Friday, June 30, 2017

Tintri up slightly after lowering IPO price

 Enterprise cloud company Tintri was supposed to debut on the public markets yesterday with an IPO price between $10.50 to $12.50, but then pushed things back a day and lowered its price to $7. Shares were up about 3.5% midday Friday, trading at roughly $7.25 per share. In what seems to be a tough week for tech IPOs, cooking kit delivery service Blue Apron also significantly lowered its price… Read More

Thursday, June 29, 2017

Crunch Report | Blue Apron IPO Has A Rocky Start

Crunch Report 6.29 Today’s Stories  Blue Apron IPO off to a rough start Microsoft confirms Cloudyn acquisition, sources say price is between $50M and $70M Instagram implements an AI system to fight mean and harassing comments Uber crosses the 5 billion trip milestone amid ongoing issues A brief history of the iPhone Credits Written and Hosted by: Anthony Ha Filmed by: Matthew Mauro Edited by: Joe… Read More

Adobe releases analytics tools for conversational AI

 It’s still hard to say if the voice controlled aluminum can will be the next smartphone or the next Segway, but either way brands are preparing. This morning Adobe launched a new set of analytics tools, Adobe Sensei for Voice, to help brands take advantage of conversational data to improve targeting and ideally conversions. Adobe says it can consume data from Alexa, Siri, Google… Read More

AppDynamics update pinpoints performance issues inside Docker containers

 AppDynamics released an update today with a nod towards the growing trend of containerization. The company, which was purchased by Cisco earlier this year for $3.7 billion, wants to help customers using Docker containers pinpoint performance issues. The problem with containers is that there is just so many of them. Containers enable developers to break down a monolithic application into a set… Read More

Kinetica scores $50 million Series A for super-charged in-memory database solution

 Kinetica’s roots as a company go back to a 2009 consulting project for US intelligence services. When they couldn’t find a solution on the market to meet the strict demands of the army and NSA to track terrorists in real-time, they decided to build it. Today, it’s an in-memory database solution that relies on commodity hardware running Nvidia GPUs to supercharge the processing.… Read More

Wednesday, June 28, 2017

Nutanix introduces two new tools in quest to simplify hybrid cloud management

 Nutanix was born in 2009 as a storage company, but always had a broader view of the computing world. As company president Sudeesh Nair told me, they started with storage because they believed legacy storage was holding back data center transformation. Today the company made another step beyond that initial vision introducing two new products that they see as part of a larger hybrid cloud… Read More

The next generational shift in enterprise infrastructure has arrived

 Cloud computing is driving growth at 3 of the 5 most valuable companies in the world. AI will impact jobs only as quickly as AI-powered business software evolves. These are just two of the ramifications of disruptions in enterprise technology permeating mainstream media. Yet the inner workings of the tightly knit enterprise software industry are rarely publicized. Read More

Intercom lands former Intuit exec Karen Peacock as its new COO

Karen Peacock, COO at Intercom Intercom, a business messaging tool that enables companies to communicate directly with customers in an online context, announced today that it has hired former Intuit SVP Karen Peacock as company COO. She joined the company May 30th, but they are making the news public for the first time today. Peacock comes with an impressive resume that starts with a BA from Harvard and an MBA from Stanford. Read More

As Egnyte turns 10, it moves into data protection

 Egnyte had a big milestone last week. It turned 10 years old, which is a pretty big deal for a startup. The company has survived and even thrived, but as it moves into its second decade, it recognizes that it can’t live on file sync and share alone, and today it announced the general availability of a new product called Egnyte Protect. The product was introduced in Beta last year, but… Read More

Salesforce introduces several Einstein AI tools for third-party developers

 Salesforce launched three AI tools for developers today at the TrailheaDX developer conference. These algorithms, which fall under the new Einstein Platform Services, enable third-party developers to add Einstein intelligence to applications built on top of the Salesforce platform. The new services include sentiment and intent analysis and some pretty sophisticated image recognition… Read More

Tuesday, June 27, 2017

Box deepens partnership with Microsoft and turns its attention to AI and machine learning

Box and Microsoft logos When I spoke to Box CEO Aaron Levie last year at the Boxworks customer conference, I had to ask the obligatory machine learning question. Surely Box was of sufficient size with enough data running through its systems to take advantage of machine learning. All he would say was they were thinking about it. Today, the company announced a deepening relationship with Microsoft in which Box will… Read More

Sumo Logic lands $75 million Series F, on path to IPO

 Sumo Logic, the cloud-based log analysis platform, announced a $75 million round today, as the seven year old company could be entering the home stretch before an IPO. While CEO Ramin Sayar was not ready or willing to commit to an IPO timeline, he did admit it was the next logical step for the company, and that the size of the investment gives him the capital to build toward that event.… Read More

Monday, June 26, 2017

Facebook, Microsoft, YouTube and Twitter form Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism

 Today Facebook, Microsoft, YouTube and Twitter collectively announced a new partnership aimed at reducing the accessibility of internet services to terrorists. The new Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism adds structure to existing efforts by the companies to target and remove recruiting materials for terror groups from major web platforms. Together, the four tech leaders say they… Read More

Amazon said to be working on translation services for AWS customers

 Amazon is working on an offering that would allow developers building apps and websites using AWS to translate their content to multiple languages, CNBC reports. The machine translation tech used to provide the multi-lingual versions of client products would be based on tech Amazon uses across its own products, the report claims. Translation services are a key competitive offering for Amazon… Read More

Saturday, June 24, 2017

Headstart wants to better analyze candidates to fit them with the best jobs

 Nicholas Shekerdemian has a pretty typical startup story: he dropped out of college, met up with a technical co-founder and then ended up starting a company. But Shekerdemian, who at the time was helping match English teachers with Chinese citizens, wanted to start a company that would solve his own problem: actually getting a job at a cookie cutter company where everyone else applies. So… Read More

Friday, June 23, 2017

Algorithmia raises $10.5M Series A round led by Google’s new AI fund

Word recently spread that Google had quietly launched a new fund for investing into AI companies. Now this fund has made its first (or at least its first public) investment, leading a $10.5 million Series A into Algorithmia, a marketplace and enterprise solution that allows developers to easily tap into its catalog of 3,500 algorithms, functions and machine-learning models. Read More

Wednesday, June 21, 2017

Fleet management tracking provider Samsara raises $40M

 Rapid changes in the shipping industry has caught the attention of investors who are starting to pour large sums of money into the industry. And likely for good reason: as a future where trucks are run autonomously becomes ever clearer, the sensors and software behind that is going to have to be able to keep up. One company, Samsara, is working on just those kinds of sensors and products to… Read More

Tuesday, June 20, 2017

MongoDB launches Stitch, a new backend as a service, and brings Atlas to Azure and GCP

 MongoDB is hosting its annual developer conference in Chicago this week and no good developer conference would be complete without a few product launches. MongoDB used today’s keynotes to announce an update to its Atlas managed database-as-a-service offering, which now also runs on Microsoft Azure and Google’s Cloud Platform, as well as two completely new products: Stitch, a new… Read More

Agentology, the referral network for real estate agents, closes on $4.5 million

 Real estate is one of those industries that has been rather slow on the uptake of technology, which makes a lot of sense. Buying and selling a home is one of the biggest, most personal decisions in a person’s life, and the shift to online browsing, transactions, etc. was bound to take longer than other sectors. Brokers, too, have grown accustomed to their ways and are usually hesitant to… Read More

Google launches its AI-powered jobs search engine

 Looking for a new job is getting easier. Google today launched a new jobs search feature right on its search result pages that lets you search for jobs across virtually all of the major online job boards like LinkedIn, Monster, WayUp, DirectEmployers, CareerBuilder and Facebook and others. Google will also include job listings its finds on a company’s homepage. The idea here is to give… Read More

Monday, June 19, 2017

Blue Apron’s up IPO is not a surprise, as unicorns fare well in 2017

 Blue Apron’s IPO moved closer to reality this week as the firm set a price range for its shares. The company is set to go public at a higher IPO price than its last private round, undercutting worry that future unicorn IPOs may only point one direction: down. The meal-kit startup may IPO at a price between $15 and $17. At midpoint, Blue Apron is worth “just under $3… Read More

Dropbox announces massive network expansion

 When Dropbox announced it was leaving AWS last year and bringing the bulk of the operation in-house, you had to figure it was working on a significant network expansion, and today the company announced a massive global network growth plan that is designed to increase syncing speed for users and cut costs for the company. The plan involves several approaches including custom-built… Read More

Sunday, June 18, 2017

Cloud Foundry makes its mark on the enterprise

a foundry for clouds Today, more than ever, it’s open source projects that are leading the charge in how modern software is developed, deployed and managed. There’s Kubernetes for containers and OpenStack for running enterprise-grade infrastructure, for example. But over the course of the last few years, another platform — Cloud Foundry — has changed the way enterprises are developing… Read More

Thursday, June 15, 2017

VR’s killer app: business services

 Enterprise adoption is trumping entertainment uses and will spring VR and AR into the mainstream. Read More

Entelo steps up its AI game with $20M Series C 

 The race to crown a winner in the AI-powered recruiting software space is on. With both Workey and Mya nabbing rounds in the last few weeks, the timing is prime for a few players to seek advantage in the form of growth capital. This seems to be exactly what Entelo, a six year old player in the space, is doing. The company is announcing a $20 million Series C round of financing today led by U.S. Read More

Slack is reportedly raising another huge $500M round of funding

 Slack is in the midst of raising another $500 million in financing at what could be a $5 billion valuation — money it will likely critically need as it goes after major corporate clients and construct a functional business — according to a report by Recode. Slack also got some interest with a $9 billion price tag from Amazon, according to a report from Bloomberg last night. All… Read More