Workplace

Can Google make bad hybrid meetings better?

Workers in the conference room can all join meetings separately with Google’s “Companion mode.”

A Google Meet highlighting Companion mode

Companion mode launched to all Google Workspace customers on Thursday.

Image: Google

The worst part of hybrid work right now might be the meeting. How do you bridge the gap between the people video calling in from home and the people chatting around the conference room table? There’s the dreaded video echo, the inability to chat through the conference room monitor and the general disconnect between the people talking in person and those stuck in the grid. One of Google’s answers to the problem of hybrid meetings is Companion mode, which launched to all Google Workspace customers on Thursday.

Companion mode brings features like chat, polls, hand-raising and screen-sharing to workers joining a call from a shared conference room. Instead of being at the whim of Google Meet’s hardware, workers can log in to meetings on their own devices and use these features (which have become standard within meeting software).

For now, workers using companion mode will rely on conference room hardware for audio and video. But Dave Citron, head of product for Google Meet, said the next step will be allowing workers in companion mode to use their own video feeds. “We heard a lot from our customers that one of the great equalizers of everyone working from home is that everyone is a tile,” Citron said.

For Google Workspace and its customers tackling hybrid work, the goal is “collaboration equity” — in other words, the ability to contribute equally no matter your location or device of choice. Though omicron has put return-to-office plans on hold, companies haven’t totally given up on the office. At the same time, they are reckoning with the fact that remote work is here to stay. At the bare minimum, remote and in-person employees need to be able to easily communicate with each other. This is where collaboration software and video conferencing hardware has become so essential. And chaotic.

The hybrid-meeting problem has created a mad dash among video software providers, and everyone’s approaching it a little differently. Zoom unveiled its “Smart Gallery” in December, which uses hardware and AI to isolate faces within a conference room and place them in separate tiles. Microsoft is experimenting with a new type of conference room, complete with a curved table and projected screen. Webex is investing in the home office.

Google rebranded its G-Suite workplace products as Google Workspace back in October 2020, and since then has positioned itself as one of the all-in-one productivity setups to beat. With our dramatic increase in usage of video software, Google Meet is one of the tools customers rely most on. Citron said he closely follows the changing ways we do our work.

He said workplace uncertainty is top of mind for his team, both as engineers and as Google employees (the company pushed back its planned Jan. 10 reopening). Flexibility is key. He wants to build products that allow for every possible way of working. “If we can continue to build products that enable work through all sorts of different flexible configurations, it helps inoculate the uncertainty and disruption,” Citron said.

Companion mode on its own cannot singlehandedly equalize meetings. As Google notes in its blog post, it’s still difficult for remote employees to weigh in when other employees are in-person. It might be hard, too, for in-person employees to resist side conversations. Fixing hybrid meetings goes beyond software. It will require a concerted culture shift and compromise from us all.

Fintech

Judge Zia Faruqui is trying to teach you crypto, one ‘SNL’ reference at a time

His decisions on major cryptocurrency cases have quoted "The Big Lebowski," "SNL," and "Dr. Strangelove." That’s because he wants you — yes, you — to read them.

The ways Zia Faruqui (right) has weighed on cases that have come before him can give lawyers clues as to what legal frameworks will pass muster.

Photo: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post via Getty Images

“Cryptocurrency and related software analytics tools are ‘The wave of the future, Dude. One hundred percent electronic.’”

That’s not a quote from "The Big Lebowski" — at least, not directly. It’s a quote from a Washington, D.C., district court memorandum opinion on the role cryptocurrency analytics tools can play in government investigations. The author is Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui.

Keep ReadingShow less
Veronica Irwin

Veronica Irwin (@vronirwin) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol covering fintech. Previously she was at the San Francisco Examiner, covering tech from a hyper-local angle. Before that, her byline was featured in SF Weekly, The Nation, Techworker, Ms. Magazine and The Frisc.

The financial technology transformation is driving competition, creating consumer choice, and shaping the future of finance. Hear from seven fintech leaders who are reshaping the future of finance, and join the inaugural Financial Technology Association Fintech Summit to learn more.

Keep ReadingShow less
FTA
The Financial Technology Association (FTA) represents industry leaders shaping the future of finance. We champion the power of technology-centered financial services and advocate for the modernization of financial regulation to support inclusion and responsible innovation.
Enterprise

AWS CEO: The cloud isn’t just about technology

As AWS preps for its annual re:Invent conference, Adam Selipsky talks product strategy, support for hybrid environments, and the value of the cloud in uncertain economic times.

Photo: Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services

AWS is gearing up for re:Invent, its annual cloud computing conference where announcements this year are expected to focus on its end-to-end data strategy and delivering new industry-specific services.

It will be the second re:Invent with CEO Adam Selipsky as leader of the industry’s largest cloud provider after his return last year to AWS from data visualization company Tableau Software.

Keep ReadingShow less
Donna Goodison

Donna Goodison (@dgoodison) is Protocol's senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the 'Big 3' cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.

Image: Protocol

We launched Protocol in February 2020 to cover the evolving power center of tech. It is with deep sadness that just under three years later, we are winding down the publication.

As of today, we will not publish any more stories. All of our newsletters, apart from our flagship, Source Code, will no longer be sent. Source Code will be published and sent for the next few weeks, but it will also close down in December.

Keep ReadingShow less
Bennett Richardson

Bennett Richardson ( @bennettrich) is the president of Protocol. Prior to joining Protocol in 2019, Bennett was executive director of global strategic partnerships at POLITICO, where he led strategic growth efforts including POLITICO's European expansion in Brussels and POLITICO's creative agency POLITICO Focus during his six years with the company. Prior to POLITICO, Bennett was co-founder and CMO of Hinge, the mobile dating company recently acquired by Match Group. Bennett began his career in digital and social brand marketing working with major brands across tech, energy, and health care at leading marketing and communications agencies including Edelman and GMMB. Bennett is originally from Portland, Maine, and received his bachelor's degree from Colgate University.

Enterprise

Why large enterprises struggle to find suitable platforms for MLops

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, and as larger enterprises go from deploying hundreds of models to thousands and even millions of models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

Photo: artpartner-images via Getty Images

On any given day, Lily AI runs hundreds of machine learning models using computer vision and natural language processing that are customized for its retail and ecommerce clients to make website product recommendations, forecast demand, and plan merchandising. But this spring when the company was in the market for a machine learning operations platform to manage its expanding model roster, it wasn’t easy to find a suitable off-the-shelf system that could handle such a large number of models in deployment while also meeting other criteria.

Some MLops platforms are not well-suited for maintaining even more than 10 machine learning models when it comes to keeping track of data, navigating their user interfaces, or reporting capabilities, Matthew Nokleby, machine learning manager for Lily AI’s product intelligence team, told Protocol earlier this year. “The duct tape starts to show,” he said.

Keep ReadingShow less
Kate Kaye

Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Her reporting on AI and tech ethics issues has been published in OneZero, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, CityLab, Ad Age and Digiday and heard on NPR. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia.org and is the author of "Campaign '08: A Turning Point for Digital Media," a book about how the 2008 presidential campaigns used digital media and data.

Latest Stories
Bulletins