NETWORKING

lcva2/Getty Images I know you’ve heard of gamification, but have you ever heard of festification? That’s what Microsoft will be doing in April and May, with the Microsoft AI Skills Fest. It’s a little odd, but it also looks like it might be a heck of a lot of fun. Also: Microsoft at 50: Its incredible rise, 15 lost years, and stunning comeback – in 4 charts I’ve written a lot about Microsoft over the…

Introducing version 3 of the Cisco Meraki Add-on for Splunk.       A Splunk technical add-on (TA) is a modular component that normalizes, validates, and enriches specific data sources before indexing in Splunk to enable proper searching, reporting, and analysis without changing the underlying raw data. Keeping track of your networks shouldn’t feel like detective work. But when you’ve got multiple Meraki organizations, various vendors, security concerns, and performance issues to monitor,…

ZDNET’s key takeaways A Shine Turbine kit, which includes a turbine, stand, guy lines, and pegs, costs $399, while the Essentials Kit, which adds a few more bits such as a wind speed meter, costs $488 — though both are on sale right now. The kit includes everything you need to turn wind into electrical energy, and the turbine features a 12,000 mAh battery. There are limitations, which include the weight of the kit and…

ZDNET’s key takeaways The Planck SSD gives your connected device quick access to up to 2TB of storage. It has read and write speeds of up to 1,050 MB/s, giving it support for Apple 4K ProRes recording. It’s not cheap at a starting price of $125, and due diligence is required for any Kickstarter project. We don’t often cover crowdfunded products at ZDNET, as the potential for production issues and undelivered promises far outweigh the…

Kerry Wan/ZDNET Soundbars are gaining in popularity because of their sleek design and ability to provide an ample boost in audio quality compared to built-in TV speakers. Even with their plug-and-play nature, you can make a few modifications to help unleash the best possible sound quality. Also: I spent hours testing Samsung’s new flagship soundbar – it gave my Sonos a run for its money Whether you’re new to soundbar setups or a self-proclaimed audiophile, familiarizing…

ZDNET’s key takeaways The Doogee Fire 6 Max is on sale at Amazon for $479. Its massive battery allows over 100 days of standby, allowing the smartphone to act as a power bank, while sporting both thermal and night vision cameras. The display is vivid, but can be rather washed out in sunlight. Doogee are giving ZDNET readers a massive 30% discount on the Fire 6 Max — just enter code OWRMNPAP at checkout and get $180…

The latest release also broadens its scope beyond chatbot benchmarks. A new graph neural network (GNN) test targets datacenter-class hardware and is designed for workloads like fraud detection, recommendation engines, and knowledge graphs. It uses the RGAT model based on a graph dataset containing over 547 million nodes and 5.8 billion edges. Judging performance Analysts suggest that these benchmarks will make it easier to judge the performance of various hardware chips and clusters based on…

Yuliya Taba/Getty Images Cisco has released a “2025 Data Privacy Benchmark Study” that looks at the privacy challenges companies face with the rise of artificial intelligence. It offers practical insights for businesses that want to integrate AI while keeping privacy front and center. Also: The best free AI courses and certificates in 2025 The study gathered opinions from 2,600 privacy and security professionals across 12 countries. A key finding is that most companies (86%) support privacy…

Cravetiger/Getty Images Generative AI, agentic AI, and other emerging technologies are morphing companies and driving businesses to rethink organizational structures and traditional roles. Also: Adobe brings four highly-requested Premiere Pro AI features out of beta That’s according to the latest report from consultant Accenture, ‘Rethinking IT operating models for the modern enterprise‘. The research suggests current IT processes will not allow businesses to stay ahead of technology disruption, so even though IT continues to play a…