Category: News and Views

Google and Microsoft agree to lawsuit truce | BBC News

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Microsoft and Google have agreed to end a five-year battle over patents.

Eighteen lawsuits had been active between the companies, relating to uses of technologies in mobile phones, wifi and other areas.

Details of the deal were not shared, but in a joint statement the firms said they would “collaborate on certain patent matters”.

It is the latest move by technology firms to keep patent rows out of the courts.

The battles, particularly over software, intensified in recent years as firms sought to capitalise on their patent portfolios.

But of late there has been a shift towards licensing rather than litigation.

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AI Is About To Go Mainstream And Reshape The Workplace | TechCrunch

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Much like the evolution of systems design, IT-enabled process change ebbs and flows over time. We see this in history as each technology revolution brings with it a refactoring of business operations.

With the rise of client/server computing in the 1980s, and the introduction of database servers and visual development tools like PowerBuilder, “business process re-engineering” became all the craze during the 1990s.

By 1993, 60 percent of the Fortune 500 developed IT systems to automate mundane tasks like insurance claims processing or AP invoice/purchase order reconciliation, channeling the mandate of technology-led business transformation in Michael Hammer’s infamous 1990 HBR article, “Don’t Automate, Obliterate.”

Twenty-odd years later, we’re about to see another “flow” of transformation thanks to resurgent interest in artificial intelligence and the emergence of the AI-powered business application. What’s different this time around is the transformation will be driven bottom up by rank-and-file employees, making it potentially more disruptive than any “flow” of process change that came before. What are AI-powered apps, and what do they have to do with business process re-engineering?

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The Fake Traffic Schemes That Are Rotting the Internet | Bloomberg Business

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Ron Amram has been in the brand marketing business for about 20 years. In the 2000s he was media director for Sprint’s prepaid cellular group, mainly figuring out where the carrier should spend its ad dollars—print, outdoor, digital, or broadcast. TV was always at the top of the pyramid. A TV campaign was like “the Air Force,” Amram says. “You wanted to get your message out, you did carpet bombing.” But TV wasn’t cheap, nor did it solve “that age-old question: Half of my marketing is working, half of it is not, and I don’t know which half.”

About 10 years ago, not long after Google went public and Yahoo! was still worth upward of $50 billion, attitudes shifted. Digital search and display ads had the potential to reach TV-size audiences at a fraction of the price. “People thought it was going to change everything,” Amram says.

The euphoria escalated again around 2010 with the arrival of programmatic advertising, a typically banal industry term for what is, essentially, automation. The ideal programmatic transaction works like this: A user clicks on a website and suddenly her Internet address and browsing history are packaged and whisked off to an auction site, where software, on behalf of advertisers, scrutinizes her profile (or an anonymized version of it) and determines whether to bid to place an ad next to that article. Ford Motor could pay to put its ads on websites for car buffs, or, with the help of cookies, track car buffs wherever they may be online. Ford might want to target males age 25-40 for pickup-truck ads, or, better yet, anybody in that age group who’s even read about pickups in the past six months.

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Meet 3 angry Volkswagen owners | CNN Money

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Volkswagen’s costly lie has left the giant automaker in crisis. It has also left its customers feeling confused, cheated and steaming mad.

The emissions scandal affects nearly 500,000 diesel Volkswagen and Audi cars in the U.S. alone — and millions more around the world. The scandal came to light when the EPA said Volkswagen had cheated on smog tests.

U.S. regulators have ordered the company to recall the cars at issue. But VW hasn’t done that yet, nor has it said how it will get the cars to comply with the law or how it will compensate customers.

Bottom line: Who knows what comes next? CNNMoney has heard from many Volkswagen customers in recent days. Here are some of their stories.

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Google launches Customer Match, Similar Audiences and Universal App Campaigns | Business Insider

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On Sunday evening, Google announced two new ad products it hopes will help it gain more share of the mobile advertising market.

The new products are quite similar to a service and a format already available from Facebook. And they’re two of the advertising products marketers love most about the social network.

First up, Google has announced a new product called “Customer Match.” It works in a similar way to Facebook’s popular “Custom Audiences” product, which the social network rolled out to all advertisers back in 2013.

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What Does the Pope Think About Technology? #It’sComplicated | WIRED

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HE’S GOT A stunning 7.2 million followers on Twitter but believes digital media “can stop people from learning how to live wisely, to think deeply and to love generously.”

He has posed for selfies in St. Peter’s Square, but has lamented the fact that so much communication online is purely about display, not real connection.

He’s called the Internet a “gift from God.” But he’s also warned that the abundance of data and digital stimulation we all consume each day can amount to a kind of “mental pollution” that harms our relationships and shields us from the real pain and joy that comes with human interaction.

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New Bill Would Cut Off Federal Forfeiture Funds For DEA Marijuana Seizures | Forbes

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A new bipartisan bill would eliminate a controversial source of funding for one federal marijuana seizure program. Last week, Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) and Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI) introduced the “Stop Civil Asset Forfeiture Funding for Marijuana Suppression Act.” The bill is quite simple: It would prevent the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) from using federal forfeiture funds to pay for its Domestic Cannabis Eradication/Suppression Program. Additionally, the bill would ban transferring property to federal, state or local agencies if that property “is used for any purpose pertaining to” the DEA’s marijuana eradication program.

Under this program, the DEA receives federal forfeiture funds ($18 million in 2013), which it then funnels to over 120 local and state agencies to eliminate marijuana grow sites nationwide. Last year, the program was responsible for over 6,300 arrests, eradicating over 4.3 million marijuana plants and seizing $27.3 million in assets. More than half of all plants destroyed were in California, which also accounted for over one-third of seized assets and nearly 40 percent of the arrests.

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What Does the Google Buy Button Mean for Your E-Commerce Business? | All Business

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It takes a lot to run a successful e-commerce business these days,and there are plenty of resources to help you when it comes to looking for strong business advice. But with all of this advice, comes more obstacles, like how to convert customers.

If you want customers, then you need Google’s help; Google essentially controls what traffic goes to which site. So when Google changes how it operates, it puts a lot of strain on businesses in order to comply. The Google “buy button” is next up in the queue of things changing, and e-commerce store owners are worried it will impact their businesses.

Why Are E-Commerce Stores Worried About the Google Buy Button?

The fear for e-commerce business owners is that Google will be more than a search engine, instead becoming a reseller or middleman. This obviously robs e-commerce stores of important relationships with their customers. The fear is that this will lead to an Amazon-style situation, where customers often believe that they are doing business with Amazon as opposed to third-party sellers, and any customer service and returns processing will be handled without the control of the e-commerce store operator.

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Weekly Economic Update | LAEDC

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v.19 n. 39 – Released September 22, 2015

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