A recent video on the Rich + Niche YouTube Channel delved into the burgeoning trend of starting a digital marketing agency. Against economic uncertainties and the specter of automation looming over traditional employment models, many are drawn to the allure of entrepreneurship, seeking autonomy, creative freedom, and financial independence in the digital landscape.

What sets the digital marketing arena apart is its resilience and adaptability. Unlike traditional employment models, which are susceptible to layoffs and automation, entrepreneurship offers a pathway to self-sufficiency and unlimited earning potential. With the digital marketing industry showing no signs of slowing down, individuals seize the opportunity to carve their niche in the burgeoning market, leveraging their expertise to provide value to clients and drive business growth.

At the heart of the one-person marketing agency model lies the concept of the full-stack marketer—an individual proficient in various aspects of digital marketing, from content creation and search engine optimization to funnel optimization and ad management. This holistic approach enables marketers to offer comprehensive services to clients, positioning them as indispensable partners in achieving business objectives.

A vital tenet of the one-person agency model is the subscription-based service offering. This all-in-one solution simplifies the client experience while providing consistent revenue streams for the marketer. By bundling services into subscription packages, marketers can offer added value to clients while streamlining operations and maximizing profitability. This subscription model fosters long-term client relationships and ensures a steady income stream, providing stability and predictability in an otherwise volatile market.

Agility and adaptability are paramount in a landscape characterized by rapid technological advancements and shifting consumer behaviors. The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and other disruptive technologies necessitates a proactive approach to staying ahead of the curve. By embracing change and incorporating emerging trends into their service offerings, full-stack marketers can future-proof their businesses and maintain a competitive edge in the market.

However, success in digital marketing requires more than technical proficiency—it demands strategic pricing, client selection, and sustainable growth strategies. Marketers must strike a delicate balance between setting competitive prices and attracting high-value clients while managing their workload and maintaining a healthy work-life balance.

Despite the allure of entrepreneurship, the journey to success is fraught with challenges and uncertainties. Shiny object syndrome and the temptation to chase new opportunities can derail progress and impede long-term success. To thrive in digital marketing, individuals must stay focused, continuously upskill, and remain committed to their goals.

As the digital marketing landscape evolves, individuals embarking on entrepreneurship must arm themselves with the knowledge, skills, and resilience to navigate the challenges ahead. By embracing the full-stack marketer ethos and adopting a proactive approach to innovation, aspiring entrepreneurs can chart a course to success in the dynamic and ever-changing world of digital marketing.

As a matter of fact, big name companies are announcing the decision to keep remote workers in place permanently. Facebook, Novartis, and Shopify barely touch the tip of the iceberg as companies continue to join the ranks. Some are keeping staff on-site. Others switched their companies to 100% virtual pretty quickly after the onset of the pandemic.

That’s because employers realized that once the kinks all worked out—both at the management level and by staff adapting to an entirely new groove—having remote teams was a totally viable option for their company. In fact, companies that had never considered a remote workforce now state it’s how they stayed afloat this year.

Robert Nickell, the founder of Rocket Station, a leader in the virtual assistance industry, isn’t a bit surprised. “Lots of employers accepted the myth that VAs could only be used to complete simple tasks—like keeping track of scheduling appointments or making scripted phone calls, for instance. The pandemic forced them to discover for themselves that isn’t the case,” he said.

Robert continued, “Remote teams dispersed on the fly and were expected to handle every aspect of the business possible. They did it by utilizing zoom and other available technologies. HR teams scrambled to make sure new processes got documented to keep everyone on the same page. It was pretty amazing to see everyone pull together and get the job done.”

Taking the plunge

Of course, it was chaos in the beginning—that tends to happen when you’re hit with life-changing events overnight! Once everyone had time to adjust to the changes—and for many that included figuring out how to homeschool their children at the same time—the new routine fell into place pretty quickly.

It didn’t take employers long to discover the benefits of having a remote workforce.

A Stanford Business study of 16,000 remote workers determined that their productivity increased by 16%.

Overhead costs reduce by as much as 40% too. That’s because you don’t need as much—or any if you decide to go 100% virtual—office space. Moreover, when hiring new employees, many candidates are willing to take a cut in salary when offered a remote position. That’s because they realize the value of not having to commute, buy lunch, or the need to purchase business attire.

Not only that, but the idea of having a flexible work day is especially attractive to millennials. They aren’t into a traditional “nine-to-five.” They want to fit their work day around their outside interests.

It’s not just a personal assistant

A lot of people still connect the term “virtual assistant” with someone hired to manage a calendar, confirm appointments, and provide necessary reminders. Taking over email correspondence and handling travel arrangements also fall into the typical job description.

Another bad rap that VAs have incurred is that you’ll wind up with someone living in another country who doesn’t have a very good grasp of the language. In the beginning, the language barrier alone caused employers to abandon the idea of hiring remote workers. Not to mention the havoc it wreaked in following a set process.

However, lots of things improve over time, don’t they?

Today, the term virtual assistant encompasses a workforce with a wide array of skill sets. You can hire a VA to perform virtually any type of task that you can imagine.

All you need is a thoroughly documented process and a stellar onboarding process. You want to make sure you provide your virtual assistant with all the necessary information and training that they need to be successful right out of the gate.

Take advantage of all that technology has to offer. You can start small or put together a stellar team of employees that can work together from remote locations around town or around the world!

Sailing into scaling

Fifty-one percent of the U.S. workforce was working from home within a month of the pandemic hitting. Overall, the only real downside of the experience for most is that co-workers miss each other.

Make sure you check in with your virtual employees to see how they’re doing. Isolation is hard for some people. Find creative ways to boost morale. It could be as simple as encouraging team members to surprise each other with “just saying hi” contacts. No business discussion allowed!

“The virtual workforce is going to continue to grow worldwide,” Nickell said. “At Rocket Station, we work with employers to develop teams that are equipped with the skill set necessary to handle the job. We set them up with employees who will enhance their businesses and promote company growth.”

He continued, “Business owners tell me all the time that they’ve tried using virtual assistants but the experience didn’t go well. That doesn’t mean that it’s not going to work for them. It just means they need to fine-tune their process.”

Here are a couple of industries that could easily utilize the remote workforce.

Web development

Using virtual assistants to develop a website for your company or for those of your clients is an excellent example of how the industry is evolving. That’s some high tech stuff!

You can hire a virtual assistant experienced in handling any aspect of web development.

Front end web development entails managing what a user sees when first arriving at your site. A front end developer, also referred to as a Javascript developer or web designer, should be fluent in front end languages, such as HTML, CSS, and Javascript. They’re responsible for analyzing code, web design, and debugging applications coupled with creating a seamless user experience.

Back end web development manages the server side of an application which includes writing code for all the communication between the database and the browser. They monitor a site’s responsiveness and speed. Back end developers may understand front end languages, but they’re experts in back end languages such as Java, PHP, Ruby, Python, and .net.

These languages are used to create dynamic sites. A dynamic site stores database information. The content on these sites is constantly updating and changing.

Full stack web developers are capable of building applications for both ends of the site. This might be the best fit for employers looking to hire virtual assistants to develop sites for clients. They could assign a set number of clients to a specific VA and hire others as necessary as the business scales.

The demand for full stack developers is high and that doesn’t look to change any time soon. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the occupational outlook for software developers shows an anticipated growth of 22% over the next decade! That’s much faster than average—and this study was done pre-COVID.

Once you’ve determined what position you’ll be looking to fill, it’s important to document your process before hiring a VA. This ensures consistent results because the entire process is layed out from start to finish. Nothing falls between the cracks.

There are a number of ways to track your process using cloud files. You won’t ever experience versioning issues because all updates are reflected instantly.

Which of the following would you choose?

• Create templates for certain types of projects
• Load the information into a Google or Word document
• Develop detailed flow charts—Diagram.net is a great tool for this.

Actually, you don’t have to choose a method and stick with it. Most agencies use a combination of these approaches.

SEO agencies

Robert said that many SEO agencies don’t think they can find the right VAs to carry out the needed tasks. He disagrees saying all they need to do is find the right approach.

Nickell laid out this example for executing a link building campaign.

• Conduct a backlink audit for our client’s site.
• Conduct a backlink audit of their competitors.
• Conduct research to identify new link building opportunities.
• Develop strategies to acquire new links.
• Develop outreach scripts.
• Review all preliminary data with the client.
• Implement toolsets for outreach and tracking.
• Conduct outreach and follow up to acquire these links.
• Track and analyze the performance of our efforts.
• Review performance data with the client.

Once you’ve mapped out the broad scope of things, you’ll want to hone in on the details like determining who does what. For instance, some tasks require specialized knowledge that can’t be conveyed in your documented process. In that case, someone on your internal team would take them on instead of handing them off to a VA.

Next, determine how you will document the process and once it’s completed you’re ready to source! You can post on job boards, gig sites, social media and other contacts, or use a virtual assistance agency—like Rocket Station for instance.

Insert your company here

No matter what type of business you own, you can utilize a remote workforce. The key is to determine exactly what your VAs will be responsible for handling. Then, create a detailed plan for them to follow.

Robert shared the framework they use in his virtual assistant agency and said it’s something all employers can implement within their own businesses.

• Identify your high-level needs
• Scope your project and determine who does what
• Document every step of the process
• Source your virtual assistants—Determine if you will use an agency, like Rocket Station for example, or onboard your remote employees directly into your company.
• Communicate throughout the project—You want to make sure nothing falls through the cracks.
• Measure performance by defining effective KPIs—You don’t want to have teams wasting time meeting KPIs if they aren’t moving the needle for your clients.
• Scaling up—As you see a need for growth, repeat the above steps so your new VAs can hit the ground running.
• Be ready to adapt and implement an entirely new process if the old one breaks as your business moves into a new environment.

The remote workforce has become a very diverse industry and will continue to grow. Employers are discovering ways to outsource and use VAs for certain aspects of their business to free up their high paid employees to focus on other tasks.

It might take a bit of trial and error to get in the groove, but once you’re there—look out!

Like many tech companies, Microsoft’s business has seen significant growth as a result of the coronavirus pandemic and the move to remote work. Its cloud business, in particular, has seen stellar growth.

The company reported revenue of $37.2 billion, representing a 12% increase over the year-ago quarter. Operating income came in at $15.9 billion, an increase of 25%, while net income increased 30% to $13.9 billion.

Office 365 Commercial revenue grew some 21%, driving Office Commercial products and services revenue up 9% as a whole. Similarly, Dynamics revenue was up 19%, with Dynamics 365 up 38%.

“The next decade of economic performance for every business will be defined by the speed of their digital transformation,” said Satya Nadella, chief executive officer of Microsoft. “We are innovating across our full modern tech stack to help our customers in every industry improve time to value, increase agility, and reduce costs.”

“Demand for our cloud offerings drove a strong start to the fiscal year with our commercial cloud revenue generating $15.2 billion, up 31% year over year,” said Amy Hood, executive vice president and chief financial officer of Microsoft. “We continue to invest against the significant opportunity ahead of us to drive long-term growth.”

Microsoft’s results illustrate the fundamental shift the pandemic has created, with effects that will last far longer than the cause.

As US carriers have rolled out their 5G networks, Verizon has taken a much different approach than AT&T and T-Mobile. Until now, Verizon has largely focused on its high-band, mmWave 5G. AT&T and T-Mobile, while deploying mmWave of their own, were quick to roll out nationwide 5G networks using low-band spectrum. AT&T used its 850 MHz spectrum, while T-Mobile used 600 MHz.

While low-band spectrum doesn’t offer nearly the same speed as mmWave, it offers much better coverage and building penetration. In many cases, low-band 5G matches or exceeds 4G LTE’s range and penetration, much of which is in the 700 MHz range. Verizon now joins the other two carriers with a nationwide 5G network using its low-band spectrum.

Unfortunately, unlike T-Mobile and AT&T, Verizon does not have enough low-band spectrum to create a dedicated, nationwide 5G network. Instead, it has to use Dynamic Spectrum Sharing (DSS) to share the same spectrum between its 4G LTE and nationwide 5G networks. In pre-launch tests—the couple of days before the announcement when 5G started showing up on Verizon devices—the new network was actually slower than Verizon’s 4G LTE.

“I wouldn’t worry too much about the 5G being slower than 4G yet,” write Sascha Segan & Steven Winkelman for PCMag. “This is pre-launch and either our devices or the network may not have been fully configured. But I think 5G being the same speed as 4G is more relevant, because DSS 5G is really just a shell game. You get faster speeds when you add spectrum to a carrier’s pool. The power of 5G comes from its ability to use wider channels than 4G—up to 100MHz each where 4G channels max out at 20MHz.

“DSS simply shifts some existing 4G channels to 5G when they aren’t being used by 4G phones. So you’re going to end up with narrow odds and ends of airwaves that don’t expand the carrier’s portfolio any, but let it show a “5G” indicator for marketing purposes.”

It remains to be seen how Verizon’s nationwide 5G network will stack up now that it’s officially launched. If the early tests are to be believed, however, it shows why T-Mobile is widely considered the 5G carrier to beat, especially with its acquisition of spectrum-rich Sprint.

Accenture Cloud First is a new multi-service group of 70,000 cloud professionals that brings together the full power and breadth of Accenture’s industry and technology capabilities, ecosystem partnerships, and deep commitment to learning and upskilling clients’ employees and to responsible business, with the singular focus of enabling organizations to move to the cloud with greater speed and achieve greater value for all their stakeholders at this critical time.

“COVID-19 has created a new inflection point that requires every company to dramatically accelerate the move to the cloud as a foundation for digital transformation to build the resilience, new experiences and products, trust, speed, and structural cost reduction that the ongoing health, economic and societal crisis demands — and that a better future for all requires,” said Accenture CEO Julie Sweet. “Accenture Cloud First and our substantial investment demonstrate our commitment to delivering greater value to our clients when they need it most. Digital transformation requires cloud at scale, and post-COVID leadership requires that every business become a ‘cloud-first’ business.”

The idea is to help clients across all industries rapidly become “cloud-first” businesses and accelerate their digital transformation to realize greater value at speed and scale. Karthik Narain will lead Accenture Cloud First and join the Global Management Committee, effective October 1.

Julie Sweet, CEO of Accenture, discusses how the company is investing in helping businesses “replatform” in the cloud:

Once In An Era Replatforming Of Global Business

There has been this massive acceleration in the cloud. Really what’s happening is a once in an era replatforming of global business. We are 20 percent in the cloud today. We believe we will move to around 80 percent in just five years. What Accenture Cloud First is about is helping companies get there faster by bringing together all of the capabilities with a singular focus of how are we going to replatform at speed.

Pre-COVID we worked with a ton of the digital leaders who have been out front. What we see is that there are three important components. First of all, with our cloud partners across the spectrum it’s really critical to not just move companies but to move entire industries. That takes the road map, the learning, and the data integration about what problems are specific to the industry. We are going to be investing in those solutions often along with our partners.

The second area is the speed, investing in better automation and technology that is going to help not just move these companies faster but actually also be able to operate in the cloud with increasingly more productivity. Think about the cloud becoming a platform for their productivity.

Investing In Making Replatforming Sustainable

The third place is around talent and sustainability. If you are replatforming entire global businesses in the cloud we have to do so in a sustainable way. This means getting out of the datacenter to the cloud and what it does for climate change. It’s around things like supply chain and making sure that you are building in the ability to have the integrity of the supply chain and that you are reskilling.

We will be investing in making this replatforming sustainable. This is core as we think about post-COVID our belief as companies across the globe and government that we need to make a better future for all by building in this view of all stakeholders from the planet to our people.

Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, discusses the company’s continued growth and progress in supporting customers with their push toward digital transformation:

Driving Better Balance Between Growth And Profitability

We’re very happy about the quarter that we just put up. We are stabilizing the growth rate with 11 percent revenue growth. We had nearly a 16 percent operating margin for the quarter. That’s been a trend that we’ve obviously been driving for the past year or so around really driving a better balance between growth and profitability. We improved our guidance on both revenue growth and profitability for the rest of the year. We guided to about 12 to 13 percent operating margin for the full year (FY21) and so we do think these results are sustainable.

Obviously, we want to be able to continue to drive them going into next year and beyond. We’re very happy about the efficiency of the business right now as well as our ability to go out and serve customers and help them power a new way to work in this very very you know dynamic landscape.

All Hands On Deck With Digital Transformation

The first couple quarters of the year we had to step back and figure out in this economy and in this market what could we do to best serve our customer base. In some segments, we had to lean in to make sure that we were better supporting our customers. In other segments, we saw more growth because in spaces like financial services, healthcare, life sciences, and the tech sector there’s still a tremendous amount of economic growth occurring. So we had to do a little bit of a reset in some of our segments, especially the SMB segment. and we’re seeing really healthy pipeline for the second half of the year.

At the same time, we saw very strong enterprise growth among these customers. We grew our number of big deals, which we measure as deals above $100,000 in transaction value, by 60 from Q1 to Q2 of this year. We’re happy about the momentum that we’re seeing in the business. We do expect that we’re going to continue to drive growth coming into the second half of the year. Right now we are all hands on deck on supporting our customers and their digital transformation strategies and hopefully really enabling them to have a more secure and more seamless way to work in this environment.

Need Better Interoperability Between Technologies

In the enterprise segment, you deal with similar questions (as consumer-facing companies do with anti-trust). How do we ensure long-term that you have interoperability between our technologies? If I put my data into one cloud platform will I have the ability to make that data work with other applications from other cloud technologies? Whether or not there needs to be oversight that’s obviously going to be a big question for the government.

What I do think across the industry we do need to continue to work on better standards. We need to drive better interoperability between our technologies. I can say confidently that companies like Microsoft and Google and others are working on making sure that we have greater interoperability between our technology stack. We work with companies like Slack, Zoom, Salesforce, and others to make sure that we have that interoperability as well. But there’s still a long way to go to really create a seamless experience for the broader customer base out there.

No Precedent For The Type of TikTok Deals Playing Out

This is obviously a very strange environment (in reference to TikTok deal rumors). I don’t think there’s been a precedent for this type of acquisition playing out ever. Especially in the back of the antitrust element, you don’t have the logical acquirers of this type of social media technology at play. All you really have are these interesting configurations of maybe not the most classic acquirers of a social tool. This is causing a lot of questions on what is the long-term strategic nature of these deals.

This is especially true for companies that don’t have a strong advertising business model or might not have some of the same demographic within their customer base. That being said, all of the players, whether it’s Larry Ellison or Satya or Doug at Walmart, these are all incredibly smart and savvy business people. I’m sure that behind the scenes there’s quite a deal of strategy going on but it’s certainly fun to watch play out.

As the coronavirus pandemics has swept the globe, companies have been moving to the cloud in record numbers. This has enabled them to remain functional and productive, despite millions of American employees working from home. Microsoft, in particular, has benefited from this thanks to its complete technology stack—from local operating systems and office software, to full cloud platform.

“The last five months have made it clear that tech intensity is the key to business resilience. Organizations that build their own digital capability will recover faster and emerge from this crisis stronger,” said Satya Nadella, chief executive officer of Microsoft. “We are the only company with an integrated, modern technology stack – powered by cloud and AI and underpinned by security and compliance – to help every organization transform and reimagine how they meet customer needs.”

The company’s position helped it hit $38 billion in revenue, an increase of 13% over the year-ago-quarter. Its operating income was $13.4 billion and its net income was $11.2 billion.

“Our commercial cloud surpassed $50 billion in annual revenue for the first time this year. And this quarter our Commercial bookings were better than expected, growing 12% year-over-year,” said Amy Hood, executive vice president and chief financial officer of Microsoft. “As we drive growth across the company, we remain committed to investing in long-term strategic opportunities.”

Analysts were deeply interested in Microsoft’s earnings for this quarter, in view of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. How the company faired would be a good indicator of the overall impact the pandemic is having. In its earnings, Microsoft beat analysts exceptions, reporting revenue of $35 billion, representing a 15% increase over the year-ago-quarter.

A particular standout was the company’s Azure cloud business, which saw revenue growth of 51%.

“We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months. From remote teamwork and learning, to sales and customer service, to critical cloud infrastructure and security – we are working alongside customers every day to help them adapt and stay open for business in a world of remote everything,” said Satya Nadella, chief executive officer of Microsoft. “Our durable business model, diversified portfolio, and differentiated technology stack position us well for what’s ahead.”

“In this dynamic environment, our sales teams and partners executed a solid third quarter, with Commercial Cloud revenue generating $13.3 billion, up 39% year over year,” said Amy Hood, executive vice president and chief financial officer of Microsoft. “We remain committed to balancing operational discipline with continued investments in key strategic areas to drive future growth.”

The quarterly report was good news, and Microsoft made a point of highlighting that the pandemic had minimal impact on its revenue. However, there was a note of caution, as the company acknowledged “the effects of COVID-19 may not be fully reflected in the financial results until future periods.”

According to the company, by making its portfolio of hardware and software solutions available as-a-service, it will help telcos rapidly deploy 5G networks and start turning a profit, by reducing the initial cost. The “edge-to-cloud, platform as-a-service strategy is uniquely positioned to help telcos capitalize on the 5G opportunity, by leveraging a cloud-native software stack for 5G core, optimized telco core and edge infrastructure blueprints, and Wi-Fi 6 enabled services. Built on open and interoperable platforms combined with carrier grade infrastructure and modular software components, the portfolio of offerings allows telcos to incorporate more automation, become more agile, and deploy new 5G services faster across the telco core, the telco edge and into the enterprise.”

With the increased emphasis on edge computing and the potential of 5G networks, HPE’s solution is designed to overcome some of the problems with previous generations of network equipment, especially those posed by proprietary equipment. By basing its solution on open source technology, HPE’s 5G portfolio will help telcos more fully realize the potential of the next generation network.

“Openness is essential to the evolutionary nature of 5G and with HPE 5G Core Stack telcos can reduce operational costs, deploy features faster and keep themselves open to multiple networks and technologies while avoiding being locked-in to a single vendor approach,” said Phil Mottram, vice president and general manager of the Communications and Media Solutions business unit at HPE. “HPE has one of the broadest 5G portfolios in the market and is uniquely positioned to help telcos build an open multi-vendor 5G core, optimize the edge with vRAN, and deliver connectivity and new compute services to the enterprise using MEC and Wi-Fi 6.”

Google is currently a distant third among U.S. cloud providers, with a mere 4% market share. In spite of that, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian has set the goal of becoming the number two cloud provider within five years. Some analysts predict that could prompt Google to purchase Salesforce in an effort to leapfrog the current number two, Microsoft.

In the meantime, to help organically grow market share, Google is launching personalized Premium Support “to serve the enterprise and mission-critical needs of Google Cloud customers.” The company’s blog post states: “We know that our customers need Google Cloud Support to be available in seamless, simple, and straightforward ways. We’re building upon our current technical account manager (TAM) service and 15-minute SLOs to add a more proactive approach and an improved overall experience.”

Google is working to make sure customers received specialized support unique to their needs.

“As a Premium Support customer, you’ll have your cases handled directly by context-aware experts who understand your unique application stack, architecture, and implementation details. This team will work hand-in-hand with your Technical Account Manager to deliver a customer-centric support experience with faster case resolution, more personalized service, and higher customer satisfaction.”

The new Premium Support is available now and the company says it will continue to rollout new features throughout the year. Cloud customers can also keep up-to-date via the Cloud Customer Care portfolio.

Image Source: Google Cloud

But biometric security goes beyond just physical identifiers, though physical identifiers are a big part of biometrics. Physical identifiers, such as fingerprints, facial features, retinal patterns, and vocal and speech patterns can all be spoofed relatively easily, but biometrics go beyond that. Biometrics can even identify who you are by your device usage patterns, the angle in which you hold your phone, how often you check your social media accounts, and even finger movements and gestures. 

Hollywood makes hacking biometrics look easy. In Diamonds Are Forever, Sean Connery uses a fake fingerprint to fool a scanner. In Sneakers, Robert Redford hacks voice recognition with a tape of the passphrase and in Gattaca, Ethan Hawke bypasses a DNA scan with a drop of blood. With how easy biometrics seem to be able to crack, how does Hollywood stack up to reality?

Before we get to how to crack biometrics, we first have to understand what makes biometrics hard to hack. Biometrics are much more time consuming to hack as compared to hacking regular traditional passwords and pins. Biometrics are also much more difficult to hack without being noticed, and creating a fake requires a huge amount of user data. Finally, biometric tech has yet to be standardized, making each device requires its own special approach to hack it. With all of these added security benefits in biometrics, how are they still being hacked?

Fakes to fool biometrics have been done, but some are easier to fool than others. BKAV, a Vietnamese cybersecurity firm, cracked Apple’s Face ID using a mask made with a 3D printer, silicone, and paper tape. Some Android devices can be tricked with just a photo – including devices from some of the largest Android manufacturers such as Sony, Huawei, and Samsung. The new Samsung S10 features a new ultrasonic fingerprint sensor which is meant to be harder to hack, but the sensor is easily fooled by a 3D printed fingerprint placed on top.

Find out the holes in biometric security and how they are being filled by manufacturers and software designers here.

Citing his ‘strategic leadership,’ Microsoft’s independent board awarded Nadella $42.9 million in compensation, much of it in stock awards. Nadella has been instrumental in helping Microsoft transition from a company primarily focused on operating systems and office software to one whose cloud services are front-and-center. This has enabled Microsoft to adapt to a changing landscape dominated by fast-moving, upstart companies. The success of Nadella’s leadership is shown in the numbers.

“Under Mr. Nadella’s leadership and ongoing commitment to long-term success, the Company saw a strong finish to a record fiscal year delivering more than $125 billion in revenue for the full year with double-digit revenue and net income growth in 2019.

“The commercial cloud business led the way, surpassing $38 billion in revenue, growing over 40% for the year. The strength in commercial cloud growth was across Azure, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, and LinkedIn. The commitment to customer success resulted in deeper partnerships and larger, longer-term cloud agreements. Microsoft continued to make investments across the key strategic areas to build new platforms and enhance and differentiate Microsoft’s technology stack, including application infrastructure, data and artificial intelligence (“AI”) business process, productivity, collaboration, and hardware. Microsoft Teams had a very successful year, with more than 13 million daily active users and 19 million weekly active users.

“Further, the closing of the GitHub acquisition in October 2018 and its successful integration has created new opportunities to build the developer community. With GitHub, Microsoft now has the opportunity to bring all its resources to better serve this very important community of developers around the world. Microsoft also invested in building a developer toolchain independent of language, framework, or cloud. Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code are now the most popular code-editing tools in the world, and TypeScript is the fastest-growing programming language.

“Windows 10 momentum was very strong this past year as well, reaching 800 million active devices. While opportunities remain for the Company with consumers, the Company’s Gaming business made new investments to empower the world’s gaming community. However, the Company needs to make progress to strengthen our consumer business and additional work is needed in consumer-facing strategies.”

Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware, discusses how VMware has become a complete digital transformation platform for companies in an interview on CNBC:

VMware Is Now a Platform For Digital Transformation

We believe that our conversations now as we’ve expanded from selling compute Hypervisor to a complete cloud infrastructure, complete end-user computing, a transformation of their network and security offerings, our conversations have gone from targeted to holistic to be this platform for their digital transformation. That core idea of how do they get to that digital future, that’s not an IT discussion anymore, that’s a business strategy conversation.

That’s why we are seeing this real uplift in the position in the conversation that we are having with customers globally. As we’ve positioned in the past, as people move to the full VMware offering that is a multiplier. A company or an institution that is using us as a Hypervisor, now the full cloud stack of network, compute, management, and automation, that is a business expansion opportunity for us.

VMware Seeking Ability To Be a Government Cloud Provider

As I said on the (earnings) call we are now in the FedRAMP High process. We are seeking that ability to be a cloud provider for the government and many of the government. Many of the government in defense and intelligence are big VMware footprints. We see this as a great opportunity. We are in process to get approval. As the JEDI contract gets resolved we hope to be able to be positioned with Amazon and Azure, given our relationships with both.

Even as our preferred relationship with Amazon is very strong we do see this ability for us to participate for government business being an essential element of our multi-cloud strategy where Amazon, Azure, IBM, and our other cloud partners all give us a great opportunity to participate for government contracts.

Jim Meyer, CEO of SiriusXM, talked during their earnings announcement about their plans for Pandora and how it will lead SiriusXM beyond the car and transform the company in the process:

Our Combination with Pandora Completely Changes the Game

We expect the Pandora merger to close Friday. The combined company will reach over 100 million listeners in North America, with nearly 40 million self-paying subscribers and 75 million trailers — trialers and ad-based listeners. The North American audio market is the most influential in the world.

The suite SiriusXM and Pandora bring to content creators and advertisers is a powerful promotional platform. The Pandora team’s continuing efforts to improve ad tech, add new content and features and to improve usability for both listeners and advertisers provides a solid foundation for Pandora’s future.

Needless to say, our combination with Pandora completely changes the game and gives us vastly more scale outside of the car in a way that we think is completely complementary to our existing efforts at SiriusXM. Together, the SiriusXM and Pandora brands are uniquely positioned to lead a new era of audio entertainment by delivering the most compelling subscription and ad-supported audio experience to millions of listeners in the car, at home, and on the go. I am incredibly excited by the opportunity in front of us to build a media company that will be competitive for decades to come.

We plan to close the Pandora transaction on Friday, and we will hit the ground running. I’ve made a decision to immediately consolidate the G&A functions and have the business units report directly to me. My goal is to streamline decision-making, increase the speed of integration and manage the businesses holistically from day one. These things are never easy. And just let me say, I have a ton of respect for Roger Lynch and the masterful job he has done at Pandora over the last 16 months. I want to personally thank him for his contributions.

Tremendous Opportunities That Combine Our Strengths

As we move closer to the combination, we are seeing increased opportunities for cost saving. By the end of next year, these cost synergies should exceed a run rate of $50 million per year. But this merger has never been about cost synergies. Let me reiterate my vision here. We see tremendous opportunities to create attractive and unique audio packages that combine our strengths, SiriusXM’s in-vehicle position with Pandora’s strong position out of the vehicle. There are strong prospects for cross-promotion across our combined North American audience.

Quite simply, I’d like to monetize at some level every single one of the close to 23 million SiriusXM trials we are running annually. Over the next decade, the vast majority of Americans will have experienced one of these trials, and I am thrilled to now have a complete stack of compelling offerings to offer consumers, from paid to free.

Pandora Brings SiriusXM a Tremendous Amount of Data

With our massive audience, particularly from the Pandora side, comes a tremendous amount of listener data that will be invaluable as we grow the combined company in the future. Let me give you just one example. Based upon our preliminary research, approximately half the owners of the SiriusXM-enabled vehicle fleet have used Pandora in the past 2 years. This is incredibly powerful.

Data from Pandora can significantly improve our understanding of these users’ preferences and behaviors when it comes to music listening. This kind of data should help us refine our marketing efforts for retention, conversions, win back as well as our streaming experience for SiriusXM subscribers over time.

Intends to Capitalize on Cross-Promotion Opportunities

We also intend to capitalize on cross-promotion opportunities between SiriusXM’s more than 36 million subscribers across North America and Pandora’s approximately 70 million monthly active users. In early February, we will begin a targeted promotion to SiriusXM subscribers and Pandora listeners. Select Pandora listeners will receive an offer to obtain a unique $5 a month mostly news — mostly music or news talk package in their satellite-equipped vehicle.

SiriusXM subscribers will also receive an extended 14-day trial to Pandora Premium. By midyear, we expect to deliver a new Pandora-powered channel to our SiriusXM app users based upon their favorite artist and a new radio channel, driven by the latest trend from Pandora’s billions of thumbs. This is just the beginning. We expect over time to create new, unique audio packages that will bring together the best of both services, creating a powerful platform for artists to reach their fans and to create new audiences.

Biggest Challenge at Pandora – Increase Listener Hours

Without a doubt, the biggest challenge at Pandora is clearly related to active users and, even more importantly, listener hours. This is going to be a tremendous focus for my management team in 2019 and beyond. The biggest opportunity for change here is through improved content and marketing. The launch of Pandora’s slate of podcasts is a great first step, and I’m confident Scott Greenstein and his team will add immediate value here.

We will also be looking to improve Pandora’s position in-vehicle, and you can bet we will look to continually improve the Pandora user experience and onboarding experience. We have an excellent track record of performance at SiriusXM. We focus on having the right strategy and business plan and then executing that against that plan. Growing Pandora and, more importantly, generating sustained and growing cash flows there will not be easy. But with the combination of SiriusXM and Pandora, we will have tremendous opportunities. And let me remind you that SiriusXM’s track record is second to none in audio entertainment.

Trust me on one thing: We understand the many new challenges that arise at Pandora. We’re excited to tackle them head-on, but we will in no way lose sight of our core business and the important opportunities for value creation that remain at SiriusXM. Great content is always the core of what we do at SiriusXM.

“Governments are now aggressively embracing cloud, not just the US government, but government’s all over the world,” noted Donahoe. “Just like in our consumer lives where cloud-based applications gave us better user experiences, hid the complexity and greater efficiency, the same things now happening in the enterprise and in government.”

John Donahoe, ServiceNow CEO, recently talked about cloud adoption by the enterprise and government in a conversation on CNBC:

Still in the Early Days of Cloud Adoption in the Enterprise

We’re still in the very early days of adoption of cloud in the enterprise. You see it in companies and you see it in governments. Governments are now aggressively embracing cloud, not just the US government, but government’s all over the world. Just like in our consumer lives where cloud-based applications gave us better user experiences, hid the complexity and greater efficiency, the same things now happening in the enterprise and in government. They need to deliver better experiences for their customers and their employees and they need productivity and cloud can deliver all three. If it were a baseball game I would say we’re in the second or third inning.

What I hear from customers is that they want to adopt four to six core strategic platforms, sort of modern tech stack of the future. Typically that includes a Salesforce, a Workday, a ServiceNow, maybe an Office 365, an Adobe, and SAP. They want to put as much as they can on those core platforms and take all that data together and deliver better experiences for their customers and better experiences for their employees. What ServiceNow does, sort of unique among that, is we help build some of the connective tissue across the different platforms.

Very Large Government Entities Embracing Cloud

I see a shift with governments and the cloud. Two to three years ago government’s were suspicious of cloud, they were worried about security and that has changed and that has changed in a powerful way. Governments are under pressure to deliver better services to their citizens, whether it’s the IRS or any other sector, and drive efficiency in productivity.

You see very large government entities embracing cloud. You saw the contract yesterday with Microsoft. We’re seeing it both in the federal government in the US, federal government’s around the world, and many state and local governments, because cloud platforms like ServiceNow enable them to drive tremendous productivity and provide better experiences.

There is Enormous Growth Left with Cloud

It’s the early innings. There is enormous growth left with cloud at the infrastructure level and at the software level. At the infrastructure level where AWS and Azure and Google Cloud play you see that cloud adoption happening around the world. I think there’s going to be a lot of growth for both organizations.

If you talk to customers, customers don’t want to be sole source on this, customers want to have choice. Even in the public cloud, they’re often embracing one or two or three different public cloud providers to make sure that they’re they’re mitigating the risk and they’re getting the best of what each of those platforms has.

Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, was interviewed on CNBC about the impact of the IBM-Red Hat deal on Box:

Red Hat Deal Puts IBM in a Great Position

Red Hat is a leader in commercial open source technology which is really the future of computing in any real IT environment or software development and IBM now has one of the world’s best companies in the open source space and the multi-cloud space.

I think it puts them in an incredible position to help enterprises that are moving to a multi-cloud environment be able to run their data centers and run their operations, whether it’s in the cloud or on-premises and a hybrid model for the future. It puts IBM in a great position.

IBM-Red Hat Deal Shows Increased Underlying Value

This is obviously an incredibly bold move on the part of Ginni (Ginni Rometty, CEO, IBM) and the rest of the team but one that I think we will look back in five or ten years and say that was a very defining decision. IBM is a great partner and we obviously want to root for their success but we partner with probably the majority of software and technology companies in the industry, so our job is to be interoperable and integrate with all the major technologies our customers use.

What the (IBM-Red Hat) deal showed was that the underlying value of some of these significant players is in many cases worth a lot – especially big incumbents. I think in general, companies like Workday, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and hopefully Box, we’re trying to build industry defining companies that will last quite some time.

Becoming a Core Part of the Technology Stack

I think, in general, when you think about enterprise IT, enterprise IT buyers are making long-term investments in the future of their technology architecture. It’s very sticky and there are massive modes in the technology that are being built out and if we do our job and continue to innovate we will become a core part of the technology stack of how the future of all enterprises operate.

That’s why these deals end up actually looking pretty good in hindsight when you can see how powerful these platforms are.

Stuart Irvine, Analytics and Optimization Lead at Heathrow Airport, recently talked about their use of Adobe products and services and how they have driven their evolution in digital marketing:

Engaging 80 Percent of Our Customers Digitally

We have 78 million customers a year and we are targeted with engaging 80 percent of our customers digitally. Certainly, we need to raise pre-awareness of our products and services before someone arrives at the airport.

We have strong commercial targets that we need to hit and the Adobe Experience Cloud allows us to get from acquisition through to activity to after the trip activity. This allows us to tailor messages as someone moves through the airport experience to make sure that we deliver relevant push messages or relevant content throughout their journey.

Email is Still the Key Driver for Us

We work a lot with geolocation where we have over 11,000 beacons around the airport. Tools like Adobe Campaign allow us to move through that journey and keep that contact regular. We implemented Adobe Campaign three years ago with integration partner Acxiom, a long-term data partner. Adobe Campaign, as a truly omnichannel tool, has allowed us to really ramp up activity across channels.

Certainly, email is still the key driver for us. We send over 6 million emails every month and Adobe Campaign has allowed us to personalize a lot more emails and make sure we get the right offers to the customers. We’ve worked with Adobe Analytics for 8 years and we now capture all of our online data. That’s all passed to Adobe Audience Manager which allows us to drive personalization at scale and deliver relevant and contextual experiences.

Adobe Professional Services Has Been a Key Advantage

I think the Adobe DAM, obviously with the integrations with Creative Cloud, can offer us huge process improvements. Working with Adobe professional services has actually been one of the key advantages for us. They have the knowledge to make the best value of the integrations between all of the solutions to really deliver experiences at scale we need to have automated processes.

Moving More Towards Personalization

We have a lot of faith in the Adobe Sensei platform and the machine learning there. We’re just opening up our homepage to automated personalization to try and bring through some subcategories of products that we’ll get a much better cut through with our customers. Now we’re moving more and more towards personalization, recommendations being the key focus areas for target.

Adobe Audience Manager has been a key driver behind that. It is really a game changer for Heathrow Airport given our investment in the rest of our tech stack. Audience Manager really brings that all together and allows us to deliver an omnichannel experience.

Open Rates Are Now Above 20 Percent

We’ve seen open rates go from the low teens to above 20 percent, some great results there. We have over 25 percent click-through rates on some of our emails, which is a fantastic number to achieve. We’ve been able to increase average retail spend per passenger from £5 ($6.48) to £8 ($10.38). With our rewards customers, we see that they travel at least five times a year they have an average spend of £140 ($182) per visit. Adobe Campaign has been key to building that relationship.

Our journey with Adobe has been a great experience. We’ve moved through from basically analytics eight years ago, but actually, the development of Adobe’s roadmap has continually evolved and that has driven our evolution in digital marketing as well.

The product is a data collecting box that car manufacturers or third parties such as Uber can attach to cars to capture data to inform autonomous driving systems to make them safer. They say that the Aeva box is “part of the autonomous stack” that can easily be dropped into vehicles.

Soroush Salehian, co-founder of Aeva discussed his companies Aeva box with CNBC:

Aeva is for automobile car manufacturers or companies that are developing ride share autonomous taxis. We are providing this as part of the autonomous stack so that these customers can actually integrate this just like a drop in a placement into their vehicles as they develop their mass production vehicles.

The beauty of this system is that we directly measure the velocity map. We do not take multiple frames to infer each measurement.

When you typically see these kinds of sensors around the vehicles you typically see them with different kinds of boxes. You see maybe one box that is maybe the sensor head or the just a sensing system and then others that is the compute system. They’re usually connected together and typically these boxes are hidden away in a trunk or something like this.

One of the unique things about technologies and the work that we’ve done in the past couple of years is that we have been able to integrate this system into this single compact package while it provides still all the capabilities of these different sensors and outputs into one box.

Mina Rezk, Aeva’s other co-founder describes how the system takes data:

We have our depth map in which the color represents the depth of objects of every of pixel on here. Then we have our reflectivity map in which every pixel represents the reflectivity of each object. We also have our own unique velocity map in which every pixel represents the velocity of these objects.

There is a lot of motion that can easily be picked up whether it’s moving away or coming towards us. It is much harder to pick that up in a depth map because you have to infer multiple frames to understand what is going. However, in the velocity map within one single frame, we can easily know what is moving away and what’s coming towards us.

Ketan Karhanis, SVP & GM, Salesforce Analytics at Salesforce talks about the need for smart analytics in businesses in order to drive better actions:

Technology is Simply an Enabler

We must be clear about one thing, technology is simply an enabler. Real transformation requires trailblazers. We live in a time of tremendous technological change with lots of good stuff happening AI, AR, voice. This is not about the technology, it’s simply about you. The single biggest question is how does all this enable your success and what does this mean to you?

You all know the world of business applications, such as sales, service, marketing, you know this world very well. Then there’s the world of analytics, some call it visualizations and some call it reporting,. No matter what you call it it is important because it’s crucial to see what is happening in your business and why.

AI and Analytics Need to Come Together

Now we have AI, the game-changing power of AI insight. What does that mean? Now we can get a glimpse of the future. We get predictive and prescriptive, very exciting technology. But are you going to be swivel chairing three different boxes, three different logins, different stats for everything, one stack for ML, one stack for visualization?  

That’s probably not going to be fun because here’s one simple thing we need to realize, these are not three separate boxes they are facets of the same experience. AI and analytics need to come together and they need to be infused in your business applications.

You Need Automated Discovery

What you need is not just a digital experience but an intelligent experience where analytics is built right in and if done right analytics becomes invisible but you get the benefits of it, and the benefits are pretty spectacular. We are drowning in data, lots of data everywhere. Making sense out of millions of data points in sub-second speeds to derive insights, that’s kind of hard, our brains are not really wired to do that.

You need automated discovery. Automated discovery helps you discover the story in your data and the intelligent experience comes built with automated discovery. Insights have to be outcome focused.

You Need Smart Analytics that Drive Better Actions

Of course, you need charts which tell you about the past, but you need recommendations and explanations. You probably don’t need yet another dashboard which tells you what happened. You need better outcomes for the future and you should not settle for incomplete. From visualizations to predictive to prescriptive you need it complete in one experience.

You need smart analytics. AI stands for actionable insights because an insight which does not lead to an action is just a dumb chart. That’s why connecting to the business process is key. Insights need to drive better actions.

You need to be able to leverage your existing teams and bring them to this new world of no-code AI, of a completely different way of interfacing with your insights. AI’s role is amplifying your effectiveness, it’s about augmenting your skills but how will you trust it. That’s why accountability is key, transparency is key, and you need all of this.

Oracle CEO Mark Hurd recently spoke to CNBC’s “Squawk Alley” about it:

Oracle Autonomous Database Is a Generational Release

Probably our most important generational database release is the Autonomous Database. This is where the database is integrated with AI and machine learning that really just self-patches and self-tunes. It actually creates a position where your security issues go down, you get higher uptime, and you pay less money. We really never in our history had a database release that had as many positive business outcomes as opposed to just technology.

This is a place where you get better performance, more uptime and you will eliminate tons of labor. Most of our customers, for example, I know this has become a bigger issue with C-Suites now where the amount of time it actually takes to patch software can be months for most of our customers.

This release of the Autonomous Database literally eliminates that need to patch. This is a generational release for us as we bring it to market.

Oracle BYOL Explained

Let me explain BYOL (Bring Your Own License). That is simply where you can buy a license and you can use it on-premise or in the cloud, so it’s basically a currency that you can move across platforms. We’re one of the very few companies that allow you to do that, so we believe it’s an advantage for our customers and what they want and that’s why we utilize that strategy.

Second,  I think you need to divide up what’s happening in the applications market versus what’s happening in the infrastructure and platform market. In the applications market, there’s an opportunity now for most companies to modernize all of their systems.

ERP is Moving to the Cloud

Let’s start with the back office systems, the biggest category of back-office applications is called ERP. ERP is basically companies financial supply chain manufacturing systems, etc.

All of those are really going to get replaced over the next several years as companies move to the cloud where there are much more innovation and much more work done by somebody else as opposed to by the customer. We’re in the very early innings of that market.

Oracles Technology is a Competitor Differentiator 

We have a significant lead technology wise in ERP and we went through a ton of customer wins in the quarter. That market is going to over the next several years be very exciting. The technology infrastructure market, that’s as you move further up the stack, meaning from compute and storage to database to other tools and systems, Oracle gets more differentiated from competition the further you move up the stack.

Just replacing somebody’s computer with somebody’s infrastructure, while that’s interesting, the more technology you have and the more IP differentiates Oracle. Oracle has always been differentiated by doing the hardest jobs the best, by investing in R&D and investing in innovation.

Oracle Autonomous Database for Transactional Processing Announced

Larry Ellison, Oracle Co-Founder, CTO, and Executive Chairman, made the announcement:

We’re announcing the immediate availability of the Oracle Autonomous Database transactional processing. Now the machine learning based technology not only can optimize itself for queries for database warehouses and Data Marts, but it also optimizes itself for transactions.

It can run batch programs, reporting, Internet of Things, simple transactions, complex transactions, and mixed workloads. Between these two systems, the system that is optimized for data warehousing and the system that’s optimized for transaction processing, the Oracle Autonomous Database now handles all of your workloads. All of them.

Larry Ellison also recently gave his take on the Autonomous Database Cloud:

The cool thing about the Autonomous Database Cloud is because it is autonomous the database is fully automated.  Human Beings don’t create the database, the database creates itself. Human Beings don’t tune the database, the database tunes itself.