Providence Technology Group

Today, the California Department of Industrial Relations, the California Division of Apprenticeship Standards (DAS), the Department of Technology (CDT), SEIU Local 1000 (Local 1000), and various state agencies along with IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced the state’s first-ever public-private partnership focused on creating a technology apprenticeship program. This program will adopt IBM’s proven apprenticeship model to address a statewide skills shortage in three critical fields: Mainframe System Administration (MSA), Software Engineering (SWE), and Application Development (AD). Sponsors of the zSystems Apprenticeship Pilot Program are the California Government Operations Agency, Employment Development Department, California Labor and Workforce Development Agency, California Department...[Read More]

A tech boom is generating new jobs in the Greater Sacramento area, and the River City looks to become a rival to Silicon Valley when it comes to highly trained tech workers. “We have folks moving in from the Bay Area, Salt Lake City to Sacramento, just because there is so much buzz here,” said Manvir Sandhu, chief executive officer of Zennify. Sandhu’s firm offered a Champagne toast to innovation Wednesday at its new headquarters in Sacramento’s Natomas neighborhood. Zennify, a startup company, just announced big plans to grow in Sacramento by tripling its workforce numbers. “We went from three to 40 (employees) in two years,” Sandhu said. “And I see us getting to about 120 here in two years from today.” Keep reading this article at MSN.com

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Already besieged by problems including long wait times, the California Department of Motor Vehicles on Tuesday said it suffered a data breach in which federal agencies, including the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, had improper access to the Social Security information of 3,200 people issued driver’s licenses. Notices of the data breach went out to those whose Social Security information — including whether or not a license holder had a Social Security number — was accessed during the last four years by seven agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service, the Small Business Administration, and district attorneys in San Diego and Santa Clara counties. Some of the data were accessed as part of investigations into criminal activity or compliance with tax laws, of...[Read More]

PowerSchool has reached an agreement to acquire Schoology, a provider of learning management systems with a sizable footprint among K-12 schools and districts. If approved, the pending acquisition would mark the latest puzzle piece that PowerSchool has purchased this decade. Founded in 1997, Powerschool was first bought by Apple in 2001, and then by Pearson in 2006. The publisher sold the PowerSchool to private equity firm Vista Equity Partners in June 2015. Onex, another private equity firm, invested in PowerSchool in 2018 and shares equal equity ownership with Vista. Since 2015, PowerSchool has acquired eight companies. Through these deals, the company has expanded its product suite beyond its original K-12 student information system offering to assessment, enrollment, special education ...[Read More]

Imagine sitting far back in the bleachers of a basketball game but being able to see the action on the court, via a hologram, as clearly as if you were sitting in the front row. Or imagine getting up at half-time to grab a snack from the concession stand and checking an app on your phone to find the line with the shortest wait time. These are only a few of the ways that technology—powered by 5G—has started to revolutionize the way we watch sports, both on the court and at home. In a new study commissioned by Amdocs, a software and services provider, researchers found that consumers under the age of 35 preferred watching sports programs through streaming video—and that they were willing to pay more for an immersive, high-quality streaming experience. For this reason, service providers are n...[Read More]

Today, the U.S. Geological Survey and the State of California pressed the “go” button to allow the first-ever statewide public testing of the California Early Earthquake Warning System, which is powered by USGS’s earthquake early warning alerts, called ShakeAlerts. Alerts will be delivered by two independent methods, first over the federal Wireless Emergency Alert (WEA) system and second through the University of California Berkeley’s MyShake smartphone app. “Today we commemorate the 30th anniversary of one of our nation’s most destructive earthquakes, the magnitude 6.9 Loma Prieta quake. That event also marked the first deployment of an early forerunner of the ShakeAlert system, which was used to warn rescue workers about potentially dangerous aftershocks,” said USGS Director Jim Re...[Read More]

It was a weird twist, but make no mistake about Harrison’s overall approach on the job: It is all about productivity. The California Northern Railroad Company is located about 30 minutes outside of Sacramento, Calif. Tomatoes are king here, and the California Northern Railroad Company, which is owned by Genesee & Wyoming, serves many customers which specialize in the production of tomato paste. They are part of a 20-mile track run between Woodland, Calif., and Davis, Calif—a trip that the California Northern Railroad Company takes daily. “[The shift] probably runs about eight hours,” Harrison said. “It starts in Woodland and then we run about 20 miles down the track to Davis, pick up a 30-, 40-, 50-car train and bring it back to Woodland to service customers.” Ask Harrison about what l...[Read More]

Cerner will transfer an estimated 360 jobs in information technology and revenue management services from its Kansas City-based headquarters back to Adventist Health, according to Kansas City Business Journal. In January 2018, Roseville, Calif.-based Adventist Health sent 275 jobs to Cerner as part of its expanded partnership with the EHR vendor. As part of the deal, Cerner assumed day-to-day management of Adventist’s revenue cycle and clinical applications IT staff. “Cerner and Adventist Health have a longstanding relationship with a shared goal of improving care quality and patient experience,” a Cerner spokesperson said in an emailed statement to Becker’s. “As part of a joint strategic business decision between the two parties, revenue cycle operations are ...[Read More]

A new cashier-less convenience store will open inside Golden 1 Center in October that should be ready it time for the Sacramento Kings’ home opener, according to a release from the team. The arena will partner with Zippin to create a checkout-free store that will allow fans to buy concessions such as water, snacks, beer and more. Fan would use Kings app or the Zippin app to see the store’s inventory. The store would be the world’s first checkout-free arena store, according to the release. “We’re always trying to make everything convenient and remove friction from the entire fan experience,” Ryan Montoya, Kings chief technical officer, said in a statement. “Within the store we’re going to be able to offer some of our top-selling concessions.” Keep reading this article at SacBee.com

California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Wednesday the award of two contracts for cutting-edge technologies designed to help combat the deadly wildfires. Under the contracts, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire, will test out a modeling platform that predicts where active blazes will spread, and an ignition detection system that relies on aerial sensors. The contracts, worth a combined $2 million, were issued under a new procurement process Newsom implemented on his first full day in office in January. Under the governor’s order, Cal Fire issued a solicitation known a request for innovative ideas, or RFI2. Rather than a traditional request for proposals, in which the soliciting government agency lays out narrow parameters for a project it wants a vendor to ...[Read More]

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (CN) – Responding to civil liberties groups who cast the budding technology as dangerously flawed and an invasion of privacy, California lawmakers on Wednesday approved temporarily barring law enforcement from implementing facial recognition software. The American Civil Liberties Union and other critics of the technology want to keep law enforcement agencies from installing the software on officer body cameras until developers like Amazon and Microsoft can work out the kinks. Along with privacy concerns, the ACLU says the technology has been proven to misidentify minorities and could open them up to wrongful arrests. The state Senate narrowly cleared the ACLU’s bill by a 22-15 margin, with two Republicans voting for the bill and six Democrats voting against. The bill hea...[Read More]

Restaurants, hotels and other businesses that serve the public in California must make their websites accessible to the blind, a state appeals court ruled Tuesday. The 1990 federal law prohibiting discrimination against the disabled in any place of “public accommodation” applies to websites where people can make reservations, said the Second District Court of Appeal in Los Angeles, the first appellate court in California to rule on the issue. It rejected arguments that the law applied only to actions at the restaurant or place of business and not to a website, a position endorsed by a federal appeals court in Philadelphia in 1998 but rejected by other courts. Tuesday’s ruling also rejected a Los Angeles restaurant owner’s contention that it had complied adequately with the law by providing...[Read More]