Michelle Maisto

A Harvard Business Review article last year offered a calm retort to fearful questions about whether machines are the world’s future workers. “We could reframe the threat of automation,” its authors suggested, “as an opportunity for augmentation.” That idea is in sync with the findings of Accenture’s 2016 Digital Health Technology Vision report, which identifies […]

SAP, Intel, GitHub and Airbnb are among the 32 companies that have signed a White House Tech Inclusion Pledge. By doing so, the companies agreed to take action to make the tech community look more like the rest of the country, and to make diversity a management priority and a business imperative. While women make […]

The most critical brand differentiator today isn’t price or even product but customer experience. Indeed, researcher firm Gartner has called customer experience the “new competitive battlefield.” With that in mind, Salesforce.com has updated its Community Cloud offering with Lightning Customer Communities’.”” Lightning Customer Communities builds on the Community Cloud Salesforce introduced in 2013 to enable […]

Uber has transformed a number of industries and shifted behaviors, including how comfortable millions of people are now with scheduling a service and expecting an instant response. Understanding this, Skedulo, a mobile workforce scheduling and management company, has introduced Skedulo Lens, a framework of APIs and software development kits to enable its field service clients […]

Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Tom Wheeler gave a speech at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., June 20, to create enthusiasm for upcoming 5G technologies and to cheerlead proposed rules for 5G that Wheeler will circulate to the commission—a group of five, firmly split down partisan lines—on June 23. “The interconnected world we […]

“Brilliance is evenly distributed, but opportunity is not.” That’s the founding principle behind Andela, a 2-year-old startup that’s bringing together brilliant developers in Africa with opportunities in America—and that today announced it’s the first major funding recipient of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. CZI, founded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Pricilla Chan, led […]

Media mogul Arianna Huffington closed out the first day of Salesforce.com and Sales Hacker’s Sales Machine NYC 16 conference with a simple, if flabbergasting, message to sales professionals: Get more sleep. Huffington, a renowned overachieving author, columnist and founder of the Huffington Post, knows salespeople usually are the hardest-driving, relentless and possibly most sleep-deprived employees […]

The U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) department announced June 13 that it had begun testing new data processes at airports that will capture biometric information on travelers leaving the United States. It’s a long-awaited development, but one that’s arriving as the FBI is working to eliminate consumer privacy protections on its biometric database. The […]

Google co-founder and CEO of Google parent company Alphabet Larry Page personally, and quietly, funded two startups—Zee.Aero and Kitty Hawk—focused on creating the long-imagined future technology that every kid hopes to grow up and find a reality: the flying car. An extensive June 9 profile by Bloomberg tells the story of Page’s growing interest in […]

The French government on June 8 introduced SAIP, a mobile application designed to alert users of a terrorist attack or other highly dangerous event. SAIP, an acronym describing a system to alert the public with information, was released two days ahead of the Euro 2016, a European football (soccer) championship that begins June 10 and […]

The federal government wastes a reported $4 billion a year by poorly managing software licenses. Sens. Bill Cassidy, R-La., and Gary Peters, D-Mich., hope to remedy this through an act with an admirable intention and acronym, the Making Electronic Government Accountable by Yielding Tangible Efficiencies Act, or the MEGABYTE Act. But although MEGABYTE made it […]

Marwan Fawaz has yet to change his LinkedIn profile, but the executive adviser and former CEO of the Motorola Home business is the new CEO of Nest. Nest co-founder Tony Fadell announced his departure, and Fawaz’s appointment, in a June 3 blog post. “Marwan’s extensive technology and engineering knowledge, his experience with global service providers, […]