Davemichels

As Slack and other cloud-based office productivity tools become more commonplace, they're making their way well beyond the land of cubicles and into more hands-on places of business like farms and restaurants. 

Rebecca Yazbek was six months pregnant when she first introduced Slack to her staff at Nomad, the Sydney, Australia-based restaurant she runs with her husband, Al. 

Then, her baby came early, and Yazbek ended up in the hospital with only her cellphone.

"Slack was the only form of communication," she told Business Insider over the phone from her vacation in Croatia, with her now 1-year-old cooing in the background. 

"That 1-year-old that you heard was forcing me to take time out. I was very hands-on before I had my son, and I was anxious about taking time out of the business and was looking for a solution."

As director of Nomad, Yazbek is just one of many small business owners finding use for software initially developed with traditional offices in mind. While a lot of what she personally oversees is the business side of the restaurant, Yazbek and her team have found ways to make Slack integrate seamlessly into the day-to-day operations of the locally-sourced eatery. 

Now, Yazbek and her husband are moving to Melbourne, Australia, to launch a second location, and she plans to continue managing the original restaurant via Slack.

"That will be the main source of communication," Yazbek said. 

Out of 47 employees at the restaurant, 20 are on the business' Slack channel. Most of them are managers and use the platform to communicate across teams — between the kitchen and the front of house, for example — or with people working different shifts. Nobody uses Slack while on the floor of the restaurant because "customers would hate that," Yazbek said.

In addition to using Slack's chat feature, Nomad uses it to get notifications from other services. For example, Nomad linked its Dropbox account to Slack, so when a prospective employee submits a resume using the online storage service, the Nomad team gets a Slack notification. 

Likewise with Wufoo, which allows users to easily create online forms. Nomad created a customer feedback form in Wufoo and linked it to Slack. Now when a customer sends in feedback, Slack alerts the Nomad team.

Getting that instant notification of customer feedback is one of the fun parts of the tool, Yazbek said. 

"Someone wants lime instead of lemon or says there is too much salt," she said. "From a team building perspective, people have a chuckle over that."

Across the globe in Hilmar, California, Aaron Wickstrom uses Slack to take care of the 2,400 Jersey cows on his family's fourth-generation dairy farm. 

All of Wickstrom's 27 full-time employees have the app installed on their phones. They use it while in the field to handle everything from spontaneous questions to solar-eclipse preparation. 

The area where Slack has had the most impact is in late-night manure emergencies.

Wickstrom Dairy uses a solids separations system to convert cow waste into fertilizer, and the machinery sometimes gets stuck. When that happens, everyone on the team gets a text alert. 

Before Slack, there was no good way to tell the rest of the team that the malfunction was being dealt with, so multiple people would show up in the middle of the night to address the same issue. Now, whomever is dealing with it just notifies everyone else over Slack.

"It's become more convenient and we're not disrupting people's sleep schedules," Wickstrom said.

Slack isn't the only program being used on the farm. Wickstrom said he uses Asana, an online project management service, for scheduling. For documents he and his team use Google's G-Suite of cloud-based productivity software and Evernote. 

"We produce a lot of data points every day. Every time a cow is milked we capture how much milk is produced," Wickstrom said. "People have a view of farming as people leaning on their pitchfork, not having a lot to do. Most people don't realize how much tech is involved in farming."

SEE ALSO: IBM wants to use the technology that underlies bitcoin to help prevent major foodborne outbreaks like salmonella

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NOW WATCH: 8 details you might have missed on season 7 episode 4 of 'Game of Thrones'

• Labor Day weekend is a good reminder that academic research has found humans work best in a four-day work schedule, not the typical 40-hour workweek.
• Psychologists and business owners have found employees are more productive when they are given more time off.
• Employees report feeling more refreshed, relaxed, and more alert — although it requires leaders to go against the grain.

National holidays that fall on a Monday — like Labor Day — shouldn't be the only reason Americans get three days off.

According to research from the worlds of psychology and business, it might be better if it happened every week.

Over the last several years, a number of companies around the world have made the switch to a shortened workweek, Amazon being one of the most prominent examples.

The world's second-largest retailer announced in August 2016 that a select group of part-time employees would soon only need to work 30 hours per week to earn 75% pay and full benefits.

It's too early to know for sure, but there's a good chance those employees will feel more passionate about their jobs and get more done than the people working twice as long.

Consider the research of K. Anders Ericsson, one of the top experts on the psychology of work. (His research led author Malcolm Gladwell to devise the 10,000-hour rule, the idea that experts need at least 10,000 hours of practice to master a given craft. However, Anders has since criticized the rule.)

Multiple experiments done in Ericsson's lab have shown that people can commit themselves to only four or five hours of concentrated work at a time before they stop getting things done. Past the peak performance level, output tends to flatline, or sometimes even suffer.

"If you're pushing people well beyond that time they can really concentrate maximally, you're very likely to get them to acquire some bad habits," Ericsson told Business Insider. What's worse, those bad habits could end up spilling into the time people are normally productive, and suddenly even the shorter weeks are wasteful.

Put into practice, shortening the work week seems to reap all kinds of rewards.

Ryan Carson, CEO of the technology education company Treehouse, has seen his employees become happier and more productive since he implemented the 32-hour work week back in 2006. Core to Carson's leadership philosophy is the belief that forcing people to work 40-hour weeks is nearly inhumane, he told the Atlantic.

"It's not about more family time, or more play time, or less work time — it's about living a more balanced total life," he said. "We basically take ridiculously good care of people because we think it's the right thing to do."

The company isn't struggling to make ends meet, either. Its yearly revenue is in the millions, and according to Carson, people love to come to work each day.

A similar story is playing out at the marketing and advertising company SteelHouse, where CEO Mark Douglas began 2017 by implementing a policy known as "SteelHouse Days." Each month, the company gets one three-day weekend to complement the months that already have such weekends, such as May and September.

"It doesn't take a lot of science" to see that an extra day off each month makes people happier when they come in to work, he told Business Insider. "It's just a matter of having the courage to do something different and believing that there will be a net gain from it."

Joe Rubin, human resources expert and co-founder of the recruiting site Crowded.com, told Business Insider that Amazon's new policy is also a win because it's bound to attract new talent.

With a 30-hour workweek, Rubin said, new mothers and people with other obligations can maintain a stable work schedule without needing to take a long leave of absence or work inconvenient hours. By offering employees more flexibility, Amazon sends the message that life outside of work matters.

Some evidence suggests the solution isn't even in working fewer hours, but in how companies allocate people's time.

In 2008, in the middle of America's financial crisis, former Utah governor Jon Huntsman implemented a plan to reorganize the work week.

With only a month's heads-up, nearly 75% of state employees changed from working five eight-hour days to working four 10-hour days.

On the one hand, the extra day off saved public resources that were normally used to heat, cool, and power the buildings — a big win when cash was tight.

But the change also produced increased worker morale. People enjoyed the extra day off and the easier commutes, since they were no longer slogging through rush-hour traffic.

So while psychologists and work-life consultants might not know where the sweet spot of productivity exists, or if it's the same spot for everyone, the evidence suggests you shouldn't need 40 hours to get there.

For maximum productivity, people should stay mindful of when they start to feel burnt out. For everyone's sake, it might be time to cut back on clocking in.

SEE ALSO: Here's why Amazon's new 30-hour workweek is such a great idea

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Microsoft is planning to release its next major Windows 10 update on October 17th. The software giant has been testing Windows 10 Fall Creators Update for the majority of the year, and it includes a number of features and changes. The biggest addition is Windows Mixed Reality, Microsoft’s platform for new VR headsets from Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, and Lenovo. The Mixed Reality software is now fully part of Windows 10 with the Fall Creators Update, and some headsets will be available on October 17th with others arriving later this year.

Microsoft had planned some far bigger features for the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, but the company ended up delaying most of them to the next update planned early next year. A new Timeline feature has...

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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella took to LinkedIn on Thursday to stand up for the DREAMers — undocumented immigrants who arrived in the United States as children.

With President Trump reportedly considering ending an Obama-era program that protected such immigrants from deportation, Nadella defended "smart immigration" policies, saying they can "help our economic growth and global competitiveness."  

"We care deeply about the DREAMers who work at Microsoft and fully support them. We will always stand for diversity and economic opportunity for everyone," he wrote. 

Nadella also discussed his own immigration story. As a child, he was inspired by the "ingenuity of American technology." Later, he was able to come to the US to pursue his dreams thanks to the country's then-welcoming immigration polices. 

"This is the America that I know and of which I am a proud citizen," he wrote. "This is the America that I love and that my family and I call home. And this is the America that I will always advocate for." 

Nadella's note followed a post on Microsoft's official blog by Brad Smith, the company's president. Microsoft is "deeply concerned" at the prospect of Trump ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which protects DREAMers, Smith wrote, noting that the move would affect 27 company employees. Over the next decade, the program's end could cost the American economy $460 billion in lost gross domestic product, and could mean $24.6 billion less in contributions to Social Security and Medicare, he said, citing unnamed studies. 

"DACA recipients bring a wide array of educational and professional backgrounds that enable them to contribute in crucial ways to our nation’s workforce," he wrote.

This isn't the first time Microsoft officials have raised their voices to oppose Trump's immigration policies. The company and Nadella also issued a statement when Trump announced his plan to ban immigration from seven predominantly Muslim countries. Earlier this year, Nadella spoke at the White House, talking about his path to the American dream and advocating for diversity and opportunity for all. 

You can read Nadella's full statement here.

SEE ALSO: Read what Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told employees on Trump's immigration ban

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NOW WATCH: Here’s how the top Silicon Valley companies are responding to Trump’s immigration ban

Darrell Etherington / TechCrunch:
California DMV website shows Samsung has secured a permit to test self-driving cars  —  Samsung got approval to test autonomous vehicles on state roads in California, according to the CA Department of Motor Vehicle's website.  The DMV maintains an ongoing list of companies and organizations …

 Salesforce and IBM are joining forces again as they attempt to deepen their alliance. The partnership began last March when they agreed to sell each other’s artificial intelligence products, Watson and Einstein. Today’s announcement is all about data integration. Salesforce will be adding the ability to include IBM weather data in Lightning apps, while IBM will enable customers… Read More

On Wednesday, Microsoft and Amazon made a surprise announcement: Cortana and Alexa, their respective AI-based voice assistants, will work together.  

Or, as Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos succinctly put it in a tweet: "Alexa has made a new friend."

For anyone following the rise of artificial intelligence and the spread of virtual assistants into our everyday lives, this feels like a big moment. 

Your home could soon be inhabited by multiple virtual beings — each already capable of talking to you — now also communicating with each other. 

It sounds like science fiction. And there's no question that this will bring about some cool new experiences and functionality when it takes effect at the end of 2017.

In real life, though, it's going to be a lot longer, if ever, before this AI friendship really pays off for you, the customer. Here's why.

The big idea 

The idea, say the two companies, is to play to each virtual assistant's strengths. 

Microsoft claims 145 million monthly active Cortana users, and Alexa-powered Amazon Echo devices dominate the still very young market for smart speakers. 

Alexa is good at (surprise, surprise) letting you shop on Amazon. And Alexa has already emerged as the central concierge for a veritable menagerie of smart home products, from smart locks to refrigerators to lightbulbs. 

Microsoft, by contrast, pitches Cortana as the ideal assistant for the tech-savvy professional: It's plugged in to the Office 365 productivity suite, so it has a view into your calendar and Word and Excel documents. In the not-so-distant future, Microsoft has said, Cortana and LinkedIn will even integrate to tell you about the people in your next meeting.

Let the two AIs play together, and you get some nice benefits.

You'll be able to use your Amazon Echo (or other Alexa device) to talk to Cortana, for example. And you can  use your Windows 10 PC (or your phone's Cortana app) to talk to Alexa.

Just say "Alexa, open Cortana," or "Cortana, open Alexa," and your device will hand over control to the appropriate virtual assistant.  

But there are some significant limitations, as the New York Times reports. The assistants will be walled off from each other, almost entirely. So if you're using Microsoft's Cortana on your Amazon Echo Dot, and you want to play music from your Amazon Prime account, you'll have to switch back to Alexa.

This makes strategic sense — Amazon probably doesn't want Microsoft to see its customers' shopping behavior. And Microsoft has its own data that it doesn't want Alexa accessing directly. But from a user experience perspective, it stinks. Imagine needing to ask one specific member of your household every time you want to turn on the TV, and somebody else to dim the lights. 

I can't imagine that a lot of people out there will actually remember to switch between their assistants. Research released earlier in 2017 shows that while people will try lots of Alexa "skills," or apps, they don't really stick with them. And as it stands in this first version, Cortana is essentially just another Alexa skill. 

Eventually, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos told the New York Times, the goal is for Alexa (or Cortana) to automatically route the right question to the right assistant, without your needing to think about it. The idea is that one assistant might be for your personal life, and one for your professional life. 

This is when things will really get interesting.

The long road ahead

AI interoperability is a grand idea, and something that Amazon and Microsoft will probably brag about a lot in the months and years to come. 

And it's easy to understand why they're so excited. 

Amazon and Microsoft both missed out on the smartphone boom, relegating them to providing apps and services for other companies' platforms. The rise of the voice assistant represents a whole new platform; a change in the status quo that both Microsoft and Amazon are hoping to exploit.

With their powers combined, it gives both assistants footholds into new markets — a vital hedge as Apple and Google go on the offensive with their own Siri and Google Assistant heading into the holiday shopping season.

Despite the shortcomings of the current Alexa-Cortana partnership, Microsoft and Amazon could be on track to solve a huge existential threat to the future of technology. The explosion of virtual assistants has set loose a slew of technologies including Alexa, Cortana, Siri, Google Assistant, Samsung Bixby, and maybe even Facebook's M, that are spreading through your home — first, with speakers, then, with voice-controlled tablets, and next, home appliances.

It means that there's going to be a war for your home: Your toaster may use a different voice assistant than your fridge, which may be incompatible with all the home entertainment system in your living room. When you say "hello" to your home, it may answer back in a veritable chorus of different voices. 

That's the kind of chaotic scenario that nobody wants.

One obvious solution is to buy gadgets that support only one company's particular assistant, similar to today's iPhone or Windows ecosystems. But with the overall virtual assistant market still very much in flux, it may be a while before things settle down to the point where there are any real "safe," future-proofed options.

That makes the  automatic voice assistant aggregation envisioned by Bezos the sanest way to deal with the explosion of intelligence in the living room and office. But this system will only live up to its true potential and catch on with consumers if the gang of virtual assistants are able talk to each other on their own, without too many constraints. And for now, that's still science fiction.

SEE ALSO: Amazon and Microsoft team up to make their AI assistants Alexa and Cortana talk to each other

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NOW WATCH: Turns out the Amazon Echo Dot makes an amazing car infotainment system

Whole Foods now sells Amazon Echos in grocery stores. And, Amazon is now selling Whole Foods groceries. 

Soon after Amazon's $13.7 billion acquisition of Whole Foods went through on Monday, more than a thousand Whole Foods items were added to Amazon.com.

The previous Thursday, Amazon had announced that, post-acquisition, Whole Foods goods would be available on Amazon.com, AmazonFresh, Prime Pantry, and Prime Now. 

Currently, to purchase many of the Whole Foods items you need to have an AmazonFresh membership. AmazonFresh is Amazon's grocery delivery service and costs Prime members an additional $14.99 per month.

New York Magazine's Grub Street noted that the average Whole Foods stocks 35,000 to 52,000 items, so there's still a way to go before you can buy every Whole Food item on Amazon.com. 

Here's a sampling of some of the best-selling Whole Foods items available on Amazon as of Wednesday afternoon. 

SEE ALSO: I visited Whole Foods on the day it was acquired by Amazon — and it's clear it'll never be the same

Butter

Product: 16 oz. 365 Everyday Value, Unsalted Butter

Price: $3.49 

Cream Cheese

Product: 8 oz. 365 Everyday Value, Organic Cream Cheese

Price: $2.99

Turkey Breasts

Product: 6 oz. 365 Everyday Value, Organic Oven Roasted Turkey Breast

Price: $5.99

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

 Plaid, which is best known for helping financial services customers build applications with direct connections to their users’ bank accounts, announced today that they have released a new SDK to bring that same type of functionality to enterprise developers. “At a high level we are the middle layer between you and your bank,” Zach Perret, CEO at Plaid told TechCrunch. When… Read More

Uber has decided to remove a controversial feature that allowed the company to track the location of users even when they weren’t using the ride-hailing app.

Uber Chief Security Officer Joe Sullivan confirmed the change to Reuters, ahead of a planned announcement on Tuesday. The update will initially roll out to iPhone users later this week, though Sullivan tells Reuters that the company will introduce an update for Android users, as well.

An app update introduced last year prompted users to allow Uber to track their location even when not using the application, or to not share their location at all. Previously, users had the option of sharing their location only when using the app.

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Big companies that want Apple's own experts to help them make slick iPhone and iPad apps now have another place to find that expertise.

Apple announced a new partnership with Accenture, the consulting firm, on Tuesday. The upshot is that Apple will embed dedicated experts in iPhone and iPad technology with Accenture.

What that means: Accenture clients can get help bolting legacy big-company systems to modern iOS apps from Apple located at what Accenture calls "Digital Studios," starting at the San Francisco location. 

Apple's experts include designers, programmers, and even hardware and software designers, according to the announcement. 

A large part of Accenture's business is helping big established companies update their digital operations. Companies like that often have lots of older, clunky back-end systems, where valuable data can sometimes lie dormant.

You probably won't be able to download the apps that Accenture will help make for its clients, unless you work for one of these companies — they'll be in-house apps. 

"We’ve seen an increase in development efforts within companies. In fact, in the last three years, the number of in-house iOS developers has doubled,” Apple VP Susan Prescott told TechCrunch. “So the demand is definitely there, but enterprises still need great partners to reinvent workflows and tap into backend systems.”

The announcement is the latest big partnership Apple has made with enterprise companies, a line item that's become more important as Apple looks for new sources of growth. 

Apple doesn't break out enterprise revenue specifically, but in May, Apple CFO Luca Maestri said that the company had been setting records. 

"We set a new enterprise revenue record for the March quarter, and we expect this momentum to continue for the remainder of the year," he said during a conference call discussing Apple's first calendar quarter results. The fourth quarter of the year is typically the biggest spending season for enterprises.

And now Apple is fully embracing a classic sales approach by partnering with big IT consultancies to help it sell iPhones and iPads by designing custom business software for them. 

Apple's deal with Accenture is one of several it's struck to target the enterprise segment over the past few years, following partnerships with IBM, SAP, and Deloitte. 

The full announcement is below:

Accenture to Create Dedicated iOS Practice Within Select Accenture Digital Studios; Apple to Co-Locate Experts with These Teams

Cupertino, California and New York — Apple and Accenture are partnering to help businesses transform how their people engage with customers through innovative business solutions for iOS. The partnership will take full advantage of the power, simplicity and security of iOS, the leading enterprise mobility platform, and Accenture’s capabilities as a leader in industry and digital transformation to help companies unlock new revenue streams, increase productivity, improve customer experience and reduce costs.

Accenture will create a dedicated iOS practice within Accenture Digital Studios in select locations around the world. Experts from Apple will be co-located with this team. Working together, the two companies will launch a new set of tools and services that help enterprise clients transform how they engage with customers using iPhone and iPad.

The experts will include visual and experience designers, programmers, data architects and scientists, and hardware and software designers.

“Starting 10 years ago with iPhone, and then with iPad, Apple has been transforming how work gets done, yet we believe that businesses have only just begun to scratch the surface of what they can do with our products,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “Both Apple and Accenture are leaders in building incredible user experiences and together we can continue to truly modernize how businesses work through amazing solutions that take advantage of the incredible capabilities of Apple’s technologies.”

Pierre Nanterme, Accenture’s chairman and CEO, said, “Based on our experience in developing mobile apps, we believe that iOS is the superior mobile platform for businesses and are excited to be partnering with Apple. By combining Accenture’s vast digital capabilities and industry expertise with Apple’s market leadership in creating products that delight customers, we are in a perfect position to help our clients transform the way they work.”

The new iOS tools and services will take full advantage of the latest Apple technologies and tap into Accenture’s leading digital and analytics capabilities.

New ecosystem services to help clients address the full range of iOS integration requirements to connect to back-end systems, leveraging Accenture’s systems integration expertise and the unique iOS advantages built by Apple with key partners like SAP and Cisco.

Internet-of-Things (IoT) services featuring new tools, templates and pre-designed code to help clients take greater advantage of the data from IoT platforms in their iOS apps, putting more power into the hands of workers.
Migration services to help clients to quickly and easily transfer their existing legacy applications and data to modern iOS apps.

For more information regarding the Apple and Accenture partnership, please visit accenture.com/apple or apple.com/business/partners. 

SEE ALSO: The CEO of consulting giant Accenture's North American business talks about innovation, jobs and business under Trump

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With Fitbit's newest product, the fitness company is moving beyond the wrist to a new body part: the ears. 

On Monday, Fitbit launched its first-ever pair of wireless headphones, the Fitbit Flyer. 

While Fitbit has branched out from wearable fitness trackers before with its Aria smart scale (the Aria 2 launched Monday as well), headphones are a totally new wearable for the company. But Fitbit CEO James Park called wireless headphones "a natural extension" of Fitbit's fitness-focused product lineup. 

The headphones come in two colors, cost $129.95, and are designed to go hand-in-hand with Fitbit's new smartwatch, which also launched Monday. 

While we haven't had a chance to fully test the Flyer yet (we have it in our offices and will publish our review in a few weeks), here's everything we can tell you so far.

SEE ALSO: Fitbit just unveiled three new products — including its first pair of wireless headphones

Fitbit Flyer is intended to be a companion to Fitbit's new smartwatch, the Ionic.

Since the watch can store music — more than 300 songs — you'll be able to leave your phone at home while exercising.

Fitbit Flyer comes in two colors: Lunar gray ...

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

• By announcing sweeping price cuts at Whole Foods, which it recently acquired, Amazon once again succeeded in wreaking havoc on the grocery industry.
• It's just the latest example of the company wiping out billions of dollars of competitors' market caps with a corporate announcement, and it's bound to happen again.
• Competitors' stock prices are looking more sensitive to Amazon's news than their own.

Amazon is once again sending shockwaves rippling through the retail industry.

The Jeff Bezos-led juggernaut announced on Thursday that it would start cutting prices at Whole Foods, the organic grocer it acquired for $13.7 billion in mid-June. The pricing overhaul will begin on Monday, it said, the same day the deal is expected to close.

The news had a quick and devastating effect on the share prices of competing grocers. Kroger dropped as much as 8.3%, while Sprouts Farmers Market slipped 6.6% and Target lost 4.2%. Walmart, which sells the most groceries in the US, fell more than 2%.

The widespread weakness in the grocery industry highlights an interesting wrinkle that's developed: Companies in Amazon's crosshairs are moving more on what the retail giant is doing than on their news and fundamentals.

Take Sprouts, for example. It fell just 1.7% after its second-quarter earnings report — a piece of news that had to do with its operations. Walmart found itself in a similar situation when it announced results last week, falling 1.6%, even after giving a lukewarm third-quarter forecast.

The collateral damage among grocers is just the latest example of Amazon imposing its will on an entire industry with a simple corporate announcement, leaving billions of dollars of erased market value in its wake. And there's nothing to suggest this dynamic will slow down anytime soon. Retailers are being forced into a new reality where the specter of Amazon lurks at every turn.

It first happened to the grocery industry right after the Whole Foods deal, with the group losing 8% over the following week. Sporting-goods retailers felt similar pain around the same time amid speculation that the sneaker and apparel giant Nike would start selling products on Amazon.

In the end, Amazon added $18 billion in market cap in a week while its competitors lost a total of $31 billion — an almost $50 billion gap.

Only time will tell which industry will be the next to feel Amazon's wrath. It's possible that competing grocers will feel the pain multiple more times before it's all said and done. Or it could be another area entirely.

And that's the scary part: Any section of the retail universe could be next.

SEE ALSO: Amazon can borrow money more cheaply than Russia, Mexico and China

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NOW WATCH: THE BOTTOM LINE: New record highs for stocks and a deep dive into Apple's iPhone

By Marty Parker
What this year's assessment reveals about the evolution and revolution of enterprise communications

Amazon has developed an algorithm that can design clothing by analyzing a bunch of images to copy the style and then apply it to new items generated from scratch, reports MIT. Amazon is focussing heavily on fashion, and has previously said it’s looking to become “the best place to buy fashion online,” so designing its own pieces pinned to current trends seems like a logical move.

The algorithm was developed by Amazon Lab 126, the company’s research and development hub and uses a tool called generative adversarial network (GAN). The GAN is a new technique in AI research that forces two neural networks against one another, using the outcome to improve the overall system. It learns from raw data — so by looking at a batch of images, it can...

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Chinese drone maker DJI is issuing a new version of the firmware to one of its products, the Spark, and said that it will stop the drone from taking off if you don't update it.

In a statement, the company explained that it tried to address some of the problems that made the Spark malfunction and fall.

"DJI decided on the option of a mandatory firmware update in order to maximize flight safety and product reliability which we consider as top priorities," the post reads.

As the drone can only be activated via the dedicated DJI app, the company will prevent Sparks from taking off entirely if the software is not up to date before September 1.

However, the new firmware version should also bring some improvements, such as better stability after takeoff, enhanced accuracy of controls under the QuickShot Dronie mode, and better compatibility of the remote controller when syncing up with new firmware updates.

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NOW WATCH: British special forces are testing out a bulletproof combat helmet that looks like something Boba Fett would wear

Last September, Apple forced new iPhone owners to accept a new reality: If you wanted to connect wired headphones to the iPhone 7, the first iPhone without a headphone jack, you'd have to use a tiny adapter.

Unofficially called a dongle, the Lightning-to-headphone-jack adapter came free with new iPhones, or cost an extra $9 on Apple's online store. 

The latest iPhone isn't the only Apple product that needs an array of dongles to become its most useful self. You need a dongle to connect your MacBook Air to an ethernet cable. You'll also need a dongle if you'd like a second screen for your computer, or if you'd like to import photos from an SD card. If you were hoping to plug a flash drive right into your new MacBook, think again: You're going to need a USB to USB-C dongle for that. 

That got us thinking: How many Apple dongles are there? And if you happened to need all of them, how much would that cost you?

We took a look through Apple's online store in an attempt to nail down the complete dongle lineup. We eliminated all the dongles not made by Apple (although Belkin makes this particularly useful adapter), and didn't count standard power cables, chargers, or plugs. 

We counted a grand total of 23 dongles on Apple's website, which would cost $857 (not including tax) to buy them all. Take a look:

 

SEE ALSO: This $30 Apple Pencil stand highlights everything that's wrong with Apple accessories

1. Lightning to 30-pin Adapter (0.2 m), $39

2. Lightning to 30-pin Adapter, $29

3. Lightning to USB Camera Adapter, $29

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Well, now we know why Verizon Wireless was “testing” reduced Netflix streaming speeds last month. Today the biggest US carrier announced that its existing unlimited data plan is being divided into three new options: Go Unlimited (starting at $75 for a single line), Beyond Unlimited ($85 for first line), and Business Unlimited. Unlike the relatively straightforward unlimited plan that Verizon surprised customers with in February, these new monthly plans are chock-full of fine print and caveats. And in a move sure to anger net neutrality advocates, the regular “Go Unlimited” plan throttles all smartphone video streaming to 480p / DVD-quality. The new plans go into effect beginning tomorrow, August 23rd, so this change is happening fast....

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 Google is launching a new enterprise service for large businesses that want to adopt Chrome OS devices. The new Chrome Enterprise subscription essentially is a rebrand of Chromebooks for Work, but with a number of additional capabilities. Even though the name would make you think this is about the Chrome browser, this program is actually all about Chrome OS. Read More

In October 2016, in a big milestone for artificial intelligence, Microsoft unveiled a system that can transcribe the contents of a phone call as well or better than human professionals.

But while Microsoft's system had fewer transcription errors than the average human transcriptionist, it still couldn't best a team of trained humans. So, the world of academia fired back with a new challenge: Lower the error rate to below what human teams can do. 

Now Microsoft has done just that. In a blog entry on Sunday, Xuedong Huang, Microsoft Research's chief speech scientist, reported that the company had broken even that barrier.

It's a major milestone, Huang wrote. And it gives the company a sound foundation to go from mere transcription to understanding the meaning of what's being said, he said. Speech recognition is a fundamental building block for building more robust artificial intelligence.

"Moving from recognizing to understanding speech is the next major frontier for speech technology," Huang wrote.

Microsoft's voice recognition system has been improving rapidly. Transcription accuracy is judged by error rates; i.e., the portion of words a system gets wrong out of a given recording of speech. That error rate is determined using Switchboard, a standard test for voice transcription accuracy widely used in the industry, including by IBM and Google.

As recently as September 2016, Microsoft's error rate, according to Switchboard, was 6.3%, which means that out of every 100 words the system was getting more than 6 wrong. By comparison, a single human transcriptionist has an average error rate of 5.9%, and a team of trained humans clocks in with an error rate of around 5.1%.

Microsoft matched the former error rate in October and just beat the latter.

That's far sooner than the company expected. Indeed, back in 2015, Huang himself told Business Insider that building a system capable of surpassing a human at transcription was "four to five years away." Less than two years later, we're well past that point.

Still, challenges remain. Microsoft's transcription system is patterned after the audio coming from a nice, stable landline telephone, Geoffrey Zweig, formerly a principal researcher at the company, told Business Insider last October. The next frontier for voice recognition is to accurately transcribe speech even when it's coming over a lousy cell connection or an echoing McDonalds drive-thru speaker.

Speech science "still has many challenges to address, such as achieving human levels of recognition in noisy environments with distant microphones, in recognizing accented speech, or speaking styles and languages for which only limited training data is available," Huang wrote in his blog post on Sunday.

SEE ALSO: Microsoft built technology that's better than a human at understanding a conversation

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NOW WATCH: 6 things in tech today that Bill Gates accurately predicted back in 1999

Fundstrat Founder Tom Lee isn't so positive on the stock market these days, but he's amplifying his bullish bet on bitcoin. 

In a note on Friday, Lee forecast that the cryptocurrency could rise to $6,000 a coin by the middle of next year.

He said the big driver of this 29% rally through mid-2018 would be greater public awareness of bitcoin as a method of payment and as a store of value like gold. He maintained his 2022 target of $25,000. 

"We see bitcoin as gaining from institutional sponsorship, improving transaction platforms and ultimately, greater public adoption," Lee said.

Investors who don't want to buy bitcoins will soon have a way to invest in the cryptocurrency. In July, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission cleared LedgerX, a cryptocurrency-trading platform, to offer bitcoin options by this fall. While also making it easier for investors to bet against bitcoin, Lee sees this as a bullish development because it would increase participation. 

Central banks could also jump in. "While one may say this is preposterous to say central banks would own bitcoin — we believe that Central banks would view crypto currencies differently if Bitcoin’s aggregate value exceeded $500 billion," Lee said. 

His forecasting model for bitcoin's value is based on Metcalfe's Law, which stipulates that a network's value increases exponentially based on the number of users within it. Lee projected that bitcoin user accounts would grow 50% by 2018.

Technical analysis — traders' use of chart patterns for forecasting — also suggests that bitcoin is set to continue climbing. The cryptocurrency this year broke out of a four-year trading range.

"Short-term traders should be prepared for another volatile consolidation period heading into late August given the XBT is nearing our next resistance levels with daily/short-term momentum becoming overbought," Lee cautioned. Bitcoin has surged about 337% this year.

Lee's year-target for the S&P 500 is 2,275. It's the lowest among strategists at major firms tracked by Bloomberg, and implies that the index would fall about 6% from Friday's opening level. 

SEE ALSO: Goldman Sachs may have lost $100 million on an energy bet gone wrong

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NOW WATCH: THE BOTTOM LINE: New record highs for stocks and a deep dive into Apple's iPhone

An arcane artifact from an unrealized future

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In the seemingly never-ending debate over whether or not the iPad is a computer, there is always something that prevents some people from adopting it as a full-time laptop replacement. For some, it might be the multitasking constraints, while others might have issue with the limitations of mobile Safari. In each case, it’s more often than not something specific, which means that while the iPad might be a great laptop replacement for some, it won’t be for everyone.

My hang-up has always been with a specific app: Google Docs. In my job, I spend a lot of time composing and editing other writers within Google Docs. This is mostly driven by decisions outside of my control — I’m personally a huge fan of Microsoft Word, especially on the iPad,...

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• Microsoft has acquired a startup called Cycle Computing for an undisclosed sum.
• Cycle Computing's software allows companies to run massively huge apps in the cloud, a profitable area for cloud vendors.
• Cycle was an early partner with AWS and Google and its customers will be asked to move to Microsoft's cloud. 

In a bit of a coup in the cloud computing world, Microsoft on Tuesday announced that it bought a startup called Cycle Computing for an undisclosed sum.

Cycle may not have the name recognition of some of its better-known tech peers, but the startup has played a crucial role in creating today's cloud computing industry. When businesses swipe a credit card today and instantly get access to unlimited supercomputing power, it's in large part thanks to Cycle.

Cycle Computing gained nationwide attention in 2012 when its technology transformed Amazon's then nascent Web Services into a supercomputer boasting the equivalent of 50,000 individual computers.  

Scientists were trying to find potential new cancer drugs and they used Cycle's software to simultaneously run their app across tens of thousands of virtual computers in Amazon's datecenters. (Specifically, they used 6,700 Amazon EC2 instances to create a 51,132-core computer — with each core is basically equivalent to a single computer).  The setup was so powerful that it cost researchers $5,000 to run their AWS app for just one hour.

It was an early proving project for Amazon's AWS business which, back in 2012, was still trying to convince enterprises to give it a go. This project was pointed out by Amazon's cloud genius Werner Vogels as one of his most proud moments to date, he told Business Insider at the time.

In the years since, Cycle Computing grew to be used by all three of the big cloud vendors, AWS, Google and Microsoft Azure. Plus, a bunch of competitive products came onto the market that also let virtual cloud computers work together as if it were one massive supercomputer.

A grab for AWS, Google customers

Flash forward to 2017 and there's now an entire market of such products called "cloud orchestration," complete with its own consortium under the Linux Foundation, the "Cloud Native Computing Foundation" of which Cycle was a founding member. CNCF has grown so powerful that Microsoft and AWS bowed and joined it last week.

Microsoft did not disclose the terms of the sale and it's hard to guess because Cycle Computing was unusual in another way: it was bootstrapped, taking on zero VC funding. Cycle raised $1 million in debt financing in 2016.

The founders "started Cycle twelve years ago on an $8,000 credit card," founder and CEO Jason Stowe said in a blog post on Tuesday announcing the news.

So this could have been sweet exit for them and their employees, who own 100% of the company. Or it could have been an aqui-hire fire sale. 

There's some reason to believe it was a happy exit. Cycle claims Novartis and NASA as marquee customers as well as a list of unnamed top companies in manufacturing, life insurance, pharma and biotech, media and financial services/hedge funds. Stowe says that all told, its customers are using the product to run the equivalent of "1 billion core-hours this year, growing at 2.7x every 12 months," in other words, a billion hours of computing time and growing.

But here's the clincher: while Microsoft says it will continue to support all of Cycle's customers on their original cloud of choice like AWS or Google Cloud, future Cycle customers won't be given that option. The software will live on Azure. And existing Cycle customers will be asked to move to Azure.

Microsoft says: "We will continue to support Cycle Computing clients using AWS and/or Google Cloud. Future Microsoft versions released will be Azure focused. We are committed to providing customers a seamless migration experience to Azure if and when they choose to migrate."

And that's why this is brilliant. These are huge application that use a lot of cloud services and rack up big cloud computing bills. Microsoft is trying to boost usage of its cloud Azure. With this acquisition it gets to do that, while also encouraging AWS and Google customers to jump ship. 

SEE ALSO: An early investor in Facebook and Google has slammed them for 'aggressive brain hacking'

SEE ALSO: A male employee claims he was fired after reporting sexual harassment at a $4 billion startup

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NOW WATCH: How the US's futuristic new aircraft carrier will change naval warfare forever

 Microsoft announced a new product in its Azure line-up in preview today that will make it easier for developers to build event-based applications. The Azure Event Grid makes events (like uploading a picture or video, clicking a button, updating a database, etc.) first-class Azure objects. Event Grid complements Azure Functions and Azure Logic Apps, Microsoft’s existing serverless offerings. Read More

Google is updating Docs, Sheets, and Slides today with a bunch of really handy new editing features — some of which are overdue, and others that are smart new improvements.

On the overdue side, we have the ability to add suggestions to a document from a phone or tablet. Until now, the suggestion mode has only been available on the desktop, which has been pretty annoying if you’ve ever wanted to make edits on the go. You can now enter into that mode by going to the “...” menu inside any of the three productivity apps. Google is also adding the ability to accept or reject all changes at once.

The other big changes are around version history. You can now name specific versions of documents,...

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Google is rolling out a long-awaited feature for its Google Home smart speaker today: voice calling. The company just announced that Home users in the US and Canada will very soon be able to call people in their contacts and local businesses using their voice and the signature “OK Google” command. That makes it more flexible than what Amazon is doing with Alexa / Echo-to-Echo calls and messaging. But you can’t call another Google Home from yours or answer calls with it; only outgoing calls work right now.

Voice calling is completely free so long as the call recipient is in the US or Canada. It works over Wi-Fi, so it doesn’t use your smartphone plan minutes. In fact, Google Home’s hands-free calling is separate from your smartphone...

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HMD Global on Wednesday announced the Nokia 8, the first high-end smartphone the Finnish company has released since it acquired the rights to the famed Nokia brand last year.

As earlier leaks suggested, the Nokia 8 has the usual slate of specs for a flagship phone in 2017:

• A Snapdragon 835 chip, the strongest Qualcomm currently offers
• 4 GB of RAM
• 64 GB of storage, with a microSD slot for more space
• A 5.3-inch display with a sharp 2,560 x 1,440 resolution
• A decently-sized 3,090 mAh battery, with support for Qualcomm’s Quick Charge 3.0 fast charging standard
• A pair of 13-megapixel cameras on the back — one has a RGB color sensor, the other has a monochrome sensor — with another 13-megapixel camera on the front

Unfortunately for American buyers anticipating another competitor in the Android market, HMD says it isn’t planning to release the Nokia 8 in the US. An HMD representative said penetrating the US market is a "long-term ambition" for the eight-month-old company, but that it isn’t equipped to compete there with a high-end phone just yet. To date, the company has only released one phone with the Nokia branding Stateside: the Nokia 6, a budget-level device that is sold exclusively through Amazon.

For other markets around the world, the device will cost €599 and start rolling out in early September.

In any case, Nokia 8’s design isn’t likely to turn heads: It’s clean, but not particularly thin or light, and HMD only says it's "splashproof," not water-resistant. It also has big borders around its display at a time where more and more of its peers are maximizing screen space.

The phone may appeal to hardcore Android fans, though: Like the other Nokia-branded phones HMD has released in recent months, the Nokia 8 runs a virtually untouched version of Android 7.1.1.

Since there’s less superfluous software in the way, HMD is promising stronger performance and faster updates than most of its peers. (A company representative said an update to the forthcoming Android O release is currently "well into development.") It’s too soon to say how true those claims will be, but HMD has generally done well to keep its other recent phones up-to-date with Google’s monthly security patches.

The big grabby feature HMD is touting with the Nokia 8 is a camera trick called "Dual-Sight." In short, the idea is to let you livestream video from both the front and rear cameras simultaneously. HMD says you can stream this kind of split-screen video Facebook or YouTube natively from the camera app itself. The company is branding these kind of videos as "bothies" (a variant of "selfie").

That’s unfortunate, but the idea is clever, and HMD says it has boosted the Nokia 8’s mics and antenna system to make the phone better handle the workload of continuous livestreaming. Still, the feature will likely have little appeal to those who aren’t regularly streaming their day-to-day lives.

Perhaps the most relevant thing about the Nokia 8, though, is the fact that it has "Nokia" in its name. HMD, which is partially led by past execs from the former mobile phone giant, acquired the rights to use the Nokia name on its phones last year. It has steadily released a number of smartphones and feature phones in the months since, all of which are aimed at the more affordable end of the market.

Nokia, for the record, is still a multibillion dollar company; it’s just left the consumer phone business after a failed partnership-turned-acquistion with Microsoft and the rise of Apple's iPhone and Google's Android platform. As a result, there hasn't been a top-tier smartphone bearing the Nokia name since 2014.

An HMD representative said its new Nokia phones have been selling "in the millions," but the Nokia 8 represents its first real stab at the premium market. The device should be strong enough to compete with other high-end peers, and it’s more affordable than devices like the Samsung Galaxy S8. But whether a few livestreaming tricks and a nostalgic name are enough to win over those with deeper pockets remains to be seen.

SEE ALSO: The newest Moto phone is strong and shatterproof — and really annoying

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If you’ve been hearing or reading a lot about blockchain but you still aren’t entirely certain how to define it, you’re not alone. It’s something that Jack Dorsey, the chief executive officer and chairman of Square (and CEO of Twitter), describes as the “next big unlock,” something that, he notes, is normally applied to accounting terms but has the potential to “be applied to so much more.”

In an interview earlier this week at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, I had the chance to ask Dorsey about Square’s business, the future of banking, cryptocurrencies, blockchain, and more.

Blockchain is often defined as a ledger that enables secure, encrypted transactions. Some financial and technical experts have described...

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