LogMeIn, the company that provides authentication and other connectivity solutions for those who connect remotely to networks and services, has made another acquisition to expand the products it offers to customers, specifically in its new Bold360 CRM platform, launched in June. The company has picked up Nanorep, a startup out of Israel that develops chatbots and other AI-based tools to… Read More

 Facebook has gone ahead and purchased Charles Jolley’s conversational AI startup Ozlo. Jolley, formerly Head of Platform for Android at Facebook, will not be returning to the company. The Ozlo team is expected to join Facebook to work on natural language processing challenges. Ozlo launched with a consumer facing app back in October 2016. Jolley told me at the time that the… Read More

 Google today announced a small but important update to how Google Calendar and Microsoft Exchange can work together going forward. It’s not unusual for a company to still use both Google’s G Suite tools and Microsoft Exchange in parallel, and with this update, G Suite admins can now allow their users to see real-time free/busy information across the two systems. This means tools… Read More

 In an unsurprising move by credit card thieves, police have found a new credit card skimmer that sends stolen data via SMS. By tearing apart cheap phones, crooks are able to send credit card information to their location instantly without having to access the skimmer physically or rely on an open Bluetooth connection. Brian Krebs received images of the skimmer from an unnamed source. They… Read More

 Intel declared $14.8 billion in revenue this afternoon and earnings per share of 72 cents. This represents a solid beat as analysts had expected revenues of $14.41 billion and EPS of 68 cents. The company’s  stock finished up 22 cents and 0.63 percent to $34.97 per share in regular trading. In the moments after the company released its earnings, Intel’s stock shot up 3.43 percent.… Read More

 Amazon reported its second-quarter earnings today, and it was a bit of a whiff — and a bummer for Jeff Bezos, who is now no longer the solar system’s richest human and has been relegated to the unfortunate position of second-richest human. Read More

 Microsoft today is launching a couple of major updates to PowerApps, its low-code service for quickly building line-of-business applications, and Flow, its business-centric IFTTT competitor. While these are obviously two very different applications, the general idea to allow businesses to leverage the data that they already generate is similar across both projects.
Ryan Cunningham… Read More

 Sometimes combining two companies that compete in the same market provides a quick way to leapfrog your market share. That was likely the thinking behind Mitel’s decision to buy ShoreTel this morning for $430 million. Combining the two companies catapults Mitel to number two in the Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) market, according to the company. As for ShoreTel, while it… Read More

 Peer5, which helps publishers stream video to large audiences, is announcing that it has raised $2.5 million in seed funding. I wrote about the startup earlier this year when it was part of Y Combinator. CEO Hadar Weiss said he raised the funding after YC Demo Day from investors including FundersClub, Oriza Ventures, Tank Hill Ventures, Leorsa Group, Ed Roman and Buddy Anheim. In… Read More

 Salesforce announced an update to its Service Cloud today, which the company says enables non-technical administrators to build a customer service organization with connected services in less than day. That’s a bold claim, even for the marketing department, but the Service Cloud app builder has been built on top of the Salesforce Lightning development platform and designed to drag and… Read More