Articles by Richard Adhikari

Apple has purchased GPS firm Coherent Navigation, according to press reports The purchase is widely viewed as an effort to improve the trouble-plagued Apple Maps. Coherent Navigation offers satellite navigation hardware; software that includes precise, secure, robust positioning; and timing and communication solutions....

Walmart will be releasing its earnings report on Tuesday, and analysts are expecting hear a lot about the role of e-commerce in the current quarter, as well as an important factor in the company's growth strategy. One of things it's planning to do is to take on Amazon Prime....

Reddit on Thursday announced a new policy prohibiting harassment and other personal attacks on its site. It defined harassment as "systematic and/or continued actions to torment or demean someone in a way that would make a reasonable person 1) conclude that Reddit is not a safe platform to express their ideas or participate in the conversation; or...

Media pressure this week led Google to reveal that its self-driving cars, which are being tested on select city streets in California, have been involved in 11 accidents. All were minor accidents that occurred over the past six years, according to Chris Urmson, director of the self-driving car program The disclosure followed an Associated Press rep...

Facebook on Tuesday introduced Instant Articles, a feature that lets publishers place their stories directly on its site. Nine major media outlets have signed on so far -- The New York Times, National Geographic, Buzzfeed, NBC, The Atlantic, The Guardian, BBC News, Der Spiegel and Bild (function(d, s, id) { var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[...

Verizon will make a tender offer of US$4.4 billion for AOL, the companies announced Tuesday.AOL will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Verizon upon completion of the merger agreement this summer The deal drives Verizon's LTE wireless video and over-the-top video strategies, and provides support and connectivity for the company's Internet of Thing...

"The chief business of the American people is business," President Calvin Coolidge said. Although that has become the country's rubric, lawmakers in the United States aren't inclined to give business free rein The Department of Justice last month trumpeted its first online marketing prosecution: the leveling of felony charges against David Topkins,...

C.H.I.P., a Linux-based mini-PC priced at just $9, is receiving an overwhelming response on Kickstarter. Launched last Thursday with a funding goal of $50,000, it has chalked up more than 16,000 backers who have shelled out upwards of $815,000. The project still has 25 days to go The tiny open source device, made by Next Thing Co., has been dubbed ...

The United States Federal Aviation Administration last week came under fire once again for problems with the implementation of its troubled Next Generation Air Transportation System The NextGen program to overhaul the U.S. national air traffic control system, estimated to cost US$29 billion between 2013 and 2030, long has been the target of congres...

Cyanogen, best known for its FOSS Android-based OS, CyanogenMod, soon will provide caller ID screening and spam blocking directly from the native dialer on Cyanogen OS, the commercial version of its operating system These capabilities will be provided through the company's global partnership with Truecaller....

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has ruled, in essence, that the U.S. National Security Agency's collection of metadata concerning Americans' communications is illegal The court vacated U.S. District Judge William Pauley's December 2013 ruling in ACLU v. Clapper, and remanded the case to the District Court for the Southern District ...

Chinese wunderkind smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi is taking its flagship Mi 4i smartphone to Hong Kong and Singapore, with availability slated for next Tuesday. Designed especially for emerging markets, the Mi 4i has been wildly successful in India, where it launched two weeks ago and reportedly sold 40,000 units in less than 15 seconds ...

Twitter recently amended its rules in yet another attempt to crack down on the abuses perpetuated by online trolls, but the changes may do little to protect victims Its latest move was an extension of its ban on threats of violence against others or the promotion of violence against others....

Rumors about Salesforce.com being courted by Microsoft, Oracle and, possibly, Amazon.com have been swirling about Wall Street and Silicon Valley for about a week. However, it's not clear how much substance there is to the speculation The buzz began last Wednesday with a Bloomberg report, and analysts ran with it....

Star Trek fans have been murmuring excitedly about the possibility of an actual "warp drive" -- that is, faster-than-light, mode of travel NASA earlier this year attempted to burst that bubble, saying in no uncertain terms that light-speed travel was simply imaginary... "at present." That qualifier, at present, was enough to fuel another round of s...

Microsoft on Monday announced a slew of products and services for IT professionals and business at its first Ignite conference, being held in Chicago through Friday It introduced the Microsoft Azure Stack, its next-generation hybrid cloud, which lets companies' IT departments blend enterprise software with distributed applications. It will be previ...

At its Build dev conference last week, Microsoft released a preview of the next version of its .Net Core runtime distribution, fulfilling last fall's pledge to open source .Net and take it cross-platform for Mac and Linux The move is in line with Microsoft's ambitious plans to have Windows run across all platforms and devices, and have a billion ac...

Apple and IBM last week announced an initiative with Japan Post Group to provide seniors in Japan with iPads preloaded with apps and analytics designed to improve their quality of life Japan Post Group will launch a pilot service later this year and expand it incrementally over time, to cover between 4 million and 5 million customers by 2020....

A flaw in iOS 8 allows hackers essentially to crash apps that perform SSL communications whenever they like. Skycure reported the bug at the RSA security conference held last week, advising owners of iOS devices to upgrade to iOS 8.3 Apple this week confirmed that iOS 8.3 addresses the vulnerability, according to Skycure....

Microsoft on Wednesday made its new Edge browser, developed under the code name "Project Spartan," available to participants in the Windows Insider Program. Joe Belfiore, corporate vice president, operating systems group, made the announcement at the company's Build developers' conference, being held in San Francisco through Friday ...