Tech means Business

Giant stadiums and local sports grounds all over the world lie empty with sports men and women competing to no audience at all, in most cases. Can tech save sport?

Steve Madincea of Fantastec thinks so. His company is behind a digital memorabilia trading platform that's powered by blockchain, and he has plenty more projects at different stages of completion, too, with haptics, drones, IoT and plenty more playing their part.

Instead of rushing to the big sports federations and organizations (there's plenty of money in professional sport), Steve looks first to the fans' interests and passions as the starting point for all Fantastec does.

How can a Spurs fan in Beijing get involved in live matches from the other side of the world? Can live cricket's passionate fans a thousand miles from a match feel what someone sat at Lord's cricket ground feels too?

Technology is ever-present in every nearly every area of life, so perhaps we need to concentrate more on the ways it can increase our enjoyment of sports, games, and competitive eSports.

The Fantastec trading app is on Google Play and the AppStore, and you can read more about some of the more experimental goings-on at Fantastec here.

Steve's LinkedIn as follows:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevemadincea/

Joe's social media presence is limited to:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/josephedwardgreen/

This episode looks at one of technology's less-regarded aspects, but one that needs quickly to be given a whole lot more attention: the sustainability of the tech we use, and our approaches and attitudes to achieve a greener, yet more technologically advanced future.

When your organization starts its next procurement round for a desktop or data center hardware refresh, how high up on the agenda are sustainability factors like the use of rare or heavy metals in components? Is the supply chain used driving up the carbon footprint of the solution? What about retirement options when the new equipment reaches end-of-life?

We're joined by Gunnar Menzel, whose day job is at Cap Gemini, but whose passion, 24/7 is for a sustainable technology future.

We discuss how and why our seeming addiction to technology is consuming more and more resources, and what we can do to stem the inexorable tide of carbon emmissions, pollution and our own throw-away culture. Do we really need five-nines reliability? Are we willing to pay the cost for failover and always-on, or should we be scaling back our expectations?

This episode of the Tech Means Business podcast hopes to bring some of the concerns about the human race's future on the planet firmly into the technologist's sights, and provides a few answers as to what we can all do to ensure there is a future to enjoy.

Gunnar on LinkedIn can be found here:

https://uk.linkedin.com/in/gunnarmenzel

Joe's page is here:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/josephedwardgreen/

This podcast is produced in conjunction with Nuage Networks from Nokia

Connectivity is a business imperative and is one of the first things companies plan when they open a new store, branch office or far-flung outpost. It's a whole lot easier to get connected these days, too, but once an organization is linked up, how is that connection best optimized?

Step forward, SD-WAN -- software-defined wide-area networking -- a technology that lets business prioritize specific types of network traffic, stay safe, and allocate available bandwidth according to what the business needs, not physical constraints.

In this episode, we're joined by James McInroe of Nuage Networks, the world's foremost provider of SD-WAN technologies. Nuage is a venture that grew up inside Nokia, a company that knows a thing or two about connectivity & communication too.

We also talk to Peter Maquera of Globe Telecom, the Philippines' biggest telecomms provider. Globe uses Nuage SD-WAN for its own retail stores, and also as part of its business connectivity offerings as a managed SD-WAN service. In that, Peter has seen both sides of the technology as it were.

The three of us talk about SD-WAN's advantages over tradition WAN services, common use-cases, security bonuses, the speed of deployment, control and real-time monitoring. If your organization has five or more outlets or offices, this is essential listening.

Find out more about Nuage Networks from Nokia SD-WAN offerings here:
https://www.nuagenetworks.net/solutions/software-defined-wan/

James McInroe of Nuage Networks on LinkedIn:
https://nz.linkedin.com/in/james-mcinroe-33b8a28

Peter Maquera of Globe Telecom on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/petermaquera/

Hosted by Joe Green, who's here:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/josephedwardgreen/

IIoT (the industrial internet of things)  is already changing the face of manufacturing, utilities and heavy industry. But here and in more white-collar settings, deploying even simple, system-on-chip devices is difficult at scale.

In this episode of Tech means Business, we talk to Hima Mukkamala, CEO of Pelion, a spin-off from the chip company that powers 99% of IoT, ARM. Hima talks to us about how industry is adopting and managing new fleets of devices.

IoT has the capability to change devices, machinery and entire environments: cheap and smart, it can sense, attenuate, control, trigger and report back on events and conditions from just about anywhere in the world, via any form of communication protocol you can think of.

If your idea of IoT is a Nest thermostat, this episode of TmB will open your mind to the possibilities.

Joe's LinkedIn-sponsored-by-Microsoft is:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/josephedwardgreen/

Pelion's socials are here:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/pelioniot/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/PelionIoT

IT professionals have thick skins that deflects most marketing, especially when it comes to AI. After all, your phone apparently uses AI to frame the perfect picture (really?) and your TV knows and adapts to your taste in viewing thanks to "advanced machine learning" (nope).

So selling AI into ITops must be an uphill struggle. But with the right message and — most importantly — demonstrable use-cases and proof, that's just what Digitate does. Jayanti Murti talks to us about perceptions of AI, the verticals most ready to adopt, and how machine-speed iterative algorithms actually improve the daily lives of IT staff.

Digitate launched in 2015, and was built by software engineers and more PhDs than you ever expect to see in a single room at any one time. A platform that's "made its bones", then, but we still have questions!

Jayanti on LinkedIn can be found here:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayantivsnmurty/

Joe's page is here:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/josephedwardgreen/

The technology press is full of references to "stampedes to the cloud" and other, assorted hyperbole. What's undeniable is that although cloud may not be ideal for your use-case, all the latest DevOps tooling is focused towards cloud.

If you want hybrid, multi-cloud or vanilla on-premise deployments and still need all the latest and greatest K8s, Rancher.io and S3-styled storage, then perhaps consider Replicated.

We talk to Grant Miller about all things DevOps, cloud, optimization and how many organizations just don't want to leap cloudwards, especially when increasingly, it's the passport to lock-in. Security, data integrity, governance, previous investments: your reasons to keep it local may differ, but the dangers remain the same. Have you ever costed what it would take to get all those petabytes of goodness out of AWS?

Our guest's Linkedin page is this one:

And Joe's only social meeja foray is right here:

In addition to the private and public sectors, there's the charity sector. Giving to needy causes is getting easier online and in person, thanks to technology like TapSimple's. In this episode of the Tech Means Business podcast, we talk to Tom Montague, co-founder of the company.

After graduating in Bristol (Hybrid News Group's home city), Tom started TapSimple with a friend and a friendly developer or two, quickly learning the ropes needed to run a complex online and electronic payment company.

From a handheld card reading device on which donations could be tapped, simply — thus the name — to a fully-featured online payment portal complete with presentation facilities and virtual attendance at fund-raising events, the TapSimple offering makes it easy to give to charity.

The company makes its money by a small levy on every donation, although most givers choose to cover the cost of that as they donate. Quick, simple, and trustworthy (like your host, Joe Green), TapSimple's offerings are dragging the "third sector" into the 21st century at a time when charitable activities are needed most.

Peruse for yourself here:

https://tapsimple.org/

Tom Montague appears on LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-montague-ba55226a/

The 1970s hostess trolley, made flesh, here:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/josephedwardgreen/

This podcast is produced in conjunction with Cisco

Cybercriminals never let up. Even schools and hospitals remained targets at the height of the coronavirus pandemic. For most people, working at home was the reality of their year, and as Kerry confirms, most organizations will be adopting a much more generous working-from-home stance from 2021.

There are practical pointers in this episode on how to stay safe and some home truths (literally) too about the reality of mixing home and work lives online.

No one solution answers all the questions when it comes to cyberattacks, but with an integrated approach, you can cover all the bases. The problems come from when teams have to co-ordinate all the moving parts across what are now hugely-distributed networks.

Educating everyone about online cyber hygiene is of enormous importance too, as many of us have probably fallen prey to having clicked phishing links in the past. As our home and work lives continue to converge, how do we ensure we are not putting ourselves and our companies at risk?

Kerry's written some great blog posts that should be essential reading:

https://news-blogs.cisco.com/apjc/2020/10/22/changing-cyber-culture-disruption-is-an-opportunity-for-transformation/  

https://www.cisco.com/c/en_au/products/security/secure-remote-worker-solution.html

He's on LinkedIn, too:

https://sg.linkedin.com/in/kerrysingleton

Hosted by Joe Green, who's here:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/josephedwardgreen/

Buy a computer chip with some serious "grunt" and you go for Intel, right? Or AMD, perhaps more likely, these days. In whichever case, it's x86 architecture. That's what data centers and clouds run on, after all — these are the serious computers for grown-ups.

The little voice you hear, however hails from Cambridge, UK, a little company called ARM, recently acquired by NVIDIA for beelions of dollars. The tiny voice is telling you not only are its chip designs as performant as those power-hungry x86 chips, but they run cooler.

It's (nearly) just a case of recompiling your applications, and like magic, your cloud bill just fell by 30% overnight. Your power consumption and carbon footprint just shrank, too, and maybe your machine-learning algorithms got a boost as well.

Even Apple's in on the act, though not passing on the savings it makes by not having to buy Intel chips straight to its customers. But nevertheless, Apple now makes its own chips, and they're ARM chips (not that Apple says "ARM"; it's "Apple silicon").

With a unique licensing model, anyone can make their own ARM silicon or variant thereon; and in fact, as Chris says, the more the merrier! This is a guy who looks forward to reading his Twitter feed as delighted comments flow through his timeline.

There will soon be 200 billion ARM chips in the wild. What's the fuss about? What will it mean to your business? Joe and Chris enthuse together in this podcast.

Nuance Communications is on a mission to put the human voice at the heart of every organization! Forget what you think you know about voice assistants and those hopelessly dumb 'bots you run into when you call into some companies. Nuance is a company that pretty much invented voice recognition and voice-to-text back in the days when such tech was so new and amazing it was like magic to mere mortals!

Technology never stands still, and the field of voice tech is no exception. How can voice combine with proven AI techniques to help businesses in 2020 and beyond? The answer comes in the form of conversational AI, the closest thing to a truly proactive virtual chat you'll get, useful in many different areas of the enterprise, from the help desk to the call center and further afield. 

In this Tech Means Business podcast, we talk to Robert Schwarz of Nuance Communications (Managing Director, Enterprise & Mobile ANZ) about how voice technologies and smart, conversational AI have multiple uses in any business, like voiceprint recognition, voice-to-big-data, smart real-time help for any professional, and even prevention of large-scale fraud. 

The host of the show, Joe Green, recounts his own use of Dragon Dictate and asks how Nuance Communications has transformed its technology and its platform's functional areas, where voice assistance (and assistants) makes critical differences to customer experience, safety, and ease-of-use. 

As ever, there was on the day too much to talk about, but the podcast will let you see some of the possibilities conversational AI offers and will, we hope, inspire your own voice-centric journey.

 - Voiceprint as part of 2FA or MFA (multi-factor authentication).

 - Interactive voice recognition that can respond intelligently when calls go "off-script."

 - Omnichannel call center operations that help customers and agents alike.

 - Mapping out conversations and strategies to drive customer satisfaction.

 - Smart assistants that help specialists (like physicians or IT support staff) in real-time. 

Nuance is pushing the boundaries of the technology it helped invent and is still driving the possibilities in multiple verticals. Find out how, who, where, what and how. 

Robert Schwarz on LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-schwarz-4872185/

Your host's one nod at the new-fangled social medias:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/josephedwardgreen/