Davemichels

Why the inti tanager was so hard to pin down

Enterprises have always analysed their businesses to help improve productivity and ensure the wellbeing of workers but now those workers are distributed across a blend of traditional offices, remote locations and working from home. Traditional approaches don’t take account of the variety of situations involved and enterprises need richer insights into the behaviours and experiences of workers. Tollring recently launched Analytics 365 its workplace analytics to help organisations understand the needs of their people better and is finding the changing situation is placing even greater emphasis on useful insights. 

“People are trying to make up their minds between working from home or getting people back to the office,” says Tony Martino, the Chief Executive Officer of Tollring. “There are people who can work absolutely beautifully from home and want to and there are people and jobs that need to be performed in offices, analytics can assist employers in understanding the right cadence in work behaviour. That’s really what we’re seeing in workplace analytics which is more relevant now than when we were all sitting at home.” 

Martino is keen to emphasise that this is not about being an intrusive Big Brother, it’s about gaining real insights into users’ experiences so enhancements can be made. He gives the example of someone working from home thinking they are being as productive as in the office but suffering poor quality voice calls because of their location. This represents the enterprise poorly and makes it harder for the employee to do their job but, without the analytics, there’s no way for the enterprise to know the situation. 

In this example, workplace analytics can be utilized to justify upgrading home office equipment or to explain to the employee why they need to spend more of their time in the office rather than working from home. Conversely, workplace analytics may prove that some workers are in fact more productive working from home than if they are required to come into the office all the time. Analytics can uncover not only their productivity but reveal insights into their wellbeing and happiness. Importantly, issues such as ensuring proper breaks are taken and excessive hours are not being worked can be monitored, with employees advised accordingly. 

“There are so many different people and different job functions to consider,” adds Martino. “The analytics we present provides a good understanding of that and the trends that are taking place. For instance, you can look at recurring meetings and understand how much attendance is external and identify who is most effective in these interactions. The profile of collaboration is also important, highly collaborative teams may need to be in the same place more often than others that involve people working more autonomously.” 

For Martino, the challenge enterprises face is to build the right policies within the organisation to allow people to work in the locations they prefer – but only if that is most beneficial to the organisation. Analytics 365 has the capability to provide the insights needed to inform decision making, not in an intrusive way but in a way that helps both the enterprise and employees through this transition. 

“If you’re not working from home effectively, Analytics 365 can provide some evidence to say it’s not working well and you need to come into the office more often”

“It’s about helping enterprises make more informed decisions about working from home.” 

 

 

The US government has seized $56 million worth of cryptocurrency from an admitted participant in the BitConnect scam and intends to sell the coins and use the proceeds to reimburse victims. The Department of Justice says that it’s the largest recovery of cryptocurrency to date — and that it was willingly given up by Los Angeles resident Glenn Arcaro, who has called himself BitConnect’s “number one promoter.”

According to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), BitConnect convinced people to invest a total of $2 billion by telling them that it had a bot capable of generating incredibly high rates of return from crypto trading. In other words, BitConnect sold itself as a way for people to easily invest in cryptocurrency and to make a...

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By Dana Casielles
VP of technology explains how this conversational AI startup is using robotic processing automation to address contact center challenges and improve the customer experience.

Telegraphs and computers helped scientists reimagine the mind, writes Matthew Cobb in The Idea of the Brain.

It’s difficult to talk about the human brain without inadvertently talking about computers. “I’m still processing,” you might say, or “Could we do a quick download about your findings?” Then there’s the favorite phrase of office workers who are stretched too thin: “I don’t have the bandwidth.”

There’s a reason computer metaphors are peppered across academic papers and lectures about the brain, according to Matthew Cobb, a zoologist and the author of The Idea of the Brain, a deep dive into the history of neuroscience. As he looked back centuries at early research into the brain, he kept running into older and older mechanical metaphors.

“I realized that at different times, one of the ways that people have conceived of the brain has been to draw a metaphor between what they think the brain does and the highest technology of their time,” he explains. Different generations of researchers drew connections between the brain and automata, electrical circuits, and the telegraph.

These technological metaphors didn’t just serve as illustrations for existing conceptions of the brain. Instead, Cobb says comparisons to inventions like the telegraph wire — which could transmit information from a central node to distant points in the countryside — actually helped researchers reimagine the brain, spurring leaps in their understanding of the structure and function of the brain.

“Once I’d realized that scientists were using these metaphors or these analogies, that actually enabled me to understand for myself why there have been changes and shifts in our understanding,” Cobb says.

The latest episode of Unexplainable, Vox’s podcast about unsolved mysteries in science, traces the impact of new tools like fMRI that probe the brain’s many secrets. But tools are not enough, Cobb argues: Researchers also need concepts or frameworks in order to interpret the data they gather from their tools. And technologies that have little to do with brain research have often inspired and influenced studies of the mind.

A transcript of our conversation, edited for clarity and length, is below.

So what’s the timeline here? When did we first start doing this?

Well, the first thing to realize is that even an interest in the brain [came] pretty late. For most of human history, the brain hasn’t been the focus of attention in thinking about perception, emotion, spirit, mind — whatever you might want to call it. It’s been some organ in the body like the liver or the kidneys or the heart.

You mention in your book that phrases like “heartache” or “pulling at heart strings” date back to this idea that thought was occurring in the heart. So when do researchers in Europe start saying, “Oh, maybe it’s the brain after all?”

Not in one moment. You mustn’t get the idea that somebody suddenly did an experiment and said, “Aha!” Instead, there’s this slow accumulation of certainty. First, there’s anatomical demonstration that the “viscera” like the heart have other functions. The heart is a pump, which was demonstrated at the beginning of the 17th century — so it doesn’t have the wherewithal to do the mysterious business associated with perception and thinking and so on.

On the other hand, the brain, as anatomical studies showed, has got all these neurons, and it’s connected by the neurons to all the sense organs and everything else. So gradually, in the course of the 17th century in particular, people became increasingly confident that it was the brain that was doing thinking. How it did it, they weren’t quite sure. Descartes, the French philosopher, looked at mechanical, water-powered, animatronic statues, and he thought, maybe we’ve got some kind of hydraulic system inside us.

We don’t, and it was very soon demonstrated that there’s no kind of water power inside our neurons. But that’s an example of people trying to use technology to explain and understand brain function.

[Researchers were later inspired by clockwork automata, like the one below.]

I think the telegraph was the example that best helped me understand how having a technological metaphor really helped researchers understand the brain. Can you tell me what happened there?

The telegraph is finally mastered in the middle of the 1830s and ’40s, and incredibly rapidly, it spreads over whole continents. And virtually immediately, scientists drew a parallel between those telegraph networks and the nervous system and the brain.

This metaphor of communication, of wires, and above all, there being information in those wires — news, facts, and orders — going from the center out to the periphery to make things happen. That changed very much how we see the brain.

How did thinking of the brain like a telegraph, sending signals out electrically from one point to another, how did that help researchers?

They looked, for example, at the structure of undersea cables that were carrying telegraph messages across the Atlantic, and they could see that there was a central core of copper and then around it was insulation. And then they looked at neurons, at nerves, and they said, “Well, this is exactly the same.” There’s this outer sheath which seems to be insulating it. So even our understanding of the most very basic units of the nervous system began to be completely fused with our understanding of technology.

When did they get to a point where they realized that maybe this telegraph metaphor had its limits, or wasn’t a perfect analogy for the brain?

Well, the key problem with the telegraph system is that it’s fixed and the wiring is static. It doesn’t change. You send a message from headquarters down to your branch office in some suburban place, and that’s it. You can’t decide to reroute that message instead to the head office, to the branch office, or to somewhere next door.

So what happened was that a new technology came along and people start to think, “Well, actually, the brain is much more like a telephone exchange.” Because that was the next big development.

Jack Delano/Farm Security Administration (Library of Congress)

A telephone exchange — is that like the switchboard operators plugging cables in and out?

A telephone exchange in the late 19th century consisted of a grid of slots with wires going into it. And if you wanted to telephone somebody, you’d pick up your receiver at home, and a light would come on in the local exchange. And one of the telephone operators, who would normally be a woman, would then plug a lead into your slot.

She would then say, “What number do you want?” And she would then connect that wire to the number you wanted to talk to. So the key point here is that messages can change their destination. The wiring is flexible, in that it alters depending on what you’re doing, and this coincided with a realization of the structure of the nervous system. Some astonishingly beautiful neuroanatomy, with new stains that people were developing, meant they could see these structures under the microscope in particular.

These structures and their interconnections, they changed with time, and they grew, and our nervous systems aren’t fixed. And that is much more like a telephone exchange than it is like a telegraph system. You still got the idea of messages going down the wires, but now it can change — it can alter and it’s plastic.

Cajal Institute, Spanish National Research Council (CSIC)

And what’s after the telephone?

Well, the dominant metaphor is that the brain is something like a computer. It’s carrying out some kind of calculations. And that idea, which came into being in the 1940s and early 1950s, still dominates over 70 years on.

There are distinct limits to this metaphor. There aren’t many scientists who would say, “Literally, the brain is like a computer with a central processing unit, with a graphics board.” If I take out my graphics unit from my computer, it’s not going to have any image, whereas if I damage a particular part of my brain, if I’m lucky, there may be sufficient plasticity from the other parts of my brain to recover some aspects of those function. Brains are alive.

If we’re seeing the limits of this metaphor that we’ve been working with for 70 years, is that because the computer metaphor has sort of outlived its usefulness? Is there a better metaphor out there?

Well, if I knew that, I’d be very rich. I’m not sure that simply saying, “Yeah, we need a new metaphor,” is going to help us. When I was an undergraduate, holograms were the big deal, but people abandoned it. More recently, with the advent of cloud computing, people started to say, “Well, the brain may be a bit more like a cloud computing system.” But there’s not really been experiments that have emerged from the use of the metaphor.

Brains have evolved over maybe 600 million years. Each animal lineage has got a different kind of brain that responds and processes the world in different ways because of its evolutionary past. So maybe our brains don’t have a single explanation. Maybe that’s a mistake. Maybe we’re just going to have to be content with lots of little explanations.

After nearly 11 suspenseful months, the Senate is expected to hold a confirmation hearing on Biden’s recently appointed Federal Communications Commission chair on Wednesday. But the new chair will arrive in the middle of an agency stalemate that’s put net neutrality work on pause for Biden’s entire first year in office.

Today, the Senate is expected to advance former FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel as chair of the commission — but it will take no action on Biden’s other nominee, and it will keep the FCC deadlocked with two Democrats, two Republicans, and one empty seat. Without a majority, Democrats will have little chance of bringing back Obama-era net neutrality rules, since the Republican commissioners remain deeply opposed to...

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Four years after Ford was reportedly considering buying Lucid Motors, the EV startup is now worth more than the Detroit automaker. Lucid Motors’ market capitalization passed Ford’s on Tuesday, one day after the startup reported its first quarterly financial results as a publicly traded company and just a few weeks after it started shipping its luxury electric sedan, the Air.

Lucid Motors has a comparatively long history for an EV startup as it was founded in 2007 as a battery company called Atieva. But after a 2016 pivot to making an electric sedan, Lucid Motors found itself running out of money at a time when others were starting to take off. One of the options it turned to was a potential Ford acquisition. From a July 2017 report in R...

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News Summary:

• DISH and Cisco announce a go-to-market partnership to deliver next-level 5G enterprise services.
• DISH’s hybrid cloud architecture features Cisco’s world-class hardware and software, including virtualized 5G routing in the cloud, fronthaul and backhaul transport, segment routing, transport slicing, automation and more.
• Cisco Customer Experience (CX) to support DISH with a variety of professional and business critical services.

SAN JOSE, CA and LITTLETON, CO – November 16, 2021 – DISH Wireless and Cisco today announced a multi-layered agreement to accelerate 5G services in the United States. The partnership is designed to enable businesses to capitalize on DISH’s 5G network and application infrastructure to support new hybrid work models.

Together with Cisco, DISH will unlock the value and benefit of 5G for businesses by building the United States’ first smart 5G network. This open and secure network allows DISH to customize solutions and enable enterprise-driven slices of its network to meet the needs of specific industry verticals. Unique to DISH’s network, this customized approach will grant enterprises across industries the access to rapidly reap the full benefits of 5G.

“Cisco and DISH are disrupting the mobile and enterprise markets by launching cloud-powered 5G services in record time through innovative technologies, fostering new application development and improving the overall customer experience,” said Chuck Robbins, Chairman and CEO, Cisco. “Together, we look forward to helping businesses across industries transform their networks to support the evolution of hybrid work models, the transition to Network as a Service (NaaS) offers, and the expansion into new markets including IoT.”

“DISH has compiled an outstanding roster of partners in the wireless industry, and Cisco is a key player helping us launch a customizable, automated, 5G network optimized for enterprise performance,” said Charlie Ergen, Chairman, DISH. “Working with Cisco is central to achieving our goal of delivering a best-in-class experience for enterprises. Our ability to continually drive value and enhance capabilities for our customers is a key differentiator for DISH and positions us to disrupt the industry with more innovation, speed, agility and security.”

The DISH 5G network will be powered by a comprehensive mix of Cisco’s latest cloud networking and automation software, as well as a unique blend of end-to-end lifecycle services from Cisco Customer Experience (CX).

Highlights of the Cisco and DISH agreement include:  

• Go-to-market strategy: DISH will participate in Cisco’s Reseller and Managed Services Program to deliver private 5G services to the enterprise, and the companies will invest in joint go-to-market plans.
• Deployment of an intelligent transport network: Cisco is helping to plan, design and deliver an open, cloud-based network that will predict, self-heal and self-optimize with closed-loop automation for transport network slicing.
• Co-innovation on virtual routing:  DISH’s 5G network will be powered with fully automated Cisco XRv9K virtualized routers running on AWS, along with virtual Cell Site Routers (vCSR) at the tower. This is a state-of-the-art, fully containerized virtual routing implementation with a purpose-built data plane to unlock the full potential for cloud-native networking.
• New operational models: Cisco is helping DISH build out a lean, world-class DevOps organization that drives automation and improves operational efficiency leading to faster time-to-market with new services, speed to revenue and return on investments. Key outcomes are CI/CD testing and zero-touch onboarding to enable DISH to quickly go from development to pre-production, as well as staging and testing directly to production.
• World-class technology:  Cisco will support DISH with the following: IOS-XR operating system for 5G, backhaul and fronthaul transport via Cisco NCS series routers, segment routing for automated traffic management and network slicing, Nexus 9000 series with an Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) fabric for data center switching, and Cisco Crosswork Network Controller as the transport domain controller including automated service provisioning and assurance.

Supporting Resources:

• Cisco 5G
• DISH Wireless

About DISH

DISH Network Corporation is a connectivity company. Since 1980, it has served as a disruptive force, driving innovation and value on behalf of consumers. Through its subsidiaries, the company provides television entertainment and award-winning technology to millions of customers with its satellite DISH TV and streaming SLING TV services. In 2020, the company became a nationwide U.S. wireless carrier through the acquisition of Boost Mobile. DISH continues to innovate in wireless, building the nation’s first virtualized, standalone 5G broadband network. DISH Network Corporation (NASDAQ: DISH) is a Fortune 200 company.

About Cisco

Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) is the worldwide leader in technology that powers the Internet. Cisco inspires new possibilities by reimagining your applications, securing your data, transforming your infrastructure, and empowering your teams for a global and inclusive future. Discover more on The Network.

The post DISH and Cisco Partner to Drive Wireless Disruption and Innovation for Enterprises appeared first on Cloud Communications Alliance.

Top Swedish officials are calling for a European Union-wide ban on energy-intensive cryptocurrency mining so that the bloc can meet its climate targets. 

The call came in a letter published last week signed by the directors of Sweden’s Financial Supervisory Authority and Environmental Protection Agency, which promotes “stability and efficiency” in the country’s financial system. In it, the two directors argue that “the social benefit of crypto-assets is questionable” and is, in any case, outweighed by its “enormous” energy consumption and carbon footprint. They specifically point to so-called “proof of work” verification protocols used by major cryptocurrency networks, in which users are required to solve increasingly complex—and therefore, they say, increasingly energy intensive—computational problems. 

 “The University of Cambridge and Digiconomist estimate that the two largest crypto-assets, Bitcoin and Ethereum, together use around twice as much electricity in one year as the whole of Sweden,” the letter said. “We therefore call for the EU to consider an EU-level ban on the energy-intensive mining method proof of work.” 

The complex nature of the computational problems require high-performance computers. Large cryptocurrency operations can use hundreds or even thousands of such computers, which often require some form of cooling system to prevent overheating. 

Bitcoin mining alone could consume more energy than Italy by 2024. If you break down the energy used to validate a block of transactions, then in terms of efficiency, one  bitcoin transaction can require as much power as an entire household does in a week. The letter claims that in between April and August of this year, electricity consumption for Bitcoin mining in Sweden increased by “several hundred” percent and is now equal to the electricity consumption of 200,000 Swedish households.

As the carbon footprint of cryptocurrency mining continues to come under scrutiny, some operations have decided to “go green” by using renewable energy, rather than fossil fuels. The Swedish officials, however, see this as a problem that will make it even more difficult for both Sweden and the EU to hit its Paris Agreement climate targets. 

“Sweden needs the renewable energy targeted by crypto-asset producers for the climate transition of our essential services, and increased use by miners threatens our ability to meet the Paris Agreement,” the letter said.

Many in the cryptocurrency mining industry tout the sector's ability to promote renewable electricity, chiefly by becoming a customer. However, even if that was the case, Swedish officials argue that renewable energy would be better used to transition existing industries off of fossil fuels.

“Due to the increased focus on CO2 emissions and in light of China's recent Bitcoin prohibition, a greater number of crypto-producers are exploring the possibility of using renewable energy for mining,” the letter said. “Crypto-producers are therefore turning their attention to the Nordic region, where prices are low, taxes for mining-related activities are favourable, and there is good access to renewable energy.” 

“If we were to allow extensive mining of crypto-assets in Sweden, there is a risk that the renewable energy available to us will be insufficient to cover the required climate transition that we need to make,” it continues. 

Besides an EU-wide ban on proof of work cryptocurrency mining, the officials also call for national measures to stop new energy-intensive crypto operations and rules that would prevent companies that invest in them from “marketing their activities as sustainable.” The letter comes as European Union officials mull bloc-wide financial regulations for cryptocurrency. 

When reached for comment, the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority directed Motherboard back to the letter. The Swedish Environmental Agency did not respond to a request for comment.

Slack has always differentiated itself as a communications tool by its ability to run applications inside of Slack and avoid dreaded context switching. At the Frontiers Conference today, the company is announcing a twist on app integrations with new building blocks — components that developers can build and string together into pre-packaged kinds of workflows.

Steve Wood, senior vice president of product management at Slack, said that the new approach required redesigning the entire platform with the idea of accommodating these reusable building blocks. In the past, a developer could build an app in Slack and it did what the developer wanted. These building blocks put the end user in control, which should make the entire platform more accessible and customizable.

“In this new world, we’re actually making [the platform] remixable going forward, so when you install an app, you [can access these] building blocks, and you can link them together, and they can actually talk to each other in channels. You can wire them together to [build] the workflows that you need for the kind of work you are trying to do,” Wood explained.

He said that the motivation behind this approach is that employees typically need to use an increasing number of apps to do their jobs, and this will provide a way to string them together and choose appropriate tasks inside these workflows built in Slack. Instead of forcing the user to jump between apps, in Slack or not, the software is doing the work for them.

He uses the example of a Zendesk help desk ticket delivered inside of Slack related to an outage. That could trigger an automated emergency response workflow where a PagerDuty alert goes out, a Zoom meeting is automatically initiated with a group of key people, the emergency response checklist gets pulled from Box, and a document is opened in Google Docs to track notes about the incident.

The tool itself is an interface for developers to build functions and triggers, which developers can create in a new Slack command-line interface (CLI). The trigger starts a function that gets the work flowing. These can then be saved as an individual app or block, or developers can string multiple blocks together.

Angela Ashenden, an analyst at CCS Insight who covers workflow transformation, said companies already using Slack integrations in conjunction with the Workflow Builder tool in Slack should like this update.

“The new capabilities are designed to accelerate the app and workflow creation process, closing the gaps between the different parts of the process, and making it easier for everyone — both tech and non-tech users — to build workflows, and also to make it easier to share and consume those workflows day-to-day. The goal is to allow employees to use workflows in ad hoc or personal processes, as well as in more well-defined team processes,” Ashenden explained.

Wayne Kurtzman, an analyst at IDC who watches the social and collaboration space, said that while the building block concept isn’t necessarily new, it could make Slack more broadly appealing as a place to process workflows inside an organization and allows it to move beyond pure communication.

“Slack has always had [integration] functionality, and the trick was making it as easy as building blocks. Pair the ease of use and reuse with people’s increased understanding of automation, and I expect that this feature will be widely used,” he said.

Woods said Slack is launching in private beta this week, but eventually there will be a distribution system like a blocks library or marketplace. That is still being considered. There will also be an update to Slack’s Workflow Builder down the road that will allow non-technical end users to string together these pre-built building blocks into meaningful templated workflows.

The tools will be released at some point next year, but if these building blocks work as described, Slack could become less about pure communication and more about workflow and process automation, something that could be important as it becomes more deeply integrated into Salesforce, which bought the company at the end of last year for over $27 billion.

By Sheila McGee-Smith
The customer experience platform demonstrates strong use cases for both single- and hybrid-cloud customer center scenarios.

Japanese design company Balmuda today announced its first smartphone at a press event in Tokyo. The straightforwardly titled Balmuda Phone is the debut product from Balmuda Technologies, a new division of the company previously known for stylish, premium home appliances like air purifiers and rice cookers. Balmuda’s toaster in particular has a cult following in Japan.

As you’d expect, the Balmuda Phone is quite a bit different to other phones on the market. CEO Gen Terao said on stage that he felt that smartphones have gotten too big and unwieldy in recent years, so the Balmuda Phone was designed with compactness and elegance as the primary goals. It has a very sharp 4.9-inch 16:9 1080p display and is roughly comparable to a 4.7-inch...

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By Dave Michels
The premises-based opportunity shouldn’t be discounted in the cloud era.

Earlier this week, Discord CEO Jason Citron posted a tweet teasing integration between the gaming-focused chat platform and Ethereum, setting off a total shitstorm.

The discourse around cryptocurrencies and blockchain collectibles such as NFTs, many of which run on Ethereum, has become extremely heated as of late and it appeared to boil over with Citron's tweet. "Probably nothing," the CEO tweeted on Monday, captioning a screenshot showing Ethereum wallet integration with Discord. While crypto fans immediately cheered the tease, the response elsewhere was swift and brutal. People piled on to Citron's tweet, which garnered thousands of replies and quote-tweets, and many on social media promised to cancel their paid Discord Nitro subscriptions if the platform integrated crypto. The backlash gained so much steam that when Discord sent a notice to users offering a free month of Nitro upon signup to users this week, a viral tweet encouraged people not to take the offer up as they speculated it was cover for the disastrous response to Citron's crypto tweet. 

Now, it appears that Discord has heard the complaints. In a tweet on Wednesday night, Citron clarified that Discord currently does not have plans to roll out integration with Ethereum wallets.

"Thanks for all the perspectives everyone," Citron tweeted. "We have no current plans to ship this internal concept. For now we're focused on protecting users from spam, scams and fraud. Web3 has lots of good but also lots of problems we need to work through at our scale. More soon."

Crypto and NFT projects put Discord in an odd position. Crypto is all over Discord, with many projects in the NFT space and beyond maintaining busy Discord servers with tens of thousands of users. People buy NFTs in Discord, and communities are run from servers. On the other hand, many crypto and NFT scams are also run from Discord, with servers being shut down overnight when scammy developers decide to cut and run. It's hard to imagine Discord ignoring all of that for much longer, and even without Ethereum wallet integration Citron's tweet implies that Discord is looking at fraud protection tools. 

More than anything, though, the Discord incident revealed just how entrenched the battle lines have become in the culture war over NFTs. Investors are making millions in the frothy market and, most likely due to that fact, video game companies are all making overtures towards integrating NFTs into their future products. At the same time, many video game players and video game-adjacent people despise them with a burning passion, either because of the environmental impact of proof-of-work tokens on Ethereum, the idea that blockchain collectibles are a grift based on mythical thinking, or both. 

Most likely, we haven't seen the last incident like this, because by all indications crypto and NFTs are not imminently going away. And neither are the critics. 

‘ We believe that enterprises are going to make long-term decisions about how to accommodate their remote workers and their hybrid workforce, as well as all the companies that are now providing multi- and omni-channel experiences. … And, frankly, the demand has been staggering for us,’ ScanSource CEO Mike Baur tells CRN.

As many organisations continue to accelerate their digital transformation efforts, more and more solutions are appearing on the market to help them along in their transitions.  

Although helpful, the sheer volume of these new and often disparate solutions can cause a headache for IT managers trying to discern which best fits their unified communications (UC) requirements. The relief for that headache may come in the form of NEC’s UNIVERGE BLUE offering. 

UNIVERGE BLUE was launched in the US last year and was rolled out across the UK and EMEA this summer. It offers users fully integrated conferencing, collaboration, screen sharing, video conferencing, back up, file synching, and contact centre capabilities available from desktop or mobile devices.  

By having a wide range of cloud services on the same platform it reduces IT administration and TCO compared to having multiple, disjointed applications, according to Andrew Cooper, NEC’s UK & Ireland Sales Director. 

“For many businesses, they rely on their phone system – such as NEC, Avaya, Cisco or Mitel – for their core telephony and then they would add applications. If they wanted meetings or video conferencing they might overlay with Zoom, WebEx or Teams,” he told UC Today. 

“If they wanted to add contact centre to that, they’d have to overlay another platform, and if they wanted documents storage, security and chat those add more layers of complexity. UNIVERGE BLUE completely simplifies that. We offer all of that under one complete UC platform, and at one low monthly rate.” 

UNIVERGE BLUE can work either as a standalone UCaaS or an integrated UCaaS / CCaaS solution, or with the upcoming BRIDGE solution – which provides UC capabilities on legacy systems, enabling users to further extend their investments. 

What really sets UNIVERGE BLUE apart in an increasingly crowded market – and one benefit it has over competitors – is its telephony capability with over 100 enterprise-level PBX features.  

“There’s a multitude of desktop collaboration applications available in the market today, but they fall down in not having that underlying core telephony capability,” explained Cooper.  

“UNIVERGE BLUE comes from one vendor; we’re not bolting lots of different third party developments together – which inherently have their own challenges. This is one platform that’s designed from the ground upwards. Resellers also get one admin simple portal and one open API integration platform” 

Established over 120 years ago, NEC has established a reputation for designing and building technology that is easy to use and understand. UNIVERGE BLUE is an extension of the vendor’s ‘Crazy Simple’ ethos.  

Cooper stated that it is important for the industry to recognise that though digital transformation has accelerated in recent years and many companies have started migrating to the cloud because of the mass shift to hybrid working, there are still many businesses out there dependent on legacy systems.  

“If you read certain articles around the way that the world’s going, you will be led to believe that the entire world is moving to cloud,” he said. 

“In some cases, you’ll be led to believe that the world has already moved to the cloud. But the reality is that there still a huge number of premise-based systems installed. From our point of view, we aim to offer our partners and end users the choice of cloud, hybrid and on-premises – and we have all bases covered” 

 

Netflix now supports the AV1 codec when streaming to some TVs, the company announced on Tuesday. It’s only available on certain devices to start with, though that list includes any TV connected to the PS4 Pro, so if you have one of those, you can give AV1 Netflix streaming a shot.

Netflix shared this lineup of supported devices with The Verge:

• Select Samsung 2020 UHD Smart TVs
• Select Samsung 2020 UHD QLED Smart TVs
• Select Samsung 2020 8K QLED Smart TVs
• Samsung The Frame 2020 Smart TVs
• Samsung The Serif 2020 Smart TVs
• Samsung The Terrace 2020 Smart TVs
• Any TV connected to a PS4 Pro streaming with the Netflix app
• Select Amazon Fire TV devices with Fire OS 7 and above
• Select Android TV devices with Android OS 10 and above

Netflix noted...

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Farmers in the Bean Belt perilously depend on just two species. New breeding — and traditional growing practices — could fix that.

The rare coffee plant sat on an isolated ridge in northern Sierra Leone, a lone shrub with thin leaves and marble-sized fruits. A team of researchers had spent over a year searching for it, only to discover the plant hadn’t begun to flower or fruit. If they hoped to scale up this uncommon variety, they would need to find it a mate.

This wasn’t just any species of coffee plant. It’s one that could help pull the world’s beloved beverage out of the dire straits it finds itself in today. Coffee is under attack from all sides. It’s threatened by climate change, by a deadly fungal disease that has devastated crops, and by risky farming practices. And at the root of it all is a startling vulnerability: The coffee we cultivate and drink today, which sustains an industry valued at over $100 billion, comes from just two species — and research on others is woefully behind.

In the meantime, rising global temperatures are exacerbating threats to production. “Climate change is a major issue for coffee plants,” said Aaron Davis, head of coffee research at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, who led the search effort in Sierra Leone. That’s because the plants need such specific conditions to grow. Around half of the suitable areas for coffee growing could be lost due to the climate crisis by 2050, according to a 2014 study published in the journal Climatic Change. In Latin America, which produces around 60 percent of the world’s coffee crop, this figure could be as high as 88 percent. Before the end of this century, the more widely produced — and better tasting — of the two species cultivated today runs the risk of disappearing in the wild completely.

It’s a familiar story in the world of food. When farmers in Ireland started growing the “lumper” variety of potato (one of an estimated 4,000 potato varieties) in the 1800s, for example, they probably didn’t imagine a blight would eventually destroy the whole crop and infamously push them into famine. And while the loss of coffee wouldn’t necessarily cause mass starvation, a whole lot relies on it: hundreds of millions of smallholder farmers and coffee-processing jobs in the tropics, as well as the gross domestic product of several countries like Nicaragua and Uganda. Not to mention, each day worldwide, coffee fills 2 billion cups with joy.

Like so much of our food system, coffee’s problems are intricate and interrelated. If the species Davis’s team found growing on a West African hilltop represents a safeguard against the biggest threats facing tomorrow’s coffee, it also illustrates how any global commodity that relies on just a few species is increasingly vulnerable to environmental shocks.

The situation is especially complex, given that the coffee industry is simultaneously fueling the climate crisis by clearing ecologically rich habitat for rows of tightly packed coffee plants. “There’s no doubt about it that coffee production has been a cause of massive deforestation,” Davis said.

But a possible model for creating a more resilient coffee system already exists. It’s an approach to growing that has been used by smallholder farmers and Indigenous peoples throughout the world for millennia. And if scaled up to meet today’s threats, it could fight climate change and conserve — and even increase — biodiversity. The challenge is convincing enough people it’s worth a shot.

The coffee crisis is fueled by climate change and a deadly fungus

The world drinks more than 500 billion cups of coffee every year, or around 22 billion pounds. But not just any of the 124 known coffee species. Most coffee (which comes from roasting and grinding the seed of the plant’s cherry-like fruit) is generally perceived as tasting too harsh. That’s why about 99 percent of all coffee consumed today comes from just two palatable African species: arabica and robusta.

Alejandra Parra/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The more preferred is arabica. Think fancy latte and single-origin selections from your neighborhood roaster — or a bigger chain like Starbucks that claims to serve 100 percent arabica beans. Despite accounting for over 60 percent of global coffee production, arabica is a delicate crop. The species can only be produced in the “Bean Belt,” a narrow strip of land between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn with optimal temperatures (65°F to 70°F) and ideal altitudes, where the plants get the right amount of rain and sunlight. Arabica is also quite susceptible to coffee leaf rust, the fungal disease that’s been plaguing crops. (This partially explains why the price of a “good” cup of joe is rising. This year alone, the cost of arabica beans is up 43 percent.)

The other species widely consumed today, robusta, entered the picture shortly after a fungus, coffee leaf rust, wiped out almost all of Sri Lanka’s arabica crop in the late 19th century. The British had deforested large swaths of land to create industrial-style arabica coffee plantations, turning it into one of the world’s leading coffee producers. But in 1869, the fungus was detected on Sri Lankan shores, and by 1885 it had ravaged nearly the entire crop and spread to other Asian countries. Around 90 percent of the land used for coffee growing in Sri Lanka was abandoned and later converted to grow tea.

Around the turn of the 20th century, as coffee leaf rust spread throughout arabica crops in Asia, robusta gained a commercial foothold. It now accounts for around 40 percent of global coffee production. The species is literally more robust than arabica, capable of growing in places where arabica can’t and with greater resistance to coffee leaf rust. Many would say robusta tastes markedly worse than arabica — think instant coffee and espresso shots. Then again, it’s also much cheaper. “The reason for that cheapness is not only because it is bad coffee,” as Wyatt Williams recently wrote in the New York Times, “but also because robusta plants are unusually hardy.”

In a world without climate change, it’s quite possible that we could survive with just these two varieties, said Davis, though warming temperatures are increasingly narrowing the range of both species.

But Hemileia vastatrix, or leaf rust, is still the most immediate threat to the coffee industry today. The fungus enters the coffee plant through miniscule openings on its leaves and then sucks up the nutrients, essentially starving the plant. Leaves become spotted with tell-tale yellow and red blotches. Growers watch unripe cherries turn from green to yellow before covering the ground in half-developed, rotting fruit.

Ezequiel Becerra/AFP via Getty Images

“They all fall,” Nubia Loaiza Vargas, a coffee farmer who has seen firsthand what the fungus has done to the crop in Colombia, told Vox’s Sam Ellis last year. “There aren’t branches. There is nothing.”

Latin America was free of coffee rust until the 1970s, when it first appeared in Brazil. The disease spread and reached epidemic proportions in 2012, infecting coffee plants from Mexico to Peru. (Central American countries were especially hard hit.) By 2013, the fungus had affected up to 70 percent of some farmers’ crops, leading several coffee-exporting countries to declare a state of “phytosanitary emergency.” While the situation isn’t as dire these days, local and regional flare-ups still occur and the rust continues to spread. Last year, for the first time, Hawaii’s coffee crops got hit, threatening one of the state’s most valuable commodities.

The persistence of coffee leaf rust has been a wake-up call for the industry recently, says Hanna Neuschwander, director of communications and strategy at World Coffee Research (WCR), an organization focused on improving coffee plants for farmers.

And now a different kind of disease — a coronavirus, afflicting mammals — has become yet another shock to the coffee ecosystem. A recent PNAS study on the socioeconomic fallout of the pandemic found that over the past year, Covid-19 “has become a new threat to the coffee industry by acting as a potential trigger for renewed epidemics of coffee leaf rust.” Labor shortages on farms, closed borders, and poor investment have all been linked to past Hemileia vastatrix outbreaks, according to the study. The authors predict it’s likely a matter of time in a post-Covid world before these factors could spark another rust outbreak.

The breeding solution

Relying on just two coffee species has put the industry in a vulnerable position. What’s more, even within these species, there’s very little genetic variation to work with to breed something hardier. That’s why some scientists are so excited about finding other coffee species to breed into the mix.

And for Davis, that plant is Coffea stenophylla.

Coffea_stenophylla_fruit_Cote_divoire by © E. Couturon (IRD), Guyot et al., 2020 Database, is licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0.

Stenophylla, by contrast, is hardier than even robusta. The species can tolerate an average annual temperature of almost 77˚F, according to Davis’s study, published earlier this year in the journal Nature Plants. That’s over 12˚F warmer than arabica and nearly 4˚F warmer than robusta. An equally important factor behind its potential to uproot the coffee industry, though, is that it goes down similar enough to arabica that judges in a blind taste test couldn’t distinguish between the two varieties.

“If you’re developing even more climate-resilient coffee,” Davis said, “stenophylla has two really good attributes — heat tolerance and great taste. Those two things don’t exist in any other species.”

That’s why stenophylla is increasingly touted as a much-needed dose of genetic diversity, capable of opening up new varieties potentially resistant to disease, pests, drought, or higher temperatures — all of which threaten the planet’s coffee supply.

When Davis and his team began their search for Coffea stenophylla in 2017, it hadn’t been seen in the wild since 1954. The team had records that stenophylla had been cultivated in the Ivory Coast and Sierra Leone until at least the 1920s, before being replaced by other species. So they made dozens of “wanted” flyers for the plant and distributed them to farmers in the area. Two leads came in, but both were duds.

They did eventually find the single stenophylla shrub. But the researchers needed at least two plants in order to produce cherries for a viable population, so they expanded their search area. After hours of hacking through the bush, ​​close to the Liberian border, they stumbled across a small patch of stenophylla 100 miles from the first site. Over the next year, a researcher periodically returned until the plants were flowering and bearing ripe fruit that he could collect for breeding. The sample they gathered was tiny, albeit enough to possibly secure the future of one of the most popular drinks — and widely traded agricultural commodities — on Earth, according to Davis.

Coffee is considered an “under-innovated” crop in the breeding world, says Neuschwander. That’s in part because cultivated coffee is extremely homogeneous; nearly all coffee in production today derives from a few wild plants originally taken out of the Horn of Africa. The genetic diversity found in arabica and robusta represents only around 1 percent of the total genetic diversity of wild varieties found just in Ethiopia (one of coffee’s birthplaces and a huge natural genetic reservoir).

“Genetic diversity is basically the raw material of breeding,” said Jorge Berny Mier y Teran, WCR’s breeding and technical manager. “If you don’t have variation, there’s nothing to select.”

Adding variation into existing coffee strains requires breeding in traits from wild species. But even those plants are at risk. Close to two-thirds of wild coffee species are threatened with extinction, including stenophylla, which is currently listed as “vulnerable” on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s global Red List.

Some breeding has been done with wild coffee, to be sure, like crossing a wild species with arabica or with robusta, Neuschwander explained. (Most coffee breeding has focused largely on the threat of leaf rust.)

But because coffee doesn’t provide calories, it occupies a somewhat different space from crops of the same economic value that do. That explains why coffee breeding is nowhere near the scale of what’s been done for other globally important crops. As of 2015, a few dozen plant breeders were working to improve coffee, in comparison with thousands working on corn, rice, or wheat, WRC founder Timothy Schilling told the BBC.

The coffee industry is resting on “a perilously narrow genetic base,” according to a study published in 2018 by the WCR and Crop Trust, an international organization working to safeguard crop diversity. That’s because of the lack of genetic material and funding for breeding programs — and perhaps also because the crop is largely grown in poor countries in the global South.

All of this underscores just how susceptible the entire coffee chain is to the kind of environmental jolts that have stimulated some investment into breeding projects. (Many of those projects are led by the WCR, which recently announced plans to launch a global breeding network in 2022.)

“You want to be prepared for the future,” Berny Mier y Teran said. “If you know that the temperature is going to go higher, you will start doing selection now under conditions that would be kind of normal in 20 and 30 years.”

What’s more, unlike annual crops such as corn that produce a new generation every year, a coffee plant is a tree that takes three to four years to mature enough to produce seeds. That means breeding takes a lot longer. In other words, developing a new, commercially viable coffee variety with stenophylla could take upward of a quarter century.

“It is an iterative slog, rust and breeding and drought and breeding,” said Neuschwander. Stenophylla, she added, “is not a silver bullet.”

That’s why most experts agree that the pathway to commercially viable stenophylla would be a costly project requiring years, if not decades, to carry out, by which point it could be too late.

Growing practices may be a major problem as well as a solution

While most coffee researchers agree that crop production is facing a crisis, some argue that the focus on climate change and leaf rust is overshadowing the real dilemmas — and potential solutions — of coffee growing.

“The industry’s response has been to fund and promote new varieties designed to contend with the challenges, involving a plant breeding scheme that will undoubtedly take years to put into effect and be fully realized,” Robert Rice, director of the Bird Friendly Coffee program at the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, wrote in 2018.

Inti Ocon/AFP via Getty Images

At the same time, there is an alternative path. It involves growing coffee alongside an array of species in a way that mimics the web of life within natural forests.

This model of production, called agroforestry, has been around for thousands of years. It creates a more ecologically diverse system that provides an abundance of crops and environmental benefits for farmers. Some smallholder growers in India, for example, utilize over 100 different types of trees on their coffee farms, forming canopy cover that provides shade for coffee plants and habitat for birds, along with food and medicinal plants for the farmers themselves.

A study published last year in the journal Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment found that agroforestry could actually mitigate many of the effects of climate change, too, by cooling the surrounding air. This kind of system could help maintain three-quarters of the Earth’s area that’s suitable for producing even picky species like arabica.

Ivette Perfecto, a University of Michigan researcher who has been studying coffee for three decades, says it’s the move away from agroforestry, not climate change alone, that has heralded a true crisis for coffee and the livelihoods of those who produce it. “The kind of system that is intensive coffee plantations, or very large-scale coffee monocultures, I see that as the crisis,” she told Vox.

Historically, small-scale farmers cultivated coffee as an understory species, growing coffee shrubs on the ground among a mix of larger shade trees. Beginning in the 1980s, governments globally started to back the widespread conversion into dense, unshaded monocultures, as technological advances in coffee processing, population growth, and globalization opened up new markets. Coffee was then planted in high densities and, lacking shade, the plants soaked up more sun and grew bigger and faster — a hyper-focused production cycle that also saw an increase in fertilizer and pesticide use, Perfecto says. Thousands of hectares of agroforestry systems were razed as a result.

This led to a drastic reduction in plant, insect, and animal diversity on coffee farms, and it diminished other vital functions this kind of ecosystem performs, like pollination, erosion control, watershed management, and storing carbon.

Large-scale, high-intensity coffee monocultures are also breeding grounds for coffee leaf rust, a throwback to the late 19th century crop collapse in Sri Lanka. “When you have these very dense coffee plants that are touching each other, that is a great way for the rust to pass from one plant to another in a very fast period of time,” said Perfecto. Studies have shown rust outbreaks are more severe in deforested areas where coffee plants are close together — essentially, unshaded monocultures.

Shade trees, by contrast, are a feature of coffee’s natural environment. Planting more of them helps bolster a refuge for critters that eat the pests that eat coffee, rather than having to rely as much on chemical sprays. The fungus Lecanicillium lecanii, for instance, lives in forests and feeds on coffee rust, while certain species of snail and even a type of mite also eat coffee rust spores. This biodiversity buffer is traditionally what has kept this sort of threat in check. “A variety of natural enemies are found in these very diverse systems that also contribute to the reduction in the levels of rust,” said Perfecto, who has studied how the shift to monoculture coffee plantations reduced insect diversity in Costa Rica.

The economic argument for more diverse farming systems

Shade-grown coffee from biodiverse agroforestry systems is the more ethical and sustainable production model, but it still has a trade-off: lower yields. And when coffee prices drop and farmers want to quickly increase production, they will often cut down the shade trees.

Although over time coffee prices have gone up, historically there has often been an oversupply of coffee. (Enough to keep up with increased global demand that is expected to reach $134 billion in 2024.) “I think the main problem with coffee production right now is overproduction,” Perfecto said.

Coffee has been in a boom-and-bust cycle for the past four decades, driven by the financial market and speculation about crop prices.

In 2019, coffee reached its lowest price in over a decade, forcing farmers to sell their product at prices under the cost of production. The World Coffee Producers Forum warned it could trigger a widespread humanitarian crisis as farmers switched to growing illicit crops like coca and cannabis, were forced into poverty, or migrated in search of better opportunities.

Then, a historic bumper crop in Brazil (the world’s biggest coffee producer), coupled with weakened Brazilian currency, helped push down the global price of coffee.

But these days, consumers are likely paying more for a cup due to a recent spike in global bean prices stemming from pandemic-related supply chain delays and a historic drought and cold snap in Brazil.

Jonne Roriz/Bloomberg via Getty Images

In such a volatile market, most coffee farmers have little to invest in taking proper care of their plants, let alone adopting eco-friendly agroforestry practices. For all of coffee’s global appeal, creating financial incentives for those with their hands in the dirt — and the most to lose — remains a significant challenge for governments and environmental organizations. “Now, they are desperate for us to plant [trees] and have shade again,” another Colombian coffee grower, Fabio Enrique Hoyos Salazar, told Vox’s Sam Ellis last year. “But at today’s cost, it is very difficult for a farmer to plant things like this.”

Still, research indicates that farmers who had diversified coffee systems were better suited to weather the price crisis and maintain their crops compared with those who had not. When prices dropped, they still had income from other crops grown on their farms, like bananas and papayas. That’s why experts like Perfecto recognize how the economy impacts farmers’ ability to conserve species diversity, and how important that is to making coffee farms the biodiversity hotspots and carbon sinks they once were.

“I think we can have a more rational system where the farmers have a stronger say into how much coffee is produced,” she explained. If farmers are able to set a fair price for coffee, Perfecto says, they will also have more money to invest in diversified systems that will benefit them and help mitigate the interlinked threats of coffee leaf rust and climate change.

Davis, for his part, sees that connection for consumers, too. “Coffee is a very good example where your purchasing choice might be beneficial for biodiversity,” he said. Not only that — buying coffee grown in shaded agroforestry systems, rather than on shadeless monocultures, also helps farmers and locks up carbon. (Here’s a coffee buying guide from Audubon.)

After Davis and his team announced they had located a wild population of stenophylla, he says he received hundreds of inquiries from farmers. Many were eager for a replacement for their arabica plants, which they told him aren’t viable anymore in a warming climate. The irony isn’t lost on him that the same forces causing climate change are also threatening the very diversity that might help us adapt to a warming world. “We think if we had waited another 10 years, stenophylla wouldn’t be there any more due to deforestation,” he said.

The reverse, he believes, is also true. There’s a lot of buzz around the drive to zero emissions and carbon neutrality, but “not about stopping biodiversity loss,” he said. The two — climate and biodiversity — he says, are essentially one and the same.

Heartland Dental Supported Offices handle over one million inquiries a month through RingCentral

BELMONT, CA – November 4, 2021 – RingCentral, Inc. (NYSE:RNG), a leading provider of global enterprise cloud communications, video meetings, collaboration, and contact center solutions, today announced that Heartland Dental, the largest dental support organization in the United States with over 2,300 dentists in more than 1,400 dental offices across 38 states, is using RingCentral MVP™ (Message Video Phone™) to power business communications among its employees and teams across the country. Heartland Dental has also improved support office contact center communications by migrating its legacy on-premise system to the RingCentral Contact Center™ cloud solution to help both create a better patient experience and grow new business opportunities.

Heartland Dental provides non-clinical administrative support so dentists and their teams can focus on delivering high-quality clinical care and excellent patient experiences. Heartland’s support includes assistance with human resources, marketing, IT, supplies, insurance credentialing, accounting, and more. The company is also widely known for providing supported doctors, hygienists, and team members with an abundance of continuing education programs and leadership development opportunities. With expanded affiliations and continued growth, the company required a single, reliable and centralized communications solution, like RingCentral MVP, to support advanced workflows for Heartland’s Patient Services Representatives, supported doctors and team members, and their patients. With RingCentral Contact Center, Heartland Dental has the sophisticated tools needed to build custom workflows.

“With more than 1,500 dental offices spread across the country, RingCentral MVP has helped us to connect, communicate, and collaborate more effectively with our supported practices’ patients,” said Jeremy Stroud, VP of Patient Services, Heartland Dental. “On the call center side, we now rely on RingCentral’s advanced contact center solution, which has allowed us to handle an increased number of calls as well as expand patient chat to our supported practice websites, allowing us to meet the patients at the channel they want to use. The analytics have been a game-changer. With all the call data at our fingertips, we’re able to help our supported doctors grow their businesses. We can review a practice’s call volume, and if we find their new patient inquiries are lower than desired, we can start increasing our marketing efforts on behalf of that practice. We’ve never had this level of visibility before.”

By utilizing RingCentral AI capabilities, which reviews all calls coming into the dental practices, Heartland Dental is able to, in real-time, flag the calls from new patients who may have missed an opportunity to set an appointment. It then sends those calls into an outbound queue for their agents, who typically respond within ten minutes. According to Stroud, “The best part is that over 20 percent of those callbacks result in a new patient.”

“When scheduling appointments, it is essential to value customers’ time and accommodate their needs. By doing so, you are providing a stellar customer experience, which drives more loyalty,” said Carson Hostetter, chief revenue officer at RingCentral. “Reaching out to a potential customer within the first few minutes of them expressing interest significantly increases the chances of them becoming a customer, so quick follow up with prospective clients is a must. At RingCentral, our goal is to continue to lead with solutions that not only optimize processes but also reduce complexity, so businesses like Heartland Dental can focus on what truly matters — the experience of their patients.”

About RingCentral

RingCentral, Inc. (NYSE: RNG) is a leading provider of business cloud communications and contact center solutions based on its powerful Message Video Phone™  (MVP®) global platform. More flexible and cost effective than legacy on-premises PBX and video conferencing systems that it replaces, RingCentral empowers modern mobile and distributed workforces to communicate, collaborate, and connect via any mode, any device, and any location. RingCentral offers three key products in its portfolio including RingCentral MVP™, a Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) platform including team messaging, video meetings, and cloud phone system; RingCentral Video®,  the company’s video meetings solution with team messaging that enables Smart Video Meetings™; and RingCentral cloud Contact Center solutions. RingCentral’s open platform integrates with leading third-party business applications and enables customers to easily customize business workflows. RingCentral is headquartered in Belmont, California, and has offices around the world.

About Heartland Dental

Heartland Dental is the nation’s largest dental support organization providing non-clinical, administrative support services. What started from the entrepreneurial spirit of Rick Workman, DMD, with his single dental practice, has evolved into affiliating with over 2,300 doctors in approximately 1,400 locations across 38 states. The company is majority owned by KKR, a leading global investment firm. For additional information, please visit heartland.com.

The post RingCentral Helps America’s Largest Dental Support Organization to Run and Grow Its Business appeared first on Cloud Communications Alliance.

By Martha Buyer
In addition to ensuring broadband access to all, expect to see more focus on net neutrality and robocall enforcement.

The social network is scaling back facial recognition, but similar technology could show up in the metaverse.

Facebook says it will stop using facial recognition for photo-tagging. In a Monday blog post, Meta, the social network’s new parent company, announced that the platform will delete the facial templates of more than a billion people and shut off its facial recognition software, which uses an algorithm to identify people in photos they upload to Facebook. This decision represents a major step for the movement against facial recognition, which experts and activists have warned is plagued with bias and privacy problems.

But Meta’s announcement comes with a couple of big caveats. While Meta says that facial recognition isn’t a feature on Instagram and its Portal devices, the company’s new commitment doesn’t apply to its metaverse products, Meta spokesperson Jason Grosse told Recode. In fact, Meta is already exploring ways to incorporate biometrics into its emerging metaverse business, which aims to build a virtual, internet-based simulation where people can interact as avatars. Meta is also keeping DeepFace, the sophisticated algorithm that powers its photo-tagging facial recognition feature.

“We believe this technology has the potential to enable positive use cases in the future that maintain privacy, control, and transparency, and it’s an approach we’ll continue to explore as we consider how our future computing platforms and devices can best serve people’s needs,” Grosse told Recode. “For any potential future applications of technologies like this, we’ll continue to be public about intended use, how people can have control over these systems and their personal data, and how we’re living up to our responsible innovation framework.”

That facial recognition for photo-tagging is leaving Facebook, also known as the “big blue app,” is certainly significant. Facebook originally launched this tool in 2010 to make its photo-tagging feature more popular. The idea was that letting an algorithm automatically suggest tagging a particular person in a photo would make it easier than manually tagging them and, perhaps, encourage more people to tag their friends. The software is informed by the photos people post of themselves, which Facebook uses to create unique facial templates tied to their profiles. The DeepFace artificial intelligence technology, which was developed from pictures uploaded by Facebook users, helps match people’s facial templates to faces in different photos.

Privacy experts raised concerns immediately after the feature launched. Since then, pivotal studies from researchers like Joy Buolamwini, Timnit Gebru, and Deb Raji have also shown that facial recognition can have baked-in racial and gender bias, and is particularly less accurate for women with darker skin. In response to growing opposition to the technology, Facebook made the facial recognition feature opt-in in 2019. The social media network also agreed to pay a $650 million settlement last year after a lawsuit claimed the tagging tool violated Illinois’s Biometric Information Privacy Act.

It’s possible that defending this particular use of facial recognition technology has become too expensive for Facebook and that the social network has already gotten what it needs out of the tool. Meta hasn’t ruled out using DeepFace in the future, and companies including Google have already incorporated facial recognition into security cameras. Future virtual reality hardware could also collect lots of biometric data.

“Every time a person interacts with a VR environment like Facebook’s metaverse, they’re exposed to collection of their biometric data,” John Davisson, an attorney at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told Recode. “Depending on how the system is built, that data could include eye movements, body tracking, facial scans, voiceprints, blood pressure, heart rate, details about the user’s environment, and much more. That’s a staggering amount of sensitive information in the hands of a company that’s shown over and over it can’t be trusted with our personal data.”

Several of Meta’s current projects show that the company has no plans to stop collecting data about peoples’ bodies. Meta is developing hyper-realistic avatars that people will operate as they travel through the metaverse, which requires tracking someone’s facial movements in real time so they can be recreated by their avatar. A new virtual reality headset that Meta plans to release next year will include sensors that track peoples’ eye and facial movements. The company also weighed incorporating facial recognition into its new Ray-Ban smart glasses, which allow the wearer to record their surroundings as they walk around, and Reality Labs, Meta’s hub for studying virtual and augmented reality, is conducting ongoing research into biometrics, according to postings on Facebook’s careers website.

In addition to Illinois’s biometric privacy law, there are a growing number of proposals at the local and federal levels that could rein in how private companies use facial recognition. Still, it’s not clear when regulators will come to a consensus on how to regulate this technology, and Meta wouldn’t point to any specific legislation that it supports. In the meantime, the company is welcoming the celebration over its new announcement. After all, it’s a convenient opportunity to emphasize something other than the recent leak of thousands of internal documents revealing that Facebook still isn’t capable of keeping its platform safe.

More than 900 people have signed the petition opposing a 20 percent fee on month-to-month Microsoft 365 subscriptions, which is expected to take effect in March 2022.

The service provider’s two major divestures will free up the company, formerly known as CenturyLink, to focus on its Quantum Fiber buildout and “aggressively” growing its enterprise business, Lumen’s CEO and CFO told investors.

According to the exchange, the meta office will allow users to decorate cyberpunks, interact with virtual furnishings, as well as chat and speak to each other i...

Volkswagen revealed the ID 5, a smaller, sportier version of its landmark ID 4 electric SUV that will only be available in Europe. It’s the latest vehicle to join VW’s growing “ID family” of electric vehicles as the company gets closer to its 2035 deadline to stop selling gas-powered vehicles in its home continent.

VW is releasing two versions of its new EV: the entry level ID 5, and the more premium ID 5 GTX, with dual electric motors on both the front and rear axel. (GTX is for VW’s ID models what GTI, or Grand Tourer Injection, means for the Golf.) The entry-level ID 5 will be equipped with a single rear-wheel-drive motor with an output of 174 horsepower and a 77kWh battery pack — theoretically enabling over 320 miles of range. (VW...

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The Biden administration is requiring civilian federal agencies to fix hundreds of cybersecurity flaws, as reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal. As the WSJ states, the BOD 22-01 directive from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) covers around 200 known threats that cybersecurity experts discovered between 2017 and 2020, as well as 90 more flaws that were found in 2021. Federal agencies have six months to patch older threats and just two weeks to fix the ones that were discovered within the past year.

The WSJ report points out that federal agencies are usually left to their own devices when it comes to security, sometimes resulting in poor security management. The goal is to force federal agencies to fix all...

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By Sheila McGee-Smith
Executives from Estee Lauder and Realtor.com discuss issues and tactics for retaining and hiring new agents.

Poly Offers New Microsoft Teams Rooms Solutions on Windows with Dell And Lenovo to Bring Pro-grade Audio and Video with Poly DirectorAI technology to Upgrade Every Meeting

Santa Cruz, CA – November 2, 2021 – Poly (NYSE: POLY), a global communications company that powers meaningful human connection and collaboration, today unveiled its updated Poly Room Solutions for Microsoft Teams Rooms. This new lineup of Poly Studio Kits, offer premium audio and video for focus, small, medium, and large rooms, and feature Poly DirectorAI technology.

The post Poly and Microsoft Teams Rooms Studio Kits Bring Equity and Ease to Hybrid Work for Any Room Size appeared first on Cloud Communications Alliance.

The biggest change to Microsoft’s Office documents in decades is expanding into Microsoft Loop, a hub for a new way of working in Office. Microsoft Loop is the new branding for Microsoft’s Fluid work, blocks of collaborative Office content that can live independently and be copied, pasted, and shared with others.

Much like Fluid, Microsoft Loop has three main elements: Loop components, Loop pages, and Loop workspaces. Loop components are live pieces of content that can exist across multiple apps, updated in real time and free for anyone to jump into. That could be a list shared in a Teams channel and also editable in a Loop page, or notes in a calendar entry that are also available to be pasted into Outlook and edited in real time within...

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Microsoft is entering the race to build a metaverse inside Teams, just days after Facebook rebranded to Meta in a push to build virtual spaces for both consumers and businesses. Microsoft is bringing Mesh, a collaborative platform for virtual experiences, directly into Microsoft Teams next year. It’s part of a big effort to combine the company’s mixed reality and HoloLens work with meetings and video calls that anyone can participate in thanks to animated avatars.

With today’s announcement, Microsoft and Meta seem to be on a collision course to compete heavily in the metaverse, particularly for the future of work.

Image: Microsoft

Microsoft Mesh always felt like the future...

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