Last December, Juniper acquired the cloud operations management and optimization startup AppFormix and said that it planned to integrate it with its own Contrail product line. That integration is moving swiftly, but under the aegis of Juniper, it’s also adding new features to its platform that are meant to better support Juniper’s customers. Read More

 The best way to grow sales is to better understand sales, but unfortunately that’s often easier said than done. Kemvi, a seed-stage startup, is launching out of stealth today to announce DeepGraph, which helps sales teams reach the right potential customers at the right time. The company has closed north of $1 million in seed financing from Seabed VC, Neotribe Ventures, Kepha… Read More

 We have all seen the studies — some American workers spend upwards of six hours a day handling email. It’s not a great use of time, it destroys productivity and it ultimately costs businesses money. A new paper written by a team Salesforce MetaMind researchers could eventually provide summaries of professional communication. More effective text summarization tools would… Read More

 Last week, to commemorate World Password Day — yes, there really is such a thing — we ran my 2015 article called Kill the password, my treatise on the myriad problems associated with passwords. Trusona, a company trying to transform identity, announced today that it is releasing support for passwordless entry on Salesforce.com. Hey, it’s a start. The trouble with the password… Read More

 The launch of Azure IoT Edge was one of Microsoft’s slightly more esoteric but interesting announcements at its Build developer conference in Seattle today. While “the cloud” is all about moving compute and data storage into the data center, there are plenty of situations where you want to avoid the roundtrip between the device and the data center, or where you can’t… Read More

 A lot of what Microsoft is showing at its Build conference this week is squarely aimed at developers. But in the barrage of news about Azure, Visual Studio and .NET, the company also showed off a preview of a new add-in for PowerPoint that is aimed at everyday users. The Presentation Translator can automatically provide real-time translated subtitles or translate the text of their actual… Read More

 At its Build developer conference, Microsoft today announced a new feature for the Azure Portal, its central dashboard for managing applications that run on Azure. The new Azure Cloud Shell brings a full Bash shell to the portal, with support for Microsoft’s own PowerShell coming later. Access to this shell is also available in the Azure mobile apps. Read More

 “A database that replicates itself and is meant to survive” — that was the connection that Cockroach Labs CEO Spencer Kimball made between the startup’s memorable name and its value proposition. Despite entering a crowded market, Cockroach has been able to gain the favor of some of the most well known VCs in tech. Today’s $27 million Series B is being led by… Read More

 As part of its Build developer conference, Microsoft is launching a new program for independent software vendors (ISVs) today that aims to make its Azure platform more attractive to them: if they deploy their applications on Azure and make them available on its AppSource marketplace, Microsoft will allow its users to access them from tools like PowerApps and it’s IFTTT competitor… Read More

 It’s no secret that today’s conversational assistants leave a lot to be desired. We spend a lot of time talking about how bad they are at hearing what we say and even worse at interpreting it. But one thing that doesn’t get nearly enough attention is the one-directional nature of conversations we have with Siri, Cortana and the rest. These systems don’t know how to… Read More