Articles by Richard Adhikari

The Federal Aviation Administration has given its first air drone delivery certification in the United States to Alphabet's Wing Aviation, paving the way for the service to begin commercial package delivery in Blacksburg, Virginia. "This is an important step forward for the safe testing and integration of drones into our economy," said U.S. Depart...

Apriva this week announced partnerships with AveriGo and Vagabond to offer innovative mobile shopping and payment solutions Apriva offers an adaptive platform for secure mobile communications and omnichannel payments....

NICE inContact this week released the Spring 2019 version of its CXone cloud-based contact center software. It features multiple artificial intelligence-powered updates for smarter customer and agent engagement, plus enhanced customer relationship management integrations NICE inContact CXone "is the most complete, unified, and intelligent cloud co...

Apple and Qualcomm on Tuesday unexpectedly announced a settlement as their case entered the second day of a hearing in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in San Diego In related news, Intel on Tuesday announced it was getting out of the 5G smartphone chip business....

Alphabet's Project Wing on Monday launched a commercial air delivery service in North Canberra, Australia, providing customers with fresh food, hot coffee and over-the-counter medications from seven local businesses Shoppers can use Wing's mobile app to place orders and receive deliveries within 30 minutes....

Google has unveiled new minimum standards for temps, vendors and contractors (TVCs) in the United States, in response to demands from an employee coalition that included full-time Google staffers as well as temporary workers and contractors "Yesterday, we shared an update on some new initiatives to support our extended U.S. workforce -- including ...

Walmart has launched a limited beta of Walmart Voice Order, which lets consumers order groceries by voice using Google Assistant The service can be used with the following devices:...

The United States Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday announced an investigation into the privacy policies, procedures and practices of seven Internet broadband providers and related entities: AT&T Inc....

The European Parliament plenary on Tuesday adopted the "Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market" by a vote of 348-274 with 36 abstentions. Member states will have two years to adopt the directive's rules under their national laws....

Facebook on Wednesday unveiled its Oculus Rift S virtual reality headset at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco It will be available this spring for US$399....

Instagram on Tuesday introduced Checkout on Instagram -- an in-app purchasing tool -- as a closed beta for consumers in the United States. Among the 20 participating brands are Adidas, Nike, Burberry, Dior, Huda Beauty, Prada and Michael Kors....

Jigsaw, which is owned by Google parent company Alphabet, on Tuesday released Tune, an experimental Chrome extension that lets users hide comments its algorithms identify as toxic. It is available for Mac, Windows, Linux and the Chrome OS Tune builds on the same machine learning (ML) models that power Jigsaw's Perspective API to rate the toxicity o...

Amazon has reportedly removed the price parity contract clause that barred third-party vendors on its platform from selling their products at a lower price elsewhere The company has long been accused of anticompetitive behavior and has come under considerable political pressure because of its use of the price parity, also known as "most favored nat...

Microsoft on Thursday announced a number of artificial intelligence, mixed reality, and customer insights tools for Microsoft Dynamics 365 at its Microsoft Business Forward event in Paris There is "a lot of hype around AI and MR," noted Rebecca Wettemann, vice president of research at Nucleus Research, "but these are real applications delivering va...

Samsung held its annual Unpacked event in San Francisco's Bill Graham Civic Auditorium on Wednesday, presenting fans with a new product lineup that includes three versions of its flagship Galaxy S10, plus the Galaxy S10 5G, the Galaxy Fold, and several new wearables. All of the devices have an edge-to-edge display that increases the amount of scre...

Walmart's e-commerce sales were up 43 percent for Q4 FY 2019, the 13-week period ended Jan. 25. Sam's Club e-commerce sales grew 21 percent. Customers "continue to respond to our increasingly omnichannel offerings. We're executing against our strategy and it's working," said Walmart spokesperson Robyn Babbitt....

JPMorgan Chase on Thursday announced that it has created and successfully tested a digital coin. Each JPM Coin represents US$1 in funds held in designated accounts at JPMorgan Chase N.A The token was created using Quorum, a variant of Ethereum developed by JPMorgan Chase, to enable instantaneous payment transfers between its clients' institutional ...

Apple plans to launch a subscription news service at an event next month, according to reports The service has been described as "Netflix for news," because it would let customers access an unlimited amount of content from publishers for a single monthly fee....

LinkedIn on Monday launched an invitation-only private beta of LinkedIn Live, a streaming video feature. The service will initially be available in the United States After the invitation-only period, LinkedIn will post a contact form on its website for others who want to participate in the beta....

AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint have sold access to subscribers' real-time location data to aggregators, which in turn have sold it to about 250 bounty hunters and related businesses, Motherboard reported Wednesday In some cases, the data allowed users to track individuals to their specific locations inside a building....