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Facebook Taking Initiatives to Help Improve the Job Conditions for its Contractors

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Facebook hires contractors for its different kinds of jobs, like moderation of the content as well as training the AI, etc. Those contractors are hired on the hourly bases. But recently, The Verge exposed the poor condition of those contact-bound moderators at the Facebook workplace in an article. Following which, Facebook finally is planning to increase the salaries of those contractors and will be providing them with extra benefits in order to improve their job conditions.

facebook moderator
Image Source: techspot.com

The company said in a blog post, “Today we’re committing to pay everyone who does contract work at Facebook in the US a wage that’s more reflective of local costs of living. And for those who review content on our site to make sure it follows our community standards, we’re going even further. We’re going to provide them with a higher base salary, additional benefits, and more supportive programs given the nature of their jobs.”

The company had set a basic pay of $15 per hour for every contractor in 2015, which in the past four years remained the same. Now according to the announcement from the company, after the increase in the wages the contractors in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York City and Washington, DC will soon receive a $20 hourly pay, and the ones from Seattle will earn $18 per hour. And this is not limited to the U.S. alone, but the contractors working with Facebook internationally will also get a hike in their hourly pay.

The Verge’s article on the Facebook moderator exposed a lot about the bad effect on the mental health of people. Many of those moderators even became suicidal. This has been a matter of concern for Facebook too. So now the company is also working on developing tools, that can help in protecting the moderators’ mental well being. According to the company, it will be providing its contractors with resilience training and counselling at their workplace.

The company will also be providing the moderators with other benefits including a minimum 15 days of paid holidays, sick leaves, and $4000 new child benefits for the new parents, who could not get the paternal or maternity paid leaves.

Also for the first time, the company now will provide the contractors with new options while moderating the Facebook content, such as they will now be able to blur an image temporarily for review.

The company said that the moderators and the contractors are the essential part of the company and their well being is the most required thing for the company as they “provide important services across a content review, security, culinary, transportation and other teams” and help in maintaining the content according to its community guideline.

Amazon Wants its Employees to Quit their Jobs at Amazon to Start a New Delivery Business

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Amazon has just revealed that it is going to expand its Delivery Service Partner program, by providing up to $10,000 cost cover to its employees to start their own package delivering business. The company had launched the Delivery Service Partner program last year, which is an initiative taken by the company to create a network of independent delivery lineups. Under the program, 200 Amazon delivery businesses have already been established since last year.

Amazon Delivery Service Partner program
Image Source: mashable.com

The company revealed that many people are interested in starting their own package delivery business. In fact, many of Amazon’s existing employees have expressed their interest in the same. According to Amazon, the main motive of the company behind this incentive program is to render faster delivery to its clients, especially to speed up the one day delivery for its Amazon Prime members.

“We received overwhelming interest from tens of thousands of individuals who applied to be part of the Delivery Service Partner program, including many employees. We’ve heard from associates that they want to participate in the program but struggled with the transition. Now we have a path for those associated with an appetite for opportunities to own their own businesses.” said Dave Clark, senior vice president of worldwide operations at Amazon, in a statement.

The company announced that it will be providing a $10000 of cover to its employees who will be selected for the program. Also, the company will pay a sum of three months’ gross salary of those employees who will be leaving their jobs to start the delivery business. The ones who will be selected for the incentive plan will also be able to rent the blue vans from Amazon.

The offer is valid for all full-time, part-time as well as for the warehouse employees, who already work in the packaging and delivery department of the company. The program will help Amazon ditch the conventional delivery methods including post, UPS as well as other delivery methods such that it will be able to increase the delivery speed for all its customers.

The company claimed that the employees who will be starting their delivery business with Amazon will be able to earn yearly profits up to $3,00,000. On the other hand, this service not only will be beneficial for Amazon in terms of faster delivery but it will automatically help the company to build a huge infrastructure for its delivery business at the minimum cost.

Dell Wants to Bring Automated and Efficient Cloud Infrastructure

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Hybrid-cloud
Image Source: channelfutures.com

Dell, one of the biggest computer maker company, which started its journey 35 years ago by selling PCs directly to the consumer is now planning to expand its cloud infrastructure to make it more intelligent, automated and efficient.

At the Dell Technologies World 2019 held in Las Vegas, Michael Dell the founder, chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies, revealed about the new Dell Technologies Cloud offering, that will be a combined project of Dell, Azure, Microsoft and VMWare. All those companies have partnered with each other to accelerate the digital transformation for their customers and bring a hybrid cloud solution to them. All the three will be combining their data centres, workplace solutions and cloud technologies to attain the very objective.

“Every business, every organisation, every government, and every healthcare organisation needs to re-imagine itself in this digital age. There are an explosion and tsunami of data that is sweeping us into the digital age. Data is our greatest asset and most important resource. Turning that data into action and progress and outcomes and success is the heart of digital transformation,” said Dell.

According to the company, other companies own their separate clouds, and it becomes tough for them to set up a multi-cloud strategy. So to simplify such complex tasks Dell is planning to bring a hybrid cloud solution, that will also render easy to handle interface. Dell’s cloud approach revolves around VMWare and targets to connect with public cloud service providers like AWS.

“For many organisations, the increasingly diverse cloud landscape is resulting in an enormous amount of IT complexity, and no one is more qualified or capable to help customers solve this challenge than Dell Technologies,” said Jeff Clarke, the vice chairman of products and operations at Dell.

HTC Might Exit the Chinese Smartphone Market Soon; Pulls Smartphones from Major Chinese Market

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The Taiwanese handset maker, HTC, had recently revealed that it would stop selling its handsets at the two of China’s largest eCommerce portals, JD.com and Tmall, temporarily. And, finally, it has pulled off its smartphone chain from the two stores. This step taken by the company has compelled everyone to think that the company might be planning to take an exit from the Chinese smartphone industry.

htc china exit
Image Source: consumercomplaintsnumbers.co

In the recent times, the rumours were making rounds that Google was planning to acquire the company, but later, Google was only able to acquire the HTC’s Pixel team in a $1.1 billion deal. After Google’s acquisition, over 2,000 HTC engineers moved to work for Google. After the deal, HTC took to exit from India last July. So, from the decision of not selling its smartphones for a temporary period, it is pretty easy to predict that HTC might also be thinking of exiting China in the same way.

For now, the company has drawn off all its smartphones from the two eCommerce giant websites as well as their flagship stores. The company has also ceased the selling of its products from the other physical retail stores in China. But the company is still selling its smartphones, except some of its flagship smartphones including U11 or U11+, at its own official store as well as the VIVE flagship physical store in Shenzhen.

The company confirmed the news through a blog post, stating, “Due to the consideration of HTC China’s long-term business strategy, we will temporarily close the HTC mobile phone Jingdong flagship store and Tmall flagship store. HTC smartphones and accessories can still be purchased through HTC Official Mall and HTC VIVE Flagship Store. We will continue to provide quality pre-sales and after-sales service as always.”

The company has been seeing great competition due to the rise of the other rival companies, including Oppo, Vivo and Xiomi, that has dropped down its smartphone sales to a greater extent. Despite pulling off its flagship smartphones from the major retail stores in China, the company is still trying to get its hold in its other business arms.

The company has emphasised its focus on the HTC 5G Hub project that according to it will be bringing 5G to every home. HTC has also moved its focus towards its VR efforts. The company has also confirmed that it will be bringing the Android 9 update to its U11, U11 Plus as well as U12 smartphones by the end of May and starting of June.

Deepfake Salvador Dali is Back to Life as Fakedeep; Takes Selfies with Museum Visitors

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Artificial Intelligence has always amazed people with its surprising experiments. One of its wing Fakedeep is also one really amazing technique that even can bring back the deads. Yes! This has happened in the past. In the month of February, Burger King featured producer-director Andy Warhol in one of its ad eating a Whopper. There has been a question on the appearance of Warhol as he has been dead for nearly 32 years.

Video Source: The Dali Museum (YouTube.com)

And now, with the help of same technology, Dali Lives, has brought the surrealist painter Salvador Dali back to life, who had died 30 years ago, in 1989. Dali Lives is an exhibition unit that hosts exhibitions in the Dalí Museum in Florida for Dali’s paintings. The museum has partnered with ad agency Goodby, Silverstein & Partners (GS&P) to create a look-alike virtual being of Dali, who can interact with the museum visitors and even can take selfies with them.

The company has used the machine learning powered video editing technique to re-create the virtual Dali. They made the use of various pictures of Dali, and the video interviews, to mimic his voice and gestures. The company re-created his face by pulling over 6,000 frames through his images and interviews. It took 1000 hours for the AI algorithm to learn all of Dali’s facial expressions. An actor with the same general physical characteristics of Dali’s body did his body double, and the facial expression of Dali was imposed on the actor’s face. A voice-over artist learned his speech and mimicked his voice following Dali’s past interviews.

The video of virtual Dali is displayed in a kiosk. To watch the video, the visitors have to press a button on it. Dali will appear on the screen, and then have a conversation with the visitors. For this, the engineers made sure to include some of his quotes and the famous statements in the conversation. Every visitor will have a different experience with Dali, as every time he will be talking about different things. And after a 45-minute conversation, he will ask the visitors to take a selfie with them. Here too, the visitors won’t be ones to click the selfie, in fact, Dali will click the picture, and even, will text it to those visitors.

Though people have been concerned about the usage of Fakedeep technique, as people can also misuse it to defame other people, Dali Museum has no such intentions, but it created the virtual Dali to acknowledge his 30th death anniversary.

CollegeDekho Raises $8M in the Series B funding, Plans to Add More Educational Institutions to the Platform

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CollegeDekho, the Indian ed tech platform, went through its round of Series B funding, where it has raised $8 million. The company’s existing investors, including GirnarSoft Education and Man Capital, including the other investors, raised the funding, who also raised a $2 million in the Series A round for the company in 2018.

collegedekho
Image Sourec: whizsky.com

GirnarSoft Education is the parent company of CollegeDekho, a startup based in Gurugram India, that helps the students to connect with different colleges so that they can choose the right college for their higher studies. A chatbot has been set on the app to respond to the basic queries from the students. The students can also refer to the website or the app for information to know more about various colleges in which they are interested, like their location, courses they offer, and the fee structure, etc. They can also track their exams, and the other activities going on in the colleges, through the CollegeDekho app.

The company has even hired over 3000 customer care executives to ensure that the users get access to all the information they want. Those executives also help the students with the recommendations for colleges according to their interest and knowledge.

The stats given by the company claims that it entertains more than five million sessions from students on the platform every month, and over 8000 students took the help of CollegeDekho for their college admissions last year.

With a seed funding of $1 million from GirnarSoft Education, Ruchir Arora founded the company in 2015, and since then, the company has raised $13 million. The company plans to use the capital to enhance the boundaries for the platform so that it can serve the users by connecting with more colleges and educational institutions in India as well as abroad.

The company aims to help those students who after completing high school, due to lack of knowledge, are not able to find the best suitable college for them. In fact, due to less literacy rate, the parents of those students suffer from the dilemma of opting for the right choice for their children.

CollegeDekho makes its profits by charging a minimal fee from the students. Last year, the calculated revenue for the company was $3.2 million, which is pretty impressive. The company has listed over 36,000 certified educational institutes on the CollegeDekho app.