Investors give Baltimore’s Facet Wealth $25 million to sell businesses on financial planning as a benefit

Yesterday, Baltimore-based fintech company Facet Wealth said it raised $25 million in financing as it readies a new business line pitching financial planning as an employment benefit to businesses looking to recruit top talent.

Employment benefit packages are expanding beyond the basic gym membership and healthcare to include subscriptions to Netflix, discounts on delivery and ride-share services, and other perks. So why not financial wellness?

The thesis certainly managed to attract a big-money backer, with Warburg Pincus, the multi-billion dollar private equity investment firm which doubled down on its commitment with the new financing into the company.

The company said the latest round would be used to finance the expansion of Facet Wealth’s direct-to-consumer business even as it readies its employee benefit service for launch.

Already customers are signing up for pre-launch partnerships to get their employees on the program. Early wannabe users include ClassPass, MyVest and ChiliPiper, the company said.

“Since our first investment two years ago, the Facet Wealth team has proven their ability to meet a unique consumer need, evolving and expanding their offering to build a truly innovative client experience and business model”, said Jeff Stein, Managing Director at Warburg Pincus. “Their expansion into the employer market further solidifies them as a category-defining company that is well-positioned to disrupt the wealth management industry for years to come.”

To date, Facet Wealth has raised $62 million in funding from Warburg Pincus, Slow Ventures and other, undisclosed investors.


Source: Tech Crunch

A new Google Assistant feature, ‘Hold for Me,’ waits on hold so you don’t have to

Google has been pushing forward the capabilities of what a smartphone can do when it comes to one of the device’s most basic — if these days, often overlooked — features: phone calls. In previous years, the company launched Call Screen to vet your incoming calls, Duplex for restaurant reservations, and just this month, a feature called Verified Calls that will tell you who is calling and why. Today, Google introduced one more handy feature for those who still use their devices as an actual phone with the introduction of “Hold for Me.”

At the company’s hardware event this afternoon, where Google introduced its new Pixel smartphones, it also briefly showed off the Pixel’s latest trick. A feature called “Hold for Me,” will stay on the line for you when you’re placed on hold, then alert you when someone picks up.

Image Credits:

Google explained the technology was built on the smarts of its existing Call Screen and Duplex technology — the latter which is an A.I.-based technology focused on how conversations take place over the phone.

In the short demo of “Hold for Me,” Google showed how a Pixel device owner is able to activate the new feature after they’ve been placed on hold. This is done by tapping a new button that appears on the phone screen above the buttons for muting the call, turning on speakerphone, and the other in-call phone controls.

Once activated, you’re alerted with a message that says “Don’t hand up,” where you’re advised that Google Assistant is listening to the call for you, so you can do other things.

A button is also available on this screen that lets you tap to return to the call at any time, and below that an on-screen message says “music playing” to indicate if the Google Assistant is still hearing the hold music. You can also choose to press the red hang up button to end the call from this screen.

When a person comes on the line, the device will alert you it’s time to return to the call.

At a time when people are waiting on hold for hours for help with COVID-19 related government assistance, like unemployment benefits, a “Hold for Me” option could be more than a useful new feature — it could be a literal lifesaver for those in the middle of a financial crisis due to job loss.

Google says the new feature will come to its new Pixel 5 devices, which will soon be followed by its older-generation Pixel phones via the next “Pixel feature drop” roll out.


Source: Tech Crunch

AOC flagged ‘material risks’ to Palantir investors in letter to SEC

In a newly released letter, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez issued words of warning to the SEC over Palantir’s efforts to take the company public, cautioning the regulatory body over details the progressive congresswoman says were “omitted” in the company’s disclosures. Illinois Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García co-authored the letter, embedded below, which was submitted to SEC Chairman Jay Clayton on September 17.

Palantir, a secretive data analytics company that provides its software to U.S. agencies, debuted on public markets Wednesday through a direct listing rather than a traditional IPO. The company debuted with an implied valuation of $16 billion.

“Palantir reports several pieces of information about its company – and omits others – that we believe require further disclosure and examination, as they present material risks of which potential investors should be aware and national security concerns of which the public should be aware,” Ocasio-Cortez and García wrote.

Among their concerns, the lawmakers asked for Palantir to disclose how much equity the CIA’s venture capital firm holds in the company.

“In-Q-Tel’s investment in Palantir is not classified information, and
Palantir is currently listed on In-Q-Tel’s website among its portfolio companies,” the representatives wrote. Palantir benefitted from an early investment from In-Q-Tel, but current information about the In-Q-Tel’s holdings is not public.

“Palantir reports that its ‘government work is central to defense and intelligence operations in the United States and its allies abroad,” but does not provide further information on the nature of its work for domestic or foreign intelligence agencies, despite recognizing that public perception of its government contracts represent a material risk to investors,” the representatives wrote.

Ocasio-Cortez and García also raised concerns about risks to investors over the company’s secretive work with foreign governments, including its relationship with Qatar, a nation with documented human rights concerns for migrants and its LGBTQ population.

As we previously reported, Palantir discussed its work with “organizations whose products or activities are or are perceived to be harmful” in the risks section of its S-1 filing. Palantir’s work with the notorious U.S. immigration enforcement agency ICE has attracted unwanted attention in recent years, and the company maintains contracts with ICE worth up to $92 million.

Palantir is currently powering the U.S. government’s COVID-19 tracking software platform HHS Protect Now, a controversial relationship that Democratic lawmakers demanded more transparency around in July.

Ocasio-Cortez and García also raise concerns around Palantir’s corporate governance — an issue we’ve reported on extensively as the company adjusted its S-1 filing.

As of a week ago, Palantir had already updated language in its S-1 five times, mostly making changes to an unusually centralized governance structure designed to ensure that a disproportionate amount of decision making power remains with the company’s three founders Alex Karp, Stephen Cohen and Peter Thiel.

In the letter to the SEC chairman, the representatives accuse Palantir’s board of “lacking the required majority of independent board members,” raising questions about Alexander Moore, who directed operations at the company for its first five years.

While today marks the end of Palantir’s journey to take itself public, the process hasn’t been completely smooth for a company so unused to public attention. Palantir already delayed its direct listing by a week as it reportedly navigated a “protracted back-and-forth” with the SEC and tweaked language over a still glaringly uneven voting structure designed to keep decision making in a few hands — including those of its controversial co-founder Peter Thiel.

Now, with its formal entrance into life as a public company, the public and lawmakers alike are set to learn more about Palantir’s work than ever before.


Source: Tech Crunch

Pixel 5 and 4a 5g get the same, improved cameras with rear ultrawide lens, Night Sight portraits and more

Google made its newest smartphones official today, unveiling the much-leaked Pixel 4a 5g and Pixel 5. Both smartphones will get the same, improved cameras, despite a $200 price different between the models, which is great news for people who are specifically coming to Google for their excellent mobile camera tech. Here’s an overview of what google did with the new and improved Pixel cameras in terms of both hardware and software.

Ultrawide lens

The biggest new physical change to the new Pixel phones is the addition of a new ultrawide lens to the camera array on the back. This provides a new wide angle field of view that lets you capture a significantly larger perspective, which is great for large group shots and landscapes. This was one of the features that Apple added to the most recent iPhone that Google fans were looking for on their Pixel devices.

Here’s an example of the additional coverage you’re getting (roughly, since the first shot likely wasn’t actually filmed on Pixel):

HDR+ with bracketing

The HDR+ feature of Google’s Pixel phones is also very popular with users, providing a way for people to get better lighting in their photos without having to worry about compositing images after the fact to adjust exposure in different parts of the scene. Google has upgraded its HDR+ feature by combining its own machine-learning powered techniques, stacked with traditional, much more old-school exposure bracketing for what the company says is a better final product.

Night Sight in portrait mode

Portrait mode has been popular since its introduction on smartphones, and has improved over time to allow people to get a more accurate depth effect with artificial background blur. Google added the ability to use portrait mode with its Night Sight feature with this generation of devices, meaning you can get that kind of depth effect even when you’re using Google’s software trickery to increase the illumination in a dark scene for clear, static-free results like the shot below.

Portrait Light

Another portrait mode feature is the addition of portrait light, which lets you apply a customizable lighting effect to do things like counteract deep shadows or washed out potions of the image. This works similar to Apple’s studio lighting effects in its own portrait mode in iOS, but it looks to be considerably more customizable, and potentially more powerful thanks to Google’s AI tech on the Pixel devices – though we’ll have to get them in for testing to know for sure.

New stabilization for video, including Cinematic Pan

Finally, there are three new stabilization modes for filming video on the new Pixels – Locked, Active and Cinematic Pan. These were built using tutorials on YouTube, Google said during its event, as well as by studying Hollywood cinematographers. Cinematic Pan looks like potentially the most fun for YouTubers, since it gives that silky smooth, slowed down effect (it’s half actual speed) that makes it look straight out of a film travelogue.


Source: Tech Crunch

Google unveils the $99 Nest Audio smart speaker

Four years after the introduction of the Google Home smart speaker, Google showcased its successor to the company’s mid-range smart speaker. In keeping with the broader rebranding of the company’s smart home products, the device is now called Nest Audio. The smart speaker will retail for $99 and come in a variety of colors including sage, sand, sky, chalk and charcoal.

The device is available starting October 5th and will go on sale in 21 countries.

The company says it prioritized more bass, added volume and clearer sound when designing the product which replaces the aged Google Home smart speaker. Indeed, Google says Nest Audio has 50% “more bass” and can get 75% louder than Google Home could. It all comes in a much larger package. It sports a 19mm tweeter to hit high frequencies while a 75mm midwoofer pushes things out on the lower-end. We’ll have to take them at their word until we can get a hand on the device ourselves.

Image Credits: Google

Nest Audio’s design ditches the candle-like form factor of the previous generation, instead embracing the fabric blob design that the Google Home Mini and Google Home Max have long sported.

The smart speaker market is in a bit of an odd place, the devices have gone through several iterations but the ecosystems for the devices have, if anything, contracted as third-party integrations with smart assistants largely failed to pan out aside from basic tasks like listening to music. For Google, the market opportunity now looks more like creating a low-cost alternative to Sonos, a company which is suing Google for IP theft by the way. Multi-room audio has gotten more and more accessible over the years and smart speaker manufacturers have largely been responsible for that.


Source: Tech Crunch

Serious injuries at Amazon fulfillment centers topped 14,000, despite the company’s safety claims

As Amazon‘s biggest shopping day of the year approaches, a new report reveals that the company’s investments in automation and safety have not stemmed surging numbers of serious injuries in the company’s warehouses and fulfillment centers.

Even as Amazon spends tens of millions on new robotics and technologies to automate its warehouses, workers are still paying the price with more than 14,000 serious injuries — requiring days off or job restrictions — reported in fulfillment centers in 2019, according to a report from Reveal.

Overall, the company saw 7.7 serious injuries per 100 employees, a number that’s 33% higher than it was four years ago and double the most recent industry standard, despite significant investments and claims that safety is improving at its facilities, the report said.

A document dump from the Center for Investigative Reporting given to Reveal, internal safety reports and weekly injury numbers from Amazon’s network of national fulfillment centers shows that Amazon has misled the public about its safety record. And that the company’s biggest shopping days — during Prime week and the long holiday season — are the most dangerous for its workers.

In a statement, Amazon called Reveal’s report “misinformed” and quibbled over the terminology, while claiming that “we continue to see improvements in injury prevention and reduction” through a variety of programs, though documents in the report suggest otherwise.

Bulletins sent out every month reveal a grim tally of injuries and safety problems, problems that the company was well aware of. Updates marked “Privileged & Confidential” and reportedly obtained by Reveal indicate that the company has failed to hit safety targets. Despite its intentions to reduce injury rates by 20% in 2018, rates rose. In 2019, when the company decided to try and lower its injury rates by a more modest 5%, the number of injuries still went up.

This isn’t the first time that Amazon has had its woeful worker safety record revealed by Reveal. Last year, the company had the covers pulled off of its alleged work with Indiana state officials to cover up a workplace safety violation that resulted in a man’s death.

And the injury rates are the highest at some of the factories that are closest to the company’s international headquarters, the Reveal report showed. Roughly an hour away from Amazon’s Seattle headquarters, in the town of Dupont, Washington, is one of Amazon’s most dangerous facilities, according to Reveal. The BFI3 warehouse saw 22 serious injuries for every 100 of the company’s workers at the warehouse.

Workers in these factories are required to hit certain production quotas that increase every year, despite investments in automation designed to reduce worker stress, according to company statements. A computer system, which tracks how many items employees scan every hour, is used to determine who needs to be flagged for not hitting targets. Those that fall too far behind are fired, according to Reveal. And the robots that were supposed to make their jobs easier, instead demanded that they increase the speed of their packing as much as fourfold.

“We vastly underestimated the effects it was going to have on our associates,” a former safety manager told Reveal. “We realized early on there was an issue. It was just – you’re already moving that way at light speed, so how do you take a step back and readjust?”

Even while the toll the robots were taking became clear to warehouse managers and supervisors, Amazon’s top executives, like Jeff Wilke, continued to tout the company’s automation investments.

What Amazon’s own data showed, according to Reveal, was that the company knew the rate of serious injuries was higher at warehouses with robots than at the ones staffed by humans.

And despite Amazon’s claims to the contrary, risks appeared to increase for workers during Amazon’s highest volume periods. Prime Day in 2019 and the days surrounding it were the worst week for injuries at the company, with nearly 400 serious injuries recorded, according to Reveal’s reporting.

Amazon is also working to obscure how many of its workers get seriously injured enough to lose time at work, because the company is putting them on other “light duty” assignments, according to the Reveal study. Amazon representatives have previously said that the company does not employ this practice, but the evidence cited in the report suggest otherwise.

Injured workers who can’t perform warehouse jobs are given other tasks like tagging photos to train the company’s machine learning software. Others perform temp work for Amazon’s partners in the non-profit world, according to the Reveal report. Reassigning injured workers rather than putting them on leave is not necessarily bad, but it can be used, as it appears to have been by Amazon, to create the appearance of lower injury rates.

These historical conditions and the company’s unwillingness to reduce its bottom line interests in the name of worker health and safety can be seen culminating in the company’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

As Americans turned to the everything store for getting everything delivered as they sheltered in place, hundreds of workers at Amazon plants were sickened by the virus. And several died.

Ultimately Amazon invested $800 million in safety measures by the end of the first six months of the year — and three month’s into the steady march of the virus across the country. The movement from Amazon’s executive team only came after workers organized to protest their conditions.

Amazon’s thanks to these organizers? Firing one of the organizers and two other employees who supported the efforts.

Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos has made $60 billion from the surge in Amazon’s stock price.


Source: Tech Crunch

Duolingo CEO explains language app’s surge in bookings

Language learning apps, like many educational technology platforms, soared when millions of students went home in response to safety concerns from the coronavirus pandemic. It makes sense: Everyone became an online learner in some capacity, and for non-frontline workers, each day became an opportunity to squeeze in a new skill (beyond sourdough).

So why not learn a new language in a low-lift way?

Language learning platforms, including Babbel, Drops and Duolingo, all have benefitted from quarantine boredom as shown by surges in their usage. However, success also depends on whether these same companies can turn that primetime interest into dollars and profit.

To figure out if the language learning boom comes with paying customers, I caught up with Luis von Ahn, the CEO of Duolingo, a popular language learning company valued at $1.5 billion.

Von Ahn tells TechCrunch that Duolingo has hit 42 million monthly active users, up from 30 million in December 2019. The surge comes as new users are spending more time on the app in aggregate, for some of the reasons explained above. Duolingo has been steadily increasing in bookings over the past few years:

This year, Duolingo will hit $180 million in bookings, von Ahn estimates. The company discloses bookings as a proxy for revenue, because when someone purchases a subscription the app it is considered a “booking” until the completion of the subscription, when it becomes revenue.

“We’re more than breaking even,” von Ahn told TechCrunch.

While this growth is impressive, the most staggering metric that von Ahn revealed is that $180 million in bookings is only coming from 3% of its current users.

“Only 3% of our users pay us, yet we make more money than the apps where 100% of their users pay them,” he said.


Source: Tech Crunch

How Twilio built its own conference platform

Twilio’s annual customer conference was supposed to happen in May, but like everyone else who had live events scheduled for this year, it ran smack-dab into COVID-19 and was forced to cancel. That left the company wondering how to reimagine the event online. It began an RFP process to find a vendor to help, but eventually concluded it could use its own APIs and built a platform on its own.

That’s a pretty bold move, but one of the key issues facing Twilio was how to recreate the in-person experience of the show floor where people could chat with specific API experts. After much internal deliberation, they realized that was what their communication API products were designed to do.

Once they committed to going their own way, they began a long process that involved figuring out must-have features, building consensus in the company, a development and testing cycle and finding third-party partnerships to help them when they ran into the limitations of their own products.

All that work culminates this week when Twilio holds its annual Signal Conference online Wednesday and Thursday. We spoke to In-Young Chang, director of experience at Twilio, to learn how this project came together.

Chang said once the decision was made to go virtual, the biggest issue for them (and for anyone putting on a virtual conference) was how to recreate that human connection that is a natural part of the in-person conference experience.

The company’s first step was to put out a request for proposals with event software vendors. She said that the problem was that these platforms hadn’t been designed for the most part to be fully virtual. At best, they had a hybrid approach where some people attended virtually, but most were there in person.

“We met with a lot of different vendors, vendors that a lot of big tech companies were using, but there were pros to some of them, and then cons to others, and none of them truly fit everything that we needed, which was connecting our customers to product experts [like we do at our in-person conferences],” Chang told TechCrunch.

Even though they had winnowed the proposals down to a manageable few, they weren’t truly satisfied with what the event software vendors were offering, and they came to a realization.

“Either we find a vendor who can do this fully custom in three months time, or [we do it ourselves]. This is what we do. This is in our DNA, so we can make this happen. The hard part became how do you prioritize because once we made the conference fully software-based, the possibilities were endless,” she said.

All of this happened pretty quickly. The team interviewed the vendors in May, and by June made the decision to build it themselves. They began the process of designing the event software they would be using, taking advantage of their own communications capabilities, first and foremost.

The first thing they needed to do was meet with various stakeholders inside the company and figure out the must-have features in their custom platform. She said that reeling in people’s ambitions for version 1.0 of the platform was part of the challenge that they faced trying to pull this together.

“We only had three months. It wasn’t going to be totally perfect. There had to be some prioritization and compromises, but with our APIs we [felt that we] could totally make this happen,” Chang said.

They started meeting with different groups across the company to find out their must-haves. They knew that they wanted to recreate this personal contact experience. Other needs included typical conference activities like being able to collect leads and build agendas and the kinds of things you would expect to do at any conference, whether in-person or virtual.

As the team met with the various constituencies across the company, they began to get a sense of what they needed to build and they created a priorities document, which they reviewed with the Signal leadership team. “There were some hard conversations and some debates, but everyone really had goodwill toward each other knowing that we only had a few months,” she said.

Signal Concierge Agent for virtual Twilio Signal Conference

Signal Concierge Agent helps attendees navigate the online conference. Image Credits: Twilio

The team believed it could build a platform that met the company’s needs, but with only 10 developers working on it, they had a huge challenge to get it done in three months.

With one of the major priorities putting customers together with the right Twilio personnel, they decided to put their customer service platform, Twilio Flex, to work on the problem. Flex combines voice, messaging, video and chat in one interface. While the conference wasn’t a pure customer service issue, they believed that they could leverage the platform to direct requests to people with the right expertise and recreate the experience of walking up to the booth and asking questions of a Twilio employee with a particular skill set.

“Twilio Flex has Taskrouter, which allows us to assign agents unique skills-based characteristics like you’re a video expert, so I’m going to tag you as a video expert. If anyone has a question around video, I know that we can route it directly to you,” Chang explained.

They also built a bot companion, called Signal Concierge, that moves through the online experience with each attendee and helps them find what they need, applying their customer service approach to the conference experience.

“Signal Concierge is your conference companion, so that if you ever have a question about what session you should go to next or [you want to talk to an expert], there’s just one place that you have to go to get an answer to your question, and we’ll be there to help you with it,” she said.

The company couldn’t do everything with Twilio’s tools, so it turned to third parties in those cases. “We continued our partnership with Klik, a conference data and badging platform all available via API. And Perficient, a Twilio SI partner we hired to augment the internal team to more quickly implement the custom Twilio Flex experience in the tight timeframe we had. And Plexus, who provided streaming capabilities that we could use in an open source video player,” she said.

They spent September testing what they built, making sure the Signal Concierge was routing requests correctly and all the moving parts were working. They open the virtual doors on Wednesday morning and get to see how well they pulled it off.

Chang says she is proud of what her team pulled off, but recognizes this is a first pass and future versions will have additional features that they didn’t have time to build.

“This is V1 of the platform. It’s not by any means exactly what we want, but we’re really proud of what we were able to accomplish from scoping the content to actually building the platform within three months’ time,” she said.


Source: Tech Crunch

With a Warby Parker playbook, SISU raises funding from Greycroft to face off against cosmetic clinics

With so many people getting botox and filler treatments to their faces these days (or are they, during the pandemic?), it’s probably no wonder that venture capital has decided to look at the space. In the same way that the small and scattered market of spectacle/optometrist shops were disrupted by startups like Warby Parker, so the extremely variable experience of back-street cosmetic clinics are ripe for targeting.

Step in SISU, a chain of cosmetic clinics created by a serial tech entrepreneur who will apply tech startup methodology to this relatively untapped world.

SISU has now raised a $5.5 million Series A led by Greycroft and Bullpen Capital. Mana Ventures and the Gaingels Syndicate also participated in the round, alongside angel investors, including Liam Casey, founder and CEO of PCH, and Dan and Linda Kiely, the co-founders of Voxpro.

The funds will be used to go into the U.S. cosmetic clinics market and standardize “facial feature” pricing for things like lips, chin, under-eye, cheeks and brow. It will also offer treatments such as anti-wrinkle injections, dermal and facial fillers, laser and teeth whitening. There is even going to be a “face as a service.” — so that would be FaaS.

According to SISU, botox consumers are charged per unit, and often sold the maximum number of units, regardless of the results. SISU will set a price for what you want done and that’s it. A website will have “instant online evaluations,” and digital bookings.

The company will launch an e-commerce platform in the U.S. and 20 medical-retail clinics are planned for the East Coast. It already has eight now in Ireland.

Dubbed by its founders as the “One Medical for aesthetic treatments,” SISU is led by Dr. James Cotter, Dr. Brian Cotter and Irish entrepreneur Pat Phelan, who previously made his name in the telecoms market. Phelan founded both Trustev, which exited to TransUnion in 2015 for $44 million, and Cubic Telecom, which exited in 2012.

They are tapping into a big market. The “medical aesthetics” market is projected to reach $14.5 billion by 2023, according to some estimates.


Source: Tech Crunch

Starlink puts towns devastated by wildfires online for disaster relief workers

SpaceX’s Starlink has showed its utility in connecting far-flung locations to the internet quickly and relatively simply in Washington, where like much of the west coast wildfires have caused enormous damage to rural areas. A couple small towns in the state have received Starlink connections to help locals and emergency workers.

The town of Malden was almost completely destroyed, but restoration efforts are underway, and of course it helps to be able to access the internet for communicating with residents and authorities. With power and cellular service unreliable, satellite internet is a good temporary option, and Starlink stepped up.

As SpaceX founder Elon Musk said on Twitter, the company is prioritizing emergency responders and areas without internet:

The effort is being organized through the state’s Emergency Management Division, a part of the military that, as you might expect, helps manage emergencies.

Steven Friederich, an EMD public information officer, explained in an email that the division has been using Starlink for a few weeks to provide public internet hotspots. The town “had a pretty big fire come through town and it burned a good chunk of the area, including the fire station and the post office. There simply hasn’t been a way to get a fast and reliable Internet connection there for the public to use,” he said.

A phone, wifi hotspot, and outlet for use by people in wildfire affected areas in Washington.

Image Credits: WA EMD

“Space X volunteered the use of their equipment to us and our Emergency Communications staff were grateful to have it,” he continued. “We were given seven terminals to use wherever we could use them free of charge. Space X, as you know, doesn’t have coverage everywhere in the country, but as it happens, they have coverage here in our state.”

That would be due to the incompleteness of the Starlink satellite constellation, which will eventually be thousands strong but currently “only” has about 600. Reliable coverage is limited to certain areas while SpaceX fills out the system.

The EMD has been working for some time on the problem of how to maintain connectivity in the case of a disaster (or indeed a pandemic) and Starlink happened to be the method they chose to test out this time.

“This is a device we could definitely utilize should we have more wildfires or even larger disasters, such as a Cascadia Subduction earthquake event, where communication problems would be a huge hurdle,” said Friederich.

The Cascadia Subduction event is the looming catastrophic earthquake on the order of a 9 referred to colloquially (and fatalistically) by those in the region as “The Big One.” If there’s anything left at all after that, satellite internet connections will indeed be helpful in putting things back together.


Source: Tech Crunch