Free shipping, not entertainment, is the primary driver of Amazon Prime memberships, said a Wednesday Diffusion Group report, saying more than half of U.S. adult broadband users are Prime subscribers. Nearly four in five Amazon Prime users said free shipping topped reasons for subscribing to Prime, 11 percent citing Prime Video and 10 percent naming Prime Music, photos, reading, Twitch or other benefits. Folding digital media into Prime memberships has “sweetened the deal and brought many new subscribers into the mix,” but service value shifts from media to free shipping as members buy more merchandise, said TDG President Michael Greeson.
Research found evidence cybercriminals are targeting Oracle and SAP vulnerabilities in enterprise resource planning applications, noted the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team, part of the Department of Homeland Security. "An attacker can exploit these vulnerabilities to obtain access to sensitive information," said US-CERT Wednesday. It linked to a report by Digital Shadows and Onapsis. Oracle and SAP didn't comment right away.
Ford is investing $4 billion in its autonomous vehicle business, including a $1 billion plug in Argo AI, through 2023, it said Tuesday, announcing a reorganization effective Aug. 1 (see the personals section of this issue). Citing computing power in cars and mobile devices, CEO Jim Hackett said, “We can now harness this technology to unlock a new world of vehicle personalization, supply chain choreography and inventory leanness.”
Sonos, whose board includes ex-FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, hopes to raise about $264 million in its initial public offering, said the wireless multiroom audio company in an SEC filing Monday. The company is offering 5.6 million shares, and selling stockholders are offering 8.4 million shares, with an offering price between $17 and $19 per share. It will trade on Nasdaq as SONO. The largest stakeholder is KKR, with 25.7 percent on June 30, followed by Index Ventures with 13 percent. Co-founder John MacFarlane owns 9.9 percent, Valdur Koha 7.4 percent, Redpoint Ventures 5.2 percent and CEO Patrick Spence 1.5 percent. Directors include Genachowski (106,422 shares), former Cisco executive and Index Ventures General Partner Mike Volpi (12.1 million shares) and former Microsoft executive Robert Bach (410,152 shares). In FY 2017, revenue rose 10 percent to $992.5 million.
Facebook will collaborate with Google, Microsoft and Twitter on finding ways for consumers to more easily transfer data among platforms, said Facebook Director-Privacy and Public Policy Steve Satterfield Friday. The Data Transfer Project will explore complications with transferring data between services that might have differing user-designated privacy controls and settings. “The Project is in its early stages, and we hope more organizations and experts will get involved,” said Satterfield.
The BBC’s iPlayer platform trials fielded more than 1.6 million requests for livestreamed Ultra HD coverage of World Cup and Wimbledon matches, “a scale never seen before in the UK,” blogged Phil Layton, BBC R&D head-broadcast and connected systems. The trials showed for the first time that Ultra HD and HDR can be delivered live and “free-to-air” over the internet, he said Thursday. “We have always felt that Ultra HD needed to be more than just extra pixels,” so the trials also demonstrated the ability to beam hybrid log-gamma HDR and wide-color-gamut images with the 4K resolution, he said. “This is essential to improving the visual experience irrespective of the viewer’s screen size.” Latency is the big “elephant in the room for live internet streaming,” and is “less of an issue for everyday viewing, but it comes in to sharp focus when we look at sport,” blogged Jim Simmons, senior product manager-BBC Design & Engineering, also Thursday. For the live World Cup and Wimbledon Ultra HD trials, “we got latency down to between 45 seconds and a few minutes but it was very variable,” depending on the device, he said. “When we asked viewers about latency in our survey, while they wanted it to be as low as possible, most said they wouldn’t trade it off against picture quality.”
Openly tracking third-party code in software products is a “well-understood best practice” that not all software vendors follow, said Administrator David Redl Thursday at NTIA’s third cybersecurity-related multistakeholder meeting (see 1806060036). Vendors, civil society and representatives from the telecom, healthcare, finance, auto, medical device and information security sectors attended. Redl said the multistakeholder process helps NTIA reach consensus from different viewpoints and develop “nimble” solutions “in the face of a constantly evolving risk environment.”
North American enterprises canvassed for an IHS Markit study expect nearly half their employees will use Wi-Fi exclusively to access company networks by 2020, said the research firm Wednesday. “Businesses are transforming their workplaces into environments that are flexible and enable employee mobility,” said IHS. “A key foundational element of these new workplaces is ubiquitous network connectivity.” Respondents ranked online security as their top worry “by a wide margin and the top reason to invest in new infrastructure,” said IHS. Other survey findings: (1) Tablets are the No. 1 type of device new to the network over the next year; (2) 77 percent of new access point deployments will be based on the new 802.11ax standard.
U.S. District Court in Washington should block enforcement of anti-sex trafficking legislation while a lawsuit (see 1806290044) against the new federal law is decided, the Electronic Frontier Foundation argued Thursday. The Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers-Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking package “is unconstitutional because it muzzles constitutionally protected speech that protects and advocates for sex workers and forces speakers and platforms to censor themselves,” EFF said.
Though 95 percent of global chief information officers say they expect cyberthreats to increase in the next three years, only 65 percent of their organizations have a cybersecurity expert on the payroll, a Gartner survey found. Gartner canvassed 3,160 CIOs in 98 countries, finding 35 percent said their organizations deploy some “aspect of digital security,” and another 36 percent are “actively experimenting” or planning to implement a security plan “in the short term,” it said. "In a twisted way, many cybercriminals are digital pioneers, finding ways to leverage big data and web-scale techniques to stage attacks and steal data," said Gartner Tuesday. "CIOs can't protect their organizations from everything, so they need to create a sustainable set of controls that balances their need to protect their business with their need to run it."