Facebook is suing the makers of four Chrome extensions, claiming the extensions are used to spy on users.
Facebook, Inc. and Facebook Ireland filed a lawsuit againts two people behind the Portuguese business “Oink and Stuff.” Facebook alleges that the individuals have created four Chrome extensions that scrape information from a user’s Facebook profile, as well as from the information stored in their browser unrelated to Facebook. To make matters worse, the extensions’ privacy policy specifically claims the software doesn’t collect any personal information.
The extensions in question are Web for Instagram plus DM, Blue Messenger, Emoji keyboard and Green Messenger. Jessica Romero, Director of Platform Enforcement and Litigation, described the information being scraped:
When people installed these extensions on their browsers, they were installing concealed code designed to scrape their information from the Facebook website, but also information from the users’ browsers unrelated to Facebook — all without their knowledge. If the user visited the Facebook website, the browser extensions were programmed to scrape their name, user ID, gender, relationship status, age group and other information related to their account. The defendants did not compromise Facebook’s security systems. Instead, they used the extensions on the users’ devices to collect information.
Facebook does not appear to be seeking any monetary damages, but is instead looking for an injunction that will force the defendants to delete all the Facebook data they have collected.
For a company that has a reputation for being on the wrong side of privacy issues, it’s a nice change to see Facebook on the right side of this one. On the flip side, it should be a major concern to users that Google’s own Chrome Web Store is insecure enough that Facebook felt it necessary to sue a Chrome extension maker to resolve the issue.
Brave has crossed a major milestone, becoming the first browser to support the new IPFS protocol.
Brave is an independent, open source browser co-founded by CEO Brendan Eich, former CEO of Mozilla, and Brian Bondy. The browser uses the open source Chromium rendering engine, giving it the same speed and compatibility advantages as Google Chrome. From the beginning, however, Brave has placed a major emphasis on privacy and security, consistently being recognized as one of the most private out-of-the-box browsers.
The indie browser has now become the first to support IPFS, beating its larger rivals. IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) emphasizes a decentralized web, providing additional speed and security. In essence, IPFS works similar to BitTorrent, allowing users to download data from multiple sources, rather than from a single location. It also provides a level of resiliency not present with traditional HTTP.
“We’re thrilled to be the first browser to offer a native IPFS integration with today’s Brave desktop browser release,” said Brian Bondy, CTO and co-founder of Brave. “Providing Brave’s 1 million+ verified content creators with the power to seamlessly serve content to millions of new users across the globe via a new and secure protocol, IPFS gives users a solution to the problem of centralized servers creating a central point of failure for content access. IPFS’ innovative content addressing uses Content Identifiers (CIDs) to form an address based on the content itself as opposed to locating data based on the address of a server. Integrating the IPFS open-source network is a key milestone in making the Web more transparent, decentralized, and resilient.”
Brave’s adoption of IPFS is a step in the right direction, hopefully a step other browser makers quickly follow.
Privacy-oriented search engine DuckDuckGo has crossed a major threshold, passing 100 million daily searches.
DuckDuckGo has built its reputation on protecting user privacy and not tracking their browsing habits. While the search engine is much smaller that Google, it has been gaining users as consumers have begun to value their privacy more.
The search engine has now reached a major milestone, passing 100 million daily searches on Monday, January 11. Since then, usage has been hovering just below that mark, ranging from 97 to 99 million.
While DuckDuckGo has a long way to go before it’s a threat to Google, its increasing popularity should be a warning sign to Google about the value of protecting user privacy.
Google has rolled out an update to its Index Coverage report, bringing some significant improvements based on user feedback.
The Index Coverage report is part of the revamped Search Console. It provides valuable insights into how Google is indexing the various pages of a website. The information is especially helpful to webmasters, giving them a way to track down and identify potential issues.
Google revamped Index Coverage report to make it even more useful.
Based on the feedback we got from the community, today we are rolling out significant improvements to this report so you’re better informed on issues that might prevent Google from crawling and indexing your pages. The change is focused on providing a more accurate state to existing issues, which should help you solve them more easily.
Specifically, the improvements include:
Removal of the generic “crawl anomaly” issue type – all crawls errors should now be mapped to an issue with a finer resolution.
Pages that were submitted but blocked by robots.txt and got indexed are now reported as “indexed but blocked” (warning) instead of “submitted but blocked” (error)
Microsoft is planning on consolidating Outlook for Windows and the Mac, providing a single version based on web technologies.
Outlook is one of the most popular productivity apps, enjoying widespread use across Windows, Mac and iOS/iPadOS. In order to support those platforms, however, Microsoft has to maintain multiple version of the application, one for each platform. This represents a significant degree of overhead, even for a company as large as Microsoft.
While web technologies were once used strictly in the creation of websites and web-based applications, modern advances have paved the way for web languages and technologies to be used in desktop applications. This has been a boon for developers, making it relatively easy to target the web, desktop and mobile platforms from a single codebase.
According to Zac Bowden at Windows Central, Microsoft is preparing to take this approach with Outlook, basing a single desktop client on the web version of Outlook. Codenamed Project Monarch, the new approach is the culmination of Microsoft’s “One Outlook” vision.
Bowden’s sources tell him the new version will still behave like a standard desktop app, complete with offline storage, native OS components, notifications, share targets and more.
This is good news for Outlook users, as it will help ensure that all users enjoy the same features and experience.
Respected cybersecurity professional and tech writer Daniel Miessler is making the case that Google is being “left behind due to horrible UI/UX.”
While many think of user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) in the content of desktop applications, UI/UX design is an important part of web app development. Especially as web apps have rivaled desktop apps for power and abilities, the line between the two categories has become increasingly blurred, making UI/UX more important than ever.
Unfortunately for Google, the company appears to be lagging behind in its UI/UX efforts, according to Miessler. While acknowledging that Google Analytics’ poor interface was at least partially excused by the engineering-centric nature of some of Google’s products, Miessler points out the problem is spreading.
“But lately it’s just becoming too much.
Even Gmail is a cesspool at this point. Nobody would ever design a webmail interface like that, starting from scratch.
What happened to Google Docs? Why does it not look and behave more like Notion, or Quip, or any of the other alternatives that made progress in the last 5-10 years?
What college course do I take to manage a Google Analytics property?”
Miessler highlights an important factor that should be a concern to Google, or any incumbent company: agile startups like Quip. Years ago the barrier-to-entry was much higher for companies looking to break into the software development market. In today’s industry, however, technologies, frameworks and APIs have progressed to the point where the barrier-to-entry is much lower. As a result, it’s important for companies to stay current, developing apps that people not only need, but also want, to use.
Google is opening the door to greater collaboration with the open source community on its latest operating system (OS) endeavorer, Fuchsia.
Google has been working on Fuchsia since at least 2016, when its existence was first publicly known. Much of Fuchsia’s development has been shrouded in mystery, and Google has been light on details. It appears to primarily be aimed at phone and tablets, although Google has hinted that it could be used on a wider array of devices.
The obvious point of reference is Android, with many believing Fuchsia represents a possible Android replacement. One big difference is the kernel, or core, of the OS. While Android is based on a Linux kernel, Fuchsia has a completely new kernel called Zircon. This may be in an effort to address the shortcomings Android has experienced.
For those interested in seeing what Fuchsia looks like, Ars Technica built a copy of the project and posted a gallery of screenshots.
In the meantime, however, Google is making it easier for the open source community to contribute to the project.
Starting today, we are expanding Fuchsia’s open source model to make it easier for the public to engage with the project. We have created new public mailing lists for project discussions, added a governance model to clarify how strategic decisions are made, and opened up the issue tracker for public contributors to see what’s being worked on. As an open source effort, we welcome high-quality, well-tested contributions from all. There is now a process to become a member to submit patches, or a committer with full write access.
In addition, we are also publishing a technical roadmap for Fuchsia to provide better insights for project direction and priorities. Some of the highlights of the roadmap are working on a driver framework for updating the kernel independently of the drivers, improving file systems for performance, and expanding the input pipeline for accessibility.
The fact that Google is opening the door to more collaboration may indicate an acceleration of this plans. It will be interesting to see where Fuchsia goes, and what devices Google uses it on.
Mozilla’s latest Firefox release, version 83.0, boosts a major increase to JavaScript performance.
JavaScript, once mainly used for animations and menus, is one of the most important languages of the web. Thanks to JavaScript, developers are able to create complex web applications, many of which rival desktop applications for functionality.
Unfortunately, running JavaScript-heavy websites is one of the most challenging aspects of a web browser’s duties. Every major browser manufacturer constantly works to increase JavaScript performance and responsiveness.
Mozilla’s latest version of Firefox significantly boosts the browser’s performance thanks to a major update to its SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine. The new update, called Warp or WarpBuilder, makes changes to the Just-In-Time (JIT) compilers.
With Warp (also called WarpBuilder) we’re making big changes to our JIT (just-in-time) compilers, resulting in improved responsiveness, faster page loads and better memory usage. The new architecture is also more maintainable and unlocks additional SpiderMonkey improvements.
Traditionally, JavaScript is an interpreted language. That means the code is interpreted on the fly as it is executed. This can result in major performance issues, especially when code must be executed repeatedly, such as code loops. JIT compilers help solve this problem by compiling and storing frequently used code, speeding up operations.
Firefox’s latest boost comes from significantly optimizing those JIT compilers, resulting in significant real-world gains over Warp’s predecessor Ion.
Warp is faster than Ion on many workloads. The picture below shows a couple examples: we had a 20% improvement on Google Docs load time, and we are about 10-12% faster on the Speedometer benchmark.
We’ve seen similar page load and responsiveness improvements on other JS-intensive websites such as Reddit and Netflix. Feedback from Nightly users has been positive as well.
Although Firefox is no longer the leading browser, in terms of market share, it continues to be a major player. Its improved performance, not to mention emphasis on privacy, will hopefully help it gain some ground against its larger rivals.
Apple announced the release of macOS Big Sur for Thursday, November 12 during its ‘One More Thing‘ event. It’s a huge upgrade that millions of Mac users will want to download ASAP. You will know when it is available in your time zone by clicking the Apple logo in the upper left of your Mac, then clicking ‘About This Mac’ and then clicking ‘Software Update.’ If it still says your Mac is up to date… then macOS Big Sur has not yet been released in your time zone.
So just when will it be available? Mac Rumors provided their best time estimates based on past releases, which is typically 10 AM Pacific Time. We’ve added additional cities:
Brave web browser is making inroads in the market, announcing it now has 20 million monthly active users and 7 million daily active users.
Brave is distinguishing itself as a browser that focuses on privacy and security. By default, the browser is considered to be more secure than Firefox. At the same time, thanks to its Chromium engine—the same engine that powers Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge— Brave generally offers top-tier performance, often beating rivals.
When it comes to monetization, Brave uses a somewhat unique method. The browser aggressively blocks ads, but gives users the option of seeing ads from Brave’s own network that, again, emphasizes privacy. This model seems to be a hit for all parties, as Brave boasts a click-through rate of 9%, well above the industry average of 2%.
In addition, Brave allows individuals to become verified content creators. Other users can then use Brave’s own cryptocurrency, Basic Attention Tokens, to tip their favorite content creators.
Brave’s features and performance seem to be gaining traction. The browser’s current 20 million monthly active users is up from 8.7 million a year ago. Similarly, the 7 million daily active users is up from 3 million a year ago. Since Apple began allowing users to set their default iOS browser in iOS 14, Brave’s daily active iOS users has grown 34%.
At a time when Mozilla is still struggling to break free from its dependance on Google subsidies, and other major browsers are bundled with operating systems, it’s good to see an independent browser succeeding with an innovative approach to monetization and sustainability.
Using spatial reality to combine the virtual and physical world, Sony’s new Spatial Reality Display creates an incredible 3D optical experience that is viewable to the naked eye.
“It’s unlike any conventional display,” says Sony Product Designer So Morimoto. “It’s like you’re looking at the real thing. The Spatial Reality Display compared to other displays is amazing. Obviously, conventional 3D displays can show things in 3D, but this actually follows your eye movements, making it feel like a real object. I love that the display feels so natural to the human senses.”
For designers, this is a huge breakthrough says Sony Product Designer and Mechanical Engineer Tatsuhito Aono. “If we could share designs that are life-size with this kind of clarity, it would make things much smoother. We could get the planner, the designer, and everyone else on the same page, so I think efficiency would improve and so would the quality. It’s almost like you are looking at the same image side by side.
“I quickly realized that I’m seeing a whole new world here,” says Morimoto. “
https://youtu.be/HY2uI39-r9I
“Every single person I’ve seen observing this display is just like wow… I’ve never seen anything like it,” says Dan Phillips, Executive Producer for Emerging Technology at The Mill, a technology creative partner for agencies, production companies, and brands. “I mean you are literally looking at magic happen on the screen. At The Mill, we always take a brief and try to expand on it, whereas this is no kind of precedent.”
“We’ve all seen holographic effects but this is one that you can see with your own eyes in a very physical sense. It tracks your eyes and it’s just got this depth that is just pretty magical.”
“Seeing it was kind of mesmerizing and kind of mind-blowing,” says The Mill Creative Director Andrew Proctor. “You’re not designing a set frame but you’re giving a window. Look deeper, look further. You find yourself leaning around and seeing something.
https://youtu.be/lBnJ9PV6OMA
Here’s how it works according to Sony:
High-speed Vision Sensor – The SR Display is based on an innovative high-speed vision sensor that follows exact eye position in space, on vertical, horizontal, and depth axes simultaneously. The display monitors eye movement down to the millisecond while rendering the image instantaneously, based on the location and position of the viewer’s eyes. This allows creators to interact with their designs in a highly-realistic virtual, 3D environment, from any angle without glasses.
Real-time Rendering Algorithm – Additionally, the SR Display leverages an original processing algorithm to display content in real-time. This allows the stereoscopic image to appear as smooth as real life, even if the viewer moves around.
Micro Optical Lens – The micro optical lens is positioned precisely over the stunning 15.6 inches (diag.) LCD display1. This lens divides the image into the left and right eyes allowing for stereoscopic viewing with just the naked eye.
IBM and ServiceNow are partnering to provide enterprise solutions that utilize AI to automate IT operations. The new joint solution combines IBM’s AI‑powered hybrid cloud software and professional services to ServiceNow’s intelligent workflow capabilities and IT service and operations management products. The solution raises up deep AI‑driven insights from their data and then recommends actions for IT organizations to take that help them prevent and fix IT issues at scale.
“AI is one of the biggest forces driving change in the IT industry to the extent that every company is swiftly becoming an AI company,” said Arvind Krishna, Chief Executive Officer, IBM. “By partnering with ServiceNow and their market-leading Now Platform, clients will be able to use AI to quickly mitigate unforeseen IT incident costs. Watson AIOps with ServiceNow’s Now Platform is a powerful new way for clients to use automation to transform their IT operations.”
“For every CEO, digital transformation has gone from opportunity to necessity,” said ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott. “As ServiceNow leads the workflow revolution, our partnership with IBM combines the intelligent automation capabilities of the Now Platform with the power of Watson AIOps. We are focused on driving a generational step improvement in productivity, innovation, and growth. ServiceNow and IBM are helping customers meet the digital demands of 21st-century business.”
ServiceNow says that in today’s technology‑driven organization, even the smallest outages can cause massive economic impact for both lost revenue and reputation. They note that this partnership will help customers address these challenges and help avoid unnecessary loss of revenue and reputation by automating old, manual IT processes and increasing IT productivity.
Here is what IBM and ServiceNow are planning:
Joint Solution: IBM and ServiceNow will deliver a first of its kind joint IT solution that marries IBM Watson AIOps with ServiceNow’s intelligent workflow capabilities and market‑leading ITSM and ITOM Visibility products to help customers prevent and fix IT issues at scale. Now, businesses that use ServiceNow ITSM can push historical incident data into the deep machine learning algorithms of Watson AIOps to create a baseline of their normal IT environment, while simultaneously having the ability to help them identify anomalies outside of that normal, which could take a human up to 60% longer to manually identify, according to initial results from specific Watson AIOps early adopter clients. The joint solution will position customers to enhance employee productivity, obtain greater visibility into their operational footprint and respond to incidents and issues faster.
Specific product capabilities will include:
ServiceNow ITSM allows IT to deliver scalable services on a single cloud platform estimated to increase productivity by 20%.
ServiceNow ITOM Visibility automatically delivers near real‑time visibility from a native Configuration Management Database, into all resources and the true operational state of all business services.
IBM Watson AIOps uses AI to automate how enterprises detect, diagnose, and respond to, and remediate IT anomalies in real time. The solution is designed to help CIOs make more informed decisions when predicting and shaping future outcomes, focus resources on higher‑value work and build more responsive and intelligent applications that can stay up and running longer. Using Watson AIOps, the average time to resolve incidents was reduced by 65 percent, according to one recent initial proof of concept project with a client.
Services: IBM is expanding its global ServiceNow business to include additional capabilities that provide advisory, implementation, and managed services on the Now Platform. Highly‑skilled IBM practitioners will apply their expertise to facilitate rapid delivery of valuable insights and innovation to clients. IBM Services professionals also will introduce clients to intelligent workflows to help improve resiliency and reduce IT risk. ServiceNow is co‑investing in training and certification of IBM employees and dedicated staff for customer success.
“Businesses are facing increased pressures to match the digital pace of a cloud‑first market in order to meet the demands of their customers,” said Stephen Elliot, program vice president, DevOps, and Management Software, IDC. “The C‑ suite is transforming workflows to deliver insights and automation for more efficient customer engagement models and cost containment strategies for the business while simplifying IT operations and increasing collaboration between IT and business stakeholders.”
“The next decade looking ahead is going to be the Software Decade,” says Snowflake board member and Altimeter Capital partner Kevin Wang. “Trends of moving more software to the cloud are just persisting. Cloud has completely changed the way that software is built and run. Software itself is being completely transformed. If what you saw over the past decade was exciting I’m even more excited about the next decade.”
The past decade has been a prolific time for technology companies. When you look at what we are set up for in the next decade it’s good to pause right now to see what has happened during the pandemic. We’ve seen that software is an integral part of the global economy. During the pandemic, we’ve found that we couldn’t go through the pandemic without the tools that we have.
Stanford research shows that just during the month of May over two-thirds of US GDP was created in our homes alone. That’s just incredible. These trends of moving more software to the cloud are just persisting. The next decade looking ahead is going to be the Software Decade.
Software Itself Is Being Completely Transformed
When we take a step back we look at how these companies are set up for the next ten years. It’s easy to get focused on what might happen in the short run. These trends are so powerful that they are going to power these companies and adoption for several years. It’s true that the pandemic has accelerated and pulled forward a lot of that demand. But a lot of the trends and behaviors we see are going to persist. For example, people are talking over Zoom and that’s just changed the way we are going to work. We can give a lot of examples of how that’s going to persist over the long run.
Software itself is being completely transformed. If what you saw over the past decade was exciting I’m even more excited about the next decade. What you have to understand is that cloud has completely changed the way that software is built and run. As we know, as business are digitally transforming they themselves are building and running more software. When you think about how to do that cloud has changed that.
Historically, you always had to decide better, faster, cheaper. You could only pick one or two of them. Now you can do all three. When you look at Snowflake, for example, you used to have to manage a cloud data warehouse, and that was a lot of work for your database experts. You don’t have to do any of that anymore. Snowflake will manage all of that for you.
The Software Decade Is Now – Altimeter Capital partner Kevin Wang
Microsoft has announced the release of a revamped version of Site Explorer, including major new features.
Site Explorer is an important tool for webmasters, as it shows them how Microsoft Bing sees their site. According to Microsoft, “It reflects most URLs we have seen on the web, including redirects, broken links, or those blocked by robots.txt, organized in a file explorer-like fashion. Thus, giving you the flexibility to navigate each folder and the URLs contained inside them to understand, debug and modify your site structure as required.”
The update comes amid a rebranding of Bing to Microsoft Bing. With this latest effort, the Redmond-based company seems to be focusing more attention on its search engine. The company probably sees an opportunity for growth, as Google has been increasingly under scrutiny for what many regulators believe is monopoly abuse of its search dominance.
While, on the surface, these updates to Site Explorer may seem minor, Microsoft told Search Engine Land: “This is a complete new experience, cleaner and far easier to use and complete new system to support this tool.”
Webmasters will likely benefit from the new tools and updated options.
“We call our approach Virtual First where most focused and solo work happens at home,” says Dropbox CEO Drew Houston. “Then because in-person collaboration is still critical for building teams and relationships and culture we’re turning our offices into collaborative spaces. We call these spaces Dropbox Studios. I feel as a company that we can only live out our mission if we’re on the leading edge of how we work ourselves.”
“We also hope this Virtual First approach will give us the best of remote and in-person work, balancing flexibility with human connection, and creating a more level playing field for everyone,” notes the Dropbox Team blog. “We’re living through a challenging time. But we believe it brings an opportunity to redesign the way we work for the better.”
Drew Houston, co-founder and CEO of Dropbox, says that starting today, Dropbox is becoming a Virtual First company. Remote work will be the primary experience for all employees and the day-to-day default for individual work:
Virtual First Reinvents Work
I don’t think anyone could have imagined how the entire world went to working from home overnight in the most traumatic and abrupt way possible. We see that the shift to distributed work is going to continue beyond when the lockdown ends. What’s interesting is the vast majority of our employees have said that they don’t want to return to the way things were before. They don’t want to lose the flexibility. They don’t want to go back to commuting. We’ve seen this with a lot of companies.
We saw this as a unique opportunity to reinvent how we work and rethink this completely. It’s a little different from some of the other approaches. We thought about how do we combine the best elements of the remote and in-person experience. We call our approach Virtual First where most focused and solo work happens at home. Then because in-person collaboration is still critical for building teams and relationships and culture we’re turning our offices into collaborative spaces. We call these spaces Dropbox Studios. This is better than going fully remote or just sort of letting people figure it out for themselves.
Fully remote cuts out the in-person experience which we think is critical to work. In a lot of the hybrid models which are saying work from home whenever you want to, we think risks the worst of both worlds situation where you don’t get the sense of community in an office and you don’t get the same level of flexibility.
Shift To Distributed Work Is Massive Opportunity
It’s a transition. Over time we’re not going to need as much physical space. That’s part of the explicit design here. Sure, there are some efficiencies on costs that result from that or result from being able to hire in lower-cost locations or allowing employees to live in lower-cost locations. But you need to solve for more than just costs. The primary factor for us is that the vast majority of our team wanted to preserve a lot of the benefits they were getting from working from home.
There are a lot of issues with remote work but most importantly our customers and all the world have shifted to working in a distributed way. We see this as massively increasing our opportunity because there are all of these pain points and ways that we can improve the remote working experience. I feel as a company that we can only do that and we can only live out our mission if we’re on the leading edge of how we work ourselves.
Dropbox CEO Drew Houston: Virtual First Reinvents Work
“Even ahead of COVID, the market for companies who are undergoing digital transformation and who need to use digital technologies to compete and win in the modern economy was enormous,” says Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson. “COVID has been a tailwind to Twilio business but really is an acceleration of the trends that have gone on for the last 10 to 20 years as a result of digital transformation in nearly every kind of company.”
Even ahead of COVID, the market for companies who are undergoing digital transformation and who need to use digital technologies to compete and win in the modern economy was enormous. What COVID did is it accelerated many of the initiatives, many of the use cases, the things that companies needed to build to be competitive in this digital era were accelerated.
They were accelerated because of COVID, because of social distancing, work from home, and migrating a lot of these business processes to software and into the cloud and modernizing all of this. COVID has been a tailwind to Twilio business but really is an acceleration of the trends that have gone on for the last 10 to 20 years as a result of digital transformation in nearly every kind of company.
I’m Not Very Concerned About Microsoft
I’m not very concerned (about new competitors like Microsoft). It’s the same reason that (I wasn’t concerned) when Amazon started building products in the communication space or Facebook or Google or even Blackberry once announced that they were going to compete with Twilio. First of all, we’re no stranger to competition. This is a huge market. It’s no surprise that a wide variety of companies have products in the communications domain.
We compete by focusing on our customers, listening to what they need, and building differentiated APIs, a differentiated platform, and a differentiated super network. We’ve got a 12-year head start on anybody entering the space. The last thing I’ll add is that we are not a company that is very focused on competition. We’re focused on our customers. That focus has driven us for the last 12 years and has served us very well. We will continue to focus on the things our customers need in this enormous market and be able to take a lot of market share.
Digital-Native Companies Want APIs That Work
Strangely, I don’t think Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wakes up every day thinking about Twilio. But we are also no stranger to pricing competition. In fact, that is how most companies have tried to compete with us through our 12-year history. They come in with an inferior product and they say we’re going to be cheaper. But it turns out that the biggest enterprises on the planet or digital-native companies, what they want are APIs that work, mature, scalable, and that work everywhere around the world.
We’ve invested a tremendous amount of time and money to build the leading platform out there and what we found is that customers value that. So we’re no stranger to people trying to undercut us on price. What we think and what we hear from our customers is that they want quality, they want reliability, and they want HIPAA compliance. They want all sorts of capabilities that let them power their business and that’s what we offer.
Low-Code, No-Code, and Yo-Code
Low-code is a really exciting area. There are three buckets. There’s low-code, no-code, and then yo-code for the people who love to write code, developers. We’ve got products really for that whole spectrum. The typical way a developer might build on top of Twilio is to write code and host it themselves. We have a Twilio Functions product that allows us to host the software for our customers. Then we have Twilio Studio which is a drag and drop designer for the non-developer to be able to build out sophisticated workflows like interactive voice response systems on top of Twilio.
We have embraced really all three of those categories of builders. We do believe that at every enterprise there is a large number of builders with different skill sets who are building the future of how those companies engage with their customers. We want to enable all those people to succeed on Twilio.
Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson: COVID Accelerated Digital Transformation
Google has confirmed it is dealing with two separate issues with its search, one impacting mobile indexing and the other canonicalization.
Around September 23, website operators began noticing a change in how sites were being ranked by Google. Originally this was chalked up to a search engine algorithm.
Google has acknowledged both issues. In the case of the mobile indexing bug, it can result in no page being indexed. The canonicalization could result in a page not being indexed, or the wrong URL being associated with a page.
Google is working to resolve the issues as quickly as possible. Site owners will not need to do anything, simply wait for Google to fix the issue.
We are currently working to resolve two separate indexing issues that have impacted some URLs. One is with mobile-indexing. The other is with canonicalization, how we detect and handle duplicate content. In either case, pages might not be indexed….
There’s no action to take with these issues on the part of site owners. We apologize for the issues here and are working rapidly to resolve them. We’ll update this thread as each is corrected.
We are going to be the most important software company in the world,” says Planatir co-founder and CEO Alex Karp. “We are going to deliver the world’s best software with the most efficient way of delivering it. Well over 90% of our growth in the first half of the year came from our existing clients. Our existing clients, the most important clients in the world, are really happy. Of course, we are going to expand those really happy clients who happen to be the coolest people on the planet.”
Alex Karp, co-founder, and CEO of Palantir Technologies Inc. says his company which initiated a direct listing today on the New York Stock Exchange will become the most important software company in the world:
We are very focused on building software a long time before others build it. We are going to be the most important software company in the world. We are going to deliver the world’s best software with the most efficient way of delivering it.
What’s interesting about our client list that people ask is how can you have this super valuable company when there are only 125 customers? To which I respond, yeah, but they are the 125 most interesting institutions in the world. These aren’t just any institutions. We don’t go out and advertise who uses our product but I would say the list of our clients is the single most impressive list of institutions in the world I’ve ever seen. We want to keep these clients.
Well over 90% of our growth in the first half of the year came from our existing clients. What does that mean? Our existing clients, the most important clients in the world, are really happy. Of course, we are going to expand those really happy clients who happen to be the coolest people on the planet.
We’ve built this product which has gotten very little attention called Apollo. Apollo allows us to maintain and deliver software to any number of clients while essentially not growing our Palantiring force at all. We are planning, now that we have Apollo, to grow the number of super cool customers all over the world. We can do it without raising our headcount. What you are going to see is that we are going to continue building with our clients.
Why, because they are the most interesting clients in the world and they clearly based on our numbers like us and some love us. Now with Apollo, we can deliver the whole stack in six hours. I don’t think any other company I’ve seen in the world can do that and we can do it with efficiencies that I don’t know any other company is going to do. We can do this with a small number of people sitting in one office that we have maintaining, updating, and providing them with new products we build.
They don’t have the Frankenstein monster that takes two years to build and has to be maintained with either human hours, like in the government contracting case, or by purchasing new product or compensating salespeople.
Palantir CEO Alex Karp: The Most Important Software Company In The World
“What we’re announcing today is the democratization of AI,” says VMWare CEO Pat Gelsinger. “VMWare and Nvidia are coming together to leverage all the work they have done over the last decade and a half in AI. This partnership will put it on the industry-standard VMWare footprint to enable every enterprise to have this game-changing technology of AI. We see it as a game-changer for the AI industry broadly.”
Patrick Gelsinger, CEO of VMWare, announced just before this year’s huge virtual VMworld 2020 conference a partnership with Nvidia that will bring on the democratization of AI:
The Democratization Of AI
Nvidia and VMWare are coming together in a new partnership. Nvidia has been building their capabilities in artificial intelligence are for quite a number of years. But AI is used by only 10 to 15% of enterprises where specialized hardware sits in the corner of the data center and is only available in remote cloud environments. What we’re announcing today is the democratization of AI. VMWare and Nvidia are coming together to leverage all the work they have done over the last decade and a half in AI.
This partnership will put it on the industry-standard VMWare footprint to enable every enterprise to have this game-changing technology of AI. Literally, that software can introspect on data and write software and bring that to every enterprise application. We are quite excited about the partnership. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and I have known each other for several decades and it really is exciting to see us bring the partnership to the next level.
Making AI Broadly Available For Enterprises
We are excited about it. We do see that this idea that we can now make AI broadly available for enterprises. It’s exciting for Nvidia because even as successful as they’ve been, they are still only cracking a small piece of the application workload. For us, this is a major accelerant not just in the data center but also extending to the Edge. As we see 5G and Edge emerge this is a major new area for both companies.
With our Tanzu offerings and virtualization offerings, it really is saying that now every enterprise can start to take availability of these powerful AI capabilities. We see it as a game-changer for the AI industry broadly and cleary an accelerant for us and for Nvidia and for our financials.
The Edge – Next Major Move Of Application Development
Multi-cloud is the core of our Tanzu offerings. We want to help companies take advantage of the most modern CI/CD pipeline DevOps, DevSecOps capabilities. But they need to be able to take advantage of it in their private data centers, across multiple clouds, and to the Edge. For this, clearly, our preferred partnership with Amazon has really taken off. Now with Azure and Google and Oracle and the Alibaba partnership showing up now they can take advantage of that across any cloud and be able to go from their private data centers to the cloud and back.
We now have major customers of which a number of those we are highlighting at VMWorld who really are taking advantage of both to the cloud as well as from the cloud. This hybrid approach enables us to save 30% on average for customers. It’s a big savings but it also enables customers to have consistent developer environments and take advantage of the Edge. The Edge will be the next major move of application development as 5G starts to become broadly available in the industry.
“Today starts a new chapter in our close collaboration with the telecommunications industry to unlock the power of 5G and bring cloud and edge closer than ever,” said Microsoft Azure Executive Vice President Jason Zander in a blog announcement. “We’re building a carrier-grade cloud and bringing more Microsoft technology to the operator’s edge. This, in combination with our developer ecosystem, will help operators to future proof their networks, drive down costs, and create new services and business models.”
Jason Zander, Executive Vice President, Microsoft Azure, announces new collaborations with the telecommunications industry that will unlock the power of 5G and bring cloud and edge closer than ever:
The increasing demand for always-on connectivity, immersive experiences, secure collaboration, and remote human relationships is pushing networks to their limits, while the market is driving down price. The network infrastructure must ensure operators are able to optimize costs and gain efficiencies, while enabling the development of personalized and differentiated services. To address the requirements of rolling out 5G, operators will face strong challenges, including high capital expenditure (CapEx) investments, an increased need for scale, automation, and secure management of the massive volume of data it will generate.
Today starts a new chapter in our close collaboration with the telecommunications industry to unlock the power of 5G and bring cloud and edge closer than ever. We’re building a carrier-grade cloud and bringing more Microsoft technology to the operator’s edge. This, in combination with our developer ecosystem, will help operators to future proof their networks, drive down costs, and create new services and business models.
In Microsoft, operators get a trusted partner who will empower them to unlock the potential of 5G. Enabling them to offer a range of new services such as ultra-reliable low-latency connectivity, mixed reality communications services, network slicing, and highly scalable IoT applications to transform entire industries and communities.
By harnessing the power of Microsoft Azure, on their edge, or in the cloud, operators can transition to a more flexible and scalable model, drive down infrastructure cost, use AI and machine learning (ML) to automate operations and create service differentiation. Furthermore, a hybrid and hyper-scale infrastructure will provide operators with the agility they need to rapidly innovate and experiment with new 5G services on a programmable network.
More specifically, we will further support operators as they evolve their infrastructure and operations using technologies such as software-defined networking, network function virtualization, and service-based architectures. We are bringing to market a carrier-grade platform for edge and cloud to support the operator’s goals to future proof their infrastructure with disaggregated, and containerized network architectures. Recognizing that not everything will move to the public cloud, we will meet operators where they are—whether at the enterprise edge, the network edge, or in the cloud.
Our approach is built on the acquisitions of industry leaders in cloud-native network functions—Affirmed Networks and Metaswitch and on the development of Azure Edge Zones. By bringing together hundreds of engineers with deep experience in the telecommunications space, we are ensuring that our product development process is catering to the most relevant networking needs of the operators. We will leverage the strengths of Microsoft to extend and enhance the current capabilities of industry-leading products such as Affirmed’s 5G core and Metaswitch’s UC portfolio. These capabilities, combined with Microsoft’s broad developer ecosystem and deep business to business partnership programs, provide Microsoft with a unique ability to support the operators as they seek to monetize the capabilities of their networks.
Your customer, your service, powered by our technology
As we build out our partnerships with different operators, it is clear to us that there will be different approaches to technology adoption based on business needs. Some operators may choose to adopt the Azure platform and select a varied mix of virtualized or containerized network function providers. We also have operators that have requested complete end-to-end services as components for their offers. As a part of these discussions, many operators have identified points of control that are important to them, for example:
Control over where a slice, network API, or function is presented to the customer.
Definition of where and how traffic enters and exits their network.
Visibility and control over where key functions are executed for a given customer scenario.
Configuration and performance parameters of core network functions.
As we build out Azure for Operators, we recognize the importance of ensuring operators have the control and visibility they require to manage their unique industry requirements. To that end, here is how our assets come together to provide operators with the platform they need.
Communication Service Providers
Interconnect
It starts with the ability to interconnect deeply with the operator’s network around the globe. We have one of the largest networks that connect with operators at more than 170 points of presence and over 20,000 peering connections around the globe, putting direct connectivity within 25 miles of 85 percent of the world’s GDP. More than 200 operators have already chosen to integrate with the Azure network through our ExpressRoute service, enabling enterprises and partners to link their corporate networks privately and securely to Azure services. We also provide additional routes to connect to the service through options as varied as satellite connectivity and TV White Space spectrum.
Edge platform
This reach helps us to supply operators with cloud computing options that meet the customer wherever those capabilities are needed: at the enterprise edge, the network edge, the network core, or in the cloud. The various form factors, optimized to support the location in which they are deployed, are supported by the Azure platform—providing virtual machine and container services with a common management framework, DevOps support, and security control.
Network functions
We believe in an open platform that leverages the strengths of our partners. Our solutions are a combination of virtualized and containerized services as composable functions, developed by us and by our Network Equipment Provider partners, to support operators’ services such as the Radio Access Network, Mobile Packet Core, Voice and Interconnect services, and other network functions.
Technology from Affirmed and Metaswitch Networks will provide services for Mobile Packet Core, Voice, and Interconnect services.
Cloud solutions and Azure IoT for operators
By exposing these services through the Azure platform, we can combine them with other Azure capabilities such as Azure Cognitive Services (used by more than 1 million developers processing more than 10 billion transaction per day), Azure Machine Learning, and Azure IoT, to bring the power of AI and automation to the delivery of network services. These capabilities, in concert with our partnerships with OSS and BSS providers, enables us to help operators streamline and simplify operations, create new services to monetize the network, and gain greater insights into customer behavior.
In IoT our primary focus is simplifying our solutions to accelerate what we can do together from the edge to the cloud. We’ve done so by creating a platform that provides simple and secure provisioning of applications and devices to Azure cloud solutions through Azure IoT Central, which is the fastest and easiest way to build IoT solutions at scale. IoT Central enables customers to provision an IoT app in seconds, customize it in hours, and go to production the same day. IoT Plug and Play dramatically simplifies all aspects of IoT device support and provides devices that “just work” with any solution and is the perfect complement to achieve speed and simplicity through IoT Central. Azure IoT Central also gives the Mobile Operator the opportunity to monetize more of the IoT solution and puts them in a position to be a re-seller of the IoT Central application platform through their own solutions. Learn more about using Azure IoT for operators here.
Cellular connectivity is increasingly important for IoT solutions and represents a vast and generational shift for mobile operators as the share of devices in market shifts towards the enterprise. We will continue our deep partnership with operators to enable fast and efficient app development and deployment, which is critical to success at the edge. This will help support scenarios such as asset tracking across industries, manufacturing and distribution of smart products, and responsive supply chains. It will also help support scenarios where things are geographically dispersed, such as smart city automation, utility monitoring, and precision agriculture.
Where we go next
Our early engagement with partners such as Telstra and Etisalat helped us shape this path. We joined the 5G Open Innovation Lab as the founding public cloud partner to accelerate enterprise startups and launch new innovations to foster new 5G use cases with even greater access to leading-edge networks. The Lab will create long-term, sustainable developer and commercial ecosystems that will accelerate the delivery of exciting new capabilities at the edge, including pervasive IoT intelligence and immersive mixed reality. And this is just the beginning. I invite you to learn more about our solutions and watch the series of videos we have curated for you.
We started Aiera with the idea of just trying to help clients engage with the advances that were coming through tech. Our focus was really Amazon. Aiera spawned from an Amazon research report, where we’re trying to just advocate for clients that they have to start taking this seriously in terms of how industries will change. We thought one way to help them do that aside from just the stock price and what Amazon had been doing in the past was to help them look to how their own roles could change.
Aiera stands for AI Equity Research Analysis. The AI is silent. Within Aiera we’re really trying to pay respect to the research analysts role. We’re trying to learn that the best we can in terms of the rules that they follow to understand markets that are constantly in flux, equities, and where their stories are constantly changing. We’ve been at this for about three years now.
Analysts really want to understand the why. They want to understand the critical events within conferences, filings, and news. We want to make that as easy as possible. What we’re trying to help clients with the most is helping them be able to be updated on the 40,000 events that we are processing right now. We want to help them access those events easily. Ultimately, whether it’s through alerts, search, or comparisons, really be more informed than they’ve been in the past. That’s how we’re trying to revolutionize the more traditional sell-side models.
A little bit is generational (in terms of the use of Aiera). When we started Aiera the business side was very focused in New York. All of our clients were in New York and there was a lot more face to face and a lot more in their offices showing them Aiera on a big screen. But inevitably we’d run into well how do we connect to the WiFi? Well, can you see what I’m trying to show you here? Whereas on a screen you can just follow the cursor. It’s easier to express to that other side exactly what it is trying to show them when selling software.
My generation still very much values that face-to-face. But when I look at our devs and most of them have worked distributed from the beginning they don’t value that same kind of face-to-face. I can also look to the other generations particularly those who are in tech and say they don’t need it in the same way. They don’t even know maybe what they’re missing in the same way that I feel from what’s happened during COVID.
Aiera is an event intelligence and insights platform founded by former Internet equity research analyst, Ken Sena (CEO), and Amazon Alexa engineering lead, Bryan Healey (CTO). Aiera began as a collaboration on how natural language processing could improve investment workflow. Aiera now covers over 40,000 live events per year, including earnings calls, analyst days, management conferences, and more, tying these events to millions of documents it is simultaneously processing and analyzing, and offering users the ability to set intelligent monitors to track what matters to them most.
