Author Archives: Matt Kapko

SAN FRANCISCO — The pressing issue of modern technology’s negative impact on jobs was largely ignored during the 2016 presidential election, according to California’s Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, who spoke this week at the Code Enterprise conference. Today’s society has deficiencies in education and regulation, and it lacks the collective mindset necessary to transform tech challenges into opportunities, Newsom said. 

The roles large technology companies play in eliminating jobs, and the responsibilities they should bear to fight this problem, are rarely discussed. However, senior executives at Google and LinkedIn addressed the issue on stage at Code Enterprise, telling the audience of business leaders that it is paramount for tech titans to minimize job losses by creating new opportunities.

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The leaders of Facebook, the world’s largest social network, which reaches 1.18 billion people every day, want to absolve the company from any responsibility for the potential proliferation of misinformation on its platform. As the dust settles following a polarized presidential election, Facebook is trying to defend itself against claims of impropriety and unchecked influence on American politics.

The social giant is taking hits from all sides of the political spectrum and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is walking a challenging line as he tries to placate Facebook’s critics. In May, he met with a group of conservative leaders to dismiss reports that Facebook’s team of curators in charge of its Trending Topics had deliberately suppressed stories from right-leaning news outlets. Then, in a blog post published four days after the election, Zuckerberg defended the social network as a neutral party that doesn’t bear the same responsibilities as a news source and said Facebook should be “extremely cautious about becoming arbiters of truth ourselves.” 

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Momentum is important for an organization before its initial public offering (IPO), and Snap, maker of the Snapchat social network, has no shortage of it as it prepares to go public during the next few months. The popular messaging and entertainment app continues to grow quickly, with about 150 million daily users as of June, according to Bloomberg. Snap also last week released a limited supply of a new set of $130 video-recording glasses, called Spectacles, to drum up more interest and prove it can sell hardware. 

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Slack may soon be careening back to earth following a meteoric rise that saw the messaging app become one of the most popular and revered in business. That’s because in the last 30 days two of the world’s largest and most influential technology companies have set their sights on Slack and the burgeoning, increasingly crowded collaboration market.

Workplace messaging and communications apps have been vying for enterprise adoption for years, but various macro trends have come together to create a greater opportunity and interest in the collaboration space, according to Vanessa Thompson, research vice president at IDC’s collaboration and communities program (CIO.com and IDC are both owned by International Data Group.). The ubiquity of cloud and mobile technologies combined with a decline in annual productivity per working hour among U.S. workers has carved out a new space for apps like Slack, Workplace by Facebook, Microsoft Teams and others to make a move.

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Microsoft yesterday entered the bustling enterprise collaboration market with Microsoft Teams. The Slack competitor borrows heavily from that app’s design and user experience and is available in beta for Office 365 enterprise and small business customers. Microsoft Teams is expected to become widely available in early 2017. 

CEO Satya Nadella described Microsoft Teams as a “chat-based workspace” during a press event. “It’s where people can come together in a digital forum to have casual conversations, work on content, create work plans, integrated all within one unified experience designed to facilitate real-time conversations and collaboration while maintaining and building up that institutional knowledge of a team,” he said. 

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Twitter has played an outsized role in a 2016 presidential election that continues to test the electorate. Despite Twitter’s ongoing business problems, the ability of a single tweet to shape political conversation and drive media coverage has never been greater. A marked contrast exists between Twitter’s business acumen (or lack thereof) and the sometimes seemingly unintentional influence it wields on the current election.

The leading candidates for America’s next presidency use Twitter to energize their supporters and draw citizens who wouldn’t otherwise follow political discourse. Twitter’s simple and personal messages resonate in a way that more traditional means of communication — mail robocalls and yard signs — no longer can.

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Messaging and collaboration applications are the most mission-critical mobile apps in enterprise today, according to a new survey of executives commissioned by Adobe. More than half of the professionals surveyed (57 percent) said mobile apps for messaging and collaboration are critical to their organizations’ success, and a similar number of respondents (59 percent) said such apps will continue to be critical in 2019. 

The survey, which was conducted by Edelman Intelligence, included responses from 1,500 executives in HR, sales and marketing from companies with more than 1,000 employees located in the United States, India, China, the United Kingdom and Germany. 

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