As more of our day-to-day services make the shift to digital platforms, a startup that has built a customer care tool to help us through some of the pain points in mobile apps has closed a Series B round of funding. Helpshift, which provides an SDK to software companies to build a chat bridge between users of their mobile apps […]
CrowdFlower is announcing that it has raised $10 million in Series D funding. The round was led by Microsoft, with participation from Canvas Ventures and Trinity Ventures. The San Francisco-based company has now raised a total of $38 million, according to CrunchBase. CrowdFlower launched at the TechCrunch50 conference (today’s Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt) back in 2009, […]
The Microsoft Office lineup is getting a new addition today: Microsoft Planner, team collaboration software that lets you visually organize plans, assign tasks, share files, chat and more. The new app, first introduced into testing last fall, enters a competitive space which includes pro software like Atlassian’s JIRA Core, as well as other easy-to-use tools from startups like […]
As Google moves ahead to develop its Area 120 in-house incubator program, Microsoft is also looking to get more of its startup ducks in a row. On Monday, the company quietly, officially unveiled Microsoft Ventures — a new arm that will focus on “Series A and beyond” investments in North America and Israel, with the first investments […]
Part of Microsoft Accelerator’s batch 3 of startups, DefinedCrowd is filling a niche in the big data and machine learning community, providing near-real-time feeds of rich language data, checked by actual well-informed humans all over the world. The need comes from the Catch-22 that often arrests deep data analysis, in that you have to understand […]
Xiaomi is moving closer to launching its smartphones in the U.S. market. Today the Chinese company announced a partnership with Microsoft that includes a cross-license and patent transfer agreement and the pre-installation of Skype and Microsoft Office products on Xiaomi devices. The companies said that, starting this September, Xiaomi’s Mi 5, Mi Max and Mi 4s, as well as cheaper Redmi […]
In a keynote presentation at Computex in Taipei and a couple of blog posts today, Microsoft doubled down on the mixed reality efforts spearheaded by Hololens – Windows 10, the company aims to show, is place to be when it comes to mixed reality. Some clarification may be welcome here — just what is “mixed […]
Microsoft just dropped the price of its gaming console. The Xbox One now costs $299 in the U.S. with a 500GB hard drive, or €299 in Europe. For $319, you get a 1TB hard drive. And bundles also get a $50 price cut. Interestingly, this news comes right before E3. Microsoft is set to announce […]
Like everyone else these days, Microsoft sure loves its bots. Now, the company has rolled out its own news-finding bot called “Rowe,” which lives inside the latest version of Microsoft’s Bing-powered personalized news reading app, News Pro. Rowe is an experiment with helping you keep up with the news that matches your current interests. You can […]
Microsoft is playing catch up when it comes to console sales. But it looks like the company doesn’t want to give up on dedicated gaming consoles. According to multiple reports, Microsoft is about to announce a new, slimmer Xbox One around E3 in June, and a more powerful Xbox One next year. In April 2016, […]