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Tag Archives: Internet

Mike Pence: ‘Spend More Time On Your Knees Than On The Internet’ as Lewinsky produces “Impeachment”

August 8, 2019   Humor
 Mike Pence: ‘Spend More Time On Your Knees Than On The Internet’ as Lewinsky produces Impeachment

Vice President Mike Pence is known for many things: the homophobic policies he instated while governor of Indiana, his fierce opposition to women’s health care, his tendency to defer to the Bible over the Constitution. Yet another facet of the vice president emerged recently: his desire to never dine alone in the company of a woman other than his wife. This is odd enough — but things get even weirder when you consider that Pence allegedly calls his wife, Karen, “Mother.” (Bustle)

Because missionaries had a difference of opinion, one should kneel in contrition, intense supplication, or adoration. 

In other such news, the story of the Equal Rights Amendment comes to FX with Cate Blanchett as Phyllis Schlafly.


Created by Dahvi Waller. With Uzo Aduba, Elizabeth Banks, Cate Blanchett, Rose Byrne. Conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly leads an unexpected fight against the Equal Rights Amendment movement during the 1970s. Mrs. America comes from the mind of Dahvi Waller, the Emmy-winning writer and producer of the beloved Mad Men—another show that examines evolving gender dynamics in 20th century America.

x

in further wigs, there’s also Elizabeth Banks as Jill Ruckelshaus, Tracey Ullman as Betty Friedan, and Sarah Paulson as a composite character named “Alice” pic.twitter.com/TPTEaxGxZw

— Jackson McHenry (@McHenryJD) August 7, 2019

Also, American Crime Story on FX will present “Impeachment” in September 2020.

No truth to the rumor that either of these projects are being developed: a Jeff Epstein biopic or a graphic novel of the 2016 civil suit accusing Individual-1 of rape.

“American Crime Story” Season 3 is officially moving forward with the FX series set to tell the story of the impeachment of President Bill Clinton.

Beanie Feldstein will star as Monica Lewinsky, with Sarah Paulson as Linda Tripp and Annaleigh Ashford as Paula Jones. The season will be based on Jeffrey Toobin’s book “A Vast Conspiracy: The Real Story of the Sex Scandal That Nearly Brought Down a President.”

The third installment will be written by Sarah Burgess who will also executive produce alongside Ryan Murphy, Nina Jacobson, Brad Simpson, Brad Falchuk, Larry Karaszewski, Scott Alexander, Alexis Martin Woodall, and Paulson. Lewinsky will serve as producer along with Henrietta Conrad and Jemima Khan. Fox 21 Television Studios and FX Productions will produce.

variety.com/…

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Leveraging the Internet of Things to Improve Your Digital Marketing Strategy

August 8, 2019   CRM News and Info

Those of us who still remember the slow speed of dialup Internet probably never imagined that technology would evolve to the degree it has. Today, physical and cloud devices that connect to the Internet (and feature an IP address) can easily talk to each other to send and receive data. These devices link to advanced programs, work remotely, process huge amounts of data, and deliver us what we want and need in a matter of seconds. This movement to connect devices and advance these technologies has been dubbed the “Internet of Things.”

More simply put, if a device has an on-off switch and can be connected to the Internet, it’s considered a part of the Internet of Things. The realm includes devices like coffee machines, the Amazon Echo, smart phones, refrigerators, washing machines, and many more. The industrial sector, for example, uses IoT for electricity monitoring, oil rig operations, and jet engine controls. The possibilities for adaptations are endless — and also a bit mind-boggling.

Aside from the changes and convenience the Internet of Things presents in our everyday lives and in various industries, it has special potential in the world of marketing. Today’s marketers have access to a wide range of customer data and the technology to help them launch more targeted and impactful campaigns at scale. The only obstacle is knowing how technology can help you and what you can do to successfully deploy these efforts. 

We know that with technology being ever changing, it can be hard to keep up with new trends and adapt your marketing strategy accordingly. But when you know what to do, the possibilities of how you can evolve your marketing are endless and come with measurable rewards like more leads and better ROI.

To remove some of the mystery associated with new marketing technology, we’ve compiled a few ways you can easily leverage the Internet of Things to transform your marketing strategy and achieve better results than ever before. 

Optimize the Customer Journey and Deliver Customers What They Want, When They Want It

One of the biggest perks about the Internet of Things is that it enables you to integrate your marketing technology and connect your efforts. This not only makes deploying your marketing efforts much easier, it enables you to easily collect and consolidate engagement and behavior data. While our customer personas used to be based on assumptions and mass market research, these new insights grant us the ability to understand our customers much better than we ever have before. 

For marketers, this presents an opportunity to leverage this data to enhance the customer journey and deliver customers what they want when they want it. Insights such as pages viewed and forms filled, as well as capabilities such as lead scoring and segmentation, enable us to understand our customers and know exactly where they are in the customer journey. As marketers, we can leverage this information to deliver messages that resonate with their specific interests and needs –– encouraging our customers to progress through the customer journey and driving conversions along the way. 

Attract New Customers by Taking Advantage of Micro-Moments

In a world where mobile devices are abundant and the answers to our most pressing questions are only a Google search away, many of us have become accustomed to immediately finding what we need. Therefore, companies that can quickly answer a customer’s question, or, to be more accurate, come up higher up in the search rankings, usually reign supreme.

Catering to the many needs of our target customers can be anxiety-inducing for those of us who are simply trying to keep up with our everyday marketing tasks. Accomplishing this, however, is much easier than it seems thanks to the Internet of things. As previously mentioned, marketers today have access to more data than they ever have had before. While it’s intuitive to use it to cater to our current customers, many of us don’t realize that we can also leverage this information to be proactive and create useful and targeted content that helps us attract new leads. 

Creating assets like explainer pages, which address the type of questions that your target audience is often searching for, do more than just help you rank higher in search results; they also help you start off on the right foot with new prospects by introducing yourself as a subject matter expert. Furthermore, curated landing pages allow you to offer new leads with a wide variety of content and information that address their current questions and ignite further curiosity about what you do. 

Drive Engagement Through Personalized Content Recommendations

Websites continue to be one of the most important and effective marketing tools at our disposal. Your website is where most of your customers first become acquainted with your brand and business, learn about what you do, sign up to receive further communications, and eventually become known leads. It’s also where you can track user behavior and collect important customer insights that will inform the rest of your marketing efforts.

All this is only possible, however, if you can present your visitors with a personalized and intuitive user journey that motivates them to keep moving from one phase of the sales cycle to the next. While delivering each website user with a unique experience used to involve a lot of time and manual effort, that is no longer the case. Today’s technology has advanced significantly, allowing marketers to automatically deliver targeted content that improves engagement without lifting a finger. 

Website personalization solutions like Act-On’s Adaptive Web allow you to automatically adapt to each user’s behavior to provide intelligent content recommendations that encourage more time on site and improve conversions. These recommendations become more targeted as you learn more about your customer, empowering you to never miss an opportunity to reach out and engage.

Improve Your Marketing ROI (and Your Ability to Measure It)

When all the pieces of your marketing technology stack integrate with and talk to each other, you improve your ability to measure your impact and attribute ROI to your marketing efforts. For example, you can link a scheduled sales call to a specific email campaign, and you can easily know which content pieces are helping you secure qualified leads. 

Why is this important? Being able to see how different efforts are performing improves your ability to identify what’s resonating with your audience and adjust your marketing strategy accordingly for even better results. More importantly, it allows you to show your leadership team how your efforts contribute to your organization’s bottom line, helping you make your case for more resources and support in the future. 

In short, the sky’s the limit when you have the proper insights to help you grow.

Invest in a Solution That Allows You to Produce Marketing Efforts at Scale

Many of us think of the various components supporting our marketing and sales strategies as being disconnected, but that doesn’t have to be the case thanks to the Internet of things. After all, why should you have to use one tool for email sending and another for social media when you can invest in a solution that allows you to do it all? 

Marketing automation platforms like Act-On help you perform every marketing task you need — at scale and all in one place. This convenience improves your ability to take advantage of the benefits listed above while freeing up time and resources  to improve the creativity and quality of your campaigns. 

Interested in learning more about how we can help you take advantage of the Internet of things to launch better and more impactful marketing efforts? Fill out this form to talk to one of our experts today. 

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A Pod world: How you’d trade your data for services over a decentralized internet

April 7, 2019   Big Data

In an era of big data and AI, what are the roles of decentralized internet and data storage concepts? The tensions and contradictions of these parallel developments were unpacked at SXSW in a compelling talk, Designing For the Next 30 Years of the Web, by Justin Bingham (CTO of Janeiro Digital) and John Bruce (Co-founder and CEO of Inrupt). They presented a whole new way of storing data and therefore breaking the current privacy paradigm, and their approach merits discussion outside of just one tech conference.

Decentralizing the web

Data is the core of the internet. However, as the internet has evolved, the way data is exchanged has shifted significantly from the intentions of one of its creators, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who had envisioned an internet where information exchange did not include the transfer of actual data to the requesting party. Instead, he believed data would only exist with its owner and the internet would consist of links to it for reading and writing purposes.

That’s why Berners-Lee started the Solid project, which defines standards for a decentralized internet. Personal data is kept by the individual user and not stored centrally with each service supplier.

Late last year, open source startup Inrupt built an application based on the Solid standards that enables a more peer-to-peer internet with Personal Online Data Stores (Pods) for everyone. The Solid network is fully conceptualized around these Pods that contain all the data of one person, whether it be your bank account or latest social posts. In this case, the data referring to you is fully owned by you. Both Inrupt and people within the Solid Community provide Pods that run on their respective servers, but you can also create your own Pod on your own server for ultimate privacy. There is no central owner of these Pods since this would undermine the Solid principal.

One single integration

With Pods, all services, from your favorite taxi company to your insurance company, would communicate through one API with your personal data, each having separate read and write access to different parts of that data whilst reading and writing simultaneously. To cater to this, Inrupt started working with Janeiro Digital to create an open standard that all applications can work with. The beauty of this is that applications only need to learn one standard and integrate with the Pod to provide a data-driven service. Integrations between different services are no longer required.

Imagine writing an application that could combine and show posts from different social networks; one would have to retrieve data from each of them. Instead, if each of these social networks stored their posts in the Pod, this new application could simply be granted access to all posts by its owner, reducing the number of integrations to just one. Furthermore, if this new application wants to combine posts with other personal data, it could easily grab that information from your Pod.

Big data & AI

So how would big data, machine learning, and AI work within such a Pod-based world? All of these concepts rely heavily on centralized storage, and Pods are anything but that; especially when Pods are hosted all over the world, with no guarantees on network availability.

If data cannot be accumulated and needs to be fetched and interpreted over millions of Pods, how would it be possible to perform any machine learning without a significant performance penalty? And even if the data could be replicated and combined with more data, wouldn’t this then contradict the whole idea of Solid in the first place? And even if that is feasible, though temporarily, wouldn’t users simply set their preferences so their data couldn’t be used for data mining?

The big players

The companies that service a huge chunk of the current centralized internet are the ones that most rely on possessing our data. The majority of their turnover, which drives their shareholder value, is based on the data they collect from us; data they will never willingly give up for the purpose of the greater good. These companies will not embrace initiatives like Solid.

On the other hand, Bruce and Bingham also explained how Pods can introduce new benefits to companies and customers by enabling instant access to more data. One example is the combination of wearable data with that of an insurance policy, where the step-counter of your smartwatch could instigate a lower premium. (Of course, that’s an over-simplified example, since in the real world, the user would likely also have to consent to sharing other data, such as the food they purchase, which could then result in an increased premium.) All in all, it is likely companies will use Pods to trade consents, where certain services will only be available if certain consents are given. It is up to you to decide if the benefit is worth the trade-off. But how fragile will this freedom of choice be when it comes to basic services like healthcare?

Catching up

The beauty of Solid lies with its simplicity, which showcases that it’s not compatible with current, complex website structures and their profit model of collecting data. The internet has become extremely vast and consists of many established platforms. Trying to change that will take an enormous amount of time, development effort, and most of all, goodwill. Having a completely new approach that disqualifies all existing applications out there can only succeed if it can grow to a similar size or bigger. Still, the Solid project is young; hopefully it will gain traction. Since the start of Inrupt, it has already seen a lot of attention, so the potential is certainly there.

Sandor Voordes is a Technical Director at Dept (Design & Technology Netherlands). A developer in the past, he now works as a technical lead and architect on large digital platforms. Sandor is a strong believer of a best of breed approach where solutions are a combination of several or more integrations. In the last 2 years, he was also part of the Dept task team to introduce GDPR and help Dept’s clients to become GDPR compliant.

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Intel reveals Hewitt Lake processor family for internet of things

February 25, 2019   Big Data
 Intel reveals Hewitt Lake processor family for internet of things

Contrary to popular belief, there’s more to the conference formerly known as Mobile World Congress than smartphones. Take Intel’s MWC Barcelona announcements, for example — they’re a bit more infrastructural in nature. The Santa Clara chipmaker today debuted a new system-on-chip for edge devices and a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) — the N3000 Programmable Acceleration Card (PAC) — designed to juggle network traffic up to 100Gbps.

The abovementioned edge chip, code-named “Hewitt Lake,” slots into Intel’s existing Xeon D 64-bit multicore microserver family, and promises improvements to both power efficiency and performance for network edge and storage solutions. It boasts a faster base frequency than Xeon D-1500 NS — a 14-nanometer product family launched in 2015 — and while details were hard to come by at press time, Hewitt Lake will presumably feature an integrated platform controller hub (PCH), a ball grid array (BGA), and other features comparable to the current-gen chip lineup.

Meanwhile, FPGA Programmable Acceleration Card (PAC) N3000, dubbed “Vista Creek,” is a 1/2 length, full-height, dual-slot PCIe card that’s optimized for custom vRAN and core solutions. Its internal hardware — which comprises 1.1 million logic elements, 9GB of DDR4 memory and 144MB of QDR IV memory, and two XL710 network adapters for packet processing — drives virtualized workloads up to 8 x 10Gbps and 4 x 25Gbps, Intel says. The company is pitching it as a processing solution for 5G radio access networks, core network apps, and more.

The N3000 is expected to be available in the third quarter of 2019.

In addition to the Hewitt Lake and the N3000, Intel today revealed that it would partner with Ericsson and ZTE to embed Intel’s Snow Ridge chip in the former two companies’ 5G base station designs. It also said that it’s working with Skyworks to optimize the 5G RF solution for its XMM 8160 modem (ahead of the projected 2020 release date), and with Fibocam, a M.2 module manufacturer, to build its 5G modem into Fibocam’s forthcoming FG100 product.

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Why Cloud Is The Foundation Of The Internet Of Things

February 24, 2019   BI News and Info
 Why Cloud Is The Foundation Of The Internet Of Things

In the quest to transform business for the digital age, the Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the most important components of your IT infrastructure.

Many experts have labeled IoT as the single biggest technical innovation to hit the world in decades, with the integration of multiple datasets running across the network enabling a huge spectrum of business functionalities. The possibilities are limitless, from helping society revolutionize farming methods to satisfy the demands of rising populations, to increasing energy efficiency to build sustainable environments.

But we need to be honest. IoT deployments are not always simple.

The technology represents completely new ways of working, changing not just what you deliver as a business but how you deliver it. They require financial investment, something not always easy to secure. And IT teams need to learn to implement and configure them.

Considering these challenges, it’s easy to understand why adoption of the technology is still slow. In Southeast Asia, only eight percent of organizations have implemented IoT solutions, while many companies are still trying to understand how it will benefit their business.

There’s no doubt IoT adoption and maturity will accelerate over the next few years – evidenced by the multiple studies highlighting increasing business investment, such as Boston Consulting Group which predicts $ 267 billion will be spent on IoT technologies by 2020 – meaning the faster you get on the front foot, the sooner you get ahead of the competition.

Creating a single business network

Developing a successful IoT offering means moving core business applications into a single cloud platform. Fundamentally, it’s migrating your business network and applications to a secure online environment.

Hosting multiple critical business applications in a single cloud environment allows your business to effectively share and integrate data captured by individual applications and sensors in real-time. You can easily push upgrades out remotely to all sites, scaling performance to individual needs, automating processes based on insights, and testing new functionalities aimed at improving user experiences.

Essentially, cloud platforms enable the capabilities that sit behind IoT visions. The Chinese City of Nanjing is one example of an organization reaping the rewards of this approach.

To help the city manage traffic flow, it deployed sensors across the transport network that generated continuous data streams about the status of systems. These insights are shared with the central team and combined with other data – such as travel behavior, fare prices, road conditions, and area accessibility – allowing officials to predict and manage changes throughout the transport networks and keep everything running smoothly.

Overcoming uncertainty

When migrating your business applications to the cloud, you need to decide which ones to move, as well as how to integrate them and share insights. You’ll also need to manage the subsequent impact on security. After all, what use is connecting and collecting data if you’re not able to analyze it and generate fresh insights.

Building your IoT technology on a cloud platform addresses these concerns. First and foremost, it offers a secure network delivering the capabilities you need to protect the insights being captured.

The agility and flexibility of cloud also allow you to safely experiment with sharing data between applications. This test-and-learn feature helps identify previously unknown trends capable of transforming traditional business processes.

Removing the barrier of cost

While cost is often cited as a barrier to IoT adoption, it will become less of a factor as sensor prices continue to fall and the market matures. Internet-enabled connectivity is fast becoming a standard feature for consumer purchases, which opens the possibility of connecting almost anything. This consumerization is why all industries will eventually reap the rewards of IoT. We’re already seeing a range of successful projects around the world in various industries.

Utilities

One of the largest utility firms in the United States is using IoT to better manage and maintain its network assets. The utility specifically wanted to discover the lifespan of certain components used in the platform and how temperature and load affected performance.

The company developed an intelligent network in the cloud able to combine performance data from multiple sensors placed throughout its energy infrastructures with information from applications detailing load measurements. By analyzing the collective insights, the company is able to better predict when equipment needs replacing and take action accordingly to ensure services don’t fail. The approach has also delivered cost savings, helping to identify energy theft, ensuring network capacity satisfies demand, and improving demand response.

Agriculture

A Sydney-based startup can better monitor the health and wellbeing of its livestock thanks to IoT. A smart ear tag is attached to each member of the herd and captures and transmits data regarding the animals’ health back to a central system in real-time. Farmers analyze this data to determine the health of their livestock, helping them take fast and proactive action when needed.

The early detection of illness in livestock is a key strategic advantage for farmers, especially among cattle with a high mortality rate. Furthermore, it equips them with insights that help them farm sustainably while meeting the demands of rising populations.

Banking

To sustain its growth and continually deliver improved customer experiences, a US-based bank needed more transparent and collaborative internal planning processes. The bank also required real-time analytics to make better and faster decisions regarding loan applications.

By moving and connecting multiple applications in the cloud, the bank was able to empower decision-makers with the insights they needed to rapidly make smarter business decisions. The company also automated various planning and budgeting processes so it could focus more resources on meeting the needs of its customers.

Having begun to transform its core business processes with IoT, the bank is now analyzing the insights captured by its intelligent network to identify future growth markets.

Transportation

A bus company in Japan wanted to improve support for its bus drivers and safety for its passengers An IoT solution was implemented in which sensor vests were developed to collect biometric data from its employees.

Biometric information is collected and processed in a nearby smartphone. With this data, it can detect any red flags, predict how drivers will behave, and if anything goes wrong, stop the vehicle safely. IoT has allowed the company to better understand driver wellbeing and customer safety by averting potentially dangerous incidents before they happen.

IoT will change the world

Across all industries, businesses are struggling to keep pace with demand – be it customer expectations or physical products.

Nowhere is this more evident than from the perspective of sustainability. If the world’s population continues to grow as the United Nations predicts, by 2050 we would need the equivalent of three planets to provide the natural resources needed to sustain current lifestyles.

While the ramifications might not be as extreme in other industries, the principles are the same: businesses need to do more with less, and must also be able to deliver services faster.

This trend shows no signs of slowing down, but IoT will play a crucial role in helping business and government rise to the challenge.

The key to unlocking the real value of the IoT is to consider it an integral part of the entire enterprise and not a standalone technology pillar.

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Swiss Post Revolutionizes Pharma Shipments With Blockchain And The Internet Of Things

January 30, 2019   BI News and Info

How can you transport temperature-sensitive pharmaceuticals through the regular parcel channel and be sure that the medication is viable when it reaches its destination? This was the challenge set for Thomas Wälchli, head of Business Development and Industry Solutions at PostLogistics, a business unit of SwissPost, and Roman Stalder, Head of Research & Development at PostLogistics. “Pharmaceutical logistics are an important business sector at Swiss Post. However, the challenge is to be compliant with EU regulations, as well as to make shipping quick, cheap and easy for pharmaceutical manufacturers and wholesalers,” Thomas Wälchli explains.

The EU guidelines of Good Distribution Practice (GDP), as well as the need to maintain certain medications at ambient temperature (15-25 degrees) or within the cold band (2-8 degrees), has forced many European postal companies to withdraw from the pharmaceuticals market, surrendering this valuable business to couriers with fleets of temperature-controlled delivery vehicles. “We knew that to reach pharmacies, doctors, and patients across all parts of Switzerland in an efficient and cost-effective manner, we needed a solution that would enable us to transport the pharmaceuticals using our nationwide mass-market parcel channel,” says Wälchli.

To address the competing goals of compliance and efficiency, Swiss Post developed a new generation of ThermoCare boxes that can be shipped in the regular parcel channel. These boxes have adaptable insulating properties, so they can be configured based on the predicted weather conditions along the transit route. As Thomas Wälchli explains, “Only a few shipments need the full thermic capacity of the boxes,” The ThermoCare passive temperature-controlled boxes are and easy to handle, while also being cheap, secure, reusable, and, therefore, eco-friendly.

Modum high 1024x684 Swiss Post Revolutionizes Pharma Shipments With Blockchain And The Internet Of Things

Image: Swiss Post’s new generation of ThermoCare boxes that can be shipped through regular post.

Of course, the challenge with a passive solution is knowing whether the medication has been maintained within the required temperature band throughout its journey. “For this, Swiss Post developed an innovative monitoring solution using blockchain and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies,” says Roman Stalder. “The best relationships are built on trust,” says Modum co-founder Marc Degen. “Providing data integrity and authenticity for global supply chain operations was the trigger to solve the business problem with a scalable, blockchain-based solution for Swiss Post.” The solution works by inserting a sensor into the ThermoCare box, which monitors the temperature of the medicine in transit. Temperature data is stored using a blockchain service, where it can be used to verify compliance by quality managers, insurers, and customers.

Swiss Post is continuing to innovate and sees – based on its pharmaceutical experience – significant potential to apply the monitoring of temperature in parcel transports in other industry sectors such as food. “For us, this is exciting, because now we have a sensor-supported service integrated into the postal logistics chain,” explains Wälchli. “So, it doesn’t matter if I deliver medicines to a doctor or deliver Swiss cheese to a household!” With its blockchain and IoT service in place, Swiss Post is ready to offer a new generation of temperature-controlled services to their customers.

Further reading:

Roman Stalder 280x215px v0100 e1548864988980 Swiss Post Revolutionizes Pharma Shipments With Blockchain And The Internet Of Things

Roman Stalder has been head of Research & Development at PostLogistics since August 2016. He works in a small team focused on the development of new business models and solutions in the field of logistics and e-commerce. The department includes market research and innovation management.

ThomasWaelchli 01 e1548865355973 300x295 Swiss Post Revolutionizes Pharma Shipments With Blockchain And The Internet Of Things

Thomas Wälchli is the head of business development and industry solutions at Swiss Post. He has 35 years of experience in logistics, 10 of which were spent with PostLogistics. In past projects, he has focused on initiatives such as the hospital supply chain.

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The Internet Of Things: Get Ready For Big Changes Ahead In 2019

December 2, 2018   SAP
 The Internet Of Things: Get Ready For Big Changes Ahead In 2019

Look through any technology publication or retail catalog, and I bet that you will find something described as “connected,” “smart,” or “intelligent” on every page. From smart digital supply chains to connected refrigerators, intelligent thermostats, and smart razors, the idea of connecting devices to an unlimited variety of things to do things better, safer, faster, and easier has been considered a competitive advantage or critical selling point.

But now that everything possible is connected, is there really anything left for the Internet of Things (IoT) to do? According to recent predictions from IDC and Gartner, now is not the time to discount the IoT as old news. In fact, it’s not yet done changing how businesses run, people go about their daily lives, and the world views what it means to be “connected.”

The next chapter of IoT: Setting the foundation for more intelligent edge operations

As we approach the new year, IoT capabilities are starting to shift from digitally enabling physical assets to automating and augmenting how people experience the connected world. By incorporating audible, visual, tactile, environmental, and contextual inputs, the technology could potentially help companies further multiply the potential for innovating unimaginable business models and processes.

IDC predicts that approximately 40% of IoT data analysis will be done on devices that reside close to their business endpoints within the next four years. To catch this wave of high-potential insight, companies may want to consider investing edge-gateway technology to analyze larger data sets as quickly as the information is captured.

As companies increasingly leverage the IoT to capture, aggregate, analyze, and interpret data from the core to the edge of the business, they create a solid foundation for more advanced digital strategies. Such approaches may include the adoption of emerging intelligent technologies such as artificial intelligence and blockchain.

Meshing “intelligence in everything” requires social, ethical, and legal IoT practices

As the IoT shifts from centralized, cloud-enabled infrastructures to edge architectures, the endpoint will likely evolve into a more unstructured landscape of a wide variety of “things” and services meshed together dynamically.

While this environment will create IoT systems that are highly flexible, intelligent, and responsive, Gartner warns that it may open a range of concerns over ownership of the data and the insights deduced from it. CIOs and IT leaders must watch whether their algorithms exhibit bias based on learned behavior and secure the company’s ability to comply with data privacy mandates such as the General Data Protection Regulation.

The IoT is far from dead – it’s evolving 

The brutal reality of the IoT is that the global ecosystem of devices, information systems, and machines is saturated with sensors and WiFi and cellular connections. The technology has become an expectation that consumers take for granted and businesses rely on just to keep up with their competitors.

But don’t be fooled: the IoT is still worth the time, effort, and attention of CIOs and functional leaders. By innovating and extending IoT capabilities to the edge of everything the business touches in socially responsible, ethical, and legal ways, companies can change how people view and benefit from connected intelligence – and possibly improve our world for the better in unimaginable ways.

Learn more about making ethics the centerpiece of AI.

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France leads effort to save internet from itself with ‘Paris Call’ and Facebook embed

November 13, 2018   Big Data
 France leads effort to save internet from itself with ‘Paris Call’ and Facebook embed

As the geopolitical picture continues to churn with uncertainty, France is making a strong and surprising bid to assume a central leadership role in fixing the hot mess otherwise known as the internet.

Following a weekend-long tribute to the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I that drew global leaders to Paris, French President Emmanuel Macron made two major announcements that underscored his administration’s drive to address the long list of problems that have put a cloud over the internet’s impact on modern life.

The first came at the UNESCO Internet Governance Forum (IGF) on Monday in Paris, where Macron launched the “Paris Call for Trust and Security in Cyberspace.”

The goal is to create a framework for regulating the internet and fighting back against cyber attacks, online censorship and hate speech. The more than 370 signatories included 51 governments, though notably absent were the U.S., China and Russia. It’s also backed by tech giants such as Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Intel, Ericsson, Samsung, Accenture, Fujitsu, SAP, Salesforce and Hitachi.

Applauding Macron’s leadership, Microsoft president wrote in a blog post:

“The Paris Call is an important step on the path toward digital peace, creating a stronger foundation for progress ahead. It calls for strong commitments in support of clear principles and strong norms to protect citizens and civilian infrastructure from systemic or indiscriminate cyberattacks. Similarly, it calls for governments, tech companies and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to work together to protect our democracies and electoral processes from nation-state cyberthreats.”

Meanwhile, Macron also announced that Facebook had agreed to allow French regulators to “embed” in the company for six months to monitor and understand its efforts to fight online hate speech and other suspicious content.

“It’s a first,” Macron told the annual Internet Governance Forum in Paris, according to Reuters. “I’m delighted by this very innovative experimental approach. It’s an experiment, but a very important first step in my view.”

The move is also one of the first major moves since Nick Clegg, the U.K.’s former deputy prime minister, became Facebook’s new vice president for global affairs.

“The best way to ensure that any regulation is smart and works for people is by governments, regulators and businesses working together to learn from each other and explore ideas,” Clegg said in a statement given to reporters.

These initiatives were just a part of a frenzied few days of action related to the internet’s future in Paris. In addition to the IGF, The Paris Peace Forum held its inaugural event over three days. And on Monday, Paris hosted the Govtech Summit, an effort to “reimagine services that place citizens at the centre of public delivery, where public servants have an array of technology-enabled resources and information at their fingertips, and can use new ways of delivering better, more efficient, more citizen-focused services.”

Attendees at the summit included Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, U.K. Health Secretary Matthew Hancock, and was organized in part by former adviser to U.K. prime minister David Cameron. The gathering prompted Politico to muse: “Brexit is distracting the U.K. from a much-touted effort to digitize government — and France is only too happy to take advantage of the situation.”

These latest efforts come as France continues to press other European Union members to adopt a tax on tech giants to attempt to level the playing field for smaller startups a and traditional businesses.

Put together, the last few days underscore the remarkable rise in France’s international profile. Diplomatically speaking, the country seemed like an afterthought in many ways just a few years ago. But the election of President Macron 1.5 year ago, plus the void left by the America-firstism of President Donald Trump, created a new opening for France to try to regain a spot on the globe’s center stage.

As some look for an alternative to at the authoritarianism of China and Russia, and the populism sweeping much of Europe and the U.S., Macron has been happy to try to fill a void. Whether his calls for cooperation and globalism will have an impact, however, remain to be seen. But at least for now, France has again found itself enjoying a new relevance on the global stage.

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Internet of Things (IoT) Device Considerations for Dynamics 365 and Connected Field Service

June 29, 2018   Microsoft Dynamics CRM
Biz Apps Azure loT 300x225 Internet of Things (IoT) Device Considerations for Dynamics 365 and Connected Field Service

Microsoft has enhanced Dynamics 365 for Field Service with the Connected Field Service Add-on, which can enable your organization to take advantage of proactive and predictive service scenarios. By leveraging an investment in IoT capable devices your organization can take more proactive steps to detect, diagnose, and correct problems before they arise.

The power of the Connected Field Service Add-on is its simplicity and how it can process messages from IoT devices using the Dynamics 365 workflow engine. Registered IoT devices can send messages to Dynamics 365 for Field Service, where workflows can determine how to respond to those messages by sending emails or creating new records such as work orders or even using IoT Device Commands to reboot a device.

Powerful IoT Capabilities

Connected Field Service is very powerful in allowing IoT scenarios that take full advantage of Microsoft Dynamics 365 capabilities while also being fully customizable and extensible. Microsoft has enabled any entity to be IoT-enabled for straightforward IoT integration by using the register custom entity action. The add-on also brings several new entities and custom actions specific to IoT. New custom actions allow device registration scenarios, the ability to parse incoming messages for String, Number, or Boolean data types, and capabilities to handle duplicate messages that may be received from an IoT device. You can also now use IoT device data in custom dashboards to display aggregates, determine trends, or other metrics.

New Service Capabilities

Your organization can now take advantage of new scenarios that allow the remote monitoring of customer assets using IoT devices with sensors. You can be notified of a potential trouble with your equipment and take corrective action by sending the IoT device a command. You can use predictive machine learning to measure sensors in the field, and know when a device may have the potential to fail soon. You also have access to details about deployed equipment and have parts and supplies on hand for the service technician to complete the call in one trip.

The World of Sensors for IoT Devices

There are many analog and digital sensor options available that you can use with your IoT devices.

Example list of sensors you can integrate with your IoT device
Accelerometer Force Resistive Resistor Liquid Level Pulse
Air Quality Gas Location (GPS) Radiation / Geiger Counter
Altitude Gesture Magnetic Contact Switch RGB color
Ammonia Gyro Magnetometer / Hall Effect Ribbon Touch Sensor
Barcode Hydrogen Magstripe Rotary Encoder
Barometric Pressure Humidity Methane/Propane/Iso-Butane Temperature
Button Infrared Sensor Microphone Tilt
Capacitive Touch IR Beam Break Motion Ultrasonic Rangefinder
Carbon Monoxide IR Distance Muscle Sensor Ultraviolet
Circular Touch Potentiometer Joystick Photo Capture Vibration
Coin Acceptor Keypad Piezo Wind Speed
Ethanol Laser Beam Break Potentiometer Knob
Fingerprint Light Sensor Pressure
Flex Sensor Liquid Flow Proximity

Getting started with the Azure IoT DevKit

The AZ3166 board contains a EMW3166 WiFi module with 256K SRAM plus OLED display, buttons, LEDs, headphone jack, microphone, sensors like temperature, humidity, pressure, motion, and more… all for a very affordable price.

  • Order MXChip IoT DevKit here.
  • Get the software here.
  • Azure IoTHub examples for Raspberry Pi, Intel Edison, Adafruit Feather ESP8266, Adafruit Feather M0, and Sparkfun ESP8266 here.

Does Your IoT Business Case Make Sense?

Consider an IoT business case to track the environmental conditions for eggs from a farm to a grocery store. We might be considering sensors for temperature, humidity, and acceleration in case of drops. The use case would track eggs per flat, for which there would be many per pallet. Knowing a dozen eggs in our local grocery are often on sale for less than one US dollar, we may ask how could a client justify the cost of the IoT device for tracking these eggs? While IoT is a hot buzzword, there are many things to consider in your business case for using IoT devices.

Does your IoT Device Cost Exceed the Product, Service, or Reputation Costs?

Not all business cases are going to equate to a product cost. It may represent the value of service to that customer because IoT is going to give you a predictive edge to “Wow” the customer for a lifetime. Maybe your business case will establish your reputation as someone who created a game changer in the marketplace?

How will your device connect to Azure IoT Hub?

Your device will need some pathway to the Internet. Most examples provided will show the device itself having Internet connectivity either directly with an Ethernet port, or wirelessly with built in Wi-Fi. There is also Azure IoT Edge, which can act as a transparent proxy for other devices. It should also be possible to support other devices with Bluetooth or Radio using the building blocks Microsoft has provided. Each device will need to be registered separately with their own connection string, and any computer proxy supporting multiple devices will require sending the correct connection string for the correct device so Azure IoT Hub tracks appropriately.

Will your IoT device take a beating?

Will your device remain in conditions where it will take a physical beating? Will your device be exposed to extreme high or low temperatures? Will your device be exposed to conductive liquids? Should you consider rugged or replaceable sensors which can take a beating? Have you considered what type of enclosure and dimensions of that enclosure will be required?

How will your IoT device be powered?

Most devices are powered via micro USB or direct current jack on the board. For stationary devices, it may be possible to power those with normal wall adapters. In mobile scenarios, the device will need some type of external battery pack with removable batteries or rechargeability. In some mobile scenarios, it may make sense to power the device with a Lithium Ion battery pack which is rechargeable via solar.

Your costs don’t end with the device.

Devices will need to be repaired or replaced, will require new batteries and new sensors, or may need to be retired. Infrastructure may also be required for your devices to work. We have seen cases where there are dead spots in Wi-Fi even within the same building. Make sure to include the device replacement, device maintenance costs, and infrastructure in your business case.

Training costs

Don’t forget the people costs! Consider if your device requires human interaction or needs to be checked up on from time to time.

It’s a Long Way from Maker to Production Device.

Most of the development boards you will find are designed for the low quantity maker community who are building small quantities or prototypes. There are many printed circuit board layout programs and manufacturers who can take your printed circuit board designs and produce you a finished board in small or large quantities. Having production printed circuit boards is only half the issue, you are going to need to source enclosures, sensors, batteries, solar, connectors, and other components that make this a finished product. Having all the components, now requires assembly, and quality control. If you are considering a production roll out, you may want to consider a turn key IoT design firm who can produce you a custom device.

Want to learn more about IoT and Dynamics 365 for Field Service? Join PowerObjects, this year’s Platinum Sponsor, at the Microsoft Business Applications Summit on July 22-24 in Seattle. Register with code HCL100dc to receive a $ 100 discount.

Happy Dynamics 365’ing!

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Donald Trump signs bill renewing NSA warrantless internet surveillance

January 22, 2018   Big Data
 Donald Trump signs bill renewing NSA warrantless internet surveillance

(Reuters) — U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday said he signed into law a bill renewing the National Security Agency’s warrantless internet surveillance program, sealing a defeat for digital privacy advocates.

“Just signed 702 Bill to reauthorize foreign intelligence collection,” Trump wrote on Twitter, referring to legislation passed by the U.S. Congress that extends Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

The law renews for six years and with minimal changes the National Security Agency (NSA) program, which gathers information from foreigners overseas but incidentally collects an unknown amount of communications belonging to Americans.

The measure easily passed the U.S. House of Representatives last week despite mixed signals posted on Twitter by Trump and narrowly avoided a filibuster in the Senate earlier this week that split party lines. The measure had drawn opposition from a coalition of privacy-minded Democrats and libertarian Republicans.

In his tweet on Friday, Trump attempted to clarify why he signed the bill despite repeating an unsubstantiated claim that his Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama, ordered intelligence agencies to eavesdrop on Trump’s 2016 Republican presidential campaign.

“This is NOT the same FISA law that was so wrongly abused during the election,” Trump wrote. “I will always do the right thing for our country and put the safety of the American people first!”

Last September, the U.S. Justice Department said in a court filing that it had no evidence to support Trump’s claim about improper surveillance during the campaign.

Without Trump’s signature, Section 702 had been set to expire on Friday, though intelligence officials had said the surveillance program could continue to operate until April.

Under the law, the NSA is allowed to eavesdrop on vast amounts of digital communications from foreigners living outside the United States via U.S. companies like Facebook Inc, Verizon Communications Inc and Alphabet Inc’s Google.

But the program also incidentally scoops up Americans’ communications, including when they communicate with a foreign target living overseas, and can search those messages without a warrant.

The White House, U.S. intelligence agencies and congressional Republican leaders have said the program is indispensable to national security, vital to protecting U.S. allies and needs little or no revision.

Privacy advocates say it allows the NSA and other intelligence agencies to grab data belonging to Americans in a way that represents an affront to the U.S. Constitution.

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