There is something inherently ignorable about an email. Ray Tomlinson sent the first one (to himself) in 1971 but he can’t remember what the subject was.  

Email is not particularly cool either; it’s a Gen-X invention that Millennials and Gen-Zs are consistently trying to move away from it with platforms like Slack, which is hellbent on killing it off. 

Slack doesn’t make any attempt to hide this contempt for email, either. Recently it added a feature to send messages beyond the walls of a company and connect organisations into shared channels. Unfortunately for email, most businesses want these instant cloud-based communications. Not some legacy tech where you can accidentally ‘cc’ in all your contacts.

Yet for some time there has been a growing community of individuals, entrepreneurs and startups that still see value in email in the golden age of cloud computing. They see an opportunity to feed that cloud-based innovation into your inbox and breathe new life into this founding pillar of the Digital Age. Simply put, the innovations that Slack has built to kill email off have, ironically, inspired others to improve it. 

The inbox revolution

In the middle of 2019, a New York Times article drew attention to a startup that promised to revolutionise emails with machine learning-based shortcuts. It was a Gmail plugin called Superhuman that reportedly had an ever expanding waiting list of potential clients, all keen to pay a $30 (£22.8) a month premium for email.  

The company borrows Gmail creator Paul Buchheit’s rule of “every interaction should be faster than 100ms”. It has developed features that it says will “make you feel superhuman”, such as an AI-based email triage (which is actually just a suped up filter), an undo send capability, message scheduling and a few more that sound like very mundane superpowers.

Productivity expert, author and founder of career advice site The Muse, Alexandra Cavoulacos points out that Superhuman is the newest in a long line of startups that claim to improve email. She gave its plugin a go, along with a rival service called Hey (you may have seen it battling Apple in the news). 

“Few have been successful in the long-term, but many have had early user growth and interest,” Cavoulacos explains. “What that indicates to me is that there is a real demand for an improved product. We spend so much time in email that something that has a better user experience or saves you time can be very valuable. 

“We are very used to our existing tools, so the new options have to be that much better to be worth switching – even more so for paid products. Superhuman has focused on speed and shortcuts, quite successfully – when I tested them out I definitely saw better speeds and enjoyed a number of their features. Hey seems to be focusing more on being a better filter – keeping just anyone from taking up your time, mental energy and inbox real estate.”

While apps like Slack have a lot of upsides, Cavoulacos still believes that email has an important role in the modern age and she suggests that instant message platforms have facilitated a move to an immediate response model. And, while there is certainly work that is best done via platforms that focus on real-time collaboration and instant messaging, the more private affair of email still has its place in 2020 and beyond. 

“Email is still the best tool for thoughtful asynchronous communication, which is critical for allowing individuals to control when and how they do their work,” Cavoulacos says. “It is already challenging enough to keep your inbox from becoming your to-do list, with every email becoming a new task for you to do. Add in Slack or other app notifications, and professionals find themselves busy all day, but not productive.” 

Collaboration loops

Like Superhuman and Hey, Boštjan Bregar, the CEO and co-founder of Loop, believes that innovations in cloud-based communications and instant collaboration tools can be imported to your inbox. HBregar has been in the collaboration space for many years but didn’t start with email. In 2016, angel investor and long-term collaborator Ben White suggested he should stop thinking about new, alternative email platforms and instead look at adding collaboration into something already in use. Whereas Slack and Microsoft Teams talk about killing off email, White and Bregar decided to go against the grain to try and modernise it.

“There are about three or four players that are really trying to sort of reinvented email – Dropbox just entered the market a few weeks ago with their solution,” Bregar explains. “So there are quite a few people now figuring out that maybe the solution is not bringing people out of email, but actually bringing all the new stuff into it.”

Loop connects to your existing email structure, whoever the provider may be, and floods it with various shortcuts and efficiency add-ons. It works as an individual performance boost or as a company-wide collaboration tool similar to Slack and Microsoft Teams. For example, when an email comes through that is perhaps more relevant to someone else in your team, rather than cc them in another message, you can @ them, or @ your whole team, and find the right person. From there, documents, resources and anything else required can be pulled in for more instant collaboration between you, your team and also the sender. 

However, as seamless as that sounds, it adds to the concerns raised by Cavoulacos about “always-on” culture where the lines between work and life can blur – something that may have been exacerbated for home workers by the pandemic. So, letting the rest of your team, or the world, know you’re currently reading emails may take away that intimacy. 

Bregar doesn’t see it that way, however. In fact, quite the opposite. “It is such an individual tool,” he says. “You’re on your own when you’re in your inbox, you don’t feel there’s anybody else in there. If you use Slack, you feel there are other people there. Any tool you take today that has been put onto the market in the last 10 years, you have this feeling that you’re sort of together. Whereas within the inbox, it’s yours.

“The challenge is how to preserve this ability to be on your own and be effective in doing your stuff while feeling that you have your team there to help you because otherwise, you have to switch between platforms.”

For now, at least, email seems here to stay as it still remains one of the most effective ways to communicate outside your organisation. With add-ons for easier collaboration that imitate what instant messaging-focused platforms offer, maybe it really will be email that triumphs after all.

VMware has discontinued Datrium’s hyperconverged infrastructure DVX hardware line “effective immediately” a little over a month after acquiring the disaster recovery specialist.

Datrium will stop accepting orders of Datrium DVX hardware from new customers, with existing customers able to make additional purchases up to 31 October 2020, according to an email distributed to Datrium customers, circulating on Reddit.

This ‘last time buy’ programme limits purchases to D12x10D, D12x4C and F24x2D hardware with the DaOS 5.1 operating system only. Existing customers can also renew support up to 31 October 2022, with a maximum support term ending a year later.

Versions of the DaOS operating system earlier than DaOS 5.0, meanwhile, will no longer be supported by VMware beyond 31 October, meaning customers will have to upgrade their systems.

Versions beyond DaOS 5.0 will be supported with critical functionality and security fixes, although customers should no longer expect any new features or added functionality. 

“Unless otherwise agreed to under your maintenance and technical support terms with Datrium, we will continue to provide maintenance and technical support through the end of your current support services period (inclusive of existing support contracts that expire after Oct 31, 2023), which may be amended by Additional Purchases and Support Renewal Order as permitted above,” the letter reads.

“Datrium DVX hardware support will be limited to the existing hardware configurations. Firmware fixes cannot be offered if the components are past end-of-support by the 3rd party component hardware vendor.”

VMware announced plans to acquire the disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) provider in a bid to expand its current VMware Site Recovery portfolio in early July. Datrium has been insistent the integration of its technology and platforms into VMware’s offerings will feed into efforts to help customers build hybrid clouds by combining the infrastructure of VMware Cloud with Datrium DRaaS.

Although specialising in DRaaS, Datrium had long-hoped to make waves in the hyperconverged infrastructure market, especially with its DaOS operating system and DVX hardware. With its hardware being discontinued, and versions of the operating system before DaOS 5.0 no longer supported by the parent company, this will be a disappointment to customers who’ve invested in Datrium’s product ecosystem.  

IT Pro approached VMware for confirmation on its post-acquisition plans.

Video conferencing platform Zoom has introduced a swathe of new features that aim to “liven up your meetings” including filters, reactions, improved lighting capabilities and better background noise suppression. 

Users can choose from a variety of virtual backgrounds, as before, as well as a set of fresh video filters and toggles to alter their appearance while in conversation with their friends, family or colleagues. 

Filters to change the colour or set it to black and white or sepia have been rolled out to add more of a “casual” tone to virtual meetings, which countless workers have had to engage in due to office closures and lockdowns. Zoom also added filters that add unicorn horns, pirate eye patches, or aerospace goggles to participants. The filters can be configured in the settings.

“We believe that people connect better on video, but feeling connected when working from home is still challenging,” Zoom said in a blog post. “The casual and fun elements that bring us together in the office seem to be missing from virtual meeting culture … until now.”

“Zoom wants to empower you to feel your best in virtual meetings, express your individuality, and build moments of fun into your day with some new features that uplevel your video game,” the company added. 

The move appears to address a serious issue with video conferencing fatigue that many remote workers have felt since lockdown began. Research shows that continuous video conferencing leads to weariness due to the way such technology has disrupted the way we naturally communicate with each other.

As part of Zoom’s changes, users can also exert more control over the lighting of their frame, which can make a difference to people who work in rooms that aren’t  well-lit. 

Another useful new addition is improved noise suppression, which can drown out background noise such as building works or children playing, for example. The low setting will allow for soft background music or audio, while high background noise suppression will apparently provide distraction-free audio for important meetings and presentations.

Users delivering presentations can also adjust their virtual background to overlay their frame over slideshows, allowing them to move the video feed to any part of the screen and even resize the window.

The drive to add more fun is significant given the platform’s origins as a business-to-business video conferencing service and could be a nod to the millions of consumers that have flocked to the system during COVID-19. 

Indeed, several other platforms, including Teams and Facebook, have instigated several major platform changes in order to keep up with the Zoom surge, with Zoom’s latest changes perhaps a means of trying to stay on top of the competition.

Image courtesy of Zoom

Facebook is allowing its employees to work from home until July 2021 due to the continuing spread of the coronavirus across the US.

The social media firm will also give its staff £1,000 to put towards any home office equipment they’ll need.

The decision follows a number of tech companies that have announced similar plans, such as Google, and those that have made remote working permanent for some of their workforces, such as Twitter and Fujitsu. 

“Based on guidance from health and government experts, as well as decisions drawn from our internal discussions about these matters, we are allowing employees to continue voluntarily working from home until July 2021,” a Facebook spokeswoman said in a statement. “In addition, we are giving employees an additional $1,000 for home office needs.”

The company also said it will continue to reopen offices in a restricted capacity, but only where virus mitigation has been in place for at least two months. It is unlikely that many locations in the US will reopen before the end of the year, however, due to the high number of coronavirus cases in the country. 

There was more optimism from Facebook and Google in May, mid-way through the first wave of the pandemic, as both announced plans to reopen offices in July. That has come and gone, but the pandemic still has a strong foothold in America.

Twitter showed a bit more flexibility and forward-thinking with its COVID-19 strategy, offering employees the decision to work from home indefinitely. The social media company also announced it wouldn’t open offices before September, though that may also change due to the continued rise in cases.

Japanese manufacturing giant Fujitsu announced plans at the start of July to make 80,000 workers permanently remote. This also included reducing its office footprint by 50% as part of its post-pandemic future. The plans are only for its employees in Japan at the moment, but Fujitsu hopes to reduce office space by 2022. 

SAP has partnered with HPE to make its HANA Enterprise Cloud available on-premise for the first time through HPE’s infrastructure as a service (IaaS) GreenLake platform.

The partnership will allow customers to keep their SAP software configuration and data on-premise while benefiting from the flexibility of the cloud experience, including the subscription-based model that GreenLake is distributed through.

HPE will supply, install and manage customers’ infrastructure, while SAP will contribute their software through the SAP HANA database, including the full SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud catalogue of apps. These will include both SAP S/4HANA and SAP BW/4HANA.

The virtual hearing for the trial against a teenager accused of July’s mass Twitter hack was cut short on Wednesday after the meeting was hijacked by members of the public.

Prosecutors were in the midst of deliberations over the alleged involvement of a 17-year-old teenager from Florida when their conference call was hijacked by a series of interruptions, including 15 seconds of a porographic clip, according to Krebsonsecurity.

The teenager is thought to have orchestrated the 15 July hack on Twitter, which led to the compromise of a number of high profile accounts. His bond hearing with the Hillsborough County criminal court was held via videoconferencing service Zoom, which has been plagued by security issues throughout 2020.

A notice of the hearing was available via public records, which included joining details and the session’s identification number. In a practice known as ‘Zoom bombing‘, unauthorised users are able to make use of this information in order to repeatedly join a call and interrupt the meeting taking place.

“Less than a minute had passed before one attendee not party to the case interrupted a discussion between the attorney and the judge by streaming a live video of himself adjusting his face mask,” Brian Krebs wrote. “Just a few minutes later, someone began interjecting loud music.”

Jude Christopher Nash, who presided over the hearing, was also “clearly” in charge of administering the video stream, according to Krebs. When the prosecution was interrupted by 15 seconds of the random conversation of an unauthorised guest, Nash reportedly told the participants he was removing the troublemakers as quickly as possible.

What happened next was quite common at the beginning of the year, when the first reports of Zoom bombing first surfaced. One of the unauthorised guests streamed a graphic video clip from Pornhub for roughly 15 seconds. Judge Nash then abruptly terminated the meeting.

Zoom has taken steps to prevent participants from hijacking meetings with settings that hide its information and capabilities to eject unwanted participants, but those settings were not fully used in this case.

The teenager on trial is accused of illegally gaining access to some 130 Twitter accounts, targeting the likes of Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates. It’s believed 36 inboxes were also accessed during the hack, which led to the theft of data from seven accounts, according to Twitter.

Despite the disruption, the Judge ruled not to change the defendant’s bail conditions.

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A recently introduced change to the way the Firefox browser handles cookies is said to be breaking a number of websites, including the gov.uk platform, with web developers being urged to re-examine their web code.

Mozilla is changing the default value of the SameSite attribute in the Firefox browser from ‘none’ to ‘lax’, meaning the browser will withhold cookies on cross-site requests unless the user navigates to the URL from an external site.

According to reports on GitHub, services on the gov.uk platform are not usable following the SameSite changes, with users experiencing broken elements or pictures missing, for example, on affected sites.

​TikTok has announced plans to open its first European data centre in Ireland, an investment worth around €420 million (£380 million).

The news comes following the US government’s crackdown on the video-sharing social media platform. President Donald Trump had previously threatened to ban the app on the basis of Chinese-linked security threats and on Monday he demanded that the US Treasury receive a cut of the proceeds from the forced sale of TikTok. However, according to regulatory lawyers, this may be open to challenges.

TikTok’s decision to open a data centre in Ireland, the first in Europe, could signify a desire to shift its operations away from the US as well as secure its position in the European market.

The million-euro investment is expected to create hundreds of jobs, as well as facilitate faster loading time and safe storage of European users’ data, according to Roland Cloutier, TikTok’s global chief information security officer.

“This data centre signals our long-term commitment to Ireland and we expect the data centre to open and be operational by early 2022,” Cloutier wrote in a blog post.

Late last month, TikTok Ireland became the data controller for users in the EEA and Switzerland.

“Ireland already plays a key role in our rapidly expanding European operations,” said Cloutier. “Since establishing our EMEA Trust and Safety Hub in Dublin at the start of this year, we have rapidly expanded our team and appointed senior leaders who are continuously enhancing the strategies, policies and processes designed to keep people on TikTok safe.”

Commenting on the announcement, Martin Shanahan, CEO of IDA Ireland, the agency responsible for the attraction and retention of inward foreign direct investment into the country, said:

“TikTok’s decision to establish its first European data centre in Ireland, representing a substantial investment here by the company, is very welcome and, following on from the establishment of its EMEA Trust & Safety Hub in Dublin earlier in the year, positions Ireland as an important location in the company’s global operations.”

With the new investment, TikTok might be hoping to receive better treatment from regulators in the EU than those in the US.

In late June, the platform signed the EU’s Code of Practice on disinformation, agreeing to a set of voluntary steps aimed at combating the spread of false information and ‘fake news’. However, it is unclear whether this will be enough to appease the EU and ward off the sort of restrictions imposed on fellow Chinese tech companies.

Financial tech firm Global Payments has agreed a partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to expand its global reach with the development of a cloud-based payment platform for card issuers.

As part of the deal, Global Payments will also tap into AWS services as its preferred cloud provider.

The cloud-based platform is described as a “processing service” for card issuers. It aims to give companies more access to technology-oriented services that could help them to deliver more modern consumer experiences and help accelerate feature improvements.

Global Payments CEO Jeff Sloan told MarketWatch that it could “level the playing field for large financial institutions” suggesting that innovations such as contactless payment options and digital banking services “can all be done better, faster and cheaper in the cloud“.

He added that the arrangement with AWS was about “letting large financial institutions globally access the same technology that startups did.”

“The new platform’s cloud-based architecture will give clients the ability to use the services they need with greater speed-to-market, flexibility and best-in-class experiences for our customers and their cardholders,” said Sloan.

“By strategically partnering with AWS, we can capitalise on the fintech and open banking movement, further expand our role in technology innovation, leapfrog existing distribution models and solidify our position as a leading provider of technology solutions for financial institutions, new market entrants, and retailers across the globe.”

Global Payments will use a range of AWS services, such as storage, compute, database, security, analytics and machine learning to fulfil compliance requirements, enable new cloud-based services, and enhance customer experiences.

The two organisations will also work together to explore additional opportunities for collaboration on innovative payments products and services across all of Global Payments.

The partnership is another big win for AWS in the financial world. The company already works with CapitalOne, CoinBase and the National Bank of Canada, to name a few.