Google is holding face-to-face gatherings outdoors on lawns and other parts of its campuses as it gets ready to welcome staff back to offices next year, a spokesperson told CNBC.
The news followed Google's CEO Sundar Pichai's September announcement that the company was making changes to its physical spaces to enable a hybrid model of work.
"We firmly believe that in-person, being together, having that sense of community, is super important for whenever you have to solve hard problems, you have to create something new," said Pichai during an interview for Time 100.
Google is testing socially distanced outdoor meetings on company campuses, preparing to get employees back to offices next year.
The socially-distanced meetings, called "onsite off-site", are held on lawns and other parts of the tech giant campuses where COVID-19 restrictions allow, a Google's spokesperson told CNBC.
It's a way to welcome and bring abroad newbies who started working remotely due to the pandemic, the spokesperson said. The company-wide effort initiative allows new hires to meet their teams and managers for outdoor meetings to discuss important tasks and projects.
Business Insider approached Google for comment.
It comes as Google prepares for a return to offices in July 2021. During a video interview for Time 100 in September, Google's CEO Sundar Pichai announced the company was making changes to its physical spaces to better support staff in a future he said would involve "hybrid models" of work.
"We firmly believe that in-person, being together, having that sense of community, is super important for whenever you have to solve hard problems, you have to create something new," Pichai said. "So we don't see that changing, so we don't think the future is just 100% remote or something."
Planning the return to offices has been "substantially more complicated" than it had been when moving everyone to remote work, said Alphabet's CFO Ruth Porat at the New York Times DealBook conference last month.
Google has a localized approach to returns in place, following the steps it took when it initially advised employees to start working from home.
Champion Solutions Group CEO Chris Pyle will become president of the MessageOps business and its flagship product, Inscape, within Sirius. Inscape is a cloud monitoring and management tool built for Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure customers that now boasts more than 1 million users.
Slack’s life as an underdog darling of Silicon Valley ended on November 2nd, 2016. That’s when the upstart communication startup published an open letter to Microsoft in TheNew York Times, offering the tech giant an insincere “welcome” to the world of workplace chat software. The occasion was Microsoft’s launch of Teams, a Slack clone that would come bundled with the company’s popular Office 365 suite of products.
In its letter, Slack warned Microsoft that “Slack is here to stay,” adding, “We’re just getting started.” But the 4 million users it had at the time would increase to just 12 million four years later, while Microsoft — which added Teams to its 365 bundle without increasing the price — took Teams from zero to 115 million users.
When the Salesforce-Slack deal was officially announced on Tuesday afternoon, and the number appeared, it was kind of hard to believe. Salesforce had shelled out more than $27 billion to buy Slack and bring it into the Salesforce family of products. The company sees a key missing piece in Slack, and that could explain why it was willing to spend such an astonishing amount of money to get it.
With Slack, Salesforce now has what CEO Marc Benioff called the interface to everything, something he says that the company has thought about for years. In 2010, they tried building it themselves with Chatter, a social tool that never really caught on in a big way. With Slack they finally have it.
“We’ve always had the vision of the social enterprise at Salesforce for more than a decade. Oh, we’ve had Dreamforces entirely dedicated to the vision of what a collaborative interface, a high production interface with applications and an ecosystem would look like wrapped on top of our Customer 360,” Benioff said.
He added that ironically in a building right next door to Salesforce Park you’ll find Slack headquarters. They won’t have to go far to collaborate (or you know, they can just use Slack).
From Chatter to Slack
Neeraj Agrawal, general partner at Battery Ventures, says that Benioff has had an interest in enterprise social going back years, and this is his way of finally delivering. “Remember Chatter? Benioff was dead on with this trend. He lost Yammer to Microsoft (when Microsoft acquired it for $1.2 billion) about 7-8 years ago, and then launched Chatter. It was a huge bet, but didn’t work. Slack is really Chatter 2.0,” he said.
Chuck Ganapathi, CEO and co-founder at Tact.ai, was product lead on the Chatter product at Salesforce in the 2009 time frame. He wrote in a soon-to-be-published blog post he shared with TechCrunch that it failed for a lot of reasons, but mostly because at its core, Salesforce was still a bunch of database guys and enterprise social was a very different animal.
“Some of the issues were technical — Salesforce is a database-centric company, founded by Oracle alums on a relational DB foundation. DB applications and unstructured communication applications like Chatter or Slack represent completely different branches of computer science with little overlap,” he wrote. Because of that, he felt that they lacked the expertise to build the application correctly, and it never really caught on, with so many similar products in the market at the time.
But Benioff never lost interest in the concept of incorporating social into the Salesforce platform. It just took another 10 years or so and a bushel of money to make it happen.
A good match or not?
Leyla Seka, a partner at Operator Capital, who formerly ran the AppExchange at Salesforce, sees good things ahead with a combined Slack and Salesforce. “Salesforce and Slack together will offer a powerful duo of applications that will help companies work more effectively together. I think that COVID-19 has shown us how critical it is to get employees the data they need to do their job, but also the community they need to thrive at their job. The marriage of Salesforce and Slack promises to do just that,” Seka told me.
Brent Leary, principal analyst at CRM Essentials, was knocked out by the price tag, but says it shows that Salesforce is not afraid to go after what it wants, even if it has to pay a hefty price to get it. “This goes to show Salesforce has absolutely no fear in them when it comes to this deal. They are willing to throw down the big bucks on this acquisition because they see a huge payoff by adding this piece into their platform,” he said.
As for Slack, he sees it as a way for them to take the fast track to the enterprise big leagues. “And for Slack they go from competing with AMOSS (Adobe, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Salesforce) to joining one of them, and the company that really made the most sense for them to team up with,” he said.
Laurie McCabe, an analyst and founder at SMB Group, agrees with Leary’s take, saying Salesforce doesn’t hesitate when it thinks the value is there. “In this case, Slack gives them a strong collaboration offering that will help them compete more effectively against Microsoft’s growing cloud portfolio, which of course includes CRM and Teams,” she said.
Show me the money
Battery’s Agrawal believes this deal is all about generating revenue, and it was willing to pay a premium to move the needle in billion-dollar chunks. The end game he believes is about catching Microsoft, or at the very least getting to $1 trillion (with a T, folks) in market cap.
It’s worth noting that investors are not showing signs, initially at least, of liking this deal, with the stock down over 8% today and 16.5% since the rumor of Salesforce’s interest in Slack surfaced last week before the Thanksgiving holiday. That translates into more than $18 billion in lost market cap — probably not the reaction they were hoping for. But Salesforce is big enough that it can afford to play a long game, and reach its financial goals with the help of Slack.
“To get to a market cap of $1 trillion, Salesforce now has to take MSFT head on. Until now, the company has mostly been able to stay in its own swim lane in terms of products. […] To get to a trillion dollars in market cap, Salesforce needs to try to grow in two massive markets,” Agrawal said. Those would be either knowledge worker/desktop (see the 2016 Quip acquisition) or cloud (see the Hyperforce announcement). Agrawal says chances are the company’s best bet is the former, and it was willing to pay top dollar to get it.
“The deal will help Salesforce maintain a 20%+ growth rate over the next few years,” he said. Ultimately, he sees it moving the revenue needle, which should eventually drive market cap higher and help achieve those goals.
It’s worth noting that Salesforce president and CEO Bret Taylor said while they intend to integrate Slack deeply into the Salesforce product family, they recognize the power and utility of Slack as a standalone product and they don’t intend to do anything that would mess with that.
“Fundamentally, we want to make sure that Slack remains as a kind of technology-agnostic platform. We know that Slack is used by millions and millions of people every day to connect every tool under the sun. The most remarkable thing is just how many customers have also just integrated their own custom internal tools as well into this is really kind of the central nervous system for the teams that use it, and we would never want to change that,” he said.
It’s hard to judge a deal this large until we have some hindsight and see how well the two companies have meshed, how well they can incorporate Slack into the Salesforce ecosystem, while allowing that independence Taylor alluded to. If they can find a way to walk that line and Slack becomes that wrapper, that operating system, that glue that holds the Salesforce ecosystem together, it will be a good deal, but if Slack stops innovating and withers under the weight of its corporate overlords, then it might not be money well spent.
by snagarajan@businessinsider.com (Shalini Nagarajan)
BlockFi
Visa will launch a credit card that rewards users in Bitcoin, instead of the traditional cash, or airline miles, in early 2021.
The card comes at an annual fee of $200.
Users will receive 1.5% of their purchases back in Bitcoin and a bonus of $250 in the world's most popular digital currency after spending $3,000 or more within the first three months.
Cryptocurrency startup BlockFi, Visa's card partner, said it "offers an easy entry point, enabling consumers to accrue bitcoin through everyday spending."
Visa is releasing a new credit card that will offer cashback rewards to customers in Bitcoin in early 2021.
The payments company has partnered with cryptocurrency startup BlockFi for its "Bitcoin Rewards Visa Credit Card," which comes at an annual fee of $200. Users will receive 1.5% of their purchases back in the form of the digital asset.
Cardholders will also receive a bonus of $250 in Bitcoin after spending $3,000 or more within the first three months of ownership, BlockFi said in a statement.
Waitlist registrations have already opened for both existing and new BlockFi account holders. But current BlockFi users will have first access as they can register, apply, and receive the new credit cards before everybody else. A public waitlist will open in early January.
The new card, which will be issued by Evolve Bank & Trust, seeks to serve the crypto-curious who are finding ways to add Bitcoin holdings to their investments. It "offers an easy entry point, enabling consumers to accrue Bitcoin through everyday spending," BlockFi said.
"We're excited to add credit cards to our suite of products and expand bitcoin's accessibility to a broader set of consumers," Zac Prince, BlockFi's CEO and founder, said in a statement. "This card makes it simple and risk-free for people to gain or increase exposure to a new asset class without changing their spending or investing habits."
Visa's adoption of Bitcoin didn't start with BlockFi. In April, the credit card firm partnered with startup Fold to offer rewards denominated in Bitcoin. In February, Visa and Coinbase announced the Coinbase Card, which allows users to issue Bitcoin using debit cards.
Bitcoin has rallied 166% this year and hit record highs near $20,000 in the last week, driven by institutional buy-in and investors looking for a hedge against the devaluation of traditional paper money.
The contribution of cars and trucks to climate change is undeniable.
A 2014 story by the Union of Concerned Scientists said personal cars and trucks accounted for nearly a fifth of all US emissions, and that almost 30% of "all US global warming emissions" came from the transportation sector, which includes cars, planes, trucks, trains, ships, and freight.
In the years since, international and US-statewide municipalities have put plans in place in the hopes to reduce emissions and curb reliance in fossil fuels. Along with more and more electrified and zero-emissions vehicles coming onto market, it might be the regulatory push consumers and manufacturers need.
Dating back
In the 1960s, climate change was hardly a blip on the public radar, let alone the knowledge that cars contributed to it. But large American automakers like Ford and General Motors apparently knew, according to an October investigation by energy and environment website E&E News.
The outlet reported that despite the knowledge that cars contributed to climate change, the automakers spent the next few decades on political lobbying that "undermined global attempts to reduce emissions while stalling US efforts to make vehicles cleaner."
"... both manufacturers largely failed to act on the knowledge that their products were heating the planet," E&E News wrote. "Instead of shifting their business models away from fossil fuels, the companies invested heavily in gas-guzzling trucks and SUVs. At the same time, the two carmakers privately donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to groups that cast doubt on the scientific consensus on global warming."
International affair
But now it's 2020 and we appear to be on the brink of a massive global overhaul of how we think about cars and their impact on the environment.
It's been widely reported that countries such as Britain, Canada, France, Iceland, and Sweden have all implemented some sort of ban on the sale of gasoline- or diesel-powered cars in the coming decades, with the ultimate goal of eventually achieving a zero-emissions future.
Recently, the UK said it'll ban the sale of new combustion-engine vehicles in 2030. It's a new deadline that's part of a 10-point "green industrial revolution" plan. By 2050, the nation hopes to be carbon-neutral.
There's no global consensus on how to tackle the change, or by when. But the roughly 20 nations listed below — some of them the biggest car markets in the world, plus California — have put forth some sort of plan to curb and end the sale of gasoline and diesel cars.
Below, you'll find a timeline of who is proposing what for when and how many cars were sold there last year.
And then there's the US
It's not quite as rosy here in the United States. Currently, there is no official proposed transition to a zero-emissions future at the federal level, though that could change under the Biden administration.
Volkswagen plans to launch a whole family of EVs.
Volkswagen
At the state level, though, things are a little different. California made headlines recently when Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order that required the sale of all new passenger cars to be emissions-free by 2035.
The move isn't out of left field; California has historically been a stronghold for climate activism. In the US, 1963 saw the passage of the Clean Air Act, which — in addition to granting the Environmental Protection Agency the ability to standardize automotive air pollution — stopped states from implementing their own standards. Except for California.
Congress granted California an exemption from the state-standardization rule because California had already been tackling the pollution issues on its own, according to ABC10. California is thus allowed to set much stricter emission standards, meaning a car that passes emissions in Missouri might not pass in California.
The 2021 Polestar 2 is the first all-electric car from the all-new brand.
Kristen Lee/Business Insider
Other states cannot set their own emission standards, but they can follow California's regulations, Green Technology points out. Currently, there are 12 states — plus the District of Columbia — that use the California standards, including Colorado, Connecticut, Maine, and Massachusetts.
The Trump administration long fought moved to abolish California's right to set stricter emission regulations. Yet the California Air Resources Board teamed up with several big automakers such as Ford, Volkswagen, Honda, and BMW to "finalize binding agreements to cut vehicle emissions in the state," according to Reuters.
The agreements made financial sense, as Reuters noted that areas opting into California's standards represent about 40% of the US automotive market. Plus, making cars that fit multiple markets simply means making more cars, and spending more money to do so.
But not all automakers were behind California. A separate Reuters story noted that General Motors, Fiat Chrysler, Toyota and "10 smaller automakers" backed the Trump administration. On November 23, however — after President-elect Joe Biden's victory — General Motors announced that it would stop siding with Trump's attempts to keep California from setting its own regulations.
Mary Barra, Chairman and CEO of General Motors, is shown at the reveals of the new 2021 Chevrolet Suburban and 2021 Chevrolet Tahoe SUVs at Little Caesars Arena on December 10, 2019 in Detroit, Michigan.
Though EVs only accounted for less than 2% of new-car sales last year in the US, they'll likely gain more popularity through the combined forces of advancements in battery technology, more EV options, an increase in charging infrastructure, tax incentives, and government mandates.
Besides Tesla, Volkswagen has promised an entire family of EVs built on its new "MEB" electric platform. Chinese auto giant Geely has spun off an EV brand in the form of Polestar. Daimler, the parent company behind Mercedes-Benz, said it'll kick more than $11 billion to building its EQ-brand of EVs and aims to introduce at least 10 EVs by 2022.
The 2021 Volkswagen ID.4 is the automaker's first EV in the US that's built on its new MEB platform.
Volkswagen
While 2030 and 2035 might seem far away, we didn't even have Tesla 20 years ago. A lot can happen in that span of time, especially with the EV landscape evolving as quickly as it is.
But with gas as cheap as it is and range anxiety still plaguing many drivers, there's also no real buyer incentive to make the EV switch right now. AAA found that at the very least, 40 million Americans said they'd "consider" an EV as their next car, according to CNBC.
Gene Liao, a Wayne State University professor who specializes in EVs and a former engineer at Ford, GM, and Toyota, told Business Insider automakers haven't been more prompt in launching EVs because they are still more expensive to build than internal-combustion engine cars. But it's getting better.
Sam Abuelsamid, a transportation analyst at the research firm Guidehouse Insights, told Business Insider the cost of batteries was about $600 per kWh just 10 years ago. Today, it's less than $200 per kWh.
It's on automakers to give us attractive, functional EV options that are priced affordably and don't feel like hobbled compliance cars. But it's also a matter of building out an expansive charging infrastructure.
"Traditionally, automakers have resisted investing in fueling infrastructure," Abuelsamid said. "What we're seeing happen is the automakers are actually working with the charging network providers."
All of this takes time. Internal-combustion engines have had nearly 100 years' head start on building out a network of gas stations, while EV charging infrastructure is barely getting going.
But with more aggressive mandates, perhaps we can jumpstart the change.
A woman walks past a Microsoft Store on 5th avenue.
John Nacion/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
Microsoft on Tuesday updated its Productivity Score tool, in response to criticism about a feature that tracked individuals using Microsoft Teams.
Organizations will receive aggregated scores, with individual user activity hidden from view, the company said.
Jared Spataro, corporate vice president for Microsoft 365, wrote in a blog post that no one in the company will now be able to use the tool to access individual user data.
Microsoft on Tuesday removed a feature that shared detailed information about how remote employees worked, responding to public backlash about the Productivity Score tool.
The feature was part of a suite of tools in Microsoft Teams that give employers insight into employee behaviour, but some said monitoring individual data was too invasive.
"We appreciate the feedback we've heard over the last few days and are moving quickly to respond by removing user names entirely from the product. This change will ensure that Productivity Score can't be used to monitor individual employees," Jared Spataro, corporate vice president for Microsoft 365, wrote in a blog post.
While the company will no longer give managers access to how their individual employees use Microsoft Teams, it will continue collecting that data. It will be scrubbed of user names and shared "at the organization level" with managers, the company said.
The removed feature had ranked individual employees on an 800-point scale, assigning values to everyday workplace norms like communication, teamwork, and network connectivity. Microsoft determined how employees were doing in each category based on "key activities," including sending emails, responding to messages, or writing internal company posts.
But the tool went further, sharing smaller data points, like whether staffers switched on their camera or shared their screen during meetings. It would also track their "mobility," logging the percentage of time they used Microsoft's desktop or mobile apps, perhaps giving managers insight into whether a person was glued to the chair in their home office. Bosses would get readouts of each employee's score on 28- and 180-day cycles.
The company said on Tuesday that it would continue using its 800-point scale, but the data from individuals will be obscured. On Wednesday, Microsoft did not reply to a request for clarification on whether it had changed any of the individual data points it was using to calculate the group score.
Tuesday's update came after privacy advocates voiced concern. In late November, a security researcher, Wolfie Christl, said the feature "normalizes extensive workplace surveillance in a way not seen before."
He listed the ways the feature was "problematic," saying: "Not least, Microsoft gets the power to define highly arbitrary metrics that will potentially affect the daily lives of millions of employees and even shape how organizations function."
But Tony Redmond, author of the book "Office 365 for IT Pros," said the individual tracking feature was similar to others that Microsoft has offered for years. The data "has been available to admins or years," he wrote on Twitter.
"It's entirely possible for managers to see information about different aspects of user activity, but not at the level anticipated in news reports. Knowing the number of meetings someone attended with video enabled is all very well but is meaningless unless placed in context," he wrote in a blog post.
Flu season rolls around each year like clockwork, bringing with it the reminders to get your flu shot (consider this your reminder.) Every other vaccine requires a finite dosage and confers long-term immunity—it’s only the flu shot that must be taken annually.
While that may not seem like a big problem, having to get a vaccine annually is at best a hassle, and at worst a barrier. In fact, the U.S. hasn’t surpassed 50 percent flu vaccine coverage at any point in the past decade, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Reaching 50 percent coverage is a critical threshold for herd immunity, which in theory prevents sustained transmission of the virus from occurring.
This is due to many reasons, including vaccine hesitancy and simple indifference, but a big one is barriers to access. Under the Affordable Care Act, health insurers must cover the cost of a flu shot, but that coverage can result in higher insurance premiums. People without insurance, meanwhile, must pay out of pocket for the shot.
While not a panacea, what if all you needed was one shot to be protected for life? That’s the theory behind a universal vaccine for influenza. Scientists have been researching the foundations of it for over a decade, yet recent advances have given experts renewed hope that a universal vaccine is within grasp.
“There is an urgent need to develop influenza vaccines that provide broader and more durable protection,” said Alan Embry, chief of the Respiratory Diseases Branch of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). “Realizing a universal influenza vaccine is one of NIAID's highest priorities, and we believe it can be achieved with significant and sustained effort.”
What is a universal vaccine?
Vaccines work by presenting our bodies with a weakened, inactivated, or partial version of a pathogen in order to prime our immune cells to be able to recognize and destroy the real deal.
Proteins called antibodies are at the center of this equation: our immune systems make them from scratch, and they attach themselves extraordinarily well to other proteins on the surface of viral particles. Once they’re in place, immune fighter cells can recognize the virus’ presence and destroy it, but it takes weeks to produce an antibody that has high binding affinity to a given pathogen’s surface proteins as well as the antibody "factories" that make them at scale.
There are four different types of flu, named A-D, but influenza A viruses are the ones that cause pandemic flus and are the main targets of a universal vaccine. As defined by a 2017 NIOSH panel chaired by Anthony Fauci, a universal vaccine would be at least 75 percent effective against all influenza A viruses and confer durable protection for at least a year across all age groups, though a vaccine you’d take once is still the goal.
“It's a constant arms race, a game of cat and mouse”
The surface protein on influenza A viruses that vaccines and our immune systems target is called hemagglutinin (Ha). Ha consists of a head and stem region, and our immune systems tend to generate antibodies that bind well to the head region, said Arup Chakraborty, a chemical engineering, physics, and chemistry professor at MIT who studies the immune response to pathogens. The reason flu shots are annual, he explained, is that the head region mutates rapidly enough so that last year’s antibodies won’t be able to target the Ha proteins found on this year’s flu.
Using the Ha protein, “it's almost like the virus is waving this flag and saying, 'Hey look at me,’ and the immune system does,” said Daniel Lingwood, an assistant professor in medicine at Harvard Medical School. “That's why it's a constant arms race, a game of cat and mouse.”
A universal vaccine, on the other hand, would propel our immune systems to produce antibodies that bind to a region that doesn’t mutate so quickly, such as the stem region of the Ha protein.
There are two main reasons why some flu vaccines are less effective than others, according to Embry: first, the World Health Organization holds an annual conference to predict which flu strains will be more prevalent in the upcoming flu season and make recommendations about the composition of the Northern Hemisphere’s flu vaccine, and sometimes their predictions are off.
“A universal influenza vaccine would provide broad protection against all influenza viruses, so you wouldn't have to predict which virus was going to emerge,” he said.
Another entry point for error is the egg-based manufacturing process, which produces over 90 percent of flu vaccines. Flu strains that have been injected into chicken eggs can acquire mutations not present in the circulating strains they’re meant to represent, leading to a mismatch between the antibodies the vaccine helps people develop and the target proteins on the flu viruses. A universal vaccine would also carry the benefits of not having to be manufactured using chicken eggs.
Why are people excited about a universal flu vaccine now?
There are a handful of vaccine candidates being tested in American and European clinical trials that target regions other than the Ha head, although to date, the trials that have been completed haven’t given “extremely positive signals,” according to Embry.
One new approach identifies vaccine candidate proteins using computational immunology, a burgeoning arm of research that uses computer algorithms to model the structures of proteins. Lingwood and Chakraborty were the senior authors on a study that took such a combined computational and experimental approach. Their paper, published in October in the journal Cell, modeled how the immune system mounts a response when given different pieces of a pathogen. Then, they applied their findings to engineer a vaccine and create a regimen that gave mice robust immunity in the form of “broadly neutralizing antibodies,” or ones that bind well to many subtypes of flu.
In other words, Lingwood and Chakraborty's effort appears to be on the right path, albeit early along.
Researchers aren’t completely sure why universal vaccine candidates that looked promising on paper did not live up to expectations in clinical trials in the past, but immunological imprinting may have something to do with their failures. Essentially, different people may have different levels of susceptibility to flu infection based on their first bout with the virus. Upon being reinfected with a similar strain of flu, the body may respond as if it caught the first strain again and produce antibodies that are less specific to the new infection.
“There's growing evidence that the first encounter we have with influenza might significantly impact our subsequent immune responses as we age,” Embry said. NIAID is currently supporting two cohort studies that will follow groups of children and track their first flu and subsequent infections.
Toward a 'pan-coronavirus vaccine'
Despite the challenges, Embry said that researchers are “very likely” to make strides within the next decade and move toward realizing universal flu vaccines.
New approaches such as computational immunology could help get us there. For years, researchers had treated vaccines and immunity like a black box, Chakraborty said. Computational approaches seek to explain how and why immunity develops, in order for researchers to have more control over it.
Other vaccine candidates are at various stages in preclinical and clinical trials, including a plant-derived vaccine that slightly improved protection to flu based on Phase 3 trial results published in November, and a nanoparticle-based one that is wrapping up a Phase 2 trial.
NasoVAX, a universal flu vaccine candidate that is a nasal spray, is also now being studied as a possible treatment for coronavirus infection. Altimmune, the company that manufactures the vaccine, plans to finish collecting data in early 2021.
Not only could the vaccine itself be useful for other viral infections, the process for developing a universal vaccine could also pave the way for others, especially against viruses that mutate rapidly. A prime example, according to Chakraborty, is the novel coronavirus.
“Complicated pathogens like HIV and influenza may be helpful if we someday have to think about pan-coronavirus vaccine.”
2020 was a year when people around the world were forced to find new ways to connect, and that trend is clearly visible when you look at the most downloaded apps on Apple hardware. Today the company revealed the most popular apps on its platforms for the year, and two names in particular stand out: video chat tool Zoom and social game Among Us, which were the top free app and game on both the iPhone and iPad.
President Donald Trump tweeted late Tuesday night that he would veto the National Defense Authorization Act unless it included a repeal of Section 230.
Section 230 is the part of US law that grants broad protections allowing tech companies to moderate their own platforms.
Trump has been trying to roll it back since Twitter first applied fact-checks to his tweets in May.
The NDAA is an annual defense-spending bill worth roughly $740 billion, and Trump has already threatened to veto it if lawmakers go ahead with a plan to rename Army bases named after Confederate generals.
President Donald Trump is trying desperately to revoke a part of US law that protects Big Tech companies.
The president tweeted late Tuesday night that he would veto the National Defense Authorization Act unless it included a repeal the statute known as Section 230.
"If the very dangerous & unfair Section 230 is not completely terminated as part of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), I will be forced to unequivocally VETO the Bill when sent to the very beautiful Resolute desk," Trump tweeted.
The NDAA is an annual defense bill that grants roughly $740 billion in spending to the US military. Trump in July threatened to veto the bill if lawmakers voted to rename Army posts named after Confederate generals.
Section 230 of the Communications and Decency Act of 1996 grants internet companies broad legal protections. It means tech companies are able to decide how to moderate their own platforms and are shielded from liability for content their users post.
Trump has been railing against the law since May, when Twitter placed fact-checks on two of his tweets. Two days later, on May 28, Trump signed an executive order instructing federal regulators to investigate how they could roll back parts of Section 230. He accused Big Tech companies of discriminating against conservative users, a claim the companies have denied.
The US election interrupted Trump's push to have the law amended, and legal experts told Business Insider there was no chance of any changes to Section 230 getting through before President-elect Joe Biden's inauguration on January 20.
"Even in the most optimistic scenario, any final rule will be challenged immediately in court and be put on hold," said Scott Shackelford, an associate professor of business law and ethics at Indiana University. "Plus, any executive action in this context cannot fundamentally change Section 230, not without congressional action."
Congress is able to override a presidential veto with a two-thirds majority. Per Politico, Trump has vetoed eight bills during his term, and Congress has been unable to put together enough bipartisan support to override them.
This means that if Trump follows through on his threat, the US may have to wait until Biden's inauguration before military spending can resume.
An anonymous source told The Washington Post that Republicans had suggested to Democrats that overhauling Section 230 could be exchanged for renaming Army bases named after Confederate figures, but that offer has been largely dismissed.
Many Democrats have expressed support for changing Section 230, but for different reasons than Republicans have. Biden expressed support for revoking the law in January on the grounds it granted tech giants too much immunity for hosting harmful content.
The 22 million US jobs that were lost during the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring won't be regained until early 2024, according to the chief economist at Moody's Analytics, part of ratings giant Moody's.
Mark Zandi said the industries that have been hit hardest in the pandemic include, retail, leisure, hospitality and recreational activities.
Tens of thousands of small retailers have failed or filed for bankruptcy "while the retail behemoths gobbled up market share," he said.
"Economic growth should kick into a higher gear, at least for a while," he said, referring to pent-up demand once "consumers let loose later in 2021 once they're vaccinated."
Ryan Sweet, a research economist at Moody's, told Business Insider: "The labor market will heal but that takes time, particularly for those segments that were most significantly hurt by the pandemic."
The 22 million jobs that were lost in the US during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic won't be regained until early 2024, according to Moody's Analytics' chief economist.
The coronavirus pandemic has ravaged the US job sector: Nearly 69 million filings for unemployment benefits have been made since the pandemic slammed the US economy in March. Continuing claims, which track Americans receiving unemployment benefits, fell to 6.1 million for the week that ended November 14.
Mark Zandi said in a November 29 note from the analytics company, part of ratings giant Moody's, that it was "expected to take until early 2024 — nearly four years after the pandemic struck — for the economy to regain the 22 million jobs lost in March and April 2020."
"The jobs recovery from the pandemic will be much slower than that of GDP," he said. US GDP surged about 33% in the third quarter.
Zandi said the industries that have suffered most from the pandemic include, retail, leisure, hospitality and recreational activities. Smaller companies have lost out to bigger competitors, particularly in retail, he said.
"Tens of thousands of mom-and-pop retailers have failed and midsize publicly traded retailers have filed for bankruptcy, while the retail behemoths gobbled up market share," Zandi said.
The "biggest winners" are in more productive industries such as technology, wholesaling, and professional services that have "taken advantage of the pandemic," he said.
These businesses have "deployed technologies and processed changes that they were investing in but reluctant to take full advantage of during the good times," he added.
He said that pent-up demand will be unleashed as households "let loose later in 2021 once they're vaccinated" and start to spend on activities they were unable to do while self-quarantine.
"As of October, households had saved nearly $1.4 trillion more because of the pandemic than they would have typically, amounting to approximately 6 percentage points of pre-pandemic GDP," said Zandi.
Moody's chief economist concluded the article saying, "The COVID-19 pandemic is sure to have a long tail. Hopefully, not entirely a dark one."
The total number of jobs in the US is still more than 10 million below its peak, Axios reported Wednesday.
Ryan Sweet, a research economist at Moody's, told Business Insider: "The US labor market is losing momentum as the initial phase of the recovery has mostly run its course and the next phase will be more difficult."
Whereas the first bounce in employment was triggered by recalled workers, the next stage of labor recovery will be driven by the underlying strength of the economy, according to Sweet.
"The labor market will heal but that takes time, particularly for those segments that were most significantly hurt by the pandemic," he said.
In an online survey of 13,200 people in August, Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan think tank, found that half of American adults that lost a job due to the COVID-19 crisis haven't returned to work.
IT services and consulting giant Tata Consultancy Services will provide clients with solutions and services incorporating the PagerDuty platform, jointly developed by the two companies in a new solutions service center.
ServiceNow, the cloud-based IT services company, is making a significant acquisition today to fill out its longer-term strategy to be a big player in the worlds of automation and artificial intelligence for enterprises. It is acquiring Element AI, a startup out of Canada.
Founded by AI pioneers and backed by some of the world’s biggest AI companies — it raised hundreds of millions of dollars from the likes of Microsoft, Intel, Nvidia and Tencent, among others — Element AI’s aim was to build and provision AI-based IT services for enterprises, in many cases organizations that are not technology companies by nature.
Terms of the deal are not being disclosed, a spokesperson told TechCrunch, but we now have multiple sources telling us the price was around $500 million. For some context, Element AI was valued at between $600 million and $700 million when it last raised money, $151 million (or C$200 million at the time) in September 2019.
Even at $500 million, this deal would be ServiceNow’s biggest acquisition, although it would be a sizeable devaluation compared to the startup’s last price at fundraising.
A spokesperson confirmed that ServiceNow is making a full acquisition and will retain most of Element AI’s technical talent, including AI scientists and practitioners, but that it will be winding down its existing business after integrating what it wants and needs.
“Our focus with this acquisition is to gain technical talent and AI capabilities,” the spokesperson said. That will also include Element AI co-founder and CEO, JF Gagné, joining ServiceNow, and co-founder Dr. Yoshua Bengio taking on a role as technical advisor.
Those who are not part of those teams will be supported with severance or assistance in looking for other jobs within ServiceNow. A source estimated to us that this could affect around half of the organization.
The startup is headquartered in Montreal, and ServiceNow’s plan is to create an AI Innovation Hub based around that “to accelerate customer-focused AI innovation in the Now Platform.” (That is the brand name of its automation services.)
Last but not least, ServiceNow will start re-platforming some of Element AI’s capabilities, she said. “We expect to wind down most of Element AI’s customers after the deal is closed.”
The deal is the latest move for a company aiming to build a modern platform fit for our times.
ServiceNow, under CEO Bill McDermott (who joined in October 2019 from SAP), has been on a big investment spree in the name of bringing more AI and automation chops to the SaaS company. That has included a number of acquisitions this year, including Sweagle, Passage AI and Loom (respectively for $25 million, $33 million and $58 million), plus regular updates to its larger workflow automation platform.
ServiceNow has been around since 2004, so it’s not strictly a legacy business, but all the same, the publicly traded company, with a current market cap of nearly $103 billion, is vying to position itself as the go-to company for “digital transformation” — the buzz term for enterprise IT services this year, as everyone scrambles to do more online, in the cloud and remotely to continue operating through a global health pandemic and whatever comes in its wake.
“Technology is no longer supporting the business, technology is the business,” McDermott said earlier this year. In a tight market where it is completely plausible that Salesforce might scoop up Slack, ServiceNow is making a play for more tools to cover its own patch of the field.
“AI technology is evolving rapidly as companies race to digitally transform 20th century processes and business models,” said ServiceNow Chief AI Officer Vijay Narayanan, in a statement today. “ServiceNow is leading this once-in-a-generation opportunity to make work, work better for people. With Element AI’s powerful capabilities and world class talent, ServiceNow will empower employees and customers to focus on areas where only humans excel – creative thinking, customer interactions, and unpredictable work. That’s a smarter way to workflow.”
Element AI was always a very ambitious concept for a startup. Dr. Yoshua Bengio, winner of the 2018 Turing Award, who co-founded the company with AI expert Nicolas Chapados and Jean-François Gagné (Element AI’s CEO) alongside Anne Martel, Jean-Sebastien Cournoyer and Philippe Beaudoin, saw a gap in the market.
Their idea was to build AI services for businesses that were not tech companies in their DNA, but would still very much need to tap into the innovations of the tech world in order to continue growing and remaining competitive with said tech companies as the latter moved deeper into a wider range of industries and the companies themselves required increasing sophistication to operate and grow. They needed, in essence, to disrupt themselves before getting unceremoniously disrupted by someone else.
And on top of that, Element AI could work for and with the tech companies taking strategic investments in Element AI, as those investors wanted to tap some of that expertise themselves, as well as work with the startup to bring more services and win more deals in the enterprise. In addition to its four (sometimes fiercely competitive) investors, other backers included the likes of McKinsey.
Yet what form all of that would take was never completely clear.
When I covered the startup’s most recent tranche of funding last year, I noted that it wasn’t very forthcoming on who its customers actually were. Looking at its website, it still isn’t, although it does lay out several verticals where it aims to work. They include insurance, pharma, logistics, retail, supply chain, manufacturing, government and capital markets.
There were some other positive points. Element AI also played a strong ethics card with its AI For Good efforts, starting with work with Amnesty in 2018 and most recently Mozilla. Indeed, 2018 — a year after Element AI was founded — was also the year AI seemed to hit the mainstream consciousness — and also started to appear somewhat more creepy, with algorithmic misfires, pervasive facial recognition and more “automated” applications that didn’t work that well and so on — so launching an ethical aim definitely made sense.
But for all of that, it seems that there perhaps were not enough threads there to need a bigger cloth as a standalone business. Glassdoor reviews also speak of an endemic disorganization at the startup, which might not have helped, or was perhaps a sign of bigger issues.
“Element AI’s vision has always been to redefine how companies use AI to help people work smarter,” said Element AI founder and CEO, Jean-Francois Gagné in a statement. “ServiceNow is leading the workflow revolution and we are inspired by its purpose to make the world of work, work better for people. ServiceNow is the clear partner for us to apply our talent and technology to the most significant challenges facing the enterprise today.”
The acquisition is expected to be completed by early 2021.
Medical staff move a patient on a gurney across the skyway at Mt. Sinai Morningside Hospital on May 18, 2020 in New York City.
John Lamparski/NurPhoto/Getty Images
The US is averaging one death from COVID-19 per minute, Dr. Beth Bell, a global health expert who serves on a CDC vaccine advisory panel, said Tuesday.
Bell shared the figure at a meeting for the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which operates under the CDC.
The federal advisory panel met Tuesday afternoon to discuss and vote on recommendations for the distribution of a coronavirus vaccine.
The committee voted that healthcare workers and nursing home residents and staff should be first in line to receive the vaccine from the initial limited supply.
The US is averaging one death from COVID-19 per minute, according to a global health expert who serves on an advisory panel under the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The grim death rate was shared at a Tuesday meeting for the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which operates under the CDC. The federal advisory panel met Tuesday afternoon to discuss and vote on recommendations for the distribution of a coronavirus vaccine.
Dr. Beth Bell, a global health expert at the University of Washington who serves as the work group co-chair for the panel, put that death rate into the perspective of the three-hour meeting.
"There is an average of one covid death per minute right now," she said during the meeting. "In the time it takes us to have this ACIP meeting 180 people will have died from COVID-19, so we are acting none too soon."
The committee voted that an estimated 21 million healthcare workers and three million nursing home residents and staff should be first in line to receive the vaccine from the initial limited supply, according to The Washington Post.
Healthcare workers are among the first to receive the vaccine in order to better protect them at the front lines as they treat COVID-19 patients in hospitals. Business Insider's Aria Bendix reported that they could start receiving shots as early as mid-December.
Residents and staffers at nursing homes and long-term care facilities are also first in line, according to the ACIP's recommendations. The group made up 6% of COVID-19 cases reported in the US and 40% of total deaths, citing data from the Kaiser Family Foundation.
Though the group voted to prioritize distribution to residents and staff at long-term care facilities, some ACIP members had doubts about voting to approve the recommendation.
Dr. Keipp Talbot, an associate professor of medicine at Vanderbilt University and ACIP member, said it was concerning that the recommendation goes against traditional vaccine rollout methods.
"We have traditionally tried a vaccine in a young healthy population and then hoped it works in our frail, older adults. That concerns me on many levels, particularly for this vaccine," Talbot said in the meeting, adding that the staff member should have higher priorities than the residents as it could have more of an effect in stemming the spread of the coronavirus in the communities.
‘If you look in the enterprise technology space, there are some providers who are competitor-focused,’ Jassy said. ‘They look at what their competitors are doing, and they try to fast-follow and one-up them. We have a competitor like that across the lake from us here in Washington.’
After declaring in 2018 that bitcoin has no place in investment portfolios, Bernstein Research's co-head of portfolio strategy told clients on Monday that he's changed his mind.
Inigo Fraser-Jenkins said that the policy environment, debt levels, and diversification options for investors have changed since the pandemic and made bitcoin more attractive.
The strategist also said that bitcoin's volatility has dropped significantly in the last three years.
He recommended a number of portfolio strategies that involve a small allocation to bitcoin, alongside stocks and US treasuries.
Once a crypto skeptic, Bernstein Research's co-head of portfolio strategy now says bitcoin should have a place in investors' portfolios.
"I have changed my mind about bitcoin's role in asset allocation," said Inigo Fraser-Jenkins in a Monday note to clients. His take comes as the coin reaches new record highs and has seen year-to-date gains of over 160%.
But bitcoin's most recent rally isn't exactly what made Fraser-Jenkins change his mind. The strategist explained that the coronavirus pandemic has changed the policy environment, debt levels, and diversification options for investors, and that this has all made bitcoin an attractive asset.
The pandemic has resulted in increased fiscal expansion, and a higher likelihood of inflation and tax increases. These policy factors will increase the demand for bitcoin, Fraser-Jenkins said.
However, he also acknowledged a paradox that could hurt bitcoin's continued rise: "The greater role that governments will likely play in economies makes cryptos potentially more appealing. These very same forces also may hinder crypto. If they get in the way of policy implementation, then governments might seek to constrain them," he said.
However, Fraser-Jenkins doubts that governments will outlaw cryptocurrencies. He said that in order for this to happen, cryptos would need to get in the way of reflationary policy efforts from the government. At the moment, cryptos are too small to have an effect like this, said Fraser-Jenkins.
He added: "The attractions of cryptos are what also make them potentially an annoyance for policymakers. Cryptos do have a place in asset allocation….for as long as they are legal!"
Fraser-Jenkins also changed his mind on bitcoin because the data on the cryptocurrency has changed since three years ago. The strategist said that bitcoin's volatility has significantly declined in the last three years, which marks it a more attractive store of value. Also, the relative volatility of bitcoin to both gold and stocks has declined to historically low levels, he said.
Fraser-Jenkins recommends investors add a small amount of bitcoin to their portfolios. In all scenarios, investors should own the S&P 500 and US 10 year government bonds. If the assumed bitcoin average monthly return is higher than 3%, that's when investors would add bitcoin.
Bernstein Research
Fraser-Jenkins also acknowledged that given bitcoin's recent rally it may pull-back in the near term, but his portfolio strategy is for investors interested in holding the coin for a longer period of time.
Microsoft is overhauling its calling features inside Microsoft Teams today. A new calling interface will now show contacts, voicemail, and calling history in a single location. It’s designed to allow Microsoft Teams to more easily replace your desk phone, with built-in spam call protection, reverse number lookup, and the ability to merge calls.
Microsoft Teams users will also be able to transfer calls between mobile and desktop soon, allowing people to quickly move locations in the middle of an audio or video call. The Teams app will let people join without audio on an additional device, or simply transfer the call and end it automatically on other devices. Microsoft says this particular feature will be available in early 2021.
Google today introduced a new mobile management and security solution, Android Enterprise Essentials, which, despite its name, is actually aimed at small to medium-sized businesses. The company explains this solution leverages Google’s experience in building Android Enterprise device management and security tools for larger organizations in order to come up with a simpler solution for those businesses with smaller budgets.
The new service includes the basics in mobile device management, with features that allow smaller businesses to require their employees to use a lock screen and encryption to protect company data. It also prevents users from installing apps outside the Google Play Store via the Google Play Protect service, and allows businesses to remotely wipe all the company data from phones that are lost or stolen.
As Google explains, smaller companies often handle customer data on mobile devices, but many of today’s remote device management solutions are too complex for small business owners, and are often complicated to get up-and-running.
Android Enterprise Essentials attempts to make the overall setup process easier by eliminating the need to manually activate each device. And because the security policies are applied remotely, there’s nothing the employees themselves have to configure on their own phones. Instead, businesses that want to use the new solution will just buy Android devices from a reseller to hand out or ship to employees with policies already in place.
Though primarily aimed at smaller companies, Google notes the solution may work for select larger organizations that want to extend some basic protections to devices that don’t require more advanced management solutions. The new service can also help companies get started with securing their mobile device inventory before they move up to more sophisticated solutions over time, including those from third-party vendors.
Google says it will roll out Android Enterprise Essentials initially with distributors Synnex in the U.S. and Tech Data in the U.K. In the future, it will make the service available through additional resellers as it takes the solution global in early 2021. Google will also host an online launch event and demo in January for interested customers.
As many as 89,000 households have left San Francisco since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, according to San Francisco-based site Public Comment.
Public Comment worked with the United States Postal Service to track requests for a change of address between March 1 and November 1, 2020.
The data showed that 124,131 households requested a change of address during that period with at least 34,803 of those requests for moves to a different neighborhood within San Francisco.
That means as many as 89,328 households left the city altogether. Those who left relocated to Las Vegas, Florida, the Denver region, and a city near Portland, Oregon, according to Public Comment.
As many as 89,000 households have moved out of San Francisco since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.
That's according to San Francisco-based site Public Comment, which worked with the United States Postal Service to track requests for a change of address between March 1 and November 1, 2020.
The data showed that 124,131 households — which can mean an individual, a couple, or a family — requested a change of address during the seven-month period, with at least 34,803 of those requests, or 28%, for moves to a different neighborhood within San Francisco. The USPS didn't include data from zip codes with 10 or fewer requests, so that amount could be higher, according to Public Comment.
Still, the data shows that as many as 89,328 households left the city altogether.
Some households relocated to neighboring areas like Marin County and Oakland. For those who decamped the Bay Area entirely, they spread to cities and towns across the country. According to Public Comment, Las Vegas was the No. 1 destination, followed by Palm Beach County, Florida; Seminole County, Florida; the Denver region; and Beaverton, Oregon, a city just west of Portland.
San Francisco has been one metro area most impacted by the secondary effects of the pandemic due to its high rents, home prices, and cost of living. As offices closed down and employees began working from home — some on a permanent basis — the need to live in an expensive city diminished.
Other data has shown something of an exodus from San Francisco. Housing inventory in San Francisco has risen 96% year-over-year, which means there are about twice as many homes listed for sale this year than there were last year, according to a Zillow report from August. At the same time, rents for studio apartments are decreasing: Realtor data from October showed that the median rent price in the city has decreased 30% since this time last year.
The migration out of San Francisco may be due, at least in part, to some tech companies shutting their offices and no longer requiring employees to live nearby. In August, anonymous workplace chat app Blind surveyed 3,300 tech workers about living in the Bay Area — the survey found that 15% had already left the area and 60% said they would leave if they could.
Companies like Twitter and Slack have said their employees may work from home permanently, and Facebook is allowing employees to work remotely full-time with their manager's permission. And Stripe is even incentivizing employees to move: Employees will take a pay cut for leaving New York, San Francisco, or Seattle, but they'll also reportedly receive a one-time $20,000 bonus for making the move.
By Sheila McGee-Smith Whether for enabling use of customer profile data or voice authentication, these new functionalities should be “no-brainers” to adopt, Amazon Connect GM says.
Bitcoin reached a new all-time high (ATH), selling for roughly $19,729 this Monday morning on multiple cryptocurrency exchanges.
There are many opinions about the precise dollar value of the last record high in late 2017, up to $20,093 on BitMex. According to Kraken exchange employee Dan Held, bitcoin reached an ATH of $19,600 on his platform before noon on Monday. Likewise, Gemini exchange co-founder Tyler Winklevoss tweeted bitcoin hit an ATH of $19,833.
Regardless, the dollar-denominated price of bitcoin generally peaks near the end of the year, going back to a previous record-breaking high of around $989 on November 25, 2013. Likewise, the next bull run — when the price spikes and trading activity surges — took off in September 2017 and peaked in December. It’s now roughly three years later, between Thanksgiving and Christmas, right on time to pump again.
There is a difference between the current bull run and earlier ones, however. As Island Castle Ventures co-founder Nic Carter told Bloomberg, the 2020 market surge is distinguished from the rest because the tech companies serving the industry are seen as mature enough to handle institutional capital. These days, companies like Bakkt and Fidelity operate institutional bitcoin trading and trading products like bitcoin futures. Along those lines, Forbes reported this month that the blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis is now fundraising with a $1 billion evaluation.
Stepping back, the Silicon Valley exchange Coinbase became one of the first crypto industry “unicorns” during the 2017 bull run. Coinbase was previously a Chainalysis customer, but pivoted to developing in-house analytics over the past year. Though Coinbase had a tumultuous year marked by public controversy, so far it appears the leading bull market unicorns are surveillance tech companies.
All things considered, Carter told Motherboard in an email the pandemic’s political factors create a near perfect storm in 2020 for the bitcoin-as-a-hedge investment thesis. This thesis argues bitcoin offers a hedge against inflationary currencies and political instability, despite clear instances of correlation between bitcoin’s volatility and the stock market and the Dow Jones Industrial Average this year.
“I’m seeing more chatter about ‘high velocity’ monetary issuance (i.e. fiscal rather than monetary), going directly into the ‘real economy’ rather than being trapped like QE (quantitative easing) is. This is potentially inflationary,” Carter said, expressing concerns that the upcoming Biden administration will be “pro stimulus.”
On the other hand, bitcoin’s fiat-denominated price continues to climb—even in markets without access to American banks, such as Iran—because the vast majority of buyers believe cryptocurrency is on the cusp of “mass adoption.” In fact, 92 percent of 15,000 Crypto.com survey respondents said cryptocurrency could achieve “mass adoption” in “the next five years.” These crypto fans expect average consumers to use cryptocurrency as often as they might use banking apps or Venmo. This narrative is as old as bitcoin pumps and hype cycles, however, which is to say as old as the technology itself. Today the daily average shows under one million active bitcoin addresses.
So far, the legal infrastructure surrounding the nascent bitcoin industry is still gridlocked. The Virtual Currency Tax Fairness Act, which would allow Americans to use crypto for small trades and purchases without cumbersome paperwork, hasn’t gotten any traction in congress since January 2020. Unless the compliance landscape improves, routine transactions with self-custodied assets may remain niche. Neeraj Agrawal, a spokesperson for the nonprofit crypto research group Coin Center, told Motherboard “we remain hopeful that those in government will see growing interest and adoption of cryptocurrency is making this particular [issue] more pressing.”
There are solid reasons why many experts remain bullish on bitcoin’s fiat-denominated price.
“Bitcoin is a 0-yield asset, which looks good by comparison [to fiat currencies],” Carter said, arguing service providers like PayPal could achieve the same “mass adoption” bottomline.
“Bitcoin ultimately scales with capital, not individual users,” Carter added. “So as long as there is capital willing to deploy into a new monetary system, it can keep monetizing for a long period.”
Leigh Cuen is a reporter in New York City. Her work has been published by Business Insider, Newsweek, Teen Vogue, Al Jazeera English, The Jerusalem Post, and many others. Her small crypto holdings are worth less than a designer purse.Follow her on Twitter at @La_Cuen._
As expected, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) boss Ajit Pai has announced he’ll be stepping down on January 20 after a four-year leadership stint rife with controversy.
Historically, the party that controls the White House holds both a 3-2 majority and the top spot at the agency. Current Democratic Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel is widely expected to at least temporarily take control of the agency after the Biden inauguration.
In a statement, Pai proclaimed he was “proud of the reforms we have instituted to make the agency more accountable to the American people.”
“I am grateful to President Trump for giving me the opportunity to lead the agency in 2017, to President Obama for appointing me as a Commissioner in 2012, and to Senate Majority Leader McConnell and the Senate for twice confirming me,” Pai said.
But Pai’s tenure was pockmarked with a long list of controversies, most notably being his unpopular attack on net neutrality. The repeal not only eliminated net neutrality rules, but left the agency without the authority to hold major telecom monopolies like AT&T and Comcast accountable during an historic public health crisis.
Pai’s tenure wasn’t entirely devoid of public benefit. Pai oversaw several important, high-profile wireless spectrum auctions, and also helped create a new 988 hotline for suicide prevention.
But Pai will long be remembered as the guy with the oversized coffee mug that ignored the public, happily-dismantled his own agency at the behest of AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast lobbyists, then danced with a pizzagater in celebration.
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Ajit Pai announced that he plans to step down on January 20, 2021, the day Joe Biden will be inaugurated.
Pai was appointed to the role by President Trump in 2017, after previously serving as commissioner under the Obama administration. His five-year term was set to end in July 2021.
Pai was a controversial figure, and under his leadership the FCC ended net neutrality rules that had governed the internet and been encoded in 2015. In short, net neutrality is the idea that ISPs should treat all data the same, without giving preference to certain websites or slowing down others.
Other notable industry developments under Pai included the merger of T-Mobile and Sprint, and the FCC adding new anti-robocall measures.
So far, not many big names in tech and privacy have reacted to the announcement. Most reactions so far indicate that people expect a renewed fight around net neutrality.
Digital Rights advocacy group Fight for the Future released a statement on "the most unpopular FCC Chairman in history" stepping down. The statement condemned Pai and emphasized the need for a "functional FCC that will quickly repair the damage done by Ajit Pai and get to work protecting the public from ISP abuses."
As of 2018, a majority of registered voters were in favor of net neutrality, based on data from Statista.
The other main reaction found on Twitter were proponents of repealing net neutrality, mocking fears that repealing the rule would have disastrous effects.
Ajit Pai is leaving the FCC when the Biden administration begins. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Pai’s business-loving, regulation-undoing legacy will likely last for years to come.
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chair Ajit Pai has announced that he will leave the agency on January 20, when Joe Biden is sworn in as president. This gives Biden at least one commissioner slot to fill on his first day in office and, should that choice be confirmed, a Democrat majority to fulfill his vision of what the FCC should be and do for the next four years.
Pai’s controversial tenure as FCC chair has been marked by business-friendly deregulation that helped media conglomerates get even bigger while doing little for lower-income people who couldn’t afford internet access — which has become an even more essential service during the pandemic. Pai also awarded billions of dollars in subsidies to broadband companies for providing internet access to remote locations, an investment of public dollars to close the digital divide that red state lawmakers found especially beneficial.
“It has been the honor of a lifetime to serve at the Federal Communications Commission, including as Chairman of the FCC over the past four years,” Pai said in a statement. “I am grateful to President Trump for giving me the opportunity to lead the agency in 2017, to President Obama for appointing me as a Commissioner in 2012, and to Senate Majority Leader McConnell and the Senate for twice confirming me. To be the first Asian-American to chair the FCC has been a particular privilege. As I often say: only in America.”
“While we did not always agree on policy matters, I always valued our shared commitment to public service,” Jessica Rosenworcel, a Democratic FCC commissioner who is likely to become the acting chair when Biden takes office, said in a statement.
Geoffrey Starks, the other Democrat on the commission, issued a similar if slightly less formal statement: “Chairman Pai and I may disagree on many policy issues, but we are in full agreement about two things: the outstanding quality of the FCC’s staff and the tremendous abilities of Patrick Mahomes.”
Pai, a Republican, joined the FCC after working for Verizon, a fact he used to gleefully troll his Democratic colleagues who were concerned about Pai’s ties to the company. And since he’d been granted a second five-year term by President Trump in 2017, Pai could have stayed on as a commissioner until that term expired, but it’s customary for chairs to leave the agency when a new administration comes in. The FCC is considered to be an independent agency with five commissioners (no more than three of whom can be from one political party) who are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate.
Under Pai, the FCC set about deregulating the industries under its purview as much as possible and reversing landmark Obama-era decisions. The net neutrality repeal is probably the most well-known example of both.
During the Obama years, the FCC reclassified internet service providers (ISPs) as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act, giving the agency more authority over them and forcing ISPs to treat all internet traffic the same. That would mean, for instance, that ISPs couldn’t charge more for certain types of traffic or restrict access to certain websites. Pai was a vocal opponent of this policy as a commissioner under Obama, and repealed it as soon as he possibly could after taking over as chair.
Pai’s reasoning was that such regulations would hamper investment and growth in a burgeoning industry (whether or not the internet can still be considered a burgeoning industry is up for debate). Pai called for a “light touch framework,” akin to the Clinton administration’s approach from decades earlier (when the internet truly was a burgeoning industry).
This light-touch framework gave the FCC little recourse when the pandemic hit. The crisis left millions of Americans to rely on the internet more than ever, but they had fewer protections from exploitive rate increases or sudden service cuts. Pai’s initiatives to reduce fraud in the agency’s universal lifeline service, which subsidizes phone and internet for lower-income people, made it harder for people who actually needed it to qualify for and stay in the program, and his actions reduced the number of companies that could provide it. The $9.25 internet service subsidy also didn’t cover the cost of most people’s vastly increased data needs.
Pai’s solutions to these problems included asking broadband companies not to cut off subscribers who couldn’t pay their bills during the first few months of the pandemic, and to pause lifeline service de-enrollment temporarily. However, Pai refused to extend the E-Rate program, which gives educational institutions heavily discounted internet and telecommunications services, to the private homes that became classrooms when the pandemic shut schools and libraries down.
One of Pai’s last acts for the agency will likely be his attempt to use Title II to assert the FCC’s authority over internet service providers, platforms, and sites by “clarifying” Section 230, which gives those services immunity from liability for user content while still allowing internet companies to moderate that content as they see fit. For example: If someone posts something defamatory about you on Facebook, you can sue that user but you can’t sue Facebook. Ironically, this is the opposite of a light-touch framework, the legal justification for which rests on having a Title II authority over internet services that Pai decidedly didn’t want and worked hard to remove.
But Section 230 was a pet cause of President Trump, especially as social media platforms increasingly cracked down on accounts that spread misinformation. Trump was enraged, for instance, when his election-related tweets and Facebook posts were labeled with fact-checks. Conservatives have increasingly asserted that tech companies are biased against certain political viewpoints, although studies have shown that social media actually amplifies and spreads conservative content far more than liberal content. Trump issued an executive order in May asking the FCC to dictate what content platforms could moderate and how, in order to keep their Section 230 protections. In October, Pai issued a statement saying the FCC would do as Trump asked. With Biden’s election, it’s exceedingly unlikely this will happen.
Pai’s business-friendly FCC also tried to “strengthen local voices” and modernize media ownership rules by increasing how many television and radio stations one company may own and allowing them to own different media outlets in the same market. Some of these rules were struck down in court.
Meanwhile, a proposed merger between conservative local television provider Sinclair Broadcast Group and Tribune Media Company, which would have put Sinclair stations in roughly 70 percent of American homes, fell apart when Sinclair lied about its plans to sell off stations in order to comply with FCC ownership regulations. Pai was an initial proponent of the Sinclair takeover — to the extent that he was investigated for showing preferential treatment to the company (he was cleared) — but would ultimately defy Trump and vote to block the merger. Sinclair ended up with a record $48 million fine from the FCC. Tribune’s stations were sold to a different company, Nexstar, which then became the largest television station owner in the country.
Pai’s FCC also approved the Sprint/T-Mobile merger, which decreased the number of major American wireless carriers from four to three. Pai said the deal would speed up the rollout of 5G. He also took a hands-off approach to the Time Warner/AT&T merger, saying the FCC didn’t need to review or approve it because it didn’t involve the transfer of airwave licenses, effectively clearing the way for the massive media conglomerate despite the Department of Justice’s antitrust concerns.
While Pai’s FCC may not have done much for urban and lower-income Americans, it did provide billions in funding for access to broadband in rural and tribal communities and — despite delays and interagency fights — eventually begin to expand 5G service across the country.
With Pai’s departure and Republican commissioner Michael O’Rielly’s term expiring at the end of the year, Biden will either begin his presidency with a 2-1 Democrat majority FCC or an FCC split along party lines. That depends on if Trump’s nominee to replace O’Rielly, Nathan Simington, is confirmed. Simington is seen as a major proponent of Trump’s Section 230 executive order and didn’t seem to be popular among Senate Democrats in his November confirmation hearing. Some Republicans have committed to voting for him, but a date for the vote has not yet been scheduled, and there isn’t much time left.
Should Simington not be confirmed, Trump appointee Brendan Carr would be left as the sole Republican commissioner on a three-person panel. Carr’s statement about Pai’s departure was significantly longer and more detailed than the other commissioners’, saying that Pai “cares deeply about the digital divide,” thanking him for his “courageous and principled service to the country,” and saying he would “leave behind an [unparalleled] record of accomplishments — one that would not even fit in his oversized coffee mug.”
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