Tag: Microsoft

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: 9/28/2018

Facebook was hacked (again), exposing 50 million users to potential data breaches. Instagram and WhatsApp accounts could also be affected.

As Intel experiences chip shortages, their plan is to focus on getting the high end chips at the door.

Ohh… Elon Musk is getting sued.

Acquisitions

  • Slack buys Astro and shuts down its email app

    It may seem curious for Slack, the giant chat app with the goal of killing email, to buy an email app — but the pairing makes a good deal of sense. Astro’s focus was on business users, and it built out some smart integrations inside of Slack. With the two teams combined, Slack can use Astro’s experience to build a native solution for dealing with emails right inside the chat app.

    There is some bad news, though: Slack is shutting down Astro’s email app. The app will stop functioning on October 10th. That’s unfortunate, given that good third-party email clients have become increasingly hard to come by, and Astro had some features that really made it stand out.

    https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/24/17897658/slack-astro-acquisition-email-app-shut-down-integration

  • With Sirius behind it, can Pandora now stage a comeback?

    Sirius XM is all about selling subscriptions to listen to Howard Stern and stations based on genres like 70s, 80s and 90s, and for those who want on-demand music, “now Sirius can cross sell a Spotify clone,” he says. “It’s a winning combination.”

    Pandora’s biggest issue has been its double-edged sword. It is under contract to the record labels in paying higher copyright fees than on-demand outlets, and thus, the more listeners it gets, the more money it has to pay out. Pachter says Pandora has lost over $100 million in 2017 and 2016 due to sky high royalty rates.

    https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2018/09/25/sirius-xm-pandora-comeback/1416707002/

  • DXC Boosts Cloud-First Approach With System Partners Buyout

    System Partners, a provider of customer-centric services like advisory, strategy designing, tailored managed services and the like, boasts more than 100 Salesforce certified consultants in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra.

    Management at DXC Technology believes that the buyout is a strategic move to support and cater to existing customers more efficiently, and strengthen its position in the cloud market

    https://www.nasdaq.com/article/dxc-boosts-cloud-first-approach-with-system-partners-buyout-cm1029023

Artificial Intelligence

Cloud

  • Rising Cloud Bills May Get a Breather

    It is a big food chain that’s gotten much bigger quickly. Total capital spending by the four aforementioned companies has jumped by an average of 45% on a year-over-year basis for the past six quarters. The four spent a total of $34.7 billion in the first six months of this year—up 59% from the same period last year. But analysts for Morgan Stanley expect that pace to decelerate to growth of 45% for the second half and warned in a note this week that it could slow further to “low double digits” next year.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/rising-cloud-bills-may-get-a-breather-1538128800

  • Microsoft, IBM sign up to cheaper cloud alliance

    GeekWire is reporting that Cloudflare has brought in Microsoft, IBM, Digital Ocean, Automattic and Backblaze under a single banner called the Bandwidth Alliance.

    Scheduled to be announced today, during Cloudflare’s eighth birthday party, the group’s goal is to make sure Cloudflare’s customers using their services pay either significantly cheaper prices, or pay nothing at all, for the traffic that passes through locations where their networks are connected to Cloudflare’s services.

    https://www.itproportal.com/news/microsoft-google-sign-up-to-cheaper-cloud-alliance/

Security

  • France records big jump in privacy complaints since GDPR

    France’s CNIL agency said today that it’s received 3,767 complaints since May 25, when GDPR came into force, up from 2,294 complaints over the same period last year — which it notes was already a record year.

    CNIL says this represents a 64% increase in complaints, which it suggests shows that EU citizens have “seized the GDPR strongly” — attributing public engagement on the issue to media attention on the new regulation and on data protection stories such as the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/25/france-records-big-jump-in-privacy-complaints-since-gdpr/

  • Facebook Is Breached by Hackers, Putting 50 Million Users’ Data at Risk

    Three software flaws in Facebook’s systems allowed hackers to break into user accounts, including those of the top executives Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, according to two people familiar with the investigation but not allowed to discuss it publicly. Once in, the attackers could have gained access to apps like Spotify, Instagram and hundreds of others that give users a way to log into their systems through Facebook.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/28/technology/facebook-hack-data-breach.html

Infrastructure/Hardware

  • Intel acknowledges supply issues, will prioritize premium chips

    In the short term, Intel plans to prioritize the premium market, including Xeon and Core processors, so it “can serve the high-performance segments of the market.” Beyond that, the company plans to invest $15 billion in capital expenditures this year, including $1 billion going toward the manufacture of 14nm silicon in the U.S., Ireland and Israel.

    These issues have left the broader PC industry in a rough spot. On the face of it, a shortage due to increased demand seems like a good problem to have, but ultimately a lack of processors could create a major issue if the market continues to grow, perhaps ultimately reversing some of that success.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/28/intel-acknowledges-supply-issues-will-prioritize-premium-chips/

  • Verizon hits 1.45Gbps 4G LTE speeds in New York

    The milestone saw it aggregate six channels of spectrum (both licensed and shared — a first in the US). According to Verizon VP of Technology Planning and Development, Bill Stone, the company is laying a “foundation” for its “evolution into 5G.”

    The trial involved aggregating four carriers of licence-assisted access (LTE-LAA) spectrum with licensed PCS and AWS spectrum, according to ZDNet. It also relied on 256 quadrature amplitude moderation (256 QAM) and 4×4 multiple-input multiple-output (4×4 MIMO) technologies — the latter antenna tech is available in 1,100 locations nationwide. Meanwhile, it’s facing fierce 5G competition from rivals AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint.

    https://www.engadget.com/2018/09/28/verizon-peak-4g-lte-speed-new-york/

Other

  • SEC charges Tesla CEO Elon Musk with fraud

    The SEC complaint alleges that Musk issued “false and misleading” statements and failed to properly notify regulators of material company events. The SEC held a press conference Thursday evening regarding the complaint.

    Among other remedies, the SEC is seeking to bar Musk from serving as an officer or director of a publicly traded company if found guilty.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/27/tesla-falls-4percent-on-report-elon-musk-sued-by-sec.html

Photo by Claudio Schwarz 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: 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