Circa 2020
IBM knows how to adapt to an ever-changing enterprise tech landscape. The venerable company more almost 20 years ago shed its PC business – selling it to Lenovo – understanding that that systems were quickly becoming commodity devices and the market was going to stumble. A decade later IBM sold its X86-based server business to Lenovo for $2.3 billion and in the intervening years has put a keen focus on hybrid clouds and artificial intelligence, buying Red Hat for $34 billion and continuing to invest its Watson portfolio.
However, that hasn’t meant throwing out product lines simply because they’ve been around for a while. IBM has continued to upgrade its mainframe systems to keep up with modern workloads and the bet has paid off. In the last quarter 2,019 the company saw mainframe revenue – driven by its System z15 mainframe in September 2019 – jump 63 percent, a number followed the next quarter by a 59 percent increase.
Tape storage is a similar story. The company rolled out its first tape storage device in 1,952 the 726 Tape Unit, which had a capacity of 2MB. Five decades later, the company is still innovating its tape storage technology and this week said that, as part of a 15-year partnership with Fujifilm, has set a record with a prototype system of 317 gigabits-per-square-inch (GB/in2) in areal density, 27 times more than the areal density of current top-performance tape drives. The record, reached with the help of a new tape material called Strontium Ferrite (SrFe), is an indication that magnetic tape fits nicely in a data storage world of flash, SSDs and NVMe and a rising demand for cloud-based storage.
Mastercard has agreed to acquire blockchain analytics start-up CipherTrace, in the latest sign of how major companies are warming to cryptocurrencies.
The payments giant said Thursday it entered into an agreement to buy CipherTrace for an undisclosed amount. Based in Menlo Park, California, CipherTrace develops tools that help businesses and law enforcement root out illicit digital currency transactions. The company’s competitors include New York-based Chainalysis and London start-up Elliptic.
“Digital assets have the potential to reimagine commerce, from everyday acts like paying and getting paid to transforming economies, making them more inclusive and efficient,” Ajay Bhalla, president of cyber and intelligence at Mastercard, said in a statement. “With the rapid growth of the digital asset ecosystem comes the need to ensure it is trusted and safe.”
A study in which machine-learning models were trained to assess over 1 million companies has shown that artificial intelligence (AI) can accurately determine whether a startup firm will fail or become successful. The outcome is a tool, Venhound, that has the potential to help investors identify the next unicorn.
It is well known that around 90% of startups are unsuccessful: Between 10% and 22% fail within their first year, and this presents a significant risk to venture capitalists and other investors in early-stage companies. In a bid to identify which companies are more likely to succeed, researchers have developed machine-learning models trained on the historical performance of over 1 million companies. Their results, published in KeAi’s The Journal of Finance and Data Science, show that these models can predict the outcome of a company with up to 90% accuracy. This means that potentially 9 out of 10 companies are correctly assessed.
“This research shows how ensembles of non-linear machine-learning models applied to big data have huge potential to map large feature sets to business outcomes, something that is unachievable with traditional linear regression models,” explains co-author Sanjiv Das, Professor of Finance and Data Science at Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business in the US.
NASA just took an important step toward making flying taxis a practical reality. The agency has started flight testing with Joby Aviation’s electric VTOL aircraft to help model and simulate future airspace with these taxis in service. The dry run began quietly, on August 30th, and will last through September 10th. The effort will include noise check using 50 microphones to gauge the “acoustic profile” of the air taxi throughout the course of a given flight.
This is the first eVTOL test as part of an Advanced Air Mobility campaign meant to spot gaps in the Federal Aviation Administration’s rules and ensure the agency is ready for commercial use of flying taxis alongside delivery drones and other unconventional aircraft. The data from the flight program will help with a fuller set of campaign tests in 2022 involving both other taxis and more complicated flight situations.
The overall program could better prepare the US for a glut of low-altitude air traffic if and when flying taxis enter widespread use. The early testing is also a minor coup for Joby. It’s ushering in crucial testing not long after buying Uber’s air taxi business and taking a $394 million investment from Toyota. There’s no telling if Joby will continue to play a prominent role, but this is clearly the kind of collaboration it was hoping for.
New marque Automobili Estrema plans for its first model to reach 200 mph in less than 10 seconds and have a 325-mile range.
Automobili Estrema is a marque soon to become synonymous with extreme technology and performance in the hypercar stratosphere. Founded in 2020—a challenging year by any measure—the company is Italian through and through, though its team members and partners represent a global Who’s Who of leaders within the energy and automotive industries. Founder and CEO Gianfranco Pizzuto, an entrepreneur with an international business background, was the first investor and cofounder of Fisker Automotive in 2007. It was a bold venture into uncharted territory at a time when EVs were experiments and the first Tesla Roadster was still a year away. Now, as head of Automobili Estrema, he and his team have spent a year in virtual collaboration and accomplished what is nothing less than remarkable.
The Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, has reiterated that the Taliban must meet certain terms if they want frozen funds to be released to them.
Addressing several pots of money that have been frozen, the Prime Minister once again insisted that the Taliban must meet the West’s demands in order to access the funds.
Mr Johnson has recently said: “If the new regime in Kabul wants diplomatic recognition, or to unlock the billions that are currently frozen, they will have to ensure safe passage for those who wish to leave the country, to respect the rights of women and girls, to prevent Afghanistan from, again, becoming an incubator for global terror, because that would be disastrous for Afghanistan.”
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The rapid commercialization of space and the establishment of the U.S. Space Force have created ideal conditions for change in the national security space business, says Steve Isakowitz, CEO of the Aerospace Corp. and former president of Virgin Galactic.
Aerospace, based in El Segundo, California, is a federally funded research and development center focused on analysis and assessment of space programs for the Defense Department, NASA and the National Reconnaissance Office.
In an interview with SpaceNews, Isakowitz says unprecedented opportunities are emerging for national security space organizations to capture commercial innovation. Defense programs won’t transform overnight, he says, but change is definitely in the air.