Tech Giants Face Grilling by Congress

Four firms — Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple — now form the de facto roster of Big Tech, thanks to Congress' decision to interrogate their CEOs together at a landmark antitrust hearing Monday, Axios reports. The big four share enormous power, massive resources, high ideals and, more recently, troubled public images. But there are enormous differences among them, too — and their leaders will be leaning on those contrasts as lawmakers grill them.

2_STARTUPS

A Different Kind of Search Engine

Until recently, Sridhar Ramaswamy was in charge of Google's entire advertising division. With his inside knowledge of the ad business and long experience in search, he'd be a prime candidate to go bite off a chunk of the market for himself, Protocol reports. Instead, Ramaswamy is doing the opposite: He's building a search engine, called Neeva, with no ads at all.

3_BUSINESS

Slack Seeks an EU Antitrust Probe of Microsoft

Slack Technologies this week asked EU antitrust regulators to investigate Microsoft for allegedly abusing its market dominance, Reuters reports. “Microsoft has illegally tied its Teams product into its market-dominant Office productivity suite, force installing it for millions, blocking its removal, and hiding the true cost to enterprise customers,” Slack said in a statement.

4_BUSINESS

LinkedIn’s Job Cuts Signal Trouble for Skilled Workers

LinkedIn this week added its name to the list of employers announcing layoffs for white-collar jobs, as coronavirus losses continued to ripple beyond low-wage work, the Washington Post reports. The company is cutting 960 jobs or 6 percent of its workforce.

SPONSORED

Why You Need Flauntly Now

Flauntly is an easy-to-use, modular marketing tool
that's perfect for remote work. Teams can collaborate,
manage, and create an unlimited number of landing pages.
Learn how

5_DATA

Tracking Covid-19 by County

Covidcountysim.org, a website launched last week, provides up-to-date data and forecasts regarding Covid-19 for every county in the United States, Vice Motherboard reports. The site, designed by Prospect 33, a data and financial services consultancy, uploads daily data from the John Hopkins University COVID-19 GitHub site and allows users to view data such as cumulative reported cases, cumulative reported deaths, and the estimated Rt, which is the average number of people infected by an infectious person.

6_APPS

Navigating the Pandemic

Apple and Google have added handy features to their map apps for these uncertain times, the New York Times reports. These features include up-to-date information on restaurants, ways to find a Covid-19 test site, and locations of social distant activity.

7_SECURITY

Fake DNS Security Upgrade a Threat to WordPress Websites

In late June, Naked Security received a scam email that pretended to originate from WordPress.com. The email informed the company that its website was eligible to receive security upgrades under the Domain Name System Security Extensions, Security Intelligence reports. Instead, it pointed to a malicious source.

8_ANALYTICS

The Importance of Analyzing Traffic Sources

Many businesses find themselves so caught up in focusing on new ways of generating website traffic that they never get around to investigating their actual traffic sources. Web Designer Depot says this can be a significant mistake because a close look at traffic sources can provide a wide range of insights about website users.

9_MARKETING

The Three Stages of Marketing ROI

Some marketers expect content revenue to have a linear path. It doesn't work that way. However, while content conversion doesn’t follow a linear pathway, you can chart the stages of marketing ROI to tie your content to revenue, Contently reports.

10_SAY WHAT?

Skin-Deep Health Monitoring

One day, people might monitor their own health conditions by simply picking up a pencil and drawing a bioelectronic device on their skin, reports Science Daily. In a new study, engineers demonstrated that the simple combination of pencils and paper could be used to create devices that might be used to monitor personal health.