Microsoft and Adobe are teaming up to make it easier for users of Adobe’s marketing software to find and target potential customers for business goods on Microsoft’s LinkedIn, thereby fighting their common competitor Salesforce.com Inc. What Is Salesforce? Salesforce is a market leading American cloud-based CRM platform. The company’s 2018 revenue was $10.5 billion, most of which came from sales of the CRM platform itself although the company also makes a lot of its revenue from selling other applications that work with the platform. Adobe California-based multinational Adobe Inc. became most widely known for products like Photoshop, but the company [...]

If you’d like to see what data your phone has been collecting about your movements here’s how: For iPhone: You can see what Apple refers to as your ‘Significant Locations’ by going to: Settings > Privacy > Location Services > Scroll down and select System Services > Significant Locations. You will need to prove it’s you before being given this info e.g. by fingerprint scan, Face ID or typing in your passcode. For Android: You can see what is referred to as ‘Your Timeline’ by: Opening the Google Maps app. Clicking on the menu (3 horizontal bars, top left) Selecting [...]

The recent £35 billion takeover of Worldpay by US company FIS has boosted the share value of other European payments technology companies including Worldline, Ingenico and Wirecard. Worldpay Worldpay, formerly known as Streamline, was set up as a subsidiary of NatWest bank back in 1989.  It was then bought by RBS in 2002 and re-christened ‘RBS Worldpay’.  Unfortunately for RBS, EU state aid rules meant that Worldpay had to be sold for £2 billion back in 2010 to Advent International and Bain Capital, although RBS Group still retained a 20% stake in the newly independent business. Worldpay was able to become a [...]

Microsoft is testing an in-browser ‘sandbox’ security extension for Chrome and Firefox that lets users access untrusted pages, safely. Windows Defender Application Guard The new browser extension, Windows Defender Application Guard, is already part of Microsoft’s Edge browser and will be rolled out as part of the next Windows 10 update 'April 2019' or 19H1 in the Spring.  It is currently being tested among Windows Insiders and will be available to Windows 10 Pro or Enterprise users when it goes live. How Do You Use It? When installed, users see a Windows Defender Application Guard landing page when they open [...]

TNG and Furhat Robotics in Sweden have developed a social, unbiased recruitment robot called “Tengai” that can be used to conduct job interviews with human candidates. Existing Robot, Modified The robot, ‘Furhat’, was developed several years ago by Stockholm based start-up Furhat Robotics. The Furhat robot, which looks like an internally projected human face on a white head sitting on top of a speaker (with camera and microphone built-in) is made with pre-built expressions and gestures as part of a pre-loaded OS which can be further customized to fit any character. In conjunction with Swedish recruitment company TNG, the Furhat [...]

A new smart drawing app that uses deep learning can convert simple sketches and doodles into photo-realistic landscape artworks in the style of famous artists. GauGAN The “GauGAN” app from Nvidia, which is a play on the name of French post-Impressionist painter Paul Gauguin, is described as a “smart paintbrush” that works through the interplay of two generative adversarial networks, a generator and a discriminator, powered by deep learning. How Does It Work? When running the app, users can draw a simple sketch/doodle outline of a landscape in an on-screen grid/segmentation map. Users can label each segment (e.g. with sea, [...]

It was back in March 1989, 30 years ago, that the World Wide Web as we know it was created by a computer scientist at the CERN particle physics lab near Geneva, Sir Tim Berners-Lee. From Proposal To Reality Sir Tim Berners-Lee wrote a proposal in March 1989, entitled "Information Management: A Proposal" which was based upon his vision of having a unifying structure for multiple computers, which by 1991 had developed into the World Wide Web. The proposal, which was mainly focused on how information could be easily stored, shared, and accessed by CERN staff (and scientists, universities and institutions) [...]

If you’d like to be able to get a report about how you or your family members use your Apple devices, apps, and websites, how much time is spent on them, and (for example) set limits on your child's device, there’s an app in the new iOS 12 to help you do it.  Here’s how : - Turn on the ‘Screen Time’ app: on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, go to Settings > Screen Time. - Select ‘Turn On Screen Time’. - Select ‘Continue’. - Select This is My [device] or This is My Child's [device]. You can now [...]

A new report has concluded that with the recent steep fall in the use of cash, particularly by young people, the government and regulators need to step in to ensure that cash remains a viable method of payment in the future. The ‘Independent’ Research The independent research called 'Access to Cash Review' was authored by Natalie Ceeney (a former financial ombudsman) and financed by cash machine network operator Link and used evidence from nearly 100 businesses and charities in the UK to reach its conclusions. What’s The Problem? The use of cash has been in decline while the use of [...]

RBS is reportedly about to hold trials of a new, more secure biometric bank card where customers can use their fingerprint instead of a PIN to verify purchases. April The trial, which will involve some 200 RBS and NatWest UK-based customers, is due to begin in April this year and will and last for three months. Although this is the first time this kind of advanced card technology has been trialled in the UK, a similar trial has already taken place in Cyprus. Partners RBS is working on the biometric fingerprint-verified card project in partnership with digital security company Gemalto, Visa, [...]