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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Parrot announces a dev kit that helps drones see and avoid obstacles
Parrot, the French company that is probably best known for its AR.Drone and Bebop drones, today announced the Parrot S.L.A.M.dunk, a new development kit for helping drones and robots navigate indoors, avoid obstacles and map its surroundings. The S.L.A.M.dunk (I know I’ll never tire of typing that out), which the company announced at the annual Interdrone conference in Las Vegas today… Read More
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Microsoft opens its UK data center region to Azure and Office 365 customers
Microsoft today announced that its U.K. data center region is now online. The new region, which the company announced last November, currently offers support for Microsoft’s Azure cloud services and Office 365, with support for Dynamics CRM Online slated for the first half of 2017. With the new data centers in the U.K. coming online, Azure now offers its users 28 regions and it… Read More
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Callstats.io raises $3M Series A round for its WebRTC analytics service
WebRTC, a relatively new web standard that allows you to make audio and video calls from your browser without plugins, is becoming increasingly popular. But as more companies and products adopt it, the need for getting better insights into how these calls perform (or when they drop and why) also increases. Callstats.io specializes in monitoring WebRTC connections and helps its customers use… Read More
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Rackspace to go private after $4.3B acquisition by private equity firm Apollo
Rackspace, which is still best known as a hosting company even as it has expanded aggressively into offering services for businesses that use other platforms, went public in 2008. Now, however, it’s going private again after accepting a $4.3 billion offer (or $32 per share) in cash from private equity firm Apollo Global Management. The deal is still subject to regulatory approval and… Read More
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Atlassian now lets you hire freelancers right from JIRA
JIRA, Atlassian’s flagship project management service, is getting a new feature today that will let you easily convert JIRA tickets into job postings on Upwork’s freelance marketplace. “The smartest people will always exist outside of your company,” Atlassian’s head of growth for JIRA and Bitbucket Sean Regan told me. For many companies — and especially… Read More
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SkyGiraffe raises $6M for its enterprise mobility platform
SkyGiraffe helps enterprises give their employees access to their line-of-business apps and enterprise data from virtually any device. The company today announced that it has raised a $6 million funding round led by SGVC, with participation from Trilogy Equity Partners and a number of angel investors, including Heroku founder and CEO James Lindenbaum, Lookout founder and CTO Kevin… Read More
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Google will soon start punishing mobile sites that show hard-to-dismiss popups
Google today announced two major changes related to its mobile search results. The one you’ll probably notice first is that Google is removing the “mobile-friendly” label that highlighted pages that were easy to read on mobile from its mobile search results pages. In the long run, though, the second change may be more wide-reaching: starting on January 10, 2017, the company… Read More
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Trello makes its Power-Ups available to free users
Project management service Trello today announced that its Power-Ups, which are essentially third-party integrations, are now available to all of its users, including those who are on the service’s free tier. Until now, only paying users were able to use this feature, which includes integrations with products like SurveyMonkey, join.me, Github and Slack, among many others. With… Read More
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NGINX Plus’s latest release puts the focus on security
NGINX, the company behind the popular open-source NGINX server, launched the latest version (R10) of its NGINX Plus commercial offering today. Like similar open-source companies, NGINX offers its core product for free, but then charges for more advanced features and services. Today marks the tenth major update to NGINX Plus and, as the company’s CMO Peter Guagenti and technical… Read More
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Opera brings its free VPN service to Android
Earlier this year, Opera launched its free and unlimited VPN service for iOS; today it is bringing the same functionality to Android. Like the iOS version, the Android app is based on Opera’s acquisition of SurfEasy in 2015 and allows you to surf safely when you are on a public network. While Opera’s marketing mostly focuses on safety, Opera VPN also allows you to appear as if you… Read More
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Android Nougat comes out of beta
Google surprised everyone when it launched a public beta of the Android Nougat back in March. Annual updates are nothing new for Android, but not only did this announcement come very early, it also offered users the option to easily install the beta with an over-the-air update. Now, half a year later, Nougat is out of beta and available for Google’s own Nexus devices (the Nexus… Read More
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AppFormix now helps enterprises monitor and optimize their virtualized networks
AppFormix helps enterprises, including the likes of Rackspace and its customers, monitor and optimize their OpenStack- and container-based clouds. The company today announced that it has also now added support for virtualized network functions (VNF) to its service. Traditionally, networking was the domain of highly specialized hardware, but increasingly, it’s commodity hardware and… Read More
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MySQL founder tries a new software licensing model
When it comes to open-source licenses, developers have their fair share of choices (GPL, BSD, MIT, Apache, etc.), all of them with their own pros and cons. The same goes for commercial licenses. MySQL founder Michael “Monty” Widenius and his co-founder David Axmark, however, came up with a different model a few years ago: the Business Source License (BSL). This new license offers… Read More
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Google will soon open a dedicated space for startup developers in San Francisco
Google today announced that it plans to set up a new space for developers and startups at 301 Howard Street in San Francisco, just a few blocks from its main San Francisco office on Spear Street. The idea here is to provide a 14,000 square-foot space (which accounts for about one floor in the building) for the next class of Google’s equity-free Launchpad Accelerator and to offer an… Read More
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ScienceLogic acquires AppFirst to bolster its IT infrastructure monitoring service
IT monitoring specialist ScienceLogic today announced that it has acquired AppFirst, a service to give IT admins deeper visibility in what apps and services run across a company’s servers, virtual machines and cloud instances. The companies did not disclose the financial details of the transaction. Minnesota-based AppFirst was founded in 2009 and raised a total of $15.2 million… Read More
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Microsoft open sources PowerShell, brings it to Linux and OS X
Microsoft today announced that it is open sourcing PowerShell and bringing it to Linux and OS X. PowerShell is Microsoft’s command line shell for Windows power users, as well as an extensible scripting language for automating system tasks. It’s not unlike Bash on Linux (and now Windows, too), but with deeper hooks into Windows. Microsoft is changing, though, and as its CEO… Read More
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Atlassian’s HipChat gets group video chats
In Atlassian‘s view, video is the next battlefield in the enterprise chat wars (a war it is mostly fighting with Slack, it seems). Its HipChat group messaging app launched one-on-one video chats back in 2014, but today, it is pushing this further by launching group video chats, as well. To enable this, Atlassian built a new video platform based on its acquisition of BlueJimp and… Read More
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Google updates Classroom with new tools for students, parents and teachers
Google Classroom, the company’s platform that brings together Google Apps for Education and a number of tools for managing classes and content, is getting one of its regular summer updates today (right in time before the next school year starts). While Classroom has traditionally focused on offering tools for teachers and students, this new version now also brings in parents and guardians. Read More
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All of Google’s cloud database services are now out of beta
Google is making a number of announcements around its Cloud Platform today. Most of these focus on its various cloud database services, but the company is also making a major update to its low-cost Nearline cloud storage service for cold data, making its disk volumes faster, and allowing its users to bring their own encryption keys to Cloud Storage. The overall message Google is clearly… Read More
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Google’s cloud chief Diane Greene will join us at Disrupt SF
The cloud services that Google uses to power its own services are second to none. But for the longest time, the company couldn’t get a foothold in the quickly growing cloud computing business while competitors like Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft Azure were growing rapidly. To right this ship, Google brought in Diane Greene by acquiring her startup BeBop Technologies for $348 million… Read More
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