Microsoft is confirming today that it no longer plans to release Windows 10X. The operating was originally supposed to arrive alongside new dual-screen devices like the Surface Neo, with a more lightweight and simplified interface and features. This was all before the pandemic hit, and Microsoft then decided to prioritize Windows 10X for single-screen laptops instead. Windows 10X is now officially over, and Microsoft is now planning to bring its best bits into Windows 10.
“Instead of bringing a product called Windows 10X to market in 2021 like we originally intended, we are leveraging learnings from our journey thus far and accelerating the integration of key foundational 10X technology into other parts of Windows and products at the...
Google is working on a next-gen video chat booth that makes the person you’re chatting with appear in front of you in 3D. You can see them from different angles by moving around and even make eye contact, Google said during a preview of the project at its I/O conference today.
The system is called “Project Starline,” and it’s basically a really, really fancy video chat setup. The platform uses multiple cameras and sensors to capture a person’s appearance and shape from different perspectives. It then stitches those together into a 3D model that’s broadcast in real time to whomever they’re chatting with. In Google’s preview, Starline was used for person-to-person calls (not group chats), and both sides seemed to be using specialized tech...
Google just finished its live Google I/O 2021 keynote, where the company unveiled a huge number of announcements, including a new look coming to Android, a bunch of features coming to its Google Workspace productivity suite, and even a new AI that talked as if it were Pluto.
Nilay Patel and Dieter Bohn followed the whole thing in real time right here on our live blog.But if you just want to get caught up on the biggest news from the show, read on for our recap.
Google revealed that Android 12 will have a brand-new “Material You” design with a whole lot of new changes. It offers a lot of color and customization, and the new mobile OS will even be able to...
New app container technology integrated with Microsoft Defender Application Guard and other products, an upgraded Voice Typing experience and key sizing, sounds, colors and animations on touch keyboards are examples of 10X integrations already added to Windows preview builds.
Ride-sharing companies are pushing to make a third category of “independent” worker the law of the land. Drivers say the notion of independence is little more than a mirage.
Erica Mighetto has been a driver for ride-hail platforms for four years, and has stories, she says, that span the spectrum “from being solicited for sex to meeting some great people that are still my friends to this day.”
When she got started, she expected it to be a transitional thing, a gig between more permanent jobs. She’d worked in accounting for 15 years and was employed by a property management company where, she says, “a lot of my role became evicting people from their homes, and I just wasn’t happy there.” But she actually liked being a driver more than she’d thought, and at first, with Lyft, she was making decent money — an average of $40 an hour.
“I really enjoyed getting away from the cubicle and into the world and sharing people’s experiences,” she says. “I always said that I really loved having the word on the street. You find out not just the best places to eat but the best person to do your taxes, everything that’s going on in your community. You have a real finger on the pulse.”
Mighetto, 39, is from Sacramento, California, and she used to drive to the Bay Area every now and then to work for a long weekend and make more money; she could bring in as much as $80 an hour on a holiday or during a big event. The company offered bonuses for many things: a hot streak — say, $15 for three rides in a row in a prescribed time frame, or sign-on bonuses if they referred another driver, or weekly bonuses for a certain number of rides. But as time went on, she says, echoing many drivers from both Lyft and Uber, she found that her bonuses were lower, and suddenly, she was making the hour-and-a-half drive every weekend just to get by. “They kept moving the goalposts,” she says.
The experience was much the same for Seydou Ouattara, a driver for Uber in New York. When he began driving in 2016, he was doing pretty well, but over the years, he says, “I was working more hours for Uber, but I was making less money.”
Mighetto’s and Ouattara’s experiences — of both promised freedom and frustration — are increasingly common in the United States as the “gig economy” grows. Companies like Uber and Lyft have argued that gig workers need to be excluded from employee status to preserve their flexibility, and that most of their drivers are part-time hustlers, not full-time professional drivers.
Since Uber launched in 2011 as “UberCab” with the aim of “disrupting” the taxi industry, the gig economy has exploded into a variety of fields and classified swaths of workers as independent contractors rather than employees. That allows companies to avoid minimum wage and overtime laws as well as unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation, and payroll taxes.
This is billed as innovation, but it’s actually a tactic that goes back more than a century. US labor law history is rife with different groups of workers being carved out of protections because their work wasn’t really seen as work.
Modern-day gig workers such as Mighetto and Ouattara have been pushing back, arguing that the amount of control the apps exercise over them (not to mention the big money they make for the gig companies) means that the work they do should come with the benefits of being an employee.
Last November, California passed a ballot initiative called Proposition 22, cementing Mighetto and her colleagues in semi-employee status. They still don’t get state unemployment, discrimination protections, sick leave, or collective bargaining rights, though they do have some bare-minimum guarantees of pay while actually carrying a passenger. The minimums were sold as a baseline that increased driver rights, but one study by University of California Berkeley researchers found that the guarantee could actually only be “the equivalent of a wage of $5.64 per hour.”
Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images
An iPhone with the Lyft ride-hailing app on it shows cars in the area.
“I’m a driver,” Mighetto says, “and that doesn’t give anyone license to treat me like a third-class citizen.”
In response to requests from Vox for comment, representatives for Uber and Lyft defended their model and practices, offering surveys and articles they contend show that drivers prefer their independent contractor status. “Driver earnings are currently at an all-time high in many of our markets,” a spokesperson for Lyft wrote in an email.
Workers across the country are now worried that the effects of Prop 22 will spread, institutionalizing a “third category” of workers well beyond Uber and Lyft drivers who have fewer rights than regular employees but also lack the real autonomy of actual freelancers — and that it might happen under a Democratic administration, and with the sign-off of some labor unions.
In other words, we’re at an inflection point, potentially for the entire American working class. Will labor figure out how to organize workers in dire conditions across the broad spectrum of “tech”-enabled jobs, from Amazon to Uber? Or are workers going to continue to see their conditions deteriorate, even as executives at the top just get richer?
In 2019, the clutch went out on Mighetto’s car, so she was driving for Lyft in a rental car to make the $1,500 she needed for the repair. (Lyft, she explains, has a rental partnership so drivers can get rentals to use for work.) Mighetto thought she could offset the cost of the rental with a particular bonus, but the number of rides she needed to do to get that bonus seemed to keep creeping upward.
“I had six rides left, and I thought, ‘I’m sacrificing my own safety and the safety of my passenger. I just can’t do it. I’m exhausted.’ I was so infuriated that I took to the internet, looking for other people who were as outraged as I was. And there was this action the following day. I took it as a sign I needed to be there.”
It happened to be the night before Uber’s initial public offering, and drivers around the world had organized a day of protest. Mighetto had found her people.
“I’d never, never done anything like that,” she says of the protest. “In our cars, we’re really isolated, and we don’t have a lot of interaction with our fellow workers. So it was really wonderful to be in a community and to realize that I wasn’t the only one out there that was feeling mistreated.”
As Mighetto got involved in driver organizing and eventually became a member of Rideshare Drivers United, an organization of Uber and Lyft drivers fighting for legal rights and unionization, California’s Assembly Bill 5 (AB 5) was moving through the legislature. An attempt to expand protections for gig workers that predated Prop 22, the bill codified the three-part “ABC test” that the state supreme court had recently laid out, making it harder for gig economy companies to classify workers as independent contractors.
The ABC test laid out three requirements that must be met in order for a worker to qualify as an independent contractor. Labor lawyer Brandon Magner explains it as a three-pronged test: “The A prong is that you have to be free from the company’s control. The B prong says you have to be doing work that isn’t central to the company’s business. And the C prong says you’re an independent business in that industry.”
For Mighetto and other drivers, who have their rates set and rides assigned by an Uber- or Lyft-controlled app and who are carrying out the company’s main — indeed, only — service, the ABC test meant that they’d be seen as employees under wage and hour laws, eligible for minimum wage and overtime protections. So Mighetto took to organizing. She even made her own flyers explaining what AB 5 would do for drivers.
When AB 5 became law in 2019, Mighetto says, “It was a huge victory for workers.” And she began to see changes — she switched to driving for Uber after the company added new features in its app. “They would tell you where you were going all of a sudden; you were able to see how much you stood to make on a particular ride. At that point, you have the ability to choose whether or not you wanted to take that ride.”
Uber was trying to prove that the drivers were truly independent. But at the same time, Mighetto says, the companies were also ramping up campaigning against the law, telling drivers that they would lose their independence if they became employees.
When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, Mighetto was able, because of AB 5, to get unemployment benefits. She has a heart condition, and between fears for her safety and the drop in traffic, she needed to stop working. Even then, getting unemployment was complicated — the federal expansion of unemployment benefits lapsed, and she and her partner, also a driver, struggled to pay the bills as benefits waxed and waned. “We don’t have basic protections,” she says. “And that’s a glaring reality during a pandemic.”(A Lyft spokesperson tells Vox, “The pandemic is an unprecedented situation for all industries and communities, and our focus has been on helping keep our drivers, riders, and team members safe. Drivers do quality for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, which we advocated for.”)
Mario Tama/Getty Images
A “caravan protest” by Uber and Lyft drivers with Rideshare Drivers United and the Transport Workers Union of America in April 2020 called on California to enforce the AB 5 law so that they could qualify for unemployment insurance during Covid-19.
And then came Prop 22, an effort funded by Uber and Lyft, along with the delivery service DoorDash, which together poured $200 million into the project of exempting themselves from regulation. Prop 22 was the most expensive initiative in state history, and when it passed last fall just as the pandemic began its ferocious second wave, it carved the gig companies out of the protections of AB 5 and threw Mighetto back into limbo, with drastically shrunken protections against sexual harassment, wondering whether she’d get her unemployment and which rules the companies would change next.
Uber yanked back the control it had given drivers in the app. An Uber spokesperson tells Vox, “While these changes gave drivers more freedom than any other ride-share app provides, they also led to a third of drivers declining more than 80 percent of trip requests, making Uber very unreliable in the state. As the recovery from the pandemic picks up steam, we want to make sure riders can get a ride when they need one, and all drivers get more trips on a regular basis.”
When we spoke the first week of April, Mighetto and her partner were in Mexico because they’d effectively been homeless. “We spend every week looking to make sure that we have a roof over our heads and something to eat,” she says. “I’ve been three weeks without pay. And in three weeks, I don’t know where I’m going to be sleeping. We’re glad to hear that the weather is turning in California because we’re going to be going back to camping soon.”
Uber and Lyft executives have long argued that regulations hold them back. Current Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told an audience at Bloomberg’s Global Business Forum that regulations are “tougher on startups” and could stifle innovation; previous CEO and founder Travis Kalanick once argued that he was a “trustbuster” and the trust in question was the taxi industry. In Lyft’s IPO filing, it claimed “Lyft has the opportunity to deliver one of the most significant shifts to society since the advent of the car.”
But the model “is not innovative or exciting at all,” argues Veena Dubal, a professor at the University of California Hastings College of the Law, who researches gig economy work.
To Dubal, the work conditions for Mighetto and others like her are, rather than innovations, a throwback to old models of labor exploitation like piecework and sharecropping. “Drivers are living in a scenario where they cannot predict how much they’re going to make, because how much they’re going to make is determined by algorithmic allocation, which often becomes personalized and then becomes a form of punishment,” she says. “Although [the companies] applied algorithmic science to allocating fares and rides, it is piecework that ultimately only pays when [drivers] are allocated work.”
In the 19th and 20th century, she says, immigrant women who sewed shirts at home and were paid by the shirt “at least knew how many pieces they were going to work, and they knew how much they were going to be paid per piece.” With algorithms, she says, it’s completely unpredictable.
The algorithms are designed, she explains, to “figure out what your income goal is and will push you to work longer to reach that income goal to keep more demand out there on the streets for consumers.” It recalls sharecropping because the drivers have to shoulder all the costs of car upkeep; Dubal points to a $20 million settlement Uber paid in 2017 to the Federal Trade Commission after the FTC found that the company had exaggerated the money drivers could make and steered drivers into financing options for buying or leasing cars that were worse than they might have received otherwise.
Prop 22 locks this model in place — and the companies are now looking to scale up the legislation. They’re calling it “IC+,” for “independent contractor-plus,” and Khosrowshahi has said he intends “to advocate for the IC+ model not only around the nation but also the world.”
In order to head off more Prop 22s, there’s been talk recently from companies, researchers, and some within the labor movement of a sort of grand bargain with Lyft and Uber, whereby drivers would accept that third-category worker status and, in return, be granted what’s known as “sectoral bargaining.” Workers would be granted the right to organize and bargain with the companies — something that, legally, independent contractors cannot do. But Dubal and labor economist Marshall Steinbaum of the University of Utah worry that the unions have latched onto sectoral bargaining as a quick fix in a moment where the labor movement is weak, hoping that a deal can bring numbers and ward off total war.
Sectoral bargaining, Steinbaum explains, is the idea that all workers across a given sector could be represented by a collective agreement, regardless of who their employer is. Labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein described it in 2019 as “social bargaining with the state on behalf of all workers,” where some public institution is created to bring together stakeholders in a given industry to bargain.
The gig economy, Steinbaum notes, is less a sector and more the part of the economy that is outside of labor relations. And what makes sectoral bargaining actually a terrible fit for gig companies, he explains, is that “where sectoral bargaining has a lot to offer, it’s exactly where you have a fragmented sector.” It works when it raises the floor for lots of different companies at the same time. In Germany, for instance, unions primarily negotiate with employers’ associations across many firms in a sector. But even there, the model has atrophied.
Eduardo MunozAlvarez/VIEWpress/Getty Images
A car marked with Uber’s insignia, left, keeps pace with a yellow cab in New York’s Times Square in November 2020. Drivers for ride-hail services are organizing with taxi workers in the state.
With Uber and Lyft, it’s the opposite situation: The two companies make up, essentially, a duopoly, and have used that power to avoid any kind of regulation. Without real worker power behind that bargaining regime, he says, it would simply solidify and legalize the existing lopsided power relationship between the companies and the drivers.
Locking the drivers into a third category — not really employees, not really independent — would wind up, Dubal says, replicating old patterns of inequality. “When they say that we need a third category of work for a new economy,” she says, “what they’re really saying is that they just don’t want to have to provide these basic protections and rights and safety nets and they think that people now should be willing to survive without all of these protections that we’ve long come to understand as being normal and necessary.”
It’s precisely the most marginalized workers that minimum wage laws were designed to protect, and according to Lyft’s own economic impact report for 2021, 69 percent of its drivers are members of racial or ethnic minority groups — drivers like Ouattara, who came to the US from the Ivory Coast. “We’re talking about a majority people-of-color workforce,” Dubal says, “and saying that this workforce shouldn’t have the same rights and benefits of other workforces of people is really a recipe for entrenched racial inequality.”
Prop 22 played up the ideathat workers needed to be excluded from employee status in order to have flexibility, and the companies often argue that most of their drivers are part-timers doing it for a little extra on the side. According to that same Lyft economic impact report, 95 percent of drivers work fewer than 20 hours per week. But, Steinbaum notes, this argument also goes back well before the supposed innovation of the apps.
The companies will say it’s not real work — something, he says, that echoes the debates around minimum wage that trot out teenagers at part-time jobs to argue that the minimum wage shouldn’t be raised. This, Steinbaum points out, is the origin of exclusion of much service and caring work from the National Labor Relations Act in the first place, and though the law has been expanded over the decades to include some of those it originally left out, others — like Mighetto and Ouattara — are still excluded.
And, Dubal adds, the companies might say that most of the drivers work just a few hours, but the reality, according to her research, is that “most of the work is done by people who are working more than full-time.” A Seattle study, for example, found that 55 percent of trips were done by the 33 percent of drivers who worked more than 32 hours a week. The companies contest this but are notoriously unwilling to make their data public, sharing it only with particularly chosen researchers, meaning it’s hard to verify study results.
So who wants such a deal? Unions such as the Teamsters and the Service Employees International Union have signaled that they’d be open to it.
Bloomberg’s Josh Eidelson wrote, “Unions that are trying to head off more Prop 22 scenarios and also expand their ranks will have to weigh the uncertain potential for better treatment from President Biden against the risk of losing or being cut out of the conversation entirely. If they play things wrong, traditional employment could end for millions more Americans.” Uber, he notes, has already backed a compromise with unions when it agreed to support the creation of the Independent Drivers Guild by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers.
But any dealmaking frustrates many drivers because, well, those unions don’t yet represent these workers. They would, in essence, be making a decision to support legislation that workers like Mighetto themselves don’t want. And such high-handed behavior is exactly what employers point to when they run anti-union campaigns. If all that workers get out of a deal is nominal union membership but no material changes to their circumstances, it’s only going to make them angry — at the union. “And that’s damaging for the broader labor movement, not just the sector,” Dubal notes.
Even unions sometimes seem to forget that what makes unions powerful is not dues money but people acting together to challenge unjust power. It is not the ability to file a grievance but the implicit understanding that behind that grievance lies the principle of “an injury to one is an injury to all,” which Uber and Lyft have countered with a story of individual independence and flexibility. But that story of flexibility is pitting drivers against one another; to defeat it, drivers must be united.
Ouattara started driving for Uberin July 2016 in New York City. When New York put new rules into effect guaranteeing a minimum wage for drivers — drivers must make at least $17.22 an hour — Ouattara says the app changed how drivers worked, exerting more control over their hours while still asserting that workers like him were independent contractors.
Ouattara explains that he must put in a request for the time he wants to work a week in advance in order to get in the queue for a work assignment. Drivers have different ratings in the app, and the drivers who are “platinum” rated get first crack at the hours, then “gold” drivers, and so on.
Because the wage must be paid for the time the driver is active on the app, not just the time that they have a fare, Uber moved to tighten its control over New York workers to avoid paying them for idle time. “They just drastically limited the length of their queue by deciding who’s in and who’s out,” Steinbaum says.
It’s a system not that different, though automated, from the “shape-up” that longshore workers faced for decades on the docks, where the number of workers needed would vary based on how many ships came in and what they carried. When the longshore workers on the West Coast organized with the radical International Longshore and Warehouse Union, they divided up the crews into “A-men” and “B-men”; A-men were full-timers who were assigned work first, and B-men got a crack at the work when all the A-men were employed. The difference was that the union, not the boss, decided who got which rating, and the assignments.
With Uber, Ouattara says, there are all sorts of arbitrary rules that go into your rating. There are the ratings customers give drivers, but there are also things the app tracks, such as the driver’s speed and braking. “They sent you a report based on how many times you had to brake hard. But they don’t know why you brake hard. It might be because someone was about to run in front of your car and then you have to brake hard not to hit that person,” he says. “If you stop to prevent an accident, that would make you a bad driver.”
The worst part, he says, is that the rules aren’t transparent. “Every year there’s some new regulation in place to stress drivers out.”
When the pandemic hit, Ouattara, too, stopped work for a time. He had a newborn child at home and didn’t want to bring the virus home, so he applied for unemployment. But he was denied. So he reached out to the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, a labor organization that started organizing yellow cab drivers and has since expanded to include ride-hail drivers like him.
He’d heard about NYTWA when he first became a driver as a place that drivers could go to get help, and he wound up one of the lead plaintiffs in a lawsuit demanding the state give the drivers regular unemployment insurance rather than the lower payments associated with the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance plan for independent workers. In July, a judge ruled that Ouattara and other drivers were eligible for unemployment.
One of the reasons for the holdup, Ouattara says, was that Uber and Lyft were not submitting the required data on drivers to the state. Without that data, he and others were denied. “I did my best when I had to work at Uber,” he says. “It’s not like I’m going to work at different things. It’s at Uber every day, 70 hours a week. How would you tell me I’m not your employee when it comes to helping me out when we have a pandemic?”
So far, no sectoral bargaining dealhas been forthcoming. In Connecticut, a proposed bill, spearheaded by the Independent Drivers Guild, was shelved when neither labor nor Uber, Lyft, or DoorDash supported it. Lyft said the bill would risk “the flexibility and control that drivers currently enjoy,” and a Lyft spokesperson notes to Vox, “The Connecticut Department of Labor testified against that proposal, citing its incompatibility with the [National Labor Relations Act].”
“The companies opposed it because it was too independent even for them,” Steinbaum says. “They didn’t exert total control, and I think that reflects the absence of middle ground here that such a compromise would have to be able to inhabit were it to take shape.”
The bill would have established a sectoral bargaining system in which representatives of the companies and of the workers would negotiate over rules for the industry, while agreeing that the workers were not employees. And in New York, negotiations have stalled. The taxi workers’ union, Ouattara’s organization, is advocating for something similar to AB 5 that would apply the ABC test to workers. He says, “You have to look at the control Uber has over drivers. It’s absolutely control of the relationship of employee and employer. Everything you’re doing is under their control.”
Seattle was the first city, in 2015, to attempt to put a bargaining regime in place for ride-hail drivers. Steinbaum, who briefly consulted for the city of Seattle on litigation that followed from the attempt, describes it as “an agency that the city government recognized as the bargaining agent for ride-sharing drivers in the city, and then that agent would be empowered to essentially collectively bargain on their behalf with ride-sharing firms under the auspices of the city.”
But the companies — and the US Chamber of Commerce, a business lobbying organization — fought it, using antitrust laws (arguing that the drivers would be unfairly colluding because they were not employees). Eventually, the city shifted gears, passing a law closer to New York’s, allowing drivers to be covered by minimum wage protections, and the city to establish a Driver Resolution Center to arbitrate disputes between the companies and the workers.
Thus far, the Biden administration seems to be uninterested in federal grand bargains. Just recently, prominent Uber critic David Weil was nominated to resume his Obama-era post at the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division, and the Labor Department withdrew a Trump-era rule around independent contractors that made it harder to classify drivers like Mighetto and Ouattara as employees.
Rebecca Dixon, executive director of the National Employment Law Project, points out that in its statement, the department “skewers” the argument from gig companies around flexibility, saying, “[F]lexible work schedules can be made available to employees as well as independent contractors, so any determination of or shift in worker classification need not affect flexibility in scheduling.”
And the president is backing the PRO Act, which includes the ABC test for the purposes of collective bargaining (though notably not for wage and hour law, as AB 5 did). While passing anything through the Senate is a tall order, labor has unsurprisingly made it a top priority to pass the act, a top-to-bottom reform of existing labor law that would, for example, include penalties for the kind of anti-union behavior demonstrated recently by Amazon in Bessemer, Alabama.
With the PRO Act, Dubal thinks that both Rideshare Drivers United and the taxi workers’ group could potentially form a real union of ride-hail workers. Rideshare Drivers United, she says, “want to be a bargaining unit for Lyft and for Uber and the potential is 100 percent there.” There’s currently organizing taking place across the gig economy, including drivers figuring out how to “strike” on the apps; she points to DoorDash drivers using Facebook to organize and selectively declining cheap orders in order to push up their wages.
Unsurprisingly, Uber and Lyft, alongside other gig companies DoorDash and Instacart, are pouring money into fighting to stop PRO. The Intercept reported that the companies spent “at least $1,190,000 on 32 lobbyists to persuade members of Congress on the PRO Act” in 2021 so far. Uber itself spent $540,000, and its annual SEC filing notes, “If a significant number of Drivers were to become unionized and collective bargaining agreement terms were to deviate significantly from our business model, our business, financial condition, operating results and cash flows could be materially adversely affected.”
A union for ride-hail drivers, Steinbaum notes, could look something like the longshore workers’ model. Rather than the app mysteriously assigning work and tweaking algorithms, drivers could set rules themselves while maintaining flexibility — longshore workers famously treasured the ability to work or not depending on their needs on a given day — and without giving up their power.
The drivers could agree on seniority or another system of deciding who gets offered work first, which, Steinbaum says, “would enhance labor power because the most experienced workers would be the ones that get the work and the dynamic where the casual workers are the ones that the company wants to bring in and undermine the power of the workers on the job would be counteracted.”
The other outcome is that more industries start to move to the Uber model of on-demand workers not classified as employees, and more people’s conditions start to look like those of Mighetto and Ouattara. Shortly after Prop 22 took effect in California, delivery drivers for grocery stores under the umbrella of Albertsons were told they would be fired and replaced with app-based “independent” drivers. Based on what venture capitalists have signaled after Prop 22, Dubal says, “I think what is going to happen now is that they’re going to start trying to gig-ify other sectors. And that’s where this stuff becomes more about the broader labor movement.”
“One thing that is gratifying about [this moment] is that what I consider to be primary concerns about control, power, and autonomy are back in the forefront,” Steinbaum says. Back in 1950, when Walter Reuther, legendary head of the United Auto Workers, negotiated what became known as the “Treaty of Detroit,” labor agreed to stop fighting to dismantle the capitalist economy and build something else. Instead, the union agreed — and most of labor followed suit — to limit bargaining to getting their particular slice of the pie. But, Steinbaum notes, employers never really held up their end of the bargain, and in this moment they’ve abandoned any commitment to their workers’ well-being. “Now these larger questions are back on the table.”
To Ouattara, the pandemic was a clarifying moment, proving that Uber wasn’t interested in helping the drivers. And to Mighetto, Prop 22 undid 100 years of progress. “It rolls back the New Deal; it rolls back all the work that’s been done to get us worker’s compensation. For me, it rolls back the Me Too movement.” The only choice, she says, is to keep fighting, because the amount the companies spent on Prop 22 is a reminder that they have no intention of changing their model. “If you think about it, $200 million is a small investment if you plan to continue exploiting people indefinitely.”
Sarah Jaffe is an independent journalist and the author of Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Nation, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and elsewhere.
Microsoft is launching the personal version of Microsoft Teams today. After previewing the service nearly a year ago, Microsoft Teams is now available for free personal use amongst friends and families. The service itself is almost identical to the Microsoft Teams that businesses use, and it will allow people to chat, video call, and share calendars, locations, and files easily.
Microsoft is also continuing to offer everyone free 24-hour video calls that it introduced in the preview version in November. You’ll be able to meet up with up to 300 people in video calls that can last for 24 hours. Microsoft will eventually enforce limits of 60 minutes for group calls of up to 100 people after the pandemic, but keep 24 hours for 1:1 calls.
Illustration by Amanda Northrop/Vox, Photography by Nilay Patel / The Verge, Joshua Lott/Getty
The billionaire’s space internet project could connect millions of remote American homes. If it actually works.
Derrin Carelli’s Reddit post couldn’t be a better advertisement for Starlink, the satellite internet service brought to you by Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
In a short video, Carelli shows off the breathtaking view from his cabin, nearly 11,000 feet up in the Colorado Rockies. The camera pans down to a tiny satellite dish perched on the edge of a cliff, then Carelli walks into his cabin, where he taps on his iPad. A YouTube video of Joe Rogan interviewing Musk comes up and loads immediately. High-speed, low-latency internet in the middle of nowhere. Carelli gives the camera a thumbs up.
Carelli’s cabin is truly off the grid — he told Recode that cell service (and the nearest grocery store) is 30 miles away, and the nearest landline is five. There are no power lines, no water lines, no sewer hookup, and no roads. Carelli has to hike about a mile just to reach his cabin, which he calls Wolf Lodge. He wanted that isolation, but he also wanted to be able to communicate with the outside world in case there was an emergency.
But, like millions of Americans who live in remote areas, he didn’t have many options. There was no terrestrial broadband. No 5G. Satellite internet was too expensive and slow. That’s a problem the government has been trying to solve for decades; the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has made it one of its mandates. And the agency has awarded SpaceX a lot of money to help close the digital divide with its new Starlink internet service, which is slowly rolling out to a small group of beta testers.
When Carelli heard about Starlink’s so-called “better than nothing” beta program, he says he became “obsessed with everything Starlink,” even watching for its satellites in the night sky and “giggling like a little kid as they went by” while he waited for his chance to become a beta tester. In February, he got his satellite dish: Dishy. (Yes, the company assigned a cutesy name to it. Dishy’s full name is Dishy McFlatface.) And it’s safe to say that Carelli certainly thinks Starlink is better than nothing.
“The feeling I got from plugging in Dishy and receiving internet at my cabin is similar to what it must have been like for cavemen to discover fire,” Carelli said. “A feeling of ‘Wow, civilization is advancing!’”
Carelli is one of more than 10,000 Starlink beta testers globally. Another 500,000 people have signed up and paid their $99 deposits to get the service when it’s available in their area, according to the company. Musk tweeted that he anticipates having “several million” users in urban areas as well as rural ones — though he also acknowledged it will be a “challenge” to serve them all. The Starlink subreddit Carelli posted his video to is full of stories similar to his: people whose remote location made it difficult or impossible to get adequate broadband internet before, and who are very happy with the service they’re getting from Starlink now. They post photos and videos of unboxing and setting up their new Dishys, screenshots of internet speed tests, and, in one case, a poem dedicated to their “crappy rural DSL provider” that they could finally leave behind now that they had Starlink.
But not everyone is thrilled with Starlink or SpaceX, which did not respond to numerous requests for comment. Somereviews complain that the service is unreliable and can be slow. Astronomers are concerned that the thousands of satellites that Starlink and similar services plan to deploy will obscure their vision of the sky; others worry that the satellites will add to space that is already too crowded, and increase the risk of collisions. Rivals have accused SpaceX of overpromising Starlink’s capabilities to get nearly $1 billion in government subsidies from the FCC, money that was part of a program that has also been controversial.
It remains to be seen if Starlink can live up to its potential. But it certainly has a lot of potential.
Why we need better satellite internet
We’ve had satellite internet for decades now, as my colleague Adam Clark Estes explained last fall. Traditional satellite internet, provided by companies like Viasat and HughesNet, puts a few satellites in high Earth orbit — about 22,000 miles up — orbiting it at the same rate as the planet rotates. This is called a geosynchronous, or GEO, orbit. At that height, just a few of them can cover most of the Earth’s surface, and they’re what many people in America who don’t have terrestrial internet have to rely on to get connected.
But GEO satellite internet has a reputation for being slow and expensive, and it wasn’t designed for data-heavy real-time applications where low latency is crucial. The distance that signals have to cover from the Earth to the satellite and back causes a significant lag for things like Zoom meetings, video games, and streaming videos. So many of the things people use the internet for today — things that are essential for school, work, even health care — are difficult or impossible to do. And that puts those people at a distinct disadvantage to those who do have high-speed, low-latency internet. The pandemic made that disadvantage very apparent.
Starlink is different. SpaceX will put thousands of small satellites in low Earth orbit, or LEO. Most of them are about 350 miles up. Here, they form an interconnected constellation around the planet. Because they’re closer to the users, data has less distance to cover and the lag is significantly reduced. It’s speedy, too: SpaceX says it can provide 100 megabits per second download speeds and 20 Mbps upload to users and plans to bump that up to 1 gigabit per second or even 10 Gbps. Compare that to HughesNet, which only offers 25 down and 3 up — the FCC’s bare minimum standard for broadband — and Viasat, which offers up to 100 Mbps download speeds for its most expensive plan but only 3 Mbps up.
SpaceX isn’t the only company trying this. Among its competitors are Amazon’s Project Kuiper and OneWeb, which recently emerged from bankruptcy. But Starlink is currently the only LEO satellite broadband service up, running, and beaming internet to residential customers: a proof of concept that’s actively being added to. There are about 1,500 Starlink satellites up there now, and plans for a constellation of as many as 42,000 of them (in the nearer future, SpaceX plans for an array of 4,408 satellites).
The LEO constellation concept isn’t new, but we’re seeing multiple efforts now because it’s become cheaper to produce satellites and get them into orbit, technology has advanced, and, the demand — the need, really — for better satellite internet and universal connectivity has never been higher, Jeff Loucks, executive director of the Deloitte’s Center for Technology, Media & Telecommunications, told Recode.
For SpaceX, which owns and operates the rockets that send its Starlink satellites into space — and has made them partially reusable — getting into orbit is even cheaper. Starlink could be a nice little revenue source for SpaceX. Or it could be a massive drain on the company’s finances.
How Starlink became one of the FCC’s rural internet solutions
One government agency has already decided that Starlink has enough promise to give it funding, so some of your money is riding on this. SpaceX was of the biggest beneficiaries of the FCC’s recent $9.4 billion Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) auction, winning nearly $900 million to provide low latency internet service with “above baseline” speed (defined as 100 Mbps download and 20 upload) to roughly 640,000 locations across 35 states.
It was a surprisingly large amount awarded to a company that was given a major break at the last minute, when the FCC decided that it qualified for the low latency tier. That gave SpaceX a huge advantage over the traditional satellite internet companies (Viasat got nothing; HughesNet got just $1.3 million) and even some terrestrial providers who needed more money to build out connections to those locations.
But that award was also decided when the FCC was chaired by Trump appointee Ajit Pai, whose tenure was marked by a pro-free-market, anti-regulation approach that matches well with how Musk does business.
“Pai decided to go all-in on this,” Harold Feld, senior vice president at the open internet advocacy group Public Knowledge, told Recode. “When you don’t want to actually do anything in terms of regulating the existing incumbents, you bet on new technologies.”
The FCC is now led by acting chair Jessica Rosenworcel, who previously criticized the RDOF auction, saying that the maps used to determine which areas needed high-speed broadband internet access weren’t accurate.
“We are spending billions of dollars without the facts we need,” Rosenworcel wrote in a partial dissent in February 2020. “We have not done a single thing to fix our dubious broadband data or address our inaccurate broadband maps.”
As some have pointed out, the FCC awarded funds to companies to cover areas that don’t appear to need internet service or that already have sufficient access to it. To give just one example: I was surprised to find that the FCC deemed one of my hometown malls eligible for RDOF subsidies (though not the surrounding homes or hospital), as well as a small section of my other hometown mall, most of which was its parking lot. SpaceX was the winning bidder for both of them, granted several thousands of dollars in subsidies. Neither is in an area anyone would consider to be rural or remote.
These concerns are echoed by some lawmakers, too. Shortly before Pai stepped down from the FCC as President Biden entered office, a bicameral, bipartisan group sent him a letter asking that the RDOF awardees be thoroughly vetted in a transparent process before any disbursements are made — which the FCC told Recode it intends to do.
“FCC staff are carefully reviewing long-form applications for the technical, financial, and operational capabilities to make sure that the winning bidders can deliver on their commitments,” spokesperson Will Wiquist told Recode. “This review will be completed before any support is disbursed.”
But the commission did not respond to follow-up questions about reexamining the locations it deemed eligible to receive subsidies (specifically, my hometown malls and their parking lots), or about when the funds will begin to be disbursed.
There are also concerns that areas awarded to SpaceX now won’t get any investment in terrestrial internet, since the subsidy those providers say they need to make such connections cost-efficient isn’t there. That’s fine if the location is so remote that no terrestrial internet company was ever going to spend the money to connect it anyway. It might not be so fine if it means your home is now relying on Starlink to emerge from beta mode, work correctly, and be affordable, when a subsidy to a terrestrial provider would have gotten you connected much sooner.
“I think a billion dollars is not necessarily a bad bet,” Feld said. “But at the same time, we need to be pushing for a much bigger investment in rural infrastructure. … We need to be much more supportive of having fiber [internet] to the home, even in rural areas.”
He added: “I’m glad they’re doing it. I support it. What I worry about is people thinking that this means that we’ve solved the problem when we really haven’t, and we don’t even know if this is going to be as good as it says it’s going to be.”
In Starlink’s favor, possibly, is that the Biden-era FCC has said closing the digital divide is a priority, with President Biden allotting $100 billion to connect all Americans to affordable high-speed internet in his $2 trillion infrastructure plan. LEO internet could help with this, especially for the remote places where terrestrial broadband is just not a reality.
“The Internet Society would prefer to see funding made available to new service providers, including community and municipal networks,” Mark Buell, the Internet Society’s regional VP for North America, told Recode. “However, for communities where fiber may not be possible, LEO satellites can work with community-driven solutions.”
If Starlink can’t ultimately deliver on the promises it made to the FCC, it wouldn’t be the first time a government program to get internet to under- and unserved areas — or one of the companies it gave money to — fell short. The government has been trying for years to connect the country through various initiatives and policies. Clearly, it has not. RDOF’s predecessor, the Connect America Fund, saw at least two established terrestrial internet providers that were given hundreds of millions of dollars, Frontier and CenturyLink, repeatedly fail to meet deadlines. Despite this, both companies were awarded hundreds of millions of dollars more at the RDOF auction.
Can Starlink scale up? Do we even want it to?
But there are already concerns about whether SpaceX and Starlink will be able to deliver on all their promises once the service finally emerges from its limited beta mode.
Competitors have been vocal about perceived shortcomings in the company and its technology, with several of them — including Viasat, Amazon, DISH Network, HughesNet, and OneWeb — protesting SpaceX’s recent request to the FCC to modify its license so its satellites could operate in an even lower orbit. Their concerns were largely waved off or left unaddressed by the FCC when it decided in April to grant SpaceX’s request, saying it was “in the public interest” and that the modification would “improve the experience for users of the SpaceX service, including in often-underserved polar regions.”
As Viasat pointed out in filings provided to the FCC and viewed by Recode, Starlink isn’t consistently meeting its 100/20 goal, according to some speed tests, and Viasat’s research indicates that Starlink will not be able to surpass various legal, technical, and economic hurdles.
“I’ve been in the industry for 33 years, and I’ve seen many systems come and go,” Viasat’s head of global government affairs, John Janka, said. “And I would say it isn’t the first time I’ve heard these pie-in-the-sky promises. … Everybody got excited. And then they couldn’t deliver.”
While it’s easy enough to dismiss Viasat’s complaints as those of a jealous rival — as Musk pretty much has — Starlink’s competition isn’t the only one making them. The Verge’s Nilay Patel, who was part of the beta tester program, said in a recent review that Starlink was “unreliable, inconsistent, and foiled by even the nearest suggestion of trees.” Sometimes, Patel said, it worked as promised. But a lot of times, it didn’t. And while this is a beta test, Starlink already has about a third of its initial planned network of satellites in the sky, which are servicing just a fraction of the number of customers SpaceX promised the FCC it would. It seems the company still has a lot of work to do.
There have also been concerns from astronomers that the number of satellites and their proximity to Earth required for constellations like Starlink will make the night sky too bright or block their view. We could be looking, literally, at tens of thousands of satellites in low Earth orbit if SpaceX, OneWeb, and Amazon’s Project Kuiper get their way, or hundreds of thousands of other companies join in. And this vastly increases the amount of space debris and the chances of a collision, especially if those satellites malfunction and can’t implement their collision avoidance systems. SpaceX and OneWeb’s satellites have already had one near miss (although, according to SpaceX, OneWeb was exaggerating the threat).
“There is something called the Kessler effect, which is essentially a collision chain reaction that renders space non-usable due to it being filled with debris,” Gabriel Rebeiz, an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) fellow, told Recode, adding that it’s “not yet clear at this point” what the effect of so many more satellites in that orbit will be.
In the meantime, LEO is becoming increasingly crowded. SpaceX’s most recent launch, on May 15, added 52 more satellites to it. It came just a week after a May 9 launch of 60 satellites.
Even if Starlink can provide access, affordability might remain an issue — both for the customers and for SpaceX. Beta testers pay $499 for a Dishy and $99 a month for unlimited data. That’s cheaper than other satellite internet services (depending on how much data you use), but it’s still not cheap. There’s also no guarantee Starlink’s prices won’t go up from there. The sheer number of satellites LEO internet needs and their relatively short life span means SpaceX will constantly be replacing its satellites to keep its constellation up and running. The discount it gets from using its own rockets may not cover the expense of constantly having to launch them.
“These are pretty advanced pieces of equipment, and they’re relatively new,” Loucks, of Deloitte, said. “It just remains to be seen how robust and reliable they’re going to be.”
Meanwhile, SpaceX is already losing money on Dishys. SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell said in April that they cost the company $1,500 each to make, even though it charges the consumer $499. In other words, SpaceX loses $1,000 on every Dishy. If and when Starlink scales up to the millions of customers SpaceX hopes to have all over the world, those costs may well go down and the company will have its path to financial viability. But, as with many things Starlink, it’s still an open question — some research from last year says that Starlink’s constellation simply won’t have the capacity to service even 500,000 customers with 100 Mbps speed internet simultaneously, let alone several million.
Musk also tweeted that Starlink was not yet financially viable and that he could only “hope” it would be able to do what previous attempts at LEO satellite internet couldn’t: not go bankrupt.
SpaceX needs to pass through a deep chasm of negative cash flow over the next year or so to make Starlink financially viable. Every new satellite constellation in history has gone bankrupt. We hope to be the first that does not.
Points for honesty, but it’s not exactly a vote of confidence.
In the meantime, other LEO and GEO satellite internet companies are trying to play catch-up, either by getting their own constellations up or by improving on their existing services with new generations of higher capacity satellites.
As for Carelli, his enthusiasm has not wavered, three months into his beta test. He’s hoping to use that service to livestream a sunset from Wolf Lodge on his YouTube channel. But he’s being held back not by internet service but by YouTube’s rules: He doesn’t yet have the 1,000-subscriber minimum to livestream. In the meantime, he says he’s been “really satisfied” with Starlink’s service.
“The greatest pioneer living today and the person working most toward helping our species become a multi-planetary species is Elon Musk,” Carelli said. “When it comes to the price of Starlink, I’d gladly pay three times what it currently costs.”
Now it remains to be seen just what that cost will be.
For a while, it seemed like Elon Musk was the hero that Bitcoin fans had been waiting for. Tesla is holding more than a billion dollars worth of bitcoins, the company disclosed in February, and announced it would be accepting the cryptocurrency as payment for its electric cars.
But the seemingly perfect match between the mercurial whims of the terminally online CEO of an electric car company and the fortunes of an electricity-powered currency that was memed into existence was not to last.
Musk announced in a tweet last week that Tesla would no longer accept Bitcoin as payment for its cars due to environmental concerns. "We are concerned about rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for Bitcoin mining and transactions, especially coal, which has the worst emissions of any fuel." Tesla will not sell its bitcoins, Musk tweeted, and will use it for transactions "as soon as mining transitions to more sustainable energy." The company is also "looking at other cryptocurrencies that use <1% of Bitcoin's energy/transaction.”
It is hard to overstate how big of a psychical bomb this is for Bitcoin fans. It might as well have been engineered by NASA scientists to make them lose it. Besides being a very public betrayal, it wades into the energy debate that has rankled cryptocurrency fans recently due to what they see as common misunderstandings. Bitcoin undoubtedly has a notable carbon footprint (like anything that uses electricity, such as computers or electric cars), but for technical reasons it can't be broken down into "energy use per transaction" calculations, as Musk did. The precise mix of energy sources powering Bitcoin (which includes fossil fuels such as natural gas and coal, as well as various renewable sources) is also a source of heated debate. And to top it all off, Musk did a little bit of trolling propping up Dogecoin as being better than Bitcoin in a tweet.
Needless to say, none of this has gone over well at all and the usually somewhat reliable online cosmos have been thrown into chaos as weird nerds attack a weird nerd CEO who is defended by other weird nerds over something that most people don't think about at all.
"Elon Musk exposing himself as a barefaced sciolist. No different from Craig 'Faketoshi' Wright," screamed one Reddit post on r/Bitcoin with 3,000 points.
"This is why people should stay in their lane," the poster wrote. "The cult of Elon has deluded themselves into believing their own bullshit that he's some sort of frickin' polymath."
A very normal "letter, to Elon" posted to the subreddit earned more than 3,000 points and flipped Musk's own Bitcoin note. "Bitcoiners will not be selling any Bitcoins for Tesla cars and we intend to use them for transport as soon as Elon Musk transitions to more contextualized data."
"Pls stop talking about Elon. Bitcoin has been successful without him. It doesn’t matter what Elon says. Just ignore what he is saying. He is not Jesus nor the crypto god," was the title of another recent Reddit post that earned more than 5,000 points.
Bitcoin took a tumble after Musk's statements, with more than $10,000 being chopped off the price of 1.0 BTC since Musk's initial tweet, though it's still going strong at north of $40,000 USD.
The US has agreed not to put Xiaomi on a blacklist blocking investment in the Chinese tech company, undoing a move made in the last week of the Trump administration. Xiaomi sued the US government over the designation, but just filed a joint status report with the Department of Defense saying the two parties “have agreed upon a path forward that would resolve this litigation without the need for contested briefing.”
President Biden directly addressed the Colonial Pipeline hack in a White House speech Thursday in a signal of both how serious the effects of the hacks have been and how hard ransomware has affected both critical infrastructure as well as public agencies and companies. Notably, Biden said that the U.S. government does not believe the Russian government was involved in the hack, but said that the FBI currently believes the hackers live in Russia.
“The FBI has released details on the attack,” Biden said. “We do not believe the Russian government was involved in this attack, but we do have strong reason to believe the criminals who did the attack are living in Russia … I am confident that I’ve read the report of the FBI accurately and they say [Putin] was not [involved], the government was not.”
In response to a reporter’s question, Biden said he has not ruled out offensive cyber attacks against the hackers responsible, and said the government would “take decisive action against ransomware networks.”
Biden refused to comment on whether Colonial Pipeline paid a $5 million ransom. There have been conflicting reports about whether or not the company paid a ransom. On Thursday, Bloomberg reported the company paid the ransom hours after the attack. A day earlier, Reuters said the company had no plan to pay the ransom.
Last week, a ransomware group called DarkSide hacked Colonial Pipeline, which operates a 5,500 mile pipeline along the Eastern seaboard and is the largest oil pipeline in the United States. In response to the hack, which affected the company's IT network, the company shut down the whole pipeline, halting the distribution of gas across the whole East Coast of the United States. There is no evidence that the hackers were able to break into the Operational Network, or OT, of the pipeline.
The hackers responsible for the attack published a press release on their dark web site on Monday, distancing themselves from the Russian government, and claiming to be completely "apolitical" and only interested in money.
"Our goal is to make money, and not creating problems for society," the hackers' statement read.
The pipeline's shutdown has resulted in gas shortages across the southeast United States, with many gas stations running out of gas because of both a gas shortage and, more importantly, widespread panic buying. Viral videos over the last few days have shown customers filling plastic bags and gas cans with gas. One Hummer in Florida was reported to have burst into flames minutes after the driver filled up several containers with gasoline. Several prominent conservative voices including Tucker Carlson have associated the pipeline hack with a Green New Deal conspiracy and hashtags associating the gas shortage with President Biden have been prominent on social media.
The speech itself is notable because it is rare for a sitting President to directly address a hack, and shows that the White House believes that both this hack and ransomware more generally is a threat to the United States. Biden used the speech to call for legislation that would provide funding to so-called "critical infrastructure" to harden their cybersecurity practices.
Biden said that Americans can expect a return to normalcy over the next few days, and said that the pipeline has "begun restarting."
"Fuel is beginning to flow to a majority of markets they service. They should be reaching full capacity this weekend and into next week," Biden said. "We will not feel the effects at the pump immediately. This pipeline is 5,500 miles long. It had never been fully shut down in its entire history. Now they have to safely and fully return to normal operations and it’s going to take some time."
Biden said that the federal government would consider taking action against any gas stations that price gouge, and said "nobody should be using this situation for financial gains. That’s what the hackers are trying to do. That’s what the hackers are about, not us."
Socio Labs’ modern event technology platform will advance Cisco’s vision to deliver inclusive experiences during in-person, virtual and hybrid events.
Socio Labs will expand Webex offerings with capabilities that include live streaming, sponsorship, participant networking and advanced analytics, along with continuous attendee engagement before, during and after events.
Together with Webex, Socio Labs and recently acquired audience engagement technology from Slido will enable Cisco Webex to deliver the industry’s most comprehensive hybrid event management solution.
San Jose, CA – May 12, 2021 – Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) today announced the intent to acquire privately-held, U.S.-based Socio Labs, a modern event technology platform that provides event organizers with everything they need to successfully host in-person, virtual or hybrid events of any size and format. Together with Socio Labs, Cisco will enrich Webex Events beyond meetings, webinars and webcasts to also include large-scale, multi-session hybrid events and conferences. The solution will enable live streaming, sponsorship, networking and advanced analytics, along with continuous engagement before, during and after events – as well as Webex features like polling, Q&A, chat and real-time translation.
The pandemic has permanently changed events. Almost overnight, event planners adopted a virtual-only format. As recovery continues and in-person events gradually resume, the hybrid event model—a combination of in-person and virtual — is emerging as the new norm.
“The future of events, like the future of work, will be hybrid,” said Jeetu Patel, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco Security and Collaboration. “With that comes increased complexity of creating inclusive experiences, and meaningful and measurable interactions for both virtual and in-person attendees. Socio Labs offers Webex powerful technology to provide customers with an unparalleled hybrid event management solution to engage participants whether they join in person or virtually.”
As part of Cisco Webex’s vision to deliver inclusive, engaging and intelligent meeting and event experiences, the acquisition of Socio Labs complements Cisco’s recent acquisition of Slido, an industry-leading audience engagement tool, which together will create a comprehensive, cost-effective and easy-to-use event management solution that spans the following best-of-breed event capabilities — all through a single portal:
Webex’s cutting-edge virtual meeting innovations like background noise removal and speech enhancement, gesture recognition, immersive share, real-time translation, customized stage layouts and more;
Slido’s audience engagement capabilities such as polling, trivia, Q&A and gamification, which make virtual meetings and events more interactive and effective; and
Socio Labs’ hybrid event technology platform that manages the full lifecycle of large-scale virtual, in-person and hybrid events – from registration to post-event analytics.
“We are delighted to join the Cisco Webex portfolio to continue our common goal of enabling seamless, personalized hybrid events of all sizes,” said Yarkin Sakucoglu, Socio Labs co-founder and CEO. “Teaming up with Cisco gives us an amazing opportunity to apply our technology and expertise at an outstanding scale. We look forward to finding new ways to support the recovery and transition of the events industry.”
Key Facts:
The acquisition is expected to close in Cisco’s Q4 fiscal year 2021. Subject to customary closing conditions and required regulatory approvals.
Upon completion of the acquisition, the Socio Labs team will join the Webex Customer Experience team led by Omar Tawakol, vice president and general manager, reporting into the Security & Collaboration Group led by Jeetu Patel, senior vice president and general manager.
Cisco Collaboration is trusted by 95 percent of the Fortune 500.
Additional Resources:
Read theblog from Javed Khan, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco Collaboration.
About Cisco
Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) is the worldwide leader in technology that powers the Internet. Cisco inspires new possibilities by reimagining your applications, securing your data, transforming your infrastructure, and empowering your teams for a global and inclusive future. Discover more at www.cisco.com.
About Cisco Webex
Webex is a leading provider of cloud-based collaboration solutions which includes video meetings, calling, messaging, events, customer experience solutions like contact center and purpose-built collaboration devices. At Webex, we start with people and their experiences first. This focus on delivering inclusive collaboration experiences fuels our innovation, which leverages AI and Machine Learning, to remove the barriers of geography, language, personality and familiarity with technology. Our solutions are underpinned with security and privacy by design. We work with the world’s leading business and productivity apps – delivered through a single application and interface. Learn more at webex.com.
Forward-Looking Statements
This press release may be deemed to contain forward-looking statements, which are subject to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including statements regarding the acquisition enabling the expansion of Webex offerings, the expected benefits to Cisco and its customers from completing the acquisition, and plans regarding Socio Labs, Inc. personnel. Readers are cautioned that these forward-looking statements are only predictions and may differ materially from actual future events or results due a variety of factors, including, among other things, that conditions to the closing of the transaction may not be satisfied, the potential impact on the business of Socio Labs, Inc. due to the uncertainty about the acquisition, the retention of employees of Socio Labs, Inc. and the ability of Cisco to successfully integrate Socio Labs, Inc. and to achieve expected benefits, business and economic conditions and growth trends in the networking industry, customer markets and various geographic regions, global economic conditions and uncertainties in the geopolitical environment and other risk factors set forth in Cisco’s most recent reports on Form 10-K and Form 10-Q. Any forward-looking statements in this release are based on limited information currently available to Cisco, which is subject to change, and Cisco will not necessarily update the information.
Long before COVID-19 precipitated “digital transformation” across the world of work, customer services and support was built to run online and virtually. Yet it too is undergoing an evolution supercharged by technology.
Today, a startup called SightCall, which has built an augmented reality platform to help field service teams, the companies they work for, and their customers carry out technical and mechanical maintenance or repairs more effectively, is announcing $42 million in funding, money that it plans to use to invest in its tech stack with more artificial intelligence tools and expanding its client base.
The core of its service, explained CEO and co-founder Thomas Cottereau, is AR technology (which comes embedded in their apps or the service apps its customers use, with integrations into other standard software used in customer service environments including Microsoft, SAP, Salesforce and ServiceNow). The augmented reality experience overlays additional information, pointers and other tools over the video stream.
This is used by, say, field service engineers coordinating with central offices when servicing equipment; or by manufacturers to provide better assistance to customers in emergencies or situations where something is not working but might be repaired quicker by the customers themselves rather than engineers that have to be called out; or indeed by call centers, aided by AI, to diagnose whatever the problem might be. It’s a big leap ahead for scenarios that previously relied on work orders, hastily drawn diagrams, instruction manuals and voice-based descriptions to progress the work in question.
“We like to say that we break the barriers that exist between a field service organization and its customer,” Cottereau said.
The tech, meanwhile, is unique to SightCall, built over years and designed to be used by way of a basic smartphone, and over even a basic mobile network — essential in cases where reception is bad or the locations are remote. (More on how it works below.)
Originally founded in Paris, France before relocating to San Francisco, SightCall has already built up a sizable business across a pretty wide range of verticals, including insurance, telecoms, transportation, telehealth, manufacturing, utilities and life sciences/medical devices.
SightCall has some 200 big-name enterprise customers on its books, including the likes of Kraft-Heinz, Allianz, GE Healthcare and Lincoln Motor Company, providing services on a B2B basis as well as for teams that are out in the field working for consumer customers, too. After seeing 100% year-over-year growth in annual recurring revenue in 2019 and 2020, SightCall’s CEO says it’s looking like it will hit that rate this year as well, with a goal of $100 million in annual recurring revenue.
The funding is being led by InfraVia, a European private equity firm, with Bpifrance also participating. The valuation of this round is not being disclosed, but I should point out that an investor told me that PitchBook’s estimate of $122 million post-money is not accurate (we’re still digging on this and will update as and when we learn more).
For some further context on this investment, InfraVia invests in a number of industrial businesses, alongside investments in tech companies building services related to them such as recent investments in Jobandtalent, so this is in part a strategic investment. SightCall has raised $67 million to date.
There has been an interesting wave of startups emerging in recent years building out the tech stack used by people working in the front lines and in the field, a shift after years of knowledge workers getting most of the attention from startups building a new generation of apps.
Workiz and Jobber are building platforms for small business tradespeople to book jobs and manage them once they’re on the books; BigChange helps manage bigger fleets; and Hover has built a platform for builders to be able to assess and estimate costs for work by using AI to analyze images captured by their or their would-be customers’ smartphone cameras.
And there is Streem, which I discovered is a close enough competitor to SightCall that they’ve acquired AdWords ads based on SightCall searches in Google. Just ahead of the COVID-19 pandemic breaking wide open, General Catalyst-backed Streem was acquired by Frontdoor to help with the latter’s efforts to build out its home services business, another sign of how all of this is leaping ahead.
What’s interesting in part about SightCall and sets it apart is its technology. Co-founded in 2007 by Cottereau and Antoine Vervoort (currently SVP of product and engineering), the two are long-time telecoms industry vets who had both worked on the technical side of building next-generation networks.
SightCall started life as a company called Weemo that built video chat services that could run on WebRTC-based frameworks, which emerged at a time when we were seeing a wider effort to bring more rich media services into mobile web and SMS apps. For consumers and to a large extent businesses, mobile phone apps that work “over the top” (distributed not by your mobile network carrier but the companies that run your phone’s operating system, and thus partly controlled by them) really took the lead and continue to dominate the market for messaging and innovations in messaging.
After a time, Weemo pivoted and renamed itself as SightCall, focusing on packaging the tech that it built into whichever app (native or mobile web) where one of its enterprise customers wanted the tech to live.
The key to how it works comes by way of how SightCall was built, Cottereau explained. The company has spent 10 years building and optimizing a network across data centers close to where its customers are, which interconnects with Tier 1 telecoms carriers and has a lot of latency in the system to ensure uptime. “We work with companies where this connectivity is mission critical,” he said. “The video solution has to work.”
As he describes it, the hybrid system SightCall has built incorporates its own IP that works both with telecoms hardware and software, resulting in a video service that provides 10 different ways for streaming video and a system that automatically chooses the best in a particular environment, based on where you are, so that even if mobile data or broadband reception don’t work, video streaming will. “Telecoms and software are still very separate worlds,” Cottereau said. “They still don’t speak the same language, and so that is part of our secret sauce, a global roaming mechanism.”
The tech that the startup has built to date not only has given it a firm grounding against others who might be looking to build in this space, but has led to strong traction with customers. The next steps will be to continue building out that technology to tap deeper into the automation that is being adopted across the industries that already use SightCall’s technology.
“SightCall pioneered the market for AR-powered visual assistance, and they’re in the best position to drive the digital transformation of remote service,” said Alban Wyniecki, partner at InfraVia Capital Partners, in a statement. “As a global leader, they can now expand their capabilities, making their interactions more intelligent and also bringing more automation to help humans work at their best.”
“SightCall’s $42M Series B marks the largest funding round yet in this sector, and SightCall emerges as the undisputed leader in capital, R&D resources and partnerships with leading technology companies enabling its solutions to be embedded into complex enterprise IT,” added Antoine Izsak of Bpifrance. “Businesses are looking for solutions like SightCall to enable customer-centricity at a greater scale while augmenting technicians with knowledge and expertise that unlocks efficiencies and drives continuous performance and profit.”
Cottereau said that the company has had a number of acquisition offers over the years — not a surprise when you consider the foundational technology it has built for how to architect video networks across different carriers and data centers that work even in the most unreliable of network environments.
“We want to stay independent, though,” he said. “I see a huge market here, and I want us to continue the story and lead it. Plus, I can see a way where we can stay independent and continue to work with everyone.”
Remember when the FCC rubber stamped the Sprint T-Mobile merger without looking at the facts? Remember when a long line of economists and experts noted the merger would likely erode competition, raise rates, and kill jobs -- and both U.S. regulators and the court system completely ignored them? And remember when the FCC and DOJ both cobbled together a "fix" to this problem by trying to throw some spectrum at Dish Network, a proposal we noted was likely to fail?
Well guess what. Not only has the merger resulted in 5,000 layoffs and counting (something T-Mobile repeatedly promised regulators would never happen), the Dish "fix" proposed by the DOJ and FCC is looking more and more like a hot mess. Dish has increasingly been complaining that before the ink on the agreement was even dry, T-Mobile was behaving a lot like AT&T and Verizon. The issue is that T-Mobile is shuttering its older and slower CDMA network, which Dish hoped to lean on as it got its full, broader 5G network up and running:
"This is the same company that goes on Twitter and talks about dumb and dumber and how they’re for everybody, they love everybody and they’re for the consumer. They went to the Public Utility Commission in California under oath and said that it would be three years before they turned CDMA off. They forgot about that. Once they got their merger done, they look like every other big company,” Ergen said.
“They’ve become the Grinch,” he said. As the Dr. Seuss story goes, the Grinch had a tiny heart and stole all the kids’ toys. In Ergen’s analogy, T-Mobile is sort of stealing phones out of consumers’ hands since they won’t work anymore.
Sounds like the strong foundation for a lasting relationship, yeah?
Ideally, the agreement offloaded T-Mobile's Boost prepaid brand and some spectrum to Dish Network in the hopes it would cobble together a replacement fourth wireless carrier over a period of seven years. But there were always ample problems with that idea that suggested it was more regulatory theater than practical solution for the market problems created by the merger.
One, even by T-Mobile's admission Dish has a long history of hoarding wireless spectrum and making empty promises in wireless. Two, Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile had absolutely every incentive in the world to prevent the creation of a viable, fourth wireless competitor. Three, regulators who take great pride in being "hands off" were never going to have the competency and willingness to nanny such a convoluted deal toward completion.
Dish continues to bleed satellite TV subscribers at an alarming rate, so it surely wants a shift to wireless to work out. But it's just not clear that the company has the competence to pull it off, especially when the consolation prize for failing is likely just a wrist slap by the FCC and a huge cash pay out should it sell off its mammoth spectrum hoard. Meanwhile, as we've seen in Canada, Ireland, and Germany, the reduction of competitors from four to three will inevitably result in higher mobile data prices for U.S. consumers, something the remaining three U.S. carriers will lobby for heavily to ensure never changes.
Hackers persistently accessed SolarWinds’ internal systems, Microsoft Office 365 environment and software development environment for months before carrying out their vicious cyberattack, the company said.
The internet is now our nervous system. We are constantly streaming and buying and watching and liking, our brains locked into the global information matrix as one universal and coruscating emanation of thought and emotion.
What happens when the machine stops though?
It’s a question that E.M. Forster was intensely focused on more than a century ago in a short story called, rightly enough, “The Machine Stops,” about a human civilization connected entirely through machines that one day just turn off.
Those fears of downtime are not just science fiction anymore. Outages aren’t just missing a must-watch TikTok clip. Hospitals, law enforcement, the government, every corporation — the entire spectrum of human institutions that constitute civilization now deeply rely on connectivity to function.
So when it comes to disaster response, the world has dramatically changed. In decades past, the singular focus could be roughly summarized as rescue and mitigation — save who you can while trying to limit the scale of destruction. Today though, the highest priority is by necessity internet access, not just for citizens, but increasingly for the on-the-ground first responders who need bandwidth to protect themselves, keep abreast of their mission objectives, and have real-time ground truth on where dangers lurk and where help is needed.
While the sales cycles might be arduous as we learned in part one and the data trickles have finally turned to streams in part two, the reality is that none of that matters if there isn’t connectivity to begin with. So in part three of this series on the future of technology and disaster response, we’re going to analyze the changing nature of bandwidth and connectivity and how they intersect with emergencies, taking a look at how telcos are creating resilience in their networks while defending against climate change, how first responders are integrating connectivity into their operations, and finally, exploring how new technologies like 5G and satellite internet will affect these critical activities.
Wireless resilience as the world burns
Climate change is inducing more intense weather patterns all around the world, creating second- and third-order effects for industries that rely on environmental stability for operations. Few industries have to be as dynamic to the changing context as telecom companies, whose wired and wireless infrastructure is regularly buffeted by severe storms. Resiliency of these networks isn’t just needed for consumers — it’s absolutely necessary for the very responders trying to mitigate disasters and get the network back up in the first place.
Unsurprisingly, no issue looms larger for telcos than access to power — no juice, no bars. So all three of America’s major telcos — Verizon (which owns TechCrunch’s parent company Verizon Media, although not for much longer), AT&T and T-Mobile — have had to dramatically scale up their resiliency efforts in recent years to compensate both for the demand for wireless and the growing damage wrought by weather.
Jay Naillon, senior director of national technology service operations strategy at T-Mobile, said that the company has made resilience a key part of its network buildout in recent years, with investments in generators at cell towers that can be relied upon when the grid cannot. In “areas that have been hit by hurricanes or places that have fragile grids … that is where we have invested most of our fixed assets,” he said.
Like all three telcos, T-Mobile pre-deploys equipment in anticipation for disruptions. So when a hurricane begins to swirl in the Atlantic Ocean, the company will strategically fly in portable generators and mobile cell towers in anticipation of potential outages. “We look at storm forecasts for the year,” Naillon explained, and do “lots of preventative planning.” They also work with emergency managers and “run through various drills with them and respond and collaborate effectively with them” to determine which parts of the network are most at risk for damage in an emergency. Last year, the company partnered with StormGeo to accurately predict weather events.
Predictive AI for disasters is also a critical need for AT&T. Jason Porter, who leads public sector and the company’s FirstNet first-responder network, said that AT&T teamed up with Argonne National Laboratory to create a climate-change analysis tool to evaluate the siting of its cell towers and how they will weather the next 30 years of “floods, hurricanes, droughts and wildfires.” “We redesigned our buildout … based on what our algorithms told us would come,” he said, and the company has been elevating vulnerable cell towers four to eight feet high on “stilts” to improve their resiliency to at least some weather events. That “gave ourselves some additional buffer.”
AT&T has also had to manage the growing complexity of creating reliability with the chaos of a climate-change-induced world. In recent years, “we quickly realized that many of our deployments were due to weather-related events,” and the company has been “very focused on expanding our generator coverage over the past few years,” Porter said. It’s also been very focused on building out its portable infrastructure. “We essentially deploy entire data centers on trucks so that we can stand up essentially a central office,” he said, empathizing that the company’s national disaster recovery team responded to thousands of events last year.
Particularly on its FirstNet service, AT&T has pioneered two new technologies to try to get bandwidth to disaster-hit regions faster. First, it has invested in drones to offer wireless services from the sky. After Hurricane Laura hit Louisiana last year with record-setting winds, our “cell towers were twisted up like recycled aluminum cans … so we needed to deploy a sustainable solution,” Porter described. So the company deployed what it dubs the FirstNet One — a “dirigible” that “can cover twice the cell coverage range of a cell tower on a truck, and it can stay up for literally weeks, refuel in less than an hour and go back up — so long-term, sustainable coverage,” he said.
AT&T’s FirstNet One dirigible to offer internet access from the air for first responders. Image Credits: AT&T/FirstNet
Secondly, the company has been building out what it calls FirstNet MegaRange — a set of high-powered wireless equipment that it announced earlier this year that can deploy signals from miles away, say from a ship moored off a coast, to deliver reliable connectivity to first responders in the hardest-hit disaster zones.
As the internet has absorbed more of daily life, the norms for network resilience have become ever more exacting. Small outages can disrupt not just a first responder, but a child taking virtual classes and a doctor conducting remote surgery. From fixed and portable generators to rapid-deployment mobile cell towers and dirigibles, telcos are investing major resources to keep their networks running continuously.
Yet, these initiatives are ultimately costs borne by telcos increasingly confronting a world burning up. Across conversations with all three telcos and others in the disaster response space, there was a general sense that utilities just increasingly have to self-insulate themselves in a climate-changed world. For instance, cell towers need their own generators because — as we saw with Texas earlier this year — even the power grid itself can’t be guaranteed to be there. Critical applications need to have offline capabilities, since internet outages can’t always be prevented. The machine runs, but the machine stops, too.
The trend lines on the frontlines are data lines
While we may rely on connectivity in our daily lives as consumers, disaster responders have been much more hesitant to fully transition to connected services. It is precisely in the middle of a tornado and the cell tower is down that you realize a printed map might have been nice to have. Paper, pens, compasses — the old staples of survival flicks remain just as important in the field today as they were decades ago.
Yet, the power of software and connectivity to improve emergency response has forced a rethinking of field communications and how deeply technology is integrated on the ground. Data from the frontlines is extremely useful, and if it can be transmitted, dramatically improves the ability of operations planners to respond safely and efficiently.
Both AT&T and Verizon have made large investments in directly servicing the unique needs of the first responder community, with AT&T in particular gaining prominence with its FirstNet network, which it exclusively operates through a public-private partnership with the Department of Commerce’s First Responder Network Authority. The government offered a special spectrum license to the FirstNet authority in Band 14 in exchange for the buildout of a responder-exclusive network, a key recommendation of the 9/11 Commission, which found that first responders couldn’t communicate with each other on the day of those deadly terrorist attacks. Now, Porter of AT&T says that the company’s buildout is “90% complete” and is approaching 3 million square miles of coverage.
Why so much attention on first responders? The telcos are investing here because in many ways, the first responders are on the frontiers of technology. They need edge computing, AI/ML rapid decision-making, the bandwidth and latency of 5G (which we will get to in a bit), high reliability, and in general, are fairly profitable customers to boot. In other words, what first responders need today are what consumers in general are going to want tomorrow.
Cory Davis, director of public safety strategy and crisis response at Verizon, explained that “more than ever, first responders are relying on technology to go out there and save lives.” His counterpart, Nick Nilan, who leads product management for the public sector, said that “when we became Verizon, it was really about voice [and] what’s changed over the last five [years] is the importance of data.” He brings attention to tools for situational awareness, mapping, and more that are a becoming standard in the field. Everything first responders do “comes back to the network — do you have the coverage where you need it, do you have the network access when something happens?”
The challenge for the telcos is that we all want access to that network when catastrophe strikes, which is precisely when network resources are most scarce. The first responder trying to communicate with their team on the ground or their operations center is inevitably competing with a citizen letting friends know they are safe — or perhaps just watching the latest episode of a TV show in their vehicle as they are fleeing the evacuation zone.
That competition is the argument for a completely segmented network like FirstNet, which has its own dedicated spectrum with devices that can only be used by first responders. “With remote learning, remote work and general congestion,” Porter said, telcos and other bandwidth providers were overwhelmed with consumer demand. “Thankfully we saw through FirstNet … clearing that 20 MHz of spectrum for first responders” helped keep the lines clear for high-priority communications.
FirstNet’s big emphasis is on its dedicated spectrum, but that’s just one component of a larger strategy to give first responders always-on and ready access to wireless services. AT&T and Verizon have made prioritization and preemption key operational components of their networks in recent years. Prioritization gives public safety users better access to the network, while preemption can include actively kicking off lower-priority consumers from the network to ensure first responders have immediate access.
Nilan of Verizon said, “The network is built for everybody … but once we start thinking about who absolutely needs access to the network at a period of time, we prioritize our first responders.” Verizon has prioritization, preemption, and now virtual segmentation — “we separate their traffic from consumer traffic” so that first responders don’t have to compete if bandwidth is limited in the middle of a disaster. He noted that all three approaches have been enabled since 2018, and Verizon’s suite of bandwidth and software for first responders comes under the newly christened Verizon Frontline brand that launched in March.
With increased bandwidth reliability, first responders are increasingly connected in ways that even a decade ago would have been unfathomable. Tablets, sensors, connected devices and tools — equipment that would have been manual are now increasingly digital.
That opens up a wealth of possibilities now that the infrastructure is established. My interview subjects suggested applications as diverse as the decentralized coordination of response team movements through GPS and 5G; real-time updated maps that offer up-to-date risk analysis of how a disaster might progress; pathfinding for evacuees that’s updated as routes fluctuate; AI damage assessments even before the recovery process begins; and much, much more. In fact, when it comes to the ferment of the imagination, many of those possibilities will finally be realized in the coming years — when they have only ever been marketing-speak and technical promises in the past.
Naillon of T-Mobile noted that the biggest benefit of 5G is that it “allows us to have greater coverage” particularly given the low-band spectrum that the standard partially uses. That said, “As far as applications — we are not really there at that point from an emergency response perspective,” he said.
Meanwhile, Porter of AT&T said that “the beauty of 5G that we have seen there is less about the speed and more about the latency.” Consumers have often seen marketing around voluminous bandwidths, but in the first-responder world, latency and edge computing tends to be the most desirable features. For instance, devices can relay video to each other on the frontlines, without necessarily needing a backhaul to the main wireless network. On-board processing of image data could allow for rapid decision-making in environments where seconds can be vital to the success of a mission.
That flexibility is allowing for many new applications in disaster response, and “we are seeing some amazing use cases coming out of our 5G deployments [and] we have launched some of our pilots with the [Department of Defense],” Porter said. He offered an example of “robotic dogs to go and do bomb dismantling or inspecting and recovery.”
Verizon has made innovating on new applications a strategic goal, launching a 5G First Responders Lab dedicated to guiding a new generation of startups to build at this crossroads. Nilan of Verizon said that the incubator has had more than 20 companies across four different cohorts, working on everything from virtual reality training environments to AR applications that allow firefighters to “see through walls.” His colleague Davis said that “artificial intelligence is going to continue to get better and better and better.”
Blueforce is a company that went through the first cohort of the Lab. The company uses 5G to connect sensors and devices together to allow first responders to make the best decisions they can with the most up-to-date data. Michael Helfrich, founder and CEO, said that “because of these new networks … commanders are able to leave the vehicle and go into the field and get the same fidelity” of information that they normally would have to be in a command center to receive. He noted that in addition to classic user interfaces, the company is exploring other ways of presenting information to responders. “They don’t have to look at a screen anymore, and [we’re] exploring different cognitive models like audio, vibration and heads-up displays.”
5G will offer many new ways to improve emergency responses, but that doesn’t mean that our current 4G networks will just disappear. Davis said that many sensors in the field don’t need the kind of latency or bandwidth that 5G offers. “LTE is going to be around for many, many more years,” he said, pointing to the hardware and applications taking advantage of LTE-M standards for Internet of Things (IoT) devices as a key development for the future here.
Link me to the stars, Elon Musk
Michael Martin of emergency response data platform RapidSOS said that “it does feel like there is renewed energy to solve real problems,” in the disaster response market, which he dubbed the “Elon Musk effect.” And that effect definitely does exist when it comes to connectivity, where SpaceX’s satellite bandwidth project Starlink comes into play.
Satellite uplinks have historically had horrific latency and bandwidth constraints, making them difficult to use in disaster contexts. Furthermore, depending on the particular type of disaster, satellite uplinks can be astonishingly challenging to setup given the ground environment. Starlink promises to shatter all of those barriers — easier connections, fat pipes, low latencies and a global footprint that would be the envy of any first responder globally. Its network is still under active development, so it is difficult to foresee today precisely what its impact will be on the disaster response market, but it’s an offering to watch closely in the years ahead, because it has the potential to completely upend the way we respond to disasters this century if its promises pan out.
Yet, even if we discount Starlink, the change coming this decade in emergency response represents a complete revolution. The depth and resilience of connectivity is changing the equation for first responders from complete reliance on antiquated tools to an embrace of the future of digital computing. The machine is no longer stoppable.
It’s better not to be distracted while driving | Photo by: Arterra/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Who among us has not tried during the pandemic to conceal the background of our home offices during a Zoom call for work— lest we reveal a messy bedroom, or get ragged on by RoomRater?
For Republican state Sen. Andrew Brenner of Ohio, the green screen betrayed him during a video call this week, making it clear he was driving a car even though his background image showed what looked like a home office. That wouldn’t have been a big deal except it was the same day that Ohio’s legislature was considering a bill that would have toughened the state’s rules on driving while using an electronic device.
One could argue that a video call might be a significant distraction while driving.
Microsoft has been trying to build a lighter version of Windows for more than 10 years without success. The latest effort, Windows 10X, has reportedly now been shelved, in favor of improving Windows 10 instead.
Petri reports that Windows 10X will no longer ship this year, and the OS will likely never arrive in its current form. Microsoft had originally been planning to deliver Windows 10X, a more lightweight and simplified version of Windows, alongside new dual-screen devices like the Surface Neo. That was before the pandemic hit, and Microsoft decided to prioritize Windows 10X for single-screen laptops instead.
Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
The Surface Neo was supposed to ship with Windows 10X.
Enhanced capabilities, incentives and training platforms redefine the Vonage channel partner experience
HOLMDEL, NJ – May 5, 2021 – Vonage (Nasdaq: VG), a global leader in cloud communications helping businesses accelerate their digital transformation, has introduced a redesigned Channel Partner Program, and a new Partner Experience Portal as a part of Vonage Accelerate, the Company’s overarching strategic growth initiative to accelerate and amplify focus, investments and efforts in the Channel. Launched in March 2021, these enhanced capabilities are driving the continued success of channel partners across the globe, empowering them to create successful customer outcomes, accelerate their business growth and expand their revenue potential.
The newly-launched Partner Program and Portal support the strong growth of the Vonage Channel, a core part of the Company’s overall growth strategy. With these new capabilities and by leveraging the Vonage Communications Platform (VCP), a single leading cloud communications platform that powers customers’ and partners’ global engagement solutions using APIs, Unified Communications and Contact Center innovations, Vonage partners can ensure their customers stay connected and drive great experiences – regardless of location or channel.
“Our channel partners are one of our most important relationships,” said Vonage Channel Chief Jim Regan. “We heard our partner feedback and enhanced our Channel Partner Program and Partner Experience Portal, doubling down on our commitment to helping them succeed by continuing to invest in our Channel model, tools, and infrastructure to support our partners in key markets and make it even easier for them to do business with us.”
Providing a better path to growth and richer benefits to its growing partner community, these enhancements also open up opportunities for new partner types – VARs, Resellers, distributors and Referral partners — and new markets across EMEA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Added Regan, “The way we work has fundamentally changed and now, more than ever, businesses rely on cloud communications to seamlessly connect employees, customers and partners across the globe to drive better engagement experiences and business outcomes. Vonage is committed to bringing those solutions to customers in partnership with our trusted partner community.”
“One of the reasons Sandler Partners has been such a long-time partner of Vonage is that Vonage is easy to do business with. They’ve made a real commitment to their partners and it is reflected in their product offering as well as their continued investment in the channel,” said Paul Seeley, Senior Vice President for Sandler, a Vonage Pinnacle Partner. “With dynamic programs, incentives, training and enablement tools, Vonage makes it easy for us to be successful and enables us to help our customers win.”
“At Telarus, we are proud of our commitment to providing our partners with the tools, technology, and ongoing support they need to compete in the new modern workplace,” said Shane Speakman, Vice President of UCaaS for Telarus, a Vonage Pinnacle Partner. “Our longstanding partnership with Vonage is a testament to this shared customer-first approach to doing business. The Vonage Channel Partner Program and tools like the Partner Experience Portal enable us to continue to put the customer first and provide the Telarus team with everything they need. It includes training, marketing collateral assets, sales support, and more – to help our partners and us succeed.”
Vonage Channel Partner Program
Core to the new Channel Partner Program is a tiered structure designed to incentivize a partner’s journey with Vonage, with multiple paths to “tier up” as their business grows. Each tier — Explorer, Select, Insider and Pinnacle — has its own set of benefits, which are built to incentivize partners to go up in the tiers, earn more and win with Vonage. The new program also includes increased and personalized support for partners and their customers before, during and after deployment, as well as richer and faster onboarding for new partners, ensuring teams have the ongoing support and training they need to get the most out of their Vonage products and services.
The Vonage Channel Partner Program also includes a new training platform, Vonage Verified, an all-new partner onboarding and training program designed to help partners establish a foundation for sales success with Vonage. Vonage Verified fosters partner growth through monthly live training sessions and comprehensive product training.
Partner Experience Portal
The new Partner Experience Portal makes it easier than ever to do business with Vonage. With updated site navigation, the new portal is more intuitive and user friendly, with deeper self-service capabilities and support to help partners succeed with Vonage. Detailed analytics and reporting include account and contract level reports, payment history, key contact info, and contract renewal details. The portal helps partners improve clarity around their commissions and incentives, and have the information they need to better serve their customers.
Learn more about the new Vonage Channel Partner Program and Partner Experience Portal.
In what looks to be a first in terms of subscriber perks, Boost Mobile has announced that its $60 per month Unlimited Plus cellphone plan will come with access to to 24/7 telemedicine through K Health starting this summer.
Specifically, Unlimited Plus subscribers will get all of the features of K Health’s usual $9-per-month offering. That includes the ability to text chat or hop on a video call with a doctor through the K Health app, which uses the app’s AI suggestions to identify symptoms and potential ailments, and receive actual treatment, including medications and other prescriptions.
The service is free and available for all Boost Unlimited Plus subscribers and offered at a discounted price of $7.99 per month for all of Boost...
The companies that succeeded at pivoting to remote work, and managing the associated IT and cybersecurity challenges, were those that enabled cross-functional teams.
UK-based EV startup Arrival is working with Uber to develop an electric car that will be “purpose-built” for ride-hailing. Arrival plans to put the car into production in late 2023 and says it will not be exclusive to Uber. Instead, the startup says the goal is to create an affordable vehicle that would appeal to the millions of ride-hailing drivers around the world.
It’s another vote of confidence in Arrival, which just became a publicly traded company in March after merging with a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC. Founded in 2015, Arrival is also developing electric delivery vans (with UPS as a customer) and buses. It also has backing from Hyundai and Kia.
Arrival and Uber released a handful of renderings of the new car’s...
Activist investor Starboard Value is clearly fed up with Box and it let the cloud content management know it in no uncertain terms in a letter published yesterday. The firm, which bought a 7.7% stake in Box two years ago, claims the company is underperforming, executing poorly and making bad business decisions — and it wants to inject the board of directors with new blood.
While they couched the letter in mostly polite language, it’s quite clear Starboard is exasperated with Box. “While we appreciate the dialogue we have had with Box’s management team and Board of Directors (the “Board”) over the past two years, we have grown increasingly frustrated with continued poor results, questionable capital allocation decisions, and subpar shareholder returns,” Starboard wrote in its letter.
Box, as you can imagine, did not take kindly to the shot across its bow and responded in a press release that it has bent over backwards to accommodate Starboard, including refreshing the board last year when they added several members, whom they point out were approved by Starboard.
“Box has a diverse and independent Board with directors who bring extensive technology experience across enterprise and consumer markets, enterprise IT, and global go-to-market strategy, as well as deep financial acumen and proven track records of helping public companies drive disciplined growth, profitability, and stockholder value. Furthermore, seven of the ten directors on the Box Board will have joined the Board within the last three years,” the company wrote in a statement. In other words, Box is saying it already has injected the new blood that Starboard claims it wants.
Box recently got a $500 million cash injection from KKR, widely believed to be an attempt to bulk up cash reserves with the goal of generating growth via acquisition. Starboard was particularly taken aback by this move, however. “The only viable explanation for this financing is a shameless and utterly transparent attempt to “buy the vote” and shows complete disregard for proper corporate governance and fiscal discipline,” Starboard wrote.
Alan Pelz-Sharpe, founder and principal analyst at Deep Analysis, a firm that closely tracks the content management market, says the two sides clearly aren’t aligned, and that’s not likely to change. “Starboard targeted and gained a seat on the board at Box at a difficult time for the firm, that’s the modus operandi for activist investors. Since that time there has clearly been a lot of improvements in terms of Box’s financial goals. However, there is and will remain a misalignment between Starboard’s goals, and Box led by Levie as a whole. Though both would like to see the share price rise, Starboard’s end goal is most likely to see Box acquired, sooner rather than later, and that is not Box’s goal,” he said.
Starboard believes the only way to resolve this situation is to inject the board with still more new blood, taking a swipe at the Box leadership team while it was at it. “There is no good reason that Box should be unable to deliver improved growth and profitability, at least in-line with better performing software companies, which, in turn, would create significant shareholder value,” Starboard wrote.
As such the firm indicated it would be putting up its own slate of board candidates at the company’s next board meeting. In the tit for tat that has been this exchange, Box indicated it would be doing the same.
Meanwhile Box vigorously defended its results. “In the past year, under the oversight of the Operating Committee, the company has made substantial progress across all facets of the business — strategic, operational and financial — as demonstrated by the strong results reported for the full year of fiscal 2021,” the company wrote, pointing to its revenue growth last fiscal year as proof of the progress, with revenue of $771 million up 11% year over year.
It’s unclear how this standoff will play out, but clearly Starboard wants to take over the Board and have its way with Box, believing that it can perform better if it were in charge. That could result ultimately, as Pelz-Sharpe suggested, in Box being acquired.
We would appear to heading for a showdown, and when it’s over, Box could be a very different company, or the current leadership could assert control once and for all and we could proceed with Box’s current growth strategy still in place. Time will tell which is the case.
Kroger is partnering with Drone Express on deliveries of packages up to five pounds. | Image: Kroger
Kroger is joining rival Walmart by launching a drone delivery pilot program for groceries later this spring. The supermarket chain is partnering with Drone Express to deliver items like baby products, over-the-counter medications, and picnic supplies weighing up to about five pounds from a test store in Centerville, Ohio.
A landing page for the Kroger Drone Delivery service says that groceries will be flown by “certified drone pilots under FAA approval.” A press release suggests that deliveries can be made to street addresses as well as to parks or beaches by homing in on a customer’s smartphone location.
As part of the pilot, Kroger is designing bundled product offerings that fit within the size and weight constraints of the Drone...
Verizon has sold its AOL and Yahoo properties to Apollo Global Management in a deal said to be worth $5 billion, about half of the nearly $9 billion Verizon originally paid for the pair. Verizon will maintain a 10 percent stake in the company, now known as Yahoo and led by CEO Guru Gowrappan. The deal, which includes Verizon’s ad tech business, was heavily rumored over the last week and is still subject to closing conditions. Once complete, it’ll bring an end to Verizon’s troubled experiment with media production and advertising.
Apollo is a private equity firm that owns the Venetian resort in Las Vegas and crafts retailer Michaels. Apollo co-founder Leon Black recently stepped down as Chairman, soon after it was revealed that he paid...
An open office, 1960s-style. | Photo: United Artists
So it seems that Google, the exemplar of the open-office concept, is trying now to figure out how to keep its design ideals intact while offering its employees at least some feeling of safety in these 6-foot-apart times. Apparently, these measures may include a number of interesting concepts, such as inflatable walls. (A GIF of one of those walls slowly unfolding nearly had me doing a spit-take with my morning coffee.)
These rather complex measures may have some people wondering whether we should abandon the entire open-office concept and go back to a more old-fashioned — but in these pandemic days, safer — plan of separate offices and high-walled cubicles. To tell you the truth, it doesn’t sound like a bad idea. But.
When you head out on the highway in the United States, you’re probably paying attention to the signs above your car and on the side of the road — the ones that direct you to your destination. If you’re looking for an exit or a rest stop, chances are you’ll see the typeface Highway Gothic. It became the highway standard in the 1950s, born out of an initiative from the California Department of Transportation to develop a clearer and more flexible standard for highway signs.
But for the past decade, a new typeface has been trying to take its place: Clearview. This new typeface boasts wider spaces inside of letters and less chunky letterforms, and tries to solve some of Highway Gothic’s readability issues. Learn more in the video above.
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