Philly EnterpriseTech Roundup 1/14: Digital First Media throws bid at Gannett



Alden-backed Digital First Media, which owns the former Journal Register papers in the 'burbs and once controlled the Inquirer, throws a surprise takeover bid at Gannett. Like Dollar General trying to buy Walmart




  • WeWork is even better without the Work!
  • John Malone said to be trying to buy Hollywood agency CAA
  • Interesting piece on "The Cost of Hospital Protectionism"
  • A look back at the evolution of RSS and why its almost dead, although I rely on it
  • Lots of things happening at Comcast's NBCU
  • USA Technologies didn't learn its lesson


















































































at 6:39 PM 0 comments

a16z Podcast: Talent, Tech Trends, and Culture -- with Ben, Marc, and Tyler Cowen



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Strange going-ons in Vegas: Russians from Warminster vs Tesla


Tom Paine




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At CES last week, there was an odd incident in which a Tesla, supposedly in self-driving mode, ran into a small robot also in the road.




It was obviously a publicity stunt set up in advance. The bot was from a company named Promobot. Its website says the company is located at 626 Jacksonville Rd, Ste 125, Warminster, PA.

As the name Promobot suggests, the company tries to rent robots to companies for use as promotional tools.

Its not clear who produces the robots, or how many Promobot actually has.


Its Founder and Chairman of the board of directors, Promobot, is Alexei Iuzhakov. Back in 2008, Iuzhakov was in a (Russian) Presidential program for training of managerial personnel for organizations of the national economy; he also received training at some Silicon Valley institute and with NASA, according to a brief CV. The rest of Promobot's personnel listed on its website are also apparently of Russian origins, judging from their names.

Promobot's only funding, according to CrunchBase , was $2 million in 2016 from (the Russian) Internet Initiatives Development Fund (IIDF).

Nothing particular wrong with this, unless it was a serious attempt to undermine Tesla, but its kind of an odd proposition. I don't waste much time on publicly stunts, but I just wanted to identify who was behind it. I'll pass on anything else of importance that comes out of this.

More analysis of event by the website Evolving Science .


at 4:23 PM 0 comments

AT BELL LABS IN MURRAY HILL, THE FUTURE OF INDUSTRIAL AUTOMATION IS ALL ABOUT THE NETWORK



Marcus Weldon introduces Future X for Industries | Esther Surden


In November, NJTechWeekly.com was among a small group of journalists who were given a first look at some new industrial automation/internet-of-things (IoT) technology at Nokia Bell Labs in Murray Hill.

The technology was both described by officials and demonstrated by engineers at a recently built laboratory at Bell Labs.

Using the laboratory, enterprise customers of the company’s newly announced Future X for industries strategy and architecture will be able to envision how slicing, fine-tuning and making changes to their industrial networks will help them achieve their goals. Need less latency in a robotic task? The network will adapt for that. Need more speed for another task? The network will adapt.





A demonstration of how the network can be dynamically changed | Esther Surden

First they’ll sit down in a futuristic network control center and see what tweaks can be made to change their productivity outcomes. Then, they’ll virtually tour a simulated factory floor that harnesses industrial-IoT, distributed-cloud, augmented-intelligence (AI), augmented-reality, virtual-reality and high-performance networking, including advanced LTE and 5G.

Nokia Entering New Markets


Nokia is entering new markets with these AI-infused industrial networks, we learned at the press briefing. The briefing included presentations by Marcus Weldon, president of Bell Labs and CTO of Nokia; interviews with representatives of Nokia’s marketing and sales teams; and a tour of the Bell Labs Future X for industries network facility, where the company demonstrated its capabilities.

According to Weldon, networks need to become more dynamic, more scalable and more economical. They also need to create more value, and the driver for all these changes will be industry: infrastructure developers, manufacturers and enterprises.

“We’ve looked at what will serve industrial needs in detail,” he said.

One of the main components of this IoT network will be network slicing. “I’m not talking about any ordinary QoS [Quality of Service], I’m talking about QoS like you wouldn’t believe,” said Weldon.






That’s Marcus Weldon on the robot greeting visitors to the Future X network lab | Esther Surden




AI and IoT for a New Industrial Age



As we enter into this new Industrial Age, all applications and services in every industry will need QoS, he noted. Applications and services will have to be dynamically adapted and managed because things keep moving, so QoS will continue to be necessary. Networks will have to adapt to a changing environment if, for example, a robot is switched out or a new sensor added. Business systems also have different monthly habits, as well as different habits for various times of the day, and these will have to be accommodated. This adaptation is already becoming more tangible, real and important, Weldon said.

The market for industrial IoT is “hyperbolically large,” Weldon said, possibly $11 trillion of new value creation over the next 10 years. “If you can solve an $11 trillion problem, and 10 percent of that can come to those who solve the problem, you can imagine that this could be something that’s as large as the current industry we are in.”


“Industry is stuck at current levels of productivity. It will need a network to fix this.”

With a constantly changing network as the backbone of a new industrial application, operations technology and information and communications technology can come together. “The network infrastructure is probably the toughest part of the problem because it is a physical thing that you have to put in, dig, put things up on poles.” Until now, there hasn’t been any reason to make this happen, he said.

But now there is a reason. “Industry is stuck at current levels of productivity. It will need a network to fix this.” Weldon added that customers had come to Nokia asking if the company could fix their production environment, as Wi-Fi wasn’t working.

“No matter how many versions of optimized Wi-Fi they had deployed, it wasn’t reliable enough, didn’t have low enough latency, didn’t have enough capacity,” he said. And he noted that the enterprise business is a natural for Nokia because its sales team can operate through service provider partners or on its own, and the company has teams in many different countries worldwide.







Nokia Bell Labs simulated industrial floor | Esther Surden


Visitors to the lab will be able to configure their networks live and to experience an emulator that recreates factory-use cases in an Imax-like theater environment. Nokia has also built a small factory that does assembly tasks, and has constructed a small city that allows it to demonstrate the flying- or moving-vehicle features of the future IoT. The demonstrations test the end-to-end performance of a network and how the network can be dynamically adapted to a representative task. Once particular network configurations are pinned down, Nokia will be able to port them to a customer’s location more easily.



Some of what is being demonstrated in Murray Hill came from technologies developed by San Mateo-based SpaceTime Insight, which Nokia acquired in May, but these technologies have been combined with technologies developed at Bell Labs. At the time of that acquisition, Nokia said SpaceTime Insight’s advanced IoT and machine learning-powered analytics technologies would accelerate the development of Nokia’s IoT offerings.
>


Esther Surden is Publisher and Editor of NJTechWeekly, and a contributor to Philly Tech News. This article originally appeared in NJTechWeekly , and is republished here with her permission.



at 5:41 PM 0 comments

DisrupTV from Constellation Research, with segment featuring Annie McKee, PhD, University of Pennsylvania & Author



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Nielsen, CBS reach agreement before playoff round





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CBS CORPORATION AND NIELSEN REACH AGREEMENT
01-11-2019

Renewal for Measurement across National, Digital and Local

New York, NY – Jan. 11, 2019 – CBS Corporation (NYSE: CBS.A and CBS) and Nielsen (NYSE: NLSN) today announced an agreement for Nielsen national, digital and local audience measurement. The renewal encompasses a range of services. CBS Television Network, CBS Television Distribution, Showtime Networks, Smithsonian, Pop, CBS Sports Network and CBS’ 27 owned-and-operated local television stations will continue to use Nielsen’s total audience measurement services as part of the deal. Financial terms were not disclosed.

“CBS is a longstanding leader in world-class video content. We are thrilled to continue our long partnership with them as we innovate for the future,” commented David Kenny, Chief Executive Officer, Nielsen.

“We are very pleased with this new agreement we were able to achieve with Nielsen,” said Joe Ianniello, President and Acting CEO, CBS Corporation. “It meets our strategic goals, and will allow us to benefit from important advances in measurement as they are rolled out. CBS programming is perennially the most-watched content rated by Nielsen, and there is significant upside ahead as next-generation advertising continues to flourish.”

ABOUT NIELSEN
Nielsen Holdings plc (NYSE: NLSN) is a global measurement and data analytics company that provides the most complete and trusted view available of consumers and markets worldwide. Our approach marries proprietary Nielsen data with other data sources to help clients around the world understand what’s happening now, what’s happening next, and how to best act on this knowledge. For more than 90 years Nielsen has provided data and analytics based on scientific rigor and innovation, continually developing new ways to answer the most important questions facing the media, advertising, retail and fast-moving consumer goods industries. An S&P 500 company, Nielsen has operations in over 100 countries, covering more than 90% of the world’s population. For more information, visit www.nielsen.com.

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CBS Corporation (NYSE: CBS.A and CBS) is a mass media company that creates and distributes industry-leading content across a variety of platforms to audiences around the world. The Company has businesses with origins that date back to the dawn of the broadcasting age as well as new ventures that operate on the leading edge of media. CBS owns the most-watched television network in the U.S. and one of the world’s largest libraries of entertainment content, making its brand — “the Eye” — one of the most-recognized in business. The Company’s operations span virtually every field of media and entertainment, including cable, publishing, local TV, film, and interactive and socially responsible media. CBS’ businesses include CBS Television Network, The CW (a joint venture between CBS Corporation and Warner Bros. Entertainment), Network 10 Australia, CBS Television Studios, CBS Studios International, CBS Television Distribution, CBS Consumer Products, CBS Home Entertainment, CBS Interactive, CBS Films, Showtime Networks, CBS Sports Network, Pop (a joint venture between CBS Corporation and Lionsgate), Smithsonian Networks, Simon & Schuster, CBS Television Stations, CBS EcoMedia, and CBS Experiences. For more information, go to www.cbscorporation.com.

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In November, Nielsen and Comcast, which sees Nielsen ratings from at least three different angles, reached an agreement that extended coverage of X1 and non-linear programing .


at 8:55 PM 0 comments

Philly EnterpriseTech Highlight 1/11: Vague for President? FanDuel (Irish, not British thankfully) at Valley Forge


Tom Paine




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Philly VC Richard Vague for President (of the US) ?

That's the speculation started by a BuzzFeed piece and followed up by Larry Platt in the Philadelphia Citizen . Don't know if there's anything to it, but Vague is a very bright man who has studied the key issues in depth.

“I have increasingly crystalized a set of issues that I think are the way to put Democrats back into the White House", he told BuzzFeed. "To oversimplify, these are kitchen-table issues. This is a laser focus on the middle class,” said Vague. “And as the 30-odd candidates coalesce, if there’s not somebody who is laser-focused on the issues I think are important, then you never say never.”



FanDuel is bringing its sports book to Valley Forge Casino , beating other PA casinos to the punch. I thought for a second whether its past Pennsylvania investors (such as Comcast) had given it a leg up, but now since its been acquired I doubt those connections matter much.



Cannon Group, a Blue Bell-based business consulting and IT management firm, has just announced the launch of a new offering, Connectivity as a Service (CaaS). This solution meets a need in the marketplace for a single point of contact across third-party connectivity providers to enable cost-effective and high-quality network connectivity while simplifying processes for customers, the company said in a release.

CaaS is a managed services offering that helps businesses manage connectivity-related processes across multiple providers, including order management, implementation management, network management and invoice management capabilities.






















































at 3:31 PM 0 comments

Fyre: The Greatest Party that Never Happened (Official Trailer)

About the guy, an ex-DreamIT Ventures startup co-founder, who convinced people he had a lot of VC money from Comcast Ventures.

It debuts on Netflix January 18.



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Guru CEO, Rick Nucci, discussing AI, Hype, and the Future of Humanity at Business of Software Conference USA 2018



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Looking back at Veeva Systems' rise


Tom Paine




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I was writing about Veeva Systems when it was still named Verticals onDemend. Few outside of certain Pharma and SaaS circles knew much about it, or what its business actually did.


Verticals onDemand becomes Veeva Systems
(May 2009)

Verticals onDemand, the Pleasanton, California-based SaaS CRM vendor that has much of its sales & marketing staff in Radnor, has changed its name to Veeva Systems (see press release). The new name, a derivative of the Latin word meaning "to live", is intended to emphasize Veeva's total focus on serving the life sciences market. With the name change, the company has also indicated it plans to get deeper into that vertical, providing applications that go further into an organization than just CRM. Announcements of some more details on this should be forthcoming.

 The two-year-old company’s application runs on Force.com from salesforce.com. In fact, of its top 4 execs three came from Salesforce.com, with the exception being EVP & GM Matt Wallach, who came from Health Market Science in King of Prussia but was formerly with Siebel (now part of Oracle).

 Veeva Systems recently expanded to Europe, and next week in Philadelphia is holding what it calls "the largest Pharma SaaS CRM Gathering" (May 19 & 20).





Veeva (NYSE: VEEV) now has a market cap of $14 billion. Today, when I look at the reaction to a simple press release, its an endless stream of tweets from around the world. Wall Street jumps on every rumor or bit of information.

Things usually look messier to insiders, but to the public eye, execution has been almost flawless.

Investors' Business Daily ran a story yesterday, Top Stocks: Veeva Systems Stands Tall In Fast-Growing Software Sector.

I am sure that Veeva must have a chart in its offices showing all known segments of the digital life sciences market. and those that ere not yet digital. And many are still beyond its current scope. The opportunity to move into other spaces exist, but Veeva is very methodical and careful about what it takes on.




at 8:17 PM 0 comments

Philly EnterpriseTech Highlights Jan 7-9; Is WeWork actually just an overvalued real estate business?; Veeva vs Salesforce: Which stock would you buy?

The early talk was that WeWork would get a $15 billon + equity infusion from SoftBank. But it ended up being only $2 billion. What happened?
Is WeWork actually just an overvalued real estate business?


Veeva vs Salesforce: Which stock would you buy? Motley Fool weighs in.












































































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