Frederic Lardinois
Frederic has spent more than five years covering news and providing analysis about technology, the industry and consumer tech related to the Internet with potential to influence industry direction. At TechCrunch, his focus spans from emerging technologies and niche startups to major product advances by industry titans – all innovation focused. Before he joined TechCrunch in 2012, he founded Silicon Filter and wrote for ReadWriteWeb (now ReadWrite).
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Latest from Frederic Lardinois
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CodeFights launches a new practice mode to help developers prepare for job interviews
Most job interviews for developers are somewhat predictable in that they will likely involve some kind of coding — generally on a whiteboard. That’s not really how developers normally work. Because they are so different from most developers’ real-world experience, even the best coders need to practice for these “exams.” CodeFights wants to help developers practice… Read More
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Facebook open sources its IT management tool for distributing Adobe’s Creative Cloud tools to employees
At Facebook, IT isn’t called “IT.” It’s referred to as the “enterprise engineering organization,” because at a company that operates at the scale of Facebook, IT has to be about more than pushing buttons on a vendor product. To emphasize this, the company today open sourced one of its internal IT management services for giving users access to products in… Read More
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Adobe acquires Mettle’s SkyBox tools to expand its VR video portfolio
Adobe today announced it has acquired all of Mettle’s SkyBox technologies and plug-ins for building transitions, titles and effects in VR applications and 360-degree videos. Mettle had made a name for itself over the last few years by providing these plug-ins for Adobe tools like Premiere Pro and After Effects, so the Adobe team was obviously aware of Mettle’s efforts in the area. Read More
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Growbots raises $2.5M for its machine learning-based sales automation platform
Growbots uses machine learning to provide sales teams with the right leads to kickstart their outbound sales process. The service, which argues that its product can save each member of a sales team a few days of work every month, today announced that it has raised a $2.5 million funding round from Buran VC, Lighter Capital and a number of angel investors. This brings the company’s… Read More
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Google Cloud Platform launches in Sydney
Nobody can accuse Google of not moving as fast as it can to make up the considerable gap in available cloud regions between its Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and its two biggest competitors: AWS and Microsoft Azure. Today, the company is launching its previously announced Sydney region. This marks yet another step in Google’s expansion of GCP’s footprint in the Asia Pacific region. Read More
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Google makes splitting the cost of Project Fi group plans easier
Every carrier offers group plans that allow you to share your wireless plan with multiple friends, family members or, if you are so inclined, random strangers. That means you’re only getting a single bill for all of these people, though, which means you have to find a way to repay the main account holder every month. For a service like Google’s Project Fi, where every user may… Read More
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MongoDB launches Stitch, a new backend as a service, and brings Atlas to Azure and GCP
MongoDB is hosting its annual developer conference in Chicago this week and no good developer conference would be complete without a few product launches. Read More
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Google launches its AI-powered jobs search engine
Looking for a new job is getting easier. Google today launched a new jobs search feature right on its search result pages that lets you search for jobs across virtually all of the major online job boards like LinkedIn, Monster, WayUp, DirectEmployers, CareerBuilder and Facebook and others. Google will also include job listings its finds on a company’s homepage. The idea here is to give… Read More
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Cloud Foundry makes its mark on the enterprise
Today, more than ever, it’s open source projects that are leading the charge in how modern software is developed, deployed and managed. There’s Kubernetes for containers and OpenStack for running enterprise-grade infrastructure, for example. But over the course of the last few years, another platform — Cloud Foundry — has changed the way enterprises are developing… Read More
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Here are all of Amazon’s acquisitions before Whole Foods
Amazon today said it would make a bid to acquire Whole Foods for $13.7 billion, making it the largest acquisition for the company by far. The next-closest acquisition in price is $1.2 billion for Zappos, which happened all the way back in 2009. Since then it’s made a few big-ticket purchases like Twitch (around $1 billion) and Kiva Systems (a bunch of robots for around $775 million)… Read More
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Windows Server moves to a semi-annual release schedule
Microsoft today announced a major change to how it will deliver new releases of Windows Server going forward. Instead of a release every few years (the last few major versions arrived in 2008, 2012 and 2016), Microsoft will now move to a semi-annual cycle that will see the company launch feature updates every spring and fall. This new release cadence, which is similar to what Microsoft is… Read More
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Top Hat takes on textbook publishers with the launch of its content marketplace
What it launched back in 2012, Toronto-based Top Hat (or “Top Hat Monocle,” as it was still known then) offered a phone-based classroom response system but little else in terms of content for teachers to use in their classes. In a way, though, that response system was Top Hat’s Trojan horse. It gave the company a foothold in the academic market and now that it has this… Read More
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Microsoft joins the open source Cloud Foundry Foundation
Microsoft today announced that it is joining the Cloud Foundry Foundation, the non-profit behind the open source Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service project that’s currently in use by about half of the Fortune 500 companies. Microsoft is joining at the Gold Member tier where it joins the likes of Google (which joined last December and also hired the foundation’s former… Read More
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Atlassian launches a new subscription bundle that includes all of its developer tools
Atlassian today announced the launch of Atlassian Stack, a new subscription service that bundles virtually all of the company’s self-hosted developer tools into a single offering. Starting at $186,875 per year for 1,000 licenses, this new bundle is meant to make the procurement process for enterprises easier and cheaper (despite what looks like an eye watering price at first). Instead… Read More
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Google Maps updates its Local Guides program with a new points system and more levels
Local Guides in Google Maps, Google’s gamified program for getting its users to update data in Google Maps and upload photos of local venues, is getting a bit of an overhaul today. Most importantly, Google is changing how it rewards points and how its leveling system works. Until today, Local Guides users we able to scale the ladder up to the fifth level. Once you hit 500 points… Read More
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Inflect makes buying internet infrastructure easier
Once your company gets to the point where you decide to move out of the comforting safety of a public cloud like AWS and set up your own infrastructure, things get rather complicated. You have to choose a data center (or two) and your network and exchange providers, for example, and chances are your team isn’t fully up to speed on how to buy these kinds of infrastructure… Read More
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Microsoft’s Power BI business analytics tool learns new tricks
Back in 2015, Microsoft launched a highly visual Power BI data exploration and interactive reporting tool into general availability. The service is now in active use at 200,000 different organizations and the team has shipped 400 updates and new features over the course of the last two years. Current users span a wide gamut and include the likes of the Seattle Seahawks, CA Technologies… Read More
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Amazon Rekognition can now recognize celebrities
Amazon Rekognition, Amazon’s deep learning-powered image detection and recognition service, is getting a little bit smarter today. The service can now recognize thousands of celebrities across a number of categories that include politics, sports, business, entertainment and media. Read More
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Yubico raises $30M as it looks to expand its platform beyond authentication
Yubico, the company behind the increasingly popular YubiKey two-factor authentication key, has raised a $30 million funding round. This marks the first major institutional funding round for Yubico, which had previously only raised $4.5 million from angel investors. New investors include New Enterprise Associates, the Valley Fund and Bure, a major growth equity firm from Sweden. Existing… Read More
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Pressboard raises $2M for its native ad marketplace
Whether you love or hate native content, revenues from traditional display advertising continue to decline for most publishers, and native ads are one of the few new revenue opportunities for them. Enter Pressboard, a native ad marketplace that today announced it has raised a $2 million funding. Read More
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