24x7 News Headlines

 As I began my career in higher education in the late 1990s, technology seemed poised to upend the entire academic enterprise. The zeitgeist was that a star system was about to be born, with million-dollar online courses starring celebrity faculty. Read More

 As Barack Obama’s second term comes to an end, an increasingly loud chorus of voices are calling for a dramatic final presidential act: the pardoning of Edward Snowden. Authoritarians are horrified by this, and, as usual, they are wrong. A pardon really isn’t enough. As I’ve argued before, Snowden deserves a medal. Read More

 New technologies have constantly changed the way we’ve worked. And continued investments have come as corporate demand for worker productivity drives tech spending. We should expect augmented reality and virtual reality to eventually attract increased spending in the enterprise as they combine with new mobile network advancements to make an emerging trend called “productive… Read More

 Say what you will about Salesforce, the company is always looking ahead. This afternoon, it announced Salesforce Einstein, its artificial intelligence (AI) initiative. The timing, which comes just ahead of rival Oracle’s Open World keynote address, is probably not a coincidence. Regardless, the larger AI theme is something Salesforce has been working on across various pieces of its… Read More

 Oracle is kicking off a big customer confab in San Francisco this week, and to mark the event, it’s announced an acquisition. Oracle is acquiring Palerra, a cloud security startup founded and led by Oracle alum Rohit Gupta. Terms of the deal were not disclosed but we will try to find out. Palerra was founded in 2013 and raised $25 million with investors including Norwest Venture Partners… Read More

 Crisis has a history of dictating government technology disruption. But innovators don’t wait for crises. They imagine a different path, whether it’s a new approach to solving an old problem or a moonshot. They observe the world, realize potential, and fund and build engines of change. Forward-thinking, optimistic entrepreneurs and investors are starting to do this with… Read More

 The Adblock Plus crowdsourced hacker militia can’t keep up with Facebook’s disciplined army of engineers. When Facebook first announced it would circumvent ad blocking software, Adblock Plus (ABP) built a workaround in two days, boasting that “We promised that the open source community would have a solution very soon…This time that community seems to have gotten… Read More

 Lyft’s response may not be autonomous cars in active duty, but it is a lengthy, detailed treatise on how Lyft sees the future of transportation over the next ten years, as penned by Lyft co-founder and President John Zimmer. The Medium post from the Lyft exec articulates a vision of the future that would see most of the rides on Lyft’s network of cars handled autonomously by 2021.… Read More

 Apple just released not one, not two but three new ads for its new devices — the iPhone 7 and the Apple Watch Series 2. They all tout new features, such as water resistance, low light camera performance and new fitness features. Let’s start with my favorite one. In “Midnight”, a young man goes for a night ride on his skateboard. He rides in the suburbs, sees a deer (!) at… Read More

 On August 24th, a warm summer night, all of Europe was shaken when an earthquake measuring 6.2 on the moment magnitude scale, hit central Italy. “The town [Amatrice] doesn’t exist anymore…..it’s all gone,” said Sergio Pirozzi, mayor of the small town of Amatrice during an interview immediately after the tragedy. More than 290 people died, and dozens more are still… Read More

 Over the past few years, the Internet of Things (IoT) has been the white-hot center of a flurry of activity. The IoT may well be The Next Big Thing, but maybe the attention around sensors is misplaced… What if we didn’t even need embedded sensors to allow things to gather data about their surrounding environment? What if material could be a sensor in and of itself? Read More