Enterprise – TechCrunch

The director of Baidu’s Silicon Valley AI Lab has departed

John Mannes — Wed, 13 Sep 2017 09:52:13 +0000

Adam Coates, director of Baidu’s Silicon Valley AI Lab, has left the company. A source confirmed the exit and Coates has updated his LinkedIn reflecting the change. Coates joined the Chinese search giant back in May of 2014 to lead a California-based team of 50 machine learning developers. Baidu has built up an established proficiency in natural language processing. While at Baidu,… Read More

New Bluetooth vulnerability can hack a phone in 10 seconds

John Biggs — Tue, 12 Sep 2017 21:22:50 +0000

Security company Armis has found a collection of eight exploits, collectively called BlueBorne, that can allow an attacker access to your phone without touching it. The attack can allow access to computers and phones, as well as IoT devices. “Armis believes many more vulnerabilities await discovery in the various platforms using Bluetooth. These vulnerabilities are fully operational, and… Read More

Pingpad update brings organizational layer to Slack

Ron Miller — Tue, 12 Sep 2017 14:45:18 +0000

One of the primary benefits of using Slack is the ability to communicate and share information across a company, but as usage scales it can sometimes lead to information overload and an inability to keep work organized. Pingpad released an update today to bring an organizational layer to Slack that could help teams keep their project information more orderly inside the communications… Read More

Alteryx Promote puts data science to work across the company

Ron Miller — Tue, 12 Sep 2017 09:00:45 +0000

When Alteryx acquired Yhat in June, it was only a matter of time before the startup’s data-science management software began showing up in Alteryx. Just today, the company announced Alteryx Promote, a new tool based on Yhat’s product set. The company made the announcement at the Alteryx Inspire Europe customer event taking place in London this week. Alteryx Promote gives data… Read More

Rackspace acquires Datapipe as it looks to expand its managed services business

Frederic Lardinois — Mon, 11 Sep 2017 16:00:11 +0000

Rackspace today announced its intention to acquire Datapipe, one of its largest competitors in the managed public and private cloud services business. Rackspace expects the acquisition, which is its largest one yet, to close in the next quarter. Read More

Data Artisans announces commercial Application Manager for open source Apache Flink

Ron Miller — Mon, 11 Sep 2017 13:00:52 +0000

Data Artisans, the business arm of open source tool, Apache Flink, announced an early-access release of the commercial version of their platform today that includes a new tool for managing streaming applications. Kostas Tzoumas, CEO at Data Artisans, says managing applications on a real-time streaming product presents some serious challenges for customers, and the new Application Manager is… Read More

Typeform, a platform for ‘conversational’ data collection, raises $35M

Ingrid Lunden — Mon, 11 Sep 2017 11:26:08 +0000

Filling out forms online and on mobile can be a tedious and bug-ridden — yet annoyingly necessary — experience. Today, a startup called Typeform has raised a significant round of capital to help fund its mission to change all that, with a platform that the startup claims gets its customers much better results because the interactive experiences created on it are more intuitive and… Read More

A perfect storm of corporate idiocy

John Biggs — Sat, 09 Sep 2017 15:40:06 +0000

At this point in the game there should be a single page on every corporate website, preferably accessible from its front page, that includes the name and all contact details for the Chief Security Officer, including the last four digits of her social security number. It should be her responsibility to ensure that no one uses this information for nefarious purposes in addition to her daily… Read More

Cloudera acquires AI research firm Fast Forward Labs

Matthew Lynley — Thu, 07 Sep 2017 22:37:22 +0000

Cloudera said today as part of its second-quarter earnings report that it is acquiring Fast Forward Labs, a startup that gives companies the latest information on how to apply machine learning and AI to their businesses, as well as consulting. Read More

Okta has a great earnings day on the back of strong international growth

John Mannes — Thu, 07 Sep 2017 21:00:20 +0000

Okta kept its beat-streak alive today with a healthy earnings report. On the back of international growth and a healthy services business, Okta beat revenue expectations by nine percent and managed to handily top EPS expectations. Read More

Canvas’ robot cart could change how factories work

John Mannes — Thu, 07 Sep 2017 18:18:26 +0000

We stopped by Andy Rubin’s Playground in Palo Alto to check out a new autonomous cart from Canvas Technologies. The startup aims to replace existing fixed and expensive factory infrastructure, like conveyor belts, with its lightweight and adaptable computer-vision-powered cart. Read More

Google launches Drive File Stream to replace the Google Drive desktop app for G Suite users

Sarah Perez — Thu, 07 Sep 2017 16:53:44 +0000

Google today announced the launch of new desktop application for Google Drive users, called Drive File Stream, which is now available to G Suite customers. The app will serve as a replacement for the Google Drive desktop app that will be shut down for good next year – a far enough date to give enterprise customers plenty of time to make the switch. The company had earlier detailed its… Read More

Microsoft and Adobe announce an expanded partnership around Adobe Sign and Microsoft Teams

Frederic Lardinois — Thu, 07 Sep 2017 13:00:59 +0000

Almost exactly a year ago, Microsoft and Adobe announced a strategic partnership around Microsoft’s Azure cloud and Adobe’s Marketing Cloud. That, however, was only a first step for the two companies. Today, they are announcing a major expansion of this partnership that sees them collaborating around e-signatures and team communications. Read More

Reddit teams with Lucidworks to build new search framework

Ron Miller — Thu, 07 Sep 2017 13:00:12 +0000

Reddit revealed today that it has teamed with Lucidworks to provide a long-needed, modern search tool for the immensely popular online discussion platform. When you face the kind of scale that Reddit does with over 300 million monthly active users generating 5 million comments and a staggering 40 million searches every day across a more than a million communities, it’s a daunting task… Read More

IBM and MIT pen 10-year, $240M AI research partnership

Ron Miller — Thu, 07 Sep 2017 05:30:40 +0000

IBM and MIT came together today to sign a 10-year, $240 million partnership agreement that establishes the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab at the prestigious Cambridge, MA academic institution. The lab will be co-chaired by Dario Gil, IBM Research VP of AI and Anantha P. Chandrakasan, dean of MIT’s School of Engineering. Big Blue intends to invest $240 million into the lab where IBM researchers… Read More

Mesosphere adds Kubernetes support to its data center operating system

Frederic Lardinois — Wed, 06 Sep 2017 17:56:00 +0000

Mesosphere, which was one of the early companies to adopt containers and which focuses on allowing businesses to run their big data and analytics workloads in the cloud, today announced that it now also supports Kubernetes on its DC/OS platform for running big data applications in the cloud. This announcement is going to come as quite a surprise to many. Read More

Nginx goes beyond its server roots and launches its application platform

Frederic Lardinois — Wed, 06 Sep 2017 16:30:14 +0000

Nginx, in its commercial and open source forms, is one of the most popular load balancers, proxies, web and application servers on the internet today. But Nginx Inc, the company behind the project, wants to cast a wider net, especially now that the way developers are writing and deploying their applications is quickly changing. As the company announced at its developer conference in… Read More

Axonius wants to help businesses manage all of their devices; raises $4M seed round

Frederic Lardinois — Wed, 06 Sep 2017 14:00:19 +0000

Axonius wants to help enterprises manage their fast-growing number of mobile, compute and IoT devices that now use their networks and in the cloud. The idea here is to provide these companies with a single platform that allows them to see which devices are active on their networks and control them. This, in turn, enables enterprises to plug potential security holes. Read More

Snowflake’s newest cloud data warehouse takes aim at regulated industries

Ron Miller — Wed, 06 Sep 2017 13:00:13 +0000

Snowflake, makers of a cloud data warehouse service, announced a new virtual private product that should appeal to highly regulated companies like financial services and healthcare. In fact, the company also announced that one of the product’s earliest customers, Capital One, will be investing $5 million in Snowflake as a strategic investor as a result of this new approach. Most… Read More

Dataiku to enhance data tools with $28 million investment led by Battery Ventures

Ron Miller — Wed, 06 Sep 2017 12:00:14 +0000

Dataiku, a French startup that helps data analysts communicate with data scientists to build more meaningful data applications, announced a significant funding round today. The company scored a $28 million Series B investment led by Battery Ventures with help from FirstMark, Serena Capital and Alven. Today’s money brings the total raised to almost $45 million. Its most recent prior round… Read More