Microsoft may finally have its Slack killer

Despite a varied portfolio of collaboration services, Microsoft is still struggling to field a strong competitor to enterprise group messaging apps like Slack and HipChat.It has SharePoint, Skype for Business and Yammer, but none of them is really a direct competitor to the slickly designed, GIF-stuffed and bot-laden crop of modern messaging applications. That may be about to change, according to a report from MSPoweruser on Tuesday. Microsoft is supposed to be working on Skype Teams, a new service with group chat capabilities that's a more direct competitor to Slack. The service, currently being tested internally at Microsoft, is supposed to let users chat both privately and in groups. It has a number of features now found in Skype, including video and voice calling.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

iPhone 7 launch may be accompanied by release of AirPods

With just one day before Apple’s iPhone 7 event takes place, the rumors surrounding Apple’s next-gen device are still rolling in. Now of course, it goes without saying that one of the more intriguing aspects of the iPhone 7 is that it will ship without a standard 3.5mm headphone jack. In its place, Apple will likely ship a pair of Lightning headphones along with a Lightning to 3.5mm headphone adapter.Having said that, there’s more to the iPhone 7 audio story than meets the eye. According to reports, Apple will take advantage of the iPhone 7's jack-less design in order to push sales of what will be completely new Bluetooth-based headphone product that will likely be dubbed “Airpods.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

45% off Epica Emergency Solar Hand Crank AM/FM/NOAA Digital Radio, Flashlight, Cell Phone Charger – Deal Alert

Are you ready for a hurricane situation or other emergency weather? Looking for the perfect camping radio that will last for years? Be the prepared one in your group with this no-hassle, sure-fire emergency radio and flashlight. Two minutes of cranking nets you at least 20 minutes of lights on or radio. With its compact design, 3-LED flashlight, and 5-way charging (hand crank, solar, USB, AC and DC), and retractable antennae, you'll never be left in the dark. The high-quality digital tuner (AM/FM/all 7 WeatherBand channels) lets you get all your news. Also, you can charge your cell with it. The rugged body and solar panels are water resistant and will stay strong between uses. The unit averages 4.5 out of 5 stars from over 800 people (read reviews). Its typical list price of $39.95 has been reduced to $21.95. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Azure August Roundup: New high-performance compute instances and more

August was a slow month for tech news, but Microsoft continued to update its Azure cloud platform with a variety of new features, including a new type of instance for high-performance computing. Here's the breakdown of all the features you need to know about:A new instance type powered by Nvidia Tesla GPUs Microsoft announced the private beta of a set of new compute instance types to power applications that need a lot of parallel processing. The new N-series virtual machines are powered by Nvidia's Tesla GPUs and built for high-performance computing.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Former Google Engineer Launches HappyGears.net

The NetSpyGlass software helps companies monitor thousands of devices.

What to do when the cloud eats your hardware vendor

In the first quarter of 2016 Amazon reported that revenue for its Web Services division grew 64% from the same period a year earlier. Salesforce.com reported a 33% increase in revenues compared to a year earlier.Meanwhile, global storage revenues declined 32% between 2007 and 2015 and server revenues dropped 13%, according to research firm Forrester. The trend is clear: Cloud revenues are up, on-premises hardware revenues are down.A new report from Forrester titled “Evolve or Crumble: Prepare for the fate of the hardware incumbents” details what these seismic shifts in the IT marketplace mean for enterprise end users as legacy vendors like EMC, Dell, HPE, Oracle and IBM that are being disrupted by the likes of cloud-focused vendors Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce and Google.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

LTE is hitting the field in the IoT game

To get small, low-power IoT devices online, it’s no longer necessary to saddle them with full-scale cellular radios. Independent players like Sigfox and Ingenu are expanding their specialized networks, and now a low-power version of LTE is coming to major operators.So-called LTE Category M1 is making a big splash at the CTIA Super Mobility show in Las Vegas this week. The biggest U.S. carriers just announced their plans for the new technology, with Verizon Wireless promising a commercial Cat M1 deployment by year's end and AT&T announcing a pilot in the San Francisco Bay Area starting in November.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

LTE is hitting the field in the IoT game

To get small, low-power IoT devices online, it’s no longer necessary to saddle them with full-scale cellular radios. Independent players like Sigfox and Ingenu are expanding their specialized networks, and now a low-power version of LTE is coming to major operators.So-called LTE Category M1 is making a big splash at the CTIA Super Mobility show in Las Vegas this week. The biggest U.S. carriers just announced their plans for the new technology, with Verizon Wireless promising a commercial Cat M1 deployment by year's end and AT&T announcing a pilot in the San Francisco Bay Area starting in November.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

AWS August Roundup: Now you can query streaming data with SQL

The dog days of summer are over, and it's time to get back to work. While you were out enjoying the sunshine and sipping margaritas, Amazon continued to update its cloud platform with new services like Kinesis Analytics, which lets users query streaming data with SQL. There were also a ton of updates to existing services, with the company's load balancer service moving up the stack, hourly billing coming to virtual desktops and support for customers bringing their own encryption keys for Amazon to manage. Here's the detailed breakdown:Kinesis Analytics is here to query streaming data with SQL Amazon launched a new product to help users process and gain insights from large amounts of streaming data as it's coming in, rather than waiting to process it when it hits a database. Kinesis Analytics lets users set up SQL queries to run on batches of data as it arrives in Amazon's cloud.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Lessons learned from WordPress attacks

I traveled from VMworld to the lab last Wednesday, and during that time, something infected two websites I control.I suspect the servers were used as part of a Syn Flood attack. The servers, both using WordPress, would come up and serve their web pages, but then they would quickly run out of cache by processes that were difficult to track.+ Also on Network World: Analyzing real WordPress hacking attempts +They initially made contact with some IPs located conveniently in Russia, then lots of syn traffic, and interesting session waits and listens. It took about two minutes before the sites cratered from resource drainage, and the errantly injected processes dominated then effectively cratered the servers from their intended use.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Lessons learned from WordPress attacks

I traveled from VMworld to the lab last Wednesday, and during that time, something infected two websites I control.I suspect the servers were used as part of a Syn Flood attack. The servers, both using WordPress, would come up and serve their web pages, but then they would quickly run out of cache by processes that were difficult to track.+ Also on Network World: Analyzing real WordPress hacking attempts +They initially made contact with some IPs located conveniently in Russia, then lots of syn traffic, and interesting session waits and listens. It took about two minutes before the sites cratered from resource drainage, and the errantly injected processes dominated then effectively cratered the servers from their intended use.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Can cybersecurity save the November elections?

The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s disclosure earlier this month that foreign hackers had infiltrated voter registration systems in Illinois and Arizona came as no surprise to some cybersecurity experts.“Given where cybercrime has gone, it’s not too surprising to think about how information risks might manifest themselves during the election season to cause some level of either potential disruption, change in voting, or even just political fodder to add the hype cycle,” says Malcolm Harkins, chief security and trust officer at network security firm Cylance.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

GE to pay $1.4B for two 3D printing companies to expand manufacturing

General Electric today announced plans to spend $1.4 billion to acquire two of the world's top suppliers of metal-based 3D printing manufacturing equipment, Arcam AB and SLM Solutions Group AG.Both companies will become part of GE's Aviation division, where the technology will be used to increase GE's production of aircraft components and other parts through additive manufacturing. SLM Solutions Group Turbine blades with internal conformal cooling channels to improve performance of jet engines printed by SLM Solutions using selective metal sintering. SLM can use a range of metal powders to print from non ferrous, tool steel, stainless steel and light alloys.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Enterprise IT pros see most workloads in cloud by 2018

Within two years, a majority of enterprises expect to be running their workloads in the cloud.After getting past considerable concerns about privacy and security, companies are increasingly placing their faith -- and their information and services -- in the cloud.The level of enterprise workloads in the cloud is expected to go from 41% today to 60% by mid-2018, according to technology research firm 451 Research, which surveyed more than 1,200 IT professionals worldwide in May and June. 451 then combined that information with separate interviews done with senior IT buyers and IT executives.The study also showed that 38% of enterprises said they have a cloud-first policy, which means they at least consider, if not prioritize, the cloud for all deployments.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: More huge tech acquisitions

The market for tech acquisitions is booming in 2016 as legacy technology companies shed old assets and consolidate, and companies in other industries scoop up tech assets at a historic pace. This comes despite 2015’s boom in overall M&A waning, the market for initial public offerings declining, and as data shows some tech “unicorns” may wait until at least 2017 to make their market debut. The tech industry appears to be an anomaly, with analysts expecting deal making to remain strong for the foreseeable future, despite near-term macro uncertainties such as the U.S. election. —Market Watch

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Big data is already a $46 billion market, but you ain’t seen nothin’ yet

Big data has been a big buzzword for more than a few years already, and it's got some solid numbers to back that up, including US$46 billion in 2016 revenues for vendors of related products and services. But the big data era is still just beginning to dawn, with the real growth yet to come.So suggests a new report from SNS Research, which predicts that by the end of 2020, companies will spend more than $72 billion on big data hardware, software, and professional services. While revenue is currently dominated by hardware sales and professional services, that promises to change: By the end of 2020, software revenue will exceed hardware investments by more than $7 billion, the researcher predicts.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft’s new kit makes gadget development with Raspberry Pi easier

If developing a cool gadget using the Raspberry Pi 3 seems like an insurmountable challenge, Microsoft's got your back.Microsoft's IoT Grove Kit has the ingredients needed to make the development of gadgets with Raspberry Pi boards much easier. The kit is a small collection of must-have components and connectors commonly used in making smart devices, drones, or robots.It doesn't come with the Raspberry Pi 3 board, which can be acquired separately for US$35.The kit is listed for $154.99 on the websites of online retailer Digi-Key and Seeed Studios, with which Microsoft co-developed the product. A shipment date wasn't immediately available.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

OpenOffice may be fading into the sunset

OpenOffice, the productivity suite viewed as an alternative to Microsoft Office developed as an open source project, is at serious risk of being closed down due to a lack of help. There have been only three updates since 2013, with the last coming in October 2015.The developers behind it have not only been slow to update the software, but they were slow to fix it. A major security flaw in July took a month to be patched, and while they were working on it, people with the project suggested switching to Microsoft Office or LibreOffice as temporary workarounds. An email entitled "What would OpenOffice retirement involve?" (and first noted by Ars Technica) was sent out last week by Dennis Hamilton, vice president of Apache OpenOffice, a volunteer position that reports to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) board.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Verizon Says Its 5G Specifications Won’t Lead To Fragmentation

Company says it is accelerating the 5G standard, not causing fragmentation.

Exascale Might Prove To Be More Than A Grand Challenge

The supercomputing industry is accustomed to 1,000X performance strides, and that is because people like to think in big round numbers and bold concepts. Every leap in performance is exciting not just because of the engineering challenges in bringing systems with kilo, mega, tera, peta, and exa scales into being, but because of the science that is enabled by such increasingly massive machines.

But every leap is getting a bit more difficult as imagination meets up with the constraints of budgets and the laws of physics. The exascale leap is proving to be particularly difficult, and not just because it …

Exascale Might Prove To Be More Than A Grand Challenge was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.