Category: Tech news

The PS5 will lean on its monster solid-state drive to make gaming more seamless.

AWS CEO Andy Jassy showed signs of frustration at his AWS re:Invent keynote address in December.

Customers weren’t moving to the cloud nearly fast enough for his taste, and he prodded them to move along. Some of their hesitation, as Jassy pointed out, was due to institutional inertia, but some of it also was due to a technology problem related to getting entrenched, on-prem workloads to the cloud.

When a challenge of this magnitude presents itself and you have the head of the world’s largest cloud infrastructure vendor imploring customers to move faster, you can be sure any number of players will start paying attention.

Sure enough, cloud infrastructure vendors (ISVs) have developed new migration solutions to help break that big data logjam. Large ISVs like Accenture and Deloitte are also happy to help your company deal with migration issues, but this opportunity also offers a big opening for startups aiming to solve the hard problems associated with moving certain workloads to the cloud.

Think about problems like getting data off of a mainframe and into the cloud or moving an on-prem data warehouse. We spoke to a number of experts to figure out where this migration market is going and if the future looks bright for cloud-migration startups.

Cloud-migration blues

It’s hard to nail down exactly the percentage of workloads that have been moved to the cloud at this point, but most experts agree there’s still a great deal of growth ahead. Some of the more optimistic projections have pegged it at around 20%, with the U.S. far ahead of the rest of the world.

In an effort to disseminate trustworthy health information on COVID-19, Facebook will roll out its own coronavirus information center, a central hub on the vast social network where the company will collect information from sources like the CDC and WHO.

“We’re going to be putting it at the top of everyone’s Facebook feed,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a press call announcing the feature.

The info center will roll out in “a number” of U.S. locations and some in Europe across the next 24 hours, with a more global rollout in the next few days.

Zuckerberg says the goal is to get authoritative health information “in front of everyone who uses our services.” The information center will include prominent links to global health authorities, but also curated posts from celebrities, politicians and journalists to spread vetted useful health information to the broadest possible audience.

“Were designing it to be very adaptive on a day to day basis,” Zuckerberg said. The center will include information that varies from location to location “because the guidance is different in different countries.” He noted that the company is coordinating with various governments to tailor that info.

While Zuckerberg noted that Facebook has added plenty of disaster relief messaging and tools in the past, the novel coronavirus poses a larger challenge. “We’ve never had to do it at the scale we’re talking about here,” Zuckerberg said.

Facebook-owned WhatsApp, an infamous hotbed of hard-to-track misinformation, also added its own coronavirus info hub.

Along with its COVID-19 misinformation policing efforts, Facebook has banned ads and listings for medical face masks, a key element of protective gear for frontline medical workers that faces potentially critical global shortages. Even so, on the world’s biggest social network, opportunists find a way.

Following Microsoft, Facebook also made an early commitment to pay hourly workers impacted by office closures, as many non-salaried workers around the world fear for their livelihoods.

The novel coronavirus has upended the global economy and created broad chaos in the business world, even for tech’s most adaptable, well-resourced giants. With every major tech event canceled or made remote, including Facebook’s F8 developer conference, the year is taking a very different shape than anyone in the industry could have anticipated.

A new iPad Pro is in town as well as a refreshed MacBook Air. There’s Lidar tech, better keyboards, and perhaps most importantly, a trackpad.

The island nation’s government is staying ahead of the virus, but don’t ascribe it to “Confucian values.” Credit democracy and transparency.

A years-long investigation and global cooperation disrupted one of the biggest botnets ever.

Like Me Too and Black Lives Matter, the Flatten the Curve movement has fomented a profound reckoning with privilege and inequality.

Because of social distancing, you probably have a lot of time on your hands. Here’s how to pass it.

Targeting strategies may be effective for marketing, but in the early stages of an epidemic, they lead to harmful trade-offs and biased data.

Hollywood tells us humans are prone to lose all rationality in a disaster, looting and trampling one another. But that’s not giving our brains any credit.

The world is talking about one thing: the coronavirus pandemic. And as social distancing takes place, our digital greetings matter more than ever.

It took a half decade, but Oculus has delivered on the promise of the first Rift.

The internet never forgets.

Don’t: hoard toilet paper and medical masks. Do: make sure you have plenty of food, water, and indoor activities.

Stanford scientists are exploring whether gene-editing technology can be used to fight pandemics. But so far, they have just one piece of a larger puzzle.