Google today announced the beta launch of its enterprise edition of Dialogflow, its tool for building chatbots and other conversational applications. In addition, Dialogflow (both in its free and enterprise version) is now getting built-in support for speech recognition, something that developers previously had to source through the Google Cloud Speech API or similar services. Unsurprisingly,… Read More

 If the blockchain is going to be an immutable record, you need to start with clean data. The question is, how do you get clean data into a blockchain database to begin with. It’s kind of a quandary for use cases not starting with a green field, but Venzee, a startup that has been helping customers clean up their retail supply chain data to share with large vendors, thinks it has an… Read More

 Algorithmia started out as an online marketplace for — can you guess it? — algorithms. Many of these algorithms that developers offered on the service focused on machine learning (think face detection, sentiment analysis, etc.). Today, with the boom in ML/AI, that’s obviously a big draw and Algorithmia is now taking its next step in this direction with the launch of a new… Read More

 Marketing email company SendGrid had a decent first day on the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday. After pricing shares at $16, the company closed at $18.03, or up almost 13%. The Denver-based company had raised $131 million after pricing its IPO at $16, above the expected range of $13.50 to $15.50. SendGrid also upsized its IPO, selling 8.2 million shares, instead of 7.7 million.… Read More

 Facebook is no stranger when it comes to open sourcing its computing knowledge. Over the years, it has consistently created software and hardware internally, then transferred that wisdom to the open source community to let them have it. Today, it announced it was open sourcing its modular network routing software called Open/R, as the tradition continues. Facebook obviously has unique scale… Read More

 Once upon a time there were two compliance companies. Smarsh was owned by Los Angeles-based private equity firm, K1 Investment Management. It worked with mostly SMBs. Another called Actiance worked with larger companies like the world’s biggest banks. This is the story of how K1 is bringing these two companies together.
Both companies are focused on archiving and compliance around… Read More

 Databricks has made a name for itself as one of the most popular commercial services around the Apache Spark data analytics platform (which, not coincidentally, was started by the founders of Databricks). Now it’s coming to Microsoft’s Azure platform in the form of a preview of the imaginatively named “Azure Databricks.” Read More

 If you’ve ever searched for a product on any website that’s not Amazon or Google, you’ve probably had a bad time trying to find something — and then go straight back to Google or Amazon. That’s a significant problem for retailers, which need to ensure that potential customers that are already signaling a lot of interest in buying something will actually be able… Read More

 LinkedIn, the Microsoft-owned social platform for the working world with some 530 million members, has made a big push in the last couple of years to position itself not just as a place to look for new jobs and network, but as a place for professional development — including services for online learning; steady streams of news and other content to expand your knowledge; and most… Read More

 While the UK continues to try to find solid ground to begin its contentious Brexit negotiations, the government has launched several initiatives to try to shore up support to (and from) the country’s technology industry. Prime Minister Theresa May and Chancellor Philip Hammond today announced that the UK would double the number of visas issued to “the brightest and best”… Read More