Articles by Richard Adhikari

Google Cloud has expanded its strategic partnership with VMware to push further into hybrid clouds The two companies on Tuesday announced Google Cloud VMware Solution by CloudSimple, a service that lets organizations run VMware workloads in Google Cloud Platform on premises, in a hybrid architecture, or in the cloud.

The United States Department of Justice on Tuesday announced an antitrust probe into big tech, following several months of rumors that it was about to do so The DoJ plans to review how the leading online platforms achieved market power and whether they have engaged in practices that reduced competition, stifled innovation, or otherwise harmed consu...

Square on Monday unveiled Square Photo Studio, which leverages state-of-the-art robotics to offer etailers professional-grade product photography For US$10, clients can get three high-resolution, multi-angle digital photos of a product. A spinning, interactive animation of the product -- which site visitors can click and drag or zoom -- will cost $...

E-commerce checkout platform vendor Bolt has raised US$68 million in a Series B funding round co-led by Activant Capital and Tribe Capital, bringing the total amount raised so far to $90M. Individuals in the retail field also kicked in money. They include Benny Joseph, head of engineering at environmentally friendly footwear manufacturer Allbirds;...

Cloud marketing company Signpost has raised US$52 million in new funding to "increase the scale of our business and invest in our technology," CEO Stuart Wall said Tuesday The funding was provided by HighBar Partners and BMO Bank of Montreal as well as previous investors Georgian Partners and Spark Capital....

The American Civil Liberties Union on Wednesday released documents showing the United States National Security Agency improperly collected Americans' call and text logs in November 2017 and in February and October 2018 The unauthorized collections occurred just four months after the agency announced it was deleting more than 620 million call detail...

LinkedIn on Tuesday disclosed algorithm changes designed to favor conversations catering to niche professional interests. Axios first reported the shift The top 1 percent of power users grabbed much of the attention on its platform, LinkedIn found through internal research in 2018....

Facebook on Tuesday released details about Libra, its long-rumored cryptocurrency The company outlined plans "for a new decentralized blockchain, a low-volatility cryptocurrency, and a smart contract platform that together aim to create a new opportunity for responsible financial services innovation."

More than half the world's population -- 3.8 billion people -- have access to the Internet, and that may not be a good thing, at least for business, according to digital savant Mary Meeker's Internet Trends 2019 report Global Internet user growth has slowed to 6 percent year over year, down from 7 percent, noted the Bond Capital general partner....

The United States House of Representatives Antitrust Subcommittee on Monday opened an investigation into competition in digital markets, increasing the pressure on big tech companies over antitrust issues. The subcommittee is part of the House Judiciary Committee The bipartisan investigation will include a series of hearings on antitrust, commercia...

Amazon on Wednesday announced the Echo Show 5 and began taking preorders for the device, which will begin shipping in the United States late next month This third-generation Echo Show is called the "5" because it has a 5.5-inch diagonal display.

Amazon has been reworking relationships with several of its long-time wholesale suppliers in a bid to cut costs, Bloomberg reported Tuesday. The plan is to buy from larger companies instead of smaller businesses Thousands of small suppliers that sell less than US$10 million annually on Amazon's platform would lose bulk orders, while big brands like...

British mobile device software design firm ARM has ordered its staff to stop working with Chinese smartphone giant Huawei and its subsidiaries, in compliance with a ban issued by President Trump, the BBC reported Wednesday Under an executive order Trump signed last week, foreign companies and individuals are prohibited from buying United States tec...

Government efforts to minimize the effects of junk and fake news circulating on social media ahead of this week's EU parliamentary elections may have succeeded, suggest results of a study conducted by Oxford University's Computational Propaganda Project The European Commission undertook targeted actions to counter junk news last year. It rolled out...

The high-tech industry once again is in a tizzy over flaws discovered in Intel CPUs. Four microarchitectural data sampling (MDS) vulnerabilities came to light on Tuesday. MDS is a sub-class of previously disclosed vulnerabilities that sample data leaked from small structures within the CPU using a locally executed speculative execution side channe...

Walmart on Tuesday announced free one-day delivery for 220,000 of its most-frequently purchased items The service will be available first in Phoenix and Las Vegas, because "these locations are major metro markets served by our fulfillment center in Southern California where we have a high volume of free two-day shipping orders, and where we expect ...

Google's Pixel 3a smartphone, launched Tuesday at Google's 2019 I/O developer conference in Mountain View, California, has wowed reviewers with the quality of its photos and other features, as well as its low price "Half the price of a high-end phone," wrote Jeffrey Van Camp for Wired. "Looks, works, and feels like plenty premium. Cameras rock, and...

Third-party gross physical merchandise sales on Amazon, made primarily by SMBs selling on the platform, accounted for more than half the units sold in the company's stores and totaled more than US$160 billion in 2018, according to Amazon's 2019 SMB Impact Report, released Tuesday Other highlights:...

Securepairs.org, an advocacy organization formed by cybersecurity professionals, on Tuesday announced that it has joined the fight for "right to repair" legislation, which would allow consumers and third parties to repair electronic equipment without voiding manufacturers' warranties Legislators in about 20 states have been working on some form of ...

Facebook has come under fire for its Ad Library application programming interface The API lets users perform customized keyword searches of all active and inactive ads related to politics or issues of national importance stored in the Ad Library....