Agile Estimation

Interesting read on 5 Overlooked Opportunities in Agile Estimation

1. Learn from Others
2. Identify Alternatives
3. Validate the Story
4. Improve Teammates’ Estimating Ability
5. Reinforce Scrum Values

Ref: https://www.agileconnection.com/article/5-overlooked-opportunities-agile-estimation

"The reward for work well done is the opportunity to do more."

Merry Xmas and Happy New Year 2018.

Spark for Azure HDInsight

As indicated in early Jul'17, Microsoft now officially leveraged Apache Spark in Azure HDInsight.  Early Ref: http://www.zdnet.com/article/spark-comes-to-azure-hdinsight/

Last week, Microsoft announced Azure Databricks service, new Cosmos DB features, enterprise AI capabilities and more at its annual Connect(); event in New York

Microsoft is getting the Apache Spark religion, introducing a new cloud service in preview, called Azure Databricks. This is noteworthy for a number of reasons.

First, the service was developed jointly by Microsoft and Databricks (the company whose founders are Spark's very creators), to deliver this Spark-based Big Data analytics service as a first-party Azure offering, and not a mere partner service on the Azure Marketplace.

Second, the service works independently of Databricks' own cloud service for Spark and of Azure HDInsight, Microsoft's own Big Data as a Service platform, on which Spark also runs.

Azure Databricks has nonetheless been designed form the ground up to take advantage of, and be fully optimized for, various Azure services, including blob storage, Data Lake Store, virtual networking, Azure Active Directory and Azure Container Service.

While Azure Databricks, like HDInsight, is still based on the creation a dedicated cluster, with the number and type of nodes (servers) being determined by the customer, it nonetheless has built-in auto-scaling and auto-termination, to grow the cluster as necessary and shut it down once it's no longer needed.

ElasticSearch 6

Mid of last week, ElasticSearch 6 GA (General Availability) was released with tech upgrades like

• migration assistant
• resiliency
• efficiency
• scalability
• security
• index sorting.

Ref: https://www.elastic.co/blog/elasticsearch-6-0-0-released

Kinesis Analytics

Kinesis Analytics now gives you the option to preprocess your data with AWS Lambda.  This gives you a great deal of flexibility in defining what data gets analyzed by your Kinesis Analytics application. You can also define how that data is structured before it is queried by your SQL.

It continuously reads data from your Kinesis stream or Kinesis Firehose delivery stream.  For each batch of records that it retrieves, the Lambda processor subsystem manages how each batch gets passed to your Lambda function.  Your function receives a list of records as input.  Within your function, you iterate through the list and apply your business logic to accomplish your preprocessing requirements (such as data transformation)

The input model to your preprocessing function varies slightly, depending on whether the data was received from a stream or delivery stream

Artificial Intelligence Gluon

Last week, an interesting industry news that Microsoft and Amazon announced a surprise partnership to build AI platform (named Gluon) for an enterprise. Gluon makes it easier for developers to build AI/machine learning systems, and related Apps with open source concept.

I've an interesting dimension of this technology partnership to challenge Google's big area of AI dominance using Tensorflow.

Google TensorflowGoogle already has a head start with a tool called Tensorflow, which is free and open source and aimed at helping developers build machine learning apps. Tensorflow is immensely popular with developers.

In fact, it's the the fifth most popular project (by stars) on GitHub out of the over 2 million hosted on that site where open source projects are shared. Quick introduction video is shown at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MotG3XI2qSs

Amazon MXNetNaturally, Amazon has a competitor to Tensorflow called MXNet.  Deep learning on AWS with MXNet, is shown at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emDxDLI9FRw

Microsoft CNTKMicrosoft has a competitor tool for Tensorflow, called CNTK (Cognitive Tool Kit). Microsoft's open source deep-learning toolkit is shown at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rb9K10JwR2g

Strategic Partnership
Machine learning and AI are the next big things in cloud computing, with the potential to cause significant changes to the cloud business that Amazon and Microsoft have long dominated.
Microsoft and Amazon have been known to cuddle up on other AI types of tech.

In August, the two announced they were partnering to make their two voice assistants work better together , Amazon Alexa and Microsoft Cortana.

Joint Venture GluonMicrosoft and Amazon have joined forces to help spread artificial intelligence across apps. They released a new tool for developers called Gluon as a free and open source project, meaning anyone can use it or work on it and contribute to it for free.

Gluon's role is to add a layer that makes MXNet and CNTK easier to use, work with and program. Only the MXNet version was released now; but the CNTX version of Gluon is promised to come soon. Short introduction is shown at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxAYuw5QQ_8

Ease for AI DevelopmentIn any case, the competition to create more AI tools for developers, and make them easier to use.  Demand of Artificial Intelligence in various industries, are reflected in 3 years scorecard

Anywhere in an Hour

During Yesterday presentation at the International Astronautical Congress in Adelaide Australia, Elon Musk shared an inspirational speech on "Anywhere in earth in an hour"

Details are available at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/anywhere-hour-ganesan-senthilvel

Personally, I admire Elon's vision, commitment, building disruptive technology, enabling tech to the society usage and so on.

TigerGraph

Industry Graph share is led by Neo4j and Titan, the latter recently acquired by DataStax (DataStax Enterprise Graph).

Social graphs are a prime example of utilizing the graph model, Dr. Xu (PhD from UCSD) was working at Twitter till 2011, and the graph databases that were around at the time could not cope.

He has 26 patents in distributed systems & databases, led Teradata's big data initiatives, and worked on Twitter's distributed data infrastructure. So when faced with that problem, Xu saw an opportunity and went off to create a solution.

Xu founded GraphSQL in 2012 and has been working with a team of 30 engineers since.  Today GraphSQL is officially entering a new stage in its development, including a new name: TigerGraph.

The product is now generally available, a series A founding round of US$33 million is announced and a hosted version of TigerGraph based on Amazon EC2 is launching.

TigerGraph also supports different graph partitioning algorithms enabling it to split very large graphs over a distributed architecture. This can be done either automatically, or as specified by users using application-specific partitioning strategies.

There probably is a hefty price tag that goes with TigerGraph, but for the ones that can afford it, it looks like it can deliver some substantial benefits.

C# 8.0

C# 8.0 has been previewed in Channel 9 by Mads Togersen.  Ref: https://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Seth-Juarez/A-Preview-of-C-8-with-Mads-Torgersen

Top 5 tech highlights are:

1. Nullable Reference Types
Consider a scenario where you know that the nullable variable x isn’t actually null, but you can’t prove that to the compiler. In this case you can use x!.Method() to suppress the compiler warning about potential null reference exceptions.

2. Extension Everything
As with interfaces, you cannot define instance fields in extensions but you can simulate them using ConditionalWeakTable. You can also define static fields.

3. Default Interface Implementations
The primary benefit of default interface implementations is that you may be able to add new methods to an existing interface without breaking backwards compatibility.

4. Async Streams (a.k.a. foreach async)
This is referred to as a “pull model”. By contrast, IObservable is a “push model”, which means the producer can flood the consumer with a higher flow rate than it can handle.

5. Extension Interfaces
Extension interfaces, the ability to add new interfaces to existing classes, is also being considered.

My closing note is C# is ahead of tech capabilities and roadmap, on comparison with Java.

.NET Core 2.0

Happy 70th Independence Day of India to my brothers and sisters.

Coincidently, Microsoft released Visual Studio 2017 version 15.3, the release of .NET Core 2.0, and a release of Visual Studio for Mac version 7.1.

VS 2017 ver 15.3 has over 1,700 improvements and still have some work to do, but if you are using Visual Studio 2017 in a low-vision or no-vision mode, a lot has improved. For the full list of improvements check out at https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/news/releasenotes/vs2017-relnotes

.NET Core 2.0 is also released today. This is the second major version of .NET Core and this release focuses on performance improvements and expanding the set of APIs available via .NET Standard 2.0. It includes the runtime and libraries for .NET Core as well as the tools for building, debugging and running .NET Core applications.

Visual Studio for Mac version 7.1 is also available today. It adds support for .NET Core 2.0 targeting in console apps, web apps, and web services. It also enables creating .NET Standard 2.0 in library projects, to share more code across projects. Like Visual Studio 2017, a lot of the improvements in this update center on reliability.

FICCI 90

On attending FICCI-90th annual conference, key take away is "Continuous learning to sustain the career; Continuous sharing to collaborate the industry trend". Itz applicable not only for individual but also enterprise.

More details are available at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ficci-90-ganesan-senthilvel

Yahoo Bullet

Yahoo Bullet is a highly distributed framework designed for cloud multi-tenant data centers that let you run forward-looking queries. Bullet queries act on data flowing through the system after you submit the query.

In other words, you query data that will arrive, rather than data that has already arrived. Unusual for an open source project, Bullet also includes a visual user interface, so you're not necessarily restricted to command line or third party tools. And it also has a REST API for programmatic access.

As a query engine, Bullet was designed to be light weight, adding minimal overhead as you process streams. But there is some heavy lift involved in that the raw data, formatted as Avro files, must be parsed into columns that can then be hit with SQL queries that are placed over sliding time windows.

For now, Bullet is early stage technology, available as open source through GitHub. There's no vendor support and it's not part of any tool, so you're on your own with regard to managing and integrating it. Bullet competes in a very crowded landscape of log monitoring engines such as Splunk, Logstash/Elasticsearch, and others that provide near real-time capabilities.

The challenge for getting mindshare is proving the case that forward-looking queries provide the edge in knowing your customers through the digital log file footprints they leave.

Ref: https://yahoo.github.io/bullet-docs/

No Support Windows Phone 8.1

By July 11 2017, Microsoft is officially ending support for its aged mobile OS, Windows Phone 8.1, which means that users will no longer receive updates.

It is reflected in Microsoft's End of Support page at https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4001737/products-reaching-end-of-support-for-2017

It also marks the end of the road for Redmond’s initial foray into phones, and essentially paves the way for Android and iOS to rule the roost.

Itz interesting to know why they made this strategic move?

Microsoft has been moving away from WP towards Windows 10 Mobile, which is essentially an extension of its desktop platform that’s geared towards letting users take their files and apps with them – but it’s no real rival to Android or iOS. The company has been working on numerous cloud-based and cross-platform apps and services lately, so Windows 10 Mobile doesn’t seem like much of a priority anymore.

In my view, Microsoft is focusing more on mobile cross platform development Xamarin to boost the business benefits of time to market, development cost benefits, easy maintenance, etc.

Amazon Athena

As illustrated in the architecture diagram above, any changes made to the items in DynamoDB will be captured and processed using DynamoDB Streams.

Next, a Lambda function will be invoked by a trigger that is configured to respond to events in DynamoDB Streams.

The Lambda function processes the data prior to pushing to Amazon Kinesis Firehose, which will output to Amazon S3.

Finally, you use Amazon Athena to analyze the streaming data landing in Amazon S3. The result can be explored and visualized in Amazon QuickSight for your company’s business analytics.

Microsoft Build 2017

In recent times, Software continues to transform the world in remarkable ways and developers are at the center of it. As an IT engineer/professional, it is essential to listen/learn from the industry technology leading annual conferences like Microsoft Build, Google I/O, Amazon ReInvent, etc.

As continuous learner, itz been a decade to take part consistently in disruptive tech sessions. Herez key take away during this week sessions by Microsoft Build 2017 at Hyderabad, India. Itz an annual tech conference and one of 6 events within Asia + only event in India. 

This year, they focused around .NET, web apps, the Universal Windows Platform, Win32 apps, Mixed Reality, Visual Studio, Xamarin, Microsoft Azure, Cognitive services, and much more.

With 2 days deeper into code level, it has the below agenda:

Day 1 (Jun 21): Itz a full day of fast-paced, demo-driven sessions, focusing primarily on new technology that you can start using immediately in your projects, with a bit of forward-looking awesomeness for inspiration.

Day 2 (Jun 22): Second day is focused on hackathon to build a fun client, cloud and mobile solution that meet the requirements of a business case given at the beginning of the day. Mobile Cross Platform Xamarin implementation is the focal point.

Industry scorecard of Windows10 is pretty impressive with 500 million devices; 300 million active users of 3.5 average hours. UWP (Universal Windows Platform) is the next Gen to build the common App for all devices, platforms, desktop, laptop, PDA, etc. Desktop Bridge is to modernise Windows10 app. It creates trusted AppX. Improvement in UWP is open sourced at https://aka.ms/uwpcommunitytoolkit/

To me, Top-5 admiring take way from Microsoft 2017 Build.

1. Mobile Center

Microsoft is well advanced positioned in cross mobile App development using Xamarin technology. Xamarin C# achieves the high performance with 100% native App feel.

2017 announcement contains XamarinForms 3.0 with memory performance theme, Embedded Xamarin Forms mixed code and Xaml standard between WPF and XamForm. CanonicalXamarin solution has Android iOS WinPhone portable projects, as depicted below.

Now, they are extending their wings of Mobile development cycle via Mobile Center.

Mobile Center brings together multiple services, commonly used by mobile developers, into a single, integrated product. It helps to build, test, distribute, and monitor your mobile apps, and also implement push notifications.

In Build process, it creates an installable app package automatically with every push to your repository.  In Test phase, it runs your automated tests on more than 400 unique device (iOS + Android) configurations. During distribution, end users can install the app via email distribution lists from (Hockey) App Store. In Analytic effort, mobile center uses events to collect rich behavioral analytics data like timely user activity, session duration, Top-X devices, etc.

2. Microsoft Graph

To me, Graph is the powerful data structure to be leveraged in the highly socially connected world business.

Microsoft Graph exposes multiple APIs from Office 365 and other Microsoft cloud services through a single endpoint: https://graph.microsoft.com. It helps to

• Access data from multiple Microsoft cloud services from office to system software
• Navigate between entities and relationships.
• Access intelligence and insights from the Microsoft cloud.

In the conference, they demonstrated a wonderful business use case with high degree of connectivity and collaboration tool set. Bot Demo was built with news feed, notify contact, reference to my known circle, LinkedIn connect, sentiment analysis of the collaborator objects and their schedule calendar.  Simply Superb.

3. Progressive Web

Progressive Web App is the mixture of best of web and best of app experience. They are useful to end user from the very first visit in browser tab, no installation required. As the user progressively builds with App over time, it becomes more powerful.

In terms of Microsoft timeline, they introduced "Pinned Site" in Windows 7; "Packaged Web App" in Windows 8; "Hosted Web App" in Windows 10. Now, PWA (Progressive Web App) as the fast and common for the cross platform/devices. Itz characteristics are listed as:

Key benefit is to compete with native. It loads quickly even on flaky networks.

Secret sauce is Service Worker. It is an asynchronous background thread which takes control of all network requests in a page, acting as proxy. It has the ability to intercept and handle network requests along with the pro grammatically managing response caches.

In the conference, they demonstrated the power of Progressive Web using Microsoft Engineering team's internal tool. It was thrilling performance improvement against the traditional App using PWA Builder.

4. Artificial Intelligence

Microsoft Artificial Intelligence (AI) suite comprises with power of Big Data, Cloud and Intelligent solutions. AI has 3 core elements, which are fundamental blocks.

1. Massive data
2. Big compute
3. Powerful algorithms

Microsoft AI eco system is built from intelligent source data (IoT), derive the intelligence behind using ML, AI, BigData Analytic, and finally to serve the smart actions delivered to the end customer.

In 2011, Cosmos DB project was initiated as "Project Florence" to address developer pain-points that are faced by large Internet-scale applications inside Microsoft. 

Now, here is an IoT use case with Cosmos in connection with WebJobs SDK. LogicApp Work flow, HDInsight, etc.

Azure Cosmos DB is a global distributed, multi-model database that is used in a wide range of applications and use cases. It is a good choice for any application that needs low order-of-millisecond response times, and needs to scale rapidly and globally. It supports multiple data models (key-value, documents, graphs and columnar) and many APIs for data access in extensible way.

5. Fluent Design

Formerly known as Project Neon, the Microsoft Fluent Design System is the latest iteration in the development of Microsoft's look-and-feel for Windows.

Fluent builds on the Metro design language introduced with Windows Phone. Metro was designed for touch devices in particular; with Fluent, Microsoft is aiming at devices ranging from those without any display at all, through phones, tablets, traditional PCs, to virtual and augmented reality systems. 

Fluent design has 5 core themes namely light, depth, motion, material and scale.

The overall design principle here was to create a design language that looks light, features layers and depth and animations, as well as materials. Because of this support for materials, Fluent will also bring back some of the translucency that Windows apps lost in recent iterations of the operating system. Fluent Mixed Reality is derived from Unity.

The main purpose here is to give developers access to a single design language that will work well across devices.

Closing Note

In a nutshell, "AI FIRST" is upcoming industry mantra based on Microsoft Build, Google I/O, Amazon ReInvent, etc. As those industry technical leaders are ahead in the business, it is essential to have the continuous learning around this emerging and disruptive technologies.

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.

Best Article Award

Today, I'm pleased to receive the best article award from CodeProject.  Thanks for your support and encouragement.

Article Ref: http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/1120056/Evolution-of-Microsoft-Bot-Framework

My Inbox has the below note:

Hi Ganesan Senthilvel,

Congratulations! You have won CodeProject Best "Everything Else" Article of March 2017 Second Prize.

Type: Article
Location: Evolution of Microsoft Bot Framework 

Again - thanks for your contribution to the CodeProject community.

Best regards,

Sean and the CodeProject Team

---

CodeProject

Note: This message has been sent from an unattended email box.

Hadoop 2 vs 3

After Doug Cutting released Hadoop - working with Yahoo, Big Data industry had the breaking point to adapt easily and fast.  Even after a decade, Hadoop is highly adapted in the industry with so much major releases.

Here is an interesting learning material to compare Hadoop 2.x and 3.x by DataFlair.  Ref: http://data-flair.training/blogs/comparison-difference-between-hadoop-2-x-vs-hadoop-3-x/

Vascular Biometrics

Recent technology invention is a biometric identification and security device known as PalmSecure. It works by identifying the vein pattern in the palms of our hands.

Similar to our fingerprints, vein patterns are unique to each individual. The purported advantages of this technology is that it is less expensive, easier to manage, and is more reliable than traditional methods of identification.

Vein recognition, otherwise known as vascular biometrics, refers to technology that measures parts of a subject’s circulatory system which is a s unique to her as a fingerprint. Segmented into different sub-modalities, vascular biometrics solutions use optical scanning technology to capture vein images in your palm, finger, or eyeball.

Because of the sub-dermal nature of veins, vascular biometrics are considered to be a highly secure modality. Whereas other types of biometrics, particularly where the cheaper consumer grade is concerned, have proven vulnerable to presentation attacks, vein patterns are virtually un-spoofable, especially considering that some vein readers require scanned veins to have blood flowing through them

IJCIR First Release

International Journal of Computational Intelligence Research (IJCIR) is a peer reviewed international journal with a key objective to provide the academic and industrial community a medium for presenting original cutting edge research related to computational intelligence and its applications.

IJCIR invites authors to submit their original and unpublished work that communicates current research on computational intelligence both the theoretical and methodological aspects, as well as various applications in real world problems from science, technology, business or commerce.

Glad to share the news about my first research publication at IJCIR.  Ref: https://www.ripublication.com/ijcir17/ijcirv13n2_01.pdf

Airbnb Open Source

Airbnb created an internal Knowledge Repo, combining git version control and Markdown templates for reporting results. Airbnb recently open-sourced its Knowledge Repository Beta, seeking contributors to help move the project forward.

Git allows the same sort of peer review and version control that developers typically use to collaborate on code, while Markdown offers a mixture of text and code in a single, easily reproducible file. You can see RStudio's tutorial on R Markdown for more info of what Markdown in general can do. Markdown is available for other languages such as Python as well.

The Airbnb framework setup requires Python and supports "knowledge posts" in several formats.

A next-generation curated knowledge sharing platform for data scientists and other technical professions, is available at https://github.com/airbnb/knowledge-repo

2021 IT Trends

1. Internet-of-things (IoT) software and solutions: IoT will be driving new levels of customer insight and engagement for some by 2021, but technology diversity and the need for organizational changes will still stymie or delay many firms.

2. Intelligent agents: Intelligent agents and related robots will have eliminated a net 6% of jobs by 2021.

3. Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR): By 2021, AR will be commonplace, while VR will remain niche.

4. Artificial intelligence (AI) and cognitive technology: Solutions powered by AI/cognitive technology will displace jobs with the biggest impact felt in transportation, logistics, customer service, and consumer services.

5. Hybrid wireless: 5G will be rolling out by 2021, creating a high-bandwidth cellular backbone to support IoT devices. In addition, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi will expand their capabilities to support IoT devices.

Google Kaggle

Couple of days ago, Google acquired a coding competition platform called Kaggle.

Founded in 2010, Kaggle allows developers and data scientists to run machine learning contests, host datasets, and to write and share code. The platform reportedly has half a million data scientists that Google would try to capitalise on in some way.

Kaggle has raised $12.5 million (£10.3 million) in investment from the likes of Index Ventures, Google chief economist Hal Varian, and Russian investor Yuri Milner. 

Google reportedly teamed up with Kaggle earlier this month to run a $100,000 (£82,000) machine learning competition around classifying YouTube videos.

Kaggle CEO Anthony confirmed the news in the company blog - I’m proud and excited to share that Kaggle is joining Google Cloud.  Ref: http://blog.kaggle.com/2017/03/08/kaggle-joins-google-cloud/