It’s going to get harder for Android apps to track users who’ve opted out of receiving personalized ads, the Financial Times reports, after Google announced changes to how it’ll handle the unique device identifiers that allow marketers to track them between apps. Starting later this year, Google is cutting off access to these “Advertising IDs” after a user opts out, and will show developers a “string of zeros” in its place.
The news was announced in an email to Play Store developers, and Google has also updated its support page for Advertising IDs with the announcement. Google told developers the changes will “provide users with more control over their data, and help bolster security and privacy,” the Financial Times reports.
It’s been a busy week for private equity, with Cloudera, Stack Overflow and FireEye coming off the board on Tuesday and Wednesday. Today Blackstone bought media and data company IDG for $1.3 billion. The company had been owned by Oriental Rainbow, LLC, a subsidiary of China Oceanwide Holdings Group, Co. Ltd.
With IDG, Blackstone gets tech analyst firm IDC along with a collection of tech publications that includes CIO, Computerworld, InfoWorld, Macworld, Network World, PCWorld and Tech Hive. The media publishing arm was once a powerhouse in the 1990s tech publishing world, although its shine has faded in recent years as the publishing industry in general has come under intense pressure.
The company has also been making some additions to the platform more recently with a stronger focus on data and analytics. Last year it bought Triblio, a marketing data platform to help companies deliver more personalized customer experiences. Last month it acquired Metri, an IT pricing service, which can help with IT budgeting and procurement. The latter could dovetail nicely with IDC’s consulting services.
Company CEO Mohamad Ali is hoping that Blackstone can infuse more capital into the company to keep building on its software services with a data focus. “Additional capital investment from Blackstone will allow us to cultivate our rich history of innovation and accelerate our product roadmaps to bring our customers the deeper insights and data they need to succeed in today’s rapidly evolving digital economy,” Ali said in a statement.
That sounds like he wants to increase his data bet. It seems that the data side of the business was particularly attractive to Blackstone as well. “The high-quality data, analytics and insights IDG delivers to technology leaders are only becoming more critical as the pace of growth and innovation accelerates,” Peter Wallace, Global Head of Core Private Equity at Blackstone said in a statement.
The company launched in 1964 with the consulting side of the business, but founder Pat McGovern had a broader vision and began the publishing side of the company in 1967 with the launch of Computerworld. The publishing business actually grew to become an integral part of the rise of the PC and the technology shift that occurred at a personal and business level in the 80s and 90s. It’s unclear what this deal will mean for the publishing side of the house or where that would even fit as it continues the push to focus on data and analytics.
It’s worth noting that Verizon Media, which owns this publication along with Engadget, was also recently sold to a private equity firm, Apollo Global, as the private equity push into all parts of the technology ecosystem continues.
A 2020 picture of the Supreme Court, as seen on a computer. | Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
Not being entirely honest on your Tinder profile is not a federal crime.
A case that the Supreme Court handed down on Thursday, Van Buren v. United States, centers on the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) — a law so old it’s practically antediluvian by the standards of the tech industry.
Enacted in 1986, the law is intended to prevent individuals from accessing computer systems or individual files that they are not permitted to see — think of it as an anti-hacking law. But the law was also enacted more than three decades ago, long before the internet shifted much of human society to the virtual world. As such, many of its provisions weren’t exactly drafted with our modern, online society in mind.
The facts of Van Buren are fairly straightforward — although the case has very broad implications that stretch far beyond these facts. Nathan Van Buren, a former police sergeant, accepted a $5,000 bribe to search a law enforcement database to see if a particular license plate number belonged to an undercover cop, and then to reveal what he found to the person who bribed him.
At the time, Van Buren was working as a police officer and was allowed to search this database — although he obviously wasn’t supposed to use it to sell confidential police information for personal profit. The question in Van Buren was whether he violated a provision of the CFAA that makes it a crime “to access a computer with authorization and to use such access to obtain or alter information in the computer that the accesser is not entitled so to obtain or alter.”
The question of whether Van Buren can be prosecuted under this federal statute turns out to have profound implications. Imagine, for example, that the popular dating app Tinder requires its users to “provide only accurate information in their user profiles if they wish to access our service.”
If someone lies on their Tinder profile and claims they are two inches taller than their actual height, they’ve violated Tinder’s rules. And if they then read other Tinder users’ profiles, they’ve technically accessed information that they are not entitled to obtain. But should that really be a federal crime?
Indeed, Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s majority opinion, which holds that Van Buren did not violate the federal law when he accessed a law enforcement database for an improper purpose, lists a wide range of fairly ordinary activity that could become a crime if the CFAA is interpreted broadly — including “using a pseudonym on Facebook” or even sending a personal email from a work computer.
Barrett’s narrow construction prevents most, but not all, of these absurd results — as Justice Clarence Thomas points out in a dissenting opinion, Barrett’s interpretation of the CFAA could still lead to criminal charges against an employee who plays video games on their work computer.
But the Court’s 6-3 opinion in Van Buren, at the very least, prevents many prosecutions against individuals who commit minor transgressions online. As Barrett warns, the approach advocated by Thomas’s dissent could potentially lead to the conclusion that “millions of otherwise law-abiding citizens are criminals.”
The two opinions in Van Buren, briefly explained
Textualism, the belief that judges should interpret statutes primarily by looking at a law’s text, is fashionable among the kind of conservative judges that dominate the federal judiciary. So Justice Barrett devotes the bulk of her majority opinion to a close reading of the CFAA’s text.
This is, to be perfectly frank, the least convincing part of her opinion. It rests on a persnickety deep dive into the meaning of the word “so” that is so convoluted and difficult to summarize concisely that I won’t even attempt to do so here. (If you care to read this part of the Court’s decision, it starts at page five of Barrett’s opinion.)
Recall that the text in question makes it a crime to access a computer that someone is allowed to access but then to “use such access to obtain or alter information in the computer that the accesser is not entitled so to obtain or alter.” Barrett argues that this reference to information “that the accesser is not entitled so to obtain” refers only to information that they cannot access for any purpose whatsoever.
Think of it this way. Suppose that Vox Media intentionally gives me access to a server that contains confidential information about our business plans and our strategy to woo advertisers. Now suppose that I access this information and sell it to a competitor. Under the majority’s approach in Van Buren, I have not violated the CFAA (although I would no doubt be fired for such a transgression), because Vox Media permitted me to access this information on its own server.
Now suppose that I log in to this Vox Media server and hack into files that the company does not permit me to see no matter what — maybe I decide to read the CEO’s emails. Under Van Buren, such a hack would violate the CFAA because I am accessing information that I am “not entitled so to obtain” under any circumstances.
Justice Thomas’s dissent, for its part, argues for a much more expansive reading of the CFAA. As he notes, many laws punish “those who exceed the scope of consent when using property that belongs to others.” Thus, a valet “may take possession of a person’s car to park it, but he cannot take it for a joyride.” Or an “employee who is entitled to pull the alarm in the event of a fire is not entitled to pull it for some other purpose, such as to delay a meeting for which he is unprepared.”
Thomas is, of course, correct that many laws do sanction individuals who use someone else’s property in a way that the property owner did not consent to. But the question in Van Buren is not whether property laws typically forbid individuals from using someone else’s property in unexpected ways. The question is what the CFAA prohibits. So Thomas’s decision to focus on laws other than the CFAA is more than a little odd.
That said, lower court judges have split between these two possible readings of the CFAA. Neither Barrett nor Thomas makes a slam-dunk case for their reading of the law because the CFAA isn’t a well-drafted statute. So reasonable judges can disagree about the best way to read its naked text.
So what’s really at stake in this case?
While textualism can’t really answer the question of how to read the CFAA, there are profound practical reasons to prefer Barrett’s approach to Thomas’s. If federal law makes it a crime to access any digitalized information in a way the owner of that information forbids, then, in Barrett’s words, “millions of otherwise law-abiding citizens are criminals.”
Facebook’s terms of service, for example, require its users to “create only one account.” Thus, if someone creates two Facebook accounts and uses both of them to search for information on Facebook’s website, they have technically accessed information that they are not entitled to under Facebook’s terms of service.
And, under Thomas’s reading of the CFAA, they have potentially committed a federal crime.
Similarly, Facebook also expects users to “use the same name that you use in everyday life.” So, if a person who uses the name “Jim” in their everyday interactions signs up for Facebook using the name “James,” they could also potentially be prosecuted under a broad reading of the CFAA.
Or what if a website imposes truly bizarre terms of service on users? In an amicus brief submitted in Van Buren, Berkeley law professor Orin Kerr imagines what would happen if a website’s terms of service forbade people with the middle name “Ralph” from accessing the site, or people who have visited the state of Alaska.
“Any computer owner or operator is free to say that no one can visit his website who has been to Alaska,” Kerr writes, “but backing up that wish with federal criminal law delegates the extraordinary power of the criminal sanction to a computer owner’s whim.” And yet, under the broad reading of the CFAA, people who have traveled to Alaska could potentially face criminal sanctions.
It’s worth noting that the majority opinion in Van Buren does not foreclose any possibility that someone will be prosecuted for a trivial transgression.
Recall that, under Barrett’s approach, the CFAA is violated if someone accesses a computer file, and the owner of that file does not permit them to access it for any purpose. In his dissenting opinion, Thomas warns of an employee who “plays a round of solitaire” on their work computer if their employer “categorically prohibits accessing the ‘games’ folder in Windows.” Such an employee could potentially face criminal charges under the majority’s interpretation of the CFAA.
But while Van Buren won’t protect all computer users from extremely overzealous prosecutors, Barrett’s opinion does prevent some of the more absurd outcomes that Kerr and others warned about in their briefs.
Ideally, Congress would update the 35-year-old Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to make sure that minor transgressions — the sort that are best addressed by company human resources departments and not by federal prosecutors — do not lead to criminal charges. But the United States Congress isn’t exactly a fully functional body right now.
And so, in the absence of a working legislature, Barrett’s opinion provides some relief to anyone who is afraid they might be arrested for not being entirely honest on their Tinder profile.
Three years ago Google announced a service called Duplex at their I/O conference. They also played purported demos of Duplex in action. I was highly skeptical, and cast doubt that the demos Google offered were legitimate. A lot of people gave me a lot of shit about my skepticism.
In a follow-up post, after Google provided a handful of journalists with a very limited hands-on demo, I wrote:
Right now it feels like a feature in search of a product, but they
pitched it as an imminent product at I/O because it made for a
stunning demo. (It remains the only thing announced at I/O that
anyone is talking about.) If what Google really wanted was just
for Google Assistant to be able to make restaurant reservations,
they’d be better off building an OpenTable competitor and giving
it away to all these small businesses that don’t yet offer online
reservations. I’m not holding my breath for Duplex ever to allow
anyone to make a reservation at any establishment.
Three years later and I’m still not holding my breath.
Update: Apparently Duplex has launched, but it’s unclear how often the AI system — not human operators — make the phone calls. Would love to hear some recordings of this in action.
As a first step, the partnership will offer Deutsche Telekom’s customers a co-branded version of RingCentral Video (RCV) as a lead stand-alone video solution
BELMONT, CA – – RingCentral, Inc. (NYSE: RNG), a leading provider of global enterprise cloud communications, video meetings, collaboration, and contact center solutions, today announced a partnership with Deutsche Telekom to transform business communications for customers of all sizes.
With Deutsche Telekom’s extensive network presence and RingCentral’s deep Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) and Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) capabilities, the partnership will deliver mobility-centric, flexible, easy to use, and secure cloud communication solutions. This will bring the benefits of next-generation communications and collaboration capabilities to companies of every size. As a first step, the partnership will offer Deutsche Telekom’s customers a co-branded version of RingCentral Video (RCV) as a lead stand-alone video solution, which delivers reliable, secure, open, video meetings and team messaging based on RingCentral’s leading Message Video Phone (MVP) platform.
Hagen Rickmann, Managing Director Business Customers Telekom Deutschland GmbH, said, “For many years, we have been accompanying customers on their way to the cloud. The cooperation with RingCentral adds an important signpost to this. Together we will support customers in the introduction of modern business cloud communication solutions. This ensures that people can work productively and efficiently from anywhere – a sustainable contribution to success and growth in a rapidly changing world of work.”
“We’re looking forward to working closely with Deutsche Telekom to combine their amazing 4G and 5G networks with the world’s best cloud-based communications solution that includes team messaging, video meetings, and cloud phone system, to empower organizations and their people to communicate efficiently with their customers, partners, and other employees,” said Anand Eswaran, RingCentral’s President and COO.
Deutsche Telekom will introduce the new solution to customers in the second half of 2021.
RingCentral, Inc. (NYSE: RNG) is a leading provider of business cloud communications and contact center solutions based on its powerful Message Video Phone (MVP) global platform. More flexible and cost effective than legacy on-premises PBX and video conferencing systems that it replaces, RingCentral empowers modern mobile and distributed workforces to communicate, collaborate, and connect via any mode, any device, and any location. RingCentral offers three key products in its portfolio including RingCentral MVP, a Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) platform including team messaging, video meetings, and cloud phone system; RingCentral Video, the company’s video meetings solution with team messaging that enables Smart Video Meetings; and RingCentral cloud Contact Center solutions. RingCentral’s open platform integrates with leading third-party business applications and enables customers to easily customize business workflows. RingCentral is headquartered in Belmont, California, and has offices around the world.
As the COVID-19 pandemic has driven an office exodus and cemented work-from-home and distributed workforces as common business structures, companies have been forced to find ways to work efficiently in these new formats. Spurwing, an API-first appointment scheduling business, provides developers with tools for building scheduling integrations that promise to relieve some of the pain points that come from remote work.
New packages combine the powerful telephony capabilities of NEC UNIVERGE BLUE with the trusted, reliable Microsoft Teams
Irving, Texas – May 26, 2021 – Today, NEC Corporation of America is announcing the availability of two new cloud-based unified communications packages for customers who have deployed Microsoft Teams in various capacities, UNIVERGE BLUE CONNECT “WITH” Microsoft Teams and UNIVERGE BLUE CONNECT “FOR” Microsoft Teams.
UNIVERGE BLUE CONNECT “WITH” Microsoft Teams and UNIVERGE BLUE CONNECT “FOR” Microsoft Teams packages come fully integrated with NEC’s comprehensive, cloud-based unified communications solution, UNIVERGE BLUE CONNECT. The new packages combine the best of both solutions by enabling customers to use Microsoft Teams for collaboration and NEC UNIVERGE BLUE CONNECT for business-grade, cloud-based phone system features, such as SMS, contact center, and advanced call routing.
“Microsoft Teams saw a tremendous uptick in user adoption in 2020 and succeeding months. Knowing that many of our customers use Microsoft Teams, developing a solution that complements Microsoft Teams was a natural next step for our UNIVERGE BLUE CONNECT platform,” said Ram Menghani, President of Product Development for NEC Enterprise Communications Technologies. “By combining the strengths of UNIVERGE BLUE and Microsoft Teams, our customers get the best of both products with industry-leading cloud-based collaboration, contact center, and telephony capabilities.”
Customers can choose between integrating the power of UNIVERGE BLUE CONNECT within the Microsoft Teams application or using a Microsoft Teams-specific version of UNIVERGE BLUE CONNECT to work side-by-side Microsoft Teams to enhance their business communications, depending on their unique business needs.
UNIVERGE BLUE CONNECT “WITH” Microsoft Teams is designed for businesses that have oriented their collaboration around Microsoft Teams but require the advanced telephony features of an enterprise PBX. Customers can continue using Microsoft Teams to manage chat, file sharing, and video conferencing while taking advantage of UNIVERGE BLUE CONNECT for all phone-related services, including SMS and advanced call routing, directly within Microsoft Teams.
To ensure a user-friendly, confusion-free experience, all UNIVERGE BLUE CONNECT collaboration features (i.e., chat, meetings, and file sharing) are disabled. Single sign-on (SSO) capabilities also allow users to seamlessly sign into UNIVERGE BLUE CONNECT using their MS365 credentials.
UNIVERGE BLUE CONNECT “FOR” Microsoft Teams is designed for businesses looking to add reliable, comprehensive PBX into their Microsoft Teams application. By integrating UNIVERGE BLUE CONNECT PBX within Teams, users gain access to enhanced, enterprise-grade telephony features, including unlimited local and long-distance calling, voicemail, call history, and basic calling features.
Customers can continue using Microsoft Teams for collaboration (i.e., chat, file sharing, and video conferencing) while benefiting from the advanced PBX features of UNIVERGE BLUE CONNECT, including auto attendant, call queuing, automatic company-wide call recording, and more. All calls are managed, routed, and placed using the familiar Microsoft Team interface, making it highly user friendly with no training required.
About NEC Corporation of America
NEC Corporation of America (NEC) is a leading technology integrator providing solutions that improve the way people work and communicate. NEC delivers integrated Solutions for Society that are aligned with our customers’ priorities to create new value for people, businesses and society, with a special focus on safety, security and efficiency. We deliver one of the industry’s strongest and most innovative portfolios of communications, analytics, security, biometrics and technology solutions that unleash customers’ productivity potential. Through these solutions, NEC combines its best-in-class solutions and technology, and leverages a robust partner ecosystem to solve today’s most complex business problems. NEC Corporation of America is a wholly-owned subsidiary of NEC Corporation, a global technology leader with a presence in 160 countries and $25 billion in revenues.
NEC has made its UCaaS solution UNIVERGE BLUE CONNECT available to resellers and customers worldwide.
The solution offers fully integrated conferencing, collaboration, screen sharing, and video conferencing capabilities available from desktop or mobile devices.
Initially launched in the US in April 2020, UNIVERGE BLUE is now available to partners in the UK, certain territories in EMEA, Australia, and elsewhere. NEC stated that feedback from its US ecosystem indicated that “thousands” of resellers and businesses benefitted from the flexible solution that supports the shift to a distributed workforce.
The comms provider is also making its CCaaS solution UNIVERGE BLUE ENGAGE available globally. The solutions can cater to businesses of all sizes, from SMBs to enterprises.
UK & Ireland Sales Director, Andrew Cooper, stated:
“As arguably one of the broadest cloud platforms available, UNIVERGE BLUE enables telecoms, collaboration, backup, security, webinars, file sharing, and more within a single solution. If purchased from different vendors, all these have their own costs along with the resources to maintain and integrate them. If these are consolidated and streamlined, the cost of ownership is lowered considerably.
“Businesses can also benefit from monthly billing – users only pay for what they use and user licenses can be altered month by month.
“On-boarding partners should be empowering, not burdening. Our partner programme philosophy is ‘We work for you’ with partners getting to maintain control of customer ownership.”
UNIVERGE BLUE CONNECT and ENGAGE are now available to NEC’s UK channel partner community and customers. This marks the third phase of a global rollout, with remaining international partners expected to be able to avail of the solutions by the end of this year.
NEC’s go-to-market strategy will be maintaining the indirect sales channel using selected resellers across the UK and has chosen Nimans as its launching partner distributor.
Nimans’ Dealer Sales Director, Tom Maxwell, said: “Unlike other cloud telephony solutions, the UNIVERGE BLUE partner programme enables resellers to stay close to their customers with greater control of pricing and billing.
“There’s a real focus on making the initial on-boarding as simple as possible – resellers can choose the partner model they’re most comfortable to start with and take it from there.”
Darren Scott-Healey, CEO of partner Taylor Made Solutions, added, “What sets UNIVERGE BLUE CONNECT apart from the competition is the strength of the voice capabilities with over 100-plus telephony features.
“Building from there, the video conferencing, file sharing and contact centre packages provide an easy path for upgrades. Our customers quickly identify the advantages of more streamlined IT administration and costs by combining their cloud services with us.”
‘Nobelium launched this week’s attacks by gaining access to the Constant Contact account of the United States Agency for International Development,’ says Tom Burt, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of customer security and trust.
It’s been just over three weeks since the Epic v. Apple proceedings kicked off, and the news has been relentless. So as we wait for a verdict to roll in, we’re taking a quick turn through all the biggest takeaways from the trial. A lot of the juiciest points didn’t speak directly to the verdict — like the profit structure of the Xbox or the troubled history of Fortnite crossplay — but that’s part of the fun of a massive trans-corporate dustup like this. Once you start digging through CEO Tim Cook’s inbox, all sorts of interesting stuff comes out.
1] Apple keeps iMessage closed in order to sell more iPhones
We’ve known for a while that Apple isn’t going to make iMessage available outside of iOS devices, but this trial showed exactly how...
A company looking to build a massive solar project in Butte, Montana claims it would provide 300MW of renewable power and cost $250 million, Gizmodo reported. That’s according to Madison River Equity LLC, whose parent company also manages cryptomining outfit Atlas Power. As Gizmodo reports, Madison would build the solar array, then sell it to Atlas, which hopes to use it to power its cryptocurrency mining operations. If the solar farm, dubbed the Basin Creek Solar Project, is actually built, it could be one of the largest in the US, but it raises questions about the impact of such projects, and about crypto’s impact on energy.
While the project would theoretically allow Atlas’ mining and other data center operations to run on renewable...
SINGAPORE – – Vonage (Nasdaq:VG), a global leader in cloud communications helping businesses accelerate their digital transformation, announced that the Company has been positioned as a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Communications Platform as a Service 2021 Vendor Assessment (Doc # US46746221, May 2021).
Focused on Vonage’s Communications APIs – Voice, Video, Messaging, Authentication – which are powered by the single, integrated Vonage Communications Platform (VCP), the report notes the Company’s ability to offer expertise across a broad range of verticals, including regionally specific regulatory and compliance knowledge. The report also highlights the power of the VCP strategy and its comprehensive platform with a modern microservices-based architecture that allows customers to leverage a broad range of communications solutions.
“With the strength of the Vonage Communications Platform, Vonage is well positioned to provide businesses undergoing digital transformation with intelligent, reliable and scalable regional or global customer engagement solutions,” said Courtney Munroe, Vice President, Worldwide Telecommunications Research for IDC. “This is the second time Vonage has been named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape for CPaaS, which is a testament to its Communications API platform and offering, as well as its ability to innovate the ways in which its customers can leverage APIs to change the way they do business.”
“We are excited to be named a Leader once again. There has been a secular change in the way businesses operate, driving a communications revolution across all industries and modes of communications,” said Savinay Berry, EVP of Product and Engineering for Vonage. “Our Vonage Communications Platform enables businesses – across any industry – to address the changing needs of customers today and to meet the needs of the future.”
The IDC MarketScape report notes that Vonage punches well above its size in the CPaaS market and that its API Platform is the center of the single, integrated VCP that brings together applications such as its unified communications and contact center offering that facilitate a seamless experience for its end users. By executing on the Company’s VCP strategy, the report also predicts that Vonage “can emerge as the broadest CPaaS platform on the market.”
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. Vonage Holdings Corp. is headquartered in New Jersey, with offices throughout the United States, Europe, Israel, and Asia.
About IDC MarketScape
IDC MarketScape vendor assessment model is designed to provide an overview of the competitive fitness of ICT (information and communications technology) suppliers in a given market. The research methodology utilizes a rigorous scoring methodology based on both qualitative and quantitative criteria that results in a single graphical illustration of each vendor’s position within a given market. IDC MarketScape provides a clear framework in which the product and service offerings, capabilities and strategies, and current and future market success factors of IT and telecommunications vendors can be meaningfully compared. The framework also provides technology buyers with a 360-degree assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of current and prospective vendors.
Microsoft has teamed up with Qualcomm to create a Windows on ARM-based dev kit for developers. The miniature PC will be sold at the Microsoft Store this summer, and is designed to be more affordable to encourage developers to create ARM64 apps for Snapdragon-based PCs.
Until now, developers have had to purchase devices like the Surface Pro X to fully test their ARM64 apps on Windows. That’s a costly exercise for developers, particularly when the Surface Pro X retails from $999 and up. While Microsoft and Qualcomm haven’t put a price on this new dev kit, there are promises it will be more affordable than what developers can buy today.
Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
The Surface Pro X was one of only a...
Microsoft first let developers build third-party apps into Teams last year, but the company is going a step further at Build 2021 today. In a push to get more app developers building for Teams, Microsoft is opening up its crucial APIs, Teams Store, and tools to what it calls collaborative apps.
Developers will soon be able to build apps that plug into the Teams meeting canvas, ones that use in-app purchases or subscriptions, and even create separate apps that get access to Teams’ real-time video and audio streams. “If you can build web apps, you can build extensions into Teams chats, channels, and meetings,” explains Jeff Teper, head of Microsoft 365 collaboration, in an interview with The Verge. “You can build once, run, deploy...
Are you planning to stick with Google Photos when its free unlimited storage disappears on June 1st? If you’re anything like me, you’re probably still struggling to figure out whether you can afford to procrastinate that decision a little bit longer — and today, Google has made that reckoning a little bit easier.
First off, the company’s finally telling it like it is: Google will no longer pretend its compressed, lower-quality photos and videos are “High quality,” something that would have saved me a lengthy explanation just last week! (After June 1st, existing Google Pixel phone owners still get unlimited “High quality” photos, but if you’re on, say, a Samsung or iPhone instead, it’s not like there was ever a “Normal quality” photo...
Will the mall ever look the way it used to? | iStockphoto/Getty Images
The pandemic has changed how Americans shop, from wider aisles to curbside pickup.
With two shots of Pfizer in her arm, Bri Blair recently did something she hadn’t risked since before the pandemic: She went to the mall.
She met up with her mom at a shopping center near her home in North Carolina to try on clothes at Belk and Earthbound Trading Company, eat chicken and rice in the food court, and generally reimmerse herself in society. And though there were some notable differences compared with the Before Times — masked shoppers, hand sanitizer stations, plastic bags covering the water fountains — she says she was surprised by how many other people were there.
After more than a year of quarantining and social distancing, being out in such a public space was a strange experience.
“I felt like I was hyperaware of everyone, for sure,” Blair says. Still, that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing: She looked people in the eyes, took advantage of the dressing rooms, and appreciated the novelty of the store environment. “I was pretty immersed in the experience,” she added.
With nearly 40 percent of Americans fully vaccinated — a share that is ticking up by the day — and most states easing pandemic restrictions and planning full reopenings, shoppers are slowly emerging from behind their screens and returning to stores. And even as some retail workers are hesitant to come back to (or continue with) what has been an especially grueling job this year, companies are also working on a host of changes that may one day make their jobs obsolete.
US retail sales jumped 10.7 percent in March as a third round of stimulus checks padded consumers’ pockets, according to the US Department of Commerce. Apparel sales more than doubled over the same month last year, while sales at department stores rose 13 percent above their February levels. In April, sales were flat as the stimulus bump receded, though economists point to the sustained improvement over 2020’s dismal figures — and Americans’ increasing comfort with indoor activities — as reasons for hope.
“When provided with the ability and the possibility of spending in a safe way, consumers have the desire to do so”
“What we’ve seen in the latest data is that when provided with the ability and the possibility of spending in a safe way, consumers have the means and the desire to do so,” says Gregory Daco, chief US economist at Oxford Economics.
Already, the spending surge has contributed to rising prices in some categories, especially those where the demand for goods has most outstripped the supply of inputs, Daco says. Currently, inflation is hitting sectors such as tech and home building, which have been impacted by shortages in semiconductors and lumber alongside skyrocketing demand. As new parts of the economy reopen, though, Daco expects prices to adjust accordingly, with inflation shifting from goods to services such as flights, hotel rooms, and sporting events. (Though, as other experts have admitted, it’s impossible to say exactly what the economy will do in the pandemic’s aftermath.)
“Inflation at this stage of the recovery is almost unavoidable … but that does not mean that it’s uncontrollable,” he says, explaining it will take time for spending patterns to normalize and for supply to catch up to demand.
While foot traffic in stores hasn’t caught up to pre-pandemic highs, the country’s best malls are seeing improvement. Among a sample of 52 Class A malls, foot traffic in April was down just 18.7 percent from 2019 levels, analytics company Placer.ai told Vox in an interview. That was a marked gain even from March, when traffic was off by 23.7 percent.
With new cases of Covid-19 on the decline across most of the country and plans for weddings, concerts, and vacations on the horizon again, retailers anticipate a spending boom. After all, as ads for beer and shapewear now suggest, what better way to get “back to normal” than to buy new stuff?
But just because vaccinated Americans can safely shop like they used to doesn’t mean all of them will. Some have moved to the suburbs and now frequent strip malls instead of street-level boutiques; others have changed jobs and routines. Some won’t be going back to the office every day, so they’re less likely to buy a new dress shirt or pop into the downtown shops after work. Many have also grown accustomed to the ease of curbside pickup and now expect their trips to the store to be as quick and convenient as checking out online.
Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Masked shoppers inside a Manhattan mall.
Even though e-commerce accounts for only about 14 percent of consumer spending in the US today, according to the Census Bureau, it may still be an existential threat to tens of thousands of existing stores. A recent UBS report forecasts 80,000 retail store closures, representing 9 percent of the country’s total retail footprint, by 2026. The report suggests more stores will close as Americans do more of their shopping online — a trend UBS says has only been exacerbated by the pandemic.
Back in February, as many as one in four US consumers said they no longer enjoyed the in-person shopping experience and didn’t feel safe shopping in stores, according to a global IBM survey.
Karl Haller, a partner at IBM Global Business Services, expects these concerns to flag, though, so long as local public health outlooks continue to improve. “As people are getting vaccinated and as restrictions are getting relaxed, safety will probably slowly migrate down in terms of its active importance in the minds of consumers, unless or until there is an outbreak of some sort,” Haller says.
While conspicuous Lysoling, mandatory hand sanitizer stations, and UV disinfection robots roaming the aisles — which the Atlantic’s Derek Thompson called “hygiene theater” — may assuage some customers’ aversion to germs, they don’t necessarily make for an enjoyable shopping experience. Do you really want to be reminded of the looming threat of plague when you’re trying to buy face cream?
A more subtle shift that could outlast the pandemic is more spacious store layouts, says MJ Munsell, chief creative officer at architecture design and strategy firm MG2. In the past 20 or so years, fixture spacing has tightened to accommodate more and more merchandise, she says. And while the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 sets some requirements for retailers — aisles must be at least 3 feet wide, for example — social distancing has awakened many companies to the value of a little extra breathing room.
“[Retailers] are realizing that it is a customer amenity to provide more space, to not feel crowded, to not feel like you’re going to bump into someone else when you’re shopping deeper into a store,” Munsell says.
Grocery chains and garden centers now tout their “massive aisles” alongside their low prices and merchandise selections. Contactless checkout sections are also here to stay, with Walmart rolling out its self-checkout kiosks in 1,000 additional stores this year. The country’s largest retailer is even testing a new format that would eliminate cashier-staffed checkouts entirely.
Retailers that added or expanded their fulfillment options — among them curbside pickup; buy online, pick up in-store; and ship-from-store — during the pandemic are now finding that they have to more seamlessly integrate those processes into their store designs.
Grocery giant Publix, for instance, recently debuted a new store format that includes a permanent online order hub, pharmacy drive-through, and designated parking spots for grocery pickup. The head of store operations at Ulta Beauty, meanwhile, told Morning Brew that it is renegotiating some store leases to include parking spots for curbside pickup.
Convenience is just one feature that retailers are ramping up. Many are also recognizing that people need a good reason to shop in-store when the same products can be found quickly and easily online.
“There can no longer be what I would call a Field of Dreams mindset when thinking about stores. It is not a ‘build it and they will come’ philosophy,” says Haller.
At the arts-and-crafts chain Michaels, new concept stores will include “maker spaces” with free supplies, classes, and crafting tutorials. Dick’s Sporting Goods, meanwhile, opened its first House of Sport megastore in April, featuring an indoor rock-climbing wall, batting cage, golf driving bays, and outdoor track and field that will be converted into a skating rink during the winter.
Lindsay Binette, director of field marketing at WS Development, says foot traffic is almost back at pre-pandemic levels at most of the company’s properties, which include the Boston Seaport and Tampa Bay’s Hyde Park Village. The Instagram-friendly ear-piercing studio Studs opened this month at The Current, the Seaport’s pop-up village, while Tampa customers are flocking back to the custom candlemaking shop The Candle Pour.
“People are really looking for more of that sense of discovery that you can experience in-store that you can’t experience when you’re online,” says Binette.
While retailers were already making more efforts to tailor each of their stores to the unique tastes and demographics of local markets prior to the pandemic, that task became especially urgent in a year when people rarely ventured far from their homes.
Nike is betting on this strategy with its Nike Live stores, which leverage data about customers’ buying patterns and engagement to “provide the ultimate localized brick-and-mortar shopping experience.” To that end, shoppers visiting the Nike Live boutique in Tokyo will have an experience very different from those visiting the store in Atlanta.
“It’s no longer a rubber stamp from store to store. You’re starting to see a real different mix based on the patterns of purchase that are happening in a particular community, and that’s really going to help make brands more relevant,” says Lara Marrero, strategy director and retail practice leader at Gensler, a global design and architecture firm.
Only 1,600 mall-based department stores remain in the US, and half of them are expected to be shuttered by the end of 2025
If all retailers could be more like Nike, perhaps the outlook for America’s malls and brick-and-mortar stores would be brighter, but as it is, most experts predict that the glut of mediocre retail is unlikely to survive for long. Last year, a record 12,200 stores closed in the US, according to an analysis by the commercial real estate firm CoStar Group. About a third of them were department stores, clothing chains, and other mall-based properties. Department stores have an especially challenging road ahead: Only 1,600 mall-based locations remain in the US — down about 40 percent since 2016 — and half of them are expected to be shuttered by the end of 2025, according to Green Street Advisors.
Matt Anthony has seen what happens when a department store closes up shop. The Akron, Ohio, resident saw the writing on the wall when Macy’s left his local mall in 2016, and again when Sears and J.C. Penney followed suit soon thereafter. Last year, with no anchor stores remaining, the mall entered foreclosure proceedings, and just recently the property was bought by a developer who plans to turn it into a business park.
Anthony had witnessed this kind of decline a decade prior at the mall across town, which lost Dillard’s, Target, and Macy’s before shuttering in 2008. The property sat mostly vacant for years, earning its place in the annals of dead malls thanks to photos of its snow-covered atrium, the skylights caved in from neglect. Today, though, the site of the former mall is once again bustling with activity: On November 1, 2020, Amazon opened a distribution center where it once stood.
Akron has one remaining (and, fortunately, far more successful) mall, and Anthony and his wife recently drove there on a Friday night to run errands and enjoy a social experience after so many months hunkered down at home.
“It felt really good to be out among people again,” he says. “Just being able to meander and wander, given the fact that we’ve just spent the past year or more not being able to be near other people, was to me really refreshing.”
Going to Summit Mall was like “walking back in time to 20 years ago,” he says. The parking lot was full, Macy’s was open for business, and people seemed to be happy to be there. While he expects it will be a luxury one day to be able to, say, walk into a camera shop to ask a question rather than firing up a chat window with a faceless customer service person online, his trip to the mall that night reminded him that there are certain aspects of the brick-and-mortar experience that can’t be replaced online.
“It kind of harkens back to what it once was,” he says. “I wish we would have appreciated it a little earlier in the process before we gave our life over to Jeff Bezos.”
Slack Connect has seen “exceptional growth” since its offical launch last year, CEO Stuart Butterfield revealed in his keynote presentation at Slack Frontiers’ EMEA Summit.
Billed as a replacement for email, Slack Connect is a secure communications platform, located within Slack Channels that enables up to 20 partners – external and internal – to collaborate, react to messages and share documents.
Slack released UK growth stats in tandem with the Frontiers event. For the UK market, revenue grew 31 percent year-on-year for its FY21, while paying customers rocketed 94 percent.
Butterfield also revealed that 74,000 organisations are now using Connect, an increase of over 100 percent year-on-year and that the number of connected endpoints jumped 245 percent year-on-year.
“The reaction to Connect has been pretty incredible,” he told attendees of the virtual event.
“People are finding it so much easier to support customers using a shared channel. We are finding that people on the sell-side – people who sell software, other services, a lot of the world’s biggest consulting organisations, a lot of the world’s biggest purchasers – are on it because they want to receive that level of responsiveness and support. Its been entirely driven by customers coming up with new use cases.
“This was part of the vision of Slack from the very beginning and it took us years to get to this point, but now that it’s happening, it’s everything that we dreamed it would be.”
Slack’s New Innovations
The vendor revealed that the number of apps built by developers for the Slack platform increased by 37 percent year-on-year since January 2020, while the number of custom apps built by customers for the Slack platform increasing by 51 percent, representing the largest increase in Europe.
Elsewhere in the presentation, Butterfield spoke of the future of work and how organisations should use the lessons learned from remote working this past year to ensure the same level of efficiency is retained when employees return to the office.
“If you ask managers or leaders ‘could your company improve the overall efficacy and productivity of its meetings by 20 percent?’ almost everyone would say yes,” he stated.
“If the majority of your employees are spending most of their day in meetings, why are you doing that? Why are people spending half of their time on basic acts of communication and coordination – like updating the status report to review – not on interesting, creative, strategic brainstorm conversations? I do think those [basic acts] are critically important because that’s how you stay aligned and able to accomplish things with a large group of people – but it is a tremendous amount of effort.
“When you start to move to a digital-first approach, it’s an opportunity to re-examine the ways that you’re working and see which ones serve you and which ones don’t and what things you’d like to change in the future.”
As part of the lessons Slack has learned over the course of the past 15 months, Butterfield elaborated on some of the product innovations it has seen developed to combat the limitations of remote working.
Huddles – which is currently being tested with customers – is an always-on audio channel intended to recreate the spontaneity of in-person conversations between small teams.
“You can just enter the huddle by yourself and have your speakers on and be working away and if someone else joins in and say something you’ll hear them like you would overhear someone at your desk,” he explained.
“It’s not intended for huge groups of a thousand people, it’s for the people that you work with most closely on a team level. This ability to have the conversation right now turns out to be super valuable because the alternative is [arranging a meeting time that suits everyone].”
The other product it has been developing doesn’t have a name yet but is intended to be a “container” for asynchronous meetings, similar to Instagram or Snapchat stories, Butterfield said. It allows users to attach a presentation, planning materials, the agenda or planning documents that it allows people to attend it in their own time.
“The biggest advantage is that it gives people some flexibility. Any process today that you can make asynchronous – even if it doesn’t reduce the total number of hours worked – is still enormously valuable to people because some people like to work early in the morning and some people would rather work in the evening,” he said.
“It helps people in multiple time zones and it also helps people who like to take a little bit more time to formulate their thoughts before giving feedback.”
The Federal Communications Commission voted unanimously Thursday to lower some of the rates incarcerated people and their families pay to speak over the phone. For jurisdictional reasons, the measure only applies to interstate or international calls.
The Commission approved a measure that prohibits companies like Global Tel Link and Pay Tel Communications from charging families and incarcerated people more than 12 cents a minute in large prisons and 14 cents a minute in large jails for out-of-state calls. Previously, rates were capped at 21 cents a minute and single conversations could total several dollars. The action also caps international calling services for the first time.
“Recognizing the exigent circumstances caused by the...
Slack experienced frustrating issues for many on Thursday, including for some of us here at The Verge. For me, some messages just wouldn’t send. But a little more than an hour after Slack first reported the outage, the company said that the issues were resolved.
“We’ve released a fix for this issue, and Slack is up and running once again,” Slack said in a post on its status site at 2:36PM ET. “If you are still experiencing any trouble, please fully quit your Slack app or browser using Command + Q (Mac) or Ctrl + Q (Windows/Linux), and then reopen it.” Slack first posted about the outage at 1:17PM ET.
The next time there’s a Slack outage, I highly recommend you cruise Twitter to see the ridiculous memes and GIFs that people post. You...
Vertex AI, Multitask Unified Model technology, the LaMDA open-domain language model for dialog applications, Google Maps updates and AR Athletes on Google Search were among the highlights from the developer conference.
Let’s talk about some big changes announced to the platform where many of us get a lot of work done: Google Workspace, home to the suite of cloud-based tools that includes Docs.
The relative stagnation of Docs in a rapidly evolving world of productivity tools has been an ongoing fascination for me. When I’m writing for myself, I use slick, modern tools like Notion, Bear, and (more recently) Substack. But when I write for others, it’s most often in Docs, which launched 15 years ago and looks more or less the same as it has since the late 2000s.
For casual users of Docs, the entire conversation can end here
Create a new document in any other digital writing tool and you see an infinite canvas; in Docs you see a picture of an 8.5 x 11-inch...
Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase is experiencing a “partial” outage this morning for its entire site and application. Additionally, both Coinbase and Binance are reporting issues specifically focused around withdrawals of Etherium and ERC-20 tokens this morning due to “network congestion.”
“We’re seeing some issues on Coinbase and Coinbase Pro and we’re aware some features may not be functioning completely normal. We’re currently investigating these issues and will provide updates as soon as possible,” Coinbase commented in a statement.
The outage comes in the midst of a massive cryptocurrency plunge over the past week — and particularly the past 24 hours — that has seen the price of some of the most popular...
‘We believe LaMDA’s natural conversation capabilities have the potential to make information and computing radically more accessible and easier to use,’ Pichai said.
(MVP
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Spencer Platt/Getty Images
