Microsoft has announced it’s handing over 500 patents to startups in the LOT Network, a community of businesses committed to protecting against patent trolls through the sharing of patents.

Some of the other businesses involved in the LOT Network are brand superpowers, such as Amazon, Facebook, Google, Netflix, SAP, Epic Games, Ford, GM, Lyft and Uber. By allowing other businesses to access their patents, it stops them being distributed illegally.

Startups are encouraged to join the LOT Network to gain access to the patents, but they also want to use it to raise capital and protect themselves from people who will either sit on patents without using then or sue others for potentially infringing upon unused patents. Because such a variety of patents are available to members, startups have a great advantage over their competitors.

“The LOT Network is really committed to helping address the proliferation of intellectual property losses, especially ones that are brought by non-practicing entities, or so-called trolls,” said Microsoft CVP and Deputy General Counsel Erich Andersen.

Those joining the LOT Network will be able to own the patents outright, giving startup members access to three of them. However, as part of the agreement, the startups must be consuming at least $1000 a month in Azure spend, based upon their previous three months’ expenditure.

“We want to help the LOT Network grow its network of startups,” Andersen said. “To provide an incentive, we are going to provide these patents to them.”

The announcement formed part of Microsoft’s wider news that it has expanded its Azure IP Advantage programme, which has been developed to protect its Azure users against patent trolls. It allows those developing IoT applications on Microsoft Azure to access 10,000 of its patents, meaning they’re less likely to find themselves in an intellectual property lawsuit.

Oracle is prepping to cut more than 350 jobs so it can better focus on its cloud business, despite already having made cuts with its IaaS business.

The company reportedly wants to stay as close as possible to AWS’s cloud model and this means it has to make cut-backs in other areas of its business – specifically the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) unit and its IaaS business aimed at compute, storage, and network resources.

Some 352 jobs will disappear as of 21 May, including 255 at its headquarters in Redwood City, California and 97 jobs from its Santa Clara campus, according to a notice filed last week, first spotted by Bloomberg.

«As our cloud business grows, we will continually balance our resources and restructure our development group to help ensure we have the right people delivering the best cloud products to our customers around the world,» an Oracle spokesperson said, speaking to Bloomberg.

Apparently, the move will push forward Oracle CEO Larry Ellison’s “vision for the future,” Oracle executive vice president Don Johnson told staff in a company-wide email sent last week.

«It will streamline our products and services, focus investments on our most strategic priorities, and help us to more effectively and rapidly deliver the full promise and reach of Oracle’s Gen 2 Cloud,» wrote Johnson.

There’s no denying that Oracle’s cloud business seems to be faltering at present, with its fiscal Q3 2019 revenues down compared to the previous period.

Oracle will lose staff from its Redwood City, California, headquarters and its Santa Clara, California office from the end of May.

However, there’s likely to be additional redundancies outside of the company’s California offices, but it hasn’t revealed where or how many others will lose their jobs, although IEEE Spectrum reported that there’s expected to be at least 200 job losses across India, Mexico, and New Hampshire.

Oracle has unveiled a deeper relationship with Slack, combining its Customer Experience (CX) Cloud with the collaboration platform to make it easier for teams to communicate about sales opportunities.

The tie-up means sales staff will be able to work more closely with others in their organisation, such as account executives, product specialists and contract managers – those responsible for collaboratively close deals – by sharing knowledge of scenarios and building upon each other’s experience.

Staff can have discussions and share deal details on one user interface, making it a much more streamlined process, rather than having to access separate messaging and CRM platforms to find the answers they need.

“As customer expectations continue to change, the way teams work with each other and the role individuals play on those teams, are changing as well,” said Stephen Fioretti, vice president of product management for Oracle CX Sales and Service.

“To support employees as their roles evolve and change, organizations need technology that can enable new ways of working.”

Oracle and Slack’s partnership will also have benefits for customer service staff, providing those in direct contact with customers the communication channel to collaborate on service requests in real time. For example, the contact centre staff can talk to the support team to find a solution to service requests faster.

“The latest integrations between Oracle and Slack will help sales and customer service collaborate more effectively and build on our commitment to providing CX professionals with the tools they need to meet the needs of the Experience Economy,” Fioretti added.

Trello has announced the introduction of 13 new features to its Enterprise platform that will make working in teams a whole lot simpler for businesses.

Some of these additions are more noteworthy than others and although all are focused on making businesses more productive, the majority are for paying customers only.

One of the major changes is that those not paying for the platform will only be able to have a maximum of ten boards open at any one time. Users that already have more than this won’t lose access, but they won’t be able to add any more without upgrading.

“We’re making this change to accelerate our ability to bring world-class business features to market, and Trello Business Class and Enterprise will get more useful and powerful to address our customers’ pain points in the workplace,” said Michael Pryor, founder of Trello.

Businesses can choose to have boards shared with an organization rather than just private, team and public, so everyone in a single business using Trello can have access.

Trello has also bundled a whole load of privacy features to its Enterprise offering, including visibility controls, membership restrictions and board creation rules too. Single sign-on can be enforced with some of the new tools, making it more secure and allowing admins to have extended control, while restrictions allow them to limit access to extensions if the business doesn’t feel it’s appropriate for them to use some tools.

Although it’s clear that the majority of these headline features are aimed at boosting enterprise subscriptions, the company has also tagged on a free feature: the addition of workflow automation tool Power-Up Butler, which Trello acquired last year.

The possibilities of Power-Up Butler are pretty far-reaching, including automatic card assignment when you move a card to a certain column and forcing notifications when a task on a card is not completed close to its due date.

There’s a whole range of automation features, including rules to automate something when a ‘trigger button’ is hit, which automatically sets off tasks based on certain parameters.

“Calendar commands are great for recurring tasks and regular board maintenance like moving and archiving cards, sorting lists, and adding new lists to a board,” said Brian Cervino, senior product marketing manager at Trello.

“These commands can be set to run at specific times on daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly times of your choosing.”

The tool can also be used with buttons. When clicked, the button will set off an automation, such as move the card to a specific list, add a due date to it, assign it to someone and apply a label.

Avaya has boosted its partnership with Google by integrating the company’s cloud services with its contact centre offering.

Google’s Cloud Contact Center AI is now embedded into Avaya’s contact centre products, powering its virtual agents, agent assist and conversational topic modeling.

Its virtual agent tool uses Google Contact Centre AI to hold human-like conversations with customers, gleaning as much information as possible from them before passing them onto a human contact centre operative.

Customers can choose when they go through to a real person. But because Avaya’s platform collects the data about exchanges, it can use this to better refine its approach and decide if it’s a better idea to pass a customer over to real-world agents faster.

Agent Assist uses Google’s Cloud Platform to provide relevant insights to staff to help them fix customer problems. It can present information to staff using either voice or text exchanges and determine how the contact centre agent should respond. This is especially useful if an exchange becomes heated, for example.

Avaya’s Conversational Topic Modeling works in the background, constantly collating data about the topics customers are talking about. It helps agents understand the most popular topics at any time, helping them prepare for calls and communicate the best actions for the scenario.

“We continue to expand our AI-enabled solutions as well as our cloud offerings for customers ranging from small-medium business to the largest global enterprises, and further collaboration with Google is providing additional capabilities to augment the innovation,” said Chris McGugan, Avaya senior vice president of solutions and technology.

“By bringing these innovations to market for Avaya customers and partners, we enable them to make every customer interaction more meaningful and insightful, and more productive for their businesses.”

Mozilla has introduced the Firefox 66 update, which the company hopes will make its user experience better than rivals like Chrome, Edge and Safari.

One of the updates headline features is blocking autoplay content, so if you’re using a website that starts videos off without your permission (such as video adverts), they will be blocked from playing. You can of course just tap on the play button if you do want to watch the video, but it will stop loud videos echoing round the office for those that have their speakers turned up.

For websites that don’t automatically switch the sound on when the video starts playing, such as on Facebook, the video will still play, just without the sound.

For other websites that have been built specifically to play content and where you want videos to autoplay, you can allow them to do this in your Firefox permissions.

Page jumps is another feature dealt with within the Firefox 66 update. If you find it frustrating when the page jumps as an advert loads from the above the content, the latest update will block this jump. So although the advert will still show, the browser window will remember where you were in the image, making sure your user experience isn’t negatively affected.

Search has also been revamped in the latest release of Firefox 66.

If you use Firefox on multiple devices using a Firefox Sync, or even if you’re only using it on one device, but have multiple tabs open, you can search across all using the tab overflow menu, which automatically appears when you have lots of tabs open. If you click on the down arrow, you can choose to search across multiple tabs and devices from one place, rather than using the % parameter in the Awesome Bar.

Another search-focused enhancement is search while in Private Browsing mode. If you opt to hide your search history by using Private Mode, you can use your preferred search engine, including private search engines such as DuckDuckGo.

Sennheiser has teamed up with Amazon to launch a range of USB-connected headsets that are compatible with Amazon Connect and Amazon Chime.

The Amazon Connect integration means users will be able to manage and control their calls, including viewing incoming calls and accepting them, muting, unmuting and ending the call via Google Chrome.

“With Amazon Connect becoming increasingly popular for customer service, we are proud to join achieve Standard Technology Partner status in the AWS Partner Network,” said Theis Moerk, Sennheiser’s vice president of enterprise solutions product management.

“By combining the benefits of Amazon Connect with Sennheiser’s premium headsets and cloud-based IT-management solution Sennheiser HeadSetup Pro Manager, cloud contact center customers can now manage their calls and headsets more efficiently.”

Additionally, headsets and speakers can be managed via Sennheiser’s HeadSetup Pro Manager, meaning IT staff can manage all the headsets in operation within the organisation, such as exception handling, firmware updates and device configuration, allowing for all devices to be managed at once if need be.

Amazon Chime allows businesses to take advantage to a unified communications platform. The integration allows all devices – whether headsets or speakers – to stay in sync during conference calls, whether voice-only or voice and video calls. Because Amazon Chime runs on AWS, IT departments don’t have to manage the infrastructure and workers can experience less disruption. 

“We are excited to connect our premium products with Amazon Connect in order to provide an even better customer experience,” Moerk added.

Dropbox looks to be aiming at convincing users of its business service to upgrade to a paid plan by limiting its app to being downloaded on a maximum of three devices.

The company has imposed the limit only for free account users, while those with Professional and Plus accounts can continue to install it on as many devices as they wish.

People who already have their Dropbox account up and running on more than three devices are apparently still able to access the service across all linked computers, phones and tablets. But the rule came into force for anyone trying to go above the three device threshold from the beginning of March.

So if you have a free account with three or more devices already connected, you’ll be invited to either unlink one device or upgrade (with a free 30-day trial) to a premium service.

It’s worth noting that this is potentially a move by Dropbox to push heavy users of its free service into adopting its professional and business grade tiers.

Although it might upset some personal users, it demonstrates the company’s efforts to try and become more of a premium, enterprise-focussed product.

For individuals, it will remain to be merely a way of storing files, while new collaboration-focused features, such as in-app document editing and note making are better suited to businesses.

Although Dropbox has an estimated 500 million users worldwide, only around 2.5% of those are paying users. Following the company’s move to become a publicly listed company, it needs to start generating revenue for its shareholders.

Upgrading free accounts to paid accounts is a priority, offering those splashing the cash enhanced storage limits as well as the ability to use the app across as many devices as they like.

Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport has opted to take on TIBCO’s data analytics services, including its Spotfire and Data Science technologies to help the company make better decisions when refining its race cars.

Mercedes-AMG can analyse terabytes of dynamic data from races via its Connected Intelligence platform, helping it uncover anomalies and make informed decisions when tweaking car performance.

«Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport are committed to developing the car throughout the season to stay ahead of competition,” said Thomas Been, chief marketing officer at TIBCO. “With new regulation changes in place for the 2019 season, data will be key to success. We wish them success in 2019, as we work together to enhance performance, improve reliability, and reduce lead-times.»

Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport has tested millions of simulations with TIBCO Spotfire, inputting variations to visualise how changes will impact performance. The company’s Data Science platform enables the company to create and validate data science models used to analyse the information.

The autosport business said it chose to use TIBCO’s data analysis platform because it can help uncover the most relevant insights into the racing car company’s performance, both throughout the season and beyond.

“TIBCO technology not only provides our team with unique insights about the W10, but also gives us the necessary, real-time data we need to take the right risks at the right time to make decisions that ultimately enhance performance and help win races,” said Toto Wolff, team principal and chief executive officer, Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport.

“The TIBCO Connected Intelligence platform plays a key role in helping us achieve success, and we are excited for it to continue to help the team in 2019.»

A Google employee has broken a Guinness World Record by predicting the value of Pi to an astonishing 31.4 trillion digits using Google’s Compute Engine. Emma Haruka Iwao smashed the previous world record that stood at 22 million digits.

Working out a calculation to that scale took the power of 25 virtual machines a mammoth 121 days to complete and although the announcement was made coincidentally on World Pi Day, the calculation was completed back in January.

To come up with the number, the system had to process 170 terabytes of data, which is the same amount of information held in the complete Library of Congress print collection.

The calculation was achieved using y-cruncher, a benchmark tool created by Alexander J. Yee, deployed to a Google Compute Engine virtual machine cluster. The tool was then run using the Chudnovsky’s Formula algorithm, but verified using Bellard’s formula and BBP formula.

Throughout the process, Google took disk snapshots at intervals so it could process the calculation, record it, then dispose of the data; something not possible using traditional infrastructure.

«I was very fortunate that there were Japanese world record holders that I could relate to,” Iwao said of the achievement. «I’m really happy to be one of the few women in computer science holding the record, and I hope I can show more people who want to work in the industry what’s possible.”

Anyone wanting to get their hands on the data can do so by obtaining the snapshots on Google Cloud Platform. It will cost $40 per day to keep a cloned disk, but you’ll need to be utilising the us-central1, us-west1, and us-east1 regions if you want to use it in your own calculations.

“The world of math and sciences is full of records just waiting to be broken,” Iwao said. “We had a great time calculating 31.4 trillion π digits, and look forward to sinking our teeth into other great challenges. Until then, let’s celebrate the day with fun experiments.”