35 Burst results for "Brad Smith"
Kinda Funny Games Daily
"brad smith" Discussed on Kinda Funny Games Daily
"Deal that sees PlayStation owners get special treatment in regards to the popular shooter series. That deal ends in 2024, according to Microsoft president Brad Smith. Quick aside, you're probably all thinking, wait, former mizu quarterback Brad Smith is not a Microsoft president. No, I assure you this is a different Brad Smith. Speaking to CNBC via insider gaming, Smith said Microsoft is offering Sony a ten year quote legally binding agreement for the Call of Duty series. The terms of which are better. He believes than the arrangement Sony currently has an Activision Blizzard. Quote, so when we bring out a new version of Call of Duty on Xbox, it will be available on Sony PlayStation on the same day on the same terms with the same features. It really ensures parody. I think everybody who has looked at this would say it's a better deal for Sony than the one they have activation blizzard right now. I'm sorry, with Activision Blizzard that will expire next year, Smith said. If that is true, then 2020 fours Call of Duty game could be the last under the existing deal between PlayStation and Activision. 2020 threes Call of Duty game is reportedly codenamed Jupiter in 2024 is maybe code named cerberus. A PlayStation or something getting special treatment for Call of Duty series for the past few years. In the form of early access to multiplayer beta is exclusive in game content and more. The fee that PlayStation pays to activate for this and others is unknown. It's possible that Smith intentionally mentioned that PlayStation's Call of Duty deals ending in 2024 is part of a bargaining tactic of some kind. I mean, Microsoft's push to appease regulators and acquire Activision Blizzard. It's also possible that Smith is wrong or misinformed about the duration of PlayStations Call of Duty deal. GameSpot GameSpot has contacted PlayStation in an attempt to get more details. Game goes on. I don't know what it'll be, I don't know how it'll be, I think eventually PlayStation is gonna get what they want out of this deal. Not that they, you know, I don't think they're gonna be able to block the activation blizzard deal. I think eventually they'll realize that this is gone as far as they can take it and Microsoft will give them whatever agreement for Call of Duty and everything else. Yeah, I think to your point of this deal is very likely going to go through and it's just a matter of when the final stuff will be finalized and it will be official. It's already like, again, if you want to look at it from that phone PlayStation's perspective of not wanting to lose out on this because that's really what it's about. It's like, oh, it's for the sake of concern. Everything's about money. Every move is about money because it's a business. So it's like, hey, we're here looking out for the people, which happens. We will be looking at ourselves. Including the people that we sold, so it's just a matter of trying to, they're trying to lose less. I don't think they're going to win in this, but they're like, how do I lose less? How do I lose the least? Yes. I got two Amazon stories for you, Janet to close out your Wednesday.
The Small Business Radio Show
"brad smith" Discussed on The Small Business Radio Show
"Third total, since the beginning of Microsoft at the beginning of my career. And so what happened was, so I was there. And it was lonely there. And it was lonely because one, my colleagues didn't. Microsoft wasn't very diverse at that point. And Seattle wasn't very diverse. I would see if I was a lucky, maybe one African American a day. And my colleagues didn't really include me, right? On lunches or after work, events or weekend events. And like I said, this city of Seattle wasn't very diverse. So at some point, probably two years after being there and going through that, I actually told Microsoft, I'm ready to leave and my exact words. I'm not negotiating. I'm going back home. And if it wasn't for the intervention of Brad Smith, who's not our vice chair and president, said no, Bruce, we value you, and we got to try to get you back to New York. And what she did. And promised that he would make Microsoft a more diverse place, which he did. I would not have I would not be here today, to be quite honest with you. Two years after joining Microsoft, I was ready to leave in 23 years later. I'm still here. What do you think that what do you think Brad Smith saw? Why do you think he stepped up and thought that you staying and having a more diverse workplace was important? I think that Brad is extraordinary in that respect. I think that one, he just died the work that I was doing. So it was important for me to stay. Because I demonstrated my ability. But I think in terms of diversity and inclusion, I guess the early on, he realized the value. But I think he had exposure of being around people of color. And in the early stages of his life, and he realized the benefit and the value that diverse minds can bring to the table. And he's been a strong advocate of that within the industry, technology industry, and within the legal profession.
AP News Radio
Microsoft strikes 10-year deal with Nintendo on Call of Duty
"Microsoft says it has struck a deal to make the video game bestseller Call of Duty available on Nintendo. Don't let anyone tell you video games are just for kids. Activision Blizzard says their latest iteration of Call of Duty Modern Warfare two, which retails for about $70, has earned more than $1 billion in sales since it was launched in late October. Now Xbox maker Microsoft, which is working on acquiring Activision, has promised to make the hit series available for Nintendo and a ten year deal. The merger of Microsoft and Activision Blizzard is facing close scrutiny from the Federal Trade Commission and global regulators. The Nintendo offers an apparent attempt to fend off objections from Sony, which makes the competing PlayStation console Sony has raised concerns about losing access to what it describes as a must have game title. Microsoft president Brad Smith said the agreement would bring Call of Duty to more gamers and tweeted we'll be happy to hammer out a deal for PlayStation as well. I'm Jennifer King.
Bloomberg Radio New York
"brad smith" Discussed on Bloomberg Radio New York
"Microsoft president Brad Smith says the company may have to trim some more costs in the face of economic headwinds. But it's not exposed to advertising revenue as other tech giants are. Smith told us that adapting to climate change will require a global effort to efficiency efficiently use AI and data for predictable modeling. I think it's really important to think a little bit about the problem that we and others are trying to help solve. So much of the work that is needed, especially to adapt to climate change, really involves better use of AI, more data, better predictive modeling. You look at predicting wildfires, whether you're in the United States or India or in Africa. If you look at things like responding to floods, you need to be able to predict these things and then give people early warning systems. Yet if you look at Africa today for every 14 day scientists that there are in developed countries, there's only one in Africa. So we've opened up we're announcing today two new data labs, one in Egypt, one in Kenya, where partnering with planet, planet labs in San Francisco, which is doing I just think this extraordinary work with new satellites to bring satellite based imagery and data, including for Africa. You put our AI capabilities, our data scientists, planets, imagery together, now we can be a bit of an equalizer. We can help climate scientists on a continent like Africa
The Dinesh D'Souza Podcast
"brad smith" Discussed on The Dinesh D'Souza Podcast
"I'm delighted to welcome our guest today Brad Smith. Brad Smith is the development coordinator at right to life Michigan covering Detroit and southeast Michigan. Brad, thank you for joining us. Oh, thanks so much for having me. It's great to be here. Well, this is great. Well, I want to start on a positive note. We are so blessed that roe V wade has been overturned. It's a huge victory, something that pro lifers have been working for for decades. And now this issue has gone back to the states. So that's where the battle really is now. Before we dive into Michigan, I want to ask you a little bit on kind of what the left's goal is and all these states and what do we need to look out for is kind of their broad strategy. Well, and I think even the step back so people understand what the real battle is here, my wife and I have a little girl with trisomy 18 significant disability and one of the things that when we were pushed to have an abortion, they wanted us to kill her. And we thought when we said no and did that fight with them, that that was the end of our fight. And little did we realize it was actually the beginning of our battle. And I kind of feel somewhat the same way with this. I mean, we've been fighting for a long time against roe versus wade. But I almost feel like it started the real fight now. Because now that it's come back to states, it's every state is battling and that the battle has only grown much more intense. And much bigger things even on the line now as we go state by state and each state is fighting this battle. So it's going to be an interesting thing to watch as these states do it, but Michigan is a crucial one. So it's one that we are working hard to make sure we don't lose here.
The Dinesh D'Souza Podcast
Brad Smith of National Right to Life Michigan on the Left's Goals
"I'm delighted to welcome our guest today Brad Smith. Brad Smith is the development coordinator at right to life Michigan covering Detroit and southeast Michigan. Brad, thank you for joining us. Oh, thanks so much for having me. It's great to be here. Well, this is great. Well, I want to start on a positive note. We are so blessed that roe V wade has been overturned. It's a huge victory, something that pro lifers have been working for for decades. And now this issue has gone back to the states. So that's where the battle really is now. Before we dive into Michigan, I want to ask you a little bit on kind of what the left's goal is and all these states and what do we need to look out for is kind of their broad strategy. Well, and I think even the step back so people understand what the real battle is here, my wife and I have a little girl with trisomy 18 significant disability and one of the things that when we were pushed to have an abortion, they wanted us to kill her. And we thought when we said no and did that fight with them, that that was the end of our fight. And little did we realize it was actually the beginning of our battle. And I kind of feel somewhat the same way with this. I mean, we've been fighting for a long time against roe versus wade. But I almost feel like it started the real fight now. Because now that it's come back to states, it's every state is battling and that the battle has only grown much more intense. And much bigger things even on the line now as we go state by state and each state is fighting this battle. So it's going to be an interesting thing to watch as these states do it, but Michigan is a crucial one. So it's one that we are working hard to make sure we don't lose here.
Wisdom From The Top
"brad smith" Discussed on Wisdom From The Top
"Is 65%. So our team is innovated on business model ways to basically monetize customers over time. So what happened to that competitor? Is it still around? It is. It fell back to a distant third. It had climbed up from probably 13th to 14th in the market and they had moved up into second place and they were trying to threaten TurboTax, which was number one at the time, and they've now slipped back to a distant third. So really, you had to make that decision if you were going to stay relevant. We did. And we made the choice. We stayed relevant, and we were able to advance our market share as a result. So let's just talk about this in context because you start into it, I think, in 2003. And the CEO at the time was Steve Bennett. And he taps you to join the company and then run TurboTax, but the founder of the company, Scott cook. I mean, I assume he was still very much in the picture and involved in the company, right? Oh yes, yeah, Scott is still actively involved to this day. He comes into the office ever since he took his self out of the CEO role. He has worked with the existing CEO and the company and is also sat on the board and he ultimately plays the most humble role of all. He asks every CEO and everyone on one, how can I best help you in the company? And he will work with our product teams to help get new innovations out the door. So Scott cook was still there, Steve Bennett was a CEO. And I guess within like four or 5 years of joining into it, they ask you to become CEO, right? And this is right around the time of the global financial crisis. That's correct. Yes, I had joined into it in 2003. I had the chance to work in Texas and the accountant relations and third party developer network. I've been asked to go to San Diego and lead TurboTax and then I had subsequently moved up to Mountain View, California to lead the small business division in QuickBooks. And then in August 2007, we announced that my predecessor will be stepping down in January of 2008, and I will be stepping in at the CEO role. And that's what I did. And it was just before the Great Recession hit. All right, so 2008, you take over into it. It's the start of the financial crisis. Many, many companies in the Silicon Valley. And of course, all across the country start to deal with the looming and impending crisis, what was going on within it. I mean, were you guys facing headwinds as well or was your business kind of recession proof? When you looked back over the period of time that we have been in existence, our company was very resilient to downturns because our products are needed most when times were tough. But in 2008, it was the first time it was a consumer driven setback. So credit cards were maxed out, home loans were no longer affordable, home equity was no longer what it had been in terms of its value. And so it really hit every single sector of our customer base. And so the first thing we had to do is say, what do we do to navigate through this? And our decision was to be there for the customers. So we lowered our price. We extended our discounts, and we basically increased our levels of service. And we said, if we help customers through this period of time, then we think when they get through the other side, they'll remember us. And that was with the choices we made, and it paid off. Did you have to implement layoffs? We did. In fact, in August 2 1007, when I had been announced, I had the chance to go out and take a look at all the parts of the business that I hadn't had the chance to be in at the time. And we looked at where we felt like we were over resource and under resourced, and we felt we had gotten a little bit overweight in areas like our central SG and a. So our center functions, and we were underweight and our engineers. So we had begun doing reductions in force right when I started in January of 2008, we were moving people out of legal out of finance out of human resources and starting to hire more in engineering and product management. And so because as I had shared at the time, we repaired the roof on the sama shining by the time the recession hit, we were really in a pretty good place from an expense perspective and we were able to play offense. So let me ask you this question, Brad, as a not just as a CEO, but as a, you know, as a guy from Canova, right? Who had the experiences you had and had a family and all those things. I mean, of course, as a CEO, you have a responsibility to the board to shareholders, investors, and you have to think and manage strategically. But it doesn't mean that that is easy, especially when it comes to letting people off, right? Because you are essentially making decisions that could potentially have a catastrophic impact on people's livelihoods. How did you kind of process that mentally? It's the hardest thing I've ever done, and it has been hard every time I've ever been faced with that decision. In fact, when we made the decision, one of the things that we did was we wanted to treat everyone with compassion with dignity and once we were able to get stable footing again and the company was in a strong position, we would open the door. And I am proud to say that to this day the number one source of new employees are prior into an employees who come back home. And guy we refer to it as family. And I know there are many people out there that say, hey, you shouldn't talk about it being a family. It should be a high performing team and you replace the athlete if they're no longer able to do the job, but we feel like you can invest in people. You can give them a chance to learn and grow. And if they aren't performing, you treat them with compassion, you help them find another place, but they can still be family. And it was hard for me. I'll say that when I had to do a company-wide announcement. Her chief communications officer was sitting with me and I said, how do I deliver this message? Am I the optimistic? I can see the light in the end of the tunnel Brad around the remorseful. I'm really sorry I had to do this, Brad. And he looked at me and he said, I want you to imagine your two daughters standing just below that camera. And I want you to explain to them why dad had to do this. And that was the message I delivered. Let me ask you about company culture when you became the CEO. Was there a lot of work that you had to do was morale mixed, was it pretty seamless? Was the culture already strong and you kind of just had to, you know, to take control of the ship and keep moving it forward or was what was going on? Well, I had the benefit of following an amazing leader who followed amazing leaders before him and the company was in a very strong position. But we had to transform the company from a North American desktop software company which was the strong company that I inherited to a mobile driven cloud product and platform company that would do business around the globe. So we basically had to become a 36 year old startup and reinvent ourselves from scratch. And that was the task that I had before me. So what did you do? Well, the first thing we did is we realized that there were companies around us in the valley and elsewhere that had transformed themselves and we wanted to learn what was it that they had done to basically make that transition seamlessly. And once we studied them and we came back and we laid a gameplay out, we basically stepped back and the first thing we did is we communicated the employees. We've questioned everything and the good news is these are the things that will not change. These are the things you'll still recognize here tomorrow. And then once we confirmed what wouldn't change, then we outlined the things that would change and we explained why. Because we had learned this from this company or because we heard this from our customers or because we saw this in our technology, these are the things we're going to do differently. And we enlisted everyone in the company and that process and that helped us transition the company to the next chapter. So into it has, what, like 9000 employees, something like that? We do, yes. So when you have such a huge company, it's challenging to be disruptive, right? The disruptors are like a bunch of guys in a garage or women in a garage. You come up with an idea and then all of a sudden they take on a tide bleach or Clorox soap or whatever it is, you know, they come out with method. Or Airbnb, all of a sudden becomes the biggest hotel chain in the world. How are you able to make sure that you weren't going to be disrupted by a bunch of people in a garage? The first thing we did is we stepped back and realized that all 9000 of our employees needed to be owners operators and entrepreneurs. And so we retrained the entire company on our two innovation techniques, customer driven innovation, and designed for the lie. It's basically lean startup, agile thinking. And then we gave all of our employees 10% of their time as unstructured time. And we explained to them that you can run experiments on anything that you think will improve the customer's life, improve your productivity or your peers productivity or make the company stronger. And we stepped away from the PowerPoint to persuasion and the politics and we leaned in to prove an experiment as a way to help us innovate and grow and immediately from that 2008 to 2010 time frame, we had over 1800 experiments going on at any point in time in the company. And then the ones that rose to the top with evidence, we invested in those as the next chapter, and basically all 9000 employees helped us innovate and transform the company. And it's all based upon the old cliche that it's not the big that eat the small. It's the fast that eat the slow, and we wanted to be a fast moving 36 year old startup, and that's the company I'm proud to say we transformed into. Well, well, how do you, how do you do that with 9000 people? Explain how that works because there's still meetings and bureaucracy and different departments and internal competition. I mean, how do you make sure that people specifically, how did you create a structure where 9000 people could take part in this? Well, you still always struggle with those things. Are there too many meetings as bureaucracy? And I loved one of my peers once said, if you want to scale and have an impact on the world, you have to have process, but when process becomes slow and methodical, then it becomes bureaucracy. So you need process, you need to fight bureaucracy. So all 9000 employees had an opportunity to basically create the next chapter. And we give out innovation awards, the Scott cook innovation awards to those top winners who have had a fundamental impact on our customer and change the trajectory of the company, and when they win, their faces are put up in all of our offices around the globe, and they get 6 months off of their day job to work on anything inside the company that gives them passion. So it really inspired all 9000 employees to want to become innovators and entrepreneurs and that helped us transform the company. What is a product that came out of that that unstructured time? We had mobile payments come out of unstructured time. We had TurboTax on the mobile phone, come out of unstructured time, which is now a big way that most tax returns get done is by beginning on the mobile device, if not completing the return on the mobile device. We had Tom and attendance products. We've had lots of products come out of this. And what's amazing is it wasn't a lesson that we alone learned. We had spoken to people at Hewlett Packard, we had spoken to the team over at Google. And we had asked him, how did you come up with your winning companies and you're winning businesses and they said it's amazing at very seldom comes from the corner office as Peter drucker said, the bottleneck is almost always at the top of the bottle. Instead, what we did is we gave our teams the ability to innovate and then put their ideas up on a lab and then watch for customers to see which one of those customers downloaded what products and then we picked the winners from there. And so that really became the model that we adopted. I'm guy raz, and you're listening to wisdom from the top. We'll be right back. This message comes from NPR sponsor give directly. 26 million people are living as refugees, often in financial insecurity, but a new study shows that simply giving refugees money can help. Cash transfers sent by give directly enabled refugees to grow their income and assets while improving their mental health and more. To send money directly to refugees and others experiencing extreme poverty, visit give directly dot org slash wisdom and your donation will be matched up to $5000. This message comes from NPR sponsor base camp. The good news is that your business is growing, but so are the number of files, emails, chats, and meetings. It's becoming impossible to stay on top of it all. Your team needs help keeping up. No problem. Join the thousands of growing businesses that sign up for base camp each week. It's the all in one place solution for organizing and collaborating. Keep it together. Put it in base camp to learn more, visit base camp dot com slash NPR. This message comes from NPR sponsor key, a bank that keeps up with technology with every advancement in tech comes a new business opportunity. KeyBank uses dedicated teams of analysts to develop unique insights for businesses. Learn more at key dot com slash tech trends. This is wisdom from the top. I'm guy Roz. So here's what I'm interested in, Brad, which is human beings. We are motivated by incentive, right? Anybody taking econ one O one will learn that, that we humans are motivated by incentive. What kinds of incentives were you able to give those teams to go out and innovate? I mean, was it, hey, you get a piece of this? Hey, we'll give you money. We'll give you a bonus. Like, what how did you get people to become motivated to innovate within the company? Well, those were the questions we wanted to know as well, so we asked the 9000 employees what would matter most to them. And one of the things that surprised us was we thought it would have to be monetary and that was not the top thing that the employees wanted. They wanted to have an impact, they wanted to be recognized for that impact. And then they wanted time to work on something else. And so ultimately, the impact was clearly getting funded and having the ability to get their idea to market. The recognition was having their faces around all the campuses around the globe, and then the ability to take time off from their day job to work on the next thing. Now what we did do is we put a sweetener in there that we never announced. We had one individual that created a business that was so significant, it became hundreds of millions of dollars for the company, and so unannounced, we granted him the founders award, and it was a $1 million in stock. And his picture hangs in the campus around the globe as well. And now all the employees know that there is an opportunity that if they have an outsized impact on the business, they may also have a life-changing grants as well. Do you think though that there's an argument to be made that if big companies like Intuit or Cisco or whoever we're talking about want to make sure that they continue to be leaders and innovators that the model down the road should possibly change, you know, in other words, creating a model where those internal entrepreneurs get a real piece of what they're building. I do think the model has to remain evergreen. The real question is, what is it that motivates those innovators? And many times we began with the hypothesis and that when we speak with them, we find out that's not the thing that they're solving for. So as I've mentioned to you earlier, we truly thought that financial incentives would be the way to get participation in this program, but instead we step back and we learn from them that was about having an impact on the customer, having the ability to be recognized by their peers and have the ability to spend time on things that they wanted to do that made their heart beat fast. And we have had no problem with getting people running experiments and basically helping transform the company. So I do think those questions and the answers to those questions may change over time. So we should constantly be pulsing. And I think we should adapt and evolve as companies to make sure that we're doing the right things for these internal innovators. In 2015, you guys announced that you were selling quick in, which is a little bit like, I don't know, you know, McDonald's saying, we're selling the Big Mac. We're gonna, we're not gonna sell it anymore, another company is gonna own that product. Like, quicken was the heart and soul of into it. Why did you make that decision? Yeah, we're very proud of quick and it was a seed corn that gave birth to the mission that became a company called into it. And we're so proud to see them continuing to thrive in the market. But in 2015, we had taken a look at the next ten years. And we had realized that the next chapter would be a platform, not a set of products. And that platform would be based in the cloud. It would be using mobile devices, and it would be powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning. And as we began to look at our portfolio of assets, we had worked for years with the customers using quick and to try to move them to the cloud, and on mobile devices, and they did not want to make that move. They were happy with the product as is. So we faced a tough decision. We either kept the product inside the company for nostalgia reasons. But we didn't resource it because we knew we'd have to put our resources into the future. Or we found it a better home. And so I really wrestled with this and the management team and ultimately went to sky and I sat down with Scott and I said, Scott, this is the dilemma we face. And without batting an eye, Scott said quicken is our yesterday. We're here for tomorrow. And I support the decision wholeheartedly. But guy, that wasn't the only conversation that needed to happen. Scott once explained to me when I asked him, how does it feel to be a founder of a company where another CEO is running the company? Yeah. And he said Brad, it's not being a biological father. Who's watching a stepfather raise your child? And as long as you know that stepfather loves your child as much as you do, you're happy. And so I realized at that moment that Scott and his wife signe had both bright quick and to life. They had made the sacrifices together. They had helped bring this product to market. So after the conversation with Scott, I sat down and wrote a handwritten note to his wife's sign. And I wanted her to understand that this was not an easy decision. And that I wanted to explain why we had made the decision and I wanted to empathize and tell her I imagined it was emotional. And I sent her that note and a handwritten letter, and then I saw her a couple weeks later at a company function with tears in her eyes. She said that meant the world to me and I'm proud to tell you quick and is doing very well now. The company is doing great, but it was because Scott and Sydney saw the future. Brad S a leader, how important is it to you that you are liked by the people who work with you and around you? I think at the end of the day, as everyone says, it's most important to be respected. But I will tell you that growing up as I did, my mother and father used to tell me you attract more bees with honey than vinegar, and so I've always had a signature at the end of every email, which is work hard, be kind, take bride. And I've always encouraged our team to never mistake kindness for weakness. So I may not be someone that is liked universally, but I do hope I am someone that people would say was always kind. Why would you think that somebody wouldn't like you? I mean, of course you got to make tough decisions. You got to fire people, you got to shuffle the deck now and again. But would those be reasons why somebody wouldn't have liked you? I mean, no one is universally liked. It's almost impossible. Well, I think human nature is what it is. Sometimes decisions that people don't agree with make them personalize the person who made the decision is the reason why. And so that could be a reason why someone may not like me. It could be because at the end of the day, I chose to not take a stand on something that they were passionate about or I maybe had to shut down a product that they were working on. There's all kinds of reasons that I truly understand someone could get upset. I hope that doesn't lead them to personalize it and make them feel like they don't like me, but at the end of the day, if they do, I respect that, but my hope is that when they look back, they'll say, I always tried to make the decisions with clear principles. And always tried to treat everyone with dignity and with kindness. You used to release your performance reviews to into its employees. You would just share the unedited performance review. Now, on the one hand, that sounds pretty amazing, like, wow, you know, all the words are going to be out there. But I have to imagine those performance reviews were pretty good, otherwise you wouldn't just share them unedited. Well, every performance review has opportunities to work on. And I did share those unedited and by the way, what's amazing was once I published them for the first time, my employees laughed and said, we already knew that. And so we may think that we are able to only show our strengths and our opportunities to grow and develop or not obvious to others, but they are. But what I found is by making it transparent, I was able to ask people to help me. To help me course correct when I was going down the wrong path to reinforce the behavior when I did it right, but it also set the tone for others that were all a work in process and let's be willing to give each other feedback as a gift and let's all grow and develop together. And so that's really been the biggest upside from this whole process. If you were writing your performance review and you were trying to give yourself critical feedback about something you really needed to improve on, what would you say? I have three clear areas that I know I have to continue to work on. The first is I like structure and harmony. And sometimes the best creativity and the best decisions come from debate and disagreement. And so I've had to learn to allow that debate to unfold and for me to sit back and speak last so that everyone can get their points of view on the table. So that's the first area that I have to work on. The second area that I have to work on is I recognize that my past performance was I would praise in public and coach in private. But I realized after getting feedback that I was robbing people of where my bar was where my standard for quality was. So now I coach business performance in public and I coach personal performance in private. And that was the second, and then the third area is I have a tendency to say yes to too many things. So I needed to step back and be really clear about where I'm going to spend my time and what I'm going to say no to and those are the three things that are posted on my offer store those are the three things any employee in the company could tell you, Brad has to continue to get better at. All right, you have, you decided to step down as CEO, you are no longer CEO of into it. We should say. You're a young guy. You're in your mid 50s. This is like a moment when people become CEOs. Why? Why just step down? Well, as I said to the team guy, the end date is inevitable. The goal is to make sure you're a part of the decision. And so when I set out, I had three objectives that I knew I wanted to have in the back of my mind that would help me know when it would be the right time. The first is when the company was ready, when we had transformed from that North American desktop software company to that global cloud driven product and platform company that I mentioned earlier. The second was when the board had several really good options as successor candidates. And our next leader had clearly emerged from that process. And then the third one is when I was ready and I never wanted to be that athlete that was a half a step slower and wasn't able to complete the pass. And some may argue that I had gotten to that point, but I really wanted to make sure that I was able to step out when we were still moving up into the right. So that's why informed my decision and I wasn't worried about how old I was. I was worried about whether the company was ready, the next leader was ready and I felt I was ready. When you look back on your career into it, what is there anything that you maybe regret or that you look back on, you think, I would have done that differently now? Yes, I saw early on in 2012 with the benefit of the leaders working with me and the learning that we had gotten from the best will makers that we studied, that the next chapter was a platform that unleashed magic for every individual who participated. To do that, you have to begin to become much more operational in terms of the services that you provide. The identity that you have customers log in using a single identity and you have to get on this data algorithm a lot faster. And I felt like we were too slow to make that transition. And if I had the chance I would go back and I would have declared we were a platform company in 2012. And I would have put the organizational resources into making sure that our data and our algorithms were ready to capitalize on that next chapter. Brett, how much do you attribute your leadership to a natural instinct? Something you were born with and how much of your leadership do you think is a product of learned behavior, experiences? I believe leadership has learned behavior and experiences. Unequivocally, I wasn't born with any special gifts. I was surrounded by an environment and nurturing parents. I was surrounded by people who inspired me and I was able to learn from their best practices. And I was surrounded by people who were always willing to grade me on a curve and basically give me feedback and help me improve. I think at the end of the day, for me, leadership is not the desire to put greatness in other people, but to recognize greatness exists in everyone and your job is to create the environment for that greatness to emerge. And that's what the world's done for me. They put me in a situation where I was able to play to some strengths that I had and to learn from others and ultimately I've had a pretty good run and I've been very
Wisdom From The Top
"brad smith" Discussed on Wisdom From The Top
"Of $1800, and when you do the math that is much less than 40 million, and I had to go present to the board and basically say to the board, look, we made a mistake and I was wrong. And so I called, on the way to that board presentation and asked my dad, what do I do? I'm pretty sure I'm going to be fired. And my dad said, well, I want you to stand up in front of that room, and I want you to basically say three things. Here's what I thought. Here's where I was wrong. And this is what I learned and I would do differently if I had the chance to do it again. And I made that presentation at the board meeting, and then I heard one single director, clap his hand. And I looked up and thought this is for sure my career ending as I stand here. And he looked me in the eye and he said, congratulations. You have now disproven the hypothesis that all these investors are saying that we'll be disrupted by the Internet. You've proven we will not. The second your team built a world class Internet payroll product, and even though we can't sell it through the Internet, we can sell it through our 2000 salespeople. So we're now first to market. And the third is you are now more valuable to us. You made a $40 million mistake. And I know you won't make that mistake again, but I want you to leave here and make a bunch of new mistakes because that is how we learn. And they promoted me. So you make this mistake. ADP sends you to go build this product, you spend $40 million, you lose it, I mean, this is a total disaster. Yes. And you go to the board and you tell them, I've just lost 40 million of your dollars and you're thinking like you're done, you're going to be fired. Yes, and instead what they say is you've your teams built an Internet payroll product that we can sell through our Salesforce and be first to market. You've disproven the pundits who say that we will be disrupted with these Internet mediums as opposed to having a direct Salesforce. And last but not least, you've learned an important lesson, but we love the fact that you've leaned into something that we didn't know and you taught us along the way. So they promoted me and I became the senior vice president of marketing and business development for the payroll division. So at what point did you start working for into it? So I went back to headquarters and I was at headquarters. We were doing roll up of the payroll industry. We were buying small, payroll providers. And we started to run into a company from the Silicon Valley who was bidding more than we were on every one of these target companies. And eventually I got a phone call that said, would you like to come out and meet with the team for men to it? And I thought, well hey, this is professional courtesy. I'll drive out there or fly out there and speak with them and see what I can learn. But when I got out there, I had a meeting with the CEO and the founder. I fell in love with the culture, and at the end of the day I went back and resigned from ADP. Wow. They offered a new job. They said, we want you to work for us. They did. Yes, they asked me to join the company to help build their accountant relations business, which were the accountant referrals that helped get small businesses into the accounting products and the payroll products into it built. And this was around 2003. It was 2003. They asked me to move to Plano, Texas, just north of Dallas, and I started there leading the accountant relations and our third party software development network, so building our ecosystem of third party developers and influencers. And after 14 months in that job, I got a phone call from the CEO who asked me if I would move to San Diego and lead the TurboTax business as a senior vice president for TurboTax. And so I moved my family from Plano, Texas to San Diego to lead TurboTax, and that was when we faced our first real disruptor in the tax business. It was a competitor who decided to give the tax software away for free and look for other ways to monetize. The industry was sure that that would be the end of TurboTax, but we made a decision to go free as well. And everyone thought that would chase the industry to the bottom, but ultimately at the end of the day, we not only advanced our market share, but our average revenue per return and our profit margins went up because our team had a lot more opportunities to monetize beyond that small startup. And it was one of the biggest opportunities to advance our business. All right, so you've got a competitor that's introducing tax software that's free and into it decides to make its software free as well.
Wisdom From The Top
"brad smith" Discussed on Wisdom From The Top
"Of a truck with them. And you'll never get to know the city better until you go down the alleys and you see actually what the city is made of. And so when I got to Pepsi, the first thing I did is I decided I was going to ride the routes with my 6 drivers. And if it was snowing and they needed help unloading cases in the snow, I would do that. And two things happened. I got to know my team better than most. And the second is they never forgot that I was there to help them and so in every contest they rose to the occasion and they helped me win and that helped my career go forward. So yes, they were bigger than me, tougher than me, older than me. Certainly more experience than me, but they adopted me because I was willing to humble myself and to work with them and try to help them do their job. All right, so you're at Pepsi and did you did you sort of see Pepsi as kind of the place where your dad was a Nestlé for, I guess, his whole career, did you see Pepsi as your home? Did you think all right, this is where I'm going to be. I did. I love Pepsi. It was an incredible company. Very, very proud of the products, very proud of the culture, and they invested in their people. And they paid for my master's degree at night at Aquinas college and I thought I would be there the rest of my career. So what happened? I was recruited by a competitor who offered me an opportunity to be the general manager of the 7 up company of Akron at the age of 27, and that was something that would not have happened until my mid 30s at best at Pepsi. And they were offering me much higher pay and so despite what my father had told me about never take a job for the title or the money. I decided to say goodbye to Pepsi and to join that next opportunity. And what was that opportunity? It was to be the journal manager of the 7up company of Akron, Ohio, and represent those soft drinks that were not bottled by Pepsi or Coke. Wow. So were they like when you left Pepsi to go to 7up or they like, you've betrayed us? What are you doing? They did. They had invested a lot in me and, you know, obviously they were disappointed in my decision. They tried to encourage me to think more strategically about my career, but at that moment, I saw an opportunity to take on a broader responsibility and quite frankly it was one of the worst career decisions I've made. Wow, why? Because I've violated the principal, my father said, don't take a job for the money or for the title and at the end of the day, I stayed in the company just about two years. And what I recognized was most of what I was asked to do was to implement the things that Pepsi had implemented three years earlier, and we were always in catch up mode. And when I looked around, there were really good hardworking people, but they weren't on the leading edge of the next chapter. They were constantly trying to play catch up. And so I felt like that I was not in a place where I was learning and growing, and I certainly wasn't in a place where I was helping advance their company. And so I needed to step away. So you spent two years at 7 up kind of regretting the decision to go there. Well, I spent two years 7 up trying my best to figure out how to catch us up so that we could play offense and not defense. And then at the end of those two years, I realized that I wouldn't be the right person for that company and I think they probably would look at me and say, hey, we're probably going to need to get somebody else in here as well. So what did you do? So a Pepsi mentor had left the soft drink industry and had gone into the direct mail marketing business and this was before the Internet when you use big data to basically target messages through solo mail through the U.S. mount. Sure. And so I followed my mentor and went to a company called advo and first started out as the regional sales manager in the Midwest and Cleveland and then from there I was asked to come to Connecticut and be the director of marketing for the flagship product and then ultimately ended up as their senior vice president of field marketing. Wow. So you are a young man, you're like writing like this pretty impressive corporate track, you're at this direct marketing company. And what was the next step for you? The next step for me was this was in the dotcom era. I was excited by big data and using it to target through solo mail. But I got a phone call from a recruiter asking me if I wanted to speak to ADP, the payroll processing company. That used technology and used data to basically help people be more effective in their day to today jobs. So I was recruited by ADP and I joined them to become the head of marketing of their small business division. And where was that? That was in New Jersey, basking ridge, New Jersey. So you moved to New Jersey at this point where you were you married? Did you have a family? Yes, I had gotten married when I was in Cleveland, Ohio. I had a blind date, and the general counselor of the 7 up company of Akron had gone to law school with who is now my wife. I met her on a blind date. I was blown away, fell in love with her at the very first time I saw her. And we ended up getting married and she went with me to Connecticut. And when we were in Connecticut for the direct mail marketing business, we had our first daughter, Peyton, and then when we moved to ADP in New Jersey, we had our second daughter, Devin. See, this is an interesting to me. I'm really interested in this idea of luck and chance. And you had mentioned that going to 7 up was a mistake. But had you not done that, you would never have met your wife. That's correct. You know, and when you look at it with a rearview mirror, you realize that your life is only where you are today because of the choices you made then. But when I step back and I try to teach the lessons I've learned in terms of decisions I've made, I try to go back to the principles that I use, and when I see a decision that didn't play out the way I thought it would, I try to see whether or not I adhere to this principles in that particular case, the mistake I made was I chose a job based upon the title and the money, not based upon whether it made my heart beat fast or I was surrounded in a franchise with people that were much more further along the path than me. But to your point, if I hadn't made that choice, I wouldn't be where I am. Right. I mean, you could make the argument that you had to make that mistake. Like you couldn't learn that lesson without having made that mistake. So true. And I've made so many more sense and thank goodness that you learn from your scar tissues and you can get up and dust yourself off because that really does make you who you are. I'm just curious, do you believe in this idea that things happen for a reason that they're meant to happen? You know, I'm a little like Forrest Gump. I think some things are meant to happen. And I think in other situations, we're kind of blowing along like that feather. And life kind of takes us where we're going to go and at the end of the day, we learn from those experiences. So I think it's a mix of both. Stay with us. We're going to take a quick break. I'm guy Roz and you're listening to wisdom from the top. This message comes from NPR sponsor base camp. The good news is that your business is growing, but so are the number of files, emails, chats, and meetings. It's becoming impossible to stay on top of it all. Your team needs help keeping up. No problem. Join the thousands of growing businesses that sign up for base camp each week. It's the all in one place solution for organizing and collaborating. Keep it together. Put it in base camp to learn more, visit base camp dot com slash NPR. This message comes from NPR sponsor carvana in the business of driving you happy. When you're shopping for a car, there's nothing sweeter than staying within your budget sweet spot. That's why carvana has no bogus fees. So visit carvana dot com or download the app to shop for a vehicle. This message comes from NPR sponsor Hulu ad manager. Want to advertise next to some of the best shows on TV. Hulu ad manager lets you do that, starting at $500 per campaign. Learn more at Hulu ad manager dot com slash stream. Welcome back to wisdom from the top. I'm guy Roz. All right, so you're at ADP in New Jersey. You're married. You have a second kid. It sounds like a great gig. And then I guess you run into some hurdles, what happens? Well, so my wife and my two daughters and I did enjoy a wonderful time in New Jersey, and then the company decided to launch the first Internet payroll product. And they tapped me to go down to Atlanta, Georgia to help start this team. They asked me to get away from the mothership and basically adopt all the Silicon Valley techniques, so we hung a pirate flag. I'd read Steve Jobs book. It was better to be a pirate than to serve in the navy. And our team worked really hard, and we created this Internet payroll product. The first of its kind. And then I also went up and convinced the board to give us two $20 million investments, 40 million in total. To allow us to basically cut exclusive deals with the two leading Internet portals at the time, and my hypothesis was we could sell more Internet payroll through the Internet than through a direct Salesforce. One year later, we had sold 15 units at an average selling price
This Week in Tech
"brad smith" Discussed on This Week in Tech
"The thesis of this think piece is that the information revolution will cause shifts, both in how societies may come into conflict and how their armed forces may wage war, and they talk about cyber war, which is the kind of warfare we're talking about bringing down a power grid or bringing down the water system. Both of which, by the way, Russia has already done to Ukraine and what looks like a kind of a test of their capabilities. But they also talk about net war. We don't use that term nowadays. Call it disinformation. Societal level, ideational conflicts waged in part through Internet nodes of communication. This was written in 93 before there was a Facebook for there was a Twitter before there were these mass disinformation campaigns, but these guys really kind of understood how this could be used against a population. They say that one of the reasons the Nazis had such success is because Joseph Goebbels, the minister of propaganda, understood and used radio, the new technology of radio so effectively. It could very well be that a country that doesn't, it's got the economy the size of Texas. It's not it does have nukes, but it also you don't have to be this great economic power to have a very powerful cyber army in effect. Georgia, tell us something to reassure us. Please. Well, my thought is really, you have to do something. You can't allow countries to just invade. I agree. And expect it to be okay. And if you don't want to get your people directly involved in a war, then you have to find other ways that are going to be able to stop this as quickly as possible with the least amount of people lives lost. So I think that attacking their infrastructure through the Internet is probably a safer bet than bringing people in. And the fact that anyone uses the fact that they have nukes as a shield that is horrific. Horrific. Of course, they're going to do that. They're going to do that for anything. They want to make this as fast as an effective as possible to be able to take over as much land as they can. So I think that they should put every single card that they have, that would be the safest and that would just be able to shut it down as quickly as possible. So I think that if they can do that through just shutting down the Internet on that will be a better option than having to send in troops and it might be more effective. I just worry that whatever we do can be responded to and that they already doing that. I guess. Let's just say it. Russia's already threatened nukes. So it's not like they wouldn't choose to do this anyways. And we'll shut down your Internet and then everyone's like, oh, okay, now we'll stop. You know, I mean, their economy is going to collapse tomorrow. They're turning off swift, so and they just, and there was just something that came out that said, Russia has just made it so that if you are a foreign investor in Russian markets, you can't exactly pull your money out of the Russian market right now. Yeah. So that's the action of a government that knows there's a huge run on banks today. There's going to be no more money to Monday is going to be crazy. Well, money will be Monday soon in Russia, actually. And they've got no airspace. They're effectively being fenced in so they're going to be cut off from the Internet. They're going to be cut off financially. And since Putin's power rested primarily in flexing some financial muscle, all he has left to negotiate with are nukes, but and again, not diminishing the terror. And I just worry not to mention it, but I think you can't sounds awful. The U.S. has professionals back in the State Department. And they've always had a deep bank of professionals and talent in The Pentagon. And I would not be surprised if they haven't gamed out all of the scenarios that are likely to happen and have figured out a way to let Putin save rattle about the nukes and say, fine, this is what he's going to negotiate with. He has nothing else to negotiate with after that. Or to threaten with and the U.S. has plenty. And we're not even officially involved yet. So the banks opened in Moscow in about 5 hours. It will be very interesting. We shall see. My fear is we have the thing that kept us from blowing each other up in the 60s. Was something called mutual assured destruction, mad. Which was the threat that if you did it, they would do it back, and the whole world would blow up. There is some deterrent that if we are too aggressive pushing a cyber war against Moscow, that they will do it back to us. I'm hoping I wonder if there should be a Geneva convention. There should be Geneva accords for funny. Because Brad Smith, again, to get back to the reading recommendations I came in. Microsoft's Brad Smith has been traveling the world giving his speech for the last 6 or 7 years, arguing that what we need is a new digital Geneva convention. I think so. Which lays out the rights of every person in the world to be able to connect online with other people to transact business online with other people. And most importantly, takes the responsibility for their own safety off of the shoulders of the individual and forces it onto the shoulders of government and..
Voices of Search by Searchmetrics
"brad smith" Discussed on Voices of Search by Searchmetrics
"Funnel you could probably outsource that content because it's not specifically talking about your products or services that can be something. That's you know research but done by a third party now. Exactly i'm gonna throw in the the covert bomb in here. Which is the world was reshuffled. It's distributed world. We're all working from home. There is no such thing as an office anymore. At least for now. So do i actually need to have in house. Employees be local to my office. Can you basically start taking people that would have been freelancers because of their geography and start bringing them onto your team and having them house now that we all have the infrastructure to work remotely. How much did that reshuffle. The deck in terms of the cost of labor and where you can source for writers totally. Yeah there's so many ways to think about it but the short answer to your question is yes. You can absolutely have an house people not in your local area or your local time zone for instance. I'm in hawaii. i'm elliot one here on our team. We have people based in all across the us and europe on most time zones because we have find some time zones. There's a couple of ways to think about it in that you can on the one hand you can often source some roles other places and save a lot of money but the other flipside of that is you can also pay people at other countries higher salaries and get a lot more value from it too so it kind of depends on how you look at it or how you want to set it up. I think the key to understand. Is that remote. Work is fundamentally different. Because it forces people to work a synchronous lead so you if i have a writer and editor who need to collaborate on something. But they're on completely different time zones. How do we get them to work together. And how do we get the hand off from one for the other two look as smoothly as possible and to work as smoothly as possible without having those people actually talk directly in real time. That's always a big challenge in one of the reasons why most enterprises wanted an in-office culture. Not only does it help build the culture it's great for retention but you can pass learnings on and have informal chats that. Are you know not something that has conducted by slack. You don't have to have everything be meeting. You could poke your head over the cubicle wall and ask a quick question. So is there a lot of loss in terms of the quality of content or the speed at which contents being produced now that we're primarily virtual..
Voices of Search by Searchmetrics
"brad smith" Discussed on Voices of Search by Searchmetrics
"Live in a more distributed world because everybody was forced into their house. It's a more digital age to talk to me about how that is impact. The creation of content and how people are staffing out their content production teams definitely so personally for autho didn't affect us a whole lot and that's because one of the drums banging for a while that i think like the rest of the world has kind of had to light. Come up wake up to a hard way is that i think more marketers sent a focus on like creativity and ingenuity and those things are good because it comes more natural to those types of people. But i think that they need to be more process oriented. And i think about operations kinda hat or the operations might set something that's often lacking and so what i mean by. That is the way we think of content seo and all. This stop is a huge factory. Right where you have. It's like a manufacturing process where you have specialized roles and you have an seo person or a strategy person working with a writer who's also working with an editor who's also working with an account manager designer. And he's i since collaborating a synchronous -ly across time zones and everything else and until you have that infrastructure built outs you're gonna struggle hitting both quality and scale meeting. Most people like for example companies can find one good writer but they can't find like hundred writers or they can't they do ten articles. A month of began do one hundred articles a month and so usually one of those things breakdown when you try to hit longer. Bigger scale usually quality starts to drop. And that's usually an indication of you don't have the processes and figured out you have the team and infrastructure figured out
Voices of Search by Searchmetrics
How To Create Your Own ROI-Driven B2B Content Strategy
"Live in a more distributed world because everybody was forced into their house. It's a more digital age to talk to me about how that is impact. The creation of content and how people are staffing out their content production teams definitely so personally for autho didn't affect us a whole lot and that's because one of the drums banging for a while that i think like the rest of the world has kind of had to light. Come up wake up to a hard way is that i think more marketers sent a focus on like creativity and ingenuity and those things are good because it comes more natural to those types of people. But i think that they need to be more process oriented. And i think about operations kinda hat or the operations might set something that's often lacking and so what i mean by. That is the way we think of content seo and all. This stop is a huge factory. Right where you have. It's like a manufacturing process where you have specialized roles and you have an seo person or a strategy person working with a writer who's also working with an editor who's also working with an account manager designer. And he's i since collaborating a synchronous -ly across time zones and everything else and until you have that infrastructure built outs you're gonna struggle hitting both quality and scale meeting. Most people like for example companies can find one good writer but they can't find like hundred writers or they can't they do ten articles. A month of began do one hundred articles a month and so usually one of those things breakdown when you try to hit longer. Bigger scale usually quality starts to drop. And that's usually an indication of you don't have the processes and figured out you have the team and infrastructure figured out
podnews
Brad Smith Promoted at SiriusXM
"Simple costs founder and ceo brand smith has been promoted is now head of podcast products for sirius. Xm simple cost was acquired by sirius. Xm last year they also own pandora stitcher and adds ways smith will be responsible for podcast strategy across platforms for creators and listeners. His boss sirius. Xm's ceo jennifer wits. Said on monday that the company plans a broader set of podcasts available for pandora listeners and will continue to publish across multiple platforms though also suggested some opportunities for exclusivity
Voices of Search by Searchmetrics
"brad smith" Discussed on Voices of Search by Searchmetrics
"The other thing you could also do if not a subject matter expert internally. Your in house is also customers too. So let's take an example of like a website and like redesigned website. Or how do we migrate. A website at not lose our seo rankings. Because we want to make sure things like erl's aren't changing and all that all that kind of stuff comes up perfect example a beach to just interview customers to so have writers do customers and what you're trying to do is pair like the seo data that you've research the stuff that's showing up at surplus that you should be writing about. So semantic key words common questions people also ask question and all that kind of stuff with actual customer insights or house insights to create more like a well rounded piece of content that brings in that nuance and subtlety. So the takeaway here is that you might find a great writer. Somebody that's good at putting the right words on the page. But they don't necessarily understand the topic and if that's the case it doesn't mean that they can't write about it. What you wanna do is connect them with some sort of an expert source so they can basically repurpose the information that the expert knows as opposed to just taking what's already been written which is what they're competing against. Now the question. I have for you here. This is something that we're struggling with. You mentioned migrating a website we just migrated the podcast. My other podcast from squarespace to wordpress were expanding the site. We moved from one page per interviewed one page per episodes. We got a lot more content. But we're thinking about creating more blog. Content more written format as opposed to repurposing are podcasts. The notion of virology just creating the content and hoping that it ranks is one marketing strategy but content is more than just. Seo right it can be an organic growth channel. It also could be something that you paid us. Indicate how do you make your b- to be content go viral totally so in the first episode. We talked about. You should only compete for key words that you can win and one of the points that's relevant here is that if i'm doing research for something i already should know how i'm gonna promote. Its before i start writing us. So for instance. If i need to rank a piece of content that needs ten referring domains i need to have a pretty good idea of. I'm gonna get those ten referring domains before i create the pizza content and what the helps me do is it helps me bring in things to the content that i know we're going to be successful. For instance can i bring an proprietary data. Can we run a custom survey. Can we interview someone. That i know who was then gonna help promote it for me. Can we create custom illustrations or video or other assets that are going to be make it much easier to promote after the back and so i think that's the key is to understand content isn't just a two thousand article content is like this multifaceted thing where there's there's quotes. There's images design. There's video the video might be examples. The video might go into more detail on a subject. Like what are all the things that i can bring together and this one piece of content. That are going to help me. Ben turnaround and pitch a to journalists. Ask another company to share. Its lead into a webinar that we're running on the same topic. Run ads to this if add. What kind of ads are they gonna be carousel style. Facebook is going to be video snippets on facebook..
Voices of Search by Searchmetrics
"brad smith" Discussed on Voices of Search by Searchmetrics
"When you're thinking about doing something like a migration when you're building a new website when you're just looking at your beginning of the year plan how do you think about be to be content strategy something we're thinking about a lot for the mar tech podcast but making sure that you're being roi driven. What's your advice orcher. Yeah it's really challenging and it's also a good segue actually because monday dot coms one of our clients enter code list so we've done a lot of content for them. It's really hard for me to be because you can't just it's a longer sale cycle number one number two. There's there's less of a direct conversion event so for example or like a software company you could write about topic xyz and someone's gonna read that and then someone's going to opt in or do a trial or something else right after that. Because it's a very narrow like very low hurdle or lombardo jump over for bbc. It's usually tupper because there's more people involved in sale usually more complex sale and so we do really think of it as a couple of things classic marketing funnel so top middle bottom where we doing content of why for example stuff like case study content stuff like customer interviews while that stuff's going to be really good for like middle ish of the funnel bottom of the funnel could also include like comparison. So we might do monday. Dot com versus asana or monday dot com versus click. Up would be another example of that to be able to show not just from trite example of like. Oh well this tools better because because we say it is but really talking to educate consumers who are going to do that research and do wanna see more like a side by side comparison and understand. Who's better in. Why for their circumstance. So i think it's it's a little more challenging for me to be because again. There's it's usually like a layered multi step approach. I think that you know when. I put my digital marketing hat on not just my seo content marketing hat on a couple of things that you said stick out which is long sales cycle. And you never really know where someone is in that sale cycle whether you're building awareness whether they're inconsideration but what really matters when they get to the bottom of your funnel when they are actually in market. Do they have awareness. Would they consider your product
Voices of Search by Searchmetrics
Building Your B2B Content Team in 2021 With Wordable CEO Brad Smith
"When you're thinking about doing something like a migration when you're building a new website when you're just looking at your beginning of the year plan how do you think about be to be content strategy something we're thinking about a lot for the mar tech podcast but making sure that you're being roi driven. What's your advice orcher. Yeah it's really challenging and it's also a good segue actually because monday dot coms one of our clients enter code list so we've done a lot of content for them. It's really hard for me to be because you can't just it's a longer sale cycle number one number two. There's there's less of a direct conversion event so for example or like a software company you could write about topic xyz and someone's gonna read that and then someone's going to opt in or do a trial or something else right after that. Because it's a very narrow like very low hurdle or lombardo jump over for bbc. It's usually tupper because there's more people involved in sale usually more complex sale and so we do really think of it as a couple of things classic marketing funnel so top middle bottom where we doing content of why for example stuff like case study content stuff like customer interviews while that stuff's going to be really good for like middle ish of the funnel bottom of the funnel could also include like comparison. So we might do monday. Dot com versus asana or monday dot com versus click. Up would be another example of that to be able to show not just from trite example of like. Oh well this tools better because because we say it is but really talking to educate consumers who are going to do that research and do wanna see more like a side by side comparison and understand. Who's better in. Why for their circumstance. So i think it's it's a little more challenging for me to be because again. There's it's usually like a layered multi step approach. I think that you know when. I put my digital marketing hat on not just my seo content marketing hat on a couple of things that you said stick out which is long sales cycle. And you never really know where someone is in that sale cycle whether you're building awareness whether they're inconsideration but what really matters when they get to the bottom of your funnel when they are actually in market. Do they have awareness. Would they consider your product
Voices of Search by Searchmetrics
"brad smith" Discussed on Voices of Search by Searchmetrics
"Which is our production management service or whatever we end up in putting monday automatically gets fed into a wordpress page. But we have to upload a bunch of different docs. I wish i had known about workable in advance. Which brings me into the topic for today. Which is content strategy when you're thinking about doing something like a migration when you're building a new website when you're just looking at your beginning of the year plan how do you think about be to be content strategy something we're thinking about a lot for the mar tech podcast but making sure that you're being roi driven. What's your advice orcher. Yeah it's really challenging and it's also a good segue actually because monday dot coms one of our clients enter code list so we've done a lot of content for them. It's really hard for me to be because you can't just it's a longer sale cycle number one number two. There's there's less of a direct conversion event so for example or like a software company you could write about topic xyz and someone's gonna read that and then someone's going to opt in or do a trial or something else right after that. Because it's a very narrow like very low hurdle or lombardo jump over for bbc. It's usually tupper because there's more people involved in sale usually more complex sale and so we do really think of it as a couple of things classic marketing funnel so top middle bottom where we doing content of why for example stuff like case study content stuff like customer interviews while that stuff's going to be really good for like middle ish of the funnel bottom of the funnel could also include like comparison. So we might do monday. Dot com versus asana or monday dot com versus click. Up would be another example of that to be able to show not just from trite example of like. Oh well this tools better because because we say it is but really talking to educate consumers who are going to do that research and do wanna see more like a side by side comparison and understand..
Marketing Spark
"brad smith" Discussed on Marketing Spark
"They're more reliant on Like the machine and building out the machine in the factory and the assembly line of yes. Yellow person works for the strategy person who hands it off to the writer who hands off the editor transit off to optimize organs of the producer. There's like this. This is very detailed assembly. Line very kind of old school manufacturing mentality of Operation that i think is really important in today's environment and not enough marketers and marketing teams are strong in that area. That makes sense so if you look at what money dot com is doing is either ads all the time. So it's hard to escape them. Are there two or three things that they've embrace that has helped their content marketing thrive. Yeah definitely i think again. It goes back to from the very beginning to a very strong focus on conclude their customer. And why so like who. What segments convert the best Who has the highest lifetime value as a segment and figuring and then backing that into What likes key categories for example. Should we even be publishing in the very beginning because they could be publishing on everything and anything like how do we actually focus a narrow down from there then figuring out okay well how do we actually target keywords in spaces that we can win and this is something i like to like arbonne but again it's kind of an old cliche but like measure twice cut once in today's like competitive surp- environment The outside results. Let's say if you look at click through rates on a search result page. Let's say sixty seventy eighty percent go to like the top three or four results. It's not good enough to like the top position. Eight on a certain you might as well like not even It sounds good. Because you're on the first page but you're probably getting like a sliver of any traffic whereas if you can get up until like the top five top four top three. It becomes heavily. Skewed where you're getting all of a sudden fifty sixty seventy percent of the action so if if you're applying not to like a much broader Content strategy where you are publishing in a high quantity. It's super super important that you're making sure that you're publishing Not just like on the biggest keywords in your space or the ones with the most commercial intent yes those things are important but they might take year sexually a to rank for so so what. What are we targeting. Why meeting like let's actually create content that we know we can win and a renault get rank for within the next six months. Because that's going to give us the biggest boost to then kind of stair step are way up up to that other competitive stuff you. I love that piece of advice. Because i've been working with a lot of bb sas clients looking at how to leverage content marketing in. And you're right. I mean you you wanna win in particular keywords or phrases because there's so much competition out there that it's gonna take you forever to rank for the top keywords. That's just not a strategy. That's gonna produce. In the short term. Both auto hinted added a little bed. But what do you see. As the biggest mistakes that bb companies make when it comes to content marketing. I suspect the list could be fairly extensive. Definitely not so. That's one that we just touched on is competing for the wrong things the wrong times so knowing that it's kind of a chicken and egg problem up as an example. Notables really small we acquired it about a year ago. Traffic was trending down. I think we're at like five thousand monthly visits when we acquired it so super small one of the first problems that we're facing okay. Well we can't go after the biggest keywords in our space right now Long long term we can but it might take. You know two three years realistically over terrain for that stuff. So in the short term we something else and we need to take a different approach and go after keywords can rank for and now we're up to like thirty forty thousand a month In terms of monthly traffic and it was just this whole stairs project okay. We're gonna go after this this less competitive staff. I because we know we can win there. And we're going to rank while for it and once our websites bigger once we have more legs once we were content which we have more top authorities there as we can come back and right that competitive stuff the other big one we checked on already too which is operations marketers marketers. Are marketers. don't have an issue with creativity. That's all that's why we do this. That's why we're all like in this in this field to have an issue with the processes and all the boring stuff all the operations all the role specialization. All the how do you coordinate. Handoff sprott with a writer in one time zone to an editor at another time zone especially in today's environment where everything's a synchronous like. How do you iron out. All those little kinks. Because that's that's where the ball gets dropped like one person you might have a writer who's really good or you might have. A market is really good They have to hand it off to someone three four time zones away if not more than that person has to hand it off to somebody else. How you're actually doing that to make sure this persons waking up and is ready to go and has everything they need and has their you know their stuff completed by the person before them without those those two people having to jump on zoom every five minutes. I think that's the that's the challenge from blocking and tackling standpoint that a lot of companies are facing today because they are trying to ramp up content and do all the stuff in the absence of conventions and conferences and other things But yet we're all forced to again. Be more reliant on a synchronous communication. So we've talked about the importance of content and how to approach it. I want to explore a few other areas including building beeby content team generating ideas distribution how companies approach content production on one hand they could use freelancers agencies or contractors but if they want people who drink the proverbial kool-aid many companies want in house writers. So where should be to be company. Start when it comes to creating content for sure. Yeah i think it's important to realize that they all have their own like strengths and weaknesses. So there's no right or wrong answer necessarily as you mentioned with drinking the kool aid internal people usually best for all the intangibles so they understand the unique point of view they understand the differentiation positioning of Product versus other ones in the space. The understand on that stuff intimately. Their problem is usually outlets And production so internal people usually get caught up with meetings and slack and whatever proofreading someone else's presentation get pulled in all these different directions that you're not able to publish a ton of stuff on the back of a lot of in house writers unless you're spending a ton of money on it because it can get Sam expensive as you can imagine so the the challenge is always well freelancers offers. You that flexibility. You can wrap up and down if you wanna do a big concept. Push free six months and then switch gears down the road. It's easy to kind of like bilbao team out. Let it run for a little bit and then wrap down over time. You don't have to deal with the same You know internal hr headaches and other things to like people up and down. the problem. freelancers is is usually getting everyone on the same page and making sure you have consistency across whatever you know. Three four five ten twenty people who are all external and have their own things in our own lives and their own clients and That's incredibly challenging. Because you you spend a ton of time. That isn't always account for on product management on editing on things that are like the the soft intangibles to get all those people together agencies offer a different approach of like usually get skill sets. You might not have internally so for example when someone hires are agency they get strategy people get. Seo people they get not just the writers and editors but also designers video people again trying to hire all those roles externally or excuse me internally would be super cost prohibitive and not always like realistic agencies tend to be more expensive on the surface but again if you if you account for some of those things like the extra manpower so to speak of management everything internally it becomes expensive so i guess the point is where are you at in terms of resources in terms of internal team already so do you internally have the people in place to manage a team of writers if not then you're probably better off going with something like an agency conversely if your if your problem is more bottom of the funnel about top of the funnel meaning if your problem is more conversions and and doing things that speak the language of the customer and creating case studies and other content around that episode Usually better with internal people because it's easier to get them on board with that as opposed to external agencies.
No Agenda
"brad smith" Discussed on No Agenda
"Eighteen thousand infected government networks. Russia that's That's an mp you know if you just painted on russia without baseless an iaea any evidence. Then people get riled up about it and brad smith i guess is brought in you. Know microsoft shoddy. Dna is responsible for all problems. I don't want to say that any other platform would necessarily be better if they were the dominant platform but microsoft pretty. It's pretty dumbly piece of crap and this these auto matic that people just trust like morons. Let's continue with brad when we analyzed everything that we saw at microsoft we asked ourselves how many engineers had probably worked on these attacks and the answer we came to was. We'll certainly more than thousands. You guys are microsoft. How did microsoft this. I think that when you look at the sophistication of this attacker. There's an asymmetric advantage for somebody. Playing offense is still going on almost. Certainly these attacks are continuing just realized that maybe another angle to this. This may be the the final kick back at microsoft after The djeddai contract was cancelled. Because of course it has to go to to amazon and basis. maybe this is also partially. Microsoft's your code is no good. You know you can't keep the you can't keep the russians out. Why would you even have br. Why would brad smith even agree to this interview which is clearly not great for microsoft couple of other things the note i think all these theories are good. I don't have any include conclusive evidence of a couple of things. One cook comes up with this one thousand engineers to create what a couple of pieces of shit code. Are you kidding me. I'm not buying that. In the least a thousand engineers we analyze it took thousand engineers for maybe if it took ten engineers do a better job. Anything you want to do on. Microsoft windows takes thousands.
No Agenda
"brad smith" Discussed on No Agenda
"Eighteen thousand infected government networks. Russia that's That's an mp defense you know if you just painted on russia without baseless any Any evidence then people get riled up about it and brad smith i guess is brought in you. Know microsoft shoddy. Dna is responsible for all problems. I don't want to say that any other platform would necessarily be better if they were the dominant platform but microsoft pretty. It's pretty dumbly piece of crap and this these auto matic that people just trust like morons. Let's continue with brad when we analyzed everything that we saw at microsoft we asked ourselves how many engineers had probably worked on these attacks and the answer we came to was. We'll certainly more than thousands. You guys are microsoft. How did microsoft this. I think that when you look at the sophistication of this attacker. There's an asymmetric advantage for somebody. Playing offense is still going on almost. Certainly these attacks are continuing just realized that maybe another angle to this. This may be the the final kick back at microsoft after The djeddai contract was cancelled. Because of course it has to go to to amazon and basis. maybe this is also partially. Microsoft's your code is no good. You know you can't keep the you can't keep the russians out. Why would you even have br. Why would brad smith even agree to this interview which is clearly not great for microsoft couple of other things the note i think all these theories are good. I don't have any include conclusive evidence of a couple of things. One cook comes up with this one thousand engineers to create what a couple of pieces of shit code. Are you kidding me. I'm not buying that. In the least a thousand engineers we analyze it took thousand engineers for maybe if it took ten engineers do a better job. Anything you want to do on. Microsoft windows takes thousands.
No Agenda
"brad smith" Discussed on No Agenda
"There's no no proof has been presented. This is just now the russians and let's bring in microsoft brad. Smith is president of microsoft where he learned about the hack after the presidential election this past november by that time the stealthy intruders had spread throughout the tech giant's computer network and stolen some of its proprietary source code cues to build its software products more alarming. How the hackers got in piggybacking on a piece of third party. Software used to connect manage and monitor computer networks. I am flabbergasted l. on a second microsoft was hacked and they were stealing the code. Yes what is the worst show doing with this. China russia brush. I'd like to know why did china wasn't even introduced into this. This story line. Who else what is. Who's the country. The biggest country one of the biggest countries in the world only top by by India is one hundred million people less than just as much as one point four or five million billion people. They don't want to pay for microsoft windows. They would love to have their own operating systems. Still some microsoft code. What are the russians getting. What are the russians doing with. This would stealing microsoft co for what to doing the bidding of trump some believable. This reporting gets better people putting this stuff together. Think at every. Here's an idiot. That's why we're doing this tech news segment. We continue with. Brad smith from microsoft. What this attacker did was identify. Network management software from a company called solar winds. They installed malware into an update for a solar winds product when that update went out to eighteen thousand organizations around the world. So did this. Malware the orion platform is the underlying allegations solar winds or is one of the most ubiquitous software products..
60 Minutes
How SolarWinds Hacked the Justice, State, Treasury, Energy and Commerce Departments
"Last year in perhaps the most audacious cyber attack in history russian military. Hackers sabotaged a tiny piece of computer code buried in a popular piece of software called solar winds as we first reported in february the hidden virus spread to eighteen thousand government and private computer networks by way of one of those software updates. We all take for granted after it was installed russian agents when rummaging through the digital files of the us departments of justice state treasury energy and commerce among others and for nine months they had unfettered access to top level communications court documents even nuclear secrets. I think from a software engineering perspective. It's probably fair to say that this is the largest and most sophisticated attack. The world has ever seen brad. Smith is president of microsoft. He learned about the hack. After the presidential election this past november by that time the stealthy intruders had spread throughout the tech giant's computer network and stolen some of its proprietary source code used to build it software products more alarming. How the hackers got in piggybacking on a piece of third party. Software used to connect manage and monitor computer networks. What makes this so momentous. One of the really disconcerting aspects of this attack was the widespread and indiscriminate nature of it. This attacker did was identify. Network management software from a company called solar wins. They installed malware into an update for a solar winds product when that update went out to eighteen thousand organizations around the world. So did this. Malware
Daily Tech News Show
Microsoft Sets out New Data Storage Options for European Customers
"Microsoft president brad smith announced eu commercial and public sector. Customers will be able to store and process most of their data within the eu by the end of twenty twenty two microsoft calls this the eu data boundary for the microsoft cloud which will be available as an option across azer microsoft three six five and dynamics three six five microsoft or the guidelines by leading companies store their own data in the eu and the new plan exceeds legal requirements by including processing of personal data including data used by microsoft to provide technical supports. Ibm announced a two nanometer node. Chip can't get too much smaller. There's only two nanometers left claiming it offers forty five percent better performance at the same power compared to the current seven nanometer processes out there with a potential density of three hundred thirty three million transistors per square millimeter. Ibm did not announce details on the test ship or even when a two nanometer process would be ready for mass production. But the i believe the ibm press release read i billboard will publish a new daily chart ranking of the most popular songs in the us based on twitter conversations creatively called the billboard hot trending powered by twitter according to twitter's head of entertainment partnerships sarah rosen. Music is the most popular conversation topic on the platform. Twitter also announced new video partnerships to make live and on demand shows with billboard but also with genius refinery twenty nine tastes made the mlb nbc olympics and nbc universal news the nhl ride games and the wnba nintendo forecast a twelve percent drop in sales of the switch for the financial year ending march. Twenty twenty two because of expected lack of parts nintendo expects to sell twenty two point. Five million switches this year but that's compared to twenty eight point eight million last year. A nintendo also reported that it has now sold a total of eighty four point five nine million switches since launch
AP News Radio
Microsoft Pledges To Let EU Users Keep Data Inside Bloc
"Textron's Microsoft is committing to local data storage the European Union uses Microsoft is pledging to that's business and public sector customers keep cloud computing data inside the twenty seven nation bloc to have little concerns about US government access to sensitive information company president Brad Smith is the way customers want stronger commitments on so cool data residency writing in a blog post Smith said in other words we will not need to move your data outside the E. U. the updates will apply to the companies cool cloud services including a zero Microsoft three sixty five and dynamics three six five Charles last month London
WBZ Morning News
US Poised to Impose Sanctions on Russia for Cyber-Attacks
"Hack of computer networks that government agencies And U. S corporations. The White House is expected to announce today a new round of sanctions against Russia. Our objective as the United States is to have a predictable relationship with Russia to stabilize that relationship. White House press secretary Jen Psaki Microsoft president Brad Smith, describing the cyber attacks as the quote largest and most sophisticated the world has ever seen. Pack
The 443 - Security Simplified
Microsoft Says "Regulate Us" In The Wake of The SolarWinds Breaches
"Part of the fallout for these solar winds breached that. I'm sure we're all probably sick of hearing about now The us senate intelligence committee asked several executives including the ceo of zafira solar winds crowd strike as well as microsoft president top lawyer. Brad smith to testify on their companies roles in the event minutes part of his opening statement. Brad smith He advocated for really increased regulations or at least stronger obligations on private sector organizations to disclose security events so as quote that stood out to me was state and local governments hospitals and countless other entities are constantly under attack and yet silence reigns. This is a recipe for making a formidable problem worse and requires all of us to change. We need to replace the silence with a clear consistent obligation for private sector organizations to disclose when they're impacted by confirmed and significant incidents the other executives they. They didn't go so far as to call for increased regulation but they did agree that there needs to be more information sharing across businesses and government. Um smith compare the patchwork set of allegations the us to the us much more stringent reporting requirements and thought. This would be a good opportunity to test the waters and see what. What are your thoughts like. Is this something where we need the government to step in or is this something that the private industry can solve on their own because there is an issue with threat actors targeting private companies. and not. because we're not sharing information willingly like others can't learn from it to stop similar incidents from
Short Wave
Why Tech Companies Are Limiting Police Use of Facial Recognition
"All right emily kwong so. We're talking about this announcement from a string of tech companies that they are going gonna put limits on their facial recognition technology especially when it comes to law enforcement amazon microsoft and ibm yes on june eighth. Ibm said it would discontinue general purpose facial recognition or analysis software altogether. Get out of the business completely and it made an impression after. Ibm's big letter. Amazon announced a one year moratorium on sales of they're very popular software recognition spelled with a k. To law enforcement to give congress time to implement appropriate rules so a one year ban. Yes microsoft took it a step further saying it wouldn't sell products to law enforcement at all until a federal law is in place. Here's microsoft president. Brad smith speaking to the washington post we need to use this moment to pursue a strong national law to govern facial recognition that is grounded in the protection of human rights and for matali in conde who has been pushing for regulation changes in tech for years. This was a big deal when these words were coming out of silicon valley. She felt all of the feelings. My initial was thank god. Thank god i was. I was happy. I was pleased. I was optimistic. I was short of breath. I was exhausted. Tally is the ceo of ai. For the people a fellow at both harvard and stanford universities for her. These announcements shifted the conversation. But that's about it. So i'm pleased. It's got us incredibly far but we're by no means the woods not out of the woods because for all of the advancement and facial recognition systems. Still get it wrong. They'll incorrectly match folks what's called a false positive or fail to associate the same person to two different images of false negative. Yeah and what's vaccine. Is these errors are happening. More often. when the machines are analyzing dark-skinned faces and that can disproportionally affect already marginalized communities prone to unconscious bias at the hands of law enforcement leading to false accusations arrests and much worse so until there's action on this metallic said words just aren't enough gotcha. So let's unpack this a little bit. Let's talk about how biased gets into facial recognition systems in the first place. I'd love that okay. So it starts right with how the systems learn to do their jobs. A process known as machine learning so to make facial recognition systems engineers feed algorithms large amounts of what's called training data in this case. That would be pictures of human faces. Yes the way machines learn is that they repeat task again and again and again and again and again developing a statistical model for what a face is supposed to look like so if you wanted to teach the algorithm to recognize a man you'd put in like millions of pictures of men you got it. The machine will then measure the distance between the eyes on each picture the circumference of the nose for example the ear to measurement and over time the machine starts to be able to predict whether the next image it seeing is quote a man which sounds okay right here comes the but but the machine is only a smart as its training data so remember joy ghulam weenie who i mentioned at the top of the episode. Yeah the the mit yes. So she and her colleague timid gabe developed a way to skin color in these training sets and the two they looked at were overwhelmingly composed of lighter skinned subjects. Seventy nine percent for ibi dash a and eighty six percent. For etienne's these are two common data sets that were largely as joy. Put it pale and male. So basically the training data used to create these algorithms is not diverse. And that's how that bias gets in The diversity of human beings is not always being represented in these training sets and so faces outside the systems norm. sometimes don't get recognized. Here's matala explaining what the research meant to her. That goes back to this other issue of not just hiring but a bigger issue of those no one in the team to say that you haven't put all the faces you haven't put all the digital images of all human beings could look like in the way that they sharpen society in order to recognize these faces. And it's so. After realizing how unbalanced these training sets were joy intimidate decided to create their own with equality in race and gender to get a general idea of how facial ai systems performed with a more diverse population so basically they fed it more diverse pictures to to look at. Yeah it was kind of interesting. They used images from the top ten national parliaments in the world with women in power specific yes specifically picking african and european nations and they tested this new data against three different commercially available systems for classifying gender one made by ibm the second microsoft and the third by face plus plus an running these tests joint him knit found clear discrepancies gender and racial lines with darker skinned faces getting mis classified the most. Here's mut-ali again. So one of the things that joy blue armies amazing work looks. That is the coloration between short hair and gender so many many many black women with afros where mislabeled as men mis gendered because the system had trained itself to recognize short hair as a male trait and this research project mattie produced a massive ripple effect further studies legislation in december the national institute of standards and technology or nist published a big paper of its own testing one hundred eighty nine facial recognition algorithms from around the world and they found biases to looking at one global data set some algorithms in their study produced one hundred times more false positives with african and asian faces compared to eastern european ones and when tested using another data set of mug shots from the us. The highest false positives were found among american indians with higher rates in african american and asian populations again depending on the algorithm. Wow yeah that is not what you want from your data. And i'm guessing white. Men benefited from the highest accuracy rates. Yes they did now. The knicks study did conclude that the most accurate algorithms demonstrated far less demographic bias but for multi. This evidence of bias raises a bigger question about the ethics of relying on. Ai systems to classify and police at all the problem with ai. Systems machine learning is that they're really really really good at standard routine tasks and the issue with humans is that we are not standard. We're not routine. Were actually massively messy right. We're not the same but when a police officer searches face in the system. They're not making arrests based on just spat match alone are they. Oh absolutely not. Yeah it's a tool for identifying potential suspects but if you think about how there's already implicit bias in policing critics. A facial recognition are basically saying. It doesn't make sense to embrace technologies riddled with bias to right if all this research has shown. These tools are capable of misidentifying black people. We cannot use biometric tools that discriminate against a group of people who are ready discriminated against within the criminal justice system but policing most specifically mattie. When i first spoke to mut-ali in march she was open to moratoriums on facial. Recognition like amazon is doing buying time for these systems to improve regulations to be put in place but the protests have her views. Because why why am i being moderate with completely reimagined how we interact with technology so now she wants to see facial recognition banned from law enforcement use which some cities in the us have done. Moutallos has tried to push for legislation to outlaw discrimination in technology before but it seems like now people are paying attention and have a language for talking about structural racism that they just didn't have before whether why america listened to me or not. I was gonna continue with this work. I believe that technology should be an empowering force for all people and that's my work but now having old and new ala not just allies but co-conspirators bright. I'm so happy. Because i didn't think would happen in my lifetime and it's an it's
The CyberWire
Frances ANSII warns of a longrunning Sandworm campaign
"French authorities specifically the information security agency. Ansi said yesterday that they determined a russian threat. Actor has been active against french targets from two thousand seventeen to twenty twenty ansi. Didn't flatly say which group was responsible but it did note. According to reuters that similar tactics techniques and procedures had been seen in use by sand worm also known as voodoo bear and operation belonging to russia's gru military intelligence service and see has also made a detailed technical report available. The attackers dropped back doors as web shells in their targets. The operation appears to have been another software supply chain attack with the attackers working their way in through century on products used for it monitoring and see didn't say how many victims there had been but the agency indicated that most of them were it service firms especially web hosting providers the similarity in targeting in approach to the so laura gate campaign in the us is obvious. Centurions customer profile is similar to that of solar wins the paris based firm lists more than six hundred customers worldwide including local and regional government agencies. There's no informed official conjecture about the goals of the campaign that exploited century on yet but wired quotes industry. Expert says observing that. Sandra has a track record of disruption and destruction and hasn't confined itself to simple data theft century on hadn't as of this morning posted any statement about the incident to its website wired says century on emailed it to say that it was too soon to say whether the campaign represented an ongoing threat or whether it had been stopped by the patches and upgrades century on regularly issues. Voodoo bear of them as fancy. Bears daughter is known for going after industrial control systems especially those associated with power generation and distribution. It's most well known. Tool is the black energy malware kit. The threat actor is widely believed to have been responsible for both two thousand eight distributed denial of service attacks against georgia and twenty fifteen action against a portion of ukraine's power grid to return to salora gate the investigation and mop-up of the very large and presumably very damaging cyber espionage campaign against us targets continues. Cbs sixty minutes this weekend. Featured the solar winds compromise and highlighted both the scope of the attack and the effort that went into conducting it microsoft president. Brad smith said quote. I think from a software engineering perspective. It's probably fair to say that this is the largest and most sophisticated attack. The world has ever seen quote. He added that microsoft believed at least a thousand engineers were involved in mounting the attack. How microsoft arrived at that figure is unclear. And while it's probably better to read a thousand as a lot and not as a rigorously supportable quantification of the human capital. Russian intelligence applied to the task. It is in any case. Allot a member of south. Korea's parliamentary intelligence committee told reuters that he'd been briefed on an attempt by north korean operators to breach pfizer and steal information on the company's covid nineteen vaccine development. Hey take king said that. The republic of north korea's national intelligence service briefed him on the attempted espionage and that the apparent motive was financial. Pyongyang is looking more to its criminal. Revenue stream not to public health in the dprk last week bloomberg renewed its reporting on an alleged chinese hardware back door allegedly found on super micro products. The report was greeted with more skepticism than such reports usually are since the earliest versions of the story published. Initially in two thousand eighteen generally went unconfirmed by organizations that would have been in a position to confirm them super micro issued a statement about the bloomberg story which says in part quote bloomberg story is a mismatch of disparate. An inaccurate allegations that date back many years. It draws far-fetched conclusions that once again. Don't withstand scrutiny. In fact the national security agency told bloomberg again last month that it stands by its two thousand eighteen comments and the agency said a bloomberg's new claims that it cannot confirm that this incident or the subsequent response actions described ever occurred despite bloomberg's allegations about supposed cyber or national security investigations that date back more than ten years super micro has never been contacted by the us government or by any of our partners or customers about these alleged investigations and quote to round out the familiar four of bad girl. Nation-states researchers at security firm anomaly report a static kitten citing. the threat. Group believed to be run by. Tehran has been targeting government agencies in the united arab emirates. Fishing them with the goal of installing screen connect remote access tools and the systems used by. Its emirati targets. The fish bait is usually an israeli themed geopolitical loor the emails masquerade is communications from kuwait's foreign ministry and the fish hook itself is similar to those used previously in operation quicksand. There's not much new to report about the oldsmar. Florida water utility sabotage attempt local authorities in oldsmar have grown increasingly tight lipped about the attack on the town's water system with the pinellas county sheriff discouraging any municipal officials from discussing what is as they say and ongoing investigation. Detectives are on the case they say. And the sheriff wants the public to understand that it was never in any danger.
News and Perspective with Taylor Van Cise
Microsoft campus near Seattle will be used to administer COVID-19 vaccine
"Governor Insley announced effective immediately. Any Washington resident age 65 or older can now get the vaccine for covert 19 almost Brian Calvert, with more details as to how the state is going to accomplish this. In his address yesterday, Inslee unveiled plans to open massive vaccination sites across the state, utilizing a syriza of privately owned facilities, including a Redmond campus. That's virtually a ghost town these days. We don't have employees and all of our buildings these days, so we're gonna be working with local hospitals. S so that they can administer their vaccines in a building on our campus. Microsoft's Brad Smith is on board. So is Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson. We're here to support the governor, Dr Shaw and all of their staffs who are working tirelessly to serve the people of the state of Washington, a vaccine and every coffee shop. Maybe not, But plans aren't final just yet by lowering the vaccination age to 65. More than 1.5 million Washingtonians are now eligible, meaning the state must now create capacity to avoid long lines like we saw last week at a vaccination site in swim.
News and Perspective with Tom Hutyler
Deeper job cuts at Boeing as pandemic throttles air travel
"Will simply build less. That's the reality company executives were facing as they announced quarter, their losses and a new round of job cuts. Couples. Corwin Take Widmore It's a reality check two years after the first deadly crash of a 7 37 Max. And after nine months of the pandemic related cratering of air travel, the reality is that our industry as a whole will simply build left over the coming years. That's Boeing President Brad Smith on a day that saw the company reported third quarter loss of $401 million and also announced it will cut 11,000 more jobs by the end of next year. Dave Calhoun is Boeing CEO 19 Continue impacts have had a more prolonged and deeper impact on her industry and will have to further reduce our workforce. Calhoun says. The job cuts will be spread across all business units. Corwin Headache Cuomo New
Daily Tech News Show
Amazon Won’t Let Police Use Its Facial-Recognition Tech for One Year
"Amazon announced it will not let law enforcement use its recognition facial service for one year, an order to give government time to introduce legislation about the ethical uses of facial recognition, the US House Committee on oversight and reform has held a number of hearings on the use of facial recognition technology, but as yet to introduce a bill Washington poster boards that Microsoft President Brad Smith said that Microsoft will not sell its facial recognition technology to police departments until a federal law on facial recognition has passed. Facial recognition is frequently trained on databases that reflect existing biased,
AP News Radio
'Political game'? Governors push back on Trump virus charge
"There's been over forty million quote in the market place but we have an end to end the issue that we needed to deal with at Monday's White House briefing assistant health and Human Services secretary Atmel brand sure our knowledge actual testing has fallen far short because of supply issues with key elements such as swabs centers for Medicare and Medicaid services director Brad Smith says the administration is using the defense production act to help a main company ramp up production well in Ohio company is also joining the effort we're helping them convert their line for making Q. tips into making swabs well the department of energy's Oak Ridge national laboratory is putting its injection molding capability to use they're in the process of ramping that up to create collection tubes Ben Thomas Washington
AP News Radio
'Political game'? Governors push back on Trump virus charge
"As president trump verbally journalists with the nation's governors over whether there's sufficient corona virus testing available to safely reopen the economy administration officials have been detailing federal efforts to close any gaps there's been over forty million quote in the market place but we have an end to end the issue that we needed to deal with at Monday's White House briefing assistant health and Human Services secretary admiral Brett share our knowledge actual testing has fallen far short because of supply issues with key elements such as swabs centers for Medicare and Medicaid services director Brad Smith says the administration is using the defense production act to help a main company ramp up production well in Ohio company is also joining the effort we're helping them convert their line for making Q. tips into making swab success together that should have some thirty million testing swaps per month well the department of energy's Oak Ridge national laboratory is putting its injection molding capability to use they're in the process of ramping that up to create collection tubes Ben Thomas Washington
Bloomberg Daybreak
Google becomes third U.S. tech company worth $1 trillion
"Meantime Microsoft is praising the partial U. S. China trade deal chief legal officer Brad Smith tells us it's a quote indisputably good and important step it absolutely adds a stability it creates a foundation for additional progress it adds to business confidence Microsoft stock closed at an all time high yesterday rising one point eight percent to finish above a hundred sixty six dollars a share at the same time we saw alphabet surpass a trillion dollars in market cap off but now joins Microsoft apple and Saudi Aramco as the only companies valued at more than a trillion