Companies like Intuit and H&R Block have lobbied for years to prevent the agency from creating its own free electronic system, ProPublica reports.
Source: CNET
After Thomas Kurian, Google Cloud’s recently minted CEO, joined the company, he took hundreds of meetings to learn what the company’s prospective and current customers were looking for. The overarching theme of those conversations was always similar, he told me during an interview at Google’s Cloud Next conference: “Love the technology — amazed at it. [They] think that it’s the best of the best. But they want more people that can help them adopt it and improvements to how they do business with us.”
So that’s the first order of business at Google Cloud now. Kurian, who came to Google Cloud after 22 years at Oracle, said that the team is rolling out new contracts and plans to simplify pricing. Most importantly, though, Google will go on a hiring spree. “A number of customers told us ‘we just need more people from you to help us.’ So that’s what we’ll do,” Kurian said.
I asked Kurian whether he believes that his predecessors made a mistake by not doing all of this already. Always the diplomat, Kurian denied that (of course). “No, I think it’s just the natural evolution of every company. Growing up, understanding their business, seeing an opportunity,” he said. “When I look at it, isn’t it a great position to be in? When you have customers saying ‘please hire more people to help me’ rather than ‘please go away from me?’ ”
Enterprises want Google to figure out the enterprise, Kurian argues, because they want to use the company’s technology. “And so we’re trying to do that.”
No matter what he thinks about Diane Greene’s tenure at Google Cloud, though, Kurian undoubtedly has the opportunity to reshape the organization now. When I asked him about how his own philosophy is different from his predecessor, though, he argued that it’s all about listening to customers and giving them what they want. And what they want is more help, but also better collaboration tools, for example, as well as more industry-specific solutions.
Later on, though, he also noted that what Google Cloud will do going forward is to play to its strengths. “I think you will see us emphasizing our differentiators and strengthening the multi-cloud infrastructure,” he said, and highlighted today’s launch of Anthos as an example of what the company can do — and as a product that was developed in response to customer requests. “We’ve taken the area of security. We’ve taken the area of analytics. We’ve taken the area of AI — and we’ve invested a lot more in solutions there. And the reason is, that’s what customers want from us,” he added
It’s no secret that Google is definitely focusing on bringing more enterprises onto its platform. That’s not to say that Google Cloud doesn’t care about startups, though. “When we say we’re focused on enterprise, it doesn’t mean we’re stopping to focus on the small and medium companies — on the digital natives and the startups,” Kurian said. “Historically, the complaint has always been ‘Google doesn’t focus on enterprises, they focus on digital natives. […] The perception outside that Google doesn’t care about enterprises is not true. And the statement that we’re now going to focus exclusively on enterprises is also not true.”
Kurian argues that nine of the 10 largest media companies use Google Cloud, as well as seven of the 10 largest retailers and six of the top 10 enterprise companies. “Other cloud providers would have you believe that no one is using Google, which is not true,” he added.
Talking about other cloud providers, it’s also worth noting that Google is taking a very different approach to open source than some of its competitors, and especially AWS. That’s something that isn’t likely to change under Kurian’s leadership at Google Cloud. “The most important thing is that we believe that the platforms that win in the end are those that enable rather than destroy ecosystems. We really fundamentally believe that,” he told me. “Any platform that wins in the end is always about fostering rather than shutting down an ecosystem. If you look at open-source companies, we think they work hard to build technology and enable developers to use it.”
Kurian isn’t the kind of CEO who will directly attack his competitors in an interview, but he did come rather close to it in this context: “In order to sustain the company behind the open-source technology, they need a monetization vehicle. If the cloud provider attacks them and takes that away, then they are not viable and it deteriorates the open-source community.”
As for the future of Google Cloud, Kurian didn’t quite want to look at his crystal ball. Instead, he argued that as long as the company focuses on doing what its customers want — starting with hiring more employees to help those customers and making it easier to do business with Google — those customers will buy a lot more of their cloud technology from Google.
Source: TechCrunch
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Source: Wired
The Event Horizon Telescope has captured the first real-life picture of the supermassive singularity at the center of the Milky Way. And it’s almost time for show and tell.
Source: CNET
Expanse, a six-year-old, San Francisco-based company that helps its clients understand and monitor what it calls their “global internet attack surface,” has received a $70 million vote of confidence from its earlier backers, as well as some notable individual investors.
Previous investor TPG Growth led the Series C round, with participation from other earlier investors that include NEA, IVP and Founders Fund. But the company also drew checks directly from Founders Fund co-founder Peter Thiel, Michael Dell, former IBM CEO Sam Palmisano, media entrepreneur Arianna Huffington and Turner Enterprise CEO Taylor Glover.
What do they find so interesting about Expanse, which was formerly known as Qadium? Its traction, for starters. It turns out that when you start indexing global internet protocol addresses before everyone else — meaning the numerical labels assigned to each device connected to a computer network — it’s hard for competitors to catch up.
Indeed, numerous big organizations, including CVS and PayPal, are among others that now use the company’s software-as-a-service to help manage their far-flung digital assets connected to the public internet. According to co-founder and CEO Tim Junio, Expanse has been tripling its sales year over year — and quadrupling the terms of its contracts. Toward that end, he says it now has more than 10 customers that have signed up for $1 million-plus contracts. “VCs like to look at how long it takes to go from $1 million to $10 million in [annual recurring revenue]. It took us 22 months, about as fast as [the now-public cloud-storage company] Box.”
Much of that revenue is also coming from U.S. federal agencies, including the U.S. Army, the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Air Force, as well as the State Department, the Defense Department and the Department of Energy. Collectively, they account for more than $100 million in contracts with Expanse, it says.
Asked if Thiel has played a role in making introductions — Thiel famously advised Donald Trump leading up to his election as president, and Thiel’s former chief of staff, Michael Kratsios, is now the country’s chief technology officer — Junio says that all of Expanse’s investors have helped in making customer introductions and pours water on any suggestion that Thiel has done special favors for the company.
Meanwhile, though the company is known for its work in helping customers identify security risks they don’t know about on their networks — like an IoT device that hasn’t been patched — it’s now going after adjacent problems that are bigger-spend problems, including looking at its customers’ critical suppliers to be sure that they aren’t introducing vulnerabilities, including across their commercial cloud providers and co-hosting facilities.
Eventually, it’s easy to see a day when Expanse sells some of the aggregated data it’s seeing, perhaps on a sector by sector basis, though Junio says that Expanse “isn’t going in that direction” currently. For now, he says, the biggest trend that’s driving the business today is the digital transformation of every type of company, which is resulting in plenty of insecurity. As more businesses move to the cloud, there is always the danger that employees — their own or those acquired through mergers — won’t always know or follow policies, and that they’ll move sensitive data where they should not.
That it’s a trend with no end in sight goes a long way in explaining the momentum of Expanse. Already, the company has 150 employees across offices in San Francisco, Washington, DC, New York and Atlanta. With its newest round — a sum that brings Expanse’s total funding to $135 million altogether — the plan is partly to move into new international markets beyond where it already operates. Those markets include the U.K., Canada, Australia and Japan.
Source: TechCrunch
China creó su Gran Cortafuegos en los albores de la web. Casi dos décadas después, y con una sociedad plenamente integrada en la red global, al país le va a costar mucho replicar la idea. Pero el Gobierno ruso no se suele ser flexible ni receptivo ante la presión pública
Source: MIT
Las herramientas de inteligencia artificial están cada vez más integradas en servicios que afectan a la vida de las personas. Si no se diseñan teniendo en cuenta el contexto y las necesidades de las minorías y las personas a las que se dirigen, no conseguirán nada más que agravar los problemas que ya sufren
Source: MIT
Sintetizado por primera vez en 2015, este material basado en el boro es más fuerte y más flexible que su antecesor, además de ligero y muy reactivo. A pesar de que es difícil de crear y manejar, químicos, físicos y otros científicos ya están entusiasmados con sus posibles aplicaciones
Source: MIT
Thanks to pressure from tax preparation industry, Congress is getting ready to ban the Internal Revenue Service from ever building a free electronic tax filing system.
As ProPublica reports, the effort is a bipartisan one. The House Ways and Means Committee, led by Massachusetts Democrat, Richard Neal, passed the Taxpayer First Act.
The bill would make changes to the IRS and is sponsored by Georgia Democratic Congressman John Lewis and Mike Kelly, a Republican from Pennsylvania.
One of its stipulations would make it illegal for the IRS to create its own online system for tax filing. That’s right, members of Congress are prohibiting a branch of the federal government from providing a much-needed service that would make the lives of all of their constituents much easier.
And why is Congress taking the step? Because companies like Intuit, the company behind TurboTax, and H&R Block have been lobbying lawmakers for years to take the step.
In other countries, the agencies in charge of taxes have their own programs which make filing taxes more efficient — and free — for citizens. But that would eat into the profits for the tax prep industry, which was estimated to pull in $11 billion in 2018.
“This could be a disaster. It could be the final nail in the coffin of the idea of the IRS ever being able to create its own program,” Mandi Matlock, a tax attorney who does work for the National Consumer Law Center, told ProPublica.
There are a number of ways that the IRS could make tax preparation easier for taxpayers dealing with the only certainty in life other than death.
The IRS could develop a free online system. It could also submit pre-prepared tax returns for people to approve and then file based on the salary data the agency already has.
Roughly 70% of American taxpayers are already able to file for free online, but only 3% do, according to data from the taxpayer advocacy organization, The Taxpayer Advocate Service.
Americans who make less than $66,000 can access the Free File Inc. software online through the IRS.gov website and all taxpayers can download electronic versions of IRS paper forms through the service.
Back in 2002, the IRS entered into an agreement with a consortium fo tax software companies, which was known as Free File, Inc. As part of that deal, the companies agreed to open up access to filing software for about taxpayers who make less than $66,000 and the IRS agreed not to compete with the companies by developing its own software.
That deal has been renewed for over a decade and the new bill before Congress would make it permanent. One reason why folks Congress could be pushing this through is all of the money that H&R Block and Intuit spent to lobby Senators and Representatives. ProPublica estimates that the tax prep industry has spent $6.6 million to advocate for the IRS filing deal. The Ways and Means chair, Neal, received $16,000 in contributions from the two companies in the last two election cycles, according to the ProPublica report.
Source: TechCrunch
YouTube even had to disable comments on the House Judiciary Committee’s livestream of the hearing because it filled up with so much filth.
Source: Wired