A full plate to start the week.

Welcome back! We hope you and your loved ones in the U.S. were able to share a safe and meaningful Thanksgiving despite all of the challenges. On today’s special post-holiday edition of Up To Speed, Andy shared the following updates:

Thanks to our front line

As our latest “Verizon vs. Verizon” spot highlights, we continue to win by competing, not so much with our competitors, but with our own standards of excellence. That includes staying laser-focused on serving our customers. That’s why we’re dedicating this episode to the V Teamers who worked over the last several days to ensure families around the world stay connected and the celebration continues into the holiday season.

A big shoutout to our retail teams across the U.S.. Black Friday may have felt a little different this year, but it remains an important time for us as we finish the year strong. Thanks for all you do. We wish all of you serving customers a safe and successful holiday shopping season.

Connecting loved ones on Thanksgiving

We want to share some pretty interesting Thanksgiving Day stats related to how many people utilized our network to make meaningful connections.

• On Thanksgiving this year, customers made more than 400 million mobile phone calls, about the same as last year.
• Calls lasted 36% longer than on Thanksgiving Day of 2019.
• With several families connecting via online video conference tools, we saw an increase in wireless data use of almost 14%.
• Data use on FIOS spiked nearly 55%.
• Customers this year sent more than 9 billion text messages on Thanksgiving Day, up 17% over last year.

It’s clear that just about all of us picked up our phones, made calls, sent texts, fired up a video chat, looking for all kinds of ways to connect with our loved ones. To our Network Team, thank you for making those connections come through at such a critical time for our customers and their families. Look for more stats like these coming up in this year's holiday trend report, set to be released later this week.

Macy’s Day Parade success

Another big shoutout goes to the V Teamers who helped connect the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade to millions of families. The results are in and they’re impressive:

• This was the highest Parade live stream viewership in Verizon history, with nearly 40 million live stream views.
• The Parade live stream was the #1 social media moment of 2020 for Verizon.
• We saw some huge engagement numbers for our 5G immersive parade portal, which gave the audience a chance to watch the parade in 360-degree views. Usage numbers doubled expectations.

A donation toward ending hunger

In the spirit of giving, our parade participation included a big donation. As part of NBCUniversal's new “Family Is Universal” initiative, NBCUniversal and Verizon together donated $300,000 to No Kid Hungry, a national campaign focused on ending childhood hunger in America. This donation will help families in need share a meal together this holiday season and beyond. This is in addition to the $5 million we donated to No Kid Hungry earlier in the pandemic.

Hackathon winner

Our new word for the day is “keelekümblus.” It’s an Estonian word for language immersion and the name of the team that won the Technology and Product Development VBG Hackathon 3.0! Here’s how the Hackathon worked: You had to build an original product, solution or enhancement that adds value for our Verizon Business customers.

Team Keelekümblus came up with the winning idea of a unified immersive experience for multi-party communication systems on the Edge with realtime AI analytics. The AI would summarize meeting notes, agendas, action items, attentiveness scores, emotion detection and visual appreciation. It would also produce real-time sign language for these virtual meetings. Congratulations to all of our Hackathon participants.

Device Protection Open Enrollment

We are currently in Open Enrollment, which ends Thursday, December 3. If you are thinking of protecting your device, now is the time. And while Open Enrollment ends this week, be sure to cover the devices you purchase during the holiday season with one of our Device Protection options. Verizon Protect Includes:

• Same-day device replacement and setup
• Unlimited, fast cracked screen repair
• Battery replacement
• Live, on-demand access to Tech Coach experts
• Security and privacy
• Wi-Fi security and protection
• Identity theft monitoring
• Identify unknown numbers

Call for Kindness

So many of you have taken part in our “Call for Kindness” campaign on social media. We are quickly getting to know the people behind the masks of our front-line team as more of us look to celebrate what brings us together. This campaign has grown to an initiative that includes Verizon, Capital One, our Big 6 agency partners and a new documentary on Amazon Prime called The Antidote.

The Antidote

The creators of the documentary film The Antidote have made it available to all Verizon employees for free. You can catch it on the Inside Verizon App. And coming up later this week on Up To Speed, our own Krista Bourne will lead a conversation with the filmmakers. That’s happening Friday, December 4, at 12 PM ET/9 AM PT right here on Up To Speed Live.

Giving Tuesday

The day after Cyber Monday has become known as Giving Tuesday, a day to donate time and funds to those individuals and organizations in our community and around the world who need our help. Be sure to check out tomorrow’s episode of Up To Speed as host Raquel Wilson fills us in on what Verizon is giving back as we move the world forward.

Click here for a transcript of the webcast.

If you have any questions, email them to live@verizon.com.

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