There are now two Dianes running the show at Google Cloud. The company announced that Diane Bryant has been hired as the COO of the division. She joins Diane Greene, who came on board as Senior VP of Google Cloud in November 2015. Greene appeared to be excited about the prospect of her joining the team. “I can’t think of a person with more relevant experience and talents. She is… Read More
Amazon is soon to announce Alexa for Business, and WeWork is one of the first partners to have hopped on the platform. WeWork’s vision is to use technology to help businesses make the most out of their physical space, all while customizing that space to each individual’s personal needs. The co-working giant has been on the Alexa for Business platform for about a month now, as part… Read More
A company that is seizing the opportunity to provide predictive analytics to the industrial world — regardless of whether a business has made the (often costly) transition to internet-of-things “smart” systems — is today announcing that it has raised a significant round of growth funding to double down on the opportunity. Uptake, a SaaS startup that uses machine learning… Read More
The interface is evolving. What has long been dominated by screens of all shapes and sizes is now being encroached upon by the voice. And while many companies are building voice interfaces — Apple with Siri, Google with Assistant, and Microsoft with Cortana — none are quite as dominant as Amazon has been with Alexa. At the AWS reinvent conference, Amazon will announce Alexa for… Read More
Amazon FreeRTOS is, as the name implies, essentially an extension of the FreeRTOS operating system that adds libraries for local and cloud connectivity. Over time, Amazon will also add support for over-the-air updates. Read More
At the AWS re:Invent conference today in Las Vegas, the company introduced AWS Fargate, a new service that lets you run containers without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure. This is a fairly remarkable, even revolutionary idea. You can launch your containers, let Kubernetes or other orchestration engine act as the manager and AWS will handle all of the underlying hardware… Read More
Amazon’s AWS cloud computing division is launching a number of new programs for its partner ecosystem today. These include a new networking competency program for companies that focus on advanced networking features, as well as the new AWS Machine Learning Partner Solutions program that highlights partners that have demonstrated expertise in (can you guess it?) running machine… Read More
All of the hyper-scale cloud providers love to tout their new customer acquisitions: Google talking about Spotify; Microsoft signing up various Adobe services for Azure; or AWS working with the likes of GE. That’s a sign of how competitive this market is, despite AWS’s continuing market share leadership. At its annual re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, Amazon’s cloud… Read More
Remember how VMware was supposed to be disrupted by AWS? Somewhere along the way it made a smart move. Instead of fighting the popular cloud platform, it decided to make it easier for IT to use its products on AWS. Today, at the opening of the AWS re:invent customer conference, it announced plans to expand that partnership with some new migration and disaster recovery services. As Mark… Read More
Here, the mapping company that powers location services in 100 million cars, is today announcing an acquisition to vastly improve how it distributes and updates its data. The company is buying Advanced Telematic Systems (ATS), a Berlin-based developer of secure over-the-air (OTA) technology, the basis for how wireless devices — including not just cars but smartphones and other… Read More
Video is what consumers are paying attention to these days, and Amazon’s AWS is hoping to capitalise on that with one of its latest launches. Doubling down on its video services for media companies, app publishers — and actually any other organization that has considered launching a video service — Amazon today announced a new suite of five video processing tools as part of… Read More
We’d heard months ago that Amazon would be using its Re:Invent AWS event to roll out some a new service related to building in mixed reality — augmented reality and virtual reality. And on the eve of the conference kicking off, it’s done just that. Today the company announced Amazon Sumerian, a new platform for developers to build and host VR, AR and 3D apps quickly and… Read More
Here’s a scary thought for decision makers inside large organizations grappling with digital transformation. You can actually be innovative and have mechanisms in place to react to disruptive forces, and still get steamrolled as layers of internal management turn your creative ideas into something unrecognizable. Kodak is a company that’s always held up as the poster child for… Read More
Ahead of Amazon’s AWS division big Re:invent conference next week, the company has announced two developments in the area of artificial intelligence. AWS is opening a machine learning lab, ML Solutions Lab, to pair Amazon machine learning experts with customers looking to build solutions using the AI tech. And it’s releasing news feature within Amazon Rekognition, Amazon’s… Read More
Ho hum, Salesforce announced its quarterly earnings yesterday and the news was all good once again with revenue up 25% to $2.68 billion. The company has blown through its $10B yearly revenue goal and has boldly set one for $20B by FY2022. I wouldn’t put it past them. The company also announced some big executive moves. More on that later Salesforce is the anti-IBM. While Big Blue has had… Read More
Salesforce has named Bret Taylor, the former chief technology officer at Facebook and founder of Quip, as president and chief product officer. Taylor first joined Salesforce in 2016, when Salesforce acquired word processing app Quip for $750 million. Now, Taylor is replacing Alex Dayon as the company’s CPO and Dayon is moving into the role of chief strategy officer. As chief product… Read More
Six years after taking the helm as head of HP, Meg Whitman will step down from her role as CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise in February 2018. Whitman’s spot will be filled by the company’s current President, Antonio Neri. Neri has been with HP since 1995, starting as a customer service engineer at at call center, ultimately rising the ranks to Executive Vice President of HPE in… Read More
If every company is truly a software company, Capital One is out to the prove it. It was one of the early users of Critical Stack, a tool designed to help build security into the container orchestration process. In fact, it liked it so much it bought the company in 2016, and today it’s releasing Critical Stack in Beta. This is a critical step toward becoming a commercial product, giving… Read More
When HPE acquired Nimble Storage in March for a cool billion dollars, it knew it was getting some nifty flash storage technology. But it also got Nimble’s InfoSight artificial intelligence capabilities that not only monitored the underlying storage arrays, but all of the adjacent datacenter technology. Today, the company announced it has enhanced that technology to provide… Read More
Google today announced the beta launch of its enterprise edition of Dialogflow, its tool for building chatbots and other conversational applications. In addition, Dialogflow (both in its free and enterprise version) is now getting built-in support for speech recognition, something that developers previously had to source through the Google Cloud Speech API or similar services. Unsurprisingly,… Read More
If the blockchain is going to be an immutable record, you need to start with clean data. The question is, how do you get clean data into a blockchain database to begin with. It’s kind of a quandary for use cases not starting with a green field, but Venzee, a startup that has been helping customers clean up their retail supply chain data to share with large vendors, thinks it has an… Read More
Algorithmia started out as an online marketplace for — can you guess it? — algorithms. Many of these algorithms that developers offered on the service focused on machine learning (think face detection, sentiment analysis, etc.). Today, with the boom in ML/AI, that’s obviously a big draw and Algorithmia is now taking its next step in this direction with the launch of a new… Read More
Marketing email company SendGrid had a decent first day on the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday. After pricing shares at $16, the company closed at $18.03, or up almost 13%. The Denver-based company had raised $131 million after pricing its IPO at $16, above the expected range of $13.50 to $15.50. SendGrid also upsized its IPO, selling 8.2 million shares, instead of 7.7 million.… Read More
Facebook is no stranger when it comes to open sourcing its computing knowledge. Over the years, it has consistently created software and hardware internally, then transferred that wisdom to the open source community to let them have it. Today, it announced it was open sourcing its modular network routing software called Open/R, as the tradition continues. Facebook obviously has unique scale… Read More
If you’ve ever searched for a product on any website that’s not Amazon or Google, you’ve probably had a bad time trying to find something — and then go straight back to Google or Amazon. That’s a significant problem for retailers, which need to ensure that potential customers that are already signaling a lot of interest in buying something will actually be able… Read More
