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Amanda Wills devoted much of the past year to coverage of the presidential election. So when she listened to voicemails left for CNN after Nov. 8, she expected to hear a lot of screaming from both sides. Instead, she heard perspectives she’d never encountered before, ones that taught her not just about CNN’s audience, but about the country itself. “For me, personally, as a journalist, it’s really, […]

In London last month, Arabian Business was treated to a behind-the-scenes explanation of how in March Google’s AlphaGo computer programme thrashed the world’s best player at the ancient board game Go. The match represented a breakthrough in artificial intelligence (AI) research being undertaken by Google’s DeepMind since the start-up was acquired for a reported $400m in 2014. Go involves two contestants moving black and white stones on […]

Apple has lost a key executive from its digital health team after less than a year in the job. Yoky Matsuoka, a former robotics professor, was a co-founder of Google’s experimental X lab and held a senior position at Nest Labs, the smart-home company that is now part of Alphabet, for five years. A MacArthur fellow, she joined Apple to work on its health efforts earlier this […]

For the past few months, a number of Microsoft watchers have been predicting and hoping (incorrectly) that Microsoft was ready to roll out a competitor to Amazon’s Echo and Google Home. A discovery by Microsoft sleuth The Walking Cat, a k a @h0x0d, of something called “Home Hub” further fueled this rumor. However, as Walking Cat also discovered, Home Hub wasn’t hardware; it was some kind of […]

Virginia-based Kryptowire said that it had discovered the problem in a number of Android-based phones using firmware from the Chinese company Shanghai ADUPS Technology A US security company says a Chinese-made smartphone popular in the United States forwarded detailed user data and user texts back to a Chinese server without the phone owner’s knowledge. Virginia-based Kryptowire, which provides mobile security services to government agencies and private businesses, […]

Juniper Networks announced Thursday it plans to acquire AppFormix, providers of cloud operations management and optimization technology. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Founded in 2013 by former Microsoft and Cisco executive Sumeet Singh, AppFormix’s software platform leverages streaming analytics and machine learning in a distributed architecture for use in cloud environments. The platform works with any OpenStack or Kubernetes distribution and includes services for […]

This week was full of Big Data news, including new releases, a brand new product, a new acquisition and an update to one of the major Hadoop distros. Let’s get a survey of what was announced and then see if we can’t draw a conclusion or two. A big driver for much of the news was this week’s Amazon Web Services re:Invent conference, providing an opportunity for […]

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Everyone wants to know when fully self-driving cars will be ready for the road. The companies developing the technology usually give a timeline of several years to decades away. Automotive parts manufacturer Delphi and Mobileye are no different, and during a media roundtable this week in San Francisco, Delphi’s VP of services, Glen DeVos, envisioned a long-term timeframe for the widespread use of the technology. […]

The notion of machine-powered facial recognition is one that predates today’s actual technology for it by many years, thanks to robot POV shots from sci-fi films such as The Terminator and Robocop. But while many advances have been made, facial recognition software is far from infallible, as researchers from Carnegie Mellon University recently found. Here are the details from a report in Quartz: Researchers showed they could […]

Good morning. Here’s our daily summary of all the media news you need to know. Want to get this briefing in your inbox every morning? Subscribe here. Since Jim VandeHei and John Harris proved most everybody to be idiots, VandeHei can only hope that reflexive suspicion of his new gambit again proves to be entrepreneurial bliss. The two journalists famously pitched the notion of an all-politics digital […]

As a microcosm of the wrenches and stresses enterprise services are experiencing, Cognizant‘s week has been pretty fascinating. Last weekend Elliott Management took an activist controlling role in Cognizant, one of the most strategic services firms, with an open public letter to Cognizant’s management essentially chastising them for too much investment in the future and for not squeezing enough money out of the IT services world as […]

Communication is broken, according to Twilio’s VP of Product Management Patrick Malatack, who thinks the root of the problem is that businesses are overlooking the fact that their customers are human. Speaking at StartCon in Sydney, Malatack said there’s a belief among businesses that personalised communication experiences are not scalable, that you can’t humanise communications and serve a wide customer base at the same time. “That’s no […]

Workday reported solid third quarter financial results Thursday after the bell. The Software-as-a-Service provider reported a net loss of $110 million, or 57 cents per share. Non-GAAP earnings were three cents per share on revenue of $409.6 million, up 34.2 percent annually. Wall Street was expecting a loss of four cents per share on a revenue of $400 million. “We had a strong third quarter and saw […]

Tax compliance gets easier for companies, but new data highlights post-filing challenges across the world JOHANNESBURG, South Africa, December 1, 2016/  Economies around the world continue to make progress in simplifying and reducing the burden of tax compliance on business, according to the latest edition of Paying Taxes 2017, a report by the World Bank Group and PwC (www.PWC.com ). Released today, the report finds that the Total […]

In recent years, computers have gotten remarkably good at recognizing speech and images: Think of the dictation software on most cellphones, or the algorithms that automatically identify people in photos posted to Facebook. But recognition of natural sounds has lagged behind. That’s because most automated recognition systems, whether they process audio or visual information, are the result of machine learning, in which computers search for patterns in […]

Apple’s new MacBook Pro lineup adds something unique: a Touch Bar atop the keyboard that I believe is an important evolution of the laptop user experience. The first time I saw and played with the Touch Bar, the macros of yore popped into my mind. MacBook power users all know the value of creating macros to speed up a particular business process we may use […]

Saudi Arabia’s aviation agency was attacked last month by an aggressive computer virus intended to disrupt high-profile government targets, officials and experts said on Thursday. The attack, which experts say emanated from outside the country, used a version of Shamoon, malware used to target the Saudi energy sector four years ago. Similar kinds of data-clearing software were used in 2014 against the Las Vegas Sands and Sony. […]

In a wide-ranging interview, Steve Ballmer this week was asked to explain what went wrong with Microsoft’s smartphone business. He pointed to skepticism over iPhone carrier subsidies, but I have another idea. As someone who was burned by the iPhone, I know why Microsoft screwed up. Since I was unable to secure any hands-on time with the iPhone prior to its release, I based the […]

In this Feb. 25, 2014 file photo, theSamsung Galaxy S5 is displayed at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, Tuesday, Feb. 25, 2014. Leading tech companies are increasingly nudging consumers to use their own fingers, faces and eyes as digital key to unlock phones and other gadgets. But there are downsides: Hackers could still steal your fingerprint, or its digital representation. And police may have broader […]

Pursglove would soon learn, however, that navigating this offshore archipelago is not easy. In any given year, trillions of dollars sit safely in the offshore financial world, effectively stateless, protected by legions of well-compensated defenders and a tangle of laws deliberately designed to impede creditors and tax collectors. Even the United States government finds it challenging: A special Internal Revenue Service division known as the “wealth squad,” […]

A Cellebrite engineer explains the technology used to unlock smartphones and pull data It only takes a few seconds for an employee of one of the world’s leading hacking companies to take a locked smartphone and pull the data from it. Israeli firm Cellebrite’s technology provides a glimpse of a world of possibilities accessible to security agencies globally that worry privacy advocates. The company has contracts […]

Fitbit is in advanced talks to acquire Pebble, the smartwatch pioneer and darling of crowdfunding site Kickstarter, according to several people close to the negotiations. The deal, which is in its closing stages but has not been completed, would bring intellectual property and new expertise in wearable devices to Fitbit at a time when the fitness-tracker maker is looking to expand its product range. Pebble has raised […]

The smart home is gaining ground, but it’s still a muddle of confusing standards, competing platforms, and gadgets that don’t do what you might expect. But the promise of products that can make your life a little easier is hard to resist, so I’m here to answer the inevitable questions that arise. Whether it’s figuring out the best connected door lock to assembling the right […]

Malware dubbed Gooligan targets devices running Android 4.0 and 5.0, which represent nearly 74 percent of mobile devices using the Google-powered operating system Malicious software designed to attack Android smartphones has breached the accounts of more than a million Google users, security researchers said Wednesday. The report by Check Point Software Technologies said the malware dubbed Gooligan targets devices running Android 4.0 and 5.0, which represent nearly […]

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