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• The tech world has changed significantly in the last decade. 
• Back in 2009, the iPad hadn't come out yet, Lyft didn't exist, and the Amazon Echo hadn't been unveiled. 
• Here are 14 major innovations that didn't exist 10 years ago. 
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

The world was a very different place 10 years ago. 

A decade ago, you couldn't order a Lyft on your phone, you couldn't scroll through Instagram, and you couldn't watch movies or answer email on an iPad.

Several incredible products and services have been invented in the last 10 years — some, in the last five or eight. Thanks to a tweet from Button cofounder Chris Maddern, we were inspired to look into some of the cool, convenient things the tech world has invented since 2009. 

1. The iPad

When Steve Jobs introduced the iPad nearly 10 years ago, he described it as "the best browsing experience you'll ever have." 

"It's unbelievably great. Way better than a laptop, way better than a smartphone," Jobs said on stage in January 2010. 

The original iPad cost between $499 and $829. Since then, the device has gone through several iterations and several price points — in 2019 alone, Apple unveiled a new 10.2-inch iPad, iPad Mini, and the iPad Air.

2. Snapchat

Snapchat debuted in the App Store in the summer of 2011 as a messaging app for sending disappearing photos. At the time, it was called Pictaboo, but it had the same now-famous ghost icon, Ghostface Chillah.

By September 2011, the name had changed to Snapchat and the app began to catch on with teens.

Six years later, Snapchat is owned by a $22 billion public company, Snap Inc., and has expanded into TV-like shows, partnerships with publishers, hardware products, and augmented reality. 

3. Oculus

Oculus VR began in a garage in Irvine, California, in June 2012. Then-19-year-old Palmer Luckey launched the company on Kickstarter, raising nearly $2.5 million for his virtual reality headset. After raising an additional $16 million in funding, Luckey sold Oculus to Facebook in 2014 for $2 billion. 

Now, Luckey has left Oculus, but the VR company lives on at Facebook. Oculus currently offers three headsets: the Rift S, Quest, and Go. 

4. Stripe

Stripe, a startup aimed at disrupting online payments, officially launched in September 2011. Now, companies from Target to the NFL use Stripe's technology to power payments in their websites and apps. 

Eight years after launch, Stripe is worth about $35 billion.

5. Instagram

Instagram launched in October 2010, and 25,000 people signed up on the first day. By 2011, Instagram was Apple's iPhone app of the year, and by April 2012, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg shelled out $1 billion to buy the company. 

Instagram now has over a billion active users and has branched into live video, stories, and face filters, and has added a long-form video service called IGTV. 

6. Lyft

Lyft launched in 2012 as a ride-sharing app. The idea morphed out of Zimride, a company founded by John Zimmer and Logan Green that offered carpooling for long-distance rides and campus car-sharing programs. 

Fast forward to 2019 and Lyft is now a $13 billion company that's dabbling in electric scooters, bike share, and self-driving car technology. The 7-year-old startup went public earlier this year. 

7. Pinterest

Pinterest, a search and discovery app and virtual "pinboard," was founded in March 2010.

Today, the app has over 300 million monthly active users and has moved on from basic searching and pinning: Pinterest is experimenting with shopping, machine learning and vision, and camera search both in the app and around the web. 

Pinterest went public in 2019 and is currently a $10 billion company. 

8. Square

Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey launched Square in October 2010 after a friend of his couldn't make a sale because he couldn't process American Express cards. 

Square was conceived as a mobile-payments service that could process credit cards with an app and a reader that plugged into smartphones.

These days, Square offers additional hardware products like a terminal, register, and contactless payments reader and is a $27.5 billion public company.

9. 4G

4G networks may seem like a given these days, but they've been around for less than a decade. The networks promised to make the mobile internet much faster and much better and were an upgrade to the 3G wireless network. 

Sprint's HTC Evo was the first 4G phone by several months — it came out in March 2010, followed by a Samsung model in June of that year. Verizon didn't launch 4G until December 2010, and 4G didn't come to the iPhone until the iPhone 5 in 2012. 

In 2019, carriers are expanding their 5G networks, and device makers are building 5G-compatible smartphones. 

10. Slack

Founder Stewart Butterfield started working on work-chat app Slack in 2012. The first iteration of the app was a web-based massively multiplayer game, but it didn't quite work out. Fast-forward to 2013 and the Slack team knew they had a product on their hands that other companies would actually use. 

"We begged and cajoled our friends at other companies to try it out and give us feedback," Butterfield said in an interview with venture capital firm First Round Capital. 

Most recently, Slack went public in a direct listing on the New York Stock Exchange.

11. AirPods

Apple's AirPods wireless earbuds are so ubiquitous now, it's hard to believe they've only been around for three years. 

The buds were unveiled alongside the iPhone 7 in September 2016. The iPhone 7 was Apple's first iPhone without a headphone jack, and AirPods were intended to be a companion for the new phone. 

Now, Apple sells two versions of AirPods — AirPods and AirPods Pro — and the earbuds have become a major boon to Apple's business: Analysts predict AirPods could become the company's third-largest product by 2021. 

12. Amazon Echo

Amazon introduced its Echo device in 2014, a home speaker with a virtual assistant, Alexa, built in. The initial pitch of the Echo was a way to control your music using just your voice. 

In 2019, the Echo can do a lot more than play music: The device can act as a smart home hub and a way to shop on Amazon, as well as the brains behind an entire household's operations. Alexa can supply your calendar, add items to your shopping list, answer random queries, and more. 

Plus, Amazon has since introduced an entire lineup of Echo devices, like the Show with a built-in screen, the Studio for high-end audio, and the Dot for making your home "smart" in every room. 

13. The Apple Watch

Apple revealed the first Apple Watch at its September keynote in 2014, but the watch didn't officially go on sale until April 2015. 

The watch was significant for Apple because it was the company's first brand-new piece of hardware since Apple cofounder Steve Jobs died in 2011. But it also sparked the growth of the wearables industry, a category Apple now dominates — the Apple Watch reportedly owns nearly 50% of the market share in 2019. 

Since the Apple Watch's lauch, Apple has introduced several more versions, the latest being the Apple Watch Series 5 released in September.

14. Microsoft Surface

In June 2012, Microsoft launched a new foray into PCs with the Microsoft Surface, a tablet-laptop hybrid that then-CEO Steve Ballmer described as "a whole new family of computing devices from Microsoft."

Now, Microsoft has vastly expanded its Surface lineup, offering several iterations of the device like the Surface Go, a smaller, lighter tablet; the Surface Studio, a pro-level desktop PC; and the Surface Book, a touchscreen laptop. 

• This year will be full of astronomical spectacles and technological firsts. Here's a calendar of what to expect in space in 2020.
• NASA spacecraft will rocket towards the poles of the sun, zip around Jupiter, and collect samples from an asteroid.
• Three different space agencies plan to launch new rovers to Mars.
• SpaceX, meanwhile, plans to launch its first people into orbit on its Crew Dragon capsule.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

From eclipses and meteor showers to Mars missions and ground-breaking rocket launches, 2020 is expected to be an extraordinary year in space.

Three Mars rovers are set to launch this summer. SpaceX and Boeing plan to send their first NASA astronauts into space. Meanwhile, shooting stars, fireballs, and total solar eclipses will grace the sky.

Here's what to watch in space this year.

SEE ALSO: Before-and-after photos from space reveal some of the biggest moments that changed our world in the last decade

DON'T MISS: Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have profound visions for humanity's future in space. Here's how the billionaires' goals compare.

January 3-4: Quadrantids meteor shower

The Quadrantids meteor shower can be one of the most remarkable shooting-star displays of the year, since it produces bright fireball meteors. At the shower's brief peak (it only lasts a few hours), more than 100 shooting stars could be visible per hour this year, according to Space.com. 

Unlike most meteor showers, which come from comets, the Quadrantids originate from an asteroid called 2003 EH1.

January 3-4, then every two weeks afterward: SpaceX launches 60 Starlink internet satellites at a time

SpaceX, the aerospace company founded by Elon Musk, is trying to launch as many of its Starlink internet satellites into orbit as soon as possible. The goal: bathe Earth in pervasive, high-speed, low-latency broadband service (before a number of competitors do so).

SpaceX has already launched 120 Starlink satellites and hopes to send up about 1,400 more in 2020 to boot up the network and start selling its service to customers. Up to 60 of the satellites can launch at a time on SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, so the company aims to launch a batch every couple of weeks.

SpaceX has permission from the Federal Communications Commission to launch nearly 12,000 Starlink satellites, but it's now hoping to send up to 42,000 of them. Analysts think Starlink could make SpaceX up to a $120 billion company if the effort is successful.

January 11: SpaceX tests a rocket escape system for its new Crew Dragon spaceship

SpaceX's new spaceship to fly astronauts, called Crew Dragon, came out of NASA's Commercial Crew Program, which aims to restore the US' ability to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station.

The new ship has undergone years' worth of trials — including parachute deployments, engine firings, and even an uncrewed launch to orbit. But before Crew Dragon can fly any people, the vehicle has to show that its abort system can safely get the capsule away from a rocket during launch if something were to go wrong.

That escape system failed during a ground test over the summer, destroying a Crew Dragon ship (no one was inside). SpaceX has since fixed the problem and successfully completed the ground test.

SpaceX now plans to perform a full abort test with a Falcon 9 rocket no sooner than January 11.

January 29: NASA's record-breaking Parker Solar Probe flies past the sun for a fourth time (it will do this three more times in 2020)

Since it launched in August 2018, the Parker Solar Probe has rocketed around the sun three times, getting closer than any spacecraft before it and traveling faster than any other human-made object in history.

So far, the probe has found the first evidence of a zone around the sun with no cosmic dust and pinpointed a source of the solar wind (a stream of charged particles) that flows from the sun and over the planets. It also discovered previously unseen bursts of rapid solar wind that bend the sun's magnetic field backward and spotted the elusive Geminids meteor trail. 

The spacecraft is set to zip around the sun 21 more times in the next six years, including four passes this year.

January 30, then twice more later this year: OneWeb launches its first internet satellites

SpaceX isn't the only company trying to establish a pervasive network of internet satellites. A company called OneWeb, founded by Greg Wyler, has already launched six test satellites. With this launch, it plans to send up 34 spacecraft.

OneWeb's immediate goal is to launch 650 satellites in its planned "megaconstellation" by the end of 2021 and start providing internet service that same year.

So far, OneWeb has three launches planned for this year, though it may launch more than 30 at a time about once a month.

February 5: The European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA launch the Solar Orbiter to investigate the sun's poles — areas the Parker probe can't reach

After the Solar Orbiter launches from Cape Canaveral, Florida, the spacecraft will repeatedly slingshot around Venus and Earth, using the planets' gravity to put it on a path over the sun's poles. Within three years, it will get as close as 26 million miles from the sun ⁠— closer than Mercury.

That should give scientists the first-ever photos of the sun's polar regions, as well as unprecedented new data about our star's activity.

Unlike the Parker probe, the Solar Orbiter will travel at the speed the sun's atmosphere rotates. That means it can observe particular regions for longer periods of time.

February 17: Juno flies over Jupiter again (and will do so six more times)

NASA's Juno probe launched in August 2011 and reached Jupiter in July 2016. Since then, the spacecraft has been doing high-speed close flybys of the planet called perijoves every 53.5 days. (That's the length of Juno's elliptical orbit around Jupiter.) After each flyby, Juno beams back fascinating and beautiful photos of Jupiter's poles and storms. 

Juno's 25th perijove will happen in February, followed by six more throughout 2020. 

Sometime between February and May: SpaceX launches its first people into orbit — and resurrects the US' human spaceflight capabilities

After retiring its space shuttle fleet in July 2011, NASA has relied exclusively — and expensively — on Russia to send astronauts to and from space aboard Soyuz spacecraft. After nearly a decade of effort, though, NASA's Commercial Crew Program is poised to solve this predicament with new commercial spaceships from SpaceX and Boeing.

If SpaceX's in-flight abort test of its Crew Dragon capsule goes well in January, the company should then get NASA's ok to fly astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley.

The last official target date set for Demo-2, as SpaceX's first-ever crewed mission is called, was in February. But since that date was announced, SpaceX has seen a variety of delays, and NASA has said it is "reevaluating" those target launch dates.

April: The crew of Expedition 63 launches to the International Space Station

A new group of astronauts and cosmonauts will arrive at the International Space Station this spring. NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy and cosmonauts Nikolai Tikhonov and Andrei Babkin will live on the ISS until October.

Cassidy has already spent a total of 182 days in space. 

April 13: BepiColombo passes close to Earth

The joint mission between the ESA and JAXA (Japan's space agency) aims to study Mercury via two orbiters. BepiColombo launched in October 2018 and will slingshot around Earth and Venus this year as part of its journey to Mercury. 

April 21-22: Lyrid meteor shower

The Lyrids come when Earth passes through the tail of the comet Thatcher. They're seen best from the Northern Hemisphere. This year, the New Moon will fall on April 23, so the moon's brightness shouldn't compete with the show. 

June 21: Annular solar eclipse

The moon doesn't orbit Earth in a perfect circle, so sometimes it appears smaller and more distant, while at other times it looks especially large. If the moon blocks the sun while at its minimum lunar size, you get an annular solar eclipse — when the moon's black circle doesn't entirely cover the sun's disk.

That's what will happen in June. The annular eclipse's path of totality will move through central Africa, Saudi Arabia, northern India, and southern China before ending in the Pacific Ocean. Most of eastern Africa, the Middle East, and southern Asia will be able to see a partial eclipse. 

July: The United Arab Emirates launches a Mars orbiter

The Hope Mars orbiter, slated to launch from Japan, will be the Arab world's first planetary science mission, according to Nature. The probe will study Mars' atmosphere, monitoring how it interacts with solar wind and tracking its loss of hydrogen and oxygen.

July 17: NASA's Mars 2020 rover launches

NASA's InSight lander and Curiosity rover will soon get another buddy on the red planet. The Mars 2020 rover, currently being constructed and tested at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, will search for signs of past microbial life on the red planet and collect samples for a future mission that could return them to Earth. It's slated to land in Mars' Jezero crater on February 18, 2021. 

Sometime between July 26 and August 13: The Rosalind Franklin ExoMars rover launches

Like NASA's Mars rover, the ESA's robot will search for organic material and other signs of life on Mars, drilling up to 6 feet below the Martian surface to sample 4 billion-year-old rock.

The ESA has yet to announce a landing site, but it plans to launch the rover in late July or early August.

July or August: China launches its own Mars rover and orbiter

For its first attempt at landing on another planet, China has chosen relatively hazard-free landing sites on Mars, according to The Planetary Society. 

These three Mars missions are scheduled to launch around the same time in order to catch Mars as it passes close to Earth.

Mid-year: Boeing launches its first NASA astronauts aboard a Starliner spaceship

Boeing's new spaceship for NASA, called the CST-100 Starliner, completed its first uncrewed space mission, called the Orbital Flight Test, on December 21. But it suffered a critical timing error, which mean the ship failed to achieve its main objective of docking with the International Space Station. Mission control was able to remotely rescue the spacecraft after its launch, though. 

Since Boeing has already successfully completed its in-flight abort test, next up is Starliner's first-ever crewed flight test.

"I think we're getting close. I think it's going to happen in the first part of next year," NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said on December 7, according to Space News. But that was before the nail-biting rescue of Starliner.

Since the problematic mission, officials have declined to offer a timeline for the crewed flight. NASA may ask for a re-do of the uncrewed mission before allowing astronauts to fly the Starliner.

August: OSIRIS-REx collects a sample of dust from asteroid Bennu

The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft arrived at asteroid Bennu, 1.2 billion miles from Earth, in December 2018. The NASA team behind the mission spent a year scoping the asteroid's extremely rugged surface; the group just selected a site to collect a sample from a few weeks ago.

To execute the sample-grabbing maneuver in August, the spacecraft will get extremely close to the surface and extend an arm to touch the asteroid for about 5 seconds. The head of that tool will blow nitrogen gas to help capture dust and pebbles. After the sample is collected, OSIRIS-REx will leave Bennu in 2021 and arrive back on Earth with the asteroid dust in 2023.

Aug 11-12: Perseids meteor shower

The Perseids are known for explosions of light and color that last longer than those of typical meteors. They can also have long, streaking tails. The show comes to us thanks to the Swift-Tuttle comet, which travels a 133-year-orbit of the sun. The bits of debris from its tale that slam into our atmosphere create the bright streaks we see each summer.

October 9-10: Southern Taurids meteor shower

The Taurids meteor shower comes in two different streams. The Southern Taurids are debris from Comet Encke, but the origin of the Northern Taurids is still debated. They could be a stream of dust grains left behind by an asteroid, though some scientists think they also came from Comet Encke, but were separated from the Southern Taurids by the distant gravitational pull of Jupiter. Still others think the whole field of debris came from the same giant comet, which disintegrated over the last 20,000 to 30,000 years.

This year, the Southern Taurids will peak about a month before the Northern stream.

October 16: BepiColombo flies past Venus

Following BepiColombo's Earth flyby in April, it will swing around Venus in August and again in October. The two orbiters it carries won't settle into orbit around Mercury until December 2025.

Oct 21-22: Orionids meteor shower

The Orionids come from dust left behind by Halley's Comet. They get their name because the shooting stars appear to originate in the area of the sky around the Orion constellation.

November 11-12: Northern Taurids meteor shower

The Taurids' Northern stream sometimes brings bight fireballs when it overlaps with the Southern stream in late October and early November.

Nov 16-17: Leonids meteor shower

The Leonids appear when Earth hurtles through the field of rock and metal debris left behind by the comet Tempel-Tuttle each time it passes by. Because the metals are rich in iron and magnesium, the Leonids often leave bright green tails in their wake.

Dec 13-14: Geminids meteor shower

Unlike most meteor showers, which come from the dust of a comet (a ball of ice and rock), the Geminids come from a trail of dust that the asteroid Phaethon left behind several thousand years ago. 

NASA's Parker Solar Probe recently spotted the Geminids debris trail for the first time ever. Thanks to the probe's observations, scientists found that the Geminids trail contains about 1 billion kilograms (1 million tons) of material.

December 14: Total solar eclipse

Parts of southern Chile and southern Argentina lie in the eclipse's path of totality, where the moon will completely block the sun's disk. Those regions will be plunged into darkness for up to 2 minutes and 9 seconds.

Total solar eclipses offer scientists unique opportunities to study the sun's outermost layer, the corona, when the moon blocks the rest of the sun. Studying the corona can help scientists learn more about how the sun's atmosphere affects our power grids, telecommunications infrastructure, and satellites. 

A partial eclipse will be visible in most parts of southern South America.

Late 2020: China intends to launch a mission to the moon that could return a sample to Earth

In January 2019, China landed its Chang'e 4 lunar rover on the moon's far side — the first time humanity had put anything there. The feat required China to first launch a lunar satellite in order to relay messages to the lander, since the moon blocks radio waves. That satellite called, Queqiao or "magpie bridge" launched in May 2018.

The next phase of China's lunar exploration program, Chang'e 5, aims to collect the nation's first-ever samples of moon dust, called regolith, and bring them back to Earth. It's expected to launch late in the year.

Late 2020: Hayabusa2 returns to Earth with rock samples from the asteroid Ryugu

In April, Japan's Hayabusa-2 probe blasted the asteroid with a copper plate and a box of explosives in order to loosen rocks and expose material under the surface. Then it landed on the asteroid's surface in July to collect samples of the space rock. Hayabusa-2 is now on its way back to Earth and should arrive in November or December.

Sometime in 2020: Artemis 1 launches the BioSentinel CubeSat carrying yeast cells — NASA's first attempt to send a living thing beyond Earth orbit since the Apollo moon missions

The launch will be a critical test for NASA's deep-space exploration spacecraft, called Orion. The unmanned test flight will rocket 280,000 miles from Earth (thousands of miles past the moon) — farther than any spacecraft built for humans has ever ventured.

After three weeks in space, Orion will attempt a splashdown off the coast of Baja California. 

As part of its journey, Orion is slated to deploy a tiny CubeSat satellite, BioSentinel, that will carry two strains of yeast. BioSentinel will circle the sun and track how the yeast responds to deep space radiation.

Scientists will compare those results to data about yeast from experiments conducted on the space station and on Earth. That should give an idea of how different levels of radiation and gravity affect life ⁠— information that will be useful as astronauts travel further from Earth.

Maybe in 2020: SpaceX could launch its first Starship into orbit

Musk said in September that SpaceX may launch a brand-new spaceship called Starship into orbit in as little as six months. However, that was before the company accidentally blew the top off of its Starship Mark-1 prototype during a fueling test in November.

Still, the company is moving quickly to convert its nascent launch site in Boca Chica, Texas, into a full-fledged private spaceport. Its workers may yet make up for lost time as they build a Mark-3 prototype for orbital launches.

• Users of popular Canadian cryptocurrency exchange platform Quadriga CX have requested that police exhume the body of late founder Gerald Cotten in order to determine if the 30-year-old is really dead. 
• In January, the company announced on Facebook that Cotten had died suddenly in December 2018 due to "complications with Crohn's disease" while traveling in India.
• Cotten was the only person with access to digital wallets containing C$180 million ($137 million) in cryptocurrency, according to the BBC. 
• Following his death, the company was forced to close and filed an application for creditor protection with the Nova Scotia Supreme Court in February.
• Soon after questions surrounding Cotten's mysterious death and rumors of mismanagement within the company began to swirl.
• Lawyers representing users of the bankrupt platform wrote a letter to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police on Friday requesting a post-mortem autopsy on Cotten in order to confirm his identity and cause of death "given the questionable circumstances" surrounding his death. 
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Users of popular Canadian cryptocurrency exchange platform Quadriga CX have requested that police exhume the body of late founder Gerald Cotten in order to determine if the 30-year-old is really dead. 

Lawyers representing users of the now-bankrupt platform wrote a letter to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police on Friday requesting a post-mortem autopsy on Cotten in order to confirm his identity and cause of death "given the questionable circumstances" surrounding his death. 

In January, the company announced on Facebook that Cotten had died suddenly in December 2018 due to "complications with Crohn's disease" while traveling in India. Cotten was the only person with access to digital wallets containing C$180 million ($137 million) in cryptocurrency, according to the BBC. 

Following Cotten's death, the company was forced to close and filed an application for creditor protection with the Nova Scotia Supreme Court in February. The company said at the time that it was working "extensively to address our liquidity issues, which include attempting to locate and secure our very significant cryptocurrency reserves held in cold wallets." 

The company had roughly 115,000 users at the time, according to the BBC. The company was believed to be one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in Canada before its collapse. 

In filing for creditor protection, the court in February appointed an independent third-party monitor to oversee proceedings. In April, the company announced that the court had issued a Termination and Bankruptcy Assignment Order.

But questions surrounding Cotten's mysterious death and rumors of mismanagement within the company began to swirl.

In June 2019, the monitor, EY, said in a report that the company's infrastructure "appears to have been significantly flawed from a financial reporting and operational control perspective."

"Activities were largely directed by a single individual, Mr. Cotten, and as a result, typical segregation of duties and basic internal controls did not appear to exist," the monitor said. 

The report added that user funds held by the company "appear to have been used by Quadriga for a number of purposes other than to fund User withdrawals."

The monitor said that the company also failed to ensure "adequate safeguard procedures were in place" to make sure passwords and other "critical" data were accessible to other executives in the case of a critical event. 

Cotten also appears to have personally taken out "substantial funds" from the platform, which the monitor was unable to locate, it said. 

Lawyers for Cotten's widow told the BBC that she is " heartbroken to learn of this request" by users of the site, and said her husband's death "should not be in doubt." 

SEE ALSO: The biggest cryptocurrency scams and arrests of 2019 so far

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Most maps of Louisiana aren't entirely right. Here's what the state really looks like.

• Take more than a page from the super-wealthy and successful by reading the books they wrote.
• The books on this list include recent releases, including "What It Takes: Lessons in the Pursuit of Excellence" by Blackstone co-founder Stephen A. Schwarzman. 
• Work your way through each of these 27 books to learn more about how these recognizable people achieved the seemingly impossible. 
• Click here for more BI Prime stories.

Whether you want to launch an empire or become the best in your field, who better to consult than those who have achieved the peak of professional and financial success?

That's why we've rounded up 27 books by self-made billionaires. From the business insights of Bill Gates to the leadership lessons of Richard Branson, the wisdom collected in these pages extends far beyond the classroom.

Learn how these masters of industry achieved the impossible, in their own words.

SEE ALSO: 16 business books that will change your life forever, according to my coworkers

"What It Takes: Lessons in the Pursuit of Excellence" by Stephen A. Schwarzman

Schwarzman is, on the surface, a man who took $400,000 and built Blackstone, an investment firm that has more than $500 billion assets under management as of January 2019.

The real story goes deeper, into Schwarzman's drive to achieve that carried him from attending Yale to managing Blackstone. This book narrates his story, and the lessons he's learned along the path of success.

Schwarzman gives readers insights on deal-making, investing, leadership, entrepreneurship, and philanthropy.

Find it here »

"The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers" by Ben Horowitz

Ben Horowitz fills in the gaps business school can't teach you by offering practical advice on launching, scaling and running a startup. 

He has plenty of experience with this as co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, a VC firm with an investment portfolio that includes Airbnb, Facebook, GitHub, and Twitter. Horowitz is a rap fan, which plays out through the lyrics he includes in this book to reinforce business lessons.  Of course, there's an honest discussion of Horowitz's own journey.

Overall, this is an inside look on leading and growing a business, from someone who's been through it. 

Find it here »

'The Virgin Way' by Richard Branson

Although Branson confesses he's never read a book on leadership, his nearly 50-year entrepreneurial career has taught him a thing or two about building a business.

In "The Virgin Way," the billionaire founder of Virgin Group offers lessons on management and entrepreneurialism, including the importance of listening to others and hiring the right people. Branson is honest about his successes as well as his failures, such as underestimating Coke's influence when he tried to launch Virgin Cola in the 1990s.

Overall, the book is a compelling glimpse into the life of someone who's never shied away from a challenge.

Find it here »

'Onward' by Howard Schultz

After resigning as Starbucks CEO in 2000, Schultz returned to the post in 2008, just as the company was struggling through a financial crisis. "Onward" details how the billionaire brought the global coffee chain back to life.

Readers will learn how Schultz made tough decisions — like temporarily shutting down more than 7,000 US stores — in order to help Starbucks grow without neglecting its core values.

They'll learn, too, about Schultz as a person, as he weaves together his unique business strategy with anecdotes about growing up in Brooklyn, New York. It's an honest and passionate recounting that will inspire entrepreneurs and everyone else to be brave in the face of adversity.

Find it here »

'How to Win at the Sport of Business' by Mark Cuban

In "How to Win at the Sport of Business," Dallas Mavericks owner and "Shark Tank" investor Cuban fleshes out his best insights on entrepreneurialism from his personal blog.

He writes candidly about how he progressed from sleeping on his friends' couches in his 20s to owning his own company and becoming a multibillionaire. It's a story of commitment and perseverance — Cuban writes that even though he didn't know much about computers, he beat his competition because he spent so much time learning about the software his company sold. 

Find it here »

'The Essays of Warren Buffett' by Warren Buffett

The 86-year-old chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway is considered one of the greatest investors in history.

This book is a collection of Buffett's letters to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders. Each one explains a different facet of his business and investment philosophies. While the topics might seem complex, the billionaire's writing is easy to read, and he often explains concepts through personal anecdotes.

Find it here »

'Business @ the Speed of Thought' by Bill Gates

With a net worth of $75 billion, Forbes estimates the Microsoft founder is the richest person in the world. In "Business @ the Speed of Thought," Gates explains how business and technology are inextricably linked.

Using examples from companies like Microsoft and GM, Gates suggests that businesses see technology as a way to enhance their operations. While the book was initially published in 1999, many of Gates' insights remain accurate and relevant today.

Find it here »

'Bloomberg by Bloomberg' by Michael Bloomberg

Published in 1997, five years before he became mayor of New York City, Bloomberg's autobiography details how he built a media empire.

He guides readers through the highlights of his career: how he rose to success at Salomon Brothers, how he was fired from Salomon Brothers in 1981, and how he used part of his severance pay to create the company that is now Bloomberg LP. The book is chock-full of valuable, honest insights on leadership and management, all based on Bloomberg's personal experience.

Find it here »

'Zero to One' by Peter Thiel

"Zero to One" starts from the controversial premise that "competition is for losers" and that entrepreneurs should instead aim to create monopolies.

Thiel, a founder of PayPal and the data-analytics firm Palantir, highlights the importance of building something new and taking over the market, as opposed to simply adding to what's already out there. Regardless of whether you agree with Thiel's philosophy, the book is a clear read with tons of ideas worth discussing.

Find it here »

'Call Me Ted' by Ted Turner

While Turner has led multiple entrepreneurial ventures, he's perhaps best known as the founder of the first 24-hour cable-news channel, CNN, and as the former owner of the Atlanta Braves.

In his autobiography, he outlines his unconventional path to success, from getting expelled from Brown University to running his father's billboard company to turning a small news station into a media empire.

The book also features personal stories about Turner's relationship with his father and the actress Jane Fonda, all of which paint a full picture of the dynamic billionaire.

Find it here »

'Think Like a Champion' by Donald Trump

"Think Like a Champion" is a collection of the president's essays on personal and professional success.

Each one combines anecdotes from his own experience with inspirational advice on everything from learning from your mistakes to confronting your fears. Acknowledging his own tendency toward self-promotion, he tells readers to "toot your own horn" when you deserve it.

Find it here »

'The First Billion Is the Hardest' by T. Boone Pickens

"The First Billion Is the Hardest" tells the story of how the now 87-year-old chairman of BP Capital Management overcame personal and professional challenges to achieve tremendous success.

The narrative takes readers all the way from Pickens' experience as a "corporate raider" in the 1980s to his late-life rebranding as an advocate for America's energy independence. Each chapter starts with a "Booneism," or a few words of wisdom on winning in life and business. Example: "I learned early on that you play by the rules. It's no fun if you cheat to win."

Find it here »

'Soros on Soros' by George Soros

That Soros survived the Holocaust to become one of the world's most brilliant investors is no small miracle. Readers learn about his career path in "Soros on Soros," which is technically two extended interviews that combine personal anecdotes with theories on finance and politics. 

Soros is honest about his successes and failures as founder and chairman of Soros Fund Management, and is hardly shy about submitting controversial opinions. It's a compelling read, whether you're interested in learning more about Soros himself or global finance and policy.

Find it here »

'Direct from Dell' by Michael Dell

Dell dropped out of college at 19 to found PC Limited, the business that is now Dell Computer Corp. At 27, he became the youngest CEO of a Fortune 500 company.

In "Direct from Dell," the billionaire entrepreneur explains how he grew his business and the theory behind his unique management style. It's an inspiring rags-to-riches story that also offers valuable leadership lessons.

Find it here »

'Built from Scratch' by Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank

In "Built from Scratch," Marcus and Blank chronicle how they changed their fate and turned their dreams into reality. After the two were fired from a home-improvement chain called Handy Dan in 1978, they decided to pursue their idea of creating a discount store. It was called The Home Depot.

The book details the company's founding and growth, and the authors draw on their own experience to provide meaningful lessons for any business leader, including the importance of knowing your customer and giving back to the community.

Find it here »

'What I Know for Sure' by Oprah Winfrey

Few people have a better understanding of passion and dedication than Winfrey. Born into poverty, she launched a career as a talk-show host, actress, and media mogul.

"What I Know for Sure" is a collection of her columns in O, the Oprah Magazine. Each one offers a different life lesson on topics including joy, gratitude, and power, often based on her personal experience.

Find it here »

'Ralph Lauren' by Ralph Lauren

Fashion designer Ralph Lauren grew up as Ralph Lipschitz, the son of Jewish immigrant parents living in the Bronx. The idea for Polo Ralph Lauren was born when he attended a polo match as a young man and was captivated by "high society" style.

In his autobiography, he shares his personal history, the inspiration behind his work, and beautiful photographs.

Find it here »

'Steering Clear' by Peter G. Peterson

At 89, Peterson has had a long and storied career, which includes stints as US secretary of commerce, chairman and CEO of Lehman Brothers, and cofounder of private-equity firm Blackstone Group.

He's also the founder and chairman of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, which focuses on raising awareness about fiscal challenges that the US faces.

In "Steering Clear," published in 2015, Peterson makes the case that we need to take immediate action to reduce long-term debt in the US, projected to hit record highs in the near future. He juxtaposes prose with charts and graphs that illustrate the issue, and offers potential solutions to the problem, including closing loopholes in the tax code.

In the book's introduction, Peterson explains why addressing this issue isn't just economic good sense: "This country has given my family and me — and millions of others — unequaled opportunities to dream and to prosper. And together we have a profound obligation to try to pass on the same opportunity to future generations."

Find it here »

'Simply Rich' by Richard DeVos

DeVos' rags-to-riches autobiography details his transition from Depression-era Michigan schoolboy to multibillionaire cofounder of direct-selling company Amway.

The book weaves together stories about DeVos' personal and professional lives, focusing in particular on the way his Christian upbringing and values paved the way for his success.

Impressions of Amway as a company are mixed — it's been the subject of investigation for having a pyramid-like structure, although the Federal Trade Commission has ruled that the company's activities are legal. But as one fan of the book says, "Whether you like the company or not, you can't argue DeVos' inspiring story."

Find it here »

'How Did You Do It, Truett?' by S. Truett Cathy

To many Americans, Cathy's invention of the chicken sandwich and founding of fast-food chain Chick-fil-A make him a modern hero.

In "How Did You Do It, Truett?" Cathy, who died in 2014, describes his rise to success, starting from the days when he worked behind the counter at the Dwarf Grill in Georgia.

At 95 pages, it's a relatively short read, and the book includes a number of inspirational business and leadership lessons for aspiring entrepreneurs.

Find it here »

'Charles Schwab's New Guide to Financial Independence' by Charles Schwab

According to Schwab, founder of Charles Schwab Corp., anyone can be a wise investor. All you need to do is learn the basics and apply them in an investing strategy.

In "New Guide to Financial Independence," a revised edition of a book published in 2007, Schwab teaches readers how to set investment goals, monitor their performance, and plan for retirement. His main argument is that, when it comes to investing, doing nothing is the worst thing you can do.

While the lessons in it are applicable to anyone, the book is a helpful road map for beginning investors, breaking down complicated concepts into simpler pieces.

Find it here »

'Fooling Some of the People All of the Time' by David Einhorn

In this book, Einhorn tells his side of a six-year financial saga.

Here's the short version:. In 2002, Einhorn, founder of Greenlight Capital, thought he'd uncovered flawed accounting practices at Allied Capital and started short selling Allied's stock. That didn't work, as the stock climbed. Einhorn tried to expose Allied's unethical behavior, even approaching the US Securities and Exchange Commission, but the SEC ended up investigating him as well. Ultimately, Allied settled with the SEC in 2008 and the accusations were never substantiated.

The book is heavy on detail, and one critic says that some parts read like Einhorn's angry rant. But it nonetheless offers some compelling insights into the general drama that often unfolds on Wall Street.

Find it here »

'Margin of Safety' by Seth Klarman

Instead of succumbing to the latest trends, Klarman, CEO and president of the Baupost Group, encourages readers to understand the rules and logic behind investing.

Specifically, he advocates and explains the rationale behind value investing, a method developed by Benjamin Graham that involves investing in securities trading at a price lower than their intrinsic value. The book takes its title from Benjamin Graham’s advice to always invest with a margin of safety.

"Margin of Safety," no longer in print, now sells for as much as $1,000 on Amazon.

Find it here »

'Made in America' by Sam Walton

"Made in America," by the founder of Walmart, is one of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' favorite books.

Readers get a glimpse into both Walton's personality and the effort it took for him to build what is now the largest retailer in the world.

One reader calls the book "wonderfully folksy" — others say it's solid inspiration for those looking to start their own business.

Find it here »

'Shoe Dog' by Phil Knight

Nike cofounder Knight retired as the chairman of Nike in June 2016. In "Shoe Dog," published April 2016, he tells the fascinating story of how he built the world's biggest athletic company.

Knight takes readers along on his personal journey to success, starting from his pivotal decision at age 24 to go the entrepreneurial route instead of joining the corporate world.

Longtime venture capitalist Brad Feld calls the book the "best memoir I've ever read by a business person" and a "must read" for any founder.

Find it here »

'Behind the Cloud' by Marc Benioff

This 2009 book details how Salesforce's founder, chairman, and CEO launched the cloud software company, now worth roughly $50 billion, in 1999.

Woven throughout the story are some 111 of Benioff's management tips, from "integrate philanthropy from the beginning" to "have the courage to pursue your innovation — before it is obvious to the market."

In January 2016, Benioff suggested in a Tweet that he might be working on a sequel: "Beyond the Cloud."

Find it here »

'How Google Works' by Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg

In 2014, Eric Schmidt, Google's executive chairman and former CEO, and Jonathan Rosenberg, former senior vice president of products, published this compilation of insights from their experience building the company.

Readers learn the meaning and importance of "smart creatives," and some anecdotes from Google's previously untold history.

Business Insider published a slide presentation that Schmidt and Rosenberg put together highlighting the book's key takeaways. Those include: "We quickly learned that almost everything we know about managing businesses was dead wrong," and "Never forget that hiring is the most important thing you do."

Find it here »

Comcast’s bills are going up, and that means many customers of its Xfinity digital cable service will be receiving higher bills, too.

The company recently started notifying subscribers in Colorado of impending price changes that kick in next month. The biggest of these will be a substantial increase in the “broadcast TV fee.” For most subscribers in Colorado that fee is going up to $13.65 per month from $8.70. That’s a 57% jump. It adds up to $59.40 in additional charges per year. The rate increase was first reported by the Colorado Sun last week.

The reason Comcast officials are giving for the bump is skyrocketing costs to carrying programming from networks. Specifically, the broadcast TV fee in the Denver market pays for ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox. Comcast claims that, across the company, its broadcast retransmission costs have gone up more than 1,350% since 2010. It is passing some of that cost on to customers, officials say. The provider claims the increasing cost of doing business with networks is driving up competitors’ prices too, including streaming services like Hulu+ Live and YouTube TV.

“Rising programming costs – most notably for broadcast TV and sports – continue to be the biggest factors driving price increases for all content distributors and their customers. While we absorb some of the increased programming costs, they have a significant impact on the cost of our services,” Leslie Oliver, a spokeswoman for Comcast’s mountain west region, said in an email.

There is a price decrease coming for Comcast customers next month, too, but it’s likely some won’t be happy about it. Because the provider is not carrying Denver-based Altitude Sports Network, the regional sports channel that airs most Denver Nuggets and Colorado Avalanche games, its “regional sports network fee” is going down from around $8 per month in most Colorado markets to approximately $6.75, a $15 drop over the course of a full year.

Since September, the company had been providing a credit to customers on their bills for the missing Altitude channel. Decreasing the sports network fee is a sign the company does not foresee reaching a resolution with Altitude anytime soon. Earlier this month, officials with Altitude said stalled negotiations with the cable provider haven’t restarted. Altitude is also unavailable through Dish Network right now, but in that case the two sides are talking, according to Altitude officials.

Related Articles

• December 5, 2019 Altitude Sports town hall reveals new details on DISH, Comcast dispute
• October 10, 2019 Comcast begins fee reduction for Altitude Sports TV subscribers as contract talks stall
• November 18, 2019 Altitude Sports files lawsuit against Comcast, alleges carrier “wants to extinguish competition”

Comcast’s broadcast TV fee increase is impacting its customers across the country. The average bill nationally will go up 3.6%, according to company officials.

It's not so much being watched. It's that I don't really know if I'm being watched or not.

From across the other side of the world, a colleague has just accessed my Ring account, and in turn, a live-feed of a Ring camera in my apartment. He sent a screenshot of me stretching, getting ready for work. Then a second colleague accessed the camera from another country, and started talking to me through the Ring device.

"Joe can you tell I'm watching you type," they added in a Slack message. The blue light which signals someone is watching the camera feed faded away. But I still couldn't shake the feeling of someone may be tuning in. I went into another room.

My colleagues were only able to access my Ring camera because they had the relevant email address and password, but Amazon-owned home security company Ring is not doing enough to stop hackers breaking into customer accounts, and in turn, their cameras, according to multiple cybersecurity experts, people who write tools to break into accounts, and Motherboard's own analysis with a Ring camera it bought to test the company's security protections.

Last week a wave of local media reports found hackers harassed people through Ring devices. In one case a hacker taunted a child in Mississippi, in another someone hurled racist insults at a Florida family. Motherboard found hackers have made dedicated software for more swiftly gaining access to Ring cameras by churning through previously compromised email addresses and passwords, and that some hackers were live-streaming the Ring abuse on their own so-called podcast dubbed "NulledCast."

In response to the hacks, Ring put much of the blame for these hacks on its users in a blog post Thursday.

"Customer trust is important to us, and we take the security of our devices and service extremely seriously. As a precaution, we highly encourage all Ring users to follow security best practices to ensure your Ring account stays secure," it said. To be clear, a user who decides to use a unique password on their Ring device and two-factor authentication is going to be safer than one who is reusing previously hacked credentials from another website. But rather than implementing its own safeguards, Ring is putting this onus on users to deploy security best practices; time and time again we've seen that people using mass-market consumer devices aren't going to know or implement robust security measures at all times.

Ring is not offering basic security precautions, such as double-checking whether someone logging in from an unknown IP address is the legitimate user, or providing a way to see how many users are currently logged in—entirely common security measures across a wealth of online services.

"They are worth billions so where is the investment in security," Daniel Cuthbert, who is on the committee for annual cybersecurity conference Black Hat, and who is also a Ring owner, told Motherboard.

The livestream of Motherboard's test Ring camera. Image: Motherboard

A Ring account is not a normal online account. Rather than a username and password protecting messages or snippets of personal information, such as with, say, a video game account, breaking into a Ring account can grant access to exceptionally intimate and private parts of someone's life and potentially puts their physical security at risk. Some customers install these cameras in their bedrooms or those of their children. Through an issue in the way a Ring-related app functions, Gizmodo found these cameras are installed all across the country. Someone with access can hear conversations and watch people, potentially without alerting the victims that they are being spied on. The app displays a user-selected address for the camera, and the live feed could be used to determine whether the person is home, which could be useful if someone were, for example, planning a robbery. Once a hacker has broken into the account, they can watch not only live streams of the camera, but can also silently watch archived video of people—and families—going about their days.

Or a hacker can digitally reach into those homes, and speak directly to the bewildered, scared, or confused inhabitants. That level of sensitivity should arguably encourage more robust security practices than an ordinary account.

Do you work at Ring? 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.

Ring doesn't appear to check a user's chosen password against known compromised user credentials. Although not a widespread practice, more online services are starting to include features that will alert a user if they're using an already compromised password.

Other steps Ring could take to better keep hackers out includes checking whether someone is logging in from an IP address Ring has never seen before, and if so, carrying out additional checks, Cuthbert said. Another is checking for concurrent sessions, such as seeing whether the user is simultaneously logged in from, say, both Germany and the U.K., Cuthbert added, in case one of those may be a hacker accessing the account.

One member of a hacking forum who codes cracking tools, and who Motherboard granted anonymity so they could speak more openly about the process, said, "just enabling SMS verification if there is a connection from an unknown IP would instantly kill each checker." A checker is a piece of software that grinds through credentials to see if they work on a particular site or service.

CRACKING RING

Motherboard purchased a Ring camera to test what sort of security protections are in place to stop or slow hackers trying to break into Ring accounts. After setting up an account, the Ring app, and the camera itself, we shared the email address and password to the camera interface with multiple reporters who used both virtual private network software to connect to the camera from IP addresses from all over the world as well as physically being located in other countries.

We logged into the Ring app and website from the U.S., U.K., Spain, and Singapore, in some cases simultaneously and from various devices and browsers that had never been used to log into the platform before. At no point did Ring trigger any sort of alert, such as an email notification, to check that the IP address the system had never seen did indeed belong to the legitimate camera owner. Gmail, for instance, may email you if it detects a suspicious login attempt from a new location, a new device, or a new browser.

On a desktop web browser, someone who is logged in is able to watch historical, archived footage. From a smartphone app, someone who is logged in can watch live and historical footage, listen through the camera's microphone, speak through the camera's speaker, play an alarm, see the name of the specific Wi-Fi network the camera is connected to, see the address the user originally registered the Ring camera with, see the phone number a user has entered into the app, and see nearby crime "incidents." This shows the specific, user-selected home address plotted on a map. Ring requires that a user input a home address to set up the camera.

A list of archived footage stored in the Ring app. Image: Motherboard

Multiple Motherboard staffers accessed these services simultaneously. But Ring provides no way to see how many people are logged in at once, meaning if a hacker is logged into the app, a Ring owner has no way to tell. If a user is livestreaming the camera feed, a blue light on the front of the camera turns on; however, many Ring users may not constantly be checking whether this light is on or not. Ring also doesn't appear to provide users a list of previous login attempts, making it harder to see if a hacker had access.

Ring hackers' software works by rapidly checking if an email address and password on the Ring web login portal works; hackers will typically use a list of already compromised combinations from other services. If someone makes too many incorrect requests to login, many online services will stop them temporarily from doing so, mark their IP address as suspicious, or present a captcha to check that the user trying to login is a human rather than an automated program. Ring appears to have minimal protections in place for this though. Motherboard deliberately entered the wrong password to our account on the login portal while connecting from the Tor anonymity network dozens of times in quick succession. At no point did Ring try to limit our login attempts or present a captcha.

One source sent Motherboard a screenshot of a piece of Ring cracking software in action.

"Headers can tell the website how legitimate a request is," they wrote along with the screenshot, headers referring to information a web request can include to give more information about the machine logging in. Headers can include the browser or operating system the request comes from, which could indicate if a login attempt is automated by software. "But Ring's security is such that even with minimal headers, you can get by," they added.

A redacted screenshot of the address stored in the Ring app. Image: Motherboard

"Ring is a physical thing, they could implement something to securely pair it with an app on your smartphone. Then, mobile app approves web logins from untrusted web browsers," Dino Dai Zovi, mobile security lead at Square, wrote in a tweet on Sunday.

Security is a trade-off with efficiency. Ring may not want to have stricter checks in place so as to not raise barriers for its users. Perhaps a customer is out of the country but still wants to log into their account and check what has happened in view of the camera, meaning they may connect from a new IP address. But even with this trade-off in mind, Ring has made decisions to not provide users alerts with new logins or other protections.

Ring does offer two-factor authentication, where a user is required to enter a second code sent to them as well as their password, but Ring does not force customers to use it. Motherboard verified that Ring's two-factor authentication does work as advertised, but multiple people who were logged into the app didn't have to log back in after it was enabled—Ring didn't eject them nor ask them to enter a two-factor token. Ring did log everyone out after a password change, however.

Motherboard asked Ring a series of specific and detailed questions, such as whether Ring limits the number of login attempts, or blocks an attempt if the connecting IP address is from a country the user is not usually located in. The company responded with a statement nearly identical to its earlier one, saying, "Ring understands what a big decision it is to pick a home security product, and we don’t take that decision lightly. Ring will continue to introduce additional security features to keep Ring accounts and devices secure, and we're working with our customers to ensure they have the knowledge and tools to practice good password habits."

"They are worth billions so where is the investment in security."

The victims of Ring hacks have said themselves that they feel the company is putting too much burden on them to stop hackers. Ashley LeMay, one of the parents in Mississippi whose camera was hijacked to then spy on their children, told the New York Times she thought Ring's response provided scant information and shifted responsibility for the breaches onto customers.

"Auth [authentication] is still stuck in the '90s," Cuthbert said. "Username and password and very little other than that. That was ok back then but today we have a wealth of knowledge and experience to know that we need additional telemetry to make the [authentication] decision," he added.

Ring is advertised as a home security device which is supposed to make its customers safer by monitoring their homes. But its lack of certain security features shows how the device can work against its owners, and open them up to other risks. When I get home tonight, I'll put the Ring camera back into its box, regardless of whether that little blue light is on or not.

Jason Koebler, Emanuel Maiberg, and Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai provided additional reporting for this piece.

Subscribe to our cybersecurity podcast, CYBER.

More companies have opted to work without expansive offices and have remote teams. However, that large conference space is not always available. Instead, companies make do with whatever they have to stay connected. Thanks to new devices like Polycom’s Poly Studio, it’s possible to turn any space into a conference or huddle room to conduct a video conference.

Recently, we tried the Poly Studio out here at our ReadWrite offices. Here’s how it worked with our remote team members.

How Polycom’s Poly Studio Works

The Poly Studio is a plug-and-play, USB video bar that works with any video collaboration platform like Zoom, LogMeIn, Google Hangouts, and Microsoft Skype for Business, just to name a few.

The Studio is also compatible with any application that supports standard USB audio and video drivers.  You’ll be able to connect to either a PC or a Mac. It’s designed for smaller rooms and huddle spaces so companies can collaborate with their teams across the virtual space.

After a quick set-up, the next step involved downloading the free Poly software. The software enables access to even more features and functionality. You can create two presets, so all you need to do is press a button to get the most frequently accessed configurations. After trying it with a few of the video collaboration platforms, I learned there might be some settings on each of those platforms that need slight tweaks. However, it only took a few minutes to figure this out to get started.

It uses Poly Acoustic Clarity technology. This technology offers full-duplex conversations, acoustic echo cancellation, and background noise suppression. The equipment also features Poly NoiseBlock technology and Poly Acoustic Fence technology.

The Poly Studio Design

It looks similar to a soundbar that goes with an HD television.  It also has a plastic section that contains a large camera lens. The 4K camera features a 120-degree field of vision. It offers a resolution of UHD 2160p. On either side of the lens are rectangular speaker grills.

The back of the Poly Studio has all of the connectivity options, which makes it easy to mount or set up without dealing with unwieldy cords. There is a USB 3.0 Type-C port with 2.0 compatibility, a power connector port, a 3.5mm stereo audio input for an external microphone, and a Kensington security lock slot. The internal connectivity options include 802.11ac Wi-Fi wireless and Bluetooth 4.2.

Poly Studio Features

Poly Studio features include a remote control to adjust volume as well as to mute, zoom, and change the camera settings. You can also use your computer or video application to control the volume and mute settings.

The Poly Studio has some advanced features like noise blocking to reduce distracting sounds. The Poly Acoustic Fence uses a triangle-shaped beam array. It can capture voices from within the beam array while blocking or reducing the volume of voice sounds from outside the beam array.

Other features include Automatic Group Framing. This feature looks for the faces of all participants and automatically zooms in. Automatic Speaker Tracking combines facial detection with audio triangulation. It can recognize who is speaking so the video equipment can zoom and frame that person. To know where the camera is pointing, there are LEDs on the front of the Poly Studio.

The Poly Studio also has Bluetooth, which lets you play music or other audio from your mobile devices directly through the Studio. Plus, the Bluetooth features lets the Studio function as a conference phone or speakerphone. Finally, the Poly Companion app can be used to update the device and manage administrator settings.

The Good and Bad

Our video conference tests revealed positive and negative things about using the Poly Studio. The best things about the Poly Studio include ease of set-up and use, audio and video quality, portability, and mounting options. If there were anything that needed improvement, it would be the soft speakers, which can be enhanced by purchasing a tabletop microphone.

In the Box

When you buy a Poly Studio, you get the Poly Studio, remote control with two AAA batteries, a power adapter, a 5m USB 2.0 cable (Type-C to Type-A), a wall mount kit, and a setup sheet.

The only thing not included is a display and computer to connect it to. However, most of us have that in our offices or for our podcasts.

Where to Buy

The Poly Studio is available on the company’s website and online at retailers like Amazon.

Overall Thoughts

The award-winning Poly Studio is a compact video conferencing bar solution that is fairly priced. The value comes from advanced technology and extraordinary sound and picture quality. Everyone in our office could easily figure out how to use it so we can have these collaborative meetings from anywhere. It’s a must-have tool for a startup or small business owner with remote staff as well as for podcasters who want to create a professional environment with high-quality audio and video.

The post Polycom Poly Studio: A Powerful All-in-One Video Conference Camera and Sound Bar System appeared first on ReadWrite.

• Clean the World is a nonprofit organization that recycles used soaps, lotions, and other toiletries from hotels.
• Its partners include Hilton, Marriott, and Walt Disney World Resorts, among others. 
• Clean the World has donated over 50 million bars of recycled soap to people in need in 127 countries since its founding in 2009.
• The organization has had to adapt as more hotel chains move away from single-use toiletries in favor of bulk offerings. 
• Visit the Business section of Insider for more stories.

Following is a transcript of the video.

Narrator: There's an episode of Friends where Ross and Chandler are checking out of a hotel in Vermont.

Ross: Could you have some complimentary toiletries sent up to my room?

Narrator: As Ross picks up his suitcase to leave, it bursts open and an avalanche of mini soaps and lotions comes tumbling out. It's admittedly a lot of stuff, but not compared to what's actually left behind in hotel rooms. So what happens to the toiletries that don't fit into Ross' suitcase?

Shawn Seipler used to stay in around 150 hotel rooms a year. One day, a thought hit him. What happens to all the half-used soaps he leaves behind? When he called the front desk to ask, they told him it all just gets tossed. So in 2009, he started Clean the World out of a one-car garage in Florida.

With a few friends, some potato peelers, meat grinders, and cookers, Seipler developed a way to recycle used bars of soap into new, sterile ones, which can then be donated to children and families around the world who don't have easy access to soap. That makes them susceptible to diseases like pneumonia and diarrhea, which kill almost 1.5 million children under 5 every year but can be prevented by handwashing.

Since 2009, Clean the World has distributed more than 50 million bars of soap to people in 127 countries. The nonprofit initiative quickly outgrew the garage and now has recycling facilities in Orlando, Las Vegas, Montreal and Hong Kong. And it works with 8,000 hotel and resort partners, including Walt Disney World Hotels, Marriott, and Hilton.

Hilton joined forces with Clean the World in March 2019. In its first seven months, Hilton donated 2 million pounds of toiletries, which contributed to 7.6 million bars of recycled soap. But how do you clean the thing that does the cleaning?

Here's how it works. Starting at the hotel, staff members are trained on the collection and recycling process. Housekeeping collects the used bars and bottles and deposits them in special bins. The bins are then transported to one of Clean the World's recycling facilities. There the toiletries are sorted by product before entering the first stage of the recycling process.

For bar soap, it's first surface cleaned before going through a sterilization process that eliminates all pathogens. The sterilized bars are then ground up and put through a manufacturing line where they're remolded into new bars. Once they're boxed and loaded onto pallets, the bars are distributed to homeless shelters and organizations in the US and to people in need around the world.

Hilton has pledged to divert all of its soap from ending up in the trash by 2030. And Clean the World has kept 20 million pounds of hotel waste from polluting North American landfills since it was founded. Some hotels are starting to take a different approach to cutting down waste by eliminating single-use toiletries from their rooms entirely, instead opting for bulk offerings.

Clean the World knows that this is a possibility for its hotel partners as well. The plan would be to create new "impact products" like hygiene kits and corporate event packages to make up for the potential drop in production and revenue. As of now, Hilton hasn't decided to make the switch from individual to bulk toiletries.

So if you're staying in a Hilton hotel or another of Clean the World's partners, don't be like Ross.

Ross: Instead of taking one, I take six.

Narrator: Leave that stuff behind. Your twice-used soaps won't go to waste.

Correction: Hilton's partnership with Clean the Word began in 2009, not 2019. The data presented in the video reflects the first seven months of the Clean the World Challenge - a promise to donate 1 million bars of soap by October 15, 2019 (Global Handwashing Day). Insider regrets the error.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This video was originally published in December 2019. 

• Light is a startup that creates products designed to help combat smartphone addiction.
• The company launched its first product, the Light Phone, in 2017. Now it's back with the second iteration, the Light Phone 2.
• The original Light Phone could only make and receive phone calls, but the second version has some additional features: alarms and texting.
• "Five years ago when we started, people didn't understand. 'Why are you creating a simple phone? What's the point?'" Kai Tang, a Light cofounder, told Business Insider. "Especially last year, we can sense the tide changed."
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

In 2020, we are simultaneously more attached to our smartphones than ever before and more aware of how attached we are to our smartphones.

For many of us, it's become something of an anxiety-inducing loop: open Instagram or Twitter or Reddit, get sucked in, realize how long we've been on said app, put the phone down, get a notification, repeat.

That loop is what the creators of the Light Phone 2 are hoping to eliminate.

The Light Phone 2, which debuted last year and costs $350 (it's on sale right now for $300), is the successor to Light's original device from 2017. It's sort of like the anti-smartphone, or maybe a Swiss Army knife: It's a tool, rather than a tool for distraction. It does only a few things (calls, texts, alarms) and has zero apps — no email, no social media, no music or video streaming, nothing.

Here's how Light got its inspiration for the Light Phone and what the company's "dumb phone" can do.

Light was founded by Joe Hollier and Kai Tang in 2014 with the mission "to bring a human voice back into this crazy world of technology."

Source: Facebook

Light launched its first product, the Light Phone, on Kickstarter in June 2015. Light raised over $400,000 from that campaign and had a 50,000-person waiting list for the phone. The original Light Phone was about the size of a credit card and could do only two things: make and receive phone calls.

The Light Phone had a different look and feel from anything else on the market — for good reason.

"We feel like it has to be a different feeling," Tang told Business Insider. "It has to be a different look and feel, different user interface. We want utility that's not distraction, not noise. No endless browsing or discovering."

"We ended up shipping about 15,000 in total," Hollier told Business Insider. "We ended up having a crazy demand for it, but we ran out of supplies, which was kind of perpetual — you know, make a few, sell, make a few, sell out."

Light decided to shift its focus to developing and producing the next Light Phone, partly because the company wanted to create a 4G device. (The first one ran on 2G networks.) Light launched its second crowdfunding campaign, this time on Indiegogo, in March 2018. The company raised $600,000 in the first 10 hours and ended up raising $3.5 million in total.

Light has also raised $8.4 million in seed funding from companies like Foxconn and from angel investors like John Zimmer, the president of Lyft, and Tim Kendall, the CEO of Moment and the former president of Pinterest.

In September 2019, the company unveiled its next product, the Light Phone 2.

The Light Phone 2 comes in two colors, which Tang said were based on the lightest and darkest colors of e-ink.

Here's a breakdown of the specs:

• Height: 95.85 x 55.85 x 8.75 millimeters
• Weight: 78 grams
• Headphone jack
• GPS-, Bluetooth-, and WiFi-enabled
• Works with AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon
• Optional Light Phone plan costs $30 a month
• Light says you'll get about two to three days of battery life and up to seven with light use.
• It charges with micro-USB. Light initially said it would have USB-C charging but ultimately decided it would increase the size of the phone too much.

The original Light Phone was intended to be a companion to your main smartphone, but the Light Phone 2 could be your only phone if you wanted. You could add it to your phone plan as a secondary device or swap in your SIM card and use it full time.

The Light Phone 2 differs from the original device in a few key ways. Light ditched the light-up screen for an actual display that uses e-ink, much like a Kindle.

Unlike the first Light Phone, the Light Phone 2 can send and receive texts. It also has alarms.

The device still doesn't have any apps. You can't use it to send emails, shop online, or scroll through Facebook.

Light says it plans to add a few features down the line, like ride-hailing, music, and turn-by-turn directions.

Light also plans to add a "find my phone" feature for parents. "A lot of parents bought the original Light Phone for their kids, which wasn't really our intention in designing it," Hollier said. "But having done that and sort of seeing how that went, I think it informed some of the Light Phone 2 decisions."

Hollier said the Light Phone aligned with what many parents were looking for in a phone for their kids: no images, no camera, and no internet browser.

"That stuff gets parents really, really excited," Hollier said.

Hollier pointed out two other types of people who get excited by the Light Phone: people who are concerned about the environmental impact of getting an expensive new smartphone every year ...

... and people who are worried about privacy. "Even if it's not just, like, Facebook blatantly sharing people's data, the risks are just super inherent," Hollier said.

For the rest of us, Hollier and Tang hope the Light Phone 2 can act as an alternative to our increasingly distracting smartphones. "Five years ago when we started, people didn't understand. 'Why are you creating a simple phone? What's the point?'" Tang said. "Especially last year, we can sense the tide changed."

So what sparked the change? Big tech companies started to take notice. At 2018's iPhone event, Apple unveiled its new Screen Time feature to track how and when you use your iPhone.

"I think the Screen Time app was a big turning point because that was, for the first time, Apple — seemingly the leader of all of these phones — really acknowledging that this isn't a niche problem that a few weirdo artists are feeling," Hollier said. "This is truly something that everyone, including the CEO, is dealing with on a daily basis."

Hollier said he and Tang heard from a lot of people who came to them after checking out the Screen Time feature and realizing how much time they spent on their phones. And while solutions like digital detoxes have become trendy, Hollier said he didn't think it was the answer to the problem — it's more like a Band-Aid. What Light is striving for is a healthier relationship with our phones overall.

Tang added: "If you walk down the street without your smartphone, it's almost like a meditation, because you're not distracted. You're thinking: 'Well, what do I like? What do I want to do? What's important to me?' It's such a profound feeling. I keep saying this is like doing yoga."

The Light Phone 2 normally costs $350, but Light is offering it for $300 right now as part of a "Break Free from Big Tech" sale.

You can find out more about Light and the Light Phone 2 on the company's website.

Americans love stuff. Our garages, closets, and spare rooms are full of stuff we think we need but probably don’t. This week Cyber talks to Adam Minter, author of Secondhand, about the end-of-life supply chain for our cell phones, computers, and all the other stuff we keep in our houses. Minter writes about trash, recycling, and where our stuff goes for Bloomberg.

America and the rest of the world is generating an incredible amount of e-waste and that e-waste is driving an economy that many of us never see. “We talk a lot at Motherboard about supply chain. Supply chain attacks, human labor and resource use, shipments all around the world and environmental effects,” says Jason Koebler, editor-in-chief of Motherboard. “But we talk less often about the second supply chain that happens when we get rid of our electronics. Today we’re going inside that end of life supply chain to discuss how our electronics are recycled, repaired, reused, and resold all around the world.”

As far as sustainability goes, Motherboard is hard on Apple and with good reason. But Minter thinks Apple’s effect on the environment is more complicated. “On balance, Apple is making some of the most durable digital products out there,” Minter says. “They support them with software updates longer than most other companies. So, if you’re concerned about the environmental impact of your device, the fact that Apple products will last longer and will remain updated longer is a net positive.”

It feels like we live in a world of disposable consumer goods, but Minter points out that consumer demand is changing and that businesses who promise devices with long lifespans are experiencing explosive growth. “We live in a consumer society and we’re not going to be able to completely withdraw from it.”

Also on the pod this week—Jason seeks absolution for an $1,100 purchase, shade is thrown at Marie Kondo, and Emanuel Maiberg makes his first CYBER appearance.

• WeChat has become an integrated part of life in China: you use it to message your friends, buy your groceries, hail a ride, and even book a doctor's appointment. It's basically impossible to exist in China without it. 
• The Chinese app started off as a simple smartphone messaging app in 2011, less than a year after WhatsApp was founded. But it grew explosively as it expanded into a kind of super-app that takes the place of Uber, GrubHub, Venmo, Craigslist, and a whole bunch of other services.
• There is no Western app quite like WeChat. But it's been said to present Apple's biggest existential threat in China, even as Facebook inches towards turning its own ecosystem into something a lot like WeChat.
• Here's what you need to know about WeChat, the app that a billion users in China rely on every single day.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

It is highly likely that you don't have a WeChat account, unless you have friends, family or business in China. 

And yet the Chinese superapp has a little over a billion active users. That's less than Facebook's 2.45 billion users or WhatsApp's 1.6 billion users, but roughly the same as Instagram.

To add onto that, WeChat users spent an average of 432.6 million hours on the app over the past 90 days, more than double the average time spent on Instagram according to the app-analytics firm Apptopia.

After all, the little green app is for far more than just chatting. It's an ubiquitous part of every day life in China.

Its payment system is used by vending machines, shops, street vendors and local transit systems. It hosts apps, or 'Mini Programs,' that allow you to hail a ride or book a doctor's appointment without a separate app. If you attend a job fair, there's a good chance you'll scan a WeChat QR code to send in your resume. The list goes on.

WeChat, made by Chinese tech giant Tencent Group, first launched in 2011 — two years after WhatsApp. The major difference is that WeChat has grown from its roots in chatting to grow into a "super-app" that, for users, scratches all the same itches as Facebook, Venmo, Uber, and other services to which Americans are well-accustomed.

In fact, in China, it's basically impossible to do anything without access to WeChat: It's used to pay for food, order from shops, and is beginning to be used as a virtual ID for social security by the Chinese government, according to the South China Morning Post.

A report published by Tencent in 2018 says WeChat aims to embed itself in "every moment of the user's daily life, from morning till night, anytime, anywhere." Kimberly Whitler, a marketing professor at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business, says that it's pretty close to its goal. 

"I take a group of students there in May and the first thing we do is download WeChat," Whitler said. "You have to use WeChat to function in China," where American-made services from Facebook and Google are blocked. 

The rise of WeChat has put American tech titans on notice: Back in 2017, the Wall Street Journal reported that Chinese users were less afraid to ditch their iPhones, because they're so reliant on WeChat anyway. And earlier this year, Mark Zuckerberg articulated a new vision for Facebook that attracted immediate comparisons to WeChat, thanks to its focus on payments and private group chats. 

Amid all of this hubbub, we took a closer look at WeChat. Here's a look at the app that China relies on, and that Silicon Valley is looking to for inspiration:

When you first open up WeChat, it looks a lot like WhatsApp. Beneath the surface, though, the "Discover" button opens up a Facebook-style newsfeed, while "Mini Programs" is your gateway to specialized apps that let you order food or hail a ride.

At first glance, WeChat's interface looks extremely similar to WhatsApp. The menu bar at the bottom of the screen lets you navigate between chats, contacts, your profile and the broader app. 

But the Discover tab serves as a portal through the rest of the app. It has a 'moments' stream where contacts share their pictures and updates, much like Facebook's newsfeed, and a 'search' stream that leads you to news articles, popular topics and official accounts. Features like 'people nearby' and 'shake' are designed to help you make new connections or socialize offline.  And "Mini Programs," WeChat's ecosystem of apps within the app, lets users hail rides, order food, and access a range of different services.

The key to WeChat's success is its QR code scanner, which has allowed it to become the dominant payments app in China.

You may have used QR codes before — like to add a friend in Snapchat via their Snap code, or using your phone's camera to open up a link from a poster or flyer.

But in China, WeChat's scan function goes far beyond that. 

For instance, you can use WeChat Pay to ride the subway in parts of urban China. Just snap a picture of the QR code at the fare gate to pay your way. 

WeChat QR codes are pushing China into becoming a cashless society. Even its street vendors use WeChat Pay to sell vegetables.

QR codes, by way of WeChat's mobile payment system, are pushing China towards becoming a cashless society. To pay for clothes at a store, just take a picture of the QR code at the register. Ditto for paying for fast food, and even at more upscale joints, waiters and bartenders might even have WeChat QR codes to accept tips. 

And street vendors selling meat and vegetables also have a QR code set up for customers on a morning grocery run. 

WeChat's QR codes are literally everywhere, going beyond payments — some public bathrooms in China even need you to scan one just to use toilet paper.

Scanning WeChat QR codes has woven its way into social etiquette, as scanning a client's personal QR code has replaced the need for exchanging business cards. 

Some public services depend on WeChat QR code, too. For instance, the South China Morning Post reported last year that China equipped its public restrooms with smart toilet paper dispensers to reduce toilet paper theft and waste, so you need to either scan a QR code or use the system's facial recognition to use the dispensers. 

WeChat's "Mini Programs" are a dream for users, but might be Apple's biggest nightmare in China.

WeChat's "Mini Programs" save you from downloading apps onto your phone.

They offer access to a dizzying variety of services, straight from WeChat: Didi Chuxing, China's ride-hailing service, lets you hail and pay for rides without leaving WeChat. Individual restaurants might have their own mini programs, accessed via a QR code on the table, 

Restaurant tables often also have Mini Programs, which users can access via a QR code on the restaurant table, and proceed to order food, pay, and have it served to the table, without human intervention. 

One perhaps-unintended casualty of this approach is customer loyalty for the iPhone. Because WeChat is available on both iOS and Android, Chinese iPhone users feel less averse to switching away from the Apple family of products, the Wall Street Journal reported in 2017. 

WeChat's more social features include a Facebook-like 'moments' stream, where you share pictures, articles and personal updates.

A 'moments' stream lets your contacts share their pictures and updates, much like Facebook's newsfeed. 

There's also a 'search' stream that looks a lot like Twitter, where you can find articles, official accounts, and trending topics.

You can also find whimsical stickers like 'fatty deities' or 'silly piggy' on chat, which don't seem to serve a practical purpose, but they have boosted local artists to fame.

Like Facebook or Apple's iMessage, WeChat offers stickers — cute graphics that can spice up your text conversations. 

While WeChat has an official sticker library, users love the customizable sticker collections that anybody can upload for public consumption. Those stickers can turn the artist into a celebrity: Fans can even donate via WeChat Pay to the creators of their favorite stickers.

Those artists can watch their fame (and wealth) skyrocket, such as in the case of the Silly Piggy sticker collection allowing its creator River Rui to leave her day job to set up shop as an independent artist, reported by AFP. 

It's worth noting that these stickers are still subject to strict censorship laws. Stickers of Winnie the Pooh were removed from WeChat's official sticker gallery after a series of memes compared the cartoon bear to President Xi Jinping, according to AFP. 

WeChat is home to all kinds of communities, including buy-and-sell groups where payments are handled via WeChat Pay. There are even WeChat influencers, who hawk products for sale via the app.

You can also find Yelp-like neighborhood reviews and recommendations, with listings well outside China — this is what it looks like when we tried it in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Notably missing from the app: Advertisements.

WeChat has surprisingly few advertisements compared to its peers in the industry. WeChat users only see one to two ads per day through the Moments feature, Tencent's chief strategy officer James Michelle told the business magazine Campaign earlier this year. 

This largely seems due to WeChat founder and president Allen Zhang's views on the app's aesthetics. Zhang has stressed simplicity in the app's design, ensuring that it remains aesthetically pleasing to its users. 

During a four hour-long speech transcribed and published by WeChat itself this January, Zhang stressed his distaste for products created to drive traffic. 

"I noticed that in various industries, when a product manager graduates and starts working, the company will misguide them. Because the company's objective is to increase traffic and make money, hence everyone's KPI is also to increase traffic and make money. This means the product manager's work objective is not to create the best product, but to use whatever means necessary to obtain traffic." 

"We don't support this way. What we advocate more is to use WeChat to create good products for our users," Zhang said. 

The app's success is increasingly global: Some American institutions have started to cater to WeChat users with their own Mini Programs.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has a mini program for WeChat users, offering a room-by-room guide and an audio companion to the museum's exhibitions for Mandarin-speaking tourists. There's a similar app available for iOS and Android, but the WeChat mini program requires no separate download, saving time and energy.

But using WeChat in the US is difficult, as WeChat Pay is not available in the US and language can be a barrier.

WeChat users outside China have a much more limited use of the app. Although WeChat Pay is available to Chinese tourists travelling in the US — and foreign tourists travelling in China — American WeChat users still can't use it.

The results are far-reaching: for instance, many Mini Programs require access to WeChat Pay, so these services are only available in China.

Another limitation is not knowing Mandarin, exploring the full potential of the app, even if you're in China, can be difficult. 

Although you can navigate through the chat stream, search for English mini programs, and join English groups, most of the app's users communicate in Mandarin. Most of the app's services are catered to its Chinese userbase. So to join groups or take advantage of certain Mini Programs, knowing the language seems to be a necessity. 

And to address the elephant in the room, it isn't clear to what degree Chinese censorship laws are applied to WeChat users in the US.

Tencent technically operates two different versions of WeChat: the China-based Weixin (微信) and its international counterpart, WeChat. (This is similar to how ByteDance handles its viral video app TikTok, which operates as Douyin in China). 

Tencent says that the difference between WeChat and Weixin goes beyond the name. The two are "sister apps" offering "different content and features," a company statement to Business Insider said. 

Tencent says these two versions exist to allow the company to navigate different regulatory environments. While WeChat and Weixin users can talk to each other, Tencent says it applies Chinese data-surveillance laws to monitor Weixin users, and may block content, but it does not do so for WeChat users. 

However, The Verge reported that an American information security analyst named Bin Xie had his WeChat account taken down after writing "the pro-China candidates totally lost," referring to Hong Kong's recent election, in a group. 

On a lighter note, I wanted to highlight "Shake," a quirky WeChat feature which helps you find new friends by matching you with somebody, anywhere in the world, who is shaking their phone at the exact same time that you are.

Got a tip about Tencent or WeChat? Contact this reporter via email at bsapra@businessinsider.com, Telegram and WeChat at bani_sapra, or Twitter DM at @bani_sapra to find out how to contact me via encrypted messaging app Signal. 

• BMW appeared to make fun of Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Wednesday and Thursday as the automaker published over 100 tweets to commemorate selling 500,000 electrified vehicles.
• In separate tweets, BMW's Twitter account counted up from 499,820 to 500,000.
• BMW's tweets resembled tweets Musk has published about the number of reservations Tesla has received for its Cybertruck pickup truck.
• Sign up for Business Insider's transportation newsletter, Shifting Gears, to get more stories like this in your inbox.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

BMW appeared to make fun of Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Wednesday and Thursday as the automaker published over 100 tweets to commemorate selling 500,000 electrified vehicles.

In separate tweets, BMW's Twitter account counted up from 499,820 to 500,000. When it reached 500,000, the automaker revealed that it has sold 500,000 electrified vehicles (which include fully-electric vehicles and hybrids).

"A big thanks to everyone who joined our little Twitter count-up for the past two days. Most of you guessed right: The BMW Group has already delivered 500,000 electrified cars worldwide. The future is now!" the automaker tweeted on Thursday.

BMW's tweets resembled tweets Musk has published about the number of reservations Tesla has received for its Cybertruck pickup truck.

Musk tweeted in February that Tesla would make 500,000 cars in 2019, and then almost immediately retracted his claim, saying in a follow-up message that "annualized production rate at end of 2019 probably around 500k, ie 10k cars/week. Deliveries for year still estimated to be about 400k."

Tesla and BMW did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Thursday.

BMW's current electrified vehicles include the i3 electric sedan and the i8 Coupe and i8 Roadster plug-in hybrid sports cars. The automaker plans to have 25 electrified vehicles available for sale by 2023, including all-electric models like the iX3 SUV and iNext SUV.

Are you a current or former Tesla employee? Do you have an opinion about what it's like to work there? 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:
• Here's why the Tesla-BMW comparison doesn't make business sense
• Leaked email reveals Tesla is asking employees to help deliver cars during the final weeks of 2019
• More Model 3 owners switched over from BMW compared to any other car brand, according to a survey of 5,000 customers
• Tesla is reportedly considering cutting the price of Model 3s built in China by 20% next year

SEE ALSO: Before and after photos show how dramatically 14 world-famous CEOs changed since they started the job

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Why it's so hard for planes to land on water

• The log-in information of 3,672 Amazon Ring camera owners were leaked this week, Buzzfeed News first reported.
• Ring users' personal information was left exposed, giving potential intruders access to their home addresses, credit card information, and footage from Ring cameras at their homes.
• The exposure is the latest in a series of incidents involving compromised Ring cameras in the past month.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Thousands of Ring camera owners' personal information was exposed on an unprotected website this week, making their emails and passwords available to potential intruders, according to a Buzzfeed News report.

The exposed log-in information was reportedly discovered by a security researcher on an unprotected text storage website, who first posted about his discovery on Reddit. 

Leaked data included people's log-in credentials, which could grant an intruder access to their account. That would allow the potential hacker to see their name, address, credit card information, and footage from Ring cameras dating back at least 30 days.

A Ring spokesperson was not immediately available for comment. In a statement to Buzzfeed News, Ring said that the data was not stolen from Ring's systems or network, implying that the passwords were aggregated from other companies' data breaches.

The exposure is the latest in a series of cybersecurity issues faced by Ring owners this month. Last week, a video of a hacker gaining access to a Ring camera and harassing an 8-year-old went viral. Another woman said her Ring was compromised by a hacker who began yelling at her dog to "wake the f— up."

Ring has maintained that these hacks are the result of users' passwords being stolen through avenues other than its own networks, rather than some inherent flaw in Ring's systems. Ring doesn't require two-factor-authentication for its users to log in, but people have the option to enable it for their Ring devices.

Ring is reportedly alerting everyone whose passwords were compromised this week.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: How autopilot on an airplane works

CenturyLink has agreed to pay over $8 million in settlement fees to customers and the state over allegations of deceptive charging practices, false advertising and failure to provide discounts, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser announced Thursday.

Under an agreement filed Thursday in Denver District Court, CenturyLink will refund customers $1.7 million for overbilling errors, as well as pay the state nearly $6.8 million for violating the Colorado Consumer Protection Act. CenturyLink denied any wrongdoing and did not admit fault in the settlement.

“One of CenturyLink’s main selling points is that its prices are low and affordable. Yet, we received hundreds of complaints from consumers that their bills were more than the advertised price or the price that sales agents quoted them,” Weiser said in a news release. “This sticker shock often was a result of misleading hidden fees, overcharges for services and CenturyLink’s failure to deliver discounts that they promised to consumers when they signed up for services.”

The attorney general’s office began investigating CenturyLink in 2017, uncovering evidence dating back to 2014 that the company “systematically and deceptively overcharged consumers for services,” the news release said.

The state alleged several examples of unlawful practices in the complaint:

• CenturyLink falsely advertised “price lock” and “fixed price” contacts while intending to charge customers more than the outlined price.
• The company misled customers by creating a “disguised surcharge,” a hidden price increase that CenturyLink kept for itself to generate profit.
• CenturyLink sometimes did not deliver refunds to customers for returning their equipment, only doing so after customers called to complain.

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“While we disagree with the Attorney General’s position, we believe it is in the best interests of our company and our customers to amicably resolve these matters,” CenturyLink said in a statement. “Toward that end, CenturyLink has entered into a consent decree to settle disputed claims and avoid the distraction and costs of litigation.”

As part of the agreement, CenturyLink agreed to disclose the actual price of its service at the time of sale; send customers an “order confirmation” with a complete summary bill within three days; stop adding the disguised “Internet Recovery Fee”; and stop charging unreturned equipment fees to customers who return their equipment on time, the consent decree said.

The company also will be required to submit compliance reports to the state for three years, and must keep all sales call recordings and written sales correspondence for two years, the consent decree said.

Disclaimer: This article does NOT constitute investment advice. All investment and financial opinions expressed in this article is from the research and experience of the author and is strictly intended as educational material. 

The Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to be worth trillions of dollars by 2020, and several companies and startups will certainly reap the benefits of that explosion. But investors can do the same if they know which IoT stocks to watch.

Each of the companies and startups below rates as one of our IoT companies to watch, as each one is doing something innovative and important in the IoT space. These range from IoT startups to more established IoT companies to invest in.

Honeywell

One of Honeywell's major focal points is the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), the integration of digital technologies into manufacturing. This puts the emphasis on information rather than physical machinery, even for areas that traditionally require physical labor.

In 2019, Honeywell launched a software solution called Honeywell Forge to help industries collect, analyze, and act on the data coming from the various parts of their operations. This could position the company well for the future of the IIoT. According to Honeywell's thought leadership study that polled 600 U.S. business professionals, 70% invested "significant" amounts in IIoT, and 9 in 10 believe IIoT will pay for itself.

Amazon

The e-commerce titan had a significant first-mover advantage with the Amazon Echo, which enabled it to set the pace for the smart speaker market. From there, the company has been expanding the capabilities of its voice assistant, Alexa, which now boasts more than 50,000 skills.

Alphabet

Despite Amazon's early lead, Google's parent company has become a true competitor with its Google Home smart speaker. In fact, Google Home added 600,000 more U.S. users than Amazon Echo in 2018, and the device continues to permeate the market.

Verizon

While T-Mobile jumped into the IoT pool first with a dedicated team in 2008, signs point to Verizon racing out ahead in the IoT space among its peers. The telecom giant will likely be the first to deploy a 5G network in the U.S., which makes it poised to be the leader in wireless connectivity in the next decade.

GrubHub

A food delivery service might seem an odd choice for an IoT company, but it checks all the boxes. Mobile device penetration and usage is increasing each year, and Seamless has become the go-to name in on-demand meal delivery. Combine those two factors and you have a recipe for a company that can take advantage of the IoT space.

Apple

Apple has also entered the smart speaker space with its HomePod, but the device has yet to gain the same foothold as the Amazon Echo and Google Home. But the tech giant has carved out its territory in the wearables space, as the Apple Watch continues to lead the pack in smartwatches.

Visa and MasterCard

The two leaders in the credit card space are poised to benefit from the increasing proliferation of non-traditional payment methods. Mobile, voice, and connected device payments adoption is increasing each year, so these two giants should be well positioned to capitalize on that growth.

What's Next?

The Internet of Things (IoT) is powering transformation for enterprises, consumers, and governments. Emerging tools and technologies like smart speakers, machine learning, and 5G are enabling huge gains to efficiency and more control at home and in the workplace.

The continued growth of the IoT industry is going to be a transformative force across all organizations. By integrating all of our modern day devices with internet connectivity, the IoT market is on pace to grow to over $3 trillion annually by 2026.

Business Insider Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, is keeping its finger on the pulse of this ongoing revolution by conducting our third annual Global IoT Executive Survey to create The Internet of Things Report, which provides us with critical insights on the most pivotal new developments within the IoT and explains how top-level perspectives are changing year to year. Our survey includes nearly 400 responses from key executives around the world, including C-suite and director-level respondents.

Through this exclusive study and in-depth research into the field, Business Insider Intelligence details the components that make up the IoT ecosystem. We size the IoT market and use exclusive data to identify key trends in the connected devices sector. And we profile the enterprise, governmental, and consumer IoT segments individually, drilling down into the drivers and characteristics that are shaping each market.

Here are some key takeaways from the report:

• We project that there will be more than 64 billion IoT devices by 2025, up from about 10 billion in 2018.
• Blockchain within the IoT is still generally the provenance of startups, and they're populating the marketplace with products that take advantage of the technology's characteristics. It's not going to upend the IoT, despite the technology's much-ballyhooed potential. And respondents to our survey of IoT providers seem, for the most part, to understand this. Just a small percentage think that blockchain will become a universal standard in the IoT. The vast majority said that blockchain will either be a tool that most companies employ at times, or a niche product that only certain solutions use.
• Lightning-fast 5G networks will change how telecommunications shapes business and will also offer new and transformative possibilities in the IoT space. The new standard will further increase the appeal of cellular solutions in the areas where it's available. And that's why nearly half of IoT providers said they're planning to introduce support for 5G networks to their solutions within the next two years.
• The report highlights the opinions and experiences of IoT decision-makers on topics that include: drivers for adoption; major challenges and pain points; deployment and maturity of IoT implementations; investment in and utilization of devices; the decision-making process; and forward- looking plans.

In full, the report:

• Provides a primer on the basics of the IoT ecosystem.
• Offers forecasts for the IoT moving forward, and highlights areas of interest in the coming years.
• Looks at who is and is not adopting the IoT, and why.
• Highlights drivers and challenges facing companies that are implementing IoT solutions.

Interested in getting the full report? Here are a few ways to access it:

1. Purchase & download the full report from our research store. >> Purchase & Download Now
2. Sign up for Connectivity & Tech Pro , Business Insider Intelligence's expert product suite keeping you up-to-date on the people, technologies, trends, and companies shaping the future of connectivity, delivered to your inbox 6x a week. >> Get Started
3. Join thousands of top companies worldwide who trust Business Insider Intelligence for their competitive research needs. >> Inquire About Our Enterprise Memberships
4. Current subscribers can read the report here.

The choice is yours. But however you decide to acquire this report, you've given yourself a powerful advantage in your understanding of the fast-moving world of the IoT.

Join the conversation about this story »

The Zoom engineers have been busy delivering new feature happiness this December! Following our Dec. 2 release, the team delivered another feature-packed release this past weekend based on your customer input. The pace of innovation with over 300 new features released this year is truly amazing! 

Here are a few of the coolest new features for Zoom Rooms, Zoom Meetings, and Zoom Phone: 

Zoom Rooms

Native Room Control Integration

Zoom Rooms’ native room control integration enables users to control IP-addressable devices, such as lighting, shades, air conditioning, and more, straight from the Zoom Rooms Controller. You can view this Zoomtopia session with our own JayJay Kim, Zoom Solution Architect, explaining how this works.

Virtual Background with Green Screen for Zoom Rooms

Zoom Rooms can now support virtual backgrounds with a green screen. Ideal for studios, webinars, broadcasts, and presentations, admins can upload backgrounds on the Zoom Rooms web portal and in-room participants can select their preferred background (or none at all) from the Zoom Rooms controller during a meeting. 

Waiting Rooms

Waiting Rooms are virtual staging areas that prevent people from joining a meeting until the host is ready. Zoom Rooms users can now use waiting rooms as a host or as a participant and can further customize settings to control which participants can join when.

Digital Signage Split Screen Layout and Weather Display

Digital Signage admins can choose different split-screen content layouts and select the content shown in each section. They’ll also have the ability to display local weather.

Companion Whiteboard

Companion whiteboard allows customers to deploy an additional Zoom Rooms for Touch device to an existing Zoom Room, enabling in-room and remote participants to whiteboard, co-annotate, and collaborate. Replace your analog whiteboards and enhance existing spaces without any additional licenses or expensive makeovers — all you need is a touch display and a Windows OS. Zoom Rooms for Touch users also can save a multi-page whiteboard as a PDF. 

Advanced Call Support

• Transfer Zoom Phone Call: Transfer active Zoom Phone calls from a Zoom Room to another user.
• Zoom Phone 3-Way Calling: Users can have multiple active calls simultaneously in a Zoom Room and merge the calls when desired. 
• Convert Zoom Phone Call to Zoom Meeting: Elevate your Zoom Phone call to a video meeting in a Zoom Room.

Device Profiles for Zoom Rooms

Admins can create specific device profiles for different types of meetings. Device profiles can be configured for specific display settings, cameras, speakers, microphones, and screen layouts. Once created, these profiles can be selected via the Zoom Room Controller.

Support for Multiple Room Controllers, Scheduling Displays

Zoom Rooms will be able to support multiple room controllers to help provide a better room control experience for larger spaces and settings. These controllers will be mirrored, providing completely synced UIs. You’ll also be able to mount multiple Scheduling Displays outside your larger spaces and rooms with multiple entrances to further simplify booking.

Zoom Meetings

Meeting Reactions

Meeting participants can now send a thumbs up or clapping icon to show engagement and give encouragement without interrupting the meeting. Reactions show up right on the video and will disappear after 5 seconds. 

View Another Participant’s Audio Status

Now it’s super easy to know if someone has connected to audio when they join a meeting. In both gallery view and speaker view, Zoom will display “Connecting Audio” below a participant’s video until that participant has joined the audio, making it clear when they can hear you.

Virtual Background Selection within Video Preview

The video preview now has an option to select or change your virtual background before you join the meeting. 

Zoom Phone

Talkdesk Contact Center Integration

This native, out-of-the-box integration allows customers to integrate TalkDesk cloud contact center to  Zoom Phone. Calls between the Zoom cloud and Talkdesk are directly routed over a private network peering connection for improved quality and automatic call routing capabilities. 

For the full list of new features, check out the release notes for Mac OSx, Windows, iOS, Android, and Linux platforms, and follow these instructions to get on the latest Zoom version. For additional information, sign up for a customized 1-on-1 demo with a Zoom product specialist today.

The post Get More Control in Your Zoom Rooms, Get More Interactive in Meetings with New Zoom Releases appeared first on Zoom Blog.

What’s the most successful pure SaaS company of all time? The answer is Salesforce, and it’s no contest — the company closed the year on an $18 billion run rate, placing it in a category no other company born in the cloud can touch.

That Salesforce is on such an impressive run rate might suggest that reaching a billion in revenue is a fairly easy proposition for an enterprise SaaS company, but firms in this category grow or drive revenue like Salesforce. Some, in fact, find themselves growing much more slowly than anyone thought, but keep slugging it out as they inch steadily toward the $1 billion mark. This happens to public and private SaaS companies alike, which means that we can look at few public ones thanks to their regular earnings disclosures.

It’s a good time to look back at the year and analyze a few firms that should reach the mythical $1 billion in revenue at some point. Today we’re examining Zuora, a SaaS player focused on building and managing subscription-based services. GuideWire, a company transitioning to SaaS with big ambitions and Box, a well-known SaaS player caught somewhere between big and a billion.

Zuora: betting on SaaS

We’ll start with the smallest company that caught our eye, Zuora . We’ll proceed from here going up in revenue terms.

Zuora is as pure a SaaS company as you can imagine. The San Mateo-based company raised nearly a quarter billion dollars while private to build out the technology that other companies use to help build their own subscription-based businesses. To some degree, Zuora’s success can be viewed as a proxy for SaaS as a whole.

However, while SaaS has chugged along admirably, Zuora has seen its share price fall by more than half in recent quarters.

At issue is the firm’s slowing growth:

• In the quarter detailed on March 21, 2019, Zuora’s subscription revenue growth slowed to 35% compared to the prior year period. Total revenue growth grew an even slower at 29%.
• In the quarter announced on May 30, 2019, Zuora’s subscription revenue grew 32% while its total revenue expanded 22%.
• Moving forward in time, the company’s quarter reported on August 28, 2019 saw subscription revenue growth of 24% and total revenue growth of 21% compared to the year-ago quarter.
• Finally, in its most recent quarterly report earlier this month, Zuora reported marginally better 25% subscription revenue growth, but slower total revenue growth of 17%.

Why is Zuora’s growth slowing? There’s no single reason to point out. Reading through coverage of the firm’s earnings report reveals a number of issues that the company has dealt with this year, including slow sales rep ramp and some technology complaints. Add in Stripe’s meteoric rise (the unicorn added tools for subscription billing in 2018, expanding the product to Europe earlier this year) and you can see why Zuora has had a tough year.

Adding to its difficulties, the company has lost more money while its growth has slowed. Zuora’s net loss expanded from $53.6 million in the three calendar quarters of 2018. That rose to $59.9 million over the same period in 2019. But the news is not all bad.

In spite of these numbers, Zuora is still growing; the company expects around $276 to $278 million in revenue in its current fiscal year and between $206 and $207 million in subscription top-line revenue over the same period.

At the revenue growth pace set in its most recent quarter (17% in the third quarter of its fiscal 2020) the company is eight years from reaching $1 billion in revenue. However, Zuora’s rising subscription growth rate in the same period is very encouraging. And, the company’s cash burn is declining. Indeed, in the most recent quarter Zuora’s operations generated cash. That improvement led to the firm’s free cash flow improving by half in the first three calendar quarters of 2019.

It also has pedigree on its side. Founder and CEO Tien Tzuo was employee number 11 at Salesforce when the company launched in 1999. He left the company in 2007 to start Zuora after realizing that traditional accounting methods designed to account for selling a widget wouldn’t work in the subscription world.

Zuora’s subscription revenue is high-margin, but the rest of its revenue (services, mostly) is not. So, with less thirst for cash and modestly improving subscription revenue growth, Zuora is still on the path towards the next revenue threshold despite a rough past year.

Guidewire: going SaaS the hard way

In an age where business communications are constantly changing, new innovators are beginning to make their mark in the digital landscape. Ooma, one of the latest brands to begin experimenting with communication tools for small businesses, offers comms via an intuitive SaaS platform. This cloud-based communications hub comes with access to cloud-based telephony and enterprise features.

The business services available from Ooma are designed to help all companies unlock the benefits of high-definition voice quality, advanced features, and mobile device integration. Here’s what you can expect from Ooma.

Ooma Office: Features and Benefits

The first solution from Ooma for businesses today is “Ooma Office”, a VoIP strategy designed to serve anyone from 2 to 200 employees. The solution comes packed with more than 25 business-class features, including virtual receptionist, extensions, and the option to keep your existing number. Additionally, Ooma has been rated number one for 24/7 customer support by its clients.

The Ooma Office VoIP solution comes with access to:

• A virtual receptionist so you can manage and automate your incoming calls
• Mobile app for on-the-go workers to stay connected to the business
• SMS messaging for sending and receiving messages
• Enhanced call blocking to protect against spam calls
• Multi-ring solutions so you never miss a call
• Call recording for compliance and training purposes
• Call parking, ring groups, music on hold, extension dialing, and other high-level calling features

The Ooma Office service comes with everything that today’s small businesses need to set up their VoIP strategy in no time. With an easy installation through the cloud, wireless options available, and multi-level call management features, any company can set up a professional communication strategy in no time. There’s even access to virtual receptionist technology with custom messages, transfer music, and call forwarding.

Ooma Enterprise: Features and Benefits

For those who need a more comprehensive communication strategy for their business, the Ooma Enterprise communication solution combines everything from voice and video, to contact centre and messaging control. Ooma Enterprise was designed to support companies that feel that they aren’t getting the support that they need from typical off-the-shelf UCaaS. The tailored solutions available from Ooma are scalable and adaptable, thanks to APIs that integrate into your processes.

Whether you’re looking for sophisticated call-centre solutions that supports your agents around the country, or you need a state-of-the-art cloud phone system, there’s something to meet everyone. Some of the features of Ooma Enterprise include:

• Always-on Enterprise phone system: Ooma is committed to giving companies a business communication system that just works – with no compromise. The reliable infrastructure delivered through the cloud gives you the reliability you need
• Custom communications through APIs: You don’t need to worry about cookie-cutter solutions to complex business problems with Ooma. The API approach that the brand takes to enterprise communication means that you get the solution that’s right for you
• Business voice plus: Enjoy a high-quality, reliable communication solution that your employees will love, complete with call reporting and recording, auto attendant and virtual receptionists, call logs, advanced call routing, and more
• Extensive Call Centre features: Integrate your unified communication strategy with your contact centre. Ooma brings UCaaS and CCaaS together into one easy-to-use system, powered by Talkdesk
• Application integration: Bring all the tools that your team members already love into their communication stack with immersive integrations

Combining both UCaaS and CCaaS into a flexible solution with API integrations and extensibility, Ooma ensures that today’s companies can access all the functionality they need in one simple tool. Ooma’s enterprise solution is the modern cloud communications service for the mobile and agile workforce. You can choose exactly which tools you need for your enterprise, from call flow editors to call ID and advanced routing and add them to a system that your employees feel comfortable using.

Finishing Thoughts

Whether you’re looking for basic business VoIP specially designed for the agile needs of small companies, or you need a comprehensive UCaaS and CCaaS solution, Ooma has you covered. A business built to take advantage of the as-a-service landscape, Ooma makes it easier for companies of all sizes to create the custom experience they need from their communication stack.

Via cloud services and APIs, you can ensure that your team members have everything they need to communicate both with each other, and members of your community. What’s more, there are endless opportunities to extend the features and functionality of your service as your business continues to evolve. Ooma is the business phone service designed for flexibility.

• Apple is dominating the wearables industry thanks to the success of its AirPods, Apple Watch, and Beats headphones, according to the International Data Corporation.
• The wearables industry overall saw record growth in the third quarter of 2019, largely thanks to growing interest in wireless earbuds.
• Growth in wireless earbuds far outpaced that of smartwatches and wristbands, which is great news for Apple since it dominates the cordless earbud space.
• But it's a troubling sign for rivals like Samsung and Fitbit, which have traditionally focused more on smartwatches and fitness trackers than headphones.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories. 

The iPhone may be Apple's biggest and most profitable product. But as wireless earbuds like AirPods are continuing to grow in popularity, Apple seems positioned to dominate the wearable technology market, possibly making it more difficult for longtime rivals like Samsung and Fitbit to catch up. 

Global shipments of wearable devices hit 84.5 million units in the third quarter of 2019, representing a year-over-year increase of 94.6%, according to recently published statistics from the International Data Corporation.

Most of that growth was driven by the rise of "hearables," a term that refers to smart wireless earbuds like Apple's AirPods, Samsung's Galaxy Buds, and Amazon's Echo Buds. Ear-worn devices like wireless earbuds showed the highest year-over-year growth and accumulated the most market share in the third quarter when compared to smartwatches and wristbands. The earwear category grew by 242.4% year-over-year, while wristbands only grew by 48.6% and smartwatches grew by 48%, reports the IDC.

The shift toward "hearables" could be troubling for players like Fitbit, which was recently acquired by Google, and Samsung, two companies that have historically held a strong presence in the wearables industry thanks to their respective wrist-worn devices, not their headphones.

SEE ALSO: Next year's iPhone is starting to take shape, and it already looks like Apple could be on its way to reclaiming dominance in the smartphone industry

Samsung and Fitbit are barely present in the wireless earbuds space, especially compared to Apple.

Samsung, for example, was the second-largest smartwatch vendor in the second quarter of 2019 coming in just behind Apple, while Fitbit came in third, according to Strategy Analytics. Samsung sells earbuds too, but the company accounts for a smaller sliver of the truly wireless earbuds market compared to the smartwatch space.

Samsung only accounted for 6% of the truly wireless earbuds market in the third quarter of 2019, according to Counterpoint Research, losing its second-place spot to Chinese tech firm Xiaomi. Apple, however, dominated the market with a 45% share of the industry in Q3 2019. 

Fitbit launched its own headphones called the Fitbit Flyer in 2017, but those earbuds no longer appear in its product lineup on its website. It is possible, however, that Fitbit's lack of a presence in the earbud market may not matter as much, considering it's joining Google. The search giant has its own plans to launch wireless earbuds called the Pixel Buds in 2020.

But even then, it will likely be challenging for Google to make a significant dent in the market, considering it's coming much later than competitors like Apple, Samsung, and the Apple-owned Beats, among others. 

It's probably not a coincidence that the companies growing in the wireless earbud space are the same ones that are taking over the broader wearables market too.

IDC's research indicates this trend is starting to have a more apparent impact on the broader wearables market. Samsung and Fitbit are continuing to trail behind Apple and other rivals, like Xiaomi, as interest in wireless headphones is ramping up.

Apple emerged as the market leader for overall wearable tech space during the third quarter of 2019, which IDC attributes to the popularity of the Apple Watch, AirPods, and Beats headphones. Apple accounts for 35% of the wearable technology market during that period and grew by 195.5% year-over-year. 

Samsung, by comparison, is responsible for 9.8% of the wearables market, according to IDC. That still represents a jump from its 7.4% share of the market in Q3 2018, but wasn't enough to bump Samsung up to second place — a position held by Xiaomi, which claims 14.6% of the market. And it's far behind Apple's 35% market share.

Fitbit saw its slice of the wearables market shrink from 8% in the third quarter of 2018 to 4.1% in the third quarter of 2019, bumping it down to fifth place behind Huawei, Samsung, and Xiaomi. 

And Apple probably isn't slowing down anytime soon since wearables are more important than ever for the company.

Products like AirPods and the Apple Watch are increasingly critical for Apple as the company combats slowing iPhone sales. That suggests Apple will probably be eager to keep its top spot in the wearables segment. 

As revenue from the iPhone has declined in recent quarters, Apple's wearables, home, and accessories divisions has soared, growing to $6.5 billion. That comes after Apple released two new pairs of AirPods this year: a refreshed version of its standard AirPods that now include hands-free Siri access and optional wireless charging, and the pricier Pro version, which offer active noise-cancelation and a new design.

Apple hasn't said how many AirPods units have been sold, and it doesn't specify how much revenue it earns from AirPods alone. But analysts at Wedbush Securities predict Apple is on pace to sell between 85 and 90 million AirPods in 2020, an increase from the estimated 65 million AirPods expected to be sold in 2019.

All told, the latest research from IDC suggests that catching up to Apple in the wearables space will be more challenging than ever for rival gadget-makers like Samsung, Fitbit, and Google. Not only does Apple dominate the smartwatch market, but it doesn't seem like any other companies are even coming close to mirroring the success of AirPods. 

Facebook executives told Attorney General William Barr that the company would not provide law enforcement with investigative access to its encrypted messaging products ahead of a senate hearing on encryption on Tuesday.

In a letter, WhatsApp and Messenger heads Will Cathcart and Stan Chudnovsky, respectively, said that any “backdoor” access into Facebook’s products created for law enforcement could be used by bad actors for nefarious purposes. For this reason, Facebook denied Barr’s request to make its products more accessible.

“The ‘backdoor’ access you are demanding for law enforcement would be a gift to criminals, hackers and repressive regimes, creating a way for them to enter our systems and leaving every person on our platforms...

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There’s nothing like the feeling of sweet relief after walking into an air-conditioned room in the middle of a heatwave. Mountain goats, an iconic species that thrives in alpine habitats such as Montana’s Glacier National Park, feel the same way on hot summer days, only they cool off using glaciers and snow patches instead of AC units or central air.

Unfortunately, glaciers and snow patches are rapidly declining around the world, due to human-driven climate change. The loss of these important environments is increasing the odds of heat stress and hyperthermia in mountain goats, according to a study published on Wednesday in PLOS One.

“Mountain goats need cooling,” said study co-author Joel Berger, a senior scientist with the Wildlife Conservation Society and a professor in wildlife biology at Colorado State University, in a call. “They just don’t seem to have the thermal flexibility that we see in some of these other large mammals.”

While scientists have been aware of the vulnerability of goats to climate change for years, there hasn’t been much observational research about the specific benefits of their snowy havens to their overall health. Berger and his colleagues aimed to fill this gap with their study, which is based on GPS satellite tracking of collared mountain goats in Glacier National Park, as well as onsite observations of the animals during the summers of 2013 to 2016.

“Given the modern world that we live in, everything is technological and satellites help us do ecological and environmental studies enormously,” Berger said. Still, “some insights can’t come from just looking down,” he added, which is why the team also trekked into the park to monitor the goats during the months of July and August.

The researchers timed the goats’ inhalations and exhalations when they were both on and off the snow, and found that their breathing rates decreased by as much as 15 percent when they were resting on snow patches.

The satellite data also revealed that the mountain goats strongly preferred areas closer to snow patches. The odds of the goats using an area decreased by 68 percent for every one kilometer increase in its distance from snow, according to the study.

The study suggests that the accelerated loss of snow and glaciers over the coming decades will have negative effects on mountain goats, and other cold-adapted species such as reindeer, which rely on these environments to keep them safe from heat exposure.

Huemels in South America, an animal that is also vulnerable to climate change. Image: Joel Berger

It will take a concerted effort to ensure that these animals are able to access habitats where they can be healthy and comfortable.

“Mountain goats have lost so much of where they used to occur historically, meaning from northern Mexico into Arizona,” Berger said. “Now their native distribution—native, not where they’ve been introduced—ends in Montana and Idaho.”

Berger and his colleagues are not only concerned about North American mammals, but also their relatives in South America, including the huemel, the most endangered large mammal in the Western hemisphere.

“We’re looking both at the top and at the bottom [of the globe] at the loss of ice and what it means for biodiversity, through the eyes of a couple of large mammals,” Berger said.

The last few years haven’t been kind to popular toy retailer Toys “R” Us. After accumulating more than $5 billion in debt and struggling to compete with online competitors like Amazon, the company filed for bankruptcy protection in 2017, then shuttered more than 800 retail locations last year. More than 30,000 employees lost their jobs, initially with no severance.

Last month the company re-emerged as a faint echo of its former self, backed by new private equity partners intent on making customer surveillance a cornerstone of their new business model.

Initially the reborn venture looked fairly ordinary. The first of the company’s new, smaller flagship stores opened in late November at the Garden State Plaza mall in Paramus, New Jersey. A second store opened last week in Houston.

But a closer look reveals a retail operation that’s nothing like store you once knew. The company’s new, much smaller stores don’t actually fully stock toys; they’re just glorified showrooms where customers peruse preferred brands before buying them online at the Toys “R” Us website—the logistics of which are actually managed by Target.

Instead, new Toys “R” Us owner TruKids has developed the showrooms with a far less playful purpose: rampant consumer surveillance. Via a partnership with a startup dubbed b8ta and another firm by the name of RetailNext, the new stores have embedded ceiling sensors, cameras, and other tech tasked with monitoring your every playful moment in the store.

RetailNext, which claims to have some 500 retail and mall partners, is part of a growing effort to bring online surveillance to the brick and mortar world. Often aided by phone location data, such firms track and monetize consumer behavior, monitoring everything from the path you walk through a mall, to the amount of time you spend looking at any one particular product.

“This data allows Toys ‘R’ Us to measure and manage the performance of the store, including product placement and staffing,” TruKids recently told Wired. “All traffic data is anonymous and the cameras do not register kids.”

All told, RetailNext claims it analyzes the shopping habits of 800 million consumers in more than 80 countries worldwide. The firm’s privacy policy states it doesn’t “knowingly” collect data on kids under 13 in adherence with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), the only meaningful internet-era privacy law the US currently has.

But there’s a long list of studies that have repeatedly showcased that anonymized data isn’t actually anonymous. And there’s just as many scandals showing that companies routinely violate COPPA, with penalties that are routinely a far cry from the money made off of kids.

Some retail giants are exploring AI-driven surveillance and facial recognition technologies capable of determining shoppers’ age, gender, or even mood. But when brands are asked whether they use these emerging technologies in their retail locations, they’ll often dodge the question—much like their online counterparts have for years.

RetailNext’s website promises to bring “e-commerce style shopper analytics to brick-and-mortar retailers.” To do so, the company’s Aurora cameras help clients with everything from “understanding shoppers’ paths” to tracking “their individual actions and behavior.” Some (but not all) of the companies’ cameras attempt to blur faces to help prevent identification.

The company insists its technology is programmed to avoid recording any humans less than four feet tall in a bid to comply with COPPA, even though CDC data suggests many young boys can easily exceed such height limitations.

To hear industry tell it, this surveillance provides important insights into how well a store and its employees perform, opening the door to real world targeted ads.

And while industry routinely insists consumer privacy is a top priority, the last decade has repeatedly shown such promises to be decidedly hollow, and government regulators routinely incapable of penalizing companies that mislead consumers or break the law.

Toys “R” Us and mascots like Geoffrey the Giraffe could have just died a quiet death, secure in the annals of retail history. Instead the brand has been lobotomized and re-animated into something decidedly different—a private equity-backed playground where everything from your location to your LEGO play is collected, stored, and monetized, whether you like it or not.

Back at my parents’ house, there’s a couple giant tubs of Lego sitting in my old bedroom closet stuffed with over 20 years of my Lego collection. If I ever had to sort that collection by hand, it would probably take me the better part of the next 20 years — but perhaps I could use this AI-powered Lego sorting machine that’s made in large part out of more than 10,000 Lego bricks (via ExtremeTech).

Dubbed the “Universal Lego Sorting Machine” by its creator, Daniel West, it’s a pretty neat contraption that’s far more useful than any of the Lego science projects I used to make. The machine is apparently able to use AI to sort Lego into one of 18 different buckets at a rate of “about one brick every two seconds.” West says he trained the...

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Today, Microsoft announced a public preview of Microsoft Teams for Linux, the first Office 365 tool that’s available for the open-source operating system.

The hope is that by making it available for preview, the company can get feedback from the community and improve it before it becomes generally available. “Starting today, Microsoft Teams is available for Linux users in public preview, enabling high quality collaboration experiences for the open source community at work and in educational institutions,” the company wrote in the blog post announcing the release.

The goal here ultimately is to help get Teams into the hands of more customers by expanding the platforms it runs on. “Most of our customers have devices running on a variety of different platforms such as Windows 10, Linux and others. We are committed to supporting mixed environments across our cloud and productivity offerings, and with this announcement, we are pleased to extend the Teams experience to Linux users,” the company wrote in the blog post.

This announcement is significant for a couple of reasons. For starters, Microsoft has had a complicated history with Linux and open source, although in recent years, under Satya Nadella, it has embraced open source. This shows that Microsoft is willing to put its tools wherever customers need them, regardless of the platform or operating system.

Secondly, as it marks the first Office 365 app on Linux, if there is positive feedback, it could open the door for more apps on the platform down the road.

The announcement also comes against the backdrop of the company’s ongoing battles with Slack for enterprise collaboration platform users. In July, Microsoft announced 13 million daily active users on Teams. Meanwhile, Slack has 12 million DAUs. It’s worth noting that Slack has been available on Linux for almost two years.

You will recall that last month we discussed the latest iteration of T-Mobile's ongoing war to defend its trademark on the color magenta, as well as close variants of that color. While there are instances in which a particularly unique color or shade of color can be trademarked by a company, this case involved T-Mobile's parent company, Deutsche Telekom, bullying insurance company Lemonade out of using the color magenta in its branding. Given that the insurance and mobile phone industries are quite disparate, this never should have been a dispute, regardless of how ridiculous it is for a company to have exclusive rights to a color like magenta.

The folks at Lemonade appear to agree. While the company complied with Telekom's C&D, it also launched a PR blitz to highlight how insane this all is. First, Lemonade launched its #FreeThePink campaign to raised public awareness, and is taking its case to EUIPO to try and invalidate the trademark. But that wasn't all. The staff of Lemonade has now released a Chrome browser extension that, ahem, helps enact T-Mobile's vision of being the only purveyor of pink out there.

Pending the decision of European IP authorities, a Lemonade employee, Itamar Kestenbaum, wrote a Chrome extension called Pink-Out.

In fact, it's fair to say that Kestenbaum primarily wanted to showcase Deutsche Telekom's appalling behavior.

What the extension – essentially designed to troll the troll – does is strip all webpages, except those belonging to the German company itself, of “questionable shades.”

The app itself claims it helps those browsing the internet to be "pink-compliant", chiefly as a way to highlight the absurdity of all of this. In addition, the extension's page says that with a click of a button all pink is removed from the depiction of public websites, except those owned by T-Mobile. The page concludes with:

This extension is free -- like the color pink should be.

I'll give the company this: they're certainly making Lemonade out of the magenta-hued lemons T-Mobile has handed them.

In October, a group of top elected officials in western democracies wrote to Facebook expressing concern about the company’s plans to incorporate end-to-end encryption in all of its messaging products. US Attorney General Bill Barr, along with his rough equivalents in the United Kingdom and Australia, wrote that encryption would make it difficult or impossible for them to uncover instances where messaging was used to facilitate terrorism, child exploitation, and other crimes. They asked Facebook to reconsider its plans.

Anyway, the company thought about it and the answer is no. Here are WhatsApp chief Will Cathcart and Messenger honcho Stan Chudnovsky (in a PDF! sorry):

Cybersecurity experts have repeatedly proven that when you weaken...

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Few communities on Earth are experiencing the effects of climate change as profoundly as Alaska Natives. Now, their voices and experiences are being amplified in a new climate report by the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration that highlights how dramatic sea ice losses and ecosystem shifts are impacting their food security and traditional way of life.

At the American Geophysical Union annual meeting in San Francisco today, NOAA released its 2019 “Arctic Report Card,” an annual status update on the changes unfolding up north as the Arctic warms at breakneck speed. Now in its 14th year, the report contains the usual mix of dismal news on retreating sea ice, thawing permafrost, and Greenland’s ongoing meltdown. But it also drew special focus to Alaska’s Bering Sea, with several chapters detailing the dramatic, warming-fueled changes unfolding across the region, changes NOAA describes as “disquieting.” To put a human face on the ongoing transformation, the report also includes a chapter authored by 10 indigenous elders representing communities across the Bering, a first for the annual report.

“Our seals are dying, our fish are going belly up before they spawn,” said Jerry Ivanoff, a Yup'ik man from the Alaskan village of Unalakleet and a co-author on the report, in an interview. “Our killer whales are showing up on the beach. We’ve never had 200 seals [dead] on a beach stretch before. This year we had.”

The testimonials in NOAA's new report make clear just how disquieting climate change is from the front lines. As it explores in detail, life across the Bering Sea has become almost unrecognizable in recent years.

Many of the ongoing changes can be traced back to ice. Sea ice in the Bering has been thinning and retreating for years, but in 2018 and 2019, the losses kicked into overdrive. The past few years saw sea ice struggle to form in the fall, hit record low maximum extents in the winter, and break up early in the spring. In late January 2019, a series of cyclones marched through the Bering, bringing warm air and fierce winds and triggering an unprecedented wintertime ice collapse.

Sea ice is a necessary precursor for the “cold pool”, a vast blob layer of near-freezing water that forms along the Bering seafloor as ice melts in the spring, providing shelter for Arctic species and keeping out warm-loving fish from the south. In 2018, for the first time in memory, the cold pool didn’t form, and in 2019 it was dramatically diminished. This has allowed southern species like Pacific cod and walleye pollock to migrate north in huge numbers, possibly contributing to the widespread seabird die-offs that have occurred across the Bering over the last few years.

“The latest NOAA survey results are showing a really rapid increase in northward movement [of southern fish],” said Kevin Wood of NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, during a NOAA press conference at AGU today. “I think in the long run, we’re going to see more and more of this.”

All of these changes are having profound effects on the more than 70 indigenous communities that call the Bering home. As Mellisa Johnson, the Executive Director of the Bering Sea Elders Group, explained during the AGU press conference, the sea ice that once offered a stable platform for hunting and fishing is becoming dangerously thin, meaning hunters are having difficulty accessing the traditional foods their communities depend on to get through the long, harsh winter.

“The sea ice and the snow helps us maintain our indigenous way of life,” Johnson said. “With that being taken away each year and within the last three years being taken away significantly, we haven’t had the opportunity as the past to continue having vast amounts of seal, walrus [and] different fish. We’ve had significant impacts to our food sources that we can’t buy in a local grocery store.”

At the same time that communities are finding it more difficult to obtain food, they’re becoming more isolated. Several traditional sea ice roads people once used to travel between communities no longer exist, while the wintertime ice runway off the remote island community of Diomede can no longer support a plane in the winter. An increase in wintertime rainfall is leaving other runways covered in ice, making it unsafe for planes to land and further isolating communities that lack road access.

Meanwhile, with temperatures rising rapidly, once-frozen ground is turning to mush and crumbling into the sea, taking out vital infrastructure along with it.

One of the biggest concerns elders voiced in the new report is that the changes are occurring so quickly it’s becoming difficult to pass traditional knowledge along to younger generations. This, combined with increases in boating traffic and industrial exploitation up north as ice retreats, threatens to further erode the identity of communities that have managed to hold onto their culture despite centuries of colonial repression.

“By adapting as we always have, we continue to hunt, fish, and harvest from the ocean and land,” elders write in the report. “But, we fear for our young people.”

• Facebook and Google have long been considered among the most desirable workplaces in the US, but both companies are absent from the annual top 10 ranking published by Glassdoor this month.
• Instead, a relatively unheard of tech company named HubSpot took the No. 1 spot in overall rankings and among tech companies.
• Both Facebook and Google are still part of the top 10 most desirable places in tech to work.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

For years, tech giants like Facebook and Google have been considered among the most desirable places to work.

They're famous for lavish employee benefits, including free meals and on-site laundry, but apparently those perks aren't enough to keep the companies in the top 10 annual ranking of best places to work.

Glassdoor, a website where employees can speak openly about their employer, issued its annual list of the best places to work this week — and both Google and Facebook were absent from the top 10. Instead, a relatively unheard of software company named HubSpot took the No. 1 spot in overall rankings and among tech companies.

That's particularly notable given their previous rankings.

Both companies have hit the No. 1 spot in past years, and both have consistently placed in the top 10. Moreover, Facebook's position at No. 23 on this year's list is its lowest ever.

Glassdoor's ranking is based on employees at each company, and thus the ranking is a reflection of actual Facebook and Google employees. Google occupies the No. 11 spot on this year's list.

Notably, other tech giants like Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon are also absent from the 10 best places to work list. 

Check out the top 25 best places to work according to employees right here.

SEE ALSO: The 25 best companies you'll want to work for in 2020

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AWS held its annual re:Invent customer conference last week in Las Vegas. Being Vegas, there was pageantry aplenty, of course, but this year’s model felt a bit different than in years past, lacking the onslaught of major announcements we are used to getting at this event.

Perhaps the pace of innovation could finally be slowing, but the company still had a few messages for attendees. For starters, AWS CEO Andy Jassy made it clear he’s tired of the slow pace of change inside the enterprise. In Jassy’s view, the time for incremental change is over, and it’s time to start moving to the cloud faster.

AWS also placed a couple of big bets this year in Vegas to help make that happen. The first involves AI and machine learning. The second, moving computing to the edge, closer to the business than the traditional cloud allows.

The question is what is driving these strategies? AWS had a clear head start in the cloud, and owns a third of the market, more than double its closest rival, Microsoft. The good news is that the market is still growing and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. The bad news for AWS is that it can probably see Google and Microsoft beginning to resonate with more customers, and it’s looking for new ways to get a piece of the untapped part of the market to choose AWS.