Davemichels

There should be a word, a friend of mine recently said, for when companies over-market a relatively simple feature that ought to just be standard in a well-made product. Until we come up with that word, I can offer a brand that does something in the same spirit: it’s called Kizik, and it sells shoes that you just step into, without having to use your hands to put them on. I’ve been trying out a pair of these shoes for a few weeks, and they definitely have that “this is how it should always be” feel to them, even if their price feels a touch stratospheric for the small bit of added practicality they provide.

The design premise of the hands-free Kizik shoes is to simply adapt to the most natural way you or I would attempt to put shoes on....

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• Ideo, the design firm that helped Steve Jobs design the first Apple mouse, is now investing in what it calls distributed web technologies to revolutionize the internet.
• The firm has set up a venture-capital fund, and it plans to make as many as a dozen investments this year on top of the six it's already made.
• The former Citigroup execs Ian Lee and Daniel Hodd are helping with the effort, alongside Joe Gerber, a longtime Ideo manager.

The design firm that created Apple's first mouse has turned its considerable design prowess on the world of blockchain with a promise that the internet won't be the same again.

Ideo is investing in startups involved with what it calls the distributed web, which are projects like peer-to-peer digital cash networks, permission-less services, marketplaces, and messaging platforms. Elements of access, ownership, and control can now be embedded into software applications, opening up a new world, according to a blog the company will post later Tuesday.

It's also set up a venture-capital fund to take stakes, though the firm declined to provide more details. Already an investor in six companies, it plans to make as many as a dozen more investments this year.

"We're at that Cambrian moment," said Joe Gerber, one of two managing directors at Ideo's CoLab project, the center of the investing program that was set up in 2015 to explore applications for blockchain beyond bitcoin. "The foundational elements of the internet are being rewritten."

Ideo hopes to use design thinking to help startup founders and engineers make their products as intuitive as possible for the end user and by doing so help speed adoption, according to Gerber.

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He helps run the CoLab project with Ian Lee, who left Citigroup's venture-capital arm in 2017 to focus on this full time. Another former Citigroup employee, Daniel Hodd, is also part of the project. The firm is making small investments in early-stage startups, though it has the flexibility to invest in later rounds if it wants.

Through their work with CoLab, Gerber and Lee quickly learned that while there were many brilliant cryptographers and engineers, they weren't doing a lot of thinking about how real people use the products they develop, Gerber said.

"The most important thing is helping these projects and protocols that we invest in get into the world and get used by people and solve real problems," Gerber said. "We think we're perfectly positioned to help with that."

Ideo's history would suggest as much. In 1980, Steve Jobs turned to Dean Hovey, one of the founders of what would become Ideo, to come up with a mouse that cost a fraction of what Xerox's $300 mouse cost. The solution, which cost $15, helped Jobs to revolutionize the personal-computing industry. More recently, Ideo helped the startup-in-residence PillPack come up with a strategy for delivering prescription medicine at home. Amazon bought the company for $1 billion last year.

Read more: JPMORGAN: Blockchain is overhyped and won't change the world anytime soon

Ideo has already made investments in Rare Bits, a wallet for digital assets; ZeppelinOS, a developer platform for smart-contract projects; Messari, a digital library to help make sense of the cryptocurrency landscape; Handshake, a career network for college students and recent graduates; and Freelance Labs, a marketplace for the gig economy that cuts out an intermediary that can sometimes capture 30% of the economics.

They compared the current state of distributed web technologies to that of personal computing in the 1970s.

So how is this revolutionizing the internet? The new technologies enable developers to encode elements of trust or access, incentives, ownership, and governance into the software, Gerber said. Some of the questions that can now be posed and potentially answered, he said: How do you create ownership around data? How do you incentivize participation in these networks? How do you start to coordinate people using this communication technology?

One example is a marketplace. Today, most marketplaces — Amazon, Etsy, or StubHub, for example — are owned and operated by a third party that is responsible for bringing buyers and sellers together and for dictating terms of the transactions. In return, the marketplace takes a cut of the money that changes hands.

Using the blockchain allows users to replace a lot of the services provided by such third parties and share in the cost savings, making it more like a cooperative. Users can be incentivized to come to the platform with tokens. Rules of engagement can be written into the code. And as a result, a marketplace can be created in which both sides have a shared interest in seeing it succeed.

Read more: A leading investor at Barry Silbert's bitcoin investment firm shares his top crypto trends for 2019

The Ideo execs recognize that some people may consider them crazy, especially given the state of cryptocurrency prices and how that's led to doubts about the industry's future. That just makes this a better time to invest and develop enduring business models, they said.

"Yes, crypto is going through a winter, but we think that people are overly fixated on the financial speculation and the cryptocurrency element of this, and we think design and adoption will be the next phase in this technology evolution," Gerber said.

Put another way, Lee said: "We have high conviction that what we consider distributed web technology is the next evolution of the internet."

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NOW WATCH: Wall Street heavyweights set the record straight on the proposed 70% super-rich tax they say is wildly misunderstood

Google is announcing two new features for Android phones today: Live Transcribe and Sound Amplifier. They’re both designed as accessibility features to help people who are deaf or hard of hearing.

Live Transcribe is an app that automatically transcribes speech in near-real time, allowing people to communicate in situations where they might not otherwise be able to. Sound Amplifier is designed for those with hearing loss, allowing you to tweak sound settings to improve your ability to hear — sort of like a hearing aid app for your phone. Sound Amplifier was originally announced back in May at Google I/O, but it’s finally shipping now.

Both will be available preinstalled on Pixel 3 phones in Accessibility Settings and also available via...

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Slack, the provider of workplace communication and collaboration tools, has submitted paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission to go public later this year, the company announced on Monday.

This is its first concrete step toward becoming a publicly listed company, five years after it launched.

Headquartered in San Francisco, Slack has raised more than $1 billion in venture capital investment, including a $427 million funding round in August. The round valued the business at $7.1 billion, cementing its position as one of the most valuable privately held businesses in the U.S.

The company counted 10 million daily active users around the world and 85,000 paying users as of January 2019. According to data provided (via email) by SensorTower, Slack’s new users on mobile increased roughly 21 percent last quarter compared to Q4 2017, while total installs on mobile grew 24 million. The company recorded 8 million installs in 2018, up 21 percent year-over-year.

Slack’s investors include SoftBank’s Vision Fund, Dragoneer Investment Group, General Atlantic, T. Rowe Price Associates, Wellington Management, Baillie Gifford, Social Capital and IVP, as well as early investors Accel and Andreessen Horowitz.

Slack is one of several tech unicorns on deck to go public this year. Uber and Lyft have both similarly filed confidentially to go public in what are expected to be traditional initial public offerings. Slack, however, is expected to pursue a direct listing, following in Spotify’s footsteps. Instead of issuing new shares, Slack will sell directly to the market existing shares held by insiders, employees and investors, a move that will allow it to bypass a roadshow and some of Wall Street’s exorbitant IPO fees.

For customers who require desk phones and conference room phones to make and receive audio calls or join meetings, Microsoft Teams provides a growing portfolio of devices that can be purchased from our Teams Marketplace. For Teams phones including the Yealink T56A/T58A/CP960 and the Crestron Flex series IP phones that run on Android 5.x or later, there may be specific configurations that need to be enabled in the customer's tenant for the phones to successfully enroll into Intune.  

Allowing successful Intune enrollment for Android versions 5.x and up  

If all the following conditions below are true, you will need to enable a specific configuration setting in the Intune admin console to allow for a successful enrollment: 

• You are deploying a Teams IP phone with Android OS version 5.x or later. 
• You have connected your Intune tenant with managed Google Play in order to manage Android Enterprise devices. 
• You have configured your enrollment restrictions such that Android work profile enrollment restrictions are applied to the end user account that you are using to enroll. 

The recommended deployment configuration is (only one of these two are necessary):  

• Adjust your enrollment restrictions settings in Intune so that the user you are enrolling the IP phone is not targeted with Android work profile.  This approach is recommended if you are managing Android Enterprise work profile devices in the same Intune tenant as your Teams device. 
• If you are not actively using Android Enterprise in your Intune tenant, you can remove the connection to managed Google Play following the directions here under "Disconnect your Android enterprise administrative account".  Disconnecting your Intune tenant from managed Google Play will disable Android Enterprise enrollment entirely for your tenant.  Therefore, this option is only recommended if you are not managing any Android Enterprise devices in your Intune tenant.     

 We are actively pursuing a fix from the firmware to handle this enrollment flow. Once the fix has been published to the Microsoft Device Management solution and devices have been updated, neither of these workarounds would be necessary regardless of whether the three factors above are all true.

Device-based Exception via Intune 

Intune allows creating device compliance policies in the tenant for the Android-based devices accessing organizational data. These policies are applied to user accounts and currently do not provide the ability to distinguish device types on the same operating system (eg: Desk phones vs conventional mobile devices phones). Tenant administrators might need to provide exceptions to user accounts for Teams IP phones to complete sign in. 

Google is opening up one of the nicest little features of its Chrome OS devices: Instant Tethering, which allows you to activate your phone’s hot spot and get online directly from a Chromebook. The feature will soon work with more than 30 Android phones and 15 additional Chromebooks, on top of the small selection where it’s already available — namely, Google’s Chromebooks and Pixel phones.

As it tends to be with Chrome OS features, the new option is rolling out to more devices beyond the current set of devices “over the coming months.”

To activate the feature, you’ll need to pair your Android phone to your Chromebook in settings. After that, you should have the option to enable Instant Tethering in the...

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Slack was late to the world of workplace messaging apps. When it arrived in in 2013, it didn’t appear to offer much that was new — chat rooms and direct messaging were already available in a host of apps. But its co-founder Stewart Butterfield cannily presented it as a powerful alternative to email and, over time, as a command hub for the workplace that would integrate all the other software a company uses into a single interface. Slack spread like wildfire, and today is worth at least $7 billion, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Now the company plans to make its stock available for purchase: the company filed its initial public offering today. It is expected to become one of the most valuable tech companies to go public since Snapchat....

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Panasonic first announced its Lumix S1 and S1R full-frame mirrorless cameras last year, but now the company is sharing the full details of two products it hopes will be recognized for their photo chops just as much as for Panasonic’s well-known video strengths. The formula is something we’ve seen from both Sony and more recently Canon: one of them is a high-megapixel resolution beast that’s aimed at pro-level photographers — the 47.3MP S1R in this case — and the other is a more well-rounded camera for a wider audience of hybrid shooters. That’s the 24.2MP S1, which will retail for $2,499 (body only) or $3,399 with a 24-105mm lens. The S1R body costs $3,699 or $4,599 with the same lens.

Both use the L-Mount, a system owned by Leica with...

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AT&T's feeling the burn of slow wireless customer growth and declines in DirecTV Now subscriber volume in its Q4 earnings results.

The second-largest US wireless carrier by volume added 3.8 million wireless net adds during the quarter, down over 7% from the 4.1 million sign-ups in Q4 2017.

AT&T added 232,000 postpaid smartphone subscribers, a 42% YoY drop from last year, and lost 410,000 tablet and other branded computing device subscriptions, a significant increase from the 230,000 net loss the prior year.

On the entertainment front, AT&T's DirecTV Now skinny bundle service lost 267,000 subscribers, or about 14% of its user base. DirecTV Now currently has about 1.6 million subs, down from 1.86 million at the end of Q3, marking the first time that it's lost customers in nearly two years.

The results suggest AT&T needs to make its offerings more attractive to remain strong in the increasingly competitive US wireless market. AT&T can drive up customer loyalty and lure subscribers from its rivals by focusing on the following areas: 

• Shoring up value in its wireless plans by offering perks that resonate with subscribers. AT&T's been pulling back on its previously offered media content since the summer. For example, it dropped its $15 monthly discount for DirecTV Now in November, and many subscribers are unwilling to pay for the service now, suggesting that the discounted service wasn't a significant value-add to AT&T's wireless plans. Introducing more must-have services — such as Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime or a new video service disruptor leveraging its media assets from Time Warner — that consumers would pay for as stand-alone products can help the carrier increase its plans' value. This is crucial because value is the chief sore spot for AT&T; the carrier came in dead last on value for cost for the second year running, according to Business Insider Intelligence's Telecom Competitive Edge Report (enterprise only). 
• Emphasizing its market-leading rollout of mobile 5G. AT&T added 3.2 million connected devices during the quarter, up 23% from last year. That's nearly 14 times the number of postpaid smartphones it added and double the number of connected devices Verizon signed up. Moreover, connected devices are becoming a larger contributor to AT&T's wireless subscriber volume: They accounted for 33% of its base in Q4 2018 versus 27% in Q4 2017. AT&T should market its leading 5G efforts and network to position itself at the forefront of the next standard of connectivity. In doing so, we think the carrier could improve the perception of its network and continue the momentum in connected device adds. 

SEE ALSO: T-Mobile is outpacing the rest of the Big Four US carriers on value, loyalty, and satisfaction — here's what consumers say is most important when selecting a mobile provider

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• Apple's latest move to lock out Facebook and Google employees from their internal iPhone apps is a show of how much power tech companies have. 
• Each company has the power to say no to certain actions it finds impermissible, by either users or other tech giants.

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NOW WATCH: China made an artificial star that's 6 times as hot as the sun, and it could be the future of energy

Today, Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) said he would “soon” introduce a bill to permanently reinstate the net neutrality rules that were repealed by the Federal Communications Commission, led by chairman Ajit Pai, in 2017.

Markey’s announcement comes as a federal court is set to hear oral arguments over the FCC’s repeal of net neutrality regulations in 2017. Markey, who is a member of the Senate Commerce Committee, has previously introduced a bill that would permanently reinstate net neutrality as a member of the House of Representatives, although the measure ultimately failed.

It’s unclear when the bill would be formally introduced, but Markey said it was imminent. “We...

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I had the opportunity to attend the Avaya Engage 2019 conference this year. As leaders in the business communications and contact centre space, Avaya had plenty of insights to offer into the changing nature of UC, and they even provided an overview of their Open SIP headset range.

I spoke to Ard Verboon, the GM of Devices at Avaya, about the changing nature of business communication endpoints, and the transformational devices that Avaya is creating to change the way we look at the desktop device.

What Were Partners Excited about in the Endpoint Space This Year?

Ard Verboon

Following a big year for endpoint development in 2018, Avaya was once again ready to show off it’s growing range of devices at Engage, including solutions like the Avaya Vantage phone, new open SIP phones and headset devices. I was keen to find out what Avaya’s partners were most excited about in 2019.

“They’re excited about a lot of things. Particularly, the open SIP nature of our endpoints is compelling to our partners because it means that they can access a brand-new multitude of potential markets. This year, we’re doing more than ever to help partners increase their addressable markets and connect with a broader range of customers. As more of the market focuses on interoperability and flexibility, open devices allow Avaya resellers to sell to people who had never previously considered Avaya.”

According to Verboon, there are two ways that Avaya plans to stand out in the growing endpoint market this year. The first method involves using Avaya’s strong reputation for reliability, scalability, and quality.

“We’re really pushing hard on zero-touch provisioning to boost scalability as well. We’re giving people a way to move to the cloud faster.”

Another USP for Avaya is their commitment to answering the needs of their customers. “We’re listening to the feedback of our customers, and we’ve found that people appreciate what we deliver.”

What’s Exciting for Avaya in the Headset Space?

I was keen to discover why Ard Verboon thought the Avaya brand had chosen to focus more aggressively on headset solutions this year. He told me that the plan right now is to make Avaya on Avaya deployments look and feel better. “We’re excited about the idea of transforming our entire install base into a customers with Avaya on Avaya solutions, where they can rely on us for everything from desktop devices to software and headsets.”

Ard told me that Avaya had recently trademarked a new technology to bring into their headset portfolio too, called “Acoustic Edge.” The feature is designed to provide better acoustic hearing protection to individuals in the office or contact centre environment. It works by measuring the energy in a signal and dynamically limiting the output to protect both sound quality, and user hearing.

“We’re making this service backward compatible through our entire portfolio too”

How Do You Feel about Device as a Service?

Avaya has had “Device as a Service” offerings for their clients for some time now. The strategy ensures that people with month-to-month cloud subscriptions for their software can also access similar as-a-service solutions for their desktop IP phones, audio conferencing devices and more. According to Verboon, device as a service allows Avaya to further deliver on the promises that they make to their market.

“We let customers move to the cloud at their own pace, which means that we still support servers, partner hosting, and various other options along with the public cloud. This means we’re not forcing people to replace their strategy in any way. You can simply have the solution that suits you. To give people that flexibility, we have to offer a range of things, including as-a-service OpEX solutions that support better cash-flow for some of our customers.”

Ard noted that OpEX solutions don’t necessarily work for everyone. However, Avaya believes that it’s not up to them to decide what’s best for their customer. As-a-service options mean that Avaya can deliver more options, and Ard noted that there would be additional support and service wrap options coming with this solution in the future.

How Do You Think the Endpoint Market is Changing?

There has been a lot of evolution in the endpoint and headset market in recent years. Avaya has been moving through their own transformation during this time too, focusing more on flexibility and cloud solutions for their customers. Ard told me that Avaya’s vision is to be the ultimate “cloud portal” for their customers – the way that they access transformation.

“We believe in giving people a gateway to their future. This is our position as an endpoint provider. Now that the workforce is changing, we’re also working on delivering the next level of openness for our customers too, so that younger users can build the experience that’s right for them.”

Ard told me that millennials and younger generations want to be able to consume technology according to their preferences. To make standard endpoint devices appeal to these customers, distributors and vendors need to present the endpoint differently. “It’s about changing the desk phone from a phone into an AI office assistant. For instance, the Vantage device can let people know how many emails they have, book meetings, and set up calls all through voice commands. It’s just like using Alexa, or another virtual assistant.”

According to Verboon, Avaya is now demonstrating great technology at conferences like GITEX that allow them to show off a vision of the desktop device as something new and customisable. “We can make endpoints into functionality blocks that people can build their ideal office with. Now that there’s so much disruptive technology in the world, there’s no reason or endpoints to stay dumb.”

How Do You Think Things Will Evolve Going Forward?

Ard told me that for him, things like wearables and new endpoint devices are a definite next step, as is the idea of “cord cutting.” He noted that today’s television companies are losing cable customers to Netflix streaming and solutions without wires and that communication will begin to move in the same direction.

“By the end of this quarter, the entire Avaya devices portfolio will be ready for this cordless future. Everything from voice to video conferencing will be wireless (WiFi enabled)”

“This means companies can avoid the expense of cabling and changing their offices every time they need to change the format of a space. In the call centre, companies will be able to temporarily add new workers without having to invest in extra cabling.”

For Avaya, the future is all about giving people the freedom to adapt and explore at their own pace, while ensuring they have the proprietary tools they need to thrive on their path to transformation.

I was fortunate enough to attend Avaya’s fantastic Engage event this year, between the 20^th and 23^rd of January. The conference introduced Avaya customers and partners to the latest developments in the Avaya platform while answering any questions the community might have about making the most of their portfolio.

During my time at Engage, I managed to sit down for a quick conversation with Ahmed Helmy, the man responsible for AI sales and running the “Advanced Solutions Architects” at Avaya. Helmy helps to drive much of the innovation that happens behind the scenes at Avaya, and I was keen to find out how the company had been evolving over the past year.

What Have You Been Up to in 2018?

Ahmed told me that much of Avaya’s research and development strategy over the last year had revolved around making the platform as flexible and accessible as possible for their customers.

“We’re beginning to focus more on what we can do with things like APIs, convergence, and integration so that everyone can get the most out of their Avaya experience.”

Since every customer using the Avaya framework is unique, it makes sense that the business would want to find a way to deliver broader, more bespoke solutions to their users. Helmy told me that customers today need their vendors, partners, and VARs to engage with them because they’re not sure what they need at the beginning of their roadmap. “People are trying a lot of new things, and they don’t want you to come along and give them a one-size-fits-all idea, they want you to give them something that adapts to their needs.”

What Are Customers Asking for Today?

During his Avaya Engage speech, CEO Jim Chirico noted that the innovation efforts that had been driving Avaya over the last year are informed by what customers say they need most to achieve digital transformation. I asked Ahmed whether the company had noticed any trends in people asking for disruptive new technologies like artificial intelligence.

“There are a lot of people talking about AI today, but people still aren’t sure what they’re going to do with this intelligent technology. Though customers are starting to get more informed, they’re looking for someone who can show them an end-to-end roadmap of the technology they need. They don’t just want AI; they want to see how new technology can solve their specific problems.”

Avaya’s innovation roadmap isn’t just about making disruptive tech simpler and more accessible to their customers, it’s about working with each end user to create solutions that are ideal for each use case.

How Has Avaya Evolved to Suit the New Environment?

There were plenty of evolutionary announcements to discuss at Avaya Engage, including the introduction of the new Avaya IX solution, which encompasses all of Avaya’s tools for contact centre, collaboration, and unified communication technology. At the same time, the company has been looking for ways to deploy solutions in the environment that best suits their customer, so that end-users have a simpler technology infrastructure in place.

“We’ve also been looking at the APIs and integrations side of things, to make sure that people can build on their systems and create the experiences that they need. We want to work with our customers to deliver the most immersive custom solutions.”

“It’s about delivering the right outcome for the customer, not just providing them with the right selection of features.”

With a commitment to customer-led development and growth, Avaya hopes to provide experiences “that matter” to their users, whether it’s for workforce optimisation, user engagement, or customer satisfaction.

Climate change is wreaking havoc in Earth’s remotest corners. At the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica, scientists found a massive cavity—roughly two-thirds the area of Manhattan—that has been growing in the ice for decades.

The hole lurks beneath the surface of the Florida-size glacier and measures 1,000 feet from top to bottom, scientists said in a study published on Wednesday in Science Advances. The study was led by researchers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the University of California Irvine, the German Aerospace Center, and France’s University Grenoble Alpes.

The cavity was revealed by data from NASA’s Operation IceBridge and spaceborne radar projects that documented Thwaites’ behavior between 1992 and 2017.

Pietro Milillo, a radar scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and lead author on the study, called it a “disturbing discovery.”

“This hole is big enough to have contained 14 billion tons of ice,” Milillo told Motherboard in an email. “To compare these numbers on a human scale, 1 billion tons is the water consumption of the City of Los Angeles in one year.”

Illustration of Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica. Image: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Antarctic researchers have known about Thwaites’ “weak underbelly” for decades. Even so, the authors suspect the cavity’s size and melt rate have been underestimated by previous models.

The glacier’s runoff is responsible for up to 10 percent of annual global sea level rise, according to estimates from the National Science Foundation. If Thwaites melted entirely, the world’s oceans could rise by nearly two feet.

Tracking ice loss is no simple feat. Antarctic glaciers are often too big and too isolated to accurately measure from the ground.

Instead, the team used a fleet of low Earth orbit satellites and planes equipped with ice-penetrating radar to monitor Thwaites over time. What this revealed was “different mechanisms of retreat,” Milillo said.

Where the cavity looms on the glacier’s western front, its grounding line—the point where Thwaites affixes to the continental shelf—has been detaching from the bedrock at a rate of 0.4 to 0.5 miles per year since 1992, according to the study.

The cycle is perpetuated as the hole grows; as more water and heat get trapped beneath the ice, the faster it melts. Most of the 14 billion tons of ice disappeared within the last three years, according to the study.

To the east, Thwaites’ grounding line recedes through small channels, “like fingers reaching beneath the glacier to melt it from below,” Milillo described. Here, the rate of retreat has quickened from 0.4 miles a year between 1992 and 2011 to 0.8 miles a year from 2011 to 2017. (However, Thwaites’ western region is still melting faster than its eastern one.)

Plenty of things are responsible for the retreat, such as topography, thinning ice, and melt brought on by masses of warm, salty ocean water. “Ice-ocean interactions are more complex than previously understood,” Milillo said.

American and British science agencies recently embarked on a five year expedition to Thwaites, in an effort to better understand its terrifying potential for sea level rise on a massive scale.

"How much, how fast? That's our mantra,” Robert Larter, a scientist with the British Antarctic Survey, told BBC News on Wednesday. “These are the questions we're asking about Thwaites.”

Thwaites connects to the West Antarctic ice sheet which has also lost ice at an unprecedented pace. Separate research suggests that large swaths have retreated to “the point of no return,” and the whole West Antarctic ice sheet could raise global sea levels by 10 feet.

In the near future, Mililo expects that a new generation of satellites “will be capable of providing more accurate and more frequent measurements over the entire Antarctica and Greenland.”

By now, you've almost certainly heard about the latest big technology security flaw, in which Apple's FaceTime feature contains a bug that allows a caller using FaceTime to hear through the recipeient's phone while the call was still ringing. This obviously has all kinds of people all kinds of freaked out, since the bug essentially turns any iPhone into a short-burst surveillance bug. This has led some to opine that Apple, which has a fairly decent reputation from a privacy standpoint, is at risk of having that reputation torpedoed over this story.

And that might be all the more the case when the public discovers that Apple was informed of this bug by a teenager and his mother in the weeks running up to the press coverage of it, and did nothing about it.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Grant Thompson, from Tucson, was “setting up a FaceTime chat with friends ahead of a ‘Fortnite’ videogame-playing session when he stumbled on the bug”. It was then that Thompson noticed that he could hear audio from friends who had yet to join the call. Grant quickly told his mother, Michele, and the pair spent a week trying to contact Apple to warn them about the issue.

The WSJ say after some calls and faxes they “eventually traded a few emails” with Apple’s security team, but it wasn’t until reports of the bug blew up on Twitter that the decision was made to disable Group Facetime.

This apparently happened a week or so before this all exploded on Twitter and in the media. We've heard stories like this in the past, of course, but it always amazes me that tech companies aren't better about having a unified message across entire companies that staff should want to report this sort of thing up the hierarchy, and those high-ups should jump on addressing these reports both quickly and publicly. Imagine a world where Apple had lauded this teenager for informing the company about the bug and in which Apple had proactively disabled group FaceTime until the bug was resolved? Apple would have come out looking, once again, as though it were looking out for the privacy interests of its users.

Instead, it sure looks like the company was hoping to stick its head in the sand and pretend the bug didn't exist. Or, more charitably, perhaps the company thought it could simply do away with the bug quietly via an update with vague patchlist notes. Either way, it's not a great look.

The tech world is probably sitting on the edge of a charger revolution, and most of us just haven’t realized it yet. No, I’m not talking about USB-C (sadly); I’m talking about GaN (gallium nitride) chargers, a material that’s started to replace silicon in chargers. I’ve had the chance to try out two of the first GaN chargers — RavPower’s 45W slimline design model and Anker’s PowerPort Atom PD 1 — and it’s not just marketing hype: the new chargers really do make a huge leap forward for shrinking down power bricks in a way that’s really exciting to see.

In both cases, simply holding the charger in your hand is enough to make you skeptical. The 30W Anker just flat out seems too small to drive anything bigger than a phone, and the 45W...

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The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Foundation of Northern California filed a lawsuit on Wednesday accusing a Sacramento sheriff of unlawfully blocking Black Lives Matter leaders from his official Facebook page.

According to the ACLU, two Black Lives Matter Sacramento leaders were blocked by Sheriff Scott Jones on Facebook after Jones refused to investigate the death of Mikel McIntyre, who was killed by Sacramento deputies in 2017. This past fall, Jones posted on his official Facebook page to seek support, but was met with criticism which prompted him to block BLM leaders Tanya Faison and Sonia Lewis.

When a page blocks someone on social media platforms, the blocked user is no longer able to view or interact with posts on that...

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Microsoft posted the second quarter of its 2019 financial results today, reporting revenue of $32.5 billion and net income of $8.4 billion. Surface and gaming are both up, but revenue from Windows licenses has slipped.

While Surface revenue only grew 1 percent in the same quarter last year, it has jumped by a massive 39 percent this year to $1.86 billion. The big jump is not entirely surprising, as Microsoft released its Surface Pro 6 and Surface Laptop 2 during the most recent quarter, alongside the new Surface Studio 2 and Surface Headphones. It was a busy holiday period for Surface, and the revenue reflects that.

Surface Book 2 and Surface Go sales pushed Surface revenue to $1.1 billion in the previous quarter, so it’s clear demand...

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• Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg outlined 4 priorities for 2019
• The four goals are designed to get the company out of the defensive crouch that's defined the past two years amid a string of scandals.
• Zuckerberg emphasized that the company will redouble its efforts on "building new experiences."

After a two-year apology tour, Facebook is changing strategy: It's going to go all-out building stuff again.

On Wednesday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told analysts on a conference call after the company's Q4 2018 earnings that the Silicon Valley tech giant believes it has made significant progress tackling its myriad woes, and that throughout 2019 one of the company's key areas of focus will be launching significant new features and products for its apps.

"I'm not talking about the many day-to-day iterative improvements we make so that ranking gets a bit better or things get somewhat faster, but major improvements to people's lives that whole communities recognize and say 'wow, we're all doing something new on Facebook or WhatsApp that we weren't doing before,'" Zuckerberg said in remarks also shared to his public Facebook page.

It's a significant step for Facebook, which has been on the back foot almost constantly since the 2016 US presidential elections, as its historically rosy image was tarnished by a string of scandals over everything from misuse of users' data and hacking, to the social network's role in spreading hate speech that fueled genocide in Myanmar and Russia's sowing of propaganda on the platform.

The new focus on product updates is also a likely necessity for keeping the company's increasingly unhappy workforce on board. Employees have been bombarded by a barrage of negative headlines, while the company's faltering stock price has put a dent in their compensation packages. ("Employee morale is dead," a Facebook employee recently told Business Insider. "It's like an open secret ... everyone has to pretend like they're all happy-go-lucky, but most people aren't, which is kinda crazy.")

As such, Zuckerberg's change of tack will allow rank-and-file employees, especially newer ones, to feel invested in new initiatives — rather than constantly playing on the defense and cleaning up other people's mess.

Zuckerberg conceded this, saying: "The reality is we've put most of our energy into security over the past 18 months so that building new experiences wasn't the priority over that period."

Particular points of focus when it comes to building new experience will be around messaging, groups and communities, "commerce and shopping" on Instagram, and Facebook's video service Watch, the 34-year-old billionaire chief exec said.

Zuck's four Facebook priorities for 2019

The plan is one of four key priorities Facebook's leadership has set for 2019. These are (in Zuckerberg's words):

• "First, continue making progress on the major social issues facing the internet and our company."
• "Second, build new experiences that meaningfully improve people's lives today and set the stage for even bigger improvements in the future."
• "Third, keep building our business by supporting the millions of businesses — mostly small businesses — that rely on our services to grow and create jobs."
• "And fourth, communicate more transparently about what we're doing and the role our services play in the world."

Facebook's attempts to refresh its image have had false starts before. The New York Times previously reported that in early 2018, the company had an internal comms campaign that was "meant to assure employees that the company was committed to getting back on track in 2018" — but it was ditched in the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

And 2019 is already shaping up to pose some challenges for Facebook.

Less than a day before Facebook announced its Q4 earnings, TechCrunch reported that Facebook was paying users on iOS to let it spy on them — and Apple responded by revoking the company's developer certificate, effectively blocking Facebook employees' from using internal apps to do their jobs and causing chaos for the company.

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SEE ALSO: Facebook's stock soars 12% after beating on top and bottom lines for Q4 2018 earnings

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NOW WATCH: Jeff Bezos is worth over $100 billion — here's how the world's richest man makes and spends his money

• Zoom, the $1 billion video conferencing company, is in the process of filing confidentially with the Securities and Exchange Commission, a source told Business Insider.
• While the company submitted its paperwork, it hasn't gotten confirmation from the regulator, which was mostly shut down throughout January with the rest of the US federal government.
• Zoom is working with Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse on its IPO.

The $1 billion video conferencing company Zoom is in the process of filing confidentially for an IPO with the Securities and Exchange Commission but its registration is stuck due to the government shutdown, according to a source familiar with the company's plans. 

While Zoom has submitted paperwork with the SEC, the compay still isn't officially filed because of a processing delay, the source added. 

The startup has picked banks for a public offering that include Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse, the source said. 

Representatives for Zoom and the banks declined to comment. 

Reuters previously reported that Zoom was preparing for an IPO with Morgan Stanley last October. 

Zoom was founded in 2011 by CEO Eric S. Yuan, who was previously VP of engineering at the video conferencing company WebEx. Yuan joined Cisco in 2007 when it bought WebEx for $3.2 billion.

Zoom, which sells subscriptions for enterprise-grade video conference services, is used by companies including Uber and Box. Morgan Stanley also uses Zoom's video conferencing technology, which played a role in the company's decision to appoint the bank as its lead underwriter, the source said. 

The company is cash flow positive, the source said. It was last valued at $1 billion in a Series D led by Sequoia Capital in 2017. The company is also backed by Facebook and Qualcomm. 

Zoom is just one of a handful of tech unicorns awaiting feedback or confirmation from the SEC following the federal government shutdown. The ride-hailing competitors Uber and Lyft reportedly had not gotten comments from the SEC as of January 9, despite filing confidentially in early December, ahead of the shutdown.

SEE ALSO: 2019 was supposed to be a banner year for IPOs, but now it's turning into a 's---show'

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• Facebook is pulling its iOS Research App following a TechCrunch report that revealed it paid people, including teenagers, to allow it to gather data about them.
• When the news first broke Facebook stood by the app, saying it had no plans to take it down. Hours later, it confirmed it is taking the app off Apple.
• Facebook did not immediately confirm whether it would also take the app off Android.

Facebook has shut down an iOS app that installed intrusive data gathering software on people's phones, just hours after vigorously defending the project.

TechCrunch reported on Tuesday that Facebook had set up an app, named Facebook Research, which paid people up to $20 a month to install a VPN which then tracked their data.

It enlisted 13 to 17 years olds to take part in the program, who had to get a parental consent agreement signed through a tick box. Facebook said less than 5% of the participants were teenagers.

Read more: Facebook got caught paying people $20 a month to let them spy on their phones

Initially, Facebook defended the programme, and a spokesman told Business Insider that it had no plans to end Facebook Research as a result of TechCrunch's report.

But around five hours after publishing, TechCrunch's Josh Constine reported that the app had been shut down on iOS.

Facebook confirmed to Business Insider that the program was shutting down on Apple, but did not immediately answer whether the same would be true for Android.

Facebook has rubbed Apple up the wrong way over intrusive apps before. It previously banned Facebook's VPN app Onavo, and the TechCrunch report suggested that much of this new app was lifted directly from Onavo's code. A Facebook spokesman stressed to Business Insider that Facebook Research was not built to replace Onavo.

Responding to Business Insider's request for comment, the spokesman said that the app was not as bad as people think. He said:

"Key facts about this market research program are being ignored. Despite early reports, there was nothing 'secret' about this; it was literally called the Facebook Research App.

"It wasn't 'spying' as all of the people who signed up to participate went through a clear onboarding process asking for their permission and were paid to participate.

"Finally, less than 5 percent of the people who chose to participate in this market research program were teens. All of them with signed parental consent forms."

SEE ALSO: An Arizona teenager discovered Apple's FaceTime bug while playing 'Fortnite' last week, but he and his mother couldn't convince Apple that it was a big deal

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NOW WATCH: We compared Apple's $159 AirPods to Xiaomi's $30 AirDots and the winner was clear

You might remember a spate of news stories last year about Google Translate spitting out ominous chunks of religious prophecy when presented with nonsense words and phrases to translate. Clickbait sites suggested it might be a conspiracy, but no, it was just Google’s machine learning systems getting confused and falling back on the data they were trained on: religious texts.

But as the head of Google Translate, Macduff Hughes, told The Verge recently, machine learning is what makes Google’s ever-useful translation tools really sing. Free, easy, and instantaneous translation is one of those perks of 21st century living that many of us take for granted, but it wouldn’t be possible without AI.

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• The United States Postal Service is suspending mail delivery in multiple states on Wednesday due to frigid temperatures, it said. 
• About 100 zip codes in Michigan, Illinois, Nebraska, and more states will miss their regular delivery on Wednesday. 
• There's no word yet on when deliveries might resume. 

The United States Postal Service will suspend some mail deliveries due to extreme cold from a polar vortex that has swept across much of the country, sending temperatures plunging well into the negatives.

"Weather forecasters are warning of dangerously cold conditions in parts of the nation," the agency said in a press release Tuesday night.

"Some places could see wind chill readings as low as 60 below zero. Due to this arctic outbreak and concerns for the safety of USPS employees, the Postal Service is suspending delivery Jan. 30 in the following 3-digit ZIP Code locations.

• Michigan: 486-491, 493-499
• Indiana: 460-469, 472-475, 478, 479
• Chicago: 606-608
• Lakeland: 530-532, 534, 535, 537-539, 541-545, 549, 600, 602, 601, 611
• Detroit: 480-485, 492
• Central Illinois: 601, 603 - 605, 609, 613, 614, 616, 617
• Northern Ohio (Cleveland and Lima areas): 441, 458
• Ohio Valley (Cincinnati and Columbus areas): 452, 430-432
• Western Pennsylvania: (Erie and Bradford areas): 165, 169-177, 188
• Northland: 540, 546-548, 550, 551, 553-564, 566
• Hawkeye: 500-514, 520-528, 612
• Dakotas: 580-588, 570-577
• Eastern Nebraska: 680-689

Temperatures in Chicago Wednesday morning were around 20 degrees below zero, according to the National Weather Service, with wind chills extending even more into the negatives. The agency has warned that the frigid wind can cause hypothermia and frostbite in just a matter of minutes.

"It’s cold, period," the NWS said. "Rarely do we see air temperatures into the -20s and they are area wide this morning, and rarely do we see wind chills colder than -45° but here they are."

"You're talking about frostbite and hypothermia issues very quickly, like in a matter of minutes, maybe seconds," Brian Hurley, a meteorologist with the Weather Prediction Center, told the Huffington Post.

Nationwide, more than 220 million Americans will be forced to contend with below-freezing temperatures. The cold is so severe that it's simply too cold for people to be safely outside. 

On Tuesday, more than 1,500 flights were canceled in Chicago and other affected airports due to weather — and Wednesday isn’t looking any better, with 2,461 cancellations nationwide as of 8:45 a.m., according to Flight Aware. Schools were closed in Chicago and parts of eastern Iowa, in addition to closures in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.

SEE ALSO: Over 1,500 flights cancelled as winter weather wreaks havoc on US's busiest airports

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NOW WATCH: What it's like to win the Gumball 3000 where drivers party until 2 am every night and drive 3,000 miles in 7 days

• Robocalls are getting more and more prevalent. 
• In 2018, Americans were hit with 26.3 billion robocalls — a whopping 46% increase compared to 2017. 
• While it's nearly impossible to be 100% robocall-free, here are some tactics you can adopt to limit your number of robocalls.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

In November 2018 alone, Americans received an estimated 5.1 billion scam calls from automated machines — more than any month on record, according to YouMail's robocall index.

That number was about 2.9 billion in the beginning of 2018, and the spike didn't come out of nowhere.  Consumer advocates worry the number will only continue to increase, now that the FCC has removed an Obama-era definition of auto-dialers that the agency thought was too broad.

In 2018, Americans were hit with 26.3 billion robocalls — a whopping 46% increase compared to 2017, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Federal agencies are taking action, holding robocallers accountable and searching for new ways to regulate as robocallers continue to become more sophisticated with their tactics. FCC chairman Ajit Pai sent a letter in November to more than a dozen phone providers demanding they adopt "a robust call authentication system to combat illegal caller ID spoofing." Pai warned that the FCC "will take action" if it doesn't see any progress in creating such a system by 2019.

Policies are in the works to address "neighborhood spoofing," which is the extremely effective tactic used by robocallers to make calls look like they're coming from recipients' own area code so they're more willing to answer. So far, no policy has been successful in preventing those. 

Even when consumers don't fall for the scam and share personal information, being inundated with robocalls can be a liability: there's no way to know whether the unknown number dialing you is a time-wasting scam, or a real-life emergency. So while lawmakers and regulators work to figure out the best way to subside the number of outgoing scam calls, agencies and companies have come up with solutions to block the ones that get through. 

It's nearly impossible to be 100% robocall-free, but here are some tactics you can adopt to limit your number of robocalls:

SEE ALSO: This viral video of a chimpanzee scrolling through Instagram proves how easy it is to get sucked into the app

Add your name to the FTC's "Do not call" registry, and report the calls you get anyway.

Registration for the service began in 2003 and sign-ups don't expire, yet the FTC reported receiving 4. 5 million complaints in 2017, at "an average of more than 375,000 robocall complaints per month," compared to 2013's 2.18 million.

It it isn't completely effective, but the people who signed up probably get fewer calls than they would have if they hadn't. 

Use your phone's Do Not Disturb mode so that you only get calls from people in your contact list.

This way you don't have to see the calls come through or have to ignore them. Keep in mind this strategy won't work for any professional hoping to hear from new clients or those who receive regular calls from unknown numbers are part of their job, but it's a great option if you have a separate, non-work phone.

If you don't want to block all new numbers, block them as they come by going into the callers' contact information in your phone.

This is especially helpful if there are a few numbers you get calls from frequently. If you choose the route of answering unknown numbers instead of waiting for a voicemail, keep a couple of things in mind: 

Don't engage by speaking OR by pressing a number even to be taken off a list, according to the FTC: "Doing so will probably lead to more unwanted calls. Instead, hang up and file a complaint with the FTC." 

Train yourself to answer questions by repeating them instead of saying "yes," because that can be used as a vocal signature to make unauthorized credit card charges. For example, the answer to "Can you hear me?" should be "I can hear you," instead of "Yes."

Verizon took great pride in being first to roll out “5G” home broadband, but the company has announced that its 5G Home won’t be expanding to other cities beyond the initial four launch markets until later this year. More specifically, it’ll take until sometime in the second half of 2019.

Why the wait? Verizon’s 5G Home is built upon its own, pre-standard 5G communication technology called 5G TF. It does employ some core 5G tech like millimeter wave, but Verizon’s fixed home 5G internet really felt like a rush job to get out ahead of competitors and shout “first!” T-Mobile CEO John Legere slammed it as such, and the fact that Verizon is halting 5G Home’s rollout until it can switch everything over to the industry-backed 5G NR basically...

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• Over 90% of adults pick their noses, and many people end up eating those boogers.
• But it turns out snacking on snot is a bad idea.
• Boogers trap invading viruses and bacteria before they can enter your body, so eating boogers might expose your system to these pathogens.
• See more stories on Insider's business page.

Following is a transcript of the video.

Narrator: Odds are you are surrounded by nose-pickers. It's true.

In one study, 91% of adults admitted to picking their nose regularly. So chances are you've probably mined for some juicy nose nuggets yourself.

But maybe you didn't stop there. Maybe you ate those boogers too!

And it turns out, that slimy snack could hurt more than just your social standing.

Let's take a closer look at that booger. It's mostly made of water, gel-like proteins that give it that gooey consistency and special immune proteins that fight off germs. Those immune proteins are especially useful because boogers are teeming with harmful viruses, like influenza.

That's the whole point, actually. Boogers serve as your body's front-line defense against invading germs. When you breathe in, you're not just inhaling air. You're also taking in bacteria, viruses, and dirt. Which get trapped by a layer of sticky snot that lines your nostrils. It's like fly paper for the flu. And as you continue to breathe, air hardens the mucus into a solid booger, a gooey prison cell for your ensnared enemies. Now, normally, you can get rid of that bacteria-ridden ball either when you sneeze or blow your nose.

But if you decide to eat it instead, it stands to reason that you're putting yourself at risk of infection. Because as your body digests the booger, it can release those harmful pathogens into your system.

Now, some people claim that eating your boogers can strengthen your immune system. By training your body to recognize and attack invading microbes. But, sorry to say, there's zero scientific evidence to support any health benefits from eating your boogers.

And besides, whether or not you eat your boogers just getting ahold of them can be dangerous. For example, scratching up the inside of your nose opens the door for a nasty bacteria that lurks under your fingernails, Staphylococcus aureus.

A 2006 study found that nose-pickers were more likely to have Staph in their nose than those who abstain. And that's a big problem since Staph can cause serious abscesses or pus-filled pockets inside your nose and on your face. Even worse, if you keep picking you could actually puncture your septum.

In one case, a 53-year-old woman managed to carve a hole right through her sinus. And if that sinus becomes infected badly enough, it can erode your skull, leaving a door open for bacteria to march right into your brain.

To be fair, these are extreme scenarios. One time probably won't hurt you. The next time you feel the urge to mine for green gold, just grab a tissue.

As Microsoft continues to shape its offerings to accommodate industries like grocery and retail, Amazon and Google have a battle of perception to overcome.

As a leading provider of business, collaboration, and productivity applications mainly targeted for small businesses, Zoho has staked its claim in helping move businesses to the cloud. The company started some 22 years ago and built an impressive roster of business applications — including sales, marketing, customer support, collaboration, finance, HR, IT, and many more — tallying more than 40 million users globally.

In the growing trend of enterprises bringing Natural Language Processing (NLP), machine learning and conversational resources to support better customer experiences and enhanced employee productivity, Zoho has integrated conversational AI capabilities into its suite of products with “Zia,” an intelligence-enabled assistant and analytics engine.

Last November, the company outlined how Zia helps customer support agents drive meaningful conversations with sentiment predictions, analyzing and autotagging words in a support ticket in order to route to the appropriate agent. According to Zoho Chief Evangelist Raju Vegesna, all Zia technology is developed internally with enhancements to train the NLP engine and connect to a host of Zoho applications and/or third-party integrations.

“Zia Voice,” first introduced in February 2018, also supports natural language and voice interactions so businesses can program AI-enabled conversation assistants to service customers. Zoho previously unveiled Zia Voice for sales teams to add speech and chat capabilities, as well as predicting deal closures. In the same vein, SalesForce introduced Einstein Voice at last year’s Dreamforce to help field reps transcribe conversations, create tasks using natural language, and navigate analytics dashboards.

At last week’s “ZohoDay” at the company’s headquarters in Pleasanton, CA, CEO Sridhar Vembu spoke eloquently about the company’s success and movement up market. And as Zia is increasingly threaded into the company’s suite of CRM and Customer Experience platform applications, it’s clear that NLP and conversational technologies are fundamentally changing the workplace for enterprises and small businesses alike.

The post Zoho Brings Conversational AI to Full Suite of CRM and Customer Service Products appeared first on .

Apple has temporarily disabled its Group FaceTime feature in iOS and macOS to fix a major security flaw. A bug in Apple’s FaceTime video calling feature has allowed anyone to call a phone or Mac and listen in before the other person picks up. The flaw works by adding yourself to a FaceTime call before the recipient picks up, tricking FaceTime into thinking it’s an active call and forcing the person you’re actually calling to start transmitting audio.

Apple has now disabled the Group FaceTime feature on the server side, and reports suggest this has fixed the security flaw for most people. Some are still able to reproduce the flaw, but it’s likely that Apple is still in the process of replicating this across multiple servers. Apple is also...

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