April 23rd, 2013

Sush.io Raises $325K Led By Kima Ventures For Its Smart Dashboard To Help Track Online/SaaS Expenditure

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Sush.io, a yet-to-launch “smart” dashboard to help individuals and small businesses track online/SaaS expenditure, has raised $325,000 in seed funding led by France-based Kima Ventures. Also participating in the round is Venteprivee.com founder, Jacques-Antoine Granjon, French Accelerator 50 Partners, and Mediastay co-founder Jonathan Zisermann. → Read More

April 23rd, 2013

SkySQL Merges With MariaDB Creator Monty Program To Solidify Its Open Source Database Position

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Some consolidation in the world of open source database startups: SkySQL, a provider of open source database solutions, is merging with Monty Program Ab, the creators of MariaDB, an open source database technology that is used by Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia and other services. The merger is also a reunion of sorts: both companies employ key people from MySQL, the database company that was bought… → Read More

April 23rd, 2013

Amazon’s AWS Turns On Redshift Data Warehousing And EC2 High Storage In Europe

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Amazon’s business model, CTO Werner Vogels reminded us today, is based on “low margins, high volume”, and today the company announced a development on how it’s applying that principle to its enterprise services. From today, it’s expanding to Europe its Redshift data warehousing service and its EC2 High Storage service. Amazon first announced the intention to go global in February; it’s actually… → Read More

April 22nd, 2013

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

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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

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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

Social Sentiment Platform Swipp Launches Consumer Opinion Tracker For Businesses, Backed By Additional $2M Investment

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Swipp, which earlier this year launched its social interest platform for consumers to share what they think of products, topics, pretty much anything, has taken the natural next step by introducing Swipp Plus: a tool for businesses to mine the consumer data that its opinion graph generates. To fund the new product, Swipp has secured an additional $2m institutional investment. → Read More

April 22nd, 2013

Gizmox Raises $7.5M, Appoints New CEO To Help Enterprises Port IT Apps To Mobile Via HTML5

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When it comes to consumer apps, the debate over HTML5 vs. native has seen native win a couple of key rounds recently, with a number of high-profile tech companies eschewing the open standard because of performance issues. However, when it comes to enterprise services, it looks like we may hear a different tune. Gizmox, which operates a platform that helps enterprises create new and translate… → Read More

April 22nd, 2013

Enterprise Big Data Platform Cloudera Opens EMEA HQ In East London’s Tech City

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+1 more for East London’s Tech City cluster: big data company Cloudera has announced the opening of its EMEA HQ on Rivington Street, Shoreditch. In late 2010, the U.K. coalition government created the Tech City label to slap on an existing, organic startup hub — promising equity finance for businesses with high growth potential and money for tech & innovation centres. → 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 19th, 2013

Mobile, Social Newsreader Flud Finds A Home In The Enterprise With A SharePoint & Yammer-Integrated Service For Both Private And Public Content

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The newsreader business has undergone major shifts in recent months. Flipboard has emerged as the consumer’s preferred mobile magazine, Pulse was acquired by LinkedIn for $90 million, Google Reader is shutting down, and now another early entrant, Flud, has refocused on the enterprise market. The company began quietly testing the waters about six months ago after feedback from customers hinted at… → Read More

April 18th, 2013

Former Googlers Launch Synergyse, An Interactive In-App Training Service For Google Apps

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Today, over five million businesses are now using Google Apps to help their employees collaborate and connect via the cloud. In just a few years, the adoption of Google’s productivity suite has skyrocketed and, while small businesses have long been its core customer, adoption up the chain is increasing as well. At the same time, as the Google Apps ecosystem continues to expand and evolve, with new… → Read More

April 17th, 2013

LinkedIn Updates iPhone, Android Apps With A Personalized Activity Stream, Better Navigation, And Ads

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With the ink still drying on last week’s acquisition of news aggregation app Pulse, LinkedIn continues to double down on mobile, the fastest-growing consumer service among its 200 million members. Today it’s announcing a major update to its iPhone and Android apps — the first big upgrade in nearly two years. And, to take advantage of the traffic it’s seeing on mobile, it is also introducing ads… → Read More

April 17th, 2013

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

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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

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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 17th, 2013

Concur Launches An App Store To Show Off Its Partners, Investments

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Travel and expense management giant Concur is today launching an app store of its own, featuring the applications from companies it has partnered with, as well as those it has invested in through its recently announced $150 million “Perfect Trip Fund.” In the Concur App Center, as the new marketplace is called, visitors can browse through apps designed for themselves as individuals… → Read More

April 17th, 2013

Le Camping Alumni Augment Raises €220K To Take Its Augmented Reality Sales Tool To The U.S.

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Despite its potential, the jury is arguably still out on the best use-case for Augmented Reality. But one startup, Augment, thinks it has the answer: helping to sell products by letting customers see what they might look like in the real world.

A graduate of the Paris-based accelerator Le Camping, today the company is announcing a €220k (~$289k) funding round — capital it will use to take… → Read More

April 16th, 2013

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

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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

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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 16th, 2013

Tibco Taps Amazon’s AWS, KPN As The First Cloud Platform Partners For Its Tibbr Enterprise Social Network

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Tibbr, the social networking service from enterprise software company Tibco, has over 1.5 million subscribers — all paid — and today it’s announcing two platform partners, Amazon Web Services and Dutch carrier KPN, as it embarks on a new drive to grow that user base. Putting tibbr on the AWS Marketplace and KPN’s GRIP platform will be the first time the social networking service will be sold… → Read More

April 15th, 2013

Dropbox Overhauls Chooser As Platform Adds “Tens of Thousands” Of Developers Each Week

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Dropbox, which is courting developers to make it easier for consumers to add and use files wherever they want, just overhauled its “Chooser” feature. Introduced in November of last year, it was designed to make it easy for developers to build in an “attach from Dropbox feature” instead of having to create one from scratch. Adding Dropbox’s Chooser to an app involves a small… → Read More

April 15th, 2013

Hosting Undergoes Massive Changes As Providers Move Towards Platform As A Service

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The explosion of infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service offerings has greatly expanded the ways in which hobbyists and professionals deploy web sites and web services. For about the same cost as cheapo shared hosting, you can get your own small virtual machine at any number of providers, allowing you to tweak the entire instance to just the way you want it. If infrastructure isn’t… → Read More

April 15th, 2013

Kodak To Sell Document Imaging Business To Brother For $210 Million

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Brother, a Japanese document imaging company, has bought Kodak’s imaging business for $210 million, according to a company release. Kodak sought bankruptcy protection in January 2012 and has been restructuring itself since. → Read More

April 14th, 2013

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

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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

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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 12th, 2013

Instructure Launches App Center To Let Teachers, Students Install Third-Party Apps Across Learning Platforms

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Props are owed to companies like Blackboard and Moodle for being early movers in the educational software space, particularly in helping catalyze innovation in learning management systems (LMS). The problem is, of course, they got their start over a decade ago, and haven’t always elicited raving reviews from students and schools. → Read More

April 12th, 2013

Enterprise Specialist Rally Software Raises $84M In IPO As Shares Pop 28%, Now Trading At $18

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Rally Software shares floated for the very first time today as the company had its IPO on the NYSE. The agile project management software development company priced its 6 million shares at $14, raising $84 million at a valuation of $315 million.

Shares popped more than 28 percent in the first hour of trading, under the ticker RALY, and the stock is now trading around $18/share. That brings… → Read More

April 12th, 2013

Arris Gets DoJ OK For Its $2.35B Acquisition Of Motorola Home Broadband Business From Google, Deal Closing Around April 17

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Another key chapter in Google’s $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola is getting concluded. Today Arris announced that it has received approval from the U.S. Department of Justice for its acquisition of Motorola Home broadband unit from Google — a deal valued at $2.35 billion when it was announced in December 2012 — $2.05 billion in cash and approximately $300 million in newly issues Arris… → Read More

April 11th, 2013

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

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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

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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

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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