Facebook has gone ahead and purchased Charles Jolley’s conversational AI startup Ozlo. Jolley, formerly Head of Platform for Android at Facebook, will not be returning to the company. The Ozlo team is expected to join Facebook to work on natural language processing challenges. Read More
Google today announced a small but important update to how Google Calendar and Microsoft Exchange can work together going forward. It’s not unusual for a company to still use both Google’s G Suite tools and Microsoft Exchange in parallel, and with this update, G Suite admins can now allow their users to see real-time free/busy information across the two systems. This means tools… Read More
In an unsurprising move by credit card thieves police have found a new credit card skimmer that sends stolen data via SMS. By tearing apart cheap phones, crooks are able to send credit card information to their location instantly without having to access the skimmer physically or rely on an open Bluetooth connection. Brian Krebs received images of the skimmer from an unnamed source. They… Read More
Amazon reported its second-quarter earnings today, and it was a bit of a whiff — and a bummer for Jeff Bezos, who is now no longer the solar system’s richest human and has been relegated to the unfortunate position of second-richest human. Read More
Intel declared $14.8 billion in revenue this afternoon and earnings per share of 72 cents. This represents a solid beat as analysts had expected revenues of $14.41 billion and EPS of 68 cents. Intel stock finished up 22 cents and 0.63 percent to $34.97 per share in regular trading. In the moments after the company released its earnings, Intel’s stock shot up 3.43 percent. It is… Read More
Peer5, which helps publishers stream video to large audiences, is announcing that it has raised $2.5 million in seed funding. I wrote about the startup earlier this year when it was part of Y Combinator. CEO Hadar Weiss said he raised the funding after YC Demo Day from investors including FundersClub, Oriza Ventures, Tank Hill Ventures, Leorsa Group, Ed Roman and Buddy Anheim. In… Read More
Sometimes combining two companies that compete in the same market provides a quick way to leapfrog your market share. That was likely the thinking behind Mitel’s decision to buy ShoreTel this morning for $430 million. Combining the two companies catapults Mitel to number two in the Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) market, according to the company. As for ShoreTel, while it… Read More
Microsoft today is launching a couple of major updates to PowerApps, its low-code service for quickly building line-of-business applications, and Flow, its business-centric IFTTT competitor. While these are obviously two very different applications, the general idea to allow businesses to leverage the data that they already generate is similar across both projects. Ryan Cunningham… Read More
Salesforce announced an update to its Service Cloud today, which the company says enables non-technical administrators to build a customer service organization with connected services in less than day. That’s a bold claim, even for the marketing department, but the Service Cloud app builder has been built on top of the Salesforce Lightning development platform and designed to drag and… Read More
Enterprise messaging service Slack is raising a $250 million round at a $5 billion valuation, TechCrunch has confirmed. We’re hearing that SoftBank, Accel Partners and other existing investors participated. The $250 million financing amount was reported by Bloomberg. Axios first had the names of the lead investors. Recode originally reported on a $500 million round last month, but… Read More
Barely a day passes without some news about containers and that speaks to how quickly this technology is being adopted by developers and the platforms and startups that serve them. Today it’s Microsoft’s turn to launch a new container service for its Azure cloud computing platform: Azure Container Instances (ACI). The company also announced that it is joining the Cloud Native… Read More
OpenText, the content management company based in Waterloo, Ontario announced today that it was buying Guidance Software, a forensic security and eDiscovery vendor for $240 million. OpenText agreed to pay Guidance shareholders $7.10 a share. The $240 million price tag is roughly the equivalent of the company’s market cap as of this morning. The price will be less Guidance’s cash… Read More
British enterprise software company Sage Group has agreed to purchase Intacct, a 19-year-old accounting software company, for $850 million, the companies announced today. A cash and stock transaction, the deal aims to help build out Sage’s cloud financial management offerings. Intacct, which competes with Financial Force and Oracle’s NetSuite, said in a related statement that it… Read More
HubSpot is announcing that it has acquired Kemvi, a startup applying artificial intelligence and machine learning to help sales teams. A few months ago, Kemvi launched DeepGraph, a product that analyzes public data so that salespeople can identify the best time (say, after a job change or the publication of an article) to reach out to potential customers. It also proactively reaches out to… Read More
Companies are increasingly dependant on digital platforms for their business growth, and that is giving a boost to analytics businesses that are helping them make better sense of that digital landscape. SimilarWeb — which offers analytics and insights about the performance of websites and apps, as well as competitive intelligence about how other apps and sites are doing (covering 80… Read More
Big data analytics — where vast troves of information are structured and used to help businesses gain more insights into their operations and customers, to develop new products, and to run more efficiently — are a cornerstone of how many tech-centric enterprises run their businesses today. Now the focus is on building solutions that the rest of the enterprise world can use, even if… Read More
Restaurant owners have a lot of responsibilities and a wide array of skills to handle those responsibilities. That said, building a website isn’t usually within that skill-set. That’s where BentoBox comes in. The company, which helps restaurant owners quickly build full-featured websites for their restaurants, has just closed a $4.8 million Series A funding round. The round was led… Read More
Following its longstanding tradition of reporting quarterly earnings for its fourth financial quarter of the year in July, Microsoft today announced non-GAAP revenue of $24.7 billion and GAAP earnings per share of $0.83 (and non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.98) for the last three months. Operating income was $7.0 billion non-GAAP. Read More
Google today announced that TCP BBR, a new congestion-control algorithm is now available to its Cloud Platform users. The general idea here is to improve on the existing congestion-control algorithms for internet traffic, which have been around since the 1980s and which typically only take packet loss into account (when networking buffers fill up, routers will discard any new packets). Read More
For a long time, traditional IT resisted the cloud, but that has changed in recent years as companies have come to realize that they can’t survive without the agility, scalability and economics that only a public cloud approach can provide. Yet in spite of the clear advantages the public cloud brings, there are still many companies out there that resist it for a variety of… Read More
After raising $55 million last year to build its business beyond its existing help desk services, today Freshworks (the parent company of Freshdesk) has made an acquisition to help it fill out that strategy. The company has acquired Joe Hukum, a startup out of India that offers a platform for businesses to build their own chatbots. I’ve asked, but the companies are not revealing any terms… Read More
Big data analytics continues to be a key driver in how organisations utilise their vast quantities of information to run their businesses, and now a startup that has built a big data platform specifically focusing on data from the public sector has raised a round of funding. LiveStories, a Seattle-based company that works with governments, education institutions and other public entities to… Read More
You may know Jeremy Bloom from his days as an Olympian on the U.S. ski team or from when he was a professional football player. These days, he’s busy running an enterprise software startup for marketers. With clients like Salesforce and Dell, Phoenix-based Integrate has raised $8 million in funding from Iron Gate Capital and existing investors, including Foundry Group, Comcast Ventures… Read More
Clara Labs, creator of the Clara AI assistant, is announcing a $7 million Series A this morning led by Basis Set Ventures. Slack Fund also joined in the round alongside existing investors Sequoia and First Round. The startup will be looking to further differentiate within the crowded field of email-centric personal assistants by building in features and integrations to address the needs of… Read More
When Google released a new enterprise version of Glass on Tuesday, a bevy of headlines suggested Glass was back, but It never really left. Even though the Explorer program aimed at consumers ended in January, 2015, Google has continued to sell Glass to businesses. In that context, yesterday’s release wasn’t a comeback so much as a continuation of an enterprise strategy for Glass… Read More
