Featurespace Raises Capital for Bank Fraud Monitoring Technology
September 21, 2016
Monitoring online fraud has become an increasingly popular application for machine learning and search technology. The Telegraph reported Cambridge AI fraud detection group raises £6.2m. The company, Featurespace, grew out of Cambridge University and its ARIC technology goes beyond rule-based fraud-detection. It scans all activity on a network and thus learns what registers as fraudulent or suspicious. The write-up tells us,
The company has now raised $9m (£6.2m), which it will use to open a US office after signing two big stateside deals. The funding is led by US fintech investor TTV Capital – the first time it has backed a UK company – and early stage investors Imperial Innovations and Nesta.
Mike Lynch, the renowned technology investor who founded software group Autonomy before its $11.7bn sale to Hewlett Packard, has previously invested in the company and sits on its board. Ms King said Featurespace had won a contract with a major US bank, as well as payments company TSYS, which processes MasterCard and Visa transactions.”
Overall, the company aims to protect consumers from credit and debit card fraud. The article reminds us that millions of consumers have been affected by stolen credit and debit card information. Betfair, William Hill and VocaLink are current customers of Featurespace and several banks are using its technology too. Will this become a big ticket application for these machine learning technologies?
Megan Feil, September 21, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
There is a Louisville, Kentucky Hidden Web/Dark Web meet up on September 27, 2016.
Information is at this link: https://www.meetup.com/Louisville-Hidden-Dark-Web-Meetup/events/233599645/
OpenText Buys CEM Platform from HP Inc.
July 27, 2016
When Hewlett Packard split up its business in 2015, consumer-printer firm HP Inc. was created; that entity got custody of HP’s CEM platform. Now we learn, from an article at TechCrunch, that “OpenText Acquires HP Customer Experience Content Management for $170 Million.” OpenText expects the deal to generate between $85 million and $95 million in its first year alone. Writer Ron Miller describes:
“The package of products sold to OpenText today come from the HP Engage line and includes HP TeamSite, a web content management tool left over from the purchase of Interwoven (which was actually bought by Autonomy before Autonomy was sold to HP), HP MediaBin, a digital asset management solution, HP Qfiniti, a workforce optimization solution for enterprise contact center management, as well as HP Explore, HP Aurasma, and HP Optimost.”
Some suspect HP was eager to unload this division from the time of the company’s split. Even if that is true, OpenText seems poised to make a lot from their investment; Miller cites the blog post of content-management consultant Tony Byrne:
“The most important thing to understand, though, is that as a vendor OpenText is a financial construct in search of a technology rationale. The company follows a ‘roll-up’ strategy: purchasing older tools for their maintenance revenue streams, streams which — while not always large — are almost always very profitable.”
It is true. In contrast to, say, Google’s method of trying nearly every idea conceived within their company and seeing what sticks, OpenText tends to be deliberate and calculated in their decisions. We are curious to see where this investment goes.
Based in Waterloo, Ontario, OpenText offers tools for enterprise information management, business process management, and customer experience management. Launched in 1991, the company now serves over 100,000 customers around the world. They are also hiring in several locations as of this writing.
Cynthia Murrell, July 27, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Hewlett Packard Makes Haven Commercially Available
July 19, 2016
The article InformationWeek titled HPE’s Machine Learning APIs, MIT’s Sports Analytics Trends: Big Data Roundup analyzes Haven OnDemand, a large part of Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s big data strategy. For a look at the smart software coming out of HP Enterprise, check out this video. The article states,
“HPE’s announcement this week brings HPE Haven OnDemand as a service on the Microsoft Azure platform and provides more than 60 APIs and services that deliver deep learning analytics on a wide range of data, including text, audio, image, social, Web, and video. Customers can start with a freemium service that enables development and testing for free, and grow into a usage and SLA-based commercial model for enterprises.”
You may notice from the video that the visualizations look a great deal like Autonomy IDOL’s visualizations from the early 2000s. That is, dated, especially when compared to visualizations from other firms. But Idol may have a new name: Haven. According to the article, that name is actually a relaxed acronym for Hadoop, Autonomy IDOL, HP Vertica, Enterprise Security Products, and “n” or infinite applications. HPE promises that this cloud platform with machine learning APIs will assist companies in growing mobile and enterprise applications. The question is, “Can 1990s technology provide what 2016 managers expects?”
Chelsea Kerwin, July 19, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
There is a Louisville, Kentucky Hidden Web/Dark
Web meet up on July 26, 2016.
Information is at this link: http://bit.ly/29tVKpx.
Meg Whitman, President of HP, Gets Flack for Partial Follow-Through on Ultimatum
October 14, 2015
The article titled HP Didn’t Actually Fire All the Employees It Threatened to Cut on Business Insider details the management teachings from Hewlett Packard. To summarize, HP recently delivered an ultimatum to several hundred employees that they had to shift off HP’s payroll and become contract workers for significantly lower pay with HP’s partner Ciber. If they refused, they would be let go. Except that the employees mutinied and complained, resulting in HP negotiating for higher salaries from Ciber as well as holding on to a few employees who refused the deal. The article states,
“On top of that, HP is also shipping most of the jobs in this business unit offshore. Whitman wants 60% of the Enterprise Services division jobs to be in low-cost areas of the world, compared to less than 40% today. Employees in this unit fully expect HP to line up more take-it-or-leave it contract jobs, they tell us, so we’ll see how HP handles the next one if it does materialize.”
This is all in the midst of HP’s massive layoffs of over 80,000 employees, 51,000 of whom have already been let go. Morale must be under the building. The non-negotiable ultimatum strategy did not seem to work, and at any rate is bad business, especially when coupled with it being overturned later in a handful of instances.
Chelsea Kerwin, October 14, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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