News You Can Use: 1/30/2019

  • How Companies Secretly Boost Their Glassdoor Ratings

    In the Journal’s analysis, five-star ratings collectively made up 45% of reviews in the months where the number of reviews jumped, compared with 25% in the six months before and after. While it isn’t possible to determine from the data alone what caused each spike, a statistical test shows the likelihood that so many would skew positive by chance is highly improbable.

    Well-known names with large spikes included messaging-app developer Slack Technologies Inc., professional-networking site LinkedIn, health insurer Anthem Inc., household-products maker Clorox Co. and Jack Daniel’s maker Brown-Forman Corp.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/companies-manipulate-glassdoor-by-inflating-rankings-and-pressuring-employees-11548171977

  • It’s Now Clear None of the Supposed Benefits of Killing Net Neutrality Are Real

    In the months leading up to the FCC assault on net neutrality, big telecom and FCC boss Ajit Pai told anybody who’d listen that killing net neutrality would boost broadband industry investment, spark job creation, and drive broadband into underserved areas at an unprecedented rate.

    As it turns out, none of those promises were actually true.

    Despite the FCC voting to kill the popular consumer protections late last year, Comcast’s latest earnings report indicates that the cable giant’s capital expenditures (CAPEX) for 2018 actually decreased 3 percent. The revelation comes on the heels by similar statements by Verizon and Charter Spectrum that they’d also be seeing lower network investment numbers in 2018.

    https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/gyab5m/its-now-clear-none-of-the-supposed-benefits-of-killing-net-neutrality-are-real

  • The experience economy is coming
  • Everyone hates open offices. Here’s why they still exist

    For as long as these floor plans have been in vogue, studies have debunked their benefits. Researchers have shown that people in open offices take nearly two-thirds more sick leave and report greater unhappiness, more stress, and less productivity than those with more privacy. A 2018 study by Harvard Business School found that open offices reduce face-to-face interaction by about 70% and increase email and messaging by roughly 50%, shattering the notion that they make workers collaborative. (They’re even subtly sexist.) And yet, the open plan persists–too symbolically powerful (and cheap) for many companies to abandon.

    This is about saving money, not about work culture:

    Of course, one of the main reasons that business leaders default to open plans is simply that they’re inexpensive. According to commercial real estate association CoreNet Global, the average space allotted to individual employees globally fell from 225 square feet in 2010 to 176 square feet in 2013, and is projected to keep decreasing. This adds up to hundreds of millions of dollars–or more–in savings per year at the country’s largest companies, according to calculations from Erik Rood, an analyst in Google’s human resources department who examines corporate financials on his personal blog, Data Interview Qs.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90285582/everyone-hates-open-plan-offices-heres-why-they-still-exist

  • How to Declutter and Organize Your Personal Tech in a Few Simple Steps

    Pick somewhere in your home where your various wires will live, like a closet, cabinet or drawer. From there, categorize the wires and give them compartments. I separate my different types of wires — earbuds, phone chargers, miscellaneous USB cables and computer chargers — into Ziploc bags and label them with a label maker. All the bags live in a drawer in my TV stand.

    There are different approaches to organizing your power cables. Families with children could give each member a compartment. For example, put your son Joe’s iPhone charger, laptop charger and earbuds into one Ziploc bag and label it “Joe’s tech.”

    This step is a must. “If you don’t have a dedicated place for your items, then you’re wasting your time finding them,” said Keith Bartolomei, a professional organizer for Zen Habitat.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/23/technology/personaltech/declutter-organize-personal-tech-few-simple-steps.html

Photo by Artem Bali on Unsplash

Supplier Report: 1/25/2019

IBM continues to have a strong news cycle, but this week is more positive. The company is expected to purchase T-Systems mainframe business unit for approximately one billion dollars.

Big Blue also inked a $550m, 8-year deal/joint-venture with Vodaphone to build out AI and cloud services. They also announced a few blockchain projects that customers are willing to pay for (sounds like everything is coming up Milhouse)

On a down note, the company’s AI schemes continue to under-perform with the announcement that “Watson Workspace” is being shut down due to “lack of customer interest.”

Acquisitions

  • IBM to Reportedly Buy T-Systems’ Mainframe Business Unit

    IBM is acquiring T-Systems’ mainframe services business from Deutsche Telekom for roughly $986 million, according to the Handelsblatt and IT-Zoom.

    Roughly 400 T-Systems employees across six countries will transition to IBM in May 2019 as part of the deal, according to the reports. The mainframe unit is only one small piece of the larger T-Systems — a German global IT services and consulting company headquartered in Frankfurt. Founded in 2000, T-Systems is a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom.

    https://www.nasdaq.com/article/ibm-to-reportedly-buy-t-systems-mainframe-business-unit-cm1081559

  • Fiserv to Acquire First Data in $22 Billion All-Stock Deal

    Fiserv Inc. has struck a deal to buy First Data Corp. for $22 billion, combining two companies that, though largely unknown to consumers, provide much of the financial technology that connects Wall Street to Main Street.

    The all-stock deal underscores the growing threat of upstart financial-technology firms to a lucrative but obscure business long controlled by more mature companies. Fiserv and First Data provide a range of technology services to banks, merchants and other companies involved in the business of moving money.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/fiserv-to-acquire-first-data-in-22-billion-all-stock-deal-11547643455

  • Google is buying Fossil’s smartwatch tech for $40 million

    The smartwatch category continues to be dominated by Apple’s offerings, and top competitors Fitbit and Samsung have opted to go different routes, supporting the Pebble-based Fitbit OS and Tizen, respectively. All of this has left Google struggling to differentiate itself and its partners’ offerings. Fossil’s team certainly has the know how to build solid watch hardware, so this could prove a solid match.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/17/google-is-buying-fossils-smartwatch-tech-for-40-million/

  • AWS makes another acquisition, grabbing TSO Logic

    Amazon confirmed the purchase by email and referred to the statement on the TSO Logic website from CEO Aaron Rallo. “We are very pleased to share the news that TSO Logic will be joining the AWS family,” Rallo wrote in the statement.

    The company takes data about workloads and applications and helps customers find the most efficient place to run them by measuring requirements like resource needs against cost to find the right balance at any given time.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/15/aws-makes-another-acquisition-grabbing-tso-logic/

Artificial Intelligence

  • IBM to put Watson Workspace out to pasture over lack of adoption

    IBM is killing off its AI-powered collaboration tool Watson Workspace after it failed to “resonate” with clients, according to a leaked memo.

    Watson Workspace is IBM’s answer to Slack or Microsoft Teams, but with AI capabilities. It provided a platform for shared workspaces, collaborations and even hosted third-party apps. But, despite having only been released in 2016 in beta, the app is being shut down by the 28 February, according to a memo seen by The Register.

    https://www.itpro.co.uk/business-operations/32768/ibm-to-put-watson-workspace-out-to-pasture-over-lack-of-adoption
    Another IBM AI tool that fails to connect with the purchasing public…

  • Robot Hotel Loses Love for Robots

    Guests became frustrated when the hotel’s robots failed to keep pace with Siri or Alexa. One laggard was the robot assistant in each room named “Churi” because of its tulip-shaped head. The doll-like device can manage simple hello-how-are-you type conversations and adjust room heating and lighting in response to voice commands. But some guests quizzed her in vain about things like the opening time of the nearby theme park.

    Atsushi Nishiguchi, a guest at the hotel in 2017, said that after an irate exchange with Churi he decided to phone the hotel reception, only to find there was no phone in the room because the assistant was intended to handle guests’ requests. He used his cellphone to call the main hotel number to reach a human worker.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/robot-hotel-loses-love-for-robots-11547484628

Cloud

  • IBM and Vodafone form cloud, 5G and AI business venture and ink $550M service deal

    IBM is announcing a new venture with mobile carrier Vodafone, in a deal that will comes in two parts. First, IBM will supply Vodafone’s B2B unit Vodafone Business with managed services in the areas of cloud and hosting. And second, the two will together work on building and delivering solutions in areas like AI, cloud, 5G, IoT and software defined networking to enterprise customers.

    The latter part of the deal appears to be a classic JV that will see both sides bringing something to the table — employees from both companies will be moving into a separate office together very soon that will essentially be “neutral” territory. The former part, meanwhile, will see Vodafone paying IBM some $550 million in an eight-year agreement.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/17/ibm-and-vodafone-form-550m-venture-to-develop-cloud-5g-and-ai-business-solutions/

Security

  • Amazon shareholders want the company to stop selling facial recognition to law enforcement

    This resolution, organized by nonprofit organization Open MIC, represents a group of shareholders that represent a total of $1.32 billion in assets under management.

    “It’s a familiar pattern: a leading tech company marketing what is hailed as breakthrough technology without understanding or assessing the many real and potential harms of that product,” Open MIC Executive Director Michael Connor wrote in a blog post. “Sales of Rekognition to government represent considerable risk for the company and investors. That’s why it’s imperative those sales be halted immediately.”

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/17/amazon-shareholders-want-the-company-to-stop-selling-facial-recognition-to-law-enforcement/

  • Another huge database exposed millions of call logs and SMS text messages

    Voipo, a Lake Forest, Calif. communications provider, exposed tens of gigabytes worth of customer data.

    Voipo is a voice-over-internet provider, providing residential and business phone line services that they can control themselves in the cloud. The company’s backend routes calls and processes text messages for its users. But because one of the backend ElasticSearch databases wasn’t protected with a password, anyone could look in and see streams of real-time call logs and text messages sent back and forth.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/15/another-huge-database-exposed-millions-of-call-logs-and-sms-text-messages/

Software/SaaS

  • IBM Announces 2 Blockchain Pilots For The Mining Industry

    The pilot program’s first use case will utilize the MineHub blockchain platform and test the technology’s ability to “manage concentrate from Goldcorp’s Penasquito Mine in Mexico throughout its path to market.” Once the ore is mined, the data will be uploaded to the blockchain platform. It will include data about sustainability and ethical practices. The data is then verified by “independent regulators,” and the ore can then be loaded for shipping. The MineHub platform records each transaction and lets participants “view and reconcile” this data as the product moves through the supply chain. EDCCs (better known as smart contracts) will be used by companies such as ING Bank and Wheaton Precious Metals for “trade finance, streaming and royalty contracts.”

    https://www.ethnews.com/ibm-announces-2-blockchain-pilots-for-the-mining-industry
    Looks like IBM has found someone to “pay for the roads to be built”

Other

  • WeWork’s CEO Makes Millions as Landlord to WeWork

    Mr. Neumann has made millions of dollars by leasing multiple properties in which he has an ownership stake back to WeWork, one of the country’s most valuable startups. Multiple investors of the privately held company said the arrangement concerned them as a potential conflict of interest in which the CEO could benefit on rents or other terms with the company.

    A WeWork spokesman said all related-party deals are reviewed and approved by the board or an independent committee and disclosed to investors. Mr. Neumann declined to comment through a spokesman.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/weworks-ceo-makes-millions-as-landlord-to-wework-11547640000

  • Foxconn might slow hiring at its Wisconsin plant

    On Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported that the company “fell short of the minimum number of jobs it was required to create in 2018 to claim state-job creation tax credits.” The Wisconsin Economic Development Corp says that the company needed to create 260 full-time jobs, but only created 178. As a result, the company won’t receive tax credits for 2018. The WSJ cites the state’s low employment rate as a factor for the slow hiring, and notes that the company could earn $19.1 million in tax credits if it passes its hiring goal of 2,080 jobs this year. The company denied reports last November that it had been looking to bring in workers from China to bolster its workforce.

    On top of that, Foxconn appears to be adjusting its expectations for hiring in the near future. It tells Bloomberg that it “remains committed” to creating those promised 13,000 jobs, but that it might slow its hiring moving forward: “we need to have the agility to adapt to a range of factors, including global economic conditions.” The company and former Governor Scott Walker have been heavily criticized, both for the steep subsidies promised to the company, as well as the possibility that the company might not deliver on its promise to bring 13,000 jobs to the state.

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/19/18189480/foxconn-wisconsin-plant-possible-hiring-slowdown-jobs

News You Can Use: 1/23/2019

  • We Are Living in the Begging Economy

    In this new paradigm, workers still have to work, but they don’t get paid at all. Instead, they beg for money on social media. It’s like replying to your viral Tweet with a link to your Soundcloud, only if you don’t go viral you have to ration your insulin (one third of GoFundMe’s campaigns are already for medical costs). This has been the case for many government employees for the entire duration of the shutdown, including the TSA employees who are supposedly there to prevent the next 9/11. It’ll be the case for the thousands more starting soon, so the Interior Department can continue to sell oil and gas drilling leases in the Gulf of Mexico.

    https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/a3m59p/we-are-living-in-the-begging-economy

  • Microsoft pledges $500M to create affordable housing around Seattle

    The money will be used in three ways: $225 million will be loaned at below-market interest rates to developers building units for households making between $62,000 to $124,000 a year; $250 million will be used for market-rate loans to support the construction of affordable housing for people making up to 60 percent of the local median income, or about $48,150 for a two-person household; and the rest of the money, $25 million, will be donated to services for low-income and homeless people. Loans will be made over a period of three years and any profit will be put back in the fund.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/16/microsoft-pledges-500m-to-create-affordable-housing-around-seattle/

  • How tax brackets actually work
  • Sorry I Forgot Your Birthday, I’ve Stopped Checking Facebook

    Michael Haber had been at his cousin Jasmine’s house for nearly two hours—chatting, playing with her children—when she brought out a fluffy chocolate sponge cake with a whipped-cream filling. “What is this for?” asked Mr. Haber, 26, a web designer in Beirut, Lebanon.

    Jasmine explained that it was for her. It was her birthday.

    “It was pretty awkward. But how would I have known?” said Mr. Haber. “I quit Facebook . ”

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/you-quit-facebook-now-you-dont-know-anyones-birthday-11547652709

  • Receipts are secretly really bad–why are we still using them?

    “We started looking into this idea of receipts and whether we should move people towards electronic receipts,” says Phil Ting, a California assembly member from San Francisco. His staff calculated the amount of paper and water wasted to create receipts that often end up in the trash seconds later, and then learned about the health issues that receipts also pose. “As we did more research, we found out the receipts aren’t just printed with regular inkjet ink, which is recyclable. It’s [coated] with BPA which is not recyclable, and actually toxic.”

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90292886/receipts-are-secretly-really-bad-why-are-we-still-using-them

Photo by Kat Yukawa on Unsplash

Supplier Report: 1/18/2019

IBM had a week of making excuses: First CEO Ginni Rometty had to defend Watson medical after reports from oncologists that the system is incorrectly diagnosing medical issues. Then the company had to defend the lack of growth in blockchain by essentially saying companies need to invest first and hope to see results. Finally, the company is failing to meet their hiring targets in Baton Rouge and are having a job fair – but someone needs to question why the company has a consulting hub in Baton Rouge in the first place.

Acquisitions

  • Amazon Web Services Acquires CloudEndure – Confirmed

    “As an AWS Advanced Technology Partner since 2016, CloudEndure has long joined forces with AWS to help customers future-proof their businesses. This acquisition expands our ability to deliver innovative and flexible migration, backup, and disaster recovery solutions.”

    Israeli media outlets estimate the deal to be worth about $200 to $250 million Dollars.

    https://esellercafe.com/amazon-web-services-acquires-cloudendure-confirmed/

  • Alibaba acquires German big data startup Data Artisans for $103M

    Alibaba has paid €90 million ($103 million) to acquire Data Artisans, a Berlin-based startup that provides distributed systems and large-scale data streaming services for enterprises.

    Data Artisans was founded in 2014 by the team leading the development of Apache Flink, an open source large-scale data processing technology. The startup offers its own dA Platform, with open source Apache Flink and Application Manager, to enterprise customers that include Netflix, ING, Uber and Alibaba itself.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/08/alibaba-data-artisans/

Artificial Intelligence

  • IBM CEO: Watson has not failed

    “Watson for Oncology is doing very well — very well,” Ms. Rometty told STAT during a photo opportunity at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas where she delivered a keynote address. STAT has requested interviews with Ms. Rometty and other company executives for months with no success.

    In 2018, STAT reported several controversies involving IBM’s health division, including one of its physician customers calling Watson for Oncology a “piece of sh–,” and numerous employee layoffs. A key complaint about Watson for Oncology, which offers cancer treatment recommendations, is that it’s biased toward American treatment methods. However, IBM said it plans to add regional treatment guidelines to Watson for Oncology, as well as real-world data on patient outcomes, to boost user satisfaction.

    https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/artificial-intelligence/ibm-ceo-watson-has-not-failed.html

  • Microsoft Could Help Kroger Counter Amazon’s Growth

    Kroger recently partnered with Microsoft to test out two data-driven connected stores. The two renovated stores will use a smart retail system powered by Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and digital shelves, which display prices, promotions, and nutritional information on screens in front of products. Kroger introduced the shelves, which are already being used in nearly 100 stores, last year. The test stores will help guide shoppers through the aisles to the products they want to buy.

    All those devices will be tethered to Microsoft’s cloud platform Azure, which is already Kroger’s preferred cloud platform. Microsoft and Kroger will also jointly market a commercial retail as a service (RaaS) product to the grocer’s industry peers.

    https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/01/11/microsoft-could-help-kroger-counter-amazons-growth.aspx
    After Amazon-Whole Foods, Microsoft-Kroger: The Grocery Revolution Is Happening

    “The two outfitted Kroger locations, in Monroe, Ohio and Redmond, Wash., will feature digital shelving displays with real-time price updates and product information, as well as digital advertisements personalized to each shopper,” CNBC published on Monday.

    The news of the Microsoft-Kroger partnership dovetails with a report from RBC Capital Markets indicating that Amazon’s cashierless grocery stores take in 50% more revenue than conventional counterparts. Amazon has said it may open up as many as 3,000 Amazon Go stores by 2021, suggesting the possibility of a $4.5 billion business.

    https://streetfightmag.com/2019/01/09/after-amazon-whole-foods-microsoft-kroger-the-grocery-revolution-is-happening/

Cloud

  • Microsoft wins $1.76 billion defense contract: Pentagon

    Microsoft Corp has been awarded a five-year contract worth $1.76 billion for delivering enterprise services for the Defense Department, Coast Guard and intelligence services, the Pentagon said on Friday.

    https://www.reuters.com/article/us-microsoft-defense/microsoft-wins-1-76-billion-defense-contract-pentagon-idUSKCN1P52HB

  • AWS gives open source the middle finger

    AWS argues that while MongoDB is great at what it does, its customers have found it hard to build fast and highly available applications on the open-source platform that can scale to multiple terabytes and hundreds of thousands of reads and writes per second. So what the company did was build its own document database, but made it compatible with the Apache 2.0 open source MongoDB 3.6 API.

    If you’ve been following the politics of open source over the last few months, you’ll understand that the optics of this aren’t great. It’s also no secret that AWS has long been accused of taking the best open-source projects and re-using and re-branding them without always giving back to those communities.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/09/aws-gives-open-source-the-middle-finger/

  • AWS, Coupa Expand IT Spend Visibility For Corporates

    Coupa users can link their accounts to Amazon Web Services to automatically have AWS invoices sent to the Coupa platform. The integration means companies using both Coupa and AWS can more quickly process those invoices, while gaining enhanced visibility into their spend with AWS services.

    The integration deploys Coupa’s InvoiceSmash solution, which accelerates invoice processing and payments for users, aimed at enabling companies to capture early payment discounts from their suppliers.

    https://www.pymnts.com/news/b2b-payments/2019/aws-coupa-it-spend-visibility-management/

Software/SaaS

  • Oracle inks stadium naming rights deal with San Francisco Giants

    The deal appears to be one of the richest of its kind in North American professional sports, which seemingly would trickle through to the Giants’ product on the field. The team already boasted the second-highest payroll in the majors last season at around $203 million.

    Kevin Bartram, principal of Bartram Partnerships, a brand sponsorship consultancy, told Bloomberg the $200 million to $350 million price tag “seems very fair.” He was one of the consultants who brokered the Pacific Telesis-Giants partnership, according to the news outlet.

    https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/01/09/oracle-inks-stadium-naming-rights-deal-with-san-francisco-giants/

    Is this the best use of Oracle’s money at the moment?

  • Why more people aren’t using blockchain, according to IBM

    “We believe that blockchain is a team sport. For a blockchain-based solution to work successfully, it requires multiple entities to come together in a symbiotic relationship and agree on common principles, operating model and governance,” Parzygnat says. “The very nature of blockchain-based solutions require the vision and leadership of a governing body to convene the ecosystem in a common blockchain-based network. Then it requires each enterprise member to acknowledge their core competencies and compete in the market by defending or enhancing them.”

    https://www.finder.com.au/why-more-people-arent-using-blockchain-according-to-ibm

    Translation: “Pay for the roads first, and maybe we will built them”

Other

  • Chinese Huawei Executive Is Charged With Espionage in Poland

    The Chinese national’s detention follows the December arrest of Huawei’s chief financial officer in Canada, at the U.S.’s request, on allegations the company violated U.S. sanctions on Iran. Unlike that case, the Polish charges relate directly to suspicions by Washington and other Western governments that China could use Huawei equipment, or its employees, to help it spy on foreign governments and companies.

    Polish officials said Huawei itself wasn’t charged with any wrongdoing. They didn’t detail the charges or say whether any sensitive information was compromised. Officials also arrested a Polish national on the same charge.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese-huawei-executive-is-charged-with-espionage-in-poland-11547201100?ns=prod/accounts-wsj

  • Google Nears Win in Europe Over ‘Right to Be Forgotten’

    At issue in the case is the right, established by the court in 2014, for EU residents to demand that search engines remove links containing personal information—such as a home address—from searches for their names. Under the 2014 ruling, search engines must balance those requests against the public’s right to access a link associated with the searched-for name, taking into account, for instance, whether the person is a public figure.

    Maciej Szpunar, an advocate general for the court, argued in Thursday’s nonbinding opinion that if the EU orders removal of content from websites accessed outside the region, there is a danger that other jurisdictions would use their laws to block information from being accessible within the EU.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/eu-court-adviser-recommends-limited-scope-for-right-to-be-forgotten-11547112114

  • Apple’s trillion-dollar market cap was always a false idol

    It’s worth noting that Apple has hardly been in alone taking a huge hit on its stock price, especially tech stocks, which have been taking a beating since November on Wall Street. Want to talk a trillion dollars, how about the biggest names in tech losing a trillion (that’s with a T, folks) in value in one stretch in November. When Apple halted trading last week to announce lower than expected revenue, the stock dove even further, as it confirmed the worst fears of investors.

    Worse, Chinese consumers have driven iPhone sales just as the Chinese economy has hit a massive speed bump this year. In June, Reuters reported shockingly weak growth. In November, Bloomberg reported that the Chinese economy was slowing down long before the president started a trade war.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/07/apples-trillion-dollar-market-cap-was-always-a-false-idol/

  • IBM now heading to Lafayette to recruit workers for Baton Rouge hub

    The company will conduct a career fair Jan. 19 from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at South Louisiana Community College in the Devalcourt Building at 320 Devalcourt St., a news release from Louisiana Economic Development said. IBM is looking to fill 75 available positions in Baton Rouge, the release said.

    IBM fell short on its promise to create 800 jobs in Baton Rouge by 2017 in exchange for state incentives. The company reached an agreement with the state to meet that goal next year and will have to pay a penalty of $10,000 for each job below the threshold of 800.

    https://neworleanscitybusiness.com/blog/2019/01/11/ibm-now-heading-to-lafayette-to-recruit-workers-for-baton-rouge-hub/
    No offense to Louisiana – but it is an odd place to start a work hub. Yes, there are colleges (36 4-year schools), but it isn’t overflowing with students compared to other states, and it doesn’t seem like people want to stay there.
    IBM laying off more than 300 workers in RTP

    The jobs, which were part of an IBM subsidiary called Seterus, will be permanently terminated “no earlier than March 11,” according to the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification on Jan. 9.

    The 310 job cuts come a week after IBM agreed to sell Seterus to the mortgage services company the Mr. Cooper Group.

    https://www.newsobserver.com/news/business/article224283465.html

Photo by chuttersnap on Unsplash

Supplier Report: 1/11/2019

Apple is having a rough week because they (finally) realized that people don’t want to pay $1,400 for a new phone every year (can we make rotten apple jokes now?). The company needs to shift to a services model ASAP – will they build or will they buy?

IBM is selling IP because they need to get cash quickly to cover their acquisition of Red Hat. Their most recent sell off is a mortgage platform called Seterus to a company called Mr. Cooper Group. I am left wondering why IBM had a mortgage group in the first place.

Continuing 2018’s trend of “you data is never going to be safe” – password management app Blur accidentally exposed user data on their AWS platform.

Acquisitions

  • Mr. Cooper buys IBM mortgage platform that brought in $200 million last year

    Coppell-based Mr. Cooper Group Inc. is continuing to expand its mortgage servicing business with Thursday’s purchase of IBM’s Seterus platform.

    Mr. Cooper said the deal bolsters its portfolio by adding servicing rights to $24 billion in mortgages and a subservicing contract for an additional $24 billion in mortgages. Terms of the transaction weren’t immediately disclosed.

    https://www.dallasnews.com/business/real-estate/2019/01/03/mr-cooper-buys-ibm-mortgage-platform-brought-200-million-last-year

  • Google picks up company behind Q&A app

    Google has quietly acquired Superpod, a startup that had built a question-and-answer mobile app, Axios has learned. Google paid less than $60 million to “acqui-hire” the founders and purchase some of Superpod’s assets, according to a source.

    The bigger picture: The search giant hasn’t been shy about its ambitions for Google Assistant, the voice-activated virtual assistant that it debuted in 2016. Superpod, which lets users ask questions and receive answers from experts, could help Google bolster its virtual assistant’s ability to answer users’ questions.

    https://www.axios.com/google-acquires-superpod-qa-app-38d68263-7122-447b-9d81-58fadc404cb9.html

Artificial Intelligence

  • Forbes is building more AI tools for its reporters

    Over the summer, the business publisher, which just had its most profitable year in more than a decade, rolled out a new CMS, called Bertie, which recommends article topics for contributors based on their previous output, headlines based on the sentiment of their pieces and images too. It’s also testing a tool that writes rough versions of articles that contributors can simply polish up, rather than having to write a full story from scratch. The CMS is currently available to Forbes’ editorial staff and senior contributors in North America, and will be rolled out to all of its contributors in North America and Europe in the first quarter of 2019. The AI story-writing tool, which Forbes’s product team is experimenting with, does not have an immediate roll-out date.

    https://digiday.com/media/forbes-built-a-robot-to-pre-write-articles-for-its-contributors/

  • PepsiCo is using robots to deliver snacks to college students

    The autonomous snackbots, built by Y-Combinator startup Robby Technologies, can travel 20 miles on a charge, and are equipped with a camera, headlights and all-wheel drive to handle rough or wet terrain. Once it arrives, you simply release the lid, grab your snacks and close it to complete the sale. The app presumably takes care of the security and dispensing end of things.

    https://www.engadget.com/2019/01/04/pepsico-robot-snack-delivery/

Cloud

  • What’s Behind Oracle’s Gen 2 Cloud: Q&A with Oracle VP Kyle York

    Why is Oracle calling the new technology “Gen 2”—what is different from other cloud technology?
    As with most new things, the first rev is not always built for the long-term success. First generation public cloud offerings were not architected to accommodate traditional application architectures. They were architected for net-new cloud native applications. Think websites, mobile apps, or ecommerce storefronts—certainly not financial systems, government workloads, or data-intensive applications. Many enterprise workloads simply cannot run in hypervisor-based environments, as they don’t provide the performance predictability and high availability often required by traditional enterprise applications. They also don’t play nice with the tooling and security infrastructure historically deployed on-premise, in a complex ecosystem cultivated over decades.

    Oracle offers the most flexibility in the public cloud, allowing companies to run traditional and cloud-native workloads on the same platform. This enables our customers to reduce operational overhead and costs and enable connectivity and shared data between these workloads.

    http://www.dbta.com/Editorial/News-Flashes/Whats-Behind-Oracles-Gen-2-Cloud-QandA-with-Oracle-VP-Kyle-York-129198.aspx

Security

  • Marriott Says Hackers Swiped Millions of Passport Numbers

    The incident marked one of the largest data breaches in history, rivaled only by a hack of Yahoo Inc. in 2013 and 2014.

    The company said early Friday in a release that the number of guests involved in the data breach is lower than the original 500 million, but it didn’t specify a number.

    Marriott said a total of about 383 million records was “the upper limit” for the number potentially compromised in the incident. That figure includes passport numbers, email addresses and payment-card data of some guests, the company said.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/marriott-says-hackers-swiped-millions-of-passport-numbers-11546605000?ns=prod/accounts-wsj

  • Hackers Dump Data on Merkel, Politicians in Giant German Leak

    It’s unclear at this point whether the data release is linked to the 2015 Bundestag hack, and how significant it is. It includes two email addresses and a fax number the perpetrators link to Merkel, and a letter by SPD lawmakers sent to the chancellor in 2016 that criticizes her handling of the refugee crisis. The data connected to Merkel was not considered sensitive, Fietz said.

    The data, which Germany is trying to remove, also includes what appears to be chat transcripts from Economy Minister Peter Altmaier. More mundane material includes rental-car contracts and letters, some of them several years old. The attack appears to have affected all major German political parties with the exception of the populist Alternative for Germany.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-04/hackers-release-personal-data-of-hundreds-of-german-politicians

  • Blur password manager exposes 2.4M users on misconfigured AWS cloud instance

    While finding no evidence that the document had been accessed, Abine is nonetheless warning users that their accounts may have been compromised. Users are being asked to reset their master passwords for Blur and to set up two-factor authentication as an additional security measure.

    Blur is not the first password manager to have had security issues. LastPass was infamously hacked in 2015 before having to issue an urgent patch in 2017 after it was discovered that plugins related to the product could expose customer passwords.

    LastPass, though, was a different case because it was specifically targeted by hackers. The fact that a company offering password protection software would “accidentally” expose user data on an AWS S3 instance is a different level of incompetence.

    https://siliconangle.com/2019/01/03/blur-password-manager-exposes-2-4m-user-details-misconfigured-aws-instance/

Software/SaaS

  • Apple’s Precarious and Pivotal 2019

    Today, the stock is down nearly 10%. Tens of billions of dollars have been shaved off of Apple’s market cap, literally overnight. The company is now the 4th most valuable corporation in the world. That sounds like a great thing until you remember that until recently, it was the most valuable company in the world — and for much of the past several years, this was the case by far.

    Also:

    And then there’s the real standout part of the paragraph: “consumers adapting to a world with fewer carrier subsidies”. Once again, this translates into English as: we pushed the price of the iPhone too far. And whereas before, such prices were obfuscated by things like carrier contracts, that world is shifting. And Apple hasn’t shifted fast enough or strongly enough to account for this.

    https://500ish.com/apples-precarious-and-pivotal-2019-f4f8cea3993a

Datacenter/Hardware

  • Why the iPhone Is Finally Fading

    You’ve probably heard before that A.I. and voice are the future. That’s still on track to be true, even though it hasn’t happened overnight. (The future rarely does.) It’s coming first in the form of speakers such as Amazon’s Echo and Google’s Home, with Apple’s HomePod and others playing catch-up. While the big tech companies don’t yet report sales figures for these devices, studies show the market expanding rapidly, with nearly a quarter of U.S. households owning one as of last fall, according to Nielsen. Some analysts predict that figure will top 50 percent by 2022.

    Meanwhile, the sector is growing at rates reminiscent of smartphones’ early days. A report by Strategy Analytics estimated that Amazon’s Echo business grew 64 percent from 2017 to 2018, while Google’s Home sales boomed 420 percent. That’s before we even start counting all the other devices that are being sold with Alexa, Google Assistant, or other voice AI services built in, or the many more that are voice-compatible.

    https://slate.com/technology/2019/01/apple-iphone-decline-china-replacement-alexa-siri.html

Other

  • Salesforce’s Marc Benioff unplugged for two weeks, and had a revelation that could change the tech industry

    All that relaxation led Benioff to one big revelation: He’s too busy.

    Weeks at work are filled with dinners, parties, events and business council meetings exclusively for CEOs, meaning that if anyone from Salesforce is to attend, it has to be him. Meanwhile, he’s trying to run a 30,000-person company, build Salesforce towers across the globe, bolster his philanthropy, invest in start-ups, mentor other business leaders and become a louder voice on a number of social and political issues.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/30/salesforce-marc-benioff-talks-tech-ethics-time-magazine-and-vacation.html

  • The case for why Big Tech is violating antitrust laws

    The nearly 20-year-old case of US v. Microsoft illustrates how today’s tech giants are breaking the law. The court held that Microsoft used its monopoly power in “Intel-compatible desktop PC operating systems” to squash the Netscape browser by requiring computer makers to instead install Microsoft’s own Internet Explorer browser. Rather than competing on the merits, Microsoft used its monopoly power to try to take over the internet browser market. Ironically, if the Department of Justice had not sued Microsoft to stop its anticompetitive behavior, Google might not exist! After taking over the internet browser market, Microsoft could have required computer makers to use its own search engine, too.

    Google, Amazon and Facebook are following the same playbook. The tech giants have “platform privilege” — the incentive and ability to prioritize their own goods and services over those of competitors that depend on their platforms. By doing so, they contend they are improving their products and benefiting customers. An entrepreneur can create a superior product or service and still get crushed because Big Tech is controlling the game and playing it, too.

    https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/02/perspectives/big-tech-facebook-google-amazon-microsoft-antitrust/index.html