Outlook, like all of the programs in Microsoft Office's productivity suite, can display a photo on your user profile. This one profile picture will appear in every Office program that displays your profile. 

By default, it simply shows your initials, but you can change it to display any photo you like. 

Note, however, that this only applies to Outlook on Windows computers. The Mac version of Outlook doesn't show your profile picture anywhere, and doesn't let you change it.

Here's how to add a profile picture to Microsoft Outlook.

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Acer Chromebook 15 (From $358.99 at Staples)

How to add a profile picture to Outlook

1. Open Outlook and sign in, and then click "File" and then "Office Account." You should see your profile photo under "User Information" on the left side of the window. 

The big data company Palantir plans to file to go public in the coming weeks, Bloomberg's Katie Roof and Lizette Chapman reported. 

This company, first launched in 2004, has been secretive for most of its existence. Last year, there were rumors that it would go public. Now, Bloomberg reports that Palantir could start trading as early as this fall. The company has yet to respond to a request for comment.

Palantir's earliest claim to fame is that it was cofounded by Facebook board member and VC Peter Thiel, one of President Donald Trump's biggest backers in Silicon Valley.

Over the years, Palantir grew into one of the most valuable startups in the country, with a $2.75 billion in venture capital raised and a $20 billion valuation — despite the fact that it operates under a veil of secrecy.

It works closely with the US government and law enforcement agencies, counting the FBI, CIA, and Department of Defense as customers, among other agencies (more on that in a moment). Indeed, Palantir CEO Alex Karp recently blasted other tech companies for what he perceives as a reluctance to work on defense-related projects. 

Palantir has boasted about the good that it does, especially as pertaining to its work with government agencies: Previously, CEO Alex Karp has said that he hears about a foiled terrorist attack in Europe almost every week. 

However, Palantir has also found itself scrutinized for its dealings with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the US agency responsible for enforcing President Donald Trump's crackdown on undocumented immigrants in the country. WNYC reported that ICE agents use the company's apps in the field during workplace raids.

That controversy has touched Amazon as well, as Palantir relies on Amazon's cloud to run its big data software. Already, people within and outside of Amazon have protested its ties to Palantir.

Now, activist organizations are protesting Palantir for working with ICE by providing the software that makes many of its core operations possible. For example, they held protests at Palantir's Palo Alto offices to protest the company's contracts with ICE. 

At the same time, Palantir's creators are going on the offensive, criticizing tech companies that don't work with the US government and proclaiming Palantir's patriotic bona fides. Joe Lonsdale, a VC who cofounded Palantir but is no longer involved in company's operations, said last year that Palantir is "probably the most patriotic company" in Silicon Valley.

Here's what to know about this richly valued and controversial data mining company.

What is Palantir?

Based in Palo Alto, California, Palantir was founded in 2003 by a group of PayPal alumni and Stanford computer scientists, including CEO Alex Karp. 

Palantir creates software to manage, analyze, and secure data. Its name comes from a mystical, spherical object in the "Lord of the Rings" book that allows its owner to "see from afar." In total, the company has raised $2.75 billion in venture capital.

As for Karp, he is a self-described socialist, even though Palantir works with large corporations and government agencies to provide big data tools.

The company was born out of Thiel's experience working at PayPal, where credit card fraud cost the company millions each month. To solve the problem, PayPal built an internal security application that helped employees analyze suspicious transactions.

Palantir takes a similar approach by finding patterns in complicated data. For example, law enforcement agencies can use it to search for links in phone records, photos, vehicle information, criminal history, biometrics, credit card transactions, addresses, and police reports.

VICE reported Palantir's software allows law enforcement to enter a license plate number and quickly get an itinerary of the routes and places the vehicle has travelled. Police can also use it to map out family and business relationships.

And Palantir's technology has been used in New Orleans for predictive policing, The Verge reported — a practice that has been shown to increase surveillance and arrests in communities of color.  Palantir has been involved in various lawsuits in the past few years. For example, in 2017, Palantir settled a lawsuit from the Department of Labor saying that its hiring practices discriminated against Asians. 

In 2016, Oracle reportedly considered buying Palantir. Previously, Palantir was reportedly in talks with Credit Suisse and Morgan Stanley about an IPO in the second half of 2019. 

As a privately held company, Palantir's valuation is believed to be anywhere from $11 billion to $41 billion, depending on who is doing the estimates. PitchBook pegs its valuation at $20 billion.

Why is Palantir so secretive?

Palantir is notoriously tight-lipped. That's because many of its customer agreements include non-disclosure clauses due to the nature of their work. As a result, Palantir tends to keep a low profile, sharing almost no information about how its software is used or its own finances. 

Palantir reportedly expects to generate $1 billion in revenue this year and to break even for the first time in its 16-year history.

While it counts commercial businesses and nonprofits as customers, it also works with many government organizations, banks, and legal research firms. Some customers include Credit Suisse, JP Morgan Chase, the Department of Defense, Merck, Airbus, the FBI, and the CIA.

On its website, it says that people work with Palantir to uncover human trafficking rings, analyze finances, respond to natural disasters, track disease outbreaks, combat cyberattacks, prevent terrorist attacks, and more. 

Working with government agencies is a core part of Palantir's business. For the first several years, Palantir only sold its data analysis products to US government agencies. Palantir works with various military organizations and combat missions to gather information on enemy activity, track criminals, identify fraud, plan logistics, and more.  

For example, its software has been used by the Marine Corps to gather intelligence, and it's building software for the US Army to analyze terrain, movement, and weather information in remote areas. It's even been rumored to have been used to track down Osama Bin Laden, although Palantir did not comment directly on it. 

Palantir has also been selective about the customers it works with. For example, Karp previously told Fortune that Palantir turned down a partnership with a tobacco company "for fear the company would harness the data to pinpoint vulnerable communities to sell cigarettes to."

What is Palantir doing with ICE?

According to USAspending.gov, Palantir has received over $170 million in contracts with ICE, including active contracts worth about $94 million. Palantir provides investigative case management software to ICE to gather, store, and search troves of data on undocumented immigrants' employment information, phone records, immigration history, and more.

Palantir employees had reportedly "begged" to end the ICE deal, but Karp said the data is being used for drug enforcement, not separating families. Palantir also said ICE uses its technology for investigating criminal activity like human trafficking, child exploitation, and counter-terrorism. However, Mijente reported that ICE agents used Palantir's software to build profiles of undocumented children and family members that could be used for prosecution and arrest.

WNYC also reported that ICE agents used a Palantir program called FALCON Mobile to plan workplace raids earlier this year. This app reportedly allowed them to search through law enforcement databases with information on people's people's immigration histories, family relationships, and past border crossings. 

Last year, two days after an ICE reportedly sent an email notifying staff to use the FALCON app, ICE raided nearly 100 7-Elevens across the country.

Why are people protesting Amazon?

All this has also sparked protests against Amazon, since Palantir relies on Amazon's cloud to run its software. Previously at the Burning Man festival, a national group for Latinx and Chicanx organizing called Mijente brought a giant cage to protest Amazon and Palantir's involvement with ICE.

In 2018, an anonymous Amazon employee wrote a Medium blog post that said over 450 Amazon employees wrote to CEO Jeff Bezos demanding it to stop working with Palantir. Employees also confronted Bezos at an all-hands about its connection to ICE.

Last year, Amazon employees circulated another internal letter demanding that Amazon stop working with Palantir and take a stand against ICE.

Read more: Read the internal letter sent by a group of Amazon employees asking the company to take a stand against ICE 

Later that week, at an Amazon Web Services conference, activists interrupted the keynote in protest of Amazon's ties to Palantir and ICE.

"As we've said many times and continue to believe strongly, companies and government organizations need to use existing and new technology responsibly and lawfully. There is clearly a need for more clarity from governments on what is acceptable use of AI and ramifications for its misuse, and we've provided a proposed legislative framework for this. We remain eager for the government to provide this additional clarity and legislation, and will continue to offer our ideas and specific suggestions," an AWS spokesperson said in a statement at the time.

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DoorDash is set to cash in from the coronavirus-spurred spike in its business.

The food delivery service is finalizing plans to sell several hundred million dollars worth of private company shares to mutual fund companies T. Rowe Price and Fidelity as well as other investors, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday. Assuming the deal goes through, the new funding round would raise the company's valuation to $15 billion. That's up from the $13 billion value investors gave it in November.

A DoorDash representative declined comment on the report.

The new financing would seem to further postpone the company's planned initial public offering. DoorDash confidentially filed its IPO paperwork in February, but in early March, CEO Tony Xu indicated the company was in no hurry to go public.

Although it has consistently lost money in recent years — including an estimated $450 million loss on $1 billion in sales last year — Door Dash had $1 billion in cash on hand prior to the new funding, The Information said in a separate report. Meanwhile, the company expects to break even in the second quarter of this year, excluding certain costs, The Journal reported.

DoorDash and other food delivery services saw a surge in sales after state governments put in place lockdown orders to try to control the COVID-19 pandemic. With people largely prohibited from dining at restaurants, many ordered food online for delivery instead. In April, food delivery sales nearly doubled from the year earlier, according to market research firm Second Measure.

But DoorDash in particular saw gains. As of April, it controlled 45% of the food delivery market, up from 35% in November, Second Measure reported.

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Going back and forth between your work and email to make sure you're not missing any urgent messages can be tedious, not to mention disruptive. 

Microsoft Outlook takes away this stress through its desktop notification feature. Desktop notifications allow users to receive pop-up updates on their desktop when a new message arrives in their Outlook inbox, even if they don't have the email client open at the time.

Desktop notifications can be helpful if you want to stay abreast of your messages, but don't want to check your inbox every couple of minutes. But even the updates can get distracting, so here's how to toggle off desktop notifications in Outlook.

Check out the products mentioned in this article:

Apple Macbook Pro (From $1,299.00 at Apple)

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How to turn off Outlook notifications

1. With your Outlook desktop inbox open, click on the gear icon in the upper right corner of your screen.

2. Choose "View all Outlook settings."

Unless you practice a time management strategy like Inbox Zero, your Outlook inbox is probably overrun with email. Some may be relevant, but many more are likely obsolete and simply cluttering your view of more urgent messages. 

To help clean up your inbox, the email client offers a way to quickly and efficiently delete multiple emails at once. The process for removing multiple emails is the same no matter what version of Outlook you use but is slightly different depending on whether you're on a desktop or the mobile app. 

Here are several handy tactics for selecting and deleting multiple emails.

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iPhone 11 (From $699.99 at Apple)

Samsung Galaxy S10 (From $699.99 at Walmart)

Apple Macbook Pro (From $1,299.00 at Apple)

Acer Chromebook 15 (From $358.99 at Staples)

How to delete multiple emails in Outlook on a computer

To delete all the emails in a single folder (such as the inbox): 

1. Click any message to select it. 

2. Then press CTRL + A to select all the messages in the folder. 

3. Press the Delete key to eliminate them.

To delete a range of consecutive messages:

1. Click the first message and then scroll to the last email you want to delete. 

2. Holding Shift, click the final email. 

The ability to record Google Meet calls has many advantages. For example, a meeting recording can be shared later for use in training, to rehash the details of a project, or to take notes on what was discussed.

But not everyone can record a Google Meet call. Google Meet recordings can only be made by people within the same organization, by a meeting's organizer, or by a teacher using Google Meet as a classroom.

Additonally, recording is usually restricted to G-Suite Enterprise members. However, Google has recently made this feature available to everyone until September 30, 2020.

With that said, here's how to record a Google Meet video call using any browser on your Mac or PC.

Check out the products mentioned in this article:

Apple Macbook Pro (From $1,299.00 at Apple)

Acer Chromebook 15 (From $358.99 at Staples)

How to record a Google Meet

1. Start or join a meeting, then click the three dots at the bottom right corner.

2. Click "Record meeting" at the top of the pop-up.

Home mortgage lender Quicken Loans is planning an initial public offering, CNBC reported on Thursday.

Quicken, which is the largest residential mortgage provider in the US by volume, filed its IPO prospectus confidentially but could make the filings public as early as next month, according to CNBC.

Quicken is working with Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse and JPMorgan on the deal, and while the target valuation is still being finalized, it could be in the tens of billions of dollars, which would potentially mean a multibillion-dollar IPO, sources told CNBC.

In a statement, a spokesperson for Rocket Mortgage, a division of Quicken Loans, said:

"As the nation's largest mortgage lender, Rocket Mortgage is continuously looking for new ways to invest in and grow our business, while also contributing in significant ways to our home communities.

"Given our continued growth, market leadership and strong financial performance, we are frequent targets of rumor and speculation.  If, and when, there is news to report, it will come directly from us."

Amid the vast economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic, interest rates have plummeted, sending homebuyers flocking back to the housing market and encouraging current homeowners to refinance their mortgages.

Mortgage applications to purchase a home increased 5% last week and were 13% higher than a year ago, according to a report from Mortgage Bankers Association. Meanwhile, the MBA's refinance index jumped 11% on the week and is 80% higher than a year ago in as the index climbed for the first time in nearly two months.

That's been a boon for Quicken, whose CEO, Jay Farner, told CNBC in April: "March was the biggest closing month in our company's history — nearly $21 billion in mortgages closed."

 

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Sony's PlayStation 5 has been unveiled following an hourlong livestream. Sony still hasn't announced the price or release date of the PS5, but the console will launch during the 2020 holiday season. 

Sony detailed the PlayStation 5's look for the first time during the event, showing off the PS5's DualSense controller and announcing the initial lineup of PlayStation 5 games. The stream included trailers for titles like "Spider-Man: Miles Morales," "Gran Turismo 7," "Resident Evil: Village," and "Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart."

The PlayStation 4 is the most popular video-game console of its generation, having sold more than 100 million units worldwide since November 2013. The PlayStation 5 will compete with the Xbox Series X, Microsoft's upcoming console, for the affection of gamers throughout the 2020 holiday season.

While new PlayStation and Xbox consoles are just a few months away, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One consoles are selling out amid the coronavirus pandemic and shelter-in-place orders. Reports have indicated that the pandemic could lead Sony to produce fewer PS5 consoles for the initial launch.

Though full details on pricing and availability for the PS5 are still forthcoming, we've detailed everything we know so far about how to buy the console. We'll update this article with more preorder information as it's revealed.

One of Mark Zuckerberg's key lieutenants is back — only a year after leaving following clashes with the Facebook CEO.

On Thursday, it was announced that Chris Cox is rejoining Facebook as its chief product officer at a pivotal time for the company. A longtime executive at the Silicon Valley social networking giant, Cox departed in March 2019 amid reported clashes with Zuckerberg over the direction of the company and its privacy initiatives.

He now returns as the company attempts to navigate the the maze of an unprecedented pandemic and a looming US election that has seen the company savaged by politicians on both sides of the aisle on its approach to political content.

Facebook also is facing an employee revolt, with dozens of workers speaking out publicly against its decision not to take action against posts by Donald Trump that discussed "shooting" in response to the anti-racism protests sweeping the US.

Cox's return means an immediate shakeup in the highest ranks of the company. A number of high-level executives who previously reported directly to Zuckerberg will now answer to him instead. His team, he wrote in a public Facebook post, will comprise Fidji Simo, the head of the Facebook app; Will Cathcart, who runs WhatsApp; Adam Mosseri, in charge of Instagram; Stan Chudnovsky, Messenger's boss, and Antonio Lucio, Facebook's chief marketing officer.

The well-liked executive's return may help to assuage some of the employee unrest. Multiple employees who have spoken out publicly to criticize Facebook in recent weeks tweeted in support of the news. "OPTIMISM RISING," said one. "Some good signs," added another (while also referencing an expansion of Facebook's chief diversity officer's role and other initiatives discussed by Zuckerberg). 

His popularity with employees prior to his 2019 departure, along with his strongly held beliefs, may encourage employees that the company is going in the right direction.

But it may come at a cost — an intensification of conservative attacks on the company. Cox is outspoken in his politics. At an event in November 2019, he said that "Trump should not be our president," and spent part of his time away from Facebook "building progressive political infrastructure for this election year" (along with playing with his reggae band).

This stridency will make him appealing to Facebook employees who fear Facebook is bending its rules for Trump out of fear of offending conservatives. But it may also embolden right-wing critics who claim — without proof — that Facebook and other big tech companies are deliberately biased against conservatives.

"2020 refocused us all, on a public health crisis, an economic crisis, and now a reckoning of racial injustice," Cox wrote in a note to employees that he also shared publicly.

"The world is unsettled, divided. People are struggling when things were already hard. I reached out to Mark awhile ago and I told him I'd be interested to help. I've been following Facebook and I've been encouraged by progress on so many of the big issues facing us. In the past month the world has grown more chaotic and unstable, which has only given me more resolve to help out. Our most important decisions and products are ahead of us."

Contact Business Insider reporter Rob Price via encrypted messaging app Signal (+1 650-636-6268), encrypted email (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.), standard email (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.), Telegram/Wickr/WeChat (robaeprice), or Twitter DM (@robaeprice). We can keep sources anonymous. Use a non-work device to reach out. PR pitches by standard email only, please.

The recent protests against systemic racism and police brutality have spurred a wave of corporate statements on racial justice, but Chris Young, the former CEO of security company McAfee, is skeptical. As a tech executive who often found himself the only Black person on upper management teams, he's looking for hard metrics and concrete commitments alongside the platitudes. 

"I would hope tech companies will avoid what I'd call 'diversity theater,' where companies make statements, and you never know if they are followed up on or not," Young said. "It needs to be backed up with action and investment. It's not OK to be up in arms with the current civil unrest in our country today and then three months from now, when other demands arise, to put it on the back burner."

It's "not even close to enough" to simply be posting support for Black Lives Matter on social media: "Where I'm skeptical of organizations is when that's all they do, and then they go back to business without following up," Young said. 

Young, 47, stepped down as the chief executive of McAfee — a $3 billion, 7,000-employee company — in January, though he remains an advisor, and is still on the boards of Snap and American Express. Before McAfee, Young was an executive at Intel, VMware, RSA, and AOL, companies where he was often the only African-American in the upper echelons. Across the Fortune 500, there are only four Black CEOs.

Young says that he learned to adapt to being one of the only Black people in upper management, but that it wasn't always easy. 

"If you're not born into it, and if you haven't grown up in some of the same networks as others, it certainly can be difficult to feel the same level of comfort and social ease with those you work closely with," he said. 

Young says companies need to think about how to help people of color "feel they can be successful" in leadership roles, but that those plans need to be paired with hard metrics and specific goals, such as increasing minority hiring and promotions by a certain percent each year. 

"Metrics are the only way you're going to get people in the company paying attention to goals in a committed way — otherwise you're just sort of hoping it gets better," Young said. "Whenever companies want to transform any element of their business, what do they do? They set targets and assign responsibility. Measurement of diversity in an organization is critical, as is holding people accountable." 

McAfee's workforce is 57% white, 23% Asian, 8% Latinx, 6% Black, and less than half a percent Pacific Islander and Native American, though, last year, 54% of new hires were racial minorities. While many tech companies have started publicly releasing their yearly diversity statistics, they often show little-to-no progress from one year to the next. That's where Young's recommendation for accountability comes in: There should be consequences for failure. 

Young says he is optimistic that change and growth can come from this moment in the nation's civil rights history, as the Black Lives Matter movement is galvanized by the killing of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others. 

"I'm encouraged by the diversity of people that I see protesting and speaking out about these issues." he said. 

Longterm commitment will be necessary to achieve specific goals such as representation of Blacks and other racial minorities in leadership positions, Young says.

"I just encourage everyone who's standing with the Black community now to keep standing with the community. Keep standing on the side of justice and equality. I can't stress enough that that is going to require a sustained commitment to change," Young said. "It's going to be uncomfortable, but it's important." 

Jim Keller, the acclaimed chip engineer Intel hired from Tesla two years ago, has resigned "due to personal reasons," the tech giant said Thursday.

Keller joined Intel in 2018 to lead the engineering group that was developing new microprocessors as part of the company's bid to go beyond its core PC and server business.

Keller, a veteran of Apple and AMD who VentureBeat described as a "rock star chip architect," was one of three outsiders Intel hired in recent years as it's eyed opportunities in new markets. The other two engineers Intel recruited were Murthy Renduchintala, who quit as copresident of Qualcomm in 2015 to become Intel's chief engineering officer, and Raja Koduri, who joined from AMD in 2017 and is now leading Intel's high-performance graphic chips team.

Intel has had to adapt to a changing market. The market for PCs — an area it has dominated for decades — is shrinking. The company is a major player in the market for server chips but is facing stiff competition from its rivals AMD and Nvidia. Under CEO Bob Swan, Intel is eyeing new emerging markets, including high-performance computing, the cloud, autonomous cars, artificial intelligence, graphics, and networking.

When he spoke with Business Insider last year, he described a challenging job that was reaping progress. 

"The company over the last number of years has pivoted to have a lot more market segments, a lot more designs in those market segments," Keller said. "That will generate a lot more chips, a very large amount of IP."

Intel said Keller would stay on for six months to help with the transition of his replacement. The company also announced other changes to its engineering team, including naming Sundari Mitra as head of its intellectual property engineering team.

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Image Credits: Menlo Ventures/CB Insights

On Monday, June 1st, I told Amy that I wanted to engage deeply in helping eliminate racism in the United States.

I’ve been involved in gender inequity issues since I joined the National Center for Women & Information Technology board in 2005 shortly after it was formed. 15 years later, I’ve learned an enormous amount about gender, especially in tech, and while I am nowhere near finished on that particular journey, I feel that I understand and can be helpful in my role as a male advocate (or “male ally”) in eliminating gender inequity in tech and entrepreneurship.

While Amy and I have been philanthropically supporting social justice issues for over 20 years through our foundation, I don’t feel like I’ve engaged in a meaningful way. I have an enormous amount to learn about racial inequality in our country and my network for and advocacy of Black entrepreneurs and investors is woefully inadequate.

In my discussion with Amy, we decided to personally fund and get involved in at least 10 initiatives right away, which I defined as “by the end of June.” I’ve spent several hours a day each day since last Monday reaching out to Black friends I know with one question.

“What are two initiatives you are involved in right now that I could put time and/or money into in support of you and your activities?”

In each case, I offered money along with a desire to actively engage in support of them and their activities. This is not “I’ll do a mentor call with you” or “Email me anytime you have a question” but an open-ended “tell me what I can do to help you execute a particular initiative.”

The conversations have been excellent and extremely enlightening. Given that almost all of them were with people I already knew, I don’t need to do any diligence on the organizations they are asking me to get involved in as their reference credibility is enough for me. In a few cases, I had inbound from people I didn’t know and I also chose several of them to engage with.

Right now, these are philanthropic contributions to non-profit organizations or sponsorships for people going through some kind of program (non-profit and for-profit). This is a completely separate initiative from investment activity with my partners at Foundry Group, which we’ll be talking about more soon once we’ve made clear decisions about what we are going to do over the next few years.

My first of these commitments is to the Zane Access Inaugural Pre-Capital Program Cohort. I got an email from Shila Nieves Burney asking if I would donate 20 copies of Venture Deals. I responded yes and asked if there was anything else I could do to help their first cohort. Shila responded that they’d love to do an AMA and asked if I would be willing to underwrite the tuition for one of the founders, as there were eight in the program who were accepted but would have to forgo the opportunity to join the program due to the financial investment obligation.

I told Shila that I’d do the AMA and underwrite all eight founders who were not in a position to make the investment. I wanted to ensure that no founder who reached the high barrier to be accepted into the program would have to turn it down due to financial concerns.

I’ll be doing the AMA early in the program, so my hope is that I’ll get to know some of the founders, can help them throughout the program, and then connect them into some of my networks proactively where appropriate.

In my previous post, I said that for a while I’ll include one powerful thing each day that I read about racial injustice and Black Lives Matter. Today’s is from Donna Harris, a long time friend who I met through our work on the Startup America Partnership. She’s the co-founder of 1776 and now runs Builders and Backers. When I read her post The Hurt is Everywhere I cried (a “Jerry Colonna induced type of cry.”)

The hurt is everywhere. In every community. If you don’t see it, it just means you’re not talking to the people who are experiencing it.

That’s where we must start. We cannot create a society where all men are truly equal and every community flourishes if we don’t understand how badly the deck is stacked against so many of us and listen to and acknowledge the deep anguish that causes. Then, all of us must commit to repairing the broken places. In our nation. But also in our families, in our schools, and on the streets of our own neighborhoods. To that end, the next time you see a black man walking down your street, stay on the same side of the road and say hello.

Please go read The Hurt is Everywhere.