Supplier Report: 7/27/2018

The Source: Joey Lombardi: Winning

IBM had quite a week – they defeated Groupon on a patent infringement case, they are scoring big deals with several companies, and they are in the middle of one of their best mainframe sales periods in years.

In contrast, Amazon reported strong earnings and experienced another stock surge thanks to AWS (again).  Can a company like IBM compete against an growing blob of a corporation with no set form or limits?

And can any of us compete against the growing employment threat of AI? (Forbes doesn’t think so).

Acquisitions

  • Qualcomm Scraps $44 Billion NXP Deal After China Inaction

    The transaction failed after a series of trade moves by the Trump administration, including tariffs on numerous Chinese goods, and retaliatory measures from China.

    Trade experts had said China appeared to be withholding approval of the Qualcomm deal to gain negotiating leverage. Eight other jurisdictions, including the United States, had already approved Qualcomm’s purchase of the Dutch chip maker. China was the exception, dragging the review process out to more than 20 months.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/25/technology/qualcomm-nxp-china-deadline.html

  • Slack is buying, and shutting down, HipChat and Stride

    Atlassian VP of Product Management, Joff Redfern, confirmed the news in a blog post, calling it the “best way forward” for its existing customers. It’s about as real of an example of “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” as you can get; even Atlassian’s own employees will be moved over to using Slack.

    According to an FAQ about the change, Stride and HipChat’s last day will be February 15th, 2019 — or a bit shy of seven months from the date of the announcement. So if you’re a customer on either one of those platforms, you’ve got time to figure things out.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/26/atlassians-hipchat-and-stride-to-be-discontinued-with-slack-buying-up-the-ip/

Artificial Intelligence

  • AI And RPA Will Absolutely, Positively Threaten Your Job (Thanks JD!)

    McKinsey & Co. predicts that AI (broadly defined) will eliminate 77,000,000 jobs over the next 20 years: “our scenarios suggest that by 2030, 75 million to 375 million workers (3 to 14 percent of the global workforce) will need to switch occupational categories.” Bloomberg has developed a tool to help you determine if you’re likely to be automated. According to Bloomberg’s research (based in part on research conducted at the University of Oxford), “nearly half of all U.S. jobs may be at risk in the coming decades, with lower-paid occupations among the most vulnerable.” Compensation and benefits managers, auditors, accountants, credit analysts, loan officers, sales representatives, truck drivers, administrative services managers and even dental hygienists are at high risk and “most likely to be automated.” Some good news? The same research suggests that physicians, surgeons, lawyers, financial managers, pharmacists, teachers and computer and information systems managers are among the professions least likely to be automated. Note that the timing for all this varies. Some analysts believe significant professional displacement will occur by 2030, while others believe it will take longer. (It won’t take longer.)

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveandriole/2018/07/23/ai-rpa-will-absolutely-positively-threaten-your-job/#6afc98b7712b

  • Anthem Expands $500M Deal with IBM with Focus on IT Automation, AI

    Under the expanded agreement, IBM will provide Anthem with enterprise services for its mainframe and data center server and storage infrastructure management. In addition, IBM will work with Anthem towards creating an AI environment which will allow for an automated infrastructure providing 24/7 digital capabilities. This will bring greater value and access to Anthem’s consumers, care providers, and employees, Anthem said.

    IBM and Anthem will also continue to work together on IT automation. Since 2015, the two companies’ have implemented over 130 bots, automating over 70 percent of the monthly high volume repetitive tasks. This includes bots that can identify when a server is reaching capacity to shift workloads to other less utilized servers ensuring that work is not impacted. This capability has improved systems availability as well as freed up resources to work on higher-value projects, Anthem said in a press release.

    https://www.healthcare-informatics.com/news-item/analytics/anthem-expands-500m-deal-ibm-it-automation-ai

  • IBM Watson recommended ‘unsafe’ cancer treatments, according to internal documents

    The data, obtained by Stat News from slide decks shared by IBM Watson Health’s deputy chief health officer last summer, revealed that IBM Watson suggested “unsafe and incorrect treatment recommendations” for cancer treatment. This specifically had to do with IBM’s Watson for Oncology product, which customers said was “often inaccurate.”

    According to the internal slide deck, the problem stems from this Watson product being trained on a small number of “synthetic,” hypothetical cancer patients, rather than real-world cases. The accuracy of any AI is dependent on being trained on a large dataset—the larger and more accurate the dataset, the better. Watson’s recommendations were based on expert advice from specialists on each cancer type but not masses of actual cancer treatment cases. The result has been recommendations that are not on part with national treatment guidelines, according to Stat News.

    https://www.dailydot.com/debug/watson-unsafe-cancer-treatments/

Cloud

  • Google Cloud wants to be No. 1. Two small problems: Amazon and Microsoft

    Urs Hölzle, the senior vice president for technical infrastructure at Google, is one of the company’s cloud veterans. At a conference keynote address Tuesday, he explained how one of the biggest problems facing business right now is the disorganization that comes with using a mix of different cloud services. He said 8 out of 10 companies use more than one cloud service.

    At the same company, different services can be “in different clouds, which creates a lot of unnecessary complexity and work” for developers, said Hölzle. “And that’s not going away overnight.”

    https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Google-Cloud-wants-to-be-No-1-Two-small-13101723.php

Software/SaaS

  • Oracle Blockchain Opens for Business

    Oracle had been testing the new blockchain platform in pilot programs with early adopting customers in recent months. After seeing success in the trials, Oracle decided to bring the offering into full production.

    One customer, Solar Site Design, a solar energy equipment supplier, has been using the blockchain service to keep tamper-proof records related to solar projects. Another customer, Arab Jordan Investment Bank, has been using it to simplify their electronic fund transfers. Yet another, Certified Origins, an olive oil producer, has been using it for food safety and supply chain tracking.

    http://fortune.com/2018/07/16/oracle-blockchain-available/

Datacenter/Hardware

  • IBM Is Enjoying the Strongest Mainframe Cycle in Years

    Systemwide encryption is a key feature in a world where cybersecurity is only becoming more important. IBM’s security business, which includes a portion of mainframe sales, is one of its “strategic imperatives” that will drive growth for years to come. Security revenue jumped 79% in the second quarter, reaching $1 billion.

    One other reason for strong mainframe growth: IBM is winning what it calls “emerging workloads.” Those include areas like blockchain and machine learning. Around 60% of MIPS (million instructions per second, a measure of processing power) shipped went toward these specialty workloads, and total MIPS shipped tripled in the second quarter.

    On top of selling systems to existing customers, IBM is adding some new mainframe customers as well. Kavanaugh pointed to a U.S. managed-care provider, a Canadian university, an Italian electronics distributor, and an African bank as examples of new customers embracing the platform. A cloud-ready version of the z14 launched earlier this year, designed to fit into a standard data center, could help IBM win even more new business.

    https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/07/23/ibm-is-enjoying-the-strongest-mainframe-cycle-in-y.aspx
    Liz Lemon is winning

Other

  • IBM Wins $83 Million From Groupon in E-Commerce Patents Case

    IBM sued Groupon for $167 million, accusing it of building its online coupon business on the back of the IBM e-commerce inventions without permission. Midway through their first full day of deliberations in Wilmington, Delaware, jurors sided with IBM, finding that Groupon infringed the patents intentionally. The ruling means the judge can increase the damages award.

    “IBM invests nearly $6 billion annually in research and development, producing innovations for society,” IBM spokesman Doug Shelton said after the verdict. “We rely on our patents to protect our innovations.”

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-27/ibm-wins-83-million-from-groupon-in-e-commerce-patents-case
    Joey Lombardi: Winning

  • Amazon ‘terrifies me as a company,’ says a valuation professor

    “You find it overvalued but you cannot bet against it because this is a disruption machine,” he said. “I’m not even sure what business the company is in anymore. It’s a platform that can be used pretty much to disrupt any business. And that’s what’s being priced in.”

    Amazon’s total revenue, which includes sales from Whole Foods, increased 39 percent year-over-year. Its North America revenue jumped 44 percent to $32.1 billion, while international sales grew 27 percent to $14.6 billion. The company’s cloud business grew nearly 49 percent year-over-year, with Amazon Web Services generating $6.11 billion in revenue.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/27/amazon-terrifies-me-as-a-company-says-dean-of-valuation.html

Supplier Report: 6/29/2018

The Source: Amazon buys PillPack - Joey Lombardi

Amazon’s desires to get into the healthcare industry made major progress this week with their announced acquisition of PillPack. It seems that the company will finally meet their goal of selling pharmaceuticals on their e-commerce engine.

IBM had a big sales announcement, but there were also reports of lack of strategic direction in their medical AI efforts.

The IT industry is still facing fallout over technological support of the DHS and ICE. As employees push back on their leaders, companies are scrambling to find a balance.

Acquisitions

  • Amazon Buys Online Pharmacy PillPack for $1 Billion

    Amazon.com Inc. is buying online pharmacy PillPack Inc. giving the e-commerce giant the ability to ship prescriptions around the country, and overnight, making it a direct threat to the more than $400 billion pharmacy business.

    Amazon is paying roughly $1 billion in cash for PillPack, which presorts medications and ships them to customers’ homes in 49 U.S. states, excluding Hawaii, according to people familiar with the matter. The online retailer beat out Walmart Inc., which also was in talks for the five-year-old startup, one of the people said. Walmart had no immediate comment.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-to-buy-online-pharmacy-pillpack-1530191443

  • Google admits it lost out to Microsoft buying GitHub

    Previous rumors suggest Google was also trying to acquire GitHub, alongside Microsoft’s bids. GitHub founder Chris Wanstrath reportedly chose Microsoft because of his relationship with CEO Satya Nadella. GitHub is a large code repository that has become very popular with developers and companies to host projects, documentation, and code. Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, and many other big tech companies use GitHub. There are 85 million repositories hosted on GitHub, and 28 million developers contribute to them.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/28/17512908/google-github-microsoft-acquisition-comments

Artificial Intelligence

  • Microsoft’s facial recognition can better identify people with darker skin tones

    Microsoft says its facial recognition tools are getting better at identifying people with darker skin tones than before, according to a company blog post today. The error rates have been reduced by as much as 20 times for men and women with darker skin and by nine times for all women.

    The company says it’s been training its AI tools with larger and more diverse datasets, which has led to the progress. “If we are training machine learning systems to mimic decisions made in a biased society, using data generated by that society, then those systems will necessarily reproduce its biases,” said Hanna Wallach, a Microsoft senior researcher, in the blog post.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/26/17507304/microsoft-facial-recognition-darker-skin-tones

  • Layoffs at Watson Health Reveal IBM’s Problem with AI

    IBM’s goal, the Phytel employees said, was to create a fancy new product that combined the capabilities of Phytel and Explorys. However, the offering managers didn’t have a clear idea of what that product would be. “They couldn’t decide on a roadmap,” says the second engineer. “We pivoted so many times.”

    Both Phytel engineers say the offering managers didn’t have technical backgrounds and sometimes came up with ideas for new products that were simply impossible. While the engineers tried to follow the shifting directions from above, Phytel didn’t deliver anything new to the market. “And we were burning through money,” the second engineer says.

    https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-human-os/robotics/artificial-intelligence/layoffs-at-watson-health-reveal-ibms-problem-with-ai

Cloud

  • Here’s how Amazon is able to poach so many execs from Microsoft

    In the three years between 2015 and 2017, at least 30 director or higher level executives went straight from Microsoft to Amazon. Google, the next most popular poaching ground for Amazon, lost just 5 executives to the e-commerce company during those three years. Apple and eBay both lost 2 executives to Amazon in that period, while Facebook, Walmart, and Netflix saw zero executives go to Amazon.

    Paysa’s data only includes people whose most recent jobs were at Microsoft and excludes the ones who may have worked elsewhere before joining Amazon. The company said it looked through at least 5 million resumes for this data, but may have missed the ones that did not update their resume profiles.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/25/amazon-favorite-poaching-ground-microsoft.html

Security

  • A new data breach may have exposed personal information of almost every American adult

    Earlier this month, security researcher Vinny Troia discovered that Exactis, a data broker based in Palm Coast, Florida, had exposed a database that contained close to 340 million individual records on a publicly accessible server. The haul comprises close to 2 terabytes of data that appears to include personal information on hundreds of millions of American adults, as well as millions of businesses. While the precise number of individuals included in the data isn’t clear—and the leak doesn’t seem to contain credit card information or Social Security numbers—it does go into minute detail for each individual listed, including phone numbers, home addresses, email addresses, and other highly personal characteristics for every name. The categories range from interests and habits to the number, age, and gender of the person’s children.

    https://www.wired.com/story/exactis-database-leak-340-million-records/

Software/SaaS

  • Salesforce Will Keep Ties to Border Agency After Protest

    “I’m opposed to separating children from their families at the border. It is immoral,” Benioff wrote Wednesday in a memo to Salesforce employees obtained by Bloomberg News. “I have personally financially supported legal groups helping families at the border. I also wrote to the White House to encourage them to end this horrible situation.”

    More than 650 Salesforce employees signed a letter to Benioff that called CBP’s actions “inhumane” and asked the San Francisco-based company to reconsider its contract providing tools to help with recruiting and communications. Some workers spoke Monday to Tony Prophet, the chief equality officer, about the letter, Bloomberg News reported. The staff’s effort is part of a growing wave of employee activism within the tech industry, as workers question how their products are used by U.S. law enforcement and the military.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-27/salesforce-s-benioff-keeps-ties-to-border-agency-after-protest

Datacenter/Hardware

  • IBM’s Competitive Advantage on Display in $320 Million Deal

    IBM announced a $320 million infrastructure outsourcing deal with KMD, one of Denmark’s leading suppliers of mission-critical software and IT services. IBM will provide KMD with IT infrastructure through 2024, and will assist KMD as it upgrades its infrastructure offerings for its clients. The scope of the agreement includes security, hybrid cloud, and machine learning, all growth areas for IBM.

    https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/06/28/ibms-competitive-advantage-on-display-in-320-milli.aspx

Other

  • Amazon Workers to Jeff Bezos: Stop Weaponizing Our Tech

    Gizmodo reports that Amazon employees are demanding that the company halt the sale of Rekognition, its facial-recognition technology, to law-enforcement agencies. “Along with much of the world we watched in horror recently as U.S. authorities tore children away from their parents,” reads an internal letter to Bezos, per Gizmodo. “In the face of this immoral U.S. policy, and the U.S.’s increasingly inhumane treatment of refugees and immigrants beyond this specific policy, we are deeply concerned that Amazon is implicated, providing infrastructure and services that enable ICE and D.H.S.”

    https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/06/amazon-workers-to-jeff-bezos-stop-weaponizing-our-tech

Photo by Geran de Klerk on Unsplash

Supplier Report: 6/22/2018

Source Report: Argumentative AI: Joey Lombardi: Jon Tyson

IBM was in the news this week for (mostly) all the right reasons… they bought a company and they developed an argumentative AI. Can this breakthrough actually bring in money for Big Blue?

Oracle reported decent earnings this quarter, but their stock still took a hit. In the following days, many articles highlighted that Oracle is combining certain sales metrics to hide the exact number of cloud sales happening (vs. legacy software).

Amazon shareholders are begging the company not to move forward with providing law enforcement facial recognition software that has been in development citing potential civil rights violations.

Acquisitions

  • IBM acquires Oniqua to bolster its Industrial IoT business

    Founded in 2000, Qniqua is a global innovator in Maintenance Repair and Operations (MRO) Inventory Optimization solutions and services focused on mining, oil & gas, transportation, utilities, manufacturing and other asset-intensive industries. Qniqua’s focus is on helping asset-intensive companies reduce costs and eliminate waste through advanced analytics and value services. It’s our pursuit and our passion, and one that every Oniqua employee is committed to delivering.

    https://techstartups.com/2018/06/15/ibm-acquires-oniqua-bolster-industrial-iot-business/

  • The court’s decision to let AT&T and Time Warner merge is ridiculously bad

    But neither Facebook nor Google owns the ultimate distribution layer of the consumer connection to the internet. They aren’t the world’s largest telecom company. Neither is Netflix or Amazon or any of the other companies AT&T and Time Warner are afraid of. (Yes, I know Google owns Google Fiber, but that has been more failure than success.)

    Tech companies might have vertically integrated the creation and production of content with consumer-facing apps and services, but they all depend on internet connections to reach their audiences. And those connections are increasingly wireless. AT&T and Time Warner aren’t trying to catch up to Netflix by merging; they’re trying to step ahead of them in line by marrying Time Warner’s content to AT&T’s network.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/15/17468612/att-time-warner-acquisition-court-decision

  • AT&T in Talks to Acquire AppNexus for About $1.6 Billion

    Acquiring AppNexus would advance AT&T’s ambitions to build a robust advertising business. AppNexus operates one of the largest online ad exchanges, automated marketplaces that allow advertisers to buy space across thousands of websites, targeting their desired audiences.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/at-t-in-talks-to-acquire-appnexus-for-about-1-6-billion-1529464400

  • Microsoft is buying AI startup, Bonsai

    The company specializes in reinforcement learning, a kind of trial and error approach to teach a system within the confines of a simulation. That learning can be used to train autonomous systems to complete specific tasks. Microsoft says the acquisition will serve to forward the kind of research the company has been pursuing in the field by leveraging its Azure cloud platform.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/20/microsoft-is-buying-a-ai-startup-bonsai/

Artificial Intelligence

  • IBM Watson Health downsizes its work with hospitals

    IBM Watson Health leadership reportedly told employees June 13 it plans to refocus its business strategy, which includes cutting down on its work with hospital clients, according to STAT.

    Because of changes to the ACA, hospitals aren’t as willing to spend resources managing their pay-for-performance contracts, executives told employees, although they did not specify which changes to the law are affecting the shift in IBM’s strategy. STAT suggested the main driver could be some of the changes the Trump administration made to the law’s reimbursement models.

    https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/healthcare-information-technology/stat-ibm-watson-health-downsizes-its-work-with-hospitals.html

  • IBM Unveils System That ‘Debates’ With Humans

    IBM’s system was designed to debate about 100 topics, but these interactions are tightly constrained: a four-minute opening statement followed by a rebuttal to its opponent’s argument — and then a statement summing up its own viewpoint. It was not exactly Lincoln v. Douglas.

    Subsidized space exploration, the machine said during its opening statement, “inspires our children to pursue education and careers in science and technology and mathematics.”

    Noam Slonim, an IBM researcher who helped oversee the project, estimated that the technology could have a “meaningful” debate on those 100 topics 40 percent of the time. IBM chose the topic for the live debate before it began. In some cases, the machine’s lengthy speeches hinted at how it was stitching together its arguments — identifying relevant sentences and clauses and then combining them into a reasonably coherent, computerized thought.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/18/technology/ibm-debater-artificial-intelligence.html
    This is cute IBM… I want to read an article about IBM actually selling some of this awesome argumentative ai technology to a paying customer.  Time to get out of the lab! 

Cloud

  • Oracle’s Cloud Thickens

    The corporate software giant said late Tuesday that revenues from its cloud services businesses jumped 25% year over year to $1.7 billion for its fiscal fourth quarter that ended May 31. That was better than the 19% to 23% rise the company projected three months ago—a projection so disappointing that it took Oracle’s stock price down 8% in response. Cloud revenues are now significant, making up nearly 16% of the company’s total for the last fiscal year compared with just 8% two years ago. Overall revenue for the quarter rose a much more modest 3.3% to $11.3 billion, though it should also be noted that Oracle ended its fiscal year with its best annual growth rate in seven years.

    The problem is that the business that was the main engine of Oracle’s recent growth will be harder to analyze in the future. Oracle changed its reporting structure so that results from the closely watched cloud segment are now folded into the much larger unit that includes software license updates and support for Oracle’s older, legacy software business. That business grows at a much slower rate. The company says the change is necessitated by its new practice of selling software licenses that cover both traditional software and cloud offerings.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/oracles-cloud-thickens-1529506558

Security

  • French media plan to meet with government over Google-GDPR concerns

    The impact of Google’s GDPR approach were felt across Europe as soon as it took effect. In France, volume demand dropped by as much as 50 percent for some independent ad tech vendors, while some publishers’ programmatic ad revenues dropped 70 percent, according to Gié. Google moved quickly to rectify the issue, with the result that several of the major exchanges such as AppNexus were reintegrated into Google’s ad-buying ecosystem in the days after May 25. Today, business is almost back to normal as more and more exchanges have been reintegrated, according to sources. But some vendors still aren’t on Google’s vendor whitelist, which has meant certain publishers’ programmatic ad revenues are suffering as a direct result, said Gié.

    https://digiday.com/media/french-media-plan-meet-government-concern-google-gdpr/

  • Amazon shareholders call for halt of facial recognition sales to police

    The shareholders, which include the Social Equity Group and Northwest Coalition for Responsible Investment, are joining groups such as the ACLU in efforts to stop the company from selling the service — pointing out the risks of mass surveillance.

    They warn about potential civil and human rights violations, and how Amazon’s involvement could have a negative impact on the company’s stock. The shareholders point to the recent scrutiny of Facebook (FB) over privacy and data as a cautionary tale.

    http://money.cnn.com/2018/06/18/technology/amazon-facial-recognition/index.html

Software/SaaS

  • Here’s why the one-size-fits-all relational database model is dead

    Seldom can one database fit the needs of multiple distinct use cases. The days of the one-size-fits-all monolithic database are behind us, and developers are now building highly distributed applications using a multitude of purpose-built databases. Developers are doing what they do best: breaking complex applications into smaller pieces and then picking the best tool to solve each problem. The best tool for a job usually differs by use case.

    https://www.techrepublic.com/article/amazon-heres-why-the-one-size-fits-all-relational-database-model-is-dead/

  • Adobe could be the next $10 billion software company

    Revenue was up across all major business lines, but as has been the norm, the vast majority comes from the company’s bread and butter, Creative Cloud, which houses the likes of Photoshop, InDesign and Dreamweaver, among others. In fact digital media, which includes Creative Cloud and Document Cloud accounted for $1.55 billion of the $2.2 billion in total revenue. The vast majority of that, $1.30 billion was from the creative side of the house with Document Cloud pulling in $243 million.

    Adobe has been mostly known as a creative tools company until recent years when it also moved into marketing, analytics and advertising. Recently it purchased Magento for $1.6 billion, giving it a commerce component to go with those other pieces. Clearly Adobe has set its sights on Salesforce, which also has a strong marketing component and is not coincidentally perhaps, the most recently crowned $10 billion software company.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/15/adobe-could-be-the-next-10-billion-software-company/

Datacenter/Hardware

  • Chip Makers: We’ll End Up Paying Tariffs on Our Own Goods

    While the U.S. tariffs may impair Chinese companies that use semiconductors, among others, the fallout also will extend to U.S. businesses that participate in the complex supply chain of chip manufacturing, the Semiconductor Industry Association said.

    That is because most chips American companies import from China are designed in the U.S. The manufacturing of many components in those chips often starts in the U.S. as well, before they are shipped to China for assembly, testing and packaging.

    The tariffs will force American companies to pay duties on their own products, some of which were initially built in the U.S., the trade group said, adding that the imposition “fails to address the serious IP and industrial policy issues in China.”

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/chip-makers-well-end-up-paying-tariffs-on-our-own-goods-1529084158?ns=prod/accounts-wsj

Other

  • Microsoft Employees Protest Work With ICE, as Tech Industry Mobilizes Over Immigration

    “We believe that Microsoft must take an ethical stand, and put children and families above profits,” said the letter, which was addressed to the chief executive, Satya Nadella. The letter pointed to a $19.4 million contract that Microsoft has with ICE for processing data and artificial intelligence capabilities.

    Calling the separation of families “inhumane,” the employees added: “As the people who build the technologies that Microsoft profits from, we refuse to be complicit. We are part of a growing movement, comprised of many across the industry who recognize the grave responsibility that those creating powerful technology have to ensure what they build is used for good, and not for harm.”
    **
    The letter is part of a wave of tech workers mobilizing this week against the Trump administration’s new “zero tolerance” policy that refers for criminal prosecution all immigrants apprehended crossing the border without authorization. The policy has resulted in about 2,000 children being separated from their migrant parents, raising a bipartisan outcry.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/technology/tech-companies-immigration-border.html

  • A complete 5G standard is finally here

    “Two years ago, 5G was seen as a vision or even just a hype — with the closing of Rel-15, 3GPP has made 5G a reality within a very short time,” Georg Mayer, chairman of 3GPP CT, said in a statement. “The outcome is an amazing set of standards that will not only provide higher data rates and bandwidth to end customers but which is open and flexible enough to satisfy the communication needs of different industries — 5G will be the integration platform for heterogeneous businesses.”

    A number of companies are already gearing up for 5G including Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile and AT&T. “This milestone will allow for more advanced testing using standards-compliant equipment and paves the way for our commercial 5G launch in a dozen cities later this year,” AT&T said in a statement.

    https://www.engadget.com/2018/06/15/complete-5g-standard-finally-here/

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash