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Salesforce takes another shot at IoT
Everyone wants a piece of the Internet of Things, and why not? If predictions come to fruition, there are going to be billions and billions of devices and sensors broadcasting information at us by 2020, and someone has to make sense of it and point us to the data that matters. Salesforce wants to be that company (or at least one of them). Salesforce has never been shy about about jumping on… Read More
Chef has long made a name for itself as the go-to tool for helping businesses automate the deployment of their on-premises or cloud infrastructure environments. About a year ago, though, the company also launched Habitat, a more application-centric service that allows developers to package up their code for deployment on a wide variety of platforms, ranging from containers and VMs to… 
“We’re actually out here trying to create value, not just give venture capital money away” says Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen. “It’s counterintuitive. The more the business works, the more cash it needs.” That’s because Flexport doesn’t ship bits, it ships atoms. Lots of them. Flexport is a freight forwarding logistics network. If you produce a… 
Spiro aims to sell CRM software to businesses that have been avoiding traditional CRM products. CEO Adam Honig told me that he and his co-founders originally set out to build artificial intelligence products that could assist with CRM. But then they started hearing from companies that weren’t using any CRM at all. So the team ended up broadening its approach. 
One of life’s puzzles that eludes me most is how a person could enjoy corporate trainings enough to spend their time designing and running them. Perhaps only with disdain for the status quo can a startup create something that people not only don’t hate, but find helpful. The idea for Butterfly originated from poor experiences the founders had when receiving leadership training. 
If you’ve got a resource-hungry app, Google Compute Engine’s latest offering has you covered. It lets you dial up to 96 CPUs and an other-worldly 624 GB of memory. Remember Bill Gates allegedly asking who would ever need more than 640K of memory. He obviously didn’t see this coming. If you think that’s a lot, you aren’t kidding, and believe it or not it’s a… 
Facebook has stealthily launched official desktop PC and Mac chat apps with screen sharing — two features users have been begging for. They’re only available for Workplace, Facebook’s enterprise collaboration software that competes with Slack and other business apps, but users would surely enjoy if the consumer Messenger app got its own desktop app and screen sharing options. 
You’ll find image recognition technology in almost every kind of consumer service you would use today — like Facebook, Google, or any number of other apps — but Yann Fleureau is hoping that he can build a whole business off of its increasing success in healthcare.
Earlier this week, a small startup called Init.ai announced that it soon would be discontinuing its service — a smart assistant for customer representatives to parse and get better insights from their interactions with users, as well as automate some of the interactions — because the team was (according to a notice on the site) “joining a project that touches the lives of… 
Larry Ellison was at it again yesterday, making friends, influencing people and pissing off rivals. It was AWS in the keynote earlier in the week. Yesterday, it was Splunk, a seemingly innocuous logging software company, which somehow fell into Ellison’s marketing cross-hairs. The company took serious exception. Splunk is best known for logging all events related to IT. Ellison announced…