Michelle Maisto

Robocalls—those annoying, unsolicited recorded messages that now even pretend to be delivered from your area code—are the No. 1 source of consumer complaints to the Federal Communications Commission, its chairman, Tom Wheeler, said in a July 22 blog post announcing he’d taken new steps to stop them. “I have sent letters to the CEOs of […]

What has the wingspan of an airliner and can fly on the power of roughly three hair dryers? The answer: Facebook’s Aquila, a solar-powered, unmanned aircraft that will beam the Internet to remote parts of the world. On June 28, Aquila took its first flight, sitting on a type of trailer bed being pulled by […]

Microsoft has been called out by the Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertes (CNIL), a French regulatory watchdog group, for collecting “excessive” amounts of data on users and improperly protecting that data. CNIL announced July 20 that it had issued a formal notice against Microsoft, following seven investigations between April and June 2016 that […]

Justin Trudeau has one, and so does Bill Clinton, the Justice Department, Stephen Elop, Kanye West and Anil Dash. On Tuesday, Twitter began accepting applications for its little blue checkmark, an icon that appears beside a user’s Twitter name and confirms that he is who he says he (or maybe also that he’s somebody). “Our […]

Google is running a “charm offensive” in Europe, wooing the public as it faces a growing list of antitrust objections from regulators there, The New York Times reported July 19. The Times estimates Google’s earmarked spending for “soft lobbying,” for the time between 2015 and 2017 to be approximately $450 million. Such heart-and-minds campaigns include […]

Google is working on a stand-alone headset that will marry augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR), according to a report from Engadget. Recode reported July 15 that Google had stopped working on a stand-alone virtual reality headset along the lines of Oculus Rift, in an effort to “streamline its more ambitious projects.” The shuttered […]

A Donald Trump presidency would be a “disaster for innovation,” states a forceful, to-the-point open letter signed by nearly 150 investors, entrepreneurs, engineers, researchers and business leaders. It first published July 14 to the Medium blog posting of Katie Jacobs Stanton, chief marketing officer of Color Genomics, which offers affordable genetic testing for common hereditary […]

In a 2012, Paul Graham, co-founder of venture capital firm Y Combinator (which has invested in Dropbox, Airbnb, Stripe and Reddit, among others), wrote a blog post describing truly ambitious startup ideas, one of which was to fix email. “Email was not designed to be used the way we use it now,” wrote Graham. “Email […]

Intranets, weak in design and clumsy to use, tend to be necessary evils if they’re thought about at all. SAP has set out to change that with Jam Collaboration, a product it launched in 2012 and that last month passed the 34 million subscriber mark. (For context, SAP points out, 33 million people live in […]

When your phone chimes, you look at it. When your Jawbone vibrates, you stand up. (And when Pokemon Go shows you a monster, you walk after it.) Sisense, a private business analytics company focused on making business information understandable to all types of users, is likewise focused on pairing insights with real-world prompts and interactions. […]