Articles by John P. Mello Jr.

Waning trust in tech companies has spawned a new C-level role: Chief Trust Officer (CTrO) According to a recent trends report by Forrester Research, tech companies are struggling to garner the trust of businesses and the public due to missteps following many breakthrough technology advances. The report pointed out that stalkers have adopted Apple A...

A new thin iPhone was the star of Apple's "Awe Dropping" event aired online Tuesday The new Air, at 5.6 millimeters thick, is the thinnest iPhone Apple has ever produced. "It's unlike anything you've ever held before, and it's packed with features," John Ternus, Apple's senior vice president of hardware engineering, said at the event....

In most cases, a misleading result from a Google search is harmless, but a case study by a consumer financial information website released Monday shows how those results can cause economic harm to searchers In its study, WalletHub did a Google search for "best 0 APR credit cards." Here's what it found:...

A survey released Monday by a trade-in comparison website found that 30% of iPhone owners are "considering" switching to foldable phones by Apple's competitors if the company waits until 2026 to launch a foldable of its own According to the survey by SellCell, 20.1% of iPhone owners would consider switching to a Samsung foldable and 10.2% to a Goog...

A plan to bolster the nation's cybersecurity that will cost virtually nothing was unveiled Tuesday by the Internet Security Alliance (ISA) In a 21-page document, the alliance offers five recommendations that it maintains "will cost the federal government virtually nothing" and, as a bonus, save private industry billions....

For nearly a decade, Apple has been trying to reduce its dependency on China for production of its cash cow, the iPhone. With the iPhone 17, it's taking a major step in that direction. All models of that phone will be made in India, Bloomberg reported Tuesday Bloomberg noted: "The company is producing all four iPhone 17 models in India ahead of the...

As more consumers tap into artificial intelligence to enhance their online shopping experiences, new risks are being created for e-commerce merchants. To address those risks, a pair of e-commerce security companies is partnering to offer a new unified framework that they say will enable merchants to safely reap the benefits of AI shopping The frame...

Tradeoffs. The world of tech is full of them. Yet, as Forrester Research points out in a recent trends report, tradeoffs can give disruptive technologies a Jekyll and Hyde personality, providing great benefits but at the same time undermining an organization's sustainability efforts "Disruptive technologies are a double-edged sword for environmenta...

Technology has become a keystone for making schools safe for kids these days. It's appearing everywhere, even in things as simple as the visitors' sign-in sheet "While many schools have paper log visitor management, we continue to see an increase in using electronic visitor management that can track visitors and cross-check them against national da...

With AI agents expected to account for 20% or more of e-commerce traffic in the next five years, digital merchants face a new wave of risks and opportunities. To help e-commerce businesses meet those risks and capitalize on those opportunities, Forter, based in New York City, rolled out some new features for its trust platform on Tuesday Those feat...

Google advanced one of its initiatives Monday to address the burgeoning demand for energy by its data centers, driven by power-hungry artificial intelligence applications The company announced agreements with Indiana Michigan Power and the Tennessee Valley Authority to throttle energy demand from machine learning workloads at its data centers in th...

Tesla's announcement this week of a US$16.5 billion deal with Samsung to produce next-generation A16 chips at the South Korean electronics giant's Texas facility has significant ramifications for both companies “This is more than a supply deal. It’s a strategic brand decision," declared Lorenzo Coruzzi, valuation director at Brand Finance, a gl...

When it comes to threats from the dark web, the U.S. is a prime target A new report by threat intelligence company SOCRadar found that more than four out of five (82%) threats from the dark web aimed at North America targeted the United States over the last 12 months. "The high percentage in the United States suggests a larger digital footprint and...

Browsers built on artificial intelligence could transform how users interact with the internet, much like applications shaped the mobile web. That could make AI browsers a killer app The AI community isn't ignoring that potential. Perplexity has released an invite-only beta of its AI browser called Comet, and OpenAI is also working on a browser. Th...

Small changes in the large language models (LLMs) at the heart of AI applications can result in substantial energy savings, according to a report released by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) on Monday The 35-page report titled "Smarter, smaller, stronger: resource-efficient generative AI & the future of ...

Many consumers may feel overwhelmed by their subscriptions, but that doesn't seem to be stopping the practice from growing. According to a report released Monday by London-based Juniper Research, the subscription economy will nearly double in the next five years to US$1.2 trillion, from $722.5 billion in 2025 Juniper is forecasting substantial grow...

Without much fanfare, Meta has been quietly enhancing the capabilities of its WhatsApp messaging software, which could transform it into a super app While super apps have gained traction in Asia, they haven't caught on in the West. Apps like WeChat in China, Grab in Singapore, Gojek in Indonesia, and Paytm in India offer users a bundle of services ...

A leader in the EV battery recycling business has announced a new use for those batteries: powering AI data centers Redwood Materials has launched Redwood Energy, which will use used EV batteries to store power from solar arrays. That power can then be used to power the data centers of Redwood's partner in the project, Crusoe, a firm best known for...

Cloudflare, which services about 20% of websites, announced Tuesday that it is now blocking web-scraping AI bots from accessing those sites by default Unless a website explicitly turns off the default, an AI crawler will need to obtain permission from the website to scrape its content. Website owners can choose whether they want AI crawlers to acce...

The U.S. Postal Service is warning consumers about a growing scam called "brushing," where unsolicited packages are sent to harvested addresses to inflate the reputation of an unscrupulous online retailer Brushing scams involve receiving unsolicited packages containing low-cost items, such as household goods, the USPS warns. These packages are ofte...