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Wednesday, June 3, 2020
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The teleconferencing company Zoom has seen a massive increase in profits and has doubled its annual sales forecast, driven by a surge in users as more people work from home and connect with friends online during the coronavirus crisis.

 The once-obscure Zoom Video Communications, which has rapidly emerged as the latest Silicon Valley gold mine, released financial results on Tuesday showing the astronomical growth that has turned it into a stock market star.Zoom's boom has come despite privacy problems that enabled outsiders to make uninvited and sometimes crude appearances during other peoples video conferences. Zoom's revenue for its fiscal first-quarter between February and April more than doubled from the same time last year to $328m, turning a profit of $27m compared with $198,000 a year ago.The numbers exceeded analysts already heightened expectations, providing another lift to a rocketing stock that has more than tripled in price so far this year. After a big run-up leading up to Tuesday's highly anticipated announcement, Zoom's stock gained nearly 3% in extended trading to $213.60 – more than five times the company's initial public offering price of $36 less than 14 months ago. The surge has left Zoom with a market value of about $59bn greater than the combined market values of the four largest US airlines, which have seen their businesses hammered by the coronavirus outbreak that has dramatically curtailed travel."We were humbled by the accelerated adoption of the Zoom platform around the globe," said boss Eric Yuan, who co-founded the company nine years ago.In a sign that its growth is not expected to be short lived, Zoom forecast revenue of roughly $500m for its current quarter ending in July, more than quadrupling from the same time last year. For its full fiscal year, Zoom now expects revenue of about $1.8bn, nearly tripling in a year.Security issues prompted some schools to stop using Zoom for online classes that have become widespread since February, although the company's efforts to introduce more security protection has brought some back to the service. More than 100,000 schools worldwide are now using Zoom for online classes, according to the company.But the once-weak privacy controls also helped make Zoom extremely easy to use, one of the reasons it became such a popular way to hold online classes, business meetings and virtual cocktail hours after most of the US began ordering people to stay at home in effort to reduce the spread of the novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19.Zoom also offers a free version of its service, another factor in its popularity at a time when about 40 million people in the US have lost their jobs since mid-March, raising the specter of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s.The San Jose, California-based company has always made most of its money from companies that subscribe to a more sophisticated version of its service that traditionally has been used for business meetings among employees working in offices far apart from each other.But the pandemic-driven shutdown turned Zoom into a tool for employees who once worked alongside each other, but have been doing their jobs from home during the past few months.Zoom ended April with 265,400 corporate customers with at least 10 employees, more than quadrupling from the same time last year.Although Zoom remains focused on servicing its corporate customers, Yuan is hoping to figure out ways to make money from the all the socialising and education taking place on the service, too. Some analysts have speculated that Zoom may eventually show ads on the free version of Zoom, although the company has not given any indication it will do that. 

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The teleconferencing company Zoom has seen a massive increase in profits and has doubled its annual sales forecast, driven by a surge in us...

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Researchers hope the addition of Facebook de-identified movement data will give a better overview of people slowly returning to their regular travels as we emerge from the coronavirus lockdown period, and help identify any potential places where physical distancing may be an issue.

Several companies, including Google, Apple and Citymapper, make public de-identified data from their mapping and other location-based apps to track traffic flow across cities, states and countries.Researchers have been using this data to model the massive traffic reductions seen as public health orders were put in place, businesses closed and some people began working from home.Citymapper, for example, shows a dip in regular traffic levels in Melbourne commencing around 12 March, dropping right down to a low of 10% of regular traffic levels in mid-April. It has now bounced back to 25%, while Sydney is up to 31%.That aligned with data from Google and Apple in a report put together by a group of Australian researchers.From Wednesday, Facebook will make public its own aggregated data set based on location data, which users can opt out of providing to Facebook through their privacy settings.Dr Nic Geard, a senior lecturer in computing and information systems at the University of Melbourne, told Guardian Australia researchers at the university hope to integrate the Facebook data into the data already being used from the other sources because it is more granular than what is on offer, down to a local government area rather than just a city or state level."We can get a slightly more detailed perspective in how physical distancing behaviour is changing across countries, different ways different spaces as different levels of restrictions are relaxed," he said."But we're still sort of working on the process of how we will integrate that information into the data stream into the modelling work that we're doing."At the moment, Geard said the data on Australia was showing a varied rise in traffic as restrictions ease, depending on the level of restrictions.Geard said, for example, movement in places where restrictions had been eased faster, such as Western Australia, was increasing faster than Victoria, where easing had been slower."We can see that corresponding signal coming out of the data in terms of the increase in the amount of movement," he said.There was also a difference in the data between regional and metropolitan areas, he said, because people in regional areas tend to need to travel longer distances for essential activity and that can register as a movement, while a person living in an urban area popping out to their local supermarket would not.While the data is more granular, Alex Pompe, from Facebook's data for good team, told Guardian Australia precautions had been taken to prevent individuals from being identified in the data sets.For starters, there is a threshold of 300 people in an area before the data is collected, and second, noise is added to the dataset."Basically, it's impossible to tell if an individual is even present in the dataset. So if they were to change their settings and withdraw their data from Facebook, we wouldn't even be able to tell the difference," he said.Geard said that he thought it was "exceedingly unlikely" someone could be identified even if all the datasets were combined."I think it's exceedingly unlikely just because all of the metrics that we're using are aggregated metrics, so there's never a point where we have something which says this is information about an individual user and something that an individual user did," he said."It's all about looking at estimates of what a large number of people were doing at that time in terms of whether they were present or absent in a particular area."Facebook is also publishing Covid-19 maps and data from surveys taken from a sample of Facebook users across the globe who have told Facebook they have coronavirus-like symptoms.

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A groundbreaking survey of Facebook users suggests that around 1% of Britons are showing symptoms for Covid-19 at any given time, with the proportion in Scotland rising as high as 3.

5% over the last week. The findings are part of Facebook's Covid-19 symptom survey, a global effort on the part of the company to use its enormous user base to track the spread of the virus. Since its launch in April, around 120,000 people in the UK have taken part in the survey, registering the presence or absence of Covid-19 symptoms by following a prompt from the social network. Globally, there have been more than 10m responses, the company said. The survey is being run in collaboration with statisticians at the University of Maryland, who worked with Facebook's Data for Good team to build a publicly available map and dashboard visualising the international results. "By fielding questions that are comparable globally the UK is benefiting from additional data that will be even more valuable going forward as we jointly examine the conditions for reopening in different countries under different scenarios," said Dr Frauke Kreuter, the director of the university's joint programme in survey methodology. The symptom survey differs from a number of others in its selection process. Many large-scale symptom surveys require users to opt-in to the survey, by proactively downloading an app or visiting a website. That risks biasing the results, if certain demographics are more likely to volunteer themselves, or if people proactively join the survey when they begin experiencing symptoms. "Survey methodologists and statisticians at UMD value particularly the fact that people cannot self-select into the respondent pool, Kreuter said. "Unlike surveys done via specific apps or websites designed to collect symptom data, the recruitment through the Facebook platform allows us to reach everyone who is using Facebook, and then randomly select within those users." For the UK at large, the symptom tracker shows a slow but steady reduction in the number of people reporting Covid symptoms, from slightly over 1% at the beginning of May to slightly under 1% now. Within the nations of the UK, the data is noisier for smaller nations, with Scotland reporting zero symptoms some days, and as high as 4% other days – a sign that the programme still has work to do to improve the quality of the data it collects. As well as the surveys, Facebook also analysed location data from its ubiquitous surveillance of its own users to show the extent to which Brits are changing their behaviour as the requirements to stay at home are lifted. At the beginning of April, 46% of English people were staying in place, Facebook's tracking revealed, while that figure has dropped by a quarter, to 36.9%, in the latest data. Similar declines were seen in Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland. In this, Facebook's data is similar to that gathered by Google and Apple through their mapping programmes, released much earlier in the Covid crisis. All three companies have seen mobility rise significantly from the lockdown lows, with some countries, including the US and Germany, returning to normality, as measured by requests for directions. Topics Coronavirus outbreak Facebook Scotland news Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share via Email Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on WhatsApp Share on Messenger Reuse this content

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A groundbreaking survey of Facebook users suggests that around 1% of Britons are showing symptoms for Covid-19 at any given time, with th...

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Zoom may be booming as the global coronavirus lockdown moves work and social life to cyberspace but deep-pocketed rivals including Microsoft, Google and Facebook are taking aim as video conferencing becomes a staple of daily life.

On Tuesday, Zoom, which has been catapulted from a relatively unknown video service to a household name during the pandemic, reported first-quarter results that were impressive on almost every measure. Zoom booms as teleconferencing company profits from coronavirus crisis Read more Revenue surged by 169% to $328m (£261m) in the three months to the end of April, prompting the company to double revenue guidance for this year. The number of people attending meetings and gatherings on any one day peaked at 300 million in April. In December it was 10 million a day. The company's share price is up 152% over the past year and its market value has risen from $19bn to $58bn since the start of 2020. Zoom's founder, Eric Yuan, who owns 20% of the company, is estimated to be the world's 146th richest person and worth $10.8bn, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. One analyst called Zoom's results "one of, if not the greatest quarter in enterprise software history" and its share price enjoyed an initial bounce. However, Zoom's stock dropped in after-hours trading on Tuesday as investors and analysts began to worry about its ability to cope with competitors aiming to muscle in on the video-conferencing boom. In March, Microsoft, an aggressive competitor against Zoom for paying business customers with Microsoft Teams, announced it would launch a version of its video-conferencing service for consumers. The following month, Facebook, the world's biggest social-networking site, introduced a group video-calling feature called Messenger Rooms that prompted a dip in Zoom's share price. In April, Google announced it was to make Meet, another Zoom competitor in the business video market, available for consumer use. With the surge in remote networking services such as Zoom, Teams and Slack expected to continue post-pandemic as businesses adapt to a new more physically distanced "normal", there is likely to be an increase in takeover activity. In April, the US telecoms giant Verizon paid $400m for BlueJeans, a smaller competitor in the video-conferencing market with about 15,000 customers. Sign up to the daily Business Today email or follow Guardian Business on Twitter at @BusinessDesk Zoom was not prepared for its dramatic surge in popularity and is struggling to rebuild its reputation after coming in for criticism for a string of security and privacy failings. These have included sending user data to Facebook and allowing "Zoombombing", when uninvited guests join video calls, usually with offensive results. A number of companies have ordered workers not to use Zoom, including Elon Musk's SpaceX and Standard Chartered bank. In the UK, the publisher of the Independent and the Evening Standard accused a journalist at a rival newspaper of snooping on a Zoom conference with staff. In April, Yuan apologised for "falling short" on security, including the company's approach to data and privacy. Zoom said it would spend the next three months finding and fixing problems. Topics Zoom Facebook Microsoft Google Coronavirus outbreak Social networking Computing news Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share via Email Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on WhatsApp Share on Messenger Reuse this content

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Zoom may be booming as the global coronavirus lockdown moves work and social life to cyberspace but deep-pocketed rivals including Micros...

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Mark Zuckerberg is standing by his decision to allow Donald Trump to threaten violence against George Floyd protesters on the platform despite harsh criticism from civil rights leaders and public dissent from his own employees, including a public resignation.

In a video conference with staff on Tuesday, Zuckerberg said that his decision to not remove Trump's warning on social media on Friday that "when the looting starts the shooting start" was "tough" but "pretty thorough", the New York Times reported. The company usually holds an all-staff meeting on Thursdays, but the session was moved up to address growing discontent among employees, hundreds of whom staged a "walkout" on Monday by requesting time off."I knew that I would have to separate out my personal opinion," he told employees, according to the report. "Knowing that when we made this decision we made, it was going to lead to a lot of people upset inside the company, and the media criticism we were going to get."Anger at Facebook has only grown since Zuckerberg announced on Friday evening that the platform would not take any action against Trump's post, which quoted a racist 1960s police chief. Twitter deemed a tweet with the same language dangerous and chose to hide it behind a warning label "in the interest of preventing others from being inspired to commit violent acts". But though Zuckerberg acknowledged the statement's racist historical antecedent, he said that the company has a policy of allowing state actors to warn the public about the use of force.This reasoning has garnered scorn from US civil rights leaders, three of whom spoke with Zuckerberg and his top lieutenant Sheryl Sandberg on Monday evening. "We are disappointed and stunned by Mark's incomprehensible explanations," said Vanita Gupta, Sherrilyn Ifill and Rashad Robinson – heads of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and Color of Change – in a joint statement."He did not demonstrate understanding of historic or modern-day voter suppression and he refuses to acknowledge how Facebook is facilitating Trump's call for violence against protesters," the added. "Mark is setting a very dangerous precedent for other voices who would say similar harmful things on Facebook."Zuckerberg has also faced continued public criticism from employees – a highly unusual occurrence for the company."It's crystal clear today that leadership refuses to stand with us," the engineer Brandon Dail tweeted on Tuesday. A Facebook ad by Donald Trump's re-election campaign running amid widespread civil unrest. Photograph: FacebookTimothy J Aveni, a Facebook software engineer, announced his resignation on Facebook and LinkedIn."Mark always told us that he would draw the line at speech that calls for violence," Aveni wrote. "He showed us on Friday that this was a lie."Aveni connected Facebook's accommodation of Trump's violent rhetoric to the company's track record in Asia, where Facebook has been implicated in ethnic cleansing in Myanmar, mob violence in Sri Lanka and the rise of a demagogue in the Philippines. "Facebook, complicit in the propagation of weaponized hatred, is on the wrong side of history," he wrote. "Facebook is providing a platform that enables politicians to radicalize individuals and glorify violence, and we are watching the United States succumb to the same kind of social media-fueled division that has gotten people killed in the Philippines, Myanmar and Sri Lanka. I'm scared for my country and I'm done trying to justify this."Facebook has been central to Trump's political rise. While Trump himself prefers to use Twitter to fire off his thoughts, his brand of divisive, xenophobic and emotive rhetoric has proved extraordinarily successful on Facebook's algorithmic timelines.In an internal memo leaked to the New York Times in January, the longtime Facebook executive Andrew Bosworth wrote: "So was Facebook responsible for Donald Trump getting elected? I think the answer is yes, but not for the reasons anyone thinks. He didn't get elected because of Russia or misinformation or Cambridge Analytica. He got elected because he ran the single best digital ad campaign I've ever seen from any advertiser. Period."On Tuesday, among the thousands of Facebook ads being run by Trump's re-election campaign were dozens that referred to "the chaos going on around the world". Supporters were encouraged to sign a "thank you" card – a political marketing technique designed to harvest email addresses and mobile phone numbers – "to show him how grateful we are for his efforts to Keep America Safe" . The "cards" were illustrated with images and text reading, "God Bless America", "God Bless, President Trump", and "God Bless The Trump Family".

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Mark Zuckerberg is standing by his decision to allow Donald Trump to threaten violence against George Floyd protesters on the platform desp...

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The BBC has given its new digital assistant a male voice to avoid the "problematic associations" of female-voiced rivals such as Amazon's Alexa, which have faced criticism for reinforcing gender stereotypes.

The voice-activated service, named "Beeb", will have a limited public release this week and the corporation said it put extra thought into what accent would make it distinct from other US-developed services. How to stop your smart home spying on you Read more As a result people who wake up the voice assistant by saying "Hey Beeb" will be greeted with a "warm and friendly" accent from the north of England, guiding them towards BBC programmes and offering localised news and weather reports. Andy Webb, who is leading the BBC's development of its voice technology, said this "reflected the diversity of the audience in the UK" and as a result it did not have the "sterile feel" or "problematic associations" of other assistants. A Unesco report last year claimed that the often submissive and flirty responses offered by female-voiced digital assistants to many queries – including abusive ones – reinforced ideas of women as subservient. Grace Boswood, the chief operating officer of the BBC's design and engineering department, said a key reason for undertaking the project was to defend against encroachment from US tech companies and to maintain a direct relationship with licence-fee payers. "It gives us a strategic edge if Amazon decide not to play fair in terms of how people access the content," she said, suggesting the BBC had an 18-month window of opportunity to establish a viable voice assistant before habits were locked down. "There has to be an alternative to them holding all the cards. We do have the content. Amazon may choose to change the game of discovery." She said a major fear was that tech firms may start recommending their own content using data gleaned from BBC programmes, hurting public service broadcasters: "The threat to us is, 'You've finished the Archers, here's a Joe Rogan podcast.'" Play Video 0:35 Testing Beeb: listen to the BBC's new voice assistant There is no intention for the BBC to produce its own physical hardware, such as Amazon's Echo speakers. Instead, the Beeb voice assistant has been designed in the hope that the software can be built into a variety of existing and future systems. Potential uses include powering the BBC Sounds app, adding extra controls to car stereos, and potentially even operating on Amazon's platform. However, as yet the only deal signed has been with Microsoft, which will launch the service to desktop-based beta testers on Wednesday. The success or failure of the service, which relies on Microsoft's AI software, is likely depend on whether the BBC can convince other platforms to incorporate Beeb into their offering. The Beeb voice assistant will have a much more limited set of functions than other rivals but the intention is that it will be better at providing access to BBC content, while offering up jokes from the Mash Report and facts from QI. People who swear at the assistant will be asked if they would like to listen to a BBC podcast.  Sign up to the Media Briefing: news for the news-makers Read more The fear within the BBC is that if it cedes control of both the user experience and user data to Amazon and Google then the UK's national broadcaster will be left playing second fiddle to tech companies in yet another area. At least one in five British homes now has a smart speaker, according to Ofcom, driven by cheap sales of kit such as Amazon's Echo and Google's Assistant. This is causing listening habits to change as people replace old radios that were permanently tuned to existing stations with voice-activated kit. There is already concerns that the BBC and other public service broadcasters have lost their prominence on television sets, with owners of modern smart TVs being offered a choice of apps from the likes of Netflix and Amazon when they turn on their sets rather than going to BBC One by default.  Topics BBC Television Amazon Alexa Apple Amazon Smart speakers news Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share via Email Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on WhatsApp Share on Messenger Reuse this content

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The BBC has given its new digital assistant a male voice to avoid the "problematic associations" of female-voiced rivals such a...

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Facebook users no longer need to worry about their teenage posts coming back to haunt them in later life, thanks to a new tool for deleting hundreds or thousands of posts at once.

The "manage activity" feature, available now on Facebook's mobile apps, lets users search for and remove posts from a particular time, mentioning a particular person, or within a range of dates. Its release shows the company acting on one increasingly common reason for young people to steer clear of traditional social networks: the fear that a permanent record of their actions may hurt them down the line.Facebook said in a statement: "We know that people's posts from years ago may not represent who they are now – eg old Facebook statuses from university. This tool lets you move posts you want to hide from others but keep for yourself to an archive and remove posts that you simply want to delete."We believe people should have the ability to manage and control their data, and we will continue to develop new ways to honour people's privacy by providing greater transparency and controls."Twitter has taken a different approach to the problem, trialling in Brazil the ability to send ephemeral tweets – dubbed "fleets" – which disappear after 24 hours.In the past year celebrities such as Kevin Hart, James Gunn and Shawn Mendes have issued apologies for old tweets that resurfaced to cause scandal.Instagram, a Facebook subsidiary, acted earlier than its parent company, driven in part by stiff competition from Snapchat. Instagram Stories have always been ephemeral by default, automatically deleting after a period of time, and in 2017 the company introduced an "archive" feature to head off a growing trend of users deleting pictures that didn't gather enough likes. By allowing the images to be archived instead, the company preserved a way for those users to undo their decision – and preserved the data for Instagram to continue to learn from.Facebook's move is the latest step in a long journey. A decade ago its founder Mark Zuckerberg confidently declared that privacy was no longer a "social norm"."People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people," he told a San Francisco awards ceremony in 2010. "That social norm is just something that has evolved over time."

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Facebook users no longer need to worry about their teenage posts coming back to haunt them in later life, thanks to a new tool for deleting...

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