Year: 2018

The team at Octi says it’s building a crucial piece of the augmented reality puzzle — the ability to understand the human body and its movement.

Co-founder and CEO Justin Fuisz told me that most existing AR technologies (including Apple’s AR Kit) tend to be “plane-based” — in other words, while they can make something cool appear against a real-world background, it’s usually on a flat surface, like a table or the floor.

Octi, on the other hand, recognizes where people are in-camera, and it can use that understanding to apply a variety of different effects.

For example, Fuisz and his team showed me how they could dance around their office while bright, squiggly lines overlaid their bodies — and then they erased their bodies entirely. They also showed me how effects could be tied to different gestures, like how a “make it rain” motion could result in dollar bills flying out of thier hands.

To do this, Octi says it’s built sophisticated machine learning and computer vision technology. For starters, it looks at a human being and detects key points like your eyes, nose, hips and elbows, then uses those points to construct a model of your skeleton.

Fuisz suggested that the technology could be applied to a number of different industries, including fashion, fitness, entertainment and gaming. In fact, the company is announcing a partnership and strategic investment from the OneTeam Collective, the accelerator of the NFL Players Association. As a result, Octi plans to create and distribute avatars of more than 2,000 active NFL players.

In addition, Octi is announcing that it has raised $7.5 million in seed funding from Shasta Ventures, I2BF Ventures, Bold Capital Partners, Day One Ventures, Human Ventures Live Nation and AB InBev, plus individuals including former Pandora and Snap executive Tom Conrad, WeWork Chief Product Officer of Technology Shiva Rajaraman, Adobe Chief Product Officer Scott Belsky, A&D Networks Chairman Abbe Raven and Joshua Kushner.

If you want to try this out for yourself, the startup has its own iOS app — Fuisz described the app as a technology showcase for potential partners, but he added, “The app is available to the public and is totally awesome.”

Netflix has broken HBO’s 17-year streak as the most nominated network at the Emmy Awards.

In the nominations released this afternoon, Netflix came out slightly ahead, with 112 nominations compared to HBO’s 108. Those include Best Comedy nods for GLOW and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, as well as Best Drama nominations for The Crown and Stranger Things.

Other Netflix shows got some love as well. Jordan Crook, my co-host on the Original Content podcast, will be glad to know that Jason Bateman was nominated for his work as both actor and director on Ozark. Meanwhile, Black Mirror‘s “USS Callister” episode was nominated for Best Television Movie.

The other big streaming services had good news, too. Hulu received 27 nominations, with last year’s Best Drama winner The Handmaid’s Tale up for the big award again. Handmaid’s Tale was one of the most-nominated shows overall, although its 20 nominations were just shy of Westworld‘s 21 and Game of Thrones’ 22. (These are nominations for GoT’s seventh season, which aired last summer.)

Meanwhile, Amazon’s shows received 22 nominations, including a Best Comedy nod for The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.

The winners will be announced in a ceremony hosted by Colin Jost and Michael Che on Sept. 17.

The U.S. Department of Justice has filed to appeal a federal judge’s decision to approve AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner.

Back when he was campaigning for the presidency, Donald Trump said his administration would block the deal, and indeed, the DOJ sued to stop the merger, arguing it would hurt competition.

Last month, however, U.S. District Court Judge Richard J. Leon ruled that the deal could move forward without conditions. He said from the bench, “The court has now spoken. … The defendants have won” — and the deal closed later that week.

In fact, we’re already starting to see some of the fallout, with AT&T’s reported plans for Time Warner-owned HBO leading to a flurry of worried headlines in just the past couple days.

The deal also seemed to set the stage for even more consolidation between telecom and media companies, leading Comcast to challenge Disney for ownership of Fox’s film and TV assets. (TechCrunch was already a very small part of this trend, since we’re owned by Verizon.)

“The Court’s decision could hardly have been more thorough, fact-based, and well-reasoned,” said AT&T General Counsel David McAtee in a statement. “While the losing party in litigation always has the right to appeal if it wishes, we are surprised that the DOJ has chosen to do so under these circumstances. We are ready to defend the Court’s decision at the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.”

To put it mildly, news media has been on the sidelines in AI development. As a consequence, in the age of AI-powered personalized interfaces, the news organizations don’t anymore get to define what’s real news, or, even more importantly, what’s truthful or trustworthy. Today, social media platforms, search engines and content aggregators control user flows to the media content and affect directly what kind of news content is created. As a result, the future of news media isn’t anymore in its own hands. Case closed?

The (Death) Valley of news digitalization

There’s a history: News media hasn’t been quick or innovative enough to become a change maker in the digital world. Historically, news used to be the signal that attracted and guided people (and advertisers) in its own right. The internet and the exponential explosion of available information online changed that for good.

In the early internet, the portals channeled people to the content in which they were interested. Remember Yahoo? As the amount of information increased, the search engine(s) took over, changing the way people found relevant information and news content online. As the mobile technologies and interfaces started to get more prominent, social media with News Feed and tweets took over, changing again the way people discovered media content, now emphasizing the role of our social networks.

Significantly, news media didn’t play an active role in any of these key developments. Quite the opposite, it was late in utilizing the rise of the internet, search engines, content aggregators, mobile experience, social media and other new digital solutions to its own benefit.

The ad business followed suit. First news organizations let Google handle searches on their websites and the upcoming search champion got a unique chance to index media content. With the rise of social media, news organizations, especially in the U.S., turned to Facebook and Twitter to break the news rather than focusing on their own breaking news features. As a consequence, news media lost its core business to the rising giants of the new digital economy.

To put it very strongly, news media hasn’t ever been fully digital in its approach to user experience, business logic or content creation. Think paywalls and e-newspapers for the iPad! The internet and digitalization forced the news media to change, but the change was reactive, not proactive. The old, partly obsolete, paradigms of content creation, audience understanding, user experience and content distribution still actively affect the way news content is created and distributed today (and to be 110 percent clear — this is not about the storytelling and the unbelievable creativity and hard work done by ingenious journalists all around the globe).

Due to these developments, today’s algorithmic gatekeepers like Google and Facebook dominate the information flows and the ad business previously dominated by the news media. Significantly, personalization and the ad-driven business logic of today’s internet behemoths isn’t designed to let the news media flourish on its own terms ever again.

From observers to change makers

News media have been reporting the rise of the new algorithmic world order as an outside observer. And the reporting has been thorough, veracious and enlightening — the stories told by the news media have had a concrete effect on how people perceive our continuously evolving digital realities.

However, as the information flows have moved into the algorithmic black boxes controlled by the internet giants, it has become obvious that it’s very difficult or close to impossible for an outside observer to understand the dynamics that affect how or why a certain piece of information becomes newsworthy and widely spread. For the mainstream news media, Trump’s rise to the presidency came as a “surprise,” and this is but one example of the new dynamics of today’s digital reality.

And here’s a paradox. As the information moves closer to us, to the mobile lock screen and other surfaces that are available and accessible for us all the time, its origins and background motives become more ambiguous than ever.

The social media combined with self-realizing feedback loops utilizing the latest machine learning methods, simultaneously being vulnerable for malicious or unintended gaming, has led us to the world of “alternative facts” and fake news. In this era of automated troll-hordes and algorithmic manipulation, the ideals of news media sound vitally important and relevant: Distribution of truthful and relevant information; nurturing the freedom of speech; giving the voice to the unheard; widening and enriching people’s worldview; supporting democracy.

But, the driving values of news media won’t ever be fully realized in the algorithmic reality if the news media itself isn’t actively developing solutions that shape the algorithmic reality.

The current course won’t be changed by commenting on or criticizing the actions of the ruling algorithmic platforms. #ChangeFacebook is not on the table for news media. New AI-powered Google News is controlled and developed by Google, based on its company culture and values, and thus can’t be directly affected by the news organizations.

After the rise of the internet and today’s algorithmic rule, we are again on the verge of a significant paradigm shift. Machine learning-powered AI solutions will have an increasingly significant impact on our digital and physical realities. This is again a time to affect the power balance, to affect the direction of digital development and to change the way we think when we think about news — a time for news media to transform from an outside observer into a change maker.

AI solutions for news media

If the news media wants to affect how news content is created, developed, presented and delivered to us in the future, they need to take an active role in AI development. If news organizations want to understand the way data and information are constantly affected and manipulated in digital environments, they need to start embracing the possibilities of machine learning.

But how can news media ever compete with today’s AI leaders?

News organisations have one thing that Google, Facebook and other big internet players don’t yet have: news organizations own the content creation process and thus have a deep and detailed content understanding. By focusing on appropriate AI solutions, they can combine the data related to the content creation and content consumption in a unique and powerful way.

News organizations need to use AI to augment you and me. And they need to augment journalists and the newsroom. What does this mean?

Augment the user-citizen

Personalization has been around for a while, but has it ever been designed and developed in the terms of news media itself? The goal for news media is to combine great content and personalized user experience to build a seamless and meaningful news experience that is in line with journalistic principles and values.

For news, the upcoming real-time machine learning methods, such as online learning, offer new possibilities to understand the user’s preferences in their real-life context. These technologies provide new tools to break news and tell stories directly on your lock screen.

An intelligent notification system sending personalized news notifications could be used to optimize content and content distribution on the fly by understanding the impact of news content in real time on the lock screens of people’s mobile devices. The system could personalize the way the content is presented, whether serving voice, video, photos, augmented reality material or visualizations, based on users’ preferences and context.

Significantly, machine learning can be utilized to create new forms of interaction between people, journalists and the newsroom. Automatically moderated commenting is just one example already in use today. Think if it would be possible to build interactions directly on the lock screen that let the journalists better understand the way content is consumed, simultaneously capturing in real time the emotions conveyed by the story.

By opening up the algorithms and data usage through data visualizations and in-depth articles, the news media could create a new, truly human-centered form of personalization that lets the user know how personalization is done and how it’s used to affect the news experience.

And let’s stop blaming algorithms when it comes to filter bubbles. Algorithms can be used to diversify your news experience. By understanding what you see, it’s also possible to understand what you haven’t seen before. By turning some of the personalization logic upside down, news organizations could create a machine learning-powered recommendation engine that amplifies diversity.

Augment the journalist

In the domain of abstracting and contextualizing new information and unpredictable (news) events, human intelligence is still invincible.

The deep content understanding of journalists can be used to teach an AI-powered news assistant system that would become better over time by learning directly from the journalists using it, simultaneously taking into account the data that flows from the content consumption.

A smart news assistant could point out what kinds of content are connected implicitly and explicitly, for example based on their topic, tone of voice or other meta-data such as author or location. Such an intelligent news assistant could help the journalist understand their content even better by showing which previous content is related to the now-trending topic or breaking news. The stories could be anchored into a meaningful context faster and more accurately.

AI solutions could be used to help journalists gather and understand data and information faster and more thoroughly. An intelligent news assistant can remind the journalist if there’s something important that should be covered next week or coming holiday season, for example by recognizing trends in social media or search queries or highlighting patterns in historic coverage. Simultaneously, AI solutions will become increasingly essential for fact-checking and in detecting content manipulation, e.g. recognizing faked images and videos.

An automated content production system can create and annotate content automatically or semi-automatically, for example by creating draft versions based on an audio interview, that are then finished by human journalists. Such a system could be developed further to create news compilations from different content pieces and formats (text, audio, video, image, visualization, AR experiences and external annotations) or to create hyper-personalized atomized news content such as personalized notifications.

The news assistant also could recommend which article should be published next using an editorial push notification, simultaneously suggesting the best time for sending the push notification to the end users. And as a reminder, even though Google’s Duplex is quite a feat, natural language processing (NLP) is far from solved. Human and machine intelligence can be brought together in the very core of the content production and language understanding process. Augmenting the linguistic superpowers of journalists with AI solutions would empower NLP research and development in new ways.

Augment the newsroom

Innovation and digitalization doesn’t change the culture of news media if it’s not brought into the very core of the news business concretely in the daily practices of the newsroom and business development, such as audience understanding.

One could start thinking of the news organization as a system and platform that provides different personalized mini-products to different people and segments of people. Newsrooms could get deeper into relevant niche topics by utilizing automated or semi-automated content production. And the more topics covered and the deeper the reporting, the better the newsroom can produce personalized mini-products, such as personalized notifications or content compilations, to different people and segments.

In a world where it’s increasingly hard to distinguish a real thing from fake, building trust through self-reflection and transparency becomes more important than ever. AI solutions can be used to create tools and practices that enable the news organization and newsroom to understand its own activities and their effects more precisely than ever. At the same time, the same tools can be used to build trust by opening the newsroom and its activities to a wider audience.

Concretely, AI solutions could detect and analyze possible hidden biases in the reporting and storytelling. For example, are some groups of people over-presented in certain topics or materials? What has been the tone of voice or the angle related to challenging multi-faceted topics or widely covered news? Are most of the photos depicting people with a certain ethnic background? Are there important topics or voices that are not presented in the reporting at all? AI solutions also can be used to analyze and understand what kind of content works now and what has worked before, thus giving context-specific insights to create better content in the future.

AI solutions would help reflect the reporting and storytelling and their effects more thoroughly, also giving new tools for decision-making, e.g. to determine what should be covered and why.

Also, such data and information could be visualized to make the impact of reporting and content creation more tangible and accessible for the whole newsroom. Thus, the entire editorial and journalistic decision-making process can become more open and transparent, affecting the principles of news organizations from the daily routines to the wider strategical thinking and management.

Tomorrow’s news organizations will be part human and part machine. This transformation, augmenting human intelligence with machines, will be crucial for the future of news media. To maintain their integrity and trustworthiness, news organizations themselves need to able to define how their AI solutions are built and used. And the only way to fully realize this is for the news organizations to start building their own AI solutions. The sooner, the better — for us all.

Robinhood has gone from being a little consumer-facing fintech app to an absolutely giant consumer-facing fintech app.

The company, which launched in 2013, has ballooned to a $5.6 billion valuation on the heels of a $363 million Series D financing round led by DST Global. The app has also grown to 5 million users, as of today, with more than $150 billion in transaction volume.

But the app, which lets people trade stocks and options for free, is also dabbling in the wondrous world of cryptocurrencies, setting the stage for a potential transition from ‘fun app’ to legitimiate financial institution.

That’s why we’re absolutely thrilled to have Robinhood cofounder and CEO Baiju Bhatt join us on the Disrupt SF 2018 stage.

The key to everything here is that Robinhood offered a simple consumer demand: free transactions on financial services. Unlike incumbents E*Trade and Scottrade, there are no trading fees on Robinhood, giving average consumers the chance to dip their toes in the market without any added barriers to entry.

At Disrupt, we’ll ask Bhatt about how Robinhood Crypto is progressing and what the company has in store as we head into next year.

Bhatt joins a wide array of big name speakers, from Dara Khosrowshahi to Reid Hoffman to Kirsten Green. It’s going to be an absolutely terrific show and we sincerely hope to see you there.

Tickets are available here.

Google acquired API management service Apigee back in 2016 but it’s been pretty quiet around the service in recent years. Today, however, Apigee announced a number of smaller updates that introduce a few new integrations with the Google Cloud platform, as well as a major new partnership with cloud data management and integration firm Informatica that essentially makes Informatica the preferred integration partner for Google Cloud.

Like most partnerships in this space, the deal with Informatica involves some co-selling and marketing agreements, but that really wouldn’t be all that interesting. What makes this deal stand out is that Google is actually baking some of Informatica’s tools right into the Google Cloud dashboard. This will allow Apigee users to use Informatica’s wide range of integrations with third-party enterprise applications while Informatica users will be able to publish their APIs through Apigee and have that service manage them for them.

Some of Google’s competitors, including Microsoft, have built their own integration services. As Google Cloud director of product management Ed Anuff told me, that wasn’t really on Google’s roadmap. “It takes a lot of know-how to build a rich catalog of connectors,” he said. “You could go and build an integration platform but if you don’t have that, you can’t address your customers needs.” Instead, Google went to look for a partner who already has this large catalog and plenty of credibility in the enterprise space.

Similarly, Informatica’s senior VP and GM for big data, cloud and data integration Ronen Schwartz noted that many of his company’s customers are now looking to move into the cloud and this move will make it easier for Informatica’s customers to bring their services into Apigee and open them up for external applications. “With this partnership, we are bringing the best of breed of both worlds to our customers,” he said. “And we are doing it now and we are making it available in an integrated, optimized way.”

A few folks have reported a new ransomware technique that preys upon corporate inability to keep passwords safe. The notes – which are usually aimed at instilling fear – are simple: the hacker says “I know that your password is X. Give me a bitcoin and I won’t blackmail you.”

Programmer Can Duruk reported getting the email today.

The email reads:

I’m aware that X is your password.

You don’t know me and you’re thinking why you received this e mail, right?

Well, I actually placed a malware on the porn website and guess what, you visited this web site to have fun (you know what I mean). While you were watching the video, your web browser acted as a RDP (Remote Desktop) and a keylogger which provided me access to your display screen and webcam. Right after that, my software gathered all your contacts from your Messenger, Facebook account, and email account.

What exactly did I do?

I made a split-screen video. First part recorded the video you were viewing (you’ve got a fine taste haha), and next part recorded your webcam (Yep! It’s you doing nasty things!).

What should you do?

Well, I believe, $1400 is a fair price for our little secret. You’ll make the payment via Bitcoin to the below address (if you don’t know this, search “how to buy bitcoin” in Google) .

BTC Address: 1Dvd7Wb72JBTbAcfTrxSJCZZuf4tsT8V72
(It is cAsE sensitive, so copy and paste it)

Important:

You have 24 hours in order to make the payment. (I have an unique pixel within this email message, and right now I know that you have read this email). If I don’t get the payment, I will send your video to all of your contacts including relatives, coworkers, and so forth. Nonetheless, if I do get paid, I will erase the video immidiately. If you want evidence, reply with “Yes!” and I will send your video recording to your 5 friends. This is a non-negotiable offer, so don’t waste my time and yours by replying to this email.

To be clear there is very little possibility that anyone has video of you cranking it unless, of course, you video yourself cranking it. Further, this is almost always a scam. That said, the fact that the hackers are able to supply your real passwords – most probably gleaned from the multiple corporate break-ins that have happened over the past few years – is a clever change to the traditional cyber-blackmail methodology.

Luckily, the hackers don’t have current passwords.

“However, all three recipients said the password was close to ten years old, and that none of the passwords cited in the sextortion email they received had been used anytime on their current computers,” wrote researcher Brian Krebs. In short, the password files the hackers have are very old and outdated.

To keep yourself safe, however, cover your webcam when not in use and change your passwords regularly. While difficult, there is nothing else that can keep you safer than you already are if you use two-factor authentication and secure logins.

Since its debut on the TechCrunch Disrupt stage in September 2016, demand for a service like productboard, which gives companies a wholistic view of product development and encourages input from across an organization, has only gotten more acute, according to company chief executive Hubert Palan.

Now, with an $8 million commitment from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers with participation from Index Ventures, Credo Ventures, Reflex Capital and Rockaway Capital, alongside a host of angel investors, the company is looking to expand its sales and marketing and product development efforts to bring the benefits of its toolkit to more companies.

In the two years since TechCrunch last saw productboard, the company’s user base has grown significantly, from 100 customers in 2016 to over 1,200 companies today spanning a broad range of industries.

For Palan, the company’s growing user base (which now includes medical device companies, academic publishers, and news organizations in addition to traditional digital product developers) is proof of a new demand in the market for more inputs around product design and development.

“Every company is now a digital company,” Palan said. “So every company needs to worry about digital product design.”

The company’s toolkit still includes features that allow it to hoover up information from customer support tickets, emails, input from sales teams and user research, to organize and prioritize features that need to be built.

But now, the company’s services allow anyone in an organization (with the proper access) to provide feedback and track the process of product development.

“Product Excellence is no longer optional,”said  productboard Palan, in a statement. “These days competitors arise in a matter of months, not years. Customer loyalty is declining and users will happily switch to a competing solution that offers a better product experience. It’s more critical than ever to get the right products to market faster.”

As part of the financing, Kleiner Perkins’ new general partner, Ilya Fushman, will join the company’s board of directors. Fushman who was integral in locking down productboard’s seed financing when he was at Index Ventures, has a long product history from his time at dropbox, and is a welcome addition to the company’s board, Palan said.

While Fushman’s imprimatur is one sign of the company’s viability, the investment from strategic angel investors like Intercom co-founders, Eoghan McCabe and Des Traynor; Clark Valberg, the co-founder of InVision; and Larry Gadea, the founder of Envoy, is still another.

“Product management is a core function in every technology organization, but few dedicated tools exist for it,” said Fushman, in a statement. 

In the wake of Broadcom failing to complete its takeover of Qualcomm, Intel is buying another chip company as it works on adjusting its own its business to fit the next generation of computing. Today, the company is announcing that it is acquiring eASIC, a fabless semiconductor company that makes customisable eASIC chips for use in wireless and cloud environments.

Financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed, as the price paid will not be material to Intel. eASIC has 120 employees, was founded in 1999 and has counted Khosla, Kleiner Perkins and Seagate among its investors, raising $149 million in total. It had been recapitalised in 2012 and so, in its last round, in November 2017, it was valued at around $110 million post-money, according to PitchBook, to give you a basic idea of a possible pricing ballpark.

eASIC’s technology and team will become a part of Intel’s Programmable Solutions Group (PSG), which Intel created after it acquired Altera in 2015 for $16.7 billion. Altera is a producer of FPGA chips, and the idea will be to complement those with eASIC’s technology, said Dan McNamara, corporate vice president and GM of the PSG division:

“We’re seeing the largest adoption of FPGA ever because of explosion of data and cloud services, and we think this will give us a lot of differentiation versus the likes of Xilinx,” which is one of Intel’s biggest competitors in FPGA. “We’ll be able to offer an end-to-end lifecycle that fits today’s changing workloads and infrastructure. No one on the marketplace will have this.” FPGA designs allow companies to quickly modify chip architectures, but they also require a lot of power. eASIC chips are more efficient, and they can be configured quickly from the outset (but cannot be modified).

The idea will be to offer eASIC as a transition to customers of Intel’s (and its competitors) who are already using FPGA and looking for a migration to the next thing. Applications that might need eASIC power could range from baseband and radio heads in 4G and 5G networks as well as applications based in the cloud that require heavy data computations, for example AI and video services, or financial risk analysis.

Intel and eASIC have actually been working together since 2015, when the latter company started to provide its flavor of ASIC designs to Intel for its Xeon chips. McNamara confirmed that Intel never invested in eASIC but it had considered the idea “multiple” times, including recently, instead of acquiring. 

However, ultimately, owning the company outright made more sense for both sides, he said.

“Strategic partnerships are good but a combination much better,” he said, “because it brings the investment capability to the next node. When you are privately held and venture-backed you can be challenged by the investment needed for the next phase of innovation.” He also noted the “key talent” and IP — including multiple patents — that Intel will be getting in the deal.

eASIC itself has felt the pinch of being a smaller chip company: it tried to file to go public in 2015 to raise $75 million but cancelled its IPO at a time when the public markets were freezing up for listings of startups. Its move to Intel is part of what’s been a long-term consolidation in the chip industry, which gets more value out of economies of scale and selling end-to-end services to larger customers.

“The eASIC team has developed and deployed a truly innovative structured ASIC product. The marriage of the eASIC technology with IP and capabilities of Intel will allow the ubiquitous deployment of this proven structured ASIC product into a wide breadth of exciting end applications and markets. This is the perfect time to usher in this new chapter for eASIC,” said Ronnie Vasishta, president and CEO of eASIC, in a statement.

While many in the technology and communications industries believe that areas like the Internet of Things and 5G — and the infrastructure, hardware and related services powering them — will be huge businesses, today they remain relatively small. In Intel’s most recent quarterly earnings reported in April, PSG had revenues of $498 million — up 17 percent on a year ago but still the smallest division within the company’s data-centric business units. As a point of comparison, Intel’s PC-centric Client Computing Division made $8.2 billion. But CCG only grew three percent over a year ago, and that stagnation and slowdown in Intel’s business is one reason why it needs to buy companies like eASIC and focus on future technologies.

eASIC’s customers include a number of vendors that work in the communications industry, including Huawei, NEC, Violin Memory, Seagate, Microsoft, Flir Systems and Arm. After it added a longtime Apple vet to its board several years ago, it was speculated that Apple might also have a tie to the company, although that has never been confirmed.

The deal comes at a key time for Intel, which in addition to its over-reliance on revenues from its legacy business, has been facing delays on the production of 10nm chips, and then unexpectedly lost its CEO Brian Krzanich in June when he resigned over inappropriate behavior. But Robert Swan is in the role now on an interim basis, and McNamara says the company is going full-steam ahead on its previous strategy.

“The executive team is fully focused on the execution of our strategy and this is a good example of it,” he said.

Microsoft is launching a few new networking features today that will make it easier for business to use the company’s Azure cloud to securely connect their own offices and infrastructure using Azure and its global network.

The first of these is the Azure Virtual LAN service, which allows businesses to connect their various branches to and through Azure. This basically works like an airline hub and spoke model where Azure becomes the central hub that all data between branches flows through. The advantage of this, Microsoft argues, is that it allows admins to manage their wide-area networks from a central dashboard and, of course, that it makes it easy to bind additional Azure services and appliances to the network. And with that, users also get access to all of the security services that Azure has to offer.

One new security service that Microsoft is launching today is the Azure Firewall, a new cloud-native security service that is meant to protect a businesses virtual network resources.

In addition to these two new networking features, Microsoft also today announced that it is expanding its Azure Data Box service, which is basically Microsoft’s version of the AWS Snowball appliances for moving data into the cloud by loading it onto a shippable appliance, to two new regions: Europe and the United Kingdom (and let’s not argue about the fact that the U.K. is still part of Europe). There is also now a ‘Data Box Disk’ option for those who don’t need to move petabytes of data. Orders with up to five of those disks can hold up to 40 terabytes of data and are currently in preview.