Latest Technology News

The media, analyst and investor communities clearly have a love-hate relationship with Snapchat. In the run-up to its IPO, it was hailed as the next great technology company (in part due to Snap's own communication efforts). And now that its S-1 is out, the commentary has turned quite negative. As always, the truth is somewhere in the middle and public filings paint a very clear picture of why that is.

The chart at the top of this post shows quarterly revenue for Snap compared with that of Twitter and Facebook, aligned by founding year (sourced from their respective IPO prospectuses). The first observation is that Snap is going public earlier in its lifecycle than both Facebook and Twitter. Of course, this is partially offset by the fact that Snap was conceived during the "post-PC" smartphone revolution, which accelerated consumer adoption cycles, especially for social media. That said, Snap's advertiser adoption seems to be growing at roughly as the same pace as its predecessors (at the same point in their respective lifecycles), which is more relevant for a revenue comparison. Taking these factors and the chart into account, it looks like Snap's revenue growth is slightly behind Facebook's pace and well ahead of Twitter's.

Whenever I am going on a day trip, such as spending an afternoon in New York City, I pack a special technology bag. Besides my laptop and camera, I am sure to include a USB battery pack. No matter what, I like to know that I can charge my iPhone in an emergency.

But what if I wanted something for a trip that is longer than a day? What if I wanted to stay juiced-up on a camping trip? Heck, what if there is a disaster that cuts my home's electricity? Renogy has a new hardcore product that is sure to excite. The Phoenix All-in-One Solar Powered Generator Briefcase could prove to be quite the life-saver -- it can charge an iPhone 6s 32 times! Not only does it offer a massive 16Ah internal battery, but it can be recharged by the sun. It can charge more than a mere smartphone too.

Using a smartphone while operating a car can be a dangerous affair. You obviously shouldn't text while driving, but sometimes using the device while moving is necessary, such as when using a maps app. Logitech ZeroTouch is an interesting Android-only solution that puts your phone into a special hands-free driving mode when mounted in a dock. It can be quite the elegant solution.

Today, Logitech announces that ZeroTouch is getting even better. The company is adding Amazon Alexa support, meaning you can call upon the voice assistant while in the car. Quite frankly, as great as Alexa is in the home, the assistant should prove equally as valuable in an automobile too.

Opera Software has released Opera 43 to the stable channel with enhanced performance-boosting tools and a welcome productivity tweak.

Instant page loading is a pre-rendering technology which attempts to predict URLs as you type, and starts to load the site in the background before you even hit enter.

Ransomware is a big problem for today's enterprises, the US Department of Justice reports an average of 4,000 ransomware attacks occur in the US every day.

This means detection and fast action is more important than ever. Cloud data protection company Druva is launching an enhanced version of its platform to manage the ransomware threat from detection right through to recovery.

Twitter has long had an abuse and harassment problem, which has put off a lot of would-be users. Over the years the company has taken steps to try to combat the issue, but with very limited success.

However, Twitter is now working hard make the service a more friendly place -- just last week it improved how users report abusive tweets. Today, the company goes even further, and introduces three new changes designed to silence the trolls.

Increasing numbers of companies are coming to accept that it's only a matter of time before they become the victim of some form of data security breach. This means they need to be able to detect and respond to threats more quickly.

Cloud-based security platform Absolute is launching a new Application Persistence product to provide embedded, self-healing capabilities to third-party endpoint controls such as VPN, anti-virus, encryption, systems management and other critical controls that are too easily compromised.

Businesses understand the need to look after sensitive data, but a problem often arises in knowing where that data is. Unstructured information held in folders and documents is just as valuable to hackers as database records and is harder to protect.

Identity management company SailPoint is launching its latest data governance solution, allowing enterprises to guard sensitive files wherever they reside.

The everlasting debate over whether robots will take our jobs or not continues. London-based think tank Reform weighted in, and most humans aren't going to like it.

It recently said that almost 250,000 jobs in the public sector could be replaced by robots in the next two decades. This will mean billions of pounds in savings for businesses and organizations, but also a loss of steady jobs for many people.

Implementing effective security can be time consuming, complex and costly, more so given the adoption of cloud-based systems.

Unified security management (USM) specialist AlienVault is aiming to simplify things with the release of USM Anywhere, an all-in-one Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) security monitoring platform.

Phone spam from robot calling systems is a major issue in the US and around the world, prompting regulators to look at controlling the problem.

Smartphone maker ZTE is taking a proactive approach and teaming up with caller profile service Hiya to integrate caller identification, spam detection and call blocking into its latest Axon 7 handset.

Immigration policy and trade protectionism play large roles in the new Administration of President Donald Trump. With the goal of Making America Great Again the new President wants to more tightly control the flow of goods and labor into the USA. Over the last week this has taken the form of an Executive Order limiting travel from seven specific Muslim countries. That order wasn’t well done, wasn’t well explained, has caused lots of angst here and abroad and is at this moment suspended pending litigation.

That order is supposedly about limiting terrorism. It will be shortly followed, we’re told, by further Presidential actions limiting abusive labor imports using, specifically, H-1B visas. This time, depending again on how the actual order is interpreted, it might be the right thing to do, because H-1B visa abuse is a very real thing that has hurt American workers.

The Email Privacy Act (HR 387) has passed through the House of Representatives for the second time. It's an attempt to update the now-ancient Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) from 1986 which gave cause for concern as it grants the government the ability to access emails and data older than 180 days which is stored on third-party servers without the need for a warrant.

The Email Privacy Act changes that. Privacy advocates are currently celebrating the fact that the updated Act has been approved by the House, but it now needs to pass through the Senate -- where it already faltered last year. Google is among those to welcome the Act's progress.

Freeware machine NirSoft has unveiled its latest system tool, LoadedDLLsView (32-bit version).

If you don’t know what the program does from the name then you’re not in the target audience, but essentially it scans all the running processes on your system, detecting and listing whatever DLLs they’re using.

A huge proportion of web traffic comes from mobile devices these days, and this means people are often trying to access online articles when they have a slow data connection. For this reason, Facebook introduced Instant Articles, and Google introduced Accelerated Mobile Pages.

Both of these technologies allow for near-instantaneous loading of pre-cached, optimized articles on mobile devices, but they have a problem. Both mask the original URL which can make it difficult to share interesting articles with others. Google has seen the problem and made an important change to the way AMP works, helping to increase trust.