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Category: DevOpsUpdate

DevOpsUpdate

  • Report: Cloud Cost Visibility Is a Major Problem for Organizations

    Report: Cloud Cost Visibility Is a Major Problem for Organizations

    As organizations continue to migrate to the cloud, clearly understanding usage and costs is proving to be a significant challenge.

    Unlike on-premise infrastructure, most cloud providers use a pay-as-you-go model, allowing for a low barrier-to-entry and easy scalability. Unfortunately, that model can also lead to significant challenges accurately predicting how much cloud computing will ultimately cost.

    According to Anodot’s State of Cloud Cost Report, almost 50% of IT executives say it’s proving difficult to control cloud costs, while respondents say that gaining visibility and understanding both usage and costs is a top challenge. Similarly, 88% cite optimization and reduced spending on existing cloud deployments as extremely or very important.

    Interestingly, despite these concerns, 60% of those polled plan to migrate more workloads to the cloud in the coming year.

    Anadot highlights the importance of organizations carefully tracking their cloud usage to better understand their needs and associated costs:

    Unless costs are managed carefully, it’s quite easy to lose track of what’s being used—especially for organizations with large development teams that move quickly and tend to try new things. Misconfigurations, over-provisioning, and forgotten resources that have been provisioned but abandoned are the bane of cost management for DevOps teams. Unfortunately, for many organizations, the surprise costs only show up when the monthly invoice arrives.

    Understanding cloud cost visibility is not a new challenge. In fact, AWS recently took steps to lower customers’ bills following years of complaints and a reputation for surprise bills, artificially high fees, and hidden costs.

    With 60% of organizations planning to increase their cloud deployments, cost visibility is something that will need to be addressed sooner rather than later.

  • GitLab Will Remove Dormant Projects From Free Accounts

    GitLab Will Remove Dormant Projects From Free Accounts

    GitLab is preparing to auto-delete dormant projects from free accounts in what is being billed as a major cost-saving measure.

    GitLab is a leading cloud-based development and code-sharing platform. According to The Register, the company plans to start removing dormant projects from free accounts to save on hosting costs.

    According to the report, the auto-delete option could save the company up to $1 million a year. The Register’s sources indicated GitLab knows the potential minefield deleting projects could turn into and will give users weeks or months to save their work or move to paid accounts. Evidently, a single commit, comment, or issue within the previous 12 months is enough to keep a project “active.”

    Needless to say, the news is already not going over well with those in the software development community.

    “Source code does not take up much disk space,” Geoff Huntley, an open-source advocate, told The Register. “For someone to delete all that code is destruction of the community. They are going to destroy their brand and goodwill.”

    “People host their code there because there is this idea it will be available to the general public to reuse and remix,” he added. “Of course there are no guarantees it will always be hosted there, but the unwritten rules in open source are that you make the code available and you don’t remove it.”

    “We have had maintainers pull code and there has been huge community outrage about it,” he said,

    Only time will tell if GitLab will go through with its plans, but the backlash should certainly give the company much to consider.

  • DevOps Organizations Are Increasingly Turning to Alternate Cloud Providers

    DevOps Organizations Are Increasingly Turning to Alternate Cloud Providers

    A new report on the DevOps industry should be a concern for the top three cloud providers, showing that organizations are increasingly looking for alternate providers.

    AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud dominate the industry, accounting for a 71% share of the market. Similarly, the three companies account for 65% of all cloud spending. Nonetheless, it appears some organizations are looking to support smaller, independent rivals.

    A new report, commissioned by Linode and conducted by Techstrong Research, shows that despite 93% of respondents using one of the Big Three, two-thirds would consider an alternative.

    The largest three hyperscalers (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Compute) are used by 93% of respondents. Yet many DevOps buyers are re-thinking a reflex default to these hyperscalers. Two-thirds of companies surveyed would consider bringing in an “alternative” CSP; almost 22% have already done so. In fact, the combined market share for the top alternative vendors is fourth in the category, just behind Microsoft and Google.

    Even more troubling for the Big Three is the growing interest in alternative providers, as well as the reasons that interest is growing.

    Interest and adoption is highest in small and medium organizations (fewer than 10,000 employees). Main reasons for bringing in a new vendor include reducing reliance on a single provider, improving price performance and ease of use, and better data protection.

    Another growing concern is competition from a company’s cloud service provider (CSP). Each of the Big Three are part of larger companies that offer a wide array of products and services, many of which can compete with the products and services of their cloud customers.

    More than 50% of DevOps professionals and leaders surveyed say their CSP is already a competitor to their B2B or B2C business or is expected to become one. Fear of IP loss and rapid market displacement is also evidenced in respondent’s strong stated desire to work with a trustworthy, capable provider who shares their company values.

    Needless to say, the Big Three hold a commanding position in the market, and it will be a long time before they face a serious challenge. Nonetheless, the report should be a cause for concern and highlights areas where they must improve in order to keep their customers happy.

  • 96% of Third-Party Cloud Container Apps Have Known Vulnerabilities

    96% of Third-Party Cloud Container Apps Have Known Vulnerabilities

    A whopping 96% of third-party cloud container apps have known vulnerabilities, highlighting ongoing cloud security challenges.

    Cloud computing is often touted as more secure than traditional options. Unfortunately, this is only true if all parties involved make security a prime objective.

    According to Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 team, some 96% of third-party container apps have known vulnerabilities. In addition, 63% of third-party code templates contain insecure configurations.

    The news is especially concerning given the rise of supply chain attacks. Hackers are increasingly targeting widely used, third-party software, services, containers and plugins. Successfully compromising a single vendor who’s product is used by thousands of customers can have a far greater impact than compromising a single target.

    Unit 42 highlights the danger of supply chain cloud attacks:

    In most supply chain attacks, an attacker compromises a vendor and inserts malicious code in software used by customers. Cloud infrastructure can fall prey to a similar approach in which unvetted third-party code could introduce security flaws and give attackers access to sensitive data in the cloud environment. Additionally, unless organizations verify sources, third-party code can come from anyone, including an Advanced Persistent Threat (APT).

    Organizations that want to stay secure must start making DevOps security a priority:

    Teams continue to neglect DevOps security, due in part to lack of attention to supply chain threats. Cloud native applications have a long chain of dependencies, and those dependencies have dependences of their own. DevOps and security teams need to gain visibility into the bill of materials in every cloud workload in order to evaluate risk at every stage of the dependency chain and establish guardrails.

  • Microsoft Drops Latest Windows 11 Build for Dev and Beta Insiders

    Microsoft Drops Latest Windows 11 Build for Dev and Beta Insiders

    Windows 11 is set to be one of the most anticipated software releases of the next few months. Penciled in for a 2021 launch, development is well underway, and Windows Insiders have been trialing the latest features since the new addition was announced.

    Some were taken by surprise at the announcement of a new iteration of Windows. Microsoft claimed back in 2015 that Windows 10 would be the last revision of the operating system. At the time, the plan was to release regular updates that would keep the software secure, functional, and up to date as computing evolved.

    Plans clearly changed, and incremental updates were clearly insufficient to keep Windows at the forefront of residential and commercial computer use. There’s also the significant importance of Windows to the company’s bottom line. More than 16% of Microsoft’s revenue comes from Windows, and free updates would never go down well with the finance department.

    Considering that Microsoft is also heavily involved with gaming through its Xbox consoles and corporate social networking following the acquisition of LinkedIn, the fact that Windows exceeds both revenues combined meant that a new version of the flagship operating system was all but inevitable.

    New Windows releases rarely pass without controversy. Outside of specific releases like Windows Vista, most complaints stem from familiarity. More so than any other piece of software, people see and interact with their operating systems every day. When something isn’t where they’re used to, the obvious reaction is one of complaint.

    Finances aside, the decision to create Windows 11 cannot have been an easy one. With an employee on record saying that a new release would never happen, a follow-up to Windows 10 would represent a U-turn at best.

    Fortunately, Microsoft appears intent on making Windows 11 fresh and feature-packed. Much more than an incremental release, this seems to be a genuine effort to upgrade what is now a six-year-old operating system into something genuinely new.

    The Highlights

    From what we’ve seen so far, the computing giant is focused on remote working and cross-platform support. During the pandemic, Microsoft Teams went from an unused inclusion in Office packages to a critical meeting tool for teams of all sizes. The meeting and collaboration tool won’t just receive a facelift with the launch of Windows 11. It will become an integral part of the operating system, with direct and easy access from the taskbar itself.

    The failed efforts at creating Windows Phones – Microsoft sold off its Nokia subsidiary shortly after Windows 10’s release – has pushed Microsoft supporters towards Android. Just as most new Xbox releases can be played on Windows PCs as things stand today, Windows 11 is set to boast full support for Android apps.

    The eternal battles between Windows and macOS continue, with some observers claiming that the new look of Windows 11 brings it more closely in line with Apple’s operating system. However, given that the company is renowned for clean design and superior functionality, that could prove a wise decision.

    How Much Will Windows 11 Cost?

    Long-time Windows users will remember the days of activating products online and desperately scrambling around for product keys when using a new PC. Today, most Microsoft users will already have a Windows 10 key attached to their Microsoft accounts. So switching to different hardware is as simple as logging into that account, at which point Windows is fully active and ready to use.

    Microsoft famously encouraged as many people as possible to make a move to Windows 10. As a result, the upgrade to the tenth iteration was completely free outside of particularly old versions or those that had never used Windows before.

    The good news is that Windows 11 looks set to follow a similar pattern. As a result, Windows 10 owners will be entitled to a free upgrade to the next iteration.

    So what does that mean to Microsoft’s Windows revenue?

    The new upgrade appears to follow a freemium model. The ever-divisive Microsoft Store will take pride of place in the latest release. It’s well known that Apple makes more from the App Store than it does from the hardware that relies on it. Microsoft seemingly wants to do something similar.

    The overhauled Microsoft Store won’t be exclusive to Windows 11 – those that opt against upgrading will find the same experience on Windows 10. Nevertheless, the new version is designed for incredible speed, a more comprehensive selection of apps, and improved usability.

    This won’t be the first time Microsoft has sought to position itself as a one-stop-shop for all the software anyone could ever need. However, with close Xbox integration, a suite of essential products such as Office, and a slew of acquisitions, the new store stands a better chance of success than anything that has come before.

    The free upgrade means that consumer appetite is set to be exceptionally high. Windows 10, with a similar upgrade path, captured 75 million users within four weeks of launch.

    There’s no reason why Windows 11 cannot become the de facto standard for consumer PCs. However, businesses are a different story, as they often are, with internal testing and reliance on older infrastructure often delaying significant software upgrades.

    Most consumers will hope for another Windows 10 success story with its successor rather than a Windows Me abomination – widely regarded as the worst Windows release of all time. Reception among Insiders has been positive so far, and so there are plenty of reasons to be excited about what Microsoft has in store later this year.

  • Prosus Buying Stack Overflow for $1.8 Billion

    Prosus Buying Stack Overflow for $1.8 Billion

    Prosus has announced it is buying Stack Overflow for $1.8 billion, as it increases its focus on the online learning market.

    Prosus is a consumer internet group that has investments in the online classifieds, education technology, food delivery and payments and fintech markets. The company is the largest shareholder of Tencent Holdings, the Chinese company behind some of the biggest games, including Fortnite, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, Call of Duty: Mobile and Ring of Elysium.

    Prosus appears to be making a major move in the online education market with the acquisition of Stack Overflow. Stack Overflow is one of the top 50 websites in the world, with an extremely active user base. In fact, 85% of the site’s community visits every week to access the 52+ million questions and answers, most about programming and development.

    “We are delighted to be welcoming Stack Overflow to the Prosus family as we increasingly focus on the future of workplace learning,” Larry Illg, CEO of EdTech at Prosus, said. “Learning of any kind typically begins with a question and their platform is critically important for global developers when they have questions about their work. There is an opportunity to connect more deeply with their community through our other education platforms to further fulfill their learning needs.

    “With enduring skills shortages and ever-evolving needs within technology organizations, technology training has emerged as the largest and fastest growing segment of corporate learning and development,” Illg continued. “As an operator of businesses across 90+ countries, we understand the needs of technologists and developers, particularly in high-growth markets. In addition to further scaling its community in the markets we know well, we want to help Stack Overflow Teams to expand within enterprises to address an underserved opportunity to transform their technology learning and collaboration.”

    “We are excited to be joining the Prosus family, which catapults us into a new phase of growth and allows us to expand and accelerate Stack Overflow’s impact around the world,” Stack Overflow’s CEO, Prashanth Chandrasekar, said. “Prosus’s expertise growing and nurturing communities, especially in a global context, will make our public platform even more invaluable in helping developers and technologists learn and grow. Given Prosus’s focus on the future of the workplace, their partnership will allow our market leading SaaS collaboration product, Stack Overflow for Teams, to reach thousands more global enterprises, allowing them to accelerate product innovation and increase productivity by unlocking institutional knowledge.”

    The deal is expected to close in Q3 2021.

  • Goldman Sachs: Microsoft Could Climb 38%

    Goldman Sachs: Microsoft Could Climb 38%

    Goldman Sachs has added Microsoft to its “Conviction List,” touting “sustained double-digit” revenue growth.

    Microsoft is currently the second-place cloud company, behind AWS. Nonetheless, the company is seen as being in a particularly strong position, thanks to its legacy business and potential to help its clients move to the cloud.

    According to Business Insider, Goldman Sachs is now calling for a $315 price target on Microsoft’s stock, a 38% increase over Monday’s close. Goldman highlighted the company’s cloud potential, saying Microsoft is “well-positioned to capitalize on a number of long-term secular trends, including public cloud and SaaS adoption, digital transformation, AI/ML, BI/analytics, and DevOps (amongst others).”

    Microsoft has been one of the biggest winners during the pandemic, with a majority of polled companies planning on increasing their Azure and Microsoft SaaS spending. In fact, a higher percentage of respondents planned on increasing their spending on Microsoft, as opposed to those planning on increasing their AWS spending.

    Wedbush recently raised their own target from $260 to $270, while acknowledging a bull-case possibility of $300 a share. It appears Goldman Sachs is a even more bullish with their $315 target.

  • COVID Has Really Impacted Aerospace… and the Air Force

    COVID Has Really Impacted Aerospace… and the Air Force

    “COVID has really impacted the aerospace industry in this nation and nations around the world disproportionately to other industries… and the Air Force has not been exempt from these impacts,” says former Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, Dr. Will Roper:

    COVID Has Really Impacted Aerospace… and the Air Force

    COVID has really impacted the aerospace industry in this nation and nations around the world disproportionately to other industries. The Air Force has not been exempt from these impacts. We have had to go into a wartime posture and engage with exceptional authorities and funding to keep the aerospace industry, which allows us to go to war, whole.

    But aside from the crisis response that we’ve all been in it’s forced us to do some serious reflection about how we engage with production and supply chains going forward. How does the Air Force need to change the way it views its future self so that we’re not just more ready for a crisis when it occurs but we’re actually designing better systems, doing better engineering, and using technology more effectively? Systems that we need to go to war are going to be hidden behind doors where their vulnerabilities are never going to be exposed because of secrecy.

    Secrecy Hinders Our Ability To Digitally Go To War

    We’re moving into an era where we’re leveraging commercial technology more frequently. Because of that, we can no longer hope that secrecy, keeping our systems classified, will be the sole means for us to be secure. We need to find a new paradigm where openness is also part of our security posture. Now we’re not going to be able to copy commercial industry one for one. Our systems in many cases don’t have a commercial analog. We can’t quickly replace them.

    We’re not in a competition where spirals occur in years. Many of our aerospace breakthroughs, especially those in technologies like stealth, take time to do. Secrecy is going to continue to be part of the equation. But secrecy can’t be the catch-all approach to how we ensure systems are able to digitally go to war and be ready to fight in a cyber environment against an adversary as capable as we are.

    Containerization Solves The Secrecy Problem

    The software development capabilities that technologies like Kubernetes or containerization and Istio bring in to the Air Force. It’s amazing that companies like Google that have now transitioned this to an open-source driven initiative have solved a lot of what we would have to solve as a military. How do you write code in a development environment, in that tech stack that may also represent the physical aspects of your system, but it certainly represents the software components?

    How do you go from your development environment out to the edge securely and know your code will run the same way. Containerization solves that problem for us. The military is behind and adopting it. It’s not old but this technology is moving through industry as fast as Linux did. If we don’t get off the dime we will be left behind. Keep pushing the Air Force and Space Force on this. Do not let us get comfortable.

    COVID Has Really Impacted Aerospace… and the Air Force
  • French Military Clears Hurdle to Bionic Troops

    French Military Clears Hurdle to Bionic Troops

    The French military has been granted permission to develop augmented troops by an ethics committee tasked with evaluating the issue.

    Bionic humans, augmented with technology, have been a major feature of science fiction for decades. The Six Million Dollar Man was a popular TV show about a USAF Colonel given bionic limbs, implants and abilities following a test flight crash.

    While many prosthetics focus on restoring lost functionality, technology is reaching the point where such prosthetics may go beyond restoration, squarely into the realm of improvement. High-tech prosthetics may be able to enhance a soldier’s strength, cognition, speed and more, not to mention offer built-in connectivity and other electronic abilities. Augments could even help a soldier deal with pain from injuries, or resist enhanced interrogation.

    According to CNN, French armed forces minister Florence Parly ruled out any “invasive” augmentations. The ethics committee also ruled out any modifications that inhibit a soldier’s ability to control their own strength, or anything that desensitizes their “humanity.”

    Much of France’s approach seems geared more toward keeping pace with potential threats than wholesale adoption.

    “But we have to be clear, not everyone has the same scruples as us and we have to prepare ourselves for such a future,” Parly said in a press release.

  • Microsoft Blames Security For Lack of Thunderbolt, Removable RAM on Surface Devices

    Microsoft Blames Security For Lack of Thunderbolt, Removable RAM on Surface Devices

    Microsoft has blamed an unlikely target for Surface devices not having Thunderbolt ports or removable RAM: security.

    According to WalkingCat on Twitter, a Surface engineering webinar says that security is the main reason for both features being missing from Surface tablets and laptops.

    The engineer says that removable RAM poses a threat since an individual could freeze it with liquid nitrogen, remove it and then put it in a memory reader and access all the contents that were stored in memory. Similarly, because Thunderbolt is “a direct memory access port,” Microsoft does not include it over concerns someone could use a memory stick plugged into the port to gain direct access to the device’s memory, bypassing the OS and security.

    The Verge was able to verify the authenticity of the leaked presentation, as well as the fact that the person narrating it is a 10+ year Microsoft veteran. Even so, as The Verge point out, it’s still surprising to hear Microsoft blaming security as the reason for not including Thunderbolt, especially since virtually every other major manufacturer deems it safe enough to include in their business-oriented machines.

    A long-standing rule of computer security is that once physical access has been achieved, all bets are off. Most computer security focuses on keeping bad actors from gaining remote access. In contrast, once a device physically falls into a bad actor’s hands, aside from full-disk encryption, there’s virtually nothing to prevent them from eventually gaining access to what’s on the disk. As a result, Microsoft’s reason seems like a pointless, and possibly self-serving, justification.

  • GitHub Poaches Leading DevOps Researcher From Google Cloud

    GitHub Poaches Leading DevOps Researcher From Google Cloud

    In the ongoing battle between Microsoft and Google, the former’s GitHub has hired Dr. Nicole Forsgren away from Google Cloud.

    Forsgren made the announcement on her website, saying she would be GitHub’s new VP of Research & Strategy. Forsgren was previously co-founder and CEO of DORA before it was acquired by Google. She is also the writer of the award-winning book Accelerate. Now Forsgren is taking her expertise in DevOps to GitHub.

    “Looking to the future, there are more and different questions I want to ask, and this move is the perfect opportunity for that,” writes Forsgren. “At GitHub, I will expand and continue investigating developer happiness and productivity while also helping the industry get better, and there’s no better place to ask these questions because GitHub is truly at the heart of software development for so many communities. Here, I can bring the research closer to the tools that we use and build on the foundation of knowledge that exists while asking different questions, from different angles, and surfacing different insights. I am excited to continue talking with and learning from developers, testers, IT ops, infosec, and executives to understand their work; working with tools teams across the ecosystem to understand their challenges and what they see so we can help make things better; nerding out with researchers and makers across the industry and academia so we can partner to find interesting questions (and ways to ask and frame and think about those questions), supporting each other and collaborating on solutions.”

    Bringing Forsgren onboard is a big win for Microsoft and GitHub. The talent, experience and expertise she brings will likely result in significant improvements to the developer community.

  • Apple Overhauling iOS Development Following iOS 13 Bugs

    Apple Overhauling iOS Development Following iOS 13 Bugs

    According to Bloomberg, Apple, Inc. is changing how it develops iOS in the wake of what has been a buggy iOS 13 rollout.

    iOS 13, as well as iPadOS 13, includes a plethora of new features, such as Dark Mode, improved Photos and Camera, increased privacy, improved Siri, QuickPath keyboard and much more. On the iPad, iPadOS includes improved multi-tasking, external storage support and goes a long way toward making the iPad a full laptop replacement.

    Along with the new features, however, as come a far greater number of bugs. Apple has had to release a quick succession of patches and updates to address security flaws, performance issues, connectivity problems and missing features. Bloomberg’s report indicates the iOS 13 testing program was a mess, leading to the buggy release. Some teams would add features on a daily basis without properly testing them, while others would update weekly. The end result was test builds that testers could not even use in some cases—due to the number of broken features—undermining the entire purpose of a test program.

    The new testing guidelines call for buggy or incomplete features to be disabled in test builds moving forward, with testers having the ability to manually enable them if they so desire. This will ensure testers are able to properly evaluate usable new features, rather than being hampered by unfinished ones.

    This change should be a welcome one to developers, testers and users alike. If Apple is able to release a solid, relatively bug-free iOS 14 as a result of the changes, it should go a long way toward regaining some of the trust that iOS 13 eroded.

  • Facebook Plans to Enter Home Device Market With ‘Portal’

    Facebook Plans to Enter Home Device Market With ‘Portal’

    Facebook may have pulled the plug on its digital assistant plan, but that does not mean it’s backing out entirely from the lucrative smart device market. In fact, there are indications that the social media giant could be making a big splash this year by launching a home-based, voice-enabled device—a product that could place it squarely against rivals Amazon, Apple, and Google.

    Facebook is reportedly preparing its attack on the home electronics front by launching a home video chat device later this year. Reports say that the upcoming gadget will be named Portal, a product that is similar to Amazon’s Echo Show. If reports are correct, this new device will also be competing against similar home-based devices from Google and Apple.

    Facebook will launch the product by May of 2018, according to online news site Cheddar. The launch date is slated to coincide with the company’s developer conference.

    Incidentally, Facebook announced early this week that it is pulling out from the digital assistant market. The company will be shutting down M, it’s AI-powered concierge service that was previously positioned as a competitor to Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa.

    Despite abandoning the digital assistant niche, Facebook is not yet giving up on the home-based smart electronics segment. To help it launch the upcoming Portal, the company is betting on its partnerships with Spotify and Netflix for content. Facebook has likewise inked a music licensing agreement with both Sony/ATV and Universal Music Group.

    In addition, Facebook is marketing the upcoming product a little bit differently than existing gadgets. Portal’s thrust will be on the communication and video calls side of things. This differentiates it from the voice-assisted controls and AI capability of devices like Echo, Alexa or Siri.

    While it may not be Facebook’s first venture into hardware, there are doubts that the company has what it takes to successfully launch the upcoming gadget. Back in 2013, it launched its first hardware—HTC First aka as the Facebook phone—but it was a failure in the market.

    There are also concerns that the rumored Portal may not be competitively priced. Facebook plans to price the gadget at $499, which is too hefty when compared to similar products such as the Echo Show, which is currently selling for only $229.99.

    At the moment, Facebook declined to comment on the issue.

    [Featured image via YouTube]

  • Microsoft Develops New Chip for Hololens 2; Promises No Lag, Real-Time Processing

    Microsoft Develops New Chip for Hololens 2; Promises No Lag, Real-Time Processing

    Microsoft revealed that its next-generation Hololens will pack quite a punch. Scheduled for a 2019 release, the new gadget will arrive with an all-new, more powerful artificial intelligence (AI) chip.

    Augmented reality (AR) technology has been steadily gaining ground in recent years. Among its most recent successes is in the gaming industry, where Niantic Lab’s AR mobile game Pokemon Go became a huge success, dominating the gaming charts in 2016.

    However, Microsoft is betting that, aside from gaming, the AR technology will have more practical applications in the real world. Thus, the software giant introduced the Hololens, a pair of AR smart glasses that can be programmed to assist users in a variety of tasks such as guiding tourists who are unfamiliar with a city, fixing engines, and even surgical operations using visualization tools.


    More Powerful Processor

    At the heart of the Hololens 2 is a new AI chip that will power the new device. According to Time, the coprocessor’s main task is to run deep neural networks, a process that parallels how the actual human brain works. The more powerful processor enables the new device to handle large amounts of data that one can expect to come from an ever-changing world at lightning fast speeds.

    No Lag Time

    Users of this new device will benefit greatly from its upgraded AI chip. The dedicated processor will ensure that the upcoming gadget will process data in real time without any lag, a necessary quality especially in systems that require split-second decisions like driving.

    Self-Contained System

    According to ARN, another advantage is that with the new AI chip in place, the Hololens 2 can be self-contained. Simply put, since the device has its own CPU, it is basically untethered and will not have to depend on a PC or a cloud service to function.

    This advantage is highlighted by Tirias Research’s Jim McGregor in a Seattle Times report. “For an autonomous car, you can’t afford the time to send it back to the cloud to make the decisions to avoid the crash, to avoid hitting a person.”

    [Featured Image by Microsoft]

  • How Google Measures Cross-Device Ad Conversions

    How Google Measures Cross-Device Ad Conversions

    Google recently conducted a live video hangout discussing cross-device measurement, which is extremely important to advertisers to properly attribute which ads are leading to sales. “With the proliferation of mobile devices we all know that user behavior has changed quite significantly over the past few years,” said Meghan Lee, Agency Development Manager for Google AdWords. “It’s very natural for marketers to start to think of new methods and new ways to measure mobile more accurately. The challenge is that measuring mobile really isn’t easy with consumers constant connectivity via mobile creating many new touch points.”

    “When we look at how people traditionally measured advertising, if you go back and kind of look at other mediums like the billboard, print, TV, radio, it was always difficult to measure the exact return on ad spend,” commented Matt, who didn’t provide his last name, but who is a Product Specialist at Google that works with Meghan Lee. “People invested a lot of money on these platforms but they had to have good faith that it actually led to bottom line conversions.”

    Screen Shot 2016-07-10 at 6.46.56 PM

    “I used to work in the TV space and although we have these measurement tools such as Neilsen ratings, it really is very difficult to pinpoint which ad led to a sale,” Lee said.

    Screen Shot 2016-07-10 at 7.02.41 PM

    “In 2000 Adwords was born, and the whole point is that digital marketing completely revolutionized the way we think about measurement,” Matt said. “We have this kind of spectrum of accuracy and it was the first time that we could accurately measure the return on investment right from a click to an actual conversion and part of the reason for it being so revolutionary at the time was because it was a one device world. Because cookies lined up across desktop we were able to easily match the research and discovery with that final purchase.”

    Screen Shot 2016-07-10 at 6.58.17 PM

    “Over 90% of people use multiple devices sequentially to accomplish a task,” says Lee. “Adwords advertisers are used to a very simple and clear way of measurement and they have that same expectation on mobile.”

    “Mobile has been fracturing the consumer journey and it has made things more difficult to measure, but the hard part is the growing pains of having to rethink how we measure things more accurately,” said Matt. “Part of the reason it is difficult is because if we do the same comparison to what we looked at before cookies don’t line up right across mobile and desktop and so it has become more difficult to match the research and discovery with that final purchase. Although it has made things more complicated and it’s important to admit that, we do offer a solution that when pieced together can give you a holistic view of your mobile performance.”

    The two solutions that Matt is referring to are “cross-device conversions” and “attribution modeling with cross-device.”

    Screen Shot 2016-07-10 at 7.16.42 PM

    Here’s how a Google White Paper (Download PDF) describes calculating cross-device conversions:

    The consumer journey has become more complex, spanning multiple devices, channels, and media types. Because 90% of people start an activity on one device and finish it on another, it’s especially important to capture how marketing influences actions across phones, tablets, and desktops.

    Cross-device conversions start as a click on an ad from one device and end as a conversion on another device (or in a different web browser on the same device). In order to measure cross-device conversion statistics, we use aggregated and anonymous data from users who have previously signed into Google services.

    We start by looking at a marketer’s ad clicks that led to cross-device conversions from users who have previously signed into Google services. Next, we expand the model to show how many cross-device conversions a marketer would report if all of their AdWords clicks and conversions came from previously signed-in users. We can do this by customizing our cross-device calculation model based on several factors unique to each marketer to optimize the accuracy of the model for each campaign and ad group. Finally, we only surface the reporting if we are 95% confindent that it reflects the real cross-device user behavior.

    Watch the full Google Hangout video on cross-device conversions below:

  • Etsy Announces Site-Building Tool ‘Pattern,’ Redesigned Landing Pages For Shops

    Etsy Announces Site-Building Tool ‘Pattern,’ Redesigned Landing Pages For Shops

    Etsy made two major announcements on Tuesday aimed at improving the selling experience. These are a new paid site-building tool called Pattern and a new redesigned landing page for Etsy shops called Shop Home.

    Pattern appears to be Etsy’s answer to ecommerce shop platforms like Shopify and site-building services like Squarespace. The main differentiator is that it’s all powered by Etsy and is integrated with the Etsy features sellers are familiar with.

    Pattern shops leverage the seller’s existing Etsy shop and the work they’ve already put into it on their own custom website on their own domain. It includes all shop listings and content, syncs orders and inventory between sites, and provides analytics integrated with Etsy shop stats. It also uses the same checkout and shipping tools sellers are already using.

    “The setup is quick and easy—for most shops, it will take only a few minutes—and offers five thoughtfully designed themes that sellers can choose from to personalize their sites,” explains Etsy’s Mike Grishaver. “Sellers can choose from themes that highlight their listings or ones that more prominently feature their brand assets, and they can customize each with shop logos and brand colors. Sellers with Direct Checkout enabled can try Pattern for free with a 30-day trial, after which Pattern is only $15/month.”

    “We believe Pattern will deliver a special shopping experience as well—a high-quality, modern and professional-looking ecommerce site with branding unique to that shop,” he says. “Pattern sites feature responsive webpages so they look great at any size, on any device. And, with co-branded Etsy checkout, buyers will be reassured that their purchase is secure and trustworthy.”

    The Shop Home landing pages are more customizable than the previous version. They’re mobile-friendly and give more sellers more creative control according to the company. They allow sellers to highlight their brands within the Etsy Marketplace.

    The design includes a prominent cover photo and the ability to rearrange listings in the desired order. Here’s the before and after:

    This is rolling out to all sellers over the coming week.

    Images via Etsy

  • Bobbi Kristina Brown: Here’s What’s In Her Autopsy

    Bobbi Kristina Brown: Here’s What’s In Her Autopsy

    More than a year after the death of Bobbi Kristina Brown, a judge finally allowed the medical examiner to release her autopsy results the public.

    According to the findings gathered by the Fulton County Medical Examiner’s Office in Georgia, several substances were found in Bobbi Kristina’s system, including alcohol, marijuana, morphine, prescription sedatives, anxiety medication, and even a cocaine by-product.

    The ME is still investigating whether the presence on morphine in Bobbi Kristina’s system was a sign of heroin use. Heroin is either metabolized into morphine or excreted in the person’s urine.

    The death of Bobbi Kristina Brown has been compared to that of her famous mother, Whitney Houston due to the similar nature of their deaths. Like Whitney, Bobbi Kristina was also found unconscious in a bathtub, although she made it alive to the hospital as opposed to her mother who was pronounced dead after unsuccessful resuscitation attempts by paramedics.

    Autopsy reports of both mother and daughter reveal similar substances in their systems as well. The 22-year-old daughter of Whitney and Bobby Brown reportedly died of “hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy, delayed effects” and “immersion of face in water complicating mixed drug intoxication.”

    Just hours after his late daughter’s autopsy report was released, Bobby Brown canceled his appearance at the Charleston Jam Fest in North Charleston, South Carolina. He was set to perform with other R&B greats such as Keith Sweat, Jagged Edge, and 112, but pulled out due to an “illness.” The release of Bobbi Kristina’s cause of death auspiciously fell on March 4th – or what would have been her 23rd birthday.

    Aside from drugs and alcohol found in her system, the ME also indicated signs of acute injury on the body of Bobbi Kristina Brown. The report stated that there were depressions in her skull as well as bruises called ecchymosis found on her arms and thighs. They also noted dozens of “well-healed scars the head and neck, torso, and extremities.”

  • Chloe Goins: Model Drops Civil Lawsuit Against Bill Cosby

    Chloe Goins: Model Drops Civil Lawsuit Against Bill Cosby

    Chloe Goins, a model who filed a civil lawsuit against Bill Cosby in October, suddenly dropped the suit without explanation on Tuesday.

    ABC News reports Chloe Goins alleged in the lawsuit that back in 2008, she was invited to the Playboy mansion by Bill Cosby. While there he allegedly gave her a drink that soon made her dizzy before taking her into one of the mansion’s bedrooms. Goins passed out, and when she awoke she was naked. Bill Cosby was allegedly biting her toes.

    Bill Cosby previously denied Chloe Goins’ allegations via his attorneys, claiming he wasn’t at the Playboy mansion on the date the alleged event took place. As he has with the lawsuits filed against him by a bevy of other women, he also denied anything sexual took place.

    Both police investigators and prosecutors looked into Chloe Goins’ allegations against Bill Cosby because they may have taken place within the California statute of limitations. No charges were ever filed, however, as prosecutors said they were unable to corroborate her story.

    ABC News has reached out to lawyers for both Bill Cosby and Chloe Goins for a comment on this latest development, but neither party has replied.

    What do you suppose is behind Chloe Goins dropping her civil lawsuit against Bill Cosby?

  • Adobe Drops the ‘Flash’ From Flash Professional CC (At Least in Name)

    Adobe Drops the ‘Flash’ From Flash Professional CC (At Least in Name)

    Adobe announced that it has shipped its latest Creative Cloud desktop updates and announced some new developments across its portfolio of tools and technologies.

    Most notably, Adobe is reanaming Flash Professional CC to Adobe Animate CC to “more accurately reflect the content-formats produced by this tool.”

    Explaining the move on the Adobe Flash Professional Team Blog, Rich Lee writes:

    For nearly two decades, Flash Professional has been the standard for producing rich animations on the web. Because of the emergence of HTML5 and demand for animations that leverage web standards, we completely rewrote the tool over the past few years to incorporate native HTML5 Canvas and WebGL support. To more accurately represent its position as the premier animation tool for the web and beyond, Flash Professional will be renamed Adobe Animate CC, starting with the next release in early 2016.

    Today, over a third of all content created in Flash Professional today uses HTML5, reaching over one billion devices worldwide. It has also been recognized as an HTML5 ad solution that complies with the latest Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) standards, and is widely used in the cartoon industry by powerhouse studios like Nickelodeon and Titmouse Inc.

    He notes that Animate CC will continue to support Flash (SWF) and AIR formats as “first-class citizens”. `

    “This has to do with Adobe’s successful pivot in the capability of its tools to support HTML5,” IDC software development research program director Al Hilwa tells WebProNews in an email. “The renaming of Adobe’s animation tools reflect that it now emits HTML5 and is widely used for this purpose and so the new name reflects this important change in the capability and usage patterns seen by its users. With respect to the other tools, it is good to see that some of the important features have found homes in Dreamweaver and other Adobe apps.”

    “With respect to the new wave of updates, I think Adobe is living up to its Creative Cloud promise of more regular feature enhancements and deliveries compared with a box program,” Hilwa adds. “They remain a successful case study of the transformation to cloud delivery for desktop software.”

    Adobe also introduced new desktop app features including precise Dehaze in Lightroom CC, expanded support for UltraHD in Premiere Pro, a new Shaper tool in Illustrator, and the ability to create realistic 3D models in Adobe Fuse CC (preview) and easily import and work on them in Photoshop CC.

    There is also news we have some news around the future of Adobe Edge Tools & Services, and Adobe is working on a new HTML5 video player for desktop browsers. More on all of this here.

    Image via Adobe (YouTube)

  • LinkedIn Develops New Email And Notifications Platform

    LinkedIn Develops New Email And Notifications Platform

    LinkedIn announced that it has been working on a new email and notifications platform called Air Traffic Controller aimed at making its experience more enjoyable (or at least less annoying) to users.

    Back in July, LinkedIn announced that it was starting to make changes to how it sends users emails so that they would be less frequent and more relevant. They began consolidating connection invitations and group updates, among other things, and claimed to have reduced the amount of email it was sending by 40%.

    LinkedIn is now saying that it has reduced sending by 50% and complaints by 65%.

    Air Traffic Controller is described as a single platform for all communication to LinkedIn members, including email, mobile, and SMS. It uses learning algorithms that take into account member interactions when determining frequency of communication.

    “In short, there should be an immediate improvement to both the quantity and quality of communications you receive from LinkedIn,” says Erica Lockheimer, director of engineering growth at LinkedIn. “Imagine seeing only the messages you want based on how you’re interacting with LinkedIn. This is what we’re striving for.”

    “Our first priority is to determine the right balance of mobile notifications and emails,” she continues. “ATC will help us understand the best time for you to hear from us and which channel you prefer; be it email, push notification or SMS, as well as determining the right amount of messages we send you. We are doing this by paying close attention to your communication-setting preferences and by building intelligence around how you interact with LinkedIn. For example, in the past, we sent an email for every connection invite you received. Now, if you receive a handful of connection invites in a short period of time, our platform will automatically roll that up into a single email.”

    The platform helps LinkedIn address volume, frequency, and quality, Lockheimer says, adding that the company is getting smarter about curating its communication with members. It also helps add a new level of personalization that should increase relevancy of messages.

    LinkedIn settled a lawsuit last month over “add me” emails. These were tied to the “Add Connections” feature, which allowed it to access users’ email contacts and send them requests to connect on LinkedIn. Users had to give permission for that, however. The suit was regarding follow-up emails, which the plaintiffs deemed unauthorized. LinkedIn did not admit any wrongdoing, but chose to settle for $13 million to focus on improving member experience.

    LinkedIn announced in its earnings call a couple weeks ago that it has surpassed 400 million members.

    Image via LinkedIn

  • Britney Spears Drops $7.4M on 21-acre Estate

    Britney Spears signed on for two more years in Las Vegas last month, extending her residency at Planet Hollywood through 2017. And with a contract that’s around $475,000 a show, Spears is definitely raking it in.

    Now, it looks like Britney Spears has decided to drop some of that Vegas cash on a brand new home. The Los Angeles Times reports that Spears has purchased a 12,464-square-foot Italian villa in Thousand Oaks.

    The 21-acre lot includes “three-green golf course with sand traps, a lighted tennis court, an infinity pool, a spa and an orchard.”

    Not too shabby.

    So, what did Spears pay for such a place? According to reports she dropped $7.4 million on the estate.

    Variety has some more details on the new digs, which are rather impressive.

    “A marble-floored foyer steps down to a hotel lobby-scaled “great room” with wall-to-wall carpeting, grandiose 35-foot high ceiling, and a gargantuan fireplace flanked by built-in media cabinets. The elevator-equipped mansion’s additional public spaces include baronial formal living and dining rooms — the former with a double stacked limestone mantelpiece that extends nearly to the ceiling, and an oak-paneled library with built-in bookshelves, fireplace, and fancy-pants Parquet de Versailles flooring.”

    The property also boasts a 3,500-bottle temperature-controlled wine cellar. It was originally developed by Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Willis.

    Britney Spears’ latest venture, other than her Las Vegas show, is a guest role on CW’s hit show Jane the Virgin. Star Gina Rodriguez recently praised Spears’ comedy chops, saying she’s “very, very good.”

    Had way too much fun with the amazing @JaimeCamil and everyone on set at @CWJaneTheVirgin

    A photo posted by Britney Spears (@britneyspears) on