Mediaboss Marketing

Furthermore, this large community contributes non-stop with traffic reports, so others can know in advance when theyre approaching a speed trap, roadkill, a construction zone, or simply a traffic jam that could slow them down.

The community-driven engine has turned Waze into a must-have weapon in the modern arsenal of a daily driver, and this is how the Google-owned app ended up becoming one of the most downloaded on both iPhone and Android.

But on the other hand, Waze has long been pretty much the only app offering such capabilities, despite smaller developers in the development of their own alternatives, sometimes to no avail. Its not easy to build a large userbase that can contribute with live reports and suggest map edits, so only a company with proven experience in the navigation software market can do this.

TomTom is one of the giants ready to get involved in a battle against Waze, as its AmiGO navigation app proposes a similar approach based on the power of the community.

The company says its userbase counts half a billion drivers that can contribute with real-time updates, therefore providing users with up-to-date traffic info, alerts, online routing, and everything else.

Similar to Waze, AmiGO allows users to report essential traffic data, such as jams, speed camera locations, blocked and closed roads, accidents, and more, and TomTom says it analyzes and verifies the information to make sure only accurate data is offered to others.

In other words, TomTom AmiGO should offer only super-accurate reports that help generate a faster and safer route to a destination, all while avoiding sections of the road flagged by others.

TomTom says AmiGO is and will remain completely free, with no plans to ever introduce ads or start selling user data. The app is available on both iPhone and Android, and more recently, it also received support for Android Auto.

At the end of the day, competition is a boost to innovation, and as far as Waze is concerned, this is a must-have, especially as the Google-owned company has long been the only solid choice in this side of the navigation software market. The only thing AmiGO needs right now is to grow bigger, especially in smaller countries where its userbase isnt as large as Wazes.

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A Free Alternative to Waze Is Finally Available and the World Seriously Needs It - autoevolution

Blue patches represent publicly owned land in Seattle that could support housing. (CityBldr Graphic)

Engineers at CityBldr knew they were sitting on a goldmine of zoning and land data. After all, thats how the Bellevue, Wash.-based big data company helps large corporations know the most cost-effective way to expand operations.

Then five years ago, staff members realized the data might lend itself toward solving one of the biggest social problems in the urban United States: affordable housing. The same information that could show a company where to build its next warehouse could also show a housing nonprofit or a city planner the entire inventory of underutilized, publicly owned land.

Moreover, it could immediately show them how many people could be housed on each parcel under existing zoning. Today, the company is launching a free demonstration website called Public to show in a sharply limited-access way what the software can do.

And with the launch, CityBldr is kicking off a campaign to get corporations to sponsor affordable housing nonprofits in order to get full access to the complete data that could reveal anything from low-hanging housing fruit to the underpinning of a long-term housing plan.

We spent five years building the Rosetta Stone of zoning, said Bryan Copley, CEO and co-founder of CityBldr. And we think it can really help change the amount of housing available.

That data could come in handy in Seattle come November. Should the Compassion Seattle Initiative get voter approval in the next election, the city will be required to build 2,000 units of housing over the following two years.

Copley said CityBldr has compiled a vast and deep land database of 100 U.S. cities with 255 different zoning standards. In those cities, Public data can show everything from land valuation, parcel size, current zoning, what currently is on the land, and how many people could be housed on the land under existing regulations.

For land that has multi-use zoning, a user can click through parameters for single-family, townhome, or multi-family dwellings to find out how many people or units the land could legally hold. A city planner could find out in minutes how many additional people could be housed on all available public land within the city limits.

After consulting with urban planning experts at U.C. Berkeley, M.I.T. and Harvard University the Harvard expert researched how best to help cities with the data Copley said the search was restricted to publicly owned land for two reasons: it can be easier to get a city to unload underused land to a nonprofit and cities sometimes dont have a simple way to track their own land inventories.

That said, the database someday could be opened to privately owned land as well, he said.

We built it so people could make use of it, Copley said. You cant make a private individual sell. Some people just want to sit on the land. But publicly owned land can be different.

Copley said CityBldr representatives have spoken to housing officials and government leaders in Seattle and across the country and the reception has been enthusiastic. He said the cost of getting the data for each city will run $10,000 so that is what a corporation will pay to sponsor a nonprofit.

Ideally, he said, CityBldr wont make a dime on Public. The plan is to collect money to pay for five full-time staff to help housing nonprofits and cities wade through and understand the data while continually updating the database as local regulations and land inventories change.

The dream, Copley said, is to make this zero out, cost wise. Were not doing this for the money.

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Mining its own data, CityBldr builds tool to show cities the best places to build affordable housing - GeekWire

For the National Whistleblower Centers National Whistleblower Day celebration, which Whistleblower Network News (WNN) co-sponsored, WNN had the pleasure of interviewing Thomas le Bonniec. In 2019, le Bonniec worked in Ireland for a subcontractor employed by Apple. When he first started the job, he was enthusiastic about the location and good pay, but he quickly took issue with what the job entailed: listening to user recordings from Siri, Apples virtual assistant.

I disagreed from the first day with what I was supposed to do at my job, le Bonniec says during the interview. He stayed at the job for two months, but when he listened to a recording from a pedophile, he decided he couldnt stay on any longer. That was also the moment le Bonniec decided that the public needed to know what was going on.

Since leaving Apple, le Bonniec has been urging the data protection authorities in Europe to take action about his allegations, because they are responsible for these kinds of violations. They are the ones who should investigate that. During the interview, he talked about his whistleblowing experience and how he tried to flag the recording to no avail. He also talked about how he was unable to blow the whistle on these issues internally, because it was the job itself that is extremely objectionable. These recordings were made on a massive scale, le Bonniec emphasizes.

During the last part of the conversation, le Bonniec gives advice to people who might want to blow the whistle. He advises that a potential whistleblower would need a lot of time of introspection before they decide what path theyre going down to. He recalls that he was told by several people close to him that blowing the whistle would be pointless and an uphill battle, and he concedes that whistleblowing is not something you should do lightly. You should definitely think about it before you start the process, thats not something you go back from, especially when you go public.

It feels good to be able to say youre not going to bow down to pressure, especially when it feels, in my case at least, that its wrong, le Bonniec remarks. So thats a good thing. Other doors, other opportunities are open. You meet different people who have a different view of the world. They may not be in power, but they are at least trying to do things for the betterIm connected to people who are trying to do things for the better, and thats very much whats important to me.

I would also say that you definitely need to bear in mind that your employer is not on your side in these specific cases pretty much anytime, actually. Your employer is not going to be on your side: be careful with what youre going to share with them and what your intentions are and how disgruntled you may seem to them as well. Be careful and dont give anything to them that they might use afterwards, le Bonniec advises.

At the end of the interview, le Bonniec emphasized his commitment to trying to enact meaningful change and urging European data protection authorities to take action. Im not going to let this go, thats for sure, he says.

He also cautions individuals to think critically about their relationship with big tech industries: If you ever think of what kind of data youre just giving away and how much it is worth, actually, to the people who are spying on you, please make sure to check your iPhone settings, your Siri settings. Please make sure that youre not using Google anymore, try another search engine like DuckDuckGo, try to switch from Google Chrome to Mozilla Firefox. Try and get involved with free software and those kinds of actors, such as the Wikimedia Foundation, the Mozilla Foundation, and Linux and all those people who are actually doing a great job of fighting that.

le Bonniec was one of the many brave whistleblowers who shared their stories and experiences at this years National Whistleblower Day celebration. His powerful story provides invaluable insights into the tech industry.

Learn more about National Whistleblower Day 2021 here.

Interested in tech and social media whistleblowers? Read an interview with Facebook whistleblower Sophie Zhang here.

Originally posted here:
Apple Whistleblower's Advice to Potential Whistleblowers: Your employer is not going to be on your side. - Whistleblowers Protection Blog

Amazon interfered with a formal election by its warehouse workers in Alabama to unionize and staff ought to be given a second chance to vote again, an official at the US National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has concluded.

After pro-union employees, represented by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU), working at the BHM1 fulfillment center in Bessemer in the Cotton State lost their unionization election in April, the union swiftly filed objections to the labor relations board.

"A free and fair election was impossible," said [PDF] Kerstin Meyers, an NLRB hearing officer, this week. "Under the circumstances, I recommend that a second election be ordered."

Stuart Appelbaum, the RWDSUs president, claimed Amazon deliberately engineered an unfair election environment that skewed the vote. For instance, Amazon had the US Postal Service install a mailbox right in front of the warehouse, and the mega-corp messaged its workers to encourage them to mail in their ballots via this box. It is said the mailbox was placed in a tent, branded with Amazon's anti-union messaging and a sign on it saying vote here in full view of Amazon's surveillance cameras. It was claimed this was a clear example of Amazon sticking its oar far too deep into the voting process.

The labor official agreed. The employers conduct in causing this generic mail receptacle to be installed usurped the NLRBs exclusive role in administering union elections, Meyers wrote.

Notwithstanding the unions substantial margin of defeat, the employers unilateral decision to create, for all intents and purposes, an onsite collection box for NLRB ballots destroyed the laboratory conditions and justifies a second election.

The e-commerce giant also not only showered workers with messages to vote no, as you might expect, it had them attend mandatory 30-minute meetings that were essentially anti-union lectures. At the end of these meetings, anti-union leaflets and pins were left for staff to pick up, with supervisors watching them as they left.

"I find that by distributing these anti-union materials in the presence of managers, the employer committed objectionable conduct," Meyers noted. "The misconduct herein occurred on numerous occasions at untold number of meetings. Virtually all of the bargaining unit employees were subjected to the misconduct, as these were mandatory employee meetings. Under the circumstances, I find that this conduct is objectionable."

It was also claimed Amazon hired off-duty cops to patrol its facilities during the election period, though it was able to demonstrate to the labor watchdog that these officers were needed due to recent on-site security incidents. Similarly, Amazon was accused of persuading the county to alter traffic light signal patterns to interfere with pro-union campaigning on street corners, though it was shown that Amazon had merely asked the county to carry out a traffic flow study of the area before union campaigning began.

In the end, 738 votes were cast for joining the RWDSU, and 1,798 votes were cast against from roughly 5,860 possible voters; 505 ballots were challenged, which wouldn't be enough to change the outcome.

That said, now that Meyers has recommended a second vote be carried out, a regional director of the labor board will decide over the summer whether to demand another election.

We support the hearing officers recommendation that the NLRB set aside the election results and direct a new election, Appelbaum said in a statement.

As President Biden reminded us earlier this year, the question of whether or not to have a union is supposed to be the workers decision and not the employers. Amazons behavior throughout the election process was despicable. Amazon cheated, they got caught, and they are being held accountable.

Amazon said it intends to appeal to block another election, adding that its workers "voted overwhelmingly in favor of a direct connection with their managers and the company."

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US labor official suggests Amazon's Alabama workers rerun that unionization vote - The Register

Salesforce-owned application integration biz Mulesoft has gobbled up Servicetrace, a robotic process automation vendor.

In a move that follows Oracle and SAP in the RPA market, the buy is intended to help Salesforce provide integration, API management, and RPA platforms, which would further "enrich" its Customer 360 tool, according to Brent Hayward, Mulesoft CEO.

"The new RPA capabilities will enhance Salesforce's Einstein Automate solution, enabling end-to-end workflow automation across any system for Service, Sales, Industries, and more," he said.

But Salesforce is not the first application giant to see the logic in buying or developing RPA technology to sit alongside their own business platforms.

In 2018, SAP bought French RPA vendor Contextor and followed up last year with the launch of SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation (RPA) 2.0, which "targets developers looking to automate repetitive, manual tasks with software bots."

Similarly, Oracle is also looking to take a chunk out of the RPA market, dominated by vendors including Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, and UiPath, which could be worth $75bn by 2025.

But just to be different, Big Red is calling its effort Intelligent Process Automation. Last year Juergen Lindner, Oracle senior veep of ERP, said it would "leapfrog the RPA approaches" by using machine learning to "auto suggest which tasks can be automated."

Not to be left out, Microsoft has bought Softomotive and last year launched its Power Automate Desktop product.

But Mulesoft sees RPA as part of the process of application integration rather than simply automating desktop tasks.

With a partial regurgitation of the jargon dictionary, CEO Hayward said: "We're continuing to build on our vision of enabling the composable business, making it possible for companies to turn every asset in their organization data, automations, and applications into reusable building blocks to create seamless digital experiences, faster."

Lovely stuff.

This being the IT industry, everyone is trying to eat each other's lunch. RPA and low-code vendor Pega is also having a stab at integration, with its "context-aware" APIs that "dynamically update" as processes change.

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Salesforce follows application rivals into the RPA market with Servicetrace purchase - The Register