Microsoft’s focus on the cloud continues to pay off. The tech titan showed growth across all its cloud-based businesses during the last quarter ended Dec. 31, including Office, Dynamics and Azure. Reporting financial results for its fiscal second quarter on Thursday, the company said its Commercial Cloud business is pulling in revenue at the rate…
Alphabet reported significantly higher revenue for the fourth quarter of 2016 on the back of increased mobile and YouTube video advertising. Revenue in the last three months of the year jumped 22 percent from a year earlier, reaching $26.1 billion, while net income rose 8 percent to $5.3 billion. “2016 was simply a great year…
Southern California Edison (SCE) has flipped the switch on what is now the largest lithium-ion battery storage facility in the world — a substation with 80 megawatt hours (MWh) of capacity. Located Ontario, Calif., the new Mira Loma substation quietly went live Dec. 30. The substation is made up of commercial-grade Tesla Powerpack 2 lithium-ion…
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has approved what will be the largest U.S. offshore wind farm when it’s built off the east end of Long Island. It will generate enough electricity to power more than 50,000 homes on Long Island’s South Fork. The South Fork Wind Farm will consist of 15 wind turbines with 90 megawatts…
Google wants to bring smarts to cool gadgets and devices made using Raspberry Pi 3 or Intel’s Edison. The company is chasing makers with open-source tools needed to add artificial intelligence to consumer, industrial, and retail devices made using board computers. The plan may include machine-learning tools, which are central to AI. AI helps Apple’s…
Starting Feb. 13, Google will no longer allow JavaScript attachments on its Gmail service, killing one of the main methods of malware distribution over the past two years. Users will no longer be able to attach .JS files to emails in Gmail, regardless of whether they attach them directly or they include them in archives…
Seagate is getting closer to reaching its goal of making 20TB hard drives by 2020. Over the next 18 months, the company plans to ship 14TB and 16TB hard drives, company executives said on an earnings call this week. Seagate’s hard drive capacity today tops out at 10TB. A 12TB drive based on helium technology…
While Google’s Pixels might still have that new phone smell, there are already signs that Google is hard at work on the follow-up to its first officially branded Android phone. Google made a huge and somewhat surprising splash with the launch of the Pixel last fall, and all eyes will be on whether the next…
Apple next week will report a return to iPhone growth after a three-quarter slump, a group of financial analysts predicted. According to Philip Elmer-DeWitt, the creator of the Apple 3.0 website, 12 institutional and 5 independent analysts all forecast a year-over-year increase in iPhone sales during the December quarter. The average sales figure from the…
We hear a lot about 2-factor authentication these days, an invaluable way to protect your account from someone who has stolen your password, but there’s an inherent wrinkle built into the system: SMS. Most 2FA setups use text messages to deliver a one-time code sent to your phone, but there can be issues with that…