Experts believe that the "Internet of Things" will include 34 billion connected devices by 2020. This represents $6 trillion invested before the end of 2021, with businesses as leading adopters.
This disruptive technology is already transforming several industries and making its first appearances in the homes of early devotees. Here is why creating new products and apps for IoT could be a goldmine for organizations all over the world.
The Spring framework is huge and being used by a lot of projects. But what is Spring really all about? When you are a beginner, it helps to first have a look at a world without Spring. And only then, try to introduce Spring step by step.
In this practical and witty episode, you'll start with the very basics, a plain Java project without Spring, which you will then 'springify.' I highly recommended taking a look, especially if you are new to Spring.
This is a 5-part blog series. See part 1 and part 2.
Kubernetes is an open-source solution for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. The business value provided by Kubernetes has been extended into the serverless world as well. In general, serverless loves Kubernetes — with Kubernetes being the ideal infrastructure for running serverless applications, because of a few key reasons.
“We’re moving from defense to offense. After years of focusing on regulatory and compliance reporting, we are pivoting to use our data assets for innovation.”
This comment was said by Joan dal Bianco of TD Bank at MIT’s gathering of CDOs last year. It was a bit of a celebratory moment for the banks present: all had passed the Comprehensive Capital Analysis Review (CCAR), a regulatory framework created by the Federal Reserve to oversee large US banks and other financial institutions. According to CIO Magazine, it was the first time banks had all passed the CCAR, thanks to the greater data accuracy that followed their big investments in data management infrastructure, which in turn is allowing them to turn to offense.
In many projects, things that seem very small come to be decisive factors to continue on the current path or find a better one. Starting from simple text editors to tools used for a long period of time, we all have different flavors for each tool in hand. Merging these ideas sometimes comes to be a to-do, and while this happens for any kind of work done in a group, there are also some other factors that shape the path to it.
This time, we came across an issue which let us think about how to proceed. Our project is being developed as an integration of many standalone microservices. This led us to use different resource files for our remote development and production environments. After considering different options, we finally decided to deploy these files through SSH (from our build server to where the application server is). Since we are using Jenkins for CI/CD, we had to use an ssh plugin.
Sometimes, we think that more is better, i.e. quantity over quality. The larger heaping of dessert on our plate, the more delicious!
But one day, we realize that one marvelously scrumptious sugar cookie is far yummier than five mediocre sugar cookies. We understand that the idea of quality first and quantity second is actually relevant to so many areas of life — including app analytics.
As part of my usual routine, I’m trying out writing some code in C, to get a feeling for a different environment. I wanted to build something that is both small enough to complete in a reasonable amount of time and complex enough that it would allow me to really explore how to use things. I decided to use C (not C++) because it is both familiar and drastically different from what I usually do. The project in question? Implementing the network protocol I wrote about here. Another part of the challenge that I set out for myself was to make this code as production quality as I could, which means paying all the usual taxes you would expect.
The first thing that I had to do was to figure out how to actually perform networking and work with SLL in C. Something that would take me 5 minutes in C# took me a several hours of exploring and figuring things out. Eventually, I settled down on the obvious choice for SSL with OpenSSL. It is portable, reasonably well documented, and seems fairly easy to get started with.
LibreNMS is a free and open source autodiscovering network monitoring tool for servers and network hardware. It supports wide range of network hardware and operating systems including Cisco, Linux, Juniper, Foundry, Windows, Brocade and many more. LibreNMS discover your network using OSPF, BGP, SNMP, CDP, FDP, LLDP and ARP protocols. LibreNMS comes with a lot of useful features including, Auto discovery, Email alert, Automatic Updates, iOS and Android App, Billing system and many more.
In this tutorial, we will explain how to install LibreNMS on Ubuntu 16.04 server.
A fresh Alibaba cloud Ubuntu 16.04 instance.
No one wants to post silly, racy, or vulnerable Stories if they’re worried their boss, parents, and distant acquaintances are watching. So to get people sharing more, and more authentically, Instagram will let you share to fewer people. Today after 17 months of testing, Instagram is globally launching Close Friends on iOS and Android over the next two days. It lets you build a single private list of your best buddies on Instagram through suggestions or search, and then share Stories just to them. They’ll see a green circle around your profile pic in the existing Story tray to let them know this is Close Friends-only content, but no one gets notified if they’re added or removed from your list that only you can view.
“As you add more and more people [on any social network], you start not to know them. That’s obviously going to change the things that you’re sharing and it makes it even harder to form every deep connections with your closest friends because you’re basically curating for the largest possible distribution,” said Instagram director of product Robby Stein, who announced the news onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin. “To really be yourself and connect and be connected to your best friends, you need your own place.”
I spent the last few days demoing Close Friends and it’s remarkably smooth, intuitive, and useful. Suddenly there was a place to post what I might otherwise consider too random or embarrassing to share. Teens already invented the idea of “Finstagrams,” or fake Instagram accounts, to share feed posts to just their favorite people without the pressure to look cool. Now Instagram is formalizing that idea into “Finstastories” through Close Friends.
The feature is a wise way to counteract the natural social graph creep that occurs as people accept social networking requests out of a sense of obligatory courtesy from people they aren’t close to, which then causes them to only share blander content. Helping people express their wild side as must-see content for their Close Friends could drive up time spent on the app. But there’s also the risk that the launch creates private echo sphere havens for offensive content beyond the eyes of those who’d rightfully report it.
“No one has ever mastered a close friends graph and made it easy for people to understand” Stein notes. The path to variable sharing privacy winds through a cemetery. Facebook’s “Lists” product struggled to find traction for a decade before being half-shut down. Google+’s big selling point was “Circles” for sharing to different groups of people. But with both, user found it too boring and confusing to make a bunch of different lists they could share to or view feeds from. Snapchat launched its own Groups feature two months ago, but it’s easy to forget who’s in which list and they’re designed around group chat. Most users just end up trying their best to reject, unfollow, or mute people they didn’t want to see or share with.
Now after almost 15 years of Facebook, 12 years of Twitter, 8 years of Instagram, and 7 years of Snapchat, that strategy has failed for many, leading to noisy feeds and a fear of sharing to too many. “People get friend requests and they feel pressure to accept” Stein explains. “The curve is actually that your sharing goes up and as you add more people initially, as more people can respond to you. But then there’s a point where it reduces sharing over time.”
So Instagram chose to build Close Friends as just a single list in hopes that you won’t lose track of who’s part of it. As the feature rolls out today, there’ll be an explainer Story from Instagram about it in your tray, you’ll get walked through when you hit the Close Friends button on the Story composer, and there’ll be a call out on your profile to configure Close Friends in the settings menu. You’ll be able to search for your close friends or quickly add them from a list of suggestions based on who you interact with most. You can add or remove as many people as you want without them knowing, they just will or won’t see your green circled Close Friends story. “We’re protecting you and your right to share or not share to certain people. It gives you air cover” Stein tells me
From then on, you can use the Close Friends shortcut in the Stories composer to share it with just those people, who’ll see a green “Close Friends” label on the story to let them know they’re special. Instagram will use the signal of who you add to help rank and order your Stories tray, but it won’t automatically pop Close Friends Stories to the front. When asked if Facebook would use that data for personalization too, Stein told me “We’re the same company” but said using it to improve Facebook is “not something that we’re actively working on.”
There’s no screenshot alerts, similar to the rest of Instagram Stories, but you won’t be able to DM anyone someone else’s Close Friends Story. That’s it. “We haven’t invented any new design affordances or things you need to know” Stein beams. For now it’s meant for user profiles, but publishers, social media celebrities, and brands would probably love ways to build fan clubs through the feature. Perhaps Instagram would even allow creators to charge users to be admitted to Close Friends. If not, some savvy influencers will probably do it anyways as they try to make Instagram more like Patreon.
Instagram’s Robby Stein (left) tells TechCrunch’s Josh Constine about Close Friends at Disrupt Berlin
The one concern here is that Close Friends could create little bunkers in which people can share objectionable content without consequence. It’d be sad to see it harbor racism, sexism, or other stuff that doesn’t belong anywhere on Instagram. Stein says that because you’re talking with friends instead of strangers on a Reddit, “it self regulates what it’s used for. We haven’t seen a lot of that usage in the testing that we’ve done. It’s still a broadcast channel and it doesn’t generate this group discussion. It doesn’t spiral.”
Overall, I think Close Friends will be a hit. When it started testing a prototype called Favorites in June 2017 it worked with feed posts too, but Instagram decided the off the cuff posts wouldn’t fit right next to your more widely broadcasted highlights. But confined to Stories, it feels like a natural and much-needed extension of what Instagram was always supposed to be but that’s gotten lost in our swelling social networks: giving the people you love a window into your life.
Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have created a system that can reproduce paintings from a single photo, allowing museums and art lovers to snap their favorite pictures and print new copies complete with paint textures.
Called RePaint, the project uses machine learning to recreate the exact colors of each painting and then prints it using a high-end 3D printer that can output thousands of colors using half-toning.
The researchers, however, found a better way to capture a fuller spectrum of Degas and Dali. They used a special technique they developed called “color-contoning”, which involves using a 3-D printer and 10 different transparent inks stacked in very thin layers, much like the wafers and chocolate in a Kit-Kat bar. They combined their method with a decades-old technique called “halftoning”, where an image is created by tons of little ink dots, rather than continuous tones. Combining these, the team says, better captured the nuances of the colors.
“If you just reproduce the color of a painting as it looks in the gallery, it might look different in your home,” said researcher Changil Kim. “Our system works under any lighting condition, which shows a far greater color reproduction capability than almost any other previous work.”
Sadly the prints are only about as big as a business card. The system also can’t yet support matte finishes and detailed surface textures but the team is working on improving the algorithms and the 3D printing tech so you’ll finally be able to recreate that picture of dogs playing poker in 3D plastic.
In the world of online language learning, there are basically two heavyweights: Duolingo and Babbel. Duolingo is betting on a freemium model and a strong focus on using algorithms to help you learn better, while Berlin-based Babbel is a paid service that employs hundreds of teachers. As Babbel co-founder and CEO Markus Witte announced at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin today, his company is now moving into a new area of language learning with the launch of a language travel marketplace. The company also today announced that it now has over 1 million paying users in the United States.
This new service, which is scheduled to go live next year, is the result of the previously undisclosed acquisition of a Lingo Ventura, a Berlin-based startup that partners with international language schools and local providers to offer a language travel booking platform. As Witte told me ahead of today’s announcement, Lingo Ventura already had connections with 200 language schools in 30 countries. The company never quite managed to make a dent in this market, which has traditionally been quite fragmented.
Witte believes that Babbel, thanks to its existing user base, will be able to turn this into a profitable business, though. “There is a lot of potential here because the current market is not very transparent,” Witte told me. “In Europe, our brand is so well-known now that we are the first stop for learning languages.” And that brand awareness will surely help drive interest in this new platform. The person who uses the company’s app has, after all, already shown interest in learning languages and a willingness to pay for that.
While language travel is quite popular in Europe, it remains a bit of a foreign concept in the United States and few people specifically travel abroad to learn a language. This isn’t a small market, though. In Germany alone, market revenue was about €220 million in 2017, and the various companies that play in this space booked about 150,000 travel bookings last year.
Unsurprisingly, Babbel will first focus its marketing efforts for its yet-to-be-named travel marketplace (I think Babbel Travel is a safe bet) on Europe. The platform, however, is global, and Babbel isn’t going to stop anybody from booking through its platform, of course.
As far as the U.S. language travel market is concerned, though, Babbel expects that it’ll be able to pull in some customers there, too. “It’s not zero,” the company’s U.S. CEO Julie Hansen told me when I asked her about that market. “I think in due course, we’ll discover if there’s a place for us. In a way, you can serve a market better that is so fragmented and ill-defined.” North America in general has generated quite a bit of growth for Babbel recently, especially since it appointed Hansen as a CEO there, though it remains to be seen if travel will become a major revenue source for the company there.
No matter in which geography it will operate, though, Babbel will work with partners, and not run its own programs. “That was a strategic decision on our part,” said Witte. “We want to work with partners, and if we make acquisitions, those are almost always about building bridges to our partners.”
Every software professional knows what an application programming interface (API) is, right? It's a decades-old technology designed to allow data flow between different applications. Today, modern APIs do much more than just enable inter-application data exchange. They are the foundation of new business processes, the lifeblood of customer-centric innovation. APIs speed new business processes into production, to quickly exploit opportunities and drive revenues.
In this new, process-driven environment, ad hoc, hand-built point-to-point integration has given way to a strategic approach — which itself demands a more strategic and structured way to manage the lifecycle of the APIs your organization relies on.
In very simple language, Pattern Recognition is a type of problem while Machine Learning is a type of solution. Pattern recognition is closely related to Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Pattern Recognition is an engineering application of Machine Learning. Machine Learning deals with the construction and study of systems that can learn from data, rather than follow only explicitly programmed instructions whereas Pattern recognition is the recognition of patterns and regularities in data.
The goal of Machine Learning is never to make "perfect" guesses because Machine Learning deals in domains where there is no such thing. The goal is to make guesses that are good enough to be useful. Machine Learning is a method of data analysis that automates analytical model building. Machine Learning is a field that uses algorithms to learn from data and make predictions. A Machine Learning algorithm then takes these examples and produces a program that does the job. Machine Learning builds heavily on statistics. For example, when we train our machine to learn, we have to give it a statistically significant random sample as training data. If the training set is not random, we run the risk of the Machine Learning patterns that aren’t actually there.
Use a golf analogy when explaining to executives. Use a car analogy for all others. — Confucius
The purpose of window functions is to translate the business reporting requirements declaratively and effectively to SQL so query performance and developer/business-analyst efficiency improve dramatically. I’ve seen real-world reports and dashboards go from hours to minutes, minutes to seconds after using window functions. Query size decreases from 40-pages to a few pages. Back in the ‘90s, Redbrick database really understood the business use case and created a new layer of functionality to do business reporting that included ranking, running totals, calculating commissions & inventory based on subgroups, positions, etc. These have been in SQL standard in 2003. Every BI layer (like Tableau, Looker, Cognos) exploits this functionality.
Imagine you have scores of six golfers through two rounds. Now, you need to create the leaderboard and rank them. Rank them using SQL.
Floyd Mayweather Jr. and DJ Khaled have agreed to “pay disgorgement, penalties and interest” for failing to disclose promotional payments from three ICOs including Centra Tech. Mayweather received $100,000 from Centra Tech while Khaled got $50,000 from the failed ICO. The SEC cited Khaled and Mayweather’s social media feeds, noting they touted securities for pay without disclosing their affiliation with the companies.
Mayweather, you’ll recall, appeared on Instagram with a whole lot of cash while Khaled called Centra Tech a “Game changer.”
“You can call me Floyd Crypto Mayweather from now on,” wrote Mayweather. Sadly, the SEC ruled he is no longer allowed to use the nom de guerre “Crypto” anymore.
Without admitting or denying the findings, Mayweather and Khaled agreed to pay disgorgement, penalties and interest. Mayweather agreed to pay $300,000 in disgorgement, a $300,000 penalty, and $14,775 in prejudgment interest. Khaled agreed to pay $50,000 in disgorgement, a $100,000 penalty, and $2,725 in prejudgment interest. In addition, Mayweather agreed not to promote any securities, digital or otherwise, for three years, and Khaled agreed to a similar ban for two years. Mayweather also agreed to continue to cooperate with the investigation.
“These cases highlight the importance of full disclosure to investors,” said Stephanie Avakian of the SEC. “With no disclosure about the payments, Mayweather and Khaled’s ICO promotions may have appeared to be unbiased, rather than paid endorsements.”
The SEC indicted Centra Tech’s founders, Raymond Trapani, Sohrab Sharma, and Robert Farkas, for fraud.
Disrupt Berlin generally kicked ass yesterday, and things are only going to get better from here.
Welcome, friends, to Disrupt Berlin Day 2. We have a great show in store for you, including Julie Hansen and Markus Witte from Babbel, the full cast of Accel Philipe Botteri, Sonali De Rycker, Luciana Lixandru, and Harry Nelis. Plus, we’ll hear from Threads founder and CEO Sophie Hill, as well as Starling’s Anne Boden.
But that’s not all…
The Startup Battlefield finals are going down today. Five startups — Imago AI, Kalepso, Legacy, Polyteia, and Spike — will battle it out one last time for $50,000 USD, the Disrupt Cup and eternal glory.
You can catch the whole thing live right here so sit back, relax, and enjoy the show.
In this article, we’ll talk about a set of predefined annotation types in the Java SE API. Some annotation types are used by the Java compiler and some apply to other annotations.
Annotations are Java types that are preceded by an @ symbol.
In a regulatory filing today, SoftBank Group said it has set an indicative price of 1,500 yen ($13.22) per share for the initial public offering of its domestic telecoms unit next month. This means the offering is potentially worth 2.4 trillion yen (about $21.16 billion), making it one of the largest IPOs ever. The price is the same as the tentative one SoftBank disclosed in a previous filing earlier this month.
The IPO is set for Dec. 19 on the Tokyo Stock Exchange and its final price will be determined on Dec. 10. The record for the largest IPO is currently held by Alibaba Group, which raised a total of $25 billion in 2014. If there is enough demand for SoftBank Group’s shares, a overallotment can potentially increase its offering’s total by 240.6 billion yen (or about $2.12 billion), bringing it closer to the amount Alibaba raised.
One interesting aspect of this initial public offering is SoftBank Group’s efforts to reach retail investors. For example, brokerages have run television ads for the offering in Japan.
SoftBank’s brand recognition may appeal to individual investors, but at the same time it may also have to answer questions about how investments by its Vision Fund are performing, as well as the $100 billion fund’s reliance on Saudi Arabia in the aftermath of the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Its biggest backer, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) put $45 billion in the Vision Fund and may put the same amount into the second Vision Fund. The PIF is led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who has been implicated by the Central Intelligence Agency and Turkish officials the planning of Khashoggi’s death.
Sorry folks. If you wanted to buy a ticket to Startup Battlefield Africa 2018 you’re out of luck. We’re sold out. However, you could be one of the lucky few to score a free ticket to our day-long startup-pitch extravaganza in Lagos, Nigeria on 11 December. We have a limited number of tickets available, so apply for your free ticket here — before they’re all gone.
Don’t miss 15 of the continent’s top early-stage startup founders as they launch their companies on a global stage in front of a live, enthusiastic audience. Choosing the Startup Battlefield competitors from hundreds of applications was no easy feat — a testament to the depth and creativity of the region’s growing startup scene.
A quick reminder of how Startup Battlefield works. The 15 teams compete in three preliminary rounds — five startups per round. They get only six minutes to pitch and present a live demo to a panel of expert technologists and VC investors. After each pitch, the judges have six minutes to grill the team with tough questions. That’s when all the free pitch-coaching they received from TechCrunch editors will come in handy.
If you’re curious about the judges, here are just a few of the many experts we’ve tapped to pick the Startup Battlefield champion.
And if you’re curious about the stakes, the winning founders receive the Battlefield Cup, US$25,000 in no-equity cash plus a trip for two and the opportunity to compete in Startup Battlefield at a TechCrunch Disrupt in 2019.
While the Startup Battlefield is the crown jewel, it’s by no means the only event of the day. We’ve scheduled an impressive agenda filled with presentations from the region’s leading experts discussing a range of topics. For example, Kola Aina, CEO and founder of Lagos-based Ventures Platform, will be on hand to discuss venture capital investing. And Flutterwave’s IIyinoluwa Aboyeji will share his take on blockchain.
The competitors are busy preparing for battle, the speakers are ready to dive deep on their respective topics. You’re the remaining piece of the puzzle. Apply now for a free ticket to Startup Battlefield Africa 2018 and join us on 11 December in Lagos, Nigeria to celebrate these exceptional African startups.
