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AWS showed no signs of slowing down in 2017
AWS had a successful year by any measure. The company continued to behave like a startup with the kind of energy and momentum to invest in new areas not usually seen in an incumbent with a significant marketshare lead. How good a year was it? According to numbers from Synergy Research, the company remains the category leader by far with around 35 percent marketshare. Microsoft sits well behind… Read More
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Google Ventures invests in Ripcord’s paper digitizing robotics service
The $40 million Ripcord Series B we reported back in August has just been bumped up to $65 million, courtesy of additional funding led by Google Ventures. The added funding comes as the record keeping company continues to grow at a healthy clip. The Bay Area based service added 100 jobs this year, and is on track to add another 150 in 2018. The service came out of stealth in March of this… Read More
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WeWork’s Powered By We product is central to 2018 growth strategy
WeWork had a big year in 2017. The seven-year-old company opened 90 new locations, doubling its global membership, and expanded into new cities in Latin America, Asia and Australia, and Europe and Israel. It is reportedly valued at $20 billion. While 2018 holds more of the same — WeWork plans to launch 1 million square feet of new space each month next year — the company also plans… Read More
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SendBird raises another $16M to help developers add chat functions to a service
If you go to any company’s website these days, you’re probably starting to see some chat functionality more and more often — and for good reason, as it’s a quick way for those companies to get in touch with their potential customers. And SendBird, which launched in February this year out of Y Combinator, has tried to quietly begin eating up this space by giving… Read More
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Bima raises $97M from Allianz for microinsurance aimed at emerging markets
On the heels of Lemonade raising $120 million from Softbank for its new “peer-to-peer” spin on insurance services, another company aimed at disrupting the insurance market is announcing a major round of its own. Bima, a European startup that builds and sells “microinsurance” services for low-income consumers in Africa, Asia and Latin America, has raised $96.6 million in… Read More
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InVision is investing $5 million in design startups with new fund
InVision, the platform for creation and collaboration among designers, has today announced the launch of the InVision Fund. Led by CEO Clark Valberg, the company is designating $5 million to invest in startups working in the design space. “The world is giving birth to all of these little design tools meant to make the world of design better,” said Valberg. “We think of… Read More
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As Kubernetes surged in popularity in 2017, it created a vibrant ecosystem
For a technology that the average person has probably never heard of, Kubernetes surged in popularity in 2017 with a particular group of IT pros who are working with container technology. Kubernetes is the orchestration engine that underlies how operations staff deploy and manage containers at scale. (For the low-down on containers, check out this article.) In plain English, that means that as… Read More
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Oracle to buy construction collaboration software maker Aconex for $1.2B in cash
Oracle will pay $1.2 billion in cash to buy construction software developer Aconex, the companies announced today. Based in Melbourne, Aconex’s cloud-based software allow teams working on building projects to collaborate and share documents. Oracle agreed to pay AUD $7.80 (about $5.97) per share in cash for a total of $1.2 billion. This price represents a 47% premium over… Read More
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Adobe had a record quarter, but still has substantial untapped potential
Adobe announced a record quarter yesterday with $2.01 billion in revenue for Q42017. That represents a healthy 25 percent year over year increase for the company, but about half of that continues to come from Creative Cloud. Experience Cloud, which includes Adobe Marketing Cloud, Adobe Analytics Cloud and Adobe Advertising Cloud in many ways represents promise for even greater revenue in… Read More
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Xage emerges from stealth with a blockchain-based IoT security solution
Getting the myriad of devices involved in the industrial internet of things provisioned and communicating with one another in a secure way will be one of the great technological challenges facing companies in the coming years. Xage (prounounced Zage) emerged from stealth today with a blockchain-based security solution that could help simplify this. The company also announced that Duncan… Read More
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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
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Microsoft makes Azure Bot Service generally available for developers
Microsoft introduced the Azure Bot Framework more than two years ago and companies have been building chatbots for a variety of scenarios ever since. Today, the company made generally available the Microsoft Azure Bot Service and Microsoft Cognitive Language Understanding service (known as LUIS). Read More
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Commerce platform iZettle raises $47M at a $950M valuation
iZettle — the commerce platform 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) as it approaches a $1 billion valuation. CEO and co-founder Jacob de Geer told TechCrunch the money will go towards… Read More
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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
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Iron Mountain acquires IO Data Centers’ US operations for $1.3 billion
Iron Mountain announced today that it’s acquiring the U.S. 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. Read More
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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
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AWS has a post re:Invent surprise as it enters the single sign-on market
Steve Jobs used to famously end his keynotes with “there is one more thing…” AWS decided to wait a week after their re:Invent conference ended to announce their more thing when they quietly released a single sign on product for the AWS cloud yesterday. While the announcement was pretty thin on details, it appears to be focused on providing single sign on for the AWS family of… Read More
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Salesforce is latest big tech vendor to join the Cloud Native Computing Foundation
Salesforce announced today that it was joining the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), the open-source organization that manages Kubernetes, the popular open-source container orchestration tool. It is the latest in a long line of big name companies, joining the likes of AWS, Oracle, Microsoft, VMware and Pivotal, all of whom joined earlier this year. Read More
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