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SALEM, Ore. (KTVZ) -- Families in Oregon now have a new option to prepare their children for kindergarten at home -- and at no cost. Thanks to generous donations made through the TED Organization, Waterford.org is bringing the Waterford Upstart program to Oregon.

Each year, 2.2 million 4-year-old children in the United States do not have access to publicly funded early education, and more than half are low-income children with no early education options at all. Waterford is one of eight nonprofit organizations in the world named a 2019 TED Audacious Project. As a part of this recognition, the organization was tasked with reaching more 4-year-olds in need, including 200 children in Oregon.

When a child begins school behind his or her peers, its very hard to catch up. An at-home solution like Waterford Upstart has proven to be not only effective in educating our youngest learners, but also a necessity for many families, said Kim Fischer, national spokesperson for Waterford.org. Waterford Upstart meets families where they are, so they can feel confident their children will walk into their first day of kindergarten prepared and ready to learn.

Waterford Upstart is an in-home, early education program that prepares four-year-old children for kindergarten. Families are given the tools they need to be their childs first and most influential teachers, including a computer and internet at no cost.

The program provides positive adult-child interactions while delivering personalized, online instruction 15 minutes a day, 5 days a week. Families are also given support through a family coach as well as tips to continue engaging their children offline. On average, 92% of children who participate in Waterford Upstart are ready for kindergartencompared to a 65% average nationwide and 48% for low-income children.

I was a little skeptical at first of my 5-year-old grandson being on a computer, but this program is phenomenal, said Laurie Danzuka, Jefferson County School Board Chair, and grandmother of a Waterford Upstart graduate. I didnt feel like he was getting the science, math, and reading instruction in preschool that he needed, and reading is everything. Waterford Upstart really boosted his learning and, more importantly, his interest in learning. My grandson is now in kindergarten and he loves to learn! Hes so far ahead of the game.

You can now apply for Waterford Upstart, but spots are limited and restrictions apply. Children must enter kindergarten in fall 2022. Families can register right now for this at-home, no-cost project by visiting WaterfordUpstart.org.

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Waterford.org

Waterford.org is an early education nonprofit with a mission to achieve universal literacy for children through equity, access, and parent empowerment. Waterford develops educational tools that guide students along adaptive, individualized learning paths toward fluent reading and lifelong learning. We empower parents as a childs first teacher, and we support teachers in taking the right actions at the right time for their students. In total, Waterford.org serves more than 300,000 children every year through all of our programs, and that number is continually growing.

Waterford Upstart

Waterford Upstart helps four-year-old children prepare for school at home and at no cost. Children develop foundational reading and social-emotional skills, and families are empowered to become their childs first and most influential teachers. The children use adaptive software just 15 minutes a day, five days a week in the year before they start school. Waterford Upstart also fuels family involvement in their childs early education through family coaches and fun educational activities parents can complete with their children offline. Waterford Upstart has been rigorously tested and proven, earning the program a federal EIR grant and the title of a TED Audacious project. Independent research shows the average Waterford Upstart graduate enters kindergarten reading at nearly a first-grade level and maintains those gains through the fourth grade.

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Free, TED-funded early education program available to Oregon 4-year-olds - KTVZ

Say youre planning to watch a movie tonight you sit down, open the Amazon app, and start searching. Want to watch Marvels The Avengers from 2012? Thats free on Amazon Prime. But if youre interested in the most recent installment in the Avengers series, Marvel Studios Avengers: Endgame from 2019, that will cost you $3.99 to rent. But not all new movies are rental only, and not all older movies are free. For example, you can watch Eddie Murphy in 2021s Coming 2 America for free with your Prime membership, but if you want to check out the Murphy classic Beverly Hills Copfrom 1984, thatll cost you an additional $2.99. What gives?

Amazon is known for making very deliberate choices about what to bundle in with a standard Prime membership, when, and for how long. To make these decisions, the company is likely using a metric like cost-per-first-stream dividing the titles costs (e.g. production or licensing) by the total number of subscribers streaming a given title to determine what to offer as standalone versus adding to the basic Prime bundle. Because the value of shows and movies tends to depreciate, some titles will lose their value after a certain period. At that point, the standalone charge can no longer be justified, so Amazon moves these titles under the standard Prime membership.

This two-step approach to rolling out services is an example of a strategy called biphasic subscription monetization in which 1) businesses roll out novel services as standalone offerings and quickly monetize them by targeting enthusiastic consumers, before 2) adding them to pre-existing bundles consisting of more mature services and monetizing them over longer periods of time with the broader consumer base.

As companies across sectors are going from a product-based to a subscription-based business model from Microsoft, Google, and Nike to auto manufacturers, industrial manufacturers, and brick-and-mortar retailers this strategy is catching on. If done correctly, it can help offset initial development costs of novel offerings, provide companies with quick and actionable feedback on these novel services, and generate positive momentum that drives larger investments in innovation. And as companies continue to add more services to existing subscription bundles, they can justify a progressive increase in subscription fees since the perceived value of the bundle is increasing.

In my experience working with thousands of subscription businesses, Ive seen three considerations that drive the successful adoption of the biphasic monetization strategy. First, companies need to prove the benefits of this biphasic monetization strategy by qualifying new services against 13 attributes that make up what I call the Unified Subscription Adoption Model (USAM). I developed the USAM as the first hybrid framework for assessing the end-to-end potential of subscription offerings, combining two widely recognized technology and product adoption models, but adjusting their core attributes to better match the idiosyncrasies of subscription-based offerings. Second, new features/services need to be added over time to maintain or increase the overall price of a given subscription bundle. And lastly, companies need to take into account how susceptible the demand for a given offering is to changes in price.

Lets dig in with an example to show this biphasic monetization strategy in action.

Recently, traditional automakers alongside software juggernauts including Apple, Google, Amazon, and Baidu have embarked on a tight race to offer the most advanced and well-integrated automotive software-as-a-service subscriptions, making them ideal candidates for deploying a biphasic monetization strategy.

Lets explore a simplified example of how that could work.

A hypothetical automaker has already introduced a basic subscription bundle consisting of three car-connected services: road navigation, road assistance, and remote start. The bundle is offered to all prospective car owners in the form of a subscription for $89 per month. Ten thousand car owners have already subscribed to the basic subscription, generating $890,000 Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) for the automaker.

Lets assume that the same automakers R&D unit has developed two new connected services that are ready to be launched: Over-The-Air software updates (OTA) and Semi-Autonomous Driving (SAD).

The marketing department has conducted a market segmentation study according to which, the automakers Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM) consists of a total 10,000 existing drivers, out of which 9,000 are low-income earners and 1,000 are high-income earners. Through various A/B tests conducted in the past, the automaker found out the Price Elasticity of Demand (PED) for the basic bundle is 0.9 (quite elastic). This means that an increase in the overall price of the bundle will result in an almost proportionate decrease in demand. The company also defined the minimum prices of the two services to be $5/month for OTA and $15/month for SAD based on the investment size required to develop each service.

So, how would the company deploy a biphasic monetization strategy?

Companies need to measure the maturity of an offer to determine the overall market readiness for a new service. The Unified Subscription Adoption Model (USAM) is a hybrid framework for assessing the end-to-end potential of offerings, measuring attributes that will impact potential adoption, including: functionality, reliability, usefulness, usability, efficiency, and desirability.

To use the framework, you measure the service quality attributes by asking a series of core questions. For example, for Desirability, the pertinent question is Does it make the user care? and what you are assessing is the measure of positive emotions, such as desire and pleasure, that a service generates for the user. Similarly, for Usefulness, the question is Does it solve real problems? For each attribute, you rate on a continuum of Low to High and then tally the results for a total score.

If we use this framework for our two new hypothetical connected services, we clearly witness that the two services differ across the board. The first service (OTA) is a very mature service (scoring 55/60 points). In contrast, semi-autonomous driving is more of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) scoring 32/60 points.

The overall service quality is very often a reliable indicator of both market maturity and market penetration. The ratings for OTA indicate the service is well diffused/adopted in the market (past the late majority of the consumer population). In other words, OTA is an existing feature in most if not all cars. Car owners expect that their cars software can be updated remotely (i.e. over the air), similarly to how laptops or PCs do. In contrast, SAD appears to be a novel service still in the early adoption phase (early majority of the consumer population). It is widely seen as a nice-to-have feature, not really a necessity.

Lets start by hypothesizing that the automaker decides to add both services to the existing basic subscription offering.

Approach 1: All-in Bundling Strategy

Once the automaker adds both services to the existing basic bundle, the subscription fee increases to cover the R&D costs incurred to develop the OTA and SAD services. In consequence, 2,000 subscribers representing 20% of the overall subscriber base cancel their subscriptions. The increased subscription fee is barely enough to offset the subscriber churn, leading to a 2% reduction in the automakers Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) from $890k to $872k.

Lets think about this dynamic. Once the automaker adds a nice-to-have service to a bundle consisting of basic services and uses that to justify a fee increase, car owners feel like they are asked to pay for a feature they dont need and never asked for. Since the basic bundle includes services with close substitutes, they wont hesitate to cancel their subscription.

Lets now see how the biphasic monetization strategy can provide a much more profitable alternative. Exhibit 2 shows the impact of adding OTA to the existing basic bundle and launching SAD as a standalone subscription service.

Approach 2: Basic Bundle + Stand-Alone Strategy

The OTA service matches closely the overall maturity of the basic bundle already adopted by 10,000 subscribers. By adding it to the bundle, the automaker increases the overall subscription fee to cover the R&D costs. In consequence, a portion of subscribers still cancel but the churn, in this case, is much lower resulting in a net MRR gain.

The gains do not end here though. The manufacturer launches SAD as a standalone subscription at $15/month and targets only those drivers in their subscriber base that demonstrate the greatest willingness/ability to pay for additional features. The car manufacturer now has two recurring revenue streams.

Over time, semi-autonomous driving will mature as a capability as an increasing number of car manufacturers offer it and its overall quality increases. It will eventually be adopted by the early and late majorities of the consumer population. At that point, the standalone subscription fee wont be justified, forcing the automaker to make the feature part of the basic bundle and, perhaps, using that as a justification for an increase in its subscription fee.

To avoid losing the second revenue stream altogether, the car manufacturer will need to launch a new service as a stand-alone subscription to replace SAD. This process creates a continuous innovation cycle that can help subscription businesses stay competitive while growing their revenue and minimizing risks associated with new launches.

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All in all, the biphasic subscription monetization strategy poses a proven, logical, and practical solution to the dilemma of launching novel services as standalone offerings versus adding them to existing bundles in the fast-moving subscription economy.

Success, however, comes with conditions. For biphasic monetization strategies to succeed, companies must maintain a constant flow of innovation, know their costs, study their subscribers, and analyze acquisition and retention drivers. Its a tall order, but the benefits make it worthwhile. Just ask Amazon.

Read the original:
What Belongs in Your Basic Bundle? - Harvard Business Review

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IBM posted better-than-expected second-quarter financial results, driven by strength in both software and services.

For the quarter, the enterprise tech giant reported revenue of $18.75 billion, up 3% from a year ago, and about $450 million ahead of the Street consensus at $18.3 billion. Adjusted for currency and divestitures, revenue was about flat compared with a year earlier.

The stock gained 3.2% to $142.60 in after-hours trading.

IBM (ticker: IBM) said non-GAAP profits were $2.33 a share, four cents above the Street consensus view of $2.29 a share, up 7% from a year ago. Under generally accepted accounting principles, the company earned $1.47 a share. On a non-GAAP basis, gross margin inched up 0.3 percentage point to 49.3%, while pretax net income was up 0.7 of a point, or 70 basis points, to 13.5%.

Revenue in the companys cloud and cognitive software segment was $6.1 billion, up 6.1%, or 2.5% in constant currency, and ahead of the Street consensus forecast of $5.9 billion.

Global Business Services revenue was $4.3 billion, up 11.6%, or 7.3% in constant currency, and ahead of the consensus estimate of $4.1 billion.

Global Technology Services, the companys IT outsourcing business, had revenue of $6.3 billion, up 0.4%, but down 4.1% adjusting for currencya result that was slightly above Street expectations. Systems revenue, which includes mainframes, was down 7.3%, or 10.2% adjusting for currency.

IBM said total cloud revenue in the quarter was $7 billion, up 13%, or 9% adjusted for currency, which was a deceleration from the first quarter, when the company posted 21% growth, or 18% adjusted for currency. Revenue at Red Hat was up 20%, or 17% adjusted for currency, an acceleration from 17% reported growth (15% adjusted for currency) in the March quarter.

IBM repeated its previous forecast for full-year adjusted free cash flow of $11 billion to $12 billion, excluding $3 billion of expenses related to cost reduction moves and the pending spinoff of the Kyndryl services business.

We built on our progress last quarter, IBM CFO Jim Kavanaugh said in an interview with Barrons. This is a continuation of that. Clients are adopting our hybrid cloud model. He notes that IBM has paid down almost $6.5 billion in debt through the first half, and has now reduced borrowings by $18 billion since it completed its acquisition of Red Hat in July 2019.

Kavanaugh said the Kyndryl transaction is on track to be completed by year-end.

Asked about the environment for IT spending, Kavanaugh said that conditions are encouraging. He said that demand has improved in markets that are recovering from the pandemic, with revenue growth in the latest quarter in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., France, Italy, and Spain. Kavanaugh cited continued challenges in some Asian markets, including India.

Write to Eric J. Savitz at eric.savitz@barrons.com

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IBM's Revenues and Profits Beat Forecasts. Software and Services Were Key. - Barron's

Microsoft has announced Extended Security Updates for Windows Server 2008 and 2012, and for SQL Server 2012 and made it free if you run them in its Azure cloud.

The current extended support offering for Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2 ends on October 10, 2023. However, Monojit Bhattacharya, a product management leader for Azure and member of Microsofts Windows Server Team, has revealed that Redmond is offering Extended Security Updates for three years.

SQL Server 2012, for which extended support ends on July 12, 2022, has also been given an extra three years of security updates.

Microsofts made this an offer thats hard to resist by making it free if users move their workloads into Azure. They also must apply the Azure Hybrid Benefit a scheme that allows use of on-prem licences acquired under Software Assurance.

Azure Hybrid Benefit includes lower Azure prices than are available with other offers. Microsoft seldom tires of pointing out that the Benefit therefore makes Azure the cheapest place to run Windows Server and SQL Server in the cloud.

If you persist in running on-prem, Microsoft will ramp the price of the extended update offering. In year one itll cost three quarters of your licence costs, in year two the price will be at parity, and in year three Extended Security Updates will cost 125 per cent of the license cost.

Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server has also been given a little extra love, with one more year of updates offered but only in Azure.

SQL Server and Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2 Extended Security Updates are currently scheduled to end on July 9, 2022, and January 14, 2023, respectively.

News of the Extended Security Updates was revealed at Microsofts partner centric Inspire virtual gabfest which, in addition to the announcement of cloudy Windows 365 desktops, saw Redmond reveal:

Inspire continues tomorrow.

Read more from the original source:
Microsoft extends security updates for Windows and SQL Server 2012 and 2008 - The Register

People all around the world deserve the right to have a private conversation. Communication privacy is a human right, a civil liberty and one of the centerpieces of a free society. And while we all deserve basic communications privacy, the journalists, NGO workers and human rights and democracy activists among us are especially at risk, since they are often at odds with powerful governments.

So it is no surprise that people around the world are angry to learn that surveillance software sold by NSO Group to governments has been found on cellphones worldwide. Thousands of NGOs, human rights and democracy activists, along with government employees and many others have been targeted and spied upon. We agree and we are thankful for the work done by Amnesty International, the countless journalists at Forbidden Stories, along with Citizen Lab, to bring this awful situation to light.

"A commitment to giving their own citizens strong security is the true test of a countrys commitment to cybersecurity."

Like many others, EFF has warned for years of the danger of the misuse of powerful state-sponsored malware. Yet the stories just keep coming about malware being used to surveil and track journalists and human rights defenders who are then murdered including the murders of Jamal Khashoggi or Cecilio Pineda-Birto. Yet we have failed to ensure real accountability for the governments and companies responsible.

What can be done to prevent this? How do we create accountability and ensure redress? Its heartening that both South Africa and Germany have recently banned dragnet communications surveillance, in part because there was no way to protect the essential private communications of journalists and privileged communications of lawyers. All of us deserve privacy, but lawyers, journalists and human rights defenders are at special risk because of their often adversarial relationship with powerful governments. Of course, the dual-use nature of targeted surveillance like the malware that NSO sells is trickier, since it is allowable under human rights law when it is deployed under proper necessary and proportionate limits. But that doesnt mean we are helpless. In fact, we have suggestions on both prevention and accountability.

First, and beyond question, we need real device security. While all software can be buggy and malware often takes advantage of those bugs, we can do much better. To do better, we need the full support of our governments. Its just shameful that in 2021 the U.S. government as well as many foreign governments in the Five Eyes and elsewhere are more interested in their own easy, surreptitious access to our devices than they are in the actual security of our devices. A commitment to giving their own citizens strong security is the true test of a countrys commitment to cybersecurity. By this measure, the countries of the world, especially those who view themselves as leaders in cybersecurity, are currently failing.

It now seems painfully obvious that we need international cooperation in support of strong encryption and device security. Countries should be holding themselves and each other to account when they pressure device manufacturers to dumb down or back door our devices and when they hoard zero days and other attacks rather than ensuring that those security holes are promptly fixed. We also need governments to hold each other to the necessary and proportionate requirement of international human rights law for evaluating surveillance and these limits must apply whether that surveillance is done for law enforcement or national security purposes. And the US, EU, and others must put diplomatic pressure on the countries where these immoral spyware companies are are headquartered in to stop selling hacking gear to countries who use them to commit human rights abuses. At this point, many of these companies -- Cellebrite, NSO Group, and Candiru/Saituare headquartered in Israel and its time that both governments and civil society focus attention there.

Second, we can create real accountability by bringing laws and remedies around the world up to date to ensure that those impacted by state-sponsored malware have the ability to bring suit or otherwise obtain a remedy. Those who have been spied upon must be able to get redress from both the governments who do the illegal spying and the companies that knowingly provide them with the specific tools to do so. The companies whose good name are tarnished by this malware deserve to be able to stop it too. EFF has supported all of these efforts, but more is needed. Specifically:

We supported WhatsApps litigation against NSO Group to stop it from spoofing WhatsApp as a strategy for infecting unsuspecting victims. The Ninth Circuit is currently considering NSOs appeal.

We sought direct accountability for foreign governments who spy on Americans in the U.S. in Kidane v. Ethiopia. We argued that foreign countries who install malware on Americans devices should be held to account, just as the U.S. government would be if it violated the Wiretap Act or any of the other many applicable laws. We were stymied by a cramped reading of the law in the D.C. Circuit -- the court wrongly decided that the fact that the malware was sent from Ethiopia rather than from inside the U.S. triggered sovereign immunity. That dangerous ruling should be corrected by other courts or Congress should clarify that foreign governments dont have a free pass to spy on people in America. NSO Group says that U.S. telephone numbers (that start with +1) are not allowed to be tracked by its service, but Americans can and do have foreign-based telephones and regardless, everyone in the world deserves human rights and redress. Countries around the world should step up to make sure their laws cover state sponsored malware attacks that occur in their jurisdiction.

We also have supported those who are seeking accountability from companies directly, including the Chinese religious minority who have been targeted using a specially-built part of the Great Firewall of China created by American tech giant Cisco.

"The truth is, too many democratic or democratic-leaning countries are facilitating the spread of this malware because they want to be able to use it against their own enemies."

Third, we must increase the pressure on these companies to make sure they are not selling to repressive regimes and continue naming and shaming those that do. EFFs Know Your Customer framework is a good place to start, as was the State Departments draft guidance (that apparently was never finalized). And these promises must have real teeth. Apparently we were right in 2019 that NSO Groups unenforceable announcement that it was holding itself to the highest standards of ethical business, was largely a toothless public relations move. Yet while NSO is rightfully on the hot seat now, they are not the only player in this immoral market. Companies who sell dangerous equipment of all kinds must take steps to understand and limit misuse and these surveillance. Malware tools used by governments are no different.

Fourth, we support former United Nations Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression David Kaye in calling for a moratorium on the governmental use of these malware technologies. While this is a longshot, we agree that the long history of misuse, and the growing list of resulting extrajudicial killings of journalists and human rights defenders, along with other human rights abuses, justifies a full moratorium.

These are just the start of possible remedies and accountability strategies. Other approaches may be reasonable too, but each must recognize that, at least right now, the intelligence and law enforcement communities of many countries are not defining cybersecurity to include actually protecting us, much less the journalists and NGOs and activists that do the risky work to keep us informed and protect our rights. We also have to understand that unless done carefully, regulatory responses like further triggering U.S. export restrictions could result in less security for the rest of us while not really addressing the problem. The NSO Group was reportedly able to sell to the Saudi regime with the permission and encouragement of the Israeli government under that countrys export regime. The truth is, too many democratic or democratic-leaning countries are facilitating the spread of this malware because they want to be able to use it against their own enemies.

Until governments around the world get out of the way and actually support security for all of us, including accountability and redress for victims, these outrages will continue. Governments must recognize that intelligence agency and law enforcement hostility to device security is dangerous for their own citizens because a device cannot tell if the malware infecting it is from the good guys or the bad guys. This fact is just not going to go away.

We must have strong security at the start, and strong accountability after the fact if we want to get to a world where all of us can enjoy communications security. Only then will our journalists, human rights defenders and NGOs be able to do their work without fear of being tracked, watched and potentially murdered simply because they use a mobile device.

Link:
Pegasus Project Shows the Need for Real Device Security, Accountability and Redress for those Facing State-Sponsored Malware - EFF