Coming up on DTNS, do you trust a digital driver's license? Amazon wants to hire even more people, and Patrick Norton is here to tell us how the chip shortage might affect your holiday shop. This is the Daily Tech News for the first of September, the first day ever in September 2021. Anyway, in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. Dogtown, St. Louis, not San Francisco. I'm Patrick Norton. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. You've just missed why Sarah Lane once hated lasagna and her freestyle rapping, if you weren't listening to Good Day Internet. So get that wider show, become a member, Patreon.com slash DTNS. That is where you can join our top patrons like Philip Shane, Paul Boyer, and Brad. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Nikkei Asia's sources say that Google began development of its own arm-based CPUs for use in Chromebooks with plans to roll them out in 2023. The company also reportedly ramped up plans to produce CPUs for its Pixel smartphone line. The latest update to the messaging app Telegram supports an unlimited number of viewers for live stream content. Previously, it was limited to a thousand. So if you've ever hit that thousand in one person, now you don't have a limit. The app also lets users remove captions and sender names when forwarding a message. Earlier this week, the analysts at Sensor Tower reported that Telegram passed one billion global downloads. Microsoft will announce new products at its surface hardware line on about its surface hardware line on September 22. The online event will discuss devices, also Windows 11. Images of a surface duo, the hinged Android device, had leaked earlier this year. So an official announcement is expected along with new laptops. Wall Street Journal sources say the Apple Watch will get new health features as early as 2022. So what are we thinking they're going to have? Looks like maybe a thermometer to help with fertility tracking and a tool to tell when your blood pressure is increasing. Probably when you look at how much you paid. Apple's also reportedly seeking FDA approval on a feature to track atrial fibrillation as well as alerts about drops in blood oxygen levels. Bloomberg sources say Intuit is in talks to acquire MailChimp in a deal worth over $10 billion. The deal isn't finalized and sources say that other companies are still interested in MailChimp, so remains to be seen. But if it goes through, this would be Intuit's largest acquisition to date. All right, let's talk about SmartBulbs. Let's do it. I love SmartBulbs. I've got one behind me right now. Philips announced new updated Hue SmartBulbs, that's its SmartBulb line, including brighter 75-watt and 100-watt equivalent standard Hue bulbs, new filament bulbs that can change color temperature, and a new candle-shaped filament bulb, also updated light strips and light tubes that sink its colors with TV content. New Cigna, that's its parent company, Philips parent company, floor and table lamps that can display multiple colors at once, also coming out, and a new ceiling light called Infuse that can change colors and send light up onto the ceiling above it as an accent. The brighter bulbs are available now. The lights drip and lamps are coming in October, and the light tube and ceiling light coming in January. An update to the Hue app also adds support for dynamic scenes that continually shift color and light coming later this year, also a natural light scene that adjusts color temperature throughout the day to mimic the light of the sun. Maybe you have a murky apartment? Could be good. And if you're intrigued by syncing lights to your TV, the Hue Play HDMI sync box that enables that is getting an update later this year to support 120 Hertz gaming up to 1440p resolution, with 4K support still limited to 60 Hertz. The company also announced a new partnership with Spotify to sync lights based on music played. This is great. This is so fun. So let me preface this. I don't actually sync anything to music with my Hue lights or media, you know, if I'm watching a movie. But I have, gosh, I don't know, maybe 12 Hue lights in my apartment. Yeah, plus a couple down here in my studio. And I'm all very much into the scenes throughout the day. I do actually take advantage of light color. But something, something, the thing that stuck out to me the most is the temperature stuff based on, you know, morning versus night, which is something that we all are have gotten very used to when it comes to our screens.  I actually find that much more helpful when it comes to the ambiance of the room that I'm in. I was thinking like it's nice to be able to switch between, you know, the daylight Kelvin because it makes it so much easier to work on projects versus, you know, the softer light that makes me look less like I need to be put into a box and buried to take a dirt nap as we were discussing earlier. I learned what a dirt nap was today. But no, I love and and Hugh Phillips is not the obviously Hue lights are not the only smart lights that you can buy. There are others on the market. I have a couple life axes as well. And using Amazon's assistant, you can make different smart lights talk to each other fairly well. And I think that's all going to get easier with the release of what are they calling it now, where all the companies are getting on board with smart matter. Yes, exactly. But but I'm a Hugh fan. I really am. There are so many fun, fun routines that I've even put into place. And then later been like, Yeah, that's not really a great routine, but it's still kind of fun to try out. Yeah, I actually like the ceiling lamp that points up at the ceiling. That's a cool effect. It doesn't feel like it's a big deal until you see it in action. You're like, Oh, yeah, that does look really cool. And I I wouldn't mind trying either the light tube or the other one that that that kind of keeps the color on the wall behind the TV synced with the color temperature of what you're watching. I think that can be fun. Yeah. Apple announced Arizona and Georgia will support digital drivers licenses and state IDs in Apple Wallet, a feature launching in iOS 15. Connecticut, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Oklahoma and Utah are also expected to follow Arizona and Georgia in this, although we didn't get a timeline for those states. US Transportation and Safety Authority or TSA, the folks who handle security screening at US airports will accept the digital IDs for domestic air travel. So they're not just being issued by these states. You'll be able to use them to get through security. Just tap your phone on a reader to present the ID. You don't need to unlock it. That was one of the big worries about this is like unlocking a phone, handing it over to somebody. A lot of people weren't comfortable with that. You won't have to do any of that stuff. It'll be like showing a card. You'll you'll just tap it. The info on the license will be stored locally, but it does need to be verified by the state before it shows up as valid. So there is a little information exchange between you and the state. Apple isn't the only one doing this either. Oklahoma, Delaware and Arizona have worked with a company called Idemia to develop an app for digital drivers licenses. Colorado and Louisiana have had digital IDs for more than two years. And yes, other countries have digital IDs. Estonia is laughing at all of us, but we don't have time to go into all of that right now. This system could be secure and protect your privacy. It's not impossible. It's perfectly conceivable that the system could work that way. And in fact, it was very nice to find out that you will not have to unlock this, but Apple isn't giving out all the details about how this works or what information is shared with the state to validate it, which if it's limited information, it's perfectly fine. We just don't know. There's an ISO standard out there for digital IDs. If Apple's following that, I think everybody feel more comfortable because that's been well vetted and reviewed by security professionals. But Apple hasn't said if they're following it or not. So where I stand on this, I don't know about you all, but I just think I would like Apple to let security professionals vet this, be more on Apple and open about this particular thing. And I think you would rest a lot of concerns. Patrick, I know you're skeptical. You know, it's less of a skeptic than not wanting to have a single point of failure for not just my communications, my email, my navigation, my airplane tickets, my credit cards, and now my driver's license. All it takes is one terrible moment or dropping your phone or something or someone accidentally picking up your phone. For me, I prefer to have things separate so that I can't lose everything all at once. So you don't put everything in one wallet, you kind of move it around so you're safe? Well, I mean, there's some stuff I keep on my phone. I don't actually have a wallet oddly enough. Everything gets deposited in a roll in my front pocket. Whereas my dad used to say, if they steal it from there, they probably earned it. But also, my dad was like, his cash was in one pocket, his credit card was in another pocket, his checkbook was in another pocket. You know what I mean? Because he grew up in some shifty cities when being pickpocketed was actually a thing. So for me, though, having lost an ID and then had to deal with getting onto a plane without an ID or having, I just, I get the convenience, I get the convenience of having all of that information or all those credit cards on your phone. But I also run into so many places like gas stations without chip readers or gas stations without card readers or tap readers. We should be clear that this system isn't replacing your physical driver's license. It's just in addition to. That's why I like this. I haven't been on a plane in some time, but it's always the same thing. It's like, okay, well, I've got my boarding pass on my phone.  But then I always have to fumble for my ID. And if I could just have both of those things on my phone, I'm still going to have my ID with me as like a failsafe. You know, you really need to see it. I've got it. It's kind of like how I use, because I have an iPhone, I use Apple Pay all the time, but I don't leave my credit cards at home because what if I need them? You know, and I know that the idea is to replace these physical things, replace the wallet. No wallets ever needed. I don't think we're anywhere close to that yet, but convenience factor wise, I love this idea.  I don't know. It's, when it works, it's amazing. And when it doesn't work, it's another layer of computerized frustration. I don't know. It's kind of fascinating to watch the idea that maybe someone will actually accept your ID on your phone. Like I just feel like there's going to be so many, you know, underage college kids trying to sneak into bars doing this and, you know, what app is going to slide through? What does the fake idea on your Apple wallet look like? I had to put my car in the shop last week and they needed to see proof of insurance. And I was like, gosh, I don't know. For some reason, I don't have my insurance card.  And I was like, Oh yeah, great. That's easy enough because I have insurance. But I also thought this is, you know, again, another layer of complexity. Well, Amazon employs almost one million people in the U.S. It's a lot of people. But Amazon's new CEO, Andy Jassy, announced that Amazon wants to get even bigger. The new CEO announced the company's plans to hire 55,000 people for corporate and technology roles in the coming months. And Reuters also notes that that figure alone, that 55,000 additional people is equal to a third of Google's headcount and almost all of Facebook's headcount. 40,000 of the new jobs will be in the U.S. with the rest in India, Germany, Japan, and a couple other countries. Some of that will be for existing retail and cloud and advertising businesses, while some is for new efforts like Project Kuiper, which aims to launch satellites to provide broadband access, which we've talked about on the show in the past. And most of the positions are in new roles. They're not vacant roles left open after people quit. They are new hires. Amazon's annual job fair takes place September 15th, and we'll probably know a little bit more about who gets hired after that. Man, I was reading this story and had not kept track of just how many people Amazon employs. The fact that a small percentage increase for them is equal to all of Facebook kind of blew me away. And Patrick, you found out that they're getting close to Walmart as far as the size of the employment. Yeah, so NBC News wrote this up, and they're reporting 1.3 million globally, 950,000 U.S. employees, not including all of the contractors like drivers that work for Amazon. This is just full-time employees. And then Walmart currently employs, quote, 1.6 million people in the U.S. So one in every 169 people in the U.S. workforce works for Amazon. About one out of every 100 people in the U.S. workforce, NBC News says, is employed by Walmart, which is a lot of people. Yeah, it's kind of mind-boggling, really. So, you know, Andy Jassy wants to look good.  So promising some new jobs, not a bad way to do that. 55,000 sounds like a lot until you see the percentage. And, you know, like, honestly for Amazon, that's not even that many, right? Like, it's less than 1% of just their domestic workforce. Speaking of Amazon, we go ahead, Patrick. Is it less than 1%? Like, now I'm doing math. Be careful, everyone, I'm doing math. Math is hard. Well, while you're doing that, just a reminder, we briefly covered this yesterday that Axios' sources said that Amazon is investing in live audio features to expand the content that it can offer through Echo Devices and also its voice assistants. The effort is being led by Amazon's Music Division with a focus on live music, but also looking at talk radio programs and podcasts as an extension of the feature. Sources kind of framed this as a digital radio-like tool for live streaming performances rather than what some other people have compared it to would be a clubhouse knockoff. Amazon also plans to integrate this live audio into Twitch. Interesting stuff there going on with Amazon. Hey, before we move on, do you want to expand your Spanish tech skills? Well, NTX's Dan Campos is here to help. Hello, friends of DTNS. It is time for the word of the day, brought to you by Noticias de Tecnología Express. I bet you have heard the term machine learning when talking about the branch of computer sciences that develops techniques for machines to learn by themselves. Originally, it was translated as Aprendizaje de máquinas, but that expression could be unclear since it could mean that a machine was learning something or a human was learning something about a machine. That is why we use Aprendizaje automático as a proper expression when referring to machine learning. You can learn this and more words by listening to Noticias de Tecnología Express available every Friday. The demand bounced back fast starting in June, and car makers scrambled to get their orders back up. However, by the time they did, the high demand for consumer devices in part caused by work from home meant the factories were now working at or past capacity, and they had not planned for the bounce back and chip demand from the car companies. Other complicating factors contributed as well. Lockdowns at ports reduced working hours and caused backups and containers getting turned around. Sanctions on Huawei by the United States caused a lot of Chinese companies to just start stockpiling chips for fear of being next. A little bit of a toilet paper effect there. Factory fires in Japan, cold weather shutdowns of NXP and Samsung factories in Texas, and a few other weather-related events complicated things as well. Fast forward to now. When everybody needs chips and there's not enough capacity, it will take a year or two to bring new fabs online to increase the capacity, and even when you can get chips, logistics is still a mess.  Where are we today? Tuesday, Vauxhall Motors said it didn't think the shortage would improve for the auto industry this year. No surprise there, they're not the first to say so. Chevy has stopped making its Bolt EVs already because of the chip shortage, but now has delayed resumption of that production because of a defective battery recall. GM had already paused three plants that make pickup trucks. Last week, Toyota announced a 40% reduction in its automotive production, and also last week, TSMC announced it's going to raise its chip prices. It just has to. 10% for the advanced chips used in consumer electronics, and 20% for less advanced chips used in cars because there's more demand for those. TSMC usually sets prices with its clients in August and September, so that's normal for them to do it now. The effect on what you pay won't show up until sometime early next year. Oh, and some typhoons off the southern coast of China in July and the rise in Delta variant infections of COVID-19 have also been slowing the turnaround of containers. Reuters reported that August 5th container rates reached fresh highs, and shipping companies are now charging four to 10 times the normal price to move cargos. The rates are expected to remain high until February 2022. So that's where we are with the current chip shortage and logistics nightmare. Patrick, tell us about our holiday gadget shopping. I'm just a little ray of sunshine. I'm just DTNS' little ray of sunshine, Tom. So it's funny he's not the right word, but when you look at TSMC raising their prices, in addition to that, they're going to stop basically. They traditionally have been bulk discounts. I think Apple consumes roughly 20% of their production. There's some other major clients there. You may think of places like Qualcomm, AMD, NVIDIA, and a whole bunch of other people. So it's going to be kind of crazy because they, and it's not just car companies. I'm dealing with somebody who makes, a friend of mine, somebody who makes audio equipment, has been buying USB controllers, gray market, because they literally cannot source one of the simplest parts in the devices he builds through normal channels. And they're already currently paying like 200% on the cost of those parts. So it's one, it's not just cars. It's not just GPUs. It is consumer electronics everywhere. Oh, we also have coppers up 200%. Steel is up the better part of 200%. And the shipping rates, you mentioned the increases. I mean, you've literally gone from a 40-foot container costing like $4,000 to something like $11,000, $12,000, $13,000, $15,000, cue the warning from the audience, Tom, where I'll be correct and double-check us there. We're good. Feel free to tell us. And it's literally just doubled between July and August because of some of the COVID problems in the typhoons, but it was already up like three, three and a half times in August.  Some people commented when I was talking about TSMC on Twitter, they're like, this is a monopoly. And it's like, no, not for the commodity level chips, like the 40 nanometers stuff. There are at least 10 major fabs that are capable of producing the relatively simple chips, not the super high-end ones. And that's a good point because that's where the shortage is. The shortage is not with the seven nanometer chips. The shortage is with the commodity stuff, with the stuff that's easier to make and made in abundance, but it's needed by more people. Yeah. And it's so much of the, there have been capacitor shortages. I've been told there have been substrate shortages. Like one of the things I've told us is at least one GPU manufacturer is like, we could put out more cards or more chips if we could just mount the chips on something, but we can't. So there's been supply line issues all the way down. On the upside, memory prices are falling after they hit a high earlier this year, GPU availability. We were, I think laughing is the right word, but GPU sales are actually up over last year significantly. You just haven't been able to buy them because they're still not enough to satisfy everybody's demand at this point. And that's been, I don't expect that to change much before. It'll be interesting. Using feeling words in the group, I feel that when Intel launches their GPUs next year, and they've bought a significant amount of memory to build into GPUs, we might see some easing in that. Also, very, very curious to see what those GPUs perform like when they ship. And that's a question for another day. Bottom line, chopperly for Xmas, don't order Hanukkah or Kwanzaa or anything else you want to celebrate or birthdays. I wouldn't expect your next GPU until 2022. Don't expect car flashes to fall anytime soon. And good luck. Yeah. So in other words, holiday prices might not be that bad because of the delayed effect. But after the first of the year, you might see some spikes. Yeah. And speaking of computer hardware, we were always like, don't buy your PC parts piecemeal. Save your money when you have your money. Buy it later because over time, you're always either going to pay less for today's chips or boards or motherboards, or you're going to pay the same amount and get more performance. At this point, I feel like if you're looking to buy something, keep an eye on the availability. We've seen things that never run out of supply. Subwoofers, like SVS has done a really good job of managing Subwoofer availability, but Shoe, Monoprice, RSL Labs, it's been really strange. I've never seen AVR's sell out, but like Denin sold out of all their AVRs for a while last year. So if you're thinking about shopping, keep an eye on availability and shop early because it may not be available later. And I'm going to hate to tell people to go buy stuff. But it's a temporary exception to the general rule, right? I'm going to call my shot right now. Everybody's buying stuff. At first, it was because of work from home. Now it's because of spending more time at home, or because the availability isn't there. And if you see a thing and you're thinking about getting it, you're going to jump on it rather than put it off because it may not be there next time you want to want to find it. I think that is going to lead mid-2022 at the earliest, maybe later, to a glut. I think down the road, because people are like, yeah, I have this laptop. It's good for three or four years. Yeah, I bought that speaker. I don't need another one for a while. We're going to see a glut of consumer electronics. Hopefully that helps to ease the shortage. And you may be able to get some bargains at that point. That would be nice. Yeah. That's not for a while though. That's just me saying that on the other side of this, look for that to happen. Maybe the way I should say it is, when you see that start to happen, that's when you know it's over. That's when you know what kind of got through the situation. It'll be interesting to see the iPhone prices and, oh yeah, I wouldn't expect a lot of big, deep Black Friday deals this year. Yeah, they'll be shallower. It'll be more of a gray Friday this year. Apollo Global Management has completed its acquisition of Verizon's media group. That's the one that includes Yahoo, AOL, a bunch of ad tech media properties like Tech Crunch and Engadget. Verizon Media, now not part of Verizon, will be called Yahoo. They're just putting all the Yahoo properties alongside Tech Crunch and Engadget and AOL under the Yahoo umbrella. It will operate as a standalone company under the Apollo group and Verizon Media CEO Guru Gal Rappan will stay on and he will now be CEO of Yahoo. I thought it would be interesting to touch on this real quickly because we've all been through this before. There was the 99 through 2003 sell-off of tech magazines and publications and Patrick, you worked for Zip Davis when they were managed by an equity group and we're sort of seeing that happen to websites now. We saw CNET sold to Red Ventures and then Red Ventures went off and sold Tech Republic to a holding company. So it's kind of a trend again and I was curious if you had any advice for the people going through that now. Buckle up, kids. I don't know. It's it was really odd to watch a lot of the purchases that were made, especially at Verizon. And it's been hard. I'd like to say something intelligent and soothing, but I feel like private equity tends to come in and tighten up belt buckles that have already been tightened beyond belief and just hang on, folks. And the good news is PC Mag's still around. A lot of those properties that equity companies took over are still around and generally what happens is stuff survives. You're not going to see TechCrunch go away, but it will be a while before that content gets hot again. And as long as they can make it through, then hopefully, things get brighter towards the other end of it. Yeah, I mean, somebody who worked at TechCrunch a few years ago, when Verizon bought AOL's properties, but bought AOL, it was kind of like, we're all like, oh, we're such an autonomous group. What will happen? Nothing. Nothing happened. And that doesn't mean that properties within these kinds of companies that gobble each other up or swap them back and forth don't have issues later on. That does happen. This feels like moving around of management that was never really available to us to start with. Yeah. All right, folks, let's check out the mailbag. All right, let's do it. This one comes from Alan, and this is in response to our conversation about floating pizza yesterday. We were talking about astronauts at the ISS eating floating pizza, and why the pizza was floating, but the toppings weren't floating off of the pizza. And Alan says, remember seeing an interview a while back? By the way, he does link us to a couple of links that describe this, so check it out in our show notes. A while back that talked about how liquids act like glue, indeed, in zero gravity because of the surface tension. And you need to have liquids in everything since anything loose could otherwise float away. Alan says, I tried to find a succinct description of this, the closest I could find is an explainer. He points us to a NASA link. But he says, if you have a few minutes, and this is also a YouTube link that he links us to, here's an interesting and entertaining video that a former astronaut made a couple of years ago about eating food in space. He mentions the thing about liquids and surface tension. He even talks about pizza, although he said he had heard about it, but he was skeptical. Well, we got video evidence now. So thank you, Alan, though. This is great. So it's the surface tension. It's nice to have a little backup for what we seem to be seeing there and get a little more on the science about it. Appreciate that. Yeah, we really do. And if you ever have feedback and anything to add or a question or comment about anything we talk about feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is where to send that email. We also have six brand new bosses, everybody. Yesterday we asked pretty nicely.  Now's the time. And boy, did you deliver. So thank you to our new bosses, Logan, Richard Alvarez, Brad Cash, Craig Godspeed, Chuck Esplaneta, and Lisa Bourbon, all who just started backing us on Patreon. So thank you, Logan. Thank you, Richard. Thank you, Brad. Thank you, Craig. Thank you, Chuck. And thank you, Lisa. Yeah. No, I was blown away when I saw the little list in there today. So thank you. Maybe we could get another list tomorrow. If you're on the fence, if you've been out there, like, oh, I would like my name to have been there. It's not too late. Join us tomorrow. You certainly can. Thank you also to Patrick Norton, who joins us regularly. Patrick, always a pleasure. Let folks know where they can keep up with the rest of your work. AVXL.com. Research for AVXL on your favorite podcatcher. And I'm generally always at Patrick Norton on the Twitters. Excellent. Well, folks, we are live Monday through Friday on this show 4.30 p.m. Eastern 2030 UTC. Put it on your calendar and find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We will be back tomorrow with Justin Robert Young. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com.


I have the pleasure to give you some information about Telecom Deutschland's approach to network function virtualization. What we are doing, what we are planning to do, what we are thinking about, and that's about my presentation and in between I will show you a short movie which we made to explain the network function virtualization, to explain the rational behind it. So, lean back and enjoy the show. What I want to do, I'll give a short introduction about NFV. NFV more than a hype? Is it a question? Or is it a statement? I will give some words about that. And then I'll talk about the network function virtualization as we are currently doing, planning it within Telecom Deutschland. Why we want to do it, what we think about and how we plan to do it. And later on at the end of my presentation I will raise some questions about open source pros and cons looking from a network operator's point of view on that stuff. Open source in general and later on also open stack in special. And as Christmas becomes nearer and nearer I will have a wish list with me about some topics I'd like to raise and I'd like to think the open stack community about.  My name is Stefan Häuser, Stephen or Stefan. However, you like to pronounce it. I am program manager for the virtualization program within the German branch of the technology part of Deutsche Telekom. And we started our program last year in summer. The management decided, yeah, it's quite an interesting thing. Network function virtualization. Let's think about it. Let's think about it in some more depth. And so we put a lot of experts together. Some of them I'm glad to have with me. So I'm not the techie guy. If you have later on some technical questions I may have to pass them to my experts. Thanks guys that you are here with me. And I hope you support me. That's it for that, yeah. Let me just have a look on my notes. Fine. So, network function virtualization. More than a hype? What do you think? I just did a search. What do you think? How many results did I get? What do you believe? I just put NFV in the mask. What do you think? How many results? Pardon? Ten thousands? I'd like to hear some more. Okay. 1.3 million. But I have to admit, it took me a lot of work to convince my browser not to show the Norddeutscher Fußballverband. The Nathan German Soccer Association at the first results. So I had to do a lot of work to get these results directly on the first page. So there may be a lot of unrelated topics or let's say topics not related to network function virtualization with that. But there is anyhow, if it's 1.3 million or if it's only 1.2 or 1.1 million, there's a lot of things going on on network function virtualization. So my statement is it's more than a hype. We left, if you think about the Gardner hype cycle, we left this high peak. But we still have a long way to go to have it really in the network and to have it work in the network, in a carrier-grade network, I have to say. So network function virtualization is of course one innovation driver for telco providers like Deutsche Telekom. So far that movie, so parts of my questions are already answered, but I want to emphasize just two points why we are doing it. The one is scaling. As mentioned in the movie before, to base it on a standard hardware, not on a vendor-specific hardware, not to have the silos, but to distribute it over a lot of other unused servers can help you to use your resources more efficiently. So just to switch off what you don't need or at least have in a low power mode running and later on, if you need more of your resources, you just fire up these resources and use them. It's just shown here for two virtual network functions, VNF1 and VNF2, but if you have more of them, the idea behind is that you will have the peaks, hopefully not at the same time for all of your virtual network functions, but who have distributed peaks. As mentioned in the movie, for the example the SMS, just give you a figure. At the 31st of December last year, starting at 11 p.m. until the 1st of January, 2 a.m. there were sent about 40 million SMS alone inside the network of Deutsche Telekom. I'm not talking about SMS which were sent to other providers or which were then from other providers into the network of Deutsche Telekom. Just within the network of Deutsche Telekom, within three hours, 40 million SMS. So you would need, and you need as we currently have, a lot of resources unused most of the year. And the idea behind the network function virtualization is to have these unused resources used by other network functions and then use their resources which they don't need because usually at Sylvester at midnight most of people are having their Sylvester party or New Year's Eve party and not working though you may use these resources just for kind of that services. So scaling and better usage of resources is one thing and the other thing as also mentioned is time to market. To decouple the hardware cycle and the software cycle. So currently we just have minor releases of new software based on our hardware we have but if you have a major release then in most cases you also have to change the hardware or if you have to change the hardware you also have to change the software. And therefore a decoupling of hardware and software as shown in the lower figure that's one possibility, one chance of network function virtualization we want to use with that. So scaling and time to market or decoupling of hardware and software and that's a rational that are the two main drivers besides others which were mentioned before operational issues, energy consumption and things like that. Yes the whole bunch that's the rational behind of going into such and of course for a traditional network provider new field. And what we think about as we talk about network functions we have several different network functions. We have let's say to give a rough cluster two kinds of functions we have the one who are network and data agnostic and a lot of power in terms of bits per seconds which have to be distributed to a customer. These functions will be distributed over our network near the customer. That's what we call a talk or what we call front-end data center or FTC. These FTCs will be distributed around Germany several locations currently thinking about 20 locations where we will have that but no final decision so far and this will be located as shown here in a distributed cloud. So we are not talking about a distinct data center we are talking about the cloud the FTC cloud and the applications shall be cloud aware. The redundancy will be handled by the application itself meaning in the front-end data center we don't have any backup redundancy concepts or things like that. The application is responsible to ensure that and on the other hand we have the so-called back-end data center which will be only a smaller number currently talking about three and there we will have the stateful applications the applications needing databases, needing a lot of computing power and things like that and that will be located into one of our back-end data centers and there we will have of course high availability concepts but again if the application needs a higher availability then can be provided by the infrastructure itself then the application has to ensure that there is a high availability of this application that means in the back-end data center case we may install an application in more than one location and to have the combination of both locations to reach an availability of 99.999 whatever percent more than the infrastructure itself can provide and for the FTC case we say okay the application itself has to ensure the interworking and the availability meaning if there is one FTC let's say by flood or by a fire out of order another FTC can be taking over the work and the load of the FTC which is not or which is unusable for that time so the application itself the infrastructure on the one hand shall support that and the application on the other hand has to make use of it I think this picture is well known I don't have to explain it just to emphasize the hardware and the virtualization layer and the NFV the manual block on this side that's the data center overview as given by Etsy NFV our approach looks a little bit different okay I step out of the pictures just give me a sign when you're done but the slides will be uploaded so there is no need to take a picture except my face is not uploaded okay so the main difference is here of course you have noticed the open stack here but the main difference is there and where the Etsy picture says okay we have the orchestrator doing the overall stuff we have the VNF managers and we have the infrastructure manager and the VNF managers may have access to the infrastructure managers we say no way the VNF manager must not no should not, no shall not, must not have access, direct access on the what we call infrastructure orchestration the rationale behind this if you have even in our case where we are talking about a private cloud and not a public cloud if we have different product owners different providers of your network function within a huge company like Deutsche Telecom you will have different interests you will have different policies for scaling of those applications and if you don't get a single and unique few on your infrastructure you will be lost you don't know in a case of scaling what's really available everybody scales out but what's happening in case of conflict who will solve this conflict if they have the direct access therefore we say okay we bundle VNF manager and application orchestration we have them and only via the orchestration there is an access to the infrastructure so we have one point of truth where we know about what's happening here and that's the main difference besides some other minor points but that's the main difference regarding our well-known Etsy picture though that's what we plan to do and open source, open stack some remarks from an operator's point of view there are lots of discussions or had been lots of discussions within our company shall we use an open source software or should we stay with the well-known software provided by our vendors should we stay with a silo approach or shall we move to the more open or hopefully totally open approach using network function virtualization I just took them pros and cons of course, positive from our perspective is we have only a limited vendor dependency community-driven development and enhancement and of course fast innovation cycles and there are a lot more but also from our point of view there are some contrasts, there are the negative points it's an unclear feature roadmap when, at which point in time will what feature be available uncertain stability is it really stable what's now provided with that release will it be stable will it be the same two or three releases from now the at least currently lacking maturity of the software can we use it for a carrier-grade network can we use it for carrier-grade requirements and therefore at least from our perspective the carrier-grade version is currently not available and again on the con side there are a lot more topics we had in our discussions nevertheless we decided okay let's try open source let's see it's promising and let's see how it works will it work for us or not we will see we'll do the one or the other tests we are doing some proof of concept on different areas in different locations with different focus but we are trying and that leads me to my wish list for Christmas as I said is coming nearer so there are some topics where we think there is work to be done one thing is the upgrade new release short release cycles as I said it's positive in principle fast innovation cycles though if there is something which doesn't work as expected it's very soon that you have a working version of it that's great but looking on an operator's business when I look the old analog telephone how long is it in our network look at the ISDN how long is it in the network so we are talking about long innovation and business investment cycles you don't replace for 40, 50, 60 million customers you don't just replace every year the technology in your network your business case wouldn't come out so that's one problem and at least the experience we make currently you have to do a lot of configuration work so it's not just installing a new software and everything runs you have to check the configuration does it work and at least currently the different maturity of the different OpenStack projects makes it hard to estimate the maturity of the overall software and how it can be used within our network the APIs, stable APIs are imperative as I said before if we install a new version it should work as before and if there are too many changes we have to adapt a lot of stuff within our network and if we have it's currently not the case but if we are talking about a productive system and we have several VNFs hopefully in future several hundred VNFs within our network we can't adapt them all and we can't spend the effort to do regression tests with all of them that would be several millions of personal days and therefore several millions of euros which we have to spend and of course that's not worth the effort again it will kill any business case another thing is KPIs and SLAs currently when buying a function as a silo we can define in the contract some SLAs at the let's say customer side throughput or whatever there will be but if we just buy the software we have to ensure KPIs at the upper end of our data center let's say at the hypervisor level and on this KPIs we have to provide the VNF provider has to rely on in order to guarantee his SLAs and if there's something going wrong the finger pointing will start your software doesn't work your platform doesn't work and then we start again the discussion who is responsible for this fault who is responsible that let's say one million customer couldn't start a phone call or couldn't surf in the web or couldn't watch a Champions League final game or whatever so that's another thing to think about and how will this be influenced if there is a new release hopefully it gets better but who guarantees it gets better maybe they're the one or the other thing it becomes worse no one knows and again here as mentioned before the error handling a breakup of silos means breakup of responsibilities and monitoring tools and measures also have to be provided in order to see where and in whose responsibility an error comes up as mentioned as well in the film and later on multi-region is a topic for us so we don't want to talk about 20 odd something data centers we talk about an infrastructure cloud and we want to provide our application within this infrastructure cloud maybe it's necessary to provide an application especially in Munich and not in Hamburg so or let's say in Munich and in Nuremberg and where else in the southern part of Germany but not in the northern part of Germany then we have to have measures to define the region where it is deployed and of course if we have the redundancy case then in another region the data center, the NFV or the VNF has to take over in case of failure in another data center so multi-region or spatial redundancy or however you will call it the need for us orchestration of course the whole stuff must be orchestrated and in best case the operational guys have just one tool, one monitor to look at one screen to type and to handle the whole stuff and not for each region a different tool a different log in and different it would become a nightmare so that's again one thing security, of course our security guys are very strict and if they don't approve we won't go into production and therefore of course we need from the application side security measures to avoid problems, to avoid security leaks but also we need at least from our point also from the open stack side some intrinsic security topics and especially when talking about running more than one virtual network function on one bare metal then you have to ensure that the virtual network function A does not corrupt the virtual function B or does something else with the virtual function B which is not allowed so the whole stuff becomes at least from our point a very very severe point and of course quality assurance is necessary including also contributions from third party vendors of course and should ensure the stability of APIs and also the external interfaces so that's my visualist nevertheless you may say hey he asks for a lot of things are they willing to contribute I have to say yes we are willing to contribute we have some people maybe not as much as we would like within the open stack community but we already have several contributors within the open stack community especially in the QA section I'm quite sure you know the statistics just filtered the Deutsche Telekom people so we are willing to contribute we are contributing we are willing to contribute I hope I can convince my management that we can extend the manpower for contributing within open stack to bring this project forward and to make it a helpful project for Deutsche Telekom thank you for your attention so far are there any questions would you just take the mic although the other people at the back can hear you hi Rod Randall from Cirrus Capital as you look at the transition to NFV and the re-architecture of your network where would you place priorities on the financial benefits would it be in savings of cost from the infrastructure do you expect a different pricing of the network functions or do you expect it to be in the agility in the introduction of new services to the communities or something else that's a good question there are several screws to drive in order to make it successful yes of course one is the cost and there probably be as our first calculations show probably be the operational cost a driver of course agility is a topic that's introducing such a kind of technology introducing that decoupling of hardware and software and become more agile is also a transformation process within the organization and it's a mind-change so we have the technology challenge and we also have the mind-change challenge and therefore I think the first step is of course the operational and later on coming together with the mind-change within the organization will be the agility okay all right thank you you're welcome so there was another question in the first row okay thank you very good presentation now Hippolodini from HP there was somebody from Orange earlier in the week who said that you know definitely it's a technical challenge but it's also a very strong cultural change you know in the operators and he said that you know in Orange it would take you know at least six years or maybe more like ten years what is your take on that it's again a good question so the let me give an answer like that the we don't have currently a final roadmap though I can't say let's say six years from today we will have all our network function virtualized and nevertheless we will of course have an approach using the life cycle of our network functions otherwise we will get some problems with our financial guys if you just replace a system you installed a year ago just replace by a virtual system they will say no way so we will have our release cycles which are between three and five years so depending on the maturity of the underlying software it will take at least five years till we have substituted our network functions our siloed network functions by virtual network functions so I think the five to six year you mentioned which was talked about the calling from Orange yes that's reasonable my name is Rao Michelinia I'm from the C3DNA is a startup one of the things that I come from telecom background AT&T Bell Labs and so on so forth so one of the things that telecom is good at is really telecom great service and that was made possible by separation of the data path and the control path so the signaling layer and so on so forth so in this architecture in the data center you do not have a service control plane the management cannot be done without a service control plane it's the same time infrastructure if you want to provide an infrastructure to your service control plane you have to have an infrastructure control plane that the service control plane can actually negotiate saying hey here is my resource requirements you can provide however you provide your resources and so on so forth so in the current data center architecture there is a piece that is missing that used to be the telecom industry and the telecom great trust came from the signaling layer as soon as you pick up the phone there were resources the profile of the the application essentially told exactly what it needed as soon as you dialed the URL the profile of the other dialed number told you what the network has to provide and there was a lot of stuff that was happening so that architecture is missing in the data center with a single data path everything is running around and so to me all of the efforts are not going to resolve the complexity because you are going to put managers of managers and managers of managers so the orchestration is going to be extremely complex so have you thought about separating actually the infrastructure control plane and the service control plane and having a signaling mechanism to negotiate maybe I'm wrong that's a good point completely but what you were talking about is within the network function so the network function itself whether it's a phone service or whether it's an SMS service of course has to ensure the signaling to be working but that has nothing to do with the infrastructure I need within the data center to get this network function up and running but nevertheless that's what our application orchestrator what that block I showed here is doing that block is responsible for allowing a network function to use a resource or not to providing the resource or to take away the resource so there of course is the signaling and that via that way there is information to the EMS or the let's say EMS and WNF manager within the EMS they are talking about they are negotiating if you like with each other and then the application orchestrator as a single point of truth will provide an infrastructure and will of course also take away if it's not used anymore yes of course right but that's that's a missing piece of course and therefore I said in my bushlist orchestration is one of the things I'd like to see Thank you Mr. Heuser, Daniel Goder from Ericsson was a very good presentation on NFV are you planning to kind of merge this project with the things which are going on in the IT cloud and the public cloud so some of the operators have chosen to provide only one infrastructure for public IT and telco is that going to I don't know be a decision later on or is that going to be an infrastructure only for NFV for the current point in time it's focused on the NFV because it's focused on our business regarding the network or our network centric business as I may say maybe there will be later on another step of evolution to bring this together but not decided for today Thank you Yes please I'm Harshad Danna from Ericsson again cloud manager project in Ericsson so it's very good that you mentioned that there is a single point of truth of control for the infrastructure resources and that's the view that we have also taken but seems like it is moving in the direction of allowing VNF managers to directly go into infrastructure orchestration that really puts vendors like us into a dilemma how to go about it with any comments Not only vendors like you but also providers like us we also have the discussions with our vendors and have to convince them no you're not allowed to do with the infrastructure what you like and you're only allowed to do what we like and that's really a crucial point from our point of view I don't want to say Etsy didn't think carefully enough about there may be other reasons or there are other reasons behind that but nevertheless that's our approach and that's our approach we are fighting for yeah of course we're just regarding the agriculture picture we just cut this connection maybe yes of course maybe we will have of course let's say that the VNF manager may listen that's okay but he may not control or must not control to make it clear okay there's another question at the end it's very quick NEC Europe from the OP NFV project website I think that Deutsche Telekom has not joined the project there are a lot a lot more operators involved why haven't Deutsche Telekom joined or is it a political reason behind or technical are you joining later and not decided for today nevertheless there are a lot of initiatives and groups popping up like mushrooms and the problem is the resources you need to have the resources and you need to ensure that the resources of one company within all those groups provide the same opinion and the same statements and so far no decision if we also participate in the open NFV group it's as I said we have to discuss how far we will go into that topic thanks the question I get from your business unit people in fact on the consumer SMB and enterprise side the we all understand the agility the cost reduction and so on but your teams are really concerned about will it make more money will it make more revenue are you considering scenario use cases where you could create innovation paths and what it means for you yes that's that point to be more flexible to be more active or even to admit when one of our competitors is faster than we are to be more reactive so that's of course a point where we think yeah we can do that but as I said before it needs also a mind change within the organization and therefore it's nothing I see in the let's say short future but at least midterm yes of course yeah between the infrastructure orchestration and the vnf manager I wanted to understand your rationale behind that I don't want to make it a design discussion but how do you envision changes in the infrastructure or the vnf manager having to make an autoscale decision and thereby requesting some virtual resources etc. scenarios and how do you handle those if you bypass that connection okay the short answer is that way the rationale behind as I said if you're talking about let's say currently we just checked part of our organization units came about 450, 480 services so if you virtualize all of them and all of the 400 or 500 or maybe 800 or even 100 services are talking directly to your infrastructure without one single point of truth you will have chaos and virtualized chaos as one of our manager says virtualized chaos is still chaos even more complex so that's the point behind it because if everyone may talk may ask for resources may block resources without one referee over it we may run into the problem that we still have lots of unused resources they are blocked by one VNF manager on what decision ever and are not available for other VNFs so that's the point behind it we need this control unit, this referee and therefore we say our single point of truth hit this up there and if a VNF requests more resources it has to be done by the administration via this single point of truth which knows which resources are available where are these resources available does the policy of the VNF allow that let's say resources in Hamburg in another part of Germany are required and does the application allow that these resources will be in the southern part in Munich provided all of our applications will allow if you need in Hamburg more resources that in Munich these resources are provided so and therefore we said just that way and not directly okay then I'm over my time thank you for your attendance thank you for your questions


I'm David Jones and we're at Princesgate Springwater down in Pembrokeshire. At the start in 1991 it was just my father, my mum and my brother and we were working out of some farm buildings and converted farm barns. We had a proper development grant where we relocated from the farm buildings over to this purpose built site which is now 100,000 square foot site. 80% of the business we sell is still and we've also diversified into a flavoured range. We also have a separate business which supplies the sort of home and office cooler water market. I'm Sam Atkinson and I'm the commercial director of Princesgate Springwater. The support that the Welsh Government has given us over the years has been of great importance really to allow us and the brothers to have confidence in continually investing into our brand and our site as a manufacturer and that's whether that be in CAPEX support, trade fairs which again we do annually and still hold our stand on the Welsh Government stand. You can get lost in a big trade show so they're very good at making sure that the right people come to your stand for the opportunities that you're looking to develop your business with because we're very proud about being a Welsh brand and a Welsh producer. Over the last three or four years we've made substantial investment in the site. Four years ago we went from buying in bottles, now we make all our bottles on the site. We've had support putting our initial blower in and also last year we had a little bit of support putting a turnkey Cronus bottling line in which makes us one of the most technically advanced bottom lines in the UK. That gives us a site capacity in the region of about 400 million bottles in the year and we'll probably by the end of next year will have used 50% of that capacity. So that's our ambitious growth plans for the next couple of years. We've worked closely with the Carbon Trust UK who came in and did a full report on us and gave us so many recommendations as to how we could improve our business and be greener. We actually ticked all of those off in a very short space of time to the point where we are now where last year we actually erected two wind turbines, which I guess was the last jigsaw piece really in achieving the status that we've got today which is the only soft drinks manufacturer in the UK to be totally self-sufficient from green energy. Our customers love the fact that we're totally self-sufficient in green energy. They love the fact that it's still me and my brother running the business. The retailers and food service industry totally support local and regional produce and I think it's for us now as Welsh producers to take on that responsibility to maximise on that. And we are as a brand very passionate about our Welsh roots and have got some very exciting marketing campaigns for 2016 actually that we hope will feed through to the retailers and really promote ourselves as that number one Welsh brand.


Hello everyone welcome back to another Premiere Pro tutorial this one I'm gonna show you how to make your voice or your audio sound like an old-time radio or like you're talking on the Telephone and we're gonna do it inside Premiere Pro. Let me show you the original audio and then I'm gonna show you what it sounds like After I've applied the effect here's some everybody. We're gonna make my voice a little bit more cinematic What it sounds like now. Let's go to the new version my voice a little bit more cinematic. All right good stuff How did we do that? Very simple. Let's just get started. Let's start from scratch, okay? So this here is my audio my voice and I've made no effects to it. Nothing's happened to it Okay, the first step is we're gonna go right into the effects panel right here and we're gonna start applying some effects There's not very much to do the first one if you type in para We're gonna go ahead and apply a parametric equalizer. That's right guys Denzel Washington's coming parametric style Drag and drop that onto your audio clip and presto We're gonna go ahead now go to the effect controls panel head up to the top And then we're gonna click on custom setup and when you do that you get this cool little option here now to get that Effect you want to go ahead to the presets and then just drop it down and for this one You want to actually go to old-time radio right there now if we apply that one effect Let's see what it sounds like now That's actually pretty good, but it's kind of quiet don't you think so we're gonna have to louden it up a bit There's a couple ways to do it But my favorite way is we're just gonna do a second effect called single band Pro Compressor compressor and our compressor drag and drop single band Compressor on it. Where did I learn to talk and then we're also gonna go back to the effect controls panel click on edit And then we're gonna click one of the presets the one that I like to use is voice thickener I want to make my voice a little thicker. Although again pancake batter does sound pretty wild voice thickener Apply that it doesn't make a huge difference. Let's just listen Hello, everybody. We're gonna make my voice a little bit more cinematic But you will notice that it has gone ahead and added a little bit more Gain to it. So basically it just made it a little louder now. I don't think it's quite louder now So I'm gonna jack it up to 15 watch as I do this. Okay, that looks pretty good So as I scan through it what we're looking for over here is that we don't want it to go into the red and it's not so Maybe we could even go to 16 something like that. Okay, we just want to avoid clipping. Hello, everybody. Yes, that looks great Okay, guys, we're almost done now if you want to make it a little bit more believable You want to go up top to the window go to workspaces and instead of selecting editing go to audio when you do that You're gonna get this essential sound panel and then you get some options here Now I'm just gonna click on edit instead of going from browse I'm gonna go to edit and then I'm gonna go to well, where is it dialogue, right? And when you see dialogue you get some options. There's some presets I'm gonna click on custom and then you're gonna see here. We've got some options now The one that I like to use is over the intercom But also from the radio is another really good option. Let's go with from the radio again, we've got two radio effects now applied to it and we've increased the level We're gonna make my voice a little bit more cinematic Okay, that might be a little bit too much depending on how much of a radio effect you're going for or a telephone effect But those are the tools that you need to go ahead and do it guys. That's all you need to know Thanks for watching ton more stuff coming up. Stay tuned


This is going to be a quick 30-minute webinar where we're going to walk you through eight steps to divine your project, your goals and constraints, and achieve a buy-in from your stakeholders. My name is Aretha Simons. I'm the webinar producer here at TechSoup, and I have my colleague Amy Hopper. She's going to be in the background. I'm so excited that you're here today. Before we get started, I'm going to go over a few housekeeping. As always, we are going to record this and send you the slides and the video replay within 48 hours. If you need the closed caption, go ahead and click on that CC button at the bottom of your Zoom screen, and you'll be able to get closed caption. If you have a question, please put them in the Q&A. I know oftentimes you put them in the chat. We'll be able to grab them from the chat. But I'm excited to hear about Laura. I've been hearing so much about Laura Quinn. I'm serious, like all over North America, and then all through TechSoup. So we finally have her here today. I have her here today as my special guest. So I'm going to get ready to turn this over to her. She's probably going to say a few hello's before she gets started at the top of the hour. So enjoy your webinar, everybody. Bye-bye. Fantastic. Hello, everybody. I am super excited to be here, and I'm just going to share my screen while we are getting ready to start. And I'll just introduce myself as we are turning over into the hour. I am currently the principal, the only person at Laura S. Quinn Consulting, where I do website and technology strategy for nonprofits. I'm probably best known in the nonprofit world as the founder and founding executive director of Idealware, which has since been renamed, it's been acquired by Tech Impact, so it's under the Tech Impact name, but is still going strong as a way for nonprofits to understand technology decisions and to select software. So definitely check out the Tech Impact Learning Library, which as it's now known, which is my initial work as of 15 years ago. These days, I work with nonprofits, both small and large, to help with the initial stages of projects to go from a vision, whether that is a pretty specific tactical vision or a larger, fuzzier vision, to move through research, if there's budget for research, and get to an action plan. So to move to, for instance, on a website to move from, hey, we should redesign our website, to what that actually means, what's in it, and what does it look like in terms of time and money to get there. I'm also doing these days some mentoring projects. So just like, let's have a weekly or every other week call to talk about what's going on with your project or your website or things like that, and to kind of provide a strategic framework. So more about me at laurasquinn.com. But you are not here to learn about me. You are here to learn about establishing a project vision. And here's what we're going to talk through. So we've got these eight steps in getting started and working towards a vision. I'm going to actually move quite fast through this content, as you would imagine, in our 30 minute session. I'm going to both be talking about some key tips for each of these.  If you are doing a more substantial project, might be useful to you. And I'm not actually going to talk through all of those things I'm showing you in substantial detail.  But they're kind of there for you to look at as an inspiration. You'll get the slides afterwards. And if you find, as I'm going fairly quickly through things, I'm going to try to go through all eight steps in about 20 minutes, please do say as we are looking at it right into the Q&A that you have a question. Here's what your question is or would love to hear more about scheduling the working group for your team. Scheduling the process for your team would actually be a more coherent question. And I can talk more about that. So simply knowing from you where you want more detail is going to be really useful. So let's get underway. Why a project vision? So a project vision, this is the same thing that is frequently called a charter, ensures that everybody has the same understanding of the project and what's important. So for instance, here's a very fairly simple team where we've only got four people in my diagram. I've got Leo, Trevor, let me actually move my controls so I can see everything. Maria and Halima, and they're all trying to collaborate on something. They've all got somewhat different views, hopefully they do intersect as we're showing. And by understanding how they intersect, we kind of defined a vision. Let me just talk a little bit about charter versus the word vision. A vision means something fairly specific in the world of branding and marketing. So if you intersect with that world, you might not want to use the word vision. However, I don't personally really like the word charter, which is more of a project management term. I find that it's hard to get people to engage in actual serious like working sessions around a charter, because it just sounds like something that ought to be simple and easy. And a vision is easier to get people to say, yes, that sounds important, I should do something with it. So there's the reason for those names and why I'm possibly confusing the world a little bit by calling what's usually called a charter a vision. So this can be really quite quick and easy if your team's pretty much already on the same page. If they're not on the same page, it's really important to do it upfront rather than to try to fix a project that's gone really awry because you didn't know people weren't on the same page upfront. So how do you do it? Number one, you want to make sure that you understand who the stakeholders for the project are. So who is going to be affected by the project? Who can help you understand how the processes that will be either impacted or will be replaced will be included? How those are currently done? Who'd be helpful in brainstorming? Who should be represented? Just a tip is almost always in every project to make sure you include people who are the front-ends and the admin parts of the team. So these are people who are both, if it's a front-end, if it's a public-facing project like a website, they're the people who often interact the most with your public. And they're also the people regardless of whether it's internal or external. They're often the people who are doing hidden workarounds for things that they're doing things because someone has told them to do it and it doesn't necessarily make any sense. And so unless you talk to them, you won't necessarily know in fact that that's even done. And this is often a fairly straightforward process of looking at the org chart, making sure that you know who it is that is relevant to the project and is not relevant at all. And then once you've figured out who's relevant, then you need to figure out number two, which is who is going to be in your working group to figure out this vision that we're talking about. I've got this idea of a Rossi framework, so responsible, accountable, consulting informed that you can certainly learn more about. So you obviously can't include 20 different people in a set of conversations. You'll never get to closure, but you should try to create a core committee and to ensure your core committee commits to, that's a lot of Cs, commits to the time and or the meeting meetings that it's going to take to define the vision. They shouldn't be wandering in and out of the process. You want to define what your working process is. So how are you going to work with your committee to actually get to a vision? So you could, for instance, if it's a fairly straightforward project, you could simply create a document that outlines all of the things that we're about to cover, have an hour, get people to read in advance, have an hour long meeting and be done with it. You could have a workshop for every item on the list, which is kind of approximately what I'm picturing here. So it's probably the way I would do this with most clients who had gone to the effort to hire me to do it in kind of a four workshop framework. Something in between, two meetings, three meetings, make sure your committee agrees on how they'll actually work. All right, so that was all upfront. So that's how you put the team together and how you're going to meet in order to actually define the things in the vision. What's actually in the vision? So your goals. What are your organization's goals for the project? What are you hoping to increase or decrease by doing it? So I really like that terminology. So thinking about it as things that you're trying to increase or decrease, rather otherwise you tend to get very luffy goals or you get things, as per my second bullet point here, you get things that are features rather than the end result. Like, so for instance, being able to support a community on your website is that's a feature and it's not even a very clear feature. So it's not clear what you're trying to increase or decrease or really what the end result is. So something like that would be much more like I want to increase the amount of ongoing communication between actually, let's say, board members could be a target audience there or between members on my website. And you can see a number of, these are good goals or well-framed goals that I've put over here. They'll see a lot of post-its in this presentation because it seems like a useful way to present things. Once you brainstorm goals, you will likely have considerably more than one or two. You want to try to approximately rank order them. So to put them in order from whatever, one to 12. And you likely, I've never typically have success in literally saying this is one to 12, but to at least say, okay, here are our three top priority goals. Here is four and five and then six, seven and eight are about the same priority. So kind of to group them at least.  So basically your North Star vision as to where you're trying to get to, what are the things that are going to be the difference between success and failure? Like what's the real reason that you're doing these projects? So like for instance, on the right here, to reduce the staff time needed to see the full relationship with a person, that sounds like a kind of a North Star goal for a constituent relationship management system or improve the first impression a visitor receives through our website. That could be a one of a couple North Star goals for a new website. What are your audiences? Another critical thing to brainstorm and talk through. Who is impacted? So it can be useful to think about this as anybody you're trying to address with the goal. So whether they're internal or external. So you want to be specific. You want to make sure you don't fall into traps of saying staff or the general public. Those are not, they're not actionable. So we don't know anything about what their needs are. We can't know anything about what their needs are from those descriptions. You want to make sure they're actual people. So local businesses is not a person. So instead you would be thinking about, all right, what people are we actually targeting at local businesses? For instance, marketing staff would be a potential audience. Policymakers is another one that is a really critical one to to to parse out. If you are actually trying to get to the decision makers at you know state government, you're talking about incredibly short explainer things or petitions probably in order to get their attention. If you're looking to impact policy, you're actually probably trying to get to the staff at policy makers. So trying to think through who the people are is really important. And again, like goals, you want to divide out your primary audiences. You can't effectively have 12 different primary audiences. You'll simply not serve any of them well. So pick some top audiences that are going to be your primary audiences. What are your audiences goals? So for your top audiences, what do you imagine they would most like to see? So I've used the word imagine here. If you have research about them or if you have the time or budget to do research, this is the probably in my mind the top place on a whole project to use that research budget to understand what your audiences want. Failing that or in addition to that, it's a great thing to brainstorm with a working group. And in fact, what I've got here is this is a screenshot of a Miro board. A Miro is a tool that I like a lot. Miro is M-I-R-O. Miro spelled like it sounds is very similar to it. Great long distance brainstorming tools where the idea here is that I've simply put up, okay, what words would you describe them? What do they want?  As you do this, make sure you're realistic. Your audience is probably not just waiting with bated breath to do whatever you want them to do. They want to make their life easier, they want basic information, they want free things. You make sure that you think through carefully that there's likely a push and pull of what you want versus what they want. And you need to balance that if you want your project to be effective. What are your constraints? So another critical thing to define for your project.  So this typical over thing, the diagram I have here is often called the golden triangle of project management. Time, scope, meaning how many features you have in something and money. You can only pick two if you expect to get quality. You can only reduce, sorry, one, two, if you expect to get quality. Otherwise, you're just going to get a mess. You're going to decrease quality. Personnel, definitely think through the staff you're going to need to both create your project. And what's more frequently forgotten is the staff you're going to need to support your project. So do you need to support it with certain people, with certain skills in a certain amount of hours? Technology, do you need to, does this project need to fit into a particular set of existing technologies? Like for instance, you've got a content management system for a website or a constituent management system. And this project isn't about changing those. So if it needs to fit within those, those are critical things to define. But of course, think through what other constraints you might have. Fantastic. So basically the idea is that either you are gaining buy-in on all of those things through the course of the project, or you, this would be a kind of with the assumption that everybody already pretty much is on the same page, you could try documenting that and sending it out to the stakeholders and getting buy-in on it. So either way, make sure you have both buy-in and documentation. So if it's a meeting process, make sure you have it written down and that people agree to the stuff that is written down. This is the type of thing where it's pretty typical, especially if you're doing a project internally, for things to kind of wander astray from the initial kind of goals, audiences, vision, and to be able to go back to the documentation and say, but look, this is what we agreed to, is really useful. All right. And where do you go from here? So you've got this overall document. This is obviously not a project plan. This is not a necessarily even an action plan for your project. This is just basically an agreement on what's going to happen. So what are the next steps? So if it's basic and it's clear to you what's going to happen, you can just define a schedule and a budget and start work. Otherwise, if it's not completely clear to you, I would define a tactical definition of what you're going to do in what order. So for instance, are you going to do any research? Is there going to be a kind of a high level strategy or action plan creation before you go? Is there going to be a site map? Is there going to be an entity model? A requirements document would be another key thing to do here. Very hard to define what the right next steps might be, because we're trying to cover all possible technology projects. And there is different first steps for those, though if you will potentially have some time to talk through in our last 10 minutes, particular next steps. So if you throw what's interesting to you, we could potentially have time to talk through some of those. Or another obvious one, if you're feeling quite overwhelmed with where you're going, is to put out a request for information to hire someone to do the project. I very purposefully have used the term request for information, rather than a request for proposal, which I could do a whole webinar about the difference between those terms and why I think they're different. But the core difference is that you are not asking for a huge amount of detail and a price without talking to people, which has equity implications and is going to get you less good people, because it's incredibly time consuming to put together a lot of detail and a lot of budget for a project you have no idea if you're going to get or not. So the idea of a request for information is to try to get a larger swath of people to give you a little bit of information about themselves, and then you narrow them down before asking for more information. And I've in fact brought it in at 21 minutes. I'm excited by that. And I see that we definitely have some questions at least. What do we have? Are there things that rise to the top, Amy? So there's just one question asking if we get a copy of the presentation, which I just want to reiterate that the recording will be sent to your email within 48 hours. Somebody has asked, do we offer project management? I'm not sure exactly what you mean by that. If you want to expand a little bit more, TechSoup does have some resources for that. You can take a look at our website and you'll find some resources and courses and blogs and all that kind of thing. Robin has said that they love the request for information idea. I wonder if you could maybe talk a little bit more about that, go in some detail, like how would you, yeah, I guess like go about doing that in a nonprofit organization. Yeah, are you able to speak a little more into that? Yes, absolutely. And I have an article up on my website about this. So certainly refer to that for more information. But the general concept is that you kind of think of hiring a consultant like you would hiring an employee. So you put out a general description of what it is that you're looking for and you ask people to send you an overview of themselves and their skills. And instead of a resume at this point, what you ask for back is, please basically tell us a little about your company, give us case studies of when you've done similar types of work with other organizations like ours. And the purpose of this is that that is the type of thing that most organizations have already. So like if I'm a small website consultant firm, for instance, I have information about my general process, what's important to us, I have information, I should have information certainly about the projects I've done and can relate those to you. What is much harder to do for me as a small nonprofit or sorry, a small website firm, is to say, all right, I'm going to try to interpret the page or three pages of text that you've sent out to the world. I'm going to then say, what is the explicit process I would do for your project for your particular needs, and how much will it cost? That's probably takes depending on the project anywhere from six to 12 to 20 hours to put that type of proposal together. And if you've just put your request for proposals out into the world, then it's very unlikely that any given small website firm is going to get that project. So they look at that and they say, well, that would be great for us, but we're not going to get that project. So we're not going to put our time in. But they could be awesome. And they could be disproportionately, they could be women owned or minority owned or in exactly the community that you'd like to work with or things like that. So basically when you get those back that the overview, so you basically you sent out your request for information, you potentially get a lot back now.  They don't seem at all compelling. What you're left with is a set that seemed interesting. You schedule a half hour phone call with them, particularly potentially to talk more to get to know them and no one's going to turn down a phone call. So that's a straightforward way to learn a little more about them. And then ideally with just one or two finalists, you ask them to do a whole costs and schedule. And very few people being a set of finalists are going to turn down. It's still the same amount of work, but now they know that they're a serious contender for it. It's not much more work for a nonprofit, if much at all, and it gets you a much better pool of organizations because it's not the ones that are only staffed for marketing and outreach. I'll get off myself to ask about that. That's great. Thank you so much. Something that's popped up in the chat that I think could be interesting for lots of people. Andy asked how you've managed scope creep and added, of course, all requests for changes in scope are important, which is very true. So yeah, could you speak a little more into that? Yes. So this process itself, so simply having a foundational document, so a vision document or a charter document is very useful to try to manage scope creep, to be able to point back to it and say, okay, we defined that this was the schedule and the budget and here were the objectives. Our scope is now getting further than we thought it was. Is it in furtherance of these objectives? So if it is, then you're going to have to move to a second foundational document, so a foundation document that is after this, like a requirements document or something like that, but to basically say, okay, we've defined the schedule and the budget and we've defined a set of scope in furtherance of these goals and these audiences goals. If it's actually in furtherance of the audience and objectives, then, so okay, so number one, either it's not in furtherance and then you can easily push, well, hopefully easily, push back on that. If it is in furtherance of the audience and the objective, then you're back to essentially that the golden triangle to say, all right, great, I can either do this stuff which does seem really useful or I can keep to the scope and the time that we talked about, but I can't do all of those things because that will bring down the quality. Yeah, 100%. So I guess on the other side of that, of asking for some changes in scope, a couple of people in the Q&A have asked for your ideas on how to get leadership on board with a project. Oh, this is a fantastic way as well, this vision process, it's a great way to get leadership on board to either to ask them to be part of a minimal process. So defining this, if it's a not a gigantic project, then potentially they are actually on the committee that defines this stuff or they are, so back to the if you remember, I had the RACI, it's responsible, accountable, the C is something and then there's informed. So there is sort of figure out where on that chart they are to make sure that they are in the loop and things are not moving forward without someone who is designated by them to for the project. So to basically try to convince them that this vision, I mean if it's a small project it might be hard to get leadership to to acknowledge it, but if it's a big project to either engage them in forming the vision is important or the idea that these are the objectives and that's why it's important. So basically at the end of the process to use this as documentation to management as to why this project is important to the organization. So both sorry that was a little rambling but one and the other. Yeah, that was great. So we're just sitting half past 10 but Laura, if you have a couple more minutes to answer just one or two more questions people obviously if you have some way to go totally fine but if you want to stick around for another couple minutes we'll just go through one or two more questions and then we'll let you get on with your day. So how would you go about defining a target audience without giving a general description? So I think the question here is around getting that sweet spot between you know you can't use actual individuals but how do you you know like group those characteristics of your target audience without going to general? Yeah I think that sorry as I make everybody nauseous by going to that slide. So I think that so when I say general I don't mean like obviously it's not towards individual people it's more like saying it's a like for instance next we are going to try to define what that audience wants and trying to so for instance if the general public is an audience it's impossible to say what the general public wants because there are sorts of people like there are many different people. So trying to hone in on what are the different kind of varieties and flavors of groups who want different things from you in a specific enough way that you can say you could differentiate so you could say ah these people want this type of thing from us but these other people do not and you'll see I do have some in my examples here um for a fairly wide sleeping site um like for instance low income people with a legal issue um is a pretty broad target audience and in fact when people have as broad a target audience as that often they dive down a little bit into like for instance different types of information seekers so people who are um looking just immediately looking for an answer they want they have a question they want an answer as opposed to people who want help they want a human to help them with something um is in fact a fairly well known way to break down this particular note there's a third in fact this particular audience of low income people with a legal issue um so yeah so to try to find the sweet spot as Amy said between it's not people but it's something that's workable for your particular project great um just as a final question um there are one or two that we haven't managed to get to but um I don't want to take up too much of your time uh is there a difference Derek is asking between vision planning for an external client and an internal project how would you go about managing those differently if there is a difference I've I've covered them both um in this uh in this presentation but I do think certainly the way you approach it is going to be different um so I'm going to interpret that question as um so if the project is externally facing compared to a oh Amy do you think it's is the project externally facing versus an internally facing or whether you are in a consultant or whether you are in the organization um I mean I think both would be useful yeah Derek saying the first one so okay the first one great I yeah probably more broadly applicable um so yes um I think most types of different projects you know like a uh something that is primarily database oriented is going to be different than something that is primarily uh knowledge management oriented although they are both um internal facing um and then definitely something that is like an intake project or a website project I do think it's going to be more challenging to uh and probably requires a bigger vision process for an externally facing project um because you uh have less knowledge about your external audiences than you do your intern you can logically just go talk to your staff to understand what they want and it's what's important to them uh unless you have research budget or time um it's a little harder to put yourself in the shoes of your external constituents um it's definitely worth trying to put yourself in their shoes and definitely important to remember that you are not your constituents you are not your users um so to not assume that they want exactly what you would want in their shoes um I think so that's a big one that feels different to me so the goals would be similar uh the audiences you might have harder time trying to define the right specificity then definitely the audience goals become harder um they're probably I would imagine that the external facing projects are reasonable sized you're not going to have tiny external projects and you might have tiny internal projects so they're going to be a difference there and actually hopefully it's easier to get your um leadership on board with an external project certainly you can at least make a a really solid argument for um what you're going to increase decrease why that's important how that actually leads to things they care about time money saved or time and money saved money earned things like that great um yeah there are just wondering that we didn't manage to get to but um we're over five minutes over so I'm gonna hit pause there and I guess your email I believe is on these slides is that correct um I'm certainly my website is and there is a form that does in fact email me um and it does literally go to me and I read it okay great so people have a way of getting in contact with you if um there's anything from this that they would like to talk about um Aretha I'll hand it back to you to close this out this is great thank you so much um just to remind you of beginning of video replay and the slides within 40 hours thank you Laura and thank you Amy for being in the background really appreciate you guys thank you so much and thanks to everybody who who participated this was really great thank you