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Tesco, a British-born multinational grocery store chain, plans to launch its own smartphone by the end of the year The device will reportedly run on Android software and have specs comparable to the Samsung Galaxy S5. Of course, the Galaxy doesn't come equipped with preinstalled Tesco services; the new phone will....

The Internet of Things, or IoT, consists of "uniquely identifiable objects and their virtual representations in an Internet-like structure," according to Wikipedia. The IoT is "the network of physical objects accessed through the Internet," according to Cisco Systems. ...

A simmering conflict between Oculus, a virtual reality startup Facebook bought last month for $2 billion, and ZeniMax Media began to boil Monday ZeniMax las week claimed one of its former employees, John Carmack, improperly shared some of its tech with Oculus for use in its Rift virtual reality headset, which is touted as having the power to bring ...

Amazon's Mayday button has intrigued CRM industry users as well as consumers. Introduced about a year ago, Mayday is a button customers can press on their mobile devices to get service or tech help. Salesforce.com last month debuted its version of Mayday. Now other tech providers are introducing variations on the theme.

EMC World -- the company's annual customer, user and partner conference -- kicks off this week in Las Vegas. So it seems like a good time to compare and contrast EMC's current position in the marketplace to its competitors' positions -- and even to its own history. In fact, those points were clarified in its recent Q1 2014 earnings call More broadl...

Sony has announced magnetic backup tape with the world's highest areal recording density -- 148 GB per square inch It provides about 74 times the recording capacity of conventional mag tape media, Sony claimed....

Amazon is now allowing consumers to add items to their shopping cart simply by sending a reply on Twitter Users who connect their accounts on the two services can add a product they see in a Twitter link to their Amazon shopping cart simply by replying to the tweet with the hashtag #AmazonCart -- or #AmazonBasket if they are located in the UK. The ...

As the volume and sophistication of cyberattacks increase, system defenders in the trenches are losing confidence in their ability to protect their organizations' information assets, suggests a survey released last week by Websense and the Ponemon Institute The survey of almost 5,000 global IT security pros found that more than half of them (57 per...

Nokia has created a US$100 million fund earmarked for investing in firms that specialize in connected and smart vehicles. The move comes days after the Finnish firm forked over its handset unit to Microsoft....

The White House last week released a review of Big Data and privacy written by counselor John Podesta. The report stems from President Obama's January request to define for the administration what is new about the technologies in this space, how Big Data affects public policy, and how consumer privacy is affected by corporate use of Big Data.

Google and Microsoft are positioned against each other as primary competitors, and that could mean trouble. I remember past dynamics similar to theirs that didn't end well for either company. Apple focused on IBM (the 1984 ad) and didn't see Microsoft coming. Microsoft focused on AOL and didn't see the Internet coming. Intel focused on AMD so much it missed both Transmeta and ARM. Microsoft and Apple focused on each other, and both were blindsided by Google. Now Microsoft and Google are focusing on each other, which likely will lead both to ignore the risk that Amazon represents, until it's too late. ...

When Microsoft included Windows XP in the Internet Explorer zero-day browser vulnerability patch it issued this week, some industry observers were stunned. Had the company decided to backtrack on its assertion that it would no longer support XP? Had it knuckled under to user protests? Not really. Redmond has not decided to backtrack on killing supp...

Traditional knowledge management programs focus on distilling knowledge into systems of record, which end up being underutilized for a number of reasons, chief among them because they cannot contain the long tail of knowledge. Conversely, nowhere are successful KM programs as impactful as where they intersect the customer experience -- from customer support to sales to marketing and product development...

Snapchat built its popularity on pictures that disappear, but new features added to the latest version of the program shows its creators want it to be more than a one-trick app Both text and video chatting on Thursday became available in the mobile app for Android and iOS devices. "Until today, we felt that Snapchat was missing an important part of...

Have you ever heard the term "The Forbidden Experiment"? If you're not familiar with it, it's a concept originating in the behavioral sciences relating to challenges in understanding human language development. Specifically, the "experiment" in question refers to actually testing empirically what would happen if a child were raised without language -- i.e., if someone deliberately interfered with normal language development as a vehicle to learn how language development works and how a person might be different without it. ...

The volunteers who developed Tails, the open source operating system used by whistleblower Edward Snowden, this week released v1.0 This is the 36th stable release of the OS since the first public version, then called "Amnesia," was released in June 2009....

There's a lot shaping up for Apple this year, and it's going to bewild. In fact, there's so much going on at Infinite Loop in Cupertinothese days that it makes me believe that 2014 will be the first post-Steve Jobs year when Apple -- in the eyes of the broader tech world --stops dancing around and finally brings the rain For starters, the profit-ge...

Although it's often mistakenly viewed as a technology, CRM is really a discipline -- and it's not a solo discipline, like a martial art or meditation. It's a team discipline, one in which every customer-facing employee can make a contribution Whether those contributions are positive or negative depends on the teammates. In most cases where CRM is d...

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Bitcoin Club plans to distribute US$100 worth of bitcoin to each of its 4,528 incoming undergraduates this fall, in an attempt to create an ecosystem for digital currencies at the institution Club founder and president Dan Elitzer and sophomore Jeremy Rubin have raised more than $500,000 for the MIT Bitco...

AT&T just announced it will be getting into and improving the in-flight WiFi business. It will be next year before this service is available, but if it's better than the current GoGo WiFi service, I think it will be a big success Back in the days before in-flight WiFi, stepping onto an airplane meant we were pretty much cut off from the rest of the...