As we develop increasingly sophisticated technologies like self-driving cars and industrial internet of things sensors, it’s going to require that we move computing to the edge. Essentially this means that instead of sending data to the cloud for processing, it needs to be done right on the device itself because even a little bit of latency is too much. Intel announced a new chip… Read More

 Pushing through a funding round is never an easy process — and for Captain401 co-founder Roger Lee, it was even more tricky this time around. That’s because Lee and his team raised $11 million right around the birth of his first baby. That gave Lee an even deeper appreciation and understanding for the need of robust employee benefits, which was part of the original goal of… Read More

 Akamai, the Cambridge Massachusetts content delivery network and network services provider, announced they had laid off 400 people in their earnings call with analysts yesterday.
On the call, Akamai CEO Tom Leighton indicated that the 400 people represented 5 percent of the company’s 8000 worldwide workforce. “As part of our effort to improve operational efficiency, we reduced… Read More

 Microsoft is targeting its cloud storage rivals including Dropbox, Box, and Google today by offering to essentially buy out customers’ existing contracts if they make the switch to OneDrive for Business. The company says that customers currently paying for one of these competitive solutions, can instead opt to use OneDrive for free for the remainder of their contract’s term. The… Read More

 In a blog post this morning Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield announced the company is naming long-time employee Allen Shim as the company’s first CFO. “Today, I’m excited to announce another milestone: Allen Shim has been appointed Chief Financial Officer for Slack,” Butterfield wrote in the blog post. He went on to describe Shim as his right hand man, who has been with… Read More

 Rubrik, the enterprise startup that provides data backup and recovery services across cloud and on-premise environments, is putting some of the funding that it raised last year at a $1.3 billion valuation to use. Rubrik has acquired NoSQL data backup specialist Datos IO, the company announced today, in what appears to be Rubrik’s first acquisition. The financial terms of the deal are… Read More

 Last year two venture capital firms, General Catalyst and CRV, launched a program called the Velocity Network to get their startups in front of Fortune 500 executives in New York City. Today they announced that Mayfield has joined as the third VC firm in the network.
New York is home to financial, insurance, security, retail, media, and other Fortune 500 companies — the very types of… Read More

 When Jason Chen first ended up at Salesforce through the acquisition of his last company Stypi, he had the tough task of integrating within Salesforce’s complex infrastructure — and not a lot of documentation to go on. Fortunately, Chen’s company had just been acquired and he was able to get the attention of the higher-ups and find that information, which was actually… Read More

 The passwords of some people using sites monitored by popular analytics provider Mixpanel were mistakenly pulled into its software. Until TechCrunch’s inquiry, Mixpanel had made no public announcement about the embarrassing error beyond quietly emailing clients about the problem. Yet some need to update to a fixed Mixpanel SDK to prevent an ongoing privacy breach. Read More

 Nick Montfort is a professor in MIT’s Comparative Media Studies/Writing and the author of a new book, “The Future.” His book explores “future makers” – people who create the future with their work. It’s a fascinating read and he’s a fascinating thinker in the space. Our conversation on Technotopia started with the Norman Bel Geddes, designer of… Read More