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Universal thought "Steve Jobs" would be a hit. Audiences thought different.

 You set up a meeting, drop it into Google Calendar. Then someone says “let’s do it another time” and you delete it. Then they say they’re available again. What do you do? You create a new entry. Until now. Today, the Google Apps team released a small but handy feature for the web version of Google Calendar — a trash can. You can now view, permanently delete or… Read More

When you're running at Facebook's scale, you're going to run into problems that no other tech company has ever encountered before. 

Which means that it falls on Facebook itself to build the tools it needs to handle the massive amounts of data it has to crunch every day.

Enter Facebook Presto, a data-crunching tool built in-house at the social network.

When Presto was first revealed in 2013, Facebook's analysts and engineers were using it to ask questions of its then-300 petabyte large data warehouse and get answers fast.

Released by Facebook as open-source code, the technology has spread beyond the social network's confines and into major organizations such as Netflix and NASDAQ, which value the tool's flexibility when dealing with mountains of data. Its rapid adoption highlights Facebook's growing influence and ability to shape the cutting-edge technology that powers today's internet economy.

More than 90 outside developers have volunteered their time to improve Presto over the last two years, bolstering Facebook's in-house efforts, according a blog post released today.

Presto, change-o

The magic of Presto is that it presents a massively more efficient way to deal with data at large scales, says Jay Tang, who leads Facebook's "interactive analytics infrastructure."

Hot open source technologies like Apache Hadoop and Apache Hive sparked the so-called "big data" revolution, giving companies a vastly more efficient way to process large quantities of information. 

Facebook uses both of those technologies, Tang told Business Insider. But the problem is that Hadoop and Hive are optimized for reliability — not speed.

"Running a query," the technical term for asking a question of a database, isn't impossible on Hive, but it often requires copying the data elsewhere and processing it to make it more digestible by data experts.

Given how much emphasis Facebook puts on "moving fast," it really harshes the vibe when engineers can only run a few queries a day on their data. 

"Presto is trying to solve a very specific problem," says Tang. 

But Tang emphasizes Presto's "very unique architecture," which brings the mountain to Mohammed, so to speak. 

Rather than shuffling the data around, Presto can read Hadoop, Hive, and other databases, right where it sits. There's no data shuffling to do; Presto can just read it and understand it, letting researchers use the SQL querying language they already know.

"Presto gives you the ability to query data wherever it lives," Tang says.

Beyond Silicon Valley 

When Facebook first released Presto, Tang says, its main appeal was to those few developers on the bleeding edge. 

But thanks in large part to the mobile revolution, companies of all sizes are dealing with ever-growing sets of data, and are starting to run into the same problems that Facebook solved years ago. 

"A lot of companies are facing the same problem," Tang says.

For example, Airbnb has turned to Presto to build Airpal, a tool to quickly put access to data right in front of employees. Gree, a Japanese social gaming giant, uses Presto because it integrates more smoothly with the Hadoop and other data center infrastructure they have in place. 

And NASDAQ and Netflix have combined Presto with Amazon Web Services to get more efficient usage of their cloud infrastructure.

Tang promises that really large "Fortune 50" companies are using Presto, too, but they're gun-shy about sharing the details. 

But companies like Teradata and MicroStrategy recently announced support for Presto in their commercial data software offerings, building out the stuff that can make it more appealing to the largest enterprises. 

Crucially, Tang says, they contribute back the data connectors that they develop for Presto under that open source model, improving the core project and furthering its overall usefulness. Thanks to the Presto community's efforts, it now has a "set of rich connectors," Tang says.

"You definitely need a vibrant, open community," Tang says.

SEE ALSO: How one Facebook engineer goofed up so badly that his wife thought he was dead

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When Australia-based project management software startup Atlassian first launched in 2002, cofounders and co-CEOs Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar set for themselves the goal of nabbing 50,000 customers. 

"We just chose it because it seemed far away," says Cannon-Brookes.

A few months ago, Cannon-Brookes says, Atlassian finally hit that goal.

Between its immensely successful JIRA product, business wiki creator Confluent, code management tool BitBucket, and business chat app HipChat, Atlassian indeed claims 50,000 paying customers in small businesses and large enterprises alike.

More impressively, Atlassian has never taken a dime of venture capital financing or employed any kind of salesperson, growing by word of mouth. These days, Atlassian is profitable, carries a reported $3.3 billion valuation, and is said to be planning a big IPO in the American markets before the end of the year.

Which all means that Atlassian needs a new goal. And it's taking its cues from social apps like Facebook and Twitter.

Rather than measure paying customers as the sign of success, Atlassian is now looking at monthly active users, or "MAUS." And Atlassian says it will consider itself a success when it has 100 million of them, taking it as a massive sign that people actually like using the company's products. 

"It'll probably take another 13 years to get there," Cannon-Brookes says.

100 million monthly users

Most of Atlassian's customers are made up of software development teams. But as time goes on, more and more customers are using Atlassian's tools in ways the company never imagined, from the marketing department up to scientific research, and the company has been switching up its products accordingly.

"The software team is incredibly strategic to business, but they need to work with everyone else," Cannon-Brookes says.

100 million MAUs is nothing compared to the likes of, say, Snapchat, which is said to have upwards of 200 million. Earlier today, Facebook announced 1.55 billion monthly active users in the last quarter.

But for an enterprise software company, especially a relatively niche one that's mainly found success by helping developers collaborate on software projects, it's a bold goal, and one that "very few" companies of Atlassian's like have achieved.

"All of our products solve a fundamental problem"

Cannon-Brookes says that setting these lofty, long-term goals helps keep the team focused on improving the products and growing, even as it gets bigger. 

"It changes the way we think, it changes the way we win," Cannon-Brookes says. 

He likes to say that rather than focusing on the Fortune 500, Atlassian focuses on the "Fortune 500,000." Rather than congratulate themselves on a few big deals, Atlassian's focus on scoring 50,000 customers meant that Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar meant that they never let employees rest on their laurels.

It's not a hard-and-fast quota, but rather a mindset.

And while Facebook likes to talk about "the next billion" internet users coming online in the developing world, Cannon-Brookes points out that a lot of them are going to start businesses, build software, and generally need to collaborate.

So while 100 million MAUs sounds super ambitious, Cannon-Brookes says the long-term plan is just going after a bigger slice of a growing pie, providing the tools and support that the next wave of people coming online will need.

"All of our products solve a fundamental problem," Cannon-Brookes says.

Get better, gradually

Cannon-Brookes also says that the whole "no salespeople" thing has a side-benefit that people don't really think about in the march towards 100 million MAUs: It means that it has a lot more capital to sink into research and development.

Since the products are Atlassian's best sales pitch, Cannon-Brookes says, it means that the company can just focus on making them slightly better, year-in and year-out, solving more problems for more customers.

"It's probably why we've had stable, reliable growth over the years," Cannon-Brookes says.

He says that Apple doesn't get enough credit for its "incremental improvements" with the iPhone — this year's new iPhone 6S may not be hugely different than the iPhone 6, but it's leaps and bounds beyond the original 2007 iPhone.

Atlassian's JIRA and the rest are similarly getting just a little better every year, solving different problems for different people. Each individual improvement may not seem like much, but it makes it that little bit more appealing to a customer who'd otherwise not want to take the leap.

And when the company realized that over a third of its customers were using JIRA for stuff outside what Atlassian had originally intended it for, it broke it up into three separate products for three separate needs, just to broaden the appeal. 

Different strokes for different folks

It hasn't always been easy: Cannon-Brookes says that it took Atlassian years to reconfigure its thinking to better serve large enterprise customers, and it's something the company is still struggling with.

End users loved JIRA and HipChat, he says, but at large scales, it didn't have the reliability or the features that the IT department demanded. When it's just a few isolated teams of programmers using the products, it's one thing.

But when a global company is trying to use Atlassian's products, downtime isn't acceptable, even if it's for maintenance.

"We can't take JIRA down at 2AM, because there is no 2AM anymore," Cannon-Brookes says.

Meanwhile, while Atlassian certainly got an early start, the competitive field has never been fiercer thanks to the rise of the programmer.

Silicon Valley darling Slack competes head-on with Atlassian HipChat, while Atlassian BitBucket is often matched up against $2 billion GitHub. And because both of them are backed by some of the biggest venture capital firms around, they get tons of press, too.

It means that while it may be both popular and profitable, the still-privately-held Atlassian is often an afterthought when talking about the business software market.

"We're Australian," Cannon-Brookes says. "We have no problem being the underdog."

SEE ALSO: How one Facebook engineer goofed up so badly that his wife thought he was dead

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After promising Office 365 users unlimited OneDrive storage a year ago and repeating that promise many times on its support forums, Microsoft late on Monday officially reneged.

The about-face is controversial.

But the company's unlimited storage promise was leaving some users feeling deceived, even before Tuesday's announcement. 

The official, public change in policy was announced in a blog post only a few hours after Business Insider and several other reporters had contacted Microsoft and asked what was going on with it.

We were contacted by a customer who said he spent the last two weeks trying to get Microsoft to honor its promise of  unlimited storage, only to be told that Microsoft wasn't going to do so.

He wasn't the only customer complaining. In June, several people posted to the forum about it. They were told to call a Microsoft account number, and when they did that, they were told to contact the online support forum.

"Eventually after an hour in chat they point you to here," wrote one frustrated customer, screen name mbshrekito back in in June.

A 'hidden cap' on 'unlimited' storage

In June, 2014, Microsoft upgraded Office 365, the cloud version of Microsoft office, to 1 terabyte of storage space.

That's a lot of storage, (1000 gigabytes) more than most people will use in five years.

In October, 2014, Microsoft one-upped itself again, promising that all Office 365 customers would get "unlimited storage at no additional cost."

But customer support reps on Microsoft's help forums soon started explaining to people that there were actually limits after all. 

They started telling people who asked that storage was capped at 10 terabytes. 

Here's just one example of an answer where a rep says, "If you subscribe to any version of Office 365, you will get unlimited storage ( fair usage 10 TB)."

Michael Halberstadt, a photographer, opted to ditch Google Apps for Office 365 Home subscription specifically because of the unlimited storage offer. He even went out and bought a Windows phone and started using it for work.

Like others, when he neared 1 terabyte he contacted Microsoft about getting more storage per the unlimited promise.

Service reps were telling people that when they reached their 1 terabyte limit, their account would simply be upgraded to 10 terabytes, and if they didn't see that increase, they were to call the account reps.

Since Microsoft hadn't formally announced a change in policy, things got really weird when Halberstadt contacted the account reps trying to find out why his storage limit wasn't upgraded.

In one conversation, Microsoft both confirmed that storage was unlimited while also saying it was capped.

 

Halberstadt persisted until an account rep finally told him that Microsoft would not be honoring a 10 terabyte limit at all, let alone unlimited storage. 

If he wanted more than the included 1 terabyte, he would have to pay for it. This, even though Microsoft was still advertising unlimited storage on its OneDrive blog, via its original post from October, 2014. (That post was removed as of today.)

 

Microsoft loses a loyal customer

Halberstadt now says he's fed up (and he's not alone).

Thanks to this free storage offer, he had bought a Windows phone and was using it for work, backing up things like his business mileage "by taking a photo of my odometer and later pulling up the photo in OneDrive."

He was also in the process of moving all of his music to OneDrive to use the new Groove player, too.

While he isn't going to immediately cancel his paid-for year of Office 365, he isn't going to buy more storage from Microsoft.

"I have been trying to figure out what to do for about two weeks when I found the hidden cap," Halberstadt, told us. "Cloud computing is based on trust. ... I just can't trust them anymore."

Instead, he's turned to Amazon and its promise of unlimited storage for $60 a year. And he's going back to his Android phone.

Microsoft blamed customer abuse

In the blog post explaining the change of heart, Microsoft blamed its customers, saying:

"Since we started to roll out unlimited cloud storage to Office 365 consumer subscribers, a small number of users backed up numerous PCs and stored entire movie collections and DVR recordings. In some instances, this exceeded 75 TB per user or 14,000 times the average."

But that explanation raises its own set of questions. As the above screen shots indicate, at least as far back as May, Microsoft was telling people that "unlimited" storage was really capped at 10T.

How many people could have reached 75 terabytes in the first few months of offer? By its own admission, not a lot.

And also it seems odd that Microsoft didn't factor in the cost of a small number of "abusers" when it decided to offer unlimited storage plan in the first place.

One thought we had: Maybe Microsoft no longer feels the need to offer the carrot of unlimited storage, now that it has 18.2 million people using consumer versions of Office 365 and there's less angst over competition with Google Apps.

When we asked Microsoft why it wasn't honoring its unlimited storage promise, we were pointed to the blog post that announced its change of heart.

In addition to killing unlimited storage, Microsoft decreased OneDrive storage limits on its free accounts, killed the 15 gigabyte of free storage for using OneDrive with your camera roll, and is also killing 100G and 200G paid plans. Microsoft will offer only a 50G plan, albeit for a dirt cheap price of $2 a month.

Microsoft is giving everyone a year to figure out a different storage options. If they are over their limits and don't like the change in policy, Microsoft says you can cancel your account and "a pro-rated refund will be given."

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Slack's new and improved slash commands make it easy to integrate third-party apps like Foursquare and Lyft.

Over the last several months, team messaging app Slack has focused more and more on becoming a platform. Rather than building a million standalone features, the company has aimed to make it simpler for developers to build bots and third-party integrations within the Slack interface. Today, Slack announced the latest update to serve that purpose: easy-to-install slash commands.

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Business-focused chat app Slack may get all the press, but $3 billion Australian tech giant Atlassian is quick to remind you that its HipChat software has been doing the same thing since 2010.

Today, Atlassian is upping the ante against Slack by introducing more full-featured apps that live straight inside HipChat. 

Right now, both HipChat and Slack offer third-party integrations with outside apps. Just today, for instance, Slack announced a partnership with Lyft that lets you hail a ride just by typing "/lyft" into the chat bar. 

HipChat is going a step further, letting you completely embed other apps, like software performance monitoring service New Relic or customer service tool ZenDesk, right into a chat channel. These souped-up apps themselves are sold via Atlassian's own HipChat Connect app store.

"We're doing something radically different," says Atlassian HipChat General Manager Steve Goldsmith. 

The benefit here is that you never have to leave HipChat for anything.

Under the current model, Goldsmith says, it breaks a lot of people's momentum when they get a new HipChat notification that there's an alert in a service like New Relic. That means that they have to leave HipChat and go to New Relic, and then back to HipChat to pull up the document that explains how to fix the problem — and so on.

By building the app right into the chat channel, everything can sit in one place, right within HipChat. You can even have multiple apps in the same channel, meaning that every tool you need to get your work done can sit in one place, right next to the tools you use to communicate with coworkers.

Crucially, it also works on the mobile versions of HipChat, kind of like apps from Salesforce's AppExchange. It means that HipChat becomes a kind of glue that holds together all these different apps on mobile, rather than having to constantly switch apps and copy-and-paste photos or text between them.

This week, Atlassian is holding its annual Atlassian Summit, gathering up some of its 50,000 claimed customers and its developers in San Francisco to talk about the future of the company. Atlassian is also rumored to be preparing a big IPO by the end of the year, with no outside investors.

SEE ALSO: Microsoft used to threaten to send weak programmers to work on a bizarre app about dogs

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Apple Music listeners are starting to end their three-month free trials — and Siri has begun to play hardball.

On Monday, angel investor Tom Conrad pointed out on Twitter that if you ask Siri to tell you the top songs in the US, and you aren’t an Apple Music subscriber, she’ll basically stick her virtual tongue out at you and refuse to respond.

We checked it out and it reads the same for other fallen Apple Music subscribers. “Sorry, Nathan,” Siri told me. “I can’t look up the music charts for you. You don’t seem to be subscribed to Apple Music.”

Siri is admitting that she has the data, but is withholding it because I am not an Apple Music subscriber. Very mature.

My colleague, who is still in his Apple Music trial period, was directed into the Apple Music app by Siri when he asked the most popular song in the US.

When I asked Siri about the top movie rentals in the US, she was much more forthcoming, and tried to get me to rent it on iTunes.

But the “give the customer information and then nudge them to buy” tactic doesn’t seem to be the way Apple wants to go at it in music.

Maybe that is because Apple hasn’t exactly been driving Spotify out of the market. Spotify’s CEO claims his service has seen even greater user growth since the launch of Apple Music.

We have reached out to Apple for comment, and will update this article when we hear back.

SEE ALSO: Spotify has been growing even faster since the launch of Apple Music, according to its CEO

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The cofounders of Skype, Ahti Heinla and Janus Friis, are building an autonomous, self-driving robot that will deliver up to 20lbs (9kg) of groceries for £1 ($1.50) in under half an hour, starting in 2016. 

The project is called Starship and is "leading the revolution in local delivery," an industry that, according to The Telegraph, has UK sales of over £150 billion ($230 billion) per year.

Starship could be up to 15% cheaper than current delivery services, according to the founders, who did not specify how much it would cost them to make each Starship. 

Starship will travel on pavements at around 4mph (6.5kph) and will "only take the last few miles" after a more traditional delivery service — such as a van — does the rest. Due to its size, Starship can get into hard-to-reach places where a van could not. 

The robot can be tracked via a smartphone, making it easy to see where your bananas, apples or oranges are. If Starship runs into trouble it can be commanded by a human — like a drone — but the majority of its movement is self-directed based on mapping data and sensors. 

The first trials of Starship will take place in 2016 Greenwich, London.  

Here is a video of Starship in action: 

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Set phasers on "stunning."

Verizon added 430,000 net accounts during the same quarter, while AT&T lost 333,000 postpaid accounts.  

For more than 60 years, scientists have dreamed of a clean, inexhaustible energy source in the form of nuclear fusion.

And they're still dreaming.

But thanks to the efforts of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, experts hope that might soon change.

Last year, after 1.1 million construction hours, the institute completed the world's largest nuclear-fusion machine of its kind, called a stellarator.

The machine, which has a diameter of 52 feet, is called the W7-X.

And after more than a year of tests, engineers are finally ready to fire up the $1.1 billion machine for the first time. It could happen before the end of this month, Science reported.

The black horse of nuclear reactors

Known in the plasma physics community as the "black horse" of reactors that use nuclear fusion, stellarators are notoriously difficult to build.

The GIF below shows the many different layers of W7-X, which took 19 years to complete:

From 2003 to 2007, as the project was being built, it suffered some major construction setbacks — including one of its contracted manufacturers going out of business — that nearly canceled the whole endeavor.

Only a handful of stellarators have been attempted, and even fewer have been completed.

By comparison, the more popular cousin to the stellarator, called a tokamak, is in wider use. Over three dozen tokamaks are operational around the world, and more than 200 have been built throughout history. These machines are easier to construct and, in the past, have performed better as a nuclear reactor than stellarators.

But tokamaks have a major flaw that W7-X is reportedly immune to, suggesting that Germany's latest monster machine could be a game changer.

How a nuclear-fusion reactor works

The key to a successful nuclear-fusion reactor of any kind is to generate, confine, and control a blob of gas, called a plasma, that has been heated to temperatures of more than 180 million degrees Fahrenheit.

At these blazing temperatures, the electrons are ripped from their atoms, forming ions. Under these extreme conditions the repulsive forces, which normally make ions bounce off one another like bumper cars, are overcome.

The ions are therefore able to collide and fuse together, which generates energy, and you have accomplished nuclear fusion. Nuclear fusion is different from what fuels today's nuclear reactors, which operate with energy from atoms that decay, or break apart, instead of fusing together.

Nuclear fusion is the process that has been fueling our sun for about 4.5 billion years and will continue to do so for another estimated 4 billion years.

Once engineers have heated the gas in the reactor to the right temperature, they use super-chilled magnetic coils to generate powerful magnetic fields that contain and control the plasma.

The W7-X, for example, houses 50 six-ton magnetic coils, shown in purple in the GIF below. The plasma is contained within the red coil:

The difference between tokamaks and stellarators

For years, tokamaks have been considered the most promising machine for producing energy in the way the sun does because the configuration of their magnetic coils contains a plasma that is better than that of currently operational stellarators.

But there's a problem: Tokamaks can control the plasma only in short bursts that last for no more than seven minutes. And the energy necessary to generate that plasma is more than the energy engineers get from these periodic bursts.

Tokamaks thus consume more energy than they produce, which is not what you want from nuclear-fusion reactors, which have been touted as the "most important energy source over the next millennium."

Because of the stellarators' design, experts suspect it could sustain a plasma for at least 30 minutes at a time, which is significantly longer than any tokamak. The French tokamak "Tore Supra" holds the record: Six minutes 30 seconds.

If W7-X succeeds, it could turn the nuclear-fusion community on its head and launch stellarators into the limelight.

"The world is waiting to see if we get the confinement time and then hold it for a long pulse," David Gates, the head of stellarator physics at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, told Science.

Check out this awesome time-lapse video of the construction of W7-X on YouTube, or below:

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When Slack first launched last year, one of its main goals was to reduce interoffice emails.

Its work-communications app lets you send messages or files to coworkers and keeps everything on file, essentially doing a lot of the stuff emails did for intra-office communication. The company's been growing like crazy and investors have been throwing money at it, last giving it a $2.8 billion valuation — it raised roughly $340 million in less than two years launching.

Based on its massive growth, it's not hard to see Slack's effectiveness at work. But now the company has numbers to prove that it's really helping companies reduce email and improve work transparency.

According to a new survey result released by the company this week, Slack users — 1,629 paid users, to be exact — say that they see an average of 48.6% reduction in email. Nearly 80% say it improved transparency and office culture. It's also dropped the number of meetings by 24%, while increasing overall productivity by 32.4%, it said.

And that's helping Slack keep up its crazy growth rate. Its updated numbers show that it now has 1.7 million daily active users — roughly 5,000 new active users added each day — and 470,000 paid users. Recently, it hit a new milestone: 1 million concurrent users connected to Slack at the same time.

In order to make it even better, Slack has released a number of new group-messaging features this week. On Thursday, it launched something called User Groups, where people can quickly send messages to every channel connected under a certain tag — like "@marketing" or "@sales" — sort of similar to how an email alias works.

Earlier this week, it also launched a new group direct-message thread that can loop in up to nine people, allowing people to have a quick private chats with a group of people.

Here's a quick snapshot of how the new User Group feature works:

SEE ALSO: Slack became a $2.8 billion company in less than two years — and it's showing no signs of slowing down

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Google will fold its Chrome operating system used in personal computers into the Android mobile OS, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Beginning in 2017, Google will only have a single operating system on the market, with Android featured on tablets, smartphones, and notebook computers, the report said. Google will show an early version of the new unified Android OS next year, The WSJ said, citing anonymous sources.

The move should help unify Google's software efforts and make its platform more appealing to third-party software developers.

But the unification effors are still early and it's still not clear how everything will ultimately play out, a person familiar with the matter told Business Insider. In fact, the person said it's possible that Google could contine to support Chrome OS, and actually maintain three different OS variants going forward. 

Three operating systems?

"There is a scenario in which we move forward and the likelihood is there is still Chrome OS and Android and there could be a third project that combines the best of both," the person said. 

Until now Google has maintained a clear delineation between its two operating systems, The Chrome OS, based on Google's Chrome web browser, is for the traditional laptop and PC-like family of Chromebook devices. Android is for lower-powered devices like tablets and smartphones, and increasingly gadgets like watches and TVs. 

Google will rename the Chromebook notebook computers, once they feature the new version of Android, The WSJ said, but the new name for the Chromebooks has not yet been determined. Google's web browser will apparently keep the Chrome name and the open source version of the Chrome OS that other PC makers can use for their laptops will continue to exist, the report said.

The move is not a complete surprise. Google executives have acknowledged in the past that Android and Chrome "will likely converge over time." Google united the teams working on the two operating systems under one management structure in 2014.

Another recent clue came in September, when Google unveiled the Pixel C hybrid tablet-notebook. The device is the first product in the Pixel line of devices to drop the Chrome OS in favor of Android.

Google declined to comment.

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 A great deal of Slack’s success has come from its ability to allow companies to communicate internally in a fluid and transparent manner. Now the enterprise messaging service is looking to enhance the experience of how larger organizations function through the introduction of User Groups. Read More

Google's AdWords search advertising business marks its 15th anniversary on Wednesday.

To celebrate, Google has released an infographic, showcasing 2001's most searched-for brands.

The full top 10 ranking shows just how much things have changed in 15 years.

Note on methodology: Google's "interest" graphs represent search interest relative to the highest point on the chart. For example, if at most 10% of searches for the given region and time frame were for "pizza," Google would consider this 100. It doesn't convey absolute search volume.

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10. Canon. The company is still a global photography superpower, but interest for the brand among consumers has significantly waned over time.

9. Honda. The automaker has mostly maintained its search share over the past decade or so, one of the outliers in the ranking.

8. Ferrari. People still love looking at Ferraris online, but not quite as much as they did before.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Microsoft has gone from a few hundred thousand iOS and Android users running Outlook to 30 million a month.

Millennials are increasingly turning to digital banking channels to perform their banking activities, and they're visiting their banks' branches less often than ever before. 

The behaviors and preferences of this generation — which makes up the largest share of both the US population and the employed population, at 26% and 34%, respectively — will shape the future of the bank, as well as the relationship between the bank and the customer.

As third parties increasingly provide the services that consumers are using to manage their finances, the valuable relationship between banks and their customers will continue to deteriorate.

To better understand what the bank of the future will look like, BI Intelligence surveyed 1,500 banked millennials (ages 18-34) on their banking behaviors and preferences — from their preferred banking devices, to what banking actions they perform on those devices, to how often they perform them.

 Here are some of the key takeaways:

• The bank branch will become obsolete. It will be some time before the final death rattle, but improving online channels, declining branch visits, and the rising cost per transaction at branches are collectively leading to branch closures.
• Banks that don't act fast are going to lose relationships with customers. Consumers are increasingly opting for digital banking services provided by third-party tech firms. This is disrupting the relationships between banks and their customers, and banks are losing out on branding and cross-selling opportunities. For many banks, this will require further commoditization of their products and services.
• The ATM will go the way of the phone booth. Relatively low operational costs compared to bank branches, paired with customers' preference for in-network ATMs, makes the ATM an attractive substitute for bank tellers. But as cash and check transactions decline, the ATM will become nonessential, ultimately facing the same fate as the physical branch.
• The smartphone will become the foundational banking channel. As the primary computing device, the smartphone has the potential to know much more about banks' customers than human advisors do. The smartphone goes everywhere its user goes, has the ability to collect user data, and is already used for making purchases. Therefore, the banks that will endure will be those that offer banking services optimized for the smartphone. 

 In full, the report:

• Analyzes how millennials use bank branches and why, even though are large share of millennials who still use branches, making significant investments in these channels isn’t a good move for banks.
• Explains how mobile payments and mobile point-of-sale adoption be small retailers will make the ATM obsolete. 
• Describes how digital channels, particularly the smartphone, will be come the foundation of the bank-customer relationship.

 Interested in getting the full report? Here are two ways to access it:

1. Purchase & download the full report from our research store. >> Purchase & Download Now
2. Subscribe to an All-Access pass to BI Intelligence and gain immediate access to this report and over 100 other expertly researched reports. As an added bonus, you'll also gain access to all future reports and daily newsletters to ensure you stay ahead of the curve and benefit personally and professionally. >> Learn More Now

 

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The Surface Book has presented an interesting conundrum for PC makers who are Microsoft's biggest partners, generating billions in revenue per year.

Sales in the PC industry are declining at around 11% per quarter, according to IDC, causing drops in profits for PC makers. Microsoft is somewhat insulated from this decline thanks to big enterprise sales, but the company's increased focus on hardware with the new Surface Book Pro — a high-end laptop with a touch screen — is making its partners anxious.

"[Surface] will bother OEMs and I know from conversations with OEMs they have mixed reactions," says analyst Annette Zimmermann of Gartner. (Microsoft historically calls PC makers "OEMs," or "original equipment manufacturers.")

Business Insider spoke to one source at an PC maker who described Microsoft as a "sleeping lion." 

A fundamental shift

Until 2012, Microsoft steered clear of making PC hardware because it already had an army of companies willing to do so. Even then, the first Surface computers were more like tablets with optional keyboards, something that most PC makers hadn't previously bothered with. They were mainly intended to show off the new touch-friendly interface that was front and center in Windows 8.

The tone has changed. Microsoft is now making a self-described "ultimate laptop," as opposed to a tablet, placing it in direct competition with PC makers such as HP, Dell, Lenovo, and others. 

Unlike Microsoft, which makes billions of dollars from software, PC makers make most of their money from selling hardware. Having Microsoft move into the industry — with its deep pockets and aggressive attitude — won't feel good, but there is nothing Dell, HP, Lenovo, and so on, can do. 

According to Zimmermann, Microsoft's aim is to ship enough devices to create awareness for Windows 10, but not enough devices to alienate its PC partners. 

But there's a natural conflict in those goals: Like any business, Microsoft ultimately wants to be the best, and this may involve shutting PC makers out.  

Marketing to Apple loyalists

So far, Microsoft has not advertised the Surface Book by comparing it to anything running Windows.

Instead, Microsoft hardware chief Panos Panay showed a slide that compared to Book to a MacBook and then directly referenced Apple as Microsoft's main competitor in an interview with Wired.

However, this strategy may have a problem. 

"The Surface Book will have a harder time stealing away MacBook users," says Linn Huang, an analyst for IDC. "The Apple brand has been sticky, and I don’t have much cause to think it won’t continue to be in the immediate future."

This "stickiness" is a problem for Microsoft who, in order to generate sales, will need to start appealing to high-end Windows users. 

While Apple dominates the high-end PC market, manufactures such as Lenovo, HP, and Dell (who own Alienware) all sell multi-thousand-dollar laptops. These customers are already primed to use Windows and can easily be converted to a Surface Book.

This is a scary prospect for PC makers. 

Owning the whole widget

While Microsoft is "not trying to become a second Lenovo or HP," according to Gartner's Zimmermann, there is still an implicit threat to the PC makers who make money selling machines which run Windows. By owning both the hardware and the software, Microsoft is in a far stronger position than PC makers who only own the former. 

For instance, Windows Hello, a security feature that can unlock Windows 10 with your face, has been lauded as one of Book's best features. (This feature is available to PC makers through Intel RealSense cameras, but Microsoft apparently isn't including Intel's technology.)

Simply put: Microsoft makes the software and so it can tightly integrate it with the hardware. 

This is something Steve Jobs described as owning "the whole widget" — and customers love it. Apple's strength has always come from being able to offer software that works perfectly with hardware on both the iPhone (think Touch ID) and laptops (think trackpad).

"Like Apple, Microsoft wants to appeal to users with an integrated hardware-software experience but the people who rushed to buy the Surface book so far are not Mac users," says Zimmermann. In many ways, this is actually even worse for PC makers: Microsoft has already started to steal customers.  

The problems don't stop there, however. Having Microsoft in the hardware game "puts the OEMs in an awkward position," says Zimmermann.

When the company merged the Windows software and hardware divisions under Satya Nadella, PC makers must now "share their [product] roadmap with the same people who are responsible for hardware at Microsoft." 

This conflict — that PC makers have to share certain product plans to get Windows 10 — has never been addressed by either party, and will only further tensions between the two sides.

But there's nothing PC makers can do. People want Windows PCs. Microsoft makes Windows. 

As Zimmermann says: "They don’t really have a choice, right?"

The Halo effect — maybe. 

The combined forces of a market down-turn with a militant Microsoft make the future seem very bleak for PC makers, but there may be a silver lining. 

"I think the Surface Book concept and design is fantastic," said IDC's Huang. "[But] at the current pricing levels I’m not sure it’s anything other than a halo product."

A "halo product" is one that lifts the image of everything else — in this case Windows laptops — up. In other words, the beauty and quality of the Surface Book will make a consumer more inclined to pick up a $400 Windows laptop just as the $2,500 MacBook Pro incentives people to buy the $849 MacBook Air or the $499 Mac Mini. 

 

Another bright spot: For the time being, Microsoft still needs the PC makers to get to its goal of selling a billion Windows 10 PCs in the next few years.

John Delaney, an analyst from IDC, told Business Insider that "Microsoft is trying to bring excitement to the Windows vector" with the Surface Book, and the company needs others on-board to help fuel the fire. 

Some PC makers, Dell and HP, have even set up deals to distribute the Surface Book to big companies through their enterprise consulting businesses.

"The truth is, we have entered a period in the industry where winning for the major players is no longer solely about capturing share, it’s about expanding the company’s footprint in the value chain," Huang told BI.

Just how PC makers are going to continue creating value is, however, the multibillion dollar question. 

SEE ALSO: How Microsoft's Hololens could slowly change the world — and what could go wrong

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NOW WATCH: We got a hands-on look at the Surface Book — Microsoft’s first-ever laptop everyone’s freaking out about

By Beth Schultz
New communications and collaboration hub to give service providers a way to add value to UC suites, better compete against Microsoft Office 365.

Chloe smiles and says thank you.

She's quick to respond, efficient, and pleasant. 

And she's a robot.

Chloe is a robot Best Buy has employed to help customers at its Chelsea location in Manhattan.

She sifts through music, movies, and games, bringing you what you want quickly without the hassle of sorting through messy shelves. 

I went to the Best Buy location to see what she's like and how she works.

Now I'm convinced retail will never be the same.

 

SEE ALSO: We tried a vending machine that dispenses Chipotle-style burritos for $4.95 — and the results are shockingly good

The first time I went to see Chloe, she was "sick." The robot had some technical issues and was under operation. I was bummed, but determined to come back and see her.

I came back a few weeks later and she was all better! So I decided to put her power to use.

Chloe is behind glass, so you communicate with her through a touchscreen computer. She looked at me with a bright face as I began to browse through the movie selection.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

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Phone makers like Samsung, HTC, and LG technically make Android phones, but what you see on their screens barely resembles the "clean" version of Android that Google develops.

That's because phone makers add their own software features, or "skins," on top of the pure version of Android so that they can differentiate themselves from other phone brands.

Unfortunately, while some skins add great features that you wouldn't find on any other phone brand's phone, it also means that you get a lot of extra apps from the phone maker and carrier.

And more often than not, apps made by phone makers and carriers tend to be poorly designed both aesthetically and functionally. It's the reason why a lot of Android fans prefer Google's version of Android over the bloated versions phone makers create.

Here's a look at all the ways phone makers are changing Android compared to the clean version from Google's own Nexus phones.

 

SEE ALSO: How two of the best smartphone cameras ever made compare to each other

This is the pure version of Android with no skin layer on top, and this phone (the Nexus 5) was bought unlocked directly from Google. That means all the apps you see here are Google's own, and it results in a clean, simple interface that's not confusing. It also means no carrier apps. Even though LG made this particular phone, there are no LG apps, either.

The Galaxy S6 has Samsung's TouchWiz layer on top of Android. As you can see, it looks much different than pure Android, and there are many extra apps from Samsung and the carrier (AT&T in this case). There are several duplicate apps for messaging and emailing, for example, which can be confusing. There are also a bunch of apps, like Yellow Pages, Uber, and Facebook that come preinstalled, which is somewhat intrusive, as the user should chose which apps to install on their devices. Notice the sharing menu on the bottom right with so many apps that it's hard to find the one you want to share to.

HTC has a skin layer called Sense. It looks quite classy, but it still carries a lot of HTC's and carrier bloatware. (T-Mobile, in this case).

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

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Awarded at the recent Intelligent Assistants Conference NYC (Oct 13-14), the IAAs raise the visibility of real-world implementations of automated services that leverage natural language understanding, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and human-like UI for customer support and personalized self-service.

The 2015 Intelligent Assistants Award winners include Amtrak’s Julie, Telefonica Mexico’s Nikko, and ING Netherland’s Inge. Each were recognized as best-of-class examples of automated self-service systems that provide a pleasant, human-like customer experience.

A panel of judges evaluated each assistant according to a mix of selection criteria including: mobile-first objectives; consistent responses across channels and devices; personalized responses; support of established KPIs; leveraging existing customer experience investments; learns from experience; a successful track record and future-ready implementations.

This year’s judges included Amy Stapleton, analyst and blogger at VirtualAgentChat,
Stas Roumiantsev, a long-time UX expert on the Wells Fargo innovation team, Nicolas De Kouchkovsky, former CMO at Genesys, and Dan Miller, lead analyst and founder at Opus Research.

While the competition was fierce, with 14 intelligent assistant entries from five countries in six different verticals, the three winners showed exemplary customer service offerings:

• Amtrak’s Julie: Well integrated and transaction-oriented
• Telefonica Mexico’s Nikko: A recognized personality across multiple channels, including social media
• ING Netherland’s Inge: Innovative mobile-first user interface with a novel approach to authentication

Opus Research looks forward to the next IAA competition to honor service offerings for intelligent assistants in automated webchat, natural language IVRs, mobile intelligent agents and other self-service/assisted self-service resources.

Amazon is famous for testing new ideas before deciding whether to scale it or shut it down.

That approach can lead to huge successes, like Amazon Web Services or the Kindle, but it can also result in failed projects.

Bezos shared his philosophy of failure with Business Insider last year. Here's what he said, and some examples of products that didn't go so well.

 

SEE ALSO: Here’s how to tell if you could make a boatload of money as a programmer

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos told us, “I’ve made billions of dollars of failures at Amazon.com…None of those things are fun. But they also don’t matter.”

Source

“What really matters is, companies that don’t continue to experiment, companies that don’t embrace failure, they eventually get in a desperate position where the only thing they can do is a Hail Mary bet at the very end of their corporate existence,” Bezos said.

That doesn’t mean companies should make bets that could risk the whole company’s existence, Bezos continued. “Companies that are making bets all along, even big bets — but not bet-the-company bets — prevail. I don’t believe in bet-the-company bets. That’s when you’re desperate. That’s the last thing you can do,” he said.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

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Apple has told a U.S. judge that it is "impossible" to access data stored on a locked iPhone that uses its latest operating system. 

Apple's position was laid out in a brief filed late Monday, after a federal magistrate judge in Brooklyn, New York, sought its input as he weighed a U.S. Justice Department request to force the company to help authorities access a seized iPhone.

In court papers, Apple said that for the 90% of its devices running iOS 8 or higher, granting the Justice Department's request "would be impossible to perform" after it strengthened encryption methods.

Those devices include a feature that prevents anyone without the device's passcode from accessing its data, including Apple itself.

The feature was adopted in 2014 amid heightened privacy concerns following leaks by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden about NSA surveillance programs. This rise of strong encryption techniques has frustrated law enforcement, who fear it means that evidence risks "going dark." 

However, security experts counter the strongest possible encryption is required to adequately protect users' data, and after months of deliberation, the Obama administration has opted not to attempt to impose limits on the technology.

Not every iPhone is inaccessible: Apple told U.S. Magistrate Judge James Orenstein it could access the 10 percent of its devices that continue to use older systems, including the one at issue in the case. But it urged the judge to not require it to comply with the Justice Department's request.

"Forcing Apple to extract data in this case, absent clear legal authority to do so, could threaten the trust between Apple and its customers and substantially tarnish the Apple brand," Apple's lawyers wrote.

A spokeswoman for Brooklyn U.S. Attorney Robert Caspers, whose office is handling the case, declined comment.

Earlier this month, Orenstein expressed skepticism about whether he could require Apple to disable security on the iPhone, citing Congress' failure to act on the issue of encryption despite the urging of the Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Orenstein deferred ruling until Apple could had a chance to say if it was technically feasible and, if so, whether compliance with the proposed order would be unduly burdensome." A hearing is expected on Friday.

Apple has positioned itself as a staunch defender of customer privacy. In an open letter published on the company website, CEO Tim Cook tells customers that "we have never worked with any government agency from any country to create a backdoor in any of our products or services. We have also never allowed access to our servers. And we never will."

SEE ALSO: British spies will be given new legal powers to hack your smartphone and computer

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Cars are no longer welcome in downtown Oslo.

 

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NOW WATCH: Take a tour of the $367 million jet that will soon be called Air Force One

We knew it wouldn't be long before Padmasree Warrior surfaced in another tech role.

Looks like she'll be joining Microsoft's board.

Warrior has been asked to take a one of two upcoming vacancies on Microsoft's board, the company disclosed in an SEC filing. Shareholders will vote on the new board members during the company's annual shareholder's meeting held in December, though its rare for shareholders to not approve the suggested new board members.

Warrior is best known as Cisco's former chief technology and chief strategy officer, one of former CEO John Chamber's lieutenants.

But she didn't survive the changing of the guard at Cisco when it appointed new CEO Chuck Robbins. He quickly created his own executive team. Prior to Cisco, she was CTO at Motorola.

There's been rumors that she's been fielding CEO offers from various startups (at one point, there was a report that she might have been considered for the Twitter CEO job) and we'll see where those rumors lead.

For now, it looks like she's doing the join-a-bunch-of-boards thing. She's already a board member for Box, and for Gap, posts she had before she left Cisco. 

Being a board member is a nice part time gig, though a drop in the bucket compared to the income that a full-time executive earns.

Microsoft pays its board members $250,000 ($100,000 in cash, another $150,000 in stock), it says, plus other stock awards depending on the work and committees that they chair.

SEE ALSO: Microsoft asked Lenovo to sell the Surface Pro 3 and Lenovo said no

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Dilbert, the well-known comic strip by cartoonist Scott Adams about the office everyman and his crew of incompetent colleagues, was the first syndicated comic that focused primarily on the workplace when it launched in 1989. Five years later, it had become so successful that Adams quit his corporate career to work on it full-time.  

It wasn't a straight line to success. Early versions of the comic were rejected by several publications, including The New Yorker and Playboy. It wasn't until an editor at United Media saw it and recognized her own husband in the character that it finally got its start, says Adams in his book, "How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big." 

Ever since, the comic has explored topics like the inefficiency of meetings, the uselessness of management, and the absurdity of office politics. 

Exclusively for Business Insider, Adams looked through the archives of Dilbert.com and shared his 10 favorite comics. Below, he explains why he chose each and counts them down to his absolute favorite of all-time.

SEE ALSO: The 10 funniest Dilbert comic strips about idiot bosses

DON'T MISS: ‘Passion is BS’ and other life advice from Dilbert creator Scott Adams

10. October 10, 2009: "Dream job"

"This comic causes the reader to imagine a funny future in which Wally will only pretend to do the assignment. Humor sometimes works best when one suggests what is coming without showing it. People laugh harder when they need to use their imaginations to complete the joke. 

"I also like comics in which characters are unusually happy about something trivial, evil, or selfish. That juxtaposition is always funny to me.

"Another technique I often use involves characters saying things that should only be thought. That creates the inappropriateness that gives it an edge."

9. September 24, 2009: "Opportunities"

"Management-by-slogan usually comes across to employees as ridiculous and condescending. That, in part, is what makes the staff in this comic so uncaring about the boss's house burning down. The ordinary evil of regular people is always funny to me. It's easy to relate to it."

8. November 12, 2009: "Roll a donut in front of the cave"

"A common humor technique involves juxtaposing something of immense importance with something trivial. The pairing of things that don't belong together makes your brain 'sneeze' in the form of a laugh. In this comic, Wally is comparing his digestive system to Jesus rising from the dead. A dash of spiritual inappropriateness gives it some seasoning."

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Microsoft, as a company, is vast: With over 40 years of heritage and 118,000 employees across every continent — not to mention almost $100 billion (£64 billion) in revenue during 2015 — it's regarded as a pioneer of the computing world. 

Almost everyone is familiar with Windows or Office, collectively two of the most widely used pieces of software ever, and will come into contact with them on a day-to-day basis.

Microsoft's domination of the PC world is part of the reason that the Windows XP default background is said to be the most viewed photo of our age and Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft along with Paul Allen, is the richest man in the world, even after giving away over $27 billion (£17.4 billion). 

While these products are well known, Microsoft has also produced some obscure hardware over the past years. Here are nine of the best. 

Microsoft broadband networking.

For a brief period between 2002 and 2004, Microsoft manufactured a broadband router that, at one point, even became the second most popular US retail Wi-Fi product. 

The router worked like every other on the market, offering USB support and a 802.11b connection (also known as Wi-Fi). 

In May 2004 the market share of the product slipped and manufacturing ceased, putting an end to Microsoft's broadband dreams. 

A cordless phone system.

Way before Lumia, Microsoft was involved in the phone market, albeit without the "smart" part. 

The Microsoft Cordless Phone System was impressive for its time — which was around 1998 —offering PC integration, speech recognition (for things like "Call John Smith"), caller ID, and more. 

The project was shelved, however, and Microsoft didn't make a phone-based product again until Windows Mobile, the company's first attempt at a smartphone operating system. The system wasn't compatible with Windows NT and Macintosh for an unknown reason. 

There is a YouTube video of the phone in action. 

The Microsoft Digital Sound System 80.

Microsoft and Phillips teamed up in 1998 to product the Digital Sound System 80, the only speaker system ever manufactured by Microsoft. 

The system, unveiled during the 1998 Electronic Entertainment Expo, was one of the first to have integrated sound hardware, meaning the PC didn't need a dedicated sound card. Additionally, the Sound 80 had a 3.5mm line-in as well as a USB port. 

The Sound 80 came with an interesting glitch: tapping either the + or - buttons could increase the volume to maximum or minimum respectively with no way to stop it beyond hitting mute. 

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

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As expected, YouTube is starting an ad-free, paid tier—but the site also plans to keep some exclusive content behind a paywall.

YouTube has been toying with the idea of charging its audience to watch videos for some time now, but it was only earlier this year that a leaked memo confirmed that YouTube would allow viewers to pay to watch videos without ads. According to Re/code, which cited unnamed industry sources, YouTube will also make some content exclusively available to those paying users.

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