IBM is selling off Lotus Notes to Indian firm HCL to free up cash for their acquisition of Red Hat… which leads to the question… who is still using Lotus Notes?
Oracle is still fired up about the Government’s project JEDI and continues to make noise in the courts.
Meanwhile, an early 5G demo was lackluster and Chinese phonemaker Huawei is imploding.
Acquisitions
- IBM selling Lotus Notes/Domino business to HCL for $1.8B
https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/07/ibm-selling-lotus-notes-domino-business-to-hcl-for-1-8b/This announcement marks the end of the line for IBM involvement. With the development of the platform out of its control, and in need of cash after spending $34 billion for Red Hat, perhaps IBM simply decided it no longer made sense to keep any part of this in-house.
As for HCL, it sees an opportunity to continue to build the Notes/Domino business, and it’s seizing it with this purchase. “The large-scale deployments of these products provide us with a great opportunity to reach and serve thousands of global enterprises across a wide range of industries and markets,” C Vijayakumar, president and CEO at HCL Technologies, said in a statement announcing the deal.
- Apple acquired Platoon, a platform for musicians to create and distribute work
https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/07/apple-platoon/Spotify has made some significant moves to bypass record labels and work directly with artists, and there are signs that Apple could be eyeing up a similar approach to get a bigger share of original content.
According to a report in Music Business Worldwide and also confirmed by us with sources close to the deal, Apple has acquired Platoon, a startup out of London that works primarily with musicians — but also other creators like writers — to produce (it has its own studios), distribute and sell their work, using analytics to source talent, and figure out the best way to target and market that content: the modern-day tech equivalent of A&R services.
Cloud
- Oracle Takes JEDI Case to Courts
https://www.nextgov.com/it-modernization/2018/12/oracle-takes-jedi-case-court/153380/The software giant, which saw its bid protest against JEDI denied by the Government Accountability Office in November, filed a lawsuit Thursday in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims.
Details of the complaint are currently under seal, but Oracle’s previous bid protests centered around the Pentagon’s decision to award JEDI—worth up to $10 billion over a decade—to a single cloud service provider rather than multiple companies.
Security
- Marriott’s breach response is so bad, security experts are filling in the gaps — at their own expense
One problem: the email sender’s domain didn’t look like it came from Marriott at all.
Marriott sent its notification email from “email-marriott.com,” which is registered to a third party firm, CSC, on behalf of the hotel chain giant. But there was little else to suggest the email was at all legitimate — the domain doesn’t load or have an identifying HTTPS certificate. In fact, there’s no easy way to check that the domain is real, except a buried note on Marriott’s data breach notification site that confirms the domain as legitimate.
But what makes matters worse is that the email is easily spoofable.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/03/marriott-data-breach-response-risk-phishing/
- Google personalizes search results even when you’re logged out, new study claims
https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/4/18124718/google-search-results-personalized-unique-duckduckgo-filter-bubbleFor the study, DuckDuckGo compiled 87 result sets (76 on desktop and 11 on mobile), and it conducted the searches consecutively and simultaneously starting at 9PM ET on June 24th, 2018. It did one private, logged-out test and then a logged-in test immediately after, so as not to influence the private test with prior results. What DuckDuckGo found was that using private browsing and logging out of Google had almost no effect on the variation in search results: users saw a roughly equitable amount of variation across all three searches and when searching privately and while logged in.
Some key elements to the variation included changes in news sources and the placement of sometimes identical links in different positions, which has a drastic impact on the likelihood that they get clicked. The study also found variations in how news articles and videos were laid out among standard text links, and as many as 22 different domains showing up in the first page of results for “vaccinations,” with a standard search result page typically containing 10 organic links.
Software/SaaS
- Google is shutting down Allo
Google has officially announced that it’s shutting down Allo, ending the run of yet another failed Google chat app experiment. The news isn’t entirely unsurprising, given that Google had already paused investment in Allo back in April. Back then, the head of the communications group at Google, Anil Sabharwal, noted that “[Allo] as a whole has not achieved the level of traction we’d hoped for.”
Allo will “continue to work through March 2019,” Google says, and users will be able to export their conversation history until then.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/5/18127540/google-kills-allo-end-date
- Mozilla’s CEO isn’t happy with Microsoft’s switch to Chromium
The note sees Beard condemning Microsoft’s move –though he admits it “may well make sense” from a business standpoint — while urging Chrome users to try Mozilla’s Firefox instead. “Will Microsoft’s decision make it harder for Firefox to prosper? It could,” states Beard, adding: “making Google more powerful is risky on many fronts.”
Recalling Microsoft’s monopoly on browsers in the early 2000s before Firefox’s arrival, Beard claims history could be about to repeat itself. Only this time, Google is at the reins. According to the Mozilla chief: “If one product like Chromium has enough market share, then it becomes easier for web developers and businesses to decide not to worry if their services and sites work with anything other than Chromium.”
https://www.engadget.com/2018/12/07/mozilla-ceo-microsoft-chromium/
Datacenter/Hardware
- The first ‘real world’ 5G test was a dud
https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/4/18125854/verizon-att-5g-speed-test-slow-maui-qualcomm-snapdragon-summitA handful of 5G devices are here on the beautiful island of Maui. But journalists aren’t being allowed to try 5G in any meaningful way. They can’t touch working versions of the Samsung phone, or the AT&T hotspot, or the Verizon hotspot, or run an actual speed test on Motorola’s 5G modded phone. There are demos, like a VR headset plugged into a computer connected to Wi-Fi that’s also technically 5G, but we can’t peer behind the curtain to verify that 5G is actually working.
Why the cloak and dagger? It’s because the networks aren’t anywhere near as fast as 5G is supposed to be. They’re slower than the Comcast internet connection I have at home.
Other
- Canadian Authorities Arrest CFO of Huawei Technologies at U.S. Request
A spokesman for Canada’s justice department said Meng Wanzhou was arrested in Vancouver on Dec. 1 and is sought for extradition by the U.S. A bail hearing has been tentatively scheduled for Friday, according to the spokesman. Ms. Meng, the daughter of Huawei’s founder, Ren Zhengfei, also serves as the company’s deputy chairwoman.
The arrest comes at a critical juncture in U.S.-Chinese relations. President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping last weekend agreed to a temporary truce in a trade spat to negotiate a settlement. The U.S. has raised other concerns with China, ranging from spying to intellectual-property theft to Beijing’s military posture in the South China Sea. China has said its actions are appropriate.