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Zoom Follows Workers Back to the Office; Payment Jewelry Hangs On Despite Smartwatch Dominance
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Welcome back. Zoom is working to protect its place in workers’ lives even after they return to the office. Contactless payment rings have been eclipsed by smartwatches and mobile wallets, but they’re not going away. And a Facebook attempt to make its platform a healthier environment had the opposite effect.
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Zoom’s video-conference booth is an effort to remain central even for workers who are no longer remote. PHOTO: ROOM INC.
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Zoom is collaborating with an office phone booth provider to offer employers a “Room for Zoom,” part of its strategy to remain useful as workers begin to trickle back to the workplace, Katie Deighton writes for The Experience Report.
The setup, from Zoom and New York-based Room Inc., includes sound-proof walls, a height-adjustable desk, built-in lighting, and an HP computer that comes installed with a high-definition webcam and Zoom Rooms software.
Workers may once have been comfortable taking phone calls in front of colleagues sitting at open-plan desks, but the visual components of video calling are sending more people into meeting rooms, said Room co-founder Morten Meisner-Jensen.
Zoom has taken steps to diversify beyond its core conferencing product as its growth slows in the wake of the return to in-person meetings.
“We want to do whatever is best for our customers,” said Ty Buell, a solutions architect at Zoom. “So if they're happy being fully remote, then we want to support that, and if they want to come into the office, we need to have offerings for that as well.”
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The Persistence of Payment Jewelry
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British jeweler Tovi Sorga said sales of its payment accessories have more than doubled in the 12 months through August. PHOTO: TOVI SORGA
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Contactless-payment accessories such as rings, bracelets and even jackets were once primed by some as the successors to credit cards. The products never really took off, primarily because financial companies turned their focus to multifunctional smartwatches and phones.
But smaller companies that make contactless-payment jewelry say there is still a market for payment devices without a screen or interface, Katie Deighton writes.
Rosan Diamond AG, which makes credit cards with inlays of precious and semiprecious stones, said its Rosan Pay unit has sold more than 2,000 wearable accessories to customers of Belgian bank KBC since July 2020. And U.K.-based Tovi Sorga said its payment-accessories sales more than doubled in the 12 months ended in August from the year-earlier period.
So-called passive wearables are faster to use than contactless cards, because their wearers don’t need to fish out their wallets, and don’t need to be charged like phones and watches, their proponents say. And then there is the question of personal preference—and style.
“I don’t personally want to wear a screen on my wrist, and I think there’s a lot of people who come under that catchment,” said Agnes Davis, director of sales and marketing at Tovi Sorga.
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Internal Facebook memos show how an algorithm change inadvertently rewarded outrage. SIUNG TJIA/WSJ
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An attempt by Facebook to make its News Feed a healthier place made the environment angrier instead, Keach Hagey and Jeff Horwitz report as part of a Wall Street Journal series on internal company documents about flaws in company’s platform.
Facebook overhauled its News Feed algorithm in 2018 to boost “meaningful social interactions,” encouraging friends and family to interact with each other and spend less time passively consuming professional content, which research suggested was harmful to their mental health.
But company researchers soon discovered that publishers and political parties were reorienting their posts toward outrage and sensationalism, because that tactic produced high levels of comments and reactions that translated into success on Facebook.
They concluded that the new algorithm’s heavy weighting of reshared material in its News Feed made angry voices louder. “Misinformation, toxicity, and violent content are inordinately prevalent among reshares,” researchers noted in internal memos.
Facebook said it has since made changes to reduce that effect.
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“The strategy is to bring digital experience and marketing together, and we want to make it much more seamless.”
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— Meredith Verdone, the departing chief marketing officer at Bank of America. Instead of naming a new CMO, the company will integrate the 1,400-person marketing department with the team under its chief digital officer.
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Grocery stores are trying out drive-through lanes. [Modern Retail]
Walmart plans to test an autonomous vehicle delivery service. [TechCrunch]
Wells Fargo plans to move its digital infrastructure to cloud services provided by Microsoft and Google, partly in a bid to offer more resilient customer services. [WSJ]
The global chief experience officer at R/GA, Ben Williams, is leaving the agency. [Adweek]
Spotify added a feature that can automatically insert suggested songs in users’ personal playlists. [Engadget]
Twitter is testing labels that reveal which accounts are run by bots. [Mashable]
Amazon is introducing its own Fire TV sets. [WSJ]
Microsoft is letting users stop using passwords and sign in with methods including its authenticator app and texted or emailed verification codes. [The Verge]
The latest Roomba is designed to identify and steer clear of pet waste. [CNN]
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