New Google London Data Centre
Google has announced that it will open a London region of the Google Cloud Platform service in 2017. The London location will be one of eight to come online next year as part of investment by Google to keep pace with demand as the firm reaches one billion cloud customers. Another advantage of a London data centre for UK customers is that their information remains in the UK for data protection requirements, especially given the uncertainty around this topic following the Brexit vote that will take the UK out of the European Union.
Mod Drone Competition
Defence boffins are running a competition to see who can develop a drone platform capable of running up to 20 UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles).
The competition, titled “Many drones make light work”, is to demonstrate how UK industry working in partnership with the MOD could rapidly deliver new military capability by exploiting emerging and innovative technologies. Examples of uses for this military robot swarm include tracking individuals / vehicles, area mapping / surveillance and communications relay tasks. If interested check out this UK Government link - https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/cde-themed-competition-many-drones-make-light-work/competition-document-many-dronesmake-light-work
Cloud Hosting Survey
Nearly 95% of small to medium businesses say they either already use a cloud hosting service or plan to transition to it according to study from B2B research firm clutch.co.
The survey of 300 SMBs (defined as having between two and 1000 employees) found a trend towards cloud hosting. Almost three quarters (72%) of SMBs have changed web hosting providers over the past five years, while a worrying 86% said they had experienced issues in the last year alone. Most businesses change providers because they can find better value elsewhere.
In terms of specific issues with hosting providers, the biggest bugbear was downtime, cited by 35% of respondents, although poor performance (33%), increased costs (32%), poor customer support (27%), and server limits (26%) were also noted.
Microsoft Outlook Updates
Microsoft have announced new features coming to Outlook.com, plus one for Outlook on the Web, part of Office 365. Key among them is support for Google Drive and Facebook photos.
• Google Drive support for Outlook.com. Outlook.com users will be able to access their Google Drive based files directly from the web UI (User Interface) when sending attachments. This feature was already available in Outlook for Android and iOS
• Edit Google Doc, Slide and Sheet documents. Also new to Outlook.com and tied to the previous feature is the ability to open and edit if you have permission, Google Doc, Slide and Sheet documents from within Outlook.com
• Facebook photos support for Outlook.com. You can now connect your Facebook account to Outlook.com allowing you to share photos from Facebook via email
• Easier attachments in Outlook on the Web. Outlook on the Web places a single attachment icon at the top of long email threads so you can find all of the attachments from that single location
