Top Android phones from 2016Image by Google, HTC, MotorolaToday, it is nearly impossible for smartphone manufacturers to build a bad phone. Component makers and the supply chain that serve the manufacturers have amazing momentum. It is the same momentum that drove PCs to market share leadership in the 1990s. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In 1991, Harvard Business Review article Computerless Computer Company by Andy Rappaport and Shmuel Halevi explained how Microsoft’s PCs overwhelmed Apple’s Macs. Most of the article’s wisdom would hold true today if applied to Google and Android’s domination of the iPhone.Since Steve Jobs orchestrated Apple’s turnaround in the late 1990s, Apple has recovered from the near-death experience when when Jobs returned and Microsoft loaned Apple $150 million. Apple is now one of the world’s richest companies in the world and is no longer in what the authors called a battle for long-term survival when they asked the question:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There’s no doubting Facebook’s commitment to open-source projects. The company has a portfolio of over 400 open-source projects with over a half million followers. A look at the top five projects gives a bird’s eye view of Facebook’s obsession with unifying and improving the effectiveness of its large internal developer community, automating the process of building software by continually deploying it, and operating at a scale matched by just a few other companies, such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft.The commit statistics below are a measure of the development activity of Facebook’s top five open-source projects that impact different parts of software development and execution. A commit is a revision or additional file usually containing software code that is saved to a GitHub repository. The commit is saved with a unique generated ID or hash and is time-stamped so that code contributions can be managed from creation through final release.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There are only two types of enterprises it seems. Enterprises who have paid cyber extortionists to recover data, and those that have not yet paid.The outlook is bad and getting worse
According to IBM Security’s report on Ransomware (pdf – sign in required):
“Almost one in two executives (46 percent) has some experience with ransomware attacks in the workplace, and 70 percent of that 46 percent have paid to get data back."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If fake news reports by the mainstream news media are true, all it takes to create fake news are some clever Romanian or Macedonian teenagers with malicious intent and a website—and shazam the fake news propagates throughout Facebook. The reality is SEO, backlinks, paid promotion and other content strategies play a key role.It is odd that mainstream news media would miss the most critical issue because after all, organic and paid promotion of internet traffic is what has put most of them on financial life support.How fake news starts
Promotion starts with a fake news site with a credible URL name, such as realtruenews.org, probably built with WordPress and themed to look like a real news site. The end goal is to get tens or hundreds of thousands of gullible people to share the stories onto Facebook. Gullible reporters help, too.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Today, on the opening day of the marquee AI conference Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference in Barcelona, Google announced in a blog post the release of its DeepMind Lab project available to the AI community under open source licensing terms.Artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR) are the next two computing platforms. DeepMind Lab is a 3D AI platform for building virtual games that bring these two platforms together in multiple dimensions. DeepMind Lab uses a special kind of AI, called machine learning (ML). And within the field of ML, it uses an advanced form of machine learning called deep reinforcement learning (DeepRL).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Facebook wants to grow the community of companies that understand and use artificial intelligence (AI) to accelerate progress in the field. Tech leaders Facebook, Google, Microsoft and IBM believe AI is the next platform that will follow mobile. During the announcement of Google Home last October, Google CEO Sundar Pichai described the AI platform shift, paraphrasing Facebook mobile-first tagline as an AI-first world.
Facebook publishes its AI and machine learning research, speaks at conferences and licenses its software under open source licenses to accelerate development and demystify AI. Today, in a blog post, Facebook released six short videos, narrated by Yann LeCun, head of Facebook's AI research group and machine learning pioneer, to introduce developers, data scientists and people interested in the most important AI topics.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
On Thanksgiving, families tried to ignore the elephant in the parlor: the presidential election. Thousands of how-to listicles were published about how a clash between loved ones’ political beliefs could be avoided. None mentioned virtual reality (VR), though they should have because it is a powerful and distracting form of entertainment.I brought the Google Pixel and Daydream View headset to Thanksgiving dinner. When the conversation was at the crossroads between boring and political, I changed the subject to VR amidst non-tech family members and friends who may have heard about VR but have never tried it. They were a perfect group to test how ordinary people would respond to VR.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Yesterday, President-elect Donald Trump announced the appointment of Jeff Eisenach and Mark Jamison to the agency landing team responsible for the Federal Communication Commission (FCC). Fortune called Eisenbach and Jamison staunch opponents of net neutrality, and Re/Code said these appointments may end net neutrality. In addition, Jamison asked, “Do we need the FCC?” in an October 2016 blog post.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Daydream mobile virtual reality experience proves critics who call VR a fad wrong. Google’s new platform will attract many new apps and experiences and create new business models.Daydream VR combined with the Pixel hardware’s powerful performance and thoughtful design of the headset will create a market of hundreds of millions of VR-capable phones. The Pixel is expensive, but the relentlessly declining price performance of mobile components will quickly bring affordability into alignment with consumers’ budgets.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Daydream mobile virtual reality experience proves critics who call VR a fad wrong. Google’s new platform will attract many new apps and experiences and create new business models.
Daydream VR combined with the Pixel hardware’s powerful performance and thoughtful design of the headset will create a market of hundreds of millions of VR-capable phones. The Pixel is expensive, but the relentlessly declining price performance of mobile components will quickly bring affordability into alignment with consumers’ budgets.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google just released a new self-contained version of Android Auto that runs on an Android smartphone without a specially equipped head unit. The term “head unit” is auto industry jargon for car stereo or infotainment system. Android Auto 2.0 locks the smartphone and changes the user interface (UI) controls to voice and large icons that the driver can interact within about the time that it takes to change a radio station. It is the safest way to drive and use a smartphone to because it reduces driver distraction.
In 2015, 2,357 more people died in traffic accidents due to distracted driving after a five-decade trend of declining fatalities, according to the Department of Transportation. Though everyone condemns texting, selecting playlists and checking Facebook Messenger while driving, most succumb to the temptation of smartphone notifications while driving and cannot resist looking at their smartphone screens—which for some, are fatally long looks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If you don’t run an order of magnitude test on your thoughts before they come out of your mouth, I am going to have to fire you. So ended an otherwise fantastic review with my boss who had earned a Ph.D. in physics from MIT. What she really meant was I should apply mathematical common sense to my ideas to check the feasibility before I discussed them. I immediately applied her criticism because I enjoyed working for someone as gifted as her and the world was amidst a recession. I never forgot her comment.The order of magnitude of the 650,000 Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin emails reported by The Wall Street Journal is not a big number. It is what 20-30 office workers deal with in a year. If someone made up the number 650,000 to make it appear an obstacle to quickly completing the investigation, they should have combed through it with an order-of-magnitude test.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The first version of a new mobile app is often like the first pancake. It tastes good, but looks less than perfect and gets pushed aside at the breakfast table. Launching a new app on the Play Store with its millions of apps and over a billion regular visitors can be like this for a new company with a new app.+ Also on Network World: How to break into Android development +
Compounding the problem is the average Play Store user is often less than tolerant of beta versions of software, quickly installing and removing the app and leaving little more than a record that the app with removed within a few seconds. And some leave bad feedback, dissuading more tolerant users from installing the software.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft just released the open-source licensed beta release of the Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit on Github. This announcement represents a shift in Microsoft’s customer focus from research to implementation. It is an update to the Computational Network Toolkit (CNTK). The toolkit is a supervised machine learning system in the same category of other open-source projects such as Tensorflow, Caffe and Torch.
Microsoft is one of the leading investors in and contributors to the open machine learning software and research community. A glance at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference reveals that there are just four major technology companies committed to moving the field of neural networks forward: Microsoft, Google, Facebook and IBM.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Stefanie Tellex, assistant professor of computer science at Brown University, is solving a thorny robotics problem: robotic grasp. She has built a machine learning model so that robots can automatically learn to manipulate objects and can produce much-needed sample data with which other researchers can use to train robots to pick up objects, she explained at the MIT Technology Review’s EmTech conference.
Video Credit: MIT Technology ReviewTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Stefanie Tellex, assistant professor of computer science at Brown University, is solving a thorny robotics problem: robotic grasp. She has built a machine learning model so that robots can automatically learn to manipulate objects and can produce much-needed sample data with which other researchers can use to train robots to pick up objects, she explained at the MIT Technology Review’s EmTech conference.
Video Credit: MIT Technology ReviewTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Hacked cameras, DVRs and other internet-connected consumer devices were conscripted by perpetrators who installed botnet malware, causing last Friday’s internet outages. The national media reported the event, but it failed to tell consumers what they need to know about buying those types of devices. For example, before making a purchase, consumers need to ask:
Does the manufacturer routinely update this device with security patches?
Can I change the default passwords when I install the device?
The national media could have talked to someone who has first-hand experience with this type of attack, such as Brian Krebs, former Washington Post journalist and now one of the leading security industry bloggers, who would have repeated what he posted on Friday:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Hacked cameras, DVRs and other internet-connected consumer devices were conscripted by perpetrators who installed botnet malware, causing last Friday’s internet outages. The national media reported the event, but it failed to tell consumers what they need to know about buying those types of devices. For example, before making a purchase, consumers need to ask:
Does the manufacturer routinely update this device with security patches?
Can I change the default passwords when I install the device?
The national media could have talked to someone who has first-hand experience with this type of attack, such as Brian Krebs, former Washington Post journalist and now one of the leading security industry bloggers, who would have repeated what he posted on Friday:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Distrust in the U.S. voting process and the presidential election has reached an all-time high, with many concerned their ballots won’t be counted. Voters can rest easy, though, when it comes to voting technology. Ballot errors are almost non-existent, said the CEO of voting system builder Clear Ballot.+ Also on Network World: Hacking the Election: Myths & Realities +
Clear Ballot, a venture-backed company in Boston, builds an end-to-end voting system that includes precinct voting, accessible voting to serve disabled voters, central tabulation, consolidation and reporting, and an election management system, all using commodity off-the-shelf hardware. Most voting systems are built using proprietary hardware and software platforms. Because the voting system relies on commodity hardware, acquiring and setting up a ballot verification system is straightforward.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Steven Max Patterson