Google Compute Engine goes a little crazy with up to 96 CPU cores and 624 GB of memory

 If you’ve got a resource-hungry app, Google Compute Engine’s latest offering has you covered. It lets you dial up to 96 CPUs and an other-worldly 624 GB of memory. Remember Bill Gates asking who would ever need more than 64K of memory. He obviously didn’t see this coming. If you think that’s a lot, you aren’t kidding, and believe it or not it’s a big boost… Read More

Cardiologs raises $6.4M to bring image recognition to EKG analysis

 You’ll find image recognition technology in almost every kind of consumer service you would use today — like Facebook, Google, or any number of other apps — but Yann Fleureau is hoping that he can build a whole business off of its increasing success in healthcare. Fleureau hopes that his startup, Cardiologs, can use image recognition to analyze an EKG and detect potential… Read More

Rasa Core kicks up the context for chatbots

 Context is everything when dealing with dialog systems. We humans take for granted how complex even our simplest conversations are. That’s part of the reason why dialog systems can’t live up to their human counterparts. But with an interactive learning approach and some open source love, Berlin-based Rasa is hoping to help enterprises solve their conversational AI problems. The… Read More

Splunk is latest company to take exception to Larry Ellison’s slams at Oracle OpenWorld

 Larry Ellison was at it again yesterday, making friends, influencing people and pissing off rivals. It was AWS in the keynote earlier in the week. Yesterday, it was Splunk, a seemingly innocuous logging software company, which somehow fell into Ellison’s marketing cross-hairs. The company took serious exception. Splunk is best known for logging all events related to IT. Ellison announced… Read More

Foursquare revamps its developer site as API usage soars

 It’s no secret that developers are the key to Foursquare’s continued success, and as part of supporting that mission the company just launched a revamped developer site, its first major refresh since 2009. The new site makes it clearer what the difference is between the developer offerings. The Places API is the free offering that most developers will use that serves up information… Read More

Apple ‘acqui-hired’ the team from messaging assistant Init.ai to work on Siri

Earlier this week, a small startup called Init.ai announced that it soon would be discontinuing its service — a smart assistant for customer representatives to parse and get better insights from their interactions with users, as well as automate some of the interactions — because the team was (according to a notice on the site) “joining a project that touches the lives of… Read More

Cloud computing has demanded a kinder, gentler Oracle

 Oracle has always had a swagger that reflects the public persona of its bombastic leader, Larry Ellison, but over the last several years, as the company has transitioned to the cloud, it has required a transformation to one that is softer and more customer-centric. Mind you, this was a company that was the poster child for vendor lock-in the 90s and early 2000s. They knew you were looking for… Read More