Initial Coin Offerings are one of those disruptive technologies filed under crazy enough to work. And the manner in which entrepreneurs launch their ICOs as new cryptocurrencies to sell them for existing cryptocurrencies (like bitcoin) to buyers betting the new currency, is expected to appreciate as any other asset. Does this sound like a safe space for scam ...

Digital business largely boils down to data. For an organization to become truly data-driven, it may have to rearrange employees’ rank and role. Aptly, the reshuffle may put the chief data officer at the front lines. “Data’s valuable to me from the point that I create it to the endpoint that I delete it — ...

Chief security officers hoping to up their game might attend a tech security conference. And they might go home empty-handed — except for a demo on how to hack an ATM machine. Conversations around security usually focus on the methodology of hackers, said Tom Kemp (pictured), chief executive officer and co-founder of Centrify Corp. “That’s great for a ...

The internet is a fine trade route. Technology companies ship their goods over internet networks instantaneously to any location in the world. But not all believe that this openness is altogether faultless. Some government officials are acting to ensure that a free internet does not compromise national interests or citizens’ data privacy. Will their good intentions choke innovation and growth in Silicon ...

What does a data-driven business look like? Is it endless lines of code and algorithms running on cloud infrastructure, sending signals back to a predictive analytics lab? Is it a huddle of Ph.D. data scientists poring over graphs that no one else can understand? Both experts and technologies have a place in it, but relying ...

Big data is flooding into companies faster than they can figure out what to do with it. Hungry as they are to monetize it, many are failing. Will new technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning solve the problem with do-it-yourself data science for regular folks? Or, will universities have to turn out a whole ...

It seems businesses these days are pinning their hopes on artificial intelligence to finally make bank from big data — and this hasn’t escaped the notice of software vendors. They’re stamping AI on new products with such repetitive thuds, one can easily guess the puff inside the packaging. Knowing what AI can and can’t do could help ...

Data analytics is a numbers game, right? Adding more data points solves inaccurate algorithm outputs. Actually, no. Outputs will not predict human behavior until inputs are as complex, unexpected and sometimes as contradictory as humans themselves. “Customers are really the most unpredictable, the most unknown, and the most difficult-to-quantify thing for any business,” said Tricia Wang (pictured), ethnographer ...

Under pressure to prove sexism stereotypes wrong, some tech companies grasp for any means to add female employees. But copying generic best practices may yield flimsy results; for example, a quota for women in tech only goes so far when a company pads it with human resources hires. Plunging deep into employee data, on the ...

“Internet of things” edge devices are causing quite a few headaches for technology vendors and businesses alike. Their whole selling point — intelligent, real-time decision-making at the edge of computing networks — is defeated by the latency of moving data back and forth to a cloud or physical data center for analytics. But edge devices ...