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Oracle adds AI development service to platform offerings

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Oracle came late to the cloud and it’s been playing catch-up in recent years trying to add a wide range of services that customers are going to be demanding from a cloud vendor. To that end, the company added artificial intelligence as a service to its dance card today at Oracle OpenWorld.

The company has been busy today with a flurry of announcements including a new autonomous database as a service and a shiny new blockchain service. The artificial intelligence service is an extension of these announcements.

Artificial Intelligence has become table stakes for developers and they need a set of tools and technologies that make it relatively easy for them to tap into AI capabilities without requiring deep subject knowledge to make use of it.

Interestingly enough, the AI service being announced today is an extension of the tools the company has been using in-house to build AI-fueled applications for their own customers. The service is designed to give their customer a similar set of tools to build their own AI applications.

Jack Berkowitz, vice president of products and data science for Oracle adaptive intelligence, says the internal teams work with the internal developers in a kind of symbiotic relationship. “One thing is we try to push use cases as far as possible. The [internal development teams] give us technology and we also drive the technology. We are the biggest customer internally. We bring together those pieces so we can build [intelligent] apps,” he told TechCrunch.

 

Amit Zavery, senior vice president at Oracle Cloud says like blockchain, it’s about providing a set of services for customers, and giving them the tools to build apps on top of the service. He says this involves offering common frameworks, libraries and development tools around that and making them available as a platform service. The service lets developers use common tools like Google Tensorflow, Caffe or Neo4j, and runs on top of NVidia GPUs to provide the speed machine learning typically demands .

Zavery says Oracle is trying to make it easier for customers to build AI applications. “What we find with these frameworks and tooling, is that it’s not easy to set up as an integrated offering, and the evolution is happening so fast that it’s tough to keep up with what you should be using in terms of APIs around that.” The service is designed to alleviate those issues for developers.

In addition to the general AI development platform, the company is offering more specific offerings around chatbots, Internet of Things and adaptive intelligence apps that will all be available in the coming weeks.

Read more: https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/02/oracle-adds-ai-development-service-to-platform-offerings/

Japanese Megabanks’ Tight Spot

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No joy at home, and little more abroad.

 

That’s the situation facing Japan’s megabanks, which have bet big expanding overseas only to find gains elusive. At the same time, they’re not benefiting from the pickup in household lending domestically. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s decision to call a snap election for later this month and the likelihood negative interest rates, introduced in early 2016 to encourage spending, will persist won’t improve matters.

 

Thanks to those low interest rates, domestic loans, particularly mortgages, are accelerating. But that business is mainly going to the nation’s regional banks, who cater more to households.

 

What’s even more worrying is that international operations, supposedly a savior of businesses coping with unfortunate local demographics, are also hurting. In the year ended March, overseas net interest margins fell at Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc., Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group Inc. and Mizuho Financial Group Inc. The latter two also posted even lower overseas net interest margins than at home, Fitch Ratings Ltd. noted. Offshore advances, hurt by higher funding costs, grew in the single digits and will continue to do so, according to director Naoki Morimura.

 

There are two reasons for the decline. First, banks in the international markets where the trio have been operating are becoming more defensive about defending their own turf. And second, U.S. regulations are increasing the cost of short-term funding such as commercial paper, forcing the megabanks to rely on more expensive pools like customer deposits and longer maturity bonds. The three financial institutions are also trying to keep risk-weighted assets under control, and are therefore more cautious about any rapid increase in overseas loans.

There are some positives. Mitsubishi UFJ has completed a few buybacks and, according to CLSA analyst Makoto Kuroda, Sumitomo Mitsui may be next to reward investors, since it has sufficient capital. And in the first quarter ended June 30, all three made money selling stock they held in other Japanese companies. With authorities pushing to unwind the country’s prevalent cross-shareholdings to improve corporate behavior, more such transactions could be in the works.

Fintech is another potential bright spot. Japan’s large lenders are investigating setting up digital currencies as China’s Alipay, owned by Jack Ma’s Ant Financial, enters a market where cash is still king. Analysts say Japan’s banks are especially keen to have their own digital currencies during the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo, when thousands of visitors from mainland China will be using Alipay. A consortium led by Mizuho and Japan Post Bank Co. is working on J Coin, an electronic currency that can be used on cellphones, while Mitsubishi UFJ is developing a blockchain-based alternative called MUFG Coin.

But none of that may be enough to improve the here and now for Japan’s big banks. With appetite from corporates for capital expenditure modest at best and persistent downward pressure on net interest margins, investors won’t have to try too hard to find a happier place to be.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners.

 

Read more: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-01/japanese-megabanks-tight-spot

Cloud computing has demanded a kinder, gentler Oracle

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Oracle has always had a swagger that reflects the public persona of its bombastic leader, Larry Ellison, but over the last several years, as the company has transitioned to the cloud, it has required a transformation to one that is softer and more customer-centric.

Mind you, this was a company that was the poster child for vendor lock-in the 90s and early 2000s. They knew you were looking for the best-of-breed enterprise database and their sales team knew how to get you hooked on costly maintenance contracts that kept you paying long after the initial sale and filled the company coffers. The cloud may not have completely killed off that model, but it has forced Oracle to play by a very different set of rules.

Of course, that didn’t stop the marketing machine from cranking up at Oracle OpenWorld this week, or Ellison himself from taking a few swings at chief cloud rival AWS (or them swiping back). But if you listened carefully to the messages coming from Oracle execs, there was clearly a shift in emphasis, which all revolved around the customer.

Interestingly enough, the company has been using its own internal users as a test bed for some of its cloud products. The new AI tools that were announced this week began as in-house tools to create the company’s new line of AI-driven applications. Jack Berkowitz, who is vice president of products and data science at Oracle adaptive intelligence, says his department’s job is to test the tools for the company and create applications that “reduce the time to value for customers.”

“Instead of hiring data scientists and data engineers and deployment specialists and system integrators, we provide those pre built to reduce time to deployment to days or weeks,” Berkowitz explained.

Even if Berkowitz and in-house team are demanding bunch, and they very likely are, it’s still not the same dynamic that Oracle faces with a subscribing cloud customer. As Salesforce vice chairman and COO Keith Block, who was once an Oracle executive, puts it, the subscription model puts the customer in control and it takes more than simply delivering a cloud product to put the focus on the customer’s needs.

 

“In the other companies who are in the perpetual license world — they can sell a lot of software up front and charge maintenance for it and you don’t get a lot of innovation for that and the risk is really on the customer, whereas in our model it is a ‘joint success model’,” Block told TechCrunch in an interview last year.

Oracle was born and raised in that perpetual license world, and while it’s made the shift to cloud services from a strictly on-prem approach, understanding the nuances of the cloud-subscription relationship could take a bit longer to understand (if they ever truly do).

While the cloud business is growing quickly — revenue from SaaS was up 62 percent in the most recent earnings report last month — it’s easier to grow a big number when you have a small percentage of the market. The cloud business provided a healthy $1.47 billion for the quarter, but that figure represented only a fraction of the company’s 9.21 billion overall revenue.

Oracle five year stock price snap shot. Chart: Yahoo Finance

The main focus of the company has clearly shifted to the cloud, but that is only part of the journey. The other is an attitude shift. Amit Zavery, senior vice president for cloud platform and middleware products at Oracle seems to sense this. When he described new offerings like the AI development tools and a new blockchain service announced this week at Oracle OpenWorld, he spoke of customer choice and of giving them the tools and technologies they want to use in the way they want to use them.

That sounds very much like a company making the shift toward the customer, but after years of working in an entirely different way, it’s a hard transformation to make. The market has demanded a kinder, gentler Oracle and it is trying to deliver. It remains to be seen if it can succeed.

Read more: https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/04/cloud-computing-has-demanded-a-kinder-gentler-oracle/

Bitcoin Is the Market’s Favorite Buzzword

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Want your company’s stock to climb? Consider mentioning “bitcoin” in the press release.

 

In the late 90s all it took was a dot-com in the name, back in the 60s “tronics” was good enough to double a share price. In 2017, the moniker sure to stoke investors’ appetite is any variation of “digital currency.”

 

Take Overstock.com Inc., which added about $137 million in market cap Wednesday after announcing the launch of a Securities and Exchange Commission-compliant digital tokens exchange. Thursday’s example: Goldmoney Inc. rose 15 percent after saying it will offer its clients the ability to trade bitcoin and ether and store the assets in auditable and insured vaults.

 

Betting that cryptocurrencies will ultimately revolutionize the world just as electronics and the internet did, investors are now casting a wide net to try to find the next Amazon.com — with perhaps not enough scrutiny to avoid this era’s Pets.com. For investors who find bitcoin or ether too risky, an alternative is buying shares of publicly-traded companies tied to the sector, said Lisa Ellis, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co.

 

“It’s like betting on the picks and shovels in the middle of a gold rush,” Ellis said in an interview. “It’s a safe and still lucrative area, which is why people get excited about firms doing things like exchanges and vaults. They’re enablers, solving the weak links in the cryptocurrency system.”

Overstock and Goldmoney are examples of companies trying to take cryptocurrencies to the mainstream by building an infrastructure around the sector that allows institutional investors to buy the assets with all the safeguards and protections of trading stocks and bonds. That plan depends on cryptocurrencies maturing enough to become their own asset class, even as eminences of the financial world such as JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s Jamie Dimon and hedge fund billionaire Ray Dalio rail against it.

And it’s not just those two stocks. In June, Nvidia Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc., which make hardware used in cryptocurrency mining, rallied as ether surged near $400 and bitcoin was near a record.

While there’s an argument to be made that the bets these companies are making are risky, they represent the more tame examples within the wider universe of crypto-endeavors. Take the Wu-Tang Coin, the digital token that’s raising money with the sole purpose of buying and releasing the Wu-Tang Clan album that convicted fraudster Martin Shkreli once spent $2 million on. Or Lydian, the blockchain-based marketing platform, backed by socialite Paris Hilton.

Roy Sebag, chief executive officer and co-founder of Goldmoney, doesn’t want his company and others like Overstock to be put in the same group as some of the startups doing initial coin offerings.

“There’s definitely euphoria, but it’s not the same as the ICOs, where people write a business plan over beers and publish it without following any regulations — that’s where you get the Pets.coms,” Sebag said in an interview. “What the finance community wants to see is legitimate companies, with cash and revenue, going into the crypto space, and it’s rewarding them with higher valuations.”

At least for now.

 

Read more: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-28/bitcoin-name-dropping-revives-market-memories-of-dot-com-mania

Oracle climbs on blockchain bandwagon with new cloud service

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Oracle is working hard to be a SaaS vendor that matters, whether with its new autonomous database service or getting involved with blockchain. Today, the database giant announced a new blockchain service at Oracle OpenWorld that aims to give enterprise customers who want to get involved with the blockchain, a fully managed approach.

“There are not a lot of production-ready capabilities around Blockchain for the enterprise. There [hasn’t been] a fully end-to-end, distributed and secure blockchain as a service,” Amit Zavery, senior vice president at Oracle Cloud said.

The Oracle blockchain service is built on the open source Hyperledger Fabric project The company joined the Hyperledger project in August ahead of this announcement. Oracle joins IBM in building a blockchain cloud service on top of the Hyperledge Fabric project.

Zavery says the purpose of this service is to give those companies who are interested in the technology a running start by taking the base capabilities in the open source project, then adding security, confidential permissions and APIs to build blockchain applications on top of that. He says there is also transaction monitoring and processing under the covers.

Blockchain is the technology originally created to track bitcoin digital currency on the internet. The idea of a secure, distributed ledger has caught on with many business cases in verticals like real estate, insurance, government and healthcare.

 

“Blockchain is one of the hardest technologies that Silicon Valley-based companies have ignored. Most innovation had been happening in the rest of world,” Ray Wang founder and principal analyst at Constellation Research told TechCrunch.

He added, “Larry [Ellison] is heavily focused on cybersecurity at all levels and Oracle’s [blockchain] service focuses in on how to deliver secure transactions.”

Oracle is attempting to offer a wide variety of cloud services to compete more fully with AWS, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce and others who have a big head start in the cloud over Oracle. Over the last couple of years, the company has accelerated its cloud strategy and increase the number and type of services to its customers. This year’s OpenWorld is about building on all of that.

Read more: https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/02/oracle-climbs-on-blockchain-bandwagon-with-new-cloud-service/

Cream Capital: Ghostface Killah’s new cryptocurrency company

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Ghostface Killah of The Wu-Tang Clan.

Image: Fergus McDonald/Getty Images

A lot has changed since the ’90s — just ask Wu-Tang Clan’s Ghostface Killah, whose world is now ruled by cryptocurrency instead of dollar dollar bills y’all.

For the rapper’s latest venture, Ghostface casually left the mic to co-found a new cryptocurrency firm called Cream Capitol.

Cream — which stands for “Crypto Rules Everything Around Me” in celebration of Wu Tang’s hit ’90s anthem, and has even been granted a trademark — hopes to raise $30 million in funding from the sale of digital tokens.

SEE ALSO: China may ban Bitcoin trading, but the market doesn’t seem to care

According to the website, the firm is developing digital currency called Cream Cash in the form of tokens that will equal the value of a U.S. dollar at all times. Cream Dividends will also be available so people can manage their tokens and exchange them for Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin.

Cryptocurrencies — decentralized digital currencies that often offer anonymous transactions — have grown in popularity, attracting attention from celebrities like Mark Cuban, Paris Hilton, and Floyd Mayweather.

Image: cream capital

But as for how Ghostface Killah got involved in the cryptocurrency business, co-founder and CEO Brett Westbrook told Pigeons and Planes he’s been a long-time, trusted business partner.

“I personally connected with him during a Reddit AMA on /r/hiphopheads last year when he was seeking tech-inclined people to work with in future technology focused projects,” Westbrook said. “Dennis is a very forward thinking person and has a keen interest in emerging technologies. It’s hard to ignore blockchain tech today even when you’re a busy, touring hip hop artist.”

And though Ghostface has no technical background with cryptocurrencies, Westbrook is confident the Wu-Tang member will succeed. “Remember that Wu-Tang is for the children. He is very focused on what the youth and millennials are interested in. He is a very solid businessman and has surrounded himself with bright individuals with a hunger for bring new, groundbreaking technologies to market,” Westbook said.

“Remember that Wu-Tang is for the children”

Ghostface is serving as the company’s chief branding officer, so it’s his job to promote the company in innovative and endearing ways. Who knows, maybe if we’re lucky the clan will even get together to remake their hit song. 

Though the company’s token sale isn’t until Nov. 11, Cream Capitol’s long-term goals already look promising. “By 2020, we intend to capture more than half of the global cryptocurrency ATM market and make cryptocurrencies more accessible to the general public than ever before,” the company explained in a press release.

To learn more about the Cream eco-system, you can read the company’s white paper. Go forth and dive into the world of cryptocurrency, but as always, remember to protect ya neck.

WATCH: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos becomes Bezosbot and it’s pretty epic

Read more: http://mashable.com/2017/10/05/ghostface-killah-cryptocurrency-company/