The smart-thermostat maker pilots a program that automatically tweaks your temperature as energy rates change.
Source: CNET
If a new analysis is correct, conditions on Mars make it impossible for existing technology to turn it into a garden of Earth-like delights.
Source: Wired
Serverless, Inc came to the serverless game early, creating an open source framework for developers back in 2015. Today, they want to build on that earlier product to give developers more control over deployment and delivery of serverless applications. To that end, they announced a $10 million Series A round led by Lightspeed Ventures. They have now raised a total of $13 million, according to the company.
The company also announced the release of the Serverless Platform, which include the Serverless Framework, Serverless Dashboard and Serverless Gateway. The Framework lets developers set up their serverless code across different cloud platforms and set conditions on the deployment such as function rules and infrastructure dependencies. The dashboard gives visibility and information about the deployment, so that you can track and trace serverless functions over time, regardless of the cloud platform you’re using.
Diagram: Serverless, Inc.
The gateway provides a way to pull in legacy tools into a serverless approach. As the company describes it, “The Serverless Gateway allows businesses to easily integrate serverless into their existing mesh of services, including containers, SaaS or other legacy systems. The Event Gateway, along with serverless compute, gives organizations a powerful way to react to all of their business events with code.”
Company founder and CEO Austen Collins says that as companies shift to a serverless-first mindset, we’re going to see a lower cost to build and deploy applications, but that is going to take some tooling to really work across a team or large organization, tooling his company wants to provide.
“I think now we are seeing widespread demand for tools to operationalize serverless development, tools to make developers across an entire team, or even across entire organization all practice serverless development in a safe and standard way,” Collins explained.
The framework and communications gateway are open source and always will be, Collins, explained. They will make money by charging companies to use the dashboard to get insights into their serverless code or to access a hosted version of the gateway. People can host their own version of the gateway through using the open source version of the product.
With serverless, developers no longer have to worry about the infrastructure required to run their applications. Instead, they create functions that trigger events and the cloud vendor takes care of deploying the necessary compute, memory and storage to run that event.
It offers a number of advantages including eliminating the need to worry about deploying the appropriate infrastructure and only paying for the infrastructure you use each time your function triggers a given event. This is in stark contrast to the traditional approach to development where you deploy a server for your application and pay for it 24/7 whether it happens to be in use or not.
While this approach undoubtedly has the potential to remove some of the complexity associated with developing and deploying applications, it doesn’t remove all of the requirements developers have to deploy and manage their code according to a set of defined policies. The kind of tool set Serverless Inc is offering provides some additional control and insight developers could be lacking with such a new approach.
The company launched in 2015 and currently has 22 employees in a distributed office approach. Their main office is in San Francisco. Customers include EA Sports, Nordstrom, Reuters and Coca-Cola. The new money should allow them to expand and build out the platform further.
Source: TechCrunch
The number of mobile payments users who tap to pay using a contactless payment solution provided by their mobile device’s maker will grow to 450 million people worldwide by 2020, according to a new forecast from Juniper Research. This includes mobile payment solutions like Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, Google Pay, and others. By this time, Apple Pay will have amassed the largest audience, with Apple accounting for 1 in 2 of these “OEM Pay” users globally – meaning those using wallets provided by the original equipment manufacturer, as opposed to a third-party app.
The forecast includes newcomers to the market, like Fitbit’s odd entry with Fitbit Pay, offered with select editions of its Versa smartwatch, for example. But not surprisingly, the analysts don’t believe these alternatives will amass much market share over the next few years.
“We believe that growth over the next five years will continue to be dominated by offerings from the major OEM players,” said the research’s author Nitin Bhas, referring to companies like Apple, Google, and Samsung. “Additionally, we now have the likes of Huawei Pay and Fitbit Pay launching in several markets; this is now included in Juniper’s contactless forecasts,” he noted.
By 2020, “OEM Pay” wallets will account for over $300 billion in transactions, representing 15 percent of the total number of contactless in-store transactions.
However, the contactless payments market will still be dominated by contactless card payments, not mobile wallets. Contactless card payments are most popular in parts of Asia, including China, where they account for nearly 55 percent of global contactless payments. Combined, all contactless payments in-store will reach $2 trillion by 2029, which is 15 percent of the total point-of-sale transactions.
Notably, contactless payments will exceed $1 trillion for the first time in 2018 – one year earlier than previously estimated.
Meanwhile, by 2022, Juniper forecasts nearly 10 billion mobile contactless ticketing transactions will take place, with North America leading other regions, followed by parts of Asia, including China.
What’s interesting about this new research report is that Apple Pay has such a large following, given how it’s Android-based smartphones, not iPhones, that dominate the worldwide smartphone market. Android’s scale is thanks to Google’s carrier partnerships and the lower cost of some Android phones, which have allowed Android to make inroads in developing regions as well. Android today accounts for around 85-86 percent of the global smartphone market, compared with Apple’s iOS’s 14-15 percent, according to various measurement firms.
Of course, Android has to contend with something Apple does not – OEMs like Samsung running their own mobile wallets to compete with Google Pay (previously called Android Pay.) That fragmentation could account for, in part, why Apple Pay will soon account for 1 out of every 2 contactless mobile wallet user.
Source: TechCrunch
In an age where people stream music instead of buying it, how do you build something equivalent to a pre-order campaign for upcoming releases? The answer is to create a “pre-save” campaign, akin to a landing page where fans can authorise you to automatically add a new song, EP or album to their steaming library or playlist of their choice as soon as it becomes available.
However, pre-save tools for Spotify — if you even knew they existed — are often perceived as expensive and solely for use at major labels or established music marketing companies. Now music marketing and technology startup Feature.fm wants to change that with its “Ultimate Pre-Save,’ a free tool for artists or labels of any size.
Better yet, the Ultimate Pre-Save tool also supports Apple’s newly launched “Pre-Add” feature, which works in a similar way to a Spotify pre-save. Deezer’s version of pre-save is supported too.
The set up process is simple. You register with Feature.fm as either an individual artist or label, select the Ultimate Pre-Save tool and click on create new pre-save. Next you are required to give the work a launch date and tell it which of the three services you plan to launch on. You then need to add a title, an image, preview link, and make any changes to the standard text. Later on, once you know the final URL for your new release on each respective service, you add that too.
And that’s pretty much it. Your fully functioning pre-save page is built, ready for you to start sharing/promoting and hopefully have a successful Day One launch.
Meanwhile, any fan who lands on your pre-save page can click “Pre-Save” or “Pre-Add” to get your music into their libraries on release day. They’ll also automatically follow your artist page if they don’t already. You also have the option to re-direct them to a different URL afterwards so you can reward fans with things like exclusive content or contests.
One other useful feature is that the Feature.fm pre-save link automatically converts to a “smart link” once the song/album is released. So up until release the message will be “pre-save on Spotify, Apple Music or Deezer” etc. and then after release day the link automatically switches to a “buy or stream on your preferred service” and pulls in other digital music services too e.g. Amazon and Tidal etc. The idea is that you only need one smart link for the entire life of a campaign.
Other than that, you can capture/collect up to 50 fan emails for free, and get access to click and pre-save counts. There is also the option to pay for some advanced features, such as custom domains, either monthly or as a one-off campaign. And of course Feature.fm wants to up-sell you to a host of other marketing tech features, such as its incredibly easy to use music ad tools, deeper analytics, and the ability to send remarketing data to your Facebook Ads, Google AdWords, and other ad programs.
Source: TechCrunch
A new horror comic series called ‘Star Wars: Tales from Vader’s Castle’ will hit shelves this October.
Source: Wired
Starting with a smart thermostat and building from there.
Source: CNET
A chat with CEO Stuart Lombard on the company’s origins and future plans.
Source: CNET
The smart-thermostat maker’s new feature turns your house into “a thermal battery.”
Source: CNET
IBM’s newest supercomputer Summit is eight times more powerful than its predeccesor.
Source: CNET