FAVORITE HEADLINES OF THE WEEK:
“Look! Up in the cloud! That’s not me!”
“Why Does The European Union Consult Microsoft On How Google Should Operate?”
“Cloud customers are still paying for twice as much as they need”
FAVORITE NEWS OF THE WEEK:
“Would Google or Microsoft Buy Concur?” … a detailed report that explores how software is influencing some of the broader trends in the online travel sector. The report estimates the market for SaaS-based solutions in the hospitality market to be approximately $8 billion and due to the potential opportunity in this market, we expect to see more and more overlap with online travel providers and traditional enterprise-software vendors.
THIS WEEK’S NOTABLE QUOTES:
[Microsoft’s Surface 3] is really a great product and we all know that. Everyone who has tried a Surface 3 is pretty blown away with the software, the interaction, how it can be a tablet and a computer, its part of the future. — Ron Johnson, Apple’s former retail chiefData Ethics. … [W]e are just in the beginning of a larger cultural, legal and of course technical process. … Thinking of the upcoming level of personalization across all devices, the IoT, bio-engineering, augmented reality, and all of it undermined by spying techniques, I just hope the societies … will not faint. It would be a terrible tragedy if the public internet became a surveillance machine which creates closed social bubbles instead of open access to information, and which only remaining freedom is to buy products recommended by advertising algorithms. But the threat is real. — Matthias Bettag, Digital Analytics Consultant and country manager Germany at Mind Your Privacy
By 2017, wearable devices will drive 50 percent of total mobile app interactions. Mobile app data is often siloed, and IT leaders will find data from apps that use cloud-based information repositories even more diffuse. — Roxane Edjlali, research director, Gartner
The tech industry is hurting itself and our economy by keeping women out of innovation. It’s limiting itself by sexism. We need diversity now more than ever. In fact, the most important trends in technology now are about social connection and beautiful design. Women know all about that. You can’t ignore the numbers that even as users, women are dominating gaming, social media, and online shopping. The idea of the old boys network funding young men to control these startups doesn’t make sense anymore. — Vivek Wadhwa, fellow at Arthur & Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance, Stanford University; director of research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at the Pratt School of Engineering, Duke University; and distinguished fellow at Singularity University
Where we [Salesforce’s venture capital arm, Salesforce1 Fund] are unique is that we’re focused purely on building out that cloud ecosystem. … There’s the strategic goal as well to make sure we have more powerful apps on the salesforce one platform. — John Somorjai, executive vice president of corporate development and strategy, Salesforce