Posts Tagged ‘microsoft’

Big Tech and Their Metaverse

Big Tech Needs to Stop Trying to Make Their Metaverse Happen

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/metaverse-big-tech-land-grab-hype

The Metaverse is a fuzzy concept: It entered dictionaries via Neal Stephenson’s 1992 dystopian sci-fi novel Snow Crash, where the Metaverse is the virtual refuge from an anarchy-laden world controlled by the Mafia, and was brought back by a series of blogposts by VC Matthew Ball.

The morality of the Metaverse project is the least of its problems. Unlike Google Glass, the gold standard of tech blunders, it is not an overhyped (and ill-conceived) product: It is pure hype, without a product—except for some hypothetical “building blocks.”

letter by the CEO of Japanese game developer Square Enix, in which the executive expounded on his interest in NFTs and drew an odd distinction between people who “play for fun” and those who “play to contribute” was also badly received.

what is the Metaverse

What Is the Metaverse? Is It Just Virtual Reality, or Something More?

https://www-howtogeek-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.howtogeek.com/745807/what-is-the-metaverse-is-it-just-virtual-reality-or-something-more/amp/

Tech CEOs keep talking about “the metaverse.” Mark Zuckerberg insists that Facebook will be seen as a “metaverse company” instead of a social media company. Satya Nadella proclaims Microsoft is creating a “metaverse stack” for the enterprise.

Author Neil Stephenson coined the term “metaverse” in Snow Crash, a dystopian cyberpunk novel published in 1992.

In the novel, the metaverse is a sort of 3D virtual world. It’s not simply a virtual reality game but is a persistent, shared virtual world. Or rather, the metaverse is a whole universe of shared virtual spaces seemingly linked together—you could, essentially, teleport between them.

If you think this all sounds a bit like Ready Player One or a higher-tech version of Second Life, you’re right.

virtual reality (VR) and not augmented reality (AR) was necessary for that kind of vision

To Zuckerberg and other tech CEOs, the concept of “the metaverse” seems to have more in common with “Web 2.0.” It’s a bunch of new technologies: VR headsets! Presence! Persistent digital worlds

Microsoft’s vision of the metaverse seems to take the form of rambling, buzzword-heavy talk about “digital twins” and “converging the physical with the digital” with “mixed reality.” Microsoft’s Azure cloud can do it!

Of course, as we learned with Windows 10’s “Mixed Reality” headsets, that term often just means Virtual Reality to Microsoft. However, it can also mean augmented reality: And, little surprise, Microsoft also has a headset to sell you: The HoloLens.

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more on Metaverse in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=metaverse

more on immersive in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=immersive

Amazon Health Care

https://newrepublic.com/article/162553/amazon-care-pharmacy-big-tech-universal-healthcare

Microsoft has a data initiative with Providence St. Joseph Health, which operates dozens of hospitals in the United States. In 2019, Google signed a deal with the Mayo Clinic to manage and parse health records for “insights,” explaining that cloud computing and data analytics would provide better performance. Google also reached an agreement this week with HCA Healthcare, a large hospital chain

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more on data privacy in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=data+privacy

Facebook Horizon

https://www.forbes.com/sites/charliefink/2020/08/28/this-week-in-xr-walmart-goes-tik-tok-as-apple-facebook-deal-and-reveal/#289e980c1985

https://www.oculus.com/facebook-horizon/

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more on Oculus in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=oculus

Epic TikTok Fortnite

https://www.forbes.com/sites/charliefink/2020/08/07/this-week-in-xr-tik-tok-makes-music-as-instagram-reels-more-on-epics-epic-raise/#7ec4b9ef6b9d

President Donald Trump signed an executive order to prohibit US companies from doing business with Tencent, which owns WeChat and nearly 50% of Epic Games, which makes Fortnite and Unreal Engine. Tik Tok has until September 20th to sell to Microsoft or another American company or it, too, will be banned. Is this because some Kpop fans on Tik Tok spoofed a Trump rally in Tulsa?

Tencent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tencent

Endgame for LinkedIn

The Endgame for LinkedIn Is Coming

Jack of all trades. LinkedIn had — and still has — multiple branded apps: Job Search, SlideShare, Learning, Recruiter, Sales Navigator and something call ‘Elevate”

Bad at integration and scaling. LinkedIn acquired many companies to introduce various services, but wasn’t so good at making them work.

Ads were expensive and user-unfriendly. Natalie Halimi, a marketer with 10 years of experience, wrote about LinkedIn ads back in July 2014. She used the headers “high CPC, poor dashboard, poor analysis” and concluded “ LinkedIn need to reassess their pricing strategy to provide better ROI for advertisers”.

Overvalued, full stop. Just before the plunge, LinkedIn shares were trading at 50x forward earnings. Twitter was at 30x, Facebook 34x and Google 21x. It was one of the most expensive stocks in tech.

When Microsoft introduced Office 365, it was to battle Google’s G Suite which appealed to smaller businesses with its cheaper pricing and cloud-based subscription model.

It is succeeding. According to a 2018 Bitglass survey, Office 365’s global market share has gone up to 56.3% from 7.7% in just four years. G Suite has stayed at about 25% since 2016.
LinkedIn’s employees were actually using G suite — the whole bag: Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Hangouts, Docs, Sheets… — before the Microsoft acquisition.

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more on LinkedIn in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=linkedin

Endgame for LinkedIn

The Endgame for LinkedIn Is Coming

https://medium.com/@lancengym/the-endgame-for-linkedin-is-coming-31d4a8b2a76

LinkedIn had — and still has — multiple branded apps: Job Search, SlideShare, Learning, Recruiter, Sales Navigator and something call ‘Elevate”, which purports to “build your reputation by sharing smart content”. A news and publishing app called Pulse was integrated into the main app in May 2017.

The idea of selling relevant services to your user base is good, but not if you can’t do it well.

LinkedIn’s employees were actually using G suite — the whole bag: Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Hangouts, Docs, Sheets… — before the Microsoft acquisition.

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more on LInkedIn in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=linkedin

Linda.com LinkedIn Microsoft Privacy

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-07-23-as-linkedin-learning-subsumes-lynda-com-library-groups-raise-privacy-concerns

The American Library Association said in a statement Monday that the planned changes to Lynda.com, which are slated to happen by the end of September 2019, “would significantly impair library users’ privacy rights.” That same day, the California State Library recommended that its users discontinue Lynda.com when it fully merges with LinkedIn Learning if it institutes the changes.

The library groups argue that by requiring users to create LinkedIn accounts to watch Lynda videos, the company is going from following best practices about privacy and identity protection to potentially asking libraries to violate a range of ethics codes they have pledged to uphold. The ALA’s Library Bill of Rights, for instance, states that: “All people, regardless of origin, age, background, or views, possess a right to privacy and confidentiality in their library use. Libraries should advocate for, educate about, and protect people’s privacy, safeguarding all library use data, including personally identifiable information.”

The change will not impact most colleges and university libraries or corporate users of Lynda.com services, who will not be required to force users to set up a LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn officials say that’s because colleges and corporations have more robust ways to identify users than public libraries do.

LinkedIn acquired Lynda.com in 2015 for $1.5 billion. The following June, Microsoft bought LinkedIn for $26.2 billion, the company’s largest-ever acquisition.

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more on privacy in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=privacy

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