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Amazon's digital assistant, Alexa, has a new musical talent, the company announced Tuesday "Today, we're making Alexa even smarter with an all-new feature that lets you play music synchronized on multiple Echo devices to provide room-filling music throughout your home," said Amazon Alexa Vice President Toni Reid....

Apple and Accenture on Tuesday announced a new partnership to develop iOS tools and services to help enterprises connect with their customers through iPads and iPhones. Accenture will create a dedicated iOS practice within Accenture Digital Studios, staffed by a range of visual and experience designers, programmers, data scientists and architects,...

Omnichannel support and communications are becoming essential for brands, as consumers' increasing use of mobile devices to make purchases and access content fuels their demand to be able to connect with companies or customer service when and how they want However, brands lack the necessary expertise and infrastructure, and are turning to mobile ne...

Open source hiring has been hampered by a lack of trained job-takers, according to The Linux Foundation, which released its sixth annual summary of career opportunities in open source last week. The report provides an overview of open source career trends, along with factors that motivate industry professionals, and methods employers use to attract and retain qualified talent...

Salesforce announced the partial attainment of one of its long-range goals in its second-quarter earnings announcement last week: It eclipsed its goal of a US$10 billion run rate. This will be followed by similar announcements over the next year (first $10 billion year, etc.), and why not? The company should celebrate Second quarter revenue hit $2....

A relatively new form of cybercrime recently has been plaguing American consumers. Thieves have been hijacking mobile phone account numbers and then transferring services to a different device, The New York Times reported last week Further, hackers have begun using mobile numbers to raid digital wallets and similar accounts, according to the paper...

Apple plans to refresh its iPhone, TV and watch lines at an event scheduled Sept. 12, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday In addition to upgrading its iPhone 7 models, the company is expected to debut a new mobile phone to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the brand, which the press has dubbed "iPhone 8."

Window Maker Live (WML) takes an unusual approach to desktop interface management. It has an old-fashioned look with a productive new feel....

Amazon on Monday kicked off the completion of its acquisition of Whole Foods Market with steep price cuts on some products Among those now available at lower prices are Whole Trade bananas, organic avocados, organic large brown eggs, responsibly-farmed salmon and tilapia, organic baby kale and baby lettuce, animal-welfare-rated 85 percent lean grou...

HP is the new turnaround king -- but is it better than Apple? By "better," I mean a better potential investment. Companies tend to wax and wane. IBM was the king of tech in the 1980s, but in the 1990s it was the king of turnarounds, after almost going under but managing to come back from a negative brand equity. (In a negative equity situation, fo...

The customer service robot market will be worth US$88 million by 2022, according to a report Tractica released earlier this week. Annual shipments are expected to increase from 2,730 units in 2016 to nearly 4,800 in 2022 The robots will be both humanoid and non-humanoid. However, telepresence robots, chatbots, and stationary customer interactive sy...

The National Alliance on Mental Illness on Wednesday announced that Google on mobile now provides people who search for the term "clinical depression" with a direct link to the PHQ-9 questionnaire used by medical professionals in the United States to evaluate patients for the disorder People can conduct a self-assessment by filling in the questionn...

Microsoft and Red Hat this week expanded their nearly 2-year-old alliance to bridge the gap between Windows and open source computing with the launch of several new initiatives to help enterprise customers more easily adopt container solutions. Through the new collaboration, customers will gain access to native support for Windows Server container...

As the healthcare industry shifts to value-based care models, patient education and communication solutions increasingly have become an investment priority for care providers and payers. Consumers have many means, whether digital or analog, to acquire medical knowledge and personal health information, and they tend to reach out to their doctor when sick, or when they have complex health questions...

Microsoft on Wednesday unveiled a new deep learning acceleration platform designed for real-time artificial intelligence, codenamed "Project Brainwave," at Hot Chips 2017 The platform has three main layers:...

Advertising technology, or ad tech, is a relatively new business segment. Both Google and Facebook have been very successful with this new advertising model. That's great for today, but what is the future of ad tech going forward? Will it be important and rapidly expand to a wider segment, or will it be limited to the way certain companies show value and grow?...

Samsung on Wednesday unveiled its Galaxy Note8 smartphone, positioning the oversized handset as the ideal choice for those who want to do bigger things. The new Android-powered device's larger Infinity Display features nearly bezel-less full-frontal glass and an edge-to-edge screen. The Note8 comes with an improved S Pen that will allow users to c...

Walmart and Google, two of Amazon's biggest rivals, on Wednesday announced a partnership that will let customers use Google's Home speaker and a number of voice-assisted mobile devices to shop online at Walmart. Their mutual goal is to eat away at Amazon's dominant share in the e-commerce shopping space and the smart speaker space, in order to cur...

Ted Dimbero is cofounder and chief customer officer of Zyme In this exclusive interview, Dimbero sheds light on the intricacies of channel data management....

As cloud popularity grows, so does the collection of free or low-cost online office tools that services like Microsoft Office Online and Google Docs/G Suite provide.