Davemichels

A new study reveals how the companies you buy meat from block climate action.

You probably already know that the fossil fuel industry has spent many millions of dollars trying to sow doubt about climate change and the industry’s role in it.

But did you know that big meat and dairy companies do the same thing?

According to a new study out of NYU, these companies have spent millions of dollars lobbying against climate policies and funding dubious research that tries to blur the links between animal agriculture and our climate emergency. The biggest link is that about 14 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions come from meat and dairy.

“US beef and dairy companies appear to act collectively in ways similar to the fossil fuel industry, which built an extensive climate change countermovement,” write the authors of the study, published in the journal Climatic Change.

One of the authors, Jennifer Jacquet, says the paper should spur a vigorous public response. “People should be mad,” she said. “And we should build a system where we can prevent this kind of influence.”

Comparing the meat and dairy industry with the fossil fuel industry is not a facile analogy. These industries have worked in tandem for years to undercut climate policy.

For example, in 2009, Tyson and other meat companies got nervous about the American Clean Energy and Security Act, also known as Waxman-Markey, which would have established a cap-and-trade system. They worked alongside the fossil fuel industry to stop the bill. Had it passed, it would’ve been the first congressional bill to directly tackle greenhouse gas emissions. But it never made it past the House.

Now, more information is coming to light about how big meat and dairy companies work against climate policies: through lobbying, through political campaigns, and through academic research.

How Big Meat lobbies against climate-friendly policies

Let’s start with lobbying.

It’s not a surprise that meat and dairy trade associations would lobby for things like access to federally owned public lands for cattle-grazing or industry-friendly manure management regulations. That’s more or less their raison d’être, and it’s what they’ve done for decades. But as the authors determined, “more recently they have been involved in blocking climate policy that would limit production.”

Six of the big US groups — the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the National Pork Producers Council, the North American Meat Institute, the National Chicken Council, the International Dairy Foods Association, and the American Farm Bureau Federation — have together spent about $200 million in lobbying since 2000. And they’ve been lobbying annually against climate policies like cap-and-trade, the Clean Air Act, and regulations that would require farms to report emissions.

Individual meat companies likewise spend millions on lobbying. Tyson, for example, has spent $25 million since 2000. Now, that may not sound like much if we compare it to what individual companies in the fossil fuel industry spend — Exxon alone spent over $240 million during the same period. But the study notes that we have to look at these amounts in proportion to each company’s bottom line. Taken as a share of total revenue over the past two decades, Tyson has spent 33 percent more on lobbying than Exxon has.

“The relative spending is very much an indicator of political engagement,” Jacquet said.

These figures refer to meat companies’ total spending on lobbying, not only climate-specific lobbying. That said, even policies that are not explicitly about climate — like crop incentives or land-use decisions — can also drive harmful emissions.

When Big Meat gets involved in political campaigns

The study also found that the big US meat companies have spent millions on political campaigns, typically to support Republican candidates.

Again, these companies are big spenders in this arena relative to their bottom line. Since 2000, Exxon spent about $17 million on US federal political campaigns, while Tyson spent $3.2 million. “But taken as a share of each company’s total revenue over that period, Tyson has spent double what Exxon has on political campaigns,” the study notes.

Meat and dairy companies bankroll candidates because it pays off. Members of Congress they’ve funded, like Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX), Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), and Rep. Roy Blunt (R-MO), have backed pro-agriculture bills and frequently voted against climate change legislation, including cap-and-trade.

According to the study, in some cases funding from Big Meat is the biggest contributor to a politician’s financial resources: “Hormel Foods was the largest contributor to Rep. Gutknecht (R-MN) over the course of his career — a former Congressman who has regularly questioned climate science.”

Sometimes, Big Meat has also funded Democratic candidates. During the 1992 presidential campaign, Tyson was known to be one of Bill Clinton’s main backers — to the point that Clinton was actually nicknamed the “Chicken Man.” Tyson, which is headquartered in Clinton’s home state of Arkansas, did not respond to a request for comment.

Can you trust environmental research funded by Big Meat?

The meat and dairy industries also fund their own academic experts, who then publish research that minimizes or denies the causal link between animal agriculture and climate change.

Industry-funded research isn’t always necessarily flawed. But it’s certainly fair to wonder about the integrity of industry-funded research that happens to advance that industry’s goals. As Undark has reported, you might read a white paper that paints a hopeful picture of the cattle industry’s emissions, only to then realize that the co-authors run dairy groups or received livestock industry funding.

This happens in adjacent industries, too: You might hear a scientist denying that overfishing is a major problem, say, only to then find out that they’ve received funding from fisheries and seafood industry groups. (To be fair, we should note that plant-based meat companies have also commissioned analyses from outside researchers, though much less extensively.)

The new study out of NYU provides other examples of how meat-industry-funded research seeks to downplay the industry’s environmental costs — like emphasizing that its emissions are small relative to those of other sectors, like transportation, instead of acknowledging that animal agriculture causes almost 15 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, which means it’s still a big driver of climate change.

In fact, the NYU paper notes that if the Food and Agriculture Organization is right in projecting that meat consumption will rise 73 percent by 2050, emissions by some meat and dairy companies could exceed the emissions of several fossil fuel companies.

That means people who care about the climate need to get serious about holding Big Meat and Big Dairy accountable, just as they’ve been trying to do for years with Big Oil.

“There has to be a big reimagining of meat and dairy,” Jacquet said. Whether that will entail a reduction in meat consumption or a total switch to plant-based or lab-grown meat and dairy, one thing is for sure: “Given what we know about climate change,” Jacquet said, “it seems clear that business as usual is not the answer.”

Anker has announced a new webcam as part of its new AnkerWork line of home office gear. The new webcam, called the PowerConf C300, is a 1080p webcam with a “built-in AI chipset,” which Anker says “provides a high-quality image with accurate color reproduction and unparalleled low-light performance.”

The webcam offers three field-of-view options: 78 degrees, intended for closeups; 90 degrees; and 115 degrees, which offers a wider field of view. It also has dual stereo microphones that can pick up your voice. The PowerConf C300 is available at Amazon, Anker.com, and “select retailers,” and it costs $129.99 in the US, €129.99 in Germany, and £119.00 in the UK.

Anker also announced a new portable conference speaker, the PowerConf S500....

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By Dave Michels
A look at how 8x8, Mitel, and 2600Hz approach the resale model for their cloud-delivered services

Workflow automation has been one of the key trends this year so far, and Zoho, a company known for its suite of affordable business tools has joined the parade with a new low code workflow product called Qntrl (pronounced control).

Zoho’s Rodrigo Vaca, who is in charge of Qntrl’s marketing says that most of the solutions we’ve been seeing are built for larger enterprise customers. Zoho is aiming for the mid-market with a product that requires less technical expertise than traditional business process management tools.

“We enable customers to design their workflows visually without the need for any particular kind of prior knowledge of business process management notation or any kind of that esoteric modeling or discipline,” Vaca told me.

While Vaca says, Qntrl could require some technical help to connect a workflow to more complex backend systems like CRM or ERP, it allows a less technical end user to drag and drop the components and then get help to finish the rest.

“We certainly expect that when you need to connect to NetSuite or SAP you’re going to need a developer. If nothing else, the IT guys are going to ask questions, and they will need to provide access,” Vaca said.

He believes this product is putting this kind of tooling in reach of companies that may have been left out of workflow automation for the most part, or which have been using spreadsheets or other tools to create crude workflows. With Qntrl, you drag and drop components, and then select each component and configure what happens before, during and after each step.

What’s more, Qntrl provides a central place for processing and understanding what’s happening within each workflow at any given time, and who is responsible for completing it.

We’ve seen bigger companies like Microsoft, SAP, ServiceNow and others offering this type of functionality over the last year as low code workflow automation has taken center stage in business.

This has become a more pronounced need during the pandemic when so many workers could not be in the office. It made moving work in a more automated workflow more imperative, and we have seen companies moving to add more of this kind of functionality as a result.

Brent Leary, principal analyst at CRM Essentials, says that Zoho is attempting to remove some the complexity from this kind of tool.

“It handles the security pieces to make sure the right people have access to the data and processes used in the workflows in the background, so regular users can drag and drop to build their flows and processes without having to worry about that stuff,” Leary told me.

Qntrl is available starting today starting at just $7 per user month.

Buried in mud for millennia, some of the hulking kauri trees in rural Northland are portals to the past, present, and future of Earth’s climate.

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

In February 2019, Mark Magee was scraping the bucket of his 45-ton excavator through a hillside when it hit something 30 feet down that wouldn’t budge.

It was high summer in the Southern Hemisphere, and Magee, a construction foreman, was clearing a platform for a new geothermal power plant near Ngāwhā, a tiny community in New Zealand’s Northland region, the long peninsula that stretches from the city of Auckland to the country’s northern tip.

He called in additional digger drivers to help. Gradually, as the machines peeled away the mudstone encasing the obstinate object, they realized it was a tree — and not an ordinary tree. More and more of it appeared, a seemingly endless log. When it lay uncovered, complete with a medusa-like rootball, it measured 65 feet long and 8 feet across, and weighed 65 tons.

It was a kauri tree, a copper-skinned conifer endemic to New Zealand. The indigenous Māori hold the species sacred and use its honey-colored softwood for traditional carvings and ocean-going canoes. Although this kauri tree had clearly been buried for thousands of years, Magee was astonished to see leaves and cones stuck to its underside that were still green.

The power company, Top Energy, called in a local sawmiller named Nelson Parker to examine Magee’s find. Parker, a champion woodchopper with powerful shoulders and a missing finger, had been digging up, processing, and selling kauri logs like this one since the early 1990s. As soon as his chainsaw bit into the bark, he knew from the color of the sawdust (dark yellow) and from the smell (subtle, resiny) that this tree was very old, and worth a lot of money.

Parker also knew that swamp kauri, as the buried trees are known, are worth a lot to science. One this large would be of special interest to a group of scientists who study the information that the ancient trees have coded into their rings. After removing the roots, he cut a four-inch-thick slice from the base of the trunk and sent it to them for analysis.

What he couldn’t know then was that this particular tree held the key to understanding an ancient global catastrophe — and how it may have shaped our collective past.

A brief history of the swamp kauri boom

The kauri tree, or Agathis australis, is one of the largest and longest-lived tree species in the world. An individual kauri can live for more than two millennia, reaching 200-feet tall and more than 16 feet in diameter. Today, the living trees grow only in remnant pockets in northern New Zealand, where the national Department of Conservation lists them as threatened, due to a century of heavy logging, forest clearing for agriculture, and, more recently, the onslaught of a deadly fungus-like pathogen.

Yet for tens of thousands of years, kauri forests dominated a vast swath of the upper North Island. As the trees grew, they recorded information in their annual rings about the climate and makeup of the atmosphere. When they fell, some of the heaviest plunged deep into nearby peat bogs, where they stayed mostly unchanged for millennia.

Itinerant 19th-century gumdiggers, who sought the swamp kauri’s preserved golden resin for use in varnish and jewelry, were the first to exploit the trees for profit, digging up fields and wetlands in search of buried gum. In 1985, after environmentalist protests, the New Zealand government banned loggers from cutting live kauri on public land, and Parker and other Northland timber merchants turned their attention to swamp kauri. They clawed the trees from the earth with excavators and sold the exotic wood to furniture makers in New Zealand, the United States, and several European and Asian countries.

The industry grew slowly until around 2010. Then, it exploded, thanks to demand from a booming China, where customers are often willing to pay more for materials with antiquity. Fetching up to $200 per cubic foot, swamp kauri became one of the most valuable timbers in the world. Chinese agents roamed rural Northland, New Zealand’s poorest region, offering farmers cash in exchange for the right to prospect on their land.

The lure of a fast buck also attracted a host of dubious kauri extractors. Among them were the aptly-named “Swamp Cowboys,” who drained endangered wetlands — only 8 percent of Northland’s wetlands are still intact — to reach their quarry. In the years that followed, conservation groups successfully fought to restrain the swamp kauri industry and hold the national Ministry for Primary Industries and regional council accountable. Finally, in 2018, New Zealand’s Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision limiting swamp kauri exports. By then, the shadiest companies had gone bankrupt, and swamp kauri exports dropped from more than 200,000 cubic feet in 2013 to around 10,000 cubic feet in 2019.

The end of the swamp kauri boom was a big victory for wetland advocates — and a big relief for the scientists who study the ancient trees. The slowdown has made it easier for them to take samples from every piece of unearthed swamp kauri before it disappears into the mill and heads out of the country. Every single tree, they know, has a story to tell.

Long-lived, well-preserved kauri are something of a ‘high-resolution time-capsule’

In a windswept paddock on Northland’s remote Karikari Peninsula, on a cool October day in 2019, I watch Andrew Lorrey use a chainsaw to cut a four-inch slab called a “biscuit” off the end of a huge kauri trunk. Around him, beached on the surface like stranded whales, were dozens more unearthed logs, their forms twisted and gum-encrusted, the tortured roots of their massive stumps reaching for a squally sky.

Lorrey, a stocky, bearded American originally from New England, is a climate scientist at New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA). He came to the country in 2002 to study swamp kauri for his PhD. During the “gold rush” years, he felt a lot of pressure to “scurry around” collecting samples, knowing most of the wood was slipping through his fingers. But over time, he and a handful of other scientists forged relationships with the main timber extractors. “I want to look back and say I did what I could to get this precious natural archive preserved for science,” he tells me.

Kate Evans

Swamp kauri fall into two age clusters: “young” trees that died anywhere between a few thousand and around 13,000 years ago, and “ancient” ones that were alive more than 25,000 years ago. No one has yet found a kauri from the roughly 12,000-year span in between. That was the height of the last glacial period, when temperatures were cooler and sea levels more than 300 feet lower. Scientists speculate that the kauri’s range may have shrunk during that time because of the cold, or that the forests moved to lower elevations on the continental shelf when sea levels fell, and were later submerged as the climate warmed and seas rose again. Or perhaps the trees from that time are simply still out there, waiting to be discovered.

The landowner here on the Karikari Peninsula, a taciturn, pipe-smoking farmer named Chris Hensley, found this batch of buried logs when he was converting an old pine forestry plantation to pasture. For Hensley, the kauri are a nuisance. “They bugger up the farm equipment,” Lorrey says. But for Lorrey, they’re treasure. After learning about them, he quickly organized an expedition, driving more than four hours from Auckland to examine them. Hensley had used his digger to lay the huge haul — 104 individual trees — on the ground like matchsticks. “When I got there, I said, ‘I’ve got gold,’” Lorrey remembers.

Now, Lorrey moves from log to log, slicing biscuits from each one, making detailed notes about their measurements and where they were found, then brushing the cut faces with a white glue-based paint to protect the wood from the elements.

While Lorrey works, Hensley arrives to watch. A tiny white fluffy dog jumps from his truck and runs frenetically among the dark logs. Knowing the age of the timber will help him sell it later, Hensley says. “This way I get them dated for free.”

What the scientists get in return is something they can’t find anywhere else.

There are other ancient trees in the world, but none as old, as long-lived, or as numerous as the kauri. Because migrating ice sheets demolished everything in their path, few trees survived the glacial periods in the Northern Hemisphere, and scientists have found only a handful — including one 23,000-year-old cypress buried in a volcanic mudflow near Mount Fuji in Japan. Northland, however, remained ice-free. “The kauri are globally unique,” Lorrey says. “There’s no other wood resource like it for this part of Earth’s history, full stop.”

Other natural climate archives, such as ice cores, lake sediments, and stalactites and stalagmites, also allow scientists to peer into the past. But trees are the “gold standard,” Lorrey says, because they directly sample the atmosphere, and make a new record of it and other aspects of the environment in each annual growth ring of wood they lay down. Unlike ice cores and lake sediments, tree rings don’t compress over time. Multiple trees growing at the same time can be cross-referenced, too, smoothing out any local or individual variation that might interfere with broad conclusions about the climate. (Imagine a single tree growing poorly for a few seasons because its roots were waterlogged or it was shaded by others.) Long-lived, well-preserved kauri are therefore a kind of “high-resolution time-capsule,” Lorrey says.

Tree rings illuminate the past in several ways. Most simply, counting them under a microscope reveals how long a tree lived. The biscuit that Nelson Parker cut from the log found near the village of Ngāwhā, for instance, indicates that the kauri was about 1,600 years old when it died: 1,600 rings, 1,600 years. Measuring the varying width of the rings from year to year allows scientists to observe changing growing conditions. Chemical analysis of each ring can indicate relative humidity, rainfall patterns, and soil moisture. And by using computer programs and eyeballing tree-ring patterns to string together multiple samples from different times and locations, scientists can create long tree-ring sequences, called “chronologies,” that span millennia and help reveal larger regional climate patterns.

University of Auckland dendrochronologist Gretel Boswijk and collaborators, for example, used 700 samples of both ancient and living kauri to piece together a continuous 4,491-year chain of trees that lived between 2488 BC and today. The chronology allowed Boswijk’s colleague, Anthony Fowler, to figure out that kauri are especially sensitive to the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), a climate pattern in the Pacific Ocean that affects annual temperatures and rainfall around the world. “When we have an El Niño year, here in the north of the country we’ll get more southwesterly flow — clearer skies but also cooler average temperatures,” Boswijk says. “Kauri tend to respond well in those conditions, so they tend to put on a wide ring.” Conversely, in a warmer, cloudier La Niña year, kauri add narrower rings. “They get stressed, they don’t grow as well.”

Using this information, the team was able create a 700-year reconstruction of ENSO variability in northern New Zealand, providing a lengthy picture of the country’s natural climate variation. For comparison, historical climate records date back only 150 years. The longer timeline is crucial for climate modelers trying to predict how ENSO will respond to future anthropogenic warming.

Scientists have also assembled a handful of other kauri chronologies that go even further back in time, each covering a few millennia of the past 60,000 years. But because they’re not connected to the present, they’re called “floating chronologies,” meaning their calendar ages remain relatively uncertain. Lorrey dreams of one day finding the right logs to link all of them into one unbroken chain.

In the meantime, the floating chronologies and ancient kauri samples are already proving incredibly valuable for global science in other ways. As a start, they can help scientists determine the ages of other plant, human, and animal artifacts, from as far back as tens of thousands of years ago.

Read the rest in bioGraphic, an online magazine about nature and sustainability powered by the California Academy of Sciences.

The desktop Google Photos website seems to be getting the ability to scan for text in an image and turn it into copy-and-pasteable text, thanks to Google’s Lens technology (via 9to5Google). Lens has been available in many places on Android for a while, but its optical character recognition (OCR) feature coming to the desktop could make Google Photos an easy and free way to get real-life text onto your computer.

According to 9to5Google, the feature seems to be rolling out widely, but a writer at XDA-Developers didn’t have it show up for them. I was able to use it, though. To use it (or to check if you have it yet), load up the Google Photos site and go to a photo where you’ve captured some text (such as a page of a book, a sign, a...

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Facebook’s experimental app development division, the NPE Team, has released a new Q&A platform that borrows concepts from buzzy, audio-only social network Clubhouse but with dashes of live-streaming thrown in.

The platform is called Hotline, and it featured its first Q&A with investor Nick Huber earlier today, according to a report from TechCrunch. A website for the service is online now and allows sign-ins via Twitter, but it features only a waitlist and a tool for applying to host your own show. TechCrunch says Facebook has created designs for mobile versions of the app, though those do not appear to be live at this moment.

News of Facebook building its own version of Clubhouse first surfaced in February, though Hotline is said to...

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We are thrilled to announce a number of enhancements that are now generally available on Microsoft Teams Rooms on Android. From an updated calendar view to a new touch console experience, users now have more visibility of meetings and easier access to them on these devices.

 

A New Calendar on the Home Screen
In this release we are bringing a more robust calendar experience to the front of the room so you can see and join not only the current meeting but also future meetings as well. Also, all the familiar controls you need have moved alongside the calendar for a sleek, modern look.

 

Introducing A New Touch Console Experience
Formerly, the touch console experience mimicked a physical remote, where users had to use directional keys to navigate the UI. With this new experience on the touch console, users can directly interact with the console UI, similar to Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows. Check with your manufacturer to see if your device supports this new, updated touch console experience.

 

The touch console includes calendar functionality where you can view your current and upcoming meetings. In addition, it also features the most important meeting and calling functionality.

 

Once you join a meeting, you will be able to take advantage of call functionality, toggle between gallery views, see hands that are raised, and use inclusive features such as pinning and turning on live captions.

 

Touch console is an optional peripheral and Teams Rooms on Android will continue functioning without the console. However, once touch console is paired, front-of-room controls will be hidden, and device operation will be available from the touch console.

 

More Enhancements When Using Microsoft Teams Rooms in Personal Mode
Some users may want to bring this experience to their home office to take Teams calls and meetings on a large, dedicated screen. If you are logged into a Teams Rooms on Android with a personal account, we have added convenient features that help you manage your meetings better.

You can blur your background or change it entirely. The background will persist across meetings to make things easier. This option is available through the ellipsis in the menu bar.

 

Recordings can be an important way to keep those who couldn’t make it to the meeting in the loop. We are introducing an ability to start and stop recordings directly from your Microsoft Teams Rooms on Android. As in all other Teams applications, you can find the “Start recording” button in the … menu.

 

For now, starting and stopping recording is only supported for personal accounts. Shared account (aka resource account) support is coming soon.

Whiteboard is a great collaboration tool. Previously, users could use Microsoft whiteboard as part of a Teams meetings, but they could not initiate a whiteboarding session. We are introducing the ability to start a whiteboarding session directly from your device. You can find “Share whiteboard” button in the … menu.

 

For now, sharing the whiteboard is only supported for personal accounts. Shared account (aka resource account) support is coming soon.

Still getting started on Microsoft Teams Rooms on Android? Check our Get Started guide here:
Get started with Teams Rooms on Android - Office Support

Twitch will now ban users who harass members of its community — even when that harassment takes place off Twitch. The streaming platform announced a major expansion of its off-service misconduct policy today that allows it to take action against users who mistreat people regardless of where it happens, whether it’s offline or on another social platform.

The new policy splits misconduct into two categories: category one, which applies to harassment that takes place on and off Twitch, and category two, which applies only to harassment off Twitch. The first category hasn’t changed. If Twitch is reviewing a harassment report about something that happened on-stream, it will take into account related harassment on Facebook.

The second...

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By Phil Edholm
Across a wide spectrum of product areas, Cisco showed where we can expect the industry to head with a focus on innovation.

Thanks to major players like Amazon and Walmart, we’ve become accustomed to next- or same-day delivery. But the pandemic has also renewed our interest in buying from smaller businesses and retailers.

Swyft, a company that has just raised $17.5 million in a Series A, helps retailers of any size provide affordable same-day delivery. The round was co-led by Inovia Capital and Forerunner Ventures, with participation from Shopify and existing investors Golden Ventures and Trucks VC.

Swyft is a marketplace, connecting a network of shipping carriers with vendors. But the company also provides software to those carriers to make them more efficient, and turns them into a vast network that allows them to pick up more inventory without adding to their infrastructure.

In other words, several regional carriers may play a part in delivering a parcel shipped via Swyft without making any big changes to their original routes or adding new drivers, trucks, etc.

To date, major players in both shipping and retail have dominated this space, thanks in large part to their ability to deliver quickly. Swyft is looking to amass an army, for lack of a better term, comprised of all of the smaller players, including mom and pop retailers and vendors as well as smaller, regional carriers. Banded together through software, these carriers and retailers can match the scale and influence of the behemoths without spending a fortune.

Swyft was co-founded by Aadil Kazmi (CEO), Zeeshan Hamid (head of Engineering) and Maraz Rahman (head of Sales). Kazmi and Hamid both spent their careers at Amazon, working on data and last-mile operations for the behemoth. Rahman was an early employee at a YC-backed proptech startup.

The trio started asking themselves early last year why retailers weren’t able to offer same-day delivery and chose to tackle the gap they discovered.

The key ingredient to Swyft is not its aggregation of couriers, but the software it provides to them. Because Swyft is increasing demand for these carriers, it also needs to make them more efficient. The back-end software allows carriers to digitize or automate a good deal of what they’re traditionally doing by hand.

Kazmi says that Swyft is able to come in anywhere between 25-30% cheaper than the incumbent option.

“I don’t know what percent of your purchases are from Amazon, but for me it’s like 150%,” said Eurie Kim. “I’d prefer to buy elsewhere with the pandemic, and support local and independent brands, but Amazon’s trained us all to have fast and free shipping. It feels like an opportunity where the consumer experience is really lacking and the burden on merchants and retailers is extremely heavy.”

Swyft currently has 16 full-time employees; 12% percent are female and 75% are people of color, according to the company.

Since April 2020, Swyft has facilitated the delivery of more than 180,000 packages, and expanded gross margin from 78% to 82%, thanks in large part to revenue from the software side of the business and a zero-asset model.

It’s easy to lose track of the numbers. But you shouldn’t.

The total number of billionaires exploded over the course of the coronavirus pandemic — and they individually became extraordinarily wealthier during the last 12 months.

That’s according to a new report from Forbes, which does one of the most complete analyses each spring about the state of the billionaire class across the globe. Tracking the net worths of the wealthy is painstaking work that requires sifting through arcane filings — and the end results are not perfect — but the estimates offered by Forbes represent one of the best stabs at covering the scale of income inequality in the world. And while it’s easy to lose track of the numbers or to see the figures as old news — “Billionaires continue to be billionaires” — the scale matters for anyone who wants to get a grasp on how much of a problem wealth inequality truly is.

The world is now home to 2,755 billionaires, a world record and a startling 30 percent increase from Forbes’ accounting last year of the world’s uber-rich. And 86 percent of those billionaires are richer than they were a year ago. The list does paint an exaggerated picture of some of the pandemic gains, because it compares today’s net worths to Forbes’ last analysis in mid-March 2020, when the market had yet to recover from the early pandemic-inspired sell-off.

The pandemic has reinvigorated the debate over inequality, with nations like Argentina adopting a wealth tax and other similar proposals gaining a foothold in the United States. In the US, many Americans have more personal income and savings than they had before the pandemic, thanks in part to unprecedented government stimulus measures. But at the same time, demand for food pantries smashed records and the economy shed about 10 million jobs. Billionaire philanthropists have played center stage in America’s recovery.

Perhaps no statistic better encapsulates the scale of the yawning inequality than that MacKenzie Scott, the former wife of Jeff Bezos and one of the wealthiest people in the world, probably gave more money away directly to nonprofits in 2020 than any person has in a single year ever before. Yet because of Amazon’s surging stock price, she actually ended the year richer, Forbes reports.

Forbes finds that the tech set, like Scott, fared particularly well. Six of the world’s 10 richest people made their money in tech, and the total assets controlled by all tech billionaires globally measures $2.5 trillion, far more than any other industry. Neither of those figures include Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who is classified by Forbes as in the automotive industry but has ridden Tesla’s extraordinary bull run to become the second richest person in the world.

That’s all to say that the debate over wealth inequality isn’t going anywhere, even when the pandemic fades away. Check out Recode’s recent coverage of how the coronavirus has made America more reliant on billionaires and our exclusive polling on how ordinary Americans feel about these central characters in American society.

Messaging is the medium these days, and today a startup that has built an API to help others build text and video interactivity into their services is announcing a big round to continue scaling its business. Sendbird, a popular provider of chat, video and other interactive services to the likes of Reddit, Hinge, Paytm, Delivery Hero and hundreds of others by way of a few lines of code, has closed a round of $100 million, money that it plans to use to continue expanding the functionalities of its platform to meet our changing interactive times. Sendbird has confirmed that the funding values the company at $1.05 billion.

Today, customers collectively channel some 150 million users through Sendbird’s APIs to chat with each other and large groups of users over text and video, a figure that has seen a lot of growth in particular in the last year, where people were spending so much more time in front of screens as their primary interface to communicate with the world.

Sendbird already provides some services around that core functionality, such as moderation and text search. John Kim, Sendbird’s CEO and founder, said that additional developments like moderation has seen a huge take-up, and services it plans to add into the mix include payments and logistics features, and that it is looking at adding in group audio conversations for customers to build their own Clubhouse clones.

“We are getting enquiries,” said Kim. “We will be setting it up in a personalized way. Voice chat has certainly picked up due to Clubhouse.”

The funding — oversubscribed, the company says — is being led by Steadfast Financial, with SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2 also participating, along with previous backers ICONIQ Capital, Tiger Global Management and Meritech Capital. It comes about two years after Sendbird closed its Series B at $102 million, and the startup appears to have nearly doubled its valuation since then: PitchBook estimates it was around $550 million in 2019.

That growth, in a sense, is not a surprise, given not just the climate right now for virtual interaction, but the fact that Sendbird itself has tripled the number of customers using its tools since 2019. The company, co-headquartered in Seoul, Korea and San Mateo, California, has now raised around $221 million.

The market that Sendbird has been pecking away at since being founded in 2013 is a hefty one.

Messaging apps have become a major digital force, with a small handful of companies overtaking (and taking on) the primary features found on the most basic of phones and finding traction with people by making them easier to use and full of more interesting features to use alongside the basic functionality. That in turn has led a wave of other companies to build in their own communications features, a way both to provide more community for their users, and to keep people on their own platforms in the process.

“It’s an arms race going on between messaging and payment apps,” Sid Suri, Sendbird’s marketing head, said to me in describing the competitive landscape. “There is a high degree of urgency among all businesses to say we don’t have to lose users to any of them. White label services like ours are powering the ability to keep up.”

Sendbird is indeed one of a wave of companies that have identified both that trend and the opportunity of building that functionality out as a commodity of sorts that can be embedded anywhere a developer chooses to place it by way of an API. It’s not the only one: Others in the same space include publicly listed Twilio, the similarly named competitor MessageBird (which is also highly capitalised and has positioned itself as a consolidator in the space), PubNub, Sinch, Stream, Firebase and many more.

That competition is one reason Sendbird has raised money. It gives it more capital to bring on more users, and critically to invest in building out more functionality alongside its core features, to address the needs of its existing users and to discover new opportunities to provide them with features they perhaps didn’t know they needed in their messaging channels to keep users’ attention.

“We are doing a lot around transactions and payments, as well as logistics,” Kim said in an interview. “We are really building out the end to end experience [since that] really ties into engagement. A couple of new features will be heavily around transactions, and others will be around more engagement.”

Karan Mehandru, a partner at Steadfast, is joining the board with this round, and he believes that there remains a huge opportunity, especially when you consider the many verticals that have yet to adopt solid and useful communications channels within their services, such as healthcare.

“The channel that Sendbird is leveraging is the next channel we have come to expect from all brands,” he said in an interview. “Sendbird may look the same as others but if you peel the onion, providing a scalable chat experience that is highly customized is a real problem to solve. Large customers think this is critical but not a core competence and then zoom back to Sendbird because they can’t do it. Sendbird is a clear leader. Sendbird is permeating many verticals and types of companies now. This is one of those rare companies that has been at the right place at the right time.”

Before it was even released, Coded Bias was positioned to become essential viewing for anyone interested in the AI ethics debate. The documentary, which was released on Netflix this week, is the kind of film that can and should be shown in countless high school classrooms, where students themselves are subjected to various AI systems in the post-pandemic age of Zoom. It's a refreshingly digestible introduction to the myriad ways algorithmic bias has infiltrated every aspect of our lives—from racist facial recognition and predictive policing systems to scoring software that decides who gets access to housing, loans, public assistance, and more.

But amid the recent high-profile firings of Timnit Gebru and others at Google's AI ethics team, the documentary seems like only one part of a deeper and ongoing story. If we understand algorithmic bias as a form of computationally-imposed ideology, rather than an unfortunate rounding error, we can't simply attack the symptoms. We need to challenge the existence of the racist and capitalist institutions that created those systems in the first place.

The film follows Joy Buolamwini, a computer scientist and founder of the Algorithmic Justice League, an organization that she started after realizing that facial recognition systems weren't trained to recognize darker-skinned faces. Buolamwini is easily one of the most important figures in the AI field, and she serves as a gateway into a range of stories about how automation has imposed on us a robotic and unjust world—albeit one that merely reflects and amplifies the pre-existing injustices brought about by racism, sexism, and capitalism.

Showing the actual human impacts of algorithmic surveillance is always a challenge, but filmmaker Shalini Kantayya manages to navigate through a series of deeply compelling portraits: a celebrated teacher who was fired after receiving a low rating from an algorithmic assessment tool, and a group of tenants in Brooklyn who campaigned against their landlord after the installation of a facial recognition system in their building, to name a few. 

Perhaps the film's greatest feat is linking all of these stories to highlight a systemic problem: it's not just that the algorithms "don't work," it's that they were built by the same mostly-male, mostly-white cadre of engineers, who took the oppressive models of the past and deployed them at scale. As author and mathematician Cathy O'Neill points out in the film, we can't understand algorithms—or technology in general—without understanding the asymmetric power structure of those who write code versus those who have code imposed on them.

In discussions of AI, there is a tendency to think of algorithmic bias as an innocent whoopsie-daisy that can be iterated out. In reality, it's often people in positions of power imposing old, bad ideas like racist pseudoscience, using computers and math as a smokescreen to avoid accountability. After all, if the computer says it, it must be true.

Given the systemic nature of the problem, the film's ending feels anticlimactic. We see Buolamwini and others speaking at a pre-pandemic Congressional hearing on AI and algorithms, bringing the issue of algorithmic bias to the highest seats of power. But given the long and ineffective history of Congress tsk-tsking tech CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg, I was left wondering how a hearing translates into justice—especially when injustice seems to be hard-wired into the business models of the tech companies shaping our algorithmic future.

Even more interesting is how the film's timeline stops just before the firing (and subsequent smearing) of Timnit Gebru and other prominent AI ethics researchers at Google. Gebru, a celebrated data scientist who appears in the film, was terminated last year after co-authoring a paper which concluded that the large language models used in many AI systems have a significant environmental impact, as well as "risk of substantial harms, including stereotyping, denigration, increases in extremist ideology, and wrongful arrest." 

In other words, the findings were a refutation of Google's core business model, which the company's senior leadership was none too interested in hearing. To many in the AI ethics field, the firings demonstrated the workings of racial capitalism—how women of color in the tech industry are merely tolerated to achieve the appearance of diversity, and disposed of when they challenge the white-male power structure and its business model of endless surveillance.

If there is hope to be found at the film's conclusion, it lies in the brief mentions of grassroots activists who have successfully campaigned to ban facial recognition in cities across the country. But ultimately, the lessons we should draw from films like Coded Bias aren't about facial recognition, or any algorithm or technology in particular. It's about how the base operating system of our society will continue to produce new, more harmful technologies—unless we dismantle it and create something better to put in its place.

Signal announced on Tuesday it’s now testing a new peer-to-peer payments system in the beta version of its apps. Appropriately called Signal Payments, the new feature right now supports only one protocol: the MobileCoin wallet and its companion cryptocurrency MOB. MobileCoin has a close relationship with Signal co-founder and CEO Moxie Marlinspike, who advised the company prior to its most recent round of funding announced last month.

“The first payments protocol we’ve added support for is a privacy focused payments network called MobileCoin, which has its own currency, MOB,” wrote Jun Harada, Signal’s head of growth and communication, in a blog post. “As always, our goal is to keep your data in your hands rather than ours; MobileCoin’s...

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Amazon’s bringing Zoom compatibility to more devices. The company announced today that it’s making the Echo Show 10 devices in the US compatible with the popular video calling software. Users who have their calendars linked up to the Alexa will have their meetings started automatically while people who haven’t done that can say, “Alexa, join my meeting” or “Alexa, join my Zoom meeting” to join one. This is the second Echo Show to gain Zoom access; the Echo Show 8 started supporting the videoconferencing platform in the US in December.

The Echo Show 10’s camera tracks users as they move throughout a room, meaning callers can see the screen no matter where they sit or stand. Presumably, this functionality will work with Zoom, putting it on...

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A right-to-repair bill died in the Colorado state legislature on March 25, 2021. After almost three hours of testimony from business leaders, disabled advocates, and a 9-year-old activist, legislators said there were too many unanswered questions and that the proposed law was too broad.

Half the country is now considering right-to-repair laws. As electronics have become a more important part of people’s lives, tech companies have attempted to tighten the control over how we use their devices.

Colorado’s proposed right-to-repair law was simple and clear. At 11 pages, the legislation spent most of its word count defining terms, but the gist was simple: It would let people fix their own stuff without needing to resort to the manufacturer and force said manufacturer to support people who want to fix stuff.  

“For the purpose of providing services for digital electronic equipment sold or used in this state, an original equipment manufacturer shall, with fair and reasonable terms and cost, make available to an independent repair provider or owner of the manufacturer’s equipment any documentation, parts, embedded software, firmware, or tools that are intended for use with the digital electronic equipment, including updates to documentation, information, or embedded software,” the proposed bill said.

Right-to-repair is often spoken of in the context of broken phone screens, but it doesn’t just affect people’s personal devices. Agricultural and medical equipment are increasingly impossible to fix because manufacturers want to maintain a monopoly on repairing the product. These issues can make the right-to-repair literally life and death.

The Colorado House Business Affairs & Labor committee met to consider the law on March 25. Twelve legislators voted to indefinitely postpone considering the bill. Only one voted for it. “I still have a lot of questions. I still have a lot of concerns,” Rep. Monica Duran (D) said at the end of the committee hearing. She voted no on the bill.

It was a stunning statement given just how many people testified on behalf of the right-to-repair legislation and how few questions the committee asked them. 

Kenny Maestas, who uses a wheelchair, drove this home in his testimony before the committee. Maestas spent a long time in the hospital and when he came home, his mobility was restricted. An electric wheelchair helped him get around, but it was broken. The right arm of the chair was broken and the battery would no longer hold a charge. 

“Both my son and brothers were capable and ready to do whatever needed to get done…I called on the 14th of December,” he told the committee. “I was told the next time a tech would be in my area would be the 18th of January. As a rural resident of Colorado I’m used to a regional delay, but 35 days seemed excessive.”

Maestas said that the electric wheelchair company had the battery and spare parts on file to fix his chair, but the company’s procedure required a technician to first inspect the chair before making a repair. It was another 28 days after the tech first arrived before Maestas was mobile again. It was more than 60 days before his chair was working again. 

“It’s never appropriate to make a human being with a critical care need wait over two months for a repair that could have been completed in two days,” he said. The committee asked Maestas no questions.

Julie Reiskin, executive director of the Colorado Cross-Disability Coalition, shared horrifying stories of what it means when someone can’t get their wheelchair repaired quickly. 

“This company left a friend and colleague for two weeks with a broken tilt, which is necessary to preserve skin integrity, with full knowledge that he has life threatening medical issues caused by pressure sores,” she said. “When they finally bothered to show up two weeks later, they failed to fix the problem.”

The wheelchair had a visible wire loose and the Reiskin’s friend had a handyman fix it. When the wheelchair manufacturer found out, it voided his warranty.  Had he not had his handyman do it, “he would have gone to the hospital or worse,” she said.

Earlier, committee members had shared concerns about improper installation of batteries causing fires; safety concerns with non-manufacturer repairs are a common talking point with industry groups and supporters. Reiskin’s own wheelchair once caught fire after authorized repair techs improperly installed batteries, she said. The committee asked her no questions.

Nine-year old activist Madhvi Chittoor took the stand to explain the environmental impact of the right-to-repair. “I support this bill. For the sustainability of planet Earth, our only home, we have to move away from the 'use and replace' mindset. It affects our ecosystem very badly,” she said. 

One legislator asked Chittoor how long she’d been an activist. Another praised her testimony. No one asked her substantive questions about the environmental impact of right-to-repair.

In their own comments, the legislators repeated lines Apple and other companies often use to defend their repair monopolies. Shannon Bird (D), for example, said that manufacturers have the right to dictate how a customer uses its product. She stressed that Apple can sell licenses to whatever it wants. “Apple Music is different than purchasing a CD,” she said. "I have a hard time believing that we would call it Apple having a monopoly on its own product.”

Many of the legislators on the committee conflated the repair market with the phone market itself. Others said that a right-to-repair bill would increase the cost of phones for everyone. Rep. Steven Woodrow (D), a sponsor of the bill, explained why this didn’t make any sense. 

“We’re not talking about the market for phones. We’re talking about the market for repairs, it’s a secondary market,” he said. “By restricting competition in that market they’re engaged in manipulation. The cost should go down. By allowing for repairs you’re increasing the supply. Basic econ says that as the supply increases the price decreases.”

At one point, the opposition even brought out former Governor and John Deere dealer Roy Romer to testify against the bill. John Deere is an industry leader in locking down products against third-party repair and  famously lied to customers about making tractors easy to repair. 

The right-to-repair bill's defeat  is a setback for Colorado, but it isn’t the end of the story. Bill sponsor Brianna Titone (D) told Motherboard she plans to keep fighting. 

“I was particularly frustrated by a committee member who said they had ‘so many unanswered questions’ yet didn't ask any during the committee,” she said in an email. “The tactics used by the industry to protect their bottom line and oppose this bill are nothing new, and I’ve known from the beginning that getting it passed would be an uphill battle. The big tech companies have virtually unlimited resources and can send the best people to sow doubt about the bill.”

At the end of the committee hearing, Titone can be heard telling the legislators “see you next year.” 

She knows that it’s a good, common sense law that has the overwhelming support of her constituents, she said. 

“I cannot recall anyone outside of the legislature who thought it was a bad idea. Farmers agree, consumers agree, independent small business repair shops agree, but the committee didn't because of whatever was told to them,” said Titone. “My constituent, Madhvi, the 9 year old environmentalist, was very disappointed with the result but I told her I will continue to fight for the issue.”

Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Washington are also considering right-to-repair laws. Colorado’s fight is a preview for what to expect as legislators prepare to consider those bills.

The best Chromebook for anyone who wants Chrome OS on their laptop

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Dish Network issued a new letter to the Federal Communications Commission this week, as reported by Axios, highlighting the urgent situation it faces if T-Mobile moves ahead with its planned January 2022 CDMA network shutdown. “We believe that T-Mobile’s actions raise significant competition and public interest concerns,” the letter states. It would be a blow to Dish’s business, but most importantly, millions of Boost Mobile customers would feel the impact as a result.

Boost Mobile, a former Sprint MVNO sold to Dish as part of T-Mobile’s acquisition, serves 9 million customers. According to the letter, more than half of them rely on CDMA service. Its prepaid service is an accessible alternative to contract plans for low-income customers;...

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Biden wants $100 billion to give broadband to everyone. It may not be that easy.

President Biden’s $2 trillion American Jobs Plan infrastructure proposal used a broader definition of infrastructure than most people tend to associate with the word. It took on everything from roads, pipes, and electricity to climate change, union jobs, and inequality.

It also provided $100 billion to America’s digital infrastructure, with a lofty goal of giving all Americans access to the affordable, reliable high-speed internet they need to participate in today’s economy. The plan is short on specifics for now, but the vast majority of that money will go to building out high-speed broadband connections to the millions of Americans who still don’t have them. There are also provisions about promoting competition and lowering prices. Biden called broadband internet “the new electricity,” comparing the need for a federal initiative to bring it to all Americans to the Rural Electrification Act of 1936.

If you’ve been paying attention, Biden’s focus on closing the digital divide shouldn’t be a surprise. He called for “universal broadband” during his campaign in his Build Back Better plan. He appointed Jessica Rosenworcel, who as an FCC commissioner has been championing affordable broadband internet for years, to be acting chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

Rosenworcel’s response to Biden’s plan, by the way? “I’m all in.”

But it’s also an enormous and complicated undertaking that America has been trying to accomplish for years, under three (now four) presidencies. The exact number of Americans who don’t have access to broadband infrastructure varies depending on several factors, including the maps you use to count them and what your definition of reliable high-speed internet is. Biden put the number at 30 million. And that number doesn’t include the millions of Americans who do have access to broadband internet but can’t afford it, rendering that access meaningless.

The affordability issue has become all the more obvious and problematic during the pandemic. Lawmakers had to scramble to help lower-income people gain internet access through various subsidies and stimulus bills, while the FCC essentially had to beg internet service providers not to cut off Americans if they couldn’t afford their internet bills. Those aren’t permanent solutions, though, and they still weren’t enough for some. Biden’s plan wants to help those people, too.

“When I say affordable, I mean it,” Biden said in a speech announcing the plan. “Americans pay too much.”

Advocates for universal broadband access and affordability have lauded the plan.

“It’s an earnest effort to attain digital equity for all Americans, address overpriced internet service, and implement greater transparency and accountability,” Willmary Escoto of digital rights nonprofit Access Now told Recode. “The American Jobs Plan advances the US into a new digital future, one where every individual in America has a fair shot at success.”

Gigi Sohn, a distinguished fellow at the Georgetown Institute for Technology Law & Policy, said in a statement that Biden’s plan was notable not only in its ambition but also in “the message it sends — that broadband, like electricity, is a necessity, and that one cannot participate in our economy, our education and health care systems and our society without it ... The United States cannot afford to be a country of digital haves and have-nots.”

“President Biden’s $100 billion infrastructure plan acknowledges an important fact about broadband today — it is an essential service, like water and electricity, and our public policy should reflect that fact,” Greg Guice, government affairs director at open internet advocacy group Public Knowledge, said in a statement. “We look forward to working with the administration and members of Congress as they seek to pass this bold initiative to close the digital divide.”

The fact sheet the Biden administration released doesn’t go into the details beyond saying how much money Biden wants to invest and, generally, what he hopes the return on that investment will be: high-speed, “future-proof” broadband access covering the entire country; more competition between providers, including municipally owned plans and co-ops; and reduced costs.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) said that the Biden plan was based on the Accessible, Affordable Internet for All Act, which she and Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC) introduced in their respective houses last year and reintroduced last month.

That bill gives $80 billion to broadband infrastructure, requires service providers who use networks built on that infrastructure to offer affordable service plans, and provides an additional $6 billion to the Emergency Broadband Benefit program. It will also make it easier for local governments, public-private partnerships, and cooperatives to set up their own networks that could compete with traditional for-profit service providers — which, in many areas, remain consumers’ only real option.

“The coronavirus pandemic exposed and exacerbated many longstanding faults that must be repaired if America is to retain her greatness,” Clyburn told Recode. “In addition to repairing many of our nation’s faults, the American Jobs Plan wisely guards against the emergence of additional faults in the future.”

Anna Read, a senior research officer with the broadband access initiative at the Pew Charitable Trusts, told Recode that the federal government should look to state and local broadband access programs, which Read believes will be the key to implementing Biden’s vision.

“States have really been leading on this issue over the last few years,” Read said. “They’ve been investing significant state dollars and expanding broadband access. ... Increasingly, states are beginning to look at the affordability question as well.”

While the Biden plan promises a lot, delivering it will be a different matter. Presidents Bush, Obama, and Trump all had lofty goals about connecting America. None of them delivered, and millions of Americans paid the price for that failure when the pandemic laid bare just how far behind America is.

Scott Wallsten, president and senior fellow at the Technology Policy Institute, said there are too many unknowns at this point to say whether Biden’s plan will be the one that reverses that trend. After all, if getting everyone in America online were easy, it would have been done already. He hopes that the plan provides for experimentation and analysis to see where and why people aren’t getting online, rather than just throwing money at a problem and assuming that will solve it. He sees a lot of places where this could go wrong or be wasteful, but he said there’s reason to be optimistic, too.

“What I think is good is that people are actually paying attention to the digital divide and its consequences in a way that they never were before,” Wallsten said. “We see the problems and the inequities and what can happen as a result ... I think, for once, those people actually really are visible.”

“This is a significant infrastructure challenge but it is also an affordability challenge,” Read said. “Addressing the two in tandem will be very important to closing the digital divide.”

Open Sourced is made possible by Omidyar Network. All Open Sourced content is editorially independent and produced by our journalists.

RoundPoint Mortgage Servicing Corporation, one of the nation’s largest non-bank mortgage servicing companies, is helping connect more customers to their business by providing the ability to engage over the customers’ channel of choice.

SAN RAMON, CA – March 30, 2021 – Five9, Inc. (NASDAQ: FIVN), an industry-leading provider of the intelligent cloud contact center is working with leading enterprises to transform their business and reimagine their customer experience by allowing customers to seamlessly communicate with companies using the channel and/or channels of their choice. The latest customer to take advantage of these capabilities is RoundPoint Mortgage Servicing Corporation (RoundPoint) who are working with Five9 to digitally transform their business for a more modern approach to customer service.

“Five9 Digital Engagement enables organizations to be more available and connected than ever before,” said Dan Burkland, President, Five9. “The key to exceeding customers’ expectations is meeting them on their terms – when and how they wish to communicate with you. Our solutions create exceptional digital-first experiences that delight customers and drive brand loyalty by meeting their needs at every touchpoint.”

The Five9 Intelligent Cloud Contact Center makes it easy for businesses to engage customers on their terms and to quickly provide the type of intuitive, personalized, and more human experience they want. This allows agents to seamlessly follow the customer’s journey regardless of the way in which they choose to engage. The Five9 solutions also ensure that as the customers change their channel of engagement, the context is not lost for the agent, meaning a more seamless experience for the customer and a more informed experience for the agent.

Prior to Five9, RoundPoint had an on-premises telephony solution that lacked the features and capabilities they required to meet their vision of delivering meaningful value to their customers for all things home. Their previous solution had insufficient reporting functionality, offered no real-time statistics, did not scale properly, did not have a predictive dialer and did not offer the ability to seamlessly service customers using the channel or channels they chose.

That’s why RoundPoint turned to Five9 to help. As part of the deployment, some of the key channels that Five9 has enabled for the mortgage company include:

• Voice: Enable the most popular method of communication so customers can get their issues addressed by a live agent with unparalleled voice quality on a global scale.
• Chat: Enable chat for customers who still want to communicate with a human but prefer not to use a voice channel to resolve their issue.
• Video: Shorten resolution times and create better experiences by letting your customers show and share their problems with agents in real time.
• Email: Provide agents with advanced search capabilities to quickly identify issues for resolution and easily include attachments with the response.
• Visual IVR: Extend IVR self-service visually on mobile devices to deliver a consistent customer experience whether they are using a voice or a visual channel.
• Messaging: Provide a unified interface to handle all message-based interactions including SMS and social messaging.
• Social Media: Automate the process of monitoring social media feeds to ensure prompt and consistent responses if needed.

Since adopting the Five9 Intelligent Cloud Contact Center, RoundPoint now offers omnichannel customer service, which saves an average two to three minutes per chat or email interaction. In addition, RoundPoint has added the ability to handle off-hour inquiries and leads through email and scheduled callbacks. They also experienced improved agent efficiency with assisted response templates that eliminated the typing needed for common questions and inquiries.

“It’s amazing to have a full-fledged contact center in the cloud with no restrictions and endless integrations that is capable of modifying IVRs in real-time to allow flexibility in contingency cases, such as agents being able to access chat and email records while engaging with customer via phone.” said Fabian Russell, Assistant VP, Call Center Operations, RoundPoint Mortgage Servicing Corporation. “It’s always a pleasure working with Five9.”

To learn more about the Five9 Digital Engagement offerings, click here.

About Five9

Five9 is an industry-leading provider of cloud contact center solutions, bringing the power of cloud innovation to more than 2,000 customers worldwide and facilitating billions of customer engagements annually. The Five9 Intelligent Cloud Contact Center provides digital engagement, analytics, workflow automation, workforce optimization, and practical AI to help customers reimagine their customer experience. Designed to be reliable, secure, compliant, and scalable, the Five9 platform helps increase agent and supervisor productivity, connects the contact center to the business, and ultimately deliver tangible business results including increased revenue and enhanced customer trust and loyalty. For more information, visit www.five9.com.

The post Five9 Enables Comprehensive Digital-First Omnichannel Experiences for Leading Enterprises appeared first on Cloud Communications Alliance.

Clubhouse had an incredible year in one most of us would rather forget. The live audio app launched during a pandemic; gained more than 10 million downloads for an invite-only, iOS-only app; and succeeded to the point that most every social platform wants to copy it. Congrats to Clubhouse.

The company now faces its biggest challenges yet, however. For one, the pandemic is waning, and people might be more interested in real-life socializing instead of conversations facilitated through their phone. Anyone advertising their backyard as the next great Clubhouse competitor has a point. But for the people who do end up wanting to talk to each other online, they’ll soon have a lot more places to do so. In case you haven’t kept up: Twitter, F...

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When UIPath filed its S-1 last week, it was a watershed moment for the robotic process automation (RPA) market. The company, which first appeared on our radar for a $30 million Series A in 2017, has so far raised an astonishing $2 billion while still private. In February, it was valued at $35 billion when it raised $750 million in its latest round.

RPA and process automation came to the fore during the pandemic as companies took steps to digitally transform. When employees couldn’t be in the same office together, it became crucial to cobble together more automated workflows that required fewer people in the loop.

When UIPath raised money in 2017, RPA was not well known in enterprise software circles even though it had already been around for several years. The category was gaining in popularity by that point because it addressed automation in a legacy context. That meant companies with deep legacy technology — practically everyone not born in the cloud — could automate across older platforms without ripping and replacing, an expensive and risky undertaking that most CEOs would rather not take.

RPA has enabled executives to provide a level of workflow automation, a taste of the modern. It essentially buys them time to update systems to more modern approaches while reducing the large number of mundane manual tasks that are part of just about every industry’s workflow.

While some people point to RPA as job-elimination software, it also provides a way to liberate people from some of the most mind-numbing and mundane chores in the organization. The argument goes that this frees up employees for higher level tasks.

As an example, RPA could take advantage of older workflow technologies like OCR (optical character recognition) to read a number from a form, enter the data in a spreadsheet, generate an invoice, send it for printing and mailing, and generate a Slack message to the accounting department that the task has been completed.

We’re going to take a deep dive into RPA and the larger process automation space — explore the market size and dynamics, look at the key players and the biggest investors, and finally, try to chart out where this market might go in the future.

Meet the vendors

UIPath is clearly an RPA star with a significant market share lead of 27.1%, according to IDC. Automation Anywhere is in second place with 19.4%, and Blue Prism is third with 10.3%, based on data from IDC’s July 2020 report, the last time the firm reported on the market.

Two other players with significant market share worth mentioning are WorkFusion with 6.8%, and NTT with 5%.

The proposal is part of the president’s $2 trillion infrastructure plan, and it calls for making affordable high-speed broadband available for every American as well as schools and businesses. It calls for building ‘future-proof’ infrastructure, prioritizing support for non-private Internet providers and increasing price transparency.

Former President Donald Trump’s ban on guest worker visas has expired, allowing foreign workers to reapply for entry into the United States. The news is a win for tech companies including Apple, Twitter, and Google, each of which vocally opposed the policy.

Former President Donald Trump said the ban was a response to rising unemployment in the United States, due to the coronavirus pandemic. On the campaign trail, Joe Biden pushed back on this claim, calling it an attempt to distract from the Trump Administration’s failure on the virus.

The ban focused on H-1B visas, but impacted a broader range of workers, NPR reports. Executives at big corporations and students participating in work-study programs were also caught up in the fray.

W...

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By Zeus Kerravala
Cisco adds user-oriented features and focuses on employee experience to regain ground.

“We’re hearing customers saying, ‘We’re going to get to the other side of the pandemic and then make longer-term, strategic decisions about hybrid work.’ I think that’s where we’ll have the opportunity to actually regain market share in this space,’” says Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins.

Microsoft is rarely shy about wading into the political conversation these days, and the latest missive from president Brad Smith is no exception: in a blog post titled “Why we are concerned about Georgia’s new election law,” he slams the state’s new Election Integrity Act for making it harder for its employees (and others) to vote — making Microsoft the first big tech company to speak out against the law.

If it’s not clear why Microsoft would go out on a limb to challenge the state on this particular issue, there are a few things you should probably know:

1. As Smith points out, Microsoft is becoming a big employer in the state — he says Atlanta is “on the path toward becoming one of Microsoft’s largest hubs in the United States in the...

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Last year, the world’s largest phone show, Mobile World Congress, hung on to the idea of hosting an in-person event during the COVID-19 pandemic as long as it could, even as major exhibitors kept pulling out — and the dominoes may be falling on this year’s show as well.

Google just announced that it will not exhibit at MWC this year. It’s the biggest name so far, following major telecom infrastructure providers Nokia and Ericsson as well as Sony and Oracle.

Here’s Google’s full statement:

Following our current COVID-19 travel restrictions and protocols, Google has made the decision to not exhibit at Mobile World Congress this year. We will continue to collaborate closely with GSMA and support our partners through virtual opportunities....

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‘So many of my peers are trying to work how to manage wellness in the workplace and insights to help people understand the way in which they are showing up. There’s a dialog right now for [partners] with HR and I think Insights will solve a lot of the challenges out there, especially in the hybrid world,’ Fran Katsoudas, Cisco’s EVP and chief people officer, tells CRN.