Month: October 2018

Workplace, the version of Facebook tailored to enterprises that has over 30,000 organizations as paying customers, is ramping up the service today with a rush of new features to help it competes with the likes of Slack and Microsoft’s Teams.

The additions are being announced at a new, standalone conference called Flow — the first time Facebook has built what’s likely to become a recurring event for a specific product, Workplace’s head Julien Codorniou told me in an interview. He described Workplace as “Facebook’s first SaaS startup.” He tells us that for existing clients, the goal of Flow is to show off new features that deepen employee engagement with Workplace so they can’t imagine switching away. And for enterprise software partners Facebook integrates with, it’s to foster an ecosystem surrounding Workplace so it can adapt to any business.

In a big upgrade to the “chat” features of Workplace (conversations that happen outside the news feed, first launched last year), users will now be able to start chats, calls and video conversations either one-to-one or in groups, in the style of WhatsApp or Messenger. Facebook is also making it easier to navigate through high volumes of messages in your channels by adding in replies, do not disturb and pinning features — Facebook’s first move to bring in algorithmic sorting to Workplace. And Facebook is also bringing its Safety Check feature from the main app to Workplace, delivered via Workchat, as a tool that can be controlled by admins to check on the status of employees during a critical incident.

Workplace has picked up 30,000 businesses as customers in the two years since it launched (including some biggies like Walmart, the world’s largest employer); and today it also added a couple of notable large enterprises to the mix: GSK, Astra Zeneca, Chevron, Kantar, Telefonica, Securitas, Clarins UK, Jumia and GRAB.

But Facebook has never revealed how many users (or “seats”, in enterprise parlance) it has on Workplace. As a point of comparison, Slack today has 8 million users across 70,000 organizations, and Facebook hasn’t updated its 30,000 figure in a year.

The range of features Facebook is introducing today are notable both for their breadth and for what they are aiming to do. Some help put Workplace more on par with the core Facebook experience in terms of functionality, but ultimately they are all squarely aimed at making Workplace into something that fits more closely with how enterprises already use IT.

The chat features that are being incorporated build on the minimal chat features that were already present in Workplace and essentially create something like WhatsApp or Messenger that sits within the same secure framework as Workplace itself. It’s effectively Facebook’s first step forward into unified communications — a specific branch of enterprise IT that used to be centred around PBXs and other expensive physical equipment, but has more recently become more virtualised with the rise of voice of IP and cloud-based systems that can be used over any internet connection.

Workplace had already had a feature in place for up to 50 companies to converse in multi-organizational conversations on the platform, and now if some members of those groups want to take the conversation to a more direct channel potentially with voice or video calling, they can do that directly from within the app without having to open a separate messaging client (which may or may not be under the control of IT).

The three features that help you better organise your conversations — do not disturb, replies and pinning important items — will be especially welcome to people who have especially “noisy” channels on Workplace.

Replies, Codorniou said, will work “like on WhatsApp” — where you can select a message and reply to it and it will appear with its mini thread later in the feed.

But they are perhaps most notable of all because they will be the first time that Facebook is introducing “algorithmic” sorting to Workplace. For those who already use normal Facebook, or Twitter, or other social media services, algorithmic sorting is something that is well-known, as it plays with the sequence of posts to show you what is deemed to be more important, versus what’s most recent.

In the case of pinning, Facebook is letting the IT admins, and users, effectively play a part in the algorithmic sorting: Admins can pin “important” posts to the top of a feed, and that will affect what users see and can respond to first. “If the CEO posts a message, this might be more important than something posted an intern,” he said.

Do not disturb, meanwhile, will let users set times when they do not get pinged with messages, but when you “return” again to Workplace, Facebook decides what gets sorted to the top of what you view.

Codorniou notes that Facebook uses machine learning and AI “to make sure that if you don’t use Workplace for two weeks [as an example] you have the most relevant information on top of the news feed.” Signals that it uses to sort include who you work with, and which groups you are most active in. “It’s algorithmic by default,” he noted, and added that this was something that was requested by Workplace users. “People don’t believe in the chronological feed anymore,” he said. “It’s important to guarantee reach to communications teams.”

The Safety Check also fits into this concept. Here, Facebook will be putting IT managers/Workplace admins into the driver’s seat, “giving them the keys to the feature”, said Codorniou, and letting them control the use and distribution of a feature that in regular Facebook is controlled by Facebook itself.

Frederic takes a deeper diver into Safety Check here, but the main idea, as Codorniou described it to me, is that it allows companies “to track and clear who is safe and who is not” when a particular location has been through an emergency or critical incident. There are apps that companies can use to run safety checks, or sometimes they might use SMS, but these tend to work more manually and are harder to execute quickly, he said. Facebook doesn’t reveal how well penetrated their apps are at organizations like Walmart and Starbucks, but this potentially becomes one lever to helping get Workplace distributed more widely.

“Employees are a company’s number-one asset of the company, and this helps make sure you are safe,” he added. “People don’t want to play Candy Crush, but things like Live” — which Workplace launched last year — “and Safety Check are relevant. They help turn companies into communities.”

(Community, of course, is the big theme for Facebook these days.)

All these updates are happening at a time when many people have been scrutinising Facebook for its approach to user privacy and personal data.

The issue was notably highlighted over the Cambridge Analytica scandal many months ago, specifically over how third parties were able to access users’ information; and then more recently Facebook faced criticism two weeks ago, when it emerged that a bug in one of its features exposed user information to malicious hackers. Both of these problems were squarely about Facebook’s core consumer app, but I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of an impact it has had on the company’s enterprise business — given that levels of security in workplace networks typically tend to be higher as they are connected to corporate information.

“We had a few questions of course but we have no reason to believe that Workplace was affected,” Codorniou said. He noted that there had once been a feature to log in to Workplace using a user’s Facebook ID, but that was disabled some time go. “We have been investigating, but most customers are on single sign on,” he noted, which uses services like Okta, One Login and Ping to connect and sign in employees to their Workplace spaces.

Facebook’s scale brings it huge advantages in the enterprise. The consumerization of the office stack means Facebook can easily port over its familiar features. It’s big enough to extensively dogfood Workplace within the company. And it already has advertising relationships with many of the world’s top brands. But being a tech giant comes with the associated scandals and constant criticism. Facebook will have to convince business leaders that its social troubles won’t muddy their suits.

Workplace, Facebook’s communications platform for enterprises, is launching its own version of Safety Check today. Safety Check itself is obviously not a new feature. Indeed, Facebook has now activated this tool, which lets you report your status during a crisis, thousands of times. For business users, though, Facebook is now offering a number of new tools that allow them to activate this feature at will, run drills with their workforce and get an accurate headcount of their employees’ status.

“Safety Check for Workplace is essentially the enterprise version of the Safety Check that we have in the big blue app [Facebook’s name for its flagship mobile app],” Facebook CIO Atish Banerjea told me. He noted that a few years ago, Facebook first built a version of this for its own employees. “Then the idea came of extending this to the customers of Workplace, primarily because given the global expansion of companies, with people traveling all over the world, keeping track of employees during times of crisis and during a natural disaster has become a very difficult challenge,” he explained.

Safety Check lets businesses locate their employees and notify them through Workplace Chat and other avenues when they are in harm’s way. The tool also allows these companies to regularly ping those who haven’t confirmed themselves as safe yet.

Facebook notes that Workplace doesn’t use any mobile geolocation technologies here to identify where employees are. That data has to come from the companies that use the tool and the travel services they use to know when they are on the road and the employee data they have to know who works in which location. Banerjea noted that this is very much on purpose and in line with the way Workplace handles data. This is not the Facebook app, after all, so none of the employee data is ever shared with Facebook.

What’s interesting here is that this is the first time Facebook has taken a tool that its own internal Enterprise Engineering group built for its employees and brought it to a wider audience. Typically, this group only builds tools for Facebook’s own growing employee base, but the team decided to take this one public. The challenge was then to ensure that this tool, which was meant to handle the demands of Facebook’s more than 30,000 employees and run on its own proprietary stack, could scale up to work for companies that are far larger. “As you can imagine, the scaling challenges are significantly different,” Facebook’s VP of Enterprise Engineering Anil Wilson told me. “Where we are talking about going from tens of thousands of employees at Facebook and going to supporting hundreds of thousands of employees in many companies.”

To get Safety Check for Workplace up and running, the company organized an internal hackathon in February of this year. “We had to completely rebuild the product,” Wilson said. “We had to switch out the backend technology to help with scale.” The team also redid its data models to accommodate new features and redesigned the user experience to be more in line with the rest of the Workplace experience. In the process, the team also added support for new features, including multi-language support.

Unsurprisingly, the Enterprise Engineering group is now also looking at bringing to a wider audience other tools that Facebook first developed for its internal usage. “There’s tons of opportunity,” Wilson said. “We don’t have the specific products mapped out yet.” Most of the tools that his team builds are very much meant for Facebook’s own specific use cases, no matter whether those are HR applications, or tools for the finance group or the marketing and sales teams. But he believes there is plenty of room for taking some of those and making them available to Workplace customers as premium offerings.

Wilson also noted that this move to bringing more of these internally developed tools to the public is going to help his group with hiring. “We’re already a pretty interesting organization to come and work for,” he said. “But the fact that some of our products are now potentially going to be launched externally adds an additional dimension of interest for engineers who are coming to work on our team.”

While the rumors and leaks didn’t leave much to the imagination ahead of today’s event, I will admit to being a bit surprised by the shape Google’s Home Hub actually took. The renders didn’t do justice to the actual product.

For starters, the seven inch screen splits the difference between the Echo Show and Spot in an interesting way. It’s not a compact device, per say, but it’s a lot smaller than I’d initially expected, and as such, it should fit in a lot more spots at home than the larger Show.

From a design standpoint, the product is best described as a seven-inch tablet resting atop a speaker at ~ a 25 to 30 degree angle. The idea is to give you a screen you can view from the other side of the room. After all, this is a voice first product. While it does have touch functionality enabled, that’s primarily secondary. As such there are certain things you can’t do here like, say, pinch to zoom.

That’s largely a moot point here, given the fact that the product doesn’t have, say, a standard web browser, unlike the new Show. Of course, part of the reason Amazon offers a browser on its own devices is so you can access YouTube. That’s obviously not a problem on a product that very much has native YouTube support.

The other thing the peculiar design affords the product is multi-directional sound. Like the Show, the bulk of the fabric-covered speaker faces back, toward the wall. There is, however, an exposed sliver on the bottom, which sends some of that sound toward you.

The sound is decent for a product of this size, but again, I wouldn’t rely on it as any sort of home entertainment system. If you’ve got multiple Home devices at home, however, you can tell Assistant, “extend to my Home Mini,” etc, and the music will follow you into the other room.

Google also notes that this isn’t really an entertainment consuming machine. The Home Hub isn’t designed for watching movies or even TV shows. Rather, if anything, it’s kind of a YouTube delivery device, in much the same way that the Portal is a real world manifestation of Facebook’s video chat. Of course, right out of the gate, this product is going to offer a much fuller experience than Portal — Facebook, after all, is still kind of testing the water to see what users want our of their devices.

That said, Google tells me that the company is still assessing whether users are interested in smart home hub functionality via something like Z Wave. It’s a bit of a glaring omission here, based on both the added focus on connected home features and the fact that the damn thing has hub in its name. That said, Google seems to prefer building that kind of syncing in via bluetooth, much like it did with those newly announced GE lights.

The Hub does fall under Google’s “Smart Display” category, meaning it’s a direct competitor with products from Lenovo, JBL and LG. The company tells me that there was a gap in announcements simply because it took the company longer to build the product from the ground up. The Hub wasn’t built via hardware partner, but rather from the ground up.

One of the upsides there is pricing. $149 certainly makes this a competitive offering versus the Show and Portal.

So many new unicorns valued at $1 billion-plus, countless $100 million venture financings, an explosion of giant funds — it’s no surprise 2018 is shaping up to be a banner year for venture capital investment in U.S.-based companies.

There are more than 2.5 months remaining in 2018 and already U.S. companies have raised $84.1 billion — more than all of 2017 — across 6,583 VC deals as of Sept. 30, 2018, according to data from PitchBook’s 3Q Venture Monitor.

Last year, companies raised $82 billion across more than 9,000 deals in what was similarly an impressive year for the industry. Many questioned whether the trend would — or could — continue this year, and oh, boy has it. VC investment has sprinted past decade-highs and shows no signs of slowing down.

Why the uptick? Fewer companies are raising money, but round sizes are swelling. Unicorns, for example, were responsible for about 25 percent of the capital dispersed in 2018. Those companies, which include Slack, Stripe and Lyft, have raised $19.2 billion so far this year — a record amount — up from $17.4 billion in 2017. There were 39 deals for unicorn companies valuing $7.96 billion in the third quarter of 2018 alone.

Some other interesting takeaways from PitchBook’s report on the U.S. venture ecosystem:

• Nearly $28 billion was invested into early-stage startups in 2018, with median deal size increasing 25 percent to  $7 million last quarter.
• Ten funds have raised more than $500 million this year and another five, including Lightspeed Venture Partners and Index Ventures, have closed on more than $1 billion.
• Companies based on the West Coast were responsible for 54.7 percent of deal value in 3Q but other regions are catching up: New England (12 percent), the Mid-Atlantic (20 percent) and The Great Lakes (5 percent).
• Investment in U.S. pharma and biotech has reached a new high of $14 billion already in 2018.
• Corporate venture capital activity is heating up. This year, CVCs invested $39.3 billion in U.S. startups, more than double the $15.2 billion invested in 2013.
• VC-backed companies are exiting via buyouts more than ever.

Of all the fascinating apps to be found out in the wild I’m especially enamored of Final Draft. It’s an app dedicated to writing and developing screenplays and it has stood the test of time, going through eleven iterations to reach this latest version, the pinnacle of screenwriting warez.

While most of us are content with Word or Google Docs, screenwriters have gotten used to Final Draft’s unique key combinations and styling but made do with software that was, to be fair, far behind the state of the art. Now the latest version is beginning to offer many competitive features including collaboration tools and powerful formatting tricks.

The most important change is the decidedly proprietary collaboration system. Final Draft creates a chatroom where you and your collaborators can sit and work together on a single document and the changes are visible on all copies of the text. You can also use the room to brainstorm ideas using the Beat Board view, essentially a cork board that makes it easy to put up ideas, scenes, or characters.

The system now also includes voice-to-text capabilities so you can dictate your next screenplay just by talking to your computer. It also adds tagging so you can break down scripts in terms of props, animals, actors, budgets, and schedules. You can also add images to scripts, a feature aimed at graphic novel writers and game creators.

There is also a Night Mode for when you’re deep in thought and that third midnight glass of Burgundy as you puzzle out a messy plot point.

I’ve used Final Draft for a year now – I wrote a script with a college friend – and I didn’t notice much of a UX/UI difference between Final Draft 10 and 11. The collaboration features are excellent, however, and great improvement over the previous versions. Being able to add in photos and other multimedia is icing on the cake, so to speak.

Final Draft is now aiming at a more general audience and, while there are plugins for scriptwriting in Word and Google Docs, many screenwriters swear by the software. At $249 it’s a bit pricey but as long as you’re working on your next great screenplay featuring a robot that falls in love with a washing machine it is, presumably, a tax write off. That said don’t hold me to that advice.

A government watchdog has said the Department of Defense has not done enough to protect critical weapons systems from cyberattacks.

The new report out of the Government Accountability Office on Tuesday said that the Pentagon has “not made weapon cybersecurity a priority,” and, although there have been some improvements over the years, the department’s “nascent understanding” of how to secure weapons systems has left officials scrambling on “how best to address weapon systems cybersecurity.”

The GAO was asked to review the Pentagon’s weapons systems cybersecurity and found a litany of vulnerabilities — which it didn’t disclose in detail as the contents were classified — but that the department “likely does not know the full extent of the problems.”

“A successful attack on one of the systems the weapon depends on can potentially limit the weapon’s effectiveness, prevent it from achieving its mission, or even cause physical damage and loss of life,” the report said.

According to its findings, the watchdog’s testers used relatively simple tools and techniques to take control of systems and operate almost undetected — because of poor password management and unencrypted communications.

“They could see, in real-time, what the operators were seeing on their screens and could manipulate the system,” the report read, and observe how operators responded to requests.

“Another test team reported that they caused a pop-up message to appear on users’ terminals instructing them to insert two quarters to continue operating,” it added.

In one case, testers were able to download more than 100 gigabytes of data from severs without detection.

Many of these flaws were exploited because the systems were running commercial or open-source software that operators “did not change the default password when the software was installed,” which “allowed test teams to look up the password on the Internet and gain administrator privileges for that software.”

Another security weakness documented by testers included a failure to patch software, even when known exploits had been developed and released online.

But that’s just the basic-level issues that the GAO reported as part of its limited tests to show that even the low-level skilled hackers could do damage — not accounting for the many more skilled attackers that may work for foreign adversaries or nation-state-backed groups.

In the past four years, the Pentagon has issued more than a dozen department-wide memos and policies to improve cybersecurity across the board. The GAO said it is “essential” that the department continues to develop and implement new cybersecurity initiatives.

A spokesperson for the Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Google unveiled a number of new products Tuesday at its big hardware event, including the Google Home Hub and Google Pixel Slate. But the Pixel 3, the company’s new smartphone, was the real star.

The Pixel 3, which is available in two sizes and starts at $799, comes in three colors and has a rear 12.2 megapixel camera as well as a dual front camera. What’s inside the phone is a host of new apps and features. The device is available for preorder today and will start shipping October 18.

Here’s a breakdown of some of best new and updated features in the Pixel 3.

Call screen

The call screen option enables Google Assistant to answer an incoming call for you. The user just taps the call screen button and the phone will answer the call and ask who is calling and why.

The conversation is then transcribed in real time on the screen, letting you decide whether to answer or send a text in response.

Call screen launched Tuesday with the Pixel 3 and will roll out to other Pixel devices in November.

Security

The Pixel 3 comes with a new security chip that Google calls Titan M. The custom-built chip helps secure passwords and the operating system of the phone.

Speakers

Front-forward speakers are 40 percent louder and richer than in the previous Pixel smartphone.

YouTube Music

The new Pixel 3 ships with the YouTube Music streaming app and a free six-month subscription.

Google Lens

Google Lens is essentially an AI-enabled camera. The smartphone camera captures an image and the AI algorithm identifies it for you. The “style search” in Lens identifies the product in an image and helps you find that product online.

Google Lens also identifies landmarks, plants and animals, and will add events to your calendar. Point the camera on a takeout menu and it will highlight the number to call.

Group selfies

Pixel 3 comes with dual front cameras for selfies that require a wider view. Users just double tap the power button to open the camera and flick their wrist twice to activate selfie mode. From here, users zoom out to get to the group selfie.

Top Shot

This photo feature captures alternate shots in HDR Plus and then recommends the best one. For instance, a user might try to take a photo of their child blowing out candles on a birthday cake. In the past, a missed shot was a missed shot. Top Shot captures the moments before or after you hit the shutter to take a photo and then automatically recommends the best one.

And if you want that other shot, you can pick that one too.

Playground

The Playground feature adds reactive characters (like a dog or a dancing stereo) and adds captions and animated stickers to your photos and videos. Users can make their photos “come to life” with Playmoji, the characters that react to each other and to you.

Some of the options are characters like Iron Man from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Google is working on a collaboration with Donald Glover to bring Childish Gambino to Playground later this year, as well.

Photo booth mode

Yup, another camera feature. This feature will automatically take photos when you make a funny face or smile.

 

The war for the countertop has begun. Google, Amazon and Facebook all revealed their new smart displays this month. Each hopes to become the center of your Internet of Things-equipped home and a window to your loved ones. The $149 Google Home Hub is a cheap and privacy-safe smart home controller. The $229 Amazon Echo Show 2 gives Alexa a visual complement. And the $199 Facebook Portal and $349 Portal+ offer a Smart Lens that automatically zooms in and out to keep you in frame while you video chat.

For consumers, the biggest questions to consider are how much you care about privacy, whether you really video chat, which smart home ecosystem you’re building around and how much you want to spend.

• For the privacy obsessed, Google’s Home Hub is the only one without a camera and it’s dirt cheap at $149.
• For the privacy agnostic, Facebook’s Portal+ offers the best screen and video chat functionality.
• For the chatty, Amazon Echo Show 2 can do message and video chat over Alexa, call phone numbers and is adding Skype.

If you want to go off-brand, there’s also the Lenovo Smart Display, with stylish hardware in a $249 10-inch 1080p version and a $199 8-inch 720p version. And for the audiophile, there’s the $199 JBL Link View. While those hit the market earlier than the platform-owned versions we’re reviewing here, they’re not likely to benefit from the constant iteration Google, Amazon and Facebook are working on for their tabletop screens.

Here’s a comparison of the top smart displays, including their hardware specs, unique software, killer features and pros and cons:

Making A Murderer is coming back to Netflix on October 18.

In 2015, Netflix released the 10-episode docuseries Making A Murderer, created by Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos. The picture looked at the mystery surrounding the murder of Teresa Halbach. Steven Avery, a Manitowoc County man charged with the murder in 2007, was wrongfully convicted of sexual assault at the age of 22, and was exonerated by DNA evidence after serving 18 years in prison.

Making A Murderer examined the original allegations, the events surrounding the murder of Teresa Halbach, all laid within the context of Avery’s wrongful conviction and subsequent lawsuit against Manitowoc County.

The docuseries quickly gripped the attention of millions.

The trailer for Making A Murderer Part 2 shows attorney Kathleen Zellner joining Avery’s team as they seek to appeal the 2007 conviction.

You can check out the full trailer below. The series returns October 18.

French President Emmanuel Macron came to France’s ginormous startup campus Station F to talk to the French tech community. The event is organized by La French Tech, the government initiative to promote and foster the startup community in France.

Station F director Roxanne Varza first took the stage to introduce the event. She announced that there will be more startups in the Fighters Program. Station F has created this program so that entrepreneurs from diverse backgrounds get a chance to relocate to Station F.

La French Tech new director Kat Borlongan then talked for a few minutes about the public initiative. “My firm belief is that La French Tech should operate just like all the startups in this room today,” she said.

According to her, it means that La French Tech should think about its users first, have a data-driven approach, and test and iterate.

Macron gave a very short speech and then held a Q&A sessions with tech entrepreneurs. This is a surprising format for Macron.

He mostly reassured entrepreneurs that things are changing and France is on the right path. He announced that the French Tech Visa would be simplified by March 2019.

Some entrepreneurs said there were paying too many taxes to hire talent in France. Macron refuted that. “I like to compare a researcher in Harvard with a researcher in France,” he said. “[In France], school is free and excellent, healthcare is free, there’s a retirement system. On the other side, there’s nothing.”

He also promised stronger antitrust rules at the European level. Tech giants sometimes dominate in Europe living no room for competition.

Macron finished by saying that tech companies also need to promote France’s system. They need to pay fair taxes, they need to think about tech’s effect on society. “I know one thing, the system will implode if you’re not responsible enough,” he said.

Things have changed in just over a year. When Macron first came to Station F for its grand opening, it was shortly after the elections. He was a popular President.

Now, most people dislike him, just like his predecessors François Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy when they were in office. According to a source, he even thought about canceling today’s event given that he’s about to appoint some new faces in his government.

But Macron built his reputation on the so-called startup nation. He first became a public figure thanks to a grassroots approach built on top of the startup community. That’s why the startup community is still overwhelmingly in favor of Macron’s policies. And yet, there’s now a clear divide between the startup nation and the middle class at large, who think the President is out of touch and doesn’t care about them.