Amazon Launches In-Car Alexa With Panasonic

Amazon is revving up its voice activation system for cars,  announcing a partnership that will integrate its Alexa device into Panasonic’s in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) system.At the CES trade show, Amazon on Monday introduced Alexa Onboard, offering in-car users the opportunity to control everyt...

By Matthew Heller • Jan. 9, 2018

The Problem with Pie Charts

Eighteenth century Scottish engineer and economist William Playfair was one of the founding fathers of presenting data visually. He is credited with inventing the ubiquitous line and bar charts. That’s more important than it sounds, given that research since shows humans process visual informatio...

By Vincent Ryan • Dec. 29, 2017

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The CFO Strategy for Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence’s impact on the office of the CFO continues to evolve, and finance chiefs must be aware of the opportunities it will create for growth. 

By CFO.com staff

Solar Boom Ends Amid SolarCity Slowdown

After years of stellar growth, home solar installations are expected to fall for the first time this year, reflecting a slowdown at SolarCity in the wake of its acquisition by Tesla.The residential solar market increased 19% in 2016 and more than 50% in the four years before that. But in a new re...

By Matthew Heller • Dec. 15, 2017

Mobile App Spending to Top $110B Next Year

Mobile app monetization will continue to grow next year with worldwide consumer spend across all app stores increasing about 30% to more than $110 billion, according to a new report.App market researcher App Annie also highlighted several signs that the app economy is maturing, with, as of Octobe...

By Matthew Heller • Dec. 6, 2017

Equifax Failed to Patch Software Flaw: Ex-CEO

Former Equifax CEO Richard Smith has confirmed the company failed to patch a software vulnerability that hackers exploited to compromise the personal information of more than 140 million Americans.In written testimony to be delivered to a congressional committee on Tuesday, Smith said the Departm...

By Matthew Heller • Oct. 3, 2017

Deloitte Confirms Hack Breached Email System

Deloitte, itself a provider of cybersecurity services, has confirmed a hack breached its email system, possibly exposing confidential client information.According to The Guardian, the “big four” accounting firm discovered the hack in March, but it is believed the attackers may have had access to ...

By Matthew Heller • Sept. 26, 2017

SEC Discloses 2016 Hack of EDGAR System

In another illustration of the vulnerability of financial infrastructure, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has disclosed a data breach that may have resulted in cyber criminals using its EDGAR online database to make illicit trades.SEC Chairman Jay Clayton said hackers had obtained acc...

By Matthew Heller • Sept. 21, 2017

Equifax Hack Exposes App Patch Vulnerability

The massive data breach at Equifax appears to highlight a security vulnerability for many large companies — they do not maintain a proper inventory of their applications.Equifax confirmed on Wednesday that the hackers exploited a flaw in Apache Struts, a popular open source framework for creating...

By Matthew Heller • Sept. 14, 2017

Three Ways to Generate Profit With Your Data

Build it and they will come. That is the view many organizations maintain about their data lakes and data warehouses. Companies are rapidly investing in systems and processes to retain business data that they know is valuable. But they have no clue what to do with it.Andrew Wells Most organizatio...

By Andrew Wells and Kathy Chiang • July 17, 2017

Microsoft Launches Azure Local Cloud Solution

Heating up its cloud competition with Amazon and Google, Microsoft has launched a long-awaited platform for organizations that prefer not to use the public cloud.Azure Stack offers the same management tools, straightforward provisioning, and usage-based licensing as the public Azure cloud, but ca...

By Matthew Heller • July 10, 2017

Anthem Agrees to Record Settlement Over Cyberattack

Anthem Inc., one of the nation’s largest health insurers has agreed to pay $115 million to settle litigation stemming from a 2015 hacking incident that compromised the personal data of some 79 million people, according to nbcnews.com, which cited lawyers for the plaintiffs.Proceeds from the settl...

By William Sprouse • June 26, 2017

Square-Off: Are Corporate Cyber Defenses Adequate?

It’s not just about the technology, stupid. That’s the collective message of the four expert commentators in this CFO Square-Off opinion forum, which addresses the issue of how CFOs and their corporations should be addressing cybersecurity in the face of rapid advances on the hacking front. Inste...

By David Katz • June 21, 2017

Apple to Launch Peer-to-Peer Payment Service

Apple has announced that its new iOS 11 operating system will enhance Apple Pay by including a feature that allows direct peer-to-peer payments through text messages.With the new service, users will be able to send and receive money inside Apple’s iMessage app, authenticate payments with Apple’s ...

By Matthew Heller • June 7, 2017

Massive Ransomware Wave Hits Banks, Hospitals

A massive ransomware attack has spread across at least 74 countries, hitting the IT systems of banks, telephone companies and hospitals and holding affected computers hostage for $300 in Bitcoin.According to Wired, the ransomware strain WannaCry (also known as WanaCrypt0r and WCry) has gained par...

By Matthew Heller • May 12, 2017

Grasping the Concepts and Benefits of Cloud ERP

A growing business must be cognizant of its financial functionality. Multiple software systems, lengthy accounting processes, suffering sales and customer experiences, and a myriad of complexities within their current systems will do nothing but slow its growth and hurt the bottom line. Forward-t...

By Kerry Maruna • May 10, 2017

Watchdog Probing Customs’ Demand to Twitter

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s internal watchdog is investigating whether Customs and Border Protection improperly demanded that Twitter identify critics of the Trump administration’s immigration policies.The demand for the identify of the owners of the Twitter account @ALT_uscis was ...

By Matthew Heller • April 24, 2017

Cyber Attacks Can Cause Major Stock Drops

Cyber security attacks have a debilitating effect on companies’ stock prices, causing an average decline of 1.8% percent on a permanent basis in cases of severe breaches, according to a new report.In an analysis of 65 companies affected by hacks since 2013, security consultant CGI and Oxford Econ...

By Matthew Heller • April 12, 2017

SAP Patches Critical Flaw in Business Software

European software giant SAP said Tuesday it had patched multiple vulnerabilities in its cloud-based enterprise platform HANA that could have allowed hackers to fully compromise databases and business applications without a valid username or password.HANA runs SAP’s latest database, cloud and othe...

By Matthew Heller • March 14, 2017

Betting on Blockchain

As a graduate student in international economics at the University of California, Berkeley, in the early 1980s, Chris Ballinger sometimes found himself engaged in speculation about what would happen when money became electronic, and whether anybody other than a central bank could issue it. Twenty...

By Randy Myers • March 2, 2017

PC Shipments Expected to Decline

Annual shipments of personal computing devices are expected to decline slightly over the next five years as manufacturers continue to combat the recent surge of smartphones into the marketplace, according to the consulting firm International Data Corporation.The global PC industry, which includes...

By Sean Allocca • Feb. 27, 2017

CFOs Rethink Cybersecurity Strategies as Hackers Organize

IT-specific concerns such as malware, firewalls, and virus scans are still part of the overall cyber security strategy. However, mitigating cyber risks requires CFOs to shore up their technical and physical defenses. Here are five articles covering trends in managing security across the organizat...

By CFO Editorial Staff • Feb. 18, 2017

Don’t Just Mitigate Ransomware

Almost every day, it seems, there’s news of another ransomware attack on a prominent organization. In fact, according to one study, almost 40% of all businesses experienced an attack from the summer of 2015 to the summer of 2016. To protect our companies against ransomware and its potentially dis...

By Roy Golding • Feb. 7, 2017

Apple Reportedly Readying Supersized iPhone

Apple’s supply chain is expecting the company will launch a new iPhone next year with a supersized 5.8-inch AMOLED display manufactured by Samsung, according to a published report.Citing Taiwan-based component manufacturers, DigiTimes said Apple will launch 4.7-, 5.5- and 5.8-inch new iPhone mode...

By Matthew Heller • Jan. 2, 2017

Detecting Cyber Attacks Faster

Two-thousand sixteen continues to deliver a growing number of cyber attacks, while financial institutions continue to be threatened and vulnerable. Sophisticated cyber attackers are clearly able to circumvent traditional cyber defenses and gain access to internal networks—and the longer they stay...

By Moshe Ben Simon • Nov. 28, 2016

10 Questions for Technology Optimists

I am, for the most part, an optimist about the contribution technology can make to business and to people’s quality of life. It’s often a mixed blessing, of course, and there’s always the potential for unintended consequences or misuse, but if we’re going to run a modern economy, or arguably, a d...

By John Parkinson • Nov. 9, 2016