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Best Buy announced late yesterday that it has acquired GreatCall,the company behind the JitterBug phone for seniors, for $800 million. The company currently focuses primarily on its emergency response service that has over 900,000 paying subscribers. The service is accessible through a range of connected devices and wearables, like the Jitterbug, which include a button that’s preprogrammed to dial GreatCall’s emergency assistance hotline.

In its release, Best Buy notes that the acquisition is a “manifestation of the Best Buy 2020 strategy to enrich lives through technology by addressing key human needs.” In plain speak, it seems the deal builds on Best Buy’s continued efforts to sell services as opposed to just...

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If vehicles could communicate directly with each other and share real-time information on road conditions, it would make for more informed drivers and eventually pave the way for self-driving cars.

A system called C-V2X, which backers purport can communicate information faster and better than existing alternatives, was demonstrated for the first time Tuesday at Panasonic North America’s facility near Denver International Airport.

“We can turn our cars into sensors, and we can send messages to cars about changing conditions,” said Chris Armstrong, director of Panasonic’s smart mobility program.

V2X stands for “vehicles to everything” and backers are trying to prove that the technology is a better way to carry the massive amounts of data a connected transportation grid would generate than an older alternative called Dedicated Short-Range Communications technology, or DSRC.

Qualcomm Technologies provides the chips for C-V2X; Ford Motors, which is also testing DSRC, is providing the vehicles; and Panasonic North America is developing the cloud-based data platform that pushes the traffic information out to users, like the Colorado Department of Transportation, another partner.

Cars with the technology send out signals 10 times a second detailing speed, direction and other information from their internal sensors, such as brakes and air bags, to nearby roadside sensors.

The river of data flows via fiber-optic networks into the Panasonic data platform, where it is filtered and organized so transportation workers can use it to monitor the road grid and spot emerging problems. When required, the system can deliver customized, just-in-time messages directly into equipped vehicles, providing alerts via display systems.

Have air bag sensors in two cars triggered and are vehicles braking hard where Interstate 70 curves into Interstate 225? An alert can be sent immediately to the drivers right behind the emerging jam, urging them to hit their brakes well before they can see the problem. For drivers farther back, the system can instantly suggest an alternate route, say to get off on Peoria Boulevard, alleviating congestion.

Has a pedestrian pushed the walk signal button at an intersection? The traffic light can warn nearby cars that it is about to change and tell drivers to stop rather than blow through the intersection.

Roadside sensors can detect changing weather conditions and communicate a warning, and so too can cars as their tires start slipping. Colorado Department of Transportation workers at a control center can be alerted quickly that a specific bridge or stretch of road is icing up and dispatch sand trucks to alleviate the problem.

Ford Motors is testing both DSRC and C-V2X technologies, and the latter has made an impression, said Naseem Sewani, an IT Strategic Portfolio Manager at the Detroit-based automaker.

“You can get the alerts way earlier,” Sewani said.

The ability of cars to connect with each other and with traffic infrastructure allows for several interesting applications, adds Jack Walpuck, a Ford engineer specializing in connected vehicle technology.

He demonstrated that in a simulation with a Ford F-150. Approaching an intersection with an obstructed view, a strategically located sensor provided video inside the cab of another test vehicle coming down the road. When Walpuck drove out of the parking lot into the path of an oncoming vehicle, the system warned him to stop.

The C-V2X technology operates within a bandwidth the Federal Communications Commission has dedicated for transportation uses. That means it can’t be used for other things, such as offering drivers $5 off a hamburger two miles before they reach a restaurant.

Nor does it transmit identifying information about the vehicle or driver, which will limit it uses by law enforcement.

The goal is to avoid creating any unnecessary distractions for drivers, while making them aware of critical items, with the hope of reducing the 40,000 traffic fatalities in the United States each year, Armstrong said.

As Walpuck pulled away from a stop sign and into the path of an oncoming vehicle, the system didn’t trigger an alert. Walpuck attributed that to his truck moving slow enough that the system knew it would avoid a direct hit, adding it is hard to purposely move into the path of a crash.

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Panasonic is keeping the system open, which will allow for drivers with older unequipped vehicles to still see benefits. Google Maps or Waze can pick up the information and provide better information on traffic conditions.

One criticism of the new technology, aside from it not having proved itself yet, is that it is more expensive than DSRC. Amy Ford, a spokeswoman for CDOT, offered some cost scenarios.

Traffic signals in urban areas are increasingly connected to fiber optics, and converting to the new technology would involve swapping out hardware, Ford said. Outfitting rural areas in Colorado will be more complicated.

If there is fiber along a roadway, then the road can be equipped with the new technology at a cost of about $1 million for every 50 to 80 miles, Ford said. Along more isolated roads without fiber, the costs will rise substantially.

Another issue that needs to be sorted out is how to handle and interpret what could become a staggering flow of data. A Colorado road grid with C-V2X grid could send out 2 billion messages an hour on average, Ford said.

By comparison, Twitter moves about 500 million tweets in an entire day.

• Chinese tech giant Tencent Holdings announced a 2% drop in second-quarter net profit.
• The decline was the first in almost 13 years. 
• Mobile gaming saw slower growth and PC gaming fell. 

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(Reuters) - Chinese technology giant Tencent Holdings Ltd on Wednesday reported a surprise 2 percent fall in second-quarter net profit, its first decline in nearly 13 years, due to slower growth in mobile games and a drop in PC gaming.

China's largest social media and gaming firm said April-June profit fell to 17.87 billion yuan ($2.59 billion), lagging the 19.67 billion yuan average of 12 analyst estimates compiled by Thomson Reuters.

The outlook for the most valuable company listed in Asia has been overshadowed by a slowdown in mobile gaming and concerns over regulatory hiccups as the Chinese regulator this week blocked Tencent's sale of the blockbuster game "Monster Hunter: World" upon debut.

Mobile gaming revenue rose 19 percent year-on-year in the quarter to 17.6 billion yuan, representing a 19 percent sequential decline. The company blamed that on "non-monetisation of popular tactical tournament games and timing of new game releases".

Tencent has yet to receive regulatory approval to monetise survival-themed game PlayerUnknowns' Battlegrounds and to introduce Fortnite, a tactical tournament game developed by its portfolio company Epic Games.

Trading in its shares has been volatile this year. Since the stock's peak in January, Tencent has lost around $170 billion in market value.

Revenue rose 30 percent to 73.68 billion yuan in the latest quarter, lagging 16 analysts' average estimate of 77.5 billion yuan. That represented the slowest quarterly revenue growth since the second quarter of 2015.

Revenue from PC games dropped 5 percent year-on-year and 8 percent quarter-on-quarter.

Users of its popular WeChat app grew incrementally to 1.06 billion.

 

(Reporting by Sijia Jiang; Editing by Christopher Cushing)

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NOW WATCH: How LeBron James makes and spends his millions

The hype cycle for bots exploded in 2016 as developers poured time and money into the dream of personal digital assistants. Facebook and Microsoft announced major investments into conversational user interfaces, and Slack launched a fund to capitalize on the bots hoping to build on its platform.

But when bots became available the public, the public largely shrugged. The advantages of conversational interfaces paled next to their drawbacks. It turned out that typing into text boxes — often while trying to guess the appropriate commands — felt frustrating compared to the visual interfaces people were used to. And so bots largely receded into the background as another Silicon Valley innovation that arrived before its time.

Eoghan...

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T-Mobile announced its latest “Un-carrier” initiative today in a fresh attempt to gain new subscribers and lure customers away from rival providers. And it focuses on a crucial, but less flashy subject than the company’s past splashes: customer service. From a stage in Charleston, South Carolina — and after being escorted into the room by a marching band — CEO John Legere kicked off an event that led to the announcement of Team of Experts, a new approach to customer service that will give customers in different regions of the US their own dedicated “team” of customer care representatives. No robot voices and no confusing tree of push-button menus.

Team of Experts launches today for T-Mobile’s postpaid customers. It can be accessed by...

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Almost two-thirds of technology executives in the U.S. and Europe said a business that can't keep up with digital transformation will last two to four years before folding or being absorbed by a competitor. 

• The oldest members of Generation Z, born in the late 1990s, are changing the way colleges teach their students.
• An Ohio State professor quoted in The New York Times uses Twitter, Slack, and Zoom for tasks like taking attendance and holding office hours.
• The changes reflect Generation Z's digital upbringing.

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Generation Z is the most tech-savvy cohort in history.

Defined as those born after 1997, Generation Z is growing up in a world where smartphones, social media, and content-streaming are ubiquitous.

And now that the oldest Gen Zers are attending college, they're rewriting the playbook for higher education.

One professor revealed to The New York Times the extent she incorporates technology into her class. Nicole Kraft, a journalism professor at Ohio State University, told reporter Laura Pappano that she takes attendance for her class via Twitter, posts coursework on the instant-messaging app Slack, and holds office hours on the video-conferencing app Zoom at 10 p.m., "because that is when they have questions."

Kraft told the Times she doesn't even use email in her class, except to teach her students how to write a "proper" one, because "that is a skill they need to have."

Kraft's methods aren't the only changes at Ohio State. According to The Times, Ohio State issued 11,000 iPads to incoming students this year and designated 42 courses as "iPad required." And the school is designing an app that students will use to plan and schedule their courses, check their grades, and even campus maps and bus routes all in one.

The changes reflect how Generation Z is diverging from the millennial generation. A full 95% of American teenagers today have access to a smartphone, and 45% of teens said they're online "almost constantly," according to a Pew Research Center survey. Teenagers today spend an average of two and a half hours a day on their phones, according to psychologist Jean Twenge.

As Generation Z continues to come of age, it seems clear that colleges are going to have to adapt to their students' changing behaviors.

Read the full article at The New York Times »

SEE ALSO: Gen Zs never watch TV, are stressed about Snapchat, and are concerned that technology has ruined their mental health — here's what it's REALLY like to be a teen in 2018

DON'T MISS: Millennials love their brands, Gen Zs are terrified of college debt, and 6 other ways Gen Zs and millennials are totally different

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NOW WATCH: We Asked Kids What They Think About Facebook, And Mark Zuckerberg Should Be Worried

• Microsoft is threatening to kick Gab, a social network popular with the racist far-right, off its cloud hosting service Azure.
• The company has taken issue with virulently anti-Semitic posts that call for "vengeance" against Jews and the vandalism of Holocaust memorial museums.
• Microsoft has given Gab a 48-hour deadline to comply.

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Microsoft has threatened to kick a social network popular with the racist far-right off its cloud hosting service over anti-Semitic content that advocated genocide and torture of Jews.

Gab, which has been described as "the alt-right's very own Twitter," is hosted on Microsoft's Azure service. But on Thursday, the Seattle-based company said it was considering booting Gab off its network, which would take the social network offline.

In a statement provided to Business Insider, a Microsoft spokesperson said the company had "received a complaint about specific posts on Gab.ai that advocate 'ritual death by torture' and the 'complete annihilation' of all Jews," and that it had determined the content incited violence, "is not protected by the First Amendment, and violates Microsoft Azure's acceptable use policy." 

Multiple users on Gab responded to the news of Microsoft's threat with virulently anti-Semitic messages of their own.

The user behind the two posts in question — which advocate the vandalism of Holocaust memorial museums and discuss in explicit detail a plan for torturing Jews — says he will delete the posts, but as of publication, they remain live on Gab. Microsoft has given Gab 48 hours to take them down.

The furor comes at a time of intense debate over the tech companies' responsibility for the content that appears on their platforms. Facebook and YouTube have recently bowed to public pressure and booted notorious conspiracy theorist Alex Jones from their social networks.

Many Gab users are outraged about Microsoft's actions, painting themselves as martyrs for the cause of free speech — but one of the posts in question is arguably a direct incitement to violence that calls for "vengeance" for the "debt the jew owes the world."

Gab co-founder Andrew Torba issued a statement on the incident from his profile on the site. 

"To the lying, sophist, mainstream media political activists who call themselves 'journalists' reaching out: we are not doing ANY interviews with Fake News," the statement reads in part. It goes on to say that Gab will only speak with Scott Budman, a reporter with NBC Bay Area News. 

We've reached out to Gab for further comment and will update if we hear back.

Here's the full statement from Microsoft:

Microsoft received a complaint about specific posts on Gab.ai that advocate ‘ritual death by torture’ and the ‘complete eradication’ of all Jews. After an initial review, we have concluded that this content incites violence, is not protected by the First Amendment, and violates Microsoft Azure’s acceptable use policy. Microsoft notified Gab.ai of this substantial concern and advised that it remove this content or respond to Microsoft within 48 hours, or potentially risk suspension of its service on Azure.

We believe we have an important responsibility to ensure that our services are not abused by people and groups seeking to incite violence against others. Our policies rightly prohibit this type of content, and we expect Gab.ai to abide by these policies if it wishes to use our service. Gab.ai is of course free to choose otherwise and work with another cloud service provider or host this content itself. If it wishes to make that choice, we will provide it with a reasonable amount of time, in this instance longer than 48 hours, to transition its content elsewhere before its access to Azure is terminated. But we will stand by our policy and insist that Gab.ai remove what is unlawful and hateful content.

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NOW WATCH: A diehard Mac user switches to PC

For the last five years, instant messaging app Slack has found success as the app that employees at startups and big companies alike use to talk to each other.

That success has led the company itself to growth: TechCrunch reported Wednesday that the company is looking to raise $400 million in an upcoming round, which would bring the company's value to $7 billion — that is, $2 billion more than the valuation it achieved when it last raised funding in late 2017. 

As this chart from Statista shows, Slack's user base has been growing exponentially since 2015, with the most impressive uptick coming in the last year. Also of note is that while Slack offers a free version, about 25% of its total userbase pays up for the premium tiers.

However, it faces stiff competition: Microsoft Teams, included in the Office 365 suite, is rapidly nipping at Slack's heels.

SEE ALSO: Instagram added more new users last year than Snapchat has in total

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• Google has historically failed to build a messaging app that has taken off like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger.
• But now it's working on a new technology called Chat, and a report by tech advisory firm Delta Partners says the omens are good for Google.
• That's because Chat isn't a Google-created service, or even an app, but builds on an existing standard that might replace the humble text message. And operators can see the benefits.

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Earlier this year, Google announced that it was working on Chat, a new service intended to supplant SMS.

Anyone who has had experience with Google Duo, Google Allo, Google Buzz, Google Wave, or the many variants of Google Hangouts might wonder why this, of all Google's chat services, will be the one that finally works.

But Chat isn't exactly comparable to WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, or other chat apps. Instead, it comprises upgraded features that will exist inside the default messaging app on Android phones, such as Android Messages or Samsung Messages.

The Verge first reported details of Google's Chat efforts in April, and how the company is adopting a standard called the "Universal Profile for Rich Communication Services," created by GSMA, the European mobile network trade body.

Rich Communication Services (RCS) has had some false starts, but is essentially a more interactive version of texting. It switches between sending messages via SMS where appropriate, or data.

It will also allow iMessage-style functionality like group chat, voice calls over data, image and video-sharing, and audio-message sharing. Think of it as the text message, but rebooted.

According to a new report from technology advisory firm Delta Partners, Google's chances of making Chat work look surprisingly good. Here are four reasons why the company could succeed where it has previously failed.

1. Operators can't agree on how to replace texting

In some ways, it seems strange something like RCS-based messaging isn't already prevalent on Android. Operators aren't making as much money as they used to through SMS, because everyone's switched over to services like WhatsApp. And iMessage has been on the iPhone for years.

According to report co-author Mayssaa Issa, part of the trouble is RCS has different standards and, up until now, operators haven't necessarily agreed to adopt the same one. They have needed a big partner like Google to chivvy them all along. "They see Google as a solution of development," she said.

She added: "Chat already has the support of 55 major carriers, 11 [phone makers] and two [operating systems] — Microsoft and Google, which together have around 86% of the global smartphone OS market."

As The Verge put it in April, Google has been pitching for consensus with the following thesis: "SMS is going to be replaced one way or another. You can either be part of the replacement or continue to watch Apple and Facebook run away with text messaging."

2. There's money to be made in marketing to people over text

Marketing via apps like Messenger or WhatsApp is currently pretty sporadic. WhatsApp has only just started offering businesses ways to reach customers, and Facebook is still trying to make the concept work on Messenger.

That leaves a big opportunity for whatever comes after SMS. There are more than 2 billion active Android devices, the majority of which are phones, so the potential audience is enormous.

According to Delta Partners, fewer people are sending SMS messages to other people, with usage expected to drop 9% by 2022. But SMS messages sent from businesses to people are on the rise, with 3% annual growth predicted between this year and 2022. According to the report: "[This] is unsurprising, given that businesses still rely on SMS as a tool to reach a wider audience."

For operators looking to replace their cratering SMS revenues, adopting something like Chat and then charging businesses to send marketing messages to users could be a nice earner. For example, airlines could allow people to use Chat to check in and receive their boarding passes.

It isn't clear at this point how Google might monetise Chat.

3. Chat won't look like all of Google's other failed chat apps

The point of Chat is that it's been developed in collaboration with operators, according to Issa. This isn't Google building a messaging app from scratch, then forcing manufacturers to install it.

Unlike Google's many failed messaging apps, Chat is intended to be a set of technologies that will be adopted by the operators. It isn't clear yet whether Apple will support Chat, however.

"I think it will work because of the rationale," explained Issa. "Some [people] position this as competition to WhatsApp or Line, but I don't see that as the case. I see it as an attempt to revamp SMS, an attempt to capture the business-to-consumer opportunity."

4. Chat won't be protected by encryption — and that might prove popular with governments

There's another reason Chat could take off. Like SMS, Chat wouldn't be protected by end-to-end encryption. That means it will be more likely to be approved by any goverment which doesn't like the fact it can't access messages on encryption-protected services like WhatsApp.

This isn't Google's fault, as the company told The Verge in April. RCS is a carrier-owned technology, and so the laws that allow operators to access message data still apply.

"Unlike some OTT apps currently in use, Chat will not support end-to-end encryption of messages because it is an evolution of SMS, which was never encrypted," Delta Partners said.

"The lack of encryption, while jeopardizing users’ privacy and posing some security concerns, may be good news for governments who have worked relentlessly on having access to subscribers’ data and tried implementing different laws to gain greater control of it to help prevent terrorism."

Lack of encryption is unlikely to get in the way of user adoption, Issa said, pointing to a case in 2014 in South Korea.

At the time, then-President Park Geun-Hye issued a crackdown on messaging apps, including the popular and unencrypted KaKao Talk. Prosecutors monitored private messages for anything rumour-mongering or insulting to the president — and South Korean users fled for encrypted apps in droves. But three years later, according to eMarketer, 85% of the country's population uses the app, suggesting no long-term ill effects.

"It shows you people care about communications and using what other friends and family members are using," said Issa.

SEE ALSO: Google wants to replace texting

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IBM and shipping giant Maersk having been working together for the last year developing a blockchain-based shipping solution called TradeLens. Today they moved the project from Beta into limited availability.

Marie Wieck, GM for IBM Blockchain says the product provides a way to digitize every step of the global trade workflow, transforming it into a real-time communication and visual data sharing tool.

TradeLens was developed jointly by the two companies with IBM providing the underlying blockchain technology and Maersk bringing the worldwide shipping expertise. It involves three components: the blockchain, which provides a mechanism for tracking goods from factory or field to delivery, APIs for others to build new applications on top of the platform these two companies have built, and a set of standards to facilitate data sharing among the different entities in the workflow such as customs, ports and shipping companies.

Wieck says the blockchain really changes how companies have traditionally tracked shipped goods. While many of the entities in the system have digitized the process, the data they have has been trapped in silos and previous attempts at sharing like EDI have been limited. “The challenge is they tend to think of a linear flow and you really only have visibility one [level] up and one down in your value chain,” she said.

The blockchain provides a couple of obvious advantages over previous methods. For starters, she says it’s safer because data is distributed, making it much more secure with digital encryption built in. The greatest advantage though is the visibility it provides. Every participant can check any aspect of the flow in real time, or an auditor or other authority can easily track the entire process from start to finish by clicking on a block in the blockchain instead of requesting data from each entity manually.

While she says it won’t entirely prevent fraud, it does help reduce it by putting more eyeballs onto the process. “If you had fraudulent data at start, blockchain won’t help prevent that. What it does help with is that you have multiple people validating every data set and you get greater visibility when something doesn’t look right,” she said.

As for the APIs, she sees the system becoming a shipping information platform. Developers can build on top of that, taking advantage of the data in the system to build even greater efficiencies. The standards help pull it together and align with APIs, such as providing a standard Bill of Lading. They are starting by incorporating existing industry standards, but are also looking for gaps that slow things down to add new standard approaches that would benefit everyone in the system.

So far, the companies have 94 entities in 300 locations around the world using TradeLens including customs authorities, ports, cargo shippers and logistics companies. They are opening the program to limited availability today with the goal of a full launch by the end of this year.

Wieck ultimately sees TradeLens as a way to facilitate trade by building in trust, the end of goal of any blockchain product. “By virtue of already having an early adopter program, and having coverage of 300 trading locations around the world, it is a very good basis for the global exchange of information. And I personally think visibility creates trust, and that can help in a myriad of ways,” she said.

At its best, science fiction can present a captivating, inventive picture of societal trends and flaws.

The Metacritic data we compiled here to track the most critically acclaimed sci-fi movies of all time traces a lineage of great films from Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" to the Tom Cruise-led "Minority Report" and Spike Jonze's "Her."

The resulting list includes all of the highest rated movies that feature a "sci-fi" tag on the site, which turned out to be a wide-ranging categorization. 

Here are the 100 best science fiction movies of all time, according to critics: 

100. "Movement and Location" (2015)

Critic score: 74/100

User score: 8.6/10

What critics said: "Despite its sci-fi hook, 'Movement and Location' turns out to be a surprisingly resonant film about how impossible it is for most people — no matter their cosmic time zone — to carve out a life that's emotionally honest." — Village Voice

99. "Serenity" (2005)

Critic score: 74/100

User score: 8.4/10

What critics said: "As challenging as it must have been to pilot Joss Whedon's space opera from the TV junk pile to the big screen, the finished product is a triumph." — San Francisco Chronicle

98. "Inception" (2010)

Critic score: 74/100

User score: 8.8/10

What critics said: "As engrossing and logic-resistant as the state of dreaming it seeks to replicate, Christopher Nolan's audacious new creation demands further study to fully absorb the multiple, simultaneous stories Nolan finagles into one narrative experience." — Entertainment Weekly

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

If you’re totally stumped on a page of Where’s Waldo and ready to file a missing persons report, you’re in luck. Now there’s a robot called There’s Waldo that’ll find him for you, complete with a silicone hand that points him out.

Built by creative agency Redpepper, There’s Waldo zeroes in and finds Waldo with a sniper-like accuracy. The metal robotic arm is a Raspberry Pi-controlled uArm Swift Pro which is equipped with a Vision Camera Kit that allows for facial recognition. The camera takes a photo of the page, which then uses OpenCV to find the possible Waldo faces in the photo. The faces are then sent to be analyzed by Google’s AutoML Vision service, which has been trained on photos of Waldo. If the robot determines a match with 95...

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Slack — the app that lets coworkers and others in professional circles chat with each other and call in data from hundreds of integrated apps in the name of getting more work done (or at least procrastinating in an entertaining way) — has been on a growth tear in the last few years, most recently passing 8 million daily active users, 3 million of them paying. Now, the company is planning to capitalise on that with some more funding.

TechCrunch has learned that Slack is raising another round, this time in the region of $400 million or possibly more, with a post-money valuation of at least $7 billion — adding a whopping $2 billion on top of the company’s last valuation in September 2017, when SoftBank led a $250 million round at a $5.1 billion valuation.

We’ve heard from multiple sources that a new investor, General Atlantic, is leading this round, with possibly another new backer, Dragoneer, also in the mix. It’s not clear which other investors might be involved; the company counts no less than 41 other backers on its cap table already, according to PitchBook. (You might even say Several People Are Funding…) We also don’t know whether this round has closed.

At $400 million, this would make it Slack’s biggest round to date. That size underscores a few different things.

First, it points to the existing opportunity in enterprise messaging. Consumerisation has taken hold, and apps that let users easily start and carry on a mix of serious and diverting conversations, infused with GIFs or whatever data they might need from other applications, are vying to replace other ways that people communicate in the workplace, such as email, phone conferences and in-person chats, even when people are in the same vicinity as each other. With consumer messaging apps like WhatsApp topping 1.5 billion users, there’s plenty of room for enterprise messaging to grow.

Second, the round and valuation emphasize Slack’s position as a leader in this area. While there were other enterprise social networking apps in existence before Slack first launched in 2013 — Yammer, Hipchat and Socialcast among them — nothing had struck a chord quite as Slack did. “Things have been going crazy”, was how co-founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield described it to me when Slack exited beta: teams trialling it were seeing usage from “every single team member, every day.”

That growth pace has continued. Today, the company counts 70,000 paid teams including Capital One, eBay, IBM, 21st Century Fox, and 65 percent of Fortune 100 companies among its bigger users; and with customers in 100 countries, half of its DAUs are outside North America (UK, Japan, Germany, France and India are its biggest international markets).

But thirdly — and this could be key when considering how this funding will be used — Slack is not the only game in town.

Software giant Microsoft has launched Teams, and social networking behemoth Facebook has Workplace. Using their respective dominance in enterprise software and social mechanics, these two have stolen a march on picking up some key customer wins among businesses that have opted for products that are more natural fits with what their employees were already using. Microsoft reported 200,000 paying organizations earlier this year, and Facebook has snagged some very large customers like Walmart.

Slack’s bottom-up distribution strategy could give it an edge against these larger companies and their broader but more complex products. The lightweight nature of Slack’s messaging-first approach allows it more easily be inserted into a company’s office stack. Nearly every type of employee needs office messaging, creating the potential for Slack to serve as an identity layer for enterprise software, not to mention the platform where not only people, but the information that exists in separate apps, converges. Its own Slack Fund invests in potential companies that plug in, as the company hopes to build an ecosystem of partners that can fill in missing functionality.

Alongside dozens of other, smaller rivals offering comparative mixes of tools, it’s no surprise that last month Slack tightened up its bootlaces to take on the role of consolidator, snapping up IP and shutting down Hipchat and Stride from Atlassian, with the latter taking a stake in Slack as part of the deal.

Slack, which has a relatively modest 1,000+ employees, has ruled out an IPO this year, so this latest round will help it shore up cash in the meantime to continue growing, and competing.

Contacted for this story, Slack said that it does not comment on rumors or speculation.

• Some major brands are in danger of being ignored as more people begin shopping using voice assistants like Amazon's Alexa.
• A new report from the ad agency Digitas found that 85% of consumers have picked the default product result — rather than asking for a specific brand — when conducting a voice search.
• Marketers need to train people to use voice search, much like they did with websites in the 1990s, the report says.

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A whole bunch of brands better find their voice quickly — or risk getting wiped off the map.

That's the dire assessment of a new report from the Publicis-owned ad agency Digitas, which finds that as more Americans use digital voice assistants like the Amazon Echo and Google Home to shop, the less inclined they will be to pick specific brands.

So brands need to start training people to voice their preferences, fast.

Digitas' report, “A Brand’s Guide To Taking Control in a Voice-Driven World," found that 85% of consumers surveyed have selected the default option when conducting a voice shopping search rather than picking a brand.

In other words, as people talk to Alexa or Google Home or Apple's new HomePod to buy things, they're increasingly using generic terms like "batteries" or "diapers" or "paper towels," and just going with the first result the device offers up.

Here are some of the product categories people say they're using these devices to shop for, according to Digitas:

• Personal Care/Wellness Products (39%)
• Beauty Supplies (38%)
• Small Home Appliances (35%)
• Clothing/Accessories (34%)
• Technology/Consumer Electronics (33%)
• Sporting Goods (33%)
• Large Home Appliances (25%)

That's bad news if you sell those kinds of products. "They are worried," said Brett Leary, Digitas' SVP and commerce innovation lead.

There's no guarantee that millions of Americans are ready to graduate from primarily asking their home assistants about the weather to shopping for everyday items using just their voice, of course. The Information reported that voice commerce has yet to catch on in a big way, for example. 

Plus, during its most recent earnings report, Amazon hinted that marketing digital services may be a nearer term opportunity over shopping for goods, as my colleague Dennis Green reported. And agencies like Digitas are motivated to promote research that indicates how seriously brands need to take the voice opportunity, since agencies are touting their own ability to help.

Still, 55% of US homes are expected to own a smart speaker by 2022, and comScore forecasts that voice commerce will hit $40 billion that year.

"Brands' biggest concern is, 'How do I make sure I’m not being substituted for Amazon?' said Ryan MacInnis, director of marketing at Voysis, an AI voice platform that works with marketers. "Nike's not worried about people just asking for 'shoes,' but for home basics kind of stuff it's a worry. And you can’t see behind the curtain."

Right now, voice search is a black box for most brands

Unfortunately, most marketers don't have insight into how Amazon or Google's or Apple's voice assistants provide their results

"[Voice] algorithms are driving a wedge between brands and consumers in the form of a preferred option," reads Digitas' report. "The option first presented to shoppers ... often isn’t the brand initially requested by the user."

What can brands do? "There's a challenge in understanding Google and Amazon algorithms. It's a murky science at best," Leary said.

These tech companies aren't about to invite brands in to see how voice search works, so marketers need to take a different tact, said Leary. Basically, they need to start training people to use specific brand names when conducting voice searches in their ads, he argued.

Leary likened this plan to the late 1990s and early 2000s, when marketers started prominently featuring their URLs and/or specific AOL keywords in their TV ads.

Leary said that marketers should also start working with tech companies like Voysis to integrate voice searches into their own websites and apps.

Voice plus screens may be the way forward for some marketers

Some categories, like retail, may need to urge consumers to coordinate voice searches with screen searches, either via laptops, phones, or eventually screens built into home assistants, Leary said.

In fact, according to Digitas research, 78% of Americans say they’d be likely to scroll multiple products during a voice search if they were also using an accompanying screen.

Brands like Target are already trying this tactic, using voice commands to drive people to shop on their mobile phones, added MacInnis.

He said the biggest mistake marketers can make is stand pat while the rules of voice shopping are being established. 

"In a world where brand maybe doesn't matter, they need some sort of strategy," he said. "The worst move to make is not doing anything at all."

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NOW WATCH: A diehard Mac user switches to PC

Google has been adding new features to Classroom throughout the summer in order to prep for the upcoming fall semester, particularly with the recent launch of the Acer Chromebook Tab 10, which is the first tablet to run Chrome OS. Now, Google has announced it will bring ARCore support to the tablet, allowing educators to become a virtual Ms. Frizzle and lead their students on augmented and virtual reality adventures.

The Chromebook Tab 10 is compatible with all of Google’s Classroom apps, and it allows students to have Magic School Bus-like experiences through the Expeditions app. Teachers can place active volcanoes on students’ desks or show spinning ladders of DNA reaching to classroom ceilings.

These virtual...

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NEC has announced that it will be providing a large-scale facial recognition system for the 2020 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games in Tokyo. The system will be used to identify over 300,000 people at the Games, including athletes, volunteers, media, and other staff. It’s the first time that facial recognition technology will ever be used for this purpose at an Olympic Games.

NEC’s system is built around an AI engine called NeoFace, which is part of the company’s overarching Bio-IDiom line of biometric authentication technology. The Tokyo 2020 implementation will involve linking photo data with an IC card to be carried by accredited people. NEC says that it has the world’s leading face recognition tech based on benchmark tests from the...

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It’s been a long time coming, but it appears that the revival of Palm smartphones is imminent. It looks like, unfortunately, whatever’s in the works won’t be anywhere near as exciting as the Pre was so many years ago.

Android Police spotted that a device called the PVG100 made by Palm Venture Group — now owned by TCL — was filed with the FCC last week and passed through the Wi-Fi Alliance’s certification program back in June. Those are both late stage steps in the development cycle of any new device, so it’s likely we’ll see whatever this phone is in a matter of months.

While the filings don’t reveal much, the Wi-Fi Alliance page reveals two things: first, that the phone will run Android 8.1 Oreo, which is a good sign; and second, that...

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Fossil’s smartwatches have always eschewed features for simplicity and affordability. They put Google’s Wear OS software on your wrist in a clean design that looks like a traditional watch, and that’s it. Many of them haven’t offered heart-rate tracking, and zero have allowed owners to make mobile payments with their wrist. But that’s changing now. Today, Fossil announced the fourth-generation of its Fossil Q lineup, and the latest models add all of those features (and also standalone GPS).

These new watches — the Q Venture HR and Q Explorist HR — range in price between $255 and $275 depending on your band and color preference. They’re available immediately from Fossil’s website. The Q Venture HR has a 40mm stainless steel casing, and...

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• Arista Networks has agreed to pay Cisco $400 million to get Cisco to settle its lawsuits, which will put the usually profitable networking upstart into the red.
• But Arista investors are thrilled with the news while Cisco investors are yawning.
• The two companies are famously bitter rivals.
• Insiders had previously told Business Insider they thought Cisco under CEO Chuck Robbins would have agreed to a settlement even sooner.

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When Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins took over the job three years ago, insiders speculated to Business Insider that one thing he would likely do is settle the litigation between Cisco and its most hated rival, Arista Networks, a series of lawsuits that begun under his predecessor, John Chambers.

That settlement finally happened, the companies announced on Monday, and Arista investors are thrilled. Arista's stock is up nearly 4% to around $267, even though Arista will have to restate its earnings and declare a rare loss for the quarter of $155.5 million.

Arista has made a name for itself in the tech world by being both relatively young and quite profitable. Although the $400 million stings, Arista can handle it. It ended its last fiscal year with over $1 billion in gross profit off of nearly $1.7 billion in revenue and $423 million in net profit after paying for things like R&D, sales and taxes.

For the payment, Cisco agreed to end all litigation and both companies agreed not to sue each other again on similar charges for five years over their current products, and three years on new products.

Arista was founded by some of the most well-known ex-Cisco engineers on the planet: Andy Bechtolsheim and David Cheriton. Both of them became billionaires as angel investors in Google, but their true claim to fame is all the networking technology they've invented over the decades. Arista's CEO Jayshree Ullal was also once a member of  former Cisco CEO John Chamber's inner circle.

As Arista grew and started peeling market share away from Cisco in the important data center market (where big internet companies are spending millions annually), it went from nipping at Cisco's heels to a true pain in its side. So Chambers went on a full-on assault, suing Arista for patent infringement and copyright in every court and in every way.

Arista's leaders publicly argued that Cisco had resorted to lawsuits because it couldn't win in the market.

Cisco argued that Arista's rise was on the back of technology invented at Cisco and had enough success in court to threaten Arista's ability to import its products from offshore manufacturing facilities.

The truth, as always, was somewhere in the middle: Arista did deliberately design its products to be easy to use for its customers: the network engineers who had spent their careers learning the ways of Cisco. This helped it win Cisco's customers away. And Cisco was irked at how well Arista was doing in an important market, sources close to both companies told Business Insider, 

Meanwhile, Cisco's investors have yawned at the news that this litigation is over, with the stock price flat. They are more interested in the long-term changes Robbins makes as he pushes Cisco into the brave new world of software cloud subscription sales. And because of that, it was smart for him to finally agree to let the Arista litigation go, take a healthy $400 million settlement, and let everyone get on with the business of building next-generation networking technology.

SEE ALSO: Oracle is trying an 'unusual' tactic to calm investors, according to an executive compensation expert

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Video, in the hands of the correct company can be a powerful thing.

In 2012 Telefonica acquires TokBox. I wrote about it at the time – almost 6 years ago. It seems sad reading that piece about TokBox acquisition again. I suggested three areas where Telefonica can make a difference with TokBox. Let’s see what happened.

What Could Telefonica do with TokBox?

What I said in 2012:

Will Telefonica wait the same amount of time it did with Jajah until it does something with this acquisition? I hope they will move faster this time…

Telefonica did nothing with TokBox. They haven’t integrated them into anything. They decided to leave TokBox independent.

This has helped grow TokBox in the 6 years into one of the dominant players in video APIs for real time communications. Almost any developer and initiative that I talk to which has decided to go for a 3rd party platform decided to use TokBox. I see others as well, but not as frequent.

Since the acquisition, TokBox:

• Switched to WebRTC fully, killing its Flash based solution
• Increased its session sizes to fit thousands of parallel streams per session
• Added recording and broadcasting
• Created their Inspector tool, one of the best I’ve seen on the market for debugging sessions after the fact
• Cleaned, beefed up and curated their documentation. Again – one of the best I’ve seen on the market for communication APIs
• They gained customers as well. Per the press release, over 2,300 customers

Telefonica failed to make use of TokBox. It didn’t go into video with it. It didn’t try to figure our VoIP. It didn’t try to understand why developers chose TokBox. Telefonica did nothing other than let TokBox continue in its trajectory. It is probably why Telefonica lost interest and decided to sell TokBox to Vonage.

Telefonica plans on folding TokBox into BlueVia, but how will they combine TokBox, if at all, with their Tu Me VoIP OTT service?

• Didn’t happen
• BlueVia died somewhere between 2013-2014
• Along with Jajah, Tu Me and Tu whatever that Telefonica built
• VoIP is not a thing for carriers
• appear.in was sold by Telenor to Videonor
• AT&T started and stopped its WebRTC APIs initiative
• What will happen with Deutsche Telekom’s immmr?

Telefonica made no use of its strengths to find synergies with TokBox. Would doing so kill TokBox altogether, or could it made them stronger?

What will Telefonica do about voice? Their main API set doesn’t seem to include voice calling, but now it has video… will they be going for Twilio or Voxeo for that one? Or will they roll out their own? Will they skip voice altogether?

TokBox doubled down on video, beefing up their capabilities in that domain. It has a SIP connector, but nothing more than that. It is a missed opportunity.

Where is TokBox today?

TokBox is video communication APIs. There are other vendors out there doing that today: Twilio, Vidyo.io, Agora, Sinch, Voximplant, Temasys and probably a few others I forgot to mention (sorry for missing out on you).

TokBox are the market leader here, when it comes to breadths of features in the video space.

It just wasn’t enough to get them to more customers and garner more than $35 million in the acquisition. I’d attribute this to:

1. They weren’t operating as a startup. Being part of Telefonica meant stability, which probably took away their focus on revenue and growth in the way you see in other CPaaS vendors. The end result of such a thing is expenses that were too high when aligned to revenue or to the potential to raise money in the VC world. Vonage will need to handle this, and a change in direction and DNA is never an easy one
2. Telefonica probably wanted out. They weren’t interested in continuing with this, so any amount above $0 was a good number for them

Does this say anything about the market of video APIs? The viability of it to other vendors? The importance of video in the bigger picture?

I don’t really know.

Where are we with Video CPaaS?

Video CPaaS, and in a way we can extend it to WebRTC CPaaS vendors – those who don’t dabble too much with PSTN voice and/or SMS is a finickey market. The vendors that get acquired in this space are gobbled up never to be seen again (think AddLive or Requestec) or they just don’t grow fast enough or become as big as their PSTN voice/SMS counterparts.

And yet.

IDC maintains that the U.S. programmable video market will be a $7.4 billion opportunity by 2022, representing more than a 140% four-year CAGR. Assuming only 10% of that becomes a reality, the question becomes who will be the winners in programmable video?

What types of services do they need to offer? What products? Are these lower level APIs, or higher level abstractions? Maybe we’re looking at almost complete solutions with a nice API lipstick on top that get calculated in that $7.4 billion.

Video is here to stay.

It won’t be replacing every voice call. But it definitely has its place.

Otherwise, why did apple go for group video calls in FaceTime with 32 participants in their latest iOS?

And why did Whatsapp just add group video calls? And Instagram added group video calls?

Are they doing it just for fun? Is the market bound to be focused only on larger social networks?

I can’t believe that will be the case.

I came from a video conferencing company. Every year I was promised by management that this year will be the year of video. It never happened.

The last 5 years, I am using video so much that the year of video has passed already.

I guess the next question is what year will be the year of video CPaaS?

The difference in these two questions is that the year of video is the year when video became a widespread service. The year of video CPaaS will be the year when video becomes a widespread feature. We’re not there yet, but we’re heading in that direction.

In many ways, TokBox is one of the vendors figuring out how to get there.

Where are we with CPaaS?

CPaaS seems to be different, but only slightly.

Growth in this space, as far as I understand, comes from SMS and PSTN voice. That’s it.

VoIP? WebRTC? IP messaging? Social omnichannel aggregation? Video? All nice to have features for now that don’t affect the bottomline enough. And at the moment, they don’t seem to be big enough to fill in the gap when SMS and PSTN voice fall out of favor.

To be a successful CPaaS vendor today, you need to:

1. Look into the future and execute the future
2. Rely on SMS and PSTN revenue – AND improve your services in that domain
3. Cultivate multiple IP based solutions and services, preparing to reap rewards once that market grows exponentially

The thing about that third point, is that it won’t be as simple to achieve as doing what CPaaS did with SMS and PSTN. In SMS and PSTN, CPaaS needed to act as an aggregator of carriers with a simple API. No one wants to deal with carriers (which is why they fail with these API initiatives when it comes to WebRTC and video services), so friendly CPaaS vendors are a great alternative.

What is the mote/barrier that CPaaS vendors are building in the IP world? Answering this question holds the key to the future of CPaaS.

What will Vonage do with TokBox?

Not have it as a standalone business.

Doing that, would mean perpetuating what happened in Telefonica. While not all of it was bad, it didn’t bring the expected growth with it.

Vonage is uniquely positioned here – more than any other vendor in the market, which is probably why it ended up acquiring TokBox.

The opportunity space:

• VBC at Vonage deals with UCaaS
• Nexmo and TokBox are all about CPaaS

CPaaS:

• TokBox will probably be merged with Nexmo, brining a single offering to developers
• Nexmo has voice, SMS, IP messaging and omnichannel aggregation, with video just launched. TokBox has video
• Together, that completes the gap in communication services for developers, brining Vonage on par with its biggest CPaaS competitor – Twilio
• This means the threat of customers leaving TokBox to Twilio because they want to deal with a single vendor and need other telephony services is now lessened
• It also means that the threat of customers leaving Nexmo to Twilio because Nexmo lacks a good video service is now lessened as well
• If you are a TokBox customer that also uses Twilio, it might make sense for you to switch to Nexmo. I am sure Nexmo will be running the roster of TokBox customers to see if they have there Twilio customers that they can convert
• TokBox had time to flesh out their service in a unique way – the time Telefonica gave them were put into good use when it comes to infrastructure and developer related capabilities (look at Inspector and their documentation). Next, Vonage can decide to cherry pick the best pieces of Nexmo and TokBox to combine them and give a better user experience across the board for the developers using their CPaaS platform

UCaaS:

• On the UCaaS front, Vonage is using Amazon Chime today. The challenge with Chime is that it is a complete standalone product – something that is harder to embed and integrate into an existing experience. Vonage isn’t alone here – RingCentral is relying on Zoom. Such integrations are nice, but they can’t go deep
• TokBox brings APIs that are far superior and more flexible than what Zoom, Chime or any other video conferencing player can bring with its integration APIs. Using these to bake video right into its UCaaS VBC app makes sense, and puts Vonage at a better position than its UCaaS competitors
• Especially if video is the next frontier

What does this mean to TokBox competitors?

TBTelefonica was never a serious competitor in video CPaaS.

Nexmo and by extension Vonage is.

Nexmo is probably second to only Twilio.

TokBox is probably first in video CPaaS.

They combine nicely and offer Nexmo a capability that its competitors don’t have if you look at the breadth of their video offering.

If Vonage executes this well, the end result will be a better CPaaS offering, a better Nexmo and a better Vonage.

The post Vonage acquires TokBox. Where do we go from here? appeared first on BlogGeek.me.

Business travelers have become an increasingly important part of Airbnb’s business, according to a new blog post. The company says that Airbnb for Work, which launched in 2014, has seen bookings triple from 2015 to 2016, and triple again from 2016 to 2017. In fact, Airbnb says that almost 700,000 companies have signed up for and booked with Airbnb for Work.

Interestingly, the breakdown of companies working with Airbnb for traveler lodging are pretty diverse — employees from large enterprise companies (5,000+ employees) and employees from startups and SMBs (one to 250 employees) take a 40-40 split, with the final 20 percent of Airbnb for Work bookings going to mid-sized companies.

In July of 2017, Airbnb started making its listings available via SAP Concur, a tool used by a large number of business travelers. Airbnb says that this integration has been a huge help to growing Airbnb for Work, with Concur seeing a 42 percent increase in employees expensing Airbnb stays from 2016 to 2017. Moreover, 63 percent of Concur’s Fortune 500 clients have booked a business trip on Airbnb.

One interesting trend that Airbnb has noticed is that nearly 60 percent of Airbnb for Work trips had more than one guest.

“We can offer big open areas for collaborations, while still giving employees their own private space,” said David Holyoke, global head of business travel at Airbnb. “We think this offers a more meaningful business trip and it saves the company a lot of money.”

Given the tremendous growth of the business segment, as well as the opportunity it represents, Airbnb is working on new features for business travelers. In fact, in the next week, Airbnb will be launching a new feature that lets employees search for Airbnb listings on a company-specific landing page.

So, for example, a Google employee might search for their lodging on Google.Airbnb.com, and the site would be refined to cater to Google’s preferences, including locations close to the office, budget, and other factors.

While the growth has picked up, Holyoke still sees Airbnb for Work as an opportunity to grow. He said that Airbnb for Work listings only represent 15 percent of all Airbnb trips.

But, the introduction of boutique hotels and other amenity-driven listings such as those on Airbnb Plus are paving the way for business travelers to lean toward Airbnb instead of a business hotel.

Plus, as mobility and relocation become even more important to how a business operates, Airbnb believes it can be a useful tool to help employees get started in a new town before they purchase a home.

British officials have suggested that the software could be used to facilitate spying in the future.

• Amazon's Alexa voice platform allows customers to shop on Amazon with voice commands rather than browsing and selecting.
• Amazon has been making it easier to shop using voice with Alexa, but the company's focus now seems to increasingly be turning to using the voice assistant as a platform to trial digital subscriptions like music and video streaming.
• In its most recent earnings call, Amazon executives hinted that the company would focus more on selling services, like Amazon's unlimited music-streaming service, to go along with its Alexa devices.

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Amazon's Alexa voice assistant is maturing, and so is its path to monetization.

In Amazon's quarterly earnings call on July 26, the company's head of investor relations, Dave Fildes, said that people were "enjoying" the company's Alexa-powered devices, but didn't directly address its role as a voice-shopping service.

"I think we're having a lot of success with devices and customers are enjoying those," Fildes said in response to an analyst's question about the impact that Alexa is having on Amazon's retail business.

He continued: "Coming out of Prime Day, [we] had some good success and happy customers enjoying some of the devices there. The focus now is really having a good and exciting roadmap of recent revises and more to come ahead, and getting those into customers' hands."

Amazon has made improvements to Alexa shopping with new initiatives like integrating it with Whole Foods delivery through Prime Now, but the company has shared few specific details about how customers are actually shopping with their voices.

Taking that in a vacuum, you might think that the voice-shopping future that Amazon heralded with Alexa's debut has not yet arrived.

However, Amazon has yet to throw down its ace in the hole: digital services made better by Alexa. Amazon's services — like audiobooks, grocery, and music streaming — have stayed in the 50% growth range since at least the first quarter of 2017.

Amazon has experienced success with its Amazon Music Unlimited service, noting that it has tens of millions of paid customers. Fildes said on the earnings call that "it continues to grow very quickly," and that Prime members with an Alexa device tend to first use the more limited, but already-included, Prime Music service before graduating to the $8-a-month and more feature-rich Unlimited one.

Since they can get users in the habit of cuing up music with voice commands, Alexa-enabled devices like the Echo speakers have the potential to convince those who don't already have premium digital music subscriptions to buy them. 

At $7.99 a month for Prime members, Amazon Music Unlimited is cheaper than the $9.99 a month Spotify and Apple Music charge for their digital music services. Amazon also offers device-only subscriptions for Unlimited for $3.99 a month. 

Video could be the next big thing for Alexa

But Amazon has been shifting away from audio-only devices, making Echo devices with screens and debuting the Amazon Fire TV Cube, an Alexa-powered entertainment and home technology hub. The Fire TV Cube marries the listening abilities of an Echo with the TV-controlling power of a Fire TV.

The Alexa-enabled Fire TV Stick was a top-selling item on Prime Day, when it was at its cheapest-ever price of $20, or 50% off its usual price.

Fildes said that Amazon is "really pleased" with the growth it's seeing from the company's channel offerings, which provide a way to buy discrete memberships to premium digital channels like HBO, Starz, and Showtime.

That could pave the way for bundling channels in a way that cord-cutting competitors already do. When asked about that possibility, Fildes said he "can't speculate on what we might do in the future."

"We've seen some good channels come online over the last few quarters, and seen some good traction there. So we'll keep focusing on building out even better selection, because it's clear to us that customers want that option to be able to add that content as part of their Prime memberships," he said.

SEE ALSO: Amazon is launching a better version of the post office in cities around the country. Here's what it's like to use.

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• The Democratic National Committee warned candidates running in the November midterms not to use devices manufactured by the Chinese electronics firms ZTE and Huawei, "even if the price is low or free," according to a CNN report.
• The DNC was reportedly considering purchasing ZTE phone for its staffers when it issued its warning.
• The warning comes amid renewed government scrutiny of consumer devices manufactured by Chinese companies.

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The Democratic National Committee warned candidates running in the November midterms not to use devices manufactured by the Chinese electronics firms ZTE and Huawei, "even if the price is low or free," according to a CNN report published on Friday.

The DNC was reportedly considering purchasing ZTE phones for its staffers when it issued its warning, a senior Democratic source told CNN.

"It's very important that party and campaign workers not use ZTE or Huawei devices, even if the price is low or free," chief security officer Bob Lord reportedly wrote.

Lord also warned staffers not to use the Chinese-produced devices "anywhere within your staff - for personal or work-related use."

The warning comes amid government scrutiny of consumer devices manufactured by Chinese firms. Lawmakers like Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, have criticized and pushed for economic penalties against ZTE and Huawei for their "extensive ties with the Chinese Communist Party," and their "track record of doing business with rogue regimes like North Korea and Iran."

"I personally don't believe we should be allowing any Chinese telecommunication company to do business in America because they use it as a tool of espionage," Rubio told Fox's Tucker Carlson on Friday night.

"In a country full of bad actors when it comes to hurting American jobs and threatening our national security, Huawei and ZTE are two of the absolute worst offenders," a group of bipartisan lawmakers said in a statement to block the US government from buying or leasing telecommunications equipment from the companies.

US intelligence agencies have also remained wary of the companies for possible cybersecurity risks. Agencies like the FBI, CIA, and NSA have expressed concern that companies like Huawei, which was founded by a former engineer in the Chinese People's Liberation Army, could be covert fronts for the Chinese government.

"It provides the capacity to maliciously modify or steal information," FBI Director Christopher Wray said to a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in February. "And it provides the capacity to conduct undetected espionage."

Following the intelligence hearing, ZTE fought back against the claims and downplayed any security concerns.

"As a publicly traded company, we are committed to adhering to all applicable laws and regulations of the United States, work with carriers to pass strict testing protocols, and adhere to the highest business standards," a ZTE spokesperson said at the time.

The US imposed a supplier ban against ZTE in April, after it was caught violating US sanctions and was found to have shipped US technology to Iran and North Korea. While the ban was in effect and the fate of ZTE's US subsidiary was uncertain, the company is believed to have spent $1.4 million to lobby Washington through parties and donations, according to a New York Times report published on Wednesday.

The ban was lifted in July, after the company paid $1 billion as part of a settlement agreement.

SEE ALSO: Apple might have hit $1 trillion, but its major rival Huawei thinks it can become number 1 in smartphones by 2019

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NOW WATCH: North Korean defector: Kim Jong Un 'is a terrorist'

The Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission today requested that the Supreme Court vacate an appeals court decision upholding net neutrality in 2016. If the court decides to grant the motion, the previous decision to support the rules would be removed, clearing the path for re-litigation in the future when it comes to classifying broadband.

In December, the FCC voted to undo the 2015 Open Internet Order which established net neutrality rules by forbidding broadband providers from throttling users’ internet speed and blocking legal online content. Months before the Commission voted to roll back the rules last year, telecommunications companies like AT&T were already working the Supreme Court in order to remove the...

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SX10 devices are unable to run the macro framework directly on the device. These devices are left out in the macro cold unable to do what other more powerful endpoints can. I can feel the chill now. But...

Thanks to a Nodejs library jsxapi we can bring these codec in from the cold and give them some powerful tools to handle in-room controls from the Touch 10 interface. My example focuses on in-room controls but this logic can be applied across monitoring any of the events that a Cisco video endpoint could generate.

There are some great macro examples on the DevNet Github repo. I am going to use one as an example to show how to convert it into a nodejs server application. The example I am using today is the audio only dial button. The example interface is shown below.



Typically when you select said button you get this interface:



 I am going to change this up slightly and instead of providing a straight dialing interface for an audio call, I am going to provide the ability to enter a meeting number to join a Webex. See below:



Once the meeting number is entered and the Join button is pressed the appropriate @mysite.webex.com is appended to the call and the calling interface launches. So a slight change but easy dialing into a meeting is always a good thing. If you want to stick to the original like the example it should be a matter of a few small changes.

To turn this into a Nodejs application we need two files. First is the typical Node application launch file index.js. This file is pretty simple and launches the application  by creating an array of endpoint objects using the TPXapi module which is our second file. My list of endpoints is a simple array but feel free to use a database or json file in its place to store your list of host URL's or IP addresses.
The TPXapi module below forms the core of our application and controls the SSH connection, provides error correction and most importantly monitors events coming from our video endpoint.  New functionality can be adding by extending the prototype with new functions. Error correction provides a way to reconnect to the endpoint should the SSH session fail. Any other type of error will close the connection and reopen it. This may or may not be preferred.
This is a very simple example of using in-room controls and converting a macro to a server side application. The possibilities of more complex functionality are endless.
VoIPNorm

Brookstone, the chain best known as “that place you go while waiting for your airplane to board,” has filed its second bankruptcy in four years, and it will close all 102 of its mall locations across the US, the company said on Thursday. The remaining 35 airport stores will stay open as it attempts to find a buyer.

In 2014, Brookstone sold to Chinese conglomerate Sanpower for $173 million in a bankruptcy auction, and it has now secured an additional $30 million loan to continue operation during this second sale. Its bankruptcy filing declares debts of up to $500 million and assets between $50 million and $100 million.

“The decision to close our mall stores was difficult,” Brookstone chief executive...

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