Alex Williams

May 1st, 2013

Microsoft WebMatrix 3 Web Development Tool Comes With Deeper Windows Azure Integration And Support For GitHub

WebMatrix3

Microsoft has released WebMatrix 3, the latest version of its free web development tool. The new version now comes with deeper Windows Azure integration and support for GitHub. WebMatrix users can now sign in through Windows Azure and create up to 10 sites for free. The capability means users can manage their sites locally or in Windows Azure. In WebMatrix 3, developers can do remote editing of… → Read More

May 1st, 2013

Datahero Turns Data Into Rich Visuals Without The Need For A Data Analyst

Dataherologo

Datahero, here at Disrupt NY, represents how the market is segmenting for data visualization and data-analytics tools based upon level of skill, complexity and overall richness and sophistication of the technology. Datahero caters to a market that often has to rely on data analysts to do their work for them. Deal flows and other segmentations have traditionally required the help of someone who is… → Read More

April 30th, 2013

Mowbly Offers A Mobile Platform With A Single-App Approach

mowblycloud

Mowbly, which recently launched and is here at Disrupt NY, takes a counter approach to mobile development platform environments. Instead of a steady stream of apps, Mowbly uses a single-app approach that it offers through its mobile platform as a service (PaaS), said Co-Founder Vignesh Swaminathan. Mowbly offers third-party app support. But it only processes the data by calling the third party… → Read More

April 30th, 2013

AWS Launches Certification Program, Shows How Much It Wants Enterprise Customers

aws-logo-640

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched a certification program to designate people who have the technical skills for building secure and reliable apps using AWS technology. The new Amazon Web Services Global Certification Program is built around the three primary roles for engineering teams delivering cloud-based solutions: Solutions Architect, SysOps Administrator and Developer. Before getting… → Read More

April 29th, 2013

Kloudless Launches Service That Uses Connectors To Move Files Between Different Cloud Services

kloudless

Kloudless launched at Disrupt NY 2013 today with its service for moving data from email to different cloud platforms through connectors which act like pipes that flow between the different services. The service offers a plugin that the user installs in Outlook or as an extension through their web browser to use in Gmail or other apps, said CEO Eliot Sun. Kloudless does not store any data, nor… → Read More

April 29th, 2013

Good Technology Raises $50M On Its Road To An IPO

goodtech

Mobile device management company Good Technology has raised $50 million, according to a Securities and Exchange (SEC) filing. A company spokesperson confirmed the fundraising but had no comment about the purpose of the raise. The SEC document says the company is seeking a total of $60 million. Founded in 1996 and headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif., Good Technology is backed by Oak Investment… → Read More

April 29th, 2013

Glider Launches At Disrupt NY With SaaS That Automates Approving And Signing Contracts, Adds Intelligence To Deal Flow

gliderlogo

At Disrupt NY 2013, Glider unveiled its SaaS for corporate teams to bring structure, clarity and reporting to the contract process much like Salesforce.com did for the sales funnel. The visual analytics tool should help shed light on the number of contracts closed, those outstanding and a host of other metrics to help executives get a better view of deal flow. The service is meant to replace… → Read More

April 29th, 2013

Gilt Chairman Kevin Ryan And 10gen Founder Dwight Merriman Could Launch 1 or 2 New Startups By September

TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 - Day 1

Kevin Ryan, appearing onstage at Disrupt NY with longtime investment partner Dwight Merriman, said it is possible they may launch one or two new startups by September through AlleyCorp, the umbrella company for the network of companies they have started. Ryan was broad and general, citing financial services, healthcare and e-commerce as possible areas of investment. He said he has three groups… → Read More

April 28th, 2013

Facebook And The Sudden Wake Up About The API Economy

api branches

What a two weeks it’s been. Something happened that has been simmering for a while. The API market exploded. Intel bought Mashery for more than $180 million and CA acquired Layer 7. 3Scale received a new $4.2 million round of funding from Javelin Ventures. Mulesoft acquired Programmable Web. And then Facebook jumped in and bought Parse. The acquisitions and funding point to a maturing market… → Read More

April 25th, 2013

New Boundary App For Splunk Predicts Root Cause Of App Brownouts

boundary

Boundary‘s application performance monitoring technology is now integrated into Splunk‘s enterprise platform, providing a window into apps that increasingly are distributed across cloud and on-premise virtualized environments. Boundary provides a snapshot every second of the app’s topology. That data now appears in Splunk Enterprise, which collects and indexes machine data such… → Read More

April 25th, 2013

Actian Buys Amazon-Funded ParAccel As April Buying Spree Continues

actian

Actian is on a buying spree. The big data management company announced today the acquisition of ParAccel, the data analytics company that has $64 million in funding from Amazon and other investors. Earlier this month, Actian acquired Pervasive Software, a data integration company based in Austin. Actian provides data integration and a a data analytics database called Vectorwise with a particular… → Read More

April 24th, 2013

GE Puts $105M Into Pivotal, The New EMC And VMware Platform Initiative, But Here’s What It Is Missing

pivotal

GE is taking a 10 percent stake and investing $105 million in Pivotal, the spin-out from EMC and VMware. GE will work with Pivotal on research and development with the aim of helping customers develop data analytics offerings. GE says its investment aligns with its focus on the “Industrial Internet.” The move shows GE’s investments in developing its own software prowess. GE and… → Read More

April 23rd, 2013

Jive Software’s New Take On Corporate Blogging And A Handy Web Anywhere Tool

jive-1

Last week,  Jive Software‘s Oudi Antebi came by the house to show off the company’s new platform. I don’t usually have people stop by for briefings but he was insistent, so I agreed. I had to meet this guy willing to come out to my house even if I was taking double shots of Nyquil. Oudi joined Jive when the company bought his startup, OffiSync, in 2011. In his words, all was… → Read More

April 23rd, 2013

MuleSoft Buys Programmable Web From Alcatel-Lucent, Marking The Telco’s Departure From A Core API Community

pweb

MuleSoft has acquired Programmable Web from Alcatel-Lucent effectively marking the telecommunication company’s exit from a core API community. For MuleSoft, a data integration company, the deal provides a vehicle for it to offer what it calls a GitHub for APIs that will integrate its APIhub with Programmable Web’s API database and rich editorial focus on the correlating market space. → Read More

April 22nd, 2013

Moxie Software Offers Freemium Service, Integrating Collaboration Spaces With Social Knowledge Engine

moxiesoftware

Moxie Software has announced a new freemium service that integrates its collaboration service with its social knowledge engine. Under the new plan, Collaboration Spaces is now free for anyone to use with no limits on users and full features that come with the SaaS offering. The social knowledge engine integration is offered as a premium service that can be integrated with Collaboration Spaces. → Read More

April 22nd, 2013

CA Acquires Layer 7 Technologies To Connect Cloud, Mobile And Internet Of Things As API Market Starts To Consolidate

ca_logo_r

CA Technologies announced this morning that it has acquired API management company Layer 7. It is the second major acquisition of an API management company in the past week, signaling a consolidation of a market that larger companies see as vital for closing the gap between on-premise and online infrastructure and apps. Last week, Intel acquired Mashery for $180 million. The acquisition price… → Read More

April 22nd, 2013

Facebook To Build A $1 Billion Data Center In Iowa

new facebook icon

Facebook is planning to build a $1 billion data center project in Altoona, Iowa, that will cover 1.4 million square feet and serve as what the company says will be “the most advanced data center in the world.” [Update 4/23: Facebook has now officially announced the new Iowa data center. Facebook says "We plan to break ground this summer and expect to begin serving user traffic in 2014."] → Read More

April 21st, 2013

Spoof Video Symbolizes The Energy And Brashness Of OpenStack, A Rising Cloud Power

At the OpenStack Summit last week, Tuesday’s keynote opened with Dope’n'Stack E.N.T.E.R.P.R.I.S.E, a video that symbolizes the arrival of a new force of disruptors who see riches in building software and systems that will displace the legacy systems of old. It’s not a question anymore. OpenStack has the momentum to win, and it can thank this young group of developers and feisty systems gurus for… → Read More

April 17th, 2013

Source: Mashery Is Selling To Intel For More Than $180M

mashery_from_eps

We’re hearing from a source familiar with deliberations that Intel is buying Mashery for more than $180 million, in a move that shows how the chipmaker is slowly becoming both a hardware and a software company. ReadWrite had ballparked the acquisition price at 2-3x the company’s last reported valuation of $60 million. → Read More

April 17th, 2013

At NSA, The Cloud Is About Big Data And Moving Beyond IT

redacted

The National Security Agency (NSA) cloud is about big data and creating unicorns. And it all started when some geeks stole two servers. It makes no sense, according to conventional thinking, but these are unconventional times, and the cloud that NSA built had to be thought through differently, too. NSA’s goal is to unify data and use it to do analysis, said Nathanael Burton, a computer… → Read More

April 16th, 2013

Tylr Mobile Launches An Email Inbox For Salespeople That Connects To Salesforce.com

tylr

Tylr Mobile today announced WorkinBox, a new mobile email inbox for salespeople connected to Salesforce.com. WorkinBox matches incoming email with CRM data to help sales people prioritize and focus on messages from customers and prospects, access relevant information and files from CRM, and update CRM systems. The technology has two parts: A native iOS application and contextual engine with… → Read More

April 16th, 2013

Windows Azure Announces General Availability And Promises To Match Any AWS Price Drop

4578.WindowsAzureLogo

Microsoft has announced general availability for Windows Azure Infrastructure Services with a promise to match any price drop from Amazon Web Services (AWS). Microsoft marked the occasion with a decrease in pricing for cloud services and virtual instances, ranging from 21 to 33 percent. Windows Azure’s infrastructure services have been in preview since last June. Specifically, Azure will… → Read More

April 14th, 2013

Rackspace Looks To The Telcos In Global Expansion Of Its OpenStack Cloud

Rackspace

Rackspace is banking on service providers such as telcos for its global expansion, leveraging OpenStack to build out cloud infrastructures that partners will then charge customers for cloud offerings. Rackspace will provide an end-to-end program that will include the hardware and the OpenStack cloud operating system software for the build out. The company will provide continuous automated testing… → Read More

April 14th, 2013

Investment Firm Expects AWS Will Hit $20 Billion In Revenues By 2020

aws-logo-640

Bernstein Research has issued a research report saying it expects AWS will have an estimated $20 billion in revenues by the end of the decade. In a separate report, RW Baird & Co. projects $10 billion in revenue for AWS by 2016 and up to $40 billion in losses from the traditional IT market. The estimates reflect Wall Street’s growing confidence in cloud services and the need that… → Read More

April 12th, 2013

Duedil Raises $5M For Open Data Platform To Conduct The Due Diligence Companies Need

duedil_logo

Duedil has raised $5 million for its platform that uses open data to help companies conduct due diligence. The Series A round was led by Notion Capital. Also participating were Oak Investment Partners as well as Passion Capital and Spotify investor Shakil Khan. With the funding, Duedil is hiring data scientists and beefing up its resources for expansion. Duedil is a company that shows what… → Read More

April 11th, 2013

CloudCheckr Raises $2M To Help AWS Customers Analyze Resources, Costs And Security

cloudcheckr

Cutting through Amazon Web Services complexity is becoming quite a business. CloudCheckr is the latest to leverage AWS’ lack of tools for analyzing resources, costs and security with the news of a $2 million investment and the general availability of its freemium service. The Series A round was led by Garrison Capital with Genesee Capital also participating. Here’s how it works. → Read More

April 11th, 2013

IBM To Invest $1 Billion In Flash Technology Research, Reflecting Obsolescence Of Hard Disk Drives

ibm_logo

IBM plans to invest $1 billion in research  to design, create and integrate Flash into its servers, storage systems and middleware, a reflection of the changing requirements needed for companies to manage massive amounts of data. As part of the news, IBM also announced a new line of Flash appliances. These storage appliances are based on technology acquired from Texas Memory Systems. IBM says… → Read More

April 11th, 2013

Mobile CRM Apps To Grow 500% By 2014 As Market Turns With Decline In PC Shipments

gartner

Gartner Research is reporting mobile CRM apps will grow 500 percent by 2014, another sign of a shifting market that has more to do with work getting done in the cloud more so than from a server behind the firewall. This is buttressed by Gartner’s news that SaaS providers will represent more than 50 percent of profits in the CRM market by 2016 and the steep decline in PC shipments that… → Read More

April 10th, 2013

Hapyrus Launches Service For Amazon Redshift, An Emerging Alternative To Hadoop And Hive

hapyruslogo

Hapyrus has launched FlyData, technology that enables it to automatically upload and migrate data to Amazon Redshift, the data-warehouse service that can scale to petabyte size. Amazon has claimed that Redshift will increase the speed of query performance when analyzing any size data set, using the same SQL-based business intelligence tools analysts use today. Hapyrus Co-Founder Koichi Fujikawa… → Read More

April 10th, 2013

Dropbox For Teams Gets Dropped In Re-Branding To Reflect “Business” Focus

dropboxbizlogo

Dropbox is renaming Dropbox Teams to better reflect its change in business focus. The move comes in tandem with Dropbox’s new support for single sign on (SSO) and partnerships with Okta and other identity providers. Dropbox for Business will replace the old name, reflecting the company’s change in focus to be more on larger business customers than teams within organizations. In… → Read More