President Faure Assents to Nine Acts approved by the National Assembly – Office of the President of the Republic of Seychelles

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26 December 2019 | Legal Affairs

President Danny Faure assented to nine Acts that have recently been approved by the National Assembly during a ceremony held at State House this morning.

The Acts approved by the National Assembly were received on Monday 23 December 2019 and includes The Appropriation Act 2020, Supplementary Appropriation Act 2019, the Seychelles Pension Fund (Amendment) Act 2019, the International Trade Zone (Amendment) Act 2020, the Corporate Social Responsibility Tax (Amendment) act 2019, the Tourism Marketing Tax (Amendment) Act 2019, the Alcoholic Drinks Control Act 2019, the Lighting of Fires (Restriction) Act 2019 and Truth, Reconciliation and National Unity Commissions (Amendment) Act 2019.

The first was theAppropriation Act for 2020, which provides the budget for the running of Government in 2020. Cabinet approved the Appropriation Bill on 9th October 2019, and it has been passed by the National Assembly, with amendments on the 6th of December 2019. The total sum approved by the National Assembly is SCR 9,230,765,399.61.

The second Act is theSupplementary Appropriation Act 2019which amounts to SCR976,107,975.61 and provides for additional budget amounts proposed by Government in June 2018, October 2018 and December 2019.

Followed by theTruth, Reconciliation & National Unity (Amendment) Act 2019,which now specifies that the Truth, National Reconciliation & Unity Commission will now include only one non-Seychellois, and six other Commissioners. Previously it required two non-Seychellois and five Seychellois Commissioners. The Bill was approved by Cabinet on 27th November, and by the National Assembly on 11th December 2019.

TheSeychelles Pension Fund (Amendment) Act 2019sets a limit on the amount of money that the Seychelles Pension Fund may use for investments, and the value of assets that the SPF may dispose of, without prior approval of the Minister responsible for Finance. The Bill was approved by Cabinet on 27th November, and approved, with amendments, by the National Assembly on 11th December 2019.

TheLighting of Fires Bill 2019was approved by the Cabinet on 16th October 2019. This Act sets clear conditions under which open fires may be lit. It was approved by the National Assembly on 11th December 2019.

TheAlcoholic Drinks Control Act 2019was approved in principle by Cabinet on15thMay 2019. The Bill was aimed at limiting the hours of sale, and the conditions of sale, of alcohol to the public. There followed a series of consultations with stakeholders after which the Bill was gazetted on 3rdJune 2019. It was approved by the National Assembly on 12th December 2019.

TheCorporate Social Responsibility Tax (Amendment) Act 2019re-defines how the termisto be interpreted by businesses in the determination of CSR Tax. The Bill was approved by Cabinet in April, 2019, and by the National Assembly on 17th December 2019.

TheTourism Marketing Tax (Amendment) Act 2019,which also clarifies how business turnover will be determined in respect of Travel Agents and Destination Management Companies. The Bill was also approved by Cabinet in April 2019, and by the National Assembly on 18th December 2019.

Lastly, theInternational Trade Zone (Amendment) Act 2019amends the conditions of licence for SITZ companies. Cabinet approved the principles of this Act as far back as 9th December 2017, but this followed a series of consultations with stakeholders before final gazetting in December 2018. The Bill was approved by the National Assembly on 18th December 2019.

Present at State House for the signing, was the Minister for Health, Mr Jean-Paul Adam, Minister for Environment, Energy and Climate Change, Mr Wallace Cosgrow, the Attorney General, Mr Frank Ally, the Secretary of State Cabinet Affairs, Mr Mohammed Afif, Principal Secretary for Environment, Mr Alain DeCommarmond, Principal Secretary for Health, Dr Bernard Valentin and theCommissioner General of the Seychelles Revenue Commission, Ms Veronique Herminie.

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President Faure Assents to Nine Acts approved by the National Assembly - Office of the President of the Republic of Seychelles

5G In India To Propel AI-Driven IoT And Cloud Computing, Heres How – Inc42 Media

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5G increases the downloading and uploading speeds over the mobile network

IoT industry in India is expected to reach $9 Bn by 2020

A 2019 Ericsson report suggests that 5G will make inroads in India by 2022

With the Indian government planning to start 5G trials in the last quarter of the current fiscal, the talks regarding the new technology have become the new routine in the industry. Moreover, industry leaders have also started to believe that the early adoption of 5G will help India to become a global leader in cloud computing and internet-of-things (IoT).

Highlighting that 5G will bring revolutionary changes in tech enterprises, Balakrishnan Anantharaman, VP and MD of Sales, India and SAARC, Nutanix, told IANS that this new age technology will be the catalyst that will drive edge computing and IoT. As increased speed and bandwidth will reduce the gap between wifi and cellular devices, edge computing will come into a realm of its own, Anantharaman added.

5G or the fifth generation technology increases the downloading and uploading speeds over the mobile network. Moreover, by reducing latency, 5G offers a more stable network across connections.

According to a Nasscom report, the IoT industry in India is expected to reach $9 Bn by 2020. The applications of IoT are commonly found in telecom, health, automobiles, among other industries. Moreover, the report also predicts that the global IoT industry will touch the $300 Bn mark by 2020. While Indias share in this industry is very minuscule, the report suggested that India will have a 20% share of the IoT market in the next five years.

Sai Pratyush, additional vice president of product marketing-ICS at Tata Teleservices Limited (TTSL), said that the tech enterprise segment is turning to new-age technologies like IoT, artificial intelligence (AI), and cloud computing.

Focusing on the growth of IoT, Pratyush added that it is seen as a key driving force to improve operational efficiencies. AI coupled with ubiquitous connectivity is enabling exponential value being generated by IoT. AI is seeing large scale adoption by enterprises owing to its power to aid automation, speed and better decision making, Pratyush added.

With 5G becoming a reality, the technology is expected to push the innovation in other technologies as well. One of the use-cases of 5G which is expected to bring a substantial change in the IoT domain is AI-driven IoT technology.

According to Atish Gude, the chief strategy officer of NetApp, the advent of 5G is what AI-driven IoT has been waiting for. 2020 will see many players in the technology industry and business community invest in building edge-computing environments to support the reality of AI-driven IoT, Gude added.

In India, the road to 5G isnt clear yet. According to a 2019 Ericsson report, the 5G network will make inroads in India by 2022. However, to push the early adoption of 5G, the government has started to shift its focus to this new-age technology. Recently, IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad in the Rajya Sabha said that the centre is finalising the framework for 5G technologies.

Moreover, the government has also reiterated its focus on 5G spectrum auctions, including 5G airwaves that are scheduled to be held by March 2020.

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Cloud Computing in Europe: Market Opportunity and Competitive Analysis – Market Research Sheets

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Cloud Computingin Europe: Market Opportunity and Competitive Analysis, a new Telecom Insider Report by GlobalData, provides an executive-level overview of the cloud computing market in Europe. It delivers deep qualitative insight into the cloud market in the region, analyzing key trends on telcos cloud offers, business models to foster their position in the cloud space and case studies.

Driven by an increasing migration of enterprises to the hybrid cloud IaaS business model, and the growing adoption of IaaS solutions by small and medium businesses, the infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) market in Europe will grow at a 27% CAGR from 2018 to 2023, reaching approximately $47bn by the end of the forecast period, outpacing the SaaS segment from 2021.

Get Sample Copy Of This Report athttp://www.orbisresearch.com/contacts/request-sample/2320189

It provides in-depth analysis of the following

Section 1: Taxonomy and market context; a look at the cloud computing definition and an adoption framework. This section details the cloud computing market context in Europe, the cloud portfolio of select telcos in the region. Section 2: Cloud computing market opportunity in Europe; an analysis on the cloud computing market sizing and forecast by type cloud segment and competitive analysis. Section 3: Case studies; two case studies of leading cloud computing service providers in Europe are presented in this section, showcasing their growth strategy in the region. Section 4: Key findings and recommendations; the Insider concludes with a number of key findings and a set of recommendations for telecom operators.

Major Companies Mentioned:

AWSIBMMicrosoftGoogleSalesforceBTT-SystemsOBSAlibabaOrange PolandVmware

Scope

The Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) segment is the fastest growing market in the region with a CAGR of 27% over 2018-2023. Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) will be the second fastest growing market in the region with a CAGR of 26.6% over 2018-2023. With the growing adoption of IoT in mission critical business processes, the need to perform analysis of the data at the edge of the network is set to gain momentum. In 2018, the group of IBM, AWS, Microsoft, and Google will have a combined market share of 32%.

Reasons to buy

This Insider Report provides a five-year forecast of enterprise cloud computing services markets, developed using GlobalDatas rigorous bottom-up modeling methodologies, to enable executives to effectively position their companies for growth opportunities and emerging trends in demand for their products. Two case studies illustrate the findings of the report, providing insight into particular situations in the cloud computing market; this will help the reader understand both the challenges confronted in the real world and the strategies employed to overcome those challenges. The report discusses concrete opportunities in the cloud computing market, providing a number of actionable recommendations for telecom operators. The report is designed for an executive-level audience, to help to understand the cloud computing market, analyzing key trends on telcos cloud offers, business models to foster their position in the cloud space and case studies.

Make an Inquiry before[emailprotected]http://www.orbisresearch.com/contacts/enquiry-before-buying/2320189

About Us:

Orbis Research (orbisresearch.com) is a single point aid for all your market research requirements. We have vast database of reports from the leading publishers and authors across the globe. We specialize in delivering customized reports as per the requirements of our clients. We have complete information about our publishers and hence are sure about the accuracy of the industries and verticals of their specialization. This helps our clients to map their needs and we produce the perfect required market research study for our clients.

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Debunking the Myths Associated with Migrating to the Cloud & Cloud Visibility – Security Boulevard

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Gartner lists cloud computing as one of the top technology investments for the next five years, and the global public cloud computing market is set to reach $258 billion in 2019. The ability to access data from anywhere is the top reason for cloud adoption, with about a third of companies IT budgets going to cloud services.

However, many enterprises transitioning to an only cloud or hybrid cloud environment are unnecessarily hitting roadblocks on issues of security and privacy. There is a common misconception that organizations can fit old security practices into the new cloud environments and when they fail to do so, the cloud environment is blamed. In fact, the cloud is inherently secure if you follow best practices to secure it. In this blog we separate myth from reality when it comes to cloud adoption.

This is one of the most persistent myths about cloud security that just wont die.

The notion that an on-premise data center and its security is more robust than cloud security is fundamentally flawed. On the contrary, the cloud can be more secure than on-prem. However, this requires following the best practices made for the cloud, and leaving behind the checks and balances we had in the pre-cloud world.

Since the cloud is made up of software, it is much more malleable than the physical infrastructure. It can be updated, audited, and secured in a more complete way than was possible with the physical nature of the pre-cloud environment.

This malleability however, is a double-edged sword. The main problems facing cloud security are still security misconfigurations and human errors. It is these glitches and configuration errors that lead to the notion of an inherent insecurity of cloud buckets.

In a recent survey of cloud professionals, nearly 22 percent of respondents linked a data breach to compromised credentials. That is why Identity and Access Management (IAM) policy for cloud apps is one key area that must be prioritized in cloud adoption strategies.

Cloud is inherently safer by design, but only when the best practices of cloud adoption are followed to a T. When set up and maintained correctly, the cloud can be much more secure than on-prem environments.

The cloud is made up of physical servers. While cooling, power, fire suppression, physical security, and server maintenance are someone elses headache, aka, the cloud service providers, the need for backups is still your responsibility.

Bugs, human errors, cyberattacks that corrupt or damage data etc, require the possibility to revert back to a previous known sound version. This is something that youre responsible for, and the cloud provider wont do it for you. Setting up backups is something that you need to handle.

A cloud service provider can support you in your efforts to be secure and compliant. Still, its up to you and your organization to do everything necessary to meet regulatory and compliance requirements. That is why it is crucial to deploy continuous monitoring of both technical and non-technical cloud compliance requirements.

Your cloud provider is responsible for the security of the cloud, while you, as a customer, are responsible for security in the cloud.

The cloud vendor is responsible for managing the host Operating System (OS), the virtualization layer, and the physical security of its facilities. But it is up to the customer to ensure security within a given cloud environment.

Dont forget about your share of responsibilities. You are responsible for configuring and managing the security controls for the guest OS and other apps (including timely updates and security patches), as well as, setting up the access control. Additionally, you are responsible for encrypting data in-transit and at-rest.

One of the most pervasive myths is that data cant be audited as effectively in the cloud as it could be on physical servers. This simply isnt the case. As the CTO of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs states with proper tooling, you can conduct much better audits in a cloud-based environment.

To power up your audits, you need to combine training with tools. Spend time with personnel who conduct audits to see how their work is carried out. Then walk them through your companys tool capabilities and how to utilize these to alleviate some of their pain points.

When set up and maintained properly, cloud can be more secure compared to pre-cloud environments.

It is tempting to sign off and just let your cloud service provider handle everything in the cloud. Providers bring with them powerful capabilities and also take on some parts of the security, such as updating the physical layers, and virtualization layers. But properly conceived security wont be provided straight out of the box, and it never will be.

Your developers and DevOps teams are ultimately the ones who build the cloud environment. If they run wild and you dont have visibility and necessary controls in place, you wont be secure. However, if you handle the cloud the way it should be handled you will be secure. Its as simple as that.

Due to the intertwined and complex nature of cloud environments, the basic foundation of securing a cloud environment is gaining full-stack visibility into all its assets. This entails a complete understanding of what is happening in the entire cloud environment across all of its layers: the cloud infrastructure level, operating systems, applications, and data.

Orcas Cloud Visibility Platform was built for the cloud. Not only does it provide you with full-stack visibility, but it also makes audits easier when compared to pre-cloud environments.

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This Cloud Computing Stock Is Transforming the $1.2 Trillion Drug Industry – Money Morning

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By Stephen Mack, Associate Editor, Money Morning December 24, 2019

Cloud computing is one of the most profitable niches in the tech industry.

It's the primary driver of earnings growth for both Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) and Microsoft Inc. (NASDAQ: MSFT). Those stocks are up 53% and 81% in the past two years, respectively.

Some pure-play cloud computing stocks have performed even better

First Trust Cloud Computing ETF (NASDAQ: SKYY), which includes a broad range of companies in the cloud computing segment, has grown 106% over the last five years. That's double the gain of the S&P 500 in that time.

And Gartner Group estimated that $111 billion in IT spending shifted to the cloud in 2016. And that figure is expected to be $216 billion by 2020. That's a 95% jump in four years.

In other words, even an average pick in this space is likely to give you strong returns.

But we can do a lot better than average.

The cloud computing stock we're bringing you today doesn't just benefit from tech. It also taps into the $1.2 trillion pharmaceutical industry.

This is an industry that can be enormously profitable. EvaluatePharma expects 10 drugs launched this year will reach billion-dollar annual sales.

But it's also hit-or-miss. Only about one in 10 drugs in development make it to market, according to Biotechnology Innovation Organization.

Getting a drug to market typically takes about 12 years and $1 billion.

When you factor in all the failures, though, the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development found that the cost balloons to $2.5 billion.

No wonder prescription drug costs are through the roof.

That's where our cloud computing stock comes in.

This company specializes in providing Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions to the pharmaceutical and life sciences industries.

The result is increased efficiency and faster development times. In some cases, drug makers have more than doubled their productivity through cloud-based products.

In other words, more drugs are making it to market quicker at a lower cost.

But you don't need to be a patient to benefit from this productivity. If you pick up this cloud computing stock today, Money Morning Defense and Tech Specialist Michael Robinson says you could double your money in three years or less.

And that's a conservative estimate, he stresses.

Join the conversation. Click here to jump to comments

About the Author

Stephen Mack has been writing about economics and finance since 2011. He contributed material for the best-selling books Aftershock and The Aftershock Investor. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

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Protect the cloud with essential security training – Android Authority

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Cloud computing is already a huge industry, and its only going to become more essential in 2020 with new tech jobs being generated every day. If you want to ring in the New Year with some brand new tech skills, you can pick up the Essential Cloud Security Certification Bundle for just $39 with a new 2020 promo code.

You can dive into over 60 hours of content and pursue the area of cloud computing that most interests you. The whole learning kit is based on hands-on practice in cloud security, CCSP, CISSP, and AWS SysOps. The introduction to cybersecurity provides foundational knowledge to set up the rest of the modules, so its a perfect place to start.

The Essential Cloud Security Certification Bundle not only provides you with a certificate of completion, but it also helps you prepare for other certification exams in this industry. Youll gain experience deploying, managing, and operating scalable systems and master the skills to become a networksecurity professional.

The Essential Cloud Security Certification Bundle has a retail value of $2,000 but you can ring in the new year with massive savings. Use the promo code 20SAVE20 at the Tech Deals checkout to get all of the content for just $39.20.

This deal will only be around for a few more days so hit the widget below to check it out.

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Essential Cloud Security Certification Use offer code: 20SAVE20

Save $1960 .80

Is this deal not quite right for you? To see all our hottest deals, head over to the DEALS HUB.

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Microsoft Stock Is Floating on a Cloud – Investorplace.com

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If you look at a multiple-year chart of Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) stock, youll see a very pretty geometric shape known as a parabola. More accurately, youll only see the part of the parabola that goes vertically upwards, as the other side of the parabola (the one that goes down) is completely missing.

Source: VDB Photos / Shutterstock.com

Thats all fine and good, but does it make sense to buy Microsoft stock at this lofty price? If you want reasons I can give them to you, but the most compelling reason might be Microsofts progress in cloud computing; this alone could justify ignoring the sky-high MSFT stock price and taking a position anyway.

If youre looking for a company that will pose a threat in the cloud race, you wont find anything much better than Microsoft. In the first fiscal quarter of 2020, Microsofts Intelligent Cloud revenue advanced by 27%, with the Azure division expanding by an astonishing 59%. Thats quite an achievement considering the companys fourth-quarter cloud segment growth was 19% and its fiscal year 2019 cloud division growth was 21%.

You can feast your eyes on those encouraging stats, but its more important to appreciate how pivotal cloud computing will be in the coming years. Just as Microsoft was a desktop-computing pioneer in the 1980s and 1990s, the companys reminding stakeholders than an old dog can do new tricks as it continues to rivalAmazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) in the cloud-computing space.

How big is Microsofts footprint in this market? Put it this way: the companys Azure platform is currently being used in 54 global regions, while Amazons AWS could-computing platform is only being used in 25. Again, investors only need to look at the numbers and the choice is crystal clear.

The characters in the mob filmThe Godfather talked about how youre supposed to separate your business from your personal matters, but Amazon founder Jeff Bezos might have forgotten that lesson. At least, he seems to be taking it personally that the Pentagon awarded Microsoft a coveted $10 billion cloud computing contract.

The fact is, the Pentagon needed a provider with hybrid-cloud experience, and Microsoft trumps Amazon in that respect. Microsofts Azure platform allows for on-premise servers as well as pure cloud computing; during the Pentagons contract negotiations, surely the government took into consideration that Microsoft has a sizable head start in the hybrid-cloud space.

This head start has clearly paid off, as 95% of Fortune 500 companies are currently using the Azure platform. The flexibility of the hybrid approach is indubitably the differentiator here: as one Fortune 500 client observed, Microsoft didnt ask us to bend to their vision of a cloud.

As you may have already heard, there have been suggestions that the Pentagons choosing Microsoft was politically motivated. Theres no need to explore that here, but we can say with confidence that the storys not likely over. I fully expect Jeff Bezos to strike back against the government, Microsoft, and any other perceived antagonist.

Whether Microsoft won the Pentagon contract fair and square is immaterial for the time being, though; what matters to investors is that the companys miles ahead and will likely stay that way for the foreseeable future.

Your best strategy as an investor is to avoid the flashy headlines and the accusations and just stick to the facts. In this case, the facts are evident: MSFT stock had a strong year and the cloud had something to do with that. I expect another exciting and prosperous year to await Microsoft shareholders the share price is high, but the cloud can take it even higher.

As of this writing, David Moadel did not hold a position in any of the aforementioned securities.

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Can Google Ever Catch Amazon And Microsoft In The Cloud? – Benzinga

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Can Alphabet Inc.'s (NASDAQ: GOOGL) Google Cloud compete with the two industry giants? And if it cant, will it shift its focus elsewhere?

A report in The Information suggested Google is pushing to have its cloud computing services unit beat at least one of the big two in the space, Amazon.com Inc.'s (NASDAQ: AMZN)Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Corporation's(NASDAQ: MSFT)Azure cloud computing services, by 2023.

If it doesnt, the division could lose funding, the article, based on an unnamed sources account of a 2018 meeting, suggests. It's a suggestion Google denies.

"Reports of these conversations from 2018 are simply not accurate, Google said in a statement it sent to The Information after the piece ran.

Cloud services where businesses and organizations essentially rent the hosting company's computing infrastructure capacity rather than investing in their own is becoming huge business in a world increasingly reliant on enormous amounts of data, and where systems that are becoming increasingly interconnected.

Observers and analysts tend to think that while Google has been willing to kill off some services (remember Google Plus?), it seems unlikely it would move away from the increasingly essential and potentially very lucrative cloud services business, especially as the world transitions to 5G.

The worldwide cloud services market grew by nearly 40% in the third quarter of 2019.

"They will need to be in cloud," said Tigress Financial analyst Ivan Feinseth. "I dont think they get out of the cloud hosting business theyre doing very well in it."

Google has been touting the growth in its cloud business for several months, with Google executives noting, for example, on a July earnings call that the Google Cloud platform is one of Alphabet's fastest-growing businessesand the third-largest revenue driver for the company.

Data tracking firm Canalys reported in October that Amazon remains the dominant player in the space even as it is seeing its cloud growth slow a bit.

AWS has about 32% of the market share in cloud, while Microsoft's Azure is at about 17%. Google is a distant third at 7%.

But Google's cloud growth was about 70% in the September quarter to just under $2 billion, according to Canalys, edging it into the list of companies legitimately vying for front-runner status.

Google is investing heavily in that growth, which doesn't signal that it may be considering eventually pulling the plug, Feinseth said.

The analyst said in a November note to investors that cloud infrastructure and machine learning are likely to be the future drivers of the company's growth.

"Google continues to invest in the buildout of data centers, along with the hiring of salespeople and engineers, to support its cloud services platform," he said.

Canalys said that in addition to building new cloud data centers, Google's made "major investment in internal sales and partner resources."

The huge promise of, and need for, the cloud computing sector was highlighted most recently in a story that didn't involve Google, as Amazon lost out to Microsoft on a $10-billion, 10-year contract to runcloud computing for the Pentagon, a contract known as Jedi.

While Amazon's AWS, an early pioneer in cloud, has been the industry leader, Microsoft's win on the Pentagon contract instantly put it in the same category.

Amazondisagrees, alleging in a formal protest that the government gave the contract to Microsoft because President Donald Trump wanted "to screw Amazon" because he doesn't like CEO Jeff Bezos. Amazon's still the sales leader in the space.

Related Links:

Microsoft In The Clouds With Q1 Earnings Report On Continued Strong Azure Performance

Microsoft Could Win Next Phase Of Cloud Battle, Wedbush Says

View More Analyst Ratings for GOOG View the Latest Analyst Ratings

2019 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.

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2020 vision: Y-Soft print industry predictions – Gigabit Magazine – Technology News, Magazine and Website

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2019 has been a year of profound change as organisations across the globe have recognised the importance of digital transformation. As a result, more businesses have started experimenting and deploying new smart tools and workflow solutions which in return have enabled rapid information sharing, increased productivity and automation of some of the more mundane tasks. According to Y Soft Corporation, companies have recognised how Cloud has become a crucial part of their companys print IT strategy and this transformation is set to go even further with the advent of Edge computing disrupting the print sector.

In light of this transformation, Ross Penman, Head of Global Delivery Management at Y Soft, notes the following key predictions for the year ahead:

1. Cloud and Edge computing

While cloud adoption has been around for several years now, plenty of companies still struggle to move into the cloud completely because of old legacy technology and hardware. However, in a world of increased remote and flexible working, cloud adoption will not only help companies to improve their overall productivity, but it can also help companies to improve costs and risk management.

In the next 12 months more companies will see a cloud approach as a crucial part of their business strategy. By prioritising models such as Software-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service companies can begin to consume applications without having to invest in skills to build solutions themselves from the ground up. Following on from this, more companies will also begin exploring Edge computing as part of the print setup to solve issues that Cloud can introduce, such as latency and bandwidth costs, which can, in turn, impact productivity and efficiency.

2. Green credentials

Sustainable lifestyles have become increasingly important not only for individuals but for organisations no matter how large or small they might be. Green movements such as Extinction Rebellion have created a huge political movement that has made climate change more imperative. As a result, individuals hold organisations more accountable than ever before, not only for their consumption but also for their contribution to the environment. Organisations are expected to improve their green credentials and do more to achieve energy efficiency goals. For most companies, print IT will play a huge role in this and organisations are expected to report on elements such as how many trees are used to print as well as report on their water and energy consumption. As a result, more companies will adopt automated scan workflows, which transform paper-based work processes into digital workflows, helping companies to keep track of their consumption and be more productive, while focusing on their core everyday tasks.

3. Security and identity

While security has always played a crucial role for IT staff, the huge amount of high-profile data breaches in recent years have made businesses more security-conscious than ever before. As companies continue to adopt smarter and integrated workflow solutions, the security of the entire system must be considered as a whole. Unfortunately, too often the security of the print IT is overlooked. However, print hacks such as the PiewDiePie incident showed that organisations can never play it safe.

SEE ALSO:

Therefore, better collaboration between an enterprise solution provider, the MFD service provider and an organisations IT department is crucial. In addition, companies that adopt a good identity management will not only improve their overall security but will also simplify the complexity of managing multiple sets of credentials. This is especially important as more people within organisations adopt flexible and remote working.

4. Reseller and customer agility

Customers have recognised that having one integrated supplier across all their hardware and software solutions will not only reduce overall costs but also provide a smoother and much more integrated experience. It is important that resellers should look to make software that supports this demand and integrate with key manufacturers in the tech space. In addition, resellers should harness new technologies to refurbish old legacy technology rather than try to completely replace them.

5. Artificial intelligence

While many predicted at the beginning of 2019 that artificial intelligence and robotics would eliminate a huge number of jobs by 2020, there is now a consensus that the increased efficiencies delivered through these technologies could actually result in more jobs. In the next 12 months, more companies will experiment with AI and robotics to run security and quality assurance tests on software and hardware solutions. This in return will help companies to detect security attacks, programme mistakes, and viruses much more quickly in addition to providing higher quality products and services.

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Amazon’s second act, Microsoft’s revival and red-hot IPOs highlighted the decade of the cloud – CNBC

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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff in 2014.

Source: Microsoft

The 2010s were the decade where companies got serious about moving everything to the cloud.

Dropbox and Slack became household names, Salesforce gained enterprise ubiquity, and Microsoft and Adobe revitalized their businesses by shifting from packaged software to cloud-based subscriptions, lifting their stock prices to record highs.

Formerly a side project, Amazon Web Services now generates $35 billion in annual revenue by allowing clients to offload their storage and computing needs to a third party, while ServiceNow, whose technology helps IT managers improve productivity, joined the S&P 500 last month after its market cap topped $50 billion.

In the past, companies, schools and government agencies operated their own data centers and bought expensive licenses to use software on their equipment, adding in hefty maintenance and update fees. The cloud changed all that, switching the applications that employees use every day as well as all the underlying databases, servers and communications equipment into services that can be delivered remotely to a host of devices over powerful networks. Customer service was upgraded, with a focus on user feedback, to keep clients from quitting their subscriptions and moving to rivals.

For investors, the paradigm shift presented an opportunity to put money into older companies positioned to make the transition, as well as a whole new crop of start-ups poised to take market share from the legacy providers. Slack, Twilio, Zoom and Okta were all founded in 2008 or later and are each now valued at over $10 billion on the public market. A bunch more are in the $5 billion range, and more still are filling up the IPO pipeline for 2020 and beyond.

Brad Gerstner, founder of Altimeter Capital, counts Salesforce as one of his top holdings and was a venture investor in Okta and Twilio. In a TV interview this month alongside Okta co-founder Frederic Kerrest, Gerstner told CNBC that the big bet has paid off.

"It really comes down to something that we talked about nearly a decade ago," said Gerstner, whose firm oversees more than $5 billion in assets, referring to his initial conversations with Okta. "We have a once in probably our lifetime rearchitecture of the entire enterprise stack into the cloud."

According to Synergy Research, 2019 revenue from enterprise software-as-a-service (SaaS) will exceed $100 billion, up from less than $4 billion in 2009. Adding up all layers of the stack, from the underlying infrastructure to the applications, IT service firm Gartner says cloud revenue will end the year at $214.3 billion, jumping to $331.2 billion by 2022.

In a $3.7 trillion global IT market with low single-digit expansion, annual cloud growth of greater than 15% is leading investors to bid up the cloud standouts in both the public and private markets.

If you're looking for the poster child of the cloud evolution, you may find it on the outskirts of Seattle.

In 2014, facing sluggish growth and disappointing investor returns, Microsoft turned to Satya Nadella to succeed Steve Ballmer as CEO, the first change at the top in 14 years. Nadella, who had previously run Microsoft's cloud and enterprise group, told employees on day one of his tenure, "Our job is to ensure that Microsoft thrives in a mobile and cloud-first world."

Weeks later Nadella announced that Office apps were coming to Apple iPads, giving customers more flexibility and showing that it was a new day at Microsoft. Office 365, the cloud version of Microsoft's flagship product, was launched in 2011, but the Apple integration was critical in bringing Word, Excel, PowerPoint and SharePoint to people who were choosing a competitor's hardware.

By 2017, commercial revenue for Office 365 had exceeded Office license revenue.

"I think the biggest event of the decade was Microsoft launching Office 365," said Todd McKinnon, CEO and co-founder of Okta who previously spent five years at Salesforce. "It was very clear that the largest software company in the world is saying, 'Cloud is good, Cloud will work, Cloud is sanctioned.' It changed the mindset of the IT industry."

Okta Conference hosts Facebook VP of Platform Partnerships Sean Ryan, Slack VP of Product April Underwood, Okta CEO Todd McKinnon, Box CEO Aaron Levie Zoom, and CEO Eric Yuan and moderator Brad Stone

Source: Harriet Taylor

McKinnon saw the movement firsthand. His company provides identity management software so businesses can securely control all of the cloud applications that employees are using.

"Companies of every size and every industry that we'd been having conversations with for years came back to us and said, 'This is real, this is happening, we need a real identity story,'" McKinnon said.

Meanwhile, Microsoft was also building Azure, its cloud infrastructure service that would eventually become the clear No. 2 to AWS, attracting as customers large retailers, health-care providers, banks and the U.S. Department of Defense along the way. Microsoft doesn't disclose Azure revenue, but it does report growth, which reached 59% in the third quarter.

Since the end of 2009, Microsoft's stock has jumped 417%, beating the S&P 500's 189% gain. This year it became the third company to reach a $1 trillion market capitalization.

Amazon isn't far behind at $889 billion, as of Monday's close. Much of Amazon's 1,233% stock surge over the last decade can be attributed to AWS, which in the latest quarter accounted for 71% of its parent company's operating income and 13% of revenue. Analysts at Jefferies said in a November report that AWS could be worth about 40% of the company's market cap, and the unit has gotten so big that it's now reportedly attracting antitrust scrutiny.

Salesforce, the company most synonymous with SaaS, has also taken advantage of investments made by the infrastructure players. In 2016, Salesforce said it would use AWS to expand its Sales Cloud and Service Cloud internationally and has since announced plans to use some services from Google and Microsoft's cloud.

While Salesforce is the biggest company that was born in the cloud, Adobe is the largest software maker to transition the majority of its business to the new model. Investors have rewarded the company, pushing the stock up ninefold since the beginning of the decade.

In 2009, subscriptions represented 3% of revenue. Two years later, Adobe introduced Creative Cloud, ushering in monthly and annual plans for access to apps like PhotoShop, along with cloud storage. Now, subscriptions account for about 90% of sales, and the company is growing at rates not seen since 1991.

"What we were able to do in terms of moving to this new way of delivering software was unshackle our product teams from the burdens of delivering products every 12 or 18 months and they could deliver at the pace at which they could innovate," CEO Shantanu Narayen said at Adobe's financial analyst meeting in November. "We were able to attract new customers to the platform, we were able to price these products globally differently."

Autodesk was founded in 1982, just like Adobe. It's undertaken a similar endeavor, moving its popular design and architecture software to the cloud. Carl Bass, Autodesk's CEO from 2006 to 2017, said in 2013 that the company "can get pretty close to subscriptions being the vast majority of our business."

He was proven right. In the most recent quarter, subscriptions accounted for 85% of sales, pushing total revenue up 28% from a year earlier. The stock has gained 620% since the end of 2009.

As Microsoft, Adobe and Autodesk were revamping their businesses, new venture-backed SaaS vendors were popping up by the month, unbundling the old software suites with targeted applications and solutions. The attrition rate has been high, but there are notable successes.

Videoconferencing company Zoom, which went public this year, reported revenue growth of 85% in the most recent quarter to $166.6 million. Twilio, a provider of communications infrastructure that went public in 2016, generated growth of 75% to $295.1 million in the third quarter. Newly public companies Elastic, Smartsheet and Coupa each reported growth in excess of 50%.

They're among the top performers in the BVP Nasdaq Emerging Cloud Index, a group of public companies that get most of their revenue from cloud products and services. Venture capital firm Bessemer Venture Partners launched the index in 2013 to bring more attention to cloud companies and provide metrics so private cloud companies could better understand public markets.

The index has risen 458% since it was formed, topping the Nasdaq's 146% jump over that stretch. In September, asset manager WisdomTree launched the WisdomTree Cloud Computing Fund, making it possible for people to bet on the group.

"We'd get tweets every week of, 'How can I trade this? How can I trade this?'" said Byron Deeter, who invests in cloud at Bessemer and sits on Twilio's board.

Rob Bernshteyn, CEO of Coupa, has been tracking cloud software since its infancy. While working at Siebel Systems in the early 2000s, he met Salesforce co-founder Marc Benioff and was skeptical of whether the company could provide cloud-based technology for many different purposes without extensive customization, even though Salesforce was already winning deals against Siebel.

"It wasn't really definitively clear to me that it could really work," Bernshteyn said in an interview at Coupa's Silicon Valley headquarters, where the server closets are filled with beanbags that employees use as chairs.

Over time, Bernshteyn said Salesforce fixed its technical issues. He considered joining the company but went to a younger cloud software provider called SuccessFactors, which was later acquired by SAP.

Bernshteyn left in 2009, in the middle of the financial crisis, and joined a small start-up that was helping companies track their spending to make sure they weren't being fleeced by vendors. That company, Coupa, is now worth over $9 billion and generating revenue of over $100 million a quarter.

But not all cloud stocks have delivered for investors.

Dropbox is 15% below its IPO price from 2018. Growth at the one-time venture darling has slowed amid competition from Google and Microsoft in the cloud storage and collaboration market.

Business intelligence software company Domo is up just 10% from its IPO in mid-2018 and way below where it was valued in the private markets before the offering. Yext, whose service helps businesses keep information like their addresses and hours up to date on Google and Amazon Alexa, is up 32% since its debut in 2017, underperforming the major indexes.

At 22% and 30% sales growth, respectively, Domo and Yext are expanding at a slower pace than many of their cloud counterparts, while still racking up big losses. It's a tough recipe for investors.

Yext CEO Howard Lerman is bullish on the broader sector. "Obviously at some point over the next decade, spending on cloud software will surpass licensed software," he said.

For venture investors, there's also plenty of money still to be made, assuming the public markets are on board. Deeter of Bessmer Ventures said there are 66 private cloud companies worth more than $1 billion.

"That's your future IPO pipeline," he said. "You're going to see this cloud index explode."

WATCH: Coupa CEO says there is a $50 billion addressable market in cloud expense management

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Amazon's second act, Microsoft's revival and red-hot IPOs highlighted the decade of the cloud - CNBC

Extending the Circle of Trust with Confidential Computing – Infosecurity Magazine

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The benefits of operational efficiency and flexibility delivered by public cloud resources have encouraged todays organizations to migrate applications and data to external computing platforms located outside the perceived security of on-premises infrastructures. Many businesses are now adopting a cloud-first design approach that emphasizes elastic scalability and cost reduction above ownership and management, and, in some cases, security.

Analyzing global trends in public cloud services, Gartner has predicted that spending on these resources will increase from $182.4B in 2018 to $331.2B in 2022, with 30 percent of all new software investments being cloud native by the end of 2019.

Trusting Someone Else to Guard Your Secrets

The benefits of third-party infrastructure and applications, however, come with risks. Deploying sensitive applications and data on computing platforms that are outside of an organizations owned and managed infrastructure requires trust in the service providers hardware and software used to process, and ultimately protect, that data.

Trusting a cloud provider can be disastrous for an organization financially and reputation-wise if they are the subject of a successful cyber-attack. In its Ninth Annual Cost of Cybercrime Study, Accenture reported that in 2018 the average cost of cyber-attacks involving either a malicious insider or the execution of malicious code was $3M per year, according to participants.

Confidential Computing

One response to the problem of the trustworthiness of the cloud when it comes to data protection has been the emergence of the Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), which has led to the concept of confidential computing. Industry leaders joined together to form the Confidential Computing Consortium (CCC) in October.

The Confidential Computing Consortium looks to address the security issues around data in use, enabling encrypted data to be processed in memory without exposing it to the rest of the system. This is the first industry-wide initiative by industry leaders to address data in use, since todays encryption security approaches mostly focus on data at rest or data in transit. The work of the Confidential Computing Consortium is especially important as companies move more workloads to multiple environments, including on premises, public cloud, hybrid, and edge environments.

Secure Enclaves

One of the most important technologies for addressing the problem of protecting data in use can be found in the form of secure enclaves, such as the protected memory regions established by Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX). Secure enclaves allow applications to execute securely and be enforced at the hardware level by the CPU itself. All data is encrypted in memory and decrypted only while being used inside the CPU: the data remains completely protected, even if the operating system, hypervisor or root user is compromised. With secure enclaves, data can be fully protected across its entire lifecycle at rest, in motion and in use for the first time.

Secure enclaves can offer further security benefits using a process called attestation to verify that the CPU is genuine, and that the deployed application is the correct one and hasnt been altered.

Operating in secure enclaves with attestation gives users complete confidence that code is running as intended and that data is completely protected during processing. This approach is gaining traction, for example it enables sensitive applications, including data analytics, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence, to run safely in the cloud with regulatory compliance.

Runtime Encryption

Encryption is a proven approach for effective data security, particularly when protecting data at rest and data in motion. However, as discussed above, a key requirement for confidential computing, and the focus of the Confidential Computing Consortium, is protecting data in use. When an application starts to run, its data is vulnerable to a variety of attacks, including malicious insiders, root users, credential compromise, OS zero-day, and network intruders.

Runtime encryption provides deterministic security with hardware-aided memory encryption for applications to protect data in use. Through optimization of the Trusted Computing Base (TCB), it enables encrypted data to be processed in memory without exposing it to the rest of the system.

This reduces the risks to sensitive data and provides greater control and transparency for users. Runtime encryption provides complete cryptographic protection for applications by running them securely inside a TEE and defending them even from root users and physical access to the server.

Expanding the Circle of Trust

The number one concern cited by enterprises in their move to the cloud continues to be security. Confidential computing and protecting data in use gives sensitive applications a safe place that protects them from todays infrastructure attacks.

Confidential computing is critical for protecting cloud data, and it is fundamentally helping establish and expand the circle of trust in cloud computing. It creates isolated runtime environments that allow execution of sensitive applications in a protected state, keeping cloud apps and data completely secure when in use.

With secure enclaves and runtime encryption supporting confidential computing, customers know that, no matter what happens, their data remains cryptographically protected. No amount of zero-day attacks, infrastructure compromises, and even government subpoenas can compromise the data. Confidential computing expands the deterministic security needed for the most sensitive cloud applications, at the performance level demanded by modern Internet-scale applications.

A Secure Cloud Future

As Gartner has reported, businesses are migrating their sensitive data and applications to public cloud services, a practice that saves them from ownership and maintenance of infrastructure that will inevitably be obsolete in the future.

Leading technology providers have recognized that confidential computing provides a security model ready to address the problems of untrusted hardware and software that have hampered this transition to the cloud.

With a growing number of use cases, and interest and deployments surging, confidential computing environments will be relied on to protect data in growing areas such as industry 4.0, digital health, the Internet of Things (IoT), and federated machine learning systems.

As the Confidential Computing Consortium continues its work, individuals and businesses may at some point expect a confidential computing architecture as a prerequisite for the exchange and processing of our private data.

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Extending the Circle of Trust with Confidential Computing - Infosecurity Magazine

Cloud Computing Service Market Structure, Industry Inspection, and Forecast 2025 – Info Street Wire

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The research study provided by UpMarketResearch on Global Cloud Computing Service Industry offers strategic assessment of the Cloud Computing Service market. The industry report focuses on the growth opportunities, which will help the market to expand operations in the existing markets.Next, in this report, you will find the competitive scenario of the major market players focusing on their sales revenue, customer demands, company profile, import/export scenario, business strategies that will help the emerging market segments in making major business decisions. The Global Cloud Computing Service Market contains the ability to become one of the most lucrative industries as factors related to this market such as raw material affluence, financial stability, technological development, trading policies, and increasing demand are boosting the market growth. Therefore, the market is expected to see higher growth in the near future and greater CAGR during the forecast period from 2019 to 2026.

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Major Players included in this report are as follows AmazonSalesforce.comVMwareSavvisRackspaceIBMDellCiscoDell EMCOracleNetSuiteMicrosoft

Cloud Computing Service Market can be segmented into Product Types as Software-as-a-ServicePlatform-as-a-ServiceInfrastructure-as-a-Service

Cloud Computing Service Market can be segmented into Applications as Private CloudsPublic CloudsHybrid Clouds

Cloud Computing Service Market: Regional analysis includes:Asia-Pacific (Vietnam, China, Malaysia, Japan, Philippines, Korea, Thailand, India, Indonesia, and Australia)Europe (Turkey, Germany, Russia UK, Italy, France, etc.)North America (United States, Mexico, and Canada.)South America (Brazil etc.)The Middle East and Africa (GCC Countries and Egypt.)

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The Cloud Computing Service report regulates a complete analysis of the parent market including dependent and independent sectors. The report provides strategic recommendations with the senior analysts consultation that gives a clear perspective to clients as to which strategy will help them best to penetrate a market. Further, the report sheds light on the raw material sources, organizational structure, production processes, capacity utilization, value chain, pricing structure, technologies, equipment, product specifications distribution channel, and serving segments. It demonstrates graphical information with figures and pictures for elucidation.

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Key Highlights of This Report: The report covers Cloud Computing Service applications, market dynamics, and the study of emerging and existing market segments. It portrays market overview, product classification, applications, and market volume forecast from 2019-2026. It provides analysis on the industry chain scenario, key market players, market volume, upstream raw material details, production cost, and marketing channels. The growth opportunities, limitations to the market growth are identified using the SWOT analysis It conducts the feasibility study, explores the industry barriers, data sources and provides key research findings The report delivers analysis on consumption volume, region-wise import/export analysis and forecast market from 2019-2026.

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About UpMarketResearch:Up Market Research (https://www.upmarketresearch.com) is a leading distributor of market research report with more than 800+ global clients. As a market research company, we take pride in equipping our clients with insights and data that holds the power to truly make a difference to their business. Our mission is singular and well-defined we want to help our clients envisage their business environment so that they are able to make informed, strategic and therefore successful decisions for themselves.

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Cloud Computing Service Market Structure, Industry Inspection, and Forecast 2025 - Info Street Wire

The true value of cloud-based AI isnt what you think – InfoWorld

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Artificial intelligence is one of those concepts that was hot in the 80s, kind of went away, and now is red hot. Most point to AIs new features and functions to explain its growing popularity, but its actually because public cloud computing has made it affordable. For a few hundred bucks a month you can have some pretty heavy-duty AI systems in place that would have cost millions 10 to 15 years ago.

However, integrating AI with applications, such as banking, medical, manufacturing, and other systems, is actually not where were finding the value of cloud-based AI. Its perhaps the most misunderstood aspect of the value of AInow, as well as in the future.

Im talking about AI engines integrated with cloud-based and cloud-oriented management, monitoring, and self-healing services that now take advantage of AI and machine learning.

Those who sell AIops tools these days, especially where AI powers cloudops systems, understand this. Those who buy cloud-based technology, and currently are transferring core systems to public clouds, often dont. Thus, the end-state cloudops systems and processes are not as valuable as they could be. Whats missing is AI and machine learning.

The points of value are clear to me, including:

The capability of self-healing. AI-based cloudops are capable of learning how things are fixed through matching problem patterns with solution patterns over time. After a while, they can do so automatically and better than humans can. This type of automation removes people from having to fix ongoing minor and major issues and increases reliability. As the cloudops knowledge engines become more experienced they get much better over time.

Better defense of cloud-based data and applications. Security and AI have long been two concepts related to each other in theory, but often not understood by either AI or security experts. Indeed, AI can allow secops systems to become proactive and learn as they go what constitutes a breach attempt, and how to defend against it.

Opportunities for sharing knowledge. An operationally oriented AI system has a great deal of value but has to learn things over time, which is fundamental to cognitive computing. What if knowledge could be shared in real time? In essence youd have a smart ops system from day one, benefiting from collective learning and knowledge. This is going to be a larger push in the near future.

The reality is that AI is one of those things that we tend to glamorize. Although we think of science fiction depictions of AI systems, their daily value is more pragmatic and less dramatic.

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The true value of cloud-based AI isnt what you think - InfoWorld

If I have no hope for the planet, why am I so determined to have this baby? – The Guardian

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Sitting, nauseous with morning sickness, on a park bench in the bright heat of an unusually hot spring day my partner and I watch children march past us, striking from school:

Whats the point of an education if we have no future, their signs say.

My heart relocates itself, sinking down somewhere around my ankles. They have 10 more years of habitable planet than the baby I am carrying.

In early summer of the same year, after a miscarriage, I find myself pregnant again in the week that megafires tear through the state. There are 70-metre flames producing their own weather systems, driving them further on across the countryside, through the bushland that relies on fire to stimulate new life, on to forests that have never before burnt.

The sky over our Canberra home is tinged orange, the air is thick and sticks in the back of your throat in such a way that no coughing seems to dislodge the sensation. The whole country is suffocating. We havent seen the sky in a month.

Outside, the particle count is only 200 PM2.5 today. Yesterday it was 700, more than double the highest warning of hazardous. Two months ago wed never looked at fine particle readings. We didnt know the difference between a 10-micrometre particle that can be filtered out by your respiratory system, and one smaller than 2.5 micrometres, that will find its way right into your bloodstream.

I wonder if my child will ever have the innocence I had two months ago, of not having to think about whether the air will kill you.

Locked in my house, waiting for a high-grade pollution mask to arrive by post, I press my nose up against the glass doors, looking at where my front fence should be. So this is what its like to have a baby at the end of the world.

**

Theres always a leap of faith in choosing to have a child. Will they be healthy? Can you provide for them? Will you be a good parent? Will you even know how to be a parent? We have to suspend our own disbelief in ourselves. We Can Do This. I Can Do This.

There are times in history where that leap has been more existential.

I can only imagine that women anxiously questioned What world will be left for my child? during the cold war. During epidemics. During genocide. And I presume they continued because, despite the terror, they still had hope. Hope that the atrocities of humanity, the threat of disease, would quiet. Hope that their child would be one of the lucky ones.

How different is this existential leap to the one women must take now? To quiet their minds as the world burns? In some ways the threat is both more abstract and more overwhelming.

War is an immediate threat to life. But war can stop as abruptly as it starts.

Climate collapse is less immediate there is, at least presently and for most of us, no imminent loss of life. But, unlike war, it cannot be stopped. Perhaps it can be slowed. Maybe a little of the damage already done could be mitigated. But as my climate researcher friend explained to me this year: Theres an analogy we use to explain climate change to students. We say: its like traffic. Youre not in traffic, you are traffic.

**

I lost two babies in 2019. With each loss, I both grieved and felt something lift from my chest. What is that lifting? I searched. Why is there the smallest touch of relief each time this happens? I dug.

Guilt was the answer. It was guilt sitting on my chest while I was pregnant, that sits there now while I write pregnant again.

Guilt for creating another human that has to live on this planet. Guilt for my unborn child that they will not live the kind of comfortable life that I have. That the things that we know we can pass on to protect our children from suffering, that previous generations have sought to pass on, will do little. Education, wisdom, wealth are useless when there is no air.

When I expressed this guilt, or rather its dispersion, after I lost babies friends would say, Dont feel climate guilt. We need a smart, informed generation if were going to get out of this. Or, Its kids like yours, like mine, that are going to change things. In these comments I see the hope they are reaching for, the way they quiet their mind when they worry what world will be left for my child? as countless women before them have.

I envy them that hope. Maybe, it will become the straw I too cling to when I finally do bring a child into this world. I nod as they talk perhaps more to themselves than to me and stop words leaving my lips: Thinking your child will be part of the solution, not the problem, is hubris. We are the collapse. Our children are the collapse.

**

Why, you might ask, if I think my child could be part of the solution is merely self-soothing hubris, do I keep getting pregnant? Why if I have no hope like my friends am I so determined that Ive now become pregnant for the third time in a year?

There are two answers to this. One is that I hope the hope will come.

The other is that in choosing between the sadness of living a childfree existence because I do not believe the Earth can survive us, and the sadness of having a child whose future may be limited I choose the latter. When I weigh them up, hold each in my mind and my hands and see which is heavier, I decide time and again that the latter is a sadness I can more easily carry.

I think of my child, of the relationship I will have with them and the world we will live in, like the time my mother was terminally ill.

When my mother had cancer there was 12 months between her diagnosis and her death. I knew she would die. But knowing that didnt mean I didnt spend time with her. Didnt laugh with her. Find joy and beauty in our relationship. Enjoy the experiences we could have, while we had time. And so it is, we must reach for the pieces of beauty the world still offers us. The clear blue sky when we have it. A child watching a bee feeding in the garden. The sounds of a flock of native birds passing overhead. We, my child-to-be and I, will visit the world on its deathbed.

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If I have no hope for the planet, why am I so determined to have this baby? - The Guardian

Neurotechnology Market Trends, Key Players, Overview, Competitive Breakdown and Regional Forecast by 2025 – Filmi Baba

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Neurotechnology Market research report 2019 gives detailed information of major players like manufacturers, suppliers, distributors, traders, customers, investors and etc. Neurotechnology market Report presents a professional and deep analysis on the present state of Neurotechnology Market that Includes major types, major applications, Data type include capacity, production, market share, price, revenue, cost, gross, gross margin, growth rate, consumption, import, export and etc. Industry chain, manufacturing process, cost structure, marketing channel are also analyzed in this report.The growth trajectory of the Global Neurotechnology Market over the assessment period is shaped by several prevalent and emerging regional and global trends, a granular assessment of which is offered in the report. The study on analyzing the global Neurotechnology Market dynamics takes a critical look at the business regulatory framework, technological advances in associated industries, and the strategic avenues.

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Prominent Manufacturers in Neurotechnology Market includes General ElectricSiemens HealthcareKoninklijke PhilipsToshiba MedicalShimadzuHitachi MedicalElektaTristan TechnologiesAllengers MedicalNatus MedicalMagstim

Market Segment by Product Types Imaging ModalitiesNeurostimulationCranial Surface MeasurementNeurological ImplantsOthers

Market Segment by Applications/End Users HospitalsClinicsDiagnostic CentersAmbulatory Surgical Centers

In order to identify growth opportunities in the market, the report has been segmented into regions that are growing faster than the overall market. These regions have been potholed against the areas that have been showing a slower growth rate than the market over the global. Each geographic segment of the Neurotechnology market has been independently surveyed along with pricing, distribution and demand data for geographic market notably: North America (United States, Canada and Mexico), Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia and Italy), Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia), South America (Brazil, Argentina, Colombia etc.), Middle East and Africa (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa).

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Additionally, the complete value chain and downstream and upstream essentials are scrutinized in this report. Essential trends like globalization, growth progress boost fragmentation regulation & ecological concerns. Factors in relation to products like the products prototype, manufacturing method, and R&D development stage are well-explained in the global Neurotechnology market research report with point-to-point structure and with flowcharts. It offers a comparative study between conventional and emerging technologies and the importance of technical developments in this market. At last, the market landscape and its growth prospects over the coming years have been added in the research.

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The Questions Answered by Neurotechnology Market Report: What are the Key Manufacturers, raw material suppliers, equipment suppliers, end users, traders and distributors in Neurotechnology Market? What are Growth factors influencing Neurotechnology Market Growth? What are production processes, major issues, and solutions to mitigate the development risk? What is the Contribution from Regional Manufacturers? What are the Neurotechnology Market opportunities and threats faced by the vendors in the global Neurotechnology Industry? What are the Key Market segments, market potential, influential trends, and the challenges that the market is facing?And Many More

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Neurotechnology Market Trends, Key Players, Overview, Competitive Breakdown and Regional Forecast by 2025 - Filmi Baba

Parents Pay Thousands for Brain Training to Help Kids With ADHD and Autism. But Does It Work? – NBC Southern California

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There is a fast-growing industry thats based on the premise that targeted games and exercises can rewire the brain to boost memory, sharpen thinking or decrease the challenges associated with anxiety, autism, ADHD and other disorders, NBC News reports. Brick-and-mortar training centers like Brain Balance Achievement Centers and LearningRx are just one piece of a $2 billion global brain technology market that is increasingly going around the medical industry and marketing directly to consumers.

But the premise behind the programs has faced significant criticism from doctors and scientists who warn that some are making dubious claims. These personalized programs can cost $12,000 or more for six months of training, three days a week. Families have gone into debt or turned tocrowdfunding sitesto pay for them.

Theyre selling hope, said Eric Rossen, the director of professional development and standards for the National Association of School Psychologists. These organizations are not necessarily predatory, but they are definitely there and almost chasing the parents who are desperate, who are overwhelmed and who feel that they have no recourse.

News from around the country and around the globe

As the number of children diagnosed withADHDandautismsurges in the U.S., according to federal data, and as parents become exasperated with treatments that dont work or involve medications that carry the risk of side effects, neurotechnology industry analysts predict the demand for programs like these will only grow.

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Parents Pay Thousands for Brain Training to Help Kids With ADHD and Autism. But Does It Work? - NBC Southern California

Letter to the Editor: Historians Critique The 1619 Project, and We Respond – The New York Times

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The work of various historians, among them David Waldstreicher and Alfred W. and Ruth G. Blumrosen, supports the contention that uneasiness among slaveholders in the colonies about growing antislavery sentiment in Britain and increasing imperial regulation helped motivate the Revolution. One main episode that these and other historians refer to is the landmark 1772 decision of the British high court in Somerset v. Stewart. The case concerned a British customs agent named Charles Stewart who bought an enslaved man named Somerset and took him to England, where he briefly escaped. Stewart captured Somerset and planned to sell him and ship him to Jamaica, only for the chief justice, Lord Mansfield, to declare this unlawful, because chattel slavery was not supported by English common law.

It is true, as Professor Wilentz has noted elsewhere, that the Somerset decision did not legally threaten slavery in the colonies, but the ruling caused a sensation nonetheless. Numerous colonial newspapers covered it and warned of the tyranny it represented. Multiple historians have pointed out that in part because of the Somerset case, slavery joined other issues in helping to gradually drive apart the patriots and their colonial governments. The British often tried to undermine the patriots by mocking their hypocrisy in fighting for liberty while keeping Africans in bondage, and colonial officials repeatedly encouraged enslaved people to seek freedom by fleeing to British lines. For their part, large numbers of the enslaved came to see the struggle as one between freedom and continued subjugation. As Waldstreicher writes, The black-British alliance decisively pushed planters in these [Southern] states toward independence.

The culmination of this was the Dunmore Proclamation, issued in late 1775 by the colonial governor of Virginia, which offered freedom to any enslaved person who fled his plantation and joined the British Army. A member of South Carolinas delegation to the Continental Congress wrote that this act did more to sever the ties between Britain and its colonies than any other expedient which could possibly have been thought of. The historian Jill Lepore writes in her recent book, These Truths: A History of the United States, Not the taxes and the tea, not the shots at Lexington and Concord, not the siege of Boston; rather, it was this act, Dunmores offer of freedom to slaves, that tipped the scales in favor of American independence. And yet how many contemporary Americans have ever even heard of it? Enslaved people at the time certainly knew about it. During the Revolution, thousands sought freedom by taking refuge with British forces.

As for the question of Lincolns attitudes on black equality, the letter writers imply that Hannah-Jones was unfairly harsh toward our 16th president. Admittedly, in an essay that covered several centuries and ranged from the personal to the historical, she did not set out to explore in full his continually shifting ideas about abolition and the rights of black Americans. But she provides an important historical lesson by simply reminding the public, which tends to view Lincoln as a saint, that for much of his career, he believed that a necessary prerequisite for freedom would be a plan to encourage the four million formerly enslaved people to leave the country. To be sure, at the end of his life, Lincolns racial outlook had evolved considerably in the direction of real equality. Yet the story of abolition becomes more complicated, and more instructive, when readers understand that even the Great Emancipator was ambivalent about full black citizenship.

The letter writers also protest that Hannah-Jones, and the projects authors more broadly, ignore Lincolns admiration, which he shared with Frederick Douglass, for the commitment to liberty espoused in the Constitution. This seems to me a more general point of dispute. The writers believe that the Revolution and the Constitution provided the framework for the eventual abolition of slavery and for the equality of black Americans, and that our project insufficiently credits both the founders and 19th-century Republican leaders like Lincoln, Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner and others for their contributions toward achieving these goals.

It may be true that under a less egalitarian system of government, slavery would have continued for longer, but the United States was still one of the last nations in the Americas to abolish the institution only Cuba and Brazil did so after us. And while our democratic system has certainly led to many progressive advances for the rights of minority groups over the past two centuries, these advances, as Hannah-Jones argues in her essay, have almost always come as a result of political and social struggles in which African-Americans have generally taken the lead, not as a working-out of the immanent logic of the Constitution.

And yet for all that, it is difficult to argue that equality has ever been truly achieved for black Americans not in 1776, not in 1865, not in 1964, not in 2008 and not today. The very premise of The 1619 Project, in fact, is that many of the inequalities that continue to afflict the nation are a direct result of the unhealed wound created by 250 years of slavery and an additional century of second-class citizenship and white-supremacist terrorism inflicted on black people (together, those two periods account for 88 percent of our history since 1619). These inequalities were the starting point of our project the facts that, to take just a few examples, black men are nearly six times as likely to wind up in prison as white men, or that black women are three times as likely to die in childbirth as white women, or that the median family wealth for white people is $171,000, compared with just $17,600 for black people. The rampant discrimination that black people continue to face across nearly every aspect of American life suggests that neither the framework of the Constitution nor the strenuous efforts of political leaders in the past and the present, both white and black, has yet been able to achieve the democratic ideals of the founding for all Americans.

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Letter to the Editor: Historians Critique The 1619 Project, and We Respond - The New York Times

When Was The Death Penalty Abolished In The UK? – Fairplanet

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A little history of the death penalty in the UK, and why capital punishment was abolished in 1965.

Since the early Anglo-Saxon times, the favoured method of execution in the UK has been hanging. However, that didnt mean a trip to a purpose-built gallows by horse and cart. The convicted could be hangedfrom said horse and cart or from some form of stepladder, with a rope slung over a convenient tree. They would die a miserable death from suffocation. Burning at the stake was popular between the 11th and 13th century for conviction of the crime of heresy in the 11th century, and treason in the 13th, and beheading was popular with Royalty.

As in most other countries of the world, life was cheap, and punishment barbaric. In the 13th century England, being convicted of treason could see you hung, drawn, and quartered. A process that saw the guilty dragged to a place of public execution, hanged by the neck until dead, then beheaded, disembowelled, and their limbs cut off. The head was often displayed on a stake.

There were many trivial misdemeanours a hapless person could commit which would often land them on a gallows. From the 1600s to the early 1800s, England had over 200 offences punishable by death. These could be as minor as poaching, cutting down a tree, petty theft, or working as a pickpocket. Although this period was known as Britains Bloody Code, they bought these statutes in as a deterrent and, on the surface at least, it seemed to work.

For several reasons, throughout the 18th century, there were fewer people executed than in the 16th and 17th centuries combined. As well as the deterrent element, by the late 1700s, early 1800s, the population was losing its appetite for needless death penalties in the UK. For instance, theft of goods above a certain value was a capital offence, so juries found ways to reduce the value of the goods, allowing the defendant to receive a custodial sentence, rather than facing the gallows.

During this same period, transportation,' rather than hanging, was used as a popular punishment for those convicted of petty theft, or less serious crimes. Convicts were transported to the Americas and then, after the American Revolution, to Australia.

In 1806, a barrister by the name of Sir Samuel Romillywas appointed Solicitor General, and during his time in office, managed to repeal the death penalty for some minor misdemeanours. In 1834, Liberal MP William Ewartalso got bills passed to reduce the number of capital offences, including abolishing the death penalty for rustling. In 1861, the death penalty in the UK was abolished for all crimes except those of high treason, piracy with violence, arson in royal dockyards, and murder. Some seven years later, public hanging ended, with the introduction of the Capital Punishment Act.

By the end of the 1800s, there was already growing concern over the validity of the evidence for several convictions for murder. Nonetheless, the majority of these unfortunate souls still found themselves on the gallows. After the Great War, further legislation reduced the use of the death penalty in the UK. In 1922 the Infanticide Act protected mothers who had killed their new-born child, from the threat of hanging, provided an unbalanced state of mind at the time could be proven. In 1931, the death penalty for pregnant women was abolished, followed in 1933 by the abolishment of the death penalty for all those under the age of 18 years.

With controversial verdicts on several murder cases continuing to hit the headlines, the number of vocal, high profile capital punishment abolitionists continued to grow. By the early 1920s the penal reform group, The Howard League, became involved, and in 1927 the Labour Party published its Manifesto on Capital Punishment. As the anti-capital punishment lobby began to gather pace, a Select Committee was set up in 1929, and published its findings the following year, recommending a trial five-year suspension of the death penalty. However, the committees suggestion was never followed up.

After the end of World War II, the new Labour government again failed to get the abolition of the death penalty included in the 1948 Criminal Justice Act, although flogging and prison with hard labour was abolished. In the 1950s, new controversial cases involving the death penalty in the UK continued to hit the headlines and fuelled continued concern over the use of capital punishment. These controversies included the hanging of at least two innocent men, Timothy Evans in 1950, and Derek Bentley in 1953. The last woman to receive the death penalty in the UK was Ruth Ellis. Although she had suffered mental and physical abuse, and everything pointed to the fact she was mentally unbalanced at the time she shot her lover, she was hanged in 1955.

Another failed attempt to abolish the death penalty was made in 1956, by Labours MP Sydney Silverman. However, in 1957, a change to the Homicide Act further reduced the types of murder that carried the death penalty. These remaining capital crimes were the murder of a police officer or murdering in the furthering of robbery. These changes reduced the number of hangings in the UK to three or four a year. On 13th August 1964, Peter Allen and Gwynne Evanswere the last people to be hanged in the UK. They were convicted of killing a taxi driver during the act of robbing him (in furtherance of theft) and consequently received a death sentence.

In 1965, the Murder Act, (the Abolition of the Death Penalty), suspended the use of capital punishment in the UK for a period of five years, before making it permanent in 1969, and replacing it with a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment. In 1971, the death penalty for arson in Royal dockyards was abolished, and in Northern Ireland, the death penalty was abolished in 1973. In 1998, capital punishment in the UK for acts of treason, and piracy with violence were also abolished, finally making the UK totally free of the death penalty.

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When Was The Death Penalty Abolished In The UK? - Fairplanet

Theatre: The Great Experiment, Tara Theatre – London News Online

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A play exposing the little-known history of the Indian migrant labourers indentured to work on plantations around the world following the abolition of slavery is coming to the stage in the new year.

The Great Experiment comes to audiences at the Tara Theatre on February 11-15.

This new work recounts the moment in history when more than two million Indians were indentured to replace slave labour in Mauritius, Malaysia, the Caribbean and mainland Africa as part of The Great Experiment.

Carefully devised by performers from various backgrounds in a process led by those of Mauritian heritage, The Great Experiment, directed by Michael Walling, tells two parallel stories that of the labourers and that of the actors themselves grappling with their own relationships to this difficult history and its enduring effects that are still felt today.

Having worked with expert historians and the communities descended from indentured workers, the production also makes use of multimedia and archive footage that the audience are encouraged to explore and interact with before each performance.

Director Michael Walling said: Most of Border Crossings previous work has been very contemporary but the current moment seems to call for a new look at our histories, and particularly the untold histories of the British Empire.

The story of the indentured migrations feels incredibly resonant at a time when people are travelling the world in search of a better life not just because these Indian labourers also migrated for work, but also because their work laid the foundations for the very inequalities which make Europe and America so rich and the global South so poor today.

Our confrontation with this history has brought into the open some incredibly powerful questions about who we are in the UK today: how our multicultural space came into being and why it contains so many unresolved divisions. The past is not past.

Deviser and performer Nisha Dassyne said: Working on The Great Experiment, Ive had to visit the ghosts and memories in my family. They have become more concrete, more human, more accessible.

The connection to my ancestors isnt just something to talk about anymore its a real connection.

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Theatre: The Great Experiment, Tara Theatre - London News Online

The Swindon Advertiser Review of the Year – Swindon Advertiser

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JANUARY: Former Mayor of Swindon and council leader Maurice Fanning died aged 74.

Although a staunch Labour representative, he won affection and respect across political boundaries as a person who saw his first duty as standing up for the borough and its people.

He was the first mayor after the abolition of the old Thamesdown council in 1997, when Swindon became a unitary local authority.

One of the first things he did after being sworn in was to get married.

He and Sheila were married by the boroughs registrar in the council chambers first wedding ceremony.

The many people who paid tribute to Mr Fanning included Conservative council leader David Renard, who said: Maurice was on the council when I was first elected and, as a councillor for Pinehurst and a former mayor of the borough, he had already given extensive public service to the people of Swindon by the time I arrived in the chamber.

Maurice was a great ambassador for our town and will be missed by all who knew him.

Labour group leader Jim Grant said: Maurice was a larger-than-life character whose good humour and generosity rubbed off on everyone.

He was one of those people who lit up a room when he walked into it.

On a personal note, he was very kind to me and helped me a lot when I first became a councillor.

He will be much missed.

Mr Fanning was survived by his wife, four children and stepchildren and grandchildren.

Mourners invited to his funeral at Kingsdown Crematorium were asked to wear a splash of colour in order to reflect his life.

JANUARY: There was a special guest for one of North Swindon Librarys storytime sessions.

The Duchess of Cornwall visited the town for a double bill of literary events as part of her work as a patron of the Literacy Trust.

Hundreds of children were waiting to cheer Her Royal Highness when she arrived for her lunchtime date at the library.

She listened intently as storyteller Olivia Williams delivered an interactive story about nature, with enthusiastic call-and-response sections for the young audience, and then presented a prize to Molly Roberts, winner of the Literacy Trusts Lost Words poetry competition.

As Molly read her poem, childrens author and artist Steve Anthony improvised a quick-fire illustration.

Steve repeated the feat when the duchess read one of her favourite works by Alfred Williams, Swindons Hammerman Poet.

The illustrator said afterwards: It was a complete honour but also quite nerve-wracking, especially when my pen started running out towards the end of the duchess reading!

It was quite a special moment to be part of an event which is the culmination of a project weve all been involved with, and an event which highlights the library service.

Later in the day, the duchess visited the borough councils Lyndhurst Centre to meet foster carers and the family support team. She also played with an energetic group of foster children.

JANUARY: A vandal who sparked widespread outrage by taking wreaths from Swindons Cenotaph and strewing them on the ground was jailed.

Magistrates sentenced 54-year-old Ashwani Kumar to eight weeks in custody after he admitted offending public decency.

His actions were reported by newspapers and other media outlets throughout the country and across the world.

The court heard that Kumar committed the offence 48 hours after being released from an earlier sentence.

The vandal, who insisted he was ashamed of himself, had drunk three quarters of a bottle of vodka before stumbling to the memorial and throwing up to 50 poppy wreaths across Regent Circus.

His attack was captured on CCTV, and when Kumar was shown the footage by police officers he admitted having thrown the wreaths.

However, he said he was unable to remember doing do because he was drunk and had not been able to take medication he needed.

The case was heard by Salisbury Magistrates. Chairman of the bench Simon Crichton told him: You would have caused a great offence to many people, both who live in Swindon and who have any connection to those names on the war memorial.

The action could also offend those who had connections to other war memorials or who had laid wreaths at Remembrance Sunday commemorations.

FEBRUARY: Honda announced that its South Marston plant would close in 2021.

Many of the workers spoke of their anger at having learned of the closure in media reports before any official statement was made to them.

Andy Foster, a union representative and 20-year assembly line veteran, said: We are not going to lay down and take the factory closure.

We are putting a case forward to save Honda. We are not talking about redundancies, lets talk about saving the plant.

Swindon will be destroyed. Its not just 3,500 jobs in the factory, it could be 10,000 or more.

People feel like the world is ending, it was like a morgue in there yesterday morning. You had some people coming in in tears.

Earlier in the month, the company had reiterated its commitment to Swindon and its workforce, but blamed market changes, notably the increasing popularity of electric vehicles, for its decision.

The firm said in its statement: The significant challenges of electrification will see Honda revise its global manufacturing operations, and focus activity in regions where it expects to have high production volumes.

Swindon MPs Robert Buckland and Justin Tomlinson, together with senior councillors, vowed to do all they could to help the Honda and supply chain staff affected.

Mayor of Swindon Coun Junab Ali said: I am saddened to hear that Honda will be closing its Swindon plant in 2021 and my heart goes out to every single person who will be affected.

Throughout the years, the company has played an extremely important role in Swindons economic success and Im sure I speak for many people when I say Honda will be hugely missed.

But it is important to remember that Swindon is a resilient town with an unshakable sense of community spirit which will see us through the challenges we face.

FEBRUARY: Snow blanketed Swindon and the surrounding countryside early in the month.

Care workers and nurses battling heavy snow to reach Great Western Hospital, Prospect Hospice and the Marlborough House unit near Old Town were given a helping hand, ensuring their crucial work was not disrupted.

They were driven by staff chauffeured by staff from the Grange Jaguar Landrover showroom who wanted to make sure patient safety and comfort were maintained.

The company put out an early-morning message offering all NHS workers lift in one of its three top-of-the-range 4x4s.

Mike Edwards, a boss at the Dorcan Way showroom, said: We have had quite a large response.

We expected to get some people, but its kept us busy for most of the day.

Its good to be able to help if we can. It makes sense really - thats what the cars were designed for.

Sometimes theres much more important things than selling cars.

A hospice spokesman said: We are very grateful to Land Rover Jaguar for their help in enabling staff and even patients family members get to Prospect Hospice today.

We would like to say a big thank you to them and to everyone else whose efforts and kindness helped us to give our care to people from across our community, despite the snow.

Staff at First City Nursing helped dig colleagues vehicles free, ensuring they were able to visit patients in the community.

Managing director Stephen Trowbridge said: Were so proud of our entire team our internal staff, frontline staff and out of hours team for how they have all pulled together and gone the extra mile to ensure that our customers are safe and cared for.

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The Swindon Advertiser Review of the Year - Swindon Advertiser