From physical to digital rendering, 3D is being hailed by many as the future, and today, Lagoa, one of software startups in this space, is unveiling a new product, called Lagoa, that’s helping 3D enter a new dimension: a full 3D rendering and collaboration platform based entirely in the cloud. To mark the launch, Lagoa is also announcing a $1.6 million round of seed funding from a strong list of… → Read More
Twilio today is taking one more step in its bid to become the most ubiquitous voice and messaging API available to developers: it is announcing a partnership with Google’s Cloud Platform. This makes it the first time that a voice and messaging API-based solution has been integrated with the Google App Engine, giving developers on the platform — some 250,000 active, with 1 million… → Read More
Marketwire, a company best known for its newswire and press release distribution, is today upping its game in another part of its business, the currently-hot areas of social analytics and big data. From today, it is rebranding as Marketwired, and it is naming a new EVP for product and technology — big-data specialist Stu Ogawa, who’s been poached from Yahoo – to help put its new focus into… → Read More
Nebula has launched its long awaited Nebula One, a hyped but often delayed integrated system that Co-Founder and former NASA CTO Christopher Kemp calls a “cloud computer” that takes mainframes and time sharing into the future with the cloud. Nebula launched at OSCON in 2011 with the goal of building systems that Kemp said would last “for generations to come.” It is now… → Read More
Japan’s Midokura, a startup with offices in SF, Tokyo, Lausanne and Barcelona, today announced a $17.3 million Series A funding round, led by Innovation Network Corporation of Japan, along with NTT Group’s DOCOMO Innovations, Inc., and Innovative Ventures Fund Investment, the investment arm of NEC Group. The funding will be used to hire and grow the team in preparation for future deployment and… → Read More
Heroku customers are getting first access to a critical update to the PostgreSQL database system that will patch a major security hole. The overall PostgreSQL community will get access to an update on Thursday. Here’s the statement from Heroku: Heroku Postgres databases will be undergoing a brief but important update between today Monday (April 1st) and Wednesday (April 3rd). During the… → Read More
I keep seeing this topic push up about how data is affecting creativity. Some say we are losing our sense of narration and storytelling. It’s not this at all. We are just experiencing a shift that other civilizations have faced when the traditional means for storytelling transform to give a sense of the changing times facing society. That does not mean a rejection of the narrative form. The… → Read More
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is “partially” opposing a request by the estate of Aaron Swartz for the release of documents related to the investigation that led to Swartz’s arrest and prosecution in federal court. In court papers filed today, MIT counsel states that its opposition stems from two factors: its concerns about people in the MIT community named in… → Read More
The spring tech tour continues next week in Santa Clara with Deploycon, and I will be there to discuss the spectrum of PaaS providers and how they play across this broad, malleable and often manipulated sector of the market. It has become apparent that the platform as a service (PaaS) market has reached a pivot point. I have written about two companies that have pivoted in recent weeks, and we… → Read More
A federal judge has thrown out a patent claim against Rackspace, ruling that mathematical algorithms can’t be patented. The ruling in the Eastern Disrict stemmed from a 2012 complaint filed by Uniloc USA asserting that processing of floating point numbers by the Linux operating system was a patent violation. → Read More
Riding the consumerisation of IT trend that’s blowing the cobwebs off enterprise software, Belgian startup Showpad — which makes iPad software for sales teams — has raised a $2 million Series A funding round from early stage European VC firm, Hummingbird Ventures. Showpad said it plans to use the funding to grow its own sales and marketing team, and to “invest heavily” in platform development. → Read More
Gartner has just released its annual projections on worldwide IT spend over the next two years — arguably the analyst house’s most wide-ranging report covering sales in hardware, software, enterprise and telecoms. The overall trends continue to point up: globally we will see $3.8 trillion spent across all categories, a rise of 4.1% on 2012. That’s a sign of slight recovery on a year ago: growth… → Read More
Here at the Citrix corporate headquarters for the presentations by the second class of the Alchemist Accelerator group. It’s quite an eclectic class for the B2B accelerator. → Read More
Last week, Spanning, a Google Apps backup service, announced a $6 million investment from an unnamed strategic investor. → Read More
Atlassian is getting more competitive with social collaboration companies like Jive Software with a new offering thst extends its social collaboration service beyond its core users. → Read More
Expensify is now supporting Bitcoin to give international contractors an alternative to Paypal and the high fees associated with the service. → Read More
Tidemark is launching a new service today that provides a visual way to view a company’s performance. The SaaS platform provides a way to see data that in many ways borrows from the infographic style that has become so popular as a marketing tool. As part of the release, Tidemark is also announcing an integration with Box, for in-line use of the online storage and collaboration service. → Read More
There is no single mobile payment company in Europe that has reached the scale and stature that Square has in the U.S., where the Jack Dorsey-led startup processed $1 billion in transactions in 2012. Payleven, one of the many mobile payment startups that want to take that crown on the other side of the pond, is today announcing two more steps in its strategy to convince businesses and consumers to… → Read More
Badgeville today launched a toolkit on the Salesforce Platform that is designed to get people more engaged in using online apps. The new toolkit puts a Salesforce Force.com wrapper around Badgeville’s APIs that hook into behavior tools and are designed to affect how people use the customer’s service, said CEO Kris Duggan in an email interview. → Read More
Zendesk has released its first iPad app whose features reflect an approach that puts a premium on development and a focus on apps native to the iOS platform.
And it is built for mountains and enhanced for couches: → Read More
Insync, a startup offering an advanced, business-focused alternative to the Google Drive desktop client, is today taking the service out of a beta with a 1.0 release for Mac and Windows users. The updated client application includes a number of features not found in the earlier build (or in Google Drive itself, for that matter), including support for multiple Google accounts, selective sync… → Read More
Zynga CIO Debra Chrapaty has a new job as the CEO at Nirvanix, the Khosla Ventures backed enterprise storage company that she expects to further compete with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and extend into the business analytics market. → Read More
BitNami, a Y Combinator company, has announced that it will focus more on being an app store for server software. The goal is to provide customers with a Google Play or Apple App Store experience that can be accessed on their own infrastructure.
The BitNami platform provides the server infrastructure that companies would otherwise have to build out themselves to connect apps. → Read More
The complexity of connecting tools in this new API economy is getting compounded by the inability to link this new breed of services so people can talk in context about the code. Application development cycles are shorter and developers are picking tools that make them more productive. → Read More
Professional social network LinkedIn today is announcing an upgrade to its search features — one of the first big overhauls that the search function has had in years, with new features including improved autocomplete and suggested phrasing by way of a new algorithm; unified searches across different product categories; and an improved ability to save searches. Facebook-style “third pillar” Graph… → Read More
Oracle continues on its acquisition trail to build out a more full-service operation targeting the carrier market. Today it announced that it would acquire Tekelec, a provider of network signaling, policy control, and subscriber data management solutions. It says it plans to integrate Tekelec’s solutions into its Communications portfolio, and specifically with products from Acme Packet, a business… → Read More
On the heels of Apple buying WifiSLAM for $20 million to improve its indoor geolocation capabilities comes another piece of M&A in the space: Tibco Software, the enterprise software company, has bought Maporama Solutions, a French geolocation company, to help expand its big data offerings with location information. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. → Read More
Evernote, the popular note taking and personal organizer app, today took another step in its strategy to ramp up its international presence, with news that it has inked a strategic partnership with Deutsche Telekom, the German carrier that also owns T-Mobile. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed — we are asking — but for now the first part of the deal will mean that all DT customers in… → Read More
Something is seriously wrong in Larry Land. Oracle does not command absolute control like it once did. You can see what is happening pretty clearly when you review the earnings the company posted last week and the growth that startups like Datastax are witnessing as more customers seek alternative databases for online applications. → Read More
Amazon Web Services believes wholeheartedly that the cloud is the future. And not just the cloud, but the AWS public cloud. As a result, Amazon sees big opportunity for its technology in the enterprise market and has been making some aggressive moves to fluster the incumbents and stalwarts, like Microsoft. → Read More
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