Driven by the rapidly growing adoption of smart speakers, the installed base of smart home devices in the U.S. will reach 244 million in 2022, up from 24 million in 2016, according to a new Forrester Research forecast. Amazon sold over 11 million Amazon Echo devices in 2016, and Forrester expects this number to double in 2017. Smart speakers, including Amazon Echo, will account for 50% of the total installed base of smart home devices in 2017 and will reach 68% by 2022.
U.S. Smart Home Devices to Reach 244 Million in 2022
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Forrester: Top 10 Technology Trends
Ten trends, which Forrester breaks into three phases of dawning, awareness, and acceptance, are setting the pace of technology-driven business change.
10 Hottest Cybersecurity and Privacy Technologies
To help cybersecurity and privacy professionals prepare for a future in which their organizations will increasingly be held accountable for the data on consumers they collect, analyze and sell, Forrester Research investigated the current state of the 20 most important data protection tools.
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A Guide to Digital Transformation
Digital transformation has taken over the business world in recent years, upending incumbents while creating new opportunities for established companies and startups alike. But many organizations stumble in the pursuit of digital-driven revenues and operations. A new guide to the digitally perplexed, written by an experienced business technology executive, provides valuable instructions on how to successfully navigate the digital tsunami.
Driving Digital: The Leader’s Guide to Business Transformation through Technology by Isaac Sacolick is a timely, engaging, and practical roadmap to developing and implementing digital strategies. It shows how to make the culture of the organization more digital-friendly, generate growth through new digital channels, create digitally immersive and rewarding experiences for customers, develop new competitive advantages, and drive new operational efficiencies.
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AI, Automation, Robotics, and Jobs
Nothing gets the Silicon Valley-obsessed media more excited than watching the online mud-wrestling of two tech titans, especially when the fight is over the hottest topic of the day: Will AI destroy our jobs or will it be a force for good?
It all started with Elon Musk declaring that “robots will be able to do everything better than us,” creating the “biggest risk that we face as a civilization.” To which Mark Zuckerberg responded that the “naysayers” drumming up “doomsday scenarios” are “pretty irresponsible.” Musk retorted on Twitter (where else?) “I’ve talked to Mark about this. His understanding of the subject is limited,” and Zuckerberg blogged on Facebook (where else?) that he is “excited about all the progress [in AI] and it’s [sic] potential to make the world better.”
And so it goes. I don’t agree with the notion that only people who are actually doing AI can comment on AI and I’m sure both Musk’s and Zuckerberg’s understanding of AI is not limited. Like the rest of us, however, they inject into the debate their own biases, perspectives, and ambitions. It may help anyone interested in the question of what AI will do or not do to our jobs and civilization to study its history (you may want to start here), to look for evidence refuting what we believe in, and to assessments of the current and future impact of AI technologies that are based on relevant data analyzed with minimal assumptions.
Surveys, interviews and conversations with the people that actually make decisions about creating or eliminating jobs are an example of the latter category and they often serve as the basis for market landscape descriptions and better-informed speculations from industry analysts. A recent case in point—and recommended reading—is “Automation technologies, Robotics, and AI in the Workplace, Q2 2017” from Forrester’s J.P. Gownder (his blog post on the report is here).
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Inviting Cyber Attacks on Your Smartphone
Omer Schwartz
How secure is your smartphone? Do you know what you can do to help the hackers who increasingly see it as a desired and lucrative target?
Yossi Oren’s research lab at Ben-Gurion University in Israel is dedicated to exploring vulnerabilities emerging from this interface, “cyberattacks that allow the extraction of secret information from various devices by exploiting their precise physical behaviors such as power consumption, electromagnetic emanations, heat or vibration.”
Together with a group of foreign journalists, members of the press delegation to Cyber Week 2017 hosted by Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, I watched as Omer Schwartz, one of Oren’s graduate students, demonstrated what could happen to your data when you install on your phone a replacement part.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83VMVrcEOCM]
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The Cybersecurity Vulnerabilities of Self-Driving Cars
Yuval Diskin
At Black Hat 2015, the talk of this annual gathering of cybersecurity experts was the remote hacking into and subsequent control of a Jeep Cherokee driving 70 mph on a public highway. Preparing for an autonomous future, the many ways by which today’s cars are linked to the internet—and the new opportunities and risks these connections imply—multiply exponentially. “The connected car is changing the automotive industry from inside,” says Yuval Diskin.
Diskin is former head of Israel’s internal security service (Shin Bet) and Chairman of CyMotive Technologies. Five years ago, he and two former Shin Bet colleagues co-founded a cybersecurity consultancy.
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How Israel Became a Cybersecurity Powerhouse
“Cyber is a great business. It’s growing geometrically because there is never a permanent solution, it’s a never-ending business,” said Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister, at Tel-Aviv University’s 7th Annual Cybersecurity Conference. Thomas Bossert, Assistant to the U.S. President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, announced at the event the creation of a US-Israeli bilateral cyber working group that will develop “innovative cyber defenses we can test here and then take back to America.”
Israel has become a cybersecurity powerhouse at the center of an $82 billion industry (not counting spending on internal security staff and processes).
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXVHIfwNK8Y&w=560&h=315]
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Jobs Displaced by AI and Automation
You will find more statistics at Statista
McKinsey Global Institute’s latest report, Jobs lost, jobs gained: Workforce transitions in a time of automation (PDF–5MB), assesses the number and types of jobs that might be created under different scenarios through 2030 and compares that to the jobs that could be lost to automation.
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Intel, Team8 and Illusive Networks Collaborate on Cybersecurity
Intel announced today it has joined the cybersecurity syndicate established by Team8, a unique Tel-Aviv-based startup-creation platform focused on developing new cybersecurity solutions. In addition, Intel announced it will work with one of Team8’s companies, Illusive Networks, to develop a solution to combat Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) by combining hardware and software competencies.
“This is very exciting—it will allow us to work at the hardware level,” says Nadav Zafrir, Team8 CEO.
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