Microsoft acquired Lobe, a company to help advance their AI strategy and make it accessible to the masses. Making AI easier is critical as there are reports that companies need to start investing in AI now to just keep up with competition in the next 5-10 years.
Companies also need to invest in software developers as CNBC reports that developers are more valuable to corporations than money…
Acquisitions
- Microsoft acquires Lobe, a drag-and-drop AI tool
Microsoft today announced that is has acquired Lobe, a startup that lets you build machine learning models with the help of a simple drag-and-drop interface. Microsoft plans to use Lobe, which only launched into beta earlier this year, to build upon its own efforts to make building AI models easier, though, for the time being, Lobe will operate as before.
“As part of Microsoft, Lobe will be able to leverage world-class AI research, global infrastructure, and decades of experience building developer tools,” the team writes. “We plan to continue developing Lobe as a standalone service, supporting open source standards and multiple platforms.”
https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/13/microsoft-acquires-lobe-a-drag-and-drop-ai-tool/
- Intel acquires NetSpeed Systems to boost its system-on-a-chip business
The company has acquired NetSpeed Systems, a startup that makes system-on-chip (SoC) design tools and interconnect fabric intellectual property (IP). The company will be joining Intel’s Silicon Engineering Group, and its co-founder and CEO, Sundari Mitra, herself an Intel vet, will be coming on as a VP at Intel where she will continue to lead her team.
Terms of the deal are not being disclosed, but for some context, during NetSpeed’s last fundraise in 2016 (a $10 million Series C) it had a post-money valuation of $60 million, according to data from PitchBook.
Artificial Intelligence
- The devilishly quiet age of AI
The era’s winners will be those who are not fooled by the absence of visible change from AI over the next 5-7 years. By the time the fruits of AI investment become clear — after 2025 — it will be extremely difficult to compete with the leading players, says Jacques Bughin and Jeongmin Seong, two co-authors of the report.
AI adoption will add $13 trillion a year to global production, the report said, and an average of 1.2% to global GDP growth per year.
- Google Cloud’s new AI chief is on a task force for AI military uses and believes we could monitor ‘pretty much the whole world’ with drones
Google’s decision to hire Moore was greeted with displeasure by at least one former Googler who objected to Project Maven.
“It’s worrisome to note after the widespread internal dissent against Maven that Google would hire Andrew Moore,” said one former Google employee. “Googlers want less alignment with the military-industrial complex, not more. This hire is like a punch in the face to the over 4,000 Googlers who signed the Cancel Maven letter.”
A Google spokesman declined to comment.
Cloud
- Oracle’s Kurian Is Said to Be at Odds With Ellison on Cloud
The growing strife between Kurian, president of product development, and Executive Chairman Ellison culminated in Kurian’s announcement on Sept. 5 that he’s taking a break, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing a private matter. Kurian wants Oracle to make more of its software available to run on public clouds from chief rivals Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. as a way to diversify from its own struggling infrastructure, a view opposed by Ellison, one of the people said.
https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/oracle/oracles-kurian-said-be-odds-ellison-cloud
Security
- A year later, Equifax lost your data but faced little fallout
“There was a failure of the company, but also of lawmakers,” said Mark Warner, a Democratic senator, in a call with TechCrunch. Warner, who serves Virginia, was one of the first lawmakers to file new legislation after the breach. Alongside his Democratic colleague, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the two senators said their bill, if passed, would hold credit agencies accountable for data breaches.
“The message sent to the market is ‘if you can endure some media blowback, you can get through this without serious long-term ramifications’, and that’s totally unacceptable,” he said.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/08/equifax-one-year-later-unscathed/
Software/SaaS
- Software developers are now more valuable to companies than money: Survey
And yet, despite being many corporations’ most precious resource, developer talents are all too often squandered. Collectively, companies today lose upward of $300 billion a year paying down “technical debt,” as developers pour time into maintaining legacy systems or dealing with the ramifications of bad software.
This is especially worrisome, given the outsized impact developers have on companies’ chances of success. Software developers don’t have a monopoly on good ideas, but their skill set makes them a uniquely deep source of innovation, productivity and new economic connections. When deployed correctly, developers can be economic multipliers — coefficients that dramatically ratchet up the output of the teams and companies of which they’re a part.
- What you need to know ahead of the EU copyright vote
European lawmakers want to extend digital copyright to also cover the ledes of news stories which aggregators such as Google News typically ingest and display — because, again, the likes of Alphabet is profiting off of bits of others’ professional work without paying them to do so. And, on the flip side, media firms have seen their profits hammered by the Internet serving up free content.
The reforms would seek to compensate publishers for their investment in journalism by letting them charge for use of these text snippets — instead of only being ‘paid’ in traffic (i.e. by becoming yet more eyeball fodder in Alphabet’s aggregators).
https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/08/what-you-need-to-know-ahead-of-the-eu-copyright-vote/
- Burger King selects SAP solutions to support growth
The chain will use Cloud-based procurement applications and a business network from SAP Ariba and SAP S/4HANA from SAP to expand its presence and increase revenue.These solutions will assist the restaurant chain to create a digital process to fuel savings, efficiencies and business growth.
Leveraging both solutions, the company will gain insights from the data stored in its supply chains and use them to grow further.
https://www.verdictfoodservice.com/news/burger-king-sap-solutions-growth/
Datacenter/Hardware
- Apple raised the price of its best phone by $330, and no one cares
Two years ago, a brand-new flagship Apple smartphone started at $650. Now, the a compromised version of Apple’s vision will set you back $750. Even though the Xr will likely be more than enough iPhone for most customers, the iPhone X proved that there are loads of people out there willing to pay $999 and up for a truly premium device.
And this year, those with lots of money have even more opportunity to spend: the iPhone Xs Max starts at $1,099 and goes up to an insane $1,449 with 512GB of storage. In 2016, the top-of-the-line iPhone 7 Plus with 256GB of storage cost $929. Not only has Apple raised the cost of a flagship device, it expanded the pricing window for its highest-end phones by more than $500.
https://www.engadget.com/2018/09/13/apple-iphone-xs-xr-price-increases/
Other
- Trump renews call for Apple to make its products in the US
But while moving its manufacturing operations to the US would allow it to skip the tariffs, Apple’s products likely wouldn’t be any cheaper. China is an attractive to tech manufacturing because its workforce is cheaper and the plants that produce individual components are in close proximity to one another. Moving that manufacturing infrastructure would be costly. On Twitter, Trade lawyer Scott Lincicome pointed out that an iPhone would be more expensive to manufacture here in the US, citing a Marketplace report from 2014 that suggested that the component cost of an iPhone in China was around $190 per phone. In the US, that price jumps up to around $600, pushing the device — at the time — to a predicted price of $2000, far more than what would be seen under the tariffs.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/8/17835158/trump-twitter-apple-manufacturing-tariffs
- Tough Days for China’s Tech Giants
For Tencent, which makes over 90% of its revenue in China, more government scrutiny has become a reality. Beijing has been holding up approvals for new games and sales of in-game items like virtual weapons—Tencent makes around half its annual revenue from the latter. The freeze caused the company’s first year-over-year profit decline since the last quarter in 2005.
This doesn’t seem like a hiccup. Beijing last week said it will continue limiting videogame releases and set restrictions on young people’s playing time, while state media has been repeatedly lambasting game companies for creating social problems. Nasdaq-listed Baidu, too, has been reprimanded for hosting content that threatens China’s “social order.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/tough-days-for-chinas-tech-giants-1536312601?ns=prod/accounts-wsj
- Tim Armstrong to depart as CEO of Verizon’s Oath
Verizon’s head of media and advertising Tim Armstrong will leave at the end of the year, the company announced Wednesday. CNBC reported Armstrong was in talks to leave as of Sept. 7.
Armstrong came to Verizon in 2015 as part of the acquisition of AOL, where he was CEO. The company later bought Yahoo and combined the two divisions into a digital advertising unit called Oath but those efforts have yet to produce significant growth. Verizon has decided to integrate Oath more fully with the rest of the company’s operations, according to a recent Wall Street Journal report, despite recent discussions about spinning off Oath into a separate business.
Oath president and COO K. Guru Gowrappan will “assume all management responsibilities” as chief executive effective Oct. 1, the company said in a release.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/12/tim-armstrong-out-at-verizons-oath.html
Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash