products based off that information to clients in the finance, travel, and e-Commerce sectors. The contents of Edison users' inboxes are of particular interest to companies who can buy the data to make better investment decisions, according to a J.P. Morgan document obtained by Motherboard.

On its website Edison says that it does "process" users' emails, but some users did not know that when using the Edison app the company scrapes their inbox for profit. Motherboard has also obtained documentation that provides more specifics about how two other popular apps—Cleanfox and Slice—sell products based on users' emails to corporate clients.

"They could definitely be a bit more upfront about their commercial intents," Seb Insua, a Edison user who said they were unaware of the data selling, told Motherboard. "Their website is all like 'No Ads' and 'Privacy First'," he added (the company's website says "Edison Trends practices privacy by design.")

"I did not know they were doing that. They've introduced new features that I really enjoyed like package tracking, price tracking and such, but it makes sense now why they built those out—if it was to just gather data on their users," Ronnie Johnson, another Edison user, said. A third user also said they weren't aware of the data selling.

Do you know about any other companies selling data? Do you have documents related to this? We'd love to hear from you. Using a non-work phone or computer, you can contact Joseph Cox securely on Signal on +44 20 8133 5190, Wickr on josephcox, OTR chat on jfcox@jabber.ccc.de, or email joseph.cox@vice.com.

Some of the companies listed in the J.P. Morgan document sell data sourced from "personal inboxes," the document adds. A spokesperson for J.P. Morgan Research, the part of the company that created the document, told Motherboard that the research "is intended for institutional clients."

That document describes Edison as providing "consumer purchase metrics including brand loyalty, wallet share, purchase preferences, etc." The document adds that the "source" of the data is the "Edison Email App."

On the product section of its website, Edison offers "Edison Trends" and "Trends Direct." The company says it can provide "Detailed behavior patterns to improve your customers' experience and business results."

Edison is just one of several companies that offer free email apps which then sell anonymized or pseudonymised data derived from users' inboxes. Another company that mines inboxes called Foxintelligence has data that comes from users of the Cleanfox app, which tidies up users' inboxes.

A section of the confidential Foxintelligence document obtained by Motherboard, which explains how Foxintelligence obtains email data. Image: Motherboard

"From a higher perspective, we believe crowd-sourced transaction data has a transformational power both for consumers and for companies and that a marketplace where value can be created for both sides without making any compromise on privacy is possible," Foxintelligence Chief Operating Officer Florian Cleyet-Merle told Motherboard in an email.

A confidential Foxintelligence presentation obtained by Motherboard lists what it claims are "examples of clients." They include PayPal, consulting giants Bain & Company, and McKinsey & Company. Most of the companies did not respond to a request for comment, but European ridesharing app Bolt, which was also listed as a client under its previous name Txfy, told Motherboard in an email "We've used Foxintelligence in the past for anonymised market share data for ride-hailing services in France. We have not used them outside of this limited purpose and are no longer a client." Cleyet-Merle added that "not all the brands in your screenshot are currently clients of Foxintelligence" but did not elaborate further.

A dataset obtained by Motherboard shows what some of the information pulled from free email app users' inboxes looks like. A spreadsheet containing data from Rakuten's Slice, an app that scrapes a user's inbox so they can better track packages or get their money back once a product goes down in price, contains the item that an app user bought from a specific brand, what they paid, and an unique identification code for each buyer. Last month the company created a page on its website telling users how to opt-out from the sale of their data. Rakuten told Motherboard in an email this was introduced to comply with the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).

"I did not know they were doing that."

Rakuten did not dispute the titles of columns of the data when Motherboard provided a list. An email obtained by Motherboard appeared to show the price for access to Rakuten data for one product category as over $100,000. Rakuten told Motherboard that, "We do not publicly disclose our pricing or terms—these are confidential to our customers."

Edison did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The company's privacy policy says "Edison accesses and processes email messages in any email accounts you have connected and data collected from other internet accounts you connect." The Wall Street Journal previously mentioned how employees of Edison read users' emails in order to improve a smart-replies feature of the app. That piece did not touch on how Edison creates products from harvested user data, however.

Insua, one of the Edison users, said they didn't have an issue with the data collection itself, but thinks Edison could be clearer on what they're really doing with collected email data.

"'Create research' makes it seem like they are academics or sharing this with the public institutions for non-commercial reasons or something," Insua said.

He added, "They could be like 'we anonymise the purchase data within your emails and sell this research.'"

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Jaguar Land Rover plans to stop making the I-Pace electric SUV for a week because of a battery shortage at supplier LG Chem, The Times reported on Sunday.

The production halt will start Monday, February 17th, in Graz, Austria, where contract manufacturer Magna Steyer makes the I-Pace for Jaguar Land Rover. When the I-Paces stop rolling off the line, it will be at least the third time that a battery shortage at LG Chem has affected the production of an electric vehicle.

Back in 2017, Hyundai fell behind on production of its Ioniq EV because LG Chem reportedly couldn’t keep up with demand for its batteries. In April 2019, a supply shortage at LG Chem caused Audi to delay the deliveries of its first electric car, the E-Tron. Audi...

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In the age of multiplatform communication, the airline is trying to improve the way it listens.

“It’s an open secret that every company is on fire,” says Kintaba co-founder John Egan. “At any given moment something is going horribly wrong in a way that it has never gone wrong before.” Code failure downtimes, server outages and hack attacks plague engineering teams. Yet the tools for waking up the right employees, assembling a team to fix the problem and doing a post-mortem to assess how to prevent it from happening again can be as chaotic as the crisis itself.

Text messages, Slack channels, task managers and Google Docs aren’t sufficient for actually learning from mistakes. Alerting systems like PagerDuty focus on the rapid response, but not the educational process in the aftermath. Finally, there’s a more holistic solution to incident response with today’s launch of Kintaba.

The Kintaba team experienced these pains firsthand while working at Facebook after Egan and Zac Morris’ Y Combinator-backed data transfer startup Caffeinated Mind was acqui-hired in 2012. Years later, when they tried to build a blockchain startup and the whole stack was constantly in flames, they longed for a better incident alert tool. So they built one themselves and named it after the Japanese art of Kintsugi, where gold is used to fill in cracked pottery, “which teaches us to embrace the imperfect and to value the repaired,” Egan says.

With today’s launch, Kintaba offers a clear dashboard where everyone in the company can see what major problems have cropped up, plus who’s responding and how. Kintaba’s live activity log and collaboration space for responders let them debate and analyze their mitigation moves. It integrates with Slack, and lets team members subscribe to different levels of alerts or search through issues with categorized hashtags.

“The ability to turn catastrophes into opportunities is one of the biggest differentiating factors between successful and unsuccessful teams and companies,” says Egan. That’s why Kintaba doesn’t stop when your outage does.

Kintaba Founders (from left): John Egan, Zac Morris and Cole Potrocky

As the fire gets contained, Kintaba provides a rich text editor connected to its dashboard for quickly constructing a post-mortem of what went wrong, why, what fixes were tried, what worked and how to safeguard systems for the future. Its automated scheduling assistant helps teams plan meetings to internalize the post-mortem.

Kintaba’s well-pedigreed team and their approach to an unsexy but critical software-as-a-service attracted $2.25 million in funding led by New York’s FirstMark Capital.

“All these features add up to Kintaba taking away all the annoying administrative overhead and organization that comes with running a successful modern incident management practice,” says Egan, “so you can focus on fixing the big issues and learning from the experience.”

Egan, Morris and Cole Potrocky met while working at Facebook, which is known for spawning other enterprise productivity startups based on its top-notch internal tools. Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz built a task management system to reduce how many meetings he had to hold, then left to turn that into Asana, which filed to go public this week.

The trio had been working on internal communication and engineering tools as well as the procedures for employing them. “We saw firsthand working at companies like Facebook how powerful those practices can be and wanted to make them easier for anyone to implement without having to stitch a bunch of tools together,” Egan tells me. He stuck around to co-found Facebook’s enterprise collaboration suite Workplace while Potrocky built engineering architecture there and Morris became a mobile security lead at Uber.

Like many blockchain projects, Kintaba’s predecessor, crypto collectibles wallet Vault, proved an engineering nightmare without clear product market fit. So the team ditched it and pivoted to build out the internal alerting tool they’d been tinkering with. That origin story sounds a lot like Slack’s, which began as a gaming company that pivoted to turn its internal chat tool into a business.

So what’s the difference between Kintaba and just using Slack and email or a monitoring tool like PagerDuty, Splunk’s VictorOps or Atlassian’s OpsGenie? Here’s how Egan breaks a site downtime situation handled with Kintaba:

You’re on call and your pager is blowing up because all your servers have stopped serving data. You’re overwhelmed and the root cause could be any of the multitude of systems sending you alerts. With Kintaba, you aren’t left to fend for yourself. You declare an incident with high severity and the system creates a collaborative space that automatically adds an experienced IMOC (incident manager on call) along with other relevant on calls. Kintaba also posts in a company-wide incident Slack channel. Now you can work together to solve the problem right inside the incident’s collaborative space or in Slack while simultaneously keeping stakeholders updated by directing them to the Kintaba incident page instead of sending out update emails. Interested parties can get quick info from the stickied comments and #tags. Once the incident is resolved, Kintaba helps you write a postmortem of what went wrong, how it was fixed, and what will be done to prevent it from happening. Kintaba then automatically distributes the postmortem and sets up an incident review on your calendar.

Essentially, instead of having one employee panicking about what to do until the team struggles to coordinate across a bunch of fragmented messaging threads, a smoother incident reporting process and all the discussion happens in Kintaba. And if there’s a security breach that a non-engineer notices, they can launch a Kintaba alert and assemble the legal and PR team to help, too.

Alternatively, Egan describes the downtime fiascoes he’d experience without Kintaba like this:

The on call has to start waking up their management chain to try and figure out who needs to be involved. The team maybe throws a Slack channel together but since there’s no common high severity incident management system and so many teams are affected by the downtime, other teams are also throwing slack channels together, email threads are happening all over the place, and multiple groups of people are trying to solve the problem at once. Engineers begin stepping all over each other and sales teams start emailing managers demanding to know what’s happening. Once the problem is solved, no one thinks to write up a postmortem and even if they do it only gets distributed to a few people and isn’t saved outside that email chain. Managers blame each other and point fingers at people instead of taking a level headed approach to reviewing the process that led to the failure. In short: panic, thrash, and poor communication.

While monitoring-apps like PagerDuty can do a good job of indicating there’s a problem, they’re weaker at the collaborative resolution and post-mortem process, and designed just for engineers rather than everyone, like Kintaba. Egan says, “It’s kind of like comparing the difference between the warning lights on a piece of machinery and the big red emergency button on a factory floor. We’re the big red button . . . That also means you don’t have to rip out PagerDuty to use Kintaba,” since it can be the trigger that starts the Kintaba flow.

Still, Kintaba will have to prove that it’s so much better than a shared Google Doc, an adequate replacement for monitoring solutions or a necessary add-on that companies should pay $12 per user per month. PagerDuty’s deeper technical focus helped it go public a year ago, though it has fallen about 60% since to a market cap of $1.75 billion. Still, customers like Dropbox, Zoom and Vodafone rely on its SMS incident alerts, while Kintaba’s integration with Slack might not be enough to rouse coders from their slumber when something catches fire.

If Kintaba can succeed in incident resolution with today’s launch, the four-person team sees adjacent markets in task prioritization, knowledge sharing, observability and team collaboration, though those would pit it against some massive rivals. If it can’t, perhaps Slack or Microsoft Teams could be suitable soft landings for Kintaba, bringing more structured systems for dealing with major screw-ups to their communication platforms.

When asked why he wanted to build a legacy atop software that might seem a bit boring on the surface, Egan concluded that, “Companies using Kintaba should be learning faster than their competitors . . . Everyone deserves to work within a culture that grows stronger through failure.”

• Facebook knew about a security risk for nine months before the issue contributed to the biggest hack in the company's history, according to a report by the Telegraph. 
• Citing legal documents from a class-action lawsuit against the social network, the Telegraph reported that Facebook was warned about the flaw by outsiders and its own employees, who privately lamented the issue wasn't remedied sooner.
• The data breach in 2018 led to the hacking of 50 million accounts. 
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Facebook was repeatedly warned about a security risk that was taken advantage of in a hack involving 50 million accounts in 2018, and failed to fix it in time, according to a report by the Telegraph's Laurence Dodds.

Concerns about the risk posed by "access tokens" — digital keys that allow access to users' accounts — were raised as early as December 2017, the Telegraph reported, citing legal documents from a class-action lawsuit filed in the US against the company.

The security risk was a contributing factor to the largest data breach in the company's history, with the access tokens of 50 million people stolen. For 14 million people, hackers obtained the birth date, devices used to log in, locations checked into, recent searches, and more.

According to the report, Facebook employees said concerns about the tokens were largely ignored, and that the hack "could have been prevented." Facebook engineers warned in December 2017 that access tokens would be "easy" for hackers to exploit, the report said. Employees reportedly expressed "guilt" over the issue.

Facebook said in a statement to Business Insider that the risk was not from access tokens themselves, but "the obscure interaction of several different Facebook features" that allowed hackers to generate access tokens for users.

"Any accusation that Facebook knew or was warned about this vulnerability is simply wrong," a company spokesperson said.

Hackers were able to generate tokens for other users, gaining access to their accounts, through Facebook's "View As" feature, leading to 50 million accounts' access tokens being compromised.

In 2018, Facebook reset the tokens for the 50 million accounts that were hacked, as well as an additional 40 million accounts that had been used for a View As look-up within the previous year, leading to 90 million Facebook users being logged out of their accounts. 

Engineers raised concerns that because the tokens used by Facebook at the time were too broad and did not expire, they posed a risk, creating a potential loophole that could easily be exploited, the report said.

Employees said that changes that could have prevented the hack were not completed, and that warnings were "almost all ignored," the report said.

One engineer said that features involving the non-expiring tokens "shouldn't be launched to the public," according to the report. A tip from a software engineer outside the company that the View As feature could be exploited was ignored, according to court documents cited by the report.

A Facebook employee said of the tokens that, "in retrospect, we definitely should have killed this months ago," the report said.

Facebook said on Friday that it would improve security protocols, including frequent monitoring of suspicious activity involving access tokens, to settle the class action lawsuit, Bloomberg reported. 

Read the full report over at The Telegraph.

SEE ALSO: Facebook just announced it was hacked, and almost 50 million users have been affected

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• Bill and Melinda Gates celebrated the 20th anniversary of their philanthropic foundation by listing two new issues that they plan to tackle over the next 20 years: gender equality and the climate crisis. 
• In an annual letter released Monday morning, the couple reminisced over their organization's growth since it was founded in 2000, and walked readers through their vision for the foundation over the next 20 years. 
• The Gates' have already begun tackling gender equality, through Melinda Gates' $1 billion pledge to address gender equality in the US over the next five years. 
• The couple used a sports metaphor, first offered by their friend and investor Warren Buffett, to sum up the spirit of their approach to philanthropy: "swing for the fences."
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Bill and Melinda Gates celebrated the 20th anniversary of their philanthropic foundation by setting two new issues that they plan to prioritize over the next 20 years: gender inequality and the climate crisis. 

In an annual letter sprinkled with baseball references like "grand slam" and "swing for the fences," the co-founders of the Gates Foundation first reminisced about the organization's work advancing global health and education over the past two decades. They then looked to the future. 

"The last 20 years have only deepened our commitment to advancing progress on global health and public education. But we've also developed a major sense of urgency around two other issues. For Bill, it's addressing climate change. For me, it's gender equality," Melinda Gates wrote in the letter. "As we look ahead to the next 20 years, we will be swinging for the fences on these, too." 

The foundation has spent $53.8 billion over the past 20 years, investing primarily in global health and development. Both of the Gates' said that gender equality and climate change had emerged as priorities for them to address through their philanthropic work. And they view their efforts on these issues as connected to their older agendas. 

"Global health will always be a core focus of our foundation. This work will only become more important in the future, as climate change makes more people susceptible to disease," Bill Gates said in the letter. 

"The cruel irony is that the world's poorest people, who contribute the least to climate change, will suffer the worst," Bill Gates later noted, as he warned that we were now at the stage where we didn't just need to mitigate the effects of climate change but also adapt to it.

"Women are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change," Melinda Gates added. 

The Gates have already begun addressing gender equality. Back in October, Melinda Gates pledged to invest $1 billion to expand women's power and influence in the country over the next decade. She kickstarted that effort in the tech industry this January, and announced a $50 million fund to invest in three emerging tech hubs beginning with Chicago. 

Meanwhile, the foundation still continues to invest in ways to improve global health or prevent disease epidemics. Most recently, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation committed up to $100 million to help keep the coronavirus epidemic in check. 

The couple summed up the spirit of their approach to running the Gates Foundation in a sports metaphor first offered by their friend and investor Warren Buffett.

"When you swing for the fences, you're putting every ounce of strength into hitting the ball as far as possible. You know that your bat might miss the ball entirely—but that if you succeed in making contact, the rewards can be huge," the Gates' explained. "That's how we think about our philanthropy, too." 

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NOW WATCH: 8 weird robots NASA wants to send to space

Monday.com, announced version 2.0 of its flexible workflow platform today, making it easier for customers to build custom apps on top of Monday.

Company co-founder and CEO Roy Mann says his product is a multi-purpose and highly flexible workflow tool, aimed mostly at medium-sized businesses. “It’s process management, portfolio management, project management, CRM management, hotel management, R&D management. It’s anything you want because we give you the building blocks to build whatever you want,” he said.

With the release of 2.0, the company is offering a code-free environment to take these building blocks and build custom applications to meet the needs of any organization or team. This can include workflow elements to set up a process inside Monday or integrate with other apps or services.

In fact, the new release includes over a hundred prebuilt automation recipes and code-free custom-automations along with more than 50 integrations with other apps, allowing project managers to build fairly sophisticated workflows without coding.

This example shows a company building a custom app to manage a hotel. Screenshot: Monday.com

The company is also opening up the Monday platform to developers who want to build applications on top of the platform. Mann says this is just the start, and the plan is to eventually add a marketplace for these apps.

“The first step will be we’re opening [the platform to developers] up in beta. [Initially], it will be for their own use and for their customers, and then we will open it up pretty soon for them to offer those apps [in a marketplace]. That’s obviously the direction,” Mann said.

With $120 million in ARR and 100,000 customers, the company has quietly gone about its business. It has 370 employees, mostly based in Israel, and has raised $273 million, according to Mann. Its most recent investment came last July — $150 million on a lofty $1.9 billion valuation.

Monday.com, announced version 2.0 of its flexible workflow platform today, making it easier for customers to build custom apps on top of Monday.

Company co-founder and CEO Roy Mann says his product is a multi-purpose and highly flexible workflow tool, aimed mostly at medium-sized businesses. “It’s process management, portfolio management, project management, CRM management, hotel management, R&D management. It’s anything you want because we give you the building blocks to build whatever you want,” he said.

With the release of 2.0, the company is offering a code-free environment to take these building blocks and build custom applications to meet the needs of any organization or team. This can include workflow elements to set up a process inside Monday or integrate with other apps or services.

In fact, the new release includes over a hundred prebuilt automation recipes and code-free custom-automations along with more than 50 integrations with other apps, allowing project managers to build fairly sophisticated workflows without coding.

This example shows a company building a custom app to manage a hotel. Screenshot: Monday.com

The company is also opening up the Monday platform to developers who want to build applications on top of the platform. Mann says this is just the start, and the plan is to eventually add a marketplace for these apps.

“The first step will be we’re opening [the platform to developers] up in beta. [Initially], it will be for their own use and for their customers, and then we will open it up pretty soon for them to offer those apps [in a marketplace]. That’s obviously the direction,” Mann said.

With $120 million in ARR and 100,000 customers, the company has quietly gone about its business. It has 370 employees, mostly based in Israel, and has raised $273 million, according to Mann. Its most recent investment came last July — $150 million on a lofty $1.9 billion valuation.

To restore service after a certificate expires, companies have to find where the credentials are stored, update all of them and reset applications if necessary. 

It seems like only yesterday that AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson was promising on live TV that if Trump followed through on his tax cuts, the company would dramatically boost investment, in the process creating thousands of new jobs. Not "entry-level jobs," mind you, but at least "7,000 jobs of people putting fiber in the ground, hard-hat jobs that make $70,000 to $80,000 per year." Each $1 billion in new investment, AT&T insisted, would result in 7,000 such jobs. "Lower taxes drives more investment, drives more hiring, drives greater wages," Stephenson said.

We've pointed out several times how these promises meant absolutely nothing, but AT&T itself keeps driving the point home.

AT&T's earnings released last week showed that the company has eliminated 37,818 jobs since the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) (which dropped AT&T's overall tax rate to 21% providing the company an estimated $46 billion in savings) was cheerily passed by Congress just three or so years ago:

"The Communications Workers of America, the telecom sector’s biggest union, says AT&T’s promised jobs never arrived either. Union officials today complained that AT&T earnings show the company has laid off 37,818 employees worldwide since the tax cut was passed in 2018, with 4,040 pink slips sent out to employees worldwide in the fourth quarter of 2019 alone."

Again that promised network investment never occurred either. AT&T's fourth quarter CAPEX was the lowest in a decade, and this year AT&T's expected to trim its overall investment somewhere in the neighborhood of $3 billion. The money? It went into executive pockets, investor pockets, and the company's massive debt load created by mindless merger mania.

We've noted a few times that making outlandish promises, grabbing billions in government favors (merger approval, tax breaks, regulatory help, whatever), then delivering jack shit is something AT&T and other telecom giants have been doing for the better part of a generation without no penalty whatsoever. None.

The same promises were made by AT&T and its primary lobbying arm (US Telecom) ahead of the net neutrality repeal. There too, AT&T promised job growth and massive new investment into broadband networks in exchange for the FCC basically self immolating its consumer protection authority. But when it came time to collect on said promises, as usual, they were nowhere to be found. The same head fake bait and switch also occurred ahead of AT&T's merger with Time Warner, which was also supposed to deliver investment, competition, and "synergies" that AT&T's earnings report shows never actually arrived.

Despite the evidence here being indisputable, somehow we never learn our lesson, and AT&T never faces any meaningful penalty. Worse, the folks that often pride themselves on standing up to government spending (like grumbling about some small town deciding to build its own broadband network) are routinely nowhere to be found when it comes time to discuss what's arguably one of the biggest, long running cons in American history.

Speaking with journalists after winning his first Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay, Jojo Rabbit and Thor: Ragnarok director Taika Waititi had other things on his mind. When asked what he thought writers should be demanding in the next round of discussions with producers, Waititi put Apple’s controversial laptop keyboards on blast.

“Apple needs to fix those keyboards,” he said. “They are impossible to write on — they’ve gotten worse. It makes me want to go back to PCs. Because PC keyboards, the bounce-back for your fingers is way better. Hands up who still uses a PC? You know what I’m talking about. It’s a way better keyboard. Those Apple keyboards are horrendous.”

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• A Tesla Model 3 recorded a man peeing on another Model 3 across the street.
• The video was captured with Tesla's Sentry Mode feature.
• Sentry Mode uses a vehicle's cameras to observe its surroundings when the owner is away.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

A man in London was caught peeing on a Tesla Model 3 sedan by another Model 3 parked across the street.

A 34-second video of the incident uploaded to YouTube on Monday shows the man circling the car while urinating on it. The incident took place at 3:40 am on a Saturday, according to the YouTube user who posted the video.

The Model 3 that recorded the video had Tesla's Sentry Mode feature activated according to the YouTube user. Introduced in 2019, the feature acts as an advanced alarm system for Tesla vehicles. When the owner is away, it will use the vehicle's cameras to observe its surroundings.

If it detects what it considers a serious threat, it will sound the vehicle's alarm, turn on its touchscreen, and play music at full volume. It will then send an alert to the owner's phone and record a video of the incident that the owner can download.

Tesla owners have used Sentry Mode and their dashboard cameras to post a variety of videos showing other drivers and pedestrians colliding with or vandalizing their vehicles. 

Are you a Tesla owner with a Sentry Mode video you'd like to share, or a current or former Tesla employee with an opinion about what it's like to work at the company? Contact this reporter at mmatousek@businessinsider.com. You can also reach out on Signal at 646-768-4712 or email this reporter's encrypted address at mmatousek@protonmail.com.

• Read more:
• Watch the moment a Tesla Model 3 scared off 2 men who were kicking its charging port
• 'Everybody has a pain threshold': 'Big Short' investor Steve Eisman explains why he covered his Tesla short long ago
• Tesla is now worth $115 billion more than Ford after the legacy automaker's slashed profit forecast tanks its stock
• 'When it flushes, it's going to flush hard': Notorious short-seller Andrew Left explains why he's betting against Tesla again — after saying he was done forever

SEE ALSO: Tesla's stock surge adds $18 billion to Elon Musk's fortune, the biggest increase for anyone this year

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NOW WATCH: Watch Google reveal the new Nest Mini, which is an updated Home Mini

One of the most famous short films in cinema is an 1896 silent film about a train pulling into a station. An intrepid Reddit user has upscaled that film to 4K, brought its frame rate up to 60fps, and even added sound. The effect is impressive, turning a movie that’s over 120 years old into something that seems like it could have been filmed today (via Digg).

Denis Shiryaev, who did the upscaling, said he used several neural networks to upscale the original film, L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (translated to Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station). The upscaled version, while not perfect, looks crisp, and I recommend comparing the original film and Shiryaev’s version side by side. The differences are quite apparent.

The...

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It was another thought-provoking and insightful analyst summit with the Zoho team outside Austin last week. No, they haven’t got every feature and function perfectly formed, yes there are plenty of spots in the portfolio that still need work. Even so, as I’ve said elsewhere, Zoho’s leadership has the audacity to dream big, the skills to focus that vision, and the tenacity to see it realized.

That combination of ambition, strategy, and ability to execute came through particularly clearly in Raju Vegesna’s overview of Zoho’s product strategy. In order for Zoho to be “the operating system for business,” the company must, he explained, own the full technology stack, from data center and networks through data, platform, and applications. In Zoho’s view, only by owning and managing the full tech stack can the company deliver a seamless, superior customer experience.

Source: Zoho Analyst Day, 2020

Note that in this context, “customer experience” refers to Zoho’s customers. In effect, this is really the Zoho “user experience”—and for the sake of clarity, that’s how I’ll refer to it from here on out. Because there’s an important connection between how Zoho is building a superior experience for its customers (UX) and how that enables those customers to do the same for their customers (CX).

This is Raju’s point: Purpose-built systems are always more efficient and effective. No matter how “cheap” and accessible things like generic compute capacity and storage have become, they will never beat the performance of systems designed for a particular use. That’s equally true for data center and network design, hardware and software interfaces, even software platforms, applications, and (my addition) business processes. For Zoho to realize the objective of being the operating system for business, all of these layers must be considered and designed together as part of a holistic system. Importantly, this includes things like a unified data model, databases, microservices, and a development platform.

Here is mine: If you want to grow a business through durable customer relationships built on great customer experiences, purpose-built systems are essential. In order to operate an entire business that is centered around customers, your applications and systems must be designed specifically to support a shared, consistent understanding of customers. Every employee in the organization can make the best decisions and take the right action to support customers when they have the information and insights they need. Where applications are easy and intuitive to use (UX), adoption isn’t an issue. Individual employees benefit directly from using these applications because they help them do their jobs better (CX). Merely using such tools validates and updates the data they contain. This is how systems become self-reinforcing and self-sustaining—essential to delivering consistently great customer experiences over time.

What’s so compelling about Zoho’s “full stack” approach to building business applications is that for customers (users), it just works. Zoho has tackled the challenge of creating a unified data model, along with a custom database, that feeds all of its applications. This solves the biggest problems that most companies face when either creating a unified view of their customers or integrating additional applications. Crack this nut and everything else becomes relatively easy.

Source: Zoho Analyst Summit, 2020

The common data model issue alone makes Zoho a strong contender for any company that wants to change the way it operates in order to be truly customer centric. The range and depth of Zoho’s application portfolio, as well as the ease of integration with other applications outside of Zoho, increases the value considerably. Catalyst, Zoho’s recently announced serverless development environment, should add another multiple as well. Both independent developers and Zoho customers now have the means to develop their own microservices and apps, for themselves and for the wider community of Zoho users.

There are some drawbacks of course. Zoho’s comfort zone is still small and medium-size businesses. The company has the scale to support larger companies, but it is in the early days of developing the support infrastructure for these customers. The challenges here are less about the technology implementation and much more about issues of internal coordination, managing politics, and change management—on a much larger scale.

Creating a whole technology stack also limits some of the benefits of broader development communities as well. There will undoubtedly be developers attracted to the opportunities within the Zoho customer base, but those opportunities today are nowhere near the size and scale of other ecosystems.

Here’s the bottom line: Zoho’s leaders understand what’s required to operate a business in the experience economy and they design their offerings to deliver it. It won’t be the right fit for every business, but for those it does, Zoho offers the potential to redefine best practices in business operations—and what it means to be customer-centric—well into the future. The direction Zoho’s taking will undoubtedly influence many others in the enterprise application market as well. I’d say that’s a pretty compelling proposition.

• As part of a reorg, Microsoft just moved a team from its Azure cloud business into the organization responsible for Windows, Surface devices, and Microsoft 365.
• Microsoft 365 is the bundle of business applications that includes the Office 365 productivity suite, collaboration tools like OneDrive and SharePoint, the Microsoft Teams chat app, and even the Windows 10 operating system itself.
• The Microsoft 365 bundle represents a huge portion of Microsoft's catalogue of cloud software — an area where it has a clear advantage in the cloud wars over rivals like Amazon Web Services and Google's G Suite.
• Below are the 22 power players behind Microsoft 365.
• Click here to read more BI Prime stories.

Microsoft just bolstered the organization responsible for Windows, Surface devices, and its Microsoft 365 bundle of business applications with some internal cloud talent.

The company recently relocated a team from its Azure cloud business to this organization, known as "experiences and devices," according to longtime Microsoft pundit Brad Sams, writing for Petri.com, "to help the Windows/Surface teams build more cohesive experiences that the company hopes customers will love and push the Surface team to create better products as well."

The experiences and devices team is responsible for a big part of Microsoft's business. Microsoft 365, for example, is the company's a bundle of business apps, introduced in 2017, that includes Office 365 – cloud-based versions of the company's flagship productivity applications such as Word and Excel – collaboration tools like OneDrive and SharePoint, the Microsoft Teams chat app, and even the Windows 10 operating system itself. The strategy, the company has said, is to make it easier for customers to adopt the best of Microsoft, all at once.

The latest changes come after the company earlier this year notified employees about a significant reorganization, which took effect Feb. 25, affecting the Windows experience and devices teams, according to an internal memo obtained by Business Insider. 

That represents a big chunk of Microsoft's lineup of cloud software products, an area where it has a clear advantage in the cloud wars with Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud. AWS doesn't have a cloud software business to speak of, while Google's G Suite only accounts for a sliver of the market compared with the juggernaut that is Microsoft Office.

United under the banner of Microsoft 365, these power players are helping the company in "moving closer toward a comprehensive enterprise application ecosystem," Nucleus Research analyst Andrew MacMillen recently told Business Insider.

Here are the 21 power players behind Microsoft 365:

Rajesh Jha, executive VP of Experiences & Devices

Rajesh Jha leads Microsoft's Experiences and Devices group.

Jha's purview includes Windows client, Office Product Group, the New Experiences and Technology team (charged with finding new ways to engage Microsoft customers) and Enterprise Mobility and Management (which runs Windows Enterprise deployment and management).

Jha was the one who notified Microsoft employees about the big reorganization in early February.

Jha has been on Microsoft's leadership team since 2006, and has worked at Microsoft since he finished graduate school in 2000.

Panos Panay, chief product officer

Panos Panay now runs the Windows + Devices Team created through the reorganization.

As Jha explained it, the new team "will drive end-to-end people centered innovation including the entire Windows ecosystem," he said in the email to employees. "The joining of these teams will streamline the decision-making process to help us deliver the best device experience from silicon through the OS for our customers on OEM and Surface Devices."

Panay is generally considered the driving force behind Microsoft's line of Surface products.

Kirk Koenigsbauer, corporate vice president of Microsoft 365

Kirk Koenigsbauer is the corporate vice president responsible for product marketing and management for Microsoft 365.

Koenigsbauer's purview includes the overall Microsoft 365 bundle, Office 365, Windows 10 Enterprise, and the IT security and management tool Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS).

Koenigsbauer originally started working at Microsoft in 1992, but left in 1998 and did a three-year stint at Amazon. He rejoined Microsoft in 2002 as a corporate vice president.

Koenigsbauer in 2015 was notably the first Microsoft executive ever to grace the stage at an Apple product event. 

Now that the reorg has taken effect, Koenigsbauer will report directly to Jha as the chief operating officer for the Experience and Devices group.

Jared Spataro, corporate vice president of Microsoft 365

Jared Spataro runs Microsoft 365 marketing, which according to Microsoft includes business management, product marketing and go-to-market programs for the suite of applications.

Spataro was tasked with public communications related to Microsoft ending support Windows 7 its operating system used on millions of PCs since its launch in 2009, and encouraged users to upgrade to Windows 10 or buy new PCs that come preinstalled with it. 

The successful upgrade push helped make Microsoft's most recent quarter the best for its Windows business in terms of growth since CEO Satya Nadella took over in 2014.

Spataro joined Microsoft in 2006 as a director for Microsoft's SharePoint collaboration platform.

Brian MacDonald, corporate vice president of Microsoft Teams

Brian MacDonald is retiring from Microsoft once the reorg goes into place — but in the interim, he's the corporate vice president of the Microsoft Teams chat app. 

MacDonald is a legend within Microsoft, known as the "father of Outlook," the company's flagship email product. He led Microsoft's push to create Teams, the fast-growing chat app, by taking a small group of engineers to his fruit plantation in Maui to hack it together.

"In-between writing lines of code, the team spent their days hiking, riding tractors, picking food from the land, all to inspire new ways of thinking about the essence of teamwork, how technology can take collaboration to new levels, and what Microsoft could uniquely offer," according to Microsoft. "By the end, they left with the crystallizing idea that they wanted to build a service that made it frictionless for individuals and teams to create, collaborate and 'work in the open.'"

Teams has more than 20 million daily active users, according to Microsoft – more than rival Slack, although Slack has taken issue with Microsoft's accounting since Teams comes bundled with Microsoft 365.

Jeff Teper, corporate vice president of Office 365

Jeff Teper is corporate vice president of Microsoft's Office 365 cloud-based suite of productivity tools. He'll also take over Microsoft Teams chat app when MacDonald retires.

Teper runs design, product and engineering for products including core Office applications such as Word and Excel, OneDrive file storage system and collaboration platform SharePoint.

Teper joined Microsoft in 1992 and is best known as a co-creator of Microsoft SharePoint, which is now an industry-standard way for teams to share files and work with each other.

Perry Clarke, corporate vice president of Microsoft 365

Perry Clarke is the Microsoft 365 corporate vice president responsible for the core platform and artificial intelligence experience.

He's a Microsoft distinguished engineer who joined the company after working on neutron scattering work at the experimental reactor at Riso Lab in Denmark.

Clarke's purview includes Microsoft's bot framework and cognitive services, which is a collection of AI tools for vision, speech, language, knowledge and search; Microsoft Search, a search tool for businesses within Microsoft 365; AI intelligence throughout Microsoft 365; and the Intelligent Office Graph, which helps track information as it moves across Office 365.

Jon Tinter, corporate vice president of business development for Microsoft 365 & Search, Ads, and News

Jon Tinter is the corporate vice president of business development for Microsoft 365 & Search, Ads, and News.

The 13-year Microsoft veteran runs strategy for products including Microsoft 365 when it comes to growth, mergers and acquisitions, commercial partnerships and strategic investments.

Tinter's strategic leadership also includes products such as Windows, Surface devices, search products like Bing and Microsoft Search, plus Microsoft News and the company's digital advertising business.

Brad Anderson, corporate vice president of Microsoft Commercial Management Experiences

Brad Anderson is corporate vice president of Microsoft Commercial Management Experiences, which means he runs the team responsible for Microsoft 365 Modern Workplace products for businesses. 

Specifically, Anderson oversees engineering and strategic leadership for security platform Enterprise Mobility + Security – a key part of Microsoft 365– and the Microsoft product for managing large groups of computers running Windows, called System Center Configuration Manager.

Anderson's team include engineers who work on Microsoft 365 customer deployment and usage, Windows commercial products, management and security of PCs and mobile devices. 

Emma Williams, corporate vice president of Microsoft Office Vertical Solutions

As Microsoft Office Vertical Solutions corporate vice president, Emma Williams runs Office 365 solutions for industry verticals including health care, financial services, retail, manufacturing, and government.

One of the biggest changes Satya Nadella has made at Microsoft is shifting the company from a focus on making general-purpose products to ones that can be tuned for specific industries, a Microsoft executive recently told Business Insider.

Williams – a 16-year veteran of Microsoft – helps make that happen. 

Now that the reorg has taken effect, Williams will report directly to Jha as a member of the Experiences and Devices leadership group.

Jon Friedman, corporate vice president of Microsoft Design & Research

Jon Friedman is corporate vice president of Microsoft Design & Research, a position he describes on his LinkedIn profile as "the chief designer of Microsoft Office products."

Friedman – responsible for the last major redesign of Microsoft Office – leads a team of 250 employees who research and design Microsoft products, including within Microsoft 365.

Sumit Chauhan, corporate vice president of Microsoft Office Engineering

Sumit Chauhan is Microsoft's Office Engineering corporate vice president, meaning she runs engineering for flagship products including Word and PowerPoint across mobile, web and desktop. 

Chauhan's team is also responsible for infusing artificial intelligence into Microsoft's Office 365 cloud-based suite of productivity tools.

Chauhan is a 24-year veteran of Microsoft who joined the company as a principal software developer in 1996. 

Jaime Teevan, chief scientist of Microsoft Experiences & Devices

Jamie Teevan is the chief scientist for Microsoft Devices and Experiences, which means she's the brains behind Microsoft's productivity innovations. She works with Microsoft's research team to get experts who can help contribute to the company's updates in productivity — across software and devices. 

She has been at Microsoft since 2006 and was previously a technical advisor to CEO Satya Nadella and a principal researcher at Microsoft Research AI, where she led the productivity team. 

She is an award-winning and leading computer scientist in her field, known particularly for her research on human-computer interaction and information retrieval and personalized search. 

Tara Roth, corporate vice president of Office Customer Success Engineering (CSE)

Tara Roth heads up the Office Customer Success Engineering team and looks at a few areas all linked to how Microsoft interacts with its customers. Her team is in charge of customer support, the help pages, and anything else that helps customers use Microsoft products.

Her team is a key part of Microsoft's process for releasing new products and answering customer questions and concerns.

Roth has been at Microsoft for 27 years, starting as an engineer in 1992. 

Ales Holecek, corporate vice president of Office Engineering

Ales Holecek is the corporate vice president of the engineering team that builds Microsoft Office applications. His team helps deliver the "modern office experience" to Microsoft customers. 

Prior to joining the Office team, Holecek worked on the Windows Developer Ecosystem and Platform team, helping third party developers build on top of the Windows platform. As part of that he designed and built the Universal Windows Platform, an ambitious push to unify app development across Windows 10 on PCs, tablets, and the Xbox One gaming console.

He's been at Microsoft since 2004. Now that the reorg has taken effect, Holecek and Joe Belfiore will lead Microsoft's Office and Office Experience Group team as "a product/engineering duo."

Guarav Sareen, corporate vice president of Communication & Time Management

Guarav Sareen leads the Communications and Time Management organization at Microsoft, overseeing engineering and product teams for Outlook, Skype and the Yammer corporate social network. Prior to that, he led the engineering team for Outlook. 

Soon after Sareen joined Microsoft in 2001, he became of the engineers that helped build the Bing search engine. He continued to develop and grow Bing until 2016, when he switched gears to lead Outlook.  

Harvinder Bhela, corporate vice president of Microsoft 365 Security & Compliance

Harvinder Bhela is in charge of product, engineering and research for Microsoft's security and compliance business. His team develops security and compliance tools that help Microsoft 365 customers make sure their employees are working safely and securely, while also integrating with other products.

On his LinkedIn, Bhela calls the security and compliance "perhaps one of the largest growth engines for the M365 business," given that its a market worth over $50 billion per year. 

Bhela has worked at Microsoft for 23 years, previously working in the Exchange, Outlook/Outlook.com, Office and Windows divisions. 

Hayete Gallot, vice president of Modern Workplace WCB

Hayete Gallot runs the sales team for the Modern Workplace Solutions team, helping to get Microsoft products in the hands of more businesses, and similarly to help those companies through their digital transformation. 

She's got experience working both for the software and hardware divisions at Microsoft. Prior to her current role, she led the team responsible for developing new business models for Office products. Before that, she played a key role in developing Microsoft's Surface tablet division into a multi-billion-dollar business. 

Rob Lefferts, corporate vice president of Microsoft 365 Security & Compliance

Rob Lefferts is in charge of making sure Microsoft 365 has simple and clear security for users across all its products. Prior to this role, he led the Windows Enterprise & Security team, and was responsible for the significant security upgrades in Windows 10.

He's been at the company for 22 years, and has played a key role in developing many of Microsoft's technologies, and was a major driver in the creation of the Microsoft 365 strategy in the first place.

Joy Chik, corporate vice president of Microsoft Identity, Cloud & Enterprise

Joy Chik is the corporate vice president for the Identity division in Microsoft's Cloud + AI group. She's responsible for a variety of cloud and identity management products, including Active Directory, the backbone of login security for Windows and other Microsoft products.

Chik's role is key to every product Microsoft makes. Whenever any Microsoft product asks you to log in — from the Xbox games console to the Office 365 suite — chances are pretty good that it's using technology from Chik's team at some layer.

Chik has been at the company for 22 years, starting as a software design engineer in 1998.

Bob Davis, corporate vice president of Microsoft 365 & Security

Bob Davis is responsible for ensuring Microsoft customers across all industries (commercial, education, and public sector) are satisfied with the products. In his role he is in charge of the engineering and commercial & partner teams that help get a product ready for the market.

Davis helped to build the first version of Office 365, Microsoft's cloud-based subscription suite of productivity tools.

He joined the company in 1993 and helped it through its transition to the cloud computing era. 

Joe Belfiore, corporate vice president of Essential Products Group (EPIC)

Joe Belfiore leads the engineering team that is responsible for Windows 10 and Microsoft's other "essential products" including Microsoft Edge, Microsoft News, OneNote, Education products, and mobile applications for iOS and Android. 

Amid an executive shuffle in the division, Belfiore will soon switch over the the Office side of the company, to lead Microsoft's Office and Office experience group with Ales Holecek "as a product/engineering duo." 

Since joining Microsoft in 1990, Belfiore has had a crucial role in building some of the most significant features for the Windows platform. That includes things like the Start Button in Windows 10 and the Cortana digital assistant. 

He's been at Microsoft since 2004. Now that the reorg has taken effect, Belfiore and Ales Holecek will lead Microsoft's Office and Office Experience Group team as "a product/engineering duo."

Massachusetts may soon be the first state to enshrine the right-to-repair in law. The Digital Right to Repair Act moved out of committee in both the House and Senate on Tuesday, clearing an important hurdle in the state legislature and moving the legislature further than it’s been in any other state. Before the bill becomes a law, both houses of the Massachusetts legislature will need to vote on it. But right-to-repair activists are optimistic.

“It’s great news—this has been a really tough step in Massachusetts,” Nathan Proctor, the head of USPIRG's Right to Repair Campaign, told Motherboard in an email. “Next it will be considered for a floor vote in one chamber, the Senate likely first. We have considerable support for the bill.”

Right-to-repair has a long history in Massachusetts. It was the first state to pass similar legislation for cars. “Clearing committee was a very significant hurdle, and getting the recommendation to pass the bill from the committee took a huge effort from a wide coalition of groups,” Proctor said. “Right to Repair has roared out the gates so far in 2020, and I think it's time manufacturers read the writing on the wall: People want to fix their stuff, and it's only a matter of time before we pass new laws to overcome the barriers in our way.”

Kyle Wiens, CEO of iFixit, told Motherboard that huge portions of both the House and Senate have cosponsored the bill.

“If leadership allows this to have a floor vote, this will pass,” Wiens said. “This is the closest we’ve ever gotten.”

Right-to-repair is an issue that affects everyone and it’s gaining support among voters. When a smartphone breaks, many people would rather fix it themselves or pay for a third party for simple repairs. Companies like Apple want consumers to come to them for repairs and recently told Congress that people would hurt themselves if they repaired their own stuff. Democratic Presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have both called for national right-to-repair laws.

Huawei has announced that it’s suing Verizon for alleged patent violations, marking the latest twist in the Chinese tech giant’s adversarial relationship with the US. The lawsuit, filed in the Eastern and Western district courts in Texas, claims that Verizon is using 12 patents owned by Huawei without authorization.

The patents relate to network technology, with titles like “Sending Method, Receiving and Processing Method and Apparatus for Adapting Payload Bandwidth for Data Transmission.” None of them involve 5G, but a person familiar with the matter who requested anonymity describes them as crucial to network functionality. Huawei is the world’s biggest maker of telecoms equipment and often makes a point of highlighting its R&D...

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Panos Panay will now control Microsoft’s hardware and software combination

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While the airwaves are inundated with ads insisting that fifth-generation (5G) wireless is a transformative technology, we've noted repeatedly how much of this stuff is little more than hype designed to spur lagging smartphone sales. While faster, more resilient wireless networks will certainly be a good thing, when the standard arrives at scale several years from now, it's not actually going to transform the world in the way carrier ads would lead you to believe. And, in fact, some things will actually get a bit dumber before 5G fully arrives.

Case in point: 5G-supporting phones are already expensive and hard to come by, much like the networks they're supposed to attach to. Qualcomm was so eager to hype 5G and sell more hardware, the company removed the integrated 4G LTE chipset in its 2020 Snapdragon 865 system-on-a-chip (SOC). But one of the impacts of removing integrated LTE is that 5G support now requires more battery life and more space, increasing phone size and overall device cost:

This means nearly every flagship Android phone will be a 5G phone in 2020, and putting the 5G and 4G on a giant extra chip means smartphones are going to use way more power, no matter which cell network you're connected to. When 5G networks are only going to be in their infancy in 2020, this sounds like an across-the-board downgrade to me.

Apple's been lambasted in some quarters for being slower to market with 5G phones, even though the networks the phones will run on are patchy at best and will be for several years, still. Apple's finally pleasing those folks and will announce the iPhone 12 family of devices later this year, which will likely be, you guessed it, bigger and more expensive to accommodate 5G:

In order to add a 5G modem into an iPhone, there needs to be space. There are physical limitations to the current 5.8-inch and 6.5-inch iPhone 11 Pro that make it impossible for Apple to retain the same dimensions. Because 5G modems are still so new, they're larger (to support multiple spectrum) and more power-hungry; this is no different than the first smartphones with 4G LTE (the HTC Thunderbolt on Verizon was a fatty).

But it is different in that the hype surrounding 5G is exponentially larger than 4G hype ever was. Again, largely thanks to a saturated smartphone sales curve, courtesy of a plateau in overall design and innovation. Consumers are barely using the 30+ Mbps they receive (sometimes) via 4G now. Although it's not necessarily a bad thing, as faster speeds will drive innovation, few are currently calling for gigabit speeds in their pockets. Most consumer studies show that, more than anything, what consumers want is lower data prices.

In time, 5G (and a variety of technologies like virtualization rolling hand in hand with the standard) will provide faster, better, more reliable networks. But, as we keep noting, it's not some deus ex machina or panacea for the broadband sector. Thanks to corruption, regulatory capture, muted competition, and consolidation, you're going to pay more than ever for the same patchy availability and shaky customer service the sector has long been known for. As usual with consumer tech, the smart play will be to wait a year or two for phone design, battery development, and network deployment to catch up before diving into the 5G pool.

• San Francisco's iconic Transamerica Pyramid has sold for $711 million to a New York developer.
• It's the first sale in the building's history since its construction in 1969. The pyramid will retain its name.
• The now-beloved Transamerica Pyramid was despised by many who opposed the addition of tall buildings to the cityscape back when it was constructed.
• The backlash contributed to office construction being limited in San Francisco, a measure that remains in today's crowded commercial and housing market.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

San Francisco's iconic Transamerica Pyramid has sold for $711 million to a real-estate group led by New York developer Michael Shvo, as Bloomberg's Noah Buhayar reports. Transamerica's COO Jay Orlandi confirmed the sale in an email to Business Insider. 

"Transamerica has accepted SHVO's offer to purchase the Transamerica Pyramid property in San Francisco for $711 million. The sale is expected to close in second quarter of 2020."

The deal is the first sale in the building's history since it was built in 1969 as headquarters for insurance company Transamerica.

Two adjacent buildings on Sansome Street were reported to be included in the deal when the pyramid was first listed for sale for $600 million in August 2019. Transamerica originally intended to sell only half of the building but pivoted to a full sale of the structure after a lack of buyer interest. 

Shvo's investment group includes German pension fund Bayerische Versorgungskammer and Deutsche Finance. Shvo is known for luxury residential properties but has recently ventured into office space, according to Bloomberg. And the developer recently added Manhattan's Coca-Cola building to its portfolio, which is valued at more than $6 billion overall.

Michael Shvo did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.

The building's figure is part of the insurance company's logo, but the insurer hasn't been housed in the building for years. Northwestern Mutual, among others, fills its floors.

The building will still be branded as the Transamerica Pyramid likely to the relief of many who hold the landmark dear to their heart. But it wasn't always such a hit with the public.

SEE ALSO: Photos show how San Francisco's new buildings built in the last decade have permanently changed the city

The 1,040-foot building was detested when it was first built in 1969.

Source: Curbed SF

The San Francisco Chronicle architectural critic Allan Temko called it an abomination and "the biggest architectural dunce cap in the world."

Source: SF Gate

It was "the most portentously and insidiously bad building in The City," wrote the San Francisco Examiner Magazine.

Source: SF Gate

It also became the city's tallest building, a feat that fed an ongoing resistance against more tall buildings cluttering the cityscape.

Source: Bloomberg

The public voted to restrict the construction of office high-rises after that, a limitation that still exists today as the office market grows even more squeezed and commercial rents continue to skyrocket.

Source: Bloomberg

Only the biggest tech players can afford dibs on office space — old and new — in the city.

Source: Business Insider

San Francisco's "East Cut" neighborhood specifically has become the city's Big Tech central, with Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn staking their flag in the area.

Source: Business Insider

This is also where Salesforce Tower sits, which eclipsed the Transamerica Pyramid as the city's tallest building when it was completed in 2017.

Source: Business Insider

And like the Transamerica Pyramid, the Salesforce Tower was met with mixed reviews from the public as well as urban and architectural critics when it was built.

Source: Curbed SF

As The New York Times wrote, "the tower is not beautiful, but is impossible to ignore."

Source: The New York Times

The East Cut, SOMA, and the Financial District are most populated with tech offices.

Source: Business Insider

The area in which the Transamerica Pyramid sits is less so. It sits at the southern end of Columbus Avenue, with the North Beach District spanning out from its doorstep.

The tower's design is also a bit dated, as Bloomberg notes. But dated as it may be, it's also solidified its place in the history of San Francisco's iconic architecture.

Source: Bloomberg

What would happen if the Earth’s temperature went up a couple of degrees, or if carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions doubled? All signs point to terrible effects, from widespread heatwaves to negative impacts on biodiversity. Now, scientists’ predictions have unexpectedly gotten even worse.

Some recent models have even predicted temperature increases in excess of 5 degrees celcius if CO2 emissions, which are setting records, double—an increase of just 3 degrees is expected to be devastating for humanity. In a study of these recent models, researchers found a surprising reason for the change: clouds.

Climate modelers rely on a centralized set of guidelines that enables comparison among their models. The models from this generation will be used to inform this year’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report and shape policy decisions to mitigate climate change. The world is already worryingly close to the temperature limits set in the Paris climate agreement, so the predictions of the latest climate models come as dire news.

“Most of the differences among models in climate sensitivity come from the clouds,” said Paulo Ceppi, a co-author of the study. “And that's basically because it's really hard to simulate clouds accurately in climate models.”

Ceppi and his co-authors compared models from the two most recent generations of guidelines based on climate sensitivity, a metric that describes the amount of surface warming a doubling in CO2 emissions would produce. Their study was published last month in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

While the previous generation of climate models predicted on average a climate sensitivity of 3.3 Kelvin, the authors found that the most recent models average a climate sensitivity of 3.9 K. Additionally, the ranges of climate sensitivity produced by these models grew, from between 2.1 and 4.7 K to between 1.8 and 5.6 K.

Mark Zelinka, the first author of the study, said in an email that the only dramatic change between the two generations of models was how climate warming due to cloud cover had been incorporated. He explained that clouds reflect some sunlight that hits them, and as the planet warms from CO2 emissions, cloud cover will decrease. This in turn causes a positive feedback loop and further warms the climate.

Ceppi added that clouds also have their own greenhouse effects and can act as a blanket in the same way as greenhouse gases. The strength of this property depends on how high a cloud is, adding another layer of complexity that has only recently been incorporated into models.

Just because clouds are being modeled more realistically does not make the model as a whole better, though. In a preprint under review for the journal Earth System Dynamics, researchers at the University of Exeter looked at whether high estimates of climate sensitivity made sense in the context of historical observations.

First author Femke Nijsse said she was spurred to look into sensitivity because the last IPCC report considered a likely range to be lower than what several new models have predicted.

“We were quite surprised that this new generation of models showed quite a few models with a very high sensitivity,” she said.

Nijsse and her team found that at least six current models were inconsistent with historical climate data, likely because of the new cloud modelling.

Ceppi agreed that some of the models predicting a higher sensitivity than before may be unrealistic; this presents a “bit of tension,” since these new models were designed to better represent the climate processes that occur in clouds.

“On the one hand, they should be better, but on the other hand, at least some of these models seem to produce sensitivities that are too high compared with observed temperature changes,” he said. “That's a bit of a puzzle there, that's something we need to resolve.”

While there is some disagreement among the different climate models, Zelinka stressed that the next IPCC report, scheduled for release in 2022, will take into account a number of measurements concerning climate sensitivity. Even so, differences of a Kelvin or two still lead to similar general conclusions, he said.

“In some ways we are splitting hairs when it is well known that CO2 heats the Earth and that even a small amount of global warming is—on the whole—bad for society.”

Last month, just weeks after climate activist Greta Thunberg was named Time’s Person of the Year, JetBlue announced that it would go carbon neutral on all its domestic flights by the end of the summer, becoming the first major airline in the world to make such a commitment. News coverage of the announcement highlighted the airline’s intention to “use an alternative fuel source for flights leaving from San Francisco” along with “direct flight paths, new planes and other technologies.”

In other words, the company was hoping to innovate its way out of the aviation industry’s massive impact on the environment.

But a closer look revealed that there was no magic bullet behind this seemingly bold initiative. The fine print of JetBlue’s press release reveals that the airline doesn’t plan to reach this ambitious goal by decreasing the amount of carbon its planes spew into the air, but by making up for that carbon somewhere else. The airline will reach net zero emissions by funding “offsets,” or projects such as wind turbines and tree plantings that decrease global emissions overall.

Fly a plane here, plant a tree there—that’s the plan, for the most part.

JetBlue isn’t alone in offering such carbon offsets as an antidote to customer anxieties about air travel, and neither is it the only airline seeking to develop green aviation technology such as biofuels and electric jet engines; just last week the British aviation industry announced a similar plan to achieve net zero emissions by 2050. These policies promise to help the aviation industry go green without having to cancel a single flight, but the solutions they offer are too little and too late. The only sustainable way to fly, it turns out, is to fly less.

“The problem we face with air travel is that at present there aren’t good low-carbon alternatives,” said Peter Miller, a regional director at the National Resources Defense Council who focuses on clean energy advocacy. “There are a lot of technologies that are on the drawing board or just getting off the drawing board, but they’re not here yet, so the question is what we should do in the interim.”

On a global scale, cars are a far larger contributor to climate change than planes: air travel still only accounts for around 10 percent of global emissions from transportation, compared to 60 percent from automobiles. As a result, the gradual increase in electric vehicle ownership and gasoline fuel economy could help put a big dent in carbon emissions over the next few decades.

But our climate challenge isn’t as simple as carbon quantity: these statistics disguise the uniquely devastating short-term impact that air travel has on the atmosphere. Jet engines emit not only carbon dioxide but also sulphates, nitrous gases, and icy vapor streams called contrails, all of which trap heat in the atmosphere. Furthermore, they emit these greenhouse gases directly into the atmosphere at high altitudes, which research suggests could contribute to a disproportionate amount of short-term warming.

Recent climate forecasts say we must cut greenhouse gas emissions in half over the next ten years in order to stave off global catastrophe, but the aviation industry has thus far been moving in the opposite direction. One recent estimate found that emissions from air travel had risen more than 1.5 times faster than previously predicted, and the fuel inefficiency of American carriers was partially to blame. Worse still, the number of annual airline passengers is currently projected to double by 2037, which means that any path toward a livable future will have to involve finding a sustainable way to fly. But the solutions that major airlines like JetBlue have embraced thus far are nowhere near guaranteed to counteract the damage that commercial aviation is doing to the planet.

Take offsetts, for instance. Even before JetBlue pledged to go carbon-neutral by funding such carbon-reducing projects, airlines including United and Delta already gave customers the option to purchase offset credits for their flight, paying a little extra to assuage their flying guilt.

These measures might sound like climate-forward action on the airlines’ part, but in many places such offsets will soon become far more common. Next year will begin the first phase of the United Nation’s aviation emissions plan, CORSIA, which requires airlines in signatory countries to commit to keeping their emissions at 2020 levels by purchasing offsets or using sustainable fuels. The plan will remain voluntary until 2027.

But Jessica Green, a professor at the University of Toronto who studies climate governance, said there’s no way to know for sure how much an offset is actually helping stop climate change, especially when an airline like JetBlue doesn’t reveal what kind of offsets it buys.

“Offsets vary a lot in quality,” Green said, “and a lot of times they’re purchased through aggregators of credits, which makes it harder to know where the project actually came from or what it’s actually doing. When you click the button it’s like, ‘oh, this is two tons of carbon,’ and you have no idea whether it was a wind farm in Malawi or methane capture in Brazil.”

A recent ProPublica investigation into reforestation projects in South America, for instance, found that the projects were completed behind schedule and delivered far less than their expected carbon benefit.

“It’s not de facto problematic, but given that we know there’s a lot of iffy projects out there, the less transparency we have about where these offsets come from, the less of a service it does,” Green said. “It also creates this mentality that you can just click a button and then you’ve been absolved of your sins.”

Sustainable fuels like the ones JetBlue will use in San Francisco are a similarly insufficient solution. The airline plans to adopt Neste biofuels, made from recycled organic material, which emit up to 80 percent less carbon than traditional fuel. Multiple European airlines including Germany’s Lufthansa have already tested these fuels on short-haul flights over the past few years, and major carriers like United are also planning to buy millions of barrels of waste-produced biofuel, and the U.S. Department of Energy is funding experiments in producing cheap fuel from fats and greases. But Miller says the infrastructure to make these fuels affordable on a large scale does not exist yet, and could take decades to develop.

“The U.S. airline industry is taking clear actions to grow more sustainable while also continuing to serve the needs of our customers,” said Carter Yang, spokesperson for Airlines for America, the lobbying group representing the country’s biggest airlines. “We’re continuously investing in more fuel-efficient planes, developing sustainable aviation fuel and implementing more efficient procedures in the air and on the ground,” Yang added, would help U.S. airlines meet CORSIA’s targets.

It’s equally unclear how much electric airplanes could do to mitigate the adverse impact of the aviation industry. Right now, the most advanced electric batteries from companies like Rolls Royce, Pipistrel, and startup ZER0 (dubbed the “Tesla of the skies”) can’t power flights of longer than a few hundred miles, and it’s unlikely that they ever will—an average jet engine is more than fifty times as powerful as the best lithium-ion battery, and the battery is much more expensive.

If the cost of such batteries ever comes down, electric planes might be able to replace many short-term flights. Norway, for instance, has pledged to take all its domestic flights electric by 2040. But passengers might traverse such short distances just as easily on transportation methods like trains and buses, which are cheaper, better-tested, and also environmentally friendly. There’s also the matter of where the electricity for these batteries comes from: if you juice them with electricity that comes from burning coal, you aren’t helping.

The best way to reduce air travel emissions in the immediate future, then, might be for people to simply fly less. Achieving that on a large scale might sound impossible—we can’t just demand that millions of people cancel their vacations—but it looks a bit easier once you realize that airline passengers are a far smaller group than car owners or users of electricity. Despite the rapid recent expansion of the aviation industry in China and Southeast Asia, some estimates suggest that more than 80 percent of the world’s population has never boarded a plane. Furthermore, a small group of frequent fliers generates a disproportionate share of emissions: the 12 percent of Americans who took six or more flights in 2017 were responsible for at least two-thirds of air travel emissions in that year, probably even more.

“JetBlue’s commitment to reduce their emissions is valuable,” Miller said, “and we have to support the decisions of companies to do more than they’re required to do. But it’s not a substitute for societal action, or national action, or international action to achieve emissions reductions.” Motherboard reached out to JetBlue and the other airlines mentioned in this story, but they did not respond to requests for comment.

In the absence of revolutionary technology that will drastically reduce the environmental impact of commercial flights, the best way for policymakers to make flying sustainable may be to discourage this frequent flying, especially when the trips are for business meetings and academic conferences that might just as easily be accomplished with a Skype call. Green said governments could accomplish this by subsidizing train travel instead of new airports, or by instituting what she calls a “runway tax”—charging consumers or airlines themselves an extra few hundred dollars to take off or land at an airport. Such taxes are always easier for corporations to absorb than individual consumers, but as Thunberg herself has pointed out, the international community has all but refused to touch the aviation industry—the Paris climate agreement, for instance, featured not a single binding resolution regarding air travel.

In the absence of any such regulation, Green said, the major airlines are still seeking to position themselves as climate-conscious, but on their terms.

“I think the airline industry, especially with this normative shift about flight-shaming, sees the writing on the wall,” she said. “I think they view initiatives like this as kind of a preemptive way to buy themselves some more time.”

• Skype is usually free; however, if you want to use Skype to call someone's cell phone or landline in the US, you can use a subscription that starts at $2.99 a month.
• You also have the option to buy Skype Credit to make phone calls, if you don't need the amount of minutes available with the monthly subscription.
• Skype also offers international plans available at different price points.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more.

As long as you keep your calls, video chats, and messaging strictly between fellow Skype users, you won't pay a penny for the service.

Whether you're chatting with a friend two towns over or an uncle all the way around the globe, Skype-to-Skype communications are completely free.

Skype is typically free, but certain Skype services will cost money

Skype is not free when a Skype user goes outside the platform, using the app to call a mobile phone or a landline. But hey, considering Skype effectively turns your computer or smart device into a phone that can call anyone in the world, it might be worth a bit of cash.

And "a bit" is the operative phrase — just $2.99 per month gets you a Skype subscription that allows up to 2,000 minutes of calls within the US; after that it's an extra 15 cents per minute.

For $6.99 a month, you get 2,000 minutes of calls to all of North America, after that it's 35 cents per minute.

You can also get 800 minutes worth of calling to India for $7.99 per month — after which it's $1 a minute. 

Not sure if you will make enough calls to justify a monthly subscription? Then, you can pay for Skype credits in increments as low as $5. You'll also need Skype Credit to call anywhere in the world outside of the US, North America, or India, since Skype's subscriptions only cover those regions. 

Related coverage from How To Do Everything: Tech:

• How to uninstall Skype on your Windows 10 computer in 2 ways

• How to add contacts on Skype to quickly make calls and start chats, on desktop or mobile

• How to delete your Skype contacts on a computer or mobile device

• How to change your Skype display name, to make it easier for friends or employers to find you

• How to make a Skype call on your computer or mobile device, or start a group call

SEE ALSO: The best budget laptops

Join the conversation about this story »

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Zoom was founded on delivering happiness to our customers, and for us, there’s no greater measure of success than customer satisfaction. We’re continuously humbled by the appreciation our customers show for our video-first unified communications platform. And that’s why we’re extremely honored to announce that Zoom was recognized as a 2020 Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for Meeting Solutions based on user reviews!

This marks the third consecutive time that Zoom has been honored as a Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for our video communications solutions.

Gartner Peer Insights ranks organizations on end-user reviews and ratings. Criteria used by Gartner to select the awarded organizations include having at least 50 published reviews and an average overall rating of 4.2 stars or higher on Gartner Peer Insights. Zoom received more than 2,000 reviews in the last 12 months (we have more than 5,300 overall) and an average overall rating of 4.6 out of 5 stars as of January 30, 2020.

Our customers’ ratings stem from a year in which our engineering team delivered more than 300 platform innovations, none of which would have been possible without the feedback from our customers. From creating a better cloud phone solution in Zoom Phone to integrating all your business-critical applications to transforming the conference room experience, everything we do is driven by the desire to deliver business value through reliable, easy-to-use communications solutions.

“The success of our customers is what makes Zoom successful,” says Eric S. Yuan, Zoom’s founder and CEO. “We’re humbled to be rated so highly by our customers on Gartner Peer Insights and believe such an achievement validates all the hard work and dedication we’ve put into building the most robust and user-friendly unified communications platform. We will continue to work hard delivering happiness to our customers every day and extending value to their teams and businesses.”

Here’s what some Zoom customers are saying on Gartner Peer Insights:

“Wе usе Zооm fоr аll оf оur tеlеcоnfеrеncіng nееds. Wе stаrtеd usіng іt wіthіn оur sаlеs dеpаrtmеnt аnd thеn еxtеndеd thе usе tо thе еntіrе оrgаnіzаtіоn. Prіоr tо Zооm, wе trіеd а numbеr оf оthеr sеrvіcеs, but Zооm’s еаsе оf usе аnd hіgh-quаlіtу cаlls іn vаrуіng bаndwіdth аrеаs mаdе іt а pеrfеct mаtch.” — Marketing Specialist in the Services Industry

“Many of our international clients were unable to dial into UK based teleconference lines, traditional solutions from our telecoms provider were going to be pricey, Zoom offered a free trial, as soon as we tried it the benefits became immediately clear.” — Product and IT Manager in the Media Industry

“After researching extensively for means of reliable and robust communication, we, collectively as an organization, came to the conclusion that Zoom should be the go-to tool. Zoom Meetings is compatible with any operating system that is out there and offers a wide variety of features and functions for the average user. The tool is user friendly through everything and, hence, there is no additional cost for purchasing training material or such. Zoom is currently being used across the organization without any sort of complications whatsoever.” — Consultant in the Services Industry

Sсrееn shаrіng аnd drаwіng аrе smооth аnd соnvеnіеnt. I wаs аlsо іmрrеssеd by hоw quісk аnd еаsy іt swіtсhеs bеtwееn рrеsеntеrs аnd lеts yоu gеt vеry sресіfіс аbоut whісh sсrееns/аррs yоu аrе shаrіng. I lіkе tо wоrk wіth twо mоnіtоrs, but іt wаs vеry еаsy tо shоw my vіеwеrs оnly whаt I wаntеd thеm tо sее аnd thеn swіtсh оvеr, аllоwіng mе tо tyре dіrесtly аnd tаkе оvеr а соllеаguе оr сlіеnt’s sсrееn tо sрееd thіngs аlоng. — Product Manager in the Finance Industry

Read more Zoom reviews here, or share your own Zoom story on Gartner Peer Insights! If you’d like to see why our customers love Zoom, sign up for a personalized 1-1 demo with a Zoom product specialist today!

The Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice Logo is a trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc., and/or its affiliates, and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice distinctions are determined by the subjective opinions of individual end-user customers based on their own experiences, the number of published reviews on Gartner Peer Insights and overall ratings for a given vendor in the market, as further described here and are not intended in any way to represent the views of Gartner or its affiliates.

The post Zoom Recognized as a 2020 Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for Meeting Solutions appeared first on Zoom Blog.

• Google Cloud just reported revenue for the first time.
• Google's cloud unit brought in $2.6 billion in its most recent quarter, compared to Microsoft's $12.5 billion and Amazon's $9.9 billion – but there's a big flaw in that comparison because the companies report cloud revenue differently.
• Microsoft doesn't report revenue for its Azure cloud platform. Instead, its "commercial cloud business" includes a bunch of other products such as Office 365 and Dynamics 365. Google's revenue also includes G Suite, its productivity suite.
• In other words: Google and Microsoft lump in other products when they report cloud revenue, whereas Amazon's impressive cloud financials almost entirely represent its massive cloud infrastructure platform business.
• The way the companies report cloud revenue would suggest Microsoft is the No. 1 cloud player, but market share estimates yield a very different result with AWS at more than three times the size of Microsoft when it comes to cloud infrastructure.
• Click here to read more BI Prime stories.

Google Cloud just reported revenue for the first time, giving us insight into a business that the company has often hyped up, but rarely given anything other than the most general details. 

That's an important step for transparency — but it doesn't actually bring us much closer to knowing how it fares against leading rivals Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, because there's still a lot that all three companies aren't telling Wall Street.

The search giant on Monday reported Google Cloud revenue of $2.6 billion for the last three months of 2019, up from $1.7 billion in the same quarter the year before. Google Cloud includes the company's G Suite collection of cloud productivity tools and the Google Cloud Platform infrastructure service. 

It's clear Google's cloud revenue is less than Amazon's or Microsoft's, but there's no way to tell exactly how the cloud businesses compare because there's a big disparity in what the companies include in cloud revenue. For instance, if you looked at this chart, you might — wrongly — believe that this tells the whole story.

The reality is a little more complicated — and makes it clear that Amazon Web Services is even more dominant than you might think. 

Microsoft, for instance, doesn't actually break out revenue for its two most prominent cloud products, the Azure infrastructure platform and the business version of the Office 365 productivity suite. Rather, it lumps those products in with its Dynamics customer relationship management software and some other undisclosed cloud services to come up with a figure it calls "commercial cloud," which is what you see on the chart. 

That business reached $12.5 billion in sales for its most revenue quarter, up 39 percent year over year. Microsoft reports only revenue growth for Azure. In its most recent quarter, Azure revenue grew 62 percent, up compared to the previous quarter, breaking a quarters-long cycle of slowing growth in the business.

AWS, meanwhile, reported about $9.9 billion in revenue for the most recent quarter. The AWS segment, according to securities filings, "consists of amounts earned from global sales of compute, storage, database, and other service offerings for start-ups, enterprises, government agencies, and academic institutions." 

In other words, almost all AWS revenue comes from its cloud infrastructure business — Amazon doesn't have any other products on the scale of Microsoft Office 365 or Google G Suite that's likely to make up much of the "other service offerings" portion of that segment.

Through that lens, it's clear that AWS is incredibly massive in the cloud computing market: Its infrastructure cloud alone is almost as big as all of Microsoft's business cloud products combined, and four times larger than Google Cloud's figure, which includes both the Google Cloud Platform and G Suite.

All of which shows that why the way companies report cloud revenue would suggest Microsoft is the No. 1 cloud player, market share estimates suggest a very different result. Gartner's most recent cloud infrastructure report estimated put AWS market share at 47.8 percent at the end of 2018, compared to Microsoft's 15.5 percent and Google's 4 percent.

Got a tip? Contact this reporter via email at astewart@businessinsider.com, message her on Twitter @ashannstew, or send her a secure message through Signal at 425-344-8242.

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