The experts have spoken – Structure Security reveals all-star advisor list

Our introductory rate expires on June 10 – grab your ticket now.   Structure Security, set for September 27-28 in San Francisco, has brought together an incredible group of security all-stars to shape the program you will see on stage. Experts like Art Coviello from RSA Security, Laz Lazarikos, Jay Leek of Blackstone and many more are taking time to review speaking applications and plan keynotes, fireside chats and panels. Structure Security’s advisors are planning a conference they want to attend with the speakers and themes they want to know more about. Come meet Structure Security’s Advisors this fall: Matt Bigge, Paladin Capital Asheem Chandra, Greylock Art Coviello, RSA Security Casey Ellis, Bugcrowd Diana Kelley, IBM Laz Lazarikos Jay Leek, Blackstone Itzik Parnafes, Battery Ventures Alex Tosheff, VMware And more we can’t reveal... See who our advisory team has recommended to the stage and grab our introductory pricing before it expires on the 10th.   SPEAKERS   Art Coviello RSA Security Diana Kelley IBM Laz Lazarikos Jay Leek Blackstone Itzik Parnafes Battery Ventures Alex Tosheff VMWare   SPONSORS   HEADLINE MEDIA PARTNER     PARTNERS     SEPTEMBER 27–28, 2016 SAN FRANCISCO, CA REGISTER NOW   Click here to unsubscribe from this list. Our mailing address is: Structure 405 El Camino Real, #215 Menlo Park, CA 94025 Add us to your address book Copyright (C) 2016 Structure All rights reserved. Forward this email to a friend. Update your profile.

Gigaom Change 2016 Leader's Summit

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Structure News: Facebook takes on Google with AI

Where We Use Just The Right Amount Of SaaS June 3rd, 2016 / by Tom Krazit This week, we'll talk about why security companies need to start making their customers' lives easier, a nifty way to water cool a data center, and Facebook's AI-driven attempt at out-Googling Google. STRUCTURE NEWS BLACKSTONE’S LEEK: SOLVE SECURITY INEFFICIENCIES, AND THE WORLD WILL BEAT A PATH TO YOUR DOOR One of the best parts of planning Structure Security has been the illuminating conversations I’ve enjoyed with our advisory board about the state of information security. Blackstone’s Jay Leek (pictured) is one of those advisors, and we recently talked at length about how frustratingly inefficient a lot of security products and services can be. Check out a short recap of that conversation, which is helping inform our agenda as the summer rolls on, and click here to register for Structure Security. INDUSTRY NEWS GOOD NEWS AND BAD NEWS FOR SERVER MAKERS It’s a sign of the times when tepid unit growth counts as “good news,” but given the transition to cloud services it’s a little surprising that the server market isn’t in the same boat as the PC market. Fortune reports on Gartner’s latest server market share numbers, which show that most server growth continues to come from big webscale companies designing and building their own servers. IBM WATSON IS NOW OFFERING AI-POWERED DIGITAL ADS THAT ANSWER CONSUMERS’ QUESTIONS As voice commands become a more popular way to interact with your computers, you had to know this was coming. Get ready for Watson Ads, served alongside The Weather Channel content that answer questions you pose to your computer through its microphone. AdWeek notes that the ads, which have been purchased by companies like Campbell Soup, will offer recipes tied to questions like “what should we make for dinner tonight?” FEDERAL RESERVE WAS HACKED MORE THAN 50 TIMES IN THE LAST FIVE YEARS Another one for the “it’s not if you’ll be hacked, it’s when” file: The U.S. Federal Reserve’s network were breached more than 50 times from 2011 to 2015, according to an investigation by Reuters. It’s not clear what, if anything, was lost in the breaches, but given the financial power of the Fed, it’s not surprising that it would be a frequent target. ORACLE PULLED MADE-UP CLOUD FIGURES OUT OF ITS SAAS - WHISTLEBLOWER The headline of the week went to The Register (as it usually does), reporting on a lawsuit filed against Oracle by a former employee claiming she was pressured to record pretty much anything coming in the front door as “cloud” revenue. Oracle said it plans to contest the suit, so we’ll see what comes out, but this isn’t the first time eyebrows have been raised about Oracle’s “cloud” revenue numbers. DELL DESIGNS CUSTOM LIQUID COOLING SYSTEM FOR EBAY DATA CENTERS This is pretty cool: Dell helped eBay bring some supercomputing cooling technology into its data centers with a special twist. As Data Center Knowledge reports, Dell and eBay are bringing cooling water directly alongside custom-built Intel chips with way fewer pumps than this type of operation usually requires, making the whole system quite efficient. MICROSOFT MULLS SALES FORCE REVAMP TO SPEED SHIFT TO CLOUD Sales people (at least in my experience) tend to work the hardest at selling the products that bring them the most commission. So it’s not surprising that Microsoft, now well into CEO Satya Nadella’s push to turn the storied software company into a cloud company, is being pushed by Chairman John Thompson into thinking about ways to better incentivize its sales people to sell cloud products and services, according to Bloomberg. BIG PICTURE Google and Facebook are the most important companies built entirely on the web; two organizations that have mastered technology and design to create two of the most popular (yet very different) consumer services we’ve ever seen and reap the ad dollars desperate to reach that audience. Google’s attempts to become more social are well chronicled, mostly because they’ve largely flopped, but Facebook’s attempts to more search-friendly have less heralded. That might start to change if a new effort from Facebook called Deep Text entices more people to search for things on Facebook. Deep Text is based on the company’s formidable artificial intelligence research and aims to analyze the immense amount of content posted to Facebook every day in hopes of returning satisfying results from a Facebook search. (Alan Packer of Facebook talked about this topic in some detail at Structure Data 2016.) Facebook’s previous efforts in search, such as Graph Search, haven’t made “Let Me Facebook That For You” into a meme. But Deep Text is interesting: “The unstructured data on Facebook presents a unique opportunity for text understanding systems to learn automatically on language as it is naturally used by people across multiple languages, which will further advance the state of the art in natural language processing,” the company wrote in a blog post. This isn’t something that will keep Larry Page up at night, at least for now. While Facebook is a massive entity, Google isn’t exactly a small fry, and it has the advantage of crawling publicly available content, as opposed to Facebook, where a lot of its content is shared within the context of one’s social network. It’s not entirely clear how Deep Text will work in terms of surfacing content posted outside your network, but the company noted that lots of celebrities and businesses post publicly on the site, and the growing capitulation of the news media to Facebook’s distribution channel means there will be a lot of public content to analyze and surface. I’ve always thought the most “disruptive” thing any tech company could do since that odious term gained traction is to dent the cash machine that is Google search. Google’s mastery of this very natural information-retrieval service is what allows it to build self-driving cars and robots, and if Facebook can start convincing advertisers that its search product is actually more targeted than Google’s, some interesting shifts might start taking place in tech.     DISCOVER MORE   Click here to unsubscribe from this list. Our mailing address is: Structure 405 El Camino Real, #215 Menlo Park, CA 94025 Add us to your address book Copyright (C) 2016 Structure All rights reserved. Forward this email to a friend. Update your profile.

Robots and the future of jobs

When it comes to the effect of AI and robots on the job market, there are two polar opposite narratives that you hear:

The first is, “As robots grow ever more sophisticated, they will eliminate jobs at a frenzied pace. The economic value of workers will dive as humans are unable to compete in the job market with the robots. Massive unemployment and social unrest are our future, while all along the 1% will grow wealthier."

The other one is, “We’ve heard that dystopian refrain for two hundred years. Technology is only disruptive to labor in the very short term. Versatile humans always learn to use the new technology to increase their productivity and value. The history of the US, at least, is one of almost constant near-full employment and rising standard of living.”

Which of these is true? Well, it depends on three different things, each of which is hard to estimate:
1) What is the true number of jobs that robots and AI will be able to do?
2) How quickly will they learn to do those jobs?
3) How many new jobs will be created by the new technologies?

It is true that we did go from an agricultural economy to an industrial one, eliminating the livelihoods of 70% of Americans. And it is true that those farmers went on to become higher-paid factory workers without a hitch. But all that took place over the leisurely course of more than a century. It is unclear how the economy and our society would handle the loss of, say, 15% of the jobs over a decade.

At Gigaom Change in Austin, we are going to dive into these questions as we look at different ways that robots are being deployed right now. We will explore the kinds of jobs which robots and AI will be able to do in the near future. (Hint: It is not just repetitive physical tasks.) And we will look at the impact that this transformation will have on a company… and on the world.

We invite you to come join the conversation. Gigaom Change is being held Sept 21-23. Early Adopter pricing is still available. Click here to register.

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Announcing NEW Security Security Conference

We’re excited to announce Structure Security – a new conference in our series dedicated solely to security in the digital age. In collaboration with an advisory board of security leaders, including Art Coviello (formerly with RSA Security), Alex Tosheff (VMWare), Laz Lazarikos (Sears Online) and a host of others, Structure Security will showcase leading experts in the tech-security space from companies including: Blackstone Intel Security Okta IBM Security and more to be announced soon… Join us September 27-28 in San Francisco. For a short time, we're offering an Introductory Rate ticket for $599, or you can snag a Buy One, Get a Buddy Pass for $1,100. Get yours now.   SPEAKERS   Art Coviello RSA Security Simon Crosby Bromium Diana Kelley IBM Jay Leek Blackstone Scott Montgomery Intel Security Paul Roberts The Security Ledger     SEPTEMBER 27–28, 2016 SAN FRANCISCO, CA REGISTER NOW   Click here to unsubscribe from this list. Our mailing address is: Structure 405 El Camino Real, #215 Menlo Park, CA 94025 Add us to your address book Copyright (C) 2016 Structure All rights reserved. Forward this email to a friend. Update your profile.

Structure News: Why Google thinks it has a winning hand

Where Birds Will Never Interrupt Your Conference Experience May 20, 2016 / by Tom Krazit This week, we'll talk about Israel's plans for a Silicon Desert (of sorts), Docker's week at OSCON, and Google's big nerdy concert at the Shoreline Amphitheater. STRUCTURE NEWS We’re continuing to add great advisers and speakers for Structure Security this September, with Oren Falkowitz of Area1 Security (pictured) joining the mix. We're particularly interested in discussing the social engineering problem of security with Oren: you can equip your people with the most secure network and best training, and fall peril to the most basic of phishing attacks nonetheless. Tickets will go on sale soon, so if you’re interested in getting a reminder from us when they hit the market, head on over here. And a brief programming note: I’m taking a week off next week to attend a friend’s wedding in Hawaii, a hardship I’m undertaking out of duty. So there won’t be a newsletter next week, but make sure to follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook for Structure updates. INDUSTRY NEWS HOW ISRAEL IS TURNING PART OF THE NEGEV DESERT INTO A CYBER CITY Some of the most influential and ground-breaking security companies have roots in Israel, and the nation continues to produce security professionals and technology at an amazing rate. The Washington Post takes a long look at Israeli government efforts to bring its array of security and technology talent together in a new city in the desert that it hopes will improve its already-formidable information security abilities. RANSOMWARE MAKER TESLACRYPT SHUTS DOWN AFTER RELEASING MASTER KEY Ransomware is a scary and growing problem that we’ll definitely talk about at Structure Security, but there was a little good news this week: TeslaCrypt released a master key allowing those affected by its ransomware to break out, Techcrunch reports. It’s probably not a huge consolation to those affected by ransomware, but it does show that a fix could be relatively easy in many cases if the perpetrators can be discovered early enough. IBM’S OPTICAL STORAGE IS 50 TIMES FASTER THAN FLASH Flash memory has been a boon to mobile computing because of its power consumption and stability, but it’s pretty slow for something named “flash.” Engadget reports that IBM has made a breakthrough with super-fast phase-change memory that increases the amount of data that type of memory can hold, which should help bring down costs over time to compete with flash. CHINA QUIETLY TARGETS US TECH COMPANIES IN SECURITY REVIEWS Remember when Congress threw a fit over potential security issues with Huawei routers and Lenovo computers in government applications? China is returning the favor and upping the ante, according to The New York Times, requiring U.S. companies to certify some capabilities of their products, even those destined for consumers. DOCKER OPENS CODE BEHIND NATIVE LAPTOP APPS Oscon seemed a little quieter this year than in the past, but Docker’s Solomon Hykes delivered a keynote address in which he addressed the concerns of some developers that Docker was too difficult to use on Macs and other laptops. Given that Docker’s whole reason for being is to making spinning up containers as easy as possible, the company decided to really focus on improving those native apps and has now released portions of that work as open-source code, according to ITNews. HOW FACEBOOK BLOCKS BAD CODE FROM THE OUTSET With over 1 billion daily users, Facebook’s apps and sites have the potential to cause all kinds of havoc if bugs or security holes make to production. The Parallax looks inside Facebook’s code review process to see how the company audits code for security problems before an array of hackers -- both good and bad -- have a chance to find holes. BIG PICTURE Google is in one of the most interesting positions in technology as the cloud and mobile computing trends mature. It controls one of the world’s two main mobile operating systems, enjoys one of the world’s most prominent web presences, is one of the world’s leading researchers in artificial intelligence, and is clearing a path for other companies to rent its computing infrastructure and tech expertise. Rivals to Google (or Alphabet, whatever) can’t match that combo: Facebook has a huge audience and AI smarts, but just torpedoed developer relations by closing Parse and doesn’t control a mobile platform. Microsoft has AI chops and cloud ambitions but has had mixed results in mobile and on the web. Apple is still selling boatloads of the most popular consumer tech product ever, but still fumbles about the web while its AI research appears to be guarded like a state secret. And Amazon has the cloud and the web customers, but has also had mixed success with mobile and seems behind this particular group when it comes to AI research. Google I/O, the company’s annual showcase of its worldview, offered several examples this week of why Google continues to show early critics that it was a one-trick pony a thing or two. Everybody mentioned above will continue to play a huge role in technology, to be quite clear, but the potential for overlap between Google’s projects is extremely interesting. Google announced (or previewed): -- a custom-built chip for machine learning that it will offer to cloud customers -- a strategy in which it will approach cloud customers as a backup alternative to AWS, not as a zero-sum competition -- an expansion of its Firebase developer platform, which received the biggest cheers of anyone gathered at the Shoreline Arena since the last Bridge School benefit -- and a mission to put its AI research into literally everything Google builds, which could be amazing, terrifying, or both Ambitious keynote proposals are part and parcel of the tech industry, and it will be very difficult for Google to execute on such a wide variety of projects to define the future of computing. Still, it’s easy to forget how broad a company Google is; even if Google-run projects don’t wind up at the top of the heap, it’s pretty obvious that Google is working on the right problems holding back the evolution of tech. Image courtesy Flickr user gilipollastv cc 2.0     DISCOVER MORE   Click here to unsubscribe from this list. Our mailing address is: Structure 405 El Camino Real, #215 Menlo Park, CA 94025 Add us to your address book Copyright (C) 2016 Structure All rights reserved. Forward this email to a friend. Update your profile.