IBM Watson Competes for the Artificial Intelligence Crown
December 21, 2015
The article titled IBM Watson Vs. Amazon: Machine Learning Systems Presage the Future on Datamation dukes it out between IBM’s famous supercomputer and the Amazon Web Services platform. Both are at the forefront of the industry, but which is best? Unsurprisingly, the article offers no definitive answer beyond: it depends what you are using them for. The article states,
“Amazon offers a simplified platform for developers who want to start working with machine learning without a lot of stress or specialized tools or investment… What IBM is trying to establish with the Watson analytics engine is not just storing and acquiring data, but taking all that information and doing something meaningful with it as an AI service or Intelligence as a Service.”
Jack Gold, Principal Analyst for J.Gold Associates, emphasizes that the larger point is that the AI technologies these two companies are competing to lead will shortly be much more far-spread due to the ever increasing amounts of data. The article also discusses some of the more exciting uses of Watson and Amazon. The former, through a company called Fluid, is being put to use in the retail industry relying on Watson’s ability to “read” customer personalities (with his handy personality matrix). Amazon Machine Learning, in the meanwhile, has recently been used for predictive modeling of job-cost estimates for insurance companies and builders.
Chelsea Kerwin, December 21, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Getting Smart About Cutting the Cable Cord
December 21, 2015
A few years ago, I read an article about someone who was fed up with streaming content because he wanted new shows and access to all the channels so they resubscribed to cable. I have to admit the easiest thing to do would be to pay a monthly cable bill and shell out additional fees for the premiere channels. The only problem is that cable and extra channels are quite expensive. It has since become easier to cut the cord.
One of the biggest problems viewers face is finding specific and new content. Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, and Amazon Prime are limited with licenses and their individual content and having to search each one is time consuming. Even worse is trying to type out a series name using a remote control instead of a keyboard. Technology to the rescue!
The Verge talks about “Yahoo’s New App Is A TV Guide For Cord Cutters” called Yahoo Video Guide that allows viewers to search by a name and instantly watch it.
“Whenever users find what they want to watch, they can click a button to “Stream Now,” and the app will automatically launch a subscription service that hosts the film. If the program isn’t available online, users can buy it, instead.”
The coolest feature is that if viewers want to channel surf all they do so with GIFs. The viewer picks a GIF that fits their mood and the app will sort out content from there.
Finally, all those moving images have a different function than entertaining reddit users.
Whitney Grace, December 21, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
A Bezos Style World Domination Video
December 4, 2015
Oh, 1999, what a year that was! It was full of people afraid of Y2K, TV was still analog, email was still a novelty, and AOL still reigned as the supreme Web browser. Nobody really knew what Amazon was as many people did their online shopping on individual Web sites or on eBay. Recode takes a look at a video blast from the past in “Watch Jeff Bezos Lay Out His Grand Vision For Amazon’s Future Dominance In This 1999 Video.”
In 1999, Amazon was a four-year-old company with $1 billion in annual sales. It started out primarily selling books, CDs, and movies. The Jeff Bezos video is of a talk he gave at the Association of American Publishers annual meeting, it played on Book TV and nobody watches that, which it is why it probably has gone unnoticed for so long. While it is a good retrospect about how the company has grown, it also offers some useful information for business entrepreneurs. The entire video is fifty-five minutes long, but the article contains some of Bezos’s best quotes. Our favorite is this one about favoring growth versus profits:
“Amazon.com is a famously unprofitable company. And the question is: Are we concerned about it? The answer is, in the short term, no; and in the long term, of course. Every company needs to be profitable at some point in time … Our strategy and we’ve consistently articulated this, is that we believe that this opportunity is so large that it would be a mistake for any management team not to invest in it very aggressively at this kind of critical category formation stage. We don’t claim it’s the right strategy. We just claim it’s ours. But we do think it’s right. And that it would be a mistake to try to optimize for short-term profitability.”
Jeff Bezos’s advice about favoring growth versus short-term profit definitely worked for him. Amazon is one of the world’s retailers and it is still growing. It is set to dominate TV, software-as-a-surface, and air delivery.
Whitney Grace, December 4, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Amazon Punches Business Intelligence
November 11, 2015
Amazon already gave technology a punch when it launched AWS, but now it is releasing a business intelligence application that will change the face of business operations or so Amazon hopes. ZDNet describes Amazon’s newest endeavor in “AWS QuickSight Will Disrupt Business Intelligence, Analytics Markets.” The market is already saturated with business intelligence technology vendors, but Amazon’s new AWS QuickSight will cause another market upheaval.
“This month is no exception: Amazon crashed the party by announcing QuickSight, a new BI and analytics data management platform. BI pros will need to pay close attention, because this new platform is inexpensive, highly scalable, and has the potential to disrupt the BI vendor landscape. QuickSight is based on AWS’ cloud infrastructure, so it shares AWS characteristics like elasticity, abstracted complexity, and a pay-per-use consumption model.”
Another monkey wrench for business intelligence vendors is that AWS QuickSight’s prices are not only reasonable, but are borderline scandalous: standard for $9/month per user or enterprise edition for $18/month per user.
Keep in mind, however, that AWS QuickSight is the newest shiny object on the business intelligence market, so it will have out-of-the-box problems, long-term ramifications are unknown, and reliance on database models and schemas. Do not forget that most business intelligence solutions do not resolve all issues, including ease of use and comprehensiveness. It might be better to wait until all the bugs are worked out of the system, unless you do not mind being a guinea pig.
Whitney Grace, November 11, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Neglect Exposes Private Medical Files
October 28, 2015
Data such as financial information and medical files are supposed to be protected behind secure firewalls and barriers that ensure people’s information does not fall into the wrong hands. While digital security is at the best it has ever been, sometimes a hacker does not to rely on his/her skills to get sensitive information. Sometimes all they need to do is wait for an idiotic mistake, such as what happened on Amazon Web Services wrote Gizmodo in “Error Exposes 1.5 Million People’s Private Records On Amazon Web Services.”
Tech junkie Chris Vickery heard a rumor that “strange data dumps” could appear on Amazon Web Services, so he decided to go looking for some. He hunted through AWS, found one such dump, and it was a huge haul or it would have been if Vickery was a hacker. Vickery discovered it was medical information belonging to 1.5 million people and from these organizations: Kansas’ State Self Insurance Fund, CSAC Excess Insurance Authority, and the Salt Lake County Database.
“The data came from Systema Software, a small company that manages insurance claims. It still isn’t clear how the data ended up on the site, but the company did confirm to Vickery that it happened. Shortly after Vickery made contact with the affected organizations, the database disappeared from the Amazon subdomain.”
The 1.5 million people should be thanking Vickery, because he alerted these organizations and the data was immediately removed from the Amazon cloud. It turns out that Vickery was the only one to access the data, but it begs the question what would happen if a malicious hacker had gotten hold of the data? You can count on that the medical information would have been sold to the highest bidder.
Vickery’s discovery is not isolated. Other organizations are bound to be negligent in data and your personal information could be posted in an unsecure area. How can you get organizations to better protect your information? Good question.
Whitney Grace, October 28, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Apple May Open up on Open Source
October 27, 2015
Is Apple ready to openly embrace open source? MacRumors reports, “Apple Building Unified Cloud Platform for iCloud, iTunes, Siri and More.” Writer Joe Rossignol cites a new report from the Information that indicates the famously secret company may be opening up to keep up with the cloudy times. He writes:
“The new platform is based on Siri, which itself is powered by open source infrastructure software called Mesos on the backend, according to the report. Apple is reportedly placing more emphasis on open source software in an attempt to attract open source engineers that can help improve its web services, but it remains to be seen how far the company shifts away from its deep culture of secrecy.
“The paywalled report explains how Apple is slowly embracing the open source community and becoming more transparent about its open source projects. It also lists some of the open source technologies that Apple uses, including Hadoop, HBase, Elasticsearch, Reak, Kafka, Azkaban and Voldemort.”
Rossignol goes on to note that, according to Bloomberg, Apple is working on a high-speed content delivery network and upgrading data centers to better compete with its rivals in the cloud, like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Will adjusting its stance on open-source allow it to keep up?
Cynthia Murrell, October 27, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Google Express Pales in Comparison to Amazon Prime
October 5, 2015
The article on Business Insider titled Google Should Be Very Scared of What Amazon Built, According to Investor Bill Gurley, details Gurley’s comments. Amazon Prime, according to Gurley, is challenging Google’s top dog position by offering inventory in addition to search capabilities. Shopping on Google might seem like a waste of time to many Prime members, who go directly to Amazon to search for what they are looking for. The article explains,
“Over many years, Amazon has built up this logistics framework and their one click feature and their Prime program to the point where the consumer has zero anxiety about the quality of the product, immense trust about the deliverability, down to a day and a half for most people, less than a day for some items. They trust on price. That doesn’t mean they are the absolute lowest price, but people don’t think Amazon’s trying to get ’em.”
Gurley estimates that Amazon may have as many as 90 million Prime Members loyal to their search engine for shopping, and using Google only as a last resort. Google Express, which most of us have never heard of, was Google’s “lame” answer to Amazon Prime, but without the years of planning and creating worldwide distribution centers. However, the article does not address that people use Google for quite a bit more than shopping, and Amazon Prime is limited that way.
Chelsea Kerwin, October 5, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Free InetSoft Data Tools for AWS Users
September 14, 2015
Users of AWS now have access to dashboard and analytics tools from data intelligence firm InetSoft, we learn from “InetSoft’s Style Scope Agile Edition Launched on Amazon Web Services for No Extra Cost Cloud-based Dashboards and Analytics” at PRWeb. The press release announces:
“Installable directly from the marketplace into an organization’s Amazon environment, the application can connect to Amazon RDS, Redshift, MySQL, and other data sources. Its primary limitation is a limit of two simultaneous users. In terms of functionality, the enterprise administration layer with granular security controls is omitted. The application gives fast access to powerful KPI reporting and multi-dimensional analysis, enabling the private sharing of dashboards and visualizations ideally suited for individual analysts, data scientists, and small teams in any departmental function. It also provides a self-service way of evaluating much of the same technology available in InetSoft’s commercial offerings, applications suitable for enterprise-wide deployment or embedding into other cloud-based solutions.”
So now AWS users can pick up free tools with this Style Scope Agile Edition, and InetSoft may pick up a customers for its commercial version of Style Scope. The company emphasizes that their product does not require users to re-architect data warehouses, and their data access layer, based on MapReduce principles, boosts performance. Founded in 1996, InetSoft is based in New Jersey.
Cynthia Murrell, September 14, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Computers Learn Discrimination from Their Programmers
September 14, 2015
One of the greatest lessons one take learn from the Broadway classic South Pacific is that children aren’t born racist, rather they learn about racism from their parents and other adults. Computers are supposed to be infallible, objective machines, but according to Gizmodo’s article, “Computer Programs Can Be As Biased As Humans.” In this case, computers are “children” and they observe discriminatory behavior from their programmers.
As an example, the article explains how companies use job application software to sift through prospective employees’ resumes. Algorithms are used to search for keywords related to experience and skills with the goal of being unbiased related to sex and ethnicity. The algorithms could also be used to sift out resumes that contain certain phrases and other information.
“Recently, there’s been discussion of whether these selection algorithms might be learning how to be biased. Many of the programs used to screen job applications are what computer scientists call machine-learning algorithms, which are good at detecting and learning patterns of behavior. Amazon uses machine-learning algorithms to learn your shopping habits and recommend products; Netflix uses them, too.”
The machine learning algorithms are mimicking the same discrimination habits of humans. To catch these computer generated biases, other machine learning algorithms are being implemented to keep the other algorithms in check. Another option to avoid the biases is to reload the data in a different manner so the algorithms do not fall into the old habits. From a practical stand point it makes sense: if something does not work the first few times, change the way it is done.
Whitney Grace, September 14, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Scribd Obtains Social Reading
July 22, 2015
Access to books and other literary material has reached an unprecedented high. People can download and read millions of books with a few simple clicks. Handheld ebook readers are curtailing the sales of printed book, but they also are increasing sales of digital books. One of the good things about ebooks is bibliophiles do not have to drive to a bookstore or get waitlisted on the library. Writers also can directly sell their material to readers and potentially by pass having to pay agents and publishers.
It occurred to someone that bibliophiles would love to have instant access to a huge library of books, similar to how Netflix offers its customers an unending video library. There is one and it is called Scribed. Scribd is described as the Netflix of books, because for a simple $8.99 bibliophiles can read and download as many books as they wish.
The digital landscape is still being tested by book platforms and Scribd has increased its offerings. VentureBeat reports Scribd’s newest business move in: “Scribd Buys Social Reading App Librify.” Librify is a social media reading app, offering users the opportunity to connect with friends and sharing their reading experiences. It is advertised as a great app for book clubs.
“In a sparse press release, Scribd argues Librify’s “focus on the social reading experience” made the deal worthwhile. The news arrives at a heated time for the publishing industry, as Amazon, Oyster, and others all fight to be the definitive Netflix for books — all while hawking remarkably similar products.”
Netflix has its own rivals: Hulu, Amazon Prime, Vimeo, and YouTube, but it offers something different by creating new and original shows. Scribd might be following a similar business move, by offering an original service its rivals do not have. Will it also offer Scribd only books?
Whitney Grace, July 22, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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