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Snap reaches $1-billion cloud computing deal with Amazon Web Services – Los Angeles Times

February 9, 2017 | Author: admin

Feb. 9, 2017, 6:11 a.m.

Snap is hedging its reliance on Google for online storage and computing resources with a $1-billion agreement with rival Amazon Web Services.

Videos and photos posted toSnapchatmove through computers operated by Google as the traverse the Internet under a five-year, $2-billion agreement between the companies. On Thursday, Snap said it has signed a similar deal with Amazon as a backup.

Analysts have questioned Snap's usage of computingvendors becausecosts could get out of hand as its social media and entertainment service grows. Many companies, including Facebook, have developed their own infrastructure. Though Snap said it might go that route, the company described working with third parties as a better use of its limited cash.

Still, the hosting costs likely accounted for about a third to a half of Snap's $925 million in expenses last year.

Snap said it has worked with Amazon since last March. Amazon is scheduled to receive $50 million from Snap this year, $125 million in 2018, $200 million in 2019, $275 million in 2020 and $350 million in 2021.

It’s not just Google Snap has a $1 billion cloud services deal with Amazon, too – Recode

February 9, 2017 | Author: admin

It turns out that Google isnt the only company Snap is paying for cloud and infrastructure support.

Snap also has a $1 billion deal with Amazon to use its cloud computing services, according to an updated version of its S-1 IPO paperwork made public Thursday morning.

The deal originally signed last year, then amended on Wednesday is for redundant infrastructure support of our business operations, and Snap says it may also invest in building our own infrastructure to better serve our customers.

The agreement requires Snap to spend at least $50 million with Amazon in 2017 and increase its spending each year for the next five years until it reaches at least $350 million in 2021.

Snaps deal with Google, worth $2 billion over five years, was one of the big takeaways from the companys original S-1. We knew Snap was a big client for Google. We didnt know just how big.

But Snap also left the door open to work with other service providers. While it said that its deal with Google requires that we use their cloud services for substantially all of our hosting requirements, it also mentioned that the arrangement permits us to use other third-party service providers for a portion of our cloud services."

Enter Amazon, whose cloud business brought in $12 billion last year. And while its Snap deal isnt as big as the one with Google, its still big. And it shows Snap hasnt handcuffed itself to just one provider.

One other notable update from the revised S-1: Compensation information for board member Joanna Coles.

Stories circulated this past week that Coles, the former editor of Cosmo and Snaps only female board member, was being paid significantly less than her male counterparts. That was indeed true in 2016. Coles signed a one-year contract in late 2015, and other board members signed more lucrative four-year deals in late 2016.

But the revised S-1 shows that Coles now has a new compensation deal with Snap that was signed in January. The deal means Coles will make $35,000 cash annually for her board commitments, and she has been awarded a stock grant of 52,736 shares that vest over three years.

Thats an average of nearly 17,579 shares per year, slightly higher than fellow board members Scott Miller and Christopher Young, neither of whom are employees or Snap investors, just like Coles. They signed four-year deals last October that included stock awards of 16,276 shares per year. A few other board members still have more lucrative deals than Coles, but shes no longer the odd person out.

Link:
It's not just Google Snap has a $1 billion cloud services deal with Amazon, too - Recode

Trump Ties at Oracle, IBM Could Pose Recruitment Challenge – Talkin’ Cloud

February 9, 2017 | Author: admin

Last week, 97 companies including some of the biggest technology firms filed a legal brief that condemns President Donald Trumps executive order on immigration. If you look at the list, you may notice a couple of significant cloud companies missing: IBM and Oracle.

IBM and Oracle are two companies that established early ties to the Trump administration, causing uneasiness among some employees who see it as counterproductive to their long-time commitments to diversity and inclusion.

Whatever your political views may be, it is interesting to consider the potential long-term effects of their actions. There are already reports of two employees from the respective companies resigning based on this reason alone. So far there is no evidence that cloud service providers are considering severing ties with vendors because of their views or affiliations with Trump.

So ifOracle and IBM are out of touch with the views of their employees, could it hinder their ability to attract top talent in the long-run? How will that impact their ability to compete in the market?

Last year IBM CEO Ginni Rometty said that the company has no problem attracting the best talent, and in addition to wooing people from Google and Facebook, gets almost a million and a half applications a year.

Subha Barry, vice president of Working Mother Media, told Bloomberg that companies that want to hold on to their best talent will have have to explain and uphold the values their corporations espouse on everything from diversity to protecting the environment.

A petition started by IBM employees calling out IBM CEO Ginni Rometty for her failure to affirm the companys core values of diversity in open letter to President Donald Trump has reached nearly 2,000 signatures.

The petition, launched in December, has received signatures from 1,825current and past IBM employees and community supporters at the time of writing.

We are disappointed that IBM CEO Ginni Rometty's open letter to President-elect Donald Trump does not affirm IBMers' core values of diversity, inclusiveness, and ethical business conduct, the petition says. For our mutual aid and protection, we call on IBM to expand diversity recruitment programs, and we assert our right to refuse participation in any U.S. government contracts that violate constitutionally protected civil liberties. We call on IBM to demonstrate commitment to our Business Conduct Guidelines and to prevent perceived influence peddling through Trump affiliated businesses. Lastly, in the present context of insecurity and unpredictability, we call on IBM to return to our traditions of high worker retention and morale by making retirement plans equitable once again.

A petition by Oracle, launched around the same time, has had much less momentum, receiving around 100 signatures.

Neither company has responded to the petitions publicly, andRometty continues to advise Trump, a company spokesman tells Bloomberg.

While companies have been the targets of political protests before, theres been nothing this substantial by employees, Roger Gottlieb, a Worcester Polytechnic Institute professor told Bloomberg. It may be a reflection of the new economy where employees feel less allegiance and entitled to more of a say.

Original post:
Trump Ties at Oracle, IBM Could Pose Recruitment Challenge - Talkin' Cloud

Bitcoin price falls as Chinese authorities meet with exchanges – MarketWatch

February 8, 2017 | Author: admin

Bitcoin prices retreated Wednesday following reports that Chinas central bank is holding a closed-door meeting with several local cryptocurrency exchanges.

The news, first reported by Bloomberg, revived fears that authorities in one of bitcoins biggest markets are planning to crack down on the digital currency market, said Charles Hayter, founder and chief executive officer of CryptoCompare. Until recently, Chinese authorities had allowed bitcoin trading to flourish with relatively few restrictions.

Bitcoin US:BTCUSD dropped as much as 3% on Wednesday after the news broke. It was down 1% in recent trade, with one bitcoin trading at $1,051. On Tuesday, the worlds largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization traded above $1,1060, its highest level since Jan. 4, when bitcoin traded at $1,100, its highest level in more than three years.

Read: Venezuelan authorities arrest 4 bitcoin miners

Also read: Bitcoin price soars past $1,060 as political worries intensify

Check out: And 2016s best-performing commodity isbitcoin?

Money laundering was one of the topics up for discussion at the meeting, according to the Bloomberg report.

News emerged late last year that Chinese authorities were exploring how to better monitor, and possibly restrict, digital-currency trading to prevent market manipulation and money laundering. In January, Chinas largest bitcoin exchanges announced they had adopted new controls to ensure compliance with local rules in accordance with the wishes of authorities at the Peoples Bank of China, the countrys central bank.

Chinese exchanges also adopted trading fees, leading to a dramatic reduction in local trading volume. Previously, Chinese exchanges had handled nearly 90% of bitcoin transactions thanks in part to their rock-bottom trading fees. U.S. exchanges, by comparison, have always required clients to pay a fee to trade.

The growth of the bitcoin market in China has been sharp, bitcoin experts say. Bitcoin miners based in China are responsible for generating more than two-thirds of the bitcoin networks processing power. Bitcoin miners compete to process pending bitcoin transactions by rushing to solve complex cryptographic puzzles before others. Whoever is first to solve a puzzle blockchain, is rewarded with a cache of freshly minted bitcoins.

The price of a single bitcoin more than doubled in 2016. Bitcoin watchers said a sharp decline in the value of the Chinese yuan USDCNY, -0.0800% inspired some locals to invest in bitcoin to help preserve the value of their assets, or, as some believe, as a means of circumventing the countrys stringent capital controls.

Originally posted here:
Bitcoin price falls as Chinese authorities meet with exchanges - MarketWatch

New system makes it harder to track Bitcoin transactions – Phys.org – Phys.Org

February 8, 2017 | Author: admin

February 8, 2017

Researchers from North Carolina State University, Boston University and George Mason University have developed a Bitcoin-compatible system that could make it significantly more difficult for observers to identify or track the parties involved in any given Bitcoin transaction.

Bitcoin was initially conceived as a way for people to exchange money anonymously. But then it was discovered that anyone could track all Bitcoin transactions and often identify the parties involved.

Bitcoin operates by giving each user a unique public key, which is a string of numbers. Users can transmit money in the form of digital bitcoins from one public key to another. This is made possible by a system that ensures a user has enough bitcoins in his or her account to make the transfer. The use of the public keys gave users a sense of anonymity, even though all of the transactions were visible on the public Bitcoin blockchain which lists all transactions. Over time, experts and private companies have developed highly effective methods of de-anonymizing those public keys.

Now researchers have developed a system called TumbleBit, which is a computer protocol that runs on top of Bitcoin.

TumbleBit takes advantage of an existing concept called "mixing service." The idea works like this: instead of Party A paying Party B directly, many different Parties A pay an intermdiary "tumbler," which then pays the Parties B. The more parties are involved, the harder it is to determine which Party A paid which Party B.

"However, this still has a security flaw," says Alessandra Scafuro, an assistant professor of computer science at NC State and co-author of a paper describing TumbleBit. "Namely, if an outside observer can compromise the tumbler, it could figure out who was paying whom."

To address this, TumbleBit takes a three-phased approach.

In the first phase, called escrow, the Parties A notify the tumbler that they would like to make a payment, and the Parties B notify the tumbler that they would like to be paid. This is all done on the public blockchain.

For the second phase, the researchers have put cryptographic tools into place that allow the tumbler to pay the correct parties without actually knowing which parties are involved. Phase two does not appear on the blockchain.

In the third phase, called cashout, all of the transactions are conducted simultaneously, making it more difficult to identify which parties are involved in any specific transaction. Phase three does appear in the public blockchain.

"We tested TumbleBit with 800 Bitcoin users, and found that the second phase only took seconds to complete," Scafuro says.

"One limitation of TumbleBit is that, right now, the system is designed to work with a fixed denomination - so paying amounts larger than that denomination require making multiple payments," Scafuro says. "That's something we're working on."

The paper, "TumbleBit: An Untrusted Bitcoin-Compatible Anonymous Payment Hub," will be presented at the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium, being held Feb. 26 to March 1 in San Diego, Calif.

Explore further: Finally, interesting uses for the blockchain that go beyond bitcoin

More information: "TumbleBit: An Untrusted Bitcoin-Compatible Anonymous Payment Hub," DOI: 10.14722/ndss.2017.23086

Most people who have heard the term think that the "blockchain" is only something to do with cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, litecoin, doguecoin and others. It's the technology that underpins digital currencies and ensures ...

Singapore will launch a new electronic payment system using blockchain, the technology behind the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, the city-state's central bank chief said Wednesday.

Australian police raided a home and office Wednesday that, according to technology websites, belongs to the founder of the virtual currency, bitcoin. However, the origin of the currency remains murky, as is the identity of ...

The IRS obtained a court order Wednesday allowing it to seek the names of people who may have failed to pay taxes on virtual currency exchanged through a San Francisco company.

Hong Kong Bitcoin exchange Bitfinex announced that it had been hacked and 119,756 Bitcoins stolen which at current prices represents nearly US $69 million. Bitcoin prices dropped 20% after word of the hack became public ...

Goldman Sachs is developing a virtual currency system that aims to revolutionize securities transactions, according to a US patent application filed by the Wall Street investment bank.

As the planet warms due to climate change and hot days become more common, the US electrical grid could be unable to meet peak energy needs by century's end, researchers warned Monday.

Researchers at MIT and Brigham and Women's Hospital have designed and demonstrated a small voltaic cell that is sustained by the acidic fluids in the stomach. The system can generate enough power to run small sensors or drug ...

Unlock them with an app, drop them off anywhere, and nip past lanes of stationary car traffic: the humble bicycle is seeing a revival in China as a new generation of start-ups help tackle urban congestion and pollution with ...

Bats have long captured the imaginations of scientists and engineers with their unrivaled agility and maneuvering characteristics, achieved by functionally versatile dynamic wing conformations as well as more than forty active ...

Engineers at MIT have fabricated transparent, gel-based robots that move when water is pumped in and out of them. The bots can perform a number of fast, forceful tasks, including kicking a ball underwater, and grabbing and ...

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(The upside is that it will still hide individual payments - so at least that part is anonymized)

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New system makes it harder to track Bitcoin transactions - Phys.org - Phys.Org

ChronoBank Raised $4m in Cryptocurrency with a Week Left for the Crowdsale – Finance Magnates

February 8, 2017 | Author: admin

ChronoBank, a blockchain-based initiative aimed at disrupting the short-term recruitment sector, has already raised just over $4 million in cryptocurrency with itscrowdfund which will end in only one week. It recently reached two new partnerships both in the employment and cryptocurrency spaces.

To unlock the Asian market, register now to the iFX EXPO in Hong Kong.

ChronoBank has established a strategic partnership with Instahire, a team that is launching an app to expedite the recruitment process. Instahire is associated with the Clifford Wallace Agency, which supplies hospitality staffing to corporate events and restaurants and receives around 1,000 job applications per month. ChronoBanks team met with representatives from Instahire last week to discuss the possibility of a partnership between the two organisations. They say that both immediately saw the potential opportunities.

Instahire will launch in February 2017, first locally in Sydney and then to Australia in its entirety. The app is currently in the final stages of testing, ahead of first release, and hospitality businesses are actively being sought and added to the list. The immediate synergy for ChronoBank is to help grow the number of pre-registrations for both jobseekers and businesses.

Once the Instahire app is up and running with sufficient numbers of employers and employees, it will make sense to introduce the LH currency used on the ChronoBank platform. As an added incentive, the team are discussing the possibility of offering a free ChronoBank debit card with $20 credit for every new registered user, charging a 2% wage transfer fee.

ChronoBank has also partnered with theNEM cryptocurrency platform to create a separate wallet for the NEM ecosystem. ChronoBank will also issue Labour Hour (LH) tokens on the NEM network and use on-chain multi-sig, one of NEMs flagship security features.

NEM (New Economy Movement) was originally conceived as a clone of the Nxt blockchain, but rapidly developed into a completely new project with its own codebase. Its ecosystem has since grown with a market cap of around $60 million now, placing it in the top 10 of all cryptocurrencies.

It is important for us to deploy tokens on several blockchains, comments Sergei Sergienko, CEO of ChronoBank.This builds in redundancy and broadens our appeal across many initiatives and communities.

LH will leverage NEMs token asset facility that enables businesses to create blockchain tokens with specific properties and identifiers. The flexibility and ease of use of this system is highly appealing to us, continues Sergienko. NEMs developers have designed a powerful but nevertheless intuitive approach to token operations.

Aside from issuing tokens on the NEM network, ChronoBank is creating a dedicated wallet for the NEM blockchain. This will incorporate another powerful feature of the NEM blockchain: on-chain multi-signature transactions. Up to 32 signatories can be required to sign a transaction and, uniquely to NEM, signatures are propagated across the blockchain as soon as they are created. The developers explain that this means further signatories do not have to worry about an aggregating server going offline there is no single point of failure.

Continued here:
ChronoBank Raised $4m in Cryptocurrency with a Week Left for the Crowdsale - Finance Magnates

Will Cryptocurrency Abuse be an Enforcement Focus for the IRS this Tax Season? – JD Supra (press release)

February 8, 2017 | Author: admin

Your first step to building a free, personalized, morning email brief covering pertinent authors and topics on JD Supra:

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Will Cryptocurrency Abuse be an Enforcement Focus for the IRS this Tax Season? - JD Supra (press release)

Top 3 Cloud Storage Priorities in 2017 – Talkin’ Cloud

February 8, 2017 | Author: admin

In recent years, cloud storage vendors have been popping up to address the growing demand for cloud storage solutions, a market that is expected to reach $74.94 billion by 2021, up from $23.76 billion in 2016.

One of those vendors is Zadara Storage, a six-year-old company based in Irvine, Calif., that offers enterprise Storage-as-a-Service, and has partnerships with cloud service providers including AWS, Microsoft, and Google. Its Partner Network includes cloud resellers, integrators and VARs.

A report released this week, commissioned by Zadara, asked IT decision-makers from the U.S., U.K. and Germany to weigh in on their cloud storage strategies. It found that above all else, decision-makers are looking for cloud storage that offers scalability to fit their organizations needs.

As future requirements are unknown, buyers will be attracted to vendors that impose the fewest limitations on scalability, with the lowest entry price point and the highest levels of security and availability, according to a paper by IDC analysts Silvia Cosso and Nick Sundby.

Heres a look at 3 of the cloud storage priorities of IT decision-makers in 2017:

One-third of IT decision-makers (33 percent) said they plan to deploy cloud storage that scales up and down according to their organizations needs. The ability to scale is essential for workloads such as ecommerce, online marketing, mobile applications, and high-performance computing, according to IDC.

[E]nterprises need flexible storage that can stretch and reduce almost in real time, without having to plan ahead, and without the risk of buying unneeded capacity, IDC said in a data sheet about Zadara Storage.

As Talkin Cloud has noted before, service level agreements (SLAs) for cloud storage are important because they set clear expectations for cloud storage customers. According to Zadara, 17 percent of decision-makers it surveyed want to obtain stronger SLAs for their cloud storage vendors this year.

Thirteen-percent of survey respondents are looking at deploying new storage hardware in 2017.

According to IDC, 26 percent of Zadara storage customers opted for its on-premises option, which uses dedicated Zadara hardware, in 2015. In 2016, Zadara's On Premise as a Service(OPaaS) offering grew to 40 percent of overall recurring revenue.

IDC remarked in 2015 that this segment wasgrowing faster than Zadaras cloud business, and proving especially popular in Western Europe, where data sovereignty is of paramount importance.

Hardware spend coupled with public cloud storage will enable organizations to establish a hybrid approach which can ease compliance and regulatory concerns.

Talkin' Cloud Wants to Know...

In conversations with your own customers, what are their cloud storage priorities for 2017? How are you evolving your service offerings to meet those needs? Let us know in the comments.

This article has been updated to include figures for Zadara's OPaaS offering in 2016.

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Top 3 Cloud Storage Priorities in 2017 - Talkin' Cloud

Microsoft will give Azure customers access to 10000 patents to fight lawsuits – GeekWire

February 8, 2017 | Author: admin

Microsoft will help its cloud computing customersfight lawsuits from patent trolls.

As an added benefit to those paying for Microsoft Azure, the tech giant announced that it willnow offer Microsoft Azure IP Advantage, a new program that helps customers hitwithintellectual property lawsuits.

Microsoft President Brad Smith called it the industrys most comprehensive protection against intellectual property (IP) risks.

Our goal is to help foster a community that values and protects innovation and investments in the cloud, Smith wrote in a blog post. We want software developers to be able to focus on coding, and businesses and enterprises to be able to respond to the changing needs of their customers with agility without worrying about lawsuits.

Smith noted that as more and more companies utilize cloud-based software services, there has been a rise in cloud-rated IP lawsuits from patent trolls, which do not sell actual products but profit off patent litigation.

Microsofts new program will allow customers to utilize 10,000 patents of the companys patents, free of charge, for lawsuitsagainst their services that run on top of Azure. It will also expand an existing service that provides resources to those fighting patent lawsuits to include any open source technology that powers Microsoft Azure services, such as Hadoop used for Azure HD Insight.

Finally, the program assures Azure customers that if Microsoft transfers patents in the future to non-practicing entities, they can never be asserted against them.

The program is an added benefit for customers of Azure, which competes with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and others. Reuters noted that its designed to help an automaker, for example, that has auto-related patents but nonefor its mobile apps or connected car technologies that could put them at risk for litigation.

In its earnings report for the December quarter, Microsoft reached an annualized commercial cloud run rate of more than $14 billion, driven in part by its Azure cloud computing division.

AWS is still the market leader by a wide margin,although direct comparisons to Azureare difficult because Microsoft includes cloud applications such as Office 365 in itsfinancial calculation.

In the December quarter, MicrosoftsIntelligent Cloud segment postedrevenue of $6.86 billion, up 8 percent,and operating income of $2.39 billion.

In a call with analysts after the earnings release, CEO Satya Nadella repeated his earlier vowthat the company will reach$20 billion in annualized cloud revenue by the companys fiscal 2018, which ends June 30, 2018.

AWS CEO: Luck gave Amazon’s cloud-computing unit a boost – The Seattle Times

February 8, 2017 | Author: admin

Speaking at the University of Washington, Andy Jassy, head of Amazon Web Services, said that luck played a part in AWS huge growth but early decisions paved the way for the companys cloud-computing dominance.

The head of Amazon Web Services (AWS) said its dominance in cloud computing stems, in part, from luck but also from early decisions that proved critical to establishing a revolutionary business.

Theres always a fair amount that is luck, AWS CEO Andy Jassy said Tuesday in a speech at the University of Washingtons department of computer science and engineering. You have to have the right timing and some things have to break your way.

Jassys comments come as AWS Amazons cloud-computing unit, which rents out computing power and storage to enterprises, governments and entrepreneurs has become a $14 billion-a-year business, driven in recent years by mass migration of data from companies private data centers to shared ones. Its a decade-old business that Amazon pioneered and a hugely profitable one.

In 2016 it brought home $3.1 billion in operating income 32 percent more than Amazons North America retail unit, the companys largest business by revenue. Its also, by far, the largest cloud provider.

AWS sales growth rate, however, has slowed to 47percent in the fourth quarter of 2016 from 69percent in the year-earlier period, amid stiffening competition from Microsoft, Google and other large tech firms.

Among the early decisions at the foundation of AWS fortunes was the creation of primitive building blocks, basic functions that customers could use and combine according to their needs, Jassy said.

Also key: AWS sold its services a la carte and based charges on usage, much like a public utility. That was a big departure from the expensive, multiyear contracts that technology providers typically charged. People gave us a lot of credit early on for the pricing model, Jassy said.

The next critical decision was the market AWS first went after.

AWS leaders very consciously targeted software developers and startups early on, even though they knew that enterprises and governments would eventually be the largest clients, according to Jassy.

That turned out to be an extremely underserved segment, Jassy said. A lot of those developers were spending only a few bucks on AWS services, but we didnt mind that, the executive said. Some of those are going to be the next big enterprise in the next five to 10 years.

It was also necessary to keep innovating, quickly, to adapt to growing needs. Being quick and moving fast and being feature-poor to start with only works if you can deliver and iterate quickly, Jassy said.

Now the breadth and sophistication of AWS offerings include artificial intelligence, voice computing, databases and machine learning tools, some of which draw on the innovations Amazon has deployed on its Alexa digital assistant and in its fulfillment centers.

As for the growing competition, Jassy said that the market for computing-related services is so big that there is room for a number of successful cloud providers. But I dont think theres going to be 30, because scale really matters.

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AWS CEO: Luck gave Amazon's cloud-computing unit a boost - The Seattle Times

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Snap reaches $1-billion cloud computing deal with Amazon Web Services – Los Angeles Times

It’s not just Google Snap has a $1 billion cloud services deal with Amazon, too – Recode

Trump Ties at Oracle, IBM Could Pose Recruitment Challenge – Talkin’ Cloud

Bitcoin price falls as Chinese authorities meet with exchanges – MarketWatch

New system makes it harder to track Bitcoin transactions – Phys.org – Phys.Org

ChronoBank Raised $4m in Cryptocurrency with a Week Left for the Crowdsale – Finance Magnates

Will Cryptocurrency Abuse be an Enforcement Focus for the IRS this Tax Season? – JD Supra (press release)

Top 3 Cloud Storage Priorities in 2017 – Talkin’ Cloud

Microsoft will give Azure customers access to 10000 patents to fight lawsuits – GeekWire

AWS CEO: Luck gave Amazon’s cloud-computing unit a boost – The Seattle Times

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