lundi 1 avril 2024

Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar explains why an email company makes sense for Intuit

Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar explains why an email company makes sense for Intuit
A portrait of Intuit Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar.
Photo illustration: The Verge / Photo by Intuit Mailchimp

Intuit purchased Mailchimp in 2021, and less than a year later, co-founder Ben Chestnut was out. Here’s how new CEO Rania Succar is moving forward.

Today, I’m talking to Intuit Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar, who took over as CEO in 2022 after a pretty rough patch in the company’s history. See, Mailchimp was founded in 2001. It was a startup that learned a lot of lessons from that first dotcom boom and bust, and it managed to stay both successful and fully independent for 20 years.

But in 2021, it sold to Intuit, the company best known for finance products like QuickBooks and TurboTax, and the very next year, Ben Chestnut, who was one of the company’s co-founders, stepped down as CEO after telling employees that he thought introducing themselves with pronouns in meetings did more harm than good. After that, Rania took over.

This is a pretty huge culture change for the company, especially as it became more integrated with Intuit. It was also a big challenge for a new leader who came in from the outside — well, the outside of Mailchimp, but the inside of Intuit.

You’ll hear us talk about that transition a lot. Rania and I also got into the weeds of making decisions, which is very Decoder. She has a lot of thoughts on how decisions are made and why sometimes the things that seem easy are challenging and other things that seem difficult aren’t. That includes shutting down cult favorite newsletter service TinyLetter, which you’ll hear Rania say was one of the easiest decisions she’s ever made.

We also got really into the core business of email. Email was hot, then it wasn’t, and now it’s hot again. As part of Intuit, Mailchimp is just one part of a platform that helps small businesses operate. Mailchimp is there to do marketing and customer management, and the platform sells itself as something that “turns emails into revenue.” You’ll hear Rania explain how all of that is supposed to work.

Of course, we had to talk about generative AI, which is a big part of the Mailchimp road map. You’ll hear Rania explain that AI right now is more useful for segmentation and targeting: sending the right message to the right customer at the right time instead of constantly bombarding everyone with emails.

But there’s a dark side to that, of course. Having AI send everybody perfectly targeted emails all the time might just lead to a lot of email spam, and it might lead to people responding to AI emails with AI emails of their own. So, I asked Rania about that loop and if there’s any way to break it and make all of this a little more human.

This was a really fun conversation with some honestly scary ideas in it — and it’s all about email.

Okay, Rania Succar, CEO of Intuit Mailchimp. Here we go.

This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Rania Succar, you are the CEO of Intuit Mailchimp. Welcome to Decoder.

Thank you for having me.

You are a new-ish CEO. You’ve made some changes. That’s what our show’s all about. I think email is just a fascinating forever project of the internet — how we use it, where it goes, who controls it. There’s quite a lot there to unpack. And then there’s just basically the state of our networks in the age of AI and how we’re going to manage making things with AI and distributing things with AI. All wrapped up in Mailchimp, a company that distributes emails. So, lots to talk about.

Let’s start at the start: Mailchimp has been around for a while. I’m sure people have heard a few ads. How do you think about Mailchimp right now? Is it just email marketing? Is it more than that? What is the core purpose of the company?

I love that you talk about how Mailchimp has been around for a while and has this incredible storied history. It’s been a company that’s been around for 20 years; one of the earliest players in small business [software-as-a-service] — started off very much as an email player. When we acquired Mailchimp into Intuit overall, we think about it having a much more expansive role to play for small businesses, and we think about it as playing a role to solve their growth problem. We are in the business of solving challenges for small businesses. The top challenge they have is getting new customers and growing existing customers. And so, for us, it’s all about: how do you power growth? Email is a very important part of that, but there’s much more to that equation than just email.

When I think about the boom time of the millennial internet, I think about a bunch of the direct-to-consumer companies that lit up. They bought cheap Facebook ads or cheap Instagram ads. There was an explosion of these companies, where we can just name them and think about them — mattresses, suitcases, whatever you want to say. Then, the price of the ads skyrocketed, and they all ended up buying real estate, which I thought was really interesting. But email was pretty steady all through that. Is that the kind of product that you’re offering to those folks — “Here’s just a steady, consistent way to get people down the funnel to a purchase” — or is it more growth-oriented than that?

It’s more growth-oriented. The problem that small businesses face is a lot more complicated than that. We know that 50 percent of small businesses fail in the first five years. The number one reason they fail is they can’t get enough customers or grow their existing customers. Marketing is hard for an enterprise. It’s especially hard for a small business, and it’s only gotten harder. It’s gotten harder because consumers are across multiple platforms these days, so you have to catch them in various different places, and that’s changing all the time. It’s challenging because businesses are increasingly using multiple apps to run their business, so their own customer data is dispersed and fragmented. So, I love the space we’re working in across Mailchimp because it’s a really important customer problem to solve, and it’s a complicated customer problem to solve. It’s not just about getting the right emails out — it’s about deeply understanding their prospects and their existing customers and helping them get the right message at the right time to the right audience in order to deliver those growth outcomes. So, it’s much more than just email.

I did something really reductive before I jumped on the call with you: I just looked at the website. The tagline on the top of the Mailchimp website is very simple. It’s, “Turn emails into revenue,” which sounds great. I wish I could turn more of my emails into revenue.

We all do.

What is the actual process? What is the thing that turns email into money?

It starts with email, and over time, it’ll increasingly be more and more channels, but it starts with the depth of understanding about our customer’s customers. So, we want them to come in and connect all their customer data into Mailchimp, and then we use our predictive analytics to be able to deeply understand their customers in a way that they can’t get from other platforms. Then, based on that, especially with the possibilities of AI, we help them craft a message that’s personalized for that customer that we know will drive outsize performance, and then we provide those recommendations for the business to just turn it on.

So, especially as AI continues to evolve, there’s a world where a small business can come into any of the Intuit small business properties — whether it’s QuickBooks or Mailchimp — and these will operate as one operating system. They can come in and be served up a growth plan that says, “We found an opportunity to double your revenue,” and have a fully built out growth plan to go after that omnichannel, et cetera. But the foundation of that is the depth of insight about their customers and the intelligence we have about what it takes to drive conversion for those customers.

So, I run an online store for widgets. I’ve collected some emails by offering 10 percent off when you come to the store, when you buy something. Now I’ve got your email address, that’s great. You can see that I’ve bought blue widgets instead of green widgets, and you’re going to have AI send me a deal on blue widgets. That’s kind of what that sounds like at the top level. You know the customer well, so you’re going to send a very targeted email to the customer saying, “Hey, do we have a deal for you.”

Just think about how hard that is! One of the things we find is the small business owner — they’re a one-man shop, and so they are trying to do everything. They’re trying to deliver the product or the service and do all these things. Even just the intelligence of how to set up a marketing campaign is not some expertise that they have. And the mid-market marketer has the expertise and the know-how, but their data is fragmented and sitting everywhere. And so, they rarely have access to those insights and those analytics to be able to build sophisticated campaigns like that. So, you described it well: it’s going to be very exciting as it all comes to market, and it’s been increasingly exciting as we’ve brought solutions like that to market.

Is that the target customer base — the small- and mid-size company?

That’s right. We’re really proud across Intuit. We have a long-standing history, as does Mailchimp, for being one of the first software solutions small businesses choose as they go to solve their problems, so we want them to continue to choose us. The majority of small business customers today across the Intuit ecosystem have fewer than 10 employees, so we really are solving for the early stage business. In the last several years, we’ve increasingly focused on that mid-market business — being able to serve them not only when they start but as they grow and across their enterprise. So, not only in marketing or accounting but also in getting paid, accessing capital, managing their employees, accessing expertise — all the gamut of things they need to grow and run their business.

This is a theme I’ve heard from a lot of the enterprise software leaders that have been on the show: “You run a dry cleaner or a yoga studio. You’re going to need a bunch of software to deal with your customers and market your business. The opportunity is in providing all of the software. And then,” — much like you just did — “we’re going to call that an operating system for business.”

I’ve heard this pitch a lot: You need something to schedule customers to come in the door. You need a billing system. You need some way to email them. You need all this stuff just to run any kind of business nowadays. And that bundle is really, really valuable. You’re starting from, “We’re going to help you email your customers,” a much more digital-focused approach. Would you extend to that other stuff that is more brick and mortar, that is more scheduling all the stuff that a physical retailer would have to do?

Yes. We think about the customers we serve today as the Intuit small business customers, which are 10 million small business customers across QuickBooks and Mailchimp. And we have the majority of those verticals already present. We have a long-standing relationship with them. We’re one of their cornerstone software solutions in terms of the work that they’re doing with us. They entrust us with a lot of their data. And so, we’ve already got an edge in working across all these businesses. And so, that’s one of the extraordinary things about Mailchimp: the historical vertical distribution.

You look across all verticals, whether it’s service-based or product-based and then e-commerce versus digital brick and mortar — they’re all represented really well on Mailchimp. Then that also translates into what you see across QuickBooks, too. So, we think about serving all these businesses and that we have a unique opportunity to do that because of the historical relationships we have with these businesses and the depth of data they entrust in and with Intuit.

We’ve been able to bring some really amazing applications to the market. I was on the QuickBooks side before I joined Mailchimp a year and a half ago to lead that team. And the number of innovations we were able to bring to market that we could uniquely do as a result of that long-standing relationship and the data is extraordinary, and that’s how you begin to build that operating system. One example of that was the work I had the chance to do on QuickBooks Capital, where we were able to build lending products for small businesses and increase the approval rates and odds in a way that others wouldn’t be able to do.

The relationship between Mailchimp and Intuit — and QuickBooks and the rest of the Intuit software suite — is utterly fascinating, especially because Mailchimp was an acquisition. This company has been around since 2001. Intuit acquired it 20 years into its existence in 2021. The acquisition and integration — I would not say were totally smooth. You’re the new CEO. You came from the acquiring company. Let me ask you just the basic question: why is it a separate division of Intuit with its own CEO at this point?

It’s a great question, and I think one that all companies think about. Acquisitions are hard, and they’re not always successful. And you have to think hard about how to get it right and set it up in the right way. One of the things that was important as we thought about the structure for Mailchimp was the reason that we acquired it and making sure that the structure — in terms of how we organized it — would set us up for that. The reason to acquire Mailchimp was to continue to build this operating system for small businesses and to solve the number one problem that small businesses had, which was growth, in addition to the other problems we were solving on QuickBooks. We wanted to create this end-to-end platform to grow and run your business, so we needed Mailchimp and QuickBooks to work together.

I report into the small business organization. The small businesses organization includes QuickBooks and Mailchimp, and it’s our entire 10 million small businesses and how we serve them. That decision was incredibly important because it allowed us to stay close and to stay true to the purpose of the acquisition and to create true differentiation in the market. Now, we also kept it independent, so it’s connected, but the team stayed separate, generally speaking. There were certain functions that we integrated because it was important to integrate to create a sense of belonging and consistency across the organization. But we also very much wanted to accelerate Mailchimp to allow it to be successful and to continue without all of the work that comes with an integration. So, we’ve been very “choiceful” over time about how we do that, what technology we integrate, what we do, how we serve our customers across our small business ecosystem with one solution. So, that gives you a little context into how we thought about it.

There are pieces there that are sort of the technical pieces, and then there’s the culture piece. Let’s start with the technical side, the really nitty-gritty Decoder stuff. There’s stuff that every company integrates at scale, right? I’m assuming, as CEO, you’re not running a totally independent division with your own legal and HR and stuff. That’s just my guess.

That’s right.

That’s usually the stuff that gets integrated first. Then, there’s things, particularly on the software side, where when you tell me you’re the CEO of QuickBooks, it feels like you have probably more freedom to make software decisions or planning decisions or go-to-market decisions. Is that different? Has that been integrated? How does that work?

I’m really proud of the technology integration decisions we’ve made that are more business outcome-oriented and choices that we made along the way, so, again, the choices we’re making are all to serve our customers with an end-to-end platform and to serve them in a unified way across QuickBooks and Mailchimp so we solve all those needs. The other thing I’d highlight is we made a declaration several years ago at Intuit that we were a platform company building services at the center that were powering the various end customer use cases. So, we could move with speed in delivering those outcomes but also create consistent experiences for those customers. I’ll give you some examples based on your question. Everything we’re doing with AI — and we’re doing a ton with AI — is integrated and connected into the GenOS that Intuit has built. That’s our GenAI operating system.

That was something we built at the center, and all teams are using that, and that’s allowing us to move with speed and efficiency. Not only does that allow Mailchimp to move with speed, but also, it allows us to create connected experiences for small businesses, regardless of where they’re entering the platform. Whether they’re using QuickBooks today or Mailchimp today, we can access all of their data and create connected workflows because it’s all on a central platform. Similarly, we integrated Mailchimp onto Intuit’s Virtual Expert Platform. That’s another very big investment we made at the Intuit level as part of our strategy. Our strategy is to be an AI-powered expert platform. So, not only do we have AI, but we constantly can connect you to an expert in any of these use cases to ensure there are no dead ends in the experience and you always have an expert that can help you.

That was another capability that Mailchimp integrated into that allowed us to create human assistance experiences really rapidly but also deliver on real differentiation that Intuit has built and extended into Mailchimp. So, those are some examples of what we’ve done. I’ll just say one more thing here. We made choices on who we brought into the management team at Intuit. I think having me lead the business was an important part of how we create this connected strategy because I had seven years of context across Intuit and connections, and then we also did that for our leader on technology. So, the Mailchimp technology leader is a long-standing Intuit leader, an incredible technologist, but also deeply connected into what Intuit can do so that we can move with speed on some of those choices that we made along the way.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has joined us on the show a couple times, most recently about a year ago. I asked him what it meant for him to become the chairman of Microsoft, in addition to the CEO, and he basically said, “I have to go to more meetings.”

So, let me ask you a version of that question: What does it mean for you to be the CEO of Mailchimp inside of Intuit? What freedom does that role give you — does that title signify to your team — that maybe another title wouldn’t? Because that, to me, is really interesting that Intuit is composed of these big divisions or these big software products that people perceive, but you’ve been talking very much about it as one company for our entire conversation so far.

Several things. One is accountability: we have this very much across Intuit. It’s one of the things I’ve loved in my eight years since joining the organization. There’s a big focus on accountability and ownership, and you certainly see that here. I felt that in my other roles as well, so that hasn’t changed in that sense. But frankly, we have a lot of debate on how we think about Mailchimp, and the way we think about Mailchimp is actually broader than just Mailchimp itself. We think about it as solving the customer growth need across our small business ecosystem. So, I’m accountable not only for the results of the Mailchimp business, but I’m accountable for driving growth outcomes for all the SMBs in our small business ecosystem. And we very much think about Mailchimp’s role that way. So, that’s another way we think about it.

That makes sense. How big is that business? How much revenue does Mailchimp represent inside of Intuit?

In our last Investor Day, we shared that it was, I think, $1.1 billion.

That’s a lot of emails. So, that’s the technical side, the nitty-gritty structural B-school side of how you run this thing and integrate Mailchimp inside of Intuit.

Let’s talk about the culture side because that’s where a lot of the, I think, bumps in the road came. The company was 20 years old. It had some loud CEOs. It was a pretty brash startup culture. I would just say Intuit is a much more buttoned-up company than Mailchimp was. There were some difficult things that came along for that ride. There were allegations of discrimination, pay disparity, gender bias. That’s all stuff that you were brought in to, I assume, to fix, to correct, to improve. How has that gone?

You’re absolutely right. The initial part of the acquisition was a little bumpier, and I certainly understand that. This had been a team that had been independent for 20 years and incredibly proud of that independence, and they were acquired by a larger company. For some employees, that was challenging. There’s a lot in the Mailchimp culture. There’s so much that is just so powerful and I’m so proud of. It’s this deep customer obsession. It’s this connection to the community. It’s really focusing on powering the small business underdog. It’s insane creativity. So, here’s how I approached it as I came into the role. First, it was certainly a focus. And when I came into the role, I spent a lot of time with our teams and our employees. And what I understood in those meetings is that they were frustrated by a lot of things, and it was the main focus of their conversation. [It] was taking up a lot of the airspace, the conversation around this.

But I also recognized that they cared deeply about our customers. And so, I refocused the organization, in my first 30 or 60 days, very rapidly on new priorities that were very customer-backed, that had a sense of urgency in terms of delivering against them. And I focused the entire organization on delivering. And what that did is it crowded out a lot of the noise, all this conversation, and it got people focused on doing great work that they loved. And it helped them see the connected nature between some of the values of Intuit and the values of Mailchimp, which turned out to be aligned in many ways. And it pivoted us. It got us back to a conversation on growth and energy and innovation as opposed to worrying about what the acquisition would mean for them. And they started to see the positives associated with that.

Let’s put that into practice. I’ll give you the examplejust so the listener knows, Rania alluded to this before we even started speaking. The previous CEO of Mailchimp sent an email that was pretty controversial, saying, “I don’t want to use pronouns in meetings. They do more harm than good.” You’ve obviously reversed that decision. Rania told me her pronouns before we started speaking — they’re she/her. How do you get people off of that onto focus on your customer? Because it seems like, “My company does not recognize gender as a spectrum or might not recognize me,” is a pretty big deal compared to, “I need to help people turn email into revenue.”

Whether it’s Mailchimp or Intuit, the focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion is so true and so strong to our values and what we focus on. At Intuit, it’s so central. And so, we were just very clear at that time, and we continue to be very clear. We create an environment where every employee feels comfortable bringing their whole selves to work, and that’s the environment we create. That is just the approach and the policy, and we were very clear about that. And so, that’s something we constantly reinforce every day with our actions. And our employees see that, and they feel that. We’ve got a very active ERG community across our Atlanta offices and chapters where a lot of the Mailchimp team resides. We have that across Intuit more generally. We focus a lot on that in our hiring decisions. So, I would say it’s about how we operate every day and the values we demonstrate to our teams.

I watch a lot of music documentaries, and you always see the band in the garage, and then you see the band at Wembley Stadium, and you never see that middle part. And I feel like I want to ask you about the middle part here. There was a big acquisition. You were at another part of Mailchimp. You are obviously proud of that time on the QuickBooks team. This acquisition is going kind of sideways. There’s an opportunity to become the CEO, right? Because Ben, the previous CEO, is leaving. What was that moment like for you? Did you pick up the phone and say, “I want to do this”? Did the board call you and say, “You’ve got to get in there”? What was that exact moment like?

One of the amazing things about Intuit is it is really a leadership lab. I’ve been here eight years — longer than any company I’ve ever been a part of. I’d been at Google for five and McKinsey for five before this, and I’ve stayed because I’ve grown so much as a leader. Whenever I get comfortable, I get a call, and I get thrown into the next thing, and it’s always intense. And it’s intense because we’ve got really big ambitions about the innovation we want to bring to customers. I’ve had that opportunity multiple times because of our growth profile as a business and our philosophy around mobility and growing our leaders. I came in to run QuickBooks Capital. It was a $6 million business when I started it. We grew it into quite a big business that I’m incredibly proud of.

I then went on to lead our payments business; that grew into multiple additional businesses that we built over time. And then I had this opportunity. So, it was a continued set of new opportunities. In each case, what I look for is: how much potential do we have to innovate and disrupt for our customers? In all these cases, it’s such a big opportunity that you jump into it, and you don’t always have the answer right away, but you jump in with confidence based on the experiences you’ve had over time. But I would put it in the context of these other growth opportunities I’ve had since I joined.

Did you make the call, or did you get the call?

It was a joint conversation. So, a year before that, I talked to my boss about being ready to take on the next big thing, and that’s how we handle it at Intuit. We have open conversations, and then we constantly discuss, at every level of leadership, who’s ready for the next role. It’s a conversation that’s happening always in advance so that, as new roles open up, we’ve got clarity on who’s ready for the next role, what are people looking to do so we can continue to grow them. And so it was a conversation that started a year in advance that led into this.

That conversation was, “Well, this role is about to open. It’s a little messy, but you’re ready for it”?

Yep, that was the conversation. It wasn’t about, “It’s a little messy” — it’s, “We have confidence you can go in there and do everything we want to have happen.” There was a lot of ambition there: “We need to solve this massive customer problem. We want to grow internationally. We want to transform Mailchimp to also serve the needs of mid-market businesses. And we know you’ve got this.” So, it was a conversation like that.

I love it. I love, “We need to solve the needs of mid-market businesses, and you’ve got it.” They’re going to make a sports movie about that someday, I promise you. Two more Decoder questions, and then I have an entire section here labeled “Existential questions about email.”

How is Mailchimp structured today? How have you built that team?

We made a lot of changes, and we made a lot of changes really rapidly because we needed to set up this team that could drive the next chapter of growth for Mailchimp. The first 20 years were extraordinary, and we need the next 20 years to be as extraordinary. We think about that, again, in the context of our small business ecosystem, not just Mailchimp. So, we need a combination of people who are deeply connected into Intuit, who can create those connections. We need people with deep industry expertise in the areas we’re looking to shift Mailchimp, whether that’s mid-market or international or leading the way on growth capabilities and technology. And then we need people who can speak to Mailchimp’s history and continue to build on that and the strengths and the culture and all of that.

So, I’ve assembled a leadership team that represents all three dimensions of that — it’s an incredible team. But as I mentioned before, some of the key leaders on that team have deep roots in Intuit history, including me, our head of technology, our head of HR. We’ve leaned in to some of the new areas we want to go into — so, international: Mailchimp has 50 percent of its revenue coming from international markets. That was true before the acquisition — it’s the outcome of this incredible brand and product. We can do so much more in international markets. You can see that in the way we’ve grown the team in the areas we’ve grown in. Secondly, in mid-market, we invested significantly so that we could not only be the place where small businesses start but the place they grow with us. We’ve invested quite a bit in those human-assisted areas and then, of course, in all the technology around AI and the investments we’ve made there.

That first big chunk of investments you’re talking about — mid-market, international, et cetera — is that all sales investments? Is that go-to-market investments? How does that look? Because you bracketed that out of technology and AI, so I’m wondering what that first chunk looks like.

A lot of it’s go-to-market, everything from sales and onboarding and account management. So, there’s a lot there and then in partnerships, channel partnerships, technology partnerships. So, it’s that, and then, of course, this is all done with the approach we take across Intuit, which is technology-powered go-to-market teams. So, we invest from an AI perspective not only on customer-facing AI but human-assisted supporting AI. And so, that’s been a big part of the Virtual Expert Platform I talked to you about earlier, where our experts or our sellers or our account managers have access to really powerful AI to enable them to do differentiated things with our customers as they spend time with them.

Big Decoder question, this one’s the whole brand: how do you make decisions? You’ve done a lot of things, you’ve grown a lot. You’ve talked about how much you’ve grown. What’s your framework for making decisions now, and how has it changed?

I make decisions every day. By the time I get home, I think to myself, “I’m too tired to make a decision about what we’re going to have for dinner.”

Oh, I’ve been there, absolutely. Why do you think I wear black every day?

That’s a perpetual thing, decisions every day. So, it includes a combination of many things. One is building intuition over time. The intuition comes from being close to our customers, being close to data. That’s the first piece. It’s the intuition of having made lots of decisions over time and then watched other decisions get made. When I watch other leaders make big decisions that involve courage, I take a note of them to see how they’re going to play out so that I can reference them later. So, that’s another piece of how I think about things. So, the first thing is intuition. The second is surrounding myself with different perspectives as I go into a decision so I can really bring a group of experts together and ask questions. So, I moderate a discussion, and I say, “Well, how might you think about this?” And really create space for the divergent views to be shared. So, that’s another piece of how I think about making decisions.

The third is I have a bias for action and making decisions fast and then learning really quickly after the decision, so we can learn from it and pivot as needed. And so, that’s a huge part of how I operate. How I’ve changed in making decisions over time? I think I’ve leaned in more to the pulling out the voices of people who might think about things differently. I have a very strong voice in the room, and I need to create space for other voices because that’s when you get really powerful decisions — when people pressure-test them in a very strong way, and someone feels comfortable saying, “Actually, I’d think about it differently, and here’s how we should think about it.” And so, not only has that translated into making decisions quickly, which is important for velocity, but increasing the number of decisions that are made with that precision to make it an even more powerful decision.

The way I think about it is: I try to have the worst ideas in the room so people can tell me that my ideas are bad, and then that creates the freedom for everyone else to have bad ideas and, hopefully, ultimately have a good idea. Let me poke at something a little bit more strongly: you mentioned intuition is the first thing, right? You trust your intuition. It takes a long time for people to trust their intuition. When did that click for you?

That’s a great question, and it’s in different levels of experience. So, I’ll highlight the point of I love the opportunity to learn every day. And so, it grows over time. I have learned so much in this Mailchimp context that I could have never read by reading a book because you have to get in there and make a mistake and learn from that mistake. I couldn’t be more proud of the opportunity I have to make mistakes almost every day. Because you learn so much, and you build that intuition, and then that becomes your playbook. And so, I recognize when I’m in a space where we’ve done that before. I’ll give you an example. Sometimes, as I lead product teams, I push hard for speed and outcomes: “We’re going to launch our new QuickBooks checking account by this date.” And I remember once being told, “We’ve never worked with a partner that launched a checking account in that amount of time.”

And you sit there and you question: Am I making the right decision for the team? Am I going to push them to a breaking point? Are we going to deliver something that’s not high-impact? But once you’ve done that three times and you’ve seen the outcome, you have confidence. And so you have to recognize the categories where you have more confidence. But I often will take a risk, like I did with that checking account example, where I’m not sure how it’s going to work, and I take a risk even if I don’t have that intuition, and I see what happens. And I’m always staying close to the learnings across the way and willing to pivot as we go.

But you take a risk, and you note that you’re taking a risk so that you can record the outcome at the end and add it to your intuition. So, I’m constantly trying to build this library of learnings, and I’ve been reflecting in the last several months about how valuable it is to have these failures in your playbook, too, because you learn so much from those. And I think about micro failures every day that you course correct as you grow.

It seems like the project at Intuit overall — and at Mailchimp — is more focused. I think most tech companies are in a period of increasing focus, and that focus comes at the cost of, potentially, some market opportunities. So, we start off by saying: email is forever. It’s hot right now and in various ways, which is interesting. I think as the algorithmic media gets unpredictable and expensive, email seems consistent and stable and predictable. I look at it from my perspective of somebody in the media and say, “Okay, there is Substack and Ghost and Beehiv and all these things that are growing. That’s where the action in media is.”

And Mailchimp is walking away from that. You all shut down TinyLetter. You used to be in that space, and you aren’t. I had the CEO of Substack on the show, and I was like, “Is Mailchimp your competitor?” And he was like, “No, I don’t think so.” Why are you not in that space? Why focus on the enterprise space and not this other thing that seems to be growing?

Focus is so incredibly important, as you said. It’s so important because you need to hone in your resources to innovate in a way that only you can and create true differentiation. For us, we’ve got clarity on the problem we’re trying to solve. We are trying to increase the success rate of small businesses, and everything we do is focused on that. And in the domain of Mailchimp, it’s all about helping them find new customers and grow existing customers. And to do that, we need to strengthen our email product and to broaden that out in a way where we can solve the problem in a way it’s not solved in the industry today. And that’s the reason we’ve chosen to focus there. It’s just having clarity on the problem we’re solving and our unique capabilities and opportunity to solve it in a way that no one else can.

Walk me through that decision to shut down TinyLetter. You’re entirely focused on small and medium-sized businesses; TinyLetter was not that. You’ve got this thing — it was an acquisition. People were really excited when Mailchimp acquired it because they thought that meant it would be stable. You’ve got to make the call. Walk me through how you made that decision.

This is one of the easier decisions we’ve ever made. We basically looked at it from a perspective of “we’ve got clarity on the customer problem we’re solving,” which is, as I said, helping small businesses grow. And we need to make sure that our technology is as efficient as possible. When you’re maintaining parts of the tech stack that are no longer core to what you’re delivering for customers, your technology becomes pretty clunky. And so, we look at that over time to say, “What was something that was important in the past that’s no longer important to the mission or was not successful?” You see that all the time as you do innovation and startups — you launch things that may no longer be successful years later. And you need to be efficient in shutting those things down so you can focus on the core and create efficiency for your engineers. So, this decision was not one of those that was a challenging one to make.

How did it come to you? Was it just an email saying, “Hey, I’m shutting down TinyLetter,” and you’re like, “Great, not core.” Were you in a conference room? Did you draw on a whiteboard?

I raised it when I came in as a conversation I’d heard from across our teams and our engineering teams, in particular, around, “There are many parts of the Mailchimp app that are no longer core to our focus.” TinyLetter was one of them. And so, the conversation was not about TinyLetter — it was about “how do we shut down things more efficiently so we can increase the velocity of the way we’re operating and running as a business?” And so, it was part of a set of things we were looking at shutting down to focus. And so, we made a decision about the need to prioritize that because, often, teams are so focused on innovation they don’t focus on those things, but that’s one of the keys to velocity: you need to slow down and do that work to accelerate your ability to innovate. And so, we made the decision in that context.

Here’s a question: do you run Mailchimp on email, or do you use Slack and Teams and Zoom?

I spend all my day in Slack. I love Slack. I love phone calls, so that’s where I spend a lot of time. But we use email, too, of course, but I spend a lot of time on Slack.

“How email-dependent is the email company?” is not a question I thought about asking, but now that I think about it, it seems very important.

We are not an email company — we are a growth company. And we focus on getting the right message at the right time to the user and, therefore, think about all the channels that are possible to reach.

Have you used the new AI tools in Slack? We just got them yesterday, and I can’t tell if they’re really useful or completely distracting.

I haven’t used them yet.

“Summarize this discussion,” if that is actually helpful to you.

It’s actually an important point. I think a lot of the early-generation AI tools that are out in the market are still pretty superficial and in the early innings of their ability to provide value. And I think that creates a lot of room for companies that are very serious about it and then have unique amounts of data and very large customer bases to experiment and learn with to really differentiate themselves. So, it’s interesting to see, a year in, how some of these tools that had a lot of promise, how few of them have actually been able to realize all the promise yet.

Would you ever send Slacks written by AI? I think about this all the time: Would I ever send an email written by an AI to a co-worker or a partner external to the company? Would I ever let Slack write more than a predictive text? Yes or no? Actually, just say something on my behalf. That feels very fraught. I feel like every leader confronts it the most because the communication bandwidth is potentially reduced if you just let the robot talk for you. Would you ever do it? It sounds like you’ve been playing with these tools and deeply considering them. Would you ever let it send more than a one-line predictive Gmail response or whatever?

I think I absolutely would. I’ll answer that, and then I want to get into how marketers should think about it and how we think about it for marketers. But yes, we’re all very busy. If you even look at the predictive tools in Google, how much better they’ve gotten over time, as they learn from the user and the voice and tone, it gets much better. In order for you to feel comfortable using them, several things have to be true. One, it needs to be consistent with your voice and tone. And oftentimes, the early generation of these solutions are not, and therefore, we don’t feel comfortable using them. The promise is for players that are able to do that and personalize it in your voice and tone; then there is a lot of potential for the AI to help you be more efficient. So, I absolutely would. I’m looking for efficiency gains all over my life.

You can also think about it as the assisted version versus the do-it-for-me version. And so, even just the assisted version where it finishes and completes your sentence, that saves a lot of time, especially on a mobile phone — it’s incredibly helpful. And so, you think about it as a continuum, but I absolutely... It’s not the case today, where my personal emails, I’m using AI to send end-to-end or work emails. But I do see a world where that’s very possible. From a marketer’s perspective, let’s understand the implications of not using AI. The implications of not using AI is a lot of revenue is left on the table. Because marketers today are not using segmentation as much as they should because it’s hard without AI to recognize what segments you should be using.

Really quickly, can you unpack two words for me for the Decoder audience: marketers and segmentation?

Yes. Marketers at a small business is typically your small business owner-

People hear marketers, and you think of the marketing department, but you’re talking about the people trying to get customers.

That’s right. So, you think about our customers that we serve. When a business has fewer than six employees, it tends to be the business owner who’s writing the marketing and doing that. So, that’s the marketer. When you grow to more than six employees, the next employee tends to be their marketing director, and then, over time, it becomes a department of six people. So, we can think about it that way. The next word you wanted me to decode was?

Segmentation.

Segmentation. Yes. Segmentation is all about finding clusters of people with similar behavior and similar demographic characteristics that are going to behave in the same way so that you can send them a different message that’s customized for them, that’s going to allow you to personalize the message and increase the likelihood of responding. I have young children, a five- and a two-year-old, so I’m going to more... They’re now older, a six- and a four-year-old. And I’m more likely to open an email from a clothing company — because I’m looking for efficiency — that’s showing me content for them than if it’s not personalized and it’s more generic. And so, that type of personalization drives much higher outcomes than if it’s not personalized.

Segmentation is a concept of the past, though, because, with AI, you can hyper-personalize. You don’t have to group people together anymore. You can write a single message to that individual. And so, if you’re not using AI to generate the content, you’re never going to be able to personalize at scale. You’d have to write a very large number of emails to be able to do that, and people won’t achieve that. And so, every marketer needs to be using AI now and over time in order to be able to achieve those revenue outcomes.

You used to group people together by saying, “Okay, you are a bunch of, I don’t know, 25- to 40-year-olds. You all lived in this town. You make about this much money. And, I don’t know, you all drive Hondas. You’re much more likely to all need an oil change at a discount at this time, at this price.” (You can tell that I need an oil change in my car, by the way. Just to be very clear, I’ve now ruthlessly targeted myself for oil change discounts. I’m ready for it.) And that was the most efficient you could get. With AI, you’re saying you’re going to know the customer individually and write that customer an individual email at the right exact time.

At the right exact time.

So, here’s my worry, and this is my existential question about email: that is an enormous step change in the amount of email that will be generated — “We’re just going to send more emails to more people.” And on the other end of it, they’re going to have their AI respond to that email or filter that email. I’m looking at my inbox today, and it is a wasteland of obviously AI-generated emails. I can feel the difference. And there’s a part of me that says, “Alright, I’m going to get an AI and just let it deal with it.” And suddenly, the entire email ecosystem feels like a bunch of robots talking to each other while the human beings are all on Slack. And I’m like, “Does that feel like a doom loop?” How do we break out of that outcome?

I look at it a lot more favorably in terms of the outcome.

Just to be clear, I would hope so, but that’s the most cynical I can be about it.

I look at it as a marketer, never inundating customers with emails they’re not going to love. Because you won’t then send the generic email to your entire base, you’ll... It doesn’t mean you’re going to send more emails or SMS messages or find them more in social media and other places. Instead, you’re going to send them the right message at the right time that’s going to be highly personalized and relevant. And so, on the marketer side, I think you’re actually going to be a lot more efficient and likely send fewer emails that are a lot more powerful or fewer content pieces to your customers to try to get them to convert.

On the consumer side, I think that’s great. If AI’s helping me as a consumer really identify what marketing messages are going to be most effective for me, what’s going to delight me in that moment with a surprise on something I may not have been shopping for or exactly what I’m shopping for right now and help me sift through that, great. But marketers are going to be in a great position to figure out how to get those top messages to customers if they’re using the AI tools that can differentiate them in that space. So, I’m very excited by the possibilities for both marketers and consumers in that scenario.

As a consumer, do you perceive that increase of incoming communication that is obviously AI-generated? Or is that are you just too busy, you’re in Slack all day?

As a consumer, our inboxes are exploding, for sure. But it’s so delightful when you find that message that hits you at the right moment in the right time, whether if you’re the type of person who wants to get an SMS at the right moment when you happen to be holding your phone or you’re in social media and you get the right message or in your inbox. And I’ve been delighted in recent weeks as I find something popped to the top with a subject line that gets my attention and the product is exactly what I want. So, it’s about getting through the noise and the clutter and having the right tool that will allow you to do that. And we talked earlier about the fact that consumers are busy. They’re inundated with messages. They’re increasingly across different channels. Everything we’re talking about reinforces how hard it is for a marketer to break through and, therefore, needing a solution that can help them do it. And the power of AI can play a massive role here. It’s going to be a total game-changer.

You can see as you just shop online, retailers are sort of desperate to get a hold of your direct contact information. They’ll lower their prices substantially. They’re like, “We’ll just take a 25 percent haircut to get your direct contact information on this first purchase because now you’re much more likely to buy from us again.” And I think that’s a function of that being the most direct distribution mechanism on the internet, compared to Facebook ads or TikTok ads or whatever algorithmic media people might be consuming. There is still one algorithm between most people and an email marketer, right? It’s Gmail. Gmail exists. It is filtered. Political campaigns wage war against Google around that filtering. It is just as contentious a content moderation system and algorithm as anything else, even if it might not be at the forefront all the time. How do you think about that relationship? Do you feel email is controlled or monopolized in the way that some of the most strident critics of Gmail feel?

We think about this in the context of deliverability and making sure that we can provide our customers the highest deliverability rates in the industry so that we are actually able to deliver their messages and get them into the inbox, so we think a lot about our algorithm that way. And then we do increasingly think about the end platforms that they’re consuming that information in and staying ahead of the changes that they’re making to those platforms and making sure that we can be surfaced there. So, we do think a lot about that. But again, we’re thinking a lot more broadly than email. And it’s increasingly disparate in terms of where consumers and Gen Z are spending their time. And, as we build Mailchimp and the broader Intuit small business ecosystem to be this growth engine for small businesses, we need to make sure that we can have a multichannel approach where we can reach customers and we’re not impacted by the decisions that one platform makes, but we can help them stay of all those outcomes and get to good outcomes for their business.

Do you think about Gmail as a platform in that way?

It’s one of the main places where a lot of customers read their email, so yeah.

Do you have conversations with Google? Do you ever go in there and say, “Look, let Mailchimp emails hit a tab that isn’t the promotions tab”?

We spend a lot of time with all of our major tech partners, as you can imagine. The ecosystem is strong, and we build deep relationships with them and talk about the possibilities to innovate together and what that could look like. But yeah, there’s lots of conversations that happen both around innovation and also just building solutions together so they can work for our customers.

This is another sort of existential problem AI has brought to the fore. If there is a text box on the internet, someone is going to fill it with AI-generated content at a rate that is perhaps unmanageable for any of our existing spam services. You’re sending to people with inboxes. They would like to manage the rate at which they’re seeing things. Those inboxes are run by big tech companies like Google and Yahoo and other companies, who provide to their customers a service of filtration and getting rid of some of the spam. And then you run an input box of your own that people are probably spamming with AI. That’s a swirl of things. Let’s start with your input box and then work all the way to the end of “Where does the email go?” You run a content distribution business that’s sort of most reductive. Are there things you won’t let people do with Mailchimp?

We have an acceptable use policy that is very clear and is adjusted all the time. And yes, we have things that we allow people to do on Mailchimp and things that we don’t. It’s focused on achieving several things. One is ensuring that we can continue to achieve a high deliverability rate. And that’s important because as our deliverability rate stays high, that allows us to support our ecosystem effectively. So, industries that may be prone to lower deliverability rates may not be able to use the platform.

Let’s pull that apart — I’ve never heard anybody pull that apart before. So, you’re saying Mailchimp, as a whole, is a sender of emails. And if you have customers that ruin your deliverability rating with the big email providers, you actually don’t want them, right?

Yep.

So, there’s some kind of customers you don’t want because it will negatively impact your other customers because Mailchimp, as a platform, will get deranked in some way.

That’s consistent with our values as well. Because oftentimes, that’s associated with spam or fraudulent activities or things like that. Because low deliverability is also associated with more concerns being raised about those emails. And yes, so if it’s going to lead to low deliverability rates, we don’t want them on our platform.

You said it was consistent with your values as well. Obviously, you have values — you’ve talked about them already. But there’s a cold business logic there, right? You don’t want spammers and scammers on your platform or fraudsters because the small business is trying to get one more customer — their emails will get filtered more aggressively. How do you make that calculation? When you’re saying, “Okay, we’re going to update the acceptable use policy, the AI-powered fraudsters are out. We need to define them and make sure they don’t get accounts.” Does that come up with you, like, a model of how your deliverability rates will get affected if you enable a new kind of customer class or get rid of them?

Yes. So, we think about it that way, and certainly, we need to maintain our deliverability rates as high because that’s one of the top reasons businesses choose us as a platform, and that’s one of the top value propositions we provide.

To your point on models, this is an area where it’s important for models to help you be as precise as possible. And I learned this when I led the fraud and risk team at Intuit. You want to protect against bad actors, but you want the models to help you not make false positive decisions so that you can be as precise as possible. And that’s where technology can really help you be effective. So, as a business leader, you say, yes, in principle, we shouldn’t allow businesses that demonstrate low deliverability to be on the platform, but how do we use the best technology in the industry to identify those so we reduce the false positive rate?

Is there any time you fired a category of customers because they were negatively impacting your deliverability?

It’s something we evaluate all the time and update it all the time based on data we’re seeing. And, as our models get better, we look at that as well, where we can pull out an individual actor versus a more blunt instrument.

Can you give me an example?

I don’t have specific examples to share, but it’s what I always push on. When we started with AI, for example, in generative AI, we opened it up to a small handful of industries to start, where we felt confident that the content would be produced, wouldn’t be sensitive, and we wouldn’t worry as much about the nature of the content that was produced. And, as we became more and more confident about our content moderation associated with AI and what we could do with the automated models and then the human in the loop, we opened it up further and further. So, we’re constantly looking to refine our policies to be able to let as many industries onto the platform and to make decisions in an automated way.

What’s the riskiest one that you think you’ve seen?

There are businesses like gambling and crypto and things like that, historically, that have had lower deliverability rates.

The security side and the crypto fraud side, they seem pretty directly linked. You obviously think about security — you were on the fraud team. But a couple of years ago, there was a pretty sophisticated crypto theft operation that was operating inside of Mailchimp. Because you’re giving people so much access to data and targeting and refinement and segmentation and all these things, that seems like a pretty attractive place for a fraudster to come do business. How do you manage that?

We take the security side really seriously across Intuit. That’s an area where we’ve had to build some of the industry’s most powerful security mechanisms because our customers entrust us with really sensitive data across all Intuit properties. So, it’s an area where we’ve built a lot of capability and strength, and we brought that to Mailchimp. It wasn’t part of Mailchimp in the earlier days of the acquisition. And since then, we’ve bolstered all the security settings with the capabilities from across Intuit. And so, that’s how we think about it. We take it extremely seriously. We have some of the world’s most sophisticated algorithms here, as well as a human monitoring team that’s constantly staying ahead of it.

Fraudsters are constantly coming back. You build the next thing, and they come back. And so, this is something we’ve invested quite heavily in over time and have very strong safeguards to always stay one step ahead. But it’s an area you have to constantly stay on your toes with. And I learned that from my time leading the risk and money movement team at Intuit and various other parts of the company.

It’s an election year. I’m assuming there’s going to be a lot of political campaigning on your platform using your tools, people trying to get donations, whether it’s the candidates themselves or their affiliated super PACs or whatever. Are there any restrictions on that kind of activity on Mailchimp? Is that something that seems dicey? Is that something that seems lucrative? Political advertising can be very lucrative. Is that something you have to think about differently?

It comes back to our acceptable use policy. We work to just ensure that there’s no harmful content on the platform or hate speech on the platform, so we just stick to the guidelines we have and ensure that all the messaging coming out of the platform is consistent with that.

One of the candidates in the presidential election cycle seems vastly more prone to things that feel like hate speech than the other candidate. Is that something you would restrict?

It would depend on the content being generated on the platform, and it would come back to looking at the guidelines we have in place. And when the situations are trickier, we spend a lot of time deliberating those decisions to get to the right decision and revisiting and learning as we go.

Is that something that’s ever come up before? It seems like this is going to be challenging for every platform in this particular presidential election cycle. Was that something you’ve had to deal with before? The company’s had to deal with before?

We’ve had several topics we look at that relate to content moderation. These are sensitive, and so we spend a lot of time deliberating over them and making the right call. And this is one where you’ve got to go back to your policies and principles and use multi levels of judgment and decisions and then make a decision and then just continue to evaluate it over time.

So, that’s your text box. That’s just your text box. It’s very challenging. That’s just yours.

Yeah.

Now you’ve got to send the email. You’ve got to make sure it’s deliverable to a bunch of other people’s input systems that might filter or otherwise adjudicate the content of your email. And, like you said, you talk to all those tech partners all the time, but some of them are also your competitors, right? I think Google thinks of itself as in-service to people who would like to buy advertising and increase their businesses. Does that feel like a competition? Does that feel like cooperation? Does that feel like they’re trustworthy? I’m picking on Google, but you could name a hundred different companies that sit between you and the actual recipient of an email.

There are certainly overlapping areas in a lot of tech companies in terms of areas they’re playing in and opportunities to partner. That’s certainly the case across the board in so many of these tech spaces. I would say we have a pretty unique place in this ecosystem as Intuit because of our relationship with small businesses and the depth of the relationship with small businesses and the number of things we do, whether it’s accounting or payments or access to capital or some of the advice and expertise we’re providing. So, in general, we find there’s a lot of appetite from tech partners to want to work and partner with us and build creative solutions together. And they can see a world where this can really work. There’s so many things we can do with each of these partners that we’re uniquely positioned to do in partnership with them.

We’ve talked about email as being an alternative to social platforms throughout this conversation. But you go out to a restaurant now, and their menus are just on Instagram, and they’re maybe not updating their website so much. And they’re maybe not asking for your email to email you discounts. There are lots of businesses now. Small Business TikTok is one of my favorite stories we’ve ever done at The Verge. Just guys with pressure washers building businesses on TikTok. Do you think about ways to address those platforms as well because that’s where so many audiences, particularly young audiences, are? Or are you focused on email, the web, small business stuff?

We’re certainly focused on reaching our customer’s audiences wherever they are, as we want to be the central growth platform where they’re managing all their growth activities through us. They need to start with Mailchimp and the Intuit ecosystem more generally, bring all their customer data, and use it as their customer data platform where all their data’s coming in getting enriched, where we’re understanding their customers better than they ever could or they could anywhere else.

Can you import that data from Instagram and YouTube and TikTok and all the other places where they might be? I’m just thinking about the — let’s just go with the pressure washer people on TikTok. They’re my favorite small business to talk about. I don’t even know if that’s still a thing, but there was a time when pressure-washing TikTok was a big deal. They’re getting lots of views. They probably want to segment those views by location, maybe serve them some ads. The people that are near them, that’s a very physical local business. Is that data you can see and import and help them with, or is that manual, or is that just a black box to you?

You can inform who you’re targeting on those platforms based on what you’re learning about your audience in Mailchimp, which is your central customer data platform. You can segment your audiences in Mailchimp and who you want to reach and then use that to get that messaging out to those other platforms. So, you can do it that way.

But there’s no direct connection?

The direct connection can come through... Today, we do have some direct connections where you can update an audience in Facebook, for example, based on the tooling that’s available in Mailchimp, and you can also schedule some messages you want to post in different places from Mailchimp.

I’m asking it this way because it feels like the email providers that you’re sending to, they’re predictable. You can model deliverability and impacts on deliverability. I think if Yahoo or Microsoft or Google or whatever big email service provider decided to start screening people’s email, there’d be more of an outcry than not. That feels like a neutral inbox. The other platforms are anything but, right? They are marketing platforms unto themselves. That is where the big direct-to-consumer companies built their businesses in the beginning, and I think they would like to eat more of your market to say, “Okay, we are the place where you’re going to understand your customer,” and that feels like a much more open competition than not. But you’re saying you can still somehow address those platforms?

Well, a couple of things. First of all, many small businesses today are not doing paid advertising because it’s overwhelming and confusing and hard for them to do it. So, it’s one of the areas where the big tech platforms have struggled to break in, and that’s an area where, through partnership, we can help them break in because we have the relationships with these very small businesses. And we have unique proprietary data where we could help them execute against these campaigns effectively. So, that’s one area of opportunity.

Secondly, it’s harder for these businesses to be able to manage their entire customer base on these platforms because they often don’t own the customer relationship one-to-one and don’t have all the data about their customer in one place. And so therefore, they need to come to a platform like Mailchimp, where they can build the logic and knowledge about their customers end-to-end and they own the customer data and, therefore, are able to take advantage of it.

One of the themes on Decoder over the last year or so is the kind of big battle versus the open internet that we’ve had for so long and the algorithmic internet that seems to be dominant at this moment — and maybe even creaking at the seams. I don’t think the algorithmic internet feels particularly stable or even good to people right now, but there’s a pendulum that swings back and forth. Do you see yourself betting more on this sort of open internet like email, like web? Or do you see more of the action going toward the algorithmic platforms?

Say more about that.

Building a business on email is a thing you can do, and you can run a business for 20 years on it, and no one can take email away. Like building a business on Facebook: a bunch of media companies tried to do that, and Facebook took their businesses away. Right now, 170 million Americans who have built communities and businesses on TikTok are looking at that potentially going away. People who have built businesses on the web are never under pressure like that. So, there’s a yin and a yang, and the audiences seem to have vastly preferred the closed platforms, but the stability is on the open platforms. And I think you’re right at the center of that tension. I’m just wondering how you’re thinking about that right now.

It comes back to the discussion we had earlier, which is the way we think about power and growth for small businesses, which is our focus. We ensure that they build a connected view of their end customers, which is extremely hard to do. Today, they’re very far from able to do that. And then once we have depth of understanding on their end customers, we’re able to help them craft the right message to reach their customers in the right place at the right time. And so, that means that we need to be able to reach their customers in all sorts of different places — across social media platforms, paid media platforms, email, WhatsApp, messaging, Discord, different platforms overall.

We’re going to continue to build the ability to reach customers everywhere, end customers everywhere. Our secret sauce is that we’ve built the depth of understanding of their end customers and then can help them craft the right message at the right time and identify what the right platform is and ensure that, regardless of the dynamics that will continue to happen on all of these end platforms, we’ve got omnichannel representation to be able to reach the end customer at the right place at the right time.

That last turn — “We’ll identify what the right platform is at the right time” — that seems like, one, an increasing amount of complexity, but two, the thing that you’re actually betting on, right? It’s not open versus closed for you.

That’s right. We’re betting on the ability to leverage AI to craft the right message that’s going to drive the best performance outcomes in the industry and then to be able to look across all the different channels to figure out what’s going to perform best and craft a strategy for a business that way.

Would Mailchimp ever get to the place that’s like, “The AI made you a TikTok video. Just put it on your TikTok channel and we think it’ll hit the right target”?

We’ll leverage in-house-built capabilities and then partner capabilities to be able to deliver an end-to-end campaign for businesses, including who you should target, what you should say to them, what the message should be, whether it’s a video or an image or text or a combination of all those things. Our vision is to deliver against all of that.

Let’s wrap up here. I’m assuming you cannot do this today. How long until somebody opens up their Mailchimp dashboard and it says, “You’ve got a big opportunity. You’re a denim retailer.” (I love making up the names of small businesses that might be your customers, by the way. This is maybe the most fun I’ve had.) “You’re a denim retailer, and there’s a guy in Westchester, New York, who needs a new pair of jeans. Make a TikTok video and send it to him.” And then push the button, and it just happens, and it’s sent to TikTok. How long from now until that is possible, do you think?

Well, I’ll tell you, this is an incredibly exciting time and space. I’ve never seen the pace of innovation be faster than it is today. And it’s been pretty rapid in my time and technology. And so, what’s incredible with generative AI, every time you open the Mailchimp app, you will see new generative AI capabilities. And where we are today is very different than where we were in September in terms of what we’re able to do and what’s happening. And so, if I answer your question, when will that be? I think it’s every month, we are going to move dramatically closer to that outcome.

But that is an outcome. I think part of my question was: is that a realistic outcome?

It’s very much part of the vision we have for what’s possible.

Well, that’s amazing — also, I think, a little scary. Rania, thank you so much for joining Decoder.

Thanks for the great discussion.

The best Garmin watches for training and everyday life

The best Garmin watches for training and everyday life
Several Garmin watches on a colorful background
Garmins aren’t just multisport behemoths anymore. | Illustration by Will Joel / The Verge

Garmin may be best known for its hardcore fitness watches, but it’s got an extensive line of lifestyle offerings, too.

Few brands are as synonymous with outdoor sports as Garmin. You’ll find these fitness trackers and smartwatches on dozens of wrists at any 5K, marathon, or Ironman. You’ll also find Garmin devotees among divers, thru-hikers, golfers, kiteboarders — you name it. But these devices aren’t just for athletes. The company’s made significant strides in its lifestyle offerings, so regardless of your fitness level, there’s a Garmin for everyone.

If you’re coming from a more traditional smartwatch, Garmin’s core strengths lie in fitness, GPS, adventuring, and durability. These are hardy devices that are meant to withstand the elements and last weeks on a single charge. Several models come with offline maps, advanced navigational features, and more training metrics than any other platform. And although many wearable companies have begun rolling out subscriptions, Garmin has publicly stated it has no intention of charging its users extra. That’s a good thing since Garmin devices tend to be on the pricier side.

Garmins aren’t too shabby on smarts, either. While more fitness-focused than anything from Apple, Google, or Samsung, there’s enough to get you the basics like notifications and then some. For example, most Garmins have fall detection and safety features, and several of the latest Garmins recently got an FDA-cleared EKG feature. (You’ll need a phone on hand, however, as only one Garmin model has cellular connectivity.) Many Garmin devices also support offline music playback and come with a small third-party app ecosystem.

There are a lot of Garmin watches to choose from. No, seriously, there are six major lineups, and each has a multitude of models. But no worries — I test several Garmins every year and can help point you in the right direction.

The best Garmin for runners

Sizes: 42mm w/ 18mm straps; 46mm w/ 22mm straps / Weight: 39g (42mm); 47g (46mm) / Battery life: Up to 15 days (42mm); 13 days (46mm) in smartwatch mode / Display type: OLED touchscreen / GPS: All-systems GNSS and dual-frequency GPS / Connectivity: Bluetooth, Ant Plus, Wi-Fi / Water resistance: 5ATM / Music storage: 8GB

Garmin has many running watches, and a lot of them are great. But the Forerunner 265 or 265S (if you have petite wrists) strikes an excellent balance between price, feature set, battery life, and a vibrant OLED display.

That said, the Forerunner 265 / 265S is a bit of an odd duck. It comes a mere nine months after its predecessor, the Forerunner 255, and is, in many ways, pretty much the same watch. The main difference is the 265 has an OLED display compared to the 255’s memory-in-pixel screen. Usually, that means worse battery life, but in this case, we got about a week on a single charge with the always-on display enabled. Without it, you can get up to 15 days. Given that OLED is easier to read and just, well, looks nicer, that gives the 265 lineup an edge over the 255.

Close-up of the Garmin Forerunner 265S on the wrist of a person putting their hand into a jacket pocket. Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
The 42mm Forerunner 265S fits on my petite wrists well. Plus, it’s lightweight, so it won’t distract you while running.

The 265 also has dual-frequency GPS (also known as multi-band). The gist is you get much more accurate maps in challenging environments like cities and dense forests because you can access both the L1 and L5 satellite frequencies. And even with dual-frequency GPS enabled, you still don’t lose a whole lot of battery life. I wore it during a half marathon with that and the AOD enabled, and I still had over 80 percent battery by the time I got home. This is also an excellent price, as the majority of multi-band GPS watches cost well over $600.

My main complaint is $450, while not bad for Garmin, is still a lot when you consider that’s the same price as smarter smartwatches with great running features. Some runners won’t care. But if you’re on a budget — or you’re new to running and feel iffy about spending that much — then consider the Forerunner 165 series. It starts at $250 (add another $50 for onboard music) and does almost everything the 265 series does. The main things you’re missing are dual-frequency GPS and a few more niche sport profiles. But if you’re mostly sticking to running, gym equipment, cycling, swimming, and hiking, you’re covered.

Neither has all of Garmin’s training features, but it’s got what you’ll need to run anything from a 5K to a full marathon. That includes a Race Predictor, which gives you an estimate of what your best time would be based on your actual training. You can also use PacePro to figure out your pacing strategy for a race. You also get Garmin’s Training Readiness feature to help gauge load and recovery, Garmin Coach plans, and a host of running form metrics. It also supports offline music and safety features like fall detection. The only thing they lack is advanced mapping. (They still have trackback, point-to-point navigation, and real-time breadcrumb trail support, however.)

Read my full review of the Garmin Forerunner 265S.

The best Garmin for endurance sports

Sizes: 42mm w/ 20mm straps; 47mm w/ 22mm straps; 51mm w/ 26mm straps / Weight: 42mm: 63g stainless steel, 58g titanium; 47mm: 78g stainless steel, 70g titanium; 51mm: 98g stainless steel, 88g titanium / Battery life: 42mm: up to 10 days (4 with AOD); 47mm: up to 16 days (6 with AOD); 51mm: up to 31 days (11 with AOD) / Display type: OLED / GPS: All-systems GNSS and dual-frequency GPS / Connectivity: Bluetooth, Ant Plus, Wi-Fi / Water resistance: 10ATM / Music storage: Up to 32GB

The Epix Pro will get you every fitness feature that Garmin has to offer. And I mean everything. It would frankly be easier to tell you what the Epix Pro does not have: things that are limited to LTE smartwatches, like the ability to make calls. (This used to include EKGs, but Garmin has since pushed a firmware update that brings this feature to its latest watches.) Otherwise, you’ve got topographical maps, turn-by-turn navigation, and more training metrics than even a seasoned triathlete would know what to do with.

The Pro is more size-inclusive than the standard second-gen Epix, which only comes in 47mm. You can get the Pro in that size, too, but it also comes in 42mm and 51mm. This was a major complaint I had with the second-gen Epix last year, and you love to see companies actually take this sort of thing seriously. The best part is the Pro models start at the same price as the regular Epix did. You’ll have to pay $100 extra for materials like titanium and sapphire crystal, but that’s also true of the standard Epix.

Garmin Epix Pro with the flashlight against a colorful background Photo by Victoria Song / The Verge
The hands-free flashlight and OLED display is a winning combination.

That said, it muddies the waters if you’re trying to pick between the Epix Pro, Fenix 7, or the Fenix 7 Pro. The main difference is the Epix watches have OLED displays. One reason I prefer OLED is that they’re much easier to read indoors — where most of us spend the majority of our time. The Fenix 7 series’ memory-in-pixel displays (plus solar charging if you opt for it) allow for weeks and weeks of charge, but the smallest Epix Pro can get around 10 days with normal usage. The 47mm and 51mm Pro models can go longer between charges due to bigger batteries, but I felt that the 42mm has enough juice to satisfy most use cases. Garmin also has so many battery-saving modes and options that I highly doubt this will ever be an issue.

But really the winning feature is the hands-free flashlight. It’s so useful in my day-to-day life, and all you have to do is double-press a button. It’s as bright as your smartphone, comes with a red light option if you want something easier on the eyes, and can act as a strobe in an emergency situation. The Fenix 7 Pro watches also have a flashlight, but the combo with the OLED display gives the Epix the edge — and it’s why I currently recommend it over the Fenix lineup.

But if you’re set on the Fenix’s extra battery life, I recommend the 7 Pro over the standard 7 for a few reasons. Its MIP display is slightly brighter, all sizes have the flashlight, and, like the Epix Pro, it has an updated sensor array. These are spendy watches, however. If you’ve got some time and savings are your top priority, then I recommend keeping an eye out for sales. We’re heading into peak smartwatch launch season — which means older models like the standard Fenix 7 line will be discounted as retailers try to reduce inventory.

Read my full Epix Pro review.

The best Garmin on a budget

Sizes: 40mm w/ 20mm straps / Weight: 19g / Battery life: Up to 5 days / Display type: “Hidden” OLED touchscreen / GPS: Tethered GPS / Connectivity: Bluetooth, Ant Plus / Water resistance: 5ATM / Music storage: N/A

What I love most about the Vivomove Sport is it doesn’t look like what most people expect from a Garmin. It’s a hybrid smartwatch, which means it looks like a regular watch but can track fitness and deliver notifications. Garmin’s hybrids are also unique in that they all use an OLED display that stays hidden until you need it.

This is best suited for a casually active person who wants style and value in a lightweight package. Think wellness, more so than fitness. It gets you continuous heart rate monitoring and blood oxygen level monitoring and can even provide abnormal heart rate alerts. You also get access to more in-depth metrics like respiration rate, fitness age, stress, and Body Battery, which is Garmin’s tool for visualizing how well-rested you are. For smart features, you get all the basics, like notifications, alarms, and timers.

Garmin Vivomove Sport on top of a blue pair of sneakers Photo by Victoria Song / The Verge
You can’t easily read a whole text on this hidden OLED display, but you will know who sent it and make an educated choice about whether you want to reach for your phone.

The Sport isn’t quite as full-featured as some other Garmins you’ll find on this list. For instance, you’re giving up built-in GPS in favor of tethered GPS through your phone. There are no contactless payments, nor is there a microphone or speaker for taking calls on the wrist. But this is a budget pick, and you get a lot, considering this is an entry-level gadget that could pass for a Swatch at a glance.

I don’t love that the battery life is short for a hybrid, at around three to four days. Even so, that’s still much better than what you’ll get on an Apple Watch or Wear OS 3 watch. If you’re willing to spend about $100 more, the $269.99 Vivomove Trend has more chic materials, gets you more screen real estate, and wireless Qi charging. Otherwise, this is a great lifestyle wearable that can serve as a classier alternative to your typical fitness band.

Read my full review of the Garmin Vivomove Sport.

The best Garmin to replace a Fitbit

Sizes: 40mm w/ 20mm straps / Weight: 38g / Battery life: Up to 11 days / Display type: OLED touchscreen / GPS: All-systems GNSS / Connectivity: Bluetooth, Ant Plus / Water resistance: 5ATM / Music storage: 4GB (for Music Edition)

If you were disappointed by the Fitbit Sense 2 and Versa 4, the Venu Sq 2 is the next best thing (and, in some ways, better).

At a glance, the Venu Sq 2 could easily be mistaken for an Apple Watch. On the wrist, you’ll notice it’s made of plastic, but it still looks quite chic and extremely lightweight. The screen is bright, easy to read, and looks better than any Versa or Sense ever did.

The feature set is also great for the price, with built-in GPS, a ton of watch faces, emergency safety features, and contactless payments. If you pay $50 more for the Music Edition, you’ll also get about 500 songs worth of storage, but we wouldn’t recommend it. This doesn’t have cellular connectivity and, therefore, isn’t truly standalone. You’ll most likely be carrying your phone with you anyway.

Garmin Venu Sq 2 showing bright clock face on woman’s wrist Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
The display is nicer than anything Fitbit ever made — and with smaller bezels, too.

As for health features, the Venu Sq 2 basically has everything you’d get on a Versa or Sense smartwatch but with Garmin’s treasure trove of metrics as well. That includes heart rate tracking, blood oxygen tracking, intensity minutes (how much moderate exercise you get in a week), stress tracking, hydration tracking, respiratory rate, period tracking, and Garmin’s recovery feature, Body Battery. As far as fitness goes, you also get access to Garmin Coach, which provides free 5K, 10K, and half marathon training plans. You love to see it.

Another big leg-up Garmin has over Fitbit? None of these features or metrics are locked behind a paywall.

Read my full review of the Garmin Venu Sq 2.

The best Garmin smartwatch

Sizes: 41mm w/ 18mm straps; 45mm w/ 22mm straps / Weight: 40g for the 3S; 47g for the 3 / Battery life: Up to 10 days for 3S; 14 days for 3 / Display type: OLED touchscreen / GPS: GPS, GLONASS, GALILEO / Connectivity: Bluetooth, Ant Plus, Wi-Fi / Water resistance: 5ATM / Music storage: 8GB

Garmin has shored up the smarts in its watches over the past few years, and the Venu 3 series is the smartest of the bunch.

The Venu 3 series comes in two sizes: 41mm and 45mm. Like the Venu 2 Plus, it has a microphone and speaker. You can take calls directly from the wrist as well as issue commands to your phone’s digital assistant via Bluetooth. It’s not the same as having Siri, Bixby, Amazon Alexa, or Google Assistant built directly into the watch, but it’s a clever workaround that works well for hands-free control. It also supports safety features like fall detection and live tracking as well as contactless payments.

Person wearing the Garmin Venu 3S while putting their hand in a jeans pocket. Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
The Venu 3S has Garmin’s latest heart rate sensor and adds a wheelchair mode and nap detection.

Like other OLED Garmins, the display is both vibrant and easy to read. As for health and fitness, you get a nice mix of basic and more advanced features and metrics. It has Garmin’s latest heart rate sensor, which enables FDA-cleared EKG and AFib detection features. Overall, it leans a bit more on the wellness and health side of things, with intensity minutes, blood oxygen monitoring, sleep tracking, period tracking, abnormal heart rate alerts, and stress tracking. As for training, you still get built-in GPS, VO2 Max, heart rate zones, respiration rate, and downloadable training plans via Garmin Coach.

New to the 3 and 3S is a sleep coach that factors in metrics like heart rate variability and recent activity to determine your sleep needs. It also finally adds nap detection, a feature that’s been long overdue for the Garmin platform. The Venu 3 series also adds audio-guided meditation sessions, and you can view how these sessions directly impact your metrics. From an accessibility standpoint, this also adds a new wheelchair mode.

This is the Garmin for you if you want the platform’s in-depth training without sacrificing the productivity of a smartwatch. The main things it’s lacking are cellular options and a robust third-party app ecosystem. That said, it’s got Spotify, Amazon Music, and Deezer for offline listening. It’s also a good option if you’re fed up with MIP displays and want a smarter Garmin rather than a full-on smartwatch.

Read my full review of the Garmin Venu 3S.

Update April 1st, 10:02AM ET: Added Garmin Forerunner 165 series as an alternative to the 265 series.

Microsoft splits Teams from Office as antitrust pressure ramps up

Microsoft splits Teams from Office as antitrust pressure ramps up
Vector illustration of the Microsoft Teams logo.
Image: The Verge

Microsoft, possibly hoping to deflect the blow of an ongoing antitrust investigation in the EU, is spinning Teams off from Office 365 to sell as its own separate app globally, Reuters reported today. A company spokesperson told Reuters it was making the change to its business chat and conferencing app “to ensure clarity for our customers” after already doing so in the EU last year.

Microsoft’s existing customers should be able to keep their current deal, which bundles Teams with Office and other products, renew, update, or pick a new offer. For anyone signing up fresh, Teams on its own will cost $5.25, while Office packages without Teams will run from $7.75 to $54.75.

Microsoft first spun off Teams in the EU in August last year, a month after the European Commission started investigating whether the bundling violated its competition rules. The investigation followed a 2020 anticompetitive complaint from Slack, when Teams saw massive growth amid the covid-19 pandemic. This latest decision comes just over a week after the US Justice Department sued Apple, accusing it of antitrust behavior (and congratulating itself for helping Apple prevail over Microsoft with a previous ruling).

As Reuters notes, it’s still possible the EU will charge the company with a violation, even with this change. There’s plenty at stake here for the company, though, as an antitrust fine could equal up to 10 percent of its global annual turnover.

dimanche 31 mars 2024

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The Forerunner 165 series is the budget training watch Garmin needed

The Forerunner 165 series is the budget training watch Garmin needed
Garmin Forerunner 165 Music viewed at an angle
Garmin really needed a training watch in the $250 to $300 range. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

The tradeoffs are well worth the savings over the slightly more advanced Forerunner 265.

If you’re training for a race, few multisport watch brands do it like Garmin. But there are two things I don’t like about ‘em. They’re pricey, and the platform can be intimidating to newcomers. Have you seen its online store? For newbies, it’s tough to parse which of Garmin’s dozens of watches gets you the basics without destroying your wallet. Not anymore. After spending the last few weeks with the $299.99 Forerunner 165 Music, I’m convinced this — or the $249.99 standard version — is the Garmin watch that hits the sweet spot.

Three hundred smackeroos may not seem budget-friendly until you look at Garmin’s flagship watches. Those can go for a whopping $700 to well over $1,000. Even midrange watches, like the excellent Forerunner 265 series, retail for $450. I loved the Forerunner 265 series. The only thing I didn’t like was the price. And that’s what makes this particular watch so appealing. It’s a near clone of the smaller 265S but for $150 to $200 less. The only things you’re really missing are dual-frequency GPS and EKGs for atrial fibrillation detection.

Seriously. Side by side, it’s hard to tell my 165 Music and 265S apart. The buttons on the 265S are a bit fancier. Thankfully, my units are different colors. I don’t think I’d be able to tell at a glance otherwise.

As for performance, in 95 percent of my daily use, I didn’t notice a difference. Even without dual-frequency GPS, you still get accurate outdoor activity tracking. I tested the 165 Music simultaneously with my phone and the Apple Watch Ultra 2 — both of which have dual-frequency GPS. The maps and distance reported all corresponded within a 10th of a mile. I might’ve seen more of a difference if I ran in a challenging environment, like Manhattan’s financial district. That said, I’ve done a lot of running with multisport watches with and without dual-frequency GPS. While dual-frequency GPS is more accurate, it mostly benefits folks who train in GPS dead zones. If that’s not you, you won’t likely notice.

Heart rate data was also on par with my Ultra 2 and a Polar H10 chest strap. Since I’m not someone with a high risk of AFib, I never even missed the EKG feature. (Even if I were, EKG-powered AFib features aren’t a diagnostic tool and still require you to see a doctor.) Unless it runs in your family or you know you’re at risk, EKGs just aren’t a feature everyone needs, especially since high / low heart rate notifications are still available.

For activity profiles and health tracking metrics, you get the basics for a training watch. And Garmin’s definition of basic is generous. Are you going to get snowboarding or boxing? No. More niche activities like triathlon, golfing, mountain biking, or team sports require a more expensive Forerunner or Garmin. But if you generally stick to the gym, cycling, running, swimming, hiking, tennis (or pickleball!), and the occasional yoga or pilates session? You’re good. Sure, spending more will get you more — but this will get most people everything they need.

Aside from these few things, you’re getting everything that makes a Garmin a Garmin: long battery life, durability, and a ton of training data. Even with a more power-hungry OLED display, the 165 Music lasted me almost a week on a single charge with the always-on display enabled and closer to 10 days with it off. The 165 Music survived my cat chomping on it, and it’s more than capable of handling a dunk in the pool. You can still access Garmin Coach, adaptive training plans, nap detection, sleep tracking, and features like Body Battery and Morning Report. And, blessedly, the redesigned Garmin Connect app has decluttered a lot of that information, making it easier to glance at.

straight on view of the Garmin Forerunner 165 Music
You still get all the basic metrics — and more.

Normally, I’d launch into a TED Talk about why Garmin’s cluttered product lineup needs fewer watches. That said, the Forerunner 165 stands out because the price, feature set, and product design are all so well aligned. Garmin’s been missing a good training watch in the sub-$300 category, where most of its options are like the Venu Sq 2 or Vivomove Trend — they’re either geared toward casual users or people looking for a more stylish vibe. This is a bona fide training watch, both in terms of design and function.

The only bad thing about the 165 series is it further muddies the already-crowded Forerunner lineup. Lord knows Garmin has a Forerunner 55, 255, 265, 745, 955, 965, and a handful of others I’m missing. There’s even other watch lines, like the Instinct, that are quite similar to the Forerunner. But amid all the clutter, the Forerunner 165 and 165 Music are my picks for an entry-level Garmin for training. It’s great for newbies to the platform — as well as intermediate and advanced athletes who aren’t interested in bells and whistles.

The T-Mobile Sidekick’s Jump button made mobile multitasking easy

The T-Mobile Sidekick’s Jump button made mobile multitasking easy
Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge

Before the iPhone, before Android, before webOS, a revolutionary soap bar of a phone made it incredibly easy to get shit done. The Danger Hiptop, better known as the T-Mobile Sidekick, made the internet portable and affordable like no phone before.

It introduced cloud sync long before iCloud, popularized unlimited data and real web browsing on mobile, and made instant messaging and email a breeze thanks to its landscape hardware keyboard.

But the Sidekick doesn’t get enough credit for one physical button that tied the whole phone together: the Jump key.

 Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge
Most remember the swiveling screen, but there was much more to a Sidekick.

On modern phones, opening an app usually means tapping on a notification or hunting for the correct homescreen icon. To do, you have to see. Before the Sidekick, the hunt-and-peck was also harder than today: it meant physically pressing down with a stylus on a resistive Palm Pilot or Windows Mobile touchscreen.

But in 2002, the Hiptop’s Jump button turned multitasking into muscle memory. Every Sidekick shipped with both preset and programmable keyboard shortcuts, letting you “Jump” to any app.

I would type up my notes in the middle of college classrooms, Jump+B my way to the web browser to look something up, Jump+N back to my notepad, Jump+I to chat on AOL Instant Messenger with pals, then Jump+E to email the notes to myself at the end of class. My thumbs never left the keys.

 Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge
Jump + B would bring up the web browser. Sadly, I couldn’t find a battery and charger for this old phone.

It was so convenient that I wound up taking most of my college notes on a Sidekick II – maybe all of them save Japanese.

Weirdly, T-Mobile didn’t make much of an effort to explain the Sidekick’s seamless task-switching potential. Real ones knew, but in the official user manuals, the Jump key is almost always described as a glorified home button. “Pressing JUMP takes you back to the Jump screen, your starting point for launching all the device applications,” reads a typical example.

 Image: Danger
I did find these Jump Shortcuts on page 38 of a 2003 user manual.

But former Danger director of design Matías Duarte, who went on to design webOS and the look and feel of Google’s Android, tells me Jump was never just a substitute for Home. It was designed to be chorded, pressing down multiple keys at a time to unlock its potential. “That was really where the power of it was, the thing that made it more than a home button, if you will.”

“We worked on them, we relied on them,” he says of the keyboard shortcuts. Danger would file bug reports, set up meetings, chat in ICQ and email, copy them into notes, all from the Hiptop itself. “I lived on it because I was commuting by Caltrain up to the city every day,” says Duarte.

 Photo by Matias Duarte
“Jump” actually appeared on the original Jump key in the first-gen Danger Hiptop / T-Mobile Sidekick.

Originally, the Jump key was born to give you a way to jump in and out of mobile app notifications, which, back then, were pretty novel in and of themselves. “There wasn’t this concept of launching a program and quitting a program, it was you can jump to the notification and just jump back to what you’re doing.”

Unlike Palm Pilots, BlackBerrys, and flip phones of the era, the Sidekick didn’t kill apps when they were closed, he says — it had a “true multitasking architecture” where they kept on running in the background, connected to the internet. (Every phone does this today.)

“The state of the art of notifications always felt like they were these obnoxious lights that don’t respect you,” he says of the notification lights on other phones, “so it was important that they would pop up, banner up, and let you know who they were from. You could jump to it if you cared about it, or not if you ignored it. Together they were solving the problem of the user not being actually interrupted, but effectively multitasking.”

 Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge
A former Danger engineer found this pristine Sidekick II in a momento bin.

But it doesn’t surprise Duarte that the Jump button was marketed as something simpler, merely a way to get back to the homescreen where you could use the Sidekick’s dial to scroll through apps — because the button was genuinely supposed to do both. “The philosophy was that we wanted to make it really accessible, but we didn’t think that making it accessible made it less powerful.”

And it was called “Jump” to keep it simple. “We wanted to make something that was for normal people, where you didn’t need to understand any of these concepts of launching or quitting or multitasking.”

Jump wasn’t the only button that offered chorded keyboard shortcuts to Sidekick power users. You could cut, copy, paste, jump to a specific chat, or start a new email without launching the email client (and prefilled with the text you just copied!) by first holding down the Menu key.

Duarte says he struggled to justify adding the Menu button because he was trying to keep the phone simple — but Danger was also trying to keep it cheap, only giving you buttons and a one-dimensional scroll wheel instead of paying for a pricey (at the time) touchscreen. Repeatedly rotating and clicking a wheel to select each command seemed like a lot to ask of users.

“That’s why we needed the Menu button: so we weren’t always drilling in and out of everything,” he says.

Above: T-Mobile’s anime ad campaign for the Sidekick hinted at task-switching but didn’t explicitly show off shortcuts.

The Sidekick eventually died a sad death, abandoned by celebrities after Paris Hilton’s phone got hacked, shunned by some users after new owner Microsoft lost gobs of user data in a server failure, and replaced for people like me by Android (which, importantly, was created by some of the same people who launched the Hiptop).

But many of Danger’s useful keyboard shortcuts live on to this very day. I found them waiting for me, like old friends, when I purchased the very first Android phone. Squinting, I spotted a tiny magnifying glass key on the T-Mobile G1’s sliding keyboard. I pressed Search+B, watched a web browser pop up, and grinned wide.

 Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge
My T-Mobile G1, originally the HTC Dream — the first Android phone.

For more on the Danger Hiptop, I recommend co-founder Joe Britt’s 2007 Stanford lecture on how it was built, Chris DeSalvo’s essay on its innovations, and retrospectives from MrMobile and TheUnlockr.

Why Did Matt Farley Put a Song About Me on Spotify?

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samedi 30 mars 2024

The Atari 400 Mini is a cute little slice of video game history

The Atari 400 Mini is a cute little slice of video game history
A promotional photo of the Atari 400 Mini.
Image: Atari

Now that the miniature game console trend has already covered most of the biggest devices from Nintendo, Sega, and Sony, we’re starting to enter more niche territory. The Atari 400 Mini isn’t a rerelease of the company’s most recognizable console (that’d be the 2600). And it isn’t full of household names. But that’s also part of what makes it so interesting — the little gadget is a cute, playful way to explore a very specific and formative niche of video game history.

Like its contemporaries, the 400 Mini is a shrunken-down version of the original. That means a small box in a very 1970s shade of beige plastic, with a keyboard and cartridge slot that are purely ornamental. I appreciate just how retro this thing looks; even the included HDMI and power cords are beige. It has five USB ports (four on the front, one on the back), an HDMI port, and USB-C port for power. There’s one functional power button on the rear, coupled with a little red light to let you know it’s on. You also get one classic Atari joystick, which has been outfitted with a USB plug and the sneaky addition of a few extra buttons, including a shoulder button and a clickable circle around the actual stick.

This is a plug-and-play device, so setup is exceedingly straightforward. It doesn’t connect to the internet, and the visual settings are pretty standard. There are two options: the 4:3 mode displays games in their original aspect ratio, while “pixel perfect” mode renders the pixels as squares. You also have the option to add virtual scanlines to imitate the experience of playing on a CRT display. Other than that, there’s not much to it. You scroll through games in alphabetical order, and it has console-level save slots, so you can pause and save your progress at any point while playing. It all works well enough, though it took me some time to get a handle on navigating the menu with a big joystick.

The more important part is the games themselves. The 400 Mini has 25 built-in games spanning Atari’s 8-bit era. That includes expected titles like Asteroids and Centipede, as well as slightly more obscure releases like the nautical-themed shooter Wavy Navy and Hover Bovver, Jeff Minter’s game about cutting lawns with a stolen lawnmower. The emulation is solid, and I was surprised by how well some of these games stood up. I had never played Crystal Castles before — a platformer where a bear tries to escape a series of magical mazes — but I ended up spending hours playing with my eight-year-old daughter, passing the joystick back and forth. Similarly, space sim Star Raiders II remains incredibly thrilling all these years later, and I was very happy to discover Airball, a fantasy maze where you play as a bouncing bubble.

It’s a well-curated list, and I found basically everything — with the exception of the dead-simple Basketball — still playable by modern standards. The collection does a great job of encompassing just what this hardware was capable of. And unlike most similar mini consoles, the 400 Mini has room for expansion. The various USB ports let you connect a variety of joysticks and keyboards, and you can also stick in a flash drive to sideload games. That opens up a lot of possibilities, especially considering how robust the Atari homebrew scene is.

A screenshot from the video game Star Raiders II. Image: Atari
Star Raiders II.

That ability to expand the device is also important because the 400 Mini has a surprising amount of competition. It’s really not that hard to find ways to play Atari games right now. The company released a recreation of the 2600 last year that can play old cartridges, and the excellent Atari 50 collection not only has an expansive list of games but also adds historical context with its interactive documentary format. With that in mind, a $119 mini console could be a tough sell. But the bookshelf-worthy design combined with its flexibility might just push it over the edge — so long as you have a craving for some Star Raiders.

The Atari 400 Mini is on sale now.

The world needs more gadgets like LG’s briefcase TV

The world needs more gadgets like LG’s briefcase TV

The company that usually specializes in premium OLED TVs has produced something refreshingly out of the ordinary. And I already hope it gets a sequel.

LG’s StanbyME Go is easily the most Inspector Gadget thing I’ve ever reviewed. It’s a 27-inch touchscreen TV that’s built into (and protected by) a large military-grade briefcase — complete with an integrated sound system, HDMI connectivity, and the same webOS software that runs on the company’s regular TVs.

Theoretically, you can bring it anywhere, but at 28 pounds, the StanbyME Go is far from a light load, and it’s a stretch to call it very portable. Road trips are no issue, but I never got bold enough to bring this thing on a flight. For one, I didn’t want to deal with TSA scrutiny over this gadget that looks like a Mission Impossible prop. But the briefcase is too wide to satisfy the carry-on requirements at most airlines, regardless.

But it’s… it’s unique as hell. And that’s what has resonated with me over these last couple months of testing the terribly-named StanbyME Go. You can take this briefcase TV tailgating; you can bring it camping; if you’re traveling somewhere, it can be a mobile entertainment and gaming solution for yourself or the kids. I’ve had friends say they’d be open to using something like this in lieu of a projector in rooms where a permanent TV might be unwelcome. When it comes time to lift it up, that excitement often dampens.

Aside from its heft, the biggest thing going against the StanbyME Go is the $1,200 that LG is asking for what, at the end of the day, is a pretty unremarkable 27-inch LCD panel. It’s a 1080p screen with so-so viewing angles and a peak brightness of 500 nits. That’s more than fine for indoor viewing, and I’ve also found it adequate for most outdoor usage so long as you’re not in direct sunlight. (The display’s anti-reflective coating helps out here big time.) But if you’re judging this thing by display specs alone, paying $1,200 for it would be lunacy. I would go wild for a 4K OLED version of the StanbyME Go, though that would likely rocket its price up into $2,000 territory. The nicheness of this product is inherently part of why it’s more expensive than many would prefer.

A photo of LG’s StanbyME Go briefcase TV being viewed on an apartment building rooftop with an episode of The Daily Show on the screen.
The display’s peak brightness of 500 nits is fine in the shade or on a cloudy day.

The claimed Dolby Vision HDR support is laughable, considering this display’s limited brightness. The same goes for the four-channel “Dolby Atmos” speaker system, though I was surprised by its fullness since the audio is coming from drivers unconventionally built into one side of a briefcase. And despite the fact that the speakers are positioned behind the screen when it’s raised, the sound remains clear. Just don’t expect much in the way of immersion or surround trickery here. If you need more impactful sound when tailgating, you can always pair up a large Bluetooth speaker.

A photo of a man holding LG’s StanbyME Go briefcase TV.
At almost 30 pounds, the StanbyME Go can be a chore to lug around.

To see any value in the StanbyME Go, you’ve got to try and appreciate the sum of its parts. That average screen is attached to a very sturdy articulating arm that lets the display be used in three different ways. It can lay flat for touchscreen games like chess or when playing music on the speakers from your phone. Pull the screen up and you can position it in either landscape or portrait orientations; the latter can be useful if you want to mirror your phone and scroll through your TikTok feed — or maybe give a presentation on the road. I rarely bothered with vertical mode, but the versatility is nice.

A photo of a couple laying in bed watching LG’s StanbyME Go briefcase TV.
It can go basically wherever you want.
A photo of LG’s StanbyME Go briefcase TV being viewed in bed by a couple slightly out of frame to the right.
The 27-inch screen is 1080p and lacks local dimming, but still looks nice enough when you're watching something.

The StanbyME Go is smart enough to automatically turn off its display and power down whenever the briefcase is latched. The hard outer shell is plenty tough — LG claims it has passed 11 different durability tests — and while I never intentionally tried to put LG’s review unit through my own torture test, it certainly took a few bumps during my weeks of testing and even had a minor fall while the case was open with the screen up. It survived all that with no issues. But the ruggedness only goes so far; the StanbyME Go doesn’t offer any water resistance, so be careful if you’ll be using it poolside or near a lake when camping. That’s a big differentiator between this, a TV that can be used outdoors, and actual “outdoor TVs” that can withstand the elements and get bright enough to combat the sun — for much more money than the StanbyME Go.

A photo of LG’s StanbyME Go briefcase TV being used alongside a Nintendo Switch OLED gaming console.
The StanbyME Go makes for a fun traveling game station — and you get LG’s typical low input lag.

There’s a dedicated cradle for the remote inside the case, and if you pop that off, there’s a section underneath for storing the power cable whenever you don’t need it. The power input is covered by a protective flap, and there’s another that guards the HDMI/eARC port, USB-A port (for media on external drives) and a switch that can turn off the battery to preserve juice when you won’t be using the TV for a while. LG says the StanbyME Go will average around three hours of battery life. In my experience, you can eke out an extra hour if you activate webOS’s energy-saving features, but those usually come at the expense of brightness, which isn’t impressive to begin with.

A photo of a couple playing touchscreen chess on LG’s StanbyME Go briefcase TV.
There are some preloaded games that take advantage of the touchscreen.
A photo of a couple playing a Photo Hunt-like game on LG’s StanbyME Go briefcase TV.
Can your OLED TV do bar games this well?

Actually using this briefcase TV feels similar to any of LG’s other models. All the standard picture and sound modes are present. But most LG sets lack a touchscreen. Don’t have the remote handy? You can navigate around with smartphone-like gestures: swipe up from the bottom of the screen to go home or swipe down for the top for quick access to brightness and volume controls.

A closeup photo of the port layout on LG’s StanbyME Go briefcase TV.
There’s a single HDMI port, plus a USB-A port that you can plug media drives into.

LG includes a handful of very simple games like the aforementioned chess and bar games like photo hunt. But the novelty of those fades fast, so you’ll want to plug in a console for the real thing. Of course, this means you’ll need to provide power for whatever HDMI devices you’re using, which can get tricky on the go and especially outside. A portable power station would prove super convenient in these situations.

All the popular streaming apps are accounted for in LG’s store, but if you want to watch them from a cabin or tent while camping, you’ll find yourself routinely tethering to your phone for an internet connection.

A photo showing the anti-glare screen and integrated speaker system on LG’s StanbyME Go briefcase TV.
There’s a four-channel, 20-watt speaker system built into the upper half of the briefcase.
A photo showing LG’s StanbyME Go briefcase TV fully closed and positioned next to a couch.
The briefcase is large but easy enough to stash away when you don’t need it.

I’ve got a soft spot in my heart for weird gadgets, which tend to come along rarely nowadays. Most big tech brands play their hands too safely and only release products with mainstream appeal. From that viewpoint, I commend LG for doing something not just a little different but so far off the beaten path. If the StanbyME Go cost a few hundred dollars less, I’d be able to recommend it for reasons beyond the uniqueness factor. It’s weighty but thoughtfully designed. It’s one of those attention-grabbing devices that people will ask questions about whenever they see you using it.

A photo of a man leaning over on a couch and using LG’s StanbyME Go briefcase TV.
More weird gadgets like this, please.

But the TV that’s packed into this briefcase is merely average — and less so when you consider the price. My hope is that the StanbyME Go won’t prove so niche that LG never gives it a second attempt. Because this first try is unique and often just plain fun. But at $1,200, the simple reality is that most people are better off with a more traditional tablet or portable monitor until LG nails the right formula (and price).

Photography by Chris Welch / The Verge

vendredi 29 mars 2024

The DNC made a weird AI-generated parody of a Lara Trump song

The DNC made a weird AI-generated parody of a Lara Trump song
Graphic photo illustration of a voting sign that reads “Vote here”.
Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photo by Stephen Morton, Getty Images

After Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump’s indie music detour to launch a heavily autotuned track called “Anything is Possible,” the Democrats have responded with “Party’s Fallin’ Down.” Published three days too early to be passed off as an awkward April Fools’ Day joke, it’s described as “a new AI-generated song about Lara Trump’s rocky start as RNC co-chair.”

The track no one asked for was posted to an otherwise anonymous SoundCloud page, promoted on TMZ, and tweeted from X accounts for DNC Chair Jaime Harrison and the Democrats’ “rapid response team.”

You can listen to it here. My recommendation, however, is that you don’t in favor of doing anything else with your time, regardless of your political affiliation, musical taste, or thoughts on AI.

In a statement, Harrison calls Trump’s music career “embarrassing, unserious, and a waste of money,” touting how the Democratic National Committee “didn’t put as much time and money into making our song.” Nevertheless, putting less time and money into making something embarrassing and unserious is still... making something embarrassing and unserious?

And besides, this injection of generative AI into election season feels like opening a door that will be hard to close. The next time we consider the question of whether or not it’s appropriate to use generative AI in the political context, it probably won’t be over a bad musical spoof with goofy lyrics.

Sam Bankman-Fried is still gambling

Sam Bankman-Fried is still gambling
Digital photo collage of Sam Bankman Fried with crypto coins behind him.
“I’ve never seen a performance quite like that.” | Collage by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photo by Victor J. Blue, Bloomberg, Getty Images

‘It’s his nature.’

Sam Bankman-Fried has learned nothing, and I’m not sure any of the rest of us have, either.

At his sentencing, I sat several rows behind Bankman-Fried, clad in prison khaki and clanking faintly when he walked from the shackles on his feet, while he gave his statement to the court. “I’m sorry about what happened at every stage,” Bankman-Fried said. “I failed everyone I cared about.”

What Bankman-Fried did not say was that he had, in fact, committed crimes and he wouldn’t do it again. Instead, he talked about the “mistakes” he’d made, how he’d assisted the FTX customers in dealing with the bankruptcy estate, that he hadn’t actually engaged in witness tampering, and that, in fact, the FTX estate had “billions” more than necessary to repay the customers, and that has been true the whole time. He didn’t say a word about his lenders, two of which went bankrupt, or the investors, whose money is gone.

It struck me that Bankman-Fried was going with the strategy he’d outlined in a document, submitted as evidence by the prosecution. He was simply going to blame the bankruptcy lawyers, as outlined in points 4, 5, 6, and 9 in his little Google Doc.

He’s appealing the verdict, and so that meant he had to dance through saying he was sorry without really admitting to anything. But I was absolutely astonished when he began talking about how FTX employees had been robbed of their chance to build something wonderful and that they should get together to, essentially, create an FTX equivalent.

“I guess there is a big opportunity in the world to do what the world thought I would do, what it hoped I would do, at least for a while, what I hoped I would do for the world, not what I ended up doing,” Bankman-Fried said. “And 300 people that I used to work with, incredibly talented, selfless, impressive people were looking for something to do. If that happens, if they do what they could for the world, then hopefully I’ll be able to see their success, not just my own failures, each night.”

Imagine standing up at your sentencing and saying, “Yeah, I’d do it again, your honor.”

I have heard a lot, throughout this trial, about Bankman-Fried’s vaunted intelligence. I have been told, in documents filed by the defense, that he is simply misunderstood because he is autistic. That may be true, but I absolutely witnessed him perjure himself on the stand. So did Judge Lewis Kaplan, who, in commenting on the perjury, gave three examples: that Bankman-Fried lied about not knowing Alameda spent FTX customer funds, that he first learned of Alameda’s debt in October 2022, and that he did not know that asking Alameda to repay its lenders would necessitate further dipping into customer funds. I’m not an expert or anything, but I don’t think lying on the stand is a symptom of autism.

“I did not think it a fruitful use of time to spell out every time I thought Mr. Bankman-Fried testified, willfully and knowingly, falsely at trial,” Kaplan said. “And when he wasn’t outright lying, he was evasive, hairsplitting, dodging questions, and trying to get the prosecutor to reword questions in ways that he could answer in ways he thought less harmful than a truthful answer to the question that was posed would have been. I’ve been doing this job for close to 30 years. I’ve never seen a performance quite like that.”

The 25-year sentence (and $11 billion forfeiture) Kaplan gave had a lot to do with Bankman-Fried’s propensity for gambling. A math nerd who makes decisions in math, doing what we might call “cost / benefit analysis” and what Bankman-Fried called “expected value.” It was the math that did him in.

“In the head of this mathematical wizard, his own counsel tells us, in substance, that he was viewing the cost of getting caught, discounted by probability or improbability, against the gain of getting away without getting caught, given the probabilities,” Kaplan said. “That was the game. It started at least as early as Jane Street [the Wall Street firm Bankman-Fried joined straight out of college], and it continued to the very end. It’s his nature. And you don’t have to take my word for it — everybody has said that.”

Kaplan lingered on Caroline Ellison’s testimony about Bankman-Fried’s character; specifically, he told her that if there was a coin where tails destroyed the world and heads made the world twice as good, he’d gamble on flipping the coin. “A man willing to flip a coin as to the continued existence of life and civilization on Earth, if the chances were imperceptibly greater that it would come out without that catastrophic outcome, that’s really a leitmotif in my judgment of this entire case.”

Bankman-Fried rolled up to his sentencing and pitched a second FTX; he would absolutely keep flipping that coin.

He is flipping the coin right now, actually, hoping for a win on appeal.

One of the key skills in gambling is knowing when to cut your losses. It is, maybe, the skill — the only one that matters. It’s the lesson every first-time investor learns in their first bear market. It’s tempting to try to double-or-nothing your way out of a hole, but that rarely works out as planned. It didn’t work out at Alameda or FTX. It didn’t work out in Bankman-Fried’s trial. It didn’t work out in his sentencing. I suppose we will see about the appeal.

Bankman-Fried’s arrogance is of a Shakespearean scale. Arrogance can take a number of forms. One is not dressing up for an event where it is customary to wear a suit because you are so important you don’t need to follow the dress code. Another way is paying one of the biggest political bribes in history because you want to have your way. A third is determining that you, personally, must have the biggest charitable impact in the world.

Kaplan suggested that Bankman-Fried just likes the game. Maybe. It’s possible that Bankman-Fried simply cannot understand that he lost.

In order to understand that he’s lost and the jig is up, he would have to accept two things: that he isn’t as smart as he thought he was and that he’s not a good boy. I have sat through endless litanies of his good boy credentials; if we leave aside FTX’s matryoshka doll of crime, he’s better behaved than me. I have also been told many, many times that he’s smart. Private school. MIT. Jane Street. You get it.

That’s actually how he views himself. He’s smart and good. John J. Ray III, in his filing, hit the nail on the head when he said, “Mr. Bankman-Fried continues to live a life of delusion.”

In November 2022, FTX’s impending collapse triggered a 22 percent drop in the price of Bitcoin in a single day. Bitcoin’s now at about $70,000, higher than the peak of the last cycle. I have been told by a suspiciously large number of people that Bankman-Fried is a one-off, just a bad apple. Since I’ve started following crypto, this is the third bull run I’ve seen. I don’t know who the main character is going to be this time, but I know there’s going to be one.

The casino’s still open, 24 hours a day, for anyone who wants to take a seat at the table. The rules haven’t changed.

Is Garry Tan San Francisco’s ‘Twitter Menace’ or True Believer?

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jeudi 28 mars 2024

Apple sues former iOS engineer for allegedly leaking Vision Pro, Journal app details

Apple sues former iOS engineer for allegedly leaking Vision Pro, Journal app details
A black-and-white graphic showing the Apple logo
Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge

Apple is suing a former employee for leaking confidential information, including unknown details about Apple’s Journal app, the development of the VisionOS headset, and more, to journalists and employees of other companies. The lawsuit, filed ten days ago in California state court (24CV433319, pdf), says Andrew Aude also leaked regulatory compliance strategies, employee headcounts, and other product hardware characteristics.

As reported previously by MacRumors, in at least one message, the company says Aude claimed he leaked information “so he could “kill” products and features with which he took issue.”

Apple referenced many of the communications in the lawsuit:

Between June and September 2023 alone, Mr. Aude connected with a Wall Street Journal (WSJ) journalist, whom Mr. Aude code named “Homeboy,” over 1,400 times using an encrypted messaging app. Mr. Aude also read “Homeboy” a final feature list for an unannounced Apple product over the phone. Mr. Aude sent another journalist at The Information over 10,000 text messages and traveled across the continent to meet with her.

The following screenshot of an encrypted message exchange on the Signal app between Aude and a WSJ journalist appears in the complaint, as Apple says, “Mr. Aude often took and saved screenshots of his communications on his Apple-issued work iPhone to preserve them for posterity.”

 Apple

Apple accuses Aude of leaking a list of finalized features for Apple’s Journal app in a phone call that occurred in April 2023 to the same reporter. A story about the unreleased app’s features appeared that same month in The Wall Street Journal.

Aude joined Apple in 2016 as an iOS engineer focused on optimizing battery performance. Apple’s lawyers write that the nature of the role gave Aude access to “information regarding dozens of Apple’s most sensitive products.”

The leaks weren’t discovered until late 2023, the company states. When representatives from Apple first sat down with Aude in November 2023, he reportedly denied his involvement in the leaks and lied about having his Apple-issued iPhone with him. Then, they claim, he faked needing to go to the bathroom, “extracted his iPhone from his pocket during the break and permanently deleted significant amounts of evidence from his device,” including the Signal app.

Then, in a second meeting on December 12th, the complaint says “Mr. Aude admitted that he leaked information about Apple’s strategies for regulatory compliance, unannounced products, development policies, and hardware characteristics of certain released products to at least two journalists.” He was fired three days later. Apple’s filing says the company is seeking a jury trial, damages, “restitution and/or disgorgement” of bonuses and stock options, plus “An order directing Mr. Aude not to disclose Apple’s confidential and proprietary, information to third parties without its written consent.”

New York City welcomes robotaxis — but only with safety drivers

New York City welcomes robotaxis — but only with safety drivers
New York City skyline
Image: Getty

New York City announced a new permitting system for companies interested in testing autonomous vehicles on its roads, including a requirement that a human safety driver sit behind the steering wheel at all times.

As cities like San Francisco continue to grapple with the problems posed by fully driverless for-hire vehicles, New York City is trying to get ahead of the problem by outlining what it calls “a rigorous permitting program” that it claims will ensure applicants are “ready to test their technology in the country’s most challenging urban environment safely and proficiently.”

“This technology is coming whether we like it or not,” Mayor Eric Adams said in a statement to The Verge, “so we’re going to make sure that we get it right.”

The requirements would exclude companies without previous autonomous vehicle testing experience in other cities. Applicants would need to submit information from previous tests, including details on any crashes that occurred and how often safety drivers have to take control of the vehicle (also known in California as “disengagements). And in what is sure to be the most controversial provision, fully driverless vehicles won’t be permitted to test on the city’s public roads; only vehicles with safety drivers will be allowed.

A small handful of companies, including Waymo and Cruise, have deployed driverless vehicles, also known as Level 4 automation — but issues around traffic obstruction and safety have stymied their rollout.

Last October, a driverless Cruise vehicle dragged a pedestrian over 20 feet to the curb on a street in San Francisco, spurring regulators to suspend the company’s operations permit. Several months later, a driverless Waymo vehicle struck a bicyclist, causing minor injuries. City officials in San Francisco have criticized both companies for blocking roads and obstructing buses and emergency vehicles.

New York City is hoping to avoid similar problems by requiring companies to keep safety drivers in the vehicles at all times. Under Adams’ proposal, companies would still need to obtain a permit from the state Department of Motor Vehicles. In addition, applicants would have to provide details on how their safety drivers are hired and trained and “attest that they will follow recent best practices from the Society of Automotive Engineers.”

Naturally, autonomous vehicles would be required to follow all traffic laws and curb regulations. Likewise, companies would need to submit “assurance protocols for how the operator will compensate for any AV system limitation or failure and proactively intervene to avoid potential crashes.”

Data from AV testing will eventually be available on the city’s Open Data portal, a spokesperson said. As part of the application process, the city’s Department of Transportation will review requests from applicants to withhold certain data from disclosure on the basis of confidentiality.

While other states have become hotbeds for AV testing, New York has been a bit of a ghost town. Part of the reason could be the state’s strict rules, which include mandating that safety drivers keep their hands on the wheel at all times. The state law originally required a police escort, but a renewal of the law several years ago removed that language.

In 2017, Cruise announced plans to test its self-driving vehicles in lower Manhattan, but those plans were later scuttled with little explanation as to why. Boston-based Optimus Ride tested autonomous shuttles in Brooklyn but only on private roads as part of the borough’s Navy Yard. Mobileye, a division of Intel, also tested a couple of vehicles in the city. And Waymo said it would bring its manually driven vehicles for mapping purposes.

Automakers and tech companies testing AVs tend to flock to states with friendlier regulations (like Arizona and Texas) or places that are more convenient to their headquarters (like California). New York is neither, but it does represent one of the biggest taxi markets in the world — and therefore is a ripe target for robotaxi companies.

How Boeing Favored Speed Over Quality for the 737 Max

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mercredi 27 mars 2024

No Man’s Sky is finally getting a ship editor in latest update

No Man’s Sky is finally getting a ship editor in latest update
A screenshot from the video game No Man’s Sky.
Image: Hello Games

No Man’s Sky just keeps on expanding. Hello Games is releasing the game’s 27th update today, dubbed “Orbital,” and it adds some major features including improved space stations and a tool for customizing ships.

The studio says that the stations are now much larger and more impressive from the outside and that the insides are now “vast, procedurally generated, and incredibly diverse.” Most notably, they now feature ship editors where players can customize their personal spacecraft.

“We haven’t introduced customisation previously, because so many players love exploring to find the perfect ship already out there to purchase,” Hello explains. “In keeping with exploration, to customise their ship, Travellers gather and trade parts for their ships as they explore, salvaging the best components from wrecks and ruins.”

A screenshot of the ship editor in the video game No Man’s Sky. Image: Hello Games

There’s a bunch of other stuff in the update as well. That includes a revamped guild system that makes “joining guilds and increasing reputation a much larger part of the game,” a refreshed user interface, and the ability to send out your frigate fleets on away missions. You can check out the full update notes right here.

Of course, these kinds of ongoing updates have become the norm since No Man’s Sky launched in 2016, adding not only new gameplay elements but also expanding to more platforms like VR and the Nintendo Switch. Meanwhile, last year, the studio announced its next game, a fantasy adventure called Light No Fire.

Chevy’s cheapest Silverado EV now starts at $57,095

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