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).
CrunchBase profile →Latest from Frederic Lardinois
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Microsoft Previews New Azure Portal, Integrates Visual Studio Online And Basic Code Editor
Microsoft today previewed its new Azure Portal, which will replace its current Azure management portal over time. This is more than just a redesign. It’s meant to make life for developers quite a bit easier and will integrate features from both Azure and Visual Studio, as well a AppInsights, Microsoft’s application- and user-level analytics service. The new portal will be live for… Read More
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Microsoft’s Azure SQL Can Now Store Up To 500GB, Gets 99.95% SLA And Adds Self-Service Recovery
As part of its larger updates to Azure today, Microsoft announced that SQL databases on the service, available later this month in the premium tier, will be able to store up to 500GB of data. Until now, the maximum size was just 150GB. In addition, Microsoft strengthened the Azure SQL SLA and now offers developers the assurance that the service will be up 99.95 percent of the time. The company… Read More
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Microsoft Launches .NET Foundation To Foster The .NET Open Source Ecosystem
At its Build developer conference in San Francisco, Microsoft today announced the launch of the .NET Foundation. This new independent foundation around the .NET framework, which forms the core of Microsoft’s developer ecosystem, will form the umbrella for all of the parts of .NET Microsoft has already open sourced and will release under an open source license (most likely Apache 2.0) in the… Read More
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Microsoft Updates Azure With Deeper Visual Studio Integration, Puppet And Chef Support
Microsoft today announced a slew of new features for its Azure cloud computing service at its Build developer conference in San Francisco. Scott Guthrie announced that Azure users will now be able to manage and deploy their apps from Visual Studio, capturing virtual machine images from running VMs and tools for making it easier to create large virtual server farms with the help of Puppet, Chef and… Read More
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FireChat Brings Its Anonymous Offline Chat Network To Android
When Open Garden’s FireChat launched on iOS about two weeks ago, it created quite a bit of interest, not in the least because it is one of the first iOS 7 apps to use Apple’s Multipeer Connectivity Framework. With that, the app can use a mesh network of local iPhones to build a local chat network, even if there is no network connection around. Starting today, Android users can join in… Read More
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Microsoft Updates IE11 With Enterprise Mode On Desktop, Reading And Data-Saving Modes On Mobile
As part of its Windows 8.1 Update, Microsoft today also announced an update to its Internet Explorer 11 browser. While the changes on the desktop are mostly about enterprise users, the F12 developer tools and bringing the interface up to par with the overall Windows update, this is the first time IE11 comes to mobile. Read More
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Microsoft Updates Visual Studio With Support For Universal Projects, TypeScript 1.0 And .NET Native Code Compilation
At its Build developers conference today, Microsoft announced the launch of the first release candidate of Visual Studio 2013 Update 2. While this may sound like a minor update, it's actually a big step forward for Visual Studio and Microsoft itself calls it one of the most significant updates it has done for Visual Studio yet. Since its release fewer than five months ago, Microsoft also today… Read More
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Microsoft Will Soon Bring Back The Start Menu In Windows 8.1
Microsoft’s Terry Myerson today announced that Microsoft is “all-in” with the desktop. Indeed, while he wasn’t quite ready to announce Windows 9, he did show off how Windows 8.1 will soon get a new version of the beloved Start menu back. When Microsoft removed the Start menu, quite a few of its users were upset, and this move did indeed make Windows 8.1 harder to use for… Read More
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ElasticBox Raises $9M Series A Round To Help Developers Deploy And Manage Apps For Any Cloud
ElasticBox, a startup that aims to make developing and deploying apps on any cloud infrastructure easier, today announced that it has raised a $9 million Series A round from Nexus Venture Partners and Intel Capital, with participation from previous investors Andreessen Horowitz and Sierra Ventures. The company previously raised a $3.4 million seed round. Read More
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Microsoft Announces Its Cortana Personal Assistant For Windows Phone 8.1, Powered By Bing
At its Build developer event in San Francisco today, Microsoft announced the launch of its oft-rumored voice-driven Cortana personal assistant. Cortana, which seems to have some of Siri's humor, gets its knowledge from Microsoft's Bing. It will be a built-in part of Windows Phone 8.1. Read More
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Watch Microsoft’s Build 2014 Keynote Here
Microsoft is kicking off its Build developer conference today. This is the second year in a row Microsoft has hosted this event in San Francisco. Last year, all eyes were on Windows 8.1, and this year, we expect to hear more about the first major update to Windows 8.1, as well as more about Microsoft’s plans for Windows Phone. This being a developer conference, chances are Microsoft will… Read More
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The Resumator Updates Its Recruiting Platform With Enhanced Reporting Tools
The Resumator, one of the more popular recruiting platforms, today announced the launch of a number of new features that give recruiters the better tools to screen their candidates with the help of dynamic reports. The so-called Flex Reporting feature allows recruiters to modify The Resumator's standard reports and customize them to their own needs. Read More
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Sookasa Raises $5M Series A Round To Help Companies Safely Use Public Cloud Services
Sookasa wants to help companies use popular cloud services like Dropbox and Gmail while at the same time transparently encrypting sensitive data to ensure that companies don't run afoul with regulations like HIPAA and FERPA. The company today announced that it has raised a $5 million Series A round led by Accel Partners with participation from existing investors First Round Capital, SV Angel and… Read More
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Microsoft Azure Matches Amazon’s Price Cuts And Introduces New “Basic” Tier
After Google's drastic price cuts for its cloud computing services, Amazon quickly matched them. Given that Microsoft always promised to match prices, it doesn't come as a surprise that the company today announced its own round of massive price cuts. Prices for compute on Microsoft Azure (previously known as Windows Azure) dropped by up to 35 percent and Microsoft cut storage prices by up to 65… Read More
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Google+ Adds Total Content View Counts To Profile Pages
Google made a small but interesting update to Google+ today. Every profile page now includes the total number of times the user's content has been seen by others. This new number is the sum of all of the views of the user's profile, posts and photos since October 2012. It's worth noting that this isn't the first time Google started highlighting these kinds of stats. Google also previously… Read More
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Microsoft Adds Data About 150M New Entities To Bing
Microsoft today announced that it has added data about 150 million new entities to Bing's entity engine -- the company's rough equivalent to Google's Knowledge Graph. Over the course of the last few months, Microsoft said today, it has added real estate listings, as well as information about lawyers, doctors and dentists to the service. Bing also added more data about "web actives" -- that is… Read More
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Outlook Web App For Office 365 To Get Smart Clutter Filter, OneDrive For Business Integration
Microsoft today announced a number of forthcoming updates to the Outlook Web App for Office 365 at its Exchange Conference in Austin. Jeff Teper, Microsoft's corporate vice president of its Office Service and Servers group, said that the overall strategy here is to embrace "cloud-first, mobile-first communications." Read More
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Microsoft Has Big Plans For Bing’s Entity Engine
Both Microsoft and Google have long worked on getting users answers without having to click through a number of websites. At Google, the current result of this is the Knowledge Graph and at Bing, it’s the company’s entity engine (previously referred to internally as Satori). Both search engines currently offer very similar experiences related to these engines. Search for “Albert… Read More
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Windows Exec Antoine Leblond Leaving Microsoft After Almost 25 Years
The post-Ballmer Microsoft is slowly taking shape now that Satya Nadella has become the company’s CEO. At the same time, though, those executives who were passed over for the CEO role and those who lost power in last year’s reorganization are starting to leave the company. The latest executive to depart, Re/Code reports today, is Antoine Leblond. A Microsoft spokesperson has… Read More
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Microsoft Launches Enterprise Mobility Suite
At a media event in San Francisco today, Microsoft's new CEO Satya Nadella announced the launch of the company's new Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS). The company says this bundle of services will make it easier for IT organizations in large businesses to manage all of the devices their employees carry with them, whether they are Windows devices, Android phone or tablets, iPads or iPhones. Read More
