Had a busy week and ended up missing your tech updates, don't worry at all, we have got you covered. Here's a list of the top ten things that happened in the tech world this week.
1) Microsoft Open-Sources Its Drone Simulator ‘AirSim’
Technology giant Microsoft's latest artificial-intelligence (AI) project, Aerial Informatics and Robotics Platform, gives developers a set of tools to train drones, robots, and several other gadgets to operate autonomously.
AirSim, which is considered as an important part of the AI project, offers a very unique and realistic open-source simulator for flying and crashing drones, in order to generate data for training autonomous robots and other vehicles. The simulator for drones is built on Unreal Engine and is available on GitHub for anyone to use and experiment.
2) IaaS, PaaS, SaaS To Lead $390 Billion Cloud Economy
According to the recently published “The Changing Faces of the Cloud” report by Bain & Company, the global cloud IT market is expected to have phenomenal three years ahead. The report predicts that by the end of 2020, the global cloud IT market revenues will more than double with both private and public cloud software, hardware and services generating a whopping $390 billion in revenues.
Of this $390 billion estimated figure, the report predicts that public cloud services will come out representing the largest part of the sector, with SaaS, also known as Software as a Service , growing at a 18% compound annual growth rate (CAGR). On the other hand, IaaS or Infrastructure as a Service and PaaS or Platform as a Service are estimated to grow at a 27% CAGR.
3) Banks To Invest $1 Million in Blockchain Technology in 2017: Report
According to the recently released global survey report — Blockchain Technology: From Hype to Reality by Infosys Finacle along with its partner Let’s Talk Payments (LTP), the year 2017 is going to be the year of blockchain technology.
Infosys Finacle in collaboration with LTP conducted the survey of more than 100 financial services professionals from over 75 banks and financial institutions, including more than 50 CXOs, with an aim of shedding some light of reality on the various variables (data privacy, transaction speed, regulatory repercussions of the technology) concerning the numerous blockchain technology initiatives undertaken by financial services incumbents.
According to the report, almost 50 per cent of banks have already invested in the blockchain technology or are contemplating to do so this year. The report projects that the average investment in blockchain in 2017 will reach about $1 million.
4) Tata Motors Collaborates With Microsoft To Bring AI, IoT To Indian Cars
Homegrown automotive biggie Tata Motorsis on a mission to “redefine” India’s connected car technology. The company recently signed a deal with Microsoft India, the Indian-based business unit of the United States’ technology giant Microsoft to realise its mission.
The agreement signed between the two will allow Tata Motors to make use of connected car technologies from Microsoft in order to gift the Indian masses advanced machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT) capabilities in their cars.
As a part of the deal, Tata Motors will get to explore Microsoft Azure global hyper-scale cloud platform which will make Tata Motors capable of providing the Indian consumers a smarter, safer and more personalised driving experience than the one which it is currently being available to deliver.
5) 3D Printing and Advanced Manufacturing in India To Rise in 2017
A recently sealed deal between UAE-based advanced composite aerostructures manufacturing company Strata and India’s Reliance Defence Limited (RDL) to work together on advanced capabilities for aerospace manufacturing has got the technology experts in both the nations excited and got their attention towards India's rising 3D Printing and Advanced Manufacturing.
Both Strata and RDL will be considering to try their hands at new commercial aerospace opportunities, cater to the currently emerging 3D printing aircraft components market and obsolescence management, and brainstorm about other important areas of growth that can prove to be beneficial from both India’s Make in India initiative and UAE’s Abu Dhabi Economic Vision 2030.
In addition to the above deal, Dassault Aviation, which is a France-based company, has recently signed a joint venture with RDL, which gives Dassault Aviation “an opportunity to have a footprint in India.” According to experts, the joint venture, which is to offset obligations for Dassault’s Rafale twin-jet fighter aircraft, will also help in further strengthening the ties between India and France.
According to experts, while India might have been a little slower than most to adopt 3D printing technologies, it is better late than never. All of these above mentioned partnerships, initiatives and contracts are going to drive further innovation in 3D printing and additive manufacturing in the country.
6) Pegasystems Launches Robotic Automation Capabilities to Reduce Time and Costs of Managing Onboarding and KYC
Pegasystems Inc., the software company empowering customer engagement at the world’s leading enterprises, has announced that Pega® Client Lifecycle Management (CLM) and Pega® Know Your Customer (KYC) now to enable banks to leverage the power of robotic automation to speed client onboarding processes, reduce operational costs, and accelerate time to market. By unifying Pega® Robotic Automation within Pega CLM and Pega KYC, global financial institutions can automate repetitive manual tasks in onboarding and KYC remediation processes to ultimately improve the customer experience.
7) An Experiment Shows That Hacking Internet of Things is A Child’s Play For Hackers
An interesting experiment done by The Atlantic reporter Andrew McGill has sent the entire Internet of Things world into a tizzy. While they were still mentally recovering from last year's Mirai malware attack, which ended up infecting internet-connected devices in over 177 countries all around the world and causing one of the worst denial of service cyberattacks that the world had experienced in the last few years. This particular incident inspired McGill to devise an experiment to find out how vulnerable his internet-connected devices are to the hackers. The experiment involved him building a virtual Internet-connected toaster, and then putting it online and waiting to see how much time does it take for the hackers to attempt to breach it. According to an interview given by McGill to North Carolina Public Radio (NPR), the hackers found him much faster than he had expected.
McGill added that based on the talks he had with some of experts before experiment, he was expecting the breach to take place within a week of putting it online or maybe never, but certainly not less than in a day. Speaking to NPR’s Ari Shapiro, McGill said, “But it came a lot sooner. It was 41 minutes. [The second attempt was] within 10 or 15 minutes [and the third was] another 10 or 15.”
8) Amazon Just Launched A Skype Competitor
The week saw Amazon launching its competitor to Skype, WebEx, Google Hangouts etc. Named as — Amazon Chime — a video conferencing app that’s built on top of AWS, a cloud-computing services by Amazon. The company claims Chimes as a more modern, secure unified communications service that makes meetings easier and more efficient than ever before.
One can use Amazon Chime for online meetings, video conferencing, calls, chat, and to share content, both inside and outside your organization. With easy-to-use apps available for Android, iOS, Mac, and Windows, meetings and chats are always synchronized, you can join meetings from any device, and you can switch seamlessly between devices anytime — even in the middle of a meeting. The app is available for free in a basic version.
9) Why The IoT Needs Blockchain For Its Own Security
According to some distinct expert voices being heard in the industry, while the IoT is expected to lead to a huge explosion of data, but the innovators are still not giving that much importance to the security side of this as they should. A research has found out that almost 90% of developers believe that IoT products do not have the necessary security in place and 85% of them have admitted that they have rushed an IoT application to the market despite knowing about security concerns.
But, there’s another technology can help bail out IoT from the various challenges it’s currently facing, and that is: blockchain.
When it comes to cybersecurity, blockchain in largely unparalleled, with proven cryptographic signing capabilities. Till date, it has been credited for protecting digital currency worth over $10 billion worth without ever being hacked. This particular transparent and trustworthiness tag that the blockchain is synonymous with, makes it a perfect architecture fit for the IoT. By doing away with single points of failure, it ends up creating a more resilient ecosystem for the devices to function in. Blockchain can keep totally secure and indisputable records of messages being sent between various IoT devices, thus enable the autonomous functioning of smart devices without any centralized authority. To put it simply, blockchain can treat message exchanges between IoT devices similar to the way it does transactions on a bitcoin network, with smart contracts that model the agreement between the two parties involved in a transaction.
10) In Next 20 Years, Parents Can Implant Their Kids with A GPS Microchip
If technology has its way, very soon you might be able to implant your baby with a GPS microchip so as to be able to keep a track on her every move.
Adrienne LaFrance in her article “Baby, Monitored” in the December issue of the Atlantic mentions that innovators might be able to make this scenario come true for parents in about another two decades. The article, a must read for parents and innovators alike, talks about how the worldwide tech industry has already began its baby steps in disrupting tears, nap time, dirty diapers and almost everything and anything that can be charted, visualised and measured when it comes to infants.
According to LaFrance, the only logical conclusion to the current parenting trend being seen in the world is to implant the child with a GPS microchip, something similar on the lines of Apple’s Find iPhone app but for people.
1) Microsoft Open-Sources Its Drone Simulator ‘AirSim’
Technology giant Microsoft's latest artificial-intelligence (AI) project, Aerial Informatics and Robotics Platform, gives developers a set of tools to train drones, robots, and several other gadgets to operate autonomously.
AirSim, which is considered as an important part of the AI project, offers a very unique and realistic open-source simulator for flying and crashing drones, in order to generate data for training autonomous robots and other vehicles. The simulator for drones is built on Unreal Engine and is available on GitHub for anyone to use and experiment.
2) IaaS, PaaS, SaaS To Lead $390 Billion Cloud Economy
According to the recently published “The Changing Faces of the Cloud” report by Bain & Company, the global cloud IT market is expected to have phenomenal three years ahead. The report predicts that by the end of 2020, the global cloud IT market revenues will more than double with both private and public cloud software, hardware and services generating a whopping $390 billion in revenues.
Of this $390 billion estimated figure, the report predicts that public cloud services will come out representing the largest part of the sector, with SaaS, also known as Software as a Service , growing at a 18% compound annual growth rate (CAGR). On the other hand, IaaS or Infrastructure as a Service and PaaS or Platform as a Service are estimated to grow at a 27% CAGR.
3) Banks To Invest $1 Million in Blockchain Technology in 2017: Report
According to the recently released global survey report — Blockchain Technology: From Hype to Reality by Infosys Finacle along with its partner Let’s Talk Payments (LTP), the year 2017 is going to be the year of blockchain technology.
Infosys Finacle in collaboration with LTP conducted the survey of more than 100 financial services professionals from over 75 banks and financial institutions, including more than 50 CXOs, with an aim of shedding some light of reality on the various variables (data privacy, transaction speed, regulatory repercussions of the technology) concerning the numerous blockchain technology initiatives undertaken by financial services incumbents.
According to the report, almost 50 per cent of banks have already invested in the blockchain technology or are contemplating to do so this year. The report projects that the average investment in blockchain in 2017 will reach about $1 million.
4) Tata Motors Collaborates With Microsoft To Bring AI, IoT To Indian Cars
Homegrown automotive biggie Tata Motorsis on a mission to “redefine” India’s connected car technology. The company recently signed a deal with Microsoft India, the Indian-based business unit of the United States’ technology giant Microsoft to realise its mission.
The agreement signed between the two will allow Tata Motors to make use of connected car technologies from Microsoft in order to gift the Indian masses advanced machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT) capabilities in their cars.
As a part of the deal, Tata Motors will get to explore Microsoft Azure global hyper-scale cloud platform which will make Tata Motors capable of providing the Indian consumers a smarter, safer and more personalised driving experience than the one which it is currently being available to deliver.
5) 3D Printing and Advanced Manufacturing in India To Rise in 2017
A recently sealed deal between UAE-based advanced composite aerostructures manufacturing company Strata and India’s Reliance Defence Limited (RDL) to work together on advanced capabilities for aerospace manufacturing has got the technology experts in both the nations excited and got their attention towards India's rising 3D Printing and Advanced Manufacturing.
Both Strata and RDL will be considering to try their hands at new commercial aerospace opportunities, cater to the currently emerging 3D printing aircraft components market and obsolescence management, and brainstorm about other important areas of growth that can prove to be beneficial from both India’s Make in India initiative and UAE’s Abu Dhabi Economic Vision 2030.
In addition to the above deal, Dassault Aviation, which is a France-based company, has recently signed a joint venture with RDL, which gives Dassault Aviation “an opportunity to have a footprint in India.” According to experts, the joint venture, which is to offset obligations for Dassault’s Rafale twin-jet fighter aircraft, will also help in further strengthening the ties between India and France.
According to experts, while India might have been a little slower than most to adopt 3D printing technologies, it is better late than never. All of these above mentioned partnerships, initiatives and contracts are going to drive further innovation in 3D printing and additive manufacturing in the country.
6) Pegasystems Launches Robotic Automation Capabilities to Reduce Time and Costs of Managing Onboarding and KYC
Pegasystems Inc., the software company empowering customer engagement at the world’s leading enterprises, has announced that Pega® Client Lifecycle Management (CLM) and Pega® Know Your Customer (KYC) now to enable banks to leverage the power of robotic automation to speed client onboarding processes, reduce operational costs, and accelerate time to market. By unifying Pega® Robotic Automation within Pega CLM and Pega KYC, global financial institutions can automate repetitive manual tasks in onboarding and KYC remediation processes to ultimately improve the customer experience.
7) An Experiment Shows That Hacking Internet of Things is A Child’s Play For Hackers
An interesting experiment done by The Atlantic reporter Andrew McGill has sent the entire Internet of Things world into a tizzy. While they were still mentally recovering from last year's Mirai malware attack, which ended up infecting internet-connected devices in over 177 countries all around the world and causing one of the worst denial of service cyberattacks that the world had experienced in the last few years. This particular incident inspired McGill to devise an experiment to find out how vulnerable his internet-connected devices are to the hackers. The experiment involved him building a virtual Internet-connected toaster, and then putting it online and waiting to see how much time does it take for the hackers to attempt to breach it. According to an interview given by McGill to North Carolina Public Radio (NPR), the hackers found him much faster than he had expected.
McGill added that based on the talks he had with some of experts before experiment, he was expecting the breach to take place within a week of putting it online or maybe never, but certainly not less than in a day. Speaking to NPR’s Ari Shapiro, McGill said, “But it came a lot sooner. It was 41 minutes. [The second attempt was] within 10 or 15 minutes [and the third was] another 10 or 15.”
8) Amazon Just Launched A Skype Competitor
The week saw Amazon launching its competitor to Skype, WebEx, Google Hangouts etc. Named as — Amazon Chime — a video conferencing app that’s built on top of AWS, a cloud-computing services by Amazon. The company claims Chimes as a more modern, secure unified communications service that makes meetings easier and more efficient than ever before.
One can use Amazon Chime for online meetings, video conferencing, calls, chat, and to share content, both inside and outside your organization. With easy-to-use apps available for Android, iOS, Mac, and Windows, meetings and chats are always synchronized, you can join meetings from any device, and you can switch seamlessly between devices anytime — even in the middle of a meeting. The app is available for free in a basic version.
9) Why The IoT Needs Blockchain For Its Own Security
According to some distinct expert voices being heard in the industry, while the IoT is expected to lead to a huge explosion of data, but the innovators are still not giving that much importance to the security side of this as they should. A research has found out that almost 90% of developers believe that IoT products do not have the necessary security in place and 85% of them have admitted that they have rushed an IoT application to the market despite knowing about security concerns.
But, there’s another technology can help bail out IoT from the various challenges it’s currently facing, and that is: blockchain.
When it comes to cybersecurity, blockchain in largely unparalleled, with proven cryptographic signing capabilities. Till date, it has been credited for protecting digital currency worth over $10 billion worth without ever being hacked. This particular transparent and trustworthiness tag that the blockchain is synonymous with, makes it a perfect architecture fit for the IoT. By doing away with single points of failure, it ends up creating a more resilient ecosystem for the devices to function in. Blockchain can keep totally secure and indisputable records of messages being sent between various IoT devices, thus enable the autonomous functioning of smart devices without any centralized authority. To put it simply, blockchain can treat message exchanges between IoT devices similar to the way it does transactions on a bitcoin network, with smart contracts that model the agreement between the two parties involved in a transaction.
10) In Next 20 Years, Parents Can Implant Their Kids with A GPS Microchip
If technology has its way, very soon you might be able to implant your baby with a GPS microchip so as to be able to keep a track on her every move.
Adrienne LaFrance in her article “Baby, Monitored” in the December issue of the Atlantic mentions that innovators might be able to make this scenario come true for parents in about another two decades. The article, a must read for parents and innovators alike, talks about how the worldwide tech industry has already began its baby steps in disrupting tears, nap time, dirty diapers and almost everything and anything that can be charted, visualised and measured when it comes to infants.
According to LaFrance, the only logical conclusion to the current parenting trend being seen in the world is to implant the child with a GPS microchip, something similar on the lines of Apple’s Find iPhone app but for people.
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