Articles by Richard Adhikari

Verizon last week completed its US$4.5 billion acquisition of Yahoo's operating business assets, merging it with its existing AOL business to create Oath The new subsidiary encompasses more than 50 media and technology brands -- including HuffPost; Yahoo Sports, Finance and Mail; AOL.com; Makers; Tumblr; TechCrunch; Flickr; and Build Studios....

Amazon on Friday announced that it has inked a deal to acquire Whole Foods Market for close to US$14 billion in cash. The agreement includes assumption of Whole Foods' net debt Whole Foods will run as a wholly independent subsidiary of Amazon. It will continue to operate stores under its own brand and source products from vendors and partners....

Visa this week announced the Visa Ready Program for Business Solutions, a strategic framework to help ensure that tech companies integrating with Visa's B2B payment services and data solutions meet the company's standards and are market ready The program lets Visa's tech partners quickly integrate and approve various Visa B2B payments solutions, in...

More than 80 percent of high-growth sales organizations use five or more sales technologies, suggests a recent online survey of 400 companies. Velocify and the American Association of Inside Sales Professionals partnered on the research and released their findings on Tuesday The average number of sales technologies in use was 10, based on the parti...

SoftBank on Thursday announced that it will acquire robotics company Boston Dynamics from Alphabet, parent company of Google. Softbank also agreed to buy robotics firm Schaft as part of the same deal SoftBank Robotics is the company's subsidiary that focuses on the development, sales and maintenance of humanoid and service robots....

LogMeIn on Thursday unveiled Bold360, a customer engagement platform that evolved from Boldchat -- the live website chat software it acquired five years ago Bold360 has an intuitive interface that consolidates data from different systems to present a unified view of all customer interactions.

Amazon on Tuesday introduced a Prime membership priced at US$5.99 monthly for people on government assistance who have a valid Electronic Benefits Transfer card. A Prime membership ordinarily costs $10.99 per month, or $99 per year The EBT card is used to disburse funds for a variety of government assistance programs, including Temporary Assistance...

Salesforce on Wednesday announced the Sales Cloud Lightning Partner Relationship Management app as a replacement for partner portals and electronic data interchanges that lack modern features such as built-in mobile, social analytics and AI capabilities The PRM app has an interactive Guided Setup Wizard that lets channel managers configure, customi...

Cybersecurity expert Eugene Kaspersky has volunteered to turn over his company's software source code to allay fears about possible ties with the Russian government, The Australian reported last week. Kaspersky made the offer public at CeBIT Australia Some U.S. officials have expressed concerns that Kaspersky Lab might have a close working relation...

Genesys on Monday introduced G-Nine as the innovation framework underlying all of its product offerings. "Think of G-Nine as the Genesys innovation framework that guides many aspects of our business -- product strategy being one of those," said Genesys CMO Merijn te Booij....

Verizon Enterprise Solutions on Friday released Visual Interactive Calling, a software development kit and platform in the Verizon network designed to enable banks, retailers, airlines, travel and hospitality companies, and other firms to communicate visually with their customers "The sweet spot for this solution is enterprises that have deep mobil...

Nvidia recently announced that Toyota will use its Drive PX AI car computer platform for advanced autonomous vehicles slated for introduction over the next few years Nvidia is combining breakthroughs in AI and high-performance computing to build Nvidia Drive PX, the brain of the autonomous car, said CEO Jensen Huang at Nvidia's GPU Technology Confe...

SugarCRM on Wednesday announced the general availability of Sugar 7.9 with a new quote-generation and management feature that helps users turn opportunities into closed deals. The upgrade provides next-generation reporting capabilities, plus enhanced advanced workflow, which lets users trigger a process based on fields changing to or from specific...

Cardiogram last week announced that it has developed a preliminary algorithm to use with the Apple Watch and Android Wear devices to detect atrial fibrillation with higher accuracy than previously validated detection methods Atrial fibrillation, or AF, affects about 2.7 million Americans, and increases the risk of stroke by five times. Overall, it ...

HPE on Tuesday introduced the world's largest single-memory computer as part of The Machine, its research project into memory-driven computing The computer has 160 T-bytes of memory, and HPE expects the architecture to allow memory to scale up to 4.096 yottabytes....

Veeva Systems earlier this week announced Veeva CRM MyInsights, a new cloud-based data visualization capability producing tailored insights within Veeva CRM MyInsights lets users of tablets or other mobile devices access, analyze and visualize information in real time....

Google and AIY Projects last week launched an open source do-it-yourself artificial intelligence Voice Kit for Raspberry Pi hobbyists The AIY Voice Kit includes hardware for audio capture and playback, connectors for the dual mike daughterboard and speaker, GPIO pins to connect low-voltage components such as micro servos and sensors, and an optiona...

A phishing scam that surfaced earlier this week used Google Docs in an attack against at least 1 million Gmail users However, that amounted to fewer than 0.1 percent of Gmail users were affected, according to the company.

Salesforce on Tuesday launched the AppExchange Partner Program, or APP, for developers, independent software vendors and startups, as a replacement for its current ISV Partner Program The APP will cost much less. Its baseline percent-net-revenue (PNR) model for all new APP partners has been slashed from 25 percent to 15 percent....

United Airlines CEO Oscar Munoz on Tuesday apologized to the United States Congress for his company causing a passenger to be dragged off a UA flight last month United failed its customers and failed as a company in that incident, and this has to be a turning point for the airline, Munoz told the U.S. House of Representatives Transportation Committ...