“Today is going to be a truly historic day for the Mac,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook at their at the Worldwide Developers Conference. “Today we are going to tell you about some really big changes, how we are going to take the Mac to a whole new level. From the very beginning, the Mac redefined the entire computer industry. The Mac has always been about innovation and boldly pushing things forward, embracing big changes to stay at the forefront of personal computing.”
The Mac has had three major transitions in its history. The move to PowerPC, the transition to macOS X, and the move to Intel. Now it’s time for a huge leap forward for the Mac. Today is the day that we are announcing that the Mac is transitioning to our own Apple Silicon. When we make bold changes it’s for one simple yet powerful reason… so we can make much better products. When we look ahead we envision some major new products and transitioning to our own custom silicon is what will enable us to bring them to life.
At Apple, integrating hardware and software is fundamental to everything we do. That’s what makes our products so great and silicon is at the heart of our hardware. So having a world class silicon design team is a game changer.
Apple CEO Tim Cook: Mac Transitioning To Our Own Apple Silicon
“In this environment, digital transformation is more important than ever,” says VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger. “If you think of it only a few percentages of employees worked from home before this (pandemic). Now it’s 97 percent. Given the length and challenges that people faced this doesn’t go away.”
Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware, discusses how the pandemic has accelerated digital transformation and dramatically increased the work from home trend for enterprise companies:
Digital Transformation Is More Important Than Ever
In this environment, digital transformation is more important than ever. If you think of it only a few percentages of employees worked from home before this (pandemic). Now it’s 97 percent. Given the length and challenges that people faced this doesn’t go away. We are going to be here for the next two years where the majority of workforces, a substantial portion, are going to be work from home distributed workforce.
In the face of that IT and technology are more important not less. Sometimes it takes a decade to make a week of progress and sometimes a week gives you a decade of progress. All of a sudden, education, healthcare, and work from home are making huge steps forward. That’s what gives us the view that long-term tech is going to be stronger and software and cloud will be stronger yet than the overall economic environment.
Work From Home Is The New Normal
For VMWare, we were 20 percent work from home. I expect as we continue in this environment we will end up in at 50 to 60 percent over time. I don’t think we are atypical. We’re doubling and tripling the amount of work from home. When you think about that distributed workforce, essentially you go from 100 or 200 sites depending on the size of your company to 10,000 or 20,000 sites.
When you think about every home becoming a new worksite they need to be managed, connected, and productive. They need to be secure. They need good quality and bandwidth. Then they need capacity. That’s where VMWare cloud comes in. That’s our business continuity focus for the future.
We don’t see ourselves as atypical here. This is the new normal. We’re excited to see these transformations happening across the industry and we’re making good progress with customers around the globe.
Every CIO Is Adjusting Their Priorities
We used to generate new projects with POC’s and being face to face with customers. The salesmen always liked to shoulder up with the potential customer. We have to make adjustments. Every CIO is also adjusting their priorities due to this radical shift of a distributed workforce and the new demands that are being placed on them.
Digital Transformation Is More Important Than Ever, Says VMWare CEO Pat Gelsinger
Google has announced that Chrome will soon start blocking resource intensive ads.
Internet ads may be a fact of life, but not all ads are created equal. Some, such as poorly programmed ones, can consume a disproportionate amount of resources, draining a laptop’s battery and slowing down a network. Google is working to address the problem, experimenting with ways of identifying those ads and blocking them.
“We have recently discovered that a fraction of a percent of ads consume a disproportionate share of device resources, such as battery and network data, without the user knowing about it,” writes Marshall Vale, Chrome Product Manager. “These ads (such as those that mine cryptocurrency, are poorly programmed, or are unoptimized for network usage) can drain battery life, saturate already strained networks, and cost money.
“In order to save our users’ batteries and data plans, and provide them with a good experience on the web, Chrome will limit the resources a display ad can use before the user interacts with the ad. When an ad reaches its limit, the ad’s frame will navigate to an error page, informing the user that the ad has used too many resources.”
This is good news for Chrome users, especially those who primarily use a notebook. Google will continue working on the solution for the next few months, with rollout planned for August.
Reddit has pulled its newly announced “Start Chatting” features amid an uproar on the part of moderators.
Start Chatting was designed to help make it easier for people to connect with other individuals to talk about common interests. According to the official launch post, Reddit “wanted to give you a heads up about a new feature that we are launching this week called ‘Start Chatting.’ This past month, as people around the world have been at home under various shelter-in-place restrictions, redditors have been using chat at phenomenal new levels. Whether it’s about topics related to COVID-19, local news, or just their favorite games and hobbies, people all around the world are looking for others to talk to. Since Reddit is in a unique position to help in this situation, we’ve created a new tool that makes it easier to find other people who want to talk about the same things you do.”
While the goal may have been admirable, it was not well received by the community. At the time of writing, the announcement had received some 1,400 comments, many of them negative and many of them highlighting some of the very difficult issues the new feature would create. For example, one of the moderators for r/abuse pointed out that people only felt safe discussing their past abuse in that community because moderators were able to aggressively protect them from trolls, perverts and abusive individuals—protection that would not be available if members could engage in moderator-free chat.
It seems the complaints have been heard, as Reddit has fully rolled back the feature. According to the update post, Reddit says they “will not roll the feature out within your community again without having a way for you to opt out, and will provide you with ample notice and regular updates going forward.”
Start Chatting has real potential to be a game-changer for Reddit, but it’s obvious some considerations were overlooked in the initial implementation. Here’s to hoping they get it right the second time around.
Google has announced that it is making its premium video conferencing product, Google Meet, available for free to everyone.
Video conferencing platforms have experienced record growth amid the coronavirus pandemic, as organizations, schools and individuals have turned to them to stay connected and productive. Zoom went from 10 million to 200 million daily users, and 300 million daily meeting participants. Other platforms have also seen stellar growth, although it appears Google would like to experience even more, if its latest blog post is any indication.
“Today, we’re making Google Meet, our premium video conferencing product, free for everyone, with availability rolling out over the coming weeks,” writes Javier Soltero Vice President & GM, G Suite. “We’ve invested years in making Meet a secure and reliable video conferencing solution that’s trusted by schools, governments and enterprises around the world, and in recent months we’ve accelerated the release of top-requested features to make it even more helpful. Starting in early May, anyone with an email address can sign up for Meet and enjoy many of the same features available to our business and education users, such as simple scheduling and screen sharing, real-time captions, and layouts that adapt to your preference, including an expanded tiled view.”
This is a big move for Google, and will likely help it better compete with Zoom and Microsoft’s products, including Skype and Teams. It will be interesting to see if Meet remains free permanently, or just while the pandemic is in full swing.
Google’s open-source user interface (UI) framework (Flutter) has already hit the 2 million user milestone, just 16 months after release.
Flutter is an open-source framework designed to help developers create applications for a variety of platforms, including Android, Google Fuchsia, iOS, Linux, macOS, Windows and the web. As a result, Flutter makes it easier for developers to create cross-platform apps. Frameworks like Flutter are becoming more and more popular as developers look to target a wider range of users without completely rewriting their code for each target platform.
According to Tim Sneath, Project Manager for Flutter and Dart, Google continues “to see fast growth in Flutter usage, with over two million developers having used Flutter in the sixteen months since we released. Despite these unprecedented circumstances, in March we saw 10% month-over-month growth, with nearly half a million developers now using Flutter each month.”
While 35% of users are in startups, some 26% are enterprise, 19% self-employed and 7% work in design agencies. Sneath says there are already 50,000 Flutter apps in the Play Store.
Creating a programming framework is never easy and many good ideas have fallen by the wayside. In contrast, it seems Google definitely has a hit on its hands.
Long-time chairwoman Mitchell Baker has officially taken the reigns as Mozilla’s next CEO.
The organization’s previous CEO, Chris Beard, resigned at the end of 2019, leaving a vacancy in Mozilla’s leadership. Now, more than three months after Beard left, Baker is taking over the position.
“I’m honored to become Mozilla’s CEO at this time. It’s a time of challenge on many levels, there’s no question about that,” Baker writes in a blog post. “Mozilla’s flagship product remains excellent, but the competition is stiff. The increasing vertical integration of internet experience remains a deep challenge. It’s also a time of need, and of opportunity. Increasingly, numbers of people recognize that the internet needs attention. Mozilla has a special, if not unique role to play here. It’s time to tune our existing assets to meet the challenge. It’s time to make use of Mozilla’s ingenuity and unbelievable technical depth and understanding of the ‘web’ platform to make new products and experiences. It’s time to gather with others who want these things and work together to make them real.”
Baker has deep roots with both Mozilla and its predecessor, Netscape. She first joined Netscape in November 1994, as one of the company’s first employees in the legal department, and became general manager of the mozilla.org project within Netscape five years later. In 2001, she was let go by America Online, who had acquired Netscape in 1999. In 2003, she helped launch the Mozilla Foundation, and became the first CEO of its subsidiary, Mozilla Corporation, when it was launched in 2005.
Given Baker’s long history with Mozilla, not to mention Netscape, she represents a solid choice to lead the organization amid tech’s changing landscape.
Apple’s Safari web browser joins the Tor browser as one of only two that fully block all third-party cookies.
The move has been a long time coming, and Safari has been gradually adding more features that limit the overall effectiveness of third-party cookies for tracking. As a result, in a WebKit blog post, the developers downplay the change as not a big deal, although they do highlight some of the significant benefits the move brings.
One of the biggest advantages is disabling login fingerprinting. Login fingerprinting is a technique that “allows a website to invisibly detect where you are logged in and is viable in any browser without full third-party cookie blocking.”
Similarly, the move “disables cross-site request forgery attacks against websites through third-party requests,” and “removes the ability to use an auxiliary third-party domain to identify users. Such a setup could otherwise persist IDs even when users delete website data for the first party.”
There are a number of additional benefits, including paving the way for other browsers to adopt a similar approach, and simplifying things for developers. Overall, this is a good move for customers, helping protect their privacy. It will hopefully motivate site admins to adopt other ways of monetizing their content, such as the Firefox Better Web initiative.
“The fact is as much as 5G is going to be tremendous, and it’s going to bring an amazing architectural shift to our economy and to our markets and economy, it’s still not here,” says Skyworks Solutions CEO Liam Griffin. “It is here in certain areas but the rollout has been somewhat delayed due to the pandemic.”
Liam Griffin, CEO of Skyworks Solutions, discusses on CNBC how thepandemic has temporarily delayed 5G but ultimately it will be a big part of a whole new world.
It’s a Stay At Home World Right Now
It’s a stay at home world right now (due to the pandemic). I talked about the digital traffic jam three or four years ago. At that time we talked about the networks being compressed and taxed and digitally clogged and we’re seeing this today. I mean it’s great that we’re seeing the network interfaces and the data traffic and the ability to do what we’re doing but we’re nowhere near where we’re headed.
We’ve got a long way to go in 5G. We’ve also got incredible Wi-Fi technologies coming. I think this pandemic situation is very difficult. It is a challenge and a big deal. But I think the technologies that we’re working on in our ecosystem with partners like Verizon and infrastructure players and even the Chinese⎯we’re all coming together to make this work. It’s a real indication of how necessary these applications are to the economy.
5G Delayed Due To The Pandemic
The fact is as much as 5G is going to be tremendous, and it’s going to bring an amazing architectural shift to our economy and to our markets and economy, it’s still not here. It is here in certain areas but the rollout has been somewhat delayed due to the pandemic. However, we’re going to see a bigger uptick in the second half.
We’re working with the marquee companies largely in the US, China, and Europe and we’re seeing some great technologies. They’re going to launch, it’s just delayed right now. That’s where we’re going to see the quality, the experience, the bandwidth upside that we’ve been talking about. That will happen.
5G Is a Multi-Year Thematic Move
5G is a multi-year thematic move. The interesting thing is that people today are clamoring to get the technology. The issue that we have and in what manifests in the demand weakness has really come about by a supply shock. It’s the supply chain in Asia and other parts of the world where folks couldn’t go to their factories and work. It creates a delay but we don’t think it’s perishable.
We think this 5G technology is absolutely going to launch. Some of that demand that did not get executed in our Q1 or Q2 will move forward into the back half of 2020 and certainly into 2021. We see this as a pause more than a complete deep dive.
Interesting Applications Are Really Emerging Through 5G
I saw the Verizon CEO talking about a 20 percent upside in data traffic and Vodafone also just announced a 50 percent increase in data traffic. So if you look at how this works, the smartphone⎯that’s your quarterback. They’re doing a lot of the work. But think about the IOT space, machine to machine, autonomous driving, and security. All of these interesting applications are really emerging through 4G, 5G and higher speed Wi-Fi. It’s creating a new experience.
If we look at what we’re doing with the young people today, the Millennials, I got three kids, they’re all face-timing. It’s just a whole new world. In a way, I think there are some real positive thematic changes that we can capitalize on once we get through this challenge with the pandemic.
5G is Delayed, But a Whole New World is Coming, Says Skyworks Solutions CEO Liam Griffin
Firefox has announced the launch of a new Test Pilot program, Better Web with Scroll, aimed at improving the web experience for both publishers and users.
Firefox is one of the most privacy-oriented companies in the world, and is constantly working to tackle problems related to privacy and the overall health of the web. Its latest initiative is designed to help publishers who have been hard hit by various privacy features, while at the same time incentivizing them to focus on quality content, rather than ad-driven quantity.
“If we’re going to create a better internet for everyone, we need to figure out how to make it work for publishers,” writes Matt Grimes. “Last year, we launched Enhanced Tracking Protection by default and have blocked more than two trillion third-party trackers to date, but it didn’t directly address the problems that publishers face. That’s where our partner Scroll comes in. By engaging with a better funding model, sites in their growing network no longer have to show you ads to make money. They can focus on quality not clicks. Firefox Better Web with Scroll gives you the fast, private web you want and supports publishers at the same time.”
The new initiative is based on Mozilla’s previously announced efforts to find alternative ways for publishers to monetize their content, without relying on ads. This is what led the non-profit to partner with Scroll. To join Firefox Better Web, users need to sign up for a Firefox account and install an extension. For the first six months, the service is discounted 50%, costing $2.50 a month. The money goes into a fund that is used to compensate writers and publishers. According to Mozilla, early tests show sites make at least 40% more than they would relying on ads.
“Firefox Better Web combines the work we’ve done with third-party tracking protection and Scroll’s network of outstanding publishers,” adds Grimes. “This ensures you will get a top notch experience while still supporting publishers directly and keeping the web healthy.”
It was bound to happen: Senators have expressed concern about Google’s role in developing a site to help screen potential coronavirus patients.
Google was caught off guard last week when President Trump said the company had 1,700 engineers working on a website designed to help screen potential coronavirus patients. In spite of the surprise, Google quickly got on board with the project and vowed to develop the site Trump had promised.
Unfortunately for the company, however, Google doesn’t have the best track record with privacy and security. As a result, several senators have raised concerns about the project, in a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Joining Sen. Bob Menendez in sending the letter were Sens. Sherrod Brown, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris and Richard Blumenthal.
“There are numerous privacy concerns about such an endeavor, including: whether people will be required to sign waivers forfeiting their privacy and personal data in order to access the questionnaire; whether Google or any of its subsidiaries will be prohibited from using data received through the website for commercial purposes; and whether Google and any of its subsidiaries will be prohibited from selling any data collected through the website to a third-party.”
The letter goes on to highlight the valuable nature of the data that will be collected and how much of a target it will be for hackers.
“To state the obvious, the information Americans enter on this website will be highly valuable to potential hackers, foreign state and nonstate actors with nefarious intent, and other criminal enterprises,” the senators continue. “We are concerned that neither the Administration nor Google has fully contemplated the range of threats to Americans’ personally identifiable information.”
Both points the letter raises are extremely pertinent. It was recently discovered that Google partnered with the Ascension healthcare group to collect the medical records of millions of American patients, without their knowledge. If patients are going to trust a website Google creates, they need to know their data is going to be used for the advertised purpose and not swallowed up into one of Google’s other commercial endeavors. Likewise, the data will represent a goldmine for hackers, requiring the very best in security technologies and processes.
The senators certainly aren’t the only individuals questioning whether Google is up to the task—on both fronts.
“We’re making email marketing even smarter with a set of new AI capabilities getting released into Salesforce Marketing Cloud,” says Salesforce VP Armita Peymandoust. “One of them is Einstein Engagement Frequency. The other one is Einstein Send Time Optimization. We also have Einstein Content Tagging out and available today to our customers. Email is definitely not dead. Even the Millennials say that.”
AI-Powered Email Capabilities Released Into Salesforce Marketing Cloud
As we know email is still a really important channel. Over 64 percent of customers are still saying that they prefer email channels to all the others. What we’re doing is we’re making email marketing even smarter with a set of new AI capabilities getting released into Salesforce Marketing Cloud. One of them is Einstein Engagement Frequency. The other one is Einstein Send Time Optimization. We also have Einstein Content Tagging out and available today to our customers. Email is definitely not dead. Even the Millennials say that.
Einstein Engagement Frequency
With Einstein Engagement Frequency we’re trying to tell the marketer what’s the sweet range that they should keep on engaging with their customers. As marketers, we want to keep on engaging with our customers but we just don’t want to get to a point that we’re potentially annoying them. So we are telling them that this is the range that you should stay in.
Einstein Send Time Optimization
Now that the marketer knows what the frequency of engagement should be, with Einstein Send Time Optimization we’re also telling them what is the right time to send those messages. It’s really easy with a drag and drop of an activity into Journey Builder we make every message go out at the right time for the customers.
Einstein Content Tagging
Then with Einstein Content Tagging, we’re basically bringing image recognition the same set of AI capabilities that you’re familiar with for your customer based or consumer based products. This is where you upload photos and then they automatically get tagged. We are bringing that same technology to the hand of the marketer. Every image that’s getting uploaded into Content Builder gets automatically tagged so they can find it later and use it when they’re building their messages.
Transactional Messaging
We’re also releasing Transactional API’s for Emails and SMS. There are different types of emails out there. There’s the commercial one and there’s the transactional one. It allows the marketer to bring both of those two in an inter-marketing cloud and take advantage of Marketing Cloud to send those emails to have the same voice, the same brand voice, and also be able to see how those are performing all in one place.
Indiana Pacers Improved Customer Engagements By 20 Percent
These features are all relatively new. So we have pilot customers that have been taking advantage of them. We have one retailer that talked about Einstein Engagement Frequency. They had a hunch that they were over messaging customers but they couldn’t really put their finger on it. With Einstein Engagement Frequency we could show them visually exactly where they’re over engaging with their customers and let them take action on it. The platform automatically created lists so that they would not send messages to the ones that are getting too many email messages.
We’ve had a set of AI features in Marketing Cloud, specifically Einstein Engagement Scores, was one that the NBA’s Indiana Pacers is taking advantage of, to increase the engagement rate that they’re having with their fans. They got a 20 percent increase in engagements with their fans using that.
Customer Engagement Getting Even More Granular
We have a jam-packed roadmap for the next of the rest of the year as well. One of the things that I’m really excited about is Content Selection that’s coming out. Content Selection lets each of those messages that we’re creating be dynamically optimized for every customer that’s receiving them. Think of your email as a template that has different aspects or different selections in it that gets automatically replaced with what your customer cares about most and also what they have engaged with most and historically. It’s very engaging for every one of your customers.
The other one that I’m interested in (that is coming later) is bringing natural language processing to understanding your subject lines. What types of subject lines are resonating? Why is it that they’re resonating with your customers? It will give you an insight on them first and then also give you recommendations on how to improve your subject lines.
https://youtu.be/oaH_OrquEcE
New AI-Powered Email Capabilities Released Into Salesforce Marketing Cloud
President Trump surprised Google Friday, saying the company was working on a coronavirus web portal. Now the company is scrambling to catch up.
During Friday’s briefing, wherein he declared a national emergency, Trump said that Google was working on a website to assist with coronavirus screening. The President even went so far as to say that some 1,700 Google engineers were hard at work on the project. There was only one problem: it wasn’t entirely true. Both President Trump, and White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Dr. Debbie Birx, had mixed up the facts and left out one very important one.
First and foremost, the company working on the site was Verily, Google’s sibling company. Like Google, Verily falls under parent company Alphabet, and is its life science company. Second, the website in question is nowhere near ready for prime time, and was only slated for initial testing in the Bay Area. In addition, according to a statement to The Verge, Verily said the website was aimed at helping healthcare professionals, not the general public as Trump indicated.
In the aftermath of the surprise announcement, however, it seems Google is shifting gears to try to deliver what Trump promised. The company made the announcement via its Google Communications (@Google_Comms) Twitter account:
”We are fully aligned and continue to work with the US Government to contain the spread of COVID-19, inform citizens, and protect the health of our communities.
“Google is partnering with the US Government in developing a nationwide website that includes information about COVID-19 symptoms, risk and testing information.
”This is in addition to other measures we are taking, including: a Google “home page promotion” to promote greater awareness of simple measures citizens can take to prevent the spread of the disease;
”Work being done by our sister company Verily to launch a pilot website that will enable individuals to do a risk assessment and be scheduled for testing at sites in the Bay Area;
”Promoting authoritative information through Google Search and YouTube; taking measures to protect users from misinformation, including phishing, conspiracy theories, malware and misinformation;
”Rolling out free access to our advanced Hangouts Meet video-conferencing capabilities to all G Suite and G Suite for Education customers globally until 7/01/20; advancing health research and science; and financially supporting global relief efforts.” – Google Spokesperson
While Google is to be commended for stepping up to the plate, even under confusing circumstances, the company will likely face additional challenges convincing individuals to trust it with their health data. Google recently found itself in hot water over its Project Nightingale, when it was discovered the company partnered with Ascension to collect medical data on millions of Americans without their knowledge. In the wake of that, there may not be many Americans that want to voluntarily give their medical data to the search giant.
Apple has just announced that its biggest event of the year, WWDC, will be online-only as a result of the coronavirus.
WWDC is Apple’s developers conference where the latest changes to iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS and watchOS are previewed, giving developers insight into what to expect in the coming year. It’s not uncommon for major hardware releases to make an appearance as well. In view of the coronavirus, however, this year’s event will be an online-only event.
“We are delivering WWDC 2020 this June in an innovative way to millions of developers around the world, bringing the entire developer community together with a new experience,” said Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “The current health situation has required that we create a new WWDC 2020 format that delivers a full program with an online keynote and sessions, offering a great learning experience for our entire developer community, all around the world. We will be sharing all of the details in the weeks ahead.”
“With all of the new products and technologies we’ve been working on, WWDC 2020 is going to be big,” said Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering. “I look forward to our developers getting their hands on the new code and interacting in entirely new ways with the Apple engineers building the technologies and frameworks that will shape the future across all Apple platforms.”
Apple is also committing $1 million to San Jose organizations to help compensate for revenue they would normally earn as a result of the venue bringing additional business to town.
DuckDuckGo is the preeminent privacy-oriented search engine and the company is taking it a step further by releasing a tool to help expose hidden tracking.
As the company points out, a quality tracking blocker is critical to online privacy. Without one, advertisers can amass a shocking amount of detail about web users, including location history, browsing history, shopping history and more. Combining the data they collect can even give them a pretty good idea of exactly how old a user is, their ethnicity, preferences and habits.
When the company started exploring possibilities, it was not happy with the state of current options.
“When we set out to add tracker protection, we found that existing lists of trackers were mostly manually curated, which meant they were often stale and never comprehensive,” reads the company’s announcement. “And, even worse, those lists sometimes break websites, which hinders mainstream adoption. So, over the last couple of years we built our own data set of trackers based on a crawling process that doesn’t have these drawbacks. We call it DuckDuckGo Tracker Radar. It is automatically generated, constantly updated, and continually tested.
“Today we’re proud to release DuckDuckGo Tracker Radar to the world, and are also open sourcing the code that generates it. This follows our recent release of our Smarter Encryption data and crawling code (that powers the upgraded website encryption component in our apps and extensions).
“Tracker Radar contains the most common cross-site trackers and includes detailed information about their tracking behavior, including prevalence, ownership, fingerprinting behavior, cookie behavior, privacy policy, rules for specific resources (with exceptions for site breakage), and performance data.”
Tracker Radar is included in DuckDuckGo’s Privacy Browser for iOS and Android, as well as the Privacy essentials browser extension for Safari, Firefox and Chrome on the desktop. Developers can also download Tracker Radar and include it in their own tools.
A security issue in a popular WordPress plugin has left some 100,000 websites vulnerable to being completely wiped.
Security firm WebARX discovered a flaw in the ThemeGrill Demo Importer plugin. The plugin imports other plugins developed by ThemeGrill. When WebARX first discovered the flaw, some 200,000 websites had the plugin installed, although that number has now dropped to 100,000. This is likely due to companies uninstalling the plugin to mitigate the risk.
To make matters worse, this vulnerability is being actively exploited. WebARX has already stopped over 16,000 attacks attempting to exploit the plugin.
“This is a serious vulnerability and can cause a significant amount of damage,” writes WebARX. “Since it requires no suspicious-looking payload just like our previous finding in InfiniteWP, it is not expected for any firewall to block this by default and a special rule needs to be created to block this vulnerability.”
ThemeGrill has updated the plugin to fix the vulnerability. All impacted sites would install the new version immediately.
Beginning August 5, 2020, Google Chrome will begin blocking some of the most intrusive video ads, according to a blog post.
According to the post, Google relies on the Better Ads Standards, developed by the Coalition for Better Ads. The group recently announced new standards, addressing some of the most intrusive types of video ads.
The first type is “long, non-skippable pre-roll ads or groups of ads longer than 31 seconds that appear before a video and that cannot be skipped within the first 5 seconds.”
The second type is “mid-roll ads of any duration that appear in the middle of a video, interrupting the user’s experience.”
The third type is “image or text ads that appear on top of a playing video and are in the middle 1/3 of the video player window or cover more than 20 percent of the video content.”
The Coalition has made it clear that website owners should stop showing these video ads within the next four months. As a result, effective August 5, 2020, Google will stop displaying these kinds of ads. Google also makes clear that YouTube will be reviewed to ensure compliance with the new guidelines.
This announcement is good news for anyone who has had to sit through these kind of ads, and Google is to be commended for quickly implementing the Coalition’s new guidelines.
“We started the rollout to all of the Walmart retail environments at the end of 2019 and so far so good,” says STRIVR CEO Derek Belch. “We’ve had almost a million Associates go through different training modules. Doug McMillon actually in their earnings report a month ago did reference employee training as being one of the reasons that their earnings are what they are. So it’s definitely something that we’re seeing have a very positive effect as it relates to placing employees in these simulation-based learning environments that virtual reality affords.”
Derek Belch, founder and CEO of STRIVR, discusses the success that enterprise companies such as Walmart, Verizon, and BMW are having with their virtual reality employee training technology in an interview on CNBC:
Walmart VR Training Positively Impacting Earnings
We started the rollout to all of the Walmart retail environments at the end of 2019 and so far so good. We’ve had almost a million Associates go through different training modules. Doug McMillon actually in their earnings report a month ago did reference employee training as being one of the reasons that their earnings are what they are. So it’s definitely something that we’re seeing have a very positive effect as it relates to placing employees in these simulation-based learning environments that virtual reality affords. It’s been really cool.
Walmart VR Training – Oculus x Walmart x STRIVR
We have about 30 customers in the Fortune 500 right now. It’s definitely crossing the chasm. We’re still on our way up here in the early adopters’ phase but we’re seeing this catch on. There’s definitely product-market fit for immersive learning as we call it. This is the real deal. This is very similar to pilots in a flight simulator. Historically, we’ve trained employees or we’ve assessed employees via PowerPoint’s, videos, and lectures. Candidly, we don’t know if people are half asleep or if they’re actually engaged.
Now with virtual reality, we’re able to put people through simulation-based learning, simulation-based training, simulation-based assessment, and it’s catching on. I think by this time next year if you’re not doing something (with VR training) you’re behind in the Fortune 500. We’re seeing that this is the real deal.
VR Technology Finding Its Legs As a Useful Tool In the Enterprise
At this point, we’ve talked to everybody. There isn’t a company in the Fortune 500 that we have not talked to in some way, shape, or form. We are not working with Amazon currently. We have talked to them on and off and we’ll see where that goes. To be honest, I’m not really worried about anyone doing this themselves. This is still the very early days of virtual reality. We work very closely with Oculus, which is owned by Facebook, they’re a great partner of ours.
We take a lot of pride at STRIVR and what we call the end-to-end solution which is basically, hey, in the early days while you’re an early adopter and the technology is certainly viable and ready it’s also really difficult to scale. So we do a lot of heavy lifting for our partners, Walmart being one of them along with Verizon and BMW. We just do a lot of work for them up front while the technology is finding its legs to get to the point where computers, iPads, and cell phones are right now as a useful tool in the enterprise. I’m not worried about anybody in the next 18 months or so doing this on their own but certainly, we’ll see as the ecosystem evolves where it goes from there.
STRIVR VR Technology Being Used by Verizon
As it relates to the viability of using this as a predictive tool, this is how the Walmart use case came about with using this for assessments. Were actually patent pending right now on what we call an engagement algorithm to see how engaged somebody is during a simulation. We tell our partners all the things we’re working on behind the scenes and Walmart said they wanted to test that out to see if this would be a good use case for them.
We Take Pride That Our VR Experiences Won’t Lead To Nausea
This (disorientation) is an issue for sure. That question always comes up in every demo. “Hey, am I going to get sick? Oh, I’m good, I don’t need to put it on. I got sick last time.” This is all about how the brain works and your equilibrium. If you’re sitting or you’re standing and you put on a headset and now you’re on a rollercoaster or you’re running through an active shooter game or something like that, yeah you’re going to get nauseous because your body is static but your brain thinks that it’s doing something else.
We take a lot of pride in making sure that the experiences we build along with some of the subtle things we do in the software aren’t going to lead to nausea.
Walmart, Verizon, BMW Having Success With Virtual Reality Training Technology – STRIVR CEO Derek Belch
“Mobile is coming to the enterprise, finally,” says ServiceNow CEO John Donahoe. “It’s been a long time coming. Our release in Q3 will have native out of the box consumer-grade mobile capability. So now any ServiceNow customer can have a brilliant mobile onboarding app so that their new employees can get up to speed quickly and seamlessly. We are very excited about the mobile capabilities coming in Q3, native out of the box so every one of our customers can build them in a low-code or no-code way.”
Our customers are very excited about mobile coming to the enterprise. It’s been a long time coming. Our release in Q3 will have native out of the box consumer-grade mobile capability. So now any ServiceNow customer can have a brilliant mobile onboarding app so that their new employees can get up to speed quickly and seamlessly. You can show a young new employee, a millennial, that you are in fact a modern company that helps get them onboard and productive quickly.
Also, the Now Mobile app which will allow employees to get their questions answered, problems reported and then dealt with, and get information. All my approvals are now in one place where I can check them. We are very excited about the mobile capabilities coming in Q3, native out of the box so every one of our customers can build them in a low-code or no-code way. Mobile is coming to the enterprise, finally.
We feel very good about our growth. We feel very good about our customer and very good about our prospects. We are just focusing and executing so our customers get those great experiences.
We Feel Very Good About the Relations We Are Building
We now have 766 customers that are a million dollars and greater. We signed 14 customers that are a million dollars and greater in the quarter. That’s just symptomatic of the fact that we now work with 75 percent of the global 500. We are increasingly a strategic partner with those customers. Of our top 20 deals, 17 had three or more products. We feel very good about the relationships that we are building with our largest customers, which are the world’s largest companies and governments.
Our relationship with Microsoft is a very good one. We are initially focusing on US federal business where Microsoft has a strong presence as do we. We have a huge federal business and our datacenters have a certain security clearance. Microsoft Azure has the highest security clearance. Rather than us trying to replicate that, we are going to partner with them to take advantage of that Azure capability and jointly call on US federal customers.
We are doing the same with federal customers in Australia and increasingly we will look at other government markets. We have 20 different product integrations with Microsoft and a long history with them. We think there is a lot of shared opportunity together.
RPO Is the Best Forward-Looking Indication of Our Business
We do think RPO is a very good indication and probably the best forward-looking indication of our business because it demonstrates what kind of revenue you can expect going forward. Our current RPO grew 35 percent in the quarter. We feel very good about the outlook and future of our business. We raised guidance for the full year, both on revenue and billings. We see a lot of opportunity and we have a lot of strong momentum. We are focused on building those customer relationships that drive that growth.
Mobile Is Finally Coming To the Enterprise, Says ServiceNow CEO John Donahoe
Once bitter rivals in the browser wars, Microsoft and Google are now cooperating like never before, with a major Chrome feature originating with Microsoft, according to The Verge.
Microsoft recently moved its Edge browser over to Chromium, the open-source rendering engine that serves as the basis for Chrome. Since the move, Microsoft has been responsible for some 1,900 changes and improvements to Chromium, according to CNET.
While many of these changes are under-the-hood, the latest is a very visible one. CNET says “the tab management feature in Edge lets you right-click on a single tab or a group of tabs you’ve selected then send them to a new or different Edge browser window. It’s useful if you like to group related tabs into a single window.”
The feature caught the eye of Google software engineer Leonard Grey and, as The Verge points out, “now Microsoft is helping bring it directly to Chromium and Chrome.” This is an excellent example of the overall benefit that comes from tech companies working together around open standards and open-source software.
Business Insider (BI) is reporting that Google Drive suffered an outage Monday that impacted Google Docs, Sheets and Slides.
Users started experiencing issues approximately 10:00 a.m. PST, and the issues appear to have been resolved by 10:46 a.m. Although there was no indication what caused the issue, Google says it has been addressed and they apologized for the inconvenience.
“The problem with Google Drive should be resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support. Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better,” Google said.
As BI points out, this is the second outage in less than a week.
