Adobe crunched the numbers and reported that on Black Friday in the US last year consumers spent a record-breaking $2. 4 billion-up an extraordinary 24%on the previous year.
According to IBM, Black Friday sales were 63.5%higher than Thanksgiving day sales -but last year they were 70%.
In the US, IBM reported that while overall sales were up, the average order value was down across both Black Friday and Thanksgiving.
It focuses on the first and clearest of a number of complaints filed in 2009-10 by various Google competitors-from other giants, such as Microsoft, to small, struggling or defunct web businesses.
Andy Stanford-Clark, distinguished engineer in IBM global internet of things team, pointed out that we can now pull in all sorts of data:
it is still not possible to engineer a way of turning the lights green as you pull up. t easy to change the traffic lights, ssays IBM Standford-Clark. ut...
says IBM Stanford-Clark. The best way to achieve it may not be via smart, reactive traffic lights,
If youe Microsoft, you can at least reassure yourself that you now also have a funky new URL.
Symantec (SYMC: Symantec announced plans to sell its data storage business, Veritas, for $8 billion cash.
According to Reuters, the company will sell Veritas to a group including Carlyle Group and Singapore's sovereign wealth fund GIC.
Microsoft told its enterprise cloud customers on Tuesday that it believes they can continue to transfer data by relying on additional steps
#Microsoft granted patent for glasses that detect wearer's emotions Put this one in the WTF file.
The United states Patent and Trademark Office granted Microsoft a patent today for a pair of glasses that can detect a wearer emotional response to what theye looking at.
Press observes that while a few large vendors--IBM, Cisco, EMC, Oracle, HP, and a reinvigorated Dell--still dominate the IT sector,
Past complainants include Microsoft, Tripadvisor, and Yelp, as well several German and French publishers. The charges will bring to a head the EC's five-year investigation into Google's business practices in Europe
One of the key reference points for the EC's actions against Microsoft in 2007, which ultimately saw the company fined hundreds of millions of euros.
and a new wave of search assistants like Apple's Siri and Microsoft's Cortana, as well as more specialized services like Amazon, Idealo, Le Guide, Expedia, or ebay.
The recent Samsung S6 is a great example of this-there are pre-installed Facebook, Microsoft,
including Samsung, Google, Microsoft, Visa, and Paypal.""We expected previous authentication technology such as passwords, certificates,
Arbor networks said the attack had traffic of up to 334 Gbps, accounting for tens of thousands of connections, targeting one Asian network operator.
"said Arbor networks'Darren Anstee in remarks s
#Google's Bigtable goes public as a cloud managed Nosql database Google is today opening up the Bigtable technology behind most of its flagship offerings,
#Samsung, Dell, other OEMS to bundle Microsoft apps, services on Android tablets Microsoft has announced an expanded partnership with Samsung and new deals with Dell and other OEMS to preload Microsoft
The Android preload deals, announced March 23, cover both consumer and business Microsoft apps and services.
Samsung, for its part, will preinstall Microsoft services and apps on its"portfolio of Android devices.""Samsung committed to offering Microsoft office 365
Microsoft also announced today it has expanded bundling deals with Dell, as well as regional OEMS including Trekstor of Germany, JP Sa Couto of Portugal, Datamatic of Italy, DEXP of Russia, Hipstreet of Canada, QMOBILE of Pakistan, Tecno of Africa,
Interestingly, Microsoft's blog post on the new bundling deals is authored by Peggy Johnson, Microsoft's Executive vice president of Global Business Development,
Android distribution startup Cyanogen might be next up to forge a similar bundling relationship with Microsoft.
A recent Forbes report claims Cyanogen is"close to finalizing a wide-ranging partnership to incorporate several of Microsoft's mobile services,
"Microsoft originally was rumored to be considering making a minority investment in Cyanogen, but supposedly the Redmondians have decided against that, at least for now
The system also tracks infection control data and simultaneously uploads the information to the hospital's web portal,
since Microsoft rolled out a new Windows 10 Mobile test Build on August 12, Microsoft pulled the trigger on Build 10512,
which it made available to Windows Insiders on the Fast Ring.""Our major focus on Windows 10 Mobile right now is on improvements to core quality,
Microsoft is expected to make Windows 10 Mobile available on new Windows phones and to and existing Windows phone users later this fall l
IBM's new Linux mainframes SEATTLE--At Linuxcon, IBM launched Linuxone, a new pair of IBM mainframes along with Linux and open-source software and services.
which built on the IBM z13 mainframe and its z13 CPU, and its little brother, Rockhopper,
IBM's new Linuxone mainframes aren't only powerful, they're very affordable. IBM claims that Linuxone Emperor is capable of scaling up to 8, 000 virtual machines or tens of thousands of containers and that's more than any other single Linux system.
Linuxone Rockhopper is an entry-level mainframe. It's designed for clients and emerging markets seeking mainframe speed
On IBM benchmarks, a loaded Linuxone could perform 30-billion Representational State Transfer (RESTFUL) transactions a day using Node. js and Mongodb in Docker containers.
IBM also states that the Linuxone are the most secure Linux systems ever with advanced encryption features built into both the hardware and software to help keep customer data and transactions confidential and secure.
IBM has enabled key open source and industry software for Linuxone and IBM z Systems. This includes Apache Spark, Node. js, Mongodb, Mariadb, Postgresql and Chef.
IBM, in partnership with Marist College and Syracuse University's School of Information Studies will host clouds that provide developers access to a virtual IBM Linuxone at no cost.
IBM will also create a special cloud for independent software providers (ISVS) hosted at IBM sites in Dallas, Beijing,
Ross Mauri, IBM's General manager of z Systems said in a Linuxcon keynote speech, that Linuxone comes with a new financing model.
IBM will work with existing customers who want to move to the new elastic pricing model."
In the USA alone, the phenomenon costs businesses around USD 100 billion every year according to a 2014 report on the subject by security firm Mcafee.
#IBM Smarter Cities Challenge is back: Could your city use some pro bono problem solvers?
But Council Lead Partner IBM has been doing just that with its Smarter Cities Challenge for the past four years.
IBM is continuing the grant program this year and is now accepting applications from local governments.
That's the idea behind IBM's Smarter Cities Challenge competitive grant program that has in the last four years helped 116 municipalities around the world solve critical local challenges.
How it works After intense preparation, six-person IBM pro bono consulting teams spend three weeks in the winning region analyzing all available data about a critical issue of the municipality's choosing for example
At the conclusion, IBM presents comprehensive recommendations for improving the delivery of services to citizens.
Past winners have seen results IBM notes that many of its past grant recipients have implemented their Smarter Cities Challenge recommendations
A program that works"We're extending IBM's Smarter Cities Challenge for one simple reason:
It works,"said Jennifer Crozier, IBM vice president of Global Citizenship Initiatives.""City leaders from around the world have told us how IBM's advice has helped them re-imagine how they can use data
and analytics to help them solve complex problems. We're told that IBM Smarter Cities Challenge is that rare program that brings people together
and gets long-term results --and we're proud of that. We invite mayors and regional leaders to apply with their toughest problems
Using data analysis technology from Council Lead Partner Microsoft, they are able to position officers where they will make the biggest difference.
How it works Microsoft Domain Awareness System gets most of the attention for its work in preventing crimes.
While the analytics were built by Microsoft, New york city police officers guided the development. Police officers described their biggest pain points
Doesn break the budget Microsoft is quick to point out that these benefits are available to cities of any size at a very modest investment.
The city has partnered with Council Lead Partners Cisco and Microsoft in addition to Fiberco, the Technology Innovation Agency and Nunnovation Africa Foundation on the program.
Council Lead Partners IBM Microsoft, andcisco and Associate Partner Siemens have been working with Chinese companies on national information security as well as technologies
and solutions to support the growth of smart cities there. Council Lead Partner Itron, meanwhile, completed installation of smart water, heat and gas meters and communication modules as well as its fixed network for Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco city in Tianjin, China.
an add-on for Microsoft Outlook that manages messages from a collaborative perspective. Decisiv Email offers more than a carbon-copy of what's going on
Microsoft is also hoping to benefit from the phenomenon. Its Microsoft Tag mobile scanning technology supports both 2d barcode formats (including QR Codes and the Tag format) as well as Near Field Communications.
This month, Procter & gamble are running a month-long test in the Chicago and New york areas of pop-up stores,
a former electronics engineer with IBM and Sun who got the idea for a water-monitoring system
One reason, says IBM senior manager of Data Centric Systems, John Gunnels, is that the pace of Moore Law has slowed. f you can shrink these chips at the rate you were shrinking them before,
IBM researchers are trying to prop up Moore law using silicon-germanium transistor channels in effort to create a 7-nanometer chip within the next four years.
Google January 2012 decision to combine the privacy policies of some 60 different products in order for it to be able to gather more intel on webs users for targeting ads quickly triggered a data protection review in October 2012
Large companies like Adobe and ebay have seen emails and other personal account information stolen. And whistleblowers like Snowden have revealed the most private and devastating aspects of government spying agendas.
(either desktop or mobile) so Microsoft is playing platform favorites with this early beta program.
It very hard to think of how Microsoft will manage to turn this around, and you do have to wonder
The big picture for feature phones is not unlike that of Microsoft legacy smartphone maker Blackberry:
Adobe, AIG, Akamai, AOL, Appnexus, AT&T, BSA, ebay, Electronic arts, Expedia, Facebook, GE, Goldman sachs, Google, Groupon, IAC, IBM, Lockheed martin, Massmutual, Microsoft
, Moody, Pixar Animation Studios, Square, The Honest Company, Twitter, Viacom, Intel, Intuit and Verizon in order to reach its goal.
Even a closed behemoth like Microsoft is now recognizing the value of open-sourced collaboration,
#Microsoft Begins Accepting Bitcoin For Windows Windows phone And Xbox Purchases If you want further proof that Microsoft is going through a transformative phase,
you may be interested to hear that the company has jumped on the bitcoin wagon. The Redmond-based tech giant is now accepting bitcoins for buying games
Members of Reddit bitcoin subred noted that Microsoft appears to be working with payments firm Bitpay to make this happen.
Neither Microsoft nor Bitpay have announced formally the partnership or details but the former does have a series of instructions related to bitcoin payments within its illing helppages.
Microsoft has confirmed now that it is indeed working with Bitpay. It described its adoption of Bitcoin as being bout giving people options
Customers can use bitcoin to load money into a Microsoft wallet or to create digital gift cards,
While some organizations already have the Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) in place allowing IT administrators to manage large groups of Windows-based computer systems,
and Microsoft consulted with the startup to make quieter fans for the Xbox One games console,
An early mover the firm has seen increased competition from younger firms like Dropbox and older companies like Microsoft and Google.
and Coreos, as well public cloud infrastructure services from companies like Amazon, Google and Microsoft. Finally, you can use it with private cloud infrastructure services including virtual machines, bare metal and Openstack.
But, according to an Adobe study, 26 percent of U s.-based Internet users installed an ad blocker.
#Elemental Path Debuts The First Toys Powered By IBM Watson A company called Elemental Path is developing a new line of smart toys for children
which will be powered by the super computing system IBM Watson, enabling the toys to engage in real and personalized conversations with kids,
which allowed them access to the IBM Watson technology, making them the first toy company to be able to tap into the system.
With the IBM Watson-powered system, the toy is able to listen and respond to questions and return its answers quickly within a second or much less,
Overstock and even Microsoft, hopped onto the cryptocurrency to give customers an alternative avenue for payments. he integration with Bitnet platform will make Rakuten one of the largest e-commerce companies in the world to begin accepting bitcoin,
he says SAP is one of a number of companies including IBM, Microsoft and countless startups working on making better predictions.
As Herzberg says, once you have been able to collect the data from a sensors, you can begin to build increasingly complex sets of predictions. ou can start modeling
#Microsoft Outlook Hacked In China New Report Finds Only a few weeks after Google Gmail service was blocked in China a new report from online censorship monitoring organization Greatfire. org released this morning
states that Microsoft email system Outlook was subjected recently to a an-in-the-middleattack in China.
but the web interfaces for Microsoft webmail services were not. That is Outlook. com and Login. live. com were affected not.
which is governed by the Cyberspace Administration of China as this would be consistent with previous man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks in China. iven the dangerous nature of this attack on Outlook we again strongly encourage organizations including Microsoft
or have allowed willingly the attack to happenwrites Greatfire. org in its report. f our accusation is correct this new attack signals that the Chinese authorities are intent on further cracking down on communication methods that they cannot readily monitor. ee reached out to Microsoft for comment on this attack
This has resulted in some sites like Github getting blocked and others like Intel shutting down some of their online operations u
and previously worked at Microsoft Research as well as other computer science researchers like Yann Lecun who are looking for better ways to teach computers how to recognize objects and speech.
and artificial intelligence projects in academic labs and at companies like Google Twitter and Intel. Facebook today is optimized launching tools to increase the speed at
And at CES last week Nvidia spent most of its keynote discussing how it uses deep learning to classify objects that a camera on a car may see in order to further its research in autonomous driving o
The product puts Facebook head-to-head with the likes of Microsoft Yammer Slack Convo Socialcast and a huge number of others who are trying to tackle the nterprise social networkspace.
A lot of messaging apps (Microsoft Yammer being one of the notably early movers) have tried to tap into onsumerizationor getting enterprise apps to look
There no reason to believe the company will stop Google Microsoft Telenav or Here from offering its mapping services on its platform though.
The members in the Genivi alliance besides Ford include the likes of BMW Honda Nissan renault Volvo and John Deere as well as chip manufacturers like Intel Qualcomm and Nvidia and plenty of aftermarket manufacturers.
#Google, Microsoft, Mozilla And Others Team up To Launch Webassembly, A New Binary Format For The Web Google, Microsoft,
Some of these projects focus on adding new features to the language (like Microsoft Typescript) or speeding up Javascript (like Mozilla asm. js project.
Microsoft this year launched a database called COCO to try to fix that. Google used COCO in its new research,
And last year, researchers at chip company Nvidia demonstrated a basic wearable display based on light fields.
Twenty minutes away in San jose, the largest city in the Valley, a camp of homeless people known as the Jungleeputed to be the largest in the countryas taken root along a creek within walking distance of Adobe
The coauthor, with fellow MIT academic Andrew Mcafee, of The Second Machine Age, Brynjolfsson, like Piketty, has gained recently unlikely prominence for an academic economist.
In an article called ew World Order, published this summer in Foreign affairs, Brynjolfsson, Mcafee, and Michael Spence, a Nobel laureate and professor at New york University, argued that uperstar-based technical change is upending the global economy.
and Mcafee argument that the transformation of work is speeding up as technological change accelerates.
Researchers from Carnegie mellon and Intel developed the prototype headlight which scans the road ahead using an infrared camera
The Carnegie mellon-Intel prototype includes a camera a computer and a digital projector. Information from the infrared camera is processed by a computer that tries to identify relevant objects on the road such as cars, pedestrians or road signs.
if the sequencer was vaporware. By this spring Oxford had worked the bugs out enough at any rate to start mailing out beta versions of the nanopore sequencer to 500 hand-picked labs it is collaborating with.
#Intel Says Laptops and Tablets with 3-D Vision Are Coming Soon Laptops with 3-D sensors in place of conventional webcams will go on sale before the end of this year according to chip maker Intel
which is providing the sensing technology to manufacturers. And tablets with 3-D sensors will hit the market in 2015 the company said at its annual developers conference in San francisco on Wednesday.
Intel first announced its 3-D sensing technology at the Consumer electronics Show in January (see Intel s 3-D Camera Heads to Laptops and Tablets.
Intel is working with software companies to develop applications that use the technology. In the next few weeks the chip maker will release free software that any software developer can use to build apps for the sensors.
Partners already working with Intel include Microsoft s Skype unit the movie and gaming studio Dreamworks and the 3-D design company Autodesk according to Achin Bhowmik general manager for Intel s
But Intel showed several demonstrations of its own. One developed with a startup called Volumental lets you snap a 3-D photo of your foot to get an accurate shoe size measurement something that could help with online shopping.
Intel also showed how the front-facing 3-D sensors can be used to recognize gestures to play games on a laptop
Those demonstrations were reminiscent of Microsoft s Kinect sensor for its Xbox gaming console which introduced gamers to depth sensing
Microsoft launched a version of Kinect aimed at Windows PCS in 2012 and significantly upgraded its depth-sensing technology in 2013
Some of Intel s demos were rough around the edges suggesting that their compact sensors are less accurate than the larger ones of Microsoft.
Intel s two sensors work in slightly different ways. The front sensor calculates the position of objects by observing how they distort an invisible pattern of infrared light by a tiny projector in the sensor.
Intel s new sensors are roughly the same size as the camera components used in existing devices says Bhowmik.
Together with three other researchers from the University of North carolina and two from Nvidia Research
Luth current and former clients include Subway, Microsoft, Walmart, the San diego padres, Nickelodeon, and Netflix. The information it collects can help companies decide where to spend advertising dollars.
Microsoft is involved in ongoing litigation against a search warrant issued in December 2013 by a U s. magistrate authorizing the search
and seizure of e-mail accounts hosted by Microsoft. The company objected to the warrant with regard to data stored at its data center in Ireland claiming that U s. courts are authorized not to issue warrants for extraterritorial searches.
Microsoft also argued that if it turned over data stored abroad to the U s. government it would be more difficult for the company to resist requests by foreign governments for data stored in the U s
Microsoft argues that it does since it directs the company to produce information stored outside the United states. The government's argument is that
because Microsoft is subject to U s. jurisdiction it must turn over data it controls regardless of where the data is stored.
and Verizon) have supported publicly Microsoft's position. The revelations of Edward Snowden have put them all under increasing pressure to resist U s. requests for data access.
The issues raised in the Microsoft case are relevant to all companies subject to U s. jurisdiction not just those in the Internet sector including companies based abroad but active in the U s. market.
Microsoft has stated that it will appeal Judge Preska's decision and sources in the U s. legal community tell me that the case could eventually go all the way to the U s. Supreme court
. But while Microsoft s argument that the case has major policy implications is compelling the U s. government's position may be difficult to overcome under the current state of the law.
#Turning a Regular Smartphone Camera into a 3-D One Microsoft researchers say simple hardware changes
new research from Microsoft shows that with some simple modifications and machine-learning techniques an ordinary smartphone camera or webcam can be used as a 3-D depth camera.
Microsoft modified camera A group led by Sean Ryan Fanello Cem Keskin, and Shahram Izadi of Microsoft Research is due to present a paper on the work Tuesday at Siggraph, a computer graphics and interaction conference in Vancouver, British columbia.
To modify the cameras, the group removed the near infrared filter, often used in everyday cameras to block normally unwanted light signals in pictures.
By doing so, they essentially made each camera act as an infrared camera. computer with Microsoft image of person's face e kind of turned the camera on its head
The Microsoft team says it wanted to use the reflective intensity of infrared light as something like a cross between a sonar signal and a torch in a dark room.
But the group needed to train the machines (in this case a Samsung galaxy Nexus smartphone and a Microsoft Lifecam Web camera) on that relationship,
Microsoft chose skin since it has so many implications for navigating Xbox and Windows environments, but Kohli points out that the machine learning techniques could transfer anywhere. he only limitation is
#IBM Chip Processes Data Similar to the Way Your Brain Does A new kind of computer chip,
unveiled by IBM today, takes design cues from the wrinkled outer layer of the human brain.
IBM Synapse chip processes information using a network of just over one million eurons, which communicate with one another using electrical spikess actual neurons do.
In a demonstration at IBM Almaden research center, MIT Technology Review saw one recognize cars, people,
and it consumed 100,000 times as much power as the IBM chip. IBM researchers are now experimenting with connecting multiple Synapse chips together,
and they hope to build a supercomputer using thousands. When data is fed into a Synapse chip it causes a stream of spikes,
says Dharmendra Modha, chief scientist for brain-inspired computing at IBM. Programming the chip involves choosing
or any chip IBM has made ever, with over five billion, it consumes strikingly little power.
IBM new chip doesn have separate memory and processing blocks, because its neurons and synapses intertwine the two functions.
One downside is that IBM chip requires an entirely new approach to programming. Although the company announced a suite of tools geared toward writing code for its forthcoming chip last year (see BM Scientists Show Blueprints for Brainlike Computing,
But IBM may find a receptive audience because it is becoming clear that current computers won be able to deliver much more in the way of performance gains. his chip is coming at the right time,
Ranveer Chandra, a senior researcher in mobile computing at Microsoft Research, says the technology could help accelerate dreams of being able to deploy cheap,
including LG Heart rate Monitor Earphone and iriver iriveron Heart rate Monitoring Bluetooth Headset (available to consumers for $180 and $200, respectively) and a pair of earbuds from Intel,
But a pair of Performtek-using earbuds that Intel showed off this year at the International Consumer electronics Show in Las Vegaseant to be a reference design for manufacturersvoids this kind of bulk by harvesting power from the microphone jack.
Steve Holmes, who leads Intel New Devices Group, says this could also make it possible to add features like noise reduction.
The technology is being developed in collaboration with researchers at MIT and Microsoft. In addition to making it easier for people with simple vision problems to use all kinds of displays without glasses,
and IBM to invest in technologies from data-capturing smartphone apps to billion-dollar analytical systems.
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