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But nobody is saying that the output of this technology can't be combined with the output of facial recognition technology to let them monitor you individually AND track your emotions. Fortunately, others are fighting back with knowledge and tech to block facial recognition. http://goo.gl/JMQM2W

"Technology leaders are disenchanted with the current state of their IT infrastructure. According to a study released Tuesday by global technology provider Insight Enterprises, tech leaders give their companies' current IT infrastructure a "B minus" grade. For its first Insight Enterprises Intelligent Technology index, Insight Enterprises used Market Intel Group to conduct an online survey of a random sample of 403 IT professionals with decision-making responsibilities between Nov. 30, 2015 and Dec. 8, 2015. How to use Windows 10 backup and recovery features Sooner or later, you're going to experience a hard drive failure, usually when you least expect it. READ NOW The study found that 55 percent of respondents felt the current technology in place at their business was a hindrance to incorporating or adopting new technologies, even as 65 percent of respondents were worried about disruption from technology innovation. While 65 percent of tech leaders overall were worried about the prospect of disruption, tech-decision makers at larger companies are especially feeling the pressure: The study found that 74 percent of tech influencers at large companies and 75 percent of tech influencers at medium-sized companies were concerned about disruption. "

""Complexity grows over time," says Bryson Koehler, chief information and technology officer (CITO) of The Weather Company in Atlanta. "Systems are built to do one thing, and then they're modified, morphed and bastardized to do things they were never meant to do." Complexity occurs when technologies overlap one another -- "when you add new stuff but keep the old instead of getting rid of it," agrees Dee Burger, North America CEO of Capgemini Consulting. [ Further reading: 5 lessons small IT shops can teach the big guys ] Even as recently as three years ago, Burger says, "people thought they could do massive replacements of technology" -- say, move everything to SaaS applications in the cloud -- "but now we're seeing way more adding of technology rather than replacing." Just consider how many new collaboration tools the enterprise has embraced without replacing or reducing email. The result can be a tangle of overlapping, redundant systems that costs money, slows innovation and hinders organizations from identifying new business opportunities."

"There's a funny pattern of awakening that tends to happen when a technological advancement sneaks up on us. It starts with a mess of confusion. We don't understand the technology or its purpose: "I don't get Twitter. Why would I want to know what you had for lunch?" It then evolves into miscategorization: "The iPhone is actually a pretty crummy phone." We get so caught up in definitions, we almost miss the larger leap that's occurring: "Why would people use messenger apps when you can just text?" Then, finally, we get it: "The iPhone is not a phone at all. It's an everything device. And Twitter is not about lunch. It's about removing the barriers to real-time publishing." While we're busy missing the big picture, a rapidly growing niche of early adopters is diving in. Early adopters don't get distracted by the need to categorize or define the technology. They just use it. And in repeated agenda-less use, the bigger picture becomes clear. This same pattern is happening today with Snapchat. Hang with me. Don't roll your eyes just yet. I'm going to pay it off. I've been a Snapchat doubter for a while now. Like many others, I relegated it to a fad or a niche service for a subset of a subset of the population. I'm beginning to realize I was wrong."

"Amazon's purchases of Twitch and Elemental Technologies appear to be only two parts of a bigger strategy at the company to move deeper into video services through acquisition. Last year, the marketplace and cloud computing giant also quietly acquired a startup out of San Francisco called Biba Systems, which develops and operates video messaging apps aimed at business users. Sources say that Amazon has been working on its own video messaging service, which it plans to unveil during its re:Invent AWS conference later this month. News of Amazon's possible purchase of Biba Systems first surfaced last week, when GeekWire found some Delaware filings that spoke of a merger with an entity called "Justin Acquisition" in September 2015. There was no direct mention of Amazon in the Justin Acquisition document, but the filing included the name of a paralegal employed at the time by Amazon. Amazon never responded to our request (or GeekWire's, it seems) for comment on the story. So we decided to do some digging of our own. We discovered some direct links between Biba and Amazon that point to both Biba's technology and employees now being part of Amazon. We found that Biba had filed and received two patents, one related to video conferencing, and another related to audio streaming. Both of these patents transferred their ownership to Amazon Technologies in the last two months. Furthermore, we've been able to trace active Amazon work email addresses to current Biba employees. (We are not publishing those here.) "

"With almost every sector of the economy facing a digital transformation, businesses must find new ways to get their information and data online. No longer does it make sense to have documents stored on paper. To keep up with the ever-changing times, more and more businesses are turning to the Portable Document Format (PDF). "Due to proliferation of new platforms, devices, and technologies, providing a quality PDF solution is more challenging than ever before," said Catherine Andersz, director of PDFTron. "So far the PDF format stood the test of time, but it's facing challenges due to fragmentation and poor implementations of the standard as well as relevance in the new world of small devices." The biggest benefits to moving to PDFs are that businesses can guarantee their documents will be accessible, viewable, and printable by everyone at any time, according to Gerald Holmann, founder and president of Qoppa Software. Today, PDF viewers are available across browsers, operating systems and applications, making it ubiquitous, according to Matt Kuznicki, CTO of Datalogics. However, as more users take interest in the technology, there will be a wider range of industries that PDFs have to address. "The PDF format contains a huge set of features and functionality designed for different audiences, and understanding the needs and capabilities of different workflows is now more important than ever," he said. PDF 2.0… The PDF file format was once a proprietary format owned by Adobe systems. Today, it is an open standard maintained by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). The last version of the PDF standard Adobe put out was version 1.7. As part of PDF 1.7, Adobe added supplementals incorporating features that came out after the release. Since the standard was handed over to ISO, the organization has been working to integrate those features into the upcoming main standard, PDF 2.0. Notable features include redaction annotations and

"Amazon has built a multibillion-dollar business in AWS, while Google is far behind. But the cloud is a rapidly evolving beast, and Amazon's advantages are about to be turned against them. THE EVOLUTION OF NEW TECHNOLOGY New technologies go through predictable phases. The hype cycle is phase one. Cloud is well beyond that. Phase two: we build what we already have with the new technology. So, cloud-based file storage. Amazon has moved far beyond storage. They enable customers to build entire data centers in the cloud. That is their key strategic advantage. Phase three is where life gets interesting: we build what we could not build before. More on that in a moment. That's the build side. What about the use side? Today, customers are happy building data centers in the cloud. They are looking for AWS to add more capabilities so they can run their legacy apps and get rid of their internal data centers altogether i.e. cloud admin will be a fast growing occupation; sys admin won't."

"Web mail, calendaring, task management, conferencing, and file sharing have become essential parts of our lives and work. They live on the web, but increasingly on mobile devices. At stake is our data and who owns it, and at the enterprise level it's a game of lock-in and standardisation that can make users feel like peasants of Westeros in giant games played by titans of the tech industry. Roundcube.net is a platform created with the goal of enabling applications that would feel native to any platform and on any device. Ten years ago the Berne, Switzerland-based project used the most advanced technologies and was ultra-modern, dynamic, and beautiful. Reviewers and users were delighted and Roundcube quickly became the default choice for many governments, universities, companies and individuals. The results to date? cPanel reports that Roundcube is dominant with 62 percent of all users in its systems. The technology is installed on approximately half a million websites globally, and it's used daily by hundreds of millions of users. Roundcube is integrated into major commercial offerings such as the Kolab Enterprise Collaboration suite, and offers a full Exchange replacement for organizations and corporations all the way up to the Fortune 50. Simply put, Roundcube is the unsung work horse of web mail. But a decade is an eternity in technology. When Roundcube started, mobile devices were large, clunky affairs used by the few. Today they are the most commonly used communication device. Roundcube Next is today's answer to that radical change. Instead of once more embarking alone on that ten year journey, Roundcube Next is about building a strong, healthy and diverse Open Source community to achieve that task within 12 to 18 months."

"The 2015 holiday season is upon us and the year is drawing to a close. Soon our thoughts will drift to our hopes and goals for 2016. For those who are dreaming of a new job at an up-and-coming young company, we've compiled this list to help. All of these companies specialize in making tech for work and business use, a $3.5 trillion worldwide market. All of them had spectacular years in 2015, by launching great new technology or getting a boatload of funding or landing big partnerships and generally setting themselves up for a successful 2016 and beyond."

"THE EVOLUTION OF NEW TECHNOLOGY New technologies go through predictable phases. The hype cycle is phase one. Cloud is well beyond that. Phase two: we build what we already have with the new technology. So, cloud-based file storage. Amazon has moved far beyond storage. They enable customers to build entire data centers in the cloud. That is their key strategic advantage. Phase three is where life gets interesting: we build what we could not build before. More on that in a moment. That's the build side. What about the use side? Today, customers are happy building data centers in the cloud. They are looking for AWS to add more capabilities so they can run their legacy apps and get rid of their internal data centers altogether i.e. cloud admin will be a fast growing occupation; sys admin won't. THE NEXT STEP The cloud has upended the enterprise storage market, but that isn't its competitive advantage. Local scale-out storage can be competitive with cloud because network bandwidth isn't cheap. What the cloud has that no enterprise-scale datacenter will ever have is the ability to spin up 10s of thousands CPUs - a virtual supercomputer - to run analytics against the data. CPUs are expensive - and they'll remain so as long as Intel can keep them that way. The ready access to massive CPU cycles means that cloud will always be better at deep analytics, especially ad-hoc queries, than enterprise scale datacenters. But more importantly, cloud-based machine learning, neural networks and artificial intelligence are the next major evolution in how we use data. And that's where Google has a huge lead over Amazon. Amazon's focus on building cloud-based datacenters makes them irresistable now, but the future of the cloud is with applications that can use thousands of cores to create value. Look at what Google - and Microsoft - has done with machine translation. Yes, you need many petabytes of storage for the corpus, but the real key is in the compute resources and algorit

"Free Online Tech Courses At one time, universities and colleges were institutes of higher learning for those who were passionate about acquiring knowledge. Today, education discussions tend to to center around how much individuals can make with their degree. Thanks to the Internet there are still places that offer open learning initiatives designed to help a new generation of technologists succeed. If money was the only thing holding you back from learning more about technology, we've got good news for you. There are many places offering free online tech training that while may not be degree/certificate driven can still give you a leg up on the competition. While many of the courses listed here offer either a certificate or credit for a fee, they also all are free for those who just want to learn about technology or add a new skill to their "toolbox.""

"It says something about the state of collaboration tech that the disruptors of a few years ago are at danger of being disrupted.  For example, take Google Hangouts. A novel development when it was released by Google in 2013, Hangouts can be used to message a friend or co-worker or up to one hundred people for a group chat. But now it could conceivably be displaced by San Francisco-based Slack Technologies, a workspace collaboration tool that has quickly grown in popularity as well as third-party features - and is now adding video and voice to the menu. So could Skype Technologies, for that matter, which Microsoft acquired in May 2011 for $8.5 billion. Indeed, Google Hangouts was referred to as a Skype-killer when it was introduced some two years later. Spot the Pattern? New York City-based BetterCloud did and it discusses this trend in its unbelievably well-timed report, "Real-time Messaging Research and Comparison Real-Time Messaging: Data Unearths Surprising Findings on Usage, Distraction, and Organizational Impact." However, the report's finding take on a surprising twist. The disruptors-get-disrupted story line does not pan out. Instead it finds that, as of right now, there is enough room for multiple messaging apps in the enterprise and indeed, we can see with our own eyes that Google Hangouts didn't kill Skype.  More than likely, Slack is not going to turn out to be a Hangouts assassin. More than half, or 57 percent, of respondents told BetterCloud that their organizations use two more real-time messaging apps with little conflict."

"Google is looking to strategically tackle the enterprise cloud market by open sourcing some of its internal technologies, embracing a multiplatform design principle and setting what it thinks are reasonable expectations for what its customers should move into the public cloud. The company hopes to continue making strides in the crowded market, which Amazon dominates, by helping enterprises identify business processes that can rapidly transition to the cloud and deliver the fastest ROI. Download the March 2016 digital issue Inside: What you need to know about staffing up for IoT, how cloud and SDN set Veritas free & much more! READ NOW Now that companies can store all the data they want in the cloud for as little as $0.01 per GB per month, figuring out what to do with it all is a significant challenge, according to Greg DeMichillie, Google Cloud Platform's (GCP) director of product management, who spoke with CIO.com at the GCP user conference last week. "It's the needle in the haystack," DeMichillie says. "Companies are drowning in data that they know, or that they suspect, there's value in ... but they don't know how to get the value out of it.""

"When Google scored a $400 million to $600 million deal to supply cloud services to Apple last week, according to multiple reports, it was widely viewed as a coup for the search giant's cloud business. And why not? Apple, which has been relying mainly on Amazon Web Services as well as Microsoft's Azure to run part of its iCloud and other services, is a marquee reference customer. It will get Google in the door of just about every big company-and, not incidentally, throw a little shade on its rivals. But the big win obscures a stark reality for Google's Cloud Platform: At just $500 million in revenues according to Morgan Stanley estimates, it trails far behind AWS's $7.9 billion reported revenues in 2015, and it's even a distant third behind Azure's $1.1 billion in estimated sales. Starting today, Mar. 23, Google will attempt to show how it aims to scramble into cloud contention at its first global cloud users conference, NEXT, in San Francisco. At the show, Google will trot out Diane Greene, the onetime co-founder and CEO of cloud pioneer VMware who now heads all of Google's cloud and enterprise applications businesses. This will be Greene's first significant public appearance since Google bought her company, Bebop, for $380 million last November. Customers and investors alike will be watching closely to see what strategy she lays out for the coming year and beyond. Google plans to introduce both a raft of new cloud features and updates as well as some significant new customers, according to various sources in the company. On the product front, there will be news about Google's container technologies, which allow applications to run more efficiently across cloud servers using the same operating system without interfering with each other, David Aronchick, senior product manager for Google's Container Engine, said Tuesday at a press briefing. "NEXT will be an opportunity to highlight all the traction we've gotten," he said."

Hey David! The horses have left the barn. Unlike the last great platform transition, the move to the Cloud involves moving billion and billions of existing data bits and documents. Much of this content (data + documents) is valuable "in-process" information vital to the current operations of legacy business systems. The last time there was a platform shift it was from the Mainframe-workstation era to the PC client-server era. Digital information was in its infancy. Today the volumes of digital business information is enormous. Meaning, the horses have already left the barn. The lock-in is set. Volumes of document content is locked into Microsoft Office applications, and can only be "worked" by either Microsoft Office, or Office 365. No business is going to move their systems to the Cloud and leve these billions of "in-process" documents behind. Another aspect to consider is the productivity equation which says that collaboration = the integration of communications and content (data + documents). ALL THREE must be integrated!!! Meaning if Microsoft apps have billions of documents locked up, an enterprise cannot make a decision based on best communications or data integration. They must choose Microsoft's Cloud where all THREE aspects can be integrated. This is the hook that has made Office 365 the most successful Cloud mover ever (85 million subscribers with an annual run rate of $13.5 billion - and all this after only two years in the marketplace) Quote: "The majority of IT decision-makers believe that vendor lock-in prevents their companies from maximizing the business value of public cloud. IT leadership often chooses not to move applications to the public cloud because they believe investing in just one cloud provider will hinder flexibility. Several studies reinforce this conclusion, stating that the overwhelming market dominance of public cloud players, like AWS, is negative for the industry. Even when using core services, such as Amazon Elast

"Samsung on Wednesday announced its intentions to support early-stage startups focused on emerging technologies. The company, through its global innovation group, has established a $150 million fund targeting businesses specializing in virtual reality, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, and "other new frontier technologies." So far, Samsung has made investments in 10 startups: Converge Industries, Dashbot, Entry Point VR, Filament, Intezer, LiquidSky, Otto Radio, 2Sens, SafeDK, and Virtru. The fund is aimed at making pre-seed to series B investments. "Our investments bring the power of the Samsung platform to startups to accelerate their growth and ultimately their success," said Brendon Kim, vice president and the managing director of Samsung's Next Ventures. "The Samsung NEXT Fund expands our global reach and capabilities, while increasing Samsung's access to more great ideas, products and talent." Samsung declined to specify how much each startup receives. In addition, it appears that the company could be targeting those in Israel next, with the opening of a new office in Tel Aviv, Israel in September. There are now five offices worldwide dedicated to innovation, including San Francisco, Mountain View, Korea, and New York. More locations are planned later this year. Samsung Next formerly was known as the Global Innovation Center. The name change was done because "our new name reflects our passion for partnering with tech innovators to take them to the NEXT level - build great ideas into products, grow products into thriving businesses and scale businesses that leverage and transform the Samsung ecosystem.""

"Dropbox made a number of headline-grabbing moves over the past few weeks, but Storm Ventures partner Anshu Sharma's more concerned than impressed. He sees a company that's failing to figure out what customers truly need - falling for what he calls the "Stack Fallacy," a term he coined to describe how successful companies in one area often overvalue what they know and misjudge what they need to build next. "Companies fail when they take the 'what' for granted," Sharma told Business Insider, referring to companies that falsely believe that they already know "what" customers want. "

An amazing article about Marc Andressen and his a16z VC firm on Sand Hill Road. Covers the entire story and provides a great insight into how Silicon Valley and VC industry work. It's long, but nevertheless a must read. Very enjoyable! " At his firm, Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capitalist routinely lays out "what will happen in the next ten, twenty, thirty years." CREDIT PHOTOGRAPH BY JOE PUGLIESE On a bright October morning, Suhail Doshi drove to Silicon Valley in his parents' Honda Civic, carrying a laptop with a twelve-slide presentation that was surely worth at least fifty million dollars. Doshi, the twenty-six-year-old C.E.O. of a data-analytics startup called Mixpanel, had come from San Francisco to Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, where many of the world's most prestigious venture-capital firms cluster, to pitch Andreessen Horowitz, the road's newest and most unusual firm. Inside the offices, he stood at the head of a massive beechwood conference table to address the firm's deal team and its seven general partners-the men who venture the money, take a seat on the board, and fire the entrepreneur if things go wrong. Marc Andreessen, the firm's co-founder, fixed his gaze on Doshi as he disinfected his germless hands with a sanitizing wipe. Andreessen is forty-three years old and six feet five inches tall, with a cranium so large, bald, and oblong that you can't help but think of words like "jumbo" and "Grade A." Two decades ago, he was the animating spirit of Netscape, the Web browser that launched the Internet boom. In many respects, he is the quintessential Silicon Valley venture capitalist: an imposing, fortyish, long-celebrated white man. (Forbes's Midas List of the top hundred V.C.s includes just five women.) But, whereas most V.C.s maintain a casual-Friday vibe, Andreessen seethes with beliefs. He's an evangelist for the church of technology, afire to reorder life as we know it. He believes that tech products will soon

The cloud has quickly become a mainstay in IT departments, with recent research from cloud solutions provider RightScale showing 93 percent of businesses using cloud technology in some form or another. But it's not all smooth sailing after the initial migration and integration - many businesses find that the second wave of cloud adoption is just as rough as the first. According to RightScale's 2015 State of the Cloud report, which surveyed 930 IT professionals about their current adoption and future plans involving cloud computing, 88 percent of businesses are using public cloud technology and 63 percent are using private cloud. Eighty-two percent have a hybrid cloud strategy, up from 74 percent in 2014, a clear indication that the cloud has quickly become an essential ingredient of modern IT.

"As a means of measuring for how technology is being adopted in the marketplace, the most common metaphor is usually war. Companies are always involved in battles for consumers, new products are launched at strategic dates in the calendar and there is often an overwhelming sense that victory must be achieved at any cost. In the software sector battlefields are vast, ongoing and filled with casualties. More often than not, the definition of who has won and who has lost is blurred-victory is defined by market share and by how and by whom the technology is being used. In the last decade, there has been a war in the workplace, especially when it comes to the integration of the cloud into daily working and collaboration practices. Both Microsoft and Google want to be the dominant players in the arena, but it appears that neither side can currently claim total victory."