LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner is stepping down from his leadership role later this year, with the firm’s senior vice president of product Ryan Roslansky taking up the post from 1 June.

Weiner will step aside after 11 years in charge of the workplace social networking firm, after successfully growing the company and overseeing its acquisition by Microsoft. 

He will shift over to become the company’s executive chairman, a role that will involve supporting the leadership team more broadly.

His replacement, Roslansky, will report into Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella, just as Weiner has done since the firm was bought out in 2016 for $26 billion. The senior vice president of product, who has been at the firm for more than ten years, has overseen building LinkedIn’s influencer programme and publishing platform.

“While I’ve been thinking about the timing of this transition for some time, over the last year or so, several factors converged that led me to conclude now is the right time to make this change,” Weiner wrote in a LinkedIn post.

“For starters, our business has never been better, our culture has never been stronger, and our future has never been clearer. Additionally, my passion for initiatives beyond my day-to-day role as CEO has continued to grow. 

“Most importantly, after working with Ryan for nearly two decades, spanning two companies and countless roles, it’s become clear to me that going forward, his vision, drive and passion are exactly what the role requires.”

Weiner said that his role as executive chairman will allow him to hold a more top-level influence position and contribute to business strategy, product vision, and general advice, much in the same way that LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman performed the role.

Tomer Cohen, meanwhile, will take over from Roslansky’s current role as the company’s product lead, having helped to shape LinkedIn’s product ecosystem strategy.

“I’m taking on this new role of CEO because I believe deeply in what we are doing, how we are manifesting our vision, and where this company can go,” Roslansky wrote in his own LinkedIn post. “And the best part about it is that I truly believe we’re just getting started.

“Over my 10+ years at LinkedIn, I’ve been fortunate to work on every part of our product ecosystem – spanning the largest global professional social network and the six distinct businesses built on top of it. 

“To say I am humbled to lead this company into the future would be an understatement.”

LinkedIn has undergone several changes in the last few years, most recently migrating to Microsoft’s Azure platform in July 2019. The move involves shifting all workloads from LinkedIn’s own data centres to Microsoft’s public cloud platform, and will take multiple years to complete.

Microsoft has also previously outlined plans to integrate the social networking platform with its other products, namely Office and Outlook. 

The spread of coronavirus is affecting technology companies including Tesla, Qualcomm, and Hon Hai – whicn makes iPhones for Apple, as well as products for HP Inc. and Sony.

Tesla’s stock fell by 17% on Wednesday, following VP Tao Lin’s announcement, via Weibo, that the coronavirus outbreak in China would delay deliveries of its Model 3 cars.

The Model 3 vehicles are produced in Tesla’s Shanghai Gigafactory, which last month was ordered by the Chinese government to shut down due to fears of the virus spreading within it. At the time, Tesla finance chief Zach Kirkhorn said that the closure would “slightly” impact the company’s profitability in the first quarter of the year.

Factories are scheduled to reopen on 9 February, yet with the death toll reaching 563, it is uncertain whether the Chinese government will or will not extend the shutdown.

The phone industry may also be negatively affected by the virus outbreak in China.

Qualcomm’s chief financial officer Akash Palkhiwala stated on Wednesday that the government-imposed shutdown caused by the coronavirus might threaten manufacturing and sales.

During a conference call with investors, Palkhiwala said that Qualcomm expects «significant uncertainty around the impact from the coronavirus on handset demand and supply chain».

Hon Hai had more precise estimates about the coronavirus’ impact on its business. The outbreak forced the company to revise its expected sales growth to 1-3%, rather than a previously projected 3-5%.

So far, the effects of the virus outbreak on tech companies were largely due to China being brought to a standstill by mandatory ‘self-quarantines’. Companies have not reported any cases of coronavirus among their workers.

However, LG has decided to prioritise its employees’ wellbeing by withdrawing from this month’s upcoming Mobile World Congress (MWC), in order to protect its staff from the virus outbreak.

MWC is scheduled to go ahead, yet organisers are likely to introduce a ‘no handshake’ policy to contain the possibility of the virus spreading among attendees.

As such, the coronavirus is having a direct impact on the technology industry form the manufacturing side through to technology showcases nations apart from China. 

When it comes to cloud computing, it’s easy to fall back on the same big name players like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, and Google. But, as in so many areas of computing, open source can offer a low or no cost alternative that businesses should be investigating.

Cozy

What we liked:

If you’re planning to take the plunge by moving away from traditional cloud platforms run by the big tech companies, mobility and security should be high on your list of considerations. You need to be able to access your files any time, anywhere, and they should be safe from nefarious net-dwellers snooping on personal data. 

Cozy offers exactly that. You can operate within your browser or download the app for your computer. Refreshingly, the company also “prohibits any use, for its benefit or for the benefit of anyone, of all or part of your ‘private’ data”. 

Thanks to a clean layout and large fonts, Cozy’s design is effortlessly user-friendly. A simple sidebar ensures navigation is slick and familiar, while adding your files to the cloud is achieved with one click of the Upload button. Clicking the three-dot menu reveals options to create new folders and select multiple items and, once you’ve added files, you can then manage items through the second three-dot menu that appears beside it, renaming and moving files, and sharing them with others. If you’re a convert from the Google and Microsoft services, you’ll have no trouble mastering Cozy.  

During our tests, we found uploading to Cozy was almost instant. As with other cloud services, a progress bar in the bottom-right corner provides a visual indication of everything you’re uploading to your Cozy cloud drive. 

You’ll find another handy shortcut by clicking the company logo in the top-left corner, which lets you quickly jump between the standard cloud service, your Photos folder and the Cozy Bank service (if you sign up for it). 

How it can be improved:

Cozy doesn’t offer the best deals when it comes to storage. Free accounts are capped at 5GB, which is fine for basic use, but you’ll need to shell out around £3 a month to increase that to a more respectable 50GB. While it’s a simple process to create new folders and the like, we’d love to have a Google Drive-style context menu to manage files with a simple right-click of the mouse.

XOR Drive

What we liked:

Security lies at the heart of XOR Drive. Proudly proclaiming itself as “encrypted cloud storage”, the platform abandons centralised systems in favour of a decentralised blockchain-based service. So, rather than letting a single company keep all your data, you’re completely in control of it, making XOR Drive the choice for the truly privacy conscious. 

To get started, you need to create an account with Blockstack, which powers the service. You can then access your cloud storage and, once you’re in, things start to look a little more familiar. In fact, if you didn’t know about XOR’s emphasis on security, privacy and data ownership, you’d think this was just another cloud-storage platform – and that’s no bad thing. 

Uploading to the service is speedy. Unlike other contenders, you can also drag and drop files to upload them. Sharing, too, offers the option to share publicly or to send files direct to other Blockstack users, keeping them private. 

How it can be improved:

If you’re a heavy user of cloud storage, you’ll notice everything slows down when uploading files over 10MB to the free account. Likewise, upload and download times are penalised if you’re using more than 10GB of storage. Occasionally, when attempting to see files, we received the notification that XOR ‘Failed to load preview’.

Bloom

What we liked:

Bloom – currently in beta – is very similar to Cozy.This browser-based cloud-storage service is big, bright and easy to navigate, and includes an Android app. 

The interface’s mobile-style icons take you to different areas – Drive, Photos, Music, contacts and so on.
And while you may not have any games saved, visit Arcade anyway, for a free version of popular puzzler 2,048.
You can also access Bitflow, for downloading files saved as torrents.

Once you get into the actual drives themselves, it begins to feel less mobile-inspired and more like a traditional cloud platform. Looking like a mash-up between OneDrive and Google Drive, navigation is standard and uploads are fairly quick, though by no means the fastest. Bloom’s storage is certainly generous – sign up for free and you’ll immediately get 30GB to use how you choose. 

How it can be improved:

Because it’s not yet had a full release, Bloom is lacking in certain areas. There’s no iOS app (though there are hints that it’s under consideration) and no dedicated desktop installation – all that cloud magic happens in your browser or in the Android app. That may be a deal-breaker, particularly for iPhone and iPad owners. 

Revenue from Microsoft’s Azure cloud offering grew by 62% in the last three months of 2019, according to the company’s most recent earnings report. 

The company’s overarching intelligent cloud service – consisting of Azure and Enterprise Services – garnered $11.9 billion (£9.2 billion) in revenue last quarter, nearly a third of the its total figure of $36.9 billion (£28.3 billion).

Among its three operating groups, Microsoft’s cloud services experienced the most significant growth, with revenue increasing 27%. Revenue in its business and productivity division, which includes LinkedIn, rose 17% to a total of $11.8 billion (£9.1 billion). Personal computing earned $13.2 billion (£10.2 billion) – only a 2% increase from the prior quarter. 

Raymond James investment banking analyst Michael Turits credited Azure’s innovation and software updates for Microsoft’s quarterly success.

“Our Microsoft checks were strong this quarter, with the biggest improvement from resellers that were seeing an uptick in Office 365 E3 to E5 conversions, on increased interest in collaboration and integration of Microsoft Teams, and from security including EMS, Azure Active Directory and Azure Sentinel,” he said in a note to clients, as reported by Seeking Alpha. 

For years Azure has maintained consistent, upward revenue growth rates: its worst performing fiscal quarter in recent memory occurred between July and September 2019 (the company’s first fiscal quarter of 2020). Within this period however, the cloud service’s revenue still managed to jump 59%.

Although Azure is one of the fastest growing cloud computing services, Amazon Web Services (AWS) dominates the field, controlling roughly a third of the cloud infrastructure market. Last quarter, AWS revenue alone grew 34%, according to Amazon’s most recent quarterly release.

Google Cloud trails far behind both Azure and AWS, although it is growing. In its first-ever public cloud revenue release, Alphabet reported Google Cloud’s revenue increased 53% last quarter, hitting $2.6 billion. 

Even though AWS prevails over both Azure and Google Cloud in terms of market share, it lags in profitability. Its revenue in calendar 2019 was $35 billion (£26.9 billion) in comparison to Microsoft’s $44.7 billion (£34.4 billion) – a 27.7% disparity in favor of Azure.

The investment arms of tech heavyweights Samsung and Salesforce have invested millions of dollars into the blockchain company Digital Asset as part of a Series C funding round worth an initial $35 million. 

Digital Asset, which has created the open-source smart contract language DAML, will use the funds to accelerate its adoption across several industries, and raise the level of integrations. 

The Series C funding was revealed in December, but the particular investors were not disclosed at the time. The $35 million will also be used to fund new products that are designed to improve the developer experience with DAML. 

Meanwhile, the company has recruited Susan Hauser, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of its worldwide enterprise and partner group, to its board of directors. Huaser had previously served as an advisor to Digital Asset while working with Microsoft, where she was in charge of partnerships across several industries in the public and private sector.

“Salesforce Ventures and Samsung joining our Series C financing round demonstrates the potential that technology giants see in DAML as the standard for smart contracts,” said Digital Asset co-founder and CEO Yuval Rooz.

“Appointing Susan Hauser to the board will help us capitalise on this vision. She brings us her unparalleled understanding of customer needs and exceptional experience building an enterprise business at Microsoft.”

DAML was open-sourced by the company in 2019, and is used to create smart contracts and software that automates business processes, as well as digitally verify and enforce agreements between several parties.

The company offers integrations of DAML with partner platforms so other companies can develop their own versions of the blockchain-powered technology.

“We strongly believe that Digital Asset’s model to embed DAML in partner platforms fundamentally changes the entire blockchain market,” said a spokesperson from Samsung Venture Investment Corp.

“Digital Asset has positioned itself for success in the blockchain space and we are pleased to help it achieve its vision.”

Salesforce has previously shown a great deal of interest in pursuing blockchain-related ventures. The software company previously connected a low-code blockchain platform with its customer relationship management (CRM) suite in May 2019 to open up a host of new services for its customers. 

The firm, together with Microsoft, also hopped onto an open-source blockchain venture run by the Linux Foundation in June. The Hyperledger research initiative expanded its reach with a host of new members, and was working on 13 projects using the Hyperledger blockchain at the time that Salesforce and Microsoft had joined.

Businesses will be able to customise their own text-to-speech voice for Alexa, Amazon has announced.

KFC is one of the first to work with the company on the feature, developing a voice for Colonel Sanders that replies to customers instead of the default Alexa voice.

This is part of a new capability within Amazon Polly called ‘Brand Voice’. Polly is a department of AWS that comprises linguists and AI research scientists who build neural text-to-speech (NTTS) technology that can match the speaking styles of a person.

It uses deep learning models that can interpret intonation patterns from natural speech data and reproduce the acquired voice in a similar style or tone. The service has already been used by National Bank Australia, as well as KFC.

«The Colonel was passionate about his fried chicken and this new skill makes re-ordering your favourite KFC menu items easier than ever but in a fun and memorable way,» said Jason Cassidy, marketing director for KFC Canada.

AWS debuted a similar feature in September that allows users to set their Alexa device’s voice to that of Samual L Jackson. The American actor didn’t have to record hours of dialogue, though, as the NTTS models are able to translate audio recordings of his voice into natural-sounding responses.

For a more serious business perspective, Laurent De Segur, the general manager of digital at National Australia Bank, said that it would help improve the experience customers have when they contact its call centres.

«For that reason, it was also important that the voice we created using Amazon Polly Brand Voice felt both uniquely NAB and consistent with our position and what our customers expect when they call us,» he said.

Alexa has become a popular household feature via Amazon’s Echo smart speaker and the tech giant has also opened the service to businesses, with Alexa for Business‘ and a number of partnerships with large organisations, such as the NHS.