Davemichels

If the founder of computer giant Acer has his way, Taiwan will be jumping into the smart city fray backed by public-private partnerships.

An article by iTech Post reports on recent comments by Stan Shih that urged Taiwan toward further smart city development through collaboration with the private sector.

Shih was speaking at a seminar on the advancement of smart cities hosted by the Industrial Technology Research Institute.

Shih urged the Taiwanese government to foster more smart city projects by fully embracing the potential of public-private partnerships.

He said that Taiwan’s smart cities initiatives are strongly positioned to take advantage of the thriving technology ecosystem offered by the country’s private sector.

Specifically he highlighted the country’s advanced position in such fields as information and communications technology, software and administration design. This technological advantage in the private sector should feed into collaborative efforts by the government to build out its smart city strategy.

One of the key outcomes that these smart city initiatives should be that there is greater support for the country’s youth, says Shih. This can be done by backing industrial clusters and innovative business models that allow the talent of tomorrow to succeed.

Taiwan smart city efforts are building

Shih’s comments come against the backdrop of a recent report that suggests cities in the U.K. could access nearly $7 billion in funding if they were better able to access private capital.

“Cities around the world are increasingly engaging in smart development to improve efficiency of local services, enhance sustainability, improve the lives of their citizens and develop their competitiveness,” said Chris Wilkinson of Siemens Financial, which prepared the report. “Private sector asset finance allows cities to make the full range of SmartStart technology investments in a timely manner.”

The Acer founder’s vocal support of greater smart city support  follows news this spring that Taiwanese investment firm Fu Hwa Securities is launching a $625 million global investment fund that focuses on Internet of Things (IoT).

Fu Hwa said its new fund will target the plethora of opportunities that are emerging from IoT technologies such as self-driving cars, big data, smart logistics, cloud computing and advanced manufacturing. As well, It added that it will be exploring investments in such sectors as pharmaceuticals, energy, environmental and biotech.

The post Acer founder wants to see Taiwan smart cities come to life appeared first on ReadWrite.

Microsoft appears to be readying a Bluetooth-powered keyboard with the Surface branding attached. WinFuture discovered a listing for a Surface Ergonomic Keyboard at the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG), and the naming appears to suggest it's designed for desktop PCs. Microsoft has typically designed Surface accessories for its line of tablet and laptop hybrids, but a desktop keyboard would signal a new area for the brand.

The software maker could simply be rebranding its line of existing desktop keyboards over to the Surface brand in an effort to unify its hardware efforts. However, recent rumors have suggested that Microsoft is preparing to launch a Surface-branded all-in-one (AIO) PC next month. Microsoft is currently targeting...

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Logitech released it last webcam in 2012. When was the last time you bought a webcam? Today it’s introducing the new C922 Pro Stream Webcam, which records in HD 1080p or 720p at 60fps video. It even comes with a tripod! Maybe you are like me and are wondering, why would someone want a webcam in 2016? This is a good question. Logitech thinks it’s because you like Twitch. Its most recent webcam, the C920, shot in HD, too, so what really makes the C922 unique is its background replacement feature. It recognizes shapes to separate players from their background, so gamers can then overlay video of themselves streaming with other broadcasting apps, like XSplit.

Every webcam purchase comes with a three-month XSplit Premium license, which...

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It’s mobile prehistory at this point, but there was once a time when the ultimate smartphone you could get was a BlackBerry. Before Apple’s iPhone arrived, Google’s first Android prototypes were basically BlackBerry clones. It’s easy to think of the stratospheric rise of Android and the iPhone over the past few years as inevitable, but we sometimes forget just what outsiders both of these platforms once were. Back in 2006, neither Apple nor Google had established relationships with carriers. Neither had a loyal following of business users to bolster its consumer proposition. And neither had the best text-input method ever devised for a pocketable device. BlackBerry, then known as Research In Motion, did. And it’s partially because of...

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The FCC voted Thursday to expand emergency text messages to include links and longer messages.

The emergency alerts that get pushed to cellphones are about to get a lot more interactive.

What arrived in 2012 as the occasional text message about imminent weather issues has emerged as the key means of alerting Americans about all manner of emergencies, including Amber Alerts on missing children.

With changes approved by the Federal Communications Commission on Thursday, wireless carriers are being directed to add support for web and phone number links, as well as longer text messages.

Although people initially freaked out when their cellphones started blaring with warnings, mobile alerts have become one of the most dependable ways to alert Americans to pending issues, from hurricanes to mass shootings.

Adding links will allow government agencies to add photos and other important information to the alerts. The FCC order also increases the maximum length of the alerts from 90 to 360 characters on messages sent over LTE and future networks.

In addition, the FCC says wireless providers that take part in the alert system will need to support transmission of Spanish-language alerts as well as a new type of public safety alert that can transmit information such as the location of emergency shelter or an order to boil water.

The FCC has more information about the alerts on its website.

The popular enterprise messaging platform will be able to pull in Salesforce record data, and sync with its Chatter messaging feature.

The popular enterprise messaging platform will be able to pull in Salesforce record data, and sync with its Chatter messaging feature.

The popular enterprise messaging app Slack said today that it's partnering with Salesforce to let companies that use both platforms more easily unify and harmonize sales lead information and conversations.

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It's the end of an era. BlackBerry is going to stop making its own smartphones.

Instead, the Canadian company will rely entirely on external companies for any future hardware projects, it announced in its quarterly earnings released Wednesday.

BlackBerry was once the undisputed king of the mobile phone world — but it was caught off-guard by the launch of the iPhone and the dawn of the smartphone era. It never recovered, and has dwindled further and further into irrelevancy ever since.

Its retreat from hardware projects has been on the cards for a while. BlackBerry's most recent phone, the DTEK50, is basically just a reskinned version of the Idol 4 from Alcatel.

And CEO John Chen had said that "if by September, I couldn’t find a way to get [to profitability], then I need to seriously consider being a software company only."

Now it's actually happening.

Here's what CEO John Chen said in a statement, emphasis ours:

"Our new Mobility Solutions strategy is showing signs of momentum, including our first major device software licensing agreement with a telecom joint venture in Indonesia. Under this strategy, we are focusing on software development, including security and applications. The company plans to end all internal hardware development and will outsource that function to partners. This allows us to reduce capital requirements and enhance return on invested capital."

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NOW WATCH: Microsoft just unveiled a $37 Nokia phone

The biggest mistake most companies make when choosing a strategy is "listening to the Hippo — the Highest-Paid Person in the Organization," Neil Hunt, chief product officer of Netflix, told attendees at the Churchill Club in Santa Clara, California.

The club presented Netflix with one of its prestigious annual awards on Thursday. Netflix won its Game Changer Award for forever changing how the world watches TV and movies.

Hunt was on stage to accept the award and interviewed by Foundation Capital's Paul Holland. (Holland was a Netflix venture investor who had worked for Netflix founder Reed Hastings at his previous company, Pure Software.)

Hunt says the other mistake companies make is to listening to their customers, because "customers are poor at knowing what they need."

At Netflix, data rules the company. In today's online, cloud computing world, where this philosophy has given rise to "data-driven" companies like Google and Facebook, such advice seems common sense.

But in 1997, when Netflix was founded as a subscriptions service that delivered DVDs through the mail, it was a radical idea.

Hunt says that really committing to this idea means loads of A/B testing and a willingness to accept a high rate of failure.

For instance, a major design change involved 600 A/B tests, of which only "150 had a material win," meaning the other 450 bombed.

This kind of testing requires painstaking commitment. It also means that changes and new product rollouts would be "very incremental, driven by customer feedback."

Kicking out the breadwinners to change the company

But a company that only changes itself in tiny, incremental ways runs a different sort of risk: being put out of business altogether by a new idea that challenges the whole business.

Netflix came close to the brink of that, too, in 2011, when it realized that online streaming was its future — and then bungled its move into that business so badly, it became fodder for a "Saturday Night Live" skit.

Netflix increased prices and spun out its DVD service into one called Qwikster. The change ticked off customers so badly that 800,000 of them immediately quit the service, and its stock tanked to about $42 from over $300 a few months earlier.

Netflix quickly reversed the Qwikster idea.

Internally, this wasn't just a huge A/B testing fail. The company still believed that internet streaming was its future and that it needed to spin out the DVD businesses. So it stuck to its plan.

"We knew streaming, the internet, was the disruption. Very few businesses get to survive a disruption. Usually the incumbent dies and the challenger succeeds. We didn't want to be the incumbent," Hunt said.

Streaming video required a much bigger investment in technology than mailing DVDs. So it had to raise prices.

And Netflix still split the company apart internally. It selected key people to "spend all of their attention focused on streaming business," building it as if it were a startup.

"We pushed out the DVDs guys. They went into a different office," Hunt said. "Me and my team didn't want to spend any time thinking about the DVD business at all. They went off and continued to produce a nice revenue stream."

"We didn't do it gracefully," he added. "It was a painful lesson, but it's how we were able to pay to attention to new customers and new revenue stream, and not just stay focused on the old business."

Data + vision = transformation

By combining a data-driven focus and streaming video, Netflix was able to respond to another potential threat: the possibility that networks would stop letting it stream their shows.

So the company was able to transform itself once again into an original studio.

With over 80 million subscribers today, Hunt says Netflix has an "unprecedented" level of data that "helps us decide the kinds of shows/movies we should make, and we can predict an audience for them with a surprising degree of certainty."

One more thing Netflix has over traditional studios: It is so good at cloud computing that it has put its "studio in the cloud," Hunt says, and uses cloud computing to do everything from managing logistics (like union drivers delivering cameras to a location) to film editing (uploading the footage to be edited immediately in another country).

And it seems to be working. Netflix shows have now been nominated for over 400 awards and won about 90 of them, including nine Emmy awards last week.

SEE ALSO: Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison never loses his cool in meetings

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NOW WATCH: Stephen Hawking warned us about contacting aliens, but this astronomer says it's 'too late'

How the software giant aims to tie everything from Cortana to Office to HoloLens to Azure servers into one AI experience.

How the software giant aims to tie everything from Cortana to Office to HoloLens to Azure servers into one AI experience.

"Microsoft was born to do a certain set of things. We're about empowering people in organizations all over the world to achieve more. In today's world, we want to use AI to achieve that."

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Big data is in many ways still a wild frontier, requiring wily smarts and road-tested persistence on the part of those hoping to find insight in all the petabytes. On Tuesday, IBM announced a new platform it hopes will make things easier.

Dubbed Project DataWorks, the new cloud-based platform is the first to integrate all types of data and bring AI to the table for analytics, IBM said.

Project DataWorks is available on IBM's Bluemix cloud platform and aims to foster collaboration among the many types of people who need to work with data. Tapping technologies including Apache Spark, IBM Watson Analytics and the IBM Data Science Experience launched in June, the new offering is designed to give users self-service access to data and models while ensuring governance and rapid-iteration capabilities.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Facebook's Slack competitor for businesses will be publicly available next month and charge per monthly active user, The Information reported on Tuesday.

The enterprise messaging platform, which is called Facebook at Work, has been in closed beta since last January.

Business Insider reported in May that Facebook at Work would be made commercially available by the end of this summer or in the fall.

Previous reports said Facebook planned to only charge for premium features, like integrations with third-party apps. But one company testing the service that Business Insider talked to in May said that companies would pay a per-user, per-month fee. They had been quoted a cost between $1 to $5 a user by Facebook.

Here are some pictures of the service, which we originally ran last May.

 

SEE ALSO: Here's what the first users are saying about Facebook's Slack competitor

Facebook makes it easy to switch between corporate and personal accounts:

When you make a new Group, you choose between several types:

Here's what a Group would look like.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

The formidable processing power and analytical tools available in public clouds could make industrial IoT more effective and less expensive. But bringing IoT data into the cloud takes more than a network connection.

On Tuesday, two companies moved to help enterprises adapt their IoT data for popular cloud services. OSIsoft introduced its PI Integrator for Microsoft Azure, and Particle announced a custom integration with Google Cloud Platform.

While some large enterprises with sensitive IoT data do all their analytics in-house, public clouds offer greater scale and better security than many organizations can achieve on their own, MachNation analyst Dima Tokar said. More advanced analytics, including better error correction, in some cases can give enterprises the same insights with fewer sensors, he said. Trading hardware for software -- especially the cloud-based kind -- typically means savings.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Last year, Kat Ascharya of 2machines interviewed Kelly, a 19-year-old community college student and intern who is fully dependent on her smartphone to access the internet.

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Google is working on a new laptop that runs on a new “Andromeda” operating system, which will merge aspects of Chrome OS into Android, according to a new report from Android Police’s David Ruddock.

Another new report from 9to5Google corroborates that rumor, but adds that Andromeda is also set to arrive on a forthcoming “Huawei Nexus” tablet.

That would likely be the presumed Google Nexus 7 successor that was apparently leaked earlier this month. (Curiously, 9to5Google says that tablet would keep the “Nexus” branding Google is rumored to be dropping with its new “Pixel” phones.)

About the laptop: Android Police claims it’s codenamed “Bison,” and that it’s informally known as the “Pixel 3.” It’s said to pack a 12.3-inch touchscreen in a design that’s under 10 mm thick, which’d make it one of the thinnest notebooks in the world.

Android Police speculates the Pixel 3 might feature a “convertible” design similar to Lenovo’s Yoga laptops, and that it’ll have a MacBook-esque glass trackpad that relies on haptic vibration feedback. Google is reportedly aiming to start it at $799.

Google is no stranger to laptop hardware, having released two Chromebook Pixels in the past, but both reports say the Pixel 3 wouldn’t run the Chrome OS you’d usually find on a Chromebook. Instead, both it and the Huawei-made tablet would run “Andromeda,” a new platform that is said to incorporate aspects of Chrome OS into Android.

Exactly what Andromeda would do differently isn’t yet clear, but the idea of Google combining its laptop and mobile operating systems has been floated around since Chrome OS was first introduced.

Those rumors picked up steam after a Wall Street Journal report last October, and invited further speculation after Google’s Hiroshi Lockheimer, the man in charge of both OSes, vaguely hinted that the company’s upcoming October 4 event would have historical significance for Android.

Whatever the case, a merger between Chrome OS and Android would seem to harmonize what’ve traditionally been two separate spheres for the tech giant. Select Chromebooks recently gained the ability to run Android apps on Chrome OS, but this would appear to be a much tighter integration across device types, potentially similar to what Microsoft does with Windows today.

The multitude of leaks suggests Andromeda is something that’s coming soon, but exactly when it'll launch remains a mystery. Android Police's report says Google wants to launch the presumed Pixel 3 in Q3 2017, but previous rumors suggested the Huawei-built tablet would be ready by the end of this year. 

Google is already rumored to showcase two new ‘Pixel’ phones, its Google Home smart speaker, a 4K- and HDR-capable Chromecast, and a new “Google WiFi” router at the aforementioned October 4 event — if the Andromeda rumors become official on top of that, we could be looking at one of the most newsworthy days in the company’s history.

Google declined our request for comment.

SEE ALSO: Here's everything we know about Google's upcoming 'Pixel' smartphones

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 Rumors were flying all day yesterday that Twitter is up for sale, and Salesforce.com could be a chief suitor. At this point, with so many possible bidders being reported, it’s hard to know what’s going to happen (if anything). But the big question for many is why Salesforce would even be interested in the consumer-facing social network. While nobody could say with certainty that… Read More

The world’s largest shipping company is testing medical delivery drones.

UPS upped its drone game yesterday. In partnership with drone maker CyPhy Works, the world’s largest shipping company completed a test delivery of medical supplies via unmanned aircraft from the town of Beverly, Mass., to Children’s Island, located about three miles off the Atlantic coast and unreachable by car.

The flight was intended to simulate the viability of using drones to make time-critical deliveries. For the mock scenario, the drone carried an inhaler to a child on the island attending summer camp, even though there was no real medical emergency.

UPS invested in CyPhy Works last fall, helping the drone startup launch the commercial version of its Persistent Aerial Reconnaissance and Communications drone, which was originally designed for surveillance and intelligence gathering for the U.S. military. UPS, however, envisions using the same aircraft for unmanned commercial deliveries. The 10-pound drone is capable of zipping across the sky with a six-pound payload in tow while traveling at speeds that reach up to 40 miles per hour (35 knots) against the wind.

Yesterday’s test flight wasn’t UPS’s first foray into unmanned aerial systems. The company already uses drones in its warehouses to survey high storage racks for stock and available space. UPS also invested in the robotics startup Zipline earlier this summer, announcing plans to deliver blood and vaccines to transfusion centers in Rwanda in drone test flights, which the company says may prove considerably faster than ground transport to remote rural medical centers. UPS’s Rwanda drone delivery testing is expected to begin this October.

Since the FAA’s new rules for small commercial drone flight require all aircraft to be flown within line of sight of the operator, a boat followed the test mission to Children’s Island to monitor the flight, reported USA Today.

UPS is working closely with the FAA. The company’s director of airline safety, Captain Houston Mills, was appointed to the regulatory agency’s drone advisory committee this summer, along with San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee and advisers from Google X, Facebook, Lockheed Martin, Amazon Prime Air and others.

Amazon has also been fine tuning its drone plans this year, but not in the United States, opting instead to operate test flights in Canada and the U.K. without the restrictions that come with piloting in U.S. airspace. The new FAA rules prohibit flying at night and operating drones that weigh over 55 pounds. This summer, DHL also shared its plans to expand into drone delivery, having completed three months of testing its own drone, dubbed the Parcelcopter, in Germany this May.

Yahoo told Verizon that there had "not been any incidents of" security breaches that could have an adverse effect on business earlier this month, but top executives reportedly knew it had been hacked since July, and quite possibly further back.

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer was "aware and involved" in investigating an apparent data breach of 200 million users since learning of a security incident in late July, according to the Financial Times, which cited a person briefed on internal discussions. 

The incident is one of "a number of previous incidents that were not managed swiftly by CEO Marissa Mayer," according to internal sources who spoke with Recode. One executive told Recode that the former head of information security tried unsuccessfully to have top management respond more strongly to such security incidents.

The breach could complicate Yahoo's pending sale to Verizon, which agreed to purchase the company for $4.8 billion on July 25. The deal is expected to be finalized by the first quarter of 2017.

In a document filed with the SEC on September 9, Yahoo reported there had "not been any incidents" of security breaches that could affect the pending deal. The document was signed by Mayer and Yahoo's general counsel, Ronald Bell.

An apparent breach was first disclosed to Yahoo by Motherboard reporter Joseph Cox on July 30, who wrote of the dataset being sold on a dark web marketplace on August 1. At the time, Yahoo told Cox it was "aware of the claim."

A person familiar with the matter told Business Insider the company initiated an investigation at that time and later found the data being sold was not legitimate, but during a deeper look into its networks, Yahoo found a much larger breach of at least 500 million user accounts exposed.

The person said Yahoo had "a high degree of confidence" the theft was carried out by a state-sponsored actor, though they declined to say which state. The person said the hack occurred sometime in 2014.

Executives at the company detected Russian-linked hackers "seeking data on 30 to 40 specific users" in the fall of 2014, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday. The hack was later reported to the FBI.

Here's the timeline we know so far:

• Executives were apparently aware of a state-sponsored hacker in its networks in the fall of 2014. 
• The FBI begins investigating that hack.
• Verizon agrees to purchase Yahoo on July 25, 2016.
• Yahoo receives a report on July 30 of a possible data breach.
• Yahoo's SEC filing says it is not aware of any security breach on September 9.
• Yahoo discloses the breach of 500 million accounts to Verizon on September 20.
• Yahoo goes public with the news on September 22.

So what's going on here?

It's possible that Yahoo's investigation which found an apparent state-sponsored actor in its networks happened after September 9, and Yahoo has not said exactly when it found out about the breach. A company spokesperson said they could not provide that level of detail right now.

There's also a question of whether the Russia-linked hacker found in the fall of 2014 is the same one behind the breach of 500 million accounts.

But if the company did find it was hacked before September 9, it could be in hot water with the SEC or Verizon — especially since the breach has moved its stock price down from its Tuesday high of $44.83 to closing at $42.80 on Friday.

“The SEC is going to want to know exactly what they knew and when they knew it,” Stewart Baker, a partner at law firm Steptoe & Johnson and a former National Security Agency general counsel, told FT. “The SEC has been eager to investigate people who are slow to disclose breaches. This is an obvious target.”

SEE ALSO: Akamai kicked journalist Brian Krebs' site off its servers after he was hit by a 'record' cyberattack

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NOW WATCH: Turns out LA’s shade balls actually worked

You might be angry that a moose has come into your yard to eat the apples from your apple tree, but scaring it away with a robotic lawn mower just isn’t going to work.

This is what was probably going through the moose’s head:

• "Hey, I like apples. I’m going to eat these ones here."
• "I love apples."
• "These apples are delicious."
• "What is this?"
• "This annoys me."
• "Well, whatever it is, I’m going to stomp on it."
• "Okay, problem solved. Back to eating apples."
• "Apples are good."

Don’t send your robotic lawn mower after the moose.

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Lexus has a wild vision for its cars of the future.

The Toyota subsidiary is unveiling its concept SUV, the UX, at the Paris Motor Show that kicks off October 1 — and it features an actual hologram globe. As Lexus writes in its press release, the UX is "showcasing Lexus’ vision for a compact SUV of the future" with it representing a "new step in the company's design journey."

That's a long-winded way of saying you won't see these features in production cars anytime soon, but you could see some in future models.

We got our first glimpse of the car earlier in September when Lexus leaked a photo of its exterior. It was already apparent Lexus was looking to showcase more car tech by replacing the sideview mirrors with cameras.

Considering Japanese automakers got the OK in June to make and sell mirrorless cars, it's not surprising a Toyota subsidiary would hint at moving in a mirrorless direction through its concept vehicle.

Now Lexus is teasing a future where the driver's instrument could be replaced by an interactive hologram globe. The hologram globe would display "analog and digital information." The concept also includes a hologram-style display of the air conditioning and the infotainment system housed in its own case where the center console normally is.

There's also a separate infotainment display on the dashboard, but Lexus doesn't go into much detail about how it would be used. Underneath is a soundbar you can remove from the car to use as a portable, but fairly large, speaker.

You can also see a display to the left of the wheel that appears to be streaming what the sideview cameras are picking up.

Lexus describes the whole 3D display as "a functional yet unexpected user interface." It's a pretty cool, futuristic concept, despite being a fairly over-the-top design proposal.

SEE ALSO: Lexus just leaked pictures of its new SUV concept and it has no mirrors

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NOW WATCH: Lexus just revealed exactly how they made the hoverboard everyone is talking about

Yahoo on Thursday revealed a massive data breach of its services.

Yahoo "has confirmed that a copy of certain user account information was stolen from the company's network in late 2014 by what it believes is a state-sponsored actor," the company posted on its investor relations page.

The stolen data include names, email addresses, telephone numbers, birthdays, hashed passwords, and some "encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers." Yahoo says it believes no payment card or bank account information was stolen.

Yahoo said it believes that at least 500 million user account credentials were stolen, which would make it the biggest breach of all time — bigger than the Myspace breach of 360 million user accounts and 427 million passwords.

The breach has turned out to be larger than the 200 million accounts previously expected.

Recode's Kara Swisher reported on Thursday that the breach could have implications for the $4.8 billion sale of Yahoo to Verizon, and that some shareholders may fear that it could change the price of the transaction.

Verizon released this statement:

Yahoo says there is no evidence that the hacker still has access to Yahoo's network or internal services.

Here's the entire message from Yahoo:

"A recent investigation by Yahoo! Inc. has confirmed that a copy of certain user account information was stolen from the company's network in late 2014 by what it believes is a state-sponsored actor. The account information may have included names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, hashed passwords (the vast majority with bcrypt) and, in some cases, encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers. The ongoing investigation suggests that stolen information did not include unprotected passwords, payment card data, or bank account information; payment card data and bank account information are not stored in the system that the investigation has found to be affected. Based on the ongoing investigation, Yahoo believes that information associated with at least 500 million user accounts was stolen and the investigation has found no evidence that the state-sponsored actor is currently in Yahoo's network. Yahoo is working closely with law enforcement on this matter.

"Yahoo is notifying potentially affected users and has taken steps to secure their accounts. These steps include invalidating unencrypted security questions and answers so that they cannot be used to access an account and asking potentially affected users to change their passwords. Yahoo is also recommending that users who haven't changed their passwords since 2014 do so.

"Yahoo encourages users to review their online accounts for suspicious activity and to change their password and security questions and answers for any other accounts on which they use the same or similar information used for their Yahoo account. The company further recommends that users avoid clicking on links or downloading attachments from suspicious emails and that they be cautious of unsolicited communications that ask for personal information. Additionally, Yahoo asks users to consider using Yahoo Account Key, a simple authentication tool that eliminates the need to use a password altogether.

"Online intrusions and thefts by state-sponsored actors have become increasingly common across the technology industry. Yahoo and other companies have launched programs to detect and notify users when a company strongly suspects that a state-sponsored actor has targeted an account. Since the inception of Yahoo's program in December 2015, independent of the recent investigation, approximately 10,000 users have received such a notice.

"Additional information will be available on the Yahoo Security Issue FAQs page, beginning at 11:30 am Pacific Daylight Time (PDT) on September 22, 2016."

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NOW WATCH: Yahoo just confirmed that hackers stole personal information from over 500 million users — here’s what they said

Yahoo might have a problem on its hands. According to a new Recode report, the recently-sold internet giant will soon confirm a massive data breach that would affect some 200 million users. News of the hack, which reportedly contains records from around 2012, was first reported by Motherboard in August.

In any case, if the breach is confirmed, it’d be among the most disastrous to date. As this chart from Statista shows, only the MySpace hack that was confirmed earlier this year would has left more consumers compromised. With LinkedIn and Dropbox suffering similar fates this year as well — reportedly from the same hacker, at that — it’s clear that, regardless of how far the internet has come, data security remains a particularly volatile problem.

In other words, go change your passwords.

SEE ALSO: The iPhone 7 costs a lot more for Apple to build than previous phones did

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NOW WATCH: WhatsApp is now sharing your data with Facebook — here's how to turn it off

And people thought Henry Blodget’s $400 call was crazy.

Amazon has posted record profits for three straight quarters. Now it has a record stock price to go with it.

The company’s shares shot across $800 for the first time ever on Thursday morning. The company’s $386 billion market cap is the fourth largest in the world, behind only Apple, Alphabet and Microsoft.

Just seven months ago, the stock was trading 40 percent lower. But the growth of Amazon’s AWS cloud computing business and the surprising profits that have come with it helped propel the stock. Jeff Bezos’s company also continues to be fueled by its Prime members, who number in the tens of millions and spend more and shop more frequently than non-members do.

If you haven’t yet enrolled to my Advanced WebRTC Architecture course – then why wait?

I just noticed that I haven’t written any specific post here about the upcoming course, so consider this one that announcement. To my defense – I sent it out a few days ago to the monthly newsletter I have.

Why a course on WebRTC architecture?

I’ve been working with entrepreneurs, developers, product managers and people in general about their WebRTC products for quite some time. But somehow I missed to notice that in many such discussions there were large gaps in what people thought about WebRTC and what WebRTC really is.

There’s lots of beginner’s information out there for WebRTC, but somehow it always focuses on how to use the WebRTC APIs in the browser, or what the meaning of a specific feature in the standard is. There is also a large set of walk-throughs of different frameworks that you can use, but no one seems to offer a path for a developer to decide on his architecture. To answer the question of “what should I be choosing for my service?”

So I set out to put a course that answers that specific question. It gives the basics of what WebRTC is, and then dives into the part of what it means to put an architecture in place:

• How to analyze the real requirements of your scenarios?
• What are the various components you will need?
• Go through common design patterns that crop up in popular service archetypes

What’s in the course?

The easiest way is to go through the course syllabus. It is available online here and also in PDF form.

When will the course take place?

The course is all conducted online, but not live.

It starts on October 24, and I am now in final preparation of recording the materials after creating them in the past two months.

The course is designed to be:

• Built out of 7 modules
• Have 40 lessons give or take, each on average should take you 30 minutes
• This means if you take a lesson on every working day, you should complete this in 2 months
• You can do it at a faster pace if you wish
• Course materials are available online for students for a period of 2 months. This can be extended to 4 months for those who wish to add Office Hours on top of the course

Any discount for friends and family?

Enrolling to the course is $247 USD. Adding Office Hours on top of it means an additional $150 USD.

Until tomorrow, there’s a $50 USD discount – so enroll now if you’re already certain you want to.

There are discounts for those who want to enroll as a larger group – contact me for that.

Have more questions?

Check the FAQ. I’ll be updating it as more questions come it.

If you can’t find what you need there – just contact me.

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Apple has yet to release sales figures for the iPhone 7, but investors are already looking forward to next year's iPhone.

One bull case for Apple stock is that this year's relatively minor iPhone upgrades is creating a "powder keg" of iPhone users who will wait and jump on next year's device, which is expected to be a drastic revamp with wireless charging and an edge-to-edge screen.

Not so fast, says Wells Fargo Securities analysts. They warn that "bullishness on next cycles should be tempered."

There are two issues with the "powder keg" or "super cycle" bull case, according to a note distributed on Thursday to Wells Fargo clients. 

"However, we believe this is the incorrect way to model iPhone units as it has two inherent flaws: 1) not all of the 500MM is what we would consider eligible (we think hand-me-down iPhones, for example, to one's child or even low-end iPhone sales in some emerging countries should not be included in the base) and 2) it ignores the cyclicality and subscriber eligibility evident from our proprietary units per carrier analysis, which suggests the iPhone 8 may have headwinds."

One of those headwinds may be the fact that carriers are basically giving the iPhone 7 away. "The current free iPhone 7 promotions by carriers may impact the 2018 cycle as those that upgrade would see an increase in their monthly bills if they upgrade," the analysts write. 

"Aggressive promotions of giving iPhone 7 for free may help unit sales now - carriers will credit the monthly charge for the handset to make it free. However, in two years, subscribers who want to upgrade will see their monthly bills increase $27-$32 per month unless carriers run another free iPhone promotion," according to the note. 

Other headwinds that Wells Fargo sees facing Apple include difficult year-over-year comparisons next year, and the cyclical nature of iPhone sales. It gives Apple a "market perform" rating and a price target of $113.55. 

SEE ALSO: Just wait for the iPhone 8 'super cycle'

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By Dave Michels
Verizon One Talk is a new service that utilizes a single, native phone number across mobile and fixed and devices.

“Alexa, does penne alla vodka really use vodka?”

Amazon’s Echo voice-controlled speaker can perform more than 3,000 skills today thanks to its Alexa technology, but the most common use case is still simply setting a timer, a recent survey of early adopters found.

And that makes sense when you consider that about half of Amazon Echo owners — 51 percent, to be exact — surveyed place the device in their kitchen. The second most popular location for the smart speaker is the living room, with about one out of three using the device in that gathering space.

The findings come from a survey of about 1,300 smartphone owners who have used voice-controlled virtual assistants from companies like Apple, Google and Amazon. Of that group, 180 respondents — or about 14 percent — said they own an Amazon Echo. The survey was a partnership between Experian and the market research firm Creative Strategies.

“Echo users in our survey are overwhelmingly satisfied with Alexa’s voice recognition, and we found that 39 percent plan to use it more frequently,” Experian’s Cherian Abraham wrote in a blog post. “As Apple cuts away wires and doubles down on Siri, baking it into both accessories (Airpods) and home (Apple TV), we will find ourselves squarely in a voice-first future. I believe voice and messaging will significantly lower technology thresholds that exist around applications and services, increasing both accessibility and usability for consumers.”

In a positive sign for Amazon, 87 percent of Echo owners said they were satisfied with the device. About 85 percent have tried setting an alarm with Echo, and 82 percent have played a song. Two-thirds of responders have also asked Echo for news updates.

What’s not so popular yet? Ordering an Uber. Just 6 percent said they have tried to hail a car by voice.

When it comes to frequency of use, the most common tasks are setting a timer, playing music and controlling lights in the home.

The findings also suggest that Amazon is seeing some traction in turning the Echo into a shopping machine; about one out of three Echo users have asked Alexa to order an item.

Today, New York-based startup Troops is launching its bot that helps make sales jobs easier.

But if you ask the company, it's more than a bot: it's a personal assistant, powered by artificial intelligence, like Apple's Siri or the Google Assistant — only for work.

If that sounds familiar, it could be because the giant of the CRM space, Salesforce, recently introduced a technology called Einstein that CEO Marc Benioff calls "a highly accurate, extremely effective AI platform,"  and is building it in to all its core products.

But Britton explained that with Troops,  users won't even have to log in to Salesforce to get the information they need, and the tight integration with other products, like Slack and Google Apps, could give an additional edge.

Plus, unlike Einstein, it's free.

After months of development, the company is making most of Troops’ platform and bot publicly available for no cost. Troops plans to add paid features eventually, but for now it's completely free.

The idea is to let salespeople do all their work from within the chat-messaging app Slack. They'll be able to type a command into messaging platform Slack and it will pull up a report from Salesforce. Or ask for the phone number of a client and it will pull that person's contact information from Google into your Slack conversation. 

 

Going forward, Britton hopes Troops' AI assistant will help "bridge the gap" between messaging and enterprise software, making the technology that salespeople use — called customer relationship management (CRM) systems — more like sending a text to a friend. 

"CRMs should not be challenging modular interfaces that aren't smart," Britton told Business Insider. "It should be intelligent and almost conversational. Artificial intelligence can be everywhere now, and you should be able to do that at work, too."

The company has also raised a $7 million Series A round, led by Felicis Ventures and including Aspect Ventures, Susa Ventures, and Flight VC. Slack's own venture arm, Slack Fund, has also invested in the company. 

Troops cofounder Scott Britton said this new round of funding will be used to bring Troops' technology to more platforms, like Microsoft Dynamics and Oracle.

 

SEE ALSO: Amazon was so impressed with this Alexa-powered video intercom, it invested in the company

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Rebecca Kantar was two years into Harvard when she dropped out. 

"I just felt like a lot of the same brain development was happening to me throughout my classes," Kantar explained. 

Like most students, her life had been spent learning information then being quizzed on it through multiple choice tests or essays. Even when she went to Harvard, she was stuck cramming knowledge and then bubbling in letters on a sheet for a score. 

"I think across the education system right now, we still have a focus on content-based learning. Can you learn more stuff about whatever domain?" Kantar told Business Insider.

"What I was more interested in was could I apply concepts that stem from understanding a domain to real-world situations? And what I found during my time at school was that there were fewer environments to bring something to life in a project-based way."

With the SAT celebrating its 90th birthday this year, Kantar believes it's time for a radical update of standardized testing — one that doesn't just reward rote memorization but one that can assess how your brain works and how you put that knowledge to use. 

To do so, she started Imbellus in 2015. Today, she's announcing that the company has now raised $4 million from investors including Upfront Ventures and Thrive Capital to try to upend one of the foundations of the education system. 

"Our hope is to measure how people think instead of what people know," Kantar said. "There’s a better way instead of using multiple choice and that’s to take advantage of technology."

What a new SAT could be

Right now, much of what Imbellus is building is under wraps. Kantar started the company last year and is realistic about how long it will take to change a national education standard.

Imbellus' approach will be closer to showing your work on a math test than just writing down the solution. The company's process will track how you solve a problem, not just whether you get the answer right.

"We’ve been using content as a proxy for a lot of skills that we need this century, like analytical thinking, like problem solving, and we’ve been doing that because our assessments haven’t known how to measure anything outside of multiple choice or essays," she said. 

And she's not doing it alone. Along with her team, Imbellus is partnering with CRESST, the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing. The education innovation arm is helping Imbellus craft some of its psychometric testing frameworks and analyzing the data.

"We hope that in the next two years we can show the world that measuring someone’s process is possible and you can understand how people think. It’ll give us much better insights on how to place people in the right career and the right school over time," Kantar said. 

Jobs first, SAT second

To start, Imbellus is going to tackle the entry level job market rather than going straight to the SAT. 

Instead of career aptitude or placement tests, Kantar envisions people taking Imbellus tests to guide their job search, so they'll know if their skills are the right match for a particular employer. 

It's a hard challenge: For starters, Imbellus has to build profiles for different companies, down to different roles. Certain companies will attract different skills like imagination and creativity versus analytical thinking, or they'll want a mix. It will also need to take into account that companies want a mix of employees who think in different ways. 

"We’re not trying to say ‘Here hire the same type A person over and over and over again’,” Kantar said.

Rather, it will start small to replace certain content-based tests for entry-level jobs, helping to instead show recruiters what skills and cognitive abilities the person has rather than how much they've memorized information about the job. The goal is to help employers to find the right fit for the right role.

Once that works, Kantar hopes it will trickle down to becoming the standard for fitting students to schools, too.

"The SAT and most other assessments have made the mistake of comparing everyone to an average that is no one. The problem is that grading model doesn’t take context into account," Kantar said. "You don’t necessarily need the same set of skills to apply for a job at Goldman Sachs as you need to be successful at the Rhode Island School of Design."

SEE ALSO: The 17 best colleges for startup founders

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Twitter is continuing its push into live events and TV with the announcement it will be live streaming the US presidential debates. As with the company's streams of NFL football games, the live video will be shown alongside curated tweets, and will be available on various Twitter apps (including Apple TV) and on the web at debates.twitter.com.

The first debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump will take place this coming Monday, September the 26th, with the vice presidential debate between Tim Kaine and Mike Pence on October 4th, and then the second and third presidential debates on October 9th and October 19th. The streams are part of Twitter's partnership with Bloomberg Television, and will be preceded and followed by analysis...

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Back in October 2015, Netflix revealed which TV episodes got you hooked to some of your favorite shows.

This year, the streaming site has analyzed even more shows to uncover which TV episodes get viewers hooked. According to data sent to INSIDER, Netflix looked at over 30 more series first seasons and recorded how viewers watch across six continents. The streaming site not only found that people around the world enjoy the same shows, but that they are also "getting hooked at the same time."

Netflix defines a hooked episode as one that kept as least "70% of viewers watching through a first season's end."

Keep reading to see which episodes are getting hooked. We've included the episode synopsis from Netflix. For some of the series, Netflix provided the moment they believe made fans fall in love with the show.

 

SEE ALSO: The kids from 'Stranger Things' did a killer rendition of 'Uptown Funk' before the Emmys

"American Horror Story: Murder House": Episode 4

Synopsis: "Two of the house's previous residents, interior designers Chad and Patrick, give the Harmons decorating advice."

"Between": Episode 3

Synopsis: "Tensions escalate as a power outage cuts off communication with the outside world; a text suggests Ronnie is involved in something sinister."

"Club de Cuervos": Episode 4

Synopsis: "Chava battles with Coach Goyo. Meanwhile, Isabel struggles to do business with a sexist sponsor."

See the rest of the story at Business Insider