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Last year saw some massive tech acquisitions, with SoftBank purchasing Cambridge-based chipmakers ARM for a whopping $32 billion (£25 billion), HP snapping up Samsung's printer business and Oracle acquiring Netsuite, not to mention the mammoth news of Verizon agreeing to buy Yahoo Inc for $4.8 billion (£3.6 billion).

And 2017 is no different, with Intel, Google and SoftBank all making interesting and expensive tech acquisitions.

Here are the most notable tech acquisitions of 2017, so far.

To take a look back at 2016's top tech purchases, see 17 of the most notable tech acquisitions of 2016.

1. ESW Capital buys Jive

Collaboration software company Jive has been acquired by ESW Capital - an Austin, Texas-based private equity firm specialising in enterprise software companies - for $462 million (£358 million). 

Jive will now become part of the Aurea family of technology companies, with the plan being to integrate it into Aurea's customer experience (CX) management platform.

Aurea CEO Scott Brighton said of the purchase: “Jive, in combination with Aurea, enables us to bring customer experience and employee and customer engagement together."

The sort of software Jive makes - known as Enterprise 2.0 - has become ubiquitous now, and is being increasingly dominated by the likes of Microsoft and new players like Slack. Which makes the acquisition at this price arguably the best possible outcome for the company.

Read next: Nine of the best enterprise collaboration software tools | Slack, Workplace, Microsoft Teams and more

2. HPE buys SimpliVity

January 2017 saw Hewlett Packard Enterprise buy hyperconverged infrastructure provider SimpliVity for $650 million (£520 million). The deal - that is expected to close in the second quarter - will boost HPE's hyperconverged portfolio.

The vendor has already announced new products following the acquisition. HPE will combine SimpliVity Omni Stack software with its DL380 servers, which will be available during the second half of 2017.

3. Cisco buys AppDynamics

In January 2017, Cisco acquired application analytics firm AppDynamics for $3.7 billion (£2.9 billion).

San Francisco-based AppDynamics provides software that monitors the performance of most applications, flagging issues and areas that need particular attention.

The deal came just before AppDynamic's IPO and closed in March 2017.

4. HPE buys Nimble Storage

In March 2017, HPE agreed to buy hybrid storage provider Nimble Storage for $1.09 billion (£1.5 billion) cash, in an attempt to expand its growing storage business.

HPE CEO Meg Whitman has been focusing on networking, storage and technology services as part of a major restructuring of the business.

5. CA buys Veracode

CA Technologies has agreed to acquire security testing firm Veracode for $614 million (£490 million). The deal is said to broaden CA's devops portfolio, and expand its development and testing offering for enterprises and app developers, with the acquisition expected to be completed in the second quarter of 2017.

Veracode provides a software-as-a-service platform that helps developers improve the security of their applications.

6. Apple buys Workflow

March 2017 marked the completion of Apple's acquisition of iPad and iPhone automation tool Workflow, according to TechCrunch.

Workflow allows users to create a list of functions or commands that will automate certain tasks within an application. Created by a small team comprising of Ari Weinstein, Conrad Kramer, Ayaka Nonaka and Nick Frey, along with the purchase of Workflow, Apple will also be hiring its creators.

7. Google buys Kaggle

In March 2017, Google confirmed its acquisition of Kaggle, an online community of data scientists and host of data science and machine learning competitions, for an undisclosed sum.

In early March, Google and Kaggle joined forces to host a $100,000 competition around machine learning and the classification of YouTube videos.

And while the details of this acquisition of vague, it's believed that Google bought Kaggle to improve its AI and machine learning capabilities, by taking advantage of Kaggle's active community of 600,000 data scientists.

8. Intel buys Mobileye

US chipmaker Intel agreed to purchase Israel-based driverless car firm Mobileye for $15.3 billion (£12.5 million).

Mobileye currently holds contracts with 27 car makers, and according to the BBC. It also controls two-thirds of the software for automatic emergency braking and semi-autonomous cruise control systems on the market.

In partnership with BMW, Intel and Mobileye are working to produce a working fleet of 40 driverless of BMW 7 Series cars on roads by the end of 2017.

9. Verizon buys Yahoo

In February 2016, Yahoo revealed that it was looking for "strategic alternatives" for its core business, and by July Yahoo had agreed to sell the company’s core internet operations to Verizon for $4.8 billion (£3.6 billion).

This acquisition spilled over into 2017, with news of Yahoo's recent (and multiple) data breaches causing Yahoo to reduce its price. This means Verizon will buy the firm for $350 million (£281 million) less than originally agreed.

So while the deal is still yet to formally close, with a new price agreed by both parties, 2017 should see the finalised acquisition happen soon.

10. Baidu buys Raven Tech

Chinese-American web services provider Baidu acquired digital assistant startup Raven Tech for an undisclosed amount in February.

Raven Tech produces a Mandarin-speaking AI-powered assistant, dubbed the Chinese answer to the Amazon Echo.

Confirming the purchase of the startup’s tech, product and staff (around 60 employees), this acquisition highlights Baidu's increasing push into artificial intelligence.

The deal comes after Baidu recently hired AI expert Qi Lu as its COO and Group President, Lu was had previously worked on Microsoft's AI efforts.

Interestingly, Raven Tech is an alumnus of the Microsoft Venture Accelerator, having previously raised $18 million of series A funding from Y Combinator and other investment firms including Zhen Fund, Matrix Partners China and DCM Ventures.

11. SoftBank buys Fortress Investment Group

In February 2017, SoftBank agreed to buy asset management firm Fortress Investment Group for $3.3 billion (£2.6 billion) cash.

Fortress Investment Group has invested in a whole host of tech firms including Lyft, Xapo and Jawbone.

The news of this deal came as part of an ongoing chapter in SoftBank's recent history, with SoftBank's COO Nikesh Arora wanting to focus more on a larger investment strategy, investing heavily in other tech firms.

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In the current climate of major data breaches amidst an ever shifting cyber threat landscape, the people in charge of vast volumes of valuable financial data are under increasing pressure to keep customer data safe from hackers and fraudsters.

Speaking at the SWIFT Business Forum in London last week, a range of senior security professionals at financial services firms and banks told the audience what keeps them up at night when it comes to cyber security and fraud. Here's what they said:

1. A constantly changing threat landscape

JF Legault, global head of cybersecurity operations at JP Morgan, highlighted the way that the threat landscape has changed over the past few years.

He explained: "In late 2014 we saw the advent of malware targeting wholesale banking platforms. Criminals stopped going after simple, low-value monetary amounts and shifted to high-value payment platforms. The reason they did that was a lot more yield on the crime they committed. We also saw a shift toward business email compromise. We also saw a number of breaches affecting the financial sector that led to fraudulent messages."

Read next: Most dangerous new cyber security threats 2017: ransomware, spearphishing, IoT botnets

His diplomatic answer to what keeps him up at night was simply: "What the business says keeps it up at night. I am there to help the business innovate and look at the different risks they face."

2. False positives

In the fraud space, the biggest issue for banks is "false positives" in its anti-money laundering (AML) monitoring systems. This means issues being flagged that aren't actually fraudulent activities, taking up valuable analyst time.

Anthony Fenwick, global head of treasury and trade solutions and AML compliance at Citi Group said simply: "Our biggest problem in this industry is false positives."

Read next: How technology will transform banking in 2017: Blockchain, cloud computing and digital challenger banks

When asked if artificial intelligence technology could help solve this issue, Fenwick said: "The story is why are we producing so many false positives, not 'let's deploy robots to get rid of the false positives'.

"One of the drivers I am trying to change is that the use of electronics and AI have to go hand-in-hand with the best humans. The idea that we remove all human activity from this process misses the point of what we are trying to do, which is marry these two capabilities to tackle the beast of bad data."

3. The big breach

Royce Curtin, managing director of global intelligence at Barclays, said: "It's the big breach that keeps us awake at night. If and when and that ultimate failure to provide the service customers expect and entrust us to keep safe. So we work very hard and take it very seriously the responsibility of building systems and trust for services that people feel comfortable using."

Read next: 2016's biggest data breach fails

Last year saw the biggest data breach at a bank in UK history. Tesco Bank was hit by an attack which saw 20,000 compromised users lose money from their accounts. The banking wing of the supermarket giant is in the process of paying back £2.5 million to customers who had their accounts compromised.

4. Missing a breach

Brendan Goode, regional CISO for UK and Ireland at Deutsche Bank said he most fears the feeling of "did we miss something? Where you look back at the logs and it is right there."

This failure of the system to alert to a potential breach is a major part of a modern cyber security strategy, and would keep any CISO worth their salt up at night.

5. Customers

As the February 2016 hack of the Bangladesh Central Bank showed, customer accounts can be the most vulnerable point of entry to a bank's systems. The hackers used stolen privileged credentials to steal $81 million before they were caught.

Matt Middleton-Leal, regional vice-president UK, Ireland and Northern Europe at security software vendor CyberArk, said: "Banks fear attacks which hide behind insider privileges because they allow cybercriminals to appear as legitimate users, giving them unprecedented freedom to work their way up to their most valuable financial assets."

Gottfried Leibbrandt, CEO at the financial messaging vendor SWIFT admitted that the bank's customers "will always be the weakest link, but at the same time the response should not be 'let's fix the weakest link' but you have to take an end-to-end view."

"Yes the weak link will always be the customer at the end of the day," he said, "but in retail banking the banks have been able to put in controls after it gets into the bank to respond to suspect logins, fraudulent transactions and do real risk scoring."

6. Ruthless adversaries

Craig Rice, director of security at Payments UK and the CSO at BACS said that the threat shouldn't be considered a technology problem but more like organised crime.

Read next: Cybersecurity trends 2017: Malicious machine learning, state-sponsored attacks, ransomware and malware

"They are ruthless shadow operations that work outside of a regulatory regime," he said. "They are quicker than you are, they are more ruthless than you are and they are more willing to be pragmatic than you are. That's a really tough competitor you are dealing with, so stop thinking about this as a technology problem."

So, how do the banks confront these issues?

How do the banks deal with this ever-changing threat landscape?

Communication and intelligence

The main theme of the day regarding cyber security and fraud was a shift from a walled-garden approach to a holistic one, and this comes down to better communication and intelligence sharing.

JF Legault at JP Morgan laid out his approach to contending with the new threat landscape: "I am responsible for collecting threat and fraud intelligence to ensure that we know where adversaries are going and what they are going after."

He said this comes down to not just technology, but people and process: "So how do we go from a cyber security analyst that is very much focused on technology and cyber controls, to an analyst that understands the business and can have a conversation with someone in the payments space?"

Read next: Travis Perkins uses Splunk’s flexible cyber security monitoring to protect against customer data breaches

This approach can also be seen in the language of modern cyber security vendors. Splunk's cyber security tools are all marketed with a focus on intelligence and response, and UK cyber startup Darktrace is making good progress in the enterprise market because it is rooted in this approach.

From perimeter security to multiple layers

Gottfried Leibbrandt from SWIFT highlighted the need for a change in thinking from its clients, "from perimeter security where no one gets inside our walls, to in-depth defence."

"Realising that sooner or later someone will get in and catching them when they get in, seeing what they do and being able to respond by having multiple layers of defence," he said.

Cross-industry collaboration

Leibbrandt from SWIFT pointed out that the days of banks keeping their cyber strategy a closely guarded secret are over if there is to be any progress in combating today's cyber threats.

He said: "A lot of the threats we see today exploit the ecosystem, they don't look for an individual link in the chain, they look for weak points in the end-to-end chain, so the response means we have to work together as an ecosystem."

Many of the conference attendees mentioned the recently opened National Cyber Security Centre as a positive step for the private sector towards snuffing out cyber threats.

Goode from Deutsche Bank put it best when he said: "As soon as you make it more difficult, as soon as you start sharing and taking away the different avenues to target any bank and increase awareness, you make it a less enticing environment for adversaries to engage in."

Scenario testing

Despite many admitting it is a pain, scenario testing and exercises are one of the best ways for organisations to protect themselves from cyber threats, especially when they are conducted across the industry. The Bank of England and Financial Conduct Authority have typically taken a pretty progressive and collaborative approach to resiliency benchmarking in the UK.

Legault from JP Morgan said: "Doing exercises, so getting everyone around the table and you simulate scenarios so you understand where your gaps are and what you do well, you understand what you need to build into your cyber process and your resiliency process. It is essential to do that with everyone within your organisation: legal, cyber, compliance, the business, the operations folks, the technology folks and even your peers."

Actionable insights

Banks are increasingly looking to get more actionable insights to not just their security analysts but people within the business units themselves. This means intelligence that can be quickly turned into a response by the most relevant people, especially important in a landscape where breaches can happen in a heartbeat.

Brendan Goode from Deutsche Bank said: "In payments it is important to create intelligence inside the bank and publish it out and disseminate that fast and someone needs to receive it and do something with it, so actionable intelligence. That comes down to speaking a common language. So being able to say: here is a set of accounts and a volume of transactions that you should be mindful of, so that they can set alerts."

Australian collaboration software company Atlassian has launched its first data centre in Europe as the company ramps up its plans for global expansion in the cloud market.  

The infrastructure in Ireland was announced at the first European Atlassian Summit in Barcelona and is available for all existing cloud customers of its team planning and project management JIRA Software and content creation and sharing platform Confluence.

Atlassian currently offers European customers including Lufthansa and Virgin Media the choice of running its software on their own servers or by Atlassian in the cloud. More than 75 percent of Atlassian customers pick the latter as their first investment in the company's products, but until now this had only been available on infrastructure in the USA.

The result of the greater distance that the data had to travel was slower speeds and worse performance than their counterparts across the Atlantic. The new data centre in Ireland will help the Europeans to catch up.

"Initial tests are amazing," co-founder and co-CEO Scott Farquhar told the audience of almost 18,000 attendees, after emerging on the stage from a posse of robot-suited dancers covered in flashing fluorescent lights.

"They show that that the latency has reduced by 300 percent," he said. "That's going to make a huge difference to those of you that use our cloud products in Europe."

The company chose Ireland as the location for the infrastructure due to its regional networking performance and legal requirements, and plans to add further cloud hosting regions around the world.

Restructuring cloud architecture

Atlassian is in midst of a major overhaul of the infrastructure it uses for its European cloud customers, which will now be hosted exclusively on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Farquhar promised that the move would enhance security, following a rough week at the $6 billion (£4.6 billion) company in which vulnerabilities in both the HipChat app and Confluence information sharing system were reported.

"To reinforce this effort, we’ve made a foundational change in our cloud platform over the last year and are now using AWS to host our services," the 37-year-old said. "This enables us to offer an increased variety of cloud deployment regions, with strong performance and local failover options."

Atlassian has an enduring relationship with the continent, where four of its first five customers were based and almost 40 percent of its revenue is generated today. To further its European reach the company will also add another 13 European languages to the nine in which core products JIRA and Confluence are currently available.

The company was founded in 2002 to help teams organise, discuss and complete shared work through a series of products that today include messaging app HipChat, user management platform Crowd and the aforementioned JIRA and Confluence. In January it added visual collaboration tool Trello to the portfolio of products.

More updates

Farqukar also announced that developer ecosystem known as Atlassian Marketplace has now generated more than $250 million in total sales since it launched in 2012 and $100 million in the last year alone.

More than 3,000 add-ons are currently available on the platform, and a number of new ones were announced at the summit, including integration with operational intelligence platform Splunk.

Atlassian has also undergone what head of design Jürgen Spangl called the "biggest redesign we have done for our cloud products." It includes streamlined navigation along a grid layout that reduces clutter, improved search and create functionality, updated colours and fonts and new versions for mobile and tablet.

New versions of Git code repository management tool Bitbucket Server and Data Center and continuous integration server Bamboo have been produced to support DevOps adoption in enterprises.  Developers have been given more control over configuration and global teams can now maintain mirror access in the event of short outages by caching authentication credentials locally.

The company also revealed that all of its major platforms are now available in data centre editions, following the recent addition of HipChat and Crowd to the line-up.

After the apparent 'disaster' of Windows 8, Microsoft users seem to have warmed to Windows 10 and all that it has to offer.

And with Microsoft reporting that there are 400 million active Windows 10 devices in use, we're surely set to see an increase in not only Windows app downloads but also the number of Windows apps being produced.

We've compiled a list of top Windows 10 apps (both desktop and phone) aimed at business users. 

And while the list is in no particular order, we like:

- Trello Cental
- Network Speed Test
- Expense Spy
- One calendar

Here are 19 useful Windows apps...

Read next: Eight free open source alternatives to Windows 10

1. Trello Central

Trello Central is the Windows version of Trello offering most of the features available on the Android app. Trello Central is a work and life planner and project management tool.

Key Features: 

- Create boards
- Invite co-workers to interact and edit documents
- Customised workflows
- Add and assign tasks
- Upload photos and videos, attach files and add editable checklists. 

Download here.

2. Expense Spy

Expense Spy keeps track of finances and set budgets. 

Key features:

- Separate budgets for short trips
- Alternative expenses
- Regular payments
- Data are displayed in a table or chart
- Active tiles
- Foreign currencies
- OneDrive backup

Download here.

3. Microsoft Teams

For those wanting to stay firmly within the Microsoft family, and those with the appropriate commercial Office 365 subscription, Microsoft Teams is a great choice for an instant messenger with extensive collaboration features.

Microsoft Teams is similar to Slack, but for those running a Microsoft shop, Teams is a great option and comes as part of your subscription, so using it will come at no additional cost.

Key features: 

- Instant messaging 
- Quick file transfers
- Group messaging and channels
- Multi-factor authentication

Download here.

4. Adobe photoshop express

This express editor enables users to create, edit and filter photos without needing a ton of experience.

Key features:

- Crop, straighten, rotate and flip photos, and remove red-eye from photos
- Auto-fix
- One-touch filters
- Looks pack and noise reduction pack

Download here.

5. Network Speed Test

Monitoring your internet speed is vital in ensuring you get the most from your broadband connection. A slow speed can indicate a break on the line or other issues that need addressing and this app will tell you exactly how well your internet connection of working.

Key features:

- Measure network latency
- Download and upload speeds
- Monitor SSID and BSSID when you are connected to a Wi-Fi hotspot
- Examine past network performance history.

Download here.

6. WhatsApp

Facebook-owned WhatsApp has launched a Windows desktop app designed to extend the experience provided by the WhatsApp mobile app.

The official WhatsApp blog stated: "Like WhatsApp Web, our desktop app is simply an extension of your phone: the app mirrors conversations and messages from your mobile device."

Key features: 

- Calling
- Send photos, videos, and Voice Messages
- Group chat
- No international charges
- Offline messages
- WhatsApp Web

Download here.

7. Zoho

Zoho has two useful business apps, Zoho Invoice and Zoho Expense that aid accounts and finance management. Both apps work on mobile and desktop Windows devices.

Zoho Expense key features:

- Receipt scanning
- Expense reporting
- Multicurrency support
- Mileage tracking

Zoho Invoice key features:

- Accept card payments
- Share, discuss and collaborate with customers online
- Client Portal
- Records expenses

8. WinOpener

WinOpener can open RAR, ZIP, 7z and other compressed files - it's a useful app to have when working with multivolume archives. 

Key features:

- It's free, with no in-app purchases needed
- Offers a bug-free guarantee 
- Supports ZIP, RAR, 7z, TAR, etc

Download here.

9. One calendar

One Calendar offers users one platform to view multiple calendars from Google calendar, Outlook,Office365 calendar and Facebook events.

Key features:

- View multiple calendars
- Add, update and delete appointments
- Filter and search the information
- Work offline
- Data storage
- Theming

Download here.

10. Dropbox

Dropbox's cloud storage platform is an accessible and secure way to manage important personal documents and those you wish to share with others. The desktop app offers offline storage for free.

Key features:

- Access photos, docs, and videos from any device
- 2 GB of free space when you sign up
- Share even your biggest files with a simple link — no more attachments!
- Add files to your "Favorites" for offline viewing

Download here.

11. Skype for Business

The Microsoft-owned Skype for Business app is a popular business-focused app that provides an online meeting room, instant messaging and an user-friendly interface. 

Key features:

- View shared content during video meeting
- Group IM or video chat
- Mute or remove attendees
- Passive authentication
- Instant messaging

Download here.

12. Evernote

Evernote users can create shared documents that can easily be edited by all staff simultaneously. Evernote also offers time-tracking functionality to map productivity and exploit areas of under-use.

Key features:

- Auto-synchronise notes among computer, tablet and smartphone
- Time-tracking
- Note taking
- Share photos

Download here.

13. Todoist

Todoist is a checklist and task manager app that enables users to view tasks, mark them as complete and create and share collaborative projects.

Key features: 

- Add, view, and organise your tasks from multiple devices
- Set recurring dates
- Delegate tasks and share projects
- Add comments, upload files, and receive instant notifications on shared projects

Download here.

14. SHARE.it

Simply put, SHARE.it  is a file and photo sharing platform from Lenovo. 

Key features:

- Share photos, music and video
- Transfer files between phone and computer
- Multi-platform

Download here.

15. 9 Notes

9 Notes is a note-taking app with advanced editing features ideal for those working within a creative environment or someone who is bored of simplistic note-taking apps with a lack of features.

Key features: 

- Notebook-style interface
- Create both handwritten and text notes
- Multiple text styling options
- Crop, resize and apply filters to images and notes
- Advanced Graphics editor for posters, brochures, and graphical content

Download here.

16. Translator

Translation apps are always useful in business, so having one on your desktop is worthwhile. Translator is an app that does just that, translates via voice, text and camera shots.

Key features:

- 51 languages
- Camera, voice and offline translation
- Text-to-speech
- Word of the Day
- Full history

Download here.

17. Grapholite

Grapholite offers an all-in-one diagrams wizard, able to create flow charts, floor plans, network layouts, sketches and illustrations. 

Key features: 

- Flow charts
- Organisational charts
- Web site structures and wireframes
- Computer network layouts
- Workflows
- Graphs, algorithms, schemes
- Infographics

Download here.

18. Battery X

Simply put, Battery X provides an app designed to know your battery status, remaining charge and statistics. Great for those on the go, in both personal and professional situations.

Key features: 

- Set custom battery level alerts
- Details of battery usage 
- Hours of remaining charge

Download here.

19. IM+ Instant Messenger

IM+ offers a fully integrated instant messenger service ideal for people with multiple chat platforms in use. This app will bring all of those together placing them in one easy location. 

Key features:

- Support for all popular instant messaging services including Facebook, Google Talk and AOL/AIM/iChat
- Free text messages and photo sending
- Group chats
- Multiple accounts per service
- Typing notifications
- Personal status messages

Download here.

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The first Outlast gained a quick reputation for terror when it arrived in 2014, and three years on Outlast 2 is here to mess us up even more.

Once again you take on the role of an investigative journalist caught up in some nasty stuff - this time a community of violent religious sorts deep in the American wilderness. You can run, you can hide, and you record what happens on your trusty night vision camera, but you can never fight back - meaning the terror never really lets up.

Thanks to our friends at GOG.com, we've got five copies of Outlast 2 on PC to give away, and you could get one absolutely free of charge by following the instructions below to enter our competition.

We're also giving away five copies of Little Nightmares, so make sure to enter that too, and if you're looking for more horror titles to round out your collection, check out GOG.com's Haunted Horrors sale this weekend, which has a huge selection of horror titles at up to 79 percent off.

To win, you'll need to use the giveaway form below. Simply log in to Gleam to use the entry options. You can choose to enter just once by picking one of the options after signing up below, or you can increase your chances of winning by choosing two or more options. If you already follow us on Twitter or Like us on Facebook, that'll count too. Simply press the +1 button and follow the instructions provided.

Outlast 2 – PC Advisor

The competition will end at 11pm BST on Sunday 30 April. The winner is chosen completely at random by the Gleam widget.

You may know them for the lovable LittleBigPlanet series, but Swedish developer Tarsier Studios have darker things lurking in the back of their minds. They've now come out in the form of Little Nightmares, which pairs the cutesy aesthetic of LittleBigPlanet with a rather darker world of things that go bump in the night.

Echoing the likes of last year's Inside, Little Nightmares sees you control the helpless young girl Six in a side-on puzzle platformer as she tries to escape from a string of distorted monsters that look like they might have come from Jim Henson's Silent Hill. The game's only just come out, but we already reckon it might be one of the best horror games around.

Thanks to our friends at GOG.com, we've got five copies of Little Nightmares on PC to give away, and you could get one absolutely free of charge by following the instructions below to enter our competition.

We're also giving away five copies of Outlast 2, so make sure to enter that too, and if you're looking for more horror titles to round out your collection, check out GOG.com's Haunted Horrors sale this weekend, which has a huge selection of horror titles at up to 79 percent off.

To win, you'll need to use the giveaway form below. Simply log in to Gleam to use the entry options. You can choose to enter just once by picking one of the options after signing up below, or you can increase your chances of winning by choosing two or more options. If you already follow us on Twitter or Like us on Facebook, that'll count too. Simply press the +1 button and follow the instructions provided.

Little Nightmares – PC Advisor

The competition will end at 11pm BST on Sunday 30 April. The winner is chosen completely at random by the Gleam widget.

Online grocery shopping is more popular than ever, with huge names like Amazon even getting in on the action. With so many options to choose from, we take a look at what's on offer and help you decide which service is best for you.

Which stores offer online grocery shopping?

There is quite a range of supermarkets and other retailers offering online groceries in the UK, as listed below.

• Tesco
• Asda
• Sainsbury’s
• Ocado
• Waitrose
• Morrisons
• Iceland
• Amazon Pantry

The big hitters all feature developed sites that are well laid out and offer comprehensive ranges of fresh food, drinks, and household goods. Most offer apps for iOS and Android, too.

Functionality is pretty much the same across the board, with all the sites proving easy to use, search and understand. You'll also find that you are able to save items and lists for future orders, which is a huge time saver.

Loyalty schemes are worth taking note of, as there are some good deals available to regular shoppers. Tesco’s Clubcard is a real jewel in the crown for the supermarket giant, as the points shoppers accrue for spending money online, physically in-store, or at Tesco petrol stations, all go towards rewards. These include restaurant vouchers that can be quadrupled in value - so a £5 Clubcard voucher transfers into £20 at Pizza Express.

Sainsbury’s offers Nectar points for its customers, and again this applies to online, in-store, or at the petrol pump.

Waitrose has a range of benefits that change on a regular basis, but an interesting one is that MyWaitrose card holders are entitled to a free cup of tea or coffee when they visit a store. Very civilised.

One of the newest and most interesting additions to the mix, though, is Amazon Pantry. This is exclusive to Amazon Prime members and has a unique approach to deliveries. Each order goes into a 20kg box, and when you add an item you’re told how much space it takes up.

The first box costs £2.99, and additional ones in an order go for £0.99. At the moment the food is restricted to tins and packets rather than fresh, but there is still a decent range on offer and if you want to stock up on cupboard essentials or pet food in bulk then it can work out surprisingly cheap.

There is a huge range of items available, from tins and cans to bottles and cleaning supplies. If you want to stock up on cupboard essentials or pet food in bulk then it can work out surprisingly cheap.

What are the advantages of online shopping?

If you enjoy slowly browsing the aisles of Waitrose looking for something to inspire your culinary imagination, then online grocery shopping might not be for you.

On the other hand, if the thought of marshalling a couple of toddlers past inconveniently placed confectionary shelves, all while trying to steer a determinedly wayward shopping trolley fills you with horror, well, online grocery shopping is probably going to be the best choice.

Most of the time, delivery will only be a few pounds, and when you consider how much time and stress that'll save you we think it's well worth it.

Having your shopping delivered to your door has a strong appeal for most people, especially when booked into specific slots which can be almost any time of day or evening.

Due to intense competition between supermarkets there are often deals to be had online.

Then there is the added benefit of being able to set up regular shopping lists, so you don’t have to start with a blank slate every time you begin your order. Plus you can do the big shop while sitting on the sofa binge-watching Netflix. The future is beautiful, and slightly unhealthy. Just remember to order some fruit.

How to use an online grocery shopping service

It will come as no great surprise that shopping for groceries online is little different to that of any other retail experience, with the exception that there will be more items in your basket at the end.

Once you’ve set up an account with an online supermarket the first thing you’ll need to do is book a delivery slot. This will usually be either one or two hours long, and will be priced differently according to demand so peak times (typically weekends) are more expensive. It’s a general rule that £6 is the most you’ll have to pay, with some slots costing as little as £1.

Most supermarkets now offer 'season pass' options for delivery, so you can pay a set amount for a period - say £35 for six months - then have as many deliveries as you want for no extra cost. There are some restrictions though, as all the major outlets require a minimum order amount before you can have an order delivered. These change over time, so be sure to check them out before you begin.

There are some restrictions though, as all the major outlets require a minimum order amount before you can have an order delivered. These change over time, so be sure to check them out before you begin.

Depending on the location you might find that a supermarket won’t actually deliver to your address. Thankfully this isn’t necessarily the end of your online adventures. If you’re happy to pick up your shopping from the store itself, then Asda, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, and Waitrose offer a free Click and Collect service where you order online, pay for the items, then have them bagged up and ready to go when you reach the store. Not quite as convenient as a delivery, but at least you avoid the queues.

The online shopping process itself is simple, you just visit the various sections - fresh food, frozen food, drinks, snacks, etc. - and add items to your order. You’ll see suggestions for complementary products or current promotions, and there are often sections that include recipes for healthy living or seasonal meals. Once you’ve finished your order the site will save the items into a

Once you’ve finished your order the site will save the items into a favourites section so you can quickly access them next time.

Make sure you take advantage of incentives

The chances are you have probably already developed some kind of affiliation with a supermarket brand and shop regularly at one location. This could be due to the fact it’s nearby, offers good parking, has the foods you prefer, or you align yourself with its values.

Online portals are simply extensions of the physical shops, so if you shop at Waitrose because you perceive it to offer higher quality produce than its rivals, then all you are changing by going online is your delivery method. If this is the case then it’s probably sensible to continue your allegiance as you may well already be in some kind of loyalty scheme.

If you’re willing to break ranks though you could find it advantageous as there are some good incentives available to new customers of other outlets including big discounts and vouchers for first-time shoppers.

How to compare online grocery shopping prices

With many supermarkets offering very similar core products, it’s wise to use price as an indicator of which is best for you. MySupermarket is a price comparison site that allows you to see which outlet currently offers the best deals for your weekly shop and boasts that its users regularly save 30 percent off their bills.

The idea is that you create a free account then enter a shopping list from your preferred supermarket. The site then checks to see if other outlets offer better value, or suggest alternatives products that are on offer. If you’re willing to take a little time setting up the service and don’t mind switching allegiances often, then it could prove a very frugal choice.

Which store is right for you?

As you can see from the range available there isn’t really a definitive answer. All of the major supermarkets offer a huge range of produce which mirrors that of their physical stores. With a quarter of all grocery shopping in the UK now conducted online it’s obvious that the brands see how important this market has become, hence the excellent websites on show. So really the choice comes down to your personal preference.

That being said, we strongly suggest that you take advantage of the new customer deals offered by the sites. Not only will this save you money, but you’ll also be able to sample the various outlets and decide for yourself which one has the best balance of products, rewards, and service for your needs. Before you give your loyalty to one brand, you owe it to yourself to sample the wares on offer, and make a few savings along the way. As someone once said, every little helps.

Google caused a stir when it open sourced its TensorFlow software back in November 2015, and the technology is starting to make its way into the mainstream.

The machine learning software library is the next generation of DistBelief, which was internally developed by the Google Brain team at the search giant for a multitude of tasks such as image search and improving its speech recognition algorithms.

TensorFlow is a deep neural network, so it learns to perform a task through positive reinforcement and works through layers of data (nodes) to help it determine the correct outcome.

Read next: How Google plans to bring AI and machine learning to the enterprise

By open sourcing the TensorFlow library of machine learning code, Google is facilitating the simpler construction, training and deployment of complex deep neural nets. TensorFlow doesn't exactly give every developer the ability to harness machine learning but it does provide both a Python and C/C++ API to link into a developer’s program.

This sort of machine learning work used to be exclusively in the realm of research, but with the open sourcing of software like TensorFlow the enterprise is increasingly able to utilise its powerful capabilities on their own data, operating it on cheap cloud computing.

The TensorFlow libraries make it far easier to incorporate self-learning elements and AI features like speech recognition, __computer vision or natural language processing into applications.

Read next: Machine learning APIs and frameworks 2017: 14 machine learning tools for data scientists and developers

TensorFlow certainly isn't the only deep learning library out there, but just as there are other search engines besides Google, it is widely regarded as the best out there. As alternatives go there is Torch, built by Swiss researchers, and Caffe, which came out of The University of California Berkley and has been built on by Facebook for its recent release of Caffe2.

In terms of limitations Google still only allows TensorFlow to be deployed on a single machine, granted with multiple GPUs, which can limit the scale businesses can use the tool. There are naturally workarounds for this, but they require expertise, time and money.

TensorFlow case study: Ocado

According to the TensorFlow website some of the biggest companies in the world are using the software library, such as Airbnb, Airbus, Dropbox, Snapchat and Uber (although they might not be using it in the most appropriate way).

However, finding actual case studies can be an uphill battle. One company that isn't shy about its use of TensorFlow is UK online supermarket Ocado.

The data science team there is using the libraries for everything from routing algorithms for its robots to move around warehouses, to improving its existing features like demand forecasting, which is currently based on decade-old linear regression models, and predictively suggesting items to add to your basket depending on past shopping habits.

Ocado actually first used TensorFlow to manage the flow of emails coming into its contact centre. Before TensorFlow the contact centre was dealing with emails on a first-in basis, with no sense of prioritisation. This would become an issue if bad weather hit and the volume of emails went up by three to four times and where issues with delivery would be much more pressing than something like website issues.

Dan Nelson, head of data at Ocado Technology told Computerworld UK: "So the business wanted to solve how to get a better grasp of what emails to deal with first, and that presented itself as a natural language problem," Nelson said. "So we wanted to intercept email as it arrived, understand the sentiment of it and also what they were talking about."

He says that the problem was too bespoke for Google's off the shelf natural language processing offering, so they turned to the TensorFlow library to solve the issue.

Ocado is a Google shop anyway, using the search giant's Big Query in the Google Cloud for much of its query and storage needs. Nelson said that deploying TensorFlow with Google certainly makes things far easier. "If we didn't use any cloud provider you would have to provision some pretty serious hardware, but they will still execute there. You don't have to use Google, but the fact that Tensor came out of there certainly helps for that process," he said.

Read next: Ocado to replace barcode scanning with AI 'vision' to speed packing processes

Speaking about the tool more generally Nelson had a dose of realism to offer: "Essentially TensorFlow allows you to access through the libraries different learning models. You need to train and adapt them, but it accelerates your learning.

"TensorFlow doesn't solve the problem, but gives you the toolkit to abstract away from academics of a convolutional neural net and use one to solve your problem," he said.

After years of lagging behind other industries, cloud computing projects are now becoming commonplace in the finance sector. But while such initiatives have generally centred around non-critical systems such as email and customer relationship management (CRM), banks are set to start entrusting core systems to public cloud providers too.

According to John Schlesinger, chief architect at Temenos - which sells banking software to some of the world’s largest lenders - the majority of new core banking projects launched by the end of this decade will be in the cloud.

“We think that by 2020 most core banking initiatives will be in the cloud,” Schlesinger told Computerworld UK at the Temenos Community Forum in Lisbon this week. He claims it is a case of ‘when’ and not ‘if’ banks adopt the technology at the heart of their business. Temenos itself has already made headway with a small number of regulated and lightly-regulated micro-finance banks that are currently using its software as a service platform.

At this stage the number of banks running core banking in the cloud is small. But while adoption is currently low, it is an increase from just one percent the previous year, and Schlesinger expects that this will grow quickly.

“We believe that by 2020, which will be after PSD2 and after Instant SEPA, that the trickle will become a tsunami,” he said.

The first steps are already being made in the UK. Newly launched OakNorth was one to be the first UK bank to run its Mambu core banking systems in the cloud last year, migrating the platform to Amazon Web Services. Digital retail challenger bank Monzo, which built its core systems from the ground up using modern infrastructure software tools such as containers, also moved its core systems. Meanwhile, Metro Bank recently migrated its core infrastructure into a private cloud managed by Rackspace.

The approach makes sense for smaller challenger banks, lowering infrastructure costs and helping removing one of the barriers to entry in the market. “What cloud does is make everything cheaper. The on-premise story dramatically would lose out to the cloud story, given the economics of manufacturing of machines.” 

“A new initiative today like Atom Bank or Starling Bank may not be in the cloud, but by 2020 it would be,” he added.

For the UK, regulation is no longer a barrier that prevents data from being held in the data centres of AWS, Azure and others, with the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority publishing guidance for lenders last year. “We don't think in the UK there is a regulatory problem, the problem is we are a very consolidated banking market, and for a bank to be in the cloud it would have to be a new initiative.”

Big Four held back by legacy infrastructure

For the Big Four UK banks the situation is different. Should they wish to move core systems out of their data centre in future, the main barrier is their reliance on complex legacy infrastructure, built up over decades in many cases.

“The big banks have a huge problem because for them it is a huge project to move their core banking,” Schlesinger said. “I think the only way they can do it is a build and migrate strategy and what they build should be built on top of infrastructure as a service. So over a fifteen-year period migrating core banking into the cloud.

“They’ll start the process in a couple of years’ time and they won’t finish it for a decade. So the data centres will be there running the existing systems but on a legacy basis.”

Cloud flexibility

There are a number of potential benefits of moving core banking to the public cloud, alongside lower costs. The flexibility of cloud computing helps lenders move more quickly to compete with nimble finch competitors, rather than relying on legacy infrastructure. There are also benefits around security for many banks, with the hyper scale cloud providers able to employ huge teams of security specialists that dwarf the number available to all but the biggest financial firms in order to protect system.

There are also numerous options in terms of routes to the cloud - IaaS, PaaS, SaaS and public, private, managed - and these will appeal to different banks depending on a range of factors, said Schelsinger. This includes the individual bank’s size and the geographies they operate in.

“I don’t think all the banks will do the same things,” said Schlesinger. “So for a tier one initiative, they will buy infrastructure and they will build platforms and software as service on it. That is the Tier 1 bank at home - so Chase in the US, or HSBC in the UK [for example]. But a Tier 1 bank out of geography looks more like a Tier 2 bank. I see Tier 2 banks renting platform as a service, and actually we are seeing that already in some of the RFPs we are getting.

"For all other banks, that's the Tier 3, 4 and 5, they will be buying software as a service, running very, very low entry costs."

In other news at the Temenos’ 18th annual European customer event, the Swiss vendor announced an update to its MarketPlace platform, launched last year to help connect bank and fintech firm services ahead of the PSD2 regulations.  Temenos has added new functions to the MarketPlace such as a Sandbox platform as a service non-production environment to make it easier to test MarketPlace services.  

Qualtrics has gone from the Silicon Slopes of Utah, building software for university researchers, to a platform of tools used by the world's biggest brands to survey their customers and employees.

As the story goes, Qualtrics started from the Smith family basement in Provo, Utah. Ryan Smith, cofounder and current CEO, started building research software as a project with his seriously ill father, a marketing professor at Utah's Brigham Young University (BYU), back in 2002.

Qualtrics started by targeting what Ryan's father knew best, the academic sector, something Smith joked about being "a horrible business model" because universities "have no money".

The original idea though was to create a Software as a Service (SaaS) tool that would allow anyone to conduct research quickly and easily. Then, as the world dealt with the fallout from the 2008 financial crash, Smith and his small team saw that customers were using the platform for something else: they had started to adopt the technology for customer experience management. In other words they were doing market instead of academic research on the platform.

Around 2010, as purse strings tightened and consumers became less brand loyal, businesses had to start competing more in the customer experience space. So although Qualtrics wasn't originally built for that, a trend was starting to form, and the team went about architecting the platform around this customer experience.

What is the Qualtrics Customer Experience Platform?

Smith told this founding story again on stage at the Qualtrics Converge Europe conference in London this week as a means of mapping how the company has evolved, as is par for the course in the tech world, into a platform – the Experience Management (XM) platform.

The journey is a familiar one: build the technology, adapt it to how customers are using it, and converge the platform back into an easy to understand package. Broken up into its component parts this consists of the customer experience, employee experience, product experience and brand experience products, all built on top of the core Qualtrics research engine.

The aim is to allow anyone within a business to gathering insights for things like customer or employee satisfaction, product testing, brand or pricing research; analyse the needs and trends, report it back and drive continuous improvement, all in a simple web-based platform.

Qualtrics wants its XM platform to be the repository for rich experiential data, instead of the static operational data businesses tend to run on. "So human factors, beliefs, emotions," Smith said. "Why things are happening and what will happen next."

Smith likes to benchmark Qualtrics against Salesforce, the SaaS leader in the customer relationship management (CRM) market. He claimed that the new experience management platform will be the "system of record for experience data".

The platform then has a whole host of smart features like sentiment analysis and statistical regression techniques to predict and push the highest priority cases to the right person to take action, not unlike Salesforce's Einstein features.

Read next: How Salesforce brought artificial intelligence and machine learning into its products with Einstein

Closing the experience gap

Smith joked on stage that you only have to look back a couple of weeks – cough, United – to see how devastating poor customer experience can be to a brand, and the importance of getting on top of what your customers think.

Smith called this the 'experience gap' and pointed to Bain and Company figures which show that 80 percent of firms believed they delivered a superior experience to their customers, but only eight percent of customers agreed.

Smith said that the Qualtrics platform, by bringing together the four core satisfaction elements of customer, product, brand and employees, helps companies close this gap.

"This is not just some new features," he said of the Experience Management platform. "We have been working on this for five years and how you manage those four core elements and how you delight customers by setting it up at every touchpoint and how you build iconic brands."

Qualtrics customer case studies

As the image below attests, Qualtrics has a seriously impressive stable of enterprise customers, and the pool is pretty vertical-agnostic.

Speaking on stage during Converge, Alison Windon from Allianz insurance said that following the arrival of a new group CEO, with a driving focus on the customer, the insurer "needed technology as a key enabler" to drive that cultural change.

"[Allianz needed] a tool to do heavy lifting for feedback, analysing it for key insights and facilitate key action planning at the client level," Windon said. "We needed to get the right information to the right people, at the right time, to drive impact. And we needed it to be flexible, self service and scalable globally. We found the right partner in Qualtrics."

After 18 months Allianz is now using Qualtrics across 22 geographies to get feedback from more than 12,000 customers.

Adidas took the opposite approach, in that it uses Qualtrics to take its expertise in customer experience to deliver a better employee experience.

Read next: How Adidas is bringing its customer experience approach to employee feedback

Qualtrics IPO?

Utah startups tend to raise less capital than those in Silicon Valley, which means they often grow at a slower, steadier pace. This genuine bootstrapping tends to give these companies a more genuine appreciation for their customers than the lip service you typically get from other B2B startups though.

Qualtrics now counts 8,500 customers globally and although progress has been a tad slower in Europe, it certainly has more of a presence than the average person might be aware of. After opening its first European office four years ago in Dublin, Qualtrics now has offices in Ireland, London, Munich and soon to be in Paris, supporting 1,200 European customers.

The money has followed, and in a major way, with the company securing a $180 million (£140 million) funding round earlier this month at a valuation of $2.5 billion (£1.94 billion) from Valley big hitters like Insight Venture Partners, Accel and Sequoia Capital, as it pushes towards growth and an eventual IPO.

Smith told TechCrunch in the aftermath of the funding round as much: "Going public is super easy to do. Just file the S-1 and we're out. It's about being public and how that works and getting the house in order to make sure that that's the case. We're going to be a great public company. We're going public."