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The project is known internally as Project Caviar. Google wants to take on Dolby with new open media formats Google shared plans for the media formats, which are internally known as Project Caviar, at a closed-door event with hardware manufacturers earlier this year. Illustration: iStock/Getty Images Plus; Protocol Janko Roettgers September 21, 2022 Google is gunning for Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision: The company is looking to introduce two new media formats to offer HDR video and 3D audio under a new consumer-recognizable brand without the licensing fees hardware manufacturers currently have to pay Dolby. Google shared plans for the media formats, which are internally known as Project Caviar, at a closed-door event with hardware manufacturers earlier this year. In a video of the presentation that was leaked to Protocol, group product manager Roshan Baliga describes the goal of the project as building "a healthier, broader ecosystem" for premium media experiences. Google didn't respond to a request for comment. The company's primary focus for Project Caviar is YouTube, which does not currently support Dolby Atmos or Dolby Vision. However, Google also aims to bring other industry players on board, including device manufacturers and service providers. This makes Project Caviar one of Google's most ambitious pushes for open media formats since the company began working on royalty-free video codecs over a decade ago. Dolby's fees can add up for manufacturers Google's open media efforts have until now primarily focused on the development of codecs. The company acquired video codec maker On2 in 2009 to open source some of its technology; it has also played a significant role in the foundation of the Alliance for Open Media, an industry consortium that is overseeing the royalty-free AV1 video codec. Project Caviar is different from those efforts in that it is not another codec. Instead, the project focuses on 3D audio and HDR video formats that make use of existing codecs but allow for more rich and immersive media playback experiences, much like Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision do. Baliga didn't mention Dolby by name during his presentation, but he still made it abundantly clear that the company was looking to establish alternatives to the Atmos and Vision formats. "We realized that there are premium media experiences where there aren't any great royalty-free solutions," he said, adding that the licensing costs for premium HDR video and 3D audio "can hurt manufacturers and consumers." Dolby makes most of its money through licensing fees from hardware manufacturers. The company charges TV manufacturers $2 to $3 to license Dolby Vision, according to its Cloud Media Solutions SVP Giles Baker. Dolby hasn't publicly disclosed licensing fees for Atmos; it charges consumers who want to add immersive audio to their Xbox consoles $15 per license, but the fee hardware manufacturers have to pay is said to be significantly lower. "We realized that there are premium media experiences where there aren't any great royalty-free solutions." Still, in an industry that long has struggled with razor-thin margins, every extra dollar matters. That's especially true because Dolby already charges virtually all device makers a licensing fee for its legacy audio codecs. A manufacturer of streaming boxes that wholesale for $50 has to pay around $2 per unit for Dolby Vision and Dolby Digital, according to a document an industry insider shared with Protocol. "For lower-cost living room devices, the cost may be prohibitive," Baliga said during his presentation. HDR10+ didn't become a household name Google isn't the first company that is trying to establish an alternative to Dolby's formats. Samsung in particular has long resisted paying Dolby more money than necessary. The TV maker co-developed HDR10+ as a royalty-free alternative to Dolby Vision, and isn't supporting Dolby Vision on any of its TV sets. However, attempts to make HDR10+ a household name have largely failed. That's in part because of Dolby's strong existing brand, as well as its licensing strategy: Instead of charging streaming services for the use of Dolby Vision, the company has been using these distributors as evangelists for the format, allowing them to market it as a premium feature. Dolby Vision has gained support from many services, including Netflix, Disney+ and HBO Max. Dolby CFO Robert Park called this arrangement a key factor for the success of Dolby Vision during a recent fireside chat. "Having the distribution partners wanting to distribute our technology was brilliant," Park said. "If we tried to monetize everything in this ecosystem, you would probably see a fraction of the brands you see today. Where we make money is on the playback, and we get our fair share." The company is set to repeat that success story in the audio space, where services like Apple Music are betting on Dolby Atmos to become the de facto standard for spatial audio. Some companies are trying to establish an alternative under the umbrella of the Alliance for Open Media, whose members include Amazon, Google, Netflix, Meta and Samsung, among others. The group is currently developing a new audio format called Immersive Audio Container that is meant to deliver 3D experiences using a variety of open codecs. However, it's unlikely that the Immersive Audio Container project would be able to compete with the branding of Dolby Atmos on its own. That's why Google is now looking to establish a new umbrella band for both HDR10+ and 3D immersive audio, which would be governed by an industry forum and made available for free to hardware manufacturers and service providers. Google has a lot of influence on hardware manufacturers In addition to making these new formats available for free, Google also wants to make them more attractive to device manufacturers and consumers alike by adding functionality beyond what Dolby Atmos and Vision offer. On the audio side, this includes greater flexibility around a larger variety of audio setups. For video, Google wants to focus on capture, allowing consumers to record video in HDR10+ and then share it via YouTube and other services. "We want users to be able to capture in these premium formats and get better-quality video," Baliga told device manufacturers during his presentation. "If we tried to monetize everything in this ecosystem, you would probably see a fraction of the brands you see today." Google is well-positioned to push the industry to adopt Project Caviar. Apple has thrown its support behind Dolby Vision, but the format has gained close to zero support from Android phone manufacturers, giving Google an opening to promote a royalty-free alternative with a big focus on video capture. At the same time, Google has a lot of influence on the makers of smart TVs and streaming devices, thanks to YouTube being a must-have app. Google has previously used this influence to push companies like Roku to support the AV1 video codec, and could do so again to advance Project Caviar. For Dolby, increased competition could have significant financial consequences. The company still makes most of its money with its legacy codecs, but Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision have been the fastest-growing parts of its business. In its fiscal year 2021, Dolby generated 25% of its revenue with Atmos, Vision and its imaging patents, according to Park, who told the audience of the William Blair 42nd Annual Growth Stock Conference in June that he fully expects this line of business to become as big as Dolby's legacy codec business over time. Janko Roettgers Janko Roettgers (@jank0) is a senior reporter at Protocol, reporting on the shifting power dynamics between tech, media, and entertainment, including the impact of new technologies. Previously, Janko was Variety's first-ever technology writer in San Francisco, where he covered big tech and emerging technologies. He has reported for Gigaom, Frankfurter Rundschau, Berliner Zeitung, and ORF, among others. He has written three books on consumer cord-cutting and online music and co-edited an anthology on internet subcultures. He lives with his family in Oakland. google dolby open source open codecs return to office Workplace The pandemic is 'over' at tech offices, too Tech offices are doing away with vaccine mandates and health surveys. "Technology companies and leaders are behaving as if this is now a manageable problem." Photo: Gary Hershorn/Getty Images September 22, 2022 Allison Levitsky Allison Levitsky is a reporter at Protocol covering workplace issues in tech. She previously covered big tech companies and the tech workforce for the Silicon Valley Business Journal. Allison grew up in the Bay Area and graduated from UC Berkeley. September 22, 2022 The COVID-19 pandemic is "over," President Joe Biden said on Sunday's "60 Minutes": "We still have a problem with COVID. We're still doing a lot of work on it. But the pandemic is over." Biden's comments earned criticism from those concerned he's downplaying the seriousness of the virus, which still poses major health risks. But the remarks mirror a shift in the U.S. toward living with COVID as an endemic virus. Many tech employers have relaxed their own COVID restrictions, according to Joe Du Bey, co-founder and CEO of the workplace experience and people operations software maker Eden. "Technology companies and leaders are behaving as if this is now a manageable problem," Du Bey told me. "They are returning to the office and to corporate events in a meaningful way." More companies have also been letting go of vaccine mandates and dropping symptom questionnaires for employees heading to the office, Du Bey said. This summer seemed like a "tipping point" for getting rid of these kinds of COVID precautions, Du Bey said. "Even a few months ago, there was much higher engagement among our vaccine tracking tools, and I was seeing a lot more chatter among our startup community customer base and people I know around requiring it for team events," Du Bey said. A similar trend has emerged with Officely, a desk-booking tool that customers use inside Slack. Officely users returned half as many health surveys in August as they did at the peak in March, co-founder and CEO Max Shepherd-Cross told me. Users also conducted 70% fewer contact traces than they did in March, according to Shepherd-Cross. "I suggest this means that the actual amount of positive cases in offices is substantially down," Shepherd-Cross said in a DM. "However, people are still worried about it, hence the smaller drop in companies requiring health surveys." AlertMedia, whose emergency communication software was used for contact tracing earlier in the pandemic, has found that customers have "less of a focus" on COVID. "They're using us in a bunch of different ways," said CEO Christopher Kenessey. "We'll hear our customers say, 'Hey, I originally bought your product for the COVID use case, to communicate with them, and now we're using your product for something different.'" (That can include natural disasters, active shooters and political unrest.) Some kind of normal At its own office in Austin, AlertMedia no longer requires employees to get vaccinated or to fill out a health survey before coming to work. The company dropped those policies as other businesses around Austin relaxed precautions like masks and vaccine cards, according to Kenessey. The vaccine mandate at AlertMedia no longer seemed necessary once employees had a chance to get the shots, Kenessey said. Much about life at AlertMedia looks close to normal these days. The company had 150 or 200 employees at the grand opening of its new, 68,000-square-foot office in Austin on Tuesday. More than 75% of the company's 450 employees live in the Austin area, and Kenessey is hopeful that employees will choose to come to the new office three or four days per week. That said, Kenessey is stopping short of requiring workers to come in. "You can't say, 'We're going to roll back the mandate to require a vaccine to come to the office,' but then force people to come to the office," Kenessey said. "If someone doesn't feel comfortable, they have the flexibility of not having to come into the office." Back to the office, sort of North American offices are busier than they have been since the start of the pandemic, though vacant desks still abound. According to new data from the desk-booking software provider Robin, workers booked 22% of available desks last week -- the first time since mid-June that one in five desks were in use. (It's worth noting, though, that as some companies cut back on office space, higher utilization rates don't necessarily mean more employees are showing up to work.) Return rates vary across different cities, where different industries dominate, the Wall Street Journal reported. In New York, badge swipes tracked by the security provider Kastle Systems found that office attendance jumped from 38% to 46.6% earlier this month. San Francisco saw only a 2.3 percentage point increase to 40.7%. And if workers are coming to the office more often, it's not necessarily because they're less nervous about getting sick. According to research from Slack's Future Forum, concern about catching COVID isn't high on the list of reasons why workers stay home. "I think that is the smallest [part] of the conversation, in some ways," Brian Elliott, executive leader of Future Forum, told Protocol. "Most of the conversation is about the fact that people want to find a balance between what works for them and the organization." And as workers gather in person, COVID cases follow. Google employees have been receiving regular notifications of colleagues' COVID infections. Several AlertMedia employees tested positive for COVID after returning from a trade show last week, Kenessey said. "We're not ready to claim victory here at AlertMedia and say it's over," Kenessey said. "But we feel that it's getting to the point now where you have to kind of live with it, work with it and be thoughtful of your peers, be respectful of them, and do it the right way." Additional reporting by Lizzy Lawrence Keep Reading Show less Allison Levitsky Allison Levitsky is a reporter at Protocol covering workplace issues in tech. She previously covered big tech companies and the tech workforce for the Silicon Valley Business Journal. Allison grew up in the Bay Area and graduated from UC Berkeley. covid-19 joe biden pandemic vaccine mandates return to office sponsored content Sponsored Content Battling the bear market: Why companies need to focus on customers' billing and payment experience September 19, 2022 Nancy Sansom Nancy Sansom is the Chief Marketing Officer for Versapay, the leader in Collaborative AR. In this role, she leads marketing, demand generation, product marketing, partner marketing, events, brand, content marketing and communications. She has more than 20 years of experience running successful product and marketing organizations in high-growth software companies focused on HCM and financial technology. Prior to joining Versapay, Nancy served on the senior leadership teams at PlanSource, Benefitfocus and PeopleMatter. September 19, 2022 While there remains debate among economists about whether we are officially in a full-blown recession, the signs are certainly there. Like most executives right now, the outlook concerns me. In any case, businesses aren't waiting for the official pronouncement. They're already bracing for impact as U.S. inflation and interest rates soar. Inflation peaked at 9.1% in June 2022 -- the highest increase since November 1981 -- and the Federal Reserve is targeting an interest rate of 3% by the end of this year. Facing a volatile market and a largely grim outlook deep into 2023, executives are naturally focused on doing more with less and protecting their cash flow. As leaders look for opportunities to increase efficiency across the business, they tend to prioritize the invoice-to-cash process last. In partnership with Wakefield Research, Versapay surveyed 1,000 C-level executives at companies with a minimum annual revenue of $100 million on their accounts receivable digital transformation efforts. Our research revealed that companies whose AR operations are most impacted by current indicators of the recession also have yet to make significant headway with digital transformation -- and their customer experience is paying the price. With customer retention doubly important during a downturn, B2B companies can't afford to neglect their buyers' experience in the billing and payment process. Economic downturn puts pressure on the accounts receivable department Accounts receivable has the most immediate impact on cash availability. So, it's not surprising that CFOs are feeling the brunt of the current economic climate's effects: inflation, rising interest rates and labor shortages topped CFOs' list of the biggest headaches facing their AR. [image] When inflation soars, cash in hand today is worth more than it will be tomorrow. Rising material and production costs put pressure on profit margins, and growing interest rates increase the cost of borrowing. Any delay in receiving payments has a powerful effect on operating capital. Companies that have not yet completed their AR digital transformation (our research finds this is most businesses) leave money on the table by not doing so. Companies that haven't made inroads with AR digitization are more susceptible to recessionary effects Companies that are early in their AR digitization efforts are more likely to be impacted by the effects of the recession, and our research confirms this. Among executives who identified supply chain disruptions as a source of strain for their AR team, 53% said they have a great deal of work left to do in digitizing their AR. This was substantially higher than the average response across all executives (at any stage in their AR transformation journey) of 32%. Similarly high, at 49%, was the proportion of executives who identified rising interest rates as a source of strain for their AR team stating they're still early on in their AR digitization efforts. Companies with higher rates of automation in their invoice-to-cash process are better equipped to face economic headwinds simply because they can bring cash in faster. But, slow internal processes only account for one part of why businesses get paid late. The other -- larger, I'd argue -- reason why B2B companies get paid late is due to customer disputes and dissatisfaction. This is a challenge that automation alone can't solve because it requires suppliers to foster more collaboration and transparency with their buyers. For this reason, companies trying to optimize cash flow during the current downturn should make customer experience in the invoice-to-cash process their focus. You can't control macroeconomic conditions, but you can control your customer experience Invoice disputes are typically caused by issues such as missing or damaged goods and conflicting expectations around credits and discounts. What we found, however, is that the culprit is often not the goods or services themselves, but human error and miscommunication during the payment process. [image] A customer's negative experience during the payment stage can have more consequences for a business's bottom line than one might think. Most executives we surveyed said miscommunication in the payment process has led to their company losing future revenue or getting paid less than they're owed (82% and 85%, respectively). But poor customer experience is too often part and parcel of B2B billing and payments. And executives are aware of the problem: 72% of C-level executives willingly admit their AR department is not customer-oriented enough (CFOs understand this even more, with 81% agreeing). In the absence of tools designed especially for accounts receivable (on the supplier's end) and accounts payable (on the buyer's end) to collaborate, finance departments must rely on traditional methods of communication like email and phone. This makes it difficult for customers to get clarity on important information like payment terms and deadlines, creating a disconnect between suppliers and their customers. This confusion ultimately delays payments, directly impacting the bottom line. Typical AR automation tools don't solve this problem, instead they focus only on improving back-office tasks like invoice creation and cash application. Even where artificial intelligence excels, like matching incoming payments with their corresponding invoices, exceptions will still emerge and those require human collaboration to resolve. These are important and powerful digital tools for AR, but unless they consider CX, they only go halfway. Collaborative AR is the answer to the CX problem in accounts receivable A Collaborative AR Network addresses the root causes of delayed payments by making it easier for AR departments to collaborate with their customers over the cloud. Versapay is the first AR automation solution designed to address the human side of AR by empowering buyers and suppliers to work together to solve challenges in real time. Our Collaborative AR Network is what you get when you combine industry-leading AR automation, a next-generation B2B payments network and all the collaboration tools we've come to expect from modern cloud-based apps. As a result, AR departments are able to bridge the divide between them and their customers and enjoy: * 50% less manual work * 30% fewer past-due invoices, and * 25% faster payments In this bear market, improving customers' experience of the actual transaction process is a measure that businesses can't ignore if they hope to preserve cash flow. Keep Reading Show less Nancy Sansom Nancy Sansom is the Chief Marketing Officer for Versapay, the leader in Collaborative AR. In this role, she leads marketing, demand generation, product marketing, partner marketing, events, brand, content marketing and communications. She has more than 20 years of experience running successful product and marketing organizations in high-growth software companies focused on HCM and financial technology. Prior to joining Versapay, Nancy served on the senior leadership teams at PlanSource, Benefitfocus and PeopleMatter. sponsored sponsored content cybersecurity Enterprise Cybersecurity is a data problem. Could Snowflake be the answer? The company -- and a growing number of customers -- believe that Snowflake's cloud data platform is ideal for helping address data-centric cybersecurity challenges. Snowflake's emphasis in the cybersecurity space comes amid intensifying cyberthreats facing enterprises. Image: Protocol September 22, 2022 Kyle Alspach Kyle Alspach ( @KyleAlspach) is a senior reporter at Protocol, focused on cybersecurity. He has covered the tech industry since 2010 for outlets including VentureBeat, CRN and the Boston Globe. He lives in Portland, Oregon, and can be reached at kalspach@protocol.com. September 22, 2022 For a startup in hyper-growth mode like Figma, scaling up its cybersecurity defenses as fast as the rest of the company has been a top concern. To pull off that feat, the company has come to rely on Snowflake, a company well known for its cloud data lake and data warehouse technology, but much less so for what it brings to the table for cybersecurity. As it turns out, though, "the same reason everyone else is using Snowflake and finds its capabilities so powerful also applies to security," said Devdatta Akhawe, head of security at Figma. Snowflake's technology is primarily used for cloud-based data analytics and data science, but it is now looking to prove it has a lot to offer when it comes to cybersecurity, which is increasingly being recognized as a data problem at its core. Figma -- which offers browser-based, collaboration-oriented design software, and is on tap to be acquired by Adobe for $20 billion -- believes Snowflake has already arrived in the cybersecurity market given its unique ability to combine security feeds with data from the rest of the business. Having a single data lake for the whole company has allowed for analysis of cybersecurity data in a broader context, enabling a better understanding of security risks, according to Akhawe. "Being able to correlate across a large number of disparate data sources is what makes a strong security program," he said. Snowflake executives told Protocol that while cybersecurity is just one of the cloud data opportunities the company is pursuing right now, it's clearly among the biggest. The company's emphasis in the space comes amid intensifying cyberthreats facing enterprises and a growing priority placed on cybersecurity in the C-suite and boardroom. The relevance of Snowflake for security teams is "the best-kept secret in cybersecurity," said Omer Singer, the company's head of cybersecurity strategy. Many of the initial customers using Snowflake for cybersecurity -- which include Dropbox, DoorDash, TripActions, and CSAA Insurance Group -- have been "using Snowflake for a long time, but the cybersecurity team wasn't," Singer said. "What's changed is, now the cybersecurity team is using it as part of their overall strategy." Correlating threats Founded in 2012 by two veterans of Oracle -- Benoit Dageville (now president of product) and Thierry Cruanes (now CTO) -- Snowflake has homed in on cybersecurity in the three years since Frank Slootman joined as CEO, said Christian Kleinerman, senior vice president of product at Snowflake. Early on at Snowflake, Slootman, who was formerly the CEO of ServiceNow, had a decisive meeting with a customer, according to Kleinerman. "The customer was telling him, 'We are doing cybersecurity with Snowflake -- why are you guys not pitching it as such?'" In June, Snowflake announced its new cybersecurity category, aiming to offer an easier way for customers to combine their security data with other business and contextual data. Doing so can enable better-informed threat detections and breach investigations, according to Snowflake executives. For instance, correlating human resources data with email-forwarding events to outside parties could help detect if an employee is trying to leak sensitive information. The more signals you have, the more patterns you can find. Meanwhile, combining data feeds from code repository GitHub and identity platform Okta could provide a view into who's logging into privileged accounts, what they're doing, and whether permissions violations are taking place, according to Snowflake executives. Typically, however, suspicious developer behavior would be missed, because GitHub data isn't usually leveraged by security operations tools or staff members. "The more signals you have, the more patterns you can find," Kleinerman said. That's not something you can easily do with traditional data warehousing technology, however. For one thing, cybersecurity is different from other parts of a business in that it generates way more data -- a nonstop stream of logs and events. For customers, storing security data for any period of time has often been costly and required tough choices about what to keep. Snowflake's separation of pricing between storage and compute, however, "works very well for security," said Uri May, co-founder and CEO of cybersecurity vendor Hunters. In security, you want to store a lot of data for potential review later on, he said, but you probably won't need to have access to all of your data all of the time. Using Snowflake, though, an organization only pays for compute time on its security data when an incident has actually occurred and the stored data needs to be queried, May said. The rest of the time, you're just paying the "relatively low" price for the storage itself. By contrast, customers that try to store security data using a system that predated the cloud -- which doesn't separate storage from compute, and doesn't leverage cloud-native storage architecture -- will be forced to get choosy about what data they collect and how long they keep it, Singer said. That's not great for security, said Figma's Akhawe. As occurred with the widely felt SolarWinds attack, many high-impact breaches are only discovered nine months to a year after they first began, he said. Deleting security data after a few months "is just illogical. You're flying blind when the actual breach is disclosed," Akhawe said. Snowflake, on the other hand, "gives us the ability to scale to gigantic amounts of [security] data." Bringing apps to the data Snowflake executives said that the company is encouraging third-party software vendors to provide the security features around its data platform. "Instead of taking the data to applications, let's bring the applications to the data," Kleinerman said. Vendor partners include Hunters, which provides security analytics and correlation for data in Snowflake; Immuta, which offers access control and privacy management; and Lacework, which focuses on enabling threat detection, investigations and measurement of security, and compliance posture. Providing customers with a way to have all of their data in one place "gives them a holistic view of what's happening in their business, with security becoming more and more important to every business," said David Hatfield, co-CEO at Lacework, which has received an investment from Snowflake and was incubated at the same private equity firm, Sutter Hill Ventures. In the case of Dropbox, the company has transitioned from using a traditional platform for security information and event management to using a cloud-native SIEM from Panther Labs. "They have completely decommissioned their traditional SIEM," Singer said. The use of Snowflake for cybersecurity is just starting to move from early adopters to more mainstream usage, executives said. Cybersecurity is one of the eight categories currently being promoted for the platform, but it is the first to target a specific audience within an enterprise. Two other new categories, planned to be announced in 2023, will similarly target a more specific audience, though details aren't being disclosed for now, Singer said. Previously, Snowflake categories have been more general in nature, targeting uses such as data science and data engineering. 'Massive opportunity' In terms of the cybersecurity push, "I think our opportunity to do something meaningful in this space is massive," Kleinerman said. Snowflake's emerging focus on security comes up in his discussions with customers on a weekly basis, he said. "I can tell you, it's a conversation changer." Without a doubt, it's easier for younger companies that can start fresh with their data architecture, like Figma, to adopt Snowflake for their cybersecurity needs, Akhawe said. "I think for a lot of other companies that have legacy architecture, it is harder to migrate," he said. But while it will take time for companies to make the shift, Akhawe believes that 10 years from now, most will have transitioned to this type of architecture for their security data. "We know attacks are getting more sophisticated and more complicated. And very often, they take longer than three or four months to detect," he said. As a result, using a large-scale, cloud-based data lake "where you don't have to worry about deleting data -- I do think this will become the default." Keep Reading Show less Kyle Alspach Kyle Alspach ( @KyleAlspach) is a senior reporter at Protocol, focused on cybersecurity. He has covered the tech industry since 2010 for outlets including VentureBeat, CRN and the Boston Globe. He lives in Portland, Oregon, and can be reached at kalspach@protocol.com. cloud data figma snowflake cybersecurity how i decided Entertainment How I decided to go all-in on blockchain gaming Michael Blank left a 20-year career at Electronic Arts for Polygon Studios and the promise of blockchain gaming. Here's why. "We're creating something new here, and in the creation of something new there's so much learning to be done." Photo: Polygon Studios September 21, 2022 Nick Statt Nick Statt is Protocol's video game reporter. Prior to joining Protocol, he was news editor at The Verge covering the gaming industry, mobile apps and antitrust out of San Francisco, in addition to managing coverage of Silicon Valley tech giants and startups. He now resides in Rochester, New York, home of the garbage plate and, completely coincidentally, the World Video Game Hall of Fame. He can be reached at nstatt@protocol.com. September 21, 2022 Click banner image for more How I decided series When Michael Blank left Apex Legends and Madden publisher Electronic Arts in March, he was coming up on his 20th anniversary at the video game company, one of the oldest and biggest in the world. Blank has done it all: He's been a producer in the trenches of game development in Vancouver; led major initiatives at EA Sports and the company's Origin platform in California; and up until this year was the senior vice president of the company's player network. That meant he oversaw a 400-plus team that was responsible for helping connect hundreds of millions of active EA players around the globe across game ecosystems, software platforms and hardware devices. Earlier this year, Blank walked away from the traditional game industry for a role as chief operating officer at Polygon Studios. The Web3 company oversees blockchain gaming, NFT and related metaverse projects on the Polygon network, a sidechain of Ethereum dedicated to helping blockchain networks work together and scale. Blank's job at Polygon is now building a global business development team dedicated to helping app makers create new products using Polygon's technology as it scales from 20,000 so-called decentralized apps (or DAPPs) to more than 100,000. Blank's story, as told to Protocol, has been edited for clarity and brevity. There were many different directions I could go. What I was working on touched on nearly every aspect of gaming. I helped conceive of EA's subscription business. I was working in the development of new business models and the idea of how streaming and subscription could come together to decrease the friction in acquisition and play of video games. Working on all of that exposed me to the array of things that one could do at a gaming company, if that company took an expansive view of what it meant to play a game. How do I help a gaming company, whether it was EA or another one, think about the future of gaming? There are many companies out there, EA included, constantly grappling with what is the next thing. I felt like I had the opportunity at Polygon to do this beyond gaming ... to help create the future of the internet -- this expansive view at a company that enabled it not just for gaming, but also movies, music, finance marketplaces across the experience of what people do on the internet. That's the direction I started to migrate down. I don't think I ever had a feeling like, "It's now or never." I feel like there's always opportunities; one door closes, another opens ... all those cliche statements for people about what the future holds if you have a growth mindset. I never had a feeling like, "I have to do this today." While I had been doing this work on the metaverse and working on helping people find games and connect with people, I was drawn to Web3, based on the reading I was doing about what was going on with NFTs at the time. I thought that these were new vehicles of engagement. I was excited, and the excitement snowballed, and I felt like I needed to try and do something not entirely different, but different. It was a difficult decision. I worked at EA for most of my adult life; I felt like I was part of a family. I love games and loved the people I worked with and making this shift was not an easy one. A guy named Phyl Terry, a friend, runs something called Collaborative Gain. It's a group of people coming together to network and to share those experiences. I was sharing with Phyl that I was thinking about making a shift, and as it turns out he was writing a book called "Never Search Alone." The premise of the book is when you're searching for your next job, you have to work with other people who can help you do that. He has a rigorous process by which one does this. I went through this with him and discovered things about myself through this process: my perspective on life ... on career opportunity, family, my excitement around this space, the opportunity to do something new, the opportunity to create and learn. All of those things factored into the opportunity and pushed me over the edge to go and take a chance on something I was truly excited about. And so here I am today. I started to follow Polygon because it was making significant advances in blockchain tech and adoption of blockchain tech in partnership with both Web 2.0 and Web3 companies. Polygon was one of the natural companies that one would look at if they wanted to make a leap into this world and frankly this has only accelerated over the last six months, despite what we are seeing in the crypto market. I'm not worried about what's happening in the world of crypto today. I think there's a lot of things we need to do better. There are things that have been done that are not good for the world of crypto and the world of blockchain. We're creating something new here, and in the creation of something new there's so much learning to be done and game companies need to drive those learnings. With any new innovation, there are peaks and valleys, just like with mobile and free-to-play. We're seeing today gaming companies across the board, Web3 and the biggest Web 2.0, thinking about how to engage in the world of blockchain gaming ... they sometimes succeed and sometimes fail, but we learn a lot. All of these innovations in distribution and delivery and connectivity and social ... they expanded the market, they created more opportunities for play. I anticipate that what we're seeing in blockchain will be another tool to help expand and create new experiences for players in games, just like mobile and free-to-play did and just like streaming and subscription will. I'm super excited and can't wait to see what game companies create. How I Decided... Wednesday, June 29 How I decided to exit my startup's original business Wednesday, July 6 How I decided to shape Microsoft's climate agenda Wednesday, July 13 How I decided to cap hiring at our high-growth software startup Wednesday, July 20 How I decided to allow remote work forever at Atlassian Wednesday, July 27 How I decided not to pivot Wednesday, Aug. 3 How I decided to move my music tech startup to London Wednesday, Aug. 10 How I decided to leave Alphabet and build a geothermal energy startup Wednesday, Aug. 17 How I decided to step down as CEO Wednesday, Aug. 24 How I decided to swap the Silicon Valley C-suite for West Virginia Wednesday, Aug. 31 How I decided on the right AI auditor for my hiring tech company Wednesday, Sept. 7 How I decided to call out the 'toxic culture' of CS Wednesday, Sept. 14 How I decided it was time to start making deals Wednesday, Sept. 21 How I decided to go all-in on blockchain gaming Keep Reading Show less Nick Statt Nick Statt is Protocol's video game reporter. Prior to joining Protocol, he was news editor at The Verge covering the gaming industry, mobile apps and antitrust out of San Francisco, in addition to managing coverage of Silicon Valley tech giants and startups. He now resides in Rochester, New York, home of the garbage plate and, completely coincidentally, the World Video Game Hall of Fame. He can be reached at nstatt@protocol.com. web3 metaverse polygon electronic arts gaming video games game industry how i decided cryptocurrency Fintech A failed bank for former slaves should give crypto hucksters caution Crypto hype has made racial and underserved communities vulnerable to scams and a volatile market. The White House wants to make sure history doesn't repeat itself. The appearance of bitcoin ATMs in lower-income communities is, to some critics, a sign of crypto's potential for exploitation of the financially vulnerable. Photo: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images September 21, 2022 Benjamin Pimentel Benjamin Pimentel ( @benpimentel) covers crypto and fintech from San Francisco. He has reported on many of the biggest tech stories over the past 20 years for the San Francisco Chronicle, Dow Jones MarketWatch and Business Insider, from the dot-com crash, the rise of cloud computing, social networking and AI to the impact of the Great Recession and the COVID crisis on Silicon Valley and beyond. He can be reached at bpimentel@protocol.com or via Google Voice at (925) 307-9342. September 21, 2022 In highlighting risks posed by crypto, the Biden administration drew particular attention to how the hype around digital currency could hurt underserved and minority communities. The Treasury Department underlined that warning by citing a tragedy that happened nearly 150 years ago: the 1874 collapse of Freedman's Savings Bank, which was set up to help formerly enslaved people but ended up devastating the Black community. Crypto's revolutionary set wants to overturn financial history, not learn from it. But the historical mention stood out for some critics who have grown increasingly concerned about the hype over crypto and welcome the Biden administration's focus on its impact on poor and minority communities. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have drawn some evangelists from historically disadvantaged communities. As prices boomed before crypto winter set in, some saw an opportunity to rebuild generational wealth lost to decades of systematic discrimination. And crypto businesses saw opportunities to market their products to new audiences. Block and Jay-Z, who serves on the fintech company's board, have backed bitcoin education programs meant to serve minority populations. "The Freedman's Bank comparison underscores a bit of the 'There's nothing new under the sun' perspective on financial products, regardless of their packaging," Mark Hays, a senior policy analyst at the Americans for Financial Reform, told Protocol. "The current risks and harms that digital assets pose to consumers and investors -- particularly low-income communities and communities of color -- are many, serious and real." Brookings Institution fellow Tonantzin Carmona said the Biden administration's special focus on poor communities "was very reaffirming" since the administration "is also seeing very similar risks." The risks are pronounced in the Black community. The Freedman's Savings Bank on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. circa 1890 The Freedman's Savings Bank building on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. circa 1890. The bank failed after the Panic of 1873. Photo: Library of Congress; Wikimedia Commons Black consumers are more likely than white consumers to own cryptocurrencies, a June Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City report said. This has raised worries that a significant number of Black households -- with median wealth of around $24,000 -- are dangerously exposed to a highly volatile market, the report said. The Kansas Fed warned that crypto holders "could simply lose their investments if the exchange goes bankrupt or gets hacked: a 21st century version of Freedman's Savings Bank." This was an analogy the Treasury Department would echo in its report. Founded in 1865 with the abolition of slavery, the Freedman's Savings Bank was created by Congress to provide banking and financial services assistance to newly freed Black people. But the bank collapsed as a result of poor management and the impact of a battered economy. The trauma of the Freedman's Bank's collapse had a huge impact on the Black community, said Brookings Institution's Carmona. "If you talk to members of the Black community, they will tell you [something] like this happened," she told Protocol. "Those stories get passed down across generations." But the story of the Freedman's Bank collapse also made many in the Black community more receptive to crypto. Crypto is viewed by many in the Black community as "more trustworthy than traditional assets," the Kansas Fed report said. Many Black consumers also "see cryptocurrencies as a relatively quick way to close the wealth gap with other races, particularly white consumers," the authors added. Shawn Wilkinson became one of the most successful Black entrepreneurs in crypto, which he called an "open terrain" that offers a lot of opportunities "especially for people of color" and entrepreneurs like him "who didn't necessarily come from money or generational wealth." In a 2021 interview with Protocol, Wilkinson, the founder of the storage blockchain startup Storj, cited another historical tragedy, the Tulsa Race Massacre, when an Oklahoma community of predominantly Black entrepreneurs known as Black Wall Street was destroyed in an anti-Black riot. The crypto and blockchain industries, Wilkinson said, open up opportunities to build "generational wealth" that cannot be "bombed away and stolen away." He acknowledged that crypto holders have taken hits in the market crash. "I've definitely seen that," he told Protocol. "I definitely know people who have gone quite down." But downturns are part of crypto, Wilkinson argued. "I've been in this space for 10 years -- this is normal to me," he said. "... Over the long haul, crypto is probably one of the best-performing assets of all time." Another Black entrepreneur, Edwardo Jackson, creator of Blacks in Bitcoin, agreed, noting that crypto offers a way to raise capital for communities that have "historically, institutionally been shut out from mainstream financial access." But Jackson acknowledged a point that was also raised by the Biden administration: Some communities clearly are vulnerable to crypto scams. The Treasury Department report warned that "crypto-asset products may be marketed in ways that obscure their level of risk, which could exacerbate the impact of targeted marketing on vulnerable communities." Signage advertising short-term loans stands in front of stores in Birmingham, Alabama, U.S., on Tuesday, Feb. 10, 2015. In Alabama, the sixth-poorest state, with one of the highest concentrations of lenders, advocates are trying to curb payday and title loans, a confrontation that clergy cast as God versus greed. They have been stymied by an industry that metamorphoses to escape regulation, showers lawmakers with donations, packs hearings with lobbyists and has even fought a common database meant to enforce a $500 limit in loans. Photographer: Gary Tramontina/Bloomberg via Getty Images Signage advertising short-term loans stands in front of stores in Birmingham, Alabama, U.S. Photo: Gary Tramontina/Bloomberg via Getty Images Jackson pointed to what he called "a disturbing trend" in the Black community. "We're targets," he told Protocol. "We're targets of every MLM [multi-level marketing] scam, every scamcoin, shitcoin, whatever it is. A lot of them have recently come home to roost." Carmona said the crypto crash underscores key lessons for underserved communities, particularly Black and Latinx people. While many minorities still grapple with access to capital and traditional banking services, she said, "that doesn't necessarily mean that crypto is automatically the solution." Despite all the talk about decentralization, "the growing concentration of the wealthy in these spaces demonstrates that not all cryptocurrency holders are created equal." The crypto crash also serves as a powerful reminder of other past financial services trends that promised financial inclusion and access, such as payday lending and subprime mortgages, which turned out to be disastrous for these communities. The Treasury Department report actually cited the "prevalence of crypto-asset ATMs in lower-income neighborhoods that lack bank branches," which Hays said "very much reminds me of payday lending storefronts proliferating in low-income neighborhoods." Carmona also cited a point that she said "was brought up again and again" in the Treasury Department report: "While crypto may present new opportunities, it also may present a new set of risks." Keep Reading Show less Benjamin Pimentel Benjamin Pimentel ( @benpimentel) covers crypto and fintech from San Francisco. He has reported on many of the biggest tech stories over the past 20 years for the San Francisco Chronicle, Dow Jones MarketWatch and Business Insider, from the dot-com crash, the rise of cloud computing, social networking and AI to the impact of the Great Recession and the COVID crisis on Silicon Valley and beyond. He can be reached at bpimentel@protocol.com or via Google Voice at (925) 307-9342. discrimination biden administration crypto regulation underbanked cryptocurrency Latest Stories See more Most Popular The green hydrogen boom Why Google is pushing for open media formats Dispatches from Dreamforce Battling the bear market: Why companies need to focus on customers' billing and payment experience The spend management battlefield heats up Livin' the Dream(force) Bulletins September 22, 2022 18:23 EST How to do a background check on a potential employer September 22, 2022 14:22 EST The SEC may back off from a total ban on payment for order flow September 22, 2022 12:01 EST Government warnings about viral fads may come too late About UsCareersContact UsAdvertiseRSS feeds Privacy StatementDo not sellTerms of Service (c) 2022 Protocol Media, LLC To give you the best possible experience, this site uses cookies. If you continue browsing. you accept our use of cookies. 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