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Today’s topics include Apple’s plans to boost the performance of watchOS 3 and open Siri to developers, the Democratic National Committee’s discovery that Russian hackers infiltrated its network, and Nokia’s new Internet of things management system.
The third generation of the Apple Watch operating system, watchOS 3, will debut this fall and include a wide range of upgrades to make the Apple Watch run faster and provide more useful features.
Among the key additions to watchOS 3 are all-new health and fitness functions, instant app launching capabilities, enhanced user interface navigation, a new Breathe relaxation app and “significantly improved performance.”
The new health and fitness features include direct tie-ins with social media platforms so that Apple Watch users will be able to instantly share their fitness experiences and compete with their friends to motivate each other to reach their fitness goals.
In addition, the Activity app in the upcoming watchOS 3 OS will be optimized for wheelchair users so they can monitor their wheelchair pushes and all-day calorie goals.
A great deal of the new IT functionality that was announced and demonstrated to a packed Bill Graham Civic Auditorium crowd of about 6,000 Apple developers on Day 1 of the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference was similar to technology demonstrated at the Google I/O conference in May at another concert venue, Shoreline Amphitheater, in Mountain View, Calif.
The two huge IT products and services companies have been competing head-to-head in certain areas for a while, but it looks like even more market battles are on the horizon.
These newer categories include messaging services, connected vehicles, home automation devices and entertainment services in addition the already hotly contested music, photo and video services.
The Democratic National Committee on June 14 revealed that it was the victim of a data breach, allegedly perpetrated by hackers from Russia looking for information on Donald Trump, the Republican Party’s presumptive presidential nominee.
The DNC called security firm CrowdStrike after suspecting it was the victim of a network breach. CrowdStrike’s research revealed that one of the Russian hacker groups infiltrated the DNC network as early as the summer of 2015, while a second group breached the DNC network separately in April 2016.
“The security of our system is critical to our operation and to the confidence of the campaigns and state parties we work with,” Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, DNC chairwoman, said in a statement first published in The Washington Post.
Nokia is expanding its efforts on Internet of things with a new platform that company officials say can handle all management aspects for more than 80,000 models of IoT-connected devices.
Nokia’s new Intelligent Management Platform for All Connected Things—aka IMPACT—can handle everything from data collection and event processing to device management, data contextualization, data analytics, security and application enablement for any device and any protocol across any application, according to company officials.
IMPACT, which is scalable and modular in design, also will be able to work with new and updated devices that reach the market in the future.