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Survey confirms smart speakers are the next big thing.




Smartphone ownership may have flatlined, and tablet ownership is actually declining, but one piece of technology is bucking the trend and getting bigger every day: smart speakers. The voice-activated virtual assistants from companies like Google and Amazon are now owned by over 39 million Americans, a remarkable statistic considering the market is only a few years old.

NPR and Edison Research surveyed about 2,000 Americans and found some incredibly interesting results. As one might expect, smart speaker owners predominantly use the devices for alarms, timers, internet searches, and listening to music. But smart speakers are also replacing the use of other technology, like traditional AM/FM radio, television, and even smartphones.

Lego teams up with Chinese internet giant Tencent for games, social network.
Danish toymaker Lego is teaming up with Chinese internet giant Tencent Holdings Ltd to jointly develop online games and potentially a social network aimed at Chinese children. Privately-owned Lego has seen a slowdown in sales growth in recent years, but the Chinese market has been a bright spot with sales growing 25-30 percent in 2016.

It is competing with Barbie maker Mattel Inc and Hasbro, the firm behind My Little Pony, for a slice of the $31 billion toys and games market in China. Lego said on Monday the partnership with Tencent, China’s biggest social network and gaming company, aimed to create a safe online environment covering content, platforms, and experiences tailored for Chinese children.

“What we are looking for now with Tencent is just to find more creative ways (of) reaching children, and creating bespoke content with Tencent, in this case, video games,” Jacob Kragh, head of Lego in China, told Reuters on Monday at joint event with Tencent in Beijing. The partnership includes developing a Lego video zone for children on the Tencent video platform, as well as developing and operating Lego branded licensed games, the toymaker said.

It also includes LEGO BOOST – a building and coding set that lets children turn their brick creations into moving objects – and will explore developing a joint social network for children in China. Tencent is Asia’s most valuable company with a market capitalisation of $537 billion. Last year, Mattel struck deals with Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd and online content developer BabyTree to sell interactive learning products based on its Fisher-Price toys.

Microservices and containers in service meshes mean less chaos, more agility.
Is it worth the effort to attempt to refactor existing, and likely monolithic, applications, as microservices, or is such time and effort better spent building new, more flexible and agile applications constructed from loosely coupled microservices? It appears enterprise IT teams are having it both ways, a recent survey finds. The survey, conducted by Red Hat among its Red Hat JBoss Middleware and Red Hat OpenShift customer base, finds 69 percent indicated that they are using microservices for both new applications and for re-architecting existing ones. "This data tells us that microservices offer value to users all along their IT transformation journey -- whether they are just looking to update their current application portfolio or are gearing up new initiatives," states Cesar Saavedra, author of the report.

For a sizable portion of IT managers, the benefits of using microservices were realized relatively quickly. One-third of the group, 33 percent, said they began to realize the benefits within two to six months of their implementations. These benefits were topped off with a greater realization of the agile and DevOps vision, in the form of continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD). Improved scalability, faster time to market, higher developer productivity, and faster debugging and maintenance were other benefits seen as applications were broken down into bite-size microservices.

Microservices -- and by extension, containers -- are playing a huge role in re-orienting approaches to greater enterprise resiliency, just as the internet itself, and now blockchain, were designed in a highly distributed fashion to avoid disruption. Astasia Myers. a venture capitalist with Redpoint Ventures, for one, sees microservices playing a tole in the unfolding of "service meshes." No longer deployed in serial or point-to-point fashion, microservices and containers are enabling service meshes that "can help manage traffic through service discovery, routing, load balancing, health checking, and observability," Myers points out in a recent post. "Service meshes attempt to tame unruly container complexity. We haven't seen widespread deployment yet, but we do know of businesses running service meshes in production. Moreover, service meshes are not exclusive to microservices or Kubernetes environments and can be applied to VM and serverless environments as well."