Trends

Google on Monday announced that it was dropping its decade-old policy of requiring media and news publishers to provide a limited amount of free content. The so-called "first click free" policy meant that publishers had to make a certain amount of content available to users who conducted a search on...

Showtime Networks apparently has mined the websites of online viewers using the same Coinhive technology that The Pirate Bay recently used in a test run on its site. A subsidiary of CBS, Showtime is a premium television network that offers professional boxing, feature films, original scripted televi...

In this age of tech industry consolidation, one has to wonder what will happen with the pace of innovation as a few large companies begin to dominate. In personal computers, the WinTel marriage continues to control the technology, while Dell, HP and Lenovo control the devices. Similarly, in smartpho...

Developers at Amazon's secret Lab 126 reportedly have been working on audio-only smart glass technology that would allow users to communicate with its virtual assistant Alexa. The smart glasses would connect wirelessly to users' smartphones and transfer communications through a bone-conduction audio...

The AI speaker war is now being waged, and it is escalating. Today you can choose between Amazon Echo and Google Home. Harman Kardon's Invoke is coming this fall. By the end of the year, Apple's HomePod will be competing in the market, and Samsung has indicated it will join the fray as well. With al...

In a rare move, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission on Thursday confirmed that it has opened an investigation into the data breach at Equifax that compromised the sensitive personal information of 143 million U.S. consumers. The FTC announcement came less than a week after Equifax revealed that an unk...

Businesses have been focusing on the Internet of Things as an enabler of growth and increased operational efficiency, as well as the means to provide a better experience to customers and partners, according to the State of the Market: Internet of Things 2017 report Verizon released this week. Sevent...

The rise of Microsoft Azure as a major competitor to Amazon Web Services has become a mixed blessing for IT managers. While many were pleased to see Microsoft finally become a cloud-first company and build Azure into a viable alternative to AWS, they now are faced with a new set of challenges in try...

Vivaldi CEO Jon von Tetzchner, the brains behind both the new Vivaldi browser and the early Opera browser, has accused Google of retaliating against his company after he questioned its customer privacy practices. Vivaldi's Google Adwords campaigns mysteriously were suspended just two days after von ...

Mobile app use has become a powerful habit among U.S. consumers, based on new research findings from comScore. An increasing number of users have been spending their time consuming video, music and social media on smartphones and other mobile devices, but many are set in their ways and reluctant to...

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...

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 informatio...

Advertising technology, or ad tech, is a relatively new business segment. Both Google and Facebook have been very successful with this new advertising model. Going forward, will ad tech be important and rapidly expand to a wider segment, or will it be limited to the way certain companies show value ...

A group of the world's top technology leaders have published an open letter urging the UN to ban the use of artificial intelligence in weapons systems, amid growing concerns that autonomous killer robots could wind up taking control.