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Technology
Modern tech companies require more computing power than ever before, so many of them are turning to cloud services like Microsoft Azure to meet their needs. As such, becoming cloud-certified is a necessity if you want to pursue todayhighest-paying IT jobs. With this 4-course bundle, you can become an Azure master for just $29.
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Read more: This $387 Azure certification prep bundle is currently on sale for $29
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Think of it as the patching prodigal son.
When Microsoft released Win10 version 1903 — indeed, in the later beta test copies of 1903, dating back to early this year — a funny thing happened. Many testers discovered that Win10 1903 hid its update deferral settings, if you had the temerity to change them.
For those who haven&t changed their update deferral settings, Win10 version 1903 Pro invites you to change the settings in a portion of the Windows Update advanced options dialog (to see it, click Start > Settings > Update - Security > Advanced options).
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Read more: Disappearing Windows Update deferral pane suddenly reappears
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People are finally waking up to the importance of privacy and the risk of entities over whom we have no control hoovering up the details of our digital lives, and thatwhy the latest news from Duck Duck Go is so worthwhile.
Applegood privacy just got better
We know Apple is working to protect privacy & its newly updated privacy website shares a huge amount of information on its efforts, while the newly-published Safari white paper confirms the browserprivacy protections include (among other things):
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Read more: Duck Duck Go offers Mac users even more privacy
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Employee uses his work computer to write an email asking his closest personal friends to support a charitable organization — but sends it out to the entire 15,000-member workforce, including this pilot fish.
And it has the predictable result.
&First wave: Countless people hitting ‘Reply all& to either praise the sender for his generosity or to chastise him for using company resources for his pet project,& reports fish.
&Second wave: Countless more people hitting ‘Reply all& to reprimand first-wavers for hitting ‘Reply all.&
&Third wave: Strongly worded email from CIO to stop the madness, because Exchange was buckling under the load.&
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Read more: Throwback Thursday: Third wave’s the charm
Write comment (93 Comments)Sir Martin Sorrell is the kind of founder who people in Silicon Valley most prize. He has enjoyed huge success, having built the worldbiggest advertising conglomerate over 32 years, WPP. Healso out for revenge. Soon after WPPboard began investing an &allegation of misconduct& in the spring of last year — it later asked him to pay back $200,000 in personal expenses — Sorrell left the company in a huff.
Six weeks later, he&d formed a new company, S4 Capital, using a playbook that he knows works. Like London-based WPP, which he and a partner launched by buying a controlling stake in publicly traded company that made wire baskets and teapots — which it then used to launch a global shopping spree — S4 emerged from a reverse-merger with Derriston Capital, a small shell company that went public on the London Stock Exchange in 2016 and rebranded as S4. Then it started bulking up.
Already S4 — which Sorrell funded himself with £40 million, and that has raised tens of millions more from other institutions for acquisitions — has successfully pursued nine companies, though Sorrell stresses these are mergers. &All half cash and half stock.& No long lock-ups, either, says Sorrell, who was bouncing around the U.S. this week before heading to the Web Summit event in Lisbon. &If you want to sell your company, if you want to make a quick kill and get out, we&re not interested. If you want to sign up to our vision& and help turn S4 is a powerhouse in its own right, thata different story, he suggests.
Silicon Valley is seemingly a big piece of the picture. Last month, S4 Capital finalized a $150 million deal to merge with the largest digital agency in the region, nine-year-old Firewood, with S4 paying $112 million up front (half shares, half cash) and the balance coming if Firewood hits its targets for the year.
It also late last year merged with the San Francisco-based digital media and programmatic consultancy MightyHive in a deal valued at $150 million.
If it sticks it to WPP on occasion, thatprobably okay, too. S4 Capitalfirst acquisition, for example, of the Dutch digital production agency MediaMonks, came at the expense of WPP, which had also been trying to buy the company. The WSJ reported at the time that S4 agreed to pay roughly $350 million for the agency.
The broad idea, he says, is to focus S4 entirely on digital advertising and on media and marketing services specifically, where in 2019, for the first time, the worldadvertisers will spend more than half of their ad budgets. &The digital media industry is up 6 percent [for the year] and itdown for traditional media, so we&re going where the growth is and pushing on an open door, unencumbered by legacy or analog businesses.&
Asked whether he doesn&t also have an axe to grind when it comes to WWP — which is steeped in both the digital and traditional ad worlds — Sorrell doesn&t hesitate. &I want to see this approach succeed. And if thatan axe, thatcorrect.&
Much of that approach centers on partnering with, rather than trying to compete, with the giants of ad tech, including Facebook and Google. Other current tech clients include Apple, Salesforce, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Uber, and ServiceNow, which, according to Sorrell, treat S4creative and strategic marketing professionals as extensions of their internal marketing teams.
Firewood, for example, will embed teams within companies like Google to &understand the client as well as possible,& Sorrell says, adding: &We don&t compete with [these companies]. We service them; we work with them. If we&re being crude about it, we&re resellers for each one of them. They don&t want to get into the service business.& (One assignment about which Sorrell seems especially proud centers on Netlix, for which MediaMonks put together 15-second video snippets from its third season of &Narcos& that catered to different audiences by using different tag lines and different edits. &Personalization at scale is critically important,& says Sorrell.)
Asked whether he thinks some of these tech clients should be broken up, given the lock on customer data they have, he insists that he does not, &as long as they&re transparent and they really exercise the power they have responsibly.&
Asked how S4 overcomes the growing number of people who don&t think companies are acting responsibly with their private information and might increasingly opt out of sharing it, Sorrell shrugs off the concern. &My view is that as long as the consumer knows what they&re letting themselves in for, itfine. If i know how my data will be used, in simple language, [I&m not going to opt out.] I think we&ll have differentiated models, [such as] ‘I want to control my data so [you&re going to pay me for it in some fractional way].& The problem is caused by people not knowing whatbeing done with their data.&
The real problem,& Sorrell continues, &is the size of these companies. When Apple was the first to become a trillion-dollar company, [former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein] was asked which would be the first $2 trillion company, and he said there won&t be one because no nation-stage would allow a company to get to $2 trillion. You see this in China, too. I&ve heard concerns expressed about the size of Alibaba, too. Itnot just a Western phenomenon.&
And what about political ads, we ask Sorrell. Should these platforms be running them, no matter their content? That one, he says is &very difficult. My view has always been that these are media companies that are responsible for the content flowing through their pipes. I think they are acknowledging it; Facebook has thousands of people monitoring content.
&But should we take political advertising or not? Well, in the U.K. You have to be truthful. If the ads aren&t truthful, we&ve got trouble.
&I think Zuckerberg made the argument that his people know whata fact or not, but arbitrating whatthe truth or not is quite difficult,& he concedes.
Sorrell is much less circumspect about traditional ad giants, like the one he himself built across three decades before leaving it abruptly last year. Perhaps itunsurprising, given his new endeavor, but he says those companies, with their tangle of properties, most of which are run like independent fiefdoms, should most definitely be dismantled. &I don&t think they have a chance of making it with the legacy assets they have.&
Sorrell recalls one &snotty comment& made by one of the established players, regarding his new venture: &Someone called us a spec in the mirror.&
Continues Sorrell, &When you&re in a car crash, that spec in the mirror catches up with you very quickly.&
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Read more: Sir Martin Sorrell’s Silicon Valley charm offensive
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Disney+ will launch in the U.S., Canada and the Netherlands on November 12th, a bit shy of a week from today. On November 19th, it&ll expand to Australia and New Zealand.
But what about the rest of the world?
Disney has kept quiet about its plans for other countries, presumably because going live in another country is a little more complicated than just flipping a switch. Every country tends to have different privacy/tax laws regarding subscription services, and rights and licensing for each bit of content has to be detangled with respect to existing deals.
Now, at least, we&ve got a launch date for five more countries: Disney says that Disney+ will launch in the U.K., Germany, Italy, France and Spain on March 31st.
This news might be slightly less intriguing for folks in the U.K., who&ve had streaming access to a pretty massive collection of Disney stuffby way of DisneyLife — a streaming service that served as a test run of sorts for Disney since its launch back in 2015. But hey, The Mandalorian!
One thing worth noting: Don&t expect Disney+ to be exactly the same around the world. Thanks to those aforementioned rights/licensing deals that may already be in place around the world, as Disney puts it, &Titles may vary by territory.&
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Read more: Disney+ will launch in the UK, Germany, Italy, France and Spain in March 2020
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