Microsoft Warns Of Late-Year Spike In Office Threats
Office exploits are hardly new, but there has been a noticeable uptick in attacks in the fall of 2017 that target the popular business productivity software suite from Microsoft. In a Nov. 21 advisory, Microsoft’s Office 365 Threat Research team said that they had observed an escalation in the efforts of attackers to infect systems running Office.
Black Friday, Thanksgiving Online Retail Traffic Skews Toward Mobile
Mobile shopping is representing the majority of e-commerce orders on Thanksgiving and Black Friday, according to Adobe. Adobe’s Experience Cloud, which tracks 80 percent of the online transactions at the largest 100 U.S. web retailers, said mobile was representing 61.1 percent of the visits for Black Friday. On Thanksgiving, mobile represented 55.7 percent of visits to retail sites.
Where Are The Holes In Digital Transformation?
Digitization has transformed many organizations over the past decade, changing how they approach communication, marketing and many elements of day-to-day operations. Mobile and flexible working is an area that has been revolutionized by digital transformation and certain business functions such as marketing and customer experience have also shown enormous advances in the use of digital technology. Yet other areas remain resolutely locked in an analogue era, unable or unwilling to update their practices according to market forces.
Enterprises Tap VR Apps To Train Its Staff
The virtual reality (VR) market has grown significantly in the past few years. VR headsets, controllers and tracking systems are being developed for many use cases other than the initial use cases in gaming and entertainment areas. Software development brings a fully immersive experience to users, providing realistic applications for enterprises. VR-based training applications have been developed to help organizations achieve faster growth. Khin Sandi Lynn, industry analyst at ABI Research, said that virtual reality enterprise training programs create a significant business opportunity, providing employees with an effective training experience.
Microsoft, Box Partner On Cloud Content Management And Collaboration
Box Using Azure, an offering that combines the content management capabilities of the business-friendly Box platform with Microsoft cloud storage, is now available. It’s not the first time Microsoft and Box have teamed up in the cloud collaboration space. In 2016, the two companies unveiled a set of integrations that allow users to save their Office files directly to their Box accounts using Microsoft’s native apps for Android and preview Excel files without launching the spreadsheet software.
Amazon Gives AWS Customers Access To Its Internal Machine-Learning Experts
Amazon has announced the Amazon ML Solutions Lab, a new program that connects Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers with Amazon’s own machine learning experts. Through boot camps, workshops, advisory professional services and other forms of programming, the program is designed to help Amazon’s cloud customers figure out how to leverage machine learning.
Tesla’s All-Electric Semi Truck: Prices Start At $150,000
Tesla has revealed pricing for its new all-electric Semi, touting a two-year payback on fuel savings. Tesla says the expected base price in the US for the Semi with a 300-mile range will be $150,000 while the base price for the 500-mile model will be $180,000. The Founders Series Semi, which can be reserved today, costs $200,000.
Uber Concealed Hack Of 57 Million Accounts For More Than A Year
Uber concealed a massive data breach for more than a year, according to a report by Bloomberg. Hackers stole names, email addresses, and phone numbers of 57 million Uber riders around the world in a breach dating back to October 2016. Data on more than 7 million drivers was also stolen, including over 600,000 drivers’ license records.
Digital Transformation: Why The Future Is Looking Bright For CIOs
While the pace of change continues to increase, so does the scope of IT leadership activities. Analyst Gartner recently presented its vision for the future of IT leadership at its European CIO Symposium in Barcelona, with its key message for CIOs that executives who embrace digital disruption have more opportunities to excel across the business than ever before. Here, we draw on the thoughts of Gartner analysts and CIOs to present six best practices for technology chiefs looking to inspire and lead digital initiatives across the organization.
Consumers Want IoT Toys Regardless Of Security
As Black Friday and Cyber Monday approach, American consumers are likely to be buying more connected Internet of Thing (IoT) toys and devices in 2017 than ever before. With those devices come a host of security risks, though few consumers care, according to a report released Nov. 20 by Keeper Security.
Serverless But Not Stress-Free: Enterprise Computing Moves Outside The Enterprise
Within the next 10 years, much of the IT infrastructure as we know it will be out in the cloud – yet it will be relatively commonplace to be moving applications back in-house, or between clouds. However, all this new agility will be tempered by the stress of needing to get applications out the door almost minute by minute.
Want To Win Big In Digital Transformation? It’s About How You Manage Your Data
When you take a hard look at the digital transformation, there are clear leaders of the tech industry, and even more clear laggards, according to Sheryl Kingstone, 451 Research director of customer experience and commerce. The most successful leaders in the tech field are the ones who are working to understand and address data management, she said. As companies collect an abundance of structured and unstructured data, looking at it from a reporting standpoint will become nearly impossible.
Black Friday Promos ‘More Subdued’ Than In Past Years
Black Friday has lost a bit of its sheen this year as wireless carriers have opted not to participate in the promotional feeding frenzy that typically highlight the day. The annual shopping orgy has traditionally prompted carriers to launch extremely aggressive promotions to poach customers from rivals and grow their market share. But rather than focusing on building their customer bases, though, operators appear to have shifted their focus to improving their bottom lines, according to a note from Cowen Equity Research.
Why Chatbot Platforms Are Quickly Expanding Their Bot Inventory
Popular chatbots commonly used today, such as Siri and Amazon Alexa, are examples of how far automated assistants have come. But they also show how far they still have to go. Some companies were developing a standalone application because it seemed popular to do so; however, for any application to have a chance at success, it must provide substantial value. Given that the use of messaging apps is growing in popularity, chatbot uses for enterprise have also grown, which has fueled major industry players to integrate more chatbots into their systems for both individual and enterprise use.
BlackBerry Motion Review: A Business-Class Mid-Ranger With Excellent Battery Life
The BlackBerry Motion is the second handset to come from BlackBerry Mobile: TCL Communication now licenses the BlackBerry brand for smartphones (TCL also makes Alcatel handsets and some under its own name too). The first smartphone from this deal, the BlackBerry KEYone, came with a physical keyboard, whereas the Motion is a more standard touchscreen-only device. Like the KEYone, the Motion runs Android, and also features a number of touches that may endear it to business users.
The Agile Network Will Power Digital Transformation Through Businesses
Digital transformation is certainly a widely-used phrase within businesses at the moment, and the trend is predicted to continue – and even increase – as we head into 2018. And the numbers look set to back this up: by the end of the year, research estimates that digital transformation spend looks set to top at over $1.2 trillion. Marketing intelligence firm IDC also sees this spend continuing to sustain its growth rate of around 18% a year until at least 2020.
AWS Secret Region Debuts As A Cloud For U.S. Intelligence Community
Amazon announced its newest cloud region on Nov. 20, with the public announcement of the AWS Secret Region. As opposed to other Amazon Web Services (AWS) regions, which are available for anyone to use, the Secret Region is specifically for use by the U.S. Intelligence Community. The Secret Region is being made available to the U.S. Intelligence Community by way of the existing Commercial Cloud Services (C2S) contract with AWS.
Cisco, Interpol Team Up To Share Cybercriminal Threat Data
Cisco and Interpol have announced a new agreement to share threat data on cybercriminal activities. Recently, the tech giant and international law enforcement agency said that sharing threat intelligence between the parties will be the “first step” in jointly tackling today’s cybercrime.
Five Areas Of Focus In The Healthcare Wearables Ecosystem
The proliferation of wearables for health and wellness, and the need for more data about the current and future condition of individuals and patients, are key factors propelling market growth. Future growth opportunities focus on the commercialization and embedding of wearables in skin patches, clothing, and electronic skins.
Data Analytics, Marketing Automation Will Matter In 2018
Data analytics will play a bigger role in 2018. Meanwhile marketing automation will increasingly shape financial services marketing success in the new year. That was what financial services and communication leaders said in the Cognito Communications and Marketing Survey 2017/18. The report surveyed 165 marketers from US, EMEA and APAC from various parts of the financial services industry, including banking, asset management, wealth management, FinTech, insurance, technology and professional services.
