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Verizon buys Zoom rival BlueJeans for less than $500 million Verizon Business has announced a deal to purchase enterprise-grade video conferencing platform BlueJeans, thereby expanding Verizon’s unified communications portfolio and improving its service for business customers. This acquisition shows that the company is also trying to capitalize on the current trend of remote employees making extensive use of online services such as Zoom, Slack and Microsoft during the pandemic. BlueJeans has more than 15,000 customers, including Facebook, IBM-owned Red Hat, ADP, Zillow and LinkedIn. The deal is worth USD 500 million and is expected to close in the second quarter of 2020. Read more at https://tinyurl.com/yd9qtfhg Apple’s new iPhone SE is surprisingly powerful for $399 Apple is launching iPhone SE 2020, the second generation of its cheapest smartphone in the iPhone lineup, priced at just USD 399. The iPhone SE runs on Apple’s latest A13 Bionic chip that enables great battery…

Comcast says voice and video calls have skyrocketed 212 percent during widespread self-isolation Comcast Corporation, a global media and technology company, has announced that voice and video calls have more than tripled on its network since people across the US started working from home due to the COVID-19 outbreak. According to the company, traffic in this category has increased by 212 percent in total, while overall peak traffic on its network has grown by 32 percent. Tony Werner, Comcast’s tech leader, said that the additional traffic is “well within the capabilities of the network,” and despite the increases in usage, the company’s network is working just fine. Read more at https://tinyurl.com/skncjow Zoom freezes feature development to fix security and privacy issues Over the past few weeks, the Zoom video conferencing app has been widely used for personal and business online meetings during the coronavirus lockdowns around the world. According to the…

Twilio rival MessageBird launches Inbox, an AI-powered contact center MessageBird, a telecommunications service provider in Amsterdam, Netherlands, has unveiled a new all-in-one, AI-powered contact center as it enters the competitive billion-dollar customer service software market. The new solution, dubbed Inbox and pitched as the “Slack for external communications,” enables customers to communicate with businesses and accept inbound messages from WhatsApp, Twitter, Messenger, Instagram, WeChat, Apple Business Chat, RCS, Line, Telegram, email, SMS, voice, and more. Additionally, companies can connect MessageBird’s Inbox to other internal tools as part of their preferred workflows, including Salesforce, Google Calendar, Shopify, HubSpot, Jira, and Slack. Read more at https://tinyurl.com/qvsqh9l CenturyLink adds IBM Cloud to its Cloud Connect portfolio US-based CenturyLink has added IBM Cloud to its growing Cloud Connect Dynamic Connections portfolio, which also includes Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and Oracle. The company said that through IBM Cloud Direct Link services, businesses can now access…

China’s Huawei Technologies has launched new database and storage products with the aim of redefining its data infrastructure and strengthening the global presence of its cloud business. The world’s first AI-native database GaussDB supports differentiated scenarios such as private and public clouds and data services in the finance, internet, logistics and automotive sectors. Huawei’s FusionStorage 8.0 is claimed to be the industry’s best-performing distributed storage solution for supporting enterprise applications. “Humanity is entering the age of an intelligent world,” said David Wang, Huawei Executive Director of the Board and President of ICT Strategy and Marketing. “Data is the new factor of production, and intelligence the new productivity. Heterogeneous, intelligent, and converged databases will become the key data infrastructure of the financial, government, and telecoms industries.” With this new database management product, the Shenzhen-based company marks its official entry into the database field and places itself in direct competition with…

Samsung phone fans are eagerly looking forward to the upcoming release of Samsung’s Galaxy S10 trio, including the top of the range model – the Galaxy S10 Plus. The new smartphone series is expected to be put on display for the first time at the Mobile World Congress 2019 in Barcelona next month. As we get closer to that expo date, additional details of this high-end smartphone are being revealed. Vision – Dynamic, Private, Detect The expectations are set high with three new trademarks applicable to these phones – Dynamic Vision, Private Vision and Detect Vision, which Samsung Electronics submitted for patents at the Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO) last December. The company is working hard on biometrics and eye movement control for the S10 series, and the advanced technology of the camera makes it possible to record videos at a speed up to 2000 frames per second. Three…

Oculeus, an innovative telecommunications software provider from Germany, has announced the launch of a cloud-based fraud protection service. The new solution, branded with the name Oculeus-Protect, is designed to meet the growing needs for security in the enterprise telecoms industry. The new fraud protection service is supported by the company’s regional cloud environment, and is currently available throughout Europe, and North and South America. The software provider defines the new service as “a real-time telecoms fraud protection service that provides enterprises an intelligent and automated framework to efficiently prevent false charges resulting from unauthorized usage of enterprise telecommunication channels by cybercriminals and other perpetrators of telecom fraud”. They claim that the software is able of block fraudulent telecommunications traffic within milliseconds, and have positioned the service to be totally independent of user’s telecommunications service provider. “There is a clear and definite need for our new telecoms fraud protection service,”…

French researchers are starting to work on the blockchain! Inria, Télécom ParisTech, Télécom SudParis and SystemX signed a framework agreement on Tuesday March 6th, to coordinate their research efforts in the blockchain area. Called “Bart” (Blockchain Advanced Research & Technologies), this initiative will last for six years and will mobilize thirty researchers. Its aim is to remove the technological barriers that slow down the deployment of blockchain-driven data storage, a technology which is currently attracting the interest of many industries. Three main challenges will be addressed: 1 – Scaling up In one second, six or seven transactions took place on the Bitcoin blockchain, versus several thousand for the Visa credit card system. This slowness limits the use of the blockchain on a larger scale. The problem is due to the validation technique required for transactions, with transactions being grouped into blocks that must be validated by a computer calculation process called mining. Typically, it takes about…

Avaya first filed for bankruptcy protection in January 2017, revealing US$6 billion in debt. But after a long and painful eight-month process through the Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, the company now has a plan to move forward. The plan includes the appointment of Jim Chirico to the position of chief executive officer, effective October 1. Current CEO Kevin Kennedy will retire from both the position and the board of directors but has agreed to remain a part of the company in an advisory role. Under Kennedy, the company transitioned nearly 80% of its revenues to software and services but also went bankrupt amid the IT industry’s shift to cloud and mobile services. Prior to Avaya, the future CEO Jim Chirico held key posts at IBM and Seagate and joined the American tech giant in 2008, where he is currently COO and global sales leader, responsible for Operations, Global Sales, Sales…