Xpertfeed

Summary: T he P20 range takes the battle to the big two, but overthrowing Apple will be tough Huawei has launched two new flagship smartphones with a big emphasis on their cameras as the company tries to take the fight to Apple and Samsung. In Paris it unveiled the P20 and P20 Pro which promise to boost the quality of photos taken by using AI and -- in the case of the P20 Pro -- a three-lens camera set up. It's been a tough time in the smartphone market recently, but Huawei has continued to grow, closing the gap on Samsung and Apple during 2017. While both Apple and Samsung saw their market share slide in the last quarter of the year, Huawei managed to grow again thanks to the introduction of new phones including the Mate 10 Lite, Honor 6C Pro, and Enjoy 7S. Separate figures from analyst IDC show that while Huawei dropped market share in the fourth quarter of 2017, it was still up significantly for the year. Huawei shipped 153.1 million units, up 9.9 percent fro...

Summary: Nike has big digital plans as it goes direct to consumer, aims to innovate faster and build relationships. It is also beefing up its analytics team. Nike has acquired Zodiac Inc., a consumer data analytics company, in a sign that its digital transformation plans revolve around customer lifetime value. The athletic shoe and apparel maker, which is in a dogfight with Adidas and Under Armour, has a strategy called Consumer Direct Offense that aims to develop products faster with personalization at scale. Nike also has to focus on selling direct and owning the customer relationship since retail is a messy industry. In 2016, Zodiac raised $3 million in seed funding to launch predictive analytics tools based on forecasting individual customer lifetime value. The models were developed by Wharton School Professor Peter Fader and a team of data scientists at the University of Pennsylvania. Zodiac's mission is to understand the value of an individual customer to boost ...

The million-dollar contract is for the development of a cryptography solution for the Australian Defence Force. Australian cybersecurity firm Penten has received AU$1.3 million from the Department of Defence to develop a cryptography solution for the Australian Army. The contract will see the Canberra-based startup further develop its AltoCrypt technology, which enables secure mobile access to government networks. The expected aim of the project is to deliver Defence secure wireless devices to counter new cyber threats and streamline information in deployed headquarters of the Australian Defence Force (ADF). "This advanced communication technology can be rapidly deployed to individual computers, which will change the way classified information is shared, used, and accessed," Minister for Defence Industry Christopher Pyne said in a statement on Friday. "The development of these devices aims to increase agility, reduce complexity, and enable better decisions ...

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are rapidly gaining importance, and Mark Russinovich, Microsoft Azure chief technology officer, believes it's because of open-source software and the cloud. Yes, Microsoft just announced that the next major edition of Windows 10 will support artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). But, marketing hype aside, Microsoft knows darn well that the real heavy lifting for AI and ML happens on the cloud with open-source software. That was the message Mark Russinovich, Microsoft's Azure CTO, brought to  The Linux Foundation 's  Open Source Leadership Summit (OSLS)  in Sonoma, CA. Russinovich opened by saying: AI technologies and techniques are experiencing a renaissance. Open-source technologies and communities have fostered the growth of self-taught machine learning developers with libraries and frameworks. The computing power of the cloud has made the processing of large data sets cost effective and com...

Additional versions of Windows 10 are now protected from these attacks, and Microsoft has begun releasing Intel microcode updates directly, but only for a small number of devices. Incompatible antivirus software remains a problem, however. Historically, even the most crippling security vulnerabilities can be patched in relatively straightforward fashion. After applying a security update, you're no longer vulnerable to exploits based on that flaw. That's not true of the  "speculative execution side-channel attacks"  broadly identified as  Meltdown  and  Spectre . Repairing these flaws requires a series of updates to hardware and software, as well as coordination with developers of security software, where incompatibilities between updates can cause crashes and possible data loss. As a result, the process of protecting PCs from these potentially deadly attacks could take months, with a series of patches (and updates on top of updates) from multiple ven...