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  • Make School – This Revolutionary Tech College is Free Until You Get a Job

    Make School – This Revolutionary Tech College is Free Until You Get a Job

    A revolutionary new tech college, Make School, is offering students the option of free tuition and $1,500 a month living expenses on the condition that they sign an Income Share Agreement. Under the ISA students will pay for their tuition only after they are hired. This business model creates a culture where the school has a vested interest in the student succeeding in the real world as quickly as possible.

    Since this is a business and not a charity, there is a huge potential upside for Make School if the student does well. Under the ISA the student agrees to pay back as much as 20% of their gross salary for up to five years.

    Income Share Agreement (2018)

    Jeremy Rossmann, co-founder of Make School, discussed the institutions’ unique student success focused business model on Fox Business:

    School Transfers Risk Away From Student to Make School

    A lot of it is about transferring the risk away from the student into us to hold the institution accountable. It’s the right thing to do and it’s really good for our culture. It keeps us focused on student success and making sure that students are getting the careers they want after graduation.

    We monetize it because our students are successful. We do a great job of preparing them for hiring in careers in tech and they go on to work in jobs that pay them good salaries and they pay us back. We had a student just this week get a job offer from Google actually.

    Companies Across Sectors Are Hiring Software Engineers

    We’re seeing hiring with the usual suspects of course; Facebook, Google, Apple, Tesla. They’ve hired out of our program. A lot of medium and small startups have as well. The common trend that we are seeing is that all companies are becoming tech companies. Companies need to have a digital presence. They need to have digital products to accompany offerings.

    Companies across sectors are hiring software engineers. Those software engineers are being sought after to create products that are ultimately the kind of products that we are training our students to build. That’s the kind of jobs we are filling and we are seeing a huge shortage of in that area and a lot of appetite for our graduates.

    Our Business Model Can Absolutely Work

    I think it is a business model that can absolutely work. We are not charitably funded. We are privately funded. If you do it right and your institution is delivering on the promise that it has made then this is both good for the student and offsets a lot of the risk that they are taking in traditional colleges and it’s good for the school.

    The school can actually be sustainable with this model. We’ve seen that play out as the students have gotten employed. I don’t think it has to be a charitable model. It absolutely can be done with a good return on investment for both the school and the student and the investors.


  • BeyondCorp – Google’s New Zero Trust Security Approach Explained

    BeyondCorp – Google’s New Zero Trust Security Approach Explained

    If you are a network person you have probably heard of BeyondCorp, but maybe you have had difficulty explaining it to others in your organization. Fortunately, Google’s Max Saltonstall does it for you in his latest video. Saltonstall says that Google has shifted to a security model without an inside or an outside, where each access request is reevaluated as it is made.

    Max Saltonstall, Google Cloud Developer Advocate, explains what BeyondCorp is in a new video posted by Google Cloud Platform:

    Most Companies Look at Security as a Binary

    Most companies look at security as a binary, with the good folks on the inside and the bad folks kept outside. Security teams install various firewalls and VPN tools to create a strong perimeter. They are always looking for taller thicker walls to respond to the last type of attack or compromise. But this model breaks down as soon as things get more complicated.

    Employees have to work outside. Contractors need access to just one or two internal systems, not all of them. Mobile devices aren’t compatible with your VPN client and attackers are sneaking into your network on previously trusted devices, hiding inside like a Trojan horse. We’ve seen the reinforced perimeter model break down in many ways exposing the highly vulnerable interior.

    We Shifted to a Model Without an Inside or an Outside

    At Google, we shifted to a model without an inside or an outside. We reevaluate the trust of each request as it is made and test to see if we should grant access. All access to company resources gets decided based on the context of the request. Who is it and should they see this thing? What device are they on and do I consider that safe? If the identity plus device plus access policy all check out, then they get in. If not, it’s an express bus to 403 town. Permission denied.

    All access to company resources gets decided based on the context of the request.

    In this model, there’s no trust inherent to any network or location. We don’t care if you’re sitting at home at a coffee shop or at the office, you get exactly the same level of access. It’s easy to start down this path on Google Cloud Platform with Identity-Aware Proxy. All you need is an app that’s using Compute Engine, App Engine or Kubernetes plus Google identities for your employees and you can start securing your apps with identity control.


  • Oculus Exec Yelena Rachitzky Talks About How VR Can Move Beyond Gaming

    Oculus Exec Yelena Rachitzky Talks About How VR Can Move Beyond Gaming

    Most virtual reality products are aimed at gamers because there is an automatically understood natural fit. Can VR move beyond gaming? Oculus executive produce of experiences at Oculus offers her insights.

    Yelena Rachitsky, Executive Producer, Experiences at Oculus, a virtual reality technology company owned by Facebook, was recently interviewed by TechCrunch writer Lucus Matney:

    It’s Not Just About Content, Technology is Making it Easier

    We’re focusing a lot more on more highly interactive content and marrying concepts that were understanding from gaming into more narrative approaches. Instead of shooters and strategy, how do we use these mechanics of understanding on how our body works, natural intuitive mechanics to create pieces that people actually want to come back to, pieces people actually enjoy and don’t feel like they are playing a game necessarily.

    So we’re marrying that knowledge also with the form factors, I think a few people have mentioned Quest which is something we’re super excited about, so it’s not just the content it’s also the technology that’s coming and making it easier.

    Technology is Also Working to Make Things More Intuitive

    A lot of technology is also working just to make things much more intuitive. It’s a combination of how we’re approaching content being more compelling, more intuitive, more interactive, more emotional, with the form factors in the hardware. The thing I’m really interested in is how we approach experiences that have very more natural intuitive interactions versus a lot of button pressing.

    I gave this talk at Oculus Connect recently about embodiment and what makes us feel like something’s ours when they connect with an object and there’s this reality, our Facebook Reality Labs research talks about something called object believability, and we really believe that we’re picking up an object if it’s something that we recognize that we’ve done in the real world.

    The Hard Part of VR is That We Are Holding Controllers

    The hard part about VR is that we’re actually holding controllers in our hands. So how do you make your brain believe that you’re actually picking up those objects? People have approached this in different ways. With  Job Simulator (by Oculus) you have big hands that you press with really really big buttons. There’s something very rewarding about that. Then there’s a game that the studios’ team did called Lone Echo which they put a lot of effort into how the hands formed themselves around objects because if you’re seeing your hands actually shift in the way that they should in real life your brain believes that and it becomes super rewarding.

    With a lot of the projects we’re creating we’re still experimenting, we still don’t know a lot of this stuff, but we’re going all the way from fully interactive to still slightly linear. There’s not a magic formula to it, everything’s just about the intent that you want to create and then all the tools that you use for VR that push forward that intent.

  • SAP CEO: We Are the Fastest Growing Business Software Company in the World

    SAP CEO: We Are the Fastest Growing Business Software Company in the World

    “We grew 41 percent in the cloud and SAP has now become the fastest growing enterprise application software company in the world,” said SAP CEO Bill McDermott in an interview on CNBC. “For business software, we are the fastest growing company in the world. It’s amazing how fast the growth is in the cloud.”

    Bill McDermott, SAP CEO:

    Our cloud business is growing faster than anyone else’s, but we are also partnering. If you look at Microsoft and the Azure Cloud, of which Microsoft has been a great partner of ours for four decades now. If you look at AWS with Amazon or if you look at the Google Cloud platform or if you look at Alibaba in China, we have partnerships with all of these hyperscalers.

    It’s All About an Open Initiative For Customers

    Our reference architecture, our software, can also run in there cloud which gives us another set of distribution channels around the world to expand our market-leading software. They’re all going to grow fast and we’re going to grow fast.

    It’s all about an open initiative for customers. Customers really need to manage their business in real time and the cloud is a great way to do it. It’s lower cost, faster innovation, easier to consume, it’s a winning formula.

    Bill McDermott On the Economy

    It’s really amazing. I’ve been obviously all over the world and if you go to China right now, things for us and all solution oriented tech companies are very strong. The Asian region is outstanding.

    John Kerry and I hosted a meeting in Bankok and we met with 35 CEOs that simply could not possibly be more positive about the economic scenario.

    Shortly thereafter, I was in Israel with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Chancellor Angela Merkel talking about Industry 4.0, venture capital, and tech investment. Yesterday, in Canada with Prime Minister Trudeau where there is a huge AI opportunity with great young people highly skilled in AI. Everyplace you go there’s nothing but optimism.

    McDermott tweeted:

    “Thank you Prime Minister @JustinTrudeau for your statesmanship and leadership. SAP is strongly committed to a bright future in Canada. We have outstanding customers and colleagues!”

    Trade Tensions Have No Impact on the Tech Industry

    The trade tensions are something that is obviously concerning, business people don’t like uncertainty, but in terms of the real impact of the business volume, new orders, global pipeline, I don’t see any impact at this stage for the tech industry.

  • Intel Study Predicts What Technology Will Look Like in 50 Years

    Intel Study Predicts What Technology Will Look Like in 50 Years

    Intel recently released the Intel Next 50 Study which surveyed people on what they think technology will look like in the next 50 years. David Shaw, in Developer Relations at Intel and is part of the Intel Delta Force team explains:

    What do you think technology will look like in the next 50 years? Maybe we’ll all be driving flying cars. Maybe there’ll be sentient robots. Okay, That might sound a little bit out there, but Intel recently conducted a study to find out what people are most excited about regarding the future of technology.

    Intel’s Next 50 project aims to help researchers understand current attitudes towards technology and its role in day-to-day activities. It tries to paint a cohesive picture of what people think about technology and to identify key areas of excitement and concern.

    For starters, over 80 percent of people believe that smartphones NPCs will continue to be important in 50 years:

    But we can’t agree on everything. People are split on whether technology will bring them closer together or further apart from friends and family:

    People also have mixed views of artificial intelligence. Over one-third of those surveyed don’t believe they use AI today. This might sound a little uncertain but research has shown that there’s still a great deal of excitement around the future:

    According to the study, people express the most excitement towards familiar established technologies like computers and smartphones. The excitement even carried over to things like smart homes of which AI is a key building block:

    In particular, parents tend to be more excited about AI research which shows that this group is more likely than consumers overall to look to AI to increase their quality of life by automating everyday tasks:

    It doesn’t stop there either. Interestingly, they are also more trustful of artificial intelligence devices and according to the study tend to look forward to technologies predicting their needs:

    The study gives good insight into how people feel towards technology and it might give you the lead on what to create next, with Intel technology, of course. 

  • Marriott Using Salesforce Einstein to Reinvent the Hotel Experience

    Marriott Using Salesforce Einstein to Reinvent the Hotel Experience

    Salesforce Co-founder & CEO Marc Benioff announced at the Dreamforce conference a new partnership with Marriott that is going to bring the power of artificial intelligence into the hotel room via a phone app. This new Marriott app will connect directly with a Salesforce Einstein powered customer database that knows the customer’s preferences and will be accessible via Siri and other voice recognition platforms.

    Marc Benioff provided some interesting details of the Marriott and Apple partnership and in a discussion with CNBC’s Jim Cramer at the Dreamforce conference:

    Marriott Using Salesforce Technology to Reinvent the Hotel Experience

    Every company has to rethink who they are in the fourth industrial revolution. This includes Marriott, that’s why Arne Sorenson is here, the CEO of Marriott, and you are going to see in the keynote a whole new vision for the future of Marriott. All the technology, everything they need to do to connect with their customer in a whole new way via Salesforce.

    That includes the ability to check into a Marriott with your digital key right on your phone, and then the ability to talk to Siri and order your favorite sandwich. In the Salesforce customer database, we will know you want a turkey sandwich and we are going to bring it to your room. Then if you tell Siri to lower the lights and put the room temperature to 67 degrees the lights go down and the temperature adjusts.

    Salesforce Einstein Radically Empowering the Customer

    How does it know, where does it get all the data, how does it have the customer background, it comes from Salesforce, we’re the backend. This is what the conference is about, helping these incredible people, our trailblazers, know how to build these systems. We had to build something amazing first. This isn’t voice recognition that we did. We had to build something called Salesforce Einstein, the number one artificial intelligence platform in enterprise applications. We now are doing billions of Einstein transactions every day giving the ability for our customers to radically use artificial intelligence to make them more productive and smarter about their customers.

    We are connecting Einstein to Siri or Einstein to any other voice platform, then we take that voice recognition and we are able to move it to the database. Don’t forget, when I say I want my favorite sandwich, Siri knows what I’m saying with my voice, but then we have to take that and retrieve it or insert into the customer database. That’s the magic, that’s Einstein Voice, it is the glue, the middleware that links all the voice systems that you are using in your home and your phone with the number one CRM in the world Salesforce.

    Marc Benioff Say the Economy is Ripping

    The economy is ripping. There is incredible demand from customers to rebuild their systems, they’re benefitting from the tax breaks, they are benefitting from a huge economy that is growing at rates they’ve never seen before. Even here in San Francisco, our unemployment now is below 3 percent. That’s amazing!

  • Twilio’s Unique Platform Business Model Drives It’s Success

    Twilio’s Unique Platform Business Model Drives It’s Success

    Twilio’s success is driven by its unique platform business model where its products are provided to developers based on usage. Companies only pay for what they use with no contracts required and they billed based on whatever is the fundamental value driver of the product they are using.

    Recently, Jeff Lawson, Twilio CEO, discussed their innovative products and business strategy on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street“:

    Why is Twilio a Successful Business?

    It’s really the continued success of our platform business model. Platform developers can use Twilio to solve a wide variety of problems inside of their companies and how their company communicates with their customers. Whether that’s voice phone calls in a contact center or that’s text message alerts, even real-time video communications and things like Facebook Messenger, you can incorporate all those things using Twilio.

    It’s the broad breadth of things that developers can build on top of Twilio coupled with our usage-based pricing model which really aligns our success with our customers’ success, so we get paid when our customers use Twilio more and build things on top of our platform. The combination of the breadth of things you can build as well as the alignment we have with their customers, that’s the platform business model that has worked so well.

    Every Company is Getting Reinvented Because of the Power of Software

    Uber is one of our largest customers, they represent about four percent of our revenue today, but we have many different companies on our platform. Whether it’s Lyft and other rideshare companies as well as everything from Silicon Valley tech companies to Fortune 500 companies including major banks and insurance companies.

    In fact, one of the customers we noted at our Q2 call was U-Haul which is not a company you typically think of as a software company. Every company is getting reinvented because of the power of software. Every company realizes that they too are a digital company now and if your business is U-Haul you have to reinvent yourself with software and when they do the software developers who work at those companies bring Twilio in.

    Customer Engagement is the Lifeblood of Every Company

    I think that every company regardless of what they do is always investing in their own growth and their customer relationships. So when you think about customer engagement, how a company talks to its customers, that’s a source of growth for every company. That is the lifeblood of every single company.

    How you engage with your customers and what they think of those interactions, that is the brand perception and that is the reality of the product delivery.  

    The Platform Business Model is a Unique Business

    We think that our business model, the platform business model, is a unique business. It’s not software as a service, it’s got a lot of different attributes, it’s not traditional on-premise software, it is a new kind of software company. Because of that usage-based model we can sustain a nice expansion rate and nice growth rate.

    How Are the Services Measured?

    Things like phone calls and text messages and video sessions are measured in gigabytes and our new contact center Twilio Flex is measured in the amount of time the agents spend using it. Each one of our products we break down into the fundamental value driver for our customers and we bill for that and what that does is it aligns our customers’ success with our success very nicely.

  • How Adobe is Using AI to Transform the Customer Experience

    How Adobe is Using AI to Transform the Customer Experience

    Adobe has now integrated their artificial intelligence platform Adobe Sensei into Photoshop and most of their creative products. “Adobe Sensei is an AI and machine learning platform that deeply understands how our users work and delivers a lot of simple workflow that makes that magical moment happens in any of our applications,” noted Abhay Parasnis, CTO & EVP at Adobe. “What makes Sensei so unique is that Adobe is the only company in the industry that can marry art of content and creative expression and science of delight on a massive scale.”

    “The key areas we focus on are content intelligence, computational creativity, and the experience which is related to understanding events related to how content is delivered,” commented Scott Prevost, VP Engineering of Adobe Sensei and Search in an Adobe explanation of the product.

    “If I can go all the way from how I create content in the creative tool and then have the ability to personalize it at scale to Adobe Experience Cloud, then have the ability to measure it through analytics and feed the measurement back into the creative workflow, saying these designs work better, that actually is the holy grail in what customers tell us they want,” says Parasnis.

    Shantanu Narayen, Adobe CEO, recently commented on CNBC about how this is helping to improve the Adobe customer experience:

    On the creativity side, everybody fears the blank page, so if AI can start to infer what people want to do in terms of using either Photoshop or one of our creative products and when you can speak to the computer and it understands and infers what you want to do and makes our products and tools more accessible, that’s a huge win. Then you can attract a tremendous amount of customers.

    At the other end of the spectrum, when you have millions of customers hitting your website, the AI that we have on the Digital Experience Cloud being able to infer intelligence from the trillions of transactions and ensure that you get the right offer that was meant for you in real time, that’s something that humans cannot do.

    Those are two really good examples at different ends of the spectrum of how AI enables our customers to do more with our technology.

  • 4 Strategies for Enterprise Content Management Success

    4 Strategies for Enterprise Content Management Success

    At the recent Enterprise World 2018 Conference, Stephen Ludlow, VP of Product Marketing at OpenText, spoke about the 4 strategies for content management success. He emphasized that there is actually a shift to content services from Enterprise Content Management. This is because ECM was mostly looked at as the lead application and content services represents a shift to consumable services that can be embedded into business processes and business applications.

    1. Differentiate “ECM: Use-Cases

    “The basics of ECM involving managing large amounts of structured and unstructured information is really differentiating itself into two significant work and use cases,” notes Ludlow. He said that the first one he would consider is the digital workplace, all the tools to make end users more productive in their day to day work, in particular around ad-hoc collaboration and communication. The other side of that is all the things around the digital business in order to make your business process more productive. That’s typically where we see content services being used to extend into business processes and business applications.

    2. Amazing User Experience

    “We think we need to provide an amazing user experience in order to drive user satisfaction, but also to drive efficiency for the end user and by doing so drive adoption of content services,” says Michael Sybala, VP of Product Engineering and Product Management at OpenText.” This is an area that OpenText has excelled at in my experience.

    3. Workspaces Instead of Taxonomies

    “If you ask me the taxonomy organizations that have deployed have ruined more ECM projects in the world than anything else I know of,” said Ludlow. “How many people have dealt with an enormous set of folders that have been created to try and organize permissions, to create and organize metadata and try and organize information? Everybody’s been through that sort of scenario.” He says that unfortunately this typically models the business rather than the business processes. for success Ludlow recommends that you use a workspace instead of a taxonomy to organize your information. “Using a workspace approach will make your users more effective,” notes Ludlow.

    4. Extend Content Services and Ux Into Business Applications

    “The concept of workspace is fundamental to build the integrations, we call it the extensions, into leading business applications,” says Sybala. “In large part that’s actually the secret sauce of our (OpenText’s) success over the last couple of years. It’s centered around how do we integrate into leading applications in order to serve those leading applications and the processes which are driven by them.” Applications may be in finance, procurement, HR, etc., but the key is to embed content management natively into the process so that the employee, partner or even customer can work seamlessly, possibly not even noticing that they are task jumping from platform to platform.

  • Envato Expands into North America with Placeit Acquisition

    Envato Expands into North America with Placeit Acquisition

    Envato has grown its presence in North America, with the acquisition of one of the web’s fastest-growing digital mockup and templates tools, Placeit.

    Purchased for an undisclosed amount, the Mexico-based company adds to Envato’s globally renowned creative community, providing a series of responsive mockups, smart design templates and maker tools for designers of all skill levels.

    Headquartered in Guadalajara, Mexico’s second-largest city and the country’s well regarded tech hub, Placeit has grown rapidly since its inception in 2012, with more than seven million templates sold and doubling in size in the last 12 months.

    The company’s most recently recorded Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) was over $3M USD. Envato’s current subscription business Envato Elements has an ARR of $21M, and grew over 100% in the last year.

    Placeit counts companies such as Google, Facebook and Oracle as among its more than 55,000 regular paying customers, with more than 87% of these customers coming from outside Mexico each month, reflecting the global footprint it has.

    The platform currently allows users with no previous design experience to make everything from on-trend logos and branding kits for everything from restaurants to sporting clubs, through to t-shirt design templates, social media videos, high-resolution iPhone and apparel mockups and more.

    Users can do all of this very simply from their browser, without the need to purchase and learn how to use specialist design and creative software.

    Envato founder and CEO Collis Ta’eed said that the acquisition of Placeit was an exciting one.

    “Placeit extends the Envato offering in a big way. We’ve made our mark in the world helping creative professionals get inspired, work faster, and level up what they do for clients.”“With Placeit we’re opening up Envato’s creative magic to absolutely anyone. Whether it’s an entrepreneur just getting started, a marketer working on their own, or just a pro user who doesn’t want the hassle of opening Photoshop – Placeit is just plain fun and simple to use.”

    “My ‘aha’ moment with Placeit was sitting down with my kids to make a logo for their basketball team. Watching a seven year old make something that I, as a professional designer, liked was pretty special, and really solidified to me what an opportunity Placeit has to connect with a whole different design audience. Seeing something come to life that simply was not possible before is why I love working in the tech industry.” concluded Mr Ta’eed.

    Placeit founder Navid Safabakhsh said he looking forward to the company becoming an integral part of Envato’s global creative community.

    “The origin story for Placeit is very similar to the one Envato has; we came up with an online, smart solution to a very particular set of problems that many digital creatives face around the world today, anchored by hard-working local tech talent.”

    “In building a series of easy-to-use and on-trend maker tools, we’ve seen first hand just how much we’ve been able to empower creatives of all skill levels around the globe to complete their projects faster, and with better outcomes. We think it’s a perfect match for Envato, one that builds on the strengths of both companies.”

    The upgraded Placeit by Envato platform officially went live last week.

  • Google’s Speech-to-Text API Gets a Big Overhaul That Could Benefit Businesses

    Google’s Speech-to-Text API Gets a Big Overhaul That Could Benefit Businesses

    Google has disclosed plans to improve its Cloud Speech-to-Text API using the same speech recognition technology that’s being utilized to power Google Assistant and Search. The updated API (formerly known as Cloud Speech API)  is predicted to enhance its voice recognition performance and reduce transcription mistakes by as much as 54 percent.

    The announcement came last week via Google’s blog post. The offered changes would let developers allow Internet of Things (IoT) devices to reply to users, power voice response systems for call centers, and transform text-based media into speech.

    The updates being made to the API by the Mountain View-based company could be a sign that the company is more determined to bring AI-powered tools to its systems.

    Big Improvements Made to the API

    Google has made a number of key improvements to the API. One of the main updates is how developers can choose between several machine learning models. There are currently four speech recognition models to choose from. These include models for short inquiries and voice commands, understanding audio from phone calls,  understanding audio from video and the default model.

    The company has also included a video model in the update. Apparently, this model has been upgraded to process sound from videos and/or audio from several speakers. The model utilizes machine learning that’s similar to what’s used in YouTube captioning. The new video model will reportedly reduce errors by as much as 64 percent.

    There’s also the “enhanced phone_call” model, one of the first opt-in programs for logging data. The model will utilize callers’ data to improve the system. Those who choose to participate in the program will receive access to the model.

    The updated Speech-to-Text API also rolled out a punctuation model. Google has admitted that transcriptions from the previous model were atrocious because of the unusual punctuation (or the lack of it). To be fair, punctuating transcribed audio is very challenging, but Google says that its new Speech-to-Text model will show transcriptions that are easier to read and understand. It will reportedly have fewer run-on sentences and more commas, question marks, and periods.

    The improved punctuation is due to a new LTM neural network which automatically suggests the punctuation marks to use in the text. The feature can be a big help when taking notes by voice or when doing conference calls.

    The Speech-to-Text update allows developers to tag the transcribed video or audio with optional recognition metadata. While it’s not clear how this will benefit developers at the moment, Google insists it will utilize the data it accumulated from users to determine what features it will prioritize.

    Google’s Speech-to-Text Geared Towards Business

    The improvements Google made to its Speech-to-Text API seems to indicate that the company wants to attract more business users. Its new phone call and video transcription models appear to be particularly geared for tasks like those carried out by call centers. The API can now support two to four speakers and takes into consideration background noises like hold music and line static.

    The API can also be used to transcribe video broadcasts of sporting events like basketball. Sports broadcasts involve the use of multiple speakers, like the hosts, player interviewers, advertisements, plus the cheers of the crowd, sound effects and other noises attributed to the game.

    In a blog post, Dan Aharon, Google’s Cloud AI product manager, pointed out that use of the Speech-to-Text API has been steadily increasing. He also pointed out that “Access to quality speech transcription technology opens up a world of possibilities for companies that want to connect with and learn from their users.”

    Google’s video and “enhanced phone_call” modes are now available for English transcription. Additional languages will soon be available as well.

    Audio transcripts will still cost about $0.006 per 15 seconds while the video model will cost around $0.012 per 15 seconds. However, companies can avail of a free trial period for the video model at $0.006 per 15 seconds that will run through May 31.

    [Featured image via Pixabay, article graphics via Google Cloud blog]

  • Google Cloud Introduces VPC Flow Logs, Allows Users to Collect Network Telemetry at Various Levels

    Google Cloud Introduces VPC Flow Logs, Allows Users to Collect Network Telemetry at Various Levels

    Last Thursday, Google introduced a new feature to its Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) users for tracking network operations between their servers in the Google Cloud. Called VPC Flow Logs, the tool logs and monitors all network flows sent from and received by the virtual machines (VM) inside a VPC in five-second intervals.

    The new feature is set to improve monitoring by Google Cloud Platform (GCP) admins and increase transparency in the VPC network, including traffic between Google Cloud regions. It is similar to Cisco’s NetFlow “but with additional features,” as explained in the company’s blog post.  

    According to Google,“It also allows you to collect network telemetry at various levels. You can choose to collect telemetry for a particular VPC network or subnet or drill down further to monitor a specific VM Instance or virtual interface.” 

    Aside from capturing telemetry data at each level, VPC Flow Logs can also track internal VPC traffic, flows between a VPC and on-premise deployments, flows between servers and any Internet endpoint, and exchange between servers and Google services.

    Users can then export the collected data to Stackdriver Logging or BigQuery if they opt to keep it on the Google Cloud server. They can also use Cloud Pub/Sub in exporting the logs to other real-time analytics or security platforms. Moreover, VPC Flow Logs has integrated with two leading logging and analytics platforms, Cisco Stealthwatch and Sumo Logic. The data updates every five seconds without any effect on the performance of deployed applications.

    VPC Flow Logs lets network operators gain more insight about the network, as well as debug and troubleshoot app-related issues. The tool allows them to optimize network usage with more available information about global traffic. It also allows GCP admins to perform network forensics in investigating suspicious behavior, such as traffic from unusual sources or substantial volumes of data migration.

    [Featured image via Google Cloud website]

  • Microsoft is Now Offering AI Certification Courses, Job-Ready Skills and Real-World Experience Included

    Microsoft is Now Offering AI Certification Courses, Job-Ready Skills and Real-World Experience Included

    Professionals wanting to polish their skills or add machine learning to their resume can now do so via the Microsoft Professional Program. Recognizing the need for companies to train their employees in the latest AI trends, the software giant is now offering a series of courses to the public that comes with “a digitally shareable, résumé-worthy credential.”

    The new program is called the Microsoft Professional Program for AI where, as promised by Microsoft, participants will get “job-ready skills and real-world experience.” The seminar is targeted to engineers who want to improve their data science and artificial intelligence skills.

    The online courses will be under the guidance of expert instructors as well as hands-on labs. The AI program consists of nine skills where each skill is estimated to take between eight and 16 hours for participants to complete. There is also a final project that each student must complete to pass the course.

    The program emphasizes hands-on learning where students are taught “how to work with data to build and train machine learning models that power interactive bots.” In addition, the series covers a variety of topics that are relevant in today’s workplace such as ethics in AI, using Python as the programming language for manipulating data and different types of machine learning models and how to create them.

    However, participants do not have to complete each segment in one go. Students can opt to complete each module within three months while the final project has a six-week deadline. Each segment or course is only offered four times in one year.

    Enrollees earn credit for finishing a course or segment. Should they require it, they can get Verified Certificates from edX.org.

    AI skills are becoming increasingly useful in today’s workplace. As explained by Microsoft  Research AI assistant director:

    “AI is increasingly important in how our products and services are designed and delivered and that is true for our customers as well. Fundamentally, we are all interested in developing talent that is able to build, understand and design systems that have AI as a central component.”

    For employees, getting AI certified is time well spent. With salaries for AI professionals going through the roof it should be considered a worthwhile investment in their future earning potential.

    [Featured image via Microsoft]

  • Google’s Mobile-First Search Indexing Goes Live

    Google’s Mobile-First Search Indexing Goes Live

    Google has announced the rollout of its mobile-first search indexing, after more than a year of testing and experimentation. The move was first detailed in 2016 when Google wanted to use phone-optimized versions of websites to index pages in its search results.

    The shift to mobile-first indexing comes from the rising trend of more people using mobile devices to browse and search the web. However, some sites have significantly different versions of content for desktop and mobile browsers, the latter often a watered-down copy of the former. “Mobile-first indexing means that we’ll use the mobile version of the page for indexing and ranking, to better help our – primarily mobile – users find what they’re looking for,” Google explained its blog.

    Google insisted that it will only use one index in displaying search results, but will prioritize mobile-friendly sites over desktop versions. It emphasized that the index only changed how content is gathered and not how it is ranked.

    Google also allayed fears that desktop content will be removed from the index, or that mobile sites not included in the initial wave would be at a disadvantage when compared to first joiners. And if a desktop site is more relevant to the search over mobile alternatives, it will be included in the results.

    The company will select sites that follow best practices for mobile-first indexing, notifying them via Search Console. Webmasters of these sites should notice increased visits from the Smartphone Googlebot. After the shift, the mobile version of sites will be shown in Google’s search results and cached pages.

    Google assured that it will continuously evaluate content in its index to determine how mobile-friendly sites are based on best practices. Moreover, it will still prefer mobile versions of sites over Google’s fast-loading AMP pages in indexing.

    The tech company has always pushed for mobile-optimized sites, boosting the rank of mobile-friendly pages on its search results in 2015. Last January, Google announced that page loading speed will also be a ranking factor for mobile searches and slow pages will be downranked starting July 2018.

    [Featured image via Pixabay]

  • Microsoft Edge Browser Will Soon be Available on Apple iPad

    Microsoft Edge Browser Will Soon be Available on Apple iPad

    Edge, Microsoft’s latest browser that replaced the venerable Internet Explorer, could be coming to iPad soon. According to reports, an iPad version of the browser is in the works and a beta is likely to happen by February.

    The Microsoft Edge browser was already available on Android devices and iPhones since last year. In fact, it is doing quite well on the iOS platform as one of its top 5 utility apps. However, what is notably missing, is the iPad support for the browser. But that gap is about to be remedied soon if reports are correct.

    In a Twitter post, Microsoft Edge product manager Sean Lyndersay revealed that an iPad version of the browser is now in the product testing stage. What’s even more exciting for iPad users is that a beta testing of the app, which anyone with iPad can participate in, will likely happen by February.

    “Shh, don’t tell anyone, but the iPad version is in internal testing and looking great,” Lyndersay wrote. “It’ll take a little longer to bake, so we’re going to roll out it to our TestFlight users early next month and get feedback from them before making it widely available. Thanks for using Edge!”

    Microsoft has been pretty aggressive in marketing the Edge browser. The company recently raised some eyebrows when it released ads early this year touting the superiority of the new browser over its rivals.

    “Microsoft Edge is up to 48 percent faster than Google Chrome,” Microsoft said in a recent 30-second ad highlighting its superiority over the Google Chrome browser in terms of speed. The ad then concluded that it is “the faster way to get things done on the web.”

    In another ad, Microsoft claimed superiority over Chrome in terms of browsing security. “Microsoft Edge blocks 18 percent more phishing sites than Google Chrome,” the ad claimed. It then concluded that using Edge is “the safer way to get things done on the web.”

    It is understandable why Window would specifically target Chrome in its marketing. Google’s browser remains the most popular browser to this day, owning an enviable 50 percent of the market.

    [Featured image via Pixabay]

  • Google Updates Its PageSpeed Insights Tool, Now Shows Real User Speed for Website Pages

    Google Updates Its PageSpeed Insights Tool, Now Shows Real User Speed for Website Pages

    Google announced on Wednesday that it had updated the PageSpeed Insights tool, enabling it to see just how fast a particular page performs in the real world. Sourced from the Chrome User Experience Report, the real-world data is now available via the enhanced PageSpeed tool. It offers developers better recommendations as they strive to optimize page performance.

    The loading speed of a page is a very important factor in clinching a deal. These days, everyone wants the page they are trying to view to load almost instantaneously. If it doesn’t, the prospective customer is not likely to wait for it to complete loading. After all, there are thousands of competitors out there eyeing the same potential customer. Simply put, a slow-loading page does not bode well for your sales conversion rate.

    As such, Google tweaked the PageSpeed tool to reveal what visitors to your site are actually experiencing. Via the tool, you will be able to see two metrics which is based on the Chrome User Experiencer Report. These are First Contentful Paint (FCP), which is the instance when visitors see a visual response from the page they are viewing, and DOM Content Loaded (DCL), which is the point when the viewed page has parsed and loaded.

    Google then rates your page as fast, slow or average based on the following rules:

    “Fast: The median value of the metric is in the fastest third of all page loads.

    Slow: The median value of the metric is in the slowest third of all page loads.

    Average: The median value of the metric is in the middle third of all page loads.”

    The new PageSpeed tool also comes with the Optimization Suggestions feature. This basically contains a list of best practices that may be applied to the page to increase its optimization score. If a page is already rated fast, the Optimization Suggestions is hidden, which means that the page has been optimized.

  • Apple Opening First iOS App Dev Center in Europe

    Apple Opening First iOS App Dev Center in Europe

    Apple announced that it will open its first European iOS app development center. It’s to be located at partner institution in Naples, Italy.

    The center gives where students can acquire skills and training pertaining to the development of iOS applications. It will support teachers and provide a specialized curriculum geared toward the growth of Apple’s developer ecosystem.

    Apple itself will work with partners throughout the country on curriculum development and additional student opportunities. Eventually, the company will expand the program to other countries.

    CEO Tim Cook said, “Europe is home to some of the most creative developers in the world and we’re thrilled to be helping the next generation of entrepreneurs in Italy get the skills they need for success. The phenomenal success of the App Store is one of the driving forces behind the more than 1.4 million jobs Apple has created in Europe and presents unlimited opportunities for people of all ages and businesses of all sizes across the continent.”

    “Thousands of companies are expanding because of their work with Apple, which supports hundreds of thousands of jobs in communities large and small across Europe,” Apple says. “Milan-based Laboratorio Elettrofisico makes some of the most sophisticated magnetization equipment in the world and their technology enables some of the industry-leading magnetic features found in Apple products. Apple also works with Europe’s leading manufacturers of Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems, which create tiny components that power some of the incredible sensor and audio technologies found in iOS devices.”

    Apple says the App Store has helped developers in Europe earn over €10.2 billion from selling their apps around the world. 75,000 jobs in Italy alone are attributable to the App Store, the company says.

    Image via Wikimedia Commons

  • Amazon: AWS SDK for Unity Now Part of SDK for .NET

    Amazon: AWS SDK for Unity Now Part of SDK for .NET

    Amazon announced that AWS SDK for Unity is now part of AWS SDK for .NET.

    Last year, the company announced the general availability of AWS SDK for Unity, but has since added support for other AWS services including Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), AWS Lambda, and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS).

    “The AWS SDK for Unity was created from a fork of the AWS SDK for .NET and supported only a subset of its features,” says Amazon’s Karthik Saligrama. “As the AWS SDK for Unity added support for more features, we realized that forking did not allow us to simultaneously release patches or new features on the AWS SDK for .NET and the AWS SDK for Unity. It was also difficult to accept pull requests from the open source community without diverging from the AWS SDK for .NET.”

    “Starting today, we are releasing to our github branch a preview version of the AWS SDK for .NET with Unity components,” Saligrama says. “Currently, the SDK can be built on Windows machines only. The branch contains test cases for all services supported on Unity, which can be run on Android, iOS, or on the Unity IDE.”

    Saligrama discusses changes made to ake the SDK easier to configure and use here. This includes AWSPrefab, releasing assemblies in the Unity package, releasing the source code under Apache license, and the SDK version being in sync with the AWS SDK for .NET version.

    Image via Amazon

  • Sundar Pichai Announces Google I/O 2016

    Sundar Pichai Announces Google I/O 2016

    Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced the dates and location for Google I/O 2016, which will take place May 18-20 at Shoreline Ampitheatre in Mountain View.

    That’s pretty much all the information Google has made available about the event so far. The Google I/O website has yet to be updated, and still shows content related to last year’s event.

    Apparently it will be an outdoor event.

    Screen Shot 2016-01-12 at 1.39.26 PM

    Image via Google

  • Twitter Gives Developers New ‘Playbook’

    Twitter Gives Developers New ‘Playbook’

    Twitter announced the launch of a new “playbook” for app developers with the first installment being published so far.

    The playbook includes what Twitter describes as a series of how-to guides that walk developers through the process of building an app.

    A spokesperson for the company tells WebProNews, “We know firsthand that it’s hard to build successful iOS and Android apps. We’ve built quite a few and we’ve learned a lot about how our partners build apps and tackle problems. At this year’s Flight conference, we showed off the power of some of the new features from Fabric with two apps that we created and open-sourced on GitHub: Cannonball, a magnetic poetry game, and Furni, a mobile-first furniture store.”

    “Based on our experience building Cannonball and Furni, we’ve organized what we’ve learned into a playbook,” the spokesperson adds. “Part one published today covers prototyping, design and stability, and a new guide will be published roughly every week.”

    You can check out the first entry of the series here.

    You can find a schedule of upcoming Twitter developer events here.

    Image via Twitter

  • Apple Has Paid Developers $40 Billion, Company Touts Role In Job Creation

    Apple Has Paid Developers $40 Billion, Company Touts Role In Job Creation

    Not that it will come as much of a surprise, but Apple announced that it had a record-breaking holiday season for its App Store.

    According to the company, in the two weeks ending January 3, customers spent over $1.1 billion on apps and in-app purchases. January 1 was the biggest day in App Store history. People spent over $144 million that day.

    “The App Store had a holiday season for the record books. We are excited that our customers downloaded and enjoyed so many incredible apps for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Apple TV, spending over $20 billion on the App Store last year alone,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “We’re grateful to all the developers who have created the most innovative and exciting apps in the world for our customers. We can’t wait for what’s to come in 2016.”

    In the announcement, the company also said it has now paid developers nearly $40 billion since 2008, adding that it continues to drive “incredible” job growth. Over a third of that money was paid in just the last year.

    “Largely as a result of the App Store’s success, Apple is now responsible for creating and supporting 1.9 million jobs in the U.S. alone,” Apple said. “Nearly three-quarters of those jobs — over 1.4 million — are attributable to the community of app creators, software engineers and entrepreneurs building apps for iOS, as well as non-IT jobs supported directly and indirectly through the app economy. Apple has previously reported that the iOS app economy has created 1.2 million jobs in Europe and 1.4 million jobs in China.”

    Gaming, Social Networking, and Entertainment were the most popular App Store categories in 2015.

    Image via Wikimedia Commons