June technology blogspot: small business

Internet trends

Before the end of this year, fully half of the world's population, or about 3.6 billion people, will be on the Internet. That’s thanks in large part to cheaper Android phones and WiFi becoming more available. Although smartphone sales are flat and Internet user growth is slowing, which could mean that individual services will have a tougher time adding new users as the Web approaches saturation, widespread mobile use does at least mean that more people are spending more time online. But more British companies need more global thinking if they are going to reach them. Presently, the top 20 Internet companies are headquartered in two countries. The United States has eleven; China has the other nine. No matter what protectionist politicians try to do, the economy will remain a global system. Marketers should not only understand that their competition is worldwide, but their opportunities are out there there too - as well as the majority of their potential new customers. Want to understand the rest of all the most important tech stats and trends? Legendary venture capitalist Mary Meeker has just released the 2018 version of her famous Internet Trends report. It covers everything from mobile to commerce to the competition between tech giants.
http://www.kpcb.com/internet-trends

Internet ends

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, World Wide Web originator, Tim Berners-Lee, and an alphabet of getting on for a hundred more major Netizens - from Aaron Rabinowitz to Stefano Zanero - have penned an open letter to Antonio Tajani, the President of the European Parliament, warning of the "imminent threat" to the Internet, which would turn it "from an open platform for sharing and innovation into a tool for the automated surveillance and control of its users". The threat to the Net, they say, comes from a new copyright directive, passed in a secret ballot by the EU's Legal Affairs Committee. According to Fraser Myers, writing for the current online issue of Spiked, "Since the EU referendum, Remainers have peddled a fantasy of an open, free and liberal EU. That fantasy is now colliding with reality on a daily basis. The EU’s protectionist trade arrangements are a barrier to open trade and now its new copyright policies threaten the open Internet and, by extension, the open society". The likelihood of secretive EU legislation helping big tech companies to transform the Internet from an open platform into a tool for the automated surveillance and control of its users also came up on a recent episode of BBC TV's 'HARDtalk' interview programme, when Stephen Sackur talked to Silicon Valley insider Jaron Lanier on the premise that although the Internet is perhaps the defining technological advance of the last 50 years, opening up new worlds of possibilities, it also represents an existential threat to humanity. That's the startling possibility raised in his new book, a timely and terrifying takedown of Facebook, Google and the rest, called 'Ten Arguments for Deleting your Social Media Accounts Right Now' by computer scientist Jaron Lanier, who is no tech-phobic sensationalist but a leading Virtual Reality pioneer and - perhaps just in time - one of six appointees this year making up the EU's New Ethics Advisory Group (EAG) on Ethical Dimensions of Data Protection.
http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/no-more-memes-the-eus-latest-threat-to-the-net/21532

A fresh serving of Apple Maps

Apple has announced that it has been busy rebuilding Apple Maps and that the first set of next-generation maps will be released for beta testers later this summer. Apple currently licenses most of the data for the Apple Maps app from companies like TomTom, but will soon begin using the company's own database to provide all the information needed for the new navigation apps it will be rolling out for iOS users. Since 2015, the company has been sending out increasing numbers of data-collecting Apple Maps Vans to photograph city streets and interconnecting routes in its home state of California. Better known and more widely used, Google Maps can be used with both Android and iOS, so that whether you have an LG or Samsung or other brand Android smartphone, or an iPhone, you have the option of using the Google solution. Apple Maps can only be used on iOS devices, meaning the utility is pretty much limited to iPhones and iPads. But Apple plans to differentiate Apple Maps using anonymised data from people's phones to improve its maps and include recreational landmarks like public pools, open spaces and pedestrian parkways. The overall design will be the same, but the maps themselves will be more detailed and useful, Eddy Cue, Apple's senior vice president for services told TechCrunch. "We haven’t announced this. We haven’t told anybody about this. It’s one of those things that we’ve been able to keep pretty much a secret. Nobody really knows about it. We’re excited to get it out there. Over the next year, we’ll be rolling it out, section by section in the US".
https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/29/apple-is-rebuilding-maps-from-the-ground-up/

Search engine of the month

A new search solution has launched with the promise to "bring order to chaos" and solve the enterprise file search problem. California-based Cloudtenna is the latest company to jump into the enterprise file search market. It has launched the public beta of its solution: DirectSearch, designed to find data across multiple clouds, file servers, and personal devices, The enterprise file search space is already a crowded market. The arrival of PC-based networks in the 1980s soon had users asking "where's my file?" and a booming industry in tracking down data across the enterprise followed - and was needed - with estimates showing a company of 1,000 users might waste millions per year searching for files. And hunting across multiple locations usually means having to access a mishmash of tools. Aaron Ganek, Cloudtenna CEO, says that employees have to use 8-10 different tools in a typical day and although many existing file search and discovery tools are good for historical reporting, they are poor when it comes to productivity. One reason is the way they search for and index files, unlike DirectSearch, which looks at more than just the file names and content. It also uses file metadata, does full-text indexing, and logs user activity. But solving the problem of enterprise search and discovery might still be more art than science and Cloudtenna will have to prove that DirectSearch can work at scale, which is where most solutions fail. Cloudtenna believes that DirectSearch is capable of scaling to any size of organisation and claims "Today’s workers are using dozens of file repositories, which is a critical problem not only for individual productivity but for corporate IT departments and for vendors of platforms that would benefit from improved search functions. There are incomplete point solutions that solve a piece of the puzzle, but DirectSearch will revolutionise the way people find and work with files".
https://www.cloudtenna.com