On the heels of Google buying analytics startup Looker last week for $2.6 billion, Salesforce today announced a huge piece of news in a bid to step up its own work in data visualization and tools to help enterprises make sense of the sea of data that they use and amass: Salesforce is buying Tableau for $15.7 billion in an all-stock deal.

The latter is publicly traded, and this deal will involve shares of Tableau Class A and Class B common stock getting exchanged for 1.103 shares of Salesforce common stock, the company said, and so the $15.7 billion figure is the enterprise value of the transaction, based on the average price of Salesforce’s shares as of June 7, 2019.

This is a significant jump on Tableau’s last market cap ($10.79 billion two days earlier.)

This is a massive deal for Salesforce as it continues to diversify beyond CRM software and into deeper layers of analytics to offer a 360-degree view of the customer and become a de facto data stack for the enterprise.
The company reportedly worked hard to buy LinkedIn but lost out to Microsoft. While there isn’t a whole lot in common between LinkedIn and Tableau, this deal will also help Salesforce extend its engagement (and data intelligence) for the customers that Salesforce already has — something that LinkedIn would have also helped it to do.

Even with Google’s move to buy Looker, one could argue that analytics is a big enough area that all major tech companies are getting their ducks in a row with stronger data analytics strategies and products. It’s unclear whether the two deals were made in response to each other, although it seems that Salesforce has been eyeing Tableau for years.

 “We are bringing together the world’s #1 CRM with the #1 analytics platform. Tableau helps people see and understand data, and Salesforce helps people engage and understand customers. It’s truly the best of both worlds for our customers – bringing together two critical platforms that every customer needs to understand their world,” said Marc Benioff, chairman, and co-CEO of Salesforce. “I’m thrilled to welcome Adam and his team to Salesforce.”

Tableau has about 86,000 business customers, including Charles Schwab, Verizon, Schneider Electric, Southwest and Netflix. Salesforce said Tableau would operate independently and under its own brand post-acquisition. It will also remain headquartered in Seattle, Wash., headed by CEO Adam Selipsky along with others on the current leadership team.

Indeed, later during an analyst conference call, Benioff let it drop that Seattle would become Salesforce’s official second headquarters with the closing of this deal.

That’s not to say, though, that the two will not be working together.

On the contrary, Salesforce is already talking up the possibilities of expanding what the company is already doing with its Einstein platform (launched back in 2016, Einstein is the home of all of Salesforce’s AI-based initiatives.) 

“Joining forces with Salesforce will enhance our ability to help people everywhere see and understand data,” said Selipsky. “As part of the world’s #1 CRM company, Tableau’s intuitive and powerful analytics will enable millions of more people to discover actionable insights across their entire organizations. I’m delighted that our companies share very similar cultures and a relentless focus on customer success. I look forward to working together in support of our customers and communities.”

“Salesforce’s incredible success has always been based on anticipating the needs of our customers and providing them the solutions they need to grow their businesses,” said Keith Block, co-CEO, Salesforce. “Data is the foundation of every digital transformation, and the addition of Tableau will accelerate our ability to deliver customer success by enabling a truly unified and powerful view across all of a customer’s data.”

Cars will soon be able to recognize you by your eyes, skin, gait and even your heartbeat, enabling a host of personalized experiences but raising troubling privacy questions, as well.

Why it Matters. New biometric technologies being developed by automakers will authenticate your identity and help keep you safe by also monitoring your health and wellbeing. But unless carefully guarded, that personal data can also be easily exploited by cybercriminals.

What's Happening. Automakers and their suppliers are working on a variety of driver-identification technologies such as facial and iris scans, as well as voice and fingerprint tracking.

• They would enable a driver to start the engine without a key and the car would automatically adjust the seats, mirrors, climate and audio settings.
• The car could then also communicate with home automation systems, turning on lights or opening the garage, for example, and automatically pay for tolls, parking or gas.
• For autonomous vehicles and car-sharing apps, ID verification is important to ensure passengers get into the right vehicle and are who they say they are.

What's Next. Such ID features are coming in the next year or so, followed by a second wave of more advanced biometric technologies. Goode Intelligence says the market for automotive-related biometric content may reach nearly $1 billion by 2023.

• An alcohol detection system that could be available as early as next year would know whether a motorist is drunk by gathering a whiff of their ambient breath. The system is being developed by a public-private partnership.

• B-Secur is marketing its Heartkey technology that can identify a driver by the unique rhythm of their heartbeat, and measure their level of stress or fatigue or even detect early signs of a stroke or heart attack, CEO Alan Foreman tells Axios.

• Aerendir Mobile's sensors capture micro-vibrations – tiny muscle twitches from cells in the human nervous system – to identify individuals and monitor their well-being by creating a neurological signature that's akin to a million-character-long password, founder Martin Zizi tells Axios.

Yes, But. Just as facial recognition systems are sounding alarms about privacy and human rights, biometric technologies in vehicles raise privacy concerns, experts say.

• Biometric information can be particularly revealing and immutable, Lauren Smith, senior counsel for the Future of Privacy Forum, says. Unlike a password or account number, you can't change your biological makeup.
• Without federal laws on bioprivacy, carmakers need to abide by state data-protection laws, many of which require notice before biometric data is collected, and the ability to opt out.

• Carmakers that signed the Automotive Privacy Principles created a higher, opt-in threshold for biometric information, requiring consent before data can be used for marketing or shared with others.

If you’re lucky enough to get to travel abroad, you know it’s getting easier and easier to use our phones and other gadgets to translate for us. So why not do so in a way that makes sense to you? This little gadget seeking funds on Kickstarter looks right up my alley, offering quick transcription and recording – plus music playback, like an iPod Shuffle with superpowers.

The ONE Miniis not that complex of a device – a couple of microphones and a wireless board in tasteful packaging – but that combination allows for a lot of useful stuff to happen both offline and with its companion app.

You activate the device, and it starts recording and both translating and transcribing the audio via a cloud service as it goes (or later, if you choose). That right there is already super useful when you have meetings to transcribe, or you’re meeting one-on-one with someone who doesn’t speak English.

Recordings are kept on the phone because there is no memory onboard the device. There’s an option for a cloud service, but that probably won’t be necessary, considering the compact size of these audio files. If you’re paranoid about security, this probably isn’t your solution, but for everyday stuff, it should be just fine.

If you want to translate a conversation with someone whose language you don’t speak, you pick two of the 12 built-in languages in the app and then either pass the gadget back and forth or let it sit between you while you talk. The transcript will show on the phone, and the ONE Mini can speak the translation in its little robotic voice.

Right now, translation is only available online, but the company plans to offer offline translation for specific language pairs that have reliable two-way edge models, probably Mandarin-English and Korean-Japanese.
It has a headphone jack, too, which lets it act as a wireless playback device for the recordings or your music, or to take calls using the nice onboard mics. It’s lightweight and has a little clip, so it’s probably better than connecting directly to your phone in many cases.
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There’s also a 24/7 interpreter line that charges two bucks a minute. Though most people won’t use the service, in an emergency, it could be pretty helpful to have a panic button that sends you directly to a person who speaks both the languages you’ve selected.
Right now you can buy a ONE Mini for $79. They’ve already passed their funding goal and are planning on shipping in June, so it shouldn’t be a long wait.

For years, IBM has offered corporate customers its Watson data-crunching technology – but only if they used it on IBM’s cloud computing service. Now, to expand Watson’s reach, IBM is also making it available on competing cloud services.

IBM said recently that it would allow businesses to use some of IBM’s Watson-related software with underlying data that is stored in rival cloud data centers like Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon Web Services. Customers will also be able to use Watson with data stored in their own data centers.

“It is enabling a level of openness that hasn’t been available to date,” said Rob Thomas, IBM general manager of data and AI.

The move marks a departure for IBM, which, until now, hasn’t seemed anything but open with its cloud computing service and Watson technologies. In 2016, for example, then-IBM CFO and current IBM senior vice president of global markets Martin Schroeter told analysts during an earnings call, “Watson runs on our cloud, and our technology will run on IBM’s cloud.”

But IBM is now shaking up its strategy to broaden Watson’s appeal. The change of heart comes as IBM’s public cloud languishes in third place, at best, in terms of market share behind AWS and Microsoft Azure.

Dan Kirsch, a research analyst at Hurwitz & Associates, called IBM’s new service “really significant” because businesses are increasingly seeking technology that’s not dependent on a single vendor.

Nick Patience, a founder and research vice president for 451 Research, said the move is “an acknowledgment by IBM that it’s a hybrid cloud world,” referring to firms wanting to use more than one cloud computing vendor as well as keeping some software running in their internal data centers.

 “We are confident in the IBM cloud that if clients try our products anywhere, they will eventually be drawn to IBM cloud and the uniqueness it provides,” said Thomas.

Although companies are concerned about being locked into a specific company’s cloud infrastructure when it comes to particular software and IT products, Patience said they are currently in the early stages of using AI and are still willing to upload their corporate data to cloud services like AWS and rely on them for machine learning software. Being locked into a particular vendor when it comes to machine learning projects isn’t yet much of a concern, but IBM is betting that will change.

He continued: “You could say IBM is trying to take back the initiative in machine learning here. The Watson brand has lost a little bit of luster over the years as others have come along. They are trying to take it back.”

SAP has launched a blockchain-based supply chain tracking system to allow drug wholesalers to authenticate pharmaceutical packaging returned by pharmacies and hospitals. That should help them weed out counterfeit drugs from their supply chain.

SAP says it hopes to eventually expand the use of distributed ledger technology to cover a broader range of pharmaceutical supply chain processes.

According to the company, its blockchain-based solution helps customers comply with the US Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA), which establishes that as of November 2019, wholesalers must verify prescription drugs that are returned and intended for resale. This piece of legislation is tasked with protecting consumers from contaminated, stolen or fake medication.

Counterfeit drugs are a significant problem in the pharmaceutical industry. Research releasedby the World Health Organization in 2017 found that an estimated 1 in 10 medical products circulating in low-and-middle-income countries was either substandard or fake.

In the US, wholesalers encounter almost 60 million returns a year, accounting for an estimated $7 billion.
With the new software, customers can verify the product code, lot, expiration date and a unique serial number which is embedded in the barcode against manufacturers’ data stored in the blockchain.

It’s worth noting that the software was co-developed with other well-known pharmaceutical companies including Boehringer Ingelheim AG & Co. KG, GlaxoSmithKline plc and Merck Sharp & Dohme.

The news comes after SAP announced two industry consortia within the SAP Blockchain Consortium program in the fall of last year, but this is not the first time blockchain technology has been leveraged in a bid to fight counterfeit goods in the healthcare industry. In fact, Merck was looking to patentblockchain-based technology to bring greater transparency to the supply chain in June 2018.
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An immutable ledger such as blockchain would prove useful in the healthcare industry, so, it’s likely we’ll see similar projects launching soon.

Amazon now has a say in the development of a commonly used smart home standard, giving the company more power as it continues to push smart speakers, cameras, doorbells, and all other kinds of gadgets into its customers’ homes.

As of today, Amazon has a seat on the board of the Zigbee Alliance, which oversees implementation of the Zigbee wireless protocol. Zigbee isn’t nearly as popular as Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, but you can think of it a lot like them – it’s a wireless protocol for letting gadgets communicate. But unlike Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, Zigbee is particularly useful for low-power devices and can travel longer distances, making it ideal for simple smart gadgets like a light switch.

Amazon introduced a version of the Echo, called Echo Plus, with Zigbee support more than a year ago. That support allowed the speaker to directly connect to a new world of smart home gadgets, like light bulbs, power outlets, and tiny sensors that it otherwise couldn’t have reached. The home alarm system for Ring, which Amazon owns, also connects to Zigbee.

It’s a slow start, but Amazon’s ascension to Zigbee’s board suggests the company will want to make more use of the protocol in the future. Other companies on Zigbee’s board include: 1) Samsung-owned SmartThings, which makes a smart home hub; 2) Signify, the company behind the popular Philips Hue smart lights; and 3) Comcast, which uses Zigbee on its Xfinity Home security solution.

Getting onto Zigbee’s board isn’t exactly a feat for Amazon, but it is an obvious and deliberate decision. Getting on the board means becoming one of the Alliance’s highest-paying members – $75,000 per year – and it gives those companies an significant advantage: they’re able to “drive specification development, requirements, and test plans.” Or basically, define where Zigbee goes next.
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If Amazon is paying that money, it means the company wants a say in what future versions of Zigbee can do and how different Zigbee devices work together. It also shows Amazon taking an opinion on which smart home standard it’d like to see win out. Zigbee’s most direct competitor is an alternative called Z-Wave, which hardware makers have criticized for relying on proprietary chips from a single company. Amazon is likely among the many companies in the smart home industry that would rather avoid dealing with the pricey parts that could come along with that if Z-Wave were to grow in popularity.

Drivers will soon have an extra set of eyes on the road, courtesy of Google.

Google’s navigation app, Google Maps, is starting to roll out speed limit and speed trap features. 

With the speed limit feature, drivers using Google Maps will be shown the posted speed limit of the road they’re driving on in the lower left side of the app. Speed traps are designated with a small camera icon and shown on the visible area of the map. The Maps app provides an audio warning for drivers when they are approaching a speed trap.

Users have had the ability to report speed traps in Google Maps since late last year. However, until now, the app wasn’t yet making the reported speed traps visible for users in maps. 

Google Maps users have long wondered when such features were going to make their debut on the service. Crowdsource-powered navigation app, Waze, grew in popularity for providing this sort of detailed information on the road. Google acquired Waze back in 2013 for around $1 billion. 

Now, nearly five and a half years later, some of the Waze features are finally making their way to Google Maps.

Several companies demonstrated C-V2X (cellular vehicle-to-everything)communications technology developed by Qualcomm at CES 2019. But Ford may be the most aggressive in bringing C-V2X to market. The Detroit automaker will add it to every new car and truck sold in the United States by 2022, Don Butler, executive director for Ford connected vehicle platform and product, wrote in a blog post.

C-V2X is the latest incarnation of so-called vehicle-to-everything (V2X), a communications technology that allows cars to “talk” to each other and infrastructure. The claimed advantage of this technology is that it can warn a driver of things beyond his or her line of sight. If a car is stopped at an intersection with poor visibility, it could, for example, pick up signals from other V2X-equipped cars or sensors mounted on nearby buildings to tell the driver if it’s okay to go.

Vehicles could also communicate with stoplights, telling drivers when a light is about to change. Audi already offers this in the form of its Traffic Light Information system. The system gives a countdown when a light is about to turn green, but it only works in a handful of cities (Audi also offers a built-in toll transponder that relies on V2X tech). Aptiv has placed sensors on traffic lights in Las Vegas to guide its self-driving cars, even when they’re onboard cameras don’t have a direct line of sight to the light.

Ford could take things even further, Butler wrote. C-V2X could be integrated with driver aids, like those in Ford’s recently introduced Co-Pilot360 suite. Or it could be added to self-driving cars. Emergency vehicles could be equipped with C-V2X transmitters, allowing cars to detect their presence and move out of the way.

The difference between the C-V2X tech embraced by Ford and previous systems is that it’s based on 5G. All other V2X systems to-date have used a competing setup called Dedicated Short-Range Communications (DSRC). But that means Ford will have to rely on the smooth rollout of 5G. Even the deployment of DSRC-based V2X vehicles and infrastructure has been slow, and DSRC is based on a more familiar technology derived from Wi-Fi.

“A conducive regulatory environment must be in place for C-V2X to be deployed, which is why we are working just as much with industry and government organizations to create such a technology-neutral environment,” Butler wrote in his blog post. He also told Bloombergthat he hopes other automakers will adopt C-V2X alongside Ford. He added that C-V2X is a simpler solution because telecom companies are already spending billions on 5G cell towers and antennas, while DSRC would require a separate government investment.
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Despite the potential hurdles, Qualcomm expects C-V2X and other related technologies to become a significant part of its business. The company believes that, within five years, 75% of cars will have some form of connectivity. A critical mass of vehicles will be needed to realize the technology’s full benefit since cars that aren’t equipped with C-V2X or similar systems can’t communicate with each other. The more vehicles on the network, the more effective it is.

Google has won approval to bolster work on its Minority Report-style touchless technology, which enables electronics to be controlled by hand gestures.

The Federal Communications Commission has approved Google’s plans to use more powerful sensors for its Project Soli initiative, first unveiled in 2015. The radar-based technology is now poised to kick on to the next level after Google was given special permission to use higher frequencies for its tests.

When Google first showcased the tech in 2015, it came under the X Labs banner and was focused on smartwatches, with specific gestures replacing a physical tap on the touchscreen. For example, it was possible to rub two fingers together in the vicinity of the watch to cycle through menus or turn up the volume of media.

Now the company could expand the operation to enable the sci-fi like air gestures we’ve seen in films like Minority Report and the Iron Man franchise, on larger screens and devices. The waiver granted by the FCCcould also be highly beneficial to tech users with mobility, speech, and tactile impairments.

In a statement (via Reuters), the FCC said: “The ability to recognize users’ touchless hand gestures to control a device, such as a smartphone, could help people with mobility, speech, or tactile impairments, which in turn could lead to higher productivity and quality of life for many members of the American public.”
The regulator also said there’s little chance of Google’s Project interfering with other spectrum users and has approved the tech for use on aircraft.
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Google hasn’t commented on the news yet, but it’ll be interesting to see what the company has in mind for Project Soli moving forward. Hopefully, we’ll find out more in 2019.

 The only sure things in this life, according to Ben Franklin, are death and taxes. And a new startup called Visor has just raised $9 million in financing to make one of them as painless as possible.

Unlike Dr. Jack Kevorkian (remember “Doctor Death”), Visor won’t kill anyone, but it may ring the death knell for the high-end tax advisors that most Americans can’t even access to get help filing and paying their taxes.  It’s like having a personalized accountant for the cost of a high-end do-it-yourself tax-prep service.

The $9 million Visor raised came from the venture capital firm, Defy, with participation from Unusual Ventures, SVB Capital and existing investors like Obvious Ventures, Fika Ventures, and Boxgroup, who had put a previous $6.5 million into the company. 

The idea for the company had been percolating for co-founder and chief executive Gernot Zacke since he settled in the U.S. 

Growing up in Sweden, Zacke was exposed to a much different process for paying taxes. “The experience of filing taxes in Sweden is that you receive a message from the government that stated how much you made and how much you were withholding. That’s it,” said Zacke. “Taxes should be as easy as ordering a cab.”

That’s the service that Visor aims to provide.

“If you think about the market there are two ways to get your taxes done. There’s the DIY space, and then there are other online services, but it requires the taxpayer to fill out the forms, and it leaves the taxpayer with a little bit of anxiety,” said Zacke. “We’re delivering the CPA experience through the convenience of a web app and a mobile app.”

On average, Americans spend about 13 hours each year dealing with taxes, and the average American doesn’t have the benefits of a professional advisor who can help optimize the process. That’s what Visor wants to provide.

“You provide the same amount of information you provide to a CPA or TurboTax… we make sure that that information is filed securely on AWS and shared between the docs and the backend,” said Zacke. 

The target customers for Zacke’s services are folks who have had a change to their tax situation – whether moving, buying a home, or any other life event; or people who have had a CPA and don’t want to pay the higher fees, he said.
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Visor currently has an operations team of around 34 people split between San Francisco and Atlanta.
“Taxpayers spend $20 billion a year to get their taxes prepared and are stuck between spending hours filling out DIY tax software and hiring an expensive CPA,” said Zacke, in a statement. “