As TikTok’s existential rollercoaster ride continues to rattle on, the company is trying to sway regulators and the public with a flood of dollars and arguments wrapped in free enterprise and free speech to ensure that its parent company Bytedance can retain control of its operations. The push to validate its business comes as reports […]
The cloud market is coming into its own during the pandemic as the novel coronavirus forced many companies to accelerate plans to move to the cloud, even while the market was beginning to mature on its own. This week, the big three cloud infrastructure vendors — Amazon, Microsoft and Google — all reported their earnings, […]
BlueOcean is a new startup offering companies a relatively fast and affordable way to see how their brands are performing and what they can do to improve. CEO Grant McDougall and COO/President Liza Nebel (the pair founded BlueOcean with Chief Data Scientist Matthew Gross) told me they’ve been developing the technology for two years. And […]
Microsoft’s new screen time and parental controls app, Microsoft Family Safety, is today launching publicly on iOS and Android, following a preview of the experience which had arrived earlier this spring. The app is designed to help parents better understand children’s use of screen time, set limits and create screen time schedules, configure boundaries around […]
GitHub today announced that it will start publishing a public roadmap to help its users understand when it will ship new features across its various versions of the GitHub code repository and products like GitHub Actions, its mobile app and its security tools. “What we’re trying to do is provide a way for people to […]
Cloudflare today announced the private beta launch of Workers Unbound, the latest step in its efforts to offer a serverless platform that can compete with the likes of AWS Lambda. The company first launched its Workers edge computing platform in late 2017. Today it has “hundreds of thousands of developers” who use it, and in […]
An antitrust battle is brewing between Microsoft and Slack, Apple continues to defend its App Store policies and Dexterity raises funding for warehouse robots. Here’s your Daily Crunch for July 22, 2020. PS: I’m going to be on vacation until Wednesday of next week. Until then, I leave you in Darrell Etherington’s capable hands! The […]
For the first few months it was operating, Shelf Engine, the Seattle-based company that optimizes the process of stocking store shelves for supermarkets and groceries, didn’t have a name. Co-founders Stefan Kalb and Bede Jordan were on a ski trip outside of Salt Lake City about four years ago when they began discussing what, exactly, […]
At Microsoft Inspire today, the company made several Dynamics 365 announcements, including Dynamics 365 Customer Voice, a real-time customer feedback tool that could compete with Qualtrics, the company SAP bought in 2018 for a cool $8 billion. Microsoft General Manager Brenda Bown says that as more customers move online during the pandemic, it’s more important […]
Microsoft is shedding its empathetic chatbot Xiaoice into an independent entity, the U.S. software behemoth said (in Chinese) Monday, confirming an earlier report by the Chinese news site Chuhaipost in June. The announcement came several months after Microsoft announced late last year it would close down its voice assistant app Cortana in China among other countries. […]