Articles by Richard Adhikari

Shopify on Wednesday announced that it has agreed to purchaseKit CRM, whose Kit chatbot automatically sends out marketing text messages for online stores It also lets businesses run targeted ads on Facebook and Instagram, make recommendations based on store activities, post on social media and use functionality provided by other social media apps, ...

The U.S. Internal Revenue Service's cybersecurity measures are woefully inadequate, according to testimony presented this week to the Senate Finance Committee The hearing was convened to examine how the IRS is safeguarding private taxpayer information this filing season and to determine what improvements may be necessary, said Sen. Orrin Hatch, the...

HTC this week unveiled its latest flagship smartphone, the HTC 10 The phone's camera is outfitted with new, larger sensors and 12 million new-generation UltraPixels. Both the front and rear cameras sport the world's first optically stabilized, larger-aperture f/1.8 lenses on, the company said....

The FBI paid hackers to break onto the iPhone of the San Bernardino, California, shooter, according to a news report published Tuesday in The Washington Post The bureau obtained the services of gray hats, the Post said, citing unnamed sources. It apparently did not get help fromCellebrite, as earlier reports had suggested....

Chariot for Women, a ride-sharing service that excludes males 13 and older, reportedly has postponed its launch to sometime this summer due to heavier-than-anticipated demand. The company originally had planned to debut the service in Boston next week Chariot for Women is open to all women, including transgender women. Children, including boys unde...

Chinese authorities have issued censorship instructions to the media following the release of thePanama Papers, according to news reports published last week The leaked documents reportedly listed several top Chinese officials who used Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca to set up offshore companies....

Marketing will shape the customer experience by 2020, based on a recent Marketo study of nearly 500 chief marketing officers and senior marketing executives worldwide. The Economist Intelligence Unit conducted the research on behalf of Marketo Eighty-percent of the respondents believed their departments would exercise significant influence over bus...

Samsung has been granted a patent for a smart contact lens, according to news reports published last week The lens is equipped with a tiny display, a camera, an antenna, and several sensors that detect movement and eye blinks. Eye blinks would provide the input, and a smartphone would be needed to process the images....

A group of newspaper publishers last week sent what amounted to a cease-and-desist letter toBrave Software, which offers the HTTPS Brave browser with built-in ad blocking and tracking protection Brave has offered to let publishers make money off blocked ads by partnering with them "for a lower fee than they pay their third-party data-tracking partn...

Reddit this week announced that it has extended the reach of its blocking tool, which was introduced in 2011 to let users fight harassment The tool previously focused on blocking private messages; now it can block comments to users' posts....

MetaMind, a startup focused on deep learning, this week announced that it has been acquired by Salesforce The company's expertise is in natural language processing -- letting computers analyze relationships between words....

Vivaldi on Wednesday launched the first release of its eponymously named browser. Vivaldi is the brainchild of CEO Jon von Tetzchner, a cofounder ofOpera Software. Aimed at the power user, Vivaldi 1.0 packs in features that were stripped out of Opera 12....

Facebook on Monday introduced automated alt text, a new tool that describes what's in an image to help visually impaired users engage more on the site The goal is to help the blind community experience Facebook the same way others enjoy it, according to Facebook's accessibility team, led by Matt King, Jeff Wieland and Shaomei Wu (pictured above)....

HP on Tuesday unveiled its latest challenger to Apple's laptops at the International Luxury Conference in Versailles, touting it as the thinnest laptop in the world. At 10.4 mm, the HP Spectre's chassis is as thin as a triple-A battery, the company noted....

Amazon on Monday launched its Payments Partner Program -- a global effort widely seen as a rival to PayPal -- in the United States, the UK, Germany and Japan Currently available by invitation only, the program provides for three levels of partners: premier partners, certified partners and certified developers. The first two are for e-commerce platf...

IBM last week announced thatLawrence Livermore National Laboratory has purchased its TrueNorth processor-based cognitive computing platform The purchase included an end-to-end ecosystem and a multisocket host node....

At last week's Microsoft Build 2016 conference, Executive Vice President for Cloud + Enterprise Scott Guthrie announced innovations in mobile app development, the Internet of Things, microservices and intelligence designed to help developers create apps for the company's Azure cloud environment ...

IBM on Thursday announced that it has agreed to buyBluewolf, a Salesforce system integrator It reportedly will pay US$200 million....

Unintentional consequences led Google to pull its April Fools' prank, Gmail Mic Drop, a few hours after launching it on Friday The joke let users claim the last word in an email thread by clicking on the "Send + Mic Drop" option. A GIF of a minion from the animated movie Despicable Me -- would accompany the reply, and the sender would not receive ...

CNBC earlier this week published a piece with the goal of helping users strengthen their password security, but the attempt backfired badly An interactive tool provided to help readers detect the strength of their passwords was to blame....