IDG Contributor Network: What will customers buy next?

Finding the sweet spot for your sensors is a challenge in many IoT projects. Collect too little data, and there isn’t enough to act on. Collect too much data, and the costs might jeopardize your project. So, where is the sweet spot for your application? GoalA retail store chain was looking for an affordable retail analytics system. It needed to track people's movements to help improve the store layout and learn more about customers' shopping behavior. The solution had to be easy to deploy, be discreet and not require any changes from shoppers. The solution was designed on the fact that most shoppers would have mobile phones, which could be used as an approximate count for the number of people in the store and could also help track their movements as they moved from one Wi-Fi hotspot to another.A "People Sensor" was designed using the principle that mobile phones share their MAC address with Wi-Fi hotspots as part of the "handshake process" in order to obtain connectivity. ( MAC addresses are not associated with a specific individual or a mobile phone number, helping to preserve privacy. ) The sensor was built by modifying the firmware Continue reading

Worth Reading: How often does the government ask for your information?

In courtrooms across the country, tech companies and the government are battling over how much user data they should be required to give to law enforcement, and whether they should be allowed to tell users.These reports may have left people wondering: How often is the government really asking for my data? -MarketWatch

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The post Worth Reading: How often does the government ask for your information? appeared first on 'net work.

Worth Reading: How often does the government ask for your information?

In courtrooms across the country, tech companies and the government are battling over how much user data they should be required to give to law enforcement, and whether they should be allowed to tell users.These reports may have left people wondering: How often is the government really asking for my data? -MarketWatch

LinkedInTwitterGoogle+FacebookPinterest

The post Worth Reading: How often does the government ask for your information? appeared first on 'net work.

73% off Tribe Premium Water Resistant Cell Phone Armband – Deal Alert

Tribe's armband cell phone holder regularly lists for $29.99, but with this 73% discount you can buy it now for just $7.98. It averages 4.5 stars out of 5 from over 4,700 people on Amazon (read reviews). Tribe's band is designed for activity. It's water-resistant, ultra-light, and made of high quality neoprene so it can flex, twist and bend without stretching or losing its shape. It features a key holder, as well as a reflective strip for increased outdoor visibility. Your touchscreen remains fully functional and accessible through the band's plastic cover. The armband accommodates just about any arm size from 8 to 16-inches. Phone support as follows: Apple iPhone SE, 6/6S (4.7"), 5/5s/5c, Samsung S4, S3, S2, HTC.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Communications platform as a service is a digital enabler

Digital transformation has become a top-of-mind initiative for CIOs and business leaders for almost all companies in all verticals. It’s no wonder, as a recent ZK Research study found that digital organizations are 26 percent more profitable than their digitally immature peers.Another interesting data point is that by 2019, 65 percent of workers will use a mobile device first for business purposes. Going digital means shifting to a mobile-first strategy.Becoming a mobile-first organization is more than just building a bunch of standalone mobile applications that customers or workers can use. The process of switching between applications on a desktop is inconvenient, but most users manage. On a mobile device, having to constantly flip between applications while trying to remember data or cut and paste data is inefficient and can make users less productive.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft, Google sweeten cloud freebies

Microsoft and Google each this week increased incentives offered for joining their cloud platforms, highlighting the aggressive nature of this battle for market share.It’s not uncommon for cloud computing providers to offer free services. In the IaaS market all the big providers have free service tiers that allow customers to test their products before paying for them. The expanded freebies announced this week by these vendors goes beyond that though.+ MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Free cloud storage options | How to store all your photos in the cloud for free +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Bolder Battle Lines Drawn At Extreme Scale Computing Borders

The race to reach exascale computing has been a point of national ambition in the United States, which is currently home to the highest number of top-performing supercomputers in the world. But without focused effort, investment, and development in research and the vendor communities, that position is set to come under fire from high performance computing (HPC) developments in China and Japan in particular, as well as elsewhere around the globe.

This national priority of moving toward ever-more capable supercomputers as a source of national competitiveness in manufacturing, healthcare, and other segments was the subject of a detailed report that …

Bolder Battle Lines Drawn At Extreme Scale Computing Borders was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Developers leak Slack access tokens on GitHub, putting sensitive business data at risk

Developers from hundreds of companies have included access tokens for their Slack accounts in public projects on GitHub, putting their teams' internal chats and other data at risk.Slack has become one of the most popular collaboration and internal communication tools used by companies because of its versatility. The platform's API allows users to develop bots that can receive commands or post content from external services directly in Slack channels, making it easy to automate various tasks.Many developers post the code for their Slack bots -- some of which are small personal projects -- on GitHub, but fail to remove the bots' access tokens. Some developers even include private tokens associated with their own accounts in the code.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Developers leak Slack access tokens on GitHub, putting sensitive business data at risk

Developers from hundreds of companies have included access tokens for their Slack accounts in public projects on GitHub, putting their teams' internal chats and other data at risk.Slack has become one of the most popular collaboration and internal communication tools used by companies because of its versatility. The platform's API allows users to develop bots that can receive commands or post content from external services directly in Slack channels, making it easy to automate various tasks.Many developers post the code for their Slack bots -- some of which are small personal projects -- on GitHub, but fail to remove the bots' access tokens. Some developers even include private tokens associated with their own accounts in the code.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

If I were the next CEO of Symantec – Redux

I just read a Bloomberg article proclaiming that Symantec cut its quarterly revenue forecast and announcing that CEO Michael Brown will step down. Unfortunately for Symantec, the company has had a revolving door of chief executives—four different individuals since 2008, and now onward to a fifth.When Symantec went through a similar CEO transition in 2014, I posted a blog to suggest what I would do as its next CEO, but surprisingly my phone never rang.  Nevertheless, I reviewed my two-year-old recommendations this morning and many of Symantec’s issues back then still need fixing. Given this, allow me to review and update my CEO action plan for Symantec:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

If I were the next CEO of Symantec – Redux

I just read a Bloomberg article proclaiming that Symantec cut its quarterly revenue forecast and announcing that CEO Michael Brown will step down. Unfortunately for Symantec, the company has had a revolving door of chief executives—four different individuals since 2008, and now onward to a fifth.When Symantec went through a similar CEO transition in 2014, I posted a blog to suggest what I would do as its next CEO, but surprisingly my phone never rang.  Nevertheless, I reviewed my two-year-old recommendations this morning and many of Symantec’s issues back then still need fixing. Given this, allow me to review and update my CEO action plan for Symantec:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

5 things containers need to win the enterprise

5 things containers need to win the enterpriseImage by PexelsContainer technology like Docker and CoreOS is growing in popularity as companies to realize the benefits of the flexible service and application delivery platform they offer. But the technology is not without its challenges in the enterprise.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

5 things containers need to win the enterprise

5 things containers need to win the enterpriseImage by PexelsContainer technology like Docker and CoreOS is growing in popularity as companies to realize the benefits of the flexible service and application delivery platform they offer. But the technology is not without its challenges in the enterprise.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Nvidia GPU-powered autonomous car teaches itself to see and steer

During the past nine months, an Nvidia engineering team built a self-driving car with one camera, one Drive-PX embedded computer and only 72 hours of training data. Nvidia published an academic preprint of the results of the DAVE2 project entitled End to End Learning for Self-Driving Cars on arXiv.org hosted by the Cornell Research Library.The Nvidia project called DAVE2 is named after a 10-year-old Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) project known as DARPA Autonomous Vehicle (DAVE). Although neural networks and autonomous vehicles seem like a just-invented-now technology, researchers such as Google’s Geoffrey Hinton, Facebook’s Yann Lecune and the University of Montreal’s Yoshua Bengio have collaboratively researched this branch of artificial intelligence for more than two decades. And the DARPA DAVE project application of neural network-based autonomous vehicles was preceded by the ALVINN project developed at Carnegie Mellon in 1989. What has changed is GPUs have made building on their research economically feasible.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Thumb PC uses Google software to give computer vision to robots and drones

A new USB stick computer uses Google's machine-learning software to give drones and robots the equivalent of a human eye, and add new smarts to cameras.Movidius’ Fathom Neural Compute Stick isn't your conventional PC. It is instead designed to analyze pixels and provide the right context for images.Fathom provides the much-needed horsepower for devices like drones, robots and cameras to run computer vision applications like image recognition. These devices alone typically don't have the ability to run computer vision applications.Fathom uses an embedded version of Google's TensorFlow machine learning software for vision processing. The device can be plugged into the USB port of a device or a developer board like Raspberry Pi, which in turn can power a drone or robot. It needs a 64-bit Linux OS and 50MB of hard drive space.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco SF250, SG250, SF350, SG350, SG350XG, and SG550XG series switches

Software version 2.1.0 adds sFlow support to Cisco 250 Series Smart Switches, 350 Series Smart Switches and 550X Series Stackable Managed Switches.
Cisco network engineers might not be familiar with the multi-vendor sFlow technology since it is a relatively new addition to Cisco products. The article, Cisco adds sFlow support, describes some of the key features of sFlow and contrasts them to Cisco NetFlow.
Configuring sFlow on the switches is straightforward. For example, The following commands configure a switch to sample packets at 1-in-1024, poll counters every 30 seconds and send sFlow to an analyzer (10.0.0.50) over UDP using the default sFlow port (6343):
sflow receiver 1 10.0.0.50
For each interface: 
sflow flow-sampling 1024 1
sflow counter-sampling 30 1
A previous posting discussed the selection of sampling rates. Additional information can be found on the Cisco web site.

Trying out sFlow offers suggestions for getting started with sFlow monitoring and reporting. The article recommends the sFlowTrend analyzer as a way to get started since it is a free, purpose built sFlow analyzer that delivers the full capabilities of sFlow instrumentation in the Cisco switches.
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