Apple supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo of TF International Securities has published his research note of predictions for Apple’s fall lineup — and it’s a doozy, via 9to5Mac.

Kuo’s note claims that in addition to the three new iPhone models already rumored to launch, Apple will also update almost all of its Mac and MacBook lineup (including the long-suffering Mac mini). He also says that Apple will introduce new bezel-less Face ID iPads, update the Apple Watch with bigger displays, and release a new pair of AirPods and the AirPower wireless charger that were announced last year.

That’s a lot to take in, so let’s break it all down:

• iPhones: The three iPhone rumor for this fall is...

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For a communication app that has become a such crucial part of so many workplaces, Slack sure does have some really poor internal search tools. Fortunately, it looks like the company is finally changing that, with revamped in-app searching that looks like it might finally fix — or at the very least, improve on — the feature.

Slack’s new search looks a lot like Alfred at first glance. Now when you search, a big, pop-up search bar will appear over your window, and intelligently suggested results will pop up below based on who you chat with, what channels you’re in, and what the search term is. If that doesn’t find what you’re looking for, you can hit enter to dive into an expanded view that will let you filter your search by file types,...

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Robotic process automation gained steam in the past few years as vendors worked to automate rote tasks, such as data entry or financial calculations.

Slack’s search functions are getting another little quality-of-life update today with the introduction of filters, which aims to make search a little more granular to find the right answers.

The company also says searches are going to be more personalized. All of this is an attempt to get to the right files or conversations quickly as Slack — a simple collection of group chats and channels that can get out of hand very fast — something a little more palatable. As companies get bigger and bigger, the sheer amount of information that ends up in it will grow faster and faster. That means that the right information will generally be more difficult to access, and if Slack is going to stick to its roots as a simple internal communications product, it’s going to have to lean on improvements under the hood and small changes in front of users. The company says search is now 70 percent faster on the back end.

Users in Slack will now be able to filter search results by channels and also the kinds of results they are looking for, like files. You can go a little more granular than that, but that’s the general gist of it, as Slack tries to limit the changes to what’s happening in front of users. Slack threads, for example, were in development for more than a year before the company finally rolled out the long-awaited feature. (Whether that feature successfully changed things for the better is still not known.)

Slack now has around 8 million daily active users, with 3 million paid users, and is still clearly pretty popular with smaller companies that are looking for something simpler than the more robust — and complex — communications tools on the market. But there are startups trying to pick away at other parts of the employee communications channels, like Slite, which aims to be a simpler notes tool in the same vein as Slack but for different parts of the employee experience. And there are other larger companies looking to tap the demand for these kinds of simpler tools, like Atlassian’s Stride and Microsoft’s Teams.

After intense speculation, President Trump said today that he has selected Judge Brett Kavanaugh as his nominee to succeed retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy. In his announcement, the president introduced his nominee as a jurist with “impeccable credentials” and as “a judge’s judge.”

Kavanaugh, who was nominated to the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit by George W. Bush, where he currently serves, certainly has a notable, if likely controversial, record on tech policy issues. While it’s difficult to anticipate exactly which issues might come before the court, his past rulings suggest a reliably conservative voice on tech. His addition to the highest court in the country could vastly reshape the digital landscape.

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You may have heard over the past few weeks that there's been some mob violence in India in response to totally false information that is being spread. But if you've heard about it, it's almost certainly in conjunction with a lot of finger pointing not at the people spreading the misinformation, or those, you know, lynching people based on false information. Instead, the blame is being squarely placed... on the app where the misinformation is being spread: WhatsApp.

A mob in India lynched five people after rumors spread by WhatsApp messages prompted suspicion that they were child abductors, the latest in a spate of violent crimes linked to the messaging service.

The victims were killed in Dhule district of the western state of Maharashtra on Sunday morning after locals accused them of being part of a gang of "child lifters," police said.

It was the fourth time in recent weeks that WhatsApp messages have inspired deadly attacks in India.

This has resulted in many, many calls for WhatsApp (and its parent company, Facebook) to "do something" about this. Indeed, the Indian government has more or less demanded that WhatsApp stop "false messages" from being spread on its app. Of course, that's... not easy. It's not easy for a variety of reasons, both technical and cultural. On the technical side, WhatsApp is (famously, and for very good and helpful reasons) using end-to-end encryption. So no one at WhatsApp/Facebook can see what's in those messages. That's a good thing (especially for everyone whining about how Facebook sucks up too much data about us). No one should want WhatsApp to backdoor that encryption in any way, because that just creates even more problems.

And then of course, there's the cultural side of this. Even if WhatsApp could read the messages, how could it possibly know what was legit and what was not. And how could it determine that fast enough to stop a mob from going nuts.

WhatsApp has tried to explain all of this to the Indian government -- and rather than understanding these issues, many people seem to be screaming about how this is Facebook/WhatsApp "ignoring" its responsibility.

That doesn't mean things can't be done. Nikhil Pahwa wrote up a thoughtful analysis of how to best tackle the problem noting (correctly) upfront that "This is a complex problem with no single solution: there is no silver bullet here." Importantly, Pahwa notes that many of the "solutions" are not dependent on WhatsApp doing anything, but rather better law enforcement, counter speech efforts, user education and more. He does have some suggestions for how WhatsApp could make a few changes that would create a level of friction for public messages and publicly sharing content -- including tagging public messages with a unique ID tied to the original message creator.

But... there are also potential unintended consequences with these approaches. And others reasonably point out that activists and dissidents could potentially be seriously hurt by some of the proposed suggestions:

And, WhatsApp does appear to be trying to do something. A new version has apparently included a "suspicious link detector." If you're wondering how that's possible with end-to-end encryption, it works locally on your phone. Of course, that also probably limits its effectiveness. It appears to at least notice "suspicious" characters that are designed to mimic more standard characters to fake more well known sites. But it's unclear how much that will actually help.

Thankfully, at least some are pointing out that blaming WhatsApp makes no sense, and the country's own government really has itself to blame.

The fact that such misinformation not only fuels citizens’ paranoia, but also causes them to take matters into their own hands in droves, is indicative of a lack of faith in the machinery meant to maintain law and order in the country, a lack of understanding of the consequences of participating in these activities, and an inability to find truth beyond the realm of their messaging inbox.

That article, at The Next Web, by Abhimanyu Ghoshal points out that rather than the Indian government demanding WhatsApp fix the problem, it might want to consider using WhatsApp to try to counter the narrative:

Instead of blaming WhatsApp, India’s government needs to tackle the larger issues that are making its people paranoid and vulnerable to the viral spread of lies. Hell, it could even use WhatsApp to do that.

Last year, the Bharatiya Janata Party, which is currently in power in the country, was reportedly working to set up roughly 5,000 WhatsApp groups to spread its campaign messaging for the 2018 assembly elections across the southern state of Karnataka, which is home to some 61 million people.

For starters, it should launch a campaign to encourage people to question the veracity of information they receive via social media and messaging platforms. It also needs to remind people about the laws that they must adhere to within the country’s borders.

It's obviously problematic that misinformation is leading to such violence and death. And, obviously, there's a lot of interest in how these messages are spreading so rapidly using apps like WhatsApp. But we shouldn't get so focused on the shiny new thing as the actual point of failure. There are much larger societal and governmental issues at play. Blaming the app may be politically convenient, but it is not accurate, and is unlikely to help in either the short or the long run.

• "Game of Thrones" star Maisie Williams said goodbye to playing Arya Stark in a bloody Instagram post over the weekend.
• Williams wrote a goodbye message under a picture of bloodied sneakers.
• This confirmed Williams is done shooting the show for good, and that Arya likely makes some people bleed in season eight.
• "Game of Thrones" season eight premieres in 2019.

Maisie Williams officially said goodbye to her "Game of Thrones" character, Arya Stark, in an Instagram post Saturday of a pair of bloody sneakers.

"Goodbye Belfast," Williams wrote. "Goodbye Arya. Goodbye Game of Thrones. What a joy I’ve had. Here’s to the adventures to come." In June, co-star Emilia Clarke posted a similar, but more emotional message on Instagram. In early July, there was a "Game of Thrones" wrap party for season eight in Belfast. 

The post confirmed that Williams is done shooting the eighth and final "Game of Thrones," and therefore finished playing her iconic character, Arya Stark. In the post, Williams did not address the bloody sneakers at all. Will Arya somehow have time to invent the sneaker amidst the fight with Cersei and the Night King's army of the dead? Probably not. Right now, we can just assume that there is a lot of bloodshed at the hands of assassin Arya in "Game of Thrones" season eight.

"Game of Thrones" has been huge for everyone involved, especially Williams. The role of Arya Stark was her first acting job ever. At 13 years old, she was selected for the role over 300 other young actresses. Williams has also been praised for her transformative performance over the years, as Arya has gone from innocent Northern girl to full-blown killer. In 2016, Williams was nominated for best supporting actress at the Emmy Awards. 

Since "Game of Thrones" gained popularity, Williams has had roles in TV and film, including "Doctor Who" and "The New Mutants."

SEE ALSO: Emilia Clarke wrote an emotional message to the 'Game of Thrones' family she will 'never stop missing'

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NOW WATCH: Why the World Cup soccer ball looks so different

As of July 1^st we are happy to announce our refreshed version Enabling Teamwork with Microsoft Teams online course.  Our latest free course provides IT Pros with important information on how to plan for and enable Microsoft Teams for their users.

MOOCs are Massively Open Online Courses that can be accessed for free for everyone to be training on different topics. Microsoft leverages EdX.org as a learning platform, where courses usually last about 2-4 hours per week over four weeks. This course includes interactive labs that enable learners to practice Teams administration in a live Office 365 tenant.  In addition, there is an option to purchase a certificate of achievement for $99 USD to verify the successful completion of the course assessments.  This is the first of several courses that we plan to publish throughout the balance of 2018.

The course will teach you about the following:

• Enable users for Microsoft Teams
• Configure Microsoft Teams
• Configure audio conferencing with Teams.
• Best practices for using Microsoft Teams.

Special thanks to Brandon Neeb for putting the MOOC together (with some help from , myself and other members across Microsoft Teams Engineering).

Call to action:

• Go to Enabling Teamwork with Microsoft Teams and enroll now!
• Any feedback? Let us know in the comments section!

• Crop One Holdings, a Silicon Valley food startup, and Emirates Flight Catering (EKFC), one of the world’s largest airline catering operators, plan build a 130,000-square-foot vertical farm in Dubai.
• Vertical farms grow crops indoors and year-round without natural sunlight or soil. The facility will be the largest of its kind, and will produce 6,000 pounds of crops daily.
• The greens and herbs will be used for in-flight meals at Dubai International Airport, the world's largest by international passenger traffic.

When passengers board their flights at Dubai International Airport, most are served in-flight meals that include salads or greens atop sandwiches. These crops usually come from traditional, outdoor farms in the United Arab Emirates.

By 2020, flights taking off from the airport will serve greens and herbs grown from a more high-tech source. 

Emirates Flight Catering (EKFC), one of the world’s largest airline catering operators, and Crop One Holdings, a San Francisco Bay Area food startup, are building a massive vertical farm to supply crops for in-flight meals.

EKFC provides catering for Emirates Airlines and all other airlines at Dubai International Airport, which is the world's largest airport by passenger traffic.

Located in a Dubai, the 130,000-square-foot indoor farm will produce up to 6,000 pounds of greens and herbs every day. Unlike traditional outdoor farms, Crop One grows crops year-round under LEDs (which mimic natural sunlight) located inside climate-controlled rooms, which are each set to optimal temperature and oxygen levels depending on the crop. Instead of soil, greens sprout in nutrient-rich water beds on trays stacked from the floor to the ceiling. Sensors in the trays track how the plants are doing in real time.

The two companies will start construction in November 2018, and start delivering crops to Emirates Flight Catering’s customers, including 105 airlines and 25 airport lounges, in December 2019. Crop One currently operates a vertical farm in Millis, Massachusetts, and delivers to Boston metro area grocery stores under the Fresh Box Farms brand name. 

The new farm in Dubai will surpass the size of the current world's largest vertical farm, which is operated by AeroFarms. The facility grows greens inside a 69,000-square-foot warehouse in Newark, New Jersey. AeroFarms and other big indoor farming companies mostly sell their products to supermarkets, but Crop One believes greater opportunity may lie within airline partnerships.

According to Sonia Lo, Crop One's CEO, airlines tend to have a more reliable demand than grocers.

"Airlines are attractive, because they give our farms anchor customers that have a predictable volume and price," she told Business Insider. "Most vertical farmers can’t address the food-service market, because they simply can’t make money doing so."

Lo is referring to the economic challenges that a number of vertical farming companies have faced in the US. (Panasonic and Google have abandoned vertical farming projects, and FarmedHere — once the largest vertical farm in the US — shut down last year.) Since vertical farms rely on large amounts of electricity from the LEDs, high energy costs can make it harder for them to compete in regions where cheap produce is abundant.

While many vertical farming companies depend on venture-capital, the majority of Crop One's funding comes from private equity, Lo said.

Crop One could find more success abroad — but only if its new Dubai farm manages to scale as promised, lowering production costs. The company also plans to expand domestically in the US. In coming years, it will launch two farms in the Northeast and one in the Southwest, selling to nearby retailers and food-service customers.

SEE ALSO: An executive behind Amazon’s massive warehouse fulfillment operation has moved to a vertical farming startup

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NOW WATCH: Cannibalism used to be a popular medical remedy — here's why humans don't eat each other today

Congressional lawmakers are intent on urging President Donald Trump and his administration to closely examine Sprint’s proposed merger with T-Mobile due to the former’s ties to the Chinese government, according to a report from Bloomberg. Sprint does not have direct ties to Beijing. Rather, it’s that the US telecom is majority owned by Japan’s SoftBank, which has worked with Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei. Alongside fellow Chinese telecom ZTE, Huawei has been deemed a national security threat by the US government, with intelligence agencies and the Department of Defense banning Huawei phones and equipment from the military and ZTE very nearly shut down over an all-out trade ban.

“Recognizing that these companies operate as...

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You’ve seen the YouTube videos. It’s a shaky-cam iPhone shot with a wide-eyed someone giggling under their breath “cat food,” or some other miscellaneous thing they allegedly never talk about or search for near or on their device. The climax of this plot line hits in the following hours or days after they’ve muttered said random phrase, and they’re suddenly served an ad on Facebook of the exact same thing they said before. Preposterous! It’s the classic “your phone is listening to everything you say,” conspiracy theory that so many people have willingly started to believe. But, according to researchers from Northeastern University, reported by Gizmodo’s Kashmir Hill, this isn’t the case at all. After a yearlong study, they found no...

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Facebook announced today that it’s acquired London-based artificial intelligence firm Bloomsbury AI, which specializes in natural language processing. According to a post from the official Facebook Academics page, the company says Bloomsbury’s “expertise will strengthen Facebook’s efforts in natural language processing research, and help us further understand natural language and its applications.” In other words, as Facebook continues to hand more platform moderation duties over to algorithms, the underlying AI technology behind those algorithms still has a long way to go. TechCrunch originally reported on the acquisition yesterday.

In the AI community, Facebook is one of the biggest players, with positions at the company’s Facebook AI...

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• Google Cloud COO Diane Bryant is leaving the company less than a year after coming aboard. 
• Bryant came from Intel, where she had a storied 32-year career, most recently leading the $17 billion data center business. 
• Intel is searching for a replacement for former CEO Brian Krzanich — and it's possible that Bryant is under consideration.

Google Cloud COO Diane Bryant is leaving the company after less than a year, Business Insider has learned. 

Bryant joined Google in December, coming off of a 32-year career at chip giant Intel. At Intel, Bryant was the face of the Data Center Group, which booked $17 billion in revenue in 2016 — a huge business that gave Intel a path towards growth, even as the traditional PC market has shrunk.

For Google, bringing on Bryant was a big deal: Under Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene, the search giant has been trying to prove that it has what it takes to sell cloud computing services into the largest businesses. Google Cloud is largely seen as a third-place player behind the leading Amazon Web Services and second-place Microsoft Azure.

Intel reportedly paid Bryant $4.5 million in a separation agreement at the time she took the COO job at Google. 

It's also worth noting that Intel will reportedly consider recently-departed execs like Bryant as it searches for a replacement to Brian Krzanich, who suddenly stepped down as CEO of the chipmaker in June following an investigation into his relationship with an employee. 

Intel declined to comment. Diane Bryant did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

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NOW WATCH: Why Rolex watches are so expensive

Third-party app developers can read the emails of millions of Gmail users, a report from The Wall Street Journal highlighted today. Gmail’s access settings allows data companies and app developers to see people’s emails and view private details, including recipient addresses, time stamps, and entire messages. And while those apps do need to receive user consent, the consent form isn’t exactly clear that it would allow humans — and not just computers — to read your emails.

Google told The Verge that it only gives data to vetted third-party developers and with users’ explicit consent. The vetting process involves checking whether a company’s identity is correctly represented by its app, its privacy policy states that it will monitor...

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Parallax, or eye contact in video conferencing is a problem that should be solved, and AI is probably how we end up solving it.

I’ve been working at a video conferencing company about 20 years ago. Since then a lot have changed:

• Resolutions and image quality have increased dramatically
• Systems migrated from on prem to the cloud
• Our focus changed from large room systems, to mobile, to desktop and now to huddle rooms
• We went from designed hardware to running it all on commodity hardware
• And now we’re going after commodity software with the help of WebRTC

One thing hasn’t really changed in all that time.

I still see straight into your nose or straight at your forehead. I can never seem to be able to look you in the eye. When I do, it ends up being me gazing straight at my camera, which is unnatural for me either.

The reason for this is known as the parallax problem in video conferencing. Parallax. What a great word.

If you believe Wikipedia, then “Parallax is a displacement or difference in the apparent position of an object viewed along two different lines of sight, and is measured by the angle or semi-angle of inclination between those two lines.”

A mouthful. Let me illustrate the problem:

What happens here is that as I watch the eyes of the person on the screen, my camera is capturing me. But I am not looking at my camera. I am looking at an angle above or beyond it. And with a group call with a couple of people in it in Hollywood squares, who should I be looking at anyway?

So you end up with either my nose.

Or my forehead.

What we really want/need is to have that camera right behind the eyes of the person we’re looking at on our display – be it a smartphone, laptop, desktop or room system.

Over the years, the notion was to “ignore” this problem as it is too hard to solve. The solution to it usually required the use of mirrors and an increase in the space the display needed.

Here’s an example from a failed kickstarter project that wanted to solve this for tablets – the eTeleporter:

The result is usually cumbersome and expensive. Which is why it never caught on.

There are those who suggest tilting the monitor. This may work well for static devices in meeting rooms, but then again, who would do the work needed, and would the same angle work on every room size and setup?

When I worked years ago at a video conferencing company, we had a European research project we participated in that included 3D imaging, 3D displays, telepresence and a few high end cameras. The idea was to create a better telepresence experience that got eye contact properly as well. It never saw the light of day.

Today, multiple cameras and depth sensors just might work.

Let’s first take it to the extreme. Think of Intel True View. Pepper a stadium with enough cameras, and you can decide to synthetically re-create any scene from that football game.

Since we’re not going to have 20+ 5K cameras in our meeting rooms, we will need to make do with one. Or two. And some depth information. Gleaned via a sensor, dual camera contraption or just by using machine learning.

Which is where two recent advancements give a clue to where we’re headed:

1. Apple Memoji (and earlier Bitmoji). iPhone X can 3D scan your face and recognize facial movements and expressions
2. Facebook can now open eyes in selfie images with the help of AI

The idea? Analyze and “map” what the camera sees, and then tweak it a bit to fit the need. You won’t be getting the real, raw image, but what you’ll get will be eye contact.

Back to AI in RTC

In our interviews this past month we’ve been talking to many vendors who make use of machine learning and AI in their real time communication products. We’ve doubled down on computer vision in the last week or two, trying to understand where is the technology today – what’s in production and what’s coming in the next release or two.

Nothing I’ve seen was about eye contact, and computer vision in real time communication is still quite nascent, solving simpler problems. But you do see the steps taken towards that end game, just not from the video communication players yet.

Interested in AI and RTC? Check out our upcoming report and be sure to assist us with our web survey (there’s an ebook you’ll receive and 5 $100 Amazon Gift cards we will raffle).

The post Can AI and Computer Vision solve the video conferencing eye contact problem? appeared first on BlogGeek.me.

There's a lot to choose from on Netflix these days. But honestly, it's not all great. 

Even with all the TV series, movies (some original and some from studio libraries), and cartoons, it can sometimes be hard to find something you can sit all the way though. We're here to help.

With July here, there's a new crop of titles on the streaming giant. Here are 8 movies we think won't disappoint you.

• "Blue Valentine" (available 7/5)
• "Gone Baby Gone" (7/12)
• "Her" (7/29
• "Interview With the Vampire" (7/1)
• "Jurassic Park" (7/1)
• “Menace II Society" (7/1)
• "The Princess Diaries" (7/1)
• "Spanglish" (7/1)

SEE ALSO: The 100 best horror movies of all time, according to critics

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NOW WATCH: Learning to celebrate failure at a young age led to this billionaire's success

• Bitcoin was trading up 4.85% Monday morning after a bullish weekend for the digital currency. 
• Track bitcoin in real-time here. 

Bitcoin was trading up 4.85% Monday morning after a bullish weekend for the largest digital currency by market capitalization. 

Bitcoin, which is known for its wild price swings, soared to $6,646 after a $200 pop around 9 a.m. ET, according to data from Markets Insider. That's its highest price in nearly 10 days, as the coin has climbed from its recent bottom near $5,900 hit on June 24. 

Since the beginning of 2018, the market for digital currencies has been under pressure, hitting a year-low in market cap of close to $230 billion on Friday. Autonomous NEXT, the financial-technology research firm, estimates recent market woes are tied to the initial-coin-offering market, the crypto-based fundraising mechanism. 

"ICOs were the reason the crypto prices shot to the moon last year, and they are also (part of) the reason why we are now seeing a prolonged weak market," the research group said in a note Monday morning. 

Autonomous' hypothesis suggests companies that raised funds at the end of 2018 for ICO projects are now selling off the ether they raised in order to pay employees. 

Still, the market was making a roaring comeback Monday with ether up close to 4% at $471 and bitcoin cash trading up 6.5% at $786. 

Mati Greenspan, a senior market analyst at eToro, said in a note out Monday morning that crypto charts show "several positive progressions" for bitcoin. 

"The most obvious is the break above the downward channel that we've been tracking," Greenspan wrote."The price has managed to sustain above $6,250 all weekend but is yet to show if the breakout is real or false."

He added, "The second is a double bottom that can be seen as the price reached the lowest price of the year ($5,780) on two separate occasions (purple circles) but didn't go any lower."

Elsewhere, Coinbase announced Monday that its crypto-custody product went live. Coinbase custody aims to safeguard cryptocurrencies for institutional clients such as hedge funds, according to a blog post. 

SEE ALSO: Crypto investors are complaining about the same 'biggest pain point,' and fixing it could add billions to the bitcoin market

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NOW WATCH: This is how moveable prosthetic covers are made for bionic limbs

Facebook, Google, Comcast, AT&T and Verizon collectively contributed to a $1 million fund to oppose the bill when it was proposed.

Tinder’s parent company Match Group publicly announced today, in a letter to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), that it is now encrypting photos sent between Tinder’s servers and its app. The changes were implemented in February, following the public disclosure of an attack that could have let hackers view people’s profile pictures and swipe actions.

Wyden wrote a letter to Tinder back in February requesting that the company encrypt photos. It had apparently already done so (the letter says they implemented the feature on February 4th), but it waited to write back to Wyden until it also adjusted a separate security feature that makes all swipe data the same size. The size of the swipe data was used by security researchers to differentiate actions...

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• Scooter startup Spin is said to be looking to raise money with its own cryptocurrency via a Secure Token Offering, widely seen as a safer alternative to an Initial Coin Offering.
• Spin tokens will be backed by actual financial instruments, which in this case is Spin's revenue.
• The report comes a day after rival startup Bird raised $300 million from prominent Silicon Valley investors.

While scooter startups Bird and Lime are courting top Silicon Valley investors, Spin is looking to raise money in a different way: making its own cryptocurrency.

The news was first reported on Friday by TechCrunch and confirmed to Business Insider by a person close to the company.

Spin is raising $125 million via a Secure Token Offering, although the company hasn't officially listed its tokens for sale on an exchange yet. The person told Business Insider that it may list on muliple cryptocurrency exchanges, but it is waiting for more mainstream exchanges like Coinbase to support STOs.

During an STO, a new idea that is widely seen as a safer version of an Initial Coin Offering, investors will be able to buy Spin's tokens — a unit of cryptocurrency. Rather than getting a liquid asset, though, would-be purchasers of the Spin STO would be buying equity in Spin. We hear that, indeed, a portion of Spin's tokens will be backed by equity in the company.

The report comes a day after rival startup Bird announced $300 million funding round from some of Silicon Valley's preeminent venture firms, valuing the company at $2 billion. Investors see e-scooter companies as the next Uber and Lyft, and are clamoring to get in on the ground floor on the business.

To date, Spin has raised $8 million in a series A round led by Grishin Robotics. The company has launched in 18 cities and a number of college campuses. And while Bird and Lime have had testy histories with city officials — who claim the scooters descended on cities with little-to-notice — Spin has been relatively quiet after it was first issued a cease and desist letter in San Francisco.

Electric scooters work by allowing users to reserve a nearby scooter via a smartphone app, ride around on it for a small fee, and, at the end of the journey, leave the scooter anywhere to be claimed by the next rider.

SEE ALSO: Scooter startup Bird raises $400 million in 4 months and rockets to $2 billion valuation

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NOW WATCH: What people get wrong about superfoods

Microsoft has been working on a new mysterious Surface device for at least two years. Codenamed Andromeda, the device has appeared in patents, reports, and in operating system references multiple times and will include a dual-display design. According to a Microsoft internal document obtained by The Verge, it’s also going to be a pocketable Surface device.

Microsoft describes its Andromeda project as something the company has quietly incubated internally, and that will create a “new and disruptive” device category to influence the overall Surface roadmap and blur the lines between what’s considered PC and mobile. “It’s a new pocketable Surface device form factor that brings together innovative new hardware and software experiences to...

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AT&T has agreed to pay a $5.25 million fine to settle an investigation into a pair of nationwide 911 outages that occurred in early 2017. The Federal Communications Commission said the first outage, on March 8th, lasted about five hours and affected 12,600 callers. The second, on May 1st, lasted 47 minutes and resulted in 2,600 failed 911 calls.

“Such preventable outages are unacceptable,” the FCC wrote in a statement announcing the settlement. “Robust and reliable 911 service is a national priority, as repeatedly expressed by both Congress and the Commission.”

In addition to the fines, AT&T is also required to make changes to help minimize issues should an outage...

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• AT&T recently raised the price of its administrative fee for monthly AT&T wireless customers. 
• The admin fee hike could bring in an extra $800 million annually for AT&T. 
• The company said the admin fee helps cover the cost of cell maintenance and interconnection with other carriers.

AT&T has increased its admin fee from $0.76 to $1.99 for every AT&T monthly customer, according to BTIG Research analyst Walter Piecyk.

The admin fee hike will make AT&T an extra $800 million per year, according to Piecyk.

AT&T hadn't announced the admin fee hike to its customers from what we could tell, and it didn't really explain why it's doing so. Business Insider reached out to AT&T to ask about the company's reasoning behind the fee hike, but the company yet to respond. Speaking to The Verge, an AT&T spokesperson said that the admin fee is standard among other wireless carriers, and that it helps cover the costs of cell maintenance and interconnection between carriers. 

While it may come as a minor sting to AT&T customers, the new higher admin fee isn't the highest we've seen. On my Verizon bill, for example, the administrative fee is $3.69 for a three-line account.

Carrier admin fees are part of the small line items you'd usually find at the bottom of your wireless bill among the surcharges.

Apart from the admin fee, AT&T also raised the price for those with grandfathered unlimited data plans in early June, according to Mac Rumors. Originally, the plan cost $30 per month. It was later raised to $40 per month, and most recently AT&T hiked the price up again to $45 per month. 

AT&T also recently closed a massive deal to buy Time Warner for $85 billion. 

SEE ALSO: Here's how the 'unlimited' plans from Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile compare

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NOW WATCH: This $530 Android phone is half the price of an iPhone X and just as good

• Walmart is launching two new ways for customers to shop for home furnishings online, with a 3D virtual tour function and an ability to "buy the room" on display.
• The tour, which launched on Thursday, allows customers to see what items look like in a virtual space so that they can envision them in their own.
• The "buy the room" feature, which will launch in July, allows customers to buy a group of items that all go together.

Walmart is looking to make it easier to buy home furnishings online.

Home furnishings is a big category for online shopping, but it faces risks as these items can be more expensive to ship, and customers often have a hard time predicting what the items will look like in their own homes. 

Walmart is looking to change that with two new initatives for customers to shop furnishings online, it announced on Thursday.

The first, which has already rolled out, is a 3D virtual tour of an apartment filled with items available for purchase on Walmart.com. Shoppers can click to move through the virtual space, and if they see something they like, all they need to do is click the yellow icon. That will take them to the product page on Walmart.com.

The items are displayed in the virtual space artfully, allowing customers to get a real idea of how it might look in their own living spaces. This contrasts with the mystery involved when most home furnishings are bought. Often, an item will be too big or small to fit in, resulting in a costly return.

The second feature, which Walmart is launching in July, is the ability to buy an entire group of items that the retailer has already picked out and organized into a "look." The items will already match, meaning that customers don't have to worry that they'll clash.

The feature will launch with five collections, and each one will feature 20 hand-picked items. The initative is designed for customers like college students, who are apt to buy furniture for a space all in one go — and might not have a careful eye for design yet.

To test it out, go to Walmart.com/virtualroomtour.

The two initatives follow the new home experience that Walmart launched online in February, which refreshed the way it sold home furnishings online. Walmart has already been getting "great feedback from customers" with regards to the initiative, Anthony Soohoo, Walmart's head of home furnishings e-commerce, said in a blog post announcing the new features.

SEE ALSO: Bed Bath & Beyond customers are starting not to care about the best reason to shop there

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NOW WATCH: Sneaky ways Costco gets you to buy more

Today we are announcing that Microsoft Teams—the hub for teamwork in Office 365— will begin rolling out for the US Government Cloud Community (GCC) on July 17th and will be available for all eligible customers by the end of August 2018. 

Microsoft Teams is a chat-based workspace that enables teams to be more productive by giving them a single and secure location that brings together everything a team needs including chats, meetings, calls, files, and tools. Teams in GCC has been built to meet the enhanced security and compliance requirements of our GCC customers allowing them to transform communication and collaboration. Implementing modern collaboration and communications capabilities in the government sector can streamline your daily work so you can more efficiently deliver against your mission and provide services to citizens and constituents.

Security and Compliance Features

Security and compliance capabilities are critical for Government customers. In Microsoft Teams, enterprise grade security, compliance and manageability capabilities are built in. Teams is built on the Office 365 hyper-scale cloud, delivering the advanced security and compliance capabilities our customers expect.

Now Microsoft Teams meets the federal compliance requirements of GCC customers, including FedRAMP Moderate, CJIS, IRS 1075, and HIPAA, in addition to supporting global standards, including SOC 1, SOC 2, EU Model Clauses, and ISO27001. We also added support for audit log search, eDiscovery, retention policies and legal hold for channels, chats and files as well as mobile application management with Microsoft Intune.

Improve Collaboration & Communication with Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams provides teams with a chat-based workspace in which you can communicate and collaborate at ease with transparent and persistent conversations. Microsoft Teams leverages the power of Office 365 apps such as SharePoint Online, OneDrive, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. Integrated access to these Office 365 services leverages your current investments and improves collaboration in the context of your team by providing central file sharing, co-authoring, and many more functions.

Microsoft Teams brings intelligent communications scenarios to life. Communication is improved by including high quality video in any meeting and from any device.  Sharing files and agendas directly in the context of the meeting supports meeting efficiency. Imagine being able to collaborate on a document in real time with other team members and then hop quickly on a call to discuss your changes. This is the power of Microsoft Teams and Office 365.  Collaborate on budget documents, project proposals, and program updates in a unified experience.   

At Microsoft, our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. With that in mind, we’re working to ensure every team member can participate, with accessibility features, including support for screen readers, high contrast and keyboard-only navigation. This enables Microsoft Teams to be more inclusive and to tap into the collective brainpower and potential of every person.

Start preparing to use Microsoft Teams today

Start using Microsoft Teams to facilitate collaboration and communication and enable your employees to achieve more.

1. Visit https://teams.microsoft.com to get started with the web experience or download the desktop client. 
2. Start to plan your implementation at https://successwithteams.com to get the most from Teams.
3. Please let us know if you have any questions by posting them in the technical community for Microsoft Teams at https://aka.ms/TeamsTechCommunity. We are here to answer your technical questions about the product.  Also visit the Drive Adoption forum to learn best practices for driving change management in your agency.

Frequently asked questions:

Q. Which Microsoft Government plans will include Microsoft Teams
A. Microsoft Teams is available in Office 365 for US Government G1, G3, G5, F1 and Microsoft 365 for US Government G3, G5, F1.

Q. What action do I (Admin) need to take to make Teams available to my users
A. Administrators do not need to take action, Microsoft Teams will be enabled by default. A Teams License will automatically be assigned to all existing users. However, for the best Teams experience, you should have Active Directory Online, Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and Groups enabled for your users.

Q. When will Teams become available to government plans?
A. Microsoft Teams will begin rolling out for the US Government Cloud Community (GCC) on July 17 and be available for all eligible customers by the end of August 2018. We are working to bring Microsoft Teams to the other US government clouds (GCC High and DoD) coming soon.

Q. Are there feature differences between Microsoft Teams in Microsoft Commercial Cloud and  Microsoft Teams in Government Community Cloud?

A. To accommodate the requirements of our government cloud customers there are a few features differences between the GCC cloud and that of commercial customers. For more information and to find out more about the features available, go to aka.ms/teamsgccsetup.

Going forward, new features for Microsoft Teams will arrive to GCC after release to commercial customers due to increased audit requirements and activities to meet the needs of the GCC environment. We are dedicated to honoring our compliance commitments laid out in the Office 365 Compliance Framework. We are working to shorten this time where possible.

Q. What platforms does Microsoft Teams support? 
A. Microsoft Teams runs on Windows, Mac, Android, iOS and web platforms.

Q. What level of security and compliance does Microsoft Teams support?
A. Microsoft Teams security and compliance includes ISO 27001, ISO 27018, EUMC, SOC 1 Type I & II, SOC 2 Type I and II, HIPAA and FedRAMP Moderate. Microsoft Teams also enforces two-factor authentication, single sign on through Active Directory and encryption of data in transit and at rest.

Q. What trainings are available to help Office 365 admins learn about Microsoft Teams?

A. Start your training process for Microsoft Teams on our SuccessWithTeams.com site.  This information will support you in planning, deploying, adopting and managing Microsoft Teams.  Video content can be found in the Training section of the site.  Additionally, visit Coffee in the Cloud main video page on YouTube at https://aka.ms/CoffeeintheCloud for long form training content and short how-to videos relevant to IT professionals, Office 365 Champions and end users.

Eighteen more Chromebooks are getting support for Linux apps on Chrome OS, with laptops based in Intel’s Apollo Lake architecture now able to run the applications, via XDA Developers.

That list includes computers from Lenovo (Thinkpad 11e Chromebook), Acer (Chromebook Spin 11 and Chromebook 15), Asus (Chromebook Flip), and Dell (Dell Chromebook 11) — check the full list at XDA’s site to see if your machine is included.

Previously, Linux apps worked on the Google Pixelbook and Samsung Chromebook Plus, but support for the Apollo Lake machines should open it up to a much wider range of users — and more importantly, to a much wider range of laptop price points.

The update is still in the works, so Canary and Developer channel users will...

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• The S Pen stylus is coming to Samsung's upcoming Galaxy Note phone.
• I often wonder why the company still gives one of its biggest phones a stylus, a seemingly antiquated technology.
• Most people use it for taking notes, but it's handy elsewhere on the phone, too. 

Every year when Samsung announces a new Galaxy Note phone I ask myself why the company is sticking with the S Pen, the stylus that comes with the company's super-sized Galaxy Note phones. Indeed, the next Galaxy Note phone, which will debut this autumn, will bring the S Pen back for another go-round.

Surely, this age-old technology — which debuted for most consumers on the Palm Pilot in 1997 — has no place here in 2018. 

But I am so very wrong. I was totally surprised to find out that 92% of Galaxy Note 8 owners — the most recent model — are active users of the S Pen, Samsung senior director of smartphone marketing Drew Blackard told Business Insider. And 73% of those who bought the Note 8 bought the device specifically for the S Pen.

Blackard said Samsung isn't disclosing Galaxy Note sales numbers, so it's hard to know in absolute terms how popular the stylus might be. Still, he did tell me that more people in the US pre-ordered the Note 8 when it was announced than any previous Note device.

That's especially notable because the Samsung Galaxy Note 7, the 2016 model, was infamously recalled after several of the devices overheated and exploded, triggering a global recall.

Still, it shows that there's demand for the Samsung Galaxy Note product line, and it turns out that a large majority want it for the S Pen. 

With that in mind, it would be misguided for Samsung to drop the S Pen in its Galaxy Note smartphones, no matter how obsolete they may seem. It would disappoint an overwhelming number of S Pen fans on a device that's a "central part" of Samsung's premium device strategy, Blackard said. 

So what do these S Pen loyalists know that I don't, and why do they need it so badly?

60% of S Pen users continue to use the S Pen and Galaxy Note combo for the simple stuff, like writing down lists and notes — the original allure of the very first Galaxy Note model from 2011. Some might prefer to write down notes with an on-screen keyboard, but others clearly value the S Pen for jotting things down quickly.

And Samsung's made it easier for those users, generation after generation, with better technology in the S Pen itself, like adding higher and higher levels of pressure sensitivity.

The Galaxy Note 8, last year's model, has 4,096 levels of pressure sensitivity, which helps with accurate handwriting and drawing. Compare that to the first Galaxy Note's 256.  To put that into further perspective, a finger tip only has one level or pressure sensitivity. The company also added features like "screen off memo," where S Pen users don't even need to wake their Note from sleep to write down a note. 

"More and more people are using [the S Pen] for direct communication," like replying to a text message with a hand-written message, Blackard added.

And the S Pen has evolved to become more of a tool to some Note users. "A lot of people use it for more precise navigation of their phone," and even for more precision in games, Blackard said. One thing that Blackard does often on a Note device is sign a PDF document and send it right back. It makes me feel like I've been doing it wrong this whole time by printing out the PDF, signing it, scanning it, then sending it back to the sender. 

Then there are the "creativity" users who use the S Pen on a Note device for more artistic purposes. Samsung pre-loads its Note devices with an app called Pen Up, basically a sketching social network designed for Galaxy Note and S Pen users. The company has an astounding 400 million users on Pen Up who are creating and sharing their art on the app since it was introduced in the Galaxy Note 3 in 2013. I had no idea people were creating art — or would want to create art — on a smartphone. But they do. 

Generally, "it’s really the user who wants to get more done, someone who’s juggling a lot in their life. They're spending more time on their device than the standard user, and they don't necessarily want to sit down on their computer to do other tasks" Blackard said. That comment made me think that perhaps I'm not really the smartphone power user I thought I was, and the true power users are the Galaxy Note fans with their S Pens.

For the next Galaxy Note that Samsung is announcing this Fall, Blackard only gave me a couple hints as to what the S Pen will bring. Expect some kind of integration with the camera and better functionality with games. Otherwise, we'll have to wait and see.

SEE ALSO: Here's how the 'unlimited' plans from Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile compare

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This is a post

To inform you

That Slack is down

It has been down for over an hour

If you use Slack for work

(Like I do)

You probably cannot connect

Your coworkers cannot hear you

Your GIFs will not send

Your messages, failed

“We’re working hard to isolate the issue.

Thanks for your patience!”

In the meantime

Maybe go for a walk

Call a friend

Eat a sandwich

Watch the World Cup

Slack will probably be back soon

And then this will all fade away

Like a dream

.....

Reconnecting in 4 seconds... Retry now?

Continue reading…

• Facebook has reversed its ban on cryptocurrency ads after less than six months.
• The ban was announced in January, but Facebook said it now wants to "refine" the policy.
• Companies can submit an application form to be approved for advertising by Facebook.
• Ads that promote binary options and initial coin offerings are still prohibited.

Facebook has reversed its ban on cryptocurrency adverts, and will now allow pre-approved businesses to promote certain services.

Facebook banned all crypto ads in January of this year, with a policy that was designed to be "intentionally broad." At the time, Facebook Product Management Director Rob Leathern suggested in a blog post that the world of cryptocurrency was untrustworthy.

"We want people to continue to discover and learn about new products and services through Facebook ads without fear of scams or deception," he said.

Leathearn released a new blog post on Tuesday explaining Facebook's decision to allow some advertising of cryptocurrency services. "In the last few months, we’ve looked at the best way to refine this policy to allow some ads while also working to ensure that they’re safe," he said.

Leathearn did not say why Facebook has reversed its ban. Business Insider has contacted Facebook for more information.

Facebook's policy now requires advertisers to submit an online application so that Facebook can assess their eligibility by scrutinising "any licenses they have obtained, whether they are traded on a public stock exchange, and other relevant public background on their business."

Not all cryptocurrency services are in the clear, binary options and initial coin offerings (ICOs) are still prohibited.

Despite its advertising ban in January, this is not the first sign Facebook's appetite for crypto has changed. In May, it launched a team dedicated to developing blockchain technology, and Cheddar reported that the company was working on creating its own cryptocurrency.

SEE ALSO: Facebook is reportedly exploring the creation of its own cryptocurrency

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