Tech Talks Daily

Nick Ford, the chief technology evangelist at Mendix, discusses some of the recent trends that have contributed to the rise of low-code adoption around the world. He also shares some of the most compelling findings from a recent survey commissioned by Mendix about low-code adoption in the manufacturing sector. I also learn more about the recent launch of Mendix 9 and how it can help businesses develop apps up to 10x faster. About Mendix Mendix, a Siemens business and the global leader in enterprise low-code, is fundamentally reinventing the way applications are built in the digital enterprise. With the Mendix platform, enterprises can "Make with More" by broadening an enterprise's development capability to conquer the software development bottleneck; "Make it Smart," by making apps with rich native experiences that are intelligent, proactive, and contextual; and "Make at Scale," to modernize core systems and build large app portfolios to keep pace with business growth. The Mendix platform is built to promote intense collaboration between business and IT teams and dramatically accelerate application development cycles while maintaining the highest standards of security, quality, and governance — in short, to help enterprises confidently leap into their digital futures. Mendix's "Go Make It" platform has been adopted by more than 4,000 leading companies around the world.

This year, global attention has continued to focus on privacy and data ownership questions within the digital sphere. On a mission to solve these issues and change how data is managed and transferred, Ontology has established itself as the platform of choice for developers, enterprises, and end-users alike. Having launched its Mainnet in June 2018, Ontology has gone from strength to strength over the last three years, forging tangible partnerships across various industries. I invited Gloria Wu, Chief of Global Ecosystem Partnerships at Ontology Blockchain on to the podcast to discuss their recent partnerships, including: Daimler — In a move set to transform the experience of drivers all over the world, Ontology recently partnered with the Daimler Mobility AG Blockchain Factory, which was set up to bring the benefits of blockchain innovations and applications to the automotive finance and mobility industry. Microworkers — To further their mutual aim of empowering microworkers across the globe, Ontology is collaborating with global freelancing marketplace leader MicroWorkers (MW). Following the initial confirmation of the partnership in February 2020, Ontology recently confirmed the integration of its ONTO Wallet with the MicroWorkers platform, facilitating additional payment options for workers. Binance Smart Chain – In August 2020, Ontology partnered with Binance Smart Chain Adopting its Decentralized Identity Solution for Security Tokenization Offering Projects. OGQ — Ontology joined forces with social creator platform OGQ in a strategic partnership that allows OGQ to leverage the Ontology blockchain to increase copyright protection for its content creators, while also presenting users with a new opportunity to purchase digital asset content using OEP-4 tokens. About Ontology Ontology is a high-performance, public blockchain specializing in decentralized identity and data. Ontology's unique infrastructure supports robust cross-chain collaboration and Layer 2 scalability, offering businesses the flexibility to design a blockchain that suits their needs. With a suite of decentralized identity and data sharing protocols to enhance speed, security, and trust, Ontology's features include ONT ID, a mobile digital ID application and DID used throughout the ecosystem, and DDXF, a decentralized data exchange and collaboration framework.

Mimecast recently released their annual State of Email Security report, which reveals enterprises faced unprecedented cybersecurity risk, including increasing attack volume, the pandemic-driven digital transformation of work, and generally deficient cyber preparedness and training. The Mimecast report revealed that 61% of organizations were infected with ransomware in 2020. It also found that 79% suffered disruption or financial loss due to cyber preparedness shortcomings. Jeremy Ventura, Senior Security Engineer at Mimecast, discusses the report's findings and the current threat landscape along with the problems organizations face today. We also discuss what organizations can do to combat threats like ransomware. Jeremy also talks about the importance of email and web security and security awareness training, which the report highlights a lack of. About Mimecast Mimecast (NASDAQ: MIME) was born in 2003. Each day, they take on cyber disruption for tens of thousands of customers around the globe and never giving up on tackling their biggest security challenges together. The company built an intentional and scalable design ideology that solves the number one cyberattack vector – email. The company continuously invests to thoughtfully integrate brand protection, security awareness training, web security, compliance and other essential capabilities. Mimecast protects large and small organizations from malicious activity, human error and technology failure; and to lead the movement toward building a more resilient world.

For a long time, tech existed in the background. Now, Customers want to do business with innovative companies, making marketing new cutting-edge technology (whether it's for mobile orders, contactless payment or online banking) more important than ever before in order to deepen customer loyalty and get continued buy-in. Dominick Profico, CTO, Mobiquity discusses how technology adoption and the need for contactless tools has led companies to bring their digital offerings to the forefront. We also talk about why this advertising is necessary to see a positive ROI on digital transformation projects and how this tactic can keep brands on the cutting edge of innovation moving forward. Mobiquity is a global digital consulting firm that helps the world's leading brands understand, apply, and engage with technology in meaningful ways. We guide companies through the process of designing and building digital products and services that serve a purpose.

Robin Purohit returns to the podcast to talk about the Peritus Assistant. He reveals how it uses AI to source and rank over 25 million answers, tips, and published content on Stack Overflow, related community, and product vendor forums from previous conversations and reported GitHub issues. I learn how It provides DevOps professionals and application developers with recommendations to help them answer support questions on community and vendor sites. Peritus.ai is a patented cloud-based recommendation engine that provides technical advice when it's needed most. The company's current focus is transforming community forums from best effort to a best-in-class support experience by empowering community users to find and answer questions faster. The Peritus roadmap includes use cases for DevOps self-service and IT Support. The Peritus Assistant, which is available as a free Chrome extension on the Google Chrome Store, is pre-trained with machine learning to empower developers, DevOps engineers, and SREs to answer cloud-native questions.

Rohit Maheshwari, Head of Strategy and Product at Subex, joins me in a conversation about Augmented Analytics and the future of data analytics in enterprises. Augmented Analytics is one of the latest data and analytics trends that is gaining considerable traction. Many organizations have realized the importance of Big Data and its role in decision-making across the business. However, this sheer volume of data available to organizations is making effective interpretation a real challenge. According to Forrester Research, less than 0.5% of all data is ever analyzed and used. In contrast, a mere 12% of enterprise data is used to make decisions. According to IDC Forecast, this will only make it worse with the growth in IoT-connected devices, which is expected to generate 79.4 Zeta Bytes (ZB) of data across 41.6 billion devices. We talk about how leveraging augmented analytics will greatly accelerate transformation projects in enterprises and the typical roadblocks to AI adoption for decision analytics. We also discuss how organizations can adopt augmented analytics technology, including connecting disparate and live data sources, finding relationships within the data, creating visualizations, and helping human users effortlessly share their findings across the entire organization.

The "search engine wars" are heating up. But Google, Yahoo, and Bing are not the only players in the game. One of the fastest-growing search engines in the U.S. is Ecosia (Ecosia.org). Ecosia is an ethical tech and not-for-profit search engine that aims to tackle the climate crisis by planting and protecting trees around the world. As a certified B-Corp, Ecosia joins the ranks of companies like Patagonia, Ben & Jerrys, and Allbirds, who have met the highest standards of verified social and environmental performance. This "eco-friendly" alternative to other search engines can track the number of trees they are planting with their searches, which helps reduce CO2 and the impact of climate change. The company is founded on green principles and has built solar farms that produce enough renewable energy to power its searches twice over. The excess actively removes dirty energy from the grid. Ecosia is also currently the largest financier of native tree restoration in the world. Ecosia is now the fifth-largest search engine in the U.S. and is rapidly adding new users and planting trees. For every 45 searches, Ecosia plants a tree, and it has now planted over 120 million trees across 9,000 planting sites worldwide. Ruby Au (Head of Ecosia North America) shares the story behind Ecosia.

Avi Freedman is the co-founder and CEO of Kentik, a network observability company. He has decades of experience as a technologist, networking executive and is also a professional poker player. Before Kentik, he was at Akamai for over a decade, as VP Network Infrastructure and then Chief Network Scientist. Prior to that, Avi started Philadelphia's first ISP (netaxs) in 1992, later running the network at AboveNet and serving as CTO for ServerCentral. Avi discusses lessons learned throughout his career, including how his poker skills have helped him in the tech industry.

Jingming Li is the former vice president and CTO of Alipay, where he spent seven years helping to build the company which lifted millions of people out of poverty in China. He is now setting his sights on doing the same thing for creators through a new company and service, TrovaPage, Which has already been used by thousands of entrepreneurs to build, market, and bill for services, ranging from yoga instruction to guitar lessons, to small restaurants, to non-profits. While the market for e-commerce solutions for selling products is competitive and mature, it has failed to develop a comprehensive solution for creators that want to easily build, market, and monetize their own business. Current solutions such as Yelp or Fiverr are either too expensive, lack the necessary functionality, or are overly complex for creators to use, and trying to get a handle on all of the CRM, social media, invoicing and bill payment solutions needed to run a business is beyond most small businesses and creators. Jingming discusses why he is motivated to create millions of creator-driven businesses and what he learned at Alibaba and his time under Jack Ma. I also learn how it has helped him drive his innovation at TrovaPage.

Mike Lynch shares his startup story, the idea behind Darktrace, and how we still need to get better at turning ideas in university seminar rooms into saleable products. As an investor and technologist, Mike also shares what sort of ideas and pitches he would like most want to see and how AI will change the legal industry. Dr. Mike Lynch OBE FREng FRS is a celebrated technologist, entrepreneur, and investor. Having founded and lead some of the UK's most successful tech companies, including Autonomy, Blinkx, and Cambridge Neurodynamics, Mike then created Invoke Capital in 2012 to create and support world-leading fundamental tech businesses such as Darktrace and Luminance. Referred to as the UK's answer to Bill Gates, Mike read Natural Sciences at Cambridge University, where he also gained a Ph.D. and held a research fellowship in adaptive pattern recognition. He was awarded an OBE for Services to Enterprise in 2006, is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the Royal Society, and was elected to the Prime Minister's Council for Science and Technology in 2011.