Trends

Cable television companies have been rushing to introduce new digital pay-TV products. Traditional cable TV has been on the decline in the midst of a growing wave of new competition and new technologies. The new offerings reflect forward thinking and are a step in the right direction, but too many p...

Oracle -- or could we say "Autoracle"? -- has introduced more autonomous products, generally in keeping with what I see as a build-out of an information utility. The products, announced last week, include Autonomous Analytics, Autonomous Integrations, Autonomous Builder code generation and free prem...

All 49 members of the Senate Democratic caucus have expressed support for a resolution to save Net neutrality, introduced Wednesday by Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., under the Congressional Review Act. The CRA is a legislative tool that lets Congress reverse federal regulations via a simple majority vote....

Much of the discussion around sales and artificial intelligence has been outwardly focused. It's exciting to think about using AI to examine leads, sift through data, and help deliver answers that allow salespeople to close more and bigger deals. However, the excitement over using AI to organize cus...

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has sounded a call for computing to empower everyone. "The world is becoming a computer," he said in the opening keynote address at Build 2018, the company's premiere event for developers. "Computing is getting embedded in every person, place and thing. That's the opportu...

Four trade groups representing 4,000 publishers have blasted Google's approach to compliance with Europe's upcoming General Data Protection Rules. Under its new GDPR-compliant policy, Google, as a provider of digital advertising services to publishers, will have sole control over data sent to it by ...

Smart home and consumer IoT solutions promise significant opportunities for the insurance industry to reduce costs, alleviate risks, deepen customer engagement, and create new services and revenue streams. There are many barriers ahead, but given the tremendous upside, insurance companies have begun...

Facebook and other social networks appear to have crossed the line with respect to privacy and censorship. Facebook has been accused of helping one side while hiding the other side in many important debates. It has been accused of exposing the personal information of its users, violating their priva...

There is a meme making the rounds and I have no idea how old it is or its origins but I've heard it twice in the last week. It's easier to start a company than it is to scale one. You can't say it's a revolutionary thought, but for the last 20 years the emphasis has been decidedly on founding, so th...

Vendors have a better shot at closing deals for large-scale B2B software purchases when they are upfront and honest about the quality of their products, a new study suggests. There is a bit of a trust gap between what is promised in negotiations for these deals and what actually is provided, indicat...

Companies that aim to upsell their existing customers should develop a hybrid message that reinforces their existing relationships while providing an incentive to break the status quo, suggests a new study. Corporate Visions previously has commissioned studies on how to shake prospective customers' ...

Apple plans to launch a news subscription service within the next year. The new service reportedly will combine features from its recent Texture acquisition and Apple's existing news app. Texture's technology and its employees will be integrated into the Apple News team, which will build the new ser...

The security skills gap has become a topic of acute interest among practitioners responsible for building security teams for their organizations -- and keeping them running smoothly. It impacts everything from how they staff, how they cultivate and develop their workforces, and how they train, to th...

After nearly a decade of company building, Zuora last week went public, valuing itself on the open market at roughly US$2 billion after gaining 43 percent on its first day of trading. Those outlines don't reveal the importance of Zuora generally, and subscription billing systems in particular, to th...