Welcome back.  Credit card companies are asking customers what they want as one of the strongest loyalty perks—air miles—loses altitude. Amazon introduced a wearable that not only tracks your heart rate but purports to monitor your positivity. And tech companies are trying to maintain collaboration among employees from afar. 

Credit-card issuers have been hit by declining consumer spending during the pandemic. But the card companies also are grappling with a longer term issue: keeping customers happy with rewards that suddenly look a lot less enticing, especially in the realm of travel.

Issuers from Chase to HSBC are introducing new spending rewards and perks in the hope of keeping customers loyal during and after the pandemic, Katie Deighton reports. AmEx is giving some cardholders a free year of the meditation app Calm, while Capital One began letting some customers redeem miles they might have spent on flights for takeout and streaming services instead.

Matt Knise, the head of Capital One rewards, said his team made those moves after analyzing spending data and speaking directly to customers.

“If we’d just looked at the data, it would have been easy to say, ‘Let’s only look at categories that were going up, like grocery and pharmacy,’” Mr. Knise said. “But what we heard was customers view their rewards as something a bit more aspirational, which is why we really decided to home in on things like deals for streaming services and restaurants.”

Amazon rolled out Amazon Halo, a wearable health and wellness tracker that the company said also monitors its users’ emotions, the Journal’s Dave Sebastian reports.

The e-commerce giant said the Halo app could track its users’ social and emotional well-being under the “Tone” feature by analyzing voice, offering insights into their “energy and positivity.” 

Combined with images from a smartphone camera, Halo can also calculate users’ body-fat percentage, according to Amazon, in addition to wearable basics like heart rate and sleep.

With privacy increasingly becoming part of the experience–or not—for tech products, Amazon said Halo encrypts health data in transit and in the cloud, deletes speech samples after analyzing them and removes body-scan images from the cloud after processing.

Technology executives are finding ways for their teams to collaborate and be productive as fully remote work persists during the coronavirus pandemic, Elaine Chen reports for the Journal. 

Seattle-based startup Uplevel held two virtual hackathons in the past five months, facilitated by the use of Miro, a virtual whiteboard platform, and by designated Slack channels. Each lasted two weeks—twice as long as an in-person hackathon the company held last fall. 

The hope was that the longer session would help employees develop their projects to the point where they could be tested with customers, said Ravs Kaur, chief technology officer at Uplevel.

“You don’t feed ideas off of each other like you would in person,” Ms. Kaur said. “We’re trying to make the most of the situation.”

LG has come up with a battery-powered face mask, designed in part based on “extensive facial shape analysis.” [Design Week]

Amazon’s main shopping app is rolling out a redesign on iPhones to all U.S. users this month, brightening the color palette and trying to make key functions easier to find. [TechCrunch]

Google is testing a tool to help developers build AI agents that can handle multiple conversation topics at once and other complex operations. [Voicebot.ai]

MLB fans can now ask Google Assistant for information like scores and schedules about 15 teams. [Mobile Marketer]

Microsoft Ads redesigned its user interface to better align with other Microsoft products and ad platforms. [Search Engine Journal] 

Restaurants are rethinking drive-through design to make everything faster for hungry consumers. [Fast Company]

U.K. chain Costa Coffee is testing street-facing service counters in central London, designed to serve customers who’d rather not enter stores. [The Grocer]

The 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles revealed an “ever-shifting,” dynamic logo created by a range of artists, performers, designers and others. [LAT]