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Weekly News Digest #5

Weekly News Digest

A week in retrospect…

The global association of mobile operators (GSMA) announced on Wednesday that it is cancelling this year’s edition of the Mobile World Congress (MWC), the world’s largest mobile trade show. The decision was taken after several industry giants like Amazon, Ericsson and Deutsche Telekom pulled out for fear of the newly baptised COVID-19 virus.

The announcement comes as a huge financial blow for the city of Barcelona and for many smaller consumer electronics companies that rely on the show to debut their new devices and make most of the year’s deals.

Interestingly, it’s business as usual for other global trade shows of similar scale being held right now, like Amsterdam’s ISE. Multiple companies that cancelled their attendance to MWC are currently exhibiting their products and solutions at ISE, suggesting fear of the virus is not the only factor at play here.

Good and bad news fo ther UK’s tech sector. First the bad ones.

We learned this week that British tech firms ended 2019 with the worst quarterly results since 2012. The bump in the road seems to have been motivated by the political uncertainty surrounding the country’s geopolitcal future.

Don’t panic, though. The UK’s tech industry is doing great. In fact, it registered the tech world’s biggest salary raises in 2019. Even ahead of San Francisco and New York.

Meantime, in Switzerland…

What’s the easiest way to crack a country’s encrypted communications? Well, of course — to secretly buy the company selling them encryption services in the first place.

At least that’s what the CIA and the West German government did with the Swiss company Crypto AG. In what the CIA itself describes as “the intelligence coup of the century,” the U.S. intercepted other countries’ communications for decades.

The whole thing started with mechanical encryption devices and ended in 2018, when ubiquitous cyber-encryption services brought the Swiss firm to bankruptcy.

Lastly, if you’re working on apps for Windows, here’s a friendly reminder that Microsoft released this week a new dev toolkit for its dual-screen OS, Windows 10X.

Dual and foldable screens are the latest fad. Will they last?

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Press review Tech Magazine

Weekly News Digest #4

Weekly News Digest
Weekly News Digest

Good morning! So… Thursday. Quite the week, right?

The UK is officially no longer part of the EU. The Wuhan coronavirus is spreading almost as quickly as the xenophobia it has sparked. Oh, and Trump finally managed to turn the State of the Union address into a full-blown reality TV show.

We have prepared a whole new batch of resources and interesting reads for you to explore this week. But, first things first. Let’s see what the tech world has been up to.

A week in retrospect…

In case the Iowa caucuses weren’t complicated enough, the app designed to collect and share the vote results for the US Democratic Party went absolutely bonkers. It wasn’t hackers, though.

Apparently, someone was so excited to implement new voting technologies that they went ahead with an untested app developed by the aptly named company Shadow. No training for volunteers either. Because, you know — why. They spent the rest of the week manually counting the results. Oh, blessed be paper backup.

Meanwhile, somewhere over the rainbow…

The Cloud Wars wrapped up this fiscal year’s offensive as the big players announced Q4 earnings.

AWS retains its leadership, with Microsoft on second place and narrowing the gap. In third place, Google Cloud, which released its first official cloud earnings report earlier this week.

The FY2019 revenue table for the top 3 cloud divisions stands as follows:

  1. Amazon — $35 billion (37% more than in 2018)
  2. Microsoft — $16.4 billion (39% yearly increase)
  3. Google — $8.9 billion (53% spike from last year)

Also —IBM recently changed CEOs, promoting its head of cloud to the top position in an effort to catch up with the competition.

Let the 2020 race begin.

Big news for the SAP community this week — The company is extending free ECC support throughout 2027, with optional maintenance until 2030.

Looks like SAP has finally accepted an extension as inevitable if it wants more of its customers to migrate to S/4HANA. The ERP vendor has vowed to support the new iteration until 2040.

Finally, human trials of the first AI-designed drug will soon start in Japan.

Targeted at patients suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), the new compound represents a major technological and medical achievement. While the average drug development takes about 5 years to get to trials, AI did it in just 12 months.

Let’s hope it actually works. That would mean better, faster, and cheaper medicine for all.

Categories
Press review Tech Magazine

Weekly News Digest #1

Weekly News Digest #1
Weekly News Digest #1

A week in retrospect…

Surprise, surprise! It has been another busy week in the world of tech. Elon Musk seems to have put his flamethrowing days behind and is now set on making his Teslas talk to nearby pedestrians. He didn’t go into much detail about what they’ll actually say, though he did confirm they will be able to fart in people’s general direction.

Classic billionaire joke.

On a more serious note — and in what effectively proposes a major shift in how we approach AI — U.S. researchers announced this week that they have successfully created the first biological robot. The Xenobot is made from frog stem cells and powered by evolutionary algorithms. It can also heal itself. Potential applications are certainly sci-fi worthy: micro-plastic cleaning bots, highly targeted drug delivery…

However, the researchers are hoping to use these robots to understand the interaction and communication between cells. After all, the human body as a whole is one of the most developed and effective forms of collective intelligence known to us.

Just imagine what could be achieved by uncovering its secrets and applying them to the advancement of robotics and AI.

RIP Windows 7….

Nothing new here — As of Tuesday, Microsoft is finally discontinuing support for what some consider the company’s best OS to date. Beyond such considerations, the phase-out leaves a good chunk of Windows users vulnerable to security breaches and other nasty hassles. Aware that some business-critical applications only run on Windows 7, Microsoft is offering to continue support for the old OS iteration until 2023. At a cost, of course.

Ironically, this happened the same week we discovered that the NSA alerted Microsoft of a security bug involving CryptoAPI that affects millions of Windows 10 computers.

We’d be curious to hear what you cybersecurity experts think could be the worst potential complications following the Windows 7 service cut. What are your thoughts?

Well, guess who’s not going to be happy with Google’s decision to end third-party cookies by 2022. Here’s a hint: our blue, furry friend above is not alone in this one.

As Google wrestles with Chrome user demands for greater privacy, it risks compromising the advertising-based revenue model that has served as the foundation of its empire. Folks at the Internet giant are already rushing to calm down advertisers while proposing they all work together to build an alternative that meets both privacy and profitability concerns.

What do you think could substitute third-party cookies and increase user privacy at the same time?

Last but not least — New developments coming straight from the front lines of the cloud wars.

Microsoft unveiled new ad tools for retailers at New York’s NRF, one of which Home Depot has already been using for the past year. The result of Microsoft’s acquisition last August of NY-based PromoteIQ, the new Microsoft PromoteIQ will allow retailers to promote products by combining intent-based data with audience insights.

The immediate goal is clear: to help MS customers increase sales at scale. The main goal? To grab some of Amazon’s cloud market share by pushing services to retailers who’d rather not deal with Mr. Bezos and his e-commerce monopoly.