Category: Amazon

Posted on November 21, 2024 by Eternity Lab

CMA clears Google over Anthropic partnership

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has said Alphabet’s partnership with Anthropic does not qualify for investigation under the merger provisions of the Enterprise Act 2002.

In October 2023, Alphabet invested $2bn in OpenAI rival Anthropic. The artificial intelligence (AI) startup has also received $4bn funding from Amazon.

The CMA is concerned that the foundational model sector is developing in ways that risk negative market outcomes. In particular, the likes of Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Apple have the market dominance to buy up or shut down competition. It is also worried that partnerships between these major technology providers and developers of AI foundation models may limit choice and be anti-competitive.

In September, the CMA concluded its investigation of Microsoft’s hiring of key staff from Inflection, finding that Inflection AI was not a strong competitor to the consumer chatbots Microsoft has developed directly in partnership with OpenAI.

Discussing the outcome of the latest investigation, Joel Bamford, executive director of the CMA, wrote on LinkedIn: “Our investigation has shown that Google has not acquired the ability to materially influence Anthropic’s commercial policy and therefore the partnership does not meet the jurisdictional threshold for UK merger control to apply.”

He described the conclusion of this latest investigation as “another decision by the CMA which provides greater clarity for businesses and their investors”.

In a summary of its findings from the phase one investigation into the deal, the CMA said it did not believe Google had acquired material influence over Anthropic as a result of the partnership. The CMA said it looked at the risk of Google exercising influence over Anthropic at shareholder and/or board level, along with an assessment of Google’s own Vertex AI product.

“The available evidence did not indicate that Google has the ability to exercise material influence over Anthropic through the partnership,” the CMA concluded.

The CMA said it had considered the fact that Anthropic and Google offer two of the leading foundational AI models globally. However, given Anthropic’s turnover is below the £70m threshold, which is one of the criteria it takes into account when assessing whether to look further into a deal, pursuing this thread of investigation was not necessary.

The CMA is also looking at whether it should investigate Amazon’s partnership with Anthropic, due to the $4bn funding the AI startup received from Amazon.

Some industry experts believe the CMA should continue looking at the foundation model market. Josh Mesout, chief innovation officer at Civo, said: “While the CMA has decided not to pursue an investigation into the Anthropic/Alphabet partnership, the broader concerns raised in the investigation about potential market concentration in AI remain valid.

“Over-dependence on a handful of major firms could still stifle innovation, limit consumer choice and potentially lead to a monopoly that favours Big Tech. Even without a formal investigation, it is the responsibility of everyone in the industry to ensure the AI market remains fair, competitive and conducive to ongoing technological advancement.”

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Posted on November 19, 2024 by Eternity Lab

Tineco CARPET ONE CRUISER is the most convenient carpet cleaner in history

This is a sponsored article. All content and opinions expressed within are of the author.

In 2024, your household probably has vacuuming covered. There are so many great vacuum models out there for tough jobs, plus most of us have at least one robot vacuum to take care of routine cleaning. But what about all those tricky messes on your carpets? And what happens when something spills on one of your rugs?

Spraying a cleaner and blotting the mess with a towel never really gets the job done, and we all know it. That’s where the Tineco CARPET ONE CRUISER comes in. This brilliant new device makes deep cleaning your carpets and rugs as easy as vacuuming, and there’s no question that it’ll be a game-changer in your home.

Available on Amazon

Clean your carpet the easy way

Using the new Tineco CARPET ONE CRUISER is as easy as vacuuming your floor. If you’ve ever tried a carpet cleaner, you know that’s not always the case.

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Carpet cleaners are typically big, bulky machines that take all of your strength to move. They soak your carpet or rug with water and chemicals, and they never seem to come anywhere close to sucking up all the liquid. That means you’re left waiting all day for your carpet to dry. You might even set up a few fans or a dehumidifier to try to speed things up, but they barely help. And is your wood flooring under those rugs even still OK after being wet for so long?

Thankfully, using the Tineco CARPET ONE CRUISER is an entirely different experience.

First of all, Tineco uses what it calls “3-level SmoothPower Tech” to ensure that the CARPET ONE CRUISER is always easy to move and maneuver. There are three different levels of power assistance that help while pushing and pulling the carpet cleaner, making it as effortless as possible. If you can use a vacuum, you can use the CARPET ONE CRUISER. Even your young kids can handle it… as long as you bribe them with candy or screen time.

Next, Tineco uses iLoop Smart Sensor Technology to automatically adjust water flow and suction based on how much dirt is detected on your carpet or rug. You never have to worry about manually adjusting the settings. Just turn it on and start cleaning.

“But what about all those stains in hard-to-reach spots,” you ask? Don’t worry, the Tineco CARPET ONE CRUISER has that covered, too. It comes with a special handheld spot cleaner that quickly connects to the CARPET ONE CRUISER so you can reach anywhere.

Deep clean any carpet or rug

Image source: Tineco

This new Tineco model is perfect for cleaning dust, dirt, spills, and even unwanted presents left behind by your dog or cat. No matter what you need to clean, the Tineco CARPET ONE CRUISER can handle it.

iLoop Smart Sensor Technology uses low water flow and light suction when it doesn’t detect much dirt on your carpet. But when the soil level increases, so does the cleaning power. The CARPET ONE CRUISER ramps up to 130W of maximum suction power to ensure that even the worst messes are cleaned up in just one or two passes.

When it comes time to tackle a really bad mess or an old stain, Tineco has you covered there, too. The unit comes with a special pre-treat formula in a spray bottle that you can use on extra tough stains and messes. Just spray the area and leave the formula to do its thing. Then, 3-5 minutes later, the CARPET ONE CRUISER will be able to suck up even the most stubborn messes in no time.

CARPET ONE CRUISER cleans your carpets, then cleans itself

Image source: Tineco

One of the best aspects of the Tineco CARPET ONE CRUISER experience is what happens after you’re done cleaning your carpets and rugs.

Most people know that other carpet cleaners leave your floors wet for hours or even more than a day. As a matter of fact, that might be the reason you find yourself avoiding cleaning your carpets altogether.

Meanwhile, the Tineco CARPET ONE CRUISER has high-temperature PowerDry that goes to work after you’re done cleaning. It uses heating elements built into the bottom of the machine to heat your carpet or rug to 167°F. This special drying feature reduces the time it takes to dry your carpet by 50% compared to other common carpet cleaners.

Last but not least, when you’re finished washing and drying your carpet, the CARPET ONE CRUISER has one more trick hiding up its sleeve. Place it on the charging dock and start the FlashDry self-cleaning cycle so the CARPET ONE CRUISER can clean itself once it’s done cleaning your carpets. It deep cleans the brush roller, brush roller cover, and inlet with just one press of a button. Then, it uses 131°F hot air to dry everything and prevent odors and mildew.

Available on Amazon

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Posted on November 18, 2024 by Eternity Lab

Nakivo aims at VMware refugees tempted by Proxmox

Backup software vendor Nakivo has added Microsoft 365 cloud-to-cloud backup, support for backups of Proxmox virtualisation environments, and cloud as a target for NAS backups in the latest version – v11 – of its Backup & Replication product.

Support for data protection of Microsoft 365 environments brings Nakivo into line with numerous backup suppliers that protect data in the main cloud services. Here, they are capitalising on the fact that the hyperscaler cloud providers do no more than rudimentary protection of customer data.

Sergei Serdyuk, product management vice-president at Nakivo, said: “Microsoft’s business model is that you are responsible for your data and they are responsible for their infrastructure. So, if you accidentally delete something, you are responsible. What we have launched allows customers to put their data somewhere it can be recovered from and they can set up a repository where they want.”

This extends Nakivo’s cloud backup capabilities from its existing EC2 support. Serdyuk said other cloud platforms would be added, but would not say when.

Meanwhile, Nakivo added support for agentless backups in the open source Proxmox virtualisation environment. According to Serdyuk, around one third (33%) of its customers – mostly small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) – who responded to an internal survey said that they planned to migrate to Proxmox and away from VMware.

The background to this is the Broadcom purchase of VMware and subsequent licensing changes and reported cost rises, said Serdyuk.

“Broadcom acquired VMware and changed the licensing model from perpetual to subscription,” said Serdyuk. “Customers have reported increased costs as a result and so many are looking elsewhere. Proxmox is free, or comes with inexpensive support, and is suited to SMEs. As a virtualisation platform, it can displace VMware. We also see a smaller percentage migrate to Nutanix and Hyper-V.”

Prominent backup product maker Veeam – which made its name providing backup for VMware – started to offer Proxmox during the summer, in a move seen as a key moment for those considering moving away from VMware. That move is seen as potentially unlocking migration to Proxmox because it removes the barrier to protecting those environments.

Nakivo has also added backup of NAS devices to cloud targets. According to Serdyuk, this necessitated the company developing a way to make file data suitable for S3 storage.

“Most cloud vendors claim S3 compatibility [for file data], but there have needed to be some tweaks to work with the API,” he said. “So, there has been some fine-tuning to work with file data – block data is easier – because when we copy file data to S3, the whole file needs to be transformed to work in the cloud.”

Version 11 also saw the addition of backup from NetApp Storage Snapshots for FAS and AFF arrays to allow customers to backup VMware VMs on these devices from storage snapshots. Federated repository capability allows customers to create a scalable storage pool from multiple locations, with failover to useable capacity elsewhere should first choice storage in the pool fail.

Nakivo now offers a tenant overview dashboard for service provider customers that allows them to manage tenant activity, performance and resource metrics from a single screen.

Nakivo was founded in 2012 and started out by specialising in VM backup. Its version 1.0 offered VMware support and installation on Windows.

It now supports workloads in VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, Nutanix, Windows and Linux, and in the cloud in Amazon EC2 and Microsoft 365.

It supports use cases that range from SMEs, to large enterprises and managed service providers (MSPs), with deployment possible on NAS, Windows and Linux, as well as in a virtual appliance or from an Amazon instance in the cloud. It can restore with granularity that ranges from single files to entire sites.

Version 10.9 of Backup & Replication software added ransomware malware scanning, as well as bare metal recovery and recovery from tape directly to virtual machine (VM).