James Farrell
Latest from James Farrell
‘We need more data!’ Steve Ballmer releases USAFacts to provide info on government spending
Former Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Steve Ballmer released his new project into the wild: a website that gives people easy access to government data without taking them on a maze-like journey into confounding digital archives. USAFacts is pretty much the everyman’s website for access into what the government is spending money on. It’s also a massive ...
A murder video posted to Facebook was inevitable, but our reaction wasn’t
On Easter Sunday, 74-year-old Robert Godwin Sr. was shot in the street in downtown Cleveland. The scene was filmed by 37-year-old Steve Stephens, and then posted to Facebook where it was subsequently, not surprisingly, watched and shared thousands of times. The video is less than a minute long, with the actual impact of the bullet ...
Report: Robots to take one in three UK jobs, requiring billions for retraining
More than 10 million jobs will be automated out of existence over the next two decades, and the poor will be hurt the most, the Institute for Public Policy Research said in a new report. The robots are coming, said the report from the British think tank, and it will be jobs in the lower-skill ...
After a very bad year at Uber, Susan Fowler starts developer publication at Stripe
Online payment processing firm Stripe Inc. said Thursday it’s launching Increment, a quarterly publication aimed at a software engineering audience with input from many of the world’s leading tech companies. But the bigger news is the editor-in-chief: Susan Fowler. Fowler, who famously detailed what sounded like a year in hell at Uber Technologies Inc., had ...
Tech giants unite against Trump administration’s plans to overhaul net neutrality
A lobbying group representing some the world’s biggest Internet companies, including Google Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Facebook Inc. and Netflix Inc., is fighting to save net neutrality. Following a draft of revised net neutrality conditions by Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai, which could overhaul the regulations put in place by the Obama administration, the Internet Association ...
Uber loses another top exec, this time PR boss Rachel Whetstone
Uber Technologies Inc.’s senior vice president of global public policy and communications, Rachel Whetstone, is the latest in a long line of top executives to leave the ride-hailing giant. Whetstone, who left Google Inc. to join Uber in 2015, said she was proud of the work she had done at Uber, but didn’t go into ...
US drone sales are going through the roof, doubling from last year
U.S. drone sales more than doubled from February 2016 to February 2017, according to a report from the NPD group released on Tuesday. In spite of drones being considered a rather expensive gadget, the report revealed that high-end drones were in demand. “Drones with a price tag over $300 drove 84 percent of dollar sales ...
US says pay discrimination against women at Google is ‘extreme,’ a charge it denies
In an ongoing investigation, the U.S. Department of Labor has accused Google Inc. of paying its female employees less than its male counterparts. A week after Equal Pay Day in the U.S. and reports surfacing that suggest the tech industry is still rife with wage abuse against women, the Department of Labor said Google is breaking ...
Updated: Twitter sues US government after order to reveal identity of Trump dissenter
Twitter Inc. Thursday filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration after the government tried to force the social media platform to reveal the identity of one of its users. * Updated: On Friday, the Department of Homeland Security dropped its attempt to reveal the owner of the account, prompting Twitter in turn to drop its ...
Tech unicorn Okta raises target again ahead of Friday’s IPO
San Francisco-based security services company Okta Inc. has raised the target for what it expects to raise in its initial public offering to $215 million. The company, which plans to sell shares to the public starting Friday, had originally filed for a $100 million offering in March, though that amount was widely seen as a ...