Enterprise adoption is trumping entertainment uses and will spring VR and AR into the mainstream. Read More

 Slack is in the midst of raising another $500 million in financing at what could be a $5 billion valuation — money it will likely critically need as it goes after major corporate clients and construct a functional business — according to a report by Recode. Slack also got some interest with a $9 billion price tag from Amazon, according to a report from Bloomberg last night. All… Read More

Salespeople have a lot of things to sell and the latest technology can help them sell even more. Do you think you have the perfect pitch? Highspot will tell you if you’re wrong. Or at least that’s their pitch. Highspot’s software analyzes various communications with prospective clients, including presentations, case studies and training videos. Then it provides data about… Read More

 Though Facebook is rarely mentioned alongside Apple, Microsoft and Amazon in discussions about conversational AI, the company has published a hoard of papers that underscore a deep interest in dialog systems. As has become clear with Siri, Cortana and Alexa, dialog is hard — it requires more than just good speech recognition to deliver a killer experience to users. From the sidelines… Read More

 Microsoft today announced that it is joining the Cloud Foundry Foundation, the non-profit behind the open source Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service project that’s currently in use by about half of the Fortune 500 companies. Microsoft is joining at the Gold Member tier where it joins the likes of Google (which joined last December and also hired the foundation’s former… Read More

 Atlassian today announced the launch of Atlassian Stack, a new subscription service that bundles virtually all of the company’s self-hosted developer tools into a single offering. Starting at $186,875 per year for 1,000 licenses, this new bundle is meant to make the procurement process for enterprises easier and cheaper (despite what looks like an eye watering price at first). Instead… Read More

 Once your company gets to the point where you decide to move out of the comforting safety of a public cloud like AWS and set up your own infrastructure, things get rather complicated. You have to choose a data center (or two) and your network and exchange providers, for example, and chances are your team isn’t fully up to speed on how to buy these kinds of infrastructure services.… Read More

 Back in 2015, Microsoft launched a highly visual Power BI data exploration and interactive reporting tool into general availability. The service is now in active use at 200,000 different organizations and the team has shipped 400 updates and new features over the course of the last two years. Current users span a wide gamut and include the likes of the Seattle Seahawks, CA Technologies,… Read More

 HelloSign, the eSignature platform, is announcing a $16 million financing round led by Foundry Group and Zach Coelius. Greylock Partners, U.S. Venture Partners and Tien Zhuo also participated. Although the San Francisco-based company has been around since 2010, they are calling it a Series B, since they’ve raised little outside capital. The business is cash flow positive and it’s… Read More

 Indeed, as technology marches relentlessly forward, it feels like many of today’s positions could soon be displaced. But just as with past technological inflection points — whether the steam engine, the telegraph, the computer or even industrial robots — technology will always give as much as it takes, as it always has. That matters little to people who have lost their… Read More