Tag: IBM

Posted on

Supplier Report: 10/12/2018

The Source: Boo Hoo Project Jedi

The Pentagon’s $10B JEDI project has had cloud providers up in arms for months. They claim the RFP favors Amazon over everyone else due to scale and the government’s refusal to break up the hosting solution to multiple providers.

Google has dropped out of the bidding process stating the project doesn’t align to their values (or perhaps they realized they wouldn’t win and this is PR spin).

IBM is filing formal complaints days before the final proposal is due while Oracle has been filing complaints for months.

Meanwhile, Apple bought a few companies that allow them to further lock down their supply chain and control the technology that powers their devices.

Acquisitions

  • Apple inks $600M deal to license IP, acquire assets and talent from Dialog to expand chipmaking in Europe

    Apple is paying $300 million in cash to buy a portion of Dialog Semiconductor, a chipmaker based out of Europe that it has been working with since the first iPhone. On top of the $300 million portion of the deal, Apple is also committing a further $300 million to make purchases from the remaining part of Dialog’s business, making it a $600 million deal in total.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/10/apple-is-paying-300m-in-cash-to-buy-a-part-of-dialog-semiconductor-and-expand-its-chipmaking-in-europe/

  • Apple confirms it has acquired Spektral, a Danish computer vision startup, for augmented reality technology

    Apple has purchased Spektral, a computer vision company based out of Denmark that has worked on segmentation technology, a more efficient way to “cut out” figures from their backgrounds in digital images and videos, reportedly for over $30 million.

    This type of technology can be used, for example, to make quicker and more accurate/realistic cut-out images in augmented reality environments, but also for more standard applications like school photos. That was actually the first market the startup targeted, in 2015, although it appeared to shift strategy after that to build up IP and make deeper inroads into video. You can see a demo of how its technology works at the bottom of this post.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/11/apple-has-acquired-spektral-a-danish-computer-vision-startup-for-augmented-reality-technology/

  • SoftBank is considering taking a majority stake in WeWork

    SoftBank may soon own up to 50 percent of WeWork, a well-funded provider of co-working spaces headquartered in New York, according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal.

    SoftBank is reportedly weighing an investment between $15 billion and $20 billion, which would come from its $92 billion Vision Fund, a super-sized venture fund led by Japanese entrepreneur and investor Masayoshi Son.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/09/softbank-is-considering-taking-a-majority-stake-in-wework/

  • LinkedIn acquires employee engagement platform Glint

    Terms of the deal are not being disclosed. For some context, Glint had raised nearly $80 million — including these rounds for $27 million and and $20 million in the last two years — was valued at around $220 million in its last round according to PitchBook. Investors included Bessemer Venture Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, Shasta Ventures and Meritech Capital Partners.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/08/linkedin-acquires-employee-engagement-and-retention-platform-glint/

Artificial Intelligence

  • Amazon Pulled the Plug on an AI Recruitment Tool That Was Biased Against Women

    Reuters reported on Wednesday that five people close to the project told the outlet that in 2014 a team began building computer programs to automate and expedite the search for talent. Such systems use algorithms that “learn” which job candidates to look for after processing a large amount of historical data. By 2015, the team realized the AI wasn’t weighing candidates in a gender-neutral way.

    “Everyone wanted this holy grail,” one of Reuters’ sources, all of whom requested to be anonymous, said in the report. “They literally wanted it to be an engine where I’m going to give you 100 resumes, it will spit out the top five, and we’ll hire those.”

    According to those engineers, the AI reduced job candidates to a star-review system, like it was reviewing a product on Amazon’s retail site. The computer models were trained on resumes submitted over a 10-year period, most of which came from men. It learned that a successful resume was a man’s resume.

    https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/evwkk4/amazon-ai-recruitment-hiring-tool-gender-bias

Cloud

  • Google Drops Out of Pentagon’s $10 Billion Cloud Competition

    Google’s announcement on Monday came just months after the company decided not to renew its contract with a Pentagon artificial intelligence program, after extensive protests from employees of the internet giant about working with the military. The company then released a set of principles designed to evaluate what kind of artificial intelligence projects it would pursue.

    “We are not bidding on the JEDI contract because first, we couldn’t be assured that it would align with our AI Principles,” a Google spokesman said in a statement. “And second, we determined that there were portions of the contract that were out of scope with our current government certifications.”

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-08/google-drops-out-of-pentagon-s-10-billion-cloud-competition

  • IBM protests $10B JEDI solicitation

    It is no secret that DOD has steadfastly refused to budge from its strategy of awarding the contract to a single cloud service provider. This has been despite objections from many in industry and pressure from Congress to move toward a multiple award strategy.

    IBM has been commenting and reviewing revisions to the final solicitation but now that the due date is upon us, the next logical step was to file its own protest.

    IBM’s protest filing is not publicly available but Sam Gordy, IBM’s general manager for federal, laid out his argument in a blog posting as well as in an interview with Washington Technology.

    https://washingtontechnology.com/blogs/editors-notebook/2018/10/ibm-jedi-protest.aspx

Security

  • The breach that killed Google+ wasn’t a breach at all

    The vulnerability itself seems to have been relatively small in scope. The heart of the problem was a specific developer API that could be used to see non-public information. But crucially, there’s no evidence that it actually was used to see private data, and given the thin user base, it’s not clear how much non-public data there really was to see. The API was theoretically accessible to anyone who asked, but only 432 people actually applied for access (again, it’s Google+), so it’s plausible that none of them ever thought of using it this way.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/9/17957312/google-plus-vulnerability-privacy-breach-law

Software/SaaS

  • Microsoft Just Did Something Big With 60,000 Patents

    The technology giant said Wednesday it would contribute more than 60,000 of its patents to the Open Invention Network. This is noteworthy because the group’s member companies cross-license their patents to each other to prevent future lawsuits in which companies may allege that another firm’s technology infringes on their own patents.

    http://fortune.com/2018/10/10/microsoft-patents-open-source/

Other

  • Google Appeals $5 Billion EU Fine in Android Case

    Google’s appeal is the latest volley in a series of actions that European regulators and legislators are directing at big tech companies—many led by EU antitrust commissioner Margrethe Vestager, who has emerged as one of the most avid global regulators for big tech firms. Google is already appealing her 2017 decision that fined Google €2.43 billion for allegedly abusing the power of its search engine to favor its own service to show product ads on behalf of online retailers.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-appeals-5-billion-eu-fine-in-android-case-1539109713

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Posted on

Supplier Report: 8/24/2018

The Source: IBM wants to get you coffee

This week the news is very beverage focused: IBM wants robots to get you coffee and Pepsi bought Israeli company SodaStream.

Microsoft is under investigation for software fraud in Turkey while Amazon quietly gobbles up all of our energy (at a discounted rate).

Finally, Tesla is staying public because I am sure that was keeping everyone up at night.

Acquisitions

  • Pepsi buys SodaStream for a future beyond cola

    The deal will also help SodaStream expand its global reach. It currently distributes in 80,000 stores across 45 countries, with the bulk of its custom coming from Western Europe which is seeing an increasing backlash against single-use plastic. The company estimates their machines help consumers save up to 1,000 bottles and cans a year, no doubt a driver behind the extremely successful quarter it reported recently. Revenue climbed 31 percent to $171.5 million for the quarter to June 30, while net income jumped 82 percent. Of course Pepsi is going to want a piece of that.

    https://www.engadget.com/2018/08/20/pepsi-buys-sodastream-for-a-future-beyond-cola/
    It isn’t a tech deal, but it is Israeli-based (and I did a podcast about this topic).

Artificial Intelligence

  • AI Can Manipulate Video to Make Everybody Dance Now

    In a paper posted to the arXiv preprint server this week, researchers at the University of California Berkeley demonstrate how they designed AI that, given video of an expert dancer and an amateur, can transfer the moves from one to the other and create convincing video of the amateur pulling off some seriously impressive rug-cutting. But that’s not all.

    “With our framework,” the researchers wrote, “we create a variety of videos, enabling untrained amateurs to spin and twirl like ballerinas, perform martial arts kicks or dance as vibrantly as pop stars.”

    https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/43pebw/ai-can-manipulate-video-to-make-anybody-dance

  • IBM has invented coffee drones – and they predict when you need a cup

    IBM has secured a patent for a coffee drone that not only flies around public spaces to deliver cups of brew but also predicts which people need caffeine pick-me-ups.

    According to paperwork filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the device could be used in an office, cafe or event setting, where a preordered cup of joe would be delivered to the drinker or where a thirsty individual would flag it down. Facial- or voice-recognition software, an electronic ID tag or Bluetooth from a person’s smartphone ensures the coffee gets to the right person.

    https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2018/08/22/ibm-has-invented-coffee-drones-and-they-predict-when-you-need-cup/1051161002/

Cloud

  • Amazon is one of the largest consumers of electricity but is offloading costs onto others

    Supporting the power requirements of astoundingly large data centers is no small feat. AWS is now responsible for nearly two percent of all electrical power consumption in the United States. Under secretive agreements between Amazon and energy providers, the true costs of running such massive data centers are well hidden from the public.

    In Ohio, Amazon opened three data centers in 2016 that are all operating with secret electric rates. Only five representatives on a public utility commission, a private development agency known as JobsOhio, and Amazon know how much is being paid for a public service. Amazon claims that its discounted rates are a trade secret and therefore must be redacted in any requests for public records.

    https://www.techspot.com/news/76042-amazon-one-largest-consumers-electricity-but-offloading-costs.html

Security

  • T-Mobile says hackers stole customer data in data breach

    The cell giant, currently merging with Sprint, said in a statement that hackers customer stole names, billing zip codes, phone numbers, email addresses, account numbers, and account type — such as if an account was prepaid or postpaid — in what the company described as an “unauthorized capture of data.”

    No customer financial or billing data was compromised, the company said.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/24/t-mobile-says-hackers-stole-customer-data-in-data-breach/

  • Who needs democracy when you have data?

    “No government has a more ambitious and far-­reaching plan to harness the power of data to change the way it governs than the Chinese government,” says Martin Chorzempa of the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, DC. Even some foreign observers, watching from afar, may be tempted to wonder if such data-driven governance offers a viable alternative to the increasingly dysfunctional­looking electoral model. But over-­relying on the wisdom of technology and data carries its own risks.

    https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611815/who-needs-democracy-when-you-have-data/

Software/SaaS

  • Oracle’s Bad Boy Image

    Oracle exercises its contractual right to audit the use of its software at customer locations. When an audit turns up a violation or potential violation of the license agreement, the sides work out a solution that often involves additional license purchases. No one likes this.

    The process makes Oracle look bad in the eyes of the public, who think of licensing as supporting one or a few software deployments. However, although the audits are randomized, they often involve customers with hundreds, or even thousands, of licenses spread across far flung empires.

    https://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/85521.html

Datacenter/Hardware

  • Big Spenders Pinch Chip Equipment Makers

    The culprit? Semiconductor equipment companies live on the capital spending of chip makers. That spending has been cyclical historically, and has seen a big upswing over the past couple years thanks to booming demand for components like memory chips. But nothing lasts forever, and two of the world’s largest chip makers—Samsung and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing —seem to be trimming their outlays again.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/big-spenders-pinch-chip-equipment-makers-1534600801

Other

  • Microsoft Hit With U.S. Bribery Probe Over Deals in Hungary

    The investigation follows a series of similar probes into Microsoft business partners that surfaced in 2013 in five other countries. Microsoft made a push earlier this decade to expand in emerging markets, as well as smaller, middle-income countries like Hungary. In some cases, those bets have turned into legal and reputational challenges.

    The U.S. Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission are probing how Microsoft sold software such as Word and Excel to middleman firms in Hungary that then sold those products to government agencies there in 2013 and 2014, according to these people.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/microsoft-hit-with-u-s-bribery-probe-over-deals-in-hungary-1535055576?ns=prod/accounts-wsj

  • Tesla will remain public, Elon Musk says

    Musk’s go-private plan didn’t just cause consternation among his shareholders — it also interested the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to The New York Times. “is ramping up an investigation about whether he misled investors and violated federal securities laws,” The Times reported earlier today. Previous reporting in The Wall Street Journal suggested that the SEC was already investigating Tesla for possibly misleading investors about its Model 3 production. Tesla faces at least three investor lawsuits that accuse Musk’s August 7 tweet of being market manipulation.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/24/17780714/elon-musk-tesla-staying-public

Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

Posted on

Supplier Report: 8/17/2018

The Source: All about the chip: joey lombardi

CPUs are the main story this week. As companies like AMD develop better processors and better manufacturing methods, former CPU champ Intel is finding ways to divest. The company purchased another AI company to add to their Movidius unit.  Can Intel fend off AMD and companies like Foxconn (who are supporting China’s agenda of creating their own processors)?

Cisco’s strategy to focus on software seems to be paying off as the company saw growth of 6% over last year.

Acquisitions

  • Intel buys deep-learning startup Vertex.AI to join its Movidius unit

    Vertex says that Intel will continue to develop PlaidML as an open source project (see its Github page here), where it will continue to support a variety of hardware under an Apache 2.0 license with an Intel nGraph backend. “We are excited to advance flexible deep learning for edge computing as part of Intel,” the company said.

    Intel, once a pace-setter and leader in the computing industry on the strength of its processors, has lost some momentum amid a new wave of companies building processors for mobile and other next-generation devices.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/16/intel-buys-deep-learning-startup-vertex-ai-to-join-its-movidius-unit/

  • Amazon in Running to Acquire Landmark Movie Chain

    Pushing into movie theaters would follow Amazon’s expansion into myriad other forms of media, including a film and TV studio and music service. With Landmark, it gets a chain focused on independent and foreign films that was founded in 1974. The company has more than 50 theaters, including high-profile locations in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco, with about 250 screens in 27 markets.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-16/amazon-is-said-to-be-in-running-to-acquire-landmark-movie-chain

Artificial Intelligence

  • IBM pushes back on negative Watson Health stories

    In response to the claims, Kelly noted a number of positives for the company, including a Mayo Clinic poster presentation showing improved enrollment in breast cancer trials following implementation of Watson for Clinical Trial Matching and training from Memorial Sloan Kettering on 13 different cancers, which he says represents 80% of the global cancer incidence and prevalence.

    Kelly also noted an extended contract with the Dept. of Veterans Affairs, research showing that its Watson for Genomics found new actionable mutations in 32% of patients and high rates of concordance in breast cancer at Manipal Hospital’s multidisciplinary tumor board.

    https://www.massdevice.com/ibm-pushes-back-on-negative-watson-health-stories/

Cloud

  • Google defends controversial China project in meeting with employees

    “Our stated mission is to organize the world’s information,” Pichai added. “China is one-fifth of the world’s population. I think if we were to do our mission well, I think we have to think seriously about how we do more in China. I genuinely do believe we have a positive impact when we engage around the world and I don’t see any reason why that would be different in China.”

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/16/17707324/google-china-search-engine-censorship-response-meeting

Security

  • Teen Allegedly Hacked Into Apple’s Network, Got Caught With ‘Hacky Hack Hack’ Folder

    It’s unclear whether the data he accessed was particularly sensitive. Apple caught the teen and alerted the FBI, which in turn worked with the Australian Federal Police (AFP) to track down the hacker. Authorities seized two laptops, a phone, and a hard drive. They found a folder on one of his computers titled “Hacky Hack Hack,” according to reports.

    https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mb44nn/autralian-teen-hacked-apple-network

  • FBI Is Reportedly Warning Banks That Hackers Are Planning to Make A Global Run on ATMs

    “The FBI has obtained unspecified reporting indicating cyber criminals are planning to conduct a global Automated Teller Machine (ATM) cash-out scheme in the coming days, likely associated with an unknown card issuer breach and commonly referred to as an ‘unlimited operation,’” the FBI letter to banks reads.

    Unlimited operations use malware to gain access to the card information of bank customers and access to the banks’ networks.

    “The cyber criminals typically create fraudulent copies of legitimate cards by sending stolen card data to co-conspirators who imprint the data on reusable magnetic strip cards, such as gift cards purchased at retail stores,” the FBI letter said. “At a pre-determined time, the co-conspirators withdraw accounts funds from ATMs using these cards.”

    https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ywke7w/fbi-is-reportedly-warning-banks-that-hackers-are-planning-to-make-a-global-run-on-atms

Software/SaaS

  • Cisco Extends Growth Streak on Strong Software Sales

    Cisco’s streak—the company generated $12.84 billion in total revenue in its fiscal fourth quarter, up 6% from a year earlier—comes after two years of declines during which it faced increasing pressure from competitors while it relied heavily on slower-growth hardware sales.

    And the company expects the run to continue, providing guidance that calls for revenue growth of between 5% and 7% in the current quarter.

    Cisco has seen its financial fortunes improve, as it focused on software sales, particularly in the security arena. Revenue in its security segment revenue jumped 12% to $627 million.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/cisco-extends-growth-streak-on-strong-software-sales-1534377123

Datacenter/Hardware

  • AMD Set to Crack Intel’s Lock on Data Centers

    There is an opening for AMD because Intel has struggled to transition to a new chip-manufacturing process. One of the companies that makes AMD’s chips, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing , or TSMC, has moved ahead of Intel and is producing the latest version of AMD’s Epyc server processor, which is expected to start shipping in volume next year. Intel doesn’t intend to launch a server chip based on its newest production process until sometime in 2020.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/amd-set-to-crack-intels-lock-on-data-centers-1534439566

  • Foxconn Posts Unexpected Drop in Profit

    Taiwan-based Foxconn said Monday that its net profit for the quarter ended June 30 was 17.5 billion New Taiwan dollars ($566.7 million). That compared with the NT$20.2 billion average estimate of analysts polled by S&P Capital IQ. Its net profit in the year-earlier quarter was NT$17.9 billion.

    Foxconn, known formally as Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. 2317 0.12% , is the world’s largest contract electronics maker, and is best known for assembling Apple’s iPhones. Last year, Foxconn relied on Apple for about 54% of its revenue, according to Arthur Liao, an analyst at Fubon Research.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/foxconn-posts-unexpected-drop-in-profit-1534163275

  • Foxconn Pursues Chip Ambitions With Plans for China Plant

    Foxconn said it is developing plans within the partnership, which includes “other stakeholders” in the city. “We will be prepared to announce these plans when they have been finalized in the coming months,” the Taiwan-based company said.

    The initiative comes at a time when China is spending billions of dollars to nurture its own semiconductor industry and reduce its reliance on foreign technology, an effort that has grown more urgent as its attempts to acquire U.S. chip companies have met opposition from the U.S. over national-security concerns.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/foxconn-to-build-semiconductor-plant-in-chinas-pearl-river-delta-1534498173?ns=prod/accounts-wsj

Photo by Brian Kostiuk on Unsplash

Posted on

Supplier Report: 8/10/2018

Big mergers seems to be getting push back. The AT&T acquisition of Time-Warner is still under scrutiny (as is the Judge that approved it) and the Sinclair acquisition of Tribune was officially shut down. Elon Musk also might be over running a publicly traded company and is thinking about taking Telsa private.

In other news, IBM is still struggling with Watson and bots might pick your veggies in the near future.

Acquisitions

  • AT&T Not Out of the Legal Woods Yet

    In the original case, the government argued that AT&T would be able to dictate higher carriage fees to competing distributors by threatening to withhold its cable networks from rival pay-TV providers, leading to higher prices for consumers. Judge Leon concluded that the facts didn’t uphold that. Antitrust experts say the government is likely to argue that the judge defined the market too loosely, allowing AT&T’s argument that its competition includes tech firms like Netflix , Facebook and Amazon.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/at-t-not-out-of-the-legal-woods-yet-1533549600
    DOJ’s Behind-the-Scenes Struggles With Judge in AT&T Case

    Jeffrey Jacobovitz, an antitrust lawyer with Arnall Golden Gregory LLP who isn’t connected with the case, said judges have their own styles for administering trials, though sidebar conferences generally happen more in jury trials, so jurors won’t be influenced. There was no jury in the AT&T trial.

    “It’s unusual for a judge to have voluminous sidebars when it’s the judge resolving the ultimate issues,” Mr. Jacobovitz said.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/dojs-behind-the-scenes-struggles-with-judge-in-at-t-case-1533682305

  • Sinclair’s Bid to Monopolize Local TV News Is Officially Dead

    Said behavior included what critics say were “sham” divestment deals, where Sinclair attempted to offload some stations to companies it still controlled in a bid to pretend the deal would fall within media ownership limits. Currently, the law states no one broadcaster can reach more than 38% of households (Sinclair would have reached 72% had the deal been approved).

    Sinclair’s efforts were so brazen, they forced even the historically mega-industry-friendly FCC chief Ajit Pai to shovel the deal off to an administrative law judge, a move traditionally seen as a death knell for such megadeals.

    https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/8xbk5p/sinclairs-bid-to-monopolize-local-tv-news-is-officially-dead

  • Elon Musk is seriously considering taking Tesla private

    “The reason for doing this is all about creating the environment for Tesla to operate best,” Musk began. Being a public company means being subjected to wild swings in stock prices (it even spiked earlier today after his tweet talking about taking the company private), and such volatility can be a “major distraction” for both Tesla’s workforce and shareholders. It’s the latter Musk seems to want to mute by going private, as he lamented the pressure that putting out quarterly reports (which are mandated by law for public companies) puts on the company to make decisions that will look better in the short term but not serve Tesla best in the long run. He also noted that going private would avoid stock shorting attempts to harm the company.

    https://www.engadget.com/2018/08/07/elon-musk-admits-want-take-tesla-private/

Artificial Intelligence

  • Employees at Google, Amazon and Microsoft Have Threatened to Walk Off the Job Over the Use of AI

    There is certainly a lot to worry about. Widespread use of facial-recognition technology by law enforcement can spell the end of speech, association and privacy rights (just think about the ability to identify, catalog and store thousands of facial images from a boisterous political rally). As O’Neill reminds us in her book, the algorithms employed in large chain store hiring processes and credit worthiness decision are opaque and lack self-correction mechanisms. They give off an air of objectivity and authority while encoding the prejudices of the people who programmed them. Weapons systems combining face recognition and social-media access can pick off opponents more efficiently than the most ruthless assassin. The images of swarm-drone warfare in Slaughterbots are the stuff of nightmares.

    https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/employees-google-amazon-and-microsoft-have-threatened-walk-job-over-use-ai-27962

  • Your vegetables are going to be picked by robots sooner than you think

    Root AI is focused on the 2.3 million square feet of indoor farms that currently exist in the world and is hoping to expand as the number of farms cultivating crops indoors increases. Some estimates from analysis firms like Agrilyst put the planned expansions in indoor farming at around 22 million square feet (much of that in the U.S.).

    While that only amounts to roughly 505 acres of land — a fraction of the 900 million acres of farmland that’s currently cultivated in the U.S. — those indoor farms offer huge yield advantages over traditional farms with a much lower footprint in terms of resources used. The average yield per acre in indoor farms for vine crops like tomatoes, and leafy greens, is over ten times higher than outdoor farms.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/08/your-vegetables-are-going-to-be-picked-by-robots-sooner-than-you-think/

  • IBM Has a Watson Dilemma

    Recommending personal medical treatment is a taller order. The software needs to be trained with data on what has worked in the past, including details on patients’ medical histories and treatment outcomes. That information is often recorded in different formats and owned by different companies, and isn’t always complete or consistent.

    Moreover, human doctors still have a lot to learn about the science of disease, including cancer.

    Oncology won’t be “a great space for making [AI] products” until there’s better data about patients, spanning genetic, environmental, lifestyle and health information, said Bob Kocher, a medical doctor and partner at venture-capital firm Venrock in Palo Alto, Calif. In the near term, most of the benefits from AI in the health-care field will come in administrative tasks such as billing, he added.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/ibm-bet-billions-that-watson-could-improve-cancer-treatment-it-hasnt-worked-1533961147

Cloud

  • AWS error exposed GoDaddy business secrets

    The information involved in the security breach appeared to describe GoDaddy’s architecture, as well as “high-level configuration information for tens of thousands of systems and pricing options for running those systems in Amazon AWS, including the discounts offered under different scenarios,” according to UpGuard.

    Configuration files for hostnames, operating systems, workloads, AWS regions, memory, CPU specifications, and more were included in the exposed cache, which described at least 24,000 systems.

    “Essentially, this data mapped a very large scale AWS cloud infrastructure deployment, with 41 different columns on individual systems, as well as summarized and modeled data on totals, averages, and other calculated fields,” the cybersecurity firm said.

    https://www.zdnet.com/article/aws-error-exposed-godaddy-server-secrets/

  • DXC Technology and AWS join forces for new integration practice

    DXC Technology and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are joining forces to build a new integrated practice focused on delivering IT migration, application transformation and industry-specific cloud services.

    The multibillion-dollar DXC – AWS Integrated Practice is part of a multi-year, global agreement that also encompasses joint development, marketing, sales, and delivery of AWS solutions. Specifically, these services include managed security and compliance services for AWS; dedicated VMware Cloud on AWS migration solutions and analytics and application services on AWS.

    https://sg.channelasia.tech/article/644922/dxc-technology-aws-join-forces-new-integration-practice/?fp=2&fpid=1

Security

  • iPhone supplier TSMC shut down factories after virus attack

    TSMC is the largest semiconductor manufacturer in the world, and supplies components for companies like ADM, Apple, Nvidia, and Qualcomm. The company told Bloomberg that the virus infected a “number of its fabrication tools,” but that the “degree of infection varies” from factory to factory. Several have resumed their operations, but others won’t come back online until tomorrow. The company indicated that its factories weren’t infected by a hacker.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/4/17651448/iphone-supplier-taiwan-semiconductor-manufacturing-co-tsmc-virus-shut-down

Software/SaaS

  • Oracle introduces autonomous transaction processing database – pounds on AWS

    We’re the easiest database in the world to use. There’s nothing to learn, there’s nothing to do. It’s much much less labor involved so it’s much, much lower in cost. It’s truly elastic because you only pay for the infrastructure that you use. So when the application is not running then Oracle deactivates servers – it’s called a serverless system. And if you’re at a busy time then it will automatically add servers while the system is is still running.

    https://diginomica.com/2018/08/07/oracle-introduces-autonomous-transaction-processing-database-pounds-on-aws/

  • SAP Ariba Named a Leader in Gartner 2018 Magic Quadrant for Strategic

    SAP Ariba today announced it has been positioned in the Leaders quadrant of the Gartner 2018 Magic Quadrant for Strategic Sourcing Application Suites. (Gartner, Inc. Magic Quadrant for Strategic Sourcing Application Suites, Magnus Bergfors, Patrick M. Connaughton, et al., August 1, 2018). In May, SAP Ariba was also recognized in the Gartner 2018 Magic Quadrant for Procure-to-Pay Suites alongside SAP Fieldglass.

    https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180806005442/en/SAP-Ariba-Named-Leader-Gartner-2018-Magic

  • Salesforce Promotes Keith Block to Co-CEO

    Mr. Block, a former Oracle Corp. executive who joined Salesforce in 2013 as vice chairman and president, now will report directly to Salesforce’s board of directors. Mr. Benioff, who will go from being sole CEO to co-CEO, will continue leading the company’s “vision and innovation in areas including technology, marketing, stakeholder engagement and culture,” while Mr. Block will run the company’s “growth strategy, execution and operations,” Salesforce said.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/salesforce-promotes-keith-block-to-co-ceo-1533704207

Datacenter/Hardware

  • Samsung is still trying to make DeX happen

    The idea of a pocketable laptop-like machine has its merits, and in theory, DeX is promising. It’s the combination of a small accessory for the Galaxy S8, Note 8 and S9 with a software mode (like on the Tab S4) that provides a faux desktop system. To minimize the number of loose accessories you have to carry around, Samsung introduced HDMI compatibility on the Note 9, so you can plug it into any supported display with an HDMI to USB-C converter and use the DeX software to immediately get to work. You can leave the converter cable on your desk or attached to the screen, so all you need to bring is your phone. Neat.

    https://www.engadget.com/2018/08/10/samsung-dex-success-outside-mainstream/
    I am all about this type of technology. It needs to happen and corporations should get behind it.

Other

  • The greedy ways Apple got to $1 trillion

    We still turn to Apple because it makes the best core products. But the edges of the customer experience have frayed like the wires of a Lightning cable. The key to Apple’s fortune is obviously selling high margin iPhones, not these ways it nickels and dimes us. But the company has an opportunity to raise its standards after this milestone, and win back the faith that could push it to a $2 trillion market cap.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/04/the-greedy-ways-apple-got-to-1-trillion/

Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash

Posted on

Supplier Report: 7/20/2018

The Source: Joey Lombardi: This Dude Loves Mainframes

Amazon’s super-hyped Prime Day was successful, but the extra traffic shut down Amazon.com for a few hours. There are reports that data-center employees were scrambling to find unused servers and equipment to keep the site running.

Google is facing another massive fine ($5B) from the EU over their android operating system. Assuming the EU is successful after appeals, what are they going to do with all that money?

IBM is reporting improved financial performance and mainframe sales are at the center of this success.

Acquisitions

  • Ajit Pai Finds a Spine, Sends Sinclair-Tribune Deal to Merger Purgatory

    Current law prohibits any one company from reaching more than 39 percent of all U.S. TV households in a bid to protect competition and local reporting. Sinclair had petitioned the FCC to eliminate the ownership cap entirely, but the FCC lacks the authority to overturn federal law (that apparently wasn’t stopping the FCC from considering the move anyway).

    In case that failed, Sinclair had a backup plan. Consumer advocates highlighted how Sinclair had hoped to offload numerous stations to either shell companies, subsidiaries, or allies, letting it limbo under the ownership cap.

    https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/594b73/ajit-pai-sinclair-tribune-deal

Cloud

  • Big Tech’s Growth Comes With a Big Bill

    Apple, for instance, is expected to boost its R&D spending by 17% to $14 billion for this calendar year, outpacing the 10% revenue growth analysts expect for the same period. The iPhone maker’s R&D bill has been steadily climbing over the last several years as it seeks out new hit products to offset its slowing smartphone and tablet businesses. But Apple still underspends Google-parent Alphabet as well as Microsoft and Amazon in both whole dollars and in percent of revenue, leading Toni Sacconaghi of Bernstein to note last week that the company may still be “underinvesting in innovation.”

    Capital spending will also rise sharply—especially for companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google that have to keep building out network infrastructure to deliver their growing list of cloud-based services. Google’s capex bill alone is projected to surge more than 50% this year, while analysts expect increases of more than 30% for Microsoft and Amazon. And most projections for Amazon exclude the capital leases that the company also uses.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/big-techs-growth-comes-with-a-big-bill-1531819800?ns=prod/accounts-wsj

  • DuckDuckGo slams Google following EU antitrust decision

    The allegation came in a series of tweets from the DuckDuckGo Twitter account as a response to the fine. In them, the search engine claims that the company’s “anti-competitive search behavior isn’t limited to Android,” but it also exists in other products, like the Chrome browser as well. “Every time we update our Chrome browser extension, all of our users are faced with an official-looking dialogue asking them if they’d like to revert their search settings and disable the entire extension,” the tweet said.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/20/17595612/google-antitrust-eu-duckduckgo-chrome
    Update: Google owns Duck.com, but it’ll give rival DuckDuckGo a shoutout anyhow

    But after a new round of complaints this Friday, Google has relented. Google comms VP Rob Shilkin just quacked tweeted that a new landing page will give people an opportunity to click from Duck.com straight through to DuckDuckGo. Or to the Wikipedia page for ducks, because that’s only fair.

    https://www.cnet.com/news/google-owns-duck-com-but-itll-give-rival-duckduckgo-a-shoutout-anyhow/
    The Source: Joey Lombardi: Duck Duck No

  • Amazon’s EC2 gets faster processors, new high-memory instances

    Not only can you now run EC2 inside a Snowball Edge device, but the company also announced a bunch of new EC2 instance types in the cloud. Thanks to these new instance types, developers now have access to a new instance type (Z1d) with custom Xeon processors that can run at up to 4.0 GHz, as well as new memory-optimized instances (R5) that run at up to 3.1 GHz and that feature up to 50 percent more CPU power and 60 percent more memory than their predecessors. There also are some bare metal variants of these instances, as well as an R5d version that features local NVMe storage.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/17/amazons-ec2-gets-faster-processors-new-high-memory-instances/

Security

  • What Stays on Facebook and What Goes? The Social Network Cannot Answer

    In exchanges with reporters and lawmakers over the past week, its leaders — including Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive — have been comically tripped up by some of the most basic questions the site faces. Mr. Zuckerberg, in an interview with the journalist Kara Swisher that was published Wednesday, argued that Facebook would not ban Holocaust denialism on the site because “there are things that different people get wrong.” He later explained there were many other ways that Holocaust deniers could be penalized by Facebook — yet lucidity remained elusive.

    Mr. Zuckerberg’s comments fit a larger pattern. Presented with straightforward queries about real-world harm caused by misinformation on their service, Facebook’s executives express their pain, ask for patience, proclaim their unwavering commitment to political neutrality and insist they are as surprised as anyone that they are even in the position of having to come up with speech rules for billions of people.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/19/technology/facebook-misinformation.html
    Zuckerberg: I didn’t intend to defend Holocaust deniers

    Earlier today, Recode’s Kara Swisher released an extensive interview with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg covering the platform’s struggles during a long, scandal-ridden year. Nestled inside was an exchange where Swisher pressed the executive on why it allows some conspiracy theorists to be allowed to post on the platform, regardless of the truth of their statements — and he explicitly explained that these users, including Holocaust deniers, deserve a voice. This predictably kicked up a ruckus online, and Zuckerberg emailed a clarification to Recode reaffirming that he finds Holocaust deniers “deeply offensive” and didn’t intend to defend them. But he did state Facebook’s goal: Not to stop fake news, but prevent it from spreading.

    https://www.engadget.com/2018/07/18/zuckerberg-i-didn-t-intend-to-defend-holocaust-deniers/
    The Source: Joey Lombardi: Zuck has no answers

Datacenter/Hardware

  • Internal documents show how Amazon scrambled to fix Prime Day glitches

    The e-commerce giant also had to add servers manually to meet the traffic demand, indicating its auto-scaling feature may have failed to work properly leading up to the crash, according to external experts who reviewed the documents. “Currently out of capacity for scaling,” one of the updates said about the status of Amazon’s servers, roughly an hour after Prime Day’s launch. “Looking at scavenging hardware.”

    A breakdown in an internal system called Sable, which Amazon uses to provide computation and storage services to its retail and digital businesses, caused a series of glitches across other services that depend on it, including Prime, authentication and video playback, the documents show.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/19/amazon-internal-documents-what-caused-prime-day-crash-company-scramble.html

  • Mainframes the Unlikely Star of IBM’s Q2 Earnings

    It was systems hardware that really stood out though: the company’s IBM Z line of mainframes was up 100 percent year-on-year, “reflecting high adoption rate of [the] z14 and strong demand for new workloads”, IBM revealed in a slideshow.

    (The new IBM z14 single frame model mainframes can process 850 million encrypted transactions per day in the space of two floor tiles, and are a popular choice for data centers; it can deliver 100 percent encryption of application, cloud service and database data and allow open source machine learning to run on it.)

    https://www.cbronline.com/news/ibm-q2-mainframes

  • Amazon denies it will challenge Cisco with switch sales

    “Cisco and AWS have a longstanding customer and partner relationship, and during a recent call between Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins and AWS CEO Andy Jassy, Andy confirmed that AWS is not actively building a commercial network switch,” a Cisco Systems Inc. spokesman told MarketWatch on Wednesday.

    https://www.marketwatch.com/story/exclusive-amazon-denies-it-will-challenge-cisco-with-switch-sales-2018-07-18
    The Source: Joey Lombardi

  • Google builds its own subsea cable from the US to France

    As Google notes, owning the cable means it can lay it exactly where it needs it to be to connect its data centers — without having to take into account the needs of other consortium partners. Owning the cable also means that Google owns all the bandwidth for the lifetime of the cable (usually 15 to 25 years).

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/17/google-builds-its-own-subsea-cable-from-the-us-to-france/

Other

  • Google fined a record $5 billion by the EU for Android antitrust violations

    Google has been hit with a record-breaking €4.3 billion ($5 billion) fine by EU regulators for breaking antitrust laws. The European Commission says Google has abused its Android market dominance in three key areas. Google has been bundling its search engine and Chrome apps into the operating system. Google has also blocked phone makers from creating devices that run forked versions of Android, and it “made payments to certain large manufacturers and mobile network operators” to exclusively bundle the Google search app on handsets.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/18/17580694/google-android-eu-fine-antitrust
    Again I ask – what would the EU do with this money? How does this fine help the people and companies Google impacted?

  • IBM Rides Newer Businesses to Higher Revenue, Profit

    The Armonk, N.Y., company’s profit rose 3.1% to $2.4 billion. Excluding special items, IBM had a profit of $3.08 a share. Analysts polled by FactSet were expecting an adjusted profit of $3.04 a share.

    IBM shares, down 6% over the past year, rose 2.8% to $148.50 in after-hours trading on Wednesday.

    Despite reporting higher revenue and profit in the latest quarter, IBM still faces challenges on several fronts. In its Cognitive Solutions segment, which includes services tied to the Watson supercomputer, sales fell 1% after adjusting for currency moves to $4.6 billion.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/ibm-rides-new-businesses-to-higher-revenue-profit-1531946666?ns=prod/accounts-wsj

Photo by Jj Mendez on Unsplash