Policies like unlimited vacation and remote work help employees manage life's demands. These companies make it work for the bottom line too.
They call us "The Sandwich Generation"—the group of workforce-aged adults who are not only caring for their aging parents, but also balancing the needs of their own children.
Hailing a ride with Uber is as easy as tapping a button. But getting customer support from the transportation giant has historically been far from easy.
Uber is trying to close that difficulty gap by bring all of its customer support inside the Uber app and moving away from the support@uber.com email system it's relied on since the beginning of the company.
It may not sound like a huge change at first, but the new system is going to mean that your problems with Uber — whether it be improper ride cancellation fees, a lost purse, or an erratic driver — get resolved faster and more efficiently.
The shift away from email-based customer support is also an important step in Uber's evolution from a scrappy San Francisco startup to multi-billion dollar enterprise that facilitates millions of trips per day across 69 countries. Moving away from email is also aimed at improving the customer support experience in countries like China and India, where people rely less on using email every day.
The help menu in Uber's app is being upgraded with the ability to message customer support directly, see your detailed trip history with receipts, and report all kinds of issues without ever having to open an email.
"The old system added a bunch of friction to actually getting to the classification of the issue and ultimately the right response," said Michael York, Uber's head of "customer obsession," in an interview with Tech Insider.
A typical example of the email system's inefficiencies is a passenger emailing Uber the morning after a ride to say they had an issue with their driver. Not only would Uber have no idea what specific ride they were referring to without guessing and asking them to confirm, but its reps would then have to pass the ticket between internal groups as the customer explained the problem in more detail.
Every step that requires more back and forth in the customer support process means that issues take longer to resolve. With the new in-app messaging system it's been quietly testing in areas like New York City, Uber says its ability to resolve an issue with the first response is at an all time high.
After Uber has phased out email completely, which it's starting to do now in the US before moving to other countries, it will be able to assign the right support rep to a case in under a second, explained York. Issues that don't require human interaction, like cancellation fee refund requests, can be fully automated while written complaints can have keywords analyzed to make sure they're seen by the right teams at Uber.
Another benefit of Uber's new support system that requests that used to require you sending an email, like getting your Uber rider rating, will be fully automated in the app.
Uber improving its customer support will hopefully help address the company's ongoing issue of driver misconduct. Uber has said that it doesn't want to replace 911 in real emergencies involving its service. But its new ability to quickly address customer complaints should help the company continue to grow without frustrating customers along the way.
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Facebook Messenger is quickly becoming a hub for much more than chatting with friends. On Wednesday the app added its first airline partner, which means you'll have everything you need to get through the airport in Messenger.
"This is one that I've been personally eager to solve for a while," Facebook's head of Messenger, David Marcus, said in a Facebook post. "Removing stress, and complication from air travel. I'm excited to announce that our first airline partner on Messenger will start rolling out their presence today."
Flyers of KLM Royal Dutch Airlines will be able to get their frequent flyer number, boarding pass, check-in reminders, flight status updates, and customer support directly in a Messenger chat thread. The integration will work everywhere Messenger and KLM both operate, which includes 140 destinations around the world.
Messenger will presumably work with other airlines in the future. The app, which is distinct from the main Facebook app, has been slow to add business partners; a range of companies have already been brought on to the platform, including Uber, Lyft, and clothing retailer Everlane.
Facebook is expected to announce more business integrations with Messenger at its annual developer conference in April.
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In 2015, Australian software company Atlassian had one of the hottest IPOs of the year. It also revealed it's been profitable since 2005 and is now worth about $5 billion on the open market.
Notably, Atlassian did it without any kind of traditional sales team and an unusually low marketing spend.
On the one hand, not ever needing a sales force reflects the popularity of Atlassian's products, including smash hits like JIRA and HipChat, among software developers, its core demographic.
On the other, though, it means that Atlassian has a challenge ahead as it expands its business outside the world of dedicated software companies to every other industry it can reach.
That's why the company is refining its sales pitch, says Atlassian Head of Growth Cameron Deatsch — it's not about any individual Atlassian product, but about what Atlassian can do for the customer. And it's not about a hard sales pitch, it's about showing customers a better way of doing things.
A new survey of 1,300 software developers released by Atlassian today indicates that even among its primary demographic, not everybody has heard the gospel of what Deatsch calls "modern development practices." For Deatsch, that means the potential for spreading the word.
Atlassian offers a whole range of tools, from JIRA for product management to workplace chat app HipChat to code management tool BitBucket. But Deatsch says that customers are rarely asking for a chat app or project management. They just tell Atlassian that whatever they're doing, they want to do it faster and better.
"It's never quite enough," says Deatsch. "It's never fast enough, it's never quality enough."
Right now, the bulk of Atlassian's effort is going back into that core software developer market, where it sells a trio of complementary ideas: So-called "agile" software development methods, which lets teams build software faster; distributed version control systems (like GitHub or Atlassian's own BitBucket) which help teams collaborate on code; and continuous delivery, which helps those teams push code into their real live apps faster.
The promise is to help its customers — which includes many big software companies and financial institutions — move faster by working together to ship better, faster products.
"You ship buggy software, you're dead," Deatsch says.
But just under half of all respondents to Atlassian's survey are using all three, though most use at least one. And that's within software developers, which theoretically are the best equipped to tackle the challenge. It means there's a big opportunity, just within that market alone.
And so, Atlassian is building up the idea that it's easier than a customer might think to move faster.
A new benchmarking tool released by Atlassian takes in all your stats and compares it to the company's existing customers to give a sense of how your software development process stacks up to the competition, along with offering suggestions for improving. It's designed to be encouraging, emphasizing next steps, rather than shaming customers into giving up.
"[If it says] 'you're well behind,' that just turns people off," says Deatsch.
Obviously, Atlassian hopes that with this tool, not only will you realize that there is a better way, but that Atlassian has the software to let your teams take advantage. But Deatsch says it's not in the company's character to make it a hard sales pitch. It just has the tools.
"If you want a hammer, we have a hammer," Deatsch says.
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From there, Deatsch says, Atlassian can continue to keep working on how it sells outside the software industry — if it can show software companies the benefit of going all-in on modern software practices, it can apply some of those same insights to selling to every other industry, too.
It's just that software developers are where Atlassian started, and it's the market Atlassian knows best.
"If we're Amazon, [software developers] are books," Deatsch says.
SEE ALSO: How Microsoft is giving its customers 'a slap in the face, but in a good way'
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An animated video that emerged online and was first spotted by Gizmodo shows various earthquake-proof bed designs that are scarier than an earthquake itself.
Story by Tony Manfred and editing by Stephen Parkhurst
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The UpCart can tackle any terrain, including stairs. It weighs 10 pounds and can carry up to 100.
Story and editing by Carl Mueller.
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Five years after the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation first challenged the world to design a sustainable and inexpensive toilet, researchers from Cranfield University may have a viable contender.
It's known as the Nano Membrane Toilet, and it was funded by the Gates Foundation in September 2012 for $710,000.
March 22 is World Water Day, an appropriate time to highlight the grim fact that more than 2.4 billion people around the world still live in unsanitary conditions.
Without access to clean running water, these at-risk communities face life-threatening sanitation-related diseases.
The Nano Membrane toilet's design is meant to offset this scarcity. It's waterless, easy to use, and provided it receives additional funding for field tests, could very well be part of the future of sanitation.
Alison Parker, a lecturer in International Water and Sanitation at Cranfield Water Science Institute, says her team's new design is meant to serve poor urban areas, as those will be easiest to accommodate.
"It will be very hard to carry out the scheduled maintenance" in remote areas, Parker tells Tech Insider, mostly because the toilet needs maintenance every six months at a minimum to replace certain parts. "Instead, the toilet will be used in dense urban areas where a number of factors make providing good sanitation very challenging, but where it would be possible to facilitate visits from a maintenance technician."
The toilet's actual design is rather complex.
After a person has done their business and closed the lid, the rotating toilet bowl turns 270 degrees to deposit the waste in a vat underneath. A scraper tool then wipes off any residual waste from the bowl.
The solid waste stays on the bottom while the liquid rises to the top.
Extremely thin fibers, known as nanofibers, are arranged in bundles inside the chamber. They help move the water vapor that exists as part of the liquid waste into a vertical tube in the rear of the toilet.
Next, water passes through specially designed beads that help condense the vapor into actual water, which flows down through the tube and settles in a tank at the front of the toilet.
As for the solid waste that's left behind, a battery-powered mechanism lifts the remaining matter out of the toilet and into a separate holding chamber. There it's coated in a scent-suppressing wax and left to dry out.
Every week, a local technician visits the community to remove the solid waste and water, and replace the toilet's batteries if needed. Residents can then use the water for tending to their plants, cleaning their homes, cooking, and bathing. The solid waste ends up at a thermo-processing plant to be turned into energy for the community.
According to Parker, one toilet can accommodate up to 10 people for no more than $0.05 per day, per user — in line with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's original criteria for the prize. Field testing will begin later this year, Parker says.
One challenge moving forward, which other designs have run into, is scalability.
While many designs work in theory, actually getting the toilets to the countries that need them isn't easy.
Local communities have to create jobs specifically so that the toilets are safely and effectively maintained, and that training process can take time. Some scientists have spent years working on their designs, and they still aren't perfect.
Parker admits the problem of toilet paper is still one the Nano Membrane Toilet has yet to resolve, as users have no choice but to toss the paper into a nearby waste bin.
In the future, the team hopes to devise a way for that paper to be burnt. It's not the most environmentally friendly disposal method, but if it means adding years onto people's lives, it could be a winning solution.
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In 2008, Facebook was still a startup. Early investors were excited about its user growth — Microsoft had put $240 million into the company at a crazy-seeming $15 billion valuation the year before — but it was far from the powerhouse it is today.
That's when CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg made a fateful decision: he hired Sheryl Sandberg, then the VP of global sales and operations at Google, to help run the company as its chief operating officer.
Today is Sandberg's eighth anniversary at the company, and this chart from Statista shows it all. Facebook has grown its revenue more than 65x, gone from a $56 million annual loss to a nearly $3.7 billion profit, succesfully navigated an IPO and numerous public relations flaps over user privacy, and now ranks as the fourth-most valuable tech company in the world (after Apple, Google, and Microsoft) with a market value of more than $320 billion.
Sandberg would never take all the credit — a company is made up of its employees, not just its leaders. But her leadership certainly helped transform Zuckerberg's passion and smarts into a real business.
SEE ALSO: Here's why the new small iPhone could be a big hit
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Once upon a time, the porn industry was famous for being the first to adopt new technology.
Porn was early to the web. And before that, the story (perhaps apocryphal) goes that the porn industry’s use of VHS videotapes caused the rival Betamax format to fall out of favor.
But a new industry has stolen porn’s role as the vanguard for new technology: Pizza.
It’s no exaggeration to say that the makers of the lactose-laden fast food are on the cutting edge of technology.
Last week, Domino’s announced plans to test rolling delivery robots in Australia that will ferry pies directly to customers’ doorsteps. Other companies are experimenting with robo-deliveries, including Amazon and Google, which are developing drones. But Domino’s claim that it will be offering the service in some areas in six months means it will beat everyone to the punch.
How widely Domino’s ultimately deploys the robots remains to be seen, and sure, the announcement, which resulted in a wave of media coverage, is as much about marketing as it is about new business models.
But the pizza industry has been ahead of the curve on technology for years, going back to the early mobile apps and social media efforts that the companies offered.
Some of the technology might seem kind of silly, like the so-called Easy Order button that Domino’s gave to some customers in the UK in November. Press the big plastic button, and an order is instantly transmitted to a nearby franchise. Yet it’s basically the same thing as the Dash instant-order buttons that Amazon introduced last year for many of the products it sells.
Both Dominos and Pizza Hut offer pizza tracking smartphone apps that allow you to follow your pie’s progress, from the oven to your house, in real time.
But there's more.
Both products cater to the most primal of urges. Both involve a product that’s basically a commodity, with little to distinguish one offering from another. And in the modern, on-demand world we live in, those conditions beg for technology.
Papa John’s and Domino’s each generate about half of their US sales from digital platforms. Papa John's lists keeping up with information technology among the key “risk factors” in its annual report, while the Domino’s annual report cites technological innovation as “vital” to the company’s brand and long-term success.
So as you order your pizza this weekend, using a smartphone app or by tweeting an emoji, take comfort in the fact that you’re not just satisfying a primal urge — you're helping to advance the state of technology.
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NOW WATCH: Domino’s is expected to start using these pizza-delivery robots within the next six months
Roughly eight months after taking the top job, Evernote's CEO announced a new team of lieutenants on Friday that he hopes will return the company to its glory days.
Evernote CEO Chris O'Neill introduced a group of seven execs to help run the company. The execs come from Google, Skype, HP, Logitech, Microsoft, Motorola, and VMware. The new team replaces many of the senior execs who have moved on from the company in recent months.
O'Neill, who himself came from Google X when he replaced Evernote's founder CEO in July, hopes to rekindle growth at the troubled startup, which was valued at $2 billion in 2012 before it began to implode last fall.
Despite reaching 150 million registered users last year, Evernote struggled to grow revenue, and, in 2015, things started to fall apart. Execs and employees were bailing, and then it hit cost-cutting mode, announced a series of layoffs and closed three of its 10 global offices.
O'Neill is tasked with giving Evernote more focus.
The people joining the team are Erik Wrobel, new head of product; Raymond Tang, new head of China; Andrew Malcolm, new head of marketing; Ben McCormack, new head of technical operations; Nate Fortin, new head of design; Michelle Wagner new head of HR; and Azmat Ali, new head of brands.
Here's the relevant parts of O'Neill's blog post.
In taking charge of our Product team, Erik Wrobel is leveraging 20 years of experience in product management, most recently as VP of Product at VMware where he started the cloud management product line and got hands-on with deeply technical engineering teams. He brings a wealth of technology experience to Evernote, along with the sort of deep understanding that can guide the business for years to come.
In China, we now have more than 16 million registered users and an independently operating business known as Yinxiang Biji. Raymond Tang, our new leader for Evernote China, has more than 20 years of tech industry experience with companies such as Nokia and Microsoft. Raymond’s ability to work seamlessly with teams from multiple functions will be essential for growing and scaling our burgeoning business in China, bringing the organization together to ensure that we are one Evernote team.
On the Marketing side, Andrew Malcolm exemplifies the ability to fearlessly dive into the details while also thinking at scale. In his first 100 days, he’s taken huge strides in evolving our brand narrative, identifying emerging market trends, renewing our marketing infrastructure, and helping new users discover the value of Evernote more quickly. Andrew’s experience guiding Skype through years of 40% increases in users gives us the foundation required to manage hyper-growth, while time spent at technology investment fund Silver Lake gives him a broad perspective about where markets are headed.
Ben McCormack, our new head of Technical Operations, has spent his career building and managing large scale infrastructure to support the needs of a diverse customer base. More recently, he has deep experience in cloud computing and is bringing that experience to Evernote as we map a future architecture for our service.
Great user experiences begin with great design. Nate Fortin has brought an increased focus on early prototyping to our Design team, with regular feedback from users driving a more focused and engaging Evernote experience. Nate brings a wealth of expertise from his time at Motorola, where he led design for the mobile device market. The critically acclaimed Moto X phone and Moto 360 smartwatch products exemplified Nate’s context-driven design approach.
By hiring leaders who are team members first and foremost, Evernote is building an organizational culture that innovates, looks forward, and helps its people do their best work while adding the capabilities we need to manage growth. As the new leader of our People Operations team, Michelle Wagner is applying nearly 20 years of experience in HR for software companies to grow and find some of the best talent in the industry.
Finally, Azmat Ali joins us at the head of our Brand organization. Azmat brings 20 years of experience in marketing for major technology brands like HP and Logitech, but it’s his start-up scrappiness that really stands out. Here is a brand leader who not only conceives of the Boom Bus to launch the UE Boom but also personally drives it up and down the California coast. I can’t wait to see what he’ll do for us.
These talented executives join a group that includes Seth Hitchings, a six-year Evernote veteran who has assumed the leadership of our Engineering organization, and Jeff Shotts, our CFO and a passionate champion of Evernote. Seth, Jeff, and many others across the company will ensure that even as we pass the baton from an incredible founding team to a new generation of leaders, we will never forget how we got here.
SEE ALSO: The inside story of how $1 billion Evernote went from Silicon Valley darling to deep trouble
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We’ve had a lot of discussions on SaaStr and at SaaStr events on founders from outside the U.S. and the Bay Area coming here.
We haven’t done enough on the opposite. When to go there. When to open your first international offices. We will do a couple of posts here from guest authors soon.
But let me throw out a few learnings, and perhaps an overly simple rule:
So you can go quite far without ever opening an international office.
And yet. And yet …
So when to go international?
I don’t have a perfect answer, but I do have a simple framework to think about. Once you have $1.5m in a geographic area, if you can hire someone strong to be the regional VP of Sales, or GM, make the hire. The reason is, at $1.5m in ARR, let’s assume the next goal is $3m ARR from, say, “Europe”. If you hire a local team, and you think they can get you to $4m in that time instead — then it’s totally worth it. Spend that $1m delta, or at least part of it, to get there faster, bigger and stronger.
It may be a bet. You may not be sure. Too early is tough. If you do this at $250k in Euro revenues, it will be harder to see it as accretive. Although it might be worth it even then, if you have higher-touch customers. Just one great hire might get you another big deal or two.
Done right, if customer success, if upsells, if referrals matter to your business, and rough-and-tough, your deal sizes are big enough ($30k+) … I say at least go Euro, go Asia, go even Australia once you have $1.5m there.
Second order magic will happen.
(Cross-posted @ SaaStr)
CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.
In technology as in life, bigger is usually better. The iPhone 6s Plus's main selling point is that its screen is nearly an inch larger than the iPhone 6s. A terabyte hard drive is obviously better than a gigabyte hard drive. No one advertises that their headphones are quieter than the competition's.
But cameras are hard to measure in terms of size.
We denote aperture, the most important spec on a smartphone camera, in weird numbers like f/2.2 and f/1.7 — and f/1.7 is actually the better of the two! And even that is only true in some circumstances! The only element of photography where bigger really is better is sensor size, and that hits a hard upper limit in the cramped confines of a thin pocket device.
So tech reviewers without backgrounds in photography zero in on a spec that seems to matter, but really doesn't: megapixels.
Megapixels are a measure of resolution, or the number of individual dots packed onto a camera's sensor. A one-megapixel image has 1 million pixels. If it's perfectly square, that means it'll have 1,000 pixels on each side. That's about the size of a typical image on a website. If you're reading this on an HD screen, you're seeing a smidge more that 2 megapixels. A 4k screen has over 8 megapixels. In order to print an image across the glossy pages of National Geographic you'll want about 10.
You can see then that megapixels do matter up to a point. But every major smartphone brand on the market shot past that point years ago. Still, it's the only measure of a camera most people have heard of or understand. Which is how you end up with statements like this one from CNET's review of the Galaxy S7:
"Although this camera has fewer megapixels than last year's S6, it takes better photos. Scenes are brighter, which makes the action easier to see."
The Galaxy S6 had a 16 megapixel camera. The S7 has 12 megapixels. A reasonable person might assume that would be a disadvantage, but in reality it's an advantage. Let's explore why.
First, megapixel counts on their own have no impact on optics — that's all to do with the lens. Check out these two images:
I shot both using the same lens, but with different cameras. The one on the left comes from a 12 megapixel Nikon D700, the one on the right from a 36 megapixel Nikon D800. There's no difference in sharpness, color quality, sensor size, aperture, or any other optical effect. The only advantage the D800 has over the D700 is that it'll print magazine-quality images up to the size of my wall, rather than just a large poster. Great for counting pores, but otherwise useless.
But high megapixel counts are more than just useless in most circumstances. They can actually be harmful to image quality. The more dots you pack into the tiny area of a smartphone camera sensor, the smaller they have to be. And the smaller they are, the weaker they'll be at accurately detecting light brightness and color.
A great example of a smartphone that chased megapixel counts off a quality cliff is the Sony Xperia Z5. Packing and proudly advertising a whopping 23 megapixels — more than Nikon's $6,500 D5 camera — Sony promised a "revolutionary" device. But my comparison revealed a machine that fell well short of the mark. Highlights got blown out, shadows clipped, and the image was actually less sharp than the 12 megapixel iPhone 6s Plus due to imperfections in the lens.
Finally, super-duper-high-res images are just a drag on your storage capacity. The 12 megapixel Galaxy S7 shoots images that hover around 3 megabytes. The 16 megapixel phones make images that nearly double that at 7 or 8 megabytes. That means that a small sacrifice in print size can lead to more than double the photo storage capacity on the same sized card.
Samsung and Apple seem to have found the smartphone sweet spot at 12 megapixels — big enough for beautiful prints, but small enough to retain quality and storage space. Instead focusing on engineering problems like lensing empowers those companies to make the best smartphone cameras on the planet. Expect megapixel counts on other brands' devices to drop as they fight to keep up.
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Dave Michels is someone I respect and known for his insightful articles on communications. Dave recently wrote this article before his attendance at the popular Enterprise Connect show in Orlando in the past week.
“The other options are to make yourself comfortable and enjoy the wait for the value WebRTC will someday deliver, OR license/embed (or create) real-time technologies that work today.”
— Dave Michels
I commented that perhaps he had forgotten how long VoIP itself took to emerge and the shards of glass those in the industry had to walk across for years because VoIP simply didn’t work. Many established vendors laughed VoIP off as a hobbyist technology. They were wrong and many became history.
As of today, most browsers do not support WebRTC.
The statement is true as an absolute. However, Google, Mozilla and Microsoft all support WebRTC today. Apple doesn’t but are hiring developers who explicitly have WebRTC skills. Why aren’t they rushing? Because the entire browser segment is up for change and communications is an integral part of whatever a “browser” is in 5 years. No one is saying WebRTC is wrong as technology choice, though clearly more work on the technology needs to happen. Communications will be part of browser technology.
Mobile is what really matters.
I couldn’t agree more. Mobile WebRTC hasn’t happened because the browser on mobile hasn’t reached it’s potential. The reality is most of us DON’T use the browser on our mobile as much as an app. But this is subject to rapid change. The trend now is towards service workers and non-downloaded applications. In fact, in the future you won’t know whether you’re using a browser or an application and you won’t care either. The days of downloading apps are nearing an end, if you’re focused on a WebRTC SDK, you’ve got the wrong focus IMHO. WebRTC is nothing more than a foot solider in a large battle ground that is shaping up for how we will use mobile devices. Watch for a massive change in how we use our mobile phones.
Google needed WebRTC to upset Skype, but that’s over.
Google has quietly doubled the WebRTC team in the last months (they didn’t feel a need to do a press release sic). Amazon is also busy hiring WebRTC developers. A job’s search on a bevy of high tech companies websites turns up “webrtc” positions. I sense we are now entering the “now that it works, what can we do phase.” I expect to see the cadence of innovation to increase. While Microsoft has great financial powder to battle for decades, enterprise Skype may be warring in the era of battleships. Though I haven’t used consumer Skype in months now and the dirty secret, most Microsoft Skype for Business users don’t actually use any voice at all.
WebRTC is Dangerous
I agree with Dave. WebRTC isn’t meant to be a all-in-one solution. You have to do some work to make it your own. David continues to write. “It’s very hard to fix something that 1) you don’t understand 2) you don’t control.” 100% agree. WebRTC is a building block, you have to create the compelling application and own the solution, in the past getting the technology to work was considered all you needed.
Dave responded to my original comment on his blog, “Organizations need to stop wasting their time with WebRTC solutions and focus on helping people effectively communicate today.”
100% agree. What I have found the companies who are building and using WebRTC aren’t publishing press releases about it. They’re not complaining about how some element is missing. Instead, they’re just doing this and pushing it out there. Netflix’s customer call center today is all powered by WebRTC. Twilio announced their SIP to WebRTC service has exceeded 1 billion minutes of usage (granted that’s not a huge number but a billion here and there can’t hurt). Tsahi, part of the Kranky Geek consortium, has a massive spreadsheet of all the WebRTC deployments.
Many of companies actually doing work with WebRTC don’t see a reason to show up at Enterprise Connect. Enterprise Connect advertises they are “the ONLY place you’ll find ALL of the leading enterprise communications equipment, software and service in one location.” The question is whether these leading providers will be the future ones as communications evolve.
For now traditional enterprise voice players, plunking down desktop telephones into businesses now offering the “same, but different” cloud based service, is a good business for the moment. Craig Walker at switch.co is unique in this group for truly trying to change the experience and has fully embraced the new realm. WebRTC is nothing more than a parlor room trick or classic trade show demo (show it but pray no one really uses it). The real risk to this audience is the unknown vendor, the one who isn’t at Enterprise Connect who changes the rules of engagement.
Serge Lachapelle – Group Product Manager @ Google
I feel Dave’s pain. I have worked with WebRTC since 2009 and it’s certainly been a long pull to this point, however, the promise remains that we can improve the efficiency of our communications. We simply have to try.
Note: Dave and I have great relationship and often agree on many points and not trying to instill a flame war.
The post Is WebRTC ready? Is the glass half full or half empty. appeared first on Chris Kranky.
Since 2010, Google has been paying money to hackers who have found vulnerabilities in its hardware or software. And after a call last year to crack its Chromebook's security system went unanswered, Google is now doubling its reward to $100,000.
The $100,000 payout specifically applies to anyone who can crack the yet-uncrackable Chromebook, but Google also has a wide range of bounties for smaller bugs. Payouts start at $500, and if you provide a fix with your bug submission you're rewarded with the hacker-friendly sum of $1,337 (the digits appear similar to the word "leet," which is hacker slang for "elite hacker").
Google also says that any vulnerabilities — regardless of whether there's an official bounty — are potentially eligible for a reward, although the rules for qualifying submissions are relatively strict.
Bub bounty rewards programs like these are becoming more and more common among tech companies, which is good for those of us hoping for safer hardware and software. Google even ended its bounty announcement with an encouraging note: "Happy hacking!"
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The Internet of Things (IoT) is changing business models, increasing output, and automating processes across a number of industries. But no other sector has been more impacted by this technological revolution than manufacturing.
Manufacturers across all areas —automotive, chemical, durable goods, electronics, etc. — have invested heavily in IoT devices, and they're already reaping the benefits. Manufacturers utilizing IoT solutions in 2014 saw an average 28.5% increase in revenues between 2013 and 2014, according to a TATA Consultancy Survey.
In this report, we examine the ways the IoT will impact the manufacturing sector. We include forecasts on device shipments, the investments made by manufacturers on IoT solutions, and we examine the return on investment that manufacturers are witnessing from their IoT solutions. Further, we look at the common IoT use cases in manufacturing, including asset tracking, control room consolidation, predictive maintenance, autonomous robots, augmented reality, and additive manufacturing.
Companies mentioned in this report include: PTC, IBM, Cisco, Microsoft, Zebra Technologies, PWC, TATA Consultancy Services, Fanuc, Stanley Black and Decker, General Motors, KUKA Systems Group, Lockheed Martin, Epson, and more.
Here are some of the key takeaways:
In full, the report:
Interested in getting the full report? Here are two ways to access it:
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NOW WATCH: Scientists made a robot art critic that is able to form its own opinions
Microsoft on Wednesday made waves in the tech industry when it announced that it is giving away for free some software it designed for its own internal use called Software for Open Networking in the Cloud (SONiC).
And this news can't be making Cisco happy.
SONiC is software used to run an up-and-coming type of computer network switch that is rising in popularity, known as software-defined networking (SDN), that threatens to overturn Cisco's stranglehold on the network switch industry.
SDN takes all the fancy features that an expensive switch offers and puts them into software, making networks easier to program, update and change. You still need the hardware, but you can use less of it, or less expensive models.
Microsoft is giving SONiC software away as part of its work with the Open Compute Project (OCP), an organization founded by Facebook to build "open source" hardware for data centers the same way that the people behind the Linux operating system do with free, open source software.
OCP hardware designs are available for free for anyone to use, change, and contribute changes back to the group to use. Contract manufacturers are standing by to build the hardware.
By extension, companies like Microsoft are contributing the software needed to run hardware to OCP, like SONiC.
Facebook has also been taking shots at Cisco's world. It has been designing creative new network switches that use low-cost hardware and open source software and giving those designs away to OCP. Several companies are building Facebook's switches and selling them.
Microsoft developed SONiC to use in its own cloud computing data centers.
It's using it now to support its Azure and Office 365, Azure CTO Mark Russinovich tells Business Insider.
"We have it in production. One of the things we wanted to do was submit something that we were confident was well-thought through and would work," he says.
(By the way, Russinovich is a famous and high-profile guy at Microsoft. He joined the company when Microsoft bought his company, Winternals, in 2006, software that was beloved by IT professionals. He's been popular speaker at many Microsoft conferences, ever since, and he's written a bunch of tech-suspense-thriller novels, too.)
Microsoft then lined up partners for SONiC, to help other companies adopt it.
They are:
Two big names not working with SONiC? Cisco and VMware. VMware is the company that offers its own SDN software and wants to lead the SDN revolution.
Specifically, what SONiC does is offer a standard way to to control and program a network switch, the piece of equipment at the center of every computer network.
SONiC will work with any just about switch as long as it exposes its guts and allows itself to be programmed. That theoretically includes certain Cisco switches.
"People can take advantage of different switches from different vendors and have them plug into their software-defined networks, Russinovich told us. This "makes it easy to move from one to another vendor, or mix and match from different vendors."
That can't be music to Cisco's ears.
It's built its network equipment empire – owning as much as 60% of the market – by making its products very sticky. Network engineers study for years to master the intracacies of operating a Cisco network, which makes these folks loath to buy, and learn, another vendor's software.
In fact, that's the main reason Cisco is currently suing Arista. Arista designed its software to work a lot like Cisco's.
The isn't the first networking project Microsoft donated to the OCP. In July, it OCP accepted some software that also helps companies program their networks.
As for how this affects Cisco or any incumbant network vendor, Russinovich tells us it doesn't matter. SDN is the future and it's here now.
"It's the reality of networking. Networking has to become software defined to operate at the agility of a hyperscale cloud, or any large data center that wants to support the speed that businesses want services to be deployed."
Cisco does have game in the SDN market. It's got its own super-fast Nexus 9000 switch, which run some of Cisco's optional, programmable software. And Cisco says it is selling very well.
But OCP is still challenging Cisco's whole model, offering new and lower-cost choices for building networks.
Cisco's new CEO might see the writing on the wall. He's been acquiring companies at a frantic pace to get Cisco into the next big things.
One more astounding thing about SONiC is that it's based on the Linux operating system (specifically a flavor of Linux called Debian), and not on Windows.
Microsoft’s Debian Linux-based stack SONiC https://t.co/rMhNiZrqXb <— source code, FAQ #OCPSummit16 pic.twitter.com/QrVTqwGuGm
— The Register (@TheRegister) March 9, 2016
A couple of decades ago, Microsoft was at war with Linux and tried to destroy it. Now the company says it loves Linux. Funny, Microsoft didn't actually mention Linux or Debian in the two blog posts it wrote about SONic, but does say so on the GitHub page hosting SONic.
There might be a bunch of technical reasons for that choice. But there's also a rational business reason. Linux is already open source and Windows is not. Windows is proprietary. By giving this Linux software away for free, Microsoft isn't giving away any part of its own protected operating system.
It is simply doing to Cisco what Linux once did to Microsoft.
SEE ALSO: The 11 highest-paying tech jobs in America in 2016
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NOW WATCH: This wing allows you to fly underwater
The Macallan is giving the tasting a 21st-century update by hosting them on social media. Cue the LOLs and WTFs.
While Scotch geeks wax lyrical about "mouthfeel" and the many flavor notes they can pick up in each sip—lemon peel, grass, oak, pebbles—to the novice drinker, a single malt whiskey can taste mostly like a punch in the face.
News broke Wednesday that office-space provider WeWork is raising a new round that will value the company at $16 billion. This flies in the face of recent talk about a popping tech bubble and dying billion-dollar "unicorn" startups.
But perhaps this isn't a bubble popping, as happened in the dot-com era, but simply a reshuffling. Startups that can convince investors that their growth prospects are still good and that they have a path to profitability may still find it easy to raise money. It's the struggling companies with slowing growth and no clear path to profits that could find a harder time.
With that reshuffling in mind, Statista has charted the most valuable venture-backed private companies in the world, based on the valuation at their most recent round (this does not include reported downgrades by big institutional investors). WeWork is now in seventh place.
SEE ALSO: Which tech companies are doing best on hiring more women?
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NOW WATCH: We tried the 'Uber-killer' that offers flat fares and no surge pricing
At today's Structure Data event in San Francisco, Microsoft Research head Peter Lee told the story of a public speaking nightmare that highlights just how difficult it is to build machines that can completely understand human language.
Some time in 2015, Lee says he was giving a keynote presentation on the power of technology and the potential of artificial intelligence at a conference in San Francisco.
To drive his point home, Lee was having his presentation translated into Mandarin over the stage speakers in real-time via Skype Translate.
Skype Translate, a project born out of Microsoft Research's speech laboratories, was rushed through development by CEO Satya Nadella to show off how Microsoft's bleeding-edge science can be used in real products.
Part of Lee's speech involved a personal story of growing up in a "snowy town" in upper Michigan. He noticed that most of the crowd was enraptured — except for a few native Chinese speakers in the crowd who couldn't stop giggling.
After the presentation, Lee says he asked one of those Chinese speakers the reason for the laughter. It turns out that "snowy town" translates into "Snow White's Town."
Which seems innocent enough, except that it turns out that "Snow White's town" is actually Chinese slang for "a town where a prostitute lives," Lee says.
Whoops.
Lee says it wasn't caught in the profanity filters because there weren't actually any bad words in the phrase. But it's the kind of regional flavor where a direct translation of the words can't bring across the meaning.
In fact, Lee says that this kind of nuance is something that's really difficult for the Skype Translate team. Another good example is the "umms" and "ahhs" that you may include in your speech — Skype Translate is totally capable of wiping them out in translations, but what if those pauses and stops are part of how you're conveying meaning?
“Maybe those 'ums' and 'uhs' are part of your charm," Lee says.
Still, there's cause for optimism that this problem will be solved. In the next four to five years, computers will be as good as humans" at understanding the words that come out of your mouth," Microsoft Research chief scientist Xuedong Huang told Business Insider in late 2015.
Other tidbits from Lee's talk: Microsoft Research is placing the bulk of its efforts behind "quantum computing," a field understood by scientists to be possible of creating computers that are hundreds more times powerful than we have today.
In fact, Lee says that quantum computing right now is like speech recognition was for most of the 1990s: Lots of good work being done, but waiting for the next big breakthrough before it's ready for prime time.
“The way I tried to explain it to [Microsoft CEO] Satya Nadella, we worked on [speech recognition] for almost a decade with no practical discernible improvement, and then we hit this tipping point," Lee says.
SEE ALSO: Microsoft is beating Apple in a key battle for the future of computing
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NOW WATCH: A guy Skyped his parents while jumping out of a plane
Amazon's decision to remove on-device encryption for its Fire tablets came under fire last week, after the updates were made public on Thursday.
Now, just a day after the controversial update, Amazon has backtracked and announced that it will bring back disk encryption on its Fire tablets.
According to a report by Engadget on Friday evening, Amazon will restore encryption to Fire OS 5, the latest version of operating system that powers Fire tablets, in a new update coming this spring.
"We will return the option for full disk encryption with a Fire OS update coming this spring," Amazon said in a statement.
On-device encryption protects the data stored in a device against hackers, or if the device is lost or stolen. It also makes it harder for government officials to possibly tap into devices to obtain personal information.
Amazon said last week that it had removed the encryption feature because "few customers were actually using it."
The decision to remove encryption drew a lot of criticism from privacy advocates as it made personal devices more vulnerable to cyber attacks. Computer security guru Bruce Schneier told Reuters that Amazon's move to remove the feature was "stupid" and called on the company to restore it.
The move drew more attention as Amazon is publicly supporting Apple's battle with the FBI over accessing one of the San Bernardino shooters' iPhone. Along with other tech companies like Facebook and Google, Amazon has filed an amicus brief asking a federal judge to overturn the court order requiring Apple to create software tools to unlock the shooter's iPhone.
SEE ALSO: Amazon wants to be in more rooms of your home with two new Echo devices
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NOW WATCH: Here's how to see how much you've spent on Amazon in your lifetime
When Slack announced new voice and video services earlier this week, the enterprise messaging startup signalled a move into territory dominated by the likes of Microsoft’s Skype. But it looks like this is not the only moment when the two company’s paths have crossed in recent times. Microsoft eyed Slack as a potential acquisition target for as much as $8 billion, TechCrunch… Read More
Amazon has quietly dropped support for disk encryption on its Fire tablets, saying the feature that secures devices by scrambling data was not popular with customers.
Privacy advocates and some users criticized the move, which came to light on Thursday even as Apple was waging an unprecedented legal battle over U.S. government demands that the iPhone maker help unlock an encrypted phone used by San Bernardino shooter Rizwan Farook.
On-device encryption scrambles data on a device so that it can be accessed only if the user enters the correct password. This helps secure users' data against hackers, or if the device is lost or stolen.
The Guardian reports that the change isn't mentioned in public materials Amazon has put out about the update.
Cryptologist Bruce Schneier said Amazon's move to remove the feature was "stupid" and called on the company to restore it. "Hopefully the market will tell them to do otherwise," he said.
Amazon is publicly supporting Apple in the iPhone case. On Thursday, it — along with Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and other tech companies — filed an amicus brief asking a federal judge to overturn the court order requiring Apple to create software tools to unlock Farook's phone. The brief said the companies "are also fully united in their view that the government's order to Apple exceeds the bounds of existing law and, when applied more broadly, will harm Americans' security in the long run."
Apple's legal battle with the FBI has thrust encryption and cybersecurity onto the US national agenda during an election year, divided public opinion, and pitted the might of the US Justice Department against one of the world's most powerful companies.
Amazon spokeswoman Robin Handaly said in an email that the company had removed the encryption feature for Fire tablets in the fall when it launched Fire OS 5, a new version of its tablet operating system.
"It was a feature few customers were actually using," she said. (Handaly also told Wired that "all Fire tablets’ communication with Amazon’s cloud meet our high standards for privacy and security, including appropriate use of encryption.")
Digital privacy advocates said that was not a good reason for discontinuing the feature.
"Removing device encryption due to lack of customer use is an incredibly poor excuse for weakening the security of those customers that did use the feature," said Jeremy Gillula, staff technologist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
"Given that the information stored on a tablet can be just as sensitive as that stored on a phone or on a computer, Amazon should instead be pushing to make device encryption the default — not removing it," Gillula said.
(Editing by Stephen R. Trousdale and David Gregorio)
SEE ALSO: The tech industry is lining up behind Apple in its war with the FBI
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