Last Friday, the Fagradalsfjall volcano near Iceland’s capital of Reykjavik began erupting for the first time in 800 years after the island nation was hit by thousands of small earthquakes. Thankfully, the eruption was small and has not put anyone in danger. Instead, it’s gifted the world with some awe-inspiring views of lava flowing from the ground.
The sight has been best captured by Icelandic drone pilot Bjorn Steinbekk, who took the straightforward approach of flying right through the eruption. We spotted the footage from Steinbekk (above) via Twitter, and it seems he flew several sorties through the airborne lava — a daring feat that makes us wonder how his drone survived the high temperatures.
Microsoft is planning to start reopening its Redmond, Seattle headquarters later this month. The software giant originally started encouraging employees to work from home more than a year ago, just as the coronavirus pandemic began, and the company’s main US offices have remained closed for months as a result. This will start to change on March 29th, with a limited reopening of Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Seattle.
“Currently, Microsoft work sites in 21 countries have been able to accommodate additional workers in our facilities – representing around 20% of our global employee population,” says Kurt DelBene, Microsoft’s head of corporate strategy. “On March 29, Microsoft will also start making this shift at our Redmond,...
By Irwin Lazar New capabilities from Microsoft and its partners, coupled with new offerings from its competitors, increase the enterprise options for Teams Phone System.
New technology will enable RingCentral to offer end-to-end encryption across its global communications platform
BELMONT, CA – – RingCentral, Inc. (NYSE: RNG), a leading provider of global enterprise cloud communications, video meetings, collaboration, and contact center solutions, today announced the acquisition of the technology and engineering team at Kindite, a developer of leading cryptographic technologies that mitigate and reduce security and privacy risks to information and applications in the cloud. The new technology will be incorporated into RingCentral’s global communications platform, providing customers with enhanced security capabilities including end-to-end encryption.
“Security and reliability are paramount in enabling employees to work from anywhere,” said Heather Hinton, chief information security officer at RingCentral. “With this team’s leading-edge security technology, we will accelerate our ability to deliver end-to-end encryption and continue to enhance our commitment to deliver the highest level of security capabilities for our global communications platform, benefiting customers everywhere.”
The Kindite engineering team has developed a data-protection platform that incorporates a unique set of cryptographic key orchestration technologies which delivers enhanced security, privacy and compliance. These technologies allow cloud applications to process encrypted data without decryption, creating a secure “zero-trust” cloud environment.
“We established Kindite to bring the very latest technological capabilities to address security and privacy in the cloud,” said Maor Cohen, co-founder and CEO of Kindite. “It’s fantastic we can bring these security capabilities to customers around the world while enhancing the RingCentral platform with the next generation of security technologies.”
RingCentral will use Kindite as a cornerstone for building its world-class security capability. The terms of the transaction were not disclosed. The transaction closed in Q1 2021 and is not estimated to have a material financial impact for the quarter ending March 31, 2021.
About RingCentral
RingCentral, Inc. (NYSE: RNG) is a leading provider of business cloud communications and contact center solutions based on its powerful Message Video Phone (MVP) platform. More flexible and cost effective than legacy on-premise PBX and video conferencing systems that it replaces, RingCentral empowers modern mobile and distributed workforces to communicate, collaborate, and connect via any mode, any device, and any location. RingCentral offers three key products in its portfolio including RingCentral Office® , a Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) platform including team messaging, video meetings, and a cloud phone system; Glip ® the company’s free video meetings solution with team messaging that enables Smart Video Meetings; and RingCentral cloud Contact Center solutions. RingCentral’s open platform integrates with leading third party business applications and enables customers to easily customize business workflows. RingCentral is headquartered in Belmont, California, and has offices around the world.
IT Leaders are adapting to new challenges by prioritizing collaboration, cloud and security more than ever before
SAN JOSE, CA – March 22, 2021 –
News Summary:
Report identifies core priorities essential to IT success including: focusing on security and collaboration for a hybrid workforce, delivering the best end-user experience, driving innovation and security in a cloud-first world, and leveraging technology to invest in employees and tackle societal issues.
To address these challenges, 56% of IT decision makers are investing in cloud applications, 56% in network security, 51% in cloud security, and 45% in multi-cloud infrastructure in 2021-2022.
According to Cisco’s new Accelerating Digital Agility Research, CIOs and IT decision makers (ITDMs) are looking to maximize investments and drive innovation after a difficult year which raised the profile of IT leaders in driving critical workplace innovation.
Over the past twelve months, CIOs and ITDMs from across the globe have been challenged to accelerate their digital and cloud capabilities while protecting their organizations from a growing list of expanding security threats. IT leaders must look to maximize critical investments made in 2020.
To set up their organizations for success in 2021 and beyond, IT leaders have adapted priorities and strategy to focus on core issues including delivering secure collaboration tools to keep distributed workforces productive, maximizing technology investments from the past year, delivering the best end-use experience to employees and customers, embracing cloud and “as a Service,” and tackling corporate and societal issues with technology.
“IT leaders are at the forefront of ensuring critical success for their organizations in 2021,” said Liz Centoni, Cisco’s Chief Strategy Officer and GM, Applications. “Even as questions remain and new challenges will surface, CIOs and IT decision makers are telling us they need to accelerate digital agility for their teams, so they have the speed, flexibility and choice to consume services across both traditional and modern environments.”
Key findings:
To prepare for the future of work, teams need highly secure access and the best collaboration experiences to succeed as a hybrid workforce. While a majority (61%) of CIOs and ITDMs are unsure of what the future of work looks like, 89% believe that maintaining security, control, and governance across user devices, networks, clouds, and applications is essential. Most (86%) agree it is important to empower a distributed workforce with seamless access to applications and high-quality collaborative experiences. Securing the expanded threat landscape created by a distributed workforce is paramount – 88% believe it is important to secure remote work tools and protect customer or employee data in the distributed work environment.
IT teams must create optimized end-user experiences to keep pace with IT environments that have become increasingly distributed, dynamic, and complex. More than three-fourths of the CIOs and ITDMs surveyed agree that user experience should focus on delight versus satisfaction. To deliver a great user experience, 89% think it is important to ensure a consistent application performance across both the application and infrastructure, and 86% believe it is important to make infrastructure as dynamic as application software to meet the changing policy and optimization needs of the application and developer. While the user experience should aim to delight, nearly all (90%) say it is important or very important to maintain application-to-infrastructure security to meet compliance without slowing down the business.
The need for agility, speed, scalability and security is driving adoption of hybrid cloud environments and SASE (Secure Access Service Edge) solutions. CIOs and ITDMs are using cloud to achieve business resilience. However, there is no one-size-fits-all cloud solution. While most CIOs and ITDMs (84%) agree it is important to offer freedom of choice when it comes to cloud environments – whether on premises, public cloud, private cloud or SaaS – 86% think offering a consistent operational model across these environments is essential. Nearly 70% of CIOs and ITDMs have adopted SASE solutions because they were investing in cloud applications that needed to be secured (61%), they like to stay up-to-date on industry best practices (56%) and/or their workforce is going to stay distributed (37%).
Customers expect a cloud-consumption experience regardless of whether their solutions are deployed on-prem or in the cloud, leading to widespread adoption of “as a Service” solutions. Of those surveyed, 73% have adopted “as a Service” solutions and 76% use flexible consumption models. Three fourths of those surveyed believe that “as a Service” will help deliver a better experience for the end user and a better experience for IT teams, helping their organizations achieve operational consistency. In addition, 76% say “as a Service” will provide better business outcomes, and 77% want “as a Service” solutions to simplify processes and remove risk.
Technology will be a driving factor in the facilitation of CIOs and ITDMs to tackle talent retention, internal corporate initiatives and broader societal issues in 2021. Most CIOs and ITDMs (85%) believe the ability to attract and retain talent in the all-digital world will be critical. Nearly half of those surveyed said they are upskilling current talent (49%) and investing in talent in new areas (46%) over the next 12 months. Most CIOs and ITDMs (90%) plan to tackle internal initiatives in 2021, including sustainability (50%), employee mental health (50%), privacy (47%), diversity and inclusion (47%). In addition, 85% will tackle external societal issues in 2021, including digital divide (39%), healthcare (37%), climate change (35%), social justice (34%), human rights (33%), misinformation or “fake news” (31%), poverty, hunger and homelessness (28%).
Survey Background Cisco’s Accelerating Digital Agility research was deployed by Censuswide in November 2020, gathering insights from more than 23,000 CIOs and IT decision makers (ITDMs) across 34 global markets:
Americas: Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Peru, United States
EMEAR: France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UAE, UK
APJC: Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam
A demonstration against anti-Asian hate crimes was held in Washington, DC, on March 17. | Alex Wong/Getty Images
From donations to bystander trainings, a list of organizations that advocate for Asian Americans.
On Tuesday, eight people were fatally shot at three Atlanta-based spa businesses. Six of the eight victims were Asian women. Authorities have not yet declared an official motive for the shooting (the gunman, who is white, claimed that the attacks weren’t “racially motivated”), but the tragedy has instigated discussions about the rise of anti-Asian hate crimes across America — and what Americans can do as fellow community members.
Violence and hate crimes against Asian Americans have spiked in the past year: In 16 of America’s biggest cities, the number of reported anti-Asian hate crimes increased nearly 150 percent in 2020, according to an analysis from the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at CSU San Bernardino. The advocacy group Stop AAPI Hate released a report this week that it had received over 3,800 reports of verbal harassment, civil rights violations, and physical assault from March 2020 to February 2021. Certain Asian community members — women and elderly people — also appear to be more vulnerable than others to attacks and harassment.
Over the past 24 hours, my social media feeds have been full of posts spotlighting the Atlanta shooting and the complex history of violence against Asians in the US, and outlining ways to help Asian American communities. The sheer amount of resources shared can be overwhelming, so Vox compiled a short list of national and community-focused organizations you can contribute to or amplify.
The Atlanta arm of Asian Americans Advancing Justice (AAJC) has organized a fundraiser to directly help the victims and their families, in addition to the broader Asian American communities in Georgia that have been impacted by violence. You can also donate directly to AAJC’s Atlanta chapter or the national nonprofit organization.
The Asian American Resource Center is a Georgia-based nonprofit that offers assistance to struggling Asian American families. Its two main programs secure housing for homeless families and provide free English literacy and civics classes to immigrants.
The Center for Pan Asian Community Services is a Georgia-based nonprofit that advocates for and provides a range of social services help to Asian immigrants, refugees, and the underprivileged.
The Asian Pacific Fund raises money for community organizations trying to combat anti-Asian racism in the San Francisco Bay Area.
The Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund is a New York-based national organization that litigates, educates, and provides legal resources for Asian Americans and community groups.
As Vox’s Li Zhou explained, the spa shootings in Atlanta cannot be divorced from the history of racism and sexualized misogyny Asian women experience. According to authorities, the suspect claims he carried out the attacks toward businesses he saw as venues for “temptation he wanted to eliminate.” It is not yet known whether the spas provide sexual services, but “the conflation of massage parlors and sex workers without any nuance is very specific to anti-Asian racism against Asian women,” Esther K, co-director of Red Canary Song, a grassroots Chinese massage parlor worker coalition, told the Guardian. Here are some organizations that specifically advocate for Asian American women.
Red Canary Song is a New York City-based grassroots massage parlor worker coalition that provides mutual aid to sex workers and advocates for the decriminalization of sex work in New York. The group takes its name from massage worker Yang Song, who was killed during a police raid at her workplace.
The National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum works to organize in 14 US cities, including Atlanta, and amplifies the stories and experiences of AAPI women. The group bases its work in a reproductive justice framework.
A message of support is left outside a spa where four people were shot and killed in Acworth, Georgia, on Tuesday evening. | Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images
Racism, misogyny, and anti-sex work stigma all intersect in the shootings that killed eight people, including six women of Asian descent, Tuesday evening.
On Tuesday evening, a 21-year-old white man killed eight people at three metro Atlanta-area spas across a 30-mile radius. Six of the victims were of Asian descent. Seven were women. The suspect claimed the murders were not racially motivated but an attack on places to eliminate his temptation around porn and sexual addiction. In the minutes and hours after this horrific attack took place, a debate emerged across the nation: Was this a racially motivated hate crime? A random act of violence, like a mass shooting? Or was this an attack on sex workers?
The responses to the attack have been swift: In his tweet responding to the events, former President Barack Obama highlighted the need for greater gun safety laws and called for an end to an alarming rise in anti-Asian violence in the US. Others highlight the events as an attack on sex work, relying on assumptions — themselves stemming from problematic stereotypes — that the women at the spas were necessarily offering illicit services. Discourse broke out throughout the media around whether the attacks were motivated by either gender or race, ignoring that they were fueled by both at once.
This was a mass shooting, an act of gendered racial violence fueled by misogyny, xenophobia, and modern-day “yellow peril,” or fear of Asia as a threat to the Western world. We must address the fact that gun violence, race, and gender all intersect here. Asian American women both in the sex industry and outside it frequently experience sexualized racism. As my fellow sociologist Nancy Wang Yuen tweeted, “addiction and fetishism can absolutely be racial.”
There’s no doubt that the “yellow peril” myth is alive and well in America today: Hate amplified by former President Trump’s dangerous rhetoric around Covid-19 stoked these fires, with the past few years seeing an alarming spike in hate crimes against Asian Americans across the nation. It comes on the heels of American anxieties regarding the rapid economic rise of China and the declining dominance of the United States worldwide, providing a convenient scapegoat for many Americans’ frustrations.
But digging deeper, there is a need to unpack the discrimination faced by Asian American women, and especially by Asian American sex workers. Anti-Asian immigrant sentiment is at the core of American xenophobia, and for Asian women, it’s long been rooted in associations with sex work. The first federal immigration law, the Page Act of 1875, targeted for exclusion Asian women, who were feared for engaging in prostitution and polygamy. This was followed by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which effectively prohibited the immigration of all Chinese laborers.
Numerous studies exist on the sex industry in the United States today, an industry that spans multiple cities, from Las Vegas and San Francisco to New York and Atlanta. According to a massive 2014 study by the Urban Institute, Atlanta is home to the largest underground sex trade. Asian American women make up a big part of that business as high-end escorts, call girls, and workers in bars and karaoke lounges, in massage parlors, and on the streets. In fact, in Atlanta, the underground sex economy is bigger than both the guns and drug economy.
Narratives around Asian sex workers can bump uncomfortably up against sexualized stereotypes. In an effort to overcome discrimination in the United States, some Asian Americans espouse a fraught “model minority” stereotype as polite, law-abiding, and hardworking citizens. For Asian American women, stereotypes portray them as submissive, docile, quiet, and invisible on one hand, and as sexual objects on the other. The idea of an “Asian fetish” has long been discussed as an unfortunate symptom of the racism and misogyny that many Asian American women face. But these stereotypes don’t erase that Asian sex workers are among the most vulnerable in the United States, eking out a living in the sex industry with virtually no legal protections for their work.
As Asian Americans come to thrive in the United States as entrepreneurs in the service sector, as owners of small businesses like dry cleaners, nail salons, spas, and massage parlors, it is important not to conflate all massage parlors or spa work as sites of sex work. These stereotypes have real-world consequences: Massage parlors have increasingly become a target of law enforcement officers and of human trafficking advocacy organizations as sites of prostitution or sex trafficking disguised as legitimate businesses. This impacts Asian-owned businesses whether or not they are involved with sex work.
In fact, there is a massive debate about the plight of Asian immigrant women working in the underground sex industry. Those who study it from the outside tend to cast this work in a human trafficking frame, while advocates for the rights of sex workers describe it as a profession that deserves respect, protection, and human rights. Without legal status, sex workers are caught between a rock in a hard place, seen either as “victims” of human trafficking or as “criminals” engaged in illegal prostitution. This stigmatizes the labor of women who are trying to make a living as sex workers and vilifies them as temptresses. The industry offers sex workers virtually no legal protections to safely go about their work and drives them further into America’s underbelly.
As we mourn the lives of all of those lost in this horrific tragedy, we must remember that just because the suspect claims he has a sexual addiction, it does not mean that all the women he targeted were working as sex workers in disguised massage parlors. (In fact, it seems several may have been customers.) But if they were, would that mean their lives mattered less? The answer is a resounding no.
We must also remember that these women are people’s daughters, mothers, sisters, and friends. Delaina Ashley Yaun, Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, and the women yet to be named all deserved to be remembered as important people whose lives were cut short by this violence.
Kimberly Kay Hoang is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Chicago and the author of Dealing in Desire.
On Thursday, House Judiciary Committee lawmakers held a hearing with some of the most prominent players in antitrust enforcement today. Two Federal Trade Commission leaders and two state attorneys general currently suing Facebook for violating antitrust law testified before the committee.
But while lawmakers have spoken extensively about breaking up companies like Facebook and Google, law enforcement agencies are the ones with real power to unwind tech mergers, even if their dwindling budgets and measly resources make it more difficult to do so. On Thursday, members of Congress signaled that they want to help them bring more lawsuits against Big Tech.
WHAT IT MEANS
In previous hearings, committee chairman Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI) and...
A cell is upgraded to handle 5G signals in Orem, Utah. | Photo by GEORGE FREY/AFP via Getty Images
Cellphone towers are being increasingly targeted by conspiracy theorists, neo-Nazis, and white supremacists who wish to “incite fear, disrupt essential services, and cause economic damage,” according to an internal New York Police Department report seen by The Intercept.
The report, issued on January 20th by the NYPD Intelligence Bureau, cites a number of recent attacks on US telecoms infrastructure, including individuals severing fiber-optic cables and removing back-up batteries from wireless sites. The sections of the report shared by The Intercept do not explicitly ascribe political motivations to these attacks.
The most high-profile attack cited in the report is the case of Anthony Quinn Warner, who set off a bomb outside an AT&T...
AT&T this week signaled a major retreat on net neutrality, as California’s new net neutrality law forces the company to stop playing favorites with its own content.
In a blog post, the company announced that thanks to California’s new law, the company will no longer engage in “zero rating,” or the exemption of some content from the company’s broadband usage caps.
Currently, AT&T DSL and fiber broadband customers face arbitrary usage caps that range from as little as 250 gigabytes to one terabyte per month. Use more than this allotment, and you’ll face penalties of $10 for each additional 50 gigabytes consumed.
Experts, executives, and researchers have long warned these restrictions serve no technical purpose, and exist solely to raise rates on captive customers. Worse, AT&T has historically exempted its own streaming TV services—like HBO Max—only hitting customers with usage surcharges if they use a competing streaming service like Netflix.
Not only does this let AT&T give its own services an unfair advantage in the market, the approach lets deep pocketed companies pay AT&T to be exempt from usage caps. Consumer groups say this creates an unfair marketplace where bigger, wealthier companies can buy an advantage over their smaller, cash-strapped competitors—once AT&T gets its cut.
But because California’s new net neutrality law puts an end to such preferential treatment, AT&T now says it’s discontinuing “zero rating” nationwide, a move applauded by consumer advocates.
“Let’s be clear: This is a win for an open and free internet, including for competing video services and internet users,” Stanford Law Professor Barbara van Schewick said of the shift. “People should be free to choose which videos they want to watch—whether that’s Netflix, Twitch or their local church’s Sunday service, without the company they pay to get online trying to influence their choices.”
In its blog post, AT&T misleadingly tries to claim that California’s new law prevented the company from offering “free data services.”
“We regret the inconvenience to customers caused by California’s new ‘net neutrality’ law,” AT&T said. “Given that the Internet does not recognize state borders, the new law not only ends our ability to offer California customers such free data services but also similarly impacts our customers in states beyond California.”
While AT&T has long tried to frame zero rating as something akin to “free shipping,” experts say that’s never been accurate. In large part because once you realize that usage caps and overage fees are artificial cash grabs in the first place, handing out exemptions becomes meaningless.
AT&T and industry-friendly regulators like Ajit Pai have also tried to claim that “zero rating” helps make broadband more affordable. But van Schewick said data has clearly shown that consumers pay notably more for broadband access in countries that embrace the practice.
“For example, in the European Union, ISPs that don’t zero-rate video give subscribers 8 times more data for the same price than ISPs that zero-rate video,” van Schewick said. “In announcing this shutdown, AT&T is trying to score political points against state net neutrality protections by lying to the public about the law and its effects.”
After the telecom industry successfully lobbied the Trump FCC to kill net neutrality, California stepped in with its own, slightly tougher state law. With the help of the Trump DOJ the broadband industry attempted to kill California’s law as well. But those efforts are falling apart in court, opening the door to California finally being able to enforce its new law.
Despite the telecom industry’s best efforts, California, Oregon, and Washington have all passed state level protections since the federal repeal, something AT&T isn’t too pleased about.
“A state-by-state approach to ‘net neutrality’ is unworkable,” AT&T claimed in its blog post. “A patchwork of state regulations, many of them overly restrictive, creates roadblocks to creative and pro-consumer solutions.”
But experts like van Schewick say AT&T created this problem by spending 15 years assaulting federal net neutrality rules that had broad, bipartisan public support. The rise in numerous state level net neutrality protections is a direct result of AT&T’s own actions, and the telecom giant is clearly upset the gambit didn’t quite work out as planned.
Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell poses the question, would you rather be forced to work in the office every day or have the option of remote or hybrid working? ‘This is not really a hard test,’ Dell says.
Intel has hired Apple’s former “I’m a Mac” actor Justin Long to create new ads praising PCs. Long starts each commercial with “Hello I’m a... Justin,” with the typical white background you’d find on Apple’s Mac vs. PC ads from the 2000s. Naturally, the ads focus on Mac vs. PC again, with Long mocking Apple’s Touch Bar, lack of M1 multiple monitor support, and the “gray and grayer” color choices for a MacBook.
One even goes all-in on Apple’s lack of touchscreens in Macs or 2-in-1 support by mocking the fact you have to buy a tablet, keyboard, stylus, and even a dongle to match what’s available on rival Intel-based laptops. Another ad also points out that “no one really games on a Mac.”
The return of Justin Long in Mac vs. PC ads for...
Krishna ‘is making a positive impact in how IBM interacts with its customers and partners,’ said one solution provider CEO, who is projecting strong growth in IBM-related revenue this year.
Tinder is giving 500 users a pair of free mail-in COVID-19 test kits — one for them and one for a Tinder match. The company says it’s a way to help people feel more comfortable meeting up with matches for real-life dates.
It’s using tests from the medical testing company EverlyWell. People taking EverlyWell’s coronavirus tests swab their noses at home and mail the sample to the lab. Results are posted online within one to two days.
Throughout the pandemic, dating app companies have introduced new features to help people date safely. One main focus was on ways to facilitate virtual dates, which are actually a good way to meet people without the risk of spreading or contracting COVID-19. Bumble recently launched Night In, a feature that...
This month 2600Hz will participate in Cavell’s Cloud Comms Summit Europe 2021 virtual event as a Gold Sponsor. The summit is the biggest Service Provider event in Europe, and takes place virtually on March 17th and 18th. 2600Hz COO and Co-Founder, Patrick Sullivan, is a keynote speaker and will address the topic of “Staying Ahead in a Competitive Market”. His presentation will shed light on how Service Providers can differentiate their offerings along with the importance of integrations, automation, and customisations in creating future growth opportunities. Sullivan will also take part in the panel discussion “Innovation in the Roaring 20’s”, which will focus on anticipated developments in the industry, the future of innovation, and what impact it will have on Service Providers. UC Today spoke with Sullivan ahead of the summit for an advanced preview of 2600Hz’s approach to the keeping up with how UCaaS has changed. “Obviously, with COVID and the need for remote working, people have embraced the idea of cloud communications more than ever and enforced the need for the transition from traditional PBXs and business communications that were reliant on on-premises support,” Sullivan explains.
“Many Service Providers are differentiating themselves by not just allowing remote access for workers but also utilising 2600Hz APIs to make a customised solution for their clients”
Customisations That Enhance Communication
Recently there have been more integrations into things like AI to harness that level of analytics to better understand how remote employees are working. It is not just for productivity but also for making sure everyone has the tools they need to serve customers best. People are using AI in the CCaaS space to help manage the conversation by rapidly providing relevant information. By AI analysing the conversation, it can detect keywords or phrases for an online search of related topics so the agent can answer questions in real-time with maximum efficiency. There are increasingly more integrations with organisations’ point of sales systems where there is more cross–functional automation with CRMs. For example, if a client calls in and the system connects to LinkedIn, the agent will have more information about a sales prospect and can speak directly to their needs or interests.
Connected Services for More Engaged Customers
Over the past year, the use of integrations, customisations, and automation has risen considerably. Beyond plugging into a traditional CRM, integrations are becoming more popular as a way to automate workflows. If someone calls in to submit an invoice or follow up on a billing issue, an agent doesn’t have to be the only means of answering those questions. With APIs creating custom CRM experiences, common problems and tasks can be handled by the system. Also, additional services can be initiated just by using the dial pad, all automated and customisable. Traditional telecommunications and computer-based functionality have begun to converge with the flexible technology that 2600Hz can deploy. Services are more connected than ever, even though the channels and access points for those services are becoming more differentiated. CCaaS access, voice, and chat are no longer dependent on a fixed location or device. Even with the adaptability of KAZOO, 2600Hz has always provided future–facing solutions that push the industry forward.
Patrick Sullivan
“We’re starting to see an increased emphasis on new technologies like WebRTC that allows video calls to be made from any device that supports an internet browser,” says Sullivan. “Companies are now using that capability to reach customers in innovative ways. 2600Hz is working with a Service Provider who is helping a large retailer use this technology that can be embedded anywhere to improve the customer experience. A consumer can click on a link whenever they are ready and chat directly with someone who can assist with a purchase. The major upside to these types of solutions is that the retailer collects data on the customer journey. All of that product information is available to the agent when the customer is ready to video chat.”
Even though it’s a dynamic tool, the Internet is often static in how information is presented. Online queries have to be specific and targeted to get the exact right answer a user is looking for. The customisation and automation that 2600Hz is championing challenges the expectation of what is possible online to meet the needs of the customer. The recent changes with telecommunications and commerce have forced new interactivity methods to emerge for the rapid and useful exchange of information, whether in sales or employee communications. To keep pace with the demands of a world whose technological dependence has been accelerated due to a year of social distancing, replicating a robust customer experience will be critical for any company seeking to advance in any service arena.
By Sheila McGee-Smith Company appears to be betting that digital engagement will become a core component of the overall customer experience platform — and it’s putting its money on the table.
Google is reducing its long-standing 30 percent cut, which it takes from each Play Store digital purchase for all Android developers around the world, on the first $1 million they make on the digital storefront each year, starting on July 1st. According to Google, that change means that 99 percent of Android developers that “that sell digital goods or services” will see a 50 percent reduction in fees.
Google’s news follows Apple’s announcement of a reduced 15 percent fee last year as part of a new small business program, with one critical difference: Apple’s fee reduction only applies to developers that make under $1 million per year. But if an app maker goes over the $1 million threshold at any point in the year, they’ll be booted from...
The 2021 Oscar nominations have finally arrived. | Mark Ralston/AFP via Getty Images
Mank is the most-nominated film, with 10 nods.
The 2021 Oscar season has been unlike any other. Due to the pandemic, the ceremony will take place on April 25, two months later than usual. Movie theaters were closed in major markets like Los Angeles and New York for nearly a year. And with release dates moving and typical awards-season events curtailed, it was a strange and unpredictable year.
But the nominations, announced via livestream on Monday morning by Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Nick Jonas, are actually pretty great. David Fincher’s Mank leads the way with 10 nominations, undoubtedly pleasing its studio Netflix. But the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences — the professional organization that votes on the Oscars — has spread the love around. Judas and the Black Messiah, Minari, Sound of Metal, The Trial of the Chicago 7, The Father, and Nomadland all received six nominations apiece, including Best Picture berths, and Promising Young Woman and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom nabbed five.
Other notable nominees include Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, which earned both Best Original Screenplay and Best Supporting Actress for Maria Bakalova; Collective, a Romanian documentary that landed in both the Best International Feature and Best Documentary category; and the Danish film Another Round, which received nods in both the Best International Feature and Best Director categories.
There are several milestones, too. Notably for the Academy, which has weathered several #OscarsSoWhite situations in recent years, white nominees are the minority in three of the four acting categories; in the Best Actor category, two men of Asian descent are nominated (Riz Ahmed and Steven Yeun). And for the first time ever, two women (Chloé Zhao and Emerald Fennell) are nominated in the Best Director category.
Tinder and other Match Group-owned apps are going to let their users run background checks on possible dates. The company announced an investment in Garbo, a nonprofit that looks to allow people to run background checks with only their first name and phone number or full name. The investment, of which Match didn’t disclose the amount, will help make the group’s tech available to Match’s users, starting with the company’s most popular app: Tinder.
This means Tinder users will be able to vet their dates with details like their arrest record or history of violence. That could dramatically affect who finds success on the app and who doesn’t. Garbo says it collects “public records and reports of violence or abuse, including arrests,...
Microsoft Teams is currently down worldwide. Microsoft says it’s attempting to bring the service back online after “a recent change to an authentication system” took some Microsoft 365 services down. “We’re rolling back the update to mitigate impact,” says Microsoft’s 365 status account.
The issues started around 3:30PM ET, and Microsoft quickly confirmed they are affecting users worldwide. This is the first major Microsoft Teams outage since the service went down back in September, alongside other Microsoft 365 services like Office 365 and Outlook. Microsoft also blamed its previous outage on a configuration change.
We've identified an issue with a recent change to an authentication system. We’re rolling back the update to mitigate...
Despite bottomless pockets and all but owning state and federal regulators for the last four years, telecom continues to stumble with adaptation in the streaming video era. Verizon's attempt to pivot from curmudgeonly old phone company to sexy new media brand fell flat on its face. AT&T's plan to spend $200 billion on the Time Warner and DirecTV mergers to dominate the television space has resulted in them losing 8 million pay TV subscribers in just the last four years. In short, pampered telecom monopolies aren't finding that getting ahead in more competitive markets to be particularly easy.
Comcast too isn't having a great time of it, despite dumping the company's resources into its new Peacock streaming platform. A new filing this week indicates that Comcast lost $914 million on the venture just last year alone. Some of these losses were expected as Comcast shuffles resources around NBC Universal, pours money into new projects, and streamlines the company's overall structure, but it's worth noting that Comcast remains somewhat cagey about how many paying customers are actually signed up:
"Comcast said Peacock had 33 million signups in the U.S. at year-end but hasn’t provided metrics on how many of those are paying subscribers. The service, available in free and premium subscription tiers, launched for Comcast cable subscribers last April and went nationwide in July 2020."
Comcast, like other giants, had hoped to elbow in on streaming and advertising by locking its NBC properties (like "Friends") behind its gatekeeper paywall. Comcast also enjoys the fact that it effectively lobbied to lobotomize the FCC, leaving it free to do things like use unnecessary broadband caps as a competitive bludgeon against other streaming providers. But even that wasn't enough to seriously threaten giants like Disney, which (thanks in large part to its Pixar, Star Wars, and Marvel catalog) just crossed the 100 million paying subscriber mark.
While Comcast expects that Peacock might break even by 2025 or so, the relentless drumbeat of deep-pocketed competitors jumping into the space means that's certainly no guarantee.
Don't be too sad for Comcast, however. As always, the company's steadily growing broadband monopoly means that as it loses TV revenue (from folks cutting the cord on expensive, traditional television), it can simply jack up prices on broadband to recoup the losses. Right now, that's coming in the form of unnecessary, bullshit broadband usage caps, but when your subscribers literally can't flee because there are no other real options to flee to, the sky's the limit.
The CEO of encrypted phone company Sky, who on Friday the Department of Justice indicted for allegedly selling devices to help international drug traffickers avoid law enforcement, has told Motherboard he is focused on clearing his name.
Jean-Francois Eap told Motherboard "The unfounded allegations of involvement in criminal activity by me and our company are entirely false," responding to the indictment. "In the coming days, my efforts will be focused on clearing my name of these allegations," he added.
The news signals how the Sky case is already different to that of the only other encrypted phone company that the Department of Justice has prosecuted. When authorities charged Vincent Ramos, the CEO of another firm called Phantom Secure, Ramos cooperated with agents before making an escape and then being recaptured. Eap's case may seemingly play out differently.
Do you work for Sky? Are you a Sky customer? Do you have documents related to these arrests or the company? We'd love to hear from you. Using a non-work phone or computer, you can contact Joseph Cox securely on Signal on +44 20 8133 5190, Wickr on josephcox, OTR chat on jfcox@jabber.ccc.de, or email joseph.cox@vice.com.
"The indictment against me personally by the U.S. District Court [for the] Southern District of California is an example of the police and the government trying to vilify anyone who takes a stance against unwarranted surveillance. It seems that it is simply not enough that you have not done anything illegal," Eap continued. "There is no question that I have been targeted, as Sky ECC has been targeted, only because we build tools to protect the fundamental right to privacy."
Sky is part of the encrypted phone industry, where various firms load their own messaging apps onto devices and then sell those phones to clients, often for thousands of dollars for an annual subscription. Some companies make physical alterations to the device, such as removing the microphone or GPS functionality. Some, like Sky, have a remote wipe feature that lets users delete their messages if they lose physical access to the device, according to the indictment.
"Leaders, members and associates of SKY GLOBAL ENTERPRISE operated throughout the world, including Canada, Colombia, Mexico, Belgium, the Netherlands, Australia, and throughout the United States, including in the Southern District of California," the indictment reads. There are at least 70,000 Sky devices in use worldwide, according to the indictment.
Specifically, the indictment charges Eap under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), which the Southern District of California also used to prosecute Phantom Secure, and conspiracy to distribute illegal drugs and aiding and abetting. The indictment says Eap, also known as "888888," and Thomas Herdman, an alleged former distributor of Sky devices, "did knowingly and intentionally conspire with each other and others to aid and abet the distribution of at least 5 kilograms and more of a mixture and substance containing a detectable amount of cocaine." Acting U.S. Attorney Randy Grossman previously said in a statement that Sky "generated hundreds of millions of dollars providing a service that allowed criminal networks around the world to hide their international drug trafficking activity from law enforcement."
What evidence the Department of Justice has against Eap is not yet publicly known. In the case of Phantom Secure, undercover agents posing as drug traffickers caught Ramos saying his company's phones were made for drug trafficking. This sort of admission of deliberately facilitating narcotics smuggling is what legally could separate an encrypted phone firm from, say, Apple, Google, WhatsApp, or Signal, whose users may include criminals but don't specifically cater to them.
"As I have been following the media reports in [the] past week, it is with great sadness that I see far reaching coverage of what can only be described as erosion of the right to privacy. Sky’s technology works for the good of all. It was not created to prevent the police from monitoring citizens; it exists to prevent anyone from monitoring and spying on the global community," Eap told Motherboard.
"I do not condone illegal activity in any way, shape or form, and nor does our company. We stand for protection of privacy and freedom of speech in an era when these rights are under increasing attack. We do not condone illegal or unethical behavior by our partners or customers. To brand anyone who values privacy and freedom of speech as a criminal is an outrage," he added.
Photo Illustration by Thiago Prudêncio/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
During Clubhouse’s weekly town hall on Sunday, CEO Paul Davison announced the voice-chat app’s first creators program. Clubhouse Creator First will help aspiring hosts and creators on the platform build their audiences, connect with brands, and perhaps most importantly, monetize their shows.
The accelerator will accept 20 creators, and Clubhouse is taking applications through March 31st.
Today’s Town Hall Updates: We are launching our first creator accelerator program, Clubhouse Creator First. We are looking to support and equip 20 creators w/ resources they need to bring their ideas and creativity to life. Details and application here: https://t.co/kmKjQvoUBK
Fleur Dawes, an activist from In Defense of Animals, walks on a dried pond in the Tule Elk Reserve in Point Reyes National Seashore, California in August 2020. Because of heat, drought, and fires, the local tule elk are running out of water. | Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images
Rising temperatures and lack of rain threaten to decrease water supplies and bring more wildfires this summer and in the years to come.
The Western US is in the midst of yet another dangerous dry spell. The drought has been building over the past year, and since November, a greater stretch of the West has been in the most severe category of drought than at any time in the 20 years that the National Drought Mitigation Center has been keeping records.
Western states are already facing water shortages, and with the National Weather Service projectingthat the dry stretch will continue, the problems that accompany droughts are likely to pile up heading into this summer.
Ryan Jensen saw the impacts of California’s last major drought firsthand while working for the Community Water Center in the San Joaquin Valley. When residential wells ran dry, students had to shower in their school locker rooms. To keep toilets running, some rural households relied on hoses slung over fences from their neighbors.
With groundwater depleted by that drought, which only ended in 2017, and ongoing overuse of water on farms,families have had to dig deeper wells, which can be prohibitively expensive.
“For some folks, the last drought never really ended. There are still homes in the San Joaquin Valley that have been on a water tank since the last drought,” said Jensen, who works in the center’s Visalia office.
That last drought also led to other fallouts: billions of dollars in economic losses as farmers were forced to let fields lie fallow and a 50 percent drop in electricity production from dams. It also contributed tothe death of over 100 million trees, which fuels bigger wildfires, like the ones that ripped through the West last summer. If the current drought continues, similarly stark consequences lie ahead.
Unfortunately, these droughts in rapid succession aren’t an aberration but rather a sign of what’s to come. Climate change is driving more severe droughts and spurring longer, more troubling “megadroughts” across the Western states. Here’s what you need to know about what the future holds for these states as temperatures rise.
The latest episode in a megadrought
This time last year, the West was relatively drought-free after a wet winter in 2019. But by now,the region has swung from 27 percent in drought to 77 percent, according to the latest data from the US Drought Monitor released March 11.
What happened?
Over the past year, the drought has been building due to a lack of rain, a weak summer monsoon in the Southwest, and intense summer heat waves. “If I had to pinpoint one thing that really drove the drought to where we are right now, it was the heat of last summer,” said Brian Fuchs, a climatologist at the University of Nebraska’s National Drought Mitigation Center.
High summer temperatures sucked the moisture out of the soil and evaporated water resources.
The Four Corners, where Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado meet, has been the epicenter of this drought, Fuchs said. The dark splotch on the map below shows that those states as well as Nevada have been experiencing the most intense drought.
Now the West is in the winter wet season, but due, in part, to the La Niña weather pattern, too little rain and snow is falling to make up for the preceding dry months.
Some rain and snow may still fall, but the National Weather Service’s seasonal forecast projects that drought conditions will persist across the Western US through May, the end of the current forecast period. “We do have some time to maybe put a dent in some of these deficits that we’ve seen through the winter,” said Fuchs. “Now the idea that we are going to catch up completely — that’s going to be tough.”
The trajectory of this drought episode remains unclear, but scientists say that it is actually part of a bigger megadrought — a decades-long dry spell, punctuated by severe droughts. This megadrought began around 2000, and as the chart below shows, the majority of land in the West has been in some level of drought ever since.
US Drought MonitorOver the past 20 years, the Western US has experienced frequent severe droughts, which together form a megadrought. (The Y-axis shows the percent of Western land that is in some kind of drought. The darker colors represent more severe categories of drought.)
To understand why the West is in a megadrought, the role of climate change, and what it means for the region’s future, we first need to look at some historical clues.
What’s behind longer and more intense droughts? Climate change.
Based on data from tree rings and other ecological records of weather and climate patterns of the last few thousand years, we know that the West is no stranger to drought. In an April 2020 tree ringstudy published in Science, researchers found that several megadroughts occurred between 850 and 1600 —before humans started pumping massive amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. These droughts were likely caused by cool temperatures in the Pacific Ocean that prevented rainfall from reaching the Southwest.
While natural variability has been a factor in recent droughts, the current megadrought is also being driven by climate change, according to the study. Higher temperatures, caused by greenhouse gases, have increased evaporation and decreased precipitation in the spring across the region. The researchers were able to identify that climate change accounted for 46 percent of the drought’s severity.
Without climate change, there still would have been a drought, but “anthropogenic warming was critical for placing 2000–2018 on a trajectory consistent with the most severe past megadroughts,” they wrote. The current megadrought, which they traced from 2000 through 2018, was the second driest 19-year episode in the 1,200-year record.
This finding is not just important for how we understand the current crisis, but also for the coming decades in the Western US as temperatures continue to climb.
The latest National Climate Assessment, authored by 13 US federal agencies in 2018, laid out a grim future for the Southwestern states: Rising temperatures will increase the likelihood of megadroughts in the region and make droughts more frequent and severe, according to the scientific literature cited.
While annual precipitation in the Southwest may not necessarily decrease, the hotter annual temperatures will burn off more moisture, contributing to droughts, the researchers explained in the Science tree ring study.
Western states need to make sure vulnerable communities aren’t left behind by droughts
Communities across the West have already felt the impacts of the latest drought, starting with last year’s devastating wildfires. The growing drought over the summer dried out vegetation, priming the landscape to burn.
Now, as water reserves plummet,New Mexico state officials are encouraging farmers to not plant crops, the Wall Street Journal reported. Reservoirs are also troublingly low in California, and snowpack — which serves as a critical water bank for the state — is at 61 percentof the average for early March.
Due to the role of climate change, preventing the worst outcomes from drought going forward starts with reducing greenhouse gas emissions as fast as possible.
And states will also have to keep adapting.
After the last drought, California put in place its first groundwater management law as well as conservation directives that decreased water use by 25 percent between 2014 and 2017. But for the 2 million Californians who rely on wells, many of whom live in marginalized communities in rural areas, the situation is still precarious. During the last drought, farmers increasingly turned to pumping groundwater, which caused thousands of neighboring drinking water wells to fail by the end of the drought.
According to Erick Orellana, a policy advocate at the Community Water Center, this could happen again because the existing groundwater laws don’t prioritize these communities. “The fact is that, currently, California does not have preparedness plans in place for the most vulnerable communities,” he said. Current regional plans under the state’s groundwater management law would allow thousands of wells to go dry, the Guardian reported.
Last month, California Senate Majority Leader Bob Hertzberg introduced Senate Bill 552, which would require smaller water systems in California to also create drought preparedness plans.
These measures are a step forward, but some government officials have also acknowledged a growing incompatibility between current patterns of water use and dwindling resources. Three-quarters of annual water consumption in the Southwest goes to irrigating crops, and populations are growing in cities that are naturally dry. In St. George, a city in southern Utah’s Washington County, a construction boom is straining water demand amid the drought.
“Our Plan B is you’ll have to at some point say, ‘Stop. You can’t build any more houses here,’” Zach Renstrom, general manager of the Washington County Water Conservancy District, told the Wall Street Journal.
In the San Joaquin Valley, as aquifers drop, researchers say current levels of agricultural water use are untenable. A few months ago, the Community Water Center in San Joaquin started fielding calls for help from people losing water access once again. “The calls we were getting last summer really just gave me a major sense of deja vu to 2014,” Jensen said.
“I think that the bottom line is that the way things have been done in the entire Western United States, but specifically in the San Joaquin Valley of California, are just clearly unsustainable.”
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