Virtual Reality: Still Goofy After All These Years

Reality is free, yet it can often leave you feeling shortchanged. Virtual Reality (VR) is expensive, and may leave you feeling exhilarated, if it hasn't made you motion-sick.

Facebook paid $2 billion last year for Oculus, maker of the Oculus Rift VR headset, because it sees a future in which virtual reality becomes an accepted form of mass entertainment. To judge by the exhibition floor at the 2015 Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco this week, many companies share that vision. (Full disclosure: GDC is produced by InformationWeek's parent company, UBM Americas.)

It's a vision that goes beyond games, as Oculus CTO John Carmack suggested in his keynote address at GDC on Wednesday. As an example, he cited the fact that his grandmother views panoramic pictures she's taken with her mobile phone through a Gear VR headset.

Businesses are already experimenting with VR. Carmaker Audi plans to make the Audi Virtual Reality Experienceavailable to a limited number of dealerships later this year. The VR car marketing program has been in pilot testing in Brazil for more than a year.

In January, Oculus announced the formation of Story Studio, an in-house group focused on the production of virtual reality movies.

To understand the commercial appeal of VR, consider what it lacks: Distractions. When you're participating in virtual reality, you're all in. You're as engaged as you can be, and engagement matters to artists and advertisers alike. An audience that doesn't pay attention doesn't pay off.

This may explain, in part, why interest in VR among technology companies has surged recently. It's also about how smartphones can work with VR headsets to make VR more affordable. And it's about incremental improvements in a variety of motion and graphics technologies that make VR systems more practical to implement.

[ VR was a hit at Mobile World Congress 2015. Read VR, Smartwatches, Wearables: 8 Cool Gadgets From MWCl. ]

Here's a quick recap of recent VR news:

• Sony's VR headset, Project Morpheus, which debuted at last year's GDC 2014, is now slated to ship in 2016.
• Microsoft HoloLens goggles were unveiled in January.
• Samsung and Oculus have announced a new version of Samsung's Gear VR goggles designed to accommodate its new Galaxy S6 smartphone.
• Razer is developing the OSVR headset. Google offers Cardboard, cardboard goggles that rely on a smartphone display to present stereoscopic images.
• HTC and Valve are working on a VR headset called Vive.
• A handful of other companies, including Fove, GameFace Labs, Magic Leap, Sulon Technologie, Vrvana, and Zeiss are developing similar technology.

VR has been a long time coming. Back in the 1990s, VRML -- virtual reality modelling language -- was all the rage. The focus then was on making 3D graphics interactive and browser-friendly. Everquest, Second Life, World of Warcraft, and various other virtual worlds showed that 3D graphics could be captivating and sometimes profitable. Now, Second Life founder Philip Rosedale is back with High Fidelity, flush with venture funding, to make a 3D ecosystem fitted to VR headsets.

We can speculate whether or not there's a VR bubble that's about to pop. But what fun is that? What we do know is that the technology will evolve and become more commonplace as companies figure out how to reach beyond hardcore gamers. Eventually, Magic Leap or some company like it will figure out how to make VR work without having to strap a bulky device to your face. Until then, enjoy the fantastical fakery before your eyes, and try not to think about the way you really look.

Who Should Sell Your Data? You Should!

Internet users of America, it's time to rethink our relationship with the companies that pimp us out for ad dollars.

15 Hot Skill Sets For IT Pros In 2015

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It's time to create an online marketplace that lets Internet users sell their data directly to companies that want it.

We all know our online activity is valuable. Google and Facebook, among others, make a fortune by trading services such as search or social networking in exchange for knowledge of our online activity, which they gather and resell to advertisers.

Now AT&T is getting in on the act, charging Gigapower customers as much as $66 a month to opt out of having their Web activity tracked and sold.

It's clear there’s a market for user data -- for our data. And where there's a market, there's opportunity. Instead of being pimped out by broadband providers, search engines, and social networks, it's time to start pimping out ourselves -- and getting a cut of that cold, hard cash.

I propose the creation of an online marketplace that allows us to sell the rights to our Web activity to the highest bidders.

I’m not sure of the technical specifications for how to pull this off. Maybe some kind of super-cookie that sits on my devices and hoovers up everything I do. This super-cookie could then link to an online market or markets where buyers bid for the data.

This super-cookie would have to be encrypted so that only authorized sources could get access to the data, and we'd need a mechanism to stop other cookies from collecting what we do online.

As for the marketplace, the seller could set preferences for how much or how little he or she is willing to share based on monetary return.

For instance, buyers may pay a base price for information such as age, annual income, and searches related to jogging. But if users included a feed from an activity tracker, they could charge a premium for buyers that want additional data.

Sellers could also link in other data sources, such as location data from smartphones or smartwatches, mobile payment information, and other feeds.

And every time our data is purchased, we get a cut.

Companies like Facebook, Google, and now AT&T act like they're doing us a favor by giving us a free or discounted service in exchange for our data. But if our online activity generates billions in profits for these companies, shouldn’t they be paying us?

Clearly there are technical barriers to such a system, but those barriers can be surmounted.

More important is that the time has come to upend the current economic relationship between consumers and Internet services.

[Read about hot cities for IT pros.]

There's a lucrative market for our data. If we're going to get sold anyway, why shouldn't we get a piece of the action?

Attend Interop Las Vegas, the leading independent technology conference and expo series designed to inspire, inform, and connect the world's IT community. In 2015, look for all new programs, networking opportunities, and classes that will help you set your organization's IT action plan. It happens April 27 to May 1. Register with Discount Code MPOIWK for $200 off Total Access & Conference Passes.

Salesforce Service Cloud Intelligence: Leader Or Laggard?

Salesforce Intelligence Engine promises to route service calls to the right agents, balance case workloads, and ease service across channels. On some counts, Oracle has it beat.

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Salesforce on Monday announced the Service Cloud Intelligence Engine, with new capabilities that the company says will support skills-based routing of service cases, automatic balancing of case workloads, and the ability to transfer a service case from one channel to another (like from Twitter to chat or phone) without forcing customers to explain their problem over and over again.

If much of that functionality sounds familiar, it should, since some of these capabilities have been around for years. Nonetheless, Salesforce insists that it's innovating -- or at least will be innovating -- when the Service Cloud Intelligence Engine becomes generally available sometime in the second half of 2015. Here's a closer look at what it's describing as original.

The ability to route service cases to specific agents based on their knowledge of particular service issues is known as skills-based routing. Unified communications and workforce-management vendors like Genesys, Avaya, and Cisco have supported skills-based routing for many years. Where Salesforce says its "layer of intelligence" will differ is in being tied into the CRM system and all channels of interaction, whether they are email, social, mobile, chat, or phone.

[Want more on this topic? Read Oracle Service Cloud Upgraded, Explained.]

"Salesforce is also an integration platform, so we're seeing a lot of customers integrating with the back-office applications," said Michael Ramsey, vice president of Service Cloud product management, in a phone interview with InformationWeek. "We're taking any business event, whether that's part of a [service] case record, a qualified lead or opportunity [in CRM], or a custom, non-Salesforce-native process exposed through back-office integration, and we're routing that where it needs to go."

So the routing capability goes beyond just service issues, and it can be tied to alerts, rules, SLAs, and other conditions. That goes beyond what a workforce-management system for contact centers can do, but it sounds like an evolution of workflow capabilities that Salesforce introduced in 2010.

In another area where Salesforce says its intelligence layer will be state of the art, Ramsey says it will base its determinations of the "right" person to route things to on the array of live data in the Salesforce platform, not just on static profiles or LinkedIn recommendations.

This screen shot of Salesforce Service Cloud Intelligence shows a service case handed off from Twitter to email to support a detailed response.

"We know who resolved particular types of issues, we know whether they did it within a defined service-level-agreement, and we know who authored the knowledge article that was used to close the case," said Ramsey. "Obviously the concept of skills-based routing has been around for decades, but we're deriving our knowledge of the work that people can handle from the Salesforce platform rather than manually updated profiles."

Oracle announced in January that the latest release of its Oracle Customer Experience Service cloud is also tied into CRM. Claiming it delivers today what Salesforce is now promising, Oracle says it can tap data within its CX Cloud to power smart routing of service cases. Acknowledging that many companies don't want to throw out workforce management systems they've spent years tuning, Oracle also offers a pass-through mode that enables CRM data to be used for skills-based routing in third-party workforce management systems (something Ramsey said Salesforce can also do).

As for that ability to pass service cases from one channel to the next without forcing customers to explain their situation over and over again, that too is a known problem, but few companies seem to have overcome it.

"How many times have you had to repeat who you are over and over again because your call was pushed to a separate agent, even though you already explained your problem to the first agent you talked to?" Sarah Patterson, VP of marketing, Service Cloud, told InformationWeek. "[Sales Cloud Intelligence] looks at what is already happening on your case, so we can preserve that context across channels. We'll also be able to route to the best channel for handling the interaction."

Twitter, for example, only handles 140 characters, while email is asynchronous and not ideal for rapid interaction and problem resolution. Salesforce says the agents who start working on a case in email or Twitter will be able to move it to chat or phone without handing off to a new agent.

Salesforce executives said the Intelligence Engine will be standard functionality exposed in Service Cloud Enterprise Edition and above. It's not clear whether the upgrades will be available as early as July or will have to wait until later in the year, but count on more CRM vendors' competitors matching these claims.  

Attend Interop Las Vegas, the leading independent technology conference and expo series designed to inspire, inform, and connect the world's IT community. In 2015, look for all new programs, networking opportunities, and classes that will help you set your organization’s IT action plan. It happens April 27 to May 1. Register with Discount Code MPOIWK for $200 off Total Access & Conference Passes.

Samsung Galaxy S6, S6 Edge Preorders Hit 20 Million, Reports Claim

In South Korea, reports claim that Samsung has already taken 20 million preorders for its new Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge smartphones.

Samsung, BlackBerry, Microsoft: 10 Killer Business Devices At MWC

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Samsung plans to launch the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edgesmartphones globally on April 10.

In order to assure availability for their customers, wireless network operators around the world are placing huge orders for the two devices, according to published reports coming from South Korea. The fervent channel-filling activity suggests consumers may be interested in the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge, too.

"Samsung received some 20 million pre-orders for the S6 and S6 Edge," said a top executive at a leading mobile network operator in Europe to The Korea Times. Samsung has taken orders for "15 million of [the] S6 and 5 million [of the] S6 Edge from mobile carriers worldwide. This is a record," claimed the unnamed exec. The source said his own employer had a favorable opinion of the device following its debut at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on March 1.

These are not orders placed by individuals. Rather, they are orders placed by the companies that will eventually sell the devices to people at wireless retail stores. The large number of orders won't necessarily reflect sales to end consumers, but it is a helpful gauge of the impact the device may have. Unfortunately, similar preorder numbers for the Galaxy S5 or S4, which might be used for comparison, aren't available.

Apple typically places massive orders for its devices ahead of launch. Consider the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, which racked up consumer pre-orders of 4 million in the first 24 hours and actually sold 10 million over the first weekend. In order to meet those numbers, Apple itself ordered in excess of 20 million devices from suppliers.

[Read about the coolest gadgets from MWC 2015.]

In the US, Verizon Wireless is the only company that has said when it will start taking orders for the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge. Verizon is opening the virtual door on April 1, but did not say when orders for the two smartphones might ship. AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and other carriers have so far remained silent about when to expect the devices. Moreover, there's no word at all on US pricing. Retailers in Europe have priced the S6 and S6 Edge at 700 and 850 euros, respectively, which amounts to about $760 and $925. Samsung's Galaxy S4 and S5 had full retail prices in the US of $649. Wireless network operators will sell the S6/S6 Edge with and without contracts, as well as through monthly payment plans.

The Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge trade in plastic materials for metal and glass. They sport 5.1-inch 2K screens, Exynos processors, 16-megapixel cameras with optical image stabilization, 3 GB of RAM, and 32, 64, or 128 GB of internal storage. The phones don't have removable batteries or expandable memory, but support QuickCharge technology and multiple wireless charging standards.

The smartphones will run Android 5.0 Lollipop out of the box with Samsung's TouchWiz user interface.

Attend Interop Las Vegas, the leading independent technology conference and expo series designed to inspire, inform, and connect the world's IT community. In 2015, look for all new programs, networking opportunities, and classes that will help you set your organization’s IT action plan. It happens April 27 to May 1. Register with Discount Code MPOIWK for $200 off Total Access & Conference Passes.

Docker Adds SDN Capabilities Via SocketPlane

Docker acquired startup SocketPlane to enhance the networking capabilities of its containers.

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Docker has acquired startup SocketPlane, which is developing technology to bring software-defined networking to Docker containers.

"We had a simple, first-generation network stack," said Scott Johnston, senior vice president of product at Docker, in an interview with InformationWeek. This was sufficient for developers running a few containers on a laptop or in a test environment.

But as Docker’s popularity has grown, applications can run on hundreds or thousands of containers across multiple hosts in a data center.

"We need the open source network DNA inside the company to guide the community to a next-generation API to address the scaling challenges and ephemeral nature of containers," said Johnston.

SocketPlane sets up network overlays to create a virtual network by using Open vSwitch to build VXLAN tunnels to connect Docker containers. Each container gets an IP address that stays with the container regardless of where it migrates.

[ Learn more about containers. Read Containers Explained: 9 Essentials You Need To Know. ]

According to Johnston, each physical host will have a container that runs Open vSwitch and will serve as a distributed controller for the virtual network.

Johnston noted that SocketPlane won't be the exclusive mechanism for linking Docker containers. Networking companies such as Cisco and VMware, and other open source projects such as Weave, can use an API developed by SocketPlane to link in their own networking stacks.

"We're not buying SocketPlane to compete with others in the community," said Johnston. "We want the expertise to guide the community in the development of this open networking API."

(Image: Stux via Pixabay)

We asked Johnston why the company didn't go with a project such as Neutron, which provides an API for networking in OpenStack. He said the scale and dynamic nature of containers and microservices creates new networking challenges. The design point for OpenStack is a virtual machine. Applications running on VMs may only need tens or a few hundred VMs to interconnect.

"In the world of containers, we see hundreds or thousands of containers making up an application," said Johnston. "When you stand up a VM, you stand it up for weeks or months. Containers may live for a minute, or move to a new host. The ephemeral nature of containers in a distributed app [is] different."

For more information on SocketPlane, Ryan Waller's blog Au Courant Technology has a detailed post on setting up a simple SocketPlane network connection.

SocketPlane will appear on a live panel at Interop Las Vegas, David Vs. Goliath: New Startups Driving Innovation, hosted by Alex Benik, a partner at Battery Ventures.

Johnston declined to provide financial details of the deal, but did say that the company will bring all of SocketPlane's six-person team on board. SocketPlane was founded in October 2014 and is backed by LightSpeed Ventures.

DroppedIn Vuln Links Victims' Androids To Attackers' DropBoxes

DropBox released a patch quick, but unpatched vulnerable Android apps that use the DropBox SDK may let attackers open up a two-way highway between victim Droids and their own Boxes.

Researchers at IBM X-Force have discovered a vulnerability in the DropBox software development kit (SDK) for Android that allows attackers to connect a victim's Android apps to an attacker's own DropBox account. The "DroppedIn" vulnerability affects any Android app developed with the DropBox SDK versions 1.5.4 through 1.6.1.

The flaw is in the implementation of the authentication mechanism used to give the app access to DropBox. It's supposed to work like this: while the user is providing their username-password combo to log in, the SDK is generating a large random number (a cryptographic nonce) to authenticate the device to DropBox. The trouble is, the proof-of-concept exploit the researchers have created "lets attackers insert an arbitrary access token into the SDK, completely bypassing the nonce protection," as they explain.

A victim could either be tricked into downloading a malicious app or infected via drive-by download. Either way, once the device is infected, the attacker has an open path from the victim's Droid to the attacker's DropBox -- through which the attacker could steal sensitive personal data and files from the device. This access would also go in the opposite direction -- the attacker could push out their own DropBox files, including malware.

To clarify, this exploit would not be a problem for the DropBox documents a user adds from their desktop machine, just files and data residing on their Android device. 

Fortunately, DropBox has already released a patch -- just four days after they learned of the vulnerability. Plus, if the DropBox app is installed on the user's Android device, then the SDK vulnerability cannot be exploited anyway. 

The trouble, of course, is that average users who don't use the DropBox app might assume they're not vulnerable. According to IBM X-Force, 1.4 percent of the top 500 Android apps use the DropBox SDK, including Microsoft Office Mobile and Agile Bits 1Password. 

Mobile malware is a growing problem, especially for Android. In a separate report released this week, Veracode found that the average global enterprise has approximately 2,400 unsafe applications in its mobile environment.

Of the unsafe apps Veracode studied, 85 percent expose sensitive device data, 35 percent obtain or share personal information about the user, and 37 perform suspicious security actions, such as "checking to see if the device is rooted or jailbroken, allowing applications to perform superuser actions such as recording conversations, disabling anti-malware, replacing firmware or viewing cached credentials such as banking passwords."

“On average, 3 percent of apps on employee devices are malicious," says Veracode vice-president of mobile Theodora Titonis. She is a bit surprised to find that 35 percent of apps were sharing personal information of the user. “That number is increasing.”

Google's London Store Signals Retail Push

Google's London store isn't a freestanding structure, but a shop-within-a-shop. The search engine giant is also showing off its new Chromebook Pixel.

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Google's timid entry into the retail business advanced another step on Wednesday with the opening of the first Google-branded shop.

It's not quite a free-standing, logo-bearing structure along the lines of an Apple Store; rather, it's a "shop in shop," called "the Google shop," that sits within the confines of Currys PC World, located on Tottenham Court Road in London.

Nonetheless, customers can experiment with Google's Android, Chromebook, and Chromecast devices, and can actually purchase in-stock items with the help of a Google specialist.

"This is the first Google shop experience Google has opened anywhere in the world," Google said in a statement.

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The company has, however, operated temporary outlets before the London experiment. In 2013, it opened pop-up product showrooms called Winter Wonderlabs in six US cities, where visitors could order Google products but could not actually obtain merchandise.

[Read about Android security concerns.]

That same year, Google tried to open a showroom built atop a barge on San Francisco's waterfront, but failed to find a way to operate its floating technology gallery within California law.

Apple has made the appeal of retail stores apparent to its competitors.

At its media event on March 9, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that 120 million people visited Apple Stores in the fourth quarter of 2014. Apple has over 450 stores. While it earns only about 12% of its annual revenue from its retail locations, it derives benefits beyond sales: marketing, customer relations, and customer support.

Google undoubtedly wants to sell products -- it just revised its online Google Store to promote its newly updated Chromebook Pixel ($999-$1,299) -- but the company also recognizes that a retail presence can provide value through interactions as well as through transactions.

"With the Google shop, we want to offer people a place where they can play, experiment and learn about all of what Google has to offer; from an incredible range of devices to a totally-connected, seamless online life," said James Elias, the UK marketing director for Google, in a March 11 statement.

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Toward that end, the Google shop offers an immersive surround screen installation, dubbed "Portal," that simulates flying around in Google Earth. There's also a Doodle Wall on which customers can digitally revise Google's logo and then share the results through social media, if they feel like advertising for Google. And there's a Chromecast Pod for viewing videos from Google Play, YouTube, and other sources.

Google is also planning to host classes and events in its Google shop that combine education with platform evangelism. The company says these may include "Virtual Space Camps," to teach basic programming skills to kids, and teacher training sessions focused on Google's free educational tools.

Attend Interop Las Vegas, the leading independent technology conference and expo series designed to inspire, inform, and connect the world's IT community. In 2015, look for all new programs, networking opportunities, and classes that will help you set your organization’s IT action plan. It happens April 27 to May 1. Register with Discount Code MPOIWK for $200 off Total Access & Conference Passes.