Davemichels

The latest mega-auction of an NFT tied to a piece of internet history is complete, with Sir Tim Berners-Lee selling a digital item representing source code to the original web browser for $5,434,500. Berners-Lee is credited as the creator of the world wide web that this site is published on, and the NFT includes a time-stamped signed archive including 10,000 lines of the source code that initially made it possible to display an HTML document, among other things.

For comparison, the highest price for an NFT remains the $69 million or so MetaKovan paid to own Everydays: the First 5000 Days by the artist Beeple, while Jack Dorsey’s digital collectible representing the first tweet on Twitter sold for a little less than $3 million.

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It’s easy to forget, but Salesforce bought Slack at the end of last year for almost $28 billion, a deal that has yet to close. We don’t know exactly when that will happen, but Slack continues to develop its product roadmap adding new functionality, even while waiting to become part of Salesforce eventually.

Just this morning, the company made official some new tools it had been talking about for some time, including a new voice tool called Slack Huddles, which is available starting today, along with video messaging and a directory service called Slack Atlas.

These tools enhance the functionality of the platform in ways that should prove useful as it becomes part of Salesforce whenever that happens. It’s not hard to envision how integrating Huddles or the video tools (or even Slack Atlas for both internal and external company organizational views) could work when integrated into the Salesforce platform.

Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield says the companies aren’t working together yet because of regulatory limits on communications, but he could definitely see how these tools could work in tandem with Salesforce Service Cloud and Sales Cloud among others and how you can start to merge the data in Salesforce with Slack’s communications capabilities.

“[There’s] this excitement around workflows from the big system of record [in Salesforce] into the communication [in Slack] and having the data show up where the conversations are happening. And I think there’s a lot of potential here for leveraging these indirectly in customer interactions, whether that’s sales, marketing, support or whatever,” he said.

He said that he could also see Salesforce taking advantage of Slack Connect, a capability introduced last year that enables companies to communicate with people outside the company.

“We have all this stuff working inside of Slack Connect, and you get all the same benefits that you would get using Huddles to properly start a conversation, solve some problem or use video as a better way of communicating with [customers],” he said.

These announcements seem to fall into two main categories: the future of work and in the context of the acquisition. Bret Taylor, Salesforce president and COO certainly seemed to recognize that when discussing the deal with TechCrunch when it was announced back in December. He sees the two companies directly addressing the changing face of work:

“When we say we really want Slack to be this next generation interface for Customer 360, what we mean is we’re pulling together all these systems. How do you rally your teams around these systems in this digital work-anywhere world that we’re in right now where these teams are distributed and collaboration is more important than ever,” Taylor said.

Brent Leary, founder and principal analyst at CRM Essentials says that there is clearly a future of work angle at play as the two companies come together. “I think moves like [today’s Slack announcements] are in response to where things are trending with respect to the future of work as we all find ourselves spending an increasing amount of time in front of webcams and microphones in our home offices meeting and collaborating with others,” he said.

Huddles is an example of how the company is trying to fix that screen fatigue from too many meetings or typing our thoughts. “This kind of ‘audio-first’ capability takes the emphasis off trying to type what we mean in the way we think will get the point across to just being able to say it without the additional effort to make it look right,” he said.

Leary added, “And not only will it allow people to just speak, but also allows us to get a better understanding of the sentiment and emotion that also comes with speaking to people and not having to guess what the intent/emotion is behind the text in a chat.”

As Karissa Bell pointed out on Engadget, Huddles also works like Discord’s chat feature in a business context, which could have great utility for Salesforce tools when it’s integrated with the Salesforce platform

While the regulatory machinations grind on, Slack continues to develop its platform and products. It will of course continue to operate as a stand-lone company, even when the mega deal finally closes, but there will certainly be plenty of cross-platform integrations.

Even if executives can’t discuss what those integrations could look like openly, there has to be a lot of excitement at Salesforce and Slack about the possibilities that these new tools bring to the table — and to the future of work in general — whenever the deal crosses the finish line.

 

Six federal agencies including the FBI have reported using facial recognition technology on images from the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests that followed the police murder of George Floyd, according to a new report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO).

The report shows that many of the agencies reported using the controversial technology for criminal investigations, and to remotely verify an individual’s identity due to the COVID-19 pandemic. All six agencies reported using facial recognition technology during the months of May through August 2020, or the height of the Black Lives Matter protests.

The FBI created a digital tip line to solicit images of people allegedly involved in criminal activity during the protests. The U.S. Park Police used an image from Twitter to identify someone who allegedly assaulted a police officer during a protest. That person was later charged with Felony Civil Disorder and two counts of Assault on a Police Officer, the report states.

The U.S. Postal Inspection Service—which is the oldest law enforcement agency operating in the U.S.—used Clearview A.I. to identify people suspected of damaging Postal Service property, opening and stealing mail, and committing arson during the protests.

Other agencies that used facial recognition include the U.S. Marshals Service, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and the U.S. Capitol Police.

These findings confirm the fears of many activists and protesters. During the height of the protests last year, activists began asking that images including protesters’ faces not be shared in fear of retaliation.

The study also tracked whether federal agencies were using third-party technology companies to conduct facial recognition searches. Of the 14 agencies that reported using these non-federal entities, only one was aware of which system was being used by its employees.

The study recommended that the use of non-federal facial recognition technology be tracked to ensure accuracy and privacy.

Grassroots efforts across the country have worked to ban the use of facial recognition technology due to its well-established bias against women and people of color. Congress also recently reintroduced a bill that would ban facial recognition tech indefinitely.

Slack started talking about a new set of communications tools to enhance the text-based channels at the end of last year. Today the company released a new audio tool called Slack Huddles and gave more details on a couple of other new tools including the ability to leave a video message and an enhanced employee directory, which you can access from inside Slack. All of these appear to have been designed with the changing nature of work in mind.

Let’s start with Slack Huddles, the audio tool that lets you have a real-time conversation with someone in Slack instead of typing out all of your thoughts. This will be much easier for people who find typing challenging, but the company also believes it will allow more spontaneous discussion, which mimics being in the office, at least to some degree.

“Huddles is a light-weight, audio-first way of communicating right in Slack. [It] recreates the spontaneous and serendipitous interactions that happen outside of scheduled meetings,” Tamar Yehoshua, chief product officer at Slack explained in a press briefing yesterday.

As companies continue to introduce more flexible working models, they will have to adjust how they work. Huddles is one way of thinking about that, says Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield.

“Some things can be synchronous, but only take three minutes. Instead of [scheduling a meeting for] next Tuesdays from 11:30 to 12 and [using] the whole half hour because that’s what we scheduled, it’s two or three minutes, right now, And if the conversation fizzles out in the Huddle you leave it open, maybe someone joins later and says something, which you wouldn’t do on a call,” Butterfield said.

And recognizing that not everyone will be able to hear, the new tool includes real-time transcription.

The company has also been talking about providing some kind of video message capability since last year. The idea is almost like a video voicemail or an Instagram Story where you shoot a short video and post it in Slack. “We’ve been thinking about it and we believe that by giving people a way to expressively and asynchronously share and consume information we can enable people to be more flexible in how they work, and reduce the need for video meetings,” Yehoshua said.

The new feature will enable Slack users to play back video, voice and screen recordings natively in Slack. People can record and upload short clips into a channel or DM, “enabling others to watch and respond on their own schedule,” she explained.  While this feature isn’t ready to release yet, Yehoshua reported it is being piloted and will be available to paid teams some time in the coming months.

The last piece is based on the Rimeto acquisition, which Slack bought last year with an eye toward upping their corporate directory piece. The Rimeto product has in fact been repurposed as Slack Atlas, a corporate directory that users can access right in Slack, rather than moving to another program to find that information. It’s another way Slack can keep users in Slack to find the information that they need, while avoiding context switching. This is currently available to a limited set of Business+ and Enterprise Grid customers, but should be more widely available some time later this year, according to the company.

Slack first announced these tools last year, initially saying they were experimental, but quickly shifting them to the product road map. Butterfield appeared in a Clubhouse interview in March with former TechCrunch reporter Josh Constine, who is now a SignalFire investor ostensibly to talk about the future of work, but he also went into more detail about these tools for the first time.

It’s hard not to wrap this discussion into the future of work, and indeed Slack’s future as part of Salesforce, which bought the communications tool for $27 billion last year. Work is changing and Slack is looking to be a broader part of that solution, whatever the future holds.

By Ryan Daily
Looks to replicate in-office experience with a space for audio conversations in channels, and more.

SpaceX’s satellite internet network, Starlink, should have roughly 500,000 users within the next 12 months, Elon Musk said at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) conference on Tuesday. SpaceX’s current goal, Musk said, is to beam broadband internet to most of the planet by August.

The internet network, in the midst of an open beta phase, has launched more than 1,700 satellites to low-Earth orbit since 2018 and recently surpassed a “strategically significant” benchmark of 69,420 active users, Musk told MWC. He said Starlink is already running in 12 countries and expanding. “We’re I think on our way to having a few hundred thousand users, possibly over 500,000 users within 12 months,” he added.

Reaching half a million users in the next year...

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By Dave Michels
As it looks to differentiate its service, AWS focuses on privacy and encryption with its latest acquisition.

The Pacific Northwest is experiencing a record-shattering heat wave with temperatures exceeding 100 degrees in many locations, a virtually unheard of occurrence in that part of the world. This extreme heat is causing, among other problems, roads to buckle and public transit to shut down.

In western Seattle, asphalt is literally baking to the point where it buckles up and away from the earth, making roads impassable. The Seattle National Weather Service Twitter account said tomorrow may be even worse, and warned to "remain vigilant on your commutes!"

In Portland, the public transit authority TriMet suspended light rail and streetcar service until Tuesday morning "due to extreme heat" because the heat is literally melting the power cables.

Climate experts have been warning for decades that extreme weather will become more frequent as climate change intensifies thanks to the world's collective failure to reduce emissions. Climate experts have broadly linked heat domes like the one over the Pacific Northwest with the effects of climate change.

As the Pacific Northwest's infrastructure melts, Congress and the Biden administration continue to move forward with a bipartisan compromise infrastructure bill that experts predict will actually increase emissions because it spends more money on new emissions-increasing infrastructure than clean energy or environmental mitigation programs.

The only thing more terrifying than living through the climate emergency we've been warned about our entire lives is the utter lack of response from the very people who should actually be doing something about it. Forecasters are predicting the temperature in Portland and Seattle on Tuesday will be 110 degrees.

In a blog post today, Microsoft is making another attempt at clarifying the minimum requirements for Windows 11, which have confused many, especially regarding what generation of CPUs the new OS will support. The post is clear that Intel 6th Gen Skylake and earlier CPUs, along with non-Zen AMD processors, will not meet “principles around security and reliability and minimum system requirements for Windows 11.” That lines up with the company’s original statement that Windows 11 would require Intel 8th Gen Coffee Lake or Zen 2 CPUs and up, but there is some hope for Intel 7th Gen Kaby Lake and Zen 1 users.

Where things get confusing again is the news that its first Insider build of Windows 11, which is available today, won’t require TPM...

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‘The era of CIOs investing in cloud IaaS and platform as a service (PaaS) discretely is long over,’ says Sid Nag, Gartner’s research vice president.

Facebook has joined the ranks of companies valued over a trillion dollars as of today’s market close. The company’s market cap is sitting at $1.008 trillion according to Yahoo Finance, putting it over the mark for the first time in its history.

Some of the most notable of Facebook’s divisions are the Facebook site itself, along with Messenger, as well as Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus. On the list of US tech companies that have passed the $1 trillion valuation mark, Facebook is the only one founded in the 2000s, making it the newest — as long as you’re counting from the date that Google was started (which was in 1998), instead of Alphabet (which was created 2015).

The news comes alongside the dismissal of the FTC’s case to unwind...

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Envoy analyzed their platform data of over 225,000 desk bookings to provide insights into how employees are using the workplace.

By Irwin Lazar
The last several weeks have highlighted the growing importance of addressing the security of team collaboration applications.

Messaging chat app Telegram has added group video chat to its mobile and desktop apps at last, something it promised was coming back in April 2020. Voice chats in any group on the platform can be turned into video calls by tapping the camera icon to turn on your device’s video.

Telegram says an unlimited number of users can participate in an audio call, but group video calls will be limited to the first 30 people who join a voice chat. The company plans to increase that limit “soon,” it said in its announcement. Users can also share their screens during a video call.

Telegram

Telegram CEO Pavel Durov said in January that the company had reached 500 million active users, many of whom came to the platform after the...

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Microsoft says some of its customer support tools were accessed by the hacking group Nobelium, which was also connected to the separate SolarWinds attack, due to a Microsoft customer service agent’s computer being compromised. Microsoft told Reuters that the agent had limited access, and was able to see things like what services customers used, and their billing contact information. According to Microsoft, the hackers used the info gleaned from the tools to start “highly targeted” attacks on specific Microsoft customers.

The attack, Microsoft says, was part of a larger Nobelium campaign largely focused on IT companies and governments throughout the world. The company says it’s reached out to the customers who were affected by the hacking...

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The new relationship will help strengthen NEC’s UCaaS and CCaaS portfolio in the US and Canada

The post NEC Corporation of America Teams Up with Telecom Consulting Group (TCG) To Expand Its UNIVERGE BLUE® CLOUD SERVICES Business appeared first on Cloud Communications Alliance.

By Dave Michels
CCaaS continues to rapidly evolve, and the next step is composability.

The ThermoWorks Thermapen is legendary among chefs as the gold standard in kitchen thermometers, affording the fastest and most reliable temperature readings around. And today, the company has revealed its latest model: the $105 Thermapen One, which promises to achieve even faster temperature readings: less than a second (hence the name).

ThermoWorks says the new thermometer is the only sub-second instant-read thermometer that can take a “full temperature reading” — technically five full readings in order to reduce uncertainty — without using estimations or predictive algorithms.

The company says it spent more than five years developing the new thermometer, which features an improved thermocouple system developed in conjunction with...

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Contactless check-in and room service robots are the future — and reality — of hotels. That’s not all.

With half of all Americans over age 12 fully vaccinated, and Covid-19 cases in the country at a low, many are itching to travel. After a year in their homes, Americans are ready for mints on their pillows and room service.

Hold up, though. If you’re planning on staying at a hotel, you’ll quickly learn they’re not the same. From contactless check-in to vending machine meals, chatbot concierges to heightened cleanliness certifications, it’s all part of the new normal for travel.

Hotels are more tech-driven than before, with individualized, digital customer service. “We know that the key to recovery and growth is for us to advance technology at a time when such advancements are shaping the industry’s recovery,” said Chip Rogers, president of the American Hotel & Lodging Association. Rogers said that everything from single-pack grab-and-go meals to flexible check-in and check-out times are part of “the new experience.”

“This also supports the new traveler trend toward ‘bleisure,’ the combination of business and leisure travel,” he said.

Bleisure travel — basically a couple of days of fun tacked onto the end of a business trip — has seen its rise over the past few years with young professionals, especially millennials.

Changes may start the moment you enter the hotel. Gone are the days where a hotel receptionist will hand you a set of keys and point you to the elevator. Chains like Marriott, Hyatt, citizenM, and Hilton have all opted for contactless check-in. Most major hotel brands have invested heavily in digital keys, so the guest can skip the front desk and use their phone as a room key.

Courtesy of Marriott

That doesn’t mean you’re not being greeted at the door. Nowadays, hotels have temperature checks at the front (some use thermal imaging cameras that read each guest’s body temperature).

For confused travelers wondering why there’s no lobby check-in, “ambassadors” walk around to help hotel guests with contactless check-in on iPads (many boast self-cleaning screens). Or the hotel’s app has information on everything from room service to changing your room temperature.

Studio 54’s Ian Schrager, founder of New York City’s luxury Public Hotel, says, “There is no longer a need to make small talk or sit and have a glass of champagne while being checked in or checked out; people don’t want that anymore. They want to get up to their room as fast as possible and not stop by the front desk.” The technology, he explains, needs to add to the experience.

A similar philosophy can be found in the Edition Hotel chain. “While technology can help streamline hotel operating functions, a luxury hotel still relies on genuine human interactions to make guests feel good,” said Dan Flannery, senior vice president and managing director at Edition Hotels.

“We might not need a check-in desk, but the lobby won’t be empty,” said Torsten van Dullemen, the general manager and area vice president of operations for Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group in Washington, New York, and Boston. Lobbies may become a space for retail, he says, containing juice bars, florists, shops, and hair salons.

Upstairs, post-pandemic hotel rooms will have less bling and fanfare, opting for a more minimal and sanitary experience. For some hotels, expect that to be reflected in room design, including antimicrobial surfaces, even special resins used on the floors and walls (which prevent viruses from sticking), as well as auto-cleaning metals in bathrooms, according to hotel designer Jean-Michel Gathy.

Thompson properties offer smart-designed guest rooms (and contactless entry), where guests can adjust in-room preferences with a quick phone tap. Hotels are also offering smart mirrors in hotel bathrooms (watch the morning news as you brush your teeth) and voice-activated, contactless room control systems such as Volara (like Amazon Alexa).

Contactless room control is the future, according to the hotel wifi provider DeepBlue, which says guests will expect rooms to automatically adjust to preferred room and water temperatures (and TV channels) before they even arrive.

Dining will change, too. Many reports detail how the pandemic sounded the death knell for the breakfast buffet as it brought the end of shared serving utensils. But others beg to differ. “I think people still want choice,” said van Dullemen. “Dining has become more creative.”

At Mandarin Oriental in Washington, the hotel partnered with the owner of the Michelin star restaurant Rose’s Luxury to create in-room dining, where beds are shoved out of the way to make room for dining tables that fit up to six people. Don’t call it room service; it’s more like an upscale dinner in a hotel room.

“We’ve been booked out every night,” van Dullemen said. Some of the culinary experiences include “Dinner & Movie,” where streaming is paired with snacks and an upscale meal, as well as an in-room “Afternoon Tea,” which is typically held in the hotel’s Empress Lounge, but is now available in-room with a menu offering foie gras, scones, macarons, and champagne.

Breakfast has been replaced by vending machines as part of the grab-and-go meals at two Fairfield by Marriott hotels. The Marriott Bonvoy app allows guests to preorder meals, which they can get at the kiosks, including breakfast items like yogurt, fruit, muffins, and hot sandwiches.

Courtesy of Marriott

Beyond vending machines, though, most dining at hotels today can be preordered through an app (or scanned via QR code) and delivered to your table or directly to your room. HospitalityNet writes that the QR code “became the silent hero of pandemic operations,” ushering in the contactless menu.

“I hope QR codes stay, but not as a means of saving wages or costs; it offers opportunities to really focus on critical ways to make an impact on our guests,” said van Dullemen.

With the rise of smart tech at hotels, messenger chat and door delivery aim to be seamless; instead of hearing a knock at the door, you get a ping on your phone.

Open the door at the Sonesta San Jose to see a three-foot-tall robot wearing a bow-tie sticker. Under its lid: a preordered meal or slippers, delivered within 10 minutes of ordering. Steve Cousins, founder and CEO of Savioke, which makes the “Relay” bots, says they’re not meant to replace staff but rather to help make late-night deliveries or during rush hours.

“The robots are doing three times as many deliveries as they did before the pandemic,” said Cousins. “Guests who have experienced robot delivery usually ask for it the next time they need something. It is fast, it doesn’t seem to inconvenience the staff, and they do not have to tip it.”

But are apps just secretly cost-cutting measures for hotels? Will human staff be replaced by apps, AI, and robots?

Despite the technological innovation over the past year, Rogers says the opposite is true: There’s so much demand for hotel staff, there’s a staffing shortage.

“The opportunity to enter and move up in our industry has never been better,” said Rogers. “As hotels welcome the return of summer leisure travelers, we are facing a rapidly emerging issue of staffing shortages, so hotels around the country are engaged in robust recruiting efforts.”

But that won’t offset the 500,000 hospitality jobs that were lost in the pandemic. Rogers and the AHLA are calling on members of Congress to pass the Save Hotel Jobs Act, which would provide payroll grants and tax credits to aid hotel workers.

Cousins thinks hotels will use the robots long after the pandemic, but that’s not to say they’ll replace employees. “The bots are a tool hotel staff use to provide a higher level of service,” he said. “Relay robots allow a front desk agent to quickly respond to a phone request from a guest, while remaining at their post to greet the next guest that arrives.”

Another kind of bot on the rise at hotels is chat services, like the Four Seasons Chat, allowing Four Seasons guests to instant message hotel staff before, during, and after their stay. According to the hotel’s stats, the hotel received over six million chat messages in 2020, despite reduced hotel occupancy.

The Public Hotel in New York uses a similar technology, and there, contactless doesn’t lack human contact — as long as vacationers want it that way. The hotel’s app allows guests to control how much they interact with staff, who will still be on hand to help guests in the restaurant, on the elevator ride to the rooftop nightclub, or via live chat.

Remember when hotels offered locals maps of the area? The concierge’s hand-drawn recommendations of a nearby neighborhood have been replaced by digital versions. InterContinental Hotels Group’s Hotel Indigo uses a chatbot that allows guests to ask about local hot spots and get recommendations for restaurants, bars, and street art walks around the city.

Amenities are changing, too. Many hotels are offering to deliver fitness equipment to hotel rooms, from yoga mats to weights, which are likely to replace the communal hotel gym. There are fitness classes on smart TVs in some hotel rooms, and live video training.

All of these strategies were conjured up when hotels went dark during the toughest days of lockdown. Most hotels got creative with their plans to reopen. Apps now offer guests real-time updates on things like pool hours, elevator capacity, and controlling TV, lights, temperature, and meal orders.

Hotels are now used not only for guests but for local businesses, too. Over the past few months, there has been a rise in office “aparthotels,” where business travelers can practically live in hotel rooms, or long-term residences with designated office space in each room, part of the “working from hotel” movement.

Mandarin Oriental

Mandarin Oriental’s Washington, DC, location offers MOBase, a new membership program for business people who need office space. For $4,500 a month, guests have a dedicated guest room with an ergonomic chair, office supplies including a printer, and access to the hotel’s business center for meetings or Zoom calls. The pricey membership also offers unlimited use of the hotel’s spa, pool, fitness center, storage, and dining.

“With remote working continuing for the foreseeable future, our goal is to offer guests, as well as locals, a space to live and work in a well-designed, safe, convenient, and productive atmosphere,” said van Dullemen.

These aparthotel rooms are going strong, with the hotel planning to devote an entire floor to them. They’re mostly being used by people who live just outside of the city but come regularly for work and don’t want to schlep their stuff around every week.

“The pandemic forced us to reassess our business model. Can we do other things?” said van Dullemen. “I don’t think it has created a new market; it was always there, but nobody thought about asking for it. We’ve had to deeply engage with our guests and try new things.”

“Only we can bring back hotels and do it together,” he added. “Not only as hotels, but as travelers, businesspeople, employees, and guests all together. More than ever before, our industry will require a personal touch. We’ll bounce back quicker than people might expect.”

In fits and starts, the US is reopening — in many cases to the chagrin of office workers who have settled into work-from-wherever setups they’ve had the past 16-ish months to perfect. And given the willingness of many of those same workers to quit rather than go back to full-time cubicle life, many companies have offered some form of “hybrid” arrangement as a compromise.

It seems that benefit isn’t being extended to all workers, though. Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft were short on concrete answers as to which contingent workers — which comprise sizable, sometimes majority portions of their workforce, and perform functions from hospitality and security to content moderation and coding — if any would be allowed to work...

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AudioCodes was recently announced as the biggest enterprise SBC vendor by revenue in the final quarter of 2020, taking a 21.4 percent chunk of overall sales, according to Omdia. 

The firm said that it experienced “unprecedented success in many areas” in 2020, largely driven by Teams migration. 

Its SBC business was no exception, Vice President of Marketing, Andy Elliot, told UC Today. 

“Unlike most of our SBC competitors, AudioCodes does much more than just SBCs,” he said. “For enterprises looking to move to Microsoft Teams – and most of them are – that makes a big difference as we can add significant value over and above voice connectivity. 

“IP Phones for every user persona, audio and video meeting room solutions; management tools; compliance call recording; and intelligent meeting insight apps are just a few examples.  

“All of these developed specifically to integrate with and add value to the Microsoft Teams experience and provide enterprises with the reassurance of working with a single vendor rather than trying to knit together a solution from multiple vendors” 

Key to the SBC success has been the rapid growth of AudioCodes’ customer base, which increased by 30 percent across all of 2020 compared to the previous year. 

The firm also more than doubled the number of SBCs it completed valued at over $400,000. The increase in deals of this size was largely attributed to direct routing in Microsoft Teams. 

“AudioCodes SBCs underpinned that growth by helping enterprises securely connect Teams to their existing voice services really quickly for Teams Direct Routing, as that was the immediate priority,” Elliot said. 

“Flexible methods of deployment made this even easier for enterprises, we could deploy SBCs on-premise, in the cloud, or increasingly as a fully managed service for optimal speed and agility. 

AudioCodes was ranked second for SBC revenue across all of 2020, meaning its growth picked up pace towards the end of the year. 

Elliot said an important component of this is the versatility of its SBC, which can be deployed on-premise, in the cloud and as a fully managed service – where it can be bundled with other AudioCodes services as part of AudioCodes Live for Microsoft Teams   

“Quality is key as is our global coverage, a community of respected partners and our strategy to add significant added value to our SBC offering with innovations such as webRTC built-in for click to call capabilities, cloud elasticity for the agile enterprise and Survivable Branch Appliance (SBA) for Microsoft Teams resilience,” he added. 

 

 

 

There are more remote jobs than ever. That doesn’t mean you’ll get one.

If you’re one of the approximately 50 percent of Americans who worked remotely during the pandemic, you’re probably wondering if remote work is in the cards after the pandemic is over. The vast majority of people say they’d like to work remotely at least part of the time, but that desire is running up against the reality of there being fewer remote jobs than there are people who say they want them. Only about 10 percent of jobs on popular hiring platforms include remote work.

That’s a boon for jobs offering remote work. Take Zillow, for example, which saw a huge spike in applicants due to a new remote work option. The real estate marketplace announced last summer that it would allow the vast majority of its workers — 90 percent of its more than 5,000 employees — to work from home at least part of the time. That represented an about-face for a company that, before the pandemic, had demanded that most employees come to the office regularly.

The move also positioned Zillow, which is hoping to eventually add 2,000 positions, at a desirable spot in a very tight labor market, in which many companies are struggling to get enough staff. Nearly 56,000 people applied to Zillow in the first quarter of 2021, up 50 percent from last year when there were more jobs posted.

“If we weren’t doing this, I think it would be tremendously difficult to be filling our positions right now,” Dan Spaulding, Zillow’s chief people officer, told Recode. “We are doing this, and it is still difficult — but I think we found an edge.”

Gabrielle Lurie/San Francisco Chronicle/Getty Images

The company’s relative success amid a hiring crunch and resignation boom illustrates the immense draw of remote work. Employees are tripping over themselves to scoop up a relatively small number of partially and fully remote positions. Zillow isn’t the only company seeing a surge in applications for remote jobs. And while the overall number of remote jobs is increasing, there are currently far more people who say they want these jobs than there are open positions.

Before the pandemic, many Americans hadn’t regularly been able to work from home, but that changed during lockdown. And for many employers and employees, the new arrangement worked surprisingly well. People were just as productive as they were before but they got to skip their lengthy commutes and spend more time with their families. As it turned out, much of what people did in an office could be accomplished pretty easily with wifi, a laptop, and Zoom. Now, as companies reopen their offices this fall, the ability to work remotely is at the top of their employee wish lists, with some valuing it higher than a pay raise.

Indeed, up to a third of office workers say they’ll quit their jobs if they can’t work remotely at least some of the time, and people are quitting their jobs at the highest level on record. Some 4 million people quit their jobs in April, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a figure that represents 2.7 percent of the workforce. And there are more jobs open than ever before.

Needless to say, employers are finding it difficult to fill positions. Companies that offer remote work are having an easier time. Companies that don’t offer it may want to start.

The growth of remote work and remote work demand

Data from a number of job sites illustrates the growing popularity of remote work, which for the purposes of this article includes jobs that allow working from home some or all of the time. On LinkedIn, the share of US jobs that allow remote work increased fivefold, from less than 2 percent in May 2020 to about 10 percent in May 2021. Those jobs are getting 25 percent of all applications. ZipRecruiter saw similar growth in remote jobs, which it says are getting four times the number of applications as jobs that don’t have any remote options.

“A lot of people are competing over very few [remote] jobs,” Julia Pollak, ZipRecruiter’s labor economist, said. “And then there’s very little competition for the in-store, at-workplace, in-warehouse kinds of jobs.”

Retail workers are leaving en masse, many lured away by other entry-level jobs offering higher wages and work from home.

“The biggest shift has been toward remote work being even an option for these lower-wage, less-senior jobs,” Pollak said. “That wasn’t a thing before.”

On LinkedIn, the most in-demand remote entry-level opportunities are in customer service (support, data entry), business development (which includes cold-calling), and product management.

Pollak says she’s noticed many industries that haven’t typically been associated with remote work are letting employees complete at least some of their tasks at home. Home health aides, for example, used to have to go into offices to complete their paperwork. Now, some of their employers are allowing them to do that portion of their job where they wish. Sales reps and even construction managers are finding that some employers are offering part-time remote positions.

Still there’s a gap between the desire for remote work and the availability, especially in fields outside of knowledge work.

Of course, the biggest growth in remote work options is where many would expect: the tech industry. Tech had already been facing challenges getting qualified workers. Given the current state of affairs, these software engineers and data scientists have an even stronger upper hand.

Gabrielle Lurie/San Francisco Chronicle/Getty Images

Gabrielle Lurie/San Francisco Chronicle/Getty Images

“It’s insanity. We’ve never seen the demand so high for top tech talent,” said Josh Brenner, CEO of Hired, which focuses on finding sales and tech workers for its client companies.

These trends are playing out in demands for higher wages, better benefits, and remote work for tech employees. And it seems to be working, as evidenced by what employers are offering on recruitment platforms.

Nearly half the jobs on Hired’s platform now include remote work. That’s up from 10 percent at the beginning of last year. The biggest growth areas for remote work are consumer mobile, security, real estate, and analytics, according to Hired.

FlexJobs, which was already geared specifically at remote and freelance work, has seen the share of jobs on its platform offering at least partial remote work go from 60-70 percent in 2019 to around 90 percent now, according to career development manager Brie Reynolds.

Employees whose jobs are calling them back into the office, she said, aren’t necessarily quitting, but they are actively searching for remote jobs.

“For those companies that are not putting remote work in place in some capacity, over the next few months there’s probably going to be quite a number of people who are jumping ship to go to a more remote job,” Reynolds said.

How remote work could benefit employers

This isn’t just employees getting what they want in a tight labor market. Many of the people Recode spoke to spun this as a way for companies to actually meet their diversity goals. Removing geographic and time constraints means employers can reach out to a much wider pool of qualified candidates. Women and people of color are much more likely to prefer remote work than their male or white counterparts, according to a recent Slack survey.

Women frequently cite child care as a reason. LinkedIn’s group product manager for careers products, Ada Yu, sees offering remote work as a way to attract more women, who disproportionately left the workforce during the pandemic.

“Flexibility of schedule will really help employers try to recruit, retain, and engage with parents in general, but especially women,” Yu said.

Black employees say remote work is better for their sense of belonging. They are 20 percent more likely to be open to remote work than employees on average, according to Hired’s Brenner.

“We’ve seen that once companies start opening up these remote searches, they’re able to also achieve their goals in terms of bringing in a more diverse employee base,” Brenner said.

The future of office space

It’s so far unclear what the rise of remote work will mean for office space, especially since many companies are adopting hybrid work plans in which employees will spend only part of their time in the office. How much office space they need will depend, in part, on how much their employees end up coming to the office.

Currently, only 9 percent of large companies say their office portfolios will get “significantly smaller” in the next three years, according to the latest employer survey from real estate services company CBRE. Some 72 percent of companies are anticipating modest office space reductions. Instead of drastically downsizing, companies are altering their floor plans to have fewer dedicated desks and more shared space for people to work together when they’re in the office.

Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call/Getty Images

Zillow, for now, is keeping its office space (though, to be fair, it held long-term leases so it doesn’t have much of a choice). Instead of downsizing, the company is redesigning its offices to be more geared for collaboration, which it says will be the main objective when its remote workers do come into the office.

About 60 percent of Zillow employees anticipate working from an office once a month or less going forward. The company plans on bringing in fully remote employees a few times a year.

“We do feel that in-person collaboration is still going to be really important coming out of the pandemic,” Zillow’s Spaulding said.

The vast majority of collaboration, however, will have to happen online.

For those who want remote jobs but are unable to get them, more jobs are likely to become remote in the future as companies use the perk as a way to attract much-needed employees. The desire to work remotely doesn’t seem to be going away, and more jobs can be remote than already are.

The milestone was made as Microsoft plans to unveil the “next generation” of its Windows operating system and as Azure cloud revenue continues to grow at a fast clip. In its most recent quarter, Microsoft said Azure sales were up 50 percent year-over-year thanks to pandemic-related tailwinds.

It seems like CPaaS vendors have grown complacent compared to the rapid innovation coming from UCaaS vendors. This makes no sense.

CPaaS has been leading the innovation when it comes to how developers build communication products. This has been the case ever since CPaaS was coined. But now, the trend is changing. This is doubly true for WebRTC and video communication services. UCaaS vendors have taken the lead in innovation and setting the pace of the market, leaving CPaaS vendors behind.

Can this trend be reversed? Is this a bad omen for CPaaS vendors competing in video use cases?

Predicting future communication trends

I used to work at RADVISION. The company specialized in video conferencing equipment but was split into two business units. The one I was a part of licensed VoIP software stacks to developers. You could say that what we did predates CPaaS. We didn’t have the cloud or server APIs but we sure did have SDKs.

In each and every townhall the company had, the CEO used to mention that our business unit was a precursor of the industry. Whatever requirements we’ve seen, whatever trend we experienced in sales (increase or decrease) was just an indicator of what is to come in the market in 3 years or so. The reasoning was simple – we licensed to developers, which then built their products and put them to market. Development cycles being as they were, 3 years was a good estimate.

Fast forward to today, and you have CPaaS vendors (the technology licensors of communication development tools) and the rest of the industry. And the large part of the rest of the industry is UCaaS.

The thing is, UCaaS vendors are no longer waiting for CPaaS vendors to innovate – they are just doing it on their own.

The promise of CPaaS

Communication Platform as a Service. What is it for anyways?

The whole purpose of CPaaS is to reduce the time to market for developers. Make it easier to get things done with communications by developing all the nasty little details for you.

Call it low code. Call it SDK or API or whatever.

I did an interview with Jeff Lawson, CEO of Twilio years ago. There Jeff explains the essence of Twilio – why he started the company. And the reason is to solve the communication problem for companies so they can focus on building great customer experiences.

Remember this one. We will be back to this interview a wee bit later.

Pandemic requirement shifts

Then the pandemic hit. And with it, a change in what communication requirements looked like around the world for all use cases.

4 distinct changes took place:

#1 – meetings became larger

We had large meetings before. The difference was that we connected rooms with groups of people in each room. Now? Everyone’s joining from his own place.

A meeting with 20 people in 3 rooms became a meeting with 20 people from 20 rooms. We will be back in the office, but the requirement for bigger meetings, with more people joining remotely will still be there with us.

Look at the start of this session from last year’s Kranky Geek virtual event.

Here Li-Tal Mashiach, Senior Engineering Manager at Facebook in the Messenger team explains what they’ve seen as changes in the usage of video calls in Messenger. Look at around the 2:40 mark in that video.

#2 – more meetings for longer periods of time

This one is obvious. Or is it?

Almost all vendors have seen a significant growth in both the number of video sessions conducted on their platforms as well the length of these sessions.

Scale had to be dealt with across these two axes.

You need to make sure you can carry conversations that now take hours on end instead of minutes:

• My daughter had 4+ hour long sessions with her friends during lockdowns going well into the night. They talked, are, cooked and did whatever the hell teenage girls do together – just remotely
• My son is still video calling with his cousin while playing Fortnite on his Xbox. And that usually lasts… well… until we stop them forcefully

In both cases, much of the interaction is just ambient video. They do things together or apart and just have these social interactions take place because they can’t meet. Funny enough, my son and his cousin aren’t stopping it now even though everything is open – that’s because meeting physically requires a 20 minute car ride…

How does that change the focus? How do you maintain servers, upgrade and update them when sessions can take hours on end on a machine? Does it mean the media servers also need to be stabler in how they operate?

And what about the number of sessions? Is it that easy to scale 10x or more your current traffic? This isn’t a simple question to contend with. Google shared their own challenges with scaling Meet which makes for a fascinating read. I had my share of vendors to help with best practices in scaling their WebRTC infrastructure during the last 15 months as well.

#3 – more networks

Back to that Kranky Geek video by Facebook. They saw an increase in desktop access. More than they had expected being mobile first.

I’d argue that we’ve all seen more variety in devices and networks. My apartment went from 1 video calling user to 4 video calling users in a matter of a day. Billion people or more who never went on a video call have done so and will continue to do so at least some of the time.

What devices do these billion people have? What does their home network look like?

If you look at the technology adoption curve, these aren’t the innovators or early adopters. They aren’t even the early majority. They include both the late majority and the laggards.

This means we’re facing a lot more variance in devices and networks. In the need to deal with lower end capabilities and resources available. And to deal with having these large groups take place with a larger variety of the differences across devices.

#4 – more places

The best part of video calling during the lockdowns and up until today is taking a peak at other people’s home office. You get to see a piece of who they really are outside “work”.

These places are almost always less than ideal.

• Dogs and cats being part of the background
• Kids. Lots of kids. Popping into the screen. Making noise
• People walking in the back doing laundry, cooking, running after kids. The works
• Construction noises from outside
• Poor lighting conditions

Everything you can think of that affects the audio and video quality due to external sources will be there. And you can’t always ask the user to go purchase a better camera, change where he is sitting or replace his device.

It becomes a technical problem to solve many of these issues, especially when the service offers ad-hoc connectivity for its users.

CPaaS during the pandemic

CPaaS were supposed to help vendors build their products. Look at future needs and cater for them. And for the most part they do. But somehow during this pandemic, it seems that many of them have failed to do so.

I’ll look at Twilio here – and not because they are the only vendor with these issues – but because they are the biggest CPaaS vendor and the precursor of the industry.

Last year after Twilio’s Signal 2020 event I wrote that I expected more of them:

For me this says that Twilio hasn’t invested in video as much in the last year or two. If they had, they would have announced something more thrilling and interesting. Maybe larger meetings, above 50 participants? Broadcasting capabilities? Noise suppression? Something…

Since I wrote that, 8 months have passed. Meeting sizes for Twilio Programmable Video are still limited to 50 participants. There are no broadcasting capabilities. No noise suppression. No background blurring. Nothing.

I can’t even recall any real additional feature that Twilio introduced for Twilio Programmable Video since that Signal event. Maybe updates and improvements to their React reference app, but nothing more.

Most other vendors showed similar inclination and introduction of new features throughout the pandemic. It seems like the trend now for video APIs is to focus on embedded iframes for faster development. These have been discussed and experimented with years ago, and now seem to be finding new traction and interest.

It takes more time to develop features in CPaaS than it does on other platforms. The reason for that is the CPaaS vendors need to do 2 things others don’t have to deal with:

1. Make the feature generic, solving a problem for more than a single use case or customer
2. Document the feature properly, so that developers will be able to figure out how to use it

But let’s face it. These new requirements have been around for 15 months now…

There are obviously a few caveats here:

I am griping here about video

CPaaS has grown during the pandemic, so this hasn’t hurt them. Yet

Video is usually a small percentage of traffic and income for a CPaaS vendor

UCaaS during the pandemic

UCaaS shows a stark contrast to how CPaaS responded.

Many of the leading vendors have added background blurring and replacement, noise suppression and other features and capabilities. They have done so in breakneck speeds and they seem to be spewing out new features every week or so.

This isn’t limited to a single vendor. Out of the top of my head: Zoom, Microsoft Teams, WebEx, Google Meet and RingCentral all introduced these features in the past year. And all of them seem to be investing further into these areas while pushing forward other initiatives they have, each with its own focus.

Remember Jeff’s interview? I asked him if he believed UC vendors should develop their services on top of CPaaS. This is what he answered:

Yeah. I believe that companies whose primary business is communications can and definitely should and would get competitive advantage by using a platform like Twilio to build upon. The reason why is this. It used to be when those UC companies started, their core competency was making the phone ring. Then they’d add some software functionality on top of it, sure, but the vast majority of what they worried about was how do I make the phone ring? The problem is Twilio has democratized that ability.

[…]

The existing UCaaS vendors, they would be wise to build on top of the same platform that any developer in the world can come and start to compete with them on. If they don’t, those independent software developers, they can actually start and build companies that are really compelling competitors, because they don’t have to focus on the low level bits. They’re focused on the things customers really care about, which is features, functionality, and the user experience that matters.

While mostly true, this doesn’t hold water these days for video communications. Relying on CPaaS vendors means you need to figure out the feature set that is necessary to be a compelling competitor yourself – larger groups, background replacement, noise suppression, …

CPaaS vendors need to put their act together in the video domain, or start losing customers that will just go build this on their own. Especially when we see Zoom coming up with their Video SDK and becoming a direct competitor to CPaaS vendors.

UCaaS vendors are having their own headaches in the market due to the dramatic changes that Microsoft and Google are bringing into this domain. I’ll leave that for a future article.

Pandemic valuations

The pandemic also changed the dynamics in communication vendor valuations, shifting the focus to slightly different domains.

Hopin and Clubhouse, which I already touched on in my previous article about the new era in WebRTC.

Agora (video CPaaS vendor) had a hugely successful IPO, followed by another spike due to the popularity of Clubhouse (who is using them). They are now back to roughly their initial IPO price point.

Twilio (CPaaS) increased in their valuation throughout the pandemic. My guess is that this is mostly due to the increased use in voice and SMS. Less so in video, where they invest a lot less.

Zoom. Need I say more?

The differentiation dilemma & Build vs Buy

How does one differentiate then?

• CPaaS vendors haven’t done enough during the pandemic to enable differentiation for the video use cases
• The same CPaaS vendors also haven’t differentiated enough from one another – at least not on the surface level
• Build on top of your CPaaS vendor the missing features (if possible)
• Build your infrastructure in-house

I am seeing the following trends in CPaaS adoption and use. They used to be related to pricing, but now they are becoming more and more related to feature sets and differentiation needs:

Most enterprises stick with the use of CPaaS vendors. They rely on them for their communication needs. They will switch from a CPaaS vendor to another CPaaS vendor if they can get better pricing or if their current vendor is lacking features (or provides poor support).

Technology vendors and startups will pick either CPaaS vendors as their starting point or prefer going it alone from the get go. Those that become hugely successful will end up actively working on replacing the CPaaS vendor with their own infrastructure. They will see that as an imperative a lot more than their enterprise brethrens.

Unified communication vendors will continue as they are. Assuming that communication infrastructure is core to their business and will work towards maintaining their own knowledge and experience in the area – doubly so after the pandemic.

Wake up and smell the coffee

CPaaS vendors should wake up and smell the coffee.

The world has changed. Drastically.

There’s no going back to the old ways – even without quarantines.

I believe that there’s a competitive advantage waiting here. CPaaS vendors have been shying away from these requirements. The first ones to come out with actual solutions and feature capabilities that will ease the development of customers will win due to this differentiation.

The reason this hasn’t happened so far is that traditionally, such things weren’t catered for directly by CPaaS vendors – it is out of their comfort zone. This leads to an opportunity that is up for the taking.

—

On a similar note, after running successfully the Future of Communications workshop with Dean Bubley, we decided that it is both information packed and fun to do. If you are interested in a private session for your company – let us know.

The post Why CPaaS is losing the innovation lead to UCaaS appeared first on BlogGeek.me.

The CIO must work in lockstep with the CMO to successfully meet or exceed ever-changing customer needs.

The acquisition of Sweden-based companies Telepo and Soluno make them the number 1 leader in European cloud communication solutions for SMEs and service providers and places them amongst the biggest players in the world, with a €170m turnover and 2 million multi-tenant seats.

Brussels – 21 June 2021 – Destiny’s ambition of becoming the leading European, SME-focused, secure cloud communication provider is surging forward. Today, the Belgian secure cloud communication provider signed two strategic acquisitions that instantly launch Destiny to the top position in the European UCaaS market.  The services of Destiny and Sweden-based Telepo already have proven to be a perfect match.  Telepo’s UCaaS platform will be Destiny’s second UCaaS platform, deployed group-wide and be leveraged in future expansions. At the same time, Telepo strengthens Destiny’s Service Provider channel. With Soluno, also Sweden-based, Destiny adds a well-known UCaaS provider to the Destiny Group that gives the company access to the Nordic market.

This leap will trigger further investment in developing the innovative, market leading, SME-focused and scalable UCaaS platform – deploying it in the existing Destiny markets and in new countries, across all channels. As a result, Destiny creates a new market force in the UCaaS European market that has unparalleled competitive advantage.

Daan De Wever, CEO Destiny: “We are thrilled to announce this exciting news of the acquisition of these two fantastic and strong companies. Thanks to the support of our investor Apax for 18 months now, Destiny is reaching the next level of its big play to own the European cloud communication space.  Combining forces with Telepo and Soluno gives us owned IP, technology that is easy to adopt, use and integrate, great partners, talented local teams and ambition to invest in further developing our innovative and market leading UCaaS platform for SME’s, today and tomorrow. It also reinforces the hunger to grow Destiny as the reference for our businesses and service provider audience. Our customers are always at the heart of all our decision making. It’s the increasing levels of service and innovation that they’ll enjoy that led us to take this unprecedented step. We’ll continue to develop human-centric communication services for the cloud, and make sure they serve all our clients’ and partners’ ambitions in their local markets and specific sectors.”

Technology synergy with Telepo

Destiny has been a loyal Telepo client for years, using their platform to deliver best-in-class UCaaS services in the Benelux region. Bringing in Telepo to the fold was a no-brainer move for Destiny, due to the proven success in the teams’ collaboration and the high-performing technology which Telepo consistently provided. The two companies believe in the importance of combining their power to advance and accelerate Telepo’s innovation velocity to build next-generation UCaaS services aimed at the European SME market and delivered via Destiny’s channels and strategic partnerships.

Rami Houbby, General Manager at Telepo: “This is a transformational step for Telepo and marks the start of an incredible new chapter for both companies as well as our service provider partners. Destiny will be able to standardize on Telepo technology for the group-wide platform to drive consistency and future growth. The Telepo team will benefit from Destiny’s strategy and resources to accelerate innovation and further enhance our offerings to better enable our Service Provider partners to compete and win in their markets. I am excited about the opportunities this acquisition introduces for our team and partners, and look forward to working with Daan and his team on driving a bright and successful future together.”

Power coalition with Soluno

Soluno was announced to be recognized as one of the top 20 leaders in growth and industry innovation by Frost & Sullivan in the 2020 UCaaS Frost Radar report. The two companies becoming one, was a more than logical choice. The acquisition gives Destiny an instantly strong position in Sweden and also leads to globalization for Soluno. Since Soluno was also using Telepo’s platform, there will be no technological changes for their employees and clients. The power coalition will invest in the growth and innovation of their platform and own IP services.

Patrik Sörqvist, CEO of Soluno: “Soluno has constantly generated strong organic growth by providing our channels and end customers with innovation that enables easy to use and future proof business communications – today. By joining the Destiny family, our European vision is already a reality and we will together transform the European UCaaS market.”

The combined Destiny group will comprise of more than 600 employees in 6 countries (Belgium, Netherlands, France, Sweden, Germany and UK), and is expected to generate a turnover of €170m in 2021. Q Advisors, a leading global TMT investment banking boutique, acted as the exclusive financial advisor to Destiny in connection with this transaction.

“We welcome every new colleague to the Destiny family. Our combined power will change the European UCaaS market forever. Destiny has a track record of company integration that emphasizes on future growth, not short-term restructuring.  In the coming period, we will develop a vision of how our combined roadmap of products and services will support our existing clients as well as winning new clients across Europe”, Daan De Wever concludes.

The post Destiny becomes Europe’s largest UCaaS platform provider thanks to strategic acquisitions appeared first on Cloud Communications Alliance.

Over the past 15 years, Google has introduced more than a dozen messaging services spanning text, voice, and video calling. This week, the company’s efforts culminated in the general availability of Google Chat, a combination of Slack / Discord-style rooms with more traditional messaging.

It’s the sort of announcement that might have been expected to bring some consistency to the company’s muddled messenger messaging, but — as is traditional for Google in this area — there’s plenty of confusion to go around.

For one thing, Google Chat is the name fans have affectionately used to refer to Google’s original messaging service, Google Talk, for many years. Is this a coincidence that brings Google’s messaging ouroboros full...

Continue reading…

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) is calling on Microsoft to face the same antitrust scrutiny as other large tech platforms in a letter to the company Monday.

In the letter, Jordan asks Microsoft president Brad Smith if he believes the company would be affected by the swath of antitrust bills introduced in the House earlier this month. There are five bills in total, spanning from offering up more money for antitrust enforcers to banning large tech platforms from buying up small competitors.

The antitrust package came out of a yearslong investigation into Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. The measures focus on the anticompetitive behaviors of these four companies, and it’s not as clear how they would affect other large companies like Microsoft....

Continue reading…

As the return to work following pandemic lockdowns gathers pace, new trends are emerging as people look to retain the benefits of homeworking alongside the collaboration and productivity enabled by traditional offices. The era of hybrid working is starting to crystallise into a blend of home, remote and traditional office-based activities, with workers and employers able to pick and choose the most suitable locations for their work and lifestyles. Enabling this to happen in an optimised way relies on providing tools that empower people with high-quality unified communications experiences regardless of their location. 

“There’s a real need to drive meeting equality so wherever people are they have the right tools to enable them to participate effectively and with the same high quality as people in meeting rooms,” said Laura Marx, the Vice President of Global Alliances and Product Marketing at Poly. “The story has changed in terms of what users’ needs are and also for IT departments which now need to manage and support a growing array of communications equipment. IT needs to manage people, devices and rooms everywhere and be able to access insights and have control over these to ensure meetings are successful.” 

The alignment of communications devices with IT departments demonstrates that policies and processes are maturing. At the peak of the pandemic, best effort solutions were accepted and people procured what they could get delivered in order to keep working. Now, though, hybrid working is set to continue and people need higher quality, personal devices to fulfill their permanent needs to be able to communicate and collaborate whatever their location. 

Attractive portfolios of equipment have been developed to meet this need, addressing mobility, home working, and traditional offices and taking account of the different demands of each and the need for equipment to move from one location to another. Poly Studio P series has pioneered the concept of providing a range of devices tailored to specific needs and situations and it has recently been awarded a Red Dot Award for the Studio P15 personal video bar. The company’s devices can be managed by the Poly Lens app and infrastructure which is enabling IT departments to track, monitor, and manage users’ experiences, thereby simplifying support and management of the device estate. 

A further product, the Poly Studio E70, takes the capability to participate in smarter hybrid meetings further. The intelligent 4k camera has been designed to enhance video quality so everyone feels like they’re in the room together. The new-age camera underpins a brand new category for hybrid work in UC launched yesterday by Microsoft which aims to bolster meeting equality by focusing on meeting participants in large rooms so they are presented similarly to lone workers.  

The intelligent capabilities of the camera mean it can present people in conferences on an equal footing, providing the same experience to all participants. The focus Microsoft is putting on this area underscores the importance and momentum behind equipping people to go back to the office but also to continue to work from home. Poly and Microsoft’s partnership extends back for more than 15 years and the two companies have collaborated closely to develop solutions to meet the needs of changing workplace. 

“We have deep ties with Teams engineers at Microsoft to ensure Poly devices are fully certified on Teams,” added Marx. “Our experience means we work hand-in-hand to develop device specifications with Microsoft and this new category will support meeting equality for all users as they go back into the office. The momentum is already underway and with Poly Studio E70 we’re ready to provide users with the smarter, hybrid meeting experiences they need for the new world of work.” 

 

 

A weakness in the algorithm used to encrypt cellphone data in the 1990s and 2000s allowed hackers to spy on some internet traffic, according to a new research paper. 

The paper has sent shockwaves through the encryption community because of what it implies: The researchers believe that the mathematical probability of the weakness being introduced on accident is extremely low. Thus, they speculate that a weakness was intentionally put into the algorithm. After the paper was published, the group that designed the algorithm confirmed this was the case.

Researchers from several universities in Europe found that the encryption algorithm GEA-1, which was used in cellphones when the industry adopted GPRS standards in 2G networks, was intentionally designed to include a weakness that at least one cryptography expert sees as a backdoor. The researchers said they obtained two encryption algorithms, GEA-1 and GEA-2, which are proprietary and thus not public, "from a source." They then analyzed them and realized they were vulnerable to attacks that allowed for decryption of all traffic. 

When trying to reverse-engineer the algorithm, the researchers wrote that (to simplify), they tried to design a similar encryption algorithm using a random number generator often used in cryptography and never came close to creating an encryption scheme as weak as the one actually used: "In a million tries we never even got close to such a weak instance," they wrote. "This implies that the weakness in GEA-1 is unlikely to occur by chance, indicating that the security level of 40 bits is due to export regulations."

Researchers dubbed the attack "divide-and-conquer," and said it was "rather straightforward." In short, the attack allows someone who can intercept cellphone data traffic to recover the key used to encrypt the data and then decrypt all traffic. The weakness in GEA-1, the oldest algorithm developed in 1998, is that it provides only 40-bit security. That's what allows an attacker to get the key and decrypt all traffic, according to the researchers. 

"To meet political requirements, millions of users were apparently poorly protected while surfing for years."

A spokesperson for the organization that designed the GEA-1 algorithm, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), admitted that the algorithm contained a weakness, but said it was introduced because the export regulations at the time did not allow for stronger encryption. 

"We followed regulations: we followed export control regulations that limited the strength of GEA-1," a spokesperson for ETSI told Motherboard in an email. 

Håvard Raddum, one of the researchers who worked on the paper, summed up the implications of this decision in an email to Motherboard.

"To meet political requirements, millions of users were apparently poorly protected while surfing for years," he said. 

Raddum and his colleagues found that GEA-1's successor, GEA-2 did not contain the same weakness. In fact, the ETSI spokesperson said that when they introduced GEA-2 the export controls had been eased. Still, the researchers were able to decrypt traffic protected by GEA-2 as well with a more technical attack, and concluded that GEA-2 "does not offer a high enough security level for today's standards," as they wrote in their paper. 

Lukasz Olejnik, an independent cybersecurity researcher and consultant who holds a computer science PhD from INRIA, told Motherboard that "this technical analysis is sound, and the conclusions as to the intentional weakening of the algorithm rather serious."

The good news is that GEA-1 and GEA-2 are not widely used anymore after cellphone providers adopted new standards for 3G and 4G networks. The bad news is that even though ETSI prohibited network operators from using GEA-1 in 2013, the researchers say that both GEA-1 and GEA-2 persist to this day because GPRS is still used as a fallback in certain countries and networks. 

"In most countries, [the risk is] not very high, and significantly lower risk than at the start of the 2000’s since GEA-3 and GEA-4 are used today," Raddum said. "But handsets still support GEA-1. Scenarios where a mobile phone today can be tricked into using GEA-1 exist."

In fact, the researchers tested several modern phones to see if they would still support the vulnerable algorithms and "surprisingly" found that they still do. The researchers said that it's the baseband manufacturers who are responsible for implementing standards.

"The use of GEA-1 has still far-reaching consequences on the user’s privacy," the researchers wrote, "and should be avoided at all costs."

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