Day: October 13, 2021

Posted on

Mattermost Launches New Project and Workflow Management Solutions for Developers

Open source collaboration platform delivers alternatives to tools like Slack, Trello, and Notion to help R&D teams improve productivity and accelerate digital operations

Palo Alto, Calif., Oct. 13, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Mattermost, Inc. today announced several new additions to its open source project at KubeCon® + CloudNativeCon North America 2021, launching and integrating modern project and workflow management solutions into its popular developer collaboration platform. Built for technical teams, Mattermost now provides flexible alternatives to tools like Slack®, Trello®, and Notion® through a unified platform for increased collaboration and productivity across a wide range of software development processes — from sprint planning and release management to incident resolution and retrospectives.

With heightened awareness around the urgency for remote collaboration and modernization of enterprise processes, developers have been increasingly asked to circumvent fragile processes, talent shortages, and security risks to deliver performance, innovation, and digital operations at scale. The newest update to the core Mattermost® platform emphasizes the complexities of these staggering objectives and the need for dynamic solutions that empower R&D teams with autonomy, flexibility, and security.

The launch of Mattermost’s modern project and workflow management solutions also reflects the company’s evolution beyond secure messaging to enable team alignment and operational agility across sophisticated R&D use cases. Unlike general collaboration products, the Mattermost platform now allows developers to contribute directly to its solutions and customize their workspaces to adapt to their preferred team processes. Mattermost also provides teams with the option to deploy on-premise or in a secure cloud instance. This gives companies more control over their data and assists them in meeting stringent security and privacy compliance standards such as those found in HIPAA, FINRA, GDPR, country-specific data sovereignty, and other regulatory requirements.

“As organizations navigate the shift to always-on digital operations, teams that effectively align their people, tools, and processes across each stage of the development lifecycle are increasing their velocity, improving delivery and gaining a strategic advantage,” said Ian Tien, co-founder and CEO of Mattermost. “With developers reporting that nearly 40% of their workweek is wasted due to tool fragmentation, manual tasks, fragile workflows, and service-impacting incidents and outages, we see a huge opportunity to help every R&D team in the world improve their operations and productivity with collaboration solutions built specifically for the way they work.”

Founded in 2016, Mattermost has powered over 800,000 developer workspaces worldwide and has a community of over 4,000 open source contributors who have updated the platform over 30,000 times since its initial release. Mattermost’s commercial offerings are used by over 800 organizations, including European Parliament, NASA, Nasdaq, Samsung, SAP, the United States Air Force, and Wealthfront.

“Mattermost has been unimaginably effective for our company and continues to exceed expectations with every new release,” said Daniel Gover, IT system administrator for Crossover Health. “The platform helps us ensure that we’re staying HIPAA-compliant while letting our clinicians collaborate efficiently and seamlessly.”

“Developer velocity is increasingly essential to driving digital operations and modernization across the enterprise,” said Paul Nashawaty, senior analyst for Enterprise Strategy Group. “Mattermost is helping to meet this requirement with a collaboration platform that reduces context switching and delivers visibility and control across the developer workflow and toolchain.”

This update to the Mattermost platform is now available to all users and features enhanced navigation and multiple tightly integrated collaboration tools, including:

Channels: The foundation of the Mattermost platform, Channels bring all of your team’s communication into one place, so you have complete visibility and control. Channels come with team messaging, conferencing, and file sharing features beyond general-purpose collaboration, including slash commands, code syntax highlighting, rich Markdown formatting, code snippets, and bot integrations.

Playbooks: Playbooks are prescribed workflows that streamline complex, recurring processes. Playbooks run side-by-side with Channels and make any structured process repeatable and predictable using checklists, triggers, automation, and tool integrations. Continuous improvement is built into each playbook with learnings and retrospectives.

Boards: Boards are Kanban-style task and project management solutions with clearly defined tasks, owners, checklists, and deadlines. Boards help teams increase transparency and keep all resources readily available, including documents, images, and links, and are used to help teams achieve project milestones and manage projects and tasks of any size.

Connections: Connections are integrations and extensions with leading developer tools, including GitHub®, Jenkins®, Circle CI®, GitLab®, Jira®, PagerDuty®, and ServiceNow®. Connections allow developers to turn any Channel into a CLI through built-in or custom commands to execute actions directly, such as posting to Channels, listening for new messages with incoming and outgoing webhooks. Developers can build Connections through custom apps, open APIs, plugins, and webhooks. The Mattermost App Framework allows developers to define custom interactive add-ons that support web, mobile, and desktop clients without changes. Apps can be written in any language, deployed on any HTTP server, or hosted as an AWS Lambda function.

Controls: Controls provide extensive data protection, information governance, eDiscovery, enterprise information archiving support, and identity/access management. Controls give administrators the ability to set granular permissions to control access to sensitive data and can be customized to meet your specific compliance requirements with fine-grained data retention, audit logs, the ability to programmatically archive and export records, and integration with Global Relay and Smarsh/Actiance for compliance, archiving, and analytics. Deployment options are available in on-prem or secure cloud environments to meet the strict requirements of GDPR, AICPA, CCPA, FINRA, HIPAA, and more.

To learn more about Mattermost’s developer collaboration platform, attendees can find the team at booth #S12 at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2021, or please visit the Mattermost Blog.

About Mattermost:

Mattermost is an open source platform for secure collaboration across the entire software development lifecycle. Hundreds of thousands of developers around the globe trust Mattermost to increase their productivity by bringing together team communication, task and project management, and workflow orchestration into a unified platform for agile software development.

Founded in 2016, Mattermost’s open source platform powers over 800,000 workspaces worldwide with the support of over 4,000 contributors from across the developer community. The company serves over 800 customers, including European Parliament, NASA, Nasdaq, Samsung, SAP, United States Air Force and Wealthfront, and is backed by world-class investors including Battery Ventures, Redpoint, S28 Capital, YC Continuity. To learn more, visit www.mattermost.com.

Mattermost and the Mattermost logo are registered trademarks of Mattermost, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Jeff Benanto
Mattermost
5083619001
jeff.benanto@mattermost.com
Posted on

Huawei’s Ken Hu Calls on ICT Industry to Work Together on Next Stage of 5G Development

DUBAI, UAE, Oct. 13, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — Huawei’s 12th annual Global Mobile Broadband Forum (MBBF) kicked off in Dubai today with a keynote from the company’s Rotating Chairman, Ken Hu.

He spoke on the current state of 5G development and new opportunities moving forward. “In just five years of commercial deployment, 5G has provided a considerable upgrade in mobile experience for consumers, and it’s already starting to empower different industries around the globe. Progress was much faster than we expected, especially in terms of the subscriber base, network coverage, and the sheer number of 5G terminals on the market.”

Hu outlined three areas of opportunity that will drive the next stage of 5G’s growth, including XR services, the B2B market, and low-carbon development.

Ken Hu speaking on 5G development at MBBF 2021

The current state of global 5G development

There are currently 176 commercial 5G networks around the globe, serving more than 500 million subscribers. In the consumer space, average 5G download speeds are roughly 10 times greater than 4G, which has fueled broader adoption of applications like VR and 360º broadcasting. In the enterprise space, there are already 10,000 projects exploring B2B applications of 5G (5GtoB) around the world. 5G applications in industries like manufacturing, mining, and ports have already passed trial and are being replicated at scale.

While progress has been steady, Hu noted that there are still some areas for improvement. “Right now more than half of these 10,000 5GtoB projects are in China. We have a huge number of use cases already, but we need to build more sustainable business cases.”

He went on to speak of broader changes that will have a long-term impact on the ICT industry, including accelerated digital transformation caused by the pandemic, how cloud and AI have become must-haves for all organizations, and how the world is taking climate change more seriously. “These trends provide many opportunities for our industry,” he said. “But they also create some challenges. There are a few things we can do to get ready.”

First, the industry needs to get networks, devices, and content ready for explosive growth in Extended Reality (XR). To support a smooth cloud-based XR experience, networks need to provide download speeds faster than 4.6 Gbit/s with latency no greater than 10 milliseconds. “Last year,” noted Hu, “we released our goals for 5.5G. And we believe they will help address this challenge.”

barriers to headset adoption is critical to reaching a tipping point in virtual reality, one of the key technologies in the Extended Reality repertoire of AR, VR, and MR. “To reach [this tipping point], we have to make improvements to both headsets and content. For headsets, people want devices that are smaller, lighter, and more affordable.” To enrich the content ecosystem, Hu called on the industry to provide cloud platforms and tools that simplify content development, which is notoriously difficult and expensive.

Second, telecom operators need to enhance their networks and develop new capabilities to get ready for 5GtoB. A strong network is key to 5G applications for industrial use, so operators need to keep making improvements to network capabilities such as uplink, positioning, and sensing. As industrial scenarios are much more complex than consumer scenarios, O&M can be a real challenge. To help, Huawei is developing autonomous networks that bring intelligence to all aspects of 5G networks, from planning and construction to maintenance and optimization.

Digital transformation also requires different roles. In addition to providing connectivity, operators can also serve as cloud service providers, systems integrators, and more, and develop the requisite capabilities. To drive broader adoption of 5G in industries, developing industry-specific telecoms standards is also important. In China, operators, together with their industry partners, have begun working on standards for applying 5G in industries like coal mining, steel, and electric power, and this has helped to fuel greater adoption within these sectors.

“Beyond technology,” concluded Hu, “these are some of the intangible strengths that won’t provide immediate profit, but will be key to long-term competitiveness in the 5GtoB market.”

Third, the industry needs to get ready to go green. According to the World Economic Forum, by 2030, digital technology can help reduce global carbon emissions by at least 15%. “On one hand,” said Hu, “we have a great opportunity to help all industries cut emissions and improve power efficiency with digital technology. On the other hand, we have to recognize that our industry has a growing carbon footprint, and we have to take steps to improve that. Right now Huawei is using new materials and algorithms to lower the power consumption of our products, and we’re remodeling sites, and optimizing power management in our data centers for greater efficiency.”

“We have seen so many changes in the past two years – with the pandemic, technology, business and the economy,” Hu concluded. “Moving forward, as the world begins to recover, we need to recognize the opportunities in front of us and get ready for them. Get our technology ready, get our businesses ready, and get our capabilities ready.”

The Global Mobile Broadband Forum 2021 is hosted by Huawei, together with its industry partners GSMA and the SAMENA Telecommunications Council. The forum gathers mobile network operators, vertical industry leaders, and ecosystem partners from around the world to discuss how to maximize the potential of 5G and push the mobile industry forward.

For more information, please visit: https://www.huawei.com/en/events/mbbf2021

Photo – https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1659317/Ken_Hu_speaking_5G_development_MBBF_2021.jpg

Posted on

Huawei’s David Wang Talks 10 Wireless Industry Trends in “Roads to Mobile 2030”

DUBAI, UAE, Oct. 13, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — During the 12th Global Mobile Broadband Forum (MBBF), Huawei Executive Director of the Board and Chairman of ICT Infrastructure Managing Board David Wang, delivered a keynote speech titled Roads to Mobile 2030: 10 Wireless Industry Trends, saying “Huawei has identified 10 wireless industry trends to define future-oriented wireless networks and prepare the industry for the Intelligent World 2030.”

David Wang delivering a keynote speech at MBBF 2021

As he explained, by 2030, the digital and physical worlds will become deeply integrated, creating a near-real-life experience. The digital economy will also become a primary driver of the real economy, and industry will shift focus from device efficiency to decision-making efficiency. But these advances will also need us to achieve intrinsic network security and to improve energy efficiency to protect the environment through green growth.

Mobile networks will be an important part of Huawei’s Intelligent World 2030 concept, and so Wang summarized the 10 trends we will see in the mobile industry over the next decade.

Trend 1: 10 Gbps for Physical-Digital Integration

In the future, digital communications will be used to expand and deepen exchanges of information between people, delivering multi-sensory experiences including hearing, sight, touch, and smell. To enable these features, mobile networks will need to support 10 Gbps at millisecond latency everywhere and transmit information in ways that are more semantically organized.

Trend 2: One Network for 100-Billion All-Scenario IoT Connections

Digital society will be reshaped by the 100 billion thing-to-thing connections cellular networks will have to support by 2030. Driven mainly by all-scenario IoT, networks will have to begin offering different types of connections services, differentiated by speed and priority requirements. This means a deterministic experience with lower latency and higher reliability must be delivered and a new form of wireless IoT that features ultra-low power consumption and passive connections must be created.

Trend 3: Satellite-Ground Collaboration for 3D Coverage

Satellite-ground collaboration will plug the gaps in wireless ground coverage and achieve three-dimensional airspace coverage, enabling communications and control for future drones and aircrafts. Mobile networks, with their exiting advanced communications technologies and multi-trillion dollar market, will also likely be used to nurture the new satellite communications technologies.

Trend 4: Integrated Sensing & Communications for True Digital Replicas

Sensing and communications will be further integrated, enabling real-time digital replication of the physical world and facilitating high-level autonomous driving and drone management. Both radio interfaces and network architectures will need to be similarly integrated and sensing resolution technology will need to advance to the centimeter level using ultra-wideband with Massive MIMO to achieve these functions.

Trend 5: Intelligence in Every Industry and Connection

Wireless networks will become fully integrated with AI technologies to enable level-5 fully autonomous driving networks, which will further support automated O&M, deliver premium experiences, and minimize carbon footprints. Future radios will also be designed with native intelligence, and smart radio algorithms will further optimize the management of channel coding and radio resource.

Trend 6: Full-Link and Full-Lifecycle Green Networks

As network traffic grows 100 times over in the next few years, there will be an equal spike in demand for solutions that reduce network energy consumption. Per-bit energy efficiency will also need to improve at a similar rate. Energy efficiency must be considered in every aspect of network design, including radio interfaces, devices, and sites. This will enable the construction of these full-link and full-lifecycle green and sustainable networks.

Trend 7: Flexible Full-Band Sub-100 GHz

By 2030, nations will need an average of 2 GHz mid-band bandwidth and over 20 GHz of bandwidths on millimeter wave to accommodate growing traffic. The industry will need to facilitate the evolution of sub-100 GHz spectrum to NR and redefine spectrum utilization using multi-band integration and other innovative technologies to achieve 10-fold spectral efficiency improvement.

Trend 8: Generalized Multi-Antenna for Reduced Per-Bit Cost

Per-bit data transmission costs will be reduced as multi-antenna technologies begin to be applied to every spectrum band and every scenario. Ultra-wideband modular antennas will support flexible combinations of multiple bands and intelligent reflecting surfaces will apply multi-antenna technologies in more scenarios to enable cloud-based, higher-performance deployment.

Trend 9: Security as the Cornerstone for a Digital Future

Intrinsic device security and intelligent and simplified security at the network layer will become increasingly important as network security and resilience come more into the global spotlight. Operators will need to provide these kinds of simplified security services via cloud-network synergy for their industry customers to promote digital transformation.

Trend 10: Mobile Computing Network for Device-Pipe-Cloud Collaboration

Future mobile networks will support more diverse services, such as the Metaverse, industrial field networks, and vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications. This means that computing will need to be integrated with mobile networks to provide uninterrupted, high-quality services on demand as a single service model will be insufficient for building new digital platforms.

Wang rounded out his presentation by reiterating how these 10 industry trends are a bright sign that the wireless industry is moving quickly in the direction of a fully intelligent world. He closed out promising Huawei will continue to work with industry partners to define these networks of the future and make their vision of the Intelligent World 2030 a reality.

For more information, see the White Paper: 10 Wireless Industry Trends.

Photo – https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1659364/David_Wang_delivering_a_keynote_speech_MBBF_2021.jpg

Posted on

UN Report: Investing in Disaster Risk Reduction Saves Lives, Money

A report marking the International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction finds many deaths and economic losses from natural disasters could be averted by investing in preventive risk reduction measures.

Climate-related disasters have nearly doubled over the past 20 years, with developing countries bearing the brunt of the damage. Though extreme weather events and other emergencies are growing, the U.N. Office for Disaster Risk Reduction says little money is being allocated to help countries prevent or reduce risks.

The report finds $133 billion of official development assistance was allocated for disaster-related aid between 2010 and 2019, but only $5.5 billion was invested in measures to reduce the risks and lessen the impact of disasters.

For every $100 spent on disaster-related development aid, only 50 cents goes toward protecting development from the impact of disasters, according to the report.

Ricardo Mena, director of the Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, said even that low-level funding should be better targeted to address the needs of poorer, more vulnerable countries.

“One would think that countries that are more prone to disasters and that experience higher mortality rates would be the ones where DRR, disaster risk reduction, financing would be allocated the most. But that is unfortunately not the case,” he said. “Insufficient investment is being provided to prevent future disasters in areas where high mortality is likely.”

Mena said failure to invest in DRR is like buying a nice car that has no brakes.

“Investing in DRR, we know it makes sense and, in terms of cost-benefit, it is tremendously positive,” he said. “So, yes, we are saying it is better to attack the underlying factors of risk, then having to spend more money at a time when disasters actually happen.”

Academic studies find every dollar invested in disaster risk reduction prevention can result in savings of $3 to $15 in disaster losses.

Mena is calling for an increase in funding to help poor countries adapt to climate change and implement national strategies for disaster risk reduction.

Source: Voice of America

Posted on

Hurricane Pamela Makes Landfall in Western Mexico

Hurricane Pamela came ashore on Mexico’s Pacific coast Wednesday, bringing with it strong winds and rain.

The Category 1 storm had just regained hurricane strength before hitting 65 kilometers north of Mazatlan, a port city and tourist destination.

The storm has the potential for strong storm surge and possible flooding.

At landfall, the storm had winds of 120 kph, but that was anticipated to dissipate quickly as the storm moves inland.

The remnants of the storm, which is expected to bring heavy rains across much of Mexico, could hit Texas on Thursday, according to the U.S. National Hurricane Center.

Source: Voice of America

Posted on

WHO Honors Henrietta Lacks, Woman Whose Cells Served Science

The chief of the World Health Organization on Wednesday honored the late Henrietta Lacks, an American woman whose cancer cells were taken without her knowledge during the 1950s and ended up providing the foundation for vast scientific breakthroughs, including research about the coronavirus.

The recognition from WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus came more than a decade after the publication of “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” Rebecca Skloot’s book about the discrimination in health care faced by Black Americans, the life-saving innovations made possible by Lacks’ cells and her family’s legal fight over their unauthorized use.

“What happened to Henrietta was wrong,” Tedros said during a special ceremony at WHO Geneva headquarters before handing the Director-General’s Award for Henrietta Lacks to her 87-year-old son Lawrence Lacks as several of her other descendants looked on.

Reproduced infinitely ever since, HeLa cells have become a cornerstone of modern medicine, including the development of the polio vaccine, genetic mapping and even COVID-19 vaccines.

Tedros noted that Lacks lived at a time when racial discrimination was legal in the United States and that it remains widespread, even if no longer legal in most countries.

“Henrietta Lacks was exploited. She is one of many women of color whose bodies have been misused by science,” he said. “She placed her trust in the health system so she could receive treatment. But the system took something from her without her knowledge or consent.”

“The medical technologies that were developed from this injustice have been used to perpetuate further injustice because they have not been shared equitably around the world,” Tedros added.

The HeLa cell line — a name derived from the first two letters of Henrietta Lacks’ first and last names — was a scientific breakthrough. Tedros said the cells were “foundational” in the development of human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines, which can eliminate the cancer that took her life.

As of last year, WHO said, less than 25% of the world’s low-income countries and fewer than 30% of lower-middle-income countries had access to HPV vaccines through national immunization programs, compared to over 85% of high-income countries.

“Many people have benefited from those cells. Fortunes have been made. Science has advanced. Nobel Prizes have been won, and most importantly, many lives have been saved,” Tedros said. “No doubt Henrietta would have been pleased that her suffering has saved others. But the end doesn’t justify the means.”

WHO said more than 50 million metric tons of HeLa cells have been distributed around the world and used in more than 75,000 studies.

Last week, Lacks’ estate sued a U.S. biotechnology company, accusing it of selling cells that doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital took from her without her knowledge or consent as part of “a racially unjust medical system.”

“We stand in solidarity with marginalized patients and communities all over the world who are not consulted, engaged or empowered in their own care,” Tedros said.

“We are firm that in medicine and in science, Black lives matter,” he added. “Henrietta Lacks’ life mattered — and still matters. Today is also an opportunity to recognize those women of color who have made incredible but often unseen contributions to medical science.”

Source: Voice of America