For all the meetings most of us seem to have on our calendars these days, you’d think the act of scheduling would be a heck of a lot easier. Sure, Google Calendar has its own built-in booking system, which is rolling out slowly but surely as we speak. But that system is available only for paying Workspace customers, and it feels more imitative than innovative. The source of its inspiration is pretty clearly Calendly—the de facto standard scheduling tool for business professionals.
For the third time in seven years, Washington and Brussels have shaken hands on a deal to keep customer data flowing—and to keep a certain American social network afloat—across the Atlantic. The new Trans-Atlantic Data Privacy Framework’s provisions for E.U. individuals to seek redress against overreaching U.S. intelligence collection may or may not survive court scrutiny in Europe. But this much about the arrangement seems clear: Once again, U.S. inaction on privacy has let
When the British army liberated the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in April 1945, they found horrors so shocking that a journalist’s eyewitness reports to the BCC were held for days because their veracity was in doubt. “We lived among heaps of bodies,” says Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, a survivor of the camp whose firsthand experience at both Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz is now memorialized in a 130-minute video testimony. In the 1998 video, she tells an interviewer from the USC
Anti-vaxxers in public office. QAnon supporters on the school boards. According to a number of media outlets, we are living in a “golden age of conspiracy theories.” Except, maybe we’re not. A new report from Google’s Jigsaw group explains how conspiracy theories are, in fact, no more numerous than in the past. Rather, it’s the distribution and means of proliferation that’s changed—the technology and internet platforms that focus more attention on
The fusing of Sony’s PlayStation Plus and PlayStation Now services was inevitable. Not only did the two subscription offerings individually fall short of Microsoft’s Game Pass offerings, the similar names of the offerings created confusion among some users. So Tuesday’s announcement that a new combined service would launch in June didn’t pack the punch that many gamers were hoping for. Instead of picking up the gauntlet Microsoft threw at its feet, Sony continues to p
Otter, the AI-powered meeting transcription service, is rolling out a set of new features designed to boost collaboration even after meetings are over. The company’s Otter Assistant can already find meeting invitations in your Google or Outlook calendar, automatically join meetings on platforms such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams, and transcribe them for you—even when you can’t attend the meetings yourself. Now, a new newsfeed-style view integrates calendar information directly
On the internet, no one knows you’re a dog. But what about at work? Running a people business is anything but dull. And when you employ enough people—especially in a remote-first, distributed company—you’re guaranteed to run into interesting questions about identity. With new paradigms of distributed computing and cryptographic identifiers erupting around us with blockchains, NFTs, and web3, I’m left wondering: Is there a better way than how w
Climate change is creating a nightmare scenario for subsistence farmers around the world. Subsistence farms are typically small operations, often less than 2 hectares, with outsize importance to the families that operate them, and to the surrounding community that relies on the crops. As of 2013, nearly 2 billion people on the planet relied on small-scale subsistence farms for survival. But those farms are in trouble: Rising CO2 levels have increased the likelihood and severity of extreme weathe
It’s an unfortunate but ever-present truth: The realities of COVID-19 are still far from over. In fact, cases are actually on the rise again—concurrent with easing U.S. restrictions, quarantine fatigue, waning vaccine efficacy and the increasing (yet misguided) belief that the pandemic is behind us. Now, with recent reports showcasing rising infections and hospitalizations in Europe, as well as new media coverage highlighting renewed lockdowns in China, it’s clear that we, a
NFTs couldn’t have gotten much frothier last year, and recent data suggests the bubbly is still flowing—despite, perhaps, fizzling, too. That’s as a third of NFTs minted since January 2021 ended up a “dead collection, with little or no trade activity post-minting,” reports blockchain analytics firm Nansen, which surveyed roughly 8,400 collections composed of more than 19 million NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain. Meanwhile, another third of NFTs are trading