There’s a joke* being reshared on chat apps that takes the form of a multiple-choice question — asking who’s the leading force in workplace digital transformation? The red-lined punchline is not the CEO or CTO, but: C) COVID-19. There’s likely more than a grain of truth underpinning the quip. The novel coronavirus is pushing a […]
While the origins of its coronavirus testing program were muddled by President Trump’s misleading announcements attributing its efforts to Google and inflating its scale, Alphabet’s Verily health sciences subsidiary has established and grown its community-based California testing initiative, deploying drive-up testing sites and ramping the number of tests completed from just over 1,200 last Wednesday […]
Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren may have ended her 2020 presidential run, but the tech used to drive her campaign will live on. Members of her staff announced they would make public the top apps and digital tools developed in Warren’s bid to become the Democratic nominee for president. “In our work, we leaned heavily on […]
Tesla is reducing the number of on-site workers at its Nevada gigafactory by 75% in response to the growing spread of COVID-19, according to an update from Storey County, where the massive plant is located. The information, which was first reported by Bloomberg, was part of a larger update on the Tahoe Reno Industrial Center […]
Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced Friday that his company would be donating more than $800 million in ad credits and loans to help government orgs and small businesses respond to the COVID-19 crisis. The announcement gives a full breakdown of the deployment, the bulk of which is in credits for Google services: Google will be […]
Josh Nadeau is a Canadian journalist based in St. Petersburg who covers the intersection of Russia, technology and culture. He has written for The Economist, Atlas Obscura and The Outline. More posts by this contributor Russia’s push back against big tech has major consequences for Apple Starlink, the satellite branch of Elon Musk’s SpaceX company, […]
With limited prospects for growth, one of the iron laws of economic downturns is that advertising is among the first budgets to be cut. Advertising revenues have already cratered at many alt-weekly newspapers, which heavily rely on local events and restaurants that have been shuttered in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak. BuzzFeed even went […]
YouTube has announced that videos on the site will default to standard definition (SD) quality for the next month in order to cope with demand from the bored, housebound masses. Similar measures were undertaken by the company in Europe last week, and other big consumers of bandwidth are likewise taking steps to minimize their impact. […]
The vicissitudes of social distancing have taken many people by surprise, making video calls a new necessity for distant socializing. But which of the two-dozen apps out there should you and your (perhaps not as tech-savvy) friends and family use? Here are our recommendations, whether it’s for a coffee meeting, a family get-together or a […]
Last Friday, President Trump, together with Vice President Pence and White House coronavirus task force coordinator Deborah Brix, announced that we would soon see a new website go up that would be at the core of the government’s testing strategy. This website, which was supposedly being built by 1,700 Google engineers, was meant to help […]