Thursday, December 14, 2017

Andrew Ng’s Landing.ai wants to bring artificial intelligence to the manufacturing industry, starting with Foxconn

 AI pioneer Andrew Ng is probably best known for his work on the Google Brain project and for leading Baidu’s AI group. After leaving Baidu earlier this year, it wasn’t quite clear what exactly Ng was up to, but today he announced the launch of Landing.ai, a new startup that focuses on bringing artificial intelligence to the manufacturing industry. Read More

Instana raises $20 million for its microservice monitoring and management service

 Instana, a company that helps enterprises monitor and manage their microservice deployments with the help of automation and artificial intelligence, today announced that it has raised a $20 million Series B round led by Accel, with participation from existing investor Target Partners. This brings Instana’s total funding to $26 million to date. Launched in 2015, Instana bills itself as… Read More

Wednesday, December 13, 2017

Microsoft makes Azure Bot Service generally available for developers

 Microsoft introduced the Azure Bot Framework over two years ago and companies have building chatbots for a variety of scenarios ever since. Today, the company made the Microsoft Azure Bot Service and Microsoft Cognitive Language Understanding service (known as LUIS) generally available. “Making these two services generally available on Azure simultaneously extends the capabilities of… Read More

Payments startup iZettle raises $47M, reportedly at a $950M valuation

 iZettle — the payments startup based out of Stockholm that competes against companies like Square, Paypal and SumUp to provide card transactions using smartphones and tablets as well as related accounting services — has raised another €40 million ($47 million), money that CEO and co-founder Jacob de Geer told TechCrunch would be used to expand into more markets beyond the 12 where… Read More

Tuesday, December 12, 2017

Box launches new consulting unit to help customers struggling with digital transformation

 Box announced a new consulting organization today called Box Transform. It is designed to help companies understand that transformation requires a new way of working and thinking as an organization, beyond simply adopting new technologies like Box. Box CEO Aaron Levie says that as his company has grown, they see their mission as more than selling software. It’s about helping change… Read More

Monday, December 11, 2017

Iron Mountain acquires IO Data Centers US operations for $1.3 billion

 Iron Mountain announced today that it’s acquiring the US data center assets of IO Data Centers for a cool $1.3 billion — and the price tag could potentially go higher With today’s purchase, Iron Mountain gets some serious assets including four state-of-the-art data centers in Phoenix and Scottsdale, Arizona, Edison, New Jersey and Columbus, Ohio. The four buildings in… Read More

Sunday, December 10, 2017

In spite of digital transformation, 2017 did not yield the desired financial results for GE

 GE is a great example of a traditional company that has recognized the need to transform into a digital organization, but by all measures 2017 has been a tough year for the industrial giant financially. The company stock price has tumbled, and last week it announced that it was laying off 12,000 employees in its power business worldwide. While you can’t attribute all of the… Read More