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March 3, 2020
With the unveiling of a super PAC aimed at getting like-minded candidates elected to Congress in 2020, the pro-Trump conspiracy theorists of QAnon have made another move into the offline world, seeking to wade further into the American political bloodstream while finding another way to profit off the whole affair.
"It's the next evolution of QAnon," said Mike Rothschild, a QAnon researcher and author of the book "The World's Worst Conspiracies." "Q is moving toward something more mainstream. Watkins is taking the movement away from the lurid stuff like executions and baby eating and sex trafficking, and focusing it toward more mainstream conservative activism."
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The super PAC, calling itself Disarm the Deep State, is run by Jim Watkins, the owner of the web forum 8Chan that has served as a platform for QAnon, along with the manifestos of at least three recent mass shooters. 8Chan was taken offline last August by its web hosting company after the suspect in the El Paso mass shooting published his manifesto on the site. The site reappeared in November, renamed 8kun with a new Russian hosting service.
Watkins has openly declared his intent to take the movement out of the dark corners of the internet on the website of the PAC. "In order to remove power from Deep State members … we need to take the movement offline and out of the shadows," the PAC's mission statement reads.
A record number of open QAnon backers have declared their candidacies for Congress in 2020. According to one count by Media Matters disinformation researcher Alex Kaplan, 28 candidates in 14 states are running this year while sympathizing with a movement that the FBI identified in a leaked document last May as a potential domestic terrorism threat. (In New York, a QAnon adherent was arrested last year for murder.)
At least two of those candidates are running unopposed in Republican primaries, among them Joanne Wright, who received an endorsement from the California Republican Party, and Matthew Lusk, who is running in Florida and devoted a page to Q on his candidate website."That there is now a super PAC launching in support of this movement is another red flag to me about the growth and influence of this conspiracy theory," Kaplan said.
Watkins' lawyer, Benjamin Barr, said the super PAC would spend its money on voter education, engagement and outreach on behalf of candidates. "It's a way for folks to exercise their First Amendment right to associate together, to band together and form a group, and share their vision with other folks," Barr said. "And let that be tested among the American public, good or bad, foolish or wise."
The super PAC's launch comes a week after the last post by Q, in which he made a rare direct reference to the 2020 elections. "This is not another 4-year election," Q said in the post. A prominent Q watcher, who tweets anonymously under the handle Dapper Gander, said, "the QAnon movement is being shifted into a get out the vote effort."
Whether a super PAC is effective at mobilizing QAnon adherents is another matter. After all, railing against super PACs has been a mainstay of the movement. The Q research community also keyed in on the fact that none of the most prominent QAnon promoters on Twitter immediately came out in support of the new PAC.
"Within the community's ideology or lore, they don't believe in super PACs, it's not something that is going to resonate well," said Marc-Andre Argentino, a doctorate candidate and Qanon researcher at Concordia University in Montreal.
For seasoned QAnon watchers, perhaps the biggest significance behind the unveiling of the PAC is that it seems to cement the connection between Watkins, 8Chan's owner, and the Q poster himself. It's been one of the most hotly discussed and debated questions within the world of Q researchers, Q watchers and Q debunkers.
"Watkins always made it seem like there was distance between him and Q, that Q was just this guy posting on his forums, that he let Q post because he's a free speech absolutist. By launching this PAC he is fully admitting that he is working with whoever is posting as Q and he is now part of the grift that is QAnon," said Mike Rains, a QAnon researcher who is behind the Poker and Politics Twitter feed, which follows the Qanon movement and debunks many of its claims.
Argentino has studied the changes in Q's syntax, grammar and selection of topics over the past three years since the first post in 2017, and believes Watkins has been posting as Q since last fall.
"There are similarities between the type of religious content that Watkins posts on his own Twitter account that echoes very closely to what Q has started posting in his drops," Argentino said. "The echoes are a little too close for it to be accidental."
The debate over the PAC underscores a bigger issue: Q is not just a fringe, right-wing conspiracy theory but a money-maker. Q drives significant traffic to 8Chan, the exclusive platform for the posts, a fact that has long puzzled Q watchers.
"It would be very easy for the Q poster to use another forum or provide a cryptographic key to prove his authenticity on some other site, but instead they wait to post on this rickety version of 8Chan," Rothschild said. "The only reason to keep Q on 8Chan is because Watkins is personally connected to him."
There were 54 million tweets with QAnon-related hashtags between Q's first drop in 2017 and February 2020, according to a count by Argentino. A 270-page book published last year called "QAnon: An Invitation to the Great Awakening" spent a stretch near the top of Amazon's charts. The book, authored by a 12-person medley of QAnon amplifiers, pushed a slew of conspiracy theories and outlandish claims. And then there's QAnon merchandise, such as bumper stickers and T-shirts.
"Q is big business," Rothschild said. "And this PAC is just another way for the big Q influencers to keep the money flowing in. These people are monetizing mental illness and loneliness."
Barr, Watkins' lawyer, said funds raised by the PAC would not go to subsidizing 8Chan, though Barr did say Watkins and others who work for the PAC would be entitled to draw a salary, as is customary with the administration of such committees.
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Watkins' PAC comes as he's stepping up his scrap with his former partner, 8Chan founder Fredrick Brennan, who has emerged as an outspoken critic of 8Chan and Watkins. Watkins sued Brennan for libel in October after Brennan tweeted that Watkins was "senile" and "incompetent." Last week, a court in the Philippines, where Watkins and Brennan both live, issued an arrest warrant for Brennan under the country's 2012 cyber libel law. Brennan fled the country hours before the arrest was issued and is now trying to fight the warrant from Los Angeles.
"Watkins wants Q to become a mainstream political thing," Brennan told Protocol, "so that he can call on people in Congress when inevitably there is another terrorist attack that gets 8Chan back in the news."
Charles Levinson
Charles Levinson (@levinsonc) is a former senior reporter at Protocol. Previously, he worked on investigative projects at Reuters, where he won awards for his reporting on Guantanamo Bay and skullduggery on Wall Street. Before that, he spent 12 years as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East for The Wall Street Journal. He covered the U.S. occupation of Iraq and that country’s sectarian civil war, the Arab Spring uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, and Syria, and Israel’s wars in Lebanon and Gaza. He has reported from over 20 countries. He lives outside New York City.
Protocol | China
Everything you need to know about the Zhihu IPO
The Beijing-based question-and-answer site just filed for an IPO.
The Zhihu homepage.
David Wertime/Protocol
March 5, 2021
David Wertime is Protocol's executive director. David is a widely cited China expert with twenty years' experience who has served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in China, founded and sold a media company, and worked in senior positions within multiple newsrooms. He also hosts POLITICO's China Watcher newsletter. After four years working on international deals for top law firms in New York and Hong Kong, David co-founded Tea Leaf Nation, a website that tracked Chinese social media, later selling it to the Washington Post Company. David then served as Senior Editor for China at Foreign Policy magazine, where he launched the first Chinese-language articles in the publication's history. Thereafter, he was Entrepreneur in Residence at the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, which owns the Philadelphia Inquirer. In 2019, David joined Protocol's parent company and in 2020, launched POLITICO's widely-read China Watcher. David is a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a Research Associate at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for the Study of Contemporary China, a Member of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, and a Truman National Security fellow. He lives in San Francisco with his wife Diane and his puppy, Luna.
Zeyi Yang is a reporter with Protocol | China. Previously, he worked as a reporting fellow for the digital magazine Rest of World, covering the intersection of technology and culture in China and neighboring countries. He has also contributed to the South China Morning Post, Nikkei Asia, Columbia Journalism Review, among other publications. In his spare time, Zeyi co-founded a Mandarin podcast that tells LGBTQ stories in China. He has been playing Pokemon for 14 years and has a weird favorite pick.
March 5, 2021
Investors eager to buy a slice of China's urban elite internet will soon have the chance. Zhihu, a Beijing-based question-and-answer site similar to the U.S.-based Quora, has just filed for an IPO to sell American Depositary Shares on the New York Stock Exchange.
What does Zhihu do?
Zhihu is China's largest online Q&A platform — the name comes from the expression "Do you know?" in classical Chinese. It was founded 10 years ago by Yuan Zhou (周源), a former journalist, and spent two years as an invite-only online platform. It quickly built a reputation as a source for quality answers and has drawn a community of elite professionals, including ZhenFund managing partner Bob Xu and venture capitalist Kai-Fu Lee, also an early investor.
Over time, the Chinese-language Zhihu has become more mainstream, and now says it hosts 315.3 million questions and answers contributed by 43.1 million "creators." (Quora, about one year older than Zhihu, had almost 61 million questions and 108 million answers by the end of 2019). The website has grown into a content platform where people also keep diaries, write fiction and blog as social media influencers.
Zhihu users do not look like China as a whole. Most than half are men, most live in "Tier 1" cities and more than three-quarters are under 30 years old.
Zhihu continues to emphasize the quality of its content. "Zhihu is also recognized as the most trustworthy online content community and widely regarded as offering the highest-quality content in China," its prospectus says.
Zhihu's financials
Zhihu registered for its IPO via the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, a.k.a. the JOBS Act, which has reduced disclosure requirements for companies with less than $1.07 billion in annual revenue. Zhihu's revenue doubled from 2019 to 2020, but still only reached $207.2 million, and the company is short of profitability with a 2020 net loss of $79.3 million. The company says it's "still in an early stage of monetization" with "significant runway for growth across multiple new monetization channels."
Trend lines are good. Zhihu has managed to double revenue while keeping expenses largely constant, with selling and marketing aimed at growing Zhihu's user base as the biggest single expense.
The company is trying to diversify its revenue streams. In 2019, 86.1% came from advertising. 2020 saw advertising account for 62.4% while "content-commerce" — meaning native advertising — took in 10%. The rest was mostly paid memberships.
What's next for Zhihu
After years of evincing a relaxed attitude toward monetization, Zhihu is putting itself in the hot seat to do just that. Zhihu is betting that monetizing Chinese web users will get easier over time. The prospectus describes "significant growth potential" in China's "online content community market" and says average revenue per user in China is expected to more than triple from about $55 in 2019 to about $199 in 2025, with revenue in the overall market reaching a projected $200 billion in 2025.
The company looks like it will basically try everything to monetize, and see what sticks. It plans to "ramp up our online education service" and to "continue to explore other innovative monetization channels, such as content e-commerce and IP-based monetization."
The prospectus also mentions AI frequently, touting Zhihu's AI content moderation tool wali as well as a "question routing system" and "feed recommendation and search systems." However, the depth and quality of content remains far more important to Zhihu's success. Users have joked on Zhihu about the poor quality of its wali filter.
What could go wrong?
Zhihu could fail to turn a profit. Like most content platforms, Zhihu has found it hard to monetize its traffic and the vast amount of free content at its core. The platform was built on the premise that anyone can acquire professional knowledge easily, which means users are not inclined to pay.
Since 2016, Zhihu has tried many monetization models: paid physical/virtual events, online courses taught by its top creators, premium memberships and paid consulting services. None have been a hit. Zhihu Live, the paid virtual event product, attracted a lot of public attention in 2016 and 2017, but since then its popularity has waned. According to the prospectus, Zhihu currently has 2.4 million paying members, or only 3.4% of its monthly active users.
Zhihu also faces intense competition. Defined narrowly, it has no rivals, with would-be contenders like Baidu Zhidao and Wukong, owned by ByteDance, falling by the wayside. But Zhihu has positioned itself as something more: a community for diverse content. In this regard, it's competing with big public-facing social media platforms such as the Twitter-like Weibo and Bilibili. While Zhihu's 68.5 million monthly active user base is growing fast, Weibo has over 500 million and Bilibili over 200 million. Zhihu differentiates itself with the quality and depth of its content, but maintaining that creates inevitable tension with the business imperative to expand.
Like every content platform in China, Zhihu is subject to rigid state censorship and faces harsh penalties for failing to police speech itself. Politically-sensitive questions are nowhere to be found on the platform, while other topics including transgender rights have been censored in the past. Even so, in March 2018, Zhihu was taken off every mobile app store for seven days at the request of Beijing's municipal Cyberspace Administration. Authorities did not specify why, but the suspension probably related to subtle criticisms of Xi Jinping on the platform; Zhihu promised to "make adjustments."
Zhihu's prospectus is largely mum on the censorship question, perhaps because the company feels it's gotten good enough at doing it. Zhihu says it has a "comprehensive community governance system" that combines "AI-powered content assessment algorithms" with the ability of users to report each other as well as "proprietary know-how." These resemble the same tools most big Chinese social media platforms use to censor content and keep in Beijing's good graces.
Who gets rich?
Here's what we know:
- Founder, CEO and Chairman Yuan Zhou currently owns 8.2% of Zhihu, with another 8% worth of options, which he can exercise within 60 days of the IPO, held in a separate holding company controlled by a trust of which he is the beneficiary. Following exercise, Zhou will have the vast majority of aggregate voting power.
- Innovation Works, beneficially owned by Peter Liu and Kai-Fu Lee, owns 13.1% of Zhihu. According to corporate database Qichacha, Innovation Works invested about $153,000 in an angel round in January 2011, then made follow-on investments in the C and D rounds.
- Tencent owns 12.3%.
- Qiming Entities owns 11.3%. According to corporate database Qichacha, Qiming invested $1 million in Zhihu's series A, then made follow-on investments in the B, C and D rounds.
Kuaishou, Baidu and Sogou also own stakes, as does SAIF IV Mobile Apps Limited.
Innovation Works' Kai-Fu Lee and Peter Liu, and Qiming Ventures, both of which invested early and often, look like the biggest winners besides founder Zhou.
What people are saying
"Zhihu, if it ever wants to be a truly massive platform, will need to go out of the hardcore knowledge-sharing space, and become more mainstream, more entertaining, and yes, even less intellectual. But to capture that market, who better to partner with than Kuaishou, who built its business on exactly those characteristics?" —Ying-Ying Lu, co-host of Tech Buzz China.
"After separating video content into its own feed, Zhihu is now in competition with Bilibili and [ByteDance-owned] Xigua Video. Education-themed videos used to be one of the important growth drivers for the latter two apps. Now [Zhihu], the app that specialized in educational content, has joined the game." —Lan Xi (pen name), independent tech writer.
David Wertime is Protocol's executive director. David is a widely cited China expert with twenty years' experience who has served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in China, founded and sold a media company, and worked in senior positions within multiple newsrooms. He also hosts POLITICO's China Watcher newsletter. After four years working on international deals for top law firms in New York and Hong Kong, David co-founded Tea Leaf Nation, a website that tracked Chinese social media, later selling it to the Washington Post Company. David then served as Senior Editor for China at Foreign Policy magazine, where he launched the first Chinese-language articles in the publication's history. Thereafter, he was Entrepreneur in Residence at the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, which owns the Philadelphia Inquirer. In 2019, David joined Protocol's parent company and in 2020, launched POLITICO's widely-read China Watcher. David is a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a Research Associate at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for the Study of Contemporary China, a Member of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, and a Truman National Security fellow. He lives in San Francisco with his wife Diane and his puppy, Luna.
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.
Politics
The PRO Act hurts American competitiveness
"The U.S. needs to focus on helping, not hurting, small businesses," says CTA president and CEO Gary Shapiro.
Nancy Pelosi is among the PRO Act's supporters in Congress.
Photo: Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/Getty Images
February 23, 2021
Gary Shapiro is president and CEO of the Consumer Technology Association, the U.S. trade association representing more than 2,000 consumer technology companies. He's also a New York Times bestselling author.
February 23, 2021
Gary Shapiro is president and CEO of the Consumer Technology Association.
Should employers be required to give up personal and private information about their employees to union organizers? If 216 Congressional Democrats and two Republicans get their way, employers would have to give a name, phone number and home address to any union official claiming to want to organize their facility. As if anyone in America wants to be visited in their home by a union official financially incentivized to make them sign a unionization petition.
<p>And with the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, or PRO Act, Democrats want that to be all it takes. Among other things, the proposal would allow employees to simply sign a petition, giving them overnight unionization. This "card check" proposal appropriately died in 2009, when the Democrats controlled the White House and both houses of Congress. Even many Democrats then could not stomach it. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>Moreover, the Democrats want to override the right-to-work laws <a href="https://www.workplacefairness.org/unions-right-to-work-laws" target="_blank">in 28 states</a>, which stops workers from being compelled to join a union to work in the public sector. Of course they do, because many workers don't want to be in a union. In 2015 after Wisconsin enacted a <a href="https://madison.com/wsj/news/local/govt-and-politics/scott-walker-signs-bill-makes-wisconsin-25th-right-to-work-state/article_9022e13e-ffb8-5011-b97c-ab88b191e784.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">right-to-work law</a>, <a href="https://fox11online.com/news/fox-11-investigates/fox-11-investigates-1-year-under-right-to-work-in-wisconsin" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">nearly 100,000</a> workers dropped out of the public-sector unions. Removing right-to-work laws also gives unions a free pass, since they no longer must answer to workers or even provide value in order to get new members.</p><p>Right to work increases jobs and choices, which is why we include it as one of the grading metrics in CTA's biennial U.S. Innovation Scorecard. States with right-to-work laws receive an A+, and those that force workers to participate in and pay dues to unions earn an F. </p><p>Although most Americans have a favorable view of unions, very <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/30/union-membership-2/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">few belong to one, according to a Pew study from 2018</a>. Provisions in the PRO Act were not designed to help small and local businesses and would limit opportunities for gig workers and independent contractors. American workers could lose key employee rights, including Americans' fundamental right to work without being forced to pay dues to or join a union — or worse, losing their jobs — if this bill is enacted. The U.S. needs to focus on helping, not hurting, small businesses — businesses currently struggling to keep their doors open during the COVID-19 pandemic. </p><h3>The tech industry and unions are incompatible
</h3><p>The tech industry is pulling our economy and stock market forward. Unions preserve the status quo, and union workers might not be shifted quickly to other jobs and projects. Tech companies by nature must pivot on a dime, work swiftly to get the next version or product out faster than competitors and redeploy workers based on changing demand. Tech workers average a higher salary, and employees typically own a portion of the company either through public stock or by equity commitment when working for a startup. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>Ironically, the big losers under the PRO Act would be workers — the very group the law is intended to help. Under the PRO Act, many independent workers would lose the right to enter flexible work arrangements that they seek and value. PRO Act provisions applying to contractors are very similar to California's AB 5 law, which has destroyed thousands of careers by making it difficult for businesses to hire freelancers or independent workers. </p><p>Unions are proposing this radical and anti-business shift in workplace rules at the worst possible time. Our economy is fragile, and American businesses are struggling to reopen and emerge from the pandemic. Employers are considering whether to invest in the U.S. or elsewhere, and union demands have made many American companies non-competitive globally. It would be economic suicide to pass laws shifting unions to the default choice of American companies — unless you want our economy to shift to European-style lackluster performance with slow, if any, GDP growth. </p>
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Gary Shapiro is president and CEO of the Consumer Technology Association, the U.S. trade association representing more than 2,000 consumer technology companies. He's also a New York Times bestselling author.
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://www.protocol.com/media-library/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNTY2NTc3NS9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYyMTM1MjYyM30._ykxxCyx3_wDbZrYgCcmK0QT2Ue1tZFdP5pf60kOmPU/image.jpg?width=980" id="2c61a" 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://www.protocol.com/media-library/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNTY2NTc4My9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYzNzg3MTM2M30.RZtqR7F_FuXK1S24V6jVaqUZ0xOSG-gCwj00xU3fxcM/image.png?width=980" id="b43ef" 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
Why the CEO of GoFundMe is calling out Congress on coronavirus
GoFundMe has seen millions of Americans asking for help to put food on the table and pay the bills. Tim Cadogan thinks Congress should help fix that.
"They need help with rent. They need help to get food. They need help with basic bills," GoFundMe CEO Tim Cadogan said. "That's what people need help with to get through this period."
Photo: John Lamparski/Getty Images
February 12, 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 11, 2021
Tim Cadogan started his first day as CEO of GoFundMe about two weeks before the pandemic wrecked the world. He knew he was joining a company that tried to help people make extra money. He didn't know his company would become a lifeline for millions of Americans who couldn't pay their bills or put food on the table.
And so after a year in which millions of people have asked for help from strangers on GoFundMe, and at least $600 million has been raised (that number could be as much as $1 billion or more now, but GoFundMe didn't provide fundraising data past August) just for coronavirus-related financial crises, Cadogan has had enough. On Thursday, he wrote an open letter to Congress calling for a massive federal aid package aimed at addressing people's fundamental needs. In an unusual call for federal action from a tech CEO, Cadogan wrote that GoFundMe should not and can never replace generous Congressional aid for people who are truly struggling.
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</div></p><p>"I don't look at it actually as political. We've got facts, we should share them," Cadogan told Protocol. Given the ongoing negotiations over a new federal aid package, Cadogan said he felt it was his duty to speak out. "There are many millions of people who urgently need help." </p><p>In mid-March, the <a href="https://www.protocol.com/coronavirus-gofundme-tim-cadogan-interview" target="_self">first wave of pleas on GoFundMe</a> focused on help for struggling small businesses, a pattern the site had never witnessed before. Campaigns for PPE came next, and then for everyday financial needs. The wave fell a bit in early fall (perhaps coinciding with the gradual reopening of businesses), and then the scariest trends sharpened as winter rolled in and the pandemic worsened. </p><p>People couldn't pay their bills, and they couldn't put food on the table. Their relatives were dying, and health care costs were escalating. When it became clear the need was overwhelming, acute and not going away anytime soon, the company launched a new fundraising category in October called "Rent, Food, Monthly Bills." In December, even after Congress passed another relief bill, <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2021/02/11/gofundme-ceo-congress-pass-covid-relief-desperate-americans-column/4440425001/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">the number of people asking for help</a> was higher than in May, the peak of the pandemic's first wave.</p><p>"They need help with rent. They need help to get food. They need help with basic bills," Cadogan explained. "It's nothing fancy. It's the basics. That's what people need help with to get through this period." It seems obvious that Congress should help fix that, he said.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>Reckoning with what's technically a pandemic success story for GoFundMe has been at times emotionally overwhelming for Cadogan and his team. GoFundMe has never had more demand, and it's for all the wrong reasons. The product was never meant for this kind of world, according to Cadogan; it was built to help people fund the better times in life, like study abroad trips and vacations. </p><p>"There are the folks on our trust and safety team and happiness team helping these customers directly, and it's a lot to take on," he said. And so they've focused relentlessly on improving their product and hiring new people to meet the demand. Their jobs are not nearly as hard as the lives of the people they are helping, and Cadogan focuses on that context to get himself and his team through each day.</p><p>"Our platform was never meant to be a source of support for basic needs, and it can never be a replacement for robust federal COVID-19 relief that is generous and targeted to help the millions of Americans who are struggling," Cadogan wrote in the open letter.</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.
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