Davemichels

LogMeIn has announced the integration of Jive and GoToMeeting. Named GoToConnect, it is the company’s first integrated UCC solution, and one of two product announcements under a new GoTo brand. An overhaul of its conference and huddle room solutions has resulted in GoToRoom, which features a new hardware partnership with Polycom.

GoToConnect gives the company a foothold in the growing cloud-based UC and collaboration market.  Citing a Frost & Sullivan report that shows 68% of UCaaS buyers prefer all-inclusive capabilities, GoToConnect is positioned by LogMeIn VP of Marketing UCC, Jim Somers, as: “the best UCC product in the marketplace, full stop.” It’s a bold claim, and one to be challenged no doubt. However, in terms of a compelling proposition there are some crucial elements that are less about technology, more about user experience, economic value and seamless future enhancements.

Mike Sharp

Jive’s encrypted hosted VoIP technology is highly respected, with the business claiming it’s the best-reviewed product in the markets it’s currently available in. On the web-meeting side, millions of users all around the world have used GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar and GoToTraining for years.

What LogMeIn has achieved in a relatively short period is full integration into GoToConnect. Billed is the “the first ever truly unified video and voice solution”, GoToConnect is a new, unified web, audio and video conferencing, and innovative VoIP telephony solution built on the foundations of “trust, reliability and performance” according to Mike Sharp, Chief Product Officer for UCC at LogMeIn.

Sharp also was keen to stress that product performance and customer experience is part of the DNA of a company that has worked hard to: “combine all of its strengths in conferencing and OVI and pull it all together into a class-leading integrated solution that delivers a great user experience.” The strategy of a unified and seamless experience across all GoTo products will improve the adoption and usage rates of additional products – GoToWebinar, GoToTraining.

How much?

Great experiences though, often come at a price.  In a move that will make many CIOs and CFOs, not to mention GoToConnect’s competitors, sit bolt upright and take notice is a highly aggressive pricing strategy.

According to Somers, pricing that’s up to 50% less than their competitors means:

“We’re going to disrupt the market and that’s our intention. We believe in the impact and effect we’re going to have on the market, and we have the capability to do that”

It’s a bold move that will have repercussions.

And it’s not just the low cost that gives the company confidence in its ability to ride the growth curve and rapidly take share. Jive’s simple pricing model is replicated.  Everyone gets everything – price is determined by the number of licences. No tiered subscriptions that unlock feature sets. Large, medium or small, everyone gets it all. Simple, competitive and attractive to a lot of organisations.

Growing a global footprint

Jim Somers

GoToMeeting and its stablemates are globally renowned. Jive is unused and unknown outside of the Americas. To achieve a leadership position in an increasingly competitive cloud-based UCC market, a global footprint is a must.  Where will GoTo go to next?  The UK, Ireland and Germany will have GoToConnect a little later this year, followed by ANZ towards the end of the year, Somers confirmed. Other countries will follow, although no details were provided, it’ll be no surprise to see GoTo where LogMeIn has a current presence with the ability to service a local market. Additional bundled solutions from the GoTo stable, and “building out the GoToRoom ecosystem with additional hardware partners and ISVs” are expected later in the year, Somers confirmed.

“More and more workers are demanding all-in-one solutions that make it easier to move between different types of communication for better productivity. At the same time, IT leaders and business owners want a single partner that they can trust to help them manage their complex UCC needs. LogMeIn’s GoTo portfolio is uniquely positioned to support these needs for businesses of all sizes today and in to the future.” Mark Strassman, SVP and General Manager, UCC at LogMeIn

GoTo – coming for who?

Sharp’s statement about being “the best on the market and the strongest offering” signals an intent for significant GoToConnect sales and competitive displacement.

Having proven high performance solutions now integrated; having a “modern look and feel and unified experience that’s seamless in nature” across the GoTo portfolio; having a very aggressive, and utterly simple, market-taking pricing strategy and a reputation for world-class customer support is highly compelling.

The point about customer experience was made many times over by both Sharp and Somers.  Could this be the smart part of the GoTo strategy of “providing fantastic standalone solutions that are best-in-class” and can be integrated seamlessly according to customer needs?  As Sharp stated “there is nothing cobbled together here” when explaining how the GoTo approach will serve CIOs that are transforming digitally with a secure, high-performance, easy-to-adopt, high-value UCC solution. More bangs for a lot less bucks. That is always a head-turner and delights CFOs.

A global GoToMeeting user base with low churn is critical in determining how far and fast LogMeIn can expand GoToConnect and GoToRoom in the short-term. Making significant inroads in global markets will hinge on outmanoeuvring the established brands that have deeper pockets, more marketing clout and many more existing customers.

In terms of the solution, the question of ‘fine-dining’ or ‘self-serve buffet’ was posed of LogMeIn’s disparate portfolio. The new GoTo brand and product direction indicate it’s akin to a ‘fine-dining buffet’ if LogMeIn’s claims hold scrutiny. How many come to feast will become clear as the year unfolds. To be continued.

Microsoft is planning to double the number of people that can participate in a Skype group video call. The software maker is testing a new change to Skype that will raise the limit from 25 people all the way up to 50 participants. It’s a change that will likely help smaller companies that rely on services like Skype to hold meetings, and it pushes past Apple’s limit of 32 people in FaceTime group video chats.

Microsoft is also managing this amount of calls by simply sending notifications to participants in large video calls, rather than having Skype ring all the members. You can also go ahead and call people once the call has begun if they don’t respond to the notification. Beta testers can access these new calling features in Skype...

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• Nvidia's stock shed nearly half of its value from November to January after the chipmaker delivered disappointing third-quarter results and later cut its fourth-quarter revenue guidance.
• But shares recovered a bit as its fourth-quarter results topped Wall Street estimates and after it beat out Intel in the race for acquiring Mellanox Technologies.
• To distill the latest arguments for and against investing in Nvidia, Markets Insider asked the Wall Street analysts carrying the stock's highest and lowest price targets the same questions.
• Watch Nvidia trade live.

Nvidia has sparked extreme views among Wall Street analysts. 

The bulls say Nvidia is a dominant player in many segments including data center, professional visualization (pro-vis) and automotive.

However, bears say Nvidia's valuation has gotten out of control and that it faces pretty decent competition in the data-center market. 

Nvidia shares shed 57% of their value from October to January after the chipmaker delivered disappointing third-quarter results and later cut its fourth-quarter revenue guidance. The company cited excess of mining graphics processing units (GPUs) following the crypto-currency boom, and declining macroeconomic conditions, particularly in China, for its underperformance. 

But shares recovered a bit as Nvidia's fourth-quarter results topped Wall Street's expectations and after the company beat out Intel in the race for acquiring Mellanox Technologies, a supplier of computer-networking products. That deal is widely seen as a strategic bid that can help the chipmaker grab an even bigger piece of the growing data-center market. Shares settled at $165.56 apiece on Thursday — 43% below their record high set in October. 

To be sure, Wall Street analysts are still pretty bullish on the name. Among those surveyed by Bloomberg, 29 have a "buy" rating, nine recommend "hold," and three say "sell."

The SunTrust analyst William Stein is the biggest Nvidia bull on Wall Street, according to Bloomberg data. He carries a $210 price target. (Ho Kang-Wei, an analyst from the Singapore-based Phillip Securities, has a price target of $274 on Nvidia, but he hasn't updated any of his recommendations since May.)

Meanwhile, Abhinav Davuluri, an analyst at Morningstar, is the biggest bear on the chipmaker, with a $120 price target. (The Exane BNP Paribas analyst David Connor also has a $120 target, but he didn't respond to a request for comment.)

These interviews have been edited for clarity and length.

Use one sentence to describe your investment thesis.

Stein (Bull): "Despite near-term demand disruptions in the Datacenter and Gaming end markets, we expect Nvidia's stock to continue outperforming owing to long-term potential for revenue & EPS upside across most segments (especially in Datacenter, Pro Vis, and Automotive) and a sustained higher P/E owing to the scarcity premium for structural growth in large-cap semis."

Davuluri (Bear): "The company is a fantastically positioned one for a lot of trends in automotive and Artificial Intelligence; however, I think the valuation is just way ahead of where it's feasible."

How concerned/confident are you about Nvidia's excess of mining GPUs after the boom and bust in digital currencies?

Stein (Bull): "Nvidia's recent weaker performance – not only in the gaming end market, but in the data center end market as well - can only make us and investors more concerned (less confident) about the company’s ability to execute." 

"Still, we find reasons for hope. First, as it relates to the crypto effect, Nvidia has taken action to reduce channel inventory, and given low Ethereum prices today, it seems that a recurrence of the crypto problem is unlikely."

Davuluri (Bear): "This is something we have been concerned about since the boom in early 2018 and even the end of 2017. Our fair value of $120 a share for Nvidia has been the same since April of 2018. So almost a full year, we've been at this valuation."

"The crypto slowdown has prompt people to buy mining GPUs from the secondary market, which has created a low demand for Nvidia's GPUs. That's why we see this massive inventory correction in a couple of quarters."

How will weaker economic conditions in China impact Nvidia's GPU business?

Stein (Bull): "Similar to many semi companies that sell into the China consumer market, weak economic conditions in the region are negatively impacting gaming demand." 

"We believe the primary source of this weakness (excluding the crypto mining overhang) was the trade conflict between the US and China. As those issues resolve themselves, we expect this market will continue to grow."

Davuluri (Bear): "China consisted of a very massive portion of Nvidia's GPU demand decline, as naturally a lot of gamers and mining operations are in China. That's pretty consistent with what Nvidia's exposure to China has been."

"Moreover, the US-and-China trade tensions, and a broader economic slowdown in China may have played some roles."

This is an excerpt from a story delivered exclusively to Business Insider Intelligence Apps and Platforms Briefing subscribers. To receive the full story plus other insights each morning, click here.

Verizon made a slew of announcements about its mobile 5G network, disclosing launch dates for two cities and the pricing structure of its unlimited 5G service. The carrier plans to light up its mobile 5G network on April 11 in Chicago and Minneapolis. Verizon subscribers on all three of its unlimited plans will be able to leverage mobile 5G for an additional $10 a month, with the first three months free.

The service will initially be accessible with Motorola’s moto z3 smartphone, which can be upgraded to become 5G-capable with a Verizon-exclusive 5G moto mod attachment. Verizon is incentivizing its customers to upgrade to its 5G service by offering the 5G moto mod attachment for as little as $50 — the mod will eventually retail for $350 — to those with a moto z3 or who buy the smartphone.

Here’s what we think about Verizon’s mobile 5G play:

• Consumers won’t readily jump to access the service because the $10 premium is above what they’re willing to pay. Less than one-third (31%) of consumers are willing to pay more for mobile 5G, and on average, they'd only be willing to pay an extra $4.40 a month, according to a survey by PWC. And given that Verizon already has the most expensive unlimited plans, an extra $10 might prove too much for its consumers to make the leap to 5G.
• But, its unlimited access is appealing, and a better option than what AT&T is currently offering. AT&T’s mobile 5G hotspot that’s used to access its 5G mobile network costs $70 for 15GB. However, among consumers willing to pay more for mobile 5G, over half (52%) say unlimited data warrants the premium. Furthermore, 76% of respondents cited unlimited data as one of the most important mobile offerings a carrier can provide, per Business Insider Intelligence’s Telecom Competitive Edge Report (enterprise only). Verizon’s move to continue to offer this must-have feature for 5G access bodes well for convincing consumers to pay the premium. 

The news marks Verizon’s first big step forward in its wireless 5G play.After launching in Chicago and Minneapolis, Verizon plans to bring its mobile 5G network to an additional 28 US markets by the end of this year. This ambitious endeavor will propel Verizon ahead of its competitors in catering to a greater audience and will better position it to capture eager consumers in these 30 markets looking to jump ship for early 5G access.

On average, one-third of consumers would be willing to switch mobile providers to get 5G earlier, according to Business Insider Intelligence’s Telecom Competitive Edge Report (enterprise only).

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SEE ALSO: 5G AND THE IoT: How the next generation of wireless technology will transform the IoT

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Tether has made a name for itself in the crowded cryptocurrency space by claiming that its so-called stablecoin is pegged to the US dollar because “every tether is always backed 1-to-1 by traditional currency held in our reserves,” as its website once said.

This is no longer the case. Tether updated its website as recently as mid-February to remove the reference to tethers being “backed 1-to-1 by traditional currency,” in other words by money held in bank accounts. For years, despite Tether’s assurances, the stablecoin has been regarded with suspicion by a community doubtful that tethers are really backed by billions of US dollars, and Euros.

Now, according to Tether’s website, Tether’s reserves “include traditional currency and cash equivalents” and “from time to time, may include other assets and receivables from loans made by Tether to third parties, which may include affiliated entities.”

While other cryptocurrencies’ value is largely volatile and based on speculation, Tether’s stable dollar “peg” is dependent on people’s belief that the firm is solvent and backing its tokens with its reserves. A reserve made up of third party debt, miscellaneous assets, and easily convertible financial instruments, as well as cash, is a bit different from one made up solely of US dollars and Euros, as Tether previously claimed.

Because of this, Tether’s dollar peg is “no longer credible,” finance commentator Frances Coppola wrote at Forbes. At the time of writing, USDT was still trading at just over $1 USD, according to coinmarketcap.com.

The changes have also led observers to characterize Tether as engaging in a close equivalent to fractional reserve banking, a practice where only a portion of bank deposits are actually backed by the bank with traditional currency.

Read More: The 'Holy Grail' of Cryptocurrency Looks Like the Banks We Already Know and Hate

“Tethers remain completely stable and 100% backed, so Tether’s reserves always equal or exceed the number of issued Tethers,” Kasper Rasmussen, director of marketing for iFinex—the parent company of cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex, which shares management with Tether, according to Reuters—wrote Motherboard in an email.

“The only change is that the composition of the assets that provide that backing includes a combination of cash, cash equivalents, and may also include other assets or receivables from loans issued by Tether,” Rasmussen wrote.

US commodities regulators subpoenaed both Bitfinex and Tether in December of 2017. The Justice Department is reportedly investigating both Tether and Bitfinex for price manipulation and is coordinating with regulators, Bloomberg reported in November.

The changes were made several weeks ago, Rasumussen said, and reflect Tether’s growth over the years. Rasmussen declined to comment on the current split of cash, debt, and financial instruments in its reserves, or if there is an upper limit on how much of Tether’s reserves can be non-cash.

The change doesn’t seem to have been rolled out smoothly across every part of Tether’s site. The “About Us” page notes that tokens are “backed by actual fiat currency assets, including USD and Euros. One Tether equals one underlying unit of the currency backing it, e.g., the U.S. Dollar, and is backed 100% by actual assets in the Tether platform’s reserve account.”

All of this is likely to be concerning to users who placed great importance on tethers being backed one-to-one by US dollars, but hey, you trust your bank, right? Right?

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• Google's latest version of Android — Android "Q" — is in the works, and Google has shared some of its upcoming features and updates.
• It doesn't appear to be a massive overhaul of the current Android Pie operating system, but it does contain some updates that make Android more efficient and streamlined to use.

This week Google outlined some of the new features we can expect in Android "Q," the next version of its Android mobile operating system.

As usual, there's a bunch of under-the-hood updates and improvements that many probably won't even realize are there.

But there's also some interesting upcoming features designed to make Android easier and more streamlined to use.

Check out some of the most exciting upcoming updates to expect in Android Q:

SEE ALSO: Check out other Android Q updates that Google hasn't officially mentioned here:

Android Q will give you more control over when an app can use your location

"Android Q enables users to give apps permission to see their location never, only when the app is in use (running), or all the time (when in the background)," Google said in its blog post.

Anyone who has used an iPhone recently will recognize this option, and it's finally coming to Android. On current versions of Android, you only have the option to turn location services on or off.

Android Q will support foldable smartphone designs for apps and Android itself.

Indeed, foldable smartphones like the Samsung Galaxy Fold and Huawei Mate X will soon become available to buy starting this spring, and they'll need an operating system that supports a foldable display.

Android Q will show you settings that are relevant for the app you're using.

Android Q will show you a quick and light Settings Panel over an app that shows you the phone settings that are relevant for the app you're using rather than scrolling and sifting through an Android phone's entire Settings menu.

One of Google's examples is with Chrome, where a setting panel will only show you WiFi, mobile data, airplane mode, and other relevant phone settings that work with Chrome. 

• Junta Nakai has spent his career on Wall Street and in financial technology. 
• In this op-ed, Nakai argues that Microsoft Excel, which has been used by the investment community for years, can no longer be the only tool used for stock-picking. 
• The explosion of alternative data in particular has pushed stock analysis beyond what Excel is capable of. 

Most investors are equipped for megabytes.

Winners are equipped for terabytes.

The vast majority of institutional investors today use Microsoft Excel as the primary tool for picking stocks.

It isn’t working.

During the last decade, hedge funds have underperformed a simple 60/40 equity/bond split almost every year. Hundreds of billions of dollars continue to shift from mutual funds towards passive strategies. Yet the ubiquity of spreadsheets has persisted. An objective observer might find it peculiar why the investment community does not question the utility of their bread-winning tool, despite leading many to famine.

It is time for money managers to ask themselves this basic question: “What if the tools we are using are no longer appropriate for investing?”

Today, "alternative data" is becoming more common as an incremental tool to address performance woes. This term refers to information that is beyond the traditional sources of market data, earnings releases, and macroeconomic indicators. The idea is to use alternative data sets such as satellite imagery to find signals to aid human expertise. Pictures to augment spreadsheets.

See also: Nasdaq's CEO says its time for corporate America to get in on alternative data, the $7 billion market that's taking Wall Street by storm

Yet despite the popularity of this approach, in 2018 just 38% of actively managed U.S. stock funds tracked by Morningstar outperformed the benchmark. Hedge funds collectively lost over 3%. What is often missed by users of alternative data is that the power of data is actually not the data itself. Ad hoc utilization of satellite images may help in certain situations.

However, simply examining pictures of Walmart parking lots once a month likely has limited utility in generating excess returns. The real power of data relies on an asset manager’s ability to ingest it, clean it and validate it from disparate sources at massive scale and at high speed. Data must be systemized into an investment process for its value to be fully unlocked.

Using Walmart as an example, continuous aggregation of credit card, geolocation, and social media data empowers portfolio managers to analyze business performance across geography, demographics and product lines in near real time. This is what enables security analysis beyond what spreadsheets are capable of.

Success comes in terabytes, not megabytes

The secret of analytics is that it’s the easiest part of analytics. The hard part is the data engineering, data preparation and data pipeline management that enable it.

Data engineers, data scientists, and portfolio managers need a place to come together on a scalable compute infrastructure: a unified analytics platform. This is when asset managers can finally ask interesting questions of their data and test investment theses. This is what lowers the cost of curiosity in the pursuit of alpha.

See also: Bloomberg is diving in to the booming alternative-data field with a new product that'll help the market become mainstream

In practice, the iterative process of advanced analytics is difficult to do on Wall Street because of the scale of its digital exhaust. However, despite the scale of the problem, a typical earnings model that an investor will build is only 5MBs.

To put into context, FINRA (the self-regulatory body for finance) analyzes 30 billion stock market events a day, equating to 70 Terabytes of market data being processed monthly. Just one data source for one market equates to 70 million MBs of data. In addition, alternative data sets such as social media, credit cards, web scrapes, satellite images, and geolocation are entering this mix. Unlike stock exchange data, alternative data comes in different formats from different sources.

These datasets can come in real time, hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly. This is the classic volume, variety and velocity complexity associated with big data. Modern investors need infrastructure robust enough to handle large volumes of data, both in streaming and in batch, and tools to manage and use the data.

Today, the most sophisticated investors in the world have built out architecture to handle big data at great cost. The expertise, time and money required makes it prohibitive to all but 1% of asset managers. They are the rarified few where “quantamental” investing, the combination of quantitative and fundamental analysis, has led to fundraising and performance success.

See also: Hedge funds are spending billions to get an edge through access to satellite images and credit-card transactions. Now they fear a crackdown's coming.

It is often quoted that 90% of the data in the world was created in the last two years. Spreadsheets should no longer be the primary tool in this paradigm.

Junta Nakai is the industry leader for Financial Services at artificial intelligence company Databricks. Prior to that he was the Global Head of Business Development at Selerity, a financial technology firm providing AI solutions for capital markets. Junta started his career at Goldman Sachs, where he spent 14 years in the securities division and served most recently as the Head of Asia Pacific sales for the Americas in the equities division.

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NOW WATCH: There's a secret room behind Mount Rushmore that's inaccessible to tourists

Yesterday, somewhere in the sixth hour of Facebook’s record outage, I sat dumbfounded alongside my fellow editors at The Verge. We wondered how it was possible that the largest and most influential technology company in the world could have a day-long service disruption and basically say nothing about it except for a curt and cryptic tweet. Facebook eventually said that the outage was the result of a “server configuration change” — an impenetrable combination of words that translates to “we played ourselves.” The company wasn’t being attacked, so why not just come clean early?

The Verge, The New York Times, and others tried to get more information out of Facebook when following up for comment. After Facebook issued its statement today,...

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Three million new users have signed up to Telegram over the past 24 hours, during a period in which Facebook (and Facebook Messenger), Instagram, and WhatsApp were all experiencing significant outages worldwide. The new users were announced by Telegram’s founder and CEO Pavel Durov on his personal Telegram channel. It’s a big number for a service boasting 200 million active users as of March 2018.

Telegram is a free encrypted messaging service similar to WhatsApp, and currently runs on user donations rather than the targeted ads model used by Facebook — which is enabled by the data it collects from its users. Telegram has always emphasized protecting its user’s privacy as one of its key features, and added end-to-end encryption support...

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Facebook’s outage cost small advertisers thousands of dollars

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The universe of cloud-based contact center providers has been a crowded place for some time. PBXs and ACDs have joined IVRs on the endangered species list as APIs and other connectors abound to support precision routing, interaction management, agent prompting and other elements of Intelligent Assistance. More than a dozen cloud-based platform providers, led by Genesys, NICE-InContact, 8×8, RingCentral and the subject of this post, Five9.

In this post, I discuss how Five9’s approach to supporting its customers and prospects’ efforts to introduce conversational AI differentiates it from the competition.

We last covered Five9 in May 2018, noting that Rowan Trollope, long time ring-master of Collaboration platforms at Cisco, had left the giant IP-router company to join a much smaller, focused business. We called his move “emblematic” of changes afoot that would have ripple effects across the entire “XaaS and “BYOxx” worlds. Fill in the “X” with “Contact Center”, “Communications Platform”, “Experience” or “You-Name it”.

As I explained, “The next big innovation could be the result of R&D efforts at Cisco, Amazon, Google or Microsoft. They may be put into practice at cloud services specialists like Five9, Interactions or Avaya. And it leaves a role for emerging, innovative companies like Accompany to be a source of new services and executive personnel.”

In January 2019 Jonathan Rosenberg joined Rowan at Five9 as Chief Technology Officer and, in very short order, started defining specific steps to offer enterprises a “path to AI”. Jonathan was lead author of the SIP protocol and has a deep knowledge of the application servers that provide the underpinnings of today’s CCaaS and CPaaS offerings. More recently, over the past fifteen years, he has been instrumental in defining how the VoIP-based collaboration platforms at Skype, Microsoft and Cisco employ the elements of so-called “artificial intelligence” – specifically speech processing, analytics and tagging, natural language processing and machine learning – to make employees more productive and customers interactions more efficient.

At its recent Analyst Summit Expect more details were shared under NDA. Suffice it to say that you’ll see the fruits of Five9’s Path to AI development efforts in general availability later this year.

Intelligent Assistance; not AI

It is gratifying to see a number of firms jump on the IA train. Five9 is a noteworthy case in point. As fellow analyst Zeus Karrravala points out in this post (with credit to Dave Michels), Five9 and its cohort are helping to define “agent augmentation”. This is a cut-to-the-chase way of noting that enterprises today will garner the highest return on investment in “Conversational AI” by using the resources that recognize a customer’s intent quickly and accurately to inform or prompt a customer support agent or advisor. This practice is not only inevitable; but it will also become routine.

Routine agent augmentation goes hand in hand with another phenomenon that defines Five9’s Path to AI. Foundational technologies have become commodities. Google, IBM, Amazon and Microsoft, among others, make speech recognition, transcription, text-to-speech, translation and, even natural language understanding available for pennies or even as a freemium offer through “open” APIs or services marketplaces. That makes them fair game or, more accurately, fodder for companies that deploy the Five9’s platform.

Handholding Still Required

In 1996, Esther Dyson’s EDventure Holding’s convened a PC Forum whose theme was “The Future Now: Some Assembly Required”. The World Wide Web was seven years old and the first order concerns of the leading minds in the computing and communications business surrounded the impact of this “network of networks” on existing communications infrastructures and businesses and individuals.

The themes of the conference parallel those that we should be considering now as we look at the applications of “AI” in the enterprise:

• Interoperability and openness: which, to a business, equates to avoiding lock-in to a single vendor while taking advantage of the resources that large companies have transformed into a commodity.
• Playing with toys: which has to do with treating service creation environments and “low-code” or “no-code” tools as the powerful toys that they are. Also refers to gamification of customer support conversations.
• Rebellious toys: which was the most prescient topic because it referred to the presence of malicious bots on the Internet. What happens when an artificial intelligence is not operating on an individual’s behalf.

And there were several others, but you get the idea. The “Path to AI” should feel familiar by now. A significant amount of assembly is required. Yet this is where Five9 is in a good position. Unlike many other CPaaS and CCaaS providers, there are a significant number of employees dedicated to customer support and professional services. As customers demand customer care “bots” and build their use cases, Five9 has defined an approach and its technicians are organized to respond to the demands placed on a solution provider by companies that are stretching the capabilities of their customer care contact centers.

In this context “Agent Augmentation”, by both humans and “artificial intelligence” is a very apt term.

The post The Genius of Five9’s “Path to AI” appeared first on .

Democrats continue to push their new net neutrality bill through Congress, but there’s signs that several members of the party are already eager to water down the proposal.

The three-page Save the Internet Act, introduced by Democrats last week, would restore the FCC’s 2015 net neutrality rules via an act of Congress. Those rules prevented giant ISPs like Comcast from throttling or otherwise hindering services they compete with.

During Tuesday hearings on the proposal in the House Communications Subcommittee, some Democrats, like Florida Rep. Darren Soto, stated the bill was simply an “opening offer” and that Democrats would be open to amendments for the bill. Others, like Oregon Rep. Kurt Schrader, insisted that additional “compromise” would be needed to ensure passage.

Normally, compromise is a healthy part of the legislative process. But activists at consumer groups like Fight For the Future told Motherboard that at this juncture in the net neutrality fight, they’re only likely to weaken the popular proposal.

“It was frustrating to hear Rep. Soto say he's open to amendments on the Save The Internet Act,” Fight for the Future’s Josh Tabish told Motherboard. “Given that his office was one of the bill's original co-sponsors, it's hard to view this as anything other than foreshadowing for a back door effort to water down the bill or add ISP-approved loopholes.”

Soto’s office did not respond to a request seeking comment on what changes he’d prefer.

The problem as activists see it: the FCC’s 2015 rules took years, countless hearings, and several court battles to craft. The rules were rebuilt after the FCC’s 2010 rules were struck down by the courts. They’re the culmination of endless Congressional debates over the better part of two decades. In short, the FCC rules were already a compromise, activists say.

Tabish argued that the rules have broad, bipartisan support among the majority of Americans who aren’t interested in a weaker or heavily modified bill.

“The message from net neutrality supporters and the grassroots has been simple: pass a clean bill out of committee to keep this a simple up or down vote on restoring strong net neutrality rules,” Tabish said. “There's really no excuse. They have the votes to do this.”

In addition to urging for passage of a clean bill, Fight for the Future has been crowdfunding billboards naming and shaming lawmakers like Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema for failing to support the restoration of the rules.

Mock up of sign targeting Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema. Image: Fight for the Future

Once the bill leaves the House Communications Subcommittee it has a solid chance of passing the new Democratically-controlled House. However it faces a steep uphill climb in the Senate, and would also need to avoid a veto by President Donald Trump.

"This bill will die in the Senate. It's dead,” Texas Rep. Pete Olson proclaimed to hearing attendees on Tuesday.

Past Republican efforts at “compromise” on this subject have fallen well short. Lawmakers with close ties to AT&T like Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn have introduced their own net neutrality bills in name only; bills critics say are intentionally filled with loopholes and serve just one function: preventing the passage of tougher, more popular protections.

Gigi Sohn, a former FCC lawyer that helped craft the original rules, noted that most of these proposals are designed to specifically weaken FCC authority over industry giants like AT&T and Comcast, not to actually protect consumers.

“Republicans have introduced “compromise” bills, and the lack of any broadband oversight authority for the FCC makes them a non-starter,” she told Motherboard in an email.

Sohn agreed with Tabish that given the telecom industry’s immense influence in Congress, efforts at amendments would only weaken the bill, further angering consumers left fuming in the wake of FCC boss Ajit Pai’s late 2017 repeal.

“The American people have said in overwhelming bipartisan numbers that they want the 2015 Open Internet Order restored,” Sohn said. “So I am puzzled why anyone would want a bill that falls short of that.”

• Gmail and Google Drive experienced a worldwide outage on Tuesday night.
• Google confirmed the outage in a statement to Business Insider. The affected users are able to access Google Drive, but are seeing error messages, high latency, and/or other unexpected behavior."
• The issues were not isolated to Gmail for some people. Users reported cases where they were not able to access their emails and other Google-owned applications.

Gmail and Google Drive experienced a worldwide outage on Tuesday evening.

Thousands of reports were filed, according to DownDetector. The apparent problem seemed to affect users from the US, Japan, Malaysia, Australia, and Japan.

Some users were able to access their emails, but encountered errors when sending a new email: "Message could not be sent. Check your network and try again."

Google said it was aware of "an issue with Google Drive" starting at 7:53 p.m.

"We will provide more information shortly," the company said on its Google Drive service website. "The affected users are able to access Google Drive, but are seeing error messages, high latency, and/or other unexpected behavior."

The issues were not isolated to Gmail for some people. Users reported cases where they were not able to access their emails and other Google-owned applications:

SEE ALSO: YouTube went down for over an hour during an abrupt worldwide outage

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Why Apple's dongle problem isn't getting any better

• Google appears to be trimming the size of its laptop and tablet hardware group, telling dozens of engineers and program managers to find other roles with the Alphabet parent company, several people familiar with the matter told Business Insider.
• The restructuring involves Google's "Create" division, which is responsible for developing and manufacturing the Pixelbook laptop and Pixel Slate tablet amongst the company's wider swath of "Made by Google" products.
• According to one source, the Create hardware team had a "bunch of stuff in the works" and that the cutting the number of hardware engineers and program managers on the team will likely "pare down the portfolio" of products. 
• Affected employees have been instructed to seek temporary roles within other Google or Alphabet teams, raising questions about Google's future hardware plans.

Google has moved dozens of employees out of its laptop and tablet division, scaling back the size of its in-house hardware group as it re-assesses product plans in the fiercely competitive computer market.

Dozens of Google employees working on the company's "Create" team — an internal hardware division responsible for developing and manufacturing Google's laptop and tablet products — have been told to find new projects within Google or its parent company Alphabet, amid what sources describe as "roadmap cutbacks." 

Among the affected employees who were given notice of the cutbacks in the last two weeks are hardware engineers, technical program managers, and those who support program managers. Sources say projects have been canceled within the laptop and tablet division, prompting the changes, but that team members have been instructed to find new roles temporarily within the Google or Alphabet organization.

By asking employees to seek temporary, rather than permanent, new roles, Google may be leaving itself flexibility to boost staffing on the Create hardware team in the future. Already, these "floating" employees have been seeking roles within the company's smartphone division, Pixel, and other Alphabet companies, sources say. 

A Google spokesperson declined Business Insider's request for comment. 

The "roadmap pushout," as one source familiar with the matter described the move to Business Insider, raises questions about the extent of Google's commitment to building its own line of laptops and tablets, a fiercely competitive market with thin razor profit margins.

After several false starts, including a short lived acquisition of phone maker Motorola from 2012 to 2014, Google declared its seriousness about hardware in 2016 when it hired Rick Osterloh to head up a new hardware group. Google has repeatedly stressed it is in the hardware business for the long run, even as the efforts have driven up expenses and weighed down the rich profit margins of Google's online ad business.

Today, the Create division is responsible for the Pixelbook laptop and Pixel Slate tablet amongst the company's wider swath of "Made by Google" products. Other divisions within the company's hardware product area (known internally as HWPA) include Pixel (for smartphones), Home (for smart home devices, including Nest), and Wearables. 

Read more: As Apple’s iPhone sales show signs of struggling, experts say Google's smartphone approach has ‘finally found the right formula’

Manufacturing roles on Create were not impacted by the recent downsizing, signaling Google's near term product lineup will likely not change. But according to one person familiar with the matter, the Create group had a "bunch of stuff in the works" and that the cutting the number of hardware engineers and program managers on the team will likely "pare down the portfolio" of products. 

The Pixelbook raised eyebrows at its launch, given its high-cost (starting at $999) relative to its limited capabilities (the Pixelbook is a Chromebook, meaning it runs on Google's Chrome OS software and is only capable of using internet-based applications). Most Chromebooks that are not manufactured by Google itself are much lower priced, like Samsung's Chromebook Plus which starts at $499. Still, the Pixelbook, with its aluminum chassis and high-end screen, was seen as a model for what a premium, Mac-like Chromebook could look like.

Rumors of a Pixelbook 2 have been swirling since the company's hardware event last October though it has yet to be released. While there is no indication that Google plans to abandon the Pixelbook, the staff reductions suggest that Google is unlikely to flesh out its in-house line of Chromebooks with a wider variety of products and prices. 

Google's tablets meanwhile have struggled to hit the right note with consumers.

The first Google manufactured tablet — known as the Pixel C — was launched in 2015 and received less than stellar reviews. The longtime tech reviewer Walt Mossberg said that the Pixel C represents "an object lesson in what Google shouldn't do if it pursues home-grown integration of hardware and software." The company launched its Pixel Slate — a tablet that acts like a laptop, meant to compete with Microsoft's Surface Pro and Apple's iPad Pro — to a similar, cold reception. 

Downsizing its laptop and tablet division comes almost three years after Google unified its hardware efforts under the leadership of Osterloh. Since then, sources tell us that pressure has increased to make hardware at Google into a "real business."

Got a tip? Contact this reporter via Signal or WhatsApp at +1 (209) 730-3387 using a non-work phone, email at nbastone@businessinsider.com, Telegram at nickbastone, or Twitter DM at @nickbastone.

SEE ALSO: As Apple’s iPhone sales show signs of struggling, experts say Google's smartphone approach has ‘finally found the right formula’

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Why the US won't let China's biggest smartphone maker enter the US market

The standard S10 model is almost as excellent as the S10 Plus, but not quite

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• 2019 seems to be a year of innovative phone design. So far, we've seen wearable and foldable phones, as well as one phone with 5 cameras. 
• This wave of new concepts could be due to smartphone design fatigue and demand from consumers.
• Mobile World Congress 2019 showed off some pretty weird phones that go beyond the typical smartphone slab.
• While phone makers like Apple have played it safe, we saw some weird phone designs from Nubia, Samsung, Huawei, LG, Nokia, and even Energizer.

Following is a transcript of the video.

Antonio Villas-Boas: 2019 is gonna be the year of the weird phone. I think these weird smartphones are really cool. They might be ridiculous or really ugly or completely crazy. This is how we know what people like, or at least this is how smartphone makers know what people like.

I think right now a lot of people are suffering from smartphone design fatigue, but it seems like 2019 is the year that the phone makers have decided to get together and just do something about the regular smartphone slab. There are the big smartphone makers like Apple and Samsung, and then there are the smaller phone makers like OnePlus, Meizu, or Vivo. The big guys, they kinda tend to play it safe, and safe is good, safe is comfortable. And the little guys, they kinda go crazy with stuff.

The first thing that comes to mind is LG's new phone. Now, it looks perfectly normal on the outside, then you go and find out what it can do to unlock the phone. It uses VR, not virtual reality, vein recognition. With vein recognition, the LG G8 wants to recognize the veins on the palm of your hand to unlock the phone. The G8 can do something else that's pretty weird. It's actually like kind of an old concept where you use gestures. You can twist a virtual knob for volume, for example, or you swipe left or right for your music or switching between apps.

Another much, much weirder phone is this Nubia wrist phone. There's a debate going on whether it's a smartphone or a smartwatch. The design is totally out of this world. It has a much larger, longer screen than the typical smartwatch. It has a camera. It has a camera that is front-facing, and I believe 5 megapixels, probably only good for taking selfies like this. I can't imagine taking a photo of landscape like this, really odd, really uncomfortable, and the Nubia also runs on Android Wear, which is a smartwatch operating system.

Now, let's talk about the Energizer PowerMax K18 Pop. It is a huge, thick phone, with an 18,000 milliampere-hour battery. Just to put that into perspective, most phones will have about 3,000, maybe even 4,000 milliampere-hour batteries. Energizer says that the K18 Pop will get about 50 days of battery life on standby, so it's not with daily usage. Apart from its massive size, the Energizer phone actually kinda looks like a normal phone. It runs Android. It even has, I think, a triple-lens camera system on the back. So in all respects, it's actually just a normal smartphone that's about the width of three iPhones.

Let's talk about the Nokia PureView 9. This phone has five camera lenses on the back. That count that five versus the three that we're just getting used to. The Nokia PureView 9 is supposedly meant to absorb 10 times more light than the standard camera. When you take a photo with the Nokia PureView 9, all the five lenses are activated and combine together to make a super photo, I guess. Yeah, we have to wait and see to use the Nokia PureView 9 ourselves to see if maybe five camera lenses are indeed better than one.

There's a new trend with smartphones, at least with Samsung's smartphones, which has this oval pill-shaped hole punch for the selfie cameras. Honestly, I quite like it. I mean, compared to a notch, it's really actually kinda better. It's not as distracting, has no interruptions around it or anything like that. The camera is off-center on the Galaxy S10, and it does make for that slight angle on your face.

Another big trend in phones is now foldable phones. We have different designs from Samsung, which opens up like a book. The Huawei Mate X that opens up like a reversible book, where the screen is on the outside of the phone. The thing is about the foldable phone so far is the price tag that is just crazy. It's just nuts. Where are you gonna get this thing repaired? Where are you gonna get its battery changed? It's all in the air right now. I do think the only thing that's gonna stick is gonna be the foldable phone. It's kind of a novelty-ish right now, but give it time, and I think it could be something really, really cool.

Do you really need all this innovation and folding phone and pop-out selfie cameras? No, you don't need it, but you want it. I know that. You guys ask for new and crazy stuff every year on the smartphones. It's odd that we're instead of going more diminutive and thinner and slimmer and lighter, we're actually going to just bigger and larger and thicker and flipper. That's just where the innovation is leading phone makers, and inevitably these things will be very strange.

There'll be some weird new stuff coming out with designs and features and functionality. At the same time, these weird things will actually appear normal to the youngest generation that's sort of born into it. You know, my kids are gonna think smartphones are totally normal. In fact, they might think smartphones are kinda old, 'cause they're gonna be using their weird wristwatch at some time.

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Jeff John Roberts / Fortune:
Ripple launches a $100M fund, overseen by Forte, to encourage integration of blockchain into games, such as in-game marketplaces, with grants to developers  —  The cryptocurrency company Ripple on Tuesday announced an ambitious project to integrate blockchain technology into video games.

Google Allo’s day of reckoning is finally here. Google said back in December that the messaging service would be shut down at some point in March, and a banner across the official Allo website has confirmed that today, March 12th, 2019, will be its last day in operation. If you haven’t already, back up your chat history, and wave goodbye to Google’s latest failed chat service.

Unfortunately, Allo’s successor isn’t quite ready yet. Yes, Google brought some of its features (such as smart replies and desktop support) into Android’s Messaging app. But in order to get features like group messaging, your carrier will need to start supporting RCS, the successor to SMS that’s been a long time coming.

RCS is getting there, slowly, but it’s...

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Amazon will no longer require third-party sellers to price their products on Amazon lower than they price them anywhere else. It quietly eliminated a clause in its contracts today that critics have called anti-competitive.

Price parity agreements, or most-favored nations clauses (MFNs), were formerly used by Amazon in contracts with third-party sellers to ensure that people selling products on the platform did not sell the same products for cheaper on any other platform like eBay or Alibaba.

Amazon declined to comment.

A few years ago, regulators in Germany and Great Britain investigated this practice and it was dropped in Europe. The threat of regulation or impending investigations might be at fault for causing Amazon to drop MFNs in...

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I wasn’t looking for pod-related gadgets, but, somehow, they found me. LG hosted a pop-up at SXSW this year where it showed off a few new prototypes, although it mostly demoed new models of its CLOi line of home robots. Naturally, LG also brought something called the Snow White to the festival: an at-home ice cream machine that requires capsules to produce a treat.

The machine requires two pods: one for flavor and another for a base texture, which determines whether you’re making sorbet, ice cream, or gelato. Every capsule has a QR code printed on it that’ll tell the machine what to make. The person demoing this device didn’t know what ingredients were inside the capsules, except for shelf-safe pasteurized milk, nor how cold the machine...

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• Some items we're used to buying every day can actually be a huge waste of money.
• Store-bought greeting cards, physical books, cable TV, and premium gasoline are just a few examples.
• Bigger purchases, such as a boat or a time-share, often aren't worth the cost either.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Waste not, want not.

We make so many purchases that we don't always realize what we are buying — and how we could be saving money. If we take a step back and think about all of our additional costs, we could cut a few out of our lives. 

These 24 products can often be a huge waste of money:

Matthew Michaels contributed to the original version of this article.

SEE ALSO: 15 things you should never skimp on

DON'T MISS: 12 clever ways to save money every day, according to financial experts

Lottery tickets

Many lottery players purchase tickets each day with the hope of striking big, but games of chance are preventing you from having more money, not less. You are expected to lose money if you play the lottery and there is no guarantee you will even keep winnings.

Cigarettes

In New York City, someone who smokes one pack of cigarettes a day burns up over $5,000 a year. Smoking can also be a huge cost to your health — medical bills can rack up from the dirty habit even tobacco companies are quitting.

Water bottles

As Americans became more health conscious and started drinking less soda, beverage companies needed a new plan. It worked as Americans now drink more bottled water than soda, even though it costs $1.22 per gallon for a commodity that can be accessed for next to nothing.

Brand name drugs

For most products that are exactly the same, customers would usually choose the cheaper option. This does not hold true for brand name drugs, which consistently outpace sales of their generic counterparts despite having the same ingredients and effects. Save yourself some money and buy the generic ibuprofen instead of Advil. 

Movie theater concessions

Movie theaters don't make profits from film tickets, but instead through food sales. The over-inflated popcorn and pricey candy is a rip off considering you can buy the same products at the supermarket for much cheaper and many theaters don't care if you bring in your own snacks (as long as you clean up after yourself).

Café coffee

Before Starbucks and Dunkin' Donuts were on every street corner, people brewed their own coffee at home. This is still somewhat popular — especially with coffee pods — but coffee shops have taken a lot of the business. With expensive price tags and long waits, it's a wonder why everyone isn't turning to homebrew.

Books

A library is the best way to save money on an expensive hobby. Libraries are free and come with millions of books, DVDs, and other materials for you to borrow.

Timeshares

Timeshares sound too good to be true. They offer low prices for a vacation home that you can use whenever you want. But they can trap you with ever-increasing fees and low resale value, making timeshares an almost guaranteed loss.

Boats

One sign of wealth is cruising on a personal yacht, but that may be a better indicator of wasted wealth. Boats are expensive on their own, but as Saltwater Sportsman says, prices for storage, gas, maintenance, and electronic navigation drive up the initial cost.

CDs and DVDs

CDs and DVDs are becoming obsolete, but many people still shell out cash for hard copies of albums and movies. Like books, CDs and DVDs can be rented at libraries, but most people now stream entertainment on apps like Spotify and Netflix for a monthly rate that costs less than a single disc.

Cable TV

Like music and movies, television is moving from more traditional modes to online streaming. Since cable packages make you pay for more than you want, a pick-and-pay model may wind up costing you less. Streaming has the added bonus of no commercials and watching on your own schedule. 

Greeting cards

Make your own — it's more meaningful if you gift a personalized card and you'll save the $5.

Gift cards

Gift cards aren't as popular a present as you may think. Almost one in three gift cards never get used at all, CBS reported in 2014, citing Consumer Reports. And those who do use them tend to spend 20% more than the value of the card, according to Investopedia. Cut your losses and buy something more thoughtful next time.

Gym membership

Gym memberships can be expensive, so if you're not a frequent visitor, you're just wasting money. Thankfully, there are ways to be healthy and exercise outside of a gym.

Premium gasoline

Regular will do just fine. For most cars, there is no need to spend more at the pump for premium gasoline. The extra cost is not worth it, so save up at the tank and pick the most affordable fuel.

The newest gadget

Whenever a new gadget hits market, the older version takes a plunge in price. The old and new version will probably be very similar and the most recent model may have kinks to work out. Save a lot of money by going with a slightly older product that has nearly identical capabilities. 

In-game purchases

Those free games you play on your smartphone have to get money from somewhere. It turns out these games are highly addictive and designed with psychological tricks so you will spend the most money to get to the next level.

Express shipping

Online retailers can make a lot of money charging customers enormous fees for quick shipping. But while the standard option may take a bit longer, the savings is worth it.

Full-priced clothing

Buying clothing full-price can add unnecessary expenses to your monthly budget. Not only do most in-store clothing items eventually go on sale after a few weeks, but there are countless other ways to get new clothes for less. Hit up your local thrift stores, swap clothes with your friends, or check out online second-hand retailers like Poshmark or Depop to save some money.  

Going out to eat

Everyone knows that going out to eat is expensive. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average American household spends about $3,000 a year dining out. That's a huge expense. According to an article by MoneyUnder30, this number far outweighs how much it costs to prepare food at home. The average price of a meal out is $13. In contrast, the price of buying groceries and making a meal at home is around $4 per plate — a whopping $9 difference. 

Alcoholic drinks in restaurants

While a whole bottle of wine at your local liquor store may cost anywhere between $10 and $15, you can expect to pay at least $8 or $9 for just a glass at a restaurant. Cocktails can cost even more, despite only containing a shot or two of alcohol per serving. Save your pennies and order a soft drink the next time you go out to eat.

Food delivery

Food delivery services are sweeping the nation. Companies like Postmates, Caviar, Seamless, GrubHub, and more allow you to enjoy your favorite restaurants from the comforts of home – for an added fee. Delivery charges can cost anywhere from $2.99 to $8, costing you more money for the same product if you simply went and picked up your food yourself. 

High-end beauty products

Drugstore makeup has come a long way in recent years, to the point where they rival higher-end brands. The actual differences between products you find in CVS and Sephora are almost slim to none — so don't pay more for the luxury brands. 

Off-brand tech accessories and chargers

Off-brand tech accessories and chargers — meaning ones not designed by Apple, Android, Samsung, etc — are usually a waste of your money. They may seem like a cheap and easy fix when you find yourself out and about with a dead device. However, according to the experts at Money, cheap cords can actually end up breaking quickly or even damaging your device. You may end up having to purchase a new phone for the sake of a $9.99 charger. 

• Read more:
• I saved over $285,000 in my 20s without ever making a budget thanks to a laughably easy strategy I use instead
• The best way to save money for the future, even if you don't know what you're saving for
• How much money you should save depends on 3 things
• Saving money is a good start, but where you keep those savings can matter even more

Coming this year, Mitsubishi will sell a system that lets you share power between your home and electric car. Launched today at the Geneva Motor Show, the Dendo Drive House (DDH) features solar panels, a home battery, and a bi-directional charger that lets power flow from your home to your car, or from your car to your home — depending on the economics and which needs the power most. DDH supports cars like the Mitsubishi Engelberg Tourer that the company also announced at the show

There are a number of scenarios when having your car charge your home could be useful. In addition to opening up a world of off-grid living, it could also serve as a backup in the event of a power cut, for example. The system could also be useful if your...

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The way many of us work is changing. For many professionals the days of sitting at their desks for weeks on end have gone. The rise of the mobile worker is transforming user’s hardware requirements and Plantronics Polycom, a company on the pioneering edge of hardware development, have realised that.

Robert Manassero

Last year we bought you news, from the Microsoft Ignite event, that Plantronics have announced the dawn of a new hardware age with the Plantronics Elara 60 Series. The next generation device transforms and enhances the capabilities of a mobile phone and will offer users a whole new wave of options when it comes to enhancing their mobile productivity.

UC Today were lucky enough to be given an in-depth demonstration of the new Elara so we could bring you all of the details on the next device that will be hitting your desktop. Plantronics’ Robert Manassero, Global Product Marketing Manager, and John Ledingham, Director of Design for User Experience, were both on hand to take us through all the features and the ideology behind Elara.

Firstly Robert explains that Plantronics latest innovation is based on the results of detailed research conducted in conjunction with their customers, and the industry as a whole, to gage how they can best enhance user performance.

“What we have noticed is this rise in this new user, what we are calling the mobile-first user. They are using their mobile phone over and above any device out there. They’re usually on the go and when they actually come into a workstation they are going to be experiencing some different communication challenges when trying to use their mobile phone as their primary device. So, we are looking to solve the challenges that this type of user is having.”

John, who specialises in how users manage technology, explains that overcoming any usage issues is key to technology adoption.

“I think the biggest issue for mobile-first workers is that traction point, when you come into the office and you are almost forced to move to another platform. Your mobile is your portal to the world and then you have this other set of equipment you have to then use, so there is all of this friction moving from one to the other and that is what the Elara solves.”

John Ledingham

Robert, John and Plantronics Polycom are acutely aware that their technologies, which formulate the last bridge from any tech platform to the end user, are critical to communication and collaboration experiences as a whole. If an endpoint fails in its goals, offers poor performance or usability then a whole stack of technological cards come tumbling down. With this in mind they are keen to ensure that mobile users can enjoy the same great experience, in terms of ease of use and performance, that any other user enjoys.

Many mobile, or mobile-first, users will be aware of the process. You return from your meeting, drop your mobile on your desk and effectively it becomes redundant as you return to use the traditional desktop tools. The Elara 60 series changes that process and Robert take us through it.

“If you are coming back into your workspace, maybe it’s your home office, you would be able to place your phone onto the station and instantly it’s going to start to wirelessly charge (If your phone supports it, if not there is a USB port for a corded option). Then you can actually extend your conversation to a more enterprise grade audio experience using a selection of different headsets we offer with the Elara.”

Plantronics are offering the Elara 60 series with a host of different customisable options to suit all mobile-first workers. Options will be available with different headsets included and wireless charging if required.

Robert explains that as soon as you are within range, the Elara 60 series will instantly connect via Bluetooth offering you all of the functionality of Elara including optional corded handset, speakerphone or integration with platforms such as Microsoft Teams. They have left no stone, or even the device itself, unturned when considering the most innovative ways to design the Elara device to provide an optimal experience. John demonstrates that the even the underside of the Elara has been sculpted to provide users with the best experience.

“Underneath the device we use a 50mm speaker which is downward firing. They are interesting because they take advantage of the surface that they are placed on to amplify the audio. We have sculpted a channel to conduct the audio to the best location, it also protects the microphone from the sound of the speakers giving you a really wonderful duplex audio experience.”

Plantronics Elara 60 Series

The Elara 60 series could well be the device with the most development time dedicated to its unseen areas, but it was all necessary to provide the optimum experience for users. There will be at least four different base models of the Elara. Entry level with no wireless charging, speakerphone or handset, an option with wireless charging, one with wireless charging and speakerphone, and the final option with all of the features including a handset.

Elara 60 series supports all mobile phones that offer Bluetooth and also will be able to manage even the largest phones in either portrait or landscape so the mobile can be utilised, with a front facing camera, for video meetings, videos or webinars. Integration with collaboration platforms like Microsoft Teams is also enabled and Elara will also offer LED notifications depending on the different statuses or notifications taking place within a Teams environment.

For the mobile workforce the Elara 60 series represents a new generation of work tools, where the mobile phone becomes the centre piece of communication in the office, just as it is out in the field. The bad news?…You will have to wait until later this year to get your hands on your preferred model.

In the fourth quarter of 2018, Avaya reported $735 million in revenue.

It was also around this time, the company announced news of its new Cloud Chief – Gaurav Passi. Mr. Passi, replacing Mercer Rower- was a recognized leader in the cloud comms industry, with over ten years of experience to bring to the role.

Prior to accepting the post at Avaya, Passi served as Executive Vice President of Products and Technology at Five9. There, he headed development, modernization, as well as growth for Five9’s contact center cloud management software. Mr. Passi also previously held senior leadership roles at P&L, Deutsche Telekom Hosted Business Services, Amdocs Inc. and Ciena Corporation.

Passi accepts challenge

At the time of appointment, Passi was charged with accelerating delivery of Avaya’s cloud solutions. Passi was, furthermore, tasked with increasing Avaya’s market share in the global UCaaS and CCaaS market. It was abundantly clear, then – he was more than qualified to lead the acceleration of Avaya’s penetration in such a strategic area.

To provide some pretext – in the third quarter of 2018, Avaya confined that its cloud-based platform had over three million of its cloud-based seats filled. The company showed no signs of slowing down, and today that number sits at over 3.5 million.

Across its private and public cloud portfolio in the UCaaS and CCaaS realm, Avaya, too, reported that its cloud-based solutions were 11 percent of its total revenue. These are the circumstances under which Mr. Passi took the helm.

So, how’s he stacking up to his initial challenge of accelerating the delivery of cloud innovation? Passi has now been on the job for over three months and we want to examine if he’s got what it takes to further establish Avaya as a global player.

Leading the way in cloud-innovation?

Earlier this year, Passi got the chance to show what he was made of. Avaya announced its new OneCloud ReadyNow private cloud offerings feature. Avaya’s latest comes preconfigured and allows ‘per-seat consumption’ as well as standard bundles of both UCaaS and CCaaS solutions.

This is all to help clients achieve scalability, security, and overall more flexibility. Said Gaurav:

“As the market leader with 145 million lines worldwide, Avaya is best equipped to help enterprise customers with their important cloud transition – working at scale and with the performance you can count on”

What’s the verdict?

It is, most certainly too soon to tell, but Avaya is continually at the forefront of innovation in UC.

What is clear, is that Avaya plans to dominate. Its OneCloud UC and CC solutions are available through a network of data centers located in the United States, Germany, and Singapore. This service is available in 34 countries.

Furthermore, the company will be expanding its network of global data centers in the coming months ‘to meet the growing needs of customers worldwide,’ according to a recent press release. The deck is most certainly stacked in your favor, and we’re rooting for you, Mr. Passi.

With your current vision – I believe you do have what it takes to keep Avaya on the cutting-edge of UC technology.

Mark Zuckerberg laid out a new direction for Facebook this week that shifts its focus from a sprawling series of social apps to a one-stop shop messaging service that combines everything the company has to offer. If there’s an analog to what Facebook is trying to build, it exists in the form of Tencent’s WeChat, the single largest social network in China. There are a number of key differences between the two products, but the ultimate goals look markedly similar: singular, all-purpose networks that can be leveraged to serve users all kinds of other services, from mobile payments to gaming to direct lines of contact to businesses.

The push to become more of a WeChat-like service has been a long time coming. Facebook has been constantly...

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2600Hz is named after the frequency in Hertz which AT&T used in the 1960s to secure a steady signal for long-distance telephone calls. Paying homage to its technological predecessors through name – 2600Hz is today, creating next-level technology in the business communications sphere. 

Nearly ten years ago, Patrick Sullivan and his business partner Darren Schreiber were sitting at a bar discussing how to create an API platform that was customizable for everyone. One with CRM integration made simple, and naturally scalable distributed programming.  

To take it a step further, the co-founders wanted to help companies of all sizes reduce costs through its Cloud-based systems at a fraction of the cost of other systems. Roughly ten years later, it is safe to say – the duo reached this and plenty of other goals. This leaves the question, what’s in store for the future of the company?  

A new app store for developers  

To understand where 2600Hz is going – we first must take a step back. In January 2018, the business had a fundamental shift in concentration to app creation and integrations. In 2019, Sullivan says they plan to launch this app store.  

“In 2019, we mostly focus on reducing operational cost for carriers utilizing bleeding-edge technology that has only been attempted in other industries”

“From self-scaling to fully redundant API-driven hosted systems, we help even the smallest companies compete with ‘the big guys’ for a fraction of the cost,” said Patrick Sullivan, Co-Founder, 2600Hz. 

With the launch of its app store, developers can sell their apps to the public. Looking further ahead, 2600Hz wants to democratize the SaaS industry. They hope – if developers can turn apps on and off when they need to, prices will become more reasonable.  

“Our new app store will have the applications of BroadSoft with the APIs of Twilio under a single platform, enabling to businesses to turn the service on and off when they want to, kind of like Salesforce,” Sullivan said.  

Global Cloud Communications platform launch 

As business continues to expand out of North America, Sullivan says they will also soon offer a new cloud-based platform in Europe and Australia that makes the process of setup a piece of cake. This shift toward improving both CX and UX is a part of 2600’s continued efforts to enhance customer satisfaction. Its customers will need their own carrier to generate phone numbers and make external calls, but the rest is handled by 2600Hz.  

First, making its debut in the United States, then in Europe and Australia – the SaaS solution is targeted toward service providers of all sizes. Another key audience is large enterprises with data centers that want to implement 2600Hz’s software on their own servers. 

• Samsung's new Galaxy S10 comes with a welcome overhaul in design, performance, and features over previous Galaxy S phones.
• It's a fantastic smartphone that anyone would be happy with.
• With that said, there are some disappointing aspects of the Galaxy S10.

Samsung's last few Galaxy S phones have been "boringly" good, but I can drop the "boring" part with the Galaxy S10.

Indeed, Samsung's previous Galaxy S devices were some of the best smartphones you could buy, but the Galaxy S9 was an incremental update over the Galaxy S8.

The Galaxy S10 is an overhaul in design, performance, and features, all while maintaining the Samsung smartphone formula that makes its smartphones great.

With that said, the Galaxy S10 isn't without its disappointments.

I've been using the Galaxy S10 Plus for more than a week, but almost everything mentioned below applies to the regular Galaxy S10, too. 

Check it out:

SEE ALSO: Samsung seems like it's trying to disguise the hole-punch display on the Galaxy S10, but it really doesn't have to

There's no doubt this is the best-looking smartphone Samsung has made so far — at least without a case.

You get the familiar Samsung Galaxy formula of a glass back and curved display edges, but its narrow display bezels is the most striking thing about the Galaxy S10 that differentiates it from previous Galaxy phones, and pretty much any other Android phone.

Unfortunately, the Galaxy S10's good looks and narrow bezels disappear almost entirely with a thick-ish case. I used the phone with Incipio's new Aerolite case, and I had forgotten just how narrow the bezels were until I removed the case. But good protective cases that are somewhat thick will do that to any phone.

The hole-punch is better than the notch.

I don't really have any issues with the divisive display notch, but if I had to pick, I'd go for the hole-punch design over the notch.

The hole-punch design for the selfie camera(s) looks and feels far more efficient with the space it uses up than a typical notch used on the iPhone XS and other Android phones. There's no wasted screen space at all with the hole-punch design, and it isn't as noticeable in everyday usage.

And the hole-punch design doesn't interrupt the display's top edge, which makes for a solid rectangular display shape that complements the Galaxy S10's utterly narrow bezels.

The display is fantastic, but I don't really see the added benefits of Samsung's new "Dynamic AMOLED" display that's supposedly better than previous Galaxy displays.

The Galaxy S10 touts a "Dynamic AMOLED" display that supports HDR10+ and it looks great, but I haven't noticed much of a difference from the Galaxy S8 or S9. You get the same 1440p resolution as previous Galaxy phones (but the resolution is set to 1080p by default, also like previous Galaxy phones). Colors might be slightly more vibrant and rich, but it's nothing to write someone with a Galaxy S8 or S9 about.

The HDR10+ support only works with content that supports HDR10+ itself, and I don't really encounter much of that on a daily basis. And personally, I don't get the hype of HDR on videos. I've tried to understand how it looks better than non-HDR content, and I just don't see it. Perhaps I'm HDR-blind.

It feels strange to say this in 2019, but one of the biggest tech companies in the world is betting its future on interoperable messaging. In a major announcement on Wednesday, Mark Zuckerberg announced a shift in focus for Facebook, moving from the News Feed to encrypted, ephemeral messaging — or as he put it, from the town square to the living room. After years of pushing for more data shared with more people, Facebook wants to give users a quiet place to talk.

It’s a fascinating plan for lots of reasons — in part because of the break from Facebook-as-usual — but it’s hard to know what it might look like in practice. The relatively simple part is knitting together the products Facebook already has. Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram all...

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FBI Director Chris Wray is still hoping to sell Americans on trading away their security for a little bit of law enforcement convenience. Wray believes the only way the FBI and other agencies will ever keep up with criminals is to do away with encryption. The "going dark" campaign may have started with Jim Comey, but Wray has proven to be every bit as obtusely tenacious as his predecessor.

Wray's latest anti-encryption pep talk occurred at the RSA Conference. CNET reports the FBI director delivered another misguided, but impassioned, speech in defense of making everything worse for everyone but the FBI.

Encryption should have limits. That's the message FBI Director Christopher Wray had for cybersecurity experts Tuesday. The technology that scrambles up information so only intended recipients can read it is useful, he said, but it shouldn't provide a playground for criminals where law enforcement can't reach them.

"It can't be a sustainable end state for there to be an entirely unfettered space that's utterly beyond law enforcement for criminals to hide," Wray said during a live interview at the RSA Conference, a major cybersecurity gathering in San Francisco.

Wray can't honestly define where encryption should stop and law enforcement access begin. All he can do is claim the status quo isn't working because sometimes the FBI can't get into a seized device. But how many times is encryption actually bringing an investigation to a halt? That's something Wray won't talk about, even though he has access to this information.

What CNET charitably calls a "back and forth" conversation between Chris Wray and tech companies is actually nothing more than Wray complaining about encryption and ignoring everything he hears back from the companies that would be affected.

Wray needs to take his anti-encryption ball and go home. Not because I disagree with him, but because the FBI has handled this "conversation" disingenuously since day one. The "going dark" narrative hasn't been backed by evidence or facts. The FBI misrepresented the number of uncrackable devices it had in its possession for more than three years. Once legislators started demanding proof, the FBI discovered it had no idea how many devices it had on hand.

No further details have been delivered by the FBI, but it's safe to assume the original estimate of 8-9,000 devices is actually less than a quarter of that. But we don't know what the actual count is because the FBI has yet to issue an updated number.

The FBI said it would recount the devices and get back to us. As of March 6th, it has been 281 days since the FBI started replacing statements of 8,000+ locked devices with asterisks and footnotes. This is why Wray needs to shut his mouth. Until his agency delivers the real number of locked devices, we don't need to entertain his anti-encryption dreams. If he and his agency are unwilling to have a real conversation about device encryption -- one containing actual facts about locked devices and their impact on investigations -- no one should grant him or his comments any credibility.