Articles by John P. Mello Jr

A new privacy report ranking the top 15 social media platforms found Reddit and Snapchat as the least intrusive on their users' privacy. At the other end of the spectrum were Meta products Facebook, Messenger and Instagram The ranking performed by data removal service Incogni was based on 14 criteria across five key categories: transgressions, data...

The 2024 holiday shopping season won't be the best for retailers. Not only is the Thanksgiving to Christmas window narrower than usual, but market watchers are predicting limp sales growth for the period Salesforce, for example, predicts year-over-year global sales growth of 2% for November and December, totaling US$1.19 trillion, and 2% growth in ...

Touting a product's AI capabilities may sound like a good idea to marketers, but it's a buzzkill for many consumers A recent study by assistant professor Mesut Cicek and professor Dogan Gursoy at the Carson School of Business at Washington State University found that people were less likely to buy things if they were called "Artificial Intelligence...

While the technology behind AI-powered chatbots quickly captured the public imagination, an even more powerful application of generative artificial intelligence has been creating a buzz among business leaders. It's called agentic AI "This innovative technology is not just another industry buzzword; it's a paradigm shift that's poised to redefine th...

Inflation is causing many consumers to pass on upgrading to a new cell phone this year, according to a survey conducted by an online personal finance platform The survey of more than 210 respondents, using data normalized by age, gender, and income so the sample would reflect U.S. demographics, found that nearly two in three Americans (63%) said th...

Apple's flavor of generative artificial intelligence, called Apple Intelligence, was laced throughout its latest watch, AirPods, and phone offerings, announced at its "Glowtime" event on Monday Speakers at the prerecorded session aired online touted a number of features in the new hardware lineup, which uses Apple Intelligence to support everything...

Attempts to protect children's safety in the two-dimensional realm of online social media could adversely impact the 3D world of augmented and virtual reality, according to a report released Tuesday by a Washington, D.C., technology think tank Legislative efforts, like the Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act (KOPSA), which has passed the U.S. Senate...

Global e-commerce transactions will skyrocket to US$11.4 trillion by 2029, a 63% increase from an estimated $7 trillion in 2024, according to a report released Tuesday by Juniper Research, a U.K.-based company A critical driver of that growth will be alternative payment methods (APMs), such as digital wallets, account-to-account payments, and buy-n...

The 2014 Google Glass debacle stigmatized smart glasses, but the devices may be poised for a comeback Despite the flaming failure of Google Glass, Meta and Google appear to be all in on the next generation of smart glasses that combine fashion, functionality, and generative AI into a compelling form factor, maintained Gene Munster, managing partner...

Some residents of College Station, Texas, are finding noise pollution from Amazon delivery drones disturbing, a problem the giant retailer is seeking to remedy as it plans to expand its Prime Air program Amazon has petitioned the Federal Aviation Administration to boost drone delivery flights from 200 to 469 per day, which isn't welcome news for de...

Although AI-capable PCs were introduced in the middle of the second quarter, they still captured 14% of global shipments, according to a report released Tuesday by research firm Canalys Canalys reported that 8.8 million AI-capable PCs were shipped during the period, 40% running Microsoft Windows and 60% running macOS....

When ChatGPT exploded on the tech scene in November 2022, one of the burning questions in the minds of many technologists was how Google -- which, up to that point, was known for its prowess in artificial intelligence -- could be caught flat-footed when the starter's gun sounded in the race to bring generative AI to the masses? Paul Buchheit, creat...

Roku has taken a bold step toward what could be the future of online advertising by announcing it will adopt a technology called Unified ID 2.0 (UID2) across its premium streaming inventory The streaming platform, which serves some 83.6 million households, boasted that the technology, developed by The Trade Desk, will offer advertisers more precise...

Malicious actors on the internet know the meaning of service. In a report released Tuesday on digital threats for the first half of 2024, a global AI cybersecurity company found that many of the prevalent threats deployed during the period heavily used malware-as-a-service (MaaS) tools The report by Darktrace, based on analysis of data across the c...

Qualcomm unveiled a new Snapdragon chip on Tuesday, designed to give entry-level mobile phones more muscle and 5G connectivity The Snapdragon 4s Gen 2 platform promises all-day battery life, improved camera capabilities, and 1 Gbps peak 5G speeds -- seven times faster than LTE platforms in the same price tier....

One of the largest ransomware payouts that's become public was reported Tuesday by cloud security firm Zscaler The US$75 million payment made to the Dark Angels ransomware group was discovered by Zscaler's security research arm ThreatLabz earlier this year, according to the company's annual ransomware report, which covers a period from April 2023 t...

With the announcement on Tuesday of its low-cost, on-road delivery robot, a San Francisco Bay Area startup believes it has the solution to the high cost of delivering products ordered online The four-wheel robot made by Vayu Robotics eschews expensive LiDAR technology typically used by on-road driverless vehicles in favor of a transformer-based mob...

Since Friday, organizations have been struggling to get their operations up and running after a software update by security vendor CrowdStrike set off an epidemic of "blue screens of death" globally, commonly known as the screen of death for Windows users On Monday, global technology advisory firm Gartner released a research note outlining short-te...

A substantial number of workers are using ChatGPT to get pay raises and promotions, according to survey results recently released by a resume resource website Some 38% of workers say ChatGPT helped them land a pay raise, and 29% say it helped them secure a promotion, according to a survey of 1,666 U.S. employees who spend most or all of their workd...

While large language AI models continue to make headlines, small language models are where the action is. At least, that's what Meta appears to be betting on, according to a paper recently released by a team of its research scientists Large language models, like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Llama, can use billions, even trillions, of parameters to obtain t...