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Kontakt.io, a leading IoT location platform provider, recently announced partnership with the IOTA Foundation, a non-profit open-source foundation which backs IOTA. This partnership aims at integrating IOTA’s next generation distributed ledger technology to Kontakt.io’s location platform and is designed specifically for condition monitoring and asset tracking. The integration will allow a tamper-proof and chargeable readings of smart sensor data. It is beneficial for healthcare operators and supply chain firms, which monitor environmental conditions for compliance reasons. They can explore fully transparent ways for storing and reporting on telemetry data. Kontakt.io’s IoT platform and IOTA’s Blockchain partnership will encrypt device-to-device and device-to-cloud communication of telemetry so the data remains intact. Consumers which include manufacturers, carriers, inspectors, technology providers, and others can leverage this new technology as it would: Increase trust and transparency Ease dispute resolution Result in better compliance breach detection and Prevent delivery of faulty products How Kontakt.io and IOTA benefit each other IOTA eliminates the cost barrier, and needs lesser computing power to confirm transactions. Unlike Blockchain or Ethereum, IOTA is capable of processing a lot of operations in real time. It scales faster depending on the amount of transactions it has queued. Hence, Proof of Work(PoW) is now possible and efficient in the IoT environment with IOTA. It is likely to become the next security standard for IoT. On the other hand, IOTA has partnered with Kontakt.io to empower the building blocks of a smart supply chain using the powerful IoT platform. Read more about this partnership at Kontakt.io official website. How to run and configure an IoT Gateway Build your first Raspberry Pi project 5 reasons to choose AWS IoT Core for your next IoT project

Qt 5.11 has been released ahead of the planned schedule. Qt is one of the most popular cross-platform software development framework for embedded and desktop applications. It holds a variety of new features and bug fixes. Qt for Web assembly and Python Qt for Web assembly version 1 has been released to allow users to target the web and browsers as a platform for Qt applications. In addition, Qt is actively working on supporting Qt on Python and the first release is planned for June. Qt Core and Network Both the Qt Core and item model have received a couple of updates. Most importantly, Qt Core now has Unicode support. So, QChar, QString, QTextBoundaryFinder and Qt algorithm for bidirectional text are now fully compatible with Unicode 10. In the Qt network, ALPN and HTTP/2 are now supported on iOS. Qt GUI and Widgets Accessibility support on Windows is now based on Microsoft UI automation. Widget styles on Windows are also updated to better support High-DPI displays. Qt widgets have received support for quick text selection by mouse in QLineEdit, along with a number of bug-fixes. The print dialog on Linux now also features much better support for all the CUPS provided options. Qt QML Engine The Qt QML compiler pipeline is completely re-written with major improvements in performance and maintainability. This pipeline always compiles QML to a platform-independent bytecode. You can also generate the bytecode ahead of time, using the qmlcompiler feature. The new bytecode interpreter has vastly improved and reaches 80-90% of the performance of the JIT in Qt 5.10. Qt Quick Qt Quick, now supports loading compressed textures in the image element. As this feature stores images in a format that is directly digestible by the GPU, it reduces application startup time and memory consumption. Qt Quick also supports both .ktx and .pkm container file formats. Qt Location Qt Location now includes experimental support for turn-by-turn navigation. It also has an experimental API to create map objects that are not bound to QQuickItems. In MapPolyline objects,  layers are now working in combination with Map items. Routing and Places API are extensible and there is a newly added element, known as WayPoint. Qt 3D and Qt 3D Studio Qt 3D Studio 2.0 is currently in beta and the complete release will soon be available with a fully rewritten runtime, that’ll be based on top of Qt 3D. With this work, Qt 3D has also received numerous new features, performance improvements, and bug fixes. Qt Webengine The Chromium version underneath Qt Webengine has been updated to Chromium 65. In addition, Qt now supports embedded DevTools without requiring the use of a separate browser, an installable cookie filter and quota permissions. Other items qdoc now uses libclang to parse C++ giving a much better support for modern C++ in the documentation. Qt Serialbus and Bluetooth have now improved support for CAN bus and BTLE. To read the complete coverage, visit the release notes page. Qt 5.11 free version will be supported for one year. For longer support periods, developers should prefer Qt 5.9 which will be supported until June 2020.  An extended lifetime support can be purchased from the Qt Company if required. The next release, Qt 5.12 is planned for November and will be a long-term supported release. How to create multithreaded applications in Qt How to Debug an application using Qt Creator 3 ways to deploy a QT and OpenCV application

Adobe has been searching for a missing piece in its marketing and eCommerce puzzle: an eCommerce platform. Fortunately for Adobe, they seem to have now found that piece, and it comes in the form of Magento. The company announced yesterday that it would be acquiring the popular eCommerce platform for $1.68 billion. That might sound like a weighty sum, but for Adobe - and Magento - it makes sense, especially when you consider just how competitive the marketing, eCommerce and analytics market place is at the moment. Adobe is facing stiff competition from the likes of Salesforce and Oracle. Magento, while still a popular eCommerce platform, is also seeing competition from eCommerce platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce. Adobe and Magento: working together to create a fully integrated marketing solution The result of this move could be a fully integrated marketing platform. The eCommerce and content management aspects would come from Magento, while Adobe would add an extra analytics dimension. This could prove very attractive to both B2C and B2B organizations, who have been faced with choice but repeatedly have to compromise or pick and choose the components they need in their platform strategy. A number of different outlets have remarked on the impressive rise of Magento's value. The company was bought by eBay in 2011 for just $180 million, then went private back in 2015 with help of VC investor Primera Funds. Although this amount was never officially disclosed, it is reported that Primera Funds stumped up $200 million. That's a pretty good return on investment. Although Magento might loos a little dated and maybe even a little small scale for Adobe, who appear more interested in tackling the enterprise and huge B2B organizations than SMEs, with more than 300,000 developers working with Magento the move isn't as outrageous as some might claim. When you consider that some of the largest organizations on the planet - like Coca-Cola - use Magento, it's more than unfair to write the eCommerce platform off. Here's what Brad Rechner, executive VP and General Manager of Digital Experience at Adobe, has to say: “Adobe is the only company with leadership in content creation, marketing, advertising, analytics and now commerce – enabling real-time experiences across the entire customer journey... Embedding commerce into the Adobe Experience Cloud with Magento enables Adobe to make every moment personal and every experience shoppable.” On the Magento side, CEO Mark Lavelle spoke of the combination of "Adobe’s strength in content and data with Magento’s open commerce innovation." Lavelle will remain the head of Magento, but will perform his role from inside Adobe's Digital Experience business. Find out more here. [news.adobe.com] Read next: Introduction to Magento 2

Internet of Things has shown a remarkable improvement over the years. The basic IoT embedded devices with sensors, have now advanced to a level where AI can be deployed into IoT devices to make them smarter. The IoT World 2018 conference was held from May 14th to 17th, at Santa Clara Convention Center, CA, USA. Al special developer centric conference designed  specifically for technologists was also part of the larger conference. The agenda for the developers’ conference was to bring together the technical leaders who have contributed with their innovations in the IoT market and tech enthusiasts who look forward to develop their careers in this domain.This conference also included sessions such as SAP learning, and interesting keynotes on Intelligent Internet of things. Here are five sessions that caught our eyes at the developer conference in IoT World 2018. How to develop Embedded Systems by using the modern software practices, Kimberly Clavin Kimberly Clavin  highlighted that a major challenge in developing autonomous vehicles include, system integration and validation techniques. These techniques are used to ensure quality factor within the code. There are a plethora of companies that have software as their core and use modern software practices such as (Test Driven Development)TDD and Continuous Integration(CI) for successful development. However, the same tactics cannot be directly implemented within the embedded environment. Kimberly presented ways to adapt these modern software practices for use within the development of embedded systems. This can help developers to create systems that are fast, scalable, and a cheaper. The highlights of this session include, Learning to test drive an embedded component. Understanding how to mock out/simulate an unavailable component. Application of Test Driven Development (TDD), Continuous Integration (CI) and mocking for achieving a scalable software process on an embedded project. How to use Machine Learning to Drive Intelligence at the Edge, Dave Shuman and Vito De Gaetano Edge IoT is gaining a lot of traction of late. One way to make edge intelligent is by building the ML models on cloud and pushing the learning and the models onto the edge. This presentation session by Dave Shuman and Vito De Gaetano, shows how organizations can push intelligence to the edge via an end-to-end open source architecture for IoT. This end-to-end open source architecture for IoT is purely based on Eclipse Kura and Eclipse Kapua. Eclipse Kura is an open source stack for gateways and the edge, whereas Eclipse Kapua is an open source IoT cloud platform. The architecture can enable: Securely connect and manage millions of distributed IoT devices and gateways Machine learning and analytics capabilities with intelligence and analytics at the edge A centralized data management and analytics platform with the ability to build or refine machine learning models and push these out to the edge Application development, deployment and integration services The presentation also showcased an Industry 4.0 demo, which highlighted how to ingest, process, analyze data coming from factory floors, i.e from the equipments and how to enable machine learning on the edge using this data. How to build Complex Things in a simplified manner, Ming Zhang Ming Zhang put forth a simple question,“Why is making hardware so hard?” Some reasons could be: The total time and cost to launch a differentiated product is prohibitively high because of expensive and iterative design, manufacturing and testing. System form factors aren’t flexible -- connected things require richer features and/or smaller sizes. There’s unnecessary complexity in the manufacturing and component supply chain. Designing a hardware is a time-consuming process, which is cumbersome and not a fun task for designers, unlike software development. Ming Zhang showcased a solution, which is ‘The zGlue ZiPlet Store’ -- a unique platform wherein users can build complex things with an ease. The zGlue Integrated Platform (ZiP) simplifies the process of designing and manufacturing devices for IoT systems and provides a seamless integration of both hardware and software on a modular platform. Building IoT Cloud Applications at Scale with Microservices, Dave Chen This presentation by Dave Chen includes how DConnectivity, big data, and analytics are transforming several business types. A major challenge in the IIoT sector is the accumulation of humongous data. This data is generated by machineries and industrial equipments such as wind turbines, sensors, and so on. Valuable information out of this data has to be extracted securely, efficiently and quickly. The presentation focused on how one can leverage microservice design principles and other open source platforms for building an effective IoT device management solution in a microservice oriented architecture. By doing this, managing the large population of IoT devices securely becomes easy and scalable. Design Patterns/Architecture Maps for IoT Design patterns are the building blocks of architecture and enable developers and architects to reuse solutions to common problems. The presentation showcased how various common design patterns for connected things, common use cases and infrastructure, can accelerate the development of connected device. Extending Security to Low Complexity IoT Endpoint Devices, Francois Le At present, there are millions of low compute, low power IoT sensors and devices deployed. These devices and sensors are predicted to multiply to billions within a decade. However, these devices do not have any kind of security even though they hold such crucial, real-time information. These low complexity devices have: Very limited onboard processing power, Less memory and battery capacity, and are typically very low cost. Low complexity IoT devices cannot work similar to IoT edge device, which can easily handle validation and encryption techniques, and also have huge processing power to handle multiple message exchanges used for authentication. The presentation states that a new security scheme needs to be designed from the ground up. It must acquire lesser space on the processor, and also have a low impact on battery life and cost. The solution should be: IoT platform agnostic and Easy to implement by IoT vendors, Easily operated over any wireless technologies (e,g, Zigbee, BLE, LoRA, etc.) seamlessly Transparent to the existing network implementation. Automated and scalable for very high volumes, Evolve with new security and encryption techniques being released Last for a long time in the field with no necessity to update the edge devices with security patches. Apart from these, many other presentations were showcased at the IoT World 2018 for developers. Some of them include, Minimize Cybersecurity Risks in the Development of IoT Solutions, Internet of Things (IoT) Edge Analytics: Do's and Don’ts. Read more keynotes presented at this exciting IoT World conference 2018 on their official website. Cognitive IoT: How Artificial Intelligence is remoulding Industrial and Consumer IoT How IoT is going to change tech teams AWS Greengrass brings machine learning to the edge    

What do they mean for the developers Facebook is having a rough year to say the least. The Cambridge Analytica scandal seems to have impacted it in a way that’s yet to unfold in it’s full form. Having the annual F8 conference during this tumultuous period can have different types of repercussions. More scrutiny of the announcements is among one of them. Today we are going to ask some questions about the recent AR related announcements made in the Facebook F8 conference, how important they are to the user as well as the developers, and what do they really imply for facebook’s future development plans. AR in Messenger Facebook has introduced AR services to its messenger platform. This will enable the developers to build bots on the messenger platform and make it a much more interactive and informative platform that it currently is, potentially. As and when these features are implemented, the question on everyone’s mind is: will our data be safe? Additionally, Facebook is also planning to implement payment gateways on their messenger platform. This opens up a new avenue for developers since now they can create third party bots for messenger. But can we really trust the security and privacy features keeping in mind that they will be majorly third party? AR in Facebook lite Facebook lite had arrived with the promise of a limited version of the social networking site for smaller and older android phones and also for the ones which have slow data connection. In the latest F8 conference, Facebook has promised to bring AR to its lite version. How does that impact the goal of the lite platform of being lightweight and being easy on system resources? Will the introduction of AR to Facebook lite make it bloated? Or it might just make it unfit for older phones since their processors and system configurations might not  also support the AR features. AR Camera effects in Instagram Last year, Facebook had announced the AR camera platform, and this time around they plan to bring it to Instagram. Using an updated version of AR Studio, creators will be able to design unique, interactive camera experiences, including face filters and world effects, for their followers on Instagram. There have been these rumors that some of these features and filters have been heavily inspired by the Snapchat features which are hugely popular. The real question is whether Facebook and Instagram together can add something more to their AR camera features which would enable them to compete with Snapchat in this particular category. Update to AR Studio Facebook has updated their inhouse AR development platform, AR Studio and the new features are the following: Filtering of image textures can now be set to none or bilinear (default: bilinear). Wrapping modes of image textures can now be set to repeat, clamp or mirror (default: clamp). Tiling scale and offset for material textures can now be specified. When using the plane tracker, you can choose to target specific textures in the world from the Inspector panel. Improved Adds some more tooltips to the texture inspector. Facebook has also signalled at the upgrading of their underlying AR technology. For instance adding advanced target tracking, which includes hand tracking as well as high-fidelity body tracking. This should make for a lot more precise filters, improving their real time object and face detection capabilities etc. But since AR Studio was introduced in last year’s F8 conference, are these changes really breaking ones or are they just a means to stay alive in the competitive AR development market? With the renewed presence of Google with its recently updated AR core and Apple’s AR Kit, how much share can AR Studio maintain is a question that can only be answered in time. AR and its implications in real life can be very interesting but AR on mobile seems to have been suffering for some time due to the lack of system resources, the non-uniformity of the mobile platforms and location based data connection related issues. How these new announcements are going to change the current mobile AR landscape is something that we will have to wait and watch. Understanding the hype behind Magic Leap’s New Augmented Reality Headsets Leap Motion open sources its $100 augmented reality headset, North Star Unity plugins for augmented reality application development  

What’s every mobile developer’s worst nightmare? The mere idea that their app has fallen into obscurity and it doesn’t have a single user engagement or installs! If you are a mobile developer and you are reading this, you might be well aware of this thought, in imagination as well as in reality sometime or the other. We all know that traditional analytics methods adopted and made popular by Google don’t really have a great impact on mobile apps. They are not helpful in finding out the exact reasons why your app might have failed to register a high number of installs or user engagements. So the real question to alleviate your fear is: what are the data pointers necessary to figure out a way to filter out the noise and make your app stand out among the clutter? The answer is not merely a name change, but a change in approach and it’s called mobile analytics. For starters, some reasons users typcially don’t interact with your app are: The UX is not tempting enough The app is slow The app doesn’t live up to what it promised The target audience segment is wrong Your app is really bad Barring the last pointer, the other four can have real life solutions that can salvage your app, if applied in time.  Here we are putting more focus on the phrase “In Time”. That’s where real time mobile analytics come in. Because in case of mobile apps, every minute counts, literally. Mobile analytics works on the ways and types of data collected. In order to understand why your app is not an instant hit, you will have to keep a track of: Geographical data of app installs: This will help you to identify your geographical strongholds i.e.,  from where you have got the most response. You can then analyze other geographies or similar locations that you can target in order to make your ad campaigns effective. Demographics of the users who engage with your app: This data will be particularly helpful in identifying the age group and the type of users who are engaging in in-app purchases. Thus, helping you to reach your overall goal. Which Sources provide loyal users and generate more revenue: Knowing the right media outlet to promote your ad is imperative to its success. This will enable you to target the correct media sources for maximum revenue and in creating more loyal fanbase. What are the reasons for the users to quit: This will identify the reason behind the app not getting popular. Analyzing this data will enable you to learn about potential flaws in the UX or in the app performance or any security issues which might be prompting the users to quit your app suddenly. So how do you enable real time mobile analytics? There are a few platforms which provide ready-to-deploy real time mobile analytics. Fair warning, you might end up feeling like you used a black box where you feed data and the result comes out without knowing why you came up with those results. However there are other solutions being provided by IBM cloud, AWS Pinpoint, among others which will enable the developers to be a part of the overall analytics process and also play with the parameters to see predictions of app usage and conversion. The real challenge however lies in bringing all these analytics into your mobile device. For example, if you have seeing sudden uninstalls of your app and what you have right now is your mobile device, then you should be able to access the cloud and upload that data and analyze that on your mobile to get insights on what should be done. Like whether there is an urgent UX issue that needs fixing or there is a sudden bug in the application, or there might be a sudden security threat that potentially can compromise user data. To perform these mobile analytics natively and real time, we would most definitely need better computation capabilities and battery power. Whether the tech giants like Google, AMD, Microsoft will come up with a possible solution to this mobile computation problem with a much longer battery life, is something that time can only tell. Packt teams up with Humble Bundle to bring developers a selection of mobile development bundles Five reasons why Xamarin will change mobile development Hybrid Mobile apps: What you need to know

The release candidate for Typescript 2.9 is here! Typescript is an open-source programming language which adds optional static typing to Javascript. Let’s jump into some highlights of Typescript 2.9 RC. Changes to keyof operator TypeScript 2.9 changes the behavior of keyof to factor in both unique symbols as well as numeric literal types. TypeScript’s keyof operator is a useful way to query the property names of an existing type. Before Typescript 2.9, keyof never recognized symbolic keys. With this functionality, mapped object types like Partial, Required, or Readonly can also recognize symbolic and numeric property keys, and no longer drop properties named by symbols. Introduction of new import( ) type syntax One long-running pain-point in TypeScript has been the inability to reference a type in another module, or the type of the module itself, without including an import at the top of the file. With Typescript 2.9, their is a new import(...) type syntax. import types use the same syntax as ECMAScript’s proposed import(...) expressions, and provide a convenient way to reference the type of a module, or the types which a module contains. Trailing commas not allowed on rest parameters This break was added for conformance with ECMAScript, as trailing commas are not allowed to follow rest parameters in the specification. Changes to strictNullChecks Unconstrained type parameters are no longer assignable to object in strictNullChecks. Since generic type parameters can be substituted with any primitive type, this is a precaution TypeScript has added under strictNullChecks. To fix this, you can add a constraint on object. never can no longer be iterated over Values of type never can no longer be iterated over. Users can avoid this behavior by using a type assertion to cast to the type any. The list of entire changes and code files can be found on the Microsoft blog. You can also view the TypeScript roadmap for everything else that’s coming in 2.9 and beyond. How to install and configure TypeScript How to work with classes in Typescript Tools in TypeScript

TensorFlow team has released a new version of TensorFlow.js - a browser-based JavaScript library - for training and deploying machine learning models. This new version 0.11.1 has brought notable features in their armory to ease WebGL accelerated browser-based machine learning. TensorFlow.js is an open source JavaScript library which allows you to build machine learning models in the browser. It provides you flexible and intuitive high-level APIs to build, train and run models from scratch. This means you can run and retrain pre-existing TensorFlow and Keras models right in the browser. Some of the noteworthy changes available in TensorFlow.js 0.11: Now you can save and load tf.models using various media - Thanks to the new capabilities added Browser IndexedDB Browser local storage HTTP requests Browser file downloads and uploads In order to know more about each medium used to save and load models in TensorFlow.js, you can refer the tutorials page. There are a set of new features added to both TensorFlow.js Core API and TensorFlow.js Layers API: TensorFlow.js Core API (0.8.3 ==> 0.11.0) TensorFlow.js Core API provides low-level, hardware-accelerated linear algebra operations. It also provides an eager API for carrying out automatic differentiation. Breaking changes From now on ES5 tf-core.js bundle users will have to use symbol tf instead of tfc Now you can export GPGPUContext and add getCanvas() to the WebGLBackend Performance and development changes They have optimized CPU conv2dDerInput on CPU to get 100x faster. Loading quantized weight support added to reduce the model size and improve model download time. New serialization infrastructure added to the core API New helper methods and basic types added to support model exporting New features added to the Core API Added tf.losses.logLoss support which allows you to add a log loss term to the training procedure They have also added tf.losses.cosineDistance which allows you to add a cosine-distance loss to the training procedure Added tensor.round() which rounds the value of a tensor to the nearest integer, element-wise. They have added tf.cumsum support which allows you to compute the cumulative sum of the tensor x along the axis. They have added tf.losses.hinge_loss support which allows you to add a hinge loss to the training procedure. For the complete list of new features, documentation changes, a plethora of bug fixes and other miscellaneous changes added to the Core API you can refer the release notes. TensorFlow.js Layers API (0.5.2 ==> 0.6.1) TensorFlow.js Layers API is a high-level machine learning model API built on TensorFlow.js Core. This API can be used to build, train and execute deep learning models in the browser. Breaking changes From now on, ES5 tf-core.js bundle users will have to use symbol tf instead of tfl They have removed the exporting of the backend symbols Changed default epochs to 1 in Model.fit () function Feature changes A new version string added to the keras_version field of JSONs from model serialization They have added tf.layers.cropping2D support which allows you to crop layer for 2D input (eg: image) For the complete list of documentation changes, bug fixes and other miscellaneous changes added to the Layers API you can refer the release notes. Emoji Scavenger Hunt showcases TensorFlow.js You can now make music with AI thanks to Magenta.js The 5 biggest announcements from TensorFlow Developer Summit 2018

Verizon Communications Inc. recently announced that it is migrating about 1000 of its business-critical applications and database back-end systems to the popular cloud provider, Amazon Web Services (AWS). Verizon had bought Terramark, a cloud and service provider, in 2011 as part of its public and private cloud strategy. This strategy included building its own cloud that offered infrastructure-as-a-service to its customers. AWS has stayed ahead of competition, where it offered added services to its customers. On the other hand, Verizon could not stay in the race for longer as it was usurped by Microsoft and Google. Due to this, two years ago, in 2016, Verizon closed down its public cloud offering and then sold off its cloud and managed hosting service assets to IBM and also sold a number of data centres to Equinix. Verizon had first started working with AWS in 2015 and has many business and consumer applications already running in the cloud. The current migrations to AWS is part of Verizon’s corporate-wide initiative, which is, to increase agility and reduce costs through the use of cloud computing. Some benefits of this migration include: With the help of AWS, Verizon will enable it to access more comprehensive set of cloud capabilities. This will ensure that its developers are able to invent on behalf of its customers. Verizon has built AWS-specific training facilities where its employees can quickly update themselves on the AWS technologies and learn how to innovate with speed and at scale. AWS enables Verizon to quickly deliver the best, most efficient customer experiences. Verizon also aims to make the public cloud a core part of its digital transformation, upgrading its database management approach to replace its proprietary solutions with Amazon Aurora To know more about AWS and Verizon’s partnership, read the AWS blog post. Linux Foundation launches the Acumos Al Project to make AI accessible Analyzing CloudTrail Logs using Amazon Elasticsearch How to create your own AWS CloudTrail

Rackspace recently announced the launch of its Kubernetes-as-a-Service offering which would be  implemented to its private cloud clients worldwide, this month. It claims this service would be soon coming to public cloud later this year. Rackspace, which is a managed-cloud computing company, revealed that it will fully operate and manage the Kubernetes deployment, including the infrastructure. It also claimed that users can save up to 50% when compared to other open source system deployments. So, if you are looking at automating deployments, scaling, and managing containerized applications then, Kubernetes is your open-source option. It is the most efficient way of running online software across a vast range of machines. Kubernetes is becoming a leading player in cloud container orchestration, where bigger players like Microsoft Azure and Cisco have started adopting its services. Not all businesses comply with the internal resources and expertise needed to effectively manage a Kubernetes environment on their own. By delivering a fully managed Kubernetes-as-a-Service, Rackspace allows organizations to focus more on building and running their applications. With the new service, Rackspace delivers an enhanced level of ongoing operations management and support for the entire technology stack. This support ranges from the hardware to the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to Kubernetes. Rackspace also claims that the key benefits of this offering include Support for operations such as Updates, Upgrades, Patching and security hardening, and The ability to use a single platform to deploy Kubernetes clusters across private and public clouds. Ensures that a customer always has access to an entire team of specialists 24*7*365 Rackspace experts fully validate and inspect each component of the service, provide static container scanning and enable customers to restrict user access to the environment. This is just an overview of Rackspace’s  extended support to Kubernetes-as-a-Service. You can know more about this new offering from the Rackspace blog. What Google, RedHat, Oracle, and others announced at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2018 How to secure a private cloud using IAM Google’s kaniko – An open-source build tool for Docker Images in Kubernetes, without a root access

Unity technologies have made a startling announcement of plunging into the automotive and transportation industry.  With their newly formed automotive division, they plan to pass on their rendering technology to auto creators. They plan to show off this technology at their very first Unity AutoTech Summit at Unite Berlin, scheduled to happen during June 19-21 this year. As John Riccitiello, Chief Executive Officer, Unity Technologies, describes it “The real-time revolution in automotive is here. Over the past 15 years, we’ve made great strides leading the game development industry – now, we’re bringing our real-time rendering technology to a new group of creators, equipping automakers with the tools that will allow them to iterate at the speed of thought.” Unity Automotive Division This automotive division will bring real-time 3D, VR, and AR technologies to the world’s automotive original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and suppliers through the Unity engine. The division is led by of experts from key automobile companies like Volkswagen, Renault, GM, Delphi, and Denso. Unity has already been working alongside the world’s top OEMs. Including Audi (VR design review), Volkswagen (interactive VR training for 10,000 employees), Cadillac (Virtual Showroom) and Mercedes-Benz (AMG Powerwall). Unity AutoTech Summit The Unity AutoTech summit that will grace Unite Berlin, is a one of a kind, two-day gathering of sessions, tech demos, and networking dedicated to the automotive industry. Featured sessions will include: Bringing the Lexus LC500 to Life Through the Magic of Unity by David Telfer, (Lexus), Joe DeMiero, and Carl Seibert from Lexus. How to Drive VR/AR Use Cases for Enterprises Using the Example of Volkswagen by Torben Volkwein from Volkswagen. Creating Powerful Mixed Reality Applications Across Auto by Jason Yim from Trigger Global for Nissan. Next Level Rendering Quality for Automotive by Arisa Scott  from Unity Unity Training Workshops Taster: Introduction to Automotive Design Visualization by Anuja Dharkar from Unity. Unity in Automotive - The Road Ahead by Tim McDonough and Ed Martin from Unity. Unity for Enterprise Unity and PiXYZ have also partnered to launch the enterprise-level Unity Industry Bundle. This bundle consists of PiXYZ products, training, and Unity Pro. It streamlines the data preparation and import of CAD data for creating real-time experiences in Unity. It provides services like design and engineering, AR/VR training, and the creation of high-impact customer experiences for both datacenters to individuals. Visit the Unity Automotive and Transportation website for the list of Unity’s entire solutions. Put your game face on! Unity 2018.1 is now available Unity plugins for augmented reality application development Unity 2D & 3D game kits simplify Unity game development for beginners

Barracuda Networks recently announced its new Cloud-Delivered Web Application Firewall service. This new service offers organizations various novel ways to manage, deploy and integrate application security into an application delivery stack. A WAF is a type of firewall purpose-built to help defend against application-layer threats and attacks. WAFs can be used to protect against known vulnerabilities in applications, such as input validation and SQL injection types of risks. Barracuda's WAF-as-a-Service application security is offered through a cloud service. It aims to simplify overall management and speed of deployments for customers. Barracuda also enables developers to use its WAF-as-a-Service for DevOps via an API. The WAF API allows developers to modify behavior of application traffic. Some features of the Cloud-Delivered Web Application Firewall service are: Secure Web applications: It delivers high level of protection via its synchronous integration with Barracuda's real-time threat intelligence network. The service defends against the OWASP Top 10, bots, DDoS, and other sophisticated attacks. For example, attacks that use XML or JSON, and even the most advanced zero-day threats. Automated vulnerability remediation and granular policy configuration: No extensive security expertise is required. This is because, the firewall service offers a simple 5-step setup wizard that starts protecting web applications in minutes. One can take full control and fine tune security policies for every application. One can even build baseline application security policies automatically with out-of-the-box automated vulnerability remediation, and pre-built templates for common applications such as WordPress and SharePoint and then take control and fine-tune as needed. Simplified cloud-delivered service: This new service is fast, with an intuitive UI. Now that one does not require any device to deploy or manage, it removes the complexity of WAF deployment. One can integrate security directly into the application development lifecycle as this solution is always available, and can reduce or eliminate the need to manually test code. To know more about this new Cloud-Delivered Web Application Firewall service visit Barracuda’s official blog post. Top 5 penetration testing tools for ethical hackers What is Digital Forensics? IoT Forensics: Security in an always connected world where things talk  

From its previous major release v0.22, the contributors of pandas release the next major version 0.23.0 with numerous new features, enhancements, lists of API changes and deprecations. This release adds pivotal support in performing custom types operations and extended support to arguments and conversion tasks.The upgraded version also power ups with performance improvements along with a large number of bug fixes. New feature highlights v0.23: Round-trippable JSON format with ‘table’ orient. Instantiation from dicts respects order for Python 3.6+. Dependent column arguments for assign. Merging/sorting on a combination of columns and index levels. Extending Pandas with custom types. Excluding unobserved categories from groupby. Changes to make output shape of DataFrame.apply consistent. Bug Fixes: Resolved bugs related to categorical operations like merge, index constructor, factorize. Bugs in numeric operations like Series constructor, Index multiplication, DataFrame flex arithmetic fixed. Other bugs related to Strings, indexing, Timezones, TimeDelta are also fixed in this version. Python’s pandas package provides developers with fast, flexible, and expressive data structures making it easy and intuitive to work with “relational” and “labeled” data. With its continuation release of feature-packed versions, pandas could soon become the most powerful and flexible open source data analysis and manipulation tool for your data science project. To know more about the API changes, deprecations and performance improvements, please read release documentation on Github. “Pandas is an effective tool to explore and analyze data”: An interview with Theodore Petrou Working with pandas DataFrames Up and Running with pandas

Fuse has announced two major new products in the app development space - Fuse Open, and Fuse App Engine, followed by a brand new business model, called as Apps-as-a-Service. First, they have open sourced their Fuse app development platform, called Fuse Open. Thus making the entire Fuse Platform, tooling and premium libraries available for free. Second, they have introduced the Fuse App Engine, combined with a new business model the Apps-as-a-service to provide existing SaaS and digital services with state-of-the-art native apps tailored to their specific needs. Fuse Open Fuse open makes it easy for students and beginner developers to create new mobile app prototypes. They can now build native mobile user interfaces using the UX Markup language, and JavaScript for adding the business logic. Among the tools and platforms that have been open sourced, include Fuse platform, Uno (the foundation of Fuse), Fuse Studio (the desktop design tool), premium code libraries, the documentation and the iOS and Android preview apps. The source code is hosted on GitHub under the MIT license. The company will continue to host the Fuse forums, documentation and Slack community. However, the forums and Slack community will transition to being managed by the community directly. Fuse App Engine + Apps-as-a-service With their new business model, Fuse aims to address one of the crucial limitations that exists in the app development space - misalignment between the people who need apps and the people who make them. With Apps as a Service, businesses and enterprises can have an app based on existing product or service, without having to develop them from scratch. This business model is fueled by the Fuse App Engine which connects with the backend, and hosts the data and logic for your mobile app. The mobile app consists of an App Model and an App. App Models are defined by adding a thin layer of semantic information to existing REST APIs. They can be configured into Apps with ease, giving each customer or use case the right amount of customization options. Visit the Fuse Blog for a comprehensive list of announcements. Android P new features: artificial intelligence, digital wellbeing, and simplicity Xamarin Forms 3, the popular cross-platform UI Toolkit, is here! Google’s Android Things, developer preview 8: First look

PyCon Conference 2018, held between May 9 -17 at Cleveland, United States, is one of the largest annual gatherings in the Python programming community. Every year features a range of important announcements and discussions, many of which could have a huge impact on the future of Python. This year featured discussions on everything from data science to cryptocurrencies. Let’s take a look at some of the highlights. Quantum Computing Quantum computers are turning into reality, 30 years after they were first theorized. Companies such as IBM, Google, Intel, and Microsoft have all jumped into the quantum computing pool by announcing their own quantum devices. Although Quantum computing is still at a very early stage, Python is slowly becoming a de facto language for programming quantum computers due to its vast ecosystem of libraries. Dr. Ravi Chityala, a Senior Engineer at Elekta Inc, gave an impressive talk on quantum computing while highlighting several caveats that distinguish a traditional and quantum computer. He also demonstrated how to program a quantum computer on stage with Python. Check out the complete presentation here. Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies Blockchain and cryptocurrencies are all the rage right now. Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin had attracted a lot of attention in the past one year, mostly from people who were trying to make a quick buck. But this trends seems to be settling down. People are shifting their focus to understanding the technology behind cryptocurrencies. This is where Blockchain comes into the picture. What’s important to developers and businesses is how Blockchain can be applied. The lack of knowledge about how Blockchain works is a barrier that stops many  people entering and exploring the blockchain and cryptocurrency world. The session “Getting Started with Blockchains and Cryptocurrencies in Python” at PyCon conducted by Amirali Sanatinia, aimed to solve this problem by helping them understand the nuts and bolts of Blockchain and embark their journey on this revolutionary technology. Django 2.0 Unchained Django is one of the most popular web development frameworks for Python. Last December the Django team released version 2 of the popular server-side framework. Since this was one of the major releases, it was no surprise that Django was a hot topic of discussion at PyCon 2018. Harry Percival, author of Test-Driven Development with Python, presented a couple of tutorials specifically for Python testers. His tutorial was an introduction to doing Test-Driven Development (TDD) with Django.He shed some light on how automated software testing has moved from being a niche interest to an important new way of thinking about how to optimise automation testing. Serverless Python Serverless is the latest phase in the evolution of cloud development; it has recently exploded in terms of popularity. Going serverless lets developers to focus on their core product instead of worrying about managing and operating servers or runtimes, either in the cloud or on-premises. This reduced overhead helps them to achieve the required scale without the overhead of running and managing the fleet of servers. Since Python is one of the few languages supported by AWS Lambda, developers can leverage it to build fast and cost-effective solutions. In PyCon 2018 we saw some exciting sessions which highlighted the latest developments in Serverless computing. James Saryerwinnie’s tutorial on Building serverless applications with AWS Chalice, sparked the interest of professional developers, while Michael Herman’s tutorial on Going Serverless with OpenFaaS, Kubernetes, and Python was explored how to build and deploy a full-stack application that uses Flask (client-facing app) along with OpenFaaS to handle background processes. While the list of sessions is long we can only cover so much. One of the most important reasons for the dominating success of Python’s popularity is it’s vibrant community and PyCon is a shining example of that. It truly symbolises how liked minded people come together and share the knowledge to make the software development world a better place to live. You can catch up on all the sessions, tutorials, and events at PyCon 2018 at their official website and their Youtube vlog. Should you move to Python 3? 7 Python experts’ opinions How to write high quality code in Python: 15+ tips for data scientists and researchers Why is Python so good for AI and Machine Learning? 5 Python Experts Explain