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Everything is bigger in Texas. This includes the state's massive auto market.

The National Automobile Dealers Association told Bloomberg's Lauren Etter that the Lone Star State accounts for more than $81 billion in auto sales every year. 

Unfortunately for Tesla, the company won't be able to sell its cars directly to consumers in the state any time soon, according to Bloomberg.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott told Bloomberg Radio this week that he is content with the state's current dealership-based sales setup and the service they provide to drivers.

However, this doesn't mean Texans can't get their hands on a new Tesla.

Instead of showrooms, people who live in many states where direct sales are banned can visit a Tesla "Gallery" to check out the only car the company is selling, the Model S. But any discussion of price and test drives are prohibited. 

Tesla has several such Galleries in Texas, and customers can also place orders online.

Earlier this year, Tesla and its direct sales model scored major victories in Georgia, New Jersey, and Maryland. However, Michigan — like Texas— has taken a hard stance in favor of the traditional dealership-based sales model.

This year, Tesla expects to sell roughly 55,000 cars worldwide but would like to expand that total to 500,000 by 2020.

SEE ALSO: Tesla is buying up huge chunks of Nevada

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NOW WATCH: These are the side effects of sleeping on your back, side, and stomach

According to data gathered from the New Horizons spacecraft, scientists say that Pluto is likely to have water ice, geysers, and volcanoes.

The ice mountains are 11,000 feet high, and the planet's surface does not have a single impact crater, indicating that it is very young.  It will take 16 months for all of the data gathered by the New Horizons probe to be sent back to Earth.

Video courtesy of Reuters

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Office for Mac -- long lagging behind its Windows cousin in features -- has essentially gained parity in the new 2016 edition.

Built for Windows and Mac, Huddle Desktop is available immediately.

When you're worth several billion dollars, you're bound to want to spend that wealth on some extravagant toys. 

As it turns out, wealthy tech executives are no exception to the rule.

From sports franchises to private planes, we've rounded up some of the most interesting toys tech billionaires have splurged on in the past.

Google chairman Eric Schmidt has a $72-million yacht called the "Oasis," which he charters out for $400,000 a week. The yacht has plenty of amenities, including a pool, jet skis, and a gym that can be converted into a disco.

Source: Page Six

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is known for her taste in high-end designer goods. In 2006, she had some 400 pieces of glass art by Dale Chihuly installed in the ceiling of her penthouse apartment at San Francisco's Four Seasons hotel. Chihuly's work typically sells for an average of $15,000 each, and the delivery reportedly caused significant traffic problems in the city.

Source: Gawker, Business Insider

In 2013, Tesla CEO Elon Musk paid $866,000 at auction for the Lotus Esprit submarine that appeared in the 1977 James Bond flick "The Spy Who Loved Me." He's said he wants to try and make it "transform for real."

Source: Jalopnik

 

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

With a life as storied as he had, it's no wonder that Steve Jobs is remembered not only for running an incredibly successful company, but for being tremendously outspoken.

He seemingly had an opinion on everything, and his thoughts often echoed his obsessive commitment to quality at Apple, whether on his approach to mistakes ("Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations"), or his attention to detail ("Design is not what it looks and feels like. Design is how it works").

But he had plenty to say on deeper matters as well.

Here's a roundup of some of his more thought-provoking words, collected from various interviews and speeches.

Note: A previous version of this article was published by Karyne Levy and Dylan Love.

SEE ALSO: The 11 best new iPhone and Android apps you might have missed recently

"Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while."

"It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them."

"Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

A hefty cache of hacking tools were leaked to the masses this week when the controversial surveillance company Hacking Team was breached and 500 GB of its files were released for download on Twitter.

"The hacking team tools are of a much higher quality and are much more effective than anything hackers have had access to," Lior Div, CEO of Israeli cybersecurity firm Cybereason, told the Times of Israel on Thursday. 

"Now that anybody can download them and use them in cyberattacks, don’t be surprised to see many more well-protected sites and servers being compromised," he added.

The hackers who infiltrated the company, which sells surveillance technology such as spyware to governments around the world, reportedly "got everything," according to Vice — including the tools Hacking Team developed to monitor cell phones, laptops, and any other device with network connectivity.

"Hacking Team’s investigation has determined that sufficient code was released to permit anyone to deploy the software against any target of their choice,” the company’s spokesperson Eric Rabe said in a statement on Wednesday. “Terrorists, extortionists and others can deploy this technology at will if they have the technical ability.”

Experts largely agree that both Div's and Rabe's statements are exaggerated — the tools Hacking Team sold to its clients were not very sophisticated, and most of them were already widely available to hackers. 

Still, "even if the hackers had little use for the tools that were leaked, they could always re-engineer them to serve their own purposes," Joe Loomis, founder and CEO of Cybersponse security, told Business Insider. 

"The leak will probably have a bigger impact on personal privacy than anything else since this software is used primarily to monitor individuals and what they’re doing."

The hack also exposed the questionable clients Hacking Team told surveillance tools to, including a number of repressive, US-blacklisted regimes such as the Syrian and Sudanese governments. The US Drug Enforcement Agency was also listed as a client.

While they can be used to "snoop and sniff," the tools are not particularly sophisticated, Dave Aitel, CEO of Immunity, Inc., noted to Business Insider. "The exploits wouldn't affect systems running basic security mechanisms."

But they don't necessarily have to be sophisticated to be effective, Dave Chronister, founder of Parameter Security, countered.

"It's causing a bit of mayhem right now," Chronister said.  "A lot of the leaked tools were already out there, but there are a few new ones that will definitely add to hackers' arsenals."

One of these tools — an Adobe Flash 0day allowing hackers to penetrate Adobe's media player — was exploited by hackers almost immediately after it was leaked. 

"The only silver lining is that cybersecurity experts know what to watch for because they know which tools were leaked," Chronister added.

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NOW WATCH: How to use Google Maps when you have no phone service

Want a small slate without a big price? The Asus ZenPad 8, now available, looks like a good value for the money.

Blackberry has reportedly purchased the domain names AndroidSecured.net and AndroidSecured.com.

That slump is only expected to continue, although hopefully not as much with a projected decline of 4.4 percent in 2015.

The Netherlands made headlines last year when it built the world's first solar road - an energy-harvesting bike path paved with glass-coated solar panels.

Now, six months into the trial, engineers say the system is working even better than expected, with the 70-metre test bike path generating 3,000 kWh, or enough electricity to power a small household for a year.

"If we translate this to an annual yield, we expect more than the 70k wh per square metre per year," Sten de Wit, spokesman for SolaRoad, the group behind the project, told Tarek Bazley at Al Jazeera. So just imagine the potential if we covered all our roads in the stuff.

It's this kind of thinking that got the Internet so hyped-up over Solar Roadways last year - a crowd-funded project that aimed to power the entire US with solar-covered roads. However, the Netherlands became the first country to put the idea into practice with their installation in Krommenie, a town north of Amsterdam.

The solar panels used on the Dutch bike path are sandwiched between glass, silicon rubber and concrete, and are strong enough to support 12-tonne fire trucks without any damage. Each individual panel connects to smart metres, which optimise their output and feed their electricity straight into street lighting, or the grid.

The engineers spent five years creating the system to be durable. "If one panel is broken or in shadow or dirt, it will only switch off that PV panel," said Jan-Hendrik Kremer, Renewable Energy Systems consultant at technology company Imtech.

More than 150,000 cyclists rode over the solar panels during the trial, and so far they've only noticed one fault - a small section of a coating, which provided grip to the surface, has become delaminated due to temperature fluctuations. The team at SolaRoad is now working to improve this coating.

"We made a set of coatings, which are robust enough to deal with the traffic loads but also give traction to the vehicles passing by," Stan Klerks, a scientist at Dutch research group TNO - the parent company, which came up with SolaRoad - told Bazley from Al Jazeera.

The researchers design the panels to not only let in as much light as possible, but also to last at least 20 years - a similar lifespan to rooftop solar panels.

The potential is pretty huge. Not only could the roads generate enough electricity to power local households, but they can also provide some amazing lighting opportunities. Last year a solar road was installed in the Netherlands by design lab Studio Roosegaarde, which sucked up the Sun's energy during the day and then guided cyclists at night using beautiful Vincent Van Gogh 'Starry Starry Night'- inspired LED lights.

SolaRoad is now working with local councils around the Netherlands to try to roll the technology out in other provinces. A similar agreement has also been signed with California in the US. Bring on the future.

SEE ALSO: A solar-powered plane just completed a record-breaking flight

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NOW WATCH: Scientists just discovered something on Mars that could prove whether it ever supported life

Hacking is the new spying. And, as we've learned time and time again, both government and private organizations are using cyber-spy techniques to gain as much intelligence as they can.

But getting this data can be difficult. In fact, some of the most previous of digital information is safeguarded by machines that have no contact with the outside world.

So can this internet-less data be hacked? Well, yes.

With some help from the research of the security firm Kaspersky Lab, as well as some of our own personal digging, here's a look into some of the insane and creepy technologies used to hack offline devices.

SEE ALSO: The best ways to keep your identity safe, according to the world's top security experts

Detecting electromagnetic radiation

Both the US and the USSR have spent decades looking into the electromagnetic radiation that an electronic device emits. Kaspersky Lab writes that once a device is plugged into a power line it "generates electromagnetic radiation that can be intercepted by proven technologies."

Now people have figured out how to harness this information to track keystrokes. Writes Kaspersky Lab:

Keystrokes can be remotely tracked with high accuracy at the 67-feet (20-meter) distance by using a homemade device that analyzes the radio spectrum and costs around $5,000. It is interesting to note that the attack is equally effective against common cheap USB keyboards, expensive wireless keyboards with a signal encryption, and built-in notebook keyboards.

Power consumption analysis

While on the topic of electricity, it's also possible to deduce a person's device activity based on the power their gadgets consume. A technique called Load Monitoring monitors voltage and current changes to understand activity. It's been used by electricity companies to better understand what is causing certain changes in electricity usage in a specific place.

But in Japan load monitoring has been shown to be able to pinpoint exactly what device is running at what time. Similarly, researchers have begun looking at electricity consumption as a way to detect when a computer malware has been injected into a computer network.

What's inside your smartphone

It's true that smartphones are connected to the internet, but there are other parts inside it that also give away a slew of information.

For example, the accelerometer inside a phone — which is the sensor used to track a phone's tilt and motion — can be used to detect what someone is typing on a computer. According to Kaspersky Lab, if a smartphone is near a computer keyboard it "provides an approximate 80 percent recognition accuracy rating" at tracking what a person is typing.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

The CEO also parried a question about a rumored merger with Dish.

The latest update to the cloud-based service reflects one of the more waggish Internet fads in recent memory than tools for fostering collaboration and productivity.

Meerkat, the live-streaming video app that has been going head-to-head with Twitter’s Periscope, announced its biggest update ever on Wednesday. The update introduces some new features that are clearly designed to differentiate Meerkat from its well-funded rival.

The most innovative new feature is “Cameo,” which lets you (consensually) hijack someone else’s Meerkat stream for up to 60 seconds.

Here’s how it works.

One user taps someone else's profile and invites them to “cameo” on their own stream. The second user then accepts and takes control of the first user's stream for up to minute. At any time, either user can end the cameo, which will revert the stream to the originator’s control.

This collaborative tool brings some of the fun of services like Chatroulette to Meerkat, without the creepy invasiveness. It's clear that in designing “Cameo,” Meerkat took pains to make its users feel in control when they invite someone to hop into their livestream.

Meerkat also announced the ability to connect to your Facebook profile instead of Twitter, though it won’t actually automatically post anything to Facebook feed. Instead, Meerkat will let you know when any of your contacts starts a Meerkat stream, or joins the service.

Meerkat has had a strained relationship with Twitter since Twitter launched a competing app, Periscope, shortly after Meerkat's launch. But even so, Meerkat users still had to have a Twitter account to sign up. Now that awkwardness has been eliminated with the wonders of Facebook’s API. And this could, perhaps, signal a deeper interest by Facebook in Meerkat. But for now, the integration will show Facebook how much its users care about Meerkat.

The last part of the update is the Meerkat Library. You can now save your streams to your own personal library at the end of each broadcast. You can them manage your streams and choose which ones in the archive to share publicly.

SEE ALSO: Meerkat's CEO describes what it was like the day Twitter decided to crush his app: 'The team went back to the office to get ready to dive in'

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NOW WATCH: No Instagram, no Twitter, no Facebook — there's basically NO internet in Cuba

Can't wait for Amazon's massive shopping holiday "Prime Day" next Wednesday? Check out this deal: You can own Amazon's first premium smartphone, the Fire Phone, unlocked, for just $159.

That's a pretty incredible deal, considering you're also getting:

• A full year of Amazon Prime (a $99 value)
• Unlimited free cloud storage for any photos you take
• A pair of Amazon Premium Headphones, which are actually considerably better (and cheaper) than Apple's EarPods (a $19 value)

That basically puts the value of the Fire Phone at around $40. Granted, the Fire Phone didn't receive the best reviews, but considering how this phone originally cost $650 unlocked, it's worth at least considering.

The Fire Phone itself comes with plenty of features you won't find on any other smartphone, like Firefly, Amazon's technology that can identify text, music, and even art, to help you save time by accessing information about those things more quickly. It also comes with Mayday, Amazon's free live customer service hotline, dual speakers with Dolby Digital Plus for high-quality audio, and other exclusive features like predictive streaming (to reduce video buffering) and X-Ray, which shows you information about the videos, music, and books you're watching.

The Fire Phone features a 4.7-inch high-res display with a 13-megapixel rear-facing camera and a 2.1-megapixel camera on the front. It also comes with 32 GB of storage, support for next-generation WiFi, and a rather large battery that should last you more than a day. You can read Business Insider's review of the Fire Phone here.

If you want this deal, you'll have to move quickly: It's available Wednesday only. Check it out on Amazon.

SEE ALSO: This is Amazon's first smartphone: The Fire Phone

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NOW WATCH: Here's how much you have to buy to make Amazon Prime worth it

Satya Nadella has spent a lot of his first year and a half as Microsoft CEO undoing some mistakes of his predecessor, Steve Ballmer.

On Wednesday, he undid the biggest one of all by essentially declaring the acquisition of Nokia's smartphone business a $7.6 billion mistake and moving on.

The acquisition was announced September 2013, a month after Ballmer had announced his retirement but before Microsoft had figured out who would replace him.

The deal was contentious inside Microsoft, leading to a shouting match during an internal meeting, according to Bloomberg. Nadella and founder Bill Gates spoke out against the deal, but Ballmer managed to get his way.

They were right. Ballmer was wrong.

Buying Nokia might have been a reasonable move in 2011, when Nokia first abandoned its homegrown platforms and decided to adopt Windows Phone exclusively instead. 

But by 2013, it was pretty clear that Windows Phone was an also-ran platform. The Nokia deal did help it cross 10 percent market share in some European countries by November 2013, according to Kantar Worldpanel, but its overall global market share was still stuck stubbornly below 5 percent, as it's been throughout Windows Phone's entire existence. 

That tiny market share meant that developers were slow to build Windows Phone apps, which in turn kept people from buying the phones, which in turn kept developers away, and so on.

There was nothing Microsoft could have gotten from owning Nokia that it didn't already have from its distribution deal with Nokia.

Plus, it was clear that Nokia's smartphone business was a disaster — between the time the Nokia deal was signed in Feb 2011 and the acquisition announcement in Sept 2013, Nokia's global market share of handsets fell from about 25% to less than 5%, according to data from Statista. 

In other words, Ballmer convinced Microsoft to drop over $7 billion on a "declining asset," as Microsoft's CFO once described Yahoo after Microsoft walked away from that attempted acquisition in 2008.

Nadella has made a lot of changes at Microsoft in the last year. Some, like shifting focus away from selling on-premises software and to cloud services, started under Ballmer and he should get some credit for them.

But others, like releasing Office apps for the iPad and Android, and publicly embracing platforms like the Mac and Linux (whose open-source model Ballmer once likened to "cancer") never would have happened under his predecessor.

With today's move, along with the elimination of other non-core businesses like selling display advertising, Nadella finally sheds the past once and for all and can concentrate on the future. It's a sad day for the up to 7,800 people  — mostly former Nokia employees — who will probably lose their jobs, but it's the right thing for Microsoft, and shows once again that Nadella is his own leader.

SEE ALSO: Microsoft is cutting 7,800 jobs

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NOW WATCH: How Mark Cuban Paved The Way For Steve Ballmer's NBA Investment

Redmond wasn't gaining much ground even going after the phone market full throttle. It's hard to see how it will be able to do so with fewer resources.

Consumer interest in the Apple Watch may have dwindled significantly since the wearable was launched in April, claims new market research data.

MaintenanceNet is known for its cloud-based service contract management platform that helps businesses spot new or lost service sales opportunities.

Samsung is offering a serious discount on its Galaxy Note 4 this month. If you buy the phone without a carrier contract at its full price, the company will send you a check for $200 to partially cover the cost.

You'll get the discount as long as you buy the phone anytime between July 7 and July 26. Once you purchase the Note 4, you'll need to fill out a form and submit a copy of your receipt by August 26, which Samsung explains how to do here.

Samsung notes that the deal is only valid if you buy the phone through a "participating location," but it doesn't specify which retailers are part of the deal. The terms and conditions only state that the rebate isn't valid if you buy the phone through Sprint.

The Galaxy Note 4 is expensive without a carrier subsidy — Verizon sells the phone off contract for $700, while AT&T sells it for $845. 

So, you could get the phone for as low as $500 if you buy it through Verizon, which is pretty decent considering you're not getting a carrier subsidy. 

The Galaxy Note 4 is one of the best Android phones on the market, especially if you're looking for something with a big screen. We ranked the Note 4 as #5 on our list of the best smartphones you can buy right now because of its gorgeous and crisp screen, sturdy design, and long battery life. 

The discount comes just as Samsung is expected to reveal its next giant smartphone, the Galaxy Note 5, which is likely to debut at this year's IFA conference in Berlin.  

SEE ALSO: Apple has been testing a giant iPad for at least 3 years

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NOW WATCH: The ‘Tesla of scooters’ is finally available and it looks incredible

The Russian government has launched a campaign to keep young Russians from taking dangerous selfies, according to the Izvestia newspaper.

On Tuesday, the Russian Interior Ministry released an illustrated guide warning people about the dangers of taking selfies. The booklet is complete with pictures of people taking selfies on boats, in front of an oncoming train, and standing on a rooftop, accompanied by captions like: "A selfie on railroads is a bad idea, if you value your life," and "A selfie with animals isn’t always nice."

The Safe Selfie campaign's motto is: "Even a million 'likes' on social media are not worth your life and well-being."

The ministry says it started the campaign in response to a series of selfie-related deaths and other incidents in the country. Russian police say that at least 10 people have been killed and 100 have been injured while taking selfies in 2015. 

SEE ALSO: 7 extreme selfies you should not try at home

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NOW WATCH: We tried Eleven James — the 'Netflix of luxury watches'

The Amazon Echo is coming to a wide swath of customers starting next week. Here's what they can expect from it.

The new Republic Refund plans give customers a credit toward the following month's bill for any unused cellular data.

 Real-time collaboration service Convo is unveiling what CEO Faizan Buzdar called “the biggest, most massive update” since it launched. While Slack has been hogging the collaboration spotlight (and raising a big funding round), it seemed like Convo was standing still, without much in the way of updates or improvements. Buzdar said that’s because his team has been working to… Read More

Microsoft's new app, Tossup, wants to help you get together with your friends — even if you're all still trying to figure out exactly what that might entail.

One of the main headaches of trying to coordinate an event — either by using Facebook or by syncing people’s calendars — is that it doesn’t leave enough room for uncertainty. If you know you want to get some friends together for brunch tomorrow, but don’t know where you want to go yet, or even when, you face the unenviable task of having to hammer all the fine print out over text message.

Microsoft's new app Tossup applies social polling technology to try to fix this problem. The app lets a group of people vote on aspects of an event — the wheres, the whens, etc. — in addition to saying if they'll be able to make it.

Built-in Yelp integration makes the app especially useful for deciding what restaurant you want to go to, since you can pull in restaurants from a specific neighborhood, complete with their rating. And even if your friends don't have the app, they can participate using a link sent by either SMS or email (similar to how the popular group messaging app GroupMe functions). 

Tossup is one of the most recent apps to come from Microsoft Garage, the internal "incubator" that encourages Microsoft's employees to bring their novel ideas to completion. Here's a rundown on how this app can streamline your event.

SEE ALSO: Microsoft employees get inspired at Bill Gates' old office

First you have to input your phone number...

...and your Facebook or email.

Then you choose what you want from the main menu.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

French bank BNP Paribas says the technology underpinning bitcoin has the potential to make existing companies "redundant," a huge admission from one of the world's biggest banks.

Analyst Johann Palychata writes in the company's magazine Quintessence that bitcoin's blockchain, the software that allows the digital currency to function, "should be considered as an invention like the steam or combustion engine," that has the potential to transform the world of finance and beyond.

The blockchain is an online ledger of all the bitcoin transactions that take place. It's spread across thousands of computers and servers globally.

It lets people exchange bitcoin by spreading the record of exchanges and ownership history across a wide area. It adds a layer of trust that is essential to bitcoin — everyone can check a coin hasn't been double spent and is actually owned by the person claiming to.

Palychata says that if this type of technology is applied to securities trading —  the world of buying and selling company shares — then "existing industry players might be redundant."

If investors can trade shares directly with each other in a system that has a layer of trust built into it then middle men — stock brokers — aren't needed anymore.

That's a huge thing for an investment bank to say, especially one of BNP Paribas' size — it's France's biggest bank. 

Most banks have been keen to play down the competition from financial technology, or fintech, startups, saying new technology presents opportunities rather than threats.

Falling technology costs and the disruption that followed the financial crisis of 2008 have lead to a wave of innovation and competition for banks. Bitcoin and the blockchain are some of the most cutting edge financial experiments we've seen.

Banks like Santander and Barclays are investing in and experimenting with financial technology of their own, saying it's a good chance to improve their own services.

But the truth — as Palychata makes clear — is these banks are being forced to innovate. While its unlikely that any one of hundreds of startups currently springing up will replace Santander or Barclays, banks face death by a thousand cuts as startups attack different parts of their businesses from multiple angels. If they don't do something soon it will start to affect the bottom line.

Palychata's scenario of blockchain being applied to stock trading isn't such an outlandish scenario either — US exchange operator Nasdaq is currently experimenting with the blockchain.

That said, Palychata's "redundant" prediction is a worst case scenario. He believes it's more likely that stock broking firms will adopt the blockchain technology to trade among themselves, rather than offer it directly to consumers.

And even if a startup or coder builds a blockchain for trading shares and opens it directly to the public, Palychata thinks the security issues around keeping private keys — the access codes used to get digital assets traded on the blockchain — means current firms could develop a new role as the guardians of these keys.

But the fact that an analyst is using the word "redundant" shows how seriously banks are taking this threat.

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NOW WATCH: Hugh Hefner's son reveals what it was like growing up in the Playboy Mansion

If you were in New York last night, you might have noticed the Empire State Building flashing a bunch of colors on and off. You probably figured it had something to do with the 4th of July.

You're partly right. In fact, the display was synchronized to a live performance more than 1,000 miles away, in Chicago. The surviving members of the Grateful Dead are playing a series of farewell concerts at Soldier Field — the site of their last shows in 1995 before founding guitarist and band leader Jerry Garcia died — and the encore last night was a song called "U.S. Blues."

According to Rolling Stone, the Empire State Building's lighting director Mark Brickman worked with the band to coordinate a light show that went with the band's performance. Video of the light show was displayed to the crowd of Deadheads in Chicago.

If you missed it, you can tune in for a repeat tonight at 9pm ET. You can listen to the song on radio station 104.3.

Here's what it looked like, synced with the original version of the song.

SEE ALSO: Grateful Dead Fans Are Creating Awesome, Intricately Designed Envelopes In Hopes Of Getting Mail Order Tickets For The Band's Farewell Tour

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NOW WATCH: The star-studded trailer for the next season of 'Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee' shows off the best cars yet

"Cloud computing is going to change everything whether you like it or not," Vimal Thomas, vice president of Yamaha of America tells us. "Get in front of it before it starts landing on top of you."

Thomas ought to know. He completed an unprecedented project to move nearly all of the company's 200 computer servers to Amazon's cloud, Amazon Web Services, getting rid of his company's data centers and saving $500,000 a year in the process.

Nearly every company is using public cloud computing services like AWS these days (Microsoft, Google, and IBM also have similar services).

This is a market that will grow 21% year over year to $32 billion in 2015, and account for about one-third of all IT infrastructure spending, according to IDC.

But very few companies are ditching the old way completely for the cloud. Most are simply adding cloud computing to the mix and keeping their own computer servers and software "on-premises" in a data center, when they feel that such tech would be too costly, or perhaps unsafe, to move to the cloud. So they are still buying their own hardware.

Thomas told Business Insider that in late 2013, after analyzing his budgets, he realized that keeping his own computers simply wasn't a good idea.

An end to tedious work

Like many companies, Yamaha was leasing its computer servers. He leased about 60 of them on 30-month cycle. That hardware ran about 200 software servers, using a combination of Windows and Linux operating systems. These in turn ran hundreds of applications, including email, Office apps, financial apps —you name it.

Every month, the lease for one or two of these servers would come due, and a new server sent to replace it. His infrastructure team had to back up the data, then test and install the apps to get the new server running.

It was tedious work and an expensive use of manpower.

"We said, this is not sustainable," Thomas said.

He thought about hiring out for that work, but the bids came it at a laughable $1 million a year just for labor, and didn't include the cost of the new servers.

So he decided to go all-in with the cloud. In November 2013, he approached several cloud computing companies including Amazon and asked for bids.

Amazon, which grew up as an ecommerce retailer, isn't known for its enterprise sales expertise or support (though it is beefing itself up in that area).

So Amazon turned Yamaha's request for a bid over to its partner 2nd Watch, who won the bid and then spent a year helping Yamaha move all of its data, servers and apps to AWS. 2nd Watch also provides Yamaha with ongoing cost management tools.

"I can tell on a daily basis how much infrastructure is costing us," he explains and he and his team can then make sure that they are not overpaying.

A domino effect

In July 2014, all of the company's IT, supporting some 450 employees in the US, was running on Amazon's cloud with three exceptions:

• The corporate accounting app Oracle enterprise resource planning app (ERP)
• The Cisco telephone system
• A bunch of employees' shared files which were set up in personal drives.

He's now in the process of moving those last items to the cloud, too. He just asked for bids from Box, Dropbox, and other file sharing companies and is working on bids for cloud versions of Cisco's telecom services, available from Cisco, AT&T and others.

As for the Oracle ERP system, he's hoping to move that to the cloud, too, maybe next year.

Using AWS caused "a domino effect," he says, which makes him want to use cloud for everything.

Corporate headquarters in Japan noticed. Thomas and his team was already providing some IT services for Yamaha Canada's 150 employees. Corporate has now asked him to take on projects for Yamaha in South American and subsidiaries in North America.

"My initial target was $500,000 in annual savings and we more than met it. That's from not having hardware leases, eliminating our data center presence," he says. "And there's a savings bonus with AWS. Under AWS services, we get [to use] the operating systems so we don’t have to license Windows Servers software."

The other bonus is that he can instantly fire up servers when he needs them and unplug them when he doesn't and the costs for those unused servers "goes away over night."

His team of 22 IT people (with just 6 of them working with the servers that now run on Amazon's cloud) is doing more work and more rewarding work, Thomas says. And spending less.

SEE ALSO: Google has nabbed some huge customers for its most important new business – cloud computing

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NOW WATCH: This artist uses the Fibonacci sequence to create stunning sculptures

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Early Facebook investor and Paypal billionaire Peter Thiel revealed two key pieces of advice he tends to give aspiring entrepreneurs and investors this week at the Atlantic Aspen Ideas Festival. 

They can be distilled into two simple concepts, starting with this tip for investors : Watch out for  buzzwords. 

If there are too many buzzwords in a presentation, that’s always a warning sign … Big data, cloud computing, if you hear those words you need to think fraud and run away as fast as possible.

Thiel told Atlantic Media owner David Bradley that buzzwords are a sign that the company doesn’t have a clear direction, and that it's chasing someone else’s ideas. A good business idea should be able to stand on its own without trendy buzzwords. 

Addressing aspiring entrepreneurs, he advised them to focus on what matters—how to serve their users, not just their own egos. 

I’m nervous about people who say they want to be an entrepreneur. That’s like saying I want to be rich or I want to be famous. You don’t want to be starting a business for the sake of it, but because there is a problem that cannot be solved in existing structures.

It may be tempting to launch a company just to brag about being a rich, successful businessman. Ironically, though, that may be a recipe for failure. Instead, solve a problem and let the operational aspects of the business follow. 

Readers can watch the full talk below: (starts @ 2:27:00). 

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Photo courtesy of Aspen Institute