Micron’s latest enterprise SSD, the 9300 Pro, is now available for sale in Germany, at a price lower than what might be expected.
The 15.36TB drive, which is a smidgen smaller in capacity than the largest hard disk drive currently on the market (a 16TB Toshiba HDD model), costs “only” €2.474,78 plus sales tax or around $2,770 (about £2,140).
While that is far more expensive than smaller capacity SSDs (Silicon Power’s 1TB SSD retails for under $95 at Amazon), it is less than half the average price of competing enterprise SSDs like the Seagate Nytro 3330, the Western Digital Ultrastar DC SS530, the Toshiba PM5-R or the Samsung SSD PM1633a.
Losing multiple terabytes of data can be life changing - check our list of the best cloud storage services
And just for the comparison, a 14TB hard disk drive, the MG07 from Toshiba, retails for around $440, about a sixth of the price, which gives you an idea of the price gulf between the two. If you are looking for something bigger, then the Samsung SSD PM1643 is probably your only bet at €7294.22 excluding VAT.
Bear in mind that these are 2.5-inch models which are far smaller than 3.5-inch hard disk drives. They also connect to the host computer using a special connector called SAS (Serial Attached Small Computer System Interface). The Micron 9300 Pro connects via the U.2 PCIe (NVMe), offering read speeds of up to 3.5GBps.
For the ultimate data hoarder, there’s the Nimbusdata Exadrive which boasts a capacity of 100TB albeit in a 3.5-inch form factor.
Driven by competition, innovation, and the need to capture new markets, businesses have bought into the idea of improving efficiency across their service-lines through digital transformation.
However, the aspirations and expectations of greater efficiency, better data management, and a sense of moving their business into the new age of modernised solutions have met with varying levels of success. In fact, in many cases, the results were inefficiencies and ultimately, failure.
Organisations face multiple trials on their journey towards digital transformation. It is therefore no surprise that 84% of companies fail in their attempt to transition to a more digital operating model. Even at the top of the market, the challenge is real: According to integrated marketing expert Michael Gale, only one in eight of the Forbes 2000 Global companies get digital transformation right.
With potentially millions of pounds staked on the idea of modernising business operations and opening new revenue streams through digital transformation, the important test becomes how organisations ensure they have adequately scrutinised and optimised solutions to counter these challenges.
In other words, how can companies learn from past industry failures, and help guarantee their organisation achieves its digital potential?
Getting your employees on board
Firstly, an early stage and extensive buy-in initiative targeted at employees is crucial. This is all about the democratisation of digital transformation within an organisation, to achieve operational excellence.
Of course, the true purpose of digital transformation is not just measured in internal efficiencies. Serving customers is the central goal for all successful transformation initiatives, and the best way to know what customers want is to understand the touchpoints they have with a business - the customer journey.
An organisation's employees are often best placed to know the operational requirements needed to understand and improve the customer journey. Ensuring employees accept the rationale behind digital transformation in turn means they can bring the same knowledge and skills to bear on improving the internal processes which impact on customer touch points.
Businesses that are better able to make clear to their workforce that instituting the proposed changes will bring benefit to all, are on track to achieve their set goals. The advantage of this would be a higher adoption rate across organisations, yielding the initial business and IT outcomes as planned.
Working with employees from the inception of management’s plans to embark on digital transformation and educating them on the proposed changes reduces the possibility of distortion or compromise further along the process. Capturing the opinions of employees along the way allows businesses to better understand their motivations or frustrations, offering direct insights into how these changes are likely to impact their productivity. In addition, employee buy-in means greater expertise available to pinpoint deliverable phases within the change project itself, leading to smooth project delivery on time and on budget.
Image Credit: Shutterstock
Benefits of digital transformation
One key outcome of digital transformation is to make teams or departments more accessible to one another. Effective streamlining of company activity in this way helps remove redundant steps or process distortions that cause frustration. It also typically ensures company methods and tools are made available to all, and correctly maintained across the entire service line. Standardisation of procedures at this high level works to cement the integrity of the business, ensuring the safety of all data, processes and protection of sensitive company tools.
Organisations worried about delays in the pace of change will need to analyse and define their set goals better. A Wipro survey on digital transformation established that only 4% of respondents realised half of their digital investment in under one year . An alarming number, but nonetheless an opportunity for proactive organisations.
By creating an evidence-based trail to identify the gaps between current and future process conditions, and recommending remedies to close these gaps, organisations can create not only a psychological safety net for employees, but also a physical paper trail of employee feedback, opinions and survey responses. This assumes there will be process failures and installs working solutions to prevent these failures from delaying the transformation.
Integration woes often result from a failure to develop and implement digital transformation the right way. A piecemeal approach to implementation of new technologies, rather than building them into a cohesive platform, significantly forestalls transformation progress. Technologies that make up the entirety of digital transformation cannot be seen as individual pieces to implement, as their value is lost through a lack of cohesion throughout the various stages of process transformation. Therefore, building in practices that support process transparency and bi-directional communication, are key to the success of digital transformation.
There are other benefits, too. Inclusivity for the entire workforce is a key objective of digital transformation and should not be seen as an isolated outcome, solely for the benefit of a select management group within the business. Rather, the entire employee group needs to be considered, allowing for success to be measured from the bottom up; not the other way round. Likewise with employees being considered, corporations are able to avoid shortcomings resulting from the confusion around workload ownership, as processes are carried out consistently and correctly regardless of who is involved.
Internal consideration
Ultimately, companies undergoing digital transformation should always begin with an internal consideration first. This means placing a premium on dialogue around cultural change; making processes more efficient; and empowering employees to make autonomous decisions.
Only when organisations deliver on digital transformation by engaging their employees are they best placed to achieve a greater return on investment.
Samsung is confident of a turnaround in the second half of 2019 after, as expected, it posted a 60 per cent drop in operating profit for the first quarter.
The company had warned investors earlier in the month that results would miss market expectations and has now confirmed profits fell to 6.2 trillion Won (£4.2bn) for the quarter, with revenue falling by 13.5 per cent to 52.4 trillion Won (£34tn).
The decline has been attributed to slowing smartphone sales, a fall in the price of memory chips and lower demand for displays panels.
Samsung’s semiconductor unit saw operating profits fall by 64 per cent to 4.1 trillion Won, while the display division posted a loss of 560 billion won. Mobile profit fell by 40 per cent to 2.3 trillion won, with strong sales of the Samsung Galaxy S10 flagship offset by lacklustre shipments in the mid-range segments.
In addition to being the world’s largest mobile phone manufacturer, Samsung is a major supplier for its competitors – including great rival Apple - who rely on the company for components. This means it is particularly susceptible to a lack of growth in the market.
Such was Samsung’s concern about the situation, it took the unprecedented step of issuing a pre-guidance warning last month in order to communicate with shareholders as soon as possible.
However, it has now advised that it expects things to pick up in the second half of 2019, buoyed by a recovery in memory prices and increased demand from data centre operators. It also hopes that new devices in the Samsung Galaxy A and Galaxy Note range will aid smartphone sales.
5G is also an area for growth, with Samsung hoping that compatible handsets will drive sales of its own handsets and those from competitors powered by its components. The Korean giant is also eyeing a greater share of the networking market and has benefited from the arrival of 5G in its homeland.
It also said it saw foldable phones as an area for growth – both in terms of display and handset revenue. However, the Samsung Galaxy Fold – released to great fanfare in the leadup to Mobile World Congress (MWC) – has suffered from technical faults leading to launch delays.
Netflix has gained a fair amount of goodwill – and money – from subscribers by refusing to run third-party ads through its TV streaming platform. But this might not be the case forever.
BGR reported on a panel discussion of advertising executives this week, at IAB’s Digital Content NewFronts in New York City. Some, like Tara Walpert Levy – who leads Agency and Brand Solutions for Google and YouTube – predict that "eventually, they're going to need more growth."
Others, like Kristin Lemkau – CMO of JP Morgan Chase – speculated that a cheaper, ad-supported subscription option for Netflix might be the way forward.
Netflix currently relies on the monthly subscriptions of its massive user base (over 130 million worldwide) to fund the production, marketing, and licensing of its content library.
It isn't having a problem turning a profit without ads so far – though the rise of competing services (Disney Plus, Apple TV Plus, etc) will put pressure on viewers to juggle several subscriptions or pick one over the other.
Ad-dendum
This may simply be hot air. After all, Netflix is a company that has consistently defied expectation, pivoting from a DVD rental company to a huge production studio of original content, and the de facto streaming platform for online TV and films.
There may be ways of showing ads less obtrusively than viewers fear. While mid-episode interruptions would likely cause fury, a quick roll-call between episodes could be something of a compromise.
Netflix has trialed showing trailers for other Netflix titles as you wait for a new episode to buffer, and is pretty keen to auto-play you trailers as you skim over content in your home page. But we'd be surprised for Netflix to risk the outrage of paying subscribers with anything more, or risk pulling their own traffic towards other websites or retailers, as ads are wont to do.
Amazon Echo speaker owners in the US will soon be able to speak to Alexa in Spanish, thanks to an expansion of the Alexa Skills Kit.
According to a blog post by Amazon, the company has added a "Spanish for US voice model", which means that Alexa skills created by developers that are approved for publication will be available in Spanish "to all customers when Alexa launches in the US with Spanish language support later this year".
The new feature will come to Echo speakers (naturally). Amazon says that Bose, Facebook, and Sony will all be releasing devices with built-in Alexa that will support the feature – while Philips, TP Link, and Honeywell Home will release "Works with Alexa devices that support Spanish in the US".
Amazon hasn't confirmed whether Spanish language support will come to its Blueprints program, which allows anyone to make their own skills with a series of walkthrough templates.
The company recently opened up its US Alexa Store to allow anyone to publish and share these skills, and with so many Spanish speakers in the US, it would make sense for Amazon to enable have-a-go developers to publish skills in this language.
The Moto E5 was a budget smartphone with some pretty impressive features for its price point – but its inevitable predecessor could be a little less impressive.
According to leaked specs from Mishaal Rahman, who has a respectable track record of hardware information leaks, the Moto E6, which we haven't heard of so far, could be similar to the Moto E5 in many ways, but perhaps a downgrade in others.
Some of the Moto E6 specs look to be the same as in the Moto E5 – the 13MP rear camera, 5MP front camera, 2GB of RAM and 16GB of storage are all common between the two phones.
While the Moto E5 ran on a Snapdragon 425 chipset, the Moto E6 apparently runs on a Snapdragon 430, so it has a modest step up in terms of processor, and the 32GB memory option may appeal to some.
But in other ways, the Moto E6 is a downgrade, specifically in terms of screen specs. While we praised the Moto E5's 5.7-inch screen size, at 5.45 inches the Moto E6 would actually be a smaller phone, although Rahman does admit he's not totally sure of these dimensions.
While we typically expect new phones to be improvements on their predecessors, if this leak is accurate, it suggests the Moto E6 could be mostly the same, and with one important downgrade.
The Moto E series phones have a roughly yearly release schedule – if the Moto E6 is released a year on from the Moto E5, we'd expect to see it in the next few months, so stay tuned to TechRadar to find out the final Moto E6 specs.
The AMD Radeon VII, AMD’s recent high-end graphics card, isn’t just great at pushing pixels while playing games, as it appears to be the new king of Ethereum cryptocurrency mining when it comes to performance.
According to VoskCoin, a member of the Bitcointalk forum, the Radeon VII is able to achieve a hash rate of 90MH/s without any tweaking. As Wccftech points out, this is almost three times the performance of the AMD RX Vega 64, and handily beats the 69MH/s hash rate of Nvidia’s powerful Titan V graphics card.
If you’re happy to do some tweaking to the GPU, then the AMD Radeon VII will perform even better, with a hash rate of between 90MH/s and 100MH/s.
These impressive results are in part thanks to the improved memory bandwidth of the new card, and the Radeon VII comes with a memory bandwidth of 1TB/s and 16GB of HBM2 (High Bandwidth Memory), whereas the older RX Vega 64 has a memory bandwidth of 484GB/s and 8GB of HBM2.
Perhaps most importantly of all, the Radeon VII is a more powe-efficient card, which brings running costs down when you’re using it to mine every hour of the day.
The fact that the AMD Radeon VII breezes past Nvidia’s GPU when it comes to Ethereum mining is noteworthy because even though the Titan V is now a few years old, it still costs near $2,999 (around £2,200, AU$4,000), compared to the Radeon VII, which costs $699 (£699, around AU$980).
A much lower cost, for much better results, makes the Radeon VII a far better purchase for budding miners. While the popularity of cryptocurrency mining has died down of late, the release of this card, which offers such good results for such a reasonable price, could convince many people to fire up their old mining rigs again.
Check out VoskCoin’s video review of the Radeon VII’s mining capabilities below.
In the latest blow to consumer privacy, researchers have discovered that the addresses and personal details of over 80m US households have been left unsecured in a cloud database.
The group of independent security researchers, led by Noam Rotem, have found that the unidentified database contains names, ages and genders as well as income levels and marital status. Some of the information such as gender, marital status and income level is coded while the names, ages and addresses are not.
Fortunately, the data stored in the database does not include any payment information or Social Security numbers.
Rotem and his team have verified that the data is accurate but the team of researchers did not download the data in order to minimize the invasion of privacy of those whose information is listed.
Exposed database
Rotem partnered with the Israeli VPN review site VPNMentor to conduct his research and in a recently published blog post, the company called on the public to help identify the owner of the database hosted on Microsoft Azure.
Securing the data inside the database is not Microsoft's responsibility but rather that of its owners. However, if the owner can be identified, the company could contact its customer to let it know of the problem.
The server hosting the data first came online February according to Rotem who discovered it in April using tools he had developed to search for and catalog unsecured databases.
The database contains information about adults aged 40 and over who could be even more susceptible to scammers trying to obtain their information to try to defraud them.
Rotem's discovery of the unsecured database could lead to its owner being identified but even more so, his research sheds light on the fact that open databases full of valuable user information exist online and could make online fraud even easier for cybercriminals.
Anki has attracted serious investment in the past, from big names including Index Ventures (which also backed Slack, Etsy, Skype and Just Eat in their early days) and Andreessen Horowitz (whose portfolio includes BuzzFeed, Facebook, Honor and Github).
Unfortunately, hardware is a notoriously expensive business and the company was left struggling after a more recent round of funding fell through. CEO Boris Sofman had previously told staff that companies including Microsoft, Amazon and Comcast were interested in acquiring Anki, but such a deal never materialized.
“Despite our past successes, we pursued every financial avenue to fund our future product development and expand on our platforms,” a company spokesperson said in a statement to Recode.
Powering down
It's a shame for a company that was so committed to the idea of robots as household companions. The most sophisticated of its devices, Vector, recently became compatible with Amazon Alexa, making it part pet and part free-roaming virtual assistant.
The company was keen to state that its products weren't toys, instead pitching them as AI-powered companions, and bringing experienced character designers on board to infuse them with personality.
"I feel like the future of home robotics needs to include character," Meghan McDowell, director of program management at Anki, told TechRadar in an interview earlier this year.
"We've seen with Vector, and even some of our previous products like Cozmo, that adding character to AI and robotics really is where the magic happens. It’s really important to the future of people accepting robots in their homes, to have people feel comfortable, and have a better, richer, deeper experience with their robot."
Sadly, it seems that household robots (at least for purposes other than housework) are still some way off becoming mainstream.
Set to launch alongside the Honor 20, the higher spec Honor 20 Pro has leaked again, and this time it shows off a third color that we can expect for the phone as well as a hint at the camera tech.
We've already seen the phone leak in both a pink/white gradient finish as well as a teal color, and today's rumor suggests it will also come in black.
Spotted by Pocket Now, you can see the black variant in a leaked image below. The website has yet to show exactly where the image comes from, but it has a good history of accurate leaks.
The leak also suggests the company will include the periscope-zoom lens feature that Huawei debuted on the P30 Pro earlier this year.
The camera on the render of the phone looks similar to how Huawei set it out on the P30 Pro, so it's likely you'll be capable of getting some fantastic zoom shots with the Honor 20 Pro too.
We wouldn't expect the camera to be as powerful as the one on Huawei's flagship. Honor often uses similar tech, but as it's a lower priced device it may be the company won't be able to reach the same level of camera quality as the P30 Pro.
Honor is hosting an event on May 21, which is where we expect to see the Honor 20 and Honor 20 Pro launch. There may be more devices in that list too, so be sure to check back in the coming weeks for the most recent leaks.
OnePlus rarely waits for the full announcement to give details away about its phones, and the OnePlus 7 Pro is no exception, as the company has taken out a big advert in the New York Times which, among other things, reveals that there’s no notch or bezel.
The advert – shared in full on Twitter by @jerflash and in part by OnePlus itself - doesn’t fully rule out a punch-hole, but based on leaks of the OnePlus 7 Pro we’re expecting an all-screen front with nothing on the top edge and instead a pop-up selfie camera.
That includes no real bezel on the top edge, though leaks have shown a slim strip of bezel below the screen, so while we wouldn’t take the company’s claims of no bezel too literally, there just probably won’t be much.
According to the advert there’s also no bells and whistles, no bloatware, no app lag, no random music and no $2000 price tag, so while few phones cost quite that much, it suggests the OnePlus 7 Pro will still undercut most flagships.
You can also see schematics of the OnePlus 7 Pro in the advert, which further suggest an all-screen front, and which appear to show a motorized front camera, which would allow it to pop up, as leaks have shown.
These aren’t the first details about the OnePlus 7 Pro that OnePlus itself has shared. The company has previously for example teased that the phone will be “smooth”, pointing to the rumored 90Hz refresh rate of the screen.
As for everything else, all will be revealed soon, as the OnePlus 7 Pro (likely alongside the standard OnePlus 7 and OnePlus 7 Pro 5G) will be announced on May 14.
The Samsung Galaxy Fold is now delayed, but should that influence how people feel about the unique phone? Joshua Vergara, Jaime Rivera, and guest Isa Rodriguez discuss it during IFA GPC in Spain!
On today's Pocketnow Daily, we talk about the new renders of Motorola's new RAZR foldable smartphone, the periscope camera in the Honor 20 Pro, and more.
