On this week’s episode of Technotopia we talk to Sarah Kaufman, the Assistant Director at the Rudin Center for Transportation Policy & Management. Kaufman is working to create new transit opportunities for New Yorkers – and the world – and expects the future to be quite interesting. Her prediction? As we move towards self-driving cars we will see more options for… Read More

 It was off to the races for Appian, which debuted on the Nasdaq on Thursday, soaring 25 percent on its first day on the stock market. After pricing shares at $12, the company closed the day above $15, valuing the company at about $900 million. Read More

 Red Hat, which has made its name as the enterprise Linux company, has been making clear in recent years that it sees the cloud and containerization as a significant part of its future. Today, it announced its intent to acquire San Francisco startup Codenvy to continue building on that strategy and give developers access to a cloud-based integrated development environment. The company did… Read More

 Rackspace announced today it was purchasing TriCore, giving it an enterprise applications management play to go along with its cloud management services. The announcement comes just one day after the company announced it was bringing a new CEO onboard, make it a busy week for the firm. The companies did not share the terms of the deal, but Rackspace called it the largest acquisition in… Read More

 Meta SaaS is a product that helps you cancel other products. Like Cardlife and Cleanshelf, Meta SaaS looks at all of your software-as-a-service subscriptions and tells you which ones you use and, more important, which ones you don’t. Founded by Arlo Gilbert and Scott Hertel, the product raised $1.5 million in seed from Mark Cuban with participation from Barracuda Networks, Capital… Read More

 Virginia-based Appian is finally braving the public markets, after a long journey as a private company formed in the dot-com boom of 1999. Appian announced Wednesday that they priced their IPO at $12 per share, raising $75 million for the company. This is in-line with the previously proposed price range of $11 to $13. Appian provides app development software for its business and… Read More

 Serena Williams (yes, THAT Serena Williams) has joined the board of consumer survey startup SurveyMonkey, along with Intuit CEO Brad Smith. This is the tennis superstar’s first venture into Silicon Valley and, according to a SurveyMonkey spokesperson, came about at the suggestion of fellow board member and Facebook’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg. Read More

 Rackspace today announced that its board has appointed Joe Eazor as its new CEO, effective June 12. Eazor will replace Rackspace president Jeff Cotten, who stepped in as the company’s interim CEO after former CEO Taylor Rhodes left the company about three weeks ago. At the time, Rhodes said he left Rackspace to become “the CEO of a smaller private company.” That company, we… Read More

 Tech companies, and increasingly even non-tech companies, are struggling with the fact that there are not enough trained data scientists to fill market demand. Every company has their own strategy for hiring and training, but Airbnb has taken things a step further — running its own university-style program, complete with a custom course-numbering system. Read More

 While we wait to get more news on Microsoft closing a reported acquisition of Cloudyn, another report has emerged of one more enterprise startup that the software giant is buying in Israel. Calacalist reported earlier today that Microsoft is paying $100 million to acquire Hexadite, a cybersecurity company that uses AI to sort through and address smaller network attacks — which can… Read More