Tag Archives: Microsoft

Nov. 6, 2017 Machine Learning

November 6, 2017 dj

On Nov. 6, 2017 The New York Times reporter Cade Metz wrote “The Rise Of The Machine: To Speed A.I. Advance, Technology Industry Aims To Edge Aside Humans.” Google’s Jeff Dean, Sundar Pichai and Barret Zopf talked about their machine learning algorithm software called AutoML that builds other algorithms. Self driving cars and facial recognition for security need this software. Unfortunately, only about 10,000 people worldwide have the experience to create such algorithms. Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft are paying top dollar for big data experts and data scientists. “The shortage is not going away anytime soon, just because mastering these skills takes years of work.” Microsoft’s Joseph Sirosh said about developing neural networks “We are eliminating a lot of the heavy lifting.” Jean Gagne of Element AI says it is a new kind of computer programming. Berkeley’s Pieter Abbeel thinks that computer invented algorithms can solve many problems very quickly. Carnegie Mellon’s Renato Neghrino say it is only a matter of when.

Blumbers, Commentary

Feb. 5, 2017 Blumbers

February 5, 2017 dj

Citizen Status Symbol

On Jan. 29, 2017, Bloomberg’s Peter Elstrom and Saritha Rai wrote “Trump’s Next Immigration Move to Hit Closer to Home for Tech” about the new administration’s immigration restrictions on high tech workers. It affected Infosys, TCS, Tech Mahindra and Wipro’s ability to supply cheap H1B labor to Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Salesforce, Microsoft and Twitter. “Ron Hira, an associate professor at Howard University, who has done extensive research on the subject, points out workers at outsourcers are typically not treated as well as others. The median wage at outsourcing firms for H-1B workers was less than $70,000, while Apple, Google and Microsoft paid their employees in the program more than $100,000, according to data he collected. That suggests the American companies are going after true, highly skilled employees, while the outsourcers are recruiting less expensive talent, he said.”

On Jan. 31, 2017, The New Republic’s Clio Chang wrote “Silicon Valley’s Uneasy Muslim Ban Dance” about Silicon Valley’s reaction to the new restrictions. “Within the structure of American capitalism, the average tech CEO has more in common with a billionaire like Donald Trump than with the average immigrant worker or refugee. That many of them continue to find ways to work with Trump and to undercut protests to protect their profits should come as no surprise. Trump is ushering in a plutocratic era that requires us to demand the most from those in powerful positions; to do so, we must first shed the assumption that Silicon Valley is on the side of the people.”

Quietly many tech executives are furious. They helped get the president elected hoping they would not have to pay taxes. The money they thought they would make may have to go toward hiring US citizens at market rates. Citizens also have an advantage because they have no travel restrictions as there might be with visas or green cards. Foreign workers who are captive in a way that even Frederick Douglass would be concerned but U.S. citizens can just walk across the street. You know, all that free market stuff conservatives talk about, until they need help.

Books, Reviews

Jul. 6, 2015 The New Yorker

July 6, 2015 dj

On Jul. 6, 2015 The New Yorker’s James Surowiecki wrote “Gigs With Benefits” about Sharing companies like Uber, Lyft, Postdates, TaskRabbit and Instacart. Called the gig economy, people scramble to get work but are not employees. The California Labor Commission has ruled that in at least one instance those people are indeed employees. Microsoft, Federal Express and many other corporations have tried to classify employees as contractors. Courts and government agencies like the IRS disagree. The social safety net needs to be expanded and strengthened as more people lose stable employment.

Lizzie Widdecombe wrote “The Higher Life” about the mindfulness meditation fad and how people misuse or try to appropriate Buddhism for their own personal gain.

Events, Reviews

Oct. 9, 2013 SVForum Ted Blosser Box.com

October 8, 2013 dj

On October 9, 2013 in Mountain View at Microsoft, SVForum’s Cloud and Virtualization SIG hosted Ted Blosser, the Platform Product Manager of Box.com. The topic was “Box Metadata: Adding Context to Content in the Cloud.” He showed how customers can store metadata along with their files using APIs.

Events, Reviews

Jun. 4, 2013 SVForum Launch Silicon Valley

June 4, 2013 dj 2 Comments

On June 4, 2013 in Mountain View at Microsoft, SVForum held “Launch: Silicon Valley.” Futurist Ray Kurzweil of Google gave the opening keynote on innovation and the rate of changing technology. Guy Kawasaki of Garage Ventures gave the second keynote on how to create a successful startup. Dr. Mike North of Discovery Channel’s “Prototype This!” gave the closing keynote on his collaboration developing technology and making a difference in the world.

Peter Delevett of the San Jose Mercury News moderated panelists Ryan Caldbeck of CircleUp, Deborah Magid of IBM Venture Capital, Bill Reichert of Garage Technology Ventures and John Gardener of Nokia Growth Partners. They discussed the future of venture investing.

Kelly Dempski of Accenture Technology Labs spoke about how “Every Business is a Digital Business.”

Arturo Duram of Digital First Media held a fireside chat with previous Launch winning leaders for HearPlanet, Intelen, Kiverdi and SocialIQ Networks.

The afternoon was a series of presentations from startup category ranging from clean tech, life science, mobile to next generation internet. The winners are:

Next Generation Internet 1 category:

Algorithms, predictive analytics algorithms, Mountain View, CA, www.algorithms.com Leverages cloud computing, open source software and proprietary technology delivering predictive analytics as a service.

Next Generation Internet 2 category:

Bugcrowd, crowdsourced bug identification, Santa Clara, CA, www.onebillsoftware.com. Provides crowdsourced security for web and mobile applications, by matching the crowd of bad guys with a crowd of curated good guys.

Mobile category:

FLASHiZ, mobile payments, Luxembourg, www.flashiz.com. Provides mobile payment solutions in Europe using both NFC and QR codes for payments in shops, online, paper invoices and peer-to-peer payments.

Life Science category:

WHILL, next generation personal mobility, Menlo Park, CA, http://whill.jp. Designs and creates new generation of personal mobility, sidewalk EV (Electric Vehicle).

Clean Tech category:

E3 Clean Technologies, Nox scrubber technology, Athens, OH, www.e3cleantechnologies.com. Provides devices that cost effectively clean up smog forming NOx emissions in diesel and power plant exhaust and contamination in wastewater while producing clean hydrogen fuel as a free by-product.

Technology category:

OnFarm, farm decision support, Fresno, CA, www.onfarmsystems.com. Integrates agriculture information in a cloud based decision and management system to increase yield and quality while reducing fertilizer, water, labor, and energy.

More pictures of SVForum Launch events at

https://djcline.com/2013/06/03/jun-3-2013-svforum-launch-silicon-valley-reception/

and

https://djcline.com/2013/06/05/jun-5-2013-svforum-launch-silicon-valley-and-visionary-awards/

Events, Reviews

May 9, 2013 SVForum Game Changing Technology

May 9, 2013 dj

On Thursday, May 9, 2013 in Mountain View at Microsoft, SVForum held its “Game Changing Technology Conference.” What if you had a machine that could build anything in your house, including the house? What about downloading a movie on a phone you downloaded as well? How soon will you be wearing Google glasses checking your messages in your Google car? Can a device recycle itself?

Dr. Jeffrey Welser of IBM delivered the first keynote “The Impact of New Technologies on the Enterprise.”

Geoffrey Doyle of GrowShapes and US Partner Percipient Capital moderated panelists Brock Hinzmann of Business Futures Network, Andrew Rutter of Type A Machines and Chris Yonge of StudioCruz. The topic was “3D Printing – The 3rd Industrial Revolution!”

Dan Levin, COO of Box had a fireside chat with Chris Gill on “Building An Enterprise Software Company That Doesn’t Suck: How Startups Are Disrupting Enterprise Software Incumbents.”

Dr. Harry Partridge of NASA’s Ames Research Center delivered the third keynote “Game On – NASA’s Space Technology Program.”

Bernard Golden of enStratus moderated panelists Stacey Bishop of Scale Venture Partners, Byron Deeter of Bessemer Venture Partners and Howard Hartenbaum of August Capital. The topic was “Investment Landscape – How to Invest in an Accelerating Environment.”

John Murray of SRI International moderated panelists Grit Denker of SRI International, James Leftwich of Orbitnet and Steve Whittaker of UC Santa Cruz. The topic was “The Future of Human Interface.”

Futurist Paul Saffo of Discern delivered the final keynote “Foresight For Innovators – Inflection-Spotting in the Face of Rapid Change.”

Events, Reviews

Sep. 27, 2012 SVForum Cloud Day

September 28, 2012 dj

On Thursday September 27, 2012 in Mountain View at Microsoft, SVForum presented “ The Cloud at Scale – It’s Not Just for Startups Anymore.” SVForum CEO Chris Gill welcomed the crowd. Dave Nielsen of CloudCamp introduced keynote speaker James Staten, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research. His talk was “State of the Cloud: Adoption, Investment, Deployment.” Rob Craft of Microsoft presented the second keynote “We Aren’t There Yet: Barriers to Cloud Success.”

Simone Brunozzi of Amazon, Michael Crandell of RightScale and George Reese of enStratus gave their particular views on “Real-world Adoption: The AWS Perspective.”

Dave Nielsen of CloudCamp moderated panelists Dr. Amr Awadallah of Cloudera, Kyle MacDonald of Canonical, Isaac Roth of Red Hat and James Watters of Vmware on the topic “Open Data, Open PaaS, Open Cloud.”

Bernard Golden of enStratus moderated panelists Chris Kemp of Nebula, Marten Mickos of Eucalyptus Systems and Peder Ulander of Citrix on the topic “Cloud Smackdown 1: Dynamics of Platforms and Hybrid Clouds.”

Rachel Chalmers of 451 Research moderated panelists Michael Hoch of Virtustream, Dima Rekesh of IBM, Guido Schroeder of Splunk and Dr. Michael Zeller of Zementis on the topic “What You May Not Know About the Cloud (or Apps you didn’t think were possible yet).”

John Akred of Accenture Technology Labs moderated panelists Michael Driscoll of Metamarkets, Damien Katz of Couchbase, Chase McMichael of Infinigraph and David Sonnenschein of SAP on the topic “Cloud Smackdown 2: Big Data/ Analytics – Raison d’etre for the Cloud?”

John Mack of Accenture moderated panelists Jeff Hinck of Icon Venture Partners, Ellen Pao of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Julia Reigel of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati on the topic “Making Rain: Funding and M&A Transaction Outlook for the Cloud.”

Events, Reviews

Jun. 5, 2012 SVForum SV Launch

June 7, 2012 dj

On June 5, 2012 in Mountain View at Microsoft, SVForum held its annual SV Launch. Here are some pictures from that event.

Commentary, Events, Reviews

May 10, 2011 WCA Mobile App Development

May 11, 2011 dj

On May 10, 2011 in San Jose at Rhomobile, the WCA Mobile SIG presented “Whither Mobile App Development?” Sarah Allen of Blazing Cloud moderated panelists Adam Blum of Rhomobile, Andre Charland of Nitobi, Jeff Haynie of Appcelerator and Isaac Mosquera of AppMakr. They discussed developing apps for more than one mobile platform using tools like Rhodes, Titanium, PhoneGap, and other web-based cross-platform development frameworks. This write-once strategy makes sense if you remember the dominant mobile platforms five years ago were Palm, Microsoft and Symbian compared to Android and Apple today.

Also on attending were Roberto Araujo of LMGPR, WiFi expert Avril Salter, STC Silicon Valley Media Advisor David Strom and Gabriele Gresta of BrainSpark.

Events, Reviews

Dec. 10, 2010 SDF Mobile Internet Tsunami

December 15, 2010 dj

On December 10, 2010 in Mountain View at Microsoft, SDForum’s Business of New Media Conference held “The Mobile Internet Tsunami.”The mobility revolution driven by consumers is changing the way we work. Every aspect of mobility was discussed, from devices and networks to content and profitability

Matt Thompson of Microsoft made the opening remarks.

Guy Kawasaki of Alltop gave the opening keynote on his upcoming book called “Enchantment.” Be a mensch.

Joe Jasin of DNA Partners moderated panelists Monique Farantzos of doubleTwist, Jeremy Geiger of Retailigence, Jeff Haynie of Appcelerator and Jeff Smith of Smule. They discussed “The Mobile Internet – Taking it Anywhere” What does it mean to sectors to have service on a mobile device rather than on a desktop?

Ted Shelton of Open-First moderated panelists Deborah Hopkins of Citigroup and Kevin Nix of SAP. They discussed “The Fall of Bricks and Mortar to Mobile” How is mobile disrupting the enterprise and traditional ways of doing business – what’s coming up?

Kevin Efrusy of Accel Partners gave a Fireside Chat.

Harold Yu of Orrick moderated panelists Lars Leckie of Hummer Winblad, Brook Wessel of T-Mobile Ventures, Sharon Wienbar of Scale Venture Partners and Richard Yen of Saban Capital Group. They discussed the investment landscape.

Afternoon Keynote: Susan Welsh de Grimaldo of Strategy Analytics

Howard Greenfield of Go Associates moderated panelists John Loughney of Nokia, Satya Mallya of Orange FT-Group, Lindsay Newell of Alcatel-Lucent and Ben Riga of Microsoft. They discussed where is the industry going and what they think is next.

Gamiel Gran of Sierra Ventures moderated panelists Aaron Emigh of Shopkick, Vishal Gurbuxani of Mobclix, Bruce Jones of GetJar and Ben Lewis of TapJoy. They discussed where the money is. From both the “start up” to the “started up” side, what new business models are emerging and who should we pay attention to?

Note: Hello Miamisburg!

Events, Reviews

Dec. 2, 2010 SDF Mobile Holiday Event

December 3, 2010 dj

December 2, 2010 in Palo Alto at Nokia, the SDForum Mobile SIG held a Sponsor Appreciation & Holiday Event. Sponsors presenting their 2011 initiatives were Microsoft, Nokia, Orange and SAP. BrunoÂ Terkaly of Microsoft gave an overview of Windows Phone 7 overview for consumers. Tony Kueh of SAP’s Sybase talked about payments, carrier provisioning, SMS and MMS transactions. SatyaÂ Mallya of Orange talked about apps, systems integration and and running multiple operating systems. Samir Agarwal of MeeGo explained how MeeGo is true open source and a handset will be available in the first quarter of 2011.

Joe Jasin took an audience survey of 47 people about which of the many OS’s which were the top 3 for the audience to develop on presently. I did not believe the the results, but maybe it was just the crowd:

Android 25
Symbian 3
Brew 0
Microsoft 6
MeeGo 6
BREW 0
Apple 8
Palm 3
RIM 0

Jasin also asked “If Facebook were to have an OS ready tomorrow would you develop on it?” The answer was a unanimous NO! He was surprised, and said, “Wow, now lets get the age demographic in the room.”

I would like to thank Joe Jasin for his contribution to this article.

Events, Reviews

Nov. 30, 2010 SDF Microsoft Azure Cloud

December 1, 2010 dj

On Tuesday November 30, 2010 in Menlo Park at Orrick, the SDForum hosted Microsoft’s Bruno Terkaly presentationÂ “Getting Scale out of your Web Apps with Azure.” Terkaly, who is a coder’s coder, showed how to reliably scale web applications in the cloud. It is done by migrating a Mode View Controller (MVC) application using Windows Azure and the database using SQL Azure to scale in the cloud with the App Fabric operating system.

Ten years ago the advantages of MS SQL Server were that it easily installed on a desktop PC and it was easy to import data other Windows applications. One of the drawbacks was scalability that is now addressed with Azure. If you have the latest hardware and software tools like Visual Studio and SQL Server 2008, you can build and migrate a database to the cloud.

More Azure resources are available to developers at:

http://blogs.msdn.com/brunoterkaly

Events, Reviews

Apr. 20, 2010 SDF PWC

April 20, 2010 dj

On April 20, 2010 at Pillsbury Winthrop in Palo Alto, SDForum held the Quarterly Venture Breakfast Series in collaboration with PWC. Allison Leopold-Tilley of Pillsbury Winthrop moderated panelists Stephane Berthier of PricewaterhouseCoopers, Asheem Chandna of Greylock, Peter Sonsini of NEA and Andy Vitus of Scale Ventures. They discussed the growth of cloud players from Amazon, Google and Microsoft down to startups looking for their first round of funding.

While aware of trends and fads, venture capitalists look for the black swan. They want the entrepreneur with the track record and passion who understands how their product fits in an existing or entirely new market. While Amazon dominates the cloud infrastructure space with its ability to supply servers, there are many opportunities in applications, security and databases. MySql does not seem to be able to scale well in the cloud and that is an opportunity for some entrepreneur.