Hangouts Chat, Google’s take on modern workplace communication, is now generally available and is becoming a core part of G Suite. Hangouts Chat was first announced at Google Cloud Next 2017, together with Hangouts Meet. While Meet went right into public availability, though, Chat went into an invite-only preview. Now, Google is rolling Chat out to all G Suite users. Read More
OpenStack, the open source infrastructure project that aims to give enterprises the equivalent of AWS for the private clouds, today announced the launch of its 17th release, dubbed ‘Queens.’ After all of those releases, you’d think that there isn’t all that much new that the OpenStack community could add to the project, but just as the large public clouds keep adding… Read More
Square posted a largely successful fourth quarter that showed continuing growth with its Cash app — with users spending around $90 million on its Cash card in December, putting it on at a potentially $1 billion run rate. That would offer another significant avenue for Square to snap up additional customers as it looks to chip away at the alternatives available for directly sending… Read More
For IBM Watson CTO Rob High, the biggest technological challenge in machine learning right now is figuring out how to train models with less data. “It’s a challenge, it’s a goal and there’s certainly reason to believe that it’s possible,” High told me during an interview at the annual Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Read More
If an engineer ends up leaving a company, on their own, or for any other reason, the company work is going to have to quickly work to change all of their keys for their credentials and keys application components. That’s a huge hassle, because often times it’s hard to know where they are stored, who can access what, and how to change everything at a massive scale — especially… Read More
When Equifax was broken into late last year — one of the biggest security breaches in recent history — Fletcher Heisler wanted to make sure security engineers got to know exactly what happened right away, and how to fix it. That’s part of the goal of Hunter2, a new online learning platform for security engineers that’s designed to teach them how to handle these kinds… Read More
Broadcom and Qualcomm, the former of which is trying to acquire the latter, are continuing to duke it out on their respective investor relations pages by issuing public statements to investors over how much drama there is over the pricing of this deal. Read More
It’s official, the Dropbox IPO filing is here. Going public is a huge milestone for Dropbox and has been one of the most anticipated tech IPOs for several years now. The company has been around since 2007 and has raised over $600 million in funding. We knew that it had already filed confidentially, but the company has now unveiled its filing, meaning the actual IPO is likely very soon… Read More
If you’ve tried to deal with a bot before you can speak to a human customer service rep, you know how frustrating that process can sometimes be. Sure, there are basic tasks that can free up a human rep to handle the more difficult matters, but it can be exasperating when there is no easy way to talk to a person. Agent IQ, a startup that has developed customer service bots, acknowledges… Read More
Max Rhodes was walking around that weird little parklet in Hayes Valley in San Francisco after taking a break from a five-year stint at Square to figure out what he wanted to do next — and he kept seeing Square registers everywhere. It was spotting them over and over again in smaller retail shops dotted throughout the city that made him think about the connections between the average… Read More
Feature Labs, a startup with roots in research begun at MIT, officially launched today with a set of tools to help data scientists build machine learning algorithms more quickly. Co-founder and CEO Max Kantor says the company has developed a way to automate “feature engineering,” which is often a time consuming and manual process for data scientists. “Feature Labs helps… Read More
Few problems are as much of a headache for the modern corporate worker as buying things on the company’s dime. Companies are loathe to hand out credit cards to everyone in the building, but they also want their employees to do your job without having to fill out six forms in triplicate to requisition a pencil. They also want to control spending and track who bought that $2,000 bottle… Read More
Falcon.io, a startup out of Denmark that helps businesses manage their presence across social media and messaging platforms, has acquired a competitor in a wider trend of consolidation in the market for such services. It is buying Komfo from customer experience software developer Sitecore, which itself was majority acquired by EQT for $1.1 billion in 2016. Falcon.io is not disclosing the terms… Read More
How much can customer service be automated? Onward has some straightforward targets — 40 percent of tickets and 40 percent of messages should be automated, and average response times should be 40 seconds on average. Founders Rémi Cossart and Pramod Thammaiah describe this as Automation40 — basically, a set of goals for businesses looking to bring more automation into the… Read More
With so many Android devices out there to choose from, it’s not always easy to find one that’s enterprise-friendly. To help alleviate that problem, Google announced the Android Enterprise Recommended program today. As the name implies, it’s designed to point enterprise IT departments at devices that Google has deemed to be enterprise-ready. This involves a number of… Read More
Cloud IoT Core, Google’s fully managed service for connecting, managing and ingesting data from IoT devices, is now out of beta and generally available. Google envisions the service, which launched in public beta last September, as the first entry point for IoT data into its cloud. Once the data has been ingested, users can use Cloud IoT Core to push data to Google’s cloud… Read More
Google and other tech giants often have huge recruiting efforts that can target students — but startups might not have those kinds of resources to find or grab them before they head off to those huge companies. The biggest tech companies in the world can offer a lot of resources and bigger compensation packages, but startups may still offer a huge opportunity too. That’s why… Read More
With the trend of growing cybercrime showing no indication of abating, a startup called Vectra that has built an artificial intelligence-based system called Cognito to detect cyberattacks and mobilise security systems to respond to them has raised $36 million to expand its R&D and business development. This Series D comes on the back of a strong year for the startup, with 181 percent growth… Read More
4me, a startup that helps companies organize and track their IT outsourcing projects, announced a $1.65 million seed investment led by Storm Ventures. The company, which launched in 2010, would seem to be a bit long in tooth to warrant a seed investment round, but co-founder and CEO Cor Winkler Prins explained that the founders both had successful exits from previous service management… Read More
Last year, when tech-company database Crunchbase (once a part of TechCrunch but since spun out) announced a funding round of $18 million, it previewed plans for a new marketplace where it would sell access to third-party data to supplement its own information. Now nearly one year later, it’s taking the wraps off that project. Today the company announced a new service called Crunchbase… Read More
The arrival of Stride, Atlassian’s Slack competitor, was probably the company’s biggest launch of 2017. While the company generally allows developers to easily integrate with its products, Stride’s API remained in closed beta for significantly longer than the product itself, which exited beta last September. Today, however, Atlassian is opening the Stride API to all… Read More
When a crisis happens and your system is down, it’s easy for panic and chaos to ensue. Large companies use a range of tools to monitor system health, and finding the source of the problem and ensuring the proper personnel are involved is not always easy. That’s where xMatters comes in. It acts as an uber monitoring tool allowing you to understand the source of your problem and… Read More
Oracle announced yesterday that it intends to acquire Zenedge, a 4-year old hybrid security startup. They didn’t reveal a purchase price. With Zenedge, Oracle gets a security service to add it to its growing cloud play. In this case, the company has products to protect customers whether in the cloud, on-prem or across hybrid environments. The company offers a range of services from… Read More
Bynder, one of the leading companies in the digital asset management space, today announced that it has acquired Shutterstock‘s Webdam. The Amsterdam-based company tells us that it paid $49.1 million for Webdam, which Shutterstock itself acquired back in 2014. Like Bynder, Webdam’s focus is on helping enterprises and agencies manage their digital assets. Currently Webdam… Read More
Slack had added Edith Cooper, who most recently served as the global head of human capital management at Goldman Sachs, to its board of directors. As Slack prepares “for accelerated growth at scale,” Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield wrote in a blog post today, Cooper marks Slack’s second independent board member. “She has an unrivaled depth of experience in the hardest… Read More
