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October 21, 2020
Can't dance? You're not alone.
"Syncing up music and dancing can be hard," said Adobe Research Scientist Jimei Yang during a recent interview. Not only can holding the beat be challenging for some people, but using consumer-grade recording equipment can also introduce additional delays that make the result look off-beat. "It isn't that trivial," Yang said.
That's why Yang's team at Adobe developed technology that can tweak an existing video and make dance moves match the rhythm of the music. The researchers are set to demonstrate their work, dubbed "Project On The Beat," at Adobe's annual Max conference Wednesday, but Yang gave Protocol an exclusive preview last week.
This is how Adobe's dance improvement algorithms work in a nutshell:
- First, the project uses Adobe's Sensei AI tech for skeletal tracking to identify the motions of the dancer.
- Then, it breaks those motions down to find the strongest movements — think claps and stomps — which Adobe's researchers call "motion beats."
- The video's music is segmented based on these key poses, and the motion beats are compared to the actual beats of the song.
- Finally, the video is adjusted segment by segment to match the motion beats to the music. "We just need to retime the video, basically warp the video," Yang said.
The technology can also be used to take clips and adjust movements to a different song, or take multiple clips from different sources and adjust all of them to the piece of music. This even works with videos that only show a person's upper body.
Like much of the technology shown during these Adobe Max research demos, Yang's work isn't part of any Adobe product yet. However, that could change. "We are actively working with the product team," Yang said. One could imagine it as an addition to a future version of Adobe Premiere Rush, the company's mobile video-editing app for influencers and other social media users.
Beyond any such specific use cases, the demo shows the potential for AI to automate and ultimately democratize video editing. Until now, video editors would have to manually segment and adjust each part of a video to synchronize music and movement with desktop video-editing software. By letting AI do the work, the same can be done faster, and on mobile devices, literally putting this kind of video editing into many more hands. "AI is really changing the video editing business, especially for amateurs," Yang said.
A version of this story will appear in our entertainment newsletter, Next Up. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Thursday.
Janko Roettgers
Janko Roettgers (@jank0) is a senior reporter at Protocol, reporting on the shifting power dynamics between tech, media, and entertainment, including the impact of new technologies. Previously, Janko was Variety's first-ever technology writer in San Francisco, where he covered big tech and emerging technologies. He has reported for Gigaom, Frankfurter Rundschau, Berliner Zeitung, and ORF, among others. He has written three books on consumer cord-cutting and online music and co-edited an anthology on internet subcultures. He lives with his family in Oakland.
Protocol | Fintech
Plaid’s COO is riding fintech’s choppy waves
He's a striking presence on the beach. If he navigates Plaid's data challenges, Eric Sager will loom large in the financial world as well.
Plaid COO Eric Sager is an avid surfer.
Photo: Plaid
March 4, 2021
Benjamin Pimentel ( @benpimentel) covers fintech from San Francisco. He has reported on many of the biggest tech stories over the past 20 years for the San Francisco Chronicle, Dow Jones MarketWatch and Business Insider, from the dot-com crash, the rise of cloud computing, social networking and AI to the impact of the Great Recession and the COVID crisis on Silicon Valley and beyond. He can be reached at bpimentel@protocol.com or via Signal at (510)731-8429.
March 4, 2021
Eric Sager is an avid surfer. It's a fitting passion for the No. 2 executive at Plaid, a startup that's riding fintech's rough waters — including a rogue wave on the horizon that could cause a wipeout.
As Plaid's chief operating officer, Sager has been helping the startup navigate that choppiness, from an abandoned merger with Visa to a harsh critique by the CEO of a top Wall Street bank.
<p>But things have been breaking nicely for Plaid during the COVID-19 crisis, which has let the company really charge. </p><p>Plaid, which is based in San Francisco and has more than 600 employees, charges financial apps for a service that helps consumers verify and connect their bank accounts, a key step for moving and managing their money. It also, controversially, pulls transaction data from those newly connected accounts and sells insights based on that information.</p><h3>Surfer-in-chief</h3><p>Plaid's surfer-in-chief describes the customer base as a series of waves.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>"The first wave is the core fintech companies — the Robinhoods, the Venmos, the Squares, the Chimes," he said, noting how these "early fintechs are getting more and more successful."</p><p>"The second wave [composed of] banks and financial institutions are rapidly moving to digitize. … The third wave are the Googles, the Apples, the Lyfts, the Teslas. Everybody is moving towards building digital financial services."</p><p>"We're riding all three of those," he added. "If anything keeps me up at night it's making sure that we continue to kind of scale the business."</p><p>Sager admits that, as a surfer bro, he can be an intimidating presence at the beach.</p><p><br></p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image">
<a href="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNTcxMzc4NC9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY1ODQ1Mjc4NX0.2-3V-Md9VtATd0QhCvcc6VFQNXuu7_reFyIPjdEVuAA/img.jpg?width=980" target="_blank"><img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNTcxMzc4NC9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY1ODQ1Mjc4NX0.2-3V-Md9VtATd0QhCvcc6VFQNXuu7_reFyIPjdEVuAA/img.jpg?width=980" id="3c170" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="4978fb31443a663192df9fc1643a9eb4" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image"></a>
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">Sager with wife Melissa Miao.</small>
<small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="add photo credit...">Photo: Plaid</small>
</p><p><br></p><p>"I'm 6'8", I have a 10-foot-board and my family has a history of skin cancer, so I go out there with a hat," he told Protocol. "So all the little kids that are surfing always make fun of me. But once I'm on the wave, all the short boarders get out of the way."</p><p>Plaid's latest charge is toward payroll data. On Thursday, the company unveiled a new product that would make it easier to verify employee income for different financing needs, including securing a loan, applying for a mortgage or leasing a car. </p><p>Plaid is supporting real-time payroll authentication for more than 250,000 of the largest employers in the U.S., which the company estimates makes up to 60% of the total working population. </p><p>"It was something we heard a lot from customers who were being asked to verify income and so forth," Sager said. "Every single lending customer we have would love to have this information for the exact same reason that it makes the onboarding flow easier."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>Melody Brue, analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy, said the new offering could "open up so many possibilities for employers, lenders, neobanks — pretty much everyone in the fintech ecosystem." </p><p>"Access to payroll data can change the way lenders look at underwriting and servicing loans and significantly cut costs and time spent on verification," she told Protocol. </p><h3>'A blessing in disguise'</h3><p>It's Plaid's first major product rollout since the collapse of merger talks with Visa. Brue called <a href="https://www.protocol.com/plaid-visa-deal" target="_self">the scuttling of the deal</a> "a blessing in disguise" after Plaid saw stronger demand for its infrastructure in the COVID-19 crisis. The company, which has raised $310 million in funding from investors that include Goldman Sachs, Citi Ventures and Visa, was last valued at $5.3 billion. That has <a href="https://www.theinformation.com/articles/plaid-shareholders-field-offers-at-15-billion-after-merger-collapse" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">reportedly jumped to $15 billion</a> following the collapse of the Visa deal.</p><p>But Plaid's latest product offering, she said, will also likely make it more of a target: "This will likely be seen as a threat to financial institutions, as they already fear security issues from open banking and now may fear losing customers."</p><p>Plaid emerged as a powerhouse by providing banks and financial startups real-time access to consumer financial data, such as bank and investment accounts. Plaid, whose services integrate with 11,000 financial institutions, has more than 4,000 customers, including Square, PayPal, Robinhood, SoFi and Affirm.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>But Plaid has taken fire for the way it manages financial data. "Plaid has irritated a lot of the banks," Logan Allin, managing general partner and founder of Fin Venture Capital, told Protocol. "You heard Jamie Dimon saying Plaid's playing dirty, right?"</p><p>He was referring to the <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/15/jamie-dimon-says-jpmorgan-chase-should-absolutely-be-scared-s-less-about-fintech-threat.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">JPMorgan Chase CEO's remark</a> on a call with analysts calling out "people who improperly use data that's been given to them, like Plaid." Dimon's remarks came despite a 2018 agreement the companies signed that they said would "protect customer data."</p><p>Plaid also faces a class action lawsuit filed by a consumer, accusing the company of using deceptive and misleading data practices.</p><p>"Imagine there is a company that knows every dollar you deposit or withdraw, every dollar you charge or pay to your credit card and every dollar you put away for retirement, within hours after you make the transaction," <a href="https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.361471/gov.uscourts.cand.361471.1.0.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">the lawsuit filed on behalf of California resident</a> Logan Mitchell began. "Imagine that, as far as you know, you never provided your username and password to this company or otherwise authorized it to access your online accounts."</p><p>The lawsuit argued that Plaid "acquired its mountain of consumer data by deceiving consumers into giving Plaid the key to their financial lives: their bank usernames and passwords." It accused the startup of committing "fraud by erecting a sophisticated edifice of deceit to trick users into thinking that they are logging into their financial institutions, when in fact they are turning over their credentials to Plaid."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p>Sager declined to comment on the lawsuit or Dimon's remarks. But he said Plaid has built features meant to give consumers control over their data. "If you're a consumer, you can log on to a dashboard, you can see every single connection you've ever made, you can permission and un-permission that information."</p><h3>Debate over data access</h3><p>However, critics, including some fintechs, argue that Plaid does not offer enough clear and convenient opportunities for consumers to opt out of having their data accessed. Yves-Gabriel Leboeuf, CEO and cofounder of Flinks, a Plaid rival based in Montreal — it's been called the "Canadian Plaid" — would not comment directly about Plaid, but he said consumer consent in fintech data aggregation is a serious issue. </p><p>"The bad data practices that we've seen in the market are practices where there will be an ongoing aggregation of the data on a daily basis, without having expressly giving the consent to do so," he told Protocol. "Our thesis is that that's not Flinks' data, that's the consumers' data. And we have no right to use that data, unless it's clear that they are giving us that right."</p><p>Steve Smith, CEO of Finicity, another Plaid rival which was recently acquired by Mastercard, also emphasized the need for "full transparency" in the way consumer financial data is accessed. He stressed the importance of "bringing down the walled garden of data, but doing it in a very responsible way."</p><p>"I can't speak to Plaid's specific data governance policy or Yodlee's specific data governance policy," Smith told Protocol, referring to another major data aggregator which has <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/dataprivacy-envestnet-yodlee/envestnet-yodlee-seek-dismissal-of-privacy-lawsuit-over-financial-data-collection-idUSL1N2HR39K" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">also been sued for its data collection practices</a>. "Clearly, I think you'll find differences between the three organizations and the way they view data or the way they approach this conversation."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="5">
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</div></p><p>Sager stressed that making all that data accessible to banks and fintechs has been a game changer for many consumers. "A lot of the innovation fintech is helping address is suddenly people are getting products that they previously weren't able to get," he said.</p><p>His views were shaped by an unusual career. Born and raised in Germany, he moved to the U.S. as a high school exchange student. He had hoped to go to California or Hawaii, for the surfing spots, but the program sent him instead to Mississippi where he also went to college.</p><p>His first job after graduation was with Capital One. He was part of a team at the credit-card issuer that ran tests to evaluate the effectiveness of direct mail campaigns. "What's the difference in response rate if the letter is blue versus pink versus white?" he said. "What's the difference in response rate if the font on the APR is 10 points versus 12 points? There's just nothing we didn't test."</p><p>That included the unorthodox, and legally dubious idea, of putting a dollar bill inside promotional mailers. That didn't sit well with Capital One's management, who promptly told them to shut it down.</p><p>"Well, I didn't put it in there myself," Sager said of the dollar bill scheme, laughing. "The results were good, but it's obviously not the kind of thing you want to be doing at scale so we shut that down. It was my first job. I was 22 and it was probably not the best judgment call."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="6">
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</div></p><p>He subsequently got an MBA from Harvard before working at Bain. He then plunged into the fintech world, first as head of sales at Square, then as chief revenue officer at BlueVine, a small business-financing startup. <em>[Disclosure: This reporter worked with Sager at BlueVine.]</em></p><p>When he joined Plaid as COO in 2019, it was a challenging transition. Plaid was six years old, and still growing quickly. He was the new guy, and he didn't want to screw things up.</p><p>For the first time in his executive career, Sager said, he was leading a team that he didn't help build from the ground up. He was used to being one of the most experienced people in the room.</p><p>"I was used to saying, 'Hey, I built this. I actually was there when we built it from zero to one or from one to two,'" he said. "Suddenly, you're in a world where it's already at 10. It was already a big, successful company. Suddenly, you're in a situation where you're going literally all day long talking to somebody else and they know way more, but they're still looking to you as if you should have some unique insight. It will make you feel dumb very quickly."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="7">
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</div></p><p>Charley Ma, who was a growth manager at Plaid when Sager joined the startup and is now a general manager at Alloy, remembered him as an effective leader. "He's very German, very direct, which I like," he told Protocol. </p><h3>Democratizing finance</h3><p>Brue of Moor Insights & Strategy said Sager has become instrumental in "driving the company" in the direction of "actually democratizing finance. The company is giving people access to financial services they've previously been excluded from."</p><p>That approach was influenced by Sager's early years in the U.S.. His first credit card after moving to the U.S. from Germany had an APR of roughly 30%, he said. "I just didn't have a good credit score because I just had never been part of the U.S. system," he said. "Don't get me wrong. Nobody should feel sorry for me. I had a good job and I could find other ways of doing it."</p><p>"But think about how many people in the U.S. aren't in that position — they don't have the history, they can't get loans or they have to get really really expensive loans. You're in a bad cycle. You're trying to take care of your family. You're forced to take high-interest loans. Now you have to work to pay off the high-interest loans and before you know it, you end up in a very negative spiral."</p><p>Fintech is helping fix this, he said. Broader data access is making it possible to offer better financing to more consumers, including those who may not have what's traditionally considered stellar credit. "At the end of the day right, better data means better underwriting," Sager said.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="8">
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</div></p><p>In fact, having more data could have improved the work he did at Capital One, he said: "If we just had some of the data that we now have, we would have been able to make much better decisions. We would have been able to offer people much lower rates."</p><p>"It's not impossible" for a consumer to provide more data then or now, he said. "The other version 10 years ago would have been you asked for all the bank statements, I go print them out, I put them in the mail or I go go to the office and drop them off and you work through all that. It's not like it couldn't be done, but it's about removing the friction."</p><p>Sager acknowledged that data access has become a "flashpoint" in financial services. Banks and other traditional financial institutions have been <a href="https://www.protocol.com/fintech/cfpb-banks-financial-data" target="_self">resisting calls to make consumer data</a> they collect and hold more accessible to new financial players. </p><p>Leboeuf, the Flinks CEO, said it's a debate in which his company and others are aligned with Plaid: "I do think that the best approach is driven by Plaid and Flinks because ultimately we are working for the best interests of the applications and the consumers."</p><p>Sager echoed that view, saying: "At the end of the day, it's the consumer's data. Whoever you've been banking with, it's your data and you should have the same rights to that data digitally as you would if you were to print out your bank statement, if you wanted to use that to get a car loan, if you wanted to use that to input that information manually into an Excel spreadsheet so you could do your budgeting — whatever it is, it's the consumers' data."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="9">
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</div></p><p>It's the view Sager hopes will prevail as Plaid gears up for that swell on the horizon. Will Sager get a clean ride — or will Plaid find itself locked in?</p>
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Benjamin Pimentel ( @benpimentel) covers fintech from San Francisco. He has reported on many of the biggest tech stories over the past 20 years for the San Francisco Chronicle, Dow Jones MarketWatch and Business Insider, from the dot-com crash, the rise of cloud computing, social networking and AI to the impact of the Great Recession and the COVID crisis on Silicon Valley and beyond. He can be reached at bpimentel@protocol.com or via Signal at (510)731-8429.
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The future of computing at the edge: an interview with Intel’s Tom Lantzsch
An interview with Tom Lantzsch, SVP and GM, Internet of Things Group at Intel
February 28, 2021
Saul Hudson has a deep knowledge of creating brand voice identity, especially in understanding and targeting messages in cutting-edge technologies. He enjoys commissioning, editing, writing, and business development, in helping companies to build passionate audiences and accelerate their growth. Hudson has reported from more than 30 countries, from war zones to boardrooms to presidential palaces. He has led multinational, multi-lingual teams and managed operations for hundreds of journalists. Hudson is a Managing Partner at Angle42, a strategic communications consultancy.
February 27, 2021
An interview with Tom Lantzsch
Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Internet of Things Group (IoT) at Intel Corporation
Edge computing had been on the rise in the last 18 months – and accelerated amid the need for new applications to solve challenges created by the Covid-19 pandemic. Tom Lantzsch, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Internet of Things Group (IoT) at Intel Corp., thinks there are more innovations to come – and wants technology leaders to think equally about data and the algorithms as critical differentiators.
In his role at Intel, Lantzsch leads the worldwide group of solutions architects across IoT market segments, including retail, banking, hospitality, education, industrial, transportation, smart cities and healthcare. And he's seen first-hand how artificial intelligence run at the edge can have a big impact on customers' success.
Protocol sat down with Lantzsch to talk about the challenges faced by companies seeking to move from the cloud to the edge; some of the surprising ways that Intel has found to help customers and the next big breakthrough in this space.
What are the biggest trends you are seeing with edge computing and IoT?
A few years ago, there was a notion that the edge was going to be a simplistic model, where we were going to have everything connected up into the cloud and all the compute was going to happen in the cloud. At Intel, we had a bit of a contrarian view. We thought much of the interesting compute was going to happen closer to where data was created. And we believed, at that time, that camera technology was going to be the driving force – that just the sheer amount of content that was created would be overwhelming to ship to the cloud – so we'd have to do compute at the edge. A few years later – that hypothesis is in action and we're seeing edge compute happen in a big way.
<p>The last 18 months have been a wild time to be in technology. We've seen edge compute come to life to help businesses adapt during the pandemic. At the same time, we are also seeing how 5G is going to drive up interest, especially from a networking perspective, rather than a use-case perspective. We also see lot of people that are focused on their data, but the <em>algorithms</em> that companies train with the data are going to be their critical assets. It doesn't matter what company or what industry; <em>this</em> will really become the differentiator for many companies.</p><p>And particularly amid the backdrop of the pandemic, we've seen how companies are using technology to either bring workers back in safely or <a href="https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/corporate-responsibility/covid-19-response-sensormatic-article.html" target="_blank">serve their customers in new ways</a>, <a href="https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/customer-spotlight/stories/brentwood-academy-customer-spotlight.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">educate children in new ways</a> -- all things that have accelerated the digital transformation that had been underway. I recently read a <a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/how-covid-19-has-pushed-companies-over-the-technology-tipping-point-and-transformed-business-forever" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">McKinsey survey</a> that reported on the "speedup in creating digital or digitally enhanced offerings. Across regions, the results suggest a seven-year increase, on average, in the rate at which companies are developing these products and services."</p><p>And based on what we're seeing at Intel, those are lifesaving and industry saving investments happening today – completely re-designing the way that <a href="https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/corporate-responsibility/covid-19-response-mic-article.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">patients are treated</a>, and businesses operate.</p><h4>What are you particularly expecting to see this year?</h4><p>What I find most interesting is the work that combines IoT with networking capabilities – and I think this is going to be a year of expansive exploration and working with our customers to put these two things together to solve real business challenges.</p><p>When we first started the integration of networking technology and operational technology capabilities and layered that across the industry verticals, we could count the amount of interested customers and opportunities on one hand. Last year, it was five times that many and this year we see that number increasing significantly already. So, we're excited to see the industry continue to build excitement to scale those types of deployments.</p><h4>What role does AI play at the edge and in what way is Intel involved?</h4><p>An AI use case recently grabbed my attention: employees in a restaurant being screened by a device that checks temperature while the employees are washing their hands – and provides a determination on whether they'd done it adequately before they report to work. I have seen other applications using similar technology in the <a href="https://marketplace.intel.com/s/offering/a5b3b000000TiMSAA0/using-ai-to-make-construction-site-safer?language=en_US" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">construction industry</a>, where an AI algorithm scans to see if employees have their helmet, goggles, vest and other safety equipment on properly to determine if they are ready to work. And the best part is – that the employer can see aggregate data on these interactions to determine if more training on handwashing or helmet wearing is needed.</p><p>At Intel, in addition to providing the fundamental base technology to enable these applications, we work with a lot of third-party developers to create these applications. And we help the developers scale them across multiple industries with our salesforce. So, we may not make the scan technology that determines if you have the right gear on, but we orchestrate that coordination across our ecosystem with all of our partners to effectively put it into a <a href="https://marketplace.intel.com/s/?language=en_US" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">catalog</a> so that if customers are interested in that sort of application, we can provide them with different parties to make that happen.</p><h4>Is there a problem with fragmentation in the market and how can that be solved?</h4><p>It's very fragmented. I gave just two examples of totally different workers coming to work in different industries and I can give you five more that are different again. Although the base technology that Intel creates to enable this type of innovation is very horizontal in nature, the reality is that bringing those to life must be very "vertically-centered" and very "use-case centered" – and must take into account, geography. The two employee use cases I cited look very different if you are talking about employees in North America, India or Germany. So, all in all, this is a holistic ecosystem challenge – and an ecosystem solution.</p><p>At Intel, we're in a unique situation to orchestrate these solutions. </p><p><cite class="pull-quote">People tend to think of Intel as providing the technical footprint that enables edge computing – but we also have the developer reach – and we can use our ecosystem and scale to help our end customers get access to the best solutions.</cite></p><h4>What sort of challenges do customers face when they're attempting to adopt edge computing?</h4><p>There are two common challenges. One is the technical question of 'Who can I work with?' A customer may have a chip focus but actually, it's a more complex question than a chip. We like that complexity, because we can be an adviser to them and <a href="https://marketplace.intel.com/s/partners-by-industry?language=en_US" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">bring to the table partners</a> that they can work with to solve that complexity leveraging our technical knowledge and ecosystem network. </p><p>The second thing that companies struggle with is the challenge of how to fund getting into this space – even if the business case warrants the investment. The world has changed. Companies don't want to write a big capital check for these types of investments – they want a pay-as-you-go model, like you see with the cloud. We've been working with customers to find a way to make that happen – and I think that is going to be a bigger part of the conversation moving forward.</p><p>You can see it across almost every aspect of technology now. We rent compute more than we buy compute. Evidenced by the success of AWS, companies can rent compute from Amazon instead of building their own data center – and there are many benefits to that approach. In the old world, even for this video conference that we're having today we would have installed capital to do this. Now it's just a service. And I think that edge as a service is right around the corner.</p><h4>Do you have an example of that?</h4><p>A customer in Mexico wanted to deploy outdoor WiFi and add security features into it. So, it was an edge-based computing issue that was part connectivity. But there was actually way more to it than just installing it. We not only helped to solved the technological challenge creatively and coordinated the <a href="https://marketplace.intel.com/s/partners-by-industry?language=en_US" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">ecosystem of providers</a> to solve this, but we also found a way so that the customer could get into this market with a service-based model without needing to outlay a lot of capital.</p><p>Other semiconductor companies would have a difficult time partnering on both sides of that challenge, but Intel can do it because we have the scale.</p><h4>How do businesses identify which functions they do want to perform at the edge versus in the cloud?</h4><p>It really comes down to a question of what you're trying to do and how you do it at the lowest cost, highest quality and standard in computability.</p><p>If you have an application and it can perform what you need it to do in the cloud, you'll probably run it there. The cloud is a great thing - there's infinite compute and lots of choice in a well-understood developer environment.</p><p>But there are many things you can't or shouldn't do in the cloud for certain reasons. Take the camera example from earlier. Say you have eight high-density cameras, and you want an action on them immediately. You may not be able to afford the latency that comes with going up into the cloud. Or it may be a financial challenge – that its actually more expensive to send that data to the cloud over and over again, and it makes sense to invest in compute at the edge. There are nuances in the decision-making. It really comes down to what you want the application to do, how quickly and how much it should cost.</p><h4>How does Intel help developers to learn, to build and then test their solutions at the edge?</h4><p>To enable what we know to be interesting and challenging use cases at the edge, required us to change our focus on who these developers are and what they care about. We learned that they <em>really</em> don't care about what hardware they're running on. The modern developers are fairly well extracted from the hardware – they just assume the compute is going to be available for them to do their work.</p><p>To make sure we can deliver on that, we typically target developers by specific capability. The most advanced case that we've been studying on the edge recently is focused video and specifically, video inferencing and AI inferencing. We created a tool called <a href="https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/tools/openvino-toolkit.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">OpenVINO</a>, which was developed in a way that developers didn't have to care about the hardware it runs on. It's a model optimization technology that enables them to easily scale out to different hardware platforms. That's proven to be an interesting value proposition to these developers.</p><p>Our goal with <a href="https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/tools/openvino-toolkit.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">OpenVINO</a> is democratize AI activity and inference at the edge. We want to make it simple -- to put these tools in the hands of non-data scientists and make it work. As a part of that process, we're also creating an environment where they can develop anyplace, anytime, anywhere they want to be. We're so proud of our <a href="https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/tools/openvino-toolkit.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">OpenVINO</a> community and are constantly working to grow the community and release new features and capabilities to edge developers.</p><h4>What's the possible next breakthrough that you see for Intel in edge computing and the IoT space?</h4><p>I'm looking forward to the big breakthrough when we show integrated 5G, Virtual Private Network and the edge workloads all in one unit. More to come.</p>
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Saul Hudson has a deep knowledge of creating brand voice identity, especially in understanding and targeting messages in cutting-edge technologies. He enjoys commissioning, editing, writing, and business development, in helping companies to build passionate audiences and accelerate their growth. Hudson has reported from more than 30 countries, from war zones to boardrooms to presidential palaces. He has led multinational, multi-lingual teams and managed operations for hundreds of journalists. Hudson is a Managing Partner at Angle42, a strategic communications consultancy.
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Google vows to do better on DEI and firings. Timnit Gebru is not impressed.
Google AI lead Jeff Dean said Google had concluded its investigation into Timnit Gebru's dismissal in an email to employees Friday.
Google has ended its investigation into the dismissal of prominent AI ethicist Timnit Gebru.
Photo: John Nacion/Getty Images
February 19, 2021
Anna Kramer is a reporter at Protocol (@ anna_c_kramer), where she helps write and produce Source Code, Protocol's daily newsletter. Prior to joining the team, she covered tech and small business for the San Francisco Chronicle and privacy for Bloomberg Law. She is a recent graduate of Brown University, where she studied International Relations and Arabic and wrote her senior thesis about surveillance tools and technological development in the Middle East.
February 19, 2021
Google has concluded its investigation into the firing of prominent AI ethics researcher Timnit Gebru, and it announced some changes to its hiring, firing and research policies in an email from AI leader Jeff Dean to employees Friday.
While Dean did not share the results of the investigation into the circumstances surrounding Gebru's dismissal, he said that the company would enact new policies to "review employee exits that are sensitive in nature." His email, which was obtained by Protocol, said the company will also begin linking performance reviews for vice presidents and above, in part regarding diversity and inclusion goals, and it will report DEI goals and progress to the Alphabet board of directors in quarterly reviews.
<p>The review process for publishing research papers will also change, especially for research that addresses "sensitive issues," according to the email. The process will become more streamlined because "what might be considered sensitive isn't always clear," Dean wrote. Part of the new process will include a review and outline of the kinds of research the company believes it should be conducting. <a href="https://www.protocol.com/timnit-gebru-fired-ethics-google" target="_blank">Gebru's departure was mired in internal controversy</a> over a research paper that discussed some of the ethical risks of large-language AI models; Gebru refused to take her name off the paper at Google's demand and then was dismissed shortly afterward. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>"I expected nothing more obviously. I write an email asking for things, I get fired, and then after a 3 month investigation, they say they should probably do some of the things I presumably got fired asking for, without holding anyone accountable for their actions," Gebru <a href="https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1362838828046831619?s=20" target="_blank">wrote</a> on Twitter.</p><p><span></span>Google also <a href="https://t.co/1BTGOo5Wry?amp=1" target="_blank">announced yesterday</a> that the company's research on responsible AI will be restructured under a new team led by Marian Croak, a long-time Google engineering director. Margaret Mitchell, Gebru's former ethical AI co-lead at Google and founder of the ethical AI team, has been under investigation by Google and without access to her accounts for several weeks, and said she was not informed about the restructuring plans. "And this is how I find out. I'm so glad for all the trust they've rebuilt. It seems I've been completely erased and my team taken," she <a href="https://twitter.com/mmitchell_ai/status/1362469250053533697?s=20" target="_blank">wrote</a> on Twitter about the news.</p><p>"I understand we could have and should have handled this situation with more sensitivity. And for that, I am sorry," Dean wrote in the email.</p><p>On Friday afternoon, Mitchell <a href="https://twitter.com/mmitchell_ai/status/1362885356127801345?s=20" target="_blank">wrote</a> on Twitter: "I'm fired."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p><em>This story was updated at 5:31 pm ET to include news of Mitchell's firing.</em></p>
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Anna Kramer is a reporter at Protocol (@ anna_c_kramer), where she helps write and produce Source Code, Protocol's daily newsletter. Prior to joining the team, she covered tech and small business for the San Francisco Chronicle and privacy for Bloomberg Law. She is a recent graduate of Brown University, where she studied International Relations and Arabic and wrote her senior thesis about surveillance tools and technological development in the Middle East.
Transforming 2021
Blockchain, QR codes and your phone: the race to build vaccine passports
Digital verification systems could give people the freedom to work and travel. Here's how they could actually happen.
One day, you might not need to carry that physical passport around, either.
Photo: CommonPass
February 23, 2021
Mike Murphy ( @mcwm) is the director of special projects at Protocol, focusing on the industries being rapidly upended by technology and the companies disrupting incumbents. Previously, Mike was the technology editor at Quartz, where he frequently wrote on robotics, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics.
February 23, 2021
There will come a time, hopefully in the near future, when you'll feel comfortable getting on a plane again. You might even stop at the lounge at the airport, head to the regional office when you land and maybe even see a concert that evening. This seemingly distant reality will depend upon vaccine rollouts continuing on schedule, an open-sourced digital verification system and, amazingly, the blockchain.
Several countries around the world have begun to prepare for what comes after vaccinations. Swaths of the population will be vaccinated before others, but that hasn't stopped industries decimated by the pandemic from pioneering ways to get some people back to work and play. One of the most promising efforts is the idea of a "vaccine passport," which would allow individuals to show proof that they've been vaccinated against COVID-19 in a way that could be verified by businesses to allow them to travel, work or relax in public without a great fear of spreading the virus.
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</div></p><p>But building a system that everyone agrees with — and can access — is no small task. There are several companies working on competing projects to verify vaccinations. But beyond that, there are more than a few hurdles that could prevent vaccine passports from succeeding, from antiquated medical records systems to interoperability issues and privacy concerns. Here's how they could actually succeed. </p><h3>Competing projects, similar standards</h3><p>Pretty much since the first blockchain white paper, people have been looking for perfect examples of where a distributed, immutable ledger could be valuable. There's obviously the push to use it for currencies, and companies have tried to use it for things like tracking <a href="https://www.protocol.com/ibm-blockchain-supply-produce-coffee" target="_self">food production</a> and <a href="https://www.govtech.com/products/Blockchain-Voting-Debate-Heats-Up-After-Historic-Election.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">voting</a>, but there are few use cases that have truly taken off, at least so far. "We've been working on this since 2014; we never thought that health care would be the kind of the use case that we take this mainstream," Jamie Smith, the senior director of business development at Evernym, a company focused on using the blockchain as a basis for verifying identities, told Protocol. </p><p>Smith said Evernym had been discussing its concepts with automakers, retailers, telcos, governments, loyalty companies and banks prior to the pandemic. One of those companies was IAG, the airline group that owns British Airways, which had been interested in the idea of contactless travel based on a single identity credential that follows you from the airport check-in to your gate. With the pandemic, that morphed into thinking about ways to verify that passengers have had negative COVID tests, and eventually, that they've received a vaccine. "From our perspective, it was a really easy lift to see," Smith said. "We're doing contactless travel, and we just added verifiable credentials for test results."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>It's a similar genesis for IBM's Digital Health Pass initiative, which leader Eric Piscini said started about two years ago as a way to store people's entire health records in a safe, accessible platform. It also relies on the blockchain for its immutable record of proof, and both Evernym and IBM are part of an open-standards group called the Good Health Pass Collaborative, which aims to bring private credentialed vaccine records to business and people around the world. Companies are working on their own implementations of the standards, but Evernym's Smith said the data is meant to be portable from one passport to another. </p><p>Most of the companies working on passports say their systems are private by design, especially given that they're mainly working off the same open standards. In most cases, the health information only ever remains on a user's phone, but where it asks to verify that the user's information meets a system's standards — such as whether this person has had two COVID vaccines and should be allowed into an office — that information is recorded on a blockchain. "You can, using blockchain technologies, verify that someone has been tested recently, without having access to the underlying data," Piscini said. "I don't know any other technology where you can do that."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>Similarly, the nonprofit Commons Project's CommonPass, backed by the likes of Oracle, Microsoft and Salesforce, started out as a project to bring an analog to Apple Health for Android. JP Pollak, a senior researcher at Cornell and founder of the Commons Project, first launched CommonHealth to bring the sort of data and insights that Apple Health offers to iPhone owners to Android users. Last summer, the group started building an app that could take health data and privately share it with others — in that case, it was to help truckers stuck at the borders in <a href="https://www.newtimes.co.rw/opinions/digital-technology-re-opening-africa" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">East African countries</a> who couldn't easily prove they'd taken COVID tests. This morphed into vaccine credentialing, with the group now working to pull together the various data streams needed to get a project like this off the ground. </p><p>"Health care institutions, EMR vendors, retail pharmacies, state vaccine registries, all issuing people a digital verifiable credential of their vaccination record that they could then use in the app of their choice, to be able to get access to various kinds of services," Pollak said. CommonPass is also working with the Mayo Clinic, as well as Epic Systems and Cerner, two of the largest EMR vendors. </p><h3>Something for everyone </h3><p>With so many competing efforts to become the world's digital vaccine passport, it might seem that the country is heading for some sort of VHS versus Betamax format war for proving everyone has had COVID vaccines. But given that so many of the efforts are using the same standards, and in many cases, looking to embed their tech in someone else's app rather than their own, the race might be less about the best tech winning, and more about various approaches working in different situations. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p>"The intent is not to be the only company; we don't want to be the proprietary platform that everybody has to use because they have no choice," IBM's Piscini said. "That's not who we are right now: That's the IBM from 30 years ago, not the IBM of today."</p><p>For IBM, though, the selling point is that the company already works with so many other massive companies. Why look elsewhere for a vaccine passport solution if your airline booking system is already powered by IBM? "We believe our network is going to be more valuable than any other because of our scale and our ability to integrate the platform with CRM systems, building systems or stadium systems — we can do that every day," Piscini said.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image">
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNTY2NTc3NS9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYyMTM1MjYyM30._ykxxCyx3_wDbZrYgCcmK0QT2Ue1tZFdP5pf60kOmPU/img.jpg?width=980" id="c81c9" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="3967636652192acfdaad341861263bc8" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image">
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">IATA's digital passport app.</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">Photo: IATA</small></p><p>For other companies, it's about securing new partnerships with major players in the hopes of finding that scale. Evernym, for example, is working with International Air Transport Association, the airline industry's trade association, on an air travel-specific app called Travel Pass. IATA is working with airlines and local governments to ensure it has the latest requirements to feed the app's rules engine. "It will say, 'Hey, you're flying JFK to Heathrow, you need a PCR test 48 hours in advance before you can land,'" Evernym's Smith said. "And of course, those policy changes are changing every day." Qatar, Emirates and Etihad Airways are all <a href="https://simpleflying.com/qatar-iata-travel-pass-launch/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">expected</a> to start trialing the app in the next few weeks.<br></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="5">
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</div></p><p>In other instances, the technology will live inside other companies' existing apps; why make someone download yet another app and add another hurdle to compliance? Instead, the experience will be rather like adding a loyalty account or TSA PreCheck number when booking a flight. Airlines and other venues restricting access will require uploading negative test results or vaccine records using one of these services. "You're going to be using the United or the Delta app, and they'll be using our solution or somebody else's, but you will do it via their app," IATA's Travel Pass lead, Alan Murray Hayden, told Protocol.</p><p>The World Health Organization is also working on its own offering, and recently convened the <a href="https://www.who.int/groups/smart-vaccination-certificate-working-group" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Smart Vaccination Certificate Working Group</a>. It's built upon the WHO's nearly century-old notion of the "yellow card" vaccination record, which first was used to document that travelers had been inoculated against diseases such as cholera and yellow fever. Evernym Chief Trust Officer Drummond Reed is part of the working group; he said there should be more to share in the coming months. </p><h3>What could go wrong?</h3><p>It's entirely possible that as more people start to get vaccinated, vaccine passports start to become the norm. You walk to work — still masked, of course — scan a QR code reader in the lobby, and are let in. You go out for lunch, and your loyalty card app has a discount for in-store shoppers verifying they're vaccinated. Your concert ticket is also tied to health pass information that you shared earlier in the day with Ticketmaster. But there are more than a few hurdles ahead of the companies rushing to turn these concepts into realities. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="6">
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</div></p><p>First off, there's the … reality … of the real world that any digital system has to contend with. For anyone without access to the internet, digital vaccine credentials will prove difficult to acquire, though all the companies Protocol spoke with said they would offer a paper-based QR code for people who don't have smartphones. But there's also the issue of having to corral so many different stakeholders into one system, especially when some health care providers are still reliant on antiquated database systems or <a href="https://www.protocol.com/manuals/health-care-revolution/electronic-health-records-after-coronavirus" target="_self">even paper records</a>. "The amount of inefficiency in the system is tremendous," IBM's Piscini said. </p><p>But in the U.S. at least, all vaccinators are required to report COVID-19 vaccines to their state. Piscini said that even for people who just received a paper copy of their vaccine records, systems like IBM's can likely link up to the state's immunization registry and allow people to import records to a vaccine passport.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image">
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNTY2NTc4My9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYzNzg3MTM2M30.RZtqR7F_FuXK1S24V6jVaqUZ0xOSG-gCwj00xU3fxcM/img.png?width=980" id="b0bd3" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="11d8002d92c0cd6ef39b12fc7b8dccf8" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image">
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">How CommonPass's app shows your records. </small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">Image: CommonPass</small></p><p>And states are willing to help out, Pollak said, adding that CommonPass has started working with Hawaii to roll out its offering for would-be tourists. "We're seeing a lot of state governments stepping up and doing a really good job with this," Pollak said. "It would be surprising if there wasn't a coordinated federal effort very soon." That being said, while <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/iceland-covid-passports-canada-1.5904828" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">many countries around</a> the world are committing to working on vaccine passports, getting a straight answer out of the U.S. government on what it's doing has proven difficult. The State Department, which maintains America's traditional, analogue passports, referred me to Homeland Security, which referred me to the White House. The acting director and chief of staff of the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy, Kei Koizumi, told Protocol that "OSTP can't discuss projects we are working on before they are publicly announced."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="7">
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</div></p><p>But even with systems in place at a federal level, there's still a fair amount of education that needs to happen before people will trust systems like these. "There's a substantial gap in understanding and knowledge of how these systems work, and people's views, in terms of who should get access to which data," Pollak said. </p><p>"We assume there's a Facebook Borg in the sky, monitoring every interaction," Smith said. "The emergence of verifiable credentials breaks down that mental model, where actually it becomes more like decentralized bits of paper that I can carry around, and no one's to know that I've been sharing this information."</p><p>"Our belief is that if you do the right thing, from a platform point of view, protecting your privacy, and giving you control and access to the platform to everybody who wants to use it," Piscini said. "I think those are very basic things that allow the core of the platform that we build to generate adoption by the individuals."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="8">
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</div></p><p>Even with a system that works, there may still be holdouts to this potential new normal. "Some people are saying, 'I will never get vaccinated,'" Piscini said, "and I don't know if the airlines are going to say, 'Well, maybe you will never fly again.'"</p>
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Mike Murphy ( @mcwm) is the director of special projects at Protocol, focusing on the industries being rapidly upended by technology and the companies disrupting incumbents. Previously, Mike was the technology editor at Quartz, where he frequently wrote on robotics, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics.
People
20 years of orange cones: The history of VLC
How a student project became one of the world's most popular open-source apps, powering much of modern-day media, without ever creating a huge windfall for its developers.
VLC is 20 years old and has been downloaded more than 3.5 billion times.
Photo: Getty Images
February 11, 2021
Janko Roettgers (@jank0) is a senior reporter at Protocol, reporting on the shifting power dynamics between tech, media, and entertainment, including the impact of new technologies. Previously, Janko was Variety's first-ever technology writer in San Francisco, where he covered big tech and emerging technologies. He has reported for Gigaom, Frankfurter Rundschau, Berliner Zeitung, and ORF, among others. He has written three books on consumer cord-cutting and online music and co-edited an anthology on internet subcultures. He lives with his family in Oakland.
February 11, 2021
When students at the École Centrale Paris lobbied for a campus network upgrade in the '90s, they weren't really thinking about the future of media. All they wanted was to play Duke Nukem 3D. But the public-private partnership that made the first-person shooter work on their campus network also laid the groundwork for the birth of the popular media player VLC.
Open sourced 20 years ago this month, VLC has since been downloaded more than 3.5 billion times, making it one of the most popular free software projects to date. Software developed for VLC is being used to power some of the world's largest streaming services. Despite all of this, VLC has largely remained a labor of love, with developers saying no to deals worth tens of millions of dollars.
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The story of VLC is about geeks pursuing their passion projects, fighting back countless legal threats and hatching a baffling plan to send Bitcoins to the moon.
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</div></p><h3>Duke Nukem, IPTV and a Swiss Army knife</h3><p>
The student staff running the campus network of the École Centrale Paris had a problem. The university's Token Ring network had become much too slow for students living on campus. For years, the technology had done its job, offering access to email and newsgroups. But by the mid-'90s, students wanted more. They wanted to download files, browse the web and most of all play Duke Nukem 3D, which was impossible on the ageing network architecture.<br>
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However, the university wasn't able to provide a network update. In desperate need for an outside sponsor, the students struck a deal with a big French broadcaster, which wanted to use the campus grounds as a testbed for an early version of IP-based TV delivery. The idea: Instead of equipping each dorm room with its own satellite dish and set-top box, students would find a way to stream TV signals over their local network.
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"The goal of the project was to show that you could resend the satellite feed and decode [it] on normal machines, which would cost a lot less," said VideoLAN foundation President Jean-Baptiste Kempf. To achieve this, students developed a video server and a playback app, at the time called VideoLAN Client. The project got passed down as students graduated, and eventually, the team behind it decided to open-source it.
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In those early days, much of the work was still focused on the server that redistributed streams across the campus network. No one really had any inkling how successful VLC could become as a cross-platform media player. "It was Linux and BeOS at the time," Kempf said. "No one cared about Windows and MacOS."
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No one on campus, that is. Weeks after VLC got released as open source in 2001, a developer in the Netherlands ported it to MacOS, causing the first real usage spike. Apple's initial versions of OS X didn't come with a built-in DVD player app, and early adopters of the new system flocked to VLC as a replacement. At the same time, a U.K.-based developer ported VLC to Windows, where it became a surprise hit as well. "People were shocked," Kempf said. "Oh my God, how did that happen?"
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One of the reasons for VLC's unexpected success lied in its Linux roots. Due to the operating system's lack of native codec infrastructure, VLC was packaged together with all of the codec dependencies necessary to play most video files and formats. That was different from Windows, where the system media player often refused to play videos downloaded from file-sharing networks, requiring users to jump through a bunch of hoops and download third-party codec packs from questionable sources. Using the same dependencies across all platforms, VLC just worked, and it quickly gained momentum as a kind of Swiss Army knife for media playback.<br>
</p><h3>Download records, patent threats and barely any money</h3><p>
The project's IP television heritage also helped it become a key enabler of modern-day streaming media. In 2003, one of the VideoLAN team members began working on an encoder for the H.264 video codec to optimize VLC's media server component. The encoder, dubbed x264, was extremely efficient, making it possible to transmit video with a fraction of the bandwidth of a traditional MPEG2 stream. And because x264 was open source, it was quickly adopted by large parts of the emerging online video industry, with Facebook, YouTube, Netflix and others using it for their entire catalog. "It's probably the most used encoder in the world," Kempf said.<br></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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All the while, download numbers for VLC kept growing. "Every time there was a release, we saturated the uplink of the university," Kempf recalled. The decision to combine VLC's server and client components in one single app, simply called VLC, further helped its growth. Around 2009, VLC had been downloaded 100 million times.
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VLC's success also put it on the radar of patent lawyers, who started to send the VideoLAN team a growing number of legal threats, looking to extract licensing fees. Over the years, the VLC team received hundreds such legal threats over alleged patent violations. Virtually all of them were without merit, according to Kempf. Many were based on U.S. software patents that weren't easily enforceable in Europe. Others were citing technology that VLC was using even before companies tried to patent it. "No one is checking whether these patents are valid," Kempf said. "It's a complete mafia; it's protection money."
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But while VLC was a hit with users and making waves in the tech community, the team behind it struggled to maintain the app. Students would cycle out of the project after graduating, and entire platforms languished for months. In 2007, there were just three people working on the entire project. "It started to be more and more difficult to maintain and support," Kempf said. "It almost collapsed."
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Kempf, who had enrolled in École Centrale Paris in 2003 but didn't join the VLC team in earnest until 2005, decided it was time for a break. He disentangled VLC from the university, and founded the VideoLAN organization as a new steward of the open-source project. He also began working on plans to commercially support the development of VLC, much like Mozilla had been able to with its software projects. The maker of the Firefox browser had founded a for-profit subsidiary, and made Google the default Firefox search engine in exchange for hundreds of millions of dollars in traffic referral fees.
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There was only one problem: The model didn't really work for the nascent streaming media space. Instead, a number of companies approached VLC to bundle its app with browser extensions and other third-party software. These kinds of bundles were at the time popular with file-sharing apps and other freeware, which often relied on users not reading the fine print during the installation process to make a quick buck. Kempf estimated that such a deal could have brought in tens of millions. "Maybe we should have done it," he said. "But at the same time, I just want to be [proud] of my work, and tricking users? Yeah, that's not for me."
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Instead, VLC got some modest support in the form of donations, and Kempf founded a company called <a href="https://www.videolabs.io/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Videolabs</a> that is closely aligned with, but not part of, VLC. Videolabs employs a number of key VLC developers, and offers consulting and development services to companies like Samsung, Cisco, Microsoft and a number of carriers, which often rely on custom VLC implementations for their set-top boxes. This setup has helped to retain key developers, but it's also been a bit of a double-edged sword, with custom jobs taking up too much time to tackle other VLC-related projects. "We don't have enough funding to start new stuff," Kempf said.
</p><h3>Big UI changes, new business opportunities and a free trip to the moon</h3><p>
That's not to say that VLC is at a standstill. Twenty years after its first open-source release, the app is as popular as ever, clocking between 800,000 and 1 million downloads every day. In addition to the desktop versions, there are now also official VLC apps for iOS, Android, Apple TV, Android TV and Chrome OS, among others. And in the coming months, VideoLAN will release VLC 4.0, which will feature a revamped UI. "We modified the interface to be a bit more modern," Kempf said.
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As the VLC team is tweaking the interface, it is also thinking about ways to integrate more content directly into the app, which could ultimately lead to new revenue opportunities as well. Kempf pointed to <a href="https://www.protocol.com/plex-live-tv-linear-streaming" target="_self">Plex and its ad-supported video services</a> as one model to learn from. "That is something that could work for VLC," he said. VLC developers also continue to be involved in the development of next-generation video codecs like AV1 and AV2.
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In addition to all of this, Videolan also has plans to celebrate its twentieth birthday this year, starting with a literal moonshot: The team wants to put a video time capsule aboard the first commercial lunar spaceflight later this year, and is currently asking VLC users to <a href="https://lunartimecapsule.space/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">submit their own videos</a>. "There are a lot of people in the VideoLAN community who actually love space," Kempf said. "We have SpaceX fans, die-hard fanboys."
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The VideoLAN team plans to add some of the videos that have been a key part of VLC's journey, like the open source movie "<a href="https://peach.blender.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Big Buck Bunny</a>," as well as VLC's source code and dependencies. "And we are probably also going to send the private key of our Bitcoin wallet," Kempf said, half-joking. "The moon thing is absolutely, completely idiotic, but it's so much fun."
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That, in a nutshell, may be the ethos behind VLC: Do things not because they promise to make a lot of money, or even always sense, but because they're fun. Chances are, the result is going to be useful to consumers, and maybe even the entire streaming media industry. "Most of the people who worked on VLC did that in their free time just to make other people happy," Kempf said. "I think that's quite rare."
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<em>For more on VideoLAN's plans for 2021, make sure to check out this week's edition of </em><a href="https://www.protocol.com/newsletters/next-up/" target="_self"><em>Protocol Next Up.</em></a>
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Janko Roettgers (@jank0) is a senior reporter at Protocol, reporting on the shifting power dynamics between tech, media, and entertainment, including the impact of new technologies. Previously, Janko was Variety's first-ever technology writer in San Francisco, where he covered big tech and emerging technologies. He has reported for Gigaom, Frankfurter Rundschau, Berliner Zeitung, and ORF, among others. He has written three books on consumer cord-cutting and online music and co-edited an anthology on internet subcultures. He lives with his family in Oakland.
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