Work-from-home policies, social distancing and government lockdowns have increased the demand for video conferencing apps, for both business and personal use. According to a new report from App Annie, out on Monday, business conferencing apps have been experiencing record growth as a result, and just hit their biggest week ever in March, when they topped […]
During a recent visit, Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella reiterated his company’s commitment to India and revealed a new fund to help SaaS startups in the country. And then Nadella and Anant Maheshwari, president of Microsoft India, discussed the success story of B2B platform Udaan in three separate onstage public appearances. Headquartered in Bangalore, Udaan […]
Since its inception, Cape Town based crowdsolving startup Zindi has been building a database of data scientists across Africa. It now has 12,000 registered on its its platform that uses AI and machine learning to tackle complex problems and will offer them cash-prizes to find solutions to curb COVID-19. Zindi has an open challenge focused […]
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention introduced a bot over the weekend to help people make decisions about what to do if they have potential symptoms of COVID-19. Called Clara, the “coronavirus self-checker” was created in partnership with CDC Foundation and Microsoft Azure’s Healthcare Bot service. While COVID-19 has been declared a global […]
Tech companies are donating supplies and adjusting priorities in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, an activist investor takes three seats on the Box board and aircraft taxi company Lilium raises $240 million. Here’s your Daily Crunch for March 23, 2020. 1. Amazon, Apple and Microsoft CEOs detail their companies’ efforts to combat coronavirus pandemic Over […]
During today’s White House coronavirus task force press conference, President Trump announced the launch of a new public/private consortium to “unleash the power of American supercomputing resources.” The members of this consortium are the White House, the Department of Energy and IBM . Other companies, including Google, Amazon and Microsoft, as well as a number […]
Today, Slack, a popular internal chat application, announced that it added 7,000 new customers between February 1 and March 18. That is 47 days. For context, Slack added 5,000 customers total in its preceding quarter, making its recent customer adds impressive. Slack, like other companies whose products can help facilitate remote work, has seen a […]
Microsoft Teams, the collaboration software that rivals Slack, is currently down. A lot of workers are staying at home because of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Countries are shutting borders, entire industries are struggling, the U.S. Federal Reserve has slashed interest rates and governments are scrambling to protect their populations by asking millions to stay at home. […]
GitHub, the developer repository owned by Microsoft, made a little deal of its own this morning when it bought JavaScript packaging vendor npm for an undisclosed amount. As GitHub CEO Nat Friedman wrote in a blog post announcing the deal, npm is a big deal in the JavaScript community. The company is the commercial entity […]
During a White House briefing on Monday detailing new recommendations regarding public health from the administration’s coronavirus task force and the CDC, President Trump was asked by a member of the press corps about reports that the White House is in “daily” contact with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos regarding the COVID-19 epidemic. Trump’s answer wasn’t […]