Author Archives: Matt Kapko

Snap faced the music in a new and very real way this week. The company’s first earnings report, after going public in March, disappointed investors and fell short of expectations on almost every metric.

The makers of Snapchat reported a $2.2 billion loss in the first quarter on almost $150 million in revenue and user growth slowed to its lowest rate in years. Shares took a nosedive and remain down by more than 20 percent at the week’s end.

[ Related: Snap soars on IPO, now what? ]

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Uber, like the smartphones and wireless networks that enable it, entered the enterprise market uninvited or at least unbeknownst to most levels of management. However, since late 2014 Uber has been developing more direct relationships through a specialized service for enterprises that assists companies with billing, reporting and management.

The 8-year-old company is now the most expensed line item for business travel — ahead of Starbucks — and ground transportation accounts for half of all business expense line items overall, says Travis Bogard, Uber’s global head of enterprise. “Companies started using Uber a lot because employees started using Uber a lot,” he tells CIO.com.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

NEW ORLEANS — Amazon has quickly built a commanding lead on voice-enabled digital assistants, but the company’s vision for bringing Alexa to connected devices as diverse as light switches, automobiles and household appliances is just getting underway. Amazon’s plans for Alexa are more widespread than any device category or the constraints of Amazon’s own hardware aspirations, Steve Rabuchin, vice president of Amazon Alexa, said at last week’s Collision conference.

“We have this vision of Alexa everywhere,” he said. “We can’t do it all ourselves. There’s no way we’re going to build every smart home device and every wearable… so we opened that up.” Voice-controlled technology is a “significant new interface that humans will use. It’s very convenient and it makes hard things simple.”

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

NEW ORLEANS — The perception of IT among employees who aren’t involved in the technology centers within their organization is generally bad and the onus is on technology leaders to rectify those problems, Blackstone CTO William Murphy said at the Collision conference this week. “People have been disappointed over IT many times,” he said. “It’s not necessarily the fault of technologists, but technologists have not stood up for themselves.”

IT still bears the blame for almost every technology-related project that’s been delayed for the last 20 years and IT professionals need to find a way out of those internal conflicts, according to Murphy. Such a change requires a shift in thinking about IT’s role and how it can deliver a more collaborative model for technology innovation, he said.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

NEW ORLEANS — The perception of IT among employees who aren’t involved in the technology centers within their organization is generally bad and the onus is on technology leaders to rectify those problems, Blackstone CTO William Murphy said at the Collision conference this week. “People have been disappointed over IT many times,” he said. “It’s not necessarily the fault of technologists, but technologists have not stood up for themselves.”

IT still bears the blame for almost every technology-related project that’s been delayed for the last 20 years and IT professionals need to find a way out of those internal conflicts, according to Murphy. Such a change requires a shift in thinking about IT’s role and how it can deliver a more collaborative model for technology innovation, he said.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here