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Rose Cisco
A computer programmer known for being the designer of the D programming language. She was also the main developer of the first native C++ compiler, Zortech C++ (later to become Symantec C++, now Digital Mars C++). Before the C++ compiler she developed the Datalight C compiler, also sold as Zorland C and later Zortech C.
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Microsoft makes a push to simplify machine learning
Ahead of its Build conference, Microsoft today released a slew of new machine learning products and tweaks to some of its existing services. These range from no-code tools to hosted notebooks, with a number of new APIs and other services in-between. The core theme, here, though, is that Microsoft is continuing its strategy of democratizing access to AI.
Ahead of the release, I sat down with Microsoft’s Eric Boyd, the company’s corporate vice president of its AI platform, to discuss Microsoft’s take on this space, where it competes heavily with the likes of Google and AWS, as well as numerous, often more specialized startups. And to some degree, the actual machine learning technologies have become table stakes. Everybody now offers pre-trained models, open-source tools and the platforms to train, build and deploy models. If one company doesn’t have pre-trained models for some use cases that its competitors support, it’s only a matter of time before it will. It’s the auxiliary services and the overall developer experience, though, where companies like Microsoft, with its long history of developing these tools, can differentiate themselves.
Microsoft’s Eric Boyd
“AI is really impacting the way the world does business,” Boyd said. “We see 75% of commercial enterprises are doing more with AI in the next several years. It’s tripled in the last couple years, according to Gartner. And so, we’re really seeing an explosion in the amount of work that’s coming from there. As people are driving this forward, as companies are driving this forward, developers are on the front lines, trying to figure out how to move their companies forward, how to build these models and how to build these applications, and help scale with all the changes that are moving through this.”
What these companies — and their developers — need is more powerful tools that allow them to become more productive and build their models faster. At Microsoft, where these companies are often large enterprises, that also includes being able to scale up to the needs of an enterprise and offer the security guarantees they need.
As companies start adopting machine learning, though, they are now also getting to a point where they have moved from a few tests to maybe running a hundred models in production. That comes with its own challenges. “They are trying to figure out how to manage the life cycle of these models,” he said. “How do I think of the operational cycle? How do I think about a new model that I’m ready to deploy? When is it ready to go?”
Only a few years ago, the industry started moving to a DevOps model for managing code. What Microsoft essentially wants to move to is MLOps for managing models. “It’s very similar to DevOps, but there’s some distinct differences in terms of how the tools operate,” Boyd noted. “At Microsoft, we’re really focusing on how do we solve these problems to make developers way more productive, using these enterprise tools to drive these changes that they need across their organization.” This means thinking about how to bring concepts like source control and continuous development to machine learning models, for example, and that will take new tools.
It’s no surprise then that adding more MLOps capabilities is a major part of today’s releases. The company is integrating some of these functions into Azure DevOps, for example, that allows them to trigger release pipelines. The company is also giving developers and data scientists tools for model version control, for example, to track and manage their assets and to share machine learning pipelines.
These are very much tools for advanced machine learning practitioners, though. On the other side of the spectrum, Microsoft also announced a number of automated machine learning tools, including one that essentially automates all of the processes, as well as a visual model builder, which grew out of the Azure ML Studio. As Boyd told me, even companies like British Petroleum and Oregon’s Deschutes Brewery (try their Black Butte Porter if you get a chance) now use these tools.
“We’ve added a bunch of features into automated machine learning to simplify how people are trying to use this kind of work,” Boyd noted.
Microsoft today also launched a number of new services in its Cognitive Services lineup, including a new personalization service, an API for recognizing handwriting and another one for transcribing conversations with multiple speakers. The personalization service stands out here because it uses reinforcement learning, a different machine learning technique from most other Cognitive Services tools, and because it is far easier to implement than similar services. For business users, there’s also the Form Recognizer, which makes extracting data from forms easy.
What’s more interesting that the specific features, though, is that Microsoft is shifting its emphasis here a little bit. “We’re moving away from some of the first-level problems of ‘here’s the table stakes, you have to have an AI platform,’ to much more sophisticated use cases around the operations of these algorithms, the simplification of them, new user experiences to really simplify how developers work and much richer cognitive services,” Boyd explained.
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Microsoft extends its Cognitive Services with personalization service, handwriting recognition APIs and more
As part of its rather bizarre news dump before its flagship Build developer conference next week, Microsoft today announced a slew of new pre-built machine learning models for its Cognitive Services platform. These include an API for building personalization features, a form recognizer for automating data entry, a handwriting recognition API and an enhanced speech recognition service that focuses on transcribing conversations.
Maybe the most important of these new services is the Personalizer. There are few apps and web sites, after all, that aren’t looking to provide their users with personalized features. That’s difficult, in part, because it often involves building models based on data that sits in a variety of silos. With Personalizer, Microsoft is betting on reinforcement learning, a machine learning technique that doesn’t need the kind of labeled training data typically used in machine learning. Instead, the reinforcement agent constantly tries to find the best way to achieve a given goal based on what users do. Microsoft argues that it is the first company to offer a service like this and the company itself has been testing the services on its Xbox, where it saw a 40% increase in engagement with its content after it implemented this service.
The handwriting recognition API, or Ink Recognizer as it is officially called, can automatically recognize handwriting, common shapes and documents. That’s something Microsoft has long focused on as it developed its Windows 10 inking capabilities, so maybe it’s no surprise that it is now packaging this up as a cognitive service, too. Indeed, Microsoft Office 365 and Windows use exactly this service already, so we’re talking about a pretty robust system. With this new API, developers can now bring these same capabilities to their own applications, too.
Conversation Transcription does exactly what the name implies: it transcribes conversations and it’s part of Microsoft’s existing speech-to-text features in the Cognitive Services lineup. It can label different speakers, transcribe the conversation in real time and even handle crosstalk. It already integrates with Microsoft Teams and other meeting software.
Also new is the Form Recognizer, a new API that makes it easier to extract text and data from business forms and documents. This may not sound like a very exciting feature, but it solves a very common problem and the service needs only five samples to understand how to extract data and users don’t have to do any of the arduous manual labeling that’s often involved in building these systems.
Form Recognizer is also coming to cognitive services containers, which allow developers to take these models outside of Azure and to their edge devices. The same is true for the existing speech-to-text and text-to-speech services, as well as the existing anomaly detector.
In addition, the company also today announced that its Neural Text-to-Speech, Computer Vision Read and Text Analytics Named Entity Recognition APIs are now generally available.
Some of these existing services are also getting some feature updates, with the Neural Text-to-Speech service now supporting five voices, while the Computer Vision API can now understand more than 10,000 concepts, scenes and objects, together with 1 million celebrities, compared to 200,000 in a previous version (are there that many celebrities?).
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Microsoft brings Plug and Play to IoT
Microsoft today announced that it wants to bring the ease of use of Plug and Play, which today allows you to plug virtually any peripheral into a Windows PC without having to worry about drivers, to IoT devices. Typically, getting an IoT device connected and up and running takes some work, even with modern deployment tools. The promise of IoT Plug and Play is that it will greatly simplify this process and do away with the hardware and software configuration steps that are still needed today.
As Azure corporate vice president Julia White writes in today’s announcement, “one of the biggest challenges in building IoT solutions is to connect millions of IoT devices to the cloud due to heterogeneous nature of devices today – such as different form factors, processing capabilities, operational system, memory and capabilities.” This, Microsoft argues, is holding back IoT adoption.
IoT Plug and Play, on the other hand, offers developers an open modeling language that will allow them to connect these devices to the cloud without having to write any code.
Microsoft can’t do this alone, though, since it needs the support of the hardware and software manufacturers in its IoT ecosystem, too. The company has already signed up a number of partners, including Askey, Brainium, Compal, Kyocera, STMicroelectronics, Thundercomm and VIA Technologies . The company says that dozens of devices are already Plug and Play-ready and potential users can find them in the Azure IoT Device Catalog.
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Microsoft launches a drag-and-drop machine learning tool
Microsoft today announced three new services that all aim to simplify the process of machine learning. These range from a new interface for a tool that completely automates the process of creating models, to a new no-code visual interface for building, training and deploying models, all the way to hosted Jupyter-style notebooks for advanced users.
Getting started with machine learning is hard. Even to run the most basic of experiments take a good amount of expertise. All of these new tools great simplify this process by hiding away the code or giving those who want to write their own code a pre-configured platform for doing so.
The new interface for Azure’s automated machine learning tool makes creating a model as easy importing a data set and then telling the service which value to predict. Users don’t need to write a single line of code, while in the backend, this updated version now supports a number of new algorithms and optimizations that should result in more accurate models. While most of this is automated, Microsoft stresses that the service provides “complete transparency into algorithms, so developers and data scientists can manually override and control the process.”
For those who want a bit more control from the get-go, Microsoft also today launched a visual interface for its Azure Machine Learning service into preview that will allow developers to build, train and deploy machine learning models without having to touch any code.
This tool, the Azure Machine Learning visual interface looks suspiciously like the existing Azure ML Studio, Microsoft’s first stab at building a visual machine learning tool. Indeed, the two services look identical. The company never really pushed this service, though, and almost seemed to have forgotten about it despite that fact that it always seemed like a really useful tool for getting started with machine learning.
Microsoft says that this new version combines the best of Azure ML Studio with the Azure Machine Learning service. In practice, this means that while the interface is almost identical, the Azure Machine Learning visual interface extends what was possible with ML Studio by running on top of the Azure Machine Learning service and adding that services’ security, deployment and lifecycle management capabilities.
The service provides an easy interface for cleaning up your data, training models with the help of different algorithms, evaluating them and, finally, putting them into production.
While these first two services clearly target novices, the new hosted notebooks in Azure Machine Learning are clearly geared toward the more experiences machine learning practitioner. The notebooks come pre-packaged with support for the Azure Machine Learning Python SDK and run in what the company describes as a “secure, enterprise-ready environment.” While using these notebooks isn’t trivial either, this new feature allows developers to quickly get started without the hassle of setting up a new development environment with all the necessary cloud resources.
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Microsoft launches a fully managed blockchain service
Microsoft didn’t rush to bring blockchain technology to its Azure cloud computing platform, but over the course of the last year, it started to pick up the pace with the launch of its blockchain development kit and the Azure Blockchain Workbench. Today, ahead of its Build developer conference, it is going a step further by launching Azure Blockchain Services, a fully managed service that allows for the formation, management and governance of consortium blockchain networks.
We’re not talking cryptocurrencies here, though. This is an enterprise service that is meant to help businesses build applications on top of blockchain technology. It is integrated with Azure Active Directory and offers tools for adding new members, setting permissions and monitoring network health and activity.
The first support ledger is J.P. Morgan’s Quorum. “Because it’s built on the popular Ethereum protocol, which has the world’s largest blockchain developer community, Quorum is a natural choice,” Azure CTO Mark Russinovich writes in today’s announcement. “It integrates with a rich set of open-source tools while also supporting confidential transactions—something our enterprise customers require.” To launch this integration, Microsoft partnered closely with J.P. Morgan.
The managed service is only one part of this package, though. Microsoft also today launched an extension to Visual Studio Code to help developers create smart contracts. The extension allows Visual Studio Code users to create and compiled Etherium smart contracts and deploy them other on the public chain or on a consortium network in Azure Blockchain Service. The code is then managed by Azure DevOps.
Building applications for these smart contracts is also going to get easier thanks to integrations with Logic Apps and Flow, Microsoft’s two workflow integration services, as well as Azure Functions for event-driven development.
Microsoft, of course, isn’t the first of the big companies to get into this game. IBM, especially, made a big push for blockchain adoption in recent years and AWS, too, is now getting into the game after mostly ignoring this technology before. Indeed, AWS opened up its own managed blockchain service only two days ago.
AWS opens up its managed blockchain as a service to everybody
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Microsoft announces the $3,500 HoloLens 2 Development Edition
As part of its rather odd Thursday afternoon pre-Build news dump, Microsoft today announced the HoloLens 2 Development Edition. The company announced the much-improved HoloLens 2 at MWC Barcelona earlier this year, but it’s not shipping to developers yet. Currently, the best release date we have is “later this year.” The Development Edition will launch alongside the regular HoloLens 2.
The Development Edition, which will retail for $3,500 to own outright or on a $99 per month installment plan, doesn’t feature any special hardware. Instead, it comes with $500 in Azure credits and 3-month trials of Unity Pro and the Unity PiXYZ plugin for bringing engineering renderings into Unity.
To get the Development Edition, potential buyers have to join the Microsoft Mixed Reality Developer Program and those who already pre-ordered the standard edition will be able to change their order later this year.
As far as HoloLens news goes, that’s all a bit underwhelming. Anybody can get free Azure credits, after all (though usually only $200) and free trials of Unity Pro are also readily available (though typically limited to 30 days).
Oddly, the regular HoloLens 2 was also supposed to cost $3,500. It’s unclear if the regular edition will now be somewhat cheaper, cost the same but come without the credits, or really why Microsoft isn’t doing this at all. Turning this into a special “Development Edition” feels more like a marketing gimmick than anything else, as well as an attempt to bring some of the futuristic glamour of the HoloLens visor to today’s announcements.
The folks at Unity are clearly excited, though. “Pairing HoloLens 2 with Unity’s real-time 3D development platform enables businesses to accelerate innovation, create immersive experiences, and engage with industrial customers in more interactive ways,” says Tim McDonough, GM of Industrial at Unity, in today’s announcement. “The addition of Unity Pro and PiXYZ Plugin to HoloLens 2 Development Edition gives businesses the immediate ability to create real-time 2D, 3D, VR, and AR interactive experiences while allowing for the importing and preparation of design data to create real-time experiences.”
Microsoft also today noted that Unreal Engine 4 support for HoloLens 2 will become available by the end of May.
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Microsoft brings Azure SQL Database to the edge (and Arm)
Microsoft today announced an interesting update to its database lineup with the preview of Azure SQL Database Edge, a new tool that brings the same database engine that powers Azure SQL Database in the cloud to edge computing devices, including, for the first time, Arm-based machines.
Azure SQL Edge, Azure corporate vice president Julia White writes in today’s announcement, “brings to the edge the same performant, secure and easy to manage SQL engine that our customers love in Azure SQL Database and SQL Server.”
The new service, which will also run on x64-based devices and edge gateways, promises to bring low-latency analytics to edge devices as it allows users to work with streaming data and time-series data, combined with the built-in machine learning capabilities of Azure SQL Database. Like its larger brethren, Azure SQL Database Edge will also support graph data and comes with the same security and encryption features that can, for example, protect the data at rest and in motion, something that’s especially important for an edge device.
As White rightly notes, this also ensures that developers only have to write an application once and then deploy it to platforms that feature Azure SQL Database, good old SQL Server on premises and this new edge version.
SQL Database Edge can run in both connected and fully disconnected fashion, something that’s also important for many use cases where connectivity isn’t always a given, yet where users need the kind of data analytics capabilities to keep their businesses (or drilling platforms, or cruise ships) running.
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AWS opens up its managed blockchain as a service to everybody
After announcing that they were launching a managed blockchain service late last year, Amazon Web Services is now opening that service up for general availability.
It was only about five months ago that AWS chief executive Andy Jassy announced that the company was reversing course on its previous dismissal of blockchain technologies and laid out a new service it would develop on top of open source frameworks like Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum.
AWS launches a managed blockchain service
“Customers want to use blockchain frameworks like Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum to create blockchain networks so they can conduct business quickly, with an immutable record of transactions, but without the need for a centralized authority. However, they find these frameworks difficult to install, configure, and manage,” said Rahul Pathak, General Manager, Amazon Managed Blockchain at AWS, in a statement. “Amazon Managed Blockchain takes care of provisioning nodes, setting up the network, managing certificates and security, and scaling the network. Customers can now get a functioning blockchain network set up quickly and easily, so they can focus on application development instead of keeping a blockchain network up and running.”
Already companies like AT&T Business, Nestlé and the Singaporean investment market, the Singapore Exchange, have signed on to use the company’s services.
With the announcement, AWS joins other big enterprise players like Azure from Microsoft and IBM in the blockchain as a service game.
Microsoft wants to make blockchain networks enterprise-ready with its new Coco Framework
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Workplace, Facebook’s enterprise edition, gets a reboot to boost activity and cut down on noise
At F8 today, Facebook is unveiling a major redesign for its desktop app — the first big update it’s made since 2014 — and a refresh of its mobile apps as it begins to bring its many functions, features and apps under a more unified umbrella. And along with that, Workplace, its enterprise version, is also getting a renovation. Aimed at increasing access to different features like Groups, Chats and Notifications, the update brings their functionality closer together, and on top of that introduces more of Facebook’s famous algorithm to suggest people and groups tailored to you.
“We’ve redesigned the experiences so that the code bases remain the same,” Karandeep Anand, the head of Workplace, said of the new updates and how they relate to Facebook.
Workplace announced in February that it now has 2 million paying users, along with “millions” more using the free or Workplace for Good versions, and now the name of the game for the company is engagement.
Getting more people to use Workplace more regularly as part of their daily work life increases the likelihood that companies will continue using (and paying for) it — and crucially not jumping to a competitor. As Slack approaches its IPO and prepares itself for more public scrutiny, and Microsoft continues to double down on new features, that strategy is perhaps more important than ever.
To that end, the company today showed off a new desktop version of Workplace that gives it parity with the mobile app and Facebook’s updated consumer desktop experience.
We’re running a series of screenshots here of how the new pages on desktop look, and the second set of images are screenshots of the “old” Workplace, so that you can see how it was cleaned up.
[gallery ids="1819673,1819675,1819676,1819677,1819678,1819680,1819681,1819683,1819684"]
And here are some shots of the older version:
[gallery ids="1819753,1819752,1819751"]
On the UI side, the new design notably brings two key Workplace features — Groups and contacts for Chats — out of the right-rail graveyard, where many users are believed to have stopped looking years ago to ignore ads — and into the left column, which used to provide a menu of tools and further information about your organization. The idea is that, by putting them on the left, it will make it more likely for people to turn to these lists and engage with them more.
“We’re making usage significantly more tighter and coupled between posts and Groups,” said Anand. “The idea is to bring messaging into the same room as wider conversations.”
Notifications, meanwhile, is getting its own “inbox,” so to speak. This is a clever turn that essentially expands the list of actions that have happened that are relevant to you, so that you can click on each one and jump to a view of that relevant piece of content, separate from being in the main default page. This is a useful way for people who might be very busy to look quickly through a series of different updates without the distraction of looking at the rest of their Workplace feed.
Distraction is a theme here: Another new update is that Workplace now has a “focus” mode in sections like Groups that take away the left navigation column so you can look specifically at the content you are working on without lots of alerts from other groups, individuals or the company at large. Given the immense amount of distraction that we have these days from notifications, this could be a welcome change for some.
On top of the UI changes, Facebook is giving Workplace a bigger international twist as well. The app is now available in 46 languages, and Facebook will be offering more auto-translation options to its users to leverage that.
There is also another level of changes taking place that are more under the hood but also interesting: Facebook is introducing more algorithmic features into Workplace, by tapping into your “work graph” to suggest people and groups that you might interact with.
Up to now, there was already some algorithmic tweaking to Workplace: admins could bump certain news items into people’s feeds so that they were seen by more employees; and similarly the News Feed didn’t run in a chronological order but was based on what you interacted with, which groups you were already a part of and so on, to bring you content that was deemed more relevant.
Now that is being expanded to connections and groups. The aim here is pretty clear: By giving you a more tailored list of people and content, Workplace will hopefully keep your attention for longer. Anand says that it’s important for Facebook and Workplace to continue to keep parity in their code bases, but it’s moves like this that underscore how Facebook aims to keep the ethos of the two products aligned as well.
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Meet the tech boss, same as the old boss
“Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” It seems darkly funny, now, that anyone ever dared to dream that tech would be different. But we did, once. We would build new companies in new ways, was the thinking, not like the amoral industrial behemoths of old. The corporate villains of 90s cyberpunk were fresh in our imaginations. We weren’t going to be like that. We were going to show that you could get rich, do good, and treat everyone who worked for or interacted with your business with fundamental decency, all at the same time.
The poster child for this was, of course, Google, whose corporate code of conduct for fifteen years famously included the motto “don’t be evil.” No longer, and the symbolism is all too apt. Since removing that phrase in 2015, we’ve all witnessed reports of widespread sexual harassment, including 13 senior managers fired for it; Project Maven; and Project Dragonfly. Internal backlashes and a mass walkout led to retractions and changes, courtesy of Google employees rather than management … and now we’re seeing multiple reports of management retaliation against those employees.
Facebook? I mean, where do we even begin. Rootkits on teenagers‘ phones. Privacy catastrophe after privacy catastrophe. Admissions that they didn’t do enough to prevent Facebook-fostered violence in Myanmar. Sheryl Sandberg personally ordering opposition research on a Facebook critic. And those are just stories from the last six months alone!
Amazon? Consider how they overwork and underpay delivery drivers and warehouse workers. Apple? Consider how they “deny Chinese users the ability to install the VPN and E2E messaging apps that would allow them to avoid pervasive censorship and surveillance,” to quote Stanford’s Alex Stamos. Microsoft? The grand dame of the Big Five has mostly evolved into a quiet enterprise respectability, but has recently seen “dozens of” reports of sexual harassment and discrimination ignored by HR, along with demands for cancellation of the HoloLens military contract.
Those are the five most valuable publicly traded companies in the world. It’s far from “absolute power,” but it’s far more power than the tech industry has had before. Have we avoided corruption and complacency? Have we done things differently? Have we been better than our predecessors? Not half so much as we hoped back in the giddy early days of the Internet. Not a quarter. Not an eighth.
And it’s mostly so gratuitous. Google didn’t need to try to build a censored search engine for China. They don’t need the money — they’re a giant money-printing machine already — and the Chinese people don’t need their product. Amazon doesn’t need to treat its lower-paid workers with vicious contempt. (It’s true they finally — finally! — raised their minimum wage to $15, but it could very easily afford to make their pay and working conditions substantially better yet.) Facebook doesn’t need to … to increasingly act like a company whose management is composed largely of wide-eyed cultists and/or mustache-twirling villains, basically.
Google should have promoted the organizers of their walkout, but there, at least, you can see why they didn’t. Raw fear. The one thing which truly frightens the management of big tech companies, more than regulators, more than competitors, more than climate change, is their own employees.
Is it that the modern megacorps have inherited from their forebears the obsession with growth at all costs, a religious drive to cast their net over every aspect of the entire world, so it’s still not enough for each of those companies to make billions upon billions from advertising and commerce to spend on their famous — and now sometimes infamous — “moonshot” projects? (Don’t talk to me about the fiduciary duty of maximum profit. Tech senior management can interpret that “duty” however they see fit.)
Is it that any sufficiently large and wealthy organization becomes, in its upper reaches, a nest of would-be Game of Thrones starlets, playing power politics with their pet projects and personal careers, regardless of the costs and repercussions? (At least when they are born of hypergrowth; it’s noticeable that more-mature Apple and Microsoft, while imperfect, still seem by some considerable distance the least objectionable of these Big Five, and Facebook the most so.)
I don’t want to sound like I think the tech industry is guilty of ruining everything. Not at all. The greatest trick the finance industry ever pulled is somehow convincing (some of) the world that it’s the tech industry who are the primary drivers of inequality. As for the many media who seem to be trying to pin recent election outcomes, and all other ills of the world, on tech, well —
Honestly I'm a little sick of journalists blaming tech for all that ails us as if "tech" put Hillary Clinton's emails on their front pages for months straight.
— Catherine Bracy (@cbracy) April 24, 2019
But the existence of greater failures should not blind us to our own, and whether we have failed in an old way or a new one is moot. Accepting this failure is — at least for people like me who were once actually dumb/optimistic enough to believe that things might be different this time — an important step towards trying to build something better.
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Microsoft’s Mixer now lets streamers reward fans for participation, not just subscriptions
On game streaming platforms today, there’s really only one way to earn status within a creator’s community: you have to become a subscriber. Microsoft’s game streaming service Mixer is today aiming to offering a third path to status through loyalty and participation. In doing so, it hopes to better differentiate itself from larger rivals like Twitch and YouTube.
Channel Progression, as this new feature is called, is a system that rewards community members and a streamer’s fans for more than just their financial contributions. It also takes into account other activity within the channel and on Mixer as a whole.
Members can level up by participating in the stream’s chat, by their repeat visits, by using Skills (aka other forms of expression like stickers, effects and GIFs that are used in chats), and more. That means that viewers will be able to earn rewards and raise their rank by just participating — watching, chatting, following, subscribing, and later, through other actions, as well.
As streamers participate, they’ll rank up, gaining them bragging rights and other perks that will vary by their rank level. They can also check on their rank at any time by clicking on the “Your Rank” button at the bottom left corner of the chat box.
The feature is rolling out on Wednesday May 1, 2019 to all streamers on Mixer — not just Mixer Partner, as it’s designed to not only be a way for streamers to grow their own communities, but for Mixer itself to grow.
In the future, however, Mixer Partners will be able to also reward monetization actions, like subscribing, gift subscriptions, and for spending Embers (virtual currency).
The changes come at a time when there’s been a rise in complaints over how hard it is to get noticed on the leading game streaming site, Twitch. Some smaller streamers told The Verge last summer they spent years broadcasting to no one, and found it difficult to grow their community, despite the effort Twitch has made in this area. More recently, that’s included the launch of a four-person Squad Stream, to help creators get discovered.
Despite this, Twitch’s longtail continues to grow — according to a recent report from StreamElements, the top 1,000 Twitch channels were responsible for 57% of Twitch’s viewership hours in Q1 2019, and the longtail (those beyond the top 10,000 channels) was responsible for 20%. In total, Twitch hit 2.7 billion hours of content watched in Q1, the report claimed.
Mixer, by comparison, is much smaller. Its numbers may have quadrupled since Q1 2019, but that’s only going from 22 million hours watched to 89 million. It still has much, much further to go to catch up with YouTube Live, not to mention Twitch.
Mixer’s channel progression feature was originally announced in November as part of Mixer’s “Season 2” release. It launches tomorrow to all on Mixer.com on the desktop and will roll out to all other platforms in the weeks ahead.
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Nintendo and Sony temper console expectations ahead of E3
E3’s just over a month away, and per usual, the news in the lead up has offered more insight into what we won’t be hearing about at the big gaming show. Late last year, Sony announced that it would be skipping its big annual press conference at the event. The move marks a key absence for the gaming giant for the first time in nearly a quarter of a century, as the company will instead be “exploring new and familiar ways to engage our community in 2019.”
The sentiment should ring familiar for those who follow the gaming industry. Several years ago Nintendo made a similar move, eschewing the in-person press conference for the online Nintendo Direct “Treehouse” it uses to showcase new trailers. It’s a method Nintendo has held to ever since.
Game publisher Square Enix this week happily slid into Sony’s prime-time slot, leaving Microsoft the last of the remaining three major console makers with a press conference at the Los Angeles event. The death of shows like E3 has been overstated throughout the years, of course. These things tend to move in cycles, with much of the hype tied specifically to new system reveals.
Microsoft took the wraps off its disc-free Xbox One S “All-Digital Edition” this month, leaving many wondering what the company could still have up its sleeve for the June event. Earlier this week, meanwhile, Sony batted away suggestions that the PlayStation 5 was coming soon. Details are, not surprisingly, still vague, but the company says the next-gen console won’t be arriving in the next six months.
On its earnings call, Nintendo similarly dismissed recent rumors that it would launch a low-cost version of the Switch. The console has been a wild success for the company on the heels of the disappointing Wii U, but slowing sales have pointed to Nintendo’s longstanding tradition of offering modified hardware. Rumors have largely pointed to a lower-cost version of the system that can only be played in portable mode.
None of this is to say we got some kind of preview. Companies love to tease these sorts of things out, but it does appear that the big three are tempering expectations for the show. That leaves some opening for other players — of course, E3 has long been dominated by the big three. Among the other rumors currently circulating ahead of the show is a 2-in-1 gaming tablet from Nvidia.
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A new era for enterprise IT
Aaron Levie Contributor
Aaron Levie is the Chief Executive Officer of Box.
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Now the cloud wars (really) begin
The Industrialist’s Dilemma
Amidst the newly minted scooter unicorns, ebbs and flows of bitcoin investments, and wagers on the price of Uber’s IPO, another trend has shaken up the tech industry: the explosion of enterprise software successes.
Bessemer notes that today there are 55 private companies valued at $1 billion or more compared to zero a decade ago. Proving this isn’t just private market hype, enterprise cloud companies have well-exceeded $500 billion in market cap and are on a path to hit $1 trillion in the next few years. Whether it’s the masterfully executed IPOs of Zoom and PagerDuty, and the imminent Slack IPO, or the mega funding rounds of companies like Asana, and Airtable, Front, and many others, the insatiable demand for enterprise cloud deals shows that the new era of IT is no longer a zero sum game.
Back when we started Box in 2005, we saw a disruption on the horizon that would change enterprise software as we knew it.Led by the same trends that were impacting the consumer internet — growth of mobile, faster web-browsers, more users connected online — combined with the advent of the cloud, enterprises in every industry are forced to transform in the digital age. But we could barely have imagined the scale of change to come.
A Tipping Point for Best-of-Breed IT
Today’s enterprise software market doesn’t look like the enterprise software of the past. For one, the market is much larger. Deploying software in the on-prem world required a team of highly trained professionals and a hefty budget. By lowering costs and and removing adoption hurdles, the cloud expanded the market from millions to billions of people globally and in turn, businesses are using more apps than ever before. In fact, Okta found in their latest Business @ Work Report that large enterprises are deploying 129 apps on average. It’s therefore no surprise that software spend is expected to reach more than $420 billion in 2019 as the shift to the cloud marches on.
With a market of that magnitude, enterprise IT no longer can be controlled by just a handful of vendors, as we saw in the 90’s. And what what were once solved problems in a prior era of IT are now unsolved relative to rapidly changing user and buyer expectations in the cloud, leaving the door open for new disruptors to emerge and solve this problem better, faster, and with more focused visions.
Previously pesky problems like alerting ops teams to technical issues have turned into an entire platform for real-time operations, leading to PagerDuty’s $3 billion valuation in the process.
Everyone thought video conferencing was a tired market but Zoom proved that with extreme focus and simple user-experience its team could build a company worth over $15 billion. Atlassian has generated $25 billion in value by building a portfolio of modern development and IT tools that power a digital enterprise.
Slack has shown that real-time communication and workflow automation can be reinvented yet again. And making this approach work seamlessly are services like Okta, which is valued at $10 billion today.
In all of these cases, “best-of-breed” platforms are growing rapidly in their respective markets, with near limitless size and potential. And as processes for every every team, department, business, and industry can now be digitized, and we’ll continue to see this play out in every category of technology.
If the move from mainframe and mini-computers to PC saw a 10X increase in applications and software, the move from PC to cloud and mobile will see an order of magnitude more.
From IT stacks to cloud ecosystems
We’ve reached a new era of enterprise software and companies are coming around to this model in droves.
What seemed unfathomable merely a decade ago is now becoming commonplace as Fortune 500 companies are mixing and matching best-in-class technologies — from upstarts to cloud mainstays like Salesforce, Workday, and ServiceNow — to power their business. But there’s still work to do.
To ensure customers get all the benefits of a best-of-breed cloud ecosystem, these tools must work together without requiring the customer to stitch systems together manually. Without interoperability and integration, enterprises will be left with siloed data, fragmented workflows and security gaps in the cloud. In a legacy world, the idea of deep integration between software stacks was great on paper, but near impossible in practice. As Larry Ellison described in Softwar, customers were left footing the bill for putting together independent technology themselves. But the rules have changed with today’s generation of API-native companies with open cultures and a deep focus on putting the customer first.
Notably, even the largest players — IBM, Microsoft, Google, Cisco, and others — have recognized this tectonic shift, a harbinger of what’s to come in the industry. Satya Nadella, in taking over Microsoft, recognized the power of partnerships in a world where IT spend would be growing exponentially, telling Wired:
…instead of viewing things as zero sum, let’s view things as, ‘Hey, what is it that we’re trying to get done? What is it that they’re trying to get done? Places where we can co-operate, let’s co-operate.’ And where we’re competing, we compete.
As Peter Sole, former head of the Research Board, points out, in this digital world we can no longer think about a few vendors owning layers in a stack but instead as an ecosystem of multiple services working together to deliver value to the entire network. The incumbents that successfully thrive in the digital age will be those that despite their scale, work and operate like the nimbler, customer-obsessed, more open disruptors. And those that don’t will face a reckoning from customers that now have choice to go a different direction for the first time.
Gone are the days of monolithic IT stacks and zero sum thinking; this is the new normal. Welcome to a new era of enterprise IT.
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Microsoft beats expectations with $30.6B in revenue as Azure’s growth continues
Microsoft reported its quarterly earnings for Q3 2019 today. Overall, Wall Street expected earnings of about $1 per share and revenue of $29.84 billion. The company handily beat this with revenue of $30.6 billion (up 14 percent from the year-ago quarter) and earnings per share of $1.14.
With Microsoft focusing heavily on its cloud business, with both Azure and its other cloud-based services, it’s no surprise that this is also what Wall Street really cares about. The expectation here, according to some analysts, was that the company would hit a run rate of about $38.5 billion.
And indeed, Microsoft Azure had a pretty good quarter, with revenue growing 73 percent. That’s a bit lower than last quarter’s results, but only by a fraction, and shows that there is plenty of growth left for Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure business.
Azure’s growth slowed somewhat in recent quarters. In some ways, that’s to be expected, though. Microsoft’s cloud is now a massive business and posting 100 percent growth when you have a run rate of almost $40 billion becomes a bit harder.
“Demand for our cloud offerings drove commercial cloud revenue to $9.6 billion this quarter, up 41% year-over-year,” said Amy Hood, executive vice president and chief financial officer of Microsoft. “We continue to drive growth in revenue and operating income with consistent execution from our sales teams and partners and targeted strategic investments.”
The company’s ‘intelligent cloud’ segment, which includes Azure and other cloud- and server-based products, reported revenue of $9.7 billion, up 22 percent from the year-ago quarter.
Microsoft’s productivity applications also fared well, with total revenue up by 14 percent to $10.2 billion. Here, revenue from LinkedIn also increased by 27 percent and the company highlighted that LinkedIn sessions also increased 24 percent.
Other highlights of the report include an increase in Surface revenue of 21 percent, which was expected given the number of new devices the company released in recent quarters.
“Leading organizations of every size in every industry trust the Microsoft cloud. We are accelerating our innovation across the cloud and edge so our customers can build the digital capability increasingly required to compete and grow,” said Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft.
For more financial details, you can find the full report here.
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Ride-hailing firm Grab is losing its CTO
Grab is once again on the hunt for a CTO after Theo Vassilakis, the former Microsoft and Google executive who currently occupies the role, announced that he will leave the ride-hailing company this summer.
Vassilakis became Grab CTO in October 2017, ending a very long search to fill the job, but he explained in a LinkedIn post that he is leaving the Singapore-based firm, and Southeast Asia, for family reasons.
My family and I moved to Singapore in late 2017 when I joined Grab. Living and working in Southeast Asia has been an adventure that broadened our horizons and will always be in our hearts. Unfortunately, our personal circumstances have changed unexpectedly and we’ll need to spend most of our time outside the region — mostly in the south of China for the foreseeable future.
Following his exit on June 30, Vassilakis will remain an advisor to Grab, with a specific focus on “coaching our senior tech leaders and shepherding our ongoing AI and marketplace optimization efforts.” He said that he will be involved in finding and hiring his replacement.
While it will lack a ‘group CTO,’ Grab does have CTOs for its transport and financial business units — Mark Porter and Vikas Agrawal, respectively — while head of product and design Jerald Singh will be involved in filling the void. Grab’s first CTO was Wei Zhu, who is credited with creating Connect with Facebook, but he left in 2015 after just a year and later sued over alleged unpaid earnings.
Under Vassilakis’ leadership, Grab massively increased its tech presence. The company now has seven R&D offices — Bangalore, Beijing, Ho Chi Minh City, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Seattle and Singapore — and it claims to have doubled its headcount in 2018. Grab said in December that it is projected to add a further 1,000 “tech roles” this year.
The company has also expanded from merely transportation services to on-demand services, apps from third-parties via its ‘platform’ strategy, and payments and financial services.
Grab has also become the largest tech company in Southeast Asia by some margin in the eyes of investors. The company was most recently valued at $14 billion when it raised nearly $1.5 billion from SoftBank’s Vision Fund in March. To date, Grab has raised and the company said earlier this month that it plans to pull in $2 billion more from investors this year to battle rival Go-Jek, make acquisitions and develop its ‘super app’ strategy.
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Drone delivery startup Zipline launches UAV medical program in Ghana
Zipline, the San Francisco-based UAV manufacturer and logistics services provider, has launched a program in Ghana today for drone delivery of medical supplies.
Working with the Ghanaian government, Zipline will operate 30 drones out of four distribution centers to distribute vaccines, blood, and life-saving medications to 2000 health facilities across the West African nation daily.
“We’ll do 600 flights day…and serve 12 million people. This is going to be the largest drone delivery network on the planet,” Zipline CEO Keller Rinaudo told TechCrunch on a call from Accra.
“No one in Ghana should die because they can’t access the medicine they need in an emergency,” Ghana’s President Nana Akufo-Addo said in a statement. “That’s why Ghana is launching the world’s largest drone delivery service…a major step towards giving everyone in this country universal access to lifesaving medicine.”
The Ghana program adds a second country to Zipline’s live operations. Zipline got off the ground in Rwanda and has leveraged its experience in East Africa to begin testing medical delivery services in the United States.
Zipline has been making moves in Africa since at least 2016 — after it raised capital and solidified its mission to carve out a global revenue-generating business around UAV delivery of critical medical supplies.
To date, the startup has raised $41 million from investors including Sequoia Capital, Google Ventures, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, and Subtraction Capital.
Founded in 2014, Zipline designs and manufactures its own UAVs, launch and landing systems, and logistics software. After a testing period in coordination with the government of Rwanda, Zipline went live in the East African country in 2016, claiming the first national drone-delivery program at scale in the world.
Through its non-profit foundation, the logistics giant UPS came in to partner with Zipline on the Rwanda program, and that support continues.
“They’re providing funding to build a lot of the infrastructure required, they are an adviser to us, and they provide some logistical support in moving equipment,” Rinaudo said of Zipline’s collaboration with the UPS Foundation. Zipline has also received grants and support from from The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and Pfizer .
Zipline then carried its experience in Africa to the U.S. In May 2018 the startup was accepted into the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration Pilot Program (UAS IPP). Out of 149 applicants, the Africa focused startup was one of 10 selected to participate in a drone pilot in the U.S.—and started testing beyond visual line of sight medical delivery services in North Carolina.
“Healthcare logistics is a $70 billion global industry, and it’s still only serving a golden billion on the planet,” says Rinaudo. “The economics of our business is pretty simple. We’re using small, electric, fully autonomous vehicles…these kinds of systems are much more efficient than the analog way of delivering things.”
Zipline is eyeing additional countries for delivery operations beyond Ghana, Rwanda, and its pilot operations in the U.S. “We’ll be launching in several additional countries, not all of which are in Africa,” said Rinaudo, though he declined to disclose specifics.
Zipline is well aware that its drone logistics systems have applications beyond medical supply chain services and Rinaudo confirmed moving cargo other than medical supplies is something Zipline has considered.
If the company moves toward other commercial applications, it could leverage its programs and relationships in Africa. The continent has become testbed for commercial drone delivery and regulatory structures.
African experiments with drone technologies could leapfrog decades of infrastructure neglect
Over the last two years South Africa passed commercial drone legislation to train and license pilots and Malawi opened a Drone Test Corridor to African and global partners. Over the same period, Kenya, Ghana, and Tanzania have issued or updated drone regulatory guidelines and announced future UAV initiatives. The government of Tanzania launched a medical drone delivery program in 2019, with DHL as one of the main partners.
In addition to its launch today in Ghana, Zipline plans to move from pilot-phase to live-delivery of medical supplies in the U.S. sometime this summer, a company spokesperson confirmed.
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Microsoft delves deeper into IoT with Express Logic acquisition
Microsoft has never been shy about being acquisitive, and today it announced it’s buying Express Logic, a San Diego company that has developed a real-time operating system (RTOS) aimed at controlling the growing number of IoT devices in the world.
The companies did not share the purchase price.
Express Logic is not some wide-eyed, pie-in-the-sky startup. It has been around for 23 years building (in its own words), “industrial-grade RTOS and middleware software solutions for embedded and IoT developers.” The company boasts some 6.2 billion (yes, billion) devices running its systems. That number did not escape Sam George, director of Azure IoT at Microsoft, but as he wrote in a blog post announcing the deal, there is a reason for this popularity.
“This widespread popularity is driven by demand for technology to support resource constrained environments, especially those that require safety and security,” George wrote.
The beauty of Express Logic’s approach is that it can work in low-power and low resource environments and offers a proven solution for a range or products. “Manufacturers building products across a range of categories — from low capacity sensors like lightbulbs and temperature gauges to air conditioners, medical devices and network appliances –leverage the size, safety and security benefits of Express Logic solutions to achieve faster time to market,” George wrote.
Writing in a blog post to his customers announcing the deal, Express Logic CEO William E. Lamie, expressed optimism that the company can grow even further as part of the Microsoft family. “Effective immediately, our ThreadX RTOS and supporting software technology, as well as our talented engineering staff join Microsoft. This complements Microsoft’s existing premier security offering in the microcontroller space,” he wrote.
Microsoft is getting an established company with a proven product that can help it scale its Azure IoT business. The acquisition is part of a $5 billion investment in IoT the company announced last April that includes a number of Azure pieces such as Azure Sphere, Azure Digital Twins, Azure IoT Edge, Azure Maps and Azure IoT Central.
“With this acquisition, we will unlock access to billions of new connected endpoints, grow the number of devices that can seamlessly connect to Azure and enable new intelligent capabilities. Express Logic’s ThreadX RTOS joins Microsoft’s growing support for IoT devices and is complementary with Azure Sphere, our premier security offering in the microcontroller space,” George wrote.
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