Davemichels

Skype is finally getting a call recording feature, only 15 years after it was first released. It should be noted that Skype isn’t building its own recording software but relying on third-party apps, including Xsplit, Wirecast, and Vmix. These products, among others, have allowed you to record Skype calls for years, but now it sounds as if Microsoft wants a more streamlined version.

Windows 10 and Mac users will be able to record calls if they switch their desktop Skype client over to “Content Creators” mode, a new version designed for vloggers, streamers, and podcast creators. Users can pick which third-party software they prefer to use and Skype now supports the integration. Skype envisions you can livestream a call now on your YouTube...

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CIOs have to evaluate the features and capabilities that can help adapt to the "needs of a changing landscape," said Harry Moseley.

MIT researchers have created a wearable device called AlterEgo that can recognize nonverbal prompts, essentially “reading your mind.” The system is made up of a device that loops around a user’s ear, follows their jawline, and attaches underneath their mouth, and a computer system. The wearable device has electrodes that pick up neuromuscular signals in your jaw and face that are triggered by internal verbalizations (aka saying words in your head) but can’t be seen by the human eye. These signals are then given to a machine learning system that analyzes the data, associating specific signals with words.

“Our idea was: Could we have a computing platform that’s more internal, that melds human and machine in some ways and that feels like...

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Microsoft is introducing a new OneDrive feature this week that will make it easier to recover from ransomware attacks. Files Restore is making its way over from OneDrive for Business to personal OneDrive accounts. The catch is you’ll need an Office 365 subscription to get access to the new Files Restore feature. OneDrive users can now use it to simply restore files from any point in time within the last 30 days. If you accidentally delete a file you’ll be able to restore it, or if you make some bad changes and want to roll back to an earlier copy.

Microsoft is marketing the Files Restore feature as a good way to protect against ransomware attacks that lock files on a local PC, and often try to delete copies that are stored in synced...

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Facebook today revealed that as many as 87 million users, most of them in the US but at least 1 million in the UK, may have had their information improperly obtained and used by the data mining firm Cambridge Analytica. The revelation indicates that nearly twice as many Facebook users may have been directly affected by the ongoing data privacy scandal resulting from the unauthorized sale of the social network’s user data to the third-party company, which was contracted by the Trump campaign to help with election ad targeting. Initial reports from The New York Times and The Guardian put the figure at as many as 50 million users.

Facebook revealed the information at the bottom of a blog post penned by chief technology officer Mike...

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I have a soft spot for ultra-rugged devices. Sure, they may not always be the best phones out there when it comes to things like cameras or razor-sharp displays, but they’re a fascinating example of what happens when you take a multipurpose device like a smartphone and turn it into a gadget that’s designed for just one thing. In this case, that’s sheer and almost ridiculously overengineered ruggedness. Joining the ring as a new contender for the toughest phone yet is the Sonim XP8, which recently went on sale at AT&T, via Android Police.

As an Android phone, there’s not much to see here. It still runs Android Nougat, instead of the newer Oreo, and internally, there’s a Snapdragon 630 processor, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage (which can be...

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Former Twitter product lead April Underwood is getting another promotion this morning, now rising to the role of chief product officer of what aims to be the dead-simple employee communications platform Slack, according to Fortune.

Underwood previously served as director of product at Twitter, where she worked for five years before joining Slack as its head of platform. Shortly after that Underwood was promoted to the company’s VP of product, and will now serve as the company’s first chief product officer. These kinds of promotions imply some additional responsibility — especially as Slack looks to diversify and pitch itself as a more robust product than just a messenger — but also another point of maturation for Slack. The company hired its first chief financial officer, Allen Shim, in February this year.

Slack is one of those companies that faces a tense push-and-pull as it looks to get into larger and larger enterprises, which all have niche needs. The company is a darling in Silicon Valley thanks to its very simple interface, but with companies with thousands (or, eventually, tens of thousands of employees) just a tool with groups and direct messages could easily become unwieldy. That’s why Slack has invested in a variety of tools, including rolling out threaded messaging a little more than a year ago. Slack is likely one of those companies that gets hundreds of feature requests a year for larger businesses that have niche use cases, but it still has to demonstrate that it’s a simple product without hitting feature creep status.

Underwood getting more authority over that evolution (of which she was already a huge part, including the development of threaded messages) is another signal that the company is looking to tap her consumer background at Twitter to create some kind of middle ground between feeling like a satisfying consumer product while still operating as an enterprise tool. Slack is increasingly looking to apply machine learning to help employees get to answers right away, and it still has to take the same kind of care in rolling out new features that satisfy the needs of larger organizations without sacrificing that simplicity that made it a darling in the first place.

Slack most recently hit a $5.1 billion valuation in a recent investment round, and said it had around 6 million daily active users in September last year. That might be small-ish compared to the size and scale of Twitter, but as something geared toward internal communications at companies, that level of engagement in the workplace is going to increasingly be a selling point for the company as it looks to grow into that valuation.

• Facebook announced Tuesday that it has removed 135 Facebook and Instagram accounts, and 138 Facebook pages, that were linked to the Internet Research Agency, a notorious Russian troll farm that was indicted for trying to meddle in the 2016 US election.
• Facebook said the 65 Instagram accounts and 138 Facebook pages reached a combined 1.5 million users around the world. It did not offer data on how many users were reached by the 70 IRA-linked Facebook accounts that have been removed.
• Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos also said Russia-linked actors had spent nearly $170,000 on Facebook and Instagram ads since the beginning of 2015.

Facebook announced Tuesday that it has removed 70 Facebook accounts, 138 Facebook pages, and 65 Instagram profiles linked to a notorious Russian troll factory that spread disinformation in an effort to interfere in the 2016 US election.

Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos said in a news release that 95% of the pages that had been removed were in Russian and targeted Russians or those who speak Russian, particularly in neighboring countries like Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and Uzbekistan.

The accounts and pages in question were controlled by the Internet Research Agency, the Russian troll farm based in St. Petersburg that was indicted by the special counsel Robert Mueller in February for mounting a social media influence operation to sway voters in favor of then Republican candidate Donald Trump.

In total, Stamos said the 138 Facebook pages and 65 Instagram accounts that were removed reached approximately 1.5 million unique users. The press release did not provide information on how many users the 70 IRA-linked Facebook accounts reached.

Stamos said the company had removed the latest set of pages and accounts "solely because they were controlled by the IRA — not based on the content."

"This included commentary on domestic and international political issues, the promotion of Russian culture and tourism as well as debate on more everyday issues," he added.

Facebook will be updating its Help Center tool in the next few weeks so users can check whether they liked or followed any IRA-linked pages.

Facebook's announcement, titled, "Authenticity Matters: The IRA Has No Place on Facebook," comes as the social media giant faces heightened scrutiny over a security issue that allowed the data firm Cambridge Analytica to harvest the personal information of 50 million Facebook users without their permission. Critics largely pointed a finger at Facebook for failing to notify users of the incident and adequately protect their private data.

Last year, Facebook announced that it had detected Russian activity on its platform that took place before, during, and after the 2016 election. In particular, the company said that "inauthentic" accounts most likely operating out of Russia had purchased $100,000 worth of political ads between 2015 and 2016.

The Russian-bought ads reached approximately 10 million people and targeted users in Michigan and Wisconsin, both of which were critical to Trump's victory. Russia-linked groups didn't limit their interference buying ads and posting memes — they tried to organize anti-immigrant, anti-Clinton rallies in Texas and Idaho.

On Tuesday, Stamos said Russian actors had spent around $167,000 on Facebook and Instagram ads since January 1, 2015.

But Russia's disinformation campaign on the social media platform long predates that. Before they capitalized on Facebook to promote fake news and divisive ads to the American public, and to organize anti-Clinton or pro-Trump rallies in different states, Russian trolls used the social-media platform to push out Ukrainian activists, The Daily Beast reported in September.

Though it's unclear when pro-Kremlin trolls' campaign against the activists began, it reportedly reached its apex in 2014 and 2015, shortly after Russia annexed the territory of Crimea and significantly ramped up its aggression against neighboring Ukraine.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been criticized by those who say he shrugged off warnings about the fake-news epidemic on the platform. The Washington Post reported that President Barack Obama asked him just after the election to take it seriously, but that Zuckerberg replied that the company's power to control the spread of information was limited.

Under mounting pressure, however, Zuckerberg announced in September that Facebook had developed a nine-point plan to examine the Russian influence campaign and prevent similar efforts in the future.

Meanwhile, Twitter estimated last November that the 36,746 Russia-linked accounts on its platform "generated approximately 1.4 million automated, election-related tweets, which collectively received approximately 288 million impressions" just from September 1 to November 15 last year.

The US intelligence community concluded in January 2017 that the social-media operation was part of a larger influence campaign by Russia — and that assessment, according to former intelligence chief James Clapper, "did serve to cast doubt on the legitimacy" of the election outcome.

SEE ALSO: Mueller just threw a wrench into the 2 main pillars of Paul Manafort's defense strategy

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NOW WATCH: BILL BROWDER: How sanctions on Russia hurt Putin's closest allies

The company will work on its own global version, which will be "in spirit" with GDPR, said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a Reuters interview. 

• On Friday, Tesla revealed that the Model X driver who was killed in an accident in California had activated Autopilot before the crash.
• A pair of YouTube videos from other Tesla drivers may shed light on what could have caused the Model X to drive into a highway barrier.
• The videos reveal how Autopilot can become confused by faded lane markings.

On Friday, Tesla revealed that the Model X driver who was killed in an accident in California had activated Autopilot before the crash. While Tesla emphasized that the driver received multiple warnings to put his hands on the wheel before the accident, a pair of YouTube videos from other Tesla drivers shed light on what may have caused the Model X to drive into a highway barrier.

One video shows a Model S driving through the same segment of the highway where the crash occurred with Autopilot activated. As the road approaches the barrier, a new lane marking indicates that drivers need to veer right if they want to stay on the road.

But the new lane marking is more faded than the prior left-hand lane marker, which becomes the right-hand lane marker for a ramp that allows drivers to exit to a new road. In Autopilot, the Model S does not recognize the new lane marker and continues to use the old lane marker, which would lead it into the barrier.

Another video, taken on a different highway in Chicago (according to Electrek), shows a Model S making the same mistake and nearly causing a similar accident.

While they're certainly not an official investigation, both videos show the potential limitations of Autopilot. While the software's Autosteer feature can keep a vehicle in its lane on the highway, it does so by reading the lane markings on either side of it. If a lane marking has faded, it's more difficult for the vehicle to recognize it, and if the faded lane marking is close to one that's more prominent, the vehicle may assume the more prominent marking is the one to follow.

The videos also emphasize Tesla's point that Autopilot is not a fully autonomous system and should not be treated as one. Business Insider's Matthew DeBord came to the same conclusion after testing the Autopilot system in multiple Tesla vehicles.

SEE ALSO: Here's what you need to know before buying a Tesla

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NOW WATCH: Trade war fears are escalating — here's who has the most to lose

Panera Bread issued a statement to Fox News this week saying it resolved a data breach that exposed the personal information of “thousands” of customer records. However, according to KrebsOnSecurity, the company was first alerted to the issue by security researcher Dylan Houlihan eight months ago but initially dismissed it as a likely scam.

The breach shows customer data available in plain text and appears to include records for any customer who signed up to order food via Panera’s website, panerabread.com. Revealed information includes individuals’ names, emails, physical addresses, birthdays, and the last four digits of the credit card used.

The formatting, which uses incremental unique identifiers, makes the data easy to scrape....

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• Verizon's Oath is starting to pick some ad tech winners and losers from its acquisitions of AOL and Yahoo.
• As a result, Oath is shuttering its 'programmatic TV' group.
• The company is working toward rolling out a new advertising tech platform that blends the best parts of AOL and Yahoo's various tools and products.

Verizon is starting to trim the ad tech fat.

The company's digital media unit, Oath, is planning to shut down its One TV division, which was the company's attempt to build the software infrastructure for TV advertising as it eventually becomes more digital.

In addition, Oath is phasing out Convertro – an ad tech company it acquired for over $100 million in 2014 – as a stand-alone brand and business. The Convertro name is essentially going away, but many of that division's offerings – including tools designed to help brands figure out the impact of multiple ads in a given campaign – will be retained.

The moves are part of Oath's sorting out of winners, losers following the merger of Verizon's two huge acquisitions over the past few years: AOL and Yahoo. As a result of these moves, the company is planning a handful of layoffs.

Both companies joined Verizon with a sprawling number of products and offerings, particularly in the ad-tech arena. Many were the result of previous acquisitions by AOL and Yahoo. 

In fact, the two web companies housed dozens of ad tech pieces between them, reported Digiday in 2017.

Oath is essentially doing ad tech bake-offs

As Verizon has worked on integrating the various pieces under the Oath banner, the company has indicated that it plans to keep the best of both companies, and eliminate parts that are redundant or no longer fit its current strategy. 

For example, among its multiple web video ad platforms, the Yahoo property BrightRoll appears to be gaining favor while AOL's Adap.tv's role is being diminished, said Oath's partners.

In fact, Oath is eventually planning to release a single, state of the art advertising platform that will feature the best pieces of all the AOL/Yahoo assets, said a spokesperson.

"From day one, we have made a commitment to build a unified and differentiated global advertising platform to maximize the brand power of the world’s best companies," said an Oath spokeswoman. "In doing so, we're taking our best assets and creating a powerful integrated, open, and transparent ad tech stack."

Prior to Verizon, AOL once harbored huge ambitions in TV and the cloud

A few short years ago, before it was acquired by Verizon, AOL announced big a pair of ambitious initiatives. For one, it planned to build the tech that would eventually underpin the $70 billion TV ad business as it inevitably embraces automation. 

To bolster that initiative, AOL acquired a data-centric TV ad startup called PrecisionDemand in 2014.

Plus, AOL made a bold entry into the 'marketing cloud' industry – one dominated by giants such as Oracle, Salesforce, and Adobe – with its ONE platform, which aspired to provide big marketers with one-stop-shopping when it came to managing and storing all of their data and analytics.

That vision appeared to be tempered, as Oath CEO Tim Armstrong looks to focus the company on mobile media and advertising. The new "ONE" is referred to as a "mobile monetization platform."

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NOW WATCH: In 50 years we'll have 'robot angels' and will be able to merge our brains with AI, according to technology experts

• Facebook could slip even more, according to Pivotal Research's Brian Wieser. 
• Facebook shares have dropped sharply since the Cambridge Analytica scandal in mid March.
• Wieser lists three core reasons for lowering his Facebook price target to $138 a share. 

Facebook's stock price could have further to fall, according to Pivotal Research's Brian Wieser. 

News of a massive data breach in mid March sent shares into bear market territory, where they currently remain. The stock closed down 2.75% Monday to $155. 

Wieser moved his price target to $138 from $152 Monday. Wall Street's consensus on Facebook is $219. Wieser rates the stock a sell. 

Wieser cites three main reasons for his lower price target: 

• Firstly, Facebook's costs will increase. "Facebook and Google will need to incur additional expense beyond those previously contemplated to better know their partners, including developers with their ecosystems, advertisers and users," the note said. Additionally, "costs should be noticeably higher for Facebook beyond the present year as it seems more likely than not that they will need to incur additional expenses to address operational challenges," Wieser wrote, referring to operational challenges that may result from data regulation. 
• Secondly, the Cambridge Analytica mishap will cause advertisers to restrict their ad spend on the platform. "The Cambridge Analytica episode is forcing more advertisers to scrutinize their spending on the platform and our guess is that scrutiny will have some additional negative impact," the note said. And while "the company will produce significant growth in 2018," Wieser thinks "revenue growth will continue to decelerate and margin compression will be incrementally more pronounced." He estimates that revenue will grow 33% in 2018, but just 25% in 2019. 
• Thirdly, Facebook's dialogue with both the US and EU governments will create headline risk. "The company also faces all sorts of headline risks both around the upcoming Congressional hearings and also around similar hearings in other countries," the note said. 

Congress has summoned Facebook for hearings, and the EU GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) is set to go into effect on May 25th this year. 

Facebook is down 14% on the year. 

SEE ALSO: Dow plunges 700 points as Trump picks on Amazon and trade-war fears return

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NOW WATCH: I quit cable for DirecTV Now and it's saving me over $1,000 a year — here's how I did it

• Sen. Bernie Sanders thinks Amazon has gotten too large.
• In an interview on CNN, the 2016 Democratic presidential candidate said, "I think it is important to take a look at the power and influence that Amazon has."
• President Donald Trump has upped his criticism of Amazon in recent days.

Sen. Bernie Sanders thinks Amazon has gotten so large that it requires closer scrutiny of its "power and influence."

On CNN's "State of the Union" on Sunday, the anchor Jake Tapper asked Sanders whether Amazon had gotten too big.

"Yeah, I do, I do," said Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont who ran as a Democratic presidential candidate in 2016.

"This is an issue that has got to be looked at," he added. "What we are seeing all over this country is the decline in retail. We're seeing this incredibly large company getting involved in almost every area of commerce. And I think it is important to take a look at the power and influence that Amazon has."

Amazon representatives declined to comment.

Sanders is one of a growing number of politicians who have been criticizing or raising concerns about the online retail giant. His remarks are evidence of a rising tide of bipartisan anti-Amazon sentiment in Washington, DC.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly gone after the company in recent days, highlighting its impact on the US's retail sector and characterizing its deal with the US Postal Service as detrimental to the agency.

Trump, who has a long-running feud with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, has called on Amazon to pay more taxes and charged that its dealings with the USPS are a "scam." An Amazon representative said in a statement to Bloomberg that its arrangements were "profitable" for USPS.

Meanwhile, Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida said on Twitter on Monday that he was concerned that Amazon's rise could lead to "less competition" in the long run.

Amazon's becoming an online behemoth worth more than $665 billion has coincided with a decline of the brick-and-mortar retail industry in the US. As people increasingly shop online, more than 6,400 stores closed throughout the country last year.

And Amazon isn't sitting still, continually branching out into — and potentially threatening the stalwarts in — new industries from ocean shipping to student loans.

Sanders also criticized Amazon and other tech giants in an interview with The Guardian last month.

"When you have companies like Amazon that have extraordinary power, when you have companies like Facebook that to a significant degree control discourse, am I concerned about monopoly power? Absolutely," he told the news outlet. "We need to have the kind of discussion that Congress has not had yet."

Here's the video of Sanders' remarks on CNN:

SEE ALSO: Trump wants to go after Amazon

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NOW WATCH: Dropbox CEO talks about how he went from rejecting Steve Jobs to an $11 billion IPO

Sometimes, timing is everything, and this is one of those instances. Apple could not have picked a better day to move its iMessage-based Business Chat out of beta. As Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg bore the slings, errors and innuendo that the breach of 50 million subscribers’ personal information engenders, Tim Cook could showcase the long-standing respect that his company has paid to individual privacy, centered on end-to-end encryption of iMessage and extended to the integration of iMessage Apps that simplify messaging-based interactions between brands and their customers or prospects.

It is also tremendously good news for a cadre of companies on Opus Research’s Conversational Commerce Landscape whose participation in the beta program was announced in June 2017. It has given the opportunity for Nuance, Genesys, LivePerson and Salesforce to highlight the newly announced platform’s ability to shorten the time it takes to get a support issue resolved and simplify or eliminate the effort it takes to reach an agent, chatbot or intelligent assistant that can understand, or even anticipate, the purpose of the contact and resolve issues quickly. Since the June 2017 announcement, the four companies mentioned above have been joined by ZenDesk and IntheChat.

A little less than a year later, with the formal integration of Business Chat into the latest version of iOS 11, we’re observing that some of the partners have been more effective than others in enlisting recognized brands into the iMessage Business Chat fold. LivePerson is definitely in the leadership position with demonstrably successful implementations with Lowe’s and Home Depot (for home improvement) and Discover (for financial services) and T-Mobile (for telecom). Salesforce will build buzz based on its support of Marriott’s International’s iMessage offering. Other companies providing conversational access to customer support or sales resources include Apple, most likely leveraging Genesys resources, Hilton Hotels, Newegg, TD Ameritrade, Wells Fargo and 1-800-Flowers.

The value proposition is quite simple both for brands and their customers/prospects. Hundreds of millions of people regularly use Twitter, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and other messaging platforms. Many of them, claimed to be around 30 percent and growing, have used messaging to reach customer care from brands. Those that have used it prefer a text-based chat to waiting on hold to reach a live agent. (It is no coincidence that 1-800-Flowers, one of the earliest innovators in promoting toll-free access to sales agents, is one of the first companies that has jumped onto the messaging bandwagon.

Customer Support Leads the Way

Apple and its partners are destined to succeed in their efforts to establish secure, trusted connections with customers and prospects. The fact that individuals are already logged in with iMessage makes their Apple ID an identifier and obviates the need for an individual to log in to carry out basic conversation and and queries (AKA Conversational Commerce). Brands have to support Chat for Business of necessity because they know that many of their best customers own iPhones and will wonder why they can’t reach support personnel via Messenger. It is not a coincidence that T-Mobile and KLM are leading the way in incorporating messaging-based support into their customer care strategies.

So it begins. Apple is showing the way for many brands to do chat-based Intelligent Assistance right. Discovery will be based on scanning a QR code. No authentication will be required because you initiate each conversation in iMessage. Life is good!

Yet in the cold light of day, Apple may just be creating another walled garden wherein an AppleID is not associated with a company’s most commonly used identifier; e.g. their account number, phone number or loyalty card. The last thing that proponents of “Digital Transformation” or “Conversational Commerce” need is yet-another-digital-channel for Marketing, Sales, or Advertising to support. Apple’s approach has real merit but it owes it to the rest of the digital commerce world to recognize that we’re not divided into Apple Fanboys and “the rest of us.”

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AV1 for video coding is what Opus is for audio coding.

The Alliance of Open Media (AOMedia) issued last week a press release announcing its public release of the AV1 specification.

Last time I wrote about AOMedia was over a year ago. AOMedia is a very interesting organization. Which got me to sit down with Alex Eleftheriadis, Chief Scientist and Co-founder of Vidyo, for a talk about AV1, AOMedia and the future of real time video codecs. It was really timely, as I’ve been meaning to write about AV1 at some point. The press release, and my chat with Alex pushed me towards this subject.

TL;DR:

• We are moving towards a future of royalty free video codecs
• This is due to the drastic changes in our industry in the last decade
• It won’t happen tomorrow, but we won’t be waiting too long either

Now let’s start, shall we?

AOMedia and AV1 are the result of greed

When AOMedia was announced I was pleasantly surprised. It isn’t that apparent that the founding members of AOMedia would actually find the strength to put their differences aside for the greater good of the video coding industry.

Video codec royalties 101

You see, video codecs at that point in time was a profit center for companies. You invested in research around video coding with the main focus on inventing new patents that will be incorporated within video codecs that will then be globally used. The vendors adopting these video codecs would pay royalties.

With H.264, said royalties came with a cap – if you distributed above a certain number of devices that use H.264, you didn’t have to pay more. And the same scheme was put in place when it came to HEVC (H.265) – just with a higher cap.

Why do we need this cap?

1. Companies want to cap their commitment and expense. In many cases, you don’t see direct revenue per device, so no cap means this it is harder to match with asymmetric business models and applications that scale today to hundreds of millions of users
2. If a company needs to pay based on the number of devices they sell, then the one holding the patents and getting the payment for royalties knows that number exactly – something which is considered trade secret for many companies

So how much money did MPEG-LA took in?

Being a private company, this is hard to know. I’ve seen estimates of $10M-50M, as well as $17.5B on Quora. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle. Which is still a considerable amount of money that was funnelled to the patent owners.

With royalty revenues flowing in, is it any wonder that companies wanted more?

An interesting tidbit about this greed (or shall we say rightfulness) can be found in the Wikipedia page of VP8:

In February 2011, MPEG LA invited patent holders to identify patents that may be essential to VP8 in order to form a joint VP8 patent pool. As a result, in March the United States Department of Justice (DoJ) started an investigation into MPEG LA for its role in possibly attempting to stifle competition. In July 2011, MPEG LA announced that 12 patent holders had responded to its call to form a VP8 patent pool, without revealing the patents in question, and despite On2 having gone to great lengths to avoid such patents.

So… we have a licensing company whose members are after royalty payments on patents. They are blinded by the success of H.264 and its royalty scheme and payments, so they go after anything and everything that looks and smells like competition. And they are working towards maintaining their market position and revenue in the upcoming HEVC specification.

The HEVC/H.265 royalties mess

Leonardo Chiariglione, founder and chairman of MPEG, attests in a rather revealing post:

Good stories have an end, so the MPEG business model could not last forever. Over the years proprietary and “royalty free” products have emerged but have not been able to dent the success of MPEG standards. More importantly IP holders – often companies not interested in exploiting MPEG standards, so called Non Practicing Entities (NPE) – have become more and more aggressive in extracting value from their IP.

HEVC, being a new playing ground, meant that there were new patents to be had – new areas where companies could claim having IP. And MPEG-LA found itself one of many patent holder groups:

MPEG-LA indicated its wish to take home $0.2 per device using HEVC, with a high cap of around $25M.

HEVC Advance started with a ridiculously greedy target of $0.8 per device AND %0.5 of the gross margin of streaming services (unheard of at the time) – with no cap. It since rescinded, making things somewhat better. It did it a bit too late in the game though.

Velos Media spent money on a clean and positive website. Their Q&A indicate that they haven’t yet made a decision on royalties, caps and content royalties. Which gives great confidence to those wanting to use HEVC today.

And then there are the unaffiliated. Companies claiming patents related to HEVC who are not in any pool. And if you think they won’t be suing anyone then think again – Blackberry just sued Facebook for messaging related patents – easy to see them suing for HEVC patents in their current position. Who can blame them? They have been repeatedly sued by patent trolls in the past.

HEVC is said to be the next biggest thing in video coding. The successor of our aging H.264 technology. And yet, there’s too many unknowns about the true price of using it. Should one pay royalties to MPEG-LA, HEVC Advance and Velos Media or only one of them? Would paying royalties protect from patent litigation?

Is it even economically viable to use HEVC?

Yes. Apple has introduced HEVC in iOS 11 and iPhone X. My guess is that they are willing to pay the price as long as this keeps the headache and mess on the Android camp (I can’t see the vendors there coming to terms of who is the one in the value chain that will end up paying the royalties for it).

With such greed and uncertainty, a void was left. One that got filled by AOMedia and AV1.

AOMedia – The who’s who of our industry

AOMedia is a who’s who list of our industry. It started small, with just 7 big names, and now has 12 founding members and 22 promoter members.

Some of these members are members of MPEG-LA or already have patents in HEVC and video coding. And this is important. Members of AOMedia effectively allow free access to essential patents in the implementation of AOMedia related specifications. I am sure there are restrictions applied here, but the intent is to have the codecs coming out of AOMedia royalty free.

A few interesting things to note about these members:

• All browser vendors are there: Google, Mozilla, Microsoft and Apple
• All large online streaming vendors are there: Google (=YouTube), Amazon and Netflix
• From that same streaming industry, we also have Hulu, Bitmovin and Videolan
• Most of the important chipset vendors are there: Intel, AMD, NVidia, Arm and Broadcom
• Facebook is there
• Of the enterprise video conferencing vendors we have Cisco, Vidyo and Polycom
• Qualcomm is missing

AOMedia is at a point that stopping it will be hard.

Here’s how AOMedia visualize its members’ products:

What’s in AV1?

AV1 is a video codec specification, similar to VP8, H.264, VP9 and HEVC.

AV1 is built out of 3 main premises:

1. Royalty free – what gets boiled into the specification is either based on patents of the members of AOMedia or uses techniques that aren’t patented. It doesn’t mean that companies can’t claim IP on AV1, but as far as the effort on developing AV1 goes, they aren’t knowingly letting in patents
2. Open source reference implementation – AV1 comes with an open source implementation that you can take and start using. So it isn’t just a specification that you need to read and build with a codec from scratch
3. Simple – similar to how WebRTC is way simpler than other real time media protocols, AV1 is designed to be simple

Simple probably needs a bit more elaboration here. It is probably the best news I heard from Alex about AV1.

Simplicity in AV1

You see, in standardization organizations, you’ll have competing vendors vying for an advantage on one another. I’ve been there during the glorious days of H.323 and 3G-324M. What happens there, is that companies come up with a suggestion. Oftentimes, they will have patents on that specific suggestion. So other vendors will try to block it from getting into the spec. Or at the very least delay it as much as they can. Another vendor will come up with a similar but different enough approach, with their own patents, of course. And now you’re in a deadlock – which one do you choose? Coalitions start emerging around each approach, with the end result being that both approaches will be accepted with some modifications and get added into the specification.

But do we really need both of these approaches? The more alternatives we have to do something similar, the more complex the end result. The more complex the end result, the harder it is to implement. The harder it is to implement, well… the closer it looks like HEVC.

Here’s the thing.

From what I understand, and I am not privy to the intricate details, but I’ve seen specifications in the past, and been part of making them happen, HEVC is your standard design-by-committee specification. HEVC was conceived by MPEG (jointly with VCEG, an ITU-T working group), which in the last 20 years have given us MPEG-2, H.264 and HEVC. Patents and royalties around these codecs were then handled by another group – MPEG-LA. The number of members in MPEG-LA with interests in getting some skin in this game is large and growing. I am sure that HEVC was a mess of a headache to contend with.

This is where AV1 diverges. I think there’s a lot less politics going on in AOMedia at the moment than in MPEG or MPEG-LA. Probably due to 2 main reasons:

1. It is a newer organization, starting fresh. There’s politics there as there are multiple companies and many people, but since it is newer, the amount of politics involved will be lower than an organization that has been around for 20+ years
2. There’s less money involved. No royalties means no pie to split between patent holders. So less fights about who gets his tools and techniques incorporated into the specification

The end result? The design is simpler, which makes for better implementations that are just easier to develop.

AV1 IRL

In real life, we’re yet to see if AV1 performs better than HEVC and in what ways.

Current estimates is that AV1 performance is equal or better than HEVC when it comes to real time. That’s because AV1 has better tools for similar computation load than what can be found in HEVC.

So… if you have all the time in the world to analyze the video and pick your tools, HEVC might end up with better compression quality, but for the most part, we can’t really wait that long when we encode video – unless we encode the latest movie coming out from Hollywood. For the rest of us, faster will be better, so AV1 wins.

The exact comparison isn’t there yet, but I was told that experiments done on the implementations of both AV1 and HEVC shows that AV1 is equal or better to HEVC.

Streaming, Real Time and SVC

There is something to be said about real time, which brings me back to WebRTC.

Real time low delay considerations of AV1 were discussed from the onset. There are many who focus on streaming and offline encoding of videos within AOMedia, like Netflix and Hulu. But some of the founding members are really interested in real time video coding – Google, Facebook, Cisco, Polycom and Vidyo to name a few.

Polycom and Vidyo are chairing the real time work group, and SVC is considered a first class citizen within AV1. It is being incorporated into the specification from the start, instead of being bolt-on into it as was done with H.264 and VP9.

Low bitrate

Then there’s the aspect of working at low bitrates.

With the newer codecs, you see a real desire to enhance the envelope. In many cases, this means increasing the resolution and frame rates a video codec supports.

As far as I understand, there’s a lot of effort being put into AV1 in the other side of the scale – in working at low resolutions and doing that really well. This is important for Google for example, if you look at what they decided to share about VP9 on YouTube:

For YouTube, it isn’t only about 4K and UHD – it is on getting videos to be streamed everywhere.

Based on many of the projects I am involved with today, I can say that there are a lot of developers out there who don’t care too much about HD or 4K – they just want to get decent video being sent and that means VGA resolutions or even less. Being able to do that with lower bitrates is a boon.

Is AV1 “next gen”?

I have always considered AV1 to be the next next generation:

We have H.264 and VP8 as the current generation of video codecs, then HEVC and VP9 as the next generation, and then there’s AV1 as the next next generation.

In my mind, this is what you’d get when it comes to compression vs power requirements:

Today though, I guess this would be closer to how I see things:

AV1 is an improvement over HEVC but probably isn’t a next generation video codec. And this is an advantage. When you start working on a new generation of a codec, the work necessary is long and arduous. Look at H.261, H.263, H.264 and HEVC codec generations:

Here are some interesting things that occured to me while placing the video codecs on a timeline:

• The year indicated for each codec is the year in which an initial official release was published
• Understand that each video codec went through iterations of improvements, annexes, appendices and versions (HEVC already has 4 versions)
• It takes 7-10 from one version until the next one gets released. On the H.26x track, the number of years between versions has grown through time
• VP8 and VP9 have only 4 years between one and the other. It makes sense, as VP8 came late in the game, playing catch-up with H.264 and VP9 is timed nicely with HEVC
• AV1 comes only 6 years after HEVC. Not enough time for research breakthroughs that would suggest a brand new video codec generation, but probably enough to make improvements on HEVC and VP9

About the latest press release

AOMedia has been working towards this important milestone for quite some time – the 1.0 version specification of AV1.

The first thing I thought when seeing it is: they got there faster than WebRTC 1.0. WebRTC has been announced 6 years ago and we’re just about to have it announced (since 2015 that is). AOMedia started in 2015 and it now has its 1.0 ready.

The second one? I was interested in the quotes at the end of that release. They show the viewpoints of the various members involved.

• Amazon – great viewing experience
• Arm – bringing high-quality video to mobile and consumer markets
• Cisco – ongoing success of collaboration products and services
• Facebook – video being watched and shared online
• Google – future of media experiences consumers love to watch, upload and stream
• Intel – unmatched video quality and lower delivery costs across consumer and business devices as well as the cloud’s video delivery infrastructure
• NVIDIA – server-generated content to consumers. […] streaming video at a higher quality […] over networks with limited bandwidth
• Mozilla – making state-of-the-art video compression technology royalty-free and accessible to creators and consumers everywhere
• Netflix – better streaming quality
• Microsoft – empowering the media and entertainment industry
• Adobe – faster and higher resolution content is on its way at a lower cost to the consumer
• AMD – best media experiences for consumers
• Amlogic – watch more streaming media
• Argon Design – streaming media ecosystem
• Bitmovin – greater innovation in the way we watch content
• Broadcom – enhance the video experience across all forms of viewing
• Hulu – Improving streaming quality
• Ittiam Systems – the future of online video and video compression
• NGCodec – higher quality and more immersive video experiences
• Vidyo – solve the ongoing WebRTC browser fragmentation problem, and achieve universal video interoperability across all browsers and communication devices
• Xillinx – royalty-free video across the entire streaming media ecosystem

Apple decided not to share a quote in the press release.

Most of the quotes there are about media streaming, with only a few looking at collaboration and social. This somewhat saddens me when it comes from the likes of Broadcom.

I am glad to see Intel and Arm taking active roles. Both as founding members and in their quotes to the press release. It is bad that Qualcomm and Samsung aren’t here, but you can’t have it all.

I also think Vidyo are spot-on. More about that later.

What’s next for AOMedia?

There’s work to be done within AOMedia with AV1. This is but a first release. There are bound to be some updates to it in the coming year.

Current plans are to have some meaningful software implementation of AV1 encoder/decoder by the end of 2018, and somewhere during 2019 (end of most probably) have hardware implementations available. Here’s the announced timeline from AOMedia:

Rather ambitious.

Realistically, mass adoption would happen somewhere in 2020-2022. Until then, we’ll be chugging along with VP8/H.264 and fighting it out around HEVC and VP9.

There are talks about adding still image format based on the work done in AV1, which makes sense. It wouldn’t be farfetched to also incorporate future voice codecs into AOMedia. This organization has shown it can bring into it the industry leaders into a table and come up with royalty free codecs that benefit everyone.

AV1 and WebRTC

Will we see AV1 in WebRTC? Definitely.

When? Probably after WebRTC 1.0. Or maybe not

It will take time, but the benefits are quite clear, which is what Alex of Vidyo alluded to in the quote given in the press release:

“solve the ongoing WebRTC browser fragmentation problem, and achieve universal video interoperability across all browsers and communication devices”

We’re still stuck in the challenge of which video codec to select in WebRTC applications.

• Should we go for VP8, just because everyone does, it is there and it is royalty free?
• Or should we opt for H.264, because Safari supports it, and it has better hardware support.
• Maybe we should go for VP9 as it offers better quality, and “suffer” the computational hit that comes with it?

AV1 for video coding is what Opus is to audio coding. That article I’ve written in 2013? It is now becoming true for video. Once adoption of AV1 hits – and it will in the next 3-5 years, the dilemma of which video codec to select will be gone.

The post AV1 Specification Released: Can we kiss goodbye to HEVC and royalty bearing video codecs? appeared first on BlogGeek.me.

In February, secure messaging service Telegram launched a presale for its cryptocurency prior to an Initial Coin Offering (ICO), raising $850 million from 81 investors, and later that month, The Verge learned that it was launching a second private presale, in which it aimed to double that amount. Bloomberg Technology reports that the company did just that, and has raised a total of $1.7 billion in March between the two sales.

In a filing to the Securities and Exchanges Commission, Telegram says that it raised an additional $850 million from 94 investors in the second sale, bringing the total amount to $1.7 billion. It also says that it might “pursue one or more subsequent offerings” beyond these first two sales.

The company is...

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• There is no law that requires Facebook continue to be the dominant social media app in our lives.
• The history of social media is a history of apps that have eventually stagnated and mostly disappeared.
• The environment is sending negative signals about engagement, users, advertising, the stock, and regulation.
• Investors sense blood in the water. “We are admittedly struggling to identify a catalyst to change the narrative,” Barclays analyst Ross Sandler said recently.

I opened up Facebook the other day and the top post in my news feed was from a friend I haven’t seen in more than 10 years. She was asking if anyone could recommend a doctor in a Southern seaside town 80 miles from where I live. “Does anyone know a good osteopath?” she wrote, “I'm in agony and mine has left the area! Thanks x”

My friend got lots of advice on a new physician, but I breathed a heavy sigh: This isn’t fun. This isn’t what I come here for. This isn’t the vital, exciting, surprising - often enraging - experience that Facebook used to be, when news and people’s reactions to news dominated the news feed.

It was boring.

Yet, this is exactly how Mark Zuckerberg’s wants Facebook to work now. Since he decided at the beginning of this year to dial down posts from news organizations and boost content from friends and family, the content that is increasingly dominating my Facebook - and yours - is hyperlocal, personal, and … trivial.

On his most recent earnings call, Zuckerberg acknowledged the change would have a negative effect on the amount of time people spend with the app. “I expect the time people spend on Facebook and some measures of engagement will go down as a result,” he said. “We estimate that these updates decrease time spent on Facebook by roughly 5% in the fourth quarter.”

Since he uttered those words on January 31, Facebook stock has been in a jagged decline, from $187 per share to $160, down 14%.

It’s premature to talk about “the end of Facebook,” of course. The company has 2 billion users. It is not MySpace.

But there is no law of physics that requires Facebook continue to be the dominant social media app in our lives. In fact, the history of social media is that all these apps eventually experience some sort of decline or stagnation, often as new ones come along but sometimes simply because the masses decide one platform is suddenly uncool, and they move away. TheGlobe.com, Friendster, Path, Livejournal, YikYak, Secret, Tumblr. Twitter and Snapchat have both seen their user-base growth slow.

Is that what we’re looking at now, the end of Facebook, at least as a dominant force in our lives?

Wall Street now expects Facebook to be regulated

The environment contains some severe negatives:

• Negative signal on advertisers: In an attempt to rein in some of the outrage around the way Facebook harvests data from users and sells it, Zuckerberg also announced he would end the “Partner Categories” program that allows advertisers to target users based on their own third-party data. It’s likely that Partner Categories was not a big business for Facebook, but nonetheless it still represents a pulling-in of the horns.
• Negative signal on engagement: If Zuck’s turn away from news in the news feed further reduces engagement, look for the stock to be punished anew after the next earnings call.
• Negative signal on GDPR and ePrivacy: The EU is about to inflict a huge surprise on Facebook as all its European users will be required to re-give permission for all the data Facebook takes from them. 20% of all Facebook users are European. There are more Europeans on Facebook than Americans. These users are likely to reduce what they share with Facebook, and thus their engagement with it, once Facebook is forced to comply with the new laws.
• Negative signal on US regulation: Zuckerberg now says he expects to be regulated. “I actually am not sure we shouldn’t be regulated. I think in general technology is an increasingly important trend in the world. I think the question is more what is the right regulation rather than ‘yes or no should we be regulated?’” Wall Street also expects that to happen.
• Negative signal on the stock: Zuckerberg's voting control of the stock - even as he personally sells down his stake in the company - means Facebook is his personal kingdom. It is not a company primarily interested in performing for its investors. And Zuckerberg makes mistakes.
• Negative signal on users: #DeleteFacebook became a trend a few days ago. When that trend hit Uber a while back it lost 5% of its market share in weeks.

Again, none of these moves are likely to “kill” Facebook, but they could certainly take the shine off it to an extent that it becomes like email. Something that everyone has, but you try to limit your use of it.

This is the defining issue among stock analysts right now. “We are admittedly struggling to identify a catalyst to change the narrative from regulatory back to innovation,” Barclays analyst Ross Sandler and his team told their clients recently.

Most analysts rate the stock a “buy.” But they hate the story.

“It’s unlikely many users fully comprehend the magnitude of personal data Facebook and others have aggregated"

“A recent survey indicated 79% of consumers in the EU didn't know that GDPR was coming, but once informed, 82% of them said they plan to take advantage of their new rights (i.e. to see, limit, or erase their data). This, combined with the continued public scrutiny around data privacy speaks to how there is a negative feedback risk that users will choose to materially reduce FB’s access to their data,” Morgan Stanley’s Brian Nowack and team told their clients.

Worse may yet be to come. The Cambridge Analytica scandal is a big deal not because anyone did anything illegal but because most consumers are clueless as to how much data - and therefore power - Facebook has on them. And when they find out they do not like it.

“What users chose to share with Facebook is only a small portion of what the company knows about its users. The company aggregates tons of data, from third-party brokers and ad tech companies (e.g Liveramp), to put together a
startlingly deep picture of users,” says Lloyd Walmsley and his Deutsche Bank team. “It’s unlikely many users fully comprehend the magnitude of personal data Facebook and others have aggregated.”

That could drive further regulation - another negative - against Facebook.

“It is clear that the extent to which data has been collected and the way it has been used is a big surprise to consumers. If anything, this has the potential to be more pernicious either because (a) it drives a consumer backlash against the online players or, worse, (b) it is a catalyst for tighter regulation in the US (perhaps along the lines already on the cusp of being implemented in the EU),” Thomas Singelhurst and the team at Citi told their clients.

MORE ON THE PROBLEMS FACING FACEBOOK:

• Wall Street analysts have dramatically changed their tone on Facebook, and are now speculating about 'fundamental risk' and a 'negative feedback loop'
• Facebook will need to re-register consent from all its users in Europe under the EU's new privacy laws
• Wall Street is beginning to worry about the effect of GDPR on Facebook

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NOW WATCH: Facebook can still track you even if you delete your account — here's how to stop it

Google announced that it is shutting down its URL shortening service, goo.gl. The company says that new and anonymous users won’t be able to create links through the goo.gl console as of April 13th, but existing users will be able to use it for another year, after which it will be discontinued completely.

Firebase Software Engineer Michael Hermanto says that the company introduced the URL shortener in 2009, and that since then, the ways in which people share information on the web has changed, while additional URL shorteners grown in popularity. He notes that Google is refocusing its efforts by replacing it with Firebase Dynamic Links (FDL), which allow users to specific locations in iOS, Android or web apps.

Existing users will be...

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• Toys R Us shut down its namesake website and Babies R Us' website on Friday. 
• The company is holding liquidation sales at its US stores. 
• Customers with outstanding gift cards will now have to visit stores to use the value on their cards. 

Toys R Us shut down its websites on Friday, just two weeks after announcing that it would be liquidating its US business. 

The company posted a message on its Toys R Us and Babies R Us websites Friday saying, in part, "We have shut down the website for any purchases but our brick and mortar stores are open and holding going out of business sales."

The message directed customers to stay up to date with the sales at a goodbyetoysrus.com. 

"We encourage you to stop by your local store and take full advantage of hte deep discounts and deals available," the message continued. "Thank you for your business and support over the years."

Customers with outstanding gift cards at Toys R Us will now have to visit stores to use the value on their cards, which will expire in two weeks.

SEE ALSO: Toys R Us owes pregnant women a ton of money — and it's refusing to pay up

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Part of the reshuffle includes the departure of long-time Microsoft executive Terry Myerson, who leads the current Windows and Devices group. 

Despite so much of enterprise collaboration turning to the cloud, traditional, on-site solutions remain the ones to beat.

A report by CSOOnline presented the possibility that Microsoft would be able to ban “offensive language” from Skype, Xbox, and, inexplicably, Office. The post, which cites Microsoft’s new terms of use, said that the company would not allow users to “publicly display or use the Services to share inappropriate content or material (involving, for example, nudity, bestiality, pornography, offensive language, graphic violence, or criminal activity)” and that you could lose your Xbox Live Membership if you curse out a kid Overwatch.

“We are committed to providing our customers with safe and secure experiences while using our services. The recent changes to the Microsoft Service Agreement’s Code of Conduct provide transparency on how we respond to customer reports of inappropriate public content,” said a Microsoft spokesperson. The company notes that “Microsoft Agents” do not watch Skype calls and that they can only respond to complaints with clear evidence of abuse. The changes, which go into effect May 1, allows Microsoft to ban you from it services if you’re found passing “inappropriate content” or using “offensive language.”

These new rules give Microsoft more power over abusive users and it seems like Microsoft is cracking down on bad behavior on its platforms. This is good news for victims of abuse in private communications channels on Microsoft products and may give trolls pause before they yell something about your mother on Xbox. We can only dare to dream.

Microsoft revealed earlier this year that the company will fully support Progressive Web Apps (PWA) in Windows 10. These new apps use the latest web technologies to make websites work better offline, and include support for push notifications. They’re lightweight apps, and many companies are starting to shift their mobile apps towards PWAs. Microsoft is planning to allow PWAs in the company’s Microsoft Store, and Twitter is the first major example.

Twitter has been working on its Windows 10 app for years, but its always been behind the features you find on Twitter’s native iOS and Android apps, or the web version of the service. A new design launched in 2015, followed by new features in 2016, but Twitter never even added 280 character...

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Last September, Atlassian launched Stride, its take on a Slack-like real-time communications platform for text, audio and video chats, into beta. Six months later, Stride is now generally available to any and all teams that want to give it a try.

While Atlassian is a bit cagey about providing exact user numbers, so the numbers it actually shared aren’t all the useful to gauge the service’s success. What the company was willing to say is that its users have now spent a quarter of a million hours in Stride’s Focus Mode, which is meant to allow worked to reclaim a bit of sanity in today’s notification-driven world by allowing you to turn off all incoming messages and notifications. As Atlassian’s head of communications products Steve Goldsmith told me, the company is happy with the state of Stride and that it’s growing quickly.

Since the closed beta launch, Atlassian has added about 50 new features and improvements to the service that include better ways to organize chat lists, better search and a number of improvements to the service’s video meetings features. Indeed, it’s these video chat features that the team is maybe the most proud of. “Small impromptu meetings don’t just happen when you have to switch context,” Goldsmith told me but declined to give us any numbers for how much time users spend in these chats beyond that “it’s a lot.”

Goldsmith also stressed that this is far from the final version of Stride. The team still has quite a roadmap of features that it wants to implement. But taking away the beta label, though, the company is signalling that it has worked out most of the kinks and that Stride is now ready for full enterprise deployments.

About a month ago, the Stride team also opened up its API to outside developers. Goldsmith was pretty open about the fact that he’s very happy with the final result but that he would’ve liked to see that happen a bit earlier. Stride’s API is the first product that sites on top of Atlassian’s new API platform. That probably made building the API a bit harder, but Goldsmith noted that that now makes integrating with Stride easier for other Atlassian teams.