Zoom Buys Cloud Call Center; iPhone 13 May Have Always-On Display; WhatsApp Tests Secure Cloud Backups; Steam Deck Deliveries Now into Mid-2022

Zoom is flexing its muscle, having a nice fat stock price and healthier coffers due to all the meetings during the pandemic months. Now,, they have snapped up Five9, a cloud call center biz, for $14.7 billion. According to techcrunch.com, the 20 year old call center firm will become an operating unit of Zoom. Five9 has some 2,000 customers, including Under Armour and Citrix. They are able to process more than 7 billion minutes of calls a year. Zoom expects to get ‘significant’ cross-selling opportunities from the deal, and plans to bring Zoom ‘ease of use’ to the call center service. 

One of the more useful features Apple brought to the Apple Watch last fall is the always on display. While such a display has been around for quite a while on other phones, it may finally be coming to the iPhone in the 13 series due out in September. 9to5mac.com reports that the phone may also finally get a 120 Hz refresh rate, and a bump in video recording abilities. Besides a rumored smaller notch at the top of the screen and a faster chip, expect this to be an ’S’ year for iPhone, without any huge ‘WOW’ feature. 

WhatsApp chats have end-to-end encryption, but up to now, your online backups have not. Engadget.com says they are now testing secure online backups at least for Android. You will have to create a separate password, however…AND if you forget the password and lose your phone you will be out of luck. There is an option for a 64-digit encryption key, but the same goes for that…lose it and lose access to your backups. As this is just being tested out right now, there’s no word so far when the service might be available to all. WhatsApp is also testing multi-device syncing that isn’t dependent on a phone connection. 

Valve opened reservations for its new hand held game machine the Steam Deck (think Nintendo Switch) the end of last week, and their site promptly crashed. According to theverge.com, as of yesterday both the entry level $399 Deck and the $529 version have delivery dates pushed into Q2 of 2022…and the top box that comes with 512Gigs for $649 is now a Q3 delivery! Valve got more than 110,000 reservations for the cheapest and mid-price model in the first 90 minutes they were open last week!