If you want to try out Google's Project Ara modular smartphone, start booking your flights to Puerto Rico: The island protectorate will be the location of the Project Ara "Market Pilot," where Google plans to sell an early version of the hardware from converted food trucks during the third quarter of this year.
The <a href="https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/01/facing-challenge-online-harassment">Electronic Frontier Foundation</a> (EFF), the non-profit digital rights advocacy group known for its strong public stances on topics like Net Neutrality, piracy and privacy, on Thursday expanded its focus with a <a href="https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/01/facing-challenge-online-harassment">blog entry</a> identifying online harassment as a digital rights issue that stands in the way of true freedom of speech.
<a href="http://www.salesforce.com">Salesforce</a>, the not-so-little cloud CRM company that could, is furthering its play to bring everybody everywhere into the fold with the launch of Salesforce Files Connect, a new tool that brings files from on-premises Microsoft SharePoint into a company's cloud workflow.
A lot of businesses trust cloud sync-and-store provider Box, but they trust a lot of other solutions, too, for things like identity, data loss protection and digital rights management.
<a href="http://www.trustev.com">Trustev's</a> main business is in what it calls "digital fingerprinting" -- an anti-fraud technology for e-commerce that can identify known credit card scammers and block them so thoroughly and completely that they would need an entirely new computer to mess with the business. Would-be fraudsters get turned away, and real customers don't even know they're being screened. (Radio Shack already uses it to protect online transactions.)
IBM Watson, apparently not content with its Jeopardy winnings, is looking for work. After a lot of buildup, Watson Analytics, the natural language business intelligence tool based on Big Blue's famed AI, is now available in beta under a freemium model where it's free to get started -- but the really powerful analytics are going to cost you.
In November, <a href="http://www.vox.com/2014/11/20/7250255/immigration-reform-obama-executive-action">President Obama outlined a sweeping executive order that would overhaul the immigration system</a> with provisions that would provide work permits for up to five million undocumented workers and provide for more software engineers and entrepreneurs to work in the U.S. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley has been pushing for immigration reform for many years, claiming a labor shortage at a crucial period of market growth.
Dropbox, the sync-and-share startup so popular it essentially created a market category, is finally, finally opening up to become an enterprise platform with the launch of a new Dropbox for Business API that enables team-level app management and integration with third-party services.
Cloud CRM provider Salesforce has long distinguished itself from other Silicon Valley heavyweights by refusing to move its corporate headquarters and offices from San Francisco itself, even as titans like Google, Facebook and Yahoo sprawl their offices all over the East Bay and the Peninsula that sits to the south.
Everybody wants to join the DevOps movement. Everybody wants their developers and their operations people to work more closely together and take advantage of greater internal IT harmony with the result of higher agility and a faster time to market.
It was all the way back in the Spring of 2011 that Google released <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebRTC">WebRTC</a>, its nascent real-time, browser-based, HTML5-powered, no-plugin-required video chat project to the public. In the three and a half years since, the Internet Engineering Task Force and the W3C have been working together to try to formalize the standard, prepare the stable 1.0 release, and get it ready for prime time.
Welcome to the age of containerization, where an ecosystem led by startup <a href="http://www.docker.com">Docker</a> is leading IT organizations to ineffable peaks of efficiency, helping them scale their workloads ever-higher, and probably baking them a nice cake to boot (it's my birthday, I have cake on the brain, sue me). <a href="https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&es_th=1&ie=UTF-8#qscrl=1&q=microsoft+azure+docker+networkworld">Microsoft</a>, <a href="http://www.citeworld.com/article/2843473/cloud-computing/google-fights-back-cloud-rivals-with-price-cuts-advances.html">Google</a> and <a href="http://www.citeworld.com/article/2847861/cloud-computing/amazon-embraces-docker-with-new-customer-tool.html">Amazon Web Services</a> are all tripping over themselves to make sure prospective customers know that <em>their </em> clouds are the place to be if you want to get the most from Docker.
Car service app Uber found itself in trouble again when top executive Emil Michael was caught at a dinner party suggesting that the company hire opposition researchers to dig up dirt on the (predominantly female) journalists who have been asking uncomfortable questions about the crazy successful car service startup caught up in scandal after scandal.
In early October, Evernote CEO Phil Libin debuted new features designed to make the immensely popular note-taking software <a href="http://www.citeworld.com/article/2691236/social-collaboration/how-evernote-will-become-a-full-fledged-collaboration-platform.html">friendlier to the enterprise</a>: Work Chat, Context and presentation mode.
Last week, Microsoft made huge waves when it announced that its long-proprietary .Net application framework was now available as open source, completely rocking the Redmond, Wash., giant's cross-platform strategy and public image, all in one fell swoop.