Fitbit sprinted into Wall Street in its debut as a public company Thursday, as its shares opened 52 percent higher than the price that the wearables company had set for them.Priced at US$20 on Wednesday, the stock instead opened at $30.40. Earlier in the week Fitbit had increased the price range of its IPO to $17 to $19 from the original range of $14 to $16.With its shares trading for around $30, Fitbit is worth approximately $6 billion dollars.Fitbit’s wearables collect health and fitness data, including calories burned and steps walked. While smartwatches also offer these features, some analysts are bullish about fitness trackers, saying that they generally have simpler user interfaces, longer battery lives and lower prices.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The European Union faces a huge shortfall of qualified IT staff in Europe by 2020, prompting EU countries to redouble efforts to offer technology training.There are not enough IT specialists graduating in Europe to fill all jobs, creating a digital skills gap that could lead to 825,000 vacancies in the sector five years from now, according to figures released by the European Commission on Thursday.The news comes as four more countries join a program begun in 2013 to increase opportunities for workers to learn IT skills across the EU.Almost 24 million of the EU’s 500 million inhabitants are looking for work, according to Commission figures, yet businesses are having difficulty finding skilled IT workers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Image by Brian Dunnette CC BY 2.0All technology, sooner or later, becomes obsolete at which point it’s often simply disposed of in one way or another and forgotten about. Sometimes that piece of technology is a one-of-kind or is historic for some other reason but its importance isn’t recognized at the time and it’s lost for good. Every once in a while, though, a historic piece of hardware or software is saved from such an inglorious fate through the hard work of those who appreciate its historic value or thanks simply to dumb luck. Use the arrows above to read about 6 historic tech items that were literally pulled out of a dumpster, landfill, or recycling center - or were rescued just before they made it into one.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft hands control of devices to Windows boss Myerson, pushes Elop overboardStephen Elop is leaving Microsoft for a second time, as CEO Satya Nadella hands control of the devices division he ran to Windows chief Terry Myerson, Computerworld reports. Elop previously left Microsoft to run Nokia, rejoining his former employer when it bought Nokia’s smartphone business. Myerson will now run the combined “Windows and Devices Group,” making him one of his own best customers.Uber goes to court in California to deny a driver employee rightsTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Oracle has reported a sharp drop in profit for the quarter just ended, with customers spending more on its cloud services but less on software that runs in their own data centers.Chairman Larry Ellison portrayed the shift as a positive one and said Oracle can make more money selling cloud services over the long term. But the change didn’t seem to help it much last quarter, when its results were also battered by the strong U.S. dollar.Oracle’s revenue and profit for the quarter, the fourth of its fiscal year, missed the forecasts of financial analysts, and its stock fell almost 7 percent after the results were announced Wednesday.Oracle’s cloud business seems to be growing strongly. Revenue from software sold as a service climbed 29 percent from this time last year, to $416 million, the company said. But that’s a relatively small part of Oracle’s business, and it wasn’t enough to offset mediocre performance elsewhere.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Electronic Frontier Foundation released the latest version of its annual “Who Has Your Back” report on tech companies’ data disclosure policies Wednesday afternoon, giving perfect five-star ratings to companies including Apple, Adobe, Dropbox and Yahoo.This year’s publication is the fifth edition of the EFF’s reporting on tech companies’ policies around disclosing information to governments in response to data requests, and it brings major changes to the organization’s framework.“The criteria we used to judge companies in 2011 were ambitious for the time, but theyve been almost universally adopted in the years since then,” the EFF said in its report.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
To boost its in-house machine learning efforts, Twitter has acquired Whetlab, a startup that makes it easier for companies to use machine learning tools.As part of the acquisition, announced Wednesday, Twitter will shut down Whetlab’s beta service on July 15, and will no longer accept sign-ups for the product. Current users will be able to export their data from Whetlabs’s website in either tab-separated format or JSON.It’s not exactly clear how Twitter plans to use Whetlab’s technology to enhance its existing machine learning plans. However, the startup’s tool seems useful for any company implementing machine learning techniques. The technology, which was developed by researchers at Harvard, Toronto and Sherbrooke universities, takes in information about the problem a user wants to solve with machine learning. It then gives the user a series of suggestions to help them optimize a machine learning model to solve the problem.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
So you are about to launch a new product or service, or are thinking about it. Congratulations. Unfortunately, having the best idea (or product or service) in the world may not get you buzz, or sales, if the right people don’t know about it. Here are nine steps you can take to increase the odds of your rollout being successful.1. Make sure the product or service works – before you start selling it. Whether your product or service is digital in nature, or you plan on selling it online, first “make sure the app or website is bug-free,” says Mark Tuchscherer, cofounder & president, Geeks Chicago, a Web development company. “We see products launch all the time that companies didn't test thoroughly, and this is the best way to lose potential customers,” he explains. “People have short attention spans and want stuff to work fast. If your application crashes in the first few seconds, you are going to lose a lot of new users.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Mark Penn, Microsoft’s executive vice president of advertising and strategy, will leave the company in September to open a private equity firm.Called the Stagwell Group, Penn’s new firm raised $250 million in capital from investors including former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, and could make up to $750 million in acquisitions using leverage. With that money, Stagwell will focus on investing in advertising, research, data analytics, public relations, and digital marketing services, the company said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco plans to invest US$10 billion in China, although its sales in the country are slumping due in part to persistent security concerns surrounding U.S. technology.The investment marks a “new chapter” for the company, and it includes agreements with the Chinese government to expand in areas including research, and job creation, Cisco said on Wednesday.The $10 billion investment will be made over several years, and will help spur technology innovation in the country, Cisco said, without further elaborating. It called the move a “renewed commitment” suggesting that the investment would be added on top of its existing operational expenses in China. Cisco could not be immediately reached for comment.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Marketers have long struggled with the challenge of engaging customers across channels, but an updated version of Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud could help.Unveiled on Wednesday, the new software offers several enhancements designed to give companies a single place for planning customer “journeys,” or managing their interactions with a brand across sales, service, marketing and more. It also aims to make it easier for marketers to orchestrate ad targeting across the digital advertising ecosystem.First, Marketing Cloud’s updated Journey Builder tool promises to give marketers the ability to guide customers on journeys across channels and devices and ensure that those customers always get the right message in the right place at the right time. Essentially, it does that by enabling companies to connect every interaction customers have with their brand across every department, making it easier to see and manage the overall picture.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Mohit Aron has a tough act to follow: His previous startup, Nutanix, may be on the cusp of filing for an IPO that values the hyperconverged infrastructure company at $2.5 billion. But Aron is off to a good start with his new venture, Cohesity, which this week emerges from stealth mode with $70 million in venture funding, reference-able customers such as Tribune Media, and a focus on a potentially big market in converging the secondary storage that houses so much DevOps, data protection, analytics and other unstructured data.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If youre looking to hire a developer, which is more important: her LinkedIn profile or samples of her code on GitHub?Many would argue the latter, which helps to explain why the online code repository is reportedly closing in on a valuation of $2 billion.“GitHub is an interesting company,” said analyst Frank Scavo, president of Computer Economics. “It is partly a hosting service for developers and partly a social media site.”The San Francisco startup, which offers a popular code-sharing platform for software developers, is seeking a whopping $200 million in an upcoming private funding round that values the company as high as $2 billion, according to a report Monday from Bloomberg, which cited people familiar with the matter.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It would have been easy enough for Dunkin’ Donuts to dismiss the Internet phenomenon “Dressgate” as irrelevant to its brand. What, after all, could an online debate over optical illusions and the color of a dress possibly have to do with pastry and coffee?Turns out, plenty. In a shining example of real-time marketing done right, Dunkin’ Donuts quickly identified the viral trend and rapidly conceived and executed a relevant promotion to insert its brand into the conversation. On the morning of Feb. 27—just hours after the phenomenon erupted—the company tweeted an image of a black-and-blue frosted doughnut alongside a white-and-gold one. “Doesn’t matter if it’s blue/black or white/gold, they still taste delicious,” read the accompanying text.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The far-and-away best satire of the technology industry on TV airs the last episode of its second season Sunday night, and you really should be watching. Silicon Valley has continued to bring the funny throughout the second set of episodes, and the finale looks like it’s leading up to a fairly insane climax.The first season ended on what was easily the strongest episode of the series so far, as the team won TechCrunch Disrupt thanks to a flash of genius inspired by what can only be described as a very clever, in-depth and witty joke having to do with an important part of the male anatomy. As good as the second season has been, its finale has a lot to live up to, if it’s going to be considered as good as the first.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Once the dreams of science-fiction, self-driving cars will soon allow passengers to specify a destination and let the car pick the best route based on factors such as time, traffic, freeways and fuel consumption. This kind of automation for an enterprise’s most precious commodity – data – is also soon coming to a data center near you.Intelligent data mobility delivered through data virtualization will allow IT professionals to specify service-level objects (SLO) such as performance, reliability, high availability, archiving and cost, and then let software automatically move data to the right storage in real time. Let’s examine the problem of data immobility and how data placement through data virtualization will finally solve common mismatch of compute and storage, resource sprawl and the cost of overprovisioning.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Dell has added Pluribus Networks to its lineup of disaggregation partners.Dell will now offer Pluribus’ Open Netvisor Linux operating system on its S6000-ON and S-4048-ON 10G/40G switches. This is an addition to the Cumulus Networks, Big Switch Networks, Midokura and VMware packages Dell already supports on those switches.Dell’s strategy is to make its merchant silicon-based hardware appealing to cloud providers who usually opt for bare metal switches running a variety of operating systems that they can easily replace or expand for scale or other requirements.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Looking to hasten the development of a Hyperloop pod transportation prototype, SpaceX this week said it would open a public completion to build a half-scale passenger system capable of traveling at speeds in excess of 760MPH.SpaceX founder, entrepreneur Elon Musk in 2013, envisioned the Hyperloop concept. He proposed building a network of elevated pneumatic tubes where specially build passenger pods could zip between two points – in this case between San Francisco and Los Angeles at speeds over 760MPH. Reuters
Elon MuskTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here