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Weather forecasters pushing for strict limits on 5G’s rapidly growing footprint were dealt a blow today by the World Radiocommunication Conference in Egypt. Delegates there voted to create a new international standard that places much looser limits on interference from 5G operating in a specific radio frequency that’s crucial to accurate weather forecasting. Meteorology experts worry that this decision could one day seriously impact their ability to forecast severe storms, leaving communities around the world vulnerable to extreme weather events.

Today’s decision is the culmination of a months-long turf battle between scientists and 5G proponents over the prized 24GHz radio frequency band. Telecommunications companies need to occupy...

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You can now use Google Duplex to book cinema tickets on the web on Android in the UK and US. The functionality, which was first teased back at Google I/O 2019, can be accessed through Google Assistant or the Google app on Android. You can ask or search for cinema listings, and once you’ve found a suitable time and location you tap the “Buy tickets” button to start the process. Then the software takes you through the steps of picking seats, and can enter your payment information for you if you have it saved in Chrome.

The new feature builds on Duplex’s existing restaurant-booking functionality, which Google started offering last year. However, in this case it’s going through the more simple process of filling out text fields on a website,...

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Sonos now owns Snips, a Paris-based “private-by-design” AI voice platform with the intent of making “the voice experience on Sonos even better,” according to a press release announcing the acquisition. The deal is worth approximately $37.5 million, and brings Snips’ 50 employees and intellectual property to Sonos.

Sonos already offers both Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant voice assistants as options on its smart speakers. So, why does it need Snips?

Part of the answer can be found in Sonos’ Q4 letter to shareholders:

“We do not plan to replicate the big tech ‘ask anything voice services’ but expect this acquisition will add to our customers’ ease of use and control as we continue to differentiate an end-to-end Sonos experience for our...

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• In November, Google's work with the second largest health system in the US came to light, raising questions about how Google will use the patient information that's being transferred to its cloud. 
• Health systems are considering moving patient records from their own data servers to cloud providers like Google. 
• We spoke to the experts who deal with patient data for major hospitals. They shared their perspectives on health systems moving to the cloud and considerations for groups making the transition.
• "I expected better from Google," John Kravitz, the chief information officer at Geisinger Health System in Pennsylvania, told Business Insider.
• Subscribe to Dispensed, Business Insider's weekly healthcare newsletter. 
• Click here for more BI Prime stories.

When news broke in November that Google was quietly working with the second-largest health system in the US, it was met with loud concerns about how much private health information the tech giant had access to and how it might use it. 

The health system, Ascension, is transferring the personal and medical information of 50 million patients onto Google's cloud network. In return, Google gains access to the data, Business Insider reported. Google has said that "a limited number" of Google employees have access to full patient data as part of the deal. 

The US Department of Health and Human Services has since said it's seeking more information on the partnership, and a number of US lawmakers have also expressed concern.

Many health systems are contemplating moving their information from data servers they operate to cloud providers like Google, Microsoft, or Amazon, as they grapple with the challenge of managing and securing large amounts of patient information. The hope is that moving to the cloud would free health systems from having to invest in costly data centers, ultimately saving them money.

Longer term, through some of the partnerships tech companies promise to work side-by-side with the health systems to develop artificial intelligence tools that can benefit the industry. Google, for instance, is developing a patient information search tool that's similar to its internet search function.

Privacy and security concerns dominate at major health systems

We spoke to the top tech executives at three health systems, all of whom work with the tech giants in some capacity, though none of them have put their electronic health records on the cloud. They laid out their hesitations with making the move, in large part because of privacy and security concerns.

They told us that the idea that there might be additional uses of the electronic health record information to build tools — rather than simply storing the information — is what surprised them about the work that Google is doing with Ascension. 

Some of the tech chiefs Business Insider spoke with are hesitant to entrust their data to the cloud, because they'd have less oversight of the security of that data. They said they have questions about how much of a technology advantage moving to the cloud would actually provide, and doubts about how much money they'd really save.

Privacy, they said, is paramount.

"That's the scary part," John Kravitz, the chief information officer at Geisinger Health System in Pennsylvania, told Business Insider. "Not everyone's just willing to jump into this two feet."

Geisinger currently runs its own data centers and works with some vendors that run applications that tend to be hosted on private clouds. 

Kravitz said he was stunned when he read the Google-Ascension news.

"I expected better from Google," Kravitz said. "I did not expect this. Now they're trying to put a spin on it where it's, you know, it's going to be something that'll, that'll be better for big changes to support docs and patients. I think they're trying to put a positive spin on something that may not be as positive as expected. That's where I would be really cautious about this."

The move to the cloud

Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have been landing major cloud deals in healthcare. In July, the health information technology giant Cerner said it had made Amazon Web Services its preferred cloud provider as it moved its business from its own data centers to the cloud. Mayo Clinic in September signed Google as its cloud and artificial-intelligence partner. In July, West Coast-based Providence St. Joseph Health signed a cloud deal with Microsoft. 

"Mayo Clinic will manage access to all data using rigorous long-standing institutional controls and will specifically authorize the use of data for joint research projects that solve health care problems," Mayo spokeswoman Duska Anastasijevic said in a statement. "No partners, including Google, will have independent access to Mayo's private patient data. It is important to note that Google will be contractually prohibited from combining Mayo data with any other data."

Across the business, health systems have to choose what they'd liked to do themselves and what outside companies can do better, Toby Cosgrove, the former head of Cleveland Clinic explained.

Cosgrove, who's now a top Google health advisor, said there's a race to convince hospitals to move to the cloud, and that tech companies are offering other tools and services to try to sway them.

"There's no doubt that that is more secure in the cloud than it is the data centers of most hospitals across the country," Cosgrove said.  

New York's Northwell Health System, which operates 23 hospitals and made $11.5 billion in revenue in 2018, works with cloud providers including Oracle, Microsoft, and Google, and some of its business partners use Amazon Web Services. Northwell doesn't keep data from its electronic medical records on the cloud, instead housing it in data centers it operates. 

A 'cautious, diligent, thorough' approach

John Bosco, the CIO of Northwell said that when working with cloud providers, he's carefully paying attention to where the cloud providers are keeping the data, who from the cloud provider has access to it, and how information that's sent to the cloud will be used.

"We are, as I think most big health systems are, very cautious, diligent, thorough in our approach to our systems and especially being out in the cloud or anywhere outside of data centers," Bosco said. 

What gave the tech experts at health systems particular pause about the deal between Google and Ascension was the potential for Google to use the massive amount of patient data it'd have to get an even more complete picture of its consumers. The information contained in a health record includes sensitive data from names and dates of birth to lab results, medications and diagnoses. 

"Google already knows everything about everybody," Andrew Kasarskis, the chief digital officer at Mount Sinai in New York told Business Insider. "Google, unlike almost every other company out there, has incredible ability to know who somebody is, so in fact, by partnering with Google you're doing a couple things that you're not doing,when you're partnering with other companies."

Google has said it isn't combining Ascension patient data with other consumer data it collects. The company said that the patient can only be used to provide services to Ascension under the companies' business agreement. Ascension has said that the partnership follows privacy laws, and that the companies are taking strong steps to protect patient data.

In Google-Ascension deal, 'a whole lot of patient data' is being shared

Close to 150 Google employees are able to access Ascension's data, internal documents show. The data includes patients' names, contact information, diagnoses, and medication orders.

"I was surprised. I think this has been #1 on a scale we haven't seen before," Bosco said.

"You're talking about a whole lot of patient data," he added.

Over the past year, Google has been building up its Google Health division, hiring former Geisinger CEO David Feinberg to run the unit. Recently, the Google Health team has revealed more details about the search tool for electronic health records that it's working on. 

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, known as HIPAA, is meant to protect the privacy of patients' health information while allowing health systems to share patient information with business partners. That can include software companies providing electronic health records and billing vendors.

HIPAA was enacted in 1996, before there were considerations of how patient data could be used by business associates, such as using machine learning to build search tools like the kind Google is working on.

Geisinger is evaluating a move to the cloud

"These point to the fact that we probably need updates to the way we regulate what can be done with data in a way that's transparent and supports a patient's needs to understand where the information goes and how it's used," Kaskaris said.

Kravitz is in the middle of evaluating whether Geisinger should make its transition to the cloud, and he anticipates he'll make a decision in the next six months. He's curious to see if the move would actually save money, and he's working to get a better understanding of the privacy protections public cloud providers have in place, he said.

"I'm very cautious that I'm making prudent sound financial decisions and decisions that protect the life of the organization moving forward," Kravitz said.  

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Earlier this week, Vodafone unveiled its partnership with Google, aimed at generating network insights with a cloud-based AI system, according to Light Reading.

Together, the companies developed an AI platform called Neuron, built on top of Google Cloud. Neuron will aggregate and draw insights from Vodafone's global network data. The project contributes to Vodafone's goal of decreasing operations costs by at least €1.2 billion ($1.3 billion) per year by the 2021 fiscal year, per Light Reading. 

Before turning to Google, Vodafone used an outdated network management system that could not easily be scaled. Neuron will replace Vodafone's cumbersome platform of over 600 on-premise servers stratified across 11 countries, which were tasked with analyzing the troves of network data from Vodafone's 25 countries of operation and 625 million customers. By comparison, the Neuron system has centralized access to network data stored on the cloud, and storage can be flexed according to demand. 

Vodafone was looking to transform its internal tools, and, like other global telecoms, had to decide whether to revamp operations in-house or partner with big tech. In explaining why Vodafone chose to partner with Google, Vodafone CTO Johan Wibergh said the organization lacked the in-house expertise to develop the same capabilities, and that working with Google proved to be more cost-effective compared with an entirely in-house transformation, according to Bloomberg.

Big tech companies including Google, Microsoft, and Amazon can offer extensive cloud storage with advanced, embedded AI systems — these can be used to, for instance, predict network demand and allocate capacity accordingly. Telecoms such as AT&T and Verizon tried to build their own cloud business units to compete against these services, but failed. With this clear gap in capabilities, several other large telecoms — including Telecom Italia and Three UK — have likewise turned to big tech to facilitate similar digital transformation initiatives. 

Telecoms with expansive operations should reduce complexity by forging partnerships with big tech companies. While the likes of Telekom Austria have taken the in-house approach to support network planning, these outfits tend to be relatively smaller and more regionally specific, making the process more manageable.

Larger telecoms sustain more complex operations — which promise to become even more complex with 5G — making scalable network insights operations all the more crucial. The effectiveness of network insight tools also takes on a greater importance at this scale, so the potential delay from ramping up an internal system gets even more costly — making the advanced systems of Google, Microsoft, and Amazon even more alluring.

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Embattled office-sharing startup WeWork confirmed on Thursday that it had cut 2,400 jobs in a round of layoffs following its failed IPO attempt.

Multiple sources told Business Insider that layoffs had begun on Monday, November 11. WeWork met with employees to announce the larger round of layoffs beginning on Thursday morning at 10 a.m ET, another source familiar with the matter told Business Insider.

"As part of our renewed focus on the core WeWork business, and as we have previously shared with employees, the company is making necessary layoffs to create a more efficient organization," a WeWork spokesperson told Business Insider.

"The process began weeks ago in regions around the world and continued this week in the U.S.," the statement continued. "This workforce reduction affects approximately 2,400 employees globally, who will receive severance, continued benefits, and other forms of assistance to aid in their career transition. These are incredibly talented professionals and we are grateful for the important roles they have played in building WeWork over the last decade."

CNBC first reported the news.

Employees who were laid off earlier this week received four months severance pay, regardless of their tenure, according to Business Insider's sources. The layoffs comprise about 20 percent of WeWork's staff — in June the company said it had 12,500 employees. Prior reports expected as many as 4,000 or 6,000 jobs to be cut.

Earlier this year WeWork was valued at $47 billion, making it the most valueable private startup company in America. However, filings for WeWork's highly-anticipated IPO revealed troubling financial reports and left potential investors questioning the company's leadership. 

SoftBank, one of WeWork's primary investors, ultimately offered a $9.5 billion package to acquire majority ownership of WeWork, giving former WeWork CEO and cofounder Adam Neumann a $1.7 billion deal in exchange for his departure.

With SoftBank now controlling about an 80 percent stake in WeWork, the company wants to build a path to profitability. But that will come at the expense of thousands of jobs, undoing years of rapid international expansion for the office sharing company.

Earlier this month the New York Times published a letter more than 150 WeWork employees sent to company management. The group, calling themselves the WeWork Coalition, asked for fair treatment during the layoff process.

"We are not the Adam Neumanns of this world — we are a diverse work force with rents to pay, households to support and children to raise," the letter reads.

This post is developing...refresh this page for the latest

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NOW WATCH: Inside the US government's top-secret bioweapons lab

Slack is accusing Microsoft of ripping off its ads. In a tweet posted by Slack today, the chat company makes a clear comparison between its own Frontiers video from earlier this year and Microsoft’s latest Teams promotional video from earlier this week. Both feature virtual colorful balls that are supposed to represent communication. Slack even hits Microsoft with the “ok boomer” meme to add insult to injury, mocking Microsoft for supposedly being old and out of touch.

Microsoft revealed its latest promotional video earlier this week, alongside an announcement that its Teams app is now being actively used by 20 million people daily. That’s a massive jump from the 13 million daily users the company reported back in July, and it’s almost...

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• Slack tweeted a video on Thursday with the caption "ok boomer," appearing to call out Microsoft for a suspiciously similar ad campaign to Slack's.
• Slack and Microsoft Teams are two competing workplace chat services. 
• Microsoft just revealed it has more users than Slack, but Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield said that Microsoft views Slack as an "existential threat." 
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Slack is leaning into its status as the young, hip startup by calling out its older, more established competition: Microsoft.

Slack tweeted a video on Thursday comparing a Slack ad and a Microsoft ad, showing the similarities between them and implying the Microsoft copied Slack's concept. The video was captioned "ok boomer," a phrase that has turned into a meme for millennials and Gen Z to voice their gripes with the baby boomer generation.

Watch the video here:

Valued at $12 billion, Slack is as essential as an internet connection in some circles, and has even become a verb. Despite its ubiquity, however, the workplace chat app might be falling behind competitor Microsoft Teams.

On Tuesday, Microsoft announced that Teams hit 20 million daily users, while Slack most recently announced just 12 million users. Slack's stock took a dive after the announcement.

Although it has fewer users, Slack points to its user engagement, saying that users enjoy using the app. Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield said that Microsoft sees the company as an "existential threat."

SEE ALSO: Amazon's Audible turned a historic deserted church into an 'Innovation Cathedral' but preserved its stained glass, pipe organ, and bowling alley

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NOW WATCH: Inside the US government's top-secret bioweapons lab

• Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and another exec met with President Donald Trump at an undisclosed dinner at the White House as the social media site faces continued criticism for its political ad policy.
• Trump hosted Zuckerberg and Facebook executive Peter Thiel for dinner while the CEO was visiting DC for a congressional hearing about Facebook's new cryptocurrency Libra, NBC News reported.
• It's unclear what Zuckerberg, Thiel, and Trump discussed during their dinner.
• This is the second time the Facebook CEO met with Trump in an undisclosed meeting. Zuckerberg previously dined with the president and other senators at the end of September in a surprise DC visit.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and another exec met with President Donald Trump at an undisclosed dinner at the White House as the social media site faces continued criticism for its political ad policy.

Trump hosted Zuckerberg and Facebook executive Peter Thiel for dinner while the CEO was visiting DC for a congressional hearing about Facebook's new cryptocurrency Libra, NBC News reported.

"As is normal for a CEO of a major US company, Mark accepted an invitation to have dinner with the President and First Lady at the White House," a Facebook spokesperson told NBC News in a statement.

It is unclear why Zuckerberg and Thiel met with the president, what they discussed, or why the meeting was undisclosed until NBC News reported it.

This is the second time the Facebook CEO met with Trump in an undisclosed meeting. Zuckerberg previously dined with the president and other senators at the end of September in a surprise DC visit.

Facebook has been under fire for its standing on political advertising, after the company announced that it would not fact check political ads. Facebook confirmed that false information could be included in an advertisement, so long as it doesn't include any profanity.

Zuckerberg appeared before Congress at the end of October to defend the site's policy, saying that the policy makes way for free speech and allows voters to consume the information without outside influences. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez grilled the CEO on what kinds of ads would be allowable under the policy.

"Would I be able to run advertisements on Facebook targeting Republicans in primaries saying they voted for the Green New Deal?" Ocasio-Cortez asked during the hearing. "I mean, if you're not fact-checking political advertisements, I'm just trying to understand the bounds here."

"I don't know the answer to that off the top of my head," Zuckerberg said. As Ocasio-Cortez began to move to another question, he added, "I think, probably."

2020 presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren has also called out Zuckerberg and Facebook's policy by creating a fake ad of her own. Her campaign posted an ad claiming that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had endorsed Trump's re-election. But she didn't run the ad without a disclaimer.

"You're probably shocked," the ad read. "And you might be thinking, 'how could this possibly be true?'"

"Well, it's not. (Sorry.)"

• Read more:
• Civil-rights leaders are lobbying Mark Zuckerberg to change his mind about allowing lies in Facebook's political ads — and he may compromise
• Facebook refuses to fact-check political ads, and it's infuriating employees and lawmakers. Here's why the issue has become Facebook's latest major controversy.
• Mark Zuckerberg launched an impassioned defense of political ads on Facebook, just minutes after Twitter banned them
• Hundreds of Facebook employees call on Mark Zuckerberg to change the social network's controversial rules on political ads

SEE ALSO: From Trump to Planned Parenthood, these are the Facebook pages spending the most money on political ads

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• Trump's 2020 election campaign is attacking Facebook over fears it might change how its ad targeting works.
• The Team Trump Twitter account claims Facebook wants to make changes that will make it harder for politicians to target its users with ads.
• However, while Facebook has said it is evaluating its advertising tools, it hasn't made any indication as to what changes it may ultimately make, if any. 
• Attacking big tech is perceived as a winning campaign strategy by politicians on both the left and the right.
• Read more on the Business Insider homepage.

President Trump's 2020 election campaign is lashing out at Facebook over fears that the social network may change its ad targeting options.

On Wednesday, the official Twitter account for Team Trump slammed the Silicon Valley social networking firm, warning that theoretical changes will "raise prices to put more of your hard earned small dollar donations into their pockets."

The attack comes amid bitter and ongoing debate over Facebook's policies on political ads. The company has been criticised for allowing politicians to lie in ads — a position it has defended on free speech grounds. And some critics, including a group of current Facebook employees, have called on the company to make changes to how political ads can be targeted in an attempt to rein in their impact. 

Earlier this week, top Facebook advertising exec Carolyn Everson said that it wouldn't make changes to political ad targeting mechanisms, saying "that's not on the table." But she subsequently rowed that back, with Axios reporter Sara Fisher tweeting that "she says the company is still considering a number of options and nothing is off the table."

Thus far, Facebook has given no indication of what — if anything — it might change about its political advertising tools, or given a timetable for any such changes.

But Trump's campaign has presented the company's comments as statements of intent to make changes that would damage its ability to campaign. 

In a tweet that begins "IMPORTANT" on Wednesday, the Team Trump account wrote that "@Facebook wants to take important tools away from us for 2020. Tools that help us reach more great Americans & lift voices the media and big tech choose to ignore!"

A Facebook spokesperson did not immediately provide comment on Facebook's current intentions around political advertising.

The Trump campaign's purported warning is the latest attack from a 2020 presidential hopeful, who have found big tech an easy candidate for criticism and for firing up their base. Trump and other American right-wing figures have repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that tech companies are trying to censor conservative voices online.

And on the left, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is part of a growing chorus calling for antitrust action to be taken against Facebook and other tech firms.

Do you work at Facebook? Contact this reporter via encrypted messaging app Signal at +1 (650) 636-6268 using a non-work phone, email at rprice@businessinsider.com, Telegram or WeChat at robaeprice, or Twitter DM at @robaeprice. (PR pitches by email only, please.)

Read more:

• Instagram's lax privacy practices let a trusted partner track millions of users' physical locations, secretly save their stories, and flout its rules
• Mark Zuckerberg's personal security chief accused of sexual harassment and making racist remarks about Priscilla Chan by 2 former staffers
• Facebook says it 'unintentionally uploaded' 1.5 million people's email contacts without their consent
• Years of Mark Zuckerberg's old Facebook posts have vanished. The company says it 'mistakenly deleted' them.

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On Wednesday, Google announced that it would start limiting the abilities of political advertisers to target their messaging in the coming months.

In a blog post, Google’s vice president of product management and advertising Scott Spencer, said that the company would begin to ban political advertisers from targeting consumers based on their political affiliation or public voter records. Advertisers will still be able to target voters based on age, gender and zip code, but no more specific location targeting will be permitted. Contextual advertising, like “serving ads to people reading or watching a story about, say, the economy,” Google said, will also be permitted.

These changes will roll out in the United Kingdom ahead of its general...

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The Trump FCC has made it abundantly clear it isn't particularly keen on state, city, or local rights, especially when they interfere with AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast's ability to make a buck. The problem: when the FCC neutered its ability to police the telecom sector at lobbyist request as part of the net neutrality repeal, it may have ironically obliterated its authority to tell states or cities what they can do.

The agency fiercely opposes your town and city's right to build its own broadband networks, even if nobody else will and locals have voted for it. The Pai FCC has also tried (illegally and unsuccessfully so far) to ban states from trying to protect consumers from predatory telecom monopolies in the wake of federal apathy. And a number of other FCC policy changes have attempted to hamstring your town or city's ability to stand up to wireless carriers over things like environmental reviews for cell tower placement, or the money they can collect for hosting telecom equipment in public rights of way.

This week, the FCC was sued by a broad coalition of cities which say they've had enough. Dozens of states have joined forces to sue the FCC over an August ruling cities say not only limit how much money cities can collect for things like environmental impact reviews on cell tower placement, but hamstrings their ability to stand up to giants like AT&T and Verizon on pretty much any issue of substance. The FCC claimed the changes were necessary to accelerate our positioning in the "race to 5G," though cities say the changes are little more than a giant gift to the nation's biggest telecom conglomerates:

"At least 46 cities are asking federal appeals courts to undo an FCC order they argue will force them to raise taxes or cut spending on local media services, including channels that schools, governments, and the general public can use for programming.

The lawsuits reflect a larger clash of interests among localities, media companies, and the FCC brought on by the agency’s tactic of promoting broadband deployment nationwide—especially in rural areas with spotty or no internet access—by easing rules for business."

The case began with Eugene, Oregon (pdf), though 46 cities, along with eight counties and the state of Hawaii, have since filed seven petitions in three different circuit courts in the hopes of overturning the rules. They say the FCC's ability to constrain the money they can collect from telecom giants will hurt localities, and is part of an overall effort to weaken any municipal opposition to AT&T and Verizon:

"...cities will have to reduce their public media budgets, stop offering services, or cut into other programs to make up the difference, Christopher Ali, associate professor in the University of Virginia’s media studies department, said.

The order also stifles municipal decision-making authority over franchise terms, Ali said. “It allows cable companies to call the shots a lot more than they used to,” he said. The franchise order is part of “much larger agenda to diminish the power of municipalities,” Ali said. “We’re seeing this battle between municipalities and big media, and big media is winning."

While the FCC says that freeing industry incumbents from oversight and accountability will spur greater broadband deployment, the net neutrality debate has shown that limited competition and regulatory capture ensures that doesn't actually happen. Also like the net neutrality debate, the FCC may have painted itself into a corner. The courts haven't looked kindly upon the FCC's decision to neuter its own oversight authority over broadband, then turn around and tell cities or states what they can or can't do, an issue that's likely to rear its head here as well.

I’ve been thinking about how Amazon takes a chaos-energy attitude towards developing ecosystems around its products. When it’s trying to get third parties to work with its products, Amazon throws open the doors and invites all comers. When it’s making new products itself, Amazon is much more likely than anybody else to just do whatever it wants, sometimes aggressively.

Sometimes that leads to hilarious Alexa products like rings that listen to your whisper, IR blasters, and Alexa party games. Other times it leads to corporate synergy with a burgeoning police interest in surveillance.

Before we get to the dark stuff, let’s just take a minute with the latest example of how willing Amazon is to just do whatever it takes to get stuff to work...

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Spark is one of the best email apps around on both Android and iOS, offering tons of customization options and plenty of high-level features, but it has tended to lag behind some of its competitors when it comes to design. That changes today with the launch of the latest version of the app, which brings a slick redesign that makes Spark far more enjoyable to look at, along with a new dark mode setting.

The odd, windowed design of the old app has been replaced by a more uniform background (either white or black, depending on which mode you select). There are also some much-needed visual tweaks, including a new font and the long-absent option to view avatars for contacts next to their emails.

The update isn’t just cosmetic, though....

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• Apple has begun construction on a new $1 billion campus in Austin, Texas, the company said on Wednesday.
• The announcement comes as President Trump, who has been making a big push to keep US manufacturing jobs in America, will be visiting Apple's Texas production facility on Wednesday.
• Tim Cook has met with Trump several times over the past year as Apple seeks exemptions on Chinese import tariffs that would impact its most popular products.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Apple has begun the construction of a new $1 billion campus in Austin, Texas, the company said on Wednesday. The announcement comes as President Trump is planning to visit the tech giant's facility in the same city, where it will assemble the new Mac Pro computer it's launching next month.

The new 3-million-square-foot campus will initially house 5,000 employees, but it will be built to eventually accommodate 15,000 workers. It's expected to open in 2022, and Apple says it already employs 7,000 people in the city.

Trump's visit to Apple's Texas factory also comes after the president made a big push to keep American manufacturing jobs in the United States. Before Apple confirmed in September that it would continue producing the Mac Pro in Texas, Trump said on Twitter that the company would not be granted a waiver on Chinese import tariffs for its new computer. Instead, he urged the tech giant to produce the Mac Pro in the United States. 

Now, Trump is visiting the facility in Austin, Texas where the computer will be assembled, which the firm says is a short distance away from the location of its upcoming office. The company said its new campus will also be designed to maximize green space and will include a 50-acre nature and wildlife preserve that will be open to the public.

In its announcement, Apple also reiterated that it's on pace to contribute $350 billion to the US economy by 2023, a commitment the iPhone maker made in 2018. Apple, meanwhile, is seeking exemptions on tariffs imposed on Chinese imports that would impact products like the Apple Watch, iPhone, and iMac among other products, as Bloomberg reported earlier this month. 

Apple CEO Tim Cook has met with Trump several times over the past year. That includes one conversation from August in which Cook described his concerns regarding tariffs imposed on Chinese goods, and how they could make it more difficult for Apple to compete with the South Korea-based Samsung, its biggest rival in the smartphone industry.

Trump also said in August that he answers calls from Cook because the Apple CEO contacts the president personally, rather than hiring a consultant or lobbyist to do it. 

"I got to help him out short term with that problem," Trump told reporters in August referencing Cook's concerns that the tariffs could benefit Samsung, according to Fox Business. "Because it's a great American company."

SEE ALSO: Apple CEO Tim Cook says privacy isn't a feature that should be built into products after the fact

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• Allbirds cofounder Joey Zwillinger slammed Amazon for selling a look-alike shoe for a third of the price of Allbirds, calling them "algorithmically inspired."
• Amazon's version of the shoe is $60 cheaper than Allbirds' wool sneaker, which has become a mainstay of Silicon Valley athleisure.
• Zwillinger also took aim at Amazon for not having the same commitment to sustainability as Allbirds during an interview with CNN's Christiane Amanpour Monday.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

If you want a shoe that looks almost identical to Allbirds' wool sneaker for a third of the price, Amazon has a knock-off for you. Allbirds cofounder Joey Zwillinger doesn't approve, however.

Zwillinger took aim at Amazon for selling a cheaper Allbirds lookalike during a CNN interview Monday.

"They know a lot about consumers and they obviously saw that a lot of people were searching for Allbirds," he told CNN's Christiane Amanpour. "It feels like they almost algorithmically inspired a shoe that looks very similar so they could capitalize on that demand."

An Amazon spokesperson was not immediately available for comment.

Founded in 2014, Allbirds has skyrocketed in popularity, especially in tech circles. The San Francisco startup sells Merino wool sneakers for $95 and raised $17.5 million in venture funding before opening its first physical stores in 2018. Allbirds also sells a range of men's and women's shoes including lace-less "loungers" and high-top sneakers made from trees, in addition to wool accessories like socks and sleeping masks.

Zwillinger also slammed Amazon for not meeting the same sustainability standards as Allbirds in producing its nearly-identical wool running shoes.

"The thing that was frustrating ... is that we open source all the materials," Zwillinger said. "If they wanted to use the materials and copy our sustainability, they had all the right to do so. We gave that away."

Watch Zwillinger's full interview on CNN.

SEE ALSO: Security experts say these are the 7 'creepiest' smart gadgets people give as holiday gifts

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: People are still debating the pink or grey sneaker, 2 years after it went viral. Here's the real color explained.

• As technology advances, things that were once innovative and groundbreaking are becoming obsolete.
• In the past 20 years along, VHS tapes, one-hour photo labs, and phone booths are some of the things that have almost completely disappeared.
• Here are nine things that have become obsolete in the past 20 years.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Technology is always hurtling forward.

A little over a century ago, entire industries related to horse-drawn transportation disappeared overnight with the advent of the automobile. More recently, advances in music recording technology have helped us transition from records to cassettes, CDs, and finally MP3s and digital streaming.

While you might not be consciously aware of the feverish pace of change today, it's easy to look back on dozens of technologies that are now completely obsolete thanks to the march of progress.

Read on to see nine things that have become utterly obsolete in the last 20 years, from VCRs to PDAs, and much more.

SEE ALSO: Scientists reveal the 13 dark technology scenarios that keep them up at night

DON'T MISS: 9 predictions from old sci-fi movies that actually came true

One-hour photo labs used to occupy street corners and malls — now there are fewer than 200 still standing in America.

Smartphone cameras have made photography a mundane activity.

But for decades, taking pictures with a camera meant choosing photographic movements carefully, since rolls of film held a finite number of shots and required taking the film to be processed and printed.

As technology improved in the late 1970s, week-long photo processing services often performed by specialty camera shops gave way to one-hour photo labs. These labs popped up in department stores, grocery stores, camera shops, and even stand-alone huts with pricey street-corner real estate.

At their peak in 1993, there were 7,600 one-hour labs in the US, and another 14,700 so-called mini-labs inside chain stores like Kmart. If you didn't live through the 1980s and 1990s, it's hard to visualize just how common these stores were.

Of course, it's no surprise what happened to one-hour photo labs, and photo developers in general. As digital cameras and smartphones hit the market, the need for photo developers disappeared virtually overnight.

In 2015, Bloomberg reported that no other US business had declined as much in the preceding 15 years as one-hour photo labs, and by that year, there were just 190 stores still operating anywhere in the country.

For two decades, every computer came with a floppy disk drive to load programs.

The floppy disk's history is inextricably tied to the growth of the personal computer.

While an eight-inch version of the floppy dates back to 1967, the first IBM PC shipped with a 5.25-inch floppy in 1981. It held 360 kilobytes of data, which is about a third of megabyte.

It was called a "floppy" drive because the data disc was enclosed in a flexible sheath, but the name stuck even for the far more rigid 3.5-inch version which quickly became standard equipment on PCs for the next two decades.

Until the rise of CDs, floppy disks were the standard medium for how software was packaged, sold, and installed. It wasn't unusual, for example, to get a box with a dozen floppy disks to install a large program (Microsoft Office 97 came on 55 floppy disks). Eventually, not only did software become too large, but even a single user file — like an MP3 song file — couldn't fit on a floppy, which held just 1.44MB.

Despite how universal the floppy was, there was enormous interest in replacing it for standard file transfers. In the mid-1990s, many consumers owned storage drives like the Iomega Zip drive, which read interchangeable 100MB cartridges, for example, and around 2000, USB flash drives finally offered a simple, affordable, and high-capacity solution that's still routinely used today.  

1998 was the beginning of the end for the venerable floppy. Apple unveiled the iMac G3, the first personal computer without a floppy, and PC makers slowly followed suit over the next few years. Floppies hung on for a number of years, but Sony — the last floppy disk maker on earth — stopped manufacturing disks in March of 2011.

Even though floppy disks are now totally obsolete, they live on as the "save" icon on many computer programs — even if young people have no idea what it is.

Personal Digital Assistants were the precursor to smartphones.

Personal Digital Assistants, known as PDAs, took the world by storm in the 1990s.

It's not hard to see why — they were proto-smartphones, able to give people their first taste of pocket-sized mobile computing. PDAs stored contact information, ran apps, played games, and some could do more media-savvy tasks like play music and video and access the internet. PayPal actually got its start on PDAs as an app that let Palm Pilot users exchange money.

The '90s were a busy decade for tech companies trying to invent the perfect handheld device, but many will agree that Apple kickstarted the PDA movement in 1993 with its Newton MessagePad, which recognized plain-English handwriting. But the devices most people actually bought were the Palm Pilot (which emerged in 1996) and Microsoft's Pocket PC, both of which became, if just for a few years, essential business tools.

Of course, it's not hard to see why they faded away. PDAs were Jurassic-era smartphones, and they could only exist as long as no one took the inherent features of a PDA and added the ability to make phone calls. When Apple released the iPhone in 2007, it seamlessly integrated into everyday life in a way PDAs never could. Palm stopped making pure PDAs by 2007, but launched an unsuccessful smartphone called the Palm Pre in 2009.

For decades, teachers used overhead projectors to beam their lessons onto screens.

The overhead projector was a permanent fixture in schools and offices for almost 50 years.

The projection system displayed images on a wall or screen by shining a bright lamp up through a transparency and into a mirror that diverted the light by 90 degrees forward.

Overhead projectors were simple devices, but required the document be transparent. For almost any student from the '60s through the '90s, teachers writing on a transparency sheet projecting onto the wall would be a familiar sight.

In the 2000s, overhead projectors began to be displaced by a number of newer technologies. Schools began to adopt interactive white boards which let teachers project digital documents like PowerPoint presentations and other more engaging content.

While there are certainly still overhead projectors in use in some schools, the market for these devices has evaporated. 3M, a company that made projectors for more than 50 years, stopped manufacturing them in 2015.

Thanks to VCRs, every home had movies on VHS tapes you had to rewind.

Imagine being able to watch a movie at home, whenever you wanted. Or see an episode of "Mork and Mindy" that you missed because you got home too late.

It was hard to imagine this any time before about 1977, but that's when the VHS video recorder debuted. (The platform defeated Sony's Betamax largely because it was less expensive and tapes could store two hours rather than one.)

VHS was a staple of home entertainment through the '80s and well into the '90s. VCRs enabled time-shifting, or recording a broadcast show to watch later. And they also gave birth to video rental stores, which in 1988, numbered in the tens of thousands in the US. Picking up a movie to rent on Friday night was America's pastime.

VCRs didn't become obsolete overnight, but died slowly. Videophiles embraced the LaserDisc format, and by 1998, there were 2 million LaserDisc households. DVD players entered the market in 1997, followed by both HD DVD and Blu-ray.

In 1998, the VCR industry tried its hand at high definition with HD VHS. But Netflix's first streaming plan delivered perhaps the fatal blow to analog movie tapes in 2007. Funai, the last company on earth making VCRs, stopped production in 2016.

Classified ads kept print newspapers in business for more than a century — but Craigslist made quick work of them.

Perhaps the oldest thing on this list to die, classified ads made newspapers profitable for most of a century.

The first modern classified section was published in the Philadelphia Public Ledger shortly after the end of the Civil War. By some accounts, as the 20th century progressed, non-personal classifieds accounted for as much as 40% of newspaper revenue. It was the go-to resource for people to buy and sell household items, find used cars, and look for employment.

By the mid-1990s, though, the internet was siphoning classified business away from newspapers. Conventional wisdom is that one site in particular — Craigslist — single-handedly killed newspaper classified ads, since the site was easy to use and most ads were free. In 2006, the Economist wrote that Craigslist founder "Craig Newmark … has probably done more than anything to destroy newspapers' income."

In 2010, Poynter reported that classified ad revenue was down 70% in the previous 10 years.

Once upon a time, most people carried paper road maps in their cars.

Road maps were a staple of American cars for decades.

After the construction of the interstate highway system, it became popular for companies like Rand McNally to create road maps for oil companies, who typically gave maps away at gas stations. By the mid-1960s, at least 200 million such road maps had been given away. 

Predictably, GPS navigation has severely constrained road map sales — they're simply not essential anymore. Road maps started to lose their value in the late 1990s, when sites like MapQuest let users create turn-by-turn directions and print them on their home printer.

Eventually, cars started being designed with built-in GPS, and today, even that innovation isn't essential, thanks to smartphones with GPS and map apps.

Nowadays, state tourism departments are printing far fewer maps, if any at all. In 2012, Pennsylvania was only printing a quarter of the 3 million maps it did a decade earlier, and Washington state stopped entirely. And while Rand McNally continues to sell maps, good luck finding someone you know who has one in their car.

MP3 players were basically iPhones that couldn't make phone calls.

Like PDAs, MP3 players are a technology that had a brief, shining moment in the spotlight. The very first model, MPMan F10, hit retail in 1998, and the entire category was declared essentially dead by 2012, thanks to the rise of the smartphone.

There was perhaps no better signal that MP3s were actually obsolete than the fact that by 2014 Apple had discontinued most iPods, the product line that virtually defined the MP3 player. Even Steve Jobs understood this was happening — he once called the iPhone "the best iPod we've ever made."

But while they were around, MP3 players were a revelation for people who wanted music on the go. They were better than portable cassette players because they had no moving parts, and were often smaller.

But at the start, MP3 players were clumsy devices. They generally required you to copy a limited amount of music onto the device via a cable or to copy tracks to a memory card, and then insert it into the player. Later devices could sync with the desktop computer, but often still lacked memory — the Rio PMP300, a popular player from 1998, shipped with 32MB. In 2001, Apple introduced the iPod, a refined take on the concept of the portable music player, and became the most popular player on the market.

In the end, MP3 players disappeared for the same reason that so many things have become obsolete — it was completely subsumed by smartphones.  

And just 20 years ago there were 2 million phone booths standing in the US.

There was a time not that long ago when finding a phone booth was about as easy as walking down any city street. But by the time the Colin Farrell movie "Phone Booth" was made in 2003, the film's producers said that the last phone booth in Manhattan had been removed while the movie was being filmed in the city.

There was an unintended reason phone booths became so popular in the first place.

In 1967, the US Supreme Court ruled that people had a Fourth Amendment right to privacy at phone booths, and so they quickly became a haven for criminals to conduct business on the streets. Regardless of why they were used, phone booths were ubiquitous — there were more than a million phone booths in the US by 1960, and by 1999, there were 2 million.

Today, there are only about 100,000 pay phones in the US, or only slightly more than existed in 1902.

While it's no mystery why pay phones are less popular today than they were a few decades ago — everyone carries a phone in their pocket — there were public policy factors at work as well. As reported in the Atlantic, a number of cities spent the last few decades quietly working to remove pay phones or zone them out of existence in efforts to reduce crime.

• On Tuesday, Microsoft announced its workplace messaging and collaboration app Teams has hit 20 million daily active users.
• Its rival Slack announced in October that it has 12 million daily active users — but emphasized how much time users spend on its app, indicating how much people actually like using it.
• Microsoft offers Teams as part of its Office 365 business cloud productivity suite, which is a major advantage as it has many long-time enterprise customers.
• Read more on the Business Insider homepage.

Microsoft announced Tuesday that Teams, its workplace messaging and collaboration app, has hit 20 million daily active users — again one-upping its rival Slack.

Microsoft says it saw more than a 50% increase in usage of its Teams platform since July, when it announced that it had 13 million daily active users. Microsoft bundles Teams in with its Office 365 productivity suite for business, which analysts have said is a major advantage that could make it more difficult for Slack to compete.

In comparison, Slack announced in October that it has 12 million daily active users, at the same time highlighting that that users spend over nine hours a day connected to the service, and 90 minutes a day actively using the app — showing, in the company's view, that users actually enjoy using the app to get work done.

The competition between the two has proven contentious: On-stage at a recent talk, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield said that Microsoft has been "surprisingly unsportsmanlike" as a business rival, and leans on the popularity of Office 365 to push Teams over the top.

Besides messaging, Teams customers have participated in over 27 million voice or video meetings and performed over 200 million open, edit, or download actions on files stored in the service, Microsoft said. Last week, Microsoft and Salesforce also announced an integration for Teams with Salesforce's Sales Cloud and Service Cloud products.

SEE ALSO: The Microsoft-owned GitHub is under pressure for its work with ICE, as employees resign and activists protest its biggest event of the year

Join the conversation about this story »

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

We've long noted that T-Mobile's brand reputation as a feisty consumer-friendly disruptor is only really skin deep. While the T-Mobile of 2012 or so certainly added some much needed competition to the wireless sector (killing ETFs, eliminating long-term contracts, and eroding international roaming costs), more recently the company has started to look a lot like the bigger competitors (AT&T, Verizon) it pretends to be superior to. From mocking groups like the EFF to opposing net neutrality, the company isn't all that different from the companies its brash CEO John Legere likes to make fun of.

The disconnect between the T-Mobile consumer friendly "uncarrier" brand and reality has proven particularly notable as T-Mobile and Sprint have kissed up to the Trump administration to gain regulatory approval for their controversial $26 billion megamerger.

From hiring Trump campaign manager Cory Lewandowski days after he mocked a kid with Down Syndrome on TV, to trampling the Constitution's emoluments clause by ramping up patronage of Trump's DC hotel to get merger approval, it hasn't been a pretty sight. Not a week goes by where Legere, who spent years mocking other companies' "bullshit," can't be found making false promises related to the megadeal.

While the deal has unsurprisingly received the DOJ (now run by former Verizon lawyer Bill Barr) and FCC (now run by former Verizon lawyer Ajit Pai) blessing thanks to T-Mobile's relentless ass kissing, it still faces a looming lawsuit by a bipartisan coalition of 13 state AGs. Which makes it an interesting time for T-Mobile CEO John Legere to announce he'll be leaving the company starting next May to be replaced by current T-Mobile COO Mike Sievert. Legere likely realizes it's best to go out on top. He also likely realizes that he probably shouldn't stick around to watch his company slowly become everything he claims to despise:

"Modern T-Mobile was born from the remnants of the DOJ’s decision to block AT&T from buying T-Mobile in 2011. The blocking of the deal forced AT&T to pay a $4 billion break up fee, money then used to propel T-Mobile to success.

Ironically, a company born out of government opposition to wireless consolidation is now pushing for one of the most controversial megadeals in industry history. The shift, driven largely by T-Mobile majority owner Deutsche Telekom, forced Legere into a role that’s in stark contrast to the brash, consumer-friendly persona he’d built since 2012."

If you've listened to economists, consumer groups, or 40 years of telecom history, it's clear that eliminating just one of four wireless competitors is going to hurt competition, raise rates, and result in endless layoffs as duplicative positions are inevitably eliminated. Since Legere has been busy promising the exact opposite of that, it's probably a good time to get while the getting's good, before his entire branding persona--replete with cookbooks and magenta high tops--is exposed as superficial by the company's inevitable thirst to take advantage of less competition than ever.

• Microsoft reported Tuesday that Teams, a messaging competitor to Slack, has 20 million daily active users. 
• Slack plunged as much as 11% on the news. In October, Slack reported 12 million daily active users.
• In addition to having more daily active users than Slack, Microsoft also said that Teams users grew by more than 50% since its last report in July. 
• Watch Slack trade live on Markets Insider.

Shares of Slack fell as much as 11% Tuesday after Microsoft reported that its competing messaging product, Teams, has 20 million daily active users. 

That's 8 million more users than Slack, which reported 12 million daily active users in October. 

It's also a huge gain in the lead Microsoft already had over Slack. In July, the company announced that it had 13 million daily active users. That means that Microsoft has seen usage of Teams increase more than 50% in the last few months. Microsoft shares were relatively unchanged Tuesday. 

Slack, on the other hand, has argued that while it doesn't have as many daily active users, the ones that do use the application spend more than nine hours a day using it, showing that people actually like using the product. 

The company has also previously called out Microsoft for its business practices, calling it "surprisingly unsportsmanlike." Microsoft offers Teams for free to businesses that use Microsoft Office 365, which could mean that it's counting users that don't actually use Teams very often, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield has claimed. 

Slack is down more than 45% since spiking nearly 50% during its first day of public trading in June.

Slack has a consensus price target of $29.65 and nine "buy" ratings, 8 "hold" ratings, and two "sell" ratings from analysts covering the company, according to Bloomberg data. 

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: A big-money investor in juggernauts like Facebook and Netflix breaks down the '3rd wave' firms that are leading the next round of tech disruption

Artificial Intelligence (AI): The fundamental change in our daily work routine, the way we live and interact with others, is all going to be represented by the fourth industrial revolution.

Moving from the third to the fourth industrial revolution is going to open a new chapter in human development – incorporating the extraordinary technological advances. These advanced technologies are emerging and will continue to merge in the business world. We see the fourth industrial revolution changing the digital, physical, and biological worlds. It is creating novel opportunities and promises of a better future.

On the other hand, the evolution of technology will become the reason for potential risks and dangers. The fourth industrial revolution is a lot more than just technology-driven change. The revolution is providing various opportunities to facilitate everyone. We see it harnessing technologies to create an inclusive human-centered future.

Fast-paced revolutions force people to rethink what it means to live in a world surrounded by AI technology and question how organizations will develop and create their market value.

Challenges and Opportunities

The fourth industrial revolution is the continuation of the third for, the digital revolution has already marked the industries since the last century. However, this revolution is based on the fusion of technologies that are eventually blurring the thin lines between the physical, digital and biological sphere.

The fourth revolution, no doubt, is based on the previous revolution, but it can be counted just as prolongation of the third industrial revolution. The evolution speed, scope and system impacts are the driving factors that make the Fourth Industrial revolution the distinct.

The current breakthroughs are no longer occurring in a defined period and time.  Comparing this period with the previous revolutions, it can be clearly analyzed that the fourth industrial revolution is evolving at an exponential pace. It proceeds at a linear pace, disrupting almost all industries and sectors in every country.

These reasons govern the transformation of the entire business world, production and management, and even the government sector.

What Economists Say

Economists say the fourth industrial revolution has a significant tendency to improve the lifestyle of the people all across the globe by raising global income levels. For now, consumers are the ones who are taking the most advantage from the digital world because of AI-powered products and services.

These innovations are there to facilitate us in our daily lives, either professional or personal. From ordering food to purchasing items and making payments remotely is all because of the technology. Not to forget Alexa being one of the finest inventions of AI.

Technological innovations are expected to lead the supply-side industry producing long-term gains. Reducing communication and transportation costs will drop. This will eventually result in more effective logistics and global supply chain.

Furthermore, it will eradicate the trading cost and expenditures. This is major factor in driving economic growth by opening new markets.

However, some economists have pointed out that the fourth revolution could impose major challenges by disrupting the labor markets. The AI technology is often taken as a substitute for human intelligence, even the idea behind the invention of the technology is to automate the manual processes for increased productivity and efficiency.

It is believed that automation can substitute for labor across various industries in the entire economy, which may increase the gap between capitals and labors. On another note, the automation can also result in secure and rewarding job opportunities. It can either of the case or maybe the hybrid – a combination of both.

The Future of Work

One of the greatest societal concerns associated with the fourth industrial revolution is “inequality.” The term inequality explains the rising gaps between the labors and the people dependent on capital in terms of financial gains and wealth.

The group of intellectual and physical capital providers includes innovators and investors. And stakeholders are significant beneficiaries of this innovation and technology.

Technology evolution is leading to a vast advancement in automation. With every passing day, the manual processes are becoming automated and will continue in the future as well. It is one of the major reasons why people fear for their jobs.

The increased demand for highly skilled labor in developing countries is an understood fact. It results in high-end jobs for highly-skilled workers leaving minimal opportunities for middle-class people.

According to McKinsey, around 375 million workers may have to change their job occupation by 2030 because market labor demand is rapidly changing.

Despite these challenges, with the ability to come up with novel practices can provide us with new opportunities. The fourth industrial revolution is believed to provide us with a new window of opportunity to learn new skills.

Explore talents and build up new job positions which we weren’t aware of before. Doing so will not only lead to the growth of the business but it will also help in a fresh generation of highly skilled workers in more diverse areas.

The impact on the Business Industry

The fourth industrial revolution mainly represents a confluence of different technologies – artificial intelligence, machine learning, augmented, and virtual reality. Internet of things into innovative products, services, and industries.

The Identity verification market is an excellent example of this new AI-powered technology. The impact of these advanced technologies is all set to bring revolution to the business world.

According to a study, the UK government estimated that Artificial intelligence alone could add up to £630 billion to the country’s economy by 2035. This has proposed to make the UK the world’s center for developing AI business. The business executives and managers need to understand that it won’t be just the business but the change is going to impact every sector of the world.

Four main effects on Business

Due to technological advancements, innovation and disruption across all industries, globally, are quite hard to anticipate. Which is driving continuous surprises for the business owners. Undoubtedly, this represents the clear evidence for that Fourth industrial revolution has a notable impact on businesses; however, four main effects are:

1. Customer expectations
2. Product enhancement
3. Collaborative innovation
4. Organizational form

The customers are the building blocks of any economy, that’s why whether consumers or businesses. It is all about improving the services offered to customers. Products and services can be enhanced with digital capabilities that increase the value of the products.

Taking an example of AI-based identity verification services, the technology is making the verification industry more resilient and as per a report, it is expected to grow up to $12.8 billion by 2024.

In the world where business success relies on customer experience, data-based AI-powered services, and effective results through analytics. New forms of collaboration are equally important and that too at the speed at which innovation and disruption are taking place.

Furthermore, due to the emergence of global platforms and technology-based business models; organizational forms, talents, and cultures will have to be revised.

Supply and Demand Economy

The supply industries are seeking new technologies and practices that can create fresh and enticing ways to serve the existing needs of the business and disrupting the existing value chains to come on the top.

The innovative competitors are the driving factor behind this disruption since it is no more following a top-down approach. Having access to global digital platforms for research, marketing, development, sale and distribution, and AI-based digital solutions.

The innovators are diminishing the big fish faster than ever. The reason is improved quality, fast speed and economic price with greater value.

Similarly, vital shifts are also happening on the demand side. The growing transparency between consumers and businesses and changing patterns of consumer behavior and engagement. This engagement is forcing organizations to revise and adapt the new ways to design. The design affects the market and delivery of its products and services.

Data is the new Currency

With the advancement of technology, the use of the internet is very common these days. People spend a lot of time on social media daily, sharing their pictures, status, liking and commenting on the posts.

Also, using the search engines billions of people carryout different searches daily. All this search history and person’s information(GPS coordinates, clickstreams, environmental data, etc.) is stored in the cloud. This results in lots and lots of data.

The data serves as a food for artificial and intelligence since it drives innovation. By applying machine learning algorithms on the obtained data the businesses can get better predictions regarding user interests and demands; that help in the growth of products and businesses.

Personalization is taking a new leap in the market. The customer experience is becoming more personalized and one-to-one powered by artificial intelligence. This is the reason why the lines are blurring between sales. Marketing and services as the focus are now on improving user experience

The impact of AI on Government Agencies

Engagement with Citizens

With the advancement of technology and more convenient communication platforms. The direct engagement of citizens and government agencies is on the rise. The citizens are voicing their opinions and even putting efforts into evading the supervision of public authorities.

The government will need to adopt new technologies and tactics to handle the population and keep them in control by keeping an eye on the digital infrastructure based on pervasive surveillance systems.

To achieve these goals, the government will face high regulatory pressure globally to make change their current policies and approach for public engagement and cater to their needs. Emerging competition and the redistribution of power have pushed the government to adopt new technologies.

National and International Security

The fourth industrial revolution is expected to profoundly impact national and international security by affecting the nature of conflict and increased probability. Warfare isn’t just a single concept of the traditional battlefield. Now it relies on technological innovations.

Modern security concerns are more of a hybrid in nature, i.e., combining traditional battlefields with technology platforms. The distinction between war and peace, violence, and non-violence (e.g., cyberwarfare) is becoming a sort of blurry. For instance, cybercrimes and cyberattacks are new forms of security concerns.

The government will equally or maybe more have to invest in the digital security infrastructure because control lines aren’t the only security gateways for intruders. Online protection is more critical for any country, and global regulatory agencies are even more cautious than before in imposing the compliances.

For example, consider the KYC and AML compliances. Also look at the CCPA, and the GDPR, and how they are used for identity and data protection. The protections will combat cyberattacks nationally and internationally. AI technology is effective in the development of products and services that will create the potential to reduce the security concerns for the government as well as businesses.

Agile Governance for Survival

Technology is advancing at a sheer speed, and the rapid adoption of these new technological innovations are pushing the government to its limits. Gone are the days of the linear and mechanical processes following a strict top-down approach.

Now the governments must incorporate a more data-driven, public-focused, and agile approach to surviving this technology wave. Governments are using the tech in the same way businesses and organizations are using this approach.

The changes that the fourth industrial revolution is bringing requires more realistic and effective solutions for faster policy-making, taking advantage of AI-based innovations. It is believed that the governments who take more advantage of technology.

Open broader gates for businesses in the ever-growing digital world. By creating legislation and; policies that can address the innovations. Are the ones that are going to survive the fourth industrial revolution.

The impact on People

Artificial intelligence is already making its way into our daily lives. However, it will be vital for every individual in the near future. AI innovations are finally fulfilling the promise that technology will make our lives much easier and happier.

Moving into the technology-driven society will definitely affect the way individuals live. There will be challenges and opportunities in the upcoming years and that will shape the future of a people professionally as well as personally.

The revolutions in biotechnology and artificial intelligence are pushing back the threshold of human life and capabilities, which will surely impel us to rethink our moral and ethical boundaries.

Privacy Concern on the Go

The fourth industrial revolution isn’t only changing the way we live but also impacting on who we are. The advent of technology — if on the one hand has made our life easier — it has also raised some serious concerns for privacy.

We have always been sure of the importance of our privacy. But, digitization has made sharing and tracking of our information a vital part of the world.

Face to become ID

The use of Artificial intelligence has taken a whole new frisk in the last few years. Digital fraud and cybercrimes are evolving at such a fast pace. Which has forced businesses and individuals to integrate AI solutions for protecting their identities?

Also, these days, customers expect more from organizations. Individuals expect personalization and extraordinary services complete with perfect security. There seem to be no exceptions. The trend of biometrics proving your ID has been there for years but now is being replaced by the Faces.

Many businesses using Face as the prime factor of identity verification will increase the use of facial recognition technology.

Shaping the Future:

Technology is an invention of the human. Taking into account the previous industrial revolutions and innovations and disruptions associated with them. There is nothing that humans can’t control.

We are the one who brings revolutions to the forefront, so we have the potential to avail the opportunities and shape the fourth industrial revolution. We move towards a better future fulfilling our common goals and reflecting our mutual values and objectives.

The post AI is the Fourth Industrial Revolution Technology appeared first on ReadWrite.

• In the last few years, we've seen record-breaking temperatures, intense hurricanes and wildfires, and unprecedented ice melt.
• All of these are predicted consequences of climate change and are expected to get worse in the coming years.
• Addressing this threat in the next 10 years is critical: Scientists say the world must slash its carbon emissions in half by 2030 to avoid catastrophic warming.
• Here's what we can expect in the next decade.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more.

We only have a decade to avoid the worst consequences of climate change.

That's the warning the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) put out last year. But so far, nations are not slashing emissions enough to keep Earth's temperature from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels — the threshold established in the Paris climate agreement. 

"What we know is that unabated climate change will really transform our world into something that is unrecognizable," Kelly Levin, a senior associate at the World Resources Institute's climate program, told Business Insider.

That transformation has already begun. The last few years saw record-breaking temperatures, catastrophic and bizarre storms, and unprecedented ice melt. That's all likely to get worse by 2030.

Here's what we can expect in the next 10 years.

SEE ALSO: Before-and-after photos reveal how landmarks have been ravaged by fires, floods, and melting ice over the last decade

Scientists attribute the increasing frequency of record-breaking temperatures, unprecedented ice melt, and extreme weather shifts to greenhouse-gas emissions.

Fossil fuels like coal contain compounds like carbon dioxide and methane, which trap heat from the sun. Extracting and burning these fuels for energy releases those gases into the atmosphere, where they accumulate and heat up the Earth over time.

"As long as we burn fossil fuels and load the atmosphere with carbon pollution, it all gets worse," climate scientist Michael Mann told Business Insider in an email. 

Last year, the IPCC warned that we only have until 2030 to act in order to avoid the worst consequences of severe climate change.

According to the IPCC, the world's carbon emissions have to fall by 45% by 2030 to keep the world's average temperature from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. 

So the next 10 years are crucial for any efforts to slow this trend.

If Earth warms more than 1.5 degrees, scientists think the world's ecosystems could start to collapse.

"The choices that we make today are going to have profound impacts," Levin said.

Even if nations stick to the goals they set under the Paris climate agreement, emissions will still likely be too high, according to the IPCC.

Under the voluntary goals set in the Paris agreement, the world would still emit the equivalent of 52 to 58 gigatons of carbon dioxide per year by 2030, according to the report. (This is measured as an "equivalent" in order to factor in other greenhouse gases, like methane, which is 84 times more effective at trapping heat than carbon dioxide.)

So far, most countries are not on track anyway.

Regardless of what actions we take, there are a few changes scientists know we'll see in the next 10 years.

That's because the world will keep getting warmer even if we stop emitting greenhouse gases immediately.

In the worst case scenario, we might even the 1.5-degree temperature-rise mark by 2030.

The globe's ice caps will continue to melt, and crucial ice sheets like the one in Greenland might start down an irreversible path toward disappearing completely.

"Somewhere between 1.5 and 2 degrees, there's a tipping point after which it will no longer be possible to maintain the Greenland Ice Sheet," Ruth Mottram, a climate scientist at the Danish Meteorological Institute, told Inside Climate News. "What we don't have a handle on is how quickly the Greenland Ice Sheet will be lost."

Greenland's ice is already approaching that tipping point, according to a study published in May. Whereas the melting that happened during warm cycles used to get balanced out when new ice formed during cool cycles, warm periods now cause significant meltdown and cool periods simply pause it. 

That makes it difficult for the ice sheet to regenerate what it's losing.

That will lead to more sea-level rise — about 0.3 to 0.6 feet on average globally by 2030, according to the US' National Climate Assessment.

In addition to melting ice, rising ocean temperatures cause seas to rise because warm water takes up more volume. As the globe heats up, scientists expect that simple fact of physics to account for about 75% of future sea-level rise.

The risk of high-tide flooding (which happens in the absence of storms or severe weather) is rapidly increasing for communities on the US Gulf and East Coasts.

In 2018, the US Northeast saw a median of one major sunny-day flood per year. By 2030, projections suggest the region will see a median of five such floods per year. By 2045, that number could grow to 25 floods.

The rising seawater won't be distributed evenly across the globe.

Low-lying countries like Bangladesh, Vietnam, and the Seychelles are especially vulnerable. Rising oceans have already begun to threaten cities like Miami, New Orleans, Venice, Jakarta, and Lagos.

Some areas could see sea levels up to 6 feet higher by the end of the century.

Extra warmth and water means hurricanes will become slower and stronger. In the next decade, we're likely to see more cyclones like Hurricane Dorian, which sat over the Bahamas for nearly 24 hours.

That's because hurricanes use warm water as fuel, so as Earth's oceans and air heat up, tropical storms get stronger, wetter, and slower.

Over the past 70 years or so, the speed of hurricanes and tropical storms has slowed about 10% on average, according to a 2018 study. 

When storms are slower, their forceful winds, heavy rain, and surging tides have much more time to cause destruction. In the Bahamas, Dorian leveled entire towns.

"The slower you go, that means more rain. That means more time that you're going to have those winds. That's a long period of time to have hurricane-force winds," National Hurricane Center director Ken Graham said in a Facebook Live video as Dorian approached the Bahamas.

A study published earlier this month found that the frequency of the most damaging hurricanes has increased 330% century-over-century.

To make matters worse, a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture. The peak rain rates of storms have increased by 30% over the past 60 years.

That means up to 4 inches of water per hour. Hurricane Harvey in 2017 was a prime example of this: After it made landfall, Harvey weakened to a tropical storm then stalled for days, dumping unprecedented amounts of rain on the Houston area. Scientist Tom Di Liberto described it as the "storm that refused to leave."

Hurricanes are likely to intensify more rapidly as well.

"It's pretty well understood that if the water is warmer and it's causing more moist air to come up, you have the potential of a storm to grow quickly and intensely," Brian Haus, a researcher who simulates hurricanes at the University of Miami, previously told Business Insider.

Overall, extreme weather is expected grow more common and intense.

"Certain types of extreme events in the US have already become more frequent and intense and long-lasting," Levin said. "There's no reason to think that we're not going to start to see an amplification of what we've been seeing."

The World Health Organization (WHO) projects that, overall, climate change will kill an additional 241,000 people per year by 2030.

The WHO expects that heat-related illnesses will be a major culprit, killing up to 121,464 additional people by 2030.

In the coming years, experts expect to see "day zeros" — the term for the moment when a city's taps run dry.

In January 2018, Cape Town, South Africa, got dangerously close to this reality: The government announced the city was three months from day zero. Residents successfully limited their water use enough to make it to the next rainy season, however. 

The IPCC projects severe reductions in water resources for 8% of the global population from 2021 to 2040.

Dry vegetation in hot regions lights up easily, which means more frequent, bigger wildfires.

"Climate change, with rising temperatures and shifts in precipitation patterns, is amplifying the risk of wildfires and prolonging the season," the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said in a July release.

A 2016 study found that climate change nearly doubled the amount of forest that burned in the western US between 1984 and 2015, adding over 10 billion additional acres of burned area. In California in particular, the annual area burned in summer wildfires increased fivefold from 1972 to 2018.

We're also likely to see more wildfires in the Arctic, which is warming almost twice as fast as the global average. That means Arctic sea ice is also disappearing.

Rapid warming means that crucial sea ice is melting, which accelerates warming even more.

"You take what was a reflective surface, the white ice, and you expose darker oceans underneath it," Levin said. "That can lead to a much greater absorption of solar radiation, and knock-on warming impacts as well as change of weather patterns."

The Amazon rainforest is in trouble as well, largely because farmers and loggers are cutting it down so rapidly.

A 2008 study projected that humans would clear away 31% of the Amazon by 2030. Another 24% would be damaged by drought or logging, the study found.

People have already cut down 20% of the Amazon. If another 20% disappears, that could trigger a feedback loop known as a "dieback," in which the forest could dry out and become a savannah.

"The risk of transforming the Amazon to a savannah-like state — it could have a tremendous impact for our ability worldwide to get a handle on the climate-change problem," Levin said.

That's because the Amazon stores up to 140 billion tons of carbon dioxide — the equivalent of 14 decades' worth of human emissions. Releasing that would accelerate global warming.

"You have a vital carbon sink no longer acting as a carbon sink, but instead acting as a carbon source," Levin added.

Other crucial ecosystems face collapse in the next decade as well. At present rates, it's expected that 60% of all coral reefs will be highly or critically threatened by 2030.

High ocean temperatures can cause coral to expel the algae living in its tissue and turn white, a process called coral bleaching.

It's an increasingly dire problem, given that oceans absorb 93% of the extra heat that greenhouse gases trap in the atmosphere. Recent research revealed that the seas are heating up 40% faster, on average, than the prior estimate. 

The consequences of coral bleaching extend beyond the coral itself, since reefs house 25% of all marine life and provide the equivalent of $375 billion in goods and services each year, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

About 55% of the world's oceans could suffer due to rising temperatures, acidification, decreasing oxygen, and other symptoms of climate change by 2030.

These largely irreversible changes will eventually force mass migrations of marine life, upend ocean ecosystems, and threaten human livelihoods that depend on the ocean, according to a 2017 study. Many species that can't adapt could die out.

"Climate impacts are also going to exacerbate social inequality," Levin said.

That's because people with fewer resources will be less able to avoid the worst impacts.

"That National Climate Assessment shows that residents, for example, in rural communities who often have less capacity to adapt, are going to be especially hard-hit given their dependence on agriculture," Levin explained.

She added: "You can think also of the scenario of the poor who live in cities who could be at greater exposure to heat stress if they lack air conditioning and heat waves increase in frequency and duration."

A 2015 report from the World Bank predicted that the climate crisis will push an additional 100 million people into extreme poverty by 2030.

That's because global crop yields could fall by 5% by 2030 in the face of climate change, according to the report. That will make food more scarce and more expensive, especially in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia.

Ultimately, "nobody is free from the impacts of climate change," Mann said.

"If you're on the coast, you're treated by hurricanes and sea-level rise," he added. "If you're in the western US, more intense, faster-spreading wildfires, worse drought. And we're seeing unprecedented heat waves and flooding events throughout the US."

To avoid these devastating consequences, "we need annual emissions to be about half of what they are now by 2030," Levin said.

That means "we need to shift across the board in terms of policies, technologies, and behavior," she added.

Scientists say the world has to shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy, especially transforming the way we travel and produce food.

"That means we need politicians who are willing to act in our interest rather than on the part of vested interests," Mann said. "Voting in the 2020 election is probably the single-most important thing we can do to address climate change."

Levin and the IPCC both say that, since we're so far off the path towards quitting fossil fuels, the transition will also require technologies that suck carbon out of the atmosphere. 

"It's definitely going to be a massive undertaking, but the risks are so large that we can't afford not to do it," Levin said. 

• Google has bought a startup called CloudSimple for an undisclosed sum. 
• This smart acquisition comes as no surprise to anybody watching Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian and his strategy.
• Interestingly, CloudSimple was originally a crucial part of Microsoft's cloud ecosystem — until Michael Dell brokered a peace deal between VMware and Microsoft.
• Now CloudSimple stands as a symbol of how important VMware has become to all the major cloud players.
• Read more enterprise tech stories on BI here.

Google announced on Monday that it was buying a startup called CloudSimple for an undisclosed sum. 

To anyone watching Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian and team try to build Google Cloud — which lags behind Amazon Web Services and Microsoft in market share —  into a fiercer enterprise competitor, this acquisition is a smart one that comes as no surprise.

But the backstory as to how CloudSimple came into Google's hands is an interesting one: CloudSimple was originally a crucial part of Microsoft's cloud ecosystem. It was founded by Guru Pangal, known for selling his startup StorSimple to Microsoft in 2012 and staying on for the next four years to work on the Microsoft Azure cloud. When he left to launch CloudSimple, he immediately landed funding from Microsoft's venture fund.

CloudSimple became an authorized VMware partner. Its goal was to allow VMware customers to be able to easily "lift and shift" from their own data centers straight to the cloud. Lots of companies — including most of the largest in the world — use VMware's products to run some of their most important applications such as financial software and databases. VMware counts some 500,000 companies as customers.

Microsoft knew that the fastest way to turn Azure into a global cloud computing giant that could rival Amazon was to grab as many VMware customers as quickly as possible.

But VMware and Microsoft were long-time rivals and VMware had partnered with Amazon Web Services, declaring it as its preferred cloud partner. 

With Microsoft as an investor, the first cloud that CloudSimple's software supported was Azure. Microsoft planned to use CloudSimple to bring VMware's software to Azure, with or without VMware's permission.

VMware was unhappy at first, until Michael Dell, CEO of the eponymous company, entered the picture. Dell's company owns a controlling interest in VMware, but Dell built his fortune selling Windows PCs and has close ties to Microsoft. He brokered a peace in which Microsoft obtained formal permission for Azure to run VMware's software using CloudSimple as the middleman.

But he also slipped another Dell-owned company into the mix: Virtustream, a competitor to CloudSimple that was named the favored method of moving VMware software to Azure.

Google enters the picture

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian also knew he needed to grab as many VMware customers as possible if he hoped to grow the unit to be as big as AWS or Azure.

And so, in August, Google struck up a partnership with the spurned startup, CloudSimple. The talk around town was that Google should cut to the chase and buy CloudSimple. It wasn't clear if the delay was because Google didn't realize it needed the startup, thinking it could do the years-worth of engineering work by itself.

But clearly with this deal, Google has decided that owning CloudSimple, and its talent, is a shortcut into the lucrative world of VMware customers — especially those who are using VMware on Microsoft Azure, where CloudSimple made its name.

Meanwhile, VMware spent much of 2019 showing that it's changed its mind about its cloud strategy and is now happy to have its software run on all the major clouds. 

While AWS is still VMware's "preferred" partner — the only cloud that has a dedicated engineering team from VMware and joint sales teams — it is not pretending the relationship is exclusive. VMware COO Sanjay Poonen has now brokered partnerships in one form or another with all six of the world's biggest public clouds. 

Got a tip? Contact Julie Bort on Signal at (970) 430-6112 using a non-work phone, or email at jbort@businessinsider.com. Open DMs on Twitter @Julie188.  You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

• Now read:
• How VMware became a secret superpower in the cloud wars and why Amazon Web Services should not be happy but Google and Microsoft are thrilled
• Insiders say WeWork's IT is a patchwork of cheap devices and Band-Aid fixes that will take millions to fix
• Amazon CTO Werner Vogels tells us how he turned his favorite part of his job into a TV show starring himself and a bunch of startups
• Amazon CTO Werner Vogels almost blew the company off when it first reached out to him 15 years ago, believing it was 'just a bookshelf'

Join the conversation about this story »

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Plenty has been made of the President's unwillingness to adhere to anything close to reasonable security when using his mobile phones. Whereas the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) and the National Security Agency usually work in concert providing state leaders with "hardened" devices that are heavily encrypted, routinely updated, and frequently swapped out, Trump has refused to use these more secure DMCC-S devices (effectively a Samsung Galaxy S4 device utilizing Samsung's Knox security architecture) because they apparently infringe on his ability to Tweet.

Just a few months ago, Senators sent a letter expressing concern that Trump's mobile phone practices were leaving the President open to potential hacking by foreign entities:

"The President of the United States stands alone as the single-most valuable intelligence target on the planet. Given the apparent lack of progress the Administration has made since initial reports in 2016 of the President’s poor operational security, it appears the only thing standing between the Office of the President and the next national security nightmare is a combination of President Trump’s personal restraint and sheer luck."

Eventually, the President was convinced to use two iPhones: one locked down specifically for Twitter, and the other specifically tasked with making phone calls. Even here reports have suggested that Trump has struggled to adhere to these restrictions, often making personal calls on his unsecured Samsung Galaxy III.

This week in testimony before the House Intel Committee, diplomat William Taylor testified he had recently learned of a call between US/EU ambassador Gordon Sondland and President Trump while at dinner at a restaurant in Kiev. The conversations regarded Trump's efforts to pressure Ukraine to help him dig up dirt on Biden, though security experts were more concerned by another aspect of the revelation; namely the idea that the President was openly discussing sensitive issues -- in public -- on foreign cellular networks:

"There are a ton of risks there, but some of the biggest involve the fact that the call is traversing the foreign country's telco,"said Jake Williams a former National Security Agency operator and founder of Rendition Infosec. "Even if you trust that country not to spy on their own telcos, others probably have. There's a non-zero chance that some country (or multiple countries) are getting call data records (CDR). This definitely would have made for increased targeting on Sondland and his contacts. Honestly, if I saw that in CDR collection, my first thought would be, 'That has to be a troll, right?' That would be immediately followed by, 'Get full voice coverage on his phone (and everyone around him). These guys don't understand OPSEC."

Needless to say, having phone calls in public restaurants over foreign cell networks is considered a no no in security circles:

"During that call with Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, Trump spoke so loudly about “the investigations” that someone in the restaurant who was not on the phone could hear his words, according to Bill Taylor, the senior American diplomat in Ukraine.

It is highly likely that others were listening too. Russia’s intelligence services have previously demonstrated the capability to intercept the phone calls of American diplomats in Ukraine and make recordings that can be used to compromise or embarrass those officials."

Granted there's a universe of other ways that foreign and US intelligence can and do spy on public officials even if you're using an encrypted connection, from the use of IMSI catchers to the exploitation of the longstanding SS7 flaw we've long noted nobody seems interested in fixing:

Like so many tech issues, the stupidity will get lost in partisan fisticuffs, with the President's supporters taking such deep offense at the idea the President is terrible at security that they'll mindlessly discount this as just more unfair partisan criticism they don't have to pay attention to. But reality doesn't care, and report after report has made it pretty damn clear the President of the United States has garbage-level OPSEC that no level of hand holding appears capable of mitigating.

• Salesforce announced Microsoft Azure would be its public-cloud vendor for Salesforce's cloud software for marketing professionals.
• It's the latest in a long history of disputes and partnerships, and the first formal announcement between the two companies since their relationship soured after a contentious battle for LinkedIn in 2016.
• The two tech giants have had a rocky history, with their CEOs exchanging public barbs and suing each other, accusing one another of patent infringement. 
• When Satya Nadella became Microsoft's CEO, he introduced a friendlier Microsoft. Nadella "opened a door that was closed. And locked. And barricaded," Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said around that time. Salesforce and Microsoft announced their first partnership in 2014 and continued to work together.
• Then tensions rose again after Microsoft reportedly tried to buy Salesforce and came to a head after both companies bid on LinkedIn. Benioff even complained about the deal to regulators after Microsoft announced it would acquire LinkedIn. The companies partnered with each other's rivals after that.
• The latest deal is indicative of Nadella's strategy to do whatever it takes to make Microsoft the top cloud company as it tries to catch up to the market-leading Amazon, and it helps Salesforce stay relevant, analysts said.
• Click here for more BI Prime stories.

Salesforce's surprise announcement that Microsoft Azure will be its public-cloud vendor for Salesforce's cloud software for marketing professionals is the latest twist in a long history of partnerships and disputes.

The two tech giants have had a complicated relationship over the years, perhaps starting in the mid-2000s, when former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff traded public jabs. The animosity continued for nearly a decade, until Microsoft named a new CEO, Satya Nadella, who introduced a friendlier Microsoft.

Nadella "opened a door that was closed. And locked. And barricaded," Benioff said at the time. The companies partnered for the first time, and Nadella even appeared at Salesforce's big Dreamforce conference. But tensions started to rise once again as Microsoft tried to buy Salesforce, according to CNBC, and later beat Salesforce in a contentious bid to acquire LinkedIn.

Thursday's announcement is the first formal partnership between Microsoft and Salesforce since that deal soured their relationship in 2016.

The latest back-and-forth is indicative of Nadella's strategy to do whatever it takes to make Microsoft the top cloud company as it tries to catch up to the market-leading Amazon, Rob Oliver, a senior research analyst at Baird Equity Research, told Business Insider.

"If you look at the way that Satya Nadella has approached his job since he took the helm, he ran the Azure business," Oliver said. "And he has approached this job as, 'Microsoft is the No. 1 enterprise incumbent globally. What do we need to do to be the No. 1 cloud enterprise incumbent?"

The deal means Microsoft is putting aside competition in the customer-relationship-management space, where its Dynamics 365 competes with Salesforce, in order to grow its cloud business, Seth Lippincott, the director of research at Nucleus Research, said. That indicates the cloud is what Microsoft expects to drive the company's growth, Lippincott said.

It also reveals that Microsoft's strategy to catch up to the market-leading Amazon Web Services is to go after market share through big partnerships, the Gartner analyst Sid Nag said.

Microsoft has a big gap to close to catch up with AWS. Gartner in a report released over the summer pegged the 2018 market share for AWS at 47.8%, and that of Microsoft Azure at 15.5%. It seems clear that Microsoft has realized that it can't close that distance without a little help from some frenemies.

"Organic growth is an extremely hard way to catch up with the market leader three times the size of the nearest competitor," Nag said. "Their best bet to grow is through these partnerships and catch up with AWS."

Meanwhile, the deal helps Salesforce stay relevant, Baird's Oliver said. The company has been looking to move its data to public-cloud providers versus its own data centers, he said. As part of the deal, Salesforce will also build an integration across Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Microsoft Teams. Having these integrations with Microsoft's suite of productivity tools as part of that, which many enterprise customers use.

The takeaway: The deal is mutually beneficial. "It's pretty clear that there was a little something for everyone in this deal," Oliver said. 

Here's a look back at the complicated history between Salesforce and Microsoft:

2005: CEOs trade barbs

The first time Microsoft and Salesforce publicly traded barbs appears to be when then-Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer — known for having a "hard time" getting along with other CEOs — made a remark about Salesforce during a conference in Redmond, Washington.

Ballmer said Microsoft would give Salesforce a "very effective run for its money," and Benioff quickly responded by issuing the following statement:

Microsoft's failed enterprise software strategy has let the industry down. We have competed against them in the CRM market since 2002, and they have failed to deliver a competitive product. They just cancelled version two of that legacy application and skipped ahead to three. In the meantime, we are on the 18th generation of our service in just six years. Customers are tired of waiting for Microsoft to innovate.

Source: ZDNet

2010: Microsoft and Salesforce sue each other, alleging patent infringement

Microsoft sued Salesforce in May 2010, accusing it of patent infringement, and Salesforce filed a countersuit a little more than a month later.

The patents in question included systems for things like displaying a web page with an embedded menu and automated website creation using a template.

The companies settled the dispute by August, when Salesforce agreed to pay Microsoft an undisclosed amount. 

"Microsoft's patent portfolio is the strongest in the software industry and is the result of decades of software innovation. Today's agreement is an example of how companies can compete vigorously in the marketplace while respecting each other's intellectual property rights," Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft's deputy general counsel, said in a statement at the time.

Source: CNET and TechCrunch

2013: Benioff tells Ballmer it's time to go

Ballmer announced plans to step down, pondering whether he was "an emblem of an old era."

Benioff's response, in an earnings conference call at the time: You're right Steve. It's time to go.

"The world has changed," Benioff said. "The companies that are struggling in the market today have not gone cloud. They have not gone social. They have not gone mobile. They are still trying to sell the same old stuff."

Source: Business Insider

2014: Tensions start to fade as Nadella is named as Microsoft's CEO

Microsoft named Nadella as Ballmer's replacement in February 2014, kicking off a series of partnerships.

Benioff would later say Nadella is the "opposite" of Ballmer.

"I think one of the reasons Steve Ballmer is not the CEO of Microsoft, and Satya Nadella is, is because Steve had a hard time having relationships with other CEOs," Benioff said in an interview on Bloomberg TV's "Bloomberg Go" in 2015. "I know that from my personal experience, and Satya's the opposite."

Source: Business Insider

2014: Microsoft strikes its first deal with Salesforce

Less than three months after Nadella became Microsoft CEO, the company signed its first deal with Salesforce, teaming up to bring Salesforce's customer-relationship-management apps and platform to Microsoft's Azure cloud.

The companies followed up the deal with another partnership in October of that year with new joint products.

"We're committed to working with Microsoft to further our mutual customers' success," Benioff said at the time.

Source: Business Insider

2015: Microsoft reportedly tries to buy Salesforce

Microsoft was in "significant talks" to acquire Salesforce, CNBC reported in May 2015, based on "a number of people familiar with the situation," but the companies couldn't agree on a price. 

Microsoft wanted to pay around $55 billion, but Benioff was said to have continually raised his expectations as high as $70 billion.

Nadella, freshly into his new role, was said to be reluctant to pull the trigger.

Source: CNBC

2015: Nadella appears at Salesforce's Dreamforce conference

Nadella appeared at Salesforce's Dreamforce conference in August 2015, its biggest event of the year. It was the first time Dreamforce ever had a notable guest from Microsoft.

It was seen as a sign of a shifting attitude of a friendlier Microsoft.

"Satya has opened a door that was closed. And locked. And barricaded," Benioff said around that time.

Salesforce and Microsoft deepened their partnership shortly after.

Source: Business Insider and Wired

2016: The relationship sours as Microsoft beats Salesforce to buy LinkedIn

Microsoft outmaneuvered Salesforce and acquired the professional social network LinkedIn for $26.2 billion, souring the new-found friendship between the two longtime rivals. 

Benioff, after the deal was announced, said he'd be willing to pay "much more" for LinkedIn and later complained to regulators about the deal.

Until now, 2016 marked the last time Microsoft and Salesforce publicly announced formal partnership agreements.

Source: Business Insider and Baird analysis

2016: Microsoft and Salesforce partner with each other's rivals

Salesforce picked Amazon's cloud-computing service as its "preferred public cloud infrastructure provider," meaning the company would start using AWS across all of its core products. 

"There is no public cloud infrastructure provider that is more sophisticated or has more robust enterprise capabilities for supporting the needs of our growing global customer base," Benioff said in a statement at the time. Salesforce later announced deals with other Microsoft rivals, including Google Cloud and IBM, and, in 2018, said it was running a "vast majority" of workloads on AWS.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has signed big deals with Adobe, including as recently as March.

Source: Business Insider and Baird analysis

November 14: Microsoft and Salesforce announce another big deal

Salesforce chose Microsoft Azure as the public cloud to power Marketing Cloud, its cloud software for marketing professionals. The companies are also working together to allow customers to share information from Salesforce within the Microsoft Teams chat app.

The deal marks their first formal partnership agreement since 2016, the year their relationship soured over Microsoft's LinkedIn acquisition.

Source: Business Insider and Baird

What's next ...

Undoubtedly, Salesforce and Microsoft will still compete. But the partnership represents a change in strategy, Daniel Newman, the founding partner and principal analyst at Futurum Research, told Business Insider. 

"I feel like Microsoft has this very strong collaboration strategy, and, frankly, Salesforce really does too," Newman said. "Benioff is more outspoken about his competitive wares, but the company has a very strong ecosystem of integrations to applications that are also competitive." 

The deal underscores the increasing prominence of Microsoft in the cloud market. Signing big partnerships, like this one with Salesforce, indicates that it could be catching up to AWS in the cloud wars, analysts said. 

"What we're seeing more and more with each wave is that perception of parity, that both clouds are of equal choice and equal capability," Newman said. "AWS started as the leader, and there's still work to be done from Azure's standpoint, but Azure's continued mounting wins continue to put pressure on AWS to innovate harder."  

Newman said it would be interesting to watch Salesforce and Microsoft's partnership and how it drives adoption of Microsoft products by Salesforce customers, and how much business it generates for Microsoft Azure.  

Huawei has been given yet another reprieve from the Trump administration’s ban on its products, according to Commerce Department documents filed today.

Earlier this year, citing concerns of electronic espionage, the United States moved to restrict the purchase of equipment from “foreign adversaries.” The decision took aim directly at Huawei, as officials expressed concern that the Chinese government could exploit the China-based company to spy on Americans. (The company has denied any wrongdoing.)

But after the initial announcement, Huawei and its subsidiaries were quickly granted licenses to continue work in the US. And after one 90-day delay ended in August, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross granted another, giving rural...

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American intelligence agencies quietly stopped the warrantless collection of US phone location data last year, according to a letter from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released today.

Last year, in a landmark decision, the Supreme Court ruled against authorities looking to search through electronic location data without a warrant. Citing the ruling, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), a privacy hawk in Congress, wrote a letter to then-Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats asking how agencies like the National Security Agency would apply the court’s decision.

In a response to Wyden released today, a representative for the office said intelligence agencies have already...

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Google is announcing that today, a year and a half after it first unveiled RCS chat as Android’s primary texting platform, it is actually making RCS chat Android’s primary texting platform. That’s because it is rolling out availability to any Android user in the US who wants to use it, starting today.

RCS stands for “rich communication services,” and it’s the successor to SMS. Like other texting services, it supports read receipts, typing indicators, improved group chats, and high-quality images. Unlike several texting apps, like iMessage or Signal, it does not offer end-to-end encryption as an option. RCS is based on your phone number, so when you are texting with somebody who also has it, it should just turn on automatically in your...

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