Xpertfeed

Summary: Windows Phone users will lose support for their native Microsoft Teams, Yammer, and Skype for Business apps as of next month. Late last week, Microsoft quietly acknowledged that it will  drop support for the Windows Phone apps for Teams, Yammer, and Skype for Business . This fact isn't surprising to anyone who has been watching what's been going on with Windows Phone over the past few years, but the suddenness of Microsoft's declaration may catch some by surprise. (And based on tweets and emails I am getting, it did.) As of May 20, 2018, Microsoft will no longer make these apps available for download from the Microsoft Store and will no longer support them. The Skype for Business and Yammer apps "may continue to work, but we can't provide any guarantees," said officials in a Microsoft support article. "These apps will no longer receive updates or support." At the same time, the Microsoft Teams app for Windows Phone "will...

Summary:Prepping for the next wave of automation may be a messy affair, involving tearing up processes and training robots. Lately, I've been hearing some people refer to the incoming wave of labor-replacing, process-enhancing automation as a "digital workforce," which suggests some type of side-by-side pairing with the human workforce, just as contingent workforce gets paired with full-time workforce. Photo: Honda Whether you or not you like these new semantics, the constellation of technologies that are birthing the digital workforce are a force to be harnessed, and if applied with forethought and entrepreneurial spirit, may open up new horizons for companies and their carbon-and-water-based human employees. Such is the perspective taken by Justin Watson, David Wright and Marina Gordeeva, all with Deloitte UK, and authors of a recent  report  based on a survey of 400 executives and finds a majority, 53 percent, have initiated efforts to embed  Robotic Process ...

Summary:Before jumping on the boat with an IoT solution, it is critical for enterprise architects to understand the fundamental principals and concepts The concept of the Internet of Things has revolutionised the opportunities for businesses to take their operational efficiency to a new level. The combination of smart sensors, connected devices, and intelligent operation can unearth new dimensions of opportunities in this digital era. Information Technology giants like Microsoft are investing heavily in software offering around IoT. This includes ready to consume SaaS solutions like Azure IoT Central, IoT components-as-a-service like IoT hub, Stream Analytics, and Events hub, and real-time analytics technologies like IoT Edge. Before jumping on the boat with an IoT solution, it is critical for enterprise architects to understand the architectural layers, design principles, and subsystems involved in a solution. Architecture Principles To start with, let's first expl...

Summary: The tech giant now boasts four Azure regions in Australia, with its latest, Azure Australia Central, allowing organisations to collocate legacy and modern applications. Microsoft has announced the go-live of two new regions in Australia targeted towards government, financial services, and critical national infrastructure clients in Australia and New Zealand that are making the move to multi-cloud. The new offering, Azure Australia Central, has been designed for mission-critical workloads, and comes after Microsoft achieved official accreditation from the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) in June, allowing the company to offer 50 services on the ASD Certified Cloud Services List across Azure and Office 365. Offered out of Canberra Data Centres (CDC), the two new Azure cloud regions will allow for the storing of unclassified and protected-level data. CDC built its facilities in advance as top secret, which allows Microsoft to offer services from within ...

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...

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 A...