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The Morning Download: Guardian Life, Priceline Accelerate Digital Efforts
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Good morning, CIOs. The pandemic may have put a stop to major digital transformation efforts, but enterprise technology executives remain focused on quickly exploiting those opportunities where they can. On Monday IT leaders from Guardian Life Insurance Co. of America and Priceline discussed their recent digital initiatives in a web conference hosted by seed-stage fund Boldstart Ventures. CIO Journal's Sara Castellanos has more.
“Decisions are being made so much quicker now,” said Dean Del Vecchio, Guardian Life’s chief information officer. In a few weeks the insurer, working with tech company IPSoft Inc., developed and deployed an AI-based “digital agent” to help the customers access claim information. “We’re seeing a level of collaboration and a sense of urgency like we’ve never seen before,” he said.
Priceline is accelerating its move toward Google Cloud to allow developers to design, develop and deploy code “at a much more accelerated pace than we do today,” said Marty Brodbeck, chief technology officer.
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The campus of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle.
PHOTO: ELAINE THOMPSON/ASSOCIATED PRESS
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Bill Gates vs. coronavirus. Back in 2014, Bill Gates told the WSJ that "the world as a whole doesn’t have the preparedness for epidemics.” Fast-forward to 2020 and Mr. Gates calls coronavirus "the most dramatic thing ever in my lifetime by a lot.” So far, the Gates Foundation has committed $305 million in the search for Covid-19 vaccines and drug remedies, as well as aid to get medicines and supplies to lower-income countries. And the foundation will spend a lot more, he said.
Elon Musk vs. Alameda County. Mr. Musk said Tesla is resuming production of cars at its lone U.S. assembly factory in Fremont, Calif., in defiance of local authorities. “I will be on the line with everyone else,” Mr. Musk, who is Tesla’s chief executive, wrote on Twitter. “If anyone is arrested, I ask that it only be me.” Tesla stopped production on March 23 at the factory, which builds the Model 3 compact car and employs more than 10,000 people. Alameda County has reported more than 2,000 cases of people infected with the Covid-19 virus through Sunday. (WSJ)
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Rhode Island replaced call-center technology with the same system that Seattle-based Amazon uses during Black Friday sales events before Christmas. PHOTO: JOHN MOORE/GETTY IMAGES
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Amazon, Google help states as unemployment claims soar. After struggling with busy phone lines, website crashes and delays in unemployment payments, states are turning to Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud to handle an unprecedented rise in unemployment claims triggered by the coronavirus pandemic. The Wall Street Journal's Sarah Chaney has more.
Rhode Island. The state turned to Amazon Web Services for help in April when its old computer systems and outdated call center became overwhelmed by the number of individuals seeking unemployment assistance during the coronavirus pandemic.
Kansas. The state's department of labor has spent about $75,000 through early May bringing on AWS to help expand its unemployment call center.
Massachusetts. The state was processing unemployment claims using Amazon’s cloud technology before the coronavirus pandemic. Massachusetts processed more than 400,000 continuing claims on Sunday, April 26.
New York and Illinois. Google is working with both states, among others, to upgrade their labor departments’ decades-old computer systems, said Todd Schroeder, the director of public-sector digital strategy for Google Cloud.
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In the year since its blacklisting by the U.S. Commerce Department, Huawei has launched two flagship smartphones—the P40 and the Mate 30—running on the homemade software. PHOTO: COSTFOTO/BARCROFT MEDIA/GETTY IMAGES
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Huawei tries to get along without Google. China’s Huawei Technologies, barred from buying American technology, has found a lot of workarounds—but is having a hard time replacing Google, on which it has relied for a decade. Huawei is now launching devices with an in-house software package that includes its own web browser to replace Google’s Chrome and its own email app to replace Gmail. (WSJ)
Foreign users help China’s WeChat refine censorship. WeChat, one of China’s most popular apps, monitors the activity of its users outside the Chinese mainland for taboo content. If content is found to be sensitive to the Chinese government, the app adds it to its internal blacklist so it can censor it in real time for Chinese users.
Apple on cloud hiring spree. New hires from Google, AWS and Docker may be working on developing new tools for Apple’s software development teams, says Protocol. (Protocol)
Twitter to add labels to coronavirus disinformation posts. The move is the latest of many efforts from Silicon Valley to try to slow the spread of false claims related to the pandemic, with mixed results, including last week when a conspiracy-laden video racked up millions of views before the tech platforms pulled it down. (WSJ)
Robot dog paroles park. The four-legged machine from Boston Dynamics is fitted with a camera to monitor social distancing at Singapore’s Bishan-Ang Moh Kio Park. (BBC)
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Everything Else You Need to Know
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New clusters of coronavirus infections are cropping up in some countries that have already loosened lockdowns, as more governors across the U.S. detailed plans to reopen their states’ economies. (WSJ)
President Trump’s personal lawyers, backed by the Justice Department, will ask the Supreme Court to quash subpoenas seeking documents he has guarded fiercely for years: his financial records, including income-tax returns. (WSJ)
U.S. consumer prices are expected to have fallen for the second consecutive month in April after energy prices collapsed and efforts to contain the new coronavirus disrupted demand for a wide array of goods and services. (WSJ)
Toyota, Japan’s biggest auto maker by sales, said it expected the car market to bottom out by June and return to the same level as the previous year by the end of 2020. (WSJ)
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