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Print and ebook revenue down as Amazon slashes prices
It’s good news and bad news for the publishing industry. The good news is that print revenue was up 3.4 percent in April, primarily in trade paperbacks, with some solid grown in young adult print and religious titles. The bad news is that revenue is down 4.3 percent year-to-date with a 7 percent loss in April compared to 2015. Further, ebook sales were down 22.7% compared to last year. Read More
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Watson Financial Services is born out of IBM’s purchase of Promontory Financial Group
If Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest had a big data eating contest brother, IBM would be a serious contender for first place. Today the tech stalwart announced that it had come to an agreement to acquire Promontory Financial Group. To make sense of this deal, you have to avoid relegating Promontory into the small box of financial services. Instead, it’s most practical to think… Read More
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Google’s Cloud Machine Learning service is now in public beta
Google announced a number of updates to its cloud computing services at a small event in San Francisco this morning. These updates touch Google’s machine learning services, as well as its database and analytics services, and include an update to how it supports its users. The company’s focus today, though, was clearly on machine learning. Google launched the private alpha of… Read More
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Google rebrands its business apps as G Suite, upgrades apps & announces Team Drive
Google announced today that its now ten-year old service Google Apps for Work (formerly Google Apps for Your Domain), is getting rebranded yet again. This time around, the company will call it “G Suite.” Sounds more hip, right? Alongside the news, Google also noted a handful of upgrades and improvements in G Suite’s existing product lineup, which includes apps like Drive… Read More
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Google combines all of its cloud services under the ‘Google Cloud’ brand
Google for Work, Google’s Cloud Platform and the rest of the company’s cloud-based services are getting a new name. They have now been combined under the “Google Cloud” moniker. Google’s Diane Greene made the announcement at a small invite-only event in San Francisco. If you’ve been following along, today’s news doesn’t come as a total surprise. Read More
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Rocketspace and Alchemist accelerator partner up to go international
The accelerator and seed-stage fund for business to business startups, Alchemist Accelerator, and the curated co-working community called Rocketspace, have partnered up in a way that should help both expand their influence beyond the San Francisco Bay Area. According to Alchemist managing partner Ravi Belani, startups admitted to the next cohort of the accelerator will work together in… Read More
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Front launches a mobile app for its inbox for teams
Front has been around for three years, but the startup is only releasing a proper mobile app now. If you’re a Front user, it brings all the features from the desktop version to your phone so that you can manage emails and other communication protocols in multiplayer mode. Front’s basic premise is quite simple. With Front, you can collaborate, comment, assign and reply to those… Read More
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Facebook at Work will launch on October 10 in London
Some more details are coming through on Facebook at Work, the social network’s big effort to move into enterprise communication services with a business version of its popular platform. Facebook has now sent out invites for a Facebook at Work launch event to take place in London on Monday, October 10. The invite confirms our report earlier this week that it would launch next month… Read More
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Skymind raises $3M to bring its Java deep-learning library to the masses
Skymind, a company developing an open-source deep-learning library for Java, along with tools for implementation, today closed $3 million in financing from Tencent, SV Angel, GreatPoint Ventures, Mandra Capital and Y Combinator. Skymind was previously part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2016 batch and has taken money from Joe Montana’s Liquid 2 Ventures and a number of other… Read More
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IBM releases DataWorks to give enterprise data a home and a brain
While the gears of research are turning fast developing new methods of machine intelligence, another, perhaps more impactful, trend is brewing in the field. Open source frameworks like Apache Spark are hitting their stride at the ideal time to put data analytics in the hands of the business development analyst without forgetting about the needs of the data scientist. IBM’s new… Read More
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Facebook At Work is launching next month
Facebook is ready to make work as addictive as socializing. The company plans to launch its enterprise communication and collaboration network Facebook At Work in the next few weeks on a per seat pricing model, The Information (paywall) first reported and a source close to Facebook confirmed to TechCrunch. Facebook believes it can keep individual employees engaged with the product, so… Read More
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Kustomer, founded by Salesforce alums, nabs $12.5M to repair customer care
The need to contact customer support is the bane of many a modern consumer’s existence: not only is it likely that you are doing it because you have a problem that needs fixing, but you are inevitably sucked into a vortex where you have to sit on the phone for ages (or wait in stasis for emailed replies), repeat your details several times to subsequent assistants, and potentially… Read More
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Windows 10 hits 400 million machines as growth slows post-free upgrade
Back in July, Microsoft tempered its Windows 10 expectations a touch, noting that its initial projection of mid-2018 for one billion active devices was probably a bit over-ambitious. That pronouncement came shortly after the company announced that its OS had hit 350 million machines (after hitting 300 million in May) — and roughly a fortnight before ending its free upgrade… Read More
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Microsoft brings new AI-powered features to Office 365 and Dynamics 365
Microsoft’s Ignite conference is bringing 23,000 IT professionals to Atlanta, Georgia this week and the company is using this opportunity to talk about how it plans to bring more intelligence to its tools and platforms. As companies gather more and more data, Microsoft argues, it’s becoming imperative that the tools these companies use also become smarter. This means bringing… Read More
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Windows Server 2016 will come with commercial support for Docker Engine
Microsoft loves to talk about how we are now living in a “cloud first, mobile first” world, but in this world, there is still plenty of room left for Windows Server. Today, at its Ignite conference in Atlanta, the company announced that Windows Server 2016 will be available for purchase on October 1 and will then ship in mid-October. That’s pretty much in line with… Read More
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Why Salesforce might be interested in Twitter
Rumors were flying all day yesterday that Twitter is up for sale, and Salesforce.com could be a chief suitor. At this point, with so many possible bidders being reported, it’s hard to know what’s going to happen (if anything). But the big question for many is why Salesforce would even be interested in the consumer-facing social network. While nobody could say with certainty that… Read More
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LinkedIn doubles down on education with LinkedIn Learning, updates desktop site
LinkedIn, the social network for the working world that now has some 450 million members and is in the process of being acquired by Microsoft for $26.2 billion, today took the wraps off its newest efforts to expand its site beyond job hunting and recruitment, its two business mainstays. The company has launched a new site called LinkedIn Learning, an ambitious e-learning portal tailored… Read More
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InfluxData closes $16 million Series B led by Battery Ventures to organize IOT data
Imagine for a moment that you’re riding in one of John Zimmer’s proposed autonomous sleeper cars and you’re fast asleep on a road trip across the state. All of the sensors on the vehicle are collecting data so that standard components like the engine and steering systems don’t kill you. At sub-second intervals, some believe your car could generate nearly a gigabyte… Read More
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Business process platform Progressly nabs Ruslan Belkin and announces $6M Series A from 8VC
Progressly, a new platform for supporting growth within large enterprises, just got a big boost in both money and staffing. Ruslan Belkin, a former top exec from Twitter and LinkedIn will be joining the roughly two year old company. With the spotlight drawn, Progressly is taking the opportunity to formally announce a $6 million Series A, led by 8VC, as part of its official coming out… Read More
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