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Artificial Intelligence Startup “Silk Labs” Acquired By Apple

Apple has just bought yet another company, whose name is Silk Labs. It is a startup company specialized in artificial intelligence. According to information emerged on several tech news portals, this small company is able to make AI software light enough to integrate into consumer equipment.

The artificial intelligence is already a significant part of many products, including smartphones. Almost every tech company out there is struggling to develop better AI systems for their purposes so that Apple couldn’t keep away from this race.

While the Cupertino-based company is already working on its own artificial intelligence systems, now they decided to buy Silk Labs, a small startup specialized in producing software and hardware products based on artificial intelligence.

Apple Acquired “Silk Labs” Startup To Reinforce Its Artificial Intelligence Department

Founded in 2015 by three former Mozilla employees (Chris Gal, Jones, and Michael Vines), Silk Labs is a small startup with only 12 employees. The company explains that it “aims to bring visual and audio intelligence to connected products.” Silk Labs is primarily working on image and sound analyzing software based on AI, which has the particularity of working directly on a product, without an Internet connection.

Silk Labs has developed several scenarios in which its services can be useful. To give you an idea, the company has devised an intercom system that can identify the person ringing the doorbell (if the person is already pre-identified, of course), or automatically disable/activate an alarm based on the face the AI system detected.

As always, the Cupertino-based tech giant firm did not wish to comment on the reasons for this new acquisition. The same applies to the amount Apple paid for this acquisition, both companies keeping that information secret. But given the size of the start-up, the price of this purchase would not be extremely high.

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Crypto Markets News

Bitcoin (BTC) Futures Contracts Postponed By Bakkt Until January 24th, 2019

Bakkt postponed the Bitcoin (BTC) futures contracts announced by the company for December 12th to January 24th, 2019, as reported by the US brokerage Intercontinental Exchange, also known as ICE. The company, an alliance between Microsoft, Starbucks and the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), said through its CEO that over the past few months they have worked on their product, which has resulted in “critical new features to support our offer, so I wanted to provide an update on what is in flight.

“Given the volume of interest in Bakkt and the work required to put all the parts in place, we will now have our sights set on January 24th, 2019, for our launch to ensure that our participants are ready to trade on Day 1. As is often the case with product launches, there are new processes, risks and mitigating factors to test and retest, and in the case of cryptocurrency, a new asset class to which these resources apply,
” said Kelly Loeffler, Bakkt CEO.

Among the announcements made by the company, it can also be mentioned that it is considering adding new contracts linked to other cryptocurrencies, although for that they will wait for the evolution of the crypto market and the opinion of their customers. In addition to that, they would offer services related to cryptos that will also include insurance for the cold storage of Bitcoin (BTC).

Bitcoin (BTC) Futures Contracts Postponed By Bakkt Until January 24th, 2019

For its part, ICE said in its statement that “will list the new daily Bitcoin (BTC) futures contract for negotiation on Thursday, January, 24th, 2019, as a subject to approval by the regulator.” In this regard, the brokerage firm explained that the contracts would be 1 BTC in exchange for US dollars.

On August 7th, news portal announced that the ICE Bitcoin (BTC) futures contracts, through Bakkt, would be the first such instruments settled in BTC in the United States and that they will be delivered to the conventional asset market. That makes a difference to the other Bitcoin (BTC) products offered by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) and the Chicago Board Options Exchange (Cboe), which liquidate BTC futures in cash.

At this point, it is important to mention that the regulatory body related to these contracts is the United States Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). In October of this year, they announced that, on December 12th, the trading of these Bitcoin (BTC) futures contracts would begin with a daily monetary exchange after the close of the market.

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Markets

SEO Tips December 2018: Increase the Traffic for Your Website with These Tricks

Every person wants its company to be successful, and for that, you need to increase traffic to your website. It might seem easy, but it’s very hard, actually. There are about 2 billion websites out there and they all want the same things: views. Most of them don’t get the attention they want, so it’s quite easy to find a website that’s failing.

There is some stuff you can do to get more traffic, and the best one is to work on the SEO of your business. It’s hard to understand and use. We’ve written this article to help you with this matter.

Make a list with the services of a professional agency

It’s not all easy peasy lemon squeeze when it comes to handling SEO. It’s a difficult thing for both a team or a single person, especially if they don’t have the necessary experience. And at your house is very difficult to handle your SEO, so make sure you have experienced people on your team. Or you can hire a professional agency. This kind of agency can give you a lot of different services and can handle your SEO – all from one place. Everything should be done perfectly, and they can help you with that. And the price is not that high.

Solid backlinks should be your thing

We all know what backlinks are, and how they represent the most important thing when it comes to search engine optimization. They’re also called inbound links, and they make the way to one other website. It’s a bit hard to get traffic if you don’t have backlinks from trusted sources. Social media can help, but not that much, not as much as you’d need to make your website popular.

However, you need to keep in mind that not all the backlinks are good. Some might even hurt your rank when it comes to Google. The link has to come from a reliable source to a relevant site.

Research keywords

SEO is all about researching keywords. You need to know what kind of keywords people search on Google and then figure out a way to make your site appear first on Google when people look for specific terms. But you shouldn’t only look at those keywords which are searched the most, but longer keywords can also be successful.

You might also want to keep a database. This way, you’ll always have an idea of what the keywords should be and how they should be included. You’ll also find that some keywords are not worth the time. If you choose not to do keyword research, then you won’t know what kind of terms you should include on your website to get the wanted audience and, of course, the traffic.

Always monitor your SEO

SEO is not something you do now and then forget about it. You need to check your SEO from time to time, to see what the traffic is and how the effort you put in your website is showing. It’s never a done deal when it comes to SEO. You never know what could happen, so you need to monitor it from time to time.

Keep track of all the traffic and how it’s changing from one week to another and see how the keywords work in time. In case they don’t, you need to change them, or even remove them to add some new ones. You should also keep an eye on the backlinks to see if they’re still in trending and if you’re going in the right direction. There are many tools online which can help you in this matter.

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Markets Tech

IBM Acquired Red Hat For $34 Billion To Strengthen Its Position In Hybrid Cloud Sector

IBM has just made the most significant purchase in its history as the renowned technology company acquired Red Hat, the famous open source company, for $34 billion, in an attempt to diversify its hardware and consulting businesses with products and services that generate higher profitability.

That is also the third most significant acquisition in the United States in the area of technology. IBM announced the news through a press release while Red Hat informed about the purchase through its Twitter account.

IBM currently has a market capitalization of $114 billion and will pay $190 in cash for each share of Red Hat, that is, 62% above the closing price of the value of the shares of the free software company last Friday.

“Joining forces with IBM will give us a greater level of scale, resources, and capabilities to accelerate the impact of open source as the foundation for digital transformation and bring Red Hat to an even wider audience while preserving our unique culture and an unwavering commitment to open source innovation,” said Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat CEO.

IBM Acquired Red Hat For $34 Billion, But Red Hat Would Remain the Same Open Source Company

Red Hat will maintain its independence and operate as a distinct unit within the IBM Hybrid Cloud team. A hybrid cloud is an integrated service that uses both in-house and third-party clouds to solve different functions within an organization.

“IBM will become the world’s first provider for hybrid clouds, providing companies with the only open cloud solution that will unlock the full value of the cloud for their business,” said Ginni Rometty, the IBM CEO, who also believes that the Red Hat acquisition will change the technology and cloud landscape.

IBM’s purchase of Red Hat means that the company would finally be able to compete with other tech businesses that offer cloud services, such as Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft. Both IBM and Red Hat expect to close the transaction during the second half of 2019.

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Markets Tech

Google Will Charge Android Smartphone Manufacturers For Pre-Installing Google Play Store

The European Commission fined Google last July and forced it to pay a total of 4,34 billion Euros for its dominant position in the market for its Android mobile operating system, as they forced smartphones manufacturers to include apps such as Chrome or Google Search. Also, according to the European Commission, the giant Internet company even paid some large mobile phones manufacturers to add these apps as default to their handsets. Now, Google is reportedly charging mobile manufacturers for Google Play Store.

Google is going to start charging a fee to smartphone manufacturers for using Google Play Store

Additionally, the European Commission gave Google 90 days to stop forcing manufacturers to include Google Chrome and Google Search on their mobile phones as mandatory for implementing the Google Play Store. The company also prevented the creation of Android forks, which the company argued would not be as stable as the original versions.

Now, as the period granted by EU ended, Google announced changes to comply with the European Commission’s requirements. The most significant difference is that the giant Internet company will now charge a fee to Android smartphones manufacturers for adding the Google Play Store as a default app.

Google’s decision would come in force on October 29th, across the European Economic Area, which affects the 28 EU members, plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Norway. Thus, the prices of smartphones might surge across the EU.

The European Commission paved the way to third-party pre-installed Internet browsers, search engines, and other apps

Thus, manufacturers such as Samsung or Huawei will have to pay for pre-installing the Google Play Store on devices sold across the European Union. In return, these smartphone manufacturers will not have to add Google Search or Google Chrome, although they will be able to do it for free if they want.

However, the European Commission paved the way to third-party pre-installed apps, allowing companies to deal with other Android developers for adding other Internet browsers and search engines than Google’s ones. For example, they could install browsers such as Microsoft Edge, Opera or Firefox, and they could even create their own Android forks with a more significant presence of apps developed by Microsoft, for example.

The smartphones manufacturers can now opt for other search engines, as well, such as Bing or DuckDuckGo. Until now, that was impossible because of the strong restrictions Google implemented for its Android OS.

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