Month: August 2020

Google hires South Bay students for yearlong IT apprenticeships

Elva Mankin 3 weeks ago

Google launched an apprenticeship program in August for San Jose City College students who are pursuing careers in information technology.

Google, one of the South Bay’s biggest employers, chose SJCC as its first partner college for the program in California, which began mid-August and will last a full year. Eight SJCC students were chosen for the apprenticeship, during which they will become certified through Google and work as IT specialists at the company’s Sunnyvale campus. Apprentices will be paid for their hours of on-the-job training and will also receive certain benefits.

In addition to the eight apprentices, Google is covering the tuition of 12 more SJCC students, whom the school will place in apprenticeships with other large companies. Lena Tran, the college’s vice president of strategic partnerships and workforce innovation, said she’s glad community colleges are being recognized as effective training grounds for jobs in the tech sector.

“Community colleges

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3 Chat Automation Tools That Accelerate Sales Growth

Elva Mankin 3 weeks ago


6 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.


Companies in most industries are struggling. According to LinkedIn’s June 2020 U.S. Recovery Tracker, key factors in the labor market haven’t improved, such as hiring rate, job postings and employer confidence. It’s important for businesses to find opportunities that maintain or grow revenue, as well as operate cost-efficiently given the new normal in U.S. consumer and B2B demand.

However, there are long-term trends that are too disruptive to ignore. A seismic change in consumer behavior is the growing use of messaging apps for more than sending and receiving texts. Ecommerce and social messaging apps are enabling internet shoppers to send payments, book reservations, watch multimedia and purchase items, among many features. Chatbots are unleashing the power of social and ecommerce by providing customer support 24/7, year-round. 

There are a number of artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted conversational bots 

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HOW TO SPOT A GOOD COMPUTER ONLINE STORE?

Elva Mankin 4 weeks ago

Buying a computer is no simple feat; so, with the prices of all of the computers available on the market now, you want to make sure you make the right choice, so you don’t blow up your savings on anything that starts fulfilling your demands within a year.

These guide will help you get a better understanding of what to search for while purchasing a device on every web-platform/online store. Of course, the tips might not be exhaustive, but they get to the heart of the most important things to bear in mind when planning to purchase computers online.

1.  Your Estimates

The first thing most of us are forced to do is budget, so this is the first thing that you should consider. We always want the best, but what we can afford must be grounded in. So get a budget and stay tuned. Before searching for online, you … Read More

Only 2 companies should buy TikTok, and Oracle isn’t one of them

Elva Mankin 4 weeks ago

As if Microsoft’s interest in buying TikTok wasn’t strange enough, reports this week suggested enterprise-focused database and cloud giant Oracle was planning to enter the fray. A broad view of the situation, however, reveals only two logical candidates: Facebook and Google.

Microsoft emerged as a surprise TikTok suitor earlier this month after U.S. President Donald Trump issued an executive order giving ByteDance — TikTok’s parent company — 45 days to sell its U.S. business. The president later extended the deadline to 90 days. Trump claimed that TikTok could hoover up data on U.S. users and share it with the government in China, where ByteDance is based. He threatened to ban TikTok unless Microsoft or another “very American” company stepped in to buy it.

This is why Oracle — whose cofounder and chair Larry Ellison has ties to Trump — could be preparing to bid on TikTok’s U.S. business, which has

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Astronaut spots California wildfires from space, sends ‘thoughts and prayers’ to victims

Elva Mankin 4 weeks ago

California is on fire, with more than 360 individual blazes scorching across the state.



a close up of a snow covered slope: In an image NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy shared on Aug. 21, 2020, smoke billows above California, which is fighting more than 360 fires.

© Provided by Space
In an image NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy shared on Aug. 21, 2020, smoke billows above California, which is fighting more than 360 fires.

Unsurprisingly, the effects are visible from space, as NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy shared images today (Aug. 21) of huge billows of smoke above California as seen from his perch on the International Space Station.

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“Thanks to all of the fire fighters and emergency teams who are working around the clock trying to get these fires contained,” Cassidy said in the tweet. “Thoughts and prayers to all of the people in the impacted areas.”

Related: Raging California wildfires spotted from space (photos, video)

California’s difficult fire season is the result of unusual lightning-rich storms occurring during a record-topping heatwave, according to The New York Times. Moreover, the

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Walmart, Target, and innovative retail startups soar as pandemic-era bankruptcies plague smaller chains and restaurants

Elva Mankin 4 weeks ago

Happy Friday!



a hand holding a glass of beer: Dunkin' is rolling out oat milk at locations across America Mario Tama/Getty Images

© Mario Tama/Getty Images
Dunkin’ is rolling out oat milk at locations across America Mario Tama/Getty Images

This is Shoshy Ciment, welcoming you back to another edition of Insider Retail, formerly known as The Drive Thru! If you’re confused, here’s the TLDR: New name, same gist. That is, Kate Taylor and I are still here to bring you a weekly round-up of all things restaurants and retail every Friday. To get us in your inbox, all you have to do is subscribe, which you can do here.

Now that we’ve settled administrative matters, onto the news of the week.



a display in a store: Walmart and Target reported earnings this week. Brendan McDermid/Reuters

© Provided by Business Insider
Walmart and Target reported earnings this week. Brendan McDermid/Reuters

Walmart and Target reported Q2 earnings this week. Spoiler alert: they blew it out of the park.

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Target posted its highest comparable sales growth in history, with a 195% annual increase in digital

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FreeFortnite Cup: Epic trash-talks Apple with its tournament

Elva Mankin 4 weeks ago

freefortnite-adjustable-hat-2386x2121-796585693

Top scorers in the #FreeFortnite Cup can win this Apple-mocking hat as well as a Nintendo Switch, PS4 Pro, Alienware laptop and more.


Epic Games

Epic Games levels up again in its battle against Apple and Google with the announcement of the #FreeFortnite Cup tournament on Aug. 23, just ahead of its Chapter 2 Season 4 launch on Aug 27. Epic is locked in a public battle with the two tech giants over their policies on in-app purchases on iOS and Android devices. 

Apple and Google last week pulled the mobile versions of the popular battle royale game from their app stores after Epic added a direct payment option in an attempt to bypass the 30% fee Apple and Google charge developers. Fortnite is free to download but charges for “V-Bucks,” in-game tokens players can use to buy different cosmetic looks for characters.

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Tech Tent: Can we trust algorithms?

Elva Mankin 1 month ago

Three students sit on a street kerb with a protest placard reading:
Three students sit on a street kerb with a protest placard reading: “students not statistics”

When school students took to the streets in London and other cities this week it was a protest unlike any other.

Its target: an algorithm they said had threatened their futures.

On Tech Tent this week, we look at whether the exam grades fiasco in the UK signals a global crisis for trust in algorithms.

Podcast available now
Podcast available now

  • Listen to the latest Tech Tent podcast on BBC Sounds

  • Listen live every Friday at 15:00 GMT on the BBC World Service

It was a uniquely difficult challenge: how to determine the exam grades on which university places depend when the exams had to be cancelled.

The answer? An algorithm, in effect a statistical recipe which is fed data.

In this case, the data was both the prior performance of a school and the ranking given this

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Adobe Lightroom Update Is Permanently Deleting Users’ Photos

Elva Mankin 1 month ago

On Tuesday, Adobe apologized to users of its iOS Lightroom software after a recent update resulted in the permanent deletion of some presets and photos. The company says it’s issued a fix for the problem.

The bug was first flagged by PetaPixel on Thursday after it received complaints from readers about their photos disappearing. Numerous testimonials appeared on Adobe’s feedback forum describing the same situation. And Adobe soon confirmed that an update issued for Lightroom on iPhone and iPad was nuking irreplaceable photos and pricey professional presets for some users.

In a statement, Adobe wrote:

Some customers who updated to Lightroom 5.4.0 on iPhone and iPad may be missing photos and/or presets. This affected customers using Lightroom mobile without a subscription to the Adobe cloud. It also affected Lightroom cloud customers with photos and presets that had not yet synced to the Adobe cloud.

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Installing version 5.4.1 will not

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Apple Shares Could Surge Another 27%, Says Wedbush Analyst

Elva Mankin 1 month ago

After reaching a market value of two-trillion dollars earlier this week, Apple may yet surge by another 27 percent, according to Wedbush analyst Daniel Ives (via BusinessInsider).

Ives believes that Apple has the potential to make further significant gains over the next year, even though the company has already hit the milestone two-trillion dollar valuation. He has classified Apple stocks with an “outperform” rating, with a target price of $515 and an optimistic bull case of $600. This prediction would place Apple as much as 27 percent higher than it closed yesterday.

“We still believe the stock has a lot of gasoline left in the tank with an iPhone 12 ‘supercycle’ on the near term horizon,” Ives wrote.

Ives described the possibility as a “once in a decade” opportunity, as “we estimate roughly 350 million of Cupertino’s 950 million iPhones worldwide are in the window of an upgrade opportunity.”

… Read More