March went out with a fizzle when it came to major tech news, but there are a few trends to be aware of…
The EU continues to regulate complex technology with far reaching effects on European users and the entire global population. If critics are correct, the EU’s Copyright Directive Article 13 could split the internet in 3 (Europe, China, and the rest of the world).
Microsoft is showing more aggression against SalesForce via partnerships with Adobe and SAP to leverage LinkedIn to improve marketing integrations and to ensure customers have an easier time moving their cloud data around.
…And Google is getting back into robotics.
Acquisitions
- Alibaba has acquired Teambition, a China-based Trello and Asana rival, in its enterprise push
There were rumors of an acquisition circulating yesterday in Chinese media. Alibaba has now confirmed the acquisition to TechCrunch but declined to provide any other details.
Teambition had raised about $17 million in funding since 2013, with investors including Tencent, Microsoft, IDG Capital and Gobi Ventures. Gobi also manages investments on behalf of Alibaba, and that might have been one route to how the two became acquainted. Alibaba’s last acquisition in enterprise was German big data startup Data Artisans for $103 million.
- Daimler Trucks buys a majority stake in self-driving tech company Torc Robotics
Daimler Trucks is the world’s largest truck manufacturer and a division of the larger Daimler Group.
Torc, meanwhile, was founded in 2005. For most of its history, it specialized in self-driving software and sensors for commercial, industrial and military use, before recently shifting its attention to consumer vehicles. Earlier this year, it announced a partnership with public transportation company Transdev to create autonomous shuttles that connect people to transit.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/29/daimler-acquires-torc-robotics/
Artificial Intelligence
- Google is taking a cautious step back into the world of robotics
The new operation is simply named Robotics at Google and will be led by AI scientist Vincent Vanhoucke. According to the Times, Google is focusing on using machine learning to teach robots how to grasp objects and navigate environments, but it’s far from clear where the company’s ambitions in this area lie.
Although Google is a pioneer in AI research, its efforts in robotics have produced no commercial successes to date. The company’s last significant foray into the field started in 2013 with a program named “Replicant” led by Android co-founder Andy Rubin. An initial flurry of activity led to the purchase of six up-and-coming robotics companies, including Boston Dynamics and DARPA challenge winner Schaft.
But these efforts stuttered, likely because the ambitious machines Google purchased were far away from commercialization
Cloud
- Sundar Pichai met with President Trump about Google’s ‘commitment to working with the US government’
“I just met with Sundar Pichai, President of Google, who is obviously doing quite well,” President Trump tweeted after the meeting. “He stated strongly that he is totally committed to the U.S. Military, not the Chinese Military. [We] also discussed political fairness and various things that Google can do for our Country. Meeting ended very well!”
Reached by The Verge, Google confirmed the meeting and its subject matter. “We were pleased to have productive conversations with the President about investing in the future of the American workforce, the growth of emerging technologies and our ongoing commitment to working with the U.S. government,” a Google representative said in a statement.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/27/18284415/sundar-pichai-donald-trump-meeting-white-house
- Microsoft, Adobe and SAP prepare to expand their Open Data Initiative
The core principle of the alliance is that the customers own their data and they should be able to get as much value out of it as they can. Ideally, having this common data schema means that the customer doesn’t have to figure out ways to transform the data from these vendors and can simply flow all of it into a single data lake that then in turn feeds the various analytics services, machine learning systems and other tools that these companies offer.
Security
- Android users’ security and privacy at risk from shadowy ecosystem of pre-installed software, study warns
The researchers behind the paper, which has been published in preliminary form ahead of a future presentation at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, unearthed a complex ecosystem of players with a primary focus on advertising and “data-driven services” — which they argue the average Android user is unlikely to be unaware of (while also likely lacking the ability to uninstall/evade the baked in software’s privileged access to data and resources themselves).
- How IBM is Rethinking its Data Protection Line-Up
In this particular case, data protection, you now have two products:
IBM Spectrum Data Protect: the good, old, TSM. While this product is one of those that have written Backup’s history and supports a myriad of Operating Systems and applications as well as backup, it is complex to operate and designed for large environments. Furthermore, it was designed well before the advent of hypervisors and modern applications, making it really tough to protect this environment efficiently.
IBM Data Protect Plus: a new product designed from the ground up for modern environments, including hypervisors, NoSQL DBs and more. It has a very modern snapshot-based design that pairs nicely with VMWARE CBT (change block tracking) for example. It’s easy to use and can be adopted by IT organizations of all sizes.
https://gigaom.com/2019/03/29/how-ibm-is-rethinking-its-data-protection-line-up/
Software/SaaS
- Adobe, Microsoft team to take on Salesforce
Adobe (ADBE) today announced an extension of its partnership with Microsoft and a new integration with LinkedIn that will accelerate account-based experiences (ABX) through new marketing solution integrations. Adobe and Microsoft are aligning key data sources to populate account-based profiles in Adobe Experience Cloud, including Marketo Engage and Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales. This will empower B2B marketers and sellers to easily identify, understand and engage B2B customer buying teams. This partnership will drive better orchestration, measurement and delivery of targeted content for a more personalized experience at both the individual and account level on key B2B platforms like LinkedIn.
https://seekingalpha.com/news/3445688-adobe-microsoft-team-take-salesforce
- Cisco CEO: ‘People Didn’t Think We Could Do’ Network Subscriptions
Robbins says the company is “on track” to meet its pledge to have software and services account for 30 percent of its revenue over the next three years.
Cisco’s focus on software and services is helping ePlus not only gain new customers, but go deeper with its existing client base, he said. It’s also making the renewal process a “nonevent.”
“When you start selling software in a multi-year fashion, you don’t want to sell services only when it’s time to do the renewal,” he said. “The solutions we are selling today are taking a different course in terms of how we interact with customers to make them successful.”
https://www.crn.com/news/networking/cisco-ceo-people-didn-t-think-we-could-do-network-subscriptions
Infrastructure/Hardware
- Tech companies not ‘comfortable’ storing data in Australia, Microsoft warns
This week the Australian tech industry renewed calls for further amendments to controversial encryption-cracking legislation at an industry forum in Sydney.
Also on Wednesday, Labor’s spokesman on the digital economy, Ed Husic, told the StartupAus forum in Sydney he wished he could “turn back time”, expressing regret for Labor’s role in passing the bill and explaining the opposition feared it would be blamed for a terrorist attack over Christmas if it refused.
In Canberra, Smith told the Committee for the Economic Development of Australia the law had not yet changed Microsoft’s operations in Australia, but the company was worried about the law’s “potential consequences”.
Other
- Europe is splitting the internet into three
Despite setbacks, the most controversial clauses of the Copyright Directive — Article 11 or the ‘link tax’ and Article 13 — have remained pretty much intact.
Article 11 lets publishers charge platforms like Google News when they display snippets of news stories, while Article 13 (renamed Article 17 in the most recent draft of the legislation) gives sites like YouTube new duties to stop users from uploading copyrighted content.
In both cases, critics say these well-intentioned laws will lead to trouble. Article 13, they say, will lead to the widespread introduction of “upload filter,” that will scan all user content uploaded to sites to remove copyrighted material. The law does not explicitly call for such filters, but critics say it will be an inevitability as sites seek to avoid penalties.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/27/18283541/european-union-copyright-directive-internet-article-13
- IBM purged “gray hairs” and “old heads” as it launched “Millennial Corps”: lawsuit
“In 2015 and 2016, IBM doubled down on its efforts to replace its long-tenured, older employees with the younger Millennials it sought to recruit,” the suit alleged. “IBM made presentations to its senior executives calling for IBM to evaluate its long-term employees more harshly, to use those negative evaluations to justify selecting long-term employees for lay-off, and to replace these employees with ‘EPs’– IBM management short-hand for ‘early professionals.’”
A 2016 presentation concerning one section of the company “specifically called for managers to exempt all ‘early professional hires’ from layoff, regardless of performance,” the suit claimed. “The long-serving, older employees were provided no such exemption.”
https://www.denverpost.com/2019/03/28/ibm-ageism-lawsuit-millennial-corps/
- Amazon To Create 800 New Jobs At Austin Tech Hub
In a press release, Amazon said the jobs will be in the areas of software and hardware engineering, research science and cloud computing. Amazon said that since it opened its Austin Tech Hub, it has created more than 22,000 full-time jobs in Texas and has invested more than $7 billion in the state, including on infrastructure and compensation to workers.
“In the last four years, we have created more than 1,000 jobs in Austin,” said Terry Leeper, general manager of Amazon’s Austin Tech Hub, in the press release. “With a strong pool of technical talent in Austin and a dynamic quality of life, we are excited to continue to expand and create more opportunity in this vibrant city.”
https://www.pymnts.com/amazon/2019/austin-tech-hub-jobs-ecommerce/
Photo by Kido Dong on Unsplash