Zoom has launched new tools for developers to help them build video-based applications and websites with fully customisable, native user interfaces. 

The Zoom Video SDK will now be made available via a free subscription service and will allow developers to build video-based applications and interactive features such as on-the-go live streaming with interactive chat, the company says. 

The Video SDK is part of Zoom’s Developer Platform, which features various resources such as dev tools, infrastructure support and access to a dev community. Developers can now access the SDK via a new «Buy Now» option which will come with no initial charge for up to 10,000 minutes per month, with additional minutes being charged on a per-minute basis. There will be a full paid tier, with a plan that starts at $1,000 a year and includes 30,000 session minutes per month.
 
As well as specific features for Zoom users, the firm hopes more business applications will be created. This could include functions for retail organisations with «unique» shopping experiences and tailored customer services via video. 

A good example of what developers can do with the SDK is Lingmo, a cloud-based AI translation software provider that built a feature for instant captions in meetings that let users converse in different languages. 

«Zoom’s fully customisable Video SDK was a good fit for us because it worked seamlessly with our technology and enabled us to assist enterprise customers in a new way. Zoom’s Video SDK allowed us to accelerate the development of our solution, and gave us the flexibility to enhance our product offering for our customers,» said Danny May, CEO of Lingmo International.

As well as the SDKs, developers can access APIs, chatbots, webhooks and even an analytical platform that can provide real-time data on their builds, such as customer engagement and performance figures. 
 
The announcement comes shortly after the anniversary of the UK’s first lockdown where the country switched to working remotely. Zoom was one of the biggest beneficiaries of the pandemic, seeing a 355% increase in adoption as consumers and businesses adopted its simple and cheap video conferencing. 

The founder of OVH, which owns the French data centre that perished in a fire last week, has said the incident highlights a need for the data centre industry to offer backups as a standard for all customers.

Octave Klaba said his company will start providing secure backups for its data centre customers by default rather than as an additional paid service.

Klaba said that the fire at OVH’s data centre site in Strasbourg earlier this month, that destroyed one building and partially damaged another, should serve as an industry-wide wakeup call.

«This incident will change our way of delivering these services, but, also, I believe it will change the industry, which will increase the securities of backups by default, without any payment,» Kalaba said in a video. «This will be our strategy, our answer to this incident.»

Several OVH customers affected by the fire were unable to bring their applications back online due to a lack of backups. Klaba suggested there was some confusion over service terms and that some of its customers hadn’t fully understood what they had brought from OVH. The French cloud firm did offer 500GB of free backup storage with every dedicated server and customers could pay to ramp that up to 10TB.

«It seems that globally, the customers… understand what we are delivering, but some customers, they don’t understand what exactly they bought,» Klaba said in the video.

The CEO added that he would post another video on Friday 19 March with an update on the ongoing investigation into the cause of the fire. Thermal images used by firefighters suggested the building’s uninterruptible power supply (UPS) system was a possible cause. Klaba said that investigators had taken the UPS units and all its batteries and fuses – along with video footage – for analysis.

The founder of OVH, which owns the French data centre that perished in a fire last week, has said the incident highlights a need for the data centre industry to offer backups as a standard for all customers.

Octave Klaba said his company will start providing secure backups for its data centre customers by default rather than as an additional paid service.

Klaba said that the fire at OVH’s data centre site in Strasbourg earlier this month, that destroyed one building and partially damaged another, should serve as an industry-wide wakeup call.

«This incident will change our way of delivering these services, but, also, I believe it will change the industry, which will increase the securities of backups by default, without any payment,» Kalaba said in a video. «This will be our strategy, our answer to this incident.»

Several OVH customers affected by the fire were unable to bring their applications back online due to a lack of backups. Klaba suggested there was some confusion over service terms and that some of its customers hadn’t fully understood what they had brought from OVH. The French cloud firm did offer 500GB of free backup storage with every dedicated server and customers could pay to ramp that up to 10TB.

«It seems that globally, the customers… understand what we are delivering, but some customers, they don’t understand what exactly they bought,» Klaba said in the video.

The CEO added that he would post another video on Friday 19 March with an update on the ongoing investigation into the cause of the fire. Thermal images used by firefighters suggested the building’s uninterruptible power supply (UPS) system was a possible cause. Klaba said that investigators had taken the UPS units and all its batteries and fuses – along with video footage – for analysis.

Dropbox will make its password manager, ‘Dropbox Passwords’, available for free from next month. 

The feature was launched last year for paying customers but will be made available to anyone that has a Dropbox account, the company announced.

Dropbox Passwords generates unique passwords for new sign-ups and autofills credentials on apps and websites. The service is based on zero-knowledge encryption, which means users don’t have to reveal the password for verification. What’s more, the company said it will soon release a feature that lets users securely share passwords with friends and family.

There are a few limitations, however. Dropbox Passwords users will only be able to store up to 50 passwords up to three devices to access those credential via the cloud.

«Last year, we launched Dropbox Passwords for all paid Dropbox plans to make signing into websites and storing your passwords seamless,» the firm said in a statement. «The Passwords app remembers your usernames and passwords on all your devices – so you don’t have to. And zero-knowledge encryption ensures only you know your passwords, not Dropbox.»

Using password managers have been touted as a best practice for businesses for years and they are now seen as a crucial part of remote working due to the increase in services needed.

The importance of these services was recently highlighted by the widespread backlash to LastPass‘ announcement that its free tier will no longer offer users unlimited access to stored passwords on both desktop and mobile devices.
 
«If you are not using a password manager then you are dangerously leaving yourself more open to cyberattacks,» said Jake Moore, ESET’s cyber security specialist. «It is vital to implement a password manager into your work and home life to remain protected from attacks, but many people mistakenly think of it as a more unsecure way of protecting accounts.
 
«Most people have dozens of accounts and this number is only going to get bigger, for example with one-time purchases, so it can be easy to reuse known passwords. But this is where threat actors often capitalise, seeking out those overused non-complex passwords and then compromising other accounts with the same credentials.»

Dropbox will make its password manager, ‘Dropbox Passwords’, available for free from next month. 

The feature was launched last year for paying customers but will be made available to anyone that has a Dropbox account, the company announced.

Dropbox Passwords generates unique passwords for new sign-ups and autofills credentials on apps and websites. The service is based on zero-knowledge encryption, which means users don’t have to reveal the password for verification. What’s more, the company said it will soon release a feature that lets users securely share passwords with friends and family.

There are a few limitations, however. Dropbox Passwords users will only be able to store up to 50 passwords up to three devices to access those credential via the cloud.

«Last year, we launched Dropbox Passwords for all paid Dropbox plans to make signing into websites and storing your passwords seamless,» the firm said in a statement. «The Passwords app remembers your usernames and passwords on all your devices – so you don’t have to. And zero-knowledge encryption ensures only you know your passwords, not Dropbox.»

Using password managers have been touted as a best practice for businesses for years and they are now seen as a crucial part of remote working due to the increase in services needed.

The importance of these services was recently highlighted by the widespread backlash to LastPass‘ announcement that its free tier will no longer offer users unlimited access to stored passwords on both desktop and mobile devices.
 
«If you are not using a password manager then you are dangerously leaving yourself more open to cyberattacks,» said Jake Moore, ESET’s cyber security specialist. «It is vital to implement a password manager into your work and home life to remain protected from attacks, but many people mistakenly think of it as a more unsecure way of protecting accounts.
 
«Most people have dozens of accounts and this number is only going to get bigger, for example with one-time purchases, so it can be easy to reuse known passwords. But this is where threat actors often capitalise, seeking out those overused non-complex passwords and then compromising other accounts with the same credentials.»

AMD has unveiled its third-generation Epyc Milan data centre CPUs, which is claims are the «world’s fastest» server processors. 

The hardware, which is already available, is the first set of AMD chips for the server market to be built on the company’s powerful 7-nanometer Zen 3 architecture. 

AMD claims Epyc Milan produces twice the power of Intel’s rival Xeon Cascade Lake Refresh chips in HPC, cloud and enterprise workloads, and claims it offers a better price-to-performance ratio.

AMD’s confidence comes from as a result of its Zen 3 architecture, which is a microarchitecture that has brought similar benefits with AMD’s Ryzen 500 series of chips, which have become increasingly popular in the desktop PC space. 

«With the launch of our 3rd Gen AMD Epyc processors, we are incredibly excited to deliver the fastest server CPU in the world. These processors extend our data centre leadership and help customers solve today’s most complex IT challenges, while substantially growing our ecosystem,» said Forrest Norrod, senior vice president and general manager, Data Center and Embedded Solutions Business Group. 

«We not only double the performance over the competition in HPC, cloud and enterprise workloads with our newest server CPUs but together with the AMD Instinct GPUs, we are breaking the exascale barrier in supercomputing and helping to tackle problems that have previously been beyond humanity’s reach.»

‘Zen 3’ refers to cores of which there are 64 within the 7003 series that is said to deliver up to twice the performance for HPC workloads compared to the competition. For cloud providers that need more computing power and security, the 7003 series has the «highest core density», according to AMD, and also includes AMD Infinity Guard protection.

Already, the AMD Epyc Milan series is being used by some of the biggest names in tech in a variety of ways. AWS will add it to its core Amazon EC2 instance families later this year, and it will also feature in Dell‘s new PowerEdge XE8545 server. Google Cloud will embed the EPYC 7003 series processors in a new compute optimised virtual machine and Microsoft has announced multiple virtual machine offerings that will be powered by the 7003 series. 

Other uses cases include Lenovo, Oracle, HPE, VMware, Tencent and many more. 

AMD has unveiled its third-generation Epyc Milan data centre CPUs, which is claims are the «world’s fastest» server processors. 

The hardware, which is already available, is the first set of AMD chips for the server market to be built on the company’s powerful 7-nanometer Zen 3 architecture. 

AMD claims Epyc Milan produces twice the power of Intel’s rival Xeon Cascade Lake Refresh chips in HPC, cloud and enterprise workloads, and claims it offers a better price-to-performance ratio.

AMD’s confidence comes from as a result of its Zen 3 architecture, which is a microarchitecture that has brought similar benefits with AMD’s Ryzen 500 series of chips, which have become increasingly popular in the desktop PC space. 

«With the launch of our 3rd Gen AMD Epyc processors, we are incredibly excited to deliver the fastest server CPU in the world. These processors extend our data centre leadership and help customers solve today’s most complex IT challenges, while substantially growing our ecosystem,» said Forrest Norrod, senior vice president and general manager, Data Center and Embedded Solutions Business Group. 

«We not only double the performance over the competition in HPC, cloud and enterprise workloads with our newest server CPUs but together with the AMD Instinct GPUs, we are breaking the exascale barrier in supercomputing and helping to tackle problems that have previously been beyond humanity’s reach.»

‘Zen 3’ refers to cores of which there are 64 within the 7003 series that is said to deliver up to twice the performance for HPC workloads compared to the competition. For cloud providers that need more computing power and security, the 7003 series has the «highest core density», according to AMD, and also includes AMD Infinity Guard protection.

Already, the AMD Epyc Milan series is being used by some of the biggest names in tech in a variety of ways. AWS will add it to its core Amazon EC2 instance families later this year, and it will also feature in Dell‘s new PowerEdge XE8545 server. Google Cloud will embed the EPYC 7003 series processors in a new compute optimised virtual machine and Microsoft has announced multiple virtual machine offerings that will be powered by the 7003 series. 

Other uses cases include Lenovo, Oracle, HPE, VMware, Tencent and many more. 

Microsoft has announced a breadth of new capabilities for Microsoft Teams, including a cross-organisation channel sharing feature that’s uncannily similar to a service recently launched by Slack. 

The updates to Teams include various new modes for presenters, with Microsoft also showcasing new hardware dedicated to the video conferencing service. 

Of all the new functions announced at Ignite, ‘Microsoft Teams Connect’ is the one that many further the flames of the company’s heated rivalry with Slack. The service, which lets users share channels with both internal and external collaborators, seems to have almost the same word-for-word description as ‘Slack Connect‘.  

Slack has previously called out Microsoft for copying its work and recently filed an antitrust complaint with European Commission over Microsoft’s «anti-competitive» conduct.

Beyond Connect, the most eye-catching update is the ability to create interactive webinars – for internal or external purposes – that can accommodate up to 1,000 attendees. This includes a number of presentation options and host controls, such as the ability to disable attendee chat and video, and post-event reporting.

What’s more, until 30 June 2021, the webinars can be switched to a ‘view-only’ broadcast of up to 20,000 people in order to accommodate higher demand for virtual events. The same capabilities have been available for general meetings on Teams since August. 

Microsoft has also made steps to alleviate stress and video call fatigue with new functions for speakers. These are aimed at creating more impactful, dynamic presentations but also at keeping a more ‘natural’ connection with the participants. Presenters will be able to use ‘Microsoft PowerPoint Live’ which will enable hosts to deliver more engaging presentations with notes, slides, meeting chat, and participants all in a single view. 

There is also a dedicated ‘Presenter mode’ that allows hosts to customise how their video feed and content appears to the audience. These include Standout and Reporter modes that put the host’s video feed in different positions to visual aids or content. All three will launch in the coming months along with new Teams-focused hardware, such as ‘Intelligent Speakers’ that can identify and differentiate up to 10 people talking in a Microsoft Teams Room.