Archives for September 2021

LONDON (AP) — Facebook has criticized the U.K. competition watchdog’s provisional decision ordering that it sell off Giphy because it said the acquisition of the company stifles competition for animated images.

The social network’s strongly worded response to the Competition and Markets Authority sets the stage for a battle over the future of Giphy.

In the Wednesday letter, Facebook said the watchdog’s decision contained “fundamental errors.” The U.S. company questioned whether the authority’s call to sell Giphy after acquiring it last year would be effective or enforceable.

“The CMA’s complete divestiture remedy is grossly unreasonable and disproportionate,” Facebook said.

Giphy’s library of short looping videos, or GIFs, are a popular tool for internet users sending messages or posting on social media.

The watchdog opened an investigation into the acquisition shortly after Facebook announced the deal reportedly worth $400 million. It found that the acquisition would hurt competition for GIFs among social media platforms and in the digital advertising competition market.

Facebook said there are “serious questions” about whether the British regulator can enforce a global order for a company to sell off a business unit and whether it would be effective – issues it said the watchdog should consider “before taking the extreme intrusive step of ordering the sale of a company which does not carry on business in the U.K.”

The CMA is due to its final report on the deal on Oct. 6.

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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Technology companies that led the charge into remote work as the pandemic unfurled are confronting a new challenge: how, when and even whether they should bring long-isolated employees back to offices that have been designed for teamwork.

“I thought this period of remote work would be the most challenging year-and-half of my career, but it’s not,” said Brent Hyder, the chief people officer for business software maker Salesforce and its roughly 65,000 employees worldwide. “Getting everything started back up the way it needs to be is proving to be even more difficult.”

That transition has been complicated by the rapid spread of the delta variant, which has scrambled the plans many tech companies had for bringing back most of their workers near or after Labor Day weekend. Microsoft has pushed those dates back to October while Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon and a growing list of others have already decided wait until next year.

Given how they set the tone for remote work, tech companies’ return-to-office policies will likely have ripple effects across other industries. Employers’ next steps could redefine how and where people work, predicts Laura Boudreau, a Columbia University assistant economics professor who studies workplace issues.

“We have moved beyond the theme of remote work being a temporary thing,” Boudreau says. The longer the pandemic has stretched on, she says, the harder it’s become to tell employees to come back to the office, particularly full time.

Because they typically revolve around digital and online products, most tech jobs are tailor made for remote work. Yet most major tech companies insist that their employees should be ready to work in the office two or three days each week after the pandemic is over.

The main reason: Tech companies have long believed that employees clustered together in a physical space will swap ideas and spawn innovations that probably wouldn’t have happened in isolation. That’s one reason tech titans have poured billions of dollars into corporate campuses interspersed with alluring common areas meant to lure employees out of their cubicles and into “casual collisions” that turn into brainstorming sessions.

But the concept of “water cooler innovation” may be overblown, says Christy Lake, chief people officer for business software maker Twilio.

“There is no data that supports that really happens in real life, and yet we all subscribe to it,” Lake says. “You can’t put the genie back in the bottle and tell people, ‘Oh you have to be back in the office or innovation won’t happen.’ “

Twilio isn’t bringing back most of its roughly 6,300 employees back to its offices until early next year at the earliest, and plans to allow most of them to figure how frequently they should come in.

This hybrid approach permitting employees to toggle between remote and in-office work has been widely embraced in the technology industry, particularly among the largest companies with the biggest payrolls.

Nearly two-thirds of the more than 200 companies responding to a mid-July survey in the tech-centric Bay Area said they are expecting their workers to come into the office two or three days each week. Before the pandemic, 70% of these employers required their workers to be in the office, according to the Bay Area Council, a business policy group that commissioned the poll.

Even Zoom, the Silicon Valley videoconferencing service that saw its revenue and stock price soar during the pandemic, says most of its employees still prefer to come into the office part of the time. “There isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to returning to the office,” Kelly Steckelberg, Zoom’s chief financial officer, recently wrote in a blog post.

But the biggest tech companies, which have profited even more than Zoom as the pandemic that made their products indispensable for many workers, aren’t giving employees much choice in the matter. Apple, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft have made it clear that they want most of their workers together at least a few days each week to maintain their culture and pace of innovation.

That well-worn creed sounds like backward thinking to Ed Zitron, who runs a public relations firm representing technology companies — and which has been fully remote since it launched in 2012.

The only reason to have an office, he says, is to satisfy managers with vested interests in grouping people together “so that they can look at them and feel good about the people that they own … so that they can enjoy that power.”

Switching to hybrid work is ideal for people like Kelly Soderlund, a mother of two young children who works in offices in San Francisco and Palo Alto, California, for travel management company TripActions, which has about 1,200 employees worldwide. She couldn’t wait to return when the company partially reopened its offices in June, partly because she missed the built-in buffer that her roughly one-hour commute provided between her personal and professional life.

“When I don’t have that, I wake up in the morning, I start doing work and I take my kids to their camp or their daycare,” Soderlund says. “And then I come back and I work and then we pick them up, make dinner and then I go back to work. So, it feels like it’s just work all the time.”

Soderlund believes being together in an office leads to more collaboration, although she also learned from the pandemic that workers don’t need to be there every day for teamwork to happen.

Camaraderie and the need to separate work from home are among the top reasons employees at business software maker Adobe cite for coming back to the office, said Gloria Chen, chief people officer for one of Silicon Valley’s older companies. Working from home “is here to stay, but we also continue to value people coming together,” she said.

The transition from the pandemic should enable smaller tech companies to adopt more flexible work-from-home policies that may help them lure away top-notch engineers from other firms more insistent on having people in the office, says Boudreau, the Columbia University scholar.

“Labor markets are relatively tight now, so employees have more bargaining chips than they have had in a while,” Boudreau says.

Ankur Dahiya, who launched his software startup RunX last year during the pandemic lockdowns, believes that remote work has helped him hire employees that otherwise may not have been candidates. The eight-worker startup rents a San Francisco office one day a week so Dahiya can meet with employees who live nearby, but other employees are in Canada, Nevada, and Oregon. The workers living outside of California have been flying in once every three months for “super productive” meetings and brainstorming, says Dahiya, who has previously worked at Facebook and Twitter.

“I’ve worked in offices for the last 10 years and I know there’s just so much time lost,” Dahiya says, recalling all the random conversations, lengthy meetings, aimless wandering, and other disruptions that seem to occur in those settings.

Twilio’s Lake is hoping the remote-work experience will transform employee behavior in the office, too, once they come back. She hopes that the remote experience will have given employees a chance to better understand how their teams work.

“I think more than anything it is going to cause us to become more intentional about when, why and how we come together,” she says.

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An earlier version of this story incorrectly referred to the name of the software company Adobe

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Follow AP coverage of how the coronavirus pandemic is transforming the economy at: https://apnews.com/hub/changing-economy

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HONOLULU (AP) — Researchers have completed a comprehensive online map of the world’s coral reefs by using more than 2 million satellite images from across the globe.

The Allen Coral Atlas, named after late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, will act as a reference for reef conservation, marine planning and coral science as researchers try to save these fragile ecosystems that are being lost to climate change.

The group announced completion of the atlas Wednesday and said it is the first global, high-resolution map of its kind. It gives users the ability to see detailed information about local reefs, including different types of submarine structure like sand, rocks, seagrass and, of course, coral.

The maps, which include areas up to 50 feet (15 meters) deep, are being used to inform policy decisions about marine protected areas, spatial planning for infrastructure such as docks and seawalls and upcoming coral restoration projects.

“Our biggest contribution in this achievement is that we have a uniform mapping of the entire coral reef biome,” said Greg Asner, managing director of the Atlas and director of Arizona State University’s Center for Global Discovery and Conservation.

Asner said they relied on a network of hundreds of field contributors who gave them local information about reefs so that they could program their satellites and software to focus on the right areas.

“And that lets us bring the playing field up to a level where decisions can be made at a bigger scale because so far decisions have been super localized,” Asner said. “If you don’t know what you’ve got more uniformly, how would the U.N. ever play a real role? How would a government that has an archipelago with 500 islands make a uniform decision?”

The atlas also includes a coral bleaching monitor to check for corals that are stressed due to global warming and other factors.

Asner said about three quarters of the world’s reefs had not previously been mapped in this kind of in-depth way, and many not at all.

The project began in 2017 when Allen’s company, Vulcan Inc., was working with Ruth Gates, a Hawaii researcher whose idea of creating “ super coral ” for reef restoration was funded by the philanthropic foundation.

Gates and Vulcan brought in Asner because of his work with the Global Airborne Observatory that had been mapping reefs in Hawaii at the time.

Allen, who said he wanted to help save the world’s coral reefs, liked the idea of using technology to visualize data, so Gates connected the group with a satellite company called Planet, and Allen funded the project for about $9 million.

The University of Queensland in Australia used artificial intelligence technology and local reference data to generate the layers on the atlas. Anyone can view the maps for free online.

Both Allen and Gates passed away in 2018, leaving Asner and others to carry on their work.

“Ruth would be so pleased, wouldn’t she?” Asner said. “She would just be tickled that this is really happening.”

He said about a third of the calls he is getting are from researchers who hope to use the maps to “be sure that their planning and their reef restoration work is going to have its max efficacy.”

When Gates found out she was sick, she selected friend and colleague Helen Fox from the National Geographic Society to help communicate with conservation groups about how to use the tool.

“It really was a global effort,” said Fox, who is now the conservation science director for Coral Reef Alliance. “There were huge efforts in terms of outreach and helping people be aware of the tool and the potential scientific and conservation value.”

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This story has been corrected to reflect that about three quarters of the world’s reefs had not previously been mapped in this kind of in-depth way, not one third.

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SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) — Prosecutors and defense attorneys sketched dueling portraits of fallen Silicon Valley star Elizabeth Holmes as her trial got underway Wednesday, alternatively describing her as a greedy villain who faked her way to the top and as a passionate underdog whose spent years trying to shake up the health care industry.

The two sides are now expected to spend the next three months trying to sway a 12-person jury impaneled to hearing the evidence in a case airing allegations that Holmes used her startup, Theranos, as a scheme to realize her dreams of becoming rich and as famous as one of her role models, late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.

Once hailed as a billionaire on paper, Holmes is now facing a sentence of up to 20 years if convicted of the felony charges.

Holmes’ rise and fall has already been the subject of documentaries, books and podcasts, feeding the fervor that has built up around a trial that has been delayed twice since she was indicted nearly three years ago. With roughly only 75 spots available for the media and general public to observe the proceedings, people began to line up outside the San Jose, California, courthouse before 5 a.m. Wednesday.

After the jury was seated and U.S. District Judge Edward Davila gave his preliminary instructions, federal prosecutor Robert Leach wasted little time vilifying Holmes.

He cast Holmes in a dark light, depicting her as a conniving entrepreneur who duped investors, customers and patients for years, even though she knew her startup, Theranos, was nearly bankrupt and its much-hyped blood-testing technology was a flop.

“This case is about fraud, about lying and cheating to get money,” Leach said during his roughly 45-minute opening statement.

He said the evidence would show that Theranos was already in deep trouble as far back as 2009, about six years after Holmes founded the Palo Alto, California, company. At that point, Leach said, Holmes resorted to a pattern of lying and hyperbole in an effort to fool major media outlets, wealthy investors such as media mogul Rupert Murdoch, well-connected Theranos board members such as former U.S. Secretaries of State George Shultz and Henry Kissinger, and customers such as Walgreens.

Some of the most damning evidence may be presented by a former top finance officer at Theranos who will testify that the company only had $650,000 in revenue from 2011 through 2014, according to Leach. Yet Holmes was telling investors and other people that Theranos would generate $140 million in revenue in 2014, Leach said.

Holmes, 37, is also accused of promising that Theranos would be able to quickly test small vials of blood in a small company-designed machine named after the famed inventor Thomas Edison. Leach said the samples were actually sent out to outside parties for testing using standard-issue machines he described as “big” and “clunky.”

Theranos eventually failed in 2018, a few years after a series of explosive stories in The Wall Street Journal exposed serious flaws in its technology and spurred regulatory investigations that shut down the testing.

The fraud committed by Holmes “is a fraud on Main Street and it’s a fraud in Silicon Valley,” Leach told the jury.

Holmes’ defense team countered with a more heroic narrative describing her as a tireless worker who poured more than 15 years of her life in pursuit of a faster, cheaper and less invasive way to test blood samples and screen for disease.

Defense attorney Lance Wade, argued that Holmes was simply trying to wrest control of the blood-testing technology market from two dominant laboratories, Quest Diagnostics and Labcorp. “She did her best day in and day out to make Theranos successful,” Wade said of Holmes as he began a roughly 90-minute presentation.

Although she didn’t succeed, Wade insisted that Holmes never stopped believing she was on the verge of a breakthrough that would realize her ambitions. Many investors thought she would too, one of the reasons that Theranos once was valued at $9 billion —- with half that amount belonging to Holmes.

“Failure is not a crime,” Wade said. “Trying your hardest is not a crime. A failed business does not make a CEO a criminal.”

In court documents unsealed just before the trial started, Holmes’ lawyers also disclosed that she may take the witness stand to assert some of her statements and actions while running Theranos were the result of “intimate partner abuse” inflicted by the company’s chief operating officer and her secret lover, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani.

Without going into specifics, Wade told the jury that she believed she was bringing in “the best businessman she knew” when she hired Balwani but now realizes it was one of her biggest mistakes.

“You will learn that Mr. Balwani did not take well to people who disagreed with him,” Wade said while asserting Balwani’s tempestuous behavior caused many Theranos employees to leave the company.

Balwani also was responsible for overseeing the Theranos lab that the government alleges provided misleading results of blood tests that endangered some people’s lives, Wade noted.

“If what government is trying to show is that Theranos’ clinical lab was well run from 2013 to 2016, we will likely agree with what they have to say,” Wade said. “Poor operations in the lab was one of Theranos’ biggest failures, but it wasn’t fraud.”

Balwani faces multiple fraud charges in a separate trial scheduled to begin next year. His attorney has denied Holmes’ allegations.

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This story has been corrected with the official names of Quest Diagnostics and Labcorp and Elizabeth Holmes’ current age, which is 37.

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