WiFi, Move Over – Here Comes LiFi

Disney researchers last week demonstrated Linux Light Bulbs — a protocol for a communications system that transmits data using visible light communication, or VLC, technology.

Linux Light Bulbs can communicate with each other and with other VLC devices — such as toys, wearables and clothing — over the Internet Protocol, according to Disney scientists Stefan Schmid, Theodoros Bourchas, Stefan Mangold and Thomas R. Gross, who coauthored a report on their work. In essence, they could establish a LiFi network that would function in much the same way that WiFi works.

Scientists have been experimenting with the concept of using light to channel data transmissions for years. Previously, however, the use of VLC supported simple communication between devices. Linux Light Bulbs may take that process one step further by enabling networking on VLC devices.

However, the throughput is critically small compared to other visible light approaches, and the technology suffers from proximity limitations, noted James T. Heires, a consultant at QSM.

“Visible light technology is viable for the Internet of Things, but only on a limited basis. This is due to the physical limitations of visible light,” he told LinuxInsider. The transmitter and receiver “must be within line of sight of each other.”

How It Works

Modern light-emitting diode light bulbs, or LEDs, can provide a foundation for networking using visible light as a communication medium, according to the Disney researchers’ report.

The team modified common commercial LED light bulbs to send and receive visible light signals. They built a system on a chip, or SoC, running the Linux operating system, a VLC controller module with the protocol software, and an additional power supply for the added electronics.

The key to the project’s success was the Linux software that enabled the signals to work with the Internet Protocol. The VLC-enabled bulbs served as broadcast beacons, which made it possible to detect the location of objects on the network and to communicate with them.

The Linux connection is at the software level. The Linux kernel driver module integrates the VLC protocol’s PHY and MAC layers into the Linux networking stack.

The VLC firmware on a separate microcontroller communicates with the Linux platform over a serial interface, the report notes.

Slow Going

The drawback is the speed. The network’s throughput maxed out at 1 kilobit per second, noted SeshuKiran, founder of XAir.

“A data rate of 1 Kpbs means a maximum 2 to 3 pixels of a good photograph can be transmitted per second,” he told LinuxInsider. “Good luck with an entire photo. For half of an HD photo to go, it will take 10.66 days.”

The technology may not be fast enough to compete with other technologies. WiFi operates around 3 GHz, and invisible light frequency starts at 3 THz. That is some 1,000 times higher than the WiFi frequency.

“Technically, it should [seem] that light has a better promise in delivering data. It is true in theory — but electronics and circuits say otherwise,” said Kiran.

Made for IoT

Developers have proposed a wide range of applications for VLC tech — using LiFi in place of anything currently supported by commercial wireless technologies such as WiFi.

“The Disney effort is fairly limited in terms of performance, but other projects suggest that broadband quality data transfer performance is possible, said Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT.

“The real issue driving VLC is the pervasiveness of the base technology,” he told LinuxInsider.

Data transfer solutions like Wi-Fi require specialized equipment, installation and maintenance. However, light fixtures are virtually everywhere.

“Since LED represents the future of commercial lighting, developers are suggesting that VLC capabilities could easily be enabled in existing homes and businesses without the need for expensive extraneous systems,” King said.

“On the IoT side, VLC would provide an easy way of connecting endpoint sensors to back-end systems without needing to build expensive, dedicated networks,” he pointed out.

The Disney researchers developed hardware peripherals that effectively turn a consumer LED fixture into a Linux host, including a kernel module that integrates the VLC’s physical and MAC (media access control) protocol layers with a Linux-based networking stack, King added.

Trying Times

Light has been used as a communication medium for decades. Major uses include fiber optics and infrared devices, noted Heires. Auto industry researchers have been investigating the incorporation of VLC tech into headlights and sensors to allow cars to communicate with each other and thus avoid collisions.

“Applications such as using light to extend the range of a WiFi signal are within reason. However, since light does not travel through solid objects, such as walls or floors, light is impractical for applications such as TV control, sensor monitoring or security,” he said.

Brighter Ideas to Come

One of the lowest data rate uses for VLC and the IoT is for automatic door openers equipped with light sensors at the lock. Point your smartphone at the door and flash a modulated-light app with a specific code to open the door.

Such a system would work for homes, hotels, garages and more.

Another use is modulating streetlights to deliver specific information, such as alerts and emergencies, across an entire city.

It also could be used to safeguard top secret communications between coworkers.

“If a light bulb in the garden could deliver commands for the automated sprinkler, … that would be “a definite possibility,” Kiran suggested. “Data rates are not yet crucial there.”

Asynchronous compute, AMD, Nvidia, and DX12: What we know so far

Ever since DirectX 12 was announced, AMD and Nvidia have jockeyed for position regarding which of them would offer better support for the new API and its various features. One capability that AMD has talked up extensively is GCN’s support for asynchronous compute. Asynchronous compute allows all GPUs based on AMD’s GCN architecture to perform graphics and compute workloads simultaneously. Last week, an Oxide Games employee reported that contrary to general belief, Nvidia hardware couldn’t perform asynchronous computing and that the performance impact of attempting to do so was disastrous on the company’s hardware.

This announcement kicked off a flurry of research into what Nvidia hardware did and did not support, as well as anecdotal claims that people would (or already did) return their GTX 980 Ti’s based on Ashes of the Singularity performance. We’ve spent the last few days in conversation with various sources working on the problem, including Mahigan and CrazyElf at Overclock.net, as well as parsing through various data sets and performance reports. Nvidia has not responded to our request for clarification as of yet, but here’s the situation as we currently understand it.

Nvidia, AMD, and asynchronous compute

When AMD and Nvidia talk about supporting asynchronous compute, they aren’t talking about the same hardware capability. The Asynchronous Command Engines in AMD’s GPUs (between 2-8 depending on which card you own) are capable of executing new workloads at latencies as low as a single cycle. A high-end AMD card has eight ACEs and each ACE has eight queues. Maxwell, in contrast, has two pipelines, one of which is a high-priority graphics pipeline. The other has a a queue depth of 31 — but Nvidia can’t switch contexts anywhere near as quickly as AMD can.

According to a talk given at GDC 2015, there are restrictions on Nvidia’s preeemption capabilities. Additional text below the slide explains that “the GPU can only switch contexts at draw call boundaries” and “On future GPUs, we’re working to enable finer-grained preemption, but that’s still a long way off.” To explore the various capabilities of Maxwell and GCN, users at Beyond3D and Overclock.net have used an asynchronous compute tests that evaluated the capability on both AMD and Nvidia hardware. The benchmark has been revised multiple times over the week, so early results aren’t comparable to the data we’ve seen in later runs.

Note that this is a test of asynchronous compute latency, not performance. This doesn’t test overall throughput — in other words, just how long it takes to execute — and the test is designed to demonstrate if asynchronous compute is occurring or not. Because this is a latency test, lower numbers (closer to the yellow “1” line) mean the results are closer to ideal.

Here’s the R9 290’s performance. The yellow line is perfection — that’s what we’d get if the GPU switched and executed instantaneously. The y-axis of the graph shows normalized performance to 1x, which is where we’d expect perfect asynchronous latency to be. The red line is what we are most interested in. It shows GCN performing nearly ideally in the majority of cases, holding performance steady even as thread counts rise. Now, compare this to Nvidia’s GTX 980 Ti.

Attempting to execute graphics and compute concurrently on the GTX 980 Ti causes dips and spikes in performance and little in the way of gains. Right now, there are only a few thread counts where Nvidia matches ideal performance (latency, in this case) and many cases where it doesn’t. Further investigation has indicated that Nvidia’s asynch pipeline appears to lean on the CPU for some of its initial steps, whereas AMD’s GCN handles the job in hardware.

Right now, the best available evidence suggests that when AMD and Nvidia talk about asynchronous compute, they are talking about two very different capabilities. “Asynchronous compute,” in fact, isn’t necessarily the best name for what’s happening here. The question is whether or not Nvidia GPUs can run graphics and compute workloads concurrently. AMD can, courtesy of its ACE units.

It’s been suggested that AMD’s approach is more like Hyper-Threading, which allows the GPU to work on disparate compute and graphics workloads simultaneously without a loss of performance, whereas Nvidia may be leaning on the CPU for some of its initial setup steps and attempting to schedule simultaneous compute + graphics workload for ideal execution. Obviously that process isn’t working well yet. Since our initial article, Oxide has since stated the following:

“We actually just chatted with Nvidia about Async Compute, indeed the driver hasn’t fully implemented it yet, but it appeared like it was. We are working closely with them as they fully implement Async Compute.”

Here’s what that likely means, given Nvidia’s own presentations at GDC and the various test benchmarks that have been assembled over the past week. Maxwell does not have a GCN-style configuration of asynchronous compute engines and it cannot switch between graphics and compute workloads as quickly as GCN. According to Beyond3D user Ext3h:

“There were claims originally, that Nvidia GPUs wouldn’t even be able to execute async compute shaders in an async fashion at all, this myth was quickly debunked. What become clear, however, is that Nvidia GPUs preferred a much lighter load than AMD cards. At small loads, Nvidia GPUs would run circles around AMD cards. At high load, well, quite the opposite, up to the point where Nvidia GPUs took such a long time to process the workload that they triggered safeguards in Windows. Which caused Windows to pull the trigger and kill the driver, assuming that it got stuck.

“Final result (for now): AMD GPUs are capable of handling a much higher load. About 10x times what Nvidia GPUs can handle. But they also need also about 4x the pressure applied before they get to play out there capabilities.”

Ext3h goes on to say that preemption in Nvidia’s case is only used when switching between graphics contexts (1x graphics + 31 compute mode) and “pure compute context,” but claims that this functionality is “utterly broken” on Nvidia cards at present. He also states that while Maxwell 2 (GTX 900 family) is capable of parallel execution, “The hardware doesn’t profit from it much though, since it has only little ‘gaps’ in the shader utilization either way. So in the end, it’s still just sequential execution for most workload, even though if you did manage to stall the pipeline in some way by constructing an unfortunate workload, you could still profit from it.”

Nvidia, meanwhile, has represented to Oxide that it can implement asynchronous compute, however, and that this capability was not fully enabled in drivers. Like Oxide, we’re going to wait and see how the situation develops. The analysis thread at Beyond3D makes it very clear that this is an incredibly complex question, and much of what Nvidia and Maxwell may or may not be doing is unclear.

Earlier, we mentioned that AMD’s approach to asynchronous computing superficially resembled Hyper-Threading. There’s another way in which that analogy may prove accurate: When Hyper-Threading debuted, many AMD fans asked why Team Red hadn’t copied the feature to boost performance on K7 and K8. AMD’s response at the time was that the K7 and K8 processors had much shorter pipelines and very different architectures, and were intrinsically less likely to benefit from Hyper-Threading as a result. The P4, in contrast, had a long pipeline and a relatively high stall rate. If one thread stalled, HT allowed another thread to continue executing, which boosted the chip’s overall performance.

GCN-style asynchronous computing is unlikely to boost Maxwell performance, in other words, because Maxwell isn’t really designed for these kinds of workloads. Whether Nvidia can work around that limitation (or implement something even faster) remains to be seen.

What does this mean for gamers and DX12?

There’s been a significant amount of confusion over what this difference in asynchronous compute means for gamers and DirectX 12 support. Despite what some sites have implied, DirectX 12 does not require any specific implementation of asynchronous compute. That aside, it currently seems that AMD’s ACE’s could give the company a leg up in future DX12 performance. Whether Nvidia can perform a different type of optimization and gain similar benefits for itself is still unknown. Regarding the usefulness of asynchronous computing (AMD’s definition) itself, Kollock notes:

“First, though we are the first D3D12 title, I wouldn’t hold us up as the prime example of this feature. There are probably better demonstrations of it. This is a pretty complex topic and to fully understand it will require significant understanding of the particular GPU in question that only an IHV can provide. I certainly wouldn’t hold Ashes up as the premier example of this feature.”

Given that AMD hardware powers both the Xbox and PS4 (and possibly the upcoming Nintendo NX), it’s absolutely reasonable to think that AMD’s version of asynchronous compute could be important to the future of the DX12 standard. Talk of returning already-purchased NV cards in favor of AMD hardware, however, is rather extreme. Game developers optimize for both architectures and we expect that most will take the route that Oxide did with Ashes — if they can’t get acceptable performance from using asynchronous compute on Nvidia hardware, they simply won’t use it. Game developers are not going to throw Nvidia gamers under a bus and simply stop supporting Maxwell or Kepler GPUs.

Right now, the smart thing to do is wait and see how this plays out. I stand by Ashes of the Singularity as a solid early look at DX12 performance, but it’s one game, on early drivers, in a just-released OS. Its developers readily acknowledge that it should not be treated as the be-all, end-all of DX12 performance, and I agree with them. If you’re this concerned about how DX12 will evolve, wait another 6-12 months for more games, as well as AMD and Nvidia’s next-generation cards on 14/16nm before making a major purchase.

If AMD cards have an advantage in both hardware and upcoming title collaboration, as a recent post from AMD’s Robert Hallock stated, then we’ll find that out in the not-too-distant future. If Nvidia is able to introduce a type of asynchronous computing for its own hardware and largely match AMD’s advantage, we’ll see evidence of that, too. Either way, leaping to conclusions about which company will “win” the DX12 era is extremely premature. Those looking for additional details on the differences between asynchronous compute between AMD and Nvidia may find this post from Mahigan useful as well.  If you’re fundamentally confused about what we’re talking about, this B3D post sums up the problem with a very useful analogy.

Everybody Can Run – Not Walk – to the Rapture

With the post-apocalyptic adventure game Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, Sony may have a cult classic on its hands. The PlayStation 4 exclusive became available Tuesday, ahead of a holiday release schedule that’s tilted in favor of Microsoft’s Xbox, as far as high-profile exclusives go.

The Chinese Room, a game development studio that previously worked exclusively on PC and Mac titles, developed Everybody’s Gone to the Rapturewith the support of Sony and Sony Computer Entertainment’s Santa Monica Studio.

Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture manages to pack a lot of humanity into the game, wrote Polygon’s Philip Kollar in his review.

“It’s a bit surprising that a game where you literally never see another person has the most humanity of anything I’ve played this year,” Kollar wrote.

Still, despite a narrative that’s engrossing, it is the execution of the game’s controls and world traversal that could be offputting to some gamers, he suggested. “A few of the design choices — the walking speed in particular — pushed me away and weakened my experience.”

However, it turns out that the game does have an option to run — a player can hold down R2 to build to sprint speed. The run button is hidden, because the feature was added just before launch, according to The Chinese Room’s Dan Pinchbeck, who apologized to early players who were frustrated by the speed.

You Can Run – but Not Rerun

The independent game bears greater similarities to The Chinese Room’s Dear Esther, an adventure game in which a novelist explores a mainly deserted island, than the studio’s more recent Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, a survival-horror game.

Although Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture flaunts graphics on par with some AAA games, and despite having the support of Sony, it retails for US$20, a price point that’s much lower than the standard $60 fare for big budget titles.

The price is low compared to the top tier of games in the PlayStation Network Store, but for Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, perception will be extremely important, noted Christine Arrington, senior analyst of games at IHS.

“If they categorize it with other independent titles, the price point could seem rather high,” she told TechNewsWorld.

Like Dear Esther, the apparent strengths of Everybody’s Gone to the Raptureare the game’s high graphical fidelity and its story. Players explore a village in Shropshire amid the apocalypse.

As the player explores the village, looking for clues regarding what exactly went down, information can be fleeting. Once the player has seen or heard something, there’s no way to replay it, wrote Alexa Ray Corriea in her reviewof the game on Gamespot.

“This inability to go over information again will make you think harder. You, like Shropshire’s doomed inhabitants, only have so much time to react,” she wrote. “It adds a sense of urgency to things, making those “aha” moments when you decipher meanings all the more poignant and personal.”

Here’s a rundown of some of the game’s review scores (scaled to 10):

Gamespot 9/10
Polygon 7/10
US Gamer 10/10
Games Radar 9/10
Metacritic 7.7/10
Trusted Review 9/10
Game Informer 7/10

The Independent Party

Sony sat out Gamescom 2015 earlier this month, and for good reason. Microsoft had a heavy presence there, fired up after its annual showdown with Sony during prime time E3. Microsoft has a lot of exclusive games to brag about this holiday season.

For Sony, there seems to be more emphasis on independent games for the PlayStation 4 this holiday season, noted IHS’ Arrington.

“I’m not sure any one game will have enough impact to mitigate the difference between the two consoles on the big name exclusives,” she said. “However, it is very important that the indy library in the PSN Store provides an attractive alternative for PS4 owners as they see the exclusives hit Xbox One.”

Independent development has become part of Sony’s culture over the years. When compared to Nintendo and Microsoft, Sony has funneled more energy and resources into incubating independent and free-to-play content on its hardware, observed George T. Chronis, director of Qualitative Analysis at DFC Intelligence.

“One, the PlayStation Network was originally a more open digital platform that did not require a subscription to access primary features, free or otherwise,” he told TechNewsWorld. “Second, Sony was forced to provide extra value and differentiation, because for many years the PS3 was significantly more expensive than its competitors.”

Now, in the PlayStation 4 era, that content differentiation is of use in competition with Microsoft and its similarly spec’d Xbox One, according to Chronis.

Sony also has ambitious plans for establishing its online streaming services across several platforms, he pointed out. Those platforms range from the handheld Vita to Sony Bravia TVs that support the company’s PlayStation Now game delivery service. PlayStation Now extends to third-party hardware, and so will Sony’s new PlayStation Vue streaming TV service.

“So we see it not supporting AAA games any less,” said Chronis, “but boosting easy-to-deliver, accessible digital game content more.”

Study: Chinese Hackers Are Savvy, Surgical

The Chinese hacking group dubbed “TG3390” sets about stealing data only after thorough reconnaissance and foundation preparation. The cyberthieves focus on a particular project or projects a target organization is working on. Then they steal every related file. “They are more surgical than some of the other groups we’ve observed in the past,” noted Dell SecureWorks’ Aaron Hackworth.

A clandestine group of sophisticated Chinese hackers have infected scores of sites on the Web and stolen documents from industrial and government organizations with surgical precision, according to a Dell SecureWorks study released last week.

Dubbed “Threat Group 3390,” the cybergang has used infected websites of some 100 organizations across the globe — in Iran, Iraq, Zambia, Italy, Afghanistan, Qatar and Ecuador, as well as in other parts of Europe, South America, the Middle East and Africa — to trap their targets.

The group placed code on each site that redirected visitors to a malicious site, according to the report. A site visitor who had an IP address that was of interest to the hackers would be served an exploit kit upon returning to the site.

To avoid detection, the hackers did not always use the compromised sites to serve code, the report notes. They would stop using a specific site altogether for a time in order to stay under the radar.

“All around the globe, they found websites that were related to topics of interest to their targets,” said Aaron Hackworth, SecureWorks Counter Threat Unit special operations team leader.

“Then they would find vulnerabilities in those websites and modify them to either directly deliver an exploit or redirect visitors to a website where the exploit could be delivered,” he told TechNewsWorld.

China Connection

Several factors support the assertion that TG3390 is a Chinese operation, the report notes. One of the favorite tools of the group is PlugX, which has a server side component written exclusively in Mandarin Chinese.

The gang also uses the Chinese Baidu search engine for reconnaissance.

In addition, a primary target of the group has been the Uyghur cultural website. The Uyghurs — a Muslim minority group located primarily in the Xinjiang region of China — have been in conflict with the Chinese government. Targeting the Uyghurs is not likely to be a priority for threat groups outside of China.

What’s more, the cyberposse was active between 4:00 and 09:00 UTC time, or 12:00 to 17:00 local time in China, which maps to the second half of the workday there.

“Any one of those things by itself wouldn’t have been enough for us to say we have a moderate degree of confidence in the China connection, but in aggregate, we can say it’s an active group operating out of China,” Hackworth said.

“As far as who is controlling them, who’s pulling their strings, we can’t determine that,” he added.

Malware-Averse Behavior

Once TG3390 penetrates a network, it spends a good deal of time getting comfortable with its surroundings before actually stealing any data.

“Only after preparing for eviction and orienting themselves with a network would they start looking for the data they were targeting,” Hackworth said.

A common trait TG3390 shares with other savvy cybergangs is an aversion to malware.

“A lot of these more sophisticated groups will use malware initially but as quickly as they can, they get rid of the malware and use stolen credentials, Web shells or things that are much less likely to be detected by endpoint security controls,” Hackworth explained.

“At some point, defenders will detect malware and remove it,” he added. “They’re less likely to detect folks using methods that don’t show up on traditional endpoint security solutions.”

After thorough reconnaissance and foundation preparation, TG3390 sets about stealing data, the study notes. The Web robbers focus on a particular project or projects a target organization is working on. Then they steal every related file.

“They are more surgical than some of the other groups we’ve observed in the past. There are groups that come in and just take everything and hope they can get some value out of it,” Hackworth said.

“That level of surgical targeting shows a level of maturity and discipline in this group that has not been seen in other groups,” he pointed out.

Russians Ransack Pentagon

The Chinese aren’t alone in engaging in data theft, as the Pentagon highlighted last week, when it blamed Russian hackers for ransacking the unclassified mail system of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The breach was detected about July 25, according to a report in The Washington Post.

The Pentagon immediately disabled the email system, which is used by about 4,000 military and civilian personnel, in an attempt to contain the damage, the paper said.

The attack was similar to one last fall that enabled hackers to rifle through the unclassified email systems at the White House and the State Department. Those intrusions also were blamed on Russians.

In this latest intrusion, which was launched through a spearphishing campaign that enticed targets to click on infected links in emails, only unclassified emails were exposed, and the damage did not appear to be significant, Pentagon officials said.

The Joint Chiefs’ classified networks were unaffected, they noted.

Alarming Puzzle

“The Russians clearly knew what they were looking for, which implies this was a precision attack,” said Richard Blech, CEO of Secure Channels.

“The hackers gathered highly sensitive data in a very short time,” he told TechNewsWorld. “Considering the high-level target, this is just a small piece of a bigger puzzle that should be leaving everyone alarmed.”

While the public should be relieved that the classified systems weren’t compromised, there is still room for concern, observed Tellagraff CEO Mark Graff, former CISO at Nasdaq and Lawrence Livermore Labs.

“As someone who has used classified systems, you can’t be sure that there is no classified material on the unclassified network,” he told TechNewsWorld. “It’s very easy to bleed over and have classified material put on the unclassified system.”

Moreover, even unclassified material can be valuable to the intruders.

“If you can get in and rummage around in an email system, you can use that information for more spear phishing,” Graff said.

“You can also get information on staffing dispositions, logistics, personnel and political intrigue — competition among groups in the Pentagon and the White House,” he added.

Breach Diary

• Aug. 3. Public statements issued by organizations in response to data breaches and other Internet-related issues rose by 19.6 percent in the second quarter compared to the first quarter of the year, CrisisResponsePro reports. At current release rate, close to 300 statements could be issued by year’s end.
• Aug. 3. Mount Desert Island, Maine, a town of some 10,000 people, adopts data breach response policy.
• Aug. 3. Siouxland Pain Clinic in South Dakota warns an unspecified number of patients that their medical information was compromised in a data breach earlier this year. There is no evidence that any of the exposed data was misused, an attorney for the clinic says.
• Aug. 4. Two lawsuits filed in federal district court in Fort Wayne, Indiana, against medical software company Medical Informatics Engineering for data breach placing at risk private information of some 3.9 million people.
• Aug. 4. U.S. Department of Labor’s Inspector General releases report critical of agency’s cybersecurity. DoL had serious control deficiencies over Personal Identity Verification cards used to access its systems, lacked a feature to lock out a person after multiple unsuccessful login attempts, and had lax monitoring of contractors and other outside groups who had access to the department’s systems, IG noted.
• Aug. 5. Google announces it will push out Over The Air security updates for its Nexus phones on a monthly basis.
• Aug. 5. U.S. Appeals Court three-judge panel in Virginia rules a warrant is required to obtain location information generated by the operation of a cellphone or other mobile device.
• Aug. 6. Russian hackers launched a sophisticated cyberattack on the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff unclassified mail system, NBC News reports. The attack occurred around July 25 and affected some 4,000 military and civilian personnel.
• Aug. 6. Electronic Frontier Foundation releases Privacy Badger 1.0, a browser extension that blocks data collection from ads and other kinds of Web-surfing trackers.
• Aug. 6. Mozilla Foundation patches Firefox browser vulnerability that searches a user’s computer for sensitive files and uploads them to a server in Ukraine.
• Aug. 6. Check Point reveals Certifi-gate vulnerability in virtually all Android devices, which allows malicious applications to gain unrestricted access to a device silently, elevate their privileges to allow access to user data, and perform a variety of actions usually available only to a device owner.
• Aug. 7. Online airline reservation system Sabre and American Airlines have suffered data breaches by same hackers that stole data from medical service provider Anthem and the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, Bloomberg reports.

Upcoming Security Events

• Aug. 19. How to Stay Off of the Data Breach Chopping Block. 2 p.m. ET. Webinar sponsored by ID Experts. Free with registration.
• Aug. 24-25. Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit. Hilton Hotel, 488 George St., Sydney, Australia. Registration: prior to June 27, AU$2,475; after June 26, AU$2,875; public sector, AU$2,375.
• Aug. 26. DDoS Readiness, Response, and Impact in the Financial Services Industry. 8 a.m. ET. Webinar sponsored by Arbor Networks. Free with registration.
• Sept. 12. B-Sides Augusta. GRU Harrison Education Commons Building, 1301 R.A. Dent Blvd., Augusta, Georgia. Free.
• Sept. 12-21. SANS Network Security 2015. Caesars Palace, Las Vegas, Nevada. Long Courses: $3,145 – $6,295. Short Courses: $1,150 – $2,100.
• Sept. 16. ISMG Data Breach Prevention and Response Summit. The Westin San Francisco Airport, 1 Old Bayshore Highway, Millbrae, California. Registration: $695.
• Sept. 16-17. SecureWorld Detroit. Ford Motor Conference & Event Center, Detroit. Registration: open sessions pass, $25; conference pass, $175; SecureWorld plus training, $545.
• Sept. 18. B-Sides Cape Breton. The Verschuren Centre, Cape Breton University, Sydney, Nova Scotia, Canada. Free.
• Sept. 22-23. SecureWorld St. Louis. America’s Center Convention Complex, St. Louis. Registration: open sessions pass, $25; conference pass, $175; SecureWorld plus training, $545.
• Sept. 28-Oct. 1. ASIS 2015. Anaheim Convention Center, Anaheim, California. Through May 31: member, $895; nonmember, $1,150; government, $945; student, $300. From June 1 through Aug. 31: member, $995; nonmember, $1,250; government, $1,045; student, $350. From Sept. 1 through Oct. 1: member, $1,095; nonmember, $1,350; government, $1,145; student, $400.
• Oct. 2-3. B-Sides Ottawa. RA Centre, 2451 Riverside Dr., Ottawa, Canada. Free with registration.
• Oct. 6. SecureWorld Cincinnati. Sharonville Convention Center, 11355 Chester Rd., Sharonville, Ohio. Registration: open sessions pass, $25; conference pass, $175; SecureWorld plus training, $545.
• Oct. 9-11. B-Sides Warsaw. Pastwomiasto, Anders 29, Warsaw, Poland. Free with registration.
• Oct. 12-14. FireEye Cyber Defense Summit. Washington Hilton, 1919 Connecticut Ave. NW, Washington, D.C. Registration: before Sept. 19, $1,125; after Sept. 18, $1,500.
• Oct. 15. SecureWorld Denver. The Cable Center, 2000 Buchtel Blvd., Denver, Colorado. Registration: open sessions pass, $25; conference pass, $175; SecureWorld plus training, $545.
• Oct. 19-21. CSX Cybersecurity Nexus Conference. Marriott Wardman Park, 2660 Woodley Rd. NW, Washington, D.C. Registration: before Aug. 26, $1,395 (member), $1,595 (nonmember); before Oct. 14, $1,595 (member), $1,795 (nonmember); after Oct. 14, $1,795 (member), $1,995 (nonmember).
• Oct. 28-29. SecureWorld Dallas. Plano Centre, 2000 East Spring Creek Parkway, Plano, Texas. Registration: open sessions pass, $25; conference pass, $175; SecureWorld plus training, $545.
• Nov. 4. Bay Area SecureWorld. San Jose Marriott, 301 South Market St., San Jose, California. Registration: open sessions pass, $25; conference pass, $175; SecureWorld plus training, $545.
• Nov. 11-12. Seattle SecureWorld. Meydenbauer Center, 11100 NE 6th St., Bellevue, Washington. Registration: open sessions pass, $25; conference pass, $175; SecureWorld plus training, $545.

The Pichai Era: Google’s New Age of Innocence?

“A” is for new Google parent company “Alphabet,” for Sundar Pichai’s “ascension” to CEO, and for a slimmed-down search engine company that seeks to become more “agile.”

After Google cofounder Larry Page’s Tuesday announcement that he and cofounder Sergey Brin were stepping back to manage Google’s divisions through the newly formed Alphabet Holdings, consumers may wonder if that “A” also stands for “altruism.”

Page and Sergey had been in search of a perch that would give them a better vantage point on Google and all of the companies that comprise it. They promoted Sundar Pichai to head of Apps and Chrome last fall, in an effort to step away from day-to-day duties, but that wasn’t enough.

Pichai’s Ascension

Pichai has been piling on responsibilities since his arrival at Google in 2004. The former vice president of product helped launch Chrome in 2008, and began overseeing Google Apps last fall.

Now, in addition to managing Web apps such as Gmail and Google Calendar, Pichai is in charge of all the vital organs inside the newly slim Google: Android, Search, Maps, YouTube and others.

Pichai’s work ethic and congeniality helped drive his ascension to the top, and he’ll need both to redirect the mounting mistrust of Google — his greatest challenge yet.

It’s possible, though, said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group. A concerted effort to change an image can be successful.

“We saw IBM go from negative brand equity to positive in the 1990s, though it took a rather impressively large marketing investment to make that happen,” he told TechNewsWorld, “and Google hasn’t shown they have either the skills or the will for this kind of an effort. So Sundar Pichai could fix this — but there is nothing in his background or skill set that suggests he will.”

Google’s Altruism

Though Google informally adopted the motto “don’t be evil,” its efforts to be “good” often have been undermined by its aggressive business practices.

Among its controversial practices are enabling apps to upload data secretly to Google Cloud, tracking users’ locations, performing analytics that potentially could violate users’ privacy, and doing who-knows-what in the clandestine Google X Labs — to name just a few.

At the heart of it all is revenue, said Michael Dub, a partner at DXAgency.

“Understanding people’s previous behavior and actions will enable Google to continually improve and predict future behavior,” he told TechNewsWorld, “and therefore provide them an advertising advantage by using that data to deliver the most relevant ad or offer.”

Google’s real customers are its advertising partners, said Enderle, and consumers are the products it sells.

However, “this change also should result in a higher-quality product, and that suggests that users should see improvements that will engage them more,” he said.

Google has to own predictive data in order to remain competitive in the Information Age, said Dub, and this latest move to stay competitive brings with it both good and bad for consumers.

The good, said Dub, is that “the likelihood of receiving a relevant offer or coupon or message based on individual preference will increase.”

Conversely, the bad is that “the likelihood of receiving unwanted communications and offers based on behavior will also increase, further limiting an individual’s ability to remain anonymous.”

Greater Agility

Now in a better position to focus on being Google, freed of business units that Page described as being “far afield” from the core, the company should enjoy marked improvement in its agility.

All of Alphabet’s companies are to be headed up by strong CEOs, said Page, who’ll have both Google cofounders at their service.

The agility gained with the Alphabet umbrella likely will result in a stronger focus on customers, said Enderle — and it likely will see those strong CEOs searching for more ways to monetize the products and services offered by their respective companies.

If Google — or Alphabet — doesn’t undertake a strong marketing campaign to educate consumers about the changes, they could backfire, he suggested.

“Users might get improvements they don’t easily see,” Enderle noted, “and react adversely to the efforts to more aggressively monetize them, concluding in the end that this move wasn’t in their best interests.”

Google, HTC vets prep ‘friggin’ awesome’ smartphone for Sept. 1 launch

Nextbit makes the bold claim that its smartphone will actually get better over time thanks to software tweaks. It plans to sell it for $300 to $400.

You would normally laugh off any no-name company’s attempt to jump into the brutally competitive smartphone business. But given the pedigree of the members at startup Nextbit, you have to at least be curious.

Nextbit, which began life as a secretive software startup focused on a cloud-based tool that allowed you to move files and setting between Android devices, has shifted gears into hardware and intends to launch its own smartphone. The company, which boasts Google Ventures as a backer, Android veterans Tom Moss and Mike Chan and former HTC design chief Scott Croyle, plans to unveil its smartphone on September 1, Moss said in an interview.

“It’s going to be friggin’ awesome,” said Moss, the chief executive of Nextbit.

Nextbit is bucking the trend and taking a bet on smartphones at a time when Microsoft is drastically cutting its mobile devices operation and Samsung continues to see falling profits from its once powerhouse smartphone business. In an industry where seemingly only Apple can turn a consistent profit, Nextbit hopes to stand out through its staff’s intimate knowledge of Android and its HTC-inspired design chops.

“Phone fatigue is a real thing,” Moss said. “That’s why we’re doing something different.”

While Moss wouldn’t comment on the price, he said the device would cost in the new “premium tier” of Android smartphones, which he said ranged between $300 and $400.

Better over time

Nextbit’s biggest boast is that its smartphone will actually get better over time. That’s a bold claim considering that the current crop of smartphones seem to be become obsolete weeks after you purchase one when the next flashier smartphone arrive.

The company believes it will be able to achieve its goals by noodling through the Android operating system. “Your phone will perform better over time and function at a higher level because of this software enhancement.”

While the Nextbit team was short on details, Chan, the chief technology officer of Nextbit, said the first smartphone would address the annoyance of storage limits. The company will use cloud technology to boost the storage level, allowing you to carry as many apps, photos and videos as you want. “We’re focusing on a device that can adapt to you,” Chan said.

Future products will tackle other issues, including the potential for a longer lasting smartphone, through software, he said.

Moss and Chan were among the early members of the Android team, and they believe they’re the best suited to use the operating system to enhance the hardware. But that doesn’t mean going so far as to radically alter Android so that it won’t have access to key Google apps, like the approach Amazon took with its Fire tablets and smartphone.

“We’re supercharging it,” Moss said, adding that it was the vision of the original Android team for handset makers to tinker with the software for a better experience.

Hardware chops

Another thing Nextbit has going for it is Croyle, one of the key HTC designers behind the successful metal-clad HTC One (as well as its follow-up, the well regarded One M9).

Chan pointed to Croyle’s hiring last year as proof that Nextbit had planned to move into hardware all along. “Hardware is not an all-of-a-sudden thing,” he said. “It’s been in the plans for some time.”

How does Nextbit hope to stand out in a sea of me-too Android smartphones? The company was vague on specifics.

“There’s a lot of you do to have a provocative design,” Moss said, noting that Croyle helped drive the current wave of metallic smartphones.

That trend, however, has gotten stale, Moss said, and the company is looking to move forward with a different kind of premium device.

A pricey strategy

A move into the smartphone business can be far costlier than software. The company will have to work with manufacturers to build up inventory, as well as retailers and carrier partners to offer its products. The Nextbit brand isn’t well known either; the company would have to spent a fortune to get its name out to the public.

Nextbit will be able to establish more of a relationship with potential customers using the Internet and social media, Moss said. The shifts in the smartphone business present an opportunity for new brands to emerge, he added.

Beyond the startup funds, Nextbit generated a few million dollars in revenue by shipping its software back-up tool to millions of Android devices sold by Japan’s NTT Docomo, according to Chan.

Nextbit will likely go after consumers directly, similar to China’s hot startup Xiaomi, or more recently, Motorola and its Moto X Pure Edition in the US.

Nextbit enters a crowded field, occupied by Chinese vendors such as Huawei, ZTE and Alcatel, which are each trying to breach the mid-tier market with affordable smartphones with quality parts. They’re also all going after consumers directly with their own websites and ties to retailers such as Amazon.

Nextbit hopes to standout because it’s so different from the rest of the pack.

“We’re trying to push the boundaries,” Moss said.

Alphabet lets Google be more ambitious, more boring and more crazy at the same time

The company is taking a page out of the playbook of Warren Buffett — a longtime hero of co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin — as it prepares for its next stage of growth.

When Google went public in 2004, co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin titled their letter to potential shareholders “An Owner’s Manual” — an homage to the booklet Warren Buffett, the iconic leader of the conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway, gave to shareholders of his company.

Now, more than 10 years later, Google is taking another page from Buffett’s book: A massive restructuring that turns the company into a Berkshire-like empire. Page announced Monday that the leaders of Google will instead become the brain trust of a new parent company, called Alphabet. The new entity will oversee a collection of companies, including Google, as well as more nascent businesses including Nest, its smart-home device company, and Calico, a research company focused on human aging. Berkshire Hathaway runs much the same way: It owns companies like Geico and Dairy Queen and has minority stakes in Coca-Cola and American Express.

Scott Devitt, an analyst from the investment bank Stifel, was more explicit when he wrote a note to investors: “The Berkshire Hathaway of the Internet emerges.”

For Page, the move helps Alphabet make better bets and do so without stretching Google’s management team too far from the popular projects like search, mapping and the Gmail email service.

 

“Some of the most fundamental questions which people are not thinking about — there’s the question of how do we organize people, how do we motivate people,” Page told the Financial Times in October. In that interview, he was talking about Google’s role in reshaping society and public policy. But he might as well have been looking at Google’s org chart when he said that, too. (Page also said there’s no model for the kind of company Google wants to become, but if there’s one person who represents the qualities Google needs as it grows, it’s Buffett.)

Conglomerates are nothing new and are in fact common in media. Viacom, for example, owns MTV, Nickelodeon and Paramount Pictures. But in technology, they’re novel.

Alphabet gives Page and Brin the room they need to operate while they come up with more out-there projects like driverless cars or Wi-Fi-beaming balloons. It appeases investors who chide Google’s big spending and lack of focus, by providing them more clarity on the company’s financials.

“The plan is that this new structure will allow for more focus and better incentives to drive the various core and noncore businesses,” Ben Schachter, an analyst with Macquarie Securities, wrote in a note to clients.

Page even called out the new company’s responsibility to investors in a blog post announcing the new name: “We also like that it means alpha‑bet (Alpha is investment return above benchmark),” he wrote. “Which we strive for!”

A is for ambition

Google’s mission may be to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible, but Page has far grander ambitions: He wants to be able to take on just about any industry and fulfill his utopian desire to improve humanity’s lot. By comparison, merely fine-tuning Google’s successful search business seems like child’s play.

By splitting noncore Google projects away from Google, those projects grow from peripheral efforts to standalone entities. They’re freed to some extent from the management structure needed to run a 55,000-employee company, gaining a nimbleness that allows for faster innovation. And by putting all of Google’s central businesses under Sundar Pichai, one of Page’s most trusted lieutenants, the other ventures get his fuller attention.

Along with more independence, though, comes more scrutiny, more accountability and more pressure to perform well on their own. Alphabet won’t be able to as easily hide poor financial results under the vast umbrella of search-ad revenue. And Google’s strong brand — No. 2 worldwide after Apple — won’t necessarily benefit Alphabet’s non-Google operations.

Still, this seemed to be the way the company was headed. Google already had established Google X to house the company’s wilder ideas. And Page in 2014 had promoted Pichai to oversee more of Google’s core products so he could devote more attention to other work.

There’s no doubt Page is seeking to create a bigger legacy for himself than just good search results, or profitable success such as Apple’s. In 2014, he said of his conversations with former Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs, “He would always tell me, ‘You’re doing too much stuff.’ I’d be, like, ‘You’re not doing enough stuff…If we just do the same things we did before and don’t do something new, it seems like a crime to me.'”

In 2013, he was more blunt: “If you’re not doing some things that are crazy, then you’re doing the wrong things.”

New York’s tech scene: More melting pot, less Silicon Valley

On Road Trip 2015, CNET takes a look at the tech scene in the Big Apple, and how it has quietly emerged from the ashes of the failed “Silicon Alley.”

The office space of TechStars NYC, which fosters startups and connects them with investors and potential customers, was, well, what you’d expect one of the key tech hubs in the city to look like: a brightly lit area with rows of tables populated with people typing away on MacBook Air computers. Motivational signs like “Move fast and break things” (a well-known Facebook mantra) decorate the walls. Occasionally, someone in a hurry zips through the room.

Even so, it was eerily calm on a Tuesday.

It’s just a few weeks before the next class of startups begins a 13-week tenure at TechStars, founded in 2006 in Boulder, Colorado, before expanding to eight other cities including the Big Apple. Once boot camp begins, a countdown clock — currently off on this August afternoon — signals the start of a race with a dozen companies working to build up their businesses for a final pitch to investors and customers. So is that when the volume pumps up?

“It’s still pretty quiet,” Alex Iskold, managing director of TechStars NYC, conceded. “But it’s intense.”

The New York tech scene has followed a similar path as it’s evolved over the years — starting off quietly but growing to the point where investors, corporations and city officials now take it seriously. While New York isn’t the birthplace of a household tech name like Google or Facebook, the city boasts a vibrant startup scene, with eager entrepreneurs able to tap into the expertise gleaned from other key industries in the city and ready to gamble on being the next big thing in tech.

“New York is the craziest city in the world,” Iskold said. “This matches our DNA perfectly. We are the city of risk takers, of a million choices and cutthroat competition.”

New York now boasts its own notable tech row. Etsy, an e-commerce site that sells handmade items, went public in April and is valued at just over $2 billion. Yahoo acquired micro-blogging site Tumblr for $1 billion in 2013, and is rumored to be interested in its Manhattan neighbor Foursquare, the location-based services provider. Fashion retail site Gilt Groupe raised $50 million earlier this year and may eventually go public. In December, WeWork raised $355 million in a deal that valued the workspace provider at nearly $5 billion.

New York, unlike California’s Bay Area and Silicon Valley, also boasts a more diverse array of industries and communities to draw talent from. That’s why you don’t always hear about tech; with such a whirling circus of activity around media, fashion, finance and other fields, it’s easy for anything to fly under the radar.

“Talking to some of my friends who have dinner parties in Silicon Valley, there’s all of the obsession about this fund raising and that fund raising,” Gilt CEO Michelle Peluso said. “The nice thing about New York is it’s a very broad city. ”

Still, New York is a distant second to San Francisco when it comes to tech. It lacks the blockbuster tech companies that have yielded wealthy founders willing to go out and create the next hot startup. There also isn’t a supply of engineering talent like there is in the Valley.

And if you’re a startup looking for more substantial funding, you still need to go west. While the amount of venture capital funding in the New York metropolitan area nearly doubled to $2.34 billion in the second quarter, it trailed well behind the $9.1 billion in funding invested in Silicon Valley, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Still, New York isn’t going to let the Bay Area have all the fun. Nor should it.

San Francisco “can’t have a monopoly on innovation or we’re all in trouble,” Peluso said with a chuckle.

A diverse scene

The theater was packed, with some enthusiastic attendees equipped with inflatable noisemakers. But this wasn’t a Broadway show or film premiere. It was the monthly gathering of the NY Tech Meetup group, which has seen its membership grow threefold over the last four years to more than 45,000 members.

A crowd of nearly a thousand tech enthusiasts, programmers, city officials, businesses and potential investors gathered to watch 10 startups run through live demonstrations of their projects as audience members alternated between hooting and hollering and asking insightful questions. The presenters aren’t all looking to build the next billion-dollar business; Seth Carnes considers his photo-and-text app, Poetics, a work of art. In his spare time, mapmaker Jeff Ferzoco built a digital map chronicling the New York hotspots for the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community going back to 1859.

“You’re seeing a diversity of demonstrators and different types of products,” said Jessica Lawrence, executive director of the group.

On a Tuesday night in early July, one demonstration in particular left the audience impressed. Yaopeng Zhou and his team from Smart Vision Labs showed off a device that used a smartphone’s camera and processor to conduct an eye exam. Smart Vision’s product, which Zhou said is already shipping, could allow people in undeveloped nations to quickly get their vision checked.

Unlike Silicon Valley, which has been a wellspring for every sort of idea in tech, New York startups tend to get their inspirations from the surrounding industries, whether it’s fashion, media or health care.

Zhou got the idea for while working at GE Healthcare in New Jersey, and met his co-founder, Marc Albanese, while he attended New York University’s business school. Smart Vision is a New York native.

Access to different industries, from a recruitment and potential customer standpoint, is also an advantage New York holds, some successful entrepreneurs say.

“It’s pretty special, because in New York you pull from different disciplines,” said Ayah Bdeir, the CEO of do-it-yourself hardware maker LittleBits, at the opening of the company’s pop-up store in Manhattan late last month. “You have skills that come from finance, from fashion, from food, so they’re not only tech people but they come into the tech scene and I think that brings in a fresh perspective to the work that we do.”

It also helps keep the tech world grounded.

“In New York, no matter what you do, there’s always someone who doesn’t care,” said Charles Bonello, co-founder and managing director of Grand Central Tech, which fosters startups with a mission of building up the local tech scene.

Money, talent still out west

In Silicon Valley, there are a number of serial entrepreneurs who struck it rich and went on to foster more startups. Think the “PayPal Mafia,” the group of former PayPal employees who went on to found or fund other big-name companies, including Tesla Motors, YouTube, LinkedIn and Facebook.

New York lacks that legacy infrastructure. While there’s an increased willingness by local funds to invest in startups at the early stage — Union Square Ventures is a major player here — companies looking to develop further find they need to get serious funding elsewhere. Smart Vision, for instance, got funding from TechStars’ Colorado office and won a $1 million award from Verizon, but Zhou said he still has to fly out west to meet with venture capitalists.

“You can’t emulate Silicon Valley,” said Jeffrey Carr, a business professor at NYU. “There’s such a unique combination of things: (Stanford) University, entrepreneurs and the rock-star status they hold out there and the money.”

It’s also tougher to find the right engineering talent in New York. It’s easy to sell programmers on the potential upside to heading to San Francisco, where billion-dollar startups seemingly spring up on a regular basis. It’s a tougher sell for New York.

“That’s probably the biggest challenge that a tech company in New York faces is really recruiting from that talent pool in San Francisco, because it’s so far away, and because it is a very different lifestyle here,” said Peter Vidani, creative director at Tumblr.

“What are we selling them? Rude people, cheap pizza and bad weather?” Iskold added.

New York is working on creating a base of technical talent. The city launched Digital.nyc last year, which serves as a hub for the local startup scene. Cornell University is spending $2 billion to build a tech-focused facility on Roosevelt Island. Coding school General Assembly is also trying to reinforce the ranks of technically savvy workers in the city.

Silicon Alley redux?

Back in the mid ’90s, a nascent tech scene in New York rallied around the term Silicon Alley. But when the tech bubble burst in 1999, taking down many of the heavy hitters in the real Silicon Valley, Silicon Alley also collapsed.

It just wasn’t the right time for New York.

“The city itself wasn’t particularly well-suited,” Peluso said, recalling how office buildings lacked basic infrastructure like wiring for high-speed Internet access, and how landlords would ask for a 10-year lease commitment. “A 10-year commitment? I don’t even know where I’m going to say I’m at 10 days from now.”

There also wasn’t a strong venture capital presence. “Silicon Alley was a loose collection with not a lot of interesting things,” Iskold said, laughing.

The name is also a bit of a misnomer at this point. Silicon Alley started off in the Flatiron District near the historic Flatiron Building on Fifth Avenue and 23rd Street. But today’s tech companies are spread all over the New York area, with pockets in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

So is this Silicon Alley, version 2.0?

“We shouldn’t be calling it Silicon Alley,” Iskold said about the New York tech scene. “It sounds off to me — I don’t even know what that means honestly.”

Can’t choose between an Apple Watch and a luxury timepiece? Have both

Watchmaker Nico Gerard has created a dual-faced watch hybrid – combining a traditional Swiss timepiece with a 38mm Apple Watch

Unable to decide between a classic Swiss timepiece and the allure of an Apple Watch? All your prayers have been answered with the invention of the Pinnacle range from watchmaker Nico Gerard.

The three piece collection claims to combine luxury Swiss craftmanship with the cutting edge of consumer technology, combining a traditional watchface with a 38mm Apple Watch designed to be worn on the inner wrist.

As you’d expect, such indisputable luxury does not come cheaply. Prices for the stainless steel Nico Gerard Pinnacle model start at $9,300 (£5,962), rising to $9,500 for the Skyview Pinnacle and $112,000 for the 18 karat gold Sunrise Pinnacle. Just placing a reservation to buy one of the watches costs between $200 and $500.

If you’re tempted to splash out, you may be disappointed to learn you’ll face a minimum wait of 6 months. Given that you’ll have to wait between 10 and 12 months for the cheapest model, it’s pretty likely the second generation of Apple Watch will either be planned for release or have made it into stores by some point in 2016.

^{The Sunrise Pinnacle model, complete with yellow gold Edition Apple Watch}

The Apple Watch 2 is rumoured to boast a video camera for FaceTiming, inbuilt WiFi to free it from its paired iPhone and new premium-priced models.

There has been much speculation over the impact the Apple Watch will have on the traditional watch market. Shares in luxury watchmaker Movado, whose brands include Coach, Hugo Boss and Tommy Hilfiger, fell 2 per cent following the wearable’s unveiling in September last year. Fossil, the company behind Armani, DKNY and Diesel watches, saw its stock fall by almost 3 per cent.

Obama pushes for more diversity in tech

At the first-ever White House Demo Day, President Obama announces a series of initiatives to bring more women and minorities into the tech sector and urges the industry to “not leave half the team on the bench.”

President Barack Obama wants to help close the diversity gap in the technology industry, and he’s marshaled support from the private sector to do it.

On Tuesday, the White House announced it has brokered a number of new initiatives involving major tech companies, such as Amazon and Microsoft; well-known venture capital firms; and engineering departments at large universities committing to concrete plans to foster diversity within their organizations. The announcement is part of the Obama administration’s first-ever Demo Day, an event where startup founders from diverse walks of life and various parts of the country came to the White House on Tuesday to showcase their innovations.

Unlike a traditional demo day, where startups pitch prospective funders, entrepreneurs at the White House Demo Day pitched Obama their ideas to highlight their innovations and bring more awareness to the struggles that underrepresented minorities in tech, such as women and people of color, face in starting a company. Today only 1 percent of venture-capital backed startups are led by an African-American, and only 3 percent of startups are founded by women. Obama said at a press conference from the White House Demo Day that these statistics must change to ensure the US remains a driver of innovation throughout the world.

He acknowledged that finding capital is tough for any entrepreneur starting a company, but it can be “harder if you’re a woman or an underrepresented minority who all too often have to fight just to get a seat at the table.”

“Today America is home to more high-tech companies than anyplace else in the world,” Obama said. “But we’ve got to make sure that we’re taking full advantage of this moment by tapping all the talent America has to offer, no matter who they are or where they set up shop.”

The president applauded the efforts of major companies, such as Intel and Pinterest, that have recently pushed their own diversity initiatives. But he said more needs to be done. With that he announced commitments from 40 venture capital firms, including Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, as well as more than a dozen companies, such as Amazon, Microsoft and Xerox that have committed to take new actions to ensure diverse recruitment in hiring. These companies will adopt variations of the so-called “Rooney Rule,” adopted by the National Football League, which requires companies to consider at least one diverse candidate for every senior executive position. Facebook and Pinterest have recently adopted similar policies.

Additionally, the administration secured commitments from institutional investors, such as the California Public Employees Retirement System and the New York city pension funds, to commit more than $11 billion to increase the diversity of its managers. And more than 100 engineering deans have promised to take steps to attract and retain a diverse student body.

The initiative has spurred companies to make their own announcements in an effort to increase diversity among their ranks. Facebook is launching a new Supplier Diversity program, which is meant to increase the number of women and minority-owned businesses in Facebook’s supply chain. Google announced it will host its first-ever Women’s Demo Day. IBM said it will expand its relationship with Girls Who Code to ensure more young women are exposed to cloud computing innovation.

The announcements come at a time when the technology industry has beenscrutinized for its lack of diversity. On average, 30 percent of the tech industry workforce is women, even though women make up 59 percent of the total workforce and 51 percent of the population, according to US Census Bureau data. As for the most-coveted spots at the top, only 14.3 percent of board seats at the top 100 companies by revenue in June 2013 were held by women, according to a survey by executive recruitment firm Korn Ferry. Ten of those boards had no women directors in December of that year.

The numbers are even more bleak when considering the participation of women in venture capital firms, which command the currency the industry needs to thrive. An overwhelming 93 percent of top investing partners at VCs are men, according to Pitchbook Data, which analyzes the private investment industry.

The exclusion of women and minorities in the board room and among the biggest venture firms doesn’t make sense from a business perspective, said Megan Smith, the US CTO of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy.

“Hiring women isn’t just the right thing for companies to do — it’s more profitable,” she said.

Smith pointed to a McKinsey and Co. study that shows companies that are more gender- and ethnically diverse perform better financially.

It’s unclear at this point what effect if any these new initiatives will have in helping women and underrepresented minorities actually influence product development or business strategy. Companies have made promises in the past to little effect. But with the urging from the president himself, these initiatives might hold more weight.

“We’ve got to make sure that everybody is getting a fair shot,” Obama said. “The next Steve Jobs might be named Stephanie or Esteban. They might never set foot in Silicon Valley. We’ve got to unleash the full potential of every American — not leave more than half the team on the bench.”