Microsoft Excel users rejoice. Your favorite spreadsheet is about to get a lot smarter, thanks to the help of machine learning and a better connection to the outside world. As Jared Spataro, Microsoft’s general manager for Office, and Rob Howard, the company’s director of Office 365 ecosystem marketing, showed me during a briefing at the company’s Ignite conference today,… Read More
Managed by Q, the platform that helps office managers handle day-to-day operations, has made its first acquisition, picking up Y Combinator graduates Hivy for an undisclosed amount. Managed By Q lets office managers book cleanings, handy work, IT help, and order office supplies thanks to a partnership with Staples. MBQ has raised upwards of $72 million and now serves New York, Chicago, San… Read More
Splunk has always been data central for IT operations info, but as the logs fill up with ever-increasing amounts of data, it has become impossible for humans to keep up. Recognizing this, Splunk started building in machine learning and artificial intelligence last year, and this week they are enhancing those capabilities to make it easier to surface the data that’s most critical. The… Read More
ProsperWorks, a service that offers a set of Google-centric CRM tools, today announced that it has raised a $53 million Series C round led by Norwest Venture Partners, with participation from GV (the fund you probably still remember as Google Ventures). This new round brings the company’s total funding to $87 million, which, in ProsperWorks’ own words, makes t the “#1 funded… Read More
Lively co-founder Shobin Uralil likes to describe the health savings account as the “401(k) for healthcare” — but that it’s woefully underused as an investment vehicle like a 401(k). So instead of just relying on it as a way to pay for healthcare, Uralil and his co-founder Alex Cyriac set out to build a way to not only help people start up health savings accounts, but… Read More
At its Ignite conference, Microsoft today put its stake in the ground and discussed its progress in building a quantum computer and giving developers tools to experiment with this new computing paradigm on their existing machines. Read More
Moving lots of data to the cloud can take a long time and cost quite a bit, even over fast connections. Like its competitors — and especially AWS — Microsoft has long allowed its Azure users to import data to its cloud by shipping hard drives to its data centers. It’s now going a step further with the preview launch of the 100 TB Azure Data Box, its answer to AWS’s 50… Read More
