Surya's Blog

Disney used to make hundreds of millions of dollars a year selling its stuff to Netflix. Now it is going to spend billions of dollars a year to try to beat Netflix. Disney executives didn’t mention Netflix once during their three-hour-plus investor presentation Thursday, at which the company laid out its  plans to build up a suite of subscription streaming services  — most notably Disney+, a $7-a-month service bursting with movies and TV shows. Disney+ launches in the US in November and will feature  everything from Disney’s recent theatrical offerings, like  Captain Marvel , to classic Disney movies like  Bambi , and new, original stuff like  The Mandalorian , a  Star Wars  TV-show spinoff. And Netflix isn’t the only company Disney will be battling in the years to come; the list of competitors and would-be rivals now includes everyone from Amazon to Apple to AT&T. But make no mistake: Netflix is the primary reason ...

WASHINGTON: The Pentagon has selected Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS, the cloud computing arm of Amazon), as two finalists for its $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud contract, as Oracle missed the bus. The JEDI Cloud computing contract at the US Department of Defence (DoD) is aimed to bring the entire military under the envelope of a single Cloud provider. The project saw backlash from several quarters including employees at tech giants like Google and Microsoft, alleging that the "contract is massive in scope and shrouded in secrecy, which makes it nearly impossible to know what we as workers would be building". Succumbing to pressure from employees, Google last year dropped its bid to be part of the JEDI contract. "After evaluating all of the proposals received, the Department of Defence has made a competitive range determination for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure Cloud request for proposals, in accorda...

South Africa is lurching towards another electricity disaster to make the Eskom disaster even worse. It comes from “renewable energy”, which here usually means solar and wind. These are excellent for off-grid uses, such as solar water heating, wind pumps on farms, and small electricity supply for households. But they are useless for grid electricity (electricity on national electricity networks, such as Eskom’s). The sun never makes electricity when it is most needed – on winter evenings just after sunset. With wind you never know when it will make electricity. Both are staggeringly expensive and hopelessly unreliable. South Africa has more than three years of data showing how bad solar and wind electricity is here. This comes from REIPPPP – the Renewable Energy Independent Power Producers Procurement Program. Under it Eskom is forced to buy extremely costly solar and wind power from independent power producers. I have the production figures for ...

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the backbone of brands when it comes to online presence. Ranking higher on SERP takes effort and time – and gets even more challenging with trends that change without a moment’s notice. Google is anamorphous search engine which is popular (and even notorious) for rolling out changes in its search algorithms pretty often. The year 2019 brought fresh updates from Google – some radical enough to ensure a swift departure from the usual SEO effortsused by professionals in the past. From the V’s (Video, Voice, and Vernacular) to the emphasis on local queries, Google is bringing a lot of changesas perthe changing internet consumption. Let’s look at some of these changes and what they mean: 1.      Content is still the dominant factor To offers users authentic, detailed, and complete information, websites’ content will continue to be Hobson’sChoice for boosting SEO efforts. Digital markete...