Travelsist hopes its air travel concierge will take off from

Travelsist hopes its air travel concierge will take off from Atlanta thinkitnow.in

If you are dreading to catch flights over the holiday season, you are not alone. Forget about marveling at the wonder that is flying; going through an airport is still very much a hassle, and this is where Atlanta-based startup Travelsist can help.

There are several sides to what the company does, including an AI-enabled chatbot called VERA. But “at the simplest level,” its team told me, “the Travelsist platform connects travelers who need help getting through the airport with a Travelsistant who provides concierge and personal assistant services that help get them from their ride to plane-side safely and on time.”

Founded by former flight attendant Veronica Woodruff, the startup was a Startup Battlefield company at TechCrunch Disrupt earlier this year. At the time, I highlighted how it was part of a growing group of startups that make life easier for disabled individuals; but there are many more people that Travelsist can help, including working moms like Woodruff.

“I arrived at the airport one day for a cross-country flight, and realized I’d left my daughter’s stroller at home,” she recalled.

From parents to seniors to first-time fliers, there are many who could use a hand, and there is more than wheelchair or stroller services that can make airports more accessible; which is why Travelsist also provides passengers “help with wayfinding, or other physical or navigational support in what is oftentimes a very stressful and chaotic portion of their trip.”

Behind the scenes

While Travelsist’s end users are the passengers, the startup’s customers are airports and airlines (except for a few exceptions where passengers can request assistance and pay for it themselves).

Going B2B2C make sense: These have a legal obligation to assist people with disabilities, for instance, but it often proves expensive and tricky, which is why they are willing to outsource it to a third party like Travelsist.

Travelsist doesn’t simply find people who can provide assistance; it also leverages technology to make the whole process more efficient. For instance, the platform reduces waiting time for assistance by locating where it is required, Woodruff told me.

While the company received international interest, the U.S. was its initial focus, starting with Atlanta — and not just Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL). Travelsist is now able to assist passengers flying in and out of the two biggest airports in its hometown. Since Disrupt, it closed a partnership with DeKalb-Peachtree Airport (PDK), which Woodruff described to me as “a popular regional Atlanta-area airport that services lots of private flights and VIP travelers.”

It is a natural evolution for Travelsist to expand its audience, and it already has. Since its inception four years ago and subsequent launch in 2020, the company wrote in a document which head of product Dino Decespedes shared with me, “Travelsist’s value proposition has evolved from babygear rental for moms who travel, to an enterprise software solution solving human capital headaches for the world’s busiest airports and airliners.”

Talking to Woodruff in person, the human element mentioned above comes across much more clearly, and it becomes clear how she is passionate not only about helping travelers, but also providing Travelsistants with fulfilling and potentially life-changing work opportunities.

“What I love most about being able to offer people the opportunity to work at a company that’s at the airport is that they have an opportunity to meet someone that’s beyond their front door. There’s so many people that come from so many different walks of life, that you never know how a 10-minute conversation can influence or change your life; that person can be someone that can offer you an even better job than Travelsist,” Woodruff said.

In the meantime, Travelsist is intentional about making sure that these 1099 workers “know that they’re valued and that they’re appreciated,” and enjoy good working conditions. “We pride ourselves in being a tech company first, but the number one thing is that we’re bringing in a new culture to this industry, where people can have more control over their time, earn good wages and be trained with [new] skills.”

Travelsist’s employee app is there to support these workers by filling them in with specific details around a traveler’s request and location, but also providing them with training and reminders. For example, making sure a passenger is properly buckled up before you lift them, and asking nicely for permission — a welcome change, considering that flying with a disability too often ends up being dehumanizing.

If the company ever runs out of Travelsistants, it can count on My PANDA, a fellow Atlanta-based startup (PANDA stands for Personal Assistants Next Door). It’s run by a really good friend of hers, Woodruff said. “We have an agreement where I can dip into her staff: If I need them, they come and work for us. Atlanta is a beautiful place to build because of those relationships.”

Besides its core team and its Travelsistants, Travelsist also has some 25 contractors and “a lot of people who advise us and meet with us.” The company was part of the first women-focused cohort of the Techstars Founder Catalyst Program based in Atlanta and conducted in partnership with J.P. Morgan; it also received support and awards from several other organizations. This is part of being from Atlanta, Woodruff beamed. “Atlanta is a very hands-on city when you’re building something that people believe in; people want us to succeed.”

Beyond Atlanta, the company was flying relatively under the radar until recently, when it obtained some provisional patents that made the team more confident about its odds against competitors.

AI is part of its strategy: At TechCrunch Disrupt, it launched VERA, a chatbot that can answer traveler questions “around flight times, airport shops and restaurants, security line wait times, parking instructions, airport and TSA rules, hours of operation, and much much more,” the team wrote to me.

Image Credits: Travelsist

For airports and airlines, the chatbot is another opportunity to improve traveler satisfaction, which they can track alongside other metrics in the customized data dashboard that Travelsist provides.

This value proposition seems to be resonating. “We are on track to close 12-15 new airports in the first half of 2024, which would allow us to service more travelers end-to-end — in their departure airport AND their arrival airport,” Woodruff messaged me.

Travelsist already has some raised some $850,000 funding to execute its plans, including investment from The Fearless Fund and a grant from the Black ParentPreneur Foundation. But it is understandably seeking more, and currently is raising a $5 million Series A round it hopes to close by the end of the year. This would be timely, as travel woes will be on many minds at this time of the year.

Mulch and the enduring appeal of internet absurdism thinkitnow.in

Mulch and the enduring appeal of internet absurdism thinkitnow.in

I am haunted by mulch posts.

The most recent mulch video came to me in the middle of the night, when I was hours into scrolling through a particularly nasty bout of insomnia. The video was an edit of a tiny dog surrounded by a frame of glittering hearts, with an AI-generated voice narrating, “Today, I soilmaxxed to the highest potential. I am full of loam, asbestos and red 40.”

Mulch posts have periodically appeared in my restless nights for months. In the hours that I know I should be sleeping, I am hounded by content of petite dogs proclaiming that they’re soilpilled, or mulchmaxxing, or delighting in eating mulch with fellow sisters of the loam. The mulchgang prays for a plentiful harvest. Mulch posts celebrate a body nourished by microplastics and synthetic food dye. The silty clay earth feeds us all. 

Before the inevitable moral panic sets in once the trend gains enough mainstream attention: mulch posts are not encouraging children to ingest dirt. Mulch memes are just that – silly posts that, like the absurd, post-ironic internet humor that has been popular for years, aren’t that deep. The trend’s earnestness provides a brief reprieve from the fatalist cynicism that tends to drive meme culture. 

The meme came from, of all places, Instagram Reels. The spread of mulch posts across TikTok shows that Instagram still has influence in driving internet culture, despite Reels’ rocky start. It’s one of the first original Reels content to go viral beyond Instagram.   

Mulchposting started with a post in May from Instagram meme account sme11a__, which featured the word “mulch” superimposed on a low-res image of a white dog. The post was captioned, “mulch is here #mulchgang.” The post itself wasn’t particularly viral; in the last six months, it’s gained about 10,000 likes. The meme didn’t go viral until sme11a__ posted a Reel referencing the meme a month later, Know Your Meme reports, which gained over 103,000 likes. Other meme accounts started posting similar content — in a post of a comically fluffy dog with the text “sandy clay loam,” the meme account qooslag even credited sme11a__ for starting the trend. 

Sme11a__, whose Instagram bio says they don’t have a TikTok account, continued posting mulch Reels throughout the summer. The videos typically featured supercuts of fluffy white dogs over audio about mulch. In September, they posted a Reel using an AI-generated childish voice that said, “I love mulch. Mulch is my favorite food.”

Others started reposting sme11a__’s Reel, which had over 195,000 likes on Instagram, to TikTok that month. The meme, which had been largely contained to Instagram, began taking off on the competing platform. On TikTok, the tag #mulchgang has over 49 million views, and tag #mulchmaxxing has over 20 million views. TikToks about the meme’s apparent obscurity and bizarre premise further propelled its popularity. 

Under a video about struggling to explain the meme to those who aren’t chronically online, TikTok user bisouchuu commented, “i am mulchmaxxing on microplastic 24/7 but i keep mentioning it to my non soilpilled friends.” 

“This message makes me feel like a Victorian child when I read it,” another user replied to bisouchuu. 

Some have questioned whether mulch posts could be dogwhistles for hate groups. It’s understandable that viewers would be suspicious of coded language in memes, given the history of white supremacy groups adopting seemingly innocuous imagery as symbols of their ideology. The white nationalist campaign to claim Pepe the Frog as the face of racist extremism jaded us all against anything online that should be wholesome. An Instagram user asked sme11a__ to reassure them that mulch gang isn’t a “n@z1” or “NFT cult” in the comments of a recent Reel.

“im not any of those things, mulch gang is just funny dogs eat dirt,” sme11a__ replied.

Mulchposting has all the markers of meme humor mischaracterized as “Gen Z culture,” which is really just Very Online humor. It’s absurd, and it’s easy to replicate, and there’s space for the joke to evolve. Internet absurdism is cyclical in nature, and mulch posts have been preceded by years of shitposting.

In 2017, the Washington Post tried to explain internet humor in a column titled, “Why is millennial humor so weird?” The column cited the meme “Hey Beter,” a four-panel image that starts with someone addressing the “Family Guy” character Peter Griffin as “Beter,” and ends with a phrase completely unrelated to the first image. In the example cited by the Washington Post, a laser-eyed Elmo holds Peter at gunpoint and demands that he spell “Whomst’ve.” The meme ends by asking viewers to “follow for a free iphone 5.”  

In its recent explanation of Gen Z humor for bewildered millennials, Insider cited the Grimace shake trend that went viral on TikTok earlier this year. In Grimace shake videos, TikTok users filmed themselves taking sips of McDonald’s purple milkshake, before the video abruptly cut to a clip of the same user incapacitated on the ground, in abandoned buildings or in eerily empty playgrounds. 

Neither “Hey Beter” nor the Grimace shake trend have an explicit punchline. The non sequitur is the punchline. Absurdist philosophy pervades meme humor, and the futility of trying to explain jokes that are ultimately meaningless is what makes internet absurdism so funny. It’s fitting that the meme “One must imagine Sisysphus happy,” which went viral on Instagram and TikTok this year when users paired the phrase with images and videos of impossible tasks, is pulled from an essay by philosopher and absurdist writer Albert Camus.

Internet culture is constantly subverting itself, and the “Gen Z humor” shaping memes today, like mulch posts, is an evolution of “millennial humor” of the 2010s. With its motivational undertones and earnest nature, the version of internet humor that exists today is decidedly less bleak than its millennial predecessor, which the Guardian described as “disorientating, dark and strange” in 2019. That millennial humor was shaped by online trends that existed long before social media. The 1998 “Hampster Dance,” credited as one of the first internet memes, was infectious, nonsensical and at the time, inexplicably funny.

The trajectory of mulch posts, from Instagram to TikTok instead of the other way around, is uncommon, but given the enduring popularity of absurdist memes, it makes sense that shitpost-y content would be one of the first original Instagram trends to break through to mainstream social media in years. Screenshots of Instagram posts, most of which are from meme accounts, are constantly reposted as TikTok slideshows — though the recycled content consists of standalone memes, and haven’t inspired a larger trend under a unifying theme. Reels may have had original trends, like viral songs or popular editing techniques, but few, if any, have been unique enough to spread to other platforms. 

Instagram’s hold on internet culture slipped as TikTok usage became more ubiquitous in recent years, and TikTok users have derided Instagram users as millennials who are behind on meme trends. Instagram’s short-form video feature, Reels, was built to rival TikTok, but the platform’s early years have been dominated by recycled TikToks. Instagram has tried to discourage users from reposting TikToks by refusing to recommend posts that contain TikTok’s watermark. An internal Meta document from August 2022 noted that nearly a third of Reels content was originally posted elsewhere, the Wall Street Journal reported. 

Lacking original content and overrun with reposts, Reels has been perceived as a platform for out-of-touch millennials — a sentiment jokingly held by many on TikTok. More Gen Z adults use Instagram than TikTok, according to surveys conducted by the data analysis company Morning Consult for its semiannual report on media and entertainment, and more Gen Z adults use both platforms at least once a day than millennials. It isn’t a generational divide that’s fueling the negative perception of Reels, it’s the lack of original content. 

TikTok users often joke that Reels users are slow to adopt trends and behind on current events. One recent viral video about Reels users, posted in November, says, “instagram reels users just finding out that the submarine imploded,” referencing OceanGate’s Titan submersible that went missing and later found wrecked in June. 

Mulch is one of the first Reels trends that actually originated on Instagram, and it’s one of the first to translate to other social media platforms’ formats. The meme can exist as a static image of a crusty white dog asking, “who up mulching?” or as a video narrated by an AI-generated voice extolling the virtues of munching on chemically enriched soil. 

In 2021, i-D predicted that incomprehensible shitposting accounts would prevail over the polished meme accounts that post content for universal appeal. Today, Instagram’s meme culture has largely shifted toward low-effort, text-heavy content that blends confessional captions with seemingly unrelated imagery. A recent post from the Instagram account fembiotic, for example, superimposed the text “my life is over. (my birthday is coming up)” over a vintage illustration of a cat holding a pink cupcake.  

Meme accounts are keeping Instagram relevant in the face of competitors, and naturally, a meme account drove one of the first original Reels trends. 

Whether the meme lasts is questionable — nothing kills a meme faster than going mainstream enough to be co-opted by brands, or worse, being covered by a news outlet — but the internet absurdism that shapes mulch posts will continue evolving into something weirder and more unexplainable long after mulch loses relevance. By then, it won’t be “Gen Alpha humor” or whatever generation comes after. It’ll still be internet absurdism. Until then, Reels can shake its profoundly uncool reputation by leaning into the shitposting. The sisters of the loam are all for it. 

Google's AI-assisted NotebookLM note-taking app is now open to users

Google’s AI-assisted NotebookLM note-taking app is now open to users in the US thinkitnow.in

Google’s AI note-taking app is now available to all users in United States who are at least 18 years old, the company announced on Friday. The experimental app is also getting a slew of new features and starting to use Gemini Pro, Google’s new large language model, to “help with document understanding and reasoning.”

Once you upload documents to NotebookLM, the app can automatically generate summaries and suggests follow-up questions about the content in the documents. Unlike generic chatbots that draw on large amounts of unrelated information, NotebookLM solely focuses on the documents that it is fed.

Now, Google is adding new capabilities to the product to go beyond generating summaries and suggesting questions.

NotebookLM now has new tools designed to help users organize their curated notes into structured writing projects. For instance, you can select a set of notes and ask NotebookLM to create something new, such as a script outline, email newsletter or a draft of a marketing plan.

Plus, NotebookLM can now suggest actions based on whatever you’re current doing. For instance, say you have selected a passage while reading a source. NotebookLM will automatically offer to summarize the text that you have selected into a new note or help you understand the content of the text. In another instance, say you’re writing a note. NotebookLM will offer to refine your prose or suggest related ideas from your sources based on what you have written so far.

Image Credits: Google

The tech giant is adding a new noteboard space to let you easily pin quotes from the chat or your own written notes. Google says the new space was a key request from users who said they wanted the ability to save their exchanges with NotebookLM as notes.

Google is also making a few other small tweaks to the product. Now when you add a note, NotebookLM will create an independent new note instead of adding to a single notepad. And when you click on the citation number in a chat response or a saved note, you will now immediately be taken to the original quote in the source.

If you want to concentrate exclusively on notetaking, you can now hide the source. And if you want to focus NotebookLM’s AI on selected sources, you can chat with a specific set of sources in your notebook by selecting them individually in the source sidebar. Plus, Google is adding PDF support and copied text support, which means you can now copy and paste text to create a new source and edit the title once it’s created.

In addition to the new features, Google is also expanding the product’s limitations, as notebooks can now include up to 20 sources, while source can now include up to 200,000 words.

Today’s announcement comes around five months after the tech giant made NotebookLM available to a select few. Google first demoed its “AI notebook for everyone” during Google I/O earlier this year as Project Tailwind before renaming it to NotebookLM. At the time, Google said the app could be used by students as a way to organize their lecture notes and other documents when completing coursework.

NotebookLM is promising, but as TechCrunch’s Devin Coldeway previously noted, let’s hope the product doesn’t end up in the Google Graveyard like so many of the tech giant’s other experimental projects.

Fancy Bear targets Nato entities via critical Outlook flaw thinkitnow.in

Fancy Bear targets Nato entities via critical Outlook flaw thinkitnow.in

The Kremlin-backed advanced persistent threat (APT) actor known to the cyber community variously as APT28, Fighting Ursa, Forest Blizzard and most famously, Fancy Bear, may have been exploiting a critical elevation of privilege (EoP) zero-day in Microsoft Outlook much earlier and more widely than thought.

CVE-2023-23397 was officially disclosed and patched back in March 2023. It is a particularly nasty bug, exploited by sending a specially crafted email to the victim, but because it can be triggered server-side, they do not actually need to open or view it to become compromised.

A few days after that, Mandiant’s John Hultquist warned that the vulnerability had likely been exploited by Moscow against Ukrainian targets for well over 12 months. Then, earlier in December, Microsoft and Polish Cyber Command warned that exploitation of the bug was ongoing.

Now, new evidence published by the Unit 42 team at Palo Alto Networks has revealed that Fancy Bear has been using the zero-day liberally over the past 20 months, in three distinct campaigns dating from March to December of 2022 – in March of 2023, and most recently between September and October of this year, targeting least 30 organisations in 14 nations, the majority of them Nato members.

Victimology extends across multiple sectors, including energy production and distribution; pipeline operations; materiel, personal and air transport; and various government defence, foreign and internal affairs and economic ministries.

The targeted countries were Bulgaria, Czechia, Italy, Jordan, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Montenegro, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Türkiye, Ukraine, the United Arab Emirates and the United States, as well as the Nato High Readiness Force Headquarters, which are dispersed across Europe in the UK, France, Germany, Greece, Poland and Türkiye.

Unit 42 said its discovery offered valuable insight into Russian state targeting priorities during the ongoing war in Ukraine. “Delving into more than 50 observed samples in which Fighting Ursa targeted victims with CVE-2023-23397 provides unique and informative insights into Russian military priorities during a time of international conflict for them,” the team wrote.

“Zero-day exploits by their nature are valuable commodities for APTs. Threat actors only use these exploits when the rewards associated with the access and intelligence gained outweigh the risk of public discovery of the exploit.

“Using a zero-day exploit against a target indicates it is of significant value. It also suggests that existing access and intelligence for that target were insufficient at the time.

“In the second and third campaigns, Fighting Ursa continued to use a publicly known exploit that was already attributed to them, without changing their techniques. This suggests that the access and intelligence generated by these operations outweighed the ramifications of public outing and discovery,” they said.

“For these reasons, the organisations targeted in all three campaigns were most likely a higher than normal priority for Russian intelligence.”

How CVE-2023-23397 works

CVE-2023-23397 targets Windows NT LAN Manager (NTLM), a challenge-response authentication protocol that is known to be prone to what are known as relay attacks, as a result of with Microsoft has used Kerberos as its default protocol sine Windows 2000.

Unfortunately for Microsoft users, many Microsoft systems, including Outlook, will default back to NTLM as a failsafe if Kerberos is not feasible.

In the exploitation chain, a vulnerable or misconfigured Outlook instance receives a specially crafted email and sends NTLM authentication message to a remote file share controlled by Fancy Bear. It receives back an NTLMv2 hash which the APT then uses to impersonate the victim and gain access to their network.

Kennet Harpsøe, Logpoint senior cyber analyst, commented: “Given the overall political situation the described attack should not come as a surprise for anyone…NTLM is ancient and depreciated. The modern replacement is Kerberos [which] is standard even in Windows networks, but NTLM is used as a fall back and is thus still widely used despites its numerous and well-known security flaws.

“If you can, disable NTLM in your AD, and if you cannot, make sure to monitor the NTLM traffic on your network. Are new users all of a sudden using NTLM authentication all the time? NTLM authentication requests should normally not be leaving your network. If they do, it should be thoroughly investigated. Track all NTLM replay attempts in your network from your AD log,” he said.

“Enforce Signing (SMB/LDAP) and Extended Protection for Authentication (EPA) for all relevant servers, like domain controllers and email servers, to defeat most replay attacks.

Added Harpsøe: “Finally, one wonders why it is still not standard to encrypt emails at rest, with keys private to the recipients. PGP has been around for a long time. It’s not much fun stealing emails if you can’t read them!”

Busy bears

Unit 42’s latest disclosure about the extent of malicious Russian cyber activity comes in the wake of major new intelligence published yesterday by the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and partner agencies in which a campaign of cyber attacks on the British political process was firmly attributed to a Federal Security Service (FSB) group called Star Blizzard, but also tracked as Cold River and Seaborgium among other names.

The government judges this campaign to be so serious in its nature that it yesterday summoned the Russian ambassador to account for it, and placed two named individuals, including an FSB agent, on the UK’s financial sanctions list over their involvement in an attack on a prominent thinktank.

Star Blizzard is known to be run by the FSB’s Centre 18 unit, whereas Fancy Bear is more likely controlled by the General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) 85th special Service Centre’s (GTsSS) Unit 26165 unit.

While both the FSB and GRU are successor units to the Soviet-era KGB beloved by generations of spy fiction writers, the FSB is responsible for counter-intelligence, state security and intelligence gathering outside Russia’s borders, and reports directly to Vladimir Putin.

The GRU, meanwhile, is the primary intelligence service of the Russian Armed Services, and unlike the FSB is ultimately subordinate to Moscow’s military command structure. The GRU is considered to be Russia’s largest intelligence service, and it also controls the country’s infamous Spetsnaz special forces.

Formed during the Cold War, the Spetsnaz saw action during the Prague Spring of 1968 and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. More recently they were the so-called Little Green Men seen in Crimea prior to its illegal annexation from Ukraine in 2014, and have participated in various actions on Ukrainian soil since February 2022, including sabotage against key targets, and potentially assassination attempts against Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.

ContactMonkey lands $55M investment to grow its email software for

ContactMonkey lands $55M investment to grow its email software for internal comms thinkitnow.in

Email is quite profitable, as it turns out. Or rather, email communications software is.

Today, Toronto-based ContactMonkey, a platform that lets companies create, send and track internal comms from Outlook and more, announced that it raised $55 million in a Series A round led by Updata Partners.

It’s a sizable round from a single VC, so what warranted the hearty vote of confidence? Perhaps ContactMonkey’s profitability — or the fact that the company was bootstrapped up until recently.

Said Updata partner Braden Snyder in a statement: “As employers continue to seek ways to better engage and retain talent, ContactMonkey is filling a key void in the market with their robust and user-friendly solution. In the remote work era, we believe that companies must continue to find avenues to best engage with their employees and communicate with them in ways that truly resonate. ContactMonkey powers this type of communication.”

ContactMonkey founder and CEO Scott Pielsticker said that the new cash will be put toward expanding in international markets and doubling the size of ContactMonkey’s 80-person team, with a particular emphasis on building out ContactMonkey’s sales and marketing organizations.

“Our reason for raising money now is simple,” Pielsticker told TechCrunch in an email interview. “We see tremendous demand in the market and around the world for internal email platforms, as companies look to improve how they communicate with employees. We believe we’re well suited to meet this demand.”

ContactMonkey

Image Credits: ContactMonkey

Prior to ContactMonkey, Pielsticker started Blueback, a London-based taxi car company. ContactMonkey came about after Pielsticker says he saw clear demand in the market for a platform to help businesses engage employees through email.

“Our mission became to create a beautiful product for teams to leverage that’s user friendly and that has key data and insights to improve internal communications,” Pielsticker said.

“Beautiful” and “user friendly” is relative, of course. But ContactMonkey indeed delivers on the promise of connecting staffers — and managers — via email. The platform integrates with Outlook, Gmail or Teams, as well as SMS and human resources information systems like Workday and ADP, assisting in orchestrating things like company announcements, alerts and updates.

Through engagement analytics, ContactMonkey allows users to build segmented employee lists, collect feedback and view metrics such as click-through rates, open rates and read rates.

“Today, there are different ways that companies communicate with their employees,” Pielsticker said. “They may send emails that have no insights into engagement, so companies don’t know whether employees opened the email — much less whether it resonated with them. Or they may use a marketing or sales platform to send emails. These solutions may have some data insights, but they run into problems as well, from delivery issues to unsubscribe buttons to a lack of enterprise-level security. We provide a third avenue.”

ContactMonkey has around a thousand customers, and Pielsticker says that the base is on a steady uptick. While he admits that ContactMonkey isn’t alone in the market for managing internal emails (see: Staffbase, Mailchimp), he argues that the investment from Updata puts it in a solid position to combat the challengers.

“COVID-19 had a positive impact as employers looked to better communicate with their remote workers and maintain company culture. We think this investment will provide us with the runway needed to deal with any market headwinds — though we do not see the slowdown in our industry as much as the wider tech industry is feeling it.

UK networks glow as Openreach hits halfway point in UK

UK networks glow as Openreach hits halfway point in UK broadband upgrade plan thinkitnow.in

Just as it published network traffic data showing its broadband infrastructure lit up to unprecedented levels thanks mainly to Liverpool, Manchester United and Manchester City’s Premier League football games being shown simultaneously over Amazon Prime Video, Openreach announced that its full-fibre network is now available to 12.5 million UK premises, which represents the halfway mark in its nationwide plan to reach 25 million premises with the technology by the end of 2026.

Openreach has invested £15bn in its full-fibre infrastructure project, looking to provide what it assures will be reliable, fast broadband that meets the needs of modern life. It said that the need for the upgrade is clear, with roughly 1.8 million Terabytes of data used on its network each week – equivalent to every person in the country watching two full HD movies every day.

The company added that broadband usage hit record-breaking levels in 2022 and data consumption was rising every single year, as technology becomes more sophisticated and integral to people’s daily lives, with social changes such as working from home and the boom in online learning. 

In a clear example of this rise, Openreach revealed that it had the biggest ever hourly peak for the data being used during the 20:00-21:00pm period on its network on 6 December. Typically, the company see an average of 21 PB of data during this period each day, but more than 29.5 Petabytes (PB) of data passed through the broadband network on Wednesday.

Given the live streaming on Amazon of the six Premier League football matches during the night, Openreach said that it expected a spike and that it was always monitoring the network to anticipate peaks in demand, confident it could cope with whatever was being thrown at it.

As it continued to see high levels of traffic across the network, Openreach stressed that faster, more reliable connectivity had become a priority for most people. To that end, it was seeing growth in deployment, reaching around 60,000 new premises every week, the equivalent of a town the size of Tunbridge Wells in Kent.

In addition, Openreach revealed that more than four million homes and businesses have already connected to the new network and demand continues to rise with the company growing its full-fibre base by more than 30,000 new orders every week.

Openreach noted that it has already made full-fibre available to more than 13,400 medical facilities – including hospitals, GP surgeries and pharmacies – across the UK, as well as 8,300 care and nursing homes. It has also made full-fibre available to over 13,500 educational facilities such as schools, universities and 4,500 children’s nurseries and creches.

Meanwhile, as part of its regular programme of build updates, Openreach has published plans to deliver full-fibre in another 142 locations in the UK, covering around 1.4. million homes and businesses, including what it said are some of the hardest-to-reach and most rural communities in the UK.

After it reaches its initial 25 million target, Openreach intends to keep building reaching up to 30 million premises with full-fibre by the end of 2030.

Commenting on the target milestone, Clive Selley, CEO, Openreach, said: “This is a national infrastructure project that’s a genuine success story. We’re delivering engineering on an epic scale, on time and on budget – and that’s thanks to a supportive policy environment which has led to huge investment and competition throughout the UK’s telecoms sector.

“Ultimately, we’ll reach up to 30 million premises by the end of the decade – unlocking a raft of economic and social benefits by supporting new models of commerce, healthcare and public services.”

With its second app, Amo wants to make photo-sharing as

With its second app, Amo wants to make photo-sharing as simple taking a photo thinkitnow.in

Less than three weeks ago, French startup Amo released ID. As I hinted in my article covering this much-anticipated launch, ID was Amo’s first idea. Today, the social consumer startup is releasing its second app called Capture.

Once again, this new app will be dissected by social app enthusiasts and other companies working in this space because Amo was co-founded by 10 veterans in the industry who cut their teeth on Zenly, the location-sharing app that was acquired by Snap, grew to become one of Europe’s biggest social app with 18 million daily active users and then was shut down by Snap.

Amo’s first app ID is all about creating (and browsing) highly-personalized profile pages. It’s a visual take on social networks with a sense of depth and space that doesn’t restrict you to a 3×3 grid of photos. Capture is something completely different.

“It’s the thing that I’ve been the most obsessively thinking aboutfor the past 12 years of my life. They all make photo apps and I use other photo apps every day. Why can’t I make one myself? How would I do it?” Amo co-founder Antoine Martin told me a few weeks ago.

“It’s the thing that I’ve been the most obsessively thinking aboutfor the past 12 years of my life. They all make photo apps and I use other photo apps every day. Why can’t I make one myself?” Antoine Martin

Capture is a radically different photo-sharing app. As the name suggests, calling it a photo-sharing app isn’t even fair as Amo spent more time thinking about capturing photos than looking at other people’s photos. It’s a fun and straightforward take on the smartphone camera that takes advantage of many of the sensors in your phone.

When you open the app, Capture immediately starts with a viewfinder of your camera. There’s a big shutter button in the middle, and some smaller icons next to it.

Capture is a camera app — and it’s social. It is meant to be used as a way to capture photos in just a few seconds, without having to think about it, just like you take photos with the iPhone’s default camera app.

When you take a photo, nothing happens. There’s no preview screen, no action buttons, nothing.

“Consumption takes a back seat, you don’t land into a feed. It’s a creation-first app, and that’s really what it’s all about,” Martin said. “If I’m walking in the street and I see a Space Invader that I like, I just capture it, I’m there, I take a photo, I turn off my phone, it’s in my pocket. I don’t spend minutes looking at the preview.”

In the background, the photos that you take with Capture are saved to your photo library and are shared with your Amo friends. There’s no need to think about what you should share or not and who you should share your photos with. Every photo that you take with Capture is shared.

A personal camera

A piece of content in Capture isn’t just a photo. By default, when you tap on the big shutter button, Capture saves two photos — what you see in the viewfinder and a wide-angle photo.

There are smaller buttons in the app that are essentially other photo modes. The smiley face lets you capture a frontback — what you see and a selfie. The third button is a superzoom mode that captures a handful of photos that are more and more zoomed in.

These features let you augment your photos with context. They could also be considered as artistic tools or opportunities to have fun.

But when you look at your friends’ photos, you only see a photo and that’s it. This time, Capture takes advantage of the accelerometer to turn a static photo into an animated image. You tilt your phone forward and backward to reveal the wide-angle shot, the selfie or the zoomed-in photos.

Just like with ID, Amo has integrated a ton of haptic effects so that you can actually feel the app as it slightly vibrates in your hand when you tilt your phone forward and backward. It’s an imaginative interaction gesture and it works extremely well.

One thing I’ve noticed when people started talking about Capture is that they say “grab my phone” because it’s easier to explain the app once the other person can move the device in their hand.

Here’s a video that explains what I mean (haptic feedback not included):

Now, what about filters? These things are popular in other social apps, right? Amo lets you customize your camera indeed, but the company isn’t calling it filters.

When you swipe left on the main screen, you get several options. There’s a menu that lets you customize the color temperature and general feel of your photos. You select a color, tap a bunch of buttons until you’re happy with the result. Amo doesn’t label these buttons or provide any explanation. It’s all about finding your style without any influence.

“There’s a button for drawing and a button for dropping stickers. And the goal here is that you can make your own signature,” Martin said. Once you hit the save button, all your future photos will be captured with these customizations. “We tried to be more personal than the others, we let you really define a style of your own and keep it that way,” he added.

And Capture has more depth than you might think. There are a few hidden tricks that users will discover over time. For instance, you can switch to a different theme by holding the palm of your hand in front of the selfie camera for a few seconds.

This way, you can save multiple camera styles without erasing your previous style. You can also move the buttons of the app in case you want to put them in the corner or you want to make the frontback button bigger.

A social camera roll

At the bottom of the app, there’s a banner that tells you if your friends have shared new photos. When you tap on it, it opens up a feed of the most recent photos. You can add comments and view where the photo was taken.

Swiping through these photos feel like browsing a shared camera roll with your friends. Arguably, it is something that messaging apps like WhatsApp have nailed with group conversations. But the content in Capture is less polished, more mundane. It reflects what your friends actually do every day.

Image Credits: Romain Dillet / TechCrunch

So there you have it, Amo is a startup building a galaxy of social apps. ID and Capture are the first two apps. There might be more apps down the road.

And it can be a powerful approach when it comes to user growth. When you create a profile and add friends in one app, you will find your friends in Amo’s other apps. You can see notifications from ID in Capture, and vice versa.

It’s a novel approach in the social consumer space. Amo isn’t just trying different things, it is building radically different social apps, tying them together with a unified experience and putting them on your phone home screen — one icon at a time.

The other common thread is that Amo wants to focus on real-life friends and loved ones. And that’s also the case with Capture.

“When users switch to consumption mode, they have a counter of content to consume. They know that it takes three to four seconds max per piece of content,” Martin said. “So users don’t get caught up in TikTok’s infinite feed, where you risk getting sucked into 3 hours’ worth of stuff.”

And when you’ve dismissed the last photo, the app closes itself. It means that it’s time to get back to real life, explore and capture interesting photos for your friends.

AMD goes after Nvidia with AI accelerator and software library

AMD goes after Nvidia with AI accelerator and software library thinkitnow.in

AMD has finally come up with its answer to Nvidia’s dominance in the artificial intelligence (AI)-optimised server space. The chipmaker has unveiled a datacentre processor and open source software stack for artificial intelligence, and Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, Dell Technologies, HPE, Lenovo, Supermicro, Arista, Broadcom and Cisco are among the companies that have announced their support for the new AMD hardware and software.

“AI is the future of computing, and AMD is uniquely positioned to power the end-to-end infrastructure that will define this AI era, from massive cloud installations to enterprise clusters and AI-enabled intelligent embedded devices and PCs,” said AMD CEO Lisa Su.

The company’s AI strategy encompasses a new datacentre processor, the AMD Instinct MI300 Series datacentre AI accelerators and ROCm 6, an open software stack, which AMD claims offers “significant optimisations and new features supporting large language models [LLMs]”. It has also launched the Ryzen 8040 Series family of processors with Ryzen AI for laptop, desktop and workstation PCs.

Microsoft said it will be offering the Azure ND MI300x v5 Virtual Machine (VM) series optimised for AI workloads that run on AMD Instinct MI300X accelerators.

Oracle has unveiled plans to offer OCI bare metal compute featuring AMD Instinct MI300X accelerators, while Meta plans to add AMD Instinct MI300X accelerators to its datacentres in combination with ROCm 6 to power AI inferencing workloads.

The Dell PowerEdge XE9680 server will use the new AMD hardware, as will Lenovo’s ThinkSystem platform, and HPE has announced plans to bring AMD Instinct MI300 accelerators to its enterprise and HPC offering.

Trish Damkroger, senior vice-president and chief product officer of HPC, AI and Labs at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, said the AMD accelerator will be used in the HPE Cray EX supercomputer to provide what she described as “powerful accelerated compute, with improved energy efficiency, to help our customers tackle compute-intensive modelling, simulation, AI and machine learning workloads, and realise a new level of insights”.

On the software side, OpenAI said it has added support for AMD Instinct accelerators to Triton 3.0, providing out-of-the-box support for AMD accelerators that, according to AMD, allow developers to work at a higher level of abstraction on AMD hardware.

Bronis R de Supinski, chief technology officer for Livermore Computing at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory said the AMD accelerator will improve the Lab’s El Capitan exascale supercomputing system being built by HPE.

“El Capitan will offer incredible programmability, performance and energy efficiency through its use of the AMD Instinct MI300A APUs virtually eliminating the challenges of repeatedly moving data between CPUs and GPUs, thus helping us achieve our mission,” he said.

Greg Diamos, co-founder and chief technology officer at Lamini, discussed how AMD’s software offered a level of compatibility with Nvidia’s Cuda libraries that have become the de facto standard for AI and developers.

“Lamini and our customers have been running LLMs on a high performance cluster of AMD Instinct accelerators for over a year,” he said. “We’ve found AMD ROCm has similar software compatibility with Nvidia’s Cuda while supporting large language models.”

UK's CMA is looking at whether Microsoft and OpenAI tie-up

UK’s CMA is looking at whether Microsoft and OpenAI tie-up is a ‘relevant merger’ thinkitnow.in

The whirlwind management drama at OpenAI last month ended with co-founder Sam Altman reinstated within a week of his surprise dismissal and a much bigger role for Microsoft, which ended up with a seat on the board for the first time since investing billions into the startup earlier this year. That new, cosier relationship is the focus of a new inquiry that was launched today by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) in the U.K. over whether the two companies are now effectively in a “relevant merger situation”.

The first part of the process is today’s announcement of the the CMA interest, and an “Invitation to Comment”, which is open to both companies and any interested third parties to provide feedback for the CMA to consider as it eyes up what steps it might take next, if any.

“The invitation to comment is the first part of the CMA’s information gathering process and comes in advance of launching any phase 1 investigation, which would only happen once the CMA has received the information it needs from the partnership parties,” said Sorcha O’Carroll, Senior Director for Mergers at the CMA, in a statement.

“Relevant merger situation” is a specific regulatory term and it is meant to account for situations where a company is not being bought or merged with outright, but the relationship between the two effectively impacts competition for the rest of the market.

The CMA notes that “a range of different kinds of transactions and arrangements may constitute a relevant merger situation,” which can include minority shareholding and commercial arrangements. Both of these, of course, exist in the relationship between Microsoft and OpenAI. Microsoft not only made a huge investment worth billions in OpenAI last year that gives it just under 50% of the business. But the pair work very closely in developing a range of AI services, including a number incorporating Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform.

If AI has been a moving target, it is one that has very prominently featured both Microsoft and OpenAI as two of the strongest and most accurate darts. OpenAI has been setting the pace for the building of LLMs, and of services build using those LLMs. Microsoft has both supported that financially, but also operationally. And Microsoft played a very pivotal role in the last month of turmoil, which appears to have been the latest move that triggered the CMA’s attention.

“There have recently been a number of developments in the governance of OpenAI, some of which involved Microsoft,” it noted today.

Although OpenAI has never fully disclosed what led to the ouster of Altman and his co-founder Greg Brockman, Microsoft wasted no time in offering the pair prominent jobs at their company, along with jobs to any other OpenAI employees who wanted to leave the startup in protest. When Altman and Brockman were reinstated, it was a victory lap for all of them: Microsoft ended up with a board seat for the first time, yes, as a non-voting observer, but still at the table.

“The speed at which artificial intelligence (AI) is scaling across use cases and markets is unrivalled in economic history, while advances in powerful foundation models (FMs) mean that this is a pivotal moment in the development of this transformative technology,” the CMA writes. Essentially, the regulator is worried that in these early days, a handful a companies are making it hard to compete in the building and operation of these foundation models. “The partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI (including a multi-year, multi-billion dollar investment, collaboration in technology development and exclusive provision of cloud services by Microsoft to OpenAI) represents a close, multi-faceted relationship between two firms with significant activities in FMs and related markets,” it added.

There are a number of other criteria to meet to be considered part of a relevant merger situation as defined under the country’s Enterprise Act. If the CMA pursues this as a full-blown investigation, these points will inevitably come up. They will include questions of whether the two businesses — in this case, in the area of AI — are distinct enough; how much revenue is generated through their relationship (there is a £70 million revenue target); and whether they can be argued to account for more than 25% of the market for the product in question. These are all points I imagine both sides would argue exist or do not exist.

SAP strategy: Why customers need an innovation plan thinkitnow.in

Executive interview: Handling vanilla S/4Hana change management thinkitnow.in

McBride, which produces white-labelled cleaning products for major retailers, is embarking on a major business transformation that will involve replacing all of its existing business processes with S/4Hana.

Speaking to Computer Weekly during the UK and Ireland SAP User Group Connect23 annual conference in Birmingham, the company’s chief transformation officer, Chris Ward, describes the transformation as “a fair challenge”.

“We’ve made it harder for ourselves because we’re going with an ‘adopt’ strategy,” he says. “This means that McBride will take the vanilla, out-of-the-box business processes built into S/4Hana rather than adapt the ERP [enterprise resource planning] to match existing business operations.

“That means the journey to get there is harder, but I think the quality of the outcome is much better,” says Ward. “The SAP ERP is effectively a proxy operating model. All of the global templates that come with S/4Hana are the future of how we’re going to run our business, irrespective of where we are at.”

The upside of this approach, according to Ward, is that it leads to a better outcome. “You get an unencumbered flow of data because we’ve not had to customise anything,” he says. The downside, however, is the change management, which Ward says is much harder.

Looking at the change management, he says S/4Hana is one of seven transformations being run at McBride. However, all of the others stem from the success of the ERP implementation, which Ward describes as having the backbone of a fish.

“I would say 90% of the energy is going to change management,” he says. Even though it has headquarters in the UK and is listed on the London Stock Exchange, Ward says, “We’re not a UK business. We’re a European business, so a big part of our ethos for the programme is that it has to feel European.”

As a consequence, the programme team is European and people on the team speak multiple languages. “We have built a community of about 120 people comprising factory staff who operate all of the different elements of what we’re going to be introducing with S/4Hana.”

According to Ward, this team of 120 needs to be evangelical about the business processes that are running on the new S/4Hana ERP system. “They’ve got to be ones you have to win over as they are the people who need to understand what they are talking about when they take S/4Hana into the business,” he says, adding that “the real resistance to change won’t be at a logical level, it will be at an emotional level”.

To help the business manage this, he says the company has adopted the Adkar change model methodology, which aims to reduce resistance to change.

Managing the people side

The new ERP implementation inevitably involves changing working practices people have used for years. Given the heavily unionised nature of the business, Ward acknowledges the difficult conversations the team needs to have with trade union leaders to give the S/4Hana deployment a chance to succeed.

Discussing the questions trade unions may raise over how the software that ultimately allows the company to run more efficiently will impact the job security of their members, he says, “If I was in their shoes, I’d ask these questions, and if they didn’t, I would suggest that they do.” His approach is to give the trade unions and their members who work in McBride factories the confidence that their job roles are secure – but Ward says the nature of the role will change.

He adds that staff currently have to deal with the frustration of input data manipulation, which takes up “the lion’s share” of their work. “Whether they work in finance, in HR or manufacturing on the shop floor, all of their work is about input data manipulation, exporting this data to Excel, just to keep the wheels turning,” says Ward.

Ward’s ambition is to elevate the quality of the work staff undertake by using S4/Hana to handle all of the previously manual input data manipulation. The work they do then changes. “This is not a headcount thing,” he says. “It’s about giving staff the tools that enable them to get above the day job and actually use their experience and ability to make value-adding decisions. Their work becomes much more about analysis.

Ward says, for example, “How does the provision of insight help me make better decisions to drive my factory performance?”

Choosing the right implementation provider

The company took two years to find a suitable implementation partner and finally selected NTT Data Solutions. “One of the benefits of working with a company as big as NTT is their offshoring capability,” he says. “I think it’s amazing.”

Ward recently went to the outsourcer’s Hyderabad site. “I met all the team that will be doing the coding and the testing,” he says. “It’s an exceptional team.”

Given the size of NTT compared with McBride, Ward believes the company will not be lost among the many large customers of NTT. Looking back at the tender process, he says NTT put a lot of commitments in place to support the company, which is something he felt others who bid for the business were somewhat lacking. “I’ve got two contacts in NTT, my delivery director, because we’re now delivering the programme, and I’ve got a pre-sales contact.”

This is to help McBride select additional SAP components beyond the S/4Hana core as and when these are required. “I also have a monthly call with the European vice-president,” adds Ward.

This offers both NTT and McBride a form of offline governance, where he can have a frank discussion with NTT’s European chief about what he has been hearing anecdotally from the NTT team managing the McBride contract. Equally, Ward is also able to share his feedback from the McBride team.

The firm is effectively taking standard S/4Hana templates and mapping these onto what it needs to do to operate the business.

NTT will follow a rigid structure with the S/4Hana deployment. The lack of S/4Hana knowledge at McBride means NTT makes the implementation choices, such as selecting the most appropriate S/4Hana business process template to use to deliver the required outcome. This business process replaces an existing one, which is why there is the team of 120 people, who work closely with NTT to understand these changes.

Getting board approval

The investment in the SAP system represents the biggest expenditure in the company’s 96 year history. Ward says the company had ended up with data silos, which inhibited streamline business operations and led to a situation that its customers found less than ideal in terms of how they dealt with McBride. “We operate across so many sites in Europe that we got to a point where data doesn’t talk to itself, and there was a little bit of a sense in McBride that the left arm doesn’t always know what the right arm is doing.”

Ward notes that a lot of the data is held locally and is not connected particularly well, which means data cannot flow across the company. This lack of data connectivity has become a bit of an inhibitor. “A lot of our processes run across countries, divisions and business units,” Ward explains, but while they were happy with the quality of products and trusted McBride as a brand, the feedback was that the company operated too slowly. The survey showed McBride took too long to do the basics, such as pricing, tendering and ordering more goods, when there’s a big promotion. “I think that’s fair,” he says.

Using the standard SAP methodology, Ward says McBride expects to finish preparations by the end of the year, and the project will then enter a design phase. The aim is to have the UK running S/4Hana by the spring of 2025, followed by Belgium, where two significant McBride factories are located. Remaining regions and sites across Europe will then be phased in.