To boldly go where no fan has gone before.
Star Trek really is the least likeliest cultural institution. It was a short-lived, low-rated television show that debuted to mixed reviews in 1966. By the end of its low-budget third season, the show was dead, and even letter-writing campaigns from fans who had rescued it once before couldn't save it.
You might not have the full might of the United States government trying to trace your communications like famous NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, but that doesn’t mean that your digital life isn’t worth protecting.
In an interview with The Intercept last year, Snowden outlined a few quick and easy ways that average people can protect themselves, even if they’ve never heard of encryption or “opsec.”
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NOW WATCH: The most annoying thing about the iPhone isn't changing any time soon
When we hear a person's words, we also try to imagine why they're saying them. Most of us suck at this.
Economics used to operate under the belief that people are rational actors. Behavioral economists came along and said that's crazy—there's no such thing as a rational actor. People make decisions for all kinds of irrational reasons. It turns out the same thing is true when we listen.
The Yahoo CEO job is the most "cursed" job in tech.
From Carol Bartz and Scott Thompson to Marissa Mayer, a parade of once-respected executives have walked into Yahoo thinking they could turn it around, only to fail spectacularly, and leave with their reputation in tatters.
And with Verizon reported to be about to announce a deal to buy Yahoo for $5 billion, there's another executive stepping to the plate with big dreams: Tim Armstrong, the head of AOL, which is owned by Verizon.
Armstrong has reportedly been spearheading Verizon's effort to acquire Yahoo and he is expected to take the helm of a combined Yahoo-AOL entity if the deal goes through.
If Armstrong can figure out how to make Yahoo a success, he'll earn plenty of glory. A one-time salesperson, Armstrong will cement his legacy as a visionary tech exec.
But the siren song of Yahoo has lured others before him. And Armstrong's desire to revive the struggling internet business may leave him blinded to the same trap as his predecessors.
"It's a big question mark," Mizuho Securities' Neil Doshi told Business Insider. "This is really his opportunity to acquire Yahoo and create a powerful media asset and advertising platform."
Armstrong would have one big advantage in that he would be unlikely to face the hordes of activist investors that regularly trained their sights on Yahoo and made life miserable for its CEOs.
Still, Armstrong certainly won't be stepping into a favorable situation. Yahoo's legacy online advertising business has been mired in years of decline, and it's expected to get worse as Google and Facebook continue to eat market share.
Worse, Yahoo's Mavens business, short for its mobile, video, native, and social revenue, saw negative growth for the first time last quarter, further illustrating the challenges the company faces in its core business.
But investors see a lot of potential in a Verizon-owned Yahoo, which will likely be combined with Armstrong's AOL. Yahoo owns a number of advertising technology assets that could be combined with AOL's, while AOL's strong sales team could help sell more ads and cut costs at Yahoo.
Mizuho's Doshi says the cost savings from the integrated sales force alone could reach nearly $1 billion. And when you combine that with a broader, integrated ad platform under AOL-Yahoo, things could suddenly start looking up.
"AOL-Yahoo will be a bigger advertising source to reckon with," Doshi added. "The Yahoo that we’re going to see under Tim and AOL will be very different from the Yahoo that we saw under Marissa Mayer."
Investors seem to have a lot more confidence in Armstrong's sales and operating capabilities than any other previous Yahoo CEO.
Indeed, Armstrong has a good track record to back it up: he was Google's top sales guy before taking over a sinking AOL business that he turned around and sold at a premium for $4.4 billion to Verizon last year.
Under Armstrong's watch, AOL turned into a video and programmatic advertising powerhouse, making bets and smart acquisitions in those areas way before its competitors did.
True, some of his bets didn't work out, such as his effort to create a local content powerhouse through Patch Media. But he knew when to admit defeat and pull the plug.
"He was in a situation where AOL's legacy business was declining and had to build a growth business from scratch," SpringOwl Asset Management's Eric Jackson told us. "And he's certainly slowed the decline of the legacy business, while growing its web business with the ad tech assets."
But Armstrong's strongest skillset might be in his sales chops and great relationships he's built with advertising agencies over the years. Jackson points out that there are many ad buyers who have made major ad commitments with AOL simply because they like doing business with Armstrong.
"That’s the biggest strength that he brings to Yahoo. I think he’ll be able to build a compelling business that a lot of advertisers are going to like at Yahoo," Jackson said.
No one believes it'll be a cakewalk for Armstrong. It doesn't help that turning around a consumer internet company's never been done before, either.
And as The Information's Jessica Lessin points out, if you're trying to find growth through cost cuts, you're doomed to fail.
"Cutting costs doesn’t help you achieve exponential effects. Only innovation and disruption do," she writes.
On top of that, there'll be no way for public investors to track how well Armstrong's doing since Yahoo will be looped in under Verizon, which is unlikely to break out its financials separately.
"We'll have no idea how he’s doing with AOL or Yahoo. Only the Verizon board will know," Needham & Co. analyst Laura Martin said.
Like all the other previous Yahoo CEOs, Armstrong has a great reputation. But every CEO that's taken the job to turn it around has been burned as well. Is he about to ruin it all by falling for the same delusion as all the others before him?
Only time will tell, but at least for now, investors seem to like the chances in him as the next Yahoo CEO.
"Armstrong is one of the great internet executives today," Martin said. "Yahoo under AOL will be better managed and it will make more money."
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NOW WATCH: How to find Pokémon in 'Pokémon Go'
Intel’s restructuring towards a focus on Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud-based businesses delivered disappointing growth this quarter.
As reported by Computer Weekly, the U.S. microchip behemoth posted profits that were down 51% this quarter compared to the same period last year.
The poor results were blamed on $1.4 billion in restructuring costs as Intel refocuses on businesses linked to IoT and cloud computing. This follows the announcement in the first quarter of 2016 to cut 12,000 employees, or 11% of its worldwide workforce, as part of the strategic reorientation.
Though growth figures were glum, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich noted that Q2 revenues matched the company’s outlook and profitability was better than forecast. Intel posted revenues of $13.5 billion, which is an increase of 3% from a year ago.
“Our restructuring initiative to accelerate Intel’s transformation is solidly on track,” said Krzanich. “We are gaining momentum heading into the second half.”
The restructuring is projected to produce $750 million in cash savings this year and $1.4 billion in annual savings beginning in 2017.
However, for this quarter Intel did not hit growth targets for microchip sales destined for data centers. These sales were meant to compensate for a slowing trend in sales of personal computers and their requisite components.
Revenues for data centers rose only 5% to $4 billion, which was less than half the growth of last year and less than analysts’ estimates of $4.16 billion. Meanwhile IoT revenues were $572 million, an increase of just 2% compared to the same period last year.
Nonetheless, Intel brass remained optimistic that the restructuring will produce the desired results sooner or later. “While we remain cautious on the PC market, we are forecasting growth in 2016 built on strength in data centers, the Internet of Things and programmable solutions,” said Krzanich.
Specifically, Intel is betting that corporate clients will buy its new datacenter chips which will be launched later this year. The microprocessors are based on Intel’s Broadwell micro-architecture and are aimed at the enterprise market.
This follows other moves by Intel to move further into such realms as autonomous vehicles and machine learning.
The post Intel pivot to IoT produces lackluster growth appeared first on ReadWrite.
Eyes are considered to be the most powerful human sense. The equivalent technological tool is an intelligent video camera that can observe, analyze and act on provided information. This technology is know as Intelligent Video Analytics or Video Content Analysis.
Vendors such as Cisco and IBM are key companies in the market. Internet of Things (IoT) technologies are only beginning to integrate intelligent cameras. Here are some examples of IoT platforms that are already using this innovative tech and the potential future market segments.
An intelligent video camera is connected to a cloud that analyzes live video content. Events captured by the camera can instantly lead to desired actions. The ability to take action without a human operator is what makes the camera intelligent.
Imagine the video camera capturing a car accident or someone falling on the ground. Instead of manually monitoring the traffic or a public place, the intelligent camera will instantly call emergency central or other necessary assistance, thus lower the reaction time from accident to action.
Key vendors in the market are Agent Vi, Axis Communications, Bosch Security Systems, Cisco, Honeywell Security and IBM. Research and Markets suggests the main market sectors to be transportation and logistics, banking and financial services, governmental, industrial, retail, healthcare and banking and financial services.
Intelligent cameras in traffic can monitor, solve logistical problems and help you get home safe and sound. Intelligent cameras can notify you of empty space in a lane or optimize your driving path. The video camera can be installed along roads or in your car. Intelligent cameras can detect who drove on a red light and only capture and save that exact moment. The transition from smart to intelligent cameras makes the analytics select only the necessary data to be saved for later investigation. Intelligent cameras can also recognize a license plate. Imagine that the garage door opens by itself when recognizing your license plate in the driveway or analyzing who is in the car in front of you.
IntelliVision — its demo is below — and other vendors such as Infinova, Nice Systems, ObjectVideo, Verint and VideoIQ are noticeable leading companies contributing and shaping the intelligent video market.
Face recognition can become an essential feature in public security and home monitoring. Detecting or tracking people, observing a person’s behavior, counting number of steps or identify who left a bag on the train station. For home monitoring, features as your door unlocking once you get home only by recognizing your face. The camera might even give you a push notification on your phone about who is outside your front door or in your backyard.
Thanks to other contributors who added to this article: Caroline Myrland and Henrik Evensen
The post IoT and cameras: Going from smart to intelligent appeared first on ReadWrite.
Police in Michigan have a new tool for unlocking phones: 3D printing. According to a new report from Flash Forward creator Rose Eveleth, law enforcement officers approached professors at the University of Michigan earlier this year to reproduce a murder victim’s fingerprint from a prerecorded scan. Once created, the 3D model would be used to create a false fingerprint, which could be used to unlock the phone.
Because the investigation is ongoing, details are limited, and it’s unclear whether the technique was successful. Still, it’s similar to techniques researchers have used in the past to re-create working fingerprint molds from scanned images, often in coordination with law enforcement. This may be the first confirmed case of police...
We just published a huge interview with Mark Zuckerberg. It's a long and in-depth conversation that revolves around the successful first flight of Facebook's solar-powered drone, Aquila, and goes on to discuss Facebook's plans for the next 10 years — from virtual reality, to promoting 5G internet, to Zuckerberg's toast-making robot (yes, really). You can read the whole thing right here, but we wanted to pull out a handful of big points Zuckerberg made throughout the course of his conversation with The Verge's Casey Newton.
The key point, and the one thing you really need to accept to understanding where Facebook is going, is that Zuckerberg sees internet access as key to making his company — and society — stronger. The internet creates...
Facebook took its futuristic, internet-beaming drone out for its first spin, and it was a major success.
The tech giant wants to use the drone to provide internet access to people living in remote locations who have to go without it. Google is also working on a similar drone as part of its Project Titan.
Scroll down for a closer look at the first test flight.
SEE ALSO: If you communicate online in any way besides email, you're probably using a Facebook product
It's worth noting that Internet.org has taken some heat by those who call it an affront to the principles of net neutrality. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has responded to that critique.
MasterCard has signed a deal to buy 92.4% of London-based payments giant VocaLink for £700 million ($920 million).
The deal has long been touted and values London-based VocaLink at £757.57 million. VocaLink shareholders could get an extra £169 million ($220 million) if performance targets are met.
VocaLink is a UK payments giant — if you take money out of a cash machine, get your salary paid into your account, or make an online bank transfer, chances are VocaLink has been involved somewhere along the line.
If you think of the UK's economy as like the plumbing in your house, VocaLink provides many of the pipes through which the money passes.
The company runs the the LINK ATM network, which accounts for 70,000 cash machines across the UK and Europe. It also runs the BACS clearing network that enables direct credit and direct debit payments between bank accounts, and Faster Payments, the payments network that lets you make payments to and from accounts on the phone, mobile, and internet in real time.
The company provides the technology that deals with 90% of UK salary payments and almost all state benefit payments. VocaLink also licenses its technology in Sweden, Singapore, Thailand, and the US. MasterCard says the deal will allow it to "play a more strategic role in the UK payments ecosystem."
A group of 18 banks including HSBC, RBS, Lloyds, and Barclays currently own VocaLink. They were ordered in February by the UK's Payment Systems Regulator to sell off the company, with initial estimates putting a price tag of £400 million on the company.
Existing owners will retain a 7.6% stake in VocaLink under the takeover deal.
Ajay Banga, president and CEO of MasterCard, says in an emailed statement:
"We’re excited about the opportunity to play a bigger role in payments in the UK, a very strategic market for us. VocaLink is a unique company with outstanding technology, assets and people. We look forward to investing in and maximizing the technology, and embedding it in our products and solutions, both in the UK and around the world."
David Yates, CEO at VocaLink, says:
"Today’s announcement is positive news for our partners, customers and employees. We will continue to focus on ensuring that the UK systems perform seamlessly, maintaining the highest levels of quality. At the same time, we’ll invest in further innovation to power competitive payments solutions for consumers and businesses around the globe."
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Just takes one year.
Udacity, the startup that offers online courses for careers in tech, is adding a new speciality curriculum: A training program for becoming a self-driving car engineer.
Thus far, Udacity’s offerings (called “nanodegrees”) have largely focused on fundamental coding, like writing Android apps. This one is a bit more advanced: The listing notes it takes twelve months to finish.
But it’s not out of left field. Udacity CEO Sebastian Thrun was a founding member of Google’s self-driving car team (and, per Bloomberg, is now running one of Larry Page’s self-flying car companies on the side).
“There is an enormous market for self-driving car engineers,” Thrun says in a short video. “Lots and lots of companies that you wouldn’t expect are entering the field and are massively hiring.”
This is true. Although the ones you would expect — car companies — will be doing the hiring too, spurred along, perhaps, by the declaration last night from Tesla’s Elon Musk, which was chock-full of self-driving car talk.
Researchers are testing mobile apps that analyze patients' activity to measure mental health.
An emotional crisis doesn't surface only in a therapy appointment. For those suffering depression, PTSD, or other mental health challenges, a breakdown can be a slow burn, developing over days or weeks in between doctor visits. Delay in treatment can have lasting consequences.
Visions of the future of medicine often involve digital sensors that constantly monitor patients, but not many people imagine that these sensors could be stitched directly into us. But that's the suggestion of a team of researchers from Tuft University, who have developed prototype "smart stitches" that can be used to close wounds — but also send real-time data on tissue health to doctors.
Mozilla's Firefox browser will start blocking Flash content "not essential to the user experience" from August 2016, the company said today, helping to hasten the achingly slow demise of the ageing plugin. The move is the beginning of the end of Flash in Firefox — Mozilla also said that from 2017, it would adopt a new click-to-activate policy that will require users to approve the use of Flash for any content on a page, advising sites that use Adobe's plugin or Microsoft Silverlight to "plan on adopting HTML technologies as soon as possible."
New York is undergoing some interesting changes in the pedestrian world, having begun the installation of LinkNYC smart sidewalk kiosks throughout the city.
These new sidewalk kiosks offer pedestrians free device charging and tablets for web browsing, along with a 911 call button and the ability to make phone calls.
See Also: Are smart citizens getting lost in the rush to build smart cities?
Other kinds of smart kiosks can record car and bike movements, track wireless devices in close proximity, monitor street sounds and aid in identifying random packages, according to information gathered by Recode. Cities could, in the future, decide on what data to gather and use with the aid of smart kiosks, depending on what sensors kiosks have.
Sidewalk Labs is one company that is currently trying to sell the idea of their particular smart kiosks to cities, stating that communities will greatly benefit from the information that can be gathered.
“It is a win-win solution,” responds Alexei Pozdnoukhov, director of the Smart Cities Research Center at the University of California at Berkeley. “Cities get environmental sensing to meet public health regulations and figure out the ‘livability’ of streets, and companies get … a playground for building new services.”
Information gathered by these kiosks could aid cities with monitoring traffic situations, discovering gas leaks and testing air quality and likely improve safety in other ways too.
“Sidewalk suggests that the video sensors might spot ‘abandoned packages or objects,’ raising the possibility of the technology being used to foil terrorist incidents,” according to an article in Recode. “More mundanely, the company says the camera could also detect clogged drains and standing water on roadways.”
Despite the benefits, a big issue in regards to these kiosks is privacy and security for individuals. Although the company states that all the information gathered would be anonymous, encrypted and regularly erased, many people still voice concerns. The company also claims that no data will be sold to a third party such as Google, in answer to one of the many complaints issued.
However, The Village Voice does not agree, calling the kiosks “data-hoovering sentinels” that Google is using to extend “its near-monopoly on information about our online behavior to include our behavior in physical space as well.”
The New York chapter of the ACLU has also discussed privacy worries. Eventually, there are to be 7,500 kiosks installed throughout the city, with the gigabit internet infrastructure that links them, the free Wi-Fi, the phone calling and USB charging all offered for free to the city. LinkNYC kiosks will be managed by the CityBridge company.
“If CityBridge is using a business model that is not charging, and they are spending a bunch of money putting these things in, they are going to be monetizing the data hard,” Lee Tien, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, explained to The Village Voice. “That means that they are always thinking about how to collect your data and how to profit off of it.”
Despite the concerns, these kiosks can offer some great benefits to community members. Depending on the outcome of these in New York and the ones being pushed by Sidewalk Labs, you might see these kiosks popping up in your city in the near future.
The post New York’s sidewalks get a smart upgrade appeared first on ReadWrite.
Narrative Science has released a new report based on a survey of 235 business executives focused on adoption of artificial intelligence in the enterprise. This report, titled Outlook on Artificial Intelligence in the Enterprise 2016 sheds light on a number of important details regarding the growing adoption of artificial intelligence as part of an organization’s overall business strategy.
The survey found that 74% of organizations are already using AI technologies in the workplace. This includes several key types of artificial intelligence systems. Among the most is predictive analytics which takes massive amount of data and analyzes it to find trends and offer predictions about the future based on that evidence.
58% of respondents to the survey indicated they are using predictive analytics already. This is a growing area of investment for companies, and one that is only expected to get bigger as the methods of gathering data and the artificial intelligence used to parse it improves.
Among the 26% of organizations that say they are not currently using AI in the workplace, an incredible 88% of them went on to cite using specific solutions that rely on AI techniques. This seemingly invisible influence of artificial intelligence lends credibility to its ability to seamlessly integrate itself into the workplace.
The leading factor driving this rise in artificial intelligence is the proliferation of data-driven projects. With the emergence of app-driven interaction and increased adoption of cloud-based SaaS solutions, consumers and enterprise customers alike are providing massive amounts of useful data to companies that they can use to improve and expand on their products and services. Artificial intelligence plays an important role in analyzing that data in order to find areas where company resources are best spent.
One of the key reasons for so much investment in artificial intelligence is the lack of of data science talent. Data scientists, humans that are able to comb through large amounts of data and analyze them to create actionable information, are in high demand right now. There simply aren’t enough trained data scientists to go around. With demand for this talent on the rise, companies are looking to AI to fill in the gaps.
Artificial intelligence isn’t just a tool for a specific industry. In fact, the health industry uses it extensively. IBM’s Watson, which became known for winning Jeopardy against human competitors went on to assist in the healthcare sector to aid providers in diagnosis for patients. Companies like Google have been investing heavily in artificial intelligence in order to put it to work for their services, including self-driving cars.
Indeed, our robot overlords are already among us. They are working alongside humans in businesses large and small. They are helping you find the fastest way to get to work in the morning, avoiding any accidents and/or traffic jams along the way. They are helping companies better their products and services by helping them to understand how their customers are actually using their products.
The post AI adoption coming quickly to the enterprise sector appeared first on ReadWrite.
The startup has invested in at least 14 other startups.
For a long time, the buzz around Slack has been that that the office collaboration software will one day finally kill email.
But based on the list of startups announced today that Slack is investing in, the company wants to do more than just replace email. A lot more. It wants to create a fleet of service integrations so that Slack users have as little reason to leave Slack as possible.
Today, the company is revealing the names of 11 startups in which it’s investing, all of which make apps for Slack. The money comes from an $80 million fund it launched with other VC firms last winter. In total, the company has invested in 14 startups that make stuff for Slack.
What’s notable about them is how many of them offer services that extend beyond things you can do over email. One service, Birdly, more closely links sales reps on Slack with their Salesforce software. Myra Labs generates tools for software developers that use Slack.
Though Slack has gotten to a $3.8 billion valuation on the promise of being an "email killer," the company is betting that its next big thing will be the third-party integrations that give users more stuff to do with Slack.
It’s an ambitious push, but Slack hasn’t replaced email yet: You can’t talk to people at other companies using the service. If they enable that function, the Slack ecosystem could become much more valuable.
Here are some of the startups announced today that the Slack fund is backing, not all of which have officially launched:
German IT services and enterprise giant SAP reported encouraging numbers for Q2 2016, beating analysts’ expectations and spiking its share price by nearly five percent in pre-market trading Wednesday as its non-IFRS EPS increased 2 percent to €0.82 ($0.90). Analysts had predicted a quarterly EPS of $0.78. The leap is owed in part to the strength of the company’s… Read More
Obi is a robot designed to help disabled people feed themselves with less assistance. Created by the robotics firm Desin, Obi features four separate bowls for food and a robotic arm with a spoon that can learn the delivery location after being shown once by a caregiver.
Obi has portion control settings, interchangeable spoons (both the spoons and the bowls are dishwasher- and microwave-safe), and a spill-proof surface for easy clean up. The robotic arm is highly agile; it can scrape the sides of bowls and adjust itself depending on the type and amount of food it picks up, as well as detect collisions.
Commercial robots built by Baxter were some of the first devices to be trained by humans instead of programmed, and now Obi is...
Microsoft officially launched Windows 10 a year ago and foisted it vigorously on consumers. But corporate America, always a little slower to adopt the latest and greatest, hasn't been entirely left.
Some 38% of companies have adopted Windows 10 for at least some of their employees, in line with expectations of a 40% adoption rate in the first year, according to a survey of 866 IT professionals who work in companies with more than 250 employees, conducted by Spiceworks, a social-networking site for IT pros.
That's actually a really fast adoption rate. Historically, most big companies tended to avoid new versions of Windows, waiting until Microsoft released its first big update, when most of the kinks were worked out, typically a year after the original product was released.
The IT pros who are supporting Windows 10 in their companies generally like it. They say that Windows 10 is faster, has some good security options, and works better with Office 365, which companies are racing to adopt, too.
But the employees? That's another story. Sixty-nine percent of the IT pros surveyed said that their employees still prefer Windows 7.
In the Spiceworks press release, Joe Kinne, IT manager at Prime Electric, put it like this:
"We're rolling out Windows 10 on our new devices and upgrading a majority of our existing devices, and the biggest benefit so far has been the overall speed and performance of the OS. At first, our end users were reluctant to give up a system they already know and like, but they quickly caught on and adapted really well once they began to try the new features and realize the improvements."
On the other hand, because so many employees and companies remain satisfied with Windows 7, the IT pros at the remaining over 60% of companies in the survey say that they are in no rush to upgrade.
They will trickle over to Windows 10 over the next few years when they have a pressing reason to do so.
This helps to explain another reason why Microsoft is no longer on track to have Windows 10 installed on 1 billion devices within the next two years.
SEE ALSO: Microsoft just rubbed Google's nose in a big cloud-computing customer win: Land O'Lakes
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NOW WATCH: This Microsoft developer built a voice-controlled smart mirror in 20 hours
Skype has been slowly transitioning from a P2P service to the cloud over the past few years, and Microsoft is unveiling some changes today to the Skype apps it supports as a result. While Microsoft will continue to support Skype on iOS 8, Android 4.03, and Windows 10 Mobile, any users stuck on Windows Phone 8 or older versions of Android will no longer receive access to the latest versions of Skype. That will render some of the apps useless over time as the Skype service evolves.
In a blog post outlining the changes, Microsoft's Skype chief Gurdeep Pall admits that Skype has experienced some issues over the past couple of years. "At times, unforeseen issues have cropped up, like messages not syncing across devices, or delayed...
More than 1 billion people now use Facebook Messenger every month, the company announced today. Facebook now has two messaging services with 1 billion users, as WhatsApp hit the milestone in February. The bot platform Facebook introduced for Messenger at F8 has grown to include over 18,000 bots — up from 11,000 just 20 days ago.
"As part of this journey to 1 billion, we focused on creating the best possible experiences in modern day communications," Facebook Messenger chief David Marcus said in a statement. "We remain focused on helping connect people to the people and businesses who matter most. Thank you to everyone who uses Messenger around the world, and we're looking forward to connecting the next billion."
"We're looking forward...
MuleSoft, provider of a platform for building application networks, today announced that it has partnered with Barclays to host a digital banking hackathon. The hackathon will take place at Barclays Technology Centre Radbroke in Cheshire on July 20 and 21. The event aims to foster innovation and harness technology to build a range of new financial services solutions. Disclosure: Mulesoft is the parent company of ProgrammableWeb.
The German footwear company Birkenstock will no longer sell its sandals on Amazon due to the rise of counterfeit products on the e-commerce site, CNBC's Ari Levy reported Wednesday.
It will also ban any sales of its products by third-party sellers on Amazon, effectively making its products unavailable on the world's largest online store, the report said.
In an internal memo obtained by CNBC, Birkenstock USA CEO David Kahan blasted Amazon's deepening counterfeit problem, saying it has become "impossible" to police all the illegal activities that end up harming Birkenstock's brand value. Kahan wrote:
"The Amazon marketplace, which operates as an 'open market,' creates an environment where we experience unacceptable business practices which we believe jeopardize our brand. This includes postings by sellers proven to have counterfeit Birkenstock products. It also includes a constant stream of unidentifiable unauthorized sellers who show a blatant disregard for our pricing policies. Policing this activity internally and in partnership with Amazon.com has proven impossible."
The news comes just a few weeks after CNBC reported that a lot of Amazon sellers are increasingly growing frustrated by the proliferation of counterfeit products on the site. Some of the problem pointed out include price undercuts, fake reviews, and weak policing measures.
At the time of the first CNBC report, Amazon denied the sale of counterfeit products on its site, telling us "occurrences of counterfeit products are very rare."
On Wednesday, Amazon's spokesperson sent the same exact statement in response to its alleged counterfeit problem:
“Amazon does not allow the sale of inauthentic items on its marketplace and occurrences of inauthentic products are rare. Every customer who orders on Amazon is covered by our A-Z guarantee and if they do receive inauthentic goods, we will refund or replace that item.”
You can read the full CNBC report here>>
SEE ALSO: Hundreds of frustrated sellers grilled an Amazon exec over Chinese counterfeit products
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NOW WATCH: This scientist thinks Elon Musk is wrong about the threat of artificial intelligence
Cities use up to 80% of the world’s resources, while occupying only 2% of its territory. That’s a pretty scary thought, right?
Smart cities are now a necessary tool in the long term economic growth and well-being of citizens, as well as in our obligation to control climate change. Smart urbanization brings convenience and opportunity to its residents, and spreads way past the tech hubs of San Francisco, Portland, Amsterdam or London.
It’s no longer a private tech sector passion project either. It’s a necessity that involves governments around the globe and brings a change to the world’s population. As Armen Orujyan put it, “if the smart cities and smart societies were an iceberg, then we have only seen the tip of it.” With that thought in mind, let’s peek into the undiscovered and uncharted territory where IoT meets business and the government.
It can’t be denied that the US is at the forefront of the Internet of Things revolution with companies such as Apple, Intel, Ford, Cisco, IBM and General Electric, as well as individuals and startups launching their IoT devices. That said, while according to Business Insider, the U.S. federal government spent almost $35 billion on Internet of Things solutions between 2011 and 2015, they are not the only, nor are they the biggest player in the game.
According to Gartner’s report published on June 9th of this year, spending by national, federal and local governments worldwide on technology products and services is forecast to grow from $430 billion in 2016 to $476 billon by 2020. With such a huge amount of money involved, the natural first question emerging is “who will benefit from all this”? The military? The average joe? Under-developed nations? Wall Street?
The answer isn’t as straightforward as some might think.
Businesses are actually the top adopters of IoT solutions, as they lower their operating costs and increase productivity. Those solutions also simplify development of new products and services, and lower the costs of entering new markets.
Then come governments – think monitoring transportation systems, identity management and verifications systems, using advanced algorithms to anticipate security risks and military bio-technologies.
Opposite to common perception, consumers will be the group least transformed by the IoT revolution — which is a whole different story. That’s not to say that the upcoming years won’t be groundbreaking for people like you and I. With the exciting R&D happening today, especially in the bio-medical field, before too long people will be able to swallow a pill that senses and reports the health of their digestive tract to a doctor over a secure Internet connection.
Meet the wild card players: South Korea and The NetherlandsSouth Korea and Netherlands launched their very own IoT networks in July of this year, proving that the Smart Cities truly are a global movement. In South Korea, SK Telecom — the largest wireless carrier in the country — is leading this initiative, introducing technology that will allow them to reach about 99% of the population.
South Korea and the Netherlands had been in somewhat of an IoT arms race. Each nation determined to be the first one to the finish line introduced a bit of competition into the projects. It is unclear who won as both countries made announcements around the same time, but the Netherlands appeared to have beaten the Koreans by just a few days. Dutch telecommunications company KPN said its own network for IoT connectivity became available across the European nation on June 30.
Singapore: a country of the elderly?According to demographers, a country needs to have 2.2 kids per woman for its population to hold steady. Welcome to Singapore, the home of the 0.81 ratio, the lowest ratio in the world.
Singapore took some drastic measures to fight the trend, including hosting a “National Night” in 2012, in which couples were encouraged “to let their patriotism explode,” but without a generation of young people who could help with taking care of the elderly, Singapore’s government is turning to IoT for help.
According to WSJ, private companies selected by the government would install the sensors throughout people’s living quarters, such as in their appliances and toilet. Real-time data on their movement patterns, sedentary behavior, and number of flushes would then get sent back to the company to be pushed to individual families via text message.
But that’s not everything. Singapore is also deploying an undetermined number of sensors and cameras across the island city-state that will allow the government to monitor everything from the cleanliness of public spaces to the density of crowds and the precise movement of every locally registered vehicle.
Germany’s footprintGermany’s involvement in IoT reaches far beyond car manufacturers such as Mercedes-Benz and BMW working on connecting drivers and their cars to the Internet.
German Conductix-Wampfler provides countries such as UK and Italy with the technology needed to wirelessly charge buses. How does it work, exactly? Conductix provides induction chargers on the streets, as well as installs them inside of the buses. On a big scale those efforts will impact the air quality for the residents of congested zones in a significantly positive manner.
Metro’s Group groceries stores rolled out “smart freezers” technologies back in 2008. The RFID tags attached to the plastic foam trays contain a unique number, linking to data about the product (such as expiration dates) in the company’s internal database. Whenever a customer removes an item, an integrated RFID reader automatically reads its tag, allowing for exact planning of in-store fresh meat production for the owners, and a better quality of food purchased for their customers- pretty neat, huh?
Adler Modemärkte AG, one of the largest fashion retailers in Germany, also deployed RFID throughout its 170 Adler fashion outlets. RFID readers are located at the checkout areas, store entrances and the areas between the stockroom and the sales floor. The readers constantly monitor and manage all current stock in the stockroom and on the sales floor, reducing loss of goods, improving customer experience and eliminating out-of-stock situation whenever possible.
That technology of course doesn’t only apply to grocery stores and clothing retailers, but those projects are a fun way of introducing RFID technology to the public as an easy to understand concept.
Big or small, smart cities are changing the way of life as we know it. With endless possibilities ahead of us, we are all invited to enjoy the world’s journey to a better tomorrow and a brighter future. And whether you like it or not, IoT really is the name of the game.
The author is a tech enthusiast, startups addict and a passionate optimist. CEO @EverOpen.co and former COO @Unbits.
The post For tomorrow’s cities, IoT is the name of the game appeared first on ReadWrite.
Slack's recently-launched $80 million VC fund has invested an unspecified amount in chatbot company Automat.
Automat allows brands and influencers to communicate with their customers, fans, and employees by using a mixture of mobile messaging, artificial intelligence, and chatbot technology.
The Canada-based company claims on its website to have 17 patents "in the fields of speech recognition, natural language understanding, virtual assistants, and AI."
Automat was cofounded by Andy Mauro in January. He was the former senior director of the "cognitive innovations group" at Nuance Communications, a US-based tech outfit that uses natural language understanding and voice recognition to help power devices for companies such as Samsung, Ford, and Domino's.
Automat counts internet trend spotter Tim O'Reilly, Chris Messina, the "inventor of the hashtag" and Uber developer experience lead, amongst its investors and advisors. Gary Clayton, who sits on the board at automobile tech company Automatic Labs and serves as an advisor to a number of other tech companies, is chairman of Automat's board of directors.
Automat's other investors include Relay Ventures, Real Ventures, You & Mr Jones, USAA, and OATV, according to the company's website.
A spokesperson for Slack declined to comment on the investment.
Back in December, Slack announced the launch of its VC fund, which primarily invests in startups building apps on top of Slack.
The fund is backed with additional capital from partners including Accel, Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Spark, and Social Capital. At launch, Slack said it would primarily make investments worth $100,000 to $250,000 in seed-stage startups that make Slack their core foundation.
Slack has only officially announced three investments to date, which coincided with the fund's launch:
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The move sidesteps the long and costly effort of testing on hundreds or thousands of devices.
One of the big challenges for Android app developers is the fact that there are just so many different phones out there using a variety of versions of Google’s operating system.
That often means a lot more time and money spent testing and supporting Android than Apple’s iOS, but with Android running on the majority of smartphones out there, what’s a large developer to do?
Salesforce is taking a rather unusual stance in an effort to avoid this problem. Starting with an update to its Salesforce1 app later this year, the company will offer support for its app only to those using certain Google Nexus or Samsung Galaxy devices.
The company declined to go into detail on its reasoning, but confirmed in a support document that it is looking to maximize its development resources.
“Due to the wide array of available Android devices, we are targeting our support to a select number of Android devices to continue improving our overall Salesforce1 for Android user experience,” the company said in the support document.
If Salesforce’s approach takes hold, it could offer a further boost for Samsung, which already is the market leader in Android devices, especially among business users.
Oculus CTO John Carmack cited a similar rationale, explaining that the virtual reality maker partnered with Samsung on Gear VR to “bypass the development hell of Android.”
Fragmentation within the Android world takes many forms. In addition to the hardware diversity, Android phones are often slow to get software updates through their carriers, forcing developers to make sure their apps run on multiple versions of the operating system.
A cottage industry of testing houses has cropped up where Android developers can test their apps on a range of leading devices rather than having to buy and maintain hundreds or thousands of different models. Google even bought one such firm, Appurify, back in 2014.
Google executives noted at its recent I/O developer conference that these issues remain a top concern, but past efforts to ensure prompt software updates have done little to lessen the problem.
As for Salesforce, it plans to support the Samsung Galaxy S5, S6 and S7; Samsung Galaxy Note 4; and Google Nexus 5X and Google Nexus 6P, as well as two Samsung tablets, the Galaxy Note 10.1 and the Tab A 9.7.
Those using unsupported Android devices will still be able to install the new Salesforce apps, but the company won’t provide support for those devices or fix any bugs that arise.
It can be easy to lose sight of the innovation in the cybersecurity industry amid frequent negative news about breaches and increasingly sophisticated hackers. The reality is that many disruptive innovations are beginning to gain traction and could very well change the way business is conducted.
The last three weeks have been very good for Twilio, the cloud communications service, which had its widely-praised IPO right at the tail end of June.
Debuting at $15 per share, it's popped up as high as $44.80 on Wall Street's excitement for the fact that Twilio's financials show both rapid growth and strong technology. Even Mad Money's Jim Cramer got in on the Twilio love-fest.
Today, though, the markets are hitting the brakes on Twilio's rising share price — at the time of writing, it's down almost 4.5% to $41.08 per share as the market starts to worry that Twilio is trading at too high a premium.
As Barron's reports, analysts at Canaccord and Pacific Crest are starting to get more cautious about Twilio: Notably, Canaccord's Richard Davis estimates that Twilio is trading at 12.1 times his projections for its 2017 revenue, which is far and above other comparable companies.
In short, both firms are concerned that Twilio's ride to the top is unsustainable, and that it's overpriced. Davis indicates that a more reasonable price would be in the high $30s, at which point his anxiety may subside.
But just to keep some perspective: A share price in that high-$30 range would still be more than twice its $15 IPO price. There's no shame in a course correction when you're still flying high.
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