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Instagram on Tuesday introduced Checkout on Instagram -- an in-app purchasing tool -- as a closed beta for consumers in the United States. Among the 20 participating brands are Adidas, Nike, Burberry, Dior, Huda Beauty, Prada and Michael Kors....

Google on Tuesday pulled the wraps off Stadia, a new cloud-based gaming platform, at the 2019 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco Using the power of Google's global information infrastructure, Stadia can stream the highest-quality games to any screen, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a keynote announcing the platform, which is expected to c...

MORE Technologies last week launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise US$20,000 for development of its open source robot ecosystem The company will fund the project if it reaches its goal by April 21. As of this writing, $6,485 of that $20,000 goal has been pledged....

Apple on Monday announced a new 10.5-inch iPad and a refresh of the iPad mini The 10.5-inch iPad Air, which will sell for US$499 ($629 with cellular), provides 64 gigabytes of solid state storage and WiFi support. It has Apple's latest mobile processor, the A12 Bionic chip, and supports Apple Pencil and the company's smart keyboard....

Storytelling is a central part of e-commerce marketing, and it's vital that brands both know their own stories and understand how to tell them. Everything from brand loyalty to purchasing decisions relies on a company having an engaging and well-told story "Facts tell, but stories sell," remarked Samantha Reynolds, president of Echo Storytelling Ag...

Elizabeth Warren's desire to curtail Facebook, Amazon and other companies that have misused their massive power -- or may do so in the future -- is well founded. The U.S. appears to be trending toward civil war, and I'd place social media in general on the wrong side of this trend. I do think most of us want to avoid that war. However, just as y...

Customer relationship management is a term you've likely heard if you have ever worked in tech. CRM software solutions have not always been as far-reaching as they are today. Over the last 40 years, CRM has evolved from a range of disparate business solutions developed for various customer needs. The earliest CRM tools were devices like Rolodexes, which you can hardly even find these days...

Amid shifting consumer habits and the digitization of everything, the retail landscape has undergone significant transformations over the past decade, and it continues to evolve as quickly as ever. These transformations bring about a slew of challenges and opportunities for retailers to improve the overall shopping experience With traditional retai...

The good news is that of the many troubles Facebook has, privacy seems to be front and center for both CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg. The question is, will the actions they take to address the company's privacy issues be enough? If not, this is the kind of problem that can and will cause long-term damage to the Facebook brand Zuckerb...

Time-tracking software records the time you spend on tasks. The time-tracking helps you create billing reports, prepare invoices, and analyze your workflow for better efficiency. This week's Linux Picks and Pans product review highlights some of the best free time-tracking applications for Linux. The apps included in this roundup are not presented...

Jigsaw, which is owned by Google parent company Alphabet, on Tuesday released Tune, an experimental Chrome extension that lets users hide comments its algorithms identify as toxic. It is available for Mac, Windows, Linux and the Chrome OS Tune builds on the same machine learning (ML) models that power Jigsaw's Perspective API to rate the toxicity o...

Amazon has reportedly removed the price parity contract clause that barred third-party vendors on its platform from selling their products at a lower price elsewhere The company has long been accused of anticompetitive behavior and has come under considerable political pressure because of its use of the price parity, also known as "most favored nat...

Trying to do business without also having a modern CRM system is like walking around naked. You can do it, at least for a little while, but people will begin to think you're weird -- and the trouble is, those people are all potential customers. CRM is essential today because, despite our reverence for the free market, it's really more like free ma...

Mozilla on Tuesday announced Firefox Send, a free encrypted file-sharing service that works in any browser To share a file, you simply visit the Send site and drag your file to a box on the Web page. Unregistered users may upload up to 1 gigabyte in files, while registered users have a 2.5 GB allowance....

Plans to bring facial recognition to major U.S. airports by 2021 are on a fast flight path, despite concerns about the new technology's readiness President Trump in 2017 issued an executive order expediting the deployment of biometric verification of the identities of all travelers crossing U.S. borders. It stipulates that facial recognition identi...

Tech giants like Amazon, Google, Facebook and Apple would be broken up under a proposal U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren aired online Friday "Today's big tech companies have too much power -- too much power over our economy, our society, and our democracy," the Democratic presidential hopeful wrote on Medium....

There's a reason that Amazon's stock skyrocketed 28 percent in 2018, a notable outlier amid the broader market trends. The behemoth retailer is bolstered by a few key differentiators when stacked against the competition -- but let's backtrack for a moment to examine the state of the current online marketplace In truth, there's an expectation in th...

The tech market is defined by its battles: Microsoft vs. IBM; Apple vs. Microsoft; Netscape vs. Microsoft; Google vs. Microsoft. If Microsoft were a person, it likely would have PTSD. Then there was Apple vs. Google, and now the big one is Apple vs. Qualcomm. The screwy thing for me is that Huawei represents a far greater threat to both companies...

Mobile search and buying continue to grow as the chosen means for consumers' online shopping, with the market set to reach an estimated US$218 billion in 2019 eMarketer has estimated that by 2021, 72.9 percent of online purchases will be made on a mobile device. If you factor in the millennial and Generation Z demographics, virtually all sales will...

Parrot offers several options for running a Linux operating system that pays much closer attention to security matters If you already are handy with digital forensic tasks and want a state-of-the-art system to handle pentesting and privacy issues, check out the Parrot Security release....