Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Advancements in the tech and the cyber threat landscape are creating vast job opportunities. The global cyber security market is projected to reach £210 billion by 2026. But in the UK, out of 952,000 working aged (16-64) UK military veterans and 15,000 service leavers a year, only 4% of them are working in tech and cyber. This is 20% lower than the non-veteran population. The cost to the UK economy of underemployed or unemployed veterans has been estimated at £1.5 billion over 5 years. This means all this talent – talent which has literally been trained to adapt to fast-moving situations like the one the world finds itself in now – is going to waste, just when the era of massive digitization of business and society is upon us.

So it’s significant that the UK’s RFEA, the Forces Employment charity, is launching a new partnership with TechVets, the non-profit set up to build a bridge for veterans into cyber security and the technology sector.

With the RFEA’s support, TechVets will create extensive new free upskilling and job opportunities for ‘tech-curious’ service leavers and veterans, through its offering of networking, mentoring, signposting and training services, via its new TechVets Academy.

The initiative is timely. It’s estimated that over 173,000 UK military veterans are at risk due to the economic impact of COVID and the ending of the government’s furlough scheme in March 2021.

Since its launch in 2018, TechVets has grown to a community of over 6,000 members and several ‘chapters’ around the UK.

TechVets uses a blend of open-source resources, partner training, and community support, to empower those new to cyber/tech to choose the pathway that is best for them. And it’s all free to veterans and service leavers.

TechVets Programme Director, James Murphy (pictured), is an Army Veteran of 19 years. He joined the 1st Battalion Royal Anglian Regiment in 2000, before transferring to the Intelligence Corps in 2013 after sustaining life-long injuries in Helmand Province, Afghanistan.

In a statement, he said: “Anyone who has held a role in the Forces comes armed with an understanding of the sensitivities of working in security. Ex-Services also possess an innate ability to learn new skills and are natural problem solvers, who can work quickly and fit into a team with ease. Ex-military personnel are also the kind of people who thrive in pressurized, or time-sensitive, situations. These soft skills are incredible assets in the security and technology industries, which can be used to fill the current skills shortage in this area.”

RFEA’s Chief Executive Officer, Alistair Halliday, added: “The TechVets Programme is a fantastic new addition to RFEA’s services that will, no doubt, encourage talented veterans to consider tech and security-based roles that may have otherwise overlooked. It will also help veterans to upskill digitally to help them get into wider roles too.”

TechVets member Gareth Paterson, joined the Army in 1994. He started out as a Tank crewman and then transferred to the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers as an instructor in 2001. He left in 2018, having completed operational tours of Northern Ireland, Former Yugoslavia and Afghanistan. He says his life has been changed by TechVets: “I left the Army as I was at the end of my 24-year career… I did not have a clue what career to move into, then I was introduced to offensive cybersecurity and penetration testing. I joined TechVets and it gave me my first insight into the tools and techniques of penetration testing. After that, I was hooked! The support of everyone at TechVets, and its community, has helped me to gain confidence and push harder. I was able to gain qualifications in penetration testing which improved my job prospects in the sector. By November 2018 I started working as a cybersecurity consultant.”

Twitter is shutting down its experimental app twttr, which the company had used publicly prototype new features back in 2019. The app was first introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show in January 2019, then launched to testers that March. Its primary focus had been on trying out new designs for threaded conversations, including things like how to branch replies, apply labels and color-code responses, among other things. Some of those tests eventually turned into Twitter features and the twttr app was no longer being used.

The idea to design in public was an interesting experiment by Twitter.

Most companies roll out internal beta tests, followed by smaller-scale A/B tests to a percentage of their public user base to get feedback about new ideas. But with twttr, the company actually invited its users to be a part of the much earlier stage development process.

The concept for twttr had been spearheaded by Twitter’s then Director of Product Management, Sara Beykpour (then Sara Haider — she and Twitter Product Lead Kayvon Beykpour have since married). But Sara announced last year she would be stepping into a new role at the company and Twitter’s new product director in charge of conversations would be Suzanne Xie, who had joined by way of Twitter’s acquisition of Lightwell.

Work on twttr appeared to stop around the time Xie stepped in, as no other significant updates were released to twttr’s TestFlight user base. And Xie left Twitter this fall for Stripe.

Now, it seems that maintaining the largely unused app no longer makes sense for the company.

Twitter announced its plans to formally shut down twttr today, saying it was turning off the app in order to work on new tests related to the conversation taking place on Twitter itself. The shutdown appears to be immediate. Though the app may still function for those who have it installed, when the TestFlight build expires in 26 days, that may no longer be the case.

It’s not likely that twttr had many dedicated users at this point, especially as the app lacked Twitter’s newer features like Topics and Fleets, for example, and was no longer offering new experiments to test.

Coronavirus is causing large and small businesses to drastically cut marketing budgets. In Forrester’s self-described “most optimistic scenario,” the analysts project a 28% drop in U.S. marketing spend by the end of 2021. Even Google is cutting its marketing budget in half. As marketers move forward, Forrester predicts marketing automation platforms will grow despite an overall decline in marketing technology investment.

Automation platforms help marketers scale their communications. However, scaling communications is not a substitute for intimacy, which all humans crave. Because of the pandemic, it is harder than ever to get attention, let alone make a connection. More mass email blasts from your marketing automation platform are not going to get you the connections with prospects you crave. So how should marketers proceed? Direct mail captures 100% of your audience’s attention. It provides a sensory experience for your prospects and customers, and that helps establish an emotional connection.

Winning marketers are strategically merging automation and digital data with the more intimate channel of direct mail. We call this tactile marketing automation (TMA).

TMA is the integration of direct mail or personalized swag with a marketing automation platform. With TMA, a marketer doesn’t have to think about creating direct mail campaigns outside of digital campaigns. Rather, direct mail experiences are already fully integrated into the pre-built customer journey.

TMA uses intent data to inform content, messaging and the timing of direct mail touchpoints that maximize relevancy and scalability. Multichannel campaigns including direct mail report an ROI 18 percentage points higher than those without direct mail. Plus, 84% of marketers state direct mail improves multichannel campaign performance.

Read on to see how you can merge digital communications and direct mail to deliver remarkable experiences that spark a connection.

Incorporate intent data

Personalization is a key ingredient of a remarkable experience. Many marketers automate processes by introducing marketing software and then call it personalization. But, oftentimes it’s just quicker batching and blasting. Brands can’t just change the first name on a piece of content and call it “personalized.” Real personalization is necessary and vital for real results. Our consumers expect more. The best way to introduce real personalization within a marketing mix is to use intent data and trigger-driven campaigns.

Following last month’s news that “Wonder Woman 1984” will be released simultaneously on HBO Max and in U.S. theaters, Warner Bros. and its parent company WarnerMedia just announced that they will follow the same strategy with every theatrical release that they’ve got planned for 2021.

That includes movies like “Godzilla vs. Kong,” “Mortal Kombat,” “In The Heights,” “Space Jam: A New Legacy” “The Suicide Squad,” “Dune,” the “Sopranos” prequel “The Many Saints of Newark” and “The Matrix 4.” (The WarnerMedia announcement notes that release dates could change, which might move some of these titles out of the scope of today’s announcement.)

These movies will be available on HBO Max for one month, in 4K Ultra HD and HDR, at no additional charge.

Earlier this year, Hollywood studios responded to widespread theatrical by bringing some films straight to streaming while delaying their big releases. The disappointing box office performance of “Tenet” (also from Warner Bros.) prompted additional delays — but as the pandemic stretched on, there was a growing sense that studios couldn’t afford to delay things forever.

For example, Universal had already reached a deal with AMC and other major chains to release movies on premium video on demand just three weeks after they launch in theaters, with the revenue split with theatrical partners.

But WarnerMedia’s announcement seems like an even more dramatic shift — and while it only covers 2021, it could signal potentially long-lasting changes to theaters’ exclusive release window.

This also comes after former Hulu CEO Jason Kilar took over as WarnerMedia’s chief executive in April, a move (followed by multiple rounds of layoffs) that seemed to put streaming front-and-center in the company’s priorities.

In a statement, Kilar said:

After considering all available options and the projected state of moviegoing throughout 2021, we came to the conclusion that this was the best way for WarnerMedia’s motion picture business to navigate the next 12 months. More importantly, we are planning to bring consumers 17 remarkable movies throughout the year, giving them the choice and the power to decide how they want to enjoy these films. Our content is extremely valuable, unless it’s sitting on a shelf not being seen by anyone. We believe this approach serves our fans, supports exhibitors and filmmakers, and enhances the HBO Max experience, creating value for all.

NASA has selected the winning candidates that they’ve decided to tap to collect lunar resources for eventual Earth return, from a number of commercial companies who applied. The four companies all have rides booked on future commercial lunar lander missions, and the agency is using this as a demonstration of what kinds of efficiencies it can realize by piggybacking on private industry for serving its needs – and a precedent-setting event for NASA paying private companies to retrieve materials that they retrieved and owned privately for their own purposes prior to transferring ownership to the agency.

The winning bids were evaluated based on two simple criteria: Basically, were they technically feasible, and how much did they cost. There were four winners, each with a different ride out, which will seek to satisfy the conditions of NASA’s request, which is basically to collect a lunar regolith (essentially what we call ‘soil’ on the Moon) in an amount ranging from between 50 grams or 500 grams, with retrieval to be handled separately by NASA at a later date. The samples had to be collected before 2024 as part of the request, which sets them up for potential retrieval via NASA’s Artemis mission series, though the agency isn’t necessarily going to actually pick up the samples, though it reserves the option to do so.

The four companies selected are:

• Lunar Outpost, from Golden, Colorado, which bid to complete the contract for just $1, following the arrival of the Blue Origin lunar lander in 2023.
• ispace Japan, which asked for $5,000 for a retrieval via the landing of its Hakuto-R lander during its first mission currently set for 2022.
• ispace Europe, a part of ispace Japan’s global corporate footprint, which bid for $5,000 and an arrival in 2023 on the second Hakuto-R mission.
• Masten Space Systems, which asked for $15,000, with an arrival in 2023 using its Masten XL lander

The agency received 22 proposals in total, between 16 and 17 companies. This was intentionally designed to help NASA demonstrate the advantages of its public-private partnerships approach, and to set precedents about how resource material collection can happen on extra-terrestrial bodies like the Moon.

“With the commercial partnerships, this is setting a precedent internally as well as externally, relative to NASA continuing that paradigm,” said NASA’s Acting Associate Administrator for International and Interagency Relations Mike Gold . “Rather than pay for the development of the systems themselves, NASA is playing the role is customer.”

More specifically, these contracts also set precedents in terms of what private companies can do in terms of collecting material from the Moon, and who has ownership of that material once collected.

“I’ve often said that the rocket science part, the engineering, sometimes that seems like the easy aspect when it comes to all of the policy issues, legal, or financial challenges that we have,” Gold said. “It’s very important that we resolve any legal or regulatory questions in advance because we never want policy, or regulations to slow down or hinder incredible innovations in development that we’re seeing from both the public and the private sector. So we think it’s very important to establish the precedent that the private sector entities can extract can take these resources that NASA can purchase, and utilize them to fuel, not only NASA’s activities, but a whole new dynamic era of public and private development and exploration on the Moon, and then eventually to Mars .”

Basically, NASA wants this to set a precedent that private companies can go to the Moon, and eventually Mars, and mine material and retain ownership of said material for later distribution to both public and other private customers.

That’s part of the reason these bids are so low – companies like ispace and Lunar Outpost have future business models that involve significant potential planetary body mining components. The other is that these lunar lander missions were already planned, and as NASA explicitly laid out in their request for proposals for this bid, the agency did not want to pay for any development costs for the mission of getting to the Moon itself – just the actual collection.

Thoma Bravo must really like Flexera, an IT asset management company out of Chicago. The private equity firm bought the company for the second time today. Sources told TechCrunch the price was $2.85 billion.

Technically, Thoma Bravo is getting a majority stake in the company, buying it from previous owners TA Associates and Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board. The firm originally bought Flexera in 2008 from Macrovision for just $200 million. It turned it around just three years later in 2011 for $1 billion profit, according to reports.

While reports last year had the company’s investors looking for $3 billion, they didn’t quite reach that mark, but it’s still a hefty profit as the company continues to change hands, giving each of its owners a substantial return on investment.

At $2.85 billion, Thoma Bravo will have a bigger challenge on its hands to make that same kind of return, but it sees a company it liked before and it still likes it, especially the management team, which to some degree at least remains intact.

“Jim [Ryan] and his team have positioned Flexera for sustained growth by focusing on the strategic challenges enterprises face with complex IT infrastructures,” Seth Boro, managing partner at Thoma Bravo said in a statement.

Ryan was pleased to see the company’s value continue to rise and to connect once again with Thoma Bravo. “This is a resounding vote of confidence in the growth Flexera has shown and the strategic initiatives we’ve undertaken to address the exponential challenges faced by organizations today,” he said in a statement.

The company was founded in 2008 and has bought 12 companies along the way including five in the last couple of years, according to Crunchbase data. The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of next subject to regulatory approvals.

Decentralized exchange protocols that allow crypto traders and investors to trade across different blockсhains have been in development for a while. A significant new development now comes with the launch of the ‘Testnet’ from Injective Protocol. Injective has been backed by Binance, one of the biggest centralized exchanges in the Crypto world.

Injective Protocol is one of the first universal ‘DeFi’ (Decentralised Finance) protocols for cross-chain derivatives trading, so the launch of the testnet is an important milestone. Injective’s main competitors (centralized and decentralized exchanges) include CME Group, BitMEX, LedgerX and OKEx among others.

As well as being incubated by Binance Labs, Injective Protocol is also backed with $3M in funding from noted blockchain investors Pantera, Hashed, and others. Pantera has had some successful exits including Kik, Bitstampt and Blockfolio.

Paul Veradittakit, Partner at Pantera Capital, said in a statement: “Injective’s Solstice testnet trades and feels like a state of the art derivatives exchange but it’s actually entirely supported by a fully decentralized infrastructure. With a 1 second blocktime, instant finality, and full EVM support, I’m confident that Injective will be able to pioneer the next wave of decentralized derivatives trading”

Injective’s team emerged from Stanford University and has been building and testing its platform privately since 2018, while validating it with several large largest funds, market makers, and institutional traders. Prior to Injective, Eric Chen, CEO and сo-founder, was working at hedge funds and worked in cryptographic research at a blockchain-focused fund.

Injective has been working towards a mainnet and has already announced partnerships with top blockchain companies such as Elrond, Ramp DeFi, Findora, and Frontier. Its layer-2 decentralized exchange protocol lets traders trade across Ethereum, Cosmos, and others, using Tendermint-based Proof-of-Stake (PoS) to facilitate cross-chain derivatives trading.

Centralized exchanges have been known for operational failures like front running, exit scams, and exchange hacks. At the same time, existing DEXs are still facing problems such as high transaction fees, low liquidity, inconvenient UI/UX, and slow speeds. But the trading volume of decentralized exchanges reportedly grew 70% in the middle of 2020, setting a recent record high of $1.52 billion. So there’s clearly an appetite for this approach.

The advantage of the approach used by Injective combines the advantages of decentralized exchanges: resistance to front running, scams, and hacks, with the speed, low transaction fees and no gas fees, only previously available with centralized platforms. Developers can also create their own derivatives and markets to trade.

With Bitcoin reaching an all-time-high at around $18k, the blockchain and crypto world is once again taking off.

Paypal bought up to 70% of all the newly mined bitcoin since the payments giant started offering cryptocurrency services.
 And Guggenheim Funds Trust filed an amendment with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to allow its $5 billion Macro Opportunities Fund gain exposure to bitcoin by investing up to 10% of the fund’s net asset value in the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust.

YouTube today announced it’s launching a new feature that will push commenters to reconsider their hateful and offensive remarks before posting. It will also begin testing a filter that allows creators to avoid having to read some of the hurtful comments on their channel that had been automatically held for review. The new features are meant to address long standing issues with the quality of comments on YouTube’s platform — a problem creators have complained about for years.

The company said it will also soon run a survey aimed at giving equal opportunity to creators, and whose data can help the company to better understand how some creators are more disproportionately impacted by online hate and harassment.

The new commenting feature, rolling out today, is a significant change for YouTube.

The feature appears when users are about to post something offensive in a video’s comments section and warns to “Keep comments respectful.” The message also tells users to check the site’s Community Guidelines if they’re not sure if a comment is appropriate.

The pop-up then nudges users to click the “Edit” button and revise their comment by making “Edit” the more prominent choice on the screen that appears.

The feature will not actually prevent a user from posting their comment, however. If they want to proceed, they can click the “Post Anyway” option instead.

Image Credits: YouTube

The idea to put up roadblocks to give users time to pause and reconsider their words and actions is something several social media platforms are now doing.

For instance, Instagram last year launched a feature that would flag offensive comments before they were posted. It later expanded that to include offensive captions. Without providing data, the company claimed that these “nudges” were helping to reduce online bullying. Meanwhile, Twitter this year began to push users to read the article linked in tweets they were about to share before tweeting their reaction, and it stopped users from being able to retweet with just one click.

These intentional pauses built into the social platforms are designed to stop people from reacting to content with heightened emotion and anger, and instead push users to be more thoughtful in what they say and do. User interface changes like this leverage basic human psychology to work, and may even prove effective in some percentage of cases. But platforms have been hesitant to roll out such tweaks as they can stifle user engagement.

In YouTube’s case, the company tells TechCrunch its systems will learn what’s considered offensive based on what content gets repeatedly flagged by users. Over time, this A.I.-powered system should be able to improve as the technology gets better at detection and the system itself is further developed.

Users on Android in the English language will see the new prompts first, starting today, Google says. The rollout will complete over the next couple of days. The company did not offer a timeframe for the feature’s support for other platforms and languages or even a firm commitment that such support would arrive in the future.

In addition, YouTube said it will also now begin testing a feature for creators who use YouTube Studio to manage their channel.

Creators will be able to try out a new filter that will hide the offensive and hurtful comments that have automatically been held for review.

Today, YouTube Studio users can choose to auto-moderate potentially inappropriate comments, which they can then manually review and choose to approve, hide or report. While it’s helpful to have these held, it’s still often difficult for creators to have to deal with these comments at all, as online trolls can be unbelievably cruel. With the filter, creators can avoid these potentially offensive comments entirely.

YouTube says it will also streamline its moderation tools to make the review process easier going forward.

The changes follow a year during which YouTube has been heavily criticized for not doing enough to combat hate speech and misinformation on its platform. The video platform’s “strikes” system for rule violations means that videos may be individually removed but a channel itself can stay online unless it collects enough strikes to be taken down. In practice, that means a YouTube creator could be as violent as calling for government officials to be beheaded and and still continue to use YouTube. (By comparison, that same threat led to an account ban on Twitter.)

YouTube claims it has increased the number of daily hate speech comment removals by 46x since early 2019. And in the last quarter, of the more than 1.8 million channels it terminated for violating our policies, more than 54,000 terminations were for hate speech. That indicates a growing problem with online discourse that likely influenced these new measures. Some would argue the platforms have a responsibility to do even more, but it’s a difficult balance.

In a separate move, YouTube said it’s soon introducing a new survey that will ask creators to voluntarily share with YouTube information about their gender, sexual orientation, race and ethnicity. Using the data collected, YouTube claims it will be able to better examine how content from different communities is treated in search, discovery and monetization systems.

It will also look for possible patterns of hate, harassment, and discrimination that could affect some communities more than others, the company explains. And the survey will give creators to optionally participate in other initiatives that YouTube hosts, like #YouTubeBlack creator gatherings or FanFest, for instance.

This survey will begin in 2021 and was designed in consultation with input from creators and civil and human rights experts. YouTube says the collected data will not be used for advertising purposes, and creators will have the ability to opt-out and delete their information entirely at any time.

Timnit Gebru, a leading researcher and voice in the field of ethics and artificial intelligence, says Google fired her for an email she sent to her direct reports.  According to Gebru, Google fired her because of an email she sent to subordinates that the company said reflected “behavior that is inconsistent with the expectations of a Google manager.”

Gebru, the co-leader of Google Ethical Artificial Intelligence team, took to Twitter last night, shortly after the National Labor Relations Board filed a complaint against Google alleging surveillance of employees and unlawful firing of employees.

Gebru says no one explicitly told her she was fired, but that she received an email from one of her boss’s reports, saying:

“Thanks for making your conditions clear. We cannot agree to #1 and #2 as you are requesting. We respect your decision to leave Google as a result, and we are accepting your resignation.”

That email, according to Gebru, went on to say that “certain aspects of the email you sent last night to non-management employees in the brain group reflect behavior that is inconsistent with the expectations of a Google manager.”

It’s not clear what exactly was contained in the email. We’ve reached out to both Gebru and Google for comment.

As Bloomberg reported, Gebru has been outspoken about the lack of diversity in tech as well as the injustices Black people in tech face. According to Bloomberg, Gebru believes Google let her go to signal to other workers that it’s not ok to speak up.

Gebru is a leading voice in the field of ethics and artificial intelligence. In 2018, Gebru collaborated with Joy Buolamwini, founder of the Algorithmic Justice League, to study biases in facial recognition systems. They found high disparities in error rates between lighter males and darker females, which led to the conclusion that those systems didn’t work well for people with darker skin.

Since Gebru’s announcement, she’s received an outpouring of support from those in the tech community.

Developing…