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As promised, Disney now gives subscribers of Disney Plus the option to watch over 19 seasons of The Simpsons in the show’s original 4:3 aspect ratio. When the subscription streaming service first launched, it only presented The Simpsons in a remastered, 16:9 aspect ratio — and this resulted in audiences missing out on some visual gags that were near the top or bottom of the frame.

It didn’t take long for Disney to address viewer complaints by announcing it would give subscribers a choice between 16:9 (optimized for modern widescreen TVs) and the original 4:3 aspect ratio to see episodes true to the way they originally aired.

• Open Disney Plus and go to The Simpsons page. This link should get you there on the web version.
• Choose the...

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Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Google announced on Thursday that it will bring its SameSite cookie update back starting July 14th, alongside the launch of Chrome 84. The update will roll out gradually to Chrome 80 and later versions.

When Chrome 80 launched in February, Google started rolling out its SameSite update, which is intended to change how cookies are handled by the browser. In April, Google announced it would be rolling back that update in order to keep essential websites working during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Chrome used to accept cookies by default, but with the introduction of its SameSite labeling policy, Chrome will block cookies from functioning in a third-party context,...

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Photo by Doug MIlls-Pool / Getty Images

President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday targeting tech companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google and the pivotal internet law that provides them broad legal immunity over content posted by their users.

“We’re fed up with it,” Trump said in the Oval Office Thursday before signing the order, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The White House released the final executive order Thursday that could pare back...

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Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Google will soon let G Suite customers with Google Voice licenses make Google Voice calls right from their Gmail inbox. The new feature seems like a handy way to make a Google Voice call without needing to jump to a second tab to do so.

If the feature is rolled out to you, you’ll be able to access Google Voice from the toolbar on the right side of your inbox, which is where you might currently see icons for Google Calendar, Keep, and Tasks. Here’s a GIF from Google showing what the interface looks like.

Google says the feature will begin rolling out on June 3rd, though you’ll only be able use it from Chrome or Firefox on a computer.

Earlier this month, Google announced that you’d be able to access its Meet...

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Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

There’s a growing divide at the Federal Communications Commission over a proposed executive order by the Trump administration to regulate speech on social media platforms.

In statements made Thursday, Commissioners Jessica Rosenworcel and Brendan Carr took opposing sides over an executive order targeting Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Democrat Rosenworcel said that the order “is not the answer” while Republican Carr suggested that the proposal “makes sense.” If the current draft order is signed, the FCC would be at the helm of adjudicating complaints of social media bias online.

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump announced plans to sign an executive order targeting Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The law...

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Hulu Watch Party | Image: Hulu

Hulu is starting to test a Watch Party feature that’ll allow subscribers to simultaneously watch a show or movie while hanging out in a group chat room.

Watch parties have grown increasingly popular over the past couple of months as friends and family who are social distancing look for new ways to connect. The services that enabled those watch parties have tended to be third-party offerings, though. There isn’t a built-in way to stream Netflix or Disney Plus with a friend.

This makes Hulu the first of the major streaming services to really tap into this growing trend. The feature begins launching today, but its availability is unfortunately very limited for the time being:...

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Image: Crestron

Crestron, which offers services to help people customize their smart homes, has teamed up with Logitech and Zoom to make an at-home video conferencing setup using technology you’d typically find in an office conference room.

The setup could, for example, let you use your living room TV and a conference room-quality video camera to take Zoom meetings while reclining on your couch instead of being hunched over a laptop. That could be a much more comfortable way to take meetings or host group calls with family and friends while at home during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We found that there were a lot of situations where people have more than one person, where you’re doing happy hours or group calls, where you...

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• Apple has acquired AI startup Inductiv Inc. to improve Siri's intelligence, according to Bloomberg.
• The company's technology uses AI to correct flaws in data.
• The acquisition signals that Apple is taking another step to improve its Siri digital helper, which has become an important part of its products in recent years.
• Siri is generally perceived as falling behind Amazon's Alexa and the Google Assistant.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Apple has acquired machine learning startup Inductiv Inc., in a bid to improve Siri's capabilities, according to Bloomberg.

Apple confirmed the deal to Bloomberg with its usual response to inquiries about acquisitions, saying that it "buys smaller technology companies from time to time and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans." The company has not yet responded to Business Insider's request for comment.

A few Inductiv Inc. employees recently updated their LinkedIn profiles to indicate that they've begun working at Apple in April or May.

Inductiv Inc.'s technology automates the process of correcting flaws in data through the use of artificial intelligence. It's one of several acquisitions Apple has made recently, following its purchase of the popular weather app DarkSky and virtual reality entertainment platform NextVR.

Although Apple doesn't disclose the purpose behind its acquisitions, Bloomberg reports that Inductiv's engineering team is working on Siri, data science, and machine learning. Apple launched Siri back in 2011 on the iPhone 4S, long before Amazon introduced Alexa and Google launched the Google Assistant.

But Apple's voice-activated helper has largely been considered as lagging behind those made by Amazon and Google, in part because Amazon's and Google's assistants have excelled in general knowledge compared with Siri and are compatible with a broader range of third-party services.

Apple has made a push to improve Siri in recent years as voice assistants have become more common in the home and elsewhere. Apple's iOS 13 software for iPhones, which it launched in September, brought several enhancements to Siri, for example.

Such improvements include a more natural-sounding voice, more intelligence for offering suggestions in apps like Safari and Podcasts, and the ability to suggest that you create reminders based on conversations in Messages, among others.

The updates show that Siri has become more than just a voice-activated assistant, but a layer of AI that lives in Apple's software and serves as the thread between its many products, from the iPhone to the Mac and Apple Watch.  

Inductiv Inc. is  the latest acquisition Apple has made in the AI field, coming after the company purchased Xnor.ai, which specializes in low-power AI tools. It also acquired Voysis in April, a company with technology for more accurately understanding natural language. 

Do you work at Apple or Inductiv Inc. and have insight to share? Contact this reporter at leadicicco@businessinsider.com or through encrypted mail at lisaeadicicco@protonmail.com.

SEE ALSO: Apple is expected to release a larger iPhone 12 Pro later this year — here's everything we know about Apple's next high-end iPhones so far

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NOW WATCH: Why Pikes Peak is the most dangerous racetrack in America

'We’ll have rigorous health and safety measures in place to ensure social distancing and sanitization guidelines are followed, so the office will look and feel different than when you left,' Google CEO Sundar Pichai told employees in an email. 'Our goal is to be fair in the way we allocate time in the office, while limiting the number of people who come in, consistent with safety protocols.'

Image: Microsoft

Microsoft is adding new abilities to Outlook’s “Play My Emails” feature, allowing you to use voice control to organize your emails and day-to-day schedule. The company originally released Play My Emails for Outlook last November, letting Microsoft’s AI assistant Cortana read emails out loud to users.

With the new features, Cortana will allow you to accept or decline meetings as well as set up a meeting with someone. If someone emails you regarding important or time-sensitive information, it will suggest setting a meeting during the next available 30-minute time slot on your calendar. Cortana will also give you an option to view your schedule and select a time to set up a meeting, and it’ll allow you to add emails to your task list.

...

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Photo by David Ryder/Getty Images

Boeing said it would resume manufacturing the troubled 737 Max airplane after a nearly five-month hiatus. The aerospace company said it would restart production “at a low rate as it implements more than a dozen initiatives focused on enhancing workplace safety and product quality.”

The Boeing 737 Max has been grounded since March 2018 following two fatal crashes that killed a total of 346 passengers and crew members. Boeing continued to manufacture the airplane, but in December 2019, the company announced plans to halt production at its Renton, Washington manufacturing plant.

The FAA has yet to clear the airplane to return to passenger service. Investigators have discovered numerous software glitches, apart from the MCAS flight control...

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Over the last few weeks, thousands of perfectly good JUMP electric bikes and scooters have been dropped off at a recycling facility and will be shredded, Motherboard has learned. The untimely end of these micromobility devices comes at a particularly absurd time, with the nation facing a widespread bike shortage because of surging demand for safe, affordable urban transportation during the pandemic.

JUMP, a bike-and-scooter share startup sold to Uber in 2018, operates in 37 cities around the world, including 18 in the U.S., according to the company’s website. Under pressure to pursue profitability, Uber dumped JUMP onto Lime, another micromobility company with operations in 114 cities around the world, in a complicated deal earlier this month that resulted in Uber taking a larger share in Lime. The fate of JUMP and its distinctive red bikes and scooters was unclear until the videos of the crushers began to surface.

The photos and videos of the JUMP bike heaps posted to social media sites have disappointed former JUMP employees, bike and scooter advocates, and people who don't like to see useless waste. The micromobility industry is now practicing the exact kind of wastefulness shared sustainable transportation is supposed to counteract.

“Even if there isn’t a city government with the chops to convert unwanted Jumps into a new/used e-bike share system, why not at least peel the decals off and sell the bikes to individuals?” asked Jon Orcutt of the non-profit group Bike New York. He added that JUMP bikes have a reputation for being “really well-made and purpose-built for city transportation,” unlike the cheap dockless bikes from companies like MoBike and Ofo that ended up in mass graveyards. Likewise, Skip Scooters co-founder and CEO Sanjay Dastoor said the videos were tough to watch and called the JUMP bikes “the best shared e-bikes ever designed.”

David Zipper, a Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Taubman Center for State and Local Government who studies the micromobility industry said that given the shortage, the videos are “so jarring, and so troubling.”

A former JUMP employee, who asked to remain anonymous because they signed a non-disclosure agreement, said watching the videos stung them personally.

“Part of my personal pride in working for JUMP was witnessing first hand the impacts these bikes had on communities," they said. "And with COVID-19, the fleet of bikes that is being destroyed could've done even more good for cities. We're in the midst of a bike boom where more people are biking than ever. We're in the midst of an e-bike shortage induced by the Chinese trade war and tens of thousands of e-bikes are getting sold for scrap.”

Are you a former JUMP employee? What do you think of the bikes and scooters being destroyed? Email aaron.gordon@vice.com or aaronwgordon@protonmail.com.

A man who answered the phone at the Durham, North Carolina location of Foss Recycling confirmed they’ve received “about 18 trailers” filled with scooters and bikes over the last week—another source at the same location put the number of trailers closer to 30—and that after their batteries and electronics are removed they’re “going to be recycled.” He declined to give his name to Motherboard and, when asked why, replied “I don’t know where it’s going.”

Why exactly these functional bikes and scooters are being destroyed even when demand for them is at a peak requires diving into the confusing world of four-letter micromobility companies. JUMP was acquired by Uber in 2018 as a diversification effort prior to going public to signal to investors it was well-positioned for whatever transportation trends may emerge over time. But it was always an awkward fit, and a money-losing one to boot. The recent sale to Lime put JUMP’s fate in question.

As for which company is responsible for selling off the bikes and scooters for scrap, Lime says it wasn’t them. “As part of the JUMP acquisition, we took possession of tens of thousands of e-bikes—including the spare parts and tools to fix them—and have already begun to deploy them,” a Lime spokesperson told Motherboard. “We have not recycled any of the JUMP e-bikes in our fleet and are committed to scaling and operating them during this critical time.” The spokesperson added that when the transaction officially closes, Lime plans to work with Uber to “find sustainable ways to donate and re-use any remaining e-bikes in their inventory.”

An Uber spokesperson said the company kept the older models. "We explored donating the remaining, older-model bikes, but given many significant issues—including maintenance, liability, safety concerns, and a lack of consumer-grade charging equipment—we decided the best approach was to responsibly recycle them."

The man at Foss Recycling told Motherboard their contract is not with either Uber or Lime, but with a company called Blue Sky Trading, which is removing and keeping the electronic and battery components. After that, the man said the bikes and scooters will “be shredded through the auto shredder, and the metal will be distributed out from there.”

The mass bike and scooter destruction, especially when demand for biking is at such a height, is yet another piece of evidence that the well-intentioned goals of micromobility workers who believed they were working to promote sustainable transportation does not ultimately align with the goals of the companies they worked for. Last month, Bird laid off more than 400 employees, some of whom openly questioned whether the company could ever achieve the grand vision it sold to investors.

For his part, the former JUMP employee sees this as yet another lost opportunity. “An amazing COVID e-bike program could've done so much good and instead we have horrific images of bikes being eaten by the Claw at the dump. It's a shameful nightmare.”

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Accessing the plethora of settings hidden in Gmail can be a pain, but it’s about to get a little easier. Google is rolling out a quick settings menu, which offers a sampling of options that let you adjust the look of your inbox without leaving the page. Once this new tweak arrives on your account, it will activate automatically, and you won’t have to leave the page to see the visual changes you make to your inbox.

The quick settings menu contains an option to change the density of information displayed (between default, comfortable, or compact). It also lets you choose which emails you want to have prioritized in your inbox. Another option lets you add a reading pane so you can see an email’s contents without actually opening it. Lastly,...

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• Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield told The Verge that Microsoft is "unhealthily preoccupied" with "killing" Slack via its Microsoft Teams tool. 
• He says that while Microsoft itself often compares itself to Slack, Teams is more of a direct competitor to the likes of Zoom, thanks to its focus on voice and video calling.
• In his view, Microsoft focuses on Slack as a rival because it poses a threat to email, which would in turn diminish the appeal of the Microsoft Office 365 cloud productivity suite. 
• Microsoft Teams and Slack have both seen surges in popularity amid the pandemic, with Microsoft saying in late April that it has 75 million daily active users. Slack hasn't shared user numbers since October, when it said that it had 12 million daily active users.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Microsoft is "unhealthily preoccupied" with "killing" Slack via its Microsoft Teams tool, CEO Stewart Butterfield recently told The Verge. But he also says that his trillion-dollar rival, and many observers, are missing the point.

The two companies have long been at loggerheads: Slack was first on the scene with its very popular corporate workplace chat app, but Microsoft came onto the scene in 2016 with Teams, its own take on the concept, bundled into the Office 365 productivity suite. 

By most measures, Teams is a huge hit: In late April, Microsoft said that the coronavirus pandemic and ensuing shift to remote work had propelled it to 75 million daily active users. Slack, for its part, hasn't shared a user number since it said in October that it had 12 million daily active users, though it said in late March that it added 9,000 new paid customers amid the pandemic. 

Butterfield has been a frequent critic of Microsoft and its focus on competition with Slack — in that interview with the Verge, he notes that when Microsoft issued an update on Teams user figures in July 2019, the company directly compared itself to Slack's user base. 

However, Butterfield told The Verge that in his view, Teams is more about voice and video calling than it is about text chatting. While Slack has limited video-chatting features, Butterfield himself says that's not the reason why anybody chooses to use the app. In that light, Butterfield suggests, "Teams is much more of a direct competitor to Zoom."

Butterfield further suggests that the reason why Microsoft might be so interested in pursuing this particular rivalry is because Slack reduces the use of email in an office. He argues that if office workers use less email, it makes suites like Microsoft Office 365 — which includes Teams — less attractive to corporate buyers.

"[It's] really about email, and if email becomes less important, then that whole $35, $40 billion-a-year collaboration productivity business unit is threatened," he said. 

Butterfield's comments build on thoughts he expressed in an interview with Business Insider in March, saying that he believes that the industry often positions Slack as competing against Microsoft Teams, when in reality it competes against email as a concept in most cases. 

It also echoes several of Butterfield's previous criticisms of Microsoft. Earlier this year, Microsoft also clarified how it counts daily active users, after criticism from Butterfield that it was counting users who the company forced into migrating from older products like Skype for Business. 

Finally, Butterfield says that Slack has no intention of building out its own voice and video chat tools to compete more directly with Teams. In his view, Slack is 'disproportionately valuable' to users because it can integrate with any number of outside tools, including videoconferencing services like Zoom, Cisco WebEx, and even Microsoft Teams itself.

Microsoft was not immediately available for comment.

Read Butterfield's full interview with The Verge here.

Got a tip? Contact this reporter via email at pzaveri@businessinsider.com or Signal at 925-364-4258. (PR pitches by email only, please.) You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

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NOW WATCH: What makes 'Parasite' so shocking is the twist that happens in a 10-minute sequence

• Alternative-data provider SimilarWeb, which tracks web traffic for millions of websites, lays out the numbers behind the coronavirus pandemic's impact on different industries.
• Winners include sporting-goods retailers and telehealth providers, while travel companies and luxury brands fell hard.
• Go inside the data that hedge funds use to make their big market bets.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

The best version of alternative data gives a story more detail or a new perspective.

Cell-phone geolocation can give a consumer-level insight into how long they're willing to wait for a new iPhone. Satellite images can show how full a barge is when it leaves port. Social media trackers can determine what kind of buzz a company is generating. 

For many hedge funds, these data inputs have become a huge part of their process, supplementing — and occasionally replacing — traditional data feeds for their quants and fundamental analysts. And in the novel coronavirus pandemic, that's been the case even more as record levels of market volatility pushed funds to gather as much information as possible, as quickly as possible, to determine the impact of the global shutdown.

These data feeds though can also serve as an important look-back, not to help predict future, but to put in context how much damage has been done by a single virus. Data from SimilarWeb, an alternative-data vendor that tracks the online traffic of millions of websites, shared with Business Insider shows how different industries, and the underlying companies, were impacted. 

Below is a heatmap from SimilarWeb looking at weekly web traffic for these different industries compared to the same week a year before. The changes for some companies have been drastic, so much so that businesses are going bankrupt.

Business Insider took a deeper look at the underlying data in 11 industries to understand the businesses that were most impacted by the novel coronavirus. 

SEE ALSO: 'A $35,000 data set that could have saved or made $100 million': Alt data is back in the spotlight — here's how providers and buyers have adapted

SEE ALSO: Hedge funds are using these 10 alt-data sources to gain an investing edge as the coronavirus wreaks havoc on global markets

SEE ALSO: The world's biggest hedge funds like Bridgewater are blending quantitative and fundamental trading. Here's why it's gaining hype on Wall Street.

Retail investing

With market volatility reaching all-time highs, it should come as no surprise that people keen to take advantage of the wild swings headed to brokerage websites. 

However, one site stood out among the group, attracting an incredible amount of traffic. Robinhood, the financial app popular with first-time investors, saw huge upticks in unique visits during the crisis, with views up at least 120% compared to the previous year for all but one week in March, April, and May. The traffic volume came despite the popular app facing multiple outages during March. 

To be sure, TD Ameritrade saw its fair share of increases as well, peaking in March, with weekly spikes of 91% and 94% toward the end of the month. 

Interactive Brokers, Fidelity and Schwab saw upticks as well, although far smaller, with the traditional players topping out around 50% in increases. 

Online banking

As the market turned volatile and layoffs mounted, one would expect banking websites to be a popular destination. However, the world's largest banks saw around a 12% decrease in traffic in late March compared to the same time period the previous year.

That changed in April, with a spike the week of the 18th following the announcement of stimulus checks being distributed. 

Overall, Bank of America nabbed the biggest increase in traffic among the group, achieving double-digit upticks in views every week in May. Wells Fargo also saw increases throughout May, albeit not as high as Bank of America.

On the other end of the spectrum, Citi attracted lower-than-average traffic all but two weeks since the coronavirus pandemic began in the US in mid-March.  

Job postings

Arguably the most surprising datapoint in SimilarWeb's study was the decrease in traffic at job listings websites. 

While the expectation might be that these sites would be flooded with traffic as unemployment rates began to skyrocket, the opposite was true. In fact, CareerBuilder, ZipRecruiter, Indeed, Glassdoor, and Monster have all faced double-digit decreases in traffic for a majority of the pandemic thus far.

CareerBuilder has fared the best of the bunch, with a 19% and 12% uptick during the weeks of March 14 and 21. However, the rest of March, all of April, and the start of May proved lower-than-average traffic.

Online grocery and food delivery

As expected, grocery and food delivery sites have fared quite well during the pandemic. April proved particularly busy for grocery sites, with Walmart, Instacart, Publix, Peapod, and FreshDirect seeing weekly increases in average traffic as high as 800%.

While those numbers have come down, they remain well above last year's weekly averages. During the week of May 16, both Walmart and Instacart saw 276% and 248% increases in unique visitors, respectively. 

As for food delivery, DoorDash and Uber Eats have shown to be big winners, enjoying upticks in traffic around 90% throughout the pandemic. Some individual restaurants have also fared well, with Chipotle maintaining increases in weekly traffic as high as 120% at times. 

That being said, Dominos and Pizza Hut have seen decreases in unique visitors. Not all food delivery has picked up, as Seamless has seen decreases in traffic throughout the pandemic. 

 

 

 

E-commerce

While Amazon traffic has continued to climb, the true standout amongst e-commerce companies has been Etsy. Perhaps as part of an increased effort among out-of-work people to launch businesses of their own, the website's weekly traffic is up 50% throughout May. 

Alibaba and AliExpress both have come on strong in May as well, seeing weekly unique visits increase by 40% and 29%, respectively, for the week of May 16.

Amazon has maintained double-digit increases in weekly unique traffic for all but two weeks during the pandemic. 

eBay, meanwhile, was the lone lagger in the bunch, with only single-digit growth starting in mid-April. 

 

Luxury

It appears that the thing people buying luxury goods enjoy the most is being seen buying luxury goods. 

Since about mid-March, a majority of major luxury labels tracked by SimilarWeb — including Chanel, Gucci, Saks Fifth Avenue, and more — have seen their web traffic decrease compared to last year, despite their marble-floored shops being closed to customers. 

Three brands though seem to have pushed through and adapted quickly to the pandemic world: Dior, Prada, and Hermes. All three brands have seen online traffic surge, relative to past visitors, since the end of March, with Dior leading way. The week of April 25, for instance, saw 64% more traffic in 2020 than 2019, SimilarWeb states. 

Web conferencing

It should be no surprise that video conferencing platforms are the big winners of the pandemic. Zoom's stock has soared since people began using it to replace their favorite watering holes and dinner tables for happy hours and family gatherings.

But the numbers are still striking as to how many more people are using the platform. Since the week of March 28, Zoom has had at least 1,300% more visitors every week than it did in 2019. 

Other video sites, like Google's offering, Webex, and GoToMeeting, have also experienced a surge, but nothing like Zoom's explosion. 

Beauty and fashion

While people might be opting for more sweatpants-and-t-shirt looks these days, beauty brands have been surprisingly resistant to the pandemic, according to SimilarWeb.

While Ulta's online traffic has mostly fallen since the outbreak, Sally Beauty's web traffic in April more than doubled, and Bath & Body Works saw a surge in traffic as well.

 

Department stores

SimilarWeb saw a big split in what it calls its department store category.

While websites for department stores like Nordstrom's and Macy's fell, the alt-data company also puts chains like Target, Walmart, and BestBuy in the department store category, despite their more diverse offerings. 

The split is pretty clear in the data — for those shops that are mostly selling clothes, traffic took a serious tumble, with only Kohl's seeing any brief increase in traffic since the pandemic.

Target, Walmart, and BestBuy however have been steadily seeing more and more people visit their websites since stay-at-home orders were issued — and that's not including Walmart's separate grocery delivery/pickup site. 

Online real estate

With people uncertain of where their next paycheck is going to come from, traffic to online real-estate sites like Realtor.com and Zillow have slumped despite some of the lowest mortgage rates in a decade.

Renter-focused sites like Apartments.com, known for their quirky ads starring Jeff Goldblum, and New York-centric StreetEasy have also seen a dip in traffic, as stimulus money and unemployment checks have become the new income for many that were laid off during the pandemic. 

Sporting goods

People can only be cooped up for so long before they want to move around. As a result, companies that give you the goods to do so have cashed in.

Peloton, the stationary cycling start-up that went public last year, has been one of the biggest recipients of the new interest in home gym equipment: The company has seen weekly web traffic double, triple, or even quadruple in the weeks since the pandemic broke out. 

Companies like Dick's Sporting Goods, Lululemon, and Nike have also seen an uptick in visitors as gyms remain closed for the foreseeable future. 

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

T-Mobile subscribers can now send RCS messages to people on other phone networks, so long as everyone involved has an Android phone and support for the new messaging standard.

There are still a bunch of caveats here, but this appears to be a big step forward for RCS. The messaging standard is meant to be the successor to SMS, but its rollout has been slow and messy. Many carriers — T-Mobile included — began supporting RCS years ago, but it generally only worked between subscribers of the same phone carrier and often only while they were using a specific carrier-made app, meaning it’s been basically useless.

Today’s launch gets us a lot closer to a world where RCS just works. T-Mobile is supporting RCS Universal Profile 1.0, which is the...

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Illustration by Alex Castro / Th

Slack is exploring a wide variety of new features that could be making their way to the popular messaging platform, including scheduled messages, Instagram-style stories, and short video and audio messages.

According to CEO Stewart Butterfield in a recent interview on The Vergecast, the company has already “implemented APIs for scheduled sending of messages, and I think we’re going to end up putting that in the product at some point.” He also noted that competitors like G Suite already offer similar features.

Butterfield also mentioned that the company is looking to add more tools to make it easier for users to “keep track of the things you want to get back to,” including the aforementioned scheduling tools and “more control over...

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Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Zoom has temporarily disabled the integration of GIF platform Giphy in its chat feature, the company said in a blog post. “Once additional technical and security measures have been deployed, we will re-enable the feature.” Zoom didn’t offer any specifics beyond that on Giphy’s removal.

The company mentioned the change as part of its latest list of security updates to the platform, which also includes limits on screen sharing, changes to muting and unmuting functions, and restrictions on logging in to meetings from multiple devices (for meetings that require registration).

The move comes a few days after Facebook acquired Giphy for over $300 million, with plans to integrate it into Instagram. How that acquisition will affect Giphy...

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Microsoft Teams is a great collaboration platform, but it’s often used for much one than that. One use case is recording podcasts/vodcasts or even professional TV production. Today what you can do is relatively limited. For example, I record my monthly UC Today podcast on Microsoft Teams, we use the native Teams experience, natively recorded in Stream. Then it is given a simple overlay in post-production.

But what if you want to do more than this? If you want to take each person’s video feed in and control the layout, do overlays etc.? Coming soon, NDI (Network Device Interface), for Microsoft Teams enable this. It will allow you to convert each participant’s video into a discrete video source that can be used in the production tool of your choice, OBS, Wirecast, Xsplit, StreamLabs and many more. These tools allow you to control layouts, levels etc.

This will be great for podcasts, YouTube and other content creators.

Skype TX Interoperability

In addition to NDI support, Microsoft is adding Skype TX Interoperability. Skype TX is a studio-grade hardware and software solution from Microsoft, which allows you to integrate Skype callers from anywhere in the world into a broadcast. Skype TX hardware is available from Newtek, Quicklink and Broadcast Bionics. Skype TX converts Skype consumer calls into professional HD-SDI feeds ready to be integrated into production workflows.

Soon Microsoft Teams interop will enable the connection of 1:1 calls for interviews and newscasts with professional capabilities, including caller queuing and connection quality management. I imagine this is working via Teams to Skype consumer interop.

No dates were given for either feature. They were mentioned in a recent Build Microsoft Teams Updates blog here. I will have a blog as soon as it’s available or we know more, to stay in the know, subscribe for my every other week email update here.

Photo illustration by William Joel | Photography by Joel Saget/AFP via Getty Images

A conversation on The Vergecast

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The workforce is the center of any organization, no matter if the workforce consists of employees, contractors or what we call gig workers. It stands to reason that a black-swan event has an immediate impact on a workforce and thus an organization’s overall business health. In challenging times, a “family-first” mentality tends to take hold — a reality that, far too often, business leaders and HR organizations underestimate. But organizational readiness is essential for sustainability and operational effectiveness.

Samara Ginsberg rocks the Knight Rider theme song on the cello | Samara Ginsberg/YouTube

The 1980s show Knight Rider was about a guy who drove a talking car and solved crimes. I think. I (sort of) remember watching a young(ish) David Hasselhoff argue with the car, a 1982 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am named KITT (Knight Industries Two Thousand), voiced by William Daniels. KITT had a Cylon-like red light on its (his?) front grill which made the car seem vaguely menacing. Knight Rider was amazing ‘80s television and as such, had an equally spectacular theme song (sidebar: I would like us to get back to TV theme songs that explain the entire plot of the show either in the lyrics or via a voiceover like this one did. I miss you, 1980s).

London-based cellist Samara Ginsberg, who among other things, produces “virtuoso arrangements of...

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• The note-taking app Evernote was one of Silicon Valley's first "unicorn" startups, but its growth slowed and it struggled to generate revenue as users complained about glitches, such as how its Android and iOS apps were incompatible with each other.
• When Evernote recruited CEO Ian Small in late 2018, he realized that the company needed to completely rebuild its apps. Not only were they filled with bugs, but their tech core was a decade old, which slowed down new releases. 
• Rebuilding the product also involved a cultural change of more collaboration and transparency within the company itself. 
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

The story of note-taking app Evernote has both high-highs and low-lows: It was one of the first "unicorn" startups with a billion-dollar valuation and a cult-like following in 2012, before plunging into "deep trouble" in 2015 and a "death spiral" that included executive departures in fall 2018. 

By October of that year, the company recruited current CEO Ian Small who has led Evernote's slow, laborious resurrection ever since, including the decision to completely rebuild its app. 

"If you work anywhere in Silicon Valley, they say, 'Let's go back to basics," Small told Business Insider. "The reason people say it is because frequently products lose their 'why.'"

That's exactly what happened to Evernote, he admits, which is why the team has spent the last year and a half chugging away on the on-going process of competely redesigning its product to try to win back its once-fervent following. 

"At the end of the day, you have to focus on who your users are and what brought them close to the products in the first place," Small said.

Here's the story of how he's trying to rebuild the company's reputation and product. 

Evernote needed an upgrade 

With the tagline "Remember everything," Evernote became wildly popular early on, whether for students taking notes in class or employees writing down meeting agendas. Since launching in 2008, it has raised a total of $296 million from investors like Sequoia Capital, Salesforce Ventures, and Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian. At its peak, it was valued at $1.23 billion. 

But as Business Insider previously reported, Evernote was slow to develop the revenue side of its business and struggled with converting free users to paid ones. It was selling fancy backpacks and water bottles through a "lifestyle" market, while also starting to receive negative feedback about glitches on its apps. In particular, the iOS version of Evernote had different sets of features than the Android version, and these different features often weren't compatible with each other – making it hard for people to use the service across multiple devices.

Small copped up to these issues in a January 2019 blog post, shortly after joining the company, writing about how "each version of Evernote seems to work slightly differently and exhibits its own unique collection of bugs and undesirable behaviors."

Small realized that while Evernote's user base was still technically growing, the rate at which it was growing had fallen off dramatically and existing users were losing interest, too. 

"When you're a company like Evernote — which is built on a movement of users who love the product — when those users start to feel skeptical about whether or not the company is listening to them, that movement starts to get a little shaky," Small said. 

He vowed in that blog post to make big changes. 

How Evernote started rebuilding its app

The first thing Evernote did was open the floodgates of user feedback and complaints; Small also asked all its employees for suggestions on what needed fixing. The company wound up with an enormous, crowdsourced list of issues. 

Members of the management team locked themselves in a room for several days, poring over the lists. They sorted through and prioritized all the necessary fixes, making each group of related issues into a small project. 

"Everyone at the company then looked at this plan," Small said. "They saw things, they suggested. It wasn't being bestowed from on high. It was built from the bottom up."

Finally, Evernote assigned teams to work on each of its mini projects. 

Progress has been slow and steady, affecting the most fundamental building blocks of the product. Previously, the technology behind the app was five to ten years old, and there wasn't much shared code between different versions, which meant that every feature Evernote built, it had to build five times. 

In other words, "you have the opportunity to make five times as many bugs," Small says. 

No more. 

Evernote is now distributing preview releases of its new iOS, Android, Mac, and Windows apps every two weeks to about 20,000 test users in six languages. Though the company declined to share user growth or totals, it says its 2020 roadmap is jam-packed with improvements and it already has a laundry-list of upgrades it can trot out. 

For example, Evernote spent two months updating its architecture from hundreds of fragmented databases into one Google Cloud BigTable database and has revamped its search. It released a new editor for its web app.

The process has been hard, but rewarding, especially because of positive feedback from users who finally seem excited again, Small said.

"It's easy as a leader to stand at the front of the room and be a talking head, but what you need to do is enroll people into that mission," Small said. "Going back to basics is a hard thing."

Evernote is still 'very much writing this journey'

Small says that although Evernote has been working on updating its technology for months, it's still "very much writing this journey."

Along with revamping its entire product from the ground up, Evernote is also working on renovating its culture. For example, it's now being more transparent about its goals. Too often, companies end up making decisions that prioritize the needs of the company over is customers, Small says, and he hopes that being frank and open will help the company avoid that mistake and focus on what makes its product special. 

"We need to have a more coherent, consistent, and reliable culture inside the organization to deliver on that," Small said. "Our goal is really — over the long haul — to do things more productively than we have before. The reason why we want to go back to basics is to be able to move forward again."

Got a tip? Contact this reporter via email at rmchan@businessinsider.com, Signal at 646.376.6106, Telegram at @rosaliechan, or Twitter DM at @rosaliechan17. (PR pitches by email only, please.) Other types of secure messaging available upon request.

SEE ALSO: Open source database startup Yugabyte just hired a new CEO: the cofounder of Pivotal who helped take the company public and sell itself to VMware

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• Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is now richer than Berkshire Hathaway's Warren Buffett and LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
• Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates currently sit at the top of the list.
• Zuckerberg's climb comes after Facebook reported better than expected earnings in April and announced new ecommerce and video chat features.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is climbing Bloomberg's Billionaire Index, passing billionaires like Berkshire Hathaway chairman Warren Buffett and LVMH Moet Hennessy — Louis Vuitton chairman and CEO Bernard Arnault, an update to the list published on May 21 shows. 

The list now estimates Zuckerberg's net worth to be at $87.8 billion, while Arnault is valued at $81.1 billion and Buffett is valued at $68.9 billion.

One year ago, those rankings looked a bit different. Zuckerberg was valued at $72.5 billion as of May 22, 2019, while Arnault was valued at $89.6 billion and Buffett was valued at $83.5 billion, Bloomberg's data shows. 

Even a month ago, both Buffett and Arnault would have placed higher than Zuckerberg. The Facebook CEO's net worth as of April 20 was $68.1 billion, according to Bloomberg, while Buffett's was $74.3 billion and Arnault's was $80.2 billion.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates top the list at number one and number two respectively. 

Zuckerberg's rise on the list comes after Facebook reported better-than-expected financials and surging users during its first-quarter earnings report on April 29. Facebook added as much as $44 billion in market value in the morning following its earnings report.

The company also recently made a big move into ecommerce by launching Shops, which enables businesses to create digital storefronts on Facebook. The social networking giant also launched a competitor to Zoom in April called Messenger Rooms, which lets users create 50-person chatrooms.

Zuckerberg still falls far behind Gates and Bezos on Bloomberg's list, but the gap isn't quite as large as it was almost one month ago when Bezos' net worth was estimated to be twice that of Zuckerberg's according to Bloomberg.

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‘We’re constantly evaluating our business to plan for resiliency in the current environment and to support our team members, customers and community in a way that sets us all up for success on the other side of this pandemic,’ says Dell in a statement to CRN.

Big Tech’s contact tracing initiative complicates the narrative of European governments protecting citizens against Silicon Valley’s privacy intrusions.

HPE CEO Antonio Neri says moving faster to an everything-as-a-service model will result in “sustainable, long-term profitable growth” with the opportunity for the channel to make more “long-term money.”

Hello, everyone! Welcome to the next edition of Insider Today. Please sign up here. 

Note we'll be off Monday for Memorial Day. Enjoy your weekends, everyone.

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BLODGET & PLOTZ

Facebook's remote-working plan is doomed

Silicon Valley, which adopts fads like it's a tween, has found a new one. The day before pandemic, the Valley was salivating over the Apple campus, goggle-eyed at Airbnb's conference rooms, passionately arguing whether the kombucha was better on the marketing floor or the engineering floor.

But now? Now let's all work from home, forever!

Twitter and Square recently announced that everyone could keep working from home when the pandemic ends. Facebook, right in character, has decided to move fast and break leases.

Mark Zuckerberg announced on Thursday that he expected up to half of Facebook's employees to work remotely in the next five to 10 years.

"We're going to be the most forward-leaning company on remote work at our scale," Zuckerberg jargoned.

The pivot to home offices is easy to explain. Pandemic uncertainty will make crowded workspaces feel unsafe for a while, and scare workers off public transportation. Companies can slash their real-estate costs with a remote workforce, and maybe even salaries. Zuckerberg advised that Facebook would cut wages for employees who live in places that are cheaper than the Bay Area.

I'm writing this from my bed, but I'm skeptical that remote work will remain so enthralling for big companies once COVID-19 recedes.

Yes, a surprising number of white-collar workers are finding lockdown life enjoyable — no commuting, no travel, no dressing up.

And it's tempting to think that if a little bit of working from home is good, a lot of working from home will be great. The history of human civilization, however, suggests this would be a mistaken conclusion.

Working from home is fine now because everyone is doing it. We've all been forced into it. You're not missing any important meetings or gossip around the water cooler or happy hours — because everyone is missing them.

Humans have a glorious capacity to adapt, especially when they feel what they're going through is fair, and this feels fair, because everyone is suffering the same way.

But once the possibility of office life returns, the career fortunes and experiences of people who repopulate the Silicon Valley headquarters and people who stay home are going to rapidly diverge.

Ask anyone who's ever worked at a partially remote company (say, me): The insiders and the outsiders have vastly different experiences.

Insiders build the small, socially lubricating connections that humans thrive on. They create stronger networks. They develop better reputations, more friendships. They know more about what's happening at the company. And that makes them more valuable employees.

Companies are deluding themselves if they think they can crush the human desire for that kind of knowledge, jockeying, and connecting. Office workers will become the elite overclass. Remote workers will be outsiders, sometimes confused, excluded from the in-jokes and cliques that develop in any real-world group.

Silicon Valley fantasizes that technology can fix this. Facebook, above all, is built on the notion that electronic relationships are the equal of in-person ones. But 15,000 years of human civilization says technology doesn't fix it. Slack, texting, Zoom happy hours — they're better than nothing. But anyone who's ever been remote at a meeting where everyone else is in person knows how much physical presence matters.

A prediction: Facebook and other tech companies will extend remote work, and for a certain class of employee it will be a godsend. Folks who generally work alone, who are temperamentally introverted, and who aren't ambitious will love it, and will thrive.

But everyone who wants to manage, to run things, to influence, to jockey, to make friends, to build a network — they will clamor to work in the office. Almost every single ambitious person in a company will be demanding a desk at HQ. Within a very short time, Silicon Valley will largely revert back to status quo, with centralized, crowded hub campuses where all the action happens, and smattering of happy introverts working remotely elsewhere. —DP

Come on, Plotz, some people will be stoked to work remotely forever!

My partner, Mr. Plotz, makes some excellent points in his argument above that the new remote-work-for-everyone-forever trend is just a fad.

Cities are amazing places, and, once it's safe to ride subways and buses again, most people will want to continue living in them.

Office life can be fantastic, especially at fun, tech-ish companies that offer food and fabulously smart and charismatic colleagues. Climbing the management career ladder will indeed still be easier to do in person: Relationships still matter, and in-person relationships are stronger than Zoom ones.

So, yes, once we finally vanquish the coronavirus, enthusiasm for cities, offices, events, business travel, and in-person work will rise again.

But!

A significant percentage of people, especially "individual producers" — writers, engineers, designers, and others who really do not need to interact with others to do amazing work — will take advantage of our collective epiphany to leave "the office" forever.

There are so many amazing places to live in this world. So many places that are cheaper, more beautiful, healthier, easier, and more fun than the "big cities." So many places where it's better and easier to raise kids; have dogs, cats, and farm animals; exercise and be outdoors.

For many of us, the benefit of being able to live in these places — while still enjoying the vibrancy, stability, compensation (even at lower levels), benefits, support systems, colleagues, and opportunities of working for larger companies and organizations — will make the trade-off worthwhile.

Well done, Facebook, Twitter, and others, for welcoming this new age! You'll now be able to hire and employ talented people all over the country and world who would have been miserable living amid the Silicon Valley and New York City rat race.

And well done, remote workers and tech providers, for showing hidebound managers that we all can now be amazingly productive from anywhere! You've helped create a better world! —HB

Brazil's coronavirus disaster confirms that the tough-guy approach doesn't work

Thanks to the various approaches to the coronavirus tried by different countries, humanity is getting real-time evidence about what works and what doesn't.

What doesn't work, it seems, is ignoring or playing down the virus and acting as though there's nothing that can be done about it.

This approach, flirted with by President Trump in the US, has been taken to its extreme by President Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, as Insider's Sarah Al-Arshani reports. And Brazilians are paying the price.

The unfolding disaster in Brazil may soon give the US some competition for the worst outbreak in the world.

Confirmed deaths are nearing 20,000 and accelerating.

Confirmed cases are also soaring.

Even on a per-capita basis, Brazil's accelerating epidemic will soon make it a card-carrying member of the coronavirus Hall of Shame. And unlike most of these countries — Spain, Italy, France, the UK — Brazil is getting worse, not better.

Countries that nipped the coronavirus in the bud — South Korea, Taiwan, Australia, Denmark, Austria, Germany, among others — show that it can be done.

Countries that were initially blindsided, meanwhile — Italy, Spain, France — show that, with a coordinated, comprehensive, and overwhelming response, the virus can be brought under control.

Countries that denied the threat of the virus and then rinsed their hands of national responsibility, meanwhile — the US, Brazil — are still struggling. —HB

 

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NEWS

Trump didn't wear a mask for most of his Ford visit. He said he "didn't want to give the press the pleasure of seeing" him in it. Just wear the mask, Mr. President! It's morally right, and it will actually help you, because it will encourage other Americans to mask, which will slow the disease. The faster the pandemic ends and the safer Americans feel, the better your chance of reelection.

Republican senators aim to boost Trump's reelection chances by investigating (and investigating, and investigating) Joe Biden: They're going to subpoena Obama officials, Democratic strategy groups, maybe Hunter Biden. This has been a successful Republican strategy in recent elections — see Swift Boats, Benghazi, Hillary Clinton's emails. The idea is to build vague doubts about Biden: Is he corrupt? Is he hiding something? At best it actually uncovers something shady. At worst it creates equivalence: Sure Trump may be corrupt and sleazy, but the other guy is too.

Karl Rove is helping the Trump campaign: Insider's Tom LoBianco has the scoop that "Bush's Brain" — as Rove was known — is advising Jared Kushner and campaign manager Brad Parscale on voter targeting and swing states. It probably doesn't signal a warming in the notoriously cool personal relationship between Trump and the Bush family, but does reflect how Trump now dominates all wings of the Republican Party.

More bad news for Trump's favorite coronavirus drug. Another big study found that hydroxychloroquine doesn't help COVID patients and increases the risk of death. Fans of the drug will point out, however, that this study doesn't address whether HCQ helps protect you from getting COVID, which is what Trump says he's taking it for. We await the outcome of those trials.

 

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BUSINESS

US air travel hit its highest per-day level since March 24. Yes, the number of passengers was still only 12% of last year. But it seems Americans are — very gradually — venturing into the skies again.

China ditched its annual GDP growth target for the first time ever. It's set a target every year since 1990. But party leaders said the pandemic made it too hard to predict what could happen with the economy.

How four 'Shark Tank' businesses reinvented themselves during pandemic. One created a mobile app for ordering Maine lobsters.

 

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LIFE

6 bucket-list trips you need to book a year in advance: Remember travel? Remember bucket lists? Easter Island, the Great Migration in the Serengeti, Antarctica, and other trips you can dream about doing when this is all over?

JK Rowling debunks claim that she came up with Harry Potter in this Edinburgh café. She says she started writing the books years before she ever started hanging out at the Elephant Café. Also, she never went to the beautiful Portuguese bookstore that was supposed to have inspired Hogwarts.

There are 13 kinds of pandemic TV ads. The "You Can Count on Us" ad. The "Hi, We're Clean Now" ad. A funny list on Slate.

 

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REVIEWS

Famous chefs like Thomas Keller are offering online cooking lessons on MasterClass. Here are the best ones.

 

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THE BIG 3*

How to assess your risk of catching coronavirus in any situation. The 6 key factors to consider.

The Kansas City Zoo sent its penguins on a field trip to the art museum. They really liked Caravaggio, not the Impressionists.

All your questions about prepaid debit cards stimulus payments, answered. Such as, who gets them? Can the government track your purchases?

*The most popular stories on Insider today.

 

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YOUR LETTERS

I agree that we must defeat the virus to revive the economy. As to air travel, there are other factors causing the steep decline. Just as it wasn't possible to visit nonessential businesses at home, that's true anywhere you travel — and hotels and restaurants aren't open, either. However, once we have full reopening, it is very likely that air travel will remain depressed for many reasons — people have become accustomed to working remotely, and businesses will want and need to save unnecessary travel expense. And if the purpose of vacation is to relax, you may not find plane travel safe and reassuring. Driving to a nearby vacation spot will have a lot of appeal.

—Jeff Furnish

 

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NOW WATCH: How the Navy's largest hospital ship can help with the coronavirus

• IBM is laying off employees, joining other tech companies that have been forced to reduce head count in the economic downturn.
• IBM is cutting "several thousand jobs," mainly in its global technology-services division, a source told Business Insider.
• Ed Barbini, IBM's vice president for corporate communications, said in an email to Business Insider: "Our workforce decisions are made in the long-term interests of our business. Recognizing the unique current conditions, IBM is offering subsidized medical coverage to all affected U.S. employees through June 2021."
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IBM is laying off employees, joining other tech giants that have cut jobs amid the COVID-19 crisis.

IBM is eliminating "several thousand" jobs, mainly in the company's technology-services division, a source familiar with the company's plans told Business Insider.

Ed Barbini, IBM's vice president for corporate communications, confirmed the job cuts, which were first reported by Bloomberg.

"Our workforce decisions are made in the long-term interests of our business," he told Business Insider in a statement. "Recognizing the unique current conditions, IBM is offering subsidized medical coverage to all affected U.S. employees through June 2021."

The company is also offering affected employees three months' pay and health coverage for a year, the source said.

IBM's global technology-services division, which offers support to clients that run their networks on on-premise data centers or the cloud, is the company's biggest business segment. The company had said in recent earnings reports that it planned to make changes to improve that business section's financials.

CEO Arvind Krishna announced last month, when he took over, that IBM was withdrawing its outlook amid the economic uncertainty caused by the pandemic.

"These are unprecedented times, and this quarter is not the time to declare that we have clarity," Krishna told analysts during the company's first-quarter earnings call.

Got a tip about IBM or another tech company? Contact this reporter via email at bpimentel@businessinsider.com, message him on Twitter @benpimentel, or send him a secure message through Signal at (510) 731-8429. You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

SEE ALSO: Here are 9 companies IBM could buy given that new CEO Arvind Krishna said that it will get back to its 'acquisitive strategy' in a few months, according to experts

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NOW WATCH: Pathologists debunk 13 coronavirus myths

Today Zoom published a draft cryptographic design for an end-to-end-encrypted video communications offering.

Security and privacy are the twin pillars of Zoom’s 90-day plan. When I joined Zoom with the rest of the Keybase team on May 7, we announced our intention to build the most secure video meeting offering that can reach current Zoom scalability.

In our commitment to remaining transparent and open as we build this end-to-end encryption offering, we have published our cryptographic design for peer review on GitHub. We will host discussions with cryptographic experts, nonprofits, advocacy groups, customers, and others to share more details and solicit feedback for the final design.

Once we have assessed this feedback for integration into a final design, we will announce our engineering milestones and goals for deploying an end-to-end encryption offering for Zoom users.

Access the paper on GitHub

The post Zoom Publishes Draft Design of End-to-End Encryption Offering appeared first on Zoom Blog.