Welcome back to our weekly tech news roundup – your one-stop shop for the trends and stories that our B2B PR teams were monitoring throughout the week.
Introducing the American AI initiative
The president introduced an executive order designed to boost America’s AI industry by prioritizing research and development, increasing access to federal data and models and preparing workers to adapt to working with artificial intelligence. Details are still vague, but it’ll be interesting to see how this initiative develops and how it stacks up against other countries that are already gaining an edge.
Publishers are not psyched about Apple’s “Netflix for news”
Major publishers are pushing back against Apple’s plans to create a subscription service for news. The tech giant wants to keep about half of the subscription revenue and likely wouldn’t be providing subscriber data to the publishers – sticking points for several influential outlets that are already dealing with an increasingly challenging digital media landscape.
Kara Swisher and Jack Dorsey’s live-tweeted interview was interesting…
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Recode founder Kara Swisher carried out an interview over Twitter on Tuesday, and pretty much everyone had trouble following along. A cool idea, but it turns out that the platform wasn’t a great place to carry out a detailed, productive conversation. Also – I wonder if some of the confusion could have been avoided if Jack had decided to include his PR team?
Google investing big in US data centers and office space
The company announced that it’ll be investing $13 billion in data centers and offices across the United States this year, up from $9 billion in investments last year. Google is clearly making a big time push for more cloud customers as it competes with AWS and Azure.
Dating app data breaches
Just in time for Valentine’s Day, both OKCupid and Coffee Meets Bagel were forced to deal with data breach and cybersecurity issues. Tough timing for their PR teams, who were forced into crisis communications mode rather than whatever fun, holiday-driven activity they had planned for this week.
Related pro tip
We’re sure a lot of security PR teams pitched expert commentary around the dating app issues this week, but there is a right way and a wrong way to do rapid response (aka news jacking). Check out this blog post for some helpful best practices.
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