Video meetings. While the move to remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic may have made them mainstream, they are not without issues and more and more people are now opting out. For good reason. As it turns out, it’s really hard for our brains to sustain concentration while we’re trying to focus on 20 people in neat squares, all with different backgrounds and never quite looking at the camera. While we’ve had quite a bit of anecdotal evidence for this, Microsoft today released some of the research it did in this area, as well as new features in Teams that it hopes will make video meetings...…Video meetings. While the move to remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic may have made them mainstream, they are not without issues and more and more people are now opting out. For good reason. As it turns out, it’s really hard for our brains to sustain concentration while we’re trying to focus on 20 people in neat squares, all with different backgrounds and never quite looking at the camera. While we’ve had quite a bit of anecdotal evidence for this, Microsoft today released some of the research it did in this area, as well as new features in Teams that it hopes will make video meetings...WW…

Google, in collaboration with a number of academic leaders and its consulting partner SADA Systems, today the launch of the , a new organization that aims to help open-source projects manage their trademarks.To be fair, at first glance, open-source trademarks may not sound like it would be a major problem (or even a really interesting topic), but there’s more here than meets the eye. As Google’s director of open source Chris DiBona told me, trademarks have increasingly become an issue for open-source projects, not necessarily because there have been legal issues around them, but because...…Google, in collaboration with a number of academic leaders and its consulting partner SADA Systems, today the launch of the , a new organization that aims to help open-source projects manage their trademarks.To be fair, at first glance, open-source trademarks may not sound like it would be a major problem (or even a really interesting topic), but there’s more here than meets the eye. As Google’s director of open source Chris DiBona told me, trademarks have increasingly become an issue for open-source projects, not necessarily because there have been legal issues around them, but because...WW…

AWS today the beta launch of , a new, fully managed low-code/no-code development tool that aims to make it easy for anybody in a company to build their own applications. All of this, of course, is backed by a database in AWS and a web-based, drag-and-drop interface builder.Developers can build applications for up to 20 users for free. After that, they pay per user and for the storage their applications take up.Image Credits: Amazon/AWS“Customers have told us that the need for custom applications far outstrips the capacity of developers to create them,” said AWS VP Larry Augustin in the...…AWS today the beta launch of , a new, fully managed low-code/no-code development tool that aims to make it easy for anybody in a company to build their own applications. All of this, of course, is backed by a database in AWS and a web-based, drag-and-drop interface builder.Developers can build applications for up to 20 users for free. After that, they pay per user and for the storage their applications take up.Image Credits: Amazon/AWS“Customers have told us that the need for custom applications far outstrips the capacity of developers to create them,” said AWS VP Larry Augustin in the...WW…

Adobe today announced a slew of updates to its various apps, ranging from Photoshop and Lightroom to Premiere Pro, After Effects, Illustrator and its XD design tool. Like with some of its most recent releases, the emphasis of these updates is often on bringing more AI smarts to these applications with the help of the company’s Sensei platform. This includes Adobe’s recently launched .In addition to bringing more AI smarts to its applications, the updates also include the usual mix of new features, workflow enhancement and performance improvements.Among the new smart tools coming to...…Adobe today announced a slew of updates to its various apps, ranging from Photoshop and Lightroom to Premiere Pro, After Effects, Illustrator and its XD design tool. Like with some of its most recent releases, the emphasis of these updates is often on bringing more AI smarts to these applications with the help of the company’s Sensei platform. This includes Adobe’s recently launched .In addition to bringing more AI smarts to its applications, the updates also include the usual mix of new features, workflow enhancement and performance improvements.Among the new smart tools coming to...WW…

The is currently suffering a major outage, and with that, multiple services that are hosted on the platform are also down, including everybody’s favorite tech news aggregator, .It looks like the problems started around 2:30pm PT and spread from there. Best we can tell, this is a worldwide problem and involves a networking issue, but IBM’s isn’t actually loading anymore and returns an internal server error, so we don’t quite know the extent of the outage or what triggered it. IBM Cloud’s Twitter account has also remained silent, though we found a hosted on a third-party server, which seems...…The is currently suffering a major outage, and with that, multiple services that are hosted on the platform are also down, including everybody’s favorite tech news aggregator, .It looks like the problems started around 2:30pm PT and spread from there. Best we can tell, this is a worldwide problem and involves a networking issue, but IBM’s isn’t actually loading anymore and returns an internal server error, so we don’t quite know the extent of the outage or what triggered it. IBM Cloud’s Twitter account has also remained silent, though we found a hosted on a third-party server, which seems...WW…