IDG Contributor Network: Time for digital detox? Searching for Wi-Fi becomes normal vacation behavior

Almost a quarter (21 percent) of Americans would rather give up sex than lose Wi-Fi for a month, and 10 percent would give up a friend than forego wireless connectivity.Those are just two of the findings in a survey conducted by a travel agency that runs digital detox tours.Digital detox vacations are trips where social media, smartphone and camera use is banned by the tour organizers. The idea is that a more in-the-moment experience is obtained when devices aren’t used.Intrepid Travel, which has four detox vacation tours lined up for this upcoming winter season, says there’s a market for vacations free from technology. And to prove it, the company commissioned a study.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google is bringing Android apps to Chromebooks

Google's Play Store for Android will be coming to Chrome OS, the lightweight operating system that powers Chromebook laptops, the company announced Thursday.That means Chromebook users will be able to download and install apps made for Android onto their Chromebooks, expanding the base of applications available for those devices. Prevously, Chromebooks were able to run only applications built for Chrome.It's an important enhancement for Chrome OS, which Google has been touting as the perfect operating system for schools and businesses, but which is lacking applications compared to Android. By bringing the two together, Google will expand the utility of both Android apps and Chromebooks.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Kubernetes – the platform for running containers – is getting more enterprisey

Application containers are all the buzz nowadays. They’re an easy way to package applications and their dependencies into Linux container boxes and run them anywhere – public cloud, a private data center or a developer’s laptop.The problem comes when managing a whole lot of containers together.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Everything you need to know about Google I/O 2016 | Will containers kill the virtual machine? + There are a handful of platforms emerging for managing containers at scale. Docker – the company that is credited with generating much of the market buzz about containers – has its own tool called Swarm. Google – which has said that most of its internal apps run in containers – has open sourced its own container management platform named Kubernetes.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google doubles down on the enterprise at I/O

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Google this week made a concerted effort to highlight its growing presence in enterprise at its annual Google I/O developer conference. The company announced new development APIs for its Sheets, Slides and Classroom apps. It also unveiled a major update to its backend-as-a-service platform Firebase, a custom chipset for machine learning, and an API partner ecosystem with Salesforce, SAP and others.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google’s mobile productivity apps bury Microsoft’s

Two years after Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella cut the cord between his firm's biggest money makers -- Office and Windows -- by introducing mobile productivity apps for Apple's iPhones and iPads, the Redmond, Wash. company remains far behind rival Google in the category, a researcher said today.According to data provided to Computerworld by SurveyMonkey Intelligence, the monthly-active users of Google's mobile productivity apps in April vastly outnumbered those for Microsoft's Office."I was surprised that Google was dominating as much as it is," said Bonnie Yu, a product manager at SurveyMonkey. "I really expected Microsoft to be a better competitor."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Behind the scenes at Google I/O 2016

Google I/O 2016 kicks off in styleImage by Matt KapkoGoogle this week held its annual developer conference right next door to its headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., at the massive, storied Shoreline Amphitheatre. More than 6,500 people attended the outdoor keynote address, which felt a bit like an early morning rave, complete with thundering bass, trippy imagery and ambient sound.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Who’s in your store right now? SAP’s new data service can tell you

Marketers can tap virtually limitless volumes of data about customers' online activities, but the offline world isn't nearly as forthcoming. That's where SAP aims to help.The company on Thursday unveiled a new service that offers demographic data in near real time about the people currently inside a store or at a particular venue or event. Called SAP Digital Consumer Insight, the service taps consumers' mobile data to deliver details on where they're coming from, their age groups and gender, and the devices they're using. Marketers can also benchmark one store location against another, compare two potential new locations, or see how well their marketing efforts stack up against the competition.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google: Hangouts won’t go away despite the launch of new messaging apps

Hangouts may not be a dead app walking after all.It sure seemed like the social app’s days were numbered after Google’s splashy rollout of Allo and Duo, its new fancy, AI-driven messaging and video chat apps. But a Google spokesperson confirmed an earlier report that Hangouts is staying put in the company’s portfolio of mobile and desktop apps.“Hangouts will remain a standalone product,” the spokesperson told Greenbot.+ ALSO: See what has gone on at Google I/O 2016 +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google Takes Unconventional Route with Homegrown Machine Learning Chips

At the tail end of Google’s keynote speech at its developer conference Wednesday, Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO mentioned that Google had built its own chip for machine learning jobs that it calls a Tensor Processing Unit, or TPU.

The boast was that the TPU offered “an order of magnitude” improvement in the performance per watt for machine learning. Any company building a custom chip for a dedicated workload is worth noting, because building a new processor is a multimillion-dollar effort when you consider hiring a design team, the cost of getting a chip to production and building the hardware and

Google Takes Unconventional Route with Homegrown Machine Learning Chips was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Cisco patches high severity flaws in its Web Security Appliance

Cisco Systems has fixed four denial-of-service vulnerabilities that attackers could exploit to cause Web Security Appliance devices to stop processing traffic correctly.The Cisco Web Security Appliance (WSA) is a line of security devices that inspect Web traffic going in and out of an organization in order to detect malware, prevent data leaks, and enforce Internet access policies for users and applications. The devices run an operating system called Cisco AsyncOS.One of the four DoS vulnerabilities fixed Wednesday by Cisco stems from how the OS handles a specific HTTP response code. An attacker could send a specifically crafted HTTP request in order to consume the entire memory of an affected device.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco patches high severity flaws in its Web Security Appliance

Cisco Systems has fixed four denial-of-service vulnerabilities that attackers could exploit to cause Web Security Appliance devices to stop processing traffic correctly.The Cisco Web Security Appliance (WSA) is a line of security devices that inspect Web traffic going in and out of an organization in order to detect malware, prevent data leaks, and enforce Internet access policies for users and applications. The devices run an operating system called Cisco AsyncOS.One of the four DoS vulnerabilities fixed Wednesday by Cisco stems from how the OS handles a specific HTTP response code. An attacker could send a specifically crafted HTTP request in order to consume the entire memory of an affected device.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco patches high severity flaws in its Web Security Appliance

Cisco Systems has fixed four denial-of-service vulnerabilities that attackers could exploit to cause Web Security Appliance devices to stop processing traffic correctly.The Cisco Web Security Appliance (WSA) is a line of security devices that inspect Web traffic going in and out of an organization in order to detect malware, prevent data leaks, and enforce Internet access policies for users and applications. The devices run an operating system called Cisco AsyncOS.One of the four DoS vulnerabilities fixed Wednesday by Cisco stems from how the OS handles a specific HTTP response code. An attacker could send a specifically crafted HTTP request in order to consume the entire memory of an affected device.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IBM Extends GPU Cloud Capabilities, Targets Machine Learning

As we have noted over the last year in particular, GPUs are set for another tsunami of use cases for server workloads in high performance computing and most recently, machine learning.

As GPU maker Nvidia’s CEO stressed at this year’s GPU Technology Conference, deep learning is a target market, fed in part by a new range of their GPUs for training and executing deep neural networks, including the Tesla M40, M4, the existing supercomputing-focused K80, and now, the P100 (Nvidia’s latest Pascal processor, which is at the heart of a new appliance specifically designed for deep learning workloads).

While

IBM Extends GPU Cloud Capabilities, Targets Machine Learning was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Advancing Enterprise Networking & Security With SDN

In this video interview from Interop las Vegas, Dom Delfino, Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Systems Engineering at VMworld, discusses the value proposition for software-defined networking.

Learn why enteprises are seeking out SDN to help keep pace with the dynamic, distributed nature of today's enterprise networks and how SDN can align security policies and help fill the gap that currently exists between information security and infrastructure security.

How to select ERP for the services industries

Most ERP software was built first for manufacturers. But the services industries (including architecture, engineering, legal and advertising) have a different set of ERP needs, according to a buyer's guide prepared by Technology Evaluation Centers (TEC).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)