Microsoft researchers are testing a new feature for Teams that aims to provide speakers on calls with a near-real-time assessment of the moods and reactions of their audience.

The ‘AffectiveSpotflight‘ is said to be built from a type of facial recognition algorithm that uses a neural network to capture and assess the expressions of call participants, monitoring for changes in emotions such as happiness, sadness and surprise.

The software is being developed by researchers across a number of Microsoft facilities in Redmond, Boston and Cambridge, MA, with findings expected to be revealed at Japan’s CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in May.

The system is said to be able to spot subtle movements, such as the shake of a head, a furrowed brow, and even a raised eyebrow. Each of these is then rated between 0 and 1, with positive emotions scoring higher. The person with the highest score is highlighted to the presenter, every 15 seconds.

The facial expressions of the participants are also matched to datasets in Microsoft’s Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), which has expression categories for anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise, and neutral.

“Public speaking is often regarded as one of the most stressful daily activities and is heavily influenced by audience responses to the presenter,” the research states. “In fact, studies that seek to reliably induce acute stress on people often involve giving a presentation in front of a neutral-looking audience (a.k.a., Trier social stress test). While research on audience responses in online settings is still nascent, there is prior work considering the impact of in-person audience responses, especially in the context of alleviating public speaking anxiety.”

The feature isn’t available on Microsoft Teams as yet, but it is very much in keeping with recent updates to the platform that focuses on wellbeing and combating so-called ‘video call fatigue‘.

However, this may be seen as a somewhat overly technical solution to a problem that is fairly easily solved with feedback, and it isn’t difficult to imagine how this feature could create further anxiety as it tries to reduce it.​

Volkswagen has extended its partnership with Microsoft to further boost the development of its self-driving car software.

The German automotive giant will use Azure services to update the software in its vehicles, as a way of gradually building up automated functions over time.

Volkswagen has developed some driver-assistance features in its current models, such as cruise control, through its software subsidiary Car.Software. However, the new deal with Microsoft is about tapping into the tech giant’s expertise with software updates.

With Volkswagen and Car.Software building the initial layer of software in its cars, it is hoped that Microsoft will be able to add more and more automated functions, in a way similar to the smartphone industry’s approach of adapting new features for older hardware.

“For our phones 15 or 20 years ago, when you bought it, it pretty much never changed. Now, we expected every week or every couple of days that, silently, there’s new features,” Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of cloud and artificial intelligence at Microsoft, told Reuters. “That ability to start to program the vehicle in richer and richer ways, and in a safe way, transforms how the experience works.”

This technique is already used by Tesla and is thought to be one of the main reasons why it was able to take the lead in the industry.

Volkswagen originally signed a deal with Microsoft in 2018 to connect its cars to Azure services, but the new agreement could help the German giant catchup to the likes of Telsa with ‘over-the-air updates’ using the industry’s second-largest cloud infrastructure provider.

“As we transform Volkswagen Group into a digital mobility provider, we are looking to continuously increase the efficiency of our software development,” said Dirk Hilgenberg, CEO of the Car.Software Organisation.

“We are building the Automated Driving Platform with Microsoft to simplify our developers’ work through one scalable and data-based engineering environment. By combining our comprehensive expertise in the development of connected driving solutions with Microsoft’s cloud and software engineering know-how, we will accelerate the delivery of safe and comfortable mobility services.”

Microsoft has reportedly been in talks to acquire the social media firm Pinterest in recent months, although the company has so far been unable to secure a deal.

It’s the second time the tech giant has attempted to buy a large social media platform, with negotiations reportedly ending after Pinterest expressed a wish to remain independent, according to The Financial Times.

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In the summer Microsoft also failed in a bid to take over Chinese video-sharing app TikTok, after the company was put up for sale to avoid a complete ban in the US. Microsoft ultimately lost out to Oracle and Walmart, though that deal is still yet to be completed.

Pinterest, however, is valued at around $51 billion (£36bn), which would not only have resulted in Microsoft’s biggest acquisition ever, but also likely one of the largest tech acquisitions in history – potentially only behind Dell’s $67 billion takeover of EMC in 2015. It would also have been the company’s most notable acquisition since it bought LinkedIn for around $26 billion in 2016.

It’s suggested that Microsoft is interested in amassing a portfolio of active online communities that can run on top of its Azure cloud platform, according to sources with knowledge of the deal, speaking to the Financial Times. Aside from LinkedIn, the other notable ‘community’ acquisitions in Microsoft’s portfolio are GitHub and Minecraft.

Owning a company with large numbers of active users, many of which post frequently, can provide valuable data for a business like Microsoft. LinkedIn data, for example, is used to customise other Microsoft apps and services, such as Outlook, which can show shared LinkedIn connections with your email contacts.

What exact use Microsoft would have had with Pinterest data is unknown, but the firm is rapidly growing with 459 million active users. It is also worth noting that the social media site currently relies on Amazon Web Services (AWS) for its infrastructure.

“In Pinterest and TikTok before it, Microsoft is clearly demonstrating that it wants to build up more consumer-facing assets within its flywheel of operations beyond hardware and its Xbox and PC businesses,” argued Nick McQuire, chief of research for enterprise at CCS Insight, speaking to IT Pro.

“When compared to its cloud competitors, particularly its archrival next door, this is a glaring gap for Microsoft. This matters, but it’s less about increasing the diversity of its revenue in new areas like advertising, which through Bing, is not an insignificant business for Microsoft. It’s about winning cloud customers, particularly in consumer-facing industries where the other clouds have bigger assets to bring to bear to win larger deals.”

He added that this approach, the type of corporate style cloud deal between cloud providers and customers that involve a wider set of assets, is becoming increasingly common.

“Having an online B2C asset within its organisation not only helps it address sentiment that it’s just a sober enterprise play, but it also gives it more credibility with customers addressing the huge shifts in consumer behaviour and brand preferences as well,” said McQuire.

Although Microsoft also failed in its bid for TikTok, Oracle and Walmart’s deal has been put on hold pending a review by US President Biden over the previous administration’s national security policies targeting Chinese firms.

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Salesforce is redesigning its office culture and giving employees more choice around when and where they work.

The cloud giant declared the 9-to-5 workday “dead” in a blog post on Tuesday, claiming its demise would lead to a greater work-life balance and, ultimately, a better business.  

Going forward, Salesforce employees will have the choice of three working models; flex, fully remote and office-based. For those that work under the ‘Flex’ bracket, which Salesforce suggests will be the majority of its employees, their time in the office will be between one and three days a week, mostly for collaborative projects, customer meetings and presentations. Otherwise, they will work remotely.

There will also be an option to work remotely on a permanent basis to accommodate those that do not live in close proximity to a Salesforce office and those who have jobs that are not dependent on office attendance.

For a small group of workers, there is the option to work in the office four to five days a week if they are in roles that require it, potentially in segregated shifts. 

“As we enter a new year, we must continue to go forward with agility, creativity and a beginner’s mind – and that includes how we cultivate our culture,” said Brent Hyder, president and chief people officer. “An immersive workspace is no longer limited to a desk in our towers; the 9-to-5 workday is dead, and the employee experience is about more than ping-pong tables and snacks.

“We have an opportunity to create an even better workplace – one that allows us to be more connected to each other, find more balance between work and home, and advance equality – ultimately leading to increased innovation and better business outcomes.”

Not everyone agrees that remote working is the way forward, however. Both Google and Microsoft have expressed concerns about prolonged working from home and Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins on Tuesday suggested that some people were tired of working from home. It’s worth noting that the only examples Robbins gave were from Cisco employees, which he claimed were longing to get back into the office.

“I think we sort of moved into that phase where people actually struggle mentally, people are – they’re not enjoying it,” Robbins said according to CNBC. “One of our employees said to me the other day, ‘I don’t mind the option of working from home. I don’t like being forced to work from home,'” he said.

Unlike most tech firms, Cisco has struggled during the pandemic. The company this week reported a decline in revenue for the fifth quarter in a row, blaming a slowdown in infrastructure spending. 

Google has warned that its productivity and finances may take a hit due to the new ‘hybrid working’ model necessitated by the global COVID pandemic. 

The firm is concerned that social distancing measures and hybrid work models – a structure whereby employees are given more flexibility to work remotely while others work from a central office – will increase costs and potentially impact its “corporate culture”, according to Google’s annual 10-K report.

The tech giant is well-known for offering employee perks as an incentive. It has over 135,000 full-time workers, but it also offers lots of temporary and freelance work for contracted professionals from third-party firms. 

“As we prepare to return our workforce in more locations back to the office in 2021, we may experience increased costs as we prepare our facilities for a safe return to work environments and experiment with hybrid work models, in addition to potential effects on our ability to compete effectively and maintain our corporate culture,” the company stated.

Google was one of the first firms to order its employees to work from home, but as the year and the pandemic progressed, it issued muddled instructions for its planned return to the office. The company has made a number of announcements about ‘testing’ a hybrid approach, but it’s also still investing in large office spaces around the world. 

In December, it was reported that CEO Sundar Pichai told employees that remote working would be extended to 1 September 2021. However, it also came with the stipulation that they would have to work at least three days in the physical office and remain within a suitable commuting distance. 

These reports suggest that one of the biggest providers of remote working software isn’t so keen on its own staff enjoying the benefits of it. Similarly, rival firm Microsoft has also made concerning remarks about mass remote working – despite also heavily investing in services that facilitate this shift. 

For some, it highlights a concerning lack of progression from the very companies powering the so-called ‘new normal’. 

“Many companies in Silicon Valley have been actively encouraging presenteeism for years now with beds, restaurants and even gyms, but it’s an outdated metric for technical staff productivity,” said Martin Biggs, VP and GM of Spinnaker Support. “Our definition of productivity has to change from clock-watching and time-in-office to actual outputs. The biggest mistake I see is organisations trying to apply old strategies to an entirely new situation.”   

There are also some businesses that find the struggles of a tech giant like Google “refreshing”. The company’s “open and honest assessment” of the time it will take to readjust is a great insight for smaller businesses, according to Dan Harding, the CEO of Sign In App. 
 
“Culture takes years to build and it’s clear that Google is not ‘anti-remote work’, just realistic about how much needs to change and adapt to new ways of working and employee expectations,” said Harding. “Some of Google’s main competitive elements and focuses are its staff, culture and wellbeing so they will certainly be one of the ones to watch how they adapt during 2021 and beyond.”

IBM and Palantir have announced a jointly developed product for AI applications called Palantir for IBM Cloud Pak for Data. 

Built on Red Hat OpenShift, the new platform offers a no-code/low-code environment for building and deploying AI-based applications. 

“Today, nearly 75% of businesses surveyed in an IBM sponsored report say they are exploring or implementing AI. However, 37% cited limited AI expertise and 31% cite increasing data complexities and silos as barriers to successful adoption,” said IBM.

Palantir for IBM Cloud Pak for Data leverages Palantir Foundry data operations platform and IBM Cloud Pak for Data services, such as Watson, to help users access, analyze, and act on extensive data spread across hybrid cloud environments. The platform also enables businesses to reduce data silos and monitor data throughout the AI lifecycle, starting from data scooping and model building to analytics and full-fledged enterprise AI deployment. 

What’s more, businesses can choose to work with IBM Data Science and AI Elite team to address AI adoption challenges and handle any data science use cases.

The offering targets enterprises looking to include AI-based applications to automate tasks and processes for large quantities of data, resulting in informed, data-driven decision-making.

For instance, Palantir for IBM Cloud Pak for Data provides retailers with increased visibility and transparency by integrating data across their operational silos, enabling vendors and distributors to proactively monitor supply-chain health in real-time. 

In the finance sector, Palantir for IBM Cloud Pak for Data helps with high-volume data integration, deduplication, and mapping to a common data model, ensuring an aggregated and consistent single customer view (SCV).

Also primed for telecommunications, Palantir for IBM Cloud Pak for Data connects data from suppliers, CRM applications, sales orders, and production data with AI models for campaign optimization and attrition prediction/prevention to enhance customer care and add value across multiple business objectives.

“Our clients deliver products and services while operating in some of the most complex, fast-changing industries of the world,” said Rob Thomas, senior vice president, cloud and data platform, IBM. “Together, IBM and Palantir aim to make it easier than ever for businesses to put AI to work and become data-driven throughout their operations.”

Users of the original version of Microsoft’s Edge browser have until April to upgrade before the tech giant kills if off completely.  

Support for the desktop application, now dubbed ‘Legacy Edge’, will end on 9 March before it is replaced by the new Microsoft Edge browser a month later. 

This move will not come as a surprise to many, as the to kill off the old browser was originally announced in August 2020.

The original version of Microsoft Edge, which first launched in 2015, failed to persuade users to ditch Chrome and Firefox and struggled to live up to the early success of Internet Explorer, which also lost popularity to rival browsers. 

Edge 2.0, however, is built upon the Chromium open source project – the same web rendering engine that powers Google Chrome, as opposed to EdgeHMTL that underpinned Internet Explorer. The decision to use Chromium was to create a browser with better web compatibility for users and less complexity for developers. 

As such, the Legacy Edge browser will now be put to rest completely, first with an update in March that removes support, before it’s ultimately replaced with the new Chromium-based Edge browser in April.
 
“To replace this out of support application [Legacy Edge], we are announcing that the new Microsoft Edge will be available as part of the Windows 10 cumulative monthly security update – otherwise referred to as the Update Tuesday (or ‘B’) release – on April 13, 2021,” the tech giant said. 
 
“The new Microsoft Edge offers built-in security and our best interoperability with the Microsoft security ecosystem, all while being more secure than Chrome for businesses on Windows 10,” the company added. 
 
Microsoft has stressed that Edge won’t suddenly become the default browser if you’ve set Chrome as the preference, but there is no mention, as yet, about automatically migrating browser-related data, such as history or bookmarks.

​If file sharing security and privacy are major concerns, you’ve come to the right place: Tresorit delivers total end-to-end encryption. Its zero-knowledge policy means all data is encrypted client-side, in transit, and on Tresorit’s cloud servers, with no encryption keys or passwords stored anywhere in unencrypted form, meaning that only you have access.

Tresorit offers a wide choice of plans for individuals and businesses, and we tried out the Business Plus plan which costs £13 per user per month if paid yearly. This is a great choice if you’re sharing very large files as the maximum single file size is 15GB, and although you don’t get the unlimited cloud storage offered by some competitors, 2TB per user should be enough for most SMBs.

The Business Plus plan brings a lot more into play as along with file sharing, syncing, user and group management plus Outlook integration, it enables custom portal branding, access audit logs, and an unlimited file version history. Businesses that need to keep their data in one country for compliance reasons can also choose from 11 global data centre locations.

Deployment is undemanding as invitations are mailed out from the Admin Center cloud portal and when a user clicks on the link, they can create an account and choose a password. Obviously, users shouldn’t forget this but, with the Advanced Control option enabled in the portal, administrators can perform password resets.

Users are also invited to download the desktop app which, on completion, will create a personal ‘Tresor’ – Tresorit’s name for a secure, encrypted folder. They can add an unlimited number of Tresors up to their storage limit and for swift access, the desktop app creates a Windows Explorer drive mapping or a Finder favorites folder for macOS.

Tresors can be shared by selecting team members from the desktop app contact list and deciding whether they can manage, edit or view them. These functions are also available from the user’s personal web portal which now allows multiple folders to be selected and offers previews of Office documents and PDFs.

There are plenty of ways to securely share files with outside partners and contractors that don’t have a Tresorit account. From the desktop app, you can create a web link or send them directly from any installed email app with the Outlook plug-in adding extra controls such as link expiry dates, download limits, password protection, access logging, and a requirement for recipients to verify their email addresses.

You can also use Tresorit on the move, as the iOS and Android mobile apps provide many of the features in the desktop app. We loved their built-in scanning functions; we used an iPad to take photos of documents, scan them as JPEGs or PDFs, encrypt them, and send them straight to a selected cloud folder.

Tresorit clearly takes security very seriously, and policies created in the Admin Center portal control everything users are allowed to do. These determine what devices they can access their account from, you can stop browsers from storing their login details and apply IP filtering to block access from specific locations.

You can choose which users are allowed to create file links, set login session limits in days, deny them personal Tresors and disable downloads so users can only view files in shared links. Policies can enforce 2-step verification and Tresorit has now added support for SSO (single sign-on) authentication using Azure Active Directory and Okta.

Tresorit may be a little light on collaboration tools but it’s very heavy on security. Affordable and easy to deploy, it’s an ideal choice for SMBs sharing sensitive and confidential information.

Google Cloud Platform has signed a multi-year agreement with Twitter that will see the social media company shift its offline analytics, data processing and machine learning workloads to Google’s Data Cloud.

The deal means Twitter will be able to more quickly process trillions of data points generated by every tweet, retweet and like send on its platform to generate insights that, in turn, can be fed into improvements to the core product.

Twitter’s data platform currently consumes hundreds of petabytes of data and runs tens of thousands of tasks over a dozen data clusters each day. It previously struck an agreement with Google Cloud Platform as part of its ‘Partly Cloudy’ strategy in 2018, when the firm moved its Hadoop clusters to Google’s infrastructure.

With this expanded partnership, Twitter will adopt a number of Google services including BigQuery, Dataflow, Cloud Bigtable and machine learning tools. Ultimately, it’ll allow the firm to expand its data ecosystem and generate insights much faster, as well as allowing for deeper machine learning-driven innovation.

“Our initial partnership with Google Cloud has been successful and enabled us to enhance the productivity of our engineering teams,” said Twitter’s CTO Parag Agrawal. “Building on this relationship and Google’s technologies will allow us to learn more from our data, move faster and serve more relevant content to the people who use our service every day. 

“As Twitter continues to scale, we’re excited to partner with Google on more industry-leading technology innovation in the data and machine learning space.

Twitter is also hoping to ‘democratise’ data access by offering a range of data processing and machine learning tools to better understand and improve how Twitter features are used. Previously, engineers and data scientists developed large custom processing jobs, although these can now be queried faster using SQL in BigQuery. 

The partnership, generally, will make it easier for both technical and non-technical teams to study data generated from the usage of Twitter, and gain insights from these.

“Helping customers manage the entire continuum of data – from storage to analytics to AI – is one of our key differentiators at Google Cloud,” said Google Cloud CEO, Thomas Kurian. 

“It’s been phenomenal to watch this company grow over the years, and we’re excited to partner with Twitter to innovate for the future and deliver the best experience possible for the people that use Twitter every day.”

Zoom has revealed a number of new updates for its Zoom Rooms video conferencing hardware suite that showcase the company’s idea of the hybrid office. 

The new features are aimed at businesses that will keep a portion of their workforce remote for some time after offices reopen or on a permanent basis. 

Zoom Rooms is a suite of tablets, monitors and webcams that organisations use throughout their place of work to enable staff to schedule, conduct and remotely connect to meetings. The company is now doubling-down on the remote element as businesses look at ways to safely return to workspaces. 

“Many organisations will likely take a gradual, phased approach to bring employees back to the office full time,” Zoom’s senior product manager, Cynthia Lee, wrote in a blog post. “When this happens, IT leaders and line-of-business managers will then face the challenge of supporting in-office and remote workers simultaneously.

“Businesses can use technology to empower workers wherever they are, streamline collaboration between in-office and remote workers, and make the transition back into the office as seamless as possible.” 

To start with, when you come back to the office you could be greeted by a virtual receptionist. This uses Zoom’s ‘Kiosk Mode’ and a touchscreen device that in-office workers and visitors can operate under the guidance of a remote receptionist. 

For meetings themselves, users can now pair iOS and Android mobile devices with Zoom Room meetings. This will include access to room controls and the ability to start and join meetings via the Zoom Rooms Controller app.

Meeting admins will also be able to view more data. They can see how many people are in a room via the dashboard, and both set and police specific social distances measures. There will also be information about the temperature within each room. 

There are also collaboration-focused updates, such a shareable whiteboard that can also be put into the chat function and a new meeting toolbar.