The Istio service mesh hits version 1.0

Istio, the service mesh for microservices from Google, IBM, Lyft, Red Hat and many other players in the open-source community, launched version 1.0 of its tools today.

If you’re not into service meshes, that’s understandable. Few people are. But Istio is probably one of the most important new open-source projects out there right now. It sits at the intersection of a number of industry trends, like containers, microservices and serverless computing, and makes it easier for enterprises to embrace them. Istio now has more than 200 contributors and the code has seen more than 4,000 check-ins since the launch of  version 0.1.

Istio, at its core, handles the routing, load balancing, flow control and security needs of microservices. It sits on top of existing distributed applications and basically helps them talk to each other securely, while also providing logging, telemetry and the necessary policies that keep things under control (and secure). It also features support for canary releases, which allow developers to test updates with a few users before launching them to a wider audience, something that Google and other webscale companies have long done internally.

“In the area of microservices, things are moving so quickly,” Google product manager Jennifer Lin told me. “And with the success of Kubernetes and the abstraction around container orchestration, Istio was formed as an open-source project to really take the next step in terms of a substrate for microservice development as well as a path for VM-based workloads to move into more of a service management layer. So it’s really focused around the right level of abstractions for services and creating a consistent environment for managing that.”

Even before the 1.0 release, a number of companies already adopted Istio in production, including the likes of eBay and Auto Trader UK. Lin argues that this is a sign that Istio solves a problem that a lot of businesses are facing today as they adopt microservices. “A number of more sophisticated customers tried to build their own service management layer and while we hadn’t yet declared 1.0, we hard a number of customers — including a surprising number of large enterprise customer — say, ‘you know, even though you’re not 1.0, I’m very comfortable putting this in production because what I’m comparing it to is much more raw.'”

IBM Fellow and VP of Cloud Jason McGee agrees with this and notes that “our mission since Istio’s launch has been to enable everyone to succeed with microservices, especially in the enterprise. This is why we’ve focused the community around improving security and scale, and heavily leaned our contributions on what we’ve learned from building agile cloud architectures for companies of all sizes.”

A lot of the large cloud players now support Istio directly, too. IBM supports it on top of its Kubernetes Service, for example, and Google even announced a managed Istio service for its Google Cloud users, as well as some additional open-source tooling for serverless applications built on top of Kubernetes and Istio.

Two names missing from today’s party are Microsoft and Amazon. I think that’ll change over time, though, assuming the project keeps its momentum.

Istio also isn’t part of any major open-source foundation yet. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), the home of Kubernetes, is backing linkerd, a project that isn’t all that dissimilar from Istio. Once a 1.0 release of these kinds of projects rolls around, the maintainers often start looking for a foundation that can shepherd the development of the project over time. I’m guessing it’s only a matter of time before we hear more about where Istio will land.

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/31/the-open-source-istio-service-mesh-for-microservices-hits-version-1-0/

The Istio service mesh hits version 1.0

Istio, the service mesh for microservices from Google, IBM, Lyft, Red Hat and many other players in the open source community, launched version 1.0 of its tools today.

If you’re not into service meshes, that’s understandable. Few people are. But Istio is probably one of the most important new open source projects out there right now. It sits at the intersection of a number of industry trends like containers, microservices and serverless computing and makes it easier for enterprises to embrace them. Istio now has over 200 contributors and the code has seen over 4,000 check-ins since the launch of  version 0.1.

Istio, at its core, handles the routing, load balancing, flow control and security needs of microservices. It sits on top of existing distributed applications and basically helps them talk to each other securely, while also providing logging, telemetry and the necessary policies that keep things under control (and secure). It also features support for canary releases, which allow developers to test updates with a few users before launching them to a wider audience, something that Google and other webscale companies have long done internally.

“In the area of microservices, things are moving so quickly,” Google product manager Jennifer Lin told me. “And with the success of Kubernetes and the abstraction around container orchestration, Istio was formed as an open source project to really take the next step in terms of a substrate for microservice development as well as a path for VM-based workloads to move into more of a service management layer. So it’s really focused around the right level of abstractions for services and creating a consistent environment for managing that.”

Even before the 1.0 release, a number of companies already adopted Istio in production, including the likes of eBay and Auto Trader UK. Lin argues that this is a sign that Istio solves a problem that a lot of businesses are facing today as they adopt microservices. “A number of more sophisticated customers tried to build their own service management layer and while we hadn’t yet declared 1.0, we hard a number of customers — including a surprising number of large enterprise customer–  say, ‘you know, even though you’re not 1.0, I’m very comfortable putting this in production because what I’m comparing it to is much more raw.'”

IBM Fellow and VP of Cloud Jason McGee agrees with this and notes that “our mission since Istio’s launch has been to enable everyone to succeed with microservices, especially in the enterprise. This is why we’ve focused the community around improving security and scale, and heavily leaned our contributions on what we’ve learned from building agile cloud architectures for companies of all sizes.”

A lot of the large cloud players now support Istio directly, too. IBM supports it on top of its Kubernetes Service, for example, and Google even announced a managed Istio service for its Google Cloud users, as well as some additional open source tooling for serverless applications built on top of Kubernetes and Istio.

Two names missing from today’s party are Microsoft and Amazon. I think that’ll change over time, though, assuming the project keeps its momentum.

Istio also isn’t part of any major open source foundation yet. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), the home of Kubernetes, is backing linkerd, a project that isn’t all that dissimilar from Istio. Once a 1.0 release of these kinds of projects rolls around, the maintainers often start looking for a foundation that can shepherd the development of the project over time. I’m guessing its only a matter of time before we hear more about where Istio will land.

from Microsoft – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/31/the-open-source-istio-service-mesh-for-microservices-hits-version-1-0/

A source of stress

Wanting to do two things at the same time.

If you’re on the stairmaster at the gym, you’re engaged in a workout voluntarily.

But if your job involved standing on a stairmaster all day, every day, you’d be stressed out. Because you want to stay (you need the paycheck) and you want to leave.

A volunteer fireman feels totally different about a burning building than someone who is trapped in one.

That’s because the volunteer goes in on purpose.

The distinction (and the stress) comes down to the word “but.”

I need to do this but I hate it.

I have to stay but I want to go.

The external forces might not be changeable, but our use of the word “but” can be.

If it’s what you want to do, then do it. Dropping the “but” costs you nothing but stress.

       

from Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/561701438/0/sethsblog~A-source-of-stress/

Branded Worlds: how technology recentralized entertainment

I love Hollywood box-office numbers because they provide a hard statistical view of cultural currents. Did you know, for instance, that there had never been a weekend when 8 of the top 10 movies in America were sequels — until this month? Or that, while almost 400 movies were released in the first half of 2018, nearly 40% of their total accumulated revenue came from just four releases, all of which were superhero sequels?

This is not what was supposed to happen. Ten years ago people thought that visual storytelling would be democratized; that new cameras, new editing suites, cheap streaming, and BitTorrent would combine to render high-cost obsolete-infrastructure Hollywood irrelevant. A worldwide cohort of genius independent filmmakers would use this new generation of accessible tools to slowly supplant Hollywood studios and producers as the drivers of visual and narrative culture.

Hoo boy, did that ever not happen. Instead we just added a few new gatekeepers to the entertainment oligarchy: YouTube, Amazon, Netflix. Instead of a new era of auteurs, of unique voices and stories, the entertainment industry has had enormous success doing the complete opposite: doubling down on sequels, and expanding brands and franchises into massive worlds of corporate-licensed, committee-written, producer-driven branded entertainment, often spanning movies, television, books, video games, and amusement parks. The Marvel Cinematic (and televised) Universe. Worlds of DC. Star Wars. Star Trek. The Wizarding World of Harry Potter. Jurassic World.

This is not in and of itself a bad thing. I’m a fan of most of those myself. But it’s worth asking; why didn’t we get that decentralized diaspora of auteurs that was once widely predicted? And what are the longer-term effects of the triumph of Branded Worlds on the grassroots, and the next generations, of pop culture?

There are two answers to the first question: cost and time. Maybe it’s a lot easier to shoot and edit movies/TV than it used to be, but sets, locations, actors, scripts — those are all expensive and difficult. Better amateur work is still far from professional. And while it’s true we’re seeing interesting new visual modes of storytelling, e.g. on Twitch and YouTube,  it’s very rarely narrative fiction, and it’s still  distributed and monetized via Twitch and YouTube, gatekeepers who implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) shape what’s popular.

More importantly, though, democratizing the means of production does not increase demand. A 10x increase in the number of TV shows, however accessible they may be, does not 10x the time any person spends watching television. For a time the “long tail” theory, that you could make a lot of money from niche audiences as long as your total accessible market grew large enough, was in vogue. This was essentially a mathematical claim, that audience demand was “fat-tailed” rather than “thin-tailed.”

But it seems that the demand for entertainment is quite thin-tailed indeed. The more options we have, the more we seem to want characters we already know, in worlds with which we’re already familiar. This makes sense — it takes a lot of work to engage with a new world and a new cast, with no guarantee at all that they will be worth the effort. But the result is that Branded Worlds increasingly feel like vast open-world video games, even including side quests (Rogue One or Ant-Man And The Wasp) along with the “main story,” and a seemingly endless amount of new downloadable content.

I also suspect that many-chaptered, many-charactered worlds are more viable than they used to be because we’re more connected to them. Did you miss a Marvel movie leading up to Infinity War? Well, you can recap its handful of key and killer scenes on YouTube, in fifteen minutes, without having to rent/watch the whole thing. Did you miss the last episode of a TV show, or do you just want to skip to its conclusion? If it has enough cultural resonance, Vulture or The AVClub probably posted a recap you can use as quick Cliff’s Notes. We can dip our toes into Branded Worlds whenever we like, in between diving into them at a movie theater or serious bingewatching session.

The other interesting question is: what does the growing supremacy of Branded Worlds mean for the next generation of writers, directors, and producers? Obviously producers will try to turn tentpoles into sequels, and sequels into franchises, as before; but now they have a new goal, that of transforming a franchise into the apotheosis of a Branded World. (Game of Thrones, The Hunger Games, and Westworld are obvious candidates, though each faces its own set of hurdles.)

Obviously writers and directors are incentivized to create what is most likely to be successful. This doesn’t mean the complete absence of standalone one-offs — we’ve also seen that horror, long a springboard for auteurs breaking into the biz, seems to give us one surprise crossover hit every year, such as Get Out and A Quiet Place. But it does mean that creators will focus on worlds as much as stories, and that fanfiction will become a completely viable path into the industry — after all, writing within a Branded World is simply paid fanfiction. (Creators will also be incentivized to write stories which might do well in China’s burgeoning market, but that’s a different post.)

Again, none of this is intrinsically bad. What I worry about a little, though, is whether the demand for entertainment is so thin-tailed that, as the number of Branded Worlds increases, that demand begins to end with them. It’s pretty clear that once a Branded World gets big enough it doesn’t necessarily have to be good to be successful. (See Age of Ultron, Batman v Superman, the bad Star Trek movies, arguably Solo, etc.) Left-field hits like Get Out are funded because their collective batting average is acceptably high. If Branded Worlds take enough of the mindshare of the masses that the batting average of original works drops faster than their production cost, then we’ll start seeing even fewer of those.

Will that happen? I can’t say — but I can tell you that a good way to measure whether it’s happening is to look at the weekend box office a few years from now and see if, for the first time, fully 9 out of the top 10 are sequels. Watch the numbers; they rarely lie.

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/29/branded-worlds-how-technology-recentralized-entertainment/

Amazon is planning to give Prime Video a big makeover

Could user profiles and better personalization features be coming to Amazon’s Prime Video app at long last? The company’s new Amazon Studios head Jennifer Salke just teased that a major upgrade to Amazon’s streaming video app is in the works – and she already has it running on a phone in her office, she said.

The exec was speaking at the Television Critics Association’s summer press tour in L.A., according to reports from AdWeek [paywall], TheWrap, and Deadline, when she mentioned the app’s big makeover.

And while Salke’s statements were light on key details – like when such an effort would reach end users, for example, or what changes, exactly, would be in store, there’s plenty of room to speculate on what Prime Video’s app today lacks.

For starters, unlike competitors such as Netflix and Hulu, Prime Video’s app doesn’t focus on making personalized recommendations about what to watch next.

Instead, the interface features a number of content groupings of shows or movies that are “included with Prime.” These are organized by category and type – like “Comedy Movies” or “Recently Added TV,” for example. It also showcases content that’s top rated, popular, or trending, along with some of its own editorial recommendations, like a section for Amazon’s “Original Movies” or its “Exclusive TV.”

A row may be dedicated to suggestions things to watch next based on viewing history, but it’s easily overlooked. Overall, the interface has always felt more focused on pushing Prime content in a variety of ways, rather than helping you discover new things you’ll actually like.

What makes this worse is that Amazon doesn’t offer user profiles, where household members could each have their own watchlist and set of recommendations – features that are standard on rival streaming apps today, including Hulu, Netflix, and even newcomers like YouTube TV.

And though Amazon does offer parental controls to lock down viewing, it doesn’t allow parents and kids to keep separate profiles where adult content is actually hidden from children.

These would all be obvious areas of improvement for a new Amazon Prime Video app, along with a better mechanism for discovering Prime Video’s optional add-on subscriptions, known as Prime Video Channels. Amazon today lets users build their own a la carte TV service by selecting premium channels like HBO, Showtime, Starz, CBS All Access, and more. But the Prime Video app itself doesn’t make channel suggestions in any sort of personal way – it simply offers an interface where you can browse through all of them.

But Amazon’s Prime Video Channels are rapidly becoming a driving force for over-the-top viewing, accounting for 55 percent of all direct-to-consumer video subscriptions. Amazon could easily revamp this feature to make it an even better selling point for Prime Video app users.

And of course, Amazon could still do a better job of highlighting its own originals – especially as it now has Emmy award winners and new nominees to promote – but in a way that feels more in tune with the viewer’s interests.

The company has at least publicly acknowledged that profiles are something it knows users want. In fact, it has even responded to incoming tweets with comments that explain how profiles aren’t available “at this time,” or “yet,” or say that’s a “good suggestion” when people offer feedback.

This sounds like a good suggestion. I'll be sure to forward it to the concerned team internally. ^AP

— Amazon Help (@AmazonHelp) July 2, 2018

At this time, multiple profiles within Prime Video s not supported. Please let us know if there is anything else we can help with. We're here 24/7 to support you! ^SG

— Amazon Help (@AmazonHelp) June 26, 2018

I'm sorry profiles aren't available with Prime Video yet. Help us improve, send us this feedback directly here: https://t.co/hApLpMlfHN. Please use these steps: (1/2)

— Amazon Help (@AmazonHelp) February 5, 2018

As for Salke’s statements, the most she offered is that the new Prime Video interface is “much more intuitive,” which hints towards improved navigation and how she finds it be “sort of seamless the way they’ve actually…” well, something – she cut herself off from that last reveal, by saying “I don’t know if I should give it away. It’s cool!”

Uh-huh. Good one.

She does say that the team wanted to develop the best UI (user interface) to line up with Amazon’s investment – meaning, apparently, the app should better highlight Amazon’s ~$4+ billion spent on original programming this year.

She also mentioned some of its upcoming high-profile series, like the sci-fi fan favorite “The Expanse,” which Amazon rescued from Syfy’s cancellation; the new “Lord of the Rings” project; and the Julia Roberts thriller “Homecoming,” directed by “Mr. Robot’s” Sam Esmail. Plus, she referenced three new series, including “The Expatriates,” from Nicole Kidman’s production company; Lena Waithe’s exec-produced horror series “Them;” and the sci-fi romantic comedy from “The Office’s” Greg Daniels, called “Upload.”

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/30/amazon-is-planning-to-give-prime-video-a-big-makeover/

Body scanning app 3DLOOK raises $1 million to measure your corpus

3D body scanning systems have hit the big time after years of stops and starts. Hot on the heels of Original Stitch’s Bodygram, another 3D scanner, 3DLOOK, has entered into the fray with a $1 million investment to measure bodies around the world.

The founders, Vadim Rogovskiy, Ivan Makeev, and Alex Arapovd, created 3DLOOK when they found that they could measure a human body using just a smartphone. The team found that other solutions couldn’t let them measure fits with any precision and depended on expensive hardware.

“After more than six years of building companies in the ad tech industry I wanted to build something new which was not a commodity,” said Rogovskiy. “I wanted to overcome growth obstacles and I learned that the apparel industry had mounting return problems in e-commerce. 3DLOOK’s co-founders spent over a year on pure R&D and testing new approaches and combinations of different technologies before creating SAIA (Scanning Artificial Intelligence for Apparel) in 2016.”

The team raised $400,000 to date and most recently raised a $1 million seed round to grow the company.

The team also collects “fit profiles” and is able to supply these profiles based on “geographic location, age, and gender groups.” This means that 3DLOOK can give you exact sizes based on your scanned measurements and tell you how clothes will fit on your body. They have 20,000 profiles already and are working with eight paying customers and five large enterprise systems. Lemonade Fashion and Koviem are both using the platform.

“3DLOOK is the first company that managed to build a technology that allows capturing human body measurements with just two casual photos, and plans to disrupt the market of online apparel sales, offering brands and small stores an API for desktop and SDK for mobile to gather clients measurements and build custom clothing proposals,” said Rogovskiy. “Additionally, the company collects the database of human body measurements so that brands could build better clothing for all types of body and solve fit and return problems. It will not only allow stores to sell more apparel, it will allow people get the quality apparel.”

3D scanners have gotten better and better over the years and it’s interesting to see companies being able to scan bodies just from a few photos. While these things can’t account for opinions of taste they can definitely make sure that your clothes fit before you order them.

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/30/body-scanning-app-3dlook-raises-1-million-to-measure-your-corpus/

Amazon starts canceling free Echo Spot orders

Let’s be honest. We all knew this was too good to last, right? For a few brief moments, Amazon’s Echo Spot was listed at $0.00. The smart device quickly went out of stock, only to have its price balloon back up to $129. Those who managed to pick one up crossed their fingers in hopes that the company would still make good.

Users (a few of our staff members included) are reporting, however, that the company has begun canceling orders placed within the window. It doesn’t appear to be a blanket cancelation at the moment, but that may well just be the time it takes to process what must have hundreds of orders, at least. Interestingly, the white version of the device (the one that was momentarily free) is still listed as being “currently unavailable” on the site.

We’re still waiting to hear back from Amazon about what, precisely, went down here. We’ve nudged them again this morning, in hopes of getting more information on the cancelation — and whether the company will, at the very, offer up something as consolation to disappointed bargain hunters.

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/30/amazon-starts-canceling-free-echo-spot-orders/

Digital Maturity or Digital Transformation? Eric D. Brown

Everyone’s working on digital transformation projects.  Much like ‘big data’ or ‘machine learning’, digital transformation is a phrase that you hear every day across just about every organization. The problem with digital transformation is that its not the end goal….you don’t set a goal of ‘being transformed’ especially when you’re looking at the digital space.  Rather, you set goals around engagement, conversion and revenue that are better / higher than what you have today.  You shouldn’t be focused on ‘transforming’ your business but on maturing your business into one that can operate in the digital model for the long run. This requires much more than digital transformation; it requires digital maturity.

MIT Sloan Management Review defines digital maturity in the following way:

Digital maturity is the process of your company learning how to respond appropriately to the emerging digital competitive environment.

Part of any good digital transformation initiative should include aspects that help an organization and its people internalize knowledge about the digital landscape, but most times it stops short of converting information about the digital world into knowledge (and ultimately into wisdom).  According to the DIKW Pyramid, there are three steps required to turn data into wisdom: data -> information -> knowledge -> wisdom.   Digital Transformation often stops short of creating ‘digital wisdom’ which is what’s necessary for digital maturity to occur. Without wisdom, you’re organization hasn’t quite reached the level of digital maturity needed.

With digital maturity, rather than chase new digital projects an organization just is digital.  This doesn’t necessarily mean the organization will have all the answers to all things digital, but it does mean that the people within the organization will have the skills and the tools to find those answers quickly and act upon the digital needs of the organization rather than just talk about the digital needs.

Deloitte released a study recently based on three years of research into digital maturity. In that study, they asked respondents to rate their digital maturity levels from a scale of 1 to 10 with a rating of 1 to 3 being ‘early maturity’, 4 to 6 being ‘developing maturity’ and 7 to 10 being ‘mature’. In the survey, only 25% of respondents rate their organization in the ‘mature’ category.  You can see the outcome of the survey in the image below.

A few more interesting stats from that survey:

• 34% of respondents from organizations at early stages of digital maturity say that their company spends more time talking about digital business than acting on it.
• Digitally maturing companies are also far more likely than are other organizations—76% of digitally maturing companies versus 32% of businesses at early stages of digital development—to use technology to conduct business in fundamentally different ways
• Digitally maturing organizations also take a longer view on digital strategy: They are twice as likely as early-stage companies to develop these strategies with time horizons of five years or more.
• More than 70% of digital maturing businesses are using cross-functional teams to organize work and charging them with implementing digital business priorities. This compares to less than 30% for early-stage organizations

There’s some interesting results there there.  Digitally mature organizations are planning for the ‘long game’ rather than (or maybe in addition to) running around trying to figure out how to get a customer in the door next week. Additionally, these companies with digital maturity are using technology to do things differently than they have done things before.

Digital transformation shouldn’t be the end goal for organizations. You don’t want to just transform into a ‘digital’ company doing things the same way you always have. You want to fundamentally do things differently using technology. That’s what digital maturity is.

This might require new organizational constructs (cross-functional teams, etc), a rethinking of digital platforms (do you really need 50 different martech platforms?) and/or chasing different projects/initiatives.  Reaching digital maturity means going through growing pains, but in the end it should be worth the pain to be able to ‘live digitally’ as an organization.

Don’t just settle for digital transformation for transformation sake. Set the main objective of your digital transformation projects to be digital maturity. Join the Deloitte respondents taking the long view and using technology to change the way you do business.

from Eric D. Brown http://ericbrown.com/digital-maturity.htm
http://ericbrown.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/digital-maturity-300x225.jpeg

Old buildings on the edge of town

“We’re not going to be here long.”

That’s because this project isn’t going to work and we can’t afford to stay, or because this project is going to work and we’re going to move up.

That’s a pretty profound thing for some real estate to say about its corporate tenant. And the employees absorb it each and every day.

Compare that to a bank in the big building in the middle of town… They’re in maintenance mode, how could they not be? It’s too hard to move—up, down or out.

Choose your metaphor, choose your narrative. It’s not just your office, of course. It never is.

 

[For those intent on moving up, consider applying to the altMBA. The last session of the year happens this fall.]

       

from Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/561511572/0/sethsblog~Old-buildings-on-the-edge-of-town/

Amazon’s Echo Spot is apparently free right now (Update: aaand it’s gone)

Update: Nothing gold can stay, Ponyboy. It was fun while it lasted, but both Spots are back to their original $129 asking price — and the white version still appears to be totally sold out. It looks as if the whole thing was a pricing mistake, rather than extra generosity on the part of Jeff B. So, nice work if you nabbed one in time. Keep those fingers crossed that it actually gets delivered. 

I like the Spot. It’s my favorite Echo. And due to what may well just be an error on Amazon’s part, the screen-sporting smart speaker is currently showing up for $0.00 — for those who can access it, at least. Some users are already registering it as Out of Stock.

The black version of the device is still listed as $99 — a much less killer deal, but still $29 down from the original asking price. It could be a pricing error, or maybe Amazon is trying to get rid of that old stock for some reason. Heck, maybe the company just really wants to get the Alexa delivery system in as many homes as humanly possible. This is certainly one way to do it. 

Chances seem decent it may never even ship — those who did order one (or three or four) are seeing a still pending delivery date. In either case, we’ve reached out to Amazon and will update when we hear back. 

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/29/amazons-echo-spot-is-apparently-free-right-now/

BMW’s Alexa integration gets it right

BMW will in a few days start rolling out to many of its drivers support for Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant. The fact that BWM is doing this doesn’t come as a surprise, given that it has long talked about its plans to bring Alexa — and potentially other personal assistants like Cortana and the Google Assistant — to its cars. Ahead of its official launch in Germany, Austria, the U.S. and U.K. (with other countries following at a later date), I went to Munich to take a look at what using Alexa in a BMW is all about.

As Dieter May, BMW’s senior VP for digital products told me earlier this year, the company has long held that in-car digital assistants have to be more than just an “Echo Dot in a cup holder,” meaning that they have to be deeply integrated into the experience and the rest of the technology in the car. And that’s exactly what BMW has done here — and it has done it really well.

What maybe surprised me the most was that we’re not just talking about the voice interface here. BMW is working directly with the Alexa team at Amazon to also integrate visual responses from Alexa. Using the tablet-like display you find above the center console of most new BMWs, the service doesn’t just read out the answer but also shows additional facts or graphs when warranted. That means Alexa in a BMW is a lot more like using an Echo Show than a Dot (though you’re obviously not going to be able to watch any videos on it).

In the demo I saw, in a 2015 BMW X5 that was specifically rigged to run Alexa ahead of the launch, the display would activate when you ask for weather information, for example, or for queries that returned information from a Wikipedia post.

What’s cool here is that the BMW team styled these responses using the same design language that also governs the company’s other in-car products. So if you see the weather forecast from Alexa, that’ll look exactly like the weather forecast from BMW’s own Connected Drive system. The only difference is the “Alexa” name at the top-left of the screen.

All of this sounds easy, but I’m sure it took a good bit of negotiation with Amazon to build a system like this, especially because there’s an important second part to this integration that’s quite unique. The queries, which you start by pushing the usual “talk” button in the car (in newer models, the Alexa wake word feature will also work), are first sent to BMW’s servers before they go to Amazon. BMW wants to keep control over the data and ensure its users’ privacy, so it added this proxy in the middle. That means there’s a bit of an extra lag in getting responses from Amazon, but the team is working hard on reducing this, and for many of the queries we tried during my demo, it was already negligible.

As the team told me, the first thing it had to build was a way to switch that can route your queries to the right service. The car, after all, already has a built-in speech recognition service that lets you set directions in the navigation system, for example. Now, it has to recognize that the speaker said “Alexa” at the beginning of the query, then route it to the Alexa service. The team also stressed that we’re talking about a very deep integration here. “We’re not just streaming everything through your smartphone or using some plug-and-play solution,” a BMW spokesperson noted.

“You get what you’d expect from BMW, a deep integration, and to do that, we use the technology we already have in the car, especially the built-in SIM card.”

One of the advantages of Alexa’s open ecosystem is its skills. Not every skill makes sense in the context of the car, and some could be outright distracting, so the team is curating a list of skills that you’ll be able to use in the car.

It’s no secret that BMW is also working with Microsoft (and many of its cloud services run on Azure). BMW argues that Alexa and Cortana have different strengths, though, with Cortana being about productivity and a connection to Office 365, for example. It’s easy to imagine a future where you could call up both Alexa and Cortana from your car — and that’s surely why BMW built its own system for routing voice commands and why it wants to have control over this process.

BMW tells me that it’ll look at how users will use the new service and tune it accordingly. Because a lot of the functionality runs in the cloud, updates are obviously easy and the team can rapidly release new features — just like any other software company.

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/29/bmws-alexa-integration-gets-it-right/

Walmart reportedly recruits ex-Epix CEO in bid to build video service

According to new reports, Walmart has enlisted the services of Mark Greenberg to help build a subscription video streaming service. Rumors have been floating around for some time now, that the retailer is looking to go head to head with the likes of Netflix and Amazon Prime video, and Greenberg — who left the role of CEO at Epix in September — is well-positioned to help.

The service would reportedly function apart from Vudu, the a la carte video service Walmart purchased in 2010, as a bid to bolster its smart TV offerings. According to Variety, the streaming service would be firmly targeted at what the retail giant views as its core demographic, with a low subscription price and content targeted directly at “Middle America.”

The company is said to be eying an $8 a month price point, which would put it $2 below Netflix’s standard subscription fee. Amazon Video is probably a more comparable competitor, given the size and breadth of both companies, but at the moment, Walmart doesn’t have an offering that fits the same scope as Amazon Prime.

Vudu, on the other hand, features around 150,000 films to purchase or rent, but currently commands only around 13-percent of videos streamed from U.S. TVs. Netflix and Amazon, meanwhile, are responsible 73 and 28 percent, respectively, by Comscore’s count.

This is all in the very early stages, according to reports. As such, neither Walmart nor Greenberg are disclosing anything.

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/29/walmart-reportedly-recruits-ex-epix-ceo-in-bid-to-build-video-service/

Our engineering ratchet

Quietly, over the last thirty years, engineering has become dramatically more efficient and effective.

Insulated glass, cars that don't break down, keyboards with just the right feel to them… Mechanical, electrical and chemical engineering are all moving faster than ever.

Several factors are at work:

1. Computer aided design and engineering means that smaller teams can do more, faster.
2. The internet shows engineers the state of the art immediately, so everyone is working off the latest benchmark.
3. Markets are more open to levelling up… new innovations that translate to productivity are adopted more easily.
4. There's an expectation that better is possible, so organizations are hooked on seeking out better. The ratchet turns the ratchet.

When we're in the middle of it, we don't see it. But travel back in time just a bit and you'll see that few things worked as well as they do now.

       

from Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/561365156/0/sethsblog~Our-engineering-ratchet/

Smooth water

Everything moves better in smooth water. Engineers spend a lot of time and energy to avoid cavitation, the often dangerous bubbles that are caused by pumps or propellers. And sailors and surfers prefer to do their thing without excess chop.

As we apply pressure to an organization, the same thing happens. At first, people engage with change as an opportunity, doing their best work in the face of small shifts. But once fear sets in, so does cavitation. The cavitation, the bubbling, the uncertainty, the expansion and collapse of bubbles of doubt and disagreement—this becomes the primary problem, more than the fear that originally caused the issue.

The challenge is to avoid this before it happens. To insert pressure relief valves, smooth out the bends, and give the energy a place to go.

The stories we tell each other will lead to the actions we take.

       

from Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/561226598/0/sethsblog~Smooth-water/

Amazon may soon let you collaborate with others on Wish Lists

Amazon may soon be adding a feature consumers have wanted for years: collaborative wish lists. A number of people using Amazon.com and its mobile app recently spotted the option to “invite others” to their wish lists. This offers a URL that can be shared via text messages, email, social apps and more. Once clicked, the invitees can then both add and remove wish list items, alongside the wish list’s original owner.

The feature, while relatively minor, is something Amazon shoppers have been clamoring for. Parents want to be able to co-manage wish lists for their kids, while others – like friends, couples, party planners, family and friends – have also wanted to team up on lists of gift ideas for special occasions, such as birthdays, holidays, and various celebrations.

But there’s been some confusion over whether the feature was something Amazon was only testing, or if it was in the early stages of a rollout to all users.

Amazon declined to comment on its plans specifically, but did tell us this is a test with a “small number of customers.”

As one report from MacRumors noted, there are some Wish List features not everyone has, even if they’ve been opted in to the new collaborative lists test. For instance, some people will also see a conversation icon on the right side of the list’s page that allows list members to discuss items on the list with one another. Another ellipsis icon lets the original list creator manage the list’s membership.

So far, the feature has been spotted on the Amazon.com desktop and mobile website, and on iOS but not Android. It’s common for Amazon to launch new features on iOS first, however. That’s the case with the recent debut of Part Finder, which has launched publicly, but only on iOS to start.

Image credit: MacRumors

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/27/amazon-may-soon-let-you-collaborate-with-others-on-wish-lists/

Russian hackers already targeted a Missouri senator up for reelection in 2018

A Democratic senator seeking reelection this fall appears to be the first identifiable target of Russian hacking in the 2018 midterm race. In a new story on the Daily Beast, Andrew Desiderio and Kevin Poulsen reported that Democratic Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill was targeted in a campaign-related phishing attack. That clears up one unspecified target from last week’s statement by Microsoft’s Tom Burt that three midterm election candidates had been targeted by Russian phishing campaigns.

The report cites its own forensic research in determining the attacker is likely Fancy Bear, a hacking group believed to be affiliated with Russian military intelligence.

“We did discover that a fake Microsoft domain had been established as the landing page for phishing attacks, and we saw metadata that suggested those phishing attacks were being directed at three candidates who are all standing for elections in the midterm elections,” Burt said during the Aspen Security Forum forum. Microsoft removed the domain and noted that the attack was unsuccessful.

Sen. McCaskill confirmed that she was targeted by the attack, which appears to have taken place in August 2017, in a press release:

“Russia continues to engage in cyber warfare against our democracy. I will continue to speak out and press to hold them accountable. While this attack was not successful, it is outrageous that they think they can get away with this. I will not be intimidated. I’ve said it before and I will say it again, Putin is a thug and a bully.”

TechCrunch has reached out to Sen. McCaskill’s office for additional details on the incident. McCaskill, a vocal Russia critic, will likely face Republican frontrunner and Trump pick Josh Hawley this fall.

from Microsoft – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/27/sen-claire-mccaskill-russia-midterm-hacking-daily-beast/

The cloud continues to grow in leaps and bounds, but it’s still AWS’s world

With the big cloud companies reporting recently, we can be sure of a couple of things: the market continues to expand rapidly and AWS is going to be hard to catch. Depending on whose numbers you look at, the market grew around 50 percent as it continues its unprecedented expansion.

Let’s start with market leader, Amazon Web Services. Canalys has them with 31 percent of the market while Synergy Research puts them at 34 percent. That’s close enough to be considered a dead heat. As Synergy’s John Dinsdale points out, AWS is so dominant that in spite of mega growth numbers from other vendors, it is still bigger than the next four competitors combined, even after all these years.

Those competitors, by the way, are no slouches by any means. They include Microsoft, Google, IBM and Alibaba, so some pretty elite enterprise players. As we’ve noted in past analyses, one of the primary issues for all the competitors is how late they were to the market. They gave Amazon a massive head start, and they show no signs of ceding that lead any time soon.

 

Of course, AWS isn’t standing still either, it grew 48 percent last quarter by Canalys’ estimate, while Synergy has AWS marketshare up a tick to 34 percent.

Interestingly, Synergy finds this overall competitor growth did not cut into Amazon’s marketshare at all, but was the result of continued growth in the marketplace, as companies continue to shift workloads to the cloud. “The rapid growth of Microsoft, Google and Alibaba sees them all increase their market shares too, but it is not at the expense of AWS,” Synergy’s John Dinsdale pointed out in a statement.

Microsoft and Google still growing fast

That is not to say that Microsoft and Google are not growing too. In fact, Canalys had Microsoft growing at an 89 percent clip last quarter while Google grew an amazing 108 percent. It’s always important to point out that it’s easier to grow from a small number to a bigger number than it is to grow from a big number to a bigger number. Yet AWS continues to defy that idea and grow anyway, although not quite at the rate of its competitors.

Synergy reports these marketshare percentages for the competitors: Microsoft 14 percent, IBM 8 percent, Google 6 percent and Alibaba 4 percent, while Canalys shows Microsoft with 18 percent and Google with 8 percent. It did not report on IBM or Alibaba.

 

While these growth numbers have to drop at some point, they could continue to grow for the next several years as large companies get more comfortable with the cloud and move increasing percentages of their workloads.

Of course, even then it’s not a zero sum game. As we see increasing use of data-intensive workloads involving internet of things, blockchain and artificial intelligence, it’s entirely possible that the market will continue to grow even with fewer workloads moving from private data centers.

For now, even with their eye-popping growth numbers, the competition continues to chase AWS. Even as these companies find ways to differentiate themselves with different approaches, offerings and services, the market dynamics are hardening and catching AWS seems less and less likely.

It also seems increasingly less likely that some small upstart can come in and undermine the top players, as it just takes too much investment to keep up with them and their scale. “In a large and strategically vital market that is growing at exceptional rates, [the market leaders] are throwing the gauntlet down to their smaller competitors by continuing to invest enormous amounts in their data center infrastructure and operations. Their increased market share is clear evidence that their strategies are working,” Synergy’s Dinsdale said a statement.

What the competitors need to do now is continue to focus on customer requirements and what they can offer in terms of price and service to continue to take advantage of their own unique strengths. There’s plenty of room in this space for everyone to thrive, but some will thrive more than others. That’s just the nature of the market.

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/27/the-cloud-continues-to-grow-in-leaps-and-bounds-but-its-still-awss-world/

The cloud continues to grow in leaps and bounds, but it’s still AWS’s world

With the big cloud companies reporting recently, we can be sure of a couple of things: the market continues to expand rapidly and AWS is going to be hard to catch. Depending on whose numbers you look at, the market grew around 50 percent as it continues its unprecedented expansion.

Let’s start with market leader, Amazon Web Services. Canalys has them with 31 percent of the market while Synergy Research puts them at 34 percent. That’s close enough to be considered a dead heat. As Synergy’s John Dinsdale points out, AWS is so dominant that in spite of mega growth numbers from other vendors, it is still bigger than the next four competitors combined, even after all these years.

Those competitors, by the way, are no slouches by any means. They include Microsoft, Google, IBM and Alibaba, so some pretty elite enterprise players. As we’ve noted in past analyses, one of the primary issues for all the competitors is how late they were to the market. They gave Amazon a massive head start, and they show no signs of ceding that lead any time soon.

 

Of course, AWS isn’t standing still either, it grew 48 percent last quarter by Canalys’ estimate, while Synergy has AWS marketshare up a tick to 34 percent.

Interestingly, Synergy finds this overall competitor growth did not cut into Amazon’s marketshare at all, but was the result of continued growth in the marketplace, as companies continue to shift workloads to the cloud. “The rapid growth of Microsoft, Google and Alibaba sees them all increase their market shares too, but it is not at the expense of AWS,” Synergy’s John Dinsdale pointed out in a statement.

Microsoft and Google still growing fast

That is not to say that Microsoft and Google are not growing too. In fact, Canalys had Microsoft growing at an 89 percent clip last quarter while Google grew an amazing 108 percent. It’s always important to point out that it’s easier to grow from a small number to a bigger number than it is to grow from a big number to a bigger number. Yet AWS continues to defy that idea and grow anyway, although not quite at the rate of its competitors.

Synergy reports these marketshare percentages for the competitors: Microsoft 14 percent, IBM 8 percent, Google 6 percent and Alibaba 4 percent, while Canalys shows Microsoft with 18 percent and Google with 8 percent. It did not report on IBM or Alibaba.

 

While these growth numbers have to drop at some point, they could continue to grow for the next several years as large companies get more comfortable with the cloud and move increasing percentages of their workloads.

Of course, even then it’s not a zero sum game. As we see increasing use of data-intensive workloads involving internet of things, blockchain and artificial intelligence, it’s entirely possible that the market will continue to grow even with fewer workloads moving from private data centers.

For now, even with their eye-popping growth numbers, the competition continues to chase AWS. Even as these companies find ways to differentiate themselves with different approaches, offerings and services, the market dynamics are hardening and catching AWS seems less and less likely.

It also seems increasingly less likely that some small upstart can come in and undermine the top players, as it just takes too much investment to keep up with them and their scale. “In a large and strategically vital market that is growing at exceptional rates, [the market leaders] are throwing the gauntlet down to their smaller competitors by continuing to invest enormous amounts in their data center infrastructure and operations. Their increased market share is clear evidence that their strategies are working,” Synergy’s Dinsdale said a statement.

What the competitors need to do now is continue to focus on customer requirements and what they can offer in terms of price and service to continue to take advantage of their own unique strengths. There’s plenty of room in this space for everyone to thrive, but some will thrive more than others. That’s just the nature of the market.

from Microsoft – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/27/the-cloud-continues-to-grow-in-leaps-and-bounds-but-its-still-awss-world/

Walking away from fast twitch

Sports gurus are happy to talk about the difference between fast and slow twitch muscles. And it resonates with us, because we fully understand the ping-pong reflexes that are so often celebrated and often fun to do as well.

On our project, it’s tempting to spend all of our time in fast twitch mode. To scan the incoming, grab the urgent, set it up and slam it back.

But if we spend all of our time twitching, we’ll never do the difficult work of the non-urgent. Important work requires a daily commitment, one that isn’t sidelined by every emergency, because there’s always an emergency, isn’t there?

       

from Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/561046686/0/sethsblog~Walking-away-from-fast-twitch/