Slack, Gmail, Monday.com, Google Meet, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Docs—this is a (surely incomplete) list of apps and platforms used over the course of reporting and writing this story.

It may ring familiar to many digital workers who have grown accustomed to constantly toggling among the seemingly infinite number of workplace productivity tools that have come to populate our professional lives.

One of the most influential of these tools, Gmail, debuted on April 1, 2004, and is credited with forever changing the ways we use email—and influencing the trajectory of the internet and workplace tech.

At the time, the service’s offering of 1,000 megabytes of storage seemed so improbable that many assumed it was an April Fool’s joke.

“Google’s rivals have copied Gmail so thoroughly that it’s hard to remember just how terrible webmail was before Gmail came along,” Slate recounted in a story marking Gmail’s 10th birthday. “Pages were clunky and slow to load, search functions were terrible, and spam was rampant. You couldn’t organize messages by conversation. Storage capacity was anemic, and if you ran out of space, you had to spend hours deleting old emails or buy more storage from your provider. Gmail…taught us that Web apps could run as smoothly as desktop applications. And it taught us the power of cloud storage.”

Keep reading here.—JG

Leaders in the geothermal industry came together earlier this year and admitted a hard truth: Geothermal energy isn’t well understood by the public. And to change that, geothermal companies need to come together and work on clear messaging and visuals to help educate the world about geothermal’s potential.

To do so, Kristina Hagström-Ilievska, chief marketing officer at geothermal company Baseload Capital, brought big names in the geothermal market together for a Declaration of Communication to start a united campaign explaining what geothermal is.

“The [geothermal] bottleneck [is] always that I have to stop to explain it in order to continue to talk about it,” Hagström-Ilievska told Tech Brew. “This is actually a problem. We need more airtime to get more investments, but we don’t get airtime, so we don’t get investments.”

Keep reading here.—TC

People in higher income countries are using AI more—but those in the highest income countries may also trust it less.

A recent report from the United Nations Development Programme examined attitudes on and usage of AI through a survey of more than 21,000 people in 21 countries across its spectrum of Human Development Index (HDI) scores.

In countries with low and medium HDI, only 14.4% of people reported AI use in health, education, or work within the last month. Around 23.6% answered similarly in high-HDI countries, a group that includes China, Brazil, and Indonesia. Around two in five (19%) reported using AI this way in very high HDI countries, like the US, most of Europe, Japan, and Korea.

But those in the first two groups of countries also expected to use AI much more in the next year—around two-thirds of respondents in each—while a more muted 45.9% expect to do so in very high income countries.

Trust gap: Bloomberg also reported, based on a yet-to-be-published piece of the research, that six in 10 people in developing countries, or those with less than “very high” HDI, trust that AI will ultimately benefit society, including 83% in China. And residents in two-thirds of countries “expressed some level of confidence” that AI could be a force for good.

Keep reading here.—PK