Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

October 20, 2015

Digital currency is poised to reinvent how startups are funded

The blockchain allows digital items to be both authentic and scarce. Beyond simply providing the backbone for digital currency like Bitcoin and Litecoin, the blockchain can also be used to publish inalterable public records of, for example, asset ownership. Chroma Fund offers blockchain-based digital share certificates for each company that investors fund. Because the blockchain can be used to verify the authenticity of digital items, digital items can then achieve scarcity similar to that of a physical, material good. While the Chroma Fund share certificate is not a paper, because its authenticity is tied to the blockchain the share becomes a unique, discrete item that can be traded and sold with trust.

Internet of Things standards groups get ready to rumble at CES

Having a house full of locks, lights, appliances and thermostats that can communicate with each other and the cloud is critical to getting value from those purchases. For example, a connected door lock is worth a lot more if it can tell a thermostat that you’ve come home and the heat should go on. Unless all the pieces come from the same company, they need a shared, cross-vendor language for finding and understanding each other. AllSeen is offering its AllJoyn framework to fill that need. OIC is promoting its own standard and a reference implementation called IoTivity. The first full version of the OIC standard was completed last month. Apple’s HomeKit system, and the Weave platform developed by Nest, now part of Google’s Alphabet universe, may also give those standards a run for their money.

Mercedes-Benz liberates the road to autonomy with connected car app

Users of the Mercedes Me app will no longer have to worry about getting into a freezing car on a winter morning or a hotbox on a summer afternoon, and accidentally locking themselves out of their cars will also be a thing of the past. The app, for iPhone and Apple Watch, will allow consumers to monitor a vehicle’s vitals and temperature from afar, as well as to lock and unlock the door from even further away than a remote-operated key. “When designed and developed right, connected apps can offer consumers the utility and convenience they desire,” said Sep Seyedi, CEO of Plastic Mobile. “In turn, brands are not only supporting the post purchase journey but continuing to drive brand awareness and engagement. It’s a win-win situation for both brands and consumers.”

Deutsche Telekom Said to Weigh New Antitrust Complaint Against Google

The move by Deutsche Telekom would make it an official complainant in the case, allowing the company to provide information and potential evidence on why it believes Google abuses its control over Android. The evidence could include data on which mobile services the carriers’ tens of millions of users regularly access on their cellphones. Such information could help European competition officials decide whether to bring formal charges against Google linked to the region’s Android investigation. Competition authorities have been focusing their attention on Google’s Android operating system, which powers more than 80 percent of the world’s smartphones, according to Gartner, a research firm.

The Estimation Game - Techniques for Informed Guessing

A big problem with being numbers-driven is that you often don’t have the numbers. This is especially true when contemplating designs for systems that don’t yet exist. The more cheaply and quickly you can make reasonable estimates of those numbers, the more designs you can consider, the better your final design will be. Fast and cheap answers allow you to explore a larger space of possibilities, kind of like how you can now research the specs and reviews of different cars before you step onto the lot. This kind of exercise is often called a “Fermi estimation”, after a legendary incident in which Enrico Fermi dropped bits of paper into the shockwave of a nuclear test to estimate its yield.

Predictive Analytics Business Case is Simpler Than You Think

To craft the specifics of the business case, concisely define the business issue that will be addressed. Assess the current environment and offer a gap analysis to show the difference between the current environment and the future environment). Offer a recommended solution, but also offer alternatives. Detail the specific value propositions associated with the change. Create a financial analysis summarizing costs and benefits. Support the analysis with a timeline including roles and responsibilities. Finally, detail the major risk factors and opportunity costs associated with the project. For complex initiatives, break the overall project into a series of shorter projects.

Virtual Reality App Innovates the Experience of Music

More and more, recorded music is being thought of as a free market. After a while of trying to catch up with that, I just didn't want to roll with it anymore. So I kind of stopped putting out CDs, really focused on the live show and what I could do more in person and that experience. That's a very difficult thing to reproduce—there's no screen, headphones, speakers, even through a theater it's so low resolution compared to being in person. The body language, the little tiny tics people make, the audience, the resonance of the room.

Artificial intelligence: Should we be as terrified as Elon Musk and Bill Gates?

AI is already creeping into military use with the rise of armed drone aircraft. No longer piloted by humans, they are carrying out attacks against enemy targets. For now, they are remotely controlled by soldiers. But the question has been raised of how long it will be until the machines are given specific humans or groups of humans--enemies in uniform--to target and given the autonomy to shoot to kill when they acquire their target. Should it ever be ethical for a machine to make a judgment call in taking a human life? ... Certainly governments are going to want to get involved with laws and regulations, but the tech industry itself can pre-empt and shape that by putting together its own standards of conduct and ethical guidelines ahead of nations and regulatory bodies hardening the lines.

QARK: Android App Exploit and SCA Tool

Ever wonder why there isn't a metasploit-style framework for Android apps? We did! Whether you're a developer trying to protect your insecure app from winding up on user devices, an Android n00b or a pentester trying to pwn all the things, QARK is just what you've been looking for! This tool combines Static Code Analysis with source-sink mapping, teaching by detailing misconfigurations, citing research detailing the issues and automatic exploitation into one, simple to use application! Our tool will review any Android app, either from source or APK, highlight version specific issues, detail your app's attack surface, inspect all your app components for misconfigurations and allow you to create on-demand proof-of-concept attack applications.

Is it Still Possible to do Phone Phreaking? Yes, With Android LTE

Google said it is working on a software patch for Android which will be released next month. Apple's mobile operating system, iOS, is not affected, according to CERT. Android's problem is with its permissions. On 3G networks, there are separate network domains for data packets going over the Internet and phone calls, which go through circuits. But with LTE, voice and data go over Internet. Android's permission that governs phone calls doesn't matter since calls are no longer going through a circuit-switched network, Kim said. That opens up an interesting avenue for attack. For example, if a victim can be tricked into downloading a malicious Android application, it could, for example, initiate a video call over the data channel.

Quote for the day:

"Action is the foundational key to all success." -- Anthony Robbins,

October 18, 2015

Why visibility and control are critical for container security

Having visibility into the code inside containers is a critical element of container security, even aside from the issue of the security of the containers themselves. New vulnerabilities are being constantly discovered that impact older versions of open source components. Hence, knowing the container is free of vulnerabilities at the time of initial build and deployment is necessary but far from sufficient. Securing the contents of containers is comparable to any other software stack security question. ... The security risk posed by a container depends on the sensitivity of the data accessed via the container as well the location of where the container is deployed, for example, behind a firewall or Internet-facing.

Wi-Fi Trick Gives Devices Super-Accurate Indoor Location Fixes

We can use off-the-shelf, already deployed Wi-Fi infrastructure but get accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art systems that require specialized equipment or modifications,” says Katti. In tests, a Wi-Fi device could locate itself with a median accuracy of 40 centimeters. SpotFi is a refinement of another existing Wi-Fi location method in which a device uses the signal strength from different Wi-Fi access points as an indication of how far away they are. It can then use data on their known locations to triangulate its own position. That approach can only locate devices to within a few meters because Wi-Fi signals bounce, obscuring the true distance to the access point.

EU to US: Stop storing our data on your servers (or else)

Based on the new unsafe harbor ruling, you're in violation of European law. That login and account information needs to be moved to a server located in Europe. Can you imagine the hassle this would be if it were enforceable, and we now needed to segment our user databases and all our other information so that we could dump data on a server located in each major country or region? This is the issue facing IT managers. Right now, as the Department of Commerce has shown, there's no determination about what y'all are supposed to do. But because the Safe Harbor provisions are now null and void, the door is open for international lawsuits targeting your organizations, just because you happen to run a database hosted in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Oliver Cameron: From iOS Developer to Udacity VP

My lowest point in the journey of becoming an iOS Developer was the launch of another app, Friends for iPhone. Friends added a layer on top of your address book, and allowed you to see activity from your friends across all of your social networks in one app: Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and more. A fun concept! Following on from the launch of Voices, I challenged myself to go bigger and better with Friends. This pressure meant that I felt like I couldn’t launch the app until it was perfect, and as such I invested 6 months of time and a ton of money. It turns out, perfection is nothing if your idea sucks. A few months after launch I had to ultimately call it: Friends was a failure.

Professor Dr Robot QC

Machines are challenging the professions’ two most important claims to being special: their ability to advance the frontiers of knowledge and their exclusive licence to apply their expertise to an unordained laity. ... Computer scientists in Tel Aviv University have invented an algorithm that, using facial-recognition software, is solving a puzzle that has kept Torah scholars busy for decades: piecing together 300,000 ancient Jewish manuscripts that were found, many torn and tattered, in the attic of an old Cairo synagogue. Various bits of software regularly outperform legal experts in predicting the outcome of court decisions from patent disputes to America’s Supreme Court.

Malvertising is a troubling trend

The Angler exploit kit has been around for a couple of years in various forms, and until now it didn’t stand out as a particularly unusual threat. But it turns out that the newest version has some new and improved techniques to avoid detection, such as encryption and the exploitation of zero-day vulnerabilities that haven’t yet been incorporated into the mainstream antivirus products. It also runs only in the memory of the infected computer, instead of installing itself on the hard drive, which is where desktop antivirus products tend to focus their attention. This is the startling part — that the bad guys have found a way to effectively stay invisible.

Is Security Possible With the Cloud?

No surprise here – the number one pushback that I get when speaking on this strategy is security. You’re really going to put all of your data, much of which is sensitive and confidential to clients, in the Cloud? Really? To be fair, security is, and always will be, a valid and primary concern for IT, and, of course, not just with respect to the Cloud. So let’s back up (so to speak) to another premise:absolute security is an abstract, theoretical concept. There is no such thing. If it’s possible to access a resource, then compromise to that resource is also possible. And since the Cloud increases the number of possible avenues to accessing a given resource, there’s a huge question here: is security even possible for Cloud-centric IT?

The Rise of Enterprise Analytics and The Analytics of Things

First, if an organization is truly experimenting with their data to make significant discoveries, to validate the results, to refine and improve the analytics models, to extract meaningful insights from data, and to implement innovative data-driven processes, then a data scientist is usually required. More specifically, a data science team is required, since no single person can have all of the required skills for successful enterprise-wide data science. Second, there are some analytics functions that are scientifically or mathematically less intensive that can be carried out by analysts throughout an organization. Some of these functions include data exploration, data quality verification, data transformations, correlation analyses, model-testing, data visualization, reporting, and so on.

LeSS Framework: Principles, Practices and Core Concepts

When adopting LeSS, it will affect the structure of your organization. What often happens is that organisational problems that are traditionally solved in a complex way, are solved in an easier way in LeSS. Having small batches of working software Sprint by Sprint enables removal of organizational complexity that was created for coping with the lack of transparency in traditional development. This is best explained with some examples. Traditionally, organizations manage work using projects. A project, from an Agile/lean perspective is a way of managing a large batch of requirements towards a release. When focus on products and continuously delivering value to users, the project way of managing work becomes largely obsolete.

3 Tips on How to Create a Cyber Security Culture at Work

As we all know, computer criminals pose a serious threat to businesses today in that they can steal corporate intellectual property, as was the case with last year’s Sony hack; compromise employees’ personal and medical health information, the latter of which isincreasingly valuable on underground web markets; and overall depreciate an organization’s reputation. These external actors may also exploit bad security decisions on the part of internal employees, the effects of which may be amplified by poor or incomplete bring your own device (BYOD) guidelines or policies designed to protect Internet of Things (IoT) devices. In accordance with NCSAM, it is everyone’s responsibility to help protect his/her organization against a breach or targeted attack.

Quote for the day:

"It is the essence of genius to make use of the simplest ideas." -- Charles Peguy

October 17, 2015

Four interesting implications of Walmart's open-source cloud announcement

OneOps, which has been an important project within @WalmartLabs, the retailer's Silicon Valley incubator, automates the process of switching from one cloud to another. OneOps helps developers and enterprises "avoid the pitfalls of being locked-in to a cloud provider, and thrive in WalmartLabs' DevOps culture - whatever code developers write, they own, from its development to its launch to customers," said King and Kimmet. They add that @WalmartLabs' 3,000 engineers use the solution, and, on average, "commit over 30,000 changes per month to deliver new or improved features to our customers." There are four interesting things about this announcement

Why There's No Such Thing as an IT Project

Portfolio managers don’t need to be told that all projects and programmes should align to strategy. A strategy without the projects to deliver it is just a plan. Probably a pleasant, creative vision of what the future state looks like, but in the absence of action it will stay as a set of slides and nothing more. The bit between the CEO presenting the strategy at the annual conference and the frontline staff actually seeing the benefits of this is often missing. Delivering business transformation requires creativity from all teams. IT is not devolved from this. If you take my old manager’s view that all change is business change, then IT becomes a service function, working in tandem with their colleagues in other departments and delivering projects that underpin business strategy.

Argentina is betting on programming to boost its tech sector

Technology and specifically computer programming has had some successes in Argentina. In June the University of Buenos Aires was recognised for computer programming skills in the International ACM Programming content. UBA finished 18th in the global rankings, with Harvard coming 19th, making it the highest ranking university in South America for computer skills. The country produces on average 98,000 graduates and 11,000 postgraduates, creating a skilled workforce across various fields, so the ministry’s new plans hope to plant the seeds for IT and computing skills at a young age. The building blocks are certainly there for Argentina to grow its IT sector by focusing on its impressive programming reputation.

Facebook Open Sources Data Query Language GraphQL

The GraphQL server is a relatively small bit of code; it's responsible for a few things. It provides utilities for defining your type system and how it interfaces with your server code. It accepts GraphQL queries and will validate that they can be safely and unambiguously run within your type system. Then of course it executes the query by calling into your code as you defined within your type system while handling things like asynchronicity, parallelism, and error catching for you. The roadmap ahead is two-fold. First, better tools for client developers for doing things like code generation and query management. Relay is our primary and most significant tool for the client.

Deep dive review: The iPhone 6S Plus delivers the goods

Existing features of the 6S Plus (and its smaller sibling, the 6S) have been improved and there are even a few groundbreaking features thrown in for good measure. Unlike the 2014 iPhone launch, when numerous issues -- including an unstable iOS 8, a botched software update that killed cellular coverage for some iPhone 6 models, and, ugh, "Bendgate" -- put a damper on things, this year's rollout went smoothly. Apple reported that it sold over 13 million iPhones in the first weekend of retail sales; the iOS 9 update has been generally responsive and stable; and, only a few weeks after release, Apple asserted that over 50% of iPhone users had the latest version installed on their devices and that over 13 million phones were sold in the weekend following the launch.

How Data Integration Can Kill a Partnership Before It Happens

Data integration has come a long way in 15 years. While it used to be a multiyear and hugely costly undertaking feasible for only large enterprises, midmarket companies now have access to the same level of integration capabilities thanks in large part to cloud technology. However, there is still a long way to go, especially in post 2008 recession times. With expectations higher than ever before to produce value and market pressures demanding that businesses move at a faster pace than ever before, small and midsize organizations especially don’t have enough IT resources, cash or time to devote to their integration efforts. Seamless integration is critical for organizations in their ongoing quest to do more with less, however certain hiccups can end a partnership before it even has a chance to begin.

Introduction to Android Wear

More than programming the smart watches, there are various aspects and concepts that one has to learn or understand in terms of designing apps for smart watches with a small real estate. These days, till today most of us are still using desktops, laptops and smart phones to perform our day to day tasks. But with the advancement of smart watches, there’s a drastic shirt in the way how things can be performed. Wearables in itself is an interesting ones with a lot more challenges in designing apps; fortunately, when it comes to the App design, Google has put forward very good documentation on how to design, so we don’t have to break our head in understanding how to design for smart watches.

What's next in aaS? Workspace-as-a-Service

An IDC research report titled, "Worldwide Workspace-as-a-Service 2014-2018 Forecast", revealed that "the hosted WaaS market will grow from $282 million in 2013 to $1.7 billion by 2018, representing a five-year CAGR of 42.5 percent." ... Microsoft realized this trend and responded with Office.com. Intuit has done the same with its web-based Quickbooks offering. And Salesforce.com was the first to set up a SaaS CRM solution for its customers. Vendors have long realized that operating systems were less important than the applications themselves. And the BYOD generation couldn't agree more. The seamless interchange of information seems to be the only requirement for applications, regardless of device, vendor, or manufacturer.

Yunomi promotes Japanese ‘tea commerce’

“If you're not a connoisseur or tea expert,” he adds “we are building a Tea Dojo, in which you don't just buy to tea to drink, but follow a progression of tasting sets to learn more about Japanese tea.” It is this idea of linking the whole culture of eating and drinking into wider aspects of being Japanese that makes the whole thing so interesting – although perhaps, at first, confusing. At present, for example, there are two websites. “The new website, Yunomi.life, will be our primary storefront,” says Chun. “Our old website will remain active and eventually become web magazine.” The original website contains a lot of information on various aspects of Japanese culture – including literature and a wide variety of other things – and Chun confirms this will continue as the company progresses.

BYOD is as entrenched (and complicated) as ever

Such wide variations likely occur because some companies reimburse workers for buying their own smartphone or tablet to use at work, and even pay part or all of a monthly wireless service charge. Other companies expect a BYOD worker to pay for it all, while offering back-end support for company apps used on the devices. At the heart of the BYOD trend is the distinction between "personally liable" devices -- those brought in from home by workers -- and "corporate liable" hardware, where a company owns a smartphone or tablet provided for a worker's use, with the company usually paying all costs. Corporate liable practices have evolved in recent years to include a choose-your-own-device (CYOD) model where a business allows workers to select from a list of specified devices for business use, primarily to give IT shops more control over hardware and data.

Quote for the day:

"Try to become not a man of success, but try rather to become a man of value." -- Albert Einstein,

October 16, 2015

Fighting today’s Advanced Attacks

Constructing a network security defense ad hoc, that is one product at a time as the need presents itself creates weak links in the overall strategy, weak links that can easily be broken. With multiple attack vectors and malware constantly increasing in volume and sophistication, what is needed is a comprehensive strategy that can eliminate the weak links and evolve as the threat landscape evolves. This solution guide explores the myths and issues surrounding Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) and how the right solution can offer the necessary protection against APTs and other targeted attacks.

Netflix reveals the future of enterprise tech: Here’s why

“AWS is now the basic layer of compute services,” said Hunt. Netflix is not just heavily reliant on AWS — it’s about to become completely dependent. Hunt plans to power down his company’s last data center this year, at which point Netflix will be running almost entirely on outsourced cloud infrastructures, mostly operated by Amazon. (It’ll still run its own content delivery network — CDN.) Note that this timeline is new. Netflix originally said it would shut down its last datacenter in 2014, and then again this past summer, but the future sometimes comes a little slower than expected. That’s one aspect of enterprise infrastructure that will probably never change.

Creating Value for Business: 2 Data Science Questions You Must Ask

Organizations should come to expect that one way a good Data Scientist will often demonstrate his or her ability is by reframing or redefining the problem put before them by the company. The first few times this may seem off-putting, but organizations who learn to embrace this sort of transformation of the business problem will be able to compete for the future. Practically speaking this may look like shifting to "medical device retention" rather than "patient retention" when targeting patient retention delivers results too late to affect the outcome. As a business concerned with the ROI from your Data Science investment, you will undoubtedly want to see activities of the Data Scientist which specify criteria for model assessment.

The Future Of Driving With V2V And V2I Technology

V2I technology also has security at its core (traffic lights, pollution levels, hazards, emergency services). But, on the top of that, V2I is more aimed at traffic flow, re-routing, fuel consumption, parking, WIFI, charging spots for electric cars on the move, conform to Dr. Joachim Taiber, research professor at Clemson University. Starting 2020, V2X (Vehicle to Everything) and its constituents, V2P (vehicle to pedestrians), V2V and V2I technology, will take an active role in semi-autonomous cars. The system at the moment is configured to avoid collision impacts by literally taking over the steering wheel and the accelerator, pushing against the driver’s foot and slowing the vehicle if needed.

Intel IoT Unlocks True Value in Connected Supply Chains

An exciting technology in this space is the 3D box bounding capabilities of Intel RealSense technology. For those who need a little brushing up on their geometry, box bounding defines the outer limits of the physical space utilized by an object. This is helpful information to have at your fingertips for packing efficiency and it’s something you can now map out in real-time with Intel RealSense. Companies across the supply chain are also beginning to see first-hand how they can use Intel RealSense technology to quickly calculate dimensional weight for shipping and to improve load planning.

Machine Age - The Next Revolution

It was long believed that while computers and robots are capable of peak technical performance, they are often unable to perform simple motor tasks. Austrian Hans Moravec already described this paradox of robotics in the 1980s. But the two authors visited a number of new companies that are working on overcoming the “Moravec paradox.” It would be a breakthrough for industrial automation if they succeeded. Recently, entrepreneurs achieved a breakthrough in combating the Moravec paradox. The revolutionary advances in robotics are the one, fascinating side of the digital revolution in industry. But as Austrian national economist Joseph Schumpeter said, innovation is usually a process of creative destruction. The destructive nature of the digital revolution is reflected in other industrial sectors, such as the photo and music industry.

Why You Should Plan Now for SDN Enabled Network Security

An SDN architecture provides an intelligent central console that decouples the network control plane from the forwarding plane. This enables carriers to meet two critical business objectives: to create more valuable services by leveraging network-wide intelligence and to automate manually intensive tasks like provisioning, operating and troubleshooting hardware-intensive networks. An SDN network can also automatically respond to changes in network behavior. This enables a learning network where carriers can now better harness the plethora of data they have to improve performance and customize service offerings in ways that would have been impossible to do manually. This is how network security can become an automated process based on best-fit policies for a carrier’s network.

Cloud computing - The sky’s limit

Being locked in to a provider is risky. Firms can start to tighten the screws by increasing prices. If a cloud provider goes bust, its customers may have trouble retrieving their data. These risks have already triggered a debate about whether the cloud needs stricter regulation. Some European politicians want to force cloud providers to ensure that data can be moved between them. That is too heavy-handed, not least because rigid rules will inhibit innovation in what is still a young industry. The history of computing suggests that common standards may well emerge naturally in response to customers’ demands—just as in personal computers, where it is now much easier to use the same files on different systems.

Edge network key to IoT data collection and transmission

With IoT data, the transmission problem is inverted, Alexander said. He described IoT data as small, frequent and plentiful (Gartner predicts there will be 25 billion connected devices by 2020). Rather than amplify out large content files, such as software upgrades, CIOs will need to funnel the bits and bytes of IoT data in. But transmitting data in a one-to-one ratio from the device to a data center can be inefficient and create chokepoints in the network. IoT data, in other words, needs to be processed en route. "A lot of architectures and networks haven't been built to do that," Alexander said during a panel discussion. That's where the edge network comes in handy. Akamai is now using its edge as an intermediary location to collect, thin and even normalize IoT data before moving it on to a centralized data center.

Sporting goods CIO hopes to hook customers with IoT, mobile apps

The walkthroughs made it clear that transactions could use a boost. The company’s Aptos POS system, in place for several years, didn’t support mobile and Web transactions. For example, if a customer couldn’t find a product in-store, a sales associate would call it in to Orvis via phone to make a sale. But Aptos’ new POS software, which Orvis began piloting at select stores in August, corrects that service hitch. If a customer comes in and finds two items in a store, but requests a third item that store does not have in stock, an associate can order the out-of-stock product online, and process payment for all three items via an iPad Mini, which is equipped with a credit card reader. The associate can also show the customer similar products they might be interested in from the iPad.

Quote for the day:

"Perseverance is the hard work you do after you get tired of doing the hard work you already did." -- Newt Gingrich

October 15, 2015

CIOs eye Dell-EMC merger with cautious optimism

CIOs have watched Dell and EMC’s changes from afar, conducting business with the companies while increasing their consumption of cloud services. But the massive merger portends change, even if its nature can't yet be quantified. Finnegan says he's optimistic about the merger means for Orvis, which he says is increasingly adopting a hybrid cloud computing model. Its point-of-sale system remains on premises, but it is in the process of moving its ERP and marketing systems to cloud services. He says he’s looking forward to what Dell and EMC build for a "guy like me that manages on-premises and cloud ... what are the tools and technology that they bring to the table that allows us to manage both really seamlessly?"

Cloud inventory management for CIOs: Build guardrails, not roadblocks

Data flowing through rogue cloud apps -- or actually any unsanctioned app, cloud or on premises -- increases risks around security and regulatory requirements, Nelson and others said. In fact, a 2014 study from cloud security company Netskope estimated that the use of cloud services by the business increases the likelihood of a data breach threefold. Additionally, with data flowing through rogue cloud apps, experts said a company could lose the so-called single version of truth for its data, a key component of corporate analytics programs and decision making. Then there are cost factors. An organization with multiple independent accounts for the same cloud service or cloud app is hardly going to get the best rate. It may also be paying for duplicate and redundant services.

Training Series for Development on Intel-based Android* Devices

This series of videos presents an overview of Intel tools available for Android* developers through Intel® Software. You´ll discover the benefits of these tools in your everyday life as a programmer whether or not you´re targeting Intel devices. These tools will improve your life as a developer by saving you time, allowing you to create better experiences, and helping you target your app to multiple platforms and architectures. Take a look at the five training videos and follow the links to learn more about each tool. Android developers can benefit from one or more of the tools that Intel offers. Xavier gives a quick description of some of the tools available, what they can do for you, and the benefits you can gain in terms of productivity and results.

The Innovative Organisation: Learning From Design Firms

In order to create value in novel ways (the goal of innovating), you must first locate opportunities to do so. Where to start looking is easy to see—with the end-user—but it’s far more difficult to detect and synthesise actionable information within the complexity of the user experience. Customer surveys and focus groups simplify the process, but are often removed from how people authentically respond in the marketplace. Designers, by contrast, prefer observation to interrogation, developing empathy to discern unarticulated, even unconscious, user needs. As Tim Kobe, CEO of design firm Eight, Inc. put it, “We represent the end-user in all the design decisions that take place in these innovation projects.” And that’s why building empathy with the target user is crucial, as Continuum did when working with Procter & Gamble to reinvigorate the Pampers brand.

A World of Awesome Mind-Controlled Prostheses Is Closer Than You Think

For now, it's up to sophisticated machine learning algorithms. Working with humans test subjects putting in hours of practice, the algorithms learn to correctly interpret a user's intentions for basic tasks like picking up an object based on the limited information picked up by a few electrodes. More complicated tasks require better systems. Froemke gives the example of drinking coffee. When you do this with your natural limbs, you don't think about how complex the motion is. But a brain-controlled arm must correctly understand the intention and execute a series of moves: pick up the cup, bring it to a user's lips, tilt it toward the mouth without spilling it. To make it happen, you need higher-bandwidth communications between brain and interface.

Developing a Sound Risk and Compliance Culture

While conceptually not difficult to understand, risk culture is not easily observable or measurable, particularly in large organizations where subcultures often exist. Knowing whether an effective risk culture exists within an organization, what steps to take to improve it, and when to do so can be somewhat baffling. The issue becomes less daunting if one looks at culture as a prerequisite for effective risk management. Behaviors, attitudes, and incentives that are aligned with a financial company’s risk policies are just as important to effective risk outcomes as are, for example, comprehensive, well-governed risk data, or robust internal controls. Focusing on risk culture may become more tractable — and its value better appreciated — if it is viewed as an essential element of an effective and sustainable independent risk management program.

Capacity planning - aiming for the sky, but hitting the cloud ceiling?

For cloud to fulfil on its promise, it will have to be dealing with multiple workloads on one flexible and elastic virtualised platform that mixes compute, storage and network capabilities. Each aspect of this mix will be dependent on the others - for example, a storage issue may be 'cured' by throwing more storage capacity at it, but this can then cause a network issue that does not fully solve the actual problem of the performance of the end-to-end system. Tools will be needed that can rapidly learn how business workloads operate; create patterns of usage; predict future usage and advise accordingly - or can take immediate action to prevent problems from occurring in the first place.

Consumer Demands Outracing Connected Cars Regulation

“The connection between the policy people and the technology developers is going to have to grow stronger, and the conversation back and forth is going to have to be more robust,” Hause said. “I think we're starting to see that.” Companies like Google Inc. and Facebook Inc., he said, are becoming involved in policy discussions as technology evolves along with regulation. The State Department is aiming for multi-stakeholder involvement on cybersecurity, Hause said. “We want to keep the Internet developed and innovative in the way it was originally deployed and developed,” he said. “It's not going to be just a government-level discussion.” Consumers will shape much of the conversation, Hause said. Brand image is “going to be a huge driver on this discussion for standards,” Hause said.

UL creating standard for wearable privacy and security

"Fraud could result if data is not properly maintained and authenticated with a proper level of assurance," Fernando added. UL wants to "begin to raise the bar for how security should be addressed...and establish a minimal baseline for what should be addressed much like we did with electricity 120 years ago," he said. "We want to reach the point [of certifying IoT data security] without having to second-guess it." Without offering many details, Fernando said that "the jury is still out" on how data privacy and security with wearables will be ultimately protected, or even how strictly it will be regulated by the government. Given the U.S. government's recent apparent willingness to let industry regulate itself in such matters, UL's role becomes more important.

Why blockchain heralds a rethink of the entire banking industry

Banks are starting to understand the potential of blockchain and to invest in learning more. RBS is one of nine founders of the R3 consortium, set up in September 2015 for members to work together on a framework and architecture for using blockchain in financial markets. ... “A year ago people were scared,” said UBS CIO Oliver Bussman. “Everybody agreed that the one topic we wanted to work together on is blockchain. The banks are getting ready to understand the impact and the use cases, and also to understand that collaboration and open standards, like the R3 consortium, is necessary. Regulators are actively involved in the discussion too. It’s only possible if we have critical mass in the industry and agree upon standards.”

Quote for the day:

"If you look at what you have in life, you'll always have more. If you look at what you don't have in life, you'll never have enough." -- Oprah Winfrey

October 14, 2015

Data & Analytics is Transforming the Audit

Leveraging the investments your organization has made in technology, we can drill down and explore your data in interactive ways, enabling us to enhance the focus of our efforts and deliver richer, more meaningful insights on the areas we audit. D&A also allows us to capture information that encompasses environmental factors such as unstructured economic and benchmarking data to paint a more complete and timely picture of an organization’s financial condition. D&A provides a more detailed view of historical performance, the causality of events and supports the ability of auditors to concentrate their time and judgment in areas with the greatest audit risk and complexity.

Google's Alphabet Move Was Brilliant

Some pundits claim that greater visibility will stifle Google's innovations, which they term "unprofitable experiments." In reality, all research projects are "losers" until they succeed in the marketplace. These critics don't seem to understand the determination of Larry Page and his cohort of brilliant leaders to transform the world through innovation. Nevertheless, I won't be surprised to see an activist investor like Dan Loeb or Nelson Peltz call for breaking up Alphabet in a few years into cash-generating Google and growth-generating Alphabet. Their inability to understand the integration of these two differentiated strategies for long-term shareholder value creation — the strategy we followed at Medtronic — never ceases to amaze me.

Cooling ICT environments: where to next?

‘Free air’ cooling technologies such as Indirect Evaporative Cooling are achieving PUE values of between 1.15 and 1.28 and the incentive to develop alternatives is inhibited by the reality of diminishing returns. Current good practice is considered to be a PUE of 1.2 using ‘free air cooling’ in temperate climates. Cooling technology is not of course only concerned with controlling temperature: it is also important to control humidity to prevent condensation in the case of high humidity, and electrostatic charge problems in the case of low humidity. An extremely important development that has not been fully appreciated by many ICT practitioners was the outcome of the extensive research by the Technical Committee 9.9 of the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRE).

Cloud-Based Analytics Requires Hybrid Data Access and Integration

Given the distributed nature of data sources as well as the diversity of data types, information platforms and integration approaches are changing. While more than three in five companies (61%) still do integration primarily between on-premises systems, significant percentages are now doing integration from the cloud to on-premises (47%) and from on-premises to the cloud (39%). In the future, this trend will become more pronounced. According to our research, 85 percent of companies eventually will integrate cloud data with on-premises sources, and 84 percent will do the reverse. We expect that hybrid architectures, a mix of on-premises and cloud data infrastructures, will prevail in enterprise information architectures for years to come while slowly evolving to equality of bidirectional data transfer between the two types.

Google takes on Apple News, Facebook Instant Articles with AMP

AMP, Apple News and Facebook Instant Articles all deliver vastly improved experiences for users compared to traditional mobile sites, but AMP is unique because it claims to be an open-source initiative meant to benefit publishers, advertisers and users. Meanwhile, an underlying perception exists that Apple and Facebook's partner-centric approaches will result in the formation of winners and losers based on those platforms' business interests. "If we have a standardized way about doing this, then all of a sudden all of these folks benefit. Twitter can win with Moments, while Google wins with AMP," says Facemire. "It's not mutually exclusive." AMP aims to improve content delivery across all mobile browsers and apps; the goal is not to serve as a defined container for articles within a specific ecosystem.

Does Cisco have to respond to Dell/EMC?

“Dell's control of VMware will have significant repercussions for other networking vendors,” says IDC analyst Brad Casemore. “Dell switches will become the preferred underlay for VMware's NSX network-virtualization overlay. Many vendors were counting on getting shares of that underlay business, and now those gains are in serious doubt.” ... Cisco also has its sights set on becoming the No. 1 IT vendor in the industry. Cisco could respond to this deal by acquiring a major storage player of its own, like partner NetApp; or one or more smaller start-ups addressing the hyperconvergence trend in IT. “As Cisco continues down their publically stated path to be the #1 IT company, we anticipate storage becoming a bigger piece of their strategy,” says Gartner analyst Andrew Lerner.

The Perch App Transforms old Gadgets into a Home-Security System

"As the years go on and hardware capabilities become similar, software is going to be the key differentiator," says Cohen. Recruiting people’s current gadgets isn’t so much to promote a homebrew spirit as to free Perch to focus on its software, which promises lag-free video feeds, realtime video chat, and image analysis that can tell what is happening in the home beyond simple motion detection. ... Perch is promising near-instantaneous video by incorporating a technology called Web Real-Time Communications, or WebRTC, an open standard for fast, peer-to-peer audio and video streams directly between clients, be they web browsers (without the need for plugins) or mobile apps. Encryption is also built into WebRTC.

The next steps for digital government - a question of accountability

“The whole culture and structure and governance of the civil service is not conducive to [working together]. All vertical organisations have that endemic problem - they’re not set up to do that. "I had a long career in Lloyds Bank, and the credit card division would never say: ‘We'll build that for personal lending as well.’ You’ve got to get those departments to collaborate, and that isn't an easy job. That's why you do need something in the centre. The answer is not technology, it's around getting people to collaborate and work together.” Beaven believes his work with departments on digital transactions shows how it can be done.

Veteran CIO values personal connections

We all have a ton of things going on, and this notion of spending time to connect with others seems to fall to the bottom of the list. But there's no substitution for spending time on this. [In the past] I blocked out time on my calendar called catch-up time, meaning catch up with others. I'd walk around or dial up people. Now I do less calendaring, because social networking allows us to have more frequent reminders to pick up that phone or drop them a line. And being in the top position makes me think about how I can facilitate others wanting to do the same thing. But in professional settings, relationships that matter are built on a foundation of trust, and trust is built on seeing each other in action. So finding ways to work together and finding ways to come together for problem-solving I have found are very effective ways to develop those bonds of trust.

Cloud vs Legacy IT. Solutions to Common Integration Challenges

The ODCA believes that integration of cloud deployments with enterprise landscapes should consider people, process, technology, and operating models. Doing so encourages faster cloud adoption, leverages existing enterprise investments in IT landscape and helps govern safe cloud adoption through effective risk and compliance management. Cloud integration must start with governance and control and then consider business process, applications, data, infrastructure, and organizational management controls. Integration should be addressed through the perspective of organizational roles involved in planning, delivering, and supporting IT services.

Quote for the day:

"Strength comes from overcoming adversity, not avoiding it." -- Gordon Tredgold

October 13, 2015

Work in Transition

It’s likely that work done by humans will increasingly involve innovative thinking, flexibility, creativity, and social skills, the things machines don’t do well. In a recent study on automation from the University of Oxford, researchers tried to quantify how likely jobs are to be computerized by evaluating how much creativity, social intelligence, and dexterity they involve. Choreographers, elementary school teachers, and psychiatric social workers are probably safe, according to that analysis, while telemarketers and tax preparers are more likely to be replaced. Most professions won’t go the way of the telemarketer, but the work involved is likely to migrate toward the tasks humans are uniquely skilled at, with automation taking over tasks that are rules-based and predictable.

Honda Using Experimental New ASIMO for Disaster Response Research

The robot was never intended to be a disaster mitigation robot; it was designed to work in offices, specifically the kind of offices that have notexperienced an earthquake, explosion, alien invasion, sharknado, or other messy event. Honda is clearly aware of ASIMO’s limitations in tackling these kinds of situations, and that’s probably why (as we reported two years ago) the company has been developing a new version of ASIMO that is specifically designed for disasters. At the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) this week, Honda engineers presented a pair of papers on research they’re doing with disaster-response humanoid robots.

Big Data Really Freaks This Guy Out

Ceglowski, who comes across a bit like a paranoid Ray Romano, also has an issue with the validity of the findings from big data. “There’s a con going on here,” he said. “On the data side they say, ‘Hey just collect everything. Collect all the data and we have these magical algorithms that will find everything in it for you.’ But on the algorithm side, where I am, they tell us ‘Throw any code you have at it–we have this awesome training data and we have enough of it that you’re sure to surface something interesting.'” The problem, Ceglowski said, is that any big data analysis that involves people has a built-in self-destruct mechanism. “Human beings always ruin everything,” he said.

Microservices: Simple servers, complex security

As Garrett explained, "The attack surface of a microservices app can be much greater [than a traditional monolithic application]." With older apps, "the attack surface is very linear -- traffic hits the load balancer, then the Web (presentation tier), and then the application and data tiers." But with microservices, Garrett noted the flow is entirely different: "It's generally necessary to expose a large number of different services so that external applications can address them directly, leading to a much greater attack surface." "If you break up your application into smaller services," said Kelsey Hightower, product manager and chief advocate for CoreOS, "you'll need a more robust authentication/authorization solution between each service.

Emerging: DataOps and three tips for getting there

"DataOps is a data management method that emphasizes communication, collaboration, integration, automation and measurement of cooperation between data engineers, data scientists and other data professionals." As with any new approach, the pioneers haven't sorted out the language just yet: While Palmer refers to it as a "data management method," Bergh calls it an "analytic development method" that should be overseen by a chief data officer or a chief analytics officer. (The Bergh team refers to DataOps as AnalyticOps.) In either case, the ultimate goal is to accelerate analytics. And, regardless of how businesses decide to practice DataOps, successful programs will require IT expertise in the form of data integration, data quality, data security and data governance, according to Palmer and Bergh.

SAP unveils SaaS analytics platform

"Whether you're in the boardroom or in front of a customer, there is a fit solution that will meet your needs," Smith says. "By bringing these capabilities together on a single platform, there's advantages those users can get — commonalities in collaboration and business process and workflow that can help bring these capabilities together."... "SAP Cloud for Analytics was transformational by allowing real-time updates to our plans, collaboration across the organization from within the app, advanced analytics and one-click visualization for our users," Stephen Hayes, analytics manager, Live Oak Bank, said in a statement today. "The end-user experience was well-received from our leadership team to our analysts."

VMware Value Lies In Modern Data Center Management

Unlike the IBM mainframe, VMware is a software company, one that so far has been able to evolve its product lines rapidly. For example, on Tuesday, Oct. 13, at VMworld in Barcelona, VMware introduced vRealize Automation 7, which gives enterprise IT or a DevOps team the ability to generate a graphical blueprint that can lead to a deployable system. On the blueprint a team can identify different parts of an application spread over many machines, then assign the application-appropriate networking and security. The system described in the blueprint will tend to be on-premises, but parts of it can exist in Amazon Web Services or an OpenStack Kilo cloud.

The missing ingredient for effective problem management

The missing ingredient in a typical implementation is skilled problem managers using a consistent, evidence-based, structured approach to solving problems. By structured, I mean either to adopt one of the major problem-solving frameworks such as Kepner and Fourie and follow it consistently, with all problem managers using it the same way and all the time. ... Technical knowledge is useful to give the confidence to challenge subject matter experts, particularly if they are invoking their deep technical knowledge to suggest that their opinion should be accepted without question. Problem managers should always seek evidence to support assertions, ensure that alternatives are properly assessed and that actions proposed are sensible

Q&A and Book Review of Software Development Metrics

Velocity is another metric that depends on certain assumptions. It depends on (1) a time-boxed process model, and (2) incremental delivery of production-ready features at least to a test environment. Provided these assumptions hold, Velocity is useful for short-term planning and also to accumulate empirical data for burn charts, which in turn can expose emerging delivery risks. So, it's useful for steering in cases when the work is done in a certain way. In my experience, Velocity is a little too slippery to use for tracking improvement. There are three reasons. First, a team's improvement efforts might include changing the length of the time-boxed iterations or shifting away from a time-boxed model altogether.

Tech Firms Laud Obama's Retreat on Encrypted-Data Law

Battered by Edward Snowden’s revelations that they aided in NSA surveillance, technology companies have leaped at the chance to showcase features such as encryption that help deter hackers. Apple, for example, helped set off the debate by announcing that iPhones would automatically encrypt data stored on them and that Apple couldn’t help the government unlock the information. What companies have rarely mentioned is that the data sought most often by police and American intelligence services -- text messages, e-mails, photos and calling records -- can still be legally obtained with court orders. That’s true no matter how much encryption is used to prevent unauthorized parties from accessing them, as Bloomberg News reported last October.

Quote for the day:

"When you do the common things in life in an uncommon way, you will command the attention of the world." -- George W. Carver

October 12, 2015

The merger of Dell and EMC stems from the rise of cloud computing

All of which helps to explain why Messrs Dell and Tucci are keen to merge their companies. Consolidation would give the merged firm more bargaining power, not least when dealing with big cloud providers themselves, and would also gel with another trend in the IT industry: converged infrastructure. Traditionally, servers, storage devices and networking equipment have been sold separately. Now they are being increasingly offered in integrated bundles by one vendor, sparing customers the tedious task of making them work together—a trend that has been pioneered by EMC in a joint venture with Cisco, a big maker of networking gear.

10 new words you need to know in Silicon Valley

A startup incubator provides management support and office space and other business resources for new companies trying to get off the ground. AngelPad is the biggest incubator in Silicon Valley. An accelerator has a tighter, shorter-term focus. The idea is to rapidly build a business in a few months, if not weeks, so that the company can succeed or crash quickly without too great of a loss. Accelerators offer mentorship for developing ideas and business plans, and provide an infusion of cash and employees, so that the company can function on its own quickly -- or fail fast.Y Combinator is the top accelerator in the valley.

5 ways the internet of things will change your everyday life

Coffee machines will chug into gear just in time to hand us a fresh cup as we walk out the door, as the lights, once more, operate throughout the day to make it seem like somebody is home. Smart doorbells – think Ring – will alert us when there is someone at the door, meaning we can accept deliveries even when abroad, or appear to be home even when in work. Pets won’t go unaffected, either, with a smart doggy door opening and closing as our pooch goes in and out of the back garden, while the humble smart watch connects to a home system so we can communicate with our lonely dogs, or a programmed laser toy can keep cats entertained.

Understanding basics of Recommendation Engines (with case study)

Ever wondered, “what algorithm google uses to maximize its target ads revenue?”. What about the e-commerce websites which advocates you through options such as ‘people who bought this also bought this’. Or “How does Facebook automatically suggest us to tag friends in pictures”? The answer is Recommendation Engines. With the growing amount of information on world wide web and with significant rise number of users, it becomes increasingly important for companies to search, map and provide them with the relevant chunk of information according to their preferences and tastes. Companies nowadays are building smart and intelligent recommendation engines by studying the past behavior of their users.

Microsoft Researchers Are Working on Multi-Person Virtual Reality

Microsoft is testing a commercial augmented reality product, called HoloLens. Lanier stresses that his work is separate from HoloLens and does not reflect how that product will develop. Still, multi-person mixed reality is a long-standing challenge for those interested in the technology. Beyond gaming, there is hope that virtual and augmented reality could prove useful for communications, collaboration, and for new ways of accessing and handling information. Lanier’s project is called Comradre (and pronounced “comradery”). A video produced by Lanier’s lab shows several projects developed by student interns in which more than one person interacts with the same virtual object or phenomena.

Big Data & Brews from Strata NY 2015: Tony Baer on Spark in the Hadoop Ecosystem

It’s really about a whole ecosystem. The fact is, is that it started getting into this contemplation of what is Hadoop? The fact is that what you’re really looking is a big data platform and ecosystem of technologies, and hopefully you’re working with technology providers that hopefully will simplify all this because the result is that you want to take advantage of innovations in scale-out clusters, commodity hardware, commodity software, so you can get results that are not commodity. ... The idea of simplifying Spark and making Spark accessible, so you can use it with tools, such as Datameer for instance. Their survey basically said that roughly about half, 49 percent I think was the exact, were using Spark basically stand alone

How to implement integrated management systems

When talking about an integrated management system (IMS), we mean systems where we deal with as many requirements as possible in the same way. E.g., if two systems have policy requirements (like management approval, revision, and communication), why don’t we deal with them the same way? Why don’t we control documents and records in the same form? When thinking about integrating management systems, there are many courses of action to be considered based on the organization’s context, the number of existing systems, and the systems’ maturity, for example. In terms of standards requirements, you can use PAS 99 as a guide (it can help you map and define one set of documentation, policies, procedures, and processes suitable for all of your management systems).

Kroger CIO: Four lessons for strategic IT

Kroger is a huge company, with almost $110 billion in revenue and 400,000 employees. Given his experience, Chris' perspective is highly valuable and can teach us a lot. As a brief summary, here are his four points on how a CIO can contribute strategically: Earn credibility as a reliable service provider; Learn the business profoundly well; Develop relationships with leaders across the company; and Rely on experts, both internal and external to the organization, to help you keep up with the latest technology. This simple advice presents a roadmap for CIO and IT relevance. However, executing the four-step program requires infrastructure, process, people, and technology. In other words, it's far easier said than done.

Future-proof your IT outsourcing contract: A CIO checklist

Getting each part of an IT outsourcing contract nailed down is labor-intensive. Pace Harmon, for example, "takes a shot" at writing the SLAs but at some point brings in the client's subject matter experts to go through the document line by line. "It's not easy, it's a grind," Sealock said. A word of caution: If the price per unit of work seems too good to be true, it probably is. Service providers eager to break into an industry are known to agree to a price point that is too low to meet the agreed-upon SLA. Once on the job and under pressure to improve margins, the service provider will start cutting corners. Another reason to get the alignment right on SOW, SLA and price?

Big Data Solutions with MS SQL ColumnStore Index

The primary purpose of the MS SQL CS Index was to enable the download of as much data as possible to memory and work with this memory when processing data, as opposed to reading it from the disc. Two advantages of this innovation were higher speed and lower HDD IOPS costs. But the product was not perfect. Even though the problem of read-only mode in the 2012 version was fixed with the 2014 clustered CS Index that lets you modify data in the table, it turned out with the clustered CS, it was impossible to have simple indices with calculable fields, foreign keys and triggers. When working with data, it is important to know which method of indexing is the most effective in which scenarios.

Quote for the day:

"Adding manpower to a late software project, makes it later.” -- Frederick Brooks Jr.

October 11, 2015

Collaborating in a shared service management environment

The processes for IT, facilities and human resources (HR) are broadly similar and do overlap, such as with commencement and exit procedures, and can easily be brought together in a single tool to manage. However, even when doing so and when supporting departments have their own tools and processes, it is not always clear to end users where they should turn for support. For instance, in practice the management of mobile phones can be sourced to each of these departments, or a combination thereof. The collaboration between IT, facilities and HR, also called shared service management, cuts costs and improves the quality of service for end users.

Man vs. machine circa 2018: A reality check on Gartner's crystal ball

Plummer said that IT leaders need to view things as customers and work to satisfy "their nonhuman requests." Reality check: This prediction sounds like it came from Salesforce, which is betting on the machine-thing-customer connection. Things requesting support won't be a surprise. ...

3 million workers will be supervised by a roboboss by 2018. Reality check: The theory here is that humans will focus on creativity, relations and strategic planning. Umm ok. Societal norms as well as politics will likely to put off the roboboss for a few more years. ... Half of the fastest growing companies will have more smart machines than people by 2018. Reality check: Not surprising, but 50 percent may be a bit too high for that time frame.

Seven Essentials for Building Your 2016 Dream Team

We all know success will be a team effort. So you send your best reps into the battle. But what if you don’t have enough “best reps”? Simple. You hire more. That may not seem so simple. But what if you had a defined process for bringing in the right reps? That’s what we’re going to discuss in this post. We’ll talk about how to hire pros who can get the job done. ... The seven essentials all are action items. They’ll help you bring in revenue-focused people who can get you to goal. But it’s not enough to know what the seven are. Each is a separate entity with plenty for you to consider. In the end, they fit together into a unified whole: your talent strategy.

Amazon’s growing clout in cloud computing stirs questions

In the past decade, Amazon has come to dominate yet another business: cloud computing. And now, as Amazon Web Services solidifies its grip on the business of selling computing services to companies over the Internet, it’s having to answer the sort of questions that dogged Microsoft when it ruled desktop computing: Will it lock customers in to its technology? Will it squish smaller tech companies that pioneer AWS niches when those businesses become lucrative? Now nearly 10 years old, AWS has left giants such as Microsoft and Google in its wake. Market-research firm Gartner thinks AWS is “the overwhelming market share leader,” running more than 10 times the infrastructure cloud-computing capacity as the next 14 largest rivals combined.

Development & Technology for Marketing Content: A Look at The Future

The marketing and development industries can’t afford to stay siloed any longer. Search marketers need to understand how JavaScript front end technologies work. Designers need to understand browser rendering technologies. Developers need to be staying abreast of marketing campaigns and the technologies behind them. Only teams where there’s cross-discipline understanding are going to be able to produce truly exceptional marketing content, and the gap between those agencies and clients and everyone else is only going to get more obvious as the rate of progress hastens. ... Very quickly, your skill sets are going to become interdependent on other creative disciplines

Too much information... the threat of mass surveilance

Snowden, the fugitive former NSA analyst, caused another stir this week when he revealed how British spies can turn smartphones belonging to suspects on and off from a remote location, and record what is happening around them. The spying agency effectively takes over the phone, and it can be used to track the target. This is what one would expect from a spying agency, but variations of this kind of snooping technology are widely available, and can even be used by ordinary individuals. Using smartphone technology to spy on another person is remarkably easy, according to Noonan. "Ordinary iPhones have a feature called Find My Phone, and once you have the password, you can find out where the phone is. So it acts as a tracking device."

Hacks to perform faster Text Mining in R

Text Mining, is one of the most frequent yet challenging exercise faced by beginners in data science / analytics experts. The biggest challenge is one needs to thoroughly assess the underlying patterns in text, that too manually. For example: it is pretty common to delete numbers from the text before we do any kind of text mining. But what if we want to extract something like “24/7”. Hence, the text cleansing exercise is highly personalized as per the objective of the exercise and the type of text patterns. ... You may find numerous ways on internet to do sentiment analysis. However, subject extraction is very specific to the context. In this article, I have shared the top 4 hacks applied in the industry to do subject extraction in R.

Compliance and ITSM

Now if you take the word compliant and put it into a translator, or search on Wiki, you get something like this: abide by others, docile, obeying, obliging, agreeing with a set of rules, adherence to standards, regulations, and other requirements. Now there are definitely different compliances to be compared to but, in general, you comply with a need or rule set up by others or yourself. ... Whether it is a process or requirement, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is how compliant you are, and that’s the tricky part. What risk are you willing to take? Do you understand the ‘data or information’ you have? Do you have the knowledge to see the risks and take decisions on the level of compliance you want or need? What actions you need to take?.

Code Signing certificates becoming popular cybercrime commodity

When cybercriminal create malicious code, their purpose is to make it appear as legitimate as possible. This is done by using signing certificates to sign their code. By stealing private keys of certificates using Trojan horses or by compromising the certificate key builder of software vendors, cybercriminals manage to get access to code signing certificates. When the researchers discovered that fraudsters used valid certificated, the first thing that came to their mind is that they somehow manage to acquire them directly from the certificate’s issuer. ... It can be rather difficult to separate legitimate from dummy companies and this is due to the fact that cybercriminals take all the required steps for making it appear as authentic.

Quote for the day:

"There is a difference between knowing the path & walking the path." -- Morpheus

October 10, 2015

California digital privacy laws boosted, protecting consumers

The new laws will prevent state and local law enforcement from snooping on emails without a warrant and alert the public when they use high-tech surveillance to tap into cellphone calls. The laws also prohibit paparazzi from flying drones over private property and make sure TV manufacturers warn viewers that voice commands may be recorded -- but stop companies from using the information to target ads. ... "It's a very exciting day for privacy in California," said Nicole Ozer, technology and civil liberties policy director for the American Civil Liberties Union of California. "Everybody is using technology is so many diverse ways. But electronic privacy law in the state and federal level have not been updated in decades.''

How Big Data Analytics Is Shining a Light on Anonymous Web Traffic

The key to greater understanding of these data-poor personas lies in the clickstream data that follows everybody on the Internet. Whether you like it or not, there’s certain amount of data that you drag around to each subsequent website you visit, including what kind of Web browser, device, and plug-ins you’re using; you’re IP address and geographical location; your time zone and language preference; and what website you came from. The owner of any particular website knows even more about you, including what website pages you view, what you search for, and how long you stay on each page. This data is a rich source of information that allows website operators to build models of website visitors who don’t otherwise say much about themselves.

Analyzing the Internet of Things

To date, a lot of effort has been put into creating sensors, deploying them, and generating masses of data. However, lagging behind that effort is the analysis of the data. As with any data, no value is driven without analysis and action. It would have been better if more thought was given to how to utilize the data generated prior to creating sensors that stream it out. Given that we are where we are, the best path forward is to begin to aggressively analyze the data of the IoT. This is what I, and others, have begun to call the Analytics of Things (AoT). The value of the AoT is already proven in a wide variety of settings. These examples are still from early adopters and often initial prototypes. However, this type of analysis will be ubiquitous very soon.

Top 10 Technology Trends Signal the Digital Mesh

We sit at the center of an expanding set of devices, other people, information and services that are fluidly and dynamically interconnected. This “digital mesh” surrounds the individual and new, continuous and ambient experiences will emerge to exploit it. In his session revealing Gartner’s Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends at Gartner/Symposium ITxpo 2015 in Orlando, David Cearley, vice president and Gartner Fellow, shared three categories for this year’s trends: the digital mesh, smart machines, and the new IT reality. ... Recent advances make it possible to mix multiple materials together with traditional 3D printing in one build.

Strategic Planning – Ideas to Delivery

DevOps is a term that has been around since the end of the last decade, originating from the Agile development movement and is a fusion of “development” and “operations”. In more practical terms it integrates developers and operations teams in order to improve collaboration and productivity by automating infrastructure, workflows and continuously measuring application performance. The drivers behind the approach are the competing needs to incorporate new products into production whilst maintaining 99.9% uptime to customers in an agile manner. To understand further the increase in complexity we need to look at how new features and functions need to be applied to our delivery of software. The world of mobile apps, middleware and cloud deployment has reduced release cycles to weeks not months with an emphasis on delivering incremental change.

Samsung wants to help IoT speak a common language

At the highest level, SAMI provides an abstraction layer for ingesting device data, processing, storing, routing, and accessing it through very developer-friendly APIs. SAMI deals with everything from data security, to real-time data, to transformations, aggregations, storage, user management, device management, and much more. SAMI also handles crucial aspects around security and privacy, which are mission critical in IoT cloud services. By developing on top of a platform that allows easy and secure access to any kind of data, from any kind of device, and interconnects with other device platforms, IoT developers using SAMI can focus on building their added value to the ecosystem.

How IoT Is poised to drive higher efficiencies for Telecom

Integration of disparate systems will take IoT deployments to a completely different level and we are already seeing that happening. As an example, IoT solutions integrated with procurement systems can ensure that network assets giving trouble or nearing end of life can be procured and replaced before they eventually shut down and impact customer operations. Customers can be informed of potential downtimes well in advance or a real-time basis, thereby helping them take timely decisions on routing traffic through alternative paths/operators. IoT solutions, as I mentioned earlier, give us the ability to know what’s happening on a real-time basis and more importantly, enable us to take decisions on a real-time basis as well.

Taming today's cyberthreat landscape: A CIO checklist

One of the few things the "experts" seem to agree upon is that cybercrime is a clear and present danger to our national security. These issues have gone way beyond the province of esoteric IT journals and cultish science fiction novels -- they have invaded our daily collective consciousness and well-being as individuals, as families, as companies, as governments, as a society and as a culture at large. Many opine at great length on how the cyber landscape has become the new battleground upon which future wars will be fought: Nations will rise and fall based upon their techno-prowess to aggressively attack and defend against the new breed of cybercriminals.

15 female founders building killer tech companies

There are a lot of lists of amazing, inspirational female founders totally crushing it around the web, but they all seem to feature the same people. We know from talking to amazing female founders and working with some awesome female-led customers, that there are so many other women out there building incredible tech companies that will change the world. These women not only deserve the spotlight for all of their hard work, but provide an excellent source of inspiration and tactical advice for anyone trying to build a business. Here are 15 female founders you might not have heard of building killer tech companies.

The Challenges in Handling 1 Billion Resident Business Objects

The term “Big Data” is nothing new. It describes huge volumes in principle; whether on disk, networks or anywhere else. Big Memory facilitates Big Data activities by doing more processing on the server or tight cluster of servers, still keeping stuff in RAM. The Big Memory approach is also conducive to real-time querying/aggregation/analytics. Think map/reduce in real-time, a kind of Hadoop that does not need to “start” and wait until done, rather “real-time Hadoop” that keeps working on data in RAM. Big Memory comes in different forms, primarily: heaps and composite data structures. Just like in any “regular” programming language, all complex/composite data structures like lists, trees, dictionaries, sets etc. are built around the heap primitives like: alloc/read/write/free.

Quote for the day:

"Celebrate what you want to see more of." -- Tom Peters