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Who run the world? Databases.

Good morning! This Tuesday, the explosion of data within enterprises, Magic Johnson joins Cameo, Niantic is making a Transformers game, and your summer reading list is here.
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Enterprises used to have to buy actual CDs and physically download programs on employee computers. And everything was saved through a connection to the local network.
Obviously much has changed since then. The cloud is quickly becoming the norm, though on-premises storage still represents a sizable portion of IT spend. And the amount of data that businesses are stockpiling has simply skyrocketed.
The database industry is undergoing one of the most significant shiftsin the history of the technology as companies increasingly look to put that information to use. And tons of startups are popping up that are promising new approaches to storing and analyzing information.
The tech plays an integral role in the modern world, too. The suggestions someone sees on Netflix, for example, or the corporate dashboards that executives use to run their businesses are all supported by databases. And the use cases are only growing.
The challenge is selling enterprises on a vision that might still be years away. Part of that is a reflection that companies have a long road ahead in their quests to adopt machine learning, which Databricks and others specialize in.
Of course, not every vendor will survive as a standalone company, particularly given the dominance of the cloud providers that all offer competing tools to the likes of Snowflake, Neo4j, Dremio and Databricks. And that will lead to a wave of consolidation, according to industry experts.
How enterprises will seek to strategize around all the options, especially with money flowing so freely in the sector right now, is one pressing question. While that could mean doubling down on services from the cloud hyperscalers, it also gives third-party providers an opportunity to steal market share, particularly given the increasing focus by businesses on multicloud.
That's why those companies, with their deep pockets, could soon be scouring the market for options. But can the new startups survive going solo? As the use of data within enterprises explodes, they just might.
Amazon's new video series on Amazon.com/15 shows how the "Amazon effect" is helping neighboring small businesses launch, grow, and thrive. In the first episode, you'll hear the experience of Sylvia Burke and François Theodore, the wife-and-husband team who serve Caribbean-inspired specialties at their restaurant - Sylvia's Café – down the street from Amazon's fulfillment center.
Hiring in a hybrid world? Re-create the whole interview process, not just the in-the-room part, said Facebook's Miranda Kalinowski:
Ransomware is the biggest security issue facing businesses, said Lindy Cameron, head of the U.K.'s National Cyber Security Centre:
John Demers is leaving the DOJin the midst of the controversy over the Trump administration's seizure of records from Apple and other companies. He was the head of the department's national security division.
Magic Johnson is joining the board at Cameo. He'll also start doing Cameos, which will hopefully be just as hilariously literal as his tweets.
Raymond Endres is the new CTO at Airtable, joining from Facebook.
Automattic bought the journaling app Day One, as the company continues to become what Matt Mullenweg called "the Berkshire Hathaway of the internet."
Boaz Gelbord is the new chief security officer at Akamai, joining from Dun & Bradstreet.
It's chaos at Lordstown Motors. CEO Steve Burns and CFO Julio Rodriguez are both out, with Angela Strand running the company until a new CEO is hired. Though that may not happen soon, given that Lordstown is also rapidly running out of money.
What do Oprah, Reese Witherspoon, Barack Obama and Bill Gates have in common (other than tons of money and social followers)? Book clubs! Gates just dropped his reading list for summer 2021, with five selections that for the most part aren't exactly light reading — can we interest you in several hundred pages on the human immune system? — but are timely and good choices for summer.
The tech-iest of them is "Lights Out: Pride, Delusion, and the Fall of General Electric," by Thomas Gryta and Ted Mann. It's a brutal, cautionary tale of what happens when giant companies fall apart, and a really good read. Plus, "The Overstory" by Richard Powers is on his list, and Obama's too. Pretty impressive for a book about trees.
In 2018, Amazon raised its starting wage for all U.S. employees to at least $15 an hour. They've seen the positive impact this has had on their employees, their families, and their communities. Since then, they've been lobbying Congress to increase the federal minimum wage—which has been stuck at $7.25 since 2009.
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Correction: An earlier version of this story erroneously stated Tim Berners-Lee was selling four NFTs; he is selling a collection of four items as a single NFT. This story was updated on June 15, 2021.
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