IT daily news: tháng 10 2016

Thứ Hai, 31 tháng 10, 2016

GoTouch makes any TV instantly interactive

The GoTouch device turns any TV or projector into a giant interactive whiteboard in about a minute.

Have you ever been in a presentation and wanted to share it with your colleagues so you could collaborate? The new GoTouch device means that you can quickly connect and start interacting using your TV, GoTouch device, and phone.

The device connects wirelessly to any TV or projector via an iOS or Android phone or tablet. First, connect your phone or computer to your TV or projector with an HDMI cable, or wirelessly with Apple TV or a similar device.

Pair the GoTouch device to your phone or Windows PC via Bluetooth, connect it to your TV, and launch the GoTouch app.

The app is free, and you can use it without GoTouch to collaborate on documents such as whiteboards, PDFs, videos, or websites remotely.

Once connected, it tracks what you write or draw on screen using the pen as a mouse, or stylus. Its rechargeable battery means GoTouch doesn't have to be plugged into anything during your presentation.

It will work with any TV or projector screen up to 80 inches in size. Internet connectivity ensures collaboration and participants can annotate images, videos, and websites on screen.

The GoTouch is small enough for you to carry it in your pocket, take it on the road and use it with a client's projector.

For accuracy, the device uses a 4K Ultra HD camera running at 100 frames per second to track the infrared light in the GoTouch Pen. This fast refresh rate means that you will not notice lag when you draw or write.

The Seoul, Korea-based startup Anyractive has smashed its Kickstarter goal of $30,000 with over $110,000 pledged to bring the project to life.

The project has been in the pipeline since 2014, and the two-person team has grown to a 15-person business in two years. The company is based in Seoul, Asia's hub for tech startups.

At $89 per device, small businesses can eliminate the extra overheads of buying collaboration infrastructure. Big businesses with road warriors on the go outside the office can ensure collaboration with clients and the office anywhere at any time.

The GoTouch certainly is an innovative idea for collaboration solutions anywhere.

Plexal offers tech start-ups a new home in London's Olympic Park

Plexal has just held a "soft launch" for a new tech hub for start-ups in the Olympic Park in London's East End. It plans to be up and running by May 2017.

Five years after the London 2012 Olympics, one floor of the event's former press centre will become the Plexal tech innovation centre. Entiq says on its website that you can start applying for space in November, and the operation will "open fully in spring 2017".

The 251,000 sq ft press centre is one of five parts of the Here East complex (PDF) in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. It's the building closest to the River Lea. It's separated from the main building (which has Here East painted on its roof) by a theatre building. The Olympic stadium - now West Ham United's football ground - is behind it in the photo (above), with Canary Wharf in the top right. Entiq's founder Claire Cockerton, was one of the co-creators of the Canary Wharf Group's Level39, which claims to be "Europe's largest technology accelerator for finance, retail, cyber-security and future cities technology companies".

Plexal will provide "a wide range of services including practical intrapreneurship and entrepreneurship education courses, a state-of-the-art testing and prototyping lab, acceleration and incubation programmes, events, networking opportunities and a range of funding alternatives. With an initial focus on technology innovation applied to sports, well-being, fashion and mobility, the centre will have capacity for 800 members, becoming the home for corporates and start-ups that are designing and creating the connected products that will improve our lives".

Plexal has 68,000 sq ft available. It is offering 300-350 co-working spaces with prices starting at £200 per desk, plus some individual offices.

The success of this kind of project depends on getting a critical mass of participants, as well as pleasant surroundings and good transport links. In its favour, the Here East complex is already home to BT Sport's television studios, and a huge Infinity SDC data centre, among other things. The "mini city" design includes plenty of spaces for shops and restaurants, plus an indoor bike park.

Loughborough University has just opened a London campus for postgraduates in Here East's broadcast building, while Hackney Community College is opening an academy for Tech City apprentices. University College London and the London College of Fashion are also opening new campuses. The close association between advanced university research and start-ups is already well known everywhere from Silicon Valley to Cambridge, England, so these could help Plexal succeed.

Transport links include the Stratford tube station, Stratford International* railway station, and next to that, a station for the Docklands Light Railway. There are also bus services.

Claire Cockerton, who is also Plexal's CEO, says: "We will deliver the UK's next technology and innovation cluster; a launch pad for scaling ﬁrms and a soft landing pad for companies coming to London for the ﬁrst time."

* High speed trains to Paris etc don't stop there, because it's only 7 minutes to St Pancras.

Thứ Hai, 24 tháng 10, 2016

Automatic Pro Review: An inexpensive tool for keeping tabs on a fleet of vehicles

Is the Internet of Things a developer's dream or a million new headaches?

With The Internet of Things, software development enters a whole new dimension.

As the IT world explodes into millions of points of contact thanks to the Internet of Things, it's creating new opportunities and challenges for the people that will be building solutions accordingly. The question is -- will it be more opportunity or more challenge?

building-with-lights-windows-cropped-photo-by-joe-mckendrick.jpg — Photo: Joe McKendrick

The number of developers currently working on IoT applications has increased 34% since last year to just over 6.2 million, according to estimates from Evans Data. The analyst firm adds that in addition, the increase of development for mobile devices, up 14% since last year, has led to smartphones being the most commonly connected IoT platform.

So, the question is, will six million-plus developers even be enough to handle the workloads that the exploding IoT will bring?

A recent piece posted at Ozy cautions that a hyperconnected future -- with 20 billion devices and up -- "could present a startling shortage of developers with the skill sets needed to build apps and meet demand. By 2020 there could be a deficit of five million to 10 million developers."

"There's this massive expectation of software going where no one has gone before," Sam Ramji, CEO of Cloud Foundry Foundation, is quoted as saying in the Ozy article. The article went on to quote Cisco's Doug Bellin, who explains the opportunity/challenge:

"We'll be unearthing and analyzing data in unheard-of ways, adding a whole new layer of intelligence that will transform business. Because with up to triple the number of connected devices at their fingertips, engineers will be working in 'real-time rather than through the rearview mirror' -- in other words, on-the-spot or proactive computing instead of reactive computing. That could lead to more sophisticated machinery that advances already fancy developments with smart turbines, which now use data that explains how the machines interact with the landscape and the wind to optimize efficiency. Or it could lead to engineers writing code to funnel terabytes of data from jet engines into the cloud, where it's analyzed and translated into meaningful insights to cut costs in areas like fuel or maintenance. "

It's not just a shortage of traditional development skills, but also a re-alignment and reshaping of development itself to meet these new possibilities. For example, developers may have adjust the cadence of their work to multiple layers of community input. I recently heard from Mance Harmon, head of architecture at Ping Identity, who discussed the implications of IoT on the development world. There certain skills required to build and manage blockchain-enabled IoT networks,

'Distributed consensus algorithms, like blockchain and hashgraph, require developers to think about the development process differently," Harmon says. "The order of transactions flowing through the network isn't settled until the community collectively agrees on the order. An application may receive a transaction, but may decide not to act on the information until the community agrees on the order of transaction relative to other transactions."

Alternatively, Harmon continues, "in some applications it may be appropriate to immediately act on the information, and then make the necessary corrections if the community agrees on a different consensus order.In some cases, a developer might want to go ahead and use the transaction prior to reaching community consensus."

Harmon provides the example of developing an IoT game, a version of Pokemon Go that interacts with sensors and things scattered throughout the environment. "Transactions received from the network may be reflected immediately in what is rendered on the screen of the smartphone or VR goggles," he explains. "If the community decides that the order of the transactions should be changed, then the updates are made as appropriate to what is rendered on the screen.On the other hand, in a distributed stock market, matches between buyers and sellers would not be reflected in the ticker tape until after the community has reached consensus.These are not design considerations that most developers have encountered before."

More of my discussion with Harmon is posted at RTInsights, in which he talked about the distinctions between open and "permissioned" networks.

ACMA opens investigation into 5G mobile broadband spectrum

The ACMA is undertaking an initial investigation of the 1.5GHz and 3.6GHz spectrum bands for refarming to enable mobile broadband over future 5G networks.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has released its first discussion paper on the possibility of refarming the 1.5GHz and 3.6GHz spectrum bands for enabling 5G mobile broadband.

ACMA acting chairman Richard Bean said the federal government agency is looking into the matter now that international consideration of those spectrum bands has "progressed significantly", including by the International Telecommunication Union-Radiocommunication Sector (ITU-R), the Asia-Pacific Telecommunity (APT), and several nations.

"Given the momentum developing, the time is right for us to consider the potential for re-planning the bands in Australia," Bean said.

"There are international standards that support 4G technologies in both the 1.5GHz and 3.6GHz bands. Importantly, the 3.6GHz band is also being looked at internationally as an early band for 5G, and the ACMA has decided to bring forward discussion of its future use.

"Refarming these bands would enable additional capacity for new or existing operators' mobile networks."

The 3.6GHz spectrum band is currently used in Australia for fixed-line and satellite services, while the 1.5GHz band is used by the Department of Defence as well as for fixed-line services in regional areas.

In its discussion paper -- Future use of the 1.5 GHz and 3.6 GHz bands: Initial investigation of the 1427-1518MHz and 3575-3700MHz bands for mobile broadband services -- the ACMA outlined its preliminary investigation of each of the bands, including looking into what comparable nations are using the spectrum for.

Submissions from interested parties are due by November 25, with a decision on whether the ACMA will progress to preliminary re-planning due in January 2017. The ACMA would then release a second discussion paper in Q2 2017, with submissions on that due in Q3 2017, and a decision on whether to progress to refarming expected in Q3 to Q4 2017.

If the ACMA decides to go ahead with refarming those bands, commencement is expected in Q4 2017.

The ACMA is seeking comment on issues including whether it should progress from initial investigation to preliminary re-planning; whether the two spectrum bands should progress in parallel or the timing of one be prioritised above the other; whether specific issues could affect the timeframe; whether the Department of Defence expects future usage of the 1.5GHz band; what frequency arrangements should be adopted; what geographical areas should be refarmed and in what order; whether existing satellite and fixed services could be migrated to new or existing mobile networks; and what coexisting or sharing arrangements could be made across both bands.

At the beginning of October, the ACMA also released its five-year spectrum outlook (FYSO) and 12-month work plan, focusing on arrangements to support 5G, the Internet of Things (IoT), and dynamic spectrum access (DSA).

The ACMA said at the time that it is considering the use of millimetre wave (mmW) bands for 5G.

"Enabling the next phase of mobile network development is likely to require the ACMA's attention in a number of areas," the FYSO said.

"From a spectrum perspective, 5G appears certain to use (though not exclusively) large contiguous bandwidths (hundreds of MHz or more) in millimetre wave bands."

For IoT concerns, the ACMA is looking at a broad range of spectrum bands due to the large number of varied uses and users involved, and in the very high frequency (VHF) band.

"Given the huge diversity of uses of IoT, there is no simple solution to providing spectrum for all of the applications which are likely to require access to it under a range of protocols from dedicated spectrum to commons spectrum, and options in between," Bean said at the beginning of October.

"We are and have taken steps to make new spectrum available to support a range of low-power applications including M2M [machine-to-machine] applications in 900MHz band as part of the implementation of our review of the 803-960[MHz] band. Permanent arrangements in this band are not currently set to be in place until 2021, but we will consider early access applications."

In regards to DSA, the ACMA recognised spectrum sharing as being "fundamental" for efficient spectrum management for 5G and the IoT. DSA relies on users and uses to co-exist on the same spectrum band, with awareness of the environment required.

The ACMA said there are currently three ways for devices to become more aware of their surroundings to enable dynamic sharing of a spectrum band.

"At this stage, three major techniques to enhance a device's awareness of its surroundings have been identified: Geolocation with database look-up; sensing; and beacon transmissions," the FYSO says.

"These techniques can be used to make use of spectrum 'white space', where secondary users take advantage of intermittent, occasional, or itinerant use by primary users."

The ACMA in July said spectrum sharing is the key to IoT and 5G, with ACMA Spectrum Planning Branch executive manager Christopher Hose saying that there needs to be more cooperation between industry and the ACMA to achieve this goal.

The Department of Communications also recently announced that the ACMA will be auctioning off 2x 15MHz of the 700MHz spectrum band for mobile broadband that went unsold during the 2013 digital dividend auction, following Vodafone Australia's proposal to buy the spectrum outright.

Autodesk, Nutonian partner on IoT analytics

After years of building up its cloud portfolio, the next logical step for Autodesk is broadening its IoT offerings.

Design software maker Autodesk is partnering with Nutonian, a machine intelligence company that can help it interpret Internet of Things (IoT) data, the companies announced Tuesday.

Per the agreement, Nutonian's artificial intelligence modeling engine, called Eureqa, will be embedded in Autodesk's IoT cloud platform, Fusion Connect. Eureqa uses raw data to design the simplest possible predictive models that can be used for functions like predicting product failures or identifying product design flaws. Once it's powered by Eureqa, Fusion Connect will use dashboards and end-user alerts to explain what's happening.

At a cost ranging from $6,000 to $12,000 a year, Autodesk promises that the Eureqa-powered platform could save a manufacturing business more than $100,000 when compared to hiring a data scientist.

"As we continually enhance our cloud capabilities, the logical next step was broadening and deepening our IoT predictive and prescriptive solutions," said Autodesk Director of IoT Bryan Kester in a statement.

Autodesk has indeed been busy bolstering its cloud portfolio over the last few years. The company has hit some rough spots as it transitions to a subscription-based service model but saw better-than-expected financial results for its second quarter. The industrial IoT of course offers plenty of potential for Autodesk: Accenture estimates it could add $14.2 trillion to the global economy by 2030. A recent Honeywell survey showed that most manufacturing and industrial executives plan on increasing their investments in data analytics even as they delay other tech investments.

Lack of security leadership hindering Australian IoT progress: UNSW professor

UNSW cybersecurity professor Jill Slay has criticised the Australian IoT industry for failing to incorporate security into the core design of IoT products, and bemoaned what she sees as a significant lack of cybersecurity leadership in Australia.

At the second annual Everything IoT Summit in Sydney on Monday, professor Jill Slay, director at the Australian Centre for Cyber Security at UNSW in Canberra, lamented Australia's lack of leadership around cybersecurity, as well as vendors overpromising and under-delivering, and urged Internet-of-Things (IoT) developers to incorporate security into the core design of IoT solutions.

Currently, there are more than 8 billion devices connected to the internet globally, according to IHS's Connected Device Market Monitor, with this number estimated to grow as high as 212 billion devices by 2020. Though market predictions vary considerably -- Cisco has estimated this number is more likely to sit at around 12.2 billion -- the general consensus is that we have surpassed the "emergent" phase and that IoT will continue to grow at an accelerated pace.

However, there are urgent cybersecurity challenges we need to address before we diverge further into a connected world, according to Slay, who said the growth of cybercrime in Australia has been exponential.

The first is the skills shortage, she said, and as technology advances, so too does crime. As such, existing network security staff need to be upskilled, while a new generation of security professionals need to be trained from the ground up, according to Slay.

"Just as we have a huge shortage of data scientists, we have an equivalent shortage of cybersecurity professionals, and even a greater shortage of those who deal with big data and cybersecurity," Slay said.

"Now we're at the stage where we're trying to train a new generation of people who might have equivalent vocational qualifications to understand what the Internet of Things looks like, what breaches to the Internet of Things look like, and how in their everyday jobs they can deal with it. But as soon as we do that, we're going to have a whole generation of hackers who do that too."

Slay said cybersecurity is often mistakenly believed to be the same as network security, and pointed out that it is far more complex and larger in scale, encompassing a range of political, social, legal, technical, management, and personnel issues. This is why it's both difficult and essential to find qualified cybersecurity professionals.

Slay said that since the Maroochy Shire water services incident in 2000, which is claimed to be the first attack on critical western infrastructure, we have seen the increasing "weaponisation of the internet."

"Sixteen years later, we have customised, highly targeted malware, which through the internet, could find the exact system that it wants [to attack]," said Slay.

She added that there's also a common belief that organisations simply need to purchase the right cybersecurity tools and their systems will be secure. Slay promptly debunked this idea, warning that vendors tend to make unrealistic promises.

Speaking of her job as a cybersecurity researcher, Slay said she and her colleagues have hacked every kind of device you can imagine.

"We walk a few steps behind you agile people who adopt [new technologies] -- then we attack them and tell you why you shouldn't use them," Slay added.

"Our mantra is: 'Don't bolt on the security afterwards, build it in at the beginning.' Security by design ... Hack [your devices] to death yourself."

Despite cybercrime growing at an "exponential" rate in Australia, Slay said it's underreported and therefore not deemed a national priority.

In Queensland for instance, Slay said there are more cases of domestic violence than of cybercrime, so funding is being allocated to fight that.

"We haven't got the financial resources or the people resources to deal with [cybersecurity issues effectively]," Slay said.

In April this year, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull announced that the government would invest AU$240 million into its cybersecurity strategy, with a particular focus on the sharing of threat information between business and government. The strategy is aimed at defending the nation's cyber networks from organised criminals and state-sponsored attackers, and sits alongside the AU$400 million provided in the Defence White Paper for cyber activities.

The government also announced that it would spend AU$136 million on small business grants to boost security, increase the government's cybercrime intelligence and investigation capabilities, create a threat information-sharing portal, and be able to identify vulnerabilities in government systems.

According to Slay, funding is still insufficient and US government is "way ahead" of Australia with their national cybersecurity systems.

Slay also complained there is no clear cybersecurity leadership in Australia, pinpointing that cybersecurity is an issue of national security.

"If you live in my world -- the training, teaching and research world -- it is really difficult to understand who wants to be the leader in cybersecurity, who wants to say, 'this is the direction in which we should go nationally'," Slay said.

"If you look at the academic literature ... there are two major voices in the literature. One is the computer scientists who have done great work in developing the algorithms and the machine learning [technology] that we trust ... but also, this is the realm of cybersecurity for national security. Cybersecurity gets mixed in with national security."

From her research, Slay also noticed a problem at bottom-end of organisations where IT and engineering departments didn't want to work together, thereby risking the organisation's cyberhealth.

"We actually looked at the security of control systems across the country and much of what we had to report back wasn't actually a technical issue, but a communications issue," she said.

"Engineers and IT not wanting to talk to each other; engineers who said certain systems belong to them; IT people who wanted to do patching; engineering people who wouldn't let IT people do the patching; physical security being incredibly important to some groups, while logical cybersecurity not being so important."

Slay believes poor cybersecurity practices among SMEs could make large organisations vulnerable, despite their own best efforts at tackling threats.

"I feel the top end will be reliant on the bottom end ... and the risk is at the bottom end. In Australia, a lot of SMEs, they struggle to deal with cybersecurity because it is hard for them to access the right level of expertise at the right costs," Slay said.

To address the slow moving pace of cybersecurity measures, CSIRO's data analytics division Data61 opened its Cyber Security and Innovation Hub in Victoria earlier this month. The hub will work with government, industry, and the private sector to tackle what is believed to be a AU$98 billion cybersecurity market.

Earlier this year Alastair MacGibbon was appointed Australia's first Special Adviser to the Prime Minister on Cybersecurity. He told ZDNet in August that there are more than 30 initiatives he'll be working on as part of the Cyber Security Strategy, but his main priority is to fix what he referred to as the "broken model" of cybersecurity in Australia.

Gartner's digital transformation, IT crystal ball for 2017: Reading between the lines

Blockchain, augmented reality, Internet of Things (IoT), and voice interfaces will have big business implications.

Augmented reality will become a shopping paradise, webpages will start to give way to screen-less voice interactions, blockchain technology will create a business worth $10 billion, and the Internet of Things will save $1 trillion a year by 2022.

Those items reflect Gartner's crystal ball predictions for 2017 and beyond. The predictions were outlined at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando. The theme for the conference is digital transformation, experiences, and engagement.

Jason Hiner at TechRepublic is looking at the implications for IT as these trends play out, but it's worth looking here at the business takeaways amid the tech shifts.

In a slide, here's a look at the technologies companies will have to put together and navigate. At the very least, the slide provides a starter set for a tech buzzword drinking game.

Here's a between-the-lines reading of Gartner's prognostications.

By 2020, 100 million consumers will shop in augmented reality. Gartner analysts Daryl Plummer and David Cearley argued that AR will go mainstream. Retailers will use AR to boost the shopping experience as digital information blends with the physical.

My take: I'll argue that AR has the potential to be the savior of malls and physical shopping. AR is one of the few technologies that may allow retailers compete with Amazon. The 100 million consumer figure seems a bit high given development tools are just being built, and beyond Pokemon Go, AR hasn't landed the masses. Another wild card: retailers don't have the expertise to really take advantage of AR by 2020. AR will have a much bigger impact on healthcare, modeling, training, and simulations.

More: Nadella: 'Windows is the most open platform there is' | IT's new role: Build a digital society worthy of our descendents TechRepublic: IT in 2017: Prioritize these 10 strategic initiatives, says Gartner | Gartner's 10 big trends that will change how IT operates

By 2020, 30 percent of web browsing sessions will be done without a screen. Gartner's take is that Google Home (unproven and resembles an air freshener) and Amazon Echo (successful) will usher in voice-first interaction.

My take: Companies need to prepare for the post-webpage and app era. I'd argue that the percentage of non-browser web interactions could be higher. Another point to ponder: kids who are tethered to their smartphones non-stop will have such repetitive stress injuries that they'll have to go with voice interactions to function. It's generation RSI.

By 2019, 20 percent of brands will abandon their mobile apps. Gartner said that returns on apps will not justify the investment. Companies will let apps expire.

My take: Just 20 percent? C'mon. Mobile apps require support for two platforms, upkeep ongoing and the risk of poor ratings. Meanwhile, mobile apps aren't delivering returns in most cases. I'll up that percentage to 35 percent.

By 2020, algorithms will positively alter the behavior of more than 1 billion global workers. Gartner said:

Human beings tend to be emotionally charged and factually drained, causing them to be irrational. Algorithms can positively alter that behavior by augmenting their intelligence with the large collective memory bank containing knowledge that has been socialized and put to the test. This will help workers "remember" anything or be informed of just-in-time knowledge that they have never even experienced, leaving them to objectively complete the task at hand but also to better appreciate life as it unveils.

My take: Algorithms will reinvent entire industries. Gartner takes the positive view. I can see 2020 as a timeline for algorithm-enhanced work and decision-making. However, I can also see 2020 as a time where algorithms will replace humans. Why screw with some defective decision driven by a worker "emotionally charged and factually drained"?

By 2022, a blockchain-based business will be worth $10 billion. Gartner's prediction is that blockchain technology will revamp how transactions are conducted.

My take: Blockchain technology is immature but is attracting funding. The 2022 time frame may be a bit of a leap. Another blockchain point to note is that it's difficult to sort through the vendors playing in the space and tossing out buzzwords as marketing fodder.

By 2021, 20 percent of all activities an individual engages in will involve at least one the top seven digital giants. Gartner said that Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent will be in so many places that they will have touch points in all aspects of life.

My take: I'd agree with that 20 percent prediction, but I would say the list may shift. Apple --unless it truly gets the services business down -- and Alibaba may not make the cut globally.

Through 2019, every $1 enterprises invest in innovation will require an additional $7 in core execution. Gartner hits a key point. Spending on innovation and ideation is one thing. Deploying that big idea or technology is another item entirely.

My take: Execution matters and there's no way that enterprises are all going to nail so-called bimodal IT as they bridge to digital business.

Through 2020, IoT will increase datacenter storage demand by less than 3 percent. Gartner said that sensor data won't tax existing storage infrastructure.

My take: The wild card here is whether enterprises will keep IoT sensor data if using their own datacenters. Companies are also likely to use cloud services so the datacenter storage demand will be someone else's problem.

By 2022, IoT will save consumers and businesses $1 trillion a year in maintenance, services, and consumables. Gartner said the challenge will be delivering savings over two decades without boosting management costs.

My take: The savings argument is clear, but Gartner's argument depends on inexpensive monitoring and analytics. We'll see.

By 2020, 40 percent of employees can cut their healthcare costs by wearing a fitness tracker. Companies will hire fitness program managers to work with HR execs, said Gartner.

My take: The caveat from Gartner is that the health care data will cut costs only if "the patient agrees to share it." In other words, the fit will land discounts and share data. The not-so-fit will view wearables as a Big Brother privacy invasion.

Chủ Nhật, 23 tháng 10, 2016

'More students, overseas skills can't solve our coding crisis': So here's Estonia's fix

With static student numbers and steep rises in tech pay, Estonia is opting to retrain some of its adult population as software developers to plug its skills gap.

There's a serious shortage of workers in Estonia's tech sector and, according to the country's minister of economic affairs and infrastructure, Kristan Michal, "It's not enough to enlarge student admission numbers or to attract a foreign workforce to alleviate it."

"We need a larger variety of opportunities for continuing education and retraining," Michal said at last month's launch of a project that aims to take adults from other fields and add them to the small Baltic state's local tech workforce.

According to the plan, in the next four years the ministry and its partners are going to train 500 people with no former background in IT to become junior software developers, focusing on .NET and Java.

The successful applicants have to dedicate themselves to the project for 14 weeks. For the first six weeks, the participants attend an intensive course in programming, followed by eight weeks working with local IT companies as trainees. After that, they should be able to work as junior software developers.

The government's initiative reflects the troubling situation in Estonia's IT field. According to the ministry's analysis of three years ago, the country needs about 6,400 additional tech workers before the year 2020. Local thinktank Praxis' estimate from the same period is 8,600.

In the second quarter this year there were 22,259 people working in the IT and comms field in Estonia. The demand for specialists has been steadily growing for years, but the local supply has been lacking.

A local bank Swedbank recently pointed out that as a result of the imbalance of supply and demand, the wages in the sector grew eight percent last year and were again up 10 percent in the first six months of 2016. As a comparison, in 2014 the growth was only one percent.

The growing labor costs have also had an impact on the profitability of the sector, according to the preliminary data of the National Office of Statistics. Last year, taken as a group, the companies in Estonia whose main field of operation is programming suffered a loss.

The Estonian Association of Information Technology and Telecommunications, or ITL, a voluntary organisation whose members represent 75 percent of Estonian tech and telecom sector's turnover, is clearly worried.

When commenting on Swedbank's report, ITL head Anneli Heinsoo said the disproportionate overpayment to a mediocre workforce when compared to its productivity is a clear warning sign. In her opinion, this situation isn't about to change.

Swedbank's head of IT sector, Anu Kalmurand, says one answer to the problem of growing labor costs may be found in tapping into the skills of workers overseas who can work remotely because of the nature of tech work.

"Entrepreneurs are recruiting more and more workers from Central European and Eastern European countries, from Ukraine and Belarus, for example. The programmers don't necessarily have to move to Estonia, which means that Estonian wages can be attractive to them when they are working in their home countries where the living costs are lower."

In recent years, the government has also made some cautious steps towards easing the rules for the local employers who have been complaining about strict laws and excess bureaucracy when hiring foreign specialists from outside the EU.

For example, until 2013, employers who wanted to hire a foreign worker first had to run a public call for competition for three weeks. Until 2016 employers had to apply separately for every foreign employee they wanted to hire at the Estonian Unemployment Insurance Fund.

Now these and a few other restrictions have been lifted. In future tech specialists will also be excluded from the official quota of immigrants whom Estonia is willing to accept every year, which is 0.1 percent of the population or a bit more than 1,300 people.

A big problem for Estonia is its demographic situation. The number of young adults is decreasing and so the number of students in higher education has dropped significantly over the past few years, from 67,600 in 2011 to 51,092 in 2015, according to Statistics Estonia.

Higher-education institutions have been heavily promoting technology courses and luring prospective students with higher scholarships and even free laptops, which has had a significant impact on the popularity of these subjects.

Regardless of the decrease in the student numbers as a whole, the popularity of computer sciences studies has remained consistent. In both 2011 and 2015, there were roughly 4,630 computer-science students in Estonia.

Tech subjects have also remained popular among students because of evidence that good careers will follow. In September local business daily Äripäev published an annual list of the wealthiest Estonians. For the first time in history, the first two places were occupied by startup entrepreneurs, not the representatives of more traditional industries such as transit or real-estate business.

The newspaper estimated the fortunes of the founders of fintech company Transferwise, Taavet Hinrikus and Kristo Käärmann, at over €200m ($220m) each.

Thứ Hai, 17 tháng 10, 2016

NNN Co trials narrowband IoT network across Queensland

Following a successful proof of concept, the world's first group multicast scalable LoRaWAN network deployment will be trialled in Queensland by the National Narrowband Network.

Australia's National Narrowband Network (NNN) Company has announced that it is delivering a long-range, wide-area (LoRaWAN) narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) network for Ergon Energy in partnership with IoT service platform provider Actility.

The solution for the energy utility, which spans 1.7 million square kilometres across Townsville in Queensland, was announced at the LoRa Alliance All Members' Meeting in Seoul on Thursday.

In what NNN Co called the "world's first group multicast LoRaWAN deployment", the network will be trialled for six months beginning in October, with sensors being installed on the hot water circuits of several houses in Townsville.

The companies are trialling a scalable solution for controlling hot water usage at the street, neighbourhood, and district levels using the flip of a switch to respond to peak demand.

"The successful implementation of end-to-end multicast functionality results in a truly cost-effective, robust, and scalable two-way network service that can support remote over-the-air configuration and software upgrades in addition to group control of endpoint devices." NNN co-founder and CEO Rob Zagarella said.

"This opens up additional use cases that require non real-time monitoring and control capability such as public lighting, agricultural irrigation, water, infrastructure, and building automation. Demonstrating this capability in one of the most challenging environments puts us in pole position for growth across these segments both in Australia and globally via partnerships with the other LoRa Alliance member operators around the world."

The network will be operating on the industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) 920-928MHz spectrum band, Zagarella told ZDNet, with configurable devices that would be able to work on ISM band extensions if more spectrum becomes available for IoT in future.

According to Ergon Energy, utilities have historically had to upgrade their infrastructure when met with limited network capacity, which imposes a high cost on the provider that is then passed onto consumers. Instead, a LoRaWAN solution would allow the company to monitor and manage loads at a more "granular level".

"For example, it may change the time that a household's hot water is heated up so that it occurs when network load is low," Ergon Energy telecommunications architect Sanjeewa Athuraliya explained.

"This could allow Ergon Energy to run its network more effectively, increase the longevity of the network, and save customers money over the long term."

NNN Co is leveraging Actility's IoT platform and network server in combination with its own implementation of end-to-end multicast technology for Ergon's tailored solution.

Last November, Zagarella argued that instead of cellular networks, LoRaWAN networks should form the backbone of IoT in order to bring down the inherent expense in connecting so many "things".

Zagarella said traditional mobile networks "aren't necessarily ideal to meet some of these IoT challenges", as they have been set up with high average revenue per user (ARPU) in mind, with significant costs and investments in spectrum.

"Low-power wide-area network technology was designed specifically to meet the low-power, low-throughput and link budget requirements of IoT," Zagarella said.

"It's adaptable, it doesn't need to be planned in the same way that an existing carrier technology does; it's designed to deal with a high level of interference, with random, unexpected signals, so there's no need to set aside specific spectrum for it; it uses a distributed RAN -- radio access network -- that accesses very low-cost and not very smart base stations that collect the data and transmit it back over a very large distance to the core without a lot of significant processing required, which again produces costs. And then, of course, there's a centralised network management infrastructure that manages that traffic across the network in a very optimal, efficient way."

Most significantly, LoRa is a more collaborative technology, allowing a low-cost point of entry for more users to make use of the IoT.

"From NNN Co's perspective, we're in the business of enabling IoT, and we believe that to make IoT happen, we need the collection and use of data to be as simple and cost effective as possible."

The NNN began trialling its technology on Sydney's North Shore in August 2015 across 10 base stations covering 50-100 square kilometres, with the company aiming to roll out its wireless network nationwide.

In Australia, the LoRa technology operates across the 918MHz-928MHz spectrum band.

NNN co-founder David Spence told ZDNet in August that the company has been "getting a lot of interest from all sorts of sectors".

Last month, the IoT Alliance Australia (IoTAA) in conjunction with the Australian government launched a live LoRaWAN IoT network in Sydney, operating on the 915MHz ISM spectrum band, which is currently used for consumer devices operating under Low Interference Potential Devices (LIPD) class licences.

The Barangaroo Community Network allows those within a 3km to 5km radius to connect IoT devices for free, for the purposes of prototyping, testing, and developing solutions, with the IoT gateway able to support 1,000 devices at a time.

The IoTAA, which emerged from the Communications Alliance IoT Think Tank earlier this year, has forecast the IoT industry to add around AU$120 billion to the Australian economy by 2025, a 2 percent rise in Australia's GDP.

Vodafone Australia similarly completed its trial of narrowband-IoT technology across a number of live sites in suburban and central Melbourne in April in partnership with Chinese technology giant Huawei, calling the wireless low-power, wide-area network tests a success.

If you think 4G's quick, Telia, Ericsson's 5G field tests show speeds '40 times faster'

After field tests on what is described as Europe's first 5G trial system, Telia and Ericsson now say a rollout is in prospect for Stockholm and Tallinn in 2018.

Estonian capital Tallinn, along with Stockholm, now looks set to get Telia-Ericsson 5G services in 2018.
Image: Shutterstock

Swedish telecom provider Telia and networking firm Ericsson have completed field tests on what they say is Europe's first 5G trial system, clearing the way for customers in the Swedish and Estonian capitals of Stockholm and Tallinn to start using 5G services in 2018.

The trials in Kista, Sweden, ran 5G over a live network and included speed and latency tests, using 800MHz of spectrum in the 15GHz band.

During the tests, the firms say users got peak rates of 15Gbps with a latency below three milliseconds. Telia reckons that performance is more than 40 times faster than the current maximum speeds achievable on 4G.

5G is the term used to describe the fifth generation of wireless networks, which offer a higher capacity and cater for the huge growth in devices that need a mobile internet connection.

Telia's Estonian spokesman, Raigo Neudorf, said it is too early to say exactly how the 5G services will be provided in Tallinn in 2018.

"Obviously, the network won't be covering the whole country or the whole city. But we are planning to demo the possible solutions and fields of use of 5G and also network and customer devices," he said.

He added that although he couldn't yet reveal the size of investments that are going to be made in the 5G service, it is clear that every new generation of technology will be more expensive than the previous one.

"Presumably, we'll have a large number of small and 'invisible' base stations for 5G in the cities," he said.

"Our partner Ericsson has already developed 5G devices which in the laboratory conditions have shown speeds over 20Gbps. So, both Telia and Ericsson are rapidly working on development."

Estonia has a tradition of being in the front rank when it comes to the new mobile technologies. 4G was first introduced in Estonia in December 2010, when Telia's local subsidiary EMT, later rebranded to Telia Estonia, rolled out its LTE network. It was only the 11th such network in the world at the time.

By the end of summer 2014, all three local mobile operators, EMT, Elisa, and Tele2 Estonia, had each covered at least 95 percent of the country with their respective 4G networks.

Estonia's ministry of economic affairs and communications has previously announced a plan to open up the 700MHz spectrum for 5G in summer 2017.

"700MHz would be an important step for fast data communications, especially in rural areas, as it enables us to cover areas with low population density," Neudorf said.

"The faster data connection of 5G provides us a lot of opportunities that 4G doesn't. In the past few years, we've witnessed a great increase in video usage on the internet. This trend will continue and 5G should enable bigger and better-quality streaming, which could bring 360-degree and 4K quality videos to users."

He said 5G also has a role in speeding up development in the IoT field, where its lower latency opens up applications in areas such as autonomous motoring and remote medicine.

"It's important that the machines get the information and orders without a delay. It's predicted that billions of devices will be connected to the internet in the next few years, so it's clear that current 4G networks can't manage to service these volumes," Neudorf said.

IoT explosion: So many things, so little time to protect ourselves

The recent pace of smartphone proliferation will feel like molasses in January compared to the impending Internet of Things storm that's bearing down on your work and life. Hang on tight, folks.

The quantity of "things" will eclipse all other product volumes in the digital technology industry, including smartphones.
Getty Images/iStockphoto

Historically, the Internet has connected general-purpose computing devices together, often with a user involved interacting with a glass screen. Many servers, too, exist to directly interact with human users.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is different. The term "Internet of Things" is used to describe the process of controlling or reading telemetry from physical (often non-computing) devices via a network, usually the internet.

In this context, sensors are deployed to provide a wide range of telemetric data streams back to command and control centers and for storage in large databases. Actuators operate on commands issued by control systems to cause physical and mechanical devices to perform specific actions.

It's important to understand that the quantity of "things" in the Internet of Things world will eclipse all other product volumes in the digital technology industry, including smartphones. As an example, take an IoT-enabled home.

IoT in the consumer market

For a family of four, there might be as many as four smartphones. By contrast, one home can reasonably be expected to contain twenty or more internet-enabled light bulbs, an internet-connected thermostat, small sensor devices attached to items in the fridge, health items (like smart scales and blood pressure cuffs), appliance monitors, and any number of cameras and alarm sensors.

In this one example, it is reasonable to expect that there is an order of magnitude more IoT devices compared to traditional computing devices and even hot-selling smartphones.

In a healthcare, industrial, or office environment, IoT devices will abound. Growth in network-connected and controlled devices like 3D printers, thermostats, and light bulbs will be impressive, but that will be nothing like the growth in sensing devices.

Growth of sensing devices

The number of internet-enabled sensing devices, like driving behavior and telemetry sensors in cars, rotational, stress, and temperature sensors in machinery, sensors deployed by utilities like energy producers and water districts to monitor flow and utilization, and an array of health-monitoring devices deployed both at healthcare providers and delivered to patients will far exceed every other category of connected device.

Sensors have existed for years, of course. The big change is that telemetry and actions can occur across the internet and have use beyond the physical device. A good example of this is the automobile. In pre-IoT models, vehicle on-board sensors would talk to a "car computer" that might, for example, regulate fuel flow for optimal gas mileage.

Today, sensors represent 31.8 percent of the total spending on IoT, says IDC. Telefónica, one of the world's largest telephone and mobile network providers, estimates that, whereas only 2 percent of mobile vehicles were connected online in 2012, a full 90 percent of vehicles will be online by 2020.

In IoT-enabled cars, sensor data and fuel flow data will be transmitted back to a central database. That data might then be sold to other vendors seeking vehicle analytics, or used by the car makers to determine, across their entire installed base, performance characteristics of their products in active use.

Hyper-growth market projections

Gartner reports that 5.5 million new IoT things will be connected every day. According to analysts, the number of connected objects has grown by 30 percent since 2015, to where we now have 6.4 billion connected things in use worldwide this year, 2016. That number will more than triple, to 20.8 billion connected IoT devices by 2020.

Cisco and Intel are even more optimistic in their projections. Cisco claims there are 15 billion IoT devices in use today, and there will be 50 billion IoT devices by 2020. And, while Gartner estimates 20 billion and Cisco estimates 50 billion, Intel estimates there will be a whopping 200 billion IoT connected devices in use by 2020.

Understanding the impact of IoT

IoT, big data, analytics, and mobile are inextricably linked and contribute to hyper-growth of Internet-enabled and connected physical devices. The following table shows how each has contributed to the market dynamic we're currently seeing:

IoT	Provides the sensors and actuators that interact directly with physical objects
Big data	Provides the storage mechanisms for managing the flood of sensor data provided by IoT objects
Cheap storage	Makes it cost-effective to store the vast quantities of data generated by IoT
Analytics	Provides the analysis and value-understanding tools to effectively make use of the data generated by IoT, along with intelligent command and control for optimizing the operations of physical devices
Mobile	Enables near-ubiquitous connectivity to make all of the above possible

When evaluating the impact of IoT, be sure to factor in the unknown of possibility. The practice of Internet-enabling physical objects is only in its infancy.

Each of the above factors, taken alone, is a hotbed of innovation and adoption. Combined, the potential for exploration and advancement is virtually limitless. In fact, IDC expects spending on IoT to reach $1.7 trillion by 2020, rising from $655.8 billion back in 2014.

There is little doubt that the Internet of Things will grow to almost unimaginable scale. But there are concerns. For example, we've been covering the security challenge that's emerged along with the popularity of IoT.

Stay tuned over the next few years as this market explodes. As penetration of new and innovative devices reach into every aspect of our work and personal lives, we'll find new conveniences but also new challenges. Hopefully, we can grow along with our devices. It will certainly be an interesting ride.

You can follow my day-to-day project updates on social media. Be sure to follow me on Twitter at @DavidGewirtz, on Facebook at Facebook.com/DavidGewirtz, on Instagram at Instagram.com/DavidGewirtz, and on YouTube at YouTube.com/DavidGewirtzTV.

Dell positions itself as essential IoT infrastructure provider

With the company merger now complete, Dell EMC wants to cement itself as the leading infrastructure provider in the age of the Internet of Things.

By 2020, analyst firm IDC has predicted that there will be 212 billion devices connected to the internet, known as the Internet of Things (IoT). Networking giant Cisco has estimated this number is more likely to sit at around 12.2 billion, while Gartner believes 6.4 billion devices is a fairer approximation.

Whatever the number, Dell EMC director of OEM Solutions for Asia North and Oceania Mauro Favero told ZDNet that he is confident it is going to be large, considering the total already sits at around 13 billion devices.

According to Favero, the beginning of the IoT explosion meant organisations had to ask themselves where they wanted to be moving forward in the new era of digital transformation.

"Of course Dell was one of them, Microsoft is another. They had to redefine themselves in the cloud, that's where they want to be, Azure is their big thing," Favero explained.

"Dell obviously came from the PC world, high-end servers, and so forth, and was known for PCs and will continue to do PCs, but essentially, we had to ask ourselves what do we want to be in this new age. And it made the most sense for Dell to be an essential infrastructure company in the digital era."

Dell made the decision to focus on providing the infrastructure and the compute power to businesses and startups that want to focus on innovation at the front end, but Favero said Dell does not just provide the background equipment; it also provides devices at the very forefront or edge of the IoT, where data is being collected.

He explained that previously, smaller companies did not have access to a lot of computing power, applications, analytics tools, and so forth, noting that today, startups and the like can essentially rent the computing power they need, providing smaller players with a huge advantage and thus being a huge driver for IoT.

Although the technology is at a business' disposal, Favero said not many are quite sure what to do with it yet.

"You see a few companies that come up with revolutionary ideas that can really take advantage of it, you know, Uber, Airbnb, they figured out what to do with the technology," he said. "You collect data, you send it off, and someone else can pick it up very quickly."

He said understanding what to do with the IoT and its resulting data will take time, as even though by 2020 there will be countless devices, businesses are still unclear on how to use it to their advantage and change their business model.

Speaking of the way GE has been focusing on integrating its software applications with its equipment, currently embedding software into the likes of aircraft engines to run equipment more efficiently, Favero said that even the big companies are redefining their focus in the IoT age.

"If you think that itself isn't too revolutionary, it's just predictive maintenance; what's more revolutionary about it is what GE can do with that once they collect all the data."

One area, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region, that Dell is heavily involved in from an IoT perspective is surveillance and security.

"It's huge, and it's just getting bigger and bigger," Favero said of the growing industry.

"Unfortunately, with the terror attacks, governments want to do everything they can to keep their people safe and their cities safe, so the spending in that area is enormous right now.

"We're supplying many companies with the computing power that they need to capture the images, process the images, and to capture the signals from the sensors."

In South Korea, Dell is currently working with development firm Innodep on a CCTV surveillance project that harnesses and analyses metadata to provide better public security systems.

"They're really going one step beyond, for example if you walk into a room, first of all the door opens, the temperature changes because a human being is inside, the humidity changes etc, they measure all kinds of things to make sure they have a pretty good picture of what's happening in that room at that time, and then they correlate it to be able to say, 'I think we have a breach here, or a guard should go and check something'," Favero said.

"All of this is possible with technology these days, and it's pretty fascinating, really.

"We are not aware of how much we're actually being tracked."

Dell, in partnership with chip giant Intel, opened an IoT lab in Singapore earlier this year to provide a platform for customers in Asia Pacific and Japan to test proof-of-concept IoT products.

Customers have access to Dell's technical consultants while its IoT industry partners, such as developers and independent software vendors, are able build new products based on Intel and Dell's IoT technologies.

"This facility will focus on enabling intelligent devices and gateways, speeding up the connection of legacy systems to the cloud," Dell said said at the time.

Earlier this month, the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) IoT working group published a report to guide designers and developers on basic security measures it believes must be incorporated throughout the development process of IoT devices.

The report says adding interconnectivity between devices and existing network infrastructures opens up new attack vectors that many will attempt to exploit.

According to Brian Russell, chair of the CSA IoT Working Group, an IoT system is only as secure as its weakest link.

"It is often heard in our industry that securing IoT products and systems is an insurmountable effort," he said. "We hope to empower developers and organisations with the ability to create a security strategy that will help mitigate the most pressing threats to both consumer and business IoT products."

Chủ Nhật, 16 tháng 10, 2016

How an Apple iPad combined with 3D printing can help mend broken bones

Two Catalan entrepreneurs have come up with a 3D printed splint that they say can speed the healing process for 80 percent of the most common injuries.

Five years ago, Ricardo Veiga broke his tibia in a motorcycle accident. While he was experiencing the drawbacks of the ubiquitous plaster cast, he decided there just had to be a way of improving and personalizing the methods used to keep broken limbs immobile while they healed.

During research conducted with Jordi Tura, Veiga came across a paper from a New Zealand student who had designed a mesh structure that overcame many of the drawbacks of conventional orthopedic casts.

Using that concept, they decided to create a prototype and a company to market the eventual product, which they christened Xkelet, a 3D-printed splint for helping heal broken bones.

Tura is now the company's CEO. He says the product, which has received certification from the EU and approval from the European Medicines Agency, promotes the healing process without causing allergic reactions or other unexpected complications.

It also avoids muscle loss, peeling, and itching, and allows the patient to bathe and wear ordinary clothes without any issues. Xkelet is scheduled to go to market in early 2017.

"We won't take any risks concerning regulations. We'll wait to have all the approvals," Xkelet CEO Tura says.

Meanwhile, the self-financed, Girona-based startup is working on improving the product, which is currently being tested for arm fractures, but may eventually be suitable for 80 percent of the most common injuries, including those to the wrist, elbow, arm, leg, knee, and ankle.

To capture the correct dimensions, the doctor will first scan the affected area using an iPad and then send the image to the 3D printing lab to get the personalized splint made up for the patient, who can choose its color and external design.

Then, the splint is sent back to the doctor two or three days later. According to physician and physiotherapist Dr Ramon Gassó, that interval is desirable because sometimes temporary splints or compressive bandages are worn for a few days to allow any swelling to ease, after which the longer-term Xkelet cast can provide the best fit.

Rather than use a prototyping printer, Xkelet has its splints printed in Belgium using a 3D production machine, which can turn out up to 9,600 pieces a year.

It's because the splints are printed out in accordance with biocompatibility and hypoallergenic ISO standards that Xkelet has been able to obtain approval from the European Medicines Agency. Tura sees that approval as a crucial advantage that lets his business stand out from the competition.

"Xkelet also has a patented locking system and changeable openings. Moreover, our splint only weighs 150 grams and is fully customizable," Tura says.

However, he argues that the knowhow and core business of the company is not even the splint itself but the software that allows it to create the 3D outputs.

"What we intend to offer is a tool for healthcare professionals, who cannot be replaced," he says.

For the moment, they are only targeting professionals working in private hospitals or private insurance companies because the price of the individual splint is about €400 ($445), which could be an obstacle for the public health system in Spain. Conventional plaster casts remain much cheaper.

Dr Gassó says the Xkelet splint may have many important advantages in comparison to traditional bracing options, such as its ability to avoid the usual side-effects of keeping a limb immobilized.

"It also might allow for faster recovery, but it will probably not work for everyone and all cases," he says.

Yet, the invention has gained unexpected attention this summer after actor Ashton Kutcher published a video about the product on Facebook.

"We had a million views in 18 hours," Tura says. "Since then, a big company has contacted us for distribution in the US."

It's a development that could help to expand the company's position dramatically.

"For the moment, we're still in conversations. The important thing is that we offer a differentiated solution," Tura says.

Sydney AI-focused fintech startup readies for AU$23m ASX listing

Flamingo is taking the road less travelled by startups, waving goodbye to the venture capital model and instead becoming a publicly listed company before the month is over.

After raising an oversubscribed AU$3 million, Sydney-based customer experience automation startup Flamingo will list on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) with a AU$23 million market value.

Based out of Sydney's fintech accelerator hub Stone & Chalk, Flamingo deals with conversational commerce, delivering what founder and CEO Dr Catriona Wallace described as a Software-as-a-Service intelligent online guided selling platform for large financial services companies.

After watching large financial services providers pump millions of dollars into trying to improve the online customer experience and getting nowhere, Wallace told ZDNet she put her background in customer experience, design, and market research to good use, to first work out where they were going wrong, and second to determine how she could fix that.

"Humans are based on behavioural models and business is based on industrial models so the two things were actually never designed to work together well," she said. "I saw that as an opportunity to develop a software platform that better connects these two models."

As humans interact with each other through conversation, Wallace said the online environment needs to have this capability as well in order to be successful.

Flamingo launched its first product in 2014 in Australia and landed the National Australia Bank as its foundation client, which saw Wallace and her team use the platform to onboard small-to-medium business customers into the bank.

Following the immediate success of Flamingo, the board made the decision to flip the company and make it a US-based firm, moving the commercial team to New York where they have stayed since.

The development team and the data science team work out of Stone & Chalk, despite Flamingo being almost too big for the startup-sized space.

"Technically we could be in our own office somewhere but the value that the co-working environment provides us far exceeds being in our own office space and the real points of value here are definitely access to potential clients, the access to mentors and advisors, and being next to other startups," she said.

"There's always politicians and government officials walking through and it just keeps us up to date with everything that's going on in the fintech community, not only in Australia but globally.

"It's really hugely valuable."

After spending some time in the United States, Wallace is impressed to return to a thriving Australian fintech market, even overhearing at a conference recently that Australia is on par with Israel when it comes to financial technology innovation.

"The Australian market is very different to what it was two years ago. We've got financial services companies coming to Stone & Chalk really seeking out the fintech players. It's 100 miles ahead of what it was two years ago," she said.

"For Australia to ever be classified in the same genus as Israel in fintech I think is a great thing."

In particular, Wallace is impressed with the eagerness of financial services companies to engage with local startups.

"We've seen a lot of the banks try and set up their own innovation labs and doing an average job with that. I think there's almost 300 fintech staff working in Stone & Chalk now, this is the absolute heart of financial services innovation happening here and we've seen most of the big financial services companies have a relationship with Stone & Chalk which should supplement what they're doing with innovation themselves," Wallace said.

"It should be on the agenda of all financial services companies that are looking at innovation"

Currently waiting on the nod from the ASX, Flamingo is expecting to be listed by the end of October, following a reverse takeover of Perth-based oil and gas exploration firm Cre8Tek.

After following the traditional venture capital (VC) path in the US, Wallace said she was keen to do it differently in Australia after experiencing a dramatic change in the market.

"The US tech market started to check and a lot of criticism about overvalued unicorns and other technology companies started to mean that the VCs were scaling back their investment in early stage companies and really only wanting to invest in companies that were further down the track," she said.

Wallace was close to signing on the dotted line to hand over 10 percent of Flamingo to a US-based insurance company and a VC firm as well. Looking well placed to raise in the US, Wallace was approached by Cre8Tek who had 30 years of ASX experience and an alternate investment strategy.

"As a startup founder I spent 50 percent of my time for the last two and a half years trying to raise capital. We've been very successful at that but it takes a huge amount of time to do," Wallace said.

"For me now in this new environment, a capital raising will be taken care of by the market and by the success of the company. I don't have to be spending 50 percent of my time raising capital -- I can go and build the business and run the business like I should be."

Flamingo joins an ever growing list of Australian-based startups that have found themselves on the ASX, with more than 100 technology companies debuted on the ASX in the past two years, particularly through a wave of backdoor listings.

In May, video technology development company Linius Technologies appeared on the exchange after a reverse takeover of Firestrike Resources which saw Linius raise AU$3.5 million at a AU$25.6 million valuation.

Digital identification and verification firm TikForce finalised its reverse takeover of Palace Resources in April, with the Perth-based company launching on the ASX after raising AU$4.5 million to complete the backdoor listing. TikForce has a market capitalisation of AU$9.4 million.

Most Brazilian homes lack broadband access

Telecoms agency attempts to improve the situation but bureaucracy remains a significant hurdle

Some 75 percent of Brazilian households still lack broadband access, according to the National Telecommunications Agency (Anatel).

Increased access to telecommunications services will be a key priority at Anatel, according to its new president, Juarez Quadros, who says the percentage is due to the lack of coverage of services in more remote areas of large cities.

The challenge, according to Quadros, is to achieve the goal of universal access to broadband in Brazil.

"There are still many areas without access to technologies such as mobile and fixed telephony, broadband, or even 3G and 4G connectivity. We need to bring access to telecommunications to every corner of Brazil," Quadros told reporters at the event on Monday, which marked his first day on the job.

Another key underlying issue behind the lack of broadband across Brazil - where connectivity is concentrated in large urban centers such as São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro - is the bureaucracy related to the relationship between operators and the government.

According to Quadros, there is a need to to simplify and facilitate the granting of permits to deploy networks.

"We need the modernization of legislation so that services can be provided more quickly and at a high quality standard," he said.

The executive added that proposed legislation that is due to be voted by Brazil's lower house of Congress will address the issue of grants.

According to separate research from the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee (CGI.br) some 47 percent of all Brazilians aged 10 or older use their mobile phones to access the Internet rather than fixed broadband.

But the South East region of Brazil concentrates 60 percent of the mobile Internet users. Conversely, the North, where the Amazon is located, has only 35 percent of all users.

The Brazilian telecommunications market is the fifth largest in the world and accounts for 4 percent of the country's GDP.

Pebble 2 review: A budget-friendly smartwatch for undecided users

Apple already has the tech to ID you using your veins

A patent suggests that Apple could one day use vascular signatures instead of fingerprints to identify users.

The Apple Watch's heart-rate sensors could also be used for biometric identification.
Image: Apple

Apple is exploring the use of the Apple Watch's heart-rate sensor to identify users by their vascular signature.

A US Apple patent published on Thursday and spotted by AppleInsider details how the company could add an identification function to the heart-rate sensor on the back of the Apple Watch.

The heart-rate sensor is an example of photoplethysmography and in the Watch's case, relies on a set of LED light emitters and light sensors to measure the amount of blood flowing through the user's wrist and calculate heart rate.

However, as Apple describes in the patent, the emitter and sensor combination could also be used to determine the unique way a user's blood vessels are arranged and so be employed as a method of biometric identification.

"Light emitters and light sensors can be used to perform biometric identification of a user based on identifying characteristics of the user's vasculature," Apple notes.

"For example, light information can be obtained at one or more light sensors, and the information can be compared with stored information associated with a user identity. Based on the comparison, the user of the device can be identified as having the user identity."

The feature could serve the same function that Touch ID does today, preventing anyone but the owner from activating the device, or for example, to log into an online banking account.

The patent was actually filed in 2013, well ahead of the Apple Watch's 2015 launch. It doesn't mention the Apple Watch, merely a device that can be strapped to the user's wrist, but it does add some color to how Apple was thinking of the hardware during its development.

It's not clear why Apple hasn't enabled such a feature given the Watch has the hardware to do it and could, if implemented, reduce the Watch's dependence on the iPhone.

The patent also explores using sensors to enable gestures for identification, such as a person rapidly moving their hand from the waist to the side of their head.

"The gesture may be recognized as a gesture associated with the identification process. Additionally, the first time period of the identification gesture may be determined. That is, once the gesture is recognized from the motion information, an initiation time and a finish time of the gesture can be determined."

The same patent surfaced in Europe last year as reported at the time by Patently Apple.

Sony Xperia XZ and X Compact, First Take: X-series choices expand to six

Businesses could save over $33000 per year by video conferencing according to new report

Businesses with teams across the globe could bolster their balance, ditch the travel expenses and use video conferences instead according to new research.

Video conferencing offers a cheaper alternative to meetings but businesses are still wasting thousands every year flying people around the world.

Perhaps they do not realise that technology has moved on to such an extent that it really does offer a viable, reliable and high-quality alternative.

Cloud-based online meeting platform, LyteSpark has carried out research showing that we do not need to bust ourselves with all of this business travel.

The company analysed the average cost involved to travel from the UK to 20 business hubs around the world.

It noted costs for return business-class trips, taxi costs to and from Central London and Heathrow, airport transfers to and from the hotel, taxi costs to and from the meeting, an overnight stay in a 4 star hotel and the cost for a three-course dinner.

The monthly cost was calculated on the basis of one trip with the annual cost calculated on 12 trips a year.

It then compared these costs with the monthly cost of using its own online meeting platform.

The research showed that businesses could make a significant saving of over $5,584 on every trip from the UK to San Francisco, Silicon Valley's capital - the costliest trip to make globally.

In other words, a trip to San Francisco is 116 times more than using video conferencing. Los Angeles is the second costliest business district to visit at $5,351 per person per trip.

In South East Asia, Singapore is the costliest city to visit drawing up a total bill of $3,729, while Tokyo comes in a close second at $3,366.

The research revealed that British businesses with teams and clients across the globe could save, on average, $33,200 per year on business trips abroad if they use online meeting platforms.

These savings should be a wake-up call for any sized business. It may seem obvious that every penny counts to the business and its bottom line.

Meetings in person are sometimes be vital, however they are not necessary on such a regular basis.

Alex Hunte, co-founder, LyteSpark said: "State-of-the-art online meeting platforms are no longer clumsy and complex. They are now designed to be intuitive, ensuring they are merely an extension of day-to-day communications.

Nobody has to wait days or weeks to discuss pressing matters which can now be resolved or actioned within minutes."