Davemichels

Amazon has gradually been improving Alexa’s calendar features recently. Outlook.com and iCloud support arrived last year, and now Alexa is getting improvements for managing meetings. While you’ve always been able to add new events and schedule them, Alexa is now supporting one-on-one meetings and the ability to move events around.

You can say “Alexa, move my meeting” or “Alexa, move my meeting at 8AM to tomorrow at 10AM” to avoid those early morning meetings where, let’s be honest, you’d be better off in bed. The one-on-one scheduling also works just as easily, letting you create a calendar event by saying “Alexa, schedule a meeting with Tom.” Alexa will access your contacts and pick the colleague or friend, and suggest times based on...

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The Comcast website that activates Xfinity routers has a bug that exposes customers’ personal information. As reported by ZDNet, the page for setting up home Wi-Fi and cable services can display the home address of where the router is located and give away the Wi-Fi password. Comcast learned about the bug and fixed its site shortly after the report, and it said it’s conducting an investigation.

The bug was first spotted by two security researchers who told ZDNet their findings. The website initially requests the user’s full home address in order to verify your account and register their device. But researchers found they could sidestep that requirement with a customer ID along with an apartment or house number, prompting the website to...

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Google demonstrated a jaw-dropping new capability in Google Assistant earlier this month, allowing the Assistant to make calls on your behalf. While Google Duplex generated controversy and discussion around artificial intelligence, Microsoft has been testing similar technology with millions of people in China. At an AI event in London today, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella showed off the company’s Xiaoice (pronounced “SHAO-ICE”) social chat bot.

Microsoft has been testing Xiaoice in China, and Nadella revealed the bot has 500 million “friends” and more than 16 channels for Chinese users to interact with it through WeChat and other popular messaging services. Microsoft has turned Xiaoice, which is Chinese for “little Bing,” into a friendly...

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• Amazon is banning customers for making too many returns, The Wall Street Journal reports. 
• The report comes after Amazon kicked hundreds of customers off the site in late March and early April, in a wave of bans apparently related to review fraud concerns. 
• Best Buy, Home Depot, Victoria's Secret, and other retailers are also tracking how often shoppers return purchases and, in some cases, punishing people who are suspected of abusing return policies. 

Amazon is reportedly banning customers for returning too many items. 

The e-commerce giant has banned a number of customers after they apparently returned too many items, The Wall Street Journal reports. Amazon apparently failed to alert the customers that they had returned too many items prior to the bans. 

The Journal spoke with two people and cited dozens more online who said they had been banned from Amazon, as well as others who received emails from the company after returning a certain amount of items. 

The two individuals who spoke to The Journal seem to be part of a wave of hundreds of people who were banned from Amazon in late March and early April, as previously reported by Business Insider.

The wave of closures were apparently linked to concerns regarding review fraud. 

Some people in private Facebook groups who were banned from Amazon admitted to violating policies through activities like leaving good reviews in exchange for a reward, such as gift cards. Some said that they may have committed acts, such as reviewing products that they received for free or at a discount, that they did not realize were not allowed. And others say they have no recollection of violating the company's policies.

An excess of returns can create issues for retailers. In addition to costing the company money, some Amazon customers may also be purchasing items and then returning them in exchange for payment or rewards, falsely inflating the reviews of third-party sellers. 

"We want everyone to be able to use Amazon, but there are rare occasions where someone abuses our service over an extended period of time," an Amazon spokesman told The Journal. "We never take these decisions lightly, but with over 300 million customers around the world, we take action when appropriate to protect the experience for all our customers."

Amazon is not alone in this. Best Buy, Home Depot, Victoria's Secret, and a host of other retailers are discreetly tracking how often shoppers return purchases and, in some cases, punishing people who are suspected of abusing their return policies. 

In March, The Journal reported that third-party company The Retail Equation keeps "return activity reports" on customers dating back several years. If The Retail Equation notices activity it considers fraudulent, customers can be punished. 

Fraud costs retailers up to $17 billion annually in the US, according to The Retail Equation. 

"Rather than forcing retailers to impose stricter return policies such as 'no receipt, no return' or 14-day limits on returns, the system actually allows retailers to offer the other 99 percent of consumers more lenient and flexible return policies," the company says on its website.

SEE ALSO: Furious customers say they've been mysteriously locked out of their Amazon accounts — and they have no idea why

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NOW WATCH: We ate everything on Taco Bell's Dollar Cravings Menu — here's what we thought

Bill Gates is a big reader.

The Microsoft cofounder and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation co-chair has said he reads about 50 books a year, and he often writes up notes about his favorites on his Gates Notes blog.

Gates has just published his list of summer reading recommendations for 2018, a list that spans genres, from literary fiction to memoir to history and biography.

Gates writes that his selections tend to "wrestle with big questions," like "What makes a genius tick? Why do bad things happen to good people? Where does humanity come from, and where are we going?"

Yet despite the weighty subject matter, Gates says they are all fun, fast and engrossing reads.

Here are the books Gates recommends checking out this summer:

SEE ALSO: Here are the 5 summer reads Bill Gates recommended last year

"Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I’ve Loved" by Kate Bowler

"Not everything happens for a reason," Gates writes about Kate Bowler's book that documents her search for answers and questions her spiritual beliefs after she was diagnosed with cancer.

"I wasn’t surprised to find that Bowler’s book is heartbreaking at times. But I didn’t expect it to be funny too. Sometimes it’s both in the same passage," Gates lauds.

The book touched Gates in a personal way too.

His grandparents were devout and believed that bad things were the result of a sin. When his grandfather got sick, failing to find a reason in his own conduct, he blamed his wife, Gates wrote.

There's value in understanding that not every why question can be answered with a straightforward response.

"Leonardo da Vinci" by Walter Isaacson

In this book, the longest of Gates' suggestions, acclaimed biographer Walter Isaacson takes on Leonardo da Vinci, who Gates describes as "one of the most fascinating people ever."

More than a painter, Leonardo was an inventor, engineer, medical researcher and more.

"When you look across all of Leonardo's many abilities and his few failings, the attribute that stands out above all else was his sense of wonder and curiosity," Gates writes.

"When he wanted to understand something — whether it was the flow of blood through the heart or the shape of a woodpecker's tongue — he would observe it closely, scribble down his thoughts, and then try to figure it all out," he wrote.

According to Gates, Isaacson does a great job pulling all the different aspects of Leonardo's life together, no easy task.

"More than any other Leonardo book I've read, this one helps you see him as a complete human being and understand just how special he was. He came close to understanding almost all of what was known on the planet at the time."

"Origin Story: A Big History of Everything" by David Christian

Historian David Christian is the creator of Big History, a free online course that traces what we know about the past 13.7 billion years of existence, going from the Big Bang and the origin of life to the complex societies we live in today.

The project is something Gates describes as his "favorite course of all time," so it's no surprise that he loves this book, which relates much of that history.

The book "will leave you with a greater appreciation of humanity's place in the universe," Gates glows.

"It shows how everything is connected to everything else, weaving together insights and evidence from across disciplines into a single, understandable narrative," he writes.

If you haven't taken the course, Gates says this book is an excellent way to understand its concepts. And if you have taken it, Gates calls the book a great refresher and an update, with some new material.

A company by the name of LocationSmart isn't having a particularly good month.

The company recently received all the wrong kind of attention when it was caught up in a privacy scandal involving the nation's wireless carriers and our biggest prison phone monopoly. Like countless other companies and governments, LocationSmart buys your wireless location data from cell carriers. It then sells access to that data via a portal that can provide real-time access to a user's location via a tailored graphical interface using just the target's phone number.

Theoretically, this functionality is sold under the pretense that the tool can be used to track things like drug offenders who have skipped out of rehab. And ideally, all the companies involved were supposed to ensure that data lookup requests were accompanied by something vaguely resembling official documentation. But a recent deep dive by the New York Times noted how the system was open to routine abuse by law enforcement, after a Missouri Sherrif used the system to routinely spy on Judges and fellow law enforcement officers without much legitimate justification (or pesky warrants):

"The service can find the whereabouts of almost any cellphone in the country within seconds. It does this by going through a system typically used by marketers and other companies to get location data from major cellphone carriers, including AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon, documents show.

Between 2014 and 2017, the sheriff, Cory Hutcheson, used the service at least 11 times, prosecutors said. His alleged targets included a judge and members of the State Highway Patrol. Mr. Hutcheson, who was dismissed last year in an unrelated matter, has pleaded not guilty in the surveillance cases."

It was yet another example of the way nonexistent to lax consumer privacy laws in the States (especially for wireless carriers) routinely come back to bite us.

But then things got worse.

Driven by curiousity in the wake of the Times report, a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University by the name of Robert Xiao discovered that the "try before you buy" system used by LocationSmart to advertise the cell location tracking system contained a bug, A bug so bad that it exposed the data of roughly 200 million wireless subscribers across the United States and Canada (read: nearly everybody). As we see all too often, the researcher highlighted how the security standards in place to safeguard this data were virtually nonexistent:

"Due to a very elementary bug in the website, you can just skip that consent part and go straight to the location," said Robert Xiao, a PhD student at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, in a phone call. "The implication of this is that LocationSmart never required consent in the first place," he said. "There seems to be no security oversight here."

The researcher notes that one of the APIs in the portal was not properly validating the consent response, making it "trivially easy" to skip the portion where the API sends a text message to the end user attempting to obtain consent (Brian Krebs, who first reported the vulnerability, has also confirmed the problem). Given the New York Times story had been making headlines since its May 10 publication, it's obviously possible that others discovered the vulnerability. LocationSmart has since pulled their location data tracking portal offline.

Meanwhile, none of the four major wireless carriers have been willing to confirm any business relationship with LocationSmart, but all claim to be investigating the problem after the week of bad press. That this actually results in substantive changes to the nation's cavalier treatment of private user data is a wager few would be likely to make.

Hopefully you’re a fan of Alexa because Acer is planning to roll out Amazon’s virtual assistant across its PC lineup. The first systems with built-in Alexa include the Aspire 5, Nitro 5 Spin, Spin 5 (both 13-inch and 15-inch versions), Spin 3, and the Switch 7 “Black Edition.”

With this first group of systems, Acer is essentially blanketing the feature across the types of PCs it makes, including gaming, tablet convertibles, ultrabooks, and thin-and-light models.

Alexa on Windows laptops will work the same as any other Alexa-compatible hardware. You can ask about the weather, handling your schedule, managing smart home devices, and more. I’d take Alexa over Cortana any day, but Acer and other PC...

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• Office life has undergone a number of major changes since the 1950s.
• Of course, workplaces have always varied in terms of look and culture, oftentimes based on regional, industry-wide, or organizational norms.
• But there have also been a number of widespread changes over time.
• These shifts include increased workforce diversity, widespread bans on smoking, and changing trends regarding popular workplace layouts.

Office culture has changed quite a bit over the years.

Some of those shifts were actually reflected in workplace design trends.

Corner offices were meant to convey hierarchical prestige and status. The cubicle was intended to improve employees' lives, but ultimately became a symbol of corporate drudgery. And the currently-popular open office layout was introduced as a more egalitarian approach, but has received quite a backlash, as well.

In his 2014 book "The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace," Ron Friedman concludes that the jury's still out on which style is the least terrible option.

"Cubicles are depressing. Private offices are isolating. Open spaces are distracting," he writes.

But the big changes to US work culture haven't just been all about appearances.

Teamwork is ostensibly in, while hierarchy is out. Typewriters got the boot with the advent of faster, user-friendly computers. Corporate jargon and ideas about job security have gone through major fluxes, as well.

Racial diversity in the workforce has increased over time — although many fields still have quite a way to go.

And workplace sexual harassment has gone from being a pervasive and widely-accepted phenomenon to a pervasive but somewhat less widely-accepted phenomenon.

Let's take a look back in time at how office culture has changed over the years:

SEE ALSO: These amazing photos show how American women took over the workforce during WWII and changed the face of US labor

SEE ALSO: 12 awesome offices reveal what work will look like in the future

DON'T MISS: 13 ways to hack your workspace for optimal productivity

In the years following World War II, Friedman wrote that most offices "... consisted of a vast open space, with rows and rows of identical desks crammed tightly together."

Source: "The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace"

This "bullpen office" had blue-collar roots, according to Friedman. The open design hearkened back to the factory floor, and was meant to foster productivity by keeping everyone visible.

Source: "The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace"

Of course, not everyone would have been stuck in the bullpen. At some companies, high-ranking employees might receive their own office.

Source: "The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace," Herman Miller

About four months after T-Mobile acquired Layer3 TV, the Denver TV service has fully integrated into its new owner, said cofounder Jeff Binder, who spoke Tuesday at a TV industry event in the Denver Tech Center.

The cellular service provider plans to launch T-Mobile TV this year, and Binder offered some hints of what’s to come. With T-Mobile’s pending merger with Sprint, Binder said that his team will have access to much more than originally thought possible.

“Obviously, 5G is key,” said Binder, now T-Mobile’s executive vice president of home and entertainment. “…There is tons of opportunity in terms of build out. We’ve talked about spending $40 billion in the first three years of the merger. It really allows the country to lead in 5G and lead wireless. That means things like broadband and video will become more available to consumers.”

Binder said that by building out a next generation wireless technology of 5G, T-Mobile will be able to get video to the home at speeds that are “hundreds and hundreds of megabits per second” and help consumers make better use of their big screen at home. Customer service is also important. “I won’t hold you hostage during a care call for 45 minutes,” he said.

But more importantly, he said, T-Mobile wants to remake the cable TV industry much like it did mobile service. The company upended the mobile industry, getting rid of two-year contracts and offering unlimited data plans when few others would.

In the TV world, however, the company faces fierce competition, as evidenced during sessions of The Pay TV Show, which attracted panelists from Sling TV, Amazon, Hulu and others. According to market researcher Parks Associates, there are 214 internet-based TV services just in the U.S.

Binder didn’t seem too concerned.

“A whole host of things have changed in the wireless industry and there is an opportunity to bring the same change to cable. It’s ripe for disruption,” Binder said. “…Disruptive means listening to customers and doing what they want. It doesn’t mean blowing things up. Look, customers are leaving pay TV. … That means it needs to be disrupted. We think we can bring new customers to the fold.”

Binder entertained the crowd with insider humor.

“First of all, we’ve got to get rid of the AT&T/DirecTV blue (lights) up there and get some magenta going,” he said early in the presentation. “I don’t know who’s in charge of the lights but they didn’t get the memo because otherwise people are going to be overcharged, with long contracts and exploding bundles.”

Following widespread outcry over the ethical dilemmas raised by Google’s new Duplex system, which lets artificial intelligence mimic a human voice to make appointments, Google has clarified in a statement that the experimental system will have “disclosure built-in.” That seems to mean that whatever eventual shape Duplex takes as a consumer product will involve some type of verbal announcement to the person on the other end that he or she is in fact talking to an AI.

“We understand and value the discussion around Google Duplex — as we’ve said from the beginning, transparency in the technology is important,” a Google spokesperson told The Verge in a statement this evening. “We are designing this feature with disclosure built-in, and we’ll...

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If you've always wanted to build you own game console, but have no idea where to start, the DIY Game Console Kit V2 will show you the way. Everything's included, from the parts to the code — and even four retro games: Tetris, Snake, Racing, and Shooting. Add additional games by modifying the code or use it as is. It's a fun way to learn about DIY electronics in the name of retro '90s gaming. It's on sale for $17.99.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Microsoft first acknowledged at Build last year that its new mobile strategy is to make iOS and Android devices work better with Windows 10 PCs. While the Windows-related news at this year’s Build developer conference has been light, Microsoft has revealed it’s working on a new “Your Phone” app that further bridges the gap between PCs and phones. The app will bring text messages, notifications, and photos from a phone directly to a Windows 10 PC, and it’s designed to make it easier to transition between the two.

I sat down with Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore and Shilpa Ranganathan at Build this week to get a better understanding of the company’s cross-device efforts for Windows 10 and the future of Windows itself. Ranganathan is responsible...

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• AT&T paying a "consultant" for insight into President Donald Trump's administration is standard procedure in Washington, experts say.
• A giant company facing a mega merger would likely have an army of lobbyists promising some unique level of access: "That’s what Washington is all about."
• Still, the fact that Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, isn’t a registered lobbyist experienced in the workings of the federal government raises questions.
• A big one is whether AT&T expected something concrete in return for the money it funneled to Cohen.
• The special counsel Robert Mueller who is overseeing an investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election has contacted AT&T over its payment to Cohen.

AT&T paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to Trump lawyer Michael Cohen’s firm, Essential Consultants, might seem strange. But paying to gain the ear of a powerful government figure is business as usual in the "swamp" of Washington, experts say, especially for a behemoth company with a pending merger.

"Twenty percent of the buildings on K Street are lobbyists selling you access pretty forthrightly," Erik Gordon, a professor at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business, told Business Insider. "That’s what Washington is all about."

On Tuesday, Michael Avenatti, the lawyer for the porn star Stormy Daniels, released a document revealing that "Essential received $200,000 in four separate payments of $50,000 in late 2017 and early 2018 from AT&T." A CNBC report suggests the number could be as high as $600,000.

AT&T confirmed to Business Insider that Essential Consultants was "one of several firms we engaged in early 2017 to provide insights into understanding the new administration."

AT&T had good reason to need insight. Bloomberg reported Wednesday that AT&T “wanted guidance” on how Trump would react to its proposed merger with Time Warner. (AT&T did not respond to a request for comment on that report.)

Trump didn’t react favorably. While most observers had expected the $85 billion deal to not face too many regulatory headaches, the Justice Department threw a wrench into the merger last November when it sued to block it. The status of the deal is pending.

Buying access to Trump

Gordon said any company of AT&T’s size, especially one seeking approval for a merger, would want the type of insight and access someone like Cohen could provide.

Former lobbyist Mark Naples, who runs the digital media consulting firm WIT Strategy, agreed. Given the stakes involved in the proposed Time Warner merger, he said, the sum is not outrageous.

“What Trump has been referring to as 'The Swamp' he was going to drain is what we in DC used to call 'Gucci Gulch,’” Naples told Business Insider. “I was a lobbyist for 11 years, and knew all sorts of guys who had LLCs like Essential Consultants."

“The thing [lobbyists] will boast about is getting you access to sell your side of the story,” Gordon said.

There’s no business as usual in Trump’s Washington

AT&T maintains that Cohen didn’t act as a lobbyist on its behalf.

AT&T told Business Insider that Essential Consulting did “no legal or lobbying work for us, and the contract ended in December 2017.”

Gordon said there wasn’t much difference between lobbying and consulting when it came to potential legal consequences for AT&T. Both are acceptable under the law as long as they don’t stray into the category of bribery.

“The law is very narrow in terms of what constitutes a bribe,” Mimi Rocah, a former federal prosecutor in New York, told Bloomberg. “You can pay money to get access to politics and curry favor — you just can’t pay money to get an official action.”

In a follow-up statement to Business Insider, an AT&T spokesperson said the special counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating multiple threads in a probe of Russian interference in the 2016 US election, had contacted AT&T about its payment to Cohen.

“When we were contacted by the Special Counsel’s office regarding Michael Cohen, we cooperated fully, providing all information requested in November and December of 2017," the statement read, adding that its consulting contract with Cohen expired at the end of 2017.

AT&T's statement continues: "Since then, we have received no additional questions from the Special Counsel's office and consider this matter closed."

One veteran DC lobbyist told Business Insider that the payment to Cohen seemed “highly abnormal,” but it’s unclear whether AT&T was trying to gain more nebulous “influence” or saw this move as a way to pay for a specific action.

“Cohen doesn't know the function of government,” the lobbyist said. “So it begs the question whether corporate entities believed that being close to people close to Trump would be to their benefit. What we don’t know is whether they expected quid pro quo.”

But this is the Trump administration, where the norms in many areas of government have shifted.

“The world is upside down right now,” the lobbyist said.

It’s a PR nightmare for AT&T

Even if AT&T paying Cohen is legally fine, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a huge blunder.

Jo-Ellen Pozner, professor of management at Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business, said that hiring Cohen, who was not a traditional registered lobbyist, was a big ethical red flag.

Legally “this may be defensible but it’s extremely dubious,” she said. “If you're AT&T and need a lobbyist, you're not going to the white pages. They know all the industry players. Cohen is not a lobbyist and has no experience in telecom … So the only reason to find someone like that if you’re AT&T is to do something that is not quite lobbying.”

Plus, the fact that Trump has referred to Cohen multiple times as his “personal attorney,” and Cohen’s shell company seems to have been established just to funnel payments to Stormy Daniels, all makes AT&T’s choice to tap Essential Consultants look off.

“AT&T’s misstep was picking Cohen,” Gordon said. “They should have gone through an organized company.” He said whoever made that decision at AT&T was likely “in the hot seat” right now and that the “optics of Cohen are lousy.”

“It’s a big PR difference” for AT&T, he continued, even if it’s not a legal one. “The last thing [AT&T needs] is a ‘can you trust them’ PR moment,” he said, as it seeks to complete its Time Warner merger.

Indeed, angry Twitter users have been bombarding its account since the news broke.

“So AT&T, as one of your customers, I want answers about the money you paid to Michael Cohen,” one user wrote. “What was the money for exactly? I am considering dropping your services like a bag of dirt if that money was what I think it was for.”

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NOW WATCH: Why Apple makes it so hard to get a new iPhone battery

Android Pie could be one of the most consequential Android updates in years. Not only is Google changing the way Android is navigated, but it’s also changing the way we interact with our phones — and how our phones interact with us. The update’s overarching goals are to make our phones less distracting and less stressful and to give people control over how much of their attention they suck up. It’s all about taking on notification and app overload.

Pie is now available for the Pixel, Pixel 2, and Essential Phone, and it’s supposed to come to other phones that had beta access within the next few months. Unfortunately, not all of Pie’s biggest features are available from the start — most notably, Google’s “digital wellbeing” features are o...

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Every company in Silicon Valley will tell you, with operatic grandeur, that it aims to change the world and make it a better place. But set aside the pretenders trying to sell you $400 juicers, Google happens to be a company that can actually alter the way we, as a global society, interact with and understand one another. Google has control over the world’s dominant search engine, web browser, video and email platforms, mapping service, and mobile operating system. The decisions made by this company have far-reaching effects, and Google I/O 2018 presented a vision of the future that makes Google even more personal, influential, and essential in our daily lives.

One of Google’s promotional videos during the event concluded with the...

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At its 2018 I/O developer conference, Google showed off some updates coming to Google Home and Assistant. One feature — Google Duplex — can make phone calls for you and talk to the person on the other end to schedule appointments and make reservations. Google says the feature will roll out as an experiment over the coming weeks.

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During Google’s I/O developer conference keynote, artificial intelligence was once again the defining theme and Google’s guiding light for the future. AI is now interwoven into everything Google does, and nowhere is the benefits of CEO Sundar Pichai’s AI-first approach more apparent than with Google Lens.

The Lens platform combines the company’s most cutting-edge advances in computer vision and natural language processing with the power of Google Search. In doing so, Google makes a compelling argument for why its way of developing AI will generate more immediately useful software than its biggest rivals, like Amazon and Facebook. It also gives AI naysayers an illustrative example of what the technology can do for consumers, instead of...

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Ballfinger is releasing new models of its reel-to-reel tape decks, which will go on sale later in May, as reported by Bloomberg. Ballfinger says its tape decks are designed for professional use and made of high-strength aluminum. All the elements for recording are on the right, playback is on the left, and drive functions are arranged in the middle. Ballfinger had previously shown one of its tape deck machines last year at an audio show.

The company will sell four different models of the tape deck (the M063H5, M063H3, M063H1, M063HX), and each will have its own unique features. The machines are pricey; they start from 9,500 euros (about $11,400) and go up to 24,000 euros ($28,500). Ballfinger’s M063H5 high-end model is equipped with an...

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Someday in the not-so-distant future, you might be able to walk into a concert venue without waiting in line for your ticket to be scanned — because instead, the venue will automatically scan and identify your face.

That’s the experience that Live Nation and Ticketmaster suggested they’ll try to develop last week, when announcing an investment in Blink Identity. Blink is a brand new company that claims to be able to identify people walking by in “half a second,” even if they aren’t looking straight at a camera.

“We will continue investing in new technologies to further differentiate Ticketmaster from others in the ticketing business,” Live Nation wrote in a note to investors last week....

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We gather once again at the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, California, to check out all the latest that Google has in store for 2018: updates to Android P, Google Assistant, Android TV, Android Auto, AR, and more. Will CEO Sundar Pichai review Android P’s official name? What’s new with the Google Home? Will there be a surprise hardware announcement? Whatever happens, The Verge has you covered with all the latest headlines out of Google I/O 2018.

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The unfortunate reality about spam calls — a common practice among criminals and unsavory marketers — is that it still works, given how so many people still fall victim these days.

Indeed, about 3.4 billion Americans received spam calls in April alone, according to The New York Times, which cites a recent study by spam call blocking company YouMail.

After all, when you see an incoming phone call from a number you don't know, but has the same area code as you, it's understandable why you would drop your guard and pick up the phone.

Spam callers can make it seem like they're calling from your hometown's area code with a tactic called caller ID "spoofing." The word "spoof" means both to imitate something, as well as to trick someone. 

The most popular way that miscreants spoof their caller ID is with voice-over-IP (VoIP) services. Some of these VoIP services let spam callers choose what number they want their victims to see on their phone's caller ID.

All the spammer needs to do is pick an area code, find every number with that area code in a directory — like a phone book — use the VoIP service to set their own caller ID with the same area code, and call every number in the list.

Meticulous spammers can even change their caller ID so they have the same area code and the same three to six numbers after your area code as your own phone number — so that their number looks especially local, as if a neighbor or nearby business was calling. So if your phone number was 111-222-3333 — a spammer can set their caller ID to show up as 111-222-3334.

The best way to handle an unknown caller, even if the number looks similar to your own phone number, is simply to let the call go unanswered, and let the caller leave a voicemail. If there's no voicemail, either the call was spam, or the message wasn't that important to begin with. If the caller does leave a voicemail, you can decide for yourself whether the call was legitimate or not — but if the voicemail asks for personal information like credit card numbers or social security numbers, it's almost certainly a scam.

You could always add your phone number to the FTC's "Do not call" registry, but it doesn't always work. Despite adding my phone number to the registry, I keep getting suspected spam calls that I usually let go to voicemail. One of the most common voicemails I get is from "Rachel" about a $250,000 line of credit I never applied for. I suspect I'll keep getting spam calls from "Rachel."

David Cogen from the The Unlockr YouTube channel also posted an interesting — yet somewhat drastic — method of dealing with spam calls that could help take your number off spammer call lists. It involves tricking the spam caller into hearing a message that your phone number is not active, but it also involves you carrying around a tiny speaker around with you for a couple weeks, so it's not a solution that will work for most people.

Cogen says he's received fewer spam calls after trying his method. Perhaps it can work for you. 

SEE ALSO: These 5 apps make better phone calls than your phone app — and you probably already have them

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NOW WATCH: I spent a week using the iPhone 8 and I think you should wait for the iPhone X — here's why

Microsoft just demonstrated a meeting room of the future at the company’s Build developer conference. Meeting rooms, conference calls, and meetings in general are usually the stuff of nightmares, but Microsoft is working on prototype hardware that will make meetings a lot easier. Microsoft’s meeting room demonstration is seriously impressive, and provides a glimpse of what’s possible in the future.

It all starts with a 360-degree camera and microphone array that can detect anyone in a meeting room, greet them, and even transcribe exactly what they say in a meeting regardless of language. Microsoft has been working on translation features for Skype for years, and the meeting room of the future includes this technology.

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As I talk with the many extraordinary guests on CXOTalk, an interview discussion forum that brings together the most innovative thinkers in the world, three key business aspects of artificial intelligence have emerged.

First, AI is a vague umbrella concept that ties together data and a set of technologies, such as pattern recognition and other techniques, that emulate human learning and intelligence. The term “artificial intelligence” is an imprecise marketing or presentation phrase used for the sake of convenience. Business buyers should dig deeper to understand the technologies that make the most sense for their organizations.

Second, few companies have deployed AI at scale. There are lots of prototypes and proofs of concept, but AI is still new and experimental for most organizations. For example, a recent survey by SAS states “AI adoption still in early stages.”

Third, be skeptical of vendor claims. Technology companies are still trying to figure out where AI can improve their products and the processes they automate. Many vendors have bought AI startups to gain expertise and fill gaps.

The bottom line for enterprise buyers: learn the tech, question your vendors, and plan for AI by developing data science talent in-house now. Talent scarcity is a big issue today.

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McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) is one of the foremost research organizations in the world on how AI will affect organizations and their workforce. McKinsey’s research combines quantitative analysis with extensive on-the-ground interviews of executives and business operators. As a result, the material they produce is insightful and useful. Two recent reports focus on the business value of AI and the impact of automation and demographics on work and the economy.

One of the partners leading McKinsey Global Institute’s work on the impact of AI and related technologies is Dr. Michael Chui, who is one of the most articulate people I know on these topics.

Chui’s comments are clear and rooted in solid research, making him a natural participant in the CXOTalk series of conversations with the most innovative leaders in the world. On episode 268 of CXOTalk, I spoke with Michael Chui about AI, business, ethics, policy, and economics.

Chui makes a couple of key points that I want to highlight. First, the success of an organization’s efforts to adopt AI is based strongly on its overall digital maturity. Companies with active programs of digital transformation will be more likely to make progress with AI initiatives. From my perspective, we can think of AI initiatives as extensions of digital transformation – rethinking culture, mindset, and business model — rather than isolated technology projects.

Second, start thinking now about how you will train your workforce as AI changes jobs and frees up labor to be re-deployed. Chui says that mass redeployment of labor will likely be one of the “grand challenges” we face.

The in-depth conversation lasts 45-minutes and is an important document describing how one of the world’s top AI business researchers views the issues today. You can watch the entire conversation and read a complete transcript of episode 268 at the CXOTalk site.

Here is an edited summary transcript pulled from the long discussion:

Tell us about McKinsey Global Institute?

McKinsey & Company is a global management consulting firm. The McKinsey Global Institute is part of McKinsey. It’s an investment by our group of global partners around the world to do research, quite frankly, on topics that matter. We’ve been around for over 25 years as part of McKinsey [and], for most of that time, have done work on productivity, country competitiveness, labor markets, [and] capital markets.

For the past few years, we’ve added another research leg, which is around the impact of long-term technology trends. We’ve looked at data and analytics. We’ve looked at open data. We’ve looked at Internet of Things. Increasingly, now we’re looking at artificial intelligence, robotics, and automation technologies and their potential impact on business, society, and jobs and employment more generally.

How do you define artificial intelligence?

You could go for hours debating it. We describe it as using machines to do cognitive work, to do the work that comes about primarily because of our brains. But, as it turns out, even from my graduate research studies, we know that not all our intelligence is just trapped in our brains. It’s also part of our bodies, et cetera. And so, we understand that, in many cases, artificial intelligence itself might enter the physical world and be things like robotics and autonomous vehicles, et cetera. But, it has to do with intelligence and then the machines that instantiate it.

What are some of the important conclusions of your research?

The potential for these technologies that we call artificial intelligence is huge. They affect potentially every sector, potentially every function. One reason for that is a lot of the potential applications of AI are extensions of the work that people had already started in data and analytics. And so, we’ve been looking at nearly 500 different use cases of artificial intelligence across every sector, across every function.

Sometimes what we say is, these traditional analytic methods, whether it’s regression or what have you, gets you this much impact. But, when you could add the multidimensionality of additional data or these additional deep learning techniques, you could increase, for instance, forecast accuracy or increased OEE or decreased waste, a number of these things, which these use cases allow us to do. You could think of AI as just being another turbocharged tool for your analytical toolkit. I think that’s one broad finding, which is that there is almost no part of the business that this couldn’t affect.

Another piece, though, is we’ve been surveying thousands of different executives in companies all around the world. My colleagues who serve clients on these topics also have very direct contact with people who are thinking about or are using AI. One of the things that we know now, as we sit in December 2017, as we’re talking, is that it’s very early. While there’s huge potential for improving economics, both in the top line and bottom line, only a very small percentage of companies have either deployed AI at scale or within core business processes.

Now, that’s changing every day as more companies develop this capability, learn more about the technology, and they can embed it within the processes of an organization, which in some cases is the hardest thing to do. We’re just very early on this learning curve. It’s a steep learning curve, but we’re early. There is so much potential, but we’re early.

What are common threads among the industries you have studied?

There are many industries where much of their value gets driven by their customer interactions. If you’re a retail company, if you’re a consumer package company, et cetera, it might make more sense to look at the value of AI and those types of functions. On the other hand, if your operational effectiveness drives you, if you’re in the business of manufacturing, delivering and shipping products, for instance, if you’re in logistics, then perhaps those operational needs [take precedence]. I think those are, at least at the top level, one way to think about it.

Another common thread that we have found is the following, which is, I think often you discover a technology which has a potentially transformative impact. You say, “Gosh, isn’t there a shortcut? Can’t I just jump and use that to compete?”

Because we need large training sets of data for AI, in fact, we’ve discovered a high correlation between sectors and individual companies that are further along on their digitization journey — the ability to use digital within their core processes to improve process effectiveness. There’s a high correlation between that and being ready for AI.

One of the other common threads we’ve discovered is, it’s quite difficult to accelerate past your digitization journey. You need to be on the digital journey to enable yourself to be ready for AI. I think that’s another finding.

If you want to accelerate your potential impact with AI, you need to accelerate your move along the digital journey.

What will the impact of AI be on workforce issues?

Some of the potential impacts are for these technologies to automate activities that we currently pay people to do in the economy.

We looked at individual activities, not just occupation, so 2,000 different activities we pay people to do in the global economy. Half the time people spend being paid at work is on activities that theoretically we could automate by adapting technologies that exist today. That sounds scary, right? That’s a large percentage, but we’re not predicting 50% unemployment tomorrow partly because it takes real time. It takes real time to develop the technology.

You need a positive business case. Technologies tend to be expensive when they are first developed, whether it’s a self-driving car or an artificial intelligence algorithm. That cost declines thanks to Moore’s law. You need to net that out against the cost of human labor, and that’s different around the world.

In any case, 50% of the world’s activities potentially might not be automated for another 40 years, so 2055. Although, we have a scenario which is 20 years earlier and a scenario that’s 20 years later. We do know that increasingly activities we pay people to do will be automated.

The question then is, will there be enough demand for human labor, even net of the things that might be automated? Our report from last month suggests yes.

If you look different potential catalysts — whether increasing prosperity around the world; another billion people entering the consuming class in the next couple of decades; whether you’re talking about aging, which is a troubling thing because we have [fewer] workers, but on the other hand it drives the need for healthcare. We have roles for people to develop and deploy the technologies themselves.

Hopefully, we’re going to see increased investment in infrastructure to help the consuming class, but also fix and improve the infrastructure we have. We’ll see changes in energy mix and efficiency, and potentially even a lot of what’s currently unpaid work in the economy that’s many times done by women at home, whether it’s childcare, cooking and cleaning, increasingly enter the market.

If you look at all of those things together, and then even your net against those the activities that AI and robotics might do, we still see plenty of work for people to do, enough to offset the effects of automation.

The broad question, though, is, if you think mass unemployment isn’t going to be the problem, mass redeployment might be the problem. As much as we want the education system to get better, it works fairly well.

We think that potentially the great grand challenge for the next couple of decades is, how do we retrain millions of workers who technology will displace? We need them to keep working to have economic growth and yet, at scale, retraining of people past their first two decades of life is something that I dare say we haven’t completely solved yet. That’s something on which we badly need to work.

Should business leaders start to think about worker retraining now or is it still too early?

This demands some immediate attention. It’s not necessarily because things are going to happen overnight, particularly with AI. But, if we think about automation technologies more broadly, then, in fact, we are starting to see these things, whether it’s robotic process automation, whether it’s physical automation from a manufacturing plant, in logistics, or in a distribution center. These technologies are coming into play today.

While we’ve described this as a multi-decade trend, which will take time in macro, it will happen quickly for individuals. It will happen quickly for individual workers. It also takes time to understand retraining. We described this as a grand challenge. Usually, grand challenges aren’t solved overnight, and so I do think business leaders engaging on this question about retraining their workforce on a continuous basis at scale is something that is a question that ought to be top of their mind when they’re starting to think about their workforce strategy.

The idea of universal basic income sometimes comes up in these discussions?

This idea of a universal basic income, guaranteed minimum income, et cetera, is capturing a lot of currency. I sit in San Francisco here and, as it turns out, there are a lot of people talking about it there. There are lots of arguments for it.

One of those arguments is if we think the machines are going to take everybody’s job and we’re going to have mass unemployment, we need to make sure that everybody has enough income so that they, in fact, can feed themselves and feed their families. I think that justification or that rationale for universal basic income gives up too early because that assumes mass unemployment. In fact, what we say is we do need mass redeployment, not mass unemployment, just to make sure that we have enough economic growth going forward.

Our point of view is that we’ve looked at the past 50 years of economic growth. Half of that has come about because of more people working. Because of aging, we’re going to lose a lot of that. One way to think about it is we just don’t have enough workers. We need all the AIs, robots, et cetera working, plus we need people working to have economic growth. Again, if you think UBI is based on the fact that we’re going to have mass unemployment, I think you’ve given up already and, in fact, you need to move.

The other thing that I think is also helpful, again, as we modeled out the potential impact of AI and other technologies, plus these additional drivers, we might continue to see this increasing income dispersion or income inequality. You might ask, “Look. We just need to make sure that people get paid enough.” Well, then again, if you want to look at it from a public policy standpoint, maybe you could target the types of subsidies such as the Earned Income Tax Credit, which both incent work as well as provide additional income to people. I think, thinking through all of those possibilities.

Now, that said, UBI for a place that’s a developing country, again, it might put a floor in place that allows people to have a lot more freedom regarding what they’re able to do in their job. But, in a developed country, both because of the expense, as well as the fact that it isn’t targeted towards trying to get people working, I think it’s challenging for that reason. That said, the overall point, another overall point that we found from history, which we hope will continue is, while we don’t think everyone can completely stop working, the working week has declined, on average, by double-digit percentages over a matter of decades and centuries.

Hopefully, we all can have more time for leisure. By the way, leisure drives new activities, new occupations. That’s something else we need to do. We need to continue to generate new activities and occupations. Hopefully, the workweek will continue to decrease over time. At least, for the foreseeable future, we don’t see it going to zero.

What about changing demographics?

Demographics is interesting and includes a number of powerful factors. Again, we cover some of this in the report we published last month. First of all, countries vary greatly in their demographics. For many countries, they’re aging, and that exacerbates this question; we don’t have enough workers to continue the economic growth that we’ve enjoyed for so many years. The reason why we have better lives than our parents and our parents had better lives than our grandparents, et cetera, is because of this economic growth and half of it coming from more people working.

Germany’s workforce is declining. Japan’s workforce is declining. China, with a population of a billion and a half people, their workforce either is or, depending on who you ask, will shortly begin declining. Those are countries which simply don’t have enough workers to underpin economic growth. Again, one of the implications of that is AI and robotics can be some of the workers, can fill in for that gap regarding just numbers of people who are available to work.

That said, there are other countries like India, countries on the African continent, et cetera, which are very young, and their demographic pyramid looks very different. We’re concerned at some point about the fact, well, gosh, what if automation AI, these technologies, come into play just as they need to create even more jobs? That’s absolutely true in India, for instance; another 150 million people need jobs going forward.

We modeled out all of these potential drivers of additional demand. By the way, we picked seven of them. We know that there are more, so even our modeling is limited. Particularly in those countries which tend to be young, those are countries also which tend to have high aspirations for their economic growth. They start relatively low on the GDP per capita scale. As a result, that will generate lots of demand for human labor, as well as robotics and artificial intelligence. Even in those countries, we see the potential for lots of work as well, work to be done.

Again, that comes back to the question of retraining and education. Can we get people into those jobs? Then, can you deploy those technologies in a way because, as I said before, AI and robotics require an underpinning of moving on the digital journey? Even those countries, which are developing and young, will need to move on the digital journey for them to take advantage of these other technologies and improve their productivity while they’re generating new jobs for people as well.

What advice do you have for established organizations?

Number one is, dedicate some time and resources to understanding the technology and its potential. I mean I should have said they should read our report, but [laughter] but I’m not going to do the commercial. I think it is starting to understand what that potential is. Then I think the same sort of test and learn philosophy, which was effective in data and analytics broadly, I think that’s something which is true here, too.

Another thing I think, which is also true, is particularly for the technologies which are working well today around machine learning and deep learning. They’re based on having training sets, so data. I think being sophisticated about having a data strategy is important.

I had the opportunity to speak with Andrew Ng, for instance, who is one of the pioneers in deep learning and machine learning, overall. He talks about some of the leading companies in the deployment of AI, really spending time on these multiyear views of what data is important to be collected or have access to so they’ll be able to compete going forward, and they’re playing these multiyear. He describes them as multidimensional chess games to have access to the data which matters.

One of the largest challenges now is on the human talent side. We saw this with data scientists previously. Again, to a certain extent, we talked about many of the AI use cases being extensions of the analytics use cases. The analytics challenges about talent now are extended to the challenges around AI as well, and so huge amounts of war for talent regarding people who understand these technologies deeply.

Of course, that’s changing, too, as more and more people take advantage of online resources, enroll in classes, et cetera. Again, supply and demand are constantly evolving. Right now, demand is so high, and supply is relatively limited. One of the biggest challenges is just having people onboard who can do it.

CXOTalk brings together the most world’s top business and government leaders for in-depth conversations on digital disruption, AI, innovation, and related topics. Be sure to watch our many episodes! Thumbnail image Creative Commons from Pixabay.

(Cross-posted @ ZDNet | Beyond IT Failure Blog)

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

Many people will write the history on why Ring became an enormously successful company and why it became a real-world unicorn in a world when many startups are anointed that merely on paper. Since I had a ringside seat to the company before it really existed all the way through the end I thought I’d offer my version and what I think it means for our future.

If you don’t know, Ring offers home security products that started with a video doorbell, then video floodlights, outdoor stickup cams and now in-home security features that innovate in-home security alongside outside protection. It is an LA-based company that was recently acquired by Amazon, which you can read more about in this incredibly well-researched article.

But why did Ring succeed when the entire market kept saying that Nest was going to be the winner? Why did Ring become an enormous success when it produced a hardware product and the market keeps saying, “hardware is too difficult to scale?”

Here are my views …

1. Founder, Founder, Founder

At Upfront we talk regularly about how 70% of our investment decision in Seed and A rounds is the quality of the entrepreneur and 30% is the quality of the idea. Of course we have to believe that there is a viable market, a differentiated product offering and a chance to build something defensible but if you do those basics right you still get crushed without an amazingly talented founder.

The minute your company reaches its peak acceleration in terms of growth is when all of the sleeping giants wake up to compete with you and will spend massive amounts of money to keep you from capturing a growth market and other talented entrepreneurs will raise large amounts of venture capital as people start to see value in the market.

Jamie Siminoff is not only one of the single best true entrepreneurs in Los Angeles, he’s amongst the best we’ve worked with in the country. We first met Jamie when had had a startup called Simulscribe, which transcribed voicemail so you could read your messages rather than listen to them. It was a novel concept well before the major players did this for you. He launched a business called Unsubscribe, which helped consumers deal with the deluge of email lists that one gets signed up to and get rid of them all. Throughout all of this we saw a tinkerer, a problem solver and a completely obsessed leader who was competitive and wanted to win.

When Jamie told us he was going to build “Doorbot” (the name prior to Ring) and he explained to us that it was a video security doorbell sold at mass-market prices to bring security to homes that have never been able to afford them — we were sold on the concept immediately. We funded the seed round, the A round, the B round, C round, D round and E round. We would have gladly followed Jamie (and Josh Roth, the CTO who is phenomenal and we’ve also known for a decade) right through an IPO if we could have. Jamie is truly a visionary and a focused executioner.

Were we SURE that consumers would buy a video doorbell? We were CONVINCED Dropcam (then Nest) wouldn’t mobilize a competing product quickly if it did sell? No. We weren’t sure. But we were sure that Jamie would be maniacally focused on improving the product, marketing the dream to consumers and out-maneuvering the slower-moving competition. He did all of these and more.

I should also say a huge thank you to my partner Greg Bettinelli, as Ring was amongst the first deals he ever funded and along with GOAT, thredUP and some of the other great deals he’s led for us — his insights and track record are looking stellar.

2. Single-purpose beats generic

One our biggest beliefs about Ring and frankly many of the other companies we’ve backed in computer vision (Nanit for baby monitors, Osmo for kids education & games, Density for people counts) is that focused computer vision beats generic use cases. Sure, general purpose cameras or laser tracking can be put up anywhere in your house, business or yard but they don’t solve specific problems well so eventually consumers stop using them.

With Ring it became your doorbell so of course you always use it when someone’s at your door. It has computer vision that sets off a motion detector when somebody passes in front of its field of vision so that you know when there’s somebody in front of your house even IF they don’t ring the doorbell. Importantly you can set “zones” so that it only triggers when somebody is only 10 feet from the house in front where perhaps cars might otherwise trigger the system whereas you can set the left and right field of vision to 30 feet so that intruders are picked up more quickly if they’re in a zone they shouldn’t be in (you can see some visuals in this old TechCrunch article from 2014).

Generic cam’s could never match the security use case as well as Ring could and when consumers went online or to a store to find our product the offering was very clear. Where you see cameras on Amazon and think “cool, but what would I really use it for?”— you would immediately understand a video doorbell use case.

Then Jamie built “stick up cams” to allow you to protect the perimeter of your house and floodlight cams for night time that screwed into existing floodlight sockets, making installation a piece of cake.

3. Consumer value

Once Jamie realized that he could not only sell tens of millions of dollars of home security cameras he also realized that he could get customers to sign up for a monthly subscription to keep the videos in storage in the cloud and review them after the fact. Jamie’s ethos led him to price at just $3 / user / camera / month at a time when traditional home security companies’ monthly fees were so unaffordable. He really thought about helping middle-income families. We had this discussion many times and with Jamie it wasn’t a marketing slogan — it was a personal mission.

A critical component to building a successful business is being able to capture ongoing revenue from consumers who feel they are getting incredible value and continue to feel good about paying. Having recurring revenue allows you to keep the original purchase price down, which in turn increases sales. In addition to the service where you can watch old videos being very compelling, the fact that Jamie has provided this service at such an affordable cost has been a large part of the appeal.

All of this was deeply rooted in Jamie’s desire to deliver consumer value for middle-income homes across the country. On numerous occasions I heard investors suggest that there was a much higher price point that consumers would pay but Jamie would have none of it. He believed that if he sold low-cost, affordable security solutions he not only would build a mass-market company but he would also earn the right to sell more future products to existing customers, which is always more valuable than signing up new customers.

Ultimately, I believe Jamie’s maniacal focus on consumer value proved to be one of the endearing things that established Ring as a beloved consumer brand.

4. Hardware + Software

The world is filled with investors who will tell you, “We don’t do hardware.” I always thought this was kind of silly because HW plus SW can produce some of the most defensible, enduring businesses if one gets it right. Yes, you have to figure out how to finance inventory and sure, it’s harder to iterate products when it involved physical production — but greatness is never easy and the spoils go to those who solve harder problems.

Just look at the success of Apple. It is fundamentally because they build very compelling hardware that couples with iTunes, the App Store and so forth. I have often argued that I believe Amazon is very well positioned in the long-term vs. Netflix because with its Echo product and Amazon Fire and its emerging tablet business it will offer significantly more touch-points for customers when they go to discover video.

And the advantages in hardware are precisely why Google had to build the Pixel phone and Google Home because if it cedes hardware dominance to others it would have eventually found its core search business eroding.

While many analysts have equated “IoT” (Internet of Things) with wearables, I have long believed that the true value would come more from using cameras, lasers, infrared and sensors to track what is happening in the physical world through the use of technology. Today voice is becoming more dominant as an “input” to computing but in the future cameras and sensors will become even more important.

5. Brand

Jamie was one of the first entrepreneurs I knew to go on Shark Tank. Back when many VCs and entrepreneurs were still dismissing the show as “cheesy” — Jamie understood the mass-market appeal and the massive audience he could reach going on the show. Both the show and Ring went on to be smashing successes and to this date Ring has been the most successful startup to appear on Shark Tank (even though those suckers passed! They could have owned 10% for $700k. If you want to see the original episode it’s here).

While Jamie started the company as DoorBot he knew that he needed a more memorable name to build a consumer brand so as soon as he had raised enough money he ponied up to buy Ring.com, which you could imagine wasn’t cheap. Not everybody was convinced it was worth the money but Jamie was steadfast.

When Jamie wanted to sign on Shaq as the company spokesperson it also cost money. Traditional investors are so focused on “quantitative marketing” that he got a lot of advice that this money was better spent on online customer acquisition. I remember Jamie told me back then, “Mark, when people walk into a store to buy a security camera three years from now there are going to be five of them listing features, functions and gadgets. They’re not going to be able to differentiate one from the other based on product specs but then they’ll see “Ring” and Shaq and have the recognition of the marketing campaigns we ran and reach for our product.” He was steadfast. He was dogmatic. He was self-assured. He was right. See bullet point 1.

Next Jamie told me he planned to sell products on QVC. That was probably one step further away from the Silicon Valley ethos than even Shark Tank! Jamie’s logic was clear — millions of people watch QVC and I will have unique access to them to tell our story that they might not pay attention to in an online ad — so he went on. And although I can’t reveal actual numbers I can tell you that through his first few appearances he sold TENS OF MILLIONS of dollars of product.

6. Viral Adoption / Group Use Cases

Jamie didn’t want to stop at a single household. He believed he could build a “Ring of Security” around your neighborhood. He created a technology version of Neighborhood Watch where people in your neighborhood could share suspicious footage of individuals around their house.

If you have a minute please watch this really inspirational video of how Ring reduced crime in an LA neighborhood by 55%. It’s a really important lesson because when you see the extent to which Jamie went out into the community to drive real change using his product and working with the police you can see what it took to have an A++ founder with a single-purpose device (security) and low-cost solutions for middle-income families helped build a beloved brand.

What does this all mean for the future?

Security is only one of the many use cases for how cameras, lasers and sensors can interpret the physical world and aid us in creating more compelling life experiences. I believe that the keyboard I am typing from and the mouse for navigation is a thing of the past.

Today we are bridging the Human-Computer Interface (HCI) through voice commands but we’re also very clearly moving towards computer vision HCI to improve how humans interact with computing devices. Whereas a doctor can ask you to walk across her office on one date and look at your gait for signs of Parkinson’s or other maladies that cause shuffling — she may not observe the behavior on that date. Camera, lasers and sensors can observe on a continual basis helping us with medical diagnosis.

The future is a computer vision world, from autonomous vehicles to robotics to security, training, education and entertainment. I’m super proud to see Jamie having become a world-class leader in this space and to Amazon for having the foresight to bring on board a tremendous brand, a great leader, an amazing team and for continuing to be … #LongLA.

(Cross-posted @ Both Sides of the Table)

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

• Apple announced as part of its quarterly earnings report on Tuesday that it would buy back another $100 billion of its stock.
• When Congress passed the GOP tax law last year, there were fears that companies would use the cash saved to enrich shareholders rather than employees — and Apple's announcement would seem to fuel those concerns.
• Apple's chief financial officer, Luca Maestri, defended the buyback on an earnings call Tuesday evening, saying the company's stock is undervalued and arguing it has enough cash to satisfy multiple corporate needs.

When President Donald Trump's massive tax plan was announced last year, experts immediately feared the worst about how companies would spend the additional cash they'd soon have for deployment.

They figured corporations would choose to enrich shareholders through buybacks and dividends, rather than reinvest in their business or create jobs.

Their fears were valid. In 2004, the last time a tax holiday occurred, companies used a whopping 80% of their proceeds on share repurchases. This time around, Bank of America Merrill Lynch expects that figure to be just 50% — but the jury is still out.

Apple didn't help matters much on Tuesday when it said it would buy back an additional $100 billion of its stock, an eye-popping number that marks the biggest increase for a company already known for making massive repurchases.

Sure, the announcement boosted Apple's stock, which was 3% higher in early trading on Wednesday. But it also fueled concerns that companies are spending their windfall with shareholders in mind rather than employees.

Apple's chief financial officer, Luca Maestri, didn't seem particularly concerned on the company's earnings call on Tuesday. He rationalized the buyback authorization by saying Apple's stock is still undervalued and said the firm was still sinking money back into its business.

Basically, the argument is that Apple has enough cash to do both handily. And since it recently expressed a desire to get its net cash balance down to zero, perhaps its recent behavior makes a bit more sense.

"Our balance sheet and our cash flow generation are strong, and that allows us to invest significantly in our product roadmap and still return a very meaningful amount of capital to our shareholders," Maestri said on the call.

Looking outside of Apple, UBS has found that corporate reinvestment — as measured by capital expenditures — has surged 39% so far this earnings season. That has outpaced net share buybacks (16%) and dividends paid (11%) by more than double and is the fastest rate since 2011, according to the firm's data.

That should put investors' minds at ease somewhat as they study the use of proceeds resulting from the new tax law. There appears to be enough cash floating around to meet multiple needs at once — and it would seem Apple is trying to do just that.

SEE ALSO: JPMorgan's quant guru explains how the 'Uberization' of markets poses an enormous risk

Join the conversation about this story »

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For a company as big and sprawling as Google, an annual developer conference can feel overwhelming. And, frankly, it is. Google offers a dizzying number of services and dabbles in almost every consumer tech industry under the sun, not to mention the 7 billion-plus user core internet products it owns and operates. But the company has a measured tempo when it comes to Google I/O, and we’ve come to understand how it prioritizes certain products over others come May every year.

At this year’s I/O, which will be held again at the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, California starting Tuesday, May 8th, we know we’ll be hearing about the future of Android and Google’s artificial intelligence efforts. But there will also be news on...

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Last December, Ashley Sehatti sold her 2015 Jetta back to a local Volkswagen dealership in California. So when the calendar turned over, she didn’t understand why she was still getting sent monthly reports about the car’s health. After another one came in April, she finally logged on to VW’s online portal for Car-Net, the telematics system that runs in many of the company’s modern cars.

To her surprise, Sehatti saw the location of her old Jetta on a map, up-to-date mileage, and the status of the car’s locks and lights. It had been resold, and yet she still had access to some of the car’s systems. “There was nothing in place to stop me from accessing the full UI,” she says over email.

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Android users can now make custom GIFs with their cameras on Gboard. The feature, which we wrote about in January, has finally made its way to Android in beta, after being available on iOS. It looks like custom GIFs haven’t come to all Android phones. The feature is on the Google Pixel but apparently not the Samsung Galaxy S9 yet, as spotted by Android Police.

There are already a variety of ways to make custom GIFs, but Gboard places the feature pretty prominently on the keyboard, so it’s more likely to be noticed and used. Through the feature, you could potentially record wacky selfie GIFs or group shots.

To try the new feature, go into the GIF interface in the keyboard and select the “My GIFs” tab. Then, give Gboard permission to...

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The month of May has brought with it a number of executive moves and company acquisitions with direct bearing on Conversational Commerce. Cisco acquired Accompany, a startup whose core product is termed a “Virtual Assistant” by some accounts and, perhaps more accurately, an “adaptive virtual chief of staff.” A very important aspect to the acquisition is the appointment of Accompany’s co-founder and CEO Amy Chang to be the Vice President in charge of the company’s collaboration efforts.

In that capacity, Chang is taking on one of the roles of Rowan Trollope, an executive that joined the Cisco team in 2012 to pilot collaboration, but had recently added responsibility initiatives surrounding interconnection and integration of the smart endpoints that comprise the Internet of Things. Trollope has decided to leave Cisco and assume the role of CEO at Five9, a cloud-based contact center service provider whose $200 million top line and $8 million loss (in 2017) stands in stark contrast to Cisco’s $48 billion in revenue and $10 billion in net income. Although frequent change in executive ranks has characterized both companies.

The personal journeys of Trollope and Chang, respectively, are emblematic of the tactical and strategic choices confronting enterprise executives in charge of procuring technology to support digital transformation, customer experience and collaboration. There is a very interesting angle to the Accompany acquisition that introduces conversational intelligence into the Enterprise Collaboration space. This is traditionally an area where sales and marketing organizations take the lead. If Cisco is able to effectively integrate Accompany type technology into WebEx and meetings, then the buyer moves slowly away from IT and infrastructure towards lines and business.

Pause for a Pop Quiz

#1: What’s the next XaaS? Analytics as a Service? Collaboration as a Service? AI as a Service? How about “all of the above?”

#2: What is the next candidate for “BYO” status? Bring Your Own Identity (BYOID) and Bring Your Own Artificial Intelligence (BYOAI), which should better be known as Bring Your Own Bot (Whoops, BYOB is already taken).

Reminder: In the enterprise world BYOD (bring your own device) exposed cracks in the corporate security perimeter ten years ago whenever a C-level executive wanted to be able to receive email on his (or her) smartphone. This democratization of IT has spawned a minor BYO mania.

#3: What sort of company should you choose to provide your Conversational Commerce platform? A firm with a long legacy in enterprise IT infrastructure spanning IVRs, contact centers, data centers and IP networking? A small, growth company that serves as a software platform for call processing, voice processing, information processing and connections to huge amounts of data and artificial intelligence? An established cloud-based company with all of the tools and “uptime” to support contact centers, collaboration, voice processing, Big Data and Analytics?

By the way, that last category sounds an awful lot like the sweet spot for Amazon’s AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google.

Intelligent Assistance Reaches its Architectural Adolescence

We’ve entered that “uncomfortable stage” of Conversational Commerce’s technology maturity curve. Enterprise IT and Telecom infrastructure has moved to “The Cloud” at the same time that individual humans are walking around with impressive amounts of computing power and digital memory of their own. Add home and automotive electronics to the mix, along with a slew of cameras, microphones and other sensors that comprise the Internet of Things (IoT) and you’ll see the necessity to sort out options rationally to leverage the capabilities offered by the full-range of solutions providers with cloud-based, premises-based, and hybrid solutions in their bag of tricks.

Lost in “XaaS versus BYOxx” discussions is an angle that is largely unspoken: Where do the privacy rights of employees fit within all of the current public debates and discourse? Does GDPR have a business user angle? What tools, including personal virtual agents, will be provided to business users to enable them to opt-out of the capabilities being put forth by Accompany and the many others (DiscoverOrg, ClearBit, Zoominfo, Gryphon, Linkedin – just to name a few).

Meanwhile, key technology components are being rendered as commodities. Speech recognition, for instance, has become quite accurate. Text-to-speech resources are getting tremendously life-like. Machine Learning platforms are striking a balance with humans – who are sometimes trainers and sometimes beneficiaries. Banks, retailers, airlines and a number of other large companies with lots at stake, are growing comfortable incorporating these components to encourage or facilitate conversations between and among customers and employees.

Keep up with Accelerating Change

During this time of uncertainty, one thing is certain: Leaders in Financial Services, Retailing, Packaged Goods, Technology and telecom aggressively incorporating IA technologies into sales, marketing, customer support and employee collaboration fabric. In effect, they are voting with their investment decisions, and have exposed some winning approaches. Rather than investing in general “Conversational AI”, they choose use cases and approaches that center on platforms capable of rapidly recognizing and correctly responding to issues at hand (termed “categories” and “intents”) from either text or voice input. They put Natural Language Understanding and Conversational Resources in the center, but also make Knowledge Management Machine Learning key.

The number of exemplary use cases and case studies is growing and the pace of adoption is accelerating. The next big innovation could be the result of R&D efforts at Cisco, Amazon, Google or Microsoft. They may be put into practice at cloud services specialists like Five9, Interactions or Avaya. And it leaves a role for emerging, innovative companies like Accompany to be a source of new services and executive personnel. At Opus Research we urge you to watch this space for up-to-date information about successful implementations and the executive decisions that are shaping the future of IA.

The post From Cisco to Five9: A Journey that Symbolizes the State of Intelligent Assistance appeared first on .

Microsoft is working to fix some device freezing and crashing issues with Google’s Chrome browser with the new Windows 10 April 2018 Update. The software maker was forced to delay rolling out its Windows 10 April 2018 Update due to Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) issues last month, and now it’s facing these fresh issues with Chrome and the “Hey Cortana” feature.

A number of Chrome users have reported issues after installing the latest update, and Microsoft says it’s aware that devices can totally hang and lock up when using the latest Windows 10 update and Chrome. The company is trying to get it fixed in time for next week’s Patch Tuesday on May 8th, but affected users can try the following workarounds:

1. Try a Windows key sequence to wake...

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