Clouds and Coins

Couple of interesting acquisitions on this rainy Austin Tuesday.

Cryptocurrency firm Coinbase is looking to add more cryptocurrencies to its exchange through its acquisition of blockchain intelligence startup, Neutrino.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but here’s the skinny on Neutrino according to a story from TechCrunch:

Based in Italy, Neutrino helps map blockchain networks, and in particular crypto token transactions, to pull in information and insight. With the rise of thefts, that includes a major focus on services for law enforcement agencies to track stolen digital assets while it also includes tracking ransomware and analyzing ‘darknets.’ Other solutions include tracking services for investment and finance companies to help find rising tokens and assets, an area Coinbase could clearly capitalize on as it goes after security token offerings.

Coinbase engineering director Varun Srinivasan wrote in a blog post that “By analyzing data on public blockchains, Neutrino will help us prevent theft of funds from peoples’ accounts, investigate ransomware attacks, and identify bad actors.” 

So, the picks, shovels, and locks plays continue to abound in the blockchain realm.

And the other big deal today, Google announced it was acquiring cloud start-up Alooma.

Alooma helps companies migrate their data from multiple sources to one data warehouse.

Terms also not disclosed, but a CNBC report cited Crunchbase when indicating Alooma had raised $15M from multiple investors.

From Google’s blog post on the announcement:

Leading companies across every industry and around the world are moving to the cloud to be more agile, secure and scalable. As organizations modernize their infrastructure to digitally transform themselves, migrating mission critical systems and the data that powers their business success can be daunting. No matter where your data is stored—on premises, in our cloud, or multiple clouds—we want to make that information accessible, valuable, and actionable.

That’s why today we’re announcing our intent to acquire Alooma, a leader in data migration. Alooma helps enterprise companies streamline database migration in the cloud with an innovative data pipeline tool that enables them to move their data from multiple sources to a single data warehouse.

Birdbrained Bird Boxers

Back in the early-to-mid aughts, before we called everything “social media” (back when I had to walk five miles through the snow to get to the office), we often referred to something that came to be known as the “wisdom of the crowd.”

The New Yorker writer James Surowiecki wrote a book on the phenomenon, “The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations.”

The central thesis of the book was the idea that the aggregation of information in groups resulted in decisions are often better than could have been made by any single member of the group. 

As an example, in his opening anecdote for the book, he relayed the surprise that a crowd had when their individual guesses of an ox’s weight were accurate when they were all averaged together.

It was a really cool idea, and it seemed to stick around for awhile.

And then, as if out of nowhere, the wisdom of the crowd seems to have gone the way of the do do bird.

Or, should I say, the way of the “Bird Box.”

Some background: Bird Box is a movie (spoiler alert!) recently released by Netflix starring Sandra Bullock in which the basic premise is that everybody must run around blindfolded lest they see the post-apocalyptic zombies running around which, if seen by the human eye, will turn them into zombies as well.

As Netflix movies go, it was pretty bad, but like an inverse of Surowiecki’s theorem, everybody had to see it because it got so much exposure via social media.  

Call it the “constipation” of the crowd.

Unfortunately, the viral meme of seeing the movie didn’t stop there.

No, lacking the wisdom of crowds from even 13 or 14 years ago, instead the “Bird Box Challenge” was born.

The challenge is simple: People inspired by the film are recreating the basic premise of the movie by going about their daily lives blindfolded.

It’s as silly as that, or even as silly as the Tide Pod challenge (another key piece of evidence of the constipation of the crowd) from last year, where people filmed themselves on YouTube eating Tide Pod laundry detergent pellets. Hey, whatever spins your cycle!

Only the Bird box Challenge has taken the constipation of the crowd to new heights, because, well, you’re blindfolded, which, you know, isn’t exactly conducive to things like driving a car or floating through rapids on a river.

It got so bad that Netflix had to issue a Tweet telling us how dangerous the Bird Box Challenge could be: “Can’t believe I have to say this, but: PLEASE DO NOT HURT YOURSELVES WITH THIS BIRD BOX CHALLENGE.”

I don’t know about you, but when I was growing up, we encouraged this kind of outlier behavior…It helps thin out the herd.

But we didn’t have a bunch of bird brains doing the Bird Box Challenge. 

We just called such phenomena “Darwin Awards.”

Go ahead, Google it.  

Just make sure you step away from the ledge.

Or not.

Smarter Assistance

Happy Friday, and Happy Holidays.

For those of you who have already started fleeing to parts beyond, here’s hoping you did not get caught up in the drone traffic at Gatwick Airport outside of London.

I guess that whole geofencing thing to keep the drones out…yeah, that’s not working out so much.

Me, I’m firmly ensconced in Turbo North, praying for the weather to stay warm enough over the weekend to follow a little white ball around.

In the meantime, I’m trying to keep up with the breakneck pace of tech news that was coming out this week.

This one caught my eye from Loup Ventures, where they conducted their annual smart speaker IQ test.

They conducted the test by asking each of the four smart speakers — Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant, and Cortana — 800 questions each, and then measured how well they answered correctly and/or understood the query.

Google Assistant came out on top, answering the questions correctly 87.9 percent of the time and understanding the query 100 percent of the time!

Surprisingly (at least to me, anyways), Siri came in second at 74.6 and 99.6 percent, respectively, and Alexa third, at 72.5 and 99 percent. Cortana was dead last at 63.4 and 99.4 percent.

Meanwhile, if you’re a user of Slack, be prepared to not be cut any if you visited or live in a U.S. sanctioned country recently.

The Verge reported yesterday that Slack is banning some users with links to Iran, even if they’ve left the country. 

“In order to comply with export control and economic sanctions laws…Slack prohibits unauthorized use of its products and services in certain sanctioned countries,” the notice from Slack read. “We’ve identified your team/account as originating from one of these countries and are closing the account effective immediately.” Users received no warning, and had no time to create archives or otherwise back up data.

That right there is the long arm emoji of Uncle Sam hard at work!

And speaking of big guvment, there’s this on the sub-continent of India today: India’s Ministry of Home Affairs has authorized ten government agencies, including intelligence and law enforcement, to monitor, intercept, and decrypt data on all computers in the country. 

The governmental order detailing the powers immediately drew strong criticism from both India’s privacy activists and its opposition parties, who said it enabled blanket state surveillance and violated the fundamental right to privacy that India’s 1.3 billion citizens are constitutionally guaranteed.

People who don’t comply might face up to seven years in prison and a fine, according to India’s Information Technology Act, which the order falls under.

The order caused a major dispute in India’s parliament, with members of the opposition calling it “unconstitutional, undemocratic, and an assault on fundamental rights.”

How come all of a sudden almost every single tech story seems to also have a government or public policy angle?!

That would be a question best responded to by Facebook’s PR team, the next great breeding ground for crisis communications talent.

Okay, back to the salt mines…Happy Holidays, everyone!

Dezinformatsiya

If you’ve had any interest in following all those alleged goings on by Russia in the 2016 elections, today was a good day. 

The Washington Post wrote that a new report that was prepared for the U.S. Senate “provides the most sweeping analysis yet of Russia’s disinformation campaign” and “used every major social media platform to deliver words, images, and videos tailored to voters’ interests to help elect President Trump.”

It was the product of a bipartisan effort from the Senate Intelligence Committee, and you can download the full report here.

Me, I’m neither going to wade into or attempt to drown that particular swamp, but I will say one of the revelations was what a significant role Instagram seemed to play in the Russia Internet Research Agency’s efforts (as opposed to the prior focus on Twitter and Facebook).

I guess a picture’s worth a thousand kompromat!

Meanwhile, more political heat on the search and social media front as The Intercept reports that Google was forced to shut down a data analysis system that it had been using to develop a censored search engine for China “after members of the company’s privacy team raised internal complaints that it had been kept secret from them.”

The internal rift over the system has had massive ramifications, effectively ending work on the censored search engine, known as Dragonfly, according to two sources familiar with the plans. The incident represents a major blow to top Google executives, including CEO Sundar Pichai, who have over the last two years made the China project one of their main priorities.

You gotta go deep to get to the bottom of this one, but it does appear that the Grinch may have stolen Google’s Chinese search gift this holiday season. I’ll leave it up.

Queue up Dr. Seuss:

And the more the Grinch thought of this Who Christmas Sing,
The more the Grinch thought, “I must stop this whole thing!”
“Why, for fifty-three years I’ve put up with it now!”
“I MUST stop this Christmas from coming! But HOW?”

Google in the Hot Box

Google CEO Sundar Pichai is in the hotbox today on Capitol Hill as he testifies before the House Judiciary Committee.

I’ve had some of the later testimony on in the background, and there have already been lots of questions about data and data sharing, preloaded apps, privacy, DoubleClick cookies and the merging of offline data (which I found sooo 1999!).

The New York Times is following much more closely, and here are some highlights of what they’ve observed:

Republican lawmakers displayed the party’s growing distrust toward Google, raising a broad array of tough questions on the search giant’s market power, plans to relaunch service in China, and whether the site suppresses conservative content. At the core of their questions was a concern over the company’s commitment to free expression.

Kevin McCarthy, House Republican Leader, had this to say:

“All of these topics — competition, censorship, bias, and others — point to one fundamental question that demands the nation’s attention. Are America’s technology companies serving as instruments of freedom or instruments of control?”

There was also discussion around liberal-leaning biases of employees and whether or not those biases “affect[ed] filtering decisions for its search engine,” a claim many right-leaning leaders have suggested in the past.

Location information was also prevalent, and Texas Republican Ted Poe held up his own smartphone and asked Pichai if Google was tracking his whereabouts if we walked to the other side of the room.

Pichai’s response: “Not by default,” suggesting it depended on the congressman’s app settings.

The Times also observed that Google’s been taking heat both internally and externally for “Project Dragonfly,” it’s initiative to build a censored search engine that could be used in the Chinese market.

My observation: Regulation of American Internet giants is not a question of if, but when, and how much. They’ve amassed too much personal data far too quickly and treated it with reckless abandon, and now the question becomes what measures can an American regulatory regime take that has both teeth for the consumer but doesn’t stifle innovation for industry.  

It’s a tall order and a complicated ask, but they, that’s why all those lobbyists get paid the big bucks! ; )

Some iPhone Models Banned In China

Happy Monday.

Axios is reporting that a Chinese court has banned the sale of a number of recent iPhone models “citing infringement of two Qualcomm patents.”

Axios writes why this matters:

The preliminary injunction blocks the sale and import of iPhones into China, but not the manufacture or export of the devices, so the direct impact is limited to the domestic Chinese market. Still, it represents a significant disruption to Apple’s business and could bring the two parties to the negotiating table in their long litigation war.

The injunction prevents the sale and import of the iPhone 6s, 6sPlus, 7, 7 Plus, iPhone 8, 8 Plus and iPhone X. 

Apple’s response: 

“Qualcomm’s effort to ban our products is another desperate move by a company whose illegal practices are under investigation by regulators around the world. All iPhone models remain available for our customers in China. Qualcomm is asserting three patents they had never raised before, including one which has already been invalidated. We will pursue all our legal options through the courts.”

And Qualcomm’s:

Apple continues to benefit from our intellectual property while refusing to compensate us. These Court orders are further confirmation of the strength of Qualcomm’s vast patent portfolio.”

Meanwhile, Kara Swisher writing in The New York Times pulls back the camera and asks the question, “Can the U.S. Stop China from Controlling the Next Internet age?”

Rhetorical???

Wide Open (Source) Software

2018 has been the biggest year for open source software (OSS), evuh.

So writes Astasia Myers with Redpoint Ventures:

The most significant exit for an open source business was IBM’s $35B acquisition of Red Hat. As my colleague Tomasz Tunguz claimed, it was “a triumph of open source.” Red Hat’s acquisition was the largest software acquisition in history, and the third largest technology acquisition after Dell/EMC at $67B and JDS/SDL for $41B.

Next, in early November VMware acquired Heptio, a startup that helps companies deploy and manage upstream Kubernetes. Founded by ex-Googlers Craig McLuckie and Joe Beda, Heptio was mostly a services business with some open source projects like Ark, Sonobuoy, Contour, and Gimbal. Heptio competes against Red Hat so it is clear VMware is trying strengthening its role in the cloud-native ecosystem.

Hortonworks had a $5.2B merger with Cloudera, and Myers notes that there’s been at least $46.8B spent on acquiring open source companies.

See Myer’s post for a full breakdown of OSS deals since 2011.

The rise in open source and cloud solution has also led to some changes in the more traditional vertical software market.

Just today, HCL Technologies has paid $1.8 billion to pick up a number of IBM Software products, including Notes and Domino; Connections; on-prem versions of Portal, Commerce, and Unica; BigFix; and AppScan.

According to ZDNet:

“The products that we are acquiring are in large growing market areas like security, marketing, and commerce, which are strategic segments for HCL,” president and CEO of HCL Technologies C Vijayakumar said.

“Many of these products are well regarded by clients and positioned in the top quadrant by industry analysts.”

Vijayakumar added the company sees “tremendous potential” for creating as-a-service offerings by combining the acquisitions with its existing products.

A year ago in October, IBM had already entered into an arrangement that had HCL become responsible for the development of Domino products. 

End of an era?

Apple a Day

Bloomberg is reporting that Apple is “experimenting” with iPhone marketing strategies it rarely uses, including discount promotions with generous device buyback terms, to help bolster sales of its new line of smartphones.

Apparently they were selling below expectations, and not coincidentally Apple has lost about a fifth of market value since the start of October. And iPhone supplier Cirrus Logic cut its holiday quarter sales forecast 16 percent due to slack demand.

You can visit apple.com if you want to see whether or not your older iPhone is eligible for the trade-in, one which is lowering the cost of an XR model by up to $300.

 

Happy Holiday AirPods

Happy Monday.

If you’ve been wondering what’s on folks’ list for Santa this year, don’t rule out the Apple AirPods.

I’ve written before about how useful and user friendly I’ve personally found the AirPods to be, and how it’s nice to once and for all be rid of any cord emanating from a pair of earbuds.

Apparently I’m not alone.

9to5 Mac wrote earlier that AirPods are on track to be Apple’s best growth product for the foreseeable future, this according to a forecast from Ming-Chi Kuo.

Kuo is forecasting growth from 16 million units in 2017 to over 100 million by 2021, calling them Apple’s most popular accessory ever, and pointing out that existing iPhone users “are more likely to buy AirPods than upgrade their phone itself.”

Kuo also suggested Apple would release an upgraded model in the first quarter of 2019 that would provide wireless charging support.

But I wouldn’t let waiting for that feature, or future ones, prevent you from offering the current AirPods to someone you love for the holidays. 

They’re great just the way they are and hey, look Ma, no wires!

Apple’s Golden Eggs

Good morning and Happy Tuesday.

Here’s hoping you got everything you wished for on Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

I bought some coffee, which isn’t very cyber, I know, but hey, a man’s gotta have his caffeine.

You know who else might need some caffeine soon?

Tim Cook, CEO of Apple.

Yesterday, justices of the U.S. Supreme Court (hereafter referred to as “SCOTUS”) appeared open to letting a lawsuit proceed against Apple that accused it of breaking federal antitrust laws by monopolizing the market for iPhone software applications and causing consumers to overpay.

According to a report from Reuters:

The nine justices heard an hour of arguments in an appeal by the Cupertino, California-based technology company of a lower court’s decision to revive the proposed class-action lawsuit filed in federal court in California in 2011 by a group of iPhone users seeking monetary damages.

The lawsuit said Apple violated federal antitrust laws by requiring apps to be sold through the company’s App Store and then taking a 30 percent commission from the purchases.

Reuters points out that while developers set the prices of their apps, Apple collects the payments from iPhone users and keeps 30 percent commission on each purchase. Developers earned more than $26 billion from the store in 2017, a 30 percent increase from the year before.

Goose. 

Golden.

Eggs.

Don’t.

Kill.