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IBM has added three new advancements to the Watson Cloud platform: real-time Speaker Diarisation (beta) support available via the Watson Speech to Text API, Visual Recognition tagging with a built-in set of visual labels, and the Watson Discovery Service.
With these new capabilities, developers will be able to add intelligent visual recognition and speech to text capabilities to web and mobile applications.
Speaker diarisation is basically used for speech transcription. IBM describes the process as “the algorithms used to identify and segment speech by speaker identity.” By adding speaker diarisation to the Watson Speech to Text API, developers will be able to build applications capable of analysing conversations and taking action while the conversation is happening between two people in real-time.
IBM has updated Visual Recognition tagging and now includes a built-in library of tens of thousands of visual labels, allowing the platform to recognise various visual concepts such as objects, people, places, activities, scenes. Watson Visual Recognition can recognise broad visual concepts and objects in photos and understand visual scenes based on context. It also features custom training and classification capabilities.
The Watson Discovery Service converts, normalises, and betters streams of data so that the content can be analysed to gain insights, discover patterns, and contextualised. This happens via using integrated Watson APIs such as the AlchemyLanguage API and Document Conversion API. Developers can upload their own sets of data to the service or use publicly available datasets.
Over the past few years, the use of artificial intelligence has expanded more rapidly than many of us could have imagined. While this may invoke fear and dread in some, these relatively new technology applications are clearly delivering real value to our global society. This value is generally seen in four distinct areas:
G-cloud is making a big impact in the UK, as is evident from the recent sales figures released by the company. For the first time since its inception in 2012, G-cloud has passed the £1.5 billion mark, and much of it comes from its small and medium enterprise (SME) customers. According to the release £875 million came from SMEs, while £702 million came from large enterprises.
These numbers, in many ways, reflect the strength of the British economy, and its ability to stand firm despite Brexit. Also, it shows the growing presence of G-cloud, and the cloud industry at large in the UK. The rate of adoption of technology, especially cloud, is fairly high in the Western world, and these numbers are yet another indicator of it.
Along with the private enterprise, the Central Government also has adopted cloud in a big way. In fact, the central government uses G-cloud more than any other area of public sector. The percentage of sales made through the central government on G-cloud is a whopping 74 percent, while the remaining sectors account for a mere 26 percent. Through this large spending, the central government has set the right example for private and public sectors in the UK.
Much of this spending comes through the Digital Outcomes and Specialists (DOS) agreements that cam into being in April of this year to replace the Digital Services framework (DSF) that was in place since 2012. The new agreement is wider and more encompassing than its predecessor, and it aims to ensure greater adoption of tech among UK governments and businesses. The next iteration of DOS is expected to be released in February 2017 by the Crown Commercial Service (CCS), and this iteration is likely to have the spending figures under the framework in the future. From a cloud perspective, this is good news, as the iteration’s budget for cloud is expected to increase to give a boost to the economy as a whole.
It is significant to note that AWS opened its new cloud data center in London to cater to the growing demands of its UK businesses. This also means that others like G-cloud and Microsoft are already taking steps or are in the process of doing it.
For G-cloud, though the sales numbers are impressive, it still has its task cut out. Local government spending is just short of £85 million, and this is abysmally low when compared to the potential. Local governments and other council services can tap into the power of cloud to improve their offering and streamline their operations, yet they are not willing to move forward. This is something that G-cloud should look into and address if they want to have a larger customer base. It’s best for the company to reach out to individual governments to see what is stopping them from using more cloud services, and how G-cloud can best address them.
In all, G-cloud has a firm grip on the market, but it still has a long way to go, especially in the public sector.
The post G-Cloud Sales Soar in the UK appeared first on Cloud News Daily.
Cloud is rapidly becoming the standard way of doing business and organisations globally are utilising it as a tool for innovation and business transformation.
Those who successfully use the cloud to achieve growth will have a mature, strategic view of how best to implement and integrate it across their organisations.
As cloud strategies mature and the business benefits of implementing cloud throughout the organisation become clear, hybrid cloud has emerged as the consensus choice to support business growth.
Nearly half of enterprises globally already use some form of hybrid cloud and 72% of enterprises are expected to pursue a hybrid strategy. Hybrid cloud solutions make it easy to deploy new business models and technologies like cognitive analytics, which have the power to transform businesses.
Managed cloud as part of a wider hybrid cloud strategy allows organisations to utilise cloud computing without having to employ an expert in every area. Companies that use managed cloud can focus on their core business rather than having to divert their cash reserves employing large teams IT experts, technical engineers and system administrators and other experts to manage their IT.
A managed cloud provider will offer its customers a range of expertise as well as large economies of scale as the provider’s engineers manage not only the customers’ computing, storage, networks, and operating systems, but also the complex tools and application stacks that run on top of that infrastructure.
These can include the latest databases and ecommerce platforms, as well as automation tools. Managed cloud allows each individual customer to choose which IT functions it wishes to manage in-house, leaving all the rest to its chosen service provider.
By partnering with a managed cloud provider, specialists can work with organisations to design and tailor an architecture specific to a customer’s application needs.
The provider will also update an organisational architecture on an on-going basis as its requirements evolve and as new features and cloud services become available.
The provider should be able to offer services across a broad range of technologies and deployment models — including dedicated hosting, private cloud platforms like OpenStack and leading public clouds like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
The combination of choice and expertise means that the provider will deliver an architecture designed to meet an organisation’s application’s specific performance, availability and scalability requirements while eliminating the need for them to retain costly architects in-house.
According to IDC, by 2018, cloud will become a preferred delivery mechanism for analytics, increasing public information consumption by 150% and paving the way for thousands of new industry applications.
New industry applications mean more data will be created and with this comes the challenges around the management of data. Data has little value if it is not available to be analysed and used to help grow the business.
From a tactical point of view, the challenge is to set about finding the best way to ensure data is stored, managed and analysed, without incurring expensive overheads and in a scalable way to allow for rapid future growth.
A managed cloud infrastructure combined with a powerful database that has the speed and flexibility to deploy complex, analytics, can address all these concerns and help an organisation quickly innovate and build new analytical applications.
(c)iStock/hocus-focus
According to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, unauthorised access of computers is a federal crime. However, the law’s vague definition of “unauthorised access,” highlighted by a recent New York court case, has consumer advocates and business groups worried.
This past July, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld defendant David Nosal’s conviction for using a colleague’s login credentials to access his employer’s research databases.
Nosal is far from the first person to be convicted on such charges. In October 2015, former Reuters journalist Matthew Keys was sentenced to two years in prison for sharing usernames and passwords with “hacktivist” collective Anonymous.
Despite being illegal, password sharing is ubiquitous. A 2016 LastPass survey found that a staggering 95% of U.S. consumers share passwords with significant others, children, co-workers, and friends.
Rampant password sharing puts content streaming services, law enforcement, and consumers in a difficult position. Do we prosecute everyone who’s ever shared a Netflix password? Or do we pretend the law doesn’t exist and let hackers off the hook?
Spotify has managed to devise a solution that avoids the situation altogether.
To comply with content owner copyright guidelines, a streaming or cloud service user must be authorised by the provider. Most websites and online services use password authentication to enforce these rules.
Between password-protected bank, utility, news, and entertainment sites, it’s common for consumers to juggle dozens of passwords. It’s also easy for them to share those credentials with others.
To prevent this account abuse, content providers analyse login times, locations, and devices to spot suspicious patterns. Service providers send warnings and threatening emails to inform users that account sharing has been spotted, but most of these companies are attacking the wrong problem.
The issue with subscription sharing isn’t unfettered access to gated apps and sites. Frankly, traffic data can be useful to marketers. The real issue is simultaneous access to media.
Netflix, for example, doesn’t care if 10 people use the same credentials to browse movies. But when all 10 users simultaneously stream content, the company pays for 10 large data streams and heftier licensing costs. In 2015, Netflix budgeted more than $6 billion for licensing deals through 2018 — the streaming video giant’s largest expense.
Spotify — unlike Netflix, HBO, and dozens of others — handles the problem in a unique way that offers valuable features to users.
The music streaming service uses real-time technology to maintain a live, two-way connection to devices running the app, including laptops, phones, tablets, smart TVs, receivers, and more. This live connection ensures only one song is played at a given time by each Spotify account, regardless of how many people are logged in.
Imagine you’re jamming to AC/DC when your cousin decides to listen to Drake using the credentials for your account. Your music cuts off within milliseconds of your relative pressing play, and you’re notified of the remote access. When you press play to resume “Thunderstruck,” your cousin’s music stops and he gets the same message.
What’s more, the live connection enables features such as the ability to start a song on a smartphone and switch to another device, like a laptop, without skipping a beat. It’s an innovative feature that helps Spotify continue to disrupt the music industry while staying compliant.
So why hasn’t every streaming provider and secure site followed Spotify’s lead?
Until recently, it was difficult to build reliable, high-speed two-way connections. Spotify implemented these connections at a global scale because of its exceptional engineers and worldwide data centers, but not every organisation had such resources.
But that’s changed. Today, global data stream networks are easily plugged into existing content-provider applications. Using technology from companies such as Pusher, Google, PubNub, and more, content providers can capitalise on Spotify’s brilliant solution.
And it doesn’t need to stop there. Cloud services like Amazon have embraced two-way data stream connections, and the proliferation of publicly accessible Wi-Fi and the FCC wireless spectrum auctions are both set to remove bottlenecks in wireless data transfer capabilities.
This new manner of authentication will soon move beyond content providers to reinvent how other sectors manage account access. Perhaps there’s nothing truly wrong with an executive allowing a secretary to log in to his workstation or a family sharing a Netflix account.
Spotify has revolutionised content streaming in more ways than it’s given credit. By the time Nosal is released from prison, the rest of us hopefully won’t have to worry about being incarcerated for something as prevalent as password sharing.
Workspot VDI 2.0 is the industry’s first cloud-native, multi-tenant, infinitely scalable VDI solution, when combined with a customer’s datacenter infrastructure, can have desktops and apps up and available to their users in a day.
First, Workspot VDI 2.0 is the industry’s first cloud-native, multi-tenant, infinitely scalable VDI solution, when combined with a customer’s datacenter infrastructure, can have desktops and apps up and available to their users in a day.Now, Workspot DaaS 2.0 is the industry’s first full-cloud Desktop as a Service solution combining Workspot VDI 2.0 with Microsoft Azure to deliver thousands of desktops in a day, in any part of the world and with zero CapEx.
“Splunk basically takes machine data and we make it usable, valuable and accessible for everyone. The way that plays in DevOps is – we need to make data-driven decisions to delivering applications,” explained Andi Mann, Chief Technology Advocate at Splunk and @DevOpsSummit Conference Chair, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at @DevOpsSummit at 19th Cloud Expo, held November 1-3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
In many organizations, IT support seems to follow a corollary of Moore’s Law in which the number of support tickets — rather than the number of transistors — doubles every two years. Even companies that experience slower growth find that tickets ultimately proliferate and threaten to overwhelm their IT support teams if they haven’t kept their ticket management systems and processes up to date. You can avoid that fate by following the 10 steps below to keep tickets manageable, resolve them quickly and provide an amazing help desk and ticket management experience.
I’m told that it has been 21 years since Scrum became public when Jeff Sutherland and I presented it at an Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages & Applications (OOPSLA) workshop in Austin, TX, in October of 1995. Time sure does fly. Things mature. I’m still in the same building and at the same company where I first formulated Scrum.[1] Initially nobody knew of Scrum, yet it is now an open source body of knowledge translated into more than 30 languages[2] People use Scrum worldwide for developing software and other uses I never anticipated[3].