About Bill

San Francisco journalist Bill Snyder has followed business, technology, and the business of technology for nearly 25 years at newspapers, national magazines and Web sites. He’s currently writing features and a weekly column -- “Tech’s Bottom Line” -- for InfoWorld.com; a consumer column for CIO.com, edits for IDG’s Content Works, and is a frequent contributor to publications of the business school at Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley.

He learned the bits and bytes of computers, chips and software during stints at PCWeek and PCWorld, where he was executive editor for news and later editor-in-chief of PCWorld.com. He was the technology editor at Business 2.0, wrote an online small business column for BusinessWeek, and worked at TheStreet.com, where he wrote the popular TechWeek column and covered technology stocks for an audience of investors.

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Six Steps to Digital Transformation for Financial Services
Digital transformation is well under way at major financial services corporations in the U.S. and around the globe. In many cases, pilots and the earliest iterations of modernization projects have gone well. But for many enterprises, it’s still early days.[more]

Blockchain pilots show big-business promise
The much-hyped, little-understood distributed ledger technology takes aim at big business, with promising pilot programs and rising demand for blockchain skills, though security and buy-in questions remain. [more]

Here We Go Again: Outsourcers Snap Up H-1b Visas at a Record Pace [InfoWorld]
The French have an elegant way to put it: Plus les choses changent, plus elles restent les mêmes. The more things change, the more they stay the same. That's especially true when it comes to the never- ending drive by the tech industry to bring in more lower-paid foreign workers to Silicon Valley and the rest of the United States.[more]

What Is the Value of Imagery in Marketing? [Stanford Business]
It seems like common sense: If you're selling a product online, the more photographs of the product that you show to shoppers, the more likely they are to buy it. After all, a picture is said to be worth a thousand words, so wouldn't seven pictures be worth a lot more? Not necessarily. [more]

The King of Fast Food Opts for Fast Payments with Apple Pay [CIO]
In an exclusive interview with CIO.com, McDonald's U.S. CIO talks about why the fast-food giant choseto support Apple's new contactless payment technology out of the gate and how it built on its experience with Google Wallet to help make Apple Pay a customer magnet. [more]

How City Governments can Deploy High-Speed Connectivity [InfoWorld]
It would be hard to find two cities that are more dissimilar than tiny Leverett, Mass., and Stockholm, Sweden, 3,700 miles across the Atlantic. Even so, they have more in common than cold winters: Both sport high-speed fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) networks built by local governments when privately owned carriers were either indifferent or simply not up to the job. [more]

Vietnam's Market Economy Leaves the Poor Behind [San Francisco Chronicle]
(12-08) 04:00 PST Ho Chi Minh City -- At 16, Xuan Phuong left her home in central Vietnam to join the Viet Minh's struggle against the French in 1946. [more]

The Science of Finding Love Online [Stanford Business]
AS FIRST DATES GO, IT RATED FOUR STARS. The antipasto platter and pizza were good; the conversation was even better. Both spoke Italian, loved Mediterranean food, and had lived in Florence, so there was plenty to talk about. The chemistry? “I knew from her pictures that shewas beautiful,” says Dan Beltramo MBA ’94, “but when we met, it was loveat first sight.” [more]