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 Partners With DocuSign To Bring eSignatures To Office 365
Microsoft and eSignature service DocuSign today announced a long-term partnership that will make it easy for Office 365 subscribers to submit and sign documents without leaving Microsoft's Office apps. Read More
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Ok Google
There can be little doubt that, just like Microsoft thinks touch is the future of computing, Google seems to believe voice will be the user interface of the future. Indeed, when I was in Mountain View earlier this month, a Google spokesperson challenged me to just use voice whenever possible on my phone. For Google, all things voice now start with “Ok Google” or “Ok… Read More
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Kinvey Launches Dedicated Backend As A Service Platform For Enterprise Developers
Kinvey, the enterprise-centric backend as a service (BaaS) platform for mobile apps, is launching a new feature today that will allow its customers to run their apps in a dedicated private cloud or on-premise instead of on Kinvey's regular multi-tenant platform. Read More
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Front Desk Raises $4M Series A Led by Floodgate To Expand Its Mobile Business Management Service
Front Desk, a software as a service platform and mobile business management tool that can handle things like scheduling, payments and client management, today announced that it has raised a $4 million Series A round. This round was led by Floodgate, with participation from existing investors, including Second Avenue Partners, Version One Ventures and Expedia founder and Zillow co-founder Rich… Read More
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Microsoft Rolls Out Smarter Chat Sync For Skype
Last October, Microsoft’s Skype promised a number of updates to its chat message syncing, and it looks like the service has now delivered on these promises. For the longest time, chat syncing had been an annoying issue on Skype, as the mobile app would often send you a bunch of alerts for messages you’d already read on your desktop. The Skype team has announced that those days are… Read More
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Zillow Reports Record Q4 2013 Earnings, Relaunches NYC-Focused StreetEasy As Free Service
Zillow today announced its Q4 2013 earnings. The company booked $58.3 million in revenue (up 70% year-over-year) for a GAAP earnings per share of $0.07 and non-GAAP EPS of $0.20. Net income was $2.7 million. In the year-ago quarter, Zillow reported earnings of $34.3 million and net income of $500K. For all of 2013, the company reported record revenue of $197.5 million, up 69 percent… Read More
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Google And VMware Make Accessing Windows Apps, Desktops From ChromeOS Easier
Google and VMware today announced that they are working together to make it easier for Chromebook users in the enterprise to access Windows apps and the Windows desktop on their machines. Using VMware’s Horizon desktop as a service (DaaS), which uses VMware‘s HTML5 Blast protocol, it will now be easier for Chromebook users to connect to a traditional Windows experience. Remote access… Read More
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With Chromebooks A Success, Google Adds Focus On Chromeboxes
When you think ChromeOS, chances are the first thing that comes to mind are Chromebooks. Since 2012, though, Google and its hardware partners have also been quietly selling its Chromeboxes, the desktop equivalents of the ChromeOS laptops Read More
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Google’s Cloud SQL Hits General Availability, Gets An SLA, Encryption And Support For Larger Databases
After two-and-a-half years in preview, Google's Cloud SQL, the company's fully managed MySQL database service, has now hit general availability. As with most Google services that hit this milestone, Cloud SQL now features an SLA, which guarantees 99.95 percent availability for the service. Google will consider a minute of 20 percent connection failure as downtime, which is pretty generous. Read More
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Google Updates Its Enterprise Search Appliance With More Flexible Search Options
The Google Search Appliance (GSA) is a rack-based server for enterprises that allows them to bring Google’s search technology in-house. Today, Google is launching a software update to GSA (version 7.2) that allows companies to more easily manage how unstructured content is indexed and gives users access to new search features, including wildcard queries. This new version also gives… Read More
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DigitalOcean Launches Its First Data Center In Asia, Prepares To Roll Out IPv6 Soon
DigitalOcean, the fast-growing SSD-based cloud hosting service, today announced the launch of its Singapore data center location. Hosted in Equinix's Singapore 2 data center, DigitalOcean's new location marks the company's first expansion into Asia. Read More
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Google Wins Right To Lease Moffett Field, Will Restore Hangar One
Google has long operated its fleet of private jets out of NASA's Moffett Field thanks to a long-standing deal with the U.S. government, but it looks like it's ready to expand its presence at the Silicon Valley airfield. The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) and NASA today announced that Planetary Ventures LLC, a shell company Google occasionally uses for its real-estate deals, has been… Read More
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Google Brings Its Apps Admin App To iOS
About a year ago, Google launched an Android app that allows Google Apps administrators to manage their users and services right from their Android phones and tablets. Today, it is bringing this app to iOS, too. Google Admin for iOS offers the same kind of features as the Android app, which means you’ll be able to create and manage users, reset passwords, edit profiles and suspend users… Read More
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Microsoft’s Power BI For Office 365 Comes Out Of Preview, Simplifies Data Analysis And Visualizations
After more than half a year in limited preview, Microsoft today launched Power BI for Office 365, its Business Intelligence for Office 365 Enterprise subscribers. In combination with Excel, Power BI allows users to model and analyze their data and query large datasets with complex natural-language queries. The tool also allows users to easily visualize their data in Excel with the help of Power… Read More
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Google Hopes Its Roadshows Will Help Normalize Glass
Google Glass is still months from its public launch, but after the initial hype, most of the recent news around Glass has been negative. It seems like for every positive round of publicity Glass gets, it soon gets hit by something negative soon after. Read More
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Firefox’s Chrome-Like Australis Redesign Arrives In Aurora Release Channel
This has been a long time in the making, but after almost three months of testing in the highly experimental Firefox Nightly release channel, Firefox’s new Australis user interface has now found its way into the pre-beta Aurora channel. The new user interface, which the company has been working on for a long time, gives the browser a more Chrome-like look. As in Chrome, the settings and… Read More
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Shutterstock Adds 4K Video
Shutterstock, the publicly traded stock photography and video site, has quietly launched support for 4K video. As the company tells us, it has already amassed a catalog of over 11,000 videos that are now available for anybody who needs ultra high-res images of somebody scrolling on an iPad or having a fun meeting in the office. There is a very slim chance that you have a 4K screen on your desk or… Read More
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Google Search App For Android Adds New Voice Commands, “Time To Leave,” And Olympics Google Now Cards
Google is rolling out an update to its Google Search for Android app today, and with this, it is introducing a number of new features for Google Now as well. Read More
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Google Launches Chromebox For Meetings, A $999 Videoconferencing System Based On ChromeOS
At a small media event in Mountain View today, Google announced the launch of Chromebox for Meetings, a $999 Core i7-based ASUS Chromebox setup with a remote, camera and microphone for conference rooms. The system uses Hangouts in the backend and is also compatible with existing conferencing setups from Vidyo and UberConference (for phone calls). The system includes all the components necessary… Read More
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HackerRank Launches CodePair To Improve Technical Interviews
HackerRank is a social platform for fun coding challenges that launched at TechCrunch SF Disrupt in 2012. It grew out of Interviewstreet, a technical recruiting platform that’s being used by companies like Evernote and Amazon to screen potential hires. Today, the company is combining these two brands under the HackerRank label. HackerRank will continue to operate as usual and… Read More
