Technology Today

Microsoft Acquires
Avere To Bolster Cloud
Storage strategy

vere Systems, a Pittsburgh-based cloud storage
company, was acquired by Microsoft, the two
companies announced Wednesday. Financial
terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Avere's team will continue to work in Pittsburgh,
according to reporting by GeekWire.

"By bringing together Avere's storage expertise
with the power of Microsoft's cloud, customers
will benefit from industry-leading innovations that
enable the largest, most complex high-
performance workloads to run in Microsoft
Azure,"

Jason Zander, corporate vice president
for Microsoft Azure, the company's cloud
services, said in a statement. "We are excited to
welcome Avere to Microsoft, and look forward to
the impact their technology and the team will
have on Azure and the customer experience."

Avere was founded in 2008. Since, the company
has raised nearly $100 million through multiple
rounds of financing. The company announced in
March it had received $14 million in its most
recent round of funding, including a large
investment from Google.

"Our cloud business is growing at triple digits, so
over 100 percent," CEO Ron Bianchini told the
Tribune-Review in March.

Avere manufactures storage hardware and
software that helps companies make use of the
public cloud to store data and host applications.

Bianchini said the company's technology can
help firms better use cloud storage and reduces
the delay experienced when accessing data
stored on the cloud.

The company employs about 80 people in its
Troy Hill offices near the Heinz Lofts. There are
120 employees companywide, Bianchini said.

Reality

Headset Race Heats Up
in Silicon Valley

ugmented reality is roaring back to prominence
as one of Silicon Valley's favorite frontier
technologies, nearly three years after Google's
brief, unsuccessful run at the market with its
infamous smart glasses.
When criticism of the Google Glass over privacy
and safety concerns led some bars and
restaurants to ban the then-$1,500 smart
glasses, the future of mixing artificial graphics
with real-life viewing seemed more like a pipe
dream than science-fiction-turned-reality.

But AR headsets are back in vogue, as
Facebook-owned Oculus, Apple and the much-
hyped and mysterious startup company Magic
Leap all work to bring new entertainment
devices to market, hoping to blend reality with
the internet.

Even Google Glass made a comeback in 2017 as
a niche, industrial product. The glasses are
reportedly being used in factories for Boeing, DHL
and General Electric, and by a few neuroscience-
related startups experimenting with the
technology.

Microsoft's Google Glass equivalent, the
HoloLens headset, also currently sells only for
commercial and development purposes. Ford
reportedly uses HoloLens to design cars in
augmented reality. And earlier this month, French
surgeons wore HoloLens during a surgery, helping
them visualize portions of a patient's anatomy
during a shoulder prosthesis operation.
Meanwhile, smartphone-based AR apps like
Pokemon GO are improving, and a new app this
holiday season has connected with fans of the
"Star Wars" movie franchise, finally bringing the
possibility of mass-market appeal that once
eluded Google Glass.
"We got the ball rolling this year," said Creative
Strategies analyst Ben Bajarin. "We went from
nobody having experienced AR to a whole lot of
people experiencing it."

AR is already heading from smartphones to
headsets in a natural evolution -- and that
transition was seen in products this holiday
season, Bajarin said, like the $199 "Star Wars"
augmented reality headset and lightsaber
package, built by Disney and Lenovo, which
allows users to battle AR-developed
stormtroopers and Sith lords like Darth Vader.

"We see augmented reality as a powerful way to
bring Disney stories to life in entirely new ways,
and we're already developing AR experiences on
these new platforms when it makes sense, such
as Star Wars: Jedi Challenges," said Kyle
Laughlin, Disney's senior vice president of games
and interactive experiences.
Owners of the Disney-Lenovo headset said they
were impressed by the believability of the
lightsaber battles.
"The sense of scale you get from having a
character like Darth Maul in your living room
while dueling with lightsabers is remarkably
compelling," said A.J. Minotti, a digital marketing
director based in Poland, Ohio. "The controller is
very responsive and provides a good amount of
rumble feedback to help the battles feel
believable."
But the device comes with some flaws, headset
owners said. For one, the headset only plays a
few "Star Wars"-based scenario games. It also
requires a smartphone attached to the headset,
draining a lot of battery power from the phone.
"I feel like the insertion of the phone was a little
cumbersome," said Christine Lauder, an
information technology and marketing manager in
Houston. "You must also be sure that your phone
is completely charged. Starting the app instantly
brightens your iPhone screen to 100 percent and
there is no built-in charger, so you are limited to
gaming for however long your phone will play
before dying."
Other new players are throwing their hats into
the AR ring. Florida-based unicorn startup Magic
Leap, which has raised $1.9 billion from
investors including Google and prominent Silicon
Valley venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins and
Andreessen Horowitz, unveiled its first
augmented reality headset this month after three
years of working in stealth mode.
The headset, scheduled to be released next year,
consists of futuristic-looking goggles, a handheld
controller and a Sony Walkman-style external
computer, which hangs at the waist.
"We believe that what we're building at Magic
Leap will completely redefine the way we
interact with the world around us, and we're
determined to get it right," Magic Leap
spokesperson Jack Ortner wrote in an email.
Yet Silicon Valley powerhouse Apple may have
already made that achievable for app developers.
In 2017, augmented reality arrived for the
masses who use iPhones and Android
smartphones. Apple unveiled its new ARKit
platform in October, ushering in dozens of new
apps like Ikea Place, which allows users to
visualize three-dimensional furniture models in
their living rooms or bedrooms.
Apple's new platform also opened up possibilities
for existing AR apps, like the popular mobile
game Pokemon Go, which updated its app this
month to incorporate ARKit technology so
Pokemon appear in real-life scale and move and
react based on users' proximity.
Meanwhile, Google has rolled out its ARKit
equivalent, called ARCore, on a smaller scale.
Earlier this month, the search giant unveiled its
AR Stickers camera app, which allows users to
insert "Star Wars" or "Stranger Things"
characters into photos. Google declined to
comment about ARCore, Google Glass's future or
the company's investment partnership with
Magic Leap.
Facebook-owned Oculus, which launched a $199
virtual reality headset in 2017, filed patents in
August detailing its plan for a futuristic
augmented reality headset. Facebook and Oculus
did not respond to a request for comment.
"We all know what we really want: AR glasses,"
said Oculus's head of research Michael Abrash
at the F8 Conference in San Jose in April. "They
aren't here yet, but when they arrive, they're
going to be one of the great transformational
technologies of the next 50 years."
Yet in the increasingly crowded race to build the
first popular AR headset, Apple is best positioned
for two reasons, said Bajarin: Its enormous
developer community gives Apple an edge in
producing apps and content for its developing
headset, and it has a track record of making
sophisticated technology -- like wearables --
commercially attractive.
Apple is ramping up development for its first AR
glasses with hundreds of engineers in Cupertino
and Sunnyvale working to complete the headset
and a new operating system by 2019, according
to Bloomberg.
"We don't give a rat's about being first, we want
to be the best, and give people a great
experience," Apple CEO Tim Cook said about AR
glasses in an October interview with British
newspaper The Independent. "But now anything
you would see on the market any time soon
would not be something any of us would be
satisfied with."

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