Enterprise Tech Dispatch: Twitter gets tough with world leaders; LinkedIn starts physical meetups

Social media giant Twitter said in an unbylined blog post on Tuesday that it would disallow users to interact with world leaders who broke its public posting policies.  

The users will not be allowed to reply, share, like and retweet the tweets that break the rules but the users can quote the tweet to allow ordinary users to express their opinion.

Twitter said the move would help users stay informed about global affairs and avoid the spread of any false information or provide an unfair advantage to any person in position.

“We want to make it clear today that the accounts of world leaders are not above our policies entirely,” Twitter tweeted on its official handle.

Meanwhile,  TechCrunch reported that Twitter was biased in its policies when it did not ban US President Donald Trump last year when he allegedly threatened war on North Korea. However, Iranian leader Sayyid Ali Hosseini Khamenei’s tweet was removed from the site due to company policies.  

LinkedIn forays into physical meetups

Microsoft-owned social networking site for businesses Linkedin will launch a new feature called Events where people can plan, announce and send invites to meetups and get-togethers, LinkedIn said in a blog post.  

The new feature will be shown as an item on the menu on the website and app and will reportedly be rolled out in English speaking countries on October 17.

“People don’t have a single place to organise [work-related] offline meetups specific to an industry or a neighbourhood. People want to find other people,” said Ajay Datta, director of product management, LinkedIn.

Amazon moves 100 functions away from Oracle to AWS

Amazon has intensified its war against Oracle by moving more than 100 functions that took place using Oracle’s servers to its very own AWS, the company said in a blog post on Tuesday.

The post said the move included more than 75 petabytes of data that was stored in over 7,500 oracle databases. “Over the years we realized that we were spending too much time managing and scaling thousands of legacy Oracle databases,” wrote Jeff Barr, chief evangelist at AWS.  

Barr said the company had been working for years to move away from Oracle databases. “Instead of focusing on high-value differentiated work, our database administrators (DBAs) spent a lot of time simply keeping the lights on while transaction rates climbed and the overall amount of stored data mounted,” he pointed out.

Data from Amazon Prime, Alexa and Twitch were some of the critical services that were part of the move.

Akamai upgrades edge capabilities

American cloud computing giant Akamai has announced enhancements to the Akamai Edge Platform, the company’s flagship edge computing solution. 

In a release, Akamai said the new features would help organisations to optimise and secure the edge.  “The edge is both where a business and its customers meet and a place where valuable insights can be gained and shared globally at lightning speed,” said Rick McConnell, president and general manager of Akamai’s web division.

The new features further addressed security, media delivery and web performance challenges by utilising distributed workloads that were at the meeting point of the data between the client and the vendor.

PwC to hire 1200 engineers and data analysts

Global tax and regulatory services organisation PwC has announced plans to hire 1,200 individuals from the engineering and data analytics background in 2020 for its India operations. The company said in a statement that many of the newly hired individuals would work for its IoT lab and the artificial centre of excellence based in the new 60,000 square foot facility in Kolkata. Other areas where hiring will occur is in cloud and blockchain-related roles. 

The labs will be used to incubate new solutions for Industry 4.0, Responsible AI usage, blockchain and similar technologies. 

PwC also said its office at Salt Lake in Kolkata would be converted into a smart building to showcase IoT solutions in the next few months.  

Hike among top three patent filers

Indian messenger app and AI unicorn Hike has been recognised as one of the top three patent filers in IT with 66 patents filed between 2017-2018. Hike took third place after Wipro and TCS who had filed 125 and 90 patents, respectively.

The list was unveiled by the office of the controller general of patents, design & trademarks, department of promotion of industry & internal trade, ministry of commerce & industry. 

Most of the patents were awarded in the areas of research in natural language processing (NLP), computer vision & social network analysis.