The content below is taken from the original ( How to train for and ride multi-day events), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
Riding back-to-back days later in the year? We’ve got tips to help you to the finish line in the best shape possible…
Riding back-to-back days later in the year? We’ve got tips to help you to the finish line in the best shape possible…
The content below is taken from the original ( How European Businesses Are Using Blockchain to Expand Globally), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
At the recent Ripple Regionals event in London, three European business leaders highlighted their successful growth in exciting new markets—from Mexico to the Philippines and beyond.
Each company has used blockchain and digital assets to overcome the challenges of dealing with exotic currencies and new banking partners, making cross-border payments faster, cheaper and more transparent for their customers worldwide. These technologies have also helped them open up fresh markets in a cost-effective way that put them ahead of the competition.
Here are three key learnings consider in expanding your business’s global reach:
1. Develop growth opportunities
Euro Exim Bank facilitates trade finance across 80 countries, many of which are home to exotic currencies and where liquidity is difficult to get.
“Our challenge,” Head of Compliance and Operations, Graham Bright told the audience at Ripple Regionals, “is to make sure that our customers can get fast, reliable, trusted, secure service.”
The company’s biggest potential growth markets are in Africa and the Eastern Asia. However, many clients in these regions do not have easy access to euros or dollars, so make payments in their local currency. Euro Exim Bank needed an alternative to the slow and expensive existing cross-border payment networks.
Within just three months of first partnering with Ripple, the bank was using xRapid to provide clients with on-demand liquidity for international transactions, instead of needing multiple pre-funded currency accounts around the world.
“We chose xRapid because we need to make it easy to move funds as quickly and as cost-effectively as possible,” says Bright.
By helping Euro Exim Bank to increase the velocity, volume, veracity and value of cross-border payments, Ripple has allowed the company to develop its key growth markets quickly and efficiently.
2. Access the inaccessible
Mercury FX aims to make money move faster around the world for clients at a lower cost. To overcome the high costs and long turnaround times of the existing SWIFT network, the company turned to Ripple’s innovative technology.
“We trialed xRapid by sending a donation to an orphanage in Mexico that takes kids off street and teaches them how to surf,” recalled CEO Alastair Constance. The trial was so successful, that Mercury FX soon started facilitating payments from a UK business that imports Mexican food.
“The payments are moving a lot faster and cheaper than they would going through SWIFT,” explains Constance.
Mexico had not been a target market for Mercury FX because of the high costs and time-consuming nature of making international payments there. Now Ripple has opened Constance’s mind to other potentially lucrative corridors. Starting with plans to use xRapid in the Philippines, the company is completely rethinking its acquisition strategy and becoming a competitive leader in a range of new markets.
“The really exciting thing that xRapid allows us to open up previously inaccessible markets where our clients can trade freely at optimized speeds and costs.”
3. Find more value
When TransferGo was founded in 2012, its goal was to provide same or next day international settlements for migrant workers.
“Today, that’s too slow,” notes the company’s Head of Operations, Tomas Snitka. In highly competitive remittances market, customers are looking for the fastest and most cost-effective providers. To overcome one of its biggest challenges – constantly spending time and money integrating with new banking partners – the company decided use RippleNet.
Snitka demonstrated to the Ripple Regionals crowd RippleNet’s impact with a test transaction to India. From the customer logging into their TransferGo account to the recipient getting the funds took just seven minutes.
“The funds are in the account,” he emphasizes. “The recipient can withdraw those funds or go to the shop and spend them. But by next year, even that that will be too slow.” Which is why TransferGo is looking to use xRapid to settle transactions in as little as two minutes.
The benefits for customers are more than just speed. Feedback from people carrying out real-time transactions to India suggests they bring peace-of-mind, as customers are confident that the money will arrive. Ripple is giving TransferGo a real competitive edge in India, which is the largest global cross-border remittance market. The rest of the world will follow.
“Our vision is to become a global real-time payments company,” states Snitka. “We see Ripple as a strategic partner moving forward.”
Moving value globally
Mercury FX’s Alastair Constance drew nods of approval from the Ripple Regionals audience when he said, “I see us becoming truly global citizens in the future and money therefore needs to be a truly global commodity.”
This is an idea that chimes with Ripple’s mission of allowing value to move anywhere around the globe as freely as information, helping businesses in Europe and elsewhere expand their reach across the world.
For more information about how Ripple and RippleNet can offer faster, cheaper and more transparent global payments, please visit us here.
The post How European Businesses Are Using Blockchain to Expand Globally appeared first on Ripple.
The content below is taken from the original ( Azure MFA – Enforced vs AAD Identity Protection+AAD Conditional Access), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
We recently transitioned from one AAD tenant to another due to an organizational rename. In the prior tenant, we were using Azure MFA and (via the MFA service portal) had been marking users as "Enforced". In the new tenant, we’ve instead implemented Azure AD Identity Protection and Conditional Access rules that dictate when MFA is required.
My understanding is that the "Enforced" status in the old MFA portal basically means that all sign ins that are not from the list of trusted IPs will have an MFA challenge run (which could be satisfied by the device token that is good for n days, as configured within the portal).
For the AAD-IP + CA scenario, MFA is enabled for all users (they are enabled for automatic registration) but MFA challenges are only brought when the conditions in the CA rules or behavioral analysis done by AAD-IP says that an MFA challenge is warranted. That challenge is subject to the trusted IPs and token as configured in the old MFA portal.
My understanding is that this should be set up as an either/or and not both (old style Enforce and the alternative AAD-IP+CA). Users have noticed a distinct lessening of MFA challenges (and they like it, but that would be expected).
The Microsoft Secure Score is registering a zero for us under the AAD-IP+CA scenario as it is looking specifically for the Enforced tag to be enabled on user accounts (since that is something that it can actually query).
Question is whether I’m significantly less secure under this setup or not. I still get MFA challenges when my account is accessing things in ways that I would expect to be challenged. We have seen users get "saved" by MFA when an external actor guesses their password. So, I assume that I’m in a working state.
Just trying to figure out if others are configured similarly or am I way off base in how I’m doing things.
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The content below is taken from the original ( PowerUp Toys is motorizing more paper vehicles), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
The content below is taken from the original ( Amazon’s ‘Alexa Blueprints’ can now be published publicly on the US Alexa Skills Store), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
Last year, Amazon introducedAlexa Blueprints, a way for an Alexa device owner to create their own customized voice skills and Alexa responses without needing to know how to code. These skills — like family trivia or tips for your babysitter — could then be published for personal use. Later, Amazon added the ability to share the skills with others by way of a link. Today, Amazon is taking things a step further — you’ll now be able to publish these skills publicly to the U.S. Alexa Skills Store.
Alongside the launch, launch, Amazon is also adding four new blueprints aimed at content creators, bloggers and organizations.
The idea with blueprints is to offer Alexa device owners a simple, online tool for building voice skills using templates you customize and edit to your liking.
Originally designed for use in the home and among families, some of the first “blueprints” included those offering instructions to houseguests and sitters or games and trivia you could play with family and friends, among other things. Others let you create your own stories for Alexa to narrate, or helped you build your own flashcards, quizzes and other educational tools.
Amazon continued to expand the Blueprints service following its April 2018 launch. For example, last summer it rolled out more customizable templates for families and roommates, like the Chore Chart or Roommate templates, for instance.
As of yesterday, there were 50 voice blueprints available across a half dozen categories, including a newer set of special-occasion and greetings skills from Hallmark.
Today, Amazon is launching four more templates.
The most interesting is the Flash Briefing blueprint, blueprint, which allows any content creator to publish their news and updates to the Alexa Skills Store in the U.S. Their audience can then opt to include the skill in their own daily briefing, alongside the news from larger organizations, like the BBC or NPR, for example.
Another allows bloggers using WordPress to deliver their blogs as audio, by way of Alexa. That’s similar to something Amazon previously offered via its Amazon Polly WordPress plugin, now called the Amazon AI Plugin. The new skill leverages that same plugin to turn the blog’s text to speech, which can then be published as an Alexa skill.
These two new blueprints allow smaller publishers or local news, local weather providers or local sports groups to reach Alexa users, but they may represent a new challenge for Amazon, too.
Because of their ease-of-use, these skills could be co-opted by extremists or conspiracy theorists who don’t have an official path to broadcast their “fake news” otherwise. Amazon will need to be careful in its vetting and approval process.
The other two new blueprints are aimed at organizations — specifically, universities and churches. churches. The University and Spiritual Talks blueprints let anyone make their live and recorded audio content accessible on Alexa devices.
To create these skills, the organization only has to add their audio feed URL, then customize their welcome and exit messages.
In addition to the new blueprints, the current set of templates may be used by a wide range of businesses, brands and individuals, ranging from personal trainers who want to offer their clients personalized routines, to tutors who offer their students flashcards and facts, to authors who want to share their short stories with the world.
Amazon declined to say how many people have used Blueprints to date, but says it’s “excited” about the level of adoption. When asked if people could monetize their blueprints, a rep responded “that’s an interesting idea.” (Which is Amazon PR speak for “yes, but not now.”)
“We’re always thinking about ways to make the experience better for customers,” a company spokesperson said.
Allowing anyone to publish Blueprints to the Skills Store could allow it to quickly grow beyond the 80,000 voice apps it offers today. But it could also fill the store with lower-quality apps, as templated apps aren’t unique in their design, have simple flows and don’t use voice talent or sound effects as part of their experience.
Users can begin publishing Blueprints today from blueprints.amazon.com.
The content below is taken from the original ( Nintendo is releasing a free battle royale version of Tetris), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
It came right in the middle of the Nintendo Direct announcement this afternoon: “99 players… but only one reigns supreme.”
It could be a tagline for just about any of the run-and-gun shoot’em up battle royale games that are so popular right now, a la Fortnite or Apex. Instead, it’s the tagline for the new… for… Tetris?
Nintendo only touched on it for about 40 seconds (so details are a bit light), but the company says it’s releasing a free-to-play, 99-player version of Tetris called Tetris 99 later today. It’ll be a free download for Nintendo Switch Online members.
It seems to mostly be the Tetris we all know, with a twist: performing particularly well will let you attack other players with garbage, filling their carefully curated rows with a bunch of junk.
No word yet on if you’ll be able to make your blocks Floss ordo the Carlton dance. dance.
Story developing…
The content below is taken from the original ( Migration Tools for the Azure Hybrid Cloud), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
While the hybrid cloud offers a number of benefits, moving to the hybrid cloud isn’t the easiest of tasks. To get there, you need to perform an analysis of the workloads and services that you are considering moving to the hybrid cloud to ensure that they are suitable candidates for running in the cloud.
Next, you need to perform an initial cost analysis. Cost saving is one of the main benefits of moving to the hybrid cloud. However, accurately estimating the cost savings can be difficult. Sometimes you may not really know the real costs until you actually make the move. Finally, you need a way to move all or select parts of your on-premise workloads into the cloud. Fortunately, if you’re considering a move to the Azure hybrid cloud then Microsoft provides several tools that can help you with the different aspects of your hybrid cloud migration. Let’s take a closer look at some of Microsoft’s most important hybrid cloud migration tools.
Cloud Migration Assessment
Accessing your current environment is the first step in moving to the hybrid cloud and Microsoft Assessment and Planning toolkit (MAPs) can help you discover the servers across your IT environment. MAPs can automatically collect data and analyze your on-premise system hardware configuration. MAPs primarily uses WMI to collect information from Windows and Linux based servers as well as Hyper-V and VMware environments. When it’s finished it generates an Inventory Results Report that can be opened in Excel and passed on to other tools.
Estimating Costs
Understanding the impact of a move to the cloud is vital for both your company’s operational efficiencies as well as its bottom line. Cost is often the number one factor that will prompt businesses to move into the cloud. To help evaluate the costs of moving to Azure Microsoft provides their Azure Total Cost of Ownership Calculator (TCO Calculator). The TCO Calculator is a web-based tool that prompts you to enter the details of your on-premise server infrastructure. First, you tell it your workloads and their details like the type of servers they are running on. Next, you enter the details of your on-premises database and storage infrastructure. Finally, you supply the amount of network bandwidth you are currently consuming. The results of your MAPs analysis can be feed into the TCO Calculator.
Azure Hybrid Use Benefit
Another tool that can help in your hybrid cloud migration is the Azure Hybrid Use Benefit. The Azure Hybrid Use Benefit allows customers with Software Assurance to run Windows VMs on Azure at a reduced rate potentially providing significant cost savings. Azure Hybrid Use Benefit can be used with Windows Server Datacenter and Standard edition licenses that are covered by Software Assurance or Windows Server Subscriptions. Windows Server Datacenter Edition customers can use licenses both on-premises and in Azure. Windows Server Standard Edition customers can assign the Azure Hybrid Use Benefit for licenses on Azure. However, if they do they cannot use the Standard Edition license on-premise. While the actual savings depends on the Azure usage and size and type of VMs, one example Microsoft touts is that for every 100 Window Server licenses you can run up to 200 virtual machines with a potential savings of over $300,000 a year (based on the D3-V2 VM size).
Azure Migrate Service
The Azure Migrate service is a paid Azure service that assesses migrating on-premise VMware workloads to Azure. The Azure Migrate service can only work with on-premises VMware VMs. The VMware VMs must be managed by vCenter Server. To use the Azure Migrate service you must install a local virtual collector appliance that analyzes on-premises VMware VMs. The service performs performance-based sizing as well as cost estimates for moving the VMs to Azure. If you want to analyze Hyper-VMs or physical servers you need to use the Azure Site Recovery Deployment Planner for Hyper-V. The Azure Migrate service has a free 180 day trial period.
Azure Site Recovery and Azure Database Migration
While its main purpose is disaster recovery, Azure Site Recovery (ASR) is can also be used to migrate VMs to Azure. ASR is a paid service and it can migrate a number of different systems types to Azure including VMs on AWS, VMware, Hyper-V or physical servers. You can configure ASR to take advantage of your Azure Hybrid Use Benefit with PowerShell. If you want to migrate databases then you can use the Azure Database Migration Service which is also a paid service that can migrate SQL Server, Amazon RDS SQL and Oracle to Azure SQL Database.
The post Migration Tools for the Azure Hybrid Cloud appeared first on Petri.
The content below is taken from the original ( From CCIE to Google Cloud Network Engineer: four things to think about), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
To stay relevant and wanted in the high-tech job market, it’s important to keep abreast of new technologies—and get certified in them! Google Cloud offers a number of professional certifications, including the new Professional Cloud Network Engineer. Currently in beta, certifications such as this can make you a valuable asset in a multi-cloud world.
If you’re coming from a traditional on-premises IT environment, there are some things that are helpful to know up front when studying for the Cloud Network Engineer certification. Personally, I spent nearly two decades working in mainstream IT operations settings, and have made the switch to cloud. As a former Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert, i.e., CCIE, I’ve had to let go of the past and open up to seeing and learning new things in a slightly different way. Here are some things to understand before you start studying. The sooner you see the difference between networking in the cloud and on-prem, the more successful you’ll be.
Figure 1 is a common network diagram that shows the data flow between two endpoints over a simple network. Data originates in applications on Endpoint 1 and flows up and down the TCP/IP network stack across the devices in the network, until it finally reaches the applications on Endpoint 2. Before a large chunk of data is sent out of EndPoint-1 it is sliced up into smaller sized pieces. Protocol headers are then prepended to these pieces before they are sent out onto the wire as packets. These packets, and their associated headers, are the atomic unit in the networking world.
As a network engineer though, you typically focus on the network devices in between the endpoints, not the endpoints themselves. As you can see in Router-1, the majority of traffic flows through the router; it comes in one interface (the so-called “goes-inta” interface), and passes out the “goes-outta” interface. Only a relatively small amount of traffic is destined to the router itself. Data destined for the network device, meanwhile, includes control-plane communications, management traffic, or malicious attacks. This “through vs. to” traffic balance is common across all networking devices (switches, routers, firewalls, and load balancers) and results in a “goes-inta/goes-outta” view of the world as you configure, operate, and troubleshoot your network devices.
Once you step into the cloud engineer role the atomic unit changes. Packets and headers are replaced with workflows and their associated datasets. Figure 2 shows this conceptual change through a typical three-tier web deployment. The idea of the network as you knew is it abstracted and distributed. The traffic pattern now inverts, with the majority of traffic either sourced or destined for a cloud service or application that resides on a cloud resource, rather than the network devices between them.
You can see this when you look at how to configure the firewall rule named http-inbound. Even though you configure the rule in relation to the VPC, you now have to identify a target using either the –target-tags or the –target-service-accounts=[IAM Service Account] gcloud arguments. In addition, depending on the ingress or egress direction of the traffic, you only configure either a source or destination filter, not both. This is because half of the information is considered to be the target itself. In other words, the focus is on the data that enters and leaves the specific cloud service.
As you move from on-premises to the cloud don’t get hung up trying to fit all the networking details you already know into the new solutions you are learning. Remember that your new goal is to enable workflows.
In the old networking world there were tangible building blocks such as switches, routers, firewalls, load balancers, cables, racks, power outlets, and BTU calculations. The intangible building blocks were features and methods defined by IETF RFCs and vendor-proprietary protocols with their ordered steps, finite-state machines, data structures, and timers. You physically assembled all these things to build inter-connectivity between the end users and the applications they used to make your business run. Implementing all this took days and weeks. In addition, as the network grew, the associated management and cost to operate it also grew disproportionately larger for your business.
Cloud solutions treat this complexity as a software problem and add a layer of abstraction between end users and workloads, removing or hiding many of the complex details associated with the old building blocks. Your new building blocks are cloud-based services and features like Google Compute Engine, Cloud SQL, Cloud Functions, and Cloud Pub/Sub. You assemble these new resources based on your needs to provide IaaS, Paas, SaaS, and FaaS solutions. Your deployment schedule shrinks from days and weeks to seconds and minutes as you connect your enterprise network via Cloud VPN or Cloud Interconnect and deploy VPCs, Cloud Load Balancing, and Docker containers with Google Kubernetes Engine. You minimize management complexity through tools like Deployment Manager, Stackdriver, and Google Cloud’s pricing tools. You no longer simply build connectivity between end points but rather enable virtualized environments by treating infrastructure as code.
Many cloud providers’ infrastructure is made up of large data center complexes in geographical regions across the globe, with each region subdivided into zones for service redundancy. Connectivity between these regions, for the most part, happens over the public internet.
The benefit of this approach is that the internet provides ubiquitous connectivity. Looking at Figure 3 though you can see that there are several downsides:
Google Cloud’s’ Premium Network Service Tier, now generally available, changes the game. As shown in Figure 4, the public internet sits outside of your global VPC. The core of your network is now Google’s own private fiber network.
This improves your situation in several ways:
Of course, if these advantages aren’t as compelling as lower bandwidth costs, Google Cloud also offers a Standard Networking Tier that routes traffic over the public internet for a lower price point.
Sure, some networking devices have GUI-based management programs or web consoles, but if you’re like me, you’ve probably spent most of your career in the CLI of a networking device. This is because GUIs tend to make the basic stuff easy and CLIs make the hard stuff possible‚—they’re your go-to place for configuration, operation, and troubleshooting.
CLIs do have their limitations though. If you want new features you have to upgrade software, and before you upgrade you have to test. That takes time and it’s expensive. If the CLI’s command structure or output changes, your existing automation and scripting breaks. In addition, in large networks with literally hundreds or thousands of devices, lack of software version consistency can be a management nightmare. Yes, you have SNMP, and where SNMP fails, XML schemas and NETCONF/YANG models step in to evolve things in the right direction. All this said, it’s a far cry from the programmatic access you are given once you step into the cloud.
From a configuration, operation, and troubleshooting standpoint, the cloud has a lot of roads to the proverbial top of Mount Fuji. Figure 5 shows the different the different paths available. You are free to choose the one that best maps to your skill level and is most appropriate to complete the task at hand. While Google Cloud has a CLI-based SDK for shell scripting or interactive terminal sessions, you don’t have to use it. If you are developing an application or prefer a programmatic approach, you can use one of many client libraries that expose a wealth of functionality. If you’re an experienced programmer with specific needs you can even write directly to the REST API itself. And of course, on the other end of the spectrum, if you are learning or prefer to use a visual approach, there’s always the console.
In addition to the tools above, If you need to create larger topologies on a regular cadence you may want to look at Google’s Cloud Deployment Manager. If you want a vendor agnostic tool that works across cloud carriers you can investigate the open-source program Terraform. Both solutions offer a jump from imperative to declarative infrastructure programming. This may be a good fit if you need a more consistent workflow across developers and operators as they provision resources
If this sounds like a lot, that’s because it is. Don’t despair though, there’s a readily available resource that will really help you grok these foundational network concepts: the documentation.
You are most likely very familiar with the documentation section of several network vendor’s websites. To get up to speed on networking on Google Cloud, your best bet is to familiarize yourself with Google’s documentation as well. There is documentation for high-level concepts like network tier levels, network peering, and hybrid connectivity. Then, each cloud service also has its own individual set of documentation, subdivided into concepts, how-tos, quotas, pricing, and other areas. Reviewing how it is structured and creating bookmarks will make studying and the certification process much easier. Better yet, it will also make you a better cloud engineer.
Finally, I want to challenge you to stretch beyond your comfort zone. Moving from network to the cloud is about virtualization, automation, programming, and developing new areas of expertise. Your journey into the cloud should not stop at learning how GCP implements VPCs. Set long term as well as short term goals. There are so many new areas where your skill sets are needed and you can provide value. You can do it; don’t doubt that for one minute.
In my next blog post I’ll be discussing an approach to structure your Cloud learning. This will make the learning and certification process easier as well as prepare you to do the cloud Network Engineer role. Until then, the Google Cloud training team has lots of ways for you to increase your Google Cloud know-how. Join our webinar on preparing for the Professional Cloud Network Engineer certification exam on February 22, 2019 at 9:45am PST. Now go visit the Google certification page and set your first certification goal! Best of Luck!
The content below is taken from the original ( How to fix various OneDrive errors on Windows 10), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
OneDrive client for Windows 10, at times, may throw up errors which will be accompanied by error codes to help us troubleshoot and fix the issue. Today, we will be checking out how to fix various OneDrive errors. Here’s how to […]
This post How to fix various OneDrive errors on Windows 10 is from TheWindowsClub.com.
The content below is taken from the original ( Startup names may have passed peak weirdness), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
For years, decades even, startup names have been getting weirder. This isn’t a scientific verdict, but it is how things have seemed to someone who spends a lot of hours perusing this stuff.
Startups have had a long run of branding themselves with creative misspellings, animal names. human first names, made-up words, adverbs and other odd collections of letters. It’s gone on so long it now seems normal. Names like Google, Airbnb and Hulu, which sounded strange at first, are now part of our everyday vocabulary.
Over the past few quarters, however, a peculiar thing has been happening: Startup founders are choosing more conventional-sounding names.
“As we reach the edge of strangeness… they’re saying: ‘It’s too weird. I’m uncomfortable,’” said Athol Foden, president of Brighter Naming, a naming consultancy. While quirky startup monikers haven’t gone away, founders are increasingly comfortable with less-unusual-sounding choices.
Foden’s observations are reflected in our annual Crunchbase News survey of startup naming trends. We’re seeing a proliferation of startups choosing simple words that describe their businesses, including companies like Hitch, an app for long-distance car rides; Duffel, a trip-booking startup named after the popular travel bag; and Coder, a software development platform.
But fortunately for fans of offbeat names, the trend is only toward less weirdness, not no weirdness. Those who wish to patronage seed-stage startups can still buy tampons from Aunt Flow, get parenting tips from an app called Mush or get insurance from a startup called Marshmallow.
Below, we look in more detail at some of the more popular startup naming practices and how they are trending.
For a long time, it seemed like a vast number of startups selected names largely by disabling the spell checker.
Most desirable dictionary words were already in use as domains or too pricey to acquire. So founders took to dropping vowels, subbing a “y” for an “i” or adding an extra consonant to make it work. The strategy worked well for a lot of well-known companies, including Lyft, Tumblr, Digg, Flickr, Grindr and Scribd.
These days, creative misspellings are still pretty common among early-stage founders. Our name survey unearthed a big number (see partial list) that recently raised funding, including Houwser, an upstart real estate brokerage; Swytch, developer of a kit for converting bikes to e-bikes; and Wurk, a provider of human resources and compliance software for the cannabis industry.
However, creative misspellings are getting less popular, Foden said. Early-stage founders are turned off by the prospect of having to spell out their names to people unfamiliar with the brand (which for seed-stage companies includes pretty much everyone).
One of the more fun naming styles is the pun. In our perusal of companies that raised seed funding in the past year, we came across a number of startups employing some sort of play-on words.
We put together a list of seven of the punniest names here. In addition to Aunt Flow, the list includes WeeCare, a network of daycare providers, and Serial Box, a digital content producer. Crunchbase News also created its own fictional startup — drone chicken delivery startup Internet of Wings — in an explainer series on startup funding.
Perhaps some day business naming will harken back to the industrial age, when corporate titans had exceedingly boring and obvious names.
Real companies with pun names that have matured to exit were harder to pinpoint. A couple that have gone public are Groupon and MedMen, a cannabis company that went public in Canada and is valued around CA$2 billion.
For some reason, it appears pun names are more popular in the brick-and-mortar world than the tech startup sphere. Restaurants specializing in the Vietnamese noodle soup Pho have dozens of play-on-word names memorialized in lists like this. Ditto for pet stores.
Personally, I’d like to see more internet startups rolling out pun-based names. Foden would, too, and he has even volunteered one suggestion for someone who wants to start a business applying artificial intelligence to artificial insemination: Ai.ai.
There are more than 170,000 non-obsolete words in the English language, per the Oxford English Dictionary. Startups, however, are convinced we need more.
Hence, one of the more enduringly popular business-naming practices is to come up with something that sounds like an actual word, even if it isn’t.
We put together a list of examples of this naming style among recently seed-funded startups.
It includes Trustology, which is building a platform to safeguard crypto assets; Invocable, a developer of voice design tools for Alexa apps; and Locomation, which focuses on autonomous trucking technology.
Naming advisors like to see the made-up word name trend on the rise, Foden said, because it’s the kind of thing companies pay a consultant to figure out. Another advantage is it’s easier to top search results for a made-up word.
Lastly, let’s look at those rebel startups choosing familiar dictionary words for their names.
We put together a list of some here. Besides the aforementioned Duffel, Hitch and Coder, there’s Decent, a healthcare startup; Chief, a women’s networking group; Journal, a note organizing tool; and many more.
Startups are less concerned than they used to be with snagging a dot-com domain that contains just their name. Commonly, they’ll add a prefix to their domain (joinchief.com, usejournal.com), choose an alternate domain (Hitch.net) or both.
Overall, Foden said, startups today are putting less emphasis on securing a dot-com suffix or an exact domain name match. Google parent Alphabet, in particular, made the alternate domain idea more palatable. It helped to see one of the world’s richest corporations forego Alphabet.com in favor of abc.xyz.
They say history repeats itself. If so, perhaps some day business naming will harken back to the industrial age, when corporate titans had exceedingly boring and obvious names like Standard Oil, U.S. Steel and General Electric.
For now, however, we live in era in which the most valuable companies have names like Google and Facebook. And to us, they sound perfectly normal.
Methodology: For the naming data set, we looked primarily at companies in English-speaking countries that raised seed funding after 2018. To broaden the potential list of names, we also included some companies funded in 2017. We also tried to limit the lists, where possible to companies founded in the past three years, although there were occasional exceptions.
The content below is taken from the original ( Light-based computers to be 5,000 times faster), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
Electrical currents are best created using semiconductor crystals that absorb light, say researchers who have announced a significant, potential computer-speed breakthrough. The team obtained ultrafast clock rates in the terahertz of frequencies, using light. That is significantly higher than existing single-gigahertz computer clock rates.
The “bursts of light contain frequencies that are 5,000 times higher than the highest clock rate of modern computer technology,” researchers at the Forschungsverbund research association in Germany announced in a press release last month. A chip’s oscillating frequencies, called clock rate, is one measurement of speed.
The content below is taken from the original ( It’s now just one week until the RISC OS Southwest Show 2019), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
And in a new, easier to reach venue, so you now have one less excuse if you don’t come! As of today, it is now just one week until the 2019 Southwest Show, which takes takes place on Saturday, 16th February – in a new, more accessible venue in Bristol. The change of venue has […]
The content below is taken from the original ( Beginner’s bike fit: how to set up your bike), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
An one-on-one appointment with a professional will help you to find your optimal position for comfort and performance. But if you just want to be in the right ballpark, and avoid injury, we’ve got everything you need to know…
If ordering a brand new bike is exciting, then receiving it is the pinnacle of joy. So much so that …Continue reading »
The content below is taken from the original ( The Linux command-line cheat sheet), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
When coming up to speed as a Linux user, it helps to have a cheat sheet that can help introduce you to some of the more useful commands.
In the tables below, you’ll find sets of commands with simple explanations and usage examples that might help you or Linux users you support become more productive on the command line.
These commands will help new Linux users become familiar with their Linux accounts.
The content below is taken from the original ( Tinder for Foodies: Samsung Turns Smart Fridge Into Dating Service), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
When it comes to dating, it’s not what’s on the outside that counts. It’s what’s inside … your fridge. Samsung this week introduced Refrigerdating—a Tinder-esque platform for meeting people based on the contents […]
The post Tinder for Foodies: Samsung Turns Smart Fridge Into Dating Service appeared first on Geek.com.
The content below is taken from the original ( reportgenerator.portable (4.0.11.0)), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
ReportGenerator converts XML reports generated by OpenCover, dotCover, Visual Studio, NCover, Cobertura, JaCoCo or Clover or into human readable reports in various formats. The reports do not only show the coverage quota, but also include the source code and visualize which line has been covered.
The content below is taken from the original ( Sonos unveils in-ceiling, in-wall and outdoor speakers), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
Sonos is partnering with Sonance for a new lineup of passive speakers. You can now pre-order in-ceiling, in-wall and outdoor Sonos speakers.
These are weird products as you still need to connect those speakers with a Sonos Amp. In other words, you can’t control those speakers from the Sonos app without the Sonos Amp.
But if you’re building a house and you want to put Sonos speakers around the house, this lineup is a good way to make sure that everything will be optimized for the Sonos ecosystem.
The in-wall and in-ceiling speakers are designed to blend in with your walls. You can even paint on the grilles to make them disappear even more. They’ll start shipping on February 26 and you can pre-order them now — each pair of speakers cost $599.
Outdoor speakers also come as a pair. They aren’t available just yet, but they’ll cost $799 a pair whenever they ship. And they should resist to extreme temperatures, water and UV rays.
According to the company, you can plug three pairs of speakers into to a single Sonos Amp. If you plan to build on building a giant house, you can still buy multiple Amps and stack them up.
Like other Sonos speakers, you can tune them using TruePlay Trueplay . This process uses your iPhone or iPad microphone to analyze the size of your room and how your furniture affects your speaker. Sonos then adjusts speaker settings. Update: TruePlay will be available for in-wall and in-ceiling speakers.
The content below is taken from the original ( What To Consider when Building Your Azure Firewall Design), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
The Azure Firewall was quite limited during its preview. In fact, I would go as far as saying that if it had not improved, I would not consider it as a firewall option in Azure – but that’s not the case anymore! I have recommended the Azure Firewall because it has the core features I commonly need for customers now, plus I can “set it and forget it”.
The most important feature of all is the ability to create NAT rules (DNAT to be precise) for inbound traffic. Yes; during the preview, the Azure Firewall only inspected outbound traffic.
Azure Firewall does not replace NSGs. Defense in depth is still a good thing. Typically, you will use 1 NSG per subnet for local or distributed firewalling, plus the Azure Firewall for central or edge protection.
There are scenarios where internal traffic will not be inspected by the Azure Firewall. If packets are routing from one subnet to another inside a virtual network, then those packets will not be routed by the firewall even if a user-defined route (UDR) in a route table directs traffic via the internal IP address of the firewall. If you want to force inspection then you can do one of the following:
Microsoft has been slow to produce reference architectures for the Azure Firewall – you can find some really good ones from Microsoft for many kinds of IaaS scenarios. However, if you read through the Microsoft docs for Azure Firewall you can figure out some designs/scenarios:
Note that the Azure Firewall must be deployed into a subnet called AzureFirewallSubnet.
The Web Application Gateway (WAG)/Web Application Firewall (WAF) still has a function. The WAG/WAF is intended for inspecting inbound HTTP/HTTPS traffic. The Azure Firewall can inspect application traffic (RDP, SSH, FTP and so on) as well as all outbound traffic.
Note that the WAG/WAF should be deployed with a public IP address at this time – yes; that does complicate architecture and increases the number of public IP addresses in your designs.
If you deploy services with their own public IP address with the Azure Firewall then you might encounter split routing. Traffic will come into those services, such as web servers behind a WAG/WAF via a public IP address, but a UDR will route the traffic out to the Internet via the Azure Firewall. That could cause some issues such as:
To avoid this you can be careful with your UDR. For example, I might route traffic to the virtual network(s) via the Azure Firewall, but not use the “everything” 0.0.0.0 destination in the route table associated with the affected web services.
If you use split routing and the Azure Firewall is effectively the default gateway for the subnet via routing, then Just-In-Time VM Access (Azure Security Center) will not work.
Enabling service endpoints on subnets has become more common; this enables secure access to Azure services, such as Azure SQL or storage accounts, from your virtual machines through your virtual network(s).
Microsoft recommends enabling service endpoints in your Azure Firewall subnet and disabling them in your other subnets. The idea is that the Azure Firewall would inspect and log all outbound traffic, including this would require a 0.0.0.0 routing rule to force all traffic through the Azure Firewall. Note that this design might require split routing if you have services with their own public IP address, so this is a “think about it before you do it” design recommendation.
The post What To Consider when Building Your Azure Firewall Design appeared first on Petri.
The content below is taken from the original ( DISM vs SFC first? What should I run first on Windows 10?), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
Should I run SFC or DISM first to repair file or system image corruptions on my Windows 10 computer? Most websites suggest you running one or both of these tools. When should you run each or both? This post tries […]
This post DISM vs SFC first? What should I run first on Windows 10? is from TheWindowsClub.com.
The content below is taken from the original ( Test Your Tone-Deafness), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
This surprisingly tough web game, from the Music Lab at the Harvard University Department of Psychology, tests how well you can distinguish tones by pitch. Put on your headphones and judge—as fast as you can—whether certain tones are higher or lower than others.
The content below is taken from the original ( What programming languages rule the Internet of Things?), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
As the Internet of Things (IoT) continues to evolve, it can be difficult to track which tools are most popular for different purposes. Similarly, trying to keep tabs on the relative popularity of programming languages can be a complex endeavor with few clear parameters. So, trying to figure out the most popular programming languages among the estimated 6.2 million IoT developers (in 2016) seems doubly fraught — but I’m not going to let that stop me.
The content below is taken from the original ( MSPAlliance Updates and Adds New Certifications for Cloud and Managed Service Providers), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
The International Association of Cloud & Managed Service Providers (MSPAlliance) today added several new certifications to its MSP/Cloud Verify… Read more at VMblog.com.
The content below is taken from the original ( Iceland starts planning for new undersea internet cable to Europe), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
Iceland has made public its plans to build a fourth undersea internet cable to Europe. While one Icelandic news outlet reported that this was because of “security reasons”, the truth appears a bit more mundane.…
The content below is taken from the original ( These Genetically Modified Chickens Can Lay Eggs With Cancer-Killing Drugs), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
Researchers are trying to “crack” expensive drug production with a cheaper alternative: Genetically modified chickens that can lay eggs with human proteins. Researchers from University of Edinburgh’s Roslin Institute and Roslin Technologies, a […]
The post These Genetically Modified Chickens Can Lay Eggs With Cancer-Killing Drugs appeared first on Geek.com.
The content below is taken from the original ( Raspberry Pi’s Latest Upgrade: the Compute Module 3+), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
We’ve become so used to the Raspberry Pi line of boards that have appeared in ever-increasing power capabilities since that leap-year morning in 2012 when the inexpensive and now ubiquitous single board computer was announced and oversold its initial production run. The consumer boards have amply fulfilled their mission in providing kids with a pocket-money computer, and even though they are not the most powerful in the class of small Linux boards they remain the one to beat.
The other side of the Pi coin comes with the industrial siblings of the familiar boards, the Compute Module. This is a version of the Pi meant to be built into other products, utilizing a SODIMM connector as the hardware interface. Today brings news of a fresh addition to that range: the Compute Module 3+.
As you might expect from the nomenclature this brings the Broadcom BCM2837B0 processor from the Raspberry Pi 3B+ to the barebones SODIMM-style Pi, but unexpectedly they have also made it available with a range of different size eMMC devices installed. In place of the 4 GB capacity of previous offerings are 8, 16, and 32 GB devices, with an intriguing new “lite” variant that has no onboard storage at all.
Perhaps the saddest thing from a Hackaday reader’s perspective is that as the Pi blog post notes due to commercial sensitivities they have little idea what products many of the Compute Modules they sell end up in — a mystery we’d really like to solve. No doubt there are some fascinating applications just waiting do be discovered by hardware hackers in a decade’s time as units enter the surplus market, but for now we’ll have to be content with community offerings. This stereoscopic camera is a recent one, or perhaps one of several handheld game consoles.
