Davemichels

By Sheila McGee-Smith
A look at how two organizations tapped Amazon Connect to improve customer experiences

Twilio, a provider of cloud-communications products and services, has announced a new set of APIs that will enable embeddable live-streaming technology for voice and video. 

Twilio Live aims to provide cloud-based interactive voice and video experiences in real-time and at scale.

Job search website Indeed recently took a look at AI job postings to see which AI jobs are most in demand and what kinds of salaries those jobs are paying. Here’s what it found.

The calls for something better are just getting louder.

The five-day workweek is so entrenched in American life that everything, from vacation packages to wedding prices to novelty signs, is built around it. When you live it every Monday through Friday, year in and year out, it can be hard to imagine any other way.

But there’s nothing inevitable about working eight hours a day, five days a week (or more). This schedule only became a part of American labor law in the 1930s, after decades of striking by labor activists who were tired of working the 14-hour days demanded by some employers. Indeed, one of the biggest goals of the American labor movement beginning in the 19th century was “an attempt to gain time back,” Erik Loomis, a history professor at the University of Rhode Island, told Vox.

Now, there’s a growing conversation about how American workers can take back more of their time. The trauma and disruption of the last three years have prompted a lot of Americans to reevaluate their relationships to work, whether it’s restaurant servers tired of risking their safety for poverty-level wages or office workers quitting rather than giving up remote work. And part of that reevaluation is about the workweek, which many say is due for a reboot. After more than 60 British companies tested a four-day workweek for six months and 90 percent of the companies decided to continue the experiment, even US policymakers such as Bernie Sanders are calling for the change in American work culture.

Over the past few decades, work for many salaried employees has ballooned far beyond 40 hours a week, thanks to a combination of weakened labor laws and technology that allows bosses to reach workers at any time of the day or night. At the same time, low-wage and hourly workers are frequently subject to unpredictable schedules that can change at a moment’s notice, and may not give them enough hours of paid work to live on. Today’s work schedules, with their combination of “overwork and then no work,” in many ways mirror the conditions that preceded the reforms of the 1930s, Loomis said.

Then as now, the country may be ripe for a change. Some employers are testing out four-day workweeks. A recent study of shorter workweeks in Iceland was a big success, boosting worker well-being and even productivity. And workers themselves are pushing back against schedules that crowd out everything that isn’t work. During the pandemic, there was a growing feeling that “we have one life — and are we working to live, or are we living to work?” Rachel Deutsch, director of worker justice campaigns at the Center for Popular Democracy, told Vox.

But to really make the workweek fair and humane for all Americans — and give people more time to do things that aren’t work — the country will need systemic changes to help workers take back their power. Otherwise, only the most privileged will benefit from the new interest in shorter workweeks — if anyone benefits at all.

The 40-hour workweek was a hard-won victory for labor activists

In the 19th century, many factory and other low-wage workers were at work nearly all the time. The workweek was whatever your employer said it was, which “could be 14 hours a day, it could be six days a week, it could be seven days a week,” Loomis said. In “strike after strike after strike,” he explained, workers fought for a more livable schedule, a push exemplified by the 1880s slogan, “eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will.”

They won some victories — the Ford Motor Company, for example, reduced its workweek from 48 to 40 hours in 1926 (though that may have been more about Henry Ford’s conviction that fewer hours made workers more productive). But it wasn’t until the 1930s that the Great Depression and more mass strikes convinced President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and reformers in the federal government that something had to change.

The result was the Fair Labor Standards Act, passed in 1938, which — among other reforms — required overtime pay for many employees if they worked more than 40 hours a week. There were exceptions — farm workers, for example, were not guaranteed overtime — but for millions of workers, the eight-hour day and five-day week became the law of the land.

Not everyone wanted to stop there. “There really were battles in the ’40s and ’50s over whether or not the eight-hour day was sufficient,” Loomis said. Pushes for a six-hour day or other ways of shortening the workweek continued in the 1960s, but rising unemployment in the 1970s had labor leaders focusing all their attention on trying to save jobs. The idea of a shorter workweek fell by the wayside.

But since then, a lot of Americans’ work schedules have only gotten worse. For example, many salaried workers (as opposed to those paid an hourly wage) are exempt from the overtime requirements of the Fair Labor Standards Act, and employers have taken advantage of this to require more and more hours of these workers. As of 2014, the average salaried worker worked 49 hours per week, according to a Gallup survey, with 25 percent working more than 60 hours — and working hours for many have actually gone up, not down, during the pandemic.

Meanwhile, the rise of smartphones and laptops has broken down the barriers between work and home, allowing bosses to contact employees at any time of the day or night. As management professor Scott Dust wrote at Fast Company earlier this year, “thanks to technology, the eight-hour, ‘9-to-5’ workday is a mirage.”

Hourly workers, especially in low-wage service jobs, meanwhile, have faced a different problem: the rise of just-in-time scheduling, in which employers decide on worker schedules just days in advance, depending on factors like how busy a particular store is. That practice has led many large employers to keep most of their employees part-time, so they can be called in at a moment’s notice, and not paid when they aren’t needed. It’s a way of essentially “offloading all of the risk of your business model onto workers,” Deutsch said.

For workers subject to just-in-time scheduling, long workweeks aren’t necessarily the problem: rather, one-third of retail and food-service workers in one 2019 survey said they were involuntarily working part-time, wanting more hours than their employer would give them. That can make it difficult or impossible for people to pay their bills, necessitating a second job — except that unpredictable schedules make juggling two or more jobs complex, to say the least. And a constantly changing work schedule can also make it hard to arrange for child care — the same survey found that unpredictable schedules for parents led to instability in children’s routines, as well as anxiety and behavior problems in kids.

A constantly changing schedule meant that Madison Nardy, a former beauty consultant at a Philadelphia-area Target, never knew how much money she’d be taking home each week, as she struggled to balance work with attending community college and caring for her mom, who has a disability. Though she was hired with the understanding that she would work 30 or 35 hours a week, soon “my hours began to dwindle down,” she told Vox. “One week I would have eight hours, the next week it would go up to 20, and then back down to 12.”

The hours she did work could be punishing — sometimes she was scheduled to close the store at 1 am and come back the next morning at 7 or 8, a practice called “clopening.” Her constantly fluctuating schedule left her so exhausted and stressed that there were days “where I would go in the bathroom and just cry,” Nardy said. “I was always running around like a chicken without a head.”

The pandemic may have paved the way for a new workweek revolution

Nothing in the Fair Labor Standards Act prohibits the practices Nardy said she experienced — employers switching up workers’ schedules with little notice, or giving each employee too little work to live on. “The only protections that we have for hourly workers are from a time when overwork was the only problem,” Deutsch said.

Recently, however, there’s been a growing push for workers’ rights in general, not just around scheduling. The Fight for $15, for example, has won minimum-wage increases in many states as well as drawing the attention of policymakers to issues facing hourly workers. “Labor reform is rising in the Democratic Party for the first time since the ’30s,” Loomis said, in part because “people are out in the streets demanding it.”

And the pandemic has only intensified that push. Record numbers of Americans across economic sectors quit their jobs in what was eventually dubbed the Great Resignation. Whether it’s hourly retail workers frustrated with contingent schedules or more highly paid salaried employees tired of working 60-hour weeks, there is “a broader consensus now that our work should sustain us,” Deutsch said. “Our whole life should not be at the mercy of a job that does not allow us to thrive.”

More livable schedules have had success elsewhere in the world. Companies in Japan, New Zealand, and elsewhere have experimented with shorter workweeks in recent years, often reporting happier workers who are actually better at their jobs. But one of the largest and most high-profile recent experiments took place in Iceland, where local and federal authorities working with trade unions launched two trials of a shortened workweek, one in 2015 and one in 2017. In the trials, workers shifted from a 40-hour work week to 35 or 36 hours, with no cut to their pay. It wasn’t just office workers who participated — the trials included day care workers, police officers, care workers for people with disabilities, and people in a variety of other occupations.

The results were impressive, according to a report on the trials published by Autonomy, a UK-based think tank that helped analyze them. Workers reported better work-life balance, lower stress, and greater well-being. “My older children know that we have shorter hours and they often say something like, ‘Is it Tuesday today, dad? Do you finish early today? Can I come home directly after school?’” one father said, according to the report. “And I might reply ‘Of course.’ We then go and do something — we have nice quality time.”

And perhaps counterintuitively, worker productivity generally stayed the same or actually increased during the trials. Workers and managers worked together to make changes like reorganizing shift changes and reducing meetings, Jack Kellam, an Autonomy researcher who co-wrote the report, told Vox. “These trials were not implemented top-down.”

Just having more rest may have helped people be more productive — as the Autonomy researchers note, overwork can lead to fatigue, which actually lowers productivity.

Encouraged by the results of the trial, many Icelandic workplaces have embraced shorter hours, with 86 percent of the working population either working shorter hours already or on contracts that will phase in the reduction in the coming years. The Autonomy report has also generated global interest at a time when workers and companies alike are rethinking what jobs should look like. For example, the shift to remote work over the last 15 months has shown that “quite drastic changes in working practices can happen quite quickly,” Kellam said. Now his work on the Iceland trials has gotten news coverage in countries from Australia to Germany, and several companies have approached Autonomy for advice on implementing shorter hours for their employees.

But making something like the Icelandic trials work in the United States would require major changes. For one thing, unions in Iceland, which represent 90 percent of workers, played a big role in negotiating both the trials and the long-term adoption of shorter hours that resulted. But union density is much lower in the United States, with just 10.8 percent of workers represented.

Making it easier to form unions would be a big step toward helping American workers negotiate better schedules, Loomis said. The PRO Act, which would reverse years of anti-union legislation at the state level, would be a start — but so far, it appears unlikely to pass the Senate.

As for unpredictable schedules, years of worker activism have led to fair workweek laws in cities like New York and San Francisco, which typically require employers to provide adequate notice of schedules (often two weeks ahead of time) and compensation for last-minute changes, as well as banning “clopening.” Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) have introduced such a law at the federal level, called the Schedules That Work Act — but it, too, has gained little traction with Republicans in the Senate.

Such nationwide changes can seem far-off, and in a country as work-focused as the United States, it can be hard to imagine reforms that would help (some) people work less. But some say the pandemic along with growing worker activism in recent years have created conditions similar to the 1930s, where big changes finally seem possible. The fact that labor law reform has close to universal support among Democrats in Congress — after decades of not being a priority for the party — is meaningful, Loomis said. And that happened in large part because workers demanded it.

Nardy is one of the workers agitating for change. She was part of a coalition that helped push Philadelphia to pass a fair workweek law in 2018, and now she’s studying political science at Temple University, with the goal of running for city council. “There isn’t really somebody sitting in office that really, genuinely cares about workers’ rights,” she said.

But one day, that person might be her. And although workers in the United States don’t yet have the kind of bargaining power they wield in other countries, their voices are growing louder, and their discontent more palpable, by the day. At this point, many are saying, “maybe the life I was leading that seemed inevitable, and never-changing, maybe I don’t want that,” Loomis said. It’s a kind of “spontaneous realization by millions of people that they could do better.”

And why so much talk of returning to the office is disingenuous.

TOKYO – July 13, 2021 – Microsoft Corp. (Microsoft) and NEC Corporation (TSE: 6701) on Tuesday announced an expansion of their decades-long collaboration. Through a new multi-year strategic partnership, the companies will leverage Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, NEC’s network and IT expertise, including 5G technologies, and each other’s AI and IoT solutions to help enterprise customers and the public sector across multiple markets and industries further accelerate their cloud adoption and digital transformation initiatives.

The partnership will see NEC adopt Microsoft Azure as its preferred cloud platform to deliver enhanced capabilities to drive sustained digitalization, help customers transform their business models, and build Digital Workplaces for the post-pandemic “new normal.”

To accelerate NEC’s Digital Workplace innovation and workforce transformation, the companies will work together to migrate NEC’s on-premises IT environment to Azure and deploy Azure Virtual Desktop and other Azure services among the NEC Group’s 110,000 employees worldwide. This modernization builds on NEC’s existing Microsoft 365 platform and will enable a highly sustainable environment that is more secure and robust, accelerating cloud migration for NEC and its customers throughout the commercial and public sector in Japan and around the world.

The companies will work together to help improve digital services for public sector and enterprise customers through workplace and workforce transformation. Greater speed and lower-latency data connections will provide high-performance network experiences to create more efficient workplaces and empower employees to realize more personalized work styles for public sector as well as private sector customers.

Leveraging the assets of both companies, including Microsoft’s Intelligent Edge solutions and NEC’s private 5G networking technologies, the companies will work together to help customers across industries transform. In retail, for example, the two companies will work together to analyze customer transaction data in real time using AI to better understand buying patterns, improve operational efficiency and identify new market opportunities.

The combination of Azure and both companies’ AI and IoT technologies and expertise will enhance NEC’s customer experience through advanced solutions and enable more secure maintenance and operation of stores. In addition, NEC and Microsoft plan to explore network innovation initiatives built on Microsoft Azure for enterprise domains and specific industries.

Through the partnership, the companies will work together to double the number of digital-focused engineers within the NEC Group who are specialized in Microsoft technologies. This investment in technical capabilities and the expertise of NEC’s employees will help ensure customers’ digital transformation success, benefiting the market and society.

“As we’ve seen over the past year, digital adoption curves are accelerating across every industry and business function,” said Satya Nadella, chairman and CEO, Microsoft. “Our strategic partnership with NEC brings together the power of Azure and Microsoft 365 with NEC’s services and infrastructure expertise to help public and private sector customers build resilience and transform during this era of rapid change.”

“NEC is pleased to enter into this strategic collaboration with Microsoft Corp.,” said Takayuki Morita, president and CEO of NEC Corporation. “With Microsoft’s trusted cloud and services, the experience that NEC has cultivated in its own systems, and both companies’ AI and IoT technologies, we will enable companies globally to use digital services that are safer and more secure than ever before as they progress with digital initiatives.”

“The need for sustainable transformation to ensure business resiliency and growth has never been more important in the world and especially Japan,” said Hitoshi Yoshida, president & CEO, Microsoft Japan. “Our partnership will help accelerate the industry’s cloud-based digital transformation and utilization of data migration and help Japan’s continued success globally, leading to greater economic and societal prosperity.”

This announcement is based on a history of strong collaboration between Microsoft and NEC spanning more than 40 years.

The post Microsoft and NEC Expand Strategic Partnership to Boost Business Resiliency and Growth appeared first on Cloud Communications Alliance.

By Dave Michels
UCaaS provider parlays video elements from Highfive acquisition plus voice smarts to push ahead on meetings, adds informal collaboration tool, and more.

With Microsoft 365 Multi-Geo, organizations have greater control over the location of specific data centers their data is stored in. Admins can provision and store data at rest in the geo locations of their choice to help meet data residency requirements, especially helpful for multi-national organizations. Microsoft 365 Multi-Geo includes support for Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and OneDrive…and now Teams!

In a Multi-Geo environment, an organization’s Microsoft 365 tenant consists of a central location and one or more satellite locations. The tenant’s central location is based on where the Microsoft 365 subscription was originally provisioned and satellite locations are the additional geo locations specified by admins. To store an end user’s data in a specific geo location separate from the tenant’s central location, an admin will set the end user’s Preferred Data Location (PDL) Azure Active Directory attribute.

Figure 1: Microsoft 365 Multi-Geo

 

Microsoft Teams Multi-Geo Support now Generally Available!

Teams Multi-Geo enables customers to store Teams core customer data at rest for end users and teams in the geo locations of their choice, controlled through the same PDL leveraged by existing Microsoft 365 Multi-Geo services. This will allow admins to control where Teams customer data will sit down to the team and end user level.

Teams data ownership principles

Teams Multi-Geo handles data ownership different for end users and teams based on who the designated “owner” of the data is.

• End user chat data: in a 1:1 or 1:N chat, the creator of the chat is the data “owner” and the PDL of that end user will determine where the chat data sits
• Meeting chat data: the organizer of the meeting is the data “owner” and the PDL of the organizer will determine where the meeting chat data sits
• Team and channel data: the team is the data “owner” and is backed by a Microsoft 365 group, meaning the Microsoft 365 group’s PDL will determine where the data sits

An important piece in data ownership is that if an end user or Microsoft 365 group’s PDL is changed, the associated data “owned” will be migrated to the newly set PDL. If an end user has Multi-Geo disabled or their license removed, their chat data will eventually migrate back to the tenant default. If the tenant has Multi-Geo disabled, all Teams core customer data will eventually migrate back to the tenant default geo location.

Frequently Asked Questions:

How will this impact my organization if we are already using Microsoft 365 Multi-Geo?

For customers who have setup and enabled Microsoft 365 Multi-Geo capabilities by setting a PDL for an end user or Microsoft 365 Group, Microsoft 365 Multi-Geo will begin migrating Teams core customer data and respecting PDLs as we work through the queue. This queue will process continuously over the next few quarters and is fully automated. No action is required by IT administrators. Any new PDL changes will be processed after the tenant has completed the initial sync, and new PDL changes beyond that will be queued and processed in the order they are received. Microsoft 365 Multi-Geo is not enabled by default - if you have not setup and enabled any Multi-Geo capabilities there will be no impact for your organization.

How do we prepare to take advantage of Microsoft 365 Multi-Geo?

The first step of Microsoft 365 Multi-Geo is to ensure that each user who will have a PDL set separate from the central tenant location has a proper Multi-Geo license assigned. If an end user has a PDL set but is not assigned a proper license, their data will not move and remain in the tenant default geo location. If a user has their Microsoft 365 Multi-Geo license removed, their data will migrate back to the tenant default geo location.

What are the licensing requirements for Microsoft 365 Multi-Geo?

Microsoft 365 Multi-Geo licensing is available as an add-on to the below Microsoft 365 subscription plans for Enterprise Agreement customers. For more information, please contact your Microsoft account team.

• Microsoft 365 F1, F3, E3, or E5
• Office 365 F3, E1, E3, or E5
• Exchange Online Plan 1 or Plan 2
• OneDrive for Business Plan 1 or Plan 2
• SharePoint Online Plan 1 or Plan 2

Does Microsoft 365 Multi-Geo impact our security and compliance capabilities?

All existing information protection and compliance capabilities will continue working as is with Microsoft 365 Multi-Geo.

Can Microsoft 365 Multi-Geo help improve network performance?

No, Microsoft 365 Multi-Geo is designed to support data residency requirements and is not designed for performance optimization. For more information about performance optimization for Microsoft 365, please reference Network planning and performance tuning for Microsoft 365.

Where can I go to learn more?

For detailed information on Microsoft 365 Multi-Geo and Teams Multi-Geo, please see:

• Multi-Geo Capabilities in Microsoft Teams
• Plan for Microsoft 365 Multi-Geo
• Configure Microsoft 365 Multi-Geo
• Administering a Microsoft 365 Multi-Geo Environment

“Mitel’s very bold changes — and they’ve been very inclusive of partner opinion — makes it feel like a true partnership,” one Mitel partner told CRN on the channel program changes.

Kaseya also says ‘with the large number of users coming back online in a short window, we have seen some performance issues. We made some configuration changes to address and need to restart the servers for these to take effect and improve performance.’

The robot apocalypse is already here, it just looks different than you thought.

The robot revolution is always allegedly just around the corner. In the utopian vision, technology emancipates human labor from repetitive, mundane tasks, freeing us to be more productive and take on more fulfilling work. In the dystopian vision, robots come for everyone’s jobs, put millions and millions of people out of work, and throw the economy into chaos.

Such a warning was at the crux of Andrew Yang’s ill-fated presidential campaign, helping propel his case for universal basic income that he argued would become necessary when automation left so many workers out. It’s the argument many corporate executives make whenever there’s a suggestion they might have to raise wages: $15 an hour will just mean machines taking your order at McDonald’s instead of people, they say. It’s an effective scare tactic for some workers.

But we often spend so much time talking about the potential for robots to take our jobs that we fail to look at how they are already changing them — sometimes for the better, but sometimes not. New technologies can give corporations tools for monitoring, managing, and motivating their workforces, sometimes in ways that are harmful. The technology itself might not be innately nefarious, but it makes it easier for companies to maintain tight control on workers and squeeze and exploit them to maximize profits.

“The basic incentives of the system have always been there: employers wanting to maximize the value they get out of their workers while minimizing the cost of labor, the incentive to want to control and monitor and surveil their workers,” said Brian Chen, staff attorney at the National Employment Law Project (NELP). “And if technology allows them to do that more cheaply or more efficiently, well then of course they’re going to use technology to do that.”

Tracking software for remote workers, which saw a bump in sales at the start of the pandemic, can follow every second of a person’s workday in front of the computer. Delivery companies can use motion sensors to track their drivers’ every move, measure extra seconds, and ding drivers for falling short.

Automation hasn’t replaced all the workers in warehouses, but it has made work more intense, even dangerous, and changed how tightly workers are managed. Gig workers can find themselves at the whims of an app’s black-box algorithm that lets workers flood the app to compete with each other at a frantic pace for pay so low that how lucrative any given trip or job is can depend on the tip, leaving workers reliant on the generosity of an anonymous stranger. Worse, gig work means they’re doing their jobs without many typical labor protections.

In these circumstances, the robots aren’t taking jobs, they’re making jobs worse. Companies are automating away autonomy and putting profit-maximizing strategies on digital overdrive, turning work into a space with fewer carrots and more sticks.

A robot boss can do a whole lot more watching

In recent years, Amazon has become the corporate poster child for automation in the name of efficiency — often at the expense of workers. There have been countless reports of unsustainable conditions and expectations at Amazon’s fulfillment centers. Its drivers reportedly have to consent to being watched by artificial intelligence, and warehouse workers who don’t move fast enough can be fired.

Demands are so high that there have been reports of people urinating in bottles to avoid taking a break. The robots aren’t just watching, they’re also picking up some of the work. Sometimes, it’s for the better, but in other cases, they may actually be making work more dangerous as more automation leads to more pressure on workers. One report found that worker injuries were more prevalent in Amazon warehouses with robots than warehouses without them.

Amazon is hardly the only company that uses automation to keep tabs on workers and push them to do more. In 2020, Josh Dzieza at the Verge outlined the various ways artificial intelligence, software, and machines are managing workers at places such as call centers, warehouses, and software development shops. He described one remote engineer in Bangladesh who was monitored by a program that took three pictures of him every 10 minutes to make sure he was at his computer, and a call center worker who learned to say “sorry” a lot to customers in order to meet an artificial intelligence-based empathy monitor. A web of technologies has enabled the management of every minute of the working day.

“It would have been prohibitively expensive to employ enough managers to time each worker’s every move to a fraction of a second or ride along in every truck, but now it takes maybe one,” Dzieza wrote. “This is why the companies that most aggressively pursue these tactics all take on a similar form: a large pool of poorly paid, easily replaced, often part-time or contract workers at the bottom; a small group of highly paid workers who design the software that manages them at the top.”

A 2018 Gartner survey found that half of large companies were already using some type of nontraditional techniques to keep an eye on their workers, including analyzing their communications, gathering biometric data, and examining how workers are using their workspace. They anticipated that by 2020, 80 percent of large companies would be using such methods. Amid the pandemic, the trend picked up pace as businesses sought more ways to keep tabs on the new waves of workers working from home.

This has all sorts of implications for workers, who lose privacy and autonomy when they’re constantly being watched and directed by technology. Daron Acemoglu, an economist at MIT, warned that they’re also losing money. “Some of these new digital technologies are not simply replacing workers or creating new tasks or changing other aspects of productivity, but they’re actually monitoring people much more effectively, and that means rents are being shared very differently because of digital technologies,” he said.

He offered up a hypothetical example of a delivery driver who is asked to deliver a certain number of packages in a day. Decades ago, the company might pay the driver more to incentivize them to work a little faster or harder or put in some extra time. But now, they’re constantly being monitored so that the company knows exactly what they’re doing and is looking for ways to save time. Instead of getting a bonus for hitting certain metrics, they’re dinged for spending a few seconds too long here or there.

The problem isn’t technology itself, it’s the managers and corporate structures behind it that look at workers as a cost to be cut instead of as a resource.

“A lot of this boom of Silicon Valley entrepreneurship where venture capital made it very easy for companies to create firms didn’t exactly prioritize the well-being of workers as one of their main considerations,” said Amy Bix, a historian at Iowa State University who focuses on technology. “A lot of what goes on in the structure of these corporations and the development of technology is invisible to most ordinary people, and it’s easy to take advantage of that.”

The future of Uber isn’t driverless cars, it’s drivers

Uber’s destiny was supposed to be driverless.

In 2016, former CEO Travis Kalanick told Bloomberg making an autonomous vehicle was “basically existential” for the company. After a deadly accident with an autonomous Uber vehicle in 2018, current chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi reiterated that the company remained “absolutely committed” to the self-driving cause. But in December 2020 and after investing $1 billion, Uber sold off its self-driving unit. A little over four months later, its main competitor, Lyft, followed suit. Uber says it’s still not giving up on autonomous technology, but the writing on the wall is clear that driverless cars aren’t core to Uber’s business model, at least in the near future.

“Five or 10 years from now, drivers are still going to be a big piece of the mix on a percentage basis [of Uber’s business], and on an absolute basis, they may be an even bigger piece than they are today even with autonomous in the mix because the business should get bigger as both segments get bigger,” said Chris Frank, director of corporate ratings at S&P Global. “In addition, drivers will need to handle more complex conditions like poorly marked roads or inclement weather.”

In other words, they’re going to need workers to make money — workers they would very much like not to classify as such.

Gig economy companies such as Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash are fighting tooth and nail to make sure the people they enlist to make deliveries or drive people around are not considered their employees. In California last year, such companies dumped $200 million into lobbying to pass Proposition 22, which lets app-based transportation and delivery companies classify their workers as independent contractors and therefore avoid paying for benefits such as sick leave, employer-provided health care, and unemployment. After it passed, a spokesman for the campaign for the ballot measure said it “represents the future of work in an increasingly technologically-driven economy.”

It’s a future of work that might not be pleasant for gig workers. In California, some workers say they’re not getting the benefits companies promised after Prop 22’s passage, such as health care stipends. Companies said that workers would make at least 120 percent of California’s minimum wage, but that’s contemplating the time they spend driving only. Before the ballot initiative was passed, research from the UC Berkeley Labor Center estimated that it would guarantee a minimum wage of just $5.64 per hour.

Companies say they’ve been clear with drivers about how to qualify for the health care stipend, which is available to drivers with more than 15 engaged hours a week (in other words, if you don’t have a job and are waiting around, it doesn’t count). In a statement to Vox, Geoff Vetter, a spokesperson for the Protect App-Based Drivers + Services Coalition, the lobbying group that championed Prop 22, said that 80 percent of drivers work fewer than 20 hours per week and most work less than 10 hours per week, and that many have health insurance through other jobs.

Gig companies have sometimes been cagey about how much their workers make, and they’re often changing their formulas. In 2017, Uber agreed to pay the Federal Trade Commission $20 million over charges that it misled prospective drivers about how much they could make with the app. The FTC found that Uber claimed some of its drivers made $90,000 in New York and $74,000 in San Francisco, when in reality their median incomes were actually $61,000 and $53,000, respectively. DoorDash caused controversy over a decision to pocket tips and use them to pay delivery workers, which it has since reversed.

Even though Uber is charging customers more for rides in the wake of the pandemic, that’s not directly being passed onto their drivers. According to the Washington Post, Uber changed the way it paid drivers in California soon after Prop 22 passed so that they were no longer paid a proportion of the cost of the ride but instead by time and distance, with different bonuses and incentives based on market and surge pricing. (This is how Uber does it in most states, but it had changed things up during the push to get Prop 22 passed.) Uber’s CEO pushed back on the Post story in a series of tweets, arguing that decoupling driver pay from customer fares had not hurt California drivers and that some are now getting a higher cut from their rides.

In light of a driver shortage, Uber recently announced what it’s billing as a $250 million “driver stimulus” that promises higher earnings to try to get drivers back onto the road. The company acknowledges this initiative is likely temporary once the supply-demand imbalance works itself out. Still, it’s hard not to notice how quickly Uber and Lyft have been able to corner most of the ride-hailing app market and exert control over their drivers and customers.

“When a new thing like this comes on, there’s huge new consumer benefits, and then over time they are the market, they have less competition except one another, probably they’re a cartel at this point. And then they start doing stuff that’s much nastier,” said David Autor, an economist at MIT.

One of the gig economy’s main selling points to workers is that it offers flexibility and the ability to work when they want. It’s certainly true that an Uber or Lyft driver has much more autonomy on the job than, say, an Amazon warehouse worker. “People drive with Lyft because they prefer the freedom and flexibility to work when, where, and for however long they want,” a Lyft spokesperson said in a statement to Vox. “They can choose to accept a ride or not, enjoy unlimited upward earning potential, and can decide to take time off from driving whenever they want, for however long they want, without needing to ask a ‘boss’ — all things they can’t do at most traditional jobs.” The spokesperson also noted that most of its drivers work outside of Lyft.

But flexibility doesn’t mean gig companies have no control over their drivers and delivery people. They use all sorts of tricks and incentives to try to push workers in certain directions and manage them, essentially, by algorithm. Uber drivers report being bothered by the constant surveillance, the lack of transparency from the company, and the dehumanization of working with the app. The algorithm doesn’t want to know how your day is, it just wants you to work as efficiently as possible to maximize its profits.

Carlos Ramos, a former Lyft driver in San Diego, described the feeling of being manipulated by the app. He noticed the company must have needed morning drivers because of the incentives structures, but he also often wondered if he was being “punished” if he didn’t do something right.

“Sometimes, if you cancel a bunch of rides in a row or if you don’t take certain rides to certain things, you won’t get any rides. They’ve shadow turned you off,” he said. The secret deprioritization of a worker is something many Lyft and Uber drivers speculate happens. “You also have no way of knowing what’s going on behind there. They have this proprietary knowledge, they have this black box of trade secrets, and those are your secrets you’re telling them,” said Ramos, now an organizer with Gig Workers Rising.

Companies deny that they secretly shut off drivers. “It is in Lyft’s best interests for drivers to have as positive an experience as possible, so we communicate often and work directly with drivers to help them improve their earnings,” a Lyft spokesperson said. “We never ‘shadow ban’ drivers, and actively coach them when they are in danger of being deactivated.”

The future of innovation isn’t inevitable

We often talk about technology and innovation with a language of inevitability. It’s as though whenever wages go up, companies will of course replace workers with robots. Now that the country is turned on to online delivery, it can be made to seem like the grocery industry is on an unavoidable path to gig work. After all, that’s what happened with Albertsons. But that’s not really the case — there’s plenty of human agency in the technological innovation story.

“Technology of course doesn’t have to exploit workers, it doesn’t have to mean robots are coming for all of our jobs,” Chen said. “These are not inevitable outcomes, they are human decisions, and they are almost always made by people who are driven by a profit motive that tends to exploit the poor and working class historically.”

Chase Copridge, a longtime California worker who’s done the gamut of gig jobs — Instacart, DoorDash, Amazon Flex, Uber, and Lyft — is one of the people stuck in that position, the victim of corporate tendencies on technological overdrive. He described seeing delivery offers that pay as little as $2. He turns those jobs down, knowing that it’s not economically worth it for him. But there might be someone else out there who picks it up. “We’re people who desperately need to make ends meet, who are willing to take the bare minimum that these companies are giving out to us,” he said. “People need to understand that these companies thrive off of exploitation.”

Not all decisions around automation are ones that increase productivity or improve really anything except corporate profits. Self-checkout stations may reduce the need for cashiers, but are they really making the shopping experience faster or better? Next time you go to the grocery store and inevitably screw up scanning one of your own items and waiting several minutes for a worker to appear, you tell me.

Despite technological advancements, productivity growth has been on the decline in recent years. “This is the paradox of the last several decades, and especially since 2000, that we had enormous technological changes as we perceive it but measured productivity growth is quite weak,” Autor said. “One reason may be that we’re automating a lot of trivial stuff rather than important stuff. If you compare antibiotics and indoor plumbing and electrification and air travel and telecommunications to DoorDash and smartphones or self-checkout, it may just not be as consequential.”

Acemoglu said that when firms focus so much on automation and monitoring technologies, they might not explore other areas that could be more productive, such as creating new tasks or building out new industries. “Those are the things that I worry have fallen by the wayside in the last several years,” he said. “If your employer is really set on monitoring you really tightly, that biases things against new tasks because those are things that are not easier to monitor.”

It matters what you automate, and not all automation is equally beneficial, not only to workers but also to customers, companies, and the broader economy.

Grappling with how to handle technological advancements and the ways they change people’s lives, including at work, is no easy task. While the robot revolution isn’t taking everyone’s jobs, automation is taking some of them, especially in areas such as manufacturing. And it’s just making work different: A machine may not eliminate a position entirely, but it may turn a more middle-skill job into a low-skill job, bringing lower pay with it. Package delivery jobs used to come with a union, benefits, and stable pay; with the rise of the gig economy, that’s declining. If and when self-driving trucks arrive, there will still be some low-quality jobs needed to complete tasks the robots can’t.

“The issue that we’ve faced in the US economy is that we’ve lost a lot of middle-skill jobs so people are being pushed down into lower categories,” Autor said. “Automation historically has tended to take the most dirty and dangerous and demeaning jobs and hand them over to machines, and that’s been great. What’s happened in the last bunch of decades is that automation has affected the middle-skill jobs and left the hard, interesting, creative jobs and the hands-on jobs that require a lot of dexterity and flexibility but don’t require a lot of formal skills.”

But again, none of this is inevitable. Companies are able to leverage technology to get the most out of workers because workers often don’t have power to push back, enforce limits, or ask for more. Unionization has seen steep declines in recent decades. America’s labor laws and regulations are designed around full-time work, meaning gig companies don’t have to offer health insurance or help fund unemployment. But the laws could — and many would argue should — be modernized.

“The key thing is it’s not just technology, it’s a question of labor power, both collectively and individually,” Bix said. “There are a lot of possible outcomes, and in the end, technology is a human creation. It’s a product of social priorities and what gets developed and adopted.”

Maybe the robot apocalypse isn’t here yet. Or it is, and many of us aren’t quite recognizing it, in part because we got some of the story wrong. The problem isn’t really the robot, it’s what your boss wants the robot to do.

HOLMDEL, NJ – July 1, 2021 – Vonage (Nasdaq: VG), a global leader in cloud communications helping businesses accelerate their digital transformation, has been named by Salesforce.org as winner of its 2021 Cross-Industry Independent Software Vendor (ISV) Partner of the Year EMEA Award. This is the second consecutive year that Vonage has won this award. 

The award recognizes firms who have demonstrated excellence in serving Salesforce not-for-profit customers, innovating and giving back.

The Vonage Contact Center (VCC) solution integrates all communications channels without expensive, disruptive hardware changes and plugs straight into an organization’s Salesforce platform. This enables Vonage customers using Salesforce, such as not-for-profit businesses Homeless Link and National Citizen Service (NCS), to perform better, connect easier and enhance experiences to help them serve their customers better.

“We are delighted to have won this prestigious award from Salesforce.org for the second year in a row,” said Kristan Fiandach, Vice President, Alliances at Vonage. “This is testament to our integration with Salesforce and commitment to enabling communications that are more flexible, intelligent and personal, helping non-profit organizations create richer relationships with their stakeholders.”

Salesforce, Salesforce.org and others are trademarks of Salesforce.com, Inc.

To find out more about Vonage, visit www.vonage.com.

About Vonage
Vonage (Nasdaq: VG), a global cloud communications leader, helps businesses accelerate their digital transformation. Vonage’s Communications Platform is fully programmable and allows for the integration of Video, Voice, Chat, Messaging and Verification into existing products, workflows and systems. Vonage’s fully programmable unified communications and contact center applications are built from the Vonage platform and enable companies to transform how they communicate and operate from the office or anywhere, providing enormous flexibility and ensuring business continuity.

The post Vonage Wins Partner of the Year Award from Salesforce for Second Consecutive Year appeared first on Cloud Communications Alliance.

HENDERSON, NV – July 1, 2021 – 2600Hz, a leading provider of unified business communications and the world-renowned KAZOO platform, is excited to announce that Demetrio Rico has joined the company as Global Vice President of Sales. In this role, Rico will lead 2600Hz’s global sales team and accelerate global growth for the company.

Rico has led several successful global sales teams and has contributed to the rapid growth of telcos for more than 20 years. Most recently, Rico served as Global Director, Service Provider Development for Five9 where he helped Service Providers launch Cloud Contact Center. Prior to Five9, Rico was the Director of Customer Experience for Cisco and Global Vice President of Professional Services for Broadsoft where he ran a 200-person team.

“2600Hz is excited to welcome Demetrio Rico as Global Vice President of Sales,” said Patrick Sullivan, COO and Co-Founder of 2600Hz. “Demetrio’s extensive knowledge of the telecom industry and service provider market, as well as his proven track record of rapid revenue growth, are outstanding. He is a huge asset to our growing team, and it is an honor to have Demetrio leading our global sales strategy.”

“I am truly honored to be joining 2600Hz and look forward to building upon the company’s successes,” said Rico. “2600Hz has been growing rapidly, and I am excited to focus on expanding the company’s presence globally. With a revolutionary solution like KAZOO, 2600Hz is uniquely positioned to help service providers around the world thrive.”

About 2600Hz: 2600Hz’s cloud communications platform called KAZOO modernizes how businesses provide communications services to their customers. With thoughtfully engineered tools built by leaders in the telecom industry, KAZOO offers feature-rich UCaaS, CPaaS, and CCaaS solutions. For developers building their own telephony apps, 2600Hz offers 300+ APIs and provides access to the building blocks of the platform. For more information, visit http://www.2600Hz.com. 2600Hz is a privately owned company with a distributed team worldwide.

The post 2600Hz Expands Global Sales Team with Hire of Demetrio Rico as Global Vice President of Sales appeared first on Cloud Communications Alliance.

In recent weeks, you’ve either had power problems or you’ve heard about them. 

In Portland, Oregon, this week, the recorded official temperature reached 115 degrees Fahrenheit, power cables for the city’s streetcars melted, sagging overhead wires forced the light rail to shut down, and more than 6,000 people lost electricity.

But it’s far from the first time extreme weather has caused serious problems with the power grid in recent months. During the winter storm that hit Texas in February, nearly 5 million people lost power. In June, California suggested that residents charge their electric vehicles during off-peak hours to save energy. And for the first time ever, after power outages hit several neighborhoods during this week’s heat wave, New York City officials sent residents an emergency mobile alert urging them to conserve energy.

It’s abundantly clear that the power grid in the United States is not ready for the effects of climate change, including the extreme weather events that come with it. After all, climate change isn’t just increasing the demand for energy to keep people cool or warm amid heat waves and winter storms. It’s also damaging the grid itself. The country is now in a race against time to shift its energy supply toward renewable sources, like wind and solar, while also needing more and more electricity to do everything from powering more air conditioning to boosting the number of EVs on the road.

“I would probably give our power grid maybe a C minus,” Kyri Baker, an engineering professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, told Recode. “It’s like this perfect storm of extreme temperatures, more electricity consumption, and aging infrastructure.”

Having a reliable power grid can be a matter of life and death. In the most severe power outages during the winter storm in Texas this past February, 700 people are estimated to have died, according to BuzzFeed. Hundreds of people died during this past week’s heat wave in the Pacific Northwest and Canada. Meanwhile, the effects of heat waves have been disproportionately worse for historically marginalized brown, Black, and Indigenous communities. People who are elderly, very young, who have certain medication conditions, or who work outdoors are also more likely to feel the impacts of extreme heat.

Climate change means that extreme weather events are becoming more intense and common, which is worrisome not just because the power grid is aging. The grid is woefully unprepared for an imminent and disturbing future.

How the US power grid works

Last year, about 40 percent of the country’s electricity generation came from natural gas. While the grid still relies on a good amount of coal-based power, a growing share of power is coming from renewable sources, like solar and wind power, which will hopefully make the grid more sustainable. But while some of these sources are a lot worse for the environment than others, they all contribute electricity to the grid, a giant engineering system full of high- and low-voltage wires, sensors, poles, and transformers that work together to transport electricity to your home.

Electricity travels across the grid, moving from high-voltage lines that carry the electricity across long distances to low-voltage lines, a process known as “stepping down.” The low-voltage lines distribute that electricity to buildings and then individual appliances and electronics. But there are hurdles. Right now, the country is still facing problems with the congestion of transmission lines that have maxed out on the amount of electricity they can carry. In Vermont, solar and wind energy have stalled because the grid is already too constrained.

“So it’s not like you can just set up a wire from point A to point B and everything will be fine,” Sam Gomberg, a senior energy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, explained. “You need to set up little steps along the way to guide that electricity in the direction that you want it to go so that it ultimately ends up at your home.”

The US power grid is actually made up of several regional grids, or interconnections, that are tied together and operate on a synchronized frequency of 60 hertz. While these systems are very large, oversight of the grid is somewhat patchwork. Generating power for the grid are more than 10,000 power plants in the country. But the grid itself, including transmission and distribution systems, is operated by a mix of state-owned and private entities, including some public-private collaborations. Then, local utility companies like Con Edison in New York City and PG&E in San Francisco ultimately deliver electricity to peoples’ homes.

“The unique thing about the power system versus any other type of infrastructure is that it’s almost instantaneous,” Baker, of UC Boulder, told Recode. “So if I turn on a light in my house, there is an instantaneous mismatch in supply and demand. And the power plants actually respond almost in real time to that increase in demand.”

At the same time, that means not being hooked up with a broader system can cause problems. Texas, for instance, has opted to operate its own electric grid, which is largely independent from other regional power systems. While this has given the state more autonomy, some have argued that Texas could have avoided such devastating outages this past winter if the state’s grid had been able to draw from other power sources. Notably, nearby Oklahoma was able to turn to other states to keep its power on during the same storm.

Why the heat makes things worse

Summer heat can interfere with the US power supply in many ways.

Hot weather can drive up energy demands, often to power air conditioners, which can overload the electric grid and cause brownouts — partial outages that reduce the overall power available. At the same time, high temperatures can make power plants less effective, limit the amount of energy power lines can carry, and make failures more likely in transformers, which help control the voltage throughout the power grid.

That’s why, during the summer months, you might receive an alert telling you to cut back on electricity usage, like delaying vacuuming until the evening. If the problem gets bad enough, utilities might even use rolling blackouts — when a utility company temporarily shuts down electrical power for different areas in order to avoid overloading the entire system — in order to protect the grid. Of course, while officials might deem these steps necessary, rolling blackouts can be inconvenient and even risky for residents who need power to stay cool during heat waves. This past week, New York’s power company Con Edison distributed dry ice to some residents of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, who were left without air conditioning during a power outage.

The heat can cause problems for the electric grid beyond overcapacity. If the weather gets hot enough, power lines start to sag — a result of the metal inside them expanding — and risk striking a tree and starting a fire. At the same time, power plants are highly dependent on water, which they need to cool down their systems. This means that as hot and dry weather drives up demand for air conditioning, the increased need for energy is also driving up the power grid’s demand for water, which is often in short supply during periods of drought. Cooling systems need electricity, too, adding even more demand for energy.

Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images

“We’re trying to project the weather two years from now or five years from now, and climate change is making it more difficult,” Anjan Bose, an electrical engineering professor at Washington State University, told Recode. “If you can’t project the weather, you can’t project the load demand.”

Eventually, individual energy users become aware of these problems. This summer, California’s state power grid operator warned that people should prepare for temporary power outages. Last week, Portland had to shut down streetcar service. And in areas where there’s a high wildfire risk, utility companies might order rolling blackouts to lessen the risk of an overloaded grid causing additional fires.

What Biden wants to do to fix this

Fixing the power grid can’t be done in one fell swoop. Instead, the grid will need to be updated by transitioning to cleaner energy sources like wind and solar, adapting grid and energy storage infrastructure to adjust to these new types of power, and changing our approach to energy consumption in general.

The system also needs to predict and respond to changes in energy demand. One part of the solution is smart grid technologies, which use internet-connected sensors on various parts of the grid to collect a lot more detailed data about how well those parts are working. That real-time data can also help utility companies quickly resolve potential problems before they become widespread. The Biden administration supports deploying this tech, which could be key to making power grids more resilient.

In April, the White House also freed up $8 billion in order to boost the grid’s capacity to support renewable energy, and committed to making it easier for new, renewables-focused transmission lines to be approved. Joe Biden is now pushing to modernize the grid as part of his massive infrastructure plan. Through that plan, the president is hoping that the government will be able to spend at least $73 billion on improvements, including building thousands of miles of new transmission lines to expand renewable energy. This will be key to making renewables more feasible. As Vox’s Umair Irfan and Rebecca Leber explain:

Transmission lines can link areas that need energy with places where wind and solar power are cheap, which can be separated by thousands of miles. This would help boost the business case for wind and solar power. The proposal calls for a new grid authority to facilitate clean energy transmission, and an infrastructure financing authority to help come up with the money to pay for it.

But changes have to go beyond the federal government. Equipment needs to be updated on the regional and local level, too. Whether Biden will succeed in addressing the complex challenges of updating the grid remains to be seen. Without government action, private companies may be left with the job of fixing the grid, and there’s no guarantee they’ll put the long-term protection of the US power supply ahead of their profits.

Many birds, mammals, and fish seem to get smaller as the temperature rises.

This story is part of Down to Earth, a Vox reporting initiative on the science, politics, and economics of the biodiversity crisis.

One fall morning in 1978, David Willard, an ornithologist at the Field Museum in Chicago, walked to the nearby McCormick Place convention center — a hulking structure along Lake Michigan — to look for dead birds. He’d received a tip that birds were crashing into the building’s many windows on their journey south.

He found a few birds lifeless on the concrete that morning. And as any good scientist might do, he brought them back to the museum to measure them and store the winged creatures in the museum’s collection. His curiosity piqued, he returned to McCormick Place the next morning. He found still more birds and brought them, too, back to the museum.

Four decades later, Willard has helped collect more than 100,000 birds from window collisions in Chicago, with support from other scientists and volunteers. They now make up a stunning 20 percent of the museum’s ornithology collection.

While these birds represent a tragic loss of life, they’ve also helped reveal fascinating insights into how wildlife is changing. One especially striking finding from the collection is that these birds have been shrinking — and rising global temperatures are likely to blame, according to a 2019 analysis of Willard’s measurements.

It’s not just birds. A growing body of research suggests that global warming is messing with the body sizes of all kinds of creatures, from cold-blooded frogs to warm-bodied mammals, and often making animals smaller.

Wild animals are already facing a wide range of threats. If they shrink — and especially if they shrink at different rates, as researchers predict — that could push some species even closer to extinction. And it could throw a wrench into ecosystems that humans rely on.

Courtesy of Kayleigh Kueffner/Field Museum

The link between body size and temperature

We already know climate change will impact wildlife in a number of ways, from shifting the distribution of some species to altering the color of others. But it might be surprising to learn about changes in something as fundamental as body size.

In ecology, a principle called Bergmann’s rule suggests that individuals of a population of warm-blooded animals like birds or mammals will be larger in cooler climates and smaller in warmer ones. Intuitively, this makes sense: Larger individuals have an easier time conserving heat when it's cold, and smaller animals have an easier time cooling off when it’s hot. This has to do with the ratio of an animal’s body size to its surface area. (It’s the same reason why a large ice cube melts relatively slower than a small one.)

The idea that warming is linked to smaller body sizes also bears out in fossil evidence. During the largest warming event in the early Eocene, about 56 million years ago — when temperatures increased between 5 to 8 degrees Celsius within 10,000 years — many animals got smaller, including mammals (which scientists learned by measuring fossilized teeth). Another past warming event called the Eocene Thermal Maximum 2, which saw temperatures increase by 3°C, was also associated with shrinking animals.

Scientists look to these warming periods to understand what the future might look like. If current warming continues, we can expect the planet to be 1.5°C warmer by 2040, compared to pre-industrial levels. And it will go up from there. “Reductions in body size in fossils,” two ecologists wrote in a 2011 perspective for Nature Climate Change, “are particularly informative of what we can expect in the coming century.”

Then again, nature is complicated and tends to surprise even the brightest minds.

Many animals are getting smaller, but it’s not a universal trend

In 2019, when scientists examined more than 70,000 bird specimens in the Field Museum collection, they found that individuals from 52 bird species shrank by an average of 2.6 percent between 1978 and 2016. A part of the birds’ legs, known as the tarsus, also got smaller, on average.

“We had no idea until two years ago that 52 of the most common, well-known species of North American bird have all gotten smaller over the last 40 years,” said Brian Weeks, the lead author of the study and an assistant professor of ecology and evolution at the University of Michigan. “It has big implications for what’s going to happen in the future.”

Other studies on birds, deer, rodents, insects, and fish show similar patterns. Research in 2017, for example, found that the body size of a small, silver fish called menhaden, which is widely used for animal feed and bait, has shrunk on average by 15 percent over the last 65 years — most likely due to warming. “As the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans continue to warm, the future of menhaden, it seems, will be even smaller,” said R. Eugene Turner, the author of the study and a professor at Louisiana State University.

What’s interesting is that fish and other so-called ectotherms don’t generate their own heat, so having a smaller body doesn’t help them stay cool. Instead, they might shrink in response to warming for other reasons, said Jennifer Sheridan, assistant curator for amphibians and reptiles at Carnegie Museum of Natural History and the lead author of the 2011 perspective. Warm temperatures, for example, speed up the development phases of frogs, from egg to tadpole and so on, but their rate of growth doesn’t keep up, she said. As a result, they’re smaller by the time they arrive at adulthood.

Courtesy of University of British Columbia

But while there are plenty of examples that fit this trend, there are also many exceptions — and a whole lot we still don’t know.

If Bergmann’s rule were truly universal, you’d expect individuals of a species’ population to be smaller in warmer parts of their range — smaller polar bears further south, say. But a 2017 analysis of more than 950 species of birds and mammals found that “most species had similar sizes regardless of the temperature of their environment.”

There’s even evidence that certain animals are getting larger, Sheridan said. It’s not totally clear how that happens, but one explanation is that warming holds back winter and extends the growing season, allowing animals that eat plants to bulk up. (Sheridan also said that museums with specimen collections are more commonly found in temperate, wealthier regions, which can create gaps in the data.)

The point is that natural systems are really complicated. Even if theory and lab research suggests that animals consistently shrink under warming, the exact result of climate change is messier in reality, she said. “It’s almost always the case that some are getting smaller and some are not,” Sheridan said. “With climate change, there are so many other factors changing at the same time.”

There are also unanswered questions about how, exactly, animals are shrinking. The big one is whether body-size changes result from natural selection — meaning, they’re passed down from one generation to the next — or occur within the lifetime of a single animal, which researchers call “plastic” changes.

What happens when animals miniaturize

These details aside, researchers are confident that global warming will mess with the size of animals and make many of them smaller. But is that a problem?

You could argue that Earth has been here before. It’s gone through major periods of warming, and many animals were able to adapt to drastic changes — birds, after all, evolved from dinosaurs millions of years ago, and there are some 10,000 to 18,000 species of them today. But then again, today is nothing like the Eocene. We’re warming the planet at an unprecedented rate — about 10 times faster than the average warming following historic ice ages — which means most animals have little time to adapt. “The idea that they’re going to happily evolve is an oversimplification,” Weeks said.

And to be clear: Shrinking comes at a cost. For many species, a smaller size translates to fewer babies, said Sheridan. “The fact that they’re smaller has implications for their future reproduction, which, in turn, has implications for population size,” she said. “This is one of the reasons why people care so much about body size.”

For some ectotherms, including amphibians, being small also makes you more likely to dry out during a drought. Body size has implications for species that have evolved specialized body types for long migrations. (Interestingly, the 2019 study on migratory birds found that their wings are actually getting longer, likely to compensate for their smaller body size, Weeks said.)

But perhaps more concerning is that warming will change body sizes in different ways for different species, said Sheridan, and that can screw up the relationships between animals. For example, if a predator shrinks more slowly than its prey, it might need more prey to fill its stomach in a warming world.

“If everything was getting smaller at the same rate, I don’t think it would be that big of a deal,” Sheridan said. There would still be consequences, she said, such as higher extinction risks for some species, but you would likely just have “a miniaturized ecosystem that is still functioning because all of the elements are still in proportion to one another.” It’s the mismatch, she said, that’s “extra worrisome.”

Debates about the role of warming in shrinking animals are ongoing. Sheridan, for one, is working on an update of her 2011 article that will include more data, and it includes more exceptions to the rule. And Weeks is working to understand, among other things, whether the changes in body size he observed in birds were produced through evolution or during their lives: “If you warm up birds while they’re developing, do they actually get smaller?”

Meanwhile, David Willard, now collections manager emeritus at the Field Museum, is still spending some of his time looking for birds. Lately, there haven’t been many to collect, he said, because the bright lights at the convention center that can attract and disorient birds have been off for much of the pandemic. That’s one bit of good news that has come out of his research: It’s possible to save the lives of birds just by turning off the lights.

Days after a ransomware gang hit hundreds of companies who were customers of Kaseya, a company that sells managing software, the company released a video officially addressing the impact of the massive breach that occurred over the weekend. In the video, CEO Fred Voccola detailed the scope and the company’s next steps following the ransomware attack.

“It totally sucks,” he said in the video as he noted that ransomware attacks like this have become an unfortunate part of the tech industry. “We all have to take a step back and realize this is the world we live in.”

According to the company's estimates, approximately 50 Kaseya clients were directly impacted. Many of their clients are managed service providers that offer IT services to other businesses, which brings the real number of those affected to approximately 800-1,500 businesses around the world, Voccola said.

The ransomware attack, carried out by cybercriminal group REvil, impacted customers who used Kaseya’s VSA product for remote monitoring and management. The attack encrypted all of their data and rendered the computers unusable. 

It appears that REvil had exploited a flaw that Kaseya and the Dutch Institute for Vulnerability Disclosure had already encountered and were working to fix. Kaseya VSA users have remained offline since then.

REvil is now demanding victims pay them $70 million in Bitcoin to publicly publish a decryptor, according to a post made on their dark web blog. 

“It’s just a business. We absolutely do not care about you and your deals, except getting benefits,” REvil's instructions read, according to screenshots on WeLiveSecurity. “If you will not cooperate with our service - for us, it does not matter. But you will lose your time and data… In practice - time is much more valuable than money.” 

Kaseya is currently in the process of developing a patch for customers to help bring them back online. Its update also mentioned that the company met with the FBI and CISA to discuss other methods of strengthening its cybersecurity before it restores clients’ access to its services. 

Kaseya is also offering a Compromise Detection Tool, which it says has already been downloaded by over 2,000 customers since Friday.

High-Definition, Cloud-Based Video Conference & Webinar Solution Powerfully Supports an Evolving Workforce

San Diego, CA – July 8, 2020 – NetSapiens, a B2B provider of Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC&C) and Contact Center solutions to service providers, today announces that TMC, a global, integrated media company, has named SNAP.HD as a 2021 TMCnet Teleworking Solutions Excellence Award winner.

The TMCnet Teleworking Solutions Excellence Award honors products that help ensure remote workers have seamless access to communications tools and other corporate resources needed to support productivity. Whether they are adjusting to new teleworking environments during the COVID-19 pandemic, or had previously adopted technologies in response to an already existing remote workforce trend, the products and services from winners of the 2021 Teleworking Solutions Excellence Award will enable businesses to effectively support their mobile and remote workforces.

SNAP.HD, NetSapiens’ high-definition video conference and webinar solution, has been instrumental in helping the company’s service provider partners empower a global remote business transition. With a complete suite of meeting collaboration tools and cloud-based capabilities, this service empowers vital collaboration and communication in a remote, geographically distributed business landscape.

When coupled with NetSapiens’ flagship SNAPsolution platform, SNAP.HD is helping to redefine flexible, intuitive, easily consumable and highly powerful unified communications and collaboration for a rapidly evolving workforce. SNAPsolution’s disruptive ‘sessions not seats’ pricing model puts power and capital back into the hands of the service provider, while immersive cloud-based collaboration tools help users stay firmly ahead of business requirements.

“We’re thrilled to have our SNAP.HD solution recognized by TMCnet. This award is yet another testament to our ability to deliver on what the new world of work is looking for. Furthermore, it showcases our ability to not only meet service providers where they are, but to help them get where they want to go,” comments Anand Buch, CEO of NetSapiens.

“Our core commitment to being there for our service provider ecosystem in turn enables them to be there for their own business customers, so enterprises can be there for their employees,” continues Buch. “This culminates in a freedom for end users to be wherever they need to be in the world — without ever missing a beat. This is where the globe is heading, and this is the change NetSapiens is committed to driving.”  

“The TMCnet Teleworking Solutions Excellence Award recognizes the best and the most innovative products that this industry has to offer. NetSapiens has proven their commitment to quality and the further development of the Teleworking Solutions industry through its SNAP.HD platform,” stated Rich Tehrani, CEO, TMC. “Congratulations to the entire team at NetSapiens for earning this great honor. I look forward to seeing more innovative solutions from them as they continue to contribute to the future of Teleworking,” Tehrani added.

This award follows NetSapiens’ history of recognition for its innovative UC&C solutions. Recently, the company has won The 2021 TMCnet Remote Work Pioneer Award, The 2020 Video Conferencing Excellence Award, The 2020 Cloud Computing Backup & Disaster Recovery Award and The 2020 Unified Communications Excellence Award.

The 2021 TMCnet Teleworking Solutions Excellence Award will be highlighted on TMCnet and INTERNET TELEPHONY magazine’s online news portal.

About NetSapiens

NetSapiens, LLC. provides a comprehensive suite of unified communications (UC), video conferencing, Collaboration & contact center solutions to over 200+ service providers , servicing over 1.8M users around the globe. Our platform enables our service provider partners to custom-package with unprecedented levels of flexibility, profitability, and ease of use.

About INTERNET TELEPHONY magazine

INTERNET TELEPHONY magazine has been the IP CommunicationsAuthority since 1998. Beginning with the first issue in February of 1998, INTERNET TELEPHONY has been providing unbiased views of the complicated converged communications space.  INTERNET TELEPHONY offers rich content from solutions-focused editorial content to reviews on products and services from TMC Labs.  INTERNET TELEPHONY magazine reaches more than 225,000 readers, including pass-along readers. For more information, please visit www.itmag.com.

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After nearly a year and a half that showed the world just how crucial collaboration tools are, market leaders and specialists have been bringing their A games to the table in the form of UCaaS and video solutions packed full of features that users want.

The president’s big antitrust push could impact how much you pay for plane tickets and prescription drugs.

President Biden issued a sweeping executive order on Friday, making the case to Americans that companies from multiple industries have become too big and too powerful, and federal intervention is needed to bring competition back to the marketplace in order to drive prices down.

The Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy represents a slight shift for the Biden administration, which has lately focused its antitrust attention on Big Tech. Last month, Biden appointed tech antitrust expert Lina Khan to be the chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which, along with the Department of Justice, is responsible for enforcing antitrust laws. The order addresses several issues with major tech companies and alleged anti-competitive behavior, calling for more scrutiny of mergers and acquisitions that certain tech companies might pursue in order to remove competitors from the marketplace. The new executive order also asks the FTC to establish rules over the collection of user data, which many Big Tech companies rely on for revenue and which Congress has consistently failed to pass laws to regulate.

But it can be hard to make the case that antitrust enforcement for Facebook and Google will do anything for consumers’ wallets because those services are largely free — you essentially pay for them with your data, which the companies use to do things like sell ads. And Amazon’s dominance over just about everything has come, partially, through its ability to make its prices lower than smaller businesses. People like to pay less for things, and lower prices have historically been interpreted as beneficial to the consumer. That’s basically what antitrust laws are for: to protect consumers.

So now Biden is rolling out a comprehensive executive order that, among other things, makes the case for how antitrust measures will save Americans money by promoting competition and driving down prices for everything from airline fees to hearing aids.

“The heart of American capitalism is a simple idea: open and fair competition,” Biden said shortly before he signed the order. “That means that if your companies want to win your business, they have to go out and they have to up their game; better prices and services; new ideas and products.”

He added: “But what we’ve seen over the past few decades is less competition and more concentration that holds our economy back. We see it in big agriculture, in big tech, in big pharma. The list goes on. Rather than competing for consumers, they are consuming their competitors.”

Here’s how the order, if fully implemented, can make things cheaper for you.

Airline fees

Biden’s executive order directs the Department of Transportation (DOT) to issue rules requiring airlines to refund fees when services aren’t provided or aren’t provided adequately. For example, if you pay a baggage fee and your bags are delayed, that fee would be refunded. Or if a plane’s wifi or in-flight entertainment system doesn’t work, the airline would issue some sort of refund on the ticket price.

The order also directs the DOT to issue rules that airlines must clearly disclose all baggage, change, and cancellation fees to their customers.

Internet bills

Americans have long been forced to pay whatever the few internet service providers charge for those services, typically because they don’t have much of a choice: Most people have one or two high-speed internet options available to them, which gives their carriers little motivation to charge them less. And the prices those providers charge can vary and are often padded with hidden fees.

The order will ask the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to stop internet service providers from making deals with landlords that restrict tenants to only one option for an internet carrier. This will, in theory, promote competition and lower prices.

The Biden administration will also push the FCC to revive its “Broadband Nutrition Label” plan. This would compel providers to explain all the different plans available to customers, all the fees associated with them, all the services customers are getting, and all the details of their final bill. These Broadband Nutrition Labels were proposed back in 2016, only to be dropped by the Trump administration’s FCC.

Finally, Biden is imploring the FCC to restore net neutrality. Net neutrality, which was established by the Obama-era FCC and repealed by the Trump FCC, would prohibit carriers from charging more to access certain sites or services. It does this by classifying internet service as a “Title II” common carrier, which would subject it to regulations along the lines of a public utility.

The order is ultimately trying to promote competition and transparency, and end fees designed to lock customers in.

Prescription drugs

Biden’s new order directs the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to work with states and tribal authorities to import drugs from Canada, where the same drugs are typically much cheaper than in the United States. This would, ideally, force drug manufacturers to bring down the prices they charge in the US, or at least give Americans the option to pay less for imported drugs.

The order also directs the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to support generic drugs that will give Americans cheaper options to brand-name equivalents, and come up with a plan to combat price gouging within 45 days.

Finally, it asks the FTC to ban “pay for delay,” which is when drug companies pay off competitors to delay offering cheaper generic versions of their drugs once their exclusive patent ends.

Hearing aids

Biden is ordering HHS to issue rules that allow hearing aids to be sold over the counter, rather than forcing consumers to have an expensive (and probably unnecessary) consultation with a medical professional first — one that few health insurers will even cover.

Repairs, from tractors to mobile phones

The order asks the FTC to expand “right to repair” rules. Farmers and iPhone owners alike have complained that their device and equipment manufacturers have made it impossible or excessively difficult for anyone but those manufacturers to do repairs — which allows the manufacturers to set their own repair prices with no competition to drive those prices down.

Products from basically any store that isn’t Amazon

In what could be one of the more sweeping parts of the order, the Biden administration asks the FTC to make rules that prevent “internet marketplaces” from using their dominant position to gain an advantage over the small businesses that have to sell their wares through them. For example, Amazon can see which of another company’s products are selling well, make its own versions of those products, and then display them more prominently. This could apply to Apple as well, as its many developers have complained that its App Store is a monopoly and that Apple will see what its users want (music streaming services, for example), make its own version, and push it onto Apple device owners.

A sweeping executive order aimed at promoting economic competition and signed Friday by President Joe Biden called on the Federal Trade Commission to institute rules to curb anticompetitive restrictions that limit consumers’ ability to repair gadgets on their own terms.

Tucked into the executive order that covered 72 initiatives to promote competition in the US economy, Biden specifically asked the FTC to crack down on “unfair anticompetitive restrictions on third-party repair or self-repair of items, such as the restrictions imposed by powerful manufacturers that prevent farmers from repairing their own equipment.”

The order is a significant win for the right to repair advocates who have long championed a consumer’s choice to have...

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Earlier today President Biden signed the Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy, and in it there were several provisions relating to net neutrality. The prior administration’s FCC and FTC rolled back Obama-era rules in those areas, and now there is a clear agenda to restore them.

Directives for the FCC from the order:

(i) adopting through appropriate rulemaking “Net Neutrality” rules similar to those previously adopted under title II of the Communications Act of 1934 (Public Law 73-416, 48 Stat. 1064, 47 U.S.C. 151 et seq.), as amended by the Telecommunications Act of 1996, in “Protecting and Promoting the Open Internet,” 80 Fed. Reg. 19738 (Apr. 13, 2015);

(iv) prohibiting unjust or...

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By Ryan Daily
The Zoom Rooms update includes webinar controls, in-meeting chats, and more.

Volkswagen, Audi, Porsche, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz parent company Daimler spent years illegally colluding to slow the deployment of cleaner emissions technology, says the European Union, which is dishing out fines as a result.

The EU’s executive branch hit the Volkswagen Group (which owns Audi and Porsche) and BMW with a collective €875 million ($1 billion) fine on Thursday for their role in the scheme. Volkswagen Group must pay €502 million ($595 million), while BMW will pay €373 million ($442 million). Daimler, however, evaded a €727 million fine of its own because the automaker revealed the collusion to the regulators.

The scheme described by EU authorities is separate from the Volkswagen Group’s massive Dieselgate scandal, in which...

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Microsoft is gifting its employees a $1,500 pandemic bonus. In an internal memo seen by The Verge, the software giant says this one-time bonus “is in recognition of the unique and challenging fiscal year that Microsoft just completed.”

Microsoft’s chief people officer, Kathleen Hogan, announced the gift to employees today, and it will apply to all eligible employees in both the US and internationally. Microsoft is gifting this bonus to all staff below corporate vice president level that started on or before March 31st, 2021, including part-time workers and those on hourly rates.

Microsoft has 175,508 employees worldwide, but LinkedIn, GitHub, and ZeniMax employees are not eligible for the bonus, despite Microsoft owning these three...

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‘They had to become boots on the ground going around to every single one of their clients and touching them manually,’ said Michael Crean, president and CEO of Master MSSP Solutions Granted, which is assisting the MSP impacted by the attack.

From the largest ransom demand of all-time to a potentially linked attack on Microsoft cloud customer apps via Synnex to how this hack was nearly avoided altogether, here are 10 things to know about the Kaseya cyberattack.

The Republican National Committee uses Synnex as a vendor and was informed by Microsoft that the Fremont, Calif.-based distributor’s system may have been exposed, an RNC spokesman told Bloomberg.

Microsoft is run AT&T’s entire network after acquiring the carriers Network Cloud technology.

The partnership will first see Microsoft take over the running of AT&T’s core 5G network and will eventually extend to AT&T’s full mobile network traffic.

Jason Zander, Executive Vice President of Azure at Microsoft, said: “With Azure, operators can provide a more flexible and scalable service model, save infrastructure cost, and use AI to automate operations and differentiate customer offerings.

“Through our collaboration with AT&T, Microsoft will expand its telecom portfolio to support operators with a carrier-grade cloud that provides seamless experiences across Microsoft’s cloud and the operator’s network”

The deal is a flagship win for Microsoft’s telco offering, Azure for Operators, which is built on Microsoft’s cloud credentials and technology that came with the acquisitions of Affirmed Networks and Metaswitch.

Microsoft said that the intellectual property that comes with the acquisition of the AT&T unit will help it develop and scale the offering.

Andre Fuetsch, Chief Technology Officer at AT&T, said: “AT&T has one of the world’s most powerful global backbone networks serving hundreds of millions of subscribers.

“Our Network Cloud team has proved that running a network in the cloud drives speed, security, cost improvements and innovation. Microsoft’s decision to acquire these assets is a testament to AT&T’s leadership in network virtualization, culture of innovation, and realization of a telco-grade cloud stack.

“The next step is making this capability accessible to operators around the world and ensuring it has the resources behind it to continue to evolve and improve. And do it securely. Microsoft’s cloud expertise and global reach make them the perfect fit for this next phase.”

Terms of the deal were not disclosed but Microsoft is set to offer jobs to several hundred AT&T engineers, according to Reuters.

 

 

It’s been nearly two years since we first announced the July 31, 2021 retirement of Skype for Business Online. Hundreds of upgrade workshops and millions of successful Skype for Business Online to Teams transitions later, we’re closing in on this significant milestone.

With a month before service retirement, we encourage remaining Skype for Business Online customers to continue transitioning users and workloads to Teams. Here’s some additional guidance to help ensure a successful journey to Teams:

Microsoft-assisted Upgrades to Teams

Organizations that have not yet upgraded to Teams Only will be scheduled for Microsoft assisted upgrades to Teams to help with last-mile technical elements of the transition. Scheduling notifications are sent to tenant admins within the Microsoft 365 Message Center and Teams admin center 90 days before the date of the assisted upgrade. Even after scheduling, customers may still self-upgrade prior to the assisted upgrade date to better control the timing of their upgrade experience.

Assisted upgrades will begin in August 2021 with tenant-specific dates shared in the scheduling notifications mentioned above. Organizations that are scheduled for assisted upgrades after July 31, 2021 will be able to use Skype for Business Online until their upgrade is complete.

 

The assisted upgrade experience will differ slightly depending on whether organizations have a Skype for Business Online-only or a Skype for Business Online with hybrid environment.

• Skype for Business Online-only: The assisted upgrade process will apply the TeamsUpgradeOverridePolicy policy to the tenant. When this policy is applied, all Skype for Business Online users will be placed in Teams Only mode.
• Skype for Business Online users in hybrid environment: The assisted upgrade will only switch Skype for Business Online users to Teams Only mode if they're not already in that mode. Skype for Business Server users won't be impacted by the assisted upgrade process and will remain on-premises.

The duration of the upgrade will vary by volume of users and the characteristics of the deployment. In most cases, users within a tenant will be upgraded within 24 hours of the start of the upgrade. During this time, end users will still have access to Skype for Business Online functionality. Once the upgrade has completed and users sign out of Skype for Business Online, they'll start using Teams for messaging, meetings, and calling. Post-upgrade, all new online users will be added in Teams Only mode.

Learn more about the post-upgrade experience.

Migrating Skype for Business Online Meetings and Contacts to Teams

Regardless of whether an organization manages all aspects of the upgrade or use the assisted process, our guidance includes steps to ensure meetings and contacts are successfully migrated from Skype for Business Online to Teams.

• Migrating Meetings Data to Teams: It’s important for customers with Skype for Business Online-only deployments to use the Meeting Migration Service (MMS) to migrate existing Skype for Business Online meetings to Teams meetings prior to the assisted upgrade date to avoid the potential for data loss. Learn more about how MMS works.
• Migrating Contacts to Teams: Existing contacts from Skype for Business Online including federated (but no distribution lists) will be migrated when users log into Teams for the first time. Users must take this step within 90 days of the completed upgrade.

Got that. What else?

Here are a few other things to know about the retirement of Skype for Business Online:

• Services that integrate with Skype for Business Online will not be supported beyond the July 31, 2021 retirement. This includes support for third-party audio conferencing providers (ACP), Skype for Business Online Cloud Connector Edition (CCE), hybrid voice configurations, and Skype Meeting Broadcast.
• Customers will not be able to move online users out of Teams Only mode after retirement.
• Customers with hybrid configurations may move users from Teams to Skype for Business Server if needed.
• Coexistence modes enable customers to operate Skype for Business Server/Teams side-by-side experiences until they are ready to move users to Teams Only.
• Users can be moved directly from Skype for Business Server to Teams Only after configuring Skype for Business hybrid with Microsoft.
• The retirement of Skype for Business Online and corresponding assisted upgrades do not affect the Skype consumer service, Skype for Business Server products and Skype for Business Online operated by 21Vianet (China Sovereign Clouds Instance).

We’re here to help

The following upgrade resources are available to help enable a successful transition to Teams and prepare for the retirement of Skype for Business Online:

• Microsoft Teams admin documentation provides guidance for rolling out, managing, and preparing users for Teams.
• Online upgrade guidance helps you prepare your technical environment and end-users for the upgrade to Teams.
• On-demand upgrade planning workshops take you through a proven framework for planning and implementing your upgrade from Skype for Business to Teams.
• FastTrack deployment assistance is available for eligible subscriptions.
• Microsoft Partners can help you plan and execute your upgrade.

 

Organizations that have completed their transitions can attest to the transformational benefits Teams brings. And while the retirement of Skype for Business Online has us a little nostalgic, we can’t be more excited about how Teams helps our customers accomplish more across work, school, and life.

See you in Teams!