[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text][vc_single_image image="11439" img_size="large" alignment="center"][vc_column_text]

Women In Technology enjoy an evening of networking and guest speaker Fia Fasbinder

On Thursday, August 25th, our Business Development Manager, Tina Rountree, and her fellow Women In Technology San Diego members hosted a Sunset Social.  The event, at Vintana Wine + Dine in Escondido, featured guest speaker Fia Fasbinder. Fia Fasbinder is a renowned communications expert with skills in public speaking.  She presented insight on the following topics:

• Learn to build a professional image on a foundation of assertive, persuasive communication.

• Control stress in high-stakes situations, speaking opportunities and conflicts.

• Instinctively communicate a dynamic, poised first impression in just seconds.

• Learn to avoid “up talk” and other common communication mistakes made by women.

Following the presentation,  guests went up to the rooftop area where they enjoyed  hors d’oeuvres and sipped on happy hour beverages, all while enjoying the sunset.  At 6pm there was live music, while fellow Women In Technology mingled and talked tech.

To see more upcoming events from Managed Solution and WIT, check out our events page >>

[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]

[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image="11389" img_size="full" alignment="center"][vc_column_text]

Whisker sensors could control the robots of the future

By John Biggs as written on techcrunch.com

Rats and other whiskered animals use senses that we don’t yet possess. In addition to being able to run mazes and lick our faces to confirm we aren’t covered in BBQ sauce, scientists have confirmed that some animals use their flowing front whiskers to sense wind position, a technique that could be used in future direction-sensing robots.

A team of students working at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering have found that rats “use their whiskers to help locate airflow sources.” While this seems like common sense, there has been no way to prove this until now.

To perform the experiment that led to this discovery, Yan Yu and Matthew Graff, co-first authors of the work, placed five, equally-spaced fans in a semicircle around the edge of a 6-foot circular table. In each trial, one of the five fans was randomly selected to blow air toward a “start-door” located on the opposite side of the table. A rat had to run from the door toward the fan blowing air, and go down a rat-sized hole directly in front of that fan. Each of the five holes (one in front of each fan) led to a tunnel beneath the table, where the rat was rewarded for choosing the correct fan. Cameras positioned above the table recorded the rats’ performance.

During the trials some of the rats were given a painless whisker haircut, a move that resulted in a 20 percent decrease in performance. The rats could have used any sense data to perform the task — from feeling the wind on their fur or sticking their little rat noses into the wind — but it was clear the whisker usage was far better at the task.

“The rat clearly uses more than one cue,” said study author Chris Bresee. “But rats still choose to rely heavily on their whiskers, which suggests that whiskers facilitate wind-sensing even when wild rats explore naturally.”

The team is working on artificial “flow sensors” that can be added to robots, creating bendable systems that vibrate in the wind. Receptors at the base of the whisker can then be read and translated into location data. This means future robots could use these sensors to read their positions, sense their speed or even move toward high or low pressure areas.

“Estimating the structure of airflow is particularly important when locating an odor source,” said Professor Mitra Hartmann. “And odor localization is important for finding explosives, chemical spills, and biological agents.”

Not bad for some foof.

[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]

Using artificial intelligence to create invisible UI

By Martin Legowiecki as written on techcrunch.com

Interaction with the world around us should be as easy as walking into your favorite bar and getting your favorite drink in hand before your butt hits the bar stool. The bartender knows you, knows exactly what drink you like and knows you just walked through the door. That’s a lot of interaction, without any “interaction.”

We’re redefining how we interact with machines and how they interact with us. Advances in AI help make new human-to-machine and machine-to-human interaction possible. Traditional interfaces get simplified, abstracted, hidden — they become ambient, part of everything. The ultimate UI is no UI.

Everyone’s getting in the game, but few have cracked the code. We must fundamentally change the way we think.

Cross-train your team

Our roles as technologists, UX designers, copywriters and designers have to change. What and how we build — scrolling pages, buttons, taps and clicks — is based on aging concepts. These concepts are familiar, proven and will still remain useful. But we need a new user interaction model for devices that listen, “feel” and talk to us.

Technologists need to become more like UX designers and vice versa. They must work much closer together and mix their roles, at least until some standards, best practices and new tools are established.

No decision trees

The bartender from the above example is where more of the UI is starting to reside. On one hand, that represents a lot more responsibility to create transparent experiences that tend to be based on hidden rules and algorithms. But on another, this gives us incredible latitude for creating open-ended experiences in which only important and viable information is presented to the user.

For example, to command our AI assistant, “Tell my wife I am going to be late,” the system needs to be smart enough not only to understand the intent, but also to know who the wife is and the best way to contact her. No extraneous information is necessary, no option list, no follow-up questions. We call this Minimum Viable Interaction (MVI).

Your interface is showing

We’ve started talking to our machines — not with commands, menus and quirky key combinations — but using our own human language. Natural language processing has seen incredible advances and we finally don’t need to be a machine to talk to one. We chat with the latest chatbots, search using Google Voice or talk to Siri. The accuracy of speech recognition has improved to an incredible 96 percent accuracy.

This space is way too dynamic to be married to an original creative concept.

The last few percentage points might not seem like a lot, but it’s what makes or breaks the perfect experience. Imagine a system that can recognize what anyone says 100 percent of the time, no matter how we say things (whether you have an accent, pause between words or say a bunch of inevitable “uhhs” and “umms”). Swap a tap or a click for the Amazon Echo’s far-field recognition, and the UI melts away. It becomes invisible, ubiquitous and natural.

We aren’t there yet. For now, we can devise smart ways of disguising the capability gap. A lot of time goes into creating programming logic and clever responses to make the machine seem smarter than it really is. Make one mistake where the UI shows and the illusion will break.

Contextual awareness

The system needs to know more about us for invisible UI to become reality. Contextual awareness today is somewhat limited. For example, when asking for directions via Google Maps, the system knows your location and will return a different result if you are in New York versus California.

Our phones, watches and other mobile devices are loaded with a ton of sensors. They make us humans the cheap sensors machines need today. We gather the knowledge and data that the system needs to do its work.

But even with all the sensors and data, the machine needs to know more about us and what is going on in our world in order to create the experiences we really need. One solution is combining the power of multiple devices/sensors to gather more information. But this usually narrows down and limits the user base — not an easy thing to sell to a client. You have to think on your feet. Change, tweak, iterate. This space is way too dynamic to be married to an original creative concept.

What wasn’t possible just yesterday is becoming mainstream today as we develop new experiences, explore new tech, topple old paradigms and continue to adapt.

[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]

Minecraft comes to VR today with Windows 10 Edition beta

By Darrell Etherington as written on techcrunch.com

Minecraft is now ready for its virtual reality debut: The update for the Minecraft Windows 10 Beta that adds VR support is available today. It’s a free update for people who already own the Windows 10 Edition Beta version of the game, but you can also get on board if you purchase the beta edition now.

There’s support for windows and mice, if you’re good enough at operating those without being able to see them, but there’s also support for the Xbox One controller, which you can use either plugged in via micro USB on Windows 10, or in tandem with the wireless Xbox One Controller for Windows adapter.

Microsoft says they’ve done a lot to ensure a range of players with a range of systems can get the most out of their VR experience, thanks to VR-specific customization options designed to maximize performance or help increase player comfort. Early impressions from people with preview access seem to enjoy what Mojang and Microsoft have put together for this, however, so go check it out if you have the necessary kit.

[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]

The Next Wave of Transformative Digital Health

By  Raj Ganguly, Eduardo Saverin as written on techcrunch.com

[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]

Digital healthcare investing has gone through several waves: 2013 was the year of consumer wearables, 2014 of healthcare big data, 2015 of virtual care delivery and 2016, so far, has been about payer disruption. 2017 will be a return to the core practice of medicine: technology that enables providers and biopharma to extend their reach and take greater risk for outcomes.

In 2016, the VC market has rewarded digital health startups that are disrupting traditional carriers. In the last 12 months, we’ve seen startups, like Bright Health (new carrier, $80 million raise in April), Clover Health (new Medicare Advantage plan, $165 million raise in May), Collective Health (TPA/ASO replacement, $80 million raise in late 2015), Hixme (migrating covered lives from large group to the individual market) and Oscar (new carrier, $400 million raise in February) raise tens to hundreds of millions of dollars in venture financing at substantial Series B and C valuations.

Why? Because payers have been an easy target.

Carriers were born in an era where fee-for-service reimbursement rewarded coverage, so they built large networks of contracted providers, leveraged economies of scale in volume and rented access to these networks to self-insured employers. That compact is fraying.

Providers are taking risk and competing upstream (with the help of companies like Evolent Health), employers are building their own narrow networks to steer volume to high-quality/low-cost centers of excellence (with the help of companies like Imagine Health) and medical loss ratios (which dictate the percentage of carrier premium revenues that need to be spent on clinical services) are squeezing carrier margins.

Large carriers have responded by consolidating, seeking even more scale. However, survival through size has its limits. The DOJ has drawn the line at Anthem’s $54 million bid for Cigna and Aetna’s $37 billion bid for Humana on antitrust grounds.

[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]

The payer disruption story has played out

Our view is the business of insuring lives at scale is labor and capital-intensive. There is substantial operational complexity required to contract with 5,600 hospitals and 800,000 physicians in the U.S., issue membership cards, verify eligibility, process claims and engage consumers when they call. It’s hard to achieve venture level returns at Series B and C valuations approaching $1 billion.

Healthcare innovation is the solution to rising costs and limited access.

We’ve seen this story before: Investors putting tens of millions to work into Fitbit and Jawbone in 2013, chasing the consumer wearables story. Similarly, 2014 was the year of using healthcare big data in vertical applications like price transparency, which resulted in Castlight’s controversial IPO. 2015 was all about telehealth — Doctor on Demand raising $63 million, MDLive raising $50 million and Teladoc raising $157 million in their IPO, all announced during an eight-week window last summer. Later-stage investors in many of those instances have not been able to generate returns at exit.

[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]

So what’s next? The funding market is returning to enabling the core practice of medicine

Our view is that in 2017, the market will reward innovative startups that are in the business of enabling providers and pharma companies to personalize care and participate in greater outcomes-based economics.

Several tailwinds are contributing to this. In the provider world, regulation with esoteric names like “Meaningful Use 1 and Meaningful Use 2” are largely behind us and providers will have more bandwidth to move on from EMR integration (plumbing) to the use of technology for expanding care (tools). Concurrently, advances in the fields of genomics and compound specialty pharmacy are enabling new ways for biopharma companies to personalize therapeutic delivery down to an individual patient, which is a building block for outcomes-based drug reimbursement.

[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]

Prediction

VC investment into digital health will flow to startups in the business of provider and pharma enablement. It will start to happen in the back half of 2016.

Silicon Valley Bank predicts that $9-$9.5 billion will be invested in healthcare in 2016. MobiHealthNews recently reported that digital health companies raised $150 million in July 2016 alone. In the last month, Azalea Health raised a $10.5 million Series B to sell revenue cycle management software and mobile tools to providers. Akili Interactive raised a $11.9 million Series B to develop clinically validated video games for cognitive interventions. Caremerge, which markets a care coordination platform for assisted living facilities, raised a $14 million Series C. Docent Health raised a $17 million Series A to build patient engagement software for health systems.

Healthcare innovation is the solution to rising costs and limited access. We think of healthcare as a global economy, not just an industry — it is a $3 trillion market approaching 20 percent of GDP in the U.S. alone. Access to affordable, effective care is a universal challenge felt in both developed and developing markets. To the entrepreneurs out there — we look forward to funding the next wave of transformative digital health companies that enable greater access to quality, outcomes-based care.

[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]

Microsoft acquires Beam interactive game live streaming service

By Darrell Etherington techcrunch.com

Microsoft has acquired Beam, a Seattle-based interactive game streaming service that lets viewers play along with streamers as they watch. Beam’s model takes the mostly passive interaction that streaming fans may be used to from services like Twitch and YouTube, and adds the ability for viewers to interact with the streamer via crowdsourced controls.

Players interacting through Beam can direct the play of the person streaming, doing things like setting which weapon loadout they take into battle for multiplayer shooters, for example. It launched at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2016, and won our Startup Battlefield competition. Visual controls provide viewers the ability to help players pick quests, and you can even assign challenges that alter the gameplay considerably from what you’d get via a typical play through.

Beam will join Microsoft’s Xbox  team, and “remains committed to its mission of importing users and streamers across platforms” according to Microsoft.

Beam founder and CEO Matt Salsamendi told me via email that Xbox’s community focus is specifically what made them a good fit for the young company.

“I’m really excited about Xbox’s focus on community,” he wrote. “Beam is fundamentally built on a connected group of passionate individuals that love gaming, and Xbox is super in tune with that.”

In a blog post announcing the news, Salsamendi explained that no immediate changes are planned for the platform, but that the Microsoft acquisition will help Beam grow the platform and add new features and game integrations thanks to the addition support the larger company can provide.

“Right now it’s business as usual!” Salsamendi wrote regarding product plans. “We just launched three brand new interactive integrations and we’ll continue to focus on making the Beam platform an awesome place for gaming communities that want to interact with their audience.”

No terms of the deal were disclosed. The company launched on January 5 this year, with an official debut of its interactive tools at Disrupt in May. Salsamendi will lead the Beam team from Microsoft’s Redmond campus, where they’ll operate under the Xbox engineering department.

In addition to wining TechCrunch Disrupt, the Beam team had raised around $420,000 in seed funding, and participated in Techstars Seattle’s 2016 class.

For Microsoft, picking up Beam gives it a way to build an in-house streaming service, and one designed for participatory play. In its blog post announcing the deal, Microsoft highlights Minecraft as an example of how Beam’s software can promote more social play, and it’s actually a title tailor-made to the kinds of interactions Beam provides. If Microsoft can use the acquisition to drive more community engagement among the younger audience that devours Let’s Play videos, then this should turn out to be a very worthwhile partnership.

[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]

IoT security suffers from a lack of awareness

By Clint Boulton as written on cio.com

As consumers we have become obsessed with connected devices. We like the idea of smart homes, smart cars, smart TVs, smart refrigerators or any machine that can be automated with sensors and an IP address. Yet fewer tasks in IT today inspire more fear than the prospect of protecting corporate networks from this proliferating wave of connected devices. The internet of things phenomenon expands the threat surface exponentially, in turn boosting business risk.

But CIOs often aren’t aware of all of the devices that make inviting targets for hackers. "One of the fundamental issues that faces the internet of things is knowing that they're there and giving them some identity,” says Gartner analyst Earl Perkins. "You can't manage what you can't see."

Factor in the hiding-in-plain-sight machines and BYOD devices, as well as emerging technologies that control office light fixtures, temperature and even window tint, and it's easy to see how vetting what's on the network will only get harder for CIOs. Securing internet of things is a primary focus of this week’s Black Hat USA conference, whose organizers told the Wall Street Journal that they received 50 proposals for seminars related to infiltrating devices, including how a computer worm could spread smart lightbulbs, how to hack medical systems, and a new kind of ATM skimming device.

Matt Kraning, CTO of security software startup and DARPA spinoff Qadium, says CIOs are focusing on locking down devices operating on the network as a result of BYOD policies while the mundane teleconference systems are ignored. There are tens of thousands of such unified communications and collaboration systems installed in executive boardrooms around the world. These systems use dated protocols, such as Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), aren't encrypted and are rarely kept current on patches.

Imagine this scenario: The entire C-suite huddles with the board for their quarterly meeting. The IP-enabled video conferencing system doesn't work so they call IT in. Turns out the system was properly blocked by the corporate firewall, consistent with corporate policy. But rather than cancel the meeting, the execs order IT to break through the firewall to get the system to work. The big no-no occurs when the IT team doesn't put the firewall back around the equipment, leaving the system open to an enterprising hacker who may eavesdrop on executive meetings.

"They grew up when the phone was just a phone," Kraning says of executives who don't realize the threat that such systems pose. "Most have no insider awareness of IoT and that persists the myth that the problem is not already here." He says mail servers are also potential threat vectors.

IoT security: a victim of market economics?

The enterprise is naturally only a subset of the broader world – one in which the increasing drumbeat of connected devices poses an even greater threat. Gartner forecasts that 6.4 billion connected things will be in use worldwide in 2016 and will reach 20.8 billion by 2020. Protecting those devices, from smart cars to smart hot water heaters to smart TVs, remains a big problem partly because of a misalignment of economics, says security expert Bruce Schneier.

PCs and cell phones churn every 18 to 24 month so the companies that produce them have financial incentive to constantly refine the security of those devices. But people replace cars every 10 years, refrigerators every 20 and thermostats "never," says Schneier. "There exists no mechanism to patch them because it's not economically viable for third-parties," Schneier says.

The problems will mount as new devices emerge and they, along with the sensors and software used in conjunction with them get cheaper and last longer. “You don’t have the same ecosystem of upgrade in terms of patching, devices and operating system -- none of these things that in a computer world makes them better,” Schneier says. “When your furnace becomes part of the IoT and they say you have to replace the hardware on your furnace every two years... people are not going to do it.”

Assigning fault also plays a big hand in the complex market dynamics. When a perpetrator infiltrates a network through a software vulnerability, we point to the flawed software. But with connected devices forming what is essentially a digital daisy chain, it is difficult to attribute fault. "If you're refrigerator interacts with your router and hacks your Google account, whose fault is it?" Schneier says. "The market economy actually works against securing IoT."

Such security threats can snowball quickly, as Schneier wrote in a blog post last week: “Vulnerabilities on one system cascade into other systems, and the result is a vulnerability that no one saw coming and no one bears responsibility for fixing. The internet of things will make exploitable vulnerabilities much more common.”

An IoT security model

Qadium is tackling the IoT security problem with “global internet sensing” software that scours hundreds of terabytes of data generated by devices configured by a given organization. Indexing a hundred different protocols, calling out to all of the devices that reside on a customer’s network and gauging their responses for anomalies. It finds dark spaces in corporate networks CIOs didn’t even know existed.

“We look at the entire internetperpetually and turn it into an analytics challenge,” Kraning says. The goal is to say, “We know where all devices of interest to a company are.” Qadium’s customers include the U.S. Cyber Command and the Navy.

According to Perkins, who says Qadium competes with Bastile Networks, Great Bay Software and ForeScout Technologies, such technologies play a useful role in helping CIOs discover what’s on what he calls the “network of entities.” However, the challenge doesn’t end there. A second set of technologies is required to isolate and neutralize malware or other network incursions. Securing connected devices, he says, requires a multi-layer approach that involves providing the proper policy enforcement for existing devices and those that will come onto the network in the future. This is no trivial task.

"We've reached an era in computing now where we are able to project a pervasive digital presence into the edges of business and into the edges of life -- on the human body, in the human body, in the house, in the car,” Perkins says. Gartner estimates spending security technologies to protect the Internet of Things will top $840.5 million by 2020.

What does the future of IoT security look like? Schneier, who has closely watched the cybersecurity market evolve over the last three decades, says the federal government must provide regulatory oversight into cybersecurity by establishing a new federal agency – ideally a Department of Technology Policy – to regulate the industry, similar to how the FCC was created to regulate airwaves and the FAA guides airlines. For now, Schneier says the government remains woefully behind on IoT awareness.

Yet Schneier remains cautiously optimistic about the industry’s chances to solve the complex challenges – like it always has – over time and through trial and error. The solutions “will be like everything we do in computer security to date -- a hodgepodge of things that work pretty well," Schneier says. "We'll muddle through, screw it up and get better."

[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]