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Tuesday, July 31, 2018

7/31/2018 10:29:00 PM

Google Daydream finally has a Chrome browser for VR

Just browsing


Google’s Daydream VR platform finally has a dedicated Android app for the Google Chrome browser.

The Daydream platform launched back in 2016 and has been the foundation for a host of both mobile-enabled and standalone VR headsets.

Now, anyone using a standalone Daydream headset, like the Lenovo Mirage Solo will be able to install Chrome from the Play Store app. 

Those using a mobile VR product like the Daydream View, however, will need to update their Chrome app on their phone before it appears on the headset for use.

Google Daydream news, features and everything you need to know
The fully-fledged app includes the ability to save bookmarks, navigate using voice search, and even hide your VR browser history in Incognito mode – if that’s something that’s important to you.

Daydreaming

Despite being what some might call the most obvious choice for a VR app on a Google-made headset, it’s taken just over 18 months for Google to bring its browser to the Daydream Play Store.

Current Daydream owners may be aware that they could already access the Chrome browser, but that it required opening Chrome on their smartphone before placing in the headset. The new app should hopefully make browsing the web in VR a slightly more practical experience.




7/31/2018 09:18:00 PM

IBM banks on strong history for success with AU$ 1b government contract

Big Blue's VP and CTO of cloud told ZDNet that Australia is punching above its weight in technological adoption after the federal government announced handing it AU$1 billion to do just that.


The federal government last month announced it had signed a AU$ 1 billion contract with IBM to provide hardware, software, and cloud-based solutions across all of its departments and agencies.

The five-year, whole-of-government contract, which also includes standing up joint innovation programs in quantum computing, cybersecurity, and research, was touted by Canberra as furthering its digital transformation agenda.

Speaking with ZDNet, global VP and CTO of IBM's Cloud Platform Jason McGee said the new contract is an opportunity to take past learnings and put them into practice in the future.

"IBM has been a partner with the Australian government and many customers because we have a long history together. Because we learn from projects that we do together, we are able to take those experiences and take our technologies and move forward with clients," he said.

"I think we will just focus on what we're trying to accomplish next and we have a long history of being a trustworthy partner and really bringing technologies to help them serve the customer."

The contract was awarded by the Digital Transformation Agency (DTA) despite it being in the middle of a project to spread the AU$6.5 billion spent annually on IT by the Australian government across the smaller players in the space.

While the new billion-dollar arrangement is in contrary to that body of work, it also follows a handful of IT-related bungles that have occurred at the hands of Big Blue in Australia.

According to newly minted local MD David La Rose, the agreement is a "very tangible demonstration" of IBM's partnership with the Australian government and its agencies, has been the vendor of choice for many Commonwealth entities for 40-plus years.

One contract IBM held in the past was the delivery of the 2016 Census.

On August 9, 2016, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) experienced a series of denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, suffered a hardware router failure, and balked at a false positive report of data being exfiltrated, which resulted in the Census website being shut down and citizens unable to complete their online submissions.

The ABS called out IBM for failing to adequately address the risk posed to the Census systems it was under contract to provide, and that IBM should have been able to handle the DDoS attack.

In April 2016, the Queensland government was ordered by the Supreme Court of Brisbane to pay IBM Australia's legal fees stemming from the legal proceedings over the state's troubled health payroll system, which cost taxpayers an estimated AU$1.2 billion.

It was said at the time that the cost of the case was potentially as high as AU$3 million.

The state government originally settled with IBM in early 2011 over the debacle, in exchange for IBM fixing the system; however, former premier Campbell Newman announced in December 2014 that the state was taking legal action against the tech giant instead.

IBM also has contracts with a handful of the country's large banks, with Westpac last month announcing it had implemented a new offsite hybrid cloud, built and operated by IBM.

Praising Westpac for its innovation in moving banking workloads to the cloud, McGee said customers in Australia are certainly keeping pace with their global peers, and in a number of cases are actually leading when it comes to cloud adoption.

"Bendigo and Adelaide Bank -- they've been really innovative in adopting some of these newer technologies like containers as a way to drive innovation within their organization," McGee explained.

"While Australia may be small in the grand scheme of things, it kind of punches above its weight in its adoption of these technologies and leverage them as a way to change their businesses."

It is expected all government agencies will have access to the tech under the billion-dollar agreement; however for the agencies that already have extensive money invested with IBM -- the Department of Human Services, the Australian Taxation Office, the Department of Home Affairs, and the Department of Defence -- IBM said the agreement "improves the current arrangements and gives them the autonomy and flexibility to change the profile of their technology over the next five years".



7/31/2018 07:10:00 PM

Seagate Q4 tops estimates, CFO to depart

Seagate said CFO David Morton was stepping down to take on a new role at another company.


Seagate on Monday announced that its CFO David Morton was stepping down to take on a new role at another company. The executive departure was reported alongside Seagate's fourth quarter financial results, which beat market expectations.

The hard-disk drive storage provider reported Q4 net income of $461 million, or $1.57 per share, on revenue of $2.8 billion. Non-GAAP earnings for the quarter were $1.62 a share.

Wall Street was expecting Seagate to report non-GAAP earnings of $1.45 a share on revenue of $2.8 billion. Shares of Seagate were up more than four percent in pre-market trading.

Seagate said Q4 revenue for its hard-disk drive (HDD) portfolio was $2.65 billion, up from $2.2 billion the previous year. The bulk of HDD sales went to OEMs. Revenue from Seagate's enterprise systems, flash, and other category was $183 million.


In his final remarks as Seagate's finance chief, Morton said the company's better-than-expected quarter reflects "solid execution and strong demand for [Seagate's] mass storage products."

"Looking ahead, we are confident that storage infrastructure demand will continue to grow with the Data Age digital transformations being fueled by new technologies, emerging industries and growing businesses," he said.

Morton's last day with Seagate August 3. Kathryn Scolnick will become interim CFO during the search for Morton's permanent replacement.

Seagate noted that Morton's departure "is not based on any disagreement with the company's accounting principles, practices or financial statement disclosures."




7/31/2018 04:16:00 PM

CAT S61 Android smartphone review: Taking the smartphone as a tool to the next level

An advanced thermal imaging camera, a laser distance tool, and an air quality monitor are all tools of the trade for the enterprise. With the Cat S61, these tools are found in an Android smartphone that lets you also do all that a smartphone can in a single rugged tool.


Earlier this year I took a look at the Cat S41 rugged smartphone. It's more advanced big brother, the Cat S61 was announced a few weeks later at MWC and I've spent the last few weeks testing out its three cool tools.

The Cat S61 includes an integrated thermal imaging camera, laser-assisted distance measuring tool, and an indoor air quality monitor all in one device. The Android smartphone offers a stock experience with the latest software and security update while skipping carrier bloatware as it is offered as an unlocked GSM device. It will both turn heads and get the job done.

SPECIFICATIONS

Processor: Qualcomm Snapdragon 630 octa-core 2.2 GHz
Display: 5.2 inches 1920x1080 pixels resolution Gorilla Glass 5
Operating system: Android 8 Oreo (Committed upgrade to P)
RAM: 4GB
Storage: 64GB internal with microSD card slot
Cameras: 16 megapixels with phase detection autofocus. Front 8-megapixel camera. FLIR Lepton lens above the rear camera.
Battery: 4500 mAh with Quick Charge 4.0 fast charging
Water resistance: IP69 and MIL-STD 810G shock and drop resistant, waterproof up to 3 meters for 60 minutes
Wireless connectivity: FM radio, 802.11 b/g/n WiFi, NFC, Bluetooth 5, GPS, Glonass, BeiDou, Galileo
Sensors: Thermal, indoor air quality (humidity and temperature), compass, proximity, accelerometer, gyro, barometer
Dimensions: 163 x 78 x 13 mm and 250 grams

HARDWARE

When I head out into a shipyard, go on a marine vessel to aid with salvage, go on a hike to the mountains, or hit up a local river for fly fishing it is routine to wrap my smartphone in some kind of rugged case. This adds bulk to my phone so that when I compare my wrapped phones to the new Cat S61 there is not much difference in size between them.

While the Cat S61 is a bulky phone, Bullitt Mobile has done a great job making it look and feel great with aluminum edges and raised housing for the FLIR camera, soft touch silicone material on the back for excellent handling, buttons that are easy to find and press, and port covers that stay in place securely. Overall, the phone looks like it means business and the features prove that it does.

On the front, we have the 5.2-inch display with a wide top bezel and substantial side bezels. When you are wearing gloves and operating the phone, this makes sense. There are three hard plastic physical buttons below the display for back, home, and task switcher. The buttons are large enough to easily press with a gloved finger and they have excellent tactile feedback too.

At the bottom, we have a USB-C port for charging and a mono speaker. It's great to finally see the move to USB-C as micro USB cables move out of my collection. The bottom speaker is very loud and if the Cat S61 had a sound meter in it I bet it would likely best the Huawei P20 Pro that has a speaker with a reported 91dB output. A loudspeaker is important when working in the field where you may have hearing protection on and where the ambient environment may be filled with operating machinery.

The power button is found at the top of the right side with ridges to make it easy to find without looking. The two volume buttons are below this with the openings for the air quality monitor just below halfway down the right side.

A large metal door covers the microSD and SIM card slot on the upper left-hand side. Below this is an orange programmable button that has traditionally been assigned as a push-to-talk button. You can customize what the button does with a short press or a long press so I have it set to launch the Google cards and MyFlir camera.

Another small metal cover protects the standard 3.5mm headset jack found on the top next to the raised area where the FLIR camera is located.

Around the back, we have the FLIR camera in the upper left with the 16-megapixel camera below it and a flashlight centered under this camera. Down at the bottom left we have the laser light that is used to measure the distance of objects from 0 to 8 meters away.

The Cat S61 has IP68 and IP69 dust and water resistance so it can handle most environments. It is also rated to handle environments from -25 to 55 degrees Celsius, but don't put it in the freezer or the oven to test this out.

ADVANCED TOOLS

Let's take a bit deeper dive into the three major tools we have on the CAT S61; the thermal imaging camera, the air quality meter, and the laser measuring device.

The CAT S60 also had a thermal imaging camera, but on the S61 we see the temperature range expanded along with higher resolution support. It can help you locate a heat source up to 400 degrees Celsius. There are a number of color palettes you can choose to see the hot or cold spots in different color schemes.

You can also capture a photo, record a video or create a time-lapse with the MyFLIR app. A temperature scale can be shown on the right side so you can check heat and cold ranges in real-time. A high-temperature mode extends the camera sensor range up to the 400 degrees, but it has a bit less accuracy. If you are seeking heat less than 120 degrees Celsius then don't use this high-temperature mode.

The thermal imaging camera cannot see through walls, but there are a ton of practical uses. For example, you can detect heat loss around windows and doors, identify "hot" electronics and circuits, or find leaks in pumps or other devices with cold liquids. The camera does "see" through smoke so you can use it to escape from a fire by plotting a route free from high temperatures.

There is also a YouTube Live option, which can be useful for field workers who are out capturing data and want to feed it back to engineers or technicians for live troubleshooting of various situations.

Sometimes we work in environments that may appear benign but can lead to trouble. The indoor air quality meter measures temperature, humidity, and the level of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in your environment. When you work in a shop, enter a paint locker, or get work done on a construction site there can be some hazardous environments where more ventilation is needed and that is where the S61 can help you out.

VOCs are commonly associated with solvents, paint, glue, and cleaning agents. The sensor in the S61 checks air quality every four seconds and can alert you when an unhealthy level is reached. Keep in mind, this is not designed for checking to see if adequate oxygen is available or whether carbon monoxide is present so know the tool and use it to help you evaluate your workspace.

The laser measuring tool uses the laser and the rear camera together to calculate distances. You use both to first calibrate the S61 and then you can start measuring distances up to 8 meters. The rear camera will attempt to auto capture the laser, but you can also tap on the dot if that isn't working reliably. You can also use it to help calculate areas, which is good for estimating material for a job.

SOFTWARE

The Cat S61 runs Android 8.1 with the June 1, 2018 security update currently installed. Bullitt Mobile has promised to upgrade it to Android P as well so we may expect to see this update before the end of the year.

The experience is very much like stock Android with a Google launcher. There are a few Cat apps preinstalled, such as an app toolbox (storefront), camera, file browser, measure, MyFLIR, and air quality.

The phone also has an underwater mode, which can be activated by triple pressing the power button or selecting the option from within the camera app. This mode locks the touch screen and allows you to capture pictures or videos underwater using the volume keys. This is a great feature I would like to see on all of these phones that people use underwater since water often causes inadvertent screen activation on other phones.

The camera app is very basic with options for underwater mode, panorama, video, and still photos. There are several filter options, HDR toggle, and a few other basic options in the settings.

PRICING AND AVAILABILITY

I haven't found another phone to challenge the Cat S61 directly and it truly stands apart with these advanced field tools. Handheld thermal imaging cameras can be found from $400 to more than $2,000, but the lower priced ones do not have the vast temperature range seen on the Cat S61. Air quality monitors with similar functionality range from $80 to $200. Laser measuring tools can be found from $50 to more than $200. Add the cost of these three tools and the lowest cost for this functionality, not even equivalent to the S61, is $530. Thus, for $1,000 you get a capable Android smartphone and three advanced tools in a single handheld device.

DAILY USAGE EXPERIENCES AND CONCLUSIONS

The Cat S61 smartphone is not designed to compete with the Apple iPhone, OnePlus 6, Galaxy Note 8, or any other typical high end or mid-range smartphone. You should only consider buying the S61 if your company has a need for thermal imaging technology. If you just want a rugged smartphone with no need for thermal imaging, then take a look at the Cat S41 for $450.

The battery easily lasts me a couple of days, the processor has never let me down, phone calls sounded great and connectivity with T-Mobile was solid, the buttons are easy to find and manipulate, and I had a great time testing all of the tools.

I am currently managing a team of surveyors and engineers working in a shipyard and the Cat S61 would be a great tool for them with the thermal imaging camera used for the electrical inspector, the laser measuring tool for the structural and piping inspectors, and the air quality sensor useful to all working in an environment with paint, high humidity, and other potentially hazardous liquids. There is clearly a market for devices like the Cat S61 and the $999.99 price is not a deterrent.



7/31/2018 12:36:00 AM

RHA MA390 Wireless earbuds hands-on: 8-hour battery, assistant button, and reasonable price

RHA Audio makes high-quality headphones and with the removal of the 3.5mm headphone jack, wireless is the solution. For $69.95, the MA390 Wireless is an excellent affordable option with a three-year warranty and a minimal level of water resistance.

RHA MA390 Wireless earbuds
Add captionRHA MA390 Wireless earbuds

Phone manufacturers used to ship wired earbuds in the box, but the removal of the headphone jack has resulted in some including USB-C or Lightning headphones instead. These are generally not very good quality and since we use our phones for music and podcasts it is worth paying a bit for a better set of headphones.

Bluetooth headphones work with your smartphone whether you have a 3.5mm headphone jack or not. The sound quality usually suffers a bit, but they have improved significantly over the years and I have been enjoying wireless audio without music skipping or hearing much difference in music quality.

I've spent a couple of weeks commuting and working with the RHA MA390 Wireless earbuds draped over my neck and have been quite satisfied. I actually had to look at the price a couple of times during my review to confirm they were truly only $69.95.

RETAIL PACKAGE AND EARPHONE FIT

The RHA MA390 retail package includes 12 total silicone ear tips, four each for small, medium, and large ear canals. With this many in the package, you can lose a few and still enjoy the headphones.

There is also a short USB-A to USB-C cable to charge up the headphones and I was ecstatic to see the move to USB-C for charging. So many other headphones and accessories still use micro USB while most phones have since moved to USB-C so it is wonderful to see a reasonably priced headphone package support USB-C.

A small draw-string mesh carrying pouch is included so you can safely carry the headset around in your gear bag when not in use.

The housing for each earbud is constructed of aluminum with RHA's Aerophonic design and a custom model 130.8 driver. The aluminum material is 6063 for durability and comfort.

Specifications of the RHA MA390 include:

  1. Codecs: AAC, aptX, SBC
  2. Frequency range: 16-22,000 Hz
  3. Wireless: Bluetooth 4.1
  4. Water resistance: IPX4 rating
  5. Battery life: 8 hours
  6. Weight: 24 grams
  7. Warranty: 3 years


HARDWARE AND DESIGN

The MA390 is an over-the-neck design with a flexible cable connecting two large ends that house the battery and wireless radio. The earbuds are at the end of a cable, about nine inches long, coming out of each end. The cables do not retract, but there is a magnet between the two earbuds so they connect when you are not wearing them and keep things from tangling up. This is one of my favorite features of RHA headphones and lets you wear them throughout the day in comfort.


The right cable has a universal three-button remote to control playback and also initiate voice assistants. Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, Cortana, and Siri are all compatible with the center activation button. Where the flexible thicker cable transitions into the earbud cable, there is a cylindrical part that houses the power button, indicator light, and USB-C port for charging. There is nothing found in the left side cylinder or along the earbud cable, making it easy to know which side is the right side when you place the headphones around your neck.

DAILY USAGE EXPERIENCES

While I personally did not run with these earbuds, they would work nicely on the elliptical or another gym machine where you are not bouncing around for the entire exercise. The IPX4 rating means they are sweatproof and have limited water resistance. I used them during my commute and while working at my desk for my evaluation period.

One of the first things I noticed about the MA390 was the light weight, only 24 grams, so you won't even know you are wearing them during the day. I never once had them slip out of my ears using the silicone tips. The cable tends to rest against my cheeks when I turn my head, but the headphones are lightweight so I quickly great accustomed to this fit. Each person has a different shaped head so your experience may vary too.

The real-world battery life matches closely to the advertised 8 hours. The MA390 Wireless is very comfortable and I often listened for two to three hours at a time without any discomfort.

Volume and sound clarity were great on all of the various phones I tested, including the Apple iPhone X, Samsung Galaxy Note 8, HTC U12+, OnePlus 6, and Huawei P20 Pro.

The MA390 headset is available for $69.95 online, at the Apple Store, and at other retail locations. RHA stands behind their well-made products with a unique three (3) year warranty so you can trust these headphones will not let you down.



Monday, July 30, 2018

7/30/2018 10:32:00 PM

Here's a sneak preview of what the Magic Leap One interface looks like

Take a peek into the augmented reality

 
The Magic Leap One has been a long time coming, a headset that transports you into a magical augmented reality world, but a proper release for the gadget is now edging closer. We also now have some official shots of the interface from Magic Leap itself.

There's a new developer guide to encourage app makers to start writing code for the upcoming device, and it shows off some of the menus and navigation screens. They only reveal so much, but it looks like the Magic Leap One will be easy to get around, with some crisp-looking UI on show in these screenshots.

The screens show an app menu, a social screen for connecting with friends, a more conventional text menu, a voice recognition screen, and an alien-blasting game. For navigating menus more easily, the real world fades out of focus.






What we also get from these pictures is a look at a possible companion mobile app for the Magic Leap One, and the option to cast what's happening on your headset to another connected screen – so your friends can watch your AR adventures too, maybe.

These images don't appear to have been captured directly from a Magic Leap One headset, so it's possible that the finished version of the device's Lumin OS is going to have differences to what we see here. However, it gives us (and developers) a good idea of what the AR goggles might actually be like to use.

Magic Leap has been slowly revealing more and more about its hardware as the launch date approaches. The company has promised that a Creators Edition aimed at developers will be out before the end of the year, with pricing still to be determined.




7/30/2018 09:33:00 PM

Google Cloud Next postmortem: The enterprise journey continues

Google is serious about convincing you that it's an enterprise technology company. Beyond the hiring of customer-facing engineers, it is upgrading its tooling and veering higher up the food chain. But this journey has just begun.

Google Cloud
Google Cloud Next postmortem: The enterprise journey continues
As the player that rounds out the top three global cloud platform providers, it is hard to ignore the sheer scale of resources that Google is investing to plant its beachhead in a market where the top two have already carved huge presence. It still trails distantly -- somewhere between $1 and $2 billion per quarter, which is a fraction of what AWS and Azure pull in.

The wild card, however, is that the game is hardly over, as there remains 80 - 90 percent of enterprise workloads running on premises that are still up for grabs.

It is playing the long game to change your impression of just being a technology company that in the past has primarily targeted developers. So, Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene reiterated the "enterprise" message this week at the annual NEXT conference that has just wrapped up in San Francisco. It points to growing traction among enterprises -- although digital upstarts like online gaming still steal the headlines. A key pillar of that message is its security and networking capabilities that have been singled out by some analyst firms.

But for now, Google looks more like a different type of "enterprise company" where customer-facing engineers outnumber salespeople. Maybe that's a blessing in disguise?

The blessing and curse of Google's reputation for advanced technology and AI is that implies a need for enterprises to transform if they are to truly benefit. Case in point? Recall our case study of Optiva, a telco billing solutions provider that is staking its turnaround on the Google Cloud Spanner globally distributed transaction database. Moving from Oracle, it had to refactor the code that had been sitting in database stored procedures back into the application because of Spanner's lighter weight architecture, and it had to change the way it laid out data. But in all fairness, if you embrace cloud-native platforms like Amazon Aurora or office suites like Microsoft 365, your organization will also have to embrace change.

But a subtle pivot could be found with Google Cloud's initial foray into what it terms "solutions." That's Google-speak, not for competing in the applications market or selling direct to enterprise customers, but for leveraging its AI to add smarts to partner applications. So, the first of the solutions to roll out is Contact Center AI which provides intelligence to hybrid chatbot/human call center processes by using natural conversation to streamline the "phone tree" process and then prompt live representatives with pertinent information -- all based on machine learning. Google has signed up a mix of call center and systems integrators as partners for its first solution venture. There will be more. On the show floor, we saw prototypes for a handful of other areas like recommendations systems that may or may not make the cut.

Part of the challenge of broadening out the enterprise focus is expanding the addressable audience. For instance, cloud rivals Amazon and Microsoft, and other analytics tool providers, Google is aiming to expand the audience for AI beyond data scientists. With the latest round of announcements, it still takes a different approach from Amazon and Microsoft in the breadth of its services for curated machine learning. But it has expanded Cloud AutoML from machine vision to natural language text and language translation services, leveraging the APIs that it already offers to developers.

An interesting announcement was the unveiling of BigQuery ML. It allows you to run machine learning routines (for now, only linear regression and binary logistic regression models are supported) inside BigQuery without having to move data.

But the messaging around BigQuery ML was a bit unclear. Yes, you can now run machine learning from a SQL program. That made it sound like any SQL developer could now invoke machine learning, but in reality, BigQuery ML is more of a subroutine facility that lets you insert machine learning models into your SQL code. So, this is not machine learning for the SQL crowd -- you'll still need to be a data scientist to take advantage of BigQuery ML. But what would be cool is if Google could marry AutoML with BigQuery ML -- now that would really open things up for the SQL folks.

Another part of Google's enterprise message is that it has made the biggest open source commitment of all the cloud players. That reflects the reality that many enterprises are embracing open-source first strategies where viable open source alternatives exist. Developers have voted in mass for open source, as it makes their skills far more portable.

Google's flouting of its open source cred is a bit ironic as the conversion is still recent -- it used to publish research papers, leaving it to others to conduct clean room development for open source. For instance, the basic building blocks of Hadoop may have been conceived at Google, but it took Yahoo, Facebook and others to perform the heavy lift to get them into the Apache community. But with Kubernetes and TensorFlow, both of which have become de facto standards, Google has sent unmistakable signals that it is now all in on the open source.

But as to being the most open source-friendly cloud? Well, that would get some strong pushback from Microsoft, especially in the wake of its GitHub acquisition.

Part of the process to becoming enterprise-grade is unifying and simplifying your tools, so devs and ops don't have to pluck raw standalone tools and constantly shift screens. The unveiling of Google Cloud Platform shows that Google is beginning the journey to integrate, unify, or in some cases, converge its tooling to a single pane of glass. The same goes for Google Kubernetes Engine, where the pane of glass can now be extended to managing Kubernetes environments on premises as well as the Google Cloud.

On the database side, Google is part way there in making the administration more refined. BigQuery recently introduced a new web UI to simplify creating and managing the database, although there are some operations like ingest where the flakiness of the stateless browser interface would not make advisable. Cloud Spanner has introduced new Avro import and export capabilities, but it still lacks the automated schema migration tool that would make standing up a new Spanner instance more seamless (Amazon and Microsoft already have such tools).

As we said, this is a journey.



7/30/2018 07:22:00 PM

How Microsoft buries key numbers in its financial reports (and how to dig them out)

In its quarterly financial reports, Microsoft goes out of its way to avoid reporting detailed results for its Surface division. Fortunately, there are enough indirect results to figure out those numbers. Here's how to do the math for yourself.

How Microsoft buries key numbers

A few days ago I published a post analyzing the growth in revenue for Microsoft's Surface division: "Surface by the numbers: How Microsoft reinvented the PC."

To get those numbers, I went through a big (virtual) stack of official SEC filings and had to do a fair amount of math. As I noted in the original post, "[The] FY2015 annual report was the one and only time Microsoft has disclosed its annual Surface revenue instead of hiding it in a series of arithmetic problems over the course of four quarterly reports."

In the comments of that post, several readers insinuated that I was making those numbers up. Well, no.

Microsoft doesn't directly report revenue for each of its many product lines. So, even though Surface has become a fairly large chunk of its business, it doesn't get its own line in quarterly (10-Q) and annual (10-K) reports to the SEC.

Instead, the company reports actual revenues and gross income by segment. The More Personal Computing segment includes Windows, Devices, Gaming, and Search advertising. The Devices division, in turn, consists of "Microsoft Surface, PC accessories, and other intelligent devices" (that last group includes HoloLens, for example).


In the body of each quarterly report, the company usually reports Surface revenue indirectly, highlighting the increase (or decrease) in revenue from the corresponding previous period and then presenting that as a percentage.

As I noted in a reply to one comment that essentially accused me of fabricating the numbers:

You're welcome to go through all those 10-Qs and 10-Ks and do the math. As I said in the story, Microsoft does disclose the numbers, but they do it as a series of arithmetic problems.

For example: For FY2016 compared with FY2015: "Surface revenue increased $486 million or 13%..." That's a fairly easy math problem to solve. $486 million is 13% of X. X is total revenue for the year before. This year's revenue is X+486. You can do that for almost every period. And in the periods that aren't available, you can calculate using subtraction.

I should note that Microsoft does a similar financial dance for other products, most notably Azure, which it reports as part of a broader "commercial cloud revenue" category, making it impossible to break out those numbers.

Even Apple, which is laudably transparent in reporting unit sales and revenue for its major product segments like iPhone and Mac, doesn't break out each category individually, so analysts have to do similar digging to try to figure how much, say, iPhone X contributed to total revenue for a given quarter.

Doing the financials this way makes sense for the folks in charge of a company's messaging. It's less likely that analysts and the financial press will misinterpret normal quarterly variations in revenue caused by seasonality and product life cycles. But any analyst who wants to tease out those numbers for Surface can do so fairly easily with some simple arithmetic.

That's what this post is about.

SOURCE DOCUMENTS

The index of official Microsoft financial reports is here: Microsoft SEC Filings.

Microsoft reports its results using a fiscal year that ends on June 30. You can view any of the reports in HTML, PDF, Word DOC, or XLS format. These are the links for the PDF files for the first three quarters of the just-ended Fiscal Year 2018:

The actual filing date is usually a few weeks after the reporting period.

The final report for the full fiscal year, including Q4 results, isn't available yet, but the information we need is in the materials that accompanied the earnings call.

If you've got those reports handy, follow along as we do some math. (Sorry, I don't have a whiteboard available.)

Q1 FY2018 (30-SEP-2017)
Under the heading "Segment Results of Operations," on page 41, we find this sentence:

"Surface revenue increased $113 million or 12%, driven by sales of the new Surface Laptop."

That's an easy one to solve: $113 million is 12 percent of $942 million, so Q1 2018 Surface revenue is $942 million plus $113 million, or $1,055 million.

We now have the first row of the table.

Quarter20172018
Q19421,055

Q2 FY2018 (31-DEC-2017)

Under the heading "Reportable Segments, Three Months Ended December 31, 2017, Compared with Three Months Ended December 31, 2016," this sentence appears on page 45:

"Surface revenue increased 1%, driven by a higher mix of premium devices sold, offset in part by a decrease in volume of devices."

Hmmm. That doesn't include a number, so we can't do a calculation. Fortunately, the next page, which breaks down the numbers by segment for the six months ended December 31, 2017, has the information we are looking for:

"Surface revenue increased $126 million or 6%, driven by a higher mix of premium devices sold, offset in part by a decrease in volume of devices sold."

Let's do the math on that one: $126 million is 6 percent of exactly $2.1 billion, so that's the revenue for the first six months of FY2017. Adding the $126 million to $2.1 billion results in $2.326 billion. If we subtract the Q1 numbers from the previous step, we end up with the Q2 row for our table.

Quarter20172018
Q19421,055
Q21,1581,271
Q3 FY2018 (31-Mar-2018)

Oh, good. This report includes a number for the period in question. On page 44, under the heading "Reportable Segments, Three Months Ended March 31, 2018, Compared with Three Months Ended March 31, 2017," this sentence appears:

"Surface revenue increased $263 million or 32% against a prior year comparable impacted by product end-of-life-cycle dynamics."

Once again we do some simple division: $263 million divided by 32 percent equals $822 million, which was the (fairly weak) revenue from Q3 of FY2017. Add $263 million to get the corresponding FY2018 number, $1.085 billion, and our table is almost complete.

Well, almost complete. We don't know how these numbers for each quarter are rounded, and that can have a small but measurable difference in the totals. When working with a fairly large percentage, as in this quarter, the variance is going to be small. But as I noted for the previous quarters, the variation could be much larger.

For example, in Q2 the report noted an increase of $126 million, which is 6 percent of $2.1 billion. But that 6 percent is rounded off for the purposes of the report; the underlying number could actually be 5.51 percent or 6.49 percent, which means that our value from the corresponding period in 2017 is between $2.287 billion and $1.941 billion. That's a pretty wide swing.

Fortunately, the Q3 report includes numbers for the nine months to date: "Surface revenue increased $389 million or 13% against a prior year comparable impacted by product end-of-life-cycle dynamics."

Doing the math there indicates that rounding errors resulted in a year-to-date total that's low by $70 million; to compensate, we can add $35 million to each of the first two quarters. Here's the result.

Quarter20172018
Q19771,090
Q21,1931,306
Q38221,085
Q4 FY2018 (30-JUN-2018)

As I mentioned in the introduction, I had to use the text from the earnings call press release (an official document, filed under the same SEC regulations as the more formal 10-Q and 10-K reports). It includes everything we need to do the necessary arithmetic:

"Surface revenue increased $237 million or 25%, driven by strong performance of the latest editions of Surface against a low prior year comparable."

This calculation is particularly easy: $237 million is one-quarter of $948 million, which gives us $1.185 billion in revenue for the final quarter of 2018 and allows us to finish filling in our table.

Quarter20172018
Q19771,090
Q21,1931,306
Q38221,085
Q49481,185
Total3,9404,666
Those numbers are, of course, slightly uncertain and could be off by a few million dollars in either direction. Maybe when the 2018 10-K comes out in a few days we'll see an exact number.

But I'm not holding my breath.



7/30/2018 12:35:00 AM

Will technology save the world?

Everything’s on fire, but the tech is giving us reasons for optimism


It’s hard to be optimistic sometimes, we know. Politics is a mess, the environment’s in trouble and half the world appears to be either melting or actually on fire. But there are reasons to be cheerful because technology is working to defeat each and every horseman of the apocalypse. Here’s how technology will save the world…

Tech vs death

Medically speaking, this is the best time in human history: our life expectancy is massively longer than our ancestors’, and the bulk of that change has happened in the last four generations: life expectancy in much of the world has doubled since 1900.

Technology hasn’t quite got rid of death, but it’s helping eradicate many killer conditions
Technology continues to find new ways to help us live longer, better lives. Gene editing with molecular 'scissors' has the potential to remove inherited diseases and battle cancers; artificial pancreases may transform the lives of people with diabetes, and 'big data' analysis may help unlock the cures for conditions that currently ruin or end many people’s lives.

We’re starting to see wearable devices save people’s lives by warning them of conditions they didn’t know they had, while platforms such as Apple’s ResearchKit could provide researchers with unprecedented amounts of information on all kinds of conditions. 

Tech vs pestilence

Pestilence is a fatal, epidemic disease such as bubonic plague, aka The Black Death. That one may not be much of a worry these days, but Ebola, HIV and bird flu show that we shouldn’t get too complacent. The specter of a natural or man-made plague killing millions is something many experts are taking very seriously.

The World Economic Forum describes four ways in which technology can help fight future epidemics: messaging, to warn people of hazards and how to avoid contracting any virus; delivering training to health workers in the field; enabling health workers, agencies and other crucial interests to monitor the spread of disease; and real-time monitoring to see how a virus is spreading and predict where it’s going. 

Tech vs famine
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The western diet’s love of meat is incredibly bad for both the environment and our long-term food security – and it’s hardly great news for the animals that provide it. Enter lab-grown meat, which has gone from the stuff of speculative fiction to something you'll soon be able to buy in the shops, while and in the meantime, protein-based meat-free burgers are finally good enough to fool even the pickiest carnivore.

The truth is that we already make more than enough food to provide for every single person on the planet, but it isn’t evenly distributed. As Oxfam reports, 65% of the world's hungry live in only seven countries: India, China, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan and Ethiopia.

The world already produces enough food for everyone, but it isn’t evenly distributed
Technology can help. Establishing supply chains that keep food fresh can make a massive difference, especially in warm countries where food spoils quickly, and social networks such as the WeFarm platform enable better communication between remote farmers. As CNN reports, technology can also help predict drought: a combination of satellite data and mobile phone information can identify vulnerable areas and enable action before there’s a problem, not afterward. 

Tech vs war

Tech may have enabled world leaders to call each other names on Twitter, but it’s also helped to prevent conflicts around the world. In Kenya, the Una Hakika ('Are You Sure?') project uses the web and SMS tools to counter misinformation and rumors that previously caused terrible violence; similar schemes have prevented conflict in other countries such as Burundi.

Such schemes are impressive, but unfortunately, we’ve got thousands of years of history demonstrating that while technology can have positive effects, it never stops the war. Quite the reverse: in addition to creating ever-smarter ways to turn people into pink mist, our highly industrialized and wasteful world has contributed to devastating climate change that’s amplifying the already terrible effects of wars. 

According to the UN, world hunger is once more on the rise due to the combination of those two factors: if the climate doesn’t destroy food supplies, sometimes warring people do. Starvation is often used as a weapon of war, with combatants damaging or destroying water systems, farms, livestock and markets. 

Tech can be used to prevent real-world violence by countering online misinformation
As Colin Kelley of Columbia University in New York told New Scientist: “Climate-related shocks, especially droughts, exacerbate existing food and water insecurity, and can even contribute to social unrest when thresholds of resilience are crossed… In turn, conflict undermines resilience and dramatically reduces access to food and water, with devastating consequences for nutrition and health.” 

It’s said that the next world war won’t be fought over oil, but water. It’s been argued that drought was a key driver of the revolution in Syria, and as climate change really kicks in it could render countries such as Sudan uninhabitable. The mass migration of desperate people from affected countries is already having a massive impact on the countries they travel to and through, especially in Europe.

Can tech really save the world?

Technology won’t stop climate change, but it can help us take our foot off the accelerator
Yes, the Arctic Circle is on fire, the US President is saber-rattling on social media and the world has many evils, but this really is the greatest time to be alive in all of human history. The challenge for technology, and for us, is to keep moving in that same positive direction.

Our options for halting or reversing climate change are limited, but by embracing smarter, greener technologies such as clean energy and transport and sustainable food we can stop pressing quite so hard on the accelerator. That should help to keep the horsemen of the apocalypse at bay.

Antonio Guterres is the UN Secretary-General, and he’s optimistic. While “there are reasons to be alarmed” about climate change, he believes that technology will find a way, stating: “I am very confident that this battle will be won.”