The COVID-19 pandemic forced (or perhaps merely accelerated the inevitable) seismic shift towards remote working. It showed how unsustainable – and in many cases entirely unnecessary – it was to write off large portions of each working day to commuting. It is little wonder, then, that as life begins to return to “normal” many of us find ourselves questioning the financial, environmental, and psychological costs of traditional work environments, and gravitate towards new setups which are either hybrid or entirely virtual.

Yet remote working has a prominent “Achilles Heel,” in that most videoconferencing tools and solutions fall well short of the engagement, clarity, and security necessary to create meaningful connections and maximize productivity and creative interactions.

As post-pandemic life returns to something like normality many of us find ourselves questioning the financial, environmental, and psychological costs of traditional work environments
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There are some who yearn to go back to the office due to that lack of a human connection, and business owners and leaders are looking for a middle ground to bridge the two and create a hybrid work environment that fulfills everyone’s needs and lead to better productivity.

Raviv Nadav – Kino by Kinetx Co Founder & Chief Solutions Architect

That is the problem that drives Raviv Nadav, Founder and CEO of Kinetx’ Kino, a platform that he believes could become the solution that bridges the gaps between hybrid work and a remote virtual work environment.

We're gravitating towards new setups that are either hybrid or entirely virtual
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According to him, the Kino video space platform is capable of supporting human connection by creating virtual conversations that feel much more personal.

“Human interaction is organic and personal. Video communication should be too,” says Nadav, pointing to the video below as an example of how his platform enables those personal connections to happen in a natural way, much as they would in real life.

“Social interaction is predominately filled with many conversations happening at once,” he explains. “It’s not some rigid experience where only one person is permitted to speak at any given time. Instead, when a person walks into a crowded room, there is a hum from all the conversation. They can choose to join a group, say ‘hello,’ focusing their attention. As time goes on, they can leave and focus on other individuals or conversations.”

Kino replicates that fluid environment where participants can communicate and shape their virtual experience as they see fit. The tool’s streaming technology allows for a more natural human experience. While others offer a “telephone conference with video” model, Kino is a video space where distance is perceived by manipulating the audio and video of participants that are in the background.

“We developed a focus feature in which the user gets to choose who they like to focus on. Others’ (unfocused participants) video gets smaller and to the side and at 5% audio level. The experience of having focused conversation with other users in the background gives a sense of an in-person gathering where people can roam around and talk to each other freely, just through video,” he says.

So rather than sending a text message to someone and waiting for a response, one can just hop into their colleague’s space and start a conversation with a full face-to-face experience.

“Remote work like we have today is very disengaging as the only face to face option because video conferencing services are glitchy and awkward. There’s no personal feel of talking to someone and really connecting. Chats and casual calls just don’t cut it. As an employer, I love being in touch with my team, seeing their faces and having those laughing moments at work where we just hang and chat. Well, we at Kinetx Co, do it remotely through our Kino platform where we can engage in one-on-one conversation but still have the ambience of an office. We work remote – but never alone.”

And that is the utopian picture that he paints of the techology’s potential to bring people together, rather than keeping them apart.

“Since the 1960’s we have had the trend of the Global Village, where all parts of the world got interconnected and, in a sense, unified. I think our economy and society is getting there,” he says referring the fact that his own team is dispersed all over the world but routinely shares the same virtual office space on Kino. “We should remember technology is an “add-on” to our lives but it should never replace the small joys in life like meeting one another in person,” he says, adding that we’ve never before been able to connect the way we are able to today.

There are some who yearn to go back to the office due to that lack of a human connection
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“As technology evolves, and we with it, new opportunities arise, and tools for real-time communication like Kino can push the global market to the next stage of international hiring and collaborating, thus distributing wealth and perhaps expediting human evolution to the next step. Working as one has always brought great achievements in the past. This is no different. We’re simply Better Together.”

Human interaction is organic and personal. Video communication should be too
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Alice Bonasio is a technology journalist, communications consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio and @techtrends_tech on Twitter.

The post Conversations vs Chaos: Creating Meaningful Virtual Connections appeared first on Tech Trends.

It’s rare to find an app where even the free version is also free of advertisement. So what’s the catch? Surely it profits from user data in some way, there’s no such thing as a free lunch in tech…

In a nutshell, Camo is an app that turns your smartphone into a webcam
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Yet according to Camo’s Founder Aidan Fitzpatrick, the app’s strict no-tracking policy is a point of principle, and there is, in fact, no need for such intrusion into user privacy. Enough of their users are happy to pay the very reasonable $4.99 a month for the “Pro version” to fund the free app as well.

In a nutshell, Camo is an app that turns your smartphone into a webcam. Like all great tech ideas, it’s a simple concept, well-executed.

Even cameras in older phones are much better than any webcam on the market, so by using that old phone sitting in your drawer doing nothing as a webcam, you can get next-level video quality.

A big part of the harm consumers face with advertising is their data, demographics, and tracking running across the web
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The app has been used by the likes of Seth Godin, Wall St Journal’s Joanna Stern plus employees from Harvard, Stanford and Oxford Universities, who praise it for its ability to create a professional-quality webcam experience from the user’s phone and browser.

“I’ve spent years building products to help people get better access to their own data,” says Fitzpatrick, who founded his company Reincubate in 2008 after building the world’s first tool for iOS data recovery, which enabled users to securely manage their data.

Camo’s Founder Aidan Fitzpatrick is a software engineer, angel investor, entrepreneur, and author who started his first company at 14

There's a huge amount of competition by unworthy publishers, trying to rank low-quality services or information
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Working in that space for so long gave him many opportunities to see the more distasteful ways to use data, and the wide range of bad actors out there looking to get access to it, he explains as he unpacks how important the issue is to him.

“The internet has played a big role in my life and my career, and it’s in almost everyone’s interests to push it along the responsible, sustainable path of public good rather than narrow, private interests.”

Fighting Fakery

Fitzpatrick talks about the idea that consumers on the web these days are surrounded by “fakery.”

Yet while some forms of fakery — fake news, fakery in public discourse, and the use of trolls to attack viewpoints on social media – have been widely discussed, there is a lot more to it than that, he explains.

“Fakery pays off for the unethical. Amazon and other platforms have received coverage for fake product reviews on their platforms. Instagram is busy with promoted products, many of which use fake reviews and undisclosed influencer endorsements. Sometimes even the products themselves are fake.”

Even cameras in older phones are much better than any webcam on the market
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“More broadly, consumers have experience with this fakery on Google. There are some Google searches that are just hard to do. Have you ever tried searching for a plumber or medical advice on Google?  There’s a huge amount of competition by unworthy publishers, trying to rank low-quality services or information.”

Even services like Grubhub and Postmates have been criticized for allegedly faking profiles for restaurants that they don’t partner with, in an attempt to capture and redirect their leads. “A big part of the harm consumers face with advertising is their data, demographics, and tracking running across the web,” says Fitzpatrick

Making it Pay

While Fitzpatrick believes that consumer privacy and choice have been jeopardized by large web corporations and social media giants, he recognizes that they must make money.

His argument, however, is that there is no need for such companies to be so data-hungry in capturing and monetizing information about their users. It is, in fact, still possible for them to build effective first-party advertising networks with a smaller set of data.

“Paid services along the lines that Apple focuses on, or which Google have explored with YouTube Music may prove increasingly worthwhile.”

And of course, his own product manages to make money without storing and tracking consumer data:

“Our model is very simple: we offer a free version of our products, and a paid version. We’ve no need to track data for trials, or to try and monetize with ads baked into our products, so we don’t.”

Algorithm Anarchy

He breaks down this disruptive rationale into three key areas that those designing tech products must think about to enable consumers to have more authentic experiences online:

1. Product: We don’t track user data in the products. We have no need to, and no interest in doing so. People’s data belongs to them. If the app fails, we do record information on what went wrong, but that’s clearly metadata, and about the functioning of the product in order that we can improve it, rather than anything about the customer. Where we record limited metadata on how the app is used, we only do for the purpose of better understanding and developing our own product — not for marketing — and we don’t share that information with any third parties.
2. Customer Records: If you buy something from a company, what data do they collect? We ask for the UK’s statutory minimum. We need their email and country of residence in order to send them the license and to apply the correct taxes. We use a third-party for card-processing, and don’t have any card details. In the UK we have to keep financial records for at least 6 years, but where users have lifetime licenses we need to keep that data for at least that time. Fortunately, it’s a very narrow set of data.
3. Marketing: This is hard because overreach in data capture feels like the norm. Most systems that permit advertising ask customers to embed tracking tools in their mobile or desktop apps or on their sites, and this is something we push back on. We don’t embed any advertising analytics tools in our products for this reason. Then there’s visitor tracking. We do use an analytics product to count the number of visitors to our site, and we’ve more work to do as the industry evolves to get ourselves happier with how these systems work. We’ve made good progress.

“The tech industry often assumes that using particular channels to market a product requires tracking. We reject that. Reincubate will continue to safeguard consumer privacy and choice with our commitment to respect privacy, refuse data monetization and intrusive tracking.”

Camo key features include:

• Film-quality video
• Easy customizing:  lighting, crop, zoom, focus, at your fingertips
• Plug and play
• Plays well with others:  use with Zoom, Meet, Teams, Skype, Slack, Google Chrome, Cisco Webex Meetings  +.
• Previews before going live
• The newly released 1.3 version offers even better functionality, including support for an additional 11 languages supported, power conservation, and screen aesthetic features.

Camo’s free edition is great for straightforward, high-quality calls, but lacks adjustments. It gives you resolutions up to and including 720p video, along with a choice of the device’s selfie lens, or it’s main back lens (the wide one). The free version of Camo also lets you access your device’s audio, and keep the screen of your device dimmed while using Camo. With free version, you can also connect multiple iOS devices and switch between them.

If you upgrade to Camo Pro, you get the following:

• Access to every lens on your phone (such as selfie, telephoto, ultra-wide & wide)
• “Portrait mode” on iPhone’s that support it, with bokeh effect and shallow depth-of-field
• Control of the device’s flash for use as a light ( turn it on and off, control the brightness)
• Access to any resolution the device provides (opening up 1080p and 1440 x 1080)
• Video mirroring
• Rotation of the feed in 90° increments (in case your phone is orientation locked)
• Zoom controls, with pan and tilt to keep you front and centre
• Focus adjustments (autofocus, focus on a particular area, manual focus control)
• Shutter speed and ISO adjustments
• Image adjustments including brightness, temperature, tint, hue, saturation, contrast, gamma, sharpness

Alice Bonasio is a technology journalist, communications consultant and Tech Trends’ Editor in Chief. Connect with her on LinkedIn and follow @alicebonasio and @techtrends_tech on Twitter.

The post How Algorithm Anarchy Can Set You Free appeared first on Tech Trends.