Highspot raises $15 million to perfect your sales pitch

Salespeople have a lot of things to sell and the latest technology can help them sell even more. Do you think you have the perfect pitch? Highspot will tell you if you’re wrong. Or at least that’s their pitch. Highspot’s software analyzes various communications with prospective clients, including presentations, case studies and training videos. Then it provides data about… Read More

Facebook teaches machines to negotiate with humans

 Though Facebook is rarely mentioned alongside Apple, Microsoft and Amazon in discussions about conversational AI, the company has published hoard of papers that underscore a deep interest in dialog systems. As has become clear with Siri, Cortana and Alexa, dialog is hard — it requires more than just good speech recognition to deliver a killer experience to users. From the sidelines… Read More

Microsoft joins the open source Cloud Foundry Foundation

 Microsoft today announced that it is joining the Cloud Foundry Foundation, the non-profit behind the open source Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service project that’s currently in use by about half of the Fortune 500 companies. Microsoft is joining at the Gold Member tier where it joins the likes of Google (which joined last December and also hired the foundation’s former… Read More

Atlassian launches a new subscription bundle that includes all of its developer tools

 Atlassian today announced the launch of Atlassian Stack, a new subscription service that bundles virtually all of the company’s self-hosted developer tools into a single offering. Starting at $186,875 per year for 1,000 licenses, this new bundle is meant to make the procurement process for enterprises easier and cheaper (despite what looks like an eye watering price at first). Instead… Read More

Inflect makes buying internet infrastructure easier

 Once your company gets to the point where you decide to move out of the comforting safety of a public cloud like AWS and set up your own infrastructure, things get rather complicated. You have to choose a data center (or two) and your network and exchange providers, for example, and chances are your team isn’t fully up to speed on how to buy these kind of infrastructure services.… Read More

Microsoft’s Power BI business analytics tool learns new tricks

 Back in 2015, Microsoft launched a highly visual Power BI data exploration and interactive reporting tool into general availability. The service is now in active use at 200,000 different organizations and the team has shipped 400 updates and new features over the course of the last two years. Current users span a wide gamut and include the likes of the Seattle Seahawks, CA Technologies,… Read More

HelloSign raises $16 million so you can stop signing paper documents

 HelloSign, the eSignature platform, is announcing a $16 million financing round led by Foundry Group and Zach Coelius. Greylock Partners, U.S. Venture Partners and Tien Zhuo also participated. Although the San Francisco-based company has been around since 2010, they are calling it a Series B, since they’ve raised little outside capital. The business is cash flow positive and it’s… Read More