Home Pod

If you look back Apple's history, it is really interesting.

At Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in 2014, Apple dipped its toes into the nascent smart home market with the launch of HomeKit, a developer program for hooking up smart devices in iOS. It was Apple's typical closed-garden approach: developers had to integrate a dedicated authentication chip into their device and go through extensive certification testing through the MFi ("Made for iPhone/iPod/iPad") program.

As every one (including Microsoft) opens its gate, Apple is opening up the doors a bit.

In this week conference, Apple said that HomeKit is now open to any Apple developer to tinker around with. Developers no longer have to get an MFi license to start controlling prototypes of smart home gadgets. They can even develop prototypes on top of popular developer boards like Raspberry Pi and Arduino. But once these developers want to bring a product out commercially, they still have to go through MFi certification.

Apple's announcement includes HomePod, a speaker powered by Apple's voice assistant, Siri. The HomePod has a six-microphone array to pick up the user's voice from anywhere in a room.

Smart speakers from Amazon and Google have been catching on lately as the hot new tech gadget and they've become a popular platform for controlling smart home devices.

TensorFlow

TensorFlow is an open source machine learning platform for anyone and everyone by Google. Few key technical features are:

• By design, it is quite fast, flexible and production-ready. 
• It has the scalability degree from PoC (Proof of Concept) to Production.
• By data structure, it has been built using computational graph with the best fit for deep learning and artificial intelligence.
• It supports CPU to GPU/TPU; iOS/Android
• To program, you can use most of popular/powerful languages C#, Java,Python, Go,etc.
• Google internal products (search, gmail, map, youtube, etc.) leverages TensorFlow

Performance benchmark is available at https://www.tensorflow.org/performance/benchmarks

Official web site is https://www.tensorflow.org/

AI First

Start of my career, technology swifts by every decade; now by year.  Some times, itz so fast by months.

A couple of years ago, most of the companies lived by the slogan ‘digital first’.  Recent time, it has been shifted towards 'mobile first' mantra.  You know what??  Again therez a change in the slogan 'AI first'

It was reflected in this special week.  As part of I/O 2017, Google CEO Sundar demonstrated their emerging product lines like Google Lens with the fundamental theme of AI First.  In the similar fashion, Microsoft CEO shared their vision around AI.

The biggest technology companies in the world (like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, etc) already made the switch towards AI first. For them it's not the future, it's today's reality.

Artificial intelligence won’t take over the human aspect of IT services, but it definitely will add a layer to it that will increase customer experience quite a bit.

So, basically, itz the right time to start thinking about how the firm will create strong customer relations in an AI first world.

Ransomware

This week had started with so much of panic in Computer world.  New shocking buzz word is termed as Ransomware.

Actually, virus attackers used a tool allegedly stolen from the U.S. National Security Agency.  In this process, it took advantage of flaws in Microsoft Windows systems to spread malware around the world on Friday.

In terms of impact, this virus encrypts files, effectively hijacking computer systems, and demands money, in the form of bitcoin, in exchange for decrypting them. Microsoft Corp. had issued a fix, or patch, for the flaw on March 14.

Technology Map

Technology needs to enable the business.  It is one of key success context in the current industry.

Recently, I came to know about an interesting map relating technologies to their impact on the business.

On observing the attached map, you can easily notice that advanced robotics are expected to be emerging technologies in 2019 and beyond, as well as smart machines and brain computer interfaces.  Cognitive computing is placed at the edge between high impact and transformational and 5G is considered as having a high impact.

All of these emerging and disruptive technologies are placed under the area of transformational, meaning that they will result in a disruption from the present way of doing business.

In recent IT industry evolution, we can easily observe the necessity of automation in every opportunity; doesn't matter testing, deployment, development, etc. 

Change is inevitable and buckle up yourself.  All the best !!!

Triple Century

Dear Friends,

7 years back, kick started this weekly tech blog with inspiration from my industry mentors.  It has been inked at http://ganesansenthilvel.blogspot.in/2010/04/kick-off.html

Now, glad to touch the key milestone of "Triple Century" with your encouragement and support.  Keep motivating me to go beyond and learn more to me.

Book Release

Recent times, Microsoft is participating into Crowd Source strategy by breaking its closed tradition. It is getting reflected their product shift from .NET to .NET Core framework and its related technologies.

Earned an opportunity to write (close to a year) international book on "Enterprise Application Architecture with .NET Core".

Book is launched now and available at https://www.packtpub.com/application-development/enterprise-application-architecture-net-core

Amazon Kindle edition is ready at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01M18CQNP/

As quoted in Authors' note, all my well wishers' support/encouragement is vital to proceed during this journey.

Secret of Success is Consistency of Purpose. Thanks to Almighty.