Information Technology

Verizon will soon hike the prices of its wireless bills for the first time in two years. Bloomberg reports that the wireless carrier is increasing administrative charges on phone bills by $1.35 per voice line starting in June. No matter which plan you have, your Verizon bill is going up. Verizon previously increased the fee from $1.23 to $1.78 per line in August 2019. The new Verizon Wireless Administrative Charge will be $3.13 per line every month.

Your Verizon bill is about to go up

Verizon is not sparing any of its business customers either. According to the report, those customers will be forced to pay a new “economic adjustment charge” starting on June 16th. Data plans for mobile phones will increase by $2.20 a month while basic service plans will go up by $0.98. Verizon started informing customers about these changes on Monday and has also been reaching out

Technology’s impact on society and national economies continues to intensify, in turn increasing the business responsibilities of technology service providers and what their customers expect from them.

This deeper entrenchment in business has also made technology providers much more sensitive to factors beyond information technology. It’s no longer sufficient for them to address client needs and provide quality products. Rather, they have to be aware of the broader economic, social and technological forces that have come to form a large bearing on their business.

Such forces make up this year’s top trends for technology service providers, or TSPs for short (below).

Co-innovation ecosystems

Technology innovation is at the heart of every TSP. However, in the digital world — with much stronger interconnections among technology providers, customers, partners and governments — traditional siloed innovation practices such as research and development and basic product development will not be enough to survive.

Instead,

Google and Samsung have partnered to create Health Connect, a platform and API (application programming interface) that gives developers a toolset to sync users’ health data between Android apps and devices. This should make it easier for users to keep track of their health and fitness data across several different platforms.

Once a user opts in, developers can compile their health data in an encrypted hub that’s located on a user’s device. Google says users will get full control over what kind of data they share and what apps they share it with. If more than one app is collecting the same type of data, such as steps taken, users can choose to share that data with one app over the others. Health Connect supports over 50 data types in a number of categories, including activity, body measurement, cycle tracking, nutrition, sleep, and vitals.

“We’re working alongside Google and

from the so-that’s-what-happened dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2017, Europe was putting free speech at risk as it struggled to figure out what to do with the GDPR, but stateside the big fight was over net neutrality. A John Oliver segment on the issue appeared to cripple the FCC website for a second time, but the agency claimed it was actually due to a DDoS attack — and then people noticed that a bot was flooding the website with anti-net neutrality comments. At the same time, the FCC was using garbage lobbyist data to defend its stance.

This was also the week that Donald Trump fired James Comey, and that we wrote about the first hearing and the ongoing filings in the lawsuit against us.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2012, the jury in the Google-Oracle trial was very confused, Twitter was challenging a court ruling saying