The big picture: A growing fight over data center development is pulling in an unexpected group of critics: country music stars. In the past few weeks, artists including Brad Paisley, Tanya Tucker, Gavin Adcock, and Willie Nelson have all spoken out against new projects. While their politics vary, their concerns overlap. They are pushing back on how these facilities are being placed in or near rural communities.

Paisley was among the first to draw attention to the issue, opposing a proposed data center in Nashville that would be located about 500 yards from the city’s zoo. He criticized both the scale and the setting of the project. “It would be an enormous monstrosity, an absolute eyesore and detract in every way for not only that zoo, but also that area,” Paisley wrote in a social media post urging people to sign a petition. Other artists quickly backed him, helping bring the issue into the wider spotlight

The conversation has since expanded beyond Tennessee. In Texas, where data center development is accelerating, Tanya Tucker warned about environmental strain tied to the projects. “It’s going to hurt our health, our wildlife, our water table, our water resources,” she posted. “It’s going to scar our land forever.” The scale of development is significant, with about 248 data centers planned across the state.

Gavin Adcock, who often takes a more confrontational tone, focused on the impact on rural communities. In a video posted online, he argued that farmers and landowners are being forced to deal with the downsides of projects driven by outside investors. “These people are getting punished for living in the country,” Adcock said, pointing to pressure on land, water, and local resources.

Willie Nelson made a similar case, tying the issue to broader concerns about rural identity and land use. Writing about potential development near his hometown of Abbott, Texas, he said, “The last thing we need is a loud, water-thieving, light-polluting, data center anywhere near our town (or any others for that matter).” He continued, “The strength of rural America has never come from big industrial footprints. It comes from generations of people, open spaces, local businesses, and a connection to the land… let’s not allow our own demise or give up control over necessary resources in the US and especially in Abbott.”

The debate centers on the real-world demands of modern data infrastructure. Facilities built to handle AI workloads require large amounts of electricity, dense server capacity, and extensive cooling systems. Those cooling systems often rely heavily on water, which has become a major sticking point in areas already dealing with resource constraints.

Public opinion appears to be lining up with that concern. A Gallup poll in May found that only 7% of Americans strongly support building data centers in their communities.

Researchers say the resistance is less about rejecting technology and more about how it is being implemented. “Amid so much partisan division, opposition to data centers seems to be the thing that unites Americans right now,” Megan Mullin of the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation told Rolling Stone. “It’s tempting to attribute this resistance to a growing wariness about technology and the titans who control it, but in reality it’s rooted in the one thing that has always united Americans: our deep affinity for where we live.”

For some artists, the issue also ties back to AI itself. Paisley tied the issue to broader concerns in the music industry, saying AI is already affecting artists and rights holders without their approval. He argued that the same lack of consent applies to the proposed data center near the zoo, where he said the people most affected were not being given a real say.

Not everyone in the industry has taken a clear position. John Rich, who was recently appointed “Special Envoy for American Landowners” by President Trump, suggested there may be a middle ground. He echoed a line he attributed to Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, saying there is a proper way to build a data center and an improper way to do it, while suggesting that more guidance from Washington may be coming soon.

Outgoing Apple CEO Tim Cook has presented his final earnings call, the quarterly financial phone meeting the company has with analysts, and just as at WWDC, he made a relatively quiet farewell.

In a change to the usual format of these earnings calls, Cook took a moment to talk both about himself and how the handover to John Ternus is going.

Before we get into questions, I just wanted to take a moment to say thank you to all of from our shareholders, particularly our long-term shareholders, who have put their trust in us for so many years, to the analysts who have followed our company so closely. As you know, this will be my final earnings call, and John will lead these calls going forward. The transition is going seamlessly, and I am beyond excited. for John to step into his new role and lead Apple into its next era.

He is truly one-of-a-kind and there is no better person to take the helm of the company. As I’ve said, I couldn’t be more confident in his leadership, in our executive team, and in the extraordinary people at Apple who are determined to lives of our users all over the world. We have a bright future ahead, and I truly have never been more optimistic. So thank you all.

Having said all of this, Cook then resumed the regular format of the call by taking questions from analysts. So far, every one has thanked Cook for his time in charge of the company.

Fifteen years of earning calls

Every quarter since at least 2011 when he took over as Apple CEO, Cook has led an earnings call discussing profits and generally side-stepping analysts’ questions. Despite having an audible head cold in many of them, he has not missed one in those 15 years, either.

There are reports, though, of just how seriously Cook takes these calls, and what he does to relax afterwards.

If you ever listen to them, the first half is chiefly Cook or the Chief Financial Officer reading prepared statements. Then the second half is both of them telling analysts that no, they won’t reveal details about the iPhone 6, iPhone X, or iPhone Fold.

Peeking behind the scenes at AppleInsider a bit, we count how many times variations of “we do not comment on unannounced products” are said during an earnings call. One 2018 call resulted in eleven, which is the standing record.

Anyway, these calls are mandatory, and every cent Apple makes is studied and debated afterwards by analysts. The calls themselves, though, don’t sound that pressing, yet after each one, Cook says he takes a walk across Apple Park to decompress.

“When I do something like our quarterly earnings call, after the earnings call, I come out here,” he said in 2020. “The sound and the look [of Apple Park] is unbelievable.”

“Just the sound itself makes these big problems and big challenges of the day seem so small,” he continued. “This is like working in a national park for me, it provides that kind of feeling.”

More than 60 earnings calls

If Tim Cook had only contributed to Apple’s quarterly earnings calls since he became CEO, he would now have completed around 60 of them. But he’s done many more, including back when Steve Jobs was in charge, and when Apple was seeing the start of its incredible financial growth.

Jobs left these calls to Tim Cook and then-CFO Peter Oppenheimer, until October 2010. That was the last earnings call Jobs spoke on before his death.

“As most of you know, I don’t usually participate in Apple’s earnings calls since you are all in such capable hands with Peter and Tim,” he said according to a transcript on Seeking Alpha. “But I just couldn’t help dropping by for our first $20 billion quarter.”

In that call, Jobs talked up the success of the then-new iPad, and Tim Cook backed it up with some figures about its adoption by enterprise firms. Then financial analysts asked for specifics such as what Apple’s margins were on the latest iPhone 4, and Cook declined to answer.

Flash forward to 2026, and the figures are dramatically different as Apple recently touched a $5 trillion market cap.

Sometimes it’s hard to criticize a company’s quarterly earnings, although without fail Apple’s share price always dips after them. Even now, AAPL is down about 8% after-hours on yet another record-breaking, and Wall Street prediction shattering earnings report.

Launch a single static binary executable, send someone a QR code or URL (or failing that, text a numerical code or shout it across a room), and they’ll get an encrypted terminal in their browser. No VPN, no port forwarding, no firewall modifications, and no account setup required. It’s BitBang by [Rich LeGrand], and there is a lot to go through in this one.

The best part? It’s not actually limited to just firing off a terminal. It’s a whole open framework for establishing an encrypted peer-to-peer connection between two systems over WebRTC without needing either a trusted central authority, or any special network configuration.

Opening a remote terminal, transferring files, or accessing web apps on a remote machine’s network is done with bitbang-cli, an implementation of BitBang focused on providing simple, zero-config remote access.

Before we go on, we want to mention that BitBang does require a lightweight, trustless signaling server only to broker the initial connection, but more on that in a moment.

On the machine to be shared, one first downloads the binary. Easiest way to do that is to go to bitba.ng and download manually, or copy and paste the one-line installer to auto-detect one’s system, download the correct release, and verify the checksum.

After the binary is downloaded, simply run it in a terminal and receive a QR code to scan, a URL to copy & paste, or a numerical code if those are inconvenient. One the remote side, one accesses the signaling server and the connection is made — one gets a terminal on the target machine open in the browser tab, with added options for file sharing and accessing web applications on the target network.

The signaling server isn’t involved in authentication or encryption, and couldn’t see private data between the two ends even if it wanted to. Prefer not to use someone else’s regardless? Run your own local instance with bitbang-server.

Originally developed as an easy way to securely make telepresence robots reachable over the Internet with nothing more than a QR code, today it’s a whole framework.

It includes not just the remote-access tool mentioned above, but also a BitBang Octoprint plugin for cloud-free remote access to 3D printers, and bitbang-python is a library for turning local Python web applications into a URL that can be opened from anywhere.

We’re sure some of you are getting more than a few ideas from this. If it lets you bring a project over the finish line, let us know on our tips line.

Two prominent science fiction authors have decried the impact of AI on their craft.

“I do not want or need a large language model to write my fiction for me. I write fiction compulsively – before I was published I wrote for many years as a hobbyist – so why on earth would I pay someone else to take my fun away?” wrote Charles Stross in a Saturday post. Stross graciously mentioned The Register in his Laundry Files novels.

“I maintain that any serious author should shun LLMs like the plague,” he added. “Did I mention the ‘stealing’ thing? This isn’t hyperbole: I’m one of the parties to the settlement in the class action lawsuit against Anthropic AI for pirating eBooks to train their LLMs.”

“That’s not my only grievance, either. You may have noticed this blog performing sluggishly or crapping out from time to time over the past few months. That’s because my server is old and feeble and periodically gets swarmed by Chinese and other foreign botnets scraping data for training LLMs.”

Stross labelled AI companies “absolute scum.”

“They’re stealing copyrighted material to train an LLM that is intended to compete for revenue with the authors of the works they stole, and they’re fine-tuning their LLMs to make them as addictive as possible in order to maximize future revenue once they pivot to token sales as their main source of income,” he wrote.

“In other words, they’re no different from a burglar who robs you one day then comes round to sell you your stuff back the next morning. Back in the 18th century we used to hang people like that and Sam Altman makes me question the wisdom of having stopped.”

Scalzi, whose best-known works include the Old Man’s War series and Hugo Award-winning novel Redshirts, on Friday commented on a recent article about a hotly tipped debut novel being pulled from publishing and film or television consideration over concerns that AI had been used to write it.

“The issue appears not to be that ‘AI’ material isn’t copyrightable, the issue is that ‘AI’ is trained on copyrighted material, so prose generated from it could be contested by the original copyright holders,” Scalzi wrote.

He expects publishers to look for signs of AI use, although the available detection tools are notoriously unreliable. He predicts that this will disadvantage new writers who lack a body of work dating from before the arrival of ChatGPT.

“Which is unfair,” Scalzi wrote. “It’s especially unfair when the makers of the tools writers use to write  – I’m looking at you, Microsoft and Google – are frantically stuffing ‘AI’ tools into the programs writers rely on.”

Then Scalzi dispensed with the diplomatic language.

“No, Microsoft, I don’t fucking want Copilot to ‘help me write’ in Word, and no, Google, I don’t fucking want Gemini to ‘help me write’ in Google Docs. The very fact these ‘AI’s are hovering around my writing at all is bad enough from a provenance standpoint. These ‘AI’ tools are making it harder for all writers in this regard, not easier.”

Stross raised a related concern: “If I was crazy enough to feed the outline of a story I was working on as a prompt to ChatGPT or Claude in hope of getting the stochastic parrot to do my homework for me, then it would be only my own fault and nobody else’s if the next model from the company in question was been trained [sic] on my book outline and could reproduce part or all of it for someone else.”

Scalzi advised authors not to “incorporate ‘AI’ into any part of your publishing process, either: Don’t use ‘AI’ editing, don’t use ‘AI’ art, don’t use ‘AI’ translation, don’t use ‘AI’ anything that calls into dispute whether your work is actually yours. Using ‘AI’ cover art, for example, will immediately call into question what else in the book is ‘AI.’ Every other aspect of the book is implicitly tarred with the same ‘AI’ brush. When I say that I have it in my contracts that I require every aspect of my book production to be done by humans, it’s not just because I want to honor human work and input. It’s also because I’m protecting my own reputation by doing so.”

Stross, however, admitted he “can see some circumstances where being able to train a local model on my work could be useful to me.”

“I’d quite like a tool (running entirely locally on my own hardware, with no cloud service and no copyright-thieving grifters making bank on it via subscription fees) that digests a manuscript and derives a scene-by-scene timeline, that I could then query interactively and use to plan my next round of edits,” he wrote.

He also allowed that “being able to map out where and when each protagonist and minor character shows up, and see a frequency distribution heat map of names in the manuscript, would be useful.”

“But such a tool would be useful to me in the same way a spelling checker is useful – as a decision-support tool, not as a substitute for doing the hard work (and having a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary on the shelf). The value of such a tool is considerably less than the value of a well-trained brain that can do the entire job the hard way, if necessary.”

Stross has also found one use of LLMs he thinks is valid: as a device in his work. To illustrate that, he shared the following excerpt of a space opera he has written and is currently editing:

The events described in this account have been translated into your language from the original source material using a non-sapient large language model.

Certain terms have been approximated, where possible, by using culturally appropriate cognates. Names of individuals have been replaced by equivalents. Similarly, institutions, ranks, religions, proverbs, idioms, quotations, and other culturally-determined signifiers have been translated into terms that will be familiar to the reader.

Units of duration and distance have also been converted.

We apologize in advance for any hallucinations our LLM may have inadvertently introduced in the process of generating this rough translation.

Neither author mentioned the fact that George R R Martin, author of the A Song of Ice and Fire novels adapted for television as Game of Thrones, writes on a PC that has no internet connection and runs DOS plus the ancient WordStar word processor. Perhaps drafts and revision histories from such setups will become another way for authors to demonstrate that their words are their own. ®

Lava’s newly launched Virat Series received a strong response on its first day of sale. The Lava Virat V1 5G and Lava Virat V1 went out of stock on Flipkart on the first day of sale. The sale began at 12 PM IST on July 31. Lava said this was the fastest stockout for the Virat Series on a sale day. The company said the response reflects the growing number of consumers buying smartphones online. According to Lava, buyers are looking for dependable performance, a clean Android experience, and affordable smartphones. The strong demand for the Virat Series highlights this growing preference.

Virat V1 Specs

Lava Virat V1 5G includes a 6.75-inch HD+ display screen with a 120Hz refresh rate. It contains a 6000mAh battery and the UNISOC T8200 chipset. The phone comes with 64GB of internal memory, expandable up to 1TB. This phone does not have any ads or bloatware; rather, it runs on the Clean Android 16 Operating System. It also has an IP64 rating for dust and water resistance.

Another version of the Lava Virat V1 phone includes a 6.75-inch HD+ screen, a 5000mAh battery, and a UNISOC SC9863A chipset. The phone includes 64GB internal memory that is also expandable. The smartphone also carries an IP64 rating for added durability. Lava confirmed that it is working with Flipkart to restore stocks as quickly as possible. Customers who could not buy the smartphones during the first sale will get another chance once the devices are back in stock.

Right now, the Internet is drowning in articles about the Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey – some loved it, others haven’t seen it, and a few have criticised it. Allow me to add another opinion to the heap.

I very much enjoyed watching The Odyssey, having bought my ticket for Waterloo BFI IMAX when the tickets went on sale (waiting in an online queue for about 50 minutes to do so). I went into the film avoiding the hype (which is always out of proportion), looking to enjoy the film.

And while I was sightly conflicted once the lights turned back on (a little more insight into Odysseus’ men, and a sight of people outside of kings, queens, soldiers and schemers would have rounded the world out some more). But it is an intense, surprisingly soulful, absorbing, and relentless film that exists on a huge canvas. Go see it on as big a screen as you can.

The stories of people going on their own odysseys, travelling thousands of miles to see the film on 15/70mm film, have added to the whirlwind of noise surrounding the film.

But with a 4K Blu-ray release certain to come out before Christmas, it had me wondering whether seeing it at home – while not the original intention of experiencing the film – might be just as good.

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A visceral experience in the cinema

I do like an IMAX viewing, and The Odyssey being the first feature film shot in full 15/70mm is all the reason I need to head to the cinema. Living in London, we’re fortunate that we have two screens capable of 15/70mm projection. With only 41 locations that can do this on the entire planet, that’s a sign of how rare this experience is.

A case can be made about elitism given the sparsity of 15/70mm IMAX venues. This goes back at least 15 years with the appearance of the ‘lie-MAX’ screenings that claimed to offer the IMAX colour and sound in proportional sizes. I’ve never liked these smaller screens. It goes against the point of IMAX in my opinion.

I’d recommend the IMAX Laser screen at the Cineworld Leicester Square, as that might possibly offer the best picture quality of any type of IMAX venue, having talked to the former CTO of IMAX way back when.

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But the actual experience of sitting in the auditorium and seeing the full screen, led to a few thoughts during the film and afterwards. I’d thought Row F and slap bang in the middle would be enough, but I think I miscalculated.

There have always been prime seats in IMAX – only the unfortunate who were too slow to buy a ticket or decided ‘the hell with it’ and lumbered in the A, B, C rows. I remember seeing Interstellar with a work colleague and while the experience of the film was great, craning your neck from row D is not ideal.

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And even in row F, I found the verticality of the IMAX screen close to intimidating at times. It’s utterly huge, and seeing Odysseus’s face loom over you is a spectacle in itself. There’s a physical side to watching the film you’ll never get watching at home, even if my neck felt a little bit like an F1 driver’s whizzing around a track for 90 minutes. The next time I see The Odyssey, my tickets are up higher.

At home though, this will be neutered, and it got me thinking about how, while the home experience will be a downgrade on the cinema, I’d get to enjoy the film in my own way. I won’t be craning my neck, the film won’t be slightly out of focus at times (which I can’t yet tell if that’s the film itself or the projector focus), and I’ll have the best seat in the house. I’m all for the cinema, but let’s not forget that home cinema and physical media at its best, is a great thing.

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The version of The Odyssey that will hit home entertainment will be different from the cinema release as it won’t be a 1:1 translation. IMAX film is effectively a square (Nolan uses the taller 1.43:1 ratio rather than the wider 1.90:1 ratio) – TVs are 16 x 9 rectangular. The maths have never fitted.

A truer translation of the IMAX film would have black borders left and right (pillarboxing) in the way Zack Snyder’s Justice League does. But Nolan carries his centre crop approach to home video with the film filling out the screen, so the 4K Blu-ray and other home video versions (streaming versions of Nolan films are often 2.39:1) will be a compromise in terms of cropping the top, bottom and sides.

In a way, that makes the IMAX 15/70mm exclusive to cinema, despite the humorous memes of people watching the film’s trailer on their iPod Classic with the line “As Nolan intended”. You’ll never really see the 15/70mm film outside of an IMAX screen. Ever.

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Bringing the epic home

But it’s not as if Nolan doesn’t take considerable care with his 4K Blu-rays. There are versions of the film, despite not being the version of the film, and they are crafted to reflect the intent and the way you want to see the film at home. And this is where my laboured point comes into view.

Nolan is an advocate of physical media, and as he said at the inaugural DEG Vanguard Award in 2023: “…with 4K UHD, you’re going to be able to produce a home video version of your film with a format that will actually show off to the best effect all of the effort and money put into the technical presentation of the theatrical. So, a lot of my interest in visual spectacle, in the technical aspects of filmmaking over my last few films, is definitely driven and enhanced by the idea that at the end of the day the people at home will be able to experience a very high-quality version of the film.”

And with regards to translating theatrical film to the home: “…what we would do is just project the material and then project the video and really try to match it as closely as possible and the added bandwidth the HDR, bit depth and color and so forth it really puts us in a position where we can get closer and closer to a theatrical print in the home. It’s really exciting that all that work — an increasing amount of work — carries through to the home presentation.”

This continues with the film’s soundtrack, which in the same talk Nolan has said with the 4K Blu-ray releases that they “decided to put the full theatrical sound mixes of the film” because of the quality of people’s home cinema systems.

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Given I review a fair amount of home cinema systems each year, I’m not sure I’d totally agree with that assertion. Many still opt for either basic or compact (and therefore compromised) sound systems, and Nolan’s sound mixes remain challenging. You could a good sound system to get the best from his films, not helped by many soundbars and TV brands ditching support for his favour DTS audio format.

There were moments during The Odyssey where I couldn’t pick up dialogue (a common criticism of Nolan films and not entirely false). The volume levels do get thunderously loud, the relentlessness of the third act is aided by the sound mix and Ludwig Göransson almost 80s-synth like score – it’s the loudest film I’ve seen in the cinema since a critics screening of Nolan’s Dunkirk at the BFI IMAX, which in a past life I described as a “concussive, forceful experience”.

At home, I can have the volume at more palatable (but still high) levels and not feel like my head is being pounded by the full-range IMAX speakers, though The Odyssey is the type of film that’d make people shell out for a new system.

Nolan’s version of The Odyssey is visceral and exhausting, both visually and aurally, in the way he intended it to be. I’m of the firm belief that whether you like the film or not, you won’t see anything like it from any other film this year.

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It’s very familiar if you’ve seen Nolan’s filmography – the nesting narratives, repeated imagery, and huge scale go with assured performances across the board (even in small parts).

So go see it in the cinema, as many people are currently doing – I’ll be seeing it in IMAX 15/70mm again soon – and once I’ve had my fill, I’ll be turning towards the 4K Blu-ray release, as while that won’t be the version seen in the cinemas, it’ll take the theatrical experience and translate it for home cinema as a ‘new’ version of the film in its own way.

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And I’m looking forward to having a copy of The Odyssey in the best possible version outside of the cinema, one that’ll hopefully echo and endure like the original poem.

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It’s so hard for big businesses to get AI tools working reliably that whole new organizations of forward-deployed engineers or FDEs— specialists who drop into a company to get its AI systems up and running — are springing up to help them.

“AI, paradoxically, increases the demand for professional services,” says Efrat Rapoport, a former Salesforce executive whose new company, June, emerged from stealth Monday morning. “The industry’s answer to AI implementation is, ‘let’s hire more and more and more people.”

Rapoport and her three cofounders — Ohad Hen, Barak Goldstein, and Idan Tsitiat — have a different idea about how to bring AI into broader use. To pursue it, the company raised $20 million in pre-seed funding led by Marc Benioff’s Time Ventures, with additional backing from tech luminaries like Michael Dell, Aaron Levie and George Kurtz. The company declined to share its valuation.

The four founders previously started Bonobo AI, a pre-transformer language model company that launched a voice-to-text service in 2017. Bonobo AI was snapped up two years later by Salesforce, and the team worked for several years on the tech giant’s AI initiatives before setting out on their own again after watching customers struggle to bring AI into their existing platforms.

Their potential was clear enough to their investors, Rapoport says, that “we didn’t even have a deck for this raise.”

While the so-called SaaSpocalypse has software firms fearing that AI might replace them, thus far no one is vibe-coding a CRM for a Fortune 500 company. Any AI model brought into a corporate setting still has to work with Salesforce, ServiceNow, DataBricks, Workday, or any of a dozen other data-management platforms.

“Before AI can create value, someone has to deal with legacy systems,” Rapoport says. “You have fragmented data across these platforms. You have complex workflows. You have years of technical debt.”

Building an agent template is the easy part, she says. The hard part is getting it to work with the mess underneath. “How does an agent know how to operate when you have 10 duplicate [database] fields that say the same thing, and different teams are using them?”

June’s platform scans a company’s existing systems to understand its business processes, find bottlenecks, and then build more optimized, agent-powered processes to replace them, automatically notifying teams through the company’s comms channels.

“We give you the full roadmap automatically of what needs to happen step by step for you to actually implement this agent successfully in an enterprise environment, which is often very complex,” Rapoport said. “We give you a step by step guide. ‘Remove these duplicates. Connect to this data source.’ And then you click on ‘build’ on each task, and June starts building it for you in the organization.”

Paul Akinmade, chief strategy officer at CMG, a major U.S. mortgage lender, moved his company’s software engineering over to Claude Code quickly, but hit roadblocks trying to integrate it with Salesforce. That was a problem since he’d promised at Salesforce’s annual conference the year before that he’d return with 100 agents running, and it wasn’t looking like he’d hit that target.

Akinmade says his team spent weeks hitting a wall — meeting with architects, talking to forward-deployed engineers, consulting everybody they could — without making progress. June changed that, he says, giving his team a clear view of where to deploy agents and letting them do so safely, even before the official kickoff call between the two companies

Rapoport sees June as a tool that complements FDEs and consultants, but her customers may be drawn to it for the opposite reason: it lets them avoid FDEs altogether.

When Akinmade was first considering piloting the tool at CMG, he says he told her: “If your product requires FDEs, I don’t want your product. I’ve already I’ve already done that and I’m getting annoyed by it. I don’t want a black box. I don’t want something only certain people can figure out. I want an easy-to-use tool.”

Evidently, June cleared the bar.