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Facebook on Tuesday introduced Instant Articles, a feature that lets publishers place their stories directly on its site. Nine major media outlets have signed on so far -- The New York Times, National Geographic, Buzzfeed, NBC, The Atlantic, The Guardian, BBC News, Der Spiegel and Bild (function(d, s, id) { var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[...

U.S. government agencies can significantly improve their ability to deal with cybersecurity problems by utilizing big data analytics. However, agencies are finding it difficult to fully benefit from these advanced analytical tools for a variety of reasons -- including dealing with the sheer volume of data, which will only keep growing Cyberthreats...

Cyberdefenders for years have adopted Fort Apache strategies to protect their networks. Strong perimeters could prevent attackers from reaching precious data, they reasoned As technology marched on, however, the idea of an impermeable wall became as quaint as the Maginot Line on the eve of World War II. Firewalls alone no longer were strong enough ...

Verizon will make a tender offer of US$4.4 billion for AOL, the companies announced Tuesday.AOL will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Verizon upon completion of the merger agreement this summer The deal drives Verizon's LTE wireless video and over-the-top video strategies, and provides support and connectivity for the company's Internet of Thing...

Castlevania producer Koji Igarashi's Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night has drawn more than three times its US$500,000 base goal in roughly two days on Kickstarter. While the concept and its art already have attracted more than $1.5 million in support from fans, there's still a winding road ahead before the game goes gold Animated by the spirit of C...

Google last week added an option that lets users place a food order directly from search results. Six providers are participating in the service: Seamless, Grubhub, Eat24, Delivery.com, BeyondMenu and MyPizza.com. More are expected to join later this year. This could provide Google with an entry into the growing food-delivery marketConsumers incre...

"The chief business of the American people is business," President Calvin Coolidge said. Although that has become the country's rubric, lawmakers in the United States aren't inclined to give business free rein The Department of Justice last month trumpeted its first online marketing prosecution: the leveling of felony charges against David Topkins,...

Most auto-correction programs correct mistakes as you make them. They even predict words for you as you type. Swiftkey's recent release for Android,Clarity Keyboard Beta, corrects mistakes -- up to several at a time -- after you've typed them "SwiftKey, for a long time, has had context awareness, but it's applied it looking forward," explained Swit...

I was doing a little reading about the concept of the customer journey. I have distinct opinions about it, and I was looking for things that might challenge or validate those ideas when I stumbled across a blog post from a major CRM vendor that got my goat The post proclaimed that 2015 was "the Year of the Customer Journey!" Really? This year? What...

C.H.I.P., a Linux-based mini-PC priced at just $9, is receiving an overwhelming response on Kickstarter. Launched last Thursday with a funding goal of $50,000, it has chalked up more than 16,000 backers who have shelled out upwards of $815,000. The project still has 25 days to go The tiny open source device, made by Next Thing Co., has been dubbed ...

For the first time in six years, China's massive mobile market saw contraction in its smartphone sector, IDC reported Monday There were 98.8 million smartphones shipped in China by the end of the first quarter of 2015, down about 4 percent year over year, according to IDC's Trackers. Quarter over quarter, the market's Q1 2015 shipments were down by...

The DFKI Robotics Innovation Center in Berman, Germany, last week unveiled a prototype of the EO Smart Connecting Car 2, which it originally announced in 2012. The tiny, two-seater electric vehicle operates much like a traditional car, but because each wheel is powered by its own motor, it can make extremely tight turns and even drive sideways whe...

The United States Federal Aviation Administration last week came under fire once again for problems with the implementation of its troubled Next Generation Air Transportation System The NextGen program to overhaul the U.S. national air traffic control system, estimated to cost US$29 billion between 2013 and 2030, long has been the target of congres...

Lisa Su, the talented new CEO for AMD, last week gave a pitch on the future to get people excited about where AMD is going. Based on the stock performance after her talk, she and her team knocked it out of the park. However, they also got me thinking about some technological advancements that have been quietly percolating, which likely will form the basis for a revolutionary announcement in the next few years. ...

Hello, and welcome to Gadget Dreams and Nightmares, the first-look gadget column with more style than any of the Met Gala's attendees. Except maybe Beyonc. And all the other invitees The guest list this week includes a virtual reality headset with added Smell-o-Vision, a case that charges smartphones using radio waves, and a physical, secure Bitcoi...

Ride-sharing company Uber has submitted a bid of up to US$3 billion to acquire Nokia's Here maps service, The New York Times reported Friday Several Here suitors have surfaced since April, when Nokia made known its intent to sell the service, including Facebook, Google, and a consortium of German automakers and Chinese search engine Baidu....

Cyanogen, best known for its FOSS Android-based OS, CyanogenMod, soon will provide caller ID screening and spam blocking directly from the native dialer on Cyanogen OS, the commercial version of its operating system These capabilities will be provided through the company's global partnership with Truecaller....

The blogosphere lit up last week after it was disclosed on Bloomberg that Salesforce was working with unnamed bankers on a possible merger. Naturally, everyone automatically thought that Salesforce was in play, and my colleagues and I went into overdrive speculating about who the suitor might be, what the striking price would be, and whether it was a good idea to do the deal. The first two questions dominated the discussion...

Facebook, in collaboration with the University of Michigan, conducted a study on the diversity of news and opinions posted by members of the network, in an effort to determine whether its manipulation of News Feed algorithms could be responsible for creating an echo chamber of viewpoints. Results were published Thursday in the journal Science To cu...

With the ever-increasing use of the cloud by more and more businesses, there is good reason to be concerned about legal risks, which are an inherent part of the cloud. The term "cloud" may be relatively new, but the concept of remote computing started more than 60 years ago, when Dartmouth University first launched "time-sharing," as I wrote in a 2011 E-Commerce Times column, entitled "Cloud Computing - New Buzzword, Old Legal Issues."