Davemichels

At the start of 2016, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos promised that Amazon's cloud computing unit, Amazon Web Services, would hit $10 billion in revenue, "doing so at a pace even faster than Amazon achieved that milestone."

And, although Amazon missed its overall projected revenue number for the quarter, AWS finished the year by blowing by those initial expectations: coming in at $12.2 billion, with $3.1 billion in operating income profit.

Amazon's closest competitor, Microsoft, doesn't report the revenue it brings in from its comparable cloud, Azure. Even so, Microsoft said last week when it reported its fiscal Q2 that "commercial cloud annualized revenue run rate exceeds $14 billion."

That means that if things continue on pace, it will have $14 billions in cloud revenue from businesses (as opposed to consumers) in two more quarters. Keep in mind that a huge chunk of that (if not the biggest chunk) is its Office apps, not the apples-to-apples cloud it sells against Amazon known as Azure.

Amazon's growing dominance in cloud is meaningful for a couple of reasons. As Amazon grows, it's putting pressure on classic IT hardware and software providers. As companies use Amazon for more of their data center needs, they don't buy as many servers, networks and storage as they used to. And Amazon builds much of its own infrastructure, doesn't buy it from the classic vendors.

At the same time, Amazon has gone on the warpath with some of the biggest vendors out there, namely Oracle. As companies move into Amazon's data centers, they are more likely to buy one of Amazon's home grown databases instead of Oracle. In fact, Amazon says that in 2016 its cloud customers migrated more than 18,000 databases from other vendors (including, but not exclusively, Oracle) using a tool it developed to make it easier for companies to move their databases.

AWS seems like an unstoppable success now, and so we expect to see more fireworks between Amazon and classic IT vendors like Oracle as 2017 continues.

SEE ALSO: 2 of Cisco's biggest competitors quietly kicked it in the teeth

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NOW WATCH: NASA just released over 100 images of Pluto — and the footage is breathtaking

Budweiser unveiled their Super Bowl ad a few days before the big game, and the minute-long cinematic piece has already angered some people on Twitter. The spot — called "Born the Hard Way" — tells the tale of co-founder Adolphus Busch who immigrated to the United States from Germany in the 1800s. While not intended as a political statement, the immigration theme isn't sitting well with some who think the company is anti-Trump. 

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The retailer’s “Store of the Future” was killed before it opened.

In the wake of a holiday season that was worse than the company expected, Target has decided to cut two of its most ambitious long-term projects before either even got off the ground, according to multiple sources.

One of the projects was dubbed the “Store of the Future” and consisted of a team building out a prototype for a small-format Target store that would be part showroom and part warehouse, with robots picking items behind the scenes to have ready for customers as they checked out, sources say.

The store was also expected to more closely integrate Target’s e-commerce offerings and include space for more experiential activities like classes and meet-ups.

The Store of the Future was likely to open this year, so the decision to ax it completely blindsided leaders working on the project, according to two sources. Target CEO Brian Cornell was said to be excited about the initiative, making the shutdown even more shocking, these people said.

The other project was an internal startup called Goldfish that was building a software platform that would have the potential to someday become an open marketplace on which retailers other than Target might list goods for sale, sources said. In the near term, Target was set to first use the platform itself for a fashion site that had a social media feel.

The leader of this project, former PayPal and BigCommerce exec West Stringfellow, has told people he and his staff have been let go from the company. The project was set to launch in the next month; Stringfellow had just relocated from Target’s hometown of Minneapolis to San Francisco to launch it.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune first reported some details of these shutdowns.

Together, the decisions to cut two of the company’s most innovative concepts before they premiered have flabbergasted the executives leading them, sources say. The big question festering inside the company now: What the heck is Target’s long-term plan to restart growth? The company lowered its profit outlook following a poor November and December. And nixing plans for the Store of the Future comes as Amazon is unveiling its own futuristic take on what physical stores should look like.

In response, Target issued the following statement:

At Target, we regularly pause to evaluate our business and have to make tough choices about where our company is best served to invest our time and resources. We recently made some changes to the innovation portfolio to refocus our efforts on supporting our core business, both in stores and online, and delivering against our strategic priorities. Target remains absolutely committed to pursuing what’s next. We see a tremendous opportunity to drive innovation in areas that will fuel our growth both in the short and long-term in areas such as digital, technology, supply chain and merchandising.

Target CEO Brian Cornell is expected to present to investors on Feb. 28 during the company’s annual investor day, when he will also reveal full fourth-quarter financial results.

Cornell has been the CEO for two-and-a-half years now, and Target’s stock price is essentially flat. Expect some tough questions for the chief executive that day.

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Microsoft recently announced a step forward in its roadmap for real-time communications with preview availability of the WebRTC 1.0 API and RTC video codec support within Microsoft Edge. The support enables video communications across platforms and browsers without the need for a plugin.

Well, it's another record-setting quarter for Apple in the books, and things are looking good for the company pretty much across the board — except in the iPad business, which continues its rapid sales shrinkage to the tune of 19%.

The decline of the iPad has caused some angst among Apple fans: With about 13 million iPads sold last quarter, it's still selling 2.5 times as well as the company's Mac line. Apple CEO Tim Cook talks the iPad up as a product with a bright future ahead. But with the decline in sales so unmistakable, that future is getting called into question.

"What if the iPad isn’t the future of computing?" writes Marco Arment, a long-time Apple developer and critic. "What if, like so much in technology, it’s mostly just additive, rather than largely replacing PCs and Macs, and furthermore had a cooling-fad effect as initial enthusiasm wore off and customers came to this conclusion?"

At Loop Insight, Dave Mark is much more bullish on the iPad, citing the fact that people keep their iPads longer as a positive: "If there’s a problem, it’s that Apple built a product that does what it is supposed to do and does it so well that it does not bear replacement. And that’s not a problem for me."

For my money, though, it's Daring Fireball's John Gruber with the most reasonable take. In addition to that longer lifecycle alluded to by Mark, where people are keeping their iPads longer because they require less frequent updates, Gruber writes "the conceptual space between phones and laptops has shrunk."

Convergence

The fact is that there's not a tremendous difference between an iPhone, an iPhone Plus, and an iPad, apart from the screen size. That feels obvious, but it's really important: An iPhone Plus is big enough to, say, watch movies on, but also small enough to pocket or tuck away in a bag. 

Then, take it a step further. As Gruber writes: "With bigger iPhones and super-thin MacBooks, the iPad stands out less. That trend isn’t going to reverse."

A 9.7-inch iPad Pro with the Apple Smart Keyboard case is only a half-pound lighter than a MacBook. And the kind of power user who wants more than a phone on which to get stuff done will probably lean towards the MacBook, with its built-in keyboard and all-around better hardware specs.

Meanwhile, on the software side, things are also changing quickly. For a long time, smartphone apps were thought to be pale imitations of their desktop PC equivalents, with fewer features. That's changing rapidly, though, as people grow more accustomed to getting stuff done on a touchscreen, and developers get better at building software that runs on a touchscreen. Think of how much more you can do on a phone now versus, say, three years ago.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that the differences between laptop, tablet, and phone are slowly blurring away, in terms of both hardware and software. 

Lost in the shuffle

The iPad seems to be getting lost in that transition, as bigger phones take care of the small, portable end of that question, and laptops eat the higher end for power users.

At the same time, competitors like Microsoft and Google are competing by building operating systems and hardware that ride the razor's edge between phone, tablet, and laptop.

And so, the question becomes less, "Do I need a tablet? or "Will this tablet replace my laptop?" and more like, "does this device do what I need it to do?" It's a healthy reminder that technology is supposed to serve you and your needs, not the other way around.

SEE ALSO: Why you should stop asking if a tablet can replace your laptop — and what to ask instead

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NOW WATCH: This woman combines calligraphy with modern technology

Slack is targeting the enterprise in a big way with Slack Enterprise Grid, a scalable version of its business communications platform. Along with the expanded platform, Slack updated its Node.js and Python SDKs so developers can add the new features to their own Slack apps.

 Slack took a big step in its evolution as a startup yesterday when it launched Slack Enterprise Grid, the enterprise version of its popular messaging platform. For Slack to continue its growth trajectory, it had to move on from being a tool for discrete teams to one that could deal with substantially more users, and provide some security and governance as it connected to other departments… Read More

While Finland is busy giving thousands of people a free $600 a month in a social experiment, the government of Oslo, Norway has announced it will give out twice that amount — to help the environment.

On February 1, Oslo's government began offering residents a $1,200 credit to be used toward the cost of an electric cargo bike.

Plagued by worsening air pollution, the city wants to cut its dependence on cars and promote a cleaner mode of transit.

The grants are designed to help people buy electric bikes that stow groceries, bags, and other personal items that one might otherwise put in the trunk of a car. Given the typical cost of e-bikes — around $2,500 to $6,400 — the credit will cover between 25% and 50% of the bike's total cost.

Norway has set aside an impressive $1 billion nationwide for new bike-related infrastructure, including new bike paths and more electric bikes. Giving more people e-bikes would minimize the need for more expensive infrastructure like "bike elevators," which carry riders uphill on their bikes.

Not all of Oslo's 618,000 residents will get the $1,200 for a bike, however. The budget only allows for 500 to 1,000 grants, City Lab reports, which means the program won't necessarily make a huge dent in Norway's smog problem. Some Norwegian news outlets have also characterized the grant as a subsidy for wealthy people, since they're more likely to have the means to buy one.

In addition to promoting bike riding, Oslo has also temporarily banned diesel vehicles and set a goal to ban all vehicles from the city center by 2019. The federal government has also discussed the possibility of becoming carbon neutral by 2030 and offering more widespread subsidies on electric bikes.

If all goes according to plan, Oslo's greenhouse gas emissions in 2020 will be at least half what they were in 1990, with many more e-bikes buzzing around.

SEE ALSO: Norway’s 450-foot-long ‘bike elevator’ is like a ski lift for cyclists

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NOW WATCH: A ridge in Norway has one of the best views in the world

Chinese tech firms often get a bad rep for stealing ideas from their Western counterparts, and, well, sometimes it’s deserved.

As part of its ongoing efforts to break into the American market, Chinese tech giant Huawei — the third biggest smartphone seller in the world after Samsung and Apple — has hired a familiar face: actor Justin Long, best known from the famous “Get a Mac” ad campaign. Long appeared in a first ad for Huawei which debuted at CES earlier this month (“The Interview”), with a second (“The Audition”) popping up on YouTube yesterday, and co-starring a Huawei MateBook running Windows 10:

The ads don’t make any direct references to Long’s previous work, but there are some not-so-subtle allusions. (“I have a tonne of...

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It may not have the same brand recognition other tech companies do, but Twilio’s API tech powers some of the most popular apps around.

Scientists have developed a way of communicating with patients who are paralysed and unable to talk by measuring the blood oxygen levels and electrical activity in their brains.

The patients were asked "yes or no" questions that they knew the answer to while a computer monitored the brain's responses to both.

The data compiled by the computer was then used to calculate the responses to other questions.

Counter to expectations, all four patients consistently answered "yes" when asked "are you happy?"

The team hopes to one day help those with paralysis resulting from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or ALS, stroke, or spinal cord injury.

They say it could transform lives, allowing completely locked-in patients to express feelings and opinion to loved ones and carers.

Produced by Leon Siciliano

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It looks like T-Mobile is rolling out support for RCS messaging in Google’s Messenger app on Android, according to reports from various social networks across the internet that were spotted by Android Police.

RCS (rich communication services) has been hailed as the savior of texting — a next-generation messaging standard for sending text and pictures without the limitations that SMS currently has. You can, for instance, send messages longer than 160 characters, which is still impossible to do through SMS.

Unlike services like Facebook Messenger or iMessage, RCS requires carrier-side implementation. Google has been pushing this for the last couple years, but it’s been slow moving. T-Mobile actually announced support for RCS messages in...

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By Dave Michels
Before selecting a workstream messaging app like Circuit, HipChat, Slack, or Spark, be sure to explore each vendor's particular architectural approach and philosophy.

It’s a big Slack made up of a bunch of little Slacks.

Slack, the chat service mostly for people at work, got its first five million users with a simple, great product — one that was best suited for early adopter-type companies with a few dozen or 100 employees.

That didn’t stop teams at big companies from trying to use Slack, and many obviously do — sometimes in smaller, unofficial or semi-official groups, and sometimes painfully.

But now Slack, which is almost three years old and has 800 employees itself, is revealing a new version of its communication software specifically built for big companies, called Slack Enterprise Grid.

In short, it’s a big Slack made of several smaller Slacks. Imagine a company-level directory of employees, but with separate, simpler Slack groups that people can belong to.

Slack

It also includes a few other things big companies often seek: Specific security and compliance features, plus compatibility with systems that retain data for things like electronic discovery in legal cases.

(Slack is also using the opportunity to announce a new partnership with SAP that will generate, among other things, a new Concur bot for those who love chatting with their expense-filing system, and to preview some new features that improve search and personalization within Slack.)

This all seems like a natural evolution for Slack, especially as competition pops up from companies like Cisco and Microsoft, which offer inferior user experiences but have longer track records selling to big corporate clients.

Another seemingly obvious future step might be a global Grid of Grids, so teams from different companies can Slack with each other and really compete with email. But first things first.

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Team communication service Slack today announced a new product designed to help its software scale to organizations with tens of thousands of employees. It’s called Slack Enterprise Grid, and it’s essentially a rethinking of the core app. It takes new features, critical design changes, and other alterations that make Slack easier to use and more efficient for corporations that are large and sprawling.

For those familiar with Slack, this new product doesn’t change much about how you use the app to communicate with your co-workers, get work done, and go about your day. For those in administrative roles, however, Slack Enterprise Grid is supposed to tackle how large companies are organized and how a myriad number of smaller teams are able...

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Slack, the $3.8 billion business chat startup, launched Slack Enterprise Grid on Tuesday — a long-awaited product that sees the four-year-old company go after bigger customers than ever before, as a new threat from Microsoft looms.

As Business Insider previously reported, Slack Enterprise Grid makes it easier for big business customers to move to the collaboration app, making it easier and more user-friendly to work with big teams. Slack already has big customers like IBM and Capital One.

At the same time, Slack unveiled some updated stats on its growth: It has over 500 million daily active users, with 1.5 million paid users. Slack also says it now has over 800 employees working across 7 offices worldwide. That's up considerably from November 2016, when Slack told Business Insider it had 650 employees across four offices.

"Enterprise Grid adapts to how a large business is organized and the ways in which individual parts of a big company work, providing enormous flexibility to create communication structures that mirror how teams already collaborate," Slack writes in a blog entry.

Basically, the new product's name refers to the fact that customers can now work in a "grid" of interconnected Slack teams, all connected to each other. The sales team, the marketing team, and the design team can all have their own separate versions of Slack, but share some central chatrooms with each other for company-wide announcements or cross-team collaboration.

Check it out:

Behind the scenes, Slack Enterprise Grid adds security and compliance controls to make the IT department happy, including the HIPAA and FINRA certifications needed to be used in the highly-regulated healthcare and financial sectors. It also sports new integrations with popular enterprise applications, including products from database giant SAP.

Slack has been talking about launching an enterprise product of this type since at least 2015, but has long taken the stance that it needed to take the time to really get it out. Now, it launches as the market is heating up in a big way.

Microsoft has set its crosshairs on Slack with Microsoft Teams, a similar product that's included in versions of the Office 365 cloud productivity suite for business. In a blog post sent out earlier this week, Microsoft says that even in its current, beta form, over 30,000 companies have tried out Microsoft Teams. When Microsoft first unveiled Teams, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield took out a full-page ad in the New York Times welcoming it to the space.

Meanwhile, $6 billion software company Atlassian company bought Trello, another hot Silicon Valley collaboration app, as part of a larger play to take on Microsoft Office — while also bolstering its own HipChat, one of the chief competitors to Slack. Networking giant Cisco, too, has Spark, a similar Slack-like service.

Still, Slack has something none of those competitors have: A ton of positive buzz in Silicon Valley, sustained even after years of being on the market. Slack's customers love it, and that word of mouth is helping it continue to grow like crazy. Plus, the $540 million in venture capital it's raised over the years probably helps it compete, too.

SEE ALSO: $3.8 billion Slack is finally launching its long-awaited version for big businesses next week

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NOW WATCH: Stewart Butterfield, co-founder of Slack and Flickr, on two beliefs that have brought him the greatest success in life

This month has easily been the most Twitter-saturated of my life. As Donald Trump upsets the order of the civilized world, I now regularly find myself in a familiar instinctive pose — left arm folded in, supporting a right hand elevating a smartphone toward my face — reading about the world in a state of growing disbelief. 140-character parcels of angst and black humor hurtle past my eyes and bombard my brain, triggering some chemical reaction that’s at once unpleasant and yet intoxicating. I don’t like reading all this bad news on Twitter, and yet I can’t bring myself to stop. I’m unable to look away from the slow-motion train crash.

But I must. For the sake of my sanity and my gainful employment, I have to decouple myself from the...

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Throughout his presidential campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly promised to pull the US out of a landmark international accord to cut carbon emissions.

“Trump has made it clear he will withdraw from the Paris Agreement,” Myron Ebell, the former head of Trump’s EPA transition team, told reporters in London on January 30. “He could do it by executive order tomorrow or he could do it as part of a larger package.”

Although the formal process for removing the US from the agreement would actually take years, it appears the Trump administration has already started the process of scaling back US involvement in the accord.

Since Trump took office, the reports that detailed the progress made on President Obama’s Climate Action Plan have disappeared from the State Department’s website, where they were once publicly accessible. 

Here's what the page with the most recent report looked like on January 20th:

And here it is now:

The three most recent reports, which were published in 2010, 2014 and 2016, are all gone from the website. Under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the US is committed to publish a report every four years that projects future greenhouse gas emissions based on existing policies. The 2010 report fulfills that requirement, while the ones published in 2014 and 2016 go a step further, describing the steps the US was taking to cut greenhouse gas pollution, prepare for the impacts of climate change, and engage with other nations about the climate problem.

The disappearances were noticed by members of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI), a group of scientists, archivists and other people working to monitor changes to government websites and download reports and data that they believe are at risk of being taken down by the Trump administration. 

During the Obama administration, the US pushed all countries to publish biennial reports analyzing how planned actions would reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the future (in addition to the reports with future projections based on current policies). The Obama administration's biennial reports assessed progress on his Climate Action Plan, charted the trends in US greenhouse gas emission, and outlined the progress made toward the reduction targets.

PDFs of the 2014 and 2016 reports are still viewable via the UNFCCC.

The page about Obama’s Climate Action Plan itself, which lives on the Department of Energy’s website, also disappeared temporarily after Trump's inauguration, but has since been put back up.

If you want to see the full PDF of the plan, however, you have to view it in the archive of Obama’s websites.

The framework of the Paris agreement, which went into effect on November 4, means it would take the US three or four years to fully withdraw, even if Trump issues an executive order to pull out of it. But there are several things the president can do now to decrease participation.

First, he could withdraw the country from the UNFCCC, which would only take a year, and would consequently remove the US from the Paris Agreement as well. Second, because the accord doesn’t impose penalties on countries that do not meet the goals they set when they ratified the deal, Trump could just ignore the targets for the US (it’s unlikely we would have reduced emissions enough to meet them anyway).

It’s not surprising that the Trump administration has taken the reports down, given its opposition to the US role in the UN and Obama’s environmental regulations. But the removal is another clear indicator that the US is rapidly ceding its global leadership on climate action.

SEE ALSO: A new browser extension lets you see what government websites looked like before the Trump administration

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NOW WATCH: Neil deGrasse Tyson explains the real problem with climate skeptics

Virtual assistants are supposed to be a linchpin of tech’s future. Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Samsung, and others have all made big investments in the tech. Many of them are using the idea of a disembodied, information-fetching helper as a selling point for new devices.

But while these assistants are infiltrating more and more gadgets, they still face a few giant hurdles on their way to wider acceptance. One, as this chart from Statista shows, is simple: People just don’t want to use them in public.

According to a June survey from Creative Strategies, those who admit to using the likes of Siri and Alexa are much more likely to use them at home (39%) or in the car (51%). When they don’t have the comfort of privacy, and when their hands are free, those numbers plummet.

That said, things been moving toward normalcy — and the more familiar virtual assistants become, the more likely people will use them wherever. If that ever happens, the next step is to hope they'll actually be good.

SEE ALSO: Alphabet’s ‘other bets’ are bringing in more money, but still cost tons

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NOW WATCH: This woman is making a fortune selling $900 blankets she knits without needles

Silicon Valley CEOs entered the debate over President Donald Trump’s immigration policy this weekend, offering criticisms of the seven-country immigration ban and in some cases outlining plans to support the employees it affects. The responses range in tone from mild rebuke to stern denunciation, reflecting both the varying personal opinions of the CEOs and their individual willingness to risk retribution from the federal government.

Here’s how tech companies reacted, with their responses sorted by the strength of their criticism.

Strong

Statements that express moral opposition to the policy.

Box. Aaron Levie, CEO of the business collaboration company, called the ban “wrong” in strong terms. He has since expanded on his thoughts in a...

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Dell is announcing a trio of new Chromebooks today, and the most interesting of the bunch is a convertible laptop that works with a stylus.

Fittingly named the Chromebook 11 Convertible, the laptop can flip around to be used like a tablet, works with the “Dell Productivity Active Pen,” and can be configured to include a camera built into the keyboard that’s meant to be used when flipped into tablet mode.

The Chromebook 11 Convertible is destined for schools, so there’s nothing particularly catchy here aside from its form. It has a generation-old Intel Celeron processor; its keyboard and trackpad are “fully sealed” to protect against spills; and it has a “rubberized trim” to improve its shock resistance — it’s going to be in schools after...

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A few weeks, I pondered (it’s what we do here in California) with a group to take an educated guess on what the Top 10 WebRTC applications are (measured in either minutes or DAU – daily active users)? Are you making your own mental list?

Telehealth? Financial Services consultation? Distance Learning/Education? Field services (remote eyes)? Is it audio or video? What about Facebook Messenger? WeChat, is certainly a big deal. However WeChat voice/video is only connecting 100 million voice calls per day on its own app. That sounds like a lot, but it’s only 8 phone calls per active user per month.

So what’s the top dog in WebRTC apps? The category winner is communitainment. It’s apps where kids of all ages are virtually hanging out, chatting, doing homework, being silly but always being social. And they’re talking about nothing. Nothing is endless, they’re video chatting on average for 2 hours a day (133 minutes)! In fact, flurry mobile reports 394% year over year growth of messaging & social usage on mobile.

After emerging from the ocean, we humans first started texting, then on to watching video snippets (YouTube), then to live one-way broadcast (more YouTube) and now to real-time interactive broadcast. WebRTC is a core component behind popular mobile apps like Musical.ly, Houseparty, Smackhigh, Monkey and the global usage is measured in billions of minutes per month.

Whether for 1-to-1 video chats or multiparty, if you want to do this real time on your mobile phone with < 300 msec delay WebRTC is the only real game in town.

But this new cool real-time technology isn’t just for the mobile youngster. The next billion dollar idea is serving the aging global population (I’m in the front car on this ride), the demographics are changing and WebRTC will be fundamental to helping this group.

Selfhelp Community Service just outside of New York City is a non-profit group promoting independent living through a wide range of community-based services to seniors and other vulnerable New Yorkers. Guess what? They’re a big user of WebRTC to help seniors enjoy a better quality of life.

Seniors, stuck at home, can’t travel, friends dying off, they need to make new friends, new social connections and they’re doing it with WebRTC technology. Who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Listen to this heartfelt user testimonial (in it’s entirety, don’t be skipping around, bring tissues) from a senior user, the next Facebook is right here. A billion dollar idea.

 

Disclaimer: I work for Tokbox. Many of the applications listed above use Tokbox as the underlying WebRTC cloud video service provider. Please consider all commercial and non-commercial WebRTC offerings for your own application. This blog represents my personal venture to promote the usage of WebRTC technology. Read my disclaimer for the other 999 things that I’m not responsible for. 

The post The biggest use case for WebRTC is all about nothing appeared first on Chris Kranky.

If you use a lock screen pattern to protect your Android phone, it's a lot less secure than you might think.

That's the message from researchers at the University of Lancaster, who have put out a paper explaining how they were able to reconstruct people's lock screen patterns with a high degree of accuracy by using discretely captured footage. (You can check out the full study below.)

If you're not familiar with lock screen patterns — perhaps because you're on iOS — they're an alternative way to secure your smartphone on Android. Instead of entering a passcode or using your fingerprint, you draw a pattern of your choosing in one unbroken movement.

But doing this requires moving your fingers — and with the right software, those movements can be reverse-engineered.

The researchers don't need to be able see the screen for the method to work, they wrote. Instead, covert footage taken from a smartphone from around two meters away — or from a professional SLR camera from up to nine meters away — was sufficient to automatically reverse-engineer the pattern using a computer vision algorithm.

The algorithm identifies one or more possible patterns from the footage, and in a study of 120 unique patterns, it could figure out over 95% of them in five attempts or less — before the device is automatically locked because of too many incorrect pattern entries.

"The size of the screen or the position of the pattern grid on the screen does not affect the accuracy of our attack," the researchers wrote. And what's more, "complex patterns actually do not provide stronger protection over simple patterns under our attack."

The result of this is pattern locks are not a particularly safe way to store your data and secure your device, the researchers say. It's relatively easy for anyone to grab covert footage of you unlocking it in a public place.

If your device is encrypted and someone steals it, then your data is normally safe — but if they can figure out your lock screen pattern beforehand, it suddenly gets more serious.

Here's the full study:

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NOW WATCH: Here's how Google Maps knows when there is traffic

In September 2013, Jamie Siminoff went on ABC's "Shark Tank" in hopes of raising $700,000 for his company, DoorBot. He thought it was worth $7 million.

His company made a video doorbell that connected to your smartphone, so you could remotely see and talk to the person at the door through your mobile device.

The idea was largely based on the fact that burglars tend to ring the bell before breaking in. With DoorBot, you could see who is at the door and even pretend you're at home when you're not, making it a convenient home-security device.

Siminoff was already making about $1 million in annual sales then, and he had high hopes of getting one of the TV show's "sharks" in as investors of his company.

But the sharks weren't impressed. One by one, the sharks dropped out, leaving only Kevin O’Leary, also known as "Mr. Wonderful," as the last potential investor.

O'Leary's offer wasn't too enticing: he would offer a $700,000 loan, then take 10% of all sales until the loan was paid off. After that, O'Leary wanted to collect a 7% royalty on all future sales, forever, plus 5% of the company's equity.

Siminoff rejected the offer and walked away with nothing.

"It's that moment when I say you're dead to me, because you don't want to take my offer," O'Leary told him.

It was a public moment of humiliation, but one that didn't deter the fast-growing Los Angeles company (although it did rebrand to Ring to convey a more serious image).

"We think we got at least $5 million of additional sales through the airing of 'Shark Tank,'" Siminoff earlier told Business Insider. "It just absolutely throttled our revenue, awareness in the market from every level. Everything just popped after that."

The company has caught the eye of both consumers and investors. Its products are now sold in over 15,000 retail locations across 100 countries. Its that growth that attracted an additional $109 million in a mix of equity and debt from investors including Goldman Sachs Investment Partners and Qualcomm Ventures. The new round brings the company's total investment to over $209 million — a long way from its days of "Shark Tank" rejection.

"Jamie, to his credit, is an experienced entrepreneur, he’s playing to win," CRV investor Saar Gur told Business Insider. "He has a very ambitious vision for where the company goes over time."

Gur thinks the "Shark Tank" judges at the time didn't get the vision for what it could become because Ring practically invented a new space. Home security used to be built on this idea that companies would protect you once the burglar got into the house by sounding alarms, Gur said. Ring kind of "flipped it inside-out."

The company has expanded from doorbells with cameras on them to whole line of outside-the-house security. Its latest product is a security camera that has flood lights and a siren in addition to the two-way talk, so you can yell at a burglar and turn on a siren if you see an intruder approaching your house.

"The idea that I have a siren on my smartphone to scare people away. That’s a new product," Gur said. "He’s seeing the world is different and inventing products from scratch."

The mega-round of $109 million doesn't put Ring into unicorn territory (or companies with a billion-dollar valuation) yet — but Gur cautions not to underestimate how big the company will become.

"Jamie is one of the best entrepreneurs that I’ve had a chance to work with," Gur said. "I believe in Jamie’s ability to constantly innovate, but I’m excited that he’s continued to fill his war chest to innovate on this space."

SEE ALSO: Here’s why this ‘Shark Tank’ investor says he hated Mark Cuban for 2 years

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NOW WATCH: Richard Branson hates public speaking — here's how he gets over it

Dell is ready to compete with Microsoft’s Surface Hub for access to your giant touchscreen budget. The PC maker has announced two 4K Interactive Touch Monitors — 55-inch and 86-inch models — designed for the education and business markets.

The monitors feature 20 touch points and stylus support, but doesn’t come with a built-in PC like the Microsoft Surface Hub does (it does feature a plethora of ports, however). You can even integrate a Dell OptiPlex Micro desktop right into the back panel of the monitors without the need for a separate power cord.

The 55-inch monitor (C5518QT) will cost less than $5,000, while the 86-inch monitor (C8618QT) will come under $11,000, according to Dell, notably cheaper than Microsoft’s...

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Vidyo, a video technology company, has announced that Vidyo.io the company’s new video communications platform is now out of beta and generally available. Vidyo.io is a step forward from the company’s original VidyoWorks API platform. Vidyo.io is a new Communications Platform-as-a-Service (CPaaS) that enterprises and application developers can use to add multiparty video chat and collaboration capabilities to Web, mobile, and native applications.

Today Vidyo announced a new cloud delivery solution for embedded video, Vidyo.io. Vidyo based the new solution on the work the company has been doing in enabling premise-based embedded video solutions extended to a Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) delivery model. The Vidyo solution is specifically focused on the emerging CPaaS 2.0 market, where the solution delivers communications embedded in the application and using the internet instead of the Public Switched Telephony Network (PSTN) integration.

Amazon doesn't want to have to rely on (and pay) third-party delivery companies. It's already taken control of lorries and planes and now it's taking control of ships, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Specifically, the Seattle-headquartered ecommerce giant has started handling the shipment of goods from Chinese retailers that sell on its platform to its vast US warehouses. Previously it left this to global freight-transportation companies.

Since October, Amazon has helped to ship some 150 containers of goods from China to the US, according to The Wall Street Journal, which cites shipping documents collected at ports of entry.

Shipping is a trillion dollar industry, according to MIT Technology Review. While Amazon doesn't actually own any ships itself, it has started reserving space on ocean vessels and acting as a global freight operator and logistics organiser. Other freight operators include FedEx and UPS.

Last August, Amazon unveiled its first branded cargo plane, one of 40 jetliners that will make up the company's own air-transportation network. Amazon also has its own fleet of branded delivery trucks and it is testing delivery drones in a field just outside Cambridge.

Amazon shipped over a billion items over the 2016 holiday season alone, according to CNET.

Amazon did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.

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NOW WATCH: Here's the gorgeous trailer for 'Super Mario Odyssey' — the first Mario game for Nintendo Switch

Gadget makers finally reached their breaking point. After being forced to put what amounted to bad Android tablets in their devices for years, they’re ready to move beyond the screen.

The proliferation of connected devices, especially the Internet of Things, was spurred by access to cheap parts. Anyone can now affordably slap a chip, accelerometer, gyroscope, and 3D-printed shell together to build something smart. But they still face one major challenge: how to give users control of their brand-new thing. Some manufacturers opt for a smartphone app; others build a touchscreen control panel right into their gadget. The touchscreen is easy, affordable, and involves no user learning curve.

But still, the touchscreen presents its own...

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 Cisco said today that it would acquire AppDynamics, which helps companies monitor application performance, for a whopping $3.7 billion. And now, it would seem that AppDynamics’ long-awaited IPO (this week!) has been called off in favor of a giant acquisition. It isn’t Cisco’s first major acquisition in recent memory — in fact, the company has been quite active —… Read More