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February 18, 2020
Democrats desperately want to avoid another Iowa — that is, another technical snafu that derails a crucial state caucus. And so, with just days to go before the Nevada caucus, Democrats are recruiting volunteers with basic tech skills to sit at major precincts throughout the state and help precinct captains troubleshoot snags as they arise.
It's kind of like teaching your parents how to use their new iPhones at Christmas, only in this case, it's the democratic process at stake.
Over the last week, links to a sign up form have been circulating on Twitter, as well as Democratic mailing lists and Slack channels. It asks for technical volunteers to come to Nevada and "pair up with a Precinct Captain — in real life! — on the day of the caucus."
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The Nevada Democratic Party didn't respond to Protocol's request for comment on this recruiting push. But according to a Democratic source who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak on behalf of the party, the effort was spearheaded by several top Democratic technologists who were alarmed by the Iowa debacle and concerned that the Democratic National Committee, still reeling from the fallout, might not have the bandwidth to prevent a similar catastrophe in Nevada. Those technologists include Raffi Krikorian, former chief technologist of the Democratic National Committee; Osi Imeokparia, former chief product officer for Hillary for America; and Lindsey Schuh Cortes, former CEO of the Democratic data analytics company BlueLabs. They declined Protocol's interview requests.
According to the source, some 50 technical volunteers across the country have signed up to help so far. That's hardly enough to pair a live tech-troubleshooter with every precinct captain in the state, which has approximately 2,000 precincts.
One recruiting message reviewed by Protocol specified that would-be volunteers should be able to, at a minimum, debug simple technology issues, use basic tech tools like PDFs and Google Docs, and communicate via Slack and Signal.
The organizers also tapped into a group called DigiDems, which was founded after the 2016 election specifically to embed technologists in campaigns. A representative from DigiDems confirmed that some of its alumni are volunteering on the ground to support early vote operations in Nevada.
Like the Iowa Democratic Party, the Nevada party had planned to use an app, built by a startup called Shadow, to tabulate and report results. But Nevada party leaders scrapped that plan after watching what happened in Iowa. Last week, the party announced that it would instead use a Google Forms calculator, which would be preloaded on iPads purchased by the party, and could be used only by precinct captains. State party officials said they worked with the DNC and the Department of Homeland Security to develop this new process.
The problem with Shadow's app stemmed from a flaw in the way the app transmitted data to the party's headquarters. That app was hastily built just a few months before the caucus, leaving people both inside and outside of the party to wonder why Iowa would take a gamble on such an untested tool.
Google Forms is certainly not untested. But that doesn't guarantee a smooth caucus night. According to POLITICO, volunteers in Nevada are already reporting rushed training sessions that fail to adequately explain how to use the iPads and Google Forms. That's particularly problematic for older volunteers who are unfamiliar with the technology.
"There were old ladies looking at me like, 'Oh, we're going to have iPads,'" one volunteer told POLITICO. The hope is that having people in the room with even rudimentary tech literacy skills could help bridge that knowledge gap.
Of course, not all of the issues in Iowa had to do with tech. The party's phone lines were also overwhelmed by 4chan trolls urging one another to "clog the lines," after the Iowa Democrats made their phone number public. The Nevada Democrats have reportedly learned from that mistake as well: This time around, only precinct chairs will have access to the reporting hotline.
Issie Lapowsky
Issie Lapowsky (@issielapowsky) is a senior reporter at Protocol, covering the intersection of technology, politics, and national affairs. Previously, she was a senior writer at Wired, where she covered the 2016 election and the Facebook beat in its aftermath. Prior to that, Issie worked as a staff writer for Inc. magazine, writing about small business and entrepreneurship. She has also worked as an on-air contributor for CBS News and taught a graduate-level course at New York University’s Center for Publishing on how tech giants have affected publishing. Email Issie.
Protocol | Fintech
Jack Dorsey is so money: What Tidal and banking do for Square
Teaming up with Jay-Z's music streaming service may seem like a move done for flash, but it's ultimately all about the money (and Cash).
Jay-Z performs at the Tidal-X concert at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn in 2017.
Photo: Theo Wargo/Getty Images
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.
Tomio Geron ( @tomiogeron) is a San Francisco-based reporter covering fintech. He was previously a reporter and editor at The Wall Street Journal, covering venture capital and startups. Before that, he worked as a staff writer at Forbes, covering social media and venture capital, and also edited the Midas List of top tech investors. He has also worked at newspapers covering crime, courts, health and other topics. He can be reached at tgeron@protocol.com or tgeron@protonmail.com.
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.
March 4, 2021
It was a big week for Jack Dorsey, who started by turning heads in Wall Street, and then went Hollywood with an unexpected music-streaming deal.
Dorsey's payments company, Square, announced Monday that it now has an actual bank, Square Financial Services, which just got a charter approved. On Thursday, Dorsey announced Square was taking a majority stake in Tidal, the music-streaming service backed by Jay-Z, for $297 million.
<p>If there's a theme around the moves, it's control. Having its own bank gives Square more purchase in the financial world. And if Square does something with Tidal, which promised to give artists a bigger cut of the money produced by streaming, it will likely be about giving musicians more control over the revenue streams they create. </p><p>It also suggests Dorsey wants to diversify Square far beyond its original smartphone-swipe business. Already, he talks about Register and Cash App as two distinct businesses within Square. (Caviar was another, until Square sold it to DoorDash.) Now Tidal joins the portfolio.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>"Dorsey is flexing his muscles and expanding his tentacles into banking, crypto, and now the Jay-Z Tidal deal," Wedbush analyst Daniel Ives told Protocol. Ives compared Dorsey to Tesla's Elon Musk in the boldness of his ambitions.</p><p>Some disagreed: There was chatter that the deal was about Dorsey's habit of hobnobbing with celebrities. He was famously photographed with Beyoncé, who is married to Jay-Z, last year. Square plans to name Jay-Z, a.k.a. Shawn Carter, to its board.</p><p>But Square's push into banking is not about "white pillars in front of buildings and marble," as Matt Harris, partner at Bain Capital Ventures, put it. Financial services are becoming a "lifestyle choice" for a new generation of consumers, he said.</p><p>It helps, then, that Cash App is part of the cultural lexicon of <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/dont-venmo-iggy-azalea-cash-app-rules-rap-11565191206" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">hip-hop</a>. "One of the things Square has captured is the consumer business for a long time," Harris said. "Their customer acquisition strategy for a long time has been urban. And Tidal is just a further step. A somewhat radical further step."</p><p>Veteran tech analyst Michael Dortch of DortchOnIT saw the deal as more straightforward: Square can offer valuable services to musicians and artists in what has become a more complex entertainment market, and let them avoid "exploitation and bad treatment" from the major labels, he said.</p><p>Artists often don't get paid for three to six months after a song is streamed, because they have to wait for their label to get paid first. Square has experience, but it's not the only one that could address this problem.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>"Maybe there's an argument that Square will get in the middle of that to simplify payments so creators get paid more quickly," said David Pakman, partner at Venrock. "That's interesting and a bunch of people have tried to do that. But Spotify could do that on their own."</p><p>Square's bet on Tidal is unlikely to shake up the streaming world in the short term. Tidal has not released any subscriber numbers for some time, but data shared by digital music wholesaler CD Baby suggests that the service is little more than an also-ran. CD Baby, which distributed the music of 800,000 independent artists, received 40% of its digital revenue from Spotify, with Apple Music accounting for 18%. Tidal, Deezer, Napster and other third-tier services together made up just 8% of CD Baby's digital revenue.</p><p>Dorsey and Jay-Z both said Thursday that the Tidal link-up went well beyond streaming.</p><p>"Square created ecosystems of tools for sellers and individuals, and we'll do the same for artists," Dorsey wrote in a <a href="https://twitter.com/jack/status/1367460921937817602" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">tweet thread</a>. "We'll work on entirely new listening experiences to bring fans closer together, simple integrations for merch sales, modern collaboration tools, and new complementary revenue streams."</p><p>"I said from the beginning that Tidal was about more than just streaming music … Artists deserve better tools to assist them in their creative journey," Jay-Z <a href="https://twitter.com/sc/status/1367461494821171202" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">tweeted</a>.</p><p>Focusing on services over streams is a smart bet, music industry analyst Mark Mulligan from <a href="https://www.midiaresearch.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">MIDiA Research</a> said. "Streaming is fundamentally a terrible margin business," he said. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p><a href="https://www.patreon.com/m/waterandmusic" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Water & Music</a> author Cherie Hu agreed. "The business of music streaming is not sustainable in and of itself," Hu said, pointing to the fact that Tidal <a href="https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2021/01/13/tidal-2019-earnings-report/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">lost $52 million</a> on subscription revenues of just $166 million in 2019. "Tidal is not a profitable business," she said.</p><p>A bigger focus on creator services could change that. "It is the only big bet at the moment," Mulligan said. And while pundits have focused on Tidal's star power, creator services could actually help Tidal and Square monetize the long tail of music: part-time creators looking to make a few extra bucks, musicians who haven't given up on their day job. "It monetizes hobbies," Mulligan said.</p><p>Square could build out credit or other products or tools for artists. "Even though Tidal has been declining as a streaming service, they have a strong brand and access to artists," said Laura Chau, partner at Canaan. "With Square buying Tidal, they essentially are buying access to those artists and circumventing the creator acquisition challenge that many emerging companies will have."</p><p>The flip side is that there are already a plethora of creator services companies out there, helping bands with everything from playlist sharing to merchandise sales. Those companies include Spotify, which has been looking to offer musicians more tools after acquiring artistry services startups SoundBetter and Soundtrap. "It's super crowded right now," Hu said. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p>The one major differentiator for Square could be its financial services business, freshly strengthened with its own chartered bank. "That is one of the growth areas," Mulligan said. The company could offer artists advances, royalty processing and more, effectively taking over some of the roles traditionally held by record labels.</p><p>It's a space that is long overdue for change. In the age of TikTok, artists can see huge streaming spikes practically overnight when one of their songs goes viral. Most of them won't see the resulting royalties for months, Hu said: "The financial innovation has not caught up to general technological innovation." </p><p>If the Tidal bet pays off, Dorsey's reputation as a daring strategic thinker will only grow.</p><p>"He deserves a lot of credit for long-term vision," Eric Sager, Plaid's chief operating officer who was once head of sales at Square, told Protocol in January. "A lot of the things that have made Square the amazing company it is today are things that he was talking about years and years and years ago when it wasn't clear at all that those things would be successful."</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.
Sponsored Content
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.
People
Google’s trying to build a more inclusive, less chaotic future of work
Javier Soltero, the VP of Workspace at Google, said time management is everything.
With everyone working in new places, Google believes time management is everything.
Image: Google
March 4, 2021
David Pierce ( @pierce) is Protocol's editor at large. Prior to joining Protocol, he was a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, a senior writer with Wired, and deputy editor at The Verge. He owns all the phones.
March 4, 2021
Javier Soltero was still pretty new to the G Suite team when the pandemic hit. Pretty quickly, everything about Google's hugely popular suite of work tools seemed to change. (It's not even called G Suite anymore, but rather Workspace.) And Soltero had to both guide his team through a new way of working and help them build the tools to guide billions of Workspace users.
This week, Soltero and his team announced a number of new Workspace features designed to help people manage their time, collaborate and get stuff done more effectively. It offered new tools for frontline workers to communicate better, more hardware for hybrid meetings, lots of Assistant and Calendar features to make planning easier and a picture-in-picture mode so people could be on Meet calls without really having to pay attention.
<p>Soltero joined the Source Code podcast to talk about the new tools and how he's planning for the future of work both as a team leader and a product maker.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><div class="rm-embed embed-media"><iframe frameborder="no" height="200px" scrolling="no" seamless="" src="https://player.simplecast.com/c6b03386-d5b4-4fd3-97f3-648321bb9b14?dark=true" width="100%"></iframe></div><p><em>You can hear our full conversation in this episode of the Source Code podcast. The following excerpts from our conversation have been lightly edited for length and clarity.</em></p><p><strong><em></em>I was talking to somebody the other day who said, "We've never had clients ask us about burnout before." They care, but it's never been sort of a top-of-mind concern: How do I make sure my employees are happy, and that work-life balance is real, and that they're taking time off? These have just never been things that are top of mind when you think about quote-unquote productivity software.</strong></p><p><strong>But the whole universe of this stuff feels different now. And it seems like both for you as somebody who runs a large team, but then also having to build that kind of ethos into products, that would feel hugely complicated, and totally unlike anything we've ever done in this space before.</strong></p><p>Look, if you're lucky enough to love what you do for a living, you'll never work a day in your life. </p><p>Except now. </p><p>Right? Not everybody is lucky enough to work on something they're passionate about, but even to those that are, there's that new set of conflicts. You've now disassociated or disconnected work with a specific location, and that is both a blessing and a curse in its own way. And along with that, the need for time and attention management at the individual level becomes crucial. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>Both of these things were true before the pandemic, they were just not universally experienced. They were viewed as a mere speed bump: "Oh, yeah, I can check my email on on the road," or "Hey, today, I'm working from home because I have a doctor's appointment." And then on the time and attention management front, no shortage of products and apps and devices and so forth are calling to us, for different reasons. That was also a known problem before, but when that's happening in the midst of all these other demands, and you're already also emotionally spent, then the energy that normally kept us fired up about our work is harder to sustain. </p><p>Lastly, there's the absence of human connection, which I've personally found maybe the hardest of all things. I've got two executives on my team who I've never actually witnessed in three-dimensional space. Yeah, I'm leading a team of people around the world who have experienced me through a two-dimensional piece of glass, right, which is terrible. So that the absence of that human connection, which is felt, again, universally by everyone, in their own way, also saps at that, and there are no good ways, at least for now, to remedy that. Saying "Well, let's spend more time on video calls" isn't the answer.</p><p><strong>It's an underrated feature of a physical workplace that I can just walk over to you and ask you something. And when that's gone, what do we do? I feel like that's the next big question.</strong></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>I saw some really creative applications of existing capabilities meant to try to address some of the problems that are at the heart of how this has affected us all. I'll give you a good example: I noticed that a group of people in my team were using their out-of-office email autoresponder to provide daily updates, to basically auto-reply to every message to set expectations with the sender about their working hours and their availability.</p><p>Then you get to the uneven application of that, and you ask, well, why? And part of the answer is a little scary, because it involves the courage that those people had to actually explicitly say, "No, I actually am not available, because I've got other responsibilities, other demands on my time." In pre-pandemic work culture, there was a question there about whether you will be perceived as a hard-charging, go-getter type of person, when you're even with the best of intentions trying to set expectations for other people. </p><p>And you get to the product opportunity around that. You say, well, this is a really crude instrument for this. So we've got this capability now to set working hours. And we introduced a bunch of enhancements around the minimal set of actions that I can take as an individual — to convey to others who want to collaborate with me and communicate with me — my availability. And it's really elegant and important in how we do it. </p><p>But what the usage of that feature represents is an aspect of a social contract that every company has, around how its workers behave with each other and how they respect each other's time. Very few, if any, companies that I've seen have taken the trouble to actually describe what that contract actually looks like. Much less to try and steer it.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p><strong>So do you feel some responsibility to try to have and share a right answer inside the product?</strong></p><p>No, not a right answer. That's where people get it wrong. I think with productivity software, it's a very difficult needle to thread. Because you have to have a point of view. "Productivity Construction Kit" is not an answer, because actually what it leads to is you putting the burden on the client, on the user and on the team to establish that, and not everybody is thoughtful enough or equipped enough to do that. </p><p>And I think when you see customers struggle with products you find that the diversity of options you have creates, well, less than an orderly, predictable exchange of information. So the threading the needle part is, you have to be opinionated enough and in the right places, but leave room for the individual user and ultimately the organization they are a part of to express their own approach to communication and collaboration and express that social contract. </p><p><strong>Google Calendar is a good example of that, right? Calendar feels like the space in which to solve a lot of these things that you're talking about. If one of the core things we need to do is get a better understanding of where we are and who's available, Calendar seems like the place to do that, right? I feel like you guys are getting, if not more opinionated, then at least more, I don't know, tools-y about what you think a calendar can be.</strong></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="5">
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</div></p><p>Yes, tools-y in the sense that we know there's an opportunity, given what I told you about the time and attention management problem being crucial. Google Calendar has this unique role in being perhaps the only global-scale, personal and work calendar management service system of record. There's a responsibility, I guess, and an opportunity for us to continue to encourage people to not only use that, but to use it more effectively both in their own individual time management and in their time management across groups of people. </p><p>The best example to offer here is recurring events. I've long joked that you should be forced to do linear algebra before you are actually allowed to create a recurring event that involves multiple people. Possibly even just yourself. The reason for that is because exactly how far ahead can you plan? </p><p>You create a recurring event with the best of intentions that says, "I want to call my parents every week at 6 p.m. on Wednesday." Now, there's a segment of people for whom that proves to be very effective. They actually are rigorous enough about surrendering the entirety of their decision-making and their time management to a calendaring surface, digital or otherwise, that having that there helps. But to the vast, vast, vast majority of people, the calendar surface risks becoming a reminder of exactly how inconsistent and undependable you are as a human being. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="6">
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</div></p><p>And so how you approach the task is to go back to the sort of toolsy-ness of Google Calendar, because there are a million things you can add to the calendar to create the absolute perfect, most comprehensive time management thing ever. You could even employ AI to this effect and get pretty far. But it's only successful if it's actually impacting behavior and if the person is actually being able to truly manage their time. The impact that actually has is what we're interested in measuring, not just "did we give you a lot of knobs to make you feel good as some kind of GTD pro."</p><p><strong>The first insight, back when it was G Suite, was to take all of these things that were single player and make them multiplayer, right? It still looks like an 8.5-by-11 inch sheet of paper when you open a Google Doc, but you can do it with another person. And that was a fundamentally new thing. </strong></p><p><strong>But now we're getting to the point where that thing is kind of table stakes. We're not all the way there yet, but that is clearly the future where all of this is going. And the next step, it seems like, is breaking the idea that all of those should be different products at all. That Workspace should be <em>a</em> thing, not a bunch of things.</strong></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="7">
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</div></p><p>Remember the show "Mad Men"? There's a picture I found on the internet of the set — no people — and you can see old-school intercom systems, typewriters, old-school inboxes, filing cabinets, a whole range of things. What we've done is we've digitized them, almost on a one-for-one basis. To be fair, there's been more innovation than that, but at heart, they're still treated in the same fashion. <br></p><p>We've now officially and irreparably broken away from that in a way that's going to create room for people to look at this problem space differently. It's by no means a finished job for us or anybody else. We still have to work hard to earn the right to be the choice of billions of people around the world, for all these important jobs. But yeah, I think we've kind of moved past that. </p><p>I don't want to have happy hours over video. There's a bunch of stuff about life in this particular period of time that people are going to look back and say, "Oh, that really sucked. Let's not go back to that." And I'm happy to turn the page on that.</p><p><strong>I've been talking to people all year about, what are the KPIs for remote work? The KPIs for regular work have always been just, like, "ass in chair," which is not good. But these questions of what it means to know you're working hard and doing well — or even just doing well, period — seem different now. And there are all these questions about what managers want to know versus what employees want to know and want to share. So I'm curious both for you as a boss, and you as a product maker, how you think about that stuff right now.</strong></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="8">
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</div></p><p>I don't believe that metrics about communication volume, frequency, depth of organizational graph, how information flows through the organization — that you can actually productize those insights in a way that is sufficiently unique to a company in a way that makes it actionable. </p><p>You may say, "Javier, you spent 72 hours in meetings last week." And I don't know the judgment of whether that is good or bad. It's very subjective, right? In addition to the understandable creepiness of, how is this information being used? Is my performance being assessed from the point of view of how many minutes am I spending in email or how much multitasking I'm doing during times where I'm otherwise supposed to be in a meeting? Some cultures and organizations and job responsibilities will reward them. Others would point at that and say, "Pay attention, man." </p><p>I'd rather put more emphasis, for example, on the rhythm of work. I'm from Puerto Rico, I love music. And there's a rhythm at which work takes place, it's not a universally-described thing, not by industry, not by company. There are lots of rhythms, even within my own organization, teams that for one reason or another move faster or slower, make more heavy use of real-time communication versus asynchronous communication. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="9">
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</div></p><p>You don't just lay out the tools and say, "I don't know, pick what you need, go ahead!" You also don't just say, "Here's an adjustable wrench and a multi-headed screwdriver. Good luck!" You have to curate the set of tools that you offer. It's somewhere between an unbounded expanse, and a bike lane that says "This is the One True Way of collaborating." That's not not really for us or any other vendor to describe.</p>
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David Pierce ( @pierce) is Protocol's editor at large. Prior to joining Protocol, he was a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, a senior writer with Wired, and deputy editor at The Verge. He owns all the phones.
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.
Power
Google wants to help you get a life
Digital car windows, curved AR glasses, automatic presentations and other patents from Big Tech.
A new patent from Google offers a few suggestions.
Image: USPTO
February 28, 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 28, 2021
Another week has come to pass, meaning it's time again for Big Tech patents! You've hopefully been busy reading all the new Manual Series stories that have come out this week and are now looking forward to hearing what comes after what comes next. Google wants to get rid of your double-chin selfie videos and find things for you as you sit bored at home; Apple wants to bring translucent displays to car windows; and Microsoft is exploring how much you can stress out a virtual assistant.
And remember: The big tech companies file all kinds of crazy patents for things, and though most never amount to anything, some end up defining the future.
<h3>Alphabet</h3><p><a href="https://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?PageNum=0&docid=10929982&IDKey=D2992D61B62A%0D%0A&HomeUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fpatft.uspto.gov%2Fnetacgi%2Fnph-Parser%3FSect1%3DPTO2%2526Sect2%3DHITOFF%2526p%3D1%2526u%3D%25252Fnetahtml%25252FPTO%25252Fsearch-bool.html%2526r%3D13%2526f%3DG%2526l%3D50%2526co1%3DAND%2526d%3DPTXT%2526s1%3Dgoogle.ASNM.%2526OS%3DAN%2Fgoogle%2526RS%3DAN%2Fgoogle" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><strong>Making selfies look better</strong></a></p><p>Perhaps even before our lives were dominated by video calls, you might've noticed when someone just couldn't figure out where to place their camera. Generally, anything below eye height is going to lead to some unflattering angles, but if you're also on a phone, holding your device up that long can get tiring. Google is apparently trying to solve this with AR: According to this patent, it's looking into using the depth sensors found on the front of many smartphones to re-create your face in video calls at a more flattering angle, to reduce what the pattern calls "the big nose effect." I'm here for this concept, but also Google's depiction of what it's trying to eliminate:</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p><img src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/lYYEYZ52NjuL8M2BnrKVI80huN6UBNYEl1sFEScg5s5MdKrv8n2pBlI3tqXw3ooNJh8h2fWLTeTQaI4TrETMRu-E8ld49QGy3U783TOD8k8WMIR0lPZBAlCih9p3NU4U2sOEqtuI"></p><p><a href="https://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?PageNum=0&docid=10929885&IDKey=AFA7541891BF%0D%0A&HomeUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fpatft.uspto.gov%2Fnetacgi%2Fnph-Parser%3FSect1%3DPTO2%2526Sect2%3DHITOFF%2526p%3D1%2526u%3D%25252Fnetahtml%25252FPTO%25252Fsearch-bool.html%2526r%3D16%2526f%3DG%2526l%3D50%2526co1%3DAND%2526d%3DPTXT%2526s1%3Dgoogle.ASNM.%2526OS%3DAN%2Fgoogle%2526RS%3DAN%2Fgoogle" target="_blank"><strong>Jamming more ads into Maps</strong></a></p><p>Google Maps has become increasingly beset with ads in recent years, with promoted pins and locations on various instances of Maps. But this patent, which determines how Google goes about valuing ads in Google Maps — it, shockingly, has a lot to do with location — shows that the company might be looking at turning every part of the world into a digital version of Times Square, by displaying ads in-between the streets on a map. Hopefully it doesn't feel the need to run ads in <em>all</em> these potential slots at once, as that might make it rather difficult to navigate: </p><p><img src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/JcWTDCLxLAIEnhwl__JCNqeGm5ivedVoZVx_t83zGUntlZdU2H3CeQm9L3RC7QEZ_Cbb1n8B-bq_B-UJoATR2JiehxRwlA_O9GgO2BcEsph9C2cMPihvsdIWJlG9iJfvo4hTmLG9"></p><p><a href="https://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?PageNum=0&docid=10929486&IDKey=8946337F7961%0D%0A&HomeUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fpatft.uspto.gov%2Fnetacgi%2Fnph-Parser%3FSect1%3DPTO2%2526Sect2%3DHITOFF%2526p%3D1%2526u%3D%25252Fnetahtml%25252FPTO%25252Fsearch-bool.html%2526r%3D23%2526f%3DG%2526l%3D50%2526co1%3DAND%2526d%3DPTXT%2526s1%3Dgoogle.ASNM.%2526OS%3DAN%2Fgoogle%2526RS%3DAN%2Fgoogle" target="_blank"><strong>Outsourcing having a life to AI</strong></a></p><p>It's tough to do things, I know. Many days, even before the pandemic, I was content to just sit on the couch all day watching TV and ordering takeout. But Google is apparently looking into outsourcing to a virtual assistant the task of making sure you actually get your butt off the sofa. The patent outlines an assistant that could suggest things to do, as well as where and when to do them, based on the user's preferences. It could also suggest things to do that your friends or other users have enjoyed doing. Some of the suggestions aren't exactly things I'd consider a hobby, though: choosing "fight off a cold" as an activity is a really odd way to want to pass the time. <img src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/uHktu_DhtqRY9P68bJLJeoFceXUWTrtEeTN7xB6hiBFWxiCY5FDqrZW0zGkqlssZ481nmrNba9nGYXrsdfEk0eTsG64QXV37qaAfQ51BYGhs5DlwKuNJiA2WI5uGtQaLcOS_INsS"></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><h3>Amazon</h3><p><a href="http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=27&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=amazon.ASNM.&OS=AN/amazon&RS=AN/amazon" target="_blank"><strong>Searching using loyalty programs</strong></a></p><p>When you search for things online, you're generally only shown the prices for things that everyone sees. But if you're a member of a loyalty program, you might often get discounts or other benefits that could make some products cheaper or more attractive. Amazon's patent outlines a search engine that can store which loyalty programs you're a part of, and show any deals associated with that membership that businesses might be running. This could be useful for finding deals at partners of loyalty programs that you might not be aware of, but if you're already loyal to one hotel or airline brand, you're probably going to search them first before doing a general search. </p><p><img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/XSeV507IoB60vuP-AKADzUQH3OCfoDarf4Ahdgo0kNH-YxVe6qj-MRv9dfGECwElzPftQ3dJfMBeJq5fEEaqcAR6cyprVeBF99cienf2ipJGV35gR5LrTL8RVSOqAHqtqKrMX6Et"></p><p><a href="https://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?PageNum=0&docid=10929810&IDKey=0F7C251F2619%0D%0A&HomeUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fpatft.uspto.gov%2Fnetacgi%2Fnph-Parser%3FSect1%3DPTO2%2526Sect2%3DHITOFF%2526p%3D1%2526u%3D%25252Fnetahtml%25252FPTO%25252Fsearch-bool.html%2526r%3D23%2526f%3DG%2526l%3D50%2526co1%3DAND%2526d%3DPTXT%2526s1%3Damazon.ASNM.%2526OS%3DAN%2Famazon%2526RS%3DAN%2Famazon" target="_blank"><strong>Indoor drones</strong></a></p><p>Amazon has been making waves for years about using autonomous drones for delivering orders, but to date, it hasn't gotten much traction. It seems, according to this patent, to be turning its attention at least partly to a less-regulated bit of airspace: indoors. The patent explains how autonomous drones, fitted with cameras and sensors, could be used to inspect inventory stored in the bins in the company's massive, high-ceilinged warehouses. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><h3>Apple</h3><p><a href="https://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?PageNum=0&docid=10928697&IDKey=B939F26801A6%0D%0A&HomeUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fpatft.uspto.gov%2Fnetacgi%2Fnph-Parser%3FSect1%3DPTO2%2526Sect2%3DHITOFF%2526u%3D%25252Fnetahtml%25252FPTO%25252Fsearch-adv.htm%2526r%3D51%2526f%3DG%2526l%3D50%2526d%3DPTXT%2526s1%3D%252522apple%252Binc%252522.ASNM.%2526p%3D2%2526OS%3DAN%2F%252522apple%252Binc%252522%2526RS%3DAN%2F%252522apple%252Binc%252522" target="_blank"><strong>Smart tinted windows</strong></a></p><p>This feels like a concept you'd see in sci-fi films set in a future where people have time to kill in the back of a self-driving car. Instead of staring at their phones, the sunroof and windows tint black, and news programs or views of scenic landscapes would replace whatever dystopian cityscape the car is driving through. It seems that Apple is looking into turning this into a reality, by creating see-through glass panes embedded with LEDs and other light sources that could change the color of the glass and allow information to be displayed on it. Pair that with the AR maps it was working on from <a href="https://www.protocol.com/alphabet-eat-balloons" target="_self">last week</a>, and you could have a whole new way of looking at driving on your hands. </p><h3>Facebook</h3><p><a href="http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=29&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=facebook.ASNM.&OS=AN/facebook&RS=AN/facebook" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><strong>Curved-lens AR glasses</strong></a></p><p>This feels a little bit like the walking-around version to Apple's patent above. Most AR headsets use cameras to portray information on flat surfaces in front of your eyes. If you're like me and wear giant glasses that make you look like an owl, that might be fine, as your entire field of view is covered by lenses, but this patent explores adding AR to the periphery as well. The glasses in the patent have lenses that curve around the side of the frames so that they can overlay information on your peripheral view, which could make the experience of augmenting reality feel a little less jarring. That said, you would have to go out in public wearing something that looks like this: </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p><img src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/YQudRSE9rpgmW6sFYiOU7-fK_tijuGQMxUhPKBq9cQWjmapgqPuV-K2FKAb-C_mlGqBmzOeFisYN3K2JLXqjzmvJzsHuEwfPo-_-CiIodnZg-alfFF1wsw74xVkb5nNaTx-pU71_"></p><h3>Microsoft</h3><p><a href="http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=36&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=microsoft.ASNM.&OS=AN/microsoft&RS=AN/microsoft" target="_blank"><strong>Automatic presentation controls</strong></a></p><p>If you've ever watched a presentation from a major tech company and wondered how they nailed the timing on slide changes so well … it's probably because they've rehearsed it a thousand times and have someone whose job it is just to press forward on the slide at the right time. But if you don't have that luxury at your disposal, you might find the ideas in this patent helpful. Microsoft is exploring presentation software that would be able to listen for cues in your speech to detect that you've gotten to the end of one slide, and move you automatically on to the next. It also suggests doing a training run, where the user runs through their presentation, manually clicking where they want to change slides, and the system would record that and do it automatically when they go to present. I'm not sure about having to have something listen to me at all times to get this to work, but it'd make presentations a lot less awkward than the "please can you click to the next slide, no, not the last slide, the next one" that often happens. </p><p><a href="https://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?PageNum=0&docid=10931607&IDKey=7B2CDAAF4E95%0D%0A&HomeUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fpatft.uspto.gov%2Fnetacgi%2Fnph-Parser%3FSect1%3DPTO2%2526Sect2%3DHITOFF%2526p%3D1%2526u%3D%25252Fnetahtml%25252FPTO%25252Fsearch-bool.html%2526r%3D19%2526f%3DG%2526l%3D50%2526co1%3DAND%2526d%3DPTXT%2526s1%3Dmicrosoft.ASNM.%2526OS%3DAN%2Fmicrosoft%2526RS%3DAN%2Fmicrosoft" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><strong>Getting angry at virtual assistants to get results</strong></a></p><p>Stressing other people out when you're in charge is a very easy, albeit not very amenable, way to get stuff done. If you're having a conversation with someone and they stress to you, "I <em>need</em> you to get this back to me by end of day," and you know that they are ultimately the person who could end your employment, you're very likely going to get it back to them soon, unless you don't want to work there anymore. It's a lot harder to convey emotion and stress like that to a digital assistant, but this patent is exploring being able to understand human intonation and emotion in requests, such as a user stressing that they need to get a meeting scheduled with someone by the end of the week, which the AI would interpret as it being an urgent meeting when looking for time to schedule. Hopefully when the robot uprising comes, they'll not be too annoyed at us taking them for granted as digital PAs. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="5">
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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.
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