BetaNews Staff

For 100 years, retailers have segmented the broad marketplace into groups -- soccer moms, or Millennials, or New Yorkers, or readers…  pretty much every retailer uses target segments like those. But Amazon has never been interested. Instead, it wants a segment of one: you. It gathers information about what you look at, what you buy, your browsing habits. To that it adds information from your purchases -- address and credit cards on file -- as well as your Amazon address book to find those close to you.

It is also the second biggest tracker on the web, after Google, so it follows your activity far beyond the Amazon ecosystem. And it can access the standard sets of information that can easily be sucked in from outside: your credit score, your home ownership, criminal complaints and records…. Amazon  probably knows more about you than any other entity on the planet, including your mother and your spouse.

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Whether you view your organization as having an agile approach or not, in 2020, companies had no choice but to drastically change their way of working as the world rapidly pivoted to remote working. Organizations that had already embraced agile principles had the advantage of being able to adapt faster to the pandemic and meet the demands of their employees, who were suddenly all working from home.

Now, as we start to slowly emerge from multiple lockdowns and restrictions, one interesting side effect of COVID-19 is that it has lowered our collective tolerance for slow, overly bureaucratic processes. We all crave an agile approach, whatever our definition of agile might be.

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The goal of digital transformation is to fundamentally change how B2B suppliers operate and deliver value to customers by creating a connected digital ecosystem. A change of this magnitude, however, is not without its challenges.

For one, in order to change a business’s value delivery model, the first step is understanding the value each customer is looking to receive -- something that is easier said than done when there is no formal way to document and collaborate around goals and objectives.

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No matter your job, it likely requires immediate answers from your enterprise Intranet. Indexed enterprise search lets you find what you need from anywhere, while cached indexed enterprise search lets you find what you need even when you are offline.

Together, these two components can help resolve what feels like a never-ending game of file hide and seek.

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At work and at home, backup is critical. From making photocopies of significant documents to digitizing old family photos, relying on hard drives to replicating servers, we all know that it’s important to have multiple copies of the information that matters to our families and our businesses. Knowing we should do something, however, isn’t the same as doing it consistently and well -- which is why backup often fails.   

Many organizations still rely on outdated backup strategies that put the company at risk from cybercrime, human error, physical disasters and more. But because the business "already has a backup plan", or because backup isn’t a shiny new object, it can be difficult to convince senior management to make it a priority. 

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The debate about the energy greediness of large AI models is raging. Recently, an AI ethics researcher at Google was dismissed because she had pinpointed the upward spiral of exploding training data sets. The fact is that the numbers make one’s head swim. In 2018, the BERT model made the headlines by achieving best-in-class NLP performance with a training dataset of 3 billion words.

Two years later, AI researchers were not working with billions of parameters anymore, but with hundreds of billions: in 2020, OpenAI presented GPT-3 -- acclaimed as the largest AI model ever built, with a data set of 500 billion words!

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Even though 'face spoof' sounds like a piece of skateboarder terminology used to describe a particularly vicious wipeout, it’s actually something more commonly dealt with by InfoSec professionals who work for huge banks, telecommunications companies, and healthcare providers. 

Simply put: it’s when a scammer uses a 3D mask -- or a printed or on-screen image -- to fool biometric security measures a la "Mission Impossible" in order to gain access to the system those security measures are in place to protect.

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Can artificial intelligence be deployed to slow down global warming, or is AI one of the greatest climate sinners ever? That is the interesting debate that finds (not surprisingly) representatives from the AI industry and academia on opposite sides of the issue.

While PwC and Microsoft published a report concluding that using AI could reduce world-wide greenhouse gas emissions by 4 percent in 2030, researchers from the University of Amherst Massachusetts have calculated that  training a single AI model can emit more than 626,000 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent—nearly five times the lifetime emissions of the average American car. Who is right?

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COVID-19 threw the spotlight on cybersecurity like never before. The unprecedented global shift to remote working and subsequent surge in cyber crime, drove a priority focus amongst business leaders to ensure a robust cybersecurity posture across every part of their newly extended network. Many organizations had to make this transition rapidly, which increased the likelihood of misconfigurations and other errors, while the drastically increased attack surface presented fresh cybersecurity challenges around remote network connections, VPN connections, phishing, and many other types of network attacks.

Ensuring adequate protection against this wave of new security threats facing every size and shape of business became paramount and challenged CISOs to balance reduced budgets and staff against the requirement for increased technology investment.

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As rural broadband initiatives help bridge the digital divide, communications service providers have a wealth of opportunities to add subscribers, expand territory, and grow their business. However, they will first need to address the challenges posed by IPv4 exhaustion -- and its impact on the cost of new subscriber IP addresses.

Since November 2019, when the final allocation of publicly available IPv4 addresses was made, new IPv4 addresses have been obtainable only at high open market prices. There is a virtually unlimited stock of IPv6 addresses available, but migration to the new standard is a highly complex prospect and impractical in the short term for many communications service providers. They need a more feasible and affordable way to support new subscribers.

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Digital transformation is a conversation that is and was taking place before COVID-19. Businesses wanted to know how to become more competitive, reactive, and efficient, and how services for users can be improved. McKinsey’s global survey of 889 executives reported that COVID-19 certainly accelerated digital transformation by several years in some sectors. Many of these changes are expected to remain in place long-term.

Here, we take a look at the top COVID-19 tech trends and how they will remain part of our lives in the future, post-pandemic.

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) has quickly emerged as a game-changing technology, often helping researchers uncover insights much faster than they otherwise could.

Here are five impressive ways that researchers have already capitalized on AI this year.

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Predictive maintenance, or PdM, is a rising star for process plants. It’s a new approach to maintenance planning that uses industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), big data, and machine learning to track the condition of plant equipment and detect the first signs of impending part failure.

Predictive maintenance is a specific application of predictive analytics for plant equipment. By issuing early alerts about potential failures, PdM enables maintenance crews to schedule repairs before the part breaks down entirely, at a time that’s convenient for them. PdM really showed its worth during COVID-19, as many plants operated on a skeleton staff with maintenance teams only coming on-site at intervals.

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The term FinTech has been coined quite recently. However, this does not change the fact that Finance and technology have always been intertwined. Way back in 1866 the first transatlantic cable was laid, which then became the backbone for the globalization of finance. Next in 1918, the first electronic transfer of money was conducted using Morse code technology. In the 1950s, credit cards, another digital payment medium, was launched by American Express and Diners Club. This event can officially be called FinTech 1.0.

The actual beginning of modern FinTech effectively dates back to 1967 when the first ATM machine was used by Barclays in 1967 and the period was called FinTech 2.0. Owing to the development of technologies in communication and transaction, the world saw its first digital stock market, which marked the beginning of online financial markets. The advances didn’t stop there.

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We celebrated World Backup Day last month.  Started in 2011 by digital consultant Ismail Jadun it is observed on March 31st every year -- a date chosen because it’s the day before April Fools Day… and of course you’d have to be a fool not to backup your data!

This especially recognized day is a strong reminder of the increasing role data plays in our lives and of how critical it is to backup all of your data. Regardless of the size of your organization, it’s likely that data is an essential aspect of running it. If you don’t yet have a solid plan to keep your data safe, there are four things you should consider:

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