Ideaforge

The recently reported Capital One data breach has once again turned the technology world’s attention to cloud security. A lot of speculation is all that the industry can surmise about exactly what happened and how the events came to pass. The indictment is vague and the companies are in PR crisis mode.

Let’s not waste this time on conjecture. It’s important to focus on the uncomfortable yet completely valid cloud security concerns while everyone is listening.

The elephant in the room in cloud platform security is the inherently problematic issue of customers not knowing which cloud provider employees are entrusted with administrative-level access to the clouds themselves. Cloud Customer X does not know the names of employees at Cloud Provider Y who, upon succumbing to moral failing, could theoretically abuse privileged knowledge, credentials, or internal cloud provider tools in order to inappropriately access, copy, or otherwise interact with Cloud Customer X’s provisioned systems or stored data.

To be clear, there’s no suggestion that the Capital One breach is the result of insider access or privileged knowledge abuse. While the alleged perpetrator’s prior work history includes employment at Amazon Web Services — the cloud provider which data was downloaded from — the amount of cloud service know-how necessary to pull off the alleged wrongful acts can certainly be gained by anyone with an internet connection and enough curiosity.

Instead, we need to talk about cloud platform security in a broader sense. We need to make sure when executives sign on the dotted line and agree to put mountains of their own customer data under someone else’s control that they understand the stark trade-off realities, rather than the myths, of cloud platform security.

Simply put, moving operations into the cloudspace means you are putting yourself at the mercy of the cloud host. Ultimately, the cloud provider can take their ball and go home, leaving your business stranded. Doing so might be in violation of some words that an attorney typed up and both sides agreed to. But those words cannot physically stop a cloud provider’s rogue subcontractor from abusing trusted access — of which the cloud customer would most likely never know.

There are no easy fixes for such a scenario. But it would be foolish to wait for egregious examples of cloud platform insider abuse to be known publicly prior to sparking the very important conversation, even if the topic is uncomfortable for cloud providers to acknowledge and unsettling for cloud users to realize.

Source: Tech Crunch

Get ready to dive into the fiercely competitive waters of enterprise software. Join more than 1,000 attendees for TC Sessions Enterprise 2019 on September 5 to navigate this rapidly evolving category with the industry’s brightest minds, biggest names and exciting startups.

Our $249 early-bird ticket price remains in play, which saves you $100. But one is the loneliest number, so why not take advantage of our group discount, buy in bulk and bring your whole team? Save an extra 20% when you buy four or more tickets at once.

We’ve packed this day-long conference with an outstanding lineup of presentations, interviews, panel discussions, demos, breakout sessions and, of course, networking. Check out the agenda, which includes both industry titans and boundary-pushing startups eager to disrupt the status quo.

We’ll add more surprises along the way, but these sessions provide a taste of what to expect — and why you’ll need your posse to absorb as much intel as possible.

Talking Developer Tools
Scott Farquhar (Atlassian)

With tools like Jira, Bitbucket and Confluence, few companies influence how developers work as much as Atlassian. The company’s co-founder and co-CEO Scott Farquhar will join us to talk about growing his company, how it is bringing its tools to enterprises and what the future of software development in and for the enterprise will look like.

Keeping the Enterprise Secure
Martin Casado (Andreessen Horowitz), Wendy Nather (Duo Security), Emily Heath (United Airlines)

Enterprises face a litany of threats from both inside and outside the firewall. Now more than ever, companies — especially startups — have to put security first. From preventing data from leaking to keeping bad actors out of your network, enterprises have it tough. How can you secure the enterprise without slowing growth? We’ll discuss the role of a modern CSO and how to move fast — without breaking things.

Keeping an Enterprise Behemoth on Course
Bill McDermott (SAP)

With over $166 billion in market cap, Germany-based SAP is one of the most valuable tech companies in the world today. Bill McDermott took the leadership in 2014, becoming the first American to hold this position. Since then, he has quickly grown the company, in part thanks to a number of $1 billion-plus acquisitions. We’ll talk to him about his approach to these acquisitions, his strategy for growing the company in a quickly changing market and the state of enterprise software in general.

The Quantum Enterprise
Jim Clarke (Intel), Jay Gambetta (IBM) and Krysta Svore (Microsoft)
4:20 PM – 4:45 PM

While we’re still a few years away from having quantum computers that will fulfill the full promise of this technology, many companies are already starting to experiment with what’s available today. We’ll talk about what startups and enterprises should know about quantum computing today to prepare for tomorrow.

TC Sessions Enterprise 2019 takes place on September 5. You can’t be everywhere at once, so bring your team, cover more ground and increase your ROI. Get your group discount tickets and save.

Source: Tech Crunch

The dreaded 10x, or, how to handle exceptional employees

The reality (myth?) is that there are engineers who are ten times more productive than other engineers (some would argue 100x, but okay). Jon Evans, who is CTO at HappyFunCorp, dives into the strengths and weaknesses of these vaunted people and how to manage them and their relationships with other team members.

The anti-10x squad raises many important and valid — frankly, obvious and inarguable — points. Go down that Twitter thread and you’ll find that 10x engineers are identified as: people who eschew meetings, work alone, rarely look at documentation, don’t write much themselves, are poor mentors, and view process, meetings, or training as reasons to abandon their employer. In short, they are unbelievably terrible team members.

Is software a field like the arts, or sports, in which exceptional performers can exist? Sure. Absolutely. Software is Extremistan, not Mediocristan, as Nassim Taleb puts it.

A guide to Virtual Beings and how they impact our world

If your 10x engineers are too annoying to deal with, maybe consider just getting virtual beings instead. The inaugural Virtual Beings Summit was held recently in San Francisco, a conference designed to bring together storyline editors, virtual reality engineers, influencer marketers and more to consider the future of “virtual beings.”

Source: Tech Crunch

CRV, formerly known as Charles River Ventures, has hired Anna Khan as its 10th general partner. Khan joins from Bessemer Venture Partners where she’s served as a vice president since 2016.

CRV invests across industries, with a portfolio that includes Bird and Airtable, among others. The venture capital firm is currently investing out of its 17th fund, a $600 million vehicle that closed in 2018.

Founded in 1970, CRV is amongst the older VC firms. While Khan isn’t the firm’s first female GP — Annie Kadavy, now a general partner at Redpoint Ventures, joined CRV as a GP in 2012 — she will be the firm’s only current female GP.

Despite, an increasing number of firms tapping female talent, less than 10% of “decision-makers” at U.S. venture capital firms are female, according to Axios. Female founders, meanwhile, attract just over 2% of venture capital dollars.

Khan joins CRV alongside another new hire, former Social Capital partner Kristin Baker Spohn. Both Khan and Spohn, a venture partner, will focus on CRV’s enterprise practice, where they’ll work with Airtable, Drift, Iterable, SignalFx and more.

CRV’s newest venture partner Kristin Baker Spohn

“As is often the case, we were introduced to both [Khan and Spohn] through friends of CRV, and from our earliest conversations knew they would add tremendously to the firm,” CRV general partner Murat Bicer said in a statement. “Kristin brings an impressive depth of knowledge in healthcare and a charisma that speaks to early entrepreneurs and seasoned executives alike, while Anna has an immense understanding of the SaaS world and an energy that has seen her accomplish so much in a relatively short period of time.”

Khan, an investor in ScaleFactor, NewVoiceMedia and Intercom, previously founded Launch X, an accelerator that helps female entrepreneurs learn how to raise capital for their businesses.

Spohn’s been an active angel investor since leaving Social Capital. She exited the once high-flying venture capital fund last year following Social Capital co-founder Chamath Palihapitiya’s decision to no longer raise outside capital.

Source: Tech Crunch

Amazon’s Alexa AI team had developed a new training method for the virtual assistant that could greatly improve its ability to handle tricky questions. In a blog post, team lead Abdalghani Abujabal details the new method, which combines both text-based search and a custom-built knowledge graph, two methods which normally compete.

Abujabal suggests the following scenario: You ask Alexa “Which Nolan films won an Oscar but missed a Golden Globe?” The answer to this question asks a lot – you need to identify that the ‘Nolan’ referred to is director Christopher Nolan, figure out which movie he’s directed (even his role as ‘director’ for the resulting list needs to be inferred) and then cross-reference those which have one an Oscar with a list of those which have also won a Golden Globe, and identify those that are present on List A but not on List B.

Amazon’s method to provide a better answer to this difficult question opts for first gathering the most complete data set possible, and then automatically building a curated knowledge graph out of an initially high volume and very noisy (ie., filled with unnecessary data) data set using algorithms that the research team custom-created to deal with cutting the chaff and arriving at mostly meaningful results.

The system devised by Amazon is actually relatively simple on its face – or rather, it combines two relatively simple methods, including a basic web search, that essentially just crawls the web for results using the full text of the question asked – just like if you’d typed “Which Nolan films won an Oscar but missed a Golden Globe?” into Google, for instance (researchers used multiple web engines in reality). The system then grabs the top ten ranked pages and breaks them down into identified names and grammar units.

On top of that resulting data set, Alexa AI’s approach then looks for clues in the structure of sentences to flag and weight significant sentences in the top texts, like “Nolan directed Inception,” and discounts the rest. This builds the ad-hoc knowledge graph, which they then asses to identify “cornerstones” within. A cornerstone is basically dead ringers for words in the original search string (ie., “Which Nolan films won an Oscar but missed a Golden Globe?”) and take those out, focusing instead of looking at the information in between as the source fo the actual answers to that question.

With some final weighting and sorting of the remaining data, the algorithm correctly returns “Inception” as the answer, and Amazon’s team found that this method actually beat out state-of-the-art approaches that were much more involved but that focused on just text search, or just building a curated knowledge graph in isolation. Still, they think they can tweak their approach to be even better, which is good news for Alexa users hoping their smart speakers will be able to settle heated debates about advanced Trival Pursuit questions.

Source: Tech Crunch

A newly released data model and draft implementation guide for providing digital access to historical health insurance claims data directly to patients could mean you have better access to this info from the devices you use everyday. Called the CARIN Blue Button API, it’s a new model developed by private sector partners including consumer organizations, insurance providers, digital health app developers and more, this new draft implementation will be in testing beginning this year, with participating companies including a number of different state-specific BlueCross/BlueShield providers, the State of Washington – and Apple, Google and Microsoft.

The news was announced today at the White House Blue Button Developers Conference in Washington D.C., and builds on the work done last year by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to launch Blue Button 2.0, a new standard aimed at providing Medicare beneficiaries in the U.S. access to all of their historical claims information in one place from whatever application they choose to use.

All of the organizations participating in the draft testing process will perform “real-world testing” of the CARIN model developed by the multi-disciplinary working group, with the aim of preparing for a broad, product launch of the data standard in 2020.

Seeing Apple, Google and Microsoft on that list along with a significant number of health care providers is a good sign, since it should mean more data portability and choice when it comes to how you access your own patient information, rather than it being decided on a platform-by-platform basis.

Apple already built a Health Records section into its own native Health app in iOS at the beginning of last year, and while it works with standards sometimes adopted by health care providers, it’s far from a universal, truly interoperable health care history feature on its own. Apple has been building partnerships with agencies and providers including Veterans’ Affairs and Aetna to flesh out its personal health data offering for users, and Microsoft has its own health records offering called HealthVault.

Source: Tech Crunch

Ford has agreed to acquire Journey Holding Corporation, a company that has developed vehicle tracking software and app-based technology designed for public transportation, as the automaker seeks to scale up its new mobility business.

Journey Holding will be housed under Ford Smart Mobility, a Ford subsidiary that invests in and builds the automaker’s transportation services. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. In a separate announcement, Ford said Tuesday it acquired Quantum Signal, a small robotics company and defense contractor known for mobile robotics and real-time simulation.

The acquisition of Journey is part of broader vision laid out by CEO Jim Hackett more than a year ago to create an ecosystem of transportation-related services that people and cities need now and in the future. The Journey acquisition follows Ford’s purchase of Autonomic and Transloc in 2018.

Today, those services might include using an app to find a Ford-owned Spin scooter or schedule a bus or on-demand shuttle. In the future, it might include finding and hailing an autonomous vehicle.

Eventually, Journey will integrate into Transloc, a transit technology business that Ford bought in 2018. Transloc develops software that helps cities manage transit services including on-demand shuttles.

The name of the combined organization will be announced at a later date, Ford said.

Journey Holding Corporation was founded in 2018 through the merger of two companies, Indianapolis-based DoubleMap and Salt Lake City-based Ride Systems. Journey offers software to municipalities, universities and corporations to help manage their fleets. It also has developed apps that lets users schedule or track rides on shuttles, buses and other public transit.

Transloc CEO Doug Kaufman will leave the new company on Aug. 16. Journey Holding CEO Justin Rees, who founded Ride Systems in 2007 with Kelly Rees and Ben Haynie, will lead the new company.

Together, this newly formed company of about 200 people will serve nearly 1,200 cities, universities, corporate campuses and other enterprises with software solutions for fixed route transportation, microtransit on-demand transportation and other related areas.

“The combination of these transit technology companies will accelerate our efforts to help cities deliver more seamless, productive, and accessible transportation solutions to their citizens and visitors,” Brett Wheatley, vice president of Ford Mobility’s marketing and growth division, said in a statement. “It also will be key to connecting customers with the other mobility solutions in our portfolio, such as Spin e-scooters and our GoRide Health service.”

These services should eventually be part the Transportation Mobility Cloud, an open cloud-based platform that Ford developed for cities to use to orchestrate and manage all the disparate transportation modes happening at any given time.

Source: Tech Crunch