Davemichels

In addition to shrinking the company by 5 percent, Dell Technologies says changes are coming to leadership with shifting responsibilities for some executives, including President of North American Sales John Byrne.

By Dave Michels
An agent-centric view of customer service remains the gold standard for customer experience – but there's a strong case to be made that bots are already doing customer service better

Microsoft Teams Premium is now available with features powered by OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 AI language model. The new premium tier of Microsoft Teams includes an intelligent recap feature that automatically generates notes, tasks, and highlights of meetings thanks to GPT-3.5, alongside branded meetings, custom meeting templates, and features like watermarking to better protect meeting contents.

Intelligent recap is the big new addition to Microsoft Teams Premium, and it may tempt users to pay the $7 per month per user introductory price ($10 per month from June 30th) just to get an idea of how useful it will be. Intelligent recap uses OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 model to generate meeting notes and highlights even if you weren’t present in a meeting.

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When Salesforce announced it was laying off 10% of its workforce last month, you might have assumed that meant that everyone who was affected was informed at that time. With social media flush with people talking about Salesforce layoffs today, the company says these are part of that original announcement, but some folks are learning about their fate today.

The overall number of approximately 7,000 people announced at the beginning of January remains unchanged, according to the company. “These are part of the reductions we announced in January,” a company spokesperson told TechCrunch.

Some of today’s announcements are hitting in Europe, with the Irish Independent reporting that 200 of 2,100 Irish employees were laid off today, fitting in with that 10% target.

CEO Marc Benioff reportedly telegraphed that the sales group could be targeted, telling employees in a company meeting last month that remote workers weren’t as productive as folks in the office, and that half the sales team accounted for 96% of the revenue, suggesting that the other half accounted for just 4%. It seems likely that department could take a big hit.

Regardless, more people learned they are out of work today, joining the sad parade of tech employees being laid off in recent months. At the time of the announcement, Benioff said that the company had hired too many people during the pandemic. “As our revenue accelerated through the pandemic, we hired too many people leading into this economic downturn we’re now facing, and I take responsibility for that,” Benioff said.

Salesforce has been under pressure to cut costs from activist investors. Just last week Elliott Management announced it had taken a multibillion-dollar investment in Salesforce. That was after Starboard Value took a significant stake in October. Two other activists, ValueAct and Inclusive Capital, are also operating inside the company. Having four activists at the same time is probably contributing to the pressure to increase profitability and reduce spending, which often translates into workers being let go.

On Friday, the company announced it was bringing on three new members to its board of directors, which was likely a nod to the activists, who like to have board representation as part of their strategy. These layoffs are also probably another step in appeasing the demands of the activist investors.

Some Salesforce employees just found out they’re part of the 10% layoff announced last month by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch

The telecom, which has been working hard in recent years to boost its enterprise focus, has revamped its leadership team with a new EVP of product and technology, EVP of enterprise sales and public sector and a customer experience officer. There are no changes to channel leadership, Lumen told CRN.

Electric automaker Rivian is developing an electric bike, according to sources speaking to Bloomberg. CEO RJ Scaringe apparently told staff about the e-bike effort during a company meeting on Friday, noting that a small team is currently working on it.

Bloomberg says it’s unclear if Scaringe was talking about a battery-assisted bicycle (aka an e-bike) or an electric motorcycle. However, Scaringe has teased an entry into micromobility in the past and the company has patents for e-bike designs and components.

Despite all the hype behind EVs, electric bikes have actually outsold electric and plug-in hybrid cars in this US since 2021. And in Europe, e-bike sales are on track to overtake the number of all cars sold, electric or not. That’s a...

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I never thought I’d actually have fun with a calculator emulator. But here I am, toying with the old-school graphing calculators that the Internet Archive has freed from their plastic chassis and put in a digital form for all to enjoy.

The Internet Archive calls this new collection the Calculator Drawer. There are 14 calculators to choose from, including the HP 48GX, TI-82, TI-83 Plus, and even the Electronic Number Muncher, which is an 80s-era toy calculator. The Internet Archive doesn’t just emulate the interface of each device, either; it incorporates their physical design and buttons, making it feel like you have the actual device right in front of you.

Screenshot: Emma Roth / The Verge

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If you’ve been keeping up with the news, you’ve seen his work.

Need to call Facebook? Frontier? Good luck.

There’s been a breach of the Jonny Boston’s International Facebook page. Jonathan Kiper, the New Hampshire restaurant’s owner, is no longer able to access his personal Facebook account or, in turn, the page for his business, where he once kept customers updated about specials and deals. He’s tried to get back in, going through the online process to report his account as compromised multiple times and sending in a picture of his driver’s license to prove he’s, well, himself. But thus far, his efforts have been to no avail. He always gets tripped up at the last verification step — the one where Facebook sends a test code — because it appears the hacker has changed the account’s phone number.

It’s actually two phone numbers that are at the heart of Kiper’s problem: the hacker’s and Facebook’s, or rather, Facebook’s lack thereof. There’s no working customer service line that Kiper can find to call and explain what’s going on, so he’s out of luck. “There is a business number for Facebook you can call, but it just tells you they have no customer service and to use the website,” he says. Not exactly, you know, helpful when the website option doesn’t work.

Facebook is not an outlier here. Plenty of companies make it impossible or at the very least very difficult for consumers to call. Frontier Airlines announced in November it was axing phone-based customer service. You can get through to Amazon if you absolutely have to, but you’ve got to go through multiple steps to find a little button to get them to call you. In the age of the internet, and with companies constantly looking to cut costs, businesses big and small are cutting off the option for consumers to get on the phone and talk to an actual human being to resolve their problems. It’s not great for anyone involved.

“When there’s no option to pick up the phone, at some point it obviously creates all kinds of havoc in customers’ lives,” said Ryan Buell, a Harvard Business School professor who specializes in customer service interactions. “It can lead customers to behave in inefficient and counterproductive ways.”

It can lead companies to act in weird ways, too. When I was reporting for this story, three of the companies I contacted to ask about the specific experiences of individual customers responded asking for those customers’ information so they could try to get their problems fixed. Having a journalist as a go-between to unlock your Facebook account is not exactly a replicable tactic.

Having someone to pick up the phone costs money that some companies would rather not spend

The answer to why companies make it hard or impossible for people to call them is simple: It saves them money. It’s more expensive to hire a person in a call center — assuming they can find people who want to work there — than it is to engineer some chatbot that offers up canned answers on a website. The result is sort of a sliding scale of cost-saving terribleness.

“There’s a straight-up clear hierarchy,” Buell said. “The cost to talk to a live person face-to-face is always going to be greater than the cost to talk to a live person on the phone, which is going to be greater than the cost to talk to a live person over chat, which is going to be greater than the cost to talk to some kind of automated solution. In the middle there is also email, and chat is more expensive than email, which is more expensive than non-human.”

Part of this is a question of strategy. If you’re Amazon and your business plan is about keeping costs really low, you don’t want to offer widely advertised and extensive personalized customer service because managing a call center is costly. But it’s also part of a gradual technological and cost-saving evolution in customer service trends, explained Kejia Hu, an assistant professor of operations management at Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management.

“Initially, all companies had phone call services, and then some firms started saying, ‘Sorry, we are only going to be reachable on certain days of certain hours,’” Hu said. Then maybe if you called off hours, you got connected with someone offshore, and eventually, you got connected with someone offshore off the bat. “It’s not for service quality, it’s for cost control,” she said. Then customer service moved to live chat options, often with a reply from a template, because automation also saves money, and then to robots and AI. The pandemic made everything worse, because many companies that did have in-person call centers shut them down altogether. It’s increasingly difficult for companies to get call center employees in the door and to get them to stick around.

Even if companies do have options to call, they’re often ineffective and have a ton of automated options before you get to a real person, if you ever do. “You have to go through all the menus, you say, ‘I want to talk with a person,’ you have to wait for an hour,” Hu said. “Even though they have the call option, it’s almost like no call at all.”

Having no call options is bad for consumers — and for companies

In a perfect world, all businesses would run seamlessly and no customer would ever need assistance. Unfortunately, the world is not perfect. Hiccups are inevitable, and they can often escalate from “huh, this seems like an inconvenience” to “wait, this is getting out of hand” to “holy hell, this entire situation is a nightmare.”

I talked to many people for this story who found themselves somewhere between “huh” and “wait” in a recent customer service experience with no call option. Kelley Diveto, from Florida, got a wine fridge as a Christmas gift in December 2021, and in the spring of 2022, it malfunctioned. She’s sent repeated emails to the manufacturer, a company called Bodega, with no response, even though the website claims all emails are answered in 24 hours. She received a handful of responses from its Facebook page before asking for a phone number, at which point she was left on read. “They just ignored me,” she says. She’s given up hopes of getting the fridge fixed. “Life goes on.”

One person I heard from signed up for a year-long Tidal music streaming subscription, couldn’t find a number to call, and was finally able to get a refund only after reaching out to the Better Business Bureau and filing a complaint. Another person can’t find a phone number for Uber to change her phone number from a UK one to a US one, so she can’t figure out how to use the app stateside. Another has been trying unsuccessfully to cancel a magazine subscription for a year and can’t get through on the phone, email, or Twitter. They were recently in New York City, where the magazine is based, and contemplated going to the company’s headquarters but “figured they’d never let me up to talk to someone.”

Bodega did not respond to a request for comment. Tidal and Uber reached out asking for the customers’ information so they could try to address what happened, and Uber said answers to common questions and 24/7 support were available through its app, though there’s no number. Facebook asked for the customer’s information, too. I’ve now done multiple rounds of back-and-forth with them trying to get Jonny Boston back in.

These types of experiences, where there’s no one on the other end of the line, can be harrowing for customers, especially in situations where they’re anxious, explained Michelle Shell, visiting assistant professor of operations and technology management at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. Research she and Buell have worked on shows that it’s “critically important” for consumers to feel as though they have permission to reach out to customer service in moments of distress.

“Eliminating human contact when people are feeling anxious causes them to be dissatisfied with their own decision-making, even if they’re making good decisions,” Shell said. People really do want to talk to a human being when they’re on edge, or at least have the option to — Shell found that even having a little button to talk to a real agent in a chatbot puts people at ease. “Reintroducing notions of human contact by giving them these options to connect with the company, even if they don’t actually use it, can restore trust.”

In taking away customers’ ability to reach out to an actual person, companies are largely seeing dollar signs. Cutting a call center obviously helps the bottom line. But they may be missing other, less obvious costs as well.

Talking to customers about their products and services may lead businesses to discover deficiencies they might not otherwise notice. This allows them to improve their offerings so that, in the long run, they build something better — and ultimately field fewer complaints.

Not giving customers an option to speak to a person directly can also erode trust and lead those customers to go elsewhere, if they can. It’s just something some companies might not see from looking at numbers. “When you’re doing that cost-benefit analysis, the savings on the benefits side look really attractive,” Shell said. “What is the cost of customer trust? How do we quantify it relative to the hard dollars that we know we’re saving by shifting to chatbots?”

Shell, who, again, studies this for a living, recently found herself on the “holy hell” end of the customer service frustration experience. She couldn’t get the electricity turned on in her new house because her credit was frozen, and the credit bureau she needed to reach out to to have it unfrozen had shuttered its call center. She had to send copies of her driver’s license and Social Security card to a random post office box in Texas. She ultimately waited months for her credit to be unfrozen and her lights to be turned on.

Bad customer service makes everybody a little evil

Let’s be honest here: Most of us are not exactly on our best behavior in customer service interactions, and American consumers overall do not have a reputation for being awesome. Part of the reason we’re like this is that companies have sort of trained us to be this way. Consumers have learned that being a little extra is often the way to get their way. (This does not give anyone an excuse to have a giant meltdown at a service worker.)

“When the experience that we have becomes frustrating, annoying, angering, and it undermines our trust in the organization, it can actually lead us, as customers, to behave in some pretty counterproductive ways from the perspective of the company, where we’re just out for blood. We want our problem solved, but we don’t care what it’s going to take to get us there,” Buell said.

If there is a call option, customers almost immediately ask for a supervisor because they’ve come to believe that’s the way to get their problems solved. They start yelling right off the bat, making life for the worker on the other end of the line — who’s not at fault at all — awful and making it harder to keep and recruit workers going forward.

Emails and chat communications get spicy quickly, and customers issue threats in an attempt to move their issue along. They try to take control by complaining on social media, hoping — often correctly — that an angry tweet will get them some attention.

Companies don’t exactly love the social media complaining, but it’s also less expensive for them to deal with than, again, operating a call center. “It’s almost like a probabilistic game,” Hu said. Say there’s a flight delay and an airline gives out vouchers, but only to the people who complain online — it’s a way to compensate the loudest customers, but not everyone. She said she’s heard anecdotally from social media people that companies sometimes look at how many followers a person has to see how they’ll respond. “If you have a lot of followers, you get better treatment,” she said.

Kiper, the New Hampshire restaurant owner, isn’t sure if his Facebook issue is losing him a lot in sales, though Facebook has definitely brought him business over the years, and he’s paid to advertise there in the past. Jonny Boston’s page now sits idle, with a note on the top posted by an ex-girlfriend, still an administrator, saying they’ve lost access to the page because of a “dumb hacker” and encouraging customers to look elsewhere for updates.

Kiper is sort of resigned to his fate here, even as he continues his search for a phone number to call. He just finds the situation a little baffling. “I just don’t know how you could guarantee that this couldn’t happen,” he says. “It’s got to be tons of people that this has happened to.” At least the restaurant’s phone number, proudly displayed on the page, still works.

We live in a world that’s constantly trying to sucker us and trick us, where we’re always surrounded by scams big and small. It can feel impossible to navigate. Every two weeks, join Emily Stewart to look at all the little ways our economic systems control and manipulate the average person. Welcome to The Big Squeeze.

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Have ideas for a future column or thoughts on this one? Email emily.stewart@vox.com.

Apple’s 27-inch Studio Display provides amazing 5K picture quality and great pixel scaling for macOS computers, but it’s notorious in a few ways: its webcam isn’t best in class, its 60Hz refresh rate cap is a bummer, it comes with a tilt-only stand by default (the VESA mount is an added cost), and its usual $1,599 price is steep. However, it’s more sensibly priced right now at Amazon, costing $1,299.99. Costco is offering a similar deal, too (via Slickdeals). Head over to Apple’s refurbished online store if you want to peep discounts on other variations of the Studio Display.

It’s good timing on this discount since January 26th marks the release day for Apple’s updated Mac Mini and MacBook Pro models with the M2 and M2 Pro chips.

In our...

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Over the past few years, a bunch of tools have been released that use AI to edit video calls in real time so that the caller is making eye contact with the camera. FaceTime can do it. Microsoft Teams can do it. And Nvidia Broadcast can do it, too. (Provided, in each case, you have the necessary hardware or software.)

This tech comes with a bunch of interesting questions, of course. Like: is constant unbroken eye contact good or a bit creepy? Are these tools useful for people who don’t naturally like eye contact? Or is this all just the thin edge of a wedge labeled, for the sake of argument, “the increasing use of AI to create a more polished digital version of ourselves is contributing to an increased sense of alienation and loss of...

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Honda is restructuring its business as it looks ahead to achieving 100 percent electric vehicle sales by 2040. As such, the company announced that all of its Acura-branded EVs will be sold exclusively online, starting with the ZDX SUV, due out next year.

The company is shaking up its leadership roster and creating a new division to handle sales, marketing, and communications for its budding EV business. And it is positioning its luxury and performance brand Acura as the “tip of the spear” in its shift to EVs, which includes improved software services and, most notably, e-commerce.

That’s all starting with the RDX and RDX Type S, presales of which begin later this year, with customer deliveries expected in 2024. The Acura ZDX, a luxury...

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T-Mobile hasn’t been what you’d call competent when it comes to protecting its customers’ data. The company has now been hacked numerous times just since 2018, with hackers at one point going so far as to publicly ridicule the company’s lousy security practices.

Case in point: T-Mobile just revealed in an SEC filing (spotted by TechCrunch) that the company was just hacked for the eighth time in five years. This time impacting the privacy and security of 37 million T-Mobile subscribers.

According to T-Mobile, starting in late November a “bad actor” managed to obtain the personal data (including names, billing addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, T-Mobile account numbers and information such as “the number of lines on the account and plan features.”) As is usually the case with such breaches, T-Mobile issued a statement trying to downplay it:

“Our investigation is still ongoing, but the malicious activity appears to be fully contained at this time, and there is currently no evidence that the bad actor was able to breach or compromise our systems or our network.”

The intruder abused an API and didn’t directly access T-Mobile’s systems. But such statements are generally worthless, as the scope of such breaches usually tend to grow in scale as investigators dig deeper. An intrusion found in the fall can be the launchpad for a worse intrusion in the spring.

As with so many modern companies, T-Mobile over-collects data, then doesn’t take the necessary steps to protect said data. It then lobbies U.S. lawmakers to ensure we don’t shore up U.S. privacy protections (as it did when Congress gutted the FCC’s fairly modest broadband privacy rules, or when it lobbies to kill federal reform), and the cycle repeats itself in perpetuity.

T-Mobile has a bit of a history of being sloppy with the vast location data it collects on users, then fighting tooth and nail against whatever slapdash accountability U.S. regulators can feebly muster. T-Mobile recently dramatically expanded the company’s collection of user browsing and app usage data via a new program dubbed “app insights.”

We’ve built a reality where nobody consistently holds giant companies accountable for lax privacy and security standards. As a result, said companies see little meaningful incentive to improve, given they now view modest and pathetic fines levied by feckless U.S. regulators (who, by design, lack the resources to tackle privacy issues at any real scale) as a reasonable cost of doing business.

The UC and collaboration space is getting smaller with Mitel’s proposed deal to acquire Atos Unify, the UC and Collaboration businesses of Atos, the two channel-centric companies revealed on Tuesday.

While smartwatch makers like Apple and Samsung are delving into rugged fitness, Garmin is shoring up its advanced health features. Today, the company announced that it’s adding FDA-cleared EKGs to its Venu 2 Plus smartwatch.

The EKG app will allow Venu 2 Plus owners to record a 30-second electrocardiogram to screen for abnormal heart rhythms, which may be an indicator of atrial fibrillation. The results will be available immediately on the watch or can be viewed later in the Garmin Connect app. Venu 2 Plus owners will also be able to create historical EKG reports that can be shared with their doctor. To get the EKG feature, you’ll need to make sure the Venu 2 Plus and Garmin Connect app are updated to versions 10.06 and 4.56,...

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If you can’t reach customer service, you might be the product.

Here’s one way to protect First Amendment rights from a looming threat.

Intel, according to Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification in California, increased the number of layoffs it had planned last year, and added a notice of a third new round of layoffs, while telling the state that it expected more layoffs to come.

Plus, stories from the recent past of Future Tense.

Microsoft will shut down AltspaceVR, the social virtual reality (VR) platform it acquired in 2017 (via VentureBeat), on March 10th, 2023. The company shared the news in a blog post just days after it announced job cuts affecting 10,000 workers, stating the move will help shift focus “to support immersive experiences powered by Microsoft Mesh.”

AltspaceVR emerged as one of the very first social VR experiences in 2015 alongside other platforms like VRChat and Rec Room. While the startup nearly shut down in 2017 due to financial issues, Microsoft scooped up the platform as part of its efforts to build out its own mixed-reality ecosystem. Microsoft says users can download their data from AltspaceVR before the shutdown.

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Layoff plans at Google add to a slew of tech sector announcements that mark the end of a hiring era.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says in an online post that Microsoft will continue to hire in ‘key strategic areas.’

Meta made millions last year on advertising that greenwashes fossil fuel companies and spreads disinformation about climate change, according to a new report. And outright climate denialism exploded on Twitter in 2022, according to the analysis published today by a coalition of environmental groups and researchers.

They identified fossil fuel-linked entities that spent about $4 million on Facebook and Instagram ads around the time of the United Nations’ climate change conference in November. Those ads disparage the transition to clean energy that’s necessary to slow climate change, the report says, while portraying oil and gas companies as unlikely environmental champions. Meanwhile on Twitter, the hashtag #climatescam has seen a...

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Winnebago’s name is synonymous with vanlife, which makes its new all-electric eRV2 notable for an industry built on top of diesel engines. It’s just a prototype, but this one is fully operational and actually on the road with a fleet of customers for six months of field testing. Input from those early experiences will ultimately inform the eRV’s final design and help kick off an era of #eVanlife in the process.

The eRV2 is a follow-up to the eRV concept announced last year. It’s built around the Ford E-Transit chassis with a range of 108 miles (174km) from its 68kWh battery. Yes, that’s paltry for a vehicle that will be used by adventure seekers far away from EV charging networks but fine for field testing a prototype, I guess. Winnebago...

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At nearly three pounds, or 1,340g, the $5,500 Nikon Z9 is a brick of a mirrorless camera with more buttons and features than I have been able to test in the nearly two months I have had with it. It has a new full-frame 45.7MP stacked CMOS sensor that, thanks to the new Expeed 7 image processor, can shoot RAW photos at 20fps for over 1,000 frames (assuming you are using a fast enough card). And the video specs put flagship specs from Sony’s A1 and Canon’s R5 to shame. They include 12-bit 8K 60fps or 4K 120fps both in N-RAW, Nikon’s RAW video format. You can also shoot in ProRes RAW up to 5K 30fps.

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The new location will bring a large base of engineering talent and provide additional scale to the company’s growing international footprint.

SAN RAMON, CA – January 17, 2023 – Five9, Inc. (NASDAQ: FIVN), a leading provider of the intelligent cloud contact center, today announced the opening of its new European Research and Development Hub in Porto, Portugal. The office will serve as the company’s European engineering headquarters, with work spanning artificial intelligence, software engineering, and cloud operations.

The site currently hosts more than 100 new and existing employees and is planned to expand to 300 employees within the next few years. The new location provides additional scale to the company’s growing international footprint, as Five9 continues expanding its capabilities to deliver the latest cloud contact center and customer experience innovations to both European customers and multinational companies with a presence in both the US and EMEA.

“When we looked at options for our next EMEA location, Porto was the clear choice,” said Mike Burkland, CEO and Chairman, Five9. “The city is an emerging, well-connected technology hub with a large base of engineering talent that will enable Five9 to continue our mission of bringing customer experience innovation and business transformation to companies around the world.”

“Following my visit to Five9 HQ in California, where I had the opportunity to discuss the company’s future expansion to Portugal, I am very happy to welcome its new European engineering hub in Porto,” said Bernardo Ivo Cruz, Portuguese Secretary of State for International Trade and Foreign Investment.

Over the past two years, Five9 has been rapidly expanding its European staff. Additionally, in May, Five9 announced the expansion of two data centers in Amsterdam and Frankfurt to ensure high availability in Europe and facilitate compliance with local regulatory requirements. Investing in localized infrastructure for Europe enables Five9 to continue to support the increasing demand of its global enterprise customers. The company also plans to establish a new Professional and Customer Support Center of Excellence at the Porto site.

“We are thrilled to welcome Five9 to Portugal, landing in the West Coast of Europe from the West Coast of the USA,” said Luís Castro Henriques, Chairman & CEO of AICEP, Portugal’s Trade & Investment Agency. “In Portugal, Porto is proving its attractiveness for IT companies due to a highly skilled talent pool, and a multilingual and multicultural working environment. We are happy that Five9 will be part of this growing tech ecosystem.”

About Five9

Five9 is an industry-leading provider of cloud contact center solutions, bringing the power of cloud innovation to more than 2,500 customers worldwide and facilitating billions of call minutes annually. The Five9 Intelligent Cloud Contact Center provides digital engagement, analytics, workflow automation, workforce optimization, and practical AI to create more human customer experiences, to engage and empower agents, and deliver tangible business results. Designed to be reliable, secure, compliant, and scalable, the Five9 platform helps contact centers increase productivity, be agile, boost revenue, and create customer trust and loyalty. For more information, visit www.five9.com.

The post Five9 Opens New European Engineering Hub in Porto, Portugal appeared first on Cloud Communications Alliance.

Citing the Logitech study Equipping Your Employees for Hybrid Work: What Research Tells Us, Scott Wharton, General Manager of Logitech B2B, stated: “We surveyed more than 3,000 remote workers and found that most non-webcam users struggle with poor lighting conditions, unflattering camera angles, and low-quality sound from their laptop speakers.”

Spec-wise the Brio 300 series (Brio 300 and Brio 305) are HD 1080p webcams with high dynamic contrast, automatic light correction, and a single digital noise-cancelling microphone that enables users to see even in poor lighting and background noise.

A consistently reliable meeting experience allows users to participate in video calls. The webcam connects to users’ computers via the USB-C connector, making it easy to join video conferences. A built-in privacy shutter can block the camera lens, giving users the option of a hidden workspace.

• The Best Logitech Webcams for 2023 
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With an unconventional conical design, the webcam colours available are Off-White, Graphite, and Rose. Logitech intends for them to coordinate in style with its mice and keyboards.

Wharton enthused: “Brio 300 series webcams are perfect for those who want to make the easy but substantial jump to improve their video meeting experiences with an external webcam significantly and for companies who need to provide certified, simple-to-use webcams to employees’ home or office workstations, Brio 305 is that budget-friendly option.”

The Brio 300 Series is the latest addition to Logitech’s webcam product portfolio, offering a personalised personal workspace, easy to set up and use and supports new work logic purposefully designed for a brighter future.

For IT teams organising employee workspaces and home offices, the Brio 300 series webcams are compatible with most video conferencing platforms and certified for use with Microsoft Teams, Zoom and Google Meet. Brio 305 can be deployed across the enterprise and managed remotely via Logitech Sync, resulting in fewer helpdesk tickets.

How Sustainable Is the Brio 300 Series?

This year will see many firms vie for sustainability credentials as many look for them to commit to better environmental governance.

David Danto, Director of UC Strategy and Research at Poly, forecasts in the just-released and exclusive UC Predictions 2023 video that: “You’re going to start to see, you know, environmental, social governance (ESG) become something that’s a recruiting standard. Young people are entering the workforce, and old people like me in the workforce organizations for sustainable organizations.”,

With an eye on this Logitech says it is committed to creating a fairer, more climate-friendly world by actively reducing its carbon footprint. The Brio 300 and Brio 305 plastic parts contain certified post-consumer recycled plastics (excludes Electronic (EE) Components, cables, and packaging), giving a second life to post-consumer plastics from older appliances.

Paper packaging is sourced from FSC certified forests and other controlled sources, and by choosing this product, Logitech claim, users are supporting the responsible management of the world’s forests.

All Logitech products are certified carbon neutral and use renewable energy wherever possible. The carbon footprint of all Logitech products, including the Brio 300 and Brio 305, has been reduced to zero by supporting carbon-reducing forests, renewable energy, and climate-affected communities.

The Brio 300 and Brio 305 will be available in January 2023 at logitech.com and other major retailers worldwide. The suggested retail price for both webcams is $69.99.

 

 

Investment in Comprehensive Product Portfolio, Ongoing Innovation and Strong Business Relationships Propel NEC’s Success

Tokyo, Irving, Hilversum – January 19, 2023 – NEC, a global leader in communications and IT solutions, announced today that it has been recognized as the number one provider of small and medium business (SMB) phone systems for eight consecutive years, and as number two globally in the overall unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) segment. This achievement highlights the strength of NEC’s portfolio, the company’s commitment to expanding its global enterprise presence, and its ability to fully satisfy customers.

NEC has a rich history in communications and remains committed to providing cloud, hybrid or on-premise unified communications solutions for small and medium-sized businesses and enterprises. At the core of its offerings is the UNIVERGE^® communications portfolio including the SL, SV and UNIVERGE 3C^® premise-based communication servers as well as the UNIVERGE BLUE^® cloud/hybrid offering.

“The way NEC looks at the world, it is about supporting our customers through their communications lifecycle and delivering value regardless of whether they are using on-premise solutions, moving to a hybrid solution, or migrating to the cloud, future-proofing them at the same time,” said Ram Menghani, President, NEC Enterprise Communications Technology.

Global Expansion

MZA’s (www.mzaconsultants.com) reporting on the global Call Control market (excluding Multi-Tenant UCaaS voice solutions) shows that NEC has led all vendors in global shipments in the SMB segment (less than 100 licenses) for the last eight years*. With a present market share of 16 percent as reported as a Rolling Annual Total as per the third quarter of 2022, NEC is well ahead of all other companies in that segment.

“MZA’s recent report once again highlights our success as a leader in business communications,” said Al Kelley, Vice President, Channel Sales, Americas at NEC. “It is a clear recognition of the strength of our offerings and the ability to serve together with our business partners and our customers worldwide with excellent solutions and services that truly assist with communications challenges our customers are facing today and in the future. The global expansion of our UNIVERGE BLUE CLOUD SERVICES (UCaaS and CCaaS) complements our on-premise portfolio and provides options to our business partners and customers to utilize these services as desired. Moreover, UNIVERGE BLUE CONNECT BRIDGE provides on-premise customers an easy path to a hybrid cloud or full cloud solution, providing investment protection and value of digital transformation,” he added.

Powerful UCaaS and CCaaS Cloud Offering

Building on its global relationship with Intermedia, a dedicated cloud communications company, NEC’s UNIVERGE BLUE is one of the most comprehensive and powerful UCaaS and CCaaS cloud platform offerings available on the market. It offers a range of features including telephony, video conferencing, collaboration, backup, security, file sharing and contact center capabilities within a single solution. Businesses can take advantage of monthly billing and only pay for what they use, with full flexibility to scale up as needed.

Dynamic Delivery of Cloud Solutions in a Hybrid Model

Hybrid work and flexible deployment models are now the preferred choice for many businesses. By aligning their resources with current business requirements and taking advantage of scalable cloud solutions, they are able to open up opportunities for integration with business applications. While enterprises shift more workload to the public cloud, strong demand remains to leverage existing infrastructure.

UNIVERGE BLUE CONNECT BRIDGE extends on-premise business phone systems to the cloud via mobile and desktop applications while also adding chat, video conferencing, and file sharing and collaboration capabilities. The result is an integrated, all-in-one, UCaaS offering that affords NEC customers the flexibility to communicate and collaborate from anywhere, extends the life and capabilities of their current NEC phone system, and allows them to keep their existinghardware and phone number and migrate gradually as required.

The Customer has Full Freedom of Choice

As a result, NEC customers now have the flexibility to choose from a range of solutions, including a fully on-premise infrastructure, a 100 percent public cloud subscription-based solution, or any combination between the two in a hybrid working model. As NEC covers all bases and offers a full range of choices – on-premise, cloud, or hybrid – this ensures NEC and its business partners can provide what’s best for each end customer.

“One thing is clear; we are here to stay. Whether the preference is on-premise, cloud-based or a hybrid business model, our focus is on providing customers the freedom of choice with a spectrum of highly integrated customizable solutions and services. With our strong foothold in the on-premise call control market and the flexibility we provide customers to add the newest cloud services to support their increasingly hybrid workforce, I look forward to prolonging our market leadership and celebrating the 10th anniversary of our market-leading position two years from now,” Kelley concludes.

* Source MZA Call Control (PBX-IP PBX) Market Reports 2015-2022

About NEC Corporation
NEC Corporation has established itself as a leader in the integration of IT and network technologies while promoting the brand statement of “Orchestrating a brighter world.” NEC enables businesses and communities to adapt to rapid changes taking place in both society and the market as it provides for the social values of safety, security, fairness and efficiency to promote a more sustainable world where everyone has the chance to reach their full potential. For more information, visit NEC at http://www.nec.com.

The post NEC Recognized as the Global Leader in SMB Phone Systems appeared first on Cloud Communications Alliance.

Conservative media recently discovered what AI experts have been warning about for years: systems built on machine learning like ChatGPT and facial recognition software are biased. But in typical fashion for the right-wing, it’s not the well-documented bias against minorities embedded in machine learning systems which has given rise to the field of AI safety that they’re upset about, no—they think AI has actually gone woke.

Accusations that ChatGPT was woke began circulating online after the National Review published a piece accusing the machine learning system of left-leaning bias because it won’t, for example, explain why drag queen story hour is bad.

National Review staff writer Nate Hochman wrote the piece after attempting to get OpenAI’s chatbot to tell him stories about Biden’s corruption or the horrors of drag queens. Conservatives on Twitter then attempted various inputs into ChatGPT to prove just how “woke” the chatbot is. According to these users, ChatGPT would tell people a joke about a man but not a woman, flagged content related to gender, and refused to answer questions about Mohammed. To them, this was proof that AI has gone “woke,” and is biased against right-wingers.

Rather, this is all the end result of years of research trying to mitigate bias against minority groups that’s already baked into machine learning systems that are trained on, largely, people’s conversations online.

ChatGPT is an AI system trained on inputs. Like all AI systems, it will carry the biases of the inputs it’s trained on. Part of the work of ethical AI researchers is to ensure that their systems don’t perpetuate harm against a large number of people; that means blocking some outputs.

“The developers of ChatGPT set themselves the task of designing a universal system: one that (broadly) works everywhere for everyone. And what they're discovering, along with every other AI developer, is that this is impossible,” Os Keyes, a PhD Candidate at the University of Washington's Department of Human Centred Design & Engineering told Motherboard.

“Developing anything, software or not, requires compromise and making choices—political choices—about who a system will work for and whose values it will represent,” Keyes said. “In this case the answer is apparently ‘not the far-right.’ Obviously I don't know if this sort of thing is the ‘raw’ ChatGPT output, or the result of developers getting involved to try to head off a Tay situation, but either way—decisions have to be made, and as the complaints make clear, these decisions have political values wrapped up in them, which is both unavoidable and necessary.”

Tay was a Microsoft-designed chatbot released on Twitter in 2016. Users quickly corrupted it and it was suspended from the platform after posting racist and homophobic tweets. It’s a prime example of why experts like Keyes and Arthur Holland Michel, Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics and International Affairs, have been sounding the alarm over the biases of AI systems for years. Facial recognition systems are famously biased. The U.S. government, which has repeatedly pushed for such systems in places like airports and the southern border, even admitted to the inherent racial bias of facial recognition technology in 2019.

Michel said that discussions around anti-conservative political bias in a chatbot might distract from other, and more pressing, discussions about bias in extant AI systems. Facial recognition bias—largely affecting Black people—has real-world consequences. The systems help police identify subjects and decide who to arrest and charge with crimes, and there have been multiple examples of innocent Black men being flagged by facial recognition. A panic over not being able to get ChatGPT to repeat lies and propaganda about Trump winning the 2020 election could set the discussion around AI bias back.

“I don't think this is necessarily good news for the discourse around bias of these systems,” Michel said. “I think that could distract from the real questions around this system which might have a propensity to systematically harm certain groups, especially groups that are historically disadvantaged. Anything that distracts from that, to me, is problematic.”

Both Keyes and Michel also highlighted that discussions around a supposedly “woke” ChatGPT assigned more agency to the bot than actually exists. “It’s very difficult to maintain a level headed discourse when you’re talking about something that has all these emotional and psychological associations as AI inevitably does,” Michel said. “It’s easy to anthropomorphize the system and say, ‘Well the AI has a political bias.’”

“Mostly what it tells us is that people don't understand how [machine learning] works…or how politics works,” Keyes said.

More interesting for Keyes is the implication that it’s possible for systems such as ChatGPT to be value-neutral. “What's more interesting is this accusation that the software (or its developers) are being political, as if the world isn't political; as if technology could be ‘value-free,’” they said. “What it suggests to me is that people still don't understand that politics is fundamental to building anything—you can't avoid it. And in this case it feels like a purposeful, deliberate form of ignorance: believing that technology can be apolitical is super convenient for people in positions of power, because it allows them to believe that systems they do agree with function the way they do simply because ‘that's how the world is.’”

This is not the first moral panic around ChatGPT, and it won’t be the last. People have worried that it might signal the death of the college essay or usher in a new era of academic cheating. The truth is that it’s dumber than you think. And like all machines, it’s a reflection of its inputs, both from the people who created it and the people prodding it into spouting what they see as woke talking points.

“Simply put, this is anecdotal,” Michel said. “Because the systems also open ended, you can pick and choose anecdotally, cases where, instances where the system doesn't operate according to what you would want it to. You can get it to operate in ways that sort of confirm what you believe may be true about the system.”

Thousands of reports have been filed on Downdetector in the U.S. regarding Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams outages on Tuesday.