Meta Moves to Make Hated Algo a Feature; FDA Refuses to Review Moderna’s mRNA Flu Vaccine; Why ‘Deleted’ isn’t Necessarily Gone; Sam Blond Launches Competitor to Salesforce

Users of Threads have complained mightily since the platform started about the algorithm. It has even become a meme. Engadget.com reports that people have been writing posts addressed ‘Dear algorithm.’ Well now, Meta is turning those ‘Dear algorithm’ posts into a feature that will let Threads users tune their recommendations in real time. You can now write a post that starts with ‘dear algo’ to adjust your preferences. You can ask to see fewer posts about topics you don’t want to see, or ask to see more posts about topics you are interested in. Meta says the dear algo feature will keep things fresher and more flexible. 

We just got a great example of how ‘deleted’ doesn’t really mean gone when it comes to internet data. By now, we’ve all seen the doorbell cam footage of the intruder at Nancy Guthrie’s home…mother of Savannah Guthrie. According to theverge.com, even though Mrs. Guthrie didn’t have a Nest account that saved video, Google engineers were able to recover the snip of video before the intruder removed the camera from the front door. Here’s some detail on how it was possible to recover the video. Most cams only stream live footage unless you either pay for a subscription to the company’s cloud service or use local storage, such as a microSD card or a home hub. Nest cameras, by contrast, can send clips to Google’s servers even without a paid subscription. Google offers a small amount of free cloud storage — older models store clips up to 5 minutes long for 3 hours; the latest models store ten-second clips for six hours. That means some footage is uploaded and stored, at least temporarily, whether you pay or not. Nest cams store footage for 3-6 hours. This means until that data was overwritten, the Google engineers could still go back and find it. Now, this is hard, and they aren’t going to do this on most cases.  If you are really concerned about privacy, though…good luck. Basically this story shows that there isn’t any when it comes to anything connected to the internet.

More Bobby Kennedy insanity. Arstechnica.com notes that the FDA has refused to review Moderna’s application for an mRNA flu vaccine. Moderna said it was blindsided by the FDA’s refusal, which the FDA cited as being due to the design of the company’s Phase 3 trial for its mRNA flu vaccine, dubbed mRNA-1010. Specifically, the FDA’s rejection was over the comparator vaccine Moderna used. The trial cost millions, and included about 41,000 participants. The findings were that the mRNA-1010 vaccine was superior. We wouldn’t want to have better vaccines, would we? 

Sam Blond, late of the venture capital Founders Fund has brought a startup called Monaco out of stealth mode. TechCrunch.com reports that Monaco is going after the business of Salesforce and others. They are using AI for sales tech with in interesting twist. Besides AI assistants, Monaco is also putting experienced human salespeople in the loop to monitor and guide the AI’s work. So far, they have raised $35 million. Blond says the product is intended to automate much of the sales grunt work. “We can replace full workflows with agents.”  For instance, Monaco builds a database of prospects, identifies the exact people at a target company to pitch and the sequence in which to target them. “We orchestrate and execute that sequence. We schedule a meeting.” Stay tuned to see if this gets the traction they plan on.

I’m Clark Reid and you’re ’Technified’ for now.