Specializing in Computer Repair, Networking, Internet Solutions, Web Designing, Hybrid App Designing and Windows Operating systems.
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Did you ever think Patrick Stewart would return to the role of Jean-Luc Picard? Neither did he.
But he will! Sir Pat Stew himself just announced the news on Instagram, timed to line up with an on-stage announcement at the Star Trek Las Vegas 2018 convention:
I will always be very proud to have been a part of Star Trek: The Next Generation, but when we wrapped that final movie in the spring of 2002, I truly felt my time with Star Trek had run its natural course. It is, therefore, an unexpected but delightful surprise to find myself excited and invigorated to be returning to Jean-Luc Picard and to explore new dimensions within him. Seeking out new life for him, when I thought that life was over.
During these past years, it has been humbling to hear stories about how The Next Generation brought people comfort, saw them through difficult periods in their lives or how the example of Jean-Luc inspired so many to follow in his footsteps, pursuing science, exploration and leadership. I feel I’m ready to return to him for the same reason – to research and experience what comforting and reforming light he might shine on these often very dark times. I look forward to working with our brilliant creative team as we endeavor to bring a fresh, unexpected and pertinent story to life once more.
The official account for the new Star Trek Discovery series sheds light on a few more details: the story will focus on the “next chapter” of Picard’s life (after Next Generation, presumably), and will be made available on CBS’ online subscription/original content service, CBS All Access.
Make it so! @SirPatStew will be returning to his iconic role as Jean-Luc Picard in a new @cbsallaccess #StarTrek series that tells the story of the next chapter in Picard’s life
pic.twitter.com/T5qQJ4gzU0
— Star Trek: Discovery (@startrekcbs) August 4, 2018
Alas, just about everything else about the show is still a mystery for now. Name? Unknown. How many episodes? Who knows!
Maybe what the world needs right now is some Star Trek. Not the flashy, snappy JJ Abrams Trek — just good ol’ Picard out there getting his Prime Directive on.
Story developing…
How Doppler Labs, a failed startup that tried to build an in-ear computer in 2016, may have influenced development of “hearables” at Amazon, Apple, and Google — [Images: Esa Riutta/Pixabay; Doppler Labs; GDJ/Pixabay] — In October 2016, an impressive group of tech industry royalty took …
Data sovereignty is on the rise across the world. Laws and regulations increasingly require that citizen data be stored in local data centers, and often restricts movement of that data outside of a country’s borders. The European Union’s GDPR policy is one example, although it’s relatively porous. China’s relatively new cloud computing law is much more strict, and forced Apple to turn over its Chinese-citizen iCloud data to local providers and Amazon to sell off data center assets in the country.
Now, it appears that India will join this policy movement. According to Aditya Kalra in Reuters, an influential cloud policy panel has recommended that India mandate data localization in the country, for investigative and national security reasons, in a draft report set to be released later this year. That panel is headed by well-known local entrepreneur Kris Gopalakrishnan, who founded Infosys, the IT giant.
That report would match other policy statements from the Indian political establishment in recent months. The government’s draft National Digital Communications Policy this year said that data sovereignty is a top mission for the country. The report called for the government by 2022 to “Establish a comprehensive data protection regime for digital communications that safeguards the privacy, autonomy and choice of individuals and facilitates India’s effective participation in the global digital economy.”
It’s that last line that is increasingly the objective of governments around the world. While privacy and security are certainly top priorities, governments now recognize that the economics of data are going to be crucial for future innovation and growth. Maintaining local control of data — through whatever means necessary — ensures that cloud providers and other services have to spend locally, even in a global digital economy.
India is both a crucial and an ironic manifestation of this pattern. It is crucial because of the size of its economy: public cloud revenues in the country are expected to hit $2.5 billion this year, according to Gartner’s estimates, an annual growth rate of 37.5%. It is ironic because much of the historical success of India’s IT industry has been its ability to offer offshoring and data IT services across borders.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has made development and rapid economic growth a top priority of his government. (Krisztian Bocsi/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
India is certainly no stranger to localization demands. In areas as diverse as education and ecommerce, the country maintains strict rules around local ownership and investment. While those rules have been opening up slowly since the 1990s, the explosion of interest in cloud computing has made the gap in regulations around cloud much more apparent.
If the draft report and its various recommendations become law in India, it would have significant effects on public cloud providers like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Alibaba, all of whom have cloud operations in the country. In order to comply with the regulations, they would almost certainly have to expend significant resources to build additional data centers locally, and also enforce data governance mechanisms to ensure that data didn’t flow from a domestic to a foreign data center accidentally or programmatically.
I’ve written before that these data sovereignty regulations ultimately benefit the largest service providers, since they’re the only ones with the scale to be able to competently handle the thicket of constantly changing regulations that govern this space.
In the India case though, the expense may well be warranted. Given the phenomenal growth of the Indian cloud IT sector, it’s highly likely that the major cloud providers are already planning a massive expansion to handle the increasing storage and computing loads required by local customers. Depending on how simple the regulations are written, there may well be limited cost to the rules.
One question will involve what level of foreign ownership will be allowed for public cloud providers. Given that several foreign companies already exist in the marketplace, it might be hard to completely eliminate them entirely in favor of local competitors. Yet, the large providers will have their work cut out for them to ensure the market stays open to all.
The real costs though would be borne by other companies, such as startups who rely on customer datasets to power artificial intelligence. Can Indian datasets be used to train an AI model that is used globally? Will the economics be required to stay local, or will the regulations be robust enough to handle global startup innovation? It would be a shame if the very law designed to encourage growth in the IT sector was the one that put a dampener on it.
India’s chief objective is to ensure that Indian data benefits Indian citizens. That’s a laudable goal on the surface, but deeply complicated when it comes time to write these sorts of regulations. Ultimately, consumers should have the right to park their data wherever they want — with a local provider or a foreign one. Data portability should be key to data sovereignty, since it is consumers who will drive innovation through their demand for best-in-class services.
Boston has regained its longstanding place as the second-largest U.S. startup funding hub.
After years of trailing New York City in total annual venture investment, Massachusetts is taking the lead in 2018. Venture investment in the Boston metro area hit $5.2 billion so far this year, on track to be the highest annual total in years.
The Massachusetts numbers year-to-date are about 15 percent higher than the New York City total. That puts Boston’s biotech-heavy venture haul apparently second only to Silicon Valley among domestic locales thus far this year. And for New England VCs, the latest numbers also confirm already well-ingrained opinions about the superior talents of local entrepreneurs.
“Boston often gets dismissed as a has-been startup city. But the successes are often overlooked and don’t get the same attention as less successful, but more hypey companies in San Francisco,” Blake Bartlett, a partner at Boston-based venture firm OpenView, told Crunchbase News. He points to local success stories like online prescription service PillPack, which Amazon just snapped up for $1 billion, and online auto marketplace CarGurus, which went public in October and is now valued around $4.7 billion.
Meanwhile, fresh capital is piling up in the coffers of local startups with all the intensity of a New England snowstorm. In the chart below, we look at funding totals since 2012, along with reported round counts.
In the interest of rivalry, we are also showing how the Massachusetts startup ecosystem compares to New York over the past five years.
So what’s the reason for Boston’s 2018 successes? It’s impossible to pinpoint a single cause. The New England city’s startup scene is broad and has deep pockets of expertise in biotech, enterprise software, AI, consumer apps and other areas.
Still, we’d be remiss not to give biotech the lion’s share of the credit. So far this year, biotech and healthcare have led the New England dealmaking surge, accounting for the majority of invested capital. Once again, local investors are not surprised.
“Boston has been the center of the biotech universe forever,” said Dylan Morris, a partner at Boston and Silicon Valley-based VC firm CRV. That makes the city well-poised to be a leading hub in the sector’s latest funding and exit boom, which is capitalizing on a long-term shift toward more computational approaches to diagnosing and curing disease.
Moreover, it goes without saying that the home city of MIT has a particularly strong reputation for so-called deep tech — using really complicated technology to solve really hard problems. That’s reflected in the big funding rounds.
For instance, the largest Boston-based funding recipient of 2018, Moderna Therapeutics, is a developer of mRNA-based drugs that raised $625 million across two late-stage rounds. Besides Moderna, other big rounds for companies with a deep tech bent went to TCR2, which is focused on engineering T cells for cancer therapy, and Starry (based in both Boston and New York), which is deploying the world’s first millimeter wave band active phased array technology for consumer broadband.
Other sectors saw some jumbo-sized rounds too, including enterprise software, 3D printing and even apparel.
Boston also benefits from the rise of supergiant funding rounds. A plethora of rounds raised at $100 million or more fueled the city’s rise in the venture funding rankings. So far this year, at least 15 Massachusetts companies have raised rounds of that magnitude or more, compared to 12 in all of 2017.
Boston companies are going public and getting acquired at a brisk pace too this year, and often for big sums.
At least seven metro-area startups have sold for $100 million or more in disclosed-price acquisitions this year, according to Crunchbase data. In the lead is online prescription drug service PillPack. The second-biggest deal was Kensho, a provider of analytics for big financial institutions that sold to S&P Global for $550 million.
IPOs are huge, too. A total of 17 Boston-area venture-backed companies have gone public so far this year, of which 15 are life science startups. The largest offering was for Rubius Therapeutics, a developer of red cell therapeutics, followed by cybersecurity provider Carbon Black.
Meanwhile, many local companies that went public in the past few years have since seen their values skyrocket. Bartlett points to examples including online retailer Wayfair (market cap of $10 billion), marketing platform HubSpot (market cap $4.8 billion) and enterprise software provider Demandware (sold to Salesforce for $2.8 billion).
Recollections of a frigid April sojourn in Massachusetts are too fresh for me to comfortably utter the phrase “Boston is hot.” However, speaking purely about startup funding, and putting weather aside, the Boston scene does appear to be seeing some real escalation in temperature.
Of course, it’s not just Boston. Supergiant venture funds are surging all over the place this year. Morris is even bullish on the arch-rival a few hours south: “New York and Boston love to hate each other. But New York’s doing some amazing things too,” he said, pointing to efforts to invigorate the biotech startup ecosystem.
Still, so far, it seems safe to say 2018 is shaping up as Boston’s year for startups.
Some companies keep products a closely guarded secret, like they were nuclear codes or ingredients to a popular cola. Others seem less concerned about the whole thing, as long as it keeps people talking. Based on all we’ve seen from the Galaxy Note 9 to date, it seems that Samsung falls firmly into the latter camp.
Of course, it’s key to point out that we won’t really know what the new handset is all about until its big reveal at Unpacked on Thursday. But also, we really know what it’s all about because, I mean, look at all these leaks.
That said, there’s probably still plenty of reason to pay attention to the event. Given the fact that the company opted not to wait to announce the Galaxy Tab S4 could point to even more big product announcements in the coming months.
There have been various other rumors swirling around these past few weeks and months, including a lot of speculation around a new Samsung Gear watch that could make its debut at the same event.
The Note 9, on the other hand, has all but stood up and announced its presence. In addition to your standard array of rumors, there have been a few egregious leaks on Samsung’s part, including a top executive using the new device in public and Samsung posting a promo video to YouTube.
Here’s what we know so far about the upcoming phablet.
Design/Display
By all accounts, the design language hasn’t changed much since the last generation device — in fact, that’s likely the reason DJ Koh thought he could go unnoticed using the phone. There is, however, one major tell that tipped off viewers to the fact that the executive was using something new.
Originally rumored to be located under screen, the fingerprint sensor has, indeed, been moved. This time, out, however, it’s under the camera, rather than beside it — addressing a key complaint with the Note 8’s design, which found users fumbling with the camera lens when attempting to unlock the device.
The dimensions are reportedly roughly the same here, as well. At 161.9 x 76.3 x 8.8mm, the device is marginally shorter than its predecessors, due perhaps in part to thinner bezels on the top and bottom. The display, meanwhile, is the ever so slightly larger at 6.4-inches to the 8’s 6.3.
Battery/Storage/Performance
Samsung’s made it pretty clear from the start that battery life is a primary focus for the new device. The company appeared to confirm early rumors that the handset would be sporting a 4,000mAh battery in an early teaser that openly mocked the iPhone’s relatively small offering (as is Samsung’s M.O. these days).
That’s a 700mAh jump over the Note 8’s offering, and puts the forthcoming handset toward the top of the phone battery heap. It also bucks Samsung’s recent trend of battery modesty, in the wake of the ongoing Note 7 fiasco. The company apologized profusely, instituted strict testing guidelines, and the phone buying public appears to have mostly forgiven and forgotten the whole kerfuffle.
Subsequent teasers, meanwhile, have focused on additional storage and performance enhancements. A massive 512GB version is rumored to be on tap and will no doubt cost a pretty penny. That can be augmented by up to a terrabyte, courtesy of the microSD slot.
Cameras
This is a no-brainer. Camera updates have been the focus of virtually every flagship phone release. That said, this is one of the few pieces of the phone that’s still a relative mystery.
S-Pen
The company’s beloved stylus was clearly a focus from the outset. In fact, the Unpacked invitation shows a closeup of the S-Pen’s button on a yellow background. The new leaked video confirms the vibrant new color scheme, which, at the very least, should make it a bit harder to lose.
The company has also strongly hinted that S-Pen improvements will be a focus for the new phone, but these have mostly managed to stay under wraps. Suggested functionality includes non-drawing controls for things like music playback and remote unlock.
Headphone Jack
Yep, still here. After all, it was only a few weeks ago that the company was mocking Apple for what it perversely deemed a “double-dongle” required to listen to music and charge the phone at the same time. It remains a key differentiator between Samsung’s handsets and the iPhone, and as such, is likely sticking around for a wwhile. All of the leaks thus far appear to confirm this.
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