Tag: Oracle

Posted on

Supplier Report: 4/12/2019

Google had a very rough week.

First it was discovered that they lost AI researcher Ian Goodfellow to Apple, who has made a habit of stealing Google’s AI talent of late.

Then the company announced the dissolution of their AI ethics board…after only one week. Some of their board selections received critical feedback both internally and externally.

Finally, Google’s temp labor teams published a letter requesting better treatment. Google responded to these demands by announcing their temporary labor services suppliers will provide better pay and benefits, but the temps say that isn’t enough, as they are looking to be treated with dignity.

Acquisitions

Artificial Intelligence

  • IBM Watson knows when you’re planning to quit your job

    At CNBC’s Work Talent + HR Summit, IBM CEO Ginni Rometty revealed that the company AI has got so adept at detecting employee satisfaction that it’s now in the “95 per cent accuracy range.”

    Rometty wouldn’t be drawn on what data points Watson consults, but Googling the spelling of “curriculum vitae”, alongside extended periods on LinkedIn would be our first clue. Nobody has ever visited LinkedIn recreationally, after all.

    Watson’s “predictive attrition program” is used to retain talent, because as Rometty says, “the best time to get to an employee is before they go.” The company estimates that the early interventions will have saved it nearly $300m in retention costs.

    https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/3073744/ibm-watson-knows-when-youre-planning-to-quit-your-job

  • What AI Will Do to Corporate Hierarchies

    The obvious answer may be that the management structure is likely to get more centralized and rigid. After all, AI will help managers track more detailed data about everything their subordinates are doing, which should make it easier—and more inviting—to exercise stricter controls.

    This will no doubt be true in some cases. But look more closely, and I believe the opposite is much more likely to happen in many cases. That’s because when AI does the routine tasks, much of the remaining nonroutine work is likely to be done in loose “adhocracies,” ever-shifting groups of people with the combinations of skills needed for whatever problems arise.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-ai-will-do-to-corporate-hierarchies-11554158120

  • Apple has poached another of Google’s top AI researchers

    Ian Goodfellow is one of the most prominent names in artificial intelligence, and previously worked at both Google and the Elon Musk-founded lab OpenAI. But, as first reported by CNBC, Goodfellow recently updated his LinkedIn profile to note that he is now working at Apple as a director for machine learning at the company’s Special Projects group.

    It’s not the first time Apple has used Google as an AI talent incubator, with the iPhonemaker luring away Goodfellow’s former boss, Google’s head of AI, John Giannandrea, last April.

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/5/18296473/apple-google-ai-research-poached-ian-goodfellow

  • Google dissolves AI ethics board just one week after forming it

    Google today disclosed that it has dissolved a short-lived, external advisory board designed to monitor its use of artificial intelligence, following a week of controversy regarding the company’s selection of members. The decision, reported first today by Vox, is largely due to outcry over the board’s inclusion of Heritage Foundation president Kay Coles James, a noted conservative figure who has openly espoused anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and, through the Heritage Foundation, fought efforts to extend rights to transgender individuals and to combat climate change.

    The advisory board, called the Advanced Technology External Advisory Council (ATEAC), included a number of prominent academics in fields ranging from AI and philosophy to psychology and robotics. But it also included those with policy backgrounds, like James and members of former US presidential administrations.

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/4/18296113/google-ai-ethics-board-ends-controversy-kay-coles-james-heritage-foundation

Cloud

Security

  • Facebook will stop asking new users for their email passwords

    Facebook told Axios that “a very small group of people have the option of entering their email password to verify their account when they sign up for Facebook,” but noted that people could choose instead to confirm their account with a code or link sent to their phone or email.

    “That said, we understand the password verification option isn’t the best way to go about this, so we are going to stop offering it,” the company said in a statement.

    https://www.axios.com/facebook-will-stop-asking-new-users-for-their-email-passwords–355c2e94-793f-47b7-a582-9ee0a4f01ae3.html

Software/SaaS

  • PwC Tests Blockchain for Validating Job Candidates’ Credentials

    If the technology becomes widely used, staffers won’t have to verify a candidate’s credentials by calling universities and previous employers, which can sometimes take weeks, Mr. Cushley said. The challenge, though, will be getting enough schools and companies on board to make blockchain truly valuable for validating credentials, he said.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/pwc-tests-blockchain-for-validating-job-candidates-credentials-11554324777

  • American Express, SAP Ariba join forces for End-to-End B2B payments

    Sources close to the move claim that American Express, as a network extension partner, will use Ariba Network APIs to allow its virtual Card potentials within the SAP Ariba platform & process to facilitate secure payments, seamless commerce, and easy settlement between businesses on a single platform.

    Moreover, businesses, through the new integration, will have the opportunity to use their current American Express® Corporate Cards to make virtual Card payments, further making it easy for customers to get started without the need to create and maintain a standalone account.

    http://solutionrocket.com/american-express-sap-ariba-join-forces-end-end-b2b-payments/

  • Why Oracle is happy to lose to AWS and MongoDB

    Put another way, how is it that Oracle can be such a miss with developers and yet still print billions of dollars in revenue? I’m guessing Hurd doesn’t care much about developer adoption. He likely doesn’t care that, measured in popularity, Oracle has been in terminal decline for many years, as DB-Engines’ data suggests. In fact, if you look at the database technologies for which developers ask the most questions (indicating production use) on Stack Overflow, only MongoDB and PostgreSQL are booming (of the top-five database technologies).

    No, what Hurd cares about, as he acknowledges in his remarks to CNBC, is the fact that Oracle still controls roughly half of the global database market, worth tens of billions of dollars. Never mind that, as Gartner analyst Merv Adrian has highlighted, Oracle has lost market share every year since 2013, and collectively the old guard relational database players have shed nearly five percentage points.

    https://www.infoworld.com/article/3387123/why-oracle-is-happy-to-lose-to-aws-and-mongodb.html

Infrastructure/Hardware

  • Samsung Expects 60% Decline in First-Quarter Operating Profit

    The world’s largest smartphone and memory chips maker by shipments has felt the economic slowdown acutely. Companies and consumers, hesitant to spend amid the U.S.-China trade fight, according to tech industry executives, have delayed smartphone purchases and moderated investments into areas like data servers.

    Samsung’s results are closely watched because of its dual role as one of the world’s biggest hardware makers and a major supplier of electronics companies—including to rivals such as Apple Inc., which buys displays and chips from the Suwon, South Korea, company.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/samsung-expects-60-decline-in-first-quarter-operating-profit-11554426661?ns=prod/accounts-wsj

  • Verizon’s 5G network is blazing fast, but it barely exists

    Yesterday, the leading US carrier triumphantly announced the debut of 5G service in “select areas of Chicago and Minneapolis,” and said that “for the first time ever, customers can access a commercial 5G network with the world’s first commercially available 5G-enabled smartphone.” Verizon welcoming customers onto its 5G network came a week earlier than initially planned. Verizon hasn’t said why it abruptly moved things up, but carriers in South Korea also went live with 5G yesterday, so it’s possible the company didn’t want to get beat by its global peers.

    I know you want speed tests, so to get started, yes, Verizon’s 5G data speeds are quite fast compared to what your smartphone can handle right now. I’m hitting between 400 and 600 Mbps on downloads. I can also tell you that, at least in Chicago, this feels like a premature launch, and 5G can be awfully hard to come by. When you do find it, you’ve basically got to stay where you are to see what it’s capable of.

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/4/18295600/verizon-5g-network-first-tests-data-speed

Other

  • Jeff Bezos, Amazon C.E.O., and MacKenzie Bezos Finalize Divorce Details

    Mr. Bezos will keep 75 percent of the couple’s Amazon stock and all of their ownership of The Washington Post and the Blue Origin space company, Ms. Bezos wrote. Mr. Bezos will also have “sole voting authority” over Ms. Bezos’ Amazon shares, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

    After the divorce, Ms. Bezos will own roughly 4 percent of Amazon, a stake that was worth almost $36 billion on Thursday. By keeping 75 percent of the couple’s Amazon shares, or about 12 percent of the company, Mr. Bezos will most likely remain the richest person in the world. His remaining stake in the company was worth almost $108 billion on Thursday. (Bill Gates, the second wealthiest, is worth $102 billion, according to Bloomberg.)

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/technology/bezos-divorce-mackenzie.html

  • UN says US fears over Huawei’s 5G are politically motivated

    The secretary general of the UN’s internet and telecoms agency has suggested US concerns about 5G networks built using Huawei equipment have more to do with politics and trade, rather than legitimate worries over security. “There is no proof so far,” Houlin Zhao, head of the International Telecommunication Union, said regarding claims about Huawei’s security. He noted it’s in telecoms’ best interests to make sure their infrastructure is secure as they might otherwise feel the wrath of authorities.

    “I would encourage Huawei to be given equal opportunities to bid for business, and during the operational process, if you find anything wrong, then you can charge them and accuse them,” Zhao said, according to Reuters. “But if we don’t have anything then to put them on the blacklist — I think this is not fair.”

    https://www.engadget.com/2019/04/05/un-huawei-5g-network-security-allegations/

  • Google staff condemn treatment of temp workers in ‘historic’ show of solidarity

    TVCs make up 54% of Google’s global workforce, and more than half of the people on the personality team, according to the letter. The TVCs on the personality team sit alongside Google FTEs in offices around the world, but they are employed by a staffing agency on contracts ranging from two to six months at a time.

    On 8 March, about 80% of the TVCs on the team – 34 people – were informed that their contracts were ending ahead of schedule, either on 5 April or, in a few cases, on 31 July, according to the letter.

    The layoffs took place around the globe, starting in Seoul, and hitting London just as TVCs in New York were heading to work.

    “During the process, our managers and the full-time workers on our team were silent,” the letter states. “Google told them that offering support or even thanking us for years of work would make the company legally liable. Our teammates were told to distance themselves from us at the moment when we were most in need – just so that Google could avoid legal responsibility.”

    https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/apr/02/google-workers-sign-letter-temp-contractors-protest

  • The EU Is Pissed at Steam for Region-Locking Games

    “Valve believes that the EC’s extension of liability to a platform provider in these circumstances is not supported by applicable law,” he wrote. Lombardi claimed that without the ability to geo-block games in the EU, publishers will have to raise prices in “less affluent regions” to avoid people in more affluent regions buying games there rather than at home. Traditionally, prices on Steam vary from region to region.

    The recipients of the Commission’s objections will now have the opportunity to examine the Commission’s investigation files, respond in writing, and request a hearing. If the Commission concludes that there was an infringement, it could prohibit the alleged conduct and impose a fine of “up to 10% of a company’s annual worldwide turnover.”

    https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/panj7v/the-eu-is-pissed-at-steam-for-region-locking-games

Photo by DJ Johnson on Unsplash

Posted on

Supplier Report: 3/29/2019

The tech industry is focused on playing games. Google has dedicated significant time and energy on a cloud-based gaming platform, and Apple is rumored to be announcing a service soon. Meanwhile, gaming veteran Microsoft is expected to have a major service update as well.

These companies are spending tons of money on retail, consumer-based services. Xbox shows it can be profitable, but is there money if the market keeps splintering?

Meanwhile Oracle is quietly going through a round of job eliminations and the President of the United States and his staff continue to struggle with technology.

Acquisitions

  • Apple Has Reportedly Acquired Italian Startup Stamplay

    Stamplay describes itself as a “low code workflow automation platform, empowering organizations to streamline manual work by integrating data and business applications used every day.” The “API-based development platform” enables developers to build and launch “full-featured cloud-based web apps.”

    https://www.macrumors.com/2019/03/21/apple-reportedly-acquired-stamplay/

Artificial Intelligence

  • Trump’s views about ‘crazy’ self-driving cars are at odds with his DOT

    Just last week during SXSW in Austin, Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao announced the creation of the Non-Traditional and Emerging Transportation Technology (NETT) Council, an internal organization designed to resolve jurisdictional and regulatory gaps that may impede the deployment of new technology, such as tunneling, hyperloop, autonomous vehicles and other innovations.

    “New technologies increasingly straddle more than one mode of transportation, so I’ve signed an order creating a new internal Department council to better coordinate the review of innovation that have multi-modal applications,” Chao said in a prepared statement at the time.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/18/trumps-views-about-crazy-self-driving-cars-are-at-odds-with-his-dot/

  • Oracle adds more AI features to its suite of sales tools

    Rob Tarkoff, who had previous stints at EMC, Adobe and Lithium, and is now EVP of Oracle CX Cloud says that the company has found ways to increase efficiency in the sales and marketing process by using artificial intelligence to speed up previously manual workflows, while taking advantage of all the data that is part of modern sales and marketing.

    For starters, the company wants to help managers and salespeople understand the market better to identify the best prospects in the pipeline. To that end, Oracle is announcing integration with DataFox, the company it purchased last fall. The acquisition gave Oracle the ability to integrate highly detailed company profiles into their Customer Experience Cloud, including information such as SEC filings, job postings, news stories and other data about the company.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/19/oracle-adds-more-ai-features-to-its-suite-of-sales-tools/

  • What AI Is Still Far From Figuring Out

    The basic technique is to give the computer millions of examples of games, images or previous judgments and to provide feedback. Which moves led to a high score? Which pictures did people label as dogs? What did the curators or judges decide in particular cases? The computer can then use machine learning techniques to try to figure out how to achieve the same objectives. In fact, machines have gotten better and better at learning how to win games or match human judgments. They often detect subtle statistical cues in the data that humans can’t even understand.

    But people also can decide to change their objectives. A great judge can argue that slavery should be outlawed or that homosexuality should no longer be illegal. A great curator can make the case for an unprecedented new kind of art, like Cubism or Abstract Expressionism, that is very different from anything in the past.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-ai-is-still-far-from-figuring-out-11553112473

Cloud

  • Google is about to reveal its plan to take on the $140 billion gaming industry, but experts are skeptical it has a chance

    Google’s streaming service could change that model by letting users stream top games to the devices they already own, like a laptop, smartphone or streaming box connected to a TV.

    “Cloud gaming will enable publishers to broaden their reach even further by potentially taping into new audiences on any device and any screen,” Forrester vice president and principal analyst Thomas Husson told CNBC. “Beyond music or video, gaming represents another opportunity to offer recurring streaming revenues for companies in the gaming ecosystem. For cloud platforms like Amazon, Google or Microsoft, it will also become an opportunity to offer cloud storage and services to game publishers, who spend more and more in their IT infrastructure.”

    https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/17/google-yeti-gaming-announcement-expectations.html

    Apple might reveal its game subscription service at Monday’s event

    For the game bundle subscription, Bloomberg notes that Apple is “likely considering” paid games only. Any titles that depend on a freemium model — free-to-play but with in-app purchases — won’t be part of the deal. That would result in hits like Fortnite and PUBG Mobile being left out, but Minecraft, Stardew Valley, Heads Up!, Monument Valley 1 and 2, and NBA 2K19 are all the kind of paid games that could be eligible.

    Customers would be charged monthly to access a bundle of those premium games, and game developers would be paid based on how frequently members of the service play their title. “The company would collect these monthly fees, then divide up the revenue between developers based on how much time users spend playing their games,” Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman said.

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/23/18278450/apple-gaming-subscription-service-iphone-ipad-march-25-rumor
    Microsoft’s Xbox boss responds to Google Stadia, promises ‘we will go big’ for E3

    Thurrott has published the full memo, and it reveals that Spencer feels validated by Google’s efforts. “Their announcement is validation of the path we embarked on two years ago,” says Spencer. Microsoft is also creating its own cloud gaming service, dubbed xCloud, that will rival Google and many others for streaming games to phones, tablets, PCs, and TVs. Microsoft recently demonstrated xCloud publicly for the first time, and it’s promising trials of the service later this year.

    “There were no big surprises in their announcement although I was impressed by their leveraging of YouTube, the use of Google Assistant and the new WiFi controller,” explains Spencer in his memo. Google is leveraging YouTube to allow people to view game clips and then instantly launch the game, or share an exact game save to the video service.

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/20/18273991/google-stadia-microsoft-xbox-phil-spencer-response-comments

  • Giant Military Contract Has a Hitch: A Little-Known Entrepreneur

    The software giant Oracle, which is widely considered ill equipped to land the deal, has aggressively criticized the one-vendor approach. As part of its opposition, the company is arguing in federal court that Mr. Ubhi’s ties to Amazon shaped the contract in the company’s favor

    Before the case was filed last year, the Pentagon found that Mr. Ubhi had no improper influence, and it continued evaluating the proposals despite Oracle’s lawsuit. But in late February, the government said it had received “new information” about Mr. Ubhi that it needed to investigate, essentially delaying the process.

    A Pentagon spokeswoman, Elissa Smith, declined to say what new information about Mr. Ubhi had been brought to the department’s attention. The Pentagon had said that the winner of the contract was projected to be announced in April. But Ms. Smith said the inquiry into Mr. Ubhi was “expected to impact the award date.”

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/20/technology/military-contract-deap-ubhi.html

Security

  • Facebook admits it stored ‘hundreds of millions’ of account passwords in plaintext

    Facebook confirmed Thursday in a blog post, prompted by a report by cybersecurity reporter Brian Krebs, that it stored “hundreds of millions” of account passwords in plaintext for years.

    The discovery was made in January, said Facebook’s Pedro Canahuati, as part of a routine security review. None of the passwords were visible to anyone outside Facebook, he said. Facebook admitted the security lapse months later, after Krebs said logs were accessible to some 2,000 engineers and developers.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/21/facebook-plaintext-passwords/
    What a surprise, an article about Facebook not properly managing personal data…

  • Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump Use Private Accounts for Official Business, Their Lawyer Says

    The chairman, Representative Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, said that a lawyer for Ms. Trump, President Trump’s daughter, and Mr. Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, told the committee late last year that in addition to a private email account, Mr. Kushner uses an unofficial encrypted messaging service, WhatsApp, for official White House business, including with foreign contacts.

    Mr. Cummings said the lawyer, Abbe Lowell, also told lawmakers that Ms. Trump did not preserve some emails sent to her private account if she did not reply to them.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/21/us/politics/jared-kushner-whatsapp.html

Software/SaaS

  • IBM Launches A Blockchain-Based Global Payments Network

    IBM has now revealed a World Wire, which is a real-time global payments network for the regulated financial institutions, that is accessible in a growing number of markets.

    The payment system which is designed to simply optimize and accelerate the foreign exchange, remittances and cross border payments. World Wire is the first blockchain network as of now its kind to integrate the payment messaging, clearing and settlement on a single unified network, which even allows the participants to dynamically choose from a wide range of digital assets for settlement.

    World Wide has also enabled payment location in more than 70 countries, with 44 bank points and 47 currencies. Some of the local regulations will continue to guide the activation, and IBM is now actively growing the network with additional financial institutions across the globe.

    https://www.techiexpert.com/ibm-launches-a-blockchain-based-global-payments-network/

  • How Salesforce paved the way for the SaaS platform approach

    It turns out that Force.com was actually the culmination of a series of incremental steps after the launch of the first version of Salesforce in February, 2000, all of which were designed to make the software more flexible for customers. Company co-founder and CTO Parker Harris says they didn’t have this goal to be a platform early on. “We were a solution first, I would say. We didn’t say ‘let’s build a platform and then build sales-force automation on top of it.’ We wanted a solution that people could actually use,” Harris told TechCrunch.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/22/how-salesforce-paved-the-way-for-the-saas-platform-approach/

Infrastructure/Hardware

  • Microsoft Says the FCC ‘Overstates’ Broadband Availability in the US

    Microsoft this week was the latest to highlight the US government’s terrible broadband mapping in a filing with the FCC, first spotted by journalist Wendy Davis. In it, Microsoft accuses the FCC of over-stating actual broadband availability and urges the agency to do better.

    “For example, in some areas the Commission’s broadband availability data suggests that ISPs have reported significant broadband availability (25 Mbps down/3 Mbps up) while Microsoft’s usage data indicates that only a small percentage of consumers actually access the Internet at broadband speeds in those areas,” Microsoft said.

    https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/pan48b/microsoft-says-the-fcc-overstates-broadband-availability-in-the-us

  • Apple will let you add 256GB of RAM to an iMac Pro for $5,200

    You could buy a second iMac Pro for the cost of that single RAM upgrade. To put that in perspective compared to Apple’s other RAM upgrades, the iMac Pro comes with 32GB of RAM by default. Upgrading to 64GB costs an extra $400, and upgrading to 128GB costs an extra $2,000. Both of those prices are dwarfed by the new 256GB option.

    https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/3/19/18272523/apple-256gb-ram-imac-pro-5200-update-configure-build

  • How phones went from $200 to $2,000

    That’s in large part because phones are getting harder to sell. Far more people own a smartphone today than just a few years ago, and people are holding on to their phones for longer (perhaps because they’re so good, or perhaps because those two-year contracts are dead). That’s left smartphone makers with an option if they don’t want to see their revenues fall: sell more phones or sell more expensive phones. Obviously, they’ve chosen the latter.

    We’ve seen options for bigger screens and more storage push the price for flagship phones into the $1,500 range. Even the starting price for today’s flagships is closer to $1,000 than the $649 of just a few years ago.

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/18/18263584/why-phones-are-so-expensive-price-apple-samsung-google

Other

  • Oracle Swings the Layoff Axe and Clear-cuts Teams of Engineers

    Rumors are flying, but the count appears to be heading into the thousands worldwide, with the lowest estimate at 500. One anonymous poster on theLayoff.com, a site that hosts discussion boards for people affected by layoffs, appeared to offer real numbers, indicating that the total target is 10 percent of Oracle’s global head count, which in 2018 was around 137,000. Cuts will be made in three phases this year, he indicated, with around 5000 employees cut in this first phase.

    Layoffs are nothing new for Oracle; in 2017 the company slashed nearly 1000 jobs in Silicon Valley, mostly from its SPARC and Solaris teams. But the sudden and secretive nature of this layoff operation came as a surprise to employees and observers. The lack of transparency and abruptness of the operation was reminiscent of IBM’s waves of layoffs in the past.

    https://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/at-work/tech-careers/oracle-swings-the-layoff-axe-and-clearcuts-teams-of-engineers.amp.html

  • Google hit with another EU antitrust fine: The grand total now comes to €8.2B

    This morning, the European Union slapped Google with a €1.5 billion fine, which comes to a little over $1.7 billion. This latest fine was over its antitrust practices with its advertising business.

    Essentially, for years Google didn’t allow its AdSense customers to feature rival search engines on their sites. Over the years, the company eased up on these rules, but European officials still decided the practice amounted to illegal behavior. This may be an especially tough blow for Google, since AdSense’s contribution to the company’s overall revenue has been steadily decreasing over the last six-plus years, according to Bloomberg.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90322678/google-hit-with-another-eu-antitrust-fine-the-grand-total-now-comes-to-e8-2b

Photo by JESHOOTS.COM on Unsplash

Posted on

Supplier Report: 3/22/2019

The technology industry saw multiple outages last week. Apple, Facebook, and Google all suffered from seemingly unrelated issues bringing services down. Facebook experienced their biggest outage in years.  The combination of these events highlight that the internet and online services are still fragile.

Apple suffered additional bad news with a ruling that the company infringed on Qualcomm’s intellectual property and will owe Qualcomm $31M.

On the topic of owing money… the EU is looking to shove their hands in Google’s pockets one more time.

Acquisitions

  • Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox, Its Biggest Deal Ever at Roughly $7 Billion

    With Mellanox, Nvidia is buying a maker of Ethernet switches and adapters that connect computers to each other, wiring together networks where users can rapidly exchange information. The company is a major supplier of equipment that conforms to the so-called InfiniBand networking standard widely used in supercomputers.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/nvidia-to-acquire-mellanox-for-about-7-billion-11552304615?ns=prod/accounts-wsj

  • Apple Acquires Machine Learning Startup in Boost for AI Group

    Laserlike was active for four years and concentrated on an “interest search engine” that could fetch news, video, and general Web content relative to each user. A key assumption was that people may want to know about things that don’t necessarily pop up in their usual sources, such as a car recall or an upcoming music festival. The app for the engine is no longer available.

    The Laserlike crew has reportedly joined Apple’s AI division, led by John Giannandrea, who was hired away from Google in 2018. His unit oversees the strategy for AI and Machine Learning across all Apple products, as well as the development of Core ML and Siri.

    https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/03/13/apple-confirms-buyout-of-machine-learning-startup-laserlike

Artificial Intelligence

  • DeepMind and Google: the battle to control artificial intelligence

    Google’s financial heft was attractive, yet, like many founders, Hassabis was reluctant to hand over the company he had nurtured. As part of the deal, DeepMind created an arrangement that would prevent Google from unilaterally taking control of the company’s intellectual property. In the year leading up to acquisition, according to a person familiar with the transaction, both parties signed a contract called the Ethics and Safety Review Agreement. The agreement, previously unreported, was drawn up by senior barristers in London.

    The Review Agreement puts control of DeepMind’s core AGI technology, whenever it may be created, in the hands of a governing panel known as the Ethics Board. Far from being a cosmetic concession from Google, the Ethics Board gives DeepMind solid legal backing to keep control of its most valuable and potentially most dangerous technology, according to the same source.

    https://www.1843magazine.com/features/deepmind-and-google-the-battle-to-control-artificial-intelligence

Cloud

  • Oracle’s Revenue Declines as It Struggles to Catch Up in Cloud Services

    Oracle has been slower than some of its rivals to develop cloud-computing technology—services customers rent on demand over the web. That has put competitors in a better position to win business as customers shift away from managing their own computing operations.

    The company expects to post revenue that is flat to down 2% in the current quarter, co-Chief Executive Safra Catz said during a conference call with analysts. Oracle shares, which fell a penny to $53.05 during regular trading Thursday, slid 3.9% after hours.

    Brad Reback, an analyst at Stifel Nicolaus & Co., said the current spending environment for information technology is the most robust in two decades. “The world is passing Oracle by,” he said.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/oracles-revenue-declines-1-11552595788

Software/SaaS

  • Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are still down for some users around the world

    According to DownDetector, it looks like the outages are mainly in New England; Texas; Seattle, Washington; parts of Latin America, including Peru; the UK; India; and the Philippines. Users have written in from Canada, Las Vegas, and Turkey to note outages there as well. We’ve reached out to Facebook and Instagram to learn more.

    Also

    It wasn’t until over 24 hours later that Facebook finally gave the all clear, attributing the downtime to a “server configuration change.” “We’ve now resolved the issues and our systems are recovering. We’re very sorry for the inconvenience and appreciate everyone’s patience,” the company said via Twitter.

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/13/18264092/facebook-instagram-down-partially-post-messages-profile-loading

  • Apple’s iCloud recovers after a four-hour outage

    The company’s system status dashboard was blanketed in yellow warning notes for more than four hours Thursday, indicating mass outages of its iCloud service.

    The page didn’t offer much in terms of detail as to why the services experienced problems, only saying that “some users are affected” and “users may be unable to access this service.” Apple didn’t say what caused the outage once iCloud recovered.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/14/apples-icloud-is-having-an-outage-too/

  • And Google had an outage too…

    At Google, some services, including Gmail, were slowed or outright inaccessible from Tuesday evening into early Wednesday on the East Coast. Google blamed a “cascading failure” that began after its engineers made tweaks to an internal storage service.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-and-instagram-suffer-lengthy-outages-11552539752

  • After the “adult content” ban, Tumblr users have ditched the platform as promised

    Tumblr’s global traffic in December clocked in at 521 million, but it had dropped to 370 million by February, web analytics firm SimilarWeb tells The Verge. Statista reports a similar trend in the number of unique visitors. By January 2019, only over 437 million visited Tumblr, compared to a high of 642 million visitors in July 2018.

    https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/14/18266013/tumblr-porn-ban-lost-users-down-traffic
    This is an example of a company putting a goal or objective over profit. They had to know that was going to happen.

  • Apple Music launches on Amazon Fire TV

    This change of pace from Apple’s standard walled-garden approach to services was most prevalent at CES 2019 where Apple said that iTunes will soon be available on Samsung smart TVs. In what was eventually dubbed a bug, Apple Music also appeared briefly on Google Home units but was never active before it was pulled offline.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/13/apple-music-for-amazon-fire-tv.html

Other

  • A Better Way to Break Up Big Tech

    The problem with applying a one-size-fits-four model to tech, as the industry analyst Ben Thompson has written, is that the large tech companies have different business models that pose different anti-competitive risks. The stranglehold that Google and Facebook have on the digital advertising market is different from the way Amazon muscles out e-commerce brands, which is different from the way Apple uses its App Store to force burdensome terms on developers.

    The possibility of unintended consequences means that tailoring regulations to address each of these problems is important. A law that banned Amazon from competing with third-party sellers on its platform could also cripple Chromebook laptops, or prevent iPhone users from getting access to their iTunes libraries.

    Rather than one giant package that crams everything together, a set of effective tech regulations would treat each problem discretely, and address each with surgical precision.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/13/technology/elizabeth-warren-tech-companies.html

  • Facebook’s Data Deals Are Under Criminal Investigation

    It is not clear when the grand jury inquiry, overseen by prosecutors with the United States attorney’s office for the Eastern District of New York, began or exactly what it is focusing on. Facebook was already facing scrutiny by the Federal Trade Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission. And the Justice Department’s securities fraud unit began investigating it after reports that Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm, had improperly obtained the Facebook data of 87 million people and used it to build tools that helped President Trump’s election campaign.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/13/technology/facebook-data-deals-investigation.html

  • Apple dealt legal blow as jury awards Qualcomm $31 million

    The $31 million in damages — or $1.41 per infringing iPhone — is a drop in the bucket for Apple, a company that briefly became a $1 trillion company last year. But it marks an important victory for Qualcomm, burnishing its reputation as a mobile components innovator. The win also lends credibility to the notion that much of the company’s innovation is reflected in iPhones.

    https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-qualcomm-patent-infringement-verdict/

  • Google faces third EU antitrust fine next week: source

    Alphabet unit Google is likely to be hit with a third EU antitrust fine next week related to its AdSense advertising service, a person familiar with the matter said on Friday, with the sanction expected to be much smaller than previous fines.

    The AdSense case may not be end of Google’s EU antitrust woes.

    EU antitrust enforcers have asked Google’s rivals if it unfairly demotes local search competitors, according to a questionnaire seen by Reuters, a move which could lead to a fourth case.

    https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-google-antitrust-idUSKCN1QW1X0

Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

Posted on

Supplier Report: 2/22/2019

Amazon has disappointed or energized certain groups of people (depending on who you talk to) by retreating from their NYC expansion plans. Both sides are still pondering if this is a good thing for New York.

Regardless, the company continues to grow through acquisitions and leveraging their market position to gain access to behavioral data.

Meanwhile, IBM finds itself defending Watson (again) by claiming they did not overhype their AI’s capabilities (they did). The company is looking to build off their Red Hat acquisition to help companies address real integration issues and not “just porting applications to the cloud”.

Acquisitions

  • Democrats want to take another look at the T-Mobile-Sprint merger

    In the ten months since T-Mobile first announced its intention to buy up its competitor, the company has cozied up to the Trump administration. The company’s executives spent more than 50 nights at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, DC. T-Mobile CEO John Legere spent two night in the hotel and paid a rate of $2,246 per night, according to the Washington Post. That activity is likely to be viewed as an attempt to buy favor with the president and will come up during this week’s hearings.

    The hearings this week won’t have a direct influence on the government’s decision on whether to allow the purchase to go forward or not. The Justice Department and the Federal Communications Commission get to approve or deny the merger based on their own investigations that will look into antitrust concerns and other potential harms. However, the hearings may turn up new information that would give regulators pause. Legere told investors last week that he believes the merger will be completed by June.

    https://www.engadget.com/2019/02/13/democrats-house-hearings-t-mobile-sprint-merger/

  • Amazon buys Eero: What does it mean for your privacy?

    Deluged in a swarm of angry tweets and social media posts, many have taken to reading tea leaves to try to understand what the acquisition means for ordinary privacy-minded folks like you and me. Not many had much love for Amazon on the privacy front. A lot of people like Eero because it wasn’t attached to one of the big tech giants. Now it’s to be part of Amazon, some are anticipating the worst for their privacy.

    Of the many concerns we’ve seen, the acquisition boils down to a key concern: “Amazon shouldn’t have access to all internet traffic.”

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/12/amazon-eero-privacy/

  • Apple buys voice app startup Pullstring

    Pullstring was founded in 2011 by a group of former Pixar executives, and originally was used to power interactive voice apps for toys (including Hello Barbie in 2015). It later broadened its approach with the introduction of such IoT products as Amazon Echo and Google Assistant.

    https://www.axios.com/apple-voice-app-pullstring-080b45b6-bbb4-466f-b60a-b87c932e2f57.html

Artificial Intelligence

  • IBM CEO Ginni Rometty: ‘We Never Overpromised’ on Watson A.I.

    Pretty much the entire world believes IBM overhyped its Watson artificial intelligence technology. Rometty isn’t one of those people. “We never overpromised,” she says, allowing, though, that “the world was mesmerized by this idea” and that the whole tech industry has learned that “you cannot just put AI on top of existing workflows.” Rometty somewhat shockingly re-framed how people should think about Watson, the subject of years of IBM’s marketing efforts. “People ask, ‘What’s the size of the Watson business?’” she says. “People want to call it a business. I call it a capability.”

    http://fortune.com/2019/02/14/ibm-ceo-rometty-ai-watson/

Cloud

  • After limping through chapter one of cloud computing, IBM aims to own chapter two

    Chapter one of the cloud represented about 20 percent of the workload opportunity. It was largely about moving a lot of new and customer-facing applications to the cloud. Chapter two is about the hard stuff. It’s about scaling artificial intelligence and creating hybrid clouds. It’s about bringing the cloud operating model to all those mission-critical apps and enabling customers to manage data, workloads and apps and move them between multiple clouds. This is a trillion-dollar opportunity and IBM intends to be No. 1.

    To claim a leadership position in this next chapter, IBM is spending $34 billion to acquire open-source software leader Red Hat Inc. This is a huge move on the chessboard, underscoring that the IBM Cloud and a decade of trying to commercialize the AI-powered Watson system aren’t enough to win the day. Rather, it sees open source, Kubernetes, containers, microservices and developers as a lynchpin to success in the next chapter of cloud.

    https://siliconangle.com/2019/02/14/limping-chapter-one-cloud-computing-ibm-aims-chapter-two/

  • Oracle Shares End Higher After Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Dumps Stake

    Berkshire Hathaway’s portfolio of around 90 U.S.-listed stocks lost around $38 billion in value over the three months ending in December, the SEC filings noted, as the S&P 500 slumped nearly 15% in a global market sell-off triggered by slowing growth and a then-hawkish U.S. Federal Reserve. Berkshire Hathaway told the SEC in its November filing that it had owned 41.4 million shares in Oracle at the end of the end of the third quarter after it had exited a holding in IBM (IBM – Get Report) earlier in the year.

    Oracle surprised investors with a bullish 2019 outlook late last year when it posted stronger-than-expected second quarter earnings and said growth in its cloud computing business would support sales and improve profit margins.

    The company also said it sees current quarter earnings of between 86 cents and 88 cents a share, topping the 84 cent Street forecasts, and said it expects full year revenue growth of around 3% on a constant currency basis.

    https://www.thestreet.com/investing/stocks/oracle-shares-slide-after-warren-buffet-s-berkshire-hathaway-dumps-stake-14867890

Software/SaaS

  • Barclaycard Integrates B2B Payments Tech To SAP Ariba

    The integration will roll out later this year with the addition of Precisionpay Bank Transfer within the SAP Ariba platform. Corporate buyers can pay their vendors via virtual card, with suppliers receiving payment the same way they receive a bank transfer. Barclaycard noted that its collaboration with SAP Ariba could also link business buyers to supply chain financing, giving companies up to 56 days to pay their invoices while suppliers receive payment more quickly.

    https://www.pymnts.com/news/b2b-payments/2019/barclaycard-sap-ariba/

  • Oracle CEO Mark Hurd throws shade at SAP’s $8 billion Qualtrics acquisition: We don’t buy companies ‘to just buy them’

    “We’re not buying somebody to just buy them. We’re buying companies that fit into our portfolio,” Hurd said onstage at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference on Wednesday, in response to a question from the on-stage interviewer about how Oracle and SAP approach acquisitions.

    In November, SAP announced it would acquire online market research software startup Qualtrics for $8 billion. The news came close to the last possible second, as Qualtrics was about to go public. Hurd’s comments were almost certainly in reference to this very recent mega-deal.

    Also:

    Hurd also said that he disagreed with SAP asking customers to completely transition to its cloud-based S/4HANA platform by 2025. After that, SAP will stop providing support for its very popular Business Suite enterprise software.

    “I think that is just a terrible damn idea,” Hurd said. “Let’s say you go to your board and say, ‘We’re going to move from this thing to this other thing, and it’s going to cost $350 million.’ My guess is, the board will say, ‘What do we get for $350 million?’ Well, we moved from this thing to the HANA thing.”

    https://factsand.news/2019/02/14/tech/oracle-ceo-mark-hurd-throws-shade-at-saps-8-billion-qualtrics-acquisition-we-dont-buy-companies-to-just-buy-them-orcl-sap/

Datacenter/Hardware

  • Google will have offices and data centers in 24 states by the end of 2019

    The company is launching a $13 billion expansion in 2019 that will give it a total US footprint of 24 states, including “major expansions” in 14 states. The growth includes its first data center in Nevada, a new office in Georgia, and multi-facility expansions in places like Texas and Virginia. This is on top of known projects like its future New York City campus.

    https://www.engadget.com/2019/02/13/google-expands-us-footprint/

Other

  • Amazon is becoming too pervasive, anti-competitive

    To put this in old-fashioned terms, Amazon owns the mall, rents space to retailers, controls access to customers, collects data on every sale while also operating the largest store in the mall. And if one of the smaller retailers show some success, Amazon will compete with them.

    Yet that is not enough for CEO Jeff Bezos, because 90 percent of retail sales still take place in brick-and-mortar buildings. Amazon has bought grocery giant Whole Foods, launched Amazon Go convenience stores and opened Amazon kiosks in shopping malls. The company is reportedly looking at old Sears stores to add more retail and warehouse space.

    https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/columnists/tomlinson/article/Amazon-is-becoming-too-pervasive-anti-competitive-13588822.php

  • Amazon’s HQ2 New York plans didn’t need to end this way

    While it’s fair on some level that Amazon felt stymied by this political climate, the company still seems petty at the end of all this. As a tech and retail titan that is nearly impossible to avoid in daily life, the company has come to expect a certain level of fealty from the people and organizations it deals with. It’s used to walking into a room and getting what it wants. In this case, dealing with activists, vocal critics and pressure from key lawmakers meant Amazon wasn’t going to have another typically easy time — the line of thinking appears to be that, as helpful as another campus would be, it wouldn’t be worth the trouble. Lots of brilliant people work at Amazon, though; is it possible that no one saw the red tape coming?

    I have a hard time believing that Amazon couldn’t have handled this better. Could it have managed the conversation better? Could it have been more transparent in its dealings? Could it have tried to work more closely, more functionally with the lawmakers involved? Does this whole thing now feel like a huge waste of time? Yes, to all of the above.

    https://www.engadget.com/2019/02/16/amazon-hq2-new-york-waste-of-time/

Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash

Posted on

Supplier Report: 2/1/2019

Microsoft purchased an open source database company continuing a trend they started with the acquisition of GitHub. As the company embraces open source, the open source community is grumbling about what happens when large software companies get involved with open source (see Amazon’s use and then discarding of MongoDB).

Speaking of Amazon, the company is getting serious about advertising, and they have access to massive amounts of personalized purchasing habit information. The company not only sells products, makes products, tracks behavior – it will have the ability to market to you as well. That certainly feels… intrusive.

Acquisitions

  • Microsoft buys an open source database startup to give it an edge against Amazon Web Services

    On Thursday, Microsoft announced it has acquired Citus Data, an open source database startup. Citus Data was first founded in 2010, and raised a relatively meager $13.2 million in venture capital funding in that time.

    What Citus Data does is take PostgreSQL, a database management system that’s popular with developers, and transform it into databases that can be dispersed over multiple computers. That gives developers the ability to bring their databases to ever-larger scales, for even the most demanding apps.

    https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-acquires-open-source-postgresql-startup-citus-data-2019-1

Artificial Intelligence

  • One-quarter of jobs are at ‘high-risk’ of being automated

    Roles in transportation, food prep, production and office admin are among those at highest risk, with robotics and artificial intelligence threatening to automate in the neighborhood of 70 percent of tasks, according to the study. Activities involving processing, data collection and physical labor are, unsurprisingly, most at risk here.

    Automation is expected to have an outsized impact in certain regions in the country, and among less well educated workers. Likewise, it’s expect to impact different segments of the population in different ways.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/26/one-quarter-of-jobs-are-at-high-risk-of-being-automated/

  • Blue Prism to issue $130M in stock to raise new funds

    CEO Alastair Bathgate attempted to put the announcement in the best possible light. “The outcome of this placing, which builds on another year of significant progress for the company, highlights the meteoric growth opportunity with RPA and intelligent automation,” he said in a statement.

    While the company’s revenue more than doubled last fiscal year, from £24.5 million (approximately $32 million) in 2017 to £55.2 million (approximately $72 million) in 2018, losses also increased dramatically, from £10.1 million (approximately $13 million) in 2017 to £26.0 million (approximately $34 million), according to reports.

    https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/24/blue-prism-to-issue-130m-in-stock-to-raise-new-funds/

Cloud

  • Amazon probed for potential conflict over $10B Pentagon contract

    Amazon Web Services (AWS) re-hired a former employee who left the company briefly to work at the Department of Defense, where he reportedly worked for the military’s cloud division Opens a New Window. and on the contract in question, as first reported by The Washington Post.

    A potential competitor for the bid, Oracle, has filed a lawsuit claiming the Pentagon needs to look into the role of the employee and whether the process is unfairly biased toward Amazon.

    While an official for the department previously said the employee’s work on the project did not impact the integrity of the procurement, the filing also noted that the agency is considering whether there is a conflict of interest now that AWS has submitted a bid for the contract.

    https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/amazons-bid-for-10b-pentagon-contract-under-review

  • IBM Smashes Analyst Estimates, But Can it Catch Cloud Rivals Amazon & Google?

    For the quarter, IBM pulled in $21.76 billion in revenue. While impressive, that figure is lower than what was reported for Q4 2017. Back then, IBM reported $22.54 billion in revenue.

    IBM’s cloud service offerings fall into its strategic imperatives group, which reaped almost $40 billion in revenue in 2018. Cloud revenue contributed about $19 billion of that, which was 12 percent higher than it was in 2017.

    https://www.ccn.com/ibm-smashes-analyst-estimates-but-can-it-catch-cloud-rivals-amazon-google/

Security

  • Google fined $57m by French regulator for breaching GDPR

    The regulator hit Google on two points: for making it difficult for users to see the detail on why and how they should give consent in order to be sent personalized ads, and for providing a pre-ticked option when requesting consent.

    CNIL has decided that essential information such as data processing purposes, the data storage periods or the categories of personal data used for sending personalized ads are “excessively disseminated” across several documents. This means users can only view the details after clicking through several pages.

    https://digiday.com/media/google-fined-57m-french-regulator-breaching-gdpr/

  • Amazon knows what you buy, and it’s built a $125-billion dollar ad business off it that’s a marketer’s dream

    But many ad agencies are particularly excited by another area of advertising that is less obvious to many consumers. The company has been steadily expanding its business of selling video or display ads — the square and rectangular ads on sites across the web — and gaining ground on the industry leaders, Google and Facebook.

    In addition to knowing what people buy, Amazon also knows where people live, because they provide delivery addresses, and which credit cards they use. It knows how old their children are from their baby registries, and who has a cold, right now, from cough syrup ordered for two-hour delivery. And the company has been expanding a self-service option for ad agencies and brands to take advantage of its data on shoppers.

    https://business.financialpost.com/news/retail-marketing/amazon-knows-what-you-buy-and-its-built-a-125-billion-dollar-ad-business-thats-a-marketers-dream

Software/SaaS

  • Zuckerberg Plans to Integrate WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger

    The services will continue to operate as stand-alone apps, but their underlying technical infrastructure will be unified, said four people involved in the effort. That will bring together three of the world’s largest messaging networks, which between them have more than 2.6 billion users, allowing people to communicate across the platforms for the first time.

    The move has the potential to redefine how billions of people use the apps to connect with one another while strengthening Facebook’s grip on users, raising antitrust, privacy and security questions. It also underscores how Mr. Zuckerberg is imposing his authority over units he once vowed to leave alone.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/technology/facebook-instagram-whatsapp-messenger.html

  • PNC, IBM, And Aetna Set To Explore Blockchain Technology For Medical Health Plans

    According to IBM, more members will join this network in the months to come. These members will come from the healthcare industry, technology industry and other startups. After the announcement, the general manager for payers at IBM Watson Health, Barbara Hayes said:

    “While IBM is among the founding members, it is not the only one with a stake. Every founding member involved has an equal stake. It is vital because you don’t have side by side competitors struggling for waste in the healthcare sector 40 to 50 cents on the dollar. In the healthcare sector, these inefficiencies are found in administrative and clinical areas. Sometimes, it may be just friction in the system that ripple into bad customer experience.”

    https://smartereum.com/46967/blockchain-technology-pnc-ibm-and-aetna-set-to-explore-blockchain-technology-for-medical-health-plans-blockchain-news-today/

    IBM is finally starting to realize that companies are not going to pay for unproven technology. It is a shame they weren’t open to partnering to this degree a few years ago.

Other

  • Oracle underpaid thousands of women, minorities, government charges

    The Department of Labor (DoL) accused Oracle of widespread discriminatory wage practices that resulted in the loss of more than $400 million in wages for female, black and Asian employees, according to a federal complaint filed on Tuesday.

    According to the filing, the Silicon Valley giant underpaid women in jobs in its product development, information technology and support job functions, resulting in pay disparities as high as 20 percent, affecting more than 5,000 women. The DoL also alleged that it underpaid black employees, with disparities as high as 7.5 percent, and Asian employees, with gaps as high as 8 percent.

    https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/oracle-deliberately-underpaid-thousands-of-women-minorities-lawsuit-says

    Oracle Could Lose $100 Million Annually in Federal Contracts Over Pay Discrimination Suit

    The situation threatens an estimated $100 million a year that Oracle gets in federal contracts. The original DOL complaint seeks “an order canceling all of Oracle’s federal government contracts and subcontracts.”

    http://fortune.com/2019/01/23/oracle-discrimination-lawsuit/

  • U.S. Believes It Doesn’t Need to Show ‘Proof’ Huawei Is a Spy Threat

    U.S. intelligence officials have suggested at times that their views on Huawei are informed by definitive examples of malfeasance, though they have so far refused to share such evidence publicly. When the House Intelligence Committee in 2012 published an unclassified report naming Huawei as a security risk, it spoke generally about a lack of trust lawmakers placed in China but steered clear of providing concrete examples of the company being caught engaging in nefarious activity.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-believes-it-doesnt-need-to-show-proof-huawei-is-a-spy-threat-11548288297?ns=prod/accounts-wsj