Amazon workers across the world are formalizing their activism with the creation of the Amazon Workers International. Its first action is a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Amazon Director of UK Customer Fulfillment Stefano Perego in which the group demands the company makes permanent certain steps Amazon has implemented amid the COVID-19 pandemic. […]

It’s fair to say that even before the impact of COVID-19, companies had begun a steady march to the cloud. Maybe it wasn’t fast enough for AWS, as Andy Jassy made clear in his 2019 Re:invent keynote, but it was happening all the same and the steady revenue increases across the cloud infrastructure market bore […]

Ali Amin-Javaheri grew up in the chemicals business. His father had worked for Iran’s state-owned chemical company and when the family fled the country in the nineteen eighties during the Iran-Iraq war, they first settled in Houston where employers welcomed the senior Amin-Jahaveri’s experience. Houston in the 80s was dominated by the petrochemicals industry and […]

Amazon is in hot water with a powerful congressional committee interested in the company’s potentially anticompetitive business practices. In a bipartisan letter sent Friday to Jeff Bezos, the House Judiciary committee demanded that the Amazon CEO explain discrepancies between his own prior statements and recent reporting from The Wall Street Journal. Specifically, the letter addressed […]

If you find voice assistants frustratingly dumb, you’re hardly alone. The much-hyped promise of AI-driven vocal convenience very quickly falls through the cracks of robotic pedantry. A smart AI that has to come back again (and sometimes again) to ask for extra input to execute your request can seem especially dumb — when, for example, […]

Apple’s long-rumored Mac ARM chip transition could happen as early as next year, according to a new report from Bloomberg. The report says that Apple is currently working on three Mac processors based on the design of the A14 system-on-a-chip that will power the next-generation iPhone. The first of the Mac versions will greatly exceed […]

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Apple device sales have taken a hit, but the company’s services are doing swell. The iPhone, the longtime cornerstone of the company’s hardware portfolio, hit $28.96 billion in revenue for Q2, down from $31.1 billion from this time last year. The iPad and Mac lines saw drops […]

The UK has this week started testing a coronavirus contacts-tracing app which NHSX, a digital arm of the country’s National Health Service, has been planning and developing since early March. The test is taking place in the Isle of Wight, a 380km2 island off the south coast of England, with a population of around 140,000. […]

The UK may be rethinking its decision to shun Apple and Google’s API for its national coronavirus contacts tracing app, according to the Financial Times, which reported yesterday that the government is paying an IT supplier to investigate whether it can integrate the tech giants’ approach after all. As we’ve reported before coronavirus contacts tracing […]

It’s fair to say that even before the impact of COVID-19, companies had begun a steady march to the cloud. Maybe it wasn’t fast enough for AWS, as Andy Jassy made clear in his 2019 Re:invent keynote, but it was happening all the same and the steady revenue increases across the cloud infrastructure market bore […]

This week we continue to look at how the coronavirus outbreak is impacting the world of apps, plus the use of live-streaming apps as fundraising tools and more.

The UK’s data protection watchdog confirmed today the government still hasn’t given it sight of a key legal document attached to the coronavirus contacts tracing app which is being developed by the NHSX, the digital transformation branch of the country’s National Health Service . Under UK and EU law, a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) […]

The UK has this week started testing a coronavirus contacts-tracing app which NHSX, a digital arm of the country’s National Health Service, has been planning and developing since early March. The test is taking place in the Isle of Wight, a 380km2 island off the south coast of England, with a population of around 140,000. […]

The UK may be rethinking its decision to shun Apple and Google’s API for its national coronavirus contacts tracing app, according to the Financial Times, which reported yesterday that the government is paying an IT supplier to investigate whether it can integrate the tech giants’ approach after all. As we’ve reported before coronavirus contacts tracing […]

The coronavirus is proving to have an unexpected upside for the adtech industry. The U.K.’s data protection agency has paused an investigation into the industry’s processing of internet users’ personal data, saying targeted suspension of privacy oversight is merited because of disruption to businesses as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The investigation into adtech […]

“Is Greta Thunberg a hypocrite?” Google that phrase and you will get thousands of results. It just goes to show that, to a large extent, the “Q&A” model is broken on the internet. Where once Yahoo Answers and Quora were considered the bright young things of Web 2.0’s “Read/Write Web,” today there is only the […]

Pillar of country’s economy resumes operations despite concerns over workers’ health

Keeping cinemas open will not stop operators from falling into a sea of red ink

Producers overwhelmed as supply chain disruption fuels fears of shortages

Companies lean heavily on equity in effort to dent blow from coronavirus

Canberra’s call for an inquiry into the origins of coronavirus has provoked threats from Beijing

Catering and ground-handling company excluded from Canberra’s coronavirus support scheme

Bank alleges collapsed Singaporean company raised money through duplicate invoices

Kingdom offers crude to US at a premium but shows reluctance to lose Asian market share

Executive decree set to prop up prices in hopes of saving domestic shale industry

Central bank of Latin America’s largest economy can now engage in monetary financing

Investment in Reliance tech and telecoms division follows Facebook and Silver Lake agreements

Two sides hold call on ‘phase one’ deal in rare easing of war of words over pandemic

Government’s travel ban due to coronavirus makes it nearly impossible for citizens to return home

US asset manager apologises following comments by company’s president over debt rules

Trust between the countries has deteriorated during the pandemic and is close to its lowest point since 1979

Founders plan for further expansion in Wuhan and beyond

President Lukashenko under fire from neighbouring countries for lax approach to pandemic

M&A activity has generally slowed down in the weeks since the novel coronavirus took a grip on the world, but there have been some pockets of activity in the tech industry when the price is right or when the divestment/acquisition just makes sense. The world of messaging brings us the latest development in that theme: SAP, […]

Sleuth, an early stage startup from three former Atlassian employees, wants to bring some much-needed order to the continuous delivery process. Today, the company announced it has raised a $3 million seed round. ​CRV led the round with participation from angel investors from New Relic, Atlassian and LaunchDarkly. “Sleuth is a deployment tracker built to […]

In the early 2000s, VMware introduced the world to virtual servers that allowed IT to make more efficient use of idle server capacity. Today, Run:AI is introducing that same concept to GPUs running containerized machine learning projects on Kubernetes. This should enable data science teams to have access to more resources than they would normally […]

Under different circumstances, GitHub would be hosting its Satellite conference in Paris this week. Like so many other events, GitHub decided to switch Satellite to a virtual event, but that isn’t stopping the Microsoft-owned company from announcing quite a bit of news this week. The highlight of GitHub’s announcement is surely the launch of GitHub […]

In spite of being in the midst of a pandemic sowing economic uncertainty, one area that continues to thrive is cloud computing. Perhaps that explains why Microsoft, which saw Azure grow 59% in its most recent earnings report, announced plans to open a new data center in New Zealand once it receives approval from the […]

We find ourselves in a time when certain businesses are being asked to scale to levels they never imagined. Sometimes that increased usage comes in bursts, which means you don’t want to pay for permanent extra capacity you might not always need. Today, Confluent introduced a new scale-on-demand feature for its Apache Kafka cloud service […]

There’s something to be said for consistency through good times and bad, and one company that has had a staggeringly consistent track record is international data center vendor, Equinix. It just recorded its 69th straight positive quarter, according to the company. That’s an astonishing record, and covers over 17 years of positive returns. That means […]

Rish Joshi Contributor Rish is an entrepreneur and investor. Previously, he was a VC at Gradient Ventures (Google’s AI fund), co-founded a fintech startup building an analytics platform for SEC filings and worked on deep-learning research as a graduate student in computer science at MIT. More posts by this contributor Health APIs usher in the […]

Even though Rohit Prakash was a dual MD and PhD researching optogenetics at Stanford University, his entrepreneurial itch kept returning him to his family’s small business roots. He and his co-founder Nipul Patel began researching the travails of small business owners, interviewing countless entrepreneurs, trying to figure out what their risks were or what caused […]

In the beginning, there were three. There was Leap Transit, the Andreessen Horowitz-backed bus startup stocked with Blue Bottle Coffee and furnished with plush stool seating for morning and evening commuters. Then there was the Nightschool’s nostalgic take with off-duty schoolbuses for late-night transport between the East Bay and San Francisco after the region’s commuter rail system BART shut down […]

Quitting Europe would see Washington deliver to Beijing its most important strategic ambition

Past prime ministers put head before heart on Europe. Not any more

The two-party system that prevailed for so long has been upended

Hopefully, its defeat will show the worth of intelligent and honest government

The superficial conclusion is that it will be a gift to populists and authoritarians 

A make-do-and-mend approach will not be enough — we need a societal transformation

Deskless workers make up 80% of the global workforce, but to Desmond Lim, that job title is his entire world. Lim grew up in Singapore and saw his father wake up every morning, six days a week, at 5 a.m. to start his job as a driver. Lim and his mom, who worked as a […]