Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

February 15, 2016

The Power of Location-Based Offers in Banking

The primary benefit of location-based offers is that it allows financial institutions the ability to move beyond traditional, calendar-based promotions to provide more relevant content in real time. This includes the cross-selling of banking products based on need, the offering of outside merchant offers to increase loyalty of current customers and the recommendation of services that can alleviate a potential negative event ... Additional benefits of location-based services include an additional security layer that can validate transactions by comparing the user location with the location of the transaction, and the ability to offload rudimentary inquiries such as the location of the nearest ATM or branch. Other location-based applications are the ability to book appointments at a branch location and the identification of a customer as they enter a branch.

Mobile app security should not be an afterthought

There's definitely a lot more development in mobile happening. The best practices in mobile aren't as well developed as best practices for the web. That's getting a little bit better.Consider HTTPS. What we saw for quite some time was something that on the Web is relatively straightforward, which HTTPS is. People were doing it wrong on mobile for years before anyone really noticed. There's a lot you can get wrong with HTTPS, and they were getting it all wrong. As people move over to mobile they are definitely having to relearn some of the lessons we learned over the years. Password security is another one of those. People began to make passwords on websites a lot more robust. You can't just have a four or five letter password anymore on most websites.

Fight threats to information security: Inform your people

The human element in information security often gets short shrift. For example, many still believe that training programs don’t work and aren’t worth spending time and money on. But the best security defenses in the world won’t be successful if even one employee doesn’t know a phishing email when he sees one. And today, it’s easy for business departments to order a cloud service or download an app to a corporate smartphone. People who don’t know what’s kosher and what isn’t are practically courting disaster. Everyone — from chief executives to business departments to the newest of hires — needs to be keenly aware of the threats out there, how to prevent them and how to counter them if they do occur.

Google's Unconscious Bias Training Yet To Fix Diversity Problem

Biases are shaped by our experiences and by cultural norms, and allow us to filter information and make quick decisions. We've evolved to trust our guts. But sometimes these mental shortcuts can lead us astray, especially when they cause us to misjudge people. In the workplace, for example, the halo effect can cause us to inflate performance ratings or in-group bias can lead us to overlook great talent. Combatting our unconscious biases is hard, because they don't feel wrong; they feel right. But it's necessary to fight against bias in order to create a work environment that supports and encourages diverse perspectives and people.

A Stress Test to Identify and Improve Corporate Culture Problems

The next step is collaborative -- identifying those who can carry the desired culture throughout the organization from the bottom up, not just the top down, and make systemic change to combat entropy. Finally, and this may seem obvious but is not practiced with any robustness, companies must hire people based on the identified values that align with the desired corporate culture. The adage "culture eats strategy for breakfast" is so much more than MBA jargon. Companies fail when they focus the lens too narrowly on profit and loss and allow values and behavior to run amuck. Satisfaction surveys show the extent of the problem. Putting a stress test to a company's culture offers benchmarks to fix the problem.

Dear IT Department, Why Community Management Matters

The primary issue at stake is this: Social business in all its flavors — from social collaboration and social marketing to social customer care and even social supply chain — is not just another communications technology. Instead, it’s focused on engaging people in powerful new ways that requires a new set of digital skills in, yes, an enabling new technology environment. The tools are secondary (though important), how people work in effective new ways is what matters. Most significantly, a new operational entity emerges from this, called an online community, that did not exist before and requires its own cultivation and management. The initiating business sponsors typically, for their part, are interested in connecting together people and their knowledge in more streamlined, dynamic, fluid, and actionable ways that benefits the work they are doing.

Your whole organisation needs to get real about IT security: Here's how to do it

Holman says the first step -- as simple as it sounds -- is for the business to take cybersecurity seriously. "A board must at least acknowledge the risk of a hacking incident or rogue piece of malware is clear and present," he says. Such c-level acknowledgement might include a security awareness exercise or penetration test. Even seemingly straightforward analyses can help, including an awareness of other companies in your sector and an up-to-date check whether they have been in the news lately. Second, says Holman, CIOs should encourage board members to take a few hours out of their busy schedules to conduct a security risk assessment. "The numbers soon add up, especially if we're talking about a business that relies on a critical online presence to bring in revenue."

Don't toss data center best practices when managing cloud services

Among those data center best practices are creating templates to determine how deployments should be carried out, development and test procedures and data governance polices. ... Of course, organizations already use authentication mechanisms like Microsoft Active Directory so users and computers can access systems. If they're using Azure, they can manage users directly in the cloud by having them log in to the cloud version, Azure AD, a separate directory of users that lives in the cloud. They can even add Federation Services so users have single sign-on -- access to multiple systems by entering just one ID and password. "Now you can have the same user credentials that you've always had, but they can extend in the public cloud," Cancila said.

5 myths about the Internet of Things

The true innovation of IoT comes not from simply connecting products, but rather from what we do with the data the “things” create. The companies that really come out on top will leverage this data, developing strategies around what this new connectivity allows them to do, from enhancing customer experiences to optimizing business processes and product development. Why is this so important? Believe it or not, most companies have no idea who their customers are. A garage door manufacturer, for example, might sell product to Lowes or Home Depot and once that product is out the door they have no idea who actually purchases it. IoT will fundamentally change this scenario by providing the manufacturer with the ability to connect directly to the person who uses the product to provide a personalized customer experience, support and service offerings.

The surprising truth about Facebook's Internet.org

Internet.org and Free Basics operate in countries where data use is often charged by the megabyte or by the minute. So the idea of using the Internet for free can be an attractive idea to many of these users. Facebook chooses which sites are included and which are rejected, and the local carriers may get veto power as well. Facebook has published these criteria, which are focused on the size of the data load, and has thus far not rejected any sites for reasons that are not technical. Facebook claims that any site, including competitors, are allowed to join Facebook's Internet. For example, Facebook does not enforce the "community guidelines" required of companies setting up shop on Facebook.com.

Quote for the day:

"Wise are those who learn that the bottom line doesn't always have to be their top priority." -- William Arthur Ward

February 14, 2016

5 things we learned from Cisco’s acquisition of Jasper Technologies

From the strategic standpoint, Jasper offers a great solution for Cisco and its customers to manage, scale, and monetize their IoT services. Jasper reportedly has over 3,500 customers and 25 IoT service providers that have been using its platform across 100 countries. While Jasper can be classified as an IoT platform, it doesn’t directly compete with the IoT services provided by cloud providers such as AWS, Microsoft, or IBM. Instead, Jasper focuses on managing and automating the lifecycle of IoT services and solutions. From this perspective, Jasper not only provides Cisco with an extremely relevant customer base, but also with a highly developed IoT platform that can be extended with Cisco’s native IoT services such as security, advanced analytics, enterprise Wi-Fi, etc.

Internet of Things (IoT) Predictions

“IoT remains mired in smart light bulbs, net-connected cameras and wireless speakers,” opined Andrew Tarantola at Engadget, “the same sorts of bland, iterative use cases we’ve been seeing since the term was first coined.” Pam Baker atFierceBigData complained that “IoT data products were again in overdrive, many in outright overkill, and the same problems with data deluge still existed,” and Todd Hixon offered this on Forbes: “The fundamental problem is, there is still no killer app for IOT: something a large group of customers really care about and just have to have.” So what’s the state-of-the-IoT and where is it going? Here’s a summary of data and predictions from Forrester, Machina Research, the World Economic Forum (WEF), Gartner, and IDC

Are Employees Entitled to Any Sort of Privacy in the Age of Mobility?

With BYOD and the blurred lines of mobile technology for personal and professional use, how much privacy can a company reasonably offer its employees? One would assume a standard right to discretion; however, the way we share, monitor, and store information means we likely have little real privacy any more. ... Binding contracts are an everyday occurrence in our interconnected world. Staying informed of these obligations is your best defense when it comes to protecting the company’s interest while providing employees some level of personal privacy. Sadly, data agreements are becoming common that they’re easily ignored. Employees may not take the time to read through every policy they come across—but it is important that they do so when it comes to BYOD.

Why Bitcoin Governance is a Competition (And That's a Good Thing)

Bitcoin may have some of the strongest network effects possible because incompatible versions of the software won't recognize each others' blocks, transactions, or mined coins. A miner on the "minority" side of a hard fork will mine bitcoins that are incompatible with the majority side, so those coins will be less useful and naturally worth less. And as more move to the majority side, "minority" coins will rapidly approach zero value, making switching a rational imperative, to be executed quickly. These dynamics make for a "winner-take-all" bitcoin software market, and they make it very unlikely that bitcoin will "split". If a split were to happen, it would be because the cryptocurrency market was big and diverse enough for two coins, fairly seamless exchange among the two coins existed, or both of those things.

The challenges of online payment in Nigeria

There are a number of issues that must be dealt with by the Nigerian e-payment companies which include that fact fraud must be tackled and online security improved. This should go with massive enlightenment campaign that is necessary to build confidence and this is where partnership with the media is key. ... Finally, I believe players in the financial tech ecosystem have to find a way to improve the process of reconciliation. The way things are at the moment, the banks are currently feeding fat in this whole arrangement to the detriment of start-ups. As a start-up, when a client pays you using any debit card in Nigeria; you don’t get it instantly. You must wait for x number of days before the reconciliation is done.

These 3 things are trying to kill Linux containers

The “fauxpen” threat isn’t new — we’ve seen it first with Unix and most recently with cloud computing solutions, particularly platform as a service (PaaS) and OpenStack-based offerings that are ostensibly open but layer proprietary technologies on top of open-source foundations. Linux containers, however, are early in their adoption cycle for enterprise IT; if proprietary hooks are landed into the technology now, it’s almost a sure thing that IT’s mood will sour on what should be an innovation, not a continuation of proprietary legacy systems. From closed stacks to exorbitant licenses to greatly-scaled back innovation, adding “fauxpen” code to the foundational technologies built on the blood, sweat and tears of the community can quickly dampen enthusiasm and breakthroughs around the open base.

The truth about Storage Data efficiency ratios.

We’ve all heard the marketing claims from some storage vendors about how efficient their storage products are. Data efficiency ratios of 40:1 , 60:1 even 100:1 continue to be thrown around as if they are amazing, somehow unique or achieved as a result of proprietary hardware. ... Funnily enough, one vendor even offloads what VAAI/VCAI can do (with almost no overhead I might add) to proprietary hardware. Either way, while VAAI/VCAI clones are fantastic and can add lots of value, claiming high data efficiency ratios as a result is again mis-leading especially if done so in the context of being a unique capability. ... When comparing between vendors, if done in a fair manner, the differences are unlikely to be significant enough to sway a purchasing decision as most modern storage platforms have more than adequate data reduction capabilities.

Why Agile Testing Needs Deprogramming

One of the problems for myself, I was previously a hard-core waterfall disciplinarian. As I worked on avionics, I originally thought “No way will this Agile thing ever work”. Because when I was testing avionics someone would pretty much come along with a forklift truck, drop these massive phone book size requirement documents through and say “That’s what you are going to test guys”. So you’d go through and you’d almost become like a legal eagle on these requirements going, “oh requirement x23 this requirement countermands that requirement” and you would build your testing on mapping all this preplanned complexity. When people said to me that you put together a story which is a small thing, it’s not even a requirement, it’s a slice of a requirement shocked me. How do you go around testing something that isn’t defined, my brain would say? But how? And that to me was the huge challenge.

The Hybrid Cloud and Information Management: A Practical Option for Food Manufacturers

In a hybrid cloud environment, organizations can connect private or public cloud-based solutions with on-premises systems in order to best meet operational needs and compliance requirements. A hybrid cloud can be architected and deployed in any number of ways, and this flexibility is one of many reasons it is so appealing to food manufacturers, particularly for enterprise information management (EIM) initiatives. For example, if there is a need to maintain specific content on-premises for operational or compliances reasons but the organization wants to leverage the cloud for sharing non-confidential information with suppliers, then the hybrid cloud becomes a viable option.

The Holy Grail of EA – Agile Planning

Or if the COO asks how the new mobile devices that were deployed to field personnel is impacting the customer score, you should be able to show where the mobile devices sit in the technology platforms (T-view), which application systems (S-view) are using those platforms, the operational capabilities (O-view) that are enabled by those system, and finally how all these elements are related to products sold to specific customer segments through specific channels in order to meet specific strategies and goals (B-view). The ability to do this is not a pipe dream. The BOST Toolkit is a standard offering from Informatica’s Business Transformation Services (BTS) team.

Quote for the day:

"The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing." -- John Powell

February 13, 2016

Graph API in a Large Scale Environment

REST doesn’t provide any guidelines for how authentication for the API should be done. You can use basic HTTP authentication, OAuth2 or even your own custom developed authentication method. However, most of the APIs support the OAuth2 authentication method. In addition, REST doesn’t define the format of the represented data. It can be JSON, XML or even plain HTML. A few years ago, XML was very popular and most of the REST APIs used this format to represent the transferred data. Although XML has many benefits it is more complicated compared to JSON and companies started providing JSON as an alternative. We chose REST as the architecture, OAuth2 for authentication and JSON as the resource format.

How these communist-era Apple II clones helped shape central Europe's IT sector

"Very often, it's said the products have been copied from Western companies. That's not exactly so," Boyanov writes in his paper, History of Bulgarian Computing. He explained that the goal of Bulgarian computer makers was to create products that "had to operate in the same functional way" as the Western ones. Rather than call them copies, a better term would be "analog" machines, he says. "Sometimes the parameters of our similar products were better than the Western goods," Boyanov says. Bulgarian engineers were able to correct some of the known shortcomings of the original products, he argues.

To save the iPad, Apple needs to copy Microsoft

The iPad was nice and exciting while it was new, but it never became an essential. Now compare this to the Microsoft Surface. Here is a device that excites me, and not just because of the hardware (though I have to admit that the hardware is nice). What excites me the most about the Surface is its ability to run a full operating system, which in turn gives me the freedom and flexibility to run full applications such as Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Office, as opposed to the watered-down versions available from the app store. At the same time, it gives me the option to run cut-down apps from the Windows app store if that's what I want. It's easy to disregard Microsoft in the hardware space, especially given its dismal performance in the smartphone market.

How smart is Big Data?

In their rush to create a Big Data strategy, many companies are overlooking their existing data and not laying down the foundations that will enable the integration of all their data. Yet, this existing data is business critical data. The best analysis comes from the best data. Being able cross reference business critical data (structured or unstructured) with Big Data will deliver far more comprehensive results than Big Data alone. What companies need to consider is how to integrate Big Data with business critical data and to consider how they will integrate All the Data as early on as possible. The integration of data from all sources and all sets, is what companies need to do, to reveal the fuller picture. All the Data is this combination and integration.

Why open source can save companies from drowning in the data lake

By applying methodologies like design thinking and agile development, businesses can ensure that they focus on the right problems and develop highly viable and feasible solutions. The best way to analyse the gathered information is to build a custom analytics solution, designed to deliver the insights required. While a bespoke platform has historically required significant time and financial investment, the use of open source technology is changing the analytics landscape. Open source big data platforms offer incredible capabilities to build not only insights solutions, but also forecasting and providing predictive analytics solutions through mathematical and statistical models that have the ability to crunch through large volumes of data.

Open Source DCIM Software Project Combats Spreadsheet-Based Data Center Management

The project’s number-one goal is to take away “the excuse for anybody to ever track their data center inventory using a spreadsheet or word processing document again,” according to its website. There’s a misconception in the industry that DCIM is only necessary for companies that own and operate their data centers. In Milliken’s opinion, there’s a lot of value to using DCIM even if you’re only monitoring a single cage in a colocation facility. As more and more data center capacity is outsourced to colocation providers, it’s going to become more and more important for colo customers to be able to manage that capacity intelligently. Colo providers increasingly provide DCIM capabilities to their customers as a service, but not all of them do.

CSA: IT Perception of Cloud Services Has Increased

So how has perception about the importance of cloud services changed over the past several years? In the past, business owners accustomed to utilizing legacy storage and in-house services struggled to see the benefits of cloud computing, especially in light of recent high-profile data leaks and controversy as to the effectiveness of remote solutions. Like any new technology, cloud services were strange and different from the norm, causing those adverse to change to shy away from their use for fear of exposing sensitive information. But in recent years, cloud has become increasingly more prevalent in both consumer and enterprise use, and in doing so has demonstrated its worth as a replacement for both physical storage and traditional data center services.

7 Android tools that can help your personal security

For most Android users, the seven tools below should cover all the important bases of device and data security. Some are third-party apps, while others are native parts of the Android operating system. They all, however, will protect your personal info in meaningful ways -- and without compromising your phone's performance. Plus, all but two of them are free. ... Android's Smart Lock feature gives you the best of both worlds by cutting down on the annoyance factor while still allowing you to keep your phone secured when it really counts. You can choose to have your phone remain unlocked whenever you're in a trusted location, like your home, or anytime you're connected to a trusted Bluetooth device, like a smartwatch that's always on your arm or a stereo that's inside your car.

What Developers Want From Their Technology (But Mostly Cloud)

What’s more, developers too are also equally influenced by peers and trendiness, and the sexiness of the user experience and API, and sometimes even the prettiness of the GUI when it comes to adopting the latest tooling (remember a world before Docker?!). However, from a developer’s perspective the API is the key interaction point, and is largely the UI equivalent of an average user for judging the user experience of a new tool. This new world order dictates that if before the focus in product releases has been on core functionality and UIs, at the expense of the API’s usability - a major transgression by many software companies, that today the API is likely the most important element that will be the measure of your product’s adoption.

Ranchers guard their livestock via the Internet of Things

Cattle-Watch will incorporate Telefónica’s Smart m2m, a platform for managing IoT communications. Ranchers can observe their livestock and receive all relevant information via smartphones or other connected devices. Bulls are fitted with solar-powered collars which act as communications hubs and calves have ear tags that send status information to the collar hubs via a Bluetooth network every 30 seconds. The bull collars send back information to ranchers via cellular or satellite networks. Decisions can then be made based on the information gathered, for example withdrawing inefficient bulls or increasing the number of bulls.

Quote for the day:

"A leader is a person who knows how to act when other people don’t.” -- Eraldo Banovac

February 11, 2016

Why personal networks are tomorrow's internet of things

The other issue is that all of these IoT devices, for the most part, use public cloud services as their main integration point. They don't actually communicate with each other per se, they all go out through your router and talk to a cloud service where your data is stored, using web protocols and RESTful APIs. In the future, this problem is going to have to be solved. Unlike today's IoT devices which are fully cloud dependent, the Personal Area Network will be in essence your own hybrid cloud. Today we like to think of hybrid clouds as things cutting-edge enterprises have -- they have certain systems that run on-premises and some workloads that are bursted to public and private cloud hosted infrastructure.

Metadata-Driven Design: Creating an User-Friendly Enterprise DSL

If you’re unfamiliar with the ideas behind a DSL, I recommend viewing Martin Fowler’s dissertation3, where he describes DSLs as “limited forms of computer language designed for a specific class of problems”. In the seminal lecture, Mr. Fowler describes how XML configuration data can be utilized as a simple DSL for Java programs and frameworks. (Of course, this method of utilizing XML can now be found in various Java frameworks of today, with Spring and Struts being just two examples.) In doing so, he mentions several advantages to using such a DSL, including the lack of requiring recompilation for many cases and its approachable usability for normal business users.

Which Security Products Do Enterprises Expect Too Much From?

Companies should consider combining AI-enabled (artificially intelligent) security products such as Scorpion Computer Services’ ScenGen (other intelligent security products include examples from Lancope and AlientVault) with products that establish exhaustive baselines such as Scorpion Computer Services’ Normalizer (other baseline security products include Magna from LightCyber). Adding these into the mix with other effective products, perhaps replacing similar products that don’t measure up should sharpen an organization’s edge against intruders, helping it to better test for vulnerabilities and flag behavioral inconsistencies.

Violate Patient Data Safety At Your Peril, Warns Judge

An OCR investigation found that Lincare employees, who provide healthcare services in patients’ homes, regularly removed patient information from the company’s offices. “Further evidence indicated that the organization had an unwritten policy requiring certain employees to store protected health information in their own vehicles for extended periods of time,” the agency reported. “Although aware of the complaint and OCR’s investigation, Lincare subsequently took only minimal action to correct its policies and procedures and strengthen safeguards to ensure compliance with the HIPAA rules.” OCR reported that Lincare denied violating HIPAA, contending that patients’ protected health information was “stolen” by the individual who found the records in the home.

Put data scientists' skills to excellent use in mission-critical scenarios

you must be very selective about the actual data scientists that you assign to these roles. The reason why you don't automatically relate data scientists to high-pressure, operational roles is because you assume analytic-minded people don't function well in these roles. And you are correct. The stereotypical analytic does not like pressure. They need time to think and analyze, and they don't want someone hovering over them for answers. I was recently working with an analytic to move through some analysis, and we were running out of time. I gently nudged her by saying, "We only have 10 minutes left," and she quickly retorted, "Don't do that! Countdowns freak me out!" This is very typical.

The best desktop office suite, LibreOffice, gets better

Besides its support for Open Document Format (ODF) 1.2, LibreOffice 5.1 also boasts improved compatibility with Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) format, Microsoft Office's default file format. Technically, Microsoft's OOXML format is an ISO standard. Technically. In practice, no version of Microsoft Office, including Office 2016 has ever used the "strict" version of the standard. Instead, Office saves documents using a "transitional" version of OOXML by default. As the Document Foundation's Italo Vignoli points out, this is a transition that's been going on nine years. The Document Foundation says this standard tends to change with each new release of Microsoft Office, often in big ways, making it a challenge for LibreOffice to keep up.

APIs Are the Connectors Between Your Company and the Outside World

Perfect is dangerous word, but there is definitely API design that is a “good fit” for your needs. The trick is that not everyone needs the same solution. So not everyone needs the same API design. One of the things we talk about a lot in Academy events is the process of focusing on the problem, digging up details, and then solving the problem you have on hand. Instead of just showing up saying something like “You should use a REST API or a Hypermedia API or a Reactive API” you should really spend time working through the problem from several of points of view. That leads you to the best fit for your current needs. Of course, a year or so from now, your needs might change and then you get to do some more digging and designing and implementing. The work of creating APIs is never done.

Is 2016 the year of mobility technology?

Businesses that truly want to exploit the potential for these mobile trends and reach end users in new, lucrative ways will have to think in big and bold terms if they are to differentiate themselves from their competition. To get ahead, organisations need to think carefully about how they push innovation boundaries and future-proof their mobile strategies. What’s also clear is that innovation comes in all shapes and sizes, and in many different forms. A wise CIO or CTO learns to seek best practice from many different sources, adopting and adapting as they go. ... When users are travelling, Google understands where people are and can provide relevant, personalised information, such as the local weather and advice on what to do, direct to devices.

SD-WAN: What It Is And Why You'll Use It One Day

This ease of deployment, central manageability and reduced costs make SD-WAN an attractive option for many businesses. At VMworld 2015 29% of 260 attendees surveyed by Riverbed were exploring SD-WAN while 5% had adopted it. That compares to 77% who were exploring SDN, with 13% who had deployed it. Lerner says leading adopters of SD-WAN have been retailers and financial institutions that have a large number of branch offices. So if SD-WAN is so great why isn’t it more ubiquitous? Many organizations have custom built ASICs controlling their WANs and LANs, which have long refresh cycles. Network engineers are traditionally averse to dramatic changes too, Lerner says. When the hardware is ready for an upgrade Lerner expects organizations will consider SD-WANs, but that could be a multi-year process.

The CMO is not replacing the CIO and here’s why

The transformational CIO, unlike the traditional CIO, is in high-demand. In many cases, organizations do not understand what this means or what a transformational CIO looks like let along what they are capable of. A transformational CIO, unlike traditional CIO, is far more aligned with the business of the company. They are in-tune with how the company makes and spends money. They also look for opportunities around customer engagement and business growth. Transformational CIOs are more about business and data than they are about technology. In many ways, the transformational CIO is a business leader (first) that happens to have responsibility for IT.

Quote for the day:

"The world's appetite for data is increasing and with this comes a greater need for organizations to support cloud workloads." -- Nevil Knupp

February 10, 2016

London Mayoral candidates go head-to-head on technology policy

Both Khan and Pidgeon said they would establish superfast broadband as a core utility, something no one in the capital should be without, but the Liberal Democrate candidate pointed out that office space “is a bigger challenge than broadband speed”. She said the government’s “relaxation of rules” which allow developers to convert commercial property into residential use without planning permission, “needs to stop”. Goldsmith said that rolling out broadband can be “achieved relatively easy” and suggested partnering with the private sector to use Transport for London’s (TfL's) existing network to turn it into a “superfast broadband network.

Intel report puts spotlight on diversity at work

While the diversity statistics may not be cause for huge celebration, tech experts are hailing Intel's level of commitment and transparency as a possible game changer in the hiring practices at tech companies. Intel is the only tech giant to have publicly set quantifiable diversity, hiring or retention goals, according to NPR. "There's nothing here [that's] top secret or should not be shared with the rest of the world, in my mind," said CEO Brian Krzanich, who added that he hopes this transparency will spur competing technology companies to follow suit in order to prove their commitment to diversity. Claire Hough, VP of Engineering at Udemy, believes Intel's transparency to be an important step toward solving the larger problem of diversity at work.

What Managers Should Know About Data Privacy and the ‘Internet of Things’

Any business leader worth his or her salt is looking at how to gain a competitive advantage with IoT. The challenge, says Giulio Coraggio, a privacy attorney at DLA Piper Italy, is “how to ensure privacy protection in a manner that does not impair business profitability, which requires the need to get access to large databases of personal data.” In terms of risk, the IoT means the number of access points where personal information could be compromised will grow exponentially. The IoT can also, unwittingly, increase the risk of unlawful surveillance: Hello Barbie is a case in point. A hacker, potentially, could break into the ToyTalk cloud and listen to a kid’s conversation with the doll.

Cloud Computing Emerging as a Panacea for every Business Qualm

Cloud computing has been and continues to be adopted by enterprises across industries in many different ways. It represents a fantastic opportunity for technology companies to help customers simplify IT. Cloud has been seeing a lot of demand across sectors. Industries like telecom, BFSI, retail, education, healthcare and government are increasingly turning to the cloud to simplify IT. The demand for public cloud has recently shown an increase in the mobile and broadband sectors; pharmacy, manufacturing, e-commerce, retail and travel were the early adopters of public cloud. These include both the SMBs as well as larger enterprises.

How Pioneering Banks Adopt Hadoop for Enterprise Data Management

Simply put, bank IT budgets can no longer cover the same spending on specialized hardware and hosting and services. Regulatory pressures that mandate additional risk and compliance costs only compound these pressures. These regulatory forces include Basel Committee guidelines on risk data reporting and aggregation (RDA), The Dodd-Frank Act, the Volcker Rule, and regulatory capital adequacy legislation such asComprehensive Capital Analysis and Review (CCAR). These regulatory pressures force an urgent retooling of existing data architectures. These forces are transforming Risk and Compliance from a set of “check box” activities into a unique and compelling opportunity for competitive advantage.

Minimally Invasive “Stentrode” Shows Potential as Neural Interface for Brain

The catheter is inserted into a blood vessel in the neck. Researchers then use real-time imaging to guide the stentrode to a precise location in the brain, where the stentrode then expands and attaches to the walls of the blood vessel to read the activity of nearby neurons. The stentrode technology leverages well-established techniques from the field of endovascular surgery, which uses blood vessels as portals for accessing deep structures while greatly reducing trauma associated with open surgery. Endovascular techniques are routinely used for surgical repair of damaged blood vessels and for installation of devices such as stents and stimulation electrodes for cardiac pacemakers.

Where does Apple go after the iPhone?

"We believe 10 years from now Generation Z will find reality inefficient," Munster went on to write. "Generation Z will see the benefits of mixed reality headsets that augment the world with real-time information as they need it and in their field of view, without needing to look at one piece of information at a time on a smartphone." This might all seem rather far-fetched, but how would we have reacted to a prediction made, say, in 2000, that smartphones would be as huge - not to mention hugely influential - as they are now? We'd have probably thought that was far-fetched, but here we are, a little more than 15 years on, pretty much every one of us with a smartphone.

IT Automation In The Wild

“The automation angle is key to rapid delivery, and it lends a high level of quality and predictability to our development process and products,” Yochem says. Interestingly, Yochem describes IT automation as an IT-driven strategy, the opposite of the view expressed by Maras. “This is an IT-driven strategy, with the desired outcome being to deliver differentiating, high quality products to our clients. We are fortune at BDP in that our broader business community understands the value of business and IT automation, and have been supportive as we’ve adopted DevOps practices as part of our broader Agile methodology for product delivery,” Yochem concludes.

Flash memory's density surpasses hard drives for first time

The highest areal density for today's HDD products is about 1.3Tbpsi, according to Coughlin. Most HDD products, however, are well below that. For example, Seagate's desktop hard drives have a maximum areal density of 850Gbpsi; those drives use shingled magnetic recording (SMR), which overlaps the magnetic tracks for greater density. While still best-case laboratory figures, the NAND flash areal densities shown at the ISSCC are not far behind what is shipping today. Major SSD makers, such as Samsung,have announced what would be industry-leading 15TB 2.5-in solid-state drives (SSDs) are already on the horizon.

CISA is the beginning of a very long cybersecurity fight

The groundwork laid by laws like the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act and standards in NIST’s cybersecurity framework have served to put the nation on a solid cybersecurity footing, but it will take much more effort if public and private sector are to deter the rise of data breaches and cyber attacks. “The level of awareness has risen, but its not where it needs to be. If you really step back and assess the threats, this goes to everything — almost every piece of equipment, every car, every refrigerator, clocks, every tool we use, let alone our computers and networks and electric grid,” said Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker. “The challenge is to make sure that we step up our game," she added, "We’ve got to collaborate.”

Quote for the day:

"The unfortunate truth is that securing internet-enabled devices is not always a high priority among vendors and manufacturers." -- Alex Chiu

February 09, 2016

Regarding Big Data, One Manager’s “Resistance” Is Another Manager’s “Caution”

After all, Turck suggests, big data is characterized by situations involving vast quantities of rapidly expanding data volumes; we puny humans can’t be expected to lasso meaning from all this without some help from AI-based minions. A lot of this makes sense when looked at from an “early adopter/late adopter” perspective. Data intensive “digital native” companies (e.g., Google, Amazon, etc.) have been in the forefront because they’re already data-centric. Less “resistance” means faster adoption by them, right? While I have to defer to Turck on the basis of his understanding of the technological landscape, a lot of this discussion has a very familiar ring to it.

9 Technologies That Could Cut Demand For Lawers

Lawyers are embracing technology that makes them more efficient and less trapped in 100-hour work weeks but that also reduces the need for them in certain types of cases or turns their counsel into a commodity. These technologies and services include a Web platform that searches patents more quickly than lawyers can, an app to find flaws in contracts, low-cost access to ask legal questions and an arbitration network to keep from having to hire legal representation to go to small-claims court. Attorneys from across the country heard about these at the recent LegalTech conference where some of the attendees indicated that the innovations could save money for law firms and even change their hiring practices by cutting the need for full-timers.

How Technology Is Helping the Blind Navigate the Physical World

Some technological developments are convenient for the rest of us but godsends to visually impaired people: Amazon reduces store visits. Uber provides transportation. Audible allows access to a selection of books and articles that vastly outstrips the audio and Braille sections of even a big city library. Most importantly, the next generation of assistive technology should change visually impaired people’s relationship with information, according to Asakawa. Personal technology allows data to be poured into the minds of the sighted, without realization or effort, through devices that have become as taken-for-granted as fingers and toes. But visually impaired people “always have to be active very active to get information,” she says. “It never just comes to us.” And the blind never take a walk just to clear their minds, says Asakawa. It takes a lot of mental energy just to get around.

How Testability Can Help Teams to Go Faster

Agile testing is testing in an agile context. The testing doesn’t change when we adopt agile, but the context changes. Some of the differences in agile testing are that by using an iterative approach the lead time for preparing, executing and reporting tests becomes shorter and that change will be a common thing. Also there is a change in roles, Schoots mentioned that as a test manager using agile he became more of a coach and was doing less testing. Rapid testing is a mind-set and a skill-set of testing said Schoots. With rapid testing there will be less documents and the focus on how to do testing increases. Rapid testing is a general testing methodology, not only for agile but suitable for any kind of project or product. Testing is about people working together in conditions of uncertainty. We can’t know everything and things will change.

IT Audits and Data Governance: What You Need to Know

By educating all IT staff members on the importance of compliance frameworks, a company can improve its audits and better, they can actually reduce risk by having everyone in IT on board to counter the dynamic threats we are all exposed to every day. The IT department can and should play a key role in responding to IT audits, audits that are there to assure the company meets this minimum standard that is the foundation for security. One excellent framework to learn is the NIST Cyber Security framework. This particular NIST framework is the result of executive order 13636,”Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity” issued by the President of the United States. This was of course in response to the many data breaches that are hurting our country and its economy.

Seven tips to tap into Word's AutoText power

Word's AutoText feature lets you store text and graphics to insert later. Any content you include regularly is an AutoText candidate. Once you create the entry, you can insert the entire element instead of retyping it. AutoText is similar to AutoCorrect, which replaces commonly misspelled words automatically. But AutoText goes beyond the AutoCorrect feature by storing formatting, line breaks, and even graphics. It's AutoCorrect, but more. Although AutoText can make you more productive, many users don't know about it. In this article, I'll show you how to create and insert an AutoText entry. Then, I'll show you several ways to use this feature that you might not think of yourself. I'm using Office 2016 on a Windows 10 64-bit system, but these tips will work with Word 2003 and later.

Easing DevOps culture shock

Getting there requires you to target specific outcomes. While those outcomes should include soft goals like “better alignment with the business,” be sure to include hard outcomes, such as target metrics around defects, deployment frequency, and deployment-to-production success rates. And don’t miss the importance of speed over cost. ... “There are a whole bunch of very different techniques we use in order to optimize for speed, including the use of small, cross-functional teams that can independently deploy value to the customer without having to rely on hundreds, or even thousands, of other people,” Kim says. “When you optimize for speed, you’re willing to do all sorts of things—cultivate internal talent, pay engineers better and send them to conferences—that you would not necessarily do if you were optimizing for cost.”

US Government Wants to Sharply Increase Spending on Cybersecurity

"We have a broad surface area of old, outdated technology that's hard to secure, expensive to operate and, on top of all that, the skill sets needed to maintain those systems are disappearing rather rapidly," Tony Scott, the U.S. chief information security officer, said during the briefing. The fund requires approval from the U.S. Congress. Much of the plan could be initiated using the president's executive authority, Daniel said, but the administration plans to work closely with Congress. "This plan really is as aggressive as we can get under existing authority, and we can do quite a bit of it without the additional resources," he said.

Using Business Analytics to Make the Most of Data in 2016

Organizations need to use data and information technology better to streamline analytics. Our research suggests that they will need to invest in data preparation for analytics, as three out of five (62%) participants identified accessing and preparing data as a challenge in their predictive analytics process. The same percentage (62%) cited accessing and integrating data as a main reason for dissatisfaction with their analytic processes. Organizations can address some of these challenges in gaining access to information by virtualizing data. We also will follow the progress of organizations in using cloud-based technologies to help streamline their analytics;

Quote for the day:

"Adaptability is about the powerful difference between adapting to cope and adapting to win." -- Max McKeown

February 08, 2016

This is why Amazon will open physical bookstores

Amazon competes with other book publishers for authors. What other publishers can offer that Amazon cannot is coveted placement in physical bookstores. Those tables you see in a bookstore when you first enter are hot properties in the world of book marketing. And Amazon can't compete with that, until it gets its own bookstores. Physical bookstores will help Amazon attract bigger-name authors. One of Amazon's secrets to customer service is that it accepts returns, no questions asked. Physical bookstores would make it easy for people to return products. They could also serve as "outlet" stores to sell returned merchandise, saving Amazon millions. One of Amazon's big advantages is that it has so many credit cards in its system. The knowledge that Amazon already has your payment and delivery details means you don't have to enter all that information into a new site.

Big data's big role in humanitarian aid

"Can big data give us peace? I think the short answer is we're starting to explore that. We're at the very early stages, where there are shining examples of little things here and there. But we're on that road," says Kalev H. Leetaru, creator of the GDELT Project, or the Global Database of Events, Language and Tone, which describes itself as a comprehensive "database of human society." The topic is gaining traction. A 2013 report, "New Technology and the Prevention of Violence and Conflict,"from the International Peace Institute, highlights uses of telecommunications technology, including data, in several crisis situations around the world. The report emphasizes the potential these technologies hold in helping to ease tensions and address problems.

Why Cloud Computing Will Shake Up Security

The good news is these are essentially the same types of services that analyze data traffic for malware, but designed for the cloud. It still won’t be easy; there are some technical hurdles, like figuring out how the anti-malware solution gets inserted into a cloud system to which it doesn’t necessarily have access. Still, I think the top-shelf anti-malware vendors will be hugely motivated to attack this problem with gusto, and will figure it out. Of course, Amazon and other cloud providers will continue to enhance their security, but dealing with the many and evolving strains of malware is not their core competency. Instead, I think they will be more inclined to work with, or at least make it easier for, established security vendors to deploy their solutions onto cloud platforms. Expect to see more APIs and frameworks from cloud providers that allow for more seamless integration of third-party anti-malware.

All Your Data Belongs To Us – Data Security in a Global Infrastructure

Security analysts are seldom invited to initial software project meetings. No documented protection requirements for sensitive data are usually present at the meetings, nor how to identify data that is sensitive. Thus data security does not influence data architectural decisions. Basic data architectural decisions are usually completed prior to a full data analysis, which is assumed to be a business analysis. A security analysis would be a data analysis that characterizes the sensitivity of the data for privacy, legal and contractual protections, customer and supplier non-disclosure agreements, trade secrets, and personal private data of customers and employees. Do you do this during project planning? Even if data sensitivity is brought up, there is often no corporate standard to indicate this sensitivity in the Enterprise Data Model.

Built in: From myth to reality

Security practitioners should create a map of their respective value chains. Only after we understand the “who, what and where” of our enterprises' value chains can we take the next step: putting in place a flexible and adaptable architecture to begin the journey of making security “built in.” Is your map complete? Do you know what organization in your enterprise owns the relationship with your distribution channel? Once you have a map, establish what threats should be part of the mindset of your value chain members. Manipulation, disruption and espionage in the IT value chain is an essential place to start. Next, establish foundational requirements that can be applied across the product lifecycle, from design to decommission. The key driving those requirements is collaborative partnerships with your value chain partners.

AR and VR: The future of work and play?

Virtual reality is all about convincing the brain that a computer-generated 3D environment delivered to your eyes via a headset is 'real' -- a concept known as 'presence' in VR circles. Anything that doesn't look 'right' to our visual system may deliver a sub-par experience, or even cause dizziness, disorientation, nausea and headaches. This is less of a problem with AR, because you can still see the real world. ... According to the report's author Matthew Duke-Woolley, a lot of potential enterprise AR adopters are currently playing their cards close to the chest: "They don't really want to publicise what they're finding, because it's a cut-throat business -- in logistics, for example, the margins are quite tight, so if you can get a 10 or 15 percent cost advantage in your process, you stand a really good chance of beating the opposition."

What to love about your IT security job

Security practices may not top the “what I love about my job” list for the everyday employee, but for those working in the InfoSec industry, it’s a different story. Between the thrill of building systems to protect data and keeping up with an ever-changing landscape, IT security professionals face new challenges daily and are never finished with their to-do lists. Whether it’s building new technologies or advancing security skill sets, these InfoSec professionals share what they love most about their jobs. ... Every day is different, every client is different, and the evolution of the hack changes every week. While we are dealing with the same premise of protecting assets and data, the threats are evolving, adapting to defenses, and can be innovative to meet the objectives of the hacker.

Feature Toggles

Feature toggles are a powerful technique, allowing teams to modify system behavior without changing code. They fall into various usage categories, and it's important to take that categorization into account when implementing and managing toggles. Toggles introduce complexity. We can keep that complexity in check by using smart toggle implementation practices and appropriate tools to manage our toggle configuration, but we should also aim to constrain the number of toggles in our system. ... "Feature Toggling" is a set of patterns which can help a team to deliver new functionality to users rapidly but safely. In this article on Feature Toggling we'll start off with a short story showing some typical scenarios where Feature Toggles are helpful.

What are containers and microservices?

Containers have been integral to Unix and Linux for years. A recent change has been the ease with which they can be used by all developers, and an entire supporting ecosystem has grown up around them. Containerisation is not something happening on the fringes of IT, it is core to the way many web-scale services operate and is increasingly being adopted by more conservative organisations. The suppliers mentioned in this article cite customers ranging from the NHS to large banks. There are many suppliers involved, but no one disputes that Docker has led the charge and sits at the heart of the market. Docker says millions of developers and tens of thousands of organisations are now using its technology. However, another statistic indicates the novelty of containerisation for many, with only 40% of Docker’s customers running containers in production.

A call for more cloud computing transparency

Although Gartner calls some cloud revenue reporting nuanced, I'd call it hiding the hardware. Companies that have a mix of cloud flavors and traditional infrastructure should break them out. There's no crime in hosting data centers, managed services and converged private cloud building blocks. Cloud revenue should be broken out by product groups and various flavors. Not all cloud revenue is created equal. Does this type of transparency matter? Gartner argues that revenue claims shouldn't matter more than strategic fit. However, revenue does indicate scale. Scale indicates the ability to lower infrastructure costs over time. My take: Revenue claims matter and the debate revolves around degree.

Quote for the day:

"Do just once what others say you can't do, and you will never pay attention to their limitations again." -- James R. Cook

February 07, 2016

Enterprise Architecture Planning 2.0

Unfortunately, at most companies, EAP, or EA, was placed under the information technology function. It was often directed toward addressing narrow technology needs for particular business units, or subsumed into complex exercises in documenting incompatible systems. Then, as EAP was combined with reengineering during the 1990s, it was frequently used as an excuse for wholesale cost cutting, which ultimately tended to make companies weaker. This history helps explain why many EAP groups developed a poor reputation, or did not deliver value to the enterprise. Today, companies can proceed in a more strategic way — with something close to EA in scope, but more ambitious in spirit and pragmatic in achieving results.

Success in CIO position increasingly tied to business expertise

The first year, CIOs put together a plan; the second year, they execute on that plan; and the third year, "things don't turn out quite the way you'd like them to," said Langer, director of the Center for Technology Management and academic director of the executive Masters of Science Program atColumbia University. Then, they're gone. What sets apart the CIOs who don't fit this pattern? Langer described 23 characteristics in his recent webinar, Strategic IT: The Transition Taking Place in the CIO Role. The material was based on research and interviews that he and his colleague Lyle Yorks conducted for their similarly named book.

What does the future of driverless cars look like?

“A lot of people talk about automation being adopted at the kind of usual pace of safety systems, which is a kind of 20 year adoption curve,” Reed says. “I think it's going to be different. “Use cases like driverless shuttles in cities could happen quite quickly. Similarly automated driving by cars and platoons of trucks on motorways.” While some companies are looking towards pods and new ownership models, others are focusing on more traditional cars gaining increasing levels of automation over a longer timeline. Reed predicts the two models will co-exist, with adoption rates being different for each. “Adoption of fully automated vehicles will take longer due to the associated technical and regulatory challenges.” He predicts that although the technology will be a premium technology at first, it will trickle down to lower value vehicles and gain rapid adoption once practical.

A Business Outcome Driven Enterprise Architecture Approach

“Focusing on a standard EA framework doesn’t work,” he said. “In the past EA practicioners focused on deliverables that were useful to enterprise architects but not valuable to senior management and/or did not respond to a specific business IT need. “We’ve witnessed a change in mind-set, execution and delivery of EA. The value of EA is not in simply ‘doing EA’, but rather in how it can help evolve the business and enable senior executives to respond to business threats and opportunities,” (for more on responding to threats and opportunities, the Agile way see here). Brian Burke’s statements are echoed across the industry. Enterprise Architecture has got to become more about business outcomes and the deliverables that steer an organization toward them.

5 Cloud Computing Predictions for 2016

It’s obvious that enterprises will retain on-premises infrastructure for the foreseeable future. Given the use of public cloud computing there is, ipso facto, hybrid computing. The key question: How much infrastructure will remain on-premises and in what form? One vision proffered for hybrid cloud is an on-premises cloud environment based on, say, OpenStack, which interoperates with a similar public environment. Another vision proffered is an on-premises cloud environment interoperating with a dissimilar public environment. Yet a third is an unchanged on-premises environment, say a vSphere cluster, along with use of some public environment. Depending upon what form of hybrid cloud one envisions, the appropriate solution varies widely. And the question of what will emerge as the dominant form of hybrid cloud emerges victorious will dictate the fortunes of both users and vendors in the future.

The Internet of Emotions: Putting the person back into personalization

“When we talk about affective devices today, we’re really looking at primary emotions and that’s what we think is going to be responded to,” notes Wendell Wallach, acclaimed ethicist and scholar from Yale University's Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics and author of, A Dangerous Master: How to Keep Technology from Slipping Beyond our Control. “But if you look at Paul Ekman’s charts, he’s got thousands of secondary ideas that represent subtler secondary states. As technology picks up on these subtle emotions it would avoid manipulating you in a very crude state one could filter out to manipulate you using those subtler cues.” Dr. Paul Ekman is the pioneer of micro-expressions, or "very brief facial expressions that occur when a person either deliberately or unconsciously conceals a feeling."

Why It’s Time To Switch To Big Data-Backed Business Decisions

Never before in the history of mankind, such a huge number of people are leaving their digital footprints. They are sharing, purchasing and surfing, searching and reviewing—and all of this is documented. You may analyze or may discard this humongous amount of data, but it certainly has a meaning. They give a clue to something that you don’t know. Companies having a foresight understand its importance. There are businesses, on the other hand, believe it more a hype. But sooner or later they will have to adopt it as this is an inevitability since technology has arrived. Human subjectivity is not going to be eliminated soon, but BIG data will be a major tool for the crucial marketing and business decisions.

Compact Strings Optimization in OpenJDK 9

UseCompressedStrings feature was rather conservative: while distinguishing between char[] and byte[] case, and trying to compress the char[] into byte[] on String construction, it done most String operations on char[], which required to unpack the String. Therefore, it benefited only a special type of workloads, where most strings are compressible (so compression does not go to waste), and only a limited amount of known String operations are performed on them (so no unpacking is needed). In great many workloads, enabling -XX:+UseCompressedStrings was a pessimization ... implementation was basically an optional feature that maintained a completely distinct String implementation in alt-rt.jar, which was loaded once the VM option is supplied. Optional features are harder to test, since they double the number of option combinations to try.

Cool Privilege Control System

Privilege Control is very common mechanism. In real life, people are allocated into different roles. Some of who can maintain sensitive information based on his/her access level, and the other cannot. In computer world, that is the same. Microsoft Window is a famous PC OS and it also has a user management system in it. Administrator can create user account and assign different privileges to different user account. E.g. Ricky’s role is administrator and Jenny’s role is guest, both of who launch the system based on his/her Login Name and Password, Ricky can control everything of the computer and Jenny does not have any permission except view right. That is based on theirs privilege.

Cloud Big Data Analytics Adoption Accelerating in Healthcare

More than a third of organizations said that big data analytics was one of their most important spending drivers. Patient engagement and consumer retention and management tools are also attracting attention, with 31.6 percent of respondents stating that they are actively seeking new technologies to help them track and communicate with their patient base. In 2016, close to 40 percent of providers are looking to enhance or refresh their patient portal offerings, while a similar number are planning to expand their electronic communications capabilities by implementing wellness and chronic disease management programs that take advantage of online communication techniques, as well as texting and phone-based initiatives.

Quote for the day:

"It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame." -- Marshall McLuhan

February 06, 2016

Large Scaled-Scrum Development Does Work!

Close interaction with the customer is one of our cornerstones and has been a significant factor in our success. Our customers are welcome during the entire flow of product development: we allow some customers to directly influence our overall product backlog, we demonstrate existing and new features per customer demand, and customers are invited to join the test labs within the development process. Any feedback given by customers at demos or test labs flows into the development: this way we can identify early on whether the developed functionality will lead to true customer value. Our product-deployment support provides support to any customer; a kanban team composed of dedicated deployment managers and team members from the development teams drives this initiative.

Why You Should be a Little Scared of Machine Learning

What deep learning will allow us to do is to bridge the semantic gap between the fuzzy thing that is the real world, and the symbolic world computer programs operate in. Simply put, machines will soon have much more understanding of the world than they currently do. A few years from now, you’ll take a picture of your friend Sarah eating an ice cream cone, and some machine in the cloud will recognize Sarah in the said picture. It will know that she’s eating ice cream, probably chocolate flavored by the color of it. Facial expression recognition will make it possible to see that she looks excited with a hint of insecurity. Combining information from multiple third party data providers, it won’t be too difficult to infer that you and Sarah are on your third date together.

The Rise of Consumer Health Wearables: Promises and Barriers

In spite of these promises, the actual use of consumer wearables within a clinical population remains limited. The potential applications described above are still in the early stages of development, have not been approved for medical use, and have so far been explored predominantly within an academic research rather than a real-world context. Clinical studies to date that have a closer resemblance to consumer wearables involve (1) pedometers and smartphone apps to tackle a sedentary lifestyle and obesity and (2) home telemonitoring solutions for patients with pulmonary conditions, diabetes, hypertension, and cardiovascular diseases.

The 'Fin'-ternet of Things: exploring the potential of IoT in the finance sector

The financial services sector, starting with insurance, capital markets and actuarial information, has always led the way in the collection, analysis and monetisation of personal data. The very concept of KYC (Know Your Customer) regulation revolves around the bank's ability to detect and prevent identity theft, fraud, money laundering and terrorist financing by identifying unusual behaviour patterns from the customer. Away from regulation and compliance requirements, this enhanced customer insight is helping to change and improve the way financial institutions interact with customers. When IoT crosses with finance, we suddenly get an explosion of data, which will bring even greater opportunities to obtain data and build even more accurate profiles of customers.

Steve Ballmer talks about the current state of Microsoft ...

When you take a look at the transition from server software to Azure, what's going on in terms of cloud infrastructure, the company is absolutely the No. 1 company serving enterprise backbone needs, which is fantastic. It's making the migration to cloud. We started a good thing with Azure, and the company has made well more than two years of progress in terms of being able to compete with the right cost profile, margin structure, and innovation versus Amazon. There's still a lot to do on that. It's not like the company rides the same momentum. I think the company in terms of the investments it's making in evangelizing those products, supporting those products technically, I think it's really doing a good job.

User Behavior Analytics: The Force of Cybersecurity Awakens

Besides cyber intelligence, companies and government agencies will begin using Blockchain encryption to protect against cyberthreats. Blockchain is the public ledger of Bitcoin transactions, which is updated by a network of several computers solving complex algorithms for verification. As such, it is considered a secure way to record data, as tampering with the records would require taking over majority of the computers in the network - a nearly impossible feat. MIT has tapped Blockchain technology to build Enigma, which could potentially allow databases to retain sensitive information and process it without risking exposure to malicious parties.

How Google's AI breakthroughs are putting us on a path to narrow AI

"If you want to solve consciousness you're not going to solve it using the sorts of algorithms they're using," he said. "We all want to get to the moon. They've managed to get somewhere up this stepladder, ahead of us, but we're only going to get there by building a rocket in the long term. "They will certainly develop useful algorithms with various applications but there will be a whole range of applications that we're really interested in that they will not succeed at by going down that route." In the case of DeepMind, Stringer says the reinforcement learning approach used to teach systems to play classic arcade games and Go has limitations compared to how animals and human acquire knowledge about the world.

IAP: Fast, Versatile Alternative to HTTP

IAP addresses many of the use cases that HTTP 1.1 ignores. While HTTP2 and WebSockets definitely address several problems not addressed by HTTP 1.1, we believe that more is still required, as we describe in our blog: Why HTTP2 and Websockets are not Enough. IAP is a free flow message based protocol. The communicating nodes exchange messages, just like HTTP requests and responses. However, IAP does not require that each message have a response. Being a free flow protocol, IAP specifies only that nodes exchange messages. Messages can flow freely in both directions of a network connection as the communicating nodes see fit for the purpose of the communication. We have described some of the core message flows in more detail in our tutorial IAP Message Flows.

Blockchain technology to disrupt financial, legal fields

Blockchain technology is going to enable disintermediation in a great many fields that until this point have largely not been digitally disrupted. Blockchain technology ... could take an enormous amount of friction [out of] legal processes and legal costs. One person's friction is another person's profit. I also think thatbanking and financial services could be significantly changed by the integration of blockchain technology. One thing that I predicted in the book, which is now happening: Goldman Sachs recently filed a patent for creating its own digital currency, which is really sort of a walled-garden use of blockchain technology, to settle foreign transactions and asset settlements, from stock sales to wire transfers and the like. Goldman Sachs is quintessential Wall Street. To see Goldman Sachs move in this direction I think portends a lot of what is to come.

Evolving Our Security in 2016

It’s important to note that as companies build out their IoT ecosystems, whether for the consumer or business market, connectivity and security standards are almost nonexistent. Most of these projects involve customization and add to this the fact that there isn’t one dominant technology service provider in the IoT space and the approach to standards is at best fractured. And of course all of this has implications for security. In fact, during 2016 we’re set to witness more examples of security vulnerabilities related to IoT. This is inevitable. The lack of standardization means IoT is an incredibly fragmented space and one in which network security has not been a priority for device manufacturers.

Quote for the day:

"I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious." -- Albert Einstein