Tech & Telecom news — Jul 15, 2019
By: S Winwood
Tags: Artificial Intelligence, Cloud Computing, Smart Cities, Privacy, Semiconductors

RETAIL

Amazon is holding its annual “Prime Day” today, looking to increase the number of Prime subscriptions, a “vital tool” that is increasingly at the core of the company’s strategy, as a way to increase loyalty and customers’ lifetime value (current US Prime subscribers, 50–60% US households, would have a net value of approx. $190bn, or $3,000 per subscriber) (Story)

PRODUCTS & SERVICES

E-sports

In spite of live streaming games having become a much more competitive field, with Google, Facebook and Microsoft having recently entered the space, Amazon’s Twitch continues to lead the market by far, with a 72.2% share of the total hours watched in 2Q19 (2.7bn hours in the three months) vs. YouTube Live (19.5%) and Facebook Gaming (5.3%) (Story)

Enterprise

A big win for Amazon in the enterprise market, after a US federal judge has ruled against a demand by Oracle on potential conflicts of interest in the award of the massive $10bn “JEDI” cloud computing contract for the Pentagon. Now it seems AWS will get the deal, but Congress is also asking the Defense Dept. to commit for a later transition to a multi-cloud solution (Story)

The top AI executive from Cloudera, a Software-as-a-Service analytics company, claims that the current low success rate of enterprise AI projects is related to data scientists and technologists having too much decision power, when this should actually be in the hands of product managers, with deeper knowledge of the actual business problems to be solved (Story)

Regulation

Shift of regulation to a more active attitude against tech giants looks like a structural change, at least in the US, where even after the FTC imposing a $5bn fine to Facebook for violations of promises to protect users’ privacy, new investigations are being launched on the company, about antitrust issues and about the implications of their new cryptocurrency, Libra (Story)

HARDWARE ENABLERS

Components

South Korea’s enormous dependence on semiconductor exports, which represented 92% of the country’s export growth in 2018, is now backfiring, as trade conflicts and a cyclical fall in chip prices are hurting the country’s commercial balance to the point of reducing the total number of exports and slowing down GDP growth (Story)

Quantum computing

IBM continues its “educational” campaign about the big opportunity of quantum computing, In a chip manufacturing industry event last week, they presented their IBM Q system and explained their current efforts to reduce “noise” and enable more powerful sets of qubits, but also recognized that it could take years before quantum computers can beat classical ones (Story)

SOFTWARE ENABLERS

Artificial Intelligence

Elon Musk’s Neuralink, the company which is building brain-computer interfaces with the vision to better integrate humans and increasingly powerful AI systems, will present an update of their activities this week. Apparently, they have been concentrating on “easier” initial targets, like addressing medical conditions like epilepsy or depression (Story)

In a webinar last week, AI “celebrity scientist” Y LeCun claimed that the future of the field is in unsupervised learning, a technique by which algorithms learn to extract patterns in data entirely on their own. These systems have been increasingly used in natural language processing, to find how different words are interrelated, but are still rare in other applications (Story)

Privacy

“Smart cities”, where sensors and cameras collect data for algorithms to improve daily life, e.g. increasing vehicle safety or controlling pollution, are becoming a reality. Only in China, up to 500 projects would be under way. But, as this opinion piece at the FT points out, this has implicit privacy trade-offs, with data-collection systems also enabling mass surveillance (Story)