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GOVERNMENT IT REPORT

VA Gives Thumbs Up to Commercial IT Software

A U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs decision to pursue a new direction in processing health records has created a highly visible endorsement of the use of commercial off-the-shelf information technology by federal agencies. President Trump cited the VA's action as an example of the administration...

Four business marketing strategies can boost business-to-business sales conversion rates by up to 25 percentage points, based on results of a recent survey by Altman Vilandrie. However, only 15 percent of businesses fully take advantage of them. Even those that do use the strategies sometimes fail t...

The European Commission has walloped Google unit with a record $2.7 billion for giving its own shopping comparison site preference above smaller competitors, and thus abusing its dominant position as a search engine. Google must end the conduct within 90 days or face penalties of 5 percent of its av...

A new ransomware exploit dubbed "Petya" struck major companies and infrastructure sites this week, following last month's WannaCry ransomware attack, which wreaked havoc on more than 300,000 computers across the globe. Petya is believed to be linked to the same set of hacking tools as WannaCry. Pety...

There is little doubt that the Internet has altered the way U.S. consumers think about shopping. E-commerce sales grew 15.6 percent in 2016 and now account for 11.7 percent of all retail sales. Amazon accounts for a whopping 43 percent of those e-commerce sales. Amazon, in particular, has changed th...

There has been an erosion in penetration of pay-TV subscriptions in the United States. They have fallen from a high of 86 percent in 2014 to 83 percent in early 2017, based on Parks Associates recent consumer research. Despite signs in late 2015 and early 2016 that the U.S. cable TV industry finally...

Influencer marketing has become an area of strategic importance for marketing departments, according to a white paper Traackr published Thursday. B2B technology companies are aware of the trend, according to the paper's coauthor, business consultant Mark Schaefer, but they lag in implementing influe...

Things change quickly. A few short years ago, Netflix was nothing more than a mail order video rental business. Since then, it has been growing rapidly and changing. Believe it or not, Netflix today has more U.S. subscribers than cable TV. That's an amazing accomplishment -- and a major hit to tradi...

By this point, most tech practitioners -- and nearly all security practitioners -- know about WannaCry. In fact, you might be sick of people analyzing it, rehashing it, sharing "lessons learned" about it, and otherwise laying out suggestions -- in some cases, contradictory -- about what you might d...

A data contractor working on behalf of the Republican National Committee earlier this month allowed the personal data of 198 million voters to be exposed online, marking the largest ever leak of voter data in history, according to the cybersecurity firm that discovered the incident. Deep Root Anal...

Verizon Makes New Oath

Verizon last week completed its US$4.5 billion acquisition of Yahoo's operating business assets, merging it with its existing AOL business to create Oath. The new subsidiary encompasses more than 50 media and technology brands -- including HuffPost; Yahoo Sports, Finance and Mail; AOL.com; Makers; T...

Amazon on Friday announced that it has inked a deal to acquire Whole Foods Market for close to $14 billion in cash. The agreement includes assumption of Whole Foods' net debt. Whole Foods will run as a wholly independent subsidiary of Amazon. It will continue to operate stores under its own brand an...

Visa this week announced the Visa Ready Program for Business Solutions, a strategic framework to help ensure that tech companies integrating with Visa's B2B payment services and data solutions meet the company's standards and are market ready. The program lets Visa's tech partners quickly integrate ...

Federal and state officials have confirmed that cyberattacks against state voting systems during the 2016 election were more widespread than previously disclosed to the public, but they said the heightened activity did not impact final vote tallies. The confirmations follow Tuesday's Bloomberg repor...

Uber Technologies CEO Travis Kalanick said he will take a leave of absence, as a company review led by Eric Holder was made public. The review sketches out a plan to make radical changes to diversify Uber in the wake of allegations of sexual harassment and discrimination. Kalanick accepted responsib...


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