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Google already commands a lot of real estate, and earlier this year, it announced big plans to build even more offices and data centers across the United States. But it’s not done growing — both figuratively and literally. The company has just made another new real estate purchase, and it’s not for shiny new offices. Instead, Google has bought land where it plans to grow trees.

According to the San Jose Mercury News, Google bought 40 acres of farmland in Gilroy, California, which is about 30 miles south of San Jose. The company intends to use the land as a nursery to grow trees and other forms of foliage for its campuses, a Google spokesperson told both the Mercury News and CNBC.

Big tech companies regularly bring in trees for their...

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• Slack and Salesforce are expanding their partnership, so their joint customers can collaborate more easily using both tools.
• Brad Armstrong, Slack VP of business and corporate development told Business Insider that these new integrations came about after hearing what customers wanted.
• "We're working a lot more closely now to present these integrations to our joint customers and new customers by going to market together," Armstrong told Business Insider.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Customers using both Slack and Salesforce will now be able to move more seamlessly between both popular cloud services.

Today, the companies announced an expansion of their existing partnership, first struck in late 2016. The deal came about in large part due to customer demand, Brad Armstrong, Slack VP of Business and Corporate Development, told Business Insider. 

"It's really about the increasing demand from our customers and meeting what they want to see in terms of collaboration between them," Armstong said. "So for both of us, we're pleasing our customers by doing this."

The new features are aimed at helping customers more efficiently collaborate across both tools — it means that Slack's 12 million monthly active users can search for and share Salesforce customer records without leaving the chat app. It also means that conversations on Slack can be appended directly to Salesforce.

Armstrong said that sales and service professionals — Salesforce's core customer demographic — are a growing part of Slack's user base, which makes these kinds of integrations valuable to them. These updates apply to Slack's existing integration with Salesforce Sales Cloud, its flagship customer relationship management (CRM) product. It will include Salesforce's Service Cloud, for customer support and other frontline workers, as well.

Slack and Salesforce first partnered up three years ago, to offer basic collaboration to customers using both tools. Armstrong said in those three years the partnership has grown tremendously. 

"We have a much better understanding of what customers want between these systems and how they want to interact with them than we did before, and then the product engagement has grown," Armstrong said.  

Salesforce's Ryan Aytay, Executive VP of Strategic Partnerships and Quip co-CEO, echoed those comments in a blog post. "This tighter integration between Salesforce and Slack is a key way for us to dramatically streamline how our joint customers work," Aytay said. Both Slack and Salesforce now have product teams that talk to customers and each other and build roadmaps to keep growing the partnership. "We're working a lot more closely now to present these integrations to our joint customers and new customers by going to market together," Armstrong said. 

As previous Salesforce executive, Armstrong said his previous knowledge of the company and its workflow helped this partnership thrive. He said that Salesforce is very forward-looking as a partner.

When working with larger enterprise software vendors, Armstrong said they try to learn as much as possible from the companies, to understand how to best collaborate. Slack, to Armstrong's mind, represents a new way for colleagues and coworkers to talk to each other, and Salesforce has been ahead of the curve in adapting to this new reality.

"They know customers really well and we in these partnerships try to learn as much as possible and to really bring our point of view there because were representing a new way of working and a new paradigm, and there's compromises along the way," he said.

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NOW WATCH: Violent video games are played all over the world, but mass shootings are a uniquely American problem

The CIO's role depends on a company's age, scale, industry and business-specific needs at any given time.

• At its 2019 "Made by Google" event, Google revealed a bunch of new products, including the new Pixel 4, Pixelbook Go, Nest Mini, Nest Wifi, and more.
• Watch everything the company showed off in the video above. 

• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories. 

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• On Tuesday, hot video conferencing company Zoom introduced its first major set of product updates since its IPO in April.
• The company partnered with Poly to introduce Zoom Rooms Appliances, a device for conference rooms that comes with a camera, microphone, a speaker, and its software so users can easily start a video meeting.
• Zoom also introduced new updates to Zoom Meetings, its flagship video conferencing service, that can help it take on competitors like Microsoft.
• Read more on the Business Insider homepage.

Zoom, the popular and buzzy videoconferencing startup, just introduced its first major set of product updates since it went public in April. 

These updates, announced Tuesday at the company's Zoomtopia user conference, include a new hardware appliance and updates to its flagship product Zoom Meetings. 

Head of products Oded Gal says that these updates show that Zoom is moving away from simply providing video meetings — the kind made famous by companies like Cisco's WebEx and even Google Hangouts — and more towards providing more ways to make meetings easier.

"We really want to be ahead of the game," Gal told Business Insider. "Initially we were successful because our product is so reliable and high quality. Now we're saying we're moving beyond that. We're adding more and more capabilities using next-generation technology to make the meeting more seamless than it is today."

Zoom introduced at the event Zoom Rooms Appliances, which are appliances such that users can simply turn on a device, connect it to a screen, and start a meeting. Zoom partnered with Poly, an audio and video communications company, to build this appliance. 

These appliances come with a camera, a microphone, and a speaker. Users can also manage these devices remotely. Gal says that when Zoom first introduced Zoom Rooms, its software for conference room videoconferencing systems, users found that it was sometimes too complicated, and wanted one device that combined everything. Facebook, Cisco, and Google all offer similarly-integrated video conferencing devices.

"It comes right off the bat with our software installed with a controller that is part of that system and you're ready to go," Gal said. "This Is a huge enhancement and we now provide more capabilities of our customers."

'It showcases our pace of innovation'

In addition, Zoom is adding several new features to its flagship Zoom Meetings app. It will now have live transcription to make it easier for users to follow what's being said in a meeting. Users can also now take notes in Zoom itself, or annotate the transcript of a meeting. This is especially helpful for international users, Gal says. 

"We also hear it's hard for international teams," Gal said. "English is not their native language. They want additional text that shows on top of the actual words that are being said."

Users can also upload a presentation as the background of a slide and present it, as if they were presenting in person. 

Read more: The CEO of Zoom lays out its next big priority after its first earnings report as a public company blows away Wall Street expectations

In March, Microsoft also announced similar captioning and presentation features to its messaging and collaboration app, Microsoft Teams. However, Gal says that Zoom stands out because competitors are not as focused on video communication products as Zoom is. For competitors, he says, it's only one aspect of what they do.

"It showcases our pace of innovation," Gal said.  "We are not a company where video communication is just one aspect of our product line. This is what we do. We are focused on that...When you are using our platform, you will feel like you're using the best video communication platform out there."

SEE ALSO: Lambda School is Silicon Valley's big bet on reinventing education and making student debt obsolete. But students say it's a 'cult' and they would have been better off learning on their own.

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NOW WATCH: Jeff Bezos is worth over $160 billion — here's how the world's richest man makes and spends his money

It’s small, it’s cute, it’s $650

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Facebook‘s Portal video chat devices will be able to run Workplace, the company’s collaboration software, so you’ll be able to make video calls at work using the Portal’s video calling technology, Facebook announced today. Until now, Facebook has positioned Portal primarily as a way to chat with friends and family, but the new work-focused updates suggest Facebook is targeting office workers as well.

Video calls for Workplace seem as if they will work like those made from a Portal device at home, and will take advantage of Portal’s Smart Camera functionality to automatically frame the people on the call, according to VentureBeat. A marketing image from Facebook also appears to show that you can share content with the person you’re...

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• As tensions have mounted between Google employees and leadership, the company's cofounders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, are missing in action.
• None of the thirteen current and former employees we spoke to know exactly why Page and Brin have receded into the background, though some speculate the billionaires simply don't want to be bothered with the growing criticism the company faces.
• In their absence, vocal employee organizers have stepped up their efforts to overturn controversial projects like licensing AI technology to the Pentagon and a censored search engine in China.
• Those efforts have flourished, organizers say, not because of Google's culture of open debate, but because of the escalating stakes at a time when trust in leadership has dwindled.
• Click here for more BI Prime stories.

When word spread through Google this August that the US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) needed a new cloud-services provider, the company's battle-tested organizers sprang into action.

A group of around ten employees drafted a petition calling on the company to forgo bidding on the lucrative project, which would move the CBP's IT infrastructure to the cloud. Any work with the CBP, the petition read, "would be trading its integrity for a bit of profit." Within the first day, over 1,200 employees had added their names in opposition.

The tactics reflected the culture of openness and debate instituted by Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. At company all-hands meetings, called "TGIFs" (which now happen on Thursdays, but not every week), employees could question the cofounders directly and would often receive a candid response. 

But confidence in Google's cofounders — who have said that the company's ethos would not be sacrificed for short-term profits — is waning. Page and Brin still weigh in on some business decisions from behind the scenes, according to recent SEC filings and conversations with board members. But they have largely been MIA — even at TGIFs, their traditional domain. 

Page and Brin's absence has left employees to bear much of the burden of upholding the principle of  "don't be evil," the famous phrase from the company's early code of conduct. Employees tell us if they want to create change at Google — or at least uphold the values it once claimed to stand for — they know they will have to fight. 

A loss of trust 

Once upon a time, Google had a censored search engine in China. For Brin, who grew up in the Soviet Union, this presented a moral dilemma.

"At some point you have to stand back and challenge this and say, this goes beyond the line of what we're comfortable with and adopt that for moral reasons," Brin said in a 2010 interview. 

Google would rescind its search engine in China mostly for reasons of "opposing censorship and speaking out for the freedom of political dissent," the brazen cofounder said at the time. 

Exiting China inspired the rank-and-file: Leadership would actually walk-the-walk on their principles, even if it meant forfeiting the world's single-biggest market. It would also help draw some of Silicon Valley's best and brightest, inspired by the commitment to ethics over profit.

But eight years later, Googlers encouraged by the exit from China would come to find out it was too good to be true. In August 2018, The Intercept reported Google planned to return to China with a new, censored version of its search engine, known as Project Dragonfly. 

"It was primarily a shock because it was both secret and it completely contradicted Google's public stance," Jack Paulson, a former senior research scientist at Google who resigned over the plan to reenter China, told us. "For Google … to be privately deciding that it was no longer concerned with human rights on this situation, it was upsetting." 

And this time around, the response from Google's leadership would be quite different. 

At a TGIF meeting two weeks after news of the confidential project leaked, Brin said that he had only learned about Dragonfly because of the "kerfuffle" it raised inside the company. (After The Intercept broke the news, a group of engineers who had been working on Dragonfly took to the company's internal Google+ pages to describe how they had been raising ethical concerns over the project to management for months, setting off a vigorous internal debate.) 

"Employees were bothered by such a serious human-rights issue being described in such an off-hand, kind of demeaning way," Paulson said of Brin's reaction to the outcry over Dragonfly. 

Weeks later, at an event hosted by Wired, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who was promoted to chief exec in 2015, would double down on Dragonfly. Working in China, which accounted for 20 percent of the world's population, would fulfill the company's mission to "provide information to everyone," he said. Even a censored search engine would still be able to "serve well over 99 percent of the queries" to Chinese users, he added. 

But that didn't satisfy the 740 employees who signed a petition calling on Google to cease its efforts in China. 

Facing a firestorm of internal dissent, Google's leaders, including Pichai, softened their position. Google, they said publicly, had no plans "right now" to launch a search engine in China. Earlier this summer, the company finally confirmed it had terminated the project.

There would be no victory lap for organizers, though: If anything, the Dragonfly incident sent a chill across the company, multiple sources said. Certain projects, like Google Wave, a communications tool with big ambitions, had been kept secret by Google. But none had "such serious ethical implications," Liz Fong-Jones, a former site reliability engineer at Google and longtime organizer, told us. 

Trust between the rank-and-file and Google's leadership eroded further in October 2018, when The New York Times published a bombshell expose detailing the company's $90-million exit package for Android creator Andy Rubin amid an allegation of sexual misconduct, which Rubin denied. Employees organized, and one week later, over 20,000 left their desks to protest the payout and the company's handling of harassment cases. 

In a letter to employees after the Times report, Pichai would admit that 48 Google employees had been fired over the previous two years in connection with sexual-harassment allegations. Thirteen had held senior positions at the company. 

The no-shows for Larry Page and Sergey Brin are piling up 

Yet even as crisis threatened to engulf their company, Page and Brin stayed quiet. They did not attend the highly anticipated TGIF held one week after the walkout. Since then, the no-shows have piled up. 

The extended absence is unprecedented. Claire Stapleton, a key walkout organizer who helped coordinate TGIFs early in her career at Google, even told us former CEO Eric Schmidt would skip the meetings altogether, knowing they were in Page and Brin's hands. 

While Pichai would regularly attend the meetings, she said, he would stand off to the side of the stage, weighing in only when tapped in by one of the cofounders. 

"The optics were really weird," Stapleton said. "[Pichai has] been the CEO for multiple years now and he's still the bit player in this whole thing."

With the exception of one surprise appearance at a TGIF in late May, Page and Brin seem to have gone into hiding since the walkout. In fact, neither cofounder — who, together, hold a majority of voting power within the company — even showed up to the company's annual shareholder meeting in June. 

None of the thirteen current and former Google employees we spoke to knew why Page and Brin had stepped out of the public eye. But some speculated it had to do with the incidents that sparked the walkout. 

"They're not exactly the people you would go to to rethink how sexual harassment claims are handled," Fong-Jones told us. 

That's because Page, according to a lawsuit reported by Bloomberg, was responsible for personally approving the mega-stock grant to Rubin, despite the pending allegation against him. Brin, meanwhile, didn't have the cleanest record when it came to extramarital relationships: In 2013, AllThingsD reported that he was splitting from his wife and 23andMe cofounder, Anne Wojcicki, and that Brin had become romantically involved with a Google employee.  

Read more: Google cofounder Sergey Brin has secretly been married to a law tech founder since 2018. Here are 14 other power couples who rule the tech world.

Others speculated that as criticism of Google's work has spiked, the multi-billionaire cofounders perhaps just didn't want to be bothered.

"The charitable interpretation is that they're giving Sundar a chance to step up and lead," Fong-Jones said. "The uncharitable interpretation is that they're out to lunch — like literally on their yachts or something."

But even if the cofounders are out at sea, they are at least still making some key decisions.

For instance: An SEC filing from 2018 detailed that Page, who serves as the CEO of Google's parent company, Alphabet, receives a weekly briefing on the company's financials. So too does Brin. Page and Brin also advise on the company's other bets, like its self-driving car initiative Waymo and "energy kite" business, Makani, the filing said.

In addition, at the stockholder meeting in June, John Hennessy, the chairman of Alphabet's board, confirmed that, despite Page's absence from that gathering, he had attended every board meeting and spoke with other board members "frequently."

Google declined Business Insider's request for more information on Page and Brin's current whereabouts and responsibilities. 

As the cofounders moved out of the public arena, employee organizers said they have tried appealing to Pichai. But any hope that he will champion their voice has mostly faded. That's because, they believe, the former head product boss is beholden to other leaders within the company in ways that Page and Brin, as cofounders, are not. 

"My hypothesis is that Sundar is an executive that tends to lead by consensus of his engineering VPs," Fong-Jones told us. "Those VPs are very, very short-term, bottom-line driven because a majority of their compensation is in stock." Page and Brin, she added, "were more willing to do the right thing long term because they're super rich anyway." 

A push to end forced arbitration 

When Googlers around the world staged a walkout last November, employee organizers also served the company's leadership with a set of demands aimed at fixing some of its deeper institutional issues. 

In response to the demands, Pichai sent a company-wide email one week later. In the letter, he described the changes Google was willing to make. But rather than addressing each of its five demands, which included a commitment to ending pay inequity and appointing an employee representative to the company's board, Pichai's note largely ignored them. 

"We knew that they were making an effort to avoid responding to the specific demands," Stapleton told us. "The response was loose. It felt lackluster." 

Pichai promised to change the company's policy around forced arbitration, a practice common in corporate America whereby employees waive their right to take employment disputes to court and instead must settle the matters privately.

By the time Pichai announced the proposed change, some tech giants had already broken from the common practice. In early 2018, Microsoft and Uber eliminated their mandatory arbitration clauses for workers who experienced harassment. The decision would give employees the power of choice: settle with their employer or take them to court.

By November, Pichai said Google would end forced arbitration for individual sexual-harassment and sexual-assault claims, a big win for organizers who believed an end to the practice was the cornerstone of the employee movement. 

Google has maintained that it has never required arbitration cases to remain confidential. 

"We thought of it as the gateway to any other issues that we wanted to tackle," one current Google employee who helped on the campaign to end forced arbitration told us.

But for organizers, Pichai's policy change — which didn't apply to cases of discrimination — didn't go far enough. The changes also did not protect Google's contract workers, a group known internally as TVCs, who reportedly outnumber full-time employees at the company. Nor did it cover employees at Alphabet's other bets, like Waymo or its life-sciences outfit, Verily.  

In the following months, a group would form within Google, the organizer said, with the aim of ending forced arbitration across Alphabet and sparking change across the tech industry. The group launched a social-media campaign and passed out stickers and pins across multiple US Google campuses. They also brought a panel of experts to the New York City office and live-streamed the discussion company-wide for employees to better understand the downsides to forced arbitration. 

"Our thinking was, 'We will continue to be vocal until you address this,'" the current employee said. 

By March 2019, Google's leadership would follow organizers demands and cut mandatory arbitration for all internal matters — a change that had gone further than most in the industry. The policy change, however, still fell short of covering TVCs and employees at Alphabet's other bets.

Meanwhile, during the campaign, some organizers would find their managers questioning their commitment to their day jobs, they said. One current employee said they would receive "side-eyed" looks from certain colleagues when passing them in the halls. 

"I don't think anyone ... expected to not face any kind of repercussions, whether explicit or implicit," the current employee told us. "We just all chose to deal with them differently." 

Google, for its part, has repeatedly said it "prohibits retaliation." 

In response to these claims, a Google spokesperson told Business Insider: "We prohibit retaliation in the workplace and publicly share our very clear policy. To make sure that no complaint raised goes unheard at Google, we give employees multiple channels to report concerns, including anonymously, and investigate all allegations of retaliation."

"For some people, they're reevaluating what Google leadership is capable of." 

As organizing efforts have galvanized a growing share of Google's workforce, so too have claims of retaliation by some employees who spoke out.

Walkout organizers Claire Stapleton and Meredith Whittaker were the first to publicly call attention to their alleged cases of retaliation. Stapleton claimed she was demoted, while Whittaker said she was told her role would be "changed dramatically." 

Retaliation claims like Whittaker's "took a toll on the organizers," one current employee who also helped on the campaign to end forced arbitration, told us.

"That took the wind out of a lot of people's sails," the organizer said. "For some people, they're reevaluating what Google leadership is capable of." 

Both Stapleton and Whittaker would leave the company months later. They cited their allegations of retaliation as a main reason for leaving. Since then, other veteran organizers have followed them to the exits.

"The company ... thinks it can just get rid of a few key organizers and lock down communication and they're hoping that will be a way forward," Irene Knapp, a former Google organizer who recently left amid claims of retaliation, told us.

The alleged clamp down comes as top government agencies covet Google's growing cloud-computing infrastructure, and as the company doubles down on investments in artificial intelligence. How it will govern those projects remains to be seen. Google maintains that even today it remains one of the most open workplaces in world, giving employees multiple forums to raise concerns and receive feedback.

Still, with Page and Brin missing in action, the task of directing the company's moral compass seems likely to fall on the shoulders of the rank-and-file. 

"Structural change is going to require them to move slowly, it's going to require them to miss market opportunities, it's going to require them to put metrics of well-being and ethics above revenue generation and infinite growth," Meredith Whittaker told us. "Ultimately, we are asking for a corporation in 2019 to choose a vision of more common good and a service mission, over a vision of profits and revenue, and that is anathema to the way corporations operate."

SEE ALSO: Sex, tequila, and a tiger: Employees inside Adam Neumann's WeWork talk about the nonstop party to attain a $100 billion dream and the messy reality that tanked it

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NOW WATCH: 7 lesser-known benefits of Amazon Prime

• After poor public performances by some of Silicon Valley's hottest private companies, venture capitalists are decrying the traditional IPO process in favor of direct listings.
• The unconventional strategy for going public removes some of the more expensive and tedious processes associated with going public, and allows investors and employees to bypass a traditional lockup period following a public debut.
• Many VCs blamed banks for overinflating share prices ahead of an IPO to profit off the fees they collect, but VCs stand to directly benefit themselves from a direct listing because they are able to sell at the opening price.
• Direct listings are marketed to founders as a cheap, fair alternative to founders looking to make a public exit, but that is not always the case.
• Some investors told Business Insider that a direct listing would be ideal for founders that want to avoid the scrutiny of an investor roadshow that precludes a traditional IPO.
• Check out Business Insider's special series — Founder Frenemies — for more stories on Silicon Valley's changing landscape for startup funding. 

With his long hair, proclivity for walking around barefoot and reputation for partying, WeWork founder Adam Neumann could have been straight out of central casting for a fictional "tech CEO" in a movie. 

That over-the-top persona is also what made Neumann a liability for WeWork in the eyes of straight-laced, conservative IPO investors. Neumann never had the chance to meet, or spook, investors in a pre-IPO roadshow for WeWork— he was ousted from the CEO job the week the roadshow was supposed to kick off, and the IPO was subsequently shelved.

WeWork's cancelled IPO is now at the center of a broader Silicon Valley reckoning, as venture capital investors and others obsess over an IPO alternative called a "direct listing." The direct listing has been framed as a way for tech startups to list their shares without being beholden to an outdated process created by Wall Street bankers and designed to benefit their clients. 

But direct listings are still a new, relatively untested concept that may not provide the all-around salvation some expect. And while venture capital investors bash an IPO system they say is broken, their sudden zeal for direct listings is, in at least one major sense, the result of a problem they created themselves.

The "founder friendly" movement in which VC investors deferred to startup founders, no matter how quirky or extravagant, has produced a crop of richly-valued companies with unconventional executives in the top job. And as many of these companies now look to go public, they're finding that an offbeat founder CEO is not always a selling point during a roadshow.

A direct listing provides a convenient way to skip that conversation.

"When you do a direct listing, you don't have to put them up there," said one VC firm founder about inexperienced or unpolished management teams. "There's a negative side that the VCs see, but they can hide it behind the direct listings," he said.

In a direct listing, a company simply lists its shares on a public exchange and the stock begins trading. There's no banks underwriting the offering, setting a price and selling it to institutional shareholders, as happens in an IPO. And while insiders, like VC investors and early employees, can sell shares right away in a direct listing, the company itself does not raise any capital.

Lise Buyer, the founder of IPO advisory firm Class V Group, describes direct listings as an interesting alternative to IPOs that will work for certain companies but that's currently wrapped in a lot of hype: "It's the new shiny object that is aggressively and brilliantly marketed."

"Ride the positive narrative" and avoid the hedge fund questions

For now, direct listings exist more in the realm of theoretical and wishful thinking than reality. To date, only two companies — Spotify and Slack — have opted to go public this way. 

But according to a recent Bloomberg report, Airbnb, the home-sharing service valued at $31 billion, is leaning towards a direct listing instead of an IPO when it goes public in 2020.

That could help the company avoid uncomfortable questions about its management team's qualifications. Brian Chesky, the cofounder of Airbnb who serves as CEO, has a background in industrial design and has never held a high-level role at any other company. Although Chesky has grown Airbnb into a juggernaut, his public company experience, and lack of the traditional engineering or business background, would likely get a hard look during an IPO roadshow, the founder of the investing firm speculated. 

"You could make a case for companies to just ride the positive narrative and just go out there with a direct listing because you don't want to answer all these extremely scrutinizing questions from some hedge fund guys," said Synovus Trust Company portfolio manager Dan Morgan about startups with novice or quirky CEOs.

In years past, a seasoned executive might have been brought on to take the reins as the startup neared its IPO. But with founders now revered, and in some cases calling the shots thank to special supervoting shares, many of the most valuable startups are helmed by founders who may or may not have the chops to run a public company.

"A CEO/Founder with a quirky personality would be fine to do a direct listing and avoid all the scrutiny of a road show," Morgan said.

Still, he stressed, everything changes after company's first earnings call as a publicly traded organization. And in the case of WeWork, he believes that even a direct listing wouldn't have saved it from a brutal reception in the public markets: "The model was not sound as there appeared to be no roadmap to profitability."

The times have changed and IPO "needs innovation"

Of course, plenty of unorthodox founders have made it through the roadshow process and gone on to lead successful publicly-traded companies. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg famously caused a stir by wearing a hoodie to the pre-IPO investor roadshow. Seven years later, the stock is up 374% and Facebook is worth $514 billion.

And the two companies that have recently gone public through direct listings were not trying to hide unpolished or inexperienced CEOs from criticism. Slack founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield is one of the tech industry's most respected, serial entrepreneurs, with a track record that includes creating photo sharing site Flickr and selling it to Yahoo for $20 million in 2005.

Slack had an optimal business model and enough brand recognition to pull off a direct listing in June, said Jyoti Bansal, a startup founder and tech investor who is a big believer in the potential of direct listings.

Bansal attended a special, invite-only summit earlier this month devoted to the merits of direct listings. The event took place in San Francisco and was organized by several VC firms in the wake of the disappointing Uber and Peloton IPOs, and the WeWork implosion.

"The way the IPO is done today is almost like a 25-year-old concept. It just needs innovation" said Bansal, who is the cofounder and CEO of enterprise startup Harness and cofounder of venture firm Unusual Ventures.

"Twenty-five years ago the primary purpose of IPO was that people didn't have access to growth capital, so you had to go to public markets to get growth capital. Now, everyone has it," he said.

Class V's Buyer says the notion that direct listings are a cheaper and more democratic process than traditional IPOs is partially true. Since the company isn't raising funds, it doesn't need to work with a traditional underwriter and thus does not need to pay the associated fees. Still, she noted that a company must pay some banker fees, register with regulatory bodies like the SEC, and participate in an audit, all of which are costly undertakings.

Spotify paid $32 million in fees for its 2018 direct listing, according to Inc, compared to the $102 million that Uber paid in its traditional IPO.

No lock-up is a big benefit — for some

Clearing the path to a liquidity event is critical for VCs who have sunk tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars into startups.

Buyer also noted that direct listings — which allow employees to sell all their vested shares right away, without the traditional several month "lock up" period of an IPO — could incentivize valuable employees to cash out and jump ship.

"I don't think it helps with [employee] retention. It actually is perhaps the opposite," Buyer said of direct listings.

And for recently-hired employees with unvested stock, a direct listing can leave them at a disadvantage if the stock sinks.

In the case of both Slack and Spotify, the companies achieved peak share prices in the first weeks or months of trading, and have only lost value since. That means early investors were able to cash out at near-peak pricing while employees with unvested stock and retail investors were left holding shares that were only becoming less valuable.

"Those who sold on Day One at Slack got a better price than those that sell today," said Buyer.

SEE ALSO: This is going to be a record year for $100 million-plus startup investment deals — and it has the unexpected side effect of forcing startups to grow up way faster

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NOW WATCH: This company turns shredded plastic and clothing into new bottles for Pepsi, Evian, and Coca-Cola

The collaboration platform also announced its users rack up an average of 5 billion actions weekly, including messaging, searching, uploading and commenting on files.

When I walked into an Apple Store in Brooklyn yesterday and asked for a phone ("I want to buy a phone," I said), the guy working there told me he didn’t have any phones to sell me. He also had no idea when I would be able to pay a truly gut-wrenching sum of money for a telephone: They don’t tell us what’s in the shipments and I don’t know when more are coming,” he said.

If you want to buy a new iPhone, there are two basic options: You can either become beholden to Apple for the next two years of your life by paying monthly installments of between $30 and $60, or you can give the company a bunch of money up front.

Neither option is appealing, and both are best done on a whim and as quickly as possible so the dopamine hit of a new phone can dull the impact of transferring the richest company on Earth more than a thousand dollars.

I think that buying a new phone is a shameful but occasionally necessary activity to continue living in the modern world. I disagree with most of Apple’s corporate philosophies on recycling, repair, and its walled-garden, monopolistic approach to the App Store. I do not like spending time in Apple Stores, nor do I like giving the company money, but I appreciate Apple's commitment to privacy and security, and my current phone is more than three years old, has been repaired three times, and no longer takes photos or connects to WiFi. It is, unfortunately, Time for a New Phone.

The problem is that, at the moment, it is nearly impossible to exchange US currency for an iPhone 11 Pro. 256GB iPhone 11 Pros (the objectively correct phone to buy, if you are going to buy a new iPhone) don’t ship until the end of the month if you order one online, and they’re sold out in stores all over the country according to the company's website. They aren’t currently available in any stores in the greater New York, Denver, Los Angeles, Washington DC, San Francisco, Chicago, Miami, or Austin areas. I was able to find an Apple store in Gilbert, Arizona and a few in suburban Cleveland that have the phone, if you’re interested.

It is worth noting that you can buy the 64GB version of the iPhone 11 Pro at most stores, which is a version of the phone that shouldn't exist because that is not enough storage.

Apple hasn't released sales figures yet, but analysts are saying that demand for the iPhone 11 are extremely high, though it's impossible to say if the phones aren't available because it's hard to get a specific part or something else. But as the world’s richest company, Apple is one of the most pure expressions of a capitalistic enterprise out there. All I want to do is plug into the capitalism machine and do some capitalism and I CANNOT. Which is to say that it’s funny—not haha funny, but funny nonetheless—that Apple is doing a bad job of making it easy for people to give it money.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission has formally instructed Telegram Group, the parent company of the Telegram encrypted messaging service, to halt sales of its cryptocurrency Gram. The SEC says the company, and its crypto-focused subsidiary TON Issuer Inc., failed to register an early sale of $1.7 billion of its crypto tokens prior to the October 31st launch of its blockchain network. Because the SEC treats cryptocurrency as securities, the agency says Telegram is in violation of the Securities Act.

“Our emergency action today is intended to prevent Telegram from flooding the US markets with digital tokens that we allege were unlawfully sold,” writes Stephanie Avakian, the co-director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement, in a...

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• On Thursday, Slack announced that it now has over 12 million daily active users.
• In comparison, its rival Microsoft Teams most recently reported over 13 million daily active users.
• Slack says users spend over nine hours a day connected to Slack and 90 minutes a day using the app.
• Slack also says most of its top customers are actually Microsoft Office 365, customers — which includes Teams — but they still actively decide to pay for Slack.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Slack's daily active user (DAU) count has crossed 12 million – short of the 13 million most recently disclosed by its leading rival Microsoft Teams. However, Slack says that numbers don't tell the full story, and offers figures to suggest that users actually like using its app. 

Slack, now valued at about $13 billion on the public market, announced this milestone on Thursday, ahead of its Spec user conference later this month in San Francisco. That 12 million DAU is up 37% from this time last year, Slack says.

Slack says that users spend over nine hours a day connected to the service, and 90 minutes a day actively using the app. It's Slack's position that figures like those matter more than any plain user number.

Read more: With 13 million daily active users, Microsoft says its Teams chat app is now growing faster than Slack

"DAUs (daily active users) get cited a lot, but what, really, is their significance?" Brian Elliott, vice president and general manager of platform at Slack, wrote in a blog post. "In our book, the 'U' is what matters: Use! Engagement is what makes Slack work — you can't transform a workplace if people aren't actually using the product."

In addition, Slack reports that every week, there are five billion "actions" on Slack, which accounts for sending messages, uploading files, searching, and other ways users interact with the app.

Office 365 customers are also Slack customers

Of note, much of Microsoft Teams' growth has been attributed to the fact that it's included as part of the Office 365 productivity suite for businesses. However, Slack now says that of its top 50 customers, at least 70% of them are Office 365 subscribers — implying that while they may get Teams included in their Office 365 subscription, they're still willing to shell out extra for Slack.

Slack also said that that large companies like Kaiser Permanente, Vanguard, and TD Ameritrade choose Slack because it supports an unlimited number of users and channels, whereas Microsoft Teams has a limit of 5,000 users and 200 channels per workspace.

"The way we work is fundamentally changing," Elliott wrote. "It's becoming faster, more adaptable, and more collaborative. This change is fueled by engagement."

SEE ALSO: Slack, the chat app competing with Microsoft, is launching 'Slack 101,' an online classroom to teach newcomers how to use its app

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NOW WATCH: Nxivm leader Keith Raniere has been convicted. Here's what happened inside his sex-slave ring that recruited actresses and two billionaire heiresses.

• This is a preview of Voice Assistants in Healthcare research report from Business Insider Intelligence.
• Purchase this report.
• Business Insider Intelligence offers even more healthcare coverage with Digital Health Pro. Subscribe today to receive industry-changing digital health news and analysis to your inbox.

Voice is making waves across industries, but the transformative power of the technology is now at a tipping point in healthcare. The opportunity for voice in healthcare is pegged to mount as the global health virtual assistant market is expected to reach $3.5 billion in 2025. 

US healthcare providers' interest in voice tech is being catalyzed by recent technological breakthroughs growing the tech's potential to transform legacy operations.

Voice tech boasts five distinct advantages that heighten its disruption potential in healthcare and the tech is being optimized for the healthcare sphere, which is increasing the visibility of voice in health and opening the door for voice assistants to perform more sensitive and complex healthcare actions. There are also several pain points within healthcare that up the pressure on providers to tap into the voice opportunity. 

In this report, Business Insider Intelligence outlines the voice opportunity in healthcare and explores the drivers propelling voice adoption in the healthcare realm. We then examine three of the highest-value voice use cases in healthcare — clinical documentation, remote care, and clinical support — and provide examples of early moving health systems and health tech companies implementing voice in each application. 

Here are some of the key takeaways from the report: 

• Health systems that deploy voice tech to facilitate clinical documentation can reduce physicians' administrative burden, increase patient volume and billable revenue, and eliminate transcription costs.
• By leveraging voice to increase touchpoints with patients outside the clinic, healthcare organizations can open the opportunity to shrink costs associated with poor medication adherence and slash value-based care (VBC) penalties stemming from preventable readmissions.
• Healthcare providers can reform diagnostics and better position themselves to deliver preventative medicine by deploying voice technology that can pinpoint diseases based on patients' speech characteristics.

In full, the report:

• Explores why and how voice is disrupting healthcare. 
• Details the three key applications where US health systems can apply voice technology. 
• Offers evidence on how voice assistants provide value in each of the selected voice use cases. 

Want to learn more about the fast-moving world of digital health? Here's how to get access:

1. Purchase & download the full report from our research store. >> Purchase & Download Now
2. Sign up for Digital Health Pro , Business Insider Intelligence's expert product suite keeping you up-to-date on the people, technologies, trends, and companies shaping the future of healthcare, delivered to your inbox 6x a week. >> Get Started
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4. Current subscribers can read the report here.

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• Tesla's Smart Summon feature was captured making some pretty egregious errors when it was released this week. 
• Videos spread rapidly online showing cars running stop signs, nearly causing accidents, and even hitting a garage. 
• Comedian Trevor Noah asked on "The Late Show" Wednesday night what would happen if an owner accidentally summoned their car while they were inside.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Videos of Tesla's new Smart Summon feature were the butt of plenty of jokes online this week, and even made it onto Comedy Central.

On "The Daily Show" Wednesday night, the new semi-autonomous function made Trevor Noah's headlines segment, where the comedian piled onto to all the snark.

"I thought Uber drivers were bad at picking me up," he said, "but now you've got to call up your own car like 'hey, it's me, i'm at the corner. No, south of the people you just mowed down on the sidewalk. Go straight! No, that's a daycare center, keep going.'"

Read more: Videos showing Tesla's Smart Summon feature doing bizarre things have gotten the NHTSA's attention

On Twitter and YouTube, clips of Teslas struggling to find their owners in complicated parking lots and driveways spread like wildfire. In one case, a blown stop sign led to a near miss, while another car suffered a hefty dent after scraping the side of a garage.

"Here's the thing, cars are not smart enough to give them this feature," Noah continued. "And people are definitely not smart enough to have this feature. Think about it, people already drive drunk. Now, what if you're drunk inside a casino and accidentally summon your car? That's just not going to end well."

To be fair, CEO Elon Musk tweeted Wednesday that the first update to the software should arrive this weekend. He added that Smart Summon was used more than 550,000 in the first few days.

Watch the full clip here »

SEE ALSO: Videos showing Tesla's Smart Summon feature doing bizarre things have gotten the NHTSA's attention

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NOW WATCH: All the ways Amazon is taking over your house

Corey Wadley dropped his service with Verizon a decade ago because of the company’s lackluster coverage in north Denver, he said. That may be changing — and he hates it.

Wadley recently discovered that Verizon’s newest cellular transmitter would be right outside his door.

“I went out to walk my dog and saw a truck and a Bobcat (excavator) right next to the house,” Wadley said. “I immediately got on the phone to everyone I could talk to.”

They were building a “small site” cell pole on the narrow stretch of grass between the sidewalk and the road, the public right of way that the city owns but residents maintain. It’s one of about 500 poles that could appear across the city in the near future. Now Wadley is the latest convert in a growing army of irritated residents in Denver and countless other cities.

It’s part of a bigger urban shift: To serve a growing and data-hungry population, cellular companies are racing to build new infrastructure along Denver’s residential blocks.

“When Denver first started, there were like six (cellular) sites, and they were all on the tallest buildings in town,” said John Rowe, a cellular infrastructure consultant in Denver.

Today, it’s nearly impossible to build large new facilities. Additionally, high-speed 5G service will require transmitters to be deployed for individual blocks. So the industry is infiltrating neighborhoods with 30-foot-tall metal poles, and companies also are retrofitting power and light poles.

“Now we’re going into the nooks and crannies of activity centers, running fiber to antennas that cover much smaller areas,” Rowe said.

Companies have built 163 freestanding cell poles around Denver in recent years, according to city permitting data, and they have requested permits for about 350 more. The towers are meant to improve current cell service and will form the backbone for higher-speed technologies.

“A lot of these poles we’re putting in now are an enhanced 4G, but they’re paving the way for a 5G environment,” said Scott Harry, government affairs manager for Crown Castle, an infrastructure provider.

So far, Verizon is the biggest player in the market. But competitor AT&T has filed for permits, as have Crown Castle, Mobilitie and Zayo Group, which provide services for other companies.

It’s resulted in new waves of outrage as the crews roll into new neighborhoods.

“We beautified the parkway there, the city right of way. We put in irrigation and sod and trees and everything,” said Wadley, a real estate broker. “And to just come drop this thing in there because it’s convenient to Verizon, it’s too much.”

The pole near his home is one of about 10 that he’s spotted plans for around Berkeley. Neighbors in Capitol Hill also have spotted construction crews. Downtown, Washington Park, Cherry Creek and patches of northeast Denver also have poles planned, according to city permitting data.

Related Articles

• 5G wireless technology is coming to Denver. It will amaze and, possibly, disappoint.
• 5G is coming to Denver, and it’s not just for smartphones: It could mean super-fast internet at home, too

The city can do little to stop the construction. A new state law gives the companies broad rights to plant their poles in the public right of way, a right supported by federal authorities.

The companies are taking some steps to minimize new construction. They have made requests to place about 1,000 transmitters on utility poles and cables, and some poles — including Crown Castle’s — will host multiple carriers. But there’s no requirement they do so.

Neighborhood groups also are asked to weigh in on applications for new poles, but there are only a few specific reasons that the city can reject a pole, including “unreasonable visual blight.” One notable catch: The poles also are supposed to be 25 feet from trees in the right of way.

“We should have planted a little more trees,” Wadley said.

My business partner Konstantin Krauss and I are both longtime SaaS entrepreneurs. In our careers so far, we founded, led, and sold technology companies, witnessing companies both thrive and fail. The one thing that rings true for most of these companies is that sales are the heartbeat of the company. Naturally, the entire company must be reliable for sales to be effective. Connected digital assistants will change the way we work and sell.

The sales team is responsible for ensuring that the bottom line is healthy.

Based on our sales experience and after talking with hundreds of seasoned professionals over the years, we noticed that smart, connected technology is missing from the workplace. Most sales and marketing teams use a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) program.

While using this tool, they develop a love/hate relationship with it. However, the hole we are talking about goes much deeper than just implementing a smart CRM. Over the past couple of years, smart assistants take the consumer market by storm. You couldn’t visit a park without hearing five people say, “Hey, Siri.”

Now when you walk into a home, more likely than not, you’ll find more than one connected device. Whether it be a smart thermostat, a fitness tracker, wearables, a personal assistant, they’re everywhere. Amazon even gave away smart devices with the purchase of a select product on Prime Day.

It is this kind of technology that helps more and more people every day be increasingly productive. People across the globe are using connected, digital devices to simplify everyday tasks and to streamline their lives. But, why aren’t more businesses using digital assistants and connected devices the same way consumers are?

Our “A-Ha” Moment.

The business market ripe with opportunity for new SaaS products. Our computers understand us better, so they can help in real-time business situations. We created the digital, connected assistant, designed for the workplace and, more specifically, inside sales representatives.

These assistants and personal connected devices have the potential to make the everyday lives of millions of workers more comfortable. The adaptation rate will be fast, as a result of previous advancements in technology. Virtual assistant technology has already been developed and tested through consumer devices and supports this new business software category.

Sales and SaaS Teams are Booming, but Struggle With Support 

• SaaS sales teams are growing by the day. The SaaS market is anticipated to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 21.20% from 2018 to 2023.
• Inside sales is also a massively growing field. Today, most B2B products and services are sold over the phone or via screen share.
• Sales tools have become overwhelmingly focused on sales control (e.g., CRM for the most part). As previously stated, most salespeople have a love/hate relationship with their CRM. They are ready for an all-encompassing solution.
• While most sales reps want and receive training (usually expensive training), few agree on its effectiveness.
• When in a conversation, most sales reps have no support at all besides their notes and scribbles. Scaling sales organizations, even in large corporations, is like a game of telephone with apparent shortcomings. Conversation support will be a game-changer for sales teams.

CRM Should Not be the Only Sales Tool

A well-managed CRM can be a gold mine. However, a correctly managed CRM is like a unicorn that no one can ever find. A CRM tool is typically full of “buried” information, which is hard to find and hard to manage. For example, salespeople spend just one-third of their day talking to prospects.

The salesperson then spends the rest of their day writing emails, prospecting, and researching leads, going to internal meetings. Between all of those tasks, it’s hard to manage and keep a CRM system up-to-date.

It’s time for the workplace to adopt a productivity tool that allows them to get more out of their days. This new software will save significant time for professionals, especially when synced with their CRM. It houses all necessary data, and assists with critical processes like on-boarding, training, playbook, and suggested language. Not to mention, it ensures consistency across all teams and locations.

The Next Addition to Your Team: “Digital Assistant” 

There is so much knowledge that needs to be shared: sales frameworks, training, FAQs, and product roadmaps. Not to mention all the advice on how to have the best and most productive conversations. Most of the time, this information is either floating around on a server or intranet site, or in someone’s head.

However, the most logical place to manage all that knowledge is in a connected device. It’s accessed instantly or brought up based on conversation tracking, providing it way faster than humans can search for it. The connected personal assistant is an entirely new way for humans to work with computers.

A personal digital assistant for business will support the following functions:

• Emerging Technology

  Previously developed voice technology allows real-time support; think of the talk-to-text and voice-search functions on cell phones. We believe that the role of a digital assistant for business has various advantages. For example, it can offer real-time support by listening to phone calls, providing advice, and transcribing call notes.

• IT Integration

  Existing siloed enterprise software tools commonly have open APIs. An open API allows for new business models, such as a digital assistant, to work on top of them.

• Share-ability
  

  Sales teams have sales frameworks, that is a fact. And with a digital assistant, sales teams can finally sync their daily operations with the company’s existing framworks. Then, sales conversations become a science rather than an art.

When you take all of this into consideration, the workplace is ready for digital, personal support. The assistant is a natural next addition to the “virtual team.”

What’s Next 

A new category of enterprise software is entering the marketplace. A digital, personal assistant that integrates all kinds of tools and provides collective experiences of various experts. With this rollout, we are combining two of the biggest markets – CRM a $193.6 billion global market with training an $87.6 billion global market. All fueled by intelligent software, augmenting human interaction in business.

People benefit from connected devices and virtual assistants, and the same trend stays true for businesses. Productivity leaps will take place, and the use of virtual assistants will become as normal as having a computer.

Although Ciara is the first dedicated digital sales assistant, we expect this category to grow as adoption happens within companies. If you’d like to learn more about Ciara, visit GetCiara.com to sign up for free and access your own personal assistant within minutes.

The post Connected Digital Assistants will Change the Way We Work appeared first on ReadWrite.

Zoom is a worldwide leader in providing frictionless communications, but did you know that we’re also a leader in workplace satisfaction?

Job-listing site Comparably just released its annual ranking of major U.S. companies with the happiest employees, and Zoom was ranked No. 1! The Happiest Employees 2019 list was based on anonymous employee feedback submitted to Comparably about fair pay, perks, benefits, and work environment. 

The list was peppered with leading technology organizations, including Microsoft, Google, and Salesforce, with social media platform LinkedIn and retail giant Costco ranking Nos. 2 and 3, respectively. But it’s no surprise that the company whose core mission is “Delivering Happiness” is atop the list of organizations with the happiest employees.

“Happiness at work is an important metric that should be used when determining who we want to work for and how we want to work,” said Comparably CEO Jason Nazar. “Providing your workforce with a positive environment, clear goals they can be invested in, and a comprehensive compensation package is a winning formula for the top-rated companies on our Happiest Employees list.”

This isn’t the first time Zoom has been recognized for its workplace environment and employee programs. Zoom was No. 2 on Glassdoor’s list of the best places to work for 2019. Zoom also made Glassdoor’s 2018 Employees’ Choice Awards honoring the Best Places to Work. These lists are compiled by analyzing millions of company reviews and ratings on Glassdoor from current and former employees, with researchers evaluating the quantity, quality, and consistency of the reviews to determine the rankings.

Zoom takes great pride in providing its employees a fun yet productive culture, an open work environment, and highly competitive workplace benefits, including competitive pay, fitness reimbursement, unlimited time off, free meals, and monthly office parties.

“We are incredibly honored to be Comparably’s No. 1 company for happiest employees,” said Lynne Oldham, Chief People Officer at Zoom. “We really believe that happy employees are the reason we have happier customers, so we do everything we can to ensure that we are spreading happiness to Zoom employees, including a Happy Crew of 100-plus volunteers from around the globe. Additionally, our core value of Care is a critical element. We care about each other in a way that I have not witnessed in other companies.”  

“As a company, Zoom strives to make our customers happy in every interaction, within every product, and across every country,” said Eric S. Yuan, Zoom’s founder and CEO. “But we’re only able to offer that level of service because we’re able to provide a productive, inspiring work environment for our employees, managers, and executives. The best employees are happy employees, and Zoom has the best around.”

Want to your grow your career in one of the happiest workplaces in America? Visit zoom.us/careers to see our current openings and be a part of something special!

The post Zoom Employees the Happiest in U.S. appeared first on Zoom Blog.

More meetings, less time. It’s the same story for every team and companies of every size. But there is only so much time in the day. A recent BlueJeans Network survey of 700 professionals found that 67% of the respondents report a significant increase in the number of weekly meetings over the past three years. And that is only part of the story. Less time for more meetings leads to employee burnout and turnover, low team morale and lasting effects on corporate culture.

In the past several years, the collaboration market has exploded with some amazing products to help teams meet and collaborate. But the focus has been on meeting quality so you can meet more often.  I think it’s time to address meeting efficiency so there are fewer meetings overall.

Most of us use at least one messaging tool as part of our workday routine. These always-on communication portals have created an additional layer of workload distribution, visibility and accountability.  We have also seen the unified communications space evolve dramatically. Products have rich features and competitive prices – a double win for users and customers.

Somewhere in the middle is the meeting itself. Physical and virtual. Audio, video and content sharing all in one frame that is accessible to the entire team. Meeting success is a product of both human and technical expertise. Meeting hosts have a responsibility to keep the discussion on track. Meeting participants expect to have the technology in place to join, speak, watch and share during the discussion. Meeting productivity must be managed as an individual component, and as a function of the overall collaboration environment. Everything from room size and meeting agendas to clear audio and video. And although we have seen a rapid cycle of collaboration innovation, teams still struggle with participation, engagement and productivity.

When is collaboration getting in the way of work?

In talking to customers, we often hear a few common meeting frustrations: fewer meetings, shorter meetings, better notes and follow up. This suggests that although we have the technology to conduct meetings, there is still an opportunity to have productive meetings that have a material impact on the business. According to the BlueJeans survey, meeting waste costs the US economy $400+ billion per year! A similar finding from Doodle in The State of Meetings report, found that workers waste 13 workdays a year in pointless meetings. Or put another way, it costs a company approximately $3,100 per employee for bad meetings. A few bad meetings a week, and you could have bought the employee of the month a new car. These aren’t small numbers. Teams and companies suffer when meetings are unproductive.

Productivity: The Endangered Corporate Species

We have identified three areas where meeting productivity is threatened.  Time is precious for all of us, and 52% of our survey respondents say they work at night and on weekends because of too many meetings.  In an interesting twist, however, people also report meeting FOMO (fear of missing out). The feeling that they will miss something important if they don’t attend the meetings that are blocking out their calendar and keeping them away from doing “important” work.

The second productivity killer for many teams and companies is the fact that the meeting itself evaporates. The discussion is ephemeral. Notes are subjective. The ability to carry momentum from one meeting to the next is a challenge and requires an internal champion to make it happen.

And that creates a third contributor to meeting unproductivity: meeting follow up requires discipline and most people are too focused on the next meeting. Action items are lost and forward progress is sidelined until the next meeting. It’s a cycle we all know too well.

#GetSmart

Productivity is the outcome of improved collaboration, and a more intelligent meeting platform is the first step.  Teams are looking for a smart meeting platform that optimises the pre, during and post meeting efforts to improve how ideas are captured, assigned and available for review after the meeting ends.

There is a window of opportunity for smart technology to serve the human experience. Call it artificial intelligence but the point is for people and teams to benefit from technical innovation. It’s a service relationship. The meeting platform serves the team. Great audio like we see from our partner Dolby Labs creates an innovation cycle where real time transcription is more accurate and can then be used to crowd source notes, assign action items and send meeting summaries. Technical innovation is the underbelly of shorter, more focused meetings, or perhaps, the ability to skip a meeting all together because the highlights provide the necessary context for those who missed it. It’s just the right amount of machine intelligence to produce better human collaboration.

Meetings Impact Everything

The enterprise IT professional often works alongside colleagues in facilities and HR to create a workplace that is productive and enjoyable for employees. That means thinking beyond connectivity and exploring how the physical and technical can work to create a productive environment. Less distracting and more focused for those in person and remote. It’s easier said than done and we can all speak to how more “productivity” tools get in the way of our work.

The right approach is a meeting supplement, a bionic meeting wrap to equip the team with the tools to be present and engaged. The tools support the process and create the best version of each person and the team. And with the right application of intelligent meeting functionality, we create a new cycle. Instead of a cycle of more meetings and less time that impacts team morale and company culture, we develop a measurable productivity quotient that lifts team spirit, inspires creativity and allows employees to prioritise their time for a better work/life balance.

Meetings won’t go away anytime soon but we can use the right tools to reshape the meeting experience as a gateway to better collaboration and communication that helps everyone feel better about the job they are doing.  Take the time to evaluate the productivity tools in your organisation. It is a worthwhile investment that will touch every part of your company.

Guest Blog by Guillaume Vives, Chief Product Officer, BlueJeans Network

An appeals court has upheld the Federal Communications Commission’s repeal of net neutrality laws, but it vacated a rule that would prevent states from passing their own. The decision mostly marks a defeat for Mozilla, which sued the agency last year. But it’s tentatively positive for states like California, which has been fighting for the right to impose stricter net neutrality laws.

The District of Columbia Court of Appeals says the FCC had authority to reclassify internet service providers as “information services” under Title I of the Telecommunications Act, rather than “common carriers” that can be more heavily regulated. It wasn’t persuaded by most of the arguments against this change, but it noted three areas where the FCC hasn’t...

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If you’re a regular reader of the Zoom blog, you’ll know that our customers love our app integrations, specifically our integration with Slack. The messaging and communication platform is one of the most popular apps in the Zoom App Marketplace, with more than 15,000 Slack teams using the app each month. HubSpot uses both Slack and Zoom and is one of those customers that understands just how big of a role the apps’ interoperability plays in the company’s success.

As one of the premier marketing, sales and service platforms, Cambridge, Massachusetts-based HubSpot helps organizations of all sizes grow using its portfolio of content management, social media marketing, customer relationship management, and analytics services. And seamless internal and external communication is critical for the future of HubSpot.

Andrew Lindsay, HubSpot’s vice president of corporate development and business development, has teams located in HubSpot’s headquarters outside Boston and also in Singapore and San Francisco. Regular in-person communication is a challenge, to say the least. Thus, effective collaboration across geographies and time zones, Lindsay says, requires seamless digital communication.

“In the past, being remote would have meant less communication or we don’t see people face to face,” Lindsay said. But the proliferation of apps in the workplace has removed some of the obstacles for remote workforces as long as the solutions work well with each other to enhance productivity, something he can always count on from the integrated Slack and Zoom platforms.

“Slack and Zoom are the two most critical ways within HubSpot that we overcome the challenges of being distant,” Lindsay said. “The development of these apps has changed the way I communicate.”

For example, Lindsay spends much of his day exchanging messages and monitoring channel updates in Slack to stay current on team activities. And when a simple chat conversation just isn’t cutting it, he can easily transition to a video call using Zoom’s Slack app. “When I’m sitting in Slack having a conversation with somebody, often we decide spontaneously that we want to start a Zoom,” he said. “It’s as simple as [typing] /zoom, and you have the invite go out and you’re on within 30 seconds. It is a fully seamless experience.”

The compatibility of leading-edge solutions like Slack and Zoom drive business today by improving productivity and better executing daily workflows. Zoom even offers a Hubspot app for joint users to receive HubSpot event notifications and search their HubSpot account database, further enabling frictionless business communications for all types of users.

“[Slack and Zoom is] how we communicate with each other. That’s how we communicate with our customers,” he said. “And for us to have a seamless experience between those apps makes us much more efficient in our day and helps us to serve our customers better.” 

Watch the video to learn more about how HubSpot uses Slack + Zoom to enhance internal and external communications:

To learn more about how Zoom’s video-first unified communications platform can transform your business, schedule a personalized Zoom demo with a product specialist today!

The post Slack + Zoom Enables Frictionless Communications for HubSpot appeared first on Zoom Blog.

The board of directors wants risk articulated in terms of trade offs and return on investment.

• Interviews with Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Sundar Pichai, and other tech power players reveal that Silicon Valley parents are strict about technology use.
• A book suggests the signs may have been clear years ago that smartphone use should be regulated.
• There may be a way to integrate tech into the classroom, however, that avoids its harmful effects.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Psychologists are learning how dangerous smartphones can be for teenage brains.

The World Health Organization recently advised parents to limit screentime to just one hour a day for children under five. Though one large study found little correlation between screen-time and mental health impacts, other research has found that an eighth-grader's risk for depression jumps 27% when he or she frequently uses social media. 

But the writing about smartphone risk might have been on the wall for roughly a decade, according to educators Joe Clement and Matt Miles, co-authors of the book "Screen Schooled: Two Veteran Teachers Expose How Technology Overuse is Making Our Kids Dumber."

It should be telling, Clement and Miles argue, that the two biggest tech figures in recent history — Bill Gates and Steve Jobs — seldom let their kids play with the very products they helped create.

"What is it these wealthy tech executives know about their own products that their consumers don't?" the authors wrote. 

Here's how Silicon Valley elites limit screentime for their own kids, despite helping sell tech to children across the world:

SEE ALSO: The World Health Organization just released screen-time guidelines for kids. Here's how some of the world's most successful CEOs limit it at home

Bill Gates, one of the most influential tech leaders in the world, limited how much technology his children could use at home.

In 2007, Gates, the former CEO of Microsoft, implemented a cap on screen time when his daughter started developing an unhealthy attachment to a video game. He also didn't let his kids get cell phones until they turned 14. 

Other techies, like Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel, limit their kids' screen time.

Spiegel and his wife Miranda Kerr impose an hour and a half of screen time per week on their kids, he told the Financial Times. Young people use Snapchat more often than any other social media platform, according to a 2018 Pew Research Center survey.

Plus, current Apple CEO Tim Cook and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella have spoken out against tech overuse among children.

Despite the fact he created the iPad, Steve Jobs wouldn't let his kids use it.

Jobs, who was the CEO of Apple until his death in 2012, revealed in a 2011 New York Times interview that he prohibited his kids from using the newly-released iPad. "We limit how much technology our kids use at home," Jobs told reporter Nick Bilton.

In an recent interview on Cheddar, iPod co-creator Tony Fadell speculated that if Steve Jobs were alive today, he'd want to address growing societal concerns about tech addiction. "He'd say, 'Hey we need to do something about it,'" Fadell said.

The CEO of Google's parent company, Sundar Pichai, limits the time his kids spend watching TV.

Pichai told the New York Times in a 2018 interview that his then-11-year-old son did not have a cell phone, and that he limits the time his children spend watching television. 

Even elite Silicon Valley schools are noticeably low-tech.

That's at the average school at least, according to the coauthors. A number of specialty Silicon Valley schools, such as the Waldorf School in Mountain View, are noticeably low-tech. They use chalkboards and No. 2 pencils. Instead of learning how to code, kids are taught the soft skills of cooperation and respect.

At Brightworks School in San Francisco, kids learn creativity by building things and attending classes in treehouses.

Some low-income schools, meanwhile, have increased their tech usage to help solve for teacher shortage problems. Parents said a Mark Zuckerberg-funded web-based teaching platform caused physical and mental ailments, The New York Times reported.

Read more: Parents say a learning app backed by Mark Zuckerberg is giving kids anxiety and headaches, raising concerns about the amount of time students spend staring at screens
 

Despite barring his own kids from using too much tech, some experts say Gates touts the use of electronic devices in schools.

If there is any concession Gates has made on technology, it's in the benefits it offers students in certain educational settings. In the years since Gates implemented his household policy, the billionaire philanthropist has taken a keen interest in personalized education, an approach that uses electronic devices to help tailor lesson plans for each student.

In a recent blog post, Gates celebrated Summit Sierra, a Seattle-based school that takes students' personal goals — like getting into a specific college — and devises a path to get there. Teachers in personalized learning settings take on more of a coaching role, helping to nudge students back on track when they get stuck or distracted.

Technology in these cases is being used as specifically as possible — and in ways Gates recognizes as useful for a student's development, not as entertainment.

"Personalized learning won't be a cure-all," he wrote. But Gates said he's "hopeful that this approach could help many more young people make the most of their talents."

Authors Clement and Miles make the case that while Silicon Valley elites have made a profit off of selling tech to kids, they recognize how addictive and harmful these products can be.

In "Screen Schooled," Clement and Miles make the case that wealthy Silicon Valley parents seem to grasp the addictive powers of smartphones, tablets, and computers more than the general public does — despite the fact that these parents often make a living by creating and investing in that technology.

"It's interesting to think that in a modern public school, where kids are being required to use electronic devices like iPads," the authors wrote, "Steve Jobs's kids would be some of the only kids opted out."

Jobs' children have finished school, so it's impossible to know how the late Apple cofounder would have responded to education technology, or "edtech." But Clement and Miles suggest that if Jobs' kids had attended the average US school today, they'd have used tech in the classroom far more than they did at home while growing up.

Chris Weller contributed to a previous version of this article.

Microsoft today announced that Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD), its Azure-based system for virtualizing the Windows and Office user experience it announced last September, is now generally available. Using WVD, enterprises can give their employees access to virtualized applications and remote desktops, including the ability to provide multi-session Windows 10 experiences, something that sets Microsoft’s own apart from that of other vendors that offer virtualized Windows desktops and applications.

In addition to making the service generally available, Microsoft is also rolling it out globally, whereas the preview was U.S.-only and the original plan was to slowly roll it out globally. Scott Manchester, the principal engineering lead for WVD, also told me that more than 20,000 companies signed up for the preview. He also noted that Microsoft Teams is getting enhanced support in WVD with a significantly improved video conferencing experience.

Shortly after announcing the preview of WVD, Microsoft acquired a company called FSLogix, which specialized in provisioning the same kind of virtualized Windows environments that Microsoft offers through WVD. As Microsoft’s corporate VP for Microsoft 365 told me ahead of today’s announcement, the company took a lot of the know-how from FSLogix to ensure that the user experience on WVD is as smooth as possible.

Brad Anderson, CVP of Microsoft 365, noted that just as enterprises are getting more comfortable with moving some of their infrastructure to the cloud (and have others worry about managing it), there is now also growing demand from organizations that want this same experience for their desktop experiences. “They look at the cloud as a way of saying, ‘listen, let the experts manage the infrastructure. They can optimize it; they can fine-tune it; they can make sure that it’s all done right.’ And then I’ll just have a first-party service — in this case Microsoft — that I can leverage to simplify my life and enable me to spin up and down capacity on demand,” Anderson said. He also noted, though, that making sure that these services are always available is maybe even more critical than for other workloads that have moved to the cloud. If your desktop stops working, you can’t get much done, after all.

Anderson also stressed that if a customer wants a multi-session Windows 10 environment in the cloud, WVD is the only way to go because that is the only way to get a license to do so. “We’ve built the operating system, we built the public cloud, so that combination is going to be unique and this gives us the ability to make sure that that Windows 10 experience is the absolute best on top of that public cloud,” he noted.

He also stressed that the FSLogix acquisition enabled his team to work with the Office team to optimize the user experience there. Thanks to this, when you spin up a new virtualized version of Outlook, for example, it’ll just take a second or two to load instead of almost a minute.

A number of companies are also still looking to upgrade their old Windows 7 deployments. Microsoft will stop providing free security patches for them very soon, but on WVD, these users will still be able to get access to virtualized Windows 7 desktops with free extended security updates until January 2023. Anderson does not believe that this will be a major driver for WVD adoption, but he does see “pockets of customers who are working on their transition.”

Enterprises can access Windows 10 Enterprise and Windows 7 Enterprise on WVD at no additional licensing cost (though, of course, the Azure resources they consume will cost them) if they have an eligible Windows 10 Enterprise or Microsoft 365 license.