Archive

Every few months, fans gather with excitement to see what Apple will introduce next -- so what can we expect to see from Apple on March 21? I think the most important thing will be fixing a mistake the company made two years ago. Apple will reintroduce a 4-inch iPhone. As smartphone sales slow, even...

Amazon has applied for a patent for selfie-based authentication for online purchases, according to a patent application published last week. Using the technology, a prospective purchaser would take a selfie, and the image would be authenticated against an image database using facial recognition soft...

Google on Tuesday announced a suite of analytics products for marketers. The Google Analytics 360 Suite is a set of integrated data and marketing analytics products designed to give enterprise-class marketers the ability to reach consumers with the right message at the right moment, according to Goo...

Apple recently updated its iAd specifications to allow the display of sponsored posts directly in users' news feeds in the Apple News app for the iPhone and iPad. The ads will appear in native-banner format and can link to articles in the News app. They will be set in the same default font as News a...

A new front may have opened up between the Department of Justice and Silicon Valley in the ongoing legal battle over government access to encrypted data, this time involving WhatsApp, the electronic messaging and voice system owned by Facebook. DoJ officials reportedly have been debating how to proc...

Hewlett Packard Enterprise last week announced the public availability of its HPE Haven OnDemand Machine Learning as a Service. The Microsoft Azure cloud-based platform provides more than 60 APIs and services that deliver deep learning analytics on a variety of data, including text, audio, images, s...

Micrososft on Monday withdrew a notice posted earlier in the day to its Windows website, which declared that bitcoin currency no longer would be accepted in its users' accounts. "We continue to support Bitcoin for adding money to your Microsoft Account which can be used for purchasing content in the...

The legal battle between Apple and the Department of Justice over access to encrypted iPhone data got a little more personal last week after lawyers for Apple blasted a government filing that accused the company of collaborating with the Chinese government. The DOJ's filing was nothing more than a s...

Lawmakers this week sent to the White House the draft version of a bill that would penalize technology companies if they failed to cooperate on encryption cases, according to Capitol Hill sources. The bill, sponsored by Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr, R-N.C., and ranking member ...

Intel on Wednesday announced its intent to acquire Replay Technologies, the company known for elevating the NBA All-Star Weekend with cutting-edge 3D graphics. Replay develops and maintains what it calls "freeD" -- that is, free dimensional -- technology. Sports fans may have noticed the Matrix-esqu...

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler on Tuesday announced a $2.25 billion plan to expand the federal Lifeline subsidy program to help low-income consumers afford broadband Internet service. Lifeline, which currently allows low-income consumers to buy mobile phone service at a discount, would let them buy standa...

The Obama administration is seeking $3.1 billion for a fund to update federal IT resources that need to be replaced with more efficient systems. The fund would bolster the government's annual spending on IT, which is set for a modest increase to $89.8 billion in the administration's fiscal 2017 budg...

Although the consumer implications of the Internet of Things have generated plenty of public attention, the real growth in the embryonic market is coming from less visible industrial environments and business applications. The early IoT advancements may come as a surprise to some, but in these indus...

With its reputation preceding it, Peeple on Monday launched on the iTunes App Store. The goal of the app is to help people better understand each other, according to the company. It was designed for people who need to display their reputation to others, including freelancers, business owners, employ...

Security researchers at Palo Alto Networks last week announced that they had found the first ransomware in the wild aimed at Macintosh computers, but Apple and one of its developers quickly neutered it. The ransomware was embedded in software for installing an OS X app for sharing files on BitTorren...