Archive

Google on Monday announced that it was dropping its decade-old policy of requiring media and news publishers to provide a limited amount of free content. The so-called "first click free" policy meant that publishers had to make a certain amount of content available to users who conducted a search on...

Amazon has unveiled five new Echo products that raise the bar in the automated home market. Among other things, Amazon has improved the sound quality in its second-gen Echo speaker to compete with several new competitors in the high-end audio segment. The new Echo has a new speaker architecture, a d...

Cloudflare on Wednesday released the beta version of Cloudflare Stream, a new, inexpensive streaming video service. Designed for app developers who want to build businesses hosting and streaming videos, Cloudflare Stream bundles encoding, global delivery and video player software into one package. ...

Showtime Networks apparently has mined the websites of online viewers using the same Coinhive technology that The Pirate Bay recently used in a test run on its site. A subsidiary of CBS, Showtime is a premium television network that offers professional boxing, feature films, original scripted televi...

In this age of tech industry consolidation, one has to wonder what will happen with the pace of innovation as a few large companies begin to dominate. In personal computers, the WinTel marriage continues to control the technology, while Dell, HP and Lenovo control the devices. Similarly, in smartpho...

Brightpearl, which offers a cloud-based retail management system for mid-sized retailers and wholesalers, on Wednesday launched a new Enterprise Partner Program. The company aims to build out its partner ecosystem to deploy an end-to-end management service for omnichannel retailers as an alternative...

Developers at Amazon's secret Lab 126 reportedly have been working on audio-only smart glass technology that would allow users to communicate with its virtual assistant Alexa. The smart glasses would connect wirelessly to users' smartphones and transfer communications through a bone-conduction audio...

The AI speaker war is now being waged, and it is escalating. Today you can choose between Amazon Echo and Google Home. Harman Kardon's Invoke is coming this fall. By the end of the year, Apple's HomePod will be competing in the market, and Samsung has indicated it will join the fray as well. With al...

Amazon Web Services on Monday unveiled a new per-second pricing plan for EC2 instances and EBS volumes, which will take effect Oct. 2. The new pricing for Elastic Compute Cloud and Elastic Block Storage used with EC2 instances will allow greater flexibility and efficiency for customers wanting to ex...

Malicious code has been discovered in two versions of Piniform's CCleaner housekeeping utility, the company disclosed on Monday. Piniform is owned by Avast, whose security products are used by more than 400 million people. The malware infecting CCleaner could give hackers control over the devices of...

Once just a hangout for teenagers, Snapchat has matured into an engaging and effective social media platform. If you're trying to reach a younger demographic, it's somewhere you probably want to be. "Snapchat is the best channel to reach young people, as they count for more than two-thirds of its au...

In a rare move, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission on Thursday confirmed that it has opened an investigation into the data breach at Equifax that compromised the sensitive personal information of 143 million U.S. consumers. The FTC announcement came less than a week after Equifax revealed that an unk...

Federal agencies have begun using an emerging IT tool to manage the huge amount of data the U.S. government generates and stores. Federal IT managers recently have embraced the concept of convergence, which has been gaining traction in the private sector. Agencies also have indicated that the approa...

Businesses have been focusing on the Internet of Things as an enabler of growth and increased operational efficiency, as well as the means to provide a better experience to customers and partners, according to the State of the Market: Internet of Things 2017 report Verizon released this week. Sevent...

Apruve last week announced a strategic alliance with Matrix Payment Systems to create a turnkey solution to mitigate the risk of advancing a revolving line of credit to business customers. Under the agreement, the companies will help businesses streamline the extension of credit with less financia...