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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 from the

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 commonplac

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 vendors.

An FDA-approved digital stethoscope opens the door to better diagnoses by an increasing number of healthcare providers, supplying artificial intelligence with data about the world's heartbeats. There are about two devices -- one wearable -- that are improving consumers' ability to monitor their intake of food and medication. While currently most of the health tracking gadgets in the marketplace have been sold directly to consumers, there are significant benefits to improving the tools used by physicians. To address this, Dr. Nayyar Hussain, who has a background spanning sports medicine and engineering, has worked with health and technology experts from Texas A&M University, MIT and the Mayo Clinic to create a product that challenges what he calls unmotivated monopolistic medical device companies. Targeting a tool synonymous with doctors,  Stethee  is a digital stethoscope that sends amplified heartbeat sounds to a companion app in real time. It houses a dual-core AR

IoT's limited capabilities have caused issues for security, but perhaps, no more. Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed processors capable of providing encryption to low-power devices.The Internet of Things (IoT), including embedded industrial sensors, smart lighting, and monitoring systems, can be invaluable for the enterprise. These devices tend to have minimal power demands, can operate on Low-Power Wide-Area Networks (LPWAN), and have entered the enterprise, industrial scene, and consumer realm rapidly over the past few years. However, when there is little power to draw upon, security can sometimes be an issue as there are no resources or means to implement traditional security solutions.Encryption, for example, is a sticking point for today's IoT devices. While many of our online transactions and communication are protected by public-key cryptography, many IoT devices cannot support individual encryption implementations d

Microsoft continues to improve Windows on the desktop and take it to devices such as the Hololens. However, it continues to struggle in efforts to make a clean break with the operating system's past. Microsoft's Surface Laptop debuted with Windows 10 S. When it became clear that Windows 10 for Phones was chasing Windows Phone, Windows Mobile and Windows CE went gently into that good night. As Microsoft poured resources into supporting Android and iOS, some loyalists questioned the company's commitment to its own champion OS. But that is frankly laughable. Microsoft continues to invest deeply in Windows and devices optimized for it. It has brought it to the futuristic devices such as the Hololens. It continues to refine the user experience on the desktop. And its roadmap continues to evolve. Windows and its traditional PC associations have had a poor track record. These have included Windows 8, which virtually ignored the desktop in the

Google developed an intelligent camera that learns what photos are meaningful to users. Behind the product is human-centered machine learning. Google's user experience (UX) proponents have shared how they have been able to apply a potent new tool to promote and embed human-centered design into the site's projects: machine learning. In a recent  post , Josh Lovejoy, UX Designer for Google, describes the process he and his team employed to integrate what they call "human centered machine learning" into a recent initiative. Machine learning systems were trained to seek out the best photos -- but it required a great deal of training to get the model right, Lovejoy relates. Plus, quite a bit of rethinking was required to reduce the complexity of the user interfaces."Our team at Google works across the company to bring UXers up to speed on core [machine learning] concepts, understand how to best integrate machine learning into the UX utility belt, and ensure w

Microsoft is said to be creating a new Mixed Reality Studio and bringing together a number of its AR/VR/MR assets into a new organization. Microsoft is moving around a bunch of its augmented reality/mixed reality/virtual reality assets as one of its regular reorgs. The details of this latest shuffle  come courtesy of Brad Sams at Petri.com. Apparently, Microsoft has created a new Mixed Reality Studio that replaces its former Evoke Studio and other of its AR/VR/MR products, including Paint 3D, Mixed Reality Viewer and Remix3D. (Microsoft refers to these AR/VR/MR software assets as EDM, or "Every Day Magic," Sams says.) Evoke Studio was formerly the domain of Corporate Vice President Chris Pratley and was part of VP Kudo Tsunoda's Windows App Studios unit. Pratley was in charge of a team of artists, data scientists, and others working on "new digital memory and video storytelling" for Windows 10 and other platforms that involved mixed reality, deep learn