The Explorer 50 Bluetooth Headset from Plantronics averages 4 out of 5 stars from over 2,000 people (read reviews) on Amazon, where its typical list price of $25.48 has been reduced 29% to just $17.99. The Plantronics Explorer 50 Bluetooth headset reduces background noise, connects to two smartphones, streams your music and GPS directions, and has a power-saving DeepSleep mode. Up to 11 hours of talk time. It's designed to fit either ear, the earloop swivels and rotates for a stable fit. See the discounted Explorer 50 now on Amazon. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Law enforcement agencies arrested 34 suspects in 13 countries, including the U.K and the U.S., as part of a crackdown last week on DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks.The arrests targeted buyers of DDoS-for-hire services, which get paid to flood websites or internet-connected systems with traffic, forcing them to go offline.In addition to the 34 arrests, law enforcement agencies interviewed and warned another 101 individuals. Many of the suspects were under the age of 20, the European Union police agency Europol said in a Monday statement.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There are a lot of reasons why IT is so excited about SD-WAN solutions these days. Of course, the potential cost savings of being able to leverage broadband Internet connections securely and with high reliability are particularly compelling. But the true value of an SD-WAN encompasses many more benefits including agility, security and application Quality of Service (QoS).
As Zeus Kerravala accurately frames in his recent SD-WAN Makes An Excellent Segmentation Tool WANSpeak blog published on Sept. 27, “most SD-WAN solutions operate as an overlay to the underlying physical topology, which makes it ideal to extend the concept of segmentation out of the data center and across the WAN and into branch offices.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Every day we are reminded that we live in a digital age. We read the news on our smart phones. We read books on our Kindles. We do our banking online. Yet we’re still drowning in paper.
In 2016, humans created more than half a billion tons of paper, and U.S. offices use more than 12.1 trillion sheets of paper a year. It’s no wonder that more than a quarter of all landfill waste is paper. Not only is this an environmental tragedy, but it is also a monument to inefficiency because paper does not give enterprises the business intelligence and insight they need to succeed. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If your company’s digital transformation has stalled, gone off-track or hasn’t even started, it’s time to kick it into high gear. According to a Forrester Research report, “by 2020, every business will become either a digital predator or digital prey.” To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos, and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son are investors in a new clean energy technology venture firm launched Monday.Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a US$1 billion venture capital fund, will focus on "next generation technologies to provide reliable, affordable, zero-carbon energy, food, and products to the world," according to its website.Other investors include Virgin Group founder Richard Branson, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, Alibaba Group Executive Chairman Jack Ma, and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers Chairman John Doerr.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft Ventures has launched an artificial intelligence investment fund, signaling its parent company's growing focus on the emerging technology.The VC arm of Microsoft has also funded Element AI, an incubator to help organizations embrace an AI-first strategy, Nagraj Kashyap, corporate vice president of Microsoft Ventures, said Monday in a blog post."AI holds great promise to augment human capabilities and improve society by tackling some of the world’s biggest problems," Kashyap wrote. "We’ll make investments in startups that are responsibly harnessing the promise of AI to empower people and businesses."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Eighty-five percent of organizations believe they have the right controls in place to protect against such attacks. Yet, 40 percent of them have been victims of cyber attacks within the last six months.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Market research and advisory firm Ovum estimates the big data market will grow from $1.7 billion in 2016 to $9.4 billion by 2020. As the market grows, enterprise challenges are shifting, skills requirements are changing, and the vendor landscape is morphing. The coming year promises to be a busy one for big data pros. Here are some predictions from industry watchers and technology players.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
With previous anti-First Amendment statements by President-elect Donald Trump, there has been some worry by journalists that writing something the soon-to-be President doesn’t like may result in unpleasant consequences. Yet that is not the same thing as reporting “fake” news or spreading disinformation.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
December hasn’t been a good month for the smartwatch sector. Pebble, the remarkable Kickstarter-fueled smartwatch success story valued at $740 million as recently as last year, was sold off to Fitbit for just $40 million. IDC’s latest wearables report indicates that smartwatch sales have “tumbled.” And Gartner noted, once again, that almost a third of smartwatch purchases are not being used. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Virtual reality is emerging as a computing category just like PCs and mobile devices, and VR headset shipments are booming.As Sony's PlayStation VR beat out the more expensive HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, VR headset shipments totaled around 2 million this year, according to research firm Canalys. That is fast growth for a market that was in its infancy last year.Canalys' estimates mainly include head-mounted displays with screens. It excludes headsets without displays such as Google's Daydream View or Samsung's Gear VR, which are shells in which mobile devices need to be attached for VR. The shipment estimates also do not include devices like Lenovo's Phab 2 Pro mobile device, which offers blended reality directly on the screen of mobile devices.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Many of us cordially detest virtual LANs (VLANs). They require complicated configuration, and consequently they are error-prone. They do not offer fully satisfactory solutions for the problems they are employed to solve, primarily limiting broadcast traffic and segregating devices and their traffic for security purposes. But as the least-worst alternative, they are a fact of life in many networks.Recent developments in WLAN and data center networking offer opportunities to escape VLANs.In the enterprise Wi-Fi world, it has long been important to reduce broadcast traffic over the air, and WLAN vendors have been developing techniques along these lines for years. An early feature allowed an access point to act as an ARP proxy for its client devices, answering on their behalf. The success of proxy-ARP functions engendered intervention in other broadcast/multicast protocols to reduce unnecessary traffic and improve performance.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Surfers conduct scientific research while surfing. Seriously. And it’s a valuable contribution.Coastal communities are most affected by climate change. The problem is strong waves make it difficult to install sensors close to coastlines to monitor near-shore conditions. Surfers, however, flock to big waves. Is it possible to use surfers to cost-effectively gather near-shore data around the globe—to turn them into citizen scientists? Researchers in the Smartfin project say yes. Background of the Smartfin project
Smartfin is the brain child of Dr. Andrew Stern at The Lost Bird Project. It is engineered by Benjamin Thompson of BoardFormula. Surfrider Foundation provides logistical and outreach support for the distribution of fins to its network of surfers worldwide. And researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, one of the world’s leading institutions for oceanographic research, validate the scientific application of Smartfin in the surf zone.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
When President-elect Donald Trump takes office next month, one of the biggest items awaiting his Justice Department will be the antitrust review of the proposed $85 billion merger of AT&T and Time Warner, a deal that could have major ramifications for online video and TV distribution arrangements.Trump addressed the proposed acquisition when it was announced in October while on the campaign trail, saying in no uncertain terms that he opposed the deal on the grounds that the combined entity would hold too much market power. Many consumer advocates feel the same way.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
With the ubiquity of cloud technology and the availability of modern systems administration tools that allow anyone from developers to administrative assistants to procure and provision servers and services, it's tempting to think that the role of the system administrator, or sysadmin, is obsolete.The sysadmin role isn't dying off, however. It's simply evolving along with the rest of the technology industry and becoming less focused on hardware and infrastructure and more on services delivery -- a shift away from being seen as a cost center in an organization to an innovation engine. And that's great news for IT pros looking to further their careers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
When we first started evaluating SD-WANs, the market was pretty straightforward. You had a few appliance (virtual and hardware) providers, a service provider and that’s about it. Today, more than 30 vendors deliver some kind of SD-WAN.Mind boggling? A bit, but we can help. There are three categories of SD-WAN offerings today. You can buy SD-WAN equipment (and software) and do it yourself (DIY), subscribe to an over-the-top (OTT) SD-WAN service, or have your SD-WAN bundled with a carrier network, such as MPLS or Direct Internet Access (DIA). We’ll look at each one of them.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
You may have heard that it's not worth your time to look for a new job during the hectic holiday season. But according to Ford R. Myers, author of Get the Job You Want, Even When No One's Hiring, and president of the career consulting firm Career Potential, there are a number of ways to make the holiday season work for your job search.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
Robots are becoming more and more ubiquitous in our daily lives, but these seven bots stole the show in 2016.The Zenbo personal assistant robot can be a caretaker and entertainer. While Boston Dynamic's SpotMini will help you do the dishes, preserve the planet by recycling, and even bring you a coke. Got a pile of clean laundry? Laundroid will fold it for you...just make sure to give it a few hours to finish the job.
Feeling lonely on that long road trip? Kirobo Mini will chat with you, as long as your trip's shorter than 2 and a half hours. Amelia will show you the way at the airport and even take a selfie. And Sophia...wow she looks so human! As long as you disregard her giant see-through computer brain.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Machine learning is fast becoming the go-to predictive paradigm for data scientists and developers alike. Of the many tools available for tapping neural networks, Microsoft’s Azure ML Studio offers a quick learning curve that won’t take deep data or coding chops to get up and running.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)