Alex Williams

posted 1 hour ago

AnyPresence Launches A Meta-API Platform To Help Companies Build Developer Communities

anypresence

AnyPresence, a mobile backend-as-a-service, is launching a platform that tailors front-end branding and functionality with a backend server that the company calls a “meta API.”
Richard Mendis, chief marketing officer and co-founder of AnyPresence, calls its “Meta- Platform” an evolution of API management. He said the first-generation of API management companies helped customers develop… → Read More

posted 7 hours ago

ThousandEyes Raises $5.5M From Sequoia, Launches With Service That Pinpoints Problems For How Apps Are Delivered

thousandeyes

ThousandEyes has raised $5..5 million from Sequoia Capital and angel investors for a service that pinpoints application issues between the enterprise and cloud services.

ThousandEyes focuses on the way apps are delivered. It is designed to breaks the boundaries between enterprise and SaaS based services by providing a way to see how apps are being delivered. It also looks at thee network layer… → Read More

posted yesterday

Teambox Adds High-Definition Video Conferencing, Market Looks for Deeper Collaboration

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Teambox has added high-definition video conferencing, adding to a list of providers that are adding video to their collaboration platforms. The Teambox offering is of particular note, as it fully integrates video conferencing and screen sharing directly into the collaboration platform through Zoom, a video-conferencing service. The service allows for video conferencing of up to 25 people across… → Read More

June 17th, 2013

GitHub Rolling Out Major Redesign, Emphasis On Speed, Content And Interactivity

github-logo

GitHub is rolling out a major redesign over the next few days with the intent of putting more emphasis on content, speed and interactivity.

A year in the making, the new redesign is meant to be optimized for how people interact with GitHub on a daily basis. → Read More

June 17th, 2013

Norway Cloud Service Touts NSA-Free Storage As Alternative To Dropbox, SkyDrive And Other U.S. Services

jottacloud

Jottacloud, a cloud storage service based in Norway, is promoting itself as a safe and secure haven, free of the NSA’s long reach that it has with services such as SkyDrive, Dropbox and iCloud. → Read More

June 16th, 2013

Speed And Automating The Connections Between Humans And Machines In The API Economy

Gapingvoid

This coming Friday night, I’ll be at the API Days conference in San Francisco to talk for a few minutes about my perspectives of the API economy. I am not a developer — just an observer — so my views are not deeply technical. That just means I have to ask more questions and talk to more people about APIs and what they represent.
But then I have to simmer it down, collect my thoughts, and… → Read More

June 14th, 2013

Elastic Path Raises $8M For Commerce Everywhere API Platform

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Elastic Path has raised an $8 million debt round to fuel the development of its “commerce everywhere,” API — a hypermedia platform that abstracts backend complexity for the front-end developer and business person.  Wellington Financial out of Toronto provided the financing.

Elastic Path has traditionally served as an e-commerce company. But over the past few years, it has focused on… → Read More

June 13th, 2013

CenturyLink Acquiring AppFog To Move Into Platform-As-A-Service Market

appfog

According to a source within the company, CenturyLink is acquiring AppFog, a platform-as-a-service company. Terms of the deal were not revealed. AppFog will become part of Savvis, a Century Link company that offers cloud infrastructure and hosted IT services.  Savvis did not reply to requests for comment about the acquisition. AppFog Co-Founder and CEO Lucas Carlson would also not comment about… → Read More

June 13th, 2013

GoodData Raises $22M From Latin America’s Largest Enterprise Software Company

gooddata

GoodData has raised $22 million in a Series D round, with funding led by Sao-Paulo-based TOTVS Ventures, the investment arm of TOTVS S.A., the largest enterprise software company in Latin America. Also participating were Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst Partners, Next World Capital and Tenaya Capital, who also participated in the latest round. This is TOTVS’ first investment outside… → Read More

June 13th, 2013

GitHub Adds Maps To Give A View Of A Developer’s Geodata

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The ability to visualize geodata as a map is the latest feature GitHub is offering developers. The new capability adds to GitHub’s family of visualization tools that now includes the ability to render 3D models on the code-collaboration platform.

According to the GitHub blog, any “.geojson” file in a GitHub repository will now be automatically rendered as an interactive browsable map, annotated… → Read More

June 13th, 2013

Former WebEx President Joins RingCentral For The Office Move To The Cloud

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RingCentral has hired David Berman, a former high-ranking executive from WebEx, a move that shows the market significance of a cloud-based approach to routing calls to different mobile devices similarly if they were extensions on a phone tree. RingCentral is one of those companies that fits into new world of the work place by automating the phone tree. It abstracts the PBX just as software and… → Read More

June 12th, 2013

New Active Authentication Allows Azure Customers To Identify And Secure Office 365, Other Apps

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Microsoft is now offering multi-factor authentication for Windows Azure to allow enterprises to secure employee, partner and customer access to cloud applications. According to the Azure blog, the capability will allow customers to enable the authentication capability for Windows Azure Active Directory (AD) that will identify and help secure access to Office 365, Windows Azure, Windows Intune… → Read More

June 12th, 2013

Google App Engine Gets New Release, No Signs Of Slowing Cloud Push

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Google just launched Google App Engine 1.8.1 with a host of new features, most notable among them a long-awaited search API and push-to-deploy feature similar to pushing code to a Git repository.

The new features follow a busy Google I/O that witnessed the company showing its strongest push ever into the cloud services market. Until the announcements, Google had been quiet about Google Cloud… → Read More

June 12th, 2013

ZenPayroll Now Gives Employers A Way To Pay Contractors That ADP Can’t

zenpayroll

ZenPayroll launched in December with $6.1 million from a group of new enterprise kingpins. Following the launch of a service for accountants in April, the Y Combinator startup today announced the capability to pay contractors through its platform. The new service automates the process of paying contractors and doing the required filings with the Internal Revenue Service. With the new capability… → Read More

June 12th, 2013

Red Hat Launches Linux-Based OpenStack Platform, Targets VMware For Control Of The Data Center

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Red Hat launched an enterprise Linux-based OpenStack platform today that provides a way to build out cloud services from either inside the data center or from a services provider. Red Hat Enterprise Linux will integrate a vanilla version of OpenStack to create the new Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform. It will mean that Red Hat applications can run in an IaaS platform and provide… → Read More

June 12th, 2013

Perforce Swarm, A Developer Platform To Compete With The Likes Of GitHub and Atlassian

swarm

The code collaboration market continues to see new entrants, which illustrates the growing power of the enterprise developer. Perforce is the latest entry to the market with Swarm, a collaboration platform for continuous integration and delivery. Before apps ever go into production, all the pieces in the development cycle need to be in place. People work across distant geographies, and their… → Read More

June 12th, 2013

Ex-Tandberg and Cisco Executives Join The Quest To Conquer Old School Video Conferencing

pexip

A group of ex-Tandberg and Cisco executives have launched a software-based video conferencing service that works across traditional hardware systems, the browser and mobile devices. Pexip Infinity is an all-software, pay-as-you-go, virtualized platform that requires no upfront hardware costs. A customer can set up multiple virtual meeting rooms for any number of users. Services like Google Hangout… → Read More

June 11th, 2013

Google Boosts BigQuery With New Analytics Functions, Adds New UI, Drops Prices

Google Compute Engine-1

Google BigQuery is getting a number of new updates to make it easier to analyze large amounts of data quickly and at a lower price. BigQuery is designed to process terabytes of data, and today’s updates should provide a greater degree of flexibility for ad hoc analysis of extremely large datasets and allow for more sophisticated analysis. → Read More

June 11th, 2013

AWS Adds Free Usage Tier For Red Hat Linux, Drops Prices For Relational Database Service

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) has added a free tier for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). The company also announced last night that it is dropping prices for its relational database service. AWS has offered Red Hat Enterprise Linux since 2007. In 2010, AWS began offering a free usage tier. With today’s news, the two are combining to offer 750 hours of RHEL to the customers eligible for the… → Read More

June 11th, 2013

Modus Raises $10M For Data Driven Approach To E-Discovery

modus

It’s not often that a services provider gets a hefty venture capital investment. Last week, though, OpenStack cloud builder Mirantis raised $10 million. And today, Modus eDiscovery raised $10 million for its data driven service for driving down the costs and finding far more than any number of lawyers can pouring over information by hand. → Read More

June 11th, 2013

Marketo’s First Launch Since IPO Is A Machine Learning Engine For Social Campaigns

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Marketo is coming out with its first launch since its successful IPO last month. It’s a one-to-one marketing tool that applies machine learning for social campaigns that allows marketers to automatically adapt messaging based on the customer and the history of engagement. The engine for Customer Engagement Marketing (CEM) utilizes templates to create a content stream, a set of ideas for how to… → Read More

June 10th, 2013

MindTouch Delivers For SAP And Salesforce By Turning The FAQ Into A Self-Service Sales Tool

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MindTouch is using data to provide context to customer support pages so people can get better answers to the questions they have about a product or a service. The FAQ just doesn’t do it anymore. It’s either because the questions don’t apply or the answers don’t address a customer’s issues.

MindTouch has won customers such as SAP and Salesforce.com by turning the manual into a contextual data… → Read More

June 9th, 2013

How The NSA Hunts For Startups Through A VC Firm Dedicated To Serving Intelligence Community

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In-Q-Tel (IQT) is a not-for-profit venture capital group that helps the NSA and other agencies hunt for startup and young companies that develop core technology for the U.S. intelligence community. These young companies are often outside the reach of the intelligence community — about 70 percent of them have never worked with the government before. IQT often co-invests with venture… → Read More

June 6th, 2013

OpenStack Cloud Builder Mirantis Raises $10M In Second A Round From Red Hat, Ericsson And SAP Ventures

mirantis

Mirantis has raised another $10 million from Red Hat, Ericsson and SAP Ventures to fuel the growing demand for the build out of OpenStack systems for private and public cloud environments. The financing came in a second round of Series A funding.

Mirantis raised $10 million in December from Dell Ventures, Intel Capital, and West Summit Capital, which also participated in this current… → Read More

June 6th, 2013

Panzura Gets $25M For The Love Of Speed In A Global File System

panzura

Panzura has raised $25 million for its global file system that stores and moves data in a fast, secure manner. Meritec Capital Partners led the D round. The company has now raised $58 million and expects to pursue an initial public offering.

Panzura is one of those plays that appeals to the enterprise CIO who looks askance at the cloud but loves saving money and helping the company use the… → Read More

June 5th, 2013

Fastly Raises $10M For Content Delivery Network Built For Mobile, Real-Time World

fastly

Fastly has raised $10 million in a Series B round for its SSD-powered content delivery network (CDN) used by the likes of Disqus, Twitter and GitHub. The round was led by August Capital.

Fastly, founded by Artur Bergman, the former CTO of Wikia, uses a patent-pending fast-caching engine that delivers content at what the company says is the fastest recorded time to first byte. Fastly… → Read More

June 5th, 2013

Google App Engine Adds Kinvey To Power Mobile Backend

Kinvey

Google is broadening its reach into the mobile app development world today through a partnership with Kinvey, which will provide an enterprise backend-as-a-service (BaaS) layer on top of Google App Engine. With Kinvey, Google App Engine will support iOS, Android and HTML 5.

Kinvey, which will integrate with Google’s new Mobile Backend Starter, a basic backend platform for Android apps → Read More

June 4th, 2013

Email Reveals Google App Engine Search API About Ready For Preview Release, Charges Planned For Storage, Operations

Image1 for post Google App Engine Offers Pricing Plan Beyond Quotas; Grab A Free I/O Ticket To Celebrate

Google is readying to move the Google App Engine Search API from experimental to preview mode with plans to charge for operations and storage.  The news comes from an email sent by a Google product manager to the experimental search users. He asked just one thing in the email. To keep the news confidential until the public release in a few weeks. → Read More

June 4th, 2013

Atlassian Bitbucket Passes 1 Million Users, Another Validation Of The Fast-Growing Developer Market

Mercurial hosting — bitbucket.org

In September 2010, Atlassian acquired Bitbucket, the service for code collaboration, similar to GitHub. At the time, the service had 45,000 users. Today it has 1 million users, a validation that the market for developer tools in the enterprise is growing fast.

We know that GitHub has had tremendous growth. In January, the service passed the 3 million user mark. But with such growth also for… → Read More

June 4th, 2013

With ExactTarget Acquisition, Salesforce.com Has Spent Close To $3.5 Billion To Get Into The Chief Marketing Officer’s Suite

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Salesforce.com added more marketing power to its arsenal today with the purchase of ExactTarget for $2.5 billion. It is the company’s largest acquisition to date, second to Buddy Media, which it bought last year for $689 million. In 2011, the company purchased social-monitoring platform Radian6 for $276 million in cash plus additional stock. → Read More