Trends

There is little doubt that the Internet has altered the way U.S. consumers think about shopping. E-commerce sales grew 15.6 percent in 2016 and now account for 11.7 percent of all retail sales. Amazon accounts for a whopping 43 percent of those e-commerce sales. Amazon, in particular, has changed th...

There has been an erosion in penetration of pay-TV subscriptions in the United States. They have fallen from a high of 86 percent in 2014 to 83 percent in early 2017, based on Parks Associates recent consumer research. Despite signs in late 2015 and early 2016 that the U.S. cable TV industry finally...

Influencer marketing has become an area of strategic importance for marketing departments, according to a white paper Traackr published Thursday. B2B technology companies are aware of the trend, according to the paper's coauthor, business consultant Mark Schaefer, but they lag in implementing influe...

Things change quickly. A few short years ago, Netflix was nothing more than a mail order video rental business. Since then, it has been growing rapidly and changing. Believe it or not, Netflix today has more U.S. subscribers than cable TV. That's an amazing accomplishment -- and a major hit to tradi...

By this point, most tech practitioners -- and nearly all security practitioners -- know about WannaCry. In fact, you might be sick of people analyzing it, rehashing it, sharing "lessons learned" about it, and otherwise laying out suggestions -- in some cases, contradictory -- about what you might d...

A data contractor working on behalf of the Republican National Committee earlier this month allowed the personal data of 198 million voters to be exposed online, marking the largest ever leak of voter data in history, according to the cybersecurity firm that discovered the incident. Deep Root Anal...

Amazon on Friday announced that it has inked a deal to acquire Whole Foods Market for close to $14 billion in cash. The agreement includes assumption of Whole Foods' net debt. Whole Foods will run as a wholly independent subsidiary of Amazon. It will continue to operate stores under its own brand an...

Visa this week announced the Visa Ready Program for Business Solutions, a strategic framework to help ensure that tech companies integrating with Visa's B2B payment services and data solutions meet the company's standards and are market ready. The program lets Visa's tech partners quickly integrate ...

Federal and state officials have confirmed that cyberattacks against state voting systems during the 2016 election were more widespread than previously disclosed to the public, but they said the heightened activity did not impact final vote tallies. The confirmations follow Tuesday's Bloomberg repor...

Uber Technologies CEO Travis Kalanick said he will take a leave of absence, as a company review led by Eric Holder was made public. The review sketches out a plan to make radical changes to diversify Uber in the wake of allegations of sexual harassment and discrimination. Kalanick accepted responsib...

Uber has lost its second-most-important executive in a shakeup stemming from an internal investigation into sexual harassment charges. The changes at the top reportedly could include the temporary loss of Uber's founder and chief executive, Travis Kalanick. Emil Michael -- who served as the company'...

During a recent grocery checkout conversation, it came up that I was a wireless analyst, and the cashier asked me which was the best wireless service and best smartphone. This is a question I get frequently, and though it seems straightforward, it's difficult to answer. As I told the cashier, it dep...

There's been a lot written recently about how artificial intelligence, machine learning and automation are going to displace millions of workers. However, these powerful new technologies already have spawned a surge in demand for a new wave of highly skilled consultants to help organizations capita...

Apple reportedly has begun production of a high-end speaker with Siri-based digital assistant technology to compete directly with Amazon's Alexa-based Echo speakers and the Google Assistant-powered Home speaker. Production is in the early stages, but the device could be unveiled as early as next wee...