Category: Supplier Report

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Supplier Report: 12/8/2017

Amazon and Google are fighting this week and end users are suffering.  This fight isn’t about cutting off access to YouTube, it is about two companies finding themselves competing in cloud hosting, digital assistants, customer behaviors, forked operating systems, and now advertising.

As companies like Google, Amazon, Oracle, and Microsoft fight with each other, China is quietly growing their AI capabilities and they are applying them to areas that the US would never (publicly) be able to admit.

CVS is trying to out-run the business black hole that is Amazon. As rumors swirl that Amazon might get into pharmaceuticals, CVS is attempting to purchase healthcare company Aetna.  These are certainly interesting times.

Acquisitions

  • CVS buys health insurer Aetna to counter Amazon

    Neither CVS nor Aetna has explicitly mentioned Amazon. However, it’s no secret that Amazon looms large over the proposed merger. The New York Times reports that CVS and Aetna met “several times” for talks with Amazon’s potential competition in mind. Also, CVS is in a prime position to change its strategy. It makes the most money from its pharmacy benefits business (which serves companies and insurers), not its stores, so it could continue to thrive even if Amazon swoops in and destroys its retail sales.

    Aetna isn’t under the gun in the same way. It was recently blocked from buying a key competitor, Humana, and has been looking for a way to expand without invoking the wrath of antitrust regulators. CVS makes sense in that regard — the two firms operate in related areas, but they wouldn’t be shrinking the markets for health insurance or pharmacies. There is a concern that they might hurt choices for Medicare, since both are key to offering prescriptions to Medicare recipients.

    https://www.engadget.com/2017/12/03/cvs-buys-aetna-to-counter-amazon/

Artificial Intelligence

  • COMB+ announces a $77M fund to help AI startups enter China

    The fund, which was announced at Slush in Helsinki this week, is run by COMB+ and the Beijing Institute of Collaborative Innovation (BICI). COMB+ launched its Sino Track accelerator program last year, which is based in Beijing and Helsinki and helps early-stage firms grow in China, and this is the second part of its strategy.

    So far more than half of the €65 million target has been raised, COMB+ CEO Leo Zhu told TechCrunch via interpreters in an interview. He didn’t name any confirmed LPs but said the fund is backed by government funds, government institutions, private enterprises and big corporates most of which are from China.

    https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/01/comb-china-ai-fund/?ncid=rss
    China’s A.I. Advances Help Its Tech Industry, and State Security

    As China tests the frontiers of artificial intelligence, iFlyTek serves as a compelling example of both the country’s sci-fi ambitions and the technology’s darker dystopian possibilities.

    The Chinese company uses sophisticated A.I. to power image and voice recognition systems that can help doctors with their diagnoses, aid teachers in grading tests and let drivers control their cars with their voices. Even some global companies are impressed: Delphi, a major American auto supplier, offers iFlyTek’s technology to carmakers in China, while Volkswagen plans to build the Chinese company’s speech recognition technology into many of its cars in China next year.

    At the same time, iFlyTek hosts a laboratory to develop voice surveillance capabilities for China’s domestic security forces. In an October report, a human rights group said the company was helping the authorities compile a biometric voice database of Chinese citizens that could be used to track activists and others.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/03/business/china-artificial-intelligence.html

  • IBM unveils ‘game-changing powerhouse’ for AI

    POWER9 has the ability to improve the training times of deep learning frameworks by almost four times faster and allows enterprises to build more accurate applications at a much faster rate.

    As a result of the better performance, data scientists are able to build applications faster, from deep learning insights across scientific research to real-time fraud detection and credit risk analysis.

    https://www.cbronline.com/news/ibm-power9-game-changing-ai

  • Elon Musk says Tesla is making A.I. hardware that could be ‘the best in the world’

    Several other automakers, including Ford and GM, are developing self-driving technology. Alphabet, which has developed custom chips that can be used instead of Nvidia graphics cards, operates the Waymo self-driving car division. Apple has pursued autonomous driving, and it has also developed custom silicon to handle AI workloads on mobile devices.

    In the Thursday talk, Keller suggested that with custom hardware it’s possible to boost efficiency, while Musk talked about power and cost advantages, according to one report about the event on Twitter.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/08/elon-musk-talks-up-teslas-upcoming-artificial-intelligence-hardware.html

Cloud

  • Amazon is an 800-pound gorilla that moves like a cheetah, says analyst

    In a week that featured 22 product and services announcements (according to Andy Jassy, AWS chief executive officer), industry analysts were left to assess the significant position in the IT ecosystem that AWS has staked out for itself. “This is a real merging of application developers and the more traditional kinds of companies,” Warren said. “It feels like re:Invent this year is a blending of the entire IT ecosystem.”

    A key message that emerged from the various AWS releases is that the company has made major strides to debunk “fear, uncertainty and doubt” that it could not be taken seriously as a major player in enterprise cloud computing. “The big story this year is legitimacy across the board in every vertical and every category,” Furrier said. “Re-engineering and re-imagining are happening, and Amazon is just feeding the marketplace.”

    https://siliconangle.com/blog/2017/12/01/amazon-is-an-800-pound-gorilla-that-moves-like-a-cheetah-says-analyst-reinvent/
    Nothing really new, I just like the headline.

  • Microsoft CFO sees Google’s cloud as a threat and praises its chief: ‘She’s always been a winner’

    In her Tuesday remarks — which came after Wells Fargo analyst Philip Winslow specifically asked about Google — Hood also praised Greene, the head of Google’s cloud efforts for the past two years. Greene, who was formerly CEO of VMware, announced last week that she hired Diane Bryant from Intel to be operating chief of Google’s cloud.

    “We’ve seen more of them in the past few quarters than we’ve seen before,” Hood said. “I think they’re making a good effort. I think Diane Greene is an excellent leader and an established enterprise CEO.”

    https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/05/microsoft-cfo-amy-hood-says-google-cloud-becoming-a-bigger-competitor.html

    I always call out the s**t-talking, I should highlight the acts of class as well.

  • Cheapest enterprise cloud storage providers not always best

    Bala’s public recommendation to conference attendees was the following: “Think about the number of years that a vendor has been in this market and their commitment to the market. The last thing you want to do is go with a vendor who says, ‘Well, the v1 version of our service didn’t work, and we’re going to scrap it, and we’re going to restart over again.’ There are a lot of customers in that boat.”

    Although Bala’s cautionary advice did not note specific enterprise cloud storage providers that abandoned the original versions of their cloud storage services, he did offer frank assessments of each of the major challengers to dominant player AWS.

    “Oracle did something very smart. They opened a large office in Seattle, and they’ve hired a bunch of AWS engineers. So, they’ve got several hundred AWS engineers that are building v2 of Oracle service,” Bala said. “After having failed the first time, they’re doing some really thoughtful things the second time.”

    Bala said IBM’s public cloud storage, also based on OpenStack, “didn’t really go anywhere” and “had lots of problems,” leaving the company “trying to rebuild it.” He said IBM spent lots of money trying to buy companies, as well as trying to rebuild in-house.

    http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/news/450431495/Cheapest-enterprise-cloud-storage-providers-not-always-best

Software/SaaS

  • Three Uber security managers reportedly resigned today

    Three senior-level security managers resigned from Uber today, Reuters reported earlier today. One of the three who resigned, Pooja Ashok, was chief of staff to now-former Chief Security Officer Joe Sullivan. Sullivan was fired last week for trying to hide the security breach that affected about 57 million riders and 600,00 drivers.

    The other two who resigned were Prithvi Rai, a senior security engineer, and Jeff Jones. Both Ashok and Jones are planning to stay at Uber until January to help with the transition.

    https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/01/three-uber-security-managers-reportedly-resigned-today/?ncid=rss

  • Inside Oracle’s cloak-and-dagger political war with Google

    For the past year, the software and cloud computing giant has mounted a cloak-and-dagger, take-no-prisoners lobbying campaign against Google, perhaps hoping to cause the company intense political and financial pain at a time when the two tech giants are also warring in federal court over allegations of stolen computer code.

    Since 2010, Oracle has accused Google of copying Java and using key portions of it in the making of Android. Google, for its part, has fought those claims vigorously. More recently, though, their standoff has intensified. And as a sign of the worsening rift between them, this summer Oracle tried to sell reporters on a story about the privacy pitfalls of Android, two sources confirmed to Recode.

    https://www.recode.net/2017/12/6/16721364/oracle-google-political-war-location-track-android-safra-catz-java-lawsuit

Other

  • Now on Oracle’s Campus, a $43 Million Public High School

    “Nobody has done anything like this before,” said Colleen Cassity, the executive director of the Oracle Education Foundation, a nonprofit funded by the company. The foundation oversees the company’s partnership with the school.

    Design Tech High School, known as d.tech, was founded in 2014 with the aim of steeping students in design thinking, a creative problem-solving strategy popularized by Stanford University’s design school. It teaches students to empathize with people before trying to devise solutions to their problems.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/03/technology/now-on-oracles-campus-a-43-million-public-high-school.html

  • Why Amazon and Google just can’t get along

    At this point, it’s easy to see why Amazon wouldn’t want to support Google’s products, and vice versa: Each company is using hardware to fortify themselves while attacking their rival’s core business. Without some broad-ranging truce, in which each company agrees to treat each other’s services equally and let consumers decide what’s best, Amazon and Google would only be undermining themselves.

    https://www.techhive.com/article/3240966/streaming-hardware/why-amazon-and-google-just-cant-get-along.html

  • IBM to invest $200 million in climate change research

    Not all businesses, however, take a short-term view of their operations, with increasing numbers of CEOs seeing reason, as a destroyed planet will even impact them and their shareholders in the long-run. In this vain, IBM recently announced it will direct around $200 million into five climate-related projects. Despite a rocky year financially, which saw global revenues further stagnate at the global technology giant, the organisation still saw fit to support scientists in their pursuit to better understand the consequences of humanity’s current uncritical climate forcing experiments.

    The funds will be awarded to projects that are judged to have the greatest potential impact on our understanding of climate change, and that consider strategies to mitigate its effects. The five projects would also be able to take advantage of IBM’s World Community Grid, an IBM Citizenship initiative that taps into the combined computing power of 730,000 worldwide volunteers. A similar project was recently run on such a network, allowing Harvard University to identify 36,000 carbon-based compounds that may approximately double the efficiency of most organic solar cells currently in production.

    https://www.consultancy.uk/news/14900/ibm-to-invest-200-million-in-climate-change-research

Photo: CloudVisual

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Supplier Report: 11/24/2017

As everyone sleeps off the last traces of tryptophan, IT companies are also taking this time to pause and reflect… except for Uber who is in trouble AGAIN.

The ride share company announced a massive breach that happened last year (which they did not inform the public of until this week).  The company also paid the hackers that breached their security $100K to delete the stolen data (and let’s take the hacker’s word that they complied with that gentlemen’s agreement) and not make any public statements.

Uber’s CSO has been terminated.

In other news, FCC chairman Ajit Pai seems poised to overturn net neutrality rules on December 14th which could greatly impact the way companies and consumers interact with each other on the internet.

Acquisitions

  • AT&T Faces U.S. Antitrust Suit Over Time Warner Deal

    The U.S. Justice Department is poised to sue to block AT&T’s $85.4 billion takeover of Time Warner, according to a person familiar with the matter, culminating more than a week of sparring over the deal and dealing a major blow to the carrier’s bid to create a media and telecommunications empire, Bloomberg News’ Sara Forden and David McLaughlin report.

    The Justice Department said it plans to make a major antitrust announcement Monday afternoon, without specifying the topic. The person familiar with the matter said the news regards the government’s plan to sue to block the proposed AT&T merger with Time Warner.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-20/at-t-faces-u-s-antitrust-suit-over-time-warner-deal

  • 5 Companies That Microsoft Could Put on Its Shopping List

    Workday Inc. (WDAY) and ServiceNow Inc. (NOW) , as the largest SaaS pure-plays not named Salesforce, could catch its attention. Workday, worth $23 billion, is the top provider of cloud human capital management (HCM) and financials apps for enterprises, and it has also rolled out analytics tools and apps meant for universities.

    ServiceNow, worth $22 billion, is the top provider of cloud-based IT service desk software and is also now a meaningful player in the IT operations management (ITOM) and IT business management (ITBM) software spaces. Buying the company would extend Microsoft’s reach within corporate IT departments and yield some synergies with the company’s System Center systems management software platform.

    https://www.thestreet.com/story/14399919/1/companies-microsoft-could-buy.html

Artificial Intelligence

  • AI Can Help Hunt Down Missile Sites in China

    The deep learning algorithms proved capable of helping people with no prior imagery analysis experience find surface-to-air missile sites scattered across nearly 90,000 square kilometers of southeastern China. Such AI based on neural networks—layers of artificial neuron capable of filtering and learning from huge amounts of data—matched the overall 90 percent accuracy of expert human imagery analysts in locating the missile sites. Perhaps even more impressively, the deep learning software helped humans reduce the time needed to eyeball potential missile sites from 60 hours to just 42 minutes.

    https://www.wired.com/story/ai-can-help-hunt-down-missile-sites-in-china/

Cloud

  • Amazon’s cloud is about to announce a huge health-care deal with Cerner, sources say

    As part of his keynote at re:Invent, AWS CEO Andy Jassy is planning to announce that Amazon is teaming up with Cerner, one of the world’s largest health technology companies, to help health-care providers better use their data to make health predictions about patient populations, according to sources familiar with the matter.

    The sources, who asked not to be named because the discussions are still in the final stages, said the partnership is initially focused on Cerner’s so-called population health product — HealtheIntent — which enables hospitals to gather and analyze huge volumes of clinical data to improve patients’ health outcomes and lower treatment costs.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/22/aws-is-partnering-with-cerner-on-cloud-deal-for-healtheintent.html

  • Google Cloud Platform cuts the price of GPUs by up to 36 percent

    Google today announced that it’s cutting the price of using Nvidia’s Tesla GPUs through its Compute Engine by up to 36 percent. In U.S. regions, using the somewhat older K80 GPUs will now cost $0.45 per hour while using the newer and more powerful P100 machines will cost $1.46 per minute (all with per-second billing).

    The company is also dropping the prices for preemptible local SSDs by almost 40 percent. “Preemptible local SSDs” refers to local SSDs attached to Google’s preemptible VMs. You can’t attach GPUs to preemptible instances, though, so this is a nice little bonus announcement — but it isn’t going to directly benefit GPU users.

    https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/20/google-cloud-platform-cuts-the-price-of-gpus-by-up-to-36-percent/?ncid=rss

  • HPE and Rackspace bring pay-as-you-go service to OpenStack Private Cloud

    “The launch of OpenStack Private Cloud with pay per use infrastructure delivered by Rackspace and HPE marks a pivotal moment in the private cloud market and in the industry at large,” said Antonio Neri, president of HPE. “This experience is the best of the cloud and on-premises worlds, and we fully expect this simple pay-per-use technology model to change the way enterprises make technology decisions.”

    The move is meant to respond to increased interest in public cloud services. The offering allows customers to pay only for what they use like a utility bill using HPE’s Flexible Capacity, making it easier to manage growth and bursts in workloads without paying for fixed capacity. The companies said providing the pay-as-you-go service will make private cloud 40% less expensive than the leading public cloud, an estimate based on Rackspace internal pricing analysis.

    https://www.rcrwireless.com/20171120/pay-as-you-go-model-inspires-hpe-rackspace-private-cloud-tag27

Security

  • Uber admits massive data breach

    CEO Dara Khosrowshahi confirmed Tuesday that, in late 2016, hackers stole the data of 57 million of the company’s riders and drivers from around the world, including names, email addresses, phone numbers and driver’s license numbers. Khosrowshahi also confirmed that the $70 billion ridehailing giant has kept the cyberattack quiet for more than a year, in violation of laws that regulate such breaches.

    As a result, Uber has fired chief security officer Joe Sullivan and one of his employees, according to Bloomberg. Sullivan was in charge of the company’s response when the attack took place. Former CEO Travis Kalanick reportedly learned about the hack roughly a month after it occurred.

    The breach was reportedly discovered by a team hired by Uber to investigate Sullivan and the security department as a whole. The outside law firm in charge of the investigation found that two hackers broke into Uber’s Amazon Web Services account to gain access to rider and driver data, then asked Uber for money to keep the information private. Uber reportedly paid the hackers $100,000 to delete the data and conceal the incident.

    https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/uber-admits-massive-data-breach
    New York attorney general launches investigation of Uber’s $100,000 hack cover-up

    The office of New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman confirmed to TechCrunch that it has opened an investigation into the incident.

    The new investigation won’t be the first time that Uber has tangled with Schneiderman. Flaunting laws over the course of its aggressive pursuit of growth, Uber often ran into conflict with city and state legal authorities, and New York is no exception. The company reached a settlement with Schneiderman’s office in January 2016 over its abuse of private data in a rider-tracking system known as “God View” and its failure to disclose a previous data breach that took place in September 2014 in a timely manner.

    Given the New York Attorney General’s interest in the latest Uber scandal, it follows that Uber will likely be in the hot seat in its home state of California, where under Civil Code 1798.82 businesses are required to disclose data breaches affecting more than 500 state residents to the Attorney General “in the most expedient time possible and without unreasonable delay.”

    https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/21/ny-ag-schneiderman-uber-hack-cover-up/?ncid=rss

Other

  • Philip Hammond just declared war on tech firms like Amazon and Apple that avoid UK tax

    Amazon, for example, uses a intricate arrangement that involves paying itself royalty fees for its own intellectual property. Those royalty fees are shielded from tax, and mean the company can wipe out its taxable income.

    The Treasury source explained: “If you’re hosting your intellectual property in a country that doesn’t charge tax, and using that IP to make profit by interacting with UK customers, we will be taxing you at 20%.”

    Since the UK’s tax authority can’t tax an overseas subsidiary, it will charge a “withholding tax”, meaning the money will be deducted at source.

    Richard Murphy, a tax specialist who has previously written about the way tech firms avoid paying UK tax, described the announcement as “a good move.”

    http://www.businessinsider.com/treasury-to-tax-uk-generated-revenue-held-offshore-by-tech-firms-such-as-amazon-and-apple-2017-11

  • Meg Whitman out as CEO of HPE early next year

    Six years after taking the helm as head of HP, Meg Whitman will step down from her role as CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise in February 2018. Whitman’s spot will be filled by the company’s current President, Antonio Neri.

    Neri has been with HP since 1995, starting as a customer service engineer at at call center, ultimately rising the ranks to Executive Vice President of HPE in 2015 and then to President in June of this year.

    https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/21/meg-whitman-out-as-ceo-of-hpe-early-next-year/?ncid=rss

  • What the End of Net Neutrality Means for You

    On Tuesday, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai announced his plan to gut net neutrality and hand over control of the internet to service providers like Comcast, AT&T and Verizon (which also happens to be Pai’s former employer).

    The new plan, titled the “Restoring Internet Freedom Order” promises to end government “micromanaging” of the internet in exchange for added transparency from service providers. However, it’s also ready been widely criticized for removing the consumer protections passed by the FCC in 2015.

    The FCC is set to vote on the proposal on December 14, and it’s expected to pass thanks to a 3-to-2 party split favoring the Republicans.

    https://lifehacker.com/what-the-end-of-net-neutrality-means-for-you-1820647171
    FCC plan would give Internet providers power to choose the sites customers see and use

    One major beneficiary of the rule-change may be AT&T, which is embroiled in a landmark legal dispute with the Justice Department over an $85 billion purchase of the entertainment conglomerate Time Warner. Should AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner be allowed to close, a repeal of the FCC’s net neutrality rules could give the telecom giant greater power to flex its new content properties in different ways, according to some analysts.

    The most immediate effect of the FCC’s plan “is that constraints limiting contractual arrangements [between Internet providers and other companies] … will be lifted for both AT&T and its competitors,” said Joshua Wright, a former Republican FTC commissioner.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/11/21/the-fcc-has-unveiled-its-plan-to-rollback-its-net-neutrality-rules/
    Net Neutrality II: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (Very NSFW!)

    I probably posted this before in the “News You Can Use” section, but this is a good summary of the situation… beware of colorful language and singing goats.

Photo: João Victor Xavier

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Supplier Report: 11/17/2017

Oracle is trying to make it harder for Chinese firms to purchase U.S. companies by supporting bills that expands the power of the Committee on Foreign Investment.  Meanwhile the rumors of Amazon’s Chinese exit have been greatly exaggerated… the company had to sell off certain assets to comply with Chinese law.

Mashable is about to be purchased by Ziff Davis, leaving some to ponder the viability of digital media.

The viability of the Oath (formerly Yahoo and AOL) is in question with reports of over 500 employees being laid off (4% of their workforce).

Acquisitions

  • Mashable Agrees to Sell to Ziff Davis for Around $50 Million

    The price is approximately one-fifth of the company’s $250 million valuation based on its last investment round in March 2016.

    It is a troubling sign for the broader outlook for digital publishers, particularly those that have embraced the “pivot to video” strategy in an effort to lure more lucrative video ad sales.

    Bloomberg earlier reported that Mashable was close to an agreement to sell to Ziff Davis. Ziff Davis is a subsidiary of J2 Global Inc. and owns brands such as PCMag, IGN, Everyday Health and Offers.com.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/mashable-agrees-to-sell-to-ziff-davis-for-around-50-million-1510863283

Artificial Intelligence

  • Oracle’s Mark Hurd: When companies claim they’re in A.I., ‘most of the time it’s just nonsense’

    Most of the time, when companies claim they’re in the business of artificial intelligence, “it’s just nonsense,” Oracle CEO Mark Hurd said Tuesday.

    “Everybody in [Silicon] Valley’s saying they’re in AI,” Hurd told CNBC’s Jon Fortt during an NYSE Fireside Chat.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/14/oracles-mark-hurd-when-companies-claim-theyre-in-ai-most-of-the-time-its-just-nonsense.html

  • A mirror exposes AI’s inherent flaws in ‘Untrained Eyes’

    Kaino and Williams wanted to reveal how something as seemingly innocuous as a Google search can expose algorithmic bias. Kaino points out that searching for “man” on Google Images surfaces page after page of white men in business suits, looking confidently into the camera, while a search for “woman” brings up a grid of white women in various stages of undress. Untrained Eyes sheds a light on issues of representation, forcing the viewer to confront how a computer, and by extension, an unknown programmer, sees them.

    https://www.engadget.com/2017/11/09/untrained-eyes-engadget-experience/

Cloud

  • Amazon Web Services denies reports of China exit, confirms some asset sales

    No, AWS did not sell its business in China and remains fully committed to ensuring Chinese customers continue to receive AWS’s industry leading cloud services. Chinese law forbids non-Chinese companies from owning or operating certain technology for the provision of cloud services. As a result, in order to comply with Chinese law, AWS sold certain physical infrastructure assets to Sinnet, its longtime Chinese partner and AWS seller-of-record for its AWS China (Beijing) Region. AWS continues to own the intellectual property for AWS Services worldwide. ‎We’re excited about the significant business we have in China and its growth potential over the next number of years.

    https://www.geekwire.com/2017/reports-amazon-web-services-exiting-china-selling-local-partner-300m-deal/

  • Companies will waste over $10 billion in cloud spending in the next year

    “Cloud providers claim they are getting better at helping companies save some of their cloud spending. For example, AWS recently claimed it saved AWS users $500 million by alerting customers when they are overpaying,” says Kim Weins, VP of cloud cost strategy at RightScale. “Unfortunately, this is just a drop in the bucket. RightScale has seen that companies waste, on average, 35 percent of their cloud spend. This equates to $6.4 billion in annualized wasted cost for AWS alone. For the top three public cloud providers (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform), this represents annualized waste of $10 billion.”

    RightScale points out some ways in which enterprises can control their cloud costs. Forty percent of instances are sized larger than is required for the workload and could be resized — and therefore made cheaper — without impacting performance of the application. Each oversized instance is wasting 50-75 percent, resulting in 11-16 percent of all cloud spend being wasted.

    https://betanews.com/2017/11/13/company-cloud-waste/

  • IBM makes 20 qubit quantum computing machine available as a cloud service

    IBM has been offering quantum computing as a cloud service since last year when it came out with a 5 qubit version of the advanced computers. Today, the company announced that it’s releasing 20-qubit quantum computers, quite a leap in just 18 months. A qubit is a single unit of quantum information.

    The company also announced that IBM researchers had successfully built a 50 qubit prototype, which is the next milestone for quantum computing, but it’s unclear when we will see this commercially available.

    https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/10/ibm-passes-major-milestone-with-20-and-50-qubit-quantum-computers-as-a-service/?ncid=rss
    Satya Nadella’s book mentions the increase in qubits as an important milestone for AI.

Software/SaaS

  • No Wild West here – Workday’s CEO on customer satisfaction

    In my conversations with Workday customers over the last year, customers have showered the company with praise on the company’s efforts to ensure everything goes to plan. I don’t normally include those remarks in my reports because, for me, it is a check mark for the future rather than an item that contributes to an assessment of the project. But then check what Paul Wright of Accuride said to me recently:

    To answer your specific question I think the customers are ready, willing and able to adopt all the technology coming at them. The questions were solid from the audience around the complexities they have in their business, and there were people in the session from all kinds of verticals. The PMs weren’t stumped by anyone. I heard similar stories from my guys who were in sessions around HR, prism analytics, and PaaS. My team was very impressed by how they constructed the open platform, and can’t wait to play with it, we’ve already got some apps in mind.

    https://diginomica.com/2017/11/16/no-wild-west-workday-customer-satisfaction/

Security

  • Google study shows how your account is most likely to be hijacked

    The tech titan found 788,000 credentials that were stolen via keyloggers, 12 million stolen via phishing and 3.3 billion exposed by third-party breaches within a year of investigating black markets. A total of 12 percent of the exposed records it found used Gmail addresses as a username, and seven percent of those accounts reused the Gmail password for other services, making them more vulnerable than the others.

    Howevever, since Google incorporates safety measures to prevent strangers from logging into your account, the company also saw increasingly sophisticated tools capable of collecting data other than usernames and passwords. Among the phishing tools and keyloggers Google examined, 82 percent and 74 percent, respectively, have the capability collect IP addresses. It also found tools that can collect phone numbers, as well as devices’ make and model. Hijackers can then use those info to authenticate the identities of the accounts they’re stealing.

    https://www.engadget.com/2017/11/11/google-study-hijack/

Other

  • The Oath bloodbath continues: 560 people are being laid off

    More cuts are coming to Oath. The entity that houses Yahoo and AOL is in the process of laying off up to 560 people today following Yahoo’s June acquisition by Verizon. That represents slightly less than 4 percent of Oath’s global employee count of 14,000. Among those people were staffers at Yahoo Finance in the U.K., but the cuts apparently aren’t concentrated in a specific brand or geography.

    Verizon in June completed its $4.48 billion acquisition of Yahoo’s assets, which were combined with AOL brands including the HuffPost (formerly The Huffington Post) under a new subsidiary called Oath. Oath laid off 2,100 of its staff after the deal closed, or 15 percent of the workforce.

    https://digiday.com/media/oath-lays-off-560-verizon-acquisition/

  • Oracle Wants to Make It Tougher for Chinese Firms to Buy U.S. Companies

    The bills, which were introduced last week, would expand the power of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), allowing it to review smaller investments and add new national security factors, such as exposure of Americans’ Social Security numbers, for CFIUS to consider.

    CFIUS, an inter-agency panel, reviews proposed transactions for national security concerns. CFIUS can recommend that a transaction be prohibited, but only the president can issue an order to stop or suspend a deal.

    http://fortune.com/2017/11/15/oracle-chinese-firms-buy-u-s-companies/

  • Microsoft plans a 75 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2030

    By pushing its carbon neutrality plans and renewable energy commitments, the target puts the company on track to meet the goals set in the Paris Climate Agreement, and of course puts a big tick in its corporate social responsibility box.

    75 percent over 15 years is not a hugely ambitious target, especially when you consider that Microsoft has had carbon reduction on its agenda since 2009, and that despite the environmental programs it has in place, it only manages a lackluster score of C- in Greenpeace’s guide to greener electronics (breaking down to a D+ for both energy and resources).

    https://www.engadget.com/2017/11/14/microsoft-sets-unambitious-but-achievable-carbon-reduction-goal/

  • Foxconn’s Profit Down 39% Amid iPhone Production Woes

    Taiwan-based Foxconn, known formally as Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., posted 21 billion New Taiwan dollars (about $695.5 million) in net profit in the three months to September, its statement showed Tuesday. That was lower than the NT$35.6 billion average estimate of analysts polled by the S&P Global Market Intelligence. The 39% decline in profit from the same period a year earlier was Foxconn’s largest drop since 2008, during the global recession, according to data from S&P.

    Apple hasn’t disclosed sales numbers for the iPhone X. The phone made its debut with long lines at Apple stores around the world and shipping delays of five-to-six weeks, showing that the company hadn’t ramped up production enough to meet demand. The delay had shrunk to three to four weeks in the U.S. as of Tuesday afternoon.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/foxconns-profit-down-39-amid-iphone-production-woes-1510666619

Photo: Derek Thomson

Posted on

Supplier Report: 11/3/2017

Masayoshi Son and John Legere are still playing this whole “will they or won’t they” merger game with TMobile and Sprint. Earlier this week it was off and now parties are coming back to the table.

Amazon also had some drama this week due to news breaking that a British public servant may have influenced the decision to purchase AWS services before taking a lucrative job with the company.

HPE is leaving their historic offices in Palo Alto and downsizing to an Aruba office in Santa Clara.  HP, who once employed over 100,000 employees in the area, has reduced staff to approximately 45,000 globally due to restructuring and asset sell-offs.

Acquisitions

  • Sprint owner SoftBank may be calling off T-Mobile merger

    According to Nikkei, SoftBank and T-Mobile’s owner Deutsche Telekom had reached a broad agreement to integrate the two major US carriers, but couldn’t work out an ownership ratio that satisfied both companies.

    Nikkei’s sources indicate that SoftBank board members decided to call the talks off on Monday, after a Friday meeting where executives determined “the company would not give up control.” SoftBank is reportedly expected to propose to Deutsche Telekom on Tuesday that they end negotiations.

    https://www.engadget.com/2017/10/30/sprint-owner-softbank-may-be-calling-off-t-mobile-merger/
    Update: T-Mobile, Sprint Working to Salvage Merger

    T-Mobile made a revised offer, which Sprint is considering, some of the people said. Terms of the new offer were unclear. The two sides could reach a deal within weeks, the people said, but the two companies could still fail to agree on deal terms.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/t-mobile-sprint-working-to-salvage-merger-1509658235

Artificial Intelligence

  • IBM Watson digs deep on data to pave the way for enterprise AI apps

    By 2018, nearly 75% of developers will build AI functionality into their apps, according to an IDC report. However, this requires wading through increasingly complex data that lives in different places, and must be continually and securely ingested, according to an IBM press release.

    In response to this challenge, Watson will now include data cataloging and data refining, to improve data visibility and better enforce data security policies so that users can more easily share information across public and private cloud environments.

    In addition to the Watson news, IBM also announced plans to extend its Unified Governance Platform with new capabilities, to help companies prepare for increasing governance and regulatory requirements, such as GDPR. They include the ability to have a single view of the Unified Governance Catalog for both structured and unstructured information. It also modified the look of its Datastage Designer with a cognitive design that can recognize and suggest usage patterns, to speed the development of data integration flows.

    https://www.techrepublic.com/article/ibm-watson-digs-deep-on-data-to-pave-the-way-for-enterprise-ai-apps/

Cloud

  • IBM kills Bluemix, a year after killing SoftLayer

    On Tuesday this week the company changed it again, announcing that “Bluemix is now IBM Cloud”.

    The company’s rationale is that “we are merging the Bluemix brand with IBM Cloud brand since they’ve grown to be synonymous.”

    Everything IBM does in the cloud comes under the new brand: Watson, PaaS, SaaS – the works.

    There’s not much more to the change than branding: the company promises all the stuff currently labelled “Bluemix” will keep running.

    https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/02/ibm_renames_bluemix_ibm_cloud/

  • Protecting our Google Docs and Drive Users

    On Tuesday, October 31, we mistakenly blocked access to some of our users’ files, including Google Docs. This was due to a short-lived bug that incorrectly flagged some files as violating our terms of service (TOS). The blocking raised questions in the community and we would like to address those questions here.

    Tuesday’s bug caused the Google Docs and Drive services to misinterpret the response from these protection systems and erroneously mark some files as TOS violations, thus causing access denials for users of those files. As soon as our teams identified the problem, we removed the bug and worked to restore access to all affected files.

    https://www.blog.google/products/docs/protecting-our-google-docs-and-drive-users/

  • Microsoft, Oracle, IBM look to lure cloud services customers with new pay structure

    Traditionally, companies would ink large software deals based on factors such as the number of a customer’s devices – and not actual subsequent use of the products.The cloud business is a crucial growth area for the traditional enterprise technology pioneers, battling against rivals Amazon.com Inc and Alphabet Inc’s Google. The public cloud services global market is likely to increase more than 18 percent to $260.2 billion this year and almost double to $411 billion in 2020, according to Gartner Inc Microsoft, for example, said last week it had generated $20.4 billion in commercial cloud revenue on an annualized basis.

    Tying usage to sales incentives should help keep customers on board when it’s time to agree to a new contract, said Stephen White, an analyst with Gartner. “The behaviors of the salespeople need to be more in tune with what a customer actually is going to need and use,” White said. “It certainly makes the renewal discussion easier.”Oracle and IBM declined to comment. Previously, Microsoft had been bundling cloud services, such as Azure for storing and running data and cloud applications, with many of its multiyear deals. Althoff said the shift in pay incentives is a significant change.

    http://indianexpress.com/article/technology/microsoft-oracle-ibm-look-to-enhance-cloud-services-customers-with-new-pay-structure-4919296/

Datacenter

  • Microsoft Turns up the Heat on Oracle, Amazon, and IBM Databases

    While transitioning database platforms is still a significant task to undertake and the cost can still be high even if the tool is free, Microsoft knows that as companies look to move away from on-premises to cloud services, that’s a natural time to consider migrating. By offering this tool now, as more companies work to plan out the future (or lack of future) for their own local metal, the offer may entice some to leave their old db tech behind.

    Microsoft has become much more aggressive in this space in the past few years as the company looks to position its technology, both software and hardware (Azure) ahead of legacy competitors like Oracle and IBM. The reason for this is that they are trying to catch up to the next generation of service providers, like Amazon, and by using their own tools and tech as a leverage, it’s fostering the growth of Azure.

    https://www.petri.com/microsoft-turns-heat-oracle-amazon-ibm-databases

  • HPE to move HQ from Palo Alto to Santa Clara as it consolidates Silicon Valley footprint

    After two years of massive restructuring and staff reductions, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is selling its headquarters on land it has owned in Palo Alto, California since 1957, the company announced on Thursday.

    The headquarters will move to nearby Santa Clara, at a new 23,000 square-foot office complex originally built to house Aruba, a company acquired by HPE in 2015. Some of the staff will also move to existing offices in San Jose and Milpitas.

    HPE wouldn’t disclose how many people work in Silicon Valley, but the company has around 45,000 employees globally.

    http://www.businessinsider.com/hpe-selling-palo-alto-headquarters-move-santa-clara-2017-11

    Make sure you update those purchase orders!

Other

  • The continuous flow of execs between AWS, Microsoft, IBM and government

    According to a report in the Times today, the Home Office’s former chief digital officer, Norman Driskell, took a job with Amazon Web Services (AWS) without gaining the necessary approvals first – a trend that has been highlighted by the National Audit Office in recent months as a concern.

    Driskell oversaw multimillion pound contracts with AWS during his time at the Home Office and has also set up one of Europe’s largest AWS user groups in his spare time, before taking up the job as a public sector lead with the cloud hosting giant.

    https://diginomica.com/2017/10/30/continuing-flow-execs-aws-microsoft-ibm-government/
    A senior civil servant with a £130,000 salary reportedly breached transparency rules when he quit and joined Amazon

    The Home Office reportedly paid the US firm £1.2 million in the 18 months prior to Driskell’s departure, which happened in November 2016. In February 2017, just three months later, the Home Office awarded AWS a two-year contract worth £4.8 million, according to The Times.

    Under the new contract, the Home Office will reportedly move immigration data from a remote provider to an “in-house AWS solution.”

    http://www.businessinsider.com/chief-digital-officer-ignored-rules-quit-government-joined-amazozn-2017-10

  • IBM Elects Two New Members to Its Board of Directors

    Ginni Rometty, IBM chairman, president and chief executive officer, said: “Joe Swedish and Rick Waddell are distinguished leaders in their fields, and we are delighted to add their insights and leadership to the IBM board. Mr. Swedish brings experience as a transformational leader in health care in both the payer and provider space, and Mr. Waddell’s experience enhances the strong financial services expertise on the board. Their perspectives on contemporary business issues and their experience running data-intensive enterprises will be an asset to IBM and to our shareholders.”

    http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20171031005218/en/Intnl-Bus.-Mach-UK-Regulatory-Announcement-IBM

  • SoftBank, Facebook, and Amazon commit to 8,700-mile transpacific subsea cable system

    Japanese telecommunications giant SoftBank is joining forces with Facebook, Amazon, and a number of other technology companies to build a new 14,000 km (8,700 mile) transpacific subsea cable connecting Asia with North America.

    The Jupiter cable system will have two landing points in Japan — at Shima in the Mie prefecture and at Maruyama in the Chiba prefecture — as well as one at Daet in the Philippines and one near Los Angeles in the U.S.

    https://venturebeat.com/2017/10/30/softbank-facebook-and-amazon-commit-to-8700-mile-transpacific-internet-cable/

  • Amazon’s HQ2 could go to Washington D.C., where it has over 500 job openings, says analyst

    While it remains unclear what city Amazon will pick, analysts at Baird Equity Research believe Washington D.C. has one major edge over others: current number of job openings.

    As of last Friday, Washington D.C. had 531 corporate jobs available, the most after Seattle and the San Francisco-Bay Area. If you exclude West Coast cities, and use current job openings density as an important measure for Amazon’s HQ2 criteria, Washington D.C. would be a front-runner to win the bid, Baird Equity Research wrote in a note Monday.

    “We view this as relevant to the HQ2 search, as Amazon might prioritize locations based on already having a sizable non-fulfillment workforce,” the note said.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/30/amazon-hq2-washington-dc-possible-given-job-openings.html

  • Just Think: What Amazon Could Do to the Pharmacy Business

    Noticing that an Amazon customer seems to be taking an awful lot of medication to lose weight, the company might pitch fitness machines or online yoga classes. But it could also provide entertainment suggestions—free with that Prime account—that would go nicely with the state of your health. If Amazon can tell from all that Xanax you’re ordering that you seem to be having a hard time, it might recommend video offerings like “Love, Actually” or “8 Hours: Ocean Lights & Whale Songs.”

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/just-think-what-amazon-could-do-to-the-pharmacy-business-1509639035

Photo: Joey Kyber

Posted on

Supplier Report: 10/27/2017

Cisco is all over the news this week: they spent at least $2B on two companies (terms were not disclosed on the Perspica deal) and they entered into a partnership with Google on cloud and network services.

Companies looking to expand their AI programs are finding an unexpected barrier… a complete lack of available talent.  Due to this shortage, those people in the AI field are commanding massive salaries.

Softbank is advancing their goal of buying all the things.

Acquisitions

  • WeWork acquires Flatiron School

    Flatiron School is a coding education platform that offers both online and offline classes to folks who want a career in the world of tech. The coding academy was launched in 2012 and has raised more than $14 million since inception, according to Crunchbase.

    The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

    https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/23/wework-acquires-flatiron-school/?ncid=rss

  • Cisco snaps up streaming-data startup Perspica (terms not disclosed)

    One of the reasons it was attracted to Perspica is because of the company’s ability to monitor data in real-time, Cisco says. Being able to process data as it’s created or very soon afterwards can speed the time that end users are able to gain insights from the data, the company says. “Perspica is known for its stream-based processing with the unique ability to apply machine learning to data as it comes in instead of waiting until it’s neatly stored,” says Bhaskar Sunkara, VP of Engineering at AppDynamics.

    https://www.networkworld.com/article/3234329/lan-wan/cisco-snaps-up-streaming-data-startup-perspica.html

  • Cisco scoops up BroadSoft for $1.9 billion to boost communications tools portfolioa

    The purchase gives Cisco a new way to sell its communications tools as it shifts its focus from a pure networking hardware company to one focused on software and services delivered in the cloud. Today’s announcement comes on the heels of an announcement last week that it intended to purchase Perspica and fold the engineering team into AppDynamics, a company it purchased earlier this year for $3.7 billion. If you’re thinking, this is an acquisitive company, you’re right. It just purchased its 200th company.

    https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/23/cisco-scoops-up-broadsoft-for-1-9-billion-to-boost-communications-tools-portfolio/?ncid=rss

  • When $100BN is not enough… Softbank is planning Vision Fund sequels

    In comments to Nikkei, Son did set out his expectations for the funds’ size and likely investment reach over the next decade.

    “We are creating a mechanism to increase our funding ability from 10 trillion yen to 20 trillion yen to 100 trillion yen,” he said, adding that, all told, the funds “will probably have invested in at least 1,000 companies within 10 years”.

    According to Nikkei, all the Vision Funds are expected to chiefly target unicorns — aka tech startups that haven’t gone public yet but have an estimated valuation above $1BN.

    The average scale of investment by the funds is likely to reach about $888 million, it said.

    https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/20/when-100bn-is-not-enough-softbank-is-planning-vision-fund-sequels/?ncid=rss

Artificial Intelligence

  • Tech Giants Are Paying Huge Salaries for Scarce A.I. Talent

    Tech’s biggest companies are placing huge bets on artificial intelligence, banking on things ranging from face-scanning smartphones and conversational coffee-table gadgets to computerized health care and autonomous vehicles. As they chase this future, they are doling out salaries that are startling even in an industry that has never been shy about lavishing a fortune on its top talent.

    Typical A.I. specialists, including both Ph.D.s fresh out of school and people with less education and just a few years of experience, can be paid from $300,000 to $500,000 a year or more in salary and company stock, according to nine people who work for major tech companies or have entertained job offers from them. All of them requested anonymity because they did not want to damage their professional prospects.

    Well-known names in the A.I. field have received compensation in salary and shares in a company’s stock that total single- or double-digit millions over a four- or five-year period. And at some point they renew or negotiate a new contract, much like a professional athlete.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/22/technology/artificial-intelligence-experts-salaries.html

Cloud

  • Amazon’s $18 billion cloud business continues to crush Microsoft and Google

    Amazon Web Services reported $4.6 billion in revenue for the quarter. AWS has already brought in $12.3 billion in 2017 so far, with a quarter left to go.

    With sales growing quickly and projected to jump again next quarter, AWS is expected to hit $18 billion in revenue for the full year. As a bonus, it’s already the single most profitable part of Amazon’s business.

    Microsoft doesn’t disclose the revenue it generates from Azure, its product that competes directly with AWS. However, it did say Azure’s sales grew 90% from the same period last year.

    Google Cloud is the biggest cipher of the three, in terms of financial performance. Instead of breaking out the amount of revenue it generates from its cloud business, Google lumps together its cloud sales with the revenue it generates from the Google Play app store and from its hardware business. That combined category posted $3.4 billion in revenue last quarter.

    http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-web-services-is-battling-microsoft-azure-and-google-cloud-2017-10

  • Google and Cisco Strike Cloud Partnership

    Google, a unit of Alphabet Inc., is contributing cloud-development expertise and tools that run on the Google Cloud Platform, a suite of services for the cloud including computing, storage, databases and analytics. Cisco is bringing networking, security and infrastructure technologies to the mix. Both companies are using open-source technologies to give customers more flexibility.

    “It really does help companies avoid lock-in,” Cisco Chief Executive Chuck Robbins said in an interview.

    Mr. Robbins is counting on new cloud services to help turn around Cisco by moving further away from its legacy hardware. Cisco’s customers are increasingly using cloud services instead of investing in hardware for their own data centers.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-and-cisco-strike-cloud-partnership-1508932804

Datacenter

  • HPE Is Exiting the Cloud Server Business

    Hewlett-Packard Enterprise is getting out of the cloud server business. That means it will no longer sell low-end “commodity” servers to large cloud computing customers like Microsoft.

    It has proven to be an exceedingly tough business for traditional hardware makers because while they may sell huge volumes of cloud servers, profits are slim to none. The target customers are companies like Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, or Google, each of which can (and do) negotiate huge discounts. Insult to injury, most of these cloud companies go directly to contract manufacturers in Taiwan or China to have servers built to their specifications at low cost. They don’t need or want to pay for name-brand servers

    http://fortune.com/2017/10/19/hpe-cloud-servers/

  • Michael Dell on cloud infrastructure:

    Wow… Mike says Boomerang kind of weird…
  • The heart of “The Cloud” is in Virginia

    This data center is in Loudoun County, Virginia. Buddy Rizer, the county’s head of business development, helped turn Loudoun County into the largest concentration of data centers in the world — 10 million square feet in 70 enormous buildings.

    According to Rizer, 70 percent of all web traffic from the world, on a daily basis, passes through a Loudoun County data center.

    AWS is growing at 40 percent a year, and Loudoun County can’t build data centers fast enough. Buddy Rizer says that seven new ones are under construction right now. A new RagingWire data center will add another two million square feet of data center space.

    And even though it will be nearly two years until construction is completed, the space is already 100 percent leased. “It’s not getting ahead; we’re just barely keeping up,” Rizer said. “There’s no empty space in our data centers. By and large they are all 100% filled.”

    https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cloud-computing-loudoun-county-virginia/

Software/SaaS

  • SAP earnings fall short on slower cloud and business software growth

    “Overall it was not a good quarter,” said Andrew Bartels, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research Inc. “The growth was not as strong as in previous quarters,” particularly in North America.

    One culprit was the source of strong growth in previous quarters: its business network group, which includes acquired businesses such as Ariba Inc., Concur Technologies Inc., Fieldglass Inc. and SuccessFactors Inc. Bartels noted that SAP had been depending on that growth to the extent that “success may have bred some complacency” in applications such as Ariba, which is said is “not really best-in-class in its category anymore.” That may have allowed competitors to gain some ground, he said.

    https://siliconangle.com/blog/2017/10/19/sap-earnings-fall-short-slower-cloud-business-software-growth/

  • Tech IPO Trends Worked In Mongo DB’s Favor, But Could Work Against Stitch Fix

    On Oct. 19, MongoDB Inc. (MDB) joined the ranks of fast-growing, money-losing, enterprise software names to see a strong 2017 debut. After pricing its 8 million-share offering at $24 (above an elevated $20 to $22 range), shares opened at $33 and as of the Oct. 20 close are at $30.68, up 28%. That leaves the company valued at $1.85 billion after accounting for outstanding stock options and warrants, or about 15 times trailing sales.

    MongoDB sells on-premise and cloud versions of a popular open-source database under the same name, while leading the community responsible for developing the database. Thanks partly to its popularity among developers, startups and big-name Internet companies, it’s arguably the most popular NoSQL database on the market.

    Also:

    Many other companies, including Cisco, SAP, Verizon, Adobe and Intuit, have embraced MongoDB, which it should be noted is often run on major third-party cloud platforms. The company claimed 4,300 clients as of the end of July, including over half the Fortune 100. With the help of 1,100 customer adds, revenue (mostly from software subscriptions) rose 51% annually to $68 million during the 6 months ending in July. Net loss — the result of big sales and R&D investments — rose fractionally to $45.8 million, or $36.4 million excluding stock expenses.

    https://realmoney.thestreet.com/articles/10/20/2017/tech-ipo-trends-worked-mongo-dbs-favor-could-work-against-stitch-fix

  • Oracle Joins The Blockchain Party

    Oracle’s Blockchain Cloud Service is a new solution that will be included in the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) family of offerings. The service is claimed to be based on a comprehensive distributed ledger platform which will create opportunities for businesses to enhance their processes by several means.

    First of all, the solution will support deploying and running smart contracts. A smart contract is an automated contract which does not require a middleman, and where the terms and conditions are written as a code. This type of technology is being increasingly adopted by the financial sector, especially in securities trading, where smart contracts can cut costs and save time and money. For instance, Bank of America (BAC) revealed earlier this year a new platform based on Etherium for automating the process of creating a standby letter of credit.

    https://seekingalpha.com/article/4115483-oracle-joins-blockchain-party

Security

  • New Ransomware ‘Bad Rabbit’ Spreading Quickly Through Russia and Ukraine

    The malware, dubbed Bad Rabbit, has hit three Russian media outlets, including the news agency Interfax, according to Russian security firm Group-IB. Once it infects a computer, Bad Rabbit displays a message in red letters on a black background, an aesthetic used in the massive NotPetya ransomware outbreak.

    The ransom message asks victims to log into a Tor hidden service website to make the payment of 0.05 Bitcoin, valued at around $282 at the time of writing. The site also displays a countdown of a little bit over 40 hours before the price of decryption goes up.

    A researcher from Proofpoint said that Bad Rabbit spread via a fake Adobe Flash Player installer. Researchers from Kaspersky Lab confirmed this, and added that the malware dropper—the file that launches the malware—was distributed via booby-trapped legitimate sites, “all of which were news or media website.”

    https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/59yb4q/bad-rabbit-petya-ransomware-russia-ukraine

  • How I Socially Engineer Myself Into High Security Facilities

    We became best buds. I was given complete and unaccompanied access to the facility where I stayed for several hours.

    I gained network access and stole several thousands of dollars in physical primitives by picking my way through cheap locks (credit to Deviant Ollam for the rad lockpicking animations.)

    https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/qv34zb/how-i-socially-engineer-myself-into-high-security-facilities

Other

  • Amazon Says 238 Places Want to Host Its New Headquarters

    Opening a second, equal headquarters is believed by management experts to be an unprecedented move by an American corporation, and it presents unique cultural challenges for the company.

    While Amazon continues to grow in Seattle, experts say it would be difficult for the company to essentially double its footprint there. In addition, hiring thousands more software developers will almost certainly be cheaper and easier in a different city, they say.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-says-238-places-want-to-host-its-new-headquarters-1508772669?mg=prod/accounts-wsj

  • Bitcoin breaks above $6,000, and $100 billion in value for the first time in its history

    The cryptocurrency hit an all-time high of $6,147.07 just a day after pushing through the $6,000 mark, according to data from industry website CoinDesk.

    Much of the rise can be attributed to another upcoming split in bitcoin known as a “fork”. This will lead to the creation of a new cryptocurrency called bitcoin gold. Holders of bitcoin will get some bitcoin gold when it is issued, essentially giving them free money.

    But Alex Sunnarborg, founding partner of cryptocurrency fund Tetras Capital, told CNBC on Friday that bitcoin investors were betting on bitcoin holding its status despite the split. Bitcoin already underwent a fork in August when a new cryptocurrency called bitcoin cash was created. Despite this, bitcoin has continued to perform strongly.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/21/bitcoin-price-6100-new-record-high.html

  • Cortana Gets A Speaker Of Its Own

    Aside from the fact that it works best with Microsoft’s own services and doesn’t support others, Cortana’s biggest limitation is that it can only support one account at this time. Calendar information, reminders, and to-dos will all be pulled from the account the Invoke was set up with, which makes it difficult to use as a shared device for those functions. Both Alexa and Google’s Assistant have added features that attempt to identify the person making the voice request and serve up personalized information to them. And while the Invoke does sound good on its own, it can’t be paired in stereo or be used in a multi-room system, like Google, Amazon, or Sonos speakers can.

    https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/20/16505468/harman-kardon-invoke-cortana-microsoft-smart-speaker-review
    I hate to say it, but I called it.

  • What’s HPE Next? Now it’s unemployment for ‘thousands’ of staff

    The cuts were expected, but still cast a pall over the enterprise IT giant. In June, we revealed the existence of the HPE Next project: a radical three-year plan to overhaul HPE’s processes and investments, and optimize its people and overheads to make itself relevant again.

    And by optimize, it means it will cut or move positions to low-wage places to save the biz a pretty penny. In September, it emerged the axe was being sharpened for 5,000 of its 50,000 workforce, or one in ten.

    https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/10/24/whats_hpe_next_an_unemployment_claim_for_thousands_of_workers_today/

Photo: Nicolas Picard