Microsoft has rolled out a suite of new features to help its Teams software compete with workplace communication competitors Slack and Zoom.
Video conferencing tools have surged since the COVID-19 pandemic began. As companies shifted to all-remote setups, in order to avoid in-office interaction, they began to employ tools like Teams to maintain face-to-face communication.
"We believe that the future of work is being shaped right now," Jared Spataro, a corporate vice president of Microsoft 365, told Cheddar on Thursday.
Courtesy of Microsoft
Spataro says that while some of the new Teams features incorporate emojis and Microsoft's AI voice assistant Cortana, the headline add-on is "Together Mode." It gives users the ability to hold meetings in virtual rooms — that actually look like rooms
"It essentially takes AI technology and allows you to cut out people who are in a meeting and put them into the same background," Spataro said. "Our research shows us that even though that sounds very simple, it actually makes a really big difference when it comes to meeting fatigue."
While the only available setting now is a simple auditorium, Spataro says Microsoft is working on building different environments like conference rooms and even a 'virtual cafe.'
While it was a volatile week in tech as Meta experienced the biggest one-day drop in the history of the U.S. stock market, industry giant Amazon reported 40 percent growth — largely on the strength of the cloud. Dan Ives, managing director of equity research at Wedbush Securities, joined Cheddar News to break down how the e-commerce company stock managed to pop despite headwinds against its core retail business. "It's all about cloud because of sum of the parts, you could argue, amazon could be $3,500/$4,000 stock just based on cloud," he said. Ives also addressed the apparent the differing impact of Apple iOS changes on Facebook and Snapchat.
Following Ford's earnings miss, the stock price dropped despite a bullish outlook from the auto giant. Karl Brauer, an executive analyst with ISeeCars.com, joined Cheddar to break down why investors may not be sold on the carmaker because of the ongoing factor of supply constraints. "The product is not an issue. There's really good product coming from them, including the electric vehicle side, and the demand is not an issue. There's plenty of demand, but nobody really has a solid grasp on when we're going to get past the supply chain issue," said Brauer.
Image-sharing app Pinterest reported big beats on its Q4 earnings for the top and bottom lines. The social platform surprised investors after seeing a decline in users while earnings and revenue were much higher than expected.
