Context is everything when dealing with dialog systems. We humans take for granted how complex even our simplest conversations are. That’s part of the reason why dialog systems can’t live up to their human counterparts. But with an interactive learning approach and some open source love, Berlin-based Rasa is hoping to help enterprises solve their conversational AI problems. The… Read More

 Oracle has always had a swagger that reflects the public persona of its bombastic leader, Larry Ellison, but over the last several years, as the company has transitioned to the cloud, it has required a transformation to one that is softer and more customer-centric. Mind you, this was a company that was the poster child for vendor lock-in the 90s and early 2000s. They knew you were looking for… Read More

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… Read More

 It’s no secret that developers are the key to Foursquare’s continued success, and as part of supporting that mission the company just launched a revamped developer site, its first major refresh since 2009. The new site makes it clearer what the difference is between the developer offerings. The Places API is the free offering that most developers will use that serves up information… Read More

 LinkedIn, the Microsoft-owned social network for the working world with some 500 million members, has made a large business out of recruitment — with some 11 million job listings on the site at any given time, and the recruitment market providing the company with its largest source of revenue. Now it is taking another step ahead in building out that business with a new product:… Read More

 Bluecore, the automated marketing platform for ecommerce brands, has today announced the close of a $35 million Series C round of funding. Norwest Venture Partners led the round, with participation from existing investors including Georgian Partners, FirstMark Capital, and Felicis Ventures. As part of the deal, NVP’s Scott Beechuk will join the board of directors at Bluecore. When… Read More

 The Salesforce product line has always been distinctly horizontal, meaning it’s a general set of tools that can be used across any industry. The company has left it to customers, partners and developers to build industry-specific tools on top of the platform. This began to shift ever so slightly last year when Salesforce took a turn toward the vertical with a set of tools devoted… Read More

 Figuring out who can access services across a platform as varied as Google Cloud can be a challenge for IT administrators. Google has done a lot of the work for you with a set of fairly granular pre-defined roles, but recognizing that canned roles won’t suit everyone’s needs, the company announced a Beta of custom roles today. As the name implies, administrators can define roles… Read More

 Figuring out who can access services across a platform as varied as Google Cloud can be a challenge for IT administrators. Google has done a lot of the work for you with a set of fairly granular pre-defined roles, but recognizing that canned roles won’t suit everyone’s needs, the company announced a Beta of custom roles today. As the name implies, administrators can define roles… Read More

 Stripe, the payments startup is now valued at $9 billion, is today taking the wraps off its latest effort to help its customers — which now number in the hundreds of thousands, and include companies like Lyft, Salesforce, Facebook, Deliveroo, and the U.K. government — generate more transactions, and thus greater returns for Stripe itself. It is launching Elements, a free toolkit… Read More