Amazon (AMZN) - Get Reportanalysts at three firms increased their price targets on the shares, saying they expected the retail-and-tech giant to perform well thanks to the coronavirus pandemic.

The upgrades come ahead of Amazon's April 30 earnings report. And they follow other firms' optimism about the Seattle company, including yesterday's move by Goldman Sachs's Heath Terry to raise his target 12% to $2,900, the highest on Wall Street, from $2,600.

Analysts at Stifel maintained their buy rating while increasing their price target to $2,600 from $2,400. Amazon is "one of the best positioned companies" in the pandemic due to "the surge in orders" at its e-commerce business, the firm said.

"We are raising our revenue estimates given the e-commerce opportunity stemming from the pandemic and the potential that prolonged dislocation in traditional retail accelerates e-commerce penetration,"the firm's analysts wrote.

"Our first-quarter 2020 revenue estimate rises 1.5% to $73.9 billion (up 24% year over year, adjusted for foreign exchange)."

Analysts at JMP Securities affirmed their market-perform rating but increased their price target to $2,650 from $2,450 as the company is "the prime beneficiary of accelerating e-commerce trends."

JMP expects recent trends to lead to "greater consumer wallet-share gains longer term."

Meanwhile, analysts at Jefferies declared that Amazon's dominance is "still undisputed" in the cloud-storage space.

"We hosted calls with two cloud experts who see [Amazon Web Services] as the undisputed leader in [infrastructure and platform as services]," analyst Brent Thill wrote.

"Overall AWS consumption flat to up as strong tailwinds (a notable uptick in government, healthcare, and education sectors usage) offset near-term headwinds. Covid-19 is likely to accelerate the migration of enterprise workloads to the cloud."

The firm affirmed its buy rating with a price target of $2,800.

Amazon's average price target is now $2,479, up from $2,179 at the end of 2019, according to Bloomberg.

At last check Amazon shares eased 0.4% to near $2,389.

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Amazon Prospects Touted at 3 Firms as Pandemic Lifts Demand - TheStreet

COVID-19 has created major havoc both in terms of health casualties and economic crisis across the globe and has brought most businesses to a standstill. It has majorly impacted productivity and overall economic growth. While the world is still coping up with its wrath, there are certain tech businesses that may have found an opportunity amid the looming crisis. In this article, we list a few businesses that may thrive in the coming few months.

AR/VR

With the lockdown in effect, many businesses are now functioning online. Even conferences and meetings are witnessing an online transition, which has called for the rising demand for AR/VR technologies. There is a newfound love for these technologies to facilitate business while ensuring optimal comfort and productivity.

Looking at the increased interest, many companies including Digital Jalebi are moving towards web AR and VR so that these experiences are just a click away. For instance, they are working on bringing an experience where users can have an AR/VR experience without installing a new application. They are also working on photorealistic shaders and rendering techniques with the browsers.

Fawaz Syed, Co-founder & Director of Digital Jalebi believes that almost all the businesses around the world have been affected, especially the visualisation or Simulation techniques. He shares that there has been a significant increase in interest among the customers who would like to get the visualisation of the product or apartments sitting at their homes without the need to actually visit the showroom.

Photorealistic visualisation techniques and seamless interactions will make the experience as close to the real one, he says. Some of the areas where AR/VR can be used tremendously are furniture visualisation, apartment interactive walkthroughs, home interior customisation, among others.

There has also been a surge in the requirement for virtual events platforms as many events are getting cancelled because of the lockdown. The company has been working on developing a platform that can allow users to carry all the aspects of a physical event such as registration, audience engagement and immersive presentations, fun activities and analytics.

Facial Recognition

Given the risk of human to human transmission of the coronavirus, many companies are looking to find an alternative for fingerprint scanners. Facial recognition comes as the most suitable option. Many countries such as China and Russia are already pitching for facial recognition to tackle COVID-19 as it avoids the need for many people touching the same surface.

With this boost to the facial recognition industry, many companies such as DERMALOG in Germany and Telpo in China have started working on it. Many other companies such as Hanvon is also facilitating facial recognition technology connected to a temperature sensor that could measure the body temperature in people.

The scenario in India is no different with many companies already working to replace fingerprint-based attendance systems with facial recognition systems. Companies such as Ramco Systems and Secureye are already observing an increase in the number of enquiries about facial recognition systems.

Indian police such as Pune state has also developed a facial recognition software system for surveillance of home quarantine persons. It lets the person upload registration details using the app. They are using AI-based face recognition and GPS algorithms to compare against the registered information. Other governments such as the Rajasthan government and Karnataka state are also using similar strategies.

While the rush to implement facial recognition may call for privacy concerns, the fact that it can help with containment is giving it a major boost. Many companies are customizing their solutions to make it better equipped to even track positive patients.

While the COVID-19 pandemic has made the situation worrisome, businesses are looking to thrive in the current scenario. Technologies such as augmented reality, virtual reality and facial recognition are definitely a means to accomplish it.

Cloud Storage and Cloud Computing

Many companies are moving applications, data and other business elements to the cloud. This is to primarily ensure accessibility of data as the teams are working remotely during the lockdown. It has become the need of an hour for companies to have a centralised location that can be accessed anywhere in the world.

While cloud storage is gaining prominence to save files in cloud-based servers, cloud computing is also being looked up to complete projects.

There is a visible increase in the demand for cloud storage and computing especially in software and data analytics firms that work with large amounts of data. The increased demand could be attributed to the fact that it brings about an ease of universal accessibility, makes work smarter and faster and ensures hassle-free data storage.

Chipmakers For Cloud Computing

It is interesting to note that the stock market for chipmakers that serve cloud computing data centres have observed a surge in the last few days. As cloud computing services are providing an infrastructure to handle the increasing work from home and homeschooling markets, it has given rise to the makers of chips that bring about high-performance computing.

For instance, companies such as Nvidia and Inphi that provide GPUs and products critical for moving large amounts of digital information quickly between and within data centres are seeing an increase in demand.

Cyber Security

Given the turn of events in the current scenario, digitisation has dramatically increased which in turn calls for greater cybersecurity and privacy measures to be in place. With work from home becoming the new normal, there are chances of increased cybersecurity threats if proper security measures are not in place.

To ensure proper security, users may turn to cybersecurity companies to use mitigation tools against any possible threats, especially as remote access and work from home become common.

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These Businesses Are Thriving Amid COVID-19 Crisis - Analytics India Magazine

Retrospect 17,one of the most comprehensive backup programs you can find, is the latest incarnation of a venerable, capable, and reliable program that PCWorld has actually used to back up its content in the past. The Solo version I tested offers the same file backup and disaster recovery and vast media type support I became used to, but adds modern niceties such as online storage, storage pool support, and more. It served us well once, and will serve you well if you need its advanced feature set.

The flip side of that is that the program would be overkill for many users. Also, the interface, while efficient, involves a learning curve, especially because of the jargon-heavy terminology used.

This review is part of our ongoing roundup of the best Windows backup software. Go there for information on competing products and how we tested them.

Retrospect 17 is available for a single computer for $49 (Solo), and $119 for five computers (Desktop). Subscriptions are available starting from $4 a month. Thats the end-user/SOHO stuff. There are a host of enterprise solutions for servers, as well as a management console and VM (Virtual Machine) support for the IT staff. The enterprise is really Retrospects bread-and-butter market, but having used the program extensively myself, I can attest that its good stuff for the average user as wellonce you know it.

Though the language is odd, Retrospect is easy to use once you know it and supports multiple destinations.

I was a bit surprised, not having looked at Retrospect for over 10 years, that the interface had not changed much, if at all. In the backup world, however, steady connotes reliabilty, so thats not a knock in the least. Its very efficient.

Theres still the highly-efficient collapsible function tree to the left, wizard-like script (job) creation, and logical but not immediately intuitive workflow, with jargon-heavy nomenclature. For instance, while Sources is obvious enough, clicking on Destination gives you the option to select a Backup Set." Thats the same as a destination, but it can give you pause initially. Where most backup programs let you filter the files that will be backed up (whitelisting, blacklisting) files, Retrospect puts this under Select. Instead of Jobs, you have Scripts, etc.

As its likely not what youre used to, I do recommend reading the well-written and comprehensive help guide before you get down to business. Note that with some types of backups, such as those made to tape, the catalog file may be stored on the machine from which the backup was made rather than with the data. Thats just one of the things the manual will tell you.

Retrospect is packed to the rafters with features. You can monitor backups, schedule and automate them, and run programs before and afterward. You can choose between progressive (basically a combination of incremental and differential) and full backups, select compression or encryption, create disaster recovery media, and much more. Destinations can include tape, optical, hard drives, storage groups, and just about anything else thats ever been designed to store data. Take a look at the screenshot below, which shows just the categories of options that are available once youve defined the basics.

Retrospects options dialog box contains virtually every option ever conceived for backup programs. The now out-of-fashion collapsible tree works very efficiently to show all the possibilities.

The shot above also points out that Retrospect supports Windows, macOS, and Linux, which covers a fair chunk of the computers on the planet. (The exception is Chromebooks, but Google designed those to store in the cloud for the most part.)

I cant think of one feature Ive seen in another backup program that isnt implemented in some way in Retrospect. If you want complete control over your backups, it provides it. Theres even more esoteric stuff such as ProactivAI, which is a very fancy name (and another misuse of the term AI), that simply means the program will try to keep track of your sources and destinations and will prioritize backups according to need. This is obviously more useful when youre backing up a larger number of PCs, but it illustrates where Retrospects strengths are.

Probably the most salient omission froms Solo is restore to dissimilar hardware for the disaster recovery media. This is not the issue it once was, as Windows now has standard drivers that will work with just about any hardware, but if you need it, its a $99 add-on. Note that to create recovery media, you must download the Microsoft Assessment and Deployment Kit. Thats a bit of a pain, as is being forced to get vendor connection tokens manually to use online storage. Thats about it for complaints.

There are lot of other add-ons such for enterprise, such as open file backup and the management console, but those wont be of much interest to the average user.

Retrospect, PCWorld, and I go a long way back. The backups of the magazine were performed using the program and 8mm tape for a very long time. Said backups were were extremely reliable. Extremely, as in we never had an issue that wasnt tape-related. Being largely a Mac product, Apples Time Machine hurt sales significantly with the average user, and though Retrospect never disappeared, it faded from consumer-level awareness.

Retrospect supports all types of media, including online services.

I tested Retrospect to local media (external hard drives and SSDs) and my main NAS box using a 250GB data set. I had zero issues backing and restoring, and speed was on a par with, or better than, the competition. With computers as fast as they are these days, performance is almost never an issue, even with heavy compression. Creating the recovery disk required the aforementioned download, but worked as advertised.

Most everyday users will be fine with one of the free backup software options such as those available from your operating system or from Easeus or Aomei and others. On the other hand, anyone who desires ultra-fine control over their backups and support for every type of media in existence will appreciate Retrospect. For those, the $50 will be money well spent. Theres a 45-day free trial available if youd like to kick the tires yourself.

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Retrospect 17 Solo review: Backup software that gives you everything - PCWorld

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Earlier in 2020, Microsoft rolled out an Android version of whats called a unified Office mobile app. The app includes Word, Excel, and Powerpoint all in one mobile application.

Previous to this rollout, you needed to install individual mobile apps for Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. Now you can get all three in one Microsoft Office app for Android or for iOS.

If youre curious about installing Microsoft Office Mobile, the following review should help you decide whether or not its right for you.

The moment you install and launch the Microsoft Office app, youll notice how quickly it runs. The app launches in seconds, and tapping items changes the window almost immediately.

Beyond the small footprint of the app, youll also notice that its intuitive. Finding your way is simple.

In the home screen, youll see any previous documents you were working on, as well as a list of any older files in your OneDrive account.

To get started using either Word, Excel, or Powerpoint, you just have to tap the + icon at the bottom of the screen. This brings up three icons.

The folder icon at the upper right of the home screen takes you to the Browse window. This is where you can see files in your OneDrive account, Google Drive, or items stored locally on your mobile device. You can also see any documents other users have shared with you, or add a new cloud storage account that you want to use with Microsoft Office mobile.

If you tap the personal OneDrive account, youll notice that it may look familiar if youre a Google Drive user. Navigating OneDrive directories and files inside this app is very similar to navigating Google Drive using the Google Drive app.

You tap folders to drill into them, and tap files to open them. Three dots to the right of file names provide options to share or see the file properties.

When you tap Documents from the main screen, youll see the option to open Word, Excel, or Powerpoint. Youll notice an icon to Scan text for opening Word.

If you tap Scan text, itll switch to the camera. As the app attempts to recognize text on the page, youll notice a red box around the outside of the text block.

Once its in-focus, press the white button at the bottom of the window. The Office mobile app will use optical character recognition (OCR) to convert the printed text document into a Word document.

OCR in the Office mobile app is surprisingly accurate. Its an excellent way to capture documents that you can edit later.

Using the mobile Word app is surprisingly easy, even on a small mobile screen. Youll see all of the common Word functions that are normally in the ribbon by tapping the up arrow at the bottom of the window.

These include the things youd expect, like:

The free version of Microsoft Office mobile has far fewer features than if you have an Office 365 subscription. However, even the free version is useful for all of your standard document needs.

Excel inside this Office mobile app is just as intuitive. All of the features youd expect to find in Excel is available. Its also easy to navigate and edit spreadsheets with just your fingers and the on-screen keyboard.

Tap in any cell and type = to start using functions. As you type, youll see a list of functions that start with those letters. If youre not sure what function you want, tap fx at the upper left corner of the screen and search through the functions directory.

Microsoft has made doing certain tasks youd think would be difficult, very easy. For example, the resize multiple cells, just drag your finger to highlight them and use the circles on each side to resize the cells.

Word, Excel, and PowerPoint all come with useful templates you can use to save time when creating new documents. Excel includes the most useful ones like budgets, task management, and organizers.

Functions from the desktop app that youll find in this mobile version of Excel include:

You wont find advanced VBA or macros in this online version, but for most Excel users itll have everything you need.

You can also add multiple tabs to your spreadsheets by tapping the tabbed folder icon at the lower-left corner. Then, tap the + icon on the right of the tabs.

Tap the tab and select Rename to rename the tab. You can also change its color, duplicate it, hide, move, and delete tabs.

You can easily share your spreadsheets with others by tapping the three connected dots share icon at the upper right of the window. This will bring up a Share window.

You can share the file as a link or as an attachment via email. Or, simply type email addresses into the Invite people to this file field. Those people will need to use their Office 365 account (free or paid) to access your shared file.

Again, this looks very similar to how Google handles file sharing in Google Drive. It seems that Microsoft is taking a few pages from Googles playbook.

If creating a PowerPoint presentation inside a mobile app scares you, rest assured that inside the Office Mobile app its not hard at all.

When you first launch PowerPoint, you can choose a theme to start with (highly recommended). Then, just type the text into each slide, add notes, and add any pictures you like as well.

To add another slide, just tap the + icon to the right of the slide deck.

Youll see tools on the bottom of the screen to add pictures, shapes, or text to your slides. Most of the simple text and shape formatting options youd expect are available.

The real power behind this app comes from its casting feature. If you tap the presentation icon (a picture of a TV on a stand) in the menu bar, the presentation launches in full-screen mode. Tap the screen and youll see a cast icon at the top. Tap this to view available Chromecast devices on your network.

When you select that device it will play the presentation slides in full-screen on that television. Meanwhile, on your mobile device, youll see the slide along with the notes underneath it.

This makes giving presentations much more enjoyable. You can use your phone to glance at your notes for the slide, while your audience can only see the slide presentation.

Even if you dont use the PowerPoint mobile app to create your presentations, it would be worthwhile to save your desktop created presentations to your OneDrive account. Then, you can open it with your mobile device to give your presentation.

One major issue with Android is that there has never been a very good note-taking app available for the platform. Microsoft Notes in the Mobile Office app changes all of that.

Note-taking is fast and easy with Notes. It also lets you change the background, edit and format the text, make quick bullet lists, and more.

Its also very easy to share those notes with other users by using the same sharing feature as the other apps.

From the main screen, if you tap the Actions icon at the bottom, youll see a list of other useful features.

These features include:

As you can see, the Microsoft Office mobile app is like six or seven apps all built into one. For a Microsoft product, its surprisingly intuitive and easy to learn.

If you havent tried the Office mobile app yet, give it a try. Who knows, you might find yourself using it more than you use Google Drive apps!

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Microsoft Office For Android: Is it Any Good? - groovyPost

There are, as always, two kinds of people in the world: those who are wondering what to do with all their free time, and those who are wondering what happened to it. The split seems to be closely correlated with the number of children who live with you.

If you are in the former group, you, like me, may have exhausted a significant quantity of procrastination cleaning. I have vacuumed under the sofa, changed the filter on my cooker hood, and even started painting the kitchen.

So why not introduce a digital component to the great tidy-up? Your laptops downloads folder might not literally collect dust, but whether physical or digital, the longer you leave things to fester, the harder they become to eventually deal with.

We all do it: its the honeymoon period with a new app, freshly downloaded, full of possibility. It asks for notification access and you grant it. Then nine months go by, and suddenly it is flashing up a push alert for a 10% off code for an annual subscription if you refer three friends. You dismiss the notification and get on with your day, but the app keeps showing up never enough to prompt you to action, but frustrating all the same.

So head to your notification settings, and search for the apps you actually want to hear from. A good rule of thumb is, only give notification access to apps that will send you real messages from real people. Oh, and maybe your favourite news app.

Its easier than ever to take photos, and have more of them than ever are stored on our devices. So its harder than ever to find the pictures that we want to look at.

AI helps a bit: Apple is moderately good at letting you search for pictures by who is in them, what they are of, or where they were taken; Google does the same job better, with a privacy trade-off. But if you want a photo library that serves a purpose beyond hoarding, you will have to delete some pictures.

Screenshots are a good target, as is clearing out all but one of every image of which you took 15 versions. And why not trim your selfie folder to just the greatest thirst traps, chucking those sunsets that dont quite match the reality of being there. You could save yourself money how many of us are paying for extra cloud storage to avoid tackling this mess head-on? And you would be reducing your carbon footprint too.

If you dont use a password manager, your digital life is insecure. I have heard it all, from people who insist that they have an uncrackable system (putting amaz0n at the end of one password and faceb00k at the end of the other is less secure than you think) to people who swear blind that they have memorised a unique password for every site they visit (until they are pushed, when they admit that yes, they have one password they reuse for unimportant sites).

The truth is, most hacks I hear about are due to credential stuffing using stolen login-password combinations from one site to breach another, thanks to the fact that people just cant stop reusing passwords. So download a password manager, such as 1Password or Dashlane they tend to be easier to use and more flexible than the built-in options from Apple and Google, although those work in a pinch and devote some time to switching your bad passwords to good random ones.

Then, turn on two-factor authentication everywhere you can. This requires you to type in a code, as well as your password, every time you log in, and offers some protection against phishing attacks. Try to avoid text message-based systems if you can, though: instead, get an app such as Authy, or use the built-in two factor tools in services such as 1Password, to store the codes you generate.

At the very least, you should do this for Amazon, Twitter, Facebook and Google, and if you want to get serious about it, a YubiKey (a small physical dongle that plugs in to your phone or computer) can do the same thing even faster.

Just like phone notifications, unwanted email is an efficiency nightmare. It is quicker to hit delete and move on, but over time, it would be quicker to unsubscribe from all those emails you never read. So do it! Trawl through your deleted emails, and click on unsubscribe on those you no longer want to receive.

Automated services will do this for you, but these are a privacy nightmare one of the most famous, unroll.me, apologised in 2017 after it emerged that its business model involved selling user data gathered from the inboxes it monitored.

This one is easy: go to haveIbeenpwned.com, and type in every email address you have. Then, when the site inevitably tells you that your personal information has been stolen by hackers numerous times, get a password manager.

I cant tell you to delete Facebook. The site remains pivotal to the social lives of many, and its hooks into other services mean that even if you rarely go to Facebook.com, deleting your account might be a difficult choice. But I can suggest that you strongly consider it: Facebook is the ground zero for many of the disordered digital habits that a spring clean is supposed to help, from receiving manipulative notifications to endless scrolling.

If you cant bring yourself to delete your account, then deleting the app is a good step towards it: doing so will help heighten your sense of whether or not you really enjoy using Facebook, or just click on it because its there.

Google is admirably open about all the ways it keeps track of your every move and utterance. The site stores its surveillance history in public, for you to check, at myactivity.google.com. A visit there will reveal everything Google has been monitoring, from your web searches, to the YouTube videos you watch, to where you go and what you say to your phone.

The good news is, its easy to delete it all, to set up automatic deletions going forward, or even just to prevent the company tracking you at all. I did the latter, and havent looked back since.

Neat file systems are alike; each messy one is messy in its own way and an awful lot of them involve storing everything on the desktop. Still, without knowing what horrors you have inflicted on your poor hard drive, I cant tell you how to fix them. But I can suggest one area you have probably let slide: your downloads folder.

If you are anything like me, the downloads folder is a mixture of things you never meant to download, things that you have already copied over elsewhere, installed, or added to a library, and things that you needed once then forgot about. So clear them out but be careful, because everyone also has one file in their downloads folder that is irreplaceable, essential, and named something like Dwnld124067395. Make sure you move that one somewhere safer, and rename it.

Ross Sleight, of the digital consultancy Somo, suggests this: Regularly check and clear the third-party sites and apps that are using your Facebook or Google ID as login information. Sharing this info makes it faster for you to create accounts, but its worth reviewing and revoking the access for sites and apps youve not used for a while.

Facebooks cybersecurity is pretty good, but if you gave access to your profile to what Hollywood celebrity are you dot tv in 2009, and that gets hacked, there isnt much Facebook can do to stop criminals wreaking havoc on your digital life. Block outdated integrations now, before you regret it later.

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The digital spring clean: how to sort out your passwords, privacy and bulging photo folder - The Guardian