Davemichels

After a huge flurry of product announcements, Apple has quietly raised prices of its 256GB and 512GB iPad Pro models by $50. The price increases were first spotted by by MacRumors. Launched in June, the 256GB and 512GB 10.5-inch Wi-Fi models were initially priced at $749 and $949 respectively. That’s now jumped up to $799 and $999, so you’re forking out extra money for the same damn thing you would’ve gotten for less just yesterday. For the same 10.5-inch model but featuring cellular capability, the new prices are $929 (up from $879) and $1,129 (up from $1,079) for the 256GB and the 512GB versions respectively.

The case is the same overseas, with increases seen in Europe and Australia. The 256GB Wi-Fi 10.5 inch iPad Pro launched in the...

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Microsoft has been gradually tweaking its Windows 10 privacy controls this year. The software giant addressed some initial concerns in the Windows 10 Creators Update with simplified data collection levels, and eventually revealed what data Windows 10 really collects in April. Microsoft is now making more privacy-related changes with the upcoming Windows 10 Fall Creators Update.

Microsoft is now planning to let Windows 10 Fall Creators Update users access the full privacy statement during setup. While most people never read this full statement, there will be a “learn more” section for each privacy setting during setup, allowing people to better understand settings without reading the full privacy statement.

Windows 10 currently prompts...

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Popular messaging platform Slack today announced the beta launch of Shared Channels, "a new kind of channel that connects two separate groups, creating a common space for both sides to make use of Slack’s communication features and platform integrations when working together."

It’s September, and that means that there are some new iPhones in town.

Specifically, there were three new phones announced today at Apple’s fall event today: the high-end iPhone X, which was the star of the show with a new bezel-less design, OLED screen, and 3D face scanning tech. There’s also the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus, the Apple Watch Series 3 (i.e., the Apple Watch Series 2 with LTE), and the Apple TV 4K (a, um, Apple TV with 4K). Oh, and everything is more powerful and faster, too.

Missed something during all the chaos? We’ve got the details below, along with full coverage of Apple’s newest iPhones and products.

The iPhone X is here

Apple’s new flagship phone is the iPhone X (pronounced iPhone 10.) As expected from...

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When Slack first launched in 2013, it didn't take too long to set a new record as the fastest-ever startup to achieve a $1 billion valuation.

From there, the work chat startup kept growing and growing: Just this past summer, Slack raised a monster $250 million funding round at a $5 billion valuation, essentially putting the kibosh on rumors that Amazon was looking to buy it up. Slack's success has sparked renewed competition from Microsoft and Aussie software giant Atlassian.

Today, at its first-ever Slack Frontiers user conference in San Francisco, the company shared a few updates on its business — our first look at Slack's performance since the last time it released some of these numbers in January 2017.

Slack now claims:

• Over 9 million weekly active users, up from the 6.8 million it reported in January.
• Over 6 million daily active users, up from 5 million in January.
• 50,000 paid teams, with 2 million paid users, up from 38,000 and 1.5 million, respectively. Slack now says it has a toehold in 43% of the Fortune 100.
• Annual recurring revenue (ARR) of $200 million, an extrapolation of how much money it will make in any given 12 months based on its current performance. That's up from the $150 million ARR it reported earlier this year. 

In other words, Slack is still showing strong growth, but perhaps not at the lightning-fast clip of its earliest days. That's to be expected as a startup grows up, though.

Slack also announced Shared Channels, a new feature to let users operate chat rooms that can be populated with internal staff and outside guests. Companies like fashion brand Everlane are using it to bring its shipping contractors closer into the process, says Slack. Also, Slack is now available in French, German, and Spanish, with Japanese coming soon, to meet what it says is large international demand.

Meanwhile, the last week has seen both Microsoft and $8 billion Atlassian draw their respective lines in the sand in these chat wars with Slack.

Atlassian launched Stride, the successor to HipChat, its popular work chat app that's especially beloved by programmers. And Microsoft is doubling down on the appeal of its Microsoft Teams app to the IT department at larger companies with a security-minded guest access feature.

Coming into the Slack Frontiers event, though, the $5 billion startup doesn't seem worried. Instead, Slack sees itself as the leaders in the work chat space, and these updates "extend our lead," VP of Product April Underwood tells Business Insider.

"We've known for some time that eventually everyone will be using Slack or something like it, so the new products on the market further support that conviction," says Underwood. "We build Slack to meet teams where they are - it's highly flexible and configurable to meet the unique needs of any organization. "

SEE ALSO: Microsoft lays out its strategy for the chat wars with $5 billion Slack

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NOW WATCH: Stewart Butterfield, co-founder of Slack and Flickr, on two beliefs that have brought him the greatest success in life

In 2016, Porsche introduced the limited edition 911R with a naturally aspirated engine sending power to the rear wheels through a manual transmission.

For 911 fanatics, it was an oasis of purity in an age of turbo engines, twin-clutch gear boxes, and all-wheel-drive.

The 991 911R production cars soon became harder to come by than Porsche's multi-million dollar 918 hypercar, leaving many of the brand's fans high and dry. 

(911Rs have been showing up on auction sites more than double its original $184,900 starting price.)

Now, Porsche going back and doing its fans a solid.  

On Monday, the company unveiled the new 911 GT3 with Touring Package ahead of the 2017 Frankfurt Motor Show. In many ways, the Touring Package turns the GT3 into a 911R, but without the exorbitant price tag. 

Like the 911R, the GT3 Touring Package is naturally aspirated with an old school six-speed stick shift and rear wheel drive. 

The GT3's 4.0-liter flat-six-cylinder engine, lifted directly from the 911RSR and 911 GT3 Cup race cars, is good for 500 horsepower, the same as the 911R.

According to Porsche, the GT3 with Touring Package can do 60 mph in just 3.8 seconds and reach a top speed of 196 mph. 

Aesthetically, the most significant change that comes with the Touring Package is the replacement of the GT3's large fixed spoiler with a retractable unit. 

Inside, the Touring Package is less bare bones than the 911R, which was devoid of a radio and air conditioning. The GT3 features Porsche's new PCM infotainment system as well as Alcantara and leather upholstery. 

The Porsche 911 GT3 with Touring Package is available for order now with delivery expected to commence in early 2018. The Touring Package equipped GT3 starts at $143,600. 

SEE ALSO: 16 hot cars we can't wait to see at the Frankfurt Motor Show

FOLLOW US: on Facebook for more car and transportation content!

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NOW WATCH: The $126,000 Porsche 911 Targa 4S offers a fresh take on a classic design

Netflix looked at data from over 100 million subscribers, in 190 different countries, to see which episodes of "Star Trek" were the most popular.

The streaming site has all six iterations of the "Star Trek" series, but only two contained the most-watched episodes in the franchise: "Voyager" and "The Next Generation."

(Netflix choose to discount the first two episodes in the series as those always tend to be the most popular.)

In honor of "Star Trek: The Next Generation's" 30th anniversary (September 28), and the release of "Star Trek: Discovery," the franchise's newest series (September 24), here are the episodes people on Netflix love to watch the most. 

Here are the top 10:

SEE ALSO: How the rise of Trump and the election influenced the upcoming 'Star Trek' TV show, 'Star Trek: Discovery'

10. "Clues"

The crew learns that they were unconscious for longer than they were led to believe after passing through a wormhole. 

9. "Time and Again"

The crew finds a planet that has endured a cataclysmic event.

8. "Q Who?"

Q tries to prove that Captain Picard needs him by propelling the Enterprise 7,000 light years away — where they encounter a Borg.

China plans to shut down domestic Bitcoin exchanges, anonymous sources told The Wall Street Journal today. The sources said that regulators weren’t giving a clear message on when the shutdown would occur. One regulator told an exchange that the decision had already been made, while another said the decision might take a few months. In response to the news, the Bitcoin prices have dipped to a low of $4,108, according to CoinDesk.

China is home to vast and lucrative cryptocurrency mining operations for both Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocoins. Three Chinese exchanges — Bitfinex, OkCoin, and BTCC — made up over 45 percent of the global market share over the last 30 days, according to Bitcoinity.org. Bitcoin’s growing popularity in...

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Some office cultures are like something out of "Lord of the Flies."

From bro-tastic party environments to hyper-competitive, treacherous workplaces, when a toxic atmosphere falls over your company, it can have drastic effects on your own well-being.

Robert Sutton, a professor of management at Stanford University and author of "The No Asshole Rule," has seen this first hand in his research for the upcoming book "The Asshole Survival Guide."

"If you're in one of those extreme situations — they call them mobbing situations — when a------- are everywhere, basically, there are little things you can do temporarily," he told Business Insider.

However, he said that people stick with terrible workplace environments at their own peril.

"When I talk to people who come out of those situations, they almost always had to fight back to survive," he said. "When you think of 'Lord of the Flies,' who got killed? It was the people who couldn't fight back."

Here are some tips from Sutton on how to survive working in a terrible office:

SEE ALSO: How to survive your terrible boss, according to a Stanford professor

1. Prepare to fight back

In an ideal office, you wouldn't have to treat each day like a potential battle waiting to break out. However, in a toxic workplace, you'll likely have to take more drastic measures to stand up for your own interests.

"In terms of a toxic workplace, if you're walking into a 'Lord of the Flies' situation where everybody treats everybody terribly, either you hide in the corner or you go to war," Sutton said.

Don't compromise your principles and completely mimic the bad behavior that you colleagues have been demonstrating. But, according to Sutton, you'd better brace yourself for conflict.

2. Avoid fighting whenever possible

It's one thing to prepare for conflict. It's another thing entirely to seek it out. Sutton said that it's better to avoid fights whenever possible.

"Try to figure out when the most obnoxious, difficult people are around and when you can avoid them," he said.

Some workers Sutton interviewed had developed an "early warning system" to deal with their manager's foul temper. Before work, they would call the boss' assistant and ask about their manager's mood ahead of time. That way, they could avoid their boss during bad times.

3. Try to make some friends

It might seem hard to make friends at work when all your coworkers seem terrible. But finding allies in a bad situation can really improve matters.

"Sometimes people will band together to protect themselves," Sutton said.

Basically, give people a chance.

A radio is an essential part of any emergency preparedness kit, whether it’s a regular radio or an National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Weather Radio (or, ideally, both). But in an age where we’ve got cellular technology and smartphones with capabilities that far exceed what radio can do, why do we still rely on such old-school tech for relaying information in an emergency?

Simply put: radio travels way farther than an LTE broadcast. That makes it much easier to get a signal, and reaching as many people as possible is the first priority with emergency broadcasts.

It makes sense, too, if you think about how radio waves work. As a general rule of thumb, the higher the frequency, the...

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The latest research confirms that Amazon continues to dominate cloud computing.

Amazon Web Services has been a big boon to the company. But the e-commerce giant isn't the only one who has benefitted from its cloud leadership. So too have IT professionals who specialize in AWS's technology.

"The high adoption rate of AWS cloud services by organizations around the globe has translated into some of the top salaries for those IT professionals choosing to pursue these certifications in particular," Global Knowledge said in a blog post from earlier this year. 

What it pays 

Global Knowledge polled IT workers in North America and around the world last fall to get a sense of their average salaries and how specializing in particular skills affected their pay. The organization's report, released in April, gives a good sense of the premium employers are paying for AWS skills. 

On average, among those who responded to the survey, IT workers in non-management positions in the US and Canada who have a certification of any kind earned $79,796 a year. But among those similarly situated survey respondents who have a certificate showing they know how to work with AWS, the average annual salary was $101,755 a year, a 27.5% increase. 

Employers are paying a similar, if less dramatic, premium for managers with AWS skills. On average, the IT managers in the US and Canada who responded to the survey who had a certificate of any kind earned $112,525 a year. But those with an AWS certificate earned $127,942 a year on average, according to the survey, or 13.7% more.  

Overall, if you combine the salaries of both managers and non-managers who participated in the Global Knowledge survey, certified IT professionals earned $90,512 a year on average. But among those who have an AWS certification, the average salary was $113,932 a year, a 25.9% premium.  

Not all AWS certificates are equally valuable. The salaries employers pay depend a lot on the particular certificate an IT worker has. Among the US and Canadian IT workers who participated in the survey — managers and non-managers alike — here were the average salaries, broken down by certificate:

• AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Associate: $119,233
• AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional: $116,838
• AWS Certified Developer – Associate: $116,456
• AWS Certified Systems Operations (SysOps) Administrator – Associate: $111,966
• AWS Certified Development Operations (DevOps) Engineer: $108,315

Interestingly, though the professional certification is more advanced than the associate certification, the average pay was lower among the certified solutions architects who responded to the survey. However, Global Knowledge said the difference was likely influenced by the sample sizes. Only 70 people who responded to the survey said they had the professional AWS Certified Solutions Architect certification, while 300 said they had the associate version. 

Regardless, the survey offers a good glimpse at how much enterprises value AWS skills. And that's understandable given just how popular AWS has become. In the second quarter of this year, AWS accounted for 34% of the money spent in the large and growing market for public cloud services.  

Behind the data 

Global Knowledge emailed more than half a million people asking them to participate in its salary survey, which it distributed through its own channels as well as through technology providers including Cisco, AWS, and Microsoft.

About 14,300 people completed the survey, of which some 12,500 were IT workers. And among the tech workers, 625 had some sort of AWS certification. 

Actual salaries varied depending on the level of the certification and whether someone has multiple certificates. But across the board, among those who participated in the survey, certificates gave a big boost to salaries. On average, among survey participants in the US and Canada, the difference between salaries of people in IT with any form of certification and those in IT with no form of certification was nearly $8,400, or 11.7%. For managers, the difference was $9,201, or 8.9%.

It's no wonder then that 82% of IT workers in the US and Canada who were polled have at least one certificate. And the average number of certifications among survey respondents was 2.9.

SEE ALSO: Travis Kalanick lasted in his role for 6.5 years — five times longer than the average Uber employee

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No office is perfect.

Maybe you some of your coworkers are jerks. Perhaps your building has such intense AC that it feels like you're hunkered down in an eternal winter.

Unfortunately, some rising trends seem sure to make the office a less pleasant place to be in the future.

At least, that's the view of Robert Sutton, a professor of management at Stanford University and author of "The No Asshole Rule" and "The Asshole Survival Guide."

Here are a few things that Sutton said will ensure more strife, rudeness, and discontent in the workplace going forward:

SEE ALSO: An ex-Apple recruiter says there's an unexpected dark side to hiring for 'culture fit'

1. We make less eye contact nowadays — and therefore have less empathy

It's not uncommon for the modern worker to rely on phone and email to communicate with employers, colleagues, and clients. In some cases, you might even be tempted to Slack or IM the colleagues sitting right next to you rather than speak to them about something directly.

Using technology to communicate is convenient and it saves time, for sure. But there's also a dark side to our increasingly impersonal communication habits.

"We use so many different forms of communication where we don't have eye contact with people," Sutton said. "Once you don't have eye contact with people, even if you know them, all sorts of things happen that can just blow up because we don't have as much empathy."

Writing in The Scientist, clinical psychologist Dr. Robert A. Lavine said that studies indicate eye contact allows people to experience "enhanced neural synchronization" and plays a major role in allowing us to empathize with one another.

Sutton described speaking to a student who served as an officer in Afghanistan. The student told Sutton that indirect communication habits had strained relationships between the soldiers he served with.

"He said, 'We'd go into our foxholes and we'd all be getting along fine and then we'd get on the internet and start sending nastier and nastier notes,'" Sutton said. "'We'd wake up in the morning and all hate each other.' It's almost a perfect illustration of what happens when you go from having eye contact to not having it."

Ultimately, Sutton's student said only one solution fixed the problem.

"He said his commanding officer said, 'No more internet at night unless it's an emergency,'" Sutton said. "And then things got better."

2. Income inequality is on the rise, leading to jealousy and scorn

It's no secrecy that income inequality is soaring around the globe.

And that trend could come back to haunt workers in the future.

"When I think of the perfect analogy for what we're suffering as a society, it's getting on an airplane," Sutton said.

He said that many airlines have set up a sort of "caste system" for members, cramming passengers in together and dividing them into numerous tiers of travel classes.

"Those sort of situations where there's obvious, vivid inequality, it causes all sort of nasty behavior," Sutton said.

Social psychologist and TED speaker Paul Piff has said that increased wealth can decrease your empathy. Meanwhile, the World Economic Forum reported that "more unequal societies tend to have lower levels of life satisfaction and higher rates of depression."

Sutton said that, with income inequality on the rise, this may eventually spill into the workplace.

If your company has a clear and increasingly insurmountable gap between the haves and the have nots, that could seriously erode morale over time.

3. We work in open offices, which exacerbate existing problems

Sutton himself works in an open office. It's safe to say he's not a huge fan of the layout.

"I have a nearly open office at Stanford so that's why I end up working at home a lot," he said. "At Stanford, it's actually great to go into the office because no one's there because we have open offices."

These kinds of offices are increasingly popular due to the fact that they cut costs, Forbes reported.

However, Sutton said that organizations that use an open layout must establish norms and rules to go along with them. Otherwise, he said they risk fostering a culture that has "less communication, less productivity, and fewer positive relationships."

The lack of privacy can also render offices hotbeds of noise, distraction, and stress.

"It gets rid of the privacy, it creates more crowding," Sutton said. "If you're within 25 feet of a toxic person, the odds that you're going to get fired or become a jerk yourself go up substantially. This is what open offices have brought us."

CIO Dive spoke with Box CEO Aaron Levie about the integration of machine learning image recognition technology into its platform and the future potential for AI.

MEEKER — In this town, with no stoplights and no Starbucks, life moves slower.

Except online.

Internet speeds in Meeker, a town of 2,500 in one of the most remote stretches of northwest Colorado, can reach breakneck download speeds of 1 gigabit per second. That’s fast enough to capture a two-hour movie in about 30 seconds and far quicker than connection speeds most urbanites get on the Front Range.

For Hannah Turner, who spends her day on a computer processing data-heavy reports for a large bank, the lightning online speed in Meeker — the result of a multimillion-dollar initiative by Rio Blanco County to upgrade its internet infrastructure — is what has kept her from fleeing to the Front Range.

“It was definitely the deciding factor,” the 24-year-old Colorado State University grad said as she settled behind two laptops and a pair of monitors in her small house in downtown Meeker. “I have to have better internet.”

SPECIAL PROJECT

This is part of an occasional series examining the issues, values and attitudes that can leave rural and urban residents feeling they live in two Colorados.

Rio Blanco’s experiment with broadband is the exception in rural Colorado. Long distances, rugged topography and scattered population centers across most of Colorado’s rural areas translate to high costs in getting broadband service into homes and businesses.

The state’s broadband map shows vast stretches of the state — especially on the Eastern Plains and across the mountains — with slow to no internet service. Meanwhile, the urban Interstate 25 corridor is lit up in speedy green.

It’s a digital dichotomy that feeds the “have-have not” narrative that in many ways marks the relationship between urban and rural Colorado, in which the booming data-rich economies of Denver, Colorado Springs and Fort Collins seem a world away from the technological crawl of far-flung Mancos, Campo and Walden.

“It’s not so much that rural America is left out,” said Jeff Devere, IT director for Colorado Northwestern Community College in Rangely. “It’s that rural America is not in a position to compete.”

Broadband today is far more than just smoothly streaming TV shows and movies on Netflix or Hulu. The lack of high-speed connections can hamper how efficiently and effectively schools, hospitals and technology-driven businesses operate. Reliable broadband can mean the difference between residents staying or leaving.

Cody Miell, who runs a video production business in Rocky Ford, said his connection speed is insufficient for the large video files he sends to clients. And it seriously lacks the bandwidth he used to get in Denver.

“It takes forever to upload big files,” Miell said. “I can manage it for now, but it is not what I need.”

As rural populations continue to shrink in Colorado — parents often see their children leave for college and take jobs on the Front Range or out of state — the worry in the state’s hinterlands mounts. While broadband isn’t the only factor in a person’s decision on where to live, it can no longer be ignored, said Eric Bergman, policy director for Colorado Counties Inc.

“This has gone from being a luxury item to being a necessity,” he said.

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The Colorado Broadband Office estimates that 77 percent of rural households in the state have access to broadband today — defined by the federal government as 25 megabits per second download and 3 mbps upload. It’s a share the office would like to see reach 100 percent by 2020.

Tony Neal-Graves, executive director of the broadband office, said robust internet is vital to making Colorado’s smaller towns and cities economically vibrant and bringing back those in decline.

“I 100 percent believe that having access to broadband service can be an economic catalyst for these communities,” he said. “It’s the 21st-century version of providing everyone with electricity or phone service.”

Slow, spotty, expensive

Things weren’t always this good in Rio Blanco County, where about 6,500 people are scattered across 3,200 square miles stretching from the Flat Tops Wilderness to the Utah state line. A little more than a year ago, the county was like much of the rest of rural Colorado when it comes to broadband — slow, spotty and expensive.

“It was just horrible,” Turner said in July, showing off today’s lickety-split download speed of 94 mbps and a blazing upload speed of 97.75 mbps on her laptop.

The potential economic heft of robust internet service was something the county took to heart a few years ago. Shawn Bolton, a Rio Blanco County commissioner, said the news that an oil and gas giant was considering a move from Rangely to Vernal, Utah, for better internet prompted the county to tackle its online deficiencies.

It laid 25 miles of fiber-optic cable in Meeker and Rangely each, put up eight towers across the county to shoot 25 mbps of wireless broadband to outlying residents and contracted with a network operator and two local internet service providers for day-to-day operations.

The county is in the final stages of making the primary towers operational and will add relay towers next year for even more coverage. The goal: Give up to 98 percent of Rio Blanco residents access to broadband.

Blake Mobley, Rio Blanco County’s IT director, calls the $12 million project a “perfect storm” of funding, partnerships with private-sector web providers and buy-in from the community. The county scored $3.6 million in grants from Colorado’s Department of Local Affairs and used money from its reserves, fed largely by oil and gas severance-tax revenues, to pay for the project.

The monthly cost for those subscribing to Rio Blanco’s network runs from $45 to $70, depending on connection speed, Mobley said.

“It makes us a very viable option for telecommuters,” he said.

Those telecommuters include Turner, who was able to buy a house in Meeker for just over $100,000 and fills her truck up with gas maybe once or twice a month.

“It’s not expensive to live here,” she said. “And taxes are not bad.”

Bolton said when he got connected to Rio Blanco’s network earlier this year, he could suddenly download bid documents for his construction business instead of having to drive 40 miles to Rifle to get a good connection.

“It was like someone walked in and turned the lights on,” he said.

“A topography issue”

But the perfect storm in Rio Blanco County is not easy to replicate in other parts of Colorado.

The physical task of bringing internet to far reaches of the state is doable, whether the job is undertaken by a large telecom firm such as CenturyLink or one of dozens of tiny rural phone companies that operate around the state, but often it’s not cost-effective to serve a tiny cluster of homes tucked into a hillside 20 miles from the closest town.

“The distances out on the Eastern Plains are just so large, and in the mountains, it’s more of a topography issue,” Neal-Graves said. “The issue is cost, in terms of building out infrastructure to these communities.”

It often leads to monthly costs in rural areas that go far beyond what city dwellers pay — prices that can be prohibitive to residents living paycheck to paycheck or on a fixed income.

In Custer County, which butts up against the Sangre de Cristo mountains west of Pueblo, internet service has long been troublesome. The county is looking at installing a half-dozen towers to provide fixed wireless broadband to its 4,500 residents, but the $2 million price tag is a major barrier. Charles Bogle, president of the Custer County Economic Development Corporation, said his county doesn’t have Rio Blanco County’s energy dollars.

“We have a real issue with our topography down here,” Bogle said  “The model that makes sense for the big internet service providers is to concentrate on the bigger population centers.”

Directly west of Custer County, over the Sangre de Cristos’ towering 14,000-foot peaks, Saguache County faces some of the same challenging dynamics. In July, online publication fivethirtyeight.com pegged the county as having “the worst internet in America,” with only 5.6 percent of adults estimated to have broadband.

It’s a dubious distinction that doesn’t entirely surprise Bart Weller. The IT consultant lives just north of Saguache County, in Gunnison County’s Crystal River Valley.

In Marble, which Weller has called home for a year, he formed the Marble Broadband Coalition in hopes of improving internet service for the town’s several hundred residents. The coalition includes representatives from the Marble Charter School, the marble quarry in town and the town’s board of trustees.

“It’s a pretty severe constraint,” Weller said of the valley’s internet service.

Marble is more than 6 miles from the closest fiber-optic loop, meaning Weller has had to resort to satellite broadband service, which he says is slow and unreliable. He ends up driving 40 minutes to Carbondale to download software for his job.

“I could never have done that kind of downloading at my home office,” he said.

Pokey download speeds plague schools as much as they do businesses. Michelle Murphy, executive director of the Colorado Rural Schools Alliance, said there are two primary issues with rural school connectivity: bandwidth and cost.

“Their computers are crashing when they are doing the online testing — their networks can’t accommodate live streaming,” she said.

And high-speed service in rural areas can cost multiples of what prices are in populated parts of the state.

“Their budgets absolutely cannot afford those inflated costs,” Murphy said of small, far-flung school districts.

Colorado launched the EAGLE-Net Alliance in 2010, harnessing a $100.6 million federal grant to connect rural schools throughout the state to its high-speed network. But after years of allegations of financial mismanagement and a suspension of its grant funding, the effort derailed. EAGLE-Net was officially dissolved in June, although its network is still operational.

Danelle Berg, Otero County economic development director, said even if school districts are on a high-speed network, nothing guarantees that students have good connections at home. She said some students in the Rocky Ford School District, in southeast Colorado, must scramble in the evenings to get their computers and other devices hooked up so they can do their school work.

“They’re going to a Walmart parking lot or outside a closed library and doing their homework where Wi-Fi is free,” Berg said.

In a broadband strategy report prepared for Baca, Bent, Crowley, Kiowa, Otero and Prowers counties, the consultancy firm Tilson noted that the lack of good home-based internet access in Colorado’s southeast corner has limited students’ abilities to efficiently use their school-sanctioned Chromebooks.

The report, released in August, said the inability to afford broadband at home was one of the major issues stopping its widespread adoption across the six-county area.

For home school mom Elisabeth Erickson-Noe, her family’s remote location — on a 29,000-acre ranch where rural Otero, Bent and Las Animas counties come together 20 miles south of La Junta — puts her in a virtual internet dead spot.

Dial-up is too slow, satellite is too limited and the wireless tower north of her property isn’t within line-of-sight of her home. So Erickson-Noe uses her cellphone as a hot spot for the internet. But that quickly has her bumping up against the limits of her data plan.

“We can’t do any live-streaming because we don’t have enough data,” she said.

And that means lesson plans for her 7-year-old daughter are limited. Erickson-Noe wants to show her daughter foreign language videos and have her do interactive online science and art programs, but she’s not always able.

“Having better internet would be a great bridge,” said Erickson-Noe, whose ranch — filled with radiant sunflowers and cholla cacti — is more than a mile off the area’s lone highway.

Staying competitive

Nearly 500 miles away, Devere, the IT chief at Colorado Northwestern Community College, said a high-speed network on the Rangely campus has gone from a wish-list item to a must-have. Students come from all over the region to take advantage of CNCC’s membership in the Scenic West Athletic Conference and to attend classes in the college’s dental hygiene and aviation program, he said.

In a town that doesn’t even have a Walmart or a McDonald’s, Devere said many students rely on the web for entertainment, studies and a connection to friends back home.

“The thing students who live here need is access to the wider world,” he said. “The lack of internet speed is one of our biggest complaints.”

Not for long, however. Starting this fall, CNCC will plug into Rio Blanco County’s broadband network, bringing 200 mbps to this campus of 250 students. That heavy bandwidth should future-proof the college for years to come, especially as increasingly data-hungry technologies hit the market, Devere said.

“We’re going to see virtual reality and augmented reality,” he said, walking along rows of dental chairs that are used to teach the hygienists of the future. “We’re going to have to stay competitive with our technology — and for a rural community college, that’s a big challenge.”

That challenge exists for rural hospitals, too, especially as telemedicine and remote doctor visits take off. Pioneers Medical Center in Meeker is in the enviable position of being able to tap into Rio Blanco County’s network.

The hospital has seen welcome improvements in the speed at which it can send high-resolution images to the radiology department at Valley View Hospital in Glenwood Springs. What used to take four hours or more sending a 3-D mammogram to Valley View now takes 20 minutes.

Even within rural areas of Colorado, there are vast differences in internet service and quality levels, said Pete Kirchhof, executive vice president of the Colorado Telecommunications Association. He likens the situation to a doughnut, where the center hole represents small towns and cities with significantly better online access than surrounding ranches and farms.

David Shipley, general manager of Rye and South Park Telephone Co., said the rollout of electricity service a century ago wasn’t an overnight thing — it first lit up the cities before charging up the farms.

There are signs of hope. CenturyLink this year expanded high-speed internet service to thousands of rural Colorado households and businesses. And Echostar Corp. and ViaSat each recently launched a satellite that will provide better speeds to rural areas.

The Colorado Broadband Deployment Board this summer announced it is accepting applications for infrastructure grants through Sept. 12, with $9.4 million available to be distributed this cycle. Last year, about $2 million went to 4,700 households and 175 businesses in 10 rural counties to help improve broadband access and bring down costs.

But just how fast the urban-rural divide on broadband is bridged remains to be seen.

“Hopefully, it gets there,” Shipley said. “My gut is that it will take many years for the rural space to catch up with the urban space. The majority of the community has to get behind it.”

Google may be close to buying the smartphone business of HTC, the troubled consumer electronics maker based in Taiwan, according to a press report. 

According to a report in a Taiwanese publication (Google Translate version here), the two companies are in the final stages of acquisition talks. The report does not say how much Google may buy HTC for.

The deal would mark a surprise return to becoming a serious hardware player for Google, three years after it sold its Motorola smartphone subsidiary. And as Google invests more efforts into building its own in-house devices, like the Pixel phone, owning a smartphone subsidiary could help it mount a stronger challenge to Apple's iPhone.

A note from UBS on Thursday, citing the Commercial Times news article, says that the deal would only involve HTC's smartphone R&D team.

A Google spokesperson declined to comment, but didn't deny the report. An HTC spokesperson declined to comment.

The Commercial Times article did not cite a price for the acquisition, but UBS said it expected that a deal would be immaterial to Google-parent company Alphabet's financials.

Among the potential benefits of the deal, UBS said:  "Deeper integration of hardware/software would offset some of the Android fragmentation issues that do not plague Apple iOS." 

Shares of Google parent company Alphabet were unchanged in after hours trading on Thursday.

History repeating itself

According to a Bloomberg report last month, HTC has been exploring its options as its smartphone sales dwindle and its VR headset business struggles to take off. One option on the table was to spin out the VR division and sell the smartphone business, according to the report.

It would be an odd move for Google, assuming the deal goes through. In 2011, Google bought Motorola for $12.5 billion in a effort to ramp up its hardware ambitions. Motorola released a few handsets while operating as a Google subsidiary, but none of them were blockbusters.

In 2014, Google dumped Motorola and sold it to Lenovo for $2.9 billion.

Back to hardware

But Google has a renewed interest in hardware, and it's seen as a growth area for the company outside its core ad business.

Last year, Google formed a new hardware division under former Motorola CEO Rick Osterloh. Osterloh's group was responsible for products like last year's well-received Pixel phones, Google Home Speaker, and Daydream View VR headset. Google partnered with HTC to manufacture the Pixel phone.

Google is expected to release an update to the Pixel phone and a new touchscreen Chromebook in October.

Do you know anything about the potential Google and HTC deal? Email skovach@businessinsider.com and you'll be kept anonymous.

SEE ALSO: Everything we know about the iPhone 8

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Last week I finally installed Little Snitch, a long-running Mac utility that lets you track every connection in and out of your computer. The latest version, released in July, comes with a map of where each connection is headed geographically, which is what convinced me to take the plunge. Now, Little Snitch can give you a physical representation of every IP your computer connects with. It will even light up particular paths when a new connection is made, a visual guide to all the invisible handshakes taking place each second just to keep your programs running.

When you can see those connections, the internet starts to look different. The first thing I noticed was that there are a lot of them. Over the course of a few days, my computer...

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Google is trying to attract Microsoft Azure customers over to its Cloud service in an unusual way: by sending free Chromebooks to Azure customers as part of its pitch to convince them to switch over to Google Cloud, as reported by Petri.

Cleverly, the Chromebook is actually part of Google’s approach. The laptop is intended to be used for a Google Hangout, with a Google Cloud representative pitching Azure users on the advantages of Google’s platform.

Along with the Chromebook, Google’s package also seems to include testimonials from companies like Spotify and Evernote to further sell Azure customers on Google’s services. It’s probably unlikely, however, that a $200 laptop will really tip the scales when...

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• GPS tracking devices, drones, apps have infiltrated Premiership Rugby clubs and changed the way coaches train players.
• A Harlequins sports scientist showed Business Insider the extent of how technology is at the forefront of a top rugby club's training sessions.
• Innovations include Harlequins players sitting inside IMAX video booths and watching drone footage of their performances.

Premiership Rugby is undergoing a technological revolution and it is changing the way coaches prepare training sessions and how they analyse player performance.

Business Insider visited Harlequins Rugby Club during a pre-season training session at Surrey Sports Park in Guildford. We were given a glimpse of how Harlequins coaches use performance tracking tech to ensure players are prepared for the 2017-2018 Premiership season.

The tools include:

1. Global Positioning System (GPS) devices — handheld systems that are placed into a pouch on the back of each player's shirt.
2. Drones and fixed "lamppost" cameras — training sessions and live matches are filmed from unique vantage points so coaches can analyse drills and passages of play from all angles.
3. Phone apps — players fill out surveys on a daily basis so coaches can monitor sleeping patterns and live match recovery.

Meshing sport and tech is not a new phenomenon. Aussie Rules has used GPS since 2004, Premier League football clubs also get players wearing tech during training sessions, and NFL teams have toyed with drones since 2015. Now it's rugby's turn.

"Technology has gotten into sport just like it has gotten into every part of life," said Tom Batchelor, the lead sports scientist at Harlequins. He went through each piece of tech with BI before a midweek morning training session in August. Here is what he said:

1. Global Positioning System (GPS) devices

"When I first started my career, we would work with athletes on a one-to-one basis," Batchelor says. "You could have a conversation for an hour in the gym and understand how they're feeling, how sore they feel, and whether any old injuries are recurring.

"But when you scale that up to 60 athletes at a Premiership rugby club, there are just not enough coaches to give that level of one-to-one support on a daily basis. GPS allows us to get as close to that level as possible. GPS gives us the ability to track exactly what's happening on the pitch."

The GPS system that Harlequins uses is a Catapult OptimEye S5 device. The unit, pictured above, is wearable technology used by 10 of the 12 Premiership rugby clubs, five-time football World Cup winners Brazil, and the 2017 NBA champions Golden State Warriors.

The units fit into a pouch on the back of each and every athlete's training kit and a powerful microprocessor computes 1,000 data points per second during training sessions.

For Harlequins, the data points the club is most interested in, includes:

• How far each athlete has run (distance)
• Sustained high-speed running (time spent at maximum velocity)
• How quickly each athlete changes direction (turn of pace)
• How fast each athlete can accelerate
• How quickly each athlete can decelerate
• When "significant load" has the potential to cause an injury (sharp changes of direction can impact mechanical load on the body)
• Total time spent on the field

"Of all the data points GPS gives, we focus more on the ones that are related to performance," Batchelor says. "We can see how hard the players are working and whether they are doing what the coaches set them out to do. For instance, we can monitor 'kick chase periods.' This is when somebody sends a kick up the field and we can monitor how many guys are actually approaching their high velocities when chasing after the ball."

Scrum algorithms have also been developed. When five Catapult GPS devices units are aligned at certain angles, the algorithm understands a scrum must be happening.

"The units don't talk to each other, but sync in a way where you can have them collectively tell you how long the scrum goes on for and how many scrums there were," Batchelor explains.

A meaningful pace for each athlete is determined using a standard test — a six-minute run consisting of laps around the rugby pitch. "That six-minute pace you get to, the average pace, is the meaningful pace. Anything below this is a speed your body won't find tiring. Above this, what we call high-speed running, would physically fatigue your body."

Batchelor stresses that meaningful paces can vary according to each athlete and also according to position. "Generally wingers are fast whereas guys who weigh 120 kilograms are not as fast. But we've got British Lions prop Kyle Sinckler who is not only rapid, he's 120 kilograms. Individual thresholds are therefore taken into account."

He adds: "Everything gets tracked. Everything. Tackle completion, line-up completion, scrum completion, system errors in defence, you name it, it gets tracked."

Then it's about crunching the data.

"After a training session, we plug all of the GPS units into a dock and, via USP, the data is pulled into a console. We then sync that up to our cloud. The cloud lets us take relevant data from it and we can then build a database of knowledge as training sessions turn into weeks, weeks into months, months into years, and so on.

"A cloud system means we can access all information regardless of which teams, units, are training away, or at home. Over time, you can track what each athlete's highs are, what the lows are, and what is average."

Batchelor tracks player performance for certain drills — high-speed running, scrum completion, tackle completion, and more — with charts like the one above.

The acute-chronic ratio line is at zero during off-season, or rest days. When this line rises, it means the player is performing well against his averages. When it falls, it may not necessarily mean the player is under-performing, but rather that the athlete is getting more and more accustomed to the drill or exercise in question.

"My background is in banking, working as a prime brokerage relationship manager for Paribas," Batchelor says. "This means I'm handy with a spreadsheet. It's probably one of the reasons Quins hired me five years ago!"

2. Drones and fixed "lamppost" cameras

"At training, Harlequins have what I call 'lampost cameras,'" Batchelor says. "They sit at one end of the pitch and provide the coaching staff with really high-quality images.

"We've used drones before, too. Drone operators sit at one end of a pitch and move the drones around manually. You get completely different camera angles and perspectives throughout the training sessions and throughout a live game.

"This high-level tech — the video, the GPS — is great as it makes our lives as coaches easier. But it is important to have specialists, high-level coaches, and sports scientists, who can interpret the data from that tech, correctly."

Coaches review footage with players in IMAX-filled analysis rooms.

"Every single training session is reviewed from a really basic stationary skill session, to a full rugby session, in an analysis room.

"There are five IMAX booths set up in there. Our players can log in at any time and we see how often they watch and which clips they watch. All training clips, all match clips, and all individual clips are available, so every athlete can watch what ruck they've hit, even going back years and years. Most of our boys tend to watch the entire games back."

How has drone use, lamppost camera footage, and IMAX booths assisted the rugby coaching process? "If one player has had a conversation with a coach and has been told his defence wasn't great, he can then watch every tackle he made and every miss-tackle, over a two year period, in ten minutes.

"The coach can then sit down with them and say 'you're positioning is wrong,' or 'your tackle choice is wrong.'" Solutions to the positioning, or tackle choice, can then be discussed.

3. Phone apps

The work-related apps rugby players have downloaded on their phones fall under two categories. The first is for video use and the second is for wellness.

"We use Vimeo," Batchelor says. "Players log in via Vimeo to have access to our private videos." These private videos loops back to footage Quins filmed during training sessions and competitive rugby.

"Our boys also use wellness apps, too," Batchelor adds. "Every morning, at 8 a.m, they will have answered a series of questions." Here's a selection:

• How well did you sleep?
• How well do you feel?
• How well recovered do you feel?
• Do you have lower back pain?
• Do you have any previous injuries that are causing you issues?

"Our guys score them on a scale of one to 10 of how bad they are, 10 being awful. That comes in centrally to us. We see it in Google Docs and put that in a spreadsheet so we can track that as the season progresses."

Players are expected to register scores of eight or nine the morning after a competitive rugby game. Coaches then expect that score to reduce down to two or three as the week progresses. However, if nines are continually logged, then Batchelor would have a one-to-one with the player in question, pull them out of a training session so they have a better chance to recover, and potentially send them for additional massage or ice baths.

"We use the data we receive from the phone apps on our athletes phones, to direct where the players are going on a day to day basis. Whether that is full contact rugby training sessions, all the way through to rest sessions."

A problem of soreness can sometimes be down to something simple — like a lack of sleep. "We'd certainly talk if they had a bad night's sleep as there are things we can do to help."

All players also have access to psychologists.

Tech is revolutionising rugby

Rugby is an unpredictable game. Batchelor's job at Quins can therefore present more problems than if he were working in another sport.

He explains: "In rowing and cycling the sports are black and white. If you can produce x-number of watts for x-amount of time, then you will win the Olympics. More watts generated means you go faster and means you win.

"In rugby we are talking about a ball that is purposely designed to not bounce evenly. There's even more variables. There's weather, there's 15 individuals, and you've got an outcome that isn't 'do it fastest.' You don't even need to score more tries to win. It's a more difficult sport to go x = y."

The technology detailed here — from the Catapult OptimEye S5 GPS devices and drone use to wellness phone apps — eases Batchelor's job and he says the technology, as well as the interpretation of data, "has been revolutionary" during his five years at Harlequins.

The Premiership rugby season kicked off last weekend. Harlequins had its first match on Saturday but lost 39-29 at London Irish. It will be back to the IMAX booths to analyse what went wrong.

"The goal is to push into the top four. We are trying to get back into Premiership title-winning contention, winning Europe, and everything else," he says. "We are an ambitious squad, improve, get better, those are the ambitions."

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Huawei, China’s leading smartphone maker, surpassed Apple’s global smartphone sales for the first time in June and July, according to analysis by consulting firm Counterpoint Research. Huawei is now only behind Samsung in sales, and Counterpoint says that’s thanks to the company’s consistent investment in R&D and manufacturing, as well as aggressive and creative marketing (including this KFC phone).

Figures haven’t been released yet for August, though Counterpoint indicates sales for that month also look strong. However, it’s worth noting that with Apple’s new iPhone releases just around the corner, the iPhone maker is almost certain to get back on top in September.

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The Boston Red Sox used an Apple Watch to steal pitching signs during baseball games, including against the New York Yankees, according to The New York Times. An investigation conducted by Major League Baseball determined that a member of the Red Sox training staff used the smartwatch to receive information that helped the team’s players decipher hand signals used by the opposing team’s catcher, who is in charge of making (and signaling) the pitch selections for the pitcher.

The MLB commissioner’s office began the investigation two weeks ago after Brian Cashman, the Yankees’ general manager, reportedly filed an official complaint. Included in that complaint were multiple video clips showing the Red Sox trainer checking his Apple Watch...

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Facebook has decided how to finally make money from WhatsApp: charge businesses that want to conduct customer support in the app.

WhatsApp's program for businesses will charge large companies that want to be verified and have access to a suite of automated tools for helping and responding to customers, the Facebook-owned app announced on Tuesday. A free standalone mobile app for small businesses will also offer similar features.

The tools and standalone app for businesses were both recently uncovered in WhatsApp's own documentation and app code. WhatsApp is testing its business program privately with a handful of businesses around the world and hasn't said when it will make the program more widely available. It also hasn't said how much it plans to charge businesses for access to its full suite of tools.

“WhatsApp has simplified communication for people around the world. Now, we want to apply this same approach to bringing businesses onto WhatsApp in ways that create value for people," WhatsApp chief operating officer Matt Idema said in a statement shared with Business Insider. "We're looking forward to making it possible for people to connect with businesses in a fast and personal way, and giving businesses the tools to make that easier to do.”

WhatsApp envisions letting businesses like airlines and banks field customer questions and provide updates for things like flight times, the company said in a blog post on Tuesday.

Facebook spent $22 billion on acquiring WhatsApp in 2014. The app used to charge users a $1 per year subscription but dropped the fee in early 2016. WhatsApp cofounder Jan Koum has long been a staunch opponent of traditional advertising and has promised that the app will never show ads.

By choosing to charge businesses out of the gate, WhatsApp is taking a different approach to making money than Messenger, Facebook's other standalone messaging app. Messenger let businesses conduct customer support for free but never managed to monetize the approach. The app has recently started showing ads.

SEE ALSO: Tencent wanted to buy WhatsApp, but Mark Zuckerberg swooped in and stole the $19 billion deal while its CEO was having back surgery

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The Galaxy Note 8 is Samsung's latest top-of-the-line smartphone, and Business Insider's testing revealed that it's shaping up to be a fantastic overall device.

Unfortunately, there might be one major flaw.

Web developer and user experience designer Mel Tajon ran a test with the Note 8, and found its facial recognition feature can be tricked with a photograph.

The feature normally allows users to unlock the phone by scanning their face with the front-facing camera, in place of a passcode or fingerprint reader.

In a video posted by Tajon on Twitter, he holds two Note 8 devices in front of one another. One Note 8 just has a selfie of Tajon on screen, and that's enough to fool the second device's front-facing camera, giving him access to the phone.

What's worse is that even relatively low-quality pictures such as those uploaded on Facebook and Instagram can seemingly do the trick. "Confirmed: I’m also able to unlock the Samsung Galaxy Note 8 with people’s Facebook profile pics and Instagram selfies from my iPhone," said Tajon.

With smartphones becoming the centralised hubs of our digital lives, and containing a lot of sensitive information about us (like the location of our home or credit card numbers), it's pretty important that the devices feel secure.

For anyone worried: You don't have to enable facial recognition. The Note 8 also lets you unlock the phone with your iris, fingerprint, or the old-fashioned passcode. 

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The store posted up a series of images on its blog, showing some of the cameras that were damaged during the eclipse. Blog editor Zach Sutton wrote that they weren’t out to criticize their customers, but wanted to show what happened, and that it’s fortunate that they have a repairs department.

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Water and oil?

Let’s start by saying this for starters:

WebRTC is VoIP

That said, it is different than VoIP in the most important of ways:

1. In the ways entrepreneurs make use of it to bring their ideas to life
2. In the ways developers yield it to build applications

Why is that?

Because WebRTC lends itself to two very different worlds, all running over the Internet: The World Wide Web. And VoIP.

And these two worlds? They don’t mix much. Beside the fact that they both run over IP, there’s not a lot of resemblance between them. Well, that and the fact that both SIP and HTTP has a 200 OK message.

If you ever developed anything in the world of VoIP, then you know how calls get connected. You’re all about ring tones and the many features that comprise a Class 5 softswitch. The truth of the matter is, that this kind of knowledge can often be your undoing when it comes to WebRTC.

Here are 10 major differences between developing with WebRTC and developing with VoIP:

#1 – You are No Longer in Control

With VoIP, life was simple. All pieces of the solution was yours.

The server, the clients, whatever.

When something didn’t work, you’d go in, analyze it, fix the relevant piece of software, and be done with it.

WebRTC is different.

You’ve got this nagging thing known as the “browser”.

4 of them.

And they change. And update. A lot.

Here’s what happened in the past year with Chrome and Firefox:

A version every 6-8 weeks. For each of them.

And these versions? They tend to change things in how the browsers change their behavior when it comes to WebRTC. These changes may cause services to falter.

These changes means that:

1. You are not in control over the whole software running your service
2. You are not in control of when pieces of your deployment get upgraded (browsers will upgrade without you having a say in it)

VoIP doesn’t work this way.

You develop, integrate, deploy and then you decide when to upgrade or modify things. With WebRTC that isn’t the case any longer.

You must continuously test against future browser versions (beta, unstable, Canary and nightly should become part of your vocabulary). You need to have the means to easily and quickly upgrade a production service – at runtime. And be prepared to do it rather frequently.

#2 – Javascript is King

My pedigree comes from VoIP.

I am a VoIP developer.

I did development, project management, product management and then been a CTO of a business unit where what we did was develop VoIP software SDKs that were used (and are still used) in many communication products.

I am a great developer. Really. One of the best I know. At least when it comes to coding in C.

VoIP was traditionally developed in C/C++ and Java.

With Javascript I know my way but by no means am I even an average developer. My guess is that a lot of VoIP engineers have a similar background to me.

WebRTC is all about Javascript.

In WebRTC, JavaScript is King
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Yes. WebRTC has a Javascript API. But that’s half the story. Many of the backend systems written for use with WebRTC ends up using Node.js. Which uses Javascript.

WebRTC isn’t limited to Javascript. There are systems written in C, Java, Python, C#, Erlang, Dart and even PHP that are used. There are .Net systems. On mobile, native apps use Objective C, Swift or Java in their implementations of client-side WebRTC SDKs.

But the majority? That’s Javascript.

Three main reasons I can see for it:

1. Fashion. Node.js is fashionable and new. WebRTC is also new, so there’s a fit
2. Asynchronous. The signaling in WebRTC needs to be snappy and interactive. It needs to have a backend that can fit nicely with its model of asynchronous interactions and interfaces. Node.js offers just that and makes it easier to think of signaling on the frontend and backend at the same time. Which leads us to the third and probably most important reason –
3. Javascript. You use it in the frontend and backend. Easier for developers to use a single language for both. Easier to shift bits and pieces of code from one side to the other if and when needed

#3 – A Big Island

VoIP is all about interoperability. A big happy family of vendors. All collaborating and cooperating. The idea is that if you purchase a phone from one vendor, you *should* be able to dial another vendor’s phone with it via a third vendor’s PBX. It works. Sometimes. And it requires a lot of effort in interoperability testing and tweaking. An ongoing arduous task. The end result though is a system where you end up testing a small set of vendors that are approved to work within a certain deployment.

VoIP and interoperability abhors the idea of islands. Different communication services that can’t connect to each other.

WebRTC is rather different. You no longer build one VoIP product or device that is designed to communicate with VoIP devices of other vendors. You build the whole shebang.

An island of sorts, but a rather big one. One where you can offer access through all browsers, operating systems and mobile devices.

You no longer care about interoperability with other vendors – just with interoperability of your service with the browsers you are relying on. It simplifies things some while complicating the whole issue of being in control (see #1 above).

#4 – It is Cloudy

It seems like VoIP was always mean to run in local deployments. There are a few cases where you see it deployed globally, but they aren’t many. Usually, there’s a geography that goes into the process.

This is probably rooted with the origins of VoIP – as a replacement / digital copy of what you did in telecom before. It also relates to the fact that the world was bigger in the past – the cloud as we know it today (AWS and the many other cloud providers that followed) didn’t really exist.

Skype is said to have succeeded so much as it did due to the fact that it had a great speech codec at the time that was error resilient (it had FEC built-in at a time companies conceptualized about bickering in the IETF and the ITU standard bodies about adding FEC in the RTP layer). It also had NAT traversal that just worked (again, when STUN and TURN were just ideas). The rest of the world? We were all happy enough to instruct customers to install their gatekeepers and B2BUAs in the DMZ.

Since then VoIP has evolved a lot. It turned towards the SBC (more on this in #10).

WebRTC has bigger challenges and requirements ahead of it.

For the most part, and with most deployments of WebRTC, there are three things that almost always are apparent:

1. Deployments are global. You never know from where the users will be joining. Not globally and not their type of network
2. Networks are unmanaged. This is similar to the above. You have zero control over the networks, but your users will still complain about the quality (just check out any of Fippo’s analysis posts)
3. We deploy them on AWS. All the time. On virtual machines. Inside Docker containers. Layers and layers of abstraction. For a real time service. It it seems to work

#5 – Bring Your Own Signaling

VoIP is easy. It is standardized. Be it SIP, H.323, XMPP or whatever you bring to the table. You are meant to use a signaling protocol. Something someone else has thought of in the far dark rooms in some standards organization. It is meant to keep you safe. To support the notion and model of interoperability. To allow for vendor agnostic deployments.

WebRTC did away with all this, opting to not have a signaling protocol at all out of the box.

Some complain about it (mostly VoIP people). I’ve written about it some 4 years ago – about the death of signaling.

With WebRTC you make the decision on what signaling protocol you will be using. You can decide to go for a standards based solution such as SIP over WebSocket, XMPP over BOSH or WebSocket – or you can use a newly created signaling protocol invented only for your specific scenario – or use whatever you already have in your app to signal people.

As with anything in WebRTC, it opens up a few immediate questions:

1. Should you use a standards based signaling protocol or a proprietary one?
2. Should you built it on your own from scratch or use a third party framework for it?
3. Should you host and manage it on your own or use it as a service instead?

All answers are now valid.

#6 – Encryption and Privacy are MANDATORY

With VoIP, encryption was always optional. Seldom used.

I remember going to these interoperability events as a developer. The tests that almost never really succeeded were the ones that used security. Why? You got to them last during the week long event, and nobody got that part quite the same as others.

That has definitely changed over the years, but the notion of using encryption hasn’t. VoIP products are shipped to customers and deployed without encryption. The encryption piece is an optional configuration that many skip. Encryption makes it hard to use wireshark to understand what goes in the network, it takes up CPU (not much anymore, but still conceptually it is), it complicates things.

WebRTC on the other hand, has only encryption configured into it. No way to use it with clear RTP. even if you really really want to. Even if you swear all browsers and their communications run inside a secure network. Nope. can’t take security out of WebRTC.

#7 – If it is New, WebRTC Will be Using it

When WebRTC came out, it made use of the latest most recent RFCs that were VoIP related in the media domain.

Ability to bundle RTP and RTCP on the same stream? Check.

Ability to multiplex audio and video on the same stream? Check.

Ability to send FIR commands over RTCP and not signaling? Check.

Ability to negotiate keys over DTLS-SRTP instead of SDES? Check.

There are many other examples for it.

And in many cases, WebRTC went to the extreme of banning the other, more common, older mechanisms of doing things.

VoIP was always made with options in mind. You have at least 10 different ways in the standard to do something. And all are acceptable.

WebRTC takes what makes sense to it, throwing the rest out the window, leaving the standard slightly cleaner in the end of it.

Just recently, a decision was made about supporting non-multiplexed streams. This forced Asterisk and all of its users to upgrade.

VoIP and SIP were never really that important to WebRTC. Live with it.

#8 – Identity Management and Authorization are Tricky

There’s no identity management in WebRTC.

There’s also no clear authorization model to be heard of.

Here’s a simple one:

With SIP, the way you handle users is giving them usernames and passwords.

The user clicks that into the client and this gets used to sign up to the service.

With regular apps, it is easy to set that username/password as your TURN credentials as well. But doing it with WebRTC inside a browser opens up a world of pain with the potential of harvesting that information to piggyback on your TURN servers, costing you money.

So instead you end up using ephemeral passwords in TURN with WebRTC. Here’s an explanation how to do just that.

In many other cases, you simply don’t care. If the user already logged into the page, and identified and authenticated himself in front of your service, then why have an additional set of credentials for him? You can just as easily piggyback a mechanism such as Facebook connect, Twitter, LinkedIn or Google accounts to get the authentication part going for you.

#9 – Route. Don’t Mix

If you come from VoIP, then you know that for more than two participants in a call you mix the media. You do it usually for audio, but also for the video. That’s just how things are (were) done.

But for WebRTC, routing media through an SFU is how you do things.

It makes the most sense because of a multitude of reasons:

1. For many use cases, this is the only thing that can work when it comes to meeting your business model. It strikes that balance between usability and costs
2. This in turn, brings a lot of developers and researchers to this domain, improving media routing and SFU related technologies, making it even better as time goes by
3. In WebRTC, the client belongs to the server – the server sends the client as HTML/JS code. With the added flexibility of getting multiple media streams, comes an added flexibility to the UI’s look and feel as well as behavior

There are those who are still resistant to the routing model. When these people have a VoIP pedigree, they’ll lean towards the mixing model of an MCU, calling it superior. It will usually cost 10 times or more to deploy an MCU instead of an SFU.

Be sure to know and understand SFUs if you plan on using WebRTC.

#10 – SBCs are Useless

Or at least not mandatory anymore.

Every. SBC. vendor. out. there. is. adding. WebRTC.

And I get it. If you’re building an SBC – a Session Border Controller – then you should also make sure it supports WebRTC so all these pesky people looking to get access through the browser can actually get it.

An SBC was an abomination added to VoIP. It was a necessary evil.

It served the purpose of sitting in the DMZ, making sure your internal network is protected against malicious VoIP access. A firewall for VoIP traffic.

Later people bolted on that SBC the ability to handle interoperability, because different vendor products never really worked well with one another (we’ve already seen that in #3). Then transcoding was added, because we could. And then other functions.

And at some point, it was just obvious to place SBCs in VoIP infrastructure. Well… WebRTC doesn’t need an SBC.

VoIP needs an SBC that handles WebRTC. But if you’re planning on doing a WebRTC based application that doesn’t have much of VoIP in it, you can skip the SBC.

#11 – Ecosystem Created by the API and Not the Specification

Did I say 10 differences? So here’s a bonus difference.

Ecosystems in VoIP are created around the network protocol.

You get people to understand the standard specification of the network protocol, and from there you build products.

In WebRTC, the center is not the network protocol (yes, it is important and everything) – it is the WebRTC APIs. The ones implemented in the browsers that enable you to build a client on top. One that theoretically should run across all browsers.

That’s a huge distinction.

Many of the developers in WebRTC are clueless about the network, which is a shame.  On the other hand, many VoIP developers think they understand the network but fail to understand the nuanced differences between how the network works in VoIP and in WebRTC.

What’s Next?

If you’re on the web side of things, then be sure to read this article as well.

If you have VoIP background, then there are things for you to learn when shifting your focus towards WebRTC. And you need to come at it with an open mind.

WebRTC seems very similar to VoIP – and it is – because it is VoIP. But it is also very different. In the ways it is designed, thought of and used.

Knowing VoIP, you should have a head start on others. But only if you grok the differences.

Need to warm up to WebRTC? Try my free WebRTC server side mini course.

And if you’re really serious, enroll to my Advanced WebRTC Architecture Course.

The post Why Developing With WebRTC is Different than VoIP Development? appeared first on BlogGeek.me.

• Islands is a new messaging app aimed at college students.
• It's designed to connect people located within five miles of each other
• Its founder, Greg Isenberg, previously launched a video curation app that he sold to StumbleUpon.  

Entrepreneur Greg Isenberg is serious about market research.

He values it so much that when he launched his new messaging app for college students, called Islands, he rented a space in student housing at the University of Western Ontario so he could be closer to his potential customers.

"It was kind of like 21 Jump Street meets Silicon Valley," Isenberg said last week, in an interview with Business Insider. 

The app, which officially launched on Wednesday, is a modern take on group messaging. It's designed to allow people in a particular geographic area — they have to be within five miles of one another — to chat with each other. Users communicate through topic-specific groups called islands that they can create on an ad-hoc basis. 

Hoping to learn from Yik-Yak

Users have been doing a range of things with Islands, Isenberg said. Sometimes they get on the service to ask where the party is that night or to see if anyone's up for a pickup basketball game. One person recently used the app to see if anyone on the second floor of a campus library had Advil. 

Islands permits users to chat anonymously. But it's hoping to prevent the type of harassment that happened on Yik-Yak, the anonymous chat app that targeted college students that was shut down earlier this year. So Islands is encouraging users to connect their accounts on its service with their Snapchat or Instagram accounts as a way of identifying themselves, thinking that will make them more reluctant to abuse others.

Additionally, when users create islands, they become the administrators of those groups, with the power to kick out anyone who is harassing other members. User who are booted out of multiple island groups can be kicked off the app entirely, Isenberg said. 

The roundabout path to college

Isenberg and his team didn't create Islands with college students in mind. The original inspiration for the app came from an encounter Isenberg had with a woman in Los Angeles who had been diagnosed with a rare type of cancer. She was part of an email support group with other women who had the same diagnosis.

Isenberg tried to get the group on Slack, even creating accounts on the communications service for members of the email group, figuring it would be more convenient for them than email. But he quickly realized that while Slack can be a helpful business tool, it's not great for more casual conversations.

"It got me thinking about the state of connecting like-minded communities on the internet, especially within local communities," he said.

He soon came to the conclusion that none of the current services or communications tools was up for the job. So he gathered a group from 5by, the video curation app he sold to StumbleUpon in 2013, and got to work making a modern communications tool for communities. 

Once the team had created Islands, they tried to figure out which kind of community was most likely to use it. The team settled on college kids.

"It's the single greatest time of self-discovery," Isenberg said. 

College evangelism

That's when he decided it was time to go back to college and make some friends. Within 30 days of being on University of Western Ontario's campus, he had convinced 10% of the school to use the app.

"That's when we realized we had something," he said. 

Since Isenberg and his team can't spend all of their time camping out at college campuses, they rely on students to promote their app. Typically, they look for ones who are passionate about a particular group on campus, such as the LGBT community or the Greek community, and encourage them to become Islands evangelists to that group. 

The Islands app is available at seven US colleges, in addition to the University of Western Ontario. The company plans to make the app available on 75 campuses by September 2018.

But Isenberg is hoping to expand Islands' service beyond college campuses. 

"The goal ultimately is to become the de-facto tool for everyone," he said. "Once we’ve saturated college we’ll have to figure out what’s next.”

That could mean high schools, cities, or anywhere else that people are looking for an easy and casual way to connect online.

SEE ALSO: These Are The Hottest Startups On College Campuses Right Now

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