Davemichels

I know what date it is, but let me assure you this is no April Fools’ gag: Huawei’s P30 Pro has the best low-light camera, better even than Google’s Pixel Night Sight, and it sets a new benchmark for night photography. It’s so good that it will make iPhone and Samsung Galaxy phone owners question their fealty. Huawei has taken the most challenging situation for any photographer and made it as easy and casual as snapping a shot in broad daylight.

It will still be a few days before I can publish my full review of the P30 Pro, but I spent this past weekend comparing its camera against Google’s Pixel 3 and struggling to believe my eyes. The Pixel 3’s Night Sight mode is algorithmic magic, granting that camera something akin to superhuman...

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As someone who was dealt a hefty dose of social anxiety at birth, I’ve often wished for a phone call to interrupt whatever situation I’ve found myself in. I’m shocked that I haven’t spontaneously developed the power to telepathically communicate I want to escape this party yet—and I’ve definitely been guilty of inventing a whole-ass boyfriend just to wriggle out of awkward moments.

To help in those moments when you just needs to get away and recharge, Chloe Condon, a Cloud Developer Advocate at Microsoft, created an app that fakes a phone call from a robotic paramour to bail her out of awkward situations.

When she triggers the call with a remote bluetooth button (Flic from Shortcut Labs), the phone starts ringing. When she answers, a hilariously robotic voice states, “Call me. It is I, your boyfriend. Please call me as soon as you can. It is very urgent.” And then “Never Gonna Give You Up” by Rick Astley plays, as she demonstrated on Twitter:

“I would be lying if I said I haven’t had one or two scenarios on the conference floor in previous roles where I wish I had some sort of app/hand-signal/telekinesis to flag down a friend to save me from an overly chatty attendee,” Condon told me in an email.

Condon describes herself as an ambivert—someone with characteristics of both introversion and extroversion—and told me in an email that her job as “a liaison between marketing, customers, and engineering” requires a lot of conferences, events and public speaking.

She made the app using the Microsoft automation app Azure Functions and an Azure Functions HTTP Trigger, according to a her blog post, to demonstrate how these tools can automate certain application tasks. In this first iteration of the app, the voice is automated, using TwiML text-to-speech to generate the spoken words. It sounds pretty goofy right now, but Condon told me that she plans to record new voices and scripts for added realism

While won’t be able to install the fake boyfriend app on your phone via the App Store or Google Play, programming-savvy folks can access the code in a GitHub repository and even personalize it.

Condon views this app as an example of why diversity in tech is important, she told me.

“Without diverse backgrounds, engineering teams, and customer input, apps with specific use cases for under-represented groups in tech such as this will not be made,” she said. “Perspective is incredibly important... If this app inspires even one woman to learn to program by seeing what can be built with technology—that’s a huge win for me.”

Some fake call apps like Condon’s already exist, whether for bail-outs or pranks. But Condon has made the code openly available, so you can personalize this one to your introverted heart’s content.

Because Condon put the app’s code on Github, others can play around and create their own versions. She envisions it being used for a variety of purposes—safety alerts between partners and friends, fake play-calls from Santa for kids, first date bail-outs, and of course the original use of escaping clingy conversations.

• On Monday, Twilio launched an app that allows users to send SMS texts through Salesforce's customer relationship management software.
• This app was originally aimed at nonprofits, which wanted a feature to send texts to people who don't have Internet access. It can also be used to help organize volunteers.
• Twilio is launching this app for enterprises after realizing that companies wanted this feature as well.

When Twilio was working with nonprofits, they asked the $16 billion cloud company for a feature that could better help them communicate with their volunteers, donors and people participating in their programs.

So on Monday, Twilio announced Twilio for Salesforce, an app that allows people to send SMS texts from Salesforce's customer relationship management software.

Originally, this feature was specifically aimed at nonprofits, but then commercial companies started asking for the feature as well.

"We needed something that's super simple that a volunteer would be able to start using immediately," Meghan Nesbit, director of nonprofit market development at Twilio, told Business Insider.  "We really focused on that with an app."

This feature can be especially helpful to nonprofits to reach people who may not have access to the Internet or email by allowing nonprofits to use Salesforce to text them instead. Or, if a nonprofit is organizing an event or coordinating volunteers to respond to a disaster, it can use Salesforce to schedule and send messages to a group of people.

"If I have a bunch of volunteers, and I want them to meet me at Golden Gate Park at 9 a.m., and I want to send a reminder, I can create a public campaign on Salesforce, schedule and send it later or send it right now," Nesbit said. "This is also really helpful for organizations that need people to do something really quickly."

Read more: CEO Jeff Lawson says Twilio is committing $1M to homelessness programs after Prop C passed: 'Let's get it done'

At a company, if employees have a meeting and are running late, they can send a text from Salesforce.

"Technology innovation is not limited to the industry titans," Nesbit said.  "A lot of innovation that's happening with technology, it's happening in the social impact sector."

SEE ALSO: Here's how this former Google Analytics head used what he learned to launch a new Accel-backed startup out of stealth

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NOW WATCH: Watch Google's Stadia video-game-platform event in 5 minutes

Like other consumer-centric offerings, Amazon is trying to morph Alexa into the enterprise tool, drawing on a new pool of buyers.

• Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' personal security consultant Gavin de Becker believes Saudi Arabia had access to Bezos' phone, according to an op-ed published by de Becker on Saturday in The Daily Beast.
• While de Becker didn't say how the Saudis gained access to his phone, the country has been accused in the past of using advanced spyware to track its adversaries.
• Some of that spyware comes from NSO Group, an Israeli company valued at $1 billion that sells technology that can track texts, emails, calls, apps and location data from "the air without leaving a trace," according to a New York Times investigation.

A $1 billion Israeli intelligence startup accused of helping Saudi Arabia track its adversaries could be the key to new assertions from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' security consultant Gavin de Becker.

In an op-ed published in The Daily Beast on Saturday, de Becker said his team concluded that Saudi Arabia  "had access to Bezos' phone and gained private information," following its investigation into how Bezos' texts with girlfriend Lauren Sanchez ended up in the hands of The National Enquirer. 

A foreign government surveilling a powerful American CEO using advanced technologies? It sounds like the stuff of a spy novel.

But as it turns out, tracking people's cell phones is a well-established practice, and the technology behind it — known as "lawful intercept spyware" — is a $12 billion industry.

Software can track texts, emails and apps 

While De Becker stopped short of asserting how Saudi Arabia accessed Bezos' phone, his op-ed linked out to a New York Times article on "internet mercenaries" including NSO Group, DarkMatter, and Black Cube — companies which use technological prowess to put advanced spying techniques in the hands of governments around the globe.

The most established is NSO Group, $1 billion Israeli startup that's open about its mission to help "government agencies prevent and investigate terrorism and crime to save thousands of lives around the globe.'

NSO Group was founded in 2008 by Shalev Hulio and Omri Lavie to help cell phone providers gain access to their customer's phones to perform maintenance.

Since then, the company has helped Saudi Arabia "track its adversaries," helped Mexico "hunt drug kingpins," and made millions of dollars doing similar work for dozens of different governments, according to an investigation by the Times. 

NSO Group's main technology Pegasus came out in 2011. Pegasus lets its users collect remote data from smartphone apps like Facebook, WhatsApp and Skype, as well as texts, emails, calls and location data, from "the air without leaving a trace," according to the Times.

While helping Mexico catch drug criminals is within NSO Group's stated mission, the company is at the center of a lawsuit which alleges its technology was used by Saudi Arabia to spy on journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was murdered at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018. 

NSO Group has also worked with the United Arab Emirates, which was caught installing NSO's software on the cell phone of human rights activist Ahmed Mansoor, according to the Times.

A spokeswoman for NSO said its technology was not used on Bezos.

“We can say unequivocally that our technology was not used in this instance. We know this because our software cannot be used on US phone numbers," the spokeswoman said. "Our technology, which is only licensed to prevent or investigate crime and terror, was not used by any of our customers to target Mr. Bezos’ phone."

NSO faces steep competition

SEE ALSO: A prominent Silicon Valley VC was 'terminated' from Lightspeed Venture Partners after admitting a link to the college-admissions scandal

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NOW WATCH: Watch Apple debut its own no-fee credit card

The parent company of restaurants such as Planet Hollywood, Buca di Beppo, and Mixology has confirmed that it experienced a security breach after security researchers found more than 2 million stolen credit card numbers being sold online.

KrebsOnSecurity says that it contacted the company in February after it discovered “strong evidence” that customer credit card and debit card numbers were being sold online. Hackers used “malware installed on its point-of-sale systems” to steal 2.15 million credit and debit card numbers, expiration dates, and some cardholder names from restaurant locations in 40 states.

Earl Enterprises says that the breach took place between May 23rd, 2018 and March 18th, 2019, and that “the incident has now been...

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One of the great things about enterprise chat applications, beyond giving employees a common channel to communicate, is the ability to integrate with other enterprise applications. Today, Workplace, Facebook’s enterprise collaboration and communication application, and ServiceNow announced a new chatbot to make it easier for employees to navigate a company’s help desks inside Workplace Chat.

The beauty of the chatbot is that employees can get answers to common questions whenever they want, wherever they happen to be. The Workplace-ServiceNow integration happens in Workplace Chat and can can involve IT or HR help desk scenarios. A chatbot can help companies save time and money, and employees can get answers to common problems much faster.

Previously, getting these kind of answers would have required navigating multiple systems, making a phone call or submitting a ticket to the appropriate help desk. This approach provides a level of convenience and immediacy.

Companies can brainstorm common questions and answers and build them in the ServiceNow Virtual Agent Designer. It comes with some standard templates, and doesn’t require any kind of advanced scripting or programming skills. Instead, non-technical end users can adapt pre-populated templates to meet the needs, language and workflows of an individual organization.

Screenshot: ServiceNow

This is all part of a strategy by Facebook to integrate more enterprise applications into the tool. In May at the F8 conference, Facebook announced 52 such integrations from companies like Atlassian, SurveyMonkey, HubSpot and Marketo (the company Adobe bought in September for $4.75 billion).

This is part of a broader enterprise chat application trend around making these applications the center of every employee’s work life, while reducing task switching, the act of moving from application to application. This kind of integration is something that Slack has done very well and has up until now provided it with a differentiator, but the other enterprise players are catching on and today’s announcement with ServiceNow is part of that.

• Verizon is now offering a free version of its Call Filter spam blocking service, which was previously a paid service that cost $3 per month. 
• The paid version has a few extra features over the free version, but they share the same spam-blocking purpose. 
• The free version of Call Filter is only available for post-paid Verizon customers, and not pre-paid customers. 

Verizon announced on Thursday that it now offers a free version of Call Filter, its robocall- and spam-call blocking service, which used to cost customers $3 per month.

With the free version of Call Filter, Verizon customers get spam detection, blocking, and reporting.

The paid "premium" version of Call Filter still exists, and contains a few extra features over the new free version, like spam caller ID, personal spam lists, personal block lists, a risk meter for incoming calls, and a lookup tool to get more details on a call that was potentially spam. 

Along with the free version of Call Filter, Verizon is also rolling out the universal Stir/Shaken caller identification technology, that's also being adopted by other carriers. Stir/Shaken is designed to verify that the number you see when you get a call actually comes from the same phone number making the call. It should help thwart spam callers who use internet-based phone systems (like Google Voice, but they might use a different service) that let spammers choose what number will appear on a victim's phone. 

For Stir/Shaken to work well, it needs to be adopted by other carriers, too, so that a spam phone number can be verified if a spam call is made on a different carrier or network. So far, T-Mobile has already added the technology to its network. AT&T and Comcast said they're adding Stir/Shaken to their networks for calls made between their networks. 

Unfortunately for Verizon customers with pre-paid plans, the free version of Call Filter won't be available to them. Only post-paid customers will get access to free spam blocking. 

To activate the free version of Call Filter, Verizon leads its customers to the main Call Filter page. 

The problem of spam calls has only been getting worse recently, so it's good to see that Verizon is finally taking steps to reduce the number of spam calls its customers receive. 

SEE ALSO: The newest big smartphone from LG finally has a price and release date

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NOW WATCH: Everyone's talking about foldable phones, but a few things need to happen before people start buying them

• Six years after its founding in Australia, Skedulo has offices in three continents and 60,000 people using its service.
• The startup charges companies a monthly per-user fee to help them manage remote workers.
• Skedulo recently raised $28 million from investors, including Microsoft's M12 venture arm.

For many workers, a 9-to-5 office job is a thing of the past — if they ever experienced it at all.

A large and growing number of people work remotely or out in the field, at least some of the time.

Managing such a decentralized workforce can be a logistical nightmare, particularly as the number of remote workers a company employs grows larger. But a San Francisco startup has created a service that's designed to ease managers' pain.

Skedulo offers an online scheduling service that allows companies to manage remote workers, keeping track of their hours, directing them to particular clients or customers, and providing them a means to send information, such as electronic signatures, back to the home office. The company offers a version of the service that corporate administrators can use back at headquarters and a mobile app for the remote workers themselves. 

"For most people, we've become the operating system for their day," Matt Fairhurst, Skedulo's CEO, told Business Insider in a recent interview.

Skedulo's service is replacing paper and white boards

Although the remote workforce has been exploding in recent years across many industries, there haven't been many good technological solutions for companies to manage their off-site workers, Fairhurst said. Many companies that have adopted Skedulo's service were previously using Excel spreadsheets, calendar apps, custom software they created themselves, and even white boards and paper, he said.

Read more: 9 traditional fields that are hiring more remote workers than ever

"This is a brand new category from a technology perspective," Fairhurst, who also cofounded the company, said. "It's actually rarely the case that we're going in and ripping out alternative applications that were used to manage this process."

Skedulo helps managers match up remote workers who have particular skills with customers in need of that expertise. Its service can do that automatically for certain companies or industries where that's a good match, Fairhurst said. Or it can just make it easier for managers to manually make those pairings in cases where automation isn't the best solution, he said.

"We're not assuming every company can deploy full optimization or automation all the time," he said. "But it is a really important part of what we do."

Skedulo's service, for which it charges customers a monthly per-user fee, hooks into other kinds of enterprises and management software and services, including Workday, ServiceNow, and Salesforce. It also can be customized and configured for particular industries. 

It's being used to schedule insurance auditors and clowns

The company, which was founded in 2013 in Australia, has about 60,000 people using its service in countries and areas including Australia, the US, and Europe, Fairhurst said. Although Skedulo's service is used across several different industries, it's found particularly strong uptake in the home healthcare business, he said. Such companies represent more than 30% of Skedulo's customer base, he said.

But the company has also seen strong adoption in the business-services sector and in training and education, he said.

"We've done everything from help companies schedule clowns to go into a hospital to juggle for sick kids all way to insurance auditors doing claims management in the field," Fairhurst said.

With the remote workforce continuing to grow, the company sees a big opportunity ahead of it. And investors do, too. Earlier this month, Skedulo closed a $28 million Series B funding round that was led by M12, the name of Microsoft's in-house venture fund. The money, which brought the company's total funding to $40.5 million, gave it a valuation of more than $100 million, according to PitchBook.

Skedulo, which has about 120 employees, plans to use the funds to bulk up its sales and marketing teams, which are mainly based in San Francisco, and its product and engineering teams, which are in Brisbane, Australia, and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, Fairhurst said.

"We want to make sure we're building a team to support the demand we're seeing in the market," he said. Skedulo has an "audacious mission," he continued, "of touching every desk-less and mobile worker."

Got a tip about a startup or other tech company? Contact this reporter via email at twolverton@businessinsider.com, message him on Twitter @troywolv, or send him a secure message through Signal at 415.515.5594. You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

• Read more about startups:
• The CEO of billion-dollar startup Airtable says it could go public any time it wants. Here’s why he doesn’t want to.
• Here's the pitch deck a Virginia startup used to raise $6 million after seven years of bootstrapping its business
• Here's the pitch deck AI startup Skymind just used to scoop up $11.5 million in funding
• Here's how Airtable raised $160 million last year — and got a valuation of about $1 billion — without a pitch deck

SEE ALSO: The era of the all-powerful tech CEO has only just begun, even though Facebook and Snap show why that's a bad thing

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NOW WATCH: Watch Google's Stadia video-game-platform event in 5 minutes

UC Today attended Enterprise Connect 2019, potentially the biggest unified communications and collaboration event on the planet, to bring you interviews with all the industry’s biggest names.

Presenter Patrick is joined by Alan Masarek who is the CEO of Vonage.

Alan tells Patrick that they have made two major announcements at Enterprise Connect 2019. Firstly they have developed number programmability for its business customers. Vonage acquired Nexmo, and now using APIs they can allow their enterprise customers to use any phone number and expand its capabilities, Alan explains how.

Secondly Alan reveals that Vonage have launched CX Cloud Express. After acquiring CCaaS platform provider NewVoiceMedia, last year, Vonage have now fully integrated the contact centre offering into Vonage Business Cloud. The offering is targeted at filling a gap in provision for medium size businesses.

Watch at your desk, whilst on your commute, or on the sun lounger, UC Today provides bite size videos, bringing you all of the latest communication and collaboration news.

Rate, review, share on YouTube and join the conversation on LinkedIn, Twitter and email.

Presenter Patrick Watson and Alan Masarek from Vonage.

Everyone hates April Fools’ Day, and Microsoft is taking a stand against its own corporate pranks. Microsoft’s marketing chief Chris Capossela has warned all employees to not participate in the process of annoying hoaxes on Monday. In an internal memo, obtained and verified by The Verge, Capossela explains that “data tells us these stunts have limited positive impact and can actually result in unwanted news cycles.” He encourages all teams inside Microsoft not to do any public-facing April Fools’ Day stunts.

“I appreciate that people may have devoted time and resources to these activities, but I believe we have more to lose than gain by attempting to be funny on this one day,” says Capossela. That’s probably a safe bet, as we’ve seen...

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• Facebook announced it removed over 2,600 pages, groups, and accounts for engaging in "coordinated inauthentic behavior."
• It identified three distinct operations originating in Russia, Iran, and Kosovo and Macedonia.
• While the Russian operation was the largest, the Iranian and Kosovan-Macedonian operations spent a combined total of $20,800 on ads since 2013.

Facebook on Tuesday announced that it removed 2,632 pages, groups, and accounts for "coordinated inauthentic behavior" on both Facebook and Instagram.

Facebook identified three separate operations originating from Iran, Russia, and Kosovo and Macedonia.

The Russian operation was the largest, with a total of 1,907 pages, groups, and accounts removed. Primarily, the Russian network produced spam, although a smaller number of its pages posted news relating to Ukraine.

According to Facebook, one or more of the groups run by the Russian operation had a membership of 1.7 million.

Second largest was the Iranian network, which comprised of 513 pages, groups, and accounts and was more overtly politicised. According to Facebook, the Iranian network both invented fake media organisations and posed as legitimate ones, as well as political groups.

The topics this network chose to amplify included among others: Sanctions against Iran, tensions between India and Pakistan, and tensions between Israel and Palestine.

It spent roughly $15,000 on ads, which it took out from as far back as 2013, all the way up to February this year.

This isn't the first time Facebook has caught Iranian-backed accounts passing themselves off as real news organisations. In August 2018, Facebook announced it had been tipped off to a network of Iran-backed sites called the "Liberty Front Press" by cybersecurity firm FireEye.

Read more: Facebook says Iran-backed accounts pretended to be news organizations to spread information and to launch cyber attacks

The final and smallest coordinated network with 212 pages, groups, and accounts removed stemmed from Kosovo and Macedonia. It mostly produced innocuous lifestyle content about topics like astrology, celebrities, and beauty tips.

A small number of pages, however, posed as political groups from Australia, the UK and the US, and posted content about political and religious topics, including Britain's exit from the European Union.

The Kosovan-Macedonian network also spent money on ads (roughly $5,800), which similarly ran from 2013 until March this year.

SEE ALSO: Facebook plans to tackle anti-vaccine misinformation by rejecting false ads and de-ranking harmful pages

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NOW WATCH: Everything we know about the Samsung Galaxy S10, which could have 6 cameras

At its Huawei P30 Pro launch event today, the company announced that it’s partnering with Korean fashion brand Gentle Monster to release its first smart glasses.

Gentle Monster is a luxury eyewear company that’s popular across Asia. Known for its experimental design, its showrooms look more like art galleries, which were shown by CEO Hankook Kim onstage as he introduced the smart glasses. Kim also threw some shade at Snapchat Spectacles, asking, “How many people want to wear this as we meet our friends or lovers?” The glasses also don’t have any cameras, which allow them to look more like regular sunglasses. It’s a smart partnership choice by Huawei that puts a real emphasis on fashion.

Users can tap the temple of the glasses to answer...

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We are thrilled to announce that live events are now generally available in Microsoft Teams – enabling anyone to create live and on-demand events to reach large online audiences. Live events in Microsoft Teams enables you to schedule, produce, broadcast and record rich, interactive streaming content. Up to 10k attendees can join live from anywhere and across any device or watch on-demand at their convenience.

Live events in Microsoft Teams enable an intuitive end-end experience for the event organizer, producer, presenter as well as attendees:

Simple scheduling and set-up experience:

Thinking of finally hosting that long-due event? Scheduling a live event and inviting your attendees is a matter of a few clicks. You can create a live event using the same Teams meeting experience that you are familiar with. Using the Teams app, you can assign appropriate attendee permissions, designate event team members, select production method, and invite attendees within your organization or make it public.

With simple scheduling and set-up experience, anyone can create a live event using Microsoft Teams

Choose appropriate production controls:

Live events in Microsoft 365 support a broad spectrum of production scenarios. Using simple production controls in Microsoft Teams, anyone can produce an high quality live event - using a webcam or A/V input from Teams room systems. For sophisticated production needs, such as for executive town hall meetings, producers can use external encoders to manage their live events with 3rd party hardware and software via Microsoft Stream. This is a great if you already have studio quality equipment, such as media mixers, which support streaming to a Real-time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) service.

As a producer, you can take control of the control the layout of the event, start/stop video streams, share desktop, enable live Q&A, make the event available on-demand and a lot more.

Check out how Microsoft is using live events to connect teams across the globe.

Increase engagement and reach new audiences:

Being able to interact with your audience helps you keep them that much more engaged and provides attendees more value from your event -

• Increase audience engagement and retention, and gather feedback on key areas using moderated live Q&A during the live event
• Make your event more accessible and extend your audience reach using AI capabilities such as live captions and translation. Live captions during an event make your content more accessible and make it easy for your attendees to follow along. Caption translation lets your attendees consume the content in the language they are most comfortable with.

Increase audience reach and enagement using AI capabilities such as live captions and translation

Analyze audience engagement and feedback:

You can’t improve what you can’t measure. Post event analytics helps the event team gather insights from the Q&A, look for unanswered questions from your audience etc. Audience engagement report helps you analyze the audience engagement and look for ways to improve – be it content, tone, production style etc.Analyze audience engagement and feedback using event analytics

Optimize network bandwidth using trusted eCDN solutions:

Live event playback uses adaptive bitrate streaming, which is a unicast stream, meaning every attendee is getting their own video stream from the internet. For live events sent out to huge audiences within your organization, this can consume significant internet bandwidth. Microsoft's trusted video delivery partners now offer enterprise content delivery networks (eCDN) to optimize the bandwidth consumed while delivering a great end user experience during large scale Microsoft Teams live events -

• Hive Streaming
• Kollective
• Ramp OmniCache

If you are using Skype Meeting Broadcast currently, we encourage you to use live events in Teams. You can refer to complete Skype to Teams transition roadmap here.

Learn how to get started with live events in Microsoft Teams, and let us know your feedback. We are just getting started and will be bringing many new capabilities over the next few months, including general availability of live captions and translation, ability to add a guest or a federated user as a presenter, managing a live event from the full calendar view in Teams and lot more.

Microsoft is planning to hold a special work-focused press event in New York City next month. The software giant has started sending press invites to members of the media today for an event that will take place on April 17th. Microsoft’s event will include Steelcase, the same company that it paired up with to envision a Surface-powered office of the future.

Microsoft’s event invite simply states “Microsoft & Steelcase invite you to experience new ways to work better, together,” but the company is expected to detail its Surface Hub 2S plans. Microsoft first unveiled the Surface Hub 2 last year, promising a 2S model in Q2 2019. Microsoft’s giant 50-inch display will work with removable hardware cartridges, allowing owners to upgrade the...

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• The shared-inbox startup Front has hired its first-ever CFO, Jenny Decker, who joins from Atlassian.
• Front's leadership team is now 50% women - something rare in tech startups.
• Front CEO and co-founder Mathilde Collin explains why she valued building an inclusive team, especially in the early days of Front.

Front, an app that helps businesses manage all of their messages, just hired its first CFO, officially making the leadership 50% female.

Jenny Decker joined Front as its first-ever CFO about three weeks ago, coming over from Australian software giant Atlassian. Front CEO and co-founder Mathilde Collin says the company started looking for a CFO because it needed someone to help scale the company — not necessarily because it's preparing for any kind of IPO.

Front just signed on its 4500th customer and now has over 100 employees, the company says. And just October, it made its first acquisition in the form of Meetingbird. That kind of growth is a challenge, regardless of any future plans, says Collin.

"We want to keep growing, no matter what exits we have," Collin said. "We didn't hire a CFO for a specific outcome. The fact that Jenny has the experience of a company that has grown as fast as Atlassian and become public is interesting to us. We didn't hire her for anything else other than scaling the business."

Front, which counts legendary Silicon Valley venture firm Sequoia Capital among its investors, combines a company's social media, e-mail, texts, and other messages into one shared inbox that the whole team can see, making it easier to work together and see what exactly customers are saying, and where they're saying it.

Read more: This first-time CEO has a 100% approval rating on Glassdoor and her company just made its first acquisition

Decker had worked at Atlassian for nearly six years, seeing Atlassian grow into a $26 billion public company with over 3,000 employees. She says she sees many similarities between Front and Atlassian in terms of culture, as both companies have the mission of helping people work together and collaborate better.

"The values are pretty amazing in terms of world class people and in terms of product," Decker said. "I just find Front to be a company that is really exciting to join at this juncture of the company's history. I understand the pain points of all email, and I love that Front is reinventing email and making it painless for knowledge workers."

"I hired them because they were the best"

With Decker on board, the leadership team is now half female. Besides Collin and Decker, the company also counts HR head Ash Alexander and marketing head Keiko Tokudo as part of its top executive team. 

Across the whole industry, men still hold the vast majority of leadership positions in tech. But Collin says that she doesn't look to specifically hire women. Rather she simply looks to hire the best person for the job, while maintaining high standards. At the company as a whole, 44% of Front employees are female — a higher proportion than you'd find at many of the Silicon Valley tech giants.

"When I hire people, especially in leadership positions, all I'm trying to do is hire the best people," Collin said. "I hired them because they were the best when I was interviewing them."

Bias can play a role in the gender gap in tech as well. According to the recruiter Stellares, at companies with all-male founding teams, only 14% of leadership positions are held by women. The more women there are on the founding team, the more even the gender split becomes down the line, according to Stellares.

"If you want to have a diverse team, it absolutely needs to start now," Collin said. "That's why I cared so much in the early days about diversity...I care about it and therefore I pay attention to it and I will always interview as many people as possible so I will have a good representation for what the talent pool is."

Collin said that in the early days of a company, it can be harder to hire a team with 50% women because the engineering talent pool is still predominantly men. But as the company scales and requires roles beyond engineering, the argument that there aren't enough women to hire doesn't make sense, Collin says.

"When you start up a tech company, 80% of the team is engineers, which is what usually happens, and it's true that it's harder to have 50/50," Collin said. "I wish that wasn't the case, and I would always fight for it."

'A very happy workforce'

Besides Front's corporate values, Decker said she was drawn to the opportunity of working with a female CEO, and she says that a diverse team translates to better products.

"It's very rare to be able to work for a female CEO and that was what kept my attention," Decker said. "Open and inclusive leadership teams tend to lead to open and inclusive products. We take feedback from customers of all sizes. We pay attention to all customers. It lends itself to a better and quite frankly more inclusive product, and a very happy workforce."

Read more: Here are the 10 fastest-growing work apps of 2018

At Front, Decker feels that her opinion is highly valued, and she says she's never felt like she was spoken over at meetings.

"At the most holistic level, it's diverse thinking and really challenging folks in a very constructive way to make sure we're not all single minded and we're focused on the entire population of all customers," Decker said. "I feel validated every single day."

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NOW WATCH: A mathematician gave us the easiest explanation of pi and why it's so important

Telegram, the WhatsApp rival that gained 3 million followers when Facebook had a day-long outage this month, has come out with a significant privacy-focused update. As of the latest version of Telegram — available on iOS, Android, and via a web client — you can now delete messages for all participants in your chats, irrespective of who sent them or when they were sent. Previously, Telegram allowed users a 48-hour window in which they could delete their own sent messages, both on their device and for others. Now, the time limit has been dropped, and you can wipe an entire chat history clean on your device and on anyone else’s who was part of the chat.

While this may seem like a drastic measure, Telegram founder Pavel Durov justifies it as...

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This month’s mass shooting at two mosques in New Zealand exposed how social media companies are still struggling to moderate their platforms. Microsoft now says a united tech industry could work together on a better approach.

“Ultimately, we need to develop an industrywide approach that will be principled, comprehensive and effective,” Microsoft president Brad Smith said in a blog post that was published on Sunday. “The best way to pursue this is to take new and concrete steps quickly in ways that build upon what already exists.”

Footage of the killings in Christchurch spread rapidly across the internet. Facebook said that in the first 24 hours after the...

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Microsoft’s upcoming Chromium-powered Edge browser has leaked online. Download links for the browser have been posted to file sharing sites and popular beta sharing forums. The leaked version appears to be an early copy of what Microsoft is expected to release in public preview soon.

Microsoft’s new version of Edge is built on Chromium, and early builds include Chrome extension support, syncing of favorites, and some custom tweaks to the user interface. The Verge got an exclusive early look at the browser recently, and it performs well on Windows 10. Some features are missing from what you might expect from Edge, though.

Microsoft hasn’t included its set aside tabs feature yet, and the inking with a stylus feature hasn’t been...

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Chances are you still mostly think of Vonage as a consumer VOIP player, but in recent years, the company also launched its Vonage Business Cloud (VBC) platform and acquired Nexmo, an API-based communications service that competes directly with many of Twilio’s core services. Today, Vonage is bringing its VBC service and Nexmo a bit closer with the launch of number programmability for its business customers.

What this means is that enterprises can now take any VBC number and extend it with the help of Nexmo’s APIs. To enable this, all they have to do is toggle a switch in their management console and then they’ll be able to programmatically route calls, create custom communications apps and workflows, and integrate third-party systems to build chatbots and other tools.

“About four years ago we made a pretty strong pivot to going from residential — a lot of people know Vonage as a residential player — to the business side,” Vonage senior VP of product management Jay Patel told me. “And through a series of acquisitions [including Nexmo], we’ve kind of built what we think is a very unique offering.” In many ways, those different platforms were always separated from each other, though. With all of the pieces in place now, however, the team started thinking about how it could use the Nexmo APIs to allow its customers in the unified communications and contact center space to more easily customize these services for them.

About a year ago, the team started working on this new functionality that brings the programmability of Nexmo to VBC. “We realized it doesn’t make sense for us to create our own new sets of APIs on our unified communications and contact center space,” said Patel. “Why don’t we use the APIs that Nexmo has already built?”

As Patel also stressed, the phone number is still very much linked to a business or individual employee — and they don’t want to change that just for the sake of having a programmable service. By turning on programmability for these existing numbers, though, and leveraging the existing Nexmo developer ecosystem and the building blocks those users have already created, the company believes that it’s able to offer a differentiated service that allows users to stay on its platform instead of having to forward a call to a third-party service like Twilio, for example, to enable similar capabilities.

In terms of those capabilities, users can pretty much do anything they want with these calls — and that’s important because every company has different processes and requirements. Maybe that’s logging info into multiple CRM systems in parallel or taking a clip of a call and pushing it into a different system for training purposes. Or you could have the system check your calendar when there are incoming calls and then, if it turns out you are in a meeting, offer the caller a callback whenever your calendar says you’re available again. All of that should only take a few lines of code or, if you want to avoid most of the coding, a few clicks in the company’s GUI for building these flows.

Vonage believes that these new capabilities will attract quite a few new customers. “It’s our value-add when we’re selling to new customers,” he said. “They’re looking for this kind of capability or are running into brick walls. We see a lot of companies that have an idea but they don’t know how to do it. They’re not engineers or they don’t have a big staff of developers, but because of the way we’ve implemented this, it brings the barrier of entry to create these solutions much lower than if you had a legacy system on-prem where you had to be a C++ developer to build an app.

Microsoft Teams, the collaboration platform that Microsoft built to complement its Office 365 suite of productivity apps for workers — which also ensures a way of keeping those workers staying within its own ecosystem — is hitting a milestone on its second birthday.

Today, the company announced that over 500,000 organizations are now using Teams. The company is not spelling out what that works out to in total users but notes that 150 of them have more than 10,000 users apiece, putting its total user numbers well over 1.5 million.

Alongside this, Microsoft also announced a number of new features that will be coming to Teams as it works on native integrations of more of Microsoft’s own tools to give Teams more functionality and more relevance for a wider range of use cases.

“The rigid hierarchy of the workplace has evolved, and environments are now about inclusivity and transparency,” said Lori Wright, General Manager of Workplace Collaboration at Microsoft, in an interview. “We see these trends playing out all over the world, and this is giving rise to new forms of technology.”

The new features indeed speak to that trend of inclusivity and making platforms more personalised to users. They include customized backgrounds; and support for cameras to capture content to bring in new ways of interacting in Teams beyond text — something that will be further explored with the eventual integration Microsoft Whiteboard, for people to create and ingest presentations that are hand-written into the system.

For those who are either hearing-impaired or cannot use or hear the audio, Microsoft’s adding live captions. And to speak to the purview of CSOs, it’s adding secure channels for private chats as well as “information barriers” that can be put in place for compliance purposes and to make sure that any potential conflicts of interest between channels are kept out; screening for data-loss prevention to prevent sensitive information from being shared.

Finally, it is adding live events support, which will let users create broadcasts on Teams for up to 10,000 people (who do not need to be registered Teams users to attend).

All in all, this is a significant list of product updates. The company kicked off its service as very much a Slack-style product for “knowledge workers” but has since emphasized a more inclusive approach, for all kinds of employees, from front line to back-office.

No updates today to the number of third-party applications that are being incorporated into Teams — an area where Slack has particularly excelled — but Microsoft is focused on making sure that as many users as it has already captured in Office 365, which today number 155 million — eventually also turn on to Teams. “We using as many as the Microsoft services as we can, tapping the Microsoft Graph to feed in services and structure information,” Wright said.

Microsoft is somewhat of a late comer to the collaboration space, coming in the wake of a number of other efforts, but these user figures put the company’s effort well within striking distance of notable, and large, competitors. Last month, Facebook noted that Workplace, its own Slack rival, had 2 million users, also with 150 organizations with more than 10,000 users each included in the number. Slack, meanwhile, in January said it had over 10 million daily active users with the number of organizations on the platform at 85,000.

(Notably, just yesterday Slack made a timely announcement in its bid to court more large enterprises: they will now give regulated customers access to their encrypted keys, an important component to win more business in those sectors.)

Volvo said on Wednesday it will use cameras installed inside its vehicles to monitor driver behavior and intervene if the driver appears to be drunk or distracted. It’s a risky move by an automaker, even one with a reputation for safety like Volvo, which could raise concerns among privacy advocates.

Volvo’s in-car cameras will monitor eye movements to gauge driver distraction and / or intoxication. If a driver looks away for a period of time, such as at a smartphone, or fails to keep their hands on the steering wheel, a representative from Volvo’s on-call assistance centers will call them to check in. Drivers who aren’t watching the road, or even have their eyes closed, will be warned as well. If they don’t respond, the car will slow...

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• Amazon has grown from an online bookseller to a domineering tech giant since Jeff Bezos founded it in 1994.
• Even when Amazon was young, Bezos had an extraordinary vision for his company.
• Here are some of the predictions Bezos made in 1999, more than 20 years ago, that turned out to be accurate.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

In 1999, Amazon was a 5-year-old kindergartner startup navigating the early ecommerce market.

But that didn't stop CEO Jeff Bezos from dreaming big. At the time, Amazon had just started to expand its offerings beyond books. But Bezos was already painting outlandish visions of his customer-first website becoming the one-stop marketplace for everything

Fast-forward to today, and Bezos is the richest man in the world, worth more than $122 billion. Amazon now comprises nearly 40% of all ecommerce sales each year in the US.

Here are eight predictions Bezos made in 1999 that are right on the money:

SEE ALSO: Inside the 3-floor New York City penthouse ex-WeWork CEO Adam Neumann is selling for $37.5 million

"We want to try and build a place where people can come to find and discover anything that they might want to buy online."

Bezos' vision, as shared in a 1999 appearance on Charlie Rose's talk show, has since become a reality. A 2018 poll conducted by NPR and Marist found that online shoppers were most likely to start on Amazon — even before going on a search engine like Google.

"Strip malls are history."

Thousands of storefronts in malls across the US have been closing in a "retail apocalypse," and a 2017 report from Credit Suisse estimated that 20% to 25% of malls would close in the next five years, indicating that there's still more truth to what Bezos told Wired.

Bezos predicted that physical storefronts would survive only if they could provide at least one of two core features: entertainment value or immediate convenience.

Bezos told Wired that entertainment value would keep places like movie theaters alive.

"That experience is what you get when you go to movie theaters, and why you don't always rent movies, right?" he said.

Many malls and retailers have looked at these two paths to stay relevant, with some offering high-tech experiences to get customers into their brick-and-mortar locations. Meanwhile, Bezos wanted a piece of that immediate convenience for Amazon, spurring it to buy Whole Foods and experiment with other physical retail stores.

"I'm a big believer in this notion of sort of appliances, that there'll be lots of little things that are connected to the internet ... There'll be a whole bunch of things sort of connected to the network."

It seems as if Bezos predicted the smart home in 1999 in his interview with Charlie Rose. Now, Amazon offers numerous Alexa-enabled smart-home devices, such as Echo speakers, plugs, clocks, microwaves, and home security systems.

In 1999, Amazon and Barnes & Noble were seen as direct competitors in the book-selling business. "I bet you a year from now they will not consider us direct competitors," Bezos told Wired. "Clearly they do today, but we're on different paths ... We're trying to invent the future of e-commerce, and they're just defending their turf."

While Barnes & Noble has largely remained a bookstore, Amazon counts books as just one product in its ever-growing marketplace. Perhaps in the early days of e-readers the two brands were seen as direct competitors, but Amazon's Kindle has greatly outpaced Barnes & Noble's Nook.

"Advertising is also a very valid model on the 'net. They're going to be able to make their ads more meaningful to customers by better targeting your ads, something that's hard to do in broadcast."

Personalized ads, using data from a person's search and shopping histories, are common today. And as live-TV consumption continues to decline, money is increasingly being put into digital advertising.

As of late 2018, Amazon was on track to become the third-largest digital advertiser in the US, behind Google and Facebook.

"There's nothing more frustrating than having to wait two minutes for your computer to boot up ... By the time I've waited the two minutes, I've forgotten what I was going to do. So that's I think a very important technology. And people are working on it. That one's going to happen sometime."

Bezos mentioned in several interviews in 1999 his gripe with the long waits needed to start up his computer.

In an interview with Charlie Rose, Bezos said computers would soon be equipped with what he referred to as "instant on."

Now, with smartphones that give you answers in the palm of your hand and laptops that don't need to be turned off after each use, it seems Bezos nailed that one. Technology has never been so readily accessible.

Wired's 1999 profile outlined the Amazon CEO's vision for 2020: "The vast bulk of store-bought goods — food staples, paper products, cleaning supplies, and the like — you will order electronically. "

While "vast bulk" may be an overstatement, online shopping has absolutely skyrocketed to the mainstream in 2020. Amazon has become a favorite for buying everyday essentials and household products, especially with offerings designed to streamline ordering these products, like subscriptions, voice-activated shopping via Alexa, and Prime Pantry.

But not every one of Bezos' predictions has been wholly accurate.

Bezos discussed Amazon's use of customer data in an interview with CBS's "60 Minutes."

"Bezos refuses to rule out selling the valuable information to other companies in the future," reporter Bob Simon said in the program. "But he doesn't think his customers are concerned about the issue."

Avaya has launched a new multitenant UCaaS platform to cater for the small business market. I spoke to Roberto Schmidl, VP Germany Small and Medium Business Unit, Avaya Germany, to get an understanding of the new UCaaS offering. Roberto is responsible for services and sales in small and medium business for Germany so was best placed to give me the lowdown.

In November, a completely online managed Avaya UCaaS platform arrived for the SMB market. The target is sub 50 seats like start-ups that can simply sign up online for their own Avaya solution. They can choose from three bundles – including bundled minutes – and consume in a commoditised fashion. End customers can even order their own thirty day trial via the online platform.

Avaya UCaaS for resellers

I asked Roberto whether resellers could utilise this online platform. “We are using an agency model. So, we’re signing up untraditional resellers who maybe already sell minutes, rather than the traditional telco resellers”. All this enables the current minutes carrier or IT specialist to become the one stop shop for customers requiring a cloud phone system or full blown UCaaS solution.

Avaya self-service

I learned that you can now subscribe to Avaya seats online via their self-service store. Already available in the US, this is now available in Germany too.

Similar to the Avaya Equinox meeting solution, which is also a self-service store, Roberto told me that Avaya is investing heavily in the “store-style” UCaaS. “Over the next 6 months we should expect to see more of this”.

This exposes Avaya to the UCaaS small business market where businesses wish to consume telecoms services like they purchase their mobiles. “Everything starts with a Google search,” Robert told me as we discussed the shift to UCaaS becoming a commoditised product.

“I absolutely think that’s where the market is going and where we need to be. The market analysis and research points to this. Smaller businesses have no IT buyer to run a procurement”

We agreed that the sales person’s role has changed from visiting customers to constant brand awareness and thought leadership. Roberto made me aware that this is the case but remains dependent on the segment. “Sometimes we have to deal with a customised solution rather than an off the shelf model – different verticals still require a level of modification”.

The role of customer success in self-service UCaaS

Avaya has created a customer success team to onboard self-service customers and help them go through sign up and get familiar with the solution. Typically, Roberto estimated that it now only takes around an hour to procure an Avaya UCaaS solution. This is a drastic reduction from the typical sales cycle where salespeople could have multiple visits, statements of work and order forms.

Roberto highlighted the importance of the customer success role even though the premise of self-service suggests you are on your own.

“It’s important we did some testing with the self-service technology but also to introduce experts to field FAQs for things we take for granted”. We spoke about the ever scary theme of number porting when customers consider moving from ISDN to VoIP for the first time.

“There’s a couple of things we’ve nailed down to help out with issues like this. We’ve developed around 15 videos to help with training and adoption. We’re always adding to our FAQ”.

Robert then explained how Avaya commissioned their own study in eye tracking to measure user experience of the self-service website. “We had access to a few students who were working for us whilst completing their thesis that helped us improve the user journey. When we asked them to place an order and they stumbled over little things that we just don’t consider as part of the industry. Things like how you sign up, with a Google account for example, impact different things in your browser”.

The amount of resource and time that both resellers and end users can save was a primary goal of Avaya’s when planning to introduce self-service.

“You can’t be successful in this market by taking a long time to order something”

Reseller adoption

Roberto told me about something he recently learned. “VARs are now on the site list. I had to ask why are they doing this? The answer was when the reseller received a request for 50 seats, they declined and directed them to the website”. If a customer is going to order some new seats for an existing business unit or a new site, there is no benefit for the reseller to intervene and initiate a never ending sales cycle that could result in delaying the client moving in or disappoint new staff on their first day.

Avaya are currently adding a reseller interface and reseller finder so customers can identify who their provider is in the website. Within the site, resellers will have access to current orders and customers on the system.

Roberto wrapped up our call by concluding that Avaya is close to providing an “Amazon-like experience” when shopping for UCaaS. I can’t stress how important it is to review how consumers buy when assessing how your business customers buy from you as a business. Everybody is a consumer. If it’s easy to buy technology in the consumer world, the business world should replicate this customer experience.

Avaya’s self-service UCaaS platform is available in Germany today at Avaycloud.de and will likely be rolled out through the rest of EMEA and the Americas shortly. Keep your eyes peeled on UC Today for more Avaya news or reach out to your Avaya account manager to get involved with the self-service scheme.

WebRTC wins over competition because there is no competition – browsers offer only WebRTC as a technology for web developers.

It was raining and miserable this last Saturday. I had lost of ideas for articles to write for BlogGeek.me in my backlog, but none of them really inspired me to action. The 8yo went to his cousin. The wife had her own things to do. My 11yo daughter was bored to death. She comes to me and says: “Can we do a trip outside to the park? I need some fresh air.” How could I answer besides saying yes?

The rain stopped a bit, so we went outside. What she really wanted wasn’t fresh air, but a chaperone to the closest candy vending machine. They are having a game at school for Purim, where she needs to bring small presents and candies to another kid in her class without her knowing who is pampering her. She needed an extra candy.

How is this related to WebRTC? It isn’t.

When I asked her about her plans for this game, she mentioned the trinket she planned on giving today –

2 mechanical pencils.

And that’s definitely WebRTC related.

A quick conversation ensued between me and my daughter – are these 0.5 mm or 0.7 mm point type? My daughter went to explain that it might even be 0.9 mm.

So many alternatives.

Competing standards

It got me thinking:

With analog video recording we had VHS and Betamax.

Paper size? A4 and Letter.

Power frequency? 50 Hz and 60 Hz.

With VoIP signaling we had H.323 and SIP. And also XMPP.

Audio and video codecs? A shopping mall of alternatives.

Web browser streaming? HLS and MPEG-DASH.

Inches and Meters. Left side vs right side driver in cars.

The list is endless.

WebRTC standard

But browser based real time media communications?

WebRTC.

There. Is. No. Other. Alternative.

We had that short romance around ORTC, which ended with ORTC dead and its main concepts just wrapped back into WebRTC.

What other technology would you use or could you use inside a browser to do a video call?

Nothing.

Just WebRTC.

The other alternatives just don’t cure it (including what Zoom is presumably doing).

• You want to build a real time service
• It needs to run in the browser
• You use WebRTC

What does that mean exactly? It gives us a kind of a virtuous circle.

• You want to build a real time service
• Looking at alternatives, you find WebRTC
• There’s a vibrant community around it (because of web browsers)
• Alternatives are limited proprietary solutions or old open source
• You pick WebRTC
• Adding to its popularity, adoption and ecosystem

For the most part, there’s no question if you should select WebRTC these days. There’s also no question what are the alternatives (there usually are none). It isn’t a question if WebRTC is getting adopted, used, growing or popular.

When our window to the world is the browser, then WebRTC is what you use.

For mobile apps or other devices, the need for browsers or just having an ecosystem around the technology picked translates again to WebRTC.

Thinking of using real time media technology? That’s synonymous to WebRTC.

The post Why is WebRTC winning over its (non)competition? appeared first on BlogGeek.me.

Slack announced today that it is launching Enterprise Key Management (EKM) for Slack, a new tool that enables customers to control their encryption keys in the enterprise version of the communications app. The keys are managed in the AWS KMS key management tool.

Geoff Belknap, chief security officer (CSO) at Slack, says the new tool should appeal to customers in regulated industries who might need tighter control over security. “Markets like financial services, healthcare and government are typically underserved in terms of which collaboration tools they can use, so we wanted to design an experience that catered to their particular security needs,” Belknap told TechCrunch.

Slack currently encrypts data in transit and at rest, but the new tool augments this by giving customers greater control over the encryption keys that Slack uses to encrypt messages and files being shared inside the app.

He said that regulated industries in particular have been requesting the ability to control their own encryption keys, including the ability to revoke them if it was required for security reasons. “EKM is a key requirement for growing enterprise companies of all sizes, and was a requested feature from many of our Enterprise Grid customers. We wanted to give these customers full control over their encryption keys, and when or if they want to revoke them,” he said.

Screenshot: Slack

Belknap says this is especially important when customers involve people outside the organization, such as contractors, partners or vendors in Slack communications. “A big benefit of EKM is that in the event of a security threat or if you ever experience suspicious activity, your security team can cut off access to the content at any time if necessary,” Belknap explained.

In addition to controlling the encryption keys, customers can gain greater visibility into activity inside of Slack via the Audit Logs API. “Detailed activity logs tell customers exactly when and where their data is being accessed, so they can be alerted of risks and anomalies immediately,” he said. If a customer finds suspicious activity, it can cut off access.

EKM for Slack is generally available today for Enterprise Grid customers for an additional fee. Slack, which announced plans to go public last month, has raised more than $1 billion on a $7 billion valuation.

Slack announced today that it is launching Enterprise Key Management (EKM) for Slack, a new tool that enables customers to control their encryption keys in the enterprise version of the communications app. The keys are managed in the AWS KMS key management tool.

Geoff Belknap, chief security officer (CSO) at Slack, says the new tool should appeal to customers in regulated industries who might need tighter control over security. “Markets like financial services, healthcare and government are typically underserved in terms of which collaboration tools they can use, so we wanted to design an experience that catered to their particular security needs,” Belknap told TechCrunch.

Slack currently encrypts data in transit and at rest, but the new tool augments this by giving customers greater control over the encryption keys that Slack uses to encrypt messages and files being shared inside the app.

He said that regulated industries in particular have been requesting the ability to control their own encryption keys, including the ability to revoke them if it was required for security reasons. “EKM is a key requirement for growing enterprise companies of all sizes, and was a requested feature from many of our Enterprise Grid customers. We wanted to give these customers full control over their encryption keys, and when or if they want to revoke them,” he said.

Screenshot: Slack

Belknap says this is especially important when customers involve people outside the organization, such as contractors, partners or vendors in Slack communications. “A big benefit of EKM is that in the event of a security threat or if you ever experience suspicious activity, your security team can cut off access to the content at any time if necessary,” Belknap explained.

In addition to controlling the encryption keys, customers can gain greater visibility into activity inside of Slack via the Audit Logs API. “Detailed activity logs tell customers exactly when and where their data is being accessed, so they can be alerted of risks and anomalies immediately,” he said. If a customer finds suspicious activity, it can cut off access.

EKM for Slack is generally available today for Enterprise Grid customers for an additional fee. Slack, which announced plans to go public last month, has raised more than $1 billion on a $7 billion valuation.

• For many of the Valley's elite, the right pair of kicks is a trademark accessory carefully selected to convey a mix of power and nonchalance, creativity, and exclusivity.
• With help from the team at the sneaker marketplace Flight Club, Business Insider compiled some of the most fashionable, expensive, and downright wild sneakers worn by tech founders and CEOs.

The inhabitants of Silicon Valley are not exactly known for haute couture.

It's a land where jeans, T-shirts, and hoodies reign supreme, and where sneakers are the footwear of choice.

But don't let the pedestrian fashion item fool you. These sneakers can be as rare and as status-defining as the fine watches adorning the wrists of Wall Street bankers or the designer handbags clutched by elite art dealers.

For many of the Valley's elite, the right pair of kicks is a trademark accessory carefully selected to convey a mix of power, nonchalance, creativity, and exclusivity.

With help from the team at the sneaker marketplace Flight Club, Business Insider compiled some of the most fashionable, expensive, and downright wild sneakers worn by tech founders and CEOs. The Flight Club team helped confirm the brands and styles and provided expert commentary and analysis.

We did our best to find photos of female tech executives wearing sneakers, but our search didn't yield many results. Women such as Sheryl Sandberg and Marissa Mayer wore low heels, flats, or loafers, which says something about how much freedom women have to dress down in the corporate world.

If you dream of becoming the next Mark Zuckerberg, lacing up a pair of these sneakers probably won't get you very far. But at least you'll look the part.

Check it out:

SEE ALSO: Inside the crazy-successful, controversial life of billionaire Uber CEO Travis Kalanick

Mark Zuckerberg: Nike Flyknit Lunar 3 in Wolf Grey

Since Nike's Flyknit franchise was introduced in 2012, Flight Club says it has seen resale values in "the hundreds, and some well over a thousand."

The Wolf Grey sneakers favored by Zuckerberg, Facebook's CEO, aren't currently sold in stores, but you might be able to find them on eBay.

Price: A similar pair costs $110.

Satya Nadella: Lanvin Suede & Patent Leather Low-Top Sneaker

When the Microsoft CEO took the helm in 2014, it quickly became clear he was stylish. So it's no surprise he opts for a more fashion-forward take on sneakers, with a pair from the French high-end brand Lanvin. Even sneaker lovers on Reddit have inquired about Nadella's kicks.

Price: $525