Bloombase announced StoreSafe, a turnkey data-at-rest encryption security solution to help meet GDPR, is now available for VMware Cloud on AWS customers.

VMware Cloud on AWS is the best possible mix of VMware's software-defined data center technologies and AWS's elastic, bare-metal infrastructure. VMware Cloud on AWS helps organizations with consistent operating model and application mobility for the private and public cloud. The VMWare Cloud of AWS partners allows customers to use their trusted solutions for the public as well as private clouds seamlessly. VMware simplifies the deployment and eliminates the need for partners to refactor solutions for VMware Cloud on AWS. This means that the partner's solution that works on existing vSphere environment will work in same fashion in VMware Cloud on AWS, said the announcement.

Bloombase, the next-generation data security company, today announced StoreSafe is available to customers of VMware Cloud™ on AWS.

Bloombase StoreSafe provides end-to-end encryption to applications through its Virtual Appliance. The StoreSafe virtual appliance works as storage proxy to trusted application hosts. It seamlessly encrypts the data while writing and decrypts the data while reading. This eliminates the need for any proprietary hardware, expensive software upgrades and works across multiple data-center technologies. This makes Bloombase StoreSafe turnkey, application-transparent, high performance unified stored data encryption solution that works with expansive reach over heterogeneous network storage protocols for on-premises VMware vSphere and off-premises VMware Cloud on AWS, notes the announcement.

With its scalable and flexible secure data services, Bloombase's software-defined architecture is future-proofed to meet infrastructure changes for hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI), private and public cloud. Bloombase solution secures vSAN-backed datastores as well as cloud storage services including Amazon Elastic File System (EFS), Simple Storage Service (S3) and Elastic Block Store (EBS). It leveraging Amazon CloudHSM for centralized key management.

The Bloombase solution enables organizations to meet GDPR and other regulatory compliance immediately and effectively.

CEO at Bloombase, Sean Xiang said, "Organizational customers are seeking total data security solutions that are open in standard, turnkey, and embrace true value-added technology for longevity. The Bloombase storage security solution for VMware Cloud on AWS addresses intensifying cyberattack challenges and supports evolving data center transformations."


Bloombase solution for VMware Cloud on AWS is available at VMware Solution Exchange Marketplace: https://marketplace.vmware.com/vsx/solutions/bloombase-storesafe-security-server

Industry 4.0 Technologies to Reach 23.1% Annual Growth Rate as per Industry 4.0 research report by BCC Research.

A degree of flexibility and efficiency brought in by Industry 4.0 are helping industries to lower production costs and increasing profitability at the same time.

Industry 4.0 initiatives generated $5.1 billion in 2017. It is expected to reach nearly $7.7 billion in 2018 and $21.7 billion in 2023. The compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) is expected to be at 23.1%, according to the latest Industry 4.0 research report by BCC Research.

The cyber-physical systems, Internet of Things (IoT), Cloud Computing and Cognitive computing will be driving significant growth in the forecasted period, said the report.

Cyber-physical systems will reach a total market value of $4.8 billion in 2023 with the highest compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 26.7%. The growth in manufacturing and the level of advanced technology investment are driving the growth of Industry 4.0. Asia-Pacific region, especially China, will retain the greatest market share through 2023, note the report.

Industry 4.0 is essentially a structure for seamlessly integrated physical machinery, robotics, information technology and the internet in manufacturing factories. Core principals of Industry 4.0 include a set of design principles—interoperability, information transparency, technical assistance and decentralized decisions.

BCC Research senior editor and author of the research report on Industry 4.0 Technologies: Global Markets Through 2023, Michael Sullivan said, “Many technological trends and innovations have positively affected manufacturing over the past decades. With the advent of improved communications and the ongoing demand for greater production efficiency, business leaders are always seeking new solutions to achieve higher output with more accuracy and insight—and technology has delivered. As organizations turn to leaner, more efficient methods of production, new expert systems, sensors and network-based solutions have come to the forefront and created more automation and new resource capabilities.”

Microsoft and National Geographic teamed up to bring Artificial Intelligence technology for advanced scientific exploration and research on critical environmental challenges. The partnership will create $1 million AI for Earth Grant program. The grant will help recipients with financial support, access to Microsoft cloud and AI tools and affiliation with National Geographic Labs, the announcement said.

National Geographic initiative National Geographic Labs harness technology and innovation, driving new ways of exploring and understanding the world. It helps accelerate transformative change exponential solutions to the world's biggest challenges.

The newly created $1 million Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Earth Innovation Grant program will provide award recipients with financial support, access to Microsoft cloud and AI tools, inclusion in the National Geographic Explorer community, and affiliation with National Geographic Labs, an initiative launched by National Geographic to accelerate transformative change and exponential solutions to the world's biggest challenges by harnessing data, technology and innovation.

The announcement also invited applications from Individuals and organizations working at the intersection of environmental science and computer science. It can be applied at https://www.nationalgeographic.org/grants/grant-opportunities/ai-earth-innovation/.



Chief scientist and executive vice president, science, and exploration at the National Geographic Society,  Jonathan Baillie said, "National Geographic is synonymous with science and exploration, and in Microsoft, we found a partner that is well-positioned to accelerate the pace of scientific research and new solutions to protect our natural world. With today's announcement, we will enable outstanding explorers seeking solutions for a sustainable future with the cloud and AI technologies that can quickly improve the speed, scope, and scale of their work as well as support National Geographic Labs' activities around technology and innovation for a planet in balance."


The chief environmental scientist at Microsoft, Lucas Joppa, said, "Microsoft is constantly exploring the boundaries of what technology can do, and what it can do for people and the world. We believe that humans and computers, working together through AI, can change the way that society monitors, models and manages Earth's natural systems. We believe this because we've seen it — we're constantly amazed by the advances our AI for Earth collaborators have made over the past months. Scaling this through National Geographic's global network will create a whole new generation of explorers who use AI to create a more sustainable future for the planet and everyone on it."
Earth Innovation Grant program will provide financial support to between five and 15 novel projects that use AI to advance conservation research toward a more sustainable future. Creation and deployment of open-sourced trained models and algorithms that will be made broadly available to other environmental researchers, which offers greater potential to provide exponential impact.

The announcement further noted that qualifying applications focus areas include agriculture, biodiversity conservation, climate change and water.

The last date for submitting an application is Oct. 8, 2018. Recipients will be announced in December 2018.

Oracle has made its an early adopter version of Oracle Blockchain Cloud Service generally available. Oracle Blockchain Cloud Service allows organizations to build blockchain networks to drive more secure and efficient transactions. It also helps them to track goods through supply chains on a global scale, said the announcement. Oracle's blockchain platform is built on top of The Linux Foundation's Hyperledger Fabric.

Oracle Cloud Platform ensure that Oracle's Blockchain platform is highly available with 99.95 percent availability SLA with autonomous recovery agents and continuous ledger backup capabilities. This helps in achieving multi-datacenter disaster recovery across availability domains. Oracle Cloud Platform brings its capabilities such as plug-and-play integration with existing cloud and on-premises applications, API management, and application development environments and tools. Common use cases such as track and trace, provenance identification, warranty and usage, and cold chain are possible with blockchain technology and can be used with Orale's SaaS applications, the announcement stated.

Blockchain along with it brings inherent characteristics such as transparency, efficiency, and immutability. Once applied to businesses it creates more business value by bringing security, transparency, efficiency and cost-effective properties into business transactions. The Blockchain platform by Oracle help customers create their own network and leverage their existing investment  by integrating with Oracle SaaS, Oracle PaaS services, third-party applications as well as other blockchain networks

Oracle Blockchain Cloud Service provides customers with a development platform to build and provision their own networks and to quickly integrate with Oracle SaaS and third-party applications they already use, as well as other blockchain networks and Oracle PaaS services. It also allows users to deploy and run smart contracts to update and query the distributed ledger.

Executive vice president, Oracle Cloud Platform, Amit Zavery said, "Blockchain promises to be one of the most transformative technologies of our generation. We are excited to announce the availability of Oracle Blockchain Cloud Service. It is the result of years of R&D alongside our valued partners and customers. With Oracle's platform, enterprises can enhance their business, eliminate unnecessary processes, and transact with their distributed networks more easily, transparently and securely than ever before."

The single console provides an integrated experience with all the underlying infrastructure dependencies, container lifecycle management, event services, identity management, REST proxy, and a number of operations and monitoring tools.

Robert Parker, group vice president of manufacturing and retail insights, IDC, said "Blockchain projects are quickly moving from pilot to production as enterprises and governments begin to see the inherent value of distributed ledgers and smart contracts. As spending accelerates, buyers will need an enterprise-class platform beyond open source that includes data security and integrity, scalability, manageability, and interoperability."

The early adopters of Oracle's blockchain platform include Arab Jordan Investment Bank, CargoSmart, Certified Origins, Indian Oil, Intelipost, MTO, Neurosoft, Nigeria Customs, Sofbang, Solar Site Design, and TradeFin.

Gamedex has raised $800,000 in a seed round led by Invictus Capital. Gamedex will use funds to build a Steam-like platform for blockchain-powered digital collectible cards and digital collectible card games like Pokemon, Hearthstone, Magic: The Gathering, and FIFA Ultimate Team said the announcement.

The global gaming market was worth 110 billion USD in 2017 and is projected to continue growing at a compounded annual growth rate of 6.2%.

Investors purchased Gamedex tokens ("GDX tokens") instead of equity in Gamedex's first token seed rounds. Invictus Capital led the round, investing via their Hyperion fund. The Hyperion fund is a tokenized venture capital fund. The Hyperion fund invests in the most talented entrepreneurs and visionaries in the blockchain industry. Invictus Capital joins the likes of Union Square Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz, who have both invested heavily in the crypto-collectibles space.

There will not be any GDX tokens until at least August, states Gamedex in their announcement.

Daniel Schwartzkopff, CEO of Cayman-based Invictus Capital, explained and said, "Digital Assets were a $35 billion market in 2017 and the cryptocurrency market has -- at times -- neared $1 trillion. The fact is, for all that blockchain is in the news, its biggest consumer use case is still untapped. I expect the nascent non-currency crypto-collectibles market to reach $100 billion by 2022."

Individual angel investors who have made large investments in the crypto-collectible space include Fred Ehrsam, Co-founder of Coinbase, Naval Ravikant, Co-founder of AngelList, and Mark Pincus, Co-founder of Zynga.

Gamedex Co-founder and CEO Cameron Garvie added, "I believe that ecosystems which rely on a community to function should belong to the community they are built on, and we aim to do just that. We chose to bring Daniel and his team over at Invictus into our seed round due to their deep expertise and wealth of connections in the industry."

Gamedex is planning a public GDX token sale for late 2018.

Global artificial intelligence as a service (AIaaS) market was valued at around USD 1.06 billion in 2017 and is expected to reach approximately USD 14.71 billion in 2024. The AIaaS market is growing at a CAGR of 45.2% between 2018 and 2024, according to a report by Zion Market research.

Similar to cloud services, Artificial intelligence as a service is offered as an outsourced service. The key benefit of Artificial Intelligence as a service is that it allows users to leverage artificial intelligence capabilities without any major upfront investment in reducing overall risk. Companies do not need any separate data science department to cater to the business requirement that needs AI capabilities.

The sudden rise of the Internet of Things and associated requirements such as real-time decision making based on real-time data is driving the need for Artificial Intelligence as a Service market. New AI Startups and strong demand for AI-Powered services in the form of API and SDK is also driving the market.  However, lack of skill set is hampering the growth of artificial intelligence market, said the report.

Tech giants such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft are already leading the race in Artificial Intelligence as a service (AIaaS) market. Amazon provides open source software the Deep Scalable Sparse Tensor Network Engine (DSSTNE) which drives customer recommendation capabilities with in-house AI expertise. Google Cloud Platform provides a Tensor Flow recommendation software library to help its customers with AI capabilities. Google Cloud Platform also offers AI services such as speech recognition, translation & image content identification etc. There are other cloud providers such as Nvidia catering to needs of AI processing capabilities. AI service providers are increasingly innovating AI technologies that can be provided as services. Other major players in the artificial intelligence as a service market. include IBM Corp., Salesforce, FICO, Baidu, SAS Institute, Bigml, IRIS Al, Intel, SAP, Rainbird Technologies, and Cognitive Scale.

AIaaS business market is also exploring emerging tends such as integrating with Big Data and expected to grow the market revenue at a rapid pace. The use of AI for an illegal purpose such as phishing scams, hacking, and preparing more destructive weapons cannot be ruled out. Service providers and integrators are more inclined towards Artificial Intelligence as a service due to demand of intelligent business applications. This will drive strong growth of AIaaS market.

Artificial intelligence as a service market is bifurcated into software tools and services which include data storage and archiving, cloud and web-based Application Programming Interface (APIs), managed services, professional services. At the same time, Artificial intelligence technology type market is classified as Machine Learning & Deep Learning, and NLP, notes the report.

Artificial intelligence as a service market geographically segmented into North America, Asia Pacific, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East & Africa.

Rapid technological advancement, the rise of digital industries helping North America and Europe regions to lead large market size for AIaaS. As of now North America contributes 46% and Europe contributes around 25% of the total market revenue.

Asia Pacific region is also showing high opportunities for key vendors due to growing industrial pace and awareness of AIaaS among various verticals such as Banking, Financial, & Insurance (BFSI), Healthcare and Life Sciences, Retail, Telecommunications, Government and defense, Manufacturing, Energy, and Others. Asia Pacific region countries including India, China, and Japan are expected to have the largest potential for artificial intelligence as a service market growth in the forecast period due to increased use of digital technology and generation of the massive amount of data from technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT).

The Middle East countries such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, and Qatar hold the majority of revenue share for the artificial intelligence as a service market and expected to gain 2% of the total AIaaS global market in the forecast.

Blis announced a pilot platform to add transparency across the data ecosystem. Blis is the global pioneer in advanced location data technology. Blis along with proprietary technology and platform helps brands use location data to better understand consumer behavior giving advertisers access to the most accurate location events, location data, and unique devices. It is backed by Unilever, Endeit, and Beringea. Blis was focusing on transparency and exploring the blockchain platform since last year.

The digital advertising industry has an inherent need to know their audiences that likely to buy products and services. In order to achieve such customer insights, digital advertising relies on disparate datasets. However, due to changing landscape, such datasets now come with the risk of violating data privacy regulations. Hence marketers need to know the source of data-sets where it came from and to account for the performance of data relative to its costs.

The platform by Blis will run on IBM blockchain platform. It helps address industry needs around data transparency and data verification including location and demographic data.

Location and demographic data help the digital advertiser to create more targeted ads. Such geographic data also helps a digital advertiser understand more about consumer behavior. The blockchain based platform by Blis will write the source of the geographical data to the blockchain. This will help advertisers and data providers with greater confidence in the provenance of the data as data on blockchain is immutable and verified.

Unilever is helping Blis to evaluate and refine services it provides to advertisers and data providers moving forward, says the announcement.

Luis Di Como, Executive VP, Global Media, Unilever Group said, ”Unilever are committed to partnering with organizations which create better digital infrastructure. This new capability is an important step towards transparency and clarity in data provenance and compliance across our global activity”.

Greg Isbister, CEO at Blis, “We've taken an innovative approach to track geographical data for digital advertising to solve a critical problem. Combining our deep expertise with blockchain technology will allow us to deliver a new solution that will address the growing trust, accountability and transparency needs that are pressing the advertising industry”.

The Blis platform enables brands to analyze the data they are using which provides access to all data transactions, from individual apps to Wi-Fi data.

GDPR came into effect late last month and the Blis addresses concerns that companies have around compliance with data regulations globally with their integration.

Snip from the rendertoken.com

Cloud-based graphics rendering firm OTOY has launched blockchain based rendering platform, RNDR.

Rendering is the automatic process by which computer programs generate photorealistic or non-photorealistic images from a 2D or 3D model. OTOY is offering rendering services that are 40 times faster than the ones processed by CPU’s through OctaneRender. Also, OTOY’s premier cloud rendering service, Octane Render Cloud (ORC) allowed users to access remote GPU power and RNDR platform is a decentralized version of ORC.

The Render Token (RNDR) platform currently powered by the Ethereum blockchain. The platform leverages a distributed network of idea GUPs across its peer-to-peer network. RNDR allows to its users to scale rendering speed and simplify the transactional process of rendering and streaming virtual reality (VR) 3D environments, models, and objects much easier than ever before. RNDR brings the power of GPU computes into a decentralized economy of connected 3D assets.

RNDR already announced their partnerships with blockchain developers zeppelin_os and Decentraland and notable players such as Hollywood director and producer J.J. Abrams, founder of Brave and Basic Attention Token Brendan Eich, and famed talent agent Ari Emanuel are on their advisory board. Zeppelin_os is an open-source, distributed platform of tools and services on top of the EVM to develop and manage smart contract applications securely. The platform is maintained and governed by a community where everything will be on chain including upgradeable contracts, a governance platform, scaling solutions and more. On the other hand, Decentraland is building a platform optimized for the creation, hosting, and sharing of new and unique digital content.


CEO of OTOY, Jules Urbach, said, “Content creation is moving faster than ever and artistic work involving visual elements has reached a degree of detail, subtlety, and complexity that was impossible to foresee a couple of decades ago. Along with the technologies that enable stunningly realistic images, the applications of visual content continue to expand and diversify. As the growth in demand for rendering services skyrockets, there are an increasingly large amount of market segments competing for these limited resources, and the solution to that problem is what we’ve built with RNDR.” 

The Render Network helps in creating a marketplace among graphics creators and users allowing them to lend their idle GPUs to power the network.

Snip from the rendertoken.com

The RNDR platform helps creators gain access to a decentralized version of OctaneRender Cloud (ORC).  Creators can choose preferences for the job including specifications around the render target, preferred resolution, number of samples, and number of frames. The RNDR platform network allows for an anonymous individual to lend their GPU to perform rendering tasks. The network incentivizes GPU power lenders with RNDR tokens with minimum information such as cryptocurrency wallet address.

Escrow accounts are used to hold payments to the creator. The RNDR tokens are held in escrow account once rendering job starts. User can watch rendering progress along with their RNDR token usage. Once rendering job finishes, frames can be downloaded and RNDR tokens are transferred.

Head of Blockchain/Project Lead of RNDR, 
Kalin Stoyanchev, said, “Currently less than 1% of the world’s GPU power is accessible to creators, leaving a huge gap of wasted idle computing power in addition to stifling innovation and prohibiting the creation of incredible complex graphics. Our goal is to have the demand covered with no expense in terms of hardware, allowing for accessible costs and the democratization of rendering resources and with today’s launch of the Render Network, we are taking a significant step toward providing access to exponentially more computing power, at a more affordable cost to creators, with the utmost security of their digital assets ownership.”  





RNDR will further expand its global partnerships and grow the platform to reach rendering-streaming through smart contracts and blockchain technology, the announcement said.

PC: Baidu

Baidu has joined the league of Artificial Intelligence (AI) champions, Google, Nvidia, Intel along with many others with its announcement to launch of its cloud-to-edge Artificial Intelligence (AI) chip, Kunlun.

Baidu started developing field-programmable gate array (FPGA) chips in 2011 for deep learning use cases.

Back in 2011, Baidu focused on field-programmable gate array (FPGA) chips for deep learning use cases. It started using GPUs in its datacenter. The newly introduced Kunlun chip is 30 times faster than original field-programmable gate array (FPGA) chips. The exact specification of Kunlun chip are, 14nm Samsung engineering, 512 GB per second memory bandwidth and 260 tera-operations per second (TOPS) while consuming 100 Watts of power along with thousands of small cores, said the announcement.

The demand for computational power has increased drastically due to AI workloads. The main purpose of the Kunlun, an Artificial Intelligence chip, is large-scale AI workloads including voice recognition, search ranking, natural language processing, autonomous driving and large-scale recommendations. The company believes that Kunlun chip will allow for significant advancements in the open AI ecosystem and plans to further develop this chip.

Baidu creates “chip power” to meet the needs of various fields including intelligent vehicles, intelligent devices, voice recognition and image recognition, the company stated.

Kunlun chip will take advantage of Baidu's Artificial Intelligence (AI) ecosystem such as search ranking and deep learning frameworks like PaddlePaddle. The requirement to optimize the performance of these AI services prompted Baidu to build Kunlun Artificial Intelligence (AI) chip.

The announcement also referred to launch of Kunlun training chip “818-300” and inference chip “818-100”.  Data centers, public cloud, autonomous vehicles and edge scenarios can use Kunlun AI chip.