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Salesforce on Tuesday launched the AppExchange Partner Program, or APP, for developers, independent software vendors and startups, as a replacement for its current ISV Partner Program The APP will cost much less. Its baseline percent-net-revenue (PNR) model for all new APP partners has been slashed from 25 percent to 15 percent....

The electronics industry over the past several years has made tremendous strides in creating artificial intelligence in a manner imagined by Allen Turing in the 1940s. The convergence of algorithmic advances in multilayer neural networks, the evolution of PC graphics processing units as massively parallel processing accelerators, and the availability of massive data sets fueled by the Internet and widely deployed sensors -- big data -- has enabled a renaissance in software neural network modeling techniques commonly referred to as "deep learning," or "DL." ...

Hulu on Wednesday announced a new live-streaming television service for US$39.99 per month, which will place the company in direct competition with newly launched services from DirecTV Now, YouTube and other OTT (over-the-top) content providers The Hulu with Live TV beta will offer 50 channels of live-streaming television -- including sports, news,...

Ultimate Edition has a lot going for it. However, the latest release, version 5.4, also reflects numerous missteps that developers of a seasoned Linux distro should avoid....

Microsoft on Tuesday launched a major effort to bulldoze its way into the educational computing space carved out by Google, with the introduction of a streamlined operating system called "Windows 10 S," a range of new collaborative programs for K-12 schools, and two new Surface laptops aimed at the college student market The Surface laptop runs on ...

Odds appear good that Apple will be joining Amazon and Google in the smart speaker competition with a Siri-powered device it plans to introduce at its World Wide Developers Conference next month, according to MacRumors, which cited a report by Ming-Chi Kuo of KGI Securities The new home-AI product will have excellent acoustics with one woofer and s...

United Airlines CEO Oscar Munoz on Tuesday apologized to the United States Congress for his company causing a passenger to be dragged off a UA flight last month United failed its customers and failed as a company in that incident, and this has to be a turning point for the airline, Munoz told the U.S. House of Representatives Transportation Committ...

Twitter on Monday announced a partnership with Bloomberg Media to launch a 24-hour streaming news service -- one of a dozen new content deals Twitter has entered to drive user engagement CEO Jack Dorsey and a group of top executives announced the slate of programming agreements -- which include concerts from Live Nation, sports from Major League Ba...

Gender bias affects contributions to the open source community, according to a paper published Monday in the open access journal PeerJ Computer Science Female programmers' suggestions for code changes in open source projects -- called "pull requests" -- were accepted more often than those of their male counterparts -- 78.7 percent for women versus ...

Nintendo last week introduced a new contender in the increasingly hot portable gaming competition. The New Nintendo 2DS XL will make its debut on July 28 at a mid-range price of US$149.99. It will slot in as the company's third portable gaming system, right between its entry-level 2DS and more robust 3DS XL.

It gives some measure of the importance we give to AI that I went to two conferences last week and sat through two panel sessions on the subject. At CRM Evolution, I was part of the discussion in a breakfast session Paul Greenberg organizes each year. Then I flew to Las Vegas for the Oracle CX show. There executives involved in the adaptive intelligent applications product line tried to define the basics in a session for analysts and reporters...

Brick-and-mortar retail's downward spiral appears to be accelerating. More than 8,600 retail locations will shut down this year, following the 5,077 that closed last year, based on data from Credit Suisse. Moreover, 2017 could surpass 2008 -- the worst year for retail closures on record -- when 6,163 stores shut down operations However, unlike 20...

Tesla is like Apple in that it represents a revolution in thinking. Although everyone seems to focus on the electric power plant, that is really a small part of the Tesla revolution, and I'm convinced that if Musk were to launch an almost-identical company but with gas engines, it would cut through the market like a hot knife through butter. In terms of volume, the electric part isn't as much a sales accelerant as it is an impediment. ...

Red Hat on Thursday announced JBoss AMQ 7, a messaging platform upgrade that enhances its overall performance and improves client availability for developers. JBoss AMQ is a lightweight, standards-based open source platform designed to enable real-time communication between applications, services, devices and the Internet of Things. It is based on...

Instagram on Wednesday announced that it had reached a milestone of 700 million members while enjoying the fastest-ever growth rate in the company's history The network has grown by more than 100 million members in the last four months, Instagram reported, although it took six months to accomplish its previous 100 million member increase....

Call of Duty will return to its World War II roots when the latest title arrives this November, publisher Activision Blizzard announced on Wednesday. The franchise has been a steady hit maker since its 2003 debut. Various titles in the series have become regular staples in e-sports tournaments and Major League Gaming Call of Duty is one of the mos...

Even if you're a newcomer to Linux, you've probably figured out that it is not a single, monolithic operating system, but a constellation of projects. The different "stars" in this constellation take the form of "distributions," or "distros." Each offers its own take on the Linux model. To gain an appreciation of the plethora of options offered by...

Cable TV has been facing mounting attacks from new technologies and new competitors. C Spire recently joined the action, announcing plans to enter the pay-TV space. It's not yet clear what C Spire TV will be, or how it will impact the marketplace. We'll have to wait for C Spire to spell that out in the coming weeks. What we know so far is that C ...

Three high-profile Internet brands this week announced initiatives to combat "fake news" online Google on Tuesday revealed that it had tweaked its search processes to help bring high-quality content to the top of search result pages....

Canonical this week said that it will end its support for Ubuntu Touch phones and Ubuntu-powered tablets in June, and that it will shut down its app store at the end of this year. The company previously had signaled the system's demise, but it had not fixed a date. With Ubuntu Touch, a unified mobile OS based on Ubuntu Linux, Canonical hoped to es...