Blockchain from Amazon

Amazon announced Amazon Managed Blockchain at AWS re:Invent 2018.  There, they invited the participants to sign up for a preview.

Now, Amazon Managed Blockchain is now available for production use in the US East Region. It leverages to create scalable blockchain networks that use the Hyperledger Fabric open source framework, with Ethereum in the works.

Amazon is also in Blockchain race of the production emerging technology.

AWS Blog Ref: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-amazon-managed-blockchain-create-manage-scalable-blockchain-networks/

Uber IPO

Uber debuted below its IPO price ($45) on Friday and ended up down -7.62%.   Lesson learnt from this incident, is quite interesting.  Because, Tech industry seems to be going through a phase of serious introspection.

Tech leaders like Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff have started to talk about and fund solutions to societal problems like homelessness. Entrepreneurs, investors and academics are having substantive conversations about artificial intelligence and its possible effects on society now, while the technology is still in its early stages.

Employees at major tech companies like Google are pushing back against leadership decisions they don’t agree with, like walking out over revelations that the company paid millions to executives accused of sexual improprieties and protesting the company’s exploratory plans to build a censored search engine for China. It’s gotten easier for companies with meaningful missions to recruit from the tech giants, as employees look for more than a paycheck.

Funding for gig-economy start-ups that serve mostly to replace the parents of young tech workers has faded, while more money has been flowing into start-ups trying to solve ambitious problems like fixing health care or revolutionizing agriculture.

Right now, I'm writing it from Silicon Valley, which has been the most innovative place in U.S. industry for the better part of 70 years. That innovation can serve the broader needs of society, rather than existing in an isolated bubble apart from them. But only if the people participating in the industry want it to go that way.

Trillion Microsoft

Microsoft has become the third US company to pass a market cap of $1 trillion. The software giant passed the milestone briefly this week after a jump in stock price following strong fiscal Q3 earnings. Microsoft joins Apple and Amazon in hitting the $1 trillion valuation ahead of rival Google.

Microsoft has overtaken Apple in market cap value for the first time in eight years. Microsoft briefly reached a market cap value of $812.93 billion this week, followed by Apple at a market cap of $812.60 billion. It made Microsoft the world’s most valuable company, even if it was only a temporary title. Microsoft and Apple are now trading back and forth for the title.

Microsoft’s latest earnings also revealed that the three main buckets the company splits its businesses up into are all doing well and roughly contributing the same amount of revenue this quarter (around 30 percent each).

1. Office, LinkedIn, and Dynamics = $10.2 billion in revenue
2. Azure cloud, server products, and enterprise services = $9.7 billion in revenue
3. Windows, Xbox, and Surface = $10.7 billion in revenue

Microsoft failed spectacularly in the mobile era with its Windows Phone efforts, but the company has shown it’s resilient. Microsoft is now focused on cross-platform technologies, the cloud, artificial intelligence, and is aiming to secure the future of quantum computing and mixed reality computing.

All of these efforts will face intense competition from Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and other companies, so expect to see a lot of market cap position trading in the years ahead

Visual Studio 2019 Ready

This week, Visual Studio 2019 got launched on Tue 2 Apr.  With Microsoft's Open
Source strategy, it is built for any developer, any app and any platform.

Three high level advancement in VS 2019, are:

1. Develop: Stay focused and productive with improved performance, instant code cleanup, and better search results.
2. Collaborate: Enjoy natural collaboration through a cloud-first workflow, real-time editing and debugging, and code reviews right in Visual Studio.
3. Debug: Highlight and navigate to specific values, optimize memory use, and take automatic snapshots of your application's execution.

For a complete list of VS 2019 product is available at Visual Studio 2019 release notes.

As usual, the product is available in 3 mode (1) Community (2) Professional and (3) Enterprise

Block Coffee

I termed 'Block Coffee' from Block chain technology enabled Coffee industry. 

 The Coffee Board of India has launched a pilot blockchain-based e-marketplace in order to integrate coffee farmers with markets. On 28 Mar, Indian Ministry of Commerce and Industry (MCI) announced the idea to reduce the number of intermediaries between coffee growers and buyers - "bean to coffee".

According to Indian business publication Business Line, the application will initially launch in a pilot phase with a limited number of growers for the next four to five months. Should the test prove successful it will be expanded to all growers in the country. There are over 350,000 coffee growers in India, according to Business Line.

Blockchain has been actively adopted by food producers around the world in a bid to bring more efficiency to their supply chains. Recently, the United States National Pork Board partnered with startup ripe.io to test out a blockchain platform for pork supply chains.

This new platform will purportedly enable the Board to monitor and evaluate sustainability practices, food safety standards, livestock health, and environmental protections.

Apple Card

Yday, Apple announced Apple Card, an innovative, new kind of credit card created by Apple and designed to help customers lead a healthier financial life.

For years, as the iPhone has become ubiquitous and sales have started to slow, Apple has tried to emulate the paradigm-shifting success of the App Store and iTunes before it by barreling its way into TV and film, mobile payments, and news.

But time and again over the last half-decade or so, Apple has run into the hard economic and logistic reality of trying to change industries that are far less malleable than mobile software and music.

Apple Pay may be a bold vision of the future, it’ll likely be years before contactless digital payments become truly mainstream in the US.  Apple’s strategy mirrors that of Amazon.

Visual Studio 2019 Launch

Microsoft is holding a day-long, virtual launch event for the next major version of its developer platform, Visual Studio 2019, on April 2. Microsoft plans to highlight how the 2019 release can improve developer productivity and AI features.  Ref: https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs2019-launch/

VS 2019 includes Microsoft's Visual Studio Live Share coding-collaboration service installed by default. The product features a new start window to help users get coding faster; improved search capabilities; overall performance improvements, Visual Studio IntelliCode AI assistance; better Python virtual and conda support; and support for .NET Core 3.0 projects, including WinForms and WPF, among other features.

Microsoft released a first public preview of Visual Studio 2019 in December 2018; Preview 2 in January 2019; and Preview 3 on February 13, 2019.

If you want to be in person, no worries.  Microsoft announced 212 local events and feel free to reserve your seat at https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs2019-launch/local-events/

Microsoft's annual Build developer conference will be a month after the VS 2019 launch, on May 6 to 8 in Seattle, USA.