Stories by Bob Brown

Tech companies LightSquared, Crittercism and ThinkingPhones are still around but no longer answer to those names.

Social media managers, and anyone else who juggles more than one Instagram account, are celebrating the small pleasure this week of now being able to switch between accounts without logging out first.

It’s been almost exactly 10 months since IBM formally launched its analytics-infused messaging system called Verse, and while the company’s announcement of “software for a new way to work” generated a relatively positive blast of press and analyst coverage, buzz about the cloud-first product has dwindled since. So I went in search of signs of excitement, or even signs of life, for Verse upon heading to the IBM Connect conference this week in Orlando.

A massive transformation is underway at IBM involving "a very maniacal focus on design" across its enterprise social and other products.

The open source community was stunned this week to learn that Ian Murdock, the "ian" in Linux distribution Debian, has died at the age of 42.

Fittingly enough, the Apple-owned Topsy data analytics business that boasted of indexing every Tweet back to 2006, announced its demise on Tuesday night via a Twitter post.

It’s not that the biggest names in enterprise IT and networking aren’t good places to work, according to employees submitting reviews to jobs and career marketplace Glassdoor. It’s just that they aren’t “Amazing!” or “Great!” places to work, according to Glassdoor’s list of the 50 Best Places to Work in 2016.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is funding creation of a heat map visualization tool that will show where cybersecurity jobs are open across the country. The first rendition should be out late next year.

Critics of the FCC's crackdown over the past year on organizations purposefully blocking consumers' Wi-Fi hotspots might actually have a couple of kindred spirits on the Commission itself.

The FCC isn’t kidding around in going after Wi-Fi blockers: Now it has slapped big electrical contracting company M.C. Dean with a $718,000 fine for blocking consumers’ Wi-Fi connections and has proposed a $25,000 fine for Hilton Worldwide for “apparent obstruction of an investigation” into whether Hilton blocked consumers’ Wi-Fi devices.

The National Science Foundation announced Monday that it is awarding a handful of universities more than $5 million to establish four regional hubs devoted to furthering the ability of organizations in fields ranging from agriculture to healthcare to make better use of big data.

Hackers really have had their way with Sony over the past year, taking down its Playstation Network last Christmas Day and creating an international incident by exposing confidential data from Sony Pictures Entertainment in response to The Interview comedy about a planned assassination on North Korea’s leader.

Tech industry employers ponder the question of how to hire good tech talent, and whether "good" is good enough.

Amidst all the excitement about the possible benefits of the Internet of Things, a slew of warnings have been sounded by IT pros, vendors and analysts about looming security threats. Now you can add the FBI to that list of those cautioning enthusiasts.

Big IT companies have largely been mum on plans to use drones, but emerging technology from Bay-area startup PreNav appears to have at least intrigued wireless service providers and cell phone tower operators.